Author: A.T.

But first, who’s gotten what so far:

• Putin’s gotten a President and Secretary of State he loves, plus a destabilized America, quickly losing its place as the world’s moral beacon.

• Trump may have gotten 19.5% of Russian oil giant Rosneft.  (We’ll probably know right about the time he releases his tax returns, as he promised he “absolutely” would if nominated. As he reminded us recently, he is a man of his word.)

• China’s been handed the Pacific trade region.  (See: Make China Great Again.)

• ISIS has been handed an enormous recruiting boost.  They just might be able to ignite a war of civilizations after all.

• Goldman Sachs got the Treasury Department and has seen its stock rise 50 points since the election, enriching its owners by $20 billion.

• Rick Perry got the Department he couldn’t remember he wanted to eliminate.

There’s more, but it’s only been two weeks.

And now the good news.

BrainHQ is the exercise program I’ve been touting for years (and of which I own a small piece).

Remember these four minutes on the Today Show?  How a 10-year study of 2,800 subjects found a 48% decrease in dementia from just having done 14 hours of training with Brain HQ?

Imagine if you — or your grandmother — “worked out” with it regularly.

Turns out, that’s what Tom Brady does.

As Tom Brady nears 40, brain training hones his edge
By Mark Craig Star Tribune FEBRUARY 2, 2017

HOUSTON – Talk about no fair.

Tom Brady plays for America’s model franchise and is married to Brazil’s model, well, model. He made $14 million this season. She made more than twice that.

He’s won four Super Bowls and is three days from playing in his seventh. He’s got 17 years of NFL quarterbacking experience, an ageless right arm and dimples beyond his 39th birthday, for gosh sakes.

So what more great fortune could this Patriots quarterback and all-time NFL icon take with him into his 40s?

Nothing, right?

Wrong.

According to Brady, his brain is faster than it’s ever been. And he believes it’s helping his long-term cognitive health while making him a better quarterback.

Not exactly the news the NFL’s 31 other teams are looking for as Brady tries to beat the Atlanta Falcons and win Super Bowl LI a whopping XV years after his first Super Bowl victory.

If opponents are looking to assign blame for this added boost in what should be Brady’s professional winding-down years, they might want to jab a finger at BrainHQ. That’s the brain training program that Brady’s TB12 Sports Center installed as one of the four pillars of improvement techniques designed to meet the boss’ goal of playing this game until he’s 50.

“I’ve used it for probably three years now consistently,” Brady said Wednesday. “There has been a lot of talk about concussions and head trauma and CTE. I’ve learned that prevention is part of the issue. I work hard to try and prevent some of those things from happening. BrainHQ does a great job of cognitively trying to keep me ahead of any of those problems.”
Yeah, but does it make you a better quarterback?

“Yeah, you can see yourself improve,” he said. “It does a great job of tracking you, monitoring you, seeing where you were before. It’s been a great tool.”

Those are sweet words to the ears of Dr. Henry Mahncke, CEO of Posit Science, the creator of the BrainHQ training program. According to Mahncke, Brady stumbled onto BrainHQ about three years ago, tried it for a year and liked it so much that he called Posit Science for a meeting.

Perhaps the greatest quarterback in NFL history wanted to add Mahncke, Dr. Michael Merzenich, a recent winner of the Kavli Prize in Neuroscience, and their team of neuroscientists to his stable of trainers. While the other three pillars of the TB12 Sports Center work on physical exercise, recovery and diet, the neuroscientists work on brain training exercises to help Brady study better between games and think faster during them.

“First of all, we built this for everyone, not just athletes,” Mahncke said by phone Wednesday. “Anyone who does the exercises repeatedly improves. But in the case of a Tom Brady, you talk to him. He told me, ‘When I look down the field, I feel I can pick out what I need to see in faster time than I have.’ For me, that’s kind of the icing on the cake about whether this works.”

Mahncke said BrainHQ has 29 brain exercises that are done on a computer screen. One example of an exercise that Brady uses is called “Double Decision.” It’s a program in which Brady has to focus on the center of the screen while also being able to acknowledge and locate items that appear in his peripheral vision.

“It’s asking his brain to split its attention,” Mahncke said. “It’s a very demanding divided-attention scenario.”

Yeah, but, c’mon Doc, Brady isn’t wearing a helmet while scrambling away from angry 300-pound defenders when he takes the test, right?

“Yes, but if you didn’t know anything about physical training and wanted to play football, you’d probably think, ‘Well, all I need to do is play a lot of football and I’m ready physically,’ ” Mahncke said. “Obviously, guys do a lot more than play football to get ready for it physically. They go to the gym and train each muscle in isolation so when they’re out on the field every muscle is at its best working together when they’re out on the field. The brain is exactly the same way.

“When we train Tom’s brain, we’ve made it faster and more accurate so when he is scrambling and he’s got his helmet on, his brain is as fast and as accurate as we can make it. It’s ready to perform. In that regard, brain science is catching up to physical science.”

And, well, all that really matters is Tom Brady’s full-hearted endorsement.

“I love doing it,” he said. “So it will always be a part of my routine.”

Try it here, free.

He hopes the Republicans will save us (see below) . . . though possibly not the South Dakota Republicans.

South Dakota’s legislature has overturned an anti-corruption referendum that would have imposed an ethics commission on them.

. . . The Republican-dominated committee that approved the repeal bill did so under South Dakota’s “state of emergency” provision . . .

Wow.

I wonder whether Trump would have come within 3 million votes of Hillary if his voters had read The Making Of Donald Trump by David Cay Johnston.  It’s not just Putin and the Russians Trump is suspiciously close to; not just Breitbart’s Steve Bannon; but convicted felons, mafia connections, and more. How did this guy, who promised “absolutely” to release his tax returns if nominated, and all but universally condemned by Republicans from Barbara Bush and Colin Powell to Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, ever pass vet to be President of the United States?

Anyhow, today belongs to Garrison Keillor in the Washington Post:

What we know so far is that the man is who he is. There is no larger, finer man inside him trying to get out. Everyone who is paying attention knows this. Flags flying at the Capitol, the U.S. Marine Band, gray eminences in black coats, and He Who Is Smarter Than Those With Intelligence delivers 16 minutes of hooey and horse hockey about corrupt politicians betraying the people, and American carnage, and patriotism healing our division, though the division is mainly about Himself and though love of country does not necessarily make people stupid.

There might as well have been a 14-year-old boy at the lectern saying that he is in possession of the Golden Goblet that will drive the Gimlets from Fredonia and preserve the Sacred Marmite of Lord Numbskull and his Nimrods.

The next day he motored out to the CIA and stood before the memorial wall honoring heroes who gave their lives in anonymity and he bitched about his newspaper coverage. The next day he boasted that his inauguration’s TV ratings were higher than those in 2013. The day after that, he told the congressional leadership that he lost the popular vote because millions of illegal votes were cast, which everyone in the room knew was a bald-faced lie, except perhaps Himself. The man is clueless, tightly locked inside his own small bubble. A sizable minority of Americans, longing for greatness or wanting to smack down an ambitious woman and to show those people in the hellhole coastal cities what the real America is all about, has elected him. To him, this minority is a mass movement such as the world has never seen. God have mercy.

“American carnage,” my Aunt Sally: The correct term is “American capitalism.” Jobs are lost to automation, innovation, obsolescence, the moving finger of fate. The carriage industry was devastated by the automobile, and the men who made surreys and broughams and hansoms had to learn something new; the Pullman porter union was hit hard by the advent of air travel, and the porters sent their sons to college; the newspaper business was hit hard by Craigslist. Too bad for us. I know gifted men who were successful graphic designers until computers came along and younger people with computer skills took their place and those gifted men had to do something else. T-shirts are made in Asian countries because Americans don’t want to pay $20 for one. Coal yields to natural gas as renewable energy marches forward. Who doesn’t get this? The idea that the government is obligated to create a good living for you is one the Republican Party has fought since Adam was in the third grade. It’s the party of personal responsibility. But there he is, promising to make the bluebirds sing. As if.

Everyone knows that the man is a fabulator, oblivious, trapped in his own terrible needs. Republican, Democrat, libertarian, socialist, white supremacist or sebaceous cyst — everyone knows it. It is up to Republicans to save the country from this man. They elected him, and it is their duty to tie a rope around his ankle. They formed a solid bloc against President Obama and held their ranks, and now, for revenge, they will go after health insurance subsidies for people of limited means, which is one of the cruelest things they can possibly do. Dishwashers and cleaning ladies need heart surgery, too — hospital emergency rooms already see streams of sick people, uninsured, poor or unable to deal with the paperwork, coming in for ordinary care, and when upward of 30 million are left high and dry, people will suffer horribly. “Nobody is going to be dying on the streets,” Trump said. No, they’re going to die at home in their bedrooms.

The question is: How cynical are we willing to be and for how long? How long will Senate Republicans wait until a few of them stand up to the man? Greatness is in the eye of the beholder. American self-respect is what is at stake here, ladies and gentlemen. The only good things to come out of that inauguration were the marches all over the country the day after, millions of people taking to the streets of their own free will, most of them women, packed in tight, lots of pink hats, lots of signage, earnest, vulgar, witty, a few brilliant (“Take your broken heart and make it art”), and all of it rather civil and good-humored. That’s the great America I grew up in. It’s still here.

 

But first . . .

My pal Phil is a good friend and law school classmate of Judge Gorsuch. They text all the time.  “He’s terrific,” Phil says — and I’m sure he is, in the same way Antonin Scalia was.  Even Ruth Bader Ginsburg loved Scalia — just not his opinions.  Judge Gorsuch is cut from much the same cloth.  And he should not be confirmed until after Merrick Garland is.  Garland was not given a hearing because — nearly a year before the next President would take office — the Republicans argued we should “let the people decide.”  Of course, they had decided when they elected Obama, and again when they reelected him.  But okay, now they have decided for a third time, with 66 million voting for Hillary (it would have been millions more if people hadn’t been assured Trump had no path to 270) and only 63 million voting for Trump (some of whom would not have if they had realized he might actually win).  So Republicans who wanted to wait for The People have their verdict: Merrick Garland.

Trump is legally president, and so should get to pick future Justices, but not the one Obama was — by the Republicans’ own logic — entitled to.

Republicans already got two “gimmes.” With fewer votes than Gore, Bush got Roberts and Alito.  And they will likely get more.  But first — by the terms they themselves set — they should confirm Judge Garland.  And Democrats should block anyone else until they do.

And now . . .

Conservative David Brooks, writing yesterday in the New York Times (subscribe!):

The Republican Fausts
David Brooks

Many Republican members of Congress have made a Faustian bargain with Donald Trump. They don’t particularly admire him as a man, they don’t trust him as an administrator, they don’t agree with him on major issues, but they respect the grip he has on their voters, they hope he’ll sign their legislation and they certainly don’t want to be seen siding with the inflamed progressives or the hyperventilating media.

Their position was at least comprehensible: How many times in a lifetime does your party control all levers of power? When that happens you’re willing to tolerate a little Trumpian circus behavior in order to get things done.

But if the last 10 days have made anything clear, it’s this: The Republican Fausts are in an untenable position. The deal they’ve struck with the devil comes at too high a price. It really will cost them their soul.

In the first place, the Trump administration is not a Republican administration; it is an ethnic nationalist administration. Trump insulted both parties equally in his Inaugural Address. The Bannonites are utterly crushing the Republican regulars when it comes to actual policy making.

The administration has swung sharply antitrade. Trump’s economic instincts are corporatist, not free market. If Barack Obama tried to lead from behind, Trump’s foreign policy involves actively running away from global engagement. Outspoken critics of Paul Ryan are being given White House jobs, and at the same time, if Reince Priebus has a pulse it is not externally evident.

Second, even if Trump’s ideology were not noxious, his incompetence is a threat to all around him. To say that it is amateur hour at the White House is to slander amateurs. The recent executive orders were drafted and signed without any normal agency review or even semicoherent legal advice, filled with elemental errors that any nursery school student would have caught.

It seems that the Trump administration is less a government than a small clique of bloggers and tweeters who are incommunicado with the people who actually help them get things done. Things will get really hairy when the world’s problems are incoming.

Third, it’s becoming increasingly clear that the aroma of bigotry infuses the whole operation, and anybody who aligns too closely will end up sharing in the stench.

The administration could have simply tightened up the refugee review process and capped the refugee intake at 50,000, but instead went out of its way to insult Islam. The administration could have simply tightened up immigration procedures, but Trump went out of his way to pick a fight with all of Mexico.

Other Republicans have gone far out of their way to make sure the war on terrorism is not a war on Islam or on Arabs, but Trump has gone out of his way to ensure the opposite. The racial club is always there.

Fourth, it is hard to think of any administration in recent memory, on any level, whose identity is so tainted by cruelty. The Trump administration is often harsh and never kind. It is quick to inflict suffering on the 8-year-old Syrian girl who’s been bombed and strafed and lost her dad. Its deportation vows mean that in the years ahead, the TV screens will be filled with weeping families being pulled apart.

None of these traits will improve with time. As former Bush administration official Eliot Cohen wrote in The Atlantic, “Precisely because the problem is one of temperament and character, it will not get better. It will get worse, as power intoxicates Trump and those around him. It will probably end in calamity — substantial domestic protest and violence, a breakdown of international economic relationships, the collapse of major alliances, or perhaps one or more new wars (even with China) on top of the ones we already have. It will not be surprising in the slightest if his term ends not in four or in eight years, but sooner, with impeachment or removal under the 25th Amendment.”

The danger signs are there in profusion. Sooner or later, the Republican Fausts will face a binary choice. As they did under Nixon, Republican leaders will have to either oppose Trump and risk his tweets, or sidle along with him and live with his stain.

Trump exceeded expectations with his cabinet picks, but his first 10 days in office have made clear this is not a normal administration. It is a problem that demands a response. It is a callous, bumbling group that demands either personal loyalty or the ax.

Already one sees John McCain and Lindsey Graham forming a bit of a Republican opposition. The other honorable senators will have to choose: Collins, Alexander, Portman, Corker, Cotton, Sasse and so on and so on.

With most administrations you can agree sometimes and disagree other times. But this one is a danger to the party and the nation in its existential nature. And so sooner or later all will have to choose what side they are on, and live forever after with the choice.

Did you know that Anne Frank, whose Diary ultimately became so famous, was denied entry to the U.S.?  Read about that — and this America First cartoon by Dr. Seuss — at Snopes.com.  Both tellingly on point all these years later, as we reject Syrian refugees who’ve already been through extreme vetting.

(Meanwhile, I wonder what little Anne Frank might have had to say about Jews being removed from the Holocaust Remembrance Day statement.  Sean Spicer explains why we’re being ridiculous to criticize this — a child of a Holocaust survivor helped draft it, he tells us. But others think generalizing the tragedy — there were lots of victims, not just Jews — is more in the style of Breitbart and alt-right nationalists.)

And wait!  Before you go . . .

This is pretty amazing.  Notice #4, the decimation of the State Department; #5, Trump’s having already filed for reelection; and #6, the possibility that he now owns 19% of Russian oil giant Rosneft. 

I like to think this is all bogus. Given whom we’re dealing with here, I’m not at all certain that will prove to be the case.

Sorry.  Still having problems sending out 20-year-old columns.  “Excuse the ring,” as operators used to say when they dialed a wrong number.

THOSE OF YOU WHO GET THIS POST BY EMAIL JUST GOT TWO BY ACCIDENT — FROM THE SPRING OF 1996.  MY UNDERPAID WEB MISTRESS HAS BEEN ADDING BACK THOSE VERY EARLIEST ONES TO THE ARCHIVE AND ACCIDENTALLY BUMPED SOMETHING WITH HER ELBOW AND OUT THEY WENT.  OOPS.  WE BOTH APOLOGIZE FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE.

HERE’S THE ONE YOU WERE MEANT TO GET TODAY OR TOMORROW:

In case you missed it . . .

Rachel: Has Putin captured the American presidency?

Part 2.

Meanwhile, Trump supporters believe most of the Women’s March marchers were paid to march. By George Soros.  Scary.  Watch.

From Friday: a couple of updates and a new suggestion:

GLDD seems to have come to life a bit. They finally have a new CEO — years of disappointing performance may be traced to his predecessor — and there seem to be some activist shareholders trying to move things along.  Plus, they just announced an $88 million dredging award.  Years ago, I had hoped we’d see the stock in the low teens; now, I’d hold on hoping for $7, which would hardly be a home run — barely a base hit after so long — but still, from here, better than a savings account.

BOREF trades so thinly that even a 1,000 shares can bump it up or down 20%.  So the only thing sillier than getting excited when it jumps to $6.75 as it did Wednesday is the fact that it’s so low to begin with.  That’s just my view, of course — beware my happy gene — but as I’ve argued so many times over the years, this is a remarkable lottery ticket.  With 5 million shares outstanding, at $6.75 it’s valued at $35 million.  Yet its WheelTug subsidiary could save the airline industry billions of dollars a year.  I won’t run through the whole spiel again; and it’s absolutely possible this lottery ticket will never pay off — it is a lottery ticket! — but with the FAA taking it seriously, and 22 airlines having signed up to try it if it ever reaches the market, it seems to me the lottery ticket should be worth more like $350 million than $35 million, in the expectation that, yes, like a lot of risky new efforts (Solyndra?), it might wash out; but that if it succeeded, it could one day be throwing off profits of $350 million per year.  As always: only with money you can truly afford to lose.

SPRT is a little company that a small group of activist investors bought into recently at $3 and change (it was $2.37 last I looked).  So, being lazy, I say to myself: they must have done a lot of homework before committing their time and cash to this speculation, and here I get to buy in 20% cheaper!  (So I did.)  One of those investors told me that the original company, founded in 1997, had all sorts of woes, but that, now much shrunk, it will sit, he thinks, with more than $2 per share in cash net of debt once the losses are staunched . . . sits with $120 million in net operating losses that, while tricky to value or turn into cash, could be worth another $1 a share . . . and — oh! — has an actual business that might be worth $2 a share.  So — in his view, at least — they ought to be able to avoid losingwhat they paid; and maybe cash out at more like $5.

Only, as always, with money you can truly afford to lose.

But first: Jason Kander on Trump’s millions-of-illegal-voters fantasy. Four minutes. Watch!

And Frank Bruni’s goes-without-saying-but-glad-he-said-it-anyway how NOT to go after Trump. (“There’s so much substantive ground on which to confront Trump. There are acres upon acres. Why swerve into the gutter?”)

And now . . .

Joey:  “Companies have found a way to keep consumers from price comparing. Lenovo (largest PC seller) makes the SAME model for Best Buy, Costco, Wal-Mart, etc., but gives them each a slightly different model number. Lenovo also sells the same unit on its own website with a slightly different model number. The one character difference in model numbers is probably a code indicating which store is selling it. So, not only can’t you price compare, but you can’t get a refund from your credit card company for the difference even if you have ‘price match’ on your credit card.  I’m attaching a short chat with Lenovo where they state that the models are EXACTLY the same.  I gave it to Citibank because my top-of-the-line card has price match, but Citi’s self-owned insurer won’t match because the model numbers are different.  Do insurers ever pay out on anything?”

Me: Your model is 80VF00A8US.  Best Buy is 80VF00AYUS.

Sales Rep: its the same.

Me: Is it EXACTLY the same?

Sales Rep: yes

Me: THE SAME EXACT SPECS?

Sales Rep: yes

Me: No difference whatsoever?

Sales Rep: no

Joey paid $1,899 plus tax at Best Buy; he showed Citibank the receipt — and a screenshot of Lenovo’s website offering the same unit for $1,649 — to no avail.

“Shop around.”

Pulling out of TPP, as Trump just did, is a huge win for China, a major, major loss for us.  Fareed Zakaria explains why, here. Maybe there’s still some way to rescue this, but I don’t see how.

Talk about self-inflicted wounds!

(Had Hillary won, I think she would have extracted exactly the sort of face-saving improvements Fareed describes and then seen President Obama’s extraordinary accomplishment through to fruition.  Take at least the first couple of minutes to watch.)

And speaking of President Obama’s accomplishments, take 16 minutes to be immensely proud of your country and our immediate past President. I’m trying to get the transcript to print and frame.

The Dutch are among the world’s citizens trying to make sense of what’s happened. I think they inherited the happy gene, too, because they had some fun with it — here (four minutes).