Posts Tagged → ocean
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
Midsummer report
My apologies for the long absence here. Summer is in full swing and our family has been operating at full tilt speed. Time only for doing things, and none for writing about it all, until now.
First off, our oldest kid was married on Independence Day. Held at a pretty and historic farm, it was a fantastic wedding, and we feel like we acquired a wonderful addition to our family. However, the preparation necessary for that event took up a lot of time and energy, for many months. And then there was the recovery week. And then there was the vacation week. Hence no blog posts. Full credit to my wife for all of the wedding planning.
At least I myself am back in the saddle, while other people around me are still recovering from their vacation. Not everyone does well with the surf fishing bum lifestyle, including sleeping on the beach, eating questionable food from a warm cooler that has been pawed over and drooled on by feral raccoons, and drinking fetid water. I myself thrive in this kind of environment, and so I am back to report back to our three readers.
What can I say about the wedding other than I fired our small black powder cannon seven times, for good luck. It was Independence Day, and while the venue does not allow fireworks, they did allow the cannon (it’s a cast iron, steel sleeved replica swivel gun with a 1.75″ bore). And in my speech as the bride’s father, how could I miss an opportunity to point out that Independence Day was brought to us by citizens with guns? That is a fact, is it not?
And (of course, I guess) I heard back afterwards that some of our wedding guests were offended by the cannon and also offended by my mention of the origins of American freedom – citizens with guns. You can’t make this stuff up if you tried, like it’s a Hollywood movie script caricature of spoiled rotten children who get everything that Planet Earth can provide and yet nonetheless complain about it. Something like “The food here is terrible and the portions are so small.”
Are Americans now really offended by Independence Day fireworks? Are they offended by displays of patriotism and mentioning of historical facts that unfortunately run contrary to some evil political narratives that privately owned guns are bad and our freedom was brought to Americans by a immaculately conceived federal government that descended from Heaven? Are some wedding guests now so crass that they actually complain about the bride’s father setting off his celebratory toy cannon for the enjoyment of all the normal fun-loving people in attendance?
I have a hard time believing these things, but I did get to witness this stuff. America is in big trouble when its own citizens, young and old, hate its founding and can’t give a proud father his one moment and some space to celebrate it. Jiminy crickets.
Just returned from a subsequent beach trip to a a long spit of federally managed property on the east coast. The National Park Service rangers were 99% normal, nice, intelligent Americans, thank you very much, Gage, Donald, and Stephen.
In this national park there is a problem with artificially high numbers of deer, foxes, and racoons. They have no natural predators and they are multiplying at breakneck rates and having huge negative impacts on the environment and local ecology. Vegetation shows a distinct deer browse line about four feet above the ground, and the racoons are everywhere, aggressive, and aiming to ruin your trip. I watched a red fox steal a camper’s breakfast sausage meal right off of his plate on the guy’s picnic table. We had raccoons patrolling our campsite and under our table as soon as we broke out our food. They will grab your food right out of your hand. It is a fact that raccoons are host to some nasty parasites they excrete in their poop, which was abundantly displayed all around the campsites. Raccoons are also the number one vector for rabies among wildlife.
Aside from posing health threats and incessantly badgering the humans who are trying to enjoy the park, the foxes and raccoons also eat the eggs of rare nesting shore birds. These rare birds enjoy huge swaths of cordoned off human-free dunes and beaches in the park (and also on federal and state lands out on Long Island, like Orient Point and Montauk). And yet the same exact NPS staff enforcing the human no-go dune zones policy are absolutely fine with the overabundant nest-raiding foxes and raccoons that render all the no-go zones meaningless. The staff do not support hunting or trapping these destructive pests, either to improve the park visitor experience or to protect the natural environment.
How can the rare birds successfully nest on the ground and hatch their chicks there when the artificially super overabundant egg-eating raccoons and foxes are allowed to roam at will?
Talking with various National Park Service staff about this problem resulted in exposure to various levels of education and serious/unserious mindset. Most of the NPS staff acknowledged there is a wildlife problem on site that must be addressed. Hunting the deer and trapping the foxes and raccoons is the normal and responsible way to deal with this artificial human-caused environmental problem. These are the responsible and serious ways of addressing a visitor problem on land that is owned by the US taxpayer and whose management is entrusted to taxpayer-paid bureaucrats.
However, when I mentioned the above normal solutions to a young, handsome, tall NPS Park Policeman patrolling our campground, he responded “The same can be said about humans — there are just too many humans. And your solution to the overabundant raccoon problem is not humane.” He would get rid of the humans and allow the artificially high numbers of nuisance wildlife to proliferate. With taxpayer-paid federal employees of this guy’s low caliber and high wokeness quotient, the park visitor experience is going to degrade. C’mon, NPS, you can screen your employee applicants better than this. This foolish people-hating young guy should never have a gun and a badge, much less wear an NPS uniform.
Overall the surf fishing was fun if mostly unproductive. Probably due to the high heat and ferocious sunshine. I can report that catching cownose/ bullnose rays on strong surf tackle is a hoot, but then safely decoupling that animal from the tackle is a whole other thing. They whip their barbed tails around trying to nail the fisherman, who is trying to release them back into the ocean (I learned to place something heavy on the tail while using heavy pliers to remove or break off the hook). We did witness a large shark violently feeding close to shore, and it would be a fair guess to say it was probably eating these rays, which we caught and saw in abundance on both the bay side and the ocean surf side.
So that is the mid-summer report. Fast action, lots of family, some big family celebration and lots of family movement across the beautiful American landscape for work and vacation. I hope that you the reader are also enjoying your summertime. Summer is such a glorious time to be with family and friends, to visit new places, to camp out under the stars and cook over an open fire, to think through life’s normal challenges and to spend time with people we love…and then it is over just when we are all starting to really get into it.
So make the most of your summer.
Campsite neighbor Steve, a PhD engineer ex-patriot Brit and defiant leftist, helped MAGA Maniac Josh fix my malfunctioning headlamp, demonstrating that it’s easy to be enemies when separated by keyboards and easy to be friends when living side by side
Nice level NPS campsites with fire ring and grill
Each campsite has a pavilion and a picnic table. Is this really camping?
Asbury Park Brewery is a local flavor that I was happy to support. No sign anywhere of Bud Lite or Budweiser anything, thankfully
Symbol of foolish National Park Service policies seeking to protect rare shore birds by excluding people from their habitat, but allowing artificially overabundant populations of nest-raiding raccoons and foxes to roam at will.
Beach goers nonetheless entered this area because there were zero nesting birds in it and there were literally tons of foxes running around in it. Come on National Park Service, you can do much smarter than this
Ahhhhh… summer vacation on the Atlantic Coast