The Bottom of the Barrel

As most of you know, I’ve been sending three jokes a day to a friend of mine with cancer for the past seventeen months. She has completed the course of treatment which included much chemo, several surgeries and a host of other side effects. She is cancer free and getting stronger by the day, but it has been a brutal slog. Still, I send her jokes, not every day anymore, but I still send her jokes. Once you start doing something, it becomes a habit, I suppose. At some point, I expect she will turn on me and say something like, “No really Doug...you can stop anytime!!” This morning would have been a golden opportunity for her to put a stop to the harassment...

Just blew the sugar off my doughnut.

....dieting is so hard.

My ex-wife still misses me.

But, her aim is starting to improve.

How do pigeons elect their leaders?

They don’t. Pigeons can only gain power through a cooo d’etat.

I believe it fair to say that the bottom of the barrel has finally been reached.

Motivation Matters

My eyes popped open in the still, pitch black bedroom. I squinted across at the digital clock on the television. 4:43 am. The first thing I thought was, wonder if it snowed? The second thing I thought about was soldiers and mercenaries. It had been the last thing I remember thinking before I had drifted off to sleep seven hours earlier. And now the thought was still with me, soldiers and mercenaries, and the difference between the two.

Almost everyone has respect for soldiers. With the notable exception of Vietnam, soldiers have always been welcomed home with the warm thanks of their grateful countrymen. Even when we disagree about the wars they are asked to fight, we generally honor the men and women who do the fighting. We admire their training, tenacity and bravery, and especially their devotion to duty and each other. We build statues and memorials to them. We know that they put themselves in harms way, for little pay, so the rest of us don’t have to. We marvel at their acts of heroism. We stand in awe of those few who intentionally give up their own lives to save the lives of the men in their unit. The selfless sacrifice stirs us. It causes thousands of us to walk up to complete strangers in uniform who we see at the airport to thank them for their service. They hold a special place in our affections.

But, consider the mercenary. They are also well trained, tenacious and brave. They also willingly place themselves in harms way so the rest of us don’t have to. But no one writes songs about their heroism. There isn’t a single statue in a single town in America that honors them. Nobody would buy a book entitled, A Mercenary’s Diary. The very idea of someone who is willing to sell his killing skills to the highest bidder sickens us. We turn away from such people. We don’t see them as selfless and honorable. And yet, they perform the same function as a front line soldier when the bullets start flying. Why don’t we honor the mercenary? Because of one thing...motivation. The thought that someone would be eager to fight if the price was right, for whichever side wants him the most,  reduces the job of soldiering to a mere financial transaction. Fighting, even fighting our enemies, when stripped of devotion and love of country becomes the blackest of arts. The triumph of money over principle changes everything.

This thought has dominated my waking hours for the past few days. Why do we work? What motivates us to strive and struggle for money? Many noble things, no doubt. We want to provide for those we love. We want to have a nice home, a nice car, educate our children, go on nice vacations. All of these things require money. The motivation to provide these things is what drives us out of bed every morning. We know that we can’t just sit around expecting someone else to give us anything. This is right and proper. But is the pursuit of money all that matters. Does it matter how we earn our money? For this discussion, I am not referring to what is legal and what is not. I think we would all agree that selling drugs to middle school kids is an evil enterprise, no matter how profitable it might be. But, not everything that’s legal is noble. Not every profitable transaction is honorable. Each of us are asked to make moral distinctions on practically a daily basis. I am sick. I need a vaccine. To obtain that vaccine is it morally justifiable to skip the line, throw some money around to bypass those unable to do so? It is the same with how we earn money. Everyone must ask themselves, Although what I’m doing is perfectly legal, is it just? Is there such a thing as too much money, an amount that would change who you are were you to become in possession of it? From my perspective after 62 years, I believe that making money off the misery of others, capitalizing on the failure of others for profit feels like darkness to me. Ambulance chasing lawyers come to mind. Payday lenders. Loan sharks. Price gougers. Short sellers...

Motivation matters...and these days, motivation is everything.

My Take on Gamestop

WARNING: What follows does NOT constitute investment advice, but rather represents the random, scattered opinions of one guy who invests money for a living.

The GameStop Saga has dominated the financial news of late and for good reason...it has been insane. I will attempt a thumbnail sketch with as little jargon as possible to summarize the madness:

GameStop, a retail seller of video games and a business that is much the same as Blockbuster Video was just before it went belly up, has been a favorite short sell target of hedge fund guys on Wall Street. A short sale is when you’re betting that a stock is going to DROP in value. Anyway, a large group of retail day trader types at a Reddit site figured out a way to hype the stock among its 2 million or so subscribers over a period of months with the strategy of bidding UP the price of the stock. The purpose of this strategy was two fold, as best I can figure. First, if the price shot up as they hoped it would A. Make them a fortune in a very short period of time and B. Force the hedge fund guys to buy more shares of GameStop to cover their mounting losses, thus driving the price up even more...rinse and repeat...in so doing cause the hedge fund hot shots to lose a boatload of money. Call it a victory of the little guy over the Wall Street fat cats.

Ok, although I totally understand and appreciate the value in a healthy market of the short sale, at least in theory, I generally detest short sellers. They are the guys who I consider vultures, dudes who only profit when something is dying. So the fact that these renegade day traders have brought many of them low gives me vicarious pleasure that I’m not exactly proud of! If you hear suggestions that these day trading millennials are some sort of brand new and unique threat to the stock market, fear not. There is nothing at all unique about this except for the fact that now a bunch of nobody’s have figured out how to do what hedge fund managers have been doing for decades...front running a bunch of worthless stocks and then profiting through put options.

But here’s my problem with all of this. It’s not investing. It’s stock manipulation and trading. Nobody is buying anything, nobody is making investment decisions because of the products or services of the underlying companies. Nothing at all is being produced except ginormous profits and staggering losses. It’s the exact same thing that happens every weekend in Las Vegas. 

I own a reasonably diverse portfolio of stocks and mutual funds that have been put together with an eye towards, yes...profit, but also sustainable growth. Every stock I own was invested in because I believed in the product or service they brought to the market. Further, I thought that they were well run, and in a position to be profitable many years into the future. By taking partial ownership of those companies I was rewarding them for their well made product or service, and helping them remain so. Now, I’m not a freak when it comes to this socially responsible investing thing. My portfolio is not a philanthropic enterprise. A company that makes the most socially responsible product in the world still has to be well run and profitable or I’m not interested. However, there are many companies that are both of those things that I would never invest in because I object to the product or service on moral grounds. That’s my right as an investor. What I will never do as an investor is seek to profit on the collapse of a business, in others words, I morally object to the implications of short selling anything. It’s just not in my DNA.

Does that make me a sucker at times? No doubt. But as far as I can tell, it hasn’t hurt my results long term. What this GameStop episode is doing is undermining the confidence that many ordinary retail investors have in the fairness and transparency of equity markets. How can a rag tag collection of dudes on the internet drive up the value of a company with very little prospects by 400% in just a few days? It seems shady and dangerous. And if two months from now billions of dollars have been gained and lost and GameStop stock is back to what it was before all of this started the question will be...What was the point? If it feels like manipulation, smells like manipulation, and looks like manipulation, its probably manipulation.

What it’s not is....new. 

Here’s an idea. Only buy things you can believe in. Only buy things that you can explain in less than two minutes to the kid down the street. 

Sophie’s Choice

For most of my life I’ve done a reasonably decent job of taking life one day at a time. Of course no one is perfect in this regard. All of us have been guilty of occasionally wishing the week away when there’s something big happening on the weekend. Who of us hasn’t secretly wanted the child to be done with the toddler stage already, only to take it all back the day they get their driver’s license? But since the arrival of COVID, my ability to stay in the moment has slowly deteriorated to the point now where I am constantly longing for...the future.

I know this is no way to live. John Lennon’s words are still true, “life is what happens when you’re busy making other plans.” And yet, restricted life in the Age of Pandemics feels something like the terrible twos to me, something to be endured until better days arrive. But with each passing day, now approaching the one year anniversary of COVID, comes the feeling that it may never truly be “over”, some limits may linger for years. Whenever I read the words variant strains they sound crushing to me. As a consequence for about six months now I have found myself sleepwalking through the present, dreaming of the future. In particular, I have become obsessed with my 66th birthday, the date I set for myself some years ago as the demarcation day of retirement, or some form thereof. It’s all I’ve been thinking about.

Now, President Biden is placing travel restrictions on incoming flights. Other countries are banning travel of any kind. I see the death toll numbers, I read the stories of new South African, Brazilian and British strains, so I understand the necessity of these measures. It’s not even like I had plans to travel, its just another shrinking of my options which feels diminishing. Freedom of movement has always been like oxygen to me, something I never ever think about. It just is. Not so much anymore.

I am certainly not alone in feeling the isolation that comes with COVID. All of us do in one way or another. My thinking and understanding of COVID has gone through many stages over the past eleven months, from skepticism to bewilderment to acceptance of the reality. But merely acknowledging something isn’t enough unless it changes your behavior, and my behavior has changed over these months. There are the ubiquitous masks, the incessant hand washing, that chill that spreads over your hands like fog shrouding a mountain when you squirt that hand sanitizer. At work there are virtual appointments, which feature me smiling awkwardly at a computer screen while I try to navigate the two second time delay.

Then there is the matter of our friends and neighbors who have come down with this dreadful virus, and the feeling of helplessness that overwhelms. When our next door neighbor got it, at least we could check up with her from across the way to see if there was anything she needed. When dear friends of ours in our  church small group came down with it we were limited to delivering a meal for them on their porch, when what we really wanted to do was march inside and clean their house, run errands and hug them close. Speaking of that group, our last face to face meeting was almost three months ago and that was a rarity in and of itself. Church? It has morphed into just another screen experience. We briefly started meeting together in reduced, socially distanced numbers, but then there was a COVID visitation among several volunteers so that’s on hold now.

Which brings me back to living in the moment. One reason I’ve become so bad at it is the fact that I truly hate this moment. So my mind constantly drifts to 2024 and what needs to happen between now and then, some things which are in my power to control but many other things where I am at the mercies of fate and chance. My choices seem to have been reduced to feeling annoyed and adrift by the here and now or nervous and anxious about the future, a Sophie’s choice for the ages.

Losing My Man Card

Ok, I think all of this social isolation is finally getting to me. Last night I made a charcuterie board. I choose not to offer photographic proof of this fact to preserve what is left of my dignity, but I did prepare my first ever charcuterie board and thought it was worth mentioning, especially considering the fact that up until a year or so ago I had no idea what a charcuterie board was, let alone how to make one. Sure, I knew that anyone could throw a bunch of cheese and sausages on a platter and serve them, I just didn’t know it had such a fancy name...charcuterie board...sounds like a board game for old ladies.

Anyway, a couple summers ago in Maine, we started having charcuterie boards every afternoon on the dock down by the lake along with Maine-themed cocktails. Whenever my daughter-in-law Sarah was in charge, these things were like works of art. She would slice up three or four types of meat, Italian sausage, pepperoni, prosciutto, summer sausage. Then she would slice up all manner of delectable cheeses and fan them out like decorations on the tray. There would be Gouda, Brie, sharp cheddar, Gruyere, etc. I learned that the cheese was key to the whole enterprise. Cheese pairings, they all called. Then there are the crackers. We can’t forget the crackers. There are thin round water crackers, rectangular focaccia crackers and the more pedestrian wheat thins. Then, to make the feast look healthier, there were grapes and sliced apples sprinkled here and there. Off to the far corner of the board there would be a small bowl full of a positively dreadful jellied concoction, the best I could tell it was some sort of soft cheese wrapped in a weird jelly/nut glaze. No thanks! On the opposite end of the board there was another small bowl of humus into which one could dip a small selection of sliced raw vegetables. 

This treat was not meant to be an actual meal, rather an afternoon snack to tide us over until dinner. But when its just the two of us here on a Sunday night with football on the television, it will do quite nicely as a meal. So there I was last night fanning the cheese around in a circle surrounding the two types of meat piled in the center of the board. I put the gross jelly thing in a side dish in the corner just like Sarah does. I even placed a couple bunches of grapes atop the pile for appearances. The board I used was a gift given to us by my nephew for Christmas—word having gotten around that the Dunnevant clan is now thoroughly addicted to this sort of thing.

And yes, it is monogrammed. 

Now that I have shared this confession It occurs to me that I have absolutely nothing to be ashamed of. What is more manly than chunks of meat and cheese that you are encouraged to eat with your fingers? Sure, the way Pam and Sarah put these things together makes them look like oil paintings, still life’s that you’re afraid to touch. But at the end of the day, its just sausage and cheese, the two finest taste combinations in all of Christendom. We just need to come up with a better name than charcuterie board.

The Death of a Hero

I opened my laptop at 6 in the morning while rubbing the sleep from my eyes and saw the headline, Hank Aaron had passed. For reasons I cannot explain, I felt my throat constrict and tears forming in the corners of my eyes. As I have gotten older this sort of thing happens more frequently than I would like to admit. My childhood heroes, like me, are getting older, and yet when one of them dies it always comes as a shock to the system. Now Hammerin’ Hank is gone.

When I was 8 years old I began a life long love affair with baseball, largely due to my older brother’s devotion to the game. His favorite players became my favorite players. For me it was always Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, and Hank Aaron. In that order. I was a Mickey guy, mostly because Donnie was a Mickey guy. I remember checking a book out of the Claiborne Elementary School library in New Orleans, Louisiana that told the story of Mickey Mantle. It was entitled, The Commerce Comet, and I was in the 3rd grade. It was the first book I had ever checked out from a library. I read it in one day. There was much to like about The Mick. He was movie star handsome, could run like the wind and hit a baseball to the moon. But I also loved Willie Mays. He did everything with style and flash, the best center fielder in the game. Then there was Hank Aaron who did nothing with style and flash. He wasn’t particularly handsome, hardly ever had anything to say. While Mickey’s smile beamed out from the cover of magazines and Willie was in every highlight reel, Hank just plugged along. The PR people with the Braves tried to juice him up with the national sports media who were Mantle v Mays obsessed by giving him the nickname Hammerin’ Hank. But it never really worked. He was just a ball player more comfortable with his real name...Henry Aaron. He lacked both the charm and charisma of Willie and Mickey, but never the talent. The press was in love with the charmers who’s rivalry started in New York City. The Yankees and The Giants, the two glamour teams. Nobody cared about the small market Braves no matter where they played...Milwaukee or Atlanta. But Hank kept showing up for work every day, playing the game brilliantly. Then one day it occurred to the baseball writers that he had an excellent chance to make a run at the most hallowed record in a sport full of hallowed records...Babe Ruth’s home run title. Finally, after a spectacular career of excellence, he would be plunged into the white hot glare of national scrutiny in the summer of 1973 and the spring of 1974 as he chased down the Babe. Suddenly after each game a throng of reporters were at his locker sticking microphones in his face. He answered their stupid repetitive questions with short, boring answers.

During this pressure packed pursuit of an icon’s record, Hank Aaron received hate mail. Tens of thousands of letters of vicious, racist hate mail. Death threats poured in among them. Yet Henry Aaron kept hitting and kept up his largely silent quest. When he finally launched a pitch by the Dodger’s Al Downing over the left field wall into the waiting glove of reliever Tom House, it was finally over. At home plate he was mobbed by his teammates, but that didn’t stop a strong, long suffering and worried to death woman from plowing through the crowd to reach her son...

And now this strong, proud and unassuming man is gone.

Willie Mays was asked once about Hank Aaron. His words seem appropriate as an ending for this tribute:

“ Hank Aaron was the best person I ever met.”

Hope Springs Eternal

Wednesday 20, 2021. Our system of government, beaten and battered though it may be, has worked. The candidate with not only the most Electoral votes, but also the most vote votes has won. The candidate who lost is leaving Washington, albeit in a childish snit. The winning candidate, who has never left Washington for over half a century, will become President today in a diminished ceremony. I will tune in for the speech. I always do. However I can’t promise I’ll stick around for the entire thing. I seldom do. One thing I will notice will be the politicians sitting behind the President, and how very old they all are. The president himself, ancient and frail, Pelosi, McConnell, and Schumer, old and sagging under the weight of all that backstabbing, guile fairly dripping off them like beads of sweat.Why are politicians so old? Where are the forty-somethings, men and women with energy and new ideas? In other lines of work, thats where. And who could blame them?

What I will not watch is the insufferable virtual parade/entertainment that the triumphant Democrats will foist on us for the rest of the day. There will be all of the beautiful Hollywood types cooing about this and that along with a procession of pop stars. You have to hand it to the Democrats though, they always have all the big stars at these types of events. Whenever Republican’s are in charge, they serve up something like Scott Baio or Tom Selleck while the music is always a couple of Country singers. Its like whoever they send up there, my first thought is always, “Wait...that guy is still alive?” But, there’s nothing to be done about it. The cool kids have always been leftists.

The best part about today—if we make it through without incident—is that it will hopefully begin a new era where politics will become boring again. Sure, for awhile Biden will be news because he’s a new President. But eventually, after his first 100 days, that tiresome legacy of FDR that forces every new administration to act like the world is on fire and they must put it out with rapid fire initiatives, things will calm down. Suddenly we will wake up and realize that every headline on the news is not about Washington infighting. It will dawn on us that politics and politicians have stopped being entertainment and gone back to being necessary but dependable annoyances.

Hope springs eternal.

My Prayer For The Week

One of the ingrained assumptions of being an American is the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next. I have watched it a total of ten times during my adult life, the outgoing President riding in the motorcade with the incoming President from the White House to the Capitol, then sitting behind him and watching him take the oath of office, then politely applauding. Its always a cool moment, satisfying, even comforting. This year at the beginning of inauguration week, I’m holding my breath that it goes off without bloodshed. There will be no huge throng of people on the Mall watching. There will be no parades and no fancy balls to mark the occasion. Only members of Congress, a few guests, and a thousand masks. But there will be 25,000 American Troops and newly erected fencing, even some razor wire, photographs of which will be gleefully distributed on Chinese, Russian, and Iranian media. Add this embarrassment to the growing list of things I thought I would never witness during my lifetime.

So, my hope and prayer is that when this week is over there will have been no violence, no deaths, no destruction of property, that all 50 state capitols will be secure, and that we can begin to move forward to the very difficult task of learning how not to hate each other so much. I wish Joe Biden all the best. I can honestly say that I have wished every new President the very best at the beginning of their term in office. I did for Clinton, Bush, Obama and Trump. Generally speaking, when a President fails it’s a failure for the country. When they succeed, generally the country succeeds. Good will should be the default emotion for any new President from every citizen of this country. When Biden does well, I will commend him here. When he screws up I will let him have it in this space. What I will not do is engage in inflamed rhetoric fantasizing about his gruesome death like I saw from Alec Baldwin this weekend. I will not tolerate violent language here. I believe it is possible to disagree, even strongly, with politicians without stooping to ad hominem attacks. After ten years and over 2000 posts, I’m sure if you search thoroughly enough you will find examples of such attacks here, but I hope very few and nothing recently. I am not a perfect witness in this area. Sometimes I forget myself and get caught up in the moment. But we all have to get better at this, better at disagreeing, better at talking to each other.

Maybe, a year from now, we won’t be so obsessed with the travails of politics. Maybe at some point our attention and our interest will be towards more nobler things. Maybe one day soon our disagreements will be less vitriolic. Maybe on that glorious day in the future when the masks finally come off, there will be smiles underneath.

Ten Things To Look Forward To

Since it is all but impossible to find even a shred of good news these days, I have taken it upon myself to assemble a list of ten things that we all have to look forward to in 2021:

1. That first blissful, 70 degree day in mid to late March when you scramble through the drawers to find a pair of shorts to wear.

2. The smell of hamburgers on the grill before your first meal of the year taken on the deck.

3. Opening Day of the baseball season.

4. The giving and receiving of robust, enthusiastic, heartfelt hugs.

5. A President who isn’t on Twitter.

6. Standing shoulder to shoulder in a packed church, singing at the top of your lungs.

7. That unique thrill that passes through the body and mind when you back the car out of the driveway, headed out for summer vacation.

8. The first tailgate of the college football season with trash talk filling the air unfiltered by face masks.

9. That first gathering with your small group from church around somebody’s fire pit, where you hear the sound of someone’s voice lifted in prayer thanking God for his Word and for these good friends.

10. That first delightfully cool day in late September when you scramble through the closet to find a sweater to wear.

Coping With 2021

What do you do when you’ve had maybe the most disturbing, disappointing week of business in at least ten years? How do you deal with that creeping feeling that the world is falling apart and there isn’t a single thing you can do to stop it? What next, when you’ve come to the conclusion that people are in the process of losing their minds? How do you cope with the knowledge that all of this has happened in a mere 15 days of the new year??

DAD JOKES. You go out there and dig deep for the worst, most pitiful ones you can find, collect them, then share them here on The Tempest. At least that’s what I do.

- Why did the couple buy stale bread on their wedding day?

Because they wanted to grow mold together...

- Did you hear about the dad who burnt the Hawaiian pizza?

He should have put it on aloha temperature...

-How did the carpenter find her spouse?

She used a stud finder...

- If you want a job in the lotion industry, the best advice I can give you is...

Apply daily...

-I got you a refrigerator for your birthday.

Can’t wait to see your face light up when you open it...

-I bought a dictionary only to get home and discover that all the pages are blank.

I have no words to describe how angry I am...

-I used to date a girl named Ruth. Whenever I was with her, she made me a better person. Then she dumped me.

Now I’m ruthless...

-Why was the superhero the one to flush the toilet?

Because it was his duty...

-What’s the easiest way to remember your wife’s birthday?

Forget it once...

-Kids: Dad, we want to see the new Pirate movie!!

Dad: No way.

Kids: Why not??!!

Dad: Because its rated Arrrrgh!!

-The Surgeon General has determined that listening to too much Queen is bad for your health.

Probably because of the high Mercury content...

Making Travel Plans?

My winter restlessness has come early this year. Usually around the middle of February I begin to feel trapped and isolated, in desperate need of sunshine and a change of scenery. The fact that this feeling has arrived a full month early shouldn’t come as a surprise. Something tells me I am not alone.

This week has been packed with appointments, but yesterday afternoon some downtime finally arrived. Immediately I pulled up my Expedia account on the old iPad. Welcome Back, Douglas!! The fact that I was so greeted should also come as no surprise. The travel industry has been battered by COVID like no other. A box quickly popped up...Would you like to chat? Poor things...

I didn’t even know what I was looking for. Where could I go during a pandemic where 4000 people a day are now perishing? Yes, I know, I see friends of mine on Facebook all the time traveling all over the place and God bless em. I’m feeling much more cautious these days. I saw what COVID did to my neighbor and I want no part of that. Plus, any travel plans I come up with will have to pass the Pam Test, a rigorous set of protocols that judge harshly any ill-conceived, hastily cobbled together plans, which are exactly the kind of plans I specialize in. 

My first idea was a quick four nighter to the Cayman Islands, a delightful location we have visited twice before. But that would require much research into foreign travel restrictions, airplane travel, etc..which sounded much too much like work. Then I reeled it in a bit and did a little recon work into Key West, another favorite spot of ours. Surprising how many hotels there are booked solid after March 1st. Suddenly the idea of being in Key West at a time when it is crawling with the sort of folks who frequent Key West seemed like an unsellable idea and not nearly as relaxing as I was imagining a trip like this would be. Time to reel it in further...Isle of Palms, Charleston, SC. Nice. We could drive instead of fly. But the weather there in late March early April is no slam dunk. Might be chilly. What about Myrtle Beach? Closer, cheaper and my partner has a place on the beach. Same weather gamble though, and my luck we’d be there the same week as the Hells Angels For Trump Rally or something.

Of course, I could stay in the Old Dominion. There are plenty of great places to visit here. But the predominant thought in my mind when contemplating this getaway is...warmth. Late March/early April would be a weather crapshoot. Wait, what about a week in Florida during spring training? We could stay in a nice hotel and catch a few games. It would be nice and warm. But, what will the COVID protocols be like in April? Will they be more relaxed or more stringent? There’s no way to know at this point. Maybe we could stay a few nights at a hotel in DC and do some sightseeing...wait, DC is a war zone. Nix that.

Maybe I’ll just have to suck it up in 2021 and wait until Maine. July 1st is only 165 more days, right? Perhaps I can make it until then.

Probably not.

AirBnB Announces Plans To Get Out of The Bribe Business

Here’s a small case study in how my mind works. (Pam: Wait, your mind works?). Whenever I am reading a news article about anything having to do with politics I do so with ears wide open and a barnyard manure filter working overtime, not because of media bias necessarily, but rather because it is impossible for me to ponder political things without reading between the lines. Nothing is ever as it appears. Here’s a perfect example.

This morning I learned that several American corporations have turned against politicians who voted to decertify the 2020 election results. This particular sentence stood out:

AirBnB, Verizon, Comcast, Marriot and others have stopped all donations to politicians who voted against certifying the election results.

My response to this rather prosaic sentence was probably not what its writer intended. All I could think was...Why in Sam Hill is AirBnB making political contributions in the first place?? Seriously. Why would an online vacation rental marketplace feel the need to give money to politicians? Am I the only one who thinks this way? Couldn’t that money be put to more productive use elsewhere, like say...making their website more user-friendly? Why do the men and women who run such a fabulously successful enterprise feel it wise and necessary to donate cash to Congressmen, Senators or Presidential candidates? The question answers itself. 

My mind always seems to be at cross purposes to conventional wisdom. If I were the CEO of a successful new venture it would be my goal to remain invisible to politicians. I would want the lowest possible profile when it came to my business and its relationship to Washington DC. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere near their radar screen. By donating money to them I come to their attention. The last thing any self respecting enterprise wants or needs is to have the undivided attention of elected officials. Not that my business would be up to no good. On the contrary, my company would be busy making the very best product or providing the very best service possible to its customers, so busy in fact, it would be oblivious to who its political representative even was! 

Spare me the lectures. I fully understand why AirBnB and all those other corporations bankroll politicians. When your country’s tax code is 2,600 pages long, with another 60,000 or so pages of addendums, codicils and explanatory case law attached, that’s a minefield of potential danger. But its also a great place to hide a favor that some savvy pol might be able to slip in that might benefit your business. In other countries, this is referred to as a bribe. In America its called working the system by the cynical and civic engagement by the clever. Either way, it would all be eliminated or at least greatly reduced by The Flat Tax.

Until then we will have to put up with the corruption that naturally flows from a system that encourages vacation rental websites, hotel chains, and cable providers to have to make grand virtue signaling proclamations divesting themselves from disobedient politicians.

America, We Have a Problem

CHAMPION	SELECTING ORGANIZATION
2020	Alabama	CFP
2019	LSU	CFP
2018	Clemson	CFP
2017	Alabama	CFP
2016	Clemson	CFP
2015	Alabama	CFP
2014	Ohio State	CFP
2013	Florida State	BCS
2012	Alabama	BCS
2011	Alabama	BCS
2010	Auburn	BCS
2009	Alabama	BCS
2008	Florida	BCS
2007	LSU	BCS
2006	Florida	BCS

America, we have a problem. Although the country has been through over a decade of vast and disruptive change in almost every aspect of life from technology to manufacturing, from social mores to fashion and everything in between...one thing never changes. The SEC owns college football and the University of Alabama owns the SEC. Moreover, over the last fifteen years, only once has a team from outside the old Confederacy won our nation’s college football championship. Heck, almost half the time the winner has been from a single state...Alabama. This is the very definition of a monopoly. This football hegemony by the Old South is blatantly unfair to the many fine teams from every other region of the country. 

Lucky for us, the political party which now rules the country has a long and storied history of not only standing up for the oppressed, but also of going after big corporations and their attendant monopolistic practices. They need look no further than the Southeastern Conferences’ stranglehold on gridiron dominance. Last night’s game was a perfect example of the unfair advantages enjoyed by the University of Alabama over the team from Ohio State. Bless their hearts, they gave it a hardy effort, but it was like watching the New York Yankees playing the Portland Seadogs. 

Then there’s the matter of optics. In this era of sectarian and regional strife it just won’t do that teams from the Old Confederacy continue to dominate so martial a sport as football. It’s high time that someone has the courage to level the playing field...an affirmative action plan for northern, midwestern and pacific coast schools, as it were. Perhaps a limit on scholarships, or only allowing SEC teams to field ten players a side, even better—award all non-SEC teams a 14 point head start each game. Whatever it takes, something must be done.

Another Fun-Filled Week

For someone who loves history so much, I’m finding that living through it as it’s being made is no fun. Every morning when I wake up I wonder what will happen next in Washington. The fact that the center of my attention has been captured by that town is galling. For someone who has spent most of his adult life seeking to build a life as far removed from Washington foolishness as it was possible to get, now suddenly it is impossible to divert my eyes from the spectacle it has become. American politics has become the ten car pileup with multiple fatalities on Interstate 95 with 250 million rubber-neckers looking on in horror. It seems like everyday has featured one large block screaming headline after another, each more outlandish than the last. Remember back years ago when the biggest argument coming out of our nation’s Capitol was...Should We or Should We Not Audit the Federal Reserve? Those were the days. Who can forget the riveting national debate about whether or not the government should bail out Chrysler? The only divisive thing about that argument was how to spell Lee Iacocca’s last name. But unfortunately, this isn’t 1979, we did bail them out but Chrysler went belly up eventually anyway, and Lee Iacocca has gone on to meet his maker.

Today’s political debates feel apocalyptic by comparison. Every issue seems like life and death. Protests, demonstrations, riots and other mayhem are ubiquitous. Violence is no longer something that organically boils over, but rather something that is premeditated, organized by elements within every movement you can name, designed to create chaos and the disruption of order. The disrupters may very well be the outliers of the crowd, but when the most extreme elements carry cell phones and gleefully advertise their mischief to the world, its the outliers who define the movement. Perhaps that’s not fair, but that’s the world we live in. Thanks, Steve Jobs.

So, this week I have to meet with nine clients over the next five days to discuss their accounts. I will do so with one eye on their numbers and the other on my news feed. Here are the possibilities:

- The resignation of a sitting President

- Impeachment proceedings

- The invoking of the 25th Amendment

- More armed insurrections at State Capitol buildings throughout the country

- Some nut job or nut jobs with guns and a grudge reeking havoc somewhere.

In other words, just another fun-filled week in America, 2021.

Final Thoughts on the Events of Wednesday Afternoon.

Perhaps the most outrageous part of Wednesday’s assault on the Capitol was the fact that the perpetrators marched under Jesus Saves banners. The presence of religious symbols throughout the crowd, although deeply disappointing, was regrettably predictable. Its part of a decades long co-opting of the Gospel of Jesus Christ by the Republican Party’s most Nationalistic elements. After the events of this week I can only say that we have got to find a way to discard this toxic notion that Jesus Christ and America are on the same team. Half the time we aren’t even playing the same freaking sport! We have made an idol out of political power and its pursuit has replaced discipleship as the core function of far too many American churches. We are now reaping the whirlwind.

I fear that for the most part the witness of the American church is damaged beyond repair. The center of the Christian witness will have to forever come from some other shore. We are the ones who need missionaries now.

Character is Destiny

I turned on the television around 3:00 yesterday afternoon. By that time I had already had three appointments and was busy doing the resulting paperwork when I noticed a text from my son...

An hour and a half later I was still sitting on the sofa watching, transfixed by the audacity. A couple of times I felt myself choking back tears. There were thousands of American citizens storming the Capitol building, overpowering the Capitol police, then parading around inside the Senate and House Chamber, taking selfies of themselves sitting at the Speaker’s podium, thinking themselves triumphant. Earlier in the day I had heard snippets of President Trump’s 90 minute speech to this same crowd, exhorting them to save the country, feeding them a series of toxic lies about how the election had been stolen from them, how he had actually won in a landslide! After whipping them into a frenzy, he slipped into his motorcade and escaped back to the White House to watch what would happen from the safety of the West Wing. When the Vice-President refused his unconstitutional request to reject the votes of the Electoral College, word travelled fast through the marching crowds. I sat and watched overcome by two consistent emotions, anger and sadness.

Of course, as soon as the optics became horrifying enough, a tidal wave of lies began flooding social media from Trump supporters claiming that it wasn’t them at all. It was really Antifa radicals dressed up to look like Trump supporters who were responsible. The old false flag Trojan Horse trick. It took all of two minutes of Google searches to discover that the alleged Antifa infiltrators were not. But, it won’t matter to the hard core apologists. The slimmest of fig leaves is all they will need to absolve themselves and their leader of guilt. Perhaps the worst part of the whole spectacle was the pathetic video produced by the White House in response to it all, a 60 second whine-fest, spewing more stolen election horse-shit with a big wet kiss to his patriots and the affectionate suggestion that they all go home now.

Winning.

Later last night my daughter sent me this charmingly concerned text, “What are your thoughts tonight?” This was her way of checking up on me. Big things were happening and her Dad was strangely silent. I replied along the lines of, “I can’t put enough coherent thoughts together at the moment to say anything. It is generally a bad thing to write while overcome with sadness and fury. Then I sent her a cartoon to change the subject...

Later last night it was time for the clever memes to begin raining down, the tiresome and predictable but what about, if this was BLM??!! Words cannot express how much I loathe this sort of lazy commentary. Whoever can make the biggest logical leap with the wittiest phrase wins. I’ll leave that short form silliness to the armchair philosophers.

Finally, as I lay awake in the darkness last night, I thought about a phrase that my Dad said to me one time years ago...character is destiny. His view was that how your life turns out is a function of your defining character traits. If you are a thief, someone or something will end up stealing your life from you. If you are violent, you will eventually be a victim of violence. If you are a manipulator, you will eventually be manipulated. When I think of Donald Trump, the first thing that comes to mind is that his defining characteristic is...lying. If you tell enough lies in your life, you become a lie. Set aside for a moment any positive accomplishments of his administration. For a second, put aside your views on immigration, trade, abortion etc. What Donald Trump will ultimately be remembered for is his shameless and pathetic actions since Election Day 2020. The man who promised us nothing but winning, winning and more winning, ends up not only losing reelection, but both houses of Congress in the bargain. He has single handedly destroyed the Republican Party for a generation.

Many of you disagree with me about all of this. I know. Nothing I say or write will change your minds. That’s ok. A few days ago I had a conversation with a friend of mine who is a Trump guy. I asked him the following question: “Suppose an audio tape was produced that had Barack Obama on the phone to the attorney general of Florida asking him to find him 11,000 votes so he could overturn the election in his favor. What would your reaction be? I dare say it would send you into a spittle-spewing rage, and rightfully so. But I haven’t heard one word from you about Trump’s call to the AG of Georgia.” If our outrage with presidential behavior is dependent on the president’s party, then that’s the very definition of false outrage. And yet, for four years now, millions upon millions of people have been content to look the other way at rampant dishonesty. Yesterday, the bill came due.

These People...

We had a professional photographer come out to the house over Christmas while we had the whole family here. We had never done anything like this before, although I see this sort of thing on Facebook all the time. Anyway, of all the hundreds of pictures he took, this was my favorite...

The session took place on our deck and we had left all three of the dogs inside. We hadn’t heard a peep from them, then someone noticed that all three of them had lined up at the back door for a closer look. They are, from left to right, Lucy, Jackson, and Frisco. Adorable.

Our photographer, Mr. Josh Hill, did manage to take some nice pictures of humans as well...

As I was sorting through these pictures it occurred to me that if I were asked to summarize my accomplishments on this earth over the past 62 years, this is what I would show people as proof that I was here. The people, and dogs, in these photographs are what truly matter to me. Everything else is secondary. The house, the cars, the bank accounts serve a purpose, but this is the purpose. My business and the material things it has afforded me are merely tools that have helped me fashion this life, but they aren’t life itself. Certainly there are other things dear to me that aren’t in these photographs, my extended family, my friends, my church family, etc..but its these people who matter the most.

This last picture is good of all of us. But the best part of it is in the background. Look closer and you will see Lucy standing at the back door, keeping watch over her people. She doesn’t sense danger, but she’s not going to relax until all six of us are back inside. Those of you who have dogs know exactly what I’m talking about. But in a way, I feel the same way Lucy does. 

Where’s My Money

Over the past 24 hours, vandals have struck the houses of both Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Mitch McConnell. As of this hour, authorities have not identified the guilty party, so for now at least they serve only as a symbolic protest against the failure of Congress to pass a more generous stimulus package...I guess.

You’ve got to hand it to whoever did this. I haven’t seen anything this honest in our political conversation in years! Aside from the fake blood and severed pig head at Pelosi’s place, this guy’s message is bold and unequivocal...Dude wants everything! I mean, why the heck not? As a negotiating position, it makes perfect sense. You shoot for the moon, and even if you don’t hit it, you’ll land among the stars, right?

Politician: So, how can we help you through this difficult season of life?

Protester: Give me everything.

Politician: I’ll have to get back to you on that...

Whoever spray-painted McConnell’s door chose an interesting possessive pronoun, the word my in his message is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Through the first 10 months of fiscal year 2020, the government of the United States collected $2.83 trillion dollars in taxes and fees. Over that same period of time it borrowed another $2.81 trillion. That’s a lot of money. But, to our protester’s point...how much of that can fairly be described as...his? But, something tells me that the graffiti artist in question here is not pondering the complexities of finance, he is just pissed that his stimulus check will be inadequate to his needs, and he blames Mr. McConnell for the shortfall. I can think of no politician, living or dead, who cares less about what this protester might think of his stimulus check than Mitch McConnell. Having said that, the protester’s decision to paint Where’s My Money, without a question mark, on the Majority Leader’s front door works well as political theatre. Where, indeed? 

A new administration will soon take power that is more favorably disposed to give this protester what he wants...at least in theory. Their ranks are filled with people who have given at least lip service to the idea of universal income guarantees, the cancelling of college debt, free college educations for all and scores of other wealth transfer programs. So maybe the answer to our vandal’s questions are, “It’s on the way. Be patient.” Much depends, I’m told, on the outcome of the two senate races in Georgia. If the Democrats sweep, they will take control of the Senate, finally ridding themselves of the heartless penny-pincher, McConnell. If not, Mister McConnell will have to worry about a lot more than graffiti on his front door the next time he blocks President Biden’s first stimulus check package.

A GREAT Christmas Present

I’ve got a buddy down in Nashville, Deen Entsminger, who gave me one of the best Christmas presents ever...The Complete Far Side...

This is Volume One. There are three such volumes. We will be sending each other coded messages ( page 54, 8/9/80 ) for the rest of our lives, I imagine. Gary Larson’s work is endlessly entertaining, but the best part is that everyone comes away from one of his strips with a different take on what it actually means. Or does it even mean anything? Sometimes, he’s just being silly. My favorites always seem to be the ones with no caption. These are usually the ones that stir up the most controversy, since it is up to the individual reader to decide what’s going on. Of course, individual readers are free to project their own problems onto such strips, turning them inside out, endowing each with all sorts of nefarious intent. Page 54, 8/9/80 is one such strip...

I love this. Two diametrically opposed groups about to confront each other, when just around the corner sits an ice cream truck playing some scratchy childhood tune. Any number of outcomes are possible. Both sides could ignore the ice cream truck. The protesters are the aggressors here since they are the ones marching. Since one of the guys in the front row is carrying a club, it can fairly be assumed that they intend physical violence. But the troops on the other side have far superior firepower and will quickly gain the upper hand in any such confrontation. We don’t know what the issue is here, the protest signs give us no hint. We don’t know if the protesters are fighting for something noble or they’re just a bunch of anarchists. What we do know is there is about to be trouble. Big trouble. Enter, the ice cream truck and its oblivious driver. Is it possible that the song is loud enough to be heard over the screaming and yelling? Is it possible that if enough of them hear it, that they will pause and look? If so, might one of the protesters and one or two of the troops walk over and ask the driver, “Do you have dreamcicles?” It’s awfully hard to beat someone up while enjoying a dreamcicle. I look at this strip and think it perfect for the first day of 2021. As the divided states of America enters a new year, will we choose to continue fighting each other, or will we pause long enough to grab a Nutty Buddy?

So, that’s my take on Page 54, 8/9/80. As I write this, Deen is preparing his take. This is going to be great fun!