Just one note for today, as we prepare the Christmas Beast (hell, yeah, we’re cookin’!). If you want to participate in one of those “5 Best Christmas Movies” debates on Twitter, these two belong on the list..
A Christmas Carol (1951 version)
Runs All Day on FXM
A Christmas Story
Runs All Day on TBS
Tweet Me Right
September 20, 2013:
FOX NEWS: If there is a shutdown, who should get fired?
TRUMP: The President.#TrumpChristmasShutdown #ResignTrump pic.twitter.com/AiWS0jAwlj
— Mrs. Betty Bowers (@BettyBowers) December 22, 2018
Oh.
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It’s kinda like when the babysitter calls and says, “First of all, you should know the children are okay…” https://t.co/8tJZ6sKSa1
— Sam Ro (@SamRo) December 24, 2018
Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, vacationing in Cabo with his Scottish mail-order bride, phones the heads of major U.S. banks to make sure their stockings are not filled with coal (but, you know, clean coal!), then writes a note to America saying not to worry. Oooooooooooo-kay.
Ten weeks ago. pic.twitter.com/QzxAI0YSeX
— Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla) December 24, 2018
Don’t you love it when the country’s supposed leading financial expert is borrowing from the opening sentence of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy?
2. panDEMONium
In front of a packed house and Bill Walton at Wells Fargo Arena, the Arizona State Sun Devils took down No. 1 Kansas. It’s only the second time the Sun Devils have defeated a No. 1 (at Oregon State, 1981) but it’s also the second time Bobby Hurley’s Devils have beaten the Jayhawks in the past 13 months (they won at No. 2 Kansas last season).
ASU trailed by 8 in the final minutes before going on a 10-0 run, and then holding off the Jayhawks in the final minute.
As you head off to church this evening or tomorrow morning, remember you are celebrating the birth of a baby whose parents were refugees, who were repeatedly refused entry at inns even though the mother was about to give birth. Remember that this person whose birth you celebrate never owned land, never held a job, never got married or had kids, never had any earthly wealth. He wore a beard (and probably had an ankle tattoo).
Also, that He was utterly uncompromised in his values. He never said, “Whatsoever you do to the least of my brothers, that you do unto me…unless that brother is illegally crossing a border.” He never said, “He who lives by the sword shall die by the sword…but it’s better to be a good guy with a sword.”
He was a refugee child. He was an instigator. A pain in the ass. He was not someone who made exceptions to rules out of convenience. Just something to remember as you head off to worship.
*The judges will not accept “Wipeout”, “Crash Into Me” or “Edge of Seventeen.” It’s Christmas, for Lord’s sake.
Nearly 400 people are known to be dead after a tsunami came ashore on the Indonesian island of Java. The pop band Seventeen had just finished a song when the wave, like something out of a movie, crashed through the screen behind the stage. The band’s lead singer survived. Its bassist and manager died, while its guitarist and drummer are missing.
Whoa pic.twitter.com/K7NADSMnWo
— Meanwhile in Canada (@MeanwhileinCana) December 21, 2018
Santa Claus Is Coming To Town
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oPM73W69wVs
Don’t ask why The Boss is playing this song in the summertime (Sept. 20, 1978) or why he says, “He’s making a wish/He’s checking it twice…”. Merry Christmas from the entire MH staff, both domestic and abroad.
Family Hour.
When the money is real — millions of dollars real, life-changing real — and can realistically be won in a manner of eight hours, you will go through some things.
The week before my World Fantasy Football Championship, with a grand prize of $500,000 and the possibility of winning an additional $1 million, I quietly went about my schedule, stubbornly pushed through the doubt and the jags of nervousness/joy, and stuck to the analytics-heavy strategy that allowed me to qualify for it (a first-place finish out of thousands of entries). I ignored the fact that everyone else in the competition was a millionaire pro, or David Portnoy. I ignored a job rejection email I received Sunday morning as I was setting my lineup (an old application, from months ago, and out of nowhere). I ignored the B- I had just received in an accounting course, ending my bid at graduating from an Ivy League institution with a 4.0 GPA. I ignored the commonly-held thought amongst NFL talking-heads and columnists and people close to me that Week 15 was a shit-show week for fantasy football purposes. I ignored my own belief that your life is the choices that you make, and that the nine open slots in my fantasy lineup was the latest and perhaps most absolute example of that belief.
I ignored the loud bells, whistles and alarms of what that money COULD do for me.
And I focused.
And when that lineup was set and my mind was fully fixed and locked in on my choices, I then experienced the wildest, nuttiest, like-huh-what-the-fuck mood swing … from insecurity to ridiculous overconfidence. I’d like to write “in my entire life” to end that sentence, but that would be a falsehood. I had never felt that, such a see-saw swing, and may never again. I did the research. Exactly like before. So, I’m good. Am I good?
I needed to step out of my hotel room and go for a run (the daily fantasy sports company set me up with a Times Square-area hotel room for the competition), but alas, freezing rain. So, I went to the hotel gym, stepped up on a treadmill for a 20-minute burn, and about three minutes in, the oddest thing happened. Across the street on 44th, eye level with me, were four ballerinas and their young instructor, working through a morning practice. I remember one of them wore a red top. I also remember all of them being exactly what you would expect: Precise, elegant, and just about perfect. At one point, “Clair De Lune” was playing in my headphones, a pure of heart piece, and as they danced and spun on their toes I no longer heard my own breath, or felt the labor of my run, or the stress of a competition. I was just … leveled. Truly in the moment. Afterward, I felt no nervousness on the bus ride over to a Hoboken bar for the competition, and at no point as the NFL games played out was I especially up or down.
Perhaps a good “put it all in perspective” moment was exactly what I needed. Some might even call it a blessing — because I finished 69th out of 75 qualifiers. There is no sugarcoating this: It was the second time playing daily fantasy sports that I closed in on a cool million only to watch the house of cards not only fall down, but burn to ashes.
I won’t go over the logic of my lineup, or defend it, or explain what went wrong out there on an NFL Sunday. And I won’t shrug it all away as bad luck. Degenerate gamblers do that – always complaining about bad beats and how close they came to life-changing money and success — and then they continue to use the same system over and over until the house beats them again. No, I recognize that my base of pro football research needs to be expanded. It’ll be the only way I get there — if I still want to get there. And I know enough about the analytics of the game, and that beautiful bounce-back from the body blows of life, to recognize that every Sunday I’m inching closer to these pros who have a much larger bankroll. I’m doing more with much less.
And I’m good with that.
Oh, and I won $8,000 and had more than a few whiskey shots.
Now on to my Week 16 picks. As always, home team in caps, with William Hill odds. I also added some percentages to correspond with my picks – they represent the probabilities calculated by The Quant Edge that my picks will actually happen. Full disclosure: I work at TQE as an advisor.
As long as Bill and Tom have been in New England and winning Super Bowls, the Patriots have found their success through exceptional game planning, and it must be said … vindictiveness. They want to get back at the lot of us. When SpyGate happened, 18-0 happened. When DeflateGate happened, Tom won another Super Bowl, and the Patriots also convinced offensive coordinator Josh Daniels to stay in New England instead of being the head coach of Indianapolis (the org that “ratted” them out). Last year, I edited together a Super Bowl pregame piece with Al Michaels and Bob Kraft, and the Patriots owner said something very telling: “Jealously is an incurable disease.” I think that’s the team’s mindset — not unlike a teen music sensation reading the comment section from her latest Instagram post:
EVERYBODY IS JUST JEALOUS. WE’LL SHOW THEM.
And yeah, vindictiveness works in pro sports. Just ask Michael Jordan.
So, I respectfully submit the Pats are going to show us all that their reign in the AFC is not yet over, that Gronk and Brady don’t look slow, that Josh Gordon didn’t actually matter … and as a result the team will splatter the Bills at home and clinch their 10th straight division title. If they don’t, then there are some real problems at Patriot Place.
Cincinnati should give Joe Mixon 35+ touches — in open space and between the tackles — and muscle out a close victory. No way Cleveland is a 9.5-point favorite against anyone.
There’s a heaping helping of offensive ugliness going on here. Like most suckers, my inclination is to always take the over (“People like scoring!”), but this one has 14-10 Broncos all over it.
As a producer I’d definitely want Panthers QB Taylor Heinicke to pull a Rocky here and maybe knock down the Falcons early, and then cut away to cameras in his hometown bar somewhere in Suwanee, Georgia, capturing the locals losing their minds over it. It’d be a nice story. But no, I think Atlanta’s Julio Jones has a monster game left in him this season, and this one will be it.
Last week: 1-3
Overall: 24-33
Welcome to The Annex. What it is is, on days when we have a little extra time and feel as if we only went off half-cocked during the morning’s IAH!, well, this is our time to go off full-cocked. Maybe we should call it Full-cocked? You can voice your opinion in the Comments on that. So here we go…
“All the best people”: Kelly, McMaster, Mattis
Whatever they believed their legacies were going to be, Generals H.R. McMaster, John Kelly and Jim “Mad Dog” Mattis will be remembered as three men who attached their careers to the Trump presidency and are now historically tarnished for that affiliation. Their collective failures as, respectively, National Security Advisor, Chief of Staff and Secretary of Defense were not military. They were not diplomatic.
If only. Their failure was not heeding a lesson they all should have learned by third grade: Never do the wrong thing for the right reasons (I just realized the last eight letters of that sentence are “treasons”).
I’ve heard the argument: If these three weren’t there, who knows what Trump is capable of? It’s as if, Hey, they’re lifelong conservatives and now they finally have someone on their side in the Oval Office, so they’ll do whatever the team asks and make sure Donald doesn’t do anything too crazy.
The problem is that this wasn’t about the GOP Team. This was about being part of Team Trump. The very act of joining that latter team was no longer about service to your country, or the GOP’s version of the country, but of legitimizing an illegitimate president. If you buy a whorehouse just because you think you can do a better job of protecting the girls, you’re still running a brothel.
Sometimes a thing has to break all the way before it can truly be fixed. The election of Donald Trump was the triumph of ignorance and nationalism over this country’s true ideals. Trump needs to fail, and to fail hard, in order to expose what a disaster he is as a president and as a man.
By signing on with him, McMaster, Kelly and Mattis attempted to hide from their fellow countrymen what a buffoon, what a malefactor, we have in the White House. Were they really trying to protect us, or were they trying to protect an archaic ultra-white conservative ideology embodied by the Republican party?
This is a HORRIBLE take from Stephen A Smith on mental illness and addiction. I’m absolutely appalled this aired on television. pic.twitter.com/W7tYQca2OA
— Will Brinson (@WillBrinson) December 21, 2018
You may not like what Stephen A. Smith is saying here, but there is nothing he says in this clip that is false. And this goes to something deeper that I see on Twitter: people don’t judge things as much by whether they are inherently wrong or right, but by how the consequences make them feel.
What SAS is saying here may not be loaded with Rinaldi-esque empathy (or sap), but he’s absolutely right: While it’s okay to call addiction a disease, it is fundamentally different than the other diseases he mentions because it begins with a choice. And if you argue that a person never had a choice before they were chemically addicted, then you have to realize that you are arguing against the existence of free will itself.
But here’s the point: Why does what SAS is saying here upset you? What is NOT true? Please, tell me. Or do you just not like it that it feels as if he is blaming the addict for his own disease, which, to a limited degree he is? Because, to a limited degree, more so than an Alzheimer’s patient, the addict IS responsible for his disease.
Let’s push this out. On the same night I saw Twitter get upset because on this play…
Zion Williamson charge to foul out of the game tonight.
Good call? Bad call?
(via @espn)pic.twitter.com/ZLNnYmyqn0
— Sports Illustrated (@SInow) December 21, 2018
…Duke’s Zion Williamson was whistled for a charge and fouled out. Now let’s do a little thought exercise. When is the last time you saw anyone under age 35 on Twitter cheer against a dunk? Or cheer for anything that prevented a dunk? That’s what I thought.
So on the above play (I had a clip earlier that showed the play a few seconds before, but cannot locate it at the moment) Duke’s precocious freshman palms the ball at least twice. Then he does commit a charge—he’s out of control as he bangs into the defender. And, okay, maybe reasonable minds can disagree about this, but it seems most of Twitter was upset because 1) he fouled out and 2) the referee was infusing himself into the game.
That’s what referees are paid to do. When someone breaks the rules. It may be that fans don’t pay to watch defense, but if you’re not going to give defenders an equal chance, then the entire quality of not just this game but any game goes out the window. I appreciate that’s very GOML of me to say, but I don’t apologize for being a GOML guy. At least I have a lawn.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AiZqFGLAeAc
Lost in all the other mess of yesterday was President Trump signing an $867 million welfare package to America’s farmers. Of course, if you call it a “farm subsidy” as opposed to “white landowner welfare,” it sounds a lot more respectable.
Personally, I’m against the government paying anyone who is healthy not to work, regardless of race or economic station. The pro-farm bill people try to explain to me that they need to do this to keep crop prices competitive, but isn’t that what capitalism is all about? If you have too much product, prices go down. And so a few farmers go out of business. Isn’t that the invisible hand of competition at work?
So then someone tells me that this very program “trickles down” (those magic words) to help the impoverished. Really? Then why not just give that $867 million directly to the impoverished and avoid the middle man?
Right-wing pundits predicted doom for Nike after making Colin Kaepernick the face of a new ad campaign. They were wrong. https://t.co/faWrBKs1dK pic.twitter.com/VLTJ92Limq
— The Daily Beast (@thedailybeast) December 21, 2018
On Labor Day weekend or thereabouts Nike unveiled a TV ad, coinciding with the beginning of football season, in which Colin Kaepernick was spokesman. A few conservative pundits (and a friend of ours) predicted that now was the time to short Nike stock, as the company would take a huge hit.
While the stock is down from where it was in September, look around. Almost all major stocks are down since then. What IS worth paying attention to is that Nike has posted double-digit growth since the ad was unveiled, demonstrating that The Swoosh may understand contemporary America better, thankfully, than Clay Travis or Joe Kernen do.
—President Ronald Reagan’s final speech was a love letter to immigrants
‘Anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American. We draw our people, our strength, from every country and every corner of the world.’ pic.twitter.com/4Tpo9vUpLw
— Vala Afshar (@ValaAfshar) December 21, 2018
Look at the @TIME cover that’s behind Christian Bale in this photo from @realdonaldtrump’s office. Have you seen it before? 2/ pic.twitter.com/rvrmq5sDFD
— David Fahrenthold (@Fahrenthold) December 20, 2018
As David Farenthold of The Washington Post points out, Donald Trump had a framed Time magazine cover of himself hanging in his office and at six of his golf courses. The problem is that no such magazine was ever printed. Now, yes, anyone can design magazine covers in which they are the cover boy (I think it used to be something you could do at a photo studio), but when you’re as prominent a figure as Donald Trump as opposed to, say, an eight year-old boy, what’s your motivation?
Secretary of Defense James Mattis, the last sane man left in “the room,” resigns. The president threatens to shut down the government if he doesn’t get funding for his border wall. The stock market is tanking. And it’s the first day of winter, Ned Stark. We’re there. Or as Donald Trump might tweet, “We’re their.”
Tweet Me Right
“A nation without borders is a nation not at all. Without borders, we have the reign of chaos, crime, cartels and believe it or not, coyotes,” Trump said of the Senate spending bill he’s refusing to sign due to it not meeting his demands on border security funding pic.twitter.com/aX3BgpTXX3
— POLITICO (@politico) December 20, 2018
Do you think he and Pence think these are the kind of coyotes that walk around with dynamite from ACME?
For Secretary of Defense James Mattis, the line in the sand was the fact that his boss no wanted to align in the sand. Specifically, in Syria. When Donald Trump went against the advice of Mattis and the other Joint Chiefs of Staff and in favor of whatever Sean Hannity and Bill Shine advised, the erstwhile four-star general said, “Yup, I’m outta here.”
Mattis joins a slew of well-meaning Republican types who boarded the H.M.S. Trump but then decided, you know what, I’m going to abandon ship before it strikes the iceberg.
Always good when a guy called Mad Dog is like “this shit is too crazy for me”
— Jess Dweck (@TheDweck) December 20, 2018
Here is Mattis’ resignation letter in full …
…and here are the two excerpts most relevant:
One core belief I have always held is that our strength as a nation is inextricably linked to the strength of our unique and comprehensive system of alliances and partnerships. While the US remains the indispensable nation in the free world, we cannot protect our interests or serve that role effectively without maintaining strong alliances and showing respect to those allies.
And…
I believe we must be resolute and unambiguous in our approach to those countries whose strategic interests are increasingly in tension with ours. It is clear that China and Russia, for example, want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model — gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions — to promote their own interests at the expense of their neighbors, America and our allies.
In short: Stop pissing off our friends and cozying up to our enemies.
Kelly’s gone. Mattis is gone. So who’s the adult in the room? Kellyanne?
Two Scandinavian women, both in their twenties, trekking by themselves in the remote Atlas Mountains region of Morocco. For a quartet of local men, this was seen as an opportunity. The bodies of Louisa Vesterager Jespersen, 24, from Denmark and Maren Ueland, 28, from Norway, were found on Monday. They had been camping near Toubkal (13,671 feet) north Africa’s highest peak.
Motive: the four men, all apprehended, have pledged allegiance to ISIS and were heard on a video pledging allegiance to its leader. Yes, at least one of the women were beheaded and if you search (not very hard) on the internet, you can see footage of the horrific act. People are just so messed up.
So we were on a little road trip over Labor Day weekend with one of our oldest friends, whose daughter was just beginning college. We asked him what’s going on in high schools these days, and he asked if we knew anything about “Juuls.” Never heard of them, we said.
He then proceeded to tell us how Juul is an incredibly popular type of E-cigarette that you can hide in the palm of your hand. One cartridge produces the nicotine kick of an entire pack of cigarettes. Juul, he told us, is rampant in high school classrooms.
Vampires hooking the next generation of nicotine addicts. https://t.co/cdbQPVJms4
— Downtown Josh Brown (@ReformedBroker) December 20, 2018
How rampant? Yesterday Altria, the tobacco company which purchased a 35% stake in Juul earlier this year for $12.8 billion, handed the company a bonus dividend of $2 billion. Now, we’re not sure how the folks who run personnel for this 1,500-person company based in San Francisco want to divvy up the proceeds, but per staffer this would balance out to a $1.3 million bonus per staffer (and that’s how we’d do it). This way, everyone at Juul could afford to at least rent in San Francisco or Tiburon or Sausalito.
Think about that: you work for a company whose chief goal is to hook teenagers on nicotine, spurring a wave of emphysema and lung cancer for the 2050s and beyond. And you’re doing it near Silicon Valley, where all businesses purportedly exist to “make the world a better place.” And for your miscreantism you may walk home at year’s end with a million-dollar bonus. What a time to be alive….
If you missed this a couple days ago, that’s Cooper Dawson, a three-star defensive end recruit from South Carolina and a five-star human being. For his NLI announcement, Dawson brought out a friend who suffers from cerebral palsy, Kingsley Feinman, to help and actually make the announcement.
Dawson missed his senior season with a torn ACL but as he said at the gathering, “Kingsley taught me that the only disability is a bad attitude.”
What a cool young man. And Cooper, that’s Tom Rinaldi calling on your other line…
We got to thinking, based on SNL‘s skit about what if Trump had never been elected president…what if Adolf Hitler had never been born? There’s probably been a movie or book (or three dozen) tackling this hypothetical in the past, but the world would be such a different place.
Consider: Industrialization may have proceeded more slowly, as World War II spurred the acceleration of some of the greatest (and most worrisome) technological advancements in history. That mustache above might be acceptable, as would the name Adolf.
Granted, Hitler did not create nationalism or racism, he just exploited it (sound like any leader you know?). Something to consider: Adolf was one of six children, three of whom died in infancy. Those are 50-50 odds, but the world came out on the wrong side of them. The fate of 70 million lives, cut short, came down to a coin flip.
Travelin’ Man
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0janfcZ8LUw
A true teen pop idol, Ricky Nelson was the son of arguably the most popular TV couple in the 1950s and early Sixties, Ozzie and Harriet Nelson (who were also married in real life). Pop would put his son’s songs onto the show and record sales would soar. This was Nelson’s second and last No. 1 hit, in 1961. Nelson died on New Year’s Eve 1985 the way all true rock stars should—in a small plane crash en route to a gig. He left the world his songs and his extremely blond sons, who would record “After The Rain,” an early ’90s hit that was big on the MTV.
Buffalo at Marquette
8:30 p.m. FSN
The 14th-ranked Bulls, who have defeated West Virginia and Syracuse, are 11-0. No. 20 Marquette is 9-2, with losses at Indiana and versus No. 1 Kansas.