John T. Reed’s news blog

I reviewed Trump’s book Art of the Deal back when it was on the best-seller list in December 1987. The review is so old that I did not have an electronic copy of it. I hd to manually transcribe it. Here it is. My review of The Art of the Deal As you know, Donald Trump is full of himself. And your buying his book will make him even more full of himself. It can’t be helped. The book has too many useful insights for real estate investors to pass it up. Read it. Theses days, when I pick up...

I have never cared for The Donald and I think reality TV shows like Survivor are idiotic, so I scoffed at his recent TV series, The Apprentice, when I first heard about it. I never intended to watch it, but I caught glimpses of it when channel surfing and saw discussions of it in various places. I ended up watching a good bit of the next-to-last show and all of the final show. I must admit that I now like The Donald much more than I expected, and I found the show to be instructive regarding management. Real estate investors need to...

Today’s Wall Street Journal has a blockbuster article about the value of prestigious undergraduate school and the value of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) degrees regardless of the school. To read it, Google the title: “Do Prestigious Colleges Pay Off? It depends on the Major.” I went to two prestigious schools: West Point and Harvard Business. My education at West Point was mostly STEM. The Journal article authors lump a business major with liberal arts majors. I would say the Harvard MBA is more STEMish, but okay. BS is profitable if it’s Ivy League BS The surprising conclusion of...

Rubio really bothers me. He is a fast-talker, as in fast-talking salesman who gives you a verbal bum’s rush because he’s scared that if he leaves you even a single second to think for yourself you’ll realize that he is nothing but a B.S. artist who never accomplished any non-politician thing in his brief life. The Wall Street Journal said he speaks with unrelenting tenseness about everything. That’s fundamentally dishonest. Obama’s every word is never-let-’em-see-you-sweat cool. That’s dishonest in that authentic human beings sometimes sweat. Sometimes we are happy; sometimes, angry; sometimes afraid, etc. Not Obama. He’s cool 24/7 since...

As I have said before, I have recently become a fan of the TV series Forensic Files. Each episode is a half hour and typically about a hard-to-solve actual crime, mostly murders. In some cases, the story is about a wrongly-convicted person getting exonerated by forensic science. In many cases, those involve poring over the evidence files and double checking every bit of it years later.One episode was about a crime solved because the spouse of the deceased spotted the solution on a Forensic Files episode. Another seemed to be a murder by a person who thought they had learned...