Archive → January, 2025
California teaches America a lot of lessons
Southern California is on fire, and why it is still on fire one week, at least fifteen lives lost, endless misery, and $150 Billion in losses later reads like a graduate course in Bad Government 101.
California has been the drug addict child of the United States for a long time, but especially in recent years. Californians can’t ever get too much woke politically correct crazy, and so they keep voting for more of it and for the drunk sailor spending that enables it. No one there knows where the money is coming from, no one cares, they just keep throwing money around for empty virtue signaling.
And no money for saving water for a bad day and cleaning up old brush around residential areas. No, these two activities were generously funded, but not implemented. They both contributed to the annual Santa Ana Winds-fueled wildfires now leveling entire neighborhoods in the Los Angeless area, as reservoirs were dry, hydrants had no water, and years of unaddressed dry brush resulted in uncontrollable fires.
For many years already, California has suffered at the hands of criminal homeless and illegal aliens. Suffered unnecessarily in the name of some vague understanding of some sad people somewhere. But these fires may have taught the citizen voters there that there are limits, hard breaks, up against the best of intentions fail.
Lessons taught, maybe not necessarily learned:
a) Repeat voting for a single political party that continuously places homeless and illegal immigrants ahead of taxpaying citizens is unsustainable and will end up destroying your society.
b) Repeat voting for a single political party that makes DEI and ESG and other foolish woke virtue signaling a central point and purpose of government will end up destroying your society. The pathetic and avoidable failures of state and local government across the Los Angeles area are all attributable to race and gender ideology hiring choices, incompetent people, not hiring practices based on merit and individual capabilities, resulting in competent people who have fire hydrants with water in them in case of a fire happening in a fire-prone ecosystem.
c) Making silly, emotional, childish public policy choices, instead of responsible adult-level decisions is no way to run any level of government. These bad choices will always come back to haunt those who are subject to them. Eventually you must pay the piper. California is now paying for Gavin Newsom’s childish ideas and bad policies.
In sum, California voters now see that they have a real choice to make. They can move forward and select leaders who make responsible decisions that protect the citizenry, or they can continue to select leaders who blame human-caused wildfires on supposed “climate change,” and continue to fail.
My own takeaway from California’s fiery carnage is that no one is more racist than a white liberal Democrat. No one. The amount of destruction they wreak on people of color everywhere is unimaginable. Chicago, Philly, New York, you name an American city and you will almost always find failure and black people suffering there, for decades, and it all goes back to people like California governor Gavin Newsom and his fellow white liberals. They just can’t not hurt people, especially people of color. It has to be purposeful.
Here it is, right in front of you, urban Americans. You can learn from this lesson in California, or you can ignore it and continue to suffer. It is your vote. Just don’t continue to vote for the Gavin Newsoms of America and then put out your hand and demand American tax dollars to fix your bad policy decisions.
Nope we Americans have now learned that lesson.
Want to feel good? Go to the PA Farm Show!
The Pennsylvania Farm Show in Harrisburg, PA, has been an annual event for something like 160 years. Over that time the Farm Show building complex has grown and grown and grown. The large, beautiful, evocative Art Deco facade remains visible on most of the buildings seen from Maclay and Cameron Streets, while the buildings themselves have multiplied in size and number, especially over the past 25 years.
While the Farm Show itself is ever so slowly evolving with time, mostly from technology changes, its direct connection to agriculture and farm life remains. Agricultural organizations like 4H and FFA remain front and center in much of the activities, including the kids’ bull riding rodeo and horse barrel vaulting competitions we watched last Saturday night. Hands-on activities include all kinds of food, fiber, and animals like sheep, goats (the baby goat snuggling place returned this year and it was overwhelmed with people wanting to snuggle with adorable baby goats), cows, horses of all size, chickens and chicks, ducks, rabbits, pigs etc. are all available for close-up viewing and or holding and petting.
While there is always food available in abundance, I was pleased to see a revamped and larger PA maple syrup stand, with more products. Hate to admit it, but I am a big fan of real maple syrup. When I am not making it myself in my own maple stand, I buy between four and six gallons a year. While 99% of maple syrup is made through the reverse osmosis process now, with no cooking or maybe a very brief flash heat at its end, it is still a unique flavor that I crave all year long.
I make my own maple syrup the old-fashioned way: Collect sap from my own maple stands with old fashioned spiles and buckets, wood or propane fire under a large stainless steel evaporation pan with a spigot, constant stirring, regular addition of maple sap until the syrup reaches an almost-done consistency. Then I tap it off the evaporation pan and finish it off in pots and pans inside the house on the stove top. Takes me about 16-20 hours to boil down sixty gallons of sap. Fact: Nothing commercially available tastes anything like my own home-made, deep brown, super rich maple syrup. I think the heat really augments the maple flavor. Anyhow, I am digressing.
Old tractors, new tractors, out-buildings, clothing, boots, hats, you name it, all kinds of neat stuff is available. The only cost is parking, and that amount depends on where you park.
If you are looking to feel good, because Lord knows we all have burned out on politics and everyone is looking for opportunities to shake off the misery, go visit the PA Farm Show. It runs until this Saturday night. You will not regret it. If nothing else, you will be reminded that the food we all eat does not in fact grow in styrofoam containers in the grocery store. Rather, our food is grown on farms, and then through an elaborate and energy-intensive route it ends up on our dinner plate. Unless you grow your own food, this is how you eat. That lesson alone is a worthy reason to take kids to the PA Farm Show.
Nina got a new Stetson at the Farm Show
January 6th is the modern July 4th
January 6th is traditionally the date upon which the previous national election is certified in the US Congress, in Washington, DC, barring any discrepancies or challenges.
Certification implies a process, and any process implies steps and checks and balances. An election cannot possibly be automatically certified. What the hell would that rubber stamp prove? Certification in its fullest meaning means that all of the questions have been answered, any outstanding challenges have been resolved, and everyone or most of everyone involved is on board.
Certifiying an election means that it is a kosher product, unadulterated and without question legitimate.
And so while tomorrow Congress is supposed to stick around DC to certify President Donald Trump’s electoral success last November, it appears an imminent snow storm has sent most congresscritters squawking for shelter. Which leaves us with the opportunity to reflect upon just what meaning January 6th has taken on since the January 6th of 2021.
I participated in a peaceful protest in Washington, DC, on January 6th 2021. Originally gathering at the Washington Monument, around 1:40PM we eventually started walking down Constitution Avenue to the US Capitol, where we were supposed to peacefully show our displeasure at the obvious rubber stamping of a blatantly stolen 2020 election.
At this point, my memory of exactly where we ended up standing out in front of the Capitol is lost to the haze of time and age. However, I recall standing on a large stone plaza with a lot of other American patriots, many of whom waved American flags and other types of flags (Gadsden, many Trump themes, gay, Vietnamese) while peacefully milling around. We were facing the Capitol and about forty feet away was a line of metal barricades.
Out of the blue an unexpected and unearned rain of flashbangs and other explosive munitions were launched into our midst, while I personally watched peaceful protestors standing in front of the barricades get shot directly in their faces with explosives by the police officers who we thought were there to protect us from Antifa thugs (I saw several protestors with destroyed faces stumbling away from the barricades). I also watch police officers lean across the barricades and spray chemical irritants into the faces of peaceful protestors, as well as smash people in the head with their batons. I myself was shot many times with rubber bullets by a single determined police officer, who seemed to be trying to hit my face, but who instead hit my chest and shoulders (a picture of some of them below that I brought back with me).
Like many other peaceful protestors gathered around me, I was also gassed several times by pepper and tear gas munitions fired by the police out over the barricades and into our peaceful gathering. Being gassed is an awful experience. Mind you, none of us were doing anything but singing the national anthem and other patriotc songs, as well as breaking out into spontaneous chants of USA! USA! USA! We were standing exactly where we were supposed to be standing. We did not deserve to be shot, gassed, bludgeoned, or blown up by the police who were sworn to protect us.
The fallout from January 6th 2021 has only begun.
January 6th was nothing like the fake presentations done by the corrupt US House January 6th Committee, which dubbed in riot sounds over the silent CCTV footage they carefully cobbled together. Nothing like the ridiculous narrative told by the mainstream media. The vast majority of protestors on January 6th were peaceful, if ultimately shocked by the illegal brutality rained down upon them by uniformed police officers.
We expect a great deal of investigation to be done this year, into the official lawlessness and criminal police brutality we protestors experienced. Only a small handful of people were in or near the Capitol or its doorways, and only a handful engaged in real violence against the police. The rest of us deserve justice, and especially those political prisoners who have been languishing away without receiving a speedy trial, often in solitary confinement, since their violent arrests in 2021.
If American citizens receive huge pay-outs for minor injuries incurred from violent police officers, then what are people like me entitled to? My right eye still has a purple clot in it that I got from the gas or pepper spray on January 6th. I still carry emotional trauma from that violent experience, not to mention the several subsequent visits I received from FBI agents, who told me up front that I had committed no crimes on January 6th, but that they “just wanted to talk with me.” Like mafia goons. Their lawlessness is breathtaking.
Other Americans were seriously injured and permanently disabled by the police on that terrible day. The January 6th political prisoners have undergone years of torture and beatings in prison. All of these people deserve just compensation, and I really hope we will get it.
If nothing else, January 6th 2021 was the modern day Kent State or even the new July 4th (recall that on January 6th four protestors were killed by police, and zero police – none, nada – were killed by the protestors). We, The People stood up to the lawless thieves and power-hungry tyrants of our time, challenged their phony election certification, declared our ownership of the government they hijacked and our independence from their tyranny.
With the 2024 election of freedom-fighter Donald John Trump, we have ultimately prevailed, despite the legacy media constantly lying about us and about what really happened on January 6th, 2021.
I stood in the vicinity of the red scratch mark on the plaza
Rubber bullets that hit Josh 1/6/21