Iran won.

What will we know for sure about what President Trump called "the little excursion in Iran?"

There will be disagreements about the Iran Memo of Understanding and eventual peace settlement.

I expect to be lied to by both sides. 

Here is what I think we know for sure:

--  We didn't get regime change in Iran. The same team is in place, but now with younger people with a fresh sense of national purpose and pride.

--  The bombing of the girls school and the death of 100-plus schoolgirls will not go away. A hundred years from now Iranians will remember that we bombed a school for girls. 

--  As with Obama's Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the eventual Trump nuclear deal will leave Iran wanting to get nuclear material. The technology is available. But they have learned that they have something better than a nuclear bomb, which would invite nuclear retaliation: They can hold the world's economy hostage by threatening the Strait of Hormuz.

--  Before the start of the war on February 28, the Strait of Hormuz was an international waterway, with free passage for everyone. Now the Iran and Oman control the strait, and we are negotiating to have it be free of Iranian tolls, while Iran is negotiating to regulate them with administrative and environmental fees. 

--  Before the start of the war the U.S. was the security guarantor for the oil-rich countries of the region. We had a deal with them: They trade in petrodollars and keep oil flowing to the world; we keep safe their glass cities, luxury hotels, hedge fund headquarters, and energy infrastructure. That is over. The war proved we cannot protect them. The protection comes from making cooperation arrangements with Iran. 

--  The U.S. military is huge, but ineffective. The weapon systems of World War II and the Cold War are obsolete. A thousand drones at $10 million are more effective than one aircraft carrier at $5 billion. And you don't need to sink the aircraft carrier. You just have to scare the insurance companies that insure oil tankers.

--  The U.S. burned its allies with insults and trade wars, so it does not lead a coalition of democracies. When it really counts, the U.S. is on its own.

--  The U.S. got led by Israel and is now scrambling to unwind the mess it got itself into. Israel has become a political liability. U.S. hawks on behalf of Israel have been discredited. Even Trump is abandoning them, and no credible American politician will try to replace Trump as a full-throated champion of Israel. 

--  The U.S. has a glass jaw militarily. The way for supposed small powers and middle powers to end wars with the U.S. on favorable terms is to cause political distress for the president. The weak spot for the U.S. is the next election. 

--  President Trump and conservative media will call this a tremendous victory for Trump and the USA.

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Sacrilege is a message.

     “Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?”

          Josh Hokit, at the White House lawn after winning his fight, June 14.

The whole event was a desecration. This was just a little extra.

Desecration has purpose and effect. It is political speech. It is a message: 

There is nothing sacred about the U.S. Not its places, institutions, or norms. We have power and will use it however we want, so, fuck you.

The cage fight took place on the White House lawn. Award ceremonies took place at the Lincoln Memorial. The event was a commercial event with paid ticketing, advertisements, and sponsors. People who accuse Trump of being thoughtless and impulsive are not wrong. But he has superb instincts about political messaging. The event was a political message of Trump marking his territory like a dog urinating on a wall, fresher and higher than the previous dog, or a graffiti-tagger putting something new and bigger on top of another tag. 

The USA has a civic religion. The country was not installed and consecrated by a pope who crowned a country's leader. The Constitution begins with "We the People." We formed it. We made it special. We have substituted civic institutions, places, and symbols for religious ones. Children stand to say the "Pledge of Allegiance." We stand for the National Anthem, and when someone kneels for it, even respectfully, a great many people object. We debate from time to time whether to limit the First Amendment's free speech clause to say that burning the U.S. flag is not permitted speech. 

I have been to the Lincoln Memorial. It feels like a temple. Imposing. Silent. Words engraved on the wall stating our purpose as a country.

Josh Hokit was celebrating his victory. With what, exactly, with his comment about Michelle Obama? He was celebrating the power of transgression. He could be racist and misogynist and offensive. He could be obscene, in the Greek drama sense. He could put before the people that which should be off-screen, i.e. obscene. 

I wrote yesterday of my great disappointment with Republicans, people who had happily voted for Ronald Reagan, who said he never took off his suit jacket in the Oval Office out of respect for it, and John McCain, whose sense of military honor kept him tortured in a North Vietnamese prison for extra years rather than be released out of order of men held longer.  Republicans voters have understood honor and personal character in the past.

Barack Obama's election seemed to have changed something in Republicans. Trump's accusation that Obama was illegitimate from the beginning found political traction within Republican voters. Obama's education and credentials were fine; he had been a state senator then a U.S. senator. But he is black -- half black, a half-breed -- and therefore uncomfortably foreign, an outsider. His wife became part of that illegitimacy. She spoke about wholesome food and healthy exercise, a good anodyne concern. They were married, scandal-free, and had two children. But there needed to be illegitimacy somehow. The right-wing trope emerged. Michelle Obama was in fact a man, making her a fraud and Barack Obama gay. The story has persisted for a decade, advocated by Elon Musk's father, by right wing trolls, by social media commenters. It is untrue, physically impossible, but persistent.

The accusation created an idea, or cemented an idea out there in the zeitgeist that the U.S. government is a fraud. That our institutions are a fraud. That playing by the rules is a sucker's game. That polite is for sissies. That norms are to be broken because actions are legitimized by the power to take them.

Donald Trump staged a cage fight award ceremony at the Lincoln Memorial to de-sanctify the Lincoln space and what it represents. Josh Hokit's comment was not out of place. It was part of the process of vandalizing. 

Perhaps, a decade from now, when Trump is gone, Republican voters and officeholders will have swept up the mess and remember themselves as never, ever having been part of the Trump movement. MAGA, they will say, was about making America great, not vandalizing it. They will pretend to forget, and then they won't need to pretend. They will have re-written their memories.

Republicans are like the foolish, stupid young men who celebrated the Knicks victory by, of all things, setting fire to a school bus. They will regret it later, I hope, but they were caught up in the moment of feeling empowered by destroying things.

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Well, THAT waa a disappointment.

I expected an answer from my congressman.

I expected an evasive, buck-passing, worthless answer, but still some recognition that there is an issue here that he needed to finesse.

No. He blew me off. 

U.S. Rep. Cliff Bentz

I wrote Republican U.S. Representative Cliff Bentz, my Oregon Second District congressman -- twice -- with the same request. Both times I used the official web page request form to ask Bentz whether he supported President Donald Trump's settlement agreement with the IRS that would awarded Trump $1.776 billion to give to January 6 rioters and anyone else Trump's appointees chose. The Congress has the "power of the purse" if they choose to exercise it. 

My presumption is that it would be an uncomfortable question for Bentz or for any other Republican senator or Representative. In the world after Trump's opposition to Rep. Thomas Massie (KY), Senators John Cornyn(TX) and Bill Cassidy (LA), and the Indiana state senators, there can be no question in Bentz' mind that open disagreement with Trump could be fatal to his career. A vaguely-positive non-committal mumble might be OK, but there is no way Bentz can say aloud that he understands it to be an outrageous self-dealing corrupt theft.

But if your political office gives Bentz, and every other Republican representative and senator, the power to stop an outrage, by speaking out against it and becoming part of a voting block to stop the slush fund deal, but he does nothing, then Bentz and the others are politically accountable for their inaction. They should have to explain themselves.

Here is the letter I got in response. I will summarize it because I expect readers to skim it, then give up and stop reading. He says that Trump told us he would issue executive orders and that Trump is trying to stop wasteful spending on programs that people like but we cannot afford. There is nothing whatever about the $1.776 billion slush fund deal. Zero.

I consider Trump a dangerous autocrat, a narcissistic sociopath who is corrupting our politics. He has profound character flaws and he is acting them out. He is being genuine to his character.

I have contempt, though, for craven representatives and senators who enable Trump to be his worst self. I presume that Cliff Bentz knows better. I presume that he has the moral sense that this self-dealing is wrong, that this deal stinks to high heaven. Surely in his former law practice he would refuse to help a client who has some public trust to do anything similar. 

I doubt Trump feels guilty for what he does. Since he is a narcissisic sociopath, he feels entitled to take whatever he can take. But Bentz is not blinded by mental illness. Bentz is protecting himself, doing the wrong thing out of selfishness and fear for his career. Americans in public jobs show selfless courage and duty every day. Police. Firefighters. People in the military. They put their lives on the line. Meanwhile Cliff Bentz lets Trump do as he wants and does nothing. It is beyond disappointing. 

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Easy Sunday: Expunging history.

"The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it."
     Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, translated by Edward FitzGerald.

Trump wants to erase history. 

It is a terrible, self-destructive idea. Democrats should let him do it. 

Trump is encouraging congressional allies to introduce a resolution to expunge both of his impeachments. "It should be done because I did nothing wrong," he told The Wall Street Journal. "It was a rigged deal -- it was a whole rigged situation."

The impeachments of Donald Trump were neither foolish nor partisan. Trump tried to condition military aid the Congress appropriated to Ukraine with the Ukraine's president announcing they were investigating former Vice President Joe Biden so Trump could cite the investigation to damage a political rival. The second impeachment was because, as Mitch McConnell put it, Trump summoned a mob to the Capitol to try to reverse an election by violence.The fact that he was not convicted in the Senate after the first impeachment was because GOP senators wanted to stand by their party leader. After the second impeachment there was a mix of standing by their party, serving the desires of the Republican primary electorate, and a sense that it was unnecessary because Trump was finished and would fade away, so why bother? That was a serious miscalculation.

Trump sometimes does wildly unpopular things in his relentless effort to glorify himself: his face on coins and currency, his name on the JFK Center for the Performing Arts, his longing for a Nobel Peace Prize, his birthday celebration cage fight, his ballroom and triumphal arch, his role-playing as Christ, Rambo, and superheroes, his over-the-top desire for flattery, and his self-flattery. Wanting the impeachments expunged is another iteration of his effort to glorify and sanitize his image.

It will do the opposite. An expungement resolution would bring hearings, testimony, and a reminder of what Trump did. Republicans have tried out a variety of contradictory ways to describe the January 6 attack:

--  The rioters were really Democrats carrying Trump flags -- an assertion that fell apart when it became clear that they were in fact long-time MAGA fans.

--  It was really the FBI that planned and executed it -- an assertion that fell apart for lack of evidence of FBI involvement, and ample evidence that the rioters Trump partisans who were there eagerly, having been summoned by Trump.

--  The rioters were just a very few were out-of-control people who Trump tried but failed to restrain. That fell apart when Trump switched positions from disapproval to approval of their actions, now praising them as patriots.

--  They were peaceful, law-abiding tourists. That fell apart when one looks at the videotape of crowds climbing the building, breaking windows, pushing and shoving police, forcing their way past doors and through windows, their vandalizing the Capitol, and when one reviews their guilty pleas for their violent acts.

Do these look like Democrats?

Do they look like non-violent tourists?

Do they look like they were invited in by the police?

Sure, let's re-litigate the impeachments. Let's show more video of the riots. Let's put Trump back center stage defending what we saw with our own eyes. Let's require Republican House members who voted not to accept electoral votes to explain themselves. Worse, they will now have to claim that there was nothing wrong about January 6. Trump would insist that they do so since it is now the Trump position: "I did nothing wrong." This is an anchor on the popularity for Trump -- but he is probably beyond accountability. It is also an anchor on all Republican Senators and Representatives, including my own, Cliff Bentz. Bentz would be trapped, forced to defend the least-defensible things Trump did.

Give Trump the rope he seeks.

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SpaceX!!! It's going publlic. Buy!

 A compass that reliably points south is just as valuable as one that reliably points north.

I got a market signal. 

Watch out.

In my career as a financial advisor I looked for exit points, moments when the animal spirits of investor enthusiasm went crazy. High points are evident only when looking up from below, i.e, when it is too late. Still, in 30 years as an advisor and another decade as a retiree hoping that my investments will see me through to the end, I looked for times of maximum mania, when as many people as possible have thrown caution to the wind and decided to get in because the gettin' is good. That is when gettin' out is smart.

Fortunately for me, I have a south-pointing compass. A longtime friend and former brokerage client is that compass. Let's call him Tom. He is busy with his law practice, so whenever he calls me with excitement over something that sounds to my ear almost like panic, I know that the party is over. He is very closely attuned to what will sell to a jury or judge. His alertness to mood is what makes him such a successful and persuasive attorney. It makes him extraordinarily sensitive to political signals. He knew Trump would win in 2016, and said so publicly, against all conventional wisdom when he was thought out of touch. Quite the opposite. He felt the vibe. He connects. That is what makes him a good political compass and a reverse compass on investment mania. He hears the vibe of sure-thing-can't-miss-money and he fears missing out. 

That is the error in being part of the crowd in investments. The crowd is always late. The crowd piles on. When the crowd is frantic with excitement every lemming has gotten into the very last line to march over the cliff. 

He called me a week ago urging me to use any connection I might still have at Morgan Stanley to get him an allocation of shares of Elon Musk's SpaceX. Tom wanted to invest the bulk of his brokerage account money. This isn't a risky investment, Tom said. This is different from other investments because Musk has an edge. Trump is afraid of what Musk could do to him and greedy about what Musk can do for him. Trump is perfectly happy to use the power of the federal government to help his friends with subsidies, contracts, regulatory breaks -- whatever a campaign-contributing billionaire needs. If any of SpaceX's three businesses gets in trouble, Trump will bail it out with contracts or subsidies, so there is a guaranteed floor, backed by the full faith and credit of the federal treasury. Tom is counting on Trump's being willing to trade favors for favors, and that is a very good bet.

We have already experienced a proof-of-concept of Musk's power and Trump's willingness to serve. Musk used his influence on Trump, who used his influence on the indexes to make sure that indexes could include SpaceX almost immediately, against previous policy, and notwithstanding a tiny public float that would otherwise block purchase of SpaceX.  All the passive investors who own investments that track the S&P500 or the NASDAQ 100 indexes in their index funds will be buying SpaceX in huge quantities even though the public float of available stock is small in comparison to the required purchases of the index-tracking funds. Mandatory price-insensitive buying creates a squeeze that forces prices up. It is shady; it hurts investors other than Musk and other early insiders; it breaks longstanding consumer-protection practice. But it makes Musk a great deal of money. See? Musk can't get hurt. Musk has an edge. You can't lose.

So what is wrong with that story? Maybe nothing. Maybe Musk can't lose. Musk could invest $50 billion in the midterms to get the "right" judges and the "right" down-ballot state legislators and county officials elected. They are the ones who count the votes, certify elections, and review the appeals. Musk would earn it back with federal contracts Trump steers his way.

But I have seen this movie before. I am reflecting my experience about market sentiment. Excitement and optimism and puffery work as long as people see things going up. Tom isn't looking at earnings, debts, cash flow, or any other metric of investment value and that isn't the source of his investment decision. Tom is attuned to the zeitgeist. It is go-go-go time for Elon Musk, and people are looking at opportunity. They are cheering a winner. Tom is betting on Musk. Momentum is a delicate foundation and at some point Hans Christian Anderson's little girl shouts that the emperor has no clothes. Something breaks the momentum of hope and people start counting. At some point price matters, earnings matter, and numbers matter.  

Devil-may-care manic enthusiasm is a contrary indicator.

I feel like a sad old killjoy, and maybe I am wrong. But Tom is the most reliable indicator I know of when the party is over. He says Elon Musk can't lose.

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Vineyard update: 11:30 a.m. on Friday

The glamorous life of a vineyard owner. 

By 11:30 I had had enough. Saturday is another day, starting again at 6:00 a.m.

11:30

Vineyard Update: Six a.m. on Friday

I set the alarm for 4:20 a.m. again today.  

I want to be at the Vineyard promptly at 6 a.m. so I can join my nephew to work in the vineyard. I want to get started in then the cool of the morning because the forecast is for 90 degrees in the shade by mid-afternoon. The vineyard has full sun. 

The immediate job at hand is to unhook the two wires that are currently attached in notches on the T-posts that suspend the trellis wires that support the vines. The wires are three inches apart when in the notches. The job is to open up that space and shove the rangy grape vines up into that space between the wires, and then re-attach the wires, which squeezes the vines into a slender, mostly-vertical plant, at least temporarily. Grapes are enormously vigorous plants, at least in the pumice soil at my farm, so vines will burst out of their confined space as the season progresses, but they are still somewhat contained and supported.

Wire in the notch

Before

After

How they look end of season. No longer looking squeezed

In posts I published last summer I mentioned my nephew, Liam Flenniken. He is age 18 now.  He is staying at the farm house this summer, once again doing vineyard labor to earn money to pay for college at Oregon State University, which he will start this fall. He is the 6th generation working on this property, purchased from a Donation Land Claim owner in 1883 by my great grandfather, Stephen Nealon. That makes Liam the great, great, great grandson of the farm's founder, a Union Army veteran. Liam does not aspire to being a vineyard worker. He wants to fly airplanes.

Buried in the mass of leaves are the two wires

A experienced vineyard worker from Valley View Vineyard, Adelberto Paz, gave Liam and me a lesson on the best way to do this job. It is hard work, but not complicated. Like much farm work, it is repetitive. One lifts up the floppy vines and pushes them toward the middle, re-hooks the wires. Again and again. There are 6,000 plants on my eight acres.

I last reported on the vineyard describing the April frosts. The plants looked pretty rough on April 21 with the frost damage to the Pinot Noir buds and leaves, but the damage was spotty, and in two weeks the plants had ample buds. It turned out to be a false worry. The fans that stirred the air did their job. It turns out that the bigger problem I face is managing vine growth. My soil may be too fertile. Workers needed to thin the nodes that would bear fruit -- 12 person-days of work. Ideally the fruit-bearing nodes are spaced four inches apart to give room for the grape clusters and until they were thinned they were too close together.

On May 22, a son of the owner of Valley View Vineyard, Colin Wisnovsky, came to the vineyard and did the first of two fungicide sprays. He is conscientious about suiting up to avoid the sulpher-based spray.

I don't have photograph of me at 6 a.m. yesterday, nor this morning, nor for the next six or eight days working with Liam to squeeze the vines between the wires. I am writing quickly and pushing Publish.

I also lack photos of me mowing the weeds so there is a "lawn" of green between the rows of grapes for most of the vineyard. Nor do I have photos of me covered with pumice dust from tilling the dozen or so rows that I need to till rather than mow. Nor do I have photos of me spraying an herbicide at the base of the plants to control weeds. (The herbicide is an alternative to the Roundup brand herbicide I want to be able to tell grape buyers that it is a Roundup-free vineyard.

Classmates at the college reunion asked me about my Pinot Noirs. Willamette Valley Pinot Noirs have an international reputation and wine connoisseurs wondered when they could buy a case of my wine. Answer: Not for at least a year, and probably two.

Some Willamette Valley Pinots have a small mixture (under five percent) of Southern Oregon grapes because our hotter summers create riper grapes and therefore dark fruit flavors and color which improves their wines. Wines labeled being from "Oregon" not "Willamette Valley" can have any amount of Southern Oregon grapes. My hope is that my grapes will stand alone labeled as coming from the Rogue Valley -- a wine region with a still-small, but growing reputation. My hope is that my wine will get labeled as being grown on100 percent pumice soil, a point of distinction.

I will ask Liam to take a snapshot of me this morning at 6 a.m. to send to the Oregon Department of Revenue to send with a message, "darned right it's work."

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