Friday, February 10, 2023, Delray Beach, Florida


Notes From My Journal

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Watching the Super Bowl This Weekend?

The Super Bowl is supposed to be the biggest sporting event of the year in the USA. Virtually all my friends and family members watch it. Not moi. I prefer more intellectual sports, like MMA, where contestants get brain-damaged without the protection of pads and helmets.

When I tell people that I don’t watch the game, they’re suspicious. “But what about the commercials?” they ask. “You are missing all those great commercials!”

The Super Bowl is known for its commercials. I’ve heard that many of them are brilliant, so this year, I decided to check them out. And I didn’t have to wait to watch them during the game. Most advertisers release them ahead of time.

Below you will find a link to one website where you can see them now. And as a service to those that don’t have the time, here are my top five in terms of entertainment:

  1. “Why Not EV?” with Jim Ferrell
  2. “Busch Light” with Sarah McLachlan
  3. “Bud Light” with Miles Teller and Keleigh Sperry Teller
  4. “Great Acting or Great Taste” with Ben Stiller
  5. “Popcorners” with Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul

Of course, making entertaining commercials has nothing to do with selling product. I found only two commercials that were any good at all in terms of sales. One was “Popcorners” (see above). But my favorite was “Hellmann’s” with Jon Hamm and Brie Larson.

Check out all the ads here.

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News & Views

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Bits and Pieces 

A Surprise Gift from Nicaragua to America 

Nicaragua released 222 political prisoners to the US yesterday, as part of a negotiated deal between the administrations of Daniel Ortega and Joe Biden.

According to the NYT, the move was “an effort to restart relations with the United States.” I don’t know about that. But I do know, personally, at least one person that was released: the father of a woman that works for us there. And he was very rare in terms of border crossers. He was a true political prisoner. (He was imprisoned for speaking out publicly against the Ortega regime.)

As for the other 221 Nicaraguan immigrants we welcomed in yesterday, I can’t vouch for them. I’d like to think they were vetted. It would be unfortunate if this turns out to be another Mariel boatlift situation.

Here’s what I’m wondering: Do they become citizens automatically? And if so, I presume they would be automatically entitled to the rights and privileges of all American citizens. Including public assistance. And if that is true, is there a limit?

You can read the NYT piece here.

 

Your Age Is Written on Your Face 

We all know that there is often a difference between one’s chronological age (the age on your license) and one’s biological age (the relative age of your body). And naturally, we would all like to be biologically younger than our chronological age.

There are various ways to measure your biological age, some more accurate than others. There are physical response tests, mental agility tests, and bio-markers that can be found through blood tests.

And now there is a new way. Thanks to Jing-Dong (Jackie) Han and her colleagues at Peking University, biological age can be measured by taking a 3D image of a person’s face.

Check it out here.

 

Convenient Conversions

Andrew Tate – the ex-kick boxer turned self-help guru turned social media superstar – was the most googled person in the US in 2022. And he had more than 11 billion views on TikTok before he was banned from the app after being arrested in Romania on sex-trafficking charges.

He’s out of jail now. And if you look closely at the photo above, you’ll discover something about him that shocked me.

Yes, that’s the Koran he’s holding. Andrew Tate is a Muslim!

He wasn’t always. But oddly, in the midst of being attacked for being a male chauvinist pig, he decided that Islam was the religion that most suited him.

Click here for an interesting essay by Shadi Hamid, writing in The Free Press, about what he calls “political conversions.”

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Worth Quoting

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Bill Bonner on Biden’s State of the Union Speech 

An excerpt from the Feb. 8 issue of Bonner Private Research…

“The tattered coat managed to stand up and deliver a long, pointless speech. It was another triumph of politics… over common sense. And a triumph for old age and treachery over youth and skill. His speech was vaguely about leading the country into a glorious future. But old men do not lead the way into the future. They get out of the way… tell tales… sing songs… and let the future happen. Not since Philippe Petain – a far abler leader – took over France in 1940 has an octogenarian been cast in such a leading role. We doubt the results will be any better.”

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Worth Reading

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Foster 

By Claire Keegan

128 pages

Published Nov. 1, 2022

I don’t know how I came to have it. But I know how I came to read it. I wrote a review of Small Things Like These, a book by the same author, Claire Keegan, on Nov. 22, 2022. That was my first encounter with her. I wrote then:

“Every once in a while, I read a book that makes me want to read everything the author has written. That is how I feel after reading Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These….   It’s been a long time since I discovered a writer that humbled me like Claire Keegan did with this book. (The last time, I think, it was Cormac McCarthy.) She writes perfectly proportioned paragraphs. Beautifully simple and simply beautiful sentences.”

This is another small book. And another literary gem. A deeply touching story about a young girl, one of many children in a large family living in rural Ireland, who is sent by her parents to live with a neighboring couple that have no children of their own.

The story is told in the first person. And Keegan does an amazing job of both first-person storytelling and engineering the voice of a child. I was several times reminded of what Mark Twain did with Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer.

What I Liked About It

* The story feels true in a universal way.

* The dialog is rich and authentic in an Irish writerly way.

* The writing is both exquisitely literary and invisible. I’ve never encountered anything quite like it.

What I Didn’t Like 

Nothing.

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Worth Considering

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The COVID Response. What We Got Wrong.

Part XII: More About the Masks

 

On Dec. 20, 2022, I wrote about how inconsistent the reporting was on the effectiveness of wearing masks against COVID-19. I explained how the WHO, the CDC, and the US government gave us all sorts of bad information in 2020, 2021, and 2022.

Their first recommendation was that the public should not wear masks because they don’t work. Their next was that the public should wear masks because they do work. (The prior misinformation was explained as a little white lie to prevent a shortage of masks among frontline workers.) Then the mask mandates became not just recommended, but mandatory. Meanwhile, studies on masks were being compiled, and they were not supporting their utility.

In my Dec. 20 report, I argued that cloth masks were virtually useless, but N-95s were somewhat useful.

“It would have been better for everyone,” I wrote, “if they had reported the ‘science’ as it arrived and made transparent recommendations based on the latest data. Had they done it that way, they would have admitted that N-95 and surgical masks were much safer than cloth masks. They would have said that if you could not get hold of or afford N-95 masks to wear a combination of surgical and cloth masks. And they would have told us that social distancing was the best way to avoid contracting COVID and spreading it to others.”

Now, after nearly three years, we have all sorts of studies done and compiled, some of them more reliable than others. And JM, one of my trainers, mentioned to me that Fauci has publicly admitted that masks don’t work and never did. I found it hard to believe that Fauci would say that. But before I could do any research, I got this note from “Greg,” a reader:

“Do You Believe In Science? 

“You do, right?

“If so, you recognize the hierarchy of evidence when it comes to poorly understood subjects.

“And let’s be clear on this: If a subject is well-understood, the outcomes are deterministic. You don’’ have a ‘percentage’ change. A thing either is or is not, and it is repeated every time. Almost nothing in medicine meets this standard. Ergo, virtually everything is poorly understood.”

Click here for an introduction to a very persuasive piece suggesting that even the N-95s do not and never did work. Chew on that for a minute!

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Arts & Letters

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The Ultimate Fantasy for Art Collectors

This painting by the 17th-century Flemish artist Pieter Brueghel the Younger will be auctioned next month in France after having been recently rediscovered. The owners were unaware that it was by the famed artist, despite it having been passed through the family for a century.

Read the details here.

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Readers Write

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Re my essay in Tuesday’s issue, “Is the China Spy Balloon a Hoax?”

From DD: 

“Hi, Mark,

“Always enjoy your eLetter.

“About the balloon…

“As you may well have heard, some people in positions to know believe it’s just China probing our technological, political, and military reactions to such an incursion.

“Now they know, among many other things, that it’s a great way to cause political dissension, and that the reaction will be pretty much like when the Three Stooges get ready to do something… fighting with and tripping over each other in the process.”

My Response: Thanks, DD! YES, I have heard that theory. In fact, that was the theory presented in the link that I mocked. As far as our political system having turned into a Three Stooges show, I don’t think China needed to send a balloon over to understand that!

 

From RS: 

“Though too early to draw conclusions about the spy balloon incursions, I found myself mystified by your remark about Gordon Chang’s response. I find nothing ‘ridiculous’ about his suggestion that it was a way to gauge the US’s air defenses/responses.

“You may have forgotten that the US received an intelligence bonanza in 1983 when KAL 007 inexplicably ventured deep into Soviet airspace. The incident ‘lit up’ the entire Soviet air defense network along their east coast, exposing the Soviets’ hand.

“His theory is underscored by recent military admissions that we have an obvious gap in our air defenses.”

My Response: The question that needs to be answered is what can China possibly learn from sending an easily detectable balloon into our air space that it doesn’t already know or couldn’t find out from a satellite?

Talk about conspiracy theories! The idea that this is an act of information gathering seems loony to me.

 

From LG, re my comments about Ron DeSantis: 

“I hope you were kidding about Ron DeSantis. Among other terrible things, he’s a blatant homophobe!”

My Response: I was half kidding. But only half. As to homophobia, here’s Dave Rubin, a well-known conservative commentator, answering that question from a personal perspective.

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