Category → Fruit of Contemplation
Oh Joni, you’re a mean ol’ granny but I like you
Aging hippie and outstanding musician Joni Mitchell became an American citizen this week. After sixty some years of living here, and benefiting from America, she finally became a citizen. She used her newfound freedoms and opportunities to immediately attack the guy responsible for her admission, President Trump.
It was the usual bad form, bad manners, lack of appreciation, and selfishishness of the political Left, who act like they were raised in caves by packs of wolves or lions.
Having been raised by hippies myself, which is like being raised by wolves, as well as being raised myself by an actual pack of wolves – no lie, absolute truth – I can both relate to much of Joni Mitchell’s music, enjoy much of her music, understand her weird counter-culturism, within the period that was her youth, while rejecting a lot of it for the corrosive immaturity it is, especially now, and also say “Joni, you are a mean old granny, but I like you.”
One of my favorite songs is Joni Mitchell’s “Carey,” which today serves as a time capsule or a time machine back to the freewheelin’ early 1970s. I recommend listening to it at least twice; once to hear the words, and twice to understand and envision them. If you binge listen to it a bunch of times, you are a normal and healthy person.
And while I am here lauding Joni Mitchell’s song, I would like to say that I wrote an eponymous apology letter recently. It is the epic apology letter of human history, and for the one young reader we have here, I can give you some advice: Follow your heart when you are young. Be like Joni Mitchell in that way, and go where your heart takes you. Be brave; do not let fear or uncertainty stand in your way. You will regret it. And if you do not regret it in your mature years, you have no heart, never did.
And Joni, honey, if you are a conservative when you are young, you have no heart, but if you are a liberal when you are old, you have no brain. You are still a hell of a talented musician, and please stop talking about politics. Forthalovagod.
Here are two versions of Carey: One where she gives a great on-stage introduction, and the produced version, which is easier on the ears, and thus easier on the mind creating mental images of 1970s Greek beaches… true freedom in a sense.
I saw China dumping today
Today, I saw tangible evidence of China just outright dumping its products at give-away prices, way below manufacturing cost. It was such a dramatic sight that it made me wonder why they are doing this. Come along with me on this trip, and see what conclusions you come to yourself about what we see together.
This morning I arrived at the Pine Run Auction in Linden, PA, good and early. Got my bidder card, #6, and walked around, looking at the items coming up for auction starting at 9:00am. Nearly everyone in attendence looked the same, dressed the same, was the same age. It was humorous, because when I threw on clothes this morning, I thought surely I would be overly rustic. Nope. We all looked the same, all the old rural northcentral Pennsylvania guys. Well, “old” is a relative thing; I was one of the younger men there. And the truly young were in their forties…..
Among the rusty old American farm machinery, tri-axles, crates of machinery attachments, tools, the almost-retired CAT excavators and the chipping and peeling John Deere bulldozers, lay piles, literally piles, heaps, of shrink-wrapped brand-new Chinese made machines. I mean piles. Brand new.
Being sold by the bushel.
Mini excavators and their extra attachments, mini skid steers, machines designed for the enterprising individual American man, sold for a few hundred dollars each. Barely their value as scrap steel. Photos below, if you doubt me.
Begging the question: What is China doing? Why are they taking these huge losses? Is China being beaten down by American tariffs, as our president said they would? Is China’s economy in free-fall? Is China in big economic trouble?
Or is China so wealthy and successful that they can afford to literally just give away their most expensive consumer products, at this huge loss? Imagine all of the myriad other little auction houses like Pine Run, all across America, all auctioning off these same machines, attachments, for pennies. This is a huge amount of steel, rubber, hydraulic fittings, and petroleum stuff being just wholesale dumped across America, by our biggest frenemy.
My impression is that this is the behavior of a drowning person.
Pine Run Auction of Linden, Pennsylvania, might be just one molecular data point in a galactic constellation of economic activity data points generated by one and a half billion human beings (America plus China). But there are calculus equations for calculating the slope (the direction) of a single data point, and while I can barely do one plus one type calculus, my gut instinct about today’s Pine Run Auction is that the Chinese economic slope is heading in a severe angle straight toward the planet’s surface in a huge flaming fireball.
Part of the bidding gang. A lot of bidders participated by Proxibid
Chinese mini excavators that should have cost thousands of dollars, sold for huundreds each.
Steel attachments for the Chinese-made excavators, many of which sold for more than the matching machine, because they will be re-fabricated and adapted for other American machines
Interesting concept, a mini-skid steer. Stacks of them. Selling for hundreds of dollars. How much did China pay to make these, versus how many pennies did they get back?
Cowboy hats and bib overalls, rural America, baby. Way off in the distance Bald Eagle Mountain is visible through the open bay doors
Oh, the ironies swirling around Columbus Day
Yesterday was Columbus Day, the traditional official day where Americans mentally or culturally mark the European discovery of what became America, also known as the New World.
Columbus Day has become a cultural battlefield, a friction point between cultural traditionalists, fair-minded empathists thinking of the displaced Amer-Indians, and cultural Marxists seeking to just tear down all of America and Western Civilization. That my calendars all say that yesterday was both Columbus Day and Indigenous People’s Day is evidence that the cultural Marxists are successful in penetrating into our national mindset and identity. This is more meaningful than the illegal defacement and vandalism of Christopher Columbus statues everywhere by knuckle-draggers performing as humans.
But oh, the rich ironies that surround all of this debate and discussion and deliberate, wilful ignorance on all sides!
Irony, one asks? Why yes, sh*t tons of ironic moments surround the Columbus debate.
First among them is the scientific fact (not theory) that Christopher Columbus was in fact…Chaim Colon… a Jew. How ironic is it that among the greatest modern tormentors of the Jews (the Spanish, and the Catholic Church) then became the greatest cheerleaders for one, when it suited their own cultural appropriation desires?
And is it not ironic that the evil 1492 Spanish total ethnic cleansing of the Jews from Spain, and the theft of their money, their businesses, their homes, and even their children, and their mass forced conversions and burning alive at the stake for religious “thought crimes,” then resulted in one of these same Jews fleeing the Spanish crime wave, and in his flight with a large crew of Jews aboard the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria, Columbus ended up locating a large and largely uninhabited continent upon which all abused people – Celts, Protestants, and Jews – could find refuge?
And was it not ironic that the barbaric Spanish Inquisition, which was really just a mass sadism, rape, pillage, and steal scheme by the Church (led by the ironically appropriately named Queen Isabella, which is the Latin name for Jezebel, the notoriously evil pagan Jewish queen of Biblical times), was so evil that it ended up creating the Protestant Reformation in response?
And that those same fleeing Protestants then populated Columbus’ “New World” and founded the free and prosperous America that we all know and love? That then relies upon the Jewish-Catholic Columbus as its modern day patron saint and national symbol?
Quite a cycle of ironies, stacked on top of one another.
And about this “Indigenous People’s Day” thingy bob: Who are these Amer-Indians? I mean yeah, we all know they most likely pre-dated the arrival of Europeans, but where did they come from, originally?
ASIA!
As if Asia is any closer to America than Europe…the take-away here being that the American Indians are themselves migratory transplants in America, also from a distant continent. They are, in effect, no different than Christopher Columbus, the Protestant Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock and Jamestown, or the subsequent waves of Italian and Irish and European immigrants.
I dunno, but maybe one human migration is the same as another? And if Europeans being here in America is some sort of huge racial crime, then what do we say about the mass invasion of Europe by non-Europeans? Should only fair-skinned indigenous Europeans inhabit Europe? They are the natives there, after all.
Native land is native land is native land, and trying to say that one native land is off limits to subsequent human migration, while the other native land should be wide open, is racially discriminatory. Which I think is actually the whole point of this cultural Marxism attack on Columbus Day and America’s Western heritage. If you ask me, it smells like an imperialistic Han Chinese plot to keep the Asian migration to America wide open, and the undermining of Western freedoms ongoing….
What makes a good podcast
Podcasts are such a hot thing right now, and have been since the 2020 covid plandemic, that even people employed in the mainstream media are trying their hand at it. Part of the draw is cache, like la la I have a podcast, as though it confers personal specialiness and high intelligence, and the other part of it has to do with simple reach and monetary remuneration.
Everyone who thinks they are someone, or who wants to be a someone, “has” a podcast.
Podcasts are a big net benefit to the world, to humans, to public policy debates, to the spread of ideas (good and bad), information (good and bad). Podcasts have democratized the spread and flow of opinions (artful and bluntly foolish), and have drawn a lot of disenfranchised people, people dejected by the low quality of ubiquitous legacy mainstream media, back into the public marketplace of ideas and news information.
American culture and politics are arguably now informed more by podcasts than by corporate establishment outlets.
Since 2020, when the world was largely locked down and stuck inside, podcasts became the latest and greatest information outlet. Doctors sitting in their living rooms, describing in detail how their hospital administration had politicized their treatment of covid patients, covid survivors, parents finally seeing for the first time the utter slop being served up as “public education” by the politicized teachers’ unions, you name it, podcasts became the end-run around the censorship-industrial machine weaponized against We, The People by the legacy media, Big Tech, and the installed Big Brother Biden Admin.
The dam had to break, the river had to find its level, and the podcast world was the most creative way for people with information that countered the brazen lies of Doctor Mengele Fauci to feel heard. And so it was with people sick and tired of the establishment lies and narrative about covid, which was more about controlling people than it was about public health.
And now that a bazillion people have jumped into podcasting since 2020, a Jurassic-level leveling is taking place. No, no metaphoric meteor is streaking towards Podcast World, ready to hit the Yucatan square on its nose and re-assemble all podcast life on our planet. But simple market forces are beginning to play out. Some people, who had made a big name for themselves during the covid plandemic and the Biden years, are now struggling to find their place in podcasting. Others took a few Tucker Carlson punches to the head and fell down, only to climb back up and give Tucker a few in the kisser himself, and now he is fallen.
Point being that actual marketplace dynamics are determining the success or failure of the podcast world. Supply and demand, risk and reward, appear to be the main arbiters of a podcaster’s success.
Unlike the legacy mainstream media, which has long been propped up by one political party and its constellation of funders and, really, political donors. Market forces only lately seem to have become a factor in the staying power and eyeball presence of partisan mainstream media outlets like CNN, CBS, NPR, the Washington Post, the New York Times. Slowly, the water falls into the cracks, freezes, expands, and widens the cracks over at the MSM. But the cracks are becoming more apparent.
So what makes a good podcast? Here are some of my filters, or requirements, that keep me returning to a podcast:
- Knowledgeable and experienced hosts. Twenty-something-year-old podcasters may be cute, they may be smart, but honestly, these people have no real life experience that I can look to in order to trust and value their opinions. Alternatively, highly experienced adults who have maybe failed here or there in their adult career, now these people intrigue me the most. They are grounded in reality, and nothing trains like pain. I will spend my precious time listening to someone who has learned some tough life lessons, and is sharing them. Alternatively, I cannot spend my precious time listening to or watching someone who merely represents my own methodology or values. This is where political/ religious/ cultural ideology is least important.
- Smart, incisive, witty commentary is a must. Simply reciting a litany of complaints or critiques should be insufficient for every prospective listener who values their own time. Humor goes a long way with this listener.
- Understandable, measured cadence in delivery. One famous podcaster is smart and knowledgable, sometimes witty, but he speaks so damned fast I cannot understand what he says half the time. It is almost physically impossible to listen to such a person.
- Creative and able to link the mundane to the big picture. A great deal of podcasting is simply evaluating and relating news events through the eye of the podcast host, and their simple blunt reactions / analysis are not (or should not) suffice to get your attention. Looking for the meta-link between small facts on the ground and bigger body politic ripple effect is the sign of a true analyst. Someone who adds real value to our understanding of current events.
So, yeah, I thought we were done with the podcast thing a few days ago, but it is such a big and timely subject that this part of the discussion had to be addressed. Because Google / YouTube so aggressively censored political and cultural ideas that its far left staff did not like, Rumble became the go-to place for intellectual refugees. Give it a shot.
Podcasting’s dark side
The other reason I do not have a podcast, is that podcasting has a dark side. And while I may have an occasional “dark side” myself, I neither need any new ones nor do I want this particular extra one added to my already cumbersome burden (hello, this is called self-deprecating humor, something the folks in Rio Linda may not always catch).
Here’s the thing about podcasting: To succeed, you must devote yourself brilliantly, daily, and even then chase clicks. Most of us are not brilliant, nor can we afford to quit our day job to fully implement a podcast, and so that leaves just the click chasing. Or, as many podcasters who now have opened up a clear view into their own dark side, as is pretty commonly called, they/ you / the aspiring podcaster becomes a “click whore.”
In other words, to aggregate as many internet “clicks” as possible, a podcaster must throw a pretty wide net. This wide net requires the aspiring click whore to essentially bite the heads off of chickens, live (the podcaster, not the chicken, which becomes dead), on air. Yes, the old freak show stunt of biting a head off of a live chicken is perhaps just a teensy exaggeration here, but it is a sad fact that in order to attract and hold viewers, the successful podcaster must really stand out in a crowd. Daily.
As Jim Seif, the former secretary of PA DEP, said in a hearing back in 1998, after taking the podium from the sixth speaker before him, “I feel like Zsa Zsa Gabor’s seventh husband. I know what to do, I am just not sure I know how to make it exciting.”
Great line, and I have used it several times myself, including on September 11, 2001, when I had just begun giving testimony in a Pennsylvania House hearing on land conservation. Moments later the 9/11 jihadi terror planes began crashing in NYC and DC and Flight 93 hit in rural PA, and everyone in the room was spared my own attempt to make the same warmed over fare seem appetizing, if not exciting. We were evacuated from the PA Capitol as I was in mid speech. Oh, my fortunate audience…
Anyhow, podcasters who have survived six months at it know that they must make the mundane seem exciting, or they must begin breaking taboos and saying naughty no-no things. All of it exciting, yes, until all those live chicken heads inside their stomach begin pecking away, trying to get out. The pressure to perform well enough to draw an audience every day results in some podcasters making nutty claims, and then doing mental backflips and wild leaps of logic to try and keep the whole dog and pony show going. They go nuts.
This dynamic is what destroyed Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens’ podcast careers, and Nick Fuentes has the rest of the same type of podcast listeners, who must also do hits of meth and huffing spray paint while nodding along with whatever repetitive thing he is saying that day.
As a podcaster, you will always find an audience, and some audiences are made of either really bored or simplistic individuals. Many podcasters have an audience of fifty, some get to fifty thousand. To get beyond that number, and thus begin to get enough clicks to make a living, well, you gotta be like Zsa Zsa Gabor’s seventh husband and perform like a porn star, every night.
Most normal people cannot or will not do this. I am not normal, but neither will I attempt to bend myself into a pretzel shape in order to chase clicks.
Oh, the irony that the ideologically rich and fabulously diverse ecosystem of podcastistan is ruled by such a hard iron rule! Would it not be somewhat of a relief to be a mainstream media personality, and have an incurious audience, or a dumb audience, or, in the case of CNN, almost no audience? So much easier!
This is the life of, say, George Stephanopoulos at ABC. He is an openly politically partisan activist, masquerading as a “news reporter.” He is not a fair-minded arbiter of accuracy or facts, and his audience would fade away were he to become such a person. No chicken head biting or dog and pony show for George Stephanopoulos. Just rote activism, day in and day out. Same boring narrative (“Donald Trump bad, Democrats good“), every day.
But it was this very vacuousness that created podcastistan!
It was the ABC News / mainstream media’s failure to address real substance, or to use accuracy and real facts, and its nonstop political partisanship, that drove thinking Americans away from the legacy media outlets in the first place. And it is this market failure of the mainstream media that is causing parent companies to turn over, say, CBS, to new editors, in the hope of breathing new life into the dead body.
See? There is no easy answer to this podcast thing. To jump into it, you must have something of value to say and the ability to say it in an engaging way. To get an initial audience started and then held, you have to hit the ground running hard. And to then maintain and grow your audience, you must have greatly incisive wit and glowing personality, as well as either a whole roost of chickens or a three ring circus full of dogs and ponies.
Yes, podcasters are better people than the George Stephanopolusususes of the world, but eventually the line between them can become thin, if one is not careful. Or one can become dark, and break taboos, and say naughty no-no things that hurt people, because stimulating a particular audience’s otherwise hidden sadism streak is all ya got left.
So no, no podcasting for ol’ Josh. Nope. None of it is appealing to me, though I do enjoy listening to some podcasts, here and there.
Thanks for being here and listening!
Why I do not have a podcast, and won’t
Couple years ago, a longtime older friend, financially successful and politically active, asked me why I do not have a podcast.
“I see all these podcasts online, and I think, Wow, Josh would be great at that You should do it.”
And to me, even though I am not going to be a podcaster or have a podcast, what a great and appreciated compliment that is, for several reasons.
The most important being that discerning thinkers — people who more carefully consider the information they consume — are increasingly tied into podcasts. Both Left and Right, and a lot of Americans in the middle, are hungry for information that breaks from the worn out, politically partisan, and openly fraudulent mainstream legacy media outlets like the New York Times, ABC-CBS-NBC-CNN-NPR-BBC, Washington Post, LA Times, etc.
These mainstream legacy media organizations are not fair-minded arbiters of accurate information. Rather, they are highly tuned political activism outlets. And it is no “conspiracy theory” to say this; they proudly flaunt their partisanship every single day. At this point, there is no material, substantive difference between the New York Times and Mother Jones magazine, other than the NYT is living off the fumes of its once great reputation and the closed circuit dopamine high that leftists live in (“I only read information sources that align with my values” said an old friend to me several years ago, deliberately not self-aware about how self-defeating such a non-diverse, mono-syllabic approach to information is to those people, especially, who pretend to consume only the very best and purest of information).
The NYT masquerades as a serious place, whereas Mother Jones has been a gleeful juvenile bomb thrower for decades. Both are far-left America-hating Marxist activism proponents who abuse their masochistic audiences.
And yes, I have the hands-on experience with both of these outfits to speak authoritatively about them. Suffice it to say that we all have a family…
And so, in this general vacuum/absence of accurate news i.e. mainstream media’s deliberate misinformation fake news, podcasts have opened up huge opportunities for people genuinely interested in learning the actual factual truth. And market demand has been met by market supply; podcasts are now such a thing that plenty of Americans run for office or commit public displays of strangeness, just to get enough of a following to launch a podcast.
Today, there are an awful lot of podcasts available. It seems like every would-have-been college professor and wingnut and ex-CIA officer and ex-combat veteran with loads of ink on his arms has started a podcast. A podcast is what serious would-be “influencers” do. The actual “influencers” just seem to post brief TikTok videos of themselves in various stages of undress, or eating messy sandwiches in an expensive car while wearing expensive clothes.
I would say most of the podcasters on the right are pretty careful thinkers, not all, but most. People who kind of defined conservative podcastistan for a long time (long by podcast terms), like Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Alex Jones, have largely discredited themselves by abandoning facts and rigorous thinking for nonsense only slightly better packaged than the trash at the New York Times or Mother Jones.
This is the beauty of the podcast world today: Dip your toe in the water and check it out. Jump in for a swim and lap up all the many flavors of individual opinions you like. It is a much richer, more diverse, more interesting, more informative place than all of the monosyllabic legacy media outlets put together.
So given my positive view of podcasts in general, why did I not start a podcast of my own? Several simple reasons: I do not have the time to do it; I am not narcissistic enough; though I am a very strong public speaker, I enjoy writing much more than talking; and I do not know how to do the necessary selfie videos, which feel socially awkward to me.
Too many podcasters really scramble to stay on top of the wave, every day, which can lead to some humorously foolish, or sophomorically high schoolean, dis-believable grasping at straws. Publicly. Which I am old enough and old school enough to feel self-conscious about. So, no thanks. This blog is a satisfying enough outlet for me. And I am not in the information “business” or in this for money, i.e. note the absence of advertising on this website.
I write because I feel compelled to write. It is an undeniable energy that wells up inside me all the time, and it is part of the reason I had at one time aspired to be an academic. If you do a search of “Josh First Harrisburg” outside of Google (which is not an honest broker about accurate information, but rather has made itself highly politicized with inaccurate search results), you will find dozens and dozens of essays and articles I have written over the past 25 years, as well as news reports and interviews on my various land projects and on some of the political races I have run in.
What emerges from that resulting morass of printer’s ink, I think, is the clear image of a guy who has strong opinions about a lot of subjects, who enjoys public speaking and writing, and who has several feet in several different worlds simultaneously.
And I am most happy limiting that all to writing one or two essays a week in my blog here, which fits in with my busy work schedule. No podcast necessary. No podcast desired.
But I will give credit to the conservative podcastistanians, whose overall grand number, high volume, interesting topics, and really wide intellectual diversity shows us just how important the First Amendment is, even as the legacy media try to hog that all to themselves, and to discredit and take it away from anyone who does not march in lockstep with their leftist narrative.
I recommend that anyone with an ounce of interest in starting a podcast do so. Explore it. Be your best self. And if you fail, that is OK. At least you will have checked it off your list. Take comfort from knowing that I will not be able to do that, because I am just too lazy.
Memes for your enjoyment
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The ultimate climate change symbol
Humans everywhere on our planet are bothered badly by hypocrisy and bee-ess (this means bullsh*t for those in Rio Linda), especially in high trust societies, like America.
Sophisticated, highly evolved, well balanced societies, like the America I grew up in, are built on informal but iron-clad mutually interlocking commitments between the society members.
If everyone agrees that stop signs and traffic lights mean what they say, then the society moves and functions like a well oiled Swiss watch (Switzerland being known as the ultimate in high trust societies). Few people to absolutely no one cuts in line or runs the stop sign, and, therefore, for example, when it is your turn to drive your car past the stop sign or traffic light, you have a very low expectation of being T-boned by another driver who simply ignored the opposing traffic signal because he simply didn’t care about it.
Same rule goes for waiting your turn in line at the gas station, at the grocery store, at a restaurant, etc. A high trust society requires a large amount of giving in to others, making room for their reasonable needs, instead of always trying to claw in everything you can get your hands on for yourself. Which is why poor and dysfunctional venues, like Gaza, Haiti, London, Detroit, and Chicago, are defined by their chaos: Anarchy rules, quality of life plummets, and, well, climate change.
These days, few subjects, no, let us be exact, no subject, involves more hypocrisy, more bee-ess, than so-called climate change.
Few subjects corrode societal trust more effectively than climate change. Climate change is the destroyer of high-trust society, simply because its loudest proponents blatantly do exactly the opposite of what they tell all of us to do. You cannot avoid the hellacious beating they give you about climate change while they are simultaneously gobbling up all of the climate they can stuff into their pants pockets. You are meant to notice this, because you are meant to accept and acknowledge that these people are our masters, our betters, our superiors.
Greta Thunberg, John Kerry, Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio, these are the red light runners, the single-seat jet-setters, the limousine liberals sipping champagne inside a gas guzzling armored car, the hypocrites who deliberately rub their double-speak in our faces, to show us they are in charge. They get to wildly carbonize the climate, while you and I are the carbon they want to eliminate.
Remember when Barack Hussein Obama bought a twenty million dollar beach front mansion on Martha’s Vineyard, having just spent eight years haranguing Americans about supposedly rising oceans from climate change? He must not have had much confidence in his own climate hoax. But he said it all anyways, and tried to guilt or frighten us into complying with his commands. But he did not have to follow the climate rules, did he…
By the way, Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard home is stocked with TWO one thousand-gallon propane tanks. Which are – you know this already – filled up with natural gas. Which was another climate change thing Obama was working against before he simultaneously needed half the world’s supply in his own back yard, so that his home would function just as he likes.
I know a guy who spent most of his career as a lawyer representing the coal industry. Nothing wrong with that, and they paid him very well. He lives in a beautiful house with an immaculate back yard, filled with manicured flower beds. After he retired, he re-invented himself as a climate change activist and environmental book author. No, he did not give back or donate to charity his decades of payment by the coal industry. Of course he didn’t, because that would un-do all the hypocrisy he is rubbing in our faces. The virtue signal about climate change is the key achievement, not the actual doing anything substantive about it.
Many years ago, the Princess of Patience and I stayed at a delightful rental home in Shrewton, England, while we enjoyed nearby Stonehenge and its magnificent surrounding landscape. In the rental home’s back yard was a small market garden, and also the biggest anti-climate change contraption I have ever seen: A tall, folding clothes hanger, made of aluminum and strung with plastic coated cables. A collapsible drying rack, standing all alone where the sunshine will hit it.
While sharing a bottle of Fireball at sundown with our hosts in said back yard, I inquired about the simple outdoor aluminum clothes rack dryer thingy.
“Why, everyone in England has one,” said they.
And in fact, we began to notice that, yes, these things are everywhere. And when we returned home to America, we bought one and installed it in our back yard.
Fast forward yourself to last summer, and a very sweet, jappy, exceedingly liberal and climatey-changey kind of friend of the Princess asked, while plucking juicy organic tomatoes from our garden, what the collapsible aluminum clothes rack dryer thingy in the back yard was all about.
Like, why would you hang your personal clothes out in public to dry?
Said the Princess in response: “Josh tries to conserve electricity. Hanging out our clothing in the sunshine means not burning up electricity unnecessarily in the electric clothes dryer inside.”
To which the jappy friend said “Oh, I would never do that.”
Which is the most hypocritical thing ever uttered on Planet Earth, except for the garden-less neighbor who once came over while I was tending my summertime garden and said (and no, I am not lying nor embellishing here), “You Republicans are causing climate change.”
Nope, he doesn’t have a garden, or a collapsible aluminum clothes rack dryer in his back yard, either, and he also just doesn’t give a damn. To him, invoking climate change as an accusation is the ultimate symbol of moral superiority.
To me, the ultimate symbol of being against climate change is the collapsible aluminum clothes rack dryer thingy in my back yard. If you don’t have one, I don’t trust ya and I ain’t buyin’ what yer sellin’.
My personal anti-climate change weapon. No, not my organic garden, the folding aluminum clothes dryer rack that magically dries clean clothes in the sun’s rays
Young Washington movie is 9/10
Last night I was encouraged to go see a movie, which happens quite infrequently lo, these many past years. Because, for many years now, Hollywood has dropped the ball, and has produced only dreck. Like most Americans, I do not pay to see dreck. Hollywood box office bomb after bomb after bomb keeps driving home the point that Americans do not want dreck and will not pay for it. Rather, most Americans see movies to be entertained, informed, inspired. Not to be preached at, especially about counter-culture values emanating from failed frootloop academics living in worlds of stupid theory and perpetual Marxist revolution.
I fall into the camp of Americans that will go see a movie if it informs, inspires, and entertains me. So, last night I went to see Young Washington, a movie about America’s greatest Founding Father, George Washington. This movie informed me, inspired me, and entertained me, and I can therefore recommend it to you, too.
But don’t just take my word for it, Men’s Journal confirmed that this movie inspires its audience because it is factual, and the facts surrounding George Washington are inspiring.
Mind you, Men’s Journal is just one of many formerly useful and interesting institutions/ magazines/ information outlets subsequently captured by the far Left and re-purposed to spew anti-America agitation propaganda, far-Left counter-culture propaganda, etc etc. So the fact that this leftwing outlet asked the question if the Young Washington movie is accurate, is not surprising; Men’s Journal will always seek to criticize any popular movie or book that is patriotic or espousing traditional American values. What is surprising is that the magazine published an article confirming that the movie’s main claims are accurate.
Mind you, Men’s Journal did not list the things that are good or inspiring or entertaining about Young Washington, it just confirmed that it is accurate, and left it at that. They did not encourage you to go and see it. They just did a fact check. As if Men’s Journal does this routinely on any other movies.
What is good and inspiring about Young Washington is that it tells us how young George Washington worked hard, took risks, made sacrifices, and heart-felt earnestly prayed to God a lot. What is inspiring about that is that all of this hard work, risk taking, sacrificing, and prayer paid off. It created a man whom his arch enemy, King George III of England, called “The greatest man in world history.”
The movie perfectly and incredibly accurately depicts the American Indians, caught between French and British forces from north and south, and also being pushed ever westward by impoverished European colonists and their feudal aristocratic overlords. The movie also accurately represents the inevitable tension resulting from the American frontier’s merit-based opportunity system clashing with European feudal entitlement, which ultimately gave way to 1775’s violent rupture between serfs-no-longer American colonists and their overbearing, self-entitled, yet unimpressive European overlords.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident…” is the logical outcome of the American frontier, on which young George Washington was raised, and tested, then confronting and contesting a feudal Europe. And the free and prosperous America we now live in is the logical outcome of the merit-based frontier having prevailed in that contest.
Seeing a movie capture all of this “first principles” stuff is eminently entertaining, and your money is well spent, because face it, this happens only once every five or twn years these days.
I give Young Washington a 9 out of 10, and not a 10/10, for a couple reasons. First, some of the scenes are kind of hackneyed rote stuff that has been used too many times in most of the Mel Gibson movies (e.g. The Patriot) and similar genre movies. Long, artificially drawn out overly dramatic moments that do not cause tears to fall, but rather tears at the belief and tolerance system. No one takes this long to die in real life. No one acts like this in real life. Ever. Second, I spotted at least two and possibly many more percussion rifles in use by British and Colonial militia troops, as well as by American frontiersmen. Big time no-no for a film based in 1755, when flintlocks alone reigned on the battlefields of Europe and America. Percussion systems first emerged around 1810, and did not become military issue until the 1840s. Lastly, about half of the scenes are filmed in places and on landscapes that just do not physically exist anywhere in Pennsylvania, especially in Western Pennsylvania. That strains credulity, even if I logically accept the plain fact that finding any undistrubed landscapes anywhere to film on is getting difficult.
Many many years ago, as a paid non-profit land conservation professional, I helped the National Park Service conserve the Fort Necessity Battlefield and also Braddock’s Trace, out in Western Pennsylvania. These important places are depicted in the movie. That same NPS park manager and I then went on to work together on conserving the Flight 93 crash site and its surrounding landscape, after 9-11. So, I have some personal knowledge and appreciation for the rugged Western PA topography, and for the specific place where young George Washington put himself to the test, and succeeded.
It was the rugged and demanding wild landscape that created the original Israelites, who gave us The Law, and then it was the rugged, demanding, and wild landscape here in North America that gave the world America, a nation based on The Law and a light unto the nations, really the only light unto the nations on this entire planet. Thanks to George Washington. And this is why conserving rural landscapes is still so important: They are our unique American culture of freedom.
This movie meant a lot to me, more than I would have expected. Maybe you will have the same positive reaction. A lot of us Americans have an awful lot of unrequited expectations built up over the past ten or fifteen years of crappy Hollywood movie output. A lot of un-met need. And this movie, Young Washington, meets those needs.
Poster for Young Washington movie