John T. Reed’s news blog

Today’s WSJ has a long article about new landlords going wrong. As with most such articles, It is vague and amateurish. Do new landlords need advice? Hell yes. They are playing with fire..Their first critique is that many new landlords do not “treat it as a business.” That is the useless because it is too vague. .What does it mean? Probably most new landlords are employees, not entrepreneurs. So it’s like saying treat your rental house like you treat your other business. “I don’t have another business. I am an elementary school administrator.” This advice was from a BiggerPockets person. As...

I just started allowing moderated comments here for the first time. I rejected all three. At my Facebook pages, people who strayed from facts and logic were eventually blocked leaving a well-behaved bunch. At my blog, anonymous kooks are allowed to post, not just facebook members who are supposed to give their names. Anonymity encourages misbehavior. . At the blog, comments do not appear until I approve them. .My facebook page is https://www.facebook.com/johntreed.publishing..This blog is Rejected first three comments here—I rarely had to do that on FacebookJan 20, 2023

I have been on Facebook for years. Lately, they have been banning and restricting me without good reason. I do not violate their rules. But their low-budget censorship is ultra sensitive to certain topics no matter how logical or fair the comment..For example, when Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, I and other vets started commenting about it. I am a West Point graduate, paratrooper, ranger, and Vietnam vet. So are many of my readers. Others were vets with slightly different backgrounds. .I surmise that the nameless, faceless censors at Facebook are young and did not serve in the military...

I have been reading the recent book Superabundance. It is generally about its title which is basically saying that the more people earth has had, the cheaper and more plentiful everything has become. That is the opposite of the Marxist predictions from Malthus and Paul Ehrlich..That case is inarguable. The evidence is monstrously overwhelming. .But I was surprised to find a very enlightening history of the human race in the book.  .We started as hunter gatherers. Not a good career. If there is too much rain or too little, half the tribe dies. But it was quite egalitarian. No one was...

I was very impressed with Tucker Carlson a year or so ago. He has now turned into a total conspiracy theorist kook..One is UFOs being extraterrestrial space craft an Roswell and all that. There have never been extraterrestrials in our solar system. We know that because the closest planets with temperatures permitting life are too far away.,https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_exoplanets. Several confirmed exoplanets are hypothesized to be potentially habitable, with Proxima Centauri b and Gliese 667 Cc (23.6 ly) considered among the most likely candidates. .Proxima Centauri is the closest and it is 4.1 light years away. That means it would take that many years traveling...