I eat one or two Oreo Thins almost every day. Note that “a serving” equals four cookies. One cookie has just 5 grams of carbohydrates including three grams of sugar. By the way, for whatever reason(s) I think Oreo Thins taste notably better than the original Oreo cookie.
This post could have been titled “A Middle Finger To A Doctor.” I once had a primary care physician who literally screamed at me about eating Oreo Thins. I asked him if he knew how many grams of carbs and sugar were in one cookie. He answered, “I don’t know and I don’t care! No Oreo Thins!” Needless to say, I was glad when he left the practice.
I have given up so many of the foods I enjoy, but Oreo Thins will not be one of them any time in the near future. Long Live Oreo Thins!
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I have written about Kyle Bass before. He is the founder and CIO of Hayman Capital, an investment manager of private funds focused on global event-driven opportunities.
I used to enjoy his appearances on Last Call hosted by Brian Sullivan, a sadly now defunct news show on CNBC. Bass never pulled any punches. Recently, he was a guest on a program on Bloomberg TV.
One of the two hosts asked him about all of the “China Hawks” who, apparently, will be a part of the next Presidential administration. Bass answered, “I call them China Realists.” He also advised no investments in China at all. The host said, “Doesn’t an investor have to be geographically diversified? Shouldn’t one be invested in the second largest economy in the world?” Bass said, “No,” and then rattled off data about how poorly Chinese stock markets have performed compared to the country’s alleged GDP growth.
Bass continued by talking about how an investment in China is an investment in the Chinese Communist Party, about how the Chinese government can literally pull the plug on any investment in any company or any sector at any time and for any reason. He didn’t hedge his opinion like so many public people do.
I have often written that I believe the West is already at war with China and its proxies such as Iran. The sooner we realize this, the better off we will be in the long run.
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I call the Cybertruck the Cyberturd. I think it is among the ugliest vehicles in history and looks like it was drawn by a three-year old, even though I know its exterior was designed by the same person who designed the Pontiac Solstice.
It is not a reliable vehicle, either. As reported on CNBC and elsewhere, Tesla is voluntarily recalling about 2,400 of the monstrosities to replace defective drive inverters. THIS IS THE SIXTH RECALL IN THE LAST YEAR FOR THESE ABOMINATIONS! No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.
By the way, I think Elon Musk’s support of Trump is not just a change in the former’s world view. I believe that Musk thinks the end of US EV subsidies and mandates will be good for his company by wiping out US competition in EVs.
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Peter Thiel co-founded PayPal and founded data analytics firm Palantir. He was the first outside investor in Fack Fucebook and was also an early investor in LinkedIn and SpaceX. Needless to say, he is quite wealthy.
He caused quite a stir in Silicon Valley in 2016 by openly supporting Trump. Here is an excerpt from a recent Free Press article/interview with Thiel:
“On the surface, Thiel seems full of contradictions. He is a libertarian who has found common cause with nationalists and populists. He invests in companies that have the ability to become monopolies, and yet Trump’s White House wants to break up Big Tech. He is a gay American immigrant, but he hates identity politics and the culture wars. He pays people to drop out of college, but still seems to venerate the Ivy League.
But perhaps that’s the secret to his success. He’s beholden to no tribe but himself, no ideology but his own.”
Here are some comments by Thiel himself:
“One institution where you can ask this question [about where is the line between skepticism of an elite, whose gatekeeping has been too strident and falling into a rabbit hole, where there’s no gatekeeping and no institutional authority at all] is science. I always think of the history of science—that it started as a two-front war against both excessive dogmatism and excessive skepticism. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a scientist was a heterodox thinker who didn’t believe in, say, the decayed Aristotelian scholasticism of the Catholic Church.
Maybe you were empirical, and there were dogmas you were questioning. But you also couldn’t be extremely skeptical—you couldn’t trust your senses. Extreme dogmatism was incompatible with science. Extreme skepticism was incompatible with science. The problem is, it’s easy to be against one. If you’re always against dogmatism, maybe you’re too skeptical of everything. If you’re always against skepticism, maybe you’re too dogmatic. There’s this complicated balance where we need to be both anti-dogmatic and anti-skeptical…
Then if you asked the scientists [of today]: Where are the scientists too dogmatic? I don’t think they could tell you. Doesn’t that tell you that we have completely lost the sense of balance? What has become “science” is something more dogmatic than the Catholic Church of the seventeenth century.”
Maybe that exposition is too esoteric for some of you, but I think it is a crystallization of what I often write, that science is supposed to be an open-minded and open-ended exploration of the universe and NOT a dissemination of dogma and blind zealotry.
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As reported here, Dodge is pushing up the release data of the ICE-powered Charger because the company is “feeling pressure to meet customer demand for new performance models with a gas engine under the hood.” What a surprise! <end sarcasm>
The ICE-powered version was not supposed to be available until “late” 2025, but now the company website indicates it will be available in “mid” 2025 even though Dodge refused to confirm the change to Car And Driver. Einstein is supposed to have said the definition of insanity is repeating the same action over and over, but expecting a different result. Most Americans, and apparently most Europeans as well, do NOT want to drive a battery-electric vehicle. Governments trying to force them on their citizens is insanity.
On a recent “Board Member” call, Everyday Driver’s Todd Deeken revealed he had just seen a Charger in person for the first time and his impression is that the car is quite large for a two-door vehicle. I didn’t get the same impression when I saw one last month at Barrett-Jackson, but was not as impressed with the car’s appearance as I had hoped to be. It’s not ugly by any means, but it’s not a “Wow” car, either. Hey, where else can you see a picture of a package of Oreo Thins and one of a 2025 Dodge Charger in the same place?!
Here are some “Pelated Rosts” according to me. WordPress is allegedly working on the issue why those posts are only referring to half of the posts from 2018 and those from the last two weeks, but we’ll see when, or if, they ever fix it.
Holy Sh*t! March?!
August, A Celebration
Random Acts Of Writing
Please feel free to click on any or all of the links to these posts. Thanks.
#AMiddleFingerToDiabetes