A Shower Head Even the Seinfeld Cast Could Live With (If You Didn't See that Episode, You Don't Watch Enough TV) April 30, 2009March 13, 2017 COLDNFUSION Brad Roth: “I think you are overly optimistic about cold fusion. See Bob Park’s recent newsletter:” Last Sunday’s edition of the CBS News program 60 Minutes was titled “Race to Fusion.” It was 1989, Fleischmann and Pons are shown with the “cold fusion” test tube that would have killed them had they been right. Because they lived, the race was called off. Michael McKubre of SRI apparently didn’t get the memo; he just kept doing it over and over for 20 years. Lucky for him there’s still no fusion, but he says he does get heat – except when he doesn’t. How does it work? He hasn’t a clue, but he showed a video cartoon of deuterium defusing through palladium and said it might be fusion. In fact McKubre called it “the most powerful source of energy known to man.” Whew! But wait, Dick Garwin did a fusion experiment 60 years ago [the hydrogen bomb]; it worked all too well. Garwin thinks McKubre is mistaken. Just about every physicist agrees, so the American Physical Society was asked to name an independent scientist to examine the claims of Energetics Technology, according to 60 Min correspondent Scott Pelley. An APS statement issued Wed. says this is totally false, and the APS does not endorse the cold fusion claims on 60 Min. Mark Klein: “The cold fusion breakthrough has been just around the corner for 60 years. Every claim has turned out to be false or flawed. CBS has removed the video clip. They also have removed the part of the transcript where they claimed (incorrectly) that the American Physical Society endorsed the claims presented.” ☞ Well, the amended clip is here. I would be first to acknowledge I tend toward too much optimism(it’s a curse). But what does one make of this part of the report: “Scientists today like to call it a nuclear effect rather than cold fusion. At least 20 labs working independently have published reports of excess heat – heat up to 25 times greater than the electricity going in.” If you watch the whole clip, it’s hard to see how this is not something to be pursued and – very – guardedly hopeful about. CHINA ON FIRE Richard Factor: “Whine as we may about anthropogenic [human-caused] CO2, there is an enormous amount generated naturally about which we can do nothing, and another enormous amount being created unnecessarily about which we (or at least China) MIGHT be able to do something. This paragraph about fires in coal mines stunned me when I first read it: ‘Today, uncontrolled fires burn fiercely in many nations; more than 100 million tons of coal are consumed by fires annually in China, contributing as much to world-wide carbon dioxide emissions as all the cars and light trucks in the U.S.’ It came from a book reviewed by the WSJ, and, as far as I know the problem is being ignored now just as it was when the book was reviewed a couple of years ago. This despite the fact that I commented on it in my blog. “There are so many things that CAN be done to help the CO2 problem (if problem it be – I am in good company with Freeman Dyson in my uncertainty) that ruining the economy needn’t be one of them. [That said,] I’m deeply skeptical of one of Huber’s points: ‘Even if solar cells themselves were free,’ he writes, ‘solar power would remain very expensive because of the huge structures and support systems required to extract large amounts of electricity from a source so weak that it takes hours to deliver a tan.’ Gimme them free solar cells! I already HAVE a structure – it’s called a ‘house.’ Arguing against photovoltaic solar power is really counterproductive even if he isn’t entirely wrong about the economics. But I guess that’s how advocacy articles are written. Notwithstanding those quibbles, he’s probably right that nothing can be done to prevent increased carbon burning. The real problem, as it has always been, and of which we’ve always been aware, is the burgeoning human population. Maybe a bumper sticker ‘real environmentalists don’t have children’ would make the point, but it won’t do it in the majority of the world where people do have children but don’t have bumpers.’” ☞ Fewer people would definitely help, but it will be more feasible to plant more trees. (And to stop deforesting the Amazon!) It’s expensive to plant big trees; but can you think of a place you have influence – your home, your school, your sidewalk – where you could plant a sapling or two? Huber seems to discount the speed with which China and others countries may find the will to confront these problems. (China is not likely to want to see Shanghai submerged any more than we are to lose South Florida.) He also seems to discount what may be continuing technological advances that could continue to narrow coal’s cost advantage. I hope so, anyway. LADYBUG Margaret Koppen: “In your quests to be green and cheap, have you installed one of these on your shower yet? It’s (rather unfortunately) called the Ladybug, from evolveshowerheads.com – when you turn on your shower and are waiting for it to heat up, it automatically stops the flow of water when it gets hot, thereby saving water and the energy to heat the water which would otherwise be pouring out of your shower – brilliant. It’s thirty bucks, and there are tons of 25%-off coupons on the web (such as TB25). Takes about five minutes to install on your current plumbing. I’ve had one on my shower for four months, and it’s great – just ordered more for other baths.” ☞ Evolve’s nice demo lady asks, “Do you multi-task while waiting for the shower to get hot? Brush your teeth? Make the bed? Pick out your clothes? We all do it.” Well we all do not do it – I don’t. But if you do, then this will indeed save water and energy. Check it out, check it out, check it out.
China, Coal, and Costa Rica April 29, 2009March 13, 2017 CONGRESSWOMAN BACHMANN ON THE ENVIRONMENT Kevin Rasmussen: “If you like clips of politicians exposing their lack of understanding of basic science, check out Phil Plait’s blog on the Discover Magazine website. That post has a hilarious clip of Rep. Michele Bachmann explaining why CO2 isn’t a bad thing.” YOUR CARS WILL BE ELECTRIC . . . . . . and may be made by this Chinese firm 10% owned by Berkshire Hathaway. But whoever makes them, you’ll get home at night, plug in, and – perhaps from solar-generated electricity, not coal – power up. That’s 10 or 20 years off, but it seems like a sensible way to get off fossil fuels.* (Another way: the cold fusion “60 Minutes” reported on that I linked to last week, in case you missed it.) *Peter Huber makes a powerful case, here, that we can’t get off coal and that trying to will only make things worse. His solution: plant a zillion more trees. I’m for that – and for dramatic conservation efforts, as simple as turning things off when not in use, and living lighter on the land. How much of the rest of his argument we should buy – nuclear power and the hopelessness of our making a dent in carbon emissions – I am still trying to process. Informed commentary welcome! 100 DAY IMPACT ON YOUR STATE Take minute to check out this interactive map. More exciting to me are the increased emphasis on funding basic research, on rebuilding infrastructure, and the like. But that may be because I don’t have to worry about losing my job or providing a poor child with health insurance or making ends meet. PARADISE BREEZES They love us in Minnesota (“‘beautiful’ does not do this place justice … ”) . . . and in Dallas (“all it was advertised to be and more …”) and New Jersey (“in all my life I’ve never had a better vacation … ”) – and those are just guest reviews from the past month. Click here for the whole lot of them. [Full disclosure: I have an interest in the place.] Note the recession pricing.* *And note the rainy season is about to begin . . . but note, also, that fares to and from Chicago (for example) to San Jose next December (for example, when it’s cooooold!) run as low as $109 each way (with either a very long but scenic drive or a short puddle-jump from San Jose).
Mother Nature Doesn’t Do Bailouts April 28, 2009March 13, 2017 PERSPECTIVE FROM ‘DR. REALIST’ Here is Dr. Nouriel Roubini in Newsweek. He thinks the economic bottom is a year off and that the recent bounce in stocks is a bear market rally – but that the chance of a depression is now small. ANOTHER LEADING REPUBLICAN ON THE ENVIRONMENT Yesterday I noted Richard Nixon’s veto of the EPA (overridden by Congress) and the Reagan/Bush lack of interest in such things . . . shared, it seems, by Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner. Here now Texas Representative Joe Barton, the ranking Republican member of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, in an exchange with Energy Secretary (and Nobel-prize-winning physicist) Stephen Chu. In the notes below that video, you’ll find this earlier Barton world view: I believe that Earth’s climate is changing, but I think it’s changing for natural variation reasons. And I think mankind has been adopting, or adapting, to climate as long as man has walked the Earth. When it rains we find shelter. When it’s hot, we get shade. When it’s cold, we find a warm place to stay. Adaptation is the practical, affordable, utterly natural reflex response to nature when the planet is heating or cooling, as it always is. ☞ So, with time, we’ll just rebuild New York City in the Catskills, move Los Angeles into Beverly Hills, move South Florida to North Carolina, Boston to Worcester, and Houston to Lubbock. MOTHER NATURE DOESN’T DO BAILOUTS Shame on me for failing to excerpt this from Tom Friedman when it first appeared a few weeks ago in the New York Times: . . . What if the crisis of 2008 represents something much more fundamental than a deep recession? What if it’s telling us that the whole growth model we created over the last 50 years is simply unsustainable economically and ecologically and that 2008 was when we hit the wall – when Mother Nature and the market both said: ‘No more.’ We have created a system for growth that depended on our building more and more stores to sell more and more stuff made in more and more factories in China, powered by more and more coal that would cause more and more climate change but earn China more and more dollars to buy more and more U.S. T-bills so America would have more and more money to build more and more stores and sell more and more stuff that would employ more and more Chinese … We can’t do this anymore. ‘We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children,’ said Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks – water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land – and not by generating renewable flows. ‘You can get this burst of wealth that we have created from this rapacious behavior,’ added Romm. ‘But it has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, ‘This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate …’ Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy.’ Over a billion people today suffer from water scarcity; deforestation in the tropics destroys an area the size of Greece every year – more than 25 million acres; more than half of the world’s fisheries are over-fished or fished at their limit. ‘Just as a few lonely economists warned us we were living beyond our financial means and overdrawing our financial assets, scientists are warning us that we’re living beyond our ecological means and overdrawing our natural assets,’ argues Glenn Prickett, senior vice president at Conservation International. But, he cautioned, as environmentalists have pointed out: ‘Mother Nature doesn’t do bailouts.’ One of those who has been warning me of this for a long time is Paul Gilding, the Australian environmental business expert. He has a name for this moment – when both Mother Nature and Father Greed have hit the wall at once – ‘The Great Disruption.’ ‘We are taking a system operating past its capacity and driving it faster and harder,’ he wrote me. ‘No matter how wonderful the system is, the laws of physics and biology still apply.’ We must have growth, but we must grow in a different way. For starters, economies need to transition to the concept of net-zero, whereby buildings, cars, factories and homes are designed not only to generate as much energy as they use but to be infinitely recyclable in as many parts as possible. Let’s grow by creating flows rather than plundering more stocks. Gilding says he’s actually an optimist. So am I. People are already using this economic slowdown to retool and reorient economies. Germany, Britain, China and the U.S. have all used stimulus bills to make huge new investments in clean power. South Korea’s new national paradigm for development is called: ‘Low carbon, green growth.’ Who knew? People are realizing we need more than incremental changes – and we’re seeing the first stirrings of growth in smarter, more efficient, more responsible ways. In the meantime, says Gilding, take notes: ‘When we look back, 2008 will be a momentous year in human history. Our children and grandchildren will ask us, ‘What was it like? What were you doing when it started to fall apart? What did you think? What did you do?‘ Often in the middle of something momentous, we can’t see its significance. But for me there is no doubt: 2008 will be the marker – the year when ‘The Great Disruption’ began.’
Of Frogs and Cows April 27, 2009March 13, 2017 BUT FIRST THE GOOD NEWS His Majesty King Abdullah II of Jordan on Meet The Press yesterday morning: MTP: “What’s the image of the United States in the Middle East today?” KING ABDULLAH: “Fantastic.” MTP: Really? KING ABDULLAH: I have been following, by chance, President Obama around the world. I was in England a day or two behind him, I was in the Czech Republic. I just come from Japan on the way here to Washington. Wherever you go, and all the leaders that I’ve spoken to in the Middle East . . . this president provides hope. Now, there was tremendous sympathy internationally for the United States and anger after 9/11, but today there’s a collective hope that there’s a new America. And a new America means new values for, for the world. What everybody believed America to stand for is what I think Obama encompasses . . . ☞ “Hope unbelieved,” wrote Jim Wallis, “is always considered nonsense. But hope believed is history in the process of being changed.” Lots of work still to be done, but it’s nice to think we’re headed in a better direction. And now back to some of the challenges . . . SIX-LEGGED FROGS It’s not just the oceans. Here is a PBS Frontline special on the way we are poisoning the rest of our water. “We know what needs to be done,” says one of the interviewees; “it’s a matter of lacking the political will.” Ah, but that’s where you and I come in. If we get informed, and come to care, we can effect change. Watch the first 20 minutes? You’ll surely get the gist. HOUSE MINORITY LEADER JOHN BOEHNER JUST DOESN’T GET IT Here is a quick assessment of the Minority Leader’s grasp of global climate change, as revealed on “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.” He thinks the objection to carbon dioxide is that it’s a carcinogen? He thinks flatulent cows emit carbon dioxide? What is it with so many of our friends in the loyal opposition? As noted in that PBS Frontline special, Nixon vetoed establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency. Only by overriding his veto was the EPA born. And then Reagan came in and crippled it. And George W. Bush? Don’t get me started. A DIFFERENT WAY OF LOOKING AT THE NEWS Click here for newsmap.
If We Were a Third World Country What the IMF Would Tell Us April 24, 2009March 13, 2017 OUR INCREASINGLY ACIDIC OCEANS – II Stewart Dean: “It’s possibly much worse than that. You can see coral reefs and shells. What you can’t see are the microscopic plankton that are the base food stock for virtually the entire fabric of swimming ocean life. And these plankton are having a harder and harder time forming their exoskeleton as the oceans acidify. If they go, fish and ocean mammals will disappear, possibly leaving only jellyfish. See this excellent article from the November 20, 2006, New Yorker.” YOU WON’T BELIEVE YOUR EYES (AND SHOULDN’T) “This incredible machine was built as a collaborative effort between the Robert M. Trammell Music Conservatory and the Sharon Wick School of Engineering at the University of Iowa. Amazingly, 97% of the machines components came from John Deere Industries and Irrigation Equipment of Bancroft, Iowa. Yes farm equipment! It took the team a combined 13,029 hours of set-up, alignment, calibration, and tuning before filming this video but as you can see it was well worth the effort. It is now on display in the Matthew Gerhard Alumni Hall at the University and is already slated to be donated to the Smithsonian.” ☞ Amazing! But how could this be possibly be real? Like so many things on the Internet, it’s not. Just a (wonderful) computer animation. LIFE LESSONS FROM A COUPLE MARRIED 80 YEARS Thanks to Beth Smith for passing this along. Sweet. WHAT THE IMF MIGHT TELL U.S. A sobering analysis from the former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund – Atlantic Monthly’s cover story. His conclusion: nationalize the big banks, clean them up, break them up, and sell them back into private hands. No bank should be “too big to fail.”
Snails and Starfish April 23, 2009March 13, 2017 OUR INCREASINGLY ACIDIC OCEANS Take three minutes to watch what we’re doing to our fragile ecosystem. It makes you want to cry – or at least try harder to live light on the land and spread the word. NATIONAL SERVICE Yesterday the President signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, a joint venture of Utah Republican Orrin Hatch and Massachusetts Democrat Ted Kennedy. (Senator Hatch graciously asked the Senate to name the bill after his long-time friend.) Among other things, the bill will ramp up AmeriCorps from 75,000 slots to 250,000 over the years ahead. You can watch the whole 22-minute event here, or just read the end of the President’s speech: A week from tomorrow marks the 100th day of my administration. In those next eight days, I ask every American to make an enduring commitment to serving your community and your country in whatever way you can. We’re getting started right away — this afternoon, I’ll be joined by President Clinton and Michelle and Joe Biden and Dr. Biden to plant trees in a park not far from here. It’s as simple as that. All that’s required on your part is a willingness to make a difference. And that is, after all, the beauty of service. Anybody can do it. You don’t need to be a community organizer, or a senator, or a Kennedy — (laughter) — or even a President to bring change to people’s lives. When Ted Kennedy makes this point, he also tells a story as elegantly simple as it is profound. An old man walking along a beach at dawn saw a young man picking up starfish and throwing them out to sea. “Why are you doing that?” the old man inquired. The young man explained that the starfish had been stranded on the beach by a receding tide, and would soon die in the daytime sun. “But the beach goes on for miles,” the old man said. “And there are so many. How can your effort make any difference?” The young man looked at the starfish in his hand, and without hesitating, threw it to safety in the sea. He looked up at the old man, smiled, and said: “It will make a difference to that one.” To Ted, that’s more than just a story. For even in the midst of his epic fights on the floor of the Senate to enact sweeping change, he’s made a quiet trek to a school not far from the Capitol, week after week, year after year, without cameras or fanfare, to sit down and read with one solitary child. Ted Kennedy is that young man who will not rest until we’ve made a difference in the life of every American. He walks down that beach and he keeps on picking up starfish, tossing them into the sea. And as I sign this legislation, I want all Americans to take up that spirit of the man for whom this bill is named; of a President who sent us to the moon; of a dreamer who always asked “Why not?” — of a younger generation that carries the torch of a single family that has made an immeasurable difference in the lives of countless families. We need your service right now, at this moment in history. I’m not going to tell you what your role should be; that’s for you to discover. But I’m asking you to stand up and play your part. I’m asking you to help change history’s course, put your shoulder up against the wheel. And if you do, I promise you your life will be richer, our country will be stronger, and someday, years from now, you may remember it as the moment when your own story and the American story converged, when they came together, and we met the challenges of our new century. Thank you very much, everybody. I’m going to sign this bill. ☞ Looking to volunteer? Here’s one place to help you look.
Vark April 22, 2009March 13, 2017 THE STORM JUST KEEPS GETTING WORSE AND WORSE Another parody. VARK Check it out. You IM vark a question (my first question: “how do I IM?”) and a minute or three later, one of your friends (or their friends), IM’s you an answer. It’s the emerging field of Social Search, and it could also work with email or text-messaging from your iPhone; but, as best I can tell, this particular service, Aardvark, does not yet do so. (Wouldn’t you think a site all about Asking Questions would have an FAQ section? I couldn’t find one, so I don’t know for sure.) Rather than blast your question to everyone (“how do I get red wine stains out of my carpet?” “is an Amex platinum card worth paying for?” “who should I vote for in the city council primary?” “what’s in a vanilla egg cream?” “is my money safe at Fidelity?” “do you know a good dermatologist?”), Aardvark selects someone whom (a) it knows is online and (b) it thinks is likely to have a good answer (because it can figure out what kind of question you’re asking and knows the areas of expertise and commonalities of taste within your extended network) . . . and then sends the question. If the selected answerer is busy or not interested in answering, Aardvark goes on to the next best answerer. But within a few minutes, you’re likely to have an answer. Google et al are best for objective information; social search, the theory goes, is best for conceptual and subjective search. Humans talking to humans. What a concept. (BTW: there’s no egg in a vanilla egg cream. Just vanilla syrup, selzer and a little milk. But Google could have told you that.) LUMENS Gary Diehl: “Remember the Lumens: Many companies sell undersized ‘replacement’ CFL bulbs that produce significantly less light (Lumens) than the incandescents they are allegedly replacing. If you want the same light you have now, check the package of the incandescent your replacing at the store and buy a CFL with a matching Lumen rating. Forget the socket rating: People forget that you can actually have more light with CFL bulbs than you could ever have with Incandescents in the exact same fixture. I loved my matching 40 Watt bedroom lamps, but the room was barely bright enough to find the bed. I replaced the 40 Watt (500 Lumen) bulbs with a couple of 19 Watt (1200 Lumen) CFL bulbs. Now I have over twice the light at half the electricity cost. I upgraded the lights in a few other places around my home as well, and in every case I saved money and electricity. Rotate before recycling: Unlike incandescent bulbs which tend to go from full output to fully dead in the blink of an eye, CFL bulbs slowly dim with age. After enough years it tends to become noticeable. But don’t recycle them just yet. A bulb that has become dim in a 100 Watt fixture may be plenty bright in a lamp that normally uses a 60 or 75 Watt bulb.”
Try It: Either Elbow April 21, 2009March 13, 2017 TOYOTA This 30-second ad has been going around the Internet forever – but it will make you smile. SHERWIN WILLIAMS Forgive me if I already showed you this, but it’s a neat way to see what your house would look like – or at least a house like yours – with an endlessly customizable set of color combinations. OLD FOOD Randy Sailer: “The stilltasty web site looks cool! The appliance that really changed the way I shop for and store food, is a vacuum sealer. You buy the bags, pack the food, suck the air out of the bag, seal it and freeze it (I write a date and what the food is on the bag). The food lasts a long time without freezer burn (the arch nemesis of freezing); I have retrieved meat that is well over a year old and I can’t taste the difference. My wife and I have an efficient freezer in the basement that we keep fairly well stuffed. We buy stuff on sale (bulk chicken breasts a lot and we seem to have lots of boneless pork ribs now along with about half of the 80 lbs of blueberries we picked last summer). I think I first got the concept of bulk buying from your book.” ☞ Randy reports that he has a FoodSaver, which is way more expensive than the little $24 item I linked to above. “It is a bit big, but if you can leave it on your counter, you will use it more regularly. Our food saver was about $100 and we easily (really easily) made up the cost in less than a year through bulk buying and having less food go bad! We also use wide mouth ball jars and the sealing system for that when we want to freeze soups or other stuff that works in jars.” GAYS IN THE MILITARY – POLITICAL CARTOON Here. (And a related factoid: The first American soldier wounded in Iraq, Eric Alva, happened to be gay.) CUBA Chip Ellis: “Rather than allowing Cuban-Americans to send cash, Obama should have allowed them to send cars: If average age of cars is as reported and parts hard to get, it seems this would be a plus for auto industry, environment (any idea how much the emissions from those old cars are polluting the air?). Cuban-Americans sending new cars or their used cars (which most would replace with a new one or a new used one if they followed a certain financial reporter’s advice) would be a boon to the auto industry, self-image in Cuba.” YOU CAN’T LICK YOUR ELBOW It’s just one of those things.
Money Thoughts April 20, 2009March 13, 2017 KRUGMAN Krugman nailed it Friday, as usual. He basically says: this mess is going to take a long time to get out of, and the government is going to have to resist calls to pull back on its massive spending. As always, well worth reading. MAULDIN The first of several snippets from his latest letter that caught my eye concerns the amount homeowners drew down in home equity loans three years ago versus last year. This was money we borrowed to keep the good times rolling. And then it stopped: Quarter 1-2006 we had $223 billion in mortgage equity withdrawals. Quarter 2-2008 it was $9.5 billion. Is it any wonder we were in recession by 2008? By the third and fourth quarters there was no money to keep the treadmill going. That $50 trillion in credit was shrinking fast. We were imploding it. Further — just as a little throwaway slide — if you look at 2010 and 2011, we are getting ready for another huge wave of mortgage resets. ☞ It may not be the worst time to remind you of “a safe-ish way to short the market.” The caveats being, first, that, as explained here, time is not on our side with RSW and SDS. And, far more important: this Administration knows all about the mistakes of the Depression, all about the collapse in consumer demand and the risks of doing too little . . . and, for this reason alone, history may not remotely repeat itself. (Another reason: don’t forget Kurzweil and the on-rush of ever-accelerating technological progress. Indeed, last night’s “60 Minutes” suggested cold fusion might not be impossible after all. Free energy.) So I don’t know how this story turns out. Mauldin’s prediction: “Understand, the Fed is going to keep [printing] money until we get inflation. You can count on it. I don’t know what that number is, I’m guessing $2 trillion. I’ve seen some studies. Ray Dalio of Bridgewater thinks it’s about $1.5 trillion. It’s some big number, some number way beyond $300 billion, and they are going to keep at it until we get inflation.” This sounds right to me, and is good news, because it means we’ll do what needs to be done to avoid cataclysm and convulsion, even as we embark on a fairly wrenching decade-long national diet and fitness program – the Great Transformation instead of the Great Depression. A sort of boot camp to get lean and – well, not mean, I hope, but efficient. Finally, Mauldin says: Will [all this money printing] create an asset bubble in stocks again? I don’t know, it could. . . . I would be nervous about stock markets, both on the long side, as I think we are in a bear market rally, but also there is real risk in being short. Bill Fleckenstein will be here tonight. He is a very famous short trader. He closed a short fund a couple of months ago. He says he doesn’t have as many good opportunities, and basically he’s scared of being short with so much stimulus coming in. So it’s going to work, at least in terms of reflation, but the question is when. A year? Two years? Oh, and there’s an aside I have to quote as well: By the way, this AIG thing and the bonuses, that’s so bogus. I mean, the 40 people that created the problem were gone, they go to 40 other people and say, stick around because we’ve got to have somebody who actually knows what these things are to try and unwind it, and we’ll give you a bonus. Some of them worked for a dollar against getting that bonus, and now we’ve told the world that a contract isn’t a contract in the US of A, for a lousy 160 million dollars. NIBBLE ANYWAY? I liked this story from my pal Chris Brown of Aristides Capital, and – despite my guess we may see another drop in the market – bought a little anyway. He writes: Would you like to own part of a company trading at 2.5 times EBITDA, 3.7 times forward earnings, with excellent products, a great CEO and CFO, a solid growth strategy, cash in the bank, and zero debt? Of course you would. Better yet, it’s a pharmaceutical company, so I’m certain I understand its business model and its products. Cornerstone Therapeutics (CRTX) is the best stock buy I’ve ever seen in my life. [He’s not that old! – A.T.] Long story short, a stellar, profitable private company (Cornerstone) did a “reverse merger” with a mismanaged, cash bleeding public company (Critical Therapeutics) for the purpose of acquiring its lead product (Zyflo) that it was doing a terrible job selling (in spite of its being a good drug), and is quickly demonstrating the excellence of excellent management. The stock closed today at $3.80. I can see it easily trading at $9-10 within a year; of course, it’s illiquid and very underfollowed, so there’s nothing stopping it from trading down before it eventually trades at some sane valuation, but I really like the odds. Better yet, it’s market beta is essentially zero, so you can buy it even if you don’t like the market here. (Disclosure: my Fund is long CRTX.) ☞ There are no free lunches, but Chris generally does his homework. COLBERT GATHERS THE STORM In case you missed this last week, here is Stephen Colbert’s take on the now-famous anti-marriage ad.
Tax Protestors . . . and don't miss Stephen Colbert April 17, 2009March 13, 2017 THE GATHERING STORM I don’t believe in making fun of religious people, but this is a parody of actors who were pretending to be religious people . . . pretending to be threatened by allowing same-sex civil marriage – a threat they need not feel, since civil marriage would still allow churches to discriminate against whomever they believe the Lord calls upon them to discriminate against. That’s how it should be. Separation of church and state. [For any who missed it, here is the actual ad; here is a rebuttal; and two minutes into this clip you can see some of the actors auditioning. Oh, gosh – and this just in: here is Steven Colbert’s parody! ] A GATHERING OF TEA PARTY PROTESTORS To understand the thinking of those whose taxes were cut by Obama but who held tax protests anyway, don’t miss this video. OBAMA – NOT BORN HERE And here is a sort of prequel from the same filmmaker: tax protesters who believe this Hawaii birth certification is fake, President Obama was born in Africa. (Somehow, the Republican governor of Hawaii has just played along?) Enjoy the clips and your weekend.