Mark Ford

August 12, 2022 No Comments

Argo (2012)

Directed by Ben Affleck

Starring Ben Affleck, Bryan Cranston, Alan Arkin, and John Goodman

Available on various streaming services, including Netflix and Amazon Prime

I saw Argo when it came out in 2012. I remembered it as being intense – almost nerve-wracking. And that’s an accomplishment, because it’s based on true events. I was aware of those events and, thus, how the story would end. But, as Aristotle pointed out, that’s the sign of a good drama. You can be familiar with the characters. You can know what happens. And yet, it will grip you and stay with you for days or weeks or sometimes years!

Argo did that for me. And credit must be given to the actors. But above all, IMHO, to the director. In this case, a young actor and unproven director named Ben Affleck.

The Plot

On Nov. 4, 1979, during the Carter administration, 52 American citizens, including six diplomats, were held hostage by Iranian terrorists in the US embassy in Tehran for 444 days. It was all over the news. What wasn’t in the news was that just before the embassy was taken over, nine embassy workers snuck out and made their way to the Canadian embassy, where they stayed hidden while the CIA tried to figure out how to bring them home.

What I Liked About It

* The cinematography: It sometimes felt a bit theatrical – in the sense of a stage play. This was typically when the characters were indoors and seated around a table. But it had the advantage of bringing the interactions of the actors closer to the camera, which gave their conversations more intensity.

* The direction: The movie has a docudrama feeling that, while not overbearing, does add to the verisimilitude and urgency of every scene. Kudos to a young Affleck.

* The editing: Brilliant. The cuts. The timing of the scenes. There was never a single minute that felt unnecessary or lax or elongated.

* The photography: Lots of little tricks that helped enhance the paranoid feeling throughout.

* The script: It could have been, but wasn’t, a good-guys vs. bad-guys story. It acknowledged the meddling of the US in Iran’s affairs to secure its private and geopolitical interests.

What I Didn’t Like So Much

The backstory on the main character – the good dad trying to hold together a broken family. A little cliché.

Critical Reception

Argo was nominated for seven Oscars and ended up winning three of them, including Best Picture. It also won the top prize at the Golden Globes and British Film Academy Awards.

* “Ben Affleck has delivered a knuckle-muncher of a thriller and a satire on Hollywood, both in one unlikely package.” (Kate Muir, Times/UK)

* “If there’s one lesson to be gleaned from director Ben Affleck’s relentlessly tense, painstakingly detailed Argo, it’s that we should consider the possibility that our history has been manipulated more than many of us would care to admit.” (Jason Buchanan, TV Guide)

* “Argo has that solid, kick-the-tires feel of those studio films from the 70s that were about something but also entertained. Only it’s as laugh outright amusing as it is sobering.” (Lisa Kennedy, Denver Post)

You can watch the trailer here.

And click here to read an article about the historical accuracy of the movie.

Recommended Places

August 12, 2022 No Comments

Savannah, Georgia

I flew from Baltimore last week to Savannah, where I spent a long weekend with K before meeting the kids and grandkids at a resort called the Palmetto Bluffs Montage in South Carolina. This is a family week for me, which means I am working no more than four hours a day. Okay, yesterday I worked eight hours, but someone has to pay the bills. And anyway, who’s counting?

This was the third time I’ve been to Savannah. Each time, I’ve liked it better than the last. It sits on the Georgian coast, on the Savannah river, across from South Carolina. It is a beautiful city in the southern style, with dozens of small, well-kept parks, cobblestoned streets, stately Civil War monuments of OWM (Old White Men) and newer statues of YBW (Young Black Women). It has a fine collection of 19th century churches and public beaches, including the Gothic-Revival Cathedral of St. John the Baptist, a river walk reminiscent of Bourbon Street, museums, a theater district, good restaurants, great food, etc.

And tying it all together, are thousands of 100- and 200-year-old live oaks, with their heavy horizontal branches, draped with Spanish moss, arching over the streets and parks.

A Few Fun Facts About Savannah

* The “Life is like a box of chocolates” scene in Forrest Gump was filmed in Savannah’s Chippewa Square.

* Instead of burning it to the ground, as he had done a month earlier with Atlanta, General Sherman gave Savannah to President Lincoln on Dec. 22, 1864 as a Christmas gift.

* Savannah’s Spanish moss is not actually a moss. It’s a close cousin to the pineapple.

* Savannah’s First African Baptist Church, a stop on the Underground Railroad, was the first Black church in the country.

* When Savannah was founded in the 1700s, the founder, James Edward Oglethorpe, made many things illegal, including Catholicism, alcohol, and lawyers.

Fun and/or Interesting

August 12, 2022 No Comments

10 Chess Hacks

I’ve never been very good at chess. But I think, probably due to an exaggerated sense of my intelligence, that I should be.

I’ve been training on a few apps, and there are many. The better ones allow you to adjust the difficulty level upwards as you progress. And I’ve found that if I move up the level by, say, 5%, my win percentage drops from about 70% to about 10%. That’s not fun, so I’ve settled on making the smallest increments that allow me to win most of the time.

I’ve wondered if this is the right thing to do. Recently, TS, a friend, colleague, and subscriber, sent me this “excellent overview of specific, proven methods for performance improvement.”

The overview comes from Scott Young, a young man that has some pretty impressive credentials when it comes to self-teaching. Among them, the two-year long MIT Challenge, where he attempted to learn MIT’s four-year computer science curriculum without taking classes, and “The Year Without English,” where he attempted to learn four languages in one year.

Young lists 10 chess hacks, the eighth of which made me feel good about what I’m doing. Click here.

Worth Quoting

August 12, 2022 No Comments

“The game of chess is not merely an idle amusement. Several very valuable qualities of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired or strengthened by it…. Life is a kind of Chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or adversaries to contend with.” – Benjamin Franklin

A Word to the Wise

August 12, 2022 No Comments

Verisimilitude is the appearance of being true or real. As I used it today in my review of Argo. “The movie has a docudrama feeling that, while not overbearing, does add to the verisimilitude and urgency of every scene.”

Readers Write

August 12, 2022 No Comments

Re Tuesday’s issue:

“Don’t assume the Inflation Creation Act is a done deal. We must act positive. Positive that the idiots in the House will squabble on this as they have in the past, and allow this to die on the vine.” – TM

“You mentioned you weren’t sure what to do with the cash coming in from your rental real estate. You might consider rolling T-bills. The 4-week bill is currently paying around 2%. You can buy them commission-free here.Setting up an account is easy. It’s what I’m doing with some of my idle cash.” – RI

Postscript

August 12, 2022 No Comments

It pays to be smart. I mean high-IQ smart. People with an above-average IQ do better in just about everything from career status to income to net worth – and even to health and happiness. Then there are the super-smart people. People with 150+ IQs.

One such person, Marilyn vos Savant, said to have the highest IQ ever recorded, has been writing the “Ask Marilyn” column for Parade magazine since 1986. She is perhaps most famous for her Sept. 9, 1990 column, where she came up with the answer to a brain teaser that has become known as the “Monty Hall problem”…

Tuesday, August 9, 2022, Palmetto Bluff, South Carolina

The Economy & Investing

August 9, 2022 No Comments

About the Inflation Reduction Act

What a wonderfully Orwellian world we live in. Congress has just passed a bill called the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) that, as far as I can tell, is practically designed to increase inflation.

Its supporters claim that, in addition to reducing inflation, it will increase GDP by increasing taxes and adding regulations and doubling the size of the IRS. Again, these are policies that are almost certain to lower GDP.

The bill won’t raise taxes – we were assured – on anyone making less than $400,000 a year. But that claim has already been refuted by the government’s own budgetary office.

I’ll talk more about this in future issues as we see how the provisions of this bill take hold in the economy. But for the moment, I want to highlight what I thought was the oddest aspect of the advertising campaign for the bill’s passage: its specificity.

As reported by Yahoo!News:

“The IRA provisions could also generate enormous public health and jobs benefits” [according to a study from the think tank Energy Innovations]. In addition to preventing between 3,700 and 3,900 premature deaths from air pollution in 2030, Energy Innovation found it would lead to a net increase of up to 1.5 million jobs in 2030 and increase the United States’ gross domestic product by 0.84% to 0.88% in 2030.

I believe Bill Bonner had it right when he said this in the August 4 edition of Bonner Private Research:

“This grab bag of boondoggles will increase US GDP by 0.84% eight years from now? It will save 3,700 to 3,900 lives? Really? The technocratic precision is breathtakingly absurd. There is no way on Earth to predict the effect of this collection of robbery, flimflam and jackassery on our $24 trillion economy… eight years in the future. And to two decimal points!”

The Economy & Investing

August 9, 2022 No Comments

Real Estate: A Time to Buy. A Time to Sell.

In April and May, housing prices in the US were at all-time highs. In some areas, they are higher than they were at the early 2007 peak, right before the real estate industry began melting down before collapsing in 2008.

Could we be in for a repeat of that?

As I’m sure you remember, when the real estate bubble burst, it sent the US economy (and the rest of the world) into what became known as The Great Recession. In less than three years, it wiped out trillions of dollars’ worth of wealth – mostly from working- and middle -class homebuyers. Thanks to the government bailout, a good deal of that money was transferred to the financial upper classes, through the conduit of Wall Street, bankers, brokers, and insurance companies.

Media pundits and Wall Street CEOs called the crash “unprecedented” and “unpredictable.” That was balderdash, Americans learned later, when books and movies about the collapse started hitting the bestseller and top-rated film lists.

I was heavily invested in real estate prior to 2006. I started pulling back in 2007, and was out entirely before the crash. My investments had been in rental houses and apartments, not in REITs or other real-estate dependent stocks. So, I wasn’t listening to CNN or reading the NYT to find out what was going on with real estate. I was looking at the local markets, and making my buy/sell decisions accordingly.

My goal back then was to make an 8% return on my investment, cash on cash, and at least 12% with leverage (a mortgage). When prices got so high that I couldn’t make those numbers, I stopped buying. It was as simple as that.

When my friends, colleagues, and Jiu Jitsu buddies that were gobbling up properties like syrup-slathered pancakes asked me why I had stopped buying, I explained it another way. I told them that I was bothered by the discrepancy between the average income of first-time homebuyers and the average cost of a starter home.

I had always heard that a healthy ratio of household income-to-house price was about 1:5 (20%). In other words, a family with an income of $50,000 should be able to buy a house priced at up to $250,000. But in 2007, the average startup houses where I was looking in South Florida were selling for $400,000 to $500,000. And the average income for first-time homebuyers was just $60,000 to $70,000.

The numbers didn’t work. Still, banks were giving mortgages to anyone and everyone that had a pulse. And then packaging that “sub-prime” paper in bundles and selling them to huge financial institutions. You know, the ones that the government later bailed out, leaving millions of middle- and working-class Americans with debt they could not possibly repay.

Today, housing prices in South Florida – and up and down the coasts – are as high (or higher) as they were back then. Household income has risen, but not as much. In terms of household income and starter-home prices, the ratio is just as bad as it was in 2007. There is a difference, however, that is important. Banks are not handing out mortgages as freely as they did back then.

What this means to me: I am not expecting another real estate collapse like the one we had 14 years ago. I’m expecting to see prices come down to a sustainable level, and, in fact, it’s already started to happen. With interest rates going up, I’m expecting them to come down a good deal more in the coming six to 18 months.

As a direct investor in real estate, that doesn’t worry me terribly. That’s because I haven’t been buying property for several years. (And won’t again till prices move into buying territory.) However, I am keeping my eye on rental rates in the areas where I own property. If those rates go down significantly, so will my future ROIs.

I’m also wondering what to do with the cash I’ve been collecting from selling off some of my properties – particularly office buildings in cities (like Baltimore) that are seeing corporate flight due to high taxes and rising crime.

I’ve been looking around in states like Texas and Nevada that are benefitting from the emigration out of California. There are some pockets of hope there. I’ve toyed with the idea of investing in REITs, but given the way the economy looks generally, and rising interest rates, I’m not sanguine about any real estate-related stocks.

MarkFord.net