Author: A.T.

Long-time readers will know that I collect “historic documents.”  E.g., this column three years ago about a Steinbeck letter along with letters by the inventor of television and another by the inventor of the telegraph.

Back off!  They are not for sale.

But with this site’s subscription fees down and ad sales as low as they’ve ever been — and an avocado-a-day habit to support — I do, in fact, offer an item or two in this upcoming auction.

Ah, but which?

Could it be the set of Edward Albee letters?  (Estimated at $600-$800, plus the buyer’s premium you have to pay.)

One of the Einsteins? (“If Hitler were not a lunatic he could easily have avoided the hostility of the Western powers. That he is a lunatic is the sole advantage in the present sinister picture of the world.” — September 3, 1942 — $30,000-$50,000.)

The Rutherford B. Hayes ($300-$500)?

The Nehru, talking about Gandhi ($3,000-$5,000)?

The President Truman to Eleanor Roosevelt (and hers, passing his along — $1,500-$2,500)?  The Hamilton?  (You’ve heard the show; now own the letter — $10,000-$15,000.)

An actual honest-to-God John Hancock ($600-$800)?

How about the photo of Thomas Edison inscribed to Madame Curie ($6,000-$12,000)?

Add a Franklin Pierce to your collection (he was President, after all, if no Lincoln — $300-500)?

A 1795 document signed by Robert Morris ($300-$500) or a 1782 Robert Morris letter to Benjamin Franklin in Paris (with Franklin’s signature of receipt — $40,000-$80,000)?

Or a Hemingway letter talking Gertrude Stein?  (“She used to talk to me about homosexuality and how it was fine in and for women and no good in men and I used to listen and learn and I always wanted to fuck her and she knew it and t was a good healthy feeling” — $25,000-$35,000.)

It’s a lot cheaper, obviously, and perhaps a lot smarter, to read through the catalog, here, free, than to get hooked on any of this.*  But if you do bid on anything April 18, please bid high.

It could be mine.

*The lots are listed alphabetically, from John Adams and Beethoven to Zachary Taylor and Orville Wright.  There is a Zola, but it’s lumped in with the seven other authors, like Rudyard Kipling and Mark Twain, who inscribed the same page, and so listed as item #8.

I suggested Unwired Planet (UPIP) at 77 cents and then again at $1.  It then reverse split 1 for 12.

Aristides’ Chris Brown still likes it.

It’s recently won another of its five patent trials in the United Kingdom.  That’s two out of three trials so far, with two more to go, in a jurisdiction where typically the plaintiff wins only 20% of the time.

The stock is down year-to-date, which Chris thinks offers a great opportunity to those of us with money we can truly afford to lose. He expects large damage awards in both UK and German courts in late 2016; and corporate expenses to plummet in 2017.  The shares, he thinks, are “ridiculously undervalued, with an enterprise value of only $57 million, a great CEO and board of directors, and a net operating loss carryforward of $1.69 billion” that alone could be worth a lot more than $57 million when it is eventually monetized.

So Trump “predicts a ‘massive recession’ but intends to eliminate the national debt in eight years” . . .

. . . which is a really smart thing to say if you’re trying to get people to think things are horrible (with gas at two bucks, 72 consecutive months of private-sector job growth, and the debt now again shrinking relative to the economy as a whole).  He says the real unemployment rate is 16% or 21% and may actually be as high as 32% or even — he’s heard — as high as 42% — and that we have stupid, stupid leaders making terrible deals that have us whimpering under the heels of our economic overlords, Mexico and China.

. . . and a really smart thing to say if you’re trying to scare the pants off them — because when people are scared, they turn to a strong man.

So a massive recession is headed our way, but he would avert it for us even as he paid off our $19 trillion national debt by the time he left office.

Of course, to any thoughtful person, the idea of paying off the National Debt in eight years — or ever — is preposterous. There’s nothing wrong with a healthy, moral family — or business or country — carrying debt.  To own a home (called a mortgage) or to finance a factory (called a bond) or to build infrastructure that, properly maintained, will last a century or more.  Sure, you don’t want that to get out of hand — our National Debt was 30% of GDP when it was handed to Reagan/Bush, who exploded it, only to have Bill Clinton bring its growth back under control; 100% of GDP after Bush 41 exploded it and handed Obama a $1.5 trillion deficit (which Obama has now cut by more than two-thirds).

A human does want to be debt-free before retiring — long before, if possible — but businesses and countries don’t retire.  Procter & Gamble has been around for longer than any human has been alive, yet carries $30 billion in debt.  Does Trump think P&G should pay off all its debt, too?  Does he not use debt to finance his own undertakings?  Why would a future-facing country like ours (if we do want to be future-facing) have as a goal paying of all our debt?

To be sure, we need the Debt to grow more slowly, in most years, than the economy as a whole, as it is now again doing.  This is how it shrank in the 35 years after World War II from 122% of GDP down to the 30% we handed Reagan/Bush.

But what serious economist or world leader thinks we need to pay it off?  Let alone in just eight years?  Or thinks we can do it by negotiating better deals with Mexico and China?  Wouldn’t sucking trillions out of the economies of our trading partners not throw them — and the rest of the world — into all out Depression?  which worsens deficits?

It’s all just SO stupid . . . we’ll just win, win, win, because I have a very good brain and big hands and belittle anyone who gets in my way and you’re a very good-looking group of readers, by the way, can we just quickly go around the room so I know who you are? . . . that you almost think he can’t be serious about wanting to be President.

And that’s exactly what Trump biographer Michael D’Antonio said on MSNBC Sunday morning: he thinks Trump would be scared to death actually to have this job.  He’s loving the game — it’s like Survivor! — and the fight and the attention and applause — he’s a performer — and will love having the nomination “stolen” from him so for the rest of his life he’ll be able to say he tried to save the country, and he could have — God knows he did his bit (or should I say: his shtick).

Humanity in these next few decades is either hurtling toward unprecedented global health and prosperity — we now have the technology to achieve that — or hurtling off the rails.  We have the technology to achieve that, too.  Sarah Palin and Donald Trump, though they delight Joe the Plumber, are not where humanity should turn for the necessary leadership to give us the best odds of a good outcome.

Licorice.

Seriously.  When was the last time you even heard about licorice?  It’s like — wait!  “What ever happened to licorice?” Not that it was ever my favorite — but I just realized it’s gone.  And has been, seemingly, for decades.  So I’m guessing it will soon be back.

Discuss.

I just received my copies of The Only Investment Guide You’ll Ever Need — ever — even though this is the eighth or ninth edition.  They invent IRAs and I have to write a new edition.  They invent Index funds and I have to write a new edition.  They invent the Internet, and I have to write a new edition.  A conspiracy of Innovation.  I don’t like it.

If you order the paperback here, as a graduation gift — or the eBook here, for yourself — I will have the wherewithal to move to higher ground if the oceans rise as projected Friday. Or maybe I’ll just adopt a puppy.

If all this seems a little whimsical (licorice? puppies?), I’d say we need all the whimsy we can get these days.

Read, for example, Chris Hedges here:  “The Revenge of the Lower Classes and the Rise of American Fascism.”  Ouch.

Or anything by Norm Ornstein, co-author, in 2012, of It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New Politics of Extremism, a 2016 sequel to which Barney Frank has suggested should be titled: It’s Even Worse Than It Was When We Said It’s Even Worse Than It Looks.  

But I inherited the happy gene, and all we have to do to make things turn out okay — even as one party strives to make it harder for young people and people of color to vote — is vote.

It would also help to treat our political adversaries with respect.  “With malice toward none,” as a great president once put it.  Because at the end of the day, we’re all — in both parties and independent — mostly pretty nice people, wanting the best for the country and the world. We just need to depolarize our politics (and no, it’s not symmetrical, as I’ve argued before) and to take satisfaction in finding common ground solutions to our common challenges.

Easier said than done.

Buy my book.

One thing your newborn may need, if he lives in any of the world’s coastal cities, is a pair of flippers.  The sea level rise may come much faster than people think.  Click here.

For those of us who are long-suffering shareholders in Borealis . . . up 10% to $5.80 yesterday on volume of 107 shares, which is to say $600 worth, less than you might spend on an office chair . . . here is an analysis of the value of the “time savings” its WheelTug subsidiary could unlock.

(Not included in the AirInsight analysis: any credit for savings on jet fuel or engine maintenance, nor any allowance for “the twist” that could double or triple those time savings by allowing passengers to board and deplane from the front and rear doors.)

It works out to about $1 billion a year for giant carriers like American or Southwest, so maybe $20 billion industrywide.

And double or triple that, eventually, with “the twist” and other savings added in.

WheelTug’s business model is to lease the systems for half the savings.

Obviously, they will never, ever — ever — see the kind of revenues that would imply.  But they don’t have to net billions of dollars a year for parent Borealis, with 5 million shares outstanding, to be worth more than $5.80 a share ($30 million).

Will short-haul aircraft one day all have WheelTug capability?  None does now.

I like to think it’s analogous to TV remote controls.  For years, not a single TV was sold with a remote.  But once they were invented?  Who today would buy a TV without a remote control?

AirInsight links to a more detailed analysis of pushback savings from the company itself.

Caution, as always: BOREF shares are only for money you can truly afford to lose (as those of us who paid as much as $16 a share surely recognize); and trade so thinly, they must only be purchased with “limit” orders, so you don’t accidentally pay a lot more than you expected to.

Have a great weekend.

Bernard Baruch said, “because summer will surely come.”

Well, I bought eight of these winter scarves on eBay last week — 100% pure cashmere made in Scotland, if the label is to be believed — and they arrived, free shipping, and they’re nice and big and warm, and I may be missing something but I think they’d be $75 each at Saks, and they were $6.97 here on eBay.  Go ye and do likewise?

(Also of possible interest: oil stocks.)

NORTH CAROLINA WELCOMES YOU

Have you seen Funny Or Die’s 56-second parody of a tourist-board spot, in wake of the unfortunate legislation passed last month?

LEGALIZING DRUGS

Judy:  “Thanks for Monday’s link to the Harper’s article.   If you found this interesting, you really need to read Chasing the Scream by Johann Hari.  It will open your eyes while breaking your heart.”

“An absolutely stunning book. It will blow people away.” ―Elton John

“A drug policy reform book like no other. Many have studied, or conducted, the science surrounding the manifold ills of drug prohibition. But Hari puts it all into riveting story form, and humanizes it . . . lively, humorous, and poignant, it’s a compelling case for why the drug war must end, yesterday.” ―Norman Stamper, former Seattle police chief

Jim Burt:  “In your litany of horrible things the Republicans have done in their pursuit of political advantage – e.g., the War on Drugs [Nixon Policy Advisor Admits He Invented War On Drugs to Suppress ‘Anti-War Left and Black People’] – you forgot to mention that in 1968 LBJ’s diplomats had negotiated a peace settlement with North Vietnam which was indistinguishable from the one Kissinger won a Nobel Prize for five years and countless deaths later . . . but that Nixon’s team told South Vietnam’s leaders to refuse to go along with it, promising them a better deal once Nixon was president.  LBJ knew of this because of wire taps on those leaders — and knew that revealing it would destroy Nixon’s chances of election — but kept it secret because of the scandal which would have attached to wiretapping allies.  I suggest that there are enough incidents of this sort to indicate a pattern.  You can’t just say, ‘Well, sure, that Nixon was a bad boy,’ if he’s only one of a long string of Republican politicians who have dealt with the devil for political advantage to the detriment of the country.”

☞ For more on this Nixon/LBJ history, click here . . . and here  (bonus: a riveting account of how LBJ almost crashed the tumultuous 1968 convention in Chicago to run for reelection after all) . . . and here (peace before the election “was exactly what Nixon feared”).  Thanks, Jim!

*”On the other hand,” Jim goes on to note, “it does not appear that Reagan actively connived with the Iranians to put off the hostage release during the 1980 campaign.  The Iranians just hated Carter with a white hot passion.”

I am enthusiastically neutral between our two fine Democratic candidates.

For all their differences (e.g., free tuition versus debt-free college), Bernie had it exactly right: either of them is, even “on our worst days, 100 times better than any Republican candidate.”

Like Carter, Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Gore, Kerry, and Obama before them,* Sanders and Clinton are people of serious purpose — each offering to apply him- or herself to the immensely complex task of leading the country and the world.

Was George W. Bush up to that task?  Was John McCain steady enough?**  Who thought Dan Quayle was ready to lead the world?

Watch Secretary of State John Kerry on Sunday’s “Face The Nation.”  Serious and steady.

Watch Secretary Clinton at Stanford.  Serious and steady.

Watch Senator Sanders on the Middle East.  Serious and steady.

Contrast this with Trump, obviously; but with Cruz, too, who would carpet bomb until the sand glows — and who shut down his own government.

I think it will ultimately turn out okay.  But, boy, had it better.

*Mondale and Dukakis lost to Republicans who quadrupled the National Debt; Gore and Kerry, to a Republican who handed Obama a disastrous, needless war, a near depression and a $1.5 trillion deficit.

**He crashed four planes, not one, and chose Sarah Palin to lead the world in the event of his disability.

Really.

Click here for a summary and here for Harper’s Magazine full report: “Legalize It All: How To Win the War On Drugs,” by Dan Baum.  It begins:

In 1994, John Ehrlichman, the Watergate co-conspirator, unlocked for me one of the great mysteries of modern American history: How did the United States entangle itself in a policy of drug prohibition that has yielded so much misery and so few good results? . . .

At the time, I was writing a book about the politics of drug prohibition. I started to ask Ehrlichman a series of earnest, wonky questions that he impatiently waved away. “You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

I must have looked shocked. Ehrlichman just shrugged. Then he looked at his watch, handed me a signed copy of his steamy spy novel, The Company, and led me to the door. Nixon’s invention of the war on drugs as a political tool was cynical, but every president since — Democrat and Republican alike — has found it equally useful for one reason or another. Meanwhile, the growing cost of the drug war is now impossible to ignore: billions of dollars wasted, bloodshed in Latin America and on the streets of our own cities, and millions of lives destroyed by draconian punishment that doesn’t end at the prison gate; one of every eight black men has been disenfranchised because of a felony conviction.

As long ago as 1949, H. L. Mencken identified in Americans “the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy,” an astute articulation of our weirdly Puritan need to criminalize people’s inclination to adjust how they feel. The desire for altered states of consciousness creates a market, and in suppressing that market we have created a class of genuine bad guys — pushers, gangbangers, smugglers, killers. Addiction is a hideous condition, but it’s rare. Most of what we hate and fear about drugs — the violence, the overdoses, the criminality — derives from prohibition, not drugs. And there will be no victory in this war either; even the Drug Enforcement Administration concedes that the drugs it fights are becoming cheaper and more easily available.

Now, for the first time, we have an opportunity to change course. Experiments in alternatives to harsh prohibition are already under way both in this country and abroad. Twenty-three states, as well as the District of Columbia, allow medical marijuana, and four — Colorado, Washington, Oregon, and Alaska — along with D.C., have legalized pot altogether. Several more states, including Arizona, California, Maine, Massachusetts, and Nevada, will likely vote in November whether to follow suit. Portugal has decriminalized not only marijuana but cocaine and heroin, as well as all other drugs. . . .

Depending on how the issue is framed, legalization of all drugs can appeal to conservatives, who are instinctively suspicious of bloated budgets, excess government authority, and intrusions on individual liberty, as well as to liberals, who are horrified at police overreach, the brutalization of Latin America, and the criminalization of entire generations of black men. It will take some courage to move the conversation beyond marijuana to ending all drug prohibitions, but it will take less, I suspect, than most politicians believe. It’s already politically permissible to criticize mandatory minimums, mass marijuana-possession arrests, police militarization, and other excesses of the drug war; even former attorney general Eric Holder and Michael Botticelli, the new drug czar — a recovering alcoholic — do so. Few in public life appear eager to defend the status quo.

This month, the General Assembly of the United Nations will be gathering for its first drug conference since 1998. The motto of the 1998 meeting was “A Drug-Free World — We Can Do It!” With all due respect, U.N., how’d that work out for you? Today the U.N. confronts a world in which those who have suffered the most have lost faith in the old strong-arm ideology. That the tide was beginning to turn was evident at the 2012 Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, when Latin American leaders for the first time openly discussed — much to the public discomfort of President Obama — whether legalizing and regulating drugs should be the hemisphere’s new approach. . . .

. . . As the once-unimaginable step of ending the war on drugs shimmers into view, it’s time to shift the conversation from why to how. . . .

. . . To minimize harm and maximize order, we’ll have to design better systems than we have now for licensing, standardizing, inspecting, distributing, and taxing dangerous drugs. A million choices will arise, and we probably won’t make any good decisions on the first try. Some things will get better; some things will get worse. But we do have experience on which to draw — from the end of Prohibition, in the 1930s, and from our recent history. Ending drug prohibition is a matter of imagination and management, two things on which Americans justifiably pride themselves. We can do this. . . .

It’s a lengthy article everyone should read, because this is something the world can fix.  And at less-than-zero cost to the taxpayer.

But hey — how about those Republicans?  Everybody knows about their Watergate break-in; about the “Southern strategy“; and about their sweeping efforts to make it harder for poor people and black people to vote.  But ruining countless lives based on knowing lies about drugs to help win elections?  That one was new to me.  Belated thanks to John Ehrlichman — and Harper’s — for bringing it to our attention.

Please don’t miss the last item — something really good House Speaker Paul Ryan did this week — but first . . .

SMALL-GOVERNMENT REPUBLICANS

In Arizona, the Republican legislature has pushed back municipal ordinances requiring paid sick leave.  ‘

In Alabama, the Republican legislature rolled back local increases in the minimum wage.

In Texas, the Republican legislature overrode local efforts to control fracking and frack water discharge within municipal boundaries.

Who cares what the local people want?  If it conflicts with corporate profits — well, as our Republican friends remind us: corporations are people, too.

And it’s not just corporate profits Republicans need to protect.

It’s so important that some forms of discrimination remain legal that when a local government — the Charlotte City Council, for example — bans one, the Republican-controlled state government steps in to intercede.

Posted at Talking Points Memo:

. . . In a span of 12 hours, the GOP political leadership of this state called the General Assembly back to Raleigh for a special session, introduced legislation written by leadership and not previously made available to members or the public, held “hearings” on that legislation, passed it through both chambers of the legislature, and it was signed by the GOP Governor.

The special legislation was called, ostensibly, to prevent an ordinance passed last month by the Charlotte City Council, from going into effect on April 1. That ordinance would have expanded the city’s LGBT anti-discrimination ordinance, and would have allowed transgendered people to use public restrooms that corresponds with their gender identity.

But the legislation introduced and passed into law by the General Assembly yesterday didn’t simply roll back that ordinance. It implemented a detailed state-wide regulation of public restrooms, and limited a person’s use of those restrooms to only those restrooms that correspond with one’s “biological sex,” defined in the new state law as the sex identified on one’s birth certificate. (So yes, by law in NC now, transgender porn star Buck Angel (look him up) will have to use the women’s room…isn’t that precisely what these lawmakers are actually wanting to prevent?).

But the legislation didn’t stop there. It also expressly pre-empted all municipal and county ordinances or policies broader than the official state anti-discrimination statute, which does not include sexual orientation or gender identity among the list of prohibited bases of discrimination. So that effectively wipes out local LGBT anti-discrimination protections in numerous NC cities (and, ironically, wipes out the protection of discrimination based on “veterans status” in Greensboro and Orange County (Chapel Hill)).

But wait, there’s more. The legislation also expressly states that there can be no statutory or common law private right of action to enforce the state’s anti-discrimination statutes in the state courts. So if a NC resident is the victim of racial discrimination in housing or employment, for example, that person is now entirely barred from going to state court to get an injunction, or to get damages of any kind. The new law completely defangs the state’s anti-discrimination statute, rendering it entirely unenforceable by the citizens of the state.

But wait, there’s more! The legislation also prohibits municipalities and counties from passing a higher minimum wage than the State’s. Not that any municipality or county had done that…but in case any of them were thinking about it, that’s now prohibited, too. . . .

12 hours, start to finish.

Look: transgender stuff is new to most people and hard, at first, to talk about and understand.  But my transgender friends are real people — many of them extremely nice once you get to know them, productive, tax-paying, and born with certain inalienable rights (among them: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness).  So if the City of Charlotte wants to make their lives easier, and deems it safe and sensible to do so, why do Republicans have to step in to shut that down?

HEAT IN THE CLASSROOM

And speaking of thwarting the will of the people — as Congressional Republicans have done on the minimum wage, comprehensive immigration reform, refinancing of federal student, and the American Jobs Act that would have put millions to work revitalizing our infrastructure — how about this?

Next summer, in addition to textbooks, laptops and double-strength coffee, Kansas college students will be able to bring something else to class: guns.

By July 2017, all six state universities plus dozens of community colleges and technical schools must allow students to carry concealed weapons on campus.

. . . While the move enjoys broad support in the [Republican dominated] Kansas Legislature, it’s a different story among the state’s professors and administrators.

Mike Williams, president of the University of Kansas Faculty Senate, says his colleagues are less worried about the possibility of an active shooter and more about accidents and simple disagreements escalating between armed students.

What’s more, Williams says, that fear of violence could discourage civil discourse, with students afraid to speak their minds “because of their worry that someone might react with armed violence instead of thoughtful debate.”

A poll of more than 20,000 employees across all Kansas Board of Regents schools found overwhelming disapproval of the new law. Eighty-two percent said they would feel less safe if students were allowed to carry guns to class. . . .

HATS OFF TO PAUL RYAN

His budget priorities are terrible, in my view — and that’s a really important thing — but hats off to our House Speaker for having an open mind, and for inspiring Congressional interns with a really good message.  Take 10 minutes to watch.

Have a great weekend!

. . . and obviously were.

Have you seen this Facebook post?

Seven years under Barack Obama:

Not to mention gas prices (down), home prices (up), gays (uplifted), Bin Laden (dead), high school seniors (graduating in records numbers), American Ebola victims (nonexistent), global climate change accord (signed!), women on the Court (tripled), weekly American body count (discontinued), net migration from Mexico (halted), stem cell lines available for research that might one day save your child’s life (multiplied).

If you’re angry we haven’t put millions more people to work revitalizing our crumbling infrastructure or raised the minimum wage or allowed graduates to refinance their federal student loans at today’s low rates — or signed into law the comprehensive immigration reform the Senate passed 68-32 — you should be.

But at the Republicans, because they consistently blocked every one of those things.

No?