Author: A.T.

Simon Schama Saw It Coming -- Hillbilly Elegy and Your Daughter Pastiche

April 5, 2017May 3, 2017

But before we get into all that — what shall we name the baby?

Not mine (I’ve had a lifelong fear even of picking them up, let alone changing their diapers; I am enormously grateful to those who get them to age 2, when they become — sort of — people; and age 4, when they become — many of them — adorable; and age 10, when — the precocious ones — do magic tricks; and age 18, when their failure to register and vote makes me crazy, but it’s more our fault than theirs, because, “if the pupil hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught.”)

Your baby. Or your daughter’s, or your co-worker’s . . . someone you know must be pregnant.

If it’s a girl, I think we go with: Tesla. If it’s a boy: Einstein. (As in, “Get over here, Einstein.” “What do you think, Einstein?”) In the latter case there are potential pitfalls, to be sure; but I’m of the view that a little adversity in childhood can lead to a more interesting, successful adulthood.

Click here for ten other suggestions, all from the world of inventors.

Or you could go with Pistachio.

“Pistachio Klein.” “Pistachio Smith.” “Pistachio O’Malley.” Think about it.

(His sister? Pastiche. “Hey, y’all. We’re Peter and Patsy Podlodowski. Meet our kids, Pastiche and Pistachio.”)

No?

Well, your call. I’m just trying to be helpful.

Meanwhile, I just finished reading Hillbilly Elegy, by J.D. Vance — or, more accurately, listening to J.D. Vance read it to me.

You really have to start doing that. For autobiographies read by the subject, you are spending five or ten hours privately — quality, intimate time — just you and Trevor Noah! You and Steve Martin! You and Amy Schumer! You and Barack Obama! You and Tina Fey!

From their vocal cords direct to your brain pan. Who gets to do stuff like that?! Reading their books with your eyeballs is okay — though hard to do while driving or hiking, waiting in line or resting. But kinda like reading a transcript of the Gettysburg Address when you had a chance to hear Lincoln recite it himself. Yet more being lost if Lincoln, like Tina Fey, had done impressions.

You can set Audible to read at 1.25X speed or 1.5X speed, which doesn’t sound squeaky and for many books is a more enjoyable pace. Read an eight-hour book in six.

And if you have Alexa, and you come in from your hike and don’t want your earphones in while you soak in the tub, you can say, “Alexa, read my book.” And she will say, “Resuming Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance” and pick up exactly where you left off.

What a world.

And Hillbilly Elegy gets us back to the point. It’s an autobiography about a special tribe of Americans — hillbillies — of whom the author is one. A tribe for whom life has been exceptionally hard. And while it’s only a very little about politics (you will be relieved to know), and a tremendously engaging read (don’t worry about being depressed; you’ll really enjoy it), it does relate to today’s brief assignment — the excerpt of a column by Professor Simon Schama in the Financial Times that I offer below.

Of particular note: it was written days before the election.

. . . The polls are tightening and the result might be closer than the received wisdom supposes. This is the first Presidential election since the Supreme Court deprived the electorate of a key provision of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the one aimed at preventing states and counties from manipulating registration.

Now who would do a thing like that? Greensboro County, North Carolina, for a start, which has reduced the number of stations available for early voting from 16 to one, and thus has seen a steep drop in pre-election day polling. At the University of Wisconsin–Green Bay, a city clerk made sure only one early voting location was available, a 15-minute drive from the campus because, it was revealed, he assumed most of the student body leaned Democratic.

. . . [C]ontrary to many narratives, the root cause of Trumpian rage has not been economic. The vision, much rehearsed in the press and reiterated ad nauseum by Mr. Trump, of legions of the unemployed rising from the dereliction of the Rust Belt, Appalachia and the south makes a dramatic story but is actually a myth.

Exit polls of nearly 100,000 Trump voters in the primaries produced a median household income of $72,000, about $20,000 higher than the national median. The most deep-dyed red Republican states are often those like the Dakotas or Nebraska with 3 per cent unemployment. Rock-ribbed Trumpian Appalachian states like Kentucky and Tennessee are among the regions which, far from seeing manufacturing disappear, are seeing it return in the “reshoring” of jobs and investment from China. GE’s Appliance Park is in Louisville, Kentucky. Under pressure from under supply of skilled labour, real wages are going up not down.

So where does the flood of rage come from….? The poisoned fountainhead is, of course, the one subject barely touched on in the campaign and that is race. Eight years ago, elated by the Obama election, many of us naively assumed that epochal event would somehow take the edge of racial polarization.

But the Obama presidency–high-minded, characterized by unflappable composure, exemplary in its domestic life–only provoked still madder furies of resentment. It was bad enough that an African-American had reversed what to alienated whites was the natural order of things; it was even worse that he should lecture them from his pulpit of intellectual superiority. When Birther Trump came along, giving disgraceful credence to racist fantasy, impervious to even the minimal obligations of evidence, conspiracy mutterings went mainstream. What Trump supporters celebrate as the repudiation of ‘political correctness’ is really the permission that their leader has given them to vocalize the happy rush of hatred.

. . .

Unexpectedly, to those living in the echo chamber of broadsheet news and policy seminars, conservative and liberal alike, something altogether outside the norms of their arguments has risen from history’s tomb: the cult of the pure national tribe is back with a vengeance. It stalks the globe, from eastern Europe to the crypto-fascist ‘alt-right.’ The world now divides into those who wish to live only with people who look, sound and pray like them, and those who live, in fact celebrate, heterogeneity, the marketplace of the modern city.

(Thanks, James Altschul!)

Mayer, Mercer, Merrick, McConnell

April 4, 2017April 4, 2017

Ms. Mayer wrote the book on Dark Money (now out in paperback with a new preface), and here, in the New Yorker, gives us Robert Mercer — The Reclusive Hedge Fund Tycoon Behind The Trump Presidency.

Enough to make non-billionaires take to the streets, though the UN warns that Americans’ right to protest is in grave danger. (I’d say that headline is a little strong, but still.)

Republicans effectively “filibustered” Merrick Garland for 10 months — they wouldn’t even let his nomination get that far (the ultimate filibuster) — arguing that we would have to see what the people wanted in the next election. By a margin of millions, the people wanted Merrick Garland.

The Electoral College could theoretically elect a president who lost the popular vote by 20 million votes, but — although that would legitimately install an unpopular president — it would not represent the will of the people, any more than Trump’s loss by 3 million did.

Not to mention the loss would have been by more if we had not been attacked by Russia . . . and that most Trump voters were more focused on jobs than on rejecting Merrick Garland.

Mitch McConnell was wrong to flout the Constitution, changing the rules to deny Garland a hearing. He was wrong to change his own standard and take Trump’s loss by 3 million votes as proof the people wanted a Republican-appointed Justice. And he will be wrong if he changes the rules the Senate agreed upon, holding Supreme Court nominees — though not lower court judges — to the 60-vote standard.

Three wrongs, let alone all by the same guy, don’t make a right.

I checked in with the friend who suggested Home Depot a couple of years ago at $89. With the stock at $147 or so, he’s holding on, hoping for double from here over the next three or four years.

The Russians Are Here! The Russians Are Here! But That’s Not What Scares Elon Musk

April 3, 2017

Friday, I offered my high school pal Howard Blum writing in Vanity Fair on the possibility the Kremlin really does have its hooks into our president.

Earlier, I linked to Russia’s Art Of War in Foreign Affairs.

(According to FBI former special agent Clinton Watts — on yesterday’s Meet the Press — Donald Trump, wittingly or unwittingly, has helped the Russians amplify their attacks on America . . . and those attacks are succeeding, here and around the world.)

Today, I offer high school pal Richard Factor’s thoughts on solar energy (he drives an electric car that he may soon be powered from his roof) . . . and whether you should take the plunge.

Could Tesla become the first “terrabuck” company — worth $1 trillion? Elon Musk hopes soon to become the leading U.S. luxury car manufacturer; but that’s nothing. Imagine the millions of solar roofs he might sell, coupled to his battery packs. With continued improvements, how many homes a decade from now — let alone two — will have disconnected from the electric grid altogether (just as millions of cell phone customers have abandoned land lines)? How many cars and trucks and homes and businesses will draw their energy not from ExxonMobil and PG&E, but from the sun?

(You probably know this quote: “I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.” — Thomas Edison)

But before you grow too sanguine (as if that were possible, post November 8), here is Maureen Dowd in Vanity Fair on what scares Elon Musk. As technology races ahead to free us from fossil fuels and high voltage power lines and perhaps even to colonize Mars, so does it also race ahead to make machines smarter than their creators.

Uh, oh. One more way our clever little species can do itself in.

Agree? Disagree? Discuss -- And Vanity Fair On Christopher Steele And Donald Trump

March 31, 2017May 3, 2017

Don’t miss the two Vanity Fair articles below, but first:

1. Either you knew at the time you were the target of Russian tweets and social media posts designed to lower your opinion of Hillary Clinton — or they worked.

Agree? Disagree? Discuss.

2. The thrice-stayed 90-day travel ban is now moot. It was designed to keep the bad hombres from flooding in while we did an emergency assessment of the current 18-to-24-month vetting system to see whether it was sufficiently extreme.

(It had to be sprung on the world without notice, lest thousands of terrorists hop the next Air Syria flight, stream through JFK without visas, and wreak havoc. As in fact they did. The Bowling Green massacre? The terror in Sweden? I blame the so-called “judges” for those.)

Given the urgency, Trump surely waited not a day to begin his 90-day review. So it must be complete by now, and the element of surprise is gone, so the legal wrangling should cease.

Agree? Disagree? Discuss.

3. The best of several reasons to filibuster Neil Gorsuch: simple fairness. Mitch McConnell set the rules when he — controversially — overruled the Constitution and wouldn’t allow Merrick Garland a vote. We had to wait, he said, to see which party the PEOPLE favored in 2016. (Not the Electoral College, the people.) So now we know; and, as argued here, Gorsuch could be next, but only after Merrick Garland. Those were Mitch’s rules. No fair changing them just because he didn’t like the outcome.

Agree? Disagree? Discuss.

And now . . .

By my high school chum Howard Blum in Vanity Fair: HOW EX-SPY CHRISTOPHER STEELE COMPILED HIS EXPLOSIVE TRUMP-RUSSIA DOSSIER.*

And by T.A. Frank who doubtless went to high school somewhere also: THE TERRIFYING TRUTH BEHIND THE TRUMP-RUSSIA MESS (“Attempts to eject Trump prematurely could unleash demons far worse than any that we’re seeing now”) — a caution to liberals like me:

While I’m going to use most of my words today to try to talk down Donald Trump’s enemies, we can’t overlook that we have a president who acts like a nut job: euphoric at midnight, paranoid a few hours later about phantom prowlers on the roof. Let’s leave aside the debate over how much of a point Trump may have had when he accused Barack Obama of being a “Bad (or sick) guy” who had overseen efforts to “tapp [sic] my phones during the very sacred election process.” (As they say on Twitter, huge if true.) Even if the accusation were perfectly accurate—which no one, including Trump, seems to believe—the manner in which he chose to reveal it was less that of a president than that of a dementia patient screaming that his clothes have been stolen by the nursing staff. There’s no way that a series of misspelled four A.M. tweets, sandwiched next to a lament about The Apprentice, is the work of someone playing 28-dimensional chess. It’s the work of someone who found a chess set and had to go to the hospital after swallowing two rooks and a knight. . . .

Yet he thinks we shouldn’t be too quick to assume the worst — or attempt removal. Read the rest.

Agree? Disagree? Discuss.

Have a great weekend.

*The criticism that Steele misspelled Alfa Bank (“Alpha Bank”) seems thin. Transliterated from the Russian, which is how Steele may have been reading most of his documents, it’s just as easily transliterated either way, and so — even though the bank is, assuredly, Alfa Bank — an easy mistake to make.

Warp Speed, WheelTug, and Oysters [corrected]

March 30, 2017

Sorry, Cap’n Kirk: not gonna happen. We’ll get to Mars; but beyond our solar system? The BBC explains why we’ll never reach, let alone exceed, the speed of light.

But we’ve gotten pretty good at 600 miles an hour, if not 186,282 miles per second.

Glenn: “The 737 is the #1 selling passenger plane in the world. Did you ever wonder how Boeing produces over forty 737 airplanes a month? The train arrives with the main body in the morning. This 3½ minute video is fascinating. Enjoy!”

☞ And one day, they’ll all be equipped with WheelTug and we’ll save 20 minutes on every flight not having to wait for a tug to back up, boarding and deplaning from both front AND rear doors. (Click here if you might be in Singapore May 23-24 for IATA’s second e-taxi conference. I wrote about the first one, here.)

“Keep away from oysters / whatever you do and / just for the hell of it / you can be a celibate, too.” So ran the line from a song in HPT 121, Harvard’s 1969 Hasty Pudding Theatrical, “Bottoms Up,” wherefrom I came to learn that oysters are thought to be an aphrodisiac. Thanks to Upworthy for this encouraging tale. While some of tomorrow’s unemployed truck drivers may be installing solar roofs, others may be farming oysters. Which, it turns out, is good for wild oysters, as well. Check it out. How can you not be excited by all this?

Artie: “Needless to say, I was intrigued by the article you linked to Tuesday (about the Russian mob), but I’m very reluctant to share information from sources that I don’t know to be reliable. Your introduction, “If this report is to be believed,” is not exactly a ringing endorsement, so I have to ask, Are you familiar with them? and Do you have reason to believe them?”

☞ Yes and yes. I shouldn’t have struck such a skeptical tone. Jonathan Z. Larsen is indeed a respected journalist who goes back a long way, having headed TIME’s Saigon bureau, edited New Times Magazine, and more. I’ve met Russ Baker and contributed a dollar or two to his work. That doesn’t make them infallible. But they are serious investigative journalists whose alarming report should be taken seriously.

Warp Speed, WheelTug, and Oysters

March 30, 2017March 30, 2017

Sorry, Cap’n Kirk: not gonna happen. We’ll get to Mars; but beyond our solar system? The BBC explains why we’ll never reach, let alone exceed, the speed of light.

But we’ve gotten pretty good at 600 miles an hour, if not 186,282 miles per second.

Even If You DIDN’T Inherit The Happy Gene

March 29, 2017March 28, 2017

No surprise: happy people live longer.

But according to this article, which you must read (because the happier you are, the longer you will live and the longer I will get to enjoy your readership, which will make me happier, and thus healthier, and — let’s be frank — it’s all about me) . . . there are eight steps you can take to, in effect, develop the happy gene.

And they cost not a cent.

And they will tend to make those around you happier as well.

Thank you, indispensable New York Times.

(There’s a thought: every time we say Trump, we should say, “the failing Donald Trump,” and every time we say the New York Times, let’s make it “the indispensable New York Times.”)

Combine this with a few hours of BrainHQ each year, and you’ll not only stay happy and healthy — you’ll be compos mentis.

At 80, you might even be like this guy.

Russian Crime: Worse Than You Thought

March 28, 2017March 28, 2017

If this report is to be believed– “WHY FBI CAN’T TELL ALL ON TRUMP, RUSSIA” — we really do need an independent investigation. Read the tiniest sliver to see if you want more. The authors, Jonathan Z. Larsen (who once headed TIME’s Saigon bureau) and Russ Baker (to whose work I once contributed a dollar or two) are serious investigative journalists.

. . . The Russian mob has a breathtaking and underappreciated reach. It is so powerful that FBI Agent Peter Kowenhoven told CNN in 2009 that Semion Mogilevich, its “boss of bosses,” is a strategic threat, and a man who “can, with a telephone call or order, affect the global economy.”

US authorities came to see Mogilevich, who is described as close with Putin, as not only a danger to the financial system but a potential threat to world peace. He had access to stockpiles of military weapons and even fissionable material, snapped up as the Soviet Union fell apart.

. . . The Russian mob should also not be confused with a mere crime syndicate. It is an organization comprised of state actors, oligarchs, and specific groups of individuals working collectively with the authority of the Russian government — a “mafia state.” At times, it is difficult to tell where the mob ends and the government begins.

. . . Right from the earliest days of Trump Tower, in 1983, some of the choicest condominiums, including those in the 10 floors immediately below the future president’s own triplex apartment, went to a rogues gallery of criminals and their associates. . . .

. . . by the early 1990s, both the arrival of Russian organized crime in the US and the strange attraction of Trump properties for Russian mobsters were on the Bureau’s radar. . . .

When you get to the line, “Today, Trump claims to have trouble remembering Sater,” you may be puzzled.

Sater could simply walk up a flight of stairs to Trump’s office and stop in for an impromptu chat. Indeed, Sater and the Trump clan grew so close that in February 2006, at the personal request of Donald Trump, the mobster joined his children Ivanka, Donald Jr., and his son’s wife Vanessa in Moscow to show them around, according to his deposition testimony.

. . . a few years later, he could still be found in Trump Tower. But now he was apparently working directly for Trump himself, with an office, business cards, phone number and email address all provided by the Trump Organization. The cards identified him as a “Senior Advisor to Donald Trump.”

Today, Trump claims to have trouble remembering Sater.

And so it goes. It’s not the Mexicans we should be worried about, methinks — it’s the Russians.*

*Friday, I quoted Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here, the 1935 novel about a man improbably elected President in 1936. “The [candidate] was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic. . . . [He would] jab his crowds with figures and facts — figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.” One of his tools of governance was fear of the Mexican people, who, by 1939, were routinely crossing the border and reportedly slaughtering Americans left and right . . . though verification of those slaughters was hard to come by . . . and whose plans, it had been discovered, were “to fly over and bomb Laredo, San Antonio, Bisbee, and probably Tacoma, and Bangor, Maine.” Faced with Mexico’s “appalling army of 67,000 men, with thirty-nine military aëroplanes . . . [w]omen in Cedar Rapids hid under the bed; elderly gentlemen in Cattaraugus County, New York, concealed their money in elm-tree boles; and the wife of a chicken-raiser seven miles N.E. of Estelline, South Dakota, a woman widely known as a good cook and a trained observer, distinctly saw a file of ninety-two Mexican soldiers pass her cabin, starting at 3:17am on July 27, 1939.”

“I Made A Huge Mistake”

March 26, 2017March 25, 2017

Bill Maher’s New Rule Friday night: “America needs more Republicans like this guy.” Six minutes not to be missed.

It seems to me two things are likely to happen on parallel tracks:

More and more Trump voters will become disenchanted (see above).

Trump associates and possibly Trump himself, will face charges of treason for cooperating with Russia in its cyber attack on our country (see below).

Sean Spicer downplays Paul Manafort’s Trump connection, but he was Trump’s campaign manager. And you wonder: of all the people in the world to run your campaign, why choose a guy who’d been paid $10 million a year to influence U.S. politics and news coverage to favor Putin? And why name as your Commerce Secretary the co-chair of a bank best known for laundering Russian oligarch money, very possibly including Putin’s own? Putin, who murders political opponents and journalists?

(“What,” says Trump, in Putin’s defense: “you think our country’s so innocent?”)

Watch the shootings, poisonings, and a guy fly out his fourth-floor window the day before he was set to testify.

There are other Russia ties as well, as you know (Trump’s pick for Secretary of State, around whose neck Putin draped the Order of Friendship award) . . . like National Security Advisor Michael Flynn.

USA Today has prepared this devastating timeline.

I don’t see how this goes on for four years. I think at some point, those two parallel tracks converge.

A 1935 Novel About You Know Who

March 24, 2017March 23, 2017

Ron: “Not to distract from Trump coverage (and have you mentioned the April 15 Tax March requesting release of Trump’s tax returns or the April 22 Earth Day March for Science?) . . .

. . . but here’s a financial comment/question: It’s been a few years since your guru commented on NKTR, which jumped this week to about double from where you suggested it in 2013. Its non-addictive opioid alternative passed phase 3 trials well. Now what?”

☞ Guru suggests hanging on. “They will likely sign a big partnership. The product is a version of oxycodone that has been altered so it can’t get into the brain quickly. You can take a huge dose iv or snort it, but it won’t get into the brain any faster than if you take the recommended dose. In the human abuse liability test, this drug registered close to the level of a placebo and dramatically below oxycodone. Thus, it could become a new gold standard for lower back pain. $10 billion is spent each year in the US on these drugs. The sales potential is quite large.”

Sinclair Lewis wrote It Can’t Happen Here in 1935, a dozen years before Trump was even born — but it’s about him and the millions who, yearning to believe, voted for him.

“The [candidate] was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his ‘ideas’ almost idiotic. . . . [He would] jab his crowds with figures and facts — figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.”

He won, and it did not go well.

Four score and two years later, we have a president who has us winning so much we’ve already begun to tire of winning; who’s protecting us from the kind of terror Swedes faced last month; who’s giving us all better health care at lower cost even as he transfers hundreds of billions back to the uber-rich Obama forced to help pay for it; whose victory by the widest margin of anyone since Ronald Reagan was witnessed in person on the Mall by the largest crowd in history.

Tom Friedman here calls upon a few good men — Secretary of Defense James Mattis, National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly, C.I.A. Director Mike Pompeo, and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson — to stand up to him.

Have a great weekend.