Mark Ford

February 21, 2023 No Comments

The Aerial Invasion: Are They Spycraft? Weather Balloons? Or what?

John Kirby, National Security Council Coordinator for Strategic Communications, admitted that the mysterious UFOs the military has been shooting down were “probably not commanded by ETs or other countries,” but more likely commercial balloons that “pose no military threat to Americans.”

However, Mr. Kirby continued to maintain that the original balloon shot down Feb. 4 was, indeed, a Chinese spy balloon, although he wasn’t able to offer any proof.

Read more here.

The Hunter Biden Show

Can Someone That Rich Be That Dumb?!!

Or Someone That Dumb Be That Rich?!!

JM, one of my trainers, made the claim. I didn’t believe him for a second.

“Look it up,” he said.

“Where?” I said. “On one of your dark web conspiracy sites?”

“Anywhere you like,” he said.

So, I looked it up. In several different places. And by gosh, he was right!

Hunter Biden’s net worth is north of $300 million!

How could that be true? Isn’t this the guy that got kicked out of the Navy – twice – for drug and alcohol addiction? Isn’t this the guy that photographed himself with all those hookers? Isn’t he the guy who barely graduated college and knows nothing about energy but became an expert consultant to major energy companies in the Ukraine, in Russia, and in China?

A lot of incriminating questions about Hunter Biden will be asked in the coming weeks and months by House Republicans. I hope one of those questions will be: “How could he have been so stupid as to allow his net worth to be published?”

Sabotage? Act of War? Mystery Solved! It Was Us!

At the end of his long and distinguished career, Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh believes he has solved the Nord Stream pipeline bombing mystery.

Hersh, who scooped journalism’s top award more than five decades ago for exposing the My Lai massacre of Vietnamese civilians by US troops in 1968, reported that US Navy divers, acting under the authority of President Biden, laid bombs that destroyed three of the four pipelines built to carry natural gas from Russia to Europe.

Although the Biden administration initially denied it, there is increasing evidence that they did it, including videotape of Biden threatening to blow it up back in February.

Check it out here.

Or here.

Worth Watching

February 21, 2023 No Comments

Triangle of Sadness

Written and directed by Ruben Östlund

Starring Charlbi Dean, Woody Harrelson, and Harris Dickinson

Released in theaters (US) Oct. 7, 2022

Available on various streaming services, including Amazon Prime

Triangle of Sadness is another film I wanted to see before the Academy Awards. I liked the premise, and it had some strong recommendations from people whose opinions I respect. But after watching it, I was somewhat disappointed. It has many great and hilarious scenes and some riveting performances, but would not have been my choice for Best Picture – or best anything – unless they had a category for best knock-off of a Lina Wertmuller movie.

The Plot

Carl and Yaya, a couple of influencers, are invited to a luxury cruise ship alongside a group of out-of-touch wealthy people. The situation takes an unexpected turn when a brutal storm hits the ship.

What I Liked About It

* It was a cruelly and beautifully scathing critique of the woke obliviousness of the super-rich. Not just the Baby Boomers, but also Gen X.

* It had an impressively wide comic range – from dark (the spat over who should pay for the bill) to Mel Brooks (the vomiting scene).

* Woody Harrelson’s performance as the ship’s too-done-to-care captain.

What I Didn’t Like So Much

* Some scenes went on a tad too long.

* It was, as I said, derivative, and that made it hard to take seriously. Ironically, however, that made it easier to enjoy. Because it was only 20% Wertmuller and 80% Mel Brooks.

Critical Reception

* “For 95 minutes of its 147-minute running time, Triangle of Sadness is one of the best movies of the year. It’s a brutal satire whose comedy changes from deadpan subtlety to the most raucous and outrageous slapstick imaginable. It’s brilliant and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny – and then comes the shift.” (Mick LaSalle, San Francisco Chronicle)

* “Two-time Palme d’Or winner Ruben Östlund’s mischievous takedown of the super-rich has more style than substance.” (Wendy Ide, The Guardian)

* “This, in the end, is a very bad movie, executed with enough visual polish and surface cleverness to fool the Cannes jurors, something Östlund has done twice. Shame on them!” (A.O. Scott, The New York Times)

You can watch the trailer here.

Fun and/or Interesting

February 21, 2023 No Comments

Global Superlatives: The World’s Most Extreme Countries

Though it’s always more rewarding to read essays that go deeply into a subject rather than widely and superficially, I can’t resist reading listicles. And sometimes, I run into one that has some very satisfying surprises. Like this one from a website called KiteKey.

For your amusement, I’ve turned it into a little self-quiz.

Test Yourself

Which country has the:

Longest life expectancy?
Highest personal net worth?
Largest GDP?
Fastest growing economy?
Largest military?
Most languages?
Happiest citizens?
Least corrupt government?

Answers:

Japan (85 years)
Monaco
United States
Guyana
China (2 million active-duty soldiers)
Papua New Guinea (840)
Norway
Denmark

Readers Write

February 21, 2023 No Comments

From RS, re the China Spy Balloon:

“I was excited to see my thoughts published in your ‘Readers Write’ section on Feb. 10, but dismayed to be dismissed as a conspiratorial loon. My hunch could certainly be wrong, but the truth behind these types of intel events can take years to come out (if ever). Let’s see where the data leads. I will investigate your original question about satellite vs. balloon surveillance.”

My Response: My dear RS, I didn’t dismiss you. You told me your theory. I told you mine. Still, I promise, I won’t mention it again.

Unless, of course, my theory turns out to be correct. In that case, I’ll not stop telling you I told you so!

More on Statins. GM sent in this excerpt from an article titled “The Medical Mafia MUST Be Destroyed” posted on The Market Ticker:

“How about statins? That entire class of drugs and the billions extracted from people scared of having a heart attack, never mind all the scolding by physicians rests on the cholesterol hypothesis, which appears to have been disproved more than a decade ago. The hypothesis in fact dates to 1913 (!!) and a single study of rabbits. Problem: It didn’t generalize when it was repeated in other mammals. Then Ancel Keys put forward an observation that higher serum cholesterol correlated with heart disease but he cherry-picked the nations in which he observed the correlation – six out of twenty-two. If you instead looked at the data from all of the nations there was no correlation. His study was clearly an intentional fraud. We next had the infamous Framingham study, which found somewhat-elevated cholesterol in men who had a heart attack. Aha, you say. Except – 30 years later the follow-up on that study was ignored – it found that in men 50+ there was no correlation between high cholesterol and death and in women none whatsoever irrespective of age. Worse, the follow-up found an inverse all-cause mortality increase with DECREASING cholesterol! That’s right – the follow-up, which is always of course superior since time is the best judge, found that higher serum cholesterol was either protective or the drug(s) used to lower cholesterol were poisons.

“How many people know this, even today? Few. You still hear this mantra, ‘medical advice’ and the prescription pads and pharmacy counters dispense statins by the truckload even though the underlying hypothesis was conclusively debunked more than a decade ago. How many billions of dollars were and are extracted from people on what appears, from all the evidence, to be a worthless intervention that, as with all drugs, carries risk of adverse effects and which was trivially proved to be predicated on an intentional falsehood by Keys – all you had to do was look at all twenty-two nations from which he originally collected the data.”

Click here to read the entire article.

Postscript

February 21, 2023 No Comments

It’s Fat Tuesday!

New Orleans, home to the best-known Fat Tuesday festivities in the US, is poised to see at least 1 million visitors and up to $1B in revenue as it brings back its full slate of events after canceling them in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and shortening routes for all parades in 2022. The city’s iconic krewes – Mardi Gras-focused social clubs – have returned to the streets and will culminate with parades by the Krewes of Rex and Zulu today, among others. Watch a livestream here.

Friday, February 17, 2023, Delray Beach, Florida

Notes From My Journal

February 17, 2023 No Comments

Mentoring the Second Generation

I’ve had the pleasure of mentoring many young people throughout my career. With family members, it’s been mostly about watching them grow into responsible and productive adults. With employees, it’s been about helping them grow into business leaders on their own.

I can’t think of anything that has been more rewarding than watching those young people listen to my advice and put it into action.

But lately, I’ve been mentoring a different group of people, and it has turned into a source of extra special pleasure for me. I’m talking about mentoring my partners’ and colleagues’ kids. Sometimes, even their grandkids.

I got a call from DL, who said, “I’m off to Madrid for a few months, but I’d like your help with D, my son.” It turns out that, after a successful career as a yoga instructor in LA, D moved east and was trying to decide whether to start again in the yoga business or do something else. I’d seen D a handful of times in the last 30 years, but we barely knew one another. Because of my relationship with DL, though, I wanted to do everything I could to help him. And I did.

RR called my office to set up an appointment. I remembered him as the first son of NR, our partner in a publishing company in Germany. Several years ago, his dad retired, putting him in charge. RR said that he was going to be in Florida and wanted to hang out with me and talk business. I was honored to spend a day with this young man, as a tribute to the relationship I had with his dad. I took him out to Paradise Palms, where we spent several hours talking as we moved through the gardens. This kid is the spitting image of his father. And he has his dad’s intellectual and emotional intelligence. He even has the same smile and hand gestures. Can you imagine what a privilege and a pleasure this was for me?

AV, a partner in our Nicaraguan development, asked me to spend some time with his son who’s starting school in the US this year. AV wanted me to encourage the boy to keep his nose to the grindstone. To spread his wings, but remember that success in life is all about doing the work that others won’t. I was happy to do it.

And that’s to say nothing of the relationships that have been developed over the years between businesses I’ve started that are run by my children and businesses my colleagues and partners have started that are now run by their children. Can you imagine how much fun it is to be copied on correspondence between your children and the children of someone you’ve spent years working with?

I’ve had relationships like this in the past. But they are becoming common now, due no doubt to my age and the age of my partners and colleagues. It’s all good. All very good. I feel so lucky.

Fun and/or Interesting

February 17, 2023 No Comments

Cops Monitoring Cops

I’ve been following this guy lately. He’s a cop. His YouTube bailiwick is police misconduct, and his thing is to call out the bad behavior of cops, whether it is verbal intimidation, bullying, or breaking the law.

Click here to see him criticizing a cop for a tactic that you can see a dozen times a day on social media: trying to intimidate someone into submission when he has no legal right to treat the person that way.

I have several cop and ex-cop friends and acquaintances. One has told me stories about how, when he was new to the force, he was shunned by his fellow officers after he made it clear to them that refused to play this sort of game.

What’s interesting about the above exchange is that the layman is standing up for himself, quite strongly. By refusing to move as the cop presses up against him. And by raising his voice as the cop raises his. He is certainly within his rights to do so. But IMHO, this isn’t something I would do or advise anyone else to do. Keep in mind: If a cop feels justified in bullying you this way when you’ve done nothing wrong, you don’t want to find out what he feels justified in doing after you’ve pissed him off… if, for whatever reason, his body cam shuts off.

Another Example of Bad Policing…

Click here.

Worth Watching

February 17, 2023 No Comments

The Fabelmans

Directed by Steven Spielberg

Written by Steven Spielberg and Tony Kushner

Starring Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, and Seth Rogan

Released in theaters (US) Nov. 11, 2022

Available to rent or buy on most platforms, including Amazon Prime and Apple TV

Another one on our (K’s and my) Academy Award Bucket List. I knew it was written and produced by Steven Spielberg. I didn’t realize that Tony Kushner was the cowriter. They are both very good at creating engaging narratives with big and important ideas, but bowdlerized for popular consumption. So, I thought, “This won’t be great. But it will probably be good.”
And that’s what it was. Good. Even quite good in some ways. But not great.

What I Liked About It

* The story itself. The early interest in moviemaking. The support of Spielberg’s father. The infidelity of his mother. The denouement.

* The character played by Seth Rogan. A great take on a weak and despicable man.

* The character played by Michelle Williams, as Spielberg’s mom. It wasn’t quite as convincing as Rogan’s, but still fascinating.

What I Didn’t Like So Much

Everything Spielberg. Spielberg is a great movie maker. There is no doubt about that. But his movies, the stories themselves, are surface level. This was even true of this story, which had more potential.

Critical Reception

* “The Fabelmans is a film that shifts something inside you. Working through one of the most crushing events of his own life, Spielberg exhorts us to discover, yet again, the enduring magic of the movies.” (Anupama Chopra, Film Companion)

* “Possibly the most lavishly mounted home movie ever made. Appropriately enough, that is its great strength and its fatal weakness.” (Mark Kermode, Observer/UK)

* “The tone gets complicated. Adolescence often is. Flippancy aside, that is the movie’s signature: the acceptance that two things can be going on at once.” (Danny Leigh, Financial Times)

You can watch the trailer here.

Fun and/or Interesting

February 17, 2023 No Comments

Speaking of Oscar-Nominated Movies…

After praising Cate Blanchett for her acting in Tár, I happened to see this essay by Calum Russell in Far Out: “The 10 Worst Oscar-bait Performances of All Time.”

I’m not sure I agree with all of Russell’s criticisms of these movies. But his thesis makes sense to me. It occurred to me, though, that Tár fits his definition of Oscar-bait.

So now, I’m not sure how good the film was. Nor how good Blanchett’s performance was. I’m going to think about it. You should too!

Worth Considering

February 17, 2023 No Comments

The COVID Response. What We Got Wrong.

Part XIV: Do Booster Shots Cause Strokes?!

I wonder…

Was the stroke I had in September caused by the Pfizer vaccines I took?

In January, the CDC released a warning, saying that they have evidence that getting a Pfizer booster shot puts people 65 and older (Me!) at an increased risk for stroke.

From Reuters:

“A safety monitoring system flagged that US drugmaker Pfizer Inc. and German partner BioNTech’s updated COVID-19 shot could be linked to a type of brain stroke in older adults, according to preliminary data analyzed by US health authorities.

“The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) said on Friday that a CDC vaccine database had uncovered a possible safety issue in which people 65 and older were more likely to have an ischemic stroke… after receiving the vaccine booster.”

And from Bloomberg, the same story.

Now, “increased risk” doesn’t mean “definitely risky.” But still. Sometime after I got my shots, including two boosters, I had a stroke. The same sort of stroke, with the same symptoms reported by the CDC in that announcement.

What’s more interesting (to me, at least) is how the different media reported this. Reuters and Bloomberg reported the CDC statement literally, as in there is some additional risk of stroke. Whereas, The New York Times took the opposite approach. (Note the italics below.)

“Fears that the COVID booster shots made by Pfizer-BioNTech may increase the risk of strokes in people aged 65 and older were not borne out by an intensive scientific investigation…”

Read the whole NYT article here.

What to make of this?

It’s too early to draw definitive conclusions. The study was relatively small, and the differences recorded were small, too. But the reportage by the NYT reminds me that we cannot rely on the mainstream media to tell us the truth about anything that has political overtones.

If you are really concerned about COVID or our role in the Ukraine, you should go to primary sources to gather your information. Then draw your own conclusions.

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