Posts Tagged → money
Career politicians ended representative democracy
At its founding, America was envisioned as a representative government, a constitutional republic, where We, The People would vote for good citizens from amongst our ranks to represent our interests in government. Guy leaves his farm and plow behind to do his civic duty, returns back to the farm four or six years later. It is a good idea, because it does away with unfair feudalism and hierarchy, where only a few people at the top have power and everyone else is a powerless serf/slave/peon with no individual rights. The people making the laws are the same people who will be subject to the same laws. Everyone is treated fairly under the law.
And for a long time America worked pretty well on this model. Yes, there have been some political scandals along the way, and some power grabs that were turned back. Typically the American citizenry have been jealous of their rights and understandably suspicious of government in every way, and so they “throw the bums out” when the collective situation gets bad.
But somewhere in the past sixty years, maybe eighty years, America got deeply into political careerism. You know, where elected officials Mary Jane and Billy Bob were so respected and maybe even revered, either for their honorable traits or for their ability to deliver taxpayer funds to private beneficiaries, that the voters routinely, even habitually vote for them at every election. And so these people who kept getting elected in primaries and in general elections became career politicians. Either their entire career or most of it was spent working their way up a sort of “ladder” from local positions of authority to national positions of authority. And thus did people aim to have a career in politics, because of all sorts of reasons, some good, some bad, some corrupt, but there developed an entire culture within the two main political parties, Democrat and Republican, where party bosses would work with special interest groups to line up tame candidates who owed their political career not to We, The People, but to the party bosses and special interest groups.
And career politicians began to get really rich from their relatively low-paying public jobs. All the more reason to just stay in there and not do anything else with your life!
And so here we are, mid 2023, and career politicians in both political parties are willfully destroying America (e.g. faux “debt ceiling” wild spending spree that no one can ever pay for, Department of Defense can’t track expenditures below $100,000,000 and so our tax dollars are wasted and stolen from us, $83 billion worth of American military hardware is abandoned to our enemies in Afghanistan by Biden, neither party will hold Rep. Adam Schiff accountable for being a serial liar needlessly costing taxpayers $32 million etc).
Because career politicians are so personally invested in their political careers that if they deviate and try to do the right thing, then they stand a good chance of losing their elected office. And then doing the wrong thing becomes accepted and then promoted by the various established information outlets.
And so career politicians continue to make one bad decision after another, to hold onto their own personal power. To the point where even when Americans lose, when America loses, career politicians still win.
And so we reach the present financially and culturally unsustainable points that will inevitably result in America failing, and everyone losing their individual rights, and then some feudal overlords take over and use brute force like everyone else around the world lives under.
I know, I know, so many readers here laugh out loud when I write this stuff.
“America destroyed! Unsustainable! Ha ha ha that Josh guy sure is an idiot, because he obviously doesn’t know America is waaay waaay too big to fail!”
And so despite a long human history littered with wrecked human civilizations, the warnings from taxpaying worker bees like me go not just unheeded, but mocked and belittled by career political staffers and career politicians in both parties as they all continue to make financially and culturally unsustainable and reckless decisions for the collective rest of us. And at the end of their day, all the careerists see is money and power, and so anyone within their orbit can commit the most grievously corrupt behavior without being held accountable. As one of my mentors Frank used to say, the longer a career politician is in office, the tighter the horse blinders get, until they see nothing except what is right in front of them, which is money and power.
The rest of us? The We, The People worker bees? We see the corrupt rot all around us eating away at America. We see Rome beginning to burn, while the career politicians feast and live carefree lives devoid of discipline or honesty. This is not going to last, friends. If we all continue to re-elect career politicians, then our freedom-loving civilization is probably going to end within the lifetimes of the people reading these words, and everything we take for granted will be gone. All of it. It will all be History, as they say.
Did FOX News throw the fight?
Much left-windrow hay has been made over the past week over FOX News settling out of court with Dominion Chinese Voting Machine Co., which FOX News had correctly, accurately, and with great piles of evidence described as being inaccurate and likely corrupted by the machines’ illegal connection to the Internet and to flashdrives.
Plus there was Dominion’s Eric Coomer bragging about how he did or would or had used his position at Dominion to block President Trump from receiving the actual vote tally Trump had earned on Election Day 2020. Coomer was Dominion’s director of security and had unique access into and control of the voting machines across America, and so his threat or bragging really amounted to something substantial. Basically the guy was bragging about having tampered with the most important election in Western Civilization in the past 100 years.
Coomer’s many partisan gaffes and showing of illegal playing cards, so to speak, would play quite well in a court room in favor of FOX News. A jury would have a tough time discounting Coomer’s claims to have illegally thrown the 2020 election.
So why did FOX News suddenly settle with Dominion, when the legal eagle work, like depositions and evidence production and cross examination and arguments, had just begun? Normally, it makes no sense for someone who has the evidence on their side to suddenly roll over and give up. And again, on the left side of the hay windrow, this settlement is being purveyed as an indication that President Trump was wrong to criticize the 2020 election outcome. This legal settlement is being interpreted by some as a vindication of Biden’s claim to have won the 2020 election fair and square.
So here is what seems to be happening to my jaded eyes: FOX News sure looks like it is unnecessarily rolling over and dying in order to paint the widespread claims of 2020 election interference and vote fraud as baseless, empty, and without merit.
And why would FOX News do this?
Because FOX News is owned by never-Trumper Republican Rupert Murdoch and his two registered Never-Trumper Democrat Party sons.
Not too long ago the Murdochs had already gone to one great and painful length to hurt President Trump’s 2024 re-election possibilities by officially declaring Trump persona non exista and persona non grata on FOX News. That is, FOX News reporters and talking heads and hosts were/ are not allowed to even mention President Donald J. Trump’s name on air, unless it is in a negative context. The Murdoch family’s goal is to make Trump invisible and thereby politically irrelevant.
The Murdochs’ political declaration of war on Trump via a supposed news reporting channel is an open declaration of war against the politically conservative FOX News audience. This is not a bluff, this is literally laying all your cards on the table, come what may. It carries real risk to the FOX News brand and to the Murdochs’ financial future.
So…Dominion…when it has now become apparent to everyone watching American politics that all the bogus criticism of Trump and the fake lawsuits against Trump and the fake criminal accusations against Trump are not only having no effect on Trump’s standing with American voters, but are actually bolstering his claim among voters to be the greatest innocent political victim in human history, and thus bolstering his just demand to be the re-elected president in 2024, it appears that the Murdoch Family had only one card left to play: The Dominion card, which looks to me like either the Joker card or the Suicide King card.
The FOX News settlement with Dominion appears to be a last-ditch effort by Trump’s FOX-RINO enemies to undermine his complaints about the 2020 election.
Because normal people would not normally give up the princely sum of $787 million dollars to settle with someone they believe to be unworthy of the money, it appears that the Murdochs are falling on their sword here to create the very public impression that they were unable to press forward with the Dominion lawsuit. Because, you know, the 2020 election “was soooo secure” and “sooooo clean.” Because in truth it was not, but such is the Murdoch family’s collective hatred for President Trump that they will deliberately pop a sacrifice fly ball or throw the fight in order to help the other side win, even at such a great financial and credibility cost to themselves.
And here is the thing the Murdoch family members don’t realize about this crazy expensive gesture of theirs: Normal people are already hip to the crazy shit that super rich people like the Murdochs do, and this throwing of the fight with Dominion looks like just more crazy rich people shit.
And given how corrupt all the Never Trumper people have been, all the lies they have told and unethical things they have done to try to stop President Trump, who is to say that this “settlement” isn’t just an even bigger charade, where Dominion quietly signs the money back over to FOX News? These people, Dominion and FOX News and the Murdochs, have very little credibility with most Americans, because it already looks like they will sell their grandmas for ten bucks to try to hurt Trump, again.
Long Live King President Donald John Trump, mofos. Nice try, but We, The People are going to run the table next year and coronate our guy, our hero, our savior.
UPDATE: FOX News has terminated its employment relationship with host Tucker Carlson, one of the very few journalists remaining at FOX News who was trusted by at least half of America (conservatives). This is yet another act by establishment elites (Murdoch family) to limit the accurate information available to American citizens. Yes, the Murdochs are damaging their Fox News business by behaving this way, but they care more about getting control of you than they care about money. They already have a lot of money, and that has whetted their appetite for getting something even better…control of you. And they can most easily achieve this by limiting the information available to you and then shaping your opinions with the fake news and misinformation they dole out. Bye bye Fox News!
Fox News played its self-defeating last-ditch card, the so-called suicide king
Digital currency’s iron slave chains
Oh, the irony of a bank that is now insolvent in part because it illegally gave unsustainable amounts of highly regulated investor money to the domestic terrorist group “Black Lives Matter,” due to the weird political and anti-historic narrative that present day huge cash transfers (so called reparations from people who never owned slaves to people who never were slaves) are required from all other Americans to American blacks alone, above and beyond the past seventy years of gigantic taxpayer funded welfare programs and affirmative action preferences that ignored merit and rewarded skin color and that have benefited American blacks almost exclusively at enormous financial cost to America.
It is illegal to give away bank assets, or structure investing strategies, if it damages the bank’s ability to fully ensure its fiduciary duty to its shareholders and clients. The sole purpose of a bank or investment firm is to maximize its clients’ financial benefits.
This failure of Silicon Valley Bank has already created a ripple effect in the banking industry that is threatening a whole host of banks, including industry giant Credit Suisse. So it is not just one bank, but many that are being destroyed by Black Lives Matter. Turns out one of the primary reasons so many banks are in big trouble is because they contributed some 73 BILLION DOLLARS to Black Lives Matter and related spin-off organizations. None of these donations were legal, because they put the banks’ balance sheets in jeopardy, but as we know already from the related failure of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX fund (which now appears to have been created primarily to launder money and funnel it into the Democrat Party and BLM), illegal massive political donations due to the need to virtue signal is a Big Thing.
What is not ironic but scary about these bank and investment fund failures is the crisis opportunity it is creating for advocates of digital currency. And digital currency means just one thing: Slavery. Slavery through government control of how, when, and where you spend your own money.
Digital currency has nothing to do with convenience. No one really cares about that. I mean, how inconvenient is it really to pull a twenty dollar bill out of your wallet or purse and pay for gas, groceries, or lunch out with a business colleague? Paper money and coin is not only plenty convenient, it is the hallmark of a free person making free market decisions. No one else controls how much of your own money you decide to spend.
On the other hand, digital currency will always be directly controlled by the government. No matter what empty promises are made about digital currency’s privacy, there is only one reason for it to exist, and that is to put government bureaucrats in charge of your own finances. And as soon as you have digital currency, the government can turn it on or turn it off, take it away with the push of a button, or block it from being transferred to a person or business because someone in government does not like what you are trying to buy. Like maybe a gun, or a gasoline powered car, or firewood, or clothing made by a particular manufacturer.
Government control of your spending choices is slavery. You will not be able to make your own decisions. This arrangement is being pushed by the same exact people in government (the current administration) who wanted to monitor every withdrawal and expenditure above $600.00 that you and I make, and who wanted to limit your bank account, and who now have the Internal Revenue Service digging deeply and illegally into every financial decision we make, looking for the smallest of discrepancies to then come down like a ton of bricks upon each of us.
Digital currency is government gone wild, driven by bad people who do not like your freedom. These are people who really truly believe that they know best how you should spend your own money, and they are now trying to use government to set up everything so that you are hemmed in on every side and can only do what these bureaucrats tell you you can do.
It is difficult to tell how many Americans are catching on to this situation. So many Americans wrongly believe that America is too big to fail, even while America is failing right under our feet and under our noses, right in front of our faces. The Silicon Valley Bank failure is bad enough, and its reasons for failing are bad enough. But the ripple effect and bigger outcomes from its failure are really, really bad. Incredibly bad. Much worse than just a handful of banks going insolvent. The use of this growing banking and “financial crisis” to implement digital currency so that we go from being a free people to an enslaved people is the worst part of it.
Say No to digital currency. Say Yes to your freedom to decide how and where and when you will spend your own money. Resist and push back against the evil people who are seeking to take over your life by controlling your financial decisions. Or, don’t resist, and then don’t complain when you find yourself suddenly enslaved to totalitarian government in heavy chains of iron.
And if you are thinking ahead about your own freedom and ability to be self-reliant and independent, then you will be growing a substantial garden, keeping some chickens, and thinking of ways you can participate in a barter system that keeps government hands off of you.
About James O’Keefe’s apparent ouster at Project Veritas
Because I have both served on numerous boards of directors and also worked for and with non-profit organizations that are subject to oversight by a board of directors, for many years, a kind of “sense of things about boards of directors” has developed in my mind.
My take on the apparent ouster of James O’Keefe at Project Veritas, the organization he founded and ran superbly for twenty five years, is that political moles were planted on his board in order to take down the organization.
Yes, James O’Keefe is probably a tough boss to work for. Given his incredible track record of real investigative journalism, he would have to be a tough boss. When I watch his videos and his reports and his hands-on real reporting from the street, I have no doubt that he drives his employees to work almost as hard as he works. And apparently in February 2023, having a tough boss who demands that employees strive for excellence and who holds employees accountable for failing, is now grounds for terminating the boss.
At least this is the standard for board members who want the tough boss gone so the organization can be greatly weakened.
And isn’t it simply amazing that the two board members who want James O’Keefe removed from his own Project Veritas are the two newest board members? One has to wonder just how much money is being secretly paid to board members by the targets of PV’s investigations, to incentivize them to take such a drastic step, especially as such new members. New board members are usually “back bench” and “learning the ropes” of the organization’s board they just joined. When someone new joins a board and immediately begins to significantly, even catastrophically dismantle the organization, then it is a clear sign that the person joined not to help but to hurt the group.
I once worked for an organization where a newly appointed and very married executive seemed to be having an open affair with a subordinate. Employees who obviously knew about the relationship were either summarily or eventually fired by the executive after he took power, and as a result the board became heavily fractured. Big time infighting on the board resulted, and about a year later the executive was allowed back into board meetings, held onto his job, cemented his power over the board and the organization, and survived.
When I see the apparent blitzkrieg coup d’etat against James O’Keefe at Project Veritas, I absolutely know that something is really deeply awry on the board. And the only explanation I can logically arrive at is that huge sums of money were paid by the enemies of PV to people on the board to act as moles and work directly against the interest of the organization.
For the record, I have donated to Project Veritas about a dozen times over the years. It is one of the very few investigative news outlets left on Planet Earth, and PV repeatedly showed a huge glaring spotlight on a lot of really bad, illegal, and immoral behavior by people in positions of public trust and power. As we all know, democracy dies in darkness, and the enemies of democracy and the advocates of darkness are now trying to turn off the lights at Project Veritas.
Wherever James O’Keefe goes, so goes my support.
Ten take-aways from my Election Day experience
With the Kerwin men, quality people
Primary elections are more important than the general election every November, because voters choose who is going to be representing them at the November election. And in the case of Republican Party voters, if you don’t vote for constitutional America-First candidates, you are guaranteed to have a Republican In Name Only (RINO) liberal running against the Democrat Party liberal in the November election. There’s not a whole lot of philosophical difference between the Republican liberal and the Democrat liberal, and after that November election between a RINO and a Democrat it’s just a question of how rapidly America is destroyed under your feet, slowly or quickly.
On Tuesday I volunteered at four different election polls, handing out brochures for Kathy Barnette, and I spoke with a lot of voters. Here are some take-aways from my experience during and after Tuesday’s Primary Election here in PA:
- Unsurprisingly, voters make both simple and complicated choices in voting for candidates. Simple choices can be lazy or principled, and complicated choices can be bizarre or carefully thought out. Candidate selection is as complex as any other choice in life, and I think that is a good thing.
- Party establishment endorsement is a negative among Republican/ conservative voters, who appear to increasingly view the GOP as a force for bad and not for good. For example, Lou Barletta’s campaign unleashed a tidal wave of Republican establishment career politician endorsements in the days before Tuesday’s election, and if anything these endorsements seemed to hurt Barletta at the polls, not help him; Doug Mastriano crushed Barletta.
- On the other hand, Democrat voters seem highly attuned to and in synch with their establishment, as witnessed by political newcomer Justin Fleming’s trouncing of long time Democrat Party activist Eric Epstein in the newly created 105th Legislative District (PA House). For at least ten years, and probably closer to twenty years, independent-minded liberal Epstein has run for everything from dog catcher to school board to state senate, almost always unsuccessfully but always with close-call results. Not this time. Apparently ten unions and the House Democrat Campaign Committee aggressively weighed in to stop Epstein from finally capitalizing on his well-known household name in southcentral PA. Fleming the unprincipled “electoral pragmatist” won with 61% of the vote.
- Money is not all that it used to be, but it can still matter in elections, no surprise. Case in point is a very small amount of money (like $157,000 total), old fashioned shoe leather, and reasonable social media networking got conservative grass roots favorite Kathy Barnette up to 25% of the vote in an eight-candidate race. This is a huge statement about the lack of importance of money. However, when the wildly false negative attacks against Barnette started pouring in during the last week from McCormick and Oz and their supporters, like Sean Hannity, Barnette lacked sufficient funds to get out her last-minute rebuttals on TV and radio that could have gotten her over the finish line to win. Enough confusion and obfuscation was created by the attacks to blunt Barnette’s position at the top, and allowed both Oz and McCormick to grow their own voter returns at her expense. Had Barnette possessed a million dollars to do last-minute TV and radio ads, she probably would have won the election.
- Negative advertising does work, and it also greatly suppresses voter turnout. At all of the five polls I was at yesterday, voting was down between 10% and 20%, and I believe many voters were just fed up and confused by all of the negative advertising. SO they stayed home and said “I will just vote in November for whoever wins this primary race.”
- Conservative voters are much more oriented toward ideology and principles than political party.
- Almost every primary election has one winner and some losers, and almost always the losers say they will take their ball and go home if they don’t win, and they won’t back the winner of their race. For weeks before and even after the election was over, I heard unceasing complaints from Republicans about how Mastriano is “too conservative” for Pennsylvania, and that his win will automatically hand the governorship to Komrade Josh Shapiro. I also heard unceasing complaints from Republican voters that Lou Barletta was too milquetoast to appeal to anyone in November, except for blue haired suburban GOPe Republicans. Folks, get used to these competitive races. They are good for us. This competition is just the nature of real and healthy primary races, something that Republicans really need, and something that the GOPe HATES. The Republican Country Club Party hates hates hates sharing decision making with the unwashed dirty masses, who keep gumming up GOPe dreams of easy ill gotten wealth and posh fundraisers. Sorry not sorry, GOPe, get used to ceding more and more decision making to the actual people you claim to represent. It is a good thing, and it is why Mastriano won by an enormous margin.
- For the most part, the GOPe got its ass kicked in PA and elsewhere in America. RINOs like Jake Corman (the sitting President Pro Tem of the PA Senate!!), Jeff Bartos, et al either dropped out or finished below 5%, while underdog candidates like Kathy Barnette and Dr. Oz scored big time vote returns against the establishment’s wishes. We are witnessing a power shift away from GOP party bosses, which is a good thing, because party bosses are corrupt and self-serving people.
- Charlie Gerow is still a good guy, and still not a catchy candidate. Once again, voters enjoy Charlie as an articulate proponent of conservative values, but not as a representative in government for their needs. Charlie is a salon intellectual in the mold of William F. Buckley, one of the 20th century’s great conservative crusaders. Not winning elections doesn’t mean Gerow isn’t relevant, it just means his strength is in policy debates and in the conservative salon of ideas. Nothing wrong with that.
- Finally, yard signs and road signs do not mean anything close to what they used to represent even ten years ago. At one time yard signs and roadside signs were a big part of electoral public outreach, but in this digital age, they are becoming less important. I would not say they are unimportant, because in some ways they can be used to get a sense of voter engagement. Like, lots of signs for Candidate X in a county or in a region probably means that Candidate X is well known there. But it does not mean that Candidate X is necessarily going to convert that name recognition into an Election Day win. Information is now moving so fast and so far across the political landscape, that just one gaffe or one slip-up by an otherwise reasonable candidate can mean the end of their lead or presumptive win. No amount of yard signs can counter a fifteen second video of a candidate doing or saying something ridiculous.
Thank you to all the voters who spent time talking with me on Tuesday. I promote candidates at polls on Election Day every year because these are people I believe in, and I believe in sharing the why and how I have arrived at my decision on whom to vote for. One thing that has not changed among voters at polls since I was a teenager is this: Liberal voters at polls are always surly, grumpy, dismissive, or disrespectful. Do not ask me why this is, but it does hint at how some people think.
Conservative media for hire, for sale, for what
While the big media news these days has politically active people atwitter about Elon Musk’s market purchase of Twitter, a quiet and evil trend has thrown some data points up on the graph chart next to Twitter that demonstrate some conservative news outlets have their own issue. Not necessarily with censorship, but with selling favorable coverage to political candidates the conservative base despises.
Twitter has always censored conservatives, outright deleting their posts, blocking their links, suspending their accounts, or even deleting their accounts, as happened with President Donald Trump, for ridiculous reasons. All while allowing the most evil, barbaric, cruel, misogynistic, anti-gay, racist accounts to remain fully active Twitter accounts, such as Hezbollah, the Taliban, and Iran’s government. To say that liberals/ Leftists/ Democrat Partiers can’t stand the truth or even a dissenting point of view is an understatement, but at least they do it openly.
Something similar and sinister is up in the world of conservative media. But it is not aimed at liberals/ Leftists/ Democrat Partiers. Rather, it is aimed at buoying up and promoting known liberal GOPe Republicans/ RINOs.
When I first saw Steve Bannon’s War Room taking up a cozy role when interviewing Pennsylvania state senator and known corrupt RINO Jake Corman, a red flag went off in my mind. Because Steve Bannon is supposed to stand for everything that Jake Corman is so obviously against. It was written about here months ago.
But then the same thing happened at Breitbart, The Gateway Pundit, the Washington Examiner, and the New York Post. Each of these conservative outlets either promoted Jake Corman or some other well documented GOPe RINO who is despised by the conservative voter base, like Dave McCormick. Some of the articles are written by different people, but share the same photos and some of the same text, as well as the same thrust (usually the inevitability of Dave McCormick’s eventual win in the PA primary, or an unwillingness to confront Corman on his overtly and highly publicized corrupt behavior).
Below are some screen grabs from some of these conservative outlet stories. When I plotted these data points on an X-Y graph, the only factor that correlated strongly with them was… guess what… Money.
By all appearances these conservative news outlets are taking what can only be, would have to be, huge amounts of money to write what is essentially paid advertising posing as news. Not only is this slimy and dishonest, but judging by the comments left on these articles and videos by the product consumers, the target audience smells a rat each time and doesn’t buy it.
The only result is that The Gateway Pundit, Breitbart, Washington Examiner, Bannon War Room, and others not mentioned here lose credibility with their audience.
Must have been a sh*t ton of money they got to so blatantly trade away their reputations selling snake oil candidates.
Steve Bannon giving GOPe RINO Jake Corman the fake and unearned but best friends forever headline
Originally titled something like “Looks like a winner is emerging in Pennsylvania senate race,” the writer edited the title after she and I exchanged some thoughts about how honest it was.
Simply judging by their happy faces, Steve Bannon and corrupt RINO Jake Corman are indeed very happy together. This is a disgrace for Bannon. How many pieces of silver, Bannon?
Same picture and sharing some of the same wording in a New York Post article about the same race, this calls into question how honest Breitbart is being here with their rah-rah “report.” Treating an internal puff poll like it is real takes money, not professional reporting.
Although The Gateway Pundit is the primary anti-GOPe conservative news outlet, it does not seem to hold GOPe Jake Corman to the same standard. Nice smiling stock photo, no questions about Corman’s effort to stop PA senator and fellow gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano from auditing the 2020 election. Total dishonest puff piece this and others by TGP about Corman. For shame.
Talk about fake news…Oz as of the date of this article is several points ahead of McCormick, who is neck and neck with Kathy Barnette. But it sure seems that money buys favorable headlines in conservative media outlets
Public Lands: Public good, public love
Someone named this September “Public Lands Month,” and while I have no idea who did this, or why they did it, I’ll take it nonetheless. Because like the vast majority of Americans, I totally, completely, absolutely love public land. Our public parks, forests, monuments, recreation areas, and wildlife management areas are one of the greatest acts of government in the history of human governments.
As a wilderness hunter, trapper, and fisherman, I truly love the idea of public land, and I love the land itself. No other place provides the lonesome opportunities to solo hunt for a huge bear or buck, either of which may have never seen a man before, or to take a fisher and a pine marten in a bodygripper or on a crossing log drowning rig, than public land.
If you want a representation of what is best and most symbolic of America, look to our public lands. They best capture the grandeur of America’s open frontier, the anvil upon which our tough national character was hammered and wrought. It was on the American frontier that Yankee ingenuity, self-reliance, and an indomitable hunger for individual freedom and liberty was born. And yes, while it was the Indian who reluctantly released his land to us, it was also the Indian who taught us the land’s value, so that we might not squander it, using it cheaply, profligately, and indiscriminately. Public lands are the antidote to our natural inclination to use land the same way we use everything else within our reach.
Some armchair conservatives argue that our public land is a waste of resources. That it is a bottled-up missed opportunity to make even more-more money, and if only we would just blow it all up, pave it all, dam it all, cut it all right now, etc, then someone somewhere would have even more millions of dollars in his pocket, and daggone it, he really wants those extra millions on top of the millions he already has in his pocket. When all our farmland is paved, that same armchair conservative will have nowhere to grow food to feed us, and apparently he will learn to eat dollar bills (he already thinks Dollars are what we survive on, anyhow, so it’ll be an interesting test of reality meeting theory).
But the truth is it’s mentally sick to talk about how much money you can get for selling your mother, or for selling your soul, which is what our land is, take your pick. Hunger for more money than a man knows what to do with, notwithstanding. But some things are just not worth valuing with money, and no number of payments of thirty pieces of silver will ever, ever amount to anything in comparison to what is actually in hand, our public land.
Others complain that public land is communism, but what do they say about the old English and New England commons, where villagers pastured their collected cows? Were our forebears who fought at Bunker Hill fighting for communism? You know they weren’t. Sometimes sharing isn’t a bad thing, and sharing some land is probably one of the best things. If Yosemite or Sequoia National Parks were privately owned, no one from the public would be there, right?
Americans are fortunate to have in their hand millions of acres of public land that they can access, from Maine to Alaska to Hawaii and everywhere in between. Little township and county squirrel parks, big state forests and parks, and vast national parks like the Appalachian Trail and Acadia are all magical experiences available only because they are public.
It is true that LaVoy Finicum was murdered in cold blood by out of control public employees over a legitimate debate with tyrannical, unaccountable public land managers in Oregon. But that is not the fault of the public grazing land there, any more than a murder can be blamed on the gun and not the man who pulled its trigger. We need to hold accountable those who screwed over Finicum and those who murdered him, not blame the land on which it all happened. Despite some failings by public land managers, of which Finicum’s murder is a great and sad example, public land remains one of the very few things that government actually does well and right almost all of the time. Corrective action is just one new administration away, as selected by the voters.
If you want to see untrammeled natural beauty for campers and hikers, or if you want to experience bountiful hunting lands for an afternoon or a week, then look to the public lands near you or far away from you. Everything else – nearly 100% of private lands – is either dead, dying, or slated for eventual execution at the hands of development.
We need a lot more public land in America. We need more to love in life, and nothing compares to loving a whole mountain range, a river, a field or a forest. It will love you back with nurture and sustenance, too.
Hang glider leaps off of Hyner View State Park, surrounded by a couple million acres of Pennsylvania state forest and state parks
Down below Hyner View State Park is the Renova (Renovo) municipal park, with some historical artifacts from past freedom-ensuring conflicts, reminding the next generations of the sacrifices made so they can enjoy iPhones and Starbucks
Yours truly standing high up in the Flatirons above super-liberal Boulder, Colorado, in the background, demonstrating “Trump Over Boulder” in case any hikers had missed the shirt. None had missed its presence there, by the way. Lots of public land here, enough for everyone to share, even Donald Trump! (and yes, there are a lot of boulders here in the photo).
The author malingering around the Boulder, Colorado Chautauqua kiosk, silently taunting the invasive liberals gathered and passing through there. And in fact, the Trump shirt earned many double and triple-takes from fellow hikers, unused to experiencing diversity of thought. I did not bite those people, though I was tempted. Great public lands experience!
PA wildlife: damned if we do, damned if we don’t
Like every other state in the Union, Pennsylvania protects, conserves, and manages its wildlife through a combination of user-pays fees like hunting and fishing licenses on the one hand, and a helping of federal funding collected from user-self-imposed federal taxes on hunting and fishing equipment like boats, guns, ammunition, fishing rods etc on the other hand (the same people who buy the hunting and fishing licenses).
Yes, 100% of the nation’s citizenry benefits from the self-imposed taxes and fees paid by just 1% of the population: the hunters, trappers, and fishermen. Yes, you read that right: just 1% of the population is carrying 100% of the public burden.
And yes, as you are correctly about to say out loud, you and I will not see this bizarre and totally unsustainable arrangement in any other area of public policy. Not in roads, not in schools, not in airports, not in museums, not in anything else official and run for public benefit. And so, yes, it is a fact that wildlife agencies across America are perennially underfunded, and have been for so long that it’s now accepted as the way America does its wildlife business. Here in Pennsylvania, despite endless rising costs and endlessly more expensive public pensions, both houses of the PA legislature have long blocked the PA Game Commission from getting a hunting license increase in decades. So the PGC is even more behind the financial Eight Ball than most other state wildlife agencies. Hunters and wildlife managers in other states look at Pennsylvania and shake their heads. It doesn’t have to be this way, but it is.
Despite the obvious imbalance and weakness inherent in such a unique and faulty funding arrangement, for fifty years this approach worked pretty well, nationally and in Pennsylvania, with some states occasionally putting new money into holes that opened up in the regular wildlife funding support. Those states with significantly increasing human populations tend to be forced into dealing with inevitable wildlife-human conflicts more than other states, and when Mr. and Mrs. America are increasingly hitting deer with their cars, you can bet that they will demand their home state do something about it. So more money is found.
So along comes the Pennsylvania Auditor General, to investigate the management and expenditure of money at the PGC. And why not, right? The PGC is a public agency, and hunting license revenue is a public trust. So sure, go ahead, look into it, audit the agency. And so it was done, and some interesting things emerged just a bit over a week ago.
In the “Atta boy” column is the fact that there appears to be no corruption, graft, or misuse of scarce sportsmen’s dollars at the PGC. By all accounts, PGC is transparent and well run. Given how much the sportsmen are always scrutinizing the agency, we all figured as much. But it is nice to have our beliefs and trust confirmed like this. We love the PGC even more today than before the audit.
In the “Aww shucks” column is the revelation that PGC staff do not immediately deposit oil and gas royalty checks when they are received, nor does the PGC ascertain for itself if those royalty payments are accurate in the first place, instead trusting the oil and gas companies to do what is right on their own. Hmmmm….This is a potential problem area, and we are all glad the auditors found it. Anyone who knows the PGC can bet money on the fact that PGC staff are right now doing all of this payment followup with a vengeance. Look out, oil and gas companies!
But then there is the big weird issue, the biggest issue of all, where the auditors “discover” that the PGC is sitting on $72 million in the bank. And accordingly, the auditors immediately and erroneously ascribe this to bad money management. After all, they say, public money is meant to be spent. “If you got ’em, smoke ’em,” goes the ancient and totally irresponsible government approach to managing public dollars. After all, under normal budgeting culture, agencies that do not spend the money budgeted to them risk losing those dollars in the next budget cycle. Failure to spend money is correlated with a failure to implement an agency’s mission, and for senior agency managers, there is the usual ego factor; the bigger the budget, the bigger the…you know. This is the old approach to managing government funds, and it is wrong, and it certainly does not fit the PGC’s reality or targeted way of doing business.
Let’s ask you a question: If you knew your family was going to be receiving less and less money going forward, and yet your family costs would be held steady, wouldn’t you begin to bank any extra money you had, in preparation for lean times ahead? If your family is responsible, then yes, this is what you do, it is what we all do. And it is what the PGC has done, thankfully.
But as a result of the audit, this single fact is being used to beat on the agency, to coerce the PGC to adopt unsustainable policies and irresponsible money management, despite the agency sailing through ever less sustainable funding waters every day. Seems like now every elected official and every Monday morning quarterback sportsman has some variation on the foolish theme that PGC has more money than it knows what to do with. Wrong!
So the real outcome of the audit is that Pennsylvania wildlife are damned either way, because the PGC is the useful straw man whipping boy for every aspiring demagogue in Pennsylvania politics. No matter what the PGC does, our wildlife resources are going to suffer. If PGC carefully, frugally husbands its limited resources, preparing for rainy days and needy wildlife, then the agency’s critics say the agency is miserly and hoarding, and they seek to punish the agency. And on the other hand, if the PGC immediately spends every dime it has, and has no money left over to deal with yet more unfunded mandates like Chronic Wasting Disease, then critics say the agency is wasteful and ineffective, and they seek to punish the agency.
And either way, the net result is the PGC’s critics damn and condemn our wildlife. Because that is the true result of all this second-guessing and monkeying about with the PGC budget and funding streams. Plenty of elected officials use their criticism of the PGC to artificially burnish their “good government” credentials, when in fact they are demanding the worst sort of government, and a total disservice to the sportsmen and wildlife everyone enjoys.
Many years ago, sportsmen were organized enough to react strongly to political demagogues who threatened our wildlife resource (and PA’s $1.6 billion annual hunting economy) with their petty politics. This latest iteration of the politics of wildlife management indicates that we need to get back to the old days, where sportsmen were unified and forceful, even vengeful, in their expectation that their elected officials would not politicize or hurt our commonly held wildlife resource.
Help! My bank account self-identifies as a billionaire
Although I had put only twelve hundred bucks in it, my bank account recently decided to start self-identifying as a billionaire.
It is true that there were not billions of dollars in the account, but that didn’t stop it from saying that there should be, and, even more important, it didn’t stop it from SPENDING like it had a billion dollars.
We had a talk, the bank account and I.
We spoke about responsibility, restraint, honesty, objectivity, working for what we want, embracing life as it is and not as we wish it would be, and so on.
I mean, come on, Bank Account, I am not a billionaire and I cannot place a billion dollars in you to cover your personal feelings and desires and all the costs associated with satiating them.
Unfortunately, the bank account then went on a wild spending spree, which I ended up being on the hook for, and which I had no money to pay for.
Our next talk turned to angry accusations.
What can I say, I was frustrated. I expected better behavior from the bank account, and I expected reasoning with simple math and logic to work. Dollars and cents. What money goes out must be covered by money coming in.
What the bank account said in response made no sense to me, but I had to accept it.
The bank account called me a bigot, and mean, and hurtful, and disrespectful of its most personal wishes.
This shocked me, and made me question myself. Was I really such a bad person for insisting on the most rudimentary good behavior?
I wasn’t sure where to go with the relationship as the bills were stacking up, and the bank told me that ultimately I was responsible for the behavior of my own bank account, so I would have to pay the bills in the end.
Believe it or not, things got worse.
When I opened the bank account, it was just me spending the money that was in it. After the bank account self-identified as a billionaire it had developed a taste for luxury items.
And then, because of feelings once again, my bank account decided it was against the simple safeguards meant to keep others from spending the money in the account.
Even worse, the bank account developed a taste for financial largess to others that bore no resemblance to the twelve hundred bucks I had originally deposited, much less the billion dollars it pretended to! Before I knew it the bank account was partying hard with all kinds of new friends, and letting them withdraw money that they wanted to spend on themselves.
That kind of generosity with my money made the bank account feel awfully good about itself, and it made others like it more than boring, crabby old me, always whining about balancing expenses with income.
When I went to the bank to complain, I was told that the bank account was in my name, and although it had obviously gone off the deep end, I was going to have to pay all the bills in the end.
So I decided to self-identify as a hermit, and I abandoned the bank account. I just withdrew from the relationship altogether. I couldn’t afford it.
Last I heard, the bank account still self-identified as a billionaire and was still living large, with all kinds of hangers-on and new-new friends, all with expensive tastes, living it up every day and night. The bills are piling up, and I have no idea who is going to pay them.