Author: A.T.

The direct link between Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump — in case you missed it in the Washington Post.  Worth reading.

Matt: “Your current opinion on BOREF and SPRT, please?”

These two could hardly be more different — and, for different reasons, I remain heavily invested in both.

At latest report, Support.com (SPRT) had $51.7 million in cash, up slightly since I first suggested it here and then again here.  That’s significant for two reasons:

First, with 18.6 million shares outstanding, that works out to $2.78 each — trading Friday at $2.38.  Buying $2.78 of cash for $2.38 is the sort of thing I like to do — especially when you get, also,  your share of a business that might someday be worth something (and that will not have any tax due on its first $120 million in profits, because it lost so much money in the years before new management took it over).  The company has no debt, so trades at about 85% of its cash in the bank.

Second, the fact that cash is up slightly suggests new management has stopped the bleeding.  Which suggests that the underlying business may have a chance to earn profits.  Which suggests that the highly incentivized CEO, a summa cum laude Wharton grad, might be able to make all this work, as hoped.

There’s more to say, but it’s not hard to imagine this stock doubling in the next year or two; and — at least in a rational market — hard to see it trading for much less than its cash on hand if its not losing money.

So as speculations go, this one strikes me as quite conservative.  Hardly a sure thing, but — to me — a lot more interesting than keeping that same $2.38 in the bank, if you can afford the risk.

BOREF is a completely different kind of speculation . . . one that long-time readers know would test any investor’s patience.  Unlike SPRT, Borealis has no cash cushion.  What it has are some patents in a variety of fields, and — mainly — a controlling interest in a privately-held company called WheelTug, whose system, if it flies, should delight passengers and save airlines (and airports) tens of billions of dollars. (Watch!)

The stock currently trades around $5.50, so about $40 million for the whole company. Three years ago I suggested it could be worth anywhere from $2.79 to $338.  Twelve years ago, I made the case for its trading at $100.

Long-time readers will remember one rationale I’ve used over the years to try to retain my patience: Television was invented in 1926.  No one made a dime from it until 1950 or so.  But ultimately, it did catch on.  Another analogy: not a single TV set was ever sold with a remote control — until remote controls were invented.  Within a few years, not a single TV set was ever sold without a remote control.

Why would anyone buy a TV without remote control?  Why would anyone want a commercial jet that can’t back out from the gate on its own?  That can’t twist around to park parallel to the gate to allow boarding and deplaning from both front AND rear doors?

The FAA approval process is underway.  Normally, it takes about two years.

Will our Borealis lottery ticket ever hit, as hoped?  I clearly don’t know.  But if it does, it should be worth many, many times what it sells for today.

Oh, gosh.  Just what you wanted for an August weekend.  Why not just a hurricane or something?

But man up: here is the trailer for a world in disarray.

Scarier still, the trailer for cyber warfare that could wreak havoc with your life — no electricity! no water! — without a single missile launched, or single terrorist within five thousand miles.

Both are 30-minute episodes of HBO’s Vice.  (Free trial if not already a subscriber.)

And here is an analysis of Trump’s North Korea missteps.  What a nightmare.

My take-away from all this?

Vote for competence and cooperation.

(And for modernized, secure infrastructure — which will require paying taxes, not cutting them.)

In the meantime, savor every minute.

We have electricity . . . as only six of the previous ten thousand generations have had.

We have hot water!

Have a great weekend.

It just might happen.  Already, more than half a million people have watched this two-minute video.  Could this steel worker beat the Speaker of the House next year?

In rural Iowa, Democrat Phil Miller won a state legislative seat by 10 points Tuesday in a district Trump carried by 20 points.

And if you have a minute, here’s a summary of the national climate report, mandated by Congress, the Trump Administration has not released.

(PS — Have you seen An Inconvenient Sequel yet?  Opens wide Friday.)

Richard Engel On Assignment takes us to China  (“China Leaving US Behind On Green Energy Jobs”) and then to Pittsburgh (“US cities pursue green future while Trump looks backward to coal”) . . . back to China (“Top US diplomat quits over Trump climate policy“), to climate-change from Reagan to Trump (“Missed climate goals a legacy of US politics“), to unelectrified villages skipping straight to solar, and finally to the blue skies ahead for China.

It’s very much worth clicking each link to watch the whole thing.  But if you’re short of time, here’s the executive summary: we’re idiots.  And by “we’re,” I think you know who I mean.

Five minutes — here.

(Don’t say I never gave you anything.)

And wait!  There’s more!  (Thanks, Glenn.)  Conservatives ask: Why Is Donald Trump Still So Horribly Witless About the World?.

In case you missed it, the White House dubbed last week “American Dream Week.”

That (not a quartet of rebukes) was its intended theme.

I herewith hand the microphone over to the Democratic National Committee, of which I am no longer treasurer, but in whose success I remain deeply invested, as should we all.

(And by whose recent hiring of Raffi Krikorian to be Chief Technology Officer — obviously, a key role in today’s election world — I am encouraged.  He was one of the geniuses at Twitter and Uber.  When I saw the press release, I pinged Megan Smith, formerly Chief Technology Officer of the United States.  “Hey, do you know him?  How are you with this choice?” Megan, who’s been privately and constructively critical of the DNC in the past, replied: “He is beyond extraordinary.  We are so lucky.” This buoys my spirits, and I hope yours.  Technology underpins everything.)

Anyhow, here’s how the DNC communications shop that you pay for summed up the week:

During ‘American Dream’ Week, Trump Threatens The American Dream

 Trump has spent “American Dream” week taking steps that would threaten the American dream for families across the country. Trump threatened the healthcare of millions, he pushed for tax cuts that would benefit millionaires, billionaires and corporations, at the expense of working families, he endorsed a bill to cut legal immigration that could hurt the economy, and he turned back the clock on civil rights. And to top it off, yesterday Trump’s top policy advisor attacked the Statue of Liberty, the very symbol of the American dream.

Trump endorsed legislation that would make dramatic cuts to legal immigration and reduce avenues for family members to unite with U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents – even raising fears that it would hurt the U.S. economy.

Washington Post: “President Trump endorsed a steep cut in legal immigration on Wednesday. Economists say that’s a ‘grave mistake.’  A Washington Post survey of 18 economists in July found that 89 percent believe it’s a terrible idea for Trump to curb immigration to the United States. Experts overwhelmingly predict it would slow growth — the exact opposite of what Trump wants to do with ‘MAGAnomics.’”

Politico: “The Cotton-Perdue legislation would also mark a broader shift away from the current immigration system, which favors those with family currently in the U.S., toward a merit-based approach. It would, for example, increase the number of green cards — which allow for permanent residency in the U.S. — that are granted on the basis of merit to foreigners in a series of categories including outstanding professors and researchers, those holding advanced degrees, and those with extraordinary ability in a particular field.”

Kevin Appleby, Senior Director For The Center For Migration Studies: “‘This is just a fundamental restructuring of our immigration system which has huge implications for the future,’ said Kevin Appleby, the senior director of international migration policy for the Center for Migration Studies. ‘This is part of a broader strategy by this administration to rid the country of low-skilled immigrants they don’t favor in favor of immigrants in their image.’”

Trump threatened to stop making cost sharing reduction payments, which could hurt millions of Americans.

CNN Money: “If Trump makes good on his threat to stop paying the subsidies, he would likely precipitate Obamacare’s implosion. Insurers would probably flee the exchanges in 2018, if not before. That could leave millions of Americans without any options for subsidized coverage in the individual market.”

CNN Money: “Insurers, meanwhile, are taking steps to protect themselves. They would have to raise premiums by about 19% on average to compensate for the loss of the payments, the Kaiser Family Foundation estimates. Many are asking for hefty hikes for 2018.”

Trump began his public push for a tax plan that would overwhelmingly benefit corporations and the top one percent at the expense of working families.

Associated Press: “The Trump administration started its public push Monday to overhaul taxes but, just as with health care, the White House lacks a detailed plan to promote to voters.  What it has, instead, is an aggressive deadline.”

Vox: “Every iteration of Trump’s tax plan, from his first campaign outline to the lightly detailed blueprint his White House team released this spring, has been scored by independent analysts as a huge tax cut for the very rich.”  

CNN Money: “About 20% of taxpayers could pay higher taxes under the Trump administration’s tax reform plans, according to an analysis released Wednesday by the Tax Policy Center… Specifically, a large number of middle class and upper-middle class tax payers would see a tax hike due to the loss of deductions and the elimination of both personal and dependent exemptions.”

CNN Money: “The group also estimates that the overwhelming majority of the tax savings would flow through to the richest tax payers. Nearly 80% of the savings would go to those earning $150,000 or more, with half the overall savings going to just those taxpayers in the top 1% of income, those earning more than $732,000 a year.”  

The Trump administration prepared to target university admissions programs that provided opportunities to disadvantage minorities.

New York Times: “The Trump administration is preparing to redirect resources of the Justice Department’s civil rights division toward investigating and suing universities over affirmative action admissions policies deemed to discriminate against white applicants, according to a document obtained by The New York Times.”

New York Times: “Supporters and critics of the project said it was clearly targeting admissions programs that can give members of generally disadvantaged groups, like black and Latino students, an edge over other applicants with comparable or higher test scores.”

Have a great week.

Did you know that today is the literal mid-point of summer?  Feels later than that, I know.

But first . . .

Take heart: as of June’s end, 209 Democratic candidates had filed to unseat Congressional Republicans, up from a more typical 45 at this point in the last mid-term cycle.

And if that’s not enough to lift your spirits, here’s one of them — and a two-minute campaign ad that could have the good people of Kentucky voting in a Democrat.  Go, Amy, go!

And now . . .

Eliot Cohen, writing in The Atlantic, sees The Downsides of John Kelly’s Ascension.  “It’s not a signal that the president is preparing to moderate his White House—it’s a signal he’s going to the mattresses.”

A piece worth reading.

Finally, speaking of four-star generals, 56 Retired Generals, Admirals Warn Against Trump’s Transgender Ban.

“This proposed ban, if implemented, would cause significant disruptions, deprive the military of mission-critical talent, and compromise the integrity of transgender troops who would be forced to live a lie, as well as non-transgender peers who would be forced to choose between reporting their comrades or disobeying policy,” the retired officers said in a statement released Tuesday by the Palm Center, which researches issues of gender and sexuality in the military.

“As a result, the proposed ban would degrade readiness even more than the failed ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy. Patriotic transgender Americans who are serving — and who want to serve — must not be dismissed, deprived of medically necessary health care, or forced to compromise their integrity or hide their identity.”

The President cited “the tremendous cost” of transgender troops’ health care as a key reason for his tweeted policy shift (which he had not decided on in consultation with his generals, as he lied).  Yet the added cost to the military health care bill (about $8 million) is in the one-tenth of one percent range.  One-tenth of one percent is “tremendous?”

The Palm Center quotes two former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

General Martin Dempsey said of our transgender troops that, “The service of men and women who volunteer and who meet our standards of service is a blessing, not a burden.”

And Admiral Mike Mullen stated that, “I led our armed forces under the flawed ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ policy and saw firsthand the harm to readiness and morale when we fail to treat all service members according to the same standards. Thousands of transgender Americans are currently serving in uniform and there is no reason to single out these brave men and women and deny them the medical care that they require. The military conducted a thorough research process on this issue and concluded that inclusive policy for transgender troops promotes readiness.” Admiral Mullen urged civilian leaders ‘to respect the military’s judgment and not to breach the faith of service members who defend our freedoms.”

Have a great weekend.

But first . . .

. . . two unrelated stats:

1. Hillary Clinton won more votes than any Republican nominee in history, including Donald Trump.  (And just a tenth of one percent fewer than Barack Obama in 2012.)

2. Between the dawn of civilization and this week’s editing of our own genes, there have been just 400 human generations.  It took us barely a speck of time, really, to figure it all out.  (If we were fruit flies, reaching reproductive age in about a week, those 400 generations would have taken 8 years.)

And now  . . .

. . . nearly as eye-catching as either of those stats is this admission/admonition in Politico from Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ):

My Party Is in Denial About Donald Trump
We created him, and now we’re rationalizing him. When will it stop?

---

. . . we conservatives mocked Barack Obama’s failure to deliver on his pledge to change the tone in Washington even as we worked to assist with that failure. It was we conservatives who, upon Obama’s election, stated that our No. 1 priority was not advancing a conservative policy agenda but making Obama a one-term president . . . It was we conservatives who were largely silent when the most egregious and sustained attacks on Obama’s legitimacy were leveled by marginal figures who would later be embraced and legitimized by far too many of us. It was we conservatives who rightly and robustly asserted our constitutional prerogatives as a co-equal branch of government when a Democrat was in the White House but who, despite solemn vows to do the same in the event of a Trump presidency, have maintained an unnerving silence as instability has ensued. To carry on in the spring of 2017 as if what was happening was anything approaching normalcy required a determined suspension of critical faculties. And tremendous powers of denial.

. . .

Under our Constitution, there simply are not that many people who are in a position to do something about an executive branch in chaos. As the first branch of government (Article I), the Congress was designed expressly to assert itself at just such moments. . . . Too often, we observe the unfolding drama along with the rest of the country, passively, all but saying, “Someone should do something!” without seeming to realize that that someone is us.

. . .

[When] the period of collapse and dysfunction set in, amplified by the internet and our growing sense of alienation from each other, and we lost our way and began to rationalize away our principles in the process. But where does such capitulation take us? . . .

[T]he strange specter of an American president’s seeming affection for strongmen and authoritarians created such a cognitive dissonance among my generation of conservatives—who had come of age under existential threat from the Soviet Union—that it was almost impossible to believe. Even as our own government was documenting a con­certed attack against our democratic processes by an enemy foreign power, our own White House was rejecting the authority of its own intelligence agencies, disclaiming their findings as a Democratic ruse and a hoax. Conduct that would have had conservatives up in arms had it been exhibited by our political opponents now had us dumbstruck.

It was then that I was compelled back to Senator Goldwater’s book, to a chapter entitled “The Soviet Menace.” . . .

Our forebears knew that “keeping a Republic” meant, above all, keeping it safe from foreign transgressors; they knew that a people cannot live and work freely, and develop national institutions conducive to freedom, except in peace and with independence.

. . .

We have taken our “institutions conducive to freedom,” as Goldwater put it, for granted as we have engaged in one of the more reckless periods of politics in our history. In 2017, we seem to have lost our appreciation for just how hard won and vulnerable those institutions are.

Congress gets to set its own definition of high crimes and misdemeanors.  At what point does destroying the country’s standing in the world and lying about everything to everyone not rise to the level of a misdemeanor?

Without truly wise, competent leadership, will we make it to 500 generations?  Or even 410?

The American Century ended in the early hours of November 9, 2016.

Consider this clip from CNN’s must-watch-every-Sunday-morning Fareed Zakaria, transcribed here:

In London last week, I met a Nigerian man who succinctly expressed the reaction of much of the world to America these days. “Your country has gone crazy,” he said, with a mixture of outrage and amusement. “I’m from Africa. I know crazy, but I didn’t ever think I would see this in America.”

The world has gone through bouts of anti-Americanism before, but this one feels very different. First, there is the sheer shock at what is going on. The bizarre candidacy of Donald Trump, which has been followed by utterly chaotic presidency.

The chaos is at such a fever pitch that one stalwart Republican, Karl Rove, described the president this week as vindictive, impulsive and shortsighted and his public shaming of the attorney general as unfair, unjustified, unseemly and stupid.

Another Republican, Kenneth Starr, the one-time grand inquisitor of Bill Clinton, went further, calling Trump’s treatment of Jeff Sessions one of the most outrageous and profoundly misguided courses of presidential conduct I have witnessed in five decades in and around the nation’s capital.

But there’s a larger aspect of the fall in respect for America. According to a recent Pew Research Center study of 37 countries, people around the world increasingly believe that they can make do without America.

Trump’s presidency has made the US something worse than we feared or derided. It is becoming irrelevant. The most fascinating finding of the Pew Survey was not that Trump is deeply unpopular, 22 percent approval compared to Obama’s 64 percent at the end of his presidency. That was to be expected, but that there are now alternatives.

On the question of confidence in various leaders to do the right thing regarding world affairs, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin got slightly higher marks than Trump, but Angela Merkel got almost twice as much support as Trump.

Even in the United States, more respondents expressed confidence in the German Chancellor than Trump. This says a lot about Trump, but it says as much about Merkel’s reputation and how far Germany has come since 1945.

Trump has managed to do something that fear of Putin could not. He has unified Europe. Facing the challenges of Trump, Brexit, populism, a funny thing has happened on the continent. Support for Europe among its residents has risen and plans for deeper European integration are underway.

If the Trump administration perceives as it has promised and initiates protectionist measures against Europe, the continent’s resolve will only strengthen.

Under the combined leadership of Merkel and the new French President Emmanuel Macron, Europe will adopt a more activist foreign policy. Its economy has rebounded and is now growing as fast as that of the United States.

Countries from Canada to China have in various ways announced that since Washington cannot be relied on to shape the global agenda anymore, others will step in its place.

The most dismaying aspect of Pew’s findings is that the drop in regard for America goes well beyond Trump. Sixty-four percent of the people surveyed expressed a favorable view of America at the end of the Obama presidency. That has now fallen to 49 percent. Even when American foreign policy was unpopular, people around the world still believed in America, the place, the idea. This is less true today.

In 2008, I wrote a book about the emerging post-American world, which was – I noted at the start – not about the decline of America, but rather about the rise of the rest.

Amidst the parochialism, ineptitude and sheer disarray of the Trump presidency, the post-American world is coming to fruition much faster than I ever expected.

[See also: CNN.com/Fareed and Fareed’s Washington Post columns.]

There’s no reason, of course, why our country has to lead the world — other than that it comes with huge advantages to us (like being able to print money out of thin air that the rest of the world accepts in return for its hard work and resources) . . . and that the world needs strong, principled, democratic, progressive, compassionate, progressive, rational leadership (which in the Clinton and Obama years, I would argue, we came as close to providing as any nation ever has).

And it’s not impossible that if and when we regain our footing, we will be looked to once again.  That’s certainly the hope.

But if one chose to mark America’s 1917 entry into World War I as the beginning of “The American Century” . . . well, do the math.

When your grandkids ask “what did you do in the war [to save the habitability of our planet],” you may be able to tell them about your carbon footprint (“I used a solar pool blanket!” “I ate less meat!”) — but now you can also tell them, “I went to the movies.”

Seriously!  Go see it.

Or at least watch the trailer.