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I saw my cardiologist last week…

It was a routine checkup six months after my surgery to remove blockage from the carotid artery in my neck after my stroke.

“I know how annoying it must be when patients come to you with Google-based diagnoses of health problems they are experiencing,” I told Dr. A, my very conservative and otherwise very mainstream cardiologist. “But I’ve been reading lots of reports online that myocarditis is being reported as a common side effect of not just COVID, but also taking several jabs of the COVID vaccine. And since a few weeks after my last – and third – jab, I’ve been experiencing pretty much all the symptoms.”

He smiled. “Such as?”

“Well, persistent fatigue, balance issues, occasional acute chest pain and heartburn, times when I feel that my heart is beating too quickly, and swollen ankles. Am I crazy?”

I smiled widely, assuming he was going to say some version of “yes.” But he surprised me.

“No,” he said. “Myocarditis is one of several documented side effects of the COVID vaccines. It’s not a crazy, unfounded conspiracy theory. It may have begun that way, but there is a wealth of information that has been examined in the past 12 to 18 months. And myocarditis is not the only danger. There are others. In fact, I no longer recommend the vaccines to my patients.”

I raised my eyebrows.“Mark,” he said, “I don’t think you have myocarditis. I think you have the problem of having been in 30-year-old shape since you were 30. And in the last several months, your body has decided to settle down and become a septuagenarian. Nevertheless, I’m ordering a few tests so we can rule out myocarditis. And I’m prescribing a diuretic to get that fluid out of your lower legs.”

But I was barely listening. “Yes!” I was thinking. “It’s not a bogus theory! And I’m not crazy! I can’t wait to tell all my Doubting Thomas friends and colleagues!”

And that’s why I’m telling you!

 

A World Divided: Is a New Dark Age Coming?

During my high school and college years, debates between liberals and conservatives were energetic and passionate. I was a card-carrying Socialist then, yet I never had the nerve to think I was smarter than Bill Buckley. Nor do I remember feeling any antipathy towards my conservative friends and family members, and I didn’t feel any from them.

Today, in the US (and, from what I’ve experienced, in Canada and in Europe, from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean), disagreements about so many ordinary things have become political – from what someone thinks of the Joe Rogan podcast, to the car he drives, to his thoughts on business issues like trade barriers and wages.

What’s remarkable about these arguments is that you can tell within the first sentence or two what the person you’re talking to believes about the topic at hand – virtually any topic, including, say, offshore windmills, or whether men can have babies, or whether African Americans deserve reparations.

You not only know in advance his positions on all these topics, but also the arguments he will make and the particular facts he will use to support those arguments. You may also know your own positions on those topics and the facts you would use to support your arguments.

What has happened? Why are our disagreements so similar these days? And why are our opinions so categorical across such a wide range of topics?

My answer is this…

A set of arguments about human dignity, social equality, and political freedom began during the Age of Enlightenment in the latter half of the 18th century. It led to great advances in the sciences, and, coupled with the great experiment of free market capitalism, to the greatest period of wealth advancement in the history of the world. (It also led to the greatest political revolutions in modern history, including the French and American Revolutions.)

In European universities in the middle of the 19th century, it was cross-bred with the Socialist theories of Carl Marx and Friedrich Engels and – perhaps more oddly – with the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud. And it emerged, towards the end of the century, as a set of ideas that were seemingly unrelated but very much connected with those of the Enlightenment (principally, Humanism, individual agency, and individual liberty.) And although no one I’ve ever read wrote about this, it seems pretty clear to me that those two philosophies – Socialism and Freudian psychology – infested the best ideas of Enlightenment thinking and gradually corrupted them, without anyone seeming to notice.

By the second half of the 20th century, the foundational beliefs of Freudianism and Socialism (which included, among other bad ideas, the inevitability of psychological, social, and political oppression and victimization), had morphed again into the advent of Structuralism, Post-structuralism, intersectionality, critical race theory, gender fluidity, and equity theories – which all felt like Humanism, but were, in fact, polar opposites of every good and useful idea that came out of the Enlightenment.

Most importantly, these were not, and are not, alternatives to Enlightenment thinking. They are religious doctrines that are anti-humane, anti-intellectual, anti-science, and anti-individual liberty that, if not opposed, will lead us towards a new age that may be more destructive to humanity than the nearly 1,000 years of tribal warfare, barbarity, acute poverty, and intellectual and moral regression that we used to call the Dark Ages.

And that is why, in my opinion, disagreements today are so mean-spirited and even hateful.

In turning towards these new “progressive” social ideas and movements, we are turning away from all of the great ideas of the Enlightenment – e.g., that all men deserve equal respect and dignity and an equal chance to participate and succeed in society – and replacing them with deeply irrational and largely unscientific ideas that are much closer to religious than rational thinking.

The powerful among us are no longer committed to researching, discovering, and publicizing the universal truths that bind us together as a single species. Instead, we have returned to believing in “revealed truths” that cannot be questioned and must be accepted with the full commitment that medieval kings and priests assigned to their religious doctrines.

And so, despite our fetish for fact-checking the statements of our opponents, we no longer care about facts at all. Nor logic. Nor science. We believe only in proselytizing the ignorant and extinguishing the infidels.

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The US Army Puts in Place a New Vax Policy

For most of my life, the US Army was a refuge for young men that didn’t have college plans or a trade they intended to learn. It was an organization that offered not just food and lodging, but education and training that could give one a hopeful trajectory in later life. And so, except for the Vietnam war years, the Army had always been able to recruit the men (and now women) that it needed. This began to change in 2020 and 2021. And by 2022, recruitment was down by almost 25%.

There were, no doubt, many reasons for this. But one was the requirement that recruits be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. I’m sure when this requirement was imposed, the top brass didn’t think it would have any significant impact. But apparently it did. Earlier this year, Secretary of the Army Christine Wormuth issued a memorandum that rescinded COVID-19 vaccine policies. Click here.

Problems at the US Southern Border Are Becoming More Unreal Every Day

Could this be true? Why is Homeland Security sending hundreds of its officers down to the border to assist with “babysitting” the thousands of illegals coming in every day. Shouldn’t they be more concerned with investigating serious crimes – like child exploitation and sex trafficking – up north? Click here.

Meanwhile, thousands – some reports say tens of thousands – are marching toward the Southern border now. Click here.

Yet Another War? And in South America? 

We have Russia vs. Ukraine. Israel vs. Hamas. We have civil wars in Afghanistan, Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Libya, Mali, Somalia, South Sudan, and Syria. And we have armed conflicts in Cyprus, Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, Syria, Turkey, Yemen, and Western Sahara.

And now, in what I assume is a desperate attempt to salvage his wrecked economy, President Nicolás Maduro proposed – and Venezuelan voters approved – that Venezuela should “claim sovereignty over” (i.e., seize) a huge slice (61,600 square miles) of Guyana’s oil-rich Essequibo region. Click here.

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Clip of the Week: Loans from Uncle Warren 

From Garrett Baldwin, writing in Postcards from the Florida Republic:

“Let’s talk about the Warren Buffett Closed-End Fund. A lot of people avoid closed-end funds because of their misunderstanding of risk. But let’s do a quick recap.

“Let’s say a money manager opens a new fund portfolio comprising stocks, bonds, or other investments. The manager sells a fixed number of shares on an exchange like the NYSE. Because it’s fixed, there will never be more shares issued. Investors buy the shares, which trade on a stock market like any other equity.

“But here’s the important part. Closed-end funds don’t trade like mutual funds and mirror their net asset value (NAV) at the end of the trading day. Instead, they are disconnected from their NAV. They trade irrationally. Sometimes, closed-end funds trade at a premium to the total fund’s net asset value.

“However, sometimes, they will trade at a discount. Imagine there’s a closed-end fund that trades at $18 per share. But the NAV may sit at $20. In this case, the fund trades at a 10% discount to its NAV…”

That could represent a very interesting opportunity… Continue reading here.

 

Chart of the Week: Office Rentals Are Getting Weaker 

The office sector’s credit crunch is intensifying. By one measure, it’s now worse than during the 2008-09 global financial crisis. Only one out of every three securitized office mortgages that expired during the first nine months of 2023 was paid off by the end of September, according to

Moody’s Analytics. That is the smallest share for the first nine months of any year since at least 2008. The reason: Many office owners can’t pay back their old loans because they can’t get new mortgages. Click here.

Economic Craziness of the Week: Biden Administration Encourages Money Managers to Push ESG Investing 

President Joe Biden’s Labor Department recently announced a new rule that will encourage money managers to put their clients’ money in what they call “environmental, social, and governance investing” (ESG). It allows them to ignore their fiduciary duties to provide their clients with the highest possible returns on their investments, based purely on financial and economic projections, in favor of funds that may be considerably weaker on the books, but have the “virtue” of being invested in companies that have high ratings in terms of social and environmental issues.

“Socially conscious investing has been around for decades,” says Stephen Moore, writing in a recent issue of Taki’s Magazine. “I have no problem with individual shareholders choosing to invest in such stocks. But it’s an entirely different matter when trillion-dollar investment and retirement funds such as BlackRock inject their own biases into the way they invest people’s savings without their knowledge or consent.

“To make matters worse, researchers at Columbia University and the London School of Economics found ESG funds may not even be achieving their goals. The study compared the ESG records of American companies in 147 ESG fund portfolios to ones in over 2,000 non-ESG portfolios and found that the ESG companies were often worse when it came to labor and environmental law compliance.”

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A Billion-Dollar David vs. a Trillion-Dollar Goliath 

Read Time: 11 minutes

Joe Kiani 

Joe Kiani emigrated to the US from Iran when he was nine. Thirteen years later, he had a master’s degree in electrical engineering. Two years after that, he began working on a way to read oxygen levels in the blood using light. He succeeded, and the “pulse oximeter” was a key factor in building his company, Masimo, from a one-person operation in a California garage into a billion-dollar corporation that monitors the health of more than 200 million patients across the US. “Then, in 2019,” says Katherine Laidlaw, writing in The Hustle, “Kiani learned that Apple, the $3 trillion industry titan, might be infringing on the tech he’d spent decades of his life perfecting.”

The rest of the story is still unfolding, and it reads like a thriller. Click here.

An Ode to “I Hate Myself and I Want to Die” 

Read Time: 8 minutes

In this essay, Freddie deBoer talks about something that everyone experiences – some more than others – and his way of thinking about it. “I’m talking about a type of self-pity,” he writes, “that the self recognizes as self-pity which just provokes more self-loathing and from that more self-pity.” Click here for more.

I Couldn’t Resist This Piece from Far Out Magazine 

Read Time: 16 minutes

The title was too good: “10 actors who declined roles in Quentin Tarantino movies.” Click here.

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Sick of Myself 

Watch Time: 97 minutes

I wanted to watch Forgotten Love, which had been highly recommended by my Myrtle Beach buddies. But I wanted to watch that one with K, and she was not available. So, I flicked through Prime’s recommendations and found Sick of Myself, a 2022 Norwegian film written and directed by Kristoffer Borgli and starring Kristine Kajuth Thorp and Erik Saether.

It began as a typical Scandinavian domestic drama, but quickly turned into something that I would have criticized as absurd and implausible… except the acting and the direction were so good, I couldn’t pull myself away from it.

Sick of Myself is hard to classify. I’d say it’s 50% black comedy, 25% political satire, and 25% horror. It’s odd. It’s not for everyone. But it’s very good.

Interesting 

Borgli said that living in Los Angeles while writing the script is what most heavily influenced the film’s characters and plot: “The influence from the environment around me here really did something to the story and to the character. The personal traits of her being hugely ambitious, opportunistic, and maybe even a little bit of a narcissist were things I bumped into more frequently here than I did in Norway.”

Critical Reception 

* “Kristoffer Borgli is unduly proud of himself for concocting his unlikable protagonists, and he marinates in their repulsive self-absorption.” (Slant Magazine)

* “Putting aside the film’s obnoxious social critique… there is something compelling about its particular brand of cynicism.” (New York Times)

* “It’s not subtle, but a committed performance from Thorp and some uncomfortable truths about the nature of self-promotion [make] this a thought-provoking satire.” (Empire Magazine)

You can watch the trailer here.

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Quick Bites:Phantom Artist… Dictionary Stand-Off… Chevrolet Meets Hallmark… Pop Quiz!

Left: Max Kolomatsky’s version of a small business’s sign above the original in a storefront window; right: a redesigned poster taped on a lamppost next to the original 

Max Kolomatsky, a talented digital artist in Brooklyn, has been stealthily redesigning homemade flyers that are posted around New York City. Click here.

I’ve never been impressed with Merriam-Webster’s choice for “Word of the Year but they nailed it for 2023. Check it out here.

OED’s choice? Not nearly as good. Click here.

Sentimental, but sweet. Hallmark sells greeting cards. Chevrolet sells cars. To greet this holiday season, Chevrolet produced this Hallmark-sentimental video about a young woman and her ailing grandmother. Click here.

AP US History Quiz: Presidents. Aced it! Click here.

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From CW: Ready, Fire, Aim – “It cut through all the BS…”

“I recently read your book Ready, Fire, Aim and thought it so nearly cut through all the BS and distilled the stages a new business goes through (hopefully) on its way to Stage 4.”

My Response: Thanks, CW!

By the way, readers of this blog can order most of my books – including Ready, Fire, Aim – directly from us at a discounted price. Click here.

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"Were it not for hypocrisy I’d have no advice to give."
"Were it not for sciolism I’d have no ideas to share."
"Were it not for arrogance, I’d have no ambition."
"Were it not for forgetfulness, I would have no new ideas to write about."