Monday, April 15, 2024, Delray Beach, Florida


Notes From My Journal

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Things I’ve Been Thinking About Lately 

What Will Israel Do Now? 

From Michael Snyder on Iran’s direct attack on Israel last week. I thought this was a good, early assessment of the quandary Israel is in now:

Just like October 7th, the shocking attack on Israel that just took place altered the course of history. This was the first time that Iran ever attacked Israel directly, and I was flooded with emails by readers that were concerned about World War III. So now that the Iranian attack is over, what will Israel do now? That is the big question. If Israel directly attacks Iran, the Iranians will inevitably respond and the conflict could spiral out of control. But if the Israelis do not strike back, they will look weak and the Iranians could feel like they will be able to get away with similar things in the future.

Read more here.

 

Two Movies I’m Not Sure I Can Recommend 

K and I watched two movies on two consecutive evenings last week. Given our schedules (often still working after dinner), this was a rare treat. We selected the two out of a list of five that had been recommended to K. Both were foreign films. And both had won numerous awards.

The first one, The Taste of Things, was a French period piece set in 1889. It was, in principle, about the professional and romantic relationship between a wealthy gourmand and his cook. About half of the movie consisted of scenes in which the two protagonists, along with some helpers, gathered ingredients and prepared elaborate gourmet meals. Another 40 percent consisted of scenes wherein the gourmand and four or five of his gourmand friends consumed the meals and chatted about great cooks of the past and great wines of the present. About 10 percent of the movie was about the relationship itself, in which a dash of flirting, a dusting of yearning, and a soupçon of lovemaking takes place. As far as K and I could discern, nothing else of consequence happened in the entire two hours and 20 minutes.

After failing to comprehend or much appreciate The Taste of Things, we were more optimistic about the film we saw the following evening: Perfect Days. In this one, the protagonist was a 60-something Japanese man who lived in a small apartment and whose job it was to clean public toilets in Tokyo. The first half-hour followed a day’s activity in great detail from the moment he woke up until he went to sleep. Nothing unexpected happened that day, so we were hopeful for something engaging and dramatic to unfold when the film moved on to his next day. Day Two, however, was, in almost every respect, the same as Day One. This went on for the full length of the two-hour movie.

There was a brief scene where the protagonist had a nearly wordless conversation with his estranged sister, and a day when his estranged sister’s daughter came to live with him and accompany him on one of his endlessly routine days. That was it. I’m all about subtlety in fiction and film. I have no problem being required to see below the surface. But for the life of me, I couldn’t find enough of either to help me understand why Perfect Days has been so widely well-regarded.

If you’ve seen either of these movies and have an idea of why it earned the plaudits it received, let me know.

 

Illegal Immigration by the Numbers

You would think it would be easy to find out how many illegal immigrants have come into the US since Joe Biden took office 2020. It’s not.

What can be said is that the US Border Patrol has reported “encountering” 8.7 million undocumented migrants, of which 7.2 million came across the southern border and 1.5 million came from other locations. However, according to several sources, of that 8.7 million, as many as 2.8 million were sent back. That would bring the total illegal immigrants that the Border Patrol released into the country to about 6 million.

But the complexity doesn’t end there. Those numbers do not include the “getaways” – people that managed to enter the US illegally without being apprehended by the Border Patrol – which must be somewhere between 600,000 and 1.8 million.

So, what’s the actual number? Considering the biases of those releasing the numbers, I’m thinking it is more than 7 million but probably less than 10 million. What do you think?

 

As Promised: A Fact About Real Estate Your Broker Doesn’t Want You to Know

In the April 8 issue of this blog, I said:

“Watch this short clip. It’s a teaser for some sort of information product – but what these two men are referring to is probably the most important secret in selling houses. I’ll tell you what it is in next week’s main issue.”

So, here is the secret…

The most important factor in selling a house – or any product whose financial value can be easily determined through a simple internet search – is pricing it right. But brokers seeking to list your property won’t tell you that.

They will most likely begin by telling you that your house is worth far more than it really is. They will do this to get you excited about signing with them. Once they have the listing, they will do everything they can to get you to sell your place as cheaply as you will let them.

You may think that, because they are on commission, they would want to get the highest price possible for your house. But that’s not how brokers get rich. They get rich by getting lots and lots of listings and then turning them over (selling them) as quickly as possible. And the best way for them to sell your house quickly is to get you to lower your price… as soon as they possibly can.

And they will start doing that as soon as you sign the contract.

“About the price…” they might say.

News & Views

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Trends in Wokeness

Don’t Believe What McKinsey Has Been Saying

It doesn’t take a master’s degree from Wharton to understand that DEI (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion), as a business agenda, makes zero sense.

It’s not because those values are ethically, philosophically, or even inherently misguided. (Although one can argue that they are). It’s because the DEI agenda has nothing to do with product innovation, sales and profit growth, or shareholder value.

And so I was surprised to learn recently that McKinsey & Company has been publishing papers for nearly 10 years (since 2015) claiming that there is a direct correlation between companies that embrace DEI practices and corporate success.

Writing in Taki’s Magazine, Steve Sailer summarizes his research into the methodologies, analysis, and resulting conclusions of those papers, and argues that they were intentionally structured to produce data that were not just statistically inaccurate, but that arrived at conclusions that were polar opposites of what correctly applied statistical analysis would have produced.

Racial, religious, or ethnic discrimination in hiring employees, contracting vendors, pricing products, and maintaining healthy profit margins are all damaging to all businesses, he asserts. And that’s why the most successful investment research companies – despite what some of them say publicly – are leery of investing in companies with a strong DEI culture.

Click here.

Election Watch

Targeting Trump 

In this essay, Taki (of Taki’s Magazine) argues that all but possibly one of the current legal charges against Trump are basically “bills of attainder,” which were expressly forbidden by the framers of the US Constitution.

 

The End of Western Culture 

Damn Dams!

In December 1997, Steven Tvedten, as a result of a complaint filed by his neighbor with the Department of Environment Quality, a regional government authority, received a letter from that agency giving him six weeks to remove two “unauthorized” and “hazardous” dams from a stream on his property or face prosecution.

Tvedten responded with a letter in which he makes a mockery of the complaint and refuses to comply on behalf of the beavers that had built the two dams. The case made the news and was quickly dropped.

You can read Tvedten’s brilliantly written letter here.

 

Health Watch 

There Are More Viruses Than Stars in the Sky

“Viruses are everywhere,” says Dr. Toby Rogers in a recent essay on the National Geographic website. “There are a quadrillion times a quadrillion individual viruses on Earth – 100 million times more viruses on Earth than there are stars in the sky.”

But, contrary to popular belief, viruses as a class are surprisingly bad at killing us. Of those quadrillion-times-a-quadrillion individual viruses on Earth, he points out, only about 200 of them contribute to disease in humans. The rest “function as a sort of divine scratch pad for working out new models of life.”

The Economy & Investing

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Chart of the Week: A Troubling Trend

M2 – otherwise known as “money supply” – is the term economists use to represent the amount of cash that is moving around in an economy at any particular time. It includes, as Sean points out below, such assets as the money we have in savings accounts, checking accounts, CDs, money market funds, traveler’s checks, and paper currency.

Money supply is not an indicator of the total net worth of an economy. Nor does it measure a country’s economic output. But it is a useful tool for economists because it can give them a hint about which way the economy is moving.

In the last two years, as the chart Sean presents demonstrates, M2 in the US has declined by more than 2%. That much activity has happened only four times before. And in each case, it preceded a major recession.

Thus, this latest two-year decline is something that all investors should be concerned about. But, Sean says, there is more to this recent turndown than meets the eye.

 If you are wondering how strong or weak the US economy will be in the next few years, take a good look at the chart and then read Sean’s cautionary analysis. – MF 

For all the talk of money printing that has pervaded media for several years, not many people have been talking about the money shredding that’s also been taking place.

Over the last two years, the money supply of the US has declined by over -2%.

Money supply, as measured by M2, tallies up all the cash-related assets held by households: savings deposits, balances in money market funds, paper currency, traveler’s checks, checking accounts, etc.

Less M2 means there’s less money floating around the economy.

And that has never been a good thing.

An analyst for Reventure Consulting looked at M2 going back to 1870. He found that there have been four times over the last 154 years when M2 fell by 2% or more: 1878, 1893, 1921, and 1931.

Those dates probably appear familiar to you because they also coincide with extraordinary unemployment, economic recessions, and massive stock market declines.

Why does this happen? When money supply is lower, people and businesses have – you guessed it – less money to spend. Consumption and investment levels decline, which can lead to deflation.

But here are the famous final words we must ask: Is this time different?

The previous declines in money supply did not follow unprecedented bouts of money printing.

The recent decline in M2 follows the Fed trimming the assets it had added to its balance sheet during 2008 and 2020, under a policy known as quantitative easing.

Despite the destruction of all this money, M2 is a whopping 35% higher than it was before the pandemic. There’s still plenty of money floating around the US economy. And the resilience of the labor market as well as the stickiness of our inflation problem suggests that the decline in M2 isn’t a serious problem yet.

What the decline in M2 does provide, however, is another troubling warning sign about the future of the economy and additional evidence that we should expect lower returns from US stocks in the years ahead.

– Sean MacIntyre

Check out Sean’s YouTube channel here.

Worth Reading

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Freddie deBoer Gets Ruthless with His Critics 

Freddie deBoer occasionally self-identifies as a Communist. I’m not big on Communism. Nor am I a fan of Communists. And yet deBoer is someone I quote from and link to all the time. That is because he is a very good writer, clear and concise. Most importantly, his thinking is original and independent, which is a rarity today.

In this posting on his website, he talks about how he’s gotten fed up with some of the trolling criticism he gets. And then he does something I’ve seen one or two other smart bloggers do: He establishes a set of rules that subscribers must follow if they don’t want to be banned from participating in his wonderful world of ideas.

I like the specificity of his rules. They are, in and of themselves, great entertainment. And I like even better his tactic for punishing his trolls.

Fun and/or Interesting

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10 Quick Bites

1. The best visual explanation of the April 8 solar eclipse that I’ve seen. Click here.

2. Why I can’t listen to NPR any longer: A political liberal and long-time editor of National Public Radio explains how, during the last 10 years, it has become a propaganda agent for a very small segment of the US population. Click here.

3. Fan letter from Clyde Barrow (of Bonnie & Clyde fame) to Henry Ford, dated April 10, 1934: “While I still have air in my lungs, I will tell you what a dandy car you make. I have drove Fords exclusively when I could get away with one. For sustained speed and freedom from trouble, the Ford has got every other car skinned, and even if my business hasn’t been strictly legal, it don’t hurt anything to tell you what a fine car you got in the V8.”

4. Yes, this could be alarming: Musician Andre Antunes added a heavy metal guitar soundtrack to a classic clip of T.D. Jakes repeatedly preaching the words “Wake Up” to his congregation – a perfect combination to quickly rouse even the soundest sleeper. Click here.

5. Listen to Mohamed Irfaan Ali, President of Guyana, respond to an arrogant Western journalist spouting the usual arrogant, first-world, climate-change hypocrisy. Click here.

6. Turning the tables on AI. This teacher came up with a clever way to find out – with certainty – if any of his students were using AI to write their essays. Click here.

7. 20 cities where it’s easiest to land a high-paying job: I’m always surprised to learn how many younger people read my blog. This one’s for them.

8. Wet paint: A short (8-minute) documentary on the last telephone booth painter in London. Click here.

9. Wait for the end! I have to believe this guy did some serious calculations and practice before attempting this.

10. Another heartwarming wild animal/Homo sapiens connection: A touching moment with the self-proclaimed “Ostrich Whisperer.” Click here.

Worth Quoting

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Finding Meaning in Life 

A five-minute search on the internet will give you hundreds of quotations about the meaning of life. Here are ten I recently came across that I liked enough to share with you.

1. “The purpose of life is a life of purpose.” (Robert Byrne)

2. “To give life a meaning one must have a purpose larger than one’s self, and more enduring than one’s life.” (Will Durant)

3. “The only failure a man ought to fear is failure in cleaving to the purpose he sees to be best.” (George Eliot)

4. “The living self has one purpose only: to come into its own fullness of being, as a tree comes into full blossom, or a bird into spring beauty, or a tiger into luster.” (D.H. Lawrence)

5. “More than anything else, what keeps a person going in the midst of adversity is having a sense of purpose.” (John C. Maxwell)

6. “The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost.” (Michel de Montaigne)

7. “Nothing contributes so much to tranquilize the mind as a steady purpose – a point on which the soul may fix its intellectual eye.” (Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley)

8. “There is nothing quite as potent as a focused life, one lived on purpose.” (Rick Warren)

9. “Integrity and firmness of purpose are all I can promise. These, be the voyage long or short, shall never forsake me.” (George Washington)

10. “Until thought is linked with purpose there is no intelligent accomplishment.” (James Allen)

Readers Write

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From TG re my April 8 review of A Purple Place for Dying: 

“I didn’t know you’ve ever read Travis McGee. I thought it was just for boat people and sailors. As Dean Koontz says, MacDonald captures the mood and feel of the times before there were cameras on every corner, computers in every police car, cellphones in every hand.”

Postscript

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I was happy to note that Bari Weiss’s The Free Press is now the number one periodical publication on SubStack, with more than 630,000 subscribers.

I wrote Bari to say:

Congratulations! You deserve it. The Free Press feels like what journalism should be: Independent. Thoughtful. In touch. I’ve been recommending you to my readers since I first discovered you nearly three years ago!

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