John T. Reed’s news blog

Oh, AG Merrick Garland has appointed a special counsel to investigate Biden’s classified documents. Like the other special counsel he appointed to investigate Trump’s classified documents..Gee, are we ending the double standard?.That would be nice. More likely, this is a one-off because the two situation are inconveniently similar..One key difference. Trump was Commander in Chief. Arguably and logically, the CIC has the highest security clearance of anyone on earth. He can declare any and every classified document unclassified and has no obligation to tell anyone he did that..The Biden documents are from when he was VICE president. The VP canNOT declassify...

Today’s Wall Street Journal says the top office building owners are switching to housing..Big mistake. They apparently forgot why they got out of rental housing. Political risk..I was the president of the Harvard Business School real estate club in 1976-7. One guest speaker we had was Claude Ballard. He was the biggest real estate investor on earth, the head of PRISA, the Prudential Real Estate Investment Separate Account. I asked him why they stopped buying residential..“If you own residential, you have to raise rents. If you raise rent on a little old lady she may call the media and complain...

I saw a National Geographic Air Disasters tonight. I thought I had seen them all. But I did not recognize this one. Then the announcers said neither the crew nor the manufacturer nor the safety investigators would talk to the TV producers. .WTF? All these shows are centered on the safety investigators interviews..Big Airbus ran out of fuel because of a leak. They had to glide a could or hundred miles and managed to land at Lajes FB in the Azores..But it was not as easy as that made it sound. You have to get lower for oxygen because you...

Liberals are pushing. Its main virtue seems to be that it replaces fossil fuels, at least inside the heat pump. It runs on electricity. It is essentially an air-conditioner that you turn the opposite way in winter. Air-conditioners throw heat outside in summer. Heat pumps also do that then reverse direction and throw heat inside and cool air outside..I studied a lot of engineering in college. I do not give a rat’s rump about the Marxist climate cult. All I am interested in is whether the life cycle cost of the heat pump is cheaper than the fossil-fuel furnace..The basic...

For a year, my wife and I paid a monthly fee to an HVAC company to take care of our central heating and air-conditioning. They were so big on smiling and neat uniforms and returning phone calls and chirpy TV commercials..Then they recommended getting a new downstairs HVAC for our two-story house. I agreed mainly because the AC had a leak, which maybe could not be found or fixed, and even if it could be both, it needed increasingly expensive, no-longer-manufactured freon..Anyway, they bid over $16,000. We got another bid for $9,000 something. We knew that guy and had worked...