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Whisky Pete Hegseth and toxic masculinity

My dad was an officer in the US Naval reserve. He served in the Panama Canal Zone for two years in the late 50’s, when I was a toddler. He always spoke highly of the US Navy, although he admitted he was almost kicked out of OCS for infractions due to his inattention to petty rules. He eventually earned a PhD in chemical engineering and retired with four US patents, one of which he spun off into a company that supported him for several years after he retired from Martin-Marietta in Oak Ridge TN. This is all by way of saying that (a) he was no dummy and (b) he was supportive of the US military. He was also an early opponent of the Vietnam war in particular and US military adventurism in general. Pete Hegseth is a Princeton alum (which he chose over West Point) and former Army National Guard officer who served in Afghanistan, Iraq and Gitmo. Far from being sobered by those experiences, he seems to have become intoxicated. “Once the Global War on Terror became politically untenable to defe...
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Will Cuba be Venezuela 2.0?

Like Lenin in Russia and Mao in China, Castro replaced a corrupt government when he came to power.  Like Lenin and Mao, Castro replaced one form of totalitarianism with another.   Unlike communism in the USSR and China, communism in Cuba has proven durable. Decades of US trade sanctions, subversion and assassination plots failed to dislodge the grip of the Castro family. Partly, this is owing to subsidy by the USSR. But the USSR has been gone for 35 years and the Castro regime still stands. I can’t help but wonder whether a better approach would have been for the US to encourage trade and tourism with Cuba, forcing the regime to explain to its people why they should eschew the bright shiny objects and opportunities of capitalism for the drab life under communism. The carrot instead of the stick. Trust capitalism and human nature. Now, the Trump Administration is once again reaching for the stick.  “ On Wednesday, federal prosecutors announced   criminal charges ...
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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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