Author: A.T.

It’s even worse than most of us think.

And ignoring the problem doesn’t solve it — it only makes it worse.

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Here is Tom Friedman on Liz Cheney and Neil Young.

What do they have in common?  Courage.

Hey, long-suffering shareholders — here is the Borealis annual report.

The Chairman’s Letter is upbeat.

I can accurately paraphrase the otherwise incomprehensible financial section this way: there were no revenues, there were expenses, they’re still in business.

The company is currently valued at $25 million (5 million shares outstanding at $5 each).  That’s less by a lot than the cost of a single new narrow-body commercial jet, of which, last I looked, there were about 17,000 in service worldwide.  By cutting what could wind up being 15 minutes or more off the ground time of each flight — 75 minutes, say, for a plane that makes five hops a day — the WheelTug system in which Borealis owns a majority interest could wind up adding 10% or 15% more capacity to the global fleet, the equivalent of perhaps 2,000 new planes . . . and without airlines’ having to hire a single new pilot or flight attendant.

Airports would gain significant capacity, as well . . . without having to build a single new runway or terminal.  Just by having planes sitting at the gate a shorter time.

Will this ever come to fruition?

Dunno.

Hope so.

(I’ve been listening to David McCullough’s wonderful The Wright Brothers.  There’s so much I never knew about “Kitty Hawk!”  Amazing what they did, how it changed the world, and how far we’ve come from 1903 in the virtual blink of an eye.  Obviously, the significance of what WheelTug is attempting is vanishingly small by comparison.  But in both cases, it had never been done; almost everyone said it couldn’t be; and, at least in the case of Wilbur and Orville, they just kept at it and at it and at it and at it . . . and guess what?)

Have you done your BrainHQ today? 

Did you see how Tom Brady’s stats compare with everyone else’s?  One thing he’s long swore by that could account for his being such an outlier — an edge he’s had over the competition to keep him sharp — is BrainHQ.

The studies just keep coming.

For example, from a Defense Department study of mild traumatic brain injury:

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Participants who used BrainHQ made significant gains in cognitive performance – four times bigger than the computer games control and comparable in size to moving from the 50^th to the 74^th percentile on a bell curve. The benefits persisted when measured three months after training.

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Hit the deck, buster!

So true.

Also (and vaguely related):

Bill Maher is so right.   We on the left are poised to hand Congress to the party of Trump.

Whom they could then elect Speaker of the House.  Far-fetched, to be sure — just as it was far-fetched to think McConnell would block Garland’s nomination for eight months, ostensibly to see whom the people favored (they favored Hillary by 3 million votes) . . . yet then in 2020 rush through Barrett’s confirmation not eight months out, but after voting had already begun (in an election Joe would win by 7 million votes).

So, yes: we absolutely need to win the mid-terms, just as we absolutely needed to win the two Senate run-offs last January — and did.

Watch Bill Maher.

I’m not suggesting we ask folks to compromise their principles; just that they be smart about their rhetoric.

If you have time, click that link, too.  It even has a Frank Luntz footnote.

His recent Guardian profile . . .

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. . . Having once worked for rightwing Republicans such as Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani, he no longer hesitates to condemn Donald Trump’s pernicious influence. . . .

. . . “Be thankful that you don’t have our poison [he told his British audience] … I’m very afraid of the American system being hopelessly damaged.”

. . . Luntz, who does not think he will be in the polling business much longer, hopes politicians will consider the lessons of his “Great Rethink” presentation and rethink their own ways before democracy seizes up for good. “I want to hit them over the head with this,” he says. “I want to be able to say to them: cut it out. Just stop. Nothing is worth destroying the country – and you are this close to destroying the country.”

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. . . is worth reading in full.

And if long-time Republican Luntz is “very afraid,” long-time Republican David Brooks is “terrified.”

David Brooks Looks At ‘Terrifying Future’ Of U.S. Right At Conservative Conference.

Wow.

If you’re concerned too (as I know most of you are), do something (as I know many of you have).

Join the League of Women Voters . . . join Field Team 6 . . . join Vote Forward . . . and, if you can — now, when your support is so much more leveraged than when most people will be giving next summer and fall — fund the Party.

Thanks!

Watch out for falling frozen iguanas.  They’re angry when they wake up.

Buy The Dips, High Inflation Will End Soon, argues a Seeking Alpha contributor.

I think there’s a good chance he’s right, though it’s anyone’s guess, because in addition to the measurable factors he assesses, like supply and demand, there’s the psychological.  Forty years ago I learned in interviewing Fed Chairman Paul Volcker that “running the Fed and charting appropriate monetary policy, have as much to do with psychology as with finance.”

But even if this inflation is just a bump caused largely by dislocations from the pandemic, I wouldn’t be too quick to “buy the dips” unless you’re truly in it for the long haul.

The market isn’t cheap here.  And have you read Billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham has a scarier prediction than his market crash call?

That said, our special situations are, I hope, well, special.

For example: PRKR.  As best I can tell, their lawsuits are substantive (see, for example, this from last week).  Patents are supposed to be enforceable.  Big Tech is not supposed to steal from American inventors any more than (say) China is supposed to.  So even if we do have a brutal bad bear market, I don’t see juries taking pity on Qualcomm or Intel, nor either of them being unable to pay up, should the trials go our way.  Only with money you can truly afford to lose; but I continue to like our odds.

Have a great week!

It’s THE BIG LIE, yes, argues a smart marketing friend, but many Americans are now too young to get the reference.  And even if they do, “big” is subliminally good (and little, bad).  Americans like big things.  We should call it THE LOSER’S LIE, he suggests, because Americans don’t like a loser.

It think we should call it both.

Either way, it clearly is a lie — see this, for example — and Americans tend not to like loser’s or liars.

Or cheaters.

Maybe we should add THE CHEATER’S LIE to the rotation.  He cheated to get into college, he cheated to get out of the draft, he cheated on his taxes, he cheated small contractors, he cheated students, he cheated at golf, he sought to cheat by pressuring someone to “find” 11,780 votes after the Georgia election result had been thrice audited.

A loser, a cheat, and a liar; leader of the Republican Party.

BONUS:

Jim Burt: “The last time a Republican-controlled Senate confirmed a Supreme Court nominee from a Democratic President was . . . (drum roll) . . . 1895!  That’s not a typo.  That really was the last one.  Sure, most Democratic presidents have had the luxury of Senates led by their own party, but not all.  By contrast, Democratic Senates have routinely confirmed most Republican Supreme Court nominations.  If Republicans take control of the Senate, they won’t confirm any Biden nominees to the high court.”

Click here.

Have a great weekend.

Any of these might offend, so I figured I’d do them all the same day:

If you’re uncomfortable with atheism:

> Skip the late Christopher Hitchens’ otherwise unmissable opening statement.

(Infallibility has always held great appeal, relieving us, as it does, of the need to think.  He alone can fix it.)

> Skip, also, last week’s word from Mr. Deity.

(I’m new to Mr. Deity.  He got his start a dozen years ago when he introduced Eve to the Garden of Eden.)

If you’re a cultist:

> Skip The Cult of Masked Schoolchildren.

(“History will not look kindly on our evidence-free decision to make kids suffer most.”)

> Skip, also, The Cult of  Mike Lindell.

(Really funny — and still relevant a half year later, as tens of millions remain on board.)

If drag rubs you wrong:

> Skip America Needs A Queen: Drag Queens Do Democracy . . . And Sports! 

(Timed to open the Winter Olympics, it benefits Field Team 6. Tickets ten bucks and up.)

If you’re altogether wholesome:

> Skip Alan Cumming’s wonderful but sporadically X-rated Baggage: Tales from a Fully Packed Life, read by the actor himself.

There you have it.

If Clarence Thomas and the others really believe the Court is not political — click here to read about the senior Justice and his wife! — they should be first in line to favor depoliticizing it.

Not packing it or stacking it — depoliticizing it.

As advocated here.

BONUS: A Righteous Man

Have 14 minutes to be inspired?

It’s not about John McCain, but about the same kind of courage, standing up to power in a POW camp.

It’s not about Liz Cheney or Adam Kinzinger, but about the same kind of courage, standing up for what’s right.

It’s about a guy you’ve never heard of: Master Sargent Roddie Edmonds.

The Democrats Can Still Prevail in the Midterms.

It’s way too soon to say.

One thing I’m looking forward to:

Republicans voting for lower prescription drug prices (that would be great!) or, more likely, against — which would help us unseat them.

Republicans voting for universal pre-K (that would be great!) or, more likely, against — which would help us unseat them.

Likewise, all the other Build Back Better components most voters would love to see that Republicans in the House and Senate block.

Likewise, too, all the measures to make voting easier.

I don’t think most Republican voters support longer lines for blacks than whites, even though their elected representatives emphatically do.

If the outcome of the mid-terms is uncertain, as it surely is, one thing I think we do know for sure is that wealth (and after-tax income) inequality have hurtled through the guard rails.  If there ever were any.

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. . . While the wealth of the world’s 10 richest men more than doubled during the pandemic — increasing from approximately $700 billion to $1.5 trillion between March 2020 and November 2021 — the incomes of approximately 99% of people around the globe fell during that time, and more than 160 million people have been forced into poverty . . .

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The new Oxfam report attributes one death every four seconds to this inequality.

Even if that’s a gross exaggeration and it’s only one death every ten or twelve seconds, it may still be a problem for people of good will to consider.

One such person is Abigail Disney, profiled on yesterday’s CBS Sunday Morning.*

I don’t believe there should be any absolute limits on income or wealth; but I do think taxes on extreme income and wealth should be high — far more difficult to avoid.

(But that the more you pay, the more effusive should be the thanks of a grateful nation.  Thanks, I would argue, are deserved. But in any event cost us nothing — and might at least marginally help the medicine go down.)

*The best weekly show on broadcast TV; set your DVR.

BONUS:

Solar-assisted cars are coming! 

Back then, it was “the Ukraine,” part of the Soviet Union.  At a campsite outside Kharkov.  I was 16.  (If you’re curious: Chapter 3.)

Little did I imagine how pivotal Ukraine would be in 2022 . . . or that the only thing their candidate would demand be changed in the 2016 Republican Party platform was not something about taxes or immigration or real estate or golf but about . . . are you ready? . . . Ukraine.

The only thing!

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The Trump campaign worked behind the scenes last week to make sure the new Republican platform won’t call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces, contradicting the view of almost all Republican foreign policy leaders in Washington. . . .

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This had to have pleased Putin and was orchestrated by Trump’s later-indicted, later-pardoned campaign manager, but — Russia, are you listening? — the one thing anyone who has not read the Mueller Report knows for sure is that there were no improper contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia.

Anyone who has read the report, on the other hand, with the possible exception of former Attorney General Bill Barr, knows that there were.

Virtually every Republican with the exception of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger has signed on to the world of alternative facts that was inaugurated just two days after Trump was.

We live in a world where tens of millions look at the crowds at the Obama and Trump inaugurals and can plainly see bigger crowds on the Mall for Trump.

At 16, I offered some alternative facts of my own.  The very junior division of the KGB knew I was lying but, given my age, let me go.  And now here we are.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia was something of a democracy for a time, but through murder and coercion all too quickly sorted itself out into the thugocracy/plutocracy/autocracy it is today, with a president for life.

You know the story.

Are the tens of millions of Americans incensed that re-election was stolen from their leader going to be misled into allowing our democracy to slip away?

CORT: Read this! Dr. Oz might be getting most of the attention, but a host of races—from governor on down—have Democrats terrified that Republicans could be setting the stage for a repeat of Donald Trump’s stolen-election claims in a key battleground state.

ME: Scary times.  But if we all do our part, we can pull it out, as we did in Georgia.

CORT: How?

ME:  Have you  joined your local chapter of the League of Women Voters?  Joined Field Team 6?  Joined Vote Forward?  Given all you comfortably can to fund the Party?

CORT: Yes, not yet, and not aware.  Will do.

Have a great weekend!