Chicken Or Beef June 13, 2011March 24, 2017 Peter Kaczowka: “With all due respect to Matt, I would rather eat a million birds than a single one of our fellow mammals.” ☞ Aren’t we taken with our own phylum! (I was going to say genus – and actually, “class” may be the more accurate level of taxonomic distinction – but phylum sounds funnier.) The solution is fried and/or chocolate-covered insects. Or eggs and tofu-bacon, but with nicer chicken coops. Spare both classes of the phylum. Peter continues: “Matt is right, the Earth is overpopulated. But vegetarianism is not the solution – it’s the cause! The book Pandora’s Seed explains: Civilization grew out of a gradual switch 10,000 years ago from hunting and gathering to farming, and, the author says, ‘more food produced more people.’ The result is a planet with 6.8 billion human grazers.” ☞ Don’t look now – 7 billion. Nearly triple what it was when I was born. Anyone not alarmed by this – and by the concomitant explosion in consumption per capita – and who doesn’t recognize that we are after 5 billion years of planetary evolution in the critical few decades . . . a split second, really . . . when we’ll either learn as a species to live sustainably on our spaceship or we won’t – is missing, well . . . everything. (Having inherited the happy gene, and being one of those who thinks we should not abolish the Environmental Protection Agency, family planning, and the like, I have high hopes that we will.) In any event, now that there are 7 billion of us, it would not help if we all ate more meat. It would help if we ate less. As reader Rick Thompson notes: “The beauty of a plant-based diet is its efficiency: you eliminate the middle man (well, actually animal). Instead of animals pre-eating food for us, we eat it directly ourselves, and in the process help the environment. On average, it takes 10 times as much fossil fuel to make one calorie of animal protein vs. one calorie of plant protein.” And costs us, personally, more money.
Watch This Clip And Earn 10.3% A Year For Seven Years, Compounded June 10, 2011March 24, 2017 WEINER / VITTER What a nightmare. Granted, Congressman Weiner never touched another woman, where Senator Vitter committed actual, physical adultery. And granted, what Congressman Weiner did was legal, where Senator Vitter hired prostitutes (which in Washington DC is not). And granted, Congressman Weiner never trumpeted his own moral rectitude, where abstinence-only advocate Senator Vitter is all about “the sanctity of marriage.” But Weiner is a Democrat. This must-watch Rachel Maddow clip just builds and builds in calling out the Republican hypocrisy. EGGPLANT HAVE NO NERVES Matt Ball: “I’d appreciate it if you could give this (or just the first two paragraphs) a quick scan. Anytime someone suggests eating chickens instead of large animals (it takes over 200 intensively-raised birds to provide the same number of meals as one steer), the amount of suffering in the world increases immensely.” ☞ Our first instinct is to ignore stuff like this – we have enough trouble with human suffering, let alone the suffering of chickens. Yet if you found your child torturing an individual chicken, or any other animal, you’d be deeply concerned. So basically – because we love cheap chicken – we don’t want to know. Might there be some middle ground, short of $15-a-pound lovingly raised chickens? Some way to avoid the worst of the suffering for “just” a couple of dollars more per pound? At least until we perfect lab-grown meat – with no bones or nerve cells at all – as described in the New Yorker last month? All this of course goes back to yesterday’s Tom Friedman column: the earth is full. Until our technology takes a quantum leap (which I think it will), we are trying to crowd too much consumption onto one finite planet; too many chickens into each coop. For now, perhaps, heavier on the family planning and lighter on the KFC? SYMS We first bought this at $6.50 seven years ago. Four years later, I wrote: “It closed last night at $14.56. Nominally a clothing chain, it’s basically a real estate play, not least Manhattan real estate. Someone with a lot more shares than me thinks that real estate makes the stock cheap. Of course, months or years from now, commercial real estate could be a lot cheaper or more expensive than it is today. For now, I’m holding my remaining shares.” With hindsight, I was an idiot not to have sold at $14.56 and bought recently at half that price. But it could be worse. The stock closed at $10.95 last night. And because we got a $1 a share dividend in April of 2005, our effective cost was not $6.50 but $5.50 – so at $10.95 we have seen a 10.3% compounded rate of return. Better than most 2004 investments have fared. And it could get better. The recent jump in these shares came on news that the company has put itself up for a possible sale, and there are those who think it is “freakishly undervalued” – and might fetch three times the current price. So I’m still not selling my remaining shares. Now go watch the Weiner/Vitter clip.
Enjoying Life With Less Stuff June 9, 2011March 24, 2017 EXTREME WEATHER I’m no scientist. (Most scientists think our greenhouse gas emissions put us on track for much worse ahead, so we ought to act with urgency to reduce them.*) But have you noticed something funny about the weather lately? *Most Democrats think this, too. CO2 Peter Kaczowka: “[Regarding your call to vegetarianism last week], note that beef and pork are the problem. Chicken and egg consumption are greener than fish – which is as bad as red meat! ‘The vegetarian diet turned out to be the most energy-efficient [concluded this 2006 University of Chicago paper], followed by poultry and the average American diet. Fish and red meat virtually tied as the least efficient.’” TIME TO PANIC From the New York Times: The Earth Is Full By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Published: June 7, 2011 You really do have to wonder whether a few years from now we’ll look back at the first decade of the 21st century — when food prices spiked, energy prices soared, world population surged, tornados plowed through cities, floods and droughts set records, populations were displaced and governments were threatened by the confluence of it all — and ask ourselves: What were we thinking? How did we not panic when the evidence was so obvious that we’d crossed some growth/climate/natural resource/population redlines all at once? “The only answer can be denial,” argues Paul Gilding, the veteran Australian environmentalist-entrepreneur, who described this moment in a new book called The Great Disruption: Why the Climate Crisis Will Bring On the End of Shopping and the Birth of a New World. “When you are surrounded by something so big that requires you to change everything about the way you think and see the world, then denial is the natural response. But the longer we wait, the bigger the response required.” Gilding cites the work of the Global Footprint Network, an alliance of scientists, which calculates how many “planet Earths” we need to sustain our current growth rates. G.F.N. measures how much land and water area we need to produce the resources we consume and absorb our waste, using prevailing technology. On the whole, says G.F.N., we are currently growing at a rate that is using up the Earth’s resources far faster than they can be sustainably replenished, so we are eating into the future. Right now, global growth is using about 1.5 Earths. “Having only one planet makes this a rather significant problem,” says Gilding. This is not science fiction. This is what happens when our system of growth and the system of nature hit the wall at once. While in Yemen last year, I saw a tanker truck delivering water in the capital, Sana. Why? Because Sana could be the first big city in the world to run out of water, within a decade. That is what happens when one generation in one country lives at 150 percent of sustainable capacity. “If you cut down more trees than you grow, you run out of trees,” writes Gilding. “If you put additional nitrogen into a water system, you change the type and quantity of life that water can support. If you thicken the Earth’s CO2 blanket, the Earth gets warmer. If you do all these and many more things at once, you change the way the whole system of planet Earth behaves, with social, economic, and life support impacts. This is not speculation; this is high school science.” It is also current affairs. “In China’s thousands of years of civilization, the conflict between humankind and nature has never been as serious as it is today,” China’s environment minister, Zhou Shengxian, said recently. “The depletion, deterioration and exhaustion of resources and the worsening ecological environment have become bottlenecks and grave impediments to the nation’s economic and social development.” What China’s minister is telling us, says Gilding, is that “the Earth is full. We are now using so many resources and putting out so much waste into the Earth that we have reached some kind of limit, given current technologies. The economy is going to have to get smaller in terms of physical impact.” We will not change systems, though, without a crisis. But don’t worry, we’re getting there. We’re currently caught in two loops: One is that more population growth and more global warming together are pushing up food prices; rising food prices cause political instability in the Middle East, which leads to higher oil prices, which leads to higher food prices, which leads to more instability. At the same time, improved productivity means fewer people are needed in every factory to produce more stuff. So if we want to have more jobs, we need more factories. More factories making more stuff make more global warming, and that is where the two loops meet. But Gilding is actually an eco-optimist. As the impact of the imminent Great Disruption hits us, he says, “our response will be proportionally dramatic, mobilizing as we do in war. We will change at a scale and speed we can barely imagine today, completely transforming our economy, including our energy and transport industries, in just a few short decades.” We will realize, he predicts, that the consumer-driven growth model is broken and we have to move to a more happiness-driven growth model, based on people working less and owning less. “How many people,” Gilding asks, “lie on their death bed and say, ‘I wish I had worked harder or built more shareholder value,’ and how many say, ‘I wish I had gone to more ballgames, read more books to my kids, taken more walks?’ To do that, you need a growth model based on giving people more time to enjoy life, but with less stuff.” Sounds utopian? Gilding insists he is a realist. “We are heading for a crisis-driven choice,” he says. “We either allow collapse to overtake us or develop a new sustainable economic model. We will choose the latter. We may be slow, but we’re not stupid.” A version of this op-ed appeared in print on June 8, 2011, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: The Earth Is Full.
Saving Lives in New York And Fuel, Potentially, In Prague June 8, 2011March 24, 2017 THE CHINATOWN BUS TRAUMA This is the story of a horrific bus crash and 15 victims who were rushed to my friend’s trauma unit. You will not be bored. Gosh, I’m proud to know this man. (Fourteen of the 15 were saved.) His sexual orientation is of little importance but perhaps worth noting (this is Gay Pride month, after all). Hard to understand why anyone would want to deny him (or anyone) equal rights. GLDD I know nothing, except that with the stock back down to $5.53 last night, and silt continuing to build (that’s just what silt does), this could be a good time to buy some for the long-term, if you haven’t already. YMI Monness Crespi Hardt, a boutique research firm, issued a report yesterday raising its target for YMI shares to $6. (Suggested here at $1.65 six months ago, it has roughly doubled to close at $3.26 last night.) Guru says he agrees with their analysis. I wouldn’t rush to buy more here; but I’m very happy holding the shares I bought at $1.65. BOREF The Prague Airport was singled out for excellence Monday. IATA made the award in part “for its technological development (the introduction of self-service kiosks and WheelTug – Prague Airport being the first airport in the world to support the latter novel technology, which allows aircraft to use built-in electric motors, etc., when taxiing between the terminals and runways).” I know. I know. But still.
Glass Roads to Ho-Hum-ization June 7, 2011March 24, 2017 GLASS ROADS Yesterday I suggested we needed to spend more on infrastructure and less on designer shoes. An example of a task ready for prime time: weatherizing 100 million homes and office buildings to make them 25% more energy efficient. It’s low-hanging fruit with a rapid payback (which equals a high internal rate of return) and could produce a great many jobs over the next few years, to boot, as this work is done. An example of a task that may or may not ever be ready for prime time – but that is clearly past the “dream” stage – is repaving our roads with solar panels. I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s way too astonishing a solution not to repost. Watch the brief video. And visit yert.com for more. My two biggest questions: what happens to your tire traction when glass roads get wet? How low can the price be driven? But, boy, would this solve our energy problem if, over the next 5 years, we were able to come up with a workable design; and then, over the subsequent 20, repave much of America with power generating roadways. TOMORROW ON PBS “Out In America” airs tomorrow (June 8) at 8pm on most PBS stations (check local listings). I’ve only seen the 5-minute trailer, but it seems an appropriate documentary to be airing this Gay Pride month. The more Americans get to know their LGBT neighbors, co-workers, family members and the like, the faster intolerance and inequality melt away. (Who could fail to like Ellen DeGeneres?) In a book I wrote long ago, I hoped for the “ho-hum-ization” of same-sex issues. Like: who cares whom you hold hands with, so long as you hold hands. Two examples of the main-streaming of this once taboo topic are: THE AARP’S LGBT PAGE Click here. THE ARMY’S LGBT PAGE Click here. It’s a great testament to our country that the long-term trend, for all its occasional setbacks, is toward fairness and equality. You no longer have to be a white male property-owner to vote. Or straight to be embraced – at least by many – as a valuable thread in the American tapestry.
The Central Question MYG June 6, 2011March 24, 2017 There’s a massive amount of work that needs doing – weatherizing 100 million homes and commercial buildings to be 25% more energy efficient comes to mind as low-hanging fruit with a very high return on investment – and there are a great many people looking for work to do. Finding ways to match the two would seem to be the obvious thing to do. We don’t need to buy more TVs or build more yachts right now, which is the kind of spending that tax cuts encourage. But we really do need bridges that don’t collapse, which is the kind of spending that is funded by taxes. Ask yourself: Is our debt is so low and our infrastructure so sound that we can relax a bit and indulge in more consumer spending? Remodel our kitchens and buy more fashionable imported shoes? Or would this decade and the next be good ones in which to restrain our personal consumption, especially among millionaires and billionaires, and to renew our infrastructure? This is the central issue of our time. The answer is beyond obvious. And it means massive infrastructure spending funded by a return to Clinton/Gore tax rates. (Please note that most of the actual work would be done by private enterprise, bidding for the jobs.) Yet the mantra of all the Republicans in Congress and all those running for President is that taxes must be kept low. For (they say) if we made the grievous mistake of resetting them to the Clinton/Gore levels . . . well . . . what? They never phrase it in terms of the Clinton/Gore tax rates, lest people recall that the Clinton/Gore years, with those rates, were magnificently prosperous – and fiscally sound. After Reagan/Bush quadrupled the National Debt, Clinton/Gore – in large part because of their prudent tax policy – handed Bush 43 ‘surpluses as far as the eye could see.’ Bush 43 squandered those surpluses on the wealthy (and an unnecessary war) and doubled our National Debt yet again. And handed Obama an economic meltdown and a $1.5 trillion 2009 deficit. The Republicans say that if only we keep taxes low, the economy will boom. But we tried that. How much proof do we need that unreasonably low taxes lead to crumbling infrastructure and crippling debt? Were the Fifties really so awful? (Many think of them as the good old days!) I’m not suggesting we go back to those tax rates, but I would remind you that – in an effort to deal responsibly with the massive debt we had accumulated to win World War II – the top federal rate throughout the Fifties was 90%. Were the Nineties really so awful? (Most of us were there: they were the even better old days!) They began with Clinton facing a recession and a bond market nervous about our deficits. He did the responsible thing – against unanimous Republican opposition – and raised taxes and got us back on track. ‘Ah,’ people will say, ‘but he was just lucky – he had the technology boom. There was the Internet.’ (Which grew out of a government-funded DARPA project, by the way; exactly the kind of thing the Republicans want to stop funding today.) Well, Bush had it, too. We are still in the technology boom. (You know what Ray Kurzweil says – not only will the next 50 years of technological progress be as dazzling as the last 50, they will be 32 times as dazzling.) And it’s just idiocy to say that entrepreneurs and venture capitalists won’t bother to start or fund new businesses if they think taxes will go back to the levels they were under Clinton/Gore. Or, for that matter, the dramatically higher levels that prevailed when Steve Jobs started Apple or Fred Smith started Federal Express. We should have had a much bigger infrastructure component in our 2009 recovery package, but the Republicans blocked it. It’s time for more – along with the taxes to fund it. There is a massive amount of work that needs doing and there are a great many people looking for work to do. (One potentially exciting project to nurture, albeit no job producer any time soon: glass roads. Once we solve problems like how they can provide traction when wet. Come back tomorrow.) MYLGF Guru told us about this one a few weeks ago at 37 cents, about where it still is, and updates as follows: ‘These are the preliminary data presented at ASCO this weekend. MYG’s drug delayed further progression of the disease in most of the patients. There is no approved drug for gastric cancer, an especially lethal cancer, so these data are encouraging. However, my interest in MethylGene has nothing to do with these data and everything to do with its mechanism. They began enrolling more prostate patients this year and should have results later this year. THAT is the reason we are in MYLGF. I continue to expect the stock to trade towards $2/share over the next year.’
Ask Less Whether Artichokes Can Produce a 160% Capital Gain in 10 Weeks June 3, 2011March 24, 2017 CO2 EMISSIONS Rick Thompson: “Regarding yesterday’s column, the real elephant (well, actually cow, pig and chicken) in the room is meat. According to a University of Chicago study, if Americans reduced their meat consumption by only 20 percent it would be as if everyone in the nation switched from a standard sedan to an ultra-efficient hybrid. Each person who goes vegetarian saves three acres of land, 2,700 pounds of soil from erosion, and saves 95,000 gallons of water every year, year after year. Every American who switches from a typical U.S. diet to a vegan diet reduces his or her consumption of fossil fuels by over 80 percent, cutting his or her carbon emissions by 3,000 pounds annually. Truly, we cannot go on meating like this!” ☞ I’m eating nothing but artichokes, tomatoes, and blueberries for the next three months. Seriously, Dude: this is huge. We need to take it more seriously. ASK LESS Less Antman: “I’ve changed web sites, and Ask Less is now in blog form. I’ve been getting virtually no questions for quite a while, since you’ve driven away all the financial traffic with your political tirades [here, Mr. Antman inserts a wry emoticon], so I figured a blog would be more useful. I’ll still answer questions sent to askless@simplyrich.com, but just do it on the blog. I’ve started a do-it-yourself personal finance course and am posting new entries at the rate of about one a week.” AMRN Guru tells me he got out at $19. That doesn’t mean it may not still be bought out at $25 or more. Just that no one ever went broke selling at $18.50 (last night’s close) a stock they bought at $7.10 ten weeks earlier, so I, too, have sold a good chunk of mine. Thanks, Guru!
The Climate Challenge And Freedom To Marry June 2, 2011March 24, 2017 GERMANY TO ABANDON ALL NUCLEAR POWER By the year 2022. Here. Which makes the climate change problem (tornadoes in Massachusetts?) all the more challenging . . . CO2 EMISSIONS According to The Guardian (“Worst ever carbon emissions leave climate on the brink”): Greenhouse gas emissions increased by a record amount last year, to the highest carbon output in history, putting hopes of holding global warming to safe levels all but out of reach, according to unpublished estimates from the International Energy Agency. The shock rise means the goal of preventing a temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius – which scientists say is the threshold for potentially “dangerous climate change” – is likely to be just “a nice Utopia”, according to Fatih Birol, chief economist of the IEA. It also shows the most serious global recession for 80 years has had only a minimal effect on emissions, contrary to some predictions. Last year, a record 30.6 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide poured into the atmosphere, mainly from burning fossil fuel – a rise of 1.6Gt on 2009, according to estimates from the IEA regarded as the gold standard for emissions data. “I am very worried. This is the worst news on emissions,” Birol told the Guardian. “It is becoming extremely challenging to remain below 2 degrees. The prospect is getting bleaker. That is what the numbers say.” Professor Lord Stern of the London School of Economics, the author of the influential Stern Report into the economics of climate change for the Treasury in 2006, warned that if the pattern continued, the results would be dire. “These figures indicate that [emissions] are now close to being back on a ‘business as usual’ path. According to the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s] projections, such a path … would mean around a 50% chance of a rise in global average temperature of more than 4C by 2100,” he said. “Such warming would disrupt the lives and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people across the planet, leading to widespread mass migration and conflict. That is a risk any sane person would seek to drastically reduce.” MAYOR BLOOMBERG ON MARRIAGE One friend told me his recent speech was “Ciceroian” – but you can judge for yourself from the link you’ll find here. Solving the climate problem will be hard and expensive. Allowing couples to wed? Easy and free.
Don’t Forget to Vote June 1, 2011March 24, 2017 The lead story in Sunday’s New York Times recapped Republican efforts to make it harder for people to vote: Less than 18 months before the next presidential election, Republican-controlled statehouses around the country are rewriting voting laws to require photo identification at the polls, reduce the number of days of early voting or tighten registration rules. Republican legislators say the new rules, which have advanced in 13 states in the past two months, offer a practical way to weed out fraudulent votes and preserve the integrity of the ballot box. Democrats say the changes have little to do with fraud prevention and more to do with placing obstacles in the way of possible Democratic voters, including young people and minorities. . . . . . . “If you have to show a picture ID to buy Sudafed, if you have to show a picture ID to get on an airplane, you should show a picture ID when you vote,” Gov. Nikki Haley said this month when she signed the bill into law in South Carolina, using a common refrain among Republicans. . . . And so . . . PHOTO ID – ONE LAST TIME Mike Lynott: “In my large family, about 25% of us were refused driver’s license renewal (in Maryland and Pennsylvania) because of various paperwork mismatches: Social Security name doesn’t match current driver’s license name, name slightly misspelled on marriage license, etc. These are all college-educated, well-spoken, and motivated adults. Each had to return to their DMV office at least twice. How hard can it be? As hard as the state wants it to be.” JK: “I no longer drive, but I have need of the state-issued photo I.D. When I last went to change my address, I found that the photo ID card was no longer free for seniors, but costs the same as a driver’s license renewal – $25. Adding to the difficulty was the fact that they would not accept the expired photo ID card and my voter’s registration as identification to issue a new card. I had to make a second trip to produce my birth certificate and another form of identification which proved I lived at the address in question, like a utility or phone bill. (Be prepared for circuitous logic – I had to produce proof of an account which I opened using an I.D. card which the state of Florida will not accept as identification. The local staff do not create the regulations, so they can only roll their eyes as they explain them, in order to indicate sympathy for the plight of the consumer.) With one thing and another, there are actually lots of opportunities for someone in his late 60’s to no longer have a document which was issued almost 70 years ago. Folks who lose everything in storms (hurricanes, tornadoes, floods) have a lot to go through in order to be able to vote again.” Steve Strunk: “Here in Indiana, where we have the voter ID law the other states are rushing to copy, you can get a voter ID from the DMV at no charge. I believe they did this specifically to get around the 24th and 14th Amendments. Of course you still have to go down there and wait in line and provide the necessary documentation which can be difficult to obtain. The Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s law and it is considered to be the most onerous in the country. When it first took effect I know there were students from Notre Dame who were prohibited from voting because their student ID’s did not contain expiration dates and out of state driver’s licenses were not accepted. So here you had legal voters who actually had 2 pieces of ID with photos and yet they were unable to vote. Now, you do have the option of casting a provisional ballot and providing the necessary ID (within 10 days I think) but the students were going home (this was the primary in May 2008) and did not want to return just to validate their vote. The funny thing is that Indiana may be facing an actual case of voter fraud. Our current Secretary of State (Republican Charlie White) has been indicted on a charge of voter fraud because he used his ex-wife’s address as his own so that he could serve on the Fishers Town council even though he no longer lived in Fishers.” ☞ The bottom line is that Republicans want to make it hard to vote, Democrats want to make it easy. They can’t come right out and say their goal is to suppress the Democratic vote, so they say it’s to prevent fraud. To strengthen this case, the Bush Justice Department made it such a high priority to find examples of voter fraud that several U.S. Attorneys were fired for failing to find any. It seems that it’s hard enough to get most people to vote legally, let alone risk a felony conviction (or deportation) for voting illegally. Think about it: as passionate as you might be about a certain election, how much risk – and extra effort – would you take to add one more lousy vote (by forging the signature of a recently deceased relative, say)? You may have been fleetingly tempted to fudge a little on your taxes or even to cheat on a test in school – though I’m certain you resisted those temptations – but have you ever considered forging a signature to commit voter fraud? Where the temptation is easier to imagine is not with individual voters, who might be able to change the vote count by one, but with election officials who, by transposing a number or losing a truckload of ballots, might be able to change the vote count by thousands. Almost none of them succumb to temptation either; but at least there one can imagine that the temptation could be real. BZ Pete Kirby: “With the expiration day quickly approaching, can you discuss the options (no pun intended) for those that still hold warrants in Boise?” ☞ You can instruct your broker to exercise the warrants, and pay $7.50 in cash (plus one warrant) for each share (worth $8.44 last night) or you can just sell the warrants (for about 94 cents). I’d take my 40-fold gain and do the latter. Pete’s really question is: what will happen in the next 18 days remaining to their expiration. I sure don’t know. Will the stock close at or below $7.50, rendering the warrants worthless? That would be good for the stock because the “dilution” overhang will disappear. Will the stock remain above $7.50, so that people exercise? That would arguably be good for the company, because it would get a cash infusion of $7.50 for each exercised warrant. So maybe investors see this as an $12 stock a few weeks from now and are willing to pay $9.50 for it (so the warrants rise to $2). Or maybe investors will see a tremendous overhang of selling by June 18 warrant exercisers who will be looking to take their profits (and recoup their $7.50 in cash) on June 19. In which case maybe the stock sells off to $7.50 or $7.75 and the warrants drop back to zero or not much more.
Town Pride And Individual Pride May 30, 2011March 24, 2017 This is Tuesday’s column, up Monday to confound the space/time continuum. LONG LIVE GRAND RAPIDS Is this video great or what? Here’s the back story. I love the detractor who says, “… the return is beyond dubious. Hoping that a nine minute song from decades ago goes viral and does any good at raising the profile of the city using faces only familiar to us is a losing bit.” I watched it Friday night when it had already had 340,000 views. By Monday, half a million more. I just loved this. (And, yes, I love that – against virtually unanimous Republican opposition – our President decided to give life support and tough love to the American auto industry. That can’t have hurt Grand Rapids one bit. And we taxpayers have been fully repaid. With interest.) The impresario behind the film, Rob Bliss, is 22. Look what he did when he was 20. AND SPEAKING OF REMARKABLE YOUNG PEOPLE . . . Here’s the story of a Mexican-American boy named Isaac, from San Diego, born a girl, who is who he is and is doing just fine, thank you very much. (Hat tip: Rex Wockner.)