John T. Reed’s news blog

A number of colleges are saying their students need to learn how to debate civilly. University of Chicago was the first a number of years ago when a new president issued a letter saying something like if you want trigger warnings and safe spaces, do not come here. Last week Dartmouth said it. Today’s WSJ has an op-ed by a Harvard professor who want to have opposite sides of various hot issues debate there. Harvard is in favor of the idea in the abstract, but no way with real spokespersons for drilling or Israel or Ukraine or life or transgender...

Ya gotta love the Real-estate experts. The Realtors' chief economist Lawrence Yun says home sales and prices are up because people are taking advantage of the lower mortgage rates. . 6.6%!? That is the rate they said killed the market a year ago. . The FACT is that 3% mortgage rates were extraordinarily low by post-WW II standards and people like Lawrence Yun and Wall Street Journal writer Nicole Friedman who wrote today's article cannot be bothered to Google “home mortgage rates historical” to put their analysis in perspective. . Almost all my real estate investing career has been in...

I was a lieutenant in the US Army 6/68 to 6/72—82nd Airborne Division, ranger, and a tour in Vietnam. I was shocked at many of the low-rank troops—privates, spec 4s, corporals, buck sergeants. A sentence I used then was, “I did not know people that dumb existed.” .One example: most elite 82nd Airborne troops ate in the mess hall at the end of the month but ate at fast food places at the beginning of the month. Why? They got paid on the first of the month. .They also tended to buy stereos on pay day, then hock them with...

Wes Clark has an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal saying that Ukraine needs to do a D-Day invasion against Russian-occupied Ukraine. . When I was a freshman at West Point, Wes, then a junior, was my table commandant for a time. There were ten cadets to a table. The table commandant sat at the southern end of the table; other cadets in descending classes toward the other, north end. I thought he was movie-star handsome—not the only such cadet—and really smart. . He commanded the NATO Bosnia war which we won with just air power—a feat that armies and...

Theater, movies, TV sitcoms, TV dramas ALL fit the same format: Act 1: introduce characters and protagonist and his or her compulsion Act 2: Protagonist encounters multiple obstacles to satisfying his or her compulsion culminating in the final seemingly insurmountable obstacle Act 3: Protagonist surmounts the insurmountable obstacle and achieves his compulsion . When this cliche sequence happens in an athletic contest, fans, and media swoon. The winning protagonist—Mahomes in the Superbowl case—is treated as super human. . Bunch of BS. If you wish to measure the virtues of Mahomes or any other QB, there are plenty of metrics that...