Posts Tagged → trust
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
“Only Trump can destroy Trump”
For five long, brutal years President Donald Trump withstood a non-stop cyclone of misinformation, disinformation, lies, hoaxes, endless false accusations, two fake impeachments, and outright mutiny and insubordination by federal employees and military officers.
President Trump handily won re-election in November 2020 with the devotion of his ardent supporters, and the big lie that basement dwelling corrupt, doofus failed career politician Joe Biden was president only became an official narrative because that cyclone of official insubordination and mutiny around President Trump reached its climax from November 4th 2020 through January 2021 with the help of Big Media lies and Big Tech censorship. All statutory and constitutional safeguards set up to protect sacred American voting from being tampered with failed, because the people entrusted with those safeguards deliberately failed.
And all throughout that five year period tens of millions of American voters kept faith that President Donald Trump would prevail, because they knew that only he, of all of America’s elected officials, believed in a free America with liberty and justice for all. Despite the Democrat Media – Big Tech industrial complex’s best efforts to divide Trump’s followers from Trump, the Trump Train continued full speed ahead. As it does even now, when Trump draws huge crowds to his rallies.
Radio personality extraordinaire Rush Limbaugh used to explain how the Big Media people just do not understand the connection that Trump has with his followers. Rush said many times “Only Trump can destroy Trump’s relationship with his followers. Because that bond of trust between them is so strong.” In other words, it would take a betrayal of that trust by Trump to sever that bond. No big lies, no hoaxes, no fake impeachments would ever dent Trump’s popularity.
And I think we are beginning to see that bond fraying, only because President Trump is fraying it through his own deliberate actions that directly alienate his strongest supporters. No one ever accused President Trump of being a politician, and in fact it is his greatest pride that he is not a politician. He didn’t think that way and he didn’t act that way. But by trying to act like one now, Trump is reaping the kinds of results that politicians invariably get when they literally play politics.
In the past week we have seen President Trump officially endorse for US Senate a known Hollywood liberal RINO candidate, Dr. Mehmet Oz, instead of a true conservative candidate who actually lives in Pennsylvania. This endorsement was so bizarre that many people are booing its mention at voter gatherings here in Pennsylvania. It is not a popular decision among Trump’s followers.
And now President Trump is actually, incredibly, unbelievably encouraging PA Swamp RINO problem child Jake Corman to stay in the PA governor’s race. Even though Corman has been the biggest obstacle to conducting an official audit of the stolen 2020 election here. Which makes people wonder if Trump is going to endorse Corman, who was just about to file paperwork to withdraw his name from the race, but who is now following Trump’s advice to stay in.
So many old adages address this situation. One goes “If you have nothing positive to say, then say nothing at all.” Another goes “It is better to be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.” And of course Rush Limbaugh’s warning to President Trump (paraphrased here): “Only Trump can destroy Trump.”
If President Trump continues destructively mucking around in Pennsylvania politics, of which he knows little, and in which many of us have devoted decades of our lives at great personal cost while battling the corrupt PAGOP and the Harrisburg Swamp, then Trump is going to break his bond with us.
All of my friends are saying this, and I am saying it, too, as painful as it is. President Trump, we will follow you to Hell and back, if we believe that you have our backs. But when you behave this destructive way and hurt us, then we no longer trust you.
Obama kicks land conservation in the n*ts
Despite having spent my career in environmental protection, conservation, and especially land conservation, I am always non-plussed when someone waves a magic wand, declares some government-managed public land off-limits, and then calls it “conservation.”
I love land acquisitions for public parks, forests, and hunting areas. Adding to the existing roster of public lands gives us more flexibility with existing areas, more chances to explore multiple use.
In the past couple of weeks lame duck president Hussein Obama has waved a magic executive wand over millions of acres of federally managed lands out west, and declared them national monuments. Obama did not work with land trusts or ranchers to purchase conservation easements or fee simple land out west, thereby adding to the total acreage available for public use. No, instead, Obama did there what he has basically done in the Middle East.
He dropped a turd in the punch bowl, and left the party.
Except Obama is so arrogant, he claims it is a big success.
Nothing damages land conservation more than unilateral actions by Washington, DC, about resource-rich lands specifically purchased to support and benefit the American people. All of them. The magic wand executive-heavy procedure just alienates so many people, you have to wonder if it is by design.
After all, recall that under Obama, the IRS made war on land trusts and conservancies. Silly rules and regulations were enacted making land purchases and tax-exempt gifts and appraisals much more difficult to do across America. My own belief is Obama hates most Americans, and especially people with land, whom he equates to colonists of some sort. So he set out to punish them. All those rich land trusts run by wealthy white people…mmm mmm mmmmmm, no good. Waaaayyy too much “privilege.”
And so as much as Obama is giving a black eye to real land conservation, he is actually doing this to hurt the people he mistakenly equates with the racist notion of “white privilege.”
He is also doing what he did best, which is rule by fiat, like the tyrant he wanted to be and like those he relates to best elsewhere, like Cuba, and Saudi Arabia. Waving the executive magic wand is ruling by fiat. In this day and age, every acre of federally managed land out west has some political land mine under it. You only start kicking it around if you want to stir things up. What a coward and home wrecker he is to stir it up and walk away.
I think Obama enjoyed kicking land conservation in the n*ts. Regardless of the damage it does to land trusts and valuable land conservation programs down the road. It is part of his scorched earth legacy as he leaves the White House.
Thank you
Dear friend, thank you for your friendship, affection, and trust.
Dear clients, colleagues, and partners, thank you for your trust. Taking risks and making sacrifices with you in the spirit of entrepreneurial pursuit is tremendously satisfying.
Dear family, thank you for your love (which I try to return equally), hard work, support and for getting good grades in school.
Dear God, thank you for making me a natural-born American citizen, and for having me live in a time of great material abundance and comfort.
Dear fellow citizen….Enjoy Thanksgiving in the greatest nation on Planet Earth.
Federal assault on land conservation continues…no surprise
Gathering enormous momentum over the past four years is an all-out assault on land conservation by the federal government. Led by the Internal Revenue Service (IRS), charitable donations of land and land development value across America have been subject to incredible scrutiny and disdainful investigators who repeatedly assert that the donations of real property literally have zero value.
Private citizens defending their generous charitable contributions often spend tens of thousands of dollars. When they win in court, the IRS agents just walk away and start again with someone else.
The investigations and audits by the IRS have spawned hundreds of lawsuits by charitable donors who feel rooked, first by having donated real property value said to be worth nothing, and then by having their own government turn against their generosity.
The donors are Americans of every walk of life, from urban elites with rural second properties, to poor dirt farmers trying to preserve the home farm and their way of life. Ducks Unlimited, Trout Unlimited, The Nature Conservancy, and every little local land trust in between Bangor, Maine, and Santa Barbara, California is subject to this onslaught and Gestapo tactics.
It is difficult to accept that protecting America’s inspiring landscape through private donations to registered charities is such a problem that the IRS must expend hundreds of millions of dollars on it every year. And yet the agency’s juggernaut rolls on. We aren’t talking about junk cars worth $300 in parts being claimed for $3,000. Rather, the donations run from tens of thousands of dollars to millions of dollars, carefully appraised by certified real estate appraisers.
Tax courts have repeatedly taken dim views of the investigations’ impetus and the IRS’s conclusions, often rebuking the government’s cases from the basic claims all the way through its reasoning, evidence, and methodology. It hasn’t stopped the IRS.
Why, one might ask, is this happening, even gathering steam, during the reign of such a perfect presidential administration? You know, the one which gets constant kudos, plaudits, and free passes from the usual array of environmental advocacy groups that during the Bush administration didn’t miss a second of the constant drum beat against their (alleged, supposed, manufactured, and yes, often real) faults and failures…Not that those environmental advocacy groups could ever, ever be accused of being partisan….
Here is one theory: Barack Obama hates private wealth, he hates private property, and he hates the idea that wealthy people can donate real estate value and be big heroes for it. Land conservation is very much the realm of wealthy blue bloods, big Republican foundations, land-rich-cash-poor ranchers and farmers who haven’t voted for a Democrat in oh, a few decades, and plenty of gun owners and outdoorsmen. In other words, land conservationists are mostly comprised of the very people Obama calls “enemies.”
Land conservation is underwritten and mostly run from stem to stern by the people most symbolic of America’s traditional modes of success: Land and natural resources. These are the people most at odds with Obama’s views of economics, wealth, and supposed historic injustices. So we can expect this assault on land conservation to continue. And we can expect the nakedly partisan advocacy groups who pretend to be neutral on natural resource conservation to continue to give this administration a 100% pass.