Author: A.T.

There’s no column today because (a) there’s so much to watch from yesterday’s Oslo Freedom Forum post, you need the extra time; (b) the dog ate my homework.

The dog, in this case, was a book party celebrating publication of Eva Moskowitz’s memoir, which you should buy here.

There are now 46 Success Academy schools in the New York area serving 15,500 scholars.  If  they were all bunched together as a single school district, they would be the 7th largest in the state, out of nearly 700.  Populated mainly by kids of color from low-income households who are “selected” by lottery, the Success Academy district ranks, out of all nearly 700 . . . are you ready? . . . #1 in student achievement.

As I’ve written so many times before, it is a thrilling story that points the way toward breaking the cycle of poverty, crime and despair.  Great for those 15,500 kids — and their kids — but also for society as a whole.  Imagine the social, civic, and fiscal/economic impact.

Yet boy is it ever hard to get entrenched interests to accept change and embrace success, as Eva recounts here.

Spread the word.  Some charter schools suck.  Many are mediocre.  But when you find a public-school formula that works so spectacularly well?  And has been proven in not just one or two schools for just one or two years, but now 46, some of them for a decade?

C’mon, people!

Speaking of embracing a good idea, have I ever mentioned WheelTug?  (Ahem.)  Several of you forwarded this article (“British Airways Using Remote-controlled, Electric Tugs At Heathrow / Roll-out across entire narrowbody network planned”).  It’s good to see interest in improved ground operations,  but Mototok, as the tugs are called, cannot do what WheelTug will: allow the pilot to back out without waiting for and connecting to and then disconnecting from, a tug; or “twist” at the gate to allow boarding and deplaning from both front AND read rear doors.  So the all-important time savings WheelTug should provide — meaningfully adding capacity to airlines and airports without their having to buy a single new plane, hire a single new crew, or build a single new terminal — cannot be matched, or even approached, really, by Mototok.  We inch forward.

There having not been a column today (Tuesday), this must be tomorrow’s!  Have a great day.

But first: guess what?  Jared Kushner — and others — have used private email accounts to conduct official White House business.

Last week I attended a bit of the Oslo Freedom Forum — in New York — founded by a young libertarian friend, Thor Halvorssen.

You might not guess from his name that he is Venezuelan — related, several family tree branches back, to Simón Bolívar (a revolutionary far more in the mold of Thomas Jefferson than of Hugo Chávez, as he recounts here) . . . or that his mother was shot in a crowd of demonstrators by Chávez forces (relegated thereafter to a wheelchair) . . . or that his cousin Leopoldo would be Venezuela’s president today, rather than a prisoner, if the country were free.

But Venezuela is just one of the many foci of the Oslo Freedom Forum, which seeks to confront oppression wherever it is found — from Iran to North Korea to China to Russia, and beyond.

Chess champion and Russian dissident Garry Kasparov is its chair.Read a summary of his thoughts and of Oslo’s day in New York here, in the National Review.

If it piques your interest, save the registration fee and expense of a trip to New York and travel back a week in time to watch much of it here.  Session One.  Then Session Two. Then Session Three.

Freedom is precious.  Putin: one of its most effective, ruthless enemies.  One speaker vowed:

“You will not see us run. You will not see us hide. You will not see us give up.” Russian democrats do not want outside help, he says. “We have to achieve democracy on our own.” But he does ask for help in this sense: “I say to you in the West, stay true to your values. Stop supporting Putin.” Stop making it easy for him. Stop welcoming him into the circle of legitimate leaders.

I wonder what the House “Freedom Caucus” members make of Trump’s great affinity for Putin / Lavrov / et al.  (“What, you think our country’s so innocent?”)  Should they not be the first people calling for him to be gone?

HEALTH CARE:

According to Politico, Jimmy Kimmel — not Senator Cassidy — is right about his health care bill.  It is a disaster.  Read or watch.

Until we get a sensible single-payer system like the rest of the First World countries on earth, why not just make two changes to the Affordable Care Act?  (1) Add a further 2% to the tax on investment income above $1 million — which would still leave the rate lower than what we had when Ronald Reagan left office — using that additional cash to lower co-pays and deductibles.  (2) Require Medicare and Medicaid to negotiate prescription drug prices (which they are currently prohibited from doing).

HURRICANES:

According to Neil DeGrasse Tyson, in six minutes with Fareed Zakaria, we are in deep trouble.  Read or watch.

Only the Republicans don’t seem to get it.  But that matters, because at the moment they control all three branches of government.

AND, JUST TO ADD TO YOUR WEEKEND FUN:

According to this completely riveting story in the New Yorker, “An earthquake will destroy a sizable portion of the coastal Northwest . . . the worst natural disaster in the history of the continent. The question is when.”  Read (too scary to watch).

I have no prescription for this one, except to take every day as a total, miraculous gift.

But first: if you have plans to be in New York at some point, run don’t walk to Sweeney Todd.  If you’re a long time fan of the show, I need say no more: you will love it.  If you don’t know Stephen Sondheim’s demon barber of Fleet Street (really?), that’s fine: listen to the score once and you will be hooked for life.  Then come see it brought to life (and death) at the Barrow Street Theater.

There is an option to have a meat pie first.  You don’t need to bother with that.  If you’re hungry or thirsty, maybe get a bite or a drink first at The Spaniard, 100 yards away.

I have no stake in the show or the bar.

If you want to enrich me, see Spamilton.  (“Convulsively funny.” — New York Times)

It always worries me when one of my stocks goes up, let alone two — have we finally reached the top of this bull market? — but it’s still a nice problem to have.  Yesterday, I mentioned the quadruple we’ve gotten in PRMRF.  I sold some, because I don’t see how oil prices get a lot stronger as the world moves ever faster toward solar.  But clearly some people think the stock has further to run — e.g., whoever bought the shares I sold.  I’m in no rush to sell them all.

Meanwhile, FANH, our Chinese automobile insurance company — that traded under the symbol CISG when I first mentioned it nearly four years ago at $5.40 and again two years ago at $5.76 — seems finally to be hitting its stride, closing yesterday at $13.48.  I asked my smart friend, who owns a ton of it, what he thought and — for what it’s worth — he said he’s not selling.  He sees a bright future that could send the stock “much higher.”  Who knows?

The real question, of course, is whether Borealis will ever pay off for us.  I don’t know that either, but here is a link to last week’s IATA conference in Panama and — of particular interest — WheelTug’s presentation.  Some of the acronyms may be opaque, but if you’ve been following this saga for the last umpty-ump years, you’ll get the gist.  And near the end you’ll see the acronym EIS, which stands for Entry Into Service — which they show as “early 2019.”  Whether they will hit that target “on time” — or ever — is an open question.  But it’s clear from the presentation, and their inclusion in yet another IATA conference, that this is a serious effort, involving serious people.

(The WheelTug presenter, Jan Vana, integrated the Czech air force into NATO, among other things.  And I love that some years ago he took a job — in the winter, as I recall — as a ground guy at the Prague airport, with those plastic ear muffs in the freezing wind, guiding planes into the gate and seeing that the chucks (chocks? blocks?) were placed properly and the tugs connected to the nose-wheel struts — “three months?” I asked him . . . and he said, basically, “I need to know every detail of how this works, at the most granular level.”)

A bet on WheelTug’s controlling shareholder, Borealis (symbol: BOREF), may never pan out.  But the business case for aircraft that can maneuver with their little electric motor is compelling; and the company seems to be driving doggedly toward that goal.  If it ultimately fails for some reason, BOREF could hit zero.  If it succeeds, it’s not hard to imagine a $500 million valuation ($100 a share) or even several times that high.  So I hold on.

As always, buy only with money you can truly afford to lose.  And using “limit” orders — the stock is very thinly traded.

Index funds: boring and tax efficient.

You know who is never boring?  And who famously beats index funds by a mile?

Warren Buffett.

So have a little fun reading about the ten-year $1 million bet he made — and has just won.  (Namely, that 0ver 10 years a cheap index fund — with no active management at all — would outperform any basket of five hedge funds, however brilliant their highly paid managers.)

It’s rich. As is Warren.  And as are those hedge fund managers, even though they added no value.  Subtracted value, actually.

(And we haven’t even talked about tax efficiency yet.  In a taxable account, that gives index funds an even greater edge over hedge funds.)

That said, I’m an investor in one tiny hedge fund in which I have high confidence and that has, as some do, at least in hindsight, consistently outperformed.

And I don’t write off the possibility of finding undervalued stocks.  I’ve suggested lots of losers here over the years; and others that may not ultimately be losers but surely, sorely try one’s patience.  But some work out.

For example, as 2015 drew to a close, I apologized for the losers, but asked: “would this be a time to buy a little GLDD?  A little PRMRF?  A little BOREF?  Each under $5?  Check back with me in a year or two and we’ll know.”

Well, as of last night, BOREF and GLDD were essentially unchanged, but PRMRF had quadrupled.  (And you would be forgiven if you now took some or all your gain on that one, as the at least the first 400% upside has now been realized.)  I hang on to BOREF and GLDD, and to SPRT and GEC and HD and others.  Hope springs eternal.  (And in the case of HD, has panned out but may have further to pan.)

[With thousands homeless and millions without power, Trump calls for emergency… corporate tax cuts.]

Jim Burt: “I am a docent at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, and part of my introduction to the Rembrandt Peale portraits of George and Martha Washington goes like this:

Who was the most famous American general of the Revolutionary War?  That’s right, George Washington.  And who was the second most famous American general of the Revolutionary War?  Benedict Arnold.  Arnold’s early service in the Revolution was competent and even heroic, suffering painful wounds as well as winning battles, but in addition to feeling slighted by Congress concerning honors and promotion, Benedict Arnold had a spendthrift and socially ambitious wife whose grasp exceeded his reach, which is thought to have contributed to his decision to turn traitor.  (Turning to the portrait of Martha Washington.)  By contrast, George Washington had a faithful and diligent wife who brought him a large fortune and whose business management skills enabled their large property holdings – which included slaves, as well as land and a profitable whiskey distillery – to prosper while George spent eight years away as a general during the Revolution plus another eight as president.  It’s no exaggeration to say that without Martha George might well have been just another country squire trying to meet his mortgage payments.

“What I don’t typically mention, because we’re mostly talking about art and not politics, is that we don’t have any monuments in this country to Benedict Arnold, even though he was, part of the time, a hero and a good general.  Fast forward to the Civil War era, and we have one acknowledged anti-slavery traitor, John Brown.  Even though he was a hero to many abolitionists, he did take up arms against the United States government, and is therefore, by constitutional definition, a traitor.  There are two monuments to John Brown, one a historical marker at Harper’s Ferry noting the location of his ‘fort,’ where he defended his band of terrorists against the Army’s effort to retake the arsenal there, and one in an enclosure blocked off to the public at the Akron, Ohio zoo.  Neither glorifies John Brown, even though — unlike every Confederate soldier — he was a traitor in a good cause.

“If in the interests of ‘history, not hate’ we’re going to put up public monuments to traitors – defined in our Constitution as anyone who takes up arms against the government — we’ve got a lot of catching up to do, starting with Benedict Arnold and John Brown.  I’m sure we can find a few others to glorify along the way.  Nat Turner comes to mind, except that he and his fellow slaves did not take up arms against the United States, but against their masters.  Anyway, I’ll take the ‘history, not hate’ crowd a lot more seriously when they start promoting monuments to John Brown.  He was a traitor and a terrorist, but at least he was on the right side of history, unlike  Robert E. Lee, ‘Stonewall’ Jackson, Jefferson Davis . . . and Benedict Arnold.

“Worth a read:  What I Wish Democrats Would Say About Confederate Monuments. In a nutshell, Tomasky would like a major Democrat, preferably one in contention for the next presidential nomination, to say that the reason to demolish or sequester Confederate monuments is not that they depict racist or bigoted people – after all, until recently, everybody in public life was racist by contemporary standards, and certainly that was true of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and others — but rather that we should honor those who rose above their racism, or stood apart from it, and did good things for our country.  I’d like to hear that speech, too.  But I’d also like to hear people point out that not only were the Confederacy’s heroes traitors and losers, but they were these things in an evil cause.  Slavery is evil.

“The myth of the ‘Lost Cause’ mired the South in economic stagnation and racial oppression for more than a century.  Racial proportions varied by state and locale, but if we assume that 40% of the Deep South was prevented from full participation in the economy by the various manifestations of Jim Crow and the death squads and state-sponsored terrorism that enforced it, that means the Southern economy was operating well below capacity.  Only, it was worse than that, because Jim Crow was not just a method of oppressing and plundering black people, but a method by which the ruling class of the South kept everyone, white as well as black, in servitude to their interests.  Whites had it better than blacks to be sure, but real economic and social mobility was hard to achieve in the Jim Crow South, no matter how white your skin.

“De Tocqueville, who transited the Ohio River in the 1830s, observed that on the free bank, farms and towns appeared prosperous and well kept, while the opposite was true on the Kentucky side of the River.  He attributed this to the fact that in a free society labor was valued and respected, while the opposite was true in a society in which an entire class of people was confined to labor and deprived of the right of ownership of themselves or anything else.  Even today in the South generally, working people are not respected, and illegal tactics are still used by the owner class to put down attempts to organize unions. I’d like to see a truly free South.  The only thing the non-owner class of Southerners has to lose is their unearned assumption of superiority over black people.  But they can gain in self-respect, self-actualization, and self-ownership.”

There are tons of things to celebrate, love, and admire about the South.  Here’s one more: a Congressional candidate from Kentucky, Amy McGrath.  Take a minute to watch her story.

I’ve previously plugged The Americans — the first four seasons free on Amazon Prime — and am now 29 episodes into it . . . the story of two KGB spies in Ronald Reagan’s Washington, DC, when Russia was our enemy animated by a noble, utopian — but irretrievably flawed — cause.  (Communism sought to provide a good life for everyone — “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need” — that, humans being hard-wired to be fundamentally self-centered, inevitably has led everywhere it’s been tried to tyranny, repression, corruption, and what can be sum up by, “they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.”)  Now Russia is still our enemy, minus the noble cause.  But watching The Americans from the point of view of the KGB protagonists, along with the FBI protagonists . . . it is completely absorbing . . . and eerily relevant today, when the FBI is investigating the KGB’s efforts (now called the FSB) to destabilize our democracy, and liberal democracies and alliances in Europe as well.

Russia is winning.

President Trump seems not to be alarmed as Ronald Reagan (say) would have been.  In some ways, Trump and Putin are alike — both dishonest billionaires.  In other ways, they are spectacularly different — contrast, e.g.,  Trump’s fake professional wrestling with Putin’s black belt and other martial arts. One presumes Putin privately holds Trump in contempt; Trump appears to admire the journalist-murdering Putin, the one person he never criticizes.

And so I commend the Sunday New York Times story a week ago about Russia’s “new theory of war” — winning without firing a shot — in case you missed it.  It’s long, but oh so relevant and important to our future.

“How the Kremlin built one of the most powerful information weapons of the 21st century — and why it may be impossible to stop.’

A snippet:

. . . In early 2013, Valery Gerasimov, a top Russian general, published an article in a Russian military journal called VPK. Gerasimov had observed Twitter and other social media helping spark the Arab Spring. “It would be easiest of all to say that the events of the ‘Arab Spring’ are not war and so there are no lessons for us — military men — to learn,” he wrote. “But maybe the opposite is true.” There were new means through which to wage war that were “political, economic, informational,” and they could be applied “with the involvement of the protest potential of the population.” Russia’s military doctrine changed its definition of modern military conflict: “a complex use of military force, political, economic, informational and other means of nonmilitary character, applied with a large use of the population’s protest potential.”

Military officials in America and Europe have come to refer to this idea alternatively as the “Gerasimov doctrine” and “hybrid war,” which they accuse Russia of engaging in now. When I asked Peskov about those charges, he shrugged. Everyone was doing it, he said. “If you call what’s going on now a hybrid war, let it be hybrid war,” he said. “It doesn’t matter: It’s war.” . . .

The Wall Street Journal adds this footnote: “Russian-backed messages in the 2016 election cycle had outsize reach, ad buyers say, because of the way Facebook rewards content that gets a reaction.”  As known so far, Russia’s Facebook ads reached only a few million people — a small piece of their overall effort. Will Facebook find more to reveal?  (For months, they knew of none.)

He’s just misinformed.

Click here to get a sense why Medicare For All is not a crazy idea.  If it can work throughout Europe, Canada, and the rest of the industrialized world, can’t we — who already pay far more for health care than any of them do — make it work here, too?

I.e., if their outcomes — spending just 9% to 12% of GDP on health care — can be as good as ours (and in many respects, they’re better), why can’t we do as well when we spend more than 17%?

And by the way? I’m no commie pinko: just as charging $1,899* for a wide seat in the front of the plane helps make cramped plan-ahead $139 seats available for everybody else, I have no problem with the wealthy paying a giant surcharge for single rooms or private nurses or even — when it’s not life-threatening — cutting to the head of the line.  For better or worse (depending on your perspective), this is America.

*$2,549 if you’re going last minute.  (And by the way?  Once WheelTug is widely deployed, the $139 folks in 36B will not only land at the same time as the folks in 1B, they’ll deplane just as fast, too, from the rear door.)

If you’ve ever read Catcher in the Rye or been intrigued by J.D. Salinger, check out Rebel In The Rye, now playing at an art house near you.

If you happen to be in Panama today, check out Jan Vanna’s 11am WheelTug presentation (after the coffee break) at IATA’s Maintenance Cost Conference.  The beat goes on.*

Here is a major piece exposing the disaster that are Michigan charter schools — of note because Trump chose their billionaire champion, Betsy DeVos, to be our Secretary of Education. Also because it drives home the point that charter schools can be ineffective or even awful.  Just like pills. (Cyanide, anyone?)  Knowing that something is a pill — or a charter school — tells you very little.  But when you find a pill — or a replicable charter school model, like Success Academy — that works spectacularly well, for heaven’s sake grab it.

OK. Can We Talk About Tom Brady’s Brain? That was Frank Bruni’s column in the New York Times.  Yet as terrific a columnist as Bruni is, he missed Brady’s secret brain sauce — my much-touted (because I own a piece) BrainHQ.

Here’s how the Boston Herald covered it:

You can now train your brain like Tom Brady. No, this isn’t the plot of a satirical sci-fi flick: TB12 has apparently teamed up with Posit Science to make the G.O.A.T.’s personal regimen of BrainHQ exercises and assessments available to the public.

Brady’s reportedly been doing BrainHQ exercises online over the past four years — during which time he’s lead the Pats to two Super Bowl championships. And he claims that the cognitive training has made a difference in how he thinks on the field.

“I’m not a brain scientist,” Brady said in a statement, “but I can tell you about my experience after using the exercises — I could feel myself seeing more, seeing things more quickly and accurately, and making better decisions, faster.”

. . . [H]ere’s what the real brain scientists are saying: More than 100 published, peer-reviewed studies point out the benefits of TB12 BrainHQ — from improved speed and executive function to better balance and gait. The research has actually revealed that the mental workouts can prompt chemical and structural changes within the brain.

Check out the special version of BrainHQ featuring Tom’s regimen at TB12.BrainHQ.com.

BrainHQ is also featured in Tom’s The TB12 Method: How to Achieve a Lifetime of Sustained Peak Performance, out next week.

There is a connection here:

The proven, replicable Success Academy charter-school model — at no additional cost to taxpayers — has the potential to dramatically improve outcomes for millions of our most vulnerable kids, breaking the cycle of poverty, teenage pregnancy, and all the drag that puts on their lives and our nation as a whole.

The proven BrainHQ exercises could dramatically reduce the incidence of dementia, with all the drag that puts on families and our nation as a whole.  Indeed, as argued here, Medicare should in effect pay folks to do BrainHQ. (Want to live healthy to 100?  Parade has some tips that include BrainHQ.)

This is big stuff, no?

*You laugh: but television was invented in 1926 and by 1946 — 20 years later! — no one had made a dime from it.  Yet it did catch on.

From Shelly Palmer a few months ago:

First.  (Journalists?  Really?)

Last.  (He forgot to include bed-makers and masseurs, hair stylists and a whole lot of others — ichthyologists spring to mind.)

But however one might dispute the specifics of his lists, the larger point is that we face rapid change that could make life amazing for 8 billion people — the sun powering all manner of machines that relieve us of most traditional work, leaving us more time to love and learn and laugh.  But that would require agreed-upon means to share the benefits of all this great technology, while also retaining incentives for excellence and hard work.  (Here’s an idea: how about the incentive being a bit more about applause and self-esteem, a little less about money?).  Universal Basic Income is an idea that deserves ever more consideration.

The alternative is a massive unemployment, demoralization, strife, and even-greater inequality.

Or not?

The Wall Street Journal recently offered, “Workers: Fear Not the Robot Apocalypse,” contending that “Automation commonly creates more, and better-paying, jobs than it destroys.”

But I’m not so sure.  Technological progress may now be accelerating-faster than we can find new things to need or want (at least new things that require human labor to provide).

There’s lots of jobs only humans can fill — caring nurses, cheerful servers, stand-up comics.  But once we’ve switched to sun-powered self-driving vehicles there will be no truck, bus, cab or limo drivers; no meter maids, toll takers, gas-station or parking-lot attendants.  And that’s just transportation. Just as agriculture — that once employed 60% of us — now requires fewer than 2% to meet our needs, the hundreds of animators who used to be required to make a film are largely replaced by a couple.  How many accountants will we need?  How many diagnosticians?

With our basic needs someday so easily satisfied, powered by free energy from the sun, Universal Basic Income (and universal health care) may be required to underpin the happy, healthy society of tomorrow