Author: A.T.

His own top general calls Trump “fascist to the core.”

“No one has ever been as dangerous to this country,” he says.

That strikes me as more important than the price of eggs — important though that price is.

His team and their 922-page plan may be even more dangerous.

Here’s an arresting 30-second summary: Project 2025: They Mean It!

Here: a guide to its provisions.

Share either or both widely, because they really do mean it.

It’s not just Dick Cheney — who went so far as to condone torture to protect America — who now goes so far as to endorse a Democrat.  It is, as well, hundreds of former Trump appointees and millions of traditional Reagan, Bush, McCain Republicans like this one.  His own vice president warns against voting for him.

Trump is liar, a sociopath, a narcissist, a convicted felon, an adjudicated rapist, the sole reason the border crisis has not been resolved . . . and the founding fathers’ greatest fear: a demagogue.

He kept a book of Hitler’s speeches by his bedside.

He faces three devastating federal indictments.

No one has ever been as dangerous to this country.

Don’t just sit there — DO SOMETHING.

President Obama’s Pittsburgh speech.  So, so good.

Howard Stern’s Kamala Harris interview.  So, so good!

Our Class, on East 13th Street, closing soon.  Based on an all-too-true story, summarized here.  I can’t stop thinking about it.  Language like “vermin” has no more place in 2024 America than it did in 1935 Poland.

Though it’s made big news in the run-up to release of Bob Woodward’s War next week — Trump sent Putin COVID tests before most Americans could get them — KGB interest in Trump goes all the way back to 1977:

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‘The perfect target’: Russia cultivated Trump as asset for 40 years

Donald Trump was cultivated as a Russian asset over 40 years and proved so willing to parrot anti-western propaganda that there were celebrations in Moscow, a former KGB spy has told the Guardian.

Yuri Shvets, posted to Washington by the Soviet Union in the 1980s, compares the former US president to “the Cambridge five”, the British spy ring that passed secrets to Moscow during the second world war and early cold war.

Now 67, Shvets is a key source for American Kompromat, a new book by journalist Craig Unger, whose previous works include House of Trump, House of Putin. The book also explores the former president’s relationship with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.

“This is an example where people were recruited when they were just students and then they rose to important positions; something like that was happening with Trump,” Shvets said by phone on Monday from his home in Virginia.

Shvets, a KGB major, had a cover job as a correspondent in Washington for the Russian news agency Tass during the 1980s. He moved to the US permanently in 1993 and gained American citizenship. He works as a corporate security investigator and was a partner of Alexander Litvinenko, who was assassinated in London in 2006.

Unger describes how Trump first appeared on the Russians’ radar in 1977 when he married his first wife, Ivana Zelnickova, a Czech model. Trump became the target of a spying operation overseen by Czechoslovakia’s intelligence service in cooperation with the KGB.

Three years later Trump opened his first big property development, the Grand Hyatt New York hotel near Grand Central station. Trump bought 200 television sets for the hotel from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned Joy-Lud electronics on Fifth Avenue.

According to Shvets, Joy-Lud was controlled by the KGB and Kislin worked as a so-called “spotter agent” who identified Trump, a young businessman on the rise, as a potential asset. Kislin denies that he had a relationship with the KGB.

Then, in 1987, Trump and Ivana visited Moscow and St Petersburg for the first time. Shvets said he was fed KGB talking points and flattered by KGB operatives who floated the idea that he should go into politics.

The ex-major recalled: “For the KGB, it was a charm offensive. They had collected a lot of information on his personality so they knew who he was personally. The feeling was that he was extremely vulnerable intellectually, and psychologically, and he was prone to flattery.

“This is what they exploited. They played the game as if they were immensely impressed by his personality and believed this is the guy who should be the president of the United States one day: it is people like him who could change the world. They fed him these so-called active measures soundbites and it happened. So it was a big achievement for the KGB active measures at the time.”

Soon after he returned to the US, Trump began exploring a run for the Republican nomination for president and even held a campaign rally in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. On 1 September, he took out a full-page advert in the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe headlined: “There’s nothing wrong with America’s Foreign Defense Policy that a little backbone can’t cure.”

The ad offered some highly unorthodox opinions in Ronald Reagan’s cold war America, accusing ally Japan of exploiting the US and expressing scepticism about US participation in Nato. It took the form of an open letter to the American people “on why America should stop paying to defend countries that can afford to defend themselves”.

The bizarre intervention was cause for astonishment and jubilation in Russia. A few days later Shvets, who had returned home by now, was at the headquarters of the KGB’s first chief directorate in Yasenevo when he received a cable celebrating the ad as a successful “active measure” executed by a new KGB asset.

“It was unprecedented. I am pretty well familiar with KGB active measures starting in the early 70s and 80s, and then afterwards with Russia active measures, and I haven’t heard anything like that or anything similar – until Trump became the president of this country – because it was just silly. It was hard to believe that somebody would publish it under his name and that it will impress real serious people in the west but it did and, finally, this guy became the president.”

Trump’s election win in 2016 was again welcomed by Moscow. Special counsel Robert Mueller did not establish a conspiracy between members of the Trump campaign and the Russians. But the Moscow Project, an initiative of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, found the Trump campaign and transition team had at least 272 known contacts and at least 38 known meetings with Russia-linked operatives.

Shvets, who has carried out his own investigation, said: “For me, the Mueller report was a big disappointment because people expected that it will be a thorough investigation of all ties between Trump and Moscow, when in fact what we got was an investigation of just crime-related issues. There were no counterintelligence aspects of the relationship between Trump and Moscow.”

He added: “This is what basically we decided to correct. So I did my investigation and then got together with Craig. So we believe that his book will pick up where Mueller left off.”

Unger, the author of seven books and a former contributing editor for Vanity Fair magazine, said of Trump: “He was an asset. It was not this grand, ingenious plan that we’re going to develop this guy and 40 years later he’ll be president. At the time it started, which was around 1980, the Russians were trying to recruit like crazy and going after dozens and dozens of people.”

“Trump was the perfect target in a lot of ways: his vanity, narcissism made him a natural target to recruit. He was cultivated over a 40-year period, right up through his election.”

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The Guardian published that report in 2021.

It will be interesting to see what Woodward’s War has to add to the story.

We used to prefer the FBI to the KGB.*

Not Trump.  He’s too smart and patriotic for that.

And has been on the phone to Putin a lot these past few years.

SWITCHING GEARS

SQNS  doubled (again).  If you paid 55 cents in August or $1 last week, $2.35 is hard to resist.  But — famous last words — I’m holding most of mine.

*Now FSB.

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Former President Donald Trump has politicized the situation at every turn, spreading falsehoods and conspiracies that fracture the community instead of bringing it together.

The worst example is a social media post Trump made on Monday, in which he accused the federal government and Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper of “going out of their way to not help people in Republican areas. MAGA!” That same day, Trump also posted that the Biden administration has “left Americans to drown” in North Carolina and other states.

. . . Trump has also said that Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp couldn’t get President Joe Biden on the phone to help his state with hurricane relief — a claim that Kemp himself debunked — and falsely claimed that the government doesn’t have enough money to respond to the disaster because “Kamala spent all her FEMA money, billions of dollars, on housing for illegal migrants.” He’s called it “the worst response in the history of hurricanes” and suggested it would be the Biden administration’s own Hurricane Katrina.

There’s no evidence to support any of those ridiculous claims.

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Gotta love this guy.  He seems to really know what he’s talking about.  Watch.

VOTING

Not sure what judges to vote for or which way to vote on obscure ballot initiatives?

1. Click BlueVoterGuide.Org.
2. Enter your address.
3. Make your choices.

Try it — even right now, if you have a few minutes.

Spread the word!

WINNING

Everyone from Dick Cheney, Mike Pence, Mitt Romney, Bernie Sanders, Taylor Swift, Willie Nelson — and the leaders of all our democratic allies around the world! — are counting on us to get this right.

Rob F.: “The Sierra Club’s letter-writing campaign is a really easy way to have a positive impact.”

And here’s how to volunteer locally.

I voted today.

Dropped my absentee ballot straight into the post office outgoing mail slot.

It felt great.

But when I first opened the three-page official ballot, I faced the usual helplessness.

I knew my choice for president, of course.  But state tax collector?  Which judges to vote to retain?

So here’s all you do:

1. Click BlueVoterGuide.Org.
2. Enter your address.*
3. Make your choices.

Try it — even right now, if you have a few minutes.

If you think it’s as helpful as I do, spread the word.

*But wait. Just above the address field (and below the big 1), click “instructions.”  You’ll see how to build your ballot, save it, print it, and share it with friends.  (Not your real, official ballot, of course; but a way to remember what you plan to do inside the voting booth or when you vote by mail.)

BONUS

Rob F.: “I’m participating in the Sierra Club’s letter-writing campaign. It’s a really easy way for people to have a positive contact with potential Harris voters in swing states.  This link provides all the details for anyone who wants to have an impact.”

DID YOU LIKE SEINFELD?  VEEP? 

If you missed Monday’s Zoom with Nebraska Senate candidate Dan Osborn, consider signing up for this one with Julia Louis-Dreyfus — Sunday 7pm EDT.  As before, you can “buy” a free ticket and decide whether and how much to give once you hear the pitch.  I, for one, was impressed.

But this is not one of the astonishing things.

DO YOU LIKE TAYLOR SWIFT?  THE 76-ERS?  CRUISING TO COZUMEL?

Andy Cohen?  Stephen Colbert?  Shakira?  P!nk?

Sign up — or get your kids or grandkids to signup — to earn free raffle tickets at FanOut.Vote.

That is not one of the astonishing things, either.

The first astonishing thing is Jack Smith’s 165-page brief outlining in damning detail how defendant Trump acted to cling to power after losing the 2020 election.  No Trump supporters will read it, just as none read the Mueller Report. (Known to movie lovers as, the “I’m not listening!” approach to knowledge acquisition).  But choosing not to know something doesn’t make it any less true.

Not being a Trump supporter, maybe you’ll breeze through it this weekend.  (They are double-spaced pages.)

The second — TOTALLY — astonishing thing is this 14-minute audio clip.

Two experts talking colloquially about artificial intelligence.

What makes it astonishing is that the two experts are not human. 

It is a conversation about AI between two AI’s.

As veteran computer scientist Gregory Miller — who co-founded the OSET Institute and TrustTheVote and has his own, real, podcast — explained it for me:

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This clip is from a podcast that explains a new audio AI technology that greatly enhances the emerging conversational capabilities of AI agents.

There is just one completely wild twist: the podcast participants engaged in this conversation about how this new level of conversational AI tech works… are both AI agents themselves.

They’re not real; they don’t exist; they’re figments of two machines’ creation.

Both were fed a blog post from computer scientist Simon Willison and subsequently autonomically generated a real-time, on-the-fly conversation with one another.

What makes it so ridiculously authentic is the integration of disfluencies. . . language elements such as changes in tone, pauses, “ums” and “ahs” . . . because, well, no one can listen to a pair of robots with mechanical-audio voices talk with one another.

It boldly illustrates the deep and disturbing depth of AI deep-fake potential.

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Sure, AI may cure cancer and Parkinsons and solve the climate crisis.  That’s nice.  But as it races along, where will actual humans fit in?  And what if someone decides to use it for ill?

“I fear it is unstoppable and uncontrollable,” I wrote Miller.

“Unstoppable, yes,” he agreed, “but not uncontrollable.  We need responsive and responsible regulation.  And on this point, I cannot overemphasize how urgent it is to have the right technologists at the tables of policy formulation.”

My sense is that he should be one of them.

BONUS – Humor from Our Neighbor to the North

America: Have You Lost Your Mind?

John Kitsteiner’s Note to Friends Outside of the South:

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We live in Greene County, East Tennessee. Our county’s southern border is the Tennessee-North Carolina state line that runs along the heights of the Appalachian Mountains. We are within the hardest hit region of the U.S.

The questions I have been hearing a lot is why was this so bad, and why weren’t people prepared. I’ll try to answer those questions in the following post.

Hurricane Helene was the strongest hurricane (in recorded history) to hit Florida’s big bend region (on the eastern edge of the panhandle). It is the deadliest hurricane to hit the United States since Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

The death toll is over 160 so far. We are still finding bodies, and there are still many, many people missing as I write this today six days after the hurricane hit land.

I work in the emergency department at Greeneville Community Hospital. The hospital itself has been evacuated because we have no water in the majority of the county. We are still running our emergency department as a critical access site for our community. Fortunately, I have a well and didn’t lose electricity for long. I was able to haul water in a 300 gallon tote in the back of my truck to the hospital for the first few days so we could flush toilets and wash hands. It took a few days, but we now have porta-potties and water tanks on trucks to keep the emergency department running.

Under an hour from our hospital to the east, Unicoi County Hospital was flooded requiring patients and providers to be rescued from the roof via helicopter.

Under an hour from our hospital to the south, over the mountains, Asheville, NC has been hit particularly hard.

But why was this region hit so hard?

First, we had a lot of rain before Hurricane Helene even showed up. Depending on the area, we had 7-11 inches of rain in the week before the first storm clouds of the hurricane arrived. This rain saturated the ground and filled ponds and streams.

Then the hurricane arrived. She barreled her way up through the panhandle of Florida, quickly shot through Georgia, and then slowed down and stalled over North Carolina and East Tennessee. And that’s right where we live.

The reason she stalled involves atmospheric pressure conditions that I don’t fully understand, but the result was that this hurricane dropped 20 inches to over 30 inches of rain in some areas… that’s an estimated 40 trillion gallons of rain.

How much is 40 trillion gallons of water?

40 trillion gallons of water is enough to cover the entire state of North Carolina with 3.5 FEET of water.

40 trillion gallons of water is enough to fill 60 MILLION Olympic-sized swimming pools.

40 trillion gallons of water is 619 DAYS of water flowing over Niagara Falls.

So this is an unprecedented amount of rain already falling on an area that had just received ground-saturated rain.

But it wasn’t just the amount of rain, it was the geography of where that rain fell.

The southeastern slopes (of western North Carolina) and the northwestern slopes (of East Tennessee) acted as funnels or rain catchments that directed all this water downhill and concentrated it into streams and rivers running into the valleys. It overflowed these streams and rivers causing massive flooding.

How much flooding?

The French Broad River usually crests at 1.5 feet… but it reached 24.6 feet during the storm.

The Nolichuckey River rose to almost 22 feet. The Nolichuckey River Dam in Greene County, during the peak of the flooding, took on 1.2 MILLION gallons of water per SECOND. Compare that to Niagara Falls which peaks at 700,000 gallons per second. Fortunately, this dam held… but barely, with damage.

Consequences.

The flooding, and all the things the flooding carried with it (large trees, vehicles, buildings, etc.) caused widespread damage. It destroyed homes and businesses. It destroyed roads and bridges. It knocked out power.

This isolated many places for days and days from normal rescue efforts and evacuation plans.

Here in Greene County, the flooding destroyed the intake pump for the county’s primary water supply. We hope they will be able to bring in a temporary pump to bypass the damaged system, but that still may take a couple weeks. In the meantime, most people in the county have no clean water for drinking, washing hands, or bathing, and no water for sanitation.

I have taken care of people in the emergency department who had their homes literally washed away. Everything they own, other than the clothes on their back, has been lost. Many friends have had their homes almost destroyed by flooding and their houses are filled with mud and debris.

And this is just in my immediate area. Other places around us have unfortunately been hit harder.

Why weren’t people prepared?

No one in the mountains of North Carolina or East Tennessee prepares for a hurricane.

It’s kind of like asking why someone in Iowa doesn’t prepare for a tidal wave or why someone in Florida doesn’t prepare for a blizzard. It’s not what happens, like ever.

This was a combination of already rain-saturated ground before the hurricane hit, the hurricane/storm stalling over this region dumping unprecedented amounts of rainfall in a small area, and the geography of mountains channeling and concentrating all this water into the valleys below that created a perfect storm, so to speak, of conditions that caused this disaster.

It couldn’t have been prevented or prepared for.

Please feel free to share this. Hopefully it answers some questions and provides a better understanding of what has happened and why it is so devastating.

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Pride goeth before the fall, so I don’t want to shout this too loudly . . . but of the 15 stocks I commented on six weeks ago, only one is down much (OPRT, from $3.13 to $2.82, making it, I hope, an even better moonshot) . . . most are up 10% or 20% (vs. 3% for the market as a whole) . . . and three have done really nicely:

> PRKR — up 150%.  I haven’t sold.

> CNF — also up 150% — in just the last couple of days, no less, on enormous volume, I don’t know why.  Yesterday, I sold some for a tax loss, holding all those in which I have a profit.

> SQNS — up 100%.  That $200 million they were supposed to get . . . they got.  So with something like $1 a share in cash net of debt, and a profitable business, I’m betting on its going higher.

This first clip starts with the guy who founded your local Walgreens and financed some pro-Hitler stuff . . . introduces you to Elizabeth Dilling, “the female Führer” . . . and leads to J.D. Vance following in at least a few of her footsteps — calling for the end of the American Republic.

This second picks up with Vance saying that most of American culture should be “ripped out like a tumor” and citing the ideas of Curtis Yarvin, who says “Americans are going to have to get over their dictator phobia.”

Putin and Trump feel exactly the same way!

They’ve been working on this for eight years now and are getting really close to a breakthrough.

(See, too: Tucker Carlson and the Right’s Love Affair with Dictators.)

In related news, it turns out there may be more going on with the Longshoremen’s strike — and it’s timing right before the election — than just a call for a 60% wage hike and a ban on increased productivity.

No, it turns out that the head of the union has close ties to Trump — and that they both have ties to the mob.

(Daggett was never convicted, though it should be noted that one of his co-defendants failed to show; his body was eventually found decomposing in the trunk of a car outside a New Jersey diner.)

“Read all about it” in this colorful tweet or (for example) in this more traditional report: Harold Daggett: How union leader who fought mob tie allegations is holding the US economy to ransom.

We need to win this election.

The whole free world is counting on it.

Pitch In!

Here’s how to volunteer locally.

5 Investment Books That Taught Me More Than an MBA (says a guy with 573,000 Instagram followers).

And in other news . . .

I spent an hour yesterday texting with a billionaire who holds Harvard Law and Harvard Business degrees and is an idiot.  (I say this with a mix of affection and frustration, as we’ve been friends for more than half a century.)

He calls Trump, with whom he used to golf, “dishonest” and a “monster,” so he’s not going to vote for him.

But he’s not going to vote for Kamala either.

He’s “sitting this one out.”

What???   

“You want socialism?” he asks.

Well, we already have socialism, I tell him, and have had it all his life.  Public schools, public roads, the social safety net.  So it’s not as though extending $35 insulin to all who need it, not just seniors . . . and providing first-time-buyer assistance to promote private homeownership and $50,000 tax incentives to promote small-business start-ups . . . would suddenly push us over the cliff from capitalism to socialism.

“You want open borders and 13,000 convicted murderers RELEASED into the USA?” he asks.

Leave aside that it is Trump who killed the bipartisan bill that would finally have resolved the border crisis . . . so it is solely Trump who is responsible for it now.

Here’s the real story on those 13,000 murderers she has allowed to roam our streets:

> First, “the vast majority” (to quote ICE) arrived in the decades before Harris was Vice President — some of them when Trump was President.

> Second, most of them are not roaming the streets — they’re in prison.  See the difference?

(These two  stories provide the facts.)

But like all those Haitians terrorizing Springfield as they feast on dogs and cats, Trump cultists — and even idiots like my friend — don’t care.  They spread this stuff anyway.

He absolutely does not want Trump re-elected (and could easily afford to throw five or ten million dollars at the problem); yet won’t do the one most minimal thing he could do to help prevent it.  Vote.

Which makes our work that much harder.

Here’s how to volunteer locally.
 

Jonathan Elkhoury:

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As a Lebanese, this is one of the happiest days in Lebanon’s history.

As a Middle Easterner, this is one of the most transformative days for the Middle East.

As a human being who holds peace before my eyes, this is the most important day for our region.

Nasrallah and Hezbollah have terrorized the Lebanese people since the 1980s. He is responsible for the continuous downfall of Lebanon’s economy and sovereignty. He bears responsibility for countless assassinations of fine Lebanese men and women, solely for opposing his grip on our precious country.

Nasrallah is also responsible for the slaughter of thousands of Syrian children, women, and men, as well as for other atrocities across the Middle East.

Every Lebanese and every decent human being should feel joy at the downfall of one of the greatest evils of our time.

Now, we have a real chance to look forward, ensuring Hezbollah’s weapons are handed over to the Lebanese authorities, and sitting down with Israelis and the West for genuine negotiations on normalization and peace between our countries—Israel and Lebanon.

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Jared Kushner Says America Should Tell Israel To Finish The Job.

Not someone I would normally expect to link to; but read it and let me know what you think.

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. . . today, with the confirmed killing of Nasrallah and at least 16 top commanders eliminated in just nine days, was the first day I started thinking about a Middle East without Iran’s fully loaded arsenal aimed at Israel. So many more positive outcomes are possible. . . .

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No one knows the Middle East like Dennis Ross.  He and Prof. Sonnenfeld also see reason for hope:

Death of Hezbollah’s Nasrallah Brings New Chance for Peace

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. . . Just when the prospect of peace in the Middle East seemed further away than ever, the dramatic death of longtime Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah significantly alters the balance of power and offers a renewed opportunity for peace.  . . .

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BONUS

Kathy M: “Perhaps, Eric Adams could pay his debt to society by sharing his culinary skills with KP duty in prison?!  And given the tragic deaths caused by Hurricane Helene, hats off to NOAA for saving us from an even worse outcome.  Yet, NOAA is on the Project 2025 hit list.”

I’m co-hosting this zoom TONIGHT at 6pm Eastern time.  Consider “buying” a free ticket — and ponying up if you like what you hear.