A Good Example of Bad Science 

Early in the COVID-19 breakout, I caught the bug from a young’un I was rassling, and then passed it on to PB, one of my trainers.

PB is in his fifties. He’s scrupulous about staying in shape, and looks like he’s 40. He is also a committed vegan, which gives us something to good-naturedly spar about.

PB had a terrible time with the virus. He was in bed for a week, and unable to work for another two. My experience was considerably better. I spent a fairly miserable 24 hours in bed, but woke up the following day feeling A-OK and was able to resume my normal schedule.

I felt sure that my much easier bout with the virus must have felt comically unjust to PB. Why would he, with his optimum health habits and scrupulously nurtured biosystem, have suffered so greatly, while I, a tequila-drinking, cigar-chomping, meat-eater 20 years older than he, beat it so quickly!

To make him feel a little better, I said, “It makes sense. Imagine when that tiny little COVID virus dropped into the lush, green fields of your unsullied bloodstream. What a paradise the little feller discovered! Now imagine an equally fragile little bug falling into my biosystem, a steaming swamp of meat fat and alcohol, struggling to stay alive while sudden gusts of toxic cigar smoke surround him. He had to be thinking, ‘I’ve got to get the hell out of here! And fast!’”

That Was Then and This Is Now: To Watch or Not to Watch 

I’m reminded of that now because after my last training session with PB, he recommended a movie to me, a four-part documentary titled You Are What You Eat. It is based, he told me, on a study comparing vegan and omnivorous diets. And since he was recommending it, I didn’t have to ask him which one proved out to be better.

Knowing that PB was earnestly trying to help me with my diet, just as he helps me with my exercise and my physical therapy, I told him I would watch it. But I also told him that I was willing to bet that the study was flawed, if not outright rigged.

And then, I think it was the very next day, I read a review of You Are What You Eat by one of my favorite health journalists, Peter Attia.

Attia begins with this:

“The investigators behind this research (and docuseries) claim that their study design – which involves the use of identical twins to control for genetic factors – has allowed them ‘to investigate metabolism in a very comprehensive way,’ including effects of the respective diets on cardiovascular and metabolic health. So how well did the study accomplish that goal? And what can we take away from the results?”

You can read the rest of Attia’s review here.

And you can watch the four-part documentary on Netflix here.

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For the past I-don’t-know-how-many years, I’ve been working on about a dozen unfinished books. Two of them are based on my experience in Nicaragua – Rancho Santana: Then and Now, a history of the resort in Nicaragua that I helped develop, and The Challenge of Charity, the story of my and Number Three Son’s 20-year experience developing Fun Limón, a non-profit community center across the road from Rancho Santana.

While both books were in their early stages, I often looked through the multitudinous entries I had made in my daily journals, hoping to find stories to include. The following is one that I’m especially fond of. It didn’t make it into the history of Rancho Santana, but I’m pretty sure it will be in The Challenge of Charity… if I ever finish it. 

Uninvited Pigs: 
Problems and Solutions 

To create the baseball and soccer fields for Fun Limón, we had to solve several serious problems.

Problem #1 

There was a thick layer of non-porous clay just below the surface of the ground on which we intended to build the fields, which made for such poor drainage that we knew we could not expect to grow healthy and sustainable grass there.

DA (a friend, Fun Limón board member, and civil engineer) told us that the only way to solve this problem and end up with the kind of grass that pro-teams and even Little League teams routinely played on in the US would be to dig out 12 to 18 inches of the non-porous clay and replace it with good soil.

We believed that having high quality baseball and soccer fields – equal to only the top one or two professional fields in the country – would be a big plus for our project. That, along with the bleachers and scoreboards and other amenities we planned to install, would make Fun Limón a model community center that could be emulated by others in the region.

So, we went ahead and cut out the clay, replaced it with good soil, and then planted a durable grass on top of it.

Once that was done, a question arose. How should we water the grass?

Problem #2 

The obvious choice was a sprinkler system. But since one of our objectives was to provide jobs for as many unemployed local people as possible, I had developed a prejudice against all mechanized systems. I believed they would almost certainly reduce the number of local people that we could hire.

Here were our choices:

The budget we had available was enough to pay three men (at the low wages that were appropriate in the area) to water the grass manually. Even if we could keep the grass watered with just three men (which looked unlikely), the cost of paying them (including taxes and government extras) would be about $12,000 a year. Meanwhile, the cost of a top-notch automated system would be about $36,000, and it could be run by one man working part-time.

We did the math and realized that, over the long haul, the manual option didn’t make sense.

After some discussion with our board members, we decided on a compromise: We would purchase an automated tractor with a watering attachment. That cut the laborers needed to 1.5 – less than the three we would be able to hire for the fully manual option, but three times better than the one part-timer needed for the fully automated option.

So, that’s what we did. And when the new system was installed, we felt doubly proud. Proud of our beautifully green and well-trimmed fields of grass, and also proud of having employed a few more local people.

Problem #3 

Alas, as I’ve learned a hundred times in my quest to turn Fun Limón into a responsible and viable charitable endeavor, our compromise gave birth to a new and unexpected problem. All that green grass was attractive not only for baseball and soccer players but for local pig owners as well. Rather than spend money on feed during the dry season, some of them figured it would be a good idea to allow their pigs to munch on our lawns.

Although we had a guard at night, that didn’t prevent stealthy pig owners from cutting the barbed wire fence that surrounded our fields and letting their pigs sneak in. One morning, we came in early to discover a half-dozen pigs dining on the soccer field.

It turns out that pigs are more aggressive grass-eaters than other grazing mammals, such as sheep and goats. Pigs eat down to the roots. Thus, a good third of the soccer field had been ruined.

Solving this new problem seemed simple. We knew all the local pig owners, so we contacted them and asked them to desist. They were gracious in acknowledging our concerns, but, in fact, that solution worked about as well as… well, it didn’t work at all.

We considered appealing to the local authorities, but were reminded, quite rightly, that even in cases of homicide the local constabulary was amazingly inefficient. “The only way to solve the problem,” said Carla, a local woman that worked as an accountant for Fun Limón, “is to shoot one of the pigs. When word gets out that we shoot the pigs, the fence cutting will stop.”

Problem #4 

“We can’t kill pigs,” I said to the board. “What kind of message will that send to the locals? There must be something we can do.”

We tried to educate the community about our problem, and even got the baseball and soccer players behind us. But three months later, the pigs were still destroying our fields.

The Final Solution 

And so, reluctantly, I agreed to execute an errant pig, rationalizing the decision bizarrely by telling myself that it was no worse than using missiles to fight terrorism.

And, yes, the problem went away.

Lesson Learned: Sometimes, you have to kill a pig. 

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Let it go! 

“YOU fix what you can fix and you let the rest go. If there ain’t nothin’ to be done about it, it aint even a problem. It’s just a aggravation.” – Cormac McCarthy in No Country for Old Men

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Election Watch

Jon Stewart on “Electile Dysfunction”

Jon Stewart is an interesting person. He’s indisputably an accomplished comic performer who has been remarkably successful at lampooning public issues and figures for decades.

I think his longevity comes from the fact that he’s committed to the moral requirement of the best type of comedy, which is to gently poke at what seems false about what the world takes as true, and to make fun of what is clearly bad about ideas, strategies, and policies that governments and media giants tell us are good.

Which is to say that I believe Jon Stewart strives to do just that, which isn’t easy, because it requires the performer to maintain an open, independent, and critical mind, while also working to maintain as large an audience as possible.

From what I’ve read about his history, Stewart began his stand-up career as a conventional liberal/leftist and continues to hold many of the sentiments of that viewpoint in his heart. But his brain has been troubled lately by the idiocy of the ideological left, and this has somehow energized him to satirize the left’s most obviously idiotic ideas. For a mainstream American celebrity, this is a dangerous game to play. But he decided to play it and has so far managed to make it work. I don’t know how he is doing in terms of the ratings algorithms, but he still has a job on mainstream media, and that, in itself, is a considerable accomplishment.

Don’t get me wrong. I am impressed by Stewart’s natural and hard-earned talents, and I admire his drive to build his comedic career on his version of what is – and is not – good and true.

The one thing I don’t like about him is that he sometimes seems to see himself as a public “intellectual,” like Jordan Peterson or Thomas Sowell or Ben Shapiro. As a well-known comedian who is accustomed to speaking about controversial issues, the level of his thinking is considerably more nuanced than, say, Stephen Colbert’s. But he’s way too conventional (timid?) in his thinking to rank alongside the truly great (which always means brave) ones like Dave Chappelle, Louis CK, and Bill Burr.

Still, in his own uncertain way, I see Jon Stewart as a challenger of mainstream morals and ideas and a successful entertainer willing to risk some of his popularity (and personal income) by working on the front lines of culture. And for that, he merits my admiration and respect.

Here’s an example, a piece he did Feb. 12 in his first reappearance as the host of “The Daily Show,” where he talked about the 2024 Trump vs. Biden rematch.

Trends in Wokeness 

Freddie deBoer on the Ugly Reality of the College Admissions Process 

“Let me stress one basic point,” writes my favorite self-proclaimed Socialist in a recent post, “You cannot make a competitive selection process equitable, as the entire point of competitive selection is to identify inequality.”

Read his entire argument here.

Wins and Losses in the Gender Wars 

Following threats of a lawsuit… 

A Minnesota school district is allowing the children of Muslim families to opt out of LGBTQ classes. Click here.

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Chart of the Week: The Cluster of Woe

I’ve been in the economic and investment prediction business for more than 40 years, and many of my favorite colleagues have been occasional or perma-bears. I was once persuaded by one of them to buy a bunch of gold when it was priced at $400 an ounce. I’ll be forever grateful to him for that. But for the most part, I’d classify my thinking as pragmatically optimistic. I’ve always believed that if you managed your portfolio smartly, you could get richer every day and every month and every year.

About two years ago, I began to lose my optimism about the potential to grow richer. Especially if most of your assets were tied up in stocks. That gloomier outlook was based partly on fundamental and technical analysis of the markets (which Sean is very good at) but also on what I consider the rapidly moving decline of Western civilization and its values.

Today, Sean gives us his perspective. Reading it, I am more convinced than I have been in recent years that now is the time for caution and for rebalancing assets to be as anti-fragile as possible. – MF

There is now mainstream consensus that the US has moved beyond the risk of recession.

The stock market has soared to new highs with all the carefree hubris of Icarus.

But in the wings, there seem to be a few voices left to shout out sensible warnings.

Dr. John Hussman, who I discovered by way of Bill Bonner, suggests we’re in fact entering a “Cluster of Woe”

A confluence of economic and market indicators that collectively screamed alarm in in 1972, 1987, 1998, 2000, 2018, 2020, and 2022 – moments that preceded pretty sizable stock market losses averaging about -12.5%.

He provides this chart that shows the relationship between subsequent market returns and valuations:

We are currently sitting at the bottom right – the point where valuations look most insane, and the returns we should expect from the stock market over the next 10 years are not very good.

And we know the culprit.

The biggest cause of market overvaluations right now is tech and AI stocks.

 

Tech has pulled away so massively from the rest of the market that the market – weighted as it is by the perceived value of the stocks in it – has become an index of tech stocks.

Tech stocks now account for 29.5% of the overall market’s value.

One stock, Nvidia, has a larger market capitalization than every energy stock in the S&P 500 combined…

Despite generating only 14.4% of the net income of those companies.

Reader, we’ve seen this movie before. We know how it ends. And it isn’t “everyone got rich from tech stocks and lived happily ever after.”

Simply put, there’s probably a very good reason why Warren Buffett just sold some or all of Berkshire’s stake in tech-adjacent companies like Apple, HP, and StoneCo…

But bought more energy companies.

A cluster of woe is upon us. It is only a matter of time before investors finally realize it.

– Sean MacIntyre

Subscribe to Sean’s YouTube channel here. 

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Something Rich and Strange 

By Ron Rash
448 pages
Published Nov. 4, 2014

This is one of two short story collections The Mules read for our February meeting. It was the second book of short stories we read by Ron Rash, who is indisputably one of the finest American short story crafters writing today.

In Something Rich and Strange, he gives us 32 different sorts of stories about different kinds of people, presented in different lengths, tempos, and points of view. The rugged hills and farms and valleys of Appalachia provide a rich and strange background for the rich and strange vignettes of the characters that come to life in each one.

What I Liked About It 

Ron Rash is a specialist in writing short stories, which takes a very different set of skills than writing novels. He is a literary writer, who, like Cormac McCarthy or William Faulkner, can not only tell a tense and compelling story but can do so with a mastery of phrasing and diction and dialog that provides its own rewards.

Critical Reception 

* “Ron Rash occupies an odd place in the pantheon of great American writers, and you’d better believe he belongs there… Something Rich and Strange is a major short-story anthology that can introduce new readers to this author’s haunting talents and reaffirm what his established following already knows.” (New York Times)

* “No one writes better about the misunderstood, bedeviled, mule-stubborn inhabitants of Southern Appalachia than Rash… Something Rich and Strange is a bonanza for short-story fans, and another great introduction to Rash for those who haven’t read the originals yet.” (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

* “The prose in every story is sensual and expressive. [Rash] swings easily between humor and pathos, the mundane and the momentous.” (Chicago Tribune)

 

Chick Lit: The Introduction of a New Fiction Genre 30 Years Ago

Helen Fielding 

On February 28, 1995, an anonymous column appeared in the British newspaper The Independent, titled “The Diary of Bridget Jones.” The idea for the column came from Charlie Leadbeater, the features editor. According to This Week in Literary History, Leadbeater “had been looking for a writer to capture a certain voice, to speak to the kind of women he saw at work every day. It was his wife who suggested Helen Fielding, who wrote for The Independent on Sunday.”

Fielding was working on what she called “an earnest and frankly unreadable novel about cultural divides in the Caribbean” when she was invited to write the column. “But,” she said, “to write a column, as myself, about single life in London. Much as I needed the money, the idea of writing about myself in that way seemed hopelessly embarrassing and revealing. I offered to write it anonymously, as an exaggerated, comic, fictional character. I assumed no one would read it, and it would be dropped after six weeks for being too silly.”

At first, Fielding didn’t tell anyone at the paper what she was doing. “I was working alongside a lot of very clever, seasoned journalists who were writing about New Labour and Chechnya and I felt stupid writing about calories and alcohol units and why it takes three hours between waking up and leaving the house in the morning,” she later wrote. “When we started getting letters praising the column, I started boasting, ‘It’s by me, meeeee!’ and things snowballed from there.”

The Diary of Bridget Jones became a hugely bestselling novel, an Academy Award-winning movie, and arguably the model for a new genre of fiction that became known as “chick lit.”

If you’d like to know more about this story and the continuing controversy about its standing in the hierarchy of contemporary British literature, here is a link to an essay on the subject.

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How the Michelin Tire Company Became Synonymous with Fine Dining 

I never associated the Michelin restaurant rating system with the Michelin tire company, but they are connected.

Watch the fascinating story of how the “star” system originated here.

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Ten Quick Bites 

1. Talk about curious! Woodworker Justin Davies, after learning that, in the 19th century, some bakers would put sawdust in their bread to cut costs, gave it a try. Click here for the results.

2. Boys will be boys. I have twin-girl granddaughters. They were a handful for their parents. Never for K and me. So, I was interested in watching this little video titled: Are your twin girls this wild? Answer: No.

3. From “The Paint Explainer”: An explanation of every known psychological effect over the course of 12 colorful minutes. Click here.

4. Duped again! Since I was a kid, I was told that the human temperature is the same for everybody: 98.6 degrees. It turns out that individual temperatures may vary and the average for all may be cooler than was thought. Click here.

5. An animated evolution of New York City (1524-2023). This is good fun. Especially if you are a New Yorker, as I am. Click here.

6. Kevin Bacon sings “My Sharona” to a reticent alpaca – named Sharona – on his farm. I know what this sounds like, but you may get a kick out of it, as I did. Click here.

7. This guy doesn’t look like he knows how to dance… but in his circle, he’s Fred Astaire to his Ginger Rogers. (Rule 1: Make your partner the star.)

8. Ever wonder what “The Simpsons” characters would look like as real people? Thanks to AI, wonder no more. Click here.

9. A record that you didn’t realize needed to be set: A Louisiana gardener just grew a 44-pound cabbage. Who would have thought? Click here.

10. Aw-shucks moment of the week: I can’t resist these, and I feel compelled to share them. Watch this Golden Retriever and parakeet frolicking. Click here.

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From GM re what I said about the failure of “The War on Poverty” in the Feb. 12 issue:

“I don’t see how any progress can be made when you have a country hell-bent on importing poverty at a furious rate. The US has been doing this for decades and, most alarmingly, for the last three years. Under the current circumstances, I’m surprised the numbers aren’t much, much worse. I believe they are. More lying figures from our overlords.”

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