Year: 2014

Long-time readers know that if today’s Republican leaders were like Abe Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, or Dwight Eisenhower — or even Richard Nixon, sans the demons and the conspiracy to subvert an election — I might still vote “Democrat” most of the time, but I sure wouldn’t have spent the last 15 years of my life as a fundraiser.

Instead, unfortunately, today’s Republican leaders are like Mitch McConnell (see yesterday’s post) — and becoming more extreme and uncompromising with each cycle — so I’m still at it.

Let me share a few stories, beginning with my favorite rejection of all time and a recent success.

FAVORITE REJECTION:

“I’d really like to help,” he said, “but I can’t. I’ve just spent $80,000 on wall coverings for my beach house.”

To him this said it all. How could he possibly be expected to do $10,000 right then?

To me it said: how could he possibly NOT?  Right?  He had just spent $80,000 on wall coverings.  For his beach house!

When it comes to Democratic fundraising, I’ve come to know that our real nemeses are not the Re-publicans (at the time, Bush was running against Gore) but rather the Re-al estate market (as in: “we just bought a new place”) and the Re-novations (as in: $80,000 wall coverings). Hey! Has no over ever heard of PAINT???

RECENT SUCCESS:

I got an email from a friend asking me to meet with a woman in charge of diversity for a global bank — could she “pick my brain”?

I hate that expression. Why would anyone want his or her brain picked? I think of ice picks, pick-pockets, picking fights, being picked on – it just grates.  Please keep your cocktail forks away from my brain.  It is not a lobster knuckle.

Plus – while I think it’s terrific we’ve come to a point where major financial institutions are actively courting gay clients – why do I care whether one bank increases its LGBT market share at the expense of another?  I mean: good for them, and I’m thrilled they value our business.  But with the Senate and House at stake, and the White House in 2016 – and therewith, potentially, the future of mankind (because the visions of the two parties are so starkly different) . . . well, I assume by now you’ve heard my pitch, perhaps ad nauseum, but it is this: After thousands of generations of striving and suffering to get us to this magical moment (we have hot water! we can fly! we have seedless watermelon!), we, as a species, have just a couple of decades to get on a sustainable trajectory: in which case the future holds all but unimaginable well-being. Or else goes horribly, horribly wrong.

So do I care which bank gets LGBT business?

And yet the guy who asked me to do this is one of my heroes, and he said the woman is pretty amazing – I sort of glossed over the details – so I emailed her that, yes, sure, any friend of Kevin’s . . . etc.

But because I am incorrigible and, by now, a virtual self-parody, I offered three options:

OPTION #1 – Come up to my place next Thursday – it will be a pleasure to meet you.

OPTION #2 – Same, but afterward walk a few blocks and spend an hour with 24 other max-out ($32,400) donors and the President of the United States.

OPTION #3 – Same thing, different day, but with the First Lady.

I knew of course I’d get a gracious, “let’s start with Option #1,” in some form or other – and that was fine – but life is short and, if nothing else, I was amusing myself. (I am past the age of more strenuous entertainment.)

Back comes an email – “Option #2.”

My eyes widen and I’m, like, REALLY? But I’ve been to this rodeo before, and I know that when it’s this easy there’s usually a catch – is she, perhaps, a felon?  (By policy, we don’t accept contributions from felons.)  Does she have outstanding tax liens? (By policy, we don’t accept contributions from people who’ve not paid their taxes.)  Is she drunk?

But, no, this was a Friday – and I had her $32,400 Monday morning.

Who WAS this woman???  Turns out, yes, she heads the diversity effort for Credit-Suisse but she also sits on its executive board – and holds three Harvard degrees (magna and Law Review) – was McKinsey’s first African American partner; CEO of CNBC (hired Jim Cramer!); and a whole bunch of other things (Simon & Schuster published her novels) . . . so THANK YOU, Kevin: I made an amazing new friend, and she got to ask the President a great question about kids (she and her husband have three), and her support brought us that much closer to a good outcome in 2014 and 2016.

It doesn’t get better than this.

So here’s what I want you to do, and why I want you to do it:

Click here to join the enormous effort needed to bend the course of history in the direction of those who “believe in” science. And diversity and diplomacy and a higher minimum wage, comprehensive immigration reform, enlightened regulation, reproductive freedom, universal background checks, investment in infrastructure – even in the notion that we should make voting easier, not harder.

I’ll see your help right away to say thanks.

With your help we’ll be able to fund the tech team that keeps our ground game ahead of theirs and maintain the voter file that give us the edge in turn-out — and other tasks essential to a good outcome in November and that paves the way to holding the White House in 2016.

Forget the wall coverings.  Join us.

Did you see Mitch McConnell’s speech over the weekend?  He’s in a tight race to hold onto his Senate seat.  “By any standard,” he said, “Barack Obama has been a disaster for our country.”

Here are some standards:

STOCKS:  The Dow has doubled on Barack Obama’s watch — a disaster for our country.

PROFITS:  Corporate profits are at record highs — a disaster for our country.

JOBS:  Private sector employment has grown for 53 months straight, 9.9 million net new jobs, the longest streak in history — a disaster for our country.

DEBT:  The $1.5 trillion deficit Bush handed Obama has been cut by two-thirds (“So Whatever Happened to the Deficit?“) and thus our National Debt is once again growing slower than the economy — a disaster for our country.

HEALTH:   The rate of health care cost increase has slowed and millions more people have access to it — a disaster for our country.

ENERGY:  The percentage of oil we import hasn’t been this low in 40 years  — a disaster for our country.

EQUALITY:  The lives of millions of LGBT Americans and their families have been significantly improved at zero cost to the taxpayers — a disaster for our country.

WARS:  Ended two, avoided several others — a disaster for our country.

HOMELAND SECURITY:  Killed Bin Laden; no 9/11 sequels — a disaster for our country.

To Mitch McConnell, by any standard — including these — the President has been a disaster for our country.

(It’s true of course that our infrastructure is in terrible need of repair and our economy weaker than it should be — to take two big examples of places we could be doing better — but that’s because the Republicans have blocked, among so much else, The American Jobs Act . . . the higher minimum wage . . . and the immigration reform economists agree would boost the economy.  Likewise, climate change: we should be further along in leading the world’s response.  Guess why we’re not.)

What does it say about today’s Republican leaders that we’re barely surprised any more when they routinely say important things that are simply not true?  It is simply not true that “by any standard, Barack Obama has been a disaster for our country.”  It was simply not true that “by far the vast majority of [Governor Bush’s proposed tax cuts, if elected President] would go to people at the bottom of the economic ladder.”  Or that the decision to attack and occupy Iraq was taken as a “last resort.”

This should matter to people more than it does.

As should the fact that the equivalent is not the case on the Democratic side.

Click here to see the demographic future of America — age, ethnicity, and more.  (Thanks, Mel! Thanks, Pew!)  Lots of food for thought.

And may I just say, apropos of nothing, that I got SEMIARIDITY in Words With Friends yesterday?  It was a good weekend.  Yours too, I hope.

This is so interesting — someone who actually really knows about Obamacare.  A doctor, even!  Who’s read all 906 pages, even!  Who helped write it, even!  And yet doesn’t hate America.

I commend to you his Commonwealth Club speech.  It’s a fascinating inside look that I think will leave you feeling pretty good about the progress, and clued in to what remains to be done.

After listening, I ordered his book:  Reinventing American Health Care: How the Affordable Care Act will Improve our Terribly Complex, Blatantly Unjust, Outrageously Expensive, Grossly Inefficient, Error Prone System.

Have a great weekend.

“Oh, look!  An oriole!”  That’s about as exotic as it gets in the beautiful place from which I’m working this month — and I love it.  

But treat yourself to these five minutes and you will be transported to Papua, New Guinea, through an enormous telephoto lens.  Ten years of work and courage (I’d be scared of everything) and itching (I’m certain I’d be itching) distilled into five minutes for your morning coffee-sipping wonder and entertainment.

ETRM

People seem to be giving up on it and maybe they know something we don’t.  But Guru still thinks its weight-loss device will get approved and that, as a result, it’s worth two or three or four times the $1.27 it closed at last night.  I live in hope.

Bob: “Don’t you see how that ‘cartoon‘ feeds into the anti-Israel, uber-liberal crowd that wants to equate throat slashing, decapitating thugs with a non-aggressive, peaceful country?”

☞ Bob is right.  Not all Mideast violence is equivalent (to say the least).  To me, the point of the cartoon is simply to emphasize the insanity and inhumanity that fighting over “sacred” ground continues, millennium after millennium, to engender.

Bob offers this must-see CNN clip.  Please watch it!

DO YOU KNOW ANY RICH PROGRESSIVE MUSLIMS?

I need one to help finance a documentary film that a gay Muslim friend is making . . . because of things like this: a Saudi man sentenced to three years in prison and 450 lashes for being gay.

ISRAEL

This Washington Post editorial makes sense to me.

You?

God, what a tragedy it all is.

Toward the illustration of which . . .

ANDY WILLIAMS SINGS ABOUT THE HOLY LAND

Here.

Friday, I offered feet:

FEET

Are you coming to New York September 21 for the People’s Climate March?   There’s a train coming from San Francisco, picking up activists along the way . . . and others are coming on foot from Los Angeles.  My plan is to walk or call an Uber — but I’ll be there.

Today, foot:

FOOT

The subject line was alarming: WheelTug’s Iron Foot Disclosed.  Ugh.  One thing you don’t want attached to your commercial jet — or to the speculative stock in which you own a gazillion shares — is an iron foot.  We’re looking for words and phrases like “soar” or “fleet of foot” or “sure winner before the end of the year.”  Not something even more dead weight than “feet of clay” or “cement shoes.”

But it’s not that at all:

WheelTug’s Iron Foot Disclosed

Gibraltar, 24 July 2014. WheelTug plc has released footage of its Iron Foot, the mechanical test rig for testing the WheelTug across a range of aircraft and airport operating parameters. The video can be seen and downloaded at http://media.wheeltug.com.

The WheelTug® system uses high-performance electric motors, installed in the nose gear wheels of an aircraft, to provide full mobility while on the ground without the use of the aircraft’s jet engines or tugs. There are currently 985 Airbus A320 family or Boeing 737 NG and MAX aircraft in the Order Book, over 23 different airlines.

“The Iron Foot is a very important tool in the development and test of the WheelTug systems. It allows us to conduct full simulations of every ground operation of the WheelTug system in every possible operating environment,” said Isaiah Cox, WheelTug’s CEO. “Because of its versatility and instant configuration changes, this system unlocks far more testing capability than if we had several airplanes doing nothing but system testing around the clock.”

To the company’s knowledge, this dynonometer is unique, perhaps larger than any other in the world.  “Nobody else has a smart-drag on the load side to simulate the real world.  The tire and wheel guys we have shown it to have been very excited.”

I am, I know, a broken record, and I may still surely be proven wrong — which is why you should only own shares of WheelTug grandparent Borealis with money you can truly afford to lose.  But how is “e-taxi” in some form by now not inevitable?  Why would any airline not want to save a bundle of money each year?  Why would any busy airport not want to increase its capacity without having to build new gates and terminals?  (Because WheelTug allows faster turnaround times, the same gate can handle more flights each day.)  And if it is in some form inevitable, why would WheelTug — with its smaller, lighter, less complex solution, and its patents, and its endorsement from industry legend Bob Crandall, and its 23 signed airlines (compared to zero signed by its competitors) — not have a chance to own a meaningful part of the business?

And if in a few years it were bringing $50,000/plane in annual lease payments to the bottom line across thousands of planes for an annual profit of hundreds of millions of dollars, might it not then have the resources to commercialize some of its other potentially valuable technologies?  (Or find a use for this one in, say, automobiles?)

At which point, why couldn’t Borealis be worth a couple of billion dollars?  I have friends worth a couple of billion dollars.  Which would be about 40 times as much as it is selling for today.  (And stupid as I feel saying this, one could even imagine a scenario in which it could be worth more than a couple of billion.)

So enjoy the video.  The music is too loud and I’d have preferred Dustin Hoffman and Marisa Tomei as the leads with Donald Sutherland doing the voice-over.  But never mind that: it’s one more reason to think our patience may — conceivably — eventually –pay off.

PS – I like to invest in things that could make the world more efficient, as e-taxi would.  If you have $250K you can truly afford to lose in a private company with a patented way to build (small) bridges faster and cheaper — that will last longer and require less maintenance — me-mail me.

CATS

“All cats are libertarians: Completely dependent on others but fully convinced of their own independence.” — Internet Wisdom

FEET

Are you coming to New York September 21 for the People’s Climate March?   There’s a train coming from San Francisco, picking up activists along the way . . . and others are coming on foot from Los Angeles.  My plan is to walk or call an Uber — but I’ll be there.

GENES

In the Brave New World Department, from PBS’s Nova comes this report:

. . . In the last few years, our ability to edit genomes has improved at a shockingly rapid clip. So rapid, in fact, that one of the easiest and most popular tools, known as CRISPR-Cas9, is just two years old. Researchers once spent months, even years, attempting to rewrite an organism’s DNA. Now they spend days.

Soon, though, scientists will begin combining gene editing with gene drives, so-called selfish genes that appear more frequently in offspring than normal genes, which have about a 50-50 chance of being passed on. With gene drives—so named because they drive a gene through a population—researchers just have to slip a new gene into a drive system and let nature take care of the rest. Subsequent generations of whatever species we choose to modify—frogs, weeds, mosquitoes—will have more and more individuals with that gene until, eventually, it’s everywhere.

Cas9-based gene drives could be one of the most powerful technologies ever discovered by humankind. “This is one of the most exciting confluences of different theoretical approaches in science I’ve ever seen,” says Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at New York University. “It merges population genetics, genetic engineering, molecular genetics, into an unbelievably powerful tool.”

We’re not there yet, but we’re extraordinarily close. “Essentially, we have done all of the pieces, sometimes in the same relevant species.” says Kevin Esvelt, a postdoc at Harvard University and the wunderkind behind the new technology. “It’s just no one has put it all together.”

It’s only a matter of time, though. The field is progressing rapidly. “We could easily have laboratory tests within the next few months and then field tests not long after that,” says George Church, a professor at Harvard University and Esvelt’s advisor. “That’s if everybody thinks it’s a good idea.”

It’s likely not everyone will think this is a good idea. “There are clearly people who will object,” Caplan says. “I think the technique will be incredibly controversial.” Which is why Esvelt, Church, and their collaborators are publishing papers now, before the different parts of the puzzle have been assembled into a working whole.

“If we’re going to talk about it at all in advance, rather than in the past tense,” Church says, “now is the time.”  . . .

*If we alter its genome.  “And, having come, moves on.” — Carl Sandberg’s bio-engineering alter ego.