Posts Tagged → risk
Memorial Day thank you
Thank you to the Armed Services personnel living and passed who have risked and sacrificed for all of us free American citizens today.
Isn’t it strange that there are so many heroic acts of bravery and valor on the battlefield, and yet almost none found in politics?
Kamala vs Trump…really?
Kamala Harris has never had a real private sector job, ever. She says she flipped burgers one summer as a teenager, but I do not believe that is true. She comes from a wealthy upper crust family that owned slaves in Jamaica. All of her jobs and roles were within one political party and in public taxpayer-funded jobs. No way does she even hold a candle to President Trump, and yes, she is far worse than he is in every measure.
Do not mistake this criticism as partisan, because Kamala Harris is like the great Republican failure here in Pennsylvania, the former state senator Jake Corman, who I also attacked mercilessly.
Jake Corman is now a “lobbyist” in Harrisburg, PA, after being forced out of his state senate seat BY HIS FELLOW REPUBLICANS and by voters like me who just could not stand his stench in politics any longer. All Jake’s jobs his entire life were in the Republican Party or in taxpayer funded public sector roles. Jake was like Kamala – fake, arrogant, snotty, unaccomplished, undeserving, mean, treated people around him like crap. Like Kamala, Jake Corman was an example of everything wrong in American politics, in both political parties.
I did everything possible to chase Republican Jake Corman out of politics and out of his senate seat. I spent thousands and thousands of my own dollars doing this, dollars that I had to work hard for in my small private sector business, often working in brutal physical conditions while running my sawmill. And believe me, all of the sycophants surrounding Jake and making money off of Jake went after me, as a result. I took a lot of slings and arrows for my efforts to unseat Jake Corman.
I hate career politicians of both parties, though I am more Republican than Democrat, because the Democrat Party is now officially an anti-America political force.
Think about this: I used to be a Democrat. In 1988 I was the central Pennsylvania regional coordinator for the Al Gore for President campaign, back when Al Gore was endorsed by the NRA. Think about that. No, I did not leave the Democrat Party, they left me. The Democrat Party is an evil organization and does not deserve the support of decent people.
So do not try to paint my criticism of Kamala Harris as partisan, no way.
And now I am looking at Kamala Harris, a hugely and justifiably unpopular, unimpressive career politician who is challenging President Donald Trump, and I am thinking whhaaaat?
There is no comparison between these two people. Kamala Harris has zero real world experience, has never really been tested by life or by reality, has taken zero risks and made zero sacrifices; she is totally fake and phony. Trump has earned all of the support he has, by not only working hard his whole life, but by standing up for the America that even partisan Democrats take for granted and enjoy, and which will disappear for good if Kamala Harris is elected.
If you are confused about this, then you are probably addicted to mainstream media bullshit. NPR is totally fake news, complete lies from end to end, and yet all the liberals in my life basically live all day long with NPR on the radio piping in complete bullshit to their ears, without any curiosity about why so many Americans despise NPR’s propaganda.
Are you intellectually curious? You probably tell your friends and family and yourself that you are “open minded” and “intellectual,” but if you are not getting information from diverse sources, you are close-minded, and therefore an uninformed fool.
If you are curious, start out at The Gateway Pundit and Breitbart. Compare and contrast their reporting with that done by NPR, ABC, PBS et al, and then you will make up your own mind with a much better array of information to make a better, more informed decision.
So for anyone with a fair minded attitude about this election, the choice is easy – vote for Trump. He is not a politician, he is not crooked, he has personally taken risks and sacrificed beyond imagination for all us Americans, whether we supported him or not. And he is subject to all kinds of assassination attempts and plots…why? Because he loves the America that you love and that you likely foolishly take for granted, and which our enemies hate and desire to destroy.
America is not too big to fail, and under Kamala Harris, America will fail.
Vote for Trump and thereby vote for the America that you love.

The Democrat Party abuses women, actually hates womanhood and motherhood, and yet some women feel strangely attracted to it
Trump groupie or devoted admirer?
President Donald Trump inspires tens of millions of loyal Americans, no doubt about it. When he is able to publicly campaign and is not being artificially held in some kangaroo courtroom by some tyrannical petty judge or bureaucrat bent on illegally interfering with the ongoing election, Trump’s public events draw record numbers of fired up participants.
Americans sleep out overnight to get into a Trump rally.
People stand for hours in the rain to get into a Trump event.
People take off from work to stand along a road or highway for hours to cheer on Trump’s motorcade as it passes by for five seconds.
No two ways about it, President Donald Trump inspires a lot of devoted people, most of whom were never involved in politics before, including many who had never even voted, until the 2016 election.
And so this almost rock star quality surrounding Trump has of course inspired his political opponents to deride said followers and supporters as “groupies” and “zombies” etc, to the point where even some of Trump’s own supporters hesitate to show the full measure of their true devotion to the guy. No one wants to be thought of as a mindless devotee, or a “cultist.”
I understand a person’s resistance to becoming a political groupie or acting excited enough to be labeled as one. But the reason so many of us Americans and even people I know in foreign countries are so emotionally devoted to Trump is because he is not just some politician, or a candidate. Rather, Trump is a symbol. To both his supporters and his opponents, Trump is a powerful symbol, either powerful medicine or bad ju-ju, depending on one’s fealty to the American founding documents and our founding first principles.
So as this powerful symbol, Trump has taken on the shape and aura of a true martyr, a hero, willing to risk everything for his holy cause. The man has taken so much unwarranted, unjust personal damage, and has taken so much risk just to do what is right for America, that he rises far above just being a vessel or a tool for us voters.
Have you seen any other political candidate defy anywhere near the same level and length of abuse and serious threats as Trump has? I haven’t.
Trump has become in some ways on a par with America’s founders, who also pledged and staked their reputations, their wealth, their homes, their families, their futures on the outcome of their inspired rebellion against Britain in 1776. And many of them lost everything, or lost so much that they were never the same person. A handful of America’s founders lost their lives. At this point right now, in addition to all of the fake legal jeopardy being thrown at him, and on top of all of the personal cost and financial cost he has had to bear, Trump is certainly also in the crosshairs of an actual assassin or two, including the Biden FBI, which crazily charged into Mar-a-Lago with actual written shoot-to-kill orders from the corrupt DOJ.
So yeah, I am not a groupie so much as I am simply in awe of Trump, an impressed admirer of his resilience and his selfless devotion to us Americans and to our country, regardless of how many unjust and serious wounds he receives. And therefore I am devoted to him and to his cause. Trump is my cause. He is the cause of and a one-man movement for a constitutional and free America, which right now hangs by a fraying thread.
Yes, I will say it, President Donald Trump is America.
The beautiful power of a free market guitar
A lot of the recent discussion and reporting about the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is how hard the participants there are trying to centralize decision making, to aggregate power into as few hands as possible, and to control the choices that individual people have available to them all around the world. This effort to concentrate power and decision making in the hands of elites runs opposite and directly against the democratic forms of government that many people around the globe have fought and died to achieve.
Places like India, France, Britain, Israel, South Korea, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Austria, Italy, Hungary, the Philippines, and of course my home country of America, have all offered their citizens a maximum amount of personal freedom and opportunity. People living there can make all kinds of choices about what they want to read, to say, to wear, to eat, what kind of job they want to try, what kinds of products they want to try and create and sell. And that last part, the creating and selling part, is really at the heart of democracy. Because free markets offer choices not just in economic spheres, but which naturally blend into our own personal lives.
When a person, you the reader here, for instance, feels personally fulfilled by fully following your natural talent and curiosity, and by fulfilling your creative spirit, often also followed by greatly improving your physical living conditions, then you become a maximally happy person. This pursuit of happiness is one of the main reasons that America exists, and it is enshrined in our Declaration of Independence. A nation filled with happy people is a miracle, because it is so rare in human history. So we see that free markets create the most happy, most fulfilled individuals, who are creative, educated, and opinionated.
And we also see with the WEF that the wealthiest people on Planet Earth are now scheming and trying to take that happiness away. The WEF people do not want “little people” individuals to make their own decisions. Instead, they want centralized decision making for all of us, by a very small number of ultra wealthy people. They do not support democracy or free choice or you having an opinion that threatens their power.
I want to share a neat related video with you. To me it is powerful because it touches on this subject of an individual who follows his dream to make the best guitars possible within the free markets that the world allows. He succeeds within the international guitar market, but because of a natural resource constraint – the almost complete loss of ebony trees, necessary for making guitar necks and frets – he takes a big risk, makes some big sacrifices, and ends up playing an even bigger and more positive role in the world.
Bob Taylor, of Taylor Guitars, uses careful market-driven management of rare ebony trees and their surrounding forests to create the conditions necessary for conserving the vast African rainforest jungle those trees grow in. When the local people no longer need to poach ebony trees to sell on the black market, they become protectors of the ebony trees. Economics and free markets keep ebony trees alive, and growing for the future, as well as the richly diverse jungle habitat in which ebony trees grow. This is powerful stuff only achievable by free markets.
The same dynamic is also at play with trophy hunting in Africa, where wealthy hunters pay much more to kill wild game than that same animal is worth as bush meat to the local populations. Because the locals get the meat from the trophy animal (99% of the trophy animal is immediately donated to locals, the hunter and the safari camp getting the other 1%) anyhow, and they also get the hunting and tourism-related jobs from the international visitors who want to see and hunt wildlife, the incentive shifts away from poaching and market hunting to the locals then protecting and conserving the wild game they once saw only as a meal. Again, powerful natural resource conservation as a direct result of free markets.
Long live free markets, personal choice, personal accountability, and personal reward for hard work and risk taking. May the World Economic Forum fail in its effort to end our choices and to make us “own nothing.”
Here is the Taylor Guitar video. I hope it speaks to you like it speaks to me.
(and here is the ten years later video, which is about ebony tree planting and husbandry)
Harrisburg Candlelight House Tour 2022
The Princess of Patience and I have an annual event we enjoy, and that is the Candlelight House Tour organized by Historic Harrisburg Association.
The homes are historic, often brick and stone, but increasingly being rehabbed and rebuilt to suit modern lifestyles. Mid Town Harrisburg is the center of a great deal of this gentrification and re-use, the reclamation of its former glory days by investors, young couples, and entrepreneurs taking empty dilapidated homes and fixing them up into tax-paying structures once again.
Often the true downtown homes are as-is-as-found-as-was, somewhat cluttered and dark, filled with holiday tsatchkes, very homey and comfortable. These downtown spaces are all smaller attached homes from the 1860s-1900s, whose original materials and design often require a significant boost to make them truly livable today. And yet so many owners keep the original pine flooring, which is as attractive now as it was 130 years ago. Many owners aggressively incorporate new steel I-beams and wall materials, and install new windows in the former closed brick, while maintaining as much of the original construction as possible. The result is always a fun and harmonious combination of antique and modern, and I would say that most of them make me wish I had it as a pied-a-terre.
One of the big efforts is taking old mansions and commercial buildings and turning them into apartments. This is not an easy or cheap thing to do. When I was in graduate school, I lived in an old Victorian mansion on Lyle Avenue that had been turned into apartments by an enterprising cocaine addict named Steve. Steve lived in one of the larger apartments that spanned from the basement to the roof. One day, while watching Steve hold his own, raging drunk, buck naked and armed with a single shot .22 rifle, in an armed stand-off with the Nashville police, who had taken cover with their service revolvers over the hoods and roofs of their squad cars and a humorously deployed bullhorn, I came to appreciate the thick, strong brick construction of the building I was in. If the bullets ever flew, I was without a doubt immune to dying from acute lead poisoning behind those bunker-like walls. Ever since then I have admired the must-be-crazy people who seek to bring these clunky dinosaurs into the current day and age as livable spaces.
One of the people I spent time talking with was Nathaniel Foote, who took the old Carpets & Draperies building and provided Harrisburgers with luxury loft apartments. His emphasis is on short-term nurse housing. Another entrepreneur I spent time talking with was Justin Heinly, who has restored both the historic Cottage Ridge Mansion and the historic Donaldson Mansion next block down. Justin told me true rehab war stories, like finding old brick chimneys upstairs that had been pulled apart downstairs, thereby leaving thousands of pounds of hidden unsupported weight bearing down hard on the floors below.
This historic home rehabilitation work takes real dedication, risk, and sacrifice by people who have slight streaks of both crazy and artistic creativity. This work directly benefits everyone who lives in Harrisburg, or who owns real estate in Harrisburg. Thank you Nathaniel, Justin, and all the others who are making Harrisburg’s old abandoned areas now livable and desirable once again, one building and one apartment at a time.
And thank you to all of the home owners who let the public enter their private spaces, and to Historic Harrisburg, for bringing us all together as the community we are.

Real estate entrepreneur Justin Heinly keeps a smile on his face, despite encountering unbelievable engineering challenges resurrecting majestic old mansions for today’s renter

The Princess of Patience listening in surprise to home rehab war stories from entrepreneur Justin Heinly
One thing Rush Limbaugh got right
Radio host Rush Limbaugh died a year ago, and people who enjoyed his show or his books are remembering him today. I am remembering him for two reasons. First, for his zig-zag career path and conventional/unconventional life path. Second, for a single political prediction he made in 2019 that was labeled “outrageous” and “dangerous” by his opponents, and which even raised a lot of eyebrows amid his supporters, but which has proven to be spookily prescient and 100% accurate.
First with number one.
Rush Limbaugh’s successful life path and career path are things worth studying, because so many Americans have been corralled into falsely believing your career must be, should be a straight and linear path forward. Even though that is just not correct, and in many cases it’s not healthy.
You know, graduate from high school, then go to college and spend an inordinate amount of money to be indoctrinated in nonsense and useless hokum, with the hope of getting a college diploma that “proves” you are smart and capable of making decisions. I don’t know if this linear career path idea is a natural result of the old guild mentality, where a son or daughter would apprentice in a particular guild (plumber, wood worker, watch maker, gun maker, horse carriage maker etc.), and then either take over his or her father’s work shop, or go start their own work shop/ atelier in some distant locale doing the same work. In truth, this guild and apprencticeship process offers a lot of value, not just three hundred years ago, but even today. It assures that young people go into work they enjoy, and that they are well trained when they are released unto the world as a certified expert. It also gives people a good income in what had been a feudal world of poor serfs and ultra-wealthy aristocrats.
But this guild approach to career saw its last vestiges swept away with the end of high school Shop Class and Vo-Tech programs that actually taught Americans how to do needed things of value.
And so Rush Limbaugh followed his own path in the radio world, and ended up being the most successful and well-known radio personality in radio history. His success did not happen in a linear way, but quite the opposite. He had to find his way. His stories about his first few jobs in radio, and about being fired by different types of radio managers for different kinds of real or imaginary infractions, and moving across the country several times to take radio jobs, are useful examples to those just now entering the work force or who are stultifying in old jobs.
Only after failing, or growing as it might be euphemistically called, did Limbaugh eventually get to sit behind the Golden EIB Microphone. It was his initial failures and zig-zags that eventually created his character and inner strength, his skills and abilities.
Lessons that Limbaugh learned were be yourself, be honest and forthright, work hard, take risks, make some sacrifices, and if you end up doing what you enjoy the most, then you will often be rewarded with material success and deep personal happiness. And as we well know, contentment is its own form of wealth (and as some of us know, there are a lot of very wealthy people who are also desperately unhappy and often cruelly, even destructively negative, to those around them), so becoming a high school shop teacher earning forty five thousand dollars a year may make you deeply content with your life, but your life partner is going to have to work, too.
But there is no such a thing as high school shop class these days….one should wonder Why…that is a separate issue.
Similarly, his personal life resulted in a strong and committed marriage to a woman, Kathryn, only after the two of them had been friends for many years. How rewarding it is to be married to both your lover and your best friend. That is the pinnacle of relationships, and Limbaugh’s marriage should serve as a useful template for others contemplating marriage themselves. Find a friend, and marry them.
Now about that crazy prediction Limbaugh made in 2019, the one thing he got right that at first sounded so outlandish and impossible…I remember shaking my head when he said that “the Democrat Party will seek a way to eliminate elections so that they can become the dominant and sole political force in America.”
“I don’t know how they are going to do it, but they are working on it,” Limbaugh said. “Oh, they will allow the trappings of elections, but they won’t be meaningful or fair.”
And I was not alone in my skepticism at such a huge claim. Many observers and listeners to Limbaugh’s radio program openly said that he was just being bombastic for the sake of poking his political opponents. No one in American politics could ever want to eliminate elections, the bedrock foundation of our constitutional republic, right?, we naively thought.
And yet Limbaugh stuck to this public claim several times more, and in the end he was proven correct with the stolen 2020 election, and the Democrat Party’s all-out hyperdrive to convert that theft into absolute iron control of Americans by any means necessary, including the federalization of elections and permanence of vote fraud activity.
It turned out that Limbaugh really did understand the Democrat Party and the American Left better than anyone else outside of those two movements. What is amazing is that the subject of his analysis, the Democrat Party, now makes no effort to hide its totalitarian ambitions. Everywhere American citizens have demanded audits of the voting machines or the ballots cast in the fraudulent 2020 election, they have been met with deviousness, rude defiance, threats, blocking lawsuits, and outright ballot-shredding skulduggery by the Democrat Party and its Republican Party enablers.
This is not the behavior of people committed to open and accountable elections, but rather the actions of the desperate and dangerous thief trying to keep his theft from becoming widespread knowledge.
America as a continuing constitutional republic is in huge trouble. Most of our institutions are overthrown and taken over by leftist activists, who then bend those cultural and political institutions against the American constitution and the rule of law. Rush Limbaugh was so deep into the political fray that like a champion prize fighter, he saw where his opponent’s next punch sequence was going to come from.
What is amazing is that the Republican Party still, even now, behaves like an amazed ringside commentator asking incredulously at the end of the fight how the champion prize fighter ever saw the attack coming and not only beat it back, but managed to land his own blows in order to win the fight. This just goes to show just how outside the political fray the Republican Party is; the GOP is barely an observer much less an actual participant in American politics.
We need Rush Limbaugh’s insights more than ever now, but he is somewhere else, and so the only bit of related wisdom or insight I can scrape up at this point is to say We must all be Rush Limbaughs, and each of us fearlessly stay in the fight for freedom and liberty.
And trust our gut instincts about our political opponents. Even if it seems like crazy talk to say that the Democrat Party or its Canadian political ally, Justin Trudeau, are hell bent on becoming absolutist totalitarian overlords. We must fight fight fight, or we lose everything.

Rush Limbaugh behind his EIB Golden Microphone, fighting for freedom and liberty. He knew politics better than most people and loved a constitutional America more than most
Today my head was designated a “Sanctuary Head” and I got a haircut as a form of civil disobedience
Today I got my hair cut in an establishment here in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania. Our county opened today by a patriotic act of the county commissioners, Jeff Haste and Mike Pries, who are looking out for their citizens (see Jeff Haste’s letter to the citizens of Pennsylvania here).
My haircut stands as a symbol of #resistance to petty tyrant Governor Tom Wolf’s power-mad attempt to control free Pennsylvanians.
I also did this act of defiance under the totally illegal but patriotic self-designation of my head as a “Barbershop Sanctuary Head.”
While this act of civil disobedience happened in an actual barbershop and salon, the hair cutter informed me that she has been doing hair coloring and haircuts at private homes over the past month, wearing PPE and a mask as the client requires. I was her first “in-patient” at the establishment. Yes, like the free adults they are, people have been deciding for themselves what level of risk they are willing to engage in order to look presentable in public. Without Governor Wolf and his creature doctor telling us what to think, what to do.
Recall that Pennsylvania is under a draconian “lockdown order” issued by the governor. Basically you can’t go pee without the government telling you to go.
In response to Dauphin County opening up, petty tyrant Governor Tom Wolf went on a tantrum tirade of threats: Businesses that open without his OK will have their state licenses pulled, and insurance companies will be notified or damaged, and federal aid will be withheld, and so on.
If you don’t listen to Tyrant Wolf, he will do everything he can to harm you, much more than the virus ever could. Governor Wolf demands that you listen to him and obey him! His threats over compliance are arguably worse than the risks he says we incur by not following his dictates. Wolf has gone overboard after already going overboard. The guy is drunk on power.
Governor Wolf is like all of the other liberal governors in America right now: Might makes right, the full coercive force of government will be brought down on the now-shorn head of anyone who dares to challenge him, you will be punished for daring to act like a free person. None of this covid19 policy stuff is about public health any longer. It is purely about power, and a rather unconstitutional, un-American power at that.
Petty tyrants like Tom Wolf just don’t realize what stuff Americans are made of. He doesn’t realize he inspired me to do this. I pulled a liberal trick out of my hat, and by unilaterally declaring my head to be a Barbershop Sanctuary Head, I have automatically blocked government from doing anything to my head. Because, you know, for years sanctuary cities and states have been releasing from jail all violent illegal alien felons, but recently locking up law-abiding citizens out for a walk while again releasing yet more violent felons from prison, because of covid19. It all made so much sense…
So now my own sanctuary head is off-limits to Governor Tom Wolf. I am sure he will understand.

Two months of hair growth on my head resulted in a pile of wool-like sheep-shearings. Sad that this pile of hair is now an act of defiance, resistance, and civil disobedience in America.