Year: 2006

So I finally succumbed to Amazon’s pleas that I join A9, some kind of search engine that, if I use it a couple of times a week, will give me yet 1.57% more off my Amazon purchases.

I went to A9 and, to try it out, searched for a Sony BP-T24 replacement battery.

I had used Google to find it here for $9.95 plus $5.98 UPS shipping (total: $15.93), and here – a sponsored link – for $15.44 plus $4.24 Priority Mail shipping (total: $19.68).

The first of ‘about 985’ hits on the A9 list was here – $1.99 plus $1.95 first class mail.

So the total was $3.94 instead of $15.93 or $19.68. And because the vendor takes PayPal, I didn’t even have to give them my credit card info, whoever they are.

I’m not saying this kind of price variation is typical, or the result of using A9 versus Google – just that, as always, it pays to shop around.

If only the Republicans had thought of that when they forbade Medicare from negotiating prices with the drug manufacturers. It’s one thing to overpay by $15 on a battery, another to overpay by $100 billion a year on prescription drugs.

Nor need the negotiation have been punitive to the drug companies. I’m out of my depth here, so you will correct me if this is stupid. But what if Medicaid were allowed to negotiate?

Rather than ultimate brinksmanship – where if a deal couldn’t be reached on some lifesaving drug the patients would just die – the dance could have gone this way:

‘Hey, this is a great drug!’ ‘Yes, isn’t it?’ ‘We want to buy 100 million of these pills a year.’ ‘Great. They’re $7 each.’ ‘Ouch!’ ‘Well, for you, and in quantity like that, maybe $6.’ ‘But you charge the Canadians $1.40, and your cost of production is only 7 cents.’ ‘That’s true, but it costs us billions to develop these drugs. We need to make a profit commensurate with our investment and our risk, or else why would we continue to advance the frontiers of medicine.’ ‘You have a good point. How about we pay double what the Canadians pay?’

‘Triple.’

‘Double.’

‘Triple.’

‘Double.’

At this point – and here’s where I was heading with this – there is an alternative if a compromise can’t be reached.

At least with some drugs, I should think, Medicare could say, ‘Well, look: if you make us pay triple instead of double, we’ll buy it – but with a high co-pay that discourages sales. We’ll probably need only 70 million pills.’

Or if it’s truly a life-saving drug with no alternative to prescribe, they could say, ‘Well, if you make us pay triple, we’ll do it – we have no choice. But if you let us pay double instead, we’ll commit to purchasing it for at least a year after an alternative therapy comes on the market.’

Or: ‘If you don’t cut us a better deal on this life-saving drug, we’ll beat you up harder on the statins, where there are lots of competitive drugs.’

My point isn’t to get the details right; only to suggest that there could be creative ways to negotiate, short of having to threaten to eschew a lifesaving drug altogether. (‘But if you don’t buy it, 50,000 people will die!’ ‘Well, that’s tough, but that’s our position. Do you want that on your head?’ ‘Do you want that on your head?’)

I have nothing whatever against the Canadians or the Brits or the Swiss – but maybe some of this would lead to their being charged a little more for drugs so that we can be charged a little less more.

And to think: all this started when my phone battery died.

Of course, it is just pie in the sky. The law, hard as the Democrats fought this part of it, specifically says Medicare may not negotiate on the price of drugs.

It is a good time to buy batteries in America, but it is a grand time to be rich and powerful.

Tomorrow: One More Movie (and a word about Bjorn Lomborg)

 And coming soon: Frozen Peas

EXTREME WEATHER

My friend Bryan Norcross’s Hurricane Almanac 2006: The Essential Guide to Storms Past, Present, and Future comes out tomorrow. For less than ten bucks, you can buy it today. After you read it, give it to your kids – what an engaging way to learn about science. Bryan, as some of you know, is CBS News’ hurricane guru. NBC made a movie of his extraordinary performance during Hurricane Andrew.

EXTREME DEFICITS

The lead headline in yesterday’s New York Times: Surprising Jump in Tax Revenues Is Curbing Deficit. But even though it now looks as of the deficit may be reported as $300 billion this year versus $318 billion last year, neither number reflects the true deficit, because neither includes the $200 billion or so we are borrowing from Social Security.

(It’s confusing, but not that confusing: if your take-home pay were $950 a week, plus your daughter gave you her $50 in babysitting money each week to put into a college fund, so you had $1,000 coming in each week . . . and you spent $1,000 each week, including that $50 she had entrusted you to set aside . . . would your budget be in balance? What if you were embezzling the extra $50 from the Church collection plate, planning to pay it back when you could? Still in balance? What if you were taking it out of your elderly parents’ retirement fund without their fully understanding what you were up to.

The two differences are that, first, it’s not $50 a week we’re talking about, it’s $200 billion a year. And, second, even with that $200 billion, we’re still falling $300 billion short.

Not that we need to balance the budget every year. Over the long-term, it would be fine if the accumulated national debt just grew slower than, or at least not faster than, our economy as a whole. Unfortunately, under Reagan, Bush and Bush, that’s not been what’s happening:

‘The long-term outlook is such a deep well of sorrow that I can’t get much happiness out of this year,’ said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office and a former White House economist under President Bush.

That quote comes well along in the story. But it may be more telling than the headline.

SUPERMAN SUCKS

Okay, Kevin Spacey makes a great villain. And the Superman music, borrowed from the ‘originals,’ is terrific. The rest of the movie . . . well, there is an awful lot of him flying underneath impossibly heavy falling objects just in time to toss them out of harm’s way. Not to mention all the savior and resurrection imagery. (And hey! Look at this! In what may have been a nod to the Da Vinci Code, it turns out Superman did have a child with Lois Lane.) But overall, at least for those of us who grew up with all this stuff in black and white TV and then with Christopher Reeve, this sequel was a disappointment. Which is amazing, because it looks as though it should be so good. If you go expecting Batman Begins, which did click, skip it.

The movie you want to see is The Devil Wears Prada. Yes, it is a chick flick, and yes, I continue to compile recipes for Cooking Like a Guy™.  (Grape Sorbet: identical to Frozen Grapes, with a little fib I supply to enhance the experience.)  I am tough.  My calluses have calluses.  But Meryl Streep will get yet another Oscar nomination for this, and the only reason she might not win is that she’s won so many already.

And then, of course, there is THE movie.  Which climbed from #13 to #12 this week, handily outgrossing both The Da Vinci Code and Jennifer Aniston’s The Breakup (both of which opened about the same time) on a per screen basis, with $2,065 on each of its 562 screens, versus $1,383 and $1,394, respectively, on their 1,012 and 1,180 screens.

Kenneth Nolan (who does not suffer boredom gladly):  “I went to the movie worried it might be hard to sit through. I could not have been more wrong.  It is completely compelling.”

If they made a movie about YOUR HOUSE, would you go see it?  Well, they have.

Tomorrow: One More Movie (and a word about Bjorn Lomborg)

AN OCCUPATION, NOT A WAR

George Lakoff has it right. Click here.

BUT A PROFITABLE ONE

Click here.

(Thanks to Arianna Huffington for these two links.)

MARRIAGE

From the ACLU:

Today we lost our effort to open marriage to same-sex couples in New York State. It was a 4-2 decision at the state’s highest court, where four different marriage lawsuits had been consolidated, including ours and Lambda Legal’s.

The majority opinion said that there were at least two reasons the state could rationally exclude us from marriage. First, it adopted a rationale advanced by NYS Attorney General Eliot Spitzer and NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Pointing out that stable relationships between parents are important for children, that straight couples can have kids by “accident,” and that gay couples must plan their children in advance, the court reasoned that straight couples who parent are less stable than gay couples who parent and therefore need the stability of marriage, whereas gay couples do not. So all of the anti-gay stereotypes we’ve been living with for so long have now been turned on their head — suddenly we’re responsible parents in stable relationships with no need for the stability that marriage could bring.

Second, the majority said that the legislature could think that kids will do better with a mom and a dad. Amazingly, this is precisely the argument that the Arkansas Supreme Court rejected last week, recognizing that the social science makes crystal clear that kids do just as well when raised by gay people as when raised by straight folks. Who would have thought that New York was behind Arkansas on this issue?

CSPLF

With the stock at $11.72, we’re well past a double. The latest tender offer is for $9.50, which management recommends taking. I sold the shares in my tax-sheltered account at $10.64 – no one ever went broke taking a profit – but am holding the rest.

FMD . . .

. . . dropped $8.85 a share yesterday, to $46.75, giving back roughly half our profit in a single day.

‘I thought I might hear from you,’ replied my guru when I e-mailed in distress. He has a good chunk of his considerable net worth tied up in this stock, so the price drop got his attention, too. ‘Having no inside information, my take is as follows:’

1. FMD has consistently been a highly volatile stock for the last 12 months, as the market tries to discern the true durability of what might appear to be an overly rich business model. As we’ve discussed, the bears would say this will either 1) invite aggressive competition, or 2) encourage larger clients to take their private Student Loan business elements provided by FMD in house. We’ve been over this debate ad nauseum at this point.

2. One month ago, the stock was at 45 and had subsequently gone up 12-13 points (before today) based on strong fundamental evidence: 1) the company raised their earnings guidance, 2) the company completed two securitizations that delivered fatter margins than anticipated (an indication of pricing power and advantageous contracts) and diminished client concentration, and 3) the company announced several new, long term partnership agreements, GE being the most prominent among them. All in all, a very, very good month for the bulls and strong factual validation of the investment thesis.

3. Today, FBR (a chronic and exaggerated bear that has made several very wrong calls on this stock over the last year) reiterated the bear case with a new bit of relatively arcane and unquantified information: BOA, FMD’s largest partnering relationship, is testing an alternative underwriting and servicing provider, EduCap, a not-for-profit company located in D.C. (information is very sketchy around the elements and degree to which this is proceeding). FBR also mentioned that they believed Chase was also testing keeping some of their new private student loans on their balance sheet, rather than securitizing them with FMD (not sure I got that part right, but it goes something like that).

4. In response to FBR’s report, FMD has gone on record to say that BOA has the right to test with other providers if they so choose, but they expect no change to their current relationship. BOA has gone on the record to say that they maintain a good relationship with FMD and that they do “from time to time” test working with alternative providers.

5. Bear Stearns (a chronic bull, and consistently right, on this stock) apparently countered that (paraphrasing here, second-hand) they don’t believe there is any material business risk in the near term, and that EduCap, while qualified, doesn’t have the scale or experience that FMD does. Also, they traditionally operate in a higher risk space of the private student loan market where FMD may not be interested in playing.

6. There have been at least two other short term “precipitous drops” of 15-20% over the last nine months – most notably in last November and December. These have proven (at least until now) to be extraordinary buying opportunities. The stock has generally recovered in a matter of weeks, if not days. Both of these drops have been provoked by unsubstantiated bear arguments and aggressive short selling.

7. If I were not so heavily invested right now, I would be adding to my position.

BOREF

The last person to buy this stock yesterday paid $9.50 a share. The last person to buy a share in its Roche Bay iron ore subsidiary (RCHBF) paid $10.60. Since BOREF is divided into 5 million shares and owns 5 million shares of RCHBF, the person who paid $9.50 got – indirectly – one $10.60 RCHBF share . . . and was thus paid $1.10 to take the rest of Borealis.

Not to say one should read too much into this. If the testing of the iron ore formation disappoints, or required Canadian government approvals do not come through, or the price of iron ore collapses, RCHBF could be worthless. This company’s logo should be a constellation of pies. (Get it? In the sky?)

But what pies!

There’s the Chorus Motors subsdiary (CHOMF) that owns the WheelTug subsidiary that made an electric motor the size of a watermelon that – according to Boeing and Air Canada’s chief pilot who was in the cockpit – drove a fully loaded 767 around a desert tarmac like a golf cart.

(I know. I know. But you try doing that trick. So maybe they’ll never be able to exploit this technology. Certainly, one would have hoped for more visible progress in the year since that test succeeded. Or maybe it will one day be worth a small fortune.)

And there are the Cool Chips subsidiary (COLCF) and the Power Chips subsidiary (PWCHF) – in each case, your $9.50 share of BOREF represents a share of these, too.

Last week – not sure which subsidiary this fits into, or whether it will spawn a new one – the company claimed to be patenting a possible breakthrough that just might reduce the cost of solar panels by 90%.

A long-time BOREF holder – and at seven years, we are by no means the longest – rolls his eyes. (That was me rolling my eyes Wednesday.) But could they actually have something viable here? Presumably not . . . but if they can move a plane . . .

And now, for the nanotechs in the crowd, we get this, regarding yet another subsidiary you are paid $1.10 a share to take (if RCHBF is actually worth $10.60 and you can buy BOREF for $9.50):

Avto Metals plc
Chairman’s Letter to Members
14 June 2006
Fellow Members:

Materials are important.

While we take them for granted today, unique materials have defined the age in which they were prevalent. We know of the stone age, the bronze age, the iron age. The 19th century was driven by steel, a material which made it possible for railroads and engines and a host of other transformative technologies to rise to the fore.

Materials are now more important than ever. We use custom-engineered materials in everything from roofing materials to prosthetics, from probes in deep space to those under the sea. But arguably the most critical new material technologies today are found within electronics. As others have said, we now live in the electronics age, and so much of what we are technologically capable of depends on the capabilities and limitations of the electronic materials at our disposal. Massive research budgets are devoted to finding ways to maximize what can be achieved with the materials we have, and indeed, to try to find new materials.

One key problem is that there are a finite number of possibilities. The periodic table gives us all of the elements there are, and for well over a hundred years technology has sustained itself by learning about the elements, and novel ways in which they can be combined with other elements to form alloys, electronic junctions, or any number of other things.

The search continues. There are lots of things we would like materials to do that we cannot do today. For example, there is always interest in finding a harder or stronger or lighter or cheaper material to replace the ones we now have. Within electronics, there is a hunt for better electronic materials to replace silicon. We’d like electrons to be able to move with less resistance, making electronics run both cooler and with less waste. There are so very many things that we can imagine but cannot yet build because we lack the material. Within the technical world, there is a name for the material which would be perfect, if only it existed: unobtanium.

Today’s materials explorers have a new landscape to explore: the nanoscale. It turns out that while a bulk material has a mechanical strength of X, or an electrical conductivity of Y, those very same atoms in clusters of just a few atoms, or spread very thinly across another surface, can demonstrate very different properties. Gold is an excellent conductor. But nanoclusters of gold can be insulators. Soot is a nuisance which we try to eliminate, but if you look closely, the nanotubes and nanorods and graphene contained within soot have astonishing material properties. The mind boggles, for example, at the potential of nanotube fibers forming a single foot-thick cable which stretches from the earth’s surface to an anchor in orbit.

While nanotechnology is undeniably attractive, we think that most of the interest around nanoelectronics is hype. Nanomaterials today are not found in electronics, but in products which use nanopowders, such as golf clubs or sunscreen. Nanoelectronics are much harder to build, because they are quite complex and extremely difficult to fabricate. The more complicated a nanomaterial or structure is, the more unlikely it is that it will ever get out of a laboratory.

This problem with nanotechnology is completely sidestepped with [Borealis subsidiary] Avto Metals, a nanotechnology which is both extremely useful and easy to manufacture.

An Avto Metal is a thin film of material which has a simple corrugated pattern on it. The pattern seems to alter the electronic energy levels within the material, and as a result, electrons emit more easily than they otherwise would. This is known as a reduced work function, and it is quite handy. It means that a material canemit electrons at a lower temperature and/or with a lower applied voltage.

This may seem like arcane trivia, but the fact is we already know where Avto Metals should come in handy because we know where today’s cathodes are used. The list includes:

• Technology ( Application )

• Cathode Ray Tubes ( TVs and monitors )

• Cold cathode displays ( Flat-panel displays )

• Vacuum fluorescent ( Displays on laptops, others )

• Power Tubes ( Triodes, rectifiers, pentodes, tetrodes, etc. )

• Field Effect Transistor ( For FETs and MOSFETS ­ Power electronics )

• Klystron: convert electron beam energy into radio frequency waves, often with significant amplification ( Radar, satellite and wideband high-power communication [very common in television broadcasting and EHF satellite terminals], and high-energy physics [particle accelerators and experimental reactors]. )

• Travelling Wave Tubes ( Space communications )

• X-Ray generation ( Imaging, including for industrial analysis )

• Microscopy: SEM, TEM, Surface Analysis and Metrology ( Scientific and industrial instruments )

• Lithography ( Semiconductor manufacture )

• Electron Beam welders ( Advanced fabrication )

• Free Electron Lasers ( Experimental laser )

• Thyratron ( Pulse drivers for pulsed radar equipment, high-energy gas lasers, radiotherapy devices )

• Krytron [not to be confused with Klystron] ( Igniting exploding-bridgewire detonators and slapper detonators in nuclear weapons, either directly or by triggering the higher-power spark gap switches. They are also used to trigger large flashlamps in photocopiers, lasers and scientific apparatus, as well as firing ignitors for industrial explosives. )

• Magnetrons: Radio waves at high power. ( Used in low power applications like microwave ovens, as well as specialized high power applications such as military radars. )

For each of these markets, an improved cathode would be welcome. And this is just a short list of markets which already exist — history has shown us that when a new material is discovered it is put to work in a host of markets and applications which the initial inventors had not considered.

After Dr. Avto Tavkhelidze first conceived of Avto Metals, it was a back burner project within Borealis for a number of years. The biggest reason for this was that we were not entirely sure how to make them; the small structures required have dimensions which were not easily achieved using conventional techniques in the late 1990s. We did some work which showed enough results to keep us interested, and looking for potential partners who had the technology and expertise to make the structures Avto Metals requires. And we started finding them in 2004; we are working with some select suppliers and consultants within the nanotechnology sphere. We have also teamed with leading physicists at three universities to consult with us on our Avto Metals, Power, and Cool Chips (AMPCC) research efforts.

After considerable work, our team was sufficiently confident of the early results to submit a paper for presentation at the 2005 International Vacuum Nanoelectronics Conference (IVNC) at Oxford University last summer (this paper can be found on our web page). The results showed that the idea of wave interference for electrons had experimental support, and we could indeed modify the work function of a metal (in this case, gold). These results proved the concept, and we have been working since then on optimizing the effect in order to have a commercially valuable product.

This year we plan to complete a sizable number of Avto Metal samples and hopefully to commence sales of cathodes to some of the above markets. At the same time we continue to explore other applications and markets as we learn more about this new materials class and seek to maximize the return to our shareholders.

We thank you for your continued support!

Avto Metals plc

Rodney T. Cox
Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Isaiah W. Cox
President and Chief Operating Officer

☞ What to make of all this? I haven’t a nano-clue. But if someone wants to give it to me for free and throw in $1.10 a share to boot, I’ll take it. (Though only, of course, with money I can truly afford to lose.)

Note: If you began reading this column Friday morning, and read that Lakoff piece and watched the Iraq trailer, it is now Sunday noon. (Sorry.)
Still time to see the movie.

Yesterday’s column somehow disappeared mid-day. If you missed it, click “July 05” at left. (Borealis thinks it may have solved the global climate change problem, yada, yada, yada.)

ZAZZLE

Shouldn’t your dog’s face be on a First Class stamp? Has there ever been a cuter face? A more loyal friend?

Or how about my book jacket? Wouldn’t that make a good First Class stamp?

Would your granny not totally freak to see her wedding picture on a First Class stamp?

Well, now all this is possible, even if it adds a few bucks to the cost of postage.

This site lets you design your own stuff. Until the novelty wears off, the postage, I think, is truly neat.

FREE GOP BUMPER STICKER

Get one and drive with it proudly.

SEE THE MOVIE

You can see its 92% rating and read reviews here. Or check out its progress here.

When the movie opened in just four theaters in New York and Los Angeles in late May, its $70,332 per-screen average was nearly eight times what ‘The Da Vinci Code’ averaged the same weekend.

By last weekend, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ was showing on 514 screens nationwide and had earned more than $9.5 million. It was scheduled to open at more theaters this weekend.

Fueled by its dark conclusions and the former vice president’s historic brush with the presidency, the film is provoking commentary across the political landscape and the Internet, and in bars, restaurants and family rooms throughout the nation.

Gore’s paperback by the same name last week inched up to No. 1 on The New York Times’ best-seller list. More than 400,000 people have agreed to participate in a ‘virtual march,’ an online protest organized by a group called stopglobalwarming.org.

I’ve gotten a lot of very smart people emailing me to debunk the movie. To each, I always answer: have you seen it? And in each case the answer has been: no.

The feeling of many – certainly of the Republican leadership – is that so long as there is some chance we are not doomed, we should not act. It’s just possible, they believe, that 6.5 billion people burning hundreds of billions of gallons of gasoline and trillions of pounds of coal into the atmosphere each year will have no effect on anything. Or maybe even a good effect – there’s no water shortage in Houston this year, that’s for sure! And it’s easier to climb Mt. Kilimanjaro without snow.

But the feeling of most who go see the movie is that everybody else ought to see the movie.

Wondering what patriotic thing you could do in the spirit of yesterday? See it.

GIVE ME A BREAK (THROUGH)

So now Borealis says ‘it appears that we have made a major breakthrough’ in solar cell technology that ‘if the theory is correct’ could lower the cost of solar-panel manufacture by 90%. Yada, yada, yada. They will be testing it ‘in probably less than 90 days.’ Blah, blah, blah. (That, in turn, would solve much of the global climate change problem, as most electricity could come, pollution-free, from the sun.) I continue to think this stock is a great speculation. But one thing we can know for all but sure: years from now, this breakthrough will be even more promising . . . and its pay-off, just over the horizon.

It gets scarier and scarier. Wait til you see how the Senate is attacking the scientific community and risking our future. But let’s ease into it this way:

Kathi Derevan: ‘We finally went to see An Inconvenient Truth last night. Now, may I say, I was going more out of duty than desire. I just couldn’t imagine it was going to be more than a lecture, and maybe a dry one at that. Wow. I am going to try to get everyone I know and everyone they know to see it. Amazing.’

And now let’s ratchet it up:

Roger in Calgary: ‘The scientific community is NOT of one mind as you insist. Please go here or here. The movie is rife with distortions and falsehoods. I consider you to be fair-minded but on this issue, you are completely closed-minded.’

☞ First off, can we avoid use of words like ‘distortion’ and ‘falsehood’? Unless you think Gore and the rest of the scientific community are on some sort of evil mission to save civilization, shouldn’t you use words like ‘unsupported conclusions and inaccuracies’ to describe what you think the film is guilty of?

But see, here’s the thing: It’s not like the space shuttle, where every last detail needs to be perfect or you shouldn’t launch. Even if there are scientists who question some of this – as until recently there were scientists who questioned any causal connection between smoking and cancer – do we really need every single scientist in the world to agree with every single word of the movie before we see the bigger picture and take action?

That question holds even if there are truly independent scientists who have reached the same conclusions as those that Exxon, et al, have funded (in the grand scientific tradition of the Tobacco Institute before them).

Here’s what the Associated Press found when it surveyed climatologists:

The nation’s top climate scientists are giving “An Inconvenient Truth,” Al Gore’s documentary on global warming, five stars for accuracy.

The former vice president’s movie – replete with the prospect of a flooded New York City, an inundated Florida, more and nastier hurricanes, worsening droughts, retreating glaciers and disappearing ice sheets – mostly got the science right, said all 19 climate scientists who had seen the movie or read the book and answered questions from The Associated Press.

. . .

The tiny errors scientists found weren’t a big deal, “far, far fewer and less significant than the shortcoming in speeches by the typical politician explaining an issue,” said Michael MacCracken, who used to be in charge of the nation’s global warming effects program and is now chief scientist at the Climate Institute in Washington.

But now here’s where it gets really scary:

The Republican Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works has vehemently attacked the AP for this report, demanding, for example, that AP list all 19 scientists it talked to, not just the five it quoted.

I don’t suppose AP would mind doing this, and may already have done so. (Would that we could say the same for the secret list of participants in Dick Cheney’s secret 2001 energy task force – the list that even a GAO lawsuit could not pry loose for public inspection.)

But what an astonishing position for the Republican Majority on this committee to take!

The headline of their press release: AP INCORRECTLY CLAIMS SCIENTISTS PRAISE GORE’S MOVIE.

Doesn’t that suggest to the casual reader that scientists don’t praise his movie?

Yet they all but unanimously do.

(Bear in mind, the oil industry controls the executive branch of our government – run by two former oil men – and wields huge influence on the Republican Congress. Hence it’s just possible the AP is more objective about this than the Republican Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works.)

So how does the Committee justify its headline?

• They have a professor from James Cook University in Australia calling Gore’s arguments “so weak they are pathetic.”  Which I guess should put the lie to the notion that 6.5 billion humans burning hundreds of billions of gallons of gasoline and lord knows how much coal  into the air each year could have any effect.

• And they have this wonderful disclosure:

Gore’s film … cites a review of scientific literature by the journal Science which claimed 100% consensus on global warming, but [MIT Professor Richard] Lindzenpointed out the study was flat out incorrect.

“A study in the journal Science by the social scientist Nancy Oreskes claimed that a search of the ISI Web of Knowledge Database for the years 1993 to 2003 under the key words “global climate change” produced 928 articles, all of whose abstracts supported what she referred to as the consensus view. A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it,” Lindzen wrote in an op-ed in the June 26, 2006 Wall Street Journal.

See?  Gore cites an article in Science that said 928 peer-reviewed articles had abstracts when only 913 did – barely 98.3% of them!

Worse, according to this, “several” of those 913 (four? six?) actually disagreed with the consensus view.

So Gore claimed her study found that “none” of the 928 peer-reviewed articles disagreed with the consensus (which it did) when really, if Lindzen has this right (he gets Naomi Oreskes’s name wrong; it is Naomi, not Nancy), her study should have said “almost none.”

If none of the 928 disagrees, maybe it’s worth taking seriously.  But if almost none disagrees, well, then, that’s enough doubt for the Wall Street Journal . . . for Exxon . . . for the Republican majority on the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee . . . and for our President – who has shown no more interest in seeing this film than he showed in the explicit CIA warning he received at Blair House on January 7, 2001, shortly before taking office, of a “tremendous,” “immediate” threat from Osama Bin Laden.  He ignored both, each time focusing on Iraq instead.

Folks: the human ecosphere is in serious trouble.  And the guys running the show are straight from the mold of the Tobacco Institute.  Only more powerful.

There is an idiot who reads this web site who is convinced I am “ashamed to tell the truth” and will not post the link to that Senate Republican Majority Report.  (Sportsmanship inhibits me from publishing even his first name; but he knows who he is.)

And there is a very bright guy named Gennady, who has read the Wall Street Journal column quoted in the Senate press release and writes to say that he won’t, therefore, go see the movie.  Tobacco guys see no link between smoking and cancer? That’s good enough for him.

And I tell you:  Go see this movie!  Read Naomi (not Nancy) Oreskes’s article in Science!

And if having done that you remain certain the world need not take action, so be it.  But my guess is that you will decide that the Republicans working so hard to debunk this movie are doing you and your kids grave harm.

Tomorrow: The Good News – and Your Thoughts on Flag Burning

THE IRONY OF THE 1% DOCTRINE

This book by Ron Suskind will surely be #1 on the best-seller lists. The 1% Doctrine holds that if there is even the slightest – one-percent – chance a terror threat may be real, America will take action as if it’s a 100% certainty.

The implications of that – and of our not having known it was our nation’s policy – seem to me to be huge.

But for the sake of argument, let’s just buy it for a minute. (And then read the book and spend many hours debating it with everyone we know, because what debate could be more important?)

The irony is that when it comes to terror threats, the Administration has decided that a 1% chance is enough to impel decisive action. But when it comes to the global climate change that could wipe out most of the world’s coastal cities and threaten civilization itself, even near certainty is not enough to provoke action.

If they made a movie about YOUR HOUSE, would you go see it? Well, they have.

BOREF

Joey: ‘I bought more BOREF at 9 today. Is this the end?’

☞ Me, too. I doubt it’s the end. More likely, if things go badly, it will be years before Borealis completely peters out.

When we started with all this, the stock was $3.50 or so and – with 5 million shares outstanding – the whole thing was valued at $17.5 million. It had a lot of wildly grandiose claims and projections (wasn’t it supposed to be making $1 billion in profit by now, or some such?), but who knew what else. Progress has been maddeningly slow, and there is still the real chance we could lose all our money; but the stock price does not necessarily reflect the odds.

In the short term, the stock price represents the intersection of impatience and greed – impatience on the part of whoever sold a few shares the last few days at $9 (having perhaps bought them at their all time high of $21 a year or so ago); greed on the part of whoever bought those shares (well, Joey and me, for example).

Consider that Borealis owns about 5 million shares of Roche Bay, Ltd., the Arctic iron ore speculation. Since Borealis is divided into 5 million shares itself, each Borealis share in effect represents, among other things, one Roche Bay share. And Roche Bay was also trading at $9 or so yesterday.

See where I’m headed? If Roche Bay shares are actually worth $9 – a big if – a buyer of Borealis at $9 a share got, for his money, $9 worth of Roche Bay – and the rest of Borealis for ‘free.’

Of course, it’s possible all Borealis subsidiaries will ultimately prove worthless, and the parent company with it. But you have a savvy British money manager investing a few million dollars to do preliminary testing on what may be a gigantic commercially exploitable iron ore deposit on the Atlantic coast of Canada . . . and you have a significant British steel company agreeing to buy 20 million tons of ore if it does prove to be commercially viable. So that’s one reason to hang on for a few years.

And you’ve got the electric motor that drove the 767 around the tarmac like a golf cart, with all the potential implications endlessly discussed here over the past year.

Will any of this ever pan out? Nobody knows. But . . . sometimes . . . patience pays off.

A long time ago, a real estate fiend of my folks told me about a company called Tejon Ranch (TRC). They owned a gigantic piece of property on Interstate 5, between Los Angeles and San Francisco. The stock was $20 a share, which worked out to $60 an acre. Something crazy like that. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but it was pretty easy to figure out – just multiply the stock price by the number of shares and divide that by 270,000 acres. And for the several years I owned it, I would do that calculation frequently. Shouldn’t that land one day be worth a lot more? For years, the stock didn’t budge. But then one day it began what I recall as a rapid quintuple. Thirty years later, the company is valued at $2,460 an acre.

So in this case, the potential turned out to be real. But people are not keen on waiting.

Or take Texas Pacific Land Trust (TPL). It owns a lot of land in West Texas. The stock was $14 in 1993. Today: $148.

The point isn’t that any stock you hold a long time will rise sharply in value. Clearly not. The point is just that where patience is required, investors sometimes show little interest. And therein – sometimes – lies an opportunity.

To me, BOREF at $9, down from the mid-teens a while back, doesn’t signal the end; it signals a (highly speculative) opportunity.