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“Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause”: a book review

I just finished reading “Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase” by Roger G. Kennedy. Most of the histories I’ve read have either taught me about events I hadn’t formed any prior impressions about or else confirmed and colored out my superficial understanding of those events. This book was different for me. I grew up thinking of Jefferson’s Louisiana purchase as being simply a real estate transaction occasioned by Napoleon’s need for cash, a kind of Founding Father’s Art of the Deal. I thought of it as an unalloyed good for the country. Kennedy convinced me that the real driver was soil exhaustion by tobacco and cotton planters in the east and the relentless push for virgin farmland to be put under cultivation by slaves of plantation owners. I confess that I never gave a thought to the fact that to effect this expansion, the actual, you know, Native American residents of the land had to be driven off. That was accomplished either by (1) forci...
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Physics and Feng Shui

Just saw this on FB, although the report apparently came out last year:   "Physicists confirmed that clocks in two rooms at identical heights separated by only 10 meters horizontally run at measurably different speeds — not because of gravity differences but because local mass distribution differences create subtly different spacetime curvatures detectable by modern optical atomic clocks.   "Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder placed optical atomic clocks in adjacent laboratories on the same floor and measured tick rate differences for 6 months. The clocks diverged at 10 to the power of minus 21 seconds per second — caused by slightly different gravitational potential created by different wall thickness, equipment mass, and geological substrate beneath each room.   "The measurement proves Einstein's general relativity operates measurably at human spatial scales, not just between planets."   I assume when they say, "not because of gravity diffe...
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It’s not just for diabetes anymore

GLP-1 receptor agonists [semaglutide (Ozempic, Wegovy) and tirzepatide (Mounjaro, Zepbound)] are proving transformational for type II diabetes patients in particular and for obese individuals in general. Now, it appears they have benefits in cancer patients. “Use of GLP-1 receptor agonists in patients with four solid tumor types was significantly associated with lower rates of progression to metastatic disease over a 5-year period, a propensity score-matched analysis found. “In patients with stage I-III colorectal, liver, breast, or lung cancers, those who started a GLP-1 drug after their cancer diagnosis had a 31% to 50% lower risk of progression to stage IV disease compared with patients who initiated another class of antidiabetic drug, DPP-4 inhibitors, reported Mark David Orland, MD, of the Cleveland Clinic Taussig Cancer Institute.” *snip* “Initially approved for type 2 diabetes and obesity, GLP-1 drugs now carry indications in  cardiovascular disease ,  chronic kidney di...
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Rentals and your retirement portfolio

I’m not an investment advisor. I do have personal experience in investing going back over 40 years. I’ve been retired for nearly two years and have no regrets so far. “Rental properties carry concentrated risk, illiquidity, and management overhead…The return needs to be significantly better [than an investment elsewhere] to justify the extra complexity. Often, it's not.” Per the link below, I’ve never owned or managed rental property—too much work and risk for my taste. But any investment portfolio should be diversified, and that includes real estate. If you own your home or at least have equity in it, you already have a real estate investment. For most Americans, that’s most of their personal wealth. Beyond that, you can buy REIT shares if real estate is real to you. But diversified also means equities, bonds, treasuries and, yes, gold. Not in equal proportions—that depends on your appetite for risk. That’s up to you. I haven’t figured out how to monetize a good night’s sleep. But...
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What could possibly go wrong?

“ As the Iran war drags on toward the end of it third month, Fars News Agency, an Iranian government-affiliated news outlet, reports that the country has launched a shipping insurance service backed by Bitcoin for Iranian ships. It cited documents that came from the Iranian Ministry of Economy and Financial Affairs.” *snip* “A report from Bloomberg stated   that Iranian business magnate Babak Zanjani, a billionaire who has been accused of embezzling money from Iran's oil ministry, first began promoting the idea on his social media on May 8.” So “Zanjani” is “Trump” in Farsi. https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/crypto/articles/iran-turns-bitcoin-shipping-insurance-193018779.html
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A six-figure limit on Social Security benefits?

Sometime around 2033 or 2034, SS benefits will drop by ca. 23% if nothing is done.   One frequent proposal is to remove the cap on payroll taxes. There are at least two problems with this: (1) the wealthiest Americans derive most of their income from non-salary sources, and (2) this just turns SS into welfare, and we already know what Congress does with welfare. SS is retirement insurance paid for by workers. Let’s keep it that way. Another proposal is to cap benefits:   “The very highest income couples can now collect $100,000 a year in Social Security benefits.” That’s gross income, not net income. Couples making $100K/yr pay income taxes on 85% of that. They don’t pocket all $100K, and the more taxable income they have outside of SS, the more tax they pay on the SS income as that income puts them into a higher tax bracket. Furthermore, the Federal income taxes on SS benefits *don’t* go into the General Fund like the rest of federal income taxes. These funds are directed *en...
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Remembering Milton Friedman

Mike Brock has a long piece up at his substack on Milton Friedman. For the tl;dr crowd, here’s the money quote: “ The honest historical record is that Friedman made substantive contributions that the contemporary American left has absorbed without recognizing and that the contemporary American right has invoked without honoring. Both receptions are defective. The historical figure is more interesting than either.”   I’ve never taken an economics course. What little I know of the subject I’ve picked up on the fly while reading history. I certainly don’t know enough to criticize Friedman’s writings. But from what I gather in Brock’s article, much of what passes for praise or attacks on Friedman in the popular press are as wide of the mark as praise and criticism of Karl Marx. I’ll just post a couple of nut grafs from the Brock piece. “The contemporary American left’s framing of Friedman as an opponent of human freedom requires the audience not to read what he actually wrote. He wrote...
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