@servicerotties Hey Chesnyy
My goodness this reminds me of Kuno and his weather reports.
I think you have struck a winner with this.
I have a friend full of sunburn 🥵 and allergies 🤧
Is there hope for him or is it best just to send him sardine sandwiches?
🐾🫎 Oh look, my baby brother Kenji the Giant Mooseweiler is out here in the parking lot “training” like he’s not 80% flailing moose legs and 20% derpy golden retriever brain 🐾😂
Weaving around pylons with his dinner-plate paws, sits that actually held for once (miracle status: unlocked), and call fronts that were... vaguely in the same province as straight. I’m just over here cackling: “Bless this chaotic walking pork roast, he’s really out here attempting big boy rally skills with all the grace of a moose on roller skates.” 🤣❤️
For the non-dog nerds: CKC Novice Rally Obedience is a fun, sign-guided team adventure with heeling, sits, some flashy turns, and maneuvers like pylon weaves and spirals. Points get docked for crooked sits, slow responses, and any time the leash gets tight. And you can't eat the judge. It's the perfect starter level for oversized puppies like my giant moose baby to learn to work around major distraction like a couple hundred dogs and crowds of humans. But fair warning! It levels up HARD. Advanced is off leash and includes a jump and food/toy distractions, Excellent adds things like moving downs and stands with the handler continuing on and giving cues from a distance, and Master level? That’s where the real chaos legends earn their stripes (ask me how I know 😏).
Yep, your girl Chesnyy has her Master Rally title and has been named Top Rally Obedience Rottweiler in Canada TWICE. No pressure, Kenji… just don’t turn the trial into a full-on moose meltdown and embarrass the family bloodline, okay big guy?
We’re hoping to get this oversized disaster into a real trial later this summer if he can manage to fit his ego through the in gate. 😂
Who else is out there training a furry ball of chaos on paws? Drop your funny training fails, wins, or “what the fluff is my dog doing?” moments below! I need the laughs (and moral support) while I supervise this future master... or magnificent moose-flop!
Retweet if you think Kenji will be ready for trials this summer!
🎥 Proof he can actually do things!
#BabyRottieKenji #ServiceRottieLife #RallyObedience #KenjiTheMooseweiler #ChesnyyTheLegend #RottweilerTraining #MooseOnAMission
I am the Director of the White House ballroom. Specifically, I am the Director of the list of people who paid for it.
People think the marble is the hard part. The marble arrives on a truck. The list is the hard part. The list is the product.
Here is the product.
We tore down the East Wing to build it. The First Lady's wing. The one with the gardens. We took it down in an afternoon, the first time anyone had touched the bones of that house since 1948, and we did it for a room she will never need to enter.
The room is ninety thousand square feet. The White House is fifty-five. I want you to sit in that. The People's House is now the smaller building on the lot.
It seats nine hundred ninety-nine. The room it replaces seated two hundred. We did not need more chairs. We needed a bigger door, and a shorter roster of who holds the key.
Three thousand dollars a square foot. You cannot get a school approved at that number. You cannot get a clinic. We got a ballroom, and we got it in a season.
The boss said it would be paid for, and I am quoting him exactly, "one hundred percent by me and some friends of mine." He was telling the truth. Every word of it. You are simply not one of his friends.
Here is how a friend gets made.
A company has a problem. An antitrust review. A labor case. Some unpleasantness with the SEC. The problem is large. The problem has its own floor of lawyers. The problem keeps the general counsel awake.
Then the company writes a check for the ballroom.
I do not connect these two events. I am not permitted to connect these two events. I simply observe that sixteen of our twenty-seven donors were under federal enforcement, and I simply observe that the cases have developed a way of going quiet. Dropped. Scaled back. Resolved on a Friday. I observe it the way a man observes weather. I carry an umbrella. I do not control the sky.
Amazon's antitrust review. Apple's. Meta's. Nvidia's. Coinbase and Ripple, with the SEC, who moved their whole operation from litigation to lobbying and saved a fortune on both.
Google had a grievance. Twenty-four and a half million dollars of grievance, over a YouTube ban. Google paid that settlement to us. Twenty-two million of it, straight into the room. The penalty became the donation. The grievance became the gift. I had the wire confirmation framed and hung by the door, so I see it on my way out.
Lockheed gave us more than ten million. Lockheed has since collected forty-three billion in new federal funding. I am assured these numbers are unrelated. I am the man who assures me.
Fifty billion dollars to our donors in six months. Three hundred thirty-eight billion over five and a half years. They spent a billion and a half on lobbying to arrange it, and most of them used the same three firms to do the arranging, so the list of donors and the list of lobbyists fit on a single page if you turn it sideways.
I did not award one contract. I merely curate the room. The room where the people who sign the deals stand under a chandelier the people who receive the deals paid for, inside a house our spokesman says, and I am quoting him exactly, we are making "better for generations to come."
The People's House. He said it out loud. I had it engraved.
The money runs through a charity for the national mall, because a gift to a park is not a gift to a president, and a clause I drafted myself lets six of our donors give without ever being named. A federal judge had to be sued before anyone outside the room could read that clause. He is still reading.
He ruled the construction had to stop. He wrote that the President is "the steward" of the house, "not the owner." A careful man. A Bush appointee, even. We filed the appeal in ninety minutes and poured concrete on his ruling by the afternoon. He stewards. We pour.
There will be a donor wall. Founders' Tier at the top, in gilt, and I set the spacing myself with a level and my own two hands. Six of the plaques will be polished brass with nothing on them. The anonymous ones. School groups will ask who they honor, and the docent is trained to answer: "Patrons who wished to give without recognition." I wrote that line too. I write the sentences other people have to stand inside.
The families pay for this. Not for the ballroom. The ballroom was free, donated, that was always the genius of it. They pay in the cases that got dropped. The fine no one collects. The merger no one blocks. The settlement that became a chandelier instead of a refund. They pay slowly, in a current they cannot feel, and not one of them will ever set foot in the room, and the room will carry the names of the people who did it to them.
I will be retired before the doors open. There is a chair reserved for me at the first gala. Front table. Under the lights I sourced.
You asked what pay-to-play looks like when it stops hiding and starts winning.
It looks like a ballroom bigger than the White House.
You're just not on the list.