How Dumb Is Howard Lutnick? And More

But first . . .

Something else you can do if you’re not already doing it:  Watch Rachel Maddow every night.  To save time, listen here.  (Advance 30 seconds at a time to skip the ads; click the “1X” to listen faster.)  The ones you’ve missed are all there . . . the perfect companions to your power walks.  Rachel will quicken your step.  This is no time to amble.

Trump Forced to Listen to 45 Minutes of Balalaika Music After Putin Puts Him on Hold.  Andy Borowitz’s headlines say it all.  No need to click.

David P.: “When I saw your ‘bonus‘ . . . <<New tool reveals Musk has overstated verified DOGE savings by at least 92%>> . . . I said to myself, ‘92%’ does not sound like a Musk lie. He’s at least an order-of-magnitude-liar.  He stated the savings are $105 billion, so if they were overstated by 92%, they would be $55 billion (192% of 55 is 105).  Sure enough, the DOGE Tracker says, ‘The total Verifiable Canceled Funding is currently $8.6 billion.’  So the savings are overstated by 1,110% (105=1210% of 8.6)!  The tracker needs more precise language.  And even then, these ‘savings’ within the $8.6 billion are bull. For example, when you unilaterally cancel a lease, you get sued and will most always lose.  So maybe it was a $1 million lease, you can chalk up those savings, but you will later have to pay $1 million in back rent plus interest plus the landlord’s court costs on your intentionally tortious act. Negative net savings — just like the negative savings when you illegally fire someone and then hire them back.”

And now . . .

Both these items are surely old news to you now, but I mean really: how dumb is Howard Lutnick?

“I think if you want to learn something on this show tonight,” he told FOX viewers, “buy Tesla. It’s unbelievable that this guy’s stock is this cheap. It’ll never be this cheap again.”

TSLA is selling for more than 100 times its trailing 12-month earnings.  Its next 12 months should be awful.  Sales have dropped precipitously worldwide among people concerned with climate change and/or democracy.  So maybe 10X or 20X trailing earnings might make more sense?  (Ford trades at 7X.)  A $20 or $40 stock instead of the $225 Howard touted as “unbelievably cheap?”

(TSLA opened at $29 five years ago, long after Musk had begun predicting his cars would that year be able to self-drive from a parking lot in LA to a parking lot in New York with never a human input.  It’s still at least year off, no?    So why is it cheap at eight or ten times the price?  Or look at it this way:  Is Howard really sure it’s worth more than the $147 it closed at last April 15?  Has the Tesla brand become that much more valuable in the last 11 months?  A friend who paid $100,000 for his top-of-the-line Tesla 5 years ago just got an offer of $24,200 when he went to sell it.)

Lutnick also now-famously suggested it could be a good idea to delay Social Security checks by a month.  Honest recipients, he said, wouldn’t mind (and so wouldn’t paralyze the administration with millions of unanswered calls?) — only “fraudsters” would complain.  A good way to ferret them out.

What does it say about Musk’s judgment that he was pushing Lutnick to be Treasury Secretary?  Bessent — though surely a disappointment if he could have prevented the DOGE kids from gaining access to the nation’s crown jewels — has at least some judgment and credibility.

And yes, of course, Musk is a genius.  That his rockets can land the way they do?  And Starlink?  But, tragically, he has become a mad genius — well-intentioned no doubt, but evil.

BONUS

I mentioned yesterday that Warren Buffett is apparently finding some investment refuge in Japan.

Pulitzer Prize-winning science reporter Laurie Garrett sends her Google group konichiwa from Kyoto:

March 20, 2025

Folks,

It’s such a relief to not be in America now. Japan is civil, kind, beautiful, sane, rational, congenial– everything we are losing. Took match tea today with a man from Greenland who is enjoying the first foreign trip of his life. He loathes Trump, of course. But he said everybody is trying to steal Greenland’s minerals, so America is on a list that includes China, Russia, and most of Europe.

A pair of women my age, from Chile, told me every big American oil and mining company is trying to get their hands on Chilean lithium. It’s a relief for them, too, to feel quiet and serene in Japan.

I hope that all of you are following what is happening to science in America.  A French scientist was denied entry to attend a conference because of his political criticism of Trump.

After years of hard work, Dr. Ian Lipkin had to shut down a research program that was caught up in Trump’s attack on Columbia U.

RFK Jr is proving even more disastrous than his cousin, Caroline, warned he would be. He ordered the CDC to review vaccine/autism links, is downplaying vaccines in favor of Vitamin A and cod liver oil to address measles, and wants farmers to let H5N1 flu spread among their chickens and dairy cows so that herd immunity will emerge.

Here’s the thing, Bobby: H5N1 has been circulating in chickens and 100s of other animal species since it first emerged in the mid-90s, and nobody has seen herd immunity yet, anywhere in the world.

Since 1988 the US and Japan have convened an annual high level scientific conference, attended by top government officials and more than 200 research scientists. This year in Tokyo I found the Americans deeply distressed for the Mar. 14-15 meeting, as the Trump Administration barred all federally employed scientists and officials from attending. A few were allowed to present their talks via Zoom, but none were permitted to come to Tokyo. It was a shameful snub of Japan, as well as another slap against science.

Few people outside of science understand the damage that is being done. Consider the example of the Lipkin program that has shut down. The ME/CFS study spent more than a decade creating cohorts of chronic fatigue patients and sufferers of other metabolic disorders whose cause has been mysterious. The work involves 1000s of stored blood samples, several scientists and technicians and years of 24/7 lab work. They had a huge breakthrough 3 years ago, discovering a specific malfunction in the mitochondria of patient’s cells. Mitochondria and the energy engines of cells, and Lipkin’s group made a mind-blowing finding.

With continued work, they hoped to cure these diseases, and get to the bottom of how profound metabolic disorders of this kind occur.

But now, it’s all shut down.

Even if the Democrats miraculously swing Congressional victories in 2026 and retake the White House in 2028 (BIG IFS), the damage has been done.  Technicians and scientists will be laid off, samples will be lost, patients will no longer be accessible.

Back to Square One.

Multiply the Lipkin example by 1000s of research labs working in biology, medicine, public health, climate, biodiversity, and dozens of other fields, and you begin to get a hint of the scale of these heinous acts of devastation.

I must return to staring at Sakura — cherry blossoms.

BREATHE…..

Laurie