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I have kept an eye on The Motley Fool (TMF), a stock picking service founded by Tom and David Gardner, since its early days, mostly because it espoused a philosophy that went against the fashion of the day, and that philosophy was long-term investing. Buy a stock and don’t sell for at least three years, five is better, forever is a lovely ideal, if rarely achieved. Fundamental (that is, based on business fundamentals) investing is far superior to technical investing (based on dubious theories of how stock prices move). Don’t bother with market timing because predicting the market on a daily basis is futile.

I even joined their Stock Advisor service.

It should not be surprising that I was dismayed by this latest mail from TMF:

Tomorrow, David Gardner will release his next set of Best Buys Now in Stock Advisor.

And while you can trust that we’ll email you for every new investment recommendation, we wanted to remind you about an additional way to receive alerts for our latest recommendations — Motley Fool Text Alerts!

No matter where you go or what you’re doing, The Motley Fool is committed to bringing you the best stocks to buy wherever you are!

Because in a market where things can change on a dime…

We think it’s critical to have the most up-to-date information possible.

Uh, really?

This is just market timing without actually using the words. We’re looking at a market in tumult, in which today’s recovery becomes tomorrow’s crash, and all it’ll take is some other bit of bad news to really send it into a tumble – whether it’s pandemic-related, or a revelation about Big Finance screwing up once again.

These sorts of things aren’t predictable, and yet here’s TMF clearly trying to predict precisely those sorts of events. Incidentally, TMF’s Stock Advisor service was badly burned when they recommended Luckin Coffee (LK), a Chinese coffeehouse chain. Following an announcement of massive fraud at the company, the stock price dropped 90% from the price when Stock Advisor recommended it. (No, no pain here.) As Stock Advisor acknowledged, these are the sorts of events that cannot be predicted – and make the life of stock timers a living hell.

I suppose they might retort that younger members expect text messages, rather than email or simply remembering to visit TMF to see the latest recommendation. However, as you can see in the quote, they are clearly selling it (just a phrase, not literal) as an important part of the investing experience.

Which is just utter nonsense.

In combination with the lapse of their portfolio tracking service, which they claimed was done in order to give better service (eh? what? do you think we’re fools? Oh, wait…):

We remain committed to helping you track your returns, and that’s why we’re retiring this tool – because we think we can do better. We are exploring other ways to help you track your returns.^[1]

That was back in October. It makes it harder to take TMF seriously. When the philosophy goes out the window, it raises suspicions that money – them getting there’s, namely – has become the number one motivation of TMF, and not educating the investor, as was their original primary purpose.

So much for their roots.

¹ Yes, I wrote a letter of complaint several months ago. No response. Another black mark on their record.

You have to wonder if the Republicans, in general, realize how discredited they’ve become by their relentless protection of the vast incompetency residing at the the top of their hierarchy. For example, if any of them had written this article concerning the behavior of the Chinese Communists, I might not take it at all seriously. But … it’s written by Senator Mitt Romney (R-UT), who had the gumption to vote for conviction on one of the two charges on which Trump was impeached.

None of the rest of the Republicans apparently took it seriously, between reports of some sleeping or reading, and responding with ridiculous criticisms. But one did, and so now I take what Mitt Romney writes seriously.

Just When We Don’t Need To Go To Work – just have a little patience.

She got a bit of an infection, it turns out, that might have explained the lack of healthy fruit last year. We had someone trim the troublesome spot.

Then I found there was a lone fruit survivor:

I’ll forego the munching part of our show. But the tree seems to be doing OK, regardless:

Lovely, I think.

I hesitate to steal someone’s video, so instead I will direct you to Spaceweather’s gallery of cool videos. In this one, Robert Barsa had been observing the recent Lyrid meteor shower when a bright fireball, unconnected to the Lyrids, came through.

It’s cool, not only for seeing it, but for the Lyrid meteorites that continue to show up as the fireball’s smoke trail slowly dissipates.

This somewhat old (9 days) Science paper summarizes what was known then about Covid-19 and suggests an idea:

Understanding the rampage could help the doctors on the front lines treat the fraction of infected people who become desperately and sometimes mysteriously ill. Does a dangerous, newly observed tendency to blood clotting transform some mild cases into life-threatening emergencies? Is an overzealous immune response behind the worst cases, suggesting treatment with immune-suppressing drugs could help? What explains the startlingly low blood oxygen that some physicians are reporting in patients who nonetheless are not gasping for breath? “Taking a systems approach may be beneficial as we start thinking about therapies,” says Nilam Mangalmurti, a pulmonary intensivist at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania (HUP).

Will we be seeing some form of chemotherapy to suppress or inhibit the immune system?This is starting to feel like a blood disease. WaPo published this article yesterday on blood clots; my Arts Editor exclaimed it sounds like “reverse-Ebola”:

Reports of strokes in the young and middle-aged — not just at Mount Sinai, but also in many other hospitals in communities hit hard by the novel coronavirus — are the latest twist in our evolving understanding of the disease it causes. The numbers of those affected are small but nonetheless remarkable because they challenge how doctors understand the virus. Even as it has infected nearly 2.8 million people worldwide and killed about 195,000 as of Friday, its biological mechanisms continue to elude top scientific minds. Once thought to be a pathogen that primarily attacks the lungs, it has turned out to be a much more formidable foe — impacting nearly every major organ system in the body.

I’m trying to be just amazed at this:

President Trump on Friday threatened to block an emergency loan to shore up the U.S. Postal Service unless it dramatically raised shipping prices on online retailers, an unprecedented move to seize control of the agency that analysts said could plunge its finances into a deeper hole.

“The Postal Service is a joke,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office. To obtain a $10 billion line of credit Congress approved this month, “The post office should raise the price of a package by approximately four times,” he said. [WaPo]

Why should the USPS take the advice of a “businessman” who has failed many, many times? Why should anyone even pay attention to his laborious business claims?

But raising USPS prices so sharply may not have the impact the president desires, analysts said, as it would put postal services prices far above those of UPS and FedEx, allowing them to raise prices a little and still gain market share, they said.

“This is about as catastrophically stupid an idea that anyone could ever imagine,” said Mark Cohen, director of retail studies at Columbia University Business School. “As if anyone from Amazon to the local mom and pop delivery businesses would ever put up with a rate increase like that when they have alternatives.”

Jon Gold, the vice president of supply chain and customs policy at the National Retail Federation, said in a statement that higher prices would “significantly hurt rural communities and small businesses in addition to USPS.”

Tell me again why we’re expecting any business sense out of this failed businessman? He should be critiquing actors, not companies.

This … is a guy.

Roger Corman’s Swamp Women (1956) is an odd combination of the bad with the good. A gang of desperate women are in their third year of imprisonment in a New Orleans prison, but the jewels they stole have not yet been found. They break out with the help of a new prisoner, who goes with them. What they don’t know? The newbie is a police lieutenant, working under cover. And what doesn’t she know? The jewels are hidden in the local swamp.

The one in the back seat on the left is bemoaning her lack of gun to return fire on the pursuing cops.
That makes her so hot.

On the good side of the ledger is the women in this movie, who quite frankly dominate. For the era, it’s unusual to see such a movie; it’s downright exotic to see a movie where several of the women are not just pushy broads, to use the jargon of the era, but actually bloodthirsty and quick with a gun. And the woman (and her boyfriend) who get caught up in the scheme on an innocent swamp trip are ground up and tossed aside by this gang.

On the negative side? The plot is silly, the acting mediocre, and the cinematography is rather ghastly – except for the underwater scenes, which I thought were impressively well done, even if they only last a total of roughly two seconds. While the characters are fairly credible, some of the actions – such as fabricating and tossing a spear, with superior accuracy, at someone in a tree, all in about two minutes – were quite unbelievable.

And I am forced to admit that the subtle acting skills of the alligator that ultimately makes a meal of the innocent woman (who seemed to more or less either try to suck the tonsils off her man, or weep and wail about her fate) were the superior skill set for this movie.

Two more notes: the commercial posters of this movie are wildly inaccurate and appeal to prurient interests. The only bonds are used on the non-entity guy who the gang captures along the way.

And the opening credit sequence? Imaginative, creative, and, in a way, disturbing.

In the end, it’s as if ideology met inferior film making, making me wonder if there might have been something more to this than made it to film.

The tulips are the next to appear:

Following these, for those who need their memory refreshed:

We’re still not sure of the species of these. Meanwhile, someone’s staring at us:

The campaign for the open Kansas Senatorial seat, to be vacated by the retirement of Pat Roberts (R-KA) in January, appears to feature of whiff of fear on the Republican side of the spectrum:

Kansas GOP chair Mike Kuckelman sent letters Thursday to two Republican candidates asking them to drop out of the race for U.S. Senate for the good of the party.

In nearly identical April 23 letters to Kansas Senate President Susan Wagle and former Johnson County Commissioner Dave Lindstrom, Kuckelman cited poor fundraising and polling data to argue that the candidates lack a viable path to the Republican nomination to replace retiring GOP Sen. Pat Roberts.

Kuckelman told the candidates that continuing their campaigns will endanger the party’s ability to hold the seat in November after eight decades of dominance in Senate races.

“I ask that you put the good of the Party — as well as the good of our state and country — ahead of all personal interests. If that is indeed your first priority, it is clear that the best course is to end your campaign. It is time to allow our Party to coalesce behind a candidate who will not only win, but will help Republicans down the ballot this November,” Kuckelman writes in the letters obtained by The Star. [The Kansas City Star]

Kris Kobach, often mentioned on this blog and others, a rabid anti-immigration activist and Second Amendment absolutist, is the unnamed candidate in the Republican primary which is concerning Kuckelman. Kobach was the Republican nominee for the Governor’s seat in 2018, and lost to Democrat Laura Kelly in what was considered the safely Republican state.

I’m wondering this: Does Kuckelman see Kobach as a loser for having lost the 2018 election, even though he had previously won a Secretary of State election in 2010?

Does he see Kobach, a former chairman of the Kansas GOP, as too much of an extremist for Kansas?

Or is he looking at the fact that moderate Republicans endorsed Kelly in 2018, and might once again endorse, and vote for, a Democrat?

In any case, if the two other Republican candidates drop out, making the primary into a mano e mano bout between Kobach and current Rep Roger Marshall (R-KA), then it becomes a commentary on the makeup of the Kansas GOP. Are they concerned more with winning the seat or going with an ideological firebrand, even if the latter endangers their chances of retaining the Kansas seat?

The Kansas primary is currently scheduled for August 4.

In case you were wondering about certain States “reopening” for business before others:

The apparent rush [to reopen] in Georgia and other states has alarmed some local leaders, who fear political considerations are overriding detailed assessments of the data.

“I have great concerns about federal and some state pressure to reopen the economy without the guidance of the public-health data,” said Erin Mendenhall, the Democratic mayor of Salt Lake City. “No one doubts the gravity of this economic crisis, but the cost of human life is also grave.”

She added: “I think politics permeates crisis. And this crisis we are in is not exempt from that.” [WaPo]

I think Republican leaders sense they’re approaching a cliff in terms of political survival. It’s a bit like the buffalo jumps^[1] used by American Indians to harvest buffalo, although the analogy may be a bit modest. The Republicans are discovering that their undisputed top of the line skill set when it comes to marketing and sales (Hello, Mr. Luntz!^[2]) does not extend to their governance skills, which includes successful communications and a competent President in the White House.

Therefore, they are set to take an enormous gamble. The entire party may find itself out on its ass come this November if all the Republican voters are still sitting unhappily at home, with money only from “socialist” legislation. However, Democrats are not in the same boat, because in the key area of governance, most Democratic office holders are superior to their Republican counterparts. Take, for example, Governor Walz (D-MN), or Governor Cuomo (D-NY), both of whom have won plaudits for the management of the crisis, from stay-at-home orders to the critical skill of communications. They are seen as active and competent, working with experts to properly modulate responses. Contrast that with Governor Kemp (R-GA) and others:

Kemp and other governors pursuing aggressive reopening plans say they are following data-driven strategies in line with White House guidelines that make a downward trajectory of new cases in a 14-day period a condition of a phased reopening.

They say that, but medical professionals and local leaders of both parties are expressing reactions ranging from discomfort to bewilderment at the rush to reopen. It’s one thing to mouth the words associated with the modern evaluation tools of the day, it’s quite another to actually use those tools – and the suspicion in many voters’ minds is that the Republicans are not engaged in sound governance.

Because they do not have the governance skills, the Republican governors are going to take an enormous chance on pushing for an early reopening. If they succeed, if the warm weather turns out to inhibit the virus as it does the flu virus, or a miracle cure is discovered, then they come out looking like bold, visionary leaders. They can even dream of credibly running for the Presidency in 2024.

And if they’re wrong? From history, specifically the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1918, comes this information via Vox:

[The] study [by Howard Markel, director of the University of Michigan’s Center for the History of Medicine] demonstrates this: As the [1918 Spanish Flu] pandemic appeared to subside, St. Louis pulled back its social distancing measures. But it turned out that the pullback was premature — and flu deaths started to rise once again. This graph shows that, with the line chart tracking flu deaths over time and the black and gray bars below showing when key social distancing measures were in place:

JAMA

If the double spike in deaths happens, those states in which a Republican governor reopened before recommendations from credible professionals to do so came down may see the fall & destruction of the Republican Party. And that contagion may spread to other states as well.

That’s the gamble. How does it feel to be a poker chip?

¹ From Archaeology:

The buffalo jump, as it is termed, is surprisingly sophisticated. Romantic nineteenth-century paintings depict Native American men urging improbably vast buffalo herds off gigantic cliffs. In reality, buffalo jumps are often modest bluffs. They sit at the end of complex sequences of natural and constructed landmarks, called drive-line systems, that can stretch for many miles, linking buffalo watering holes to other points on the prairie with the intention of drawing the buffalo ever closer to the cliff itself. Archaeologists have long recognized that nomadic prehistoric Native Americans such as the ancestral Blackfoot (“Blackfeet” refers specifically to tribal members now living in Montana) constructed cairns whose function was to funnel buffalo herds toward cliffs.

I’m left to contemplate an enormous pile of dead and injured buffalo, and wonder at how far the analogy extends.

² I’ve mentioned Mr. Luntz a time or two, and this is probably the best post to read, although I doubt I can recommend The Persuaders too many times as well for systematic observations on how you are the target of manipulation.

Almost a month ago I noted that the TV Critic for WaPo, Hank Stuever, reported ratings for the world news coverage shows of the old-line broadcast networks, NBC, CBS, and ABC, were way up. Now WaPo’s Margaret Sullivan notes ABC’s World News Tonight is doing particularly well:

This tree is inching its way:

This is fun:

And you get to learn a bit.

A reader chides me for falling behind in the software development industry:

The state of the art of software development has moved a lot in the past 20 years, dear Hue. And a great deal of that movement has been created by or adopted by open source practitioners. Functional programming was quite the hot thing for a while, but now it seems like declarative programming is even hotter.

Ah, interesting. I have a special interest in performance and scalability, so I have to wonder how declarative languages hold up under those sorts of loads.

Agile is a methodology for doing software development as a team for an engaged set of stakeholders, particularly a customer. If one is coding for oneself alone, it of course makes little sense and likely adds nothing to your code quality.

I took SAFE (Scaled Agile) training at work, and while it has little application in my project, I could see it being a nicely structured approach to projects in which the requirements are not well-understood. In the aforementioned DMV setting, though, there was little point since the requirements had already been worked out decades ago – but they seem to have treated it as if they weren’t.

Provably correct software is a pipe dream for any software application worth creating, at least now and for the foreseeable future. The degree of complexity in the average piece of software is so immense as to defy any rigorous way of proving every path through it is correct. But modern programming languages (they keep springing up left and right, Kotlin, Typescript, Rust, Dart, etc. anyone?), design paradigms (e.g. OO, functional, declarative), tooling (IDEs, static analysis, unit test, CI/CD) and programming techniques are all focused on making both the time to build something reasonably quantifiable and repeatable, but also insure that the quality is higher. And much progress has been achieved. But bug free, provably correct and nothing but correct? Nope.

Yeah. Every time I read about provably correct (ah, “formal methods”) it seems like it’s only a few years away – rather like fusion. But, now that I’ve tracked down my reference, perhaps TLA+ will ride to our rescue.

From NBC News:

The manufacturer of Lysol, a disinfectant spray and cleaning product, issued a statement warning against any internal use after President Donald Trump suggested that people could get an “injection” of “the disinfectant that knocks (coronavirus) out in a minute.”

“As a global leader in health and hygiene products, we must be clear that under no circumstance should our disinfectant products be administered into the human body (through injection, ingestion or any other route),” a spokesperson for Reckitt Benckiser, the United Kingdom-based owner of Lysol, said in a statement to NBC News.

To which I would only add:

WARNING: Listening To This President May Be Harmful To Your Health.

Back in February, Antonia Groneberg won this off-beat competition, illustrating some of her work in neuroscience.

Specific category winners are here.

In real war, propaganda is a delicate art of weaving truth with shaded truth with prevarications, knowing the people on the receiving end have compromised knowledge sources which they may not be able to remedy.

In our current political war, the context is far different: facts may be sought out by the vigorous, and the bar for persuading someone to make a choice may, and even should, include honesty and a sense of fairness. An advocate for one side or the other becomes a representative of that side, an exemplar – or they do for me.

This is why this anti-Trump ad, created by American Bridge 21st Century, is such a disappointment:

Sounds awful on its face, doesn’t it? But WaPo’s fact checkers took a closer look:

But these were actually donations by private charities and public companies for Project HOPE, an international health-care organization that has been operating in Wuhan for a quarter-century and helped establish a nursing school there. Usually, donors to Project HOPE arrange for charter aircraft to take their donations overseas.

For instance, as these shipments arrived in Wuhan, another shipment — 2 million respirator masks, 11,000 protective suits and 280,000 pairs of nitrile gloves donated by MAP International and MedShare — was sent to Project HOPE via UPS, which provided the transportation as an in-kind donation.

Derangement:

In combinatorial mathematics, a derangement is a permutation of the elements of a set, such that no element appears in its original position. In other words, a derangement is a permutation that has no fixed points. [Wikipedia]

Noted in “A mysterious blood-clotting complication is killing coronavirus patients,” Ariana Eunjung Cha, WaPo:

Scientists call this “hemostatic derangement.” In math, a derangement is a permutation in which no element is in its original position.

My wife just expressed grave incredulity that she married me – that broad’s crazy about me, doncha think?!

The People’s Enemy (1935) is a dreary little crime flick that follows the sordid drama involving three men, centering around Vince Falcone, headed for prison as he finally commits a crime that even his lawyer, Traps Stuart, cannot successfully defend, and Falcone cannot bribe his way out of, despite a hefty donation that should have been managed by another lawyer, Duke Ware. As Falcone stews in prison, his brother, Tony, tries to dig out what happened, but the reality is that Vince’s refusal to take responsibility for how his life is turning out is the driving force in his break-out from prison – and his pursuit of Stuart, as someone has to take the fall for Falcone’s lack of ethics.

This isn’t a study in morality, nor an explanation for the ice water that Stuart appears to have running through his veins. It’s simply a matter of the bad guys getting it, while the good guys … get their due, I suppose. I was bored.

From NOAA:

This one’s no more encouraging:

While right-wing fringers organize to sow more discord in the United States, temperatures keep going up.

Sadly, it appears Dr. Navarro, senior advisor to the President and holder of no medical-related degrees at all, may be wrong about hydroxychloroquine:

A malaria drug widely touted by President Donald Trump for treating the new coronavirus showed no benefit in a large analysis of its use in U.S. veterans hospitals. There were more deaths among those given hydroxychloroquine versus standard care, researchers reported.

The nationwide study was not a rigorous experiment. But with 368 patients, it’s the largest look so far of hydroxychloroquine with or without the antibiotic azithromycin for COVID-19, which has killed more than 171,000 people as of Tuesday. [AP]

Note the caveat by the researchers – not a rigorous test. Nor is 368 a particularly large number, so I wouldn’t take too seriously the statement that there were more deaths in the hydroxychloroquine group; there are many factors for which controls would have to be implemented, as well.

But for those itching to end this crisis now – and I do believe we can state that group is roughly equivalent to the entire population of the world, including myself – this is not the positive signal for which we were hoping. If this was the fix, I would expect some signal to come through the noise. There still might turn out to be some positive benefit for some patients, but the lack of signal suggests its potential is limited.

And this shouldn’t be surprising. This is the Administration of Arrogant Amateurs. They’ve had decades of telling themselves they could do better than the experts, and, well, it’s just not happening. They’re worse. If more reports surface of well-done studies of hydroxychloroquine’s effect on Covid-19 that are negative, then Dr. Navarro may come to the ego-deflating realization that knowing a bit about statistics isn’t enough when it comes to medicine.

Or will he? One of the problems of this Administration has been hubris: acknowledging mistakes is simply not in the makeup, political or psychological, of President Trump. Last night I saw a clip of a press conference with President Trump in which a reporter brought up the campaign rallies held since the coronavirus became prevalent in the United States, and he said he didn’t remember any campaign rallies.

Dr. Navarro may never admit this error, and if an error cannot be admitted, it’s unlikely it’ll be the source of learning. I wonder how many other medicines will be getting the rah-rah treatment. I hope none of my readers find themselves running short on some med that’s caught the eye of the Administration.

An update on the Kelly / McSally contest in Arizona:

In the race to serve the final two years of John McCain’s six-year term, astronaut Mark Kelly continues his stellar performance over former fighter pilot Martha McSally.

The most recent Arizona Public Opinion Pulse (AZPOP) of 600 Arizona Likely voters shows Kelly leading McSally by 9 points, earning the support of 51 percent of respondents compared to McSally’s 42 percent. Seven percent of respondents were undecided. The latest results closely mirror the head-to-head matchup of former Vice President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump. In the same poll, Biden leads Trump 52 to 43 percent. [OH Predictive Insights]

Eleven electoral votes and a Senate seat? I wonder how many resources the Republicans are willing to pour into Arizona.

And what do you get?

Heather Cox Richardson gives her take for Georgia’s Governor Kemp’s (R) hurried rush to reopen for business:

The state’s unemployment fund has about $2.6 billion. The shutdown has made claims skyrocket—Chidi says the fund will empty in about 28 weeks. There is no easy way to replenish the account because Georgia has recently set a limit on income taxes that cannot be overridden without a constitutional amendment. It cannot borrow enough to cover the fund either, because by law Georgia can’t borrow more than 5% of its previous year’s revenue in any year, and any borrowing must be repaid in full before the state can borrow any more.

By ending the business closures, Kemp guarantees that workers can no longer claim they are involuntarily unemployed, and so cannot claim unemployment benefits. [Georgia journalist George] Chidi notes that the order did not include banks, software firms, factories, or schools. It covered businesses usually staffed by poorer people that Kemp wants to keep off the unemployment rolls. …

The modern Republican program calls for the end to business regulation, social welfare programs, and infrastructure development, with the idea that freedom from restraint will allow businesses to thrive and the country will prosper in turn.

To bring their ideology to life, Republicans have slashed regulation, taxation, and social programs. Under such a regime, a few individuals have done very well indeed, while the majority of Americans has fallen behind. Georgia has been aggressive in putting the Republican program into action.

The classic blind belief in the Laffer Curve, essentially. And while a premature reopening order may bring Georgia an encouraging start, they may end up strangling on their, er, stranglehold on government spending.

That is, if they, quite literally, survive long enough to experience it:

This is the logical outcome of an ideology of radical individualism: as one Tennessee protester’s sign put it “Sacrifice the weak/Reopen T[ennessee].” In 1883, during a time of similar discussions over the responsibility of government to provide a social safety net, Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner wrote a famous book: What Social Classes Owe to Each Other. Sumner’s answer was… nothing. Sumner argued that protecting the weak was actually bad for society because it wasted resources and would permit weaker people to dilute the population. Far from helping poorer Americans, the government should let them die out for the good of society.

Sumner wanted the government to stay out of social welfare programs, but thought it should continue to protect businesses, which men like Sumner believed helped everyone.

Sumner, whoever he is, sounds like he didn’t pay a lot of attention to history or the human condition. In this case, neglecting the working class in the mistaken belief that the businesses, besotted with higher and higher profits via such efficiency measures as automation, will come through and take care of them won’t just result in a poverty stricken working class.

It’ll result in violence.

And now mix in the conservative belief in an absolutist Second Amendment, including the immense fire power modern weaponry can put in the hands of an individual (compare to: Pitchfork and torch). The dominant political class in Georgia will be putting their collective necks at risk if Richardson and Chidi, above, are correct in their assertions. Their only hope may be getting voted out of office for gross incompetency.