For more information about the gardens or to schedule a private tour or event, email giovanna@palimi.net.

A Crisis You Probably Never Knew Existed!

I came across this in my reading yesterday: Hormel Foods is once again sponsoring what it calls the “10 Under 20 Food Heroes Awards” to honor young people working in the fight against “food insecurity.”

What is food insecurity?

The US Dept. of Agriculture’s definition is “a household-level economic and social condition of limited or uncertain access to adequate food.”

I wasn’t sure what that meant, so I went on a little Google search. I found nothing that helped me understand it any better, but I did discover that, apparently, it’s a huge crisis.

According to Feeding America, one of more than a dozen non-profit, fund-raising businesses that are enjoying the growth of this crisis, “nearly 40 million Americans, including 12 million children, faced food insecurity in 2020.”

Did you know that?

I didn’t. Nor did I know that “food insecurity can have a seriously bad impact on people that experience it.” For example, they say that…

* Food insecurity can cause serious health issues when people must choose between spending money on food and medicine or healthcare.

* Food insecurity can make it more difficult for a child to learn and grow.

* Food insecurity can lead to difficult decisions, like choosing between food and rent, bills, and transportation.

I know what you may be thinking: “Really? In America? I thought the food problem here is that so many Americans are too fat!”

Well, yes. That is true. The data (from the FDA as well as other government sources) indicate that 20% of America’s children and 30% of its adult population are obese. Another 30% of adults are just fat – too fat, in fact, to be eligible for basic training. And the lower the family income, the more likely it is that family members will be fat or obese.

So then, if you were heartless, you might wonder whether the Food Insecurity Industry’s efforts to get more food to our low-income people is the right thing to do. Because if lack of food was the problem, wouldn’t all those tens of millions of “food-insecure” people in America be skinny? Like the photos we see now and then of adults and children in third-world countries?

No. In America – and the rest of the developed world – we have the opposite problem. So, clearly, it’s not because they need more food.

Starvation and undernourishment (when people are not able to consume enough calories to sustain health) are problems that do exist. They are much less common than many people think, but they exist, usually on a temporary basis, in third-world countries suffering from famine or war.

But in America, we have neither starvation nor undernourishment. We have malnutrition caused by eating too much of foods that make you fat and sick.

Countless studies have shown that when your diet is heavy in carbohydrates and processed foods, all sorts of unhealthy things happen. One, for example, is that your insulin spikes. And when insulin spikes, you experience (an hour or two later) a craving for more junk.

In other words, low-income Americans do not suffer from not eating enough. They suffer from eating too much of the wrong foods.

And the Food Insecurity Industry is telling us it’s a crisis. If they were to say, “In America we have a crisis of Americans eating too much junk food and being fat,” I would agree. But they won’t say that because then how could they justify the billions of dollars they raise each year to “solve” that problem?

It would be a hard sell, because we all know how to solve the problem of being fat. We don’t need a thriving industry, funded by taxpayers, to figure it out.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words. Here are four that may help.

This is what starvation looks like:

This is what undernourishment looks like:

This is what malnutrition looks like:

This is what food insecurity looks like:

An Embarrassing Answer to a Simple Question

“I know this is a strange question,” JW wrote, “but how do you like to spend your weekends? I’m sure it has changed as you’ve gone through different seasons of life. But how did you handle weekends during your biggest wealth-building years? I feel good about my progress during a typical week, but weekends are my Achilles heel. Since my friends and family are off on weekends, I try to spend more time with them. While the time together is great, I also have a sense of guilt. I don’t get much productive work done. I don’t work out like I do during the week. My nutrition habits go out the window. It feels like I take five steps forward during the week and two steps back on the weekend. Do you have any advice for me?”

My weekends. I wish he hadn’t asked that. The answer is embarrassing.

My longtime partner BB worked non-stop during the week, but then devoted his weekends to building barns and reading scripture. His very unbusinesslike weekends seemed to give him the break he needed from writing and working out business problems and allowed him to exercise his body and different parts of his brain. Monday mornings, he always seemed reenergized.

I can’t say for certain that’s true. I never asked him. In any case, I’ve never had that problem.

I shouldn’t say never.

When I was in my twenties, when my family was young and we lived in DC, I adhered to the work-all-week/ have-fun-on-the-weekend idea. I jampacked our weekend calendar with things to do with the kids. That meant walks in the parks, visits to the zoo and the kids’ museums, going to kid-oriented movies, etc. I thought I was working hard and so I deserved to spend my weekends that way. That was then.

In my early thirties, we moved to South Florida and I began my career as a CEO and an entrepreneur. This made a big difference in my weekend schedule. I still loved “playing” on Saturdays and Sundays. But I realized I couldn’t possibly keep up with my work obligations if I didn’t squeeze in some work on the weekends.

In my early forties, I went harder at my work, and probably regularly worked at least six hours each weekend day. There were weekends I’d work straight through. I never saw NOT working as an option. People depended on me. I had things to do.

At 49, I decided I didn’t need to make any more money and made my second effort at retirement. I vowed that, as a first step, I would stop working on weekends. That lasted about a week. I worked harder in my fifties than I did in my forties.

When I turned 60, I tried to retire again and failed again. I continued to work weekends. Probably five or six hours a day.

Now that I’m in my 70s, I’ve really gotten control of myself. I still work on weekends, but I’ve cut the time dramatically so that I can devote as much time as possible to what matters. Which is never work.

I’m down to about four hours per weekend day. So… what do I do for the rest of the day?

Mostly, what I’m “advised” to do.

Why I’m a Conservative, Part I

Bill Maher, who has identified (and been identified) as a typical Hollywood Liberal for most of his career, has, in recent years, felt the need to explain why he sometimes makes fun of Woke ideas and Woke ideology.

His explanation is pretty good. He says something like:

“They [the Woke mob] accuse me of abandoning the cause in recent years. Not true. What has happened is that the center of Liberal consciousness had drifted to the extreme left. My values and beliefs haven’t changed. Theirs have.”

I take that to be a fair and honest description of Maher’s personal experience. And when I first heard it, I liked it so much that I thought about using it as a response to friends and family members that accuse me of having suddenly become a “Conservative” (i.e., Fascist, Racist, Misogynist, Homophobe, etc.).

But then I realized that, unlike Maher, my political, economic, and social views have changed. And that’s because, when I was younger, my opinions were based on what I knew back then – which was, in terms of making adult decisions, next to nothing.

Work, for example. From the age of six, I had chores that I was obliged to do. And I had my first job (on weekends and holidays) at the age of twelve. So, by the time I was a senior in high school, I had a great deal more experience than most of my classmates in working hard to make extra spending money. But I had no experience with the kind of serious financial obligations I would be taking on as an adult – to meet my own needs as well as the needs of my future dependents.

I began working full-time when I was 18 and have worked full-time ever since. And during those years, I learned a great deal more about making money. I also, very gradually, learned to make smarter choices in the way I managed that money to chart a better and safer future for myself and my family.

This is what we do – what we are programmed to do. It is how we survive and prosper in an unforgiving world. It is how we propagate our species.

This takes me back to the assumption behind both the criticism of Bill Maher and his defense – that there is something good about maintaining one’s ideas, views, and values as time passes. Think about it. It’s a completely dumb idea. Having the same ideas, views, and beliefs at 50 that you had at 20 is not virtuous. It’s a form of willful stupidity.

And this takes me to my current thinking. I don’t feel ashamed of abandoning so many of my younger beliefs and ideas. I feel good about it. I feel like what is happening in both my rational and emotional brain parts is what nature intended.

Becoming conservative as one ages is good for the individual, the social and work environments one lives in, for one’s particular DNA, and ultimately for the survival of the species!

The Three Stages of Learning 

At every stage (and facet) of life, there are three levels of learning: ignorance, knowledge, and wisdom.

* Ignorance gives one the ability to believe in and be stirred into doing the most incredibly brave and stupid things.

* Knowledge gives one the ability to teach and lead the ignorant.

* And wisdom allows one to teach and lead the knowledgeable.

We are all born ignorant. We are also born with an insatiable attraction to knowledge. Every major stage of life involves learning countless thousands of wonderous things and acquiring countless thousands of small, sometimes unconscious, physical, verbal, and mental skills. This is essential for not just survival, but success in every realm of human experience.

Wisdom comes from knowledge. Wisdom is about understanding the limits of knowledge and the danger of certainty. Wisdom is about realizing and remembering how many bits of certain knowledge one had at some point that turned out be untrue – or at least not as universally true as one had imagined.

Wisdom is a critical component of group intelligence – perhaps the most critical component, because it allows the group to try and fail, but live to another day.

In case you’re wondering where I’m going with this, I am not going to make the argument that political Conservatives are wise and political Liberals are unwise.

What I’m saying here is that whatever world one finds oneself in, there is always a tension around important decisions – between those advocating for quick and significant action, and those that pull back on the reins.

In Part II of this essay, I’ll give you some examples of how these three levels of learning work their way into just about every social institution and just about everything we do.

The US and Iran executed a deal on Monday – the return of five incarcerated Americans in return for the release of five Iranians.

That sounds fair.

But the Biden administration threw in some glicken by unfreezing nearly $6 billion in Iranian assets held in South Korea. The Iranians have agreed to spend the $6 billion for “humanitarian” purposes. And Qatar’s central bank will oversee the regulation of the unfrozen funds.

I judge that arrangement to be pure poppycock, a mutual PR stunt to subdue the obvious criticism that was likely to follow.

The US has long followed a policy of not paying for hostages. And from what I can tell, it has worked well. But now, in reversing this policy, opponents say that the US is sending a strong message to all the other anti-US terrorist countries: Just kidnap a handful of American citizens residing in or passing through your country. We can make a deal.

So why would the Biden administration make such a foolhardy deal, knowing that for the five coming home, 50 or 500 will likely be incarcerated in enemy prisons in the near future?

I can think of only one answer. Some smooth-talking foreign policy wonk convinced Biden and his backers that it would look good on the list of the president’s accomplishments in office. And it could work – at least with naïve voters – so long as there isn’t an eruption of kidnappings in the next 13 months. (Maybe that was assured with a handshake?)

For a mostly positive review of the deal, click here.

For a somewhat critical perspective, click here.

For an article on Iran’s frozen assets, click here.

And click here for a brief explanation of how the US came to its hostage policy.

Doubling Down on My Predictions for 2024

The 70 million to 80 million voting age people in America that hate Trump – whether they be journalists, lobbyists, pundits, or voters – have always found it difficult to believe that Orange Top would ever get the large and tenacious support he has gotten.

And because of their blinding antipathy, they were never able to see how foolish a political strategy it would be to highlight their condescending animosity towards him. That is why, during the 2016 elections, Hillary Clinton felt free to call Trump’s supporters “the Deplorables.” I believe that was the single biggest factor in her losing to Trump.

Today, these same people are even more surprised to discover that – after all the allegations and indictments they’ve thrown at him for six years running – Trump has held onto his base and is still so strong in the polls. (Click here.)

I’ve been saying for at least a year that Biden will not be running for reelection in 2024. For several reasons.

For openers, Biden no longer has the mental or physical strength to compete successfully against Trump in another nationally televised campaign. His handlers skillfully protected him in 2020 by severely limiting his public exposure – particularly on occasions when he’d be expected to speak extemporaneously. But that strategy is no longer possible. In the last 18 months, Biden’s physical weakness and mental lapses have increased so greatly that even a partisan media has been unable to ignore them.

The video evidence of Biden’s mental deterioration is abundant. If you think I’m being myopic in this regard, freebeacon.com is a website that tracks and publishes it weekly. Here, for example, are three senior moments that happened the week of the 2023 G20 Summit in India. Biden forgot:

* the year of his presidential inauguration

* the name and job title of the US Secretary of Defense, and

* whether or not it’s appropriate to stroke a little girl’s face.

Click here.

But Biden’s mental condition is not the only thing Democrat insiders are worried about. They are just as worried that he is going to be criminally implicated in the Hunter Biden investigation. The proof is piling up. There is now documented evidence (including tape recordings and canceled checks) that during Biden’s tenure as vice president under Obama, China, Russia, and Ukraine paid Hunter, Biden’s brother, and as many as a dozen other members of the Biden family at least $20 million, which was deposited into various anonymous trusts.

Though the mainstream media has done a fantastic job of keeping this story under wraps, with all that incriminating evidence coming into public view, it’s become difficult for them to continue to keep their audiences in the dark.

But I don’t think that’s what’s really going on. I think the increase in news articles and editorials that are critical of Biden is being done not just with the blessing of the Democrat machine, but in response to a plan to get rid of Biden that was hatched at least a year ago.

As I’ve said before, Trump’s support is at an all-time high and growing. Biden’s support is at an all-time low. And the felony indictments are galvanizing Trump’s base and even pulling in some undecided voters that see the indictments as third-world-level political ploys.

And this, the Democrat party leaders saw as a possibility a long time ago. So, they put together a Plan B.

Plan B is to replace Biden with a stronger candidate. Someone that has the credentials, the intelligence, and the charisma to compete with or beat Trump on the debate stage and in press conferences. It seems highly likely that the politician that fits that role is Gavin Newsom. So, I’m betting that he’ll be running against Trump next year.

I also predict that we will see an acceleration of critical coverage of Hunter and then his father during the next several months. The mainstream media will begin reporting on both the Hunter laptop scandal and President Biden’s mental decline on a weekly basis. Until it is obvious to everyone, including Democrat voters, that Biden has no chance of winning and must be replaced.

At that point, Biden will have to recognize that, considering his age and his health, he would be doing America a service by stepping down so that someone else, whom he endorses, can pick up the baton.

If the campaign for Newsom is to be ready in time, it must begin with a strong push by January 2024 at the latest. That’s why I’m predicting that Biden’s announcement will come before then.

Here’s the latest (and clearest) evidence that the left-leaning media is following the plan and gradually turning against Biden. The timing is predictable.

That’s enough about this for now. Sometime next week, I’ll give you my predictions for Newsom’s running mate and the issues the Democrats will highlight in their campaign.