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Following is a slightly updated list of professional firms I keep on hand for those occasions when I am asked for a referral.

Previously posted on April 1, 2013. Updated with two new legal firms on April 1, 2024.

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I frequently get requests from colleagues for names of other professionals who could assist with particular client needs.

As a public service to the wider CPA community, I thought it would be helpful to publish a list of the firms I mention most often.

Attorneys:

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It was not until about a decade ago that I finally understood the song “The Little Drummer Boy,” which is a fictional story of a little boy who could bring no gift to the newborn baby Jesus than playing on his drum.

Took me decades of listening to the song before I realized that every talent, offering, service, activity, positive action, and good deed I could ever bring to Jesus as an offering is nothing more to the creator of the universe than a little boy playing a drum.

I can give nothing, absolutely nothing, to Jesus other than my heart.

Strangely as it seems, that is all He ever wants from me.

That little thing is all He wants from you. Give Jesus your heart. He will give you riches unimaginable.

“The Little Drummer Boy” as you have not heard it before:

for KING + COUNTRY – Little Drummer Boy | LIVE from Phoenix

Not quite sure why this variation of O Come All Ye Faithful and O Holy Night moves my heart so much.  I wish it could be heard by the entire world after the gospel good news is explained and the lyrics of the songs described.

If you have heard the good news of Jesus being born so he could then die on the cross, this will bring tears to your eyes.

Trans-Siberian Orchestra – O’ Come All Ye Faithful / O’ Holy Night

Joy to the World (2017) – Gabriel Trumpet Ensemble & The Tabernacle Choir

Joy to the world, the Lord is come
Let Earth receive her King
Let every heart prepare Him room
And Heaven and nature sing
And Heaven and nature sing
And Heaven, and Heaven, and nature sing

Joy to the Earth, the Savior reigns
Let all their songs employ
While fields and floods, rocks, hills, and plains
Repeat the sounding joy
Repeat the sounding joy
Repeat, repeat the sounding joy

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For my remembrance of the 9/11 attacks during which 2,996 Americans were slaughtered by 19 terrorists, my family watched 9/11: The Filmmakers’ Commemorative Edition.

The movie started as a documentary following one rookie New York firefighter through training and his nine months of probation.  In doing so, the two filmmakers were following an engine company on a call when the first hijacked airplane hit. The strike was on camera.

(Cross-post from my other blog, Outrun Change. Christians, the primary audience for this blog, do not need to be reminded of the reality of evil. Still, it is good to look at it closely once in a while to refresh our memory of the depths of evil. Thus, this post.)

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There are many things you could not say in public two or three years ago, all of which are now safe to say. Here is a starting point of the list of things you can now talk about in the open:

• The virus came from a lab leak.

• Natural immunity works. (previous post)
• Masks don’t work. (previous post)

As I find articles to further develop the issues now say to say, I will have further discussion.

The virus came from a lab leak.

This was crazy talk three years ago but is slowly becoming accepted: the most likely place the COVID-19 virus came from was a Chinese research laboratory. Oh, by the way, said lab was funded in part by Dr. Fauci’s department.

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There are many things you could not say in public two or three years ago, all of which are now safe to say. Here is a starting point of the list of things you can now talk about in the open:

• Natural immunity works.
• Masks don’t work.
• The virus came from a lab leak. (next post)

A slow trickle of news reports are showing that lots of the crazy, coo-coo bird, nutzo, conspiracy theory wackiness you heard from your friends two or three years ago were actually correct. My friends deemed nuts by society who were saying these things were right.

Natural immunity works.

2/27/23 – Wall Street Journal – Three Years Late, the Lancet Recognizes Natural Immunity

Research report by Lancet has one surprise and two not-at-all-surprises. 

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The Fed formally approved rules which will provide significant restrictions on investment activities by regional bank presidents, senior staff, and a host of staff have access to market-moving information as a part of their job.

This follows multiple news reports of Fed officials who were trading securities with somewhat awkward timing, such as after decisions had been made and before the full impact hit the market or in anticipation of major decisions which would be made within days.

The Fed issued a press release on 2/18/22: FOMC follow adopts comprehensive new rules for investment and trading activity.

Here are a few comments in the press release, which provide a great summary of the new restrictions. I converted the comment into bullet points:

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Been a while since I updated the sentences so richly earned by parents in the “Varsity Blues” college admissions scam.  Six more parents have learned the consequences of cheating and bribing their darlings into schools, usually as fake athletes.

Punishment for not pleading guilty.

Of particular note is two men who went to trial earned 15 months and a year plus a day.  The other four in this update who all seem to have been into the scheme to roughly the same extent, earned 6 weeks, 6 weeks, 6 weeks, and 2 months.

See a pattern?

There is a brutal penalty to be paid in the United States for insisting on a trial by jury of your peers.  In this small sample, the two who demanded trial earned average of 13.5 months average. The four who pleaded out earned average of 6.5 weeks, or 1.6 months.

That is a difference of 11.9 months.  That is about a year. Or, 8.4 times longer.

Six sentences

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Today, January 28, 2022, marks the twentieth anniversary of the Ulvog CPA firm.

It has been a joy to serve the nonprofit community for these two decades as an independent CPA firm. Focusing on the religious nonprofit community has been a professional honor and a personal delight.

Thanks to all the organizations who have made this journey possible.

Looking forward to many more years of serving churches and ministries.

God’s blessings to you all.

The supply chain for everything is tangle up to the extent it will take lots of time to function normally again.

Two articles describing the depth of issues:

• Analogy of turning off a complex computer system. Some of the hundreds of components won’t work when you throw the ‘on’ switch.
• Description of the demand side pressure on supply chain. All those trillions of federal dollars sloshing around have created demand which has overloaded distribution systems.

American Thinker – 12/11/21 – We broke everything in the name of Covid – Author ran a large IT department at one point in the past. Every few years they had to shut down the entire computer system so that the factory could go through maintenance of the electrical system.

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At a time when the media is telling us this Covid pandemic will continue forever and there are frequent variants that will kill us all dead, who should we actually be paying attention to?

The possibilities:

• people who know how to spell epidemiology, or
• actual epidemiologists, or
• people who are so convinced that Covid is deadly that they don’t bother to protect themselves; these are the people who also routinely ignore the rules they dictate we must follow.

People who know how to spell epidemiology and actually know someone they went to school with who is an epidemiologist:

Tweet by Martin Kulldorff

“The vocal pro-lockdown “public health scientists”, with their limited knowledge of infectious disease epidemiology, will be the last to recognize the public health disaster they created.”

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The amount of money Congress has pumped into the economy in an attempt to fight the Covid pandemic is staggering. Don’t quite have enough adjectives to describe the amount of money that is forced into the economy without any corresponding increase in production.

The amount spent directly on the pandemic is more than four times the annual budget at the federal level.

This is one of the primary reasons we are seeing inflation rates running at a thirty year high.

A close cousin on the list of inflation causes is the Fed flooding the economy with liquidity.  See previous discussion: Just how much money has the Federal Reserve created out of thin air and injected into the economy?

I’ve pulled together the amount of money appropriated by Congress in 2020 and 2021 which are focused on fighting the pandemic and stimulating the economy. Here is my tally, with amount of funding in billions of dollars, date Congress passed the legislation, and name of the program:

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The double whammy of Covid pandemic and government policies in reaction to the pandemic continue to hammer the educational sector. Unsettling thing is to consider these articles only discuss the current impact and not the long-term destruction of education for all students from pre-K to grad school.

Articles for you to consider:

• Columbia University settles for a refund of fees their class-action lawsuit claiming refund of fees and tuition.
• Freshman enrollment in colleges and universities continued to decline in fall 2021. The anticipated return of students who skipped matriculation in fall 2020 has not happened.
• As an indicator of what is likely happening in all primary and secondary schools across the country, Washington state public schools estimate enrollment for the next two years will be down another 4.5% from their February 2021 estimate.

TaxProf – 11/27/21 – Columbia Settles Covid-19 Class Action Tuition Refund Suit For $12.5 Million – Looks like Columbia University got off easy. Students there established a class and were suing for refund of tuition and fees because they were prohibited from in-person classes and instead attended an Ivy League school on their monitor.

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