Author: A.T.

And more.

But start with this:

WELL, THAT WAS FAST

SQNS, suggested here two weeks ago at $2.37, announced yesterday it had agreed to be acquired at $3.03.  As I type, it’s jumped to $2.80, an 18% gain.  For those who hold until the deal closes “in the first quarter,” a promised 28% gain.  I’m inclined to hold for the full $3.03 (and the dream someone might bid it higher); but you never know what snag might crater the deal and put us back to square one, so it’s your call.

APE is taking longer.  Suggested here at $1.05 nine months ago, it’s the virtual twin of AMC.  Yet when I looked yesterday mid-day, AMC — buoyed by the $1.5 billion success of the Barbenheimer movies — was up 30 cents to $5.23 . . . while APE was down 8 cents to $1.72.

By the close, AMC was up only 19 cents and APE down only 2 cents.  But it’s still nuts.  Upon their conversion, every 100 APE shares will become 88 AMC shares.  So APE should trade at 88% the price of AMC — not yesterday’s 33%.

On the remote chance you own AMC, because you like the company’s prospects, sell immediately and buy APE instead.

NOBODY’S PERFECT

There is much to laud about Anthony Fauci, especially his work decades ago with HIV-AIDS; but I am one who has long believed that — after the first few very scary months of COVID before we knew anything — we should have tried much harder to open schools . . . while making accommodations for those at serious risk . . . just as we managed to keep grocery stores open and UPS delivering.  The damage we’ve done to millions of kids is enormous.

And I’ve always been a little nervous about the way Dr. Fauci dismissed the possibility that COVID originated in the Wuhan lab he had a hand in funding.  On that point, this article could be described as damning.

THE THUNDERBOLT KID

If you grew up in the Fifties, as Bill Bryson did, read it or, better still, let him read it to you.  Huge fun.

OK, now:

TWO PLAYS I LOVE BUT HAVEN’T SEEN

Sweat was recommended by a friend.  I had forgotten entirely until it arrived — had no clue what it was about (or even, actually, which friend had recommended it) — but dove in.  As mentioned a week or two ago, I was gob-smacked.  And in the same way it’s often true “the book was better than the movie,” so, it seems to me, reading Sweat is probably better than seeing it.  That way, you have all the time you want to pause and think as you go.  Not to mention the time and money saved not having to buy tickets and fly somewhere to see it (most recently, Detroit this past June).

The Accidental Death of an Anarchist I read as an eBook on my phone.  I was not about to fly over to London to see it, though it’s getting standing ovations every night.  I was just curious to see what I had somewhat reluctantly invested in.  Having now read it, all I’ll tell you is that (a) I would have invested with gusto, had I actually read it; and (b) it is a 1970 Italian masterpiece wonderfully updated and relocated.  So sharp, so funny, so inventive.  Try to know nothing about it.  Just start reading.

And finally (apart from the BONUS CARTOON that follows):

REFILLING YOUR UNREFILLABLE PEPPER GRINDER

I hate waste, as long-time readers know, so — trivial though it is — throwing out the now-empty disposable pepper mill someone had brought at the beginning of the summer made me crazy last week.  I know:  We are in mid-coup!  The planet is burning up!  Who has time to worry about this?!

Apparently, I do.

I fished it back out of the trash and tried to think what tools I might have lying around to make the world a better place.

A wrench?  Pliers?  The edge of a screwdriver?

In fact, the tool that did the trick is called YouTube.

I typed in a few words and — presto:

How to Open Pepper Grinders from the Supermarket

More amazing still — “Handy Andy” being the last moniker anyone who knows me would apply — I followed the instructions and it worked.

Don’t say I never gave you anything.

BONUS CARTOON

Krugman: Is a U.S. Debt Crisis Looming? Is it Even Possible?

Executive summary:  NO.

To which I would add a few thoughts of my own.

First, even for me, who kinda gets it, this is reassuring.  So enjoy the reassurance.  I did.

Second, as you’ve heard me say for decades:

Just as a $300,000 mortgage is worrisome on a home appraised at $290,000 but trivial on a $4 million home . . . frightening for a family earning $40,000 a year but inconsequential to a family earning $800,000 a year . . . so is it not the size of the National Debt that matters, but its size relative to the economy as a whole.

Imagine that we run $1 trillion deficits annually for the next 50 years.  Oh, my God!  Oh, my God!  Oh, my God!  Another $50 trillion on top of today’s $31 trillion?

But if our economy grows at 4.5% a year for those same 50 years — the Fed’s 2% inflation target we’re once again close to achieving plus 2.5% real growth — our GDP would have grown from $26 trillion to $243 trillion.

So the by-then $81 trillion we owed would bring us back from today’s Debt/GDP ratio of 120% or so . . . about where it was after we borrowed like crazy to win World War II . . . to 33% — about where it was 35 years later, before Reagan/Bush 43/Trump sent it soaring with tax cuts for billionaires.

Except that if we’re smart, our future deficits will go not toward defeating fascism in World War II by blowing things up, but toward building things that will last 50 and 100 years . . . i.e., revitalizing our infrastructure and investing in our kids . . . even as we defeat fascism here without spending a dime, simply by voting Democrat in 2024.

And continuing to vote that way as long as it takes for the Republican Party to regain its footing as a party of real facts, not alternative facts, with leaders like Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, and Chris Christie (to take three of the all-too-few examples) rather than Trump, Giuliani and the Pillow Guy (to take three of the all-too-numerous), who are willing to defy the strongman who, even as we speak, is continuing his attempted overthrow of democracy.

We are in mid-coup, writes not-to-be-missed Maureen Dowd.

But if this year’s special elections are an indication, more people are beginning to see the importance of voting blue.

That’s reassuring, too.

Jonathan C.: “Would you advise contributing to Biden/Harris, or rather to the DNC?”

→ It’s a joint victory fund, so you don’t have to make a decision. The first $6,600 automatically goes to the Biden Campaign.  Anything beyond that goes to the DNC.

“Lock her up,” Trump often exhorted.

If his followers believed that was appropriate, given her behavior, then surely he must be locked up, because what he did was orders of magnitude worse.

What she did?

Move on, folks: nothing to see here.  Not with Benghazi — nine Republican-led investigations found her innocent.  And not with the emails — even though she made a mistake.

There was no indictment of Hillary when Trump controlled things — much as he would have liked to see one — because there was nothing to indict her for.

What he did?

You could see what he did on TV.  You can see Mitch McConnell and Kevin McCarthy and Lindsey Graham, among so many others, laying the blame directly at his feet.

You can listen to his “perfect call” warning Georgia’s Secretary of State of criminal charges if he didn’t find Trump 11,780 more votes.

You can read the transcript of his “perfect call” linking Congressionally mandated aid to Ukraine to getting dirt on his political opponent.

You can read the latest indictment.

Now he’s out on bail, indicted in New York, in Florida, in DC, and, soon, in Georgia.

Because — under oath — his own people provided evidence that led grand juries to indict him.

He broke his oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.”

Attempting a coup is a direct assault on the Constitution.

“But what about Hunter Biden?” his admirers retort.

Because surely if Hunter is guilty of something, his father must be, too.

And if his father is guilty of something, then Trump must be innocent!

Or, if that’s not what they’re arguing, then what they must be arguing is that two wrong do make a right.

I.e., that there can be no proceedings against Trump unless someone also indicts Joe Biden.

And Joe must be guilty because Trump says so over and over!

(And when has Trump ever not been truthful?)

Behold “the Biden crime family.”  The wife who teaches community college.  The husband who rides Amtrak.  The son who died.  The other son who has addiction problems and played on his father’s name to enhance his career and fortunes (which is entirely legal — George W. Bush is one of myriad examples that spring to mind).  Sounds like a major crime family to me.

But now comes the real story, under oath, from an insider as close to the goings-on with Hunter and Joe as you can get.

And here it is.

Spread it around.

Turns out, Joe Biden did nothing wrong.

Staging a coup is a serious crime even if it fails.

It’s worse than paying someone to take your SATs or raping women or lying about hush money; worse than lying to banks or defrauding consumers or misusing a charitable foundation; worse than cheating on your taxes or bankrupting businesses (which is not illegal at all) or cheating at golf (also not illegal); worse than colluding with Russia or obstructing the investigation thereinto (1,000 former federal prosecutors of both parties say that one is massively illegal); worse than stealing top-secret documents, lying about having them, and refusing to give them back.

This Is the Case, argues Tom Nichols in the Atlantic.

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This is the moment that will decide our future as a democracy.

Trump is accused of multiple conspiracies against the United States, all designed to keep him in power against the will of the voters and in violation of the Constitution. . . .

. . . Republicans now, more than ever, face a moment of truth. They must decide if they are partisans or patriots. They can no longer claim to be both. . . .

The indictment handed down today challenges every American to put a shoulder to the wheel and defend our republic in every peaceful, legal, and civilized way they can.

According to the charges . . . the alleged plot inside the White House was not merely to invalidate an election; it included the possibility of unleashing the American military against its own people.

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Worth reading in full.

Then helping, if you can, with time or with treasure.

We all know he’s guilty, it’s just that a lot of people don’t care.

Like Trump, they wanted to see him hold onto power . . . and plan to help him once again.  What better way to own the libs?

But as you read the indictment, note that it’s not liberals whose words and actions are cited, but those of his own people.

On a  related topic, let’s talk prison reform.

Not because I can imagine his serving time any time soon — though he should — but because I’ve been meaning to share these two links for a while:

>  California’s free prison calls are repairing estranged relationships and aiding rehabilitation.

>  Planting seeds of the “Scandinavian model” in America: “California to transform infamous San Quentin prison with Scandinavian ideas, rehab focus.”

Both come from the Los Angeles Times (I had to pay $6 for a six-month subscription to see the second one, but it was quick and easy, with a link to cancel that I pasted into my calendar if I don’t want to renew at $4/week in January) . . .

. . . and both make great sense.

CONTRAST #1: Trump talks; Biden delivers (30 seconds).

CONTRAST #2: We want to make it easy to vote; they want to make it hard (e.g., Texas) — and to make administering elections fairly hazardous (e.g., Arizona).

If you care about women’s rights or gun safety . . . about delivering rural broadband or revitalizing our C-minus-rated infrastructure . . . about confronting climate change or preserving democracy . . . this stuff should matter a million times more than whether the NCAA guidelines on trans women in sports are sufficiently stringent.

But that’s our challenge: getting people to focus on what’s important.

And awakening more voters to the fact that — CONTRAST #3 — the economy does better under Democrats than Republicans. 

And the stock market — CONTRAST #4 — does much better. 

But because Republicans will try to distract voters with stuff that should matter a million times less, indulge me on two of them:

> Trans girls in sports.

Did you even know the NCAA has guidelines?  The once-Grand Old Party never mentions it. 

For high school sports, policies vary all over the map and I happily concede reasonable people can disagree on how this should work. 

But reasonable people might also disagree about whether whether 140-pound 12-year-olds should be allowed to play football. 

The median 12-year-old American boy weighs 89 pounds.  Why is he — or even his 125-pound classmate — at less of a disadvantage against the 140-pounder than is a 12-year-old girl on the field hockey team playing against a trans girl?  The trans girl may (or may not) be stronger or faster or heavier than the others — but someone has to be.  Why can it never be a trans girl?  Or, as above, a 140-pound 12-year-old boy?

My own preference would be to leave this to local officials who strive to be fair and who care about all children — including trans children.  Adults who love their trans children, I believe, are more to be admired than adults who hate or disown or otherwise discriminate against trans children.  My two cents.  Republican leadership may disagree.

But wherever you stand on this issue, it’s one-millionth as important as the issues the once-G.O.P. hopes to distract us from.

> Voter ID. 

Voter suppression has long been a key Republican tactic.  An NRA card is fine, but not a university-issued student ID?  A crime to supply water to voters standing for hours in line?  Really?    

I can’t count the number of times people have asked me why, if you need photo ID to borrow books from a library, you shouldn’t need one to vote. 

That’s meant to be a conversation stopper, but actually it’s bogus. 

Library theft is an actual problem; voter ID fraud is not.

Some people really do intentionally steal library books.  Others don’t return them because — like practically all of us — they’re lazy or forgetful or tend to procrastinate.  And/or because — once the books are overdue — they want to avoid fines.  In short:  there is a problem.  The library card helps somewhat to mitigate it. 

With voting, there is no problem.  The number of people who pretend to be someone they’re not and vote illegally is vanishingly small — and those criminals are at least as likely to be Republicans as Democrats, so the two vanishingly small numbers more or less cancel each other out anyway.

The rightwing Heritage Foundation keeps a database of all proven cases of voter fraud and have come up with a headline number of 1,437.  And yes, for every proven case there may be 100 that go undetected.  But this database covers decades.  During which time billions of votes have been cast. 

And it includes all kinds of voter fraud — not just identity fraud.  And if you drill down on a state — Pennsylvania, say — you’ll see that (a) there have been just a handful of cases since 1994 and (b) Heritage does not report whether it was Democrats or Republicans who cheated.  This may not always be knowable, but even where it’s not, it can usually be inferred.  And I’m pretty sure that if the preponderance of the vanishingly small number of identity fraud crimes were committed by Democrats, Heritage would have added a “party affiliation” column to its table.

Republicans know it’s not easy for people who can’t afford cars to get government issued ID’s, especially if they’re poor or housebound or working two jobs with no time to spare — and that such people are far more likely to vote Democrat than Republican. 

And that’s the reason they use the library card analogy to justify this unneeded barrier to voting.

But wherever you stand on THIS issue, it, too, is one-millionth as important as the issues the once-G.O.P. hopes to distract us from.

Have a great week.

Was Gen. Mark Milley right last year about the war in Ukraine?

A seemingly spot-on perspective.

But so long as the Ukrainians want to fight, we should support them.

Meanwhile, with Americans burning up this weekend and the increased risk of severe climate change (like: out-of-the-movies severe), our Republicans friends — who understand that fossil fuels and a burning planet are no more related than tobacco and cancer or than Trump’s January 6th rally and the innocent “tourism” that followed — have a plan to “block the expansion of the electrical grid for wind and solar energy; slash funding for the EPA environmental justice office; shutter the Energy Department’s renewable energy offices; prevent states from adopting California’s electric car standards; and give Republican state officials more power to regulate polluting industries.”

Stay cool.

Help if you can, with time or treasure.

Robert Reich lays out the Five Made Up Crises the right is using to distract voters from how well Bidenomics is working (inflation down! real wages rising! unemployment at record lows! factory-construction booming! 401k’s robust!) and what a terrible threat to democracy the right has become.

It’s A New Kind of Fascism, writes this history professor in The Atlantic.  “I’ve resisted using the word until now, but something menacing and novel is taking shape with the possibility of a second Trump term.”

How is this even a possibility in America?  Thom Hartmann explains how demagogues seize power.

It’s scary, and it’s real, and we’re not going to let it happen.

I know practically nothing about the Internet of Things, 4G, 5G, or the French company Sequans.  But I’m betting Maria Marced does, or she wouldn’t recently have agreed to join the board.   SQNS at $2.37 a share — only with money I can truly afford to lose.

It’s dumb to buy gold — and a whole lot dumber to buy it this way, as so many MAGA Republicans have and do.  Like Ed DeSanto, “a semiretired Florida medical coder and an avid right-wing radio fan.”

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. . . DeSanto’s $100,000 investment netted him just $53,000 worth of gold and silver . . . meaning the coins had been marked up 92 percent over the value of the metal. . . .

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The only surprise here is that Trump himself is not somehow in on the scam.  But Giuliani and Ted Cruz are.

So many fundamentally nice people have fallen so deeply into the right-wing’s alternative reality.

One of them — a faithful reader — took the time to respond to yesterday‘s comment on APE and AMC.

You may recall that it concluded:

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At what price the combined stock will trade after the two merge — and in the years to come — I have no idea.  But I’d rather own nine-tenths of a share for $1.80 than a full share for $5.85.

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To which he responded . . .

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Or would you rather own nine-tenths of a Hunter artwork?

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. . . offering this clip from The Yeshiva World:

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ENDLESS SCANDALS: Joe Biden Appointed Buyer of Hunter’s Paintings to Prominent Position

As President Joe Biden campaigned for the presidency, he promised to maintain an “absolute wall” between his official duties and his family’s private business interests. This pledge came into focus when Hunter Biden’s artwork debut in a New York art gallery in 2021 garnered attention with prices soaring up to $500,000.

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You can read the whole article, but the (unpaid) “prominent position” the buyer was appointed to was not ambassador to France, as you might expect, or Deputy Secretary of the Treasury.

It was not head of the Federal Trade Commission, Chief of Protocol, or even Poet Laurate.

No, it was a seat — one of 19 — on  the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad.

It’s hard to get more prominent than that!

What’s more, this “SCANDAL” was brought to light by “an explosive expose.”

Or at least that’s how it seemed to my correspondent.

He wasn’t interested in the weird mispricing of APE and AMC.

He had no comment on the situation in Israel or the struggle to preserve our democracy we face here.

And he certainly had nothing to say about this.

What occupied his attention and he successfully brought to mine was the “explosive” revelation that a long-time Democratic mega-donor, who had overpaid for one of Hunter’s paintings, landed an unpaid seat on a commission that neither he nor you nor I nor almost anyone else had ever heard of.

Welcome to the cult.

BONUS

Why All the stimulus was a good idea and not the cause of inflation.

Sunday’s first “Israel” post was quickly followed by a second, so if you missed it — and want to see the good that planting an olive tree, or a whole grove, could do (and how little it costs) — check it out.

As you know, Israel took a giant step backward yesterday.

Even so, a young Israeli friend writes:

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It’s a setback but I think/hope that we can leap out of it stronger and emboldened.

The liberal secular public in Israel is galvanizing. The current head of the Mossad spoke to his employees yesterday and was quoted as saying: “if it comes to it I assure you I will stand on the right side of history”.

All former heads of the Israeli defense apparatus are against this move.

The name of the game now is perseverance – fighting on with no loss of enthusiasm!

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Nick Kristoff thinks It’s Time to Start Discussing the Unmentionable.

Here at home, the same fight is underway:

Autocracy versus democracy.

A strongman who refuses to give up power, vows retribution, kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside, admires Putin; a demagog and a liar who assaults women and stiffs creditors, vilifies the press and the FBI, watches gleefully as rioters storm our nation’s Capitol refusing — for hours — to call them off; a bully and a narcissist who could walk down Fifth Avenue shooting people without losing votes.  (“You’re damn straight he could!” shout his supporters when they read a sentence like that.)

Versus a normal Administration that respects the Constitution, the rule of law, and civility; works long hours trying to make life better, safer, and healthier for its citizens and for generations to come.

Jonathan Alter says 2024 should be about A, B, C, D . . .

           Abortion, Bidenomics, Climate, Democracy

. . . but that the last of these is the one to emphasize. 

This is an election to decide whether we keep the world’s longest-running democracy — a beacon to the world — or watch the light go out.

If you can help, click here.

Barbenheimer‘s giant opening weekend  pushed AMC stock up more than 30% yesterday, closing at $5.85,  The nearly identical shares we own, APE, closed unchanged at $1.80. 

Fairly soon, the two stocks will be one and the same . . . although a lawsuit wound up changing the terms slightly: instead of each APE share converting into an AMC share, it will convert into just under nine-tenths of a share. 

At what price the combined stock will trade after the two merge — and in the years to come — I have no idea.  But I’d rather own nine-tenths of a share for $1.80 than a full share for $5.85.