My Customs Story

I read a few financial newsletters. One of my favorites is The Daily Dirtnap, by Jared Dillian. He’s mainly a sentiment and charts guy, big on ETFs over individual stocks, leans conservative politically but doesn’t beat you over the head with it, and writes about his six cats, with pictures sometimes. He’s also a Progressive House DJ with a decent following on Soundcloud and is finishing up an MFA. Earlier this week he wrote about coming back into the U.S. from a recent trip to the Caymans, and the weird reception he and his tattoos got from the Customs agent in Charlotte. He told readers to send him Customs stories, so I sent him mine.

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We, The People…

One day, when we look back on our lives, we will be defined by the way we behaved in this moment.

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Rules of Civility

I was just a kid April 4, 1968, when Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot and killed in my hometown. My family – mom, dad, my younger brother Robert, and my baby sister Monica – were in the dining room finishing dinner when I rushed in from the TV room to announce the news. Both my parents had grown up in the east, in Brooklyn, but they’d lived in the south long enough to know a thing or two about race relations, and were savvy enough about “the times” to understand King’s assassination would be a momentous event, that it might change everything.

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The First Thing We Do, Let’s Kill The Tax Man

tax zombies

Anti-tax zombie Grover Norquist posted a truly incredible tweet on Twitter Monday. Widely-known in the media (and somewhat in the popular consciousness) for his audacious quote, first published in 2001, that he wasn’t so much interested in abolishing government, rather, just wanted to shrink it to where it might be “drowned in a bathtub” – he is arguably the nation’s foremost one-trick pony arguing “tax is theft.”

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