Year: 2019

Watch Jimmy Kimmel’s Monday monologue.  At 6:20, he quotes a Republican senator who — at least in this case — is spot on.  (No, not the senator with the snowball.)  That senator is followed by Lindsey Graham, who once said “impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office” (boy has he ever devolved) . . . and then by Stephen Miller . . . and then by Moscow Mitch.

Moscow Mitch says, “If I were [Speaker Pelosi] I wouldn’t want to go into next year’s election having it credibly said that all you did for the whole Congress was harass the president and try to remove him from office.”

Right?

That’s all she’s done.

Well, except for passing HR1, to make voting easier and more secure, requiring a paper-ballot backup . . . and The Equality Act . . . and an act to protect Dreamers . . . and the The Paycheck Fairness Act . . . and The Bipartisan Background Checks Act . . . and The Climate Action Now Act . . . and The Strengthening Health Care and Lowering Prescription Drug Costs Act . . . and The Violence Against Women Reauthorization Act . . . and The Save the Internet Act . . .

. . . and literally hundreds more bills (The Stopping Bad Robocalls Act!) that McConnell proudly killed without discussion or a vote.

Putin is winning.  Kim Jong-Un is winning.  The ghosts of Roy Cohn and Joe McCarthy are winning.  Evil and cruelty are winning.

(And as a practical matter, while shooting migrants in the legs would, for sure, slow them down, I can only imagine what Trump’s minions found when, on his instruction, they went to cost out an alligator-filled moat.  Because it’s not as practical an idea as it at first appears.  For one thing, a lot of the border is hot and dry. What would it cost to keep the moat filled?  For another, apart from the occasional desperate human and her child, what would the alligators eat?  In addition to water, you’d have tens of thousands of alligators you had to feed.  And if walking 2,000 miles to get to the moat is not a sufficient obstacle, I’m not sure ingenious rapists and drug dealers would not find away to shoot the proximate alligators or pole vault over the moat or in some other way foil what seems to be a really good plan.  But, like our president, I digress.)

We are better than this, as will be demonstrated November 3, 2020.

Most Americans are not “the radical left” or the “extreme right,” we are the humane center.  (Click that link to see if that’s you.)

Have a great weekend.

This set-up may not entirely fit your aesthetic, but I’m seriously thinking of trying it out.  (Thanks, Mel!)

Did you see Stephen Colbert explain the impeachment inquiry as a children’s story Monday night?  “Once upon a time,” he began, “Donald Trump called the president of Ukraine and asked the foreign leader to investigate Joe Biden. The end.”

Right?  Plus, a thousand other reasons.

But just that one malfeasance is WAY worse than lying to cover up a wildly inappropriate — but legal and consensual — extra-marital affair.  Which in an earlier era would never have come to light in the first place.  And that had zero national-security or election-integrity implications.  But that Lindsey Graham deemed impeachable because, in his words, “Impeachment is about cleansing the office.  Impeachment is about restoring honor and integrity to the office.”  Amen, brother.  Lindsey Graham has an unwavering moral compass.

With its stock now around $10, Borealis — with 5 million shares outstanding — is valued at $50 million . . . a little less than Martha Stewart’s daughter’s spectacular triplex apartment overlooking the Hudson.  That apartment could make a family very happy but would cost a great deal each year in taxes and maintenance.  Borealis, by contrast, via its WheelTug subsidiary, could save airlines billions of dollars a year, improve air travel for tens of millions of passengers, and expand airport capacity by 10% or 20% worldwide at no cost.

The stock remains a speculation to be bought only with money you can truly afford to lose; but WheelTug has accomplished a lot since the last time BOREF traded this high.  The two main achievements: (1) Reaching a “pre-certification agreement,” as they are called, that made FAA approval — while not guaranteed — highly likely if they could get the funds to complete the FAA process.  This happened a couple of years ago.  (2) Getting the funds.  This happened last month.

So how to value the company?  There are so many ways to look at this — here’s me going through much the same giddy eexercise when the stock was $17 six years ago (which just goes to prove you must always keep a grain of salt at hand when reading this page) — and here’s me estimating a fair price for BOREF at someplace between $2.79 and $338 — but I’ve thought of one more:

There are something like 17,000 737s and A320s that could one day be retrofitted with WheelTugs.

If they can save five or ten minutes on every flight (twenty minutes once airport jet bridges are modified to accommodate “the twist“), airlines might well pay $5 million per retrofit.  Look how much more productive each $80 million aircraft and its crew would be if scheduled 200-minute trips took only 175 minutes instead.

But let’s say for the purposes of this calculation the company could make a one-time profit of just $250,000 for each plane they retrofitted.  On 17,000 planes over the next 10 years, say (because what airline would not want this capability?), that’s a little north of $4 billion.

That’s not their plan.  Their business model is to lease — not sell — WheelTug systems, and at a profit that they think (hope? dream?  hallucinate?) will ultimately dwarf that $4 billion.

But still . . . what’s a definitely-not-guaranteed $4 billion profit over 10 years worth today?  I don’t know; but more than $50 million?

Yesterday I offered “Losing Earth: The Decade We Almost Stopped Climate Change” with the editor’s note.  (And last week: 16-year-old Greta Thurnberg’s call to action.)

Trump and many of his followers believe it’s all a Chinese hoax.*

And yet:

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Prologue

The world has warmed more than one degree Celsius since the Industrial Revolution. The Paris climate agreement — the nonbinding, unenforceable and already unheeded treaty signed on Earth Day in 2016 — hoped to restrict warming to two degrees. The odds of succeeding, according to a recent study based on current emissions trends, are one in 20. If by some miracle we are able to limit warming to two degrees, we will only have to negotiate the extinction of the world’s tropical reefs, sea-level rise of several meters and the abandonment of the Persian Gulf. The climate scientist James Hansen has called two-degree warming “a prescription for long-term disaster.” Long-term disaster is now the best-case scenario. Three-degree warming is a prescription for short-term disaster: forests in the Arctic and the loss of most coastal cities. Robert Watson, a former director of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has argued that three-degree warming is the realistic minimum. Four degrees: Europe in permanent drought; vast areas of China, India and Bangladesh claimed by desert; Polynesia swallowed by the sea; the Colorado River thinned to a trickle; the American Southwest largely uninhabitable. The prospect of a five-degree warming has prompted some of the world’s leading climate scientists to warn of the end of human civilization.

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Trump works against efforts to confront the climate crisis that could lead to the end of human civilization.  Is that not, at he very least, a misdemeanor?

The cockroaches, who will be here long after humans are gone, are laughing their little heads off.

Read the whole thing?

*Just as they believe the Mueller report was 448 pages of vindication — whereas, in the real world, more than 1,000 former Republican and Democratic federal prosecutors saw multiple felonies in Volume 2 and anyone who reads Volume 1 — Russia, if you’re listening — will see grave cause for concern.   Trump ignored a surprise attack on our democracy — an attack that is ongoing, that is succeeding, and that, as commander in chief, he and Moscow Mitch do nothing to confront, oath of office be damned.  Yet so effective is his rhetoric, tens of millions of still-Trumpers don’t care.

It matters who’s in charge.  From the New York Times last year:

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Editor’s Note
This narrative by Nathaniel Rich is a work of history, addressing the 10-year period from 1979 to 1989: the decisive decade when humankind first came to a broad understanding of the causes and dangers of climate change. Complementing the text is a series of aerial photographs and videos, all shot over the past year by George Steinmetz. With support from the Pulitzer Center, this two-part article is based on 18 months of reporting and well over a hundred interviews. It tracks the efforts of a small group of American scientists, activists and politicians to raise the alarm and stave off catastrophe. It will come as a revelation to many readers — an agonizing revelation — to understand how thoroughly they grasped the problem and how close they came to solving it.

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And oh, look!  Borealis Exploration sells Share Assets to Borealis Holdings. A corporate housekeeping non-event that we have 10 years to deal with, as I understand it.  For now, no action required.

I continue to support the Clinton Foundation.

(Also: the Carter Center, the Obama Foundation, and Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project . . . though not the Trump Foundation or whatever world-healing efforts George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and Dan Quayle may be leading.)

Here’s why. Three minutes.

Want to see the full whistle-blower report, that Lindsey Graham and Bill Barr don’t find troubling and that Trump finds potentially treasonous?  Click here.

[Russia has invaded a U.S. ally that desperately needs our military aid to defend itself; Congress appropriated that aid; the President instructed that it be suspended without explanation to Congress and then asked that ally’s president to do him “a favor”; the transcript of that phone call was deemed so potentially damning it was removed from the computer that ordinarily stores such transcripts; the “favor” Trump asked was for that ally’s president to meet with Trump’s attorney general (who used to be the nation’s attorney general, but not anymore) and with his demented personal attorney (famous for locating New York’s emergency response center inside New York’s previously-attacked prime target) to try to gain personal political advantage in the 2020 election.]

With footnotes: nine pages long.

The 448-page Mueller report detailed collusion (though not conspiracy) . . . and obstruction of justice that more than 1,000 Republican and Democratic former federal prosecutors labeled criminal and that may have been the reason conspiracy could not be proven . . . but it was, as the kids say, “tl;dr.”  Oh, well.

Have a great weekend.

When I started writing these posts in 1996 — at $500 a pop for the first three years — I took no time off.  Hey: $500 for a half hour’s work?  Do you even begin to know how money motivates me?  Once the money stopped, I found myself working harder on them — some perverse thing about doing it because I “wanted to” versus doing it because I had committed to.  But I did feel entitled to take, occasionally, what I used to call “Andy days,” though rarely if ever more than one every month or two.  And I reserve the right to do that again.

This in fact is sort of one of those days.

But it’s a chance to offer you two things.

First, the story of how the $500 a pop stopped, 20 years ago.

Second, part II of my pal Bryan Norcross’s wonderful remembrance of the moon landing.  It should have posted July 20, on the 50th anniversary, but got crowded out.  (Part I, which I did manage to post timely, remembered the mission’s launch.)

It is so uplifting . . . and a call, by implication, for America to work together on great projects again, and to exalt science, as administrations pretty much all the way up to, but ending with, this one, always have.  (This one suppresses and defunds science; fires scientists en masse; exits the Paris Climate Accords.)

Whenever you’re reading this — perhaps a few days from now, because it’s just too damn hot to write anything, or this fall or winter, because I suddenly remembered, two frozen margaritas in, that I had it in reserve — remember: If we can get out from under the Russian attack designed to make us hate each other, we can come together to do great things.

Cort: “At your invitation, I stand ready to set up my Fundraising Page and start inviting all of my friends and acquaintances to donate to the DNC.  But I haven’t done it yet, because I am so profoundly concerned about what our party is NOT doing in Congress.  Call me picky or stingy, but I need to feel like our party in Congress is living up to its obligation to us before I step out and obligate myself and my friends to our party.  Is it too much to ask that our party give me a reason to believe, and fundraise?  What is it going to take for Speaker Pelosi to get fired up, inspire her caucus, and lead a robust Impeachment inquiry?  Seriously, WTF is she waiting for?”

→ I guess she was waiting for a Trump-appointed Inspector General to find a whistle-blower report to be “urgent and credible.”

The invitation still stands!

Bill McDonald: “I think you’ve gone as far as you can with the book of Hitler’s speeches. There are so many reasons to disfavor Trump which are better grounded, I think you undercut your persuasiveness by repeatedly citing this one.”

→ I hear you!  But by coincidence, within hours of your note, one of your fellow readers sent me this remarkable book review which I find myself incapable of not sharing.  In small part:

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. . . In When at Times the Mob Is Swayed: A Citizen’s Guide to Defending Our Republic, Burt Neuborne mostly focuses on how America’s constitutional foundation in 2019—an unrepresentative Congress, the Electoral College and a right-wing Supreme Court majority—is not positioned to withstand Trump’s extreme polarization and GOP power grabs. However, its second chapter, “Why the Sudden Concern About Fixing the Brakes?,” extensively details Trump’s mimicry of Hitler’s pre-war rhetoric and strategies.

Neuborne doesn’t make this comparison lightly. His 55-year career began by challenging the constitutionality of the Vietnam War in the 1960s. He became the ACLU’s national legal director in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan. He was founding legal director of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School in the 1990s. He has been part of more than 200 Supreme Court cases and Holocaust reparation litigation.

“Why does an ignorant, narcissistic buffoon like Trump trigger such anxiety? Why do so many Americans feel it existentially (not just politically) important to resist our forty-fifth president?” he writes. “Partly it’s just aesthetics. Trump is such a coarse and appalling man that it’s hard to stomach his presence in Abraham Lincoln’s house. But that’s not enough to explain the intensity of my dread. LBJ was coarse. Gerald Ford and George W. Bush were dumb as rocks. Richard Nixon was an anti-Semite. Bill Clinton’s mistreatment of women dishonored his office. Ronald Reagan was a dangerous ideologue. I opposed each of them when they appeared to exceed their constitutional powers. But I never felt a sense of existential dread. I never sensed that the very existence of a tolerant democracy was in play.”

A younger Trump, according to his first wife’s divorce filings, kept and studied a book translating and annotating Adolf Hitler’s pre-World War II speeches in a locked bedside cabinet, Neuborne noted. The English edition of My New Order, published in 1941, also had analyses of the speeches’ impact on his era’s press and politics. “Ugly and appalling as they are, those speeches are masterpieces of demagogic manipulation,” Neuborne says.

“Watching Trump work his crowds, though, I see a dangerously manipulative narcissist unleashing the demagogic spells that he learned from studying Hitler’s speeches—spells that he cannot control and that are capable of eroding the fabric of American democracy,” Neuborne says. “You see, we’ve seen what these rhetorical techniques can do. Much of Trump’s rhetoric—as a candidate and in office—mirrors the strategies, even the language, used by Adolf Hitler in the early 1930s to erode German democracy.” . . .

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The review goes on to detail 20 points of comparison.  You’re surely correct that it won’t persuade Trump supporters.  But it’s of engrossing interest nonetheless (if you ask me), and might even motivate some of “our” folks to chip in, and/or try fundraising themselves. (Why should I have all the fun?)

A minute with Barack.

Nine with Trevor Noah.

But really most powerful of all — if you watch nothing else — these three minutes with Ms. Thunberg speaking directly to us.

Even though she doesn’t come from a s—hole country (she’s Nordic!), Republicans are too smart to fall for her pitch (though every other country in the world has signed on).

She’s just 16, for crying out loud!

If climate were truly the crisis virtually all the world’s scientists claim, surely Trump and his “best people” (whether acting, fired, in jail or under indictment) . . . working with Moscow Mitch and Snowball Jim . . . would be working to protect our future.

No?

I mean: if you can’t trust Trump and McConnell, whom can you trust?

And what’s the big deal about 500-year floods, anyway?  They happen all the time.

The rain that fell on Texas the other day?  My pool was deeper than three-and-a-half feet.*

What would have been impressive: the equivalent amount of snow.  Now that might have gotten Republican attention: Houston under 46 feet of snow.**

Watch Greta.

*Until it got washed away at high tide under a full moon this past December.

**On average, thirteen inches of snow equals one inch of rain — so, 46 feet.

He is a:

Liar

Racist

Sociopath

Fascist

Russian asset

Who loves autocrats, obstructs justice, and kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside.

→ If you doubt any of this, click the links for substantiation.

About 40% of us have bought the notion that it’s all fake news.

Want to help get the country back on track?  Read these:

1. OVERALL STRATEGY
2. PUSHBACK – AND ANSWERS
3. WHAT YOUR MONEY GOES TO FUND
4. HOW YOU CAN HELP

But first:

On recycling/reusing (from Tuesday) . . . two delightful NPR Planet Money podcasts:  WHY we recycle.  (It started with a funny story and the mob.)  And, more to the point, SHOULD we recycle.  (Oh, God.  It turns out: maybe not.)

You are allowed one reusable water bottle.  And one SodaStream.  No plastic bottles or aluminum cans.

On Borealis . . . everything I know I already told you Monday.  Now that they have funding, it’s kind of silly the stock is $8 — a $40 million market cap for a company that might save the airlines billions each year.  But as always: only with money you can truly afford to lose.

And now, as summer yields to fall:

Putin is winning in so many ways. “Technology is about to upend our entire national security infrastructure.”

These are the good old days.  I count my blessings quarter hourly.

Have a great weekend!