Little Narco January 9, 2026January 8, 2026 But first . . . OPRT Closing at $5.32 yesterday, OPRT is selling at less than 4X its expected earnings of $1.30-$1.40/share. The case can be made it’s worth a lot more. These three insiders seem to agree — the chief credit officer, the chief legal officer, and the controller — having this week reported year-end purchases of $1+ million, in one case more than doubling his holdings from 28,090 shares to 73,980. As always: only to be bought with money you can truly afford to lose. But gosh. PRKR It’s a good thing I plan to live forever because — other than BOREF, which could take even longer than that — PRKR just drags on and on. But I’ve learned two things since Uncle Lou gave my brother and me 10 shares of General Motors 68 years ago: (1) Sometimes, patience pays off. I had to wait 35 years for one to finally pay off last year — for more than 50 times my money . . . which is a good thing, because . . . (2) Often, it doesn’t. (GM went bankrupt in 2009.) I don’t know into which category PRKR will ultimately fall. The company director who recently bought 5 million shares must think it’s the former. But even though its lawsuits against Qualcomm just drag on and on, jury selection in its suit against MediaTek (Case 6:22-cv-01163-ADA) is scheduled to begin March 23 — so who knows? Even more than with OPRT: only to be bought with money you can truly afford to lose! MINNEAPOLIS “The woman screaming was, obviously, a professional agitator, and the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self-defense.” — Trump You almost surely know the truth (here’s a post, from Charlie Sykes; and here’s Andrew Yang’s thoughtful take). But whom are you going to believe? Donald Trump, a very stable genius who alone can fix it — or your lying eyes? The Republican view is that it’s okay to shoot and kill a woman disregarding orders from a masked ICE officer. Similarly, it’s the Republican view that if you’re a suspected cocaine trafficker driving your boat south toward Trinidad in international waters, Pete Hegseth has the right to murder you. Ah, cocaine. Which brings us, finally, to . . . LITTLE NARCO The truth is, I don’t actually care what he was doing as a teenager. What matters is what he’s doing today. He’s Secretary of State! He’s Acting National Security Advisor! He’s Acting Archivist of the United States! (Is that where the Epstein files will ultimately reside?) He’s responsible for what’s left of the agency that for 65 years projected our soft power — and humanity — across the world! Still, did you know all this? I didn’t. Pretty colorful. From The American Prospect. It begins: If you’re a little too online, you likely know that Marco Rubio as a teenager made extra cash working for his late brother-in-law Orlando Cicilia. The business imported and sold exotic animals as a front for moving nearly a half million pounds of cocaine and marijuana. It was later said, when kingpin Mario Tabraue became a main character on the monstrously popular documentary series Tiger King, that the cocaine was actually stuffed into the bodies of vipers and boa constrictors, though an 80-page indictment of the enterprise makes no mention of that, and Tabraue has been known to sue those who accuse him of animal cruelty. “I dealt to support my animal habit,” Tabraue humbly told the Netflix documentarians about the drug ring that imported and distributed $79 million worth of drugs between 1976 and 1987. It was Rubio’s job, according to Manuel Roig-Franzia’s 2012 biography of the then-senator, to build the cages. Rubio has sworn he knew nothing about the drugs. He was only 16. (Admittedly, one of Cicilia’s co-defendants had been only 16 when Tabraue had allegedly ordered him to murder his estranged wife to stop her from telling the feds what they’d done with the body of another guy they’d murdered the year earlier.) Not that it matters, of course: What politician doesn’t have a felon relative? But for Rubio in particular, the connection seems too incongruous with his long-cultivated squeaky-cleanness. As a third grader, Rubio convinced his family to convert to Mormonism to better fit in with their wholesome new neighbors during a short stint living in Las Vegas. He spent every spare hour of high school obsessing over football, and his wife attends masses at multiple churches multiple times per week. When Univision broke the story of his ties to Cicilia’s business in 2011, Team Rubio declared war on the entire network, first dispatching surrogates like Ana Navarro to pressure executives to shelve the story, then convincing a host of other Republican politicians to boycott its debate on the nonsensical premise that the network had attempted to use the information about his brother-in-law as “blackmail” for the purposes of “extorting” an interview out of him. And then it gets more serious. I don’t know enough to assess its over-arching assertion . . . . . . Rubio’s approval ratings are the highest in the Republican Party, even as he is the architect of what is arguably Trump’s single most cynical policy: the scheme to appoint drug cartel bosses and their cronies atop the governments of every Latin American country, in the name of fighting drug cartels. . . . but things like Trump’s as-yet-unexplained pardon of the former Honduran President just 18 months into his 45-year prison sentence keep me from dismissing it out of hand. And, boy, does the story ever run deep and wide, with tons of CIA involvement, to before Secretary Rubio was even born. GREENLAND, ETC. Could we please get back to boring old normalcy? Where we’re by and large the good guys? Fighting countries that invade their neighbors rather than threatening to become one? Could we see the Epstein files?