Those Sunscreens Could Kill You 

About 10 years ago, I published a book about skin cancer.

Back then, all my smart friends knew that the sun caused skin cancer and that skin cancer can be fatal. So they were lathering themselves and their children with suntan lotion every time they stepped outside.

Like them, I’d read the scary reports. But the idea that the sun could be inherently bad for Homo sapiens made no sense to me. The sun, I knew, was the source of all life on earth. Plus, being outside in the sun felt so naturally good. Like drinking spring water or swimming in the ocean.

A colleague, Jon Herring, did the research and most of the writing for the book. His conclusion was that, yes, I was mostly right. Too much sun – i.e., getting a sunburn – can, if the exposure is repeated, result in the less-harmful forms of skin cancer: squamous and basal cell. But the sun in healthy doses is not only good for you, it is really good at producing Vitamin D. And Vitamin D is superbly good at protecting us from all sorts of cancers, including melanoma, which is the kind of skin cancer that kills.

If this is true, how did we come to believe that even a bit of sun would could kill us?

Jon also discovered that many of the studies that linked sun exposure to skin cancer were funded by… you guessed it! Coppertone!

And here’s another discovery that Jon made: Of the six most popular sunscreens on the market at the time, five had carcinogenic ingredients! And something like three of those ingredients were activated by the sun!

I was hoping that the book would go viral. It didn’t. And most of my smart friends are still coating themselves in sunblock when they go out.

I talk about it now and then. And I’ve given away many copies of the book. But it’s not much on my mind. So I was interested to see this in a recent blog post from my friend Dr. Al Sears:

A new study, commissioned by the FDA, who has told us for years that sunscreen is unsafe, looked at six common toxic sunscreen ingredients – and found that these chemicals don’t just affect your skin. They accumulate in your bloodstream at dangerously high concentrations – far higher than the FDA’s own safety threshold.

An editorial accompanying the FDA research in the Journal of the American Medical Association, admitted: “Sunscreens have not been subjected to standard drug safety testing.” Even The Wall Street Journal has started asking questions about why these toxins are still used in sunscreens.

The six chemicals – avobenzone, oxybenzone, octocrylene, homosalate, octisalate, and octinoxate – have been linked to multiple short- and long-term health problems, including hormone disruption and, ironically, skin cancer. The FDA has also requested safety data from sunscreen manufacturers on further six ingredients known to have toxic effects.

These chemicals mimic estrogen, causing hormonal imbalances, allergic reactions, skin irritations, and reproductive harm. They also attack the cells in your body, causing premature aging. And studies show they can promote the onset of breast cancer.

In the interest of giving parents more control over their children’s education and addressing quality concerns, Sweden implemented a voucher system in 1992.

This meant that parents were able to choose any school for their children, regardless of where they lived and without worrying about tuition. And since then, more and more of them have been choosing to put their children in independent charter schools.

Before the voucher system was implemented, fewer than 1% of all students in Sweden attended these charter schools. That number jumped to 4% in 2003, 14% in 2012, and 18% in 2019. This suggests that charter schools were always more desirable than their attendance numbers indicated… but beyond the reach of many families because of the cost.

They are called friskola – “free school” – to distinguish them from private tuition-based schools. They have to be approved by the Swedish National Agency for Education, and they follow the same national curriculum as the municipal public schools.

They can be owned and operated by profit-oriented private companies as well as non-profit organizations. And as economist Milton Friedman has pointed out, this has introduced an element of competition into the entire Swedish school system that should improve the overall quality of education and drive down costs.

Neither Snow Nor Rain Nor… Misinformation

There’s a lot of chatter going on about a nefarious plot by the administration to undermine the upcoming election by crippling the USPS. So I figured it might be a good idea to clarify some things about the way the service works.

First off, while it’s true that the USPS is in financial trouble (it lost $8.8 billion in 2019, its 13th consecutive year operating at a loss), it’s not in any immediate danger of shutting down. The service has “sufficient liquidity,” according to its most recent quarterly report, “to continue operating through at least August 2021.”

Next, pictures have been going around showing mailboxes loaded onto trucks. This led to the idea that Trump was having mailboxes removed in order to make it more difficult for people to vote by mail. Fact is, the USPS often moves mailboxes around, on a case-by-case basis, as part of its regular routine. Due to this misconception, however, the service has opted to pause this activity.

Lastly, keep in mind that the USPS  has never been able to guarantee a delivery date for any mail, so there’s no guarantee that all mail-in ballots – especially those posted last-minute – can be delivered in time to be counted. No matter what you’re mailing, you have to take ordinary delivery delays into consideration.

Hopefully this eases some concerns you may have had about voting by mail. Even so, assuming you have the option, I’d still say that in-person voting is best. After all, if you had a winning lottery ticket, would you mail it in… or put on your running shoes?

Welcome Aboard, Warren 

“It doesn’t do anything but sit there and look at you.”

Until recently, Warren Buffett’s opinion on gold seemed pretty clear. That seems to have changed a bit, though.

Okay. So maybe he didn’t actually buy gold. But he bought shares in Canadian gold miner Barrick Gold through his investment company Berkshire Hathaway. 20.9 million shares, to be exact – all while selling his Goldman Sachs majority (84%) share.

While this doesn’t prove that he’s had a change of heart on gold ownership per se, it may suggest a change in his faith in the American dollar/economy. Or maybe he’s found a reason in something I’ve been saying for quite a while now: Gold is tangible, portable, and private. It is the ultimate insurance against the type of economic catastrophe we’ve been dreading.

While I wouldn’t call myself an elite numismatist, I have always been a supporter of precious metals (namely gold) ownership and have written about it a few times. In fact, I recently wrote a beginner’s guide for buying gold bullion coins that you might want to check out. Maybe it will inspire you to join the millions of us who are collectors.

Meanwhile, for whatever reason…

Welcome aboard, Warren.

Mega Mansions Are Selling Like Hotcakes! 

A five-bedroom house built in 1955 in East Hampton is up for sale. The price tag: $72 million.

Nirav Tolia, the co-founder Nextdoor, is selling his San Francisco home in the Pacific Heights for $25 million.

Entertainment mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg just sold his Beverly Hills home, privately, for $125 million.

And a mountain home in Vail was recently purchased by a biotech entrepreneur for $57 million, a record sales price for this ultra-affluent Colorado town.

These are just four of dozens of houses sold for mega-millions since March, when the Corona Crisis shutdown began. A glance at sales data from these super-exclusive real estate markets presents a clear conclusion: They have not suffered. Quite the contrary, demand and prices are at all-time highs.

In my June 29 blog, where I talked about the immediate economic consequences of the coronavirus crisis, I said that I would not want to be investing in multi-million-dollar houses right now.

So, what’s going on?

I did a bit of research. There’s not enough data to support any reasonable conclusions… but we can make some guesses.

Why the selling? 

The super-rich are generally better informed about economics and market trends than the average Joe. That means they are aware of and concerned about the runaway federal spending that has accelerated in the past several months. It’s possible that some of them have decided that inflation is inevitable in the long run and a market crash is possible in the short-term, and so they’ve decided that it’s a good time to transfer some of their stock market wealth into real estate, whose prices traditionally rise and fall in line with inflation. If you have half a billion in stocks right now, converting 10% of it to buy a $50 million mansion might be a smart, anti-inflationary move.

Why the buying? 

Many of these super-exclusive neighborhoods are protected enclaves – far from the city centers that are being burned and pillaged by BLM and Antifa revolutionaries and local, fun-loving looters. But some of them – like Beverly Hills in LA and Pacific Heights in San Francisco – are close enough to the action to be vulnerable to the sort of spread of chaos to suburbia that Donald Trump has been criticized for talking about. I have more than one friend in New York, LA, and other city centers that are considering moving away. If you had a mega mansion near one of the high-tax, high-unemployment, hyper-revolutionary hotspots and you could make a few million by relocating to a safter, quieter, tax-friendlier location, wouldn’t you be tempted to move?

That said… I’m still not buying.

The Fake Problem of Imposture Syndrome 

Here’s the thing about imposture syndrome. It’s not worth talking about.

I just watched a TED Talk in which Elizabeth Cox posits that the way to relieve imposture syndrome is to talk about it. Talk to your peers. Talk to your boss. Talk to anyone that will listen to your precious problem: “I’ve accomplished so much, but I feel like a fraud.”

Cox says that no amount of success will rid you of this sort of self-doubt. Maya Angelou had it. So did Albert Einstein. If they felt that they were faking it, there is no height you can climb to that will eliminate it.

I can’t argue with that. But it’s a bogus issue. A made-up malady to justify yet another idiotic social science program and millions of dollars in wasted studies.

I have two reasons for saying that.

First, you can easily overcome self-doubts by characterizing them honestly. Einstein felt that he didn’t deserve the accolades he received, that his accomplishments were based on the work of others that he pilfered. And Angelou felt that she might not be the greatest American poet of the century, which is what so many fawning critics called her.

Guess what? They were both right. Einstein was, indeed, a thief of good ideas. And there were (and are) dozens of American poets better than Angelou.

And second, the imposture syndrome is a silly exercise in narcissism – in the vain idea that one can be the best.

The way to get rid of it is to accept the fact that however good you are, there are always several that are equally good but not as lucky-to-be-in-the-limelight as you. And there is always at least one that is better.

The worst thing you can do when you have imposture syndrome is talk about it. You may fool yourself into thinking that your interlocutor will feel sympathy for you, but all he or she is doing is thinking, “What is this jackass humbly bragging about?”

According to CDC data, the current wave of coronavirus peaked on July 25 (5-day moving average) nationwide and between July 22 and August 1 in the states that have accounted for the most cases: California, Florida, Texas, Georgia, etc. Since then, cases have come down about 12% nationwide and as much as 30% in the affected states. (Again, 5-day moving average.) The death count, which should follow the case count by two to three weeks, hit 1000 deaths per day (again, on a 5-day moving average) on July 31 and has, as would be expected, stayed in that range since then, but should start coming down sometime this week or next. We’ll see.

The Golden Rule: It’s Universal, but Is It Golden? 

I’m sure you’ve noticed that most religions have, as a core principle, The Golden Rule:

* Christianity – “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” (the Bible, Matthew 7:12) 

* Judaism – “What is hateful to you, do not to others.” (the Torah) 

* Taoism – “Regard your neighbor’s gain as your own gain, and your neighbor’s loss as your own.” (T’ai-Shang Kan-Ying P’ien) 

* Hinduism – “One should never do that to another which one regards as injurious to one’s own self.” (the Mahabharata)

* Buddhism – “A state that is not pleasing or delightful to me… how could I inflict that upon another?” 

* Confucianism – “What you do not wish done to you, do not do to others.”

* Islam – “None of you has faith until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself.” (Imam an-Nawawi’s Forty Hadith)

And most of the great ethical philosophers advocated the same idea. Two examples:

* Immanuel Kant’s Categorical Imperative – “Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.”  

* John Stuart Mill’s Utilitarianism – “Always do whatever will bring the greatest amount of well-being to the greatest number of people.”

There are, of course, nuances of difference. And they provide for interesting discussions among nit-picky intellectuals. But it seems to me that they are all fundamentally the same. They describe an ethical principle so universal that it could be located deep inside our consciousness, perhaps in the reptilian brain.

Equally universal, it seems to me, would be the number one tenet of the Golden Rule: Thou shalt not kill. And yet, if you listed the top three accomplishments of religion over the ages, you’d have to say that justified murder/genocide is one of them.

Why?

Has the Spike Peaked? 

You might not know this if you rely on the media for your news and views, but the spike in cases and deaths from COVID-19 seems to have peaked and is heading down.

The daily case count peaked on July 17 with 77,638 cases and was down to 46,321 as of August 3. The 5-day average death count, which always follows the case count by a week or two, peaked on July 25 at 1096. On August 3, it was down to 984.

And this pattern is true for the states that experienced the biggest surges: California, Florida, and Texas.

If the decline continues for another week or so, we will have in Florida, Texas, and California pretty much the same pattern that we saw in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut, whose cases peaked around April 7 and whose deaths peaked about two weeks later.

What’s really interesting to me is the fact that those states that peaked in April have had no surge in cases since then. You could attribute that to more masks and social distancing – a claim I’ve yet to see any evidence for – or it is possible, as I speculated in March, that the reported case count is still a fraction of the real count, and we may be closer to herd immunity than we think.

The Two Worst Ideas of the 20^th Century 

I’ve been thinking about it. The 20^th century was not nearly as great a century as I had somehow assumed.

It had its positives. There were some very significant achievements in terms of science and technology. And people generally got richer. And work got easier. And there were more conveniences. But it was also the most murderous century in the history of humankind. And the general level of happiness went down – especially in “advanced” countries.

Prior to the 20^th century, I’d say that the worst ideas (in terms of life and happiness) were religious ideas – e.g., “My religion is better than your religion,” or “My authority, as your ruler, comes from God.” In the 20^th century, this sort of thinking lost its power to destroy and decimate. But it was more than amply replaced by two ideas that have the same evil little seed.

I’m talking, of course, about communism and psychoanalysis, two hugely influential schools of thought based on a very similar (and very appealing) untruth: that the troubles in our lives have causes, and those causes are something or someone other than ourselves, and that the way to deal with these issues is to understand, first of all, that we are not responsible for them. In the case of communism, they are caused by systemic oppression on a class level. In the case of psychoanalysis, they are caused by early childhood trauma, usually imposed on us by our parents.

The obvious problem with this idea, besides its patent absurdity, is that it liberates the individual from personal responsibility and excuses him for his bad behavior.

The idea of communism is responsible for more than 100 million deaths in the 20^th century. The core idea of psychoanalysis is probably responsible for a billion miserable lives.

More on this as I chew it over.