Category → Fruit of Contemplation
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.
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
D Day May-Day, D Day Pride Day
Tomorrow is D-Day, the anniversary of the heroic Allied invasion of France’s Normandy beaches on June 6th, 1944, in order to bring offensive action against evil.
Movies like Saving Private Ryan have been made about D Day. Books have been written, patriotic marches and celebrations and interviews of veterans about it. Without the heroism of primarily American soldiers and Airmen, beginning on D Day and continuing through to after the end of the war, World War II would have been won by Nazi Germany, and the world as we know it today would not exist.
To my generation, D Day is well known, symbolic, inspiring. I have friends and family members whose fathers fought on D-Day, on the beaches, in the dunes, and up into the hedgerows. Some died there, all returned to America with painful memories of it, and some with the physical battle scars of their time there.
Yes, my generation knows all about D Day. It embodies the clearest example of Good vs. Evil. It was the day that the Western Civilization calvary came galloping in, at huge cost in blood and money, to save the day, save Europe. It is one of the most inspiring days in modern American history, and people my age can casually talk about D Day as if it happened just yesterday.
And yet, I worry about it, because D Day is fast becoming a minor footnote in the modern American education establishment. Because the far-left teacher’s unions run the American education establishment, there is a huge and mostly successful effort to erase positive history about America, and replace it with indefensible nonsense about “systemic racism,” and with adult sexuality that has no place among children. The modern American culture is rejecting D Day heroism and electing to office hyper sexual freaks who advocate for preying upon children.
So I am making a May-Day call for help on D Day remembrance, and I think we should call every June hereafter “D Day Pride Month.” The entire month of June will be devoted to educating Americans about the evils of big government fascism, like the Germans did in 1944.
Let us reinforce the good and positive things about America, our greatness, the acts of heroism and self sacrifice of our citizens that got our greatest nation to this successful point in human history. We need an antidote to the meaningless hedonistic physical crap (drugs, sex, aimless lethargy as a lifestyle of choice) that is just rotting out America into a hollowed husk.
Happy D Day Pride Month, dear readers!
You are reading this as a free American because of the self sacrifice and bravery of these American fighting men disembarking from this boat into a hailstorm of bullets and bombs on D Day, 1944. Remember that.
Portrait of an American Man
Across America, tourists visit all kinds of special places, built and natural. Across America, university campuses are home to special academic buildings, donated by successful business people who graduated from those same colleges. Probably everyone who visits and studies at these places take them for granted, except the conservancies, land trusts, and other caretakers charged with the operations and maintenance jobs.
Here today, we look at one of these historic donors, who built and donated one of America’s most famous architectural statements. He was a successful businessman from humble beginnings in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Back in the 1920s and 1930s, the heyday of department stores, which were the internet/ Amazon/ eBay of their time, his family went from owning small clothing, fabric, and hat stores to one big department store in downtown Pittsburgh. The enormous store was famous for carrying everything that every household required, in grades, qualities, and prices that every household could afford. Foods, clothing, fabrics for making clothing, pots, pans, utensils, firearms and ammunition, fishing gear, shoes, work boots…the list is endless.
Incidentally, in the 1970s State College, PA, where I grew up, the O.W. Houts department store, out at the Western very end of College Avenue, carried everything a family would need, including old coins, stone arrowheads dug up in the local farm fields, records, a wide selection of utility-grade firearms (where I got my first .22 single shot rifle and a 16 gauge single shot shotgun), clothing, shoes, food, etc. Next door was the Houts Hardware store and Lumber Yard. They sold nails by the pennyweight, tools, keys, and of course all kinds of locally sourced lumber.
Despite its relatively small size, the O.W. Houts department store and hardware store were absolutely core parts of the State College area lifestyle. And so we can imagine what the gigantic Kaufmann Department Store was like in Pittsburgh, many many times the size of Houts. The wives and daughters of coal miners shopping for calico two aisles over from the wives and daughters of coal mine owners shopping for lace and fur trimmings. 1920s Pittsburgh was a gigantic melting pot of iron, steel, and fifty different nationalities from around the world, and everyone got most of their necessities from the Kaufmann Department Store.
Edgar Kaufmann built the family business from the ground up, taking big risks and making big sacrifices along the way, and became exceptionally wealthy. His family upbringing emphasized giving charity, which he did in large amounts throughout his life. The one charitable donation he is best known for is Fallingwater and its surrounding Bear Run Preserve.
Below is Edgar Kaufmann’s portrait, done in 1929, and occasionally on display at Fallingwater, which is where I photographed it. It is filled with meaningful symbolism and clues to his personality and outlook on life. Below is my understanding of this statement.
Edgar is standing between two potent symbols, the (Christian?) alms bowl (charity) to his right, and the carefully shielded Middle Eastern crescent moon, on his left. This moon would be his own background, of the desert, partially obstructed by cloth, that is slightly pulled back to both cover it, and also reveal it by drawing the eye to it. Cloth being the most representative symbol of his department store’s biggest staple as well as its famous fashion statements.
He is holding a rustic walking stick in his dominant right hand, which puts emphasis on the importance of this simple cut branch. Yes, it is a humble symbol of hiking and the outdoor lifestyle, and it also has the V top for holding venomous snakes’ heads. The other venemous snakes in 1929 were the Nazis, and maybe this is his way of saying he would be seeking to catch them and pin them down. Or that he was at least aware of them in his life.
Edgar’s left arm leans heavily on the chair, perhaps a symbol of his never-ending work ethic stuck at a desk.
The chair’s right side, Edgar’s outdoorsy, charitable, artistic, manly, masculine, and muscular side, is well carved, carefully defined. Its left side is deliberately stunted and malformed, as if to say that his outdoors life and his charity work defined him best, and his boring work life was his least interesting aspect. Don’t we all have have different sides to us and to our personalities?
His sporty tennis sweater says all-America, while his shirt sleeves are pulled up to reveal his manly biceps. The tennis sweater is Harvard red, instead of the blue from his alma mater Yale. Something must have happened at Yale to make him upset with the school.
Edgar Kaufmann conveys an image of American masculinity straddling two worlds, one of which he must subtly hide. And the reason I picked this portrait to write about is because nearly 100 years after this was painted, America is back to that 1929 period, where American Jews have to hide their identity, lest they be hurt, abused, robbed, for merely being Jews. This is not a good reflection on Americans, that we have come back to this kind of un-American behavior.
Edgar was a political conservative, but a cultural libertine..another personality split some readers might relate to. He helped design, build, lived in, showcased, and then donated Fallingwater through his son, Edgar jr, for public benefit. Across America, so many historic tourist attractions and artistic buildings were created or donated by Jews, as were an awful lot of the donated buildings at universities. We should be celebrating this ethic, not picking on these people as a whole.
Edgar Kaufmann
Musical “1776” Two Thumbs Up
Please do not tell anyone, but I saw a musical play the other day, and I liked it. Humiliating to admit, yes, but our three readers come here for honesty, if nothing else. Today you get five doses of honesty: The musical “1776” was excellent, timely, accurate, entertaining, and all the other positive stuff that my movie and theater critic mentors Siskel & Ebert would say about it.
We saw it at the historic Walnut Street Theater in Philadelphia, America’s oldest longest-continuously running theater. Because the venue has a sane policy on weapons (have your carry permit available if anyone asks to see it), I was strapped. I was strapped because it is downtown Philly, where the Wild West can descend upon one in the blink of an eye.
The docents, volunteers, and paid staff were all nice and helpful. Before the show started, we could have raised Lazarus more readily than actually reaching a human being during operating hours. Weak spot, but probably a weak spot in all theaters. No one there answers the phones or the emails until after you have come and gone.
Look here, theater is not for me. Watching adults play dress-up and make-believe is usually overwhelmingly annoying for me. These are not mature people, and many of them have gratingly annoying personalities. It is impossible to take actors seriously, on stage or off. Now that TDS is ravaging Hollywood, I am reminded daily about how much I dislike actors. It seems that the kind of people drawn to acting all fall into the “Big Jerk” category of life.
One exception in my world exists for those live stage performances that are about meaningful, inspirational, true stories. Biblical stuff ranks “acceptable.” Political theater is almost always heavily slopped to the falling overboard-left, preachy, inaccurate, dumb, communist, and, thus, annoying. Best bets are on movies, where the nonsense and forgotten lines moments have been left on the editing room floor.
“1776” is about the writing of the Declaration of Independence over a one month period, however, and is, therefore, a ten out of ten in my book, any day. It involves the story of the delegates from 13 colonies, debating the break-up with Britain, in Independence Hall, in Philadelphia, in June and early July, 1776. The widely documented personal performances of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and our own (local to PA) John Dickinson are performed admirably by the capable actors. Thank you!
Real focus is put onto the debate about slavery, which did occur in the actual Continental Congress, and how that hot issue was taken out of Jefferson’s first version of the Declaration of Independence. Depicting this on stage is especially important these days, as it is bizarrely considered “cool” by some to incorrectly badmouth America about slavery.
Fact: In 1794 America just about had a civil war over slavery. We also almost had a full civil war over whisky and taxes, then, too. But abolishing slavery was an early goal in our nation’s founding, and white people were ready to fight and die to end it, even as slavery was a full blown enterprise in the rest of the world. Eventually American whites got around to that fighting and dying thing, in 1861, when the insurrectionist Democrat Party declared separation from the rest of America, over keeping their slaves.
By 1865, the Republicans took away the Democrats’ slaves, and as we see even today, the Democrats never forgave them for it.
I digress.
That this was a musical without much singing was God’s way of showing me that beauty can occasionally exist in the darnedest places, including on a stage full of … feh… actors. That most of the singing that did occur was bawdy or silly really took the sting out of the musical part.
The actors said their lines well, performed very well, and entertained us audience people well, about an important subject. The Walnut Street Theater was clean, had no stray odors, and was a pleasure to visit. All the audience members upon whom I threw myself were friendly and gracious.
In another couple of months America, us, our nation, will celebrate its 250th anniversary since our founding. It is a really big deal. This play was timed to synch with our national celebration, and it fits well. If you find yourself going anywhere near Philly in the coming weeks or months, go see “1776.”
And go strapped, because the venue has a Constitutionally-minded policy on 2A concealed carry. God bless ’em. That was the only reason I set foot inside the theater…they actually believe in FREEDOM.
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USS Liberty…what happened and why we should know
In the heat of the Six Day War just fifty-nine years ago, an American Navy spy ship in the eastern Mediterranean Sea was strafed, bombed, badly damaged, and I think 34 US Sailors died as a result, with many others getting hurt and having lasting combat-related injuries.
Despite the documented history of friendly-fire incidents going all the way back to Greek and Roman naval battles, with not one being in common parlance or memory today, the attack on the USS Liberty has persisted and persisted and persisted up until right now, when it serves as a battle cry against the only reason anyone knows anything about it: Jews.
Israel’s ships and planes attacked the USS Liberty, by mistake, and thus has a special grudge and entire anti-Jew movement built up and carried on around the incident. That Israel is America’s only real and loyal ally makes the accusation carry even more weight.
No Jews, no news, goes the modern adage. Because the USS Liberty involved a handful of Israeli naval sailors and pilots, all Jews everywhere are despised, and the state of Israel became a criminal enterprise, this USS Liberty movement says. For the mistaken acts of some warriors in the heat of battle, all of their kinsmen everywhere must be hated, judged, cast out, and exterminated forever, says this political movement based on the USS Liberty attack. No forgiveness ever!
If you doubt me, go online anywhere the USS Liberty is discussed, like a YouTube or Rumble video, or a written article, and see for yourself. The comments sections are filled up with endless acid vitriol for all Jews, everywhere, and ditto for the existence of the state of Israel. As if this one brief incident speaks for the full character of every single one of the ten million Jews around the entire world, and for an entire nation.
Which is bizarre, because no other group of humans anywhere is judged entirely in its entirety for the acts of a few in the midst of an existential battle for survival.
Despite having a long, bad reputation as thuggish ruffians, the Irish today are beloved leprechauns. There is no hateful world-wide anti-Irishman anti-Ireland movement based on some anti-British massacre by Irish nationalists that occurred two hundred years ago. My own quip is that if you don’t have at least a tiny amount of Irish in you, you are not a real American. No one hates all of the Irish, certainly not Ireland as a nation.
Ditto for Germany, whose crimes against humans in World War One and World War Two were truly monstrous. No one hates all Germans everywhere, and no one calls for the dissolution of Germany as a country, based on its national actions in the early and mid-20th century.
Ditto for Russia and Russians, whose terrible crimes against Poland and Polish citizens for the past two hundred years, or its own extermination of Chechens just twenty years ago, could easily disqualify them from belonging to world civilization.
And so on, including South Africa, which today in 2026 is far more racist and Apartheid than the South Africa of 1986.
And so this reveals why the USS Liberty incident has persisted well beyond the regular shelf life of any other friendly fire example, including the inexplicable recent 1-2-3 tail-end shoot-down of three American fighter jets by a Kuwaiti fighter pilot two months ago. Three expensive American fighter jets that were protecting Kuwait from Iranian bombs and missiles, shot down from behind by a pilot whose deadly actions defy any scrutiny, except for a jihadi mindset against white infidels. But… crickets from the USS Liberty crowd.
Here is what is known about the USS Liberty attack: It was a friendly fire mistake, on a warship that appeared to have no flag and which did not respond to radio challenges or identify itself, during the intense Six Day War in 1967.
Yesterday, Roger Stone disseminated an essay about the USS Liberty. You can find it on his SubStack page. Stone takes a slightly different tack from the usual “hate-the-Jews” mob, in which he blames President Johnson (“LBJ”), Sec. of State Robert MacNamara, and others leading American government in 1967, for the USS Liberty incident, its alleged coverup, and the alleged failure to hold Israel fully completely and totally accountable. Which, of course, as all these conspiracy allegations go, in the end leads Stone to implicate all Jews and the entire nation of Israel….which is the same end result as the other “hate-the-Jews” mob.
It has been distressing to see Roger Stone grasp at internet clicks, and reveal a hateful side of him I had never detected before he wrote that Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Thomas Massie, and other open Jew haters, are just good America-first patriots, and anyone caught up in their hateful net deserves to be in it. Roger Stone remains a compelling victim of the Biden witch hunt, and his subsequent character reveals have been truly sad to witness (if you hate all Jews, not just the far left ones who damage America, but all Jews everywhere all the time, including the conservative ones, you have an emotional or mental problem; it is a sickness).
The most sober and thorough discussion of the USS Liberty attack is done by conservative commenter, Jeremy Boreing. His approach is slow, analytical, thorough, methodical, not flamboyant, not flip, not bombastic, not caustic. If you are interested in this sad moment in American military history, and in the failure of our American military to always fully care for our battlefield wounded, watch Jeremy’s video here.
Fifty nine years later, let us honestly remember and fully appreciate the service and sacrifice of our American Navy Sailors on board the USS Liberty. It is important to know the truth, because in truth bad accidents happen, mistakes happen on the field of battle, and it is best that we understand this reality and not defy it by dreaming up mysterious or nefarious explanations that prevent us from problem solving in the future.
USS Liberty after attack
The 1967 Six Day War was one of the great military successes of modern history. It was complicated, big, and messy
The symbol of an Israeli bathing in the Suez Canal was huge
Battlefield chaos in the Sinai Peninsula, and the USS Liberty was anchored just off this coast
The 1967 Six Day War was an all-out battle for Israel’s survival. Any and all threats were attacked. Including mistakenly percieved threats like the USS Liberty