Burnin’

New York Times reporter Ben Stein recently had the pleasure of visiting my hometown and meeting its most famous person–Warren Buffett, chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway. Buffett told Stein (who also happens to be an economist and lawyer) he’s not pleased with the current tax system in this country. But not for reasons typically associated with the wealthy.

Mr. Buffett compiled a data sheet of the men and women who work in his office. He had each of them make a fraction; the numerator was how much they paid in federal income tax and in payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, and the denominator was their taxable income. The people in his office were mostly secretaries and clerks, though not all.

It turned out that Mr. Buffett, with immense income from dividends and capital gains, paid far, far less as a fraction of his income than the secretaries or the clerks or anyone else in his office. Further, in conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires. “How can this be fair?” he asked of how little he pays relative to his employees. “How can this be right?”

Even though I agreed with him, I warned that whenever someone tried to raise the issue, he or she was accused of fomenting class warfare.

“There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”

Many of the richest people in the nation look to Buffet for answers on how to increase their holdings. But Buffet’s philosophy by example goes far beyond mere numbers and business analysis. Maybe the rich could begin to ask deeper questions. Like how shall we best reform ourselves and the nation in the process?

There’s a restaurant in downtown Naples, FL attracting a ton of attention–from patrons, the most important food critics in the world.

I’ve been there twice and can say the place has great energy, good food and good service.

While I’m motivated to talk about Campiello here, others have been inspired to paint the scene.

“Afternoon Light at Campiello Naples” by Jim Freeheart

Here’s how the owners describe their venture:

Like Italy, its inspiration, Campiello is a study in contrasts. The restaurant is both urban and rural, sophisticated and casual, old-world and strikingly new.

Campiello is owned and operated by D’Amico & Partners, one of the nation’s preeminent restaurant developers and management companies. Based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the privately-owned company operates 18 Italian restaurants, plus a catering division.

WWVV-FM, a.k.a. Wave 104.9, Hilton Head’s adult album alternative station is no more.

According to Wikipedia:

On Tuesday, November 21st, 2006 the station began playing Christmas music as “104.9 John FM” with a new callsign, WWJN-FM. A male on-air voice could be heard in between songs stating “104.9 is John FM. John tells us what to play. Right now John wants to hear Christmas music so that’s what we’re playing. 104.9 John FM”. It is unknown at this point what format will show up on WWVV after the holidays, although the on-air statements make it seem as though Adult Hits might be likely even though that format is already represented in the area by WGCO-FM and WSGA-FM.

In a larger market, this would be no big deal since radio consumers would have other stations to turn to. Here, the loss is decidedly more papable. For instance, Wave 104.9’s Sunday evening programming included shows like eTown and Grateful Dead Hour. Will another local station pick up these best-in-class programs?

The genesis of these changes began last spring with the sale of the station by California-based Triad Broadcasting to JB Broadcasting, a small South Carolina company headed by John Broomfield. According to The Island Packet, Triad sold in order to comply with federal regulations. Federal Communications Commission regulations only allow a company to own or operate five FM stations in any one market.

The Island Packet reports today on the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s bust of a charity dove hunt at Turkey Hill in Jasper County.

A Ridgeland dove hunt for charity turned into a federal raid Saturday when about 40 hunters who each donated $100 to participate were detained and questioned by agents suspicious that the area had been illegally baited to attract the birds.

Camouflage-clad agents with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Department who were hidden “like snipers” surrounded the area and stopped the event.

About six or seven federal agents held the hunters on the property for about two hours and interviewed each for details, including their names and addresses, occupations and places of work, Social Security numbers and shotgun serial numbers. The hunters were shown aerial photos of themselves taken that day and asked to confirm they were pictured.

“It was really demoralizing,” said Mike Healy, who lives in Bluffton and went on the hunt with his sons. “It was expensive to go on this hunt; most of the people were wealthy and were” angry.

Why this story grabbed my attention is hard to say. I guess I didn’t know doves had such serious backup.

Thomas Pynchon has a new 1,085-page novel out–Against the Day–his first book in nine years.

Publisher’s Weekly says, “Now pushing 70, Pynchon remains the archpoet of death from above, comedy from below and sex from all sides. His new book will be bought and unread by the easily discouraged, read and reread by the cult of the difficult.”

“The International Publication of Book Publishing and Book Selling” also reports on retailers reactions to the new book. Several held midnight release parties last night.

“This is a big deal for us because I’m deeply in love with Pynchon’s work,” said Charles Hauther, buyer at Skylight Books in Los Angeles. “The only other midnight sale we’ve done was for Harry Potter, and I thought, if Harry Potter can have one, then Thomas Pynchon deserves one, too.”

“There has been a huge amount of bookseller enthusiasm about this book,” said Tracy Locke, Penguin Press’s associate publisher. “Thomas Pynchon is living the fiction writer’s ultimate dream, to be able to write his books and put them out there without having to promote them himself. It will be in all the holiday programs and in front of stores. It’s slated to be reviewed in every major outlet in the country.”

Pynchon, famous for being a recluse, is also the author of Gravity’s Rainbow, The Crying of Lot 49, V, Mason & Dixon and Vineland.

State Highway 462, south of Coosawhatchie, Jasper County, SC

Sometimes a picture really is worth a thousand words.

There’s a popular Rebel Flag bumper sticker in these parts that says, “Heritage, Not Hate.” While one could argue the merits of that message, at least there’s an effort being made to say, “Hey, we’re not racists, we just love the South.” But “Never Forget” does not achieve this. Rather, it reinforces in a stark manner what happened here, namely slavery and the War of Northern Agression (which forever put an end to the plantation economy). While sentiments like “The South’s gonna rise again” are common in some parts, it is rare to see the defiant but dreamy message so plainly displayed as it is on this outdoor board.

Connect Savannah is running an interview with former Poet Laureate of the United States, Billy Collins, who will give a reading in Savannah next Tuesday night.

Here are a couple of poignant excepts from the interview:

I think that poetry is something that takes place after prose has been exhausted. I would include political thought and psychology and any other discipline or school of thought that would find its expression in prose. When all of those possibilities are exhausted, that is where poetry occurs. It’s trying to express things that cannot be expressed in prose. I tell my writing students, if you can say what you are trying to say in a letter to the editor, or in an opinion piece, or in a letter to your girlfriend, they all means stop writing poetry.

I think poetry in the last 40 years has inched its way into the center of culture. I think it was marginalized, largely due to the esoteric work of people like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot because it was so difficult to understand. I think seriousness identified it with difficulty. I think that linkage has been broken. Poetry doesn’t have to be so difficult, it doesn’t have to be so serious either.

[via Largehearted Boy]

[UPDATE 11/15/06] Rarely does the appearance of a poet fill a high school auditorium with attentive listeners, but such was the case last night in Savannah. Billy Collins, held the audience in his grasp, eliciting hearty laughs throughout his performance, for his comic delivery is perfectly on key.

Here’s one the poems he read (click here to listen along):

Forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

“Those who are too smart to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are dumber.” -Plato

I normally tune out conservative propagandists, but in the wake of last night’s election returns, I was curious how they were handling the news. Not well.

CNN’s douche du jour, Glenn Beck characterized the Democrat’s platform as “the politics of destruction.” His assertion would be laughable, if it wasn’t so twisted. I don’t know how it happened, but Republicans have become masters of semantic deception. They take whatever it is they themselves are–draft dodgers, spendaholics, criminals, pervs, etc.–and claim that’s what their opposition is.

On my way in to the office this morning, I paused to hear what radio luminaries, Rick and Bubba (not to be confused with Johnboy and Billy) had to say. They claimed the Democrat platform goes against Biblical teachings. Yeah, that makes sense. Taking care of the poor, the environment, the sick, and looking out for the interests of minorities and other disenfranchised Americans is clearly the work of Satan.

I’m done letting this slide. The ideas these people promote need to be marginalized. Which brings me to the epigraph above. It’s time for all good Americans to get involved. Our nation needs a new energy policy, serious investment in education, food and health care for all and a deeper commitment to protecting the environment. And that’s just for starters.

Are you prepared to help? Or do you prefer to act like a parrot and mouth Karl Rove’s latest talking points?

[UPDATE] This bumper sticker speaks volumes.

Wow, that didn’t take long. Just hours after a sweeping Democrat victory in the midterm elections, President Bush announced that his Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld will step down.

According to Bloomberg, former Central Intelligence Agency Director Robert M. Gates will replace Rumsfeld at the Pentagon. Gates was head of the U.S. spy agency under Bush’s father, former President George H.W. Bush.

Democrats were quick today to call the election a mandate to change the U.S. course in Iraq.

“Nowhere was the call for a new direction more clear from the American people than in the war in Iraq,” House Majority Leader-to-be Nancy Pelosi said today. “We know that stay-the-course is not working, has not made our country safer, it has not honored our commitment to our troops and it has not brought stability to the region. We must not continue on this catastrophic path.”

The death toll of U.S. military personnel in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion stood at 2,836 as of today, and more than 21,572 have been wounded, according to Pentagon figures.

My alma mater has a Flickr page.