Author: A.T.

Human Intelligence Is Sharply Declining, reports this piece (feel free to supply your own joke), in part because our attention spans are getting shorter.  Arguably, we all have attention deficit disorder.

Which is why you might not actually sit still long enough to read Chris Hayes’s The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource but perhaps should.  (I read it with my ears, walking.)

I say “perhaps” because, although Hayes does a masterful and engaging job of describing the problem, the only sensible solution he comes up with at the end — albeit an important one — is to ban smart phones in schools (and perhaps require some sort of age verification as we do with alcohol).

And then there is the correlation of on-line social connection with loneliness, depression, and lack of real social c0nnection.  Much in the book to ponder — though I, for one, would not give up my smart phone for anything.  It is a miracle for which I am endlessly grateful.

Speaking of short attention spans . . .

Glenn P.:  “NATO leaked a memo sent to them by the State Department. It advised that a briefing for Trump should:

1. Be a max of three pages long
2. Should be mostly pictures
3. Should praise Trump regularly or he wouldn’t read it.

This was in preparation for a vital summit on the security of the Western world.”

Dan M.:  “One of my cousins, who briefed Trump daily during his first term, said much the same:   Trump almost never read anything, regardless of how short.  To get/keep his attention one needed to use the name ‘Trump’ as frequently as possible.  To brief him on the size of the islands China is building in the South China Sea, for example, they used a scale model of the Trump Tower.”

As long-time readers know, I’ve been suggesting OPRT for quite some time.  The company offers no-credit borrowers a high-interest alternative (28%-36%) to the 300%-600% effective rate pay-day lenders charge.

OPRT went public at $15 before I had ever heard of it (thankfully) and quickly rose to $26; then quickly mucked things up.  Even so, management recently announced a return to profitability and projected 2025 earnings in the range of $1.10-$1.30.

The company’s largest shareholder today released this letter, arguing that earnings on the order of $3.75-$4.75 would be possible if one more board seat could be flipped.  Either way — at $1.10 per share or $3.75 — the stock seems awfully cheap at $6.20.  I just bought more — though only with money (needless to say by now?) I can truly afford to lose.

And speaking of losing money:

I worry that the Trump/Musk/Putin demolition of democracy and the post-War world order may not turn out as well for the American stock market as all of us would all like.  (Warren Buffett has apparently been shifting some of his focus to places like Japan.)

The potential success of most of the speculations I suggest here from time to time is not tightly correlated to the market (e.g., if PRKR wins its lawsuits or ANIX’s cancer treatments prove effective or HYMC is seen mainly as a leveraged way to buy gold).

Even so, in a really bad market, few names are spared.

Including fine companies like Home Depot (HD), suggested here a decade ago at $91, climbing over time to a high of $435 before Trump took office, with dividends along the way.  Selling long-held stocks like that in a taxable account guarantees a “loss” of the tax due.  Instead of selling, you could write short-term calls against them if you know what you’re doing, rolling them over every month or two as they expire (or as you buy them back so as not to have your stock called away from you).

If you don’t want to hassle with that . . . let alone with every stock you own . . . but prefer to hedge against a collapse of the market as a whole, you might consider — definitely with money you can afford to lose because no one wants a market collapse! — something like puts on the Dow (DIA) or the S&P (SPY) or NASDAQ (QQQ).

As I type, one DIA December 18, 2026 DIA 430 put costs about $3,000.  It gives you the right to “put” 1 “share” of the Dow to someone at $43,000 any time between now and the end of 2026.  So with the Dow at 42,000, the right to do that has an “intrinsic” value of $1,000.  The extra $2,000 that you’re paying is the cost of “insurance,” as it were.  If the Dow just climbs from here, albeit with customary ups and downs, but never really looks back, you will have lost the full $3,000.  (Just as you “lose” your insurance premium if your house doesn’t burn down.)  Then again, if in a panic the Dow plunged to 26,000, you’d have a gain of $14,000.  Not that it would be easy to know when to cash in.  At 26,000 you might think the Dow had yet further to fall (it’s a panic, after all!) and hold on, only to see it rise . . . so now you think it really has further to fall so you hold on some more . . . and then it keeps rising — and maybe by the time it expires it’s worthless without your even having sold.  Not a terrible outcome — you collected nothing on your “insurance” because your house did not burn down.

Knowing what to do isn’t easy — and (in my view) we wouldn’t have to be thinking about any of it if we had elected a normal president in 2024.  Instead, Putin and the Proud Boys won, and we are in really serious trouble.

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BONUS

Introducing: The Musk Watch DOGE Tracker . . . as described here: New tool reveals Musk has overstated verified DOGE savings by at least 92%.

(On why he’s now anti-Trump.)

“I never took an hour off from MAGA.  It was my life, it was my being, my personhood, my identity.”

Listen . . . and share?

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Give time or money to Wisconsin!*

*I checked: early voting has begun, but it’s truly not too late.  Musk has already given more than $13 million to beat us — the race is that important!

Let the Trump tax cuts expire on schedule (but only on income above $400,000) and use that revenue to restore all the cuts DOGE has made — except those Congress agrees were wasteful, fraudulent, or abusive.

Also:

> Raise the estate-tax rates above $100 million / $1 billion / $10 billion and tighten the loopholes.  Because once you’re dead, how painful will it really be for you, the deceased, to toss a bigger chunk of your fortune back into the pot as thanks to the country that helped you make it in the first place?  I mean: You’re dead!  Stop complaining!*

> Adequately fund the IRS so the revenue owed by the wealthy and large corporations is, in fact, collected.

> Make the Social Security tweaks I’ve been suggesting for decades.  By the time they kicked in, we might actually not need them to kick in . . . although they would be relatively painless if they did.

Together, those four simple changes would buoy the bond market — i.e., lower interest rates — which would be good for almost everybody and lower the deficit.

*If you hate the U.S. government so much that you don’t want it to have a nickel of your vast fortune — swell.  Just build a new science lab bearing your name or a new opera house or endow an oceanographic institute or make tuition free at your favorite medical school.  That would lower your estate tax to zero.

Herewith the lens through which this must all be seen — and a call to action:

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We are living through moral collapse
by Ruth Ben-Ghiat

Authoritarianism is a political system built on a logic of betrayals: betrayals of others and betrayals of self. It cultivates, and rewards, a state I call moral deregulation: a rolling back of civic and ethical norms against defrauding, silencing, bullying, and physically harming others. Democratic societies inculcate such norms in schools, religious spaces, workplaces, and other social institutions and networks. Authoritarian takeovers mean such norms are discredited and dismantled.

When moral deregulation advances because violence and corruption have been institutionalized, including in the behavior of national leaders, then a society can experience moral collapse. We hear about how authoritarians “hollow out” institutions by removing anyone not loyal to the leader and the party, but they also hollow out people to the point where they will participate in acts of violence, corruption and sabotage against their compatriots.

We are living through processes of moral deregulation and moral collapse in America today under the authoritarian government of President Donald Trump and unelected co-President Elon Musk. Their policies are wrecking a robust national economy, paralyzing government, allying with dictators, creating conditions for the spread of disease, and abandoning the rule of law.

Rather than denounce the clear and present dangers to our country, many business, religious, media, and other elites continue to support Trump and Musk. Some do this by staying silent, while others follow hollowed-out GOP politicians and Christian nationalist charlatans in claiming that the smash-and-plunder operation masquerading as a government is “saving the nation.”

Trump has worked hard for a decade now to encourage moral collapse among Americans. In 2016, two months after he boasted, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” Trump raised the issue of changing collective behavior to favor violence and cruelty. “Part of the problem…is nobody wants to hurt each other anymore,” he said when security guards treated protesters at a campaign rally too politely for his tastes.

The strongman’s goal is always to make his collaborators descend to his level, and Trump realized that “giving permission” to Republicans to be their worse selves was key to his domestication of the party. He made Republican elites complicit in his criminal efforts to overturn the 2020 election and then shocked them into submission on Jan. 6 by targeting them for physical harm.

The Jan. 6 insurrection pushed the party into a full-blown state of moral collapse: Republicans now justified violence as a way of doing politics and submitted to the leader’s needs. Politicians who had called their families to say goodbye on Jan. 6, thinking they might die, now accepted a pact of silence about their traumatic experiences in order to maintain their standing in the party.

The drama of Senator Josh Hawley pumping his fist to encourage the insurrectionists and then running for his life from those same people has a devastating third act: his silence about that near-escape from harm when he re-emerged as a MAGA loyalist. In 2022, the GOP officially declared the Jan. 6 attack to be “legitimate political discourse,” meaning the party accepted the violence that was used against it.

The capitulations continued throughout the re-election campaign. At an August 2023 GOP presidential debate which Trump did not bother to attend, all but two candidates debased themselves by pledging with raised hands that they would support Trump even if he became a “convicted criminal.” “The Republicans are very high class. You’ve got to get a little bit lower class,” Trump had commented a month earlier. On that and many other occasions, the GOP obliged him.

. . . This trajectory of moral collapse explains how GOP elites such as Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance, both of whom called out Trump’s strongman ways in 2016, now collude with his destruction of democracy and alliances with autocrats.

Co-President Musk set the tone for these officials by taking moral collapse global, encouraging members of the extreme-right Alternative for Germany party to stop feeling guilty for the genocidal regime of Nazism. Vance echoed him in telling European leaders they should stop shunning that party, which includes neo-Nazi sympathizers. “There is no room for firewalls,” Vance said. Dismantling firewalls against the circulation of hate speech is a good example of moral deregulation.

Of course, the GOP has been working on a domestic version of this for years now, through state legislation that bans teaching the history of institutionalized racism so that Americans don’t have to feel “emotional distress”—i.e. the voice of conscience.

As for Rubio, he provided the face of moral collapse during the Feb. 28 Oval Office Trump and Vance ambush of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. Rubio may have been feeling discomfort, but more likely he was sulking and feeling left out: strongmen often privatize foreign policy, as Trump has done through his personal relationship with Vladimir Putin, reducing the foreign minister’s prestige and power.

In fact, after his moody performance ended, Rubio sprang into action to debase himself further, praising Trump’s open prioritizing of Putin’s aims in Ukraine as patriotic: “Thank you @POTUS for standing up for America in a way that no President has ever had the courage to do before,” was his take.

Authoritarians try to normalize extreme actions through states of emergency and exception. Yet, as a Chilean victim of state torture during the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship told me, “states of exception can be normalized in people too.” Moral collapse begins as an individual process and, when the conditions are right, generates new collective norms of behavior that can support large-scale repression.

Consorting with kleptocrats, dehumanizing immigrants, and banning books that speak of injustice so people don’t feel empathy for the vulnerable are among the ways Trump and his morally collapsed GOP seek to get ordinary Americans to forget their consciences so they will accept whatever abuses the government has planned.

Strike Back by Prioritizing Democratic Values and Moral Authority

This gives Democrats a big opportunity. Pro-democracy movements that claim the mantle of moral authority and show care and solidarity in the face of plunder and violence can have an impact. In fact, even a relatively tiny percentage of the population –often just 3.5%, according to the political scientist Erica Chenoweth’s study of successful civil resistance movements—can make a difference if they mobilize on behalf of democratic values in situations of tyranny.

Creating a big-tent opposition movement that includes progressive faith traditions and organized labor —two sectors of civil society that privilege values-guided action— would be key. Individuals can refuse to betray others, deciding not to stay silent and hide away as rights vanish and abuses are perpetrated. As some people disappear, being visible on behalf of others becomes even more important.

So does having conversations with family and community members who still support Trump, and explicitly raising with them questions of dignity and decency and the betrayal of national and self-interests by this administration. As the government paralysis deepens and affects everyday life, these conversations will likely become easier.

Each time we show solidarity with others, or support those who are protecting the rule of law, helping the targeted, or exposing the lies and the corruption, we are standing up for democratic values of justice, accountability, equality, and more. In doing so, we model the behaviors the authoritarian state wants us to abandon. Joining with others, we transform our individual righteous indignation into a potent moral force for good.

Republicans may feel empowered right now, but there will be a reckoning as Americans come to understand the scale of Republican sabotage of the country. Lately I have been returning to a 2016 Atlantic essay in which I warned that the GOP was setting itself on a path of self-destruction in supporting Trump. As I wrote, Italian conservatives who supported Benito Mussolini through all the early violence and corruption “never recovered from their acquiescence to Il Duce. Of the many lessons the GOP can take from its experience with Trump so far, this might be the most valuable.”

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Strike back!  Join Indivisible!

Get ready to peacefully demonstrate.

Be part of the 3.5% referenced above.

And then there’s this:

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Navajo Code Talkers stupidly erased from military websites by Trump’s DEI orders
EJ Montini
Arizona Republic – opinion

I thought that Donald Trump’s unhinged obsession with eliminating anything he thought to be the result of diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives could get no worse than dishonoring the heroes buried at Arlington National Cemetery by scrubbing information about some Black, Latino and women from the cemetery’s website.

I was wrong.

Axios is reporting that articles and information about World War II’s heroic Native Code Talkers have disappeared from some military websites.

According to the report, when asked about the missing pages, Pentagon Press Secretary John Ullyot replied in a statement: “As Secretary [Pete] Hegseth has said, DEI is dead at the Defense Department. … We are pleased by the rapid compliance across the Department with the directive removing DEI content from all platforms.”

Pleased?

Code talkers were vital to military success in the Pacific during WWII.

Who could possibly be pleased by an effort to erase the history of a group of native men who were vital to the success of every major Marine Corps operation in the Pacific Theater of World War II, particularly America’s victory at Iwo Jima.

. . . Every elected official in Arizona from every party should be pounding on the doors of the Defense Department to reverse the idiotic DEI overreach that is trying to erase the Code Talker legacy.

They were not an example of DEI hires.

They were an example of honor. Of bravery. Of patriotism.

Of everything the people behind this atrocity are not.

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And this:

“The secret history of the secret history of the U.S. intelligence business is not widely known in this country,” writes Lucian Truscott IV, as he reveals its outlines, “but you can be sure of one thing: it is known to Vladimir Putin and his henchmen.”

And they are loving the way Trump is destroying the capabilities and good built up over 80 years.

Worth reading in full.

CORRECTION

Earlier today:  << Floating around the ether: a photo of Aldous Huxley bellowing, as if he were alive today (he died in 1963), “I wrote 1984 as a warning, not as a f—ing instruction manual!” >> 

Never mind that it was George Orwell who wrote it.  Huxley wrote Brave New World.  (Oops.)  The point stands!

A two-minute view from Canada — Trump is evil.

Another from France (if you missed the subtitled clip I posted last week) — Trump is a traitor.  (The translation comes courtesy of Robert Reich.  If you have time to feel really good, read his remembrance of the late Wyoming Senator Alan Simpson, who died last week.)

If you don’t have time to watch Trump’s 40-Year Entanglement with the FBI and Organized Crime from the beginning, you’ll see I’ve cued it up to just the last few minutes.

It’s also fun to watch this minute, where Trump swears under oath that he’s met Felix Sater so few times that “if he were sitting in the room right now I really wouldn’t know what he looked like” . . . followed by Sater saying he met Trump “hundreds, maybe thousands of times.”

Putin is winning.

Floating around the ether: a photo of Aldous Huxley bellowing, as if he were alive today (he died in 1963), “I wrote 1984 as a warning, not as a f—ing instruction manual!”  Never mind that it was George Orwell who wrote it.  Huxley wrote Brave New World.  The point stands.

CNF — If you bought this one when I first suggested it, you’ve lost a lot of money.  Like me, you may have sold those original shares for a tax loss, waited 31 days, and then bought many more shares much cheaper.  (Or reversed the order, first buying the cheap shares, then waiting 31 days to sell the expensive ones.)

Friday, I saw it trading at 65 cents — less than 3X earnings.  I tried to buy a lot of shares, but some Fidelity algorithm that had apparently been designed to protect me from myself (did I really know what I was doing?) limited my order to 10,000 shares.  By the time I reached a human who reached a human who — eyebrow raised, as I imagine it — lifted the restriction, the stock was 80 cents, so they had managed to protect me from making many thousands of dollars.  Yesterday it changed hands at 90 cents in after-hours trading.  But that’s still just 3.5X earnings.

CNF is in China . . . so who knows?  And if memory serves, there is a 2-cent-a-share annual fee paid to the American custodian of these “American Depositary Receipts.”  But my CNF guru — who had considered it a great buy at $4 years ago — says that, as far as he knows, “There is really nothing new or bad other than the Chinese market. Business is fine.”  He owns a ton of it, and I own a small ton — though only with money I can truly afford to lose.

PRKR doesn’t need the Supreme Court to accept its petition for review . . . or grant the petition if it does.  Its pending cases don’t depend on that.  But if, like me, you own shares, and/or care about American innovation . . . and thus care about American inventors . . . and thus care about having a patent system that actually protects American inventors . . . then this podcast could be of interest.   

Of “Antisemitism” and Antisemitism, Timothy Snyder writes:

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Fascism places emotion over reason. Words are to become just tools to achieve the vision of the Leader. In our post-truth world, this takes the very special form of the inversion of meaning: fascists call other people “fascists” and antisemites call other people “antisemites.” This is taking place right now, in the United States, before our eyes, at the highest levels of our government.

An example from abroad might help us to see what is happening. The notion that all of Russia’s enemies are the “fascists” has become more entrenched as the Russian state has become fascist.  Russian authorities ludicrously justified their full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a struggle against antisemitism. They claimed, absurdly, that it would amount to “denazification” if they overthrew the democratically-elected president of Ukraine, who is of Jewish origin. This is fascism in the name of “fighting fascism.” Antisemitism in the name of “fighting antisemitism.”

. . . The Trump team recently engaged in an action of highly public Jew-baiting inside the Oval Office. Elon Musk performs the Hitler salute and claims that people whom he does not like are “Soros puppets”; in other words, Musk endorses the theory of a worldwide Jewish conspiracy. Musk has enabled antisemitism by the way he has chosen to run Twitter. He trivializes the Holocaust by making jokes about Himmler and Goebbels or by blaming public sector workers for the Holocaust. JD Vance visited Europe in February to endorse the German far right. The secretary of defense is a Christian reconstructionist who associates with a very well-known promoter of antisemitic ideas. Under the new leadership of the FBI, the American far right, the center of American violent terrorism, will receive much less attention. Antisemitic incidents increased during Trump’s previous term, during which Trump characterized participants at a neo-Nazi gathering (“Jews will not replace us,” Charlottesville) as “very fine people.” Trump says that Jews who do not vote for him are not loyal Americans. He refers to people and institutions with whom he disagrees as “globalist,” which is a code for “Jewish” that every antisemite understands. His supporters antisemitically attack Jewish judges who rule in ways that Trump does not like, including in the case of Mahmoud Khalil.

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Worth reading in full.

Chuck Schumer, meanwhile, has written Antisemitism in America: A Warning, out tomorrow.  He discusses it in this New York Times interview.  The last 8 or 9 minutes explain his choice not to give Trump/Musk the legally unchallengeable power they hoped for by shutting down the government.

Fareed Zakaria — a Sunday morning must — argues that Trump’s war on colleges undermines a crucial competitive edge.

We’re handing technological leadership to China.

Why are we doing this to ourselves?

Timothy Snyder’s piece explains why Columbia was the first to be hit.

To our Irish friends, including the Obamas . . . Happy St. Patrick’s Day!

Murph L. “Thought he had done the wrong thing. But you convinced me!”

→ It was really Chuck who convinced you; I just relayed his message.  Please help amplify it!

Harold Z.:  “I disagree. The public-polled perception of the Democrats is one of embarrassing weakness.  Holding back their votes would have ultimately caused the GOP to include various guard rails etc. and showed the American people Dems are fighting for them.  This is a very sad, historical moment.”

→ Maybe (and thanks for your feedback) but it’s not clear to me the Trump team would have been in any hurry to relinquish the extra power a shutdown would have given them.  Or to take the spotlight off our side for refusing to re-open the government.

Michael K.:  “This one stumped me.  Why did he do it?  I wish I had a nickel for every person who has said ‘Chuck Schumer is dead to me.’  The only good thing I can say about it is that he’s bringing unity to the Democratic Party…in opposition to him. If it’s the right thing to do, why didn’t it get 40+ Dem Senators supporting it? They make the House Dems, who almost all stood strong, look like idiots.”

→ If Schumer had sought to make it unanimous, it would’ve sent the message that we think it’s a good bill.  Instead, the message he sent with this bare-minimum approval, was: “We hate the bill and we hate what you’re doing. But shutting down the government would give you yet more power and hurt the American people even worse.  We’re doing this — but only kicking and screaming.”

And as I argued yesterday, the House sent the right message also: “It’s a horrible bill.”  They could vote for a shutdown without shutting anything down — so did.  Hats off to Hakeem Jeffries for his leadership.

Our Senators were the ones who had to choose the less awful of two terrible options, and did, even though they knew it would expose them to the real anger they are now receiving.  To me, that is a profile in courage.  Hats off to Chuck Schumer.

I think that by speaking out on lots of TV and writing that op-ed, Senator Schumer’s hope was that people like you and me, Michael, will amplify his message.  That’s kind of our job today.

Freda S.: “Yes, I reluctantly agree even though I initially felt angry and betrayed by Schumer.  Check out Tim Walz in his first town hall in a red district, in Iowa — a great Dem strategy, spreading from Rep. Mark Pocan’s town hall in Wisconsin.”

→ I think “reluctantly” is exactly the right way to agree . . . and echoes Schumer’s own reluctance.  He didn’t vote for the bill with enthusiasm — but rather, as I say, kicking and screaming.

And thanks for those links.  The Walz line I most want to highlight:

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The road to authoritarianism is littered with people telling you you’re overreacting. You’re not, you’re not. You’re not.

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Mike McG.: “Imagine the Dems had voted down the CR and the government shut down, and then a week or two later the DOGE boys accidentally collapsed the Social Security payment system. Trump would have blamed it on the shutdown, thus on the Dems. We need to keep the focus on the disastrous actions of Trump and Musk.”

Carole S.: “Civics class was a long time ago, but if Trump doesn’t sign the bill, is that a pocket veto? Does he then create the shutdown he and Musk, et al, may actually be hoping for?”

→ Yikes!  Hadn’t thought of that!  But he’ll surely sign it [UPDATE: he just did] because at this stage, at least, he wants to pretend he doesn’t aim to rule America as Putin rules Russia, Kim rules North Korea, or Xi rules China.

Geoff M.: “I found Schumer’s argument surprisingly compelling. I say ‘surprisingly’ because my inclination was very much the opposite. In fact, on Thursday, I called the DC offices for each of my two senators and asked them in no uncertain terms to respect their oath of office and defend the Constitution by voting against the CR.  Then I read Schumer’s piece. Sad to say, I found nobody actually engaging with Schumer’s argument from a critical perspective. All the arguments I saw were just that Schumer was a coward or <fill in the blank with your preferred imprecation and name-calling>.”

Kathy McL.: “Sen. Schumer made the right decision.  Shutting down the government would give extraordinary legal power to Trump (and Musk).  Yes, both will continue to push illegal measures to take power, but the Dems can continue to fight those in court.”

Glenn P.: “It was A Hobson’s choice.  Regrettably, Schumer made the only decision he really could.”

The Continuing Resolution to keep the government open was horrible.

Leader Jeffries was right to rally virtually unanimous opposition from his members.  Doing so made a much-needed statement — without shutting anything down.

But Chuck Schumer — even knowing how horrible Trump and Musk are, how horrible the bill was, and the tremendous heat he’d take — made the right call.

Here was his reasoning:

Trump and Musk Would Love a Shutdown. We Must Not Give Them One.

It strikes me as sound.

Had we killed the bill:

> WE would have been blamed for shutting down the government.

> We would have taken attention away from the awful things Trump/Musk/Putin are doing every day — the story, instead, would have been how to get Democrats to reopen the National Parks, etc.

> And most importantly — read Senator Schumer’s op-ed — we would have been giving Trump significantly more power than he already has.

Why would we want to do that?

And think about it:  How would this end?  Why would Trump want to give up that power?  Why would he cave?  Because he cares about people?  Or medical research?  Or starving babies?  Clearly not.

Eventually, would we not have had to agree to re-opening a by-then far more irreparably crippled government?

I would love your thoughts.

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Tom Friedman explains what’s happening.

You have to read it and decide what to do.

I’ve bought more puts.

The only solution I can see is for judges to continue to stay strong and for Republican Senators and Congresspersons to impeach the President and Vice President.

But that is not going to happen because, increasingly, we are becoming a nation ruled by fear rather than law.  Legislators afraid of angering Trump and his base (not least those MAGAs, now pardoned, who tried to kill Vice President Pence).  Business people afraid.  Media executives afraid.  Government bureaucrats afraid.  University presidents afraid.  Election officials afraid.

This is how it works in autocracies.

The people who overcome their fear often wind up in prison or, like Navalny and dozens if not hundreds of Russian journalists, dead.

Barring some extraordinary bravery on the part of Republicans, Putin has won.  The American-led democratic world order he has sought to destroy is unraveling.  Tiny Russia!  With an economy smaller than Texas!  But isn’t that how judo works?  I’ve long noted that Putin is a legitimate judo black belt, whereas Trump is a fake wrestling hall of famer.  See the difference?

Cry, the Beloved Country, about South Africa, was on my parents’ bookshelf when I was growing up.  The title has somehow always gripped me; never more than now.

Maybe judges will continue to stand firm — and not be overruled by Trump’s Supreme Court.  Maybe Republicans will risk their jobs — and their personal safety — to stop this horrible unravelling.  Maybe a tanking stock market, ever-growing civil outrage, and a military that remembers its oath is to the Constitution, not Trump, will save us.  God, I hope so!

Needless to say, nothing would make me happier than to see my puts expire worthless.

Amidst all this gloom — for which I apologize, but I think alarm is warranted — there are so many people to admire and applaud — beginning with Liz Cheney a while back.

Another is Sarah McBride, who, when introduced as “Mister McBride” Tuesday by Keith Self, the Texas Republican chair of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee, calmly and without missing a beat responded, “thank you, Madam Chair.”  And her Democratic colleague, Bill Keating of Massachusetts, who rose immediately to her defense.  If you haven’t already seen it — watch!  It’s wonderful.  (Much more to say on the trans issue, but for a future post.)

A third, is profiled today in Vanity Fair:  How Elissa Slotkin, a Moderate Michigan Democrat, Is Fighting Trump Tooth and Nail.  The contrast between her patriotism and competence and, say, Tulsi Gabbard’s, is stark.  The section in the profile where newly elected Senator Slotkin (former CIA agent and so much more) questions her former House colleague Tulsi Gabbard (now, horrifyingly, Director of National Security), is worth buying a lifetime subscription to Vanity Fair — but it’s free to read.

A fourth is you, if you’re doing things — in the gentlest, most respectful way — to inspire others to “join the resistance” or, if they voted for Trump, to see they’ve been betrayed.

We will prevail!  I don’t quite see how — but we have to, and we will.

Watch Congressman John Larson crying “shame!” yesterday!

Join Indivisible!

Read Tom Friedman.

But first . . . a two-minute view from Canada.

And now . . .

I bought some puts last week (not nearly enough!) because Trump seems to be wrecking the economy . . . giving us stagflation that could prove very hard to work our way out from . . . and to have lost the confidence of the Free World and the good will of the Third World.  This is great for Putin — his wildest dream come true — but not for a stock market that, in the main, was selling at a very rich multiple of earnings on Inauguration Day.

So what to do with your money?

I fear it’s not too late to buy more puts on the various market indices; but — don’t.  Or at least think long and hard before you do.  First, you could easily lose 100% of the bet even if you’re right that the market has a lot further to fall — because the market might rebound or fall or stay flat before your puts expired worthless, even if it plunged the following day.  Second, even if you do “win,” your gain will be fully taxable.  (I bought most of mine inside a tax-deferred retirement account, where taxes are not an issue; the rest in a taxable account as a hedge, rather than sell highly appreciated stocks on which there’d also have been a high tax bill.)

And don’t be tempted by stocks just because they’ve dropped a lot.  I’m often a sucker for those — but by no means for all of them.

Most obviously a bad idea . . . TSLA. Though down to $224 from its $488 high 90 days ago, consider that as recently as June, it was $170.  Why is it worth more than that now that perhaps 90% of those who worry about climate change — Tesla’s best market — kind of hate him?  Why is the company worth more than 100 times its trailing 12-month earnings when next year’s earning could be much worse?  To drop to 20 times its trailing 12-month earnings, it would have to drop a further 80%.  (Ford, by way of context, pays a 7.5% dividend and sells around 7 times its trailing 12-month earnings.  I don’t know enough about Ford’s prospects to know whether to buy it, but it seems less wildly overpriced than TSLA.)

A few I do like here, all of which I’ve written about here more than once (use the search box to see):

CHRB

UNIT

OPRT

SQNS

HYMC

ANIX

PRKR

CHRB is limited to the $25 upside it promises to pay next year, plus the very nice dividend you get in the meantime.

My UNIT guru thinks it will be $12 after their merger and that the merged company will then be bought out at an even higher price by one of the giants, like Verizon or AT&T.

The next three. I think. have pretty solid underpinnings (as speculations go) and could easily triple in the next year or two.  (Or not!)

The last two are swing-for-the-fences speculations.

For better or worse, I have lots of all of them.