The Risk of Unrealized Tax Gain.

 

   Snagged this off Farcebook.  The "Cloud People" as I call them, don't want us owning anything, just resting and leasing.  "You will own nothing and be happy" was something that Mao said as did Lenin and Marx.  Of course they WILL own stuff.  Remember the Gas vs electric cars?  I remember that they wanted to make gas soo expensive that only the rich could afford it and the "Hoi Pelloi" well they would have to accept the electric version of the "K-car" with limited range...you know...so you can't go far from your "work district" without permission from your "betters"

Unrealized gains tax for Gen-X-Z:

You buy a Pokémon card for $50.

Someone offers you $500 for it. You say no. You love that card. You're keeping it.

The government says: "Cool, but that card is worth $500 now. You owe us $100 in taxes."

You: "…I didn't sell it."

Government: "Don't care. Pay up."

You don't have $100 lying around. So you're forced to sell the card you love just to pay a tax on money you never received.

Next month? That card drops back to $50.

Your card is gone. Your money is gone. And the government shrugs.

That's a wealth tax on unrealized gains. They don't pay you back the tax...

Now picture this.

Your mom calls you crying. She has to sell the house she raised you in. Not because she can't afford it. She's lived there 30 years. It's paid off.

But some website says it's worth more now and the government says she owes $15,000 she doesn't have.

So she sells your childhood home. The kitchen where she made you breakfast. The doorframe where she marked your height every birthday.

Gone.

To pay a tax on money that was never real.

Now picture the opposite.

Your dad put everything into his small business. For 20 years he built it from nothing. One year the business is "valued" at $2 million on paper. He owes a massive tax bill. He empties his savings. Sells his truck. Borrows money. Pays it.

Next year the market crashes. His business is worth $200,000.

He lost everything to pay a tax on a number that doesn't exist anymore.

Does the government give him his money back?

No.

Does the government give him his truck back?

No.

Does the government care?

No.

They sold this idea as "taxing billionaires." But billionaires have armies of lawyers, offshore accounts, and trusts. They'll be fine.

You know who won't be fine? Your mom. Your dad. Your neighbor with a small business. The farmer down the road who's had the same land for four generations and now has to sell it because dirt got expensive.

You're not taxing wealth. You're taxing people for owning things.

It's like getting a parking ticket for a car you might drive somewhere someday.

They want you to own nothing and be happy. To fund the fraud, waste and abuse of the welfare state they created.

There is enough money. More tax isn't needed. It's all a lie. But you've been gaslit into believing this is a rich vs poor debate.

I hope you understand what's at stake.

"Self Hating Elites Are hating Our Commonwealth"

 I remember reading way back at the turn of the last century that the people that graduated from our elite schools were imbued with a sense of duty, (besides making money) of a sense of altruism, a sense to do what's is good for the country also, to temper their judgement and decisions as to not hurt the country in their pursuit of fame and fortune, and most did just that, and those that didn't were shunned by high society.  But now how things have changed, our "elites" work at cross purposes to the needs of the country, like they want us to fail, not realizing that if we fail, they will also, somehow believing that they money and power will protect them, but it won't...WHere could they go...Europe?   That place is more of a dumsterfire than we are, the middle East?...nope China has a lot of influence there as does the Mullah's.  Short sighted they are, their fortunes are tied in with this country, and they have forgotten it.

   I got this from "Washington Examiner"

DENVER, CO – JANUARY 20: Members of the Communist Party USA and other anti-fascist groups burn an American flag on the steps of the Colorado State Capitol on January 20, 2021 in Denver, Colorado. Joe Biden was sworn in as the 46th President of the United States with Vice President Kamala Harris at an inauguration ceremony in Washington DC earlier in the day. (Photo by Michael Ciaglo/Getty Images)

The Great Seal of the United States proclaims that the American founding is a novus ordo seclorum, a “new order of the ages.” On the one hand, the Constitution of 1787 was indeed a remarkable achievement, establishing a new commonwealth intended to protect the natural rights of all citizens. On the other, the American founding and the changes that have occurred over time can best be understood by looking further into the past, especially the taxonomy of regime types identified by such Greek philosophers as Plato and Aristotle.

Such history will help us understand the danger the American project is put in by its current corps of self-loathing elites.

Plato and Aristotle were the founders of the science of politics. The Ancient Greek science of politics differs from the political science of our time by focusing on the big questions: What is the best form of government? What form best ensures the excellence (arete) and happiness (eudaimonia) of the citizens? What causes the corruption and decline of a political community? In contrast, today’s political science concerns itself with minutiae. Adopting the value-free perspective of modernity, the political scientists of our time cannot adequately explain why one form of government is superior to another, other than personal preference. Today’s political scientists, therefore, write more and more about less and less.

The Greeks postulated a direct relationship between the human soul (psyche) and political constitutions. The Greeks divided the human soul into three parts: nous, the intellective, reasoning part; thumos, the spirited part, concerned with honor and justice; and epithumeia, the appetitive part, concerned with basic human desires and especially subject to the passions.

They believed that various polities each reflected a part of the human soul. In this taxonomy of regimes, the noetic part of the soul was seen in rule by the one; the thumetic part of the soul in rule by the few; and the appetitive part of the soul in rule by the many. Each form of rule had a good and bad version, the former based on rule for the benefit of the entire polity and the latter rule on behalf of the ruler or ruling class alone. Thus, the good form of rule by the one was kingship; the bad form, tyranny. The good form of rule by the few was aristocracy; the bad form, oligarchy or plutocracy. And the good form of rule by the many was politeia or a balanced constitution, which the Romans translated as res publica and which is most properly rendered as commonwealth in English; the bad form was democracy or ochlocracy: that is, mob rule.

This taxonomy led the Greek historian Polybius to suggest that all political regimes were subject to the “cycle of constitutions” (anakuklosis politeion). A kingship begins virtuously, but over time, the rule by the one on behalf of the whole deteriorates into tyranny. The virtuous few, the aristoi, depose the tyrant and reestablish well-ordered rule. But over time, that aristocracy deteriorates into oligarchy. The oligarchs are then overthrown by the virtuous many, but the balanced constitution that is put in place inevitably deteriorates into unruly democracy, after which the cycle will repeat. This cycle of constitutions was the central problem for the Greek founders of the science of politics: essentially, that good forms of rule become corrupted and tend to descend into bad forms.

These days, we tend not to think in terms of cycles. Indeed, the essence of modernity is the idea of linear progress. But the Greek taxonomy of regimes is useful in examining what has happened to the United States. The U.S. Constitution established the good form of rule by the many: a self-governing republic or commonwealth. As such, it established a “balanced” structure of government, in which the executive branch, in essence, represented the one, the Senate represented the few, and the House of Representatives represented the many (and the judicial Supreme Court represented the mediation between those elements and the law itself). But its foundation was ultimately democratic, in that both the executive and Senate, as well as the House, were elected by the many, albeit indirectly.

But for a variety of reasons — not least of which has been the rise of the “administrative state,” an unconstitutional pseudo fourth branch of government in violation of the principle of separation of power — the United States now exhibits the characteristics of oligarchy. Oligarchy, you’ll remember, is what the Greeks considered the bad form of rule by the few, in our case a ruling “elite” that includes not only unelected bureaucrats ruling in their own interests but also corporate leaders in tech, finance, and media. This oligarchic elite establishes rules from which they themselves are exempt.

Of course, all complex societies have a “ruling class,” which can be either aristocratic or oligarchic. The United States has prospered when its ruling class has been aristocratic. In such cases, the interests of this aristocratic ruling class have coincided with the interests of the nation as a whole. But problems arise when an aristocratic ruling class devolves into an oligarchic one, the interest of which diverges from that of the republic and its citizens.

We have seen this with the evolution, or rather devolution, of previous American elites from aristocracy to oligarchy: how America’s first aristocratic elite, the Federalists of George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, devolved into an oligarchic rump of resentful and bitter New Englanders; how Thomas Jefferson’s “natural aristocracy of virtue and talents” became the cotton oligarchy of the antebellum American South; how the industrialists of the late 19th century became the plutocrats of the Gilded Age; how the great statesmen who won World War II and presided over the establishment of the post-war liberal world order devolved into an elite that undermines the American power that is necessary to maintain an order that benefits all American citizens, not just the ruling elites.

The new American oligarchy differs from its predecessors in one unprecedented way: its utter disdain for the American republic, as well as for its fellow citizens. In the past, the members of an aristocratic ruling class loved the United States as a nation and its principles, or at least identified their own interests with those of the country. But not only does today’s oligarchic ruling class not love the United States, but its members make it all too clear that they hate it. In this, they resemble the Athenian oligarchs who favored Sparta over their own city and its citizens.

For example, our oligarchic elites today insist that the United States is racist to the core and that Americans who espouse patriotic nationalism are anti-immigrant purveyors of ethnic and religious hatred. Our oligarchs are for “open borders” without the assimilation that has always characterized and facilitated immigration in the past. They reject the reasoning of the Founders, who saw the necessity of what Hamilton called a “common national sentiment.” As Hamilton argued, “The safety of a republic depends essentially on the energy of a common national sentiment; on a uniformity of principles and habits; on the exemption of the citizens from foreign bias, and prejudice; and on that love of country which will almost invariably be found to be closely connected with birth, education, and family.” In contrast, our oligarchs view themselves not as citizens of America but as “citizens of the world” who reject national sovereignty and embrace “diversity” as a normative, positive good.

Our current oligarchic government-corporate-media-technology-finance complex poses an existential threat to republican self-government. For decades, its economic policies have hollowed out the American middle class and helped to impoverish American workers, while the economic gains have accrued to the oligarchs. In this, they resemble the Roman elites who replaced free labor with slaves from Rome’s wars of conquest, creating a seething urban proletariat to be bought off with bread and circuses.

Our present oligarchs follow the same path by buying off those who can be bought with government programs. Those who do not acquiesce in the oligarchy’s enterprise, who are not compliant with its actions, are dismissed as resentful racists or “anti-science” troglodytes, whose punishment is to be subject to surveillance and limits on speech and association. If they do not accept the tenets of “diversity and inclusion” in language or the workplace, they are subject to the loss of employment and social status. All the while, there is the clear, black irony that these oligarchs are, in fact, the largest beneficiaries of the society and institutions they wish to destroy. This renders our ruling elites not only oligarchic but self-hating and stupid. Do they really think they can benefit more from the wreckage of a broken polity?

The United States is at a tipping point. Will we as citizens reclaim the mantle of republican self-government or meekly submit to the rule of our oligarchic elites? If the latter, the American commonwealth is at a tragic end.

"The Plays The Thing"

 

The modern American Liberal is so cut off from danger, so insulated that they crave validation, crave thrills, we have made our society soo safe that unless you are totally retarded, you will survive.  Because liberalism and modern feminism has taken God out of the belief system, they believe that "is this it, is there all there is" so they go looking for something to show meaning in their lives, they have no kids in most cases, because their belief system told them that "Kids were a drain on the earth, and you can't live how you want if there are kids around, " so the liberals they have no kids, and if they do, it is maybe 1 perhaps 2, and that poor child will have a high probability of going "trans" as an accessory to the lifestyle like a new purse.   SO they go looking for the new thrill, COSPlay, "ICE is evil" is the new play, and the long running favorite"Orange man bad " coming around for another run.....again.   

An interesting aspect of the AWFUL culture — including the male Karens — is the heavy involvement of people who are affluent, college-educated, and living in safe suburban environments, yet possess absolutely zero commonality or lived connection with the groups they aggressively champion. They are not merely sympathetic observers. They become rabid foot soldiers, sometimes even risking arrest or physical harm, to demonstrate how much they “care.”

This phenomenon is not new. Many of the white activists of the late 1960s came from wealthy or professionally prominent families. Their parents were often community leaders, executives, professors, or political figures. Yet these young activists aligned themselves with revolutionary Marxists, violent radicals, or black nationalist groups whose goals — and frequently whose stated hatred — did not include them. The connection was emotional and symbolic, not experiential.

What I’ve come to understand is that modern Americans who are anti-ICE, pro-Palestine, or pro-ANTIFA — and who are not illegal migrants, Gazans, or members of those groups themselves — are not actually supporting those causes in the literal sense. They are recontextualizing them. They are repurposing them as instruments for their own social positioning, turning the output of these movements into moral currency.

The activist does not gain material benefit, but they gain status: moral superiority, belonging, and identity. In a society where traditional markers of meaning — religion, community obligation, and civic responsibility — have weakened, political activism fills the vacuum. It becomes a performance of virtue. The cause itself matters less than the signaling attached to it.

In this way they resemble an army of modern Don Quixotes, charging into battle against enemies that largely exist in narrative form. The windmills must be giant dragons because the activist requires epic battles against giant dragons. Without dragons, the urgent moral drama collapses.

Quixotic politics has become the stock-in-trade of the American left during the Trump era. Trump is not without flaws — far from it — but his opponents have elevated him from a political adversary into a mythological villain. The Trump presidency has been rhetorically transformed into Custer’s Last Stand, the Stonewall riots, the killing of George Floyd, and Auschwitz all rolled into one continuous moral emergency because once politics becomes existential theater, proportion disappears.

Every policy disagreement becomes oppression, every enforcement action becomes fascism, and every election becomes the last election. Trump is planning to cancel the 2028 election and simply stay in the White House. Blacks will be returned to slavery, women will live the Handmaid’s Tale, and January 6th will be successful this time. The narrative demands consequences of not acting so disastrous that compromise becomes betrayal, ordinary civic disagreement becomes immoral. One is either with the movement or against the movement, there can be no middle ground.

Trump himself has been converted into a symbolic tyrant — a straw-man Nicolae Ceaușescu, the Romanian dictator who ruled from 1965 until his execution in 1989. The comparison is historically absurd, but emotionally useful. If the villain is a dictator, then any resistance becomes justified. Why, by definition, opposition is positively heroic.

As Hamlet said, “The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the king.”

These activists are not reacting to reality; they are constructing a moral stage on which they can play the role of liberator, the causes they attach themselves to function as props. Immigration enforcement becomes apartheid. Foreign conflict becomes personal guilt. Law enforcement becomes occupation. The facts are secondary to the utility of the narrative.

The suburban protester shouting revolutionary slogans is not expressing solidarity so much as seeking meaning and because there is no rational basis for their opposition, it explains why debate or persuasion rarely, if ever, works. Their activism is not about solving a problem; it is about sustaining their identity. If the problem were solved, the identity would disappear with it.

Since one cannot fact-check a psychological reward system, the windmills must become dragons, and the dragons must remain.

Contemporary activists do not want victory in the traditional sense, largely because they can’t define what victory looks like and even worse, success ends the crusade. Instead, they need perpetual crisis, because crisis provides purpose and satisfies their vanity. This mentality has resulted in the “Omnicause”, their use of intersectionality to seamlessly slip from one “cause” to the next, an Alinsky outlined process of discarding one cause when it becomes a drag and adopting another that stokes the fires once again.

Quixotic AWFULS and male Karens will keep charging, convinced they are saving the world when they are primarily saving themselves from the terrifying possibility that their lives might otherwise be wasted or ordinary. To me, it seems as if this is the culturally approved version of having an extramarital affair – it’s all the thrill without the downside of getting caught.

Monday Music "The Age of Aquarius/Let The Sunshine In" By the 5th Dimension

Yes This should have dropped yesterday....but it didn't....I will have my wife flay me with a wet noodle as punishment.

I heard this song playing on my "60's Gold" channel on my Sirius XM, on my way to work and it reminded me of my Dad, I don't know if I had covered this song before, but if I did, it was a long time ago.   I remembered this song being on my Dads reel to reel recorder.  It to me did showcase the 60's to me musically and it was to me considered a "bookend" song for the decade.

   The image above is what most people think of when they hear this song, the peace, and love generation the counterculture had gone mainstream and it changed music forever.
    Now there are a few people like me and others like my Dad and others that were around during this time, when we hear the song, this is the image that we think of,

UH-1 (Huey) dropping men off on a mountain during an operation.

 This song and a couple of others pretty much described the 60's to millions of people.  The 60's was a revolution in music and massive social change and upheaval.  We had several prominent people assassinated during this decade from the assassination of J.F.K which scarred the national psyche to the possibilities that might have been.  From the death of M.L.K and finally Robert Kennedy.  Those were the low points, the War in Vietnam was raging all over American television so the people were actually seeing "War" for the first time.  To the high point of the moon landings in 1969 that helped ended the decade that changed America.  I remember a comment my Dad made about this song, he had said that "Let The Sunshine In" described Vietnam...Depending on the season...Either no sun or too much, there were no half measures...  "

"Medley: Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In (The Flesh Failures)" (commonly called "Aquarius/Let the Sunshine In", "The Age of Aquarius" or "Let the Sunshine In") is a medley of two songs written for the 1967 musical Hair by James Rado and Gerome Ragni(lyrics), and Galt MacDermot (music), released as a single by American R&B group The 5th Dimension. The song peaked at number one for six weeks on the US Billboard Hot 100 pop singles chart in the spring of 1969. The single topped the American pop charts and was eventually certified platinum in the US by the RIAA. Instrumental backing was written by Bill Holman and provided by session musicians commonly known as the Wrecking Crew. The actual recording is something of a "rarity"; the song was recorded in two cities, Los Angeles and Las Vegas, then mixed together in the studio, afterwards.

The song listed at number 66 on Billboard's "Greatest Songs of All Time".

This song was one of the most popular songs of 1969 worldwide, and in the United States it reached the number one position on both the Billboard Hot 100 (for six weeks in April and May) and the Billboard Adult Contemporaries Chart. It also reached the top of the sales charts in Canada and elsewhere. Billboard ranked it as the No. 2 record overall for 1969.

The recording won both the Grammy Award for Record of the Year and Best Pop Vocal Performance by a Group for the Grammy Awards of 1970, after being published on the album The Age of Aquarius by the 5th Dimension, and also being released as a seven-inch vinyl single record.

The lyrics of this song were based on the astrological belief that the world would soon be entering the "Age of Aquarius", an age of love, light, and humanity, unlike the current "Age of Pisces". The exact circumstances for the change are "When the moon is in the seventh house, and Jupiter aligns with Mars." This change was presumed to occur at the end of the 20th century; however, astrologers differ extremely widely as to when. Their proposed dates range from 2062 to 2680.

Astrologer Neil Spencer denounced the lyrics as "astrological gibberish", noting that Jupiter forms an astrological aspect with Mars several times a year and the moon is in the 7th House for two hours every day. These lines are considered by many to be merely poetic license, though some people take them literally.

The New Corporate Beliefs and Identity

 

A lot of corporations are still ate up with DEI, I call them "Zampolit Office" and to get promoted one would need to get the approval of the DEI office to make sure you are of acceptable political "flavor", either acceptable by checking off the correct boxes or being an "ally".  Needless to say, one wonders why soo many straight white dudes are going into the trades.  THis does have a long term effect, this will over generations will create a "underclass" of workers and a political class of "acceptables" unless there is a purging.  Some companies have started, but most of them have not.  I honestly believe that if a company is in a fight for survival, the DEI office and its many "activities will be cut soo fast because it isn't necessary for the company to survive.  People are starting to move past all the drama from the "Summer of love(TM)" and the other "agitprop" that has infected the American workplace that the Chinese and Indians don't deal with.

There's a cage, made of polite smiles and soft words, being built around the honest person. If you've worked in any corporate positions, or if the company you work for has a one-sided corporate culture...you already know this.

You've most likely been in a position where you were demanded to affirm something you knew was false.

And when you hesitated? They called you cruel.

The Soviet machine is obsolete. The modern method of ideological conformity doesn't require heavy artillery or columns of infantry. Just employee handbooks and HR departments.

---

This is the psychology of coercive kindness or "weaponized empathy" and understanding how it works is the first step toward refusing to be controlled by it.

The radicals have learned something that's very effective, raw force creates martyrs, but guilt? Guilt creates slaves.

When they demand that you "validate" an identity or a falsehood that contradicts truth and order, they are not appealing to your empathy. It's a loyalty test.

The belief itself is secondary or otherwise irrelevant. What matters is the act of submission...the moment you say something you do not believe because the social cost of honesty has been engineered to feel unbearable. They don't need to chain your hands by force.

You put them on yourself, and thank them for it.

---

The compassionate tyrant is still a tyrant.

The moment you stop lying for them is the moment their power over you ends.

And they know it.