John Brown's Notes and Essays

The real estate industry has long enjoyed uniquely favorable tax treatment — thanks in part to Mr. Trump’s actions before and after he became president. Mr. Trump at his under-construction Washington hotel, which likely made him eligible for federal tax credits. Crdit...Zach Gibson for The New York Times By Jesse Drucker and James B. Stewart The New York Times Oct. 30, 2020, 11:25 a.m. ET  Original article contains links and additional illustrations Twenty-five years before he was elected president, Donald J. Trump went to Capitol Hill to complain that Congress had closed too many tax loopholes. He warned that one industry, in particular, had been severely harmed: real estate.   The recent demise of real-estate tax shelters, part of a landmark 1986 overhaul of the tax code, was “an absolute catastrophe for the country,” Mr. Trump testified to Congress that day in November 1991. “Real estate really means so many jobs,” he said. “You create so many other things. They buy carpet....

Sophisticated algorithms can do everything they are supposed to do, performing wonders, and still make bad recommendations and dodgy claims.  Image from article:  By Brian Christian Norton, 476 pages, $27.95 By David A. Shaywitz The Wall Street Journal Oct. 25, 2020 4:52 pm  In the mid-1990s, a group of software developers applied the latest computer learning to tackle a problem that emergency-room doctors were routinely facing: which of the patients who showed up with pneumonia should be admitted and which could be sent home to recover there? An algorithm analyzed more than 15,000 patients and came up with a series of predictions intended to optimize patient survival. There was, however, an oddity— the computer concluded that asthmatics with pneumonia were low-risk and could be treated as outpatients. The programmers were skeptical .  Their doubts proved correct. As clinicians later explained, when asthmatics show up to an emergency room with pneumonia, they are c...

Everyone has felt tested the past few years. Now the country is making a big and steely decision.  Noonan image from article By Peggy Noonan The Wall Street Journal Oct. 29, 2020 6:59 pm ET  Excerpt:  I find myself going back, as I review these years, to a crisp, dark evening in December 2016, in Manhattan, where I’d joined a visiting friend, a Catholic activist, for a drink. She had been ardently anti-Trump, was heartbroken at his election and struggling to come to terms, to find some higher meaning. “Maybe this is God’s way of giving us a last chance,” she said. “I think when God gives you a last chance he gives you John Kasich [ jb - see ],” I said, and we both laughed.  The 2016 election to me felt more like a chastisement, a judgment from on high of who we are and what we are becoming.  Where did Donald Trump come from? I think now what I wrote then. He was produced by both parties’ collusion in refusing to stop illegal immigration, carelessness about war,...

Rose Dugdale rejected her privileged English upbringing—and devoted much of her adult life to the cause of Irish republicanism.  Walter Heaton and Rose Dugdale.  Photo: From the author's personal collection   By Tom Nolan The Wall Street Journal  Oct. 29, 2020 6:46 pm ET  Bridget Rose Dugdale, born into a world of English privilege in 1941, seemed an unlikely candidate to become a radical activist who would spend much of her adult life attempting to undermine the British Empire. But as security expert Anthony Amore recounts in “The Woman Who Stole Vermeer,” Rose, as she is known, gained notoriety in the 1970s by devising daring art thefts and other crimes in service to the cause of Irish republicanism. “She was media gold,” writes Mr. Amore, “having abandoned a life of wealth and leisure to take up arms.”  Rose’s most famous action may be the 1974 theft of a collection of Old Master artwork; the haul included a painting by that favorite of connoisseurs, Ve...

Article  from , which notes:  John Maxwell Hamilton's highly acclaimed new book on the history of American propaganda is now available (released Oct. 21, 2020) at  LSUPress.org . "Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda" tells the story of the enduring threat to American democracy that arose out of World War I: the establishment of pervasive, systematic propaganda as an instrument of the state.  (jb: See below items for more information on this important new book, including an interview with its author.) See also ( 1 ) ( 2 ) ( 3 ); and my own minor contribution to a collection of essays  re this intriguing subject ,  edited by Deborah L. Trent, Ph.D ,  Nontraditional U.S. Public Diplomacy: Past, Present, and Future (Public Diplomacy Council, 2016), pp. 44-72. The editor  notes in her kind introduction: "John Brown’s rich analysis of two of President Woodrow Wilson’s key and colorful appointees elucidates the r...

image (not from article) from By  Gregory Zuckerman  and  Ken Brown,  The Wall Street Journal , Updated Oct. 28, 2020 5:07 pm ET; article contains additional illustrations They  predicted a victory  for Donald J. Trump in 2016 when almost everyone else on Wall Street counted him out. This year they aren’t quite so bold. In 2016, a small number of well-known investors and executives, including Jeffrey Gundlach, who runs asset manager DoubleLine Capital LP, investor Carl Icahn, hedge-fund manager John Paulson and a few others made a truly contrarian bet. While pundits and others  anticipated a victory  for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton, these investors predicted a win for Mr. Trump.  S&P 500 price return in the three months prior to each presidential election YEARS WHEN INCUMBENT PARTY WON THIS YEAR 20 % Average return ahead of incumbent wins: +5.0% 10 0 –0.7% –10 1928 ’52 ’76 2000 ’16 2020 INCUMBENT PARTY LOST 10 % 0 –0.7% Average ret...