Pie In The Sky Speculation . . . July 19, 2026 But first . . . LARRY DAVID IS BACK Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness streams on HBO Max. KRUGMAN ON CRYPTO From his conversation with Dennis Kelleher: There is no legitimate use case for crypto. They’ve had 18 years to come up with one. They keep throwing things up like “an inflation hedge” or “source of stability.” Every one of them has turned out to be baseless. The only real use for crypto is tax evasion, money laundering, and crime. It’s the preferred mechanism of choice for global terrorists, sex traffickers, and rogue nations like North Korea and Iran. You have to ask yourself why crypto has basically hijacked the political agenda of Washington. It’s because they followed the Sam Bankman-Fried model of buying bipartisan support by spending hundreds of millions of dollars in campaigns. And this is the astonishing thing, Paul, that people don’t know. . . . THE KING’S SPEECH III 75 seconds — completely insane. A VIEW FROM AUSTRALIA Duane Proctor: “This Australian’s reply to Trump’s rant about NATO not being there for America is perfect.” Mate. You run a country with 600,000 homeless people sleeping on the street tonight. A country where 40% of adults can’t cover a $400 emergency without borrowing money. A country where insulin costs more than a car payment and people are rationing it to survive. A country where medical debt is the number 1 cause of bankruptcy. A country where women are dying in hospital car parks because doctors are too scared of abortion laws to treat a miscarriage. You lock up more of your own citizens than any nation on earth. More than China. More than Russia. More than North Korea. The land of the free has 2 million people in cages, and a quarter of them haven’t even been convicted of anything. They’re just too poor to make bail. Your life expectancy is going backwards. You’re the only developed nation where that’s happening. Your infant mortality rate is worse than Cuba’s. Your kids do active shooter drills between maths and English while you sell the gunmaker’s stock to your mates. Your minimum wage hasn’t moved in 15 years. You’ve got teachers working 2 jobs and veterans sleeping under bridges and you just spent a trillion dollars flattening a country that didn’t attack you. And you’ve got a convicted felon, adjudicating raping, paedophile protecting, porn star shagging insurrectionist running the biggest dumpster fire war campaign since the Taliban thanked you very much for losing again. And you’re calling Greenland poorly run? Greenland has universal healthcare. Free education. One of the lowest incarceration rates in the world. Nobody goes bankrupt there because they got sick. Nobody dies in a waiting room because their insurance said no. ‘NATO wasn’t there when we needed them.” When exactly was that, champ? September 11? Because NATO invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in history FOR YOU. Soldiers from dozens of countries deployed, fought, bled, and died in Afghanistan FOR YOU. Australia wasn’t even in NATO and we still showed up. For 20 years. And you pulled out at 2am without telling anyone and left them to deal with the mess. So maybe before you start calling other countries poorly run, have a look at your own backyard, you spray-tanned aluminium siding salesman. BEWARE THE LETTUCE And the measles and the polio. Firing thousands of competent professionals turns out to have come with a cost (60 seconds). BEWARE THE RIGHT ‘Hondurasgate’ . . . former president Juan Orlando Hernández (JOH) and current leader Nasry Asfura can be heard discussing a scheme orchestrated by leaders of the international far right to destabilize progressive governments in Latin America. . . . JOH, pardoned by Trump despite facing drug trafficking charges in the United States, allegedly played the key role in financing Asfura’s victory in the latest Honduran elections, with Trump’s backing. Furthermore, JOH is said to have pushed for the assassination of Marlon Ochoa . . . Although Hondurasgate has a highly domestic dimension within Honduran politics, its regional and international implications should not be underestimated. The recordings reveal that JOH was allegedly organizing a disinformation campaign with financial support from Argentine president Javier Milei, aimed at destabilizing the political climate in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, countries governed by progressive forces. . . . At 90, Trump could rule over the U.S., Canada, Greenland, Mexico, Central and South America. King of the Western Hemisphere! BEWARE THE LEFT I Watched the DSA Go Crazy. The Democrats May Be Next. Vermont and New York City notwithstanding — and not totally terrible places to live or visit, if you ask me — I think the fears expressed here are (wildly) overdone. But I learned troubling things about some Democratic Socialists that I had not known. In America there should be room for misguided Leninists and Trotsky-ites (and room, on the right, for racists, homophobes, misogynysts, and anti-Semites). Freedom of thought. There’s a tiny bit of this stuff on the left (can you name a single prominent Leninist or Trotsky-ite? even one?), though perhaps more than I realized . . . and a huge amount of it on the right. CHRB Still digesting 143 pages — the length of which alone makes me nervous. I now think I’ll probably just take my $25 August 31 — holding my breath that it really comes — and enjoy the win. But we have time to decide. If I change my mind, I’ll let you know. And now! (Are you still here?) . . . RNGE — MY PIE IN THE SKY So, look. You know I have the happy gene and you know I am frequently wrong. And you know you should purchase RNGE only with money you can truly afford to lose. But here’s why I sold none when it jumped from 15 cents to 94 cents earlier this month, and why I’m not concerned that it’s fallen back this month to 66 cents and may fall further. It went up on two substantial pieces of news I’ve posted before. But what’s it worth? Who knows? So some I think a lot of new people bought on the news (or maybe just a couple of big buyers) . . . while those of us who owned it at much lower prices watched it go up and up . . . why sell while it’s soaring? . . . but then when it seemed to peak and plateau, decided to take profits. I almost sold some myself. Now that it’s been falling (about 10% Friday on very light volume), I think potential buyers are waiting to see how low it will fall and where it will bottom out, giving them a chance to get in. But its more than a lottery or musical chairs here — this isn’t crypto — there could be real value here. Imagine — and here is my pie in the sky — that RNGE and its partner find a giant company in search of the perfect site for a data center. RNGE seems to have one. Imagine, further, that the giant company signs a lease that nets RNGE and its partner $50 million a year, so $25 million each. In the world of multi-billion-dollar data centers, could that be the right ballpark? Could the prospect of $25 million a year more or less forever be worth $250 million? That alone would be triple RNGE’s current market cap. But what if their experienced new hire is successful in developing a community of homes and businesses on their thousands of acres that would surround the giant data center? That could be worth a lot, too? And what if their 100,000 acres of mineral rights turned out to have some value? And what if this is just the first of — say, totally pie in the sky — four such reclaimed coal mines RNGE were able to repurpose in much the same way over the next five or ten years. All told, could RNGE support an $800 million market cap by then? About 10X where it is today? As I say, this is nothing more than unfounded, back-of-the-envelope, pie-in-the-sky day dreaming. But it’s fun. Have a great week. Join Indivisible. Don’t let Trump win.