SBF, of course, was well on his way to becoming a cardinal in the Church of Our Holy Climate after dropping forty million in the collection plates of mostly left-wing politicians–and somehow convincing Major League Baseball’s umpires to stitch the FTX logo on their uniforms. The former earns a big meh, because that’s how America really works. But the latter is extremely disconcerting because it is hard to accept that people who will rep for an imaginary asset class can be trusted to call real balls and strikes.

Yesterday I travelled down into Bend with my bride to buy some new cell phones. This seemingly innocent task turned into an excellent lesson in modern commerce, and maybe some other things, though hard lessons are difficult to draw from the early part of the second millennium which is a kind of historical bouillabaisse.

On June 17, 1859, an otherworldly blast of hot wind blew into Santa Barbara, California, from the northwest. Within minutes the temperature rose to 133°. Cattle fell over, birds dropped from the sky, and old men toppled over in their adobe doorways, dead right there. Or so the legend goes. It’s an interesting story, this sudden simoom, even if the pointillist schools of modern thought have sought to debunk its veracity, dot by dot.

There is a family of mountain bluebirds that nest in a birdhouse in our yard every year. They come in spring, take up residence just long enough to raise other mountain bluebirds to flight, and then they are gone. They leave about the same time the blue-green swallows arrive, with their manic and dazzling flights. This year the bluebirds came when I was having my morning tea and devouring great scoops of Robert Penn Warren–who wrote so brilliantly about cypress swamps and southern pride as a damaging curse, and of course about those nearly Jurassic birds that stretch their necks and scull the swampy southern air for lift.

We showed up early because we expected a crowd. We were right. There had been a bird nest over the front door to the Montana Club but in the opening hubbub, not nearly as violent as a Black Friday crush at Walmart, it crashed to the ground and was promptly stomped. An old man in front me said, “Well, at least you know what they are feeding you in here.” He meant it as a joke and I did laugh. But there had been eggs in the nest and the yolks were a smear on the concrete.

There’s a good case to be made that America would not exist as the nation we know without Benjamin Franklin. In 1778, France concluded a formal alliance with the newly declared United States of America — and it was Franklin who almost single-handedly engineered that geopolitical coup. The alliance provided America with critical arms and financing and, eventually, […]