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How to render bear fat into usable grease

We take a break today from our more usual political commentary and slide easily over into rural culture. Specifically, how to render your luscious bear fat into a usable grease.

Why, you ask?

Because at one time, bear grease was considered a very close substitute for whale oil, which was such a cool product that literally every kind of food, medicine, and flame was made from it. As whales are rightly protected, and bears are bursting at the seams everywhere across America, making a bit o’ bear grease is a neat way to reach back in time.

Many people will use their bear grease for baking, and I have heard and read it is delicious for that purpose, provided it is rendered down carefully. My purpose was and is much more utilitarian: bear grease is going to be a new leather preservative and a lubricant for the patched round balls in my flintlock rifle. I am going to experiment with this unique grease as it was primarily used until the 1880s, when bears were in short supply from unsustainable market hunting, and more modern substitutes, mostly synthetic oils but also including whale oil, were more widely available.

Here are some photos of the simple process I did, using about five pounds of fresh and then immediately frozen fat from a young male bear.

The fat started out as mostly well trimmed, with only slight slices of meat on it. I left those on to see how those slices and the grease would turn out, and if the meat would impart a smell\flavor\aroma to the grease. What I have read is that any meat left on the fat will leave a meaty aroma and flavor to the grease after rendering. Based on the sniffing results of my snoot’s sharp capabilities, I think that is true. That is, meat left on the bear fat will definitely infuse a meaty smell into the grease.

If you intend to cook with the bear grease, then whether or not the meat is absolutely all removed is a question of what you intend to cook in the grease. If it is vegetables and other meats you will be frying in it, then my opinion is the aroma of the bear meat is pleasing and it will not ruin your cooking. If, however, you wish to bake pastries, pie crusts, and breads with your bear grease, then all of the meat ought to be removed. That means every scrap, shaving, and hint of meat should be sliced off the fat.

The fat should be clean, free of debris, leaves, twigs, pine needles, etc. Wash it well. You do not need to dry the fat when you go to render it, as a little water will only help you. It will not be a problem. Cut it with a knife into small chunks. The smaller the better. Some people process their bear fat in a meat grinder, breaking it down into a gooey mess that has no bonds linking the globules. Which makes the fat break down much faster. I think if I had ground up the bear fat, then it would have rendered out in the boiling water in a couple hours.

At first I steamed/ boiled the fat chunks in a second metal bowl immersed in a boiling cauldron over a propane burner. My goal was to be gentle, go slow, and not burn or even cook the fat. For cooks, burned or fried bear fat will definitely impart a certain taste or flavor to the grease. Depending upon your cooking goals, that “cooked” flavor might not be a bad thing. It is a savory smell, and will not go well with pies or sweet pastries.

After six hours on the water, the bear fat had barely begun to melt. So I turned up the heat. The higher the heat under the water, the faster the fat melted. But it was still taking way, way too long. So with about a third of the fat rendered, it was removed from the water and put directly on the lowest flame possible. A little water was added to keep the fat from immediately scalding. Some people put in a lot of water and render the fat on top of it, skimming it off. I did not try that, and it may work better than what I did. It would also be messier.

Direct flame under the pot definitely caused the fat to begin to cook down much faster, and it also began to fry a bit as time went on. The chunks and bits of bear fat began to turn a golden brown. For those interested in rural cuisine, these are called chittlins, much like various types of fried animal fats from Down South. And not just hog skins. Be a bit more creative in your imagining.

Think Larks’ tongues, Wrens’ livers, Chaffinch brains, Jaguars’ earlobes, Wolf nipple chips, Dromedary pretzels, Tuscany fried bats, Otters’ noses, Ocelot spleens, and a host of other fancy Roman cuisine listed in The Life of Brian.

Comparatively speaking, bear chittlins are right up there in that “unusual and fancy” category.

For me, the goal was to maximize the amount of bear grease rendered from the fat, and to minimize the cooking smell or odor imparted to it from the rendering process. This meant reaching a balancing or tipping point where the fat chunks were clearly cooking down substantially, but not completely. Because at completely rendered, the fat is really hot and it is cooking itself. As I wanted to avoid the grease having any kind of food smell, this meant I prematurely ended the whole process, before all the fat was completely cooked down, or even close, to avoid scorching the fat and making the grease smelly.

As you can see from the photo, about 36 ounces of bear grease was obtained from the several pounds of bear fat. Not a bad conversion ratio.

The first photo below shows double boiling; you can see some of the grease appearing. The second photo shows the grease after six hours. Clearly not much progress, even with higher heat. The last photo is after the pot was put directly on a very low flame, with a small amount of water added. Even after this care, the pot had some fat cooked (not burned) onto the bottom. This did give a faint food smell to it. The last photo shows the grease in a refrigerated wide mouth glass pickle jar. It is easy to access in the big jar.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You are damn right I still support President Trump

Despite a howling mob’s best effort to obfuscate, harangue, punish, slow down and hamstring the president of the United States, I still strongly support him.

What broken third-world country do we live in where otherwise normal everyday Americans boast about being in “the resistance” against their own president?! Are they running a guerilla civil war against the country?

Can you imagine if these were conservative militia members saying this about a president in the other political party? The uproar that would follow!

This shameful notion that liberal activists as well as average Democrats have about “resisting” a legally elected president of their own nation is incredibly harmful to our nation. All the foolish talk about our electoral system being compromised by “Russia” hurts the integrity of our electoral system, because it undermines people’s trust in it.

And yet none of these liberals wants voter ID, none want the local voter rolls to be purged and verified. Oh no no no, that would remove too many fake voters from the rolls!

One of the reasons I support President Trump is that, by and large, I agree with his choices and policies. Certainly not all of them, but definitely the preponderance. There are some policies and actions I think his administration could do better, like in the environmental and resource conservation fields. More nuance, more refined distinctions, more sophisticated analysis. But like with any other elected official, you learn to take the good with the bad, and with this particular elected official I believe we have much more good than bad. This president is running a net Positive. America is booming!

Another reason I support President Trump is that he is standing strong amid a withering personal crusade against him, his children, his grandchildren, his wife, his in-laws, his friends, his business associates, his business partners, his employees, his friends, his neighbors, and everyone else who has any sort of association with him. It is meant to punish him and everyone he cares about. Just for him being him.

This ridiculous attack is way outside the normal scope of American politics. It is unprecedented. It is unfair. It is evil and disgusting. If it were Obama, or Clinton getting this same treatment, you couldn’t get away with it for ten seconds.

For me and I think a lot of Americans like me, this very personal and destructive assault on President Trump is an attack on basic American decency and on our system of government. No one in public service should be subjected to this. Certainly that is what some people argued about president Bill Clinton, when he was caught having sex with women in the White House and then lying to cover it up.

People who win elections should get to carry on with their work. That is the way our system works. Is supposed to work.

That the media have been corrupted into this crusade only cements my view that this treatment of our American President is simply unjustified and wrong, enabled by the corruption of the First Amendment.

That Hollywood actors feel free to use the most vulgar language against the person who was elected to represent our country means that they, the Hollywood people, are that low vulgar quality. It does not mean anything about the person they are aiming at. Hollywood and its actors are really in the smelly gutter. Makes you wonder why you went to see their stupid movies in the past. Why should we enable such infantile jerks?

All of this mistreatment has only hardened my resolve for President Trump to stay in office and succeed.

So when people ask me “Josh, do you still support President Trump?,” I say “You are damned right I support President Trump!”

To Hell and back.

Time to regulate the social media utilities

Social media companies like FakeBook, Twitter, Google, InstaGram, etc. have become the modern day information equivalents of the first power and public service utilities.

Instead of water molecules, gas, sewer, or electrons (electricity) entering and exiting your home to keep your life running, today’s digital social media companies transmit photons and ones and zeros to your laptop and handheld device. The net result for the end user is that all these things are all one and the same utility service, and they serve the same function.

Just like the power company, say PPL, and the gas company, and the water company cannot discriminate against users of their services, so the same applies to the digital information companies above.

For example, you do not come home at night, flick the light switch on your wall, and remain in darkness because you got a call earlier in the day from PPL saying “Sorry, Jane, we have turned off your electricity, because we have determined that your political views are contrary to our arbitrary and vague terms of service and our company’s values.”

PPL and other utilities must provide their services and products equally to all who pay for them.

It is time to hold digital utility service providers to the same exact standard. No discrimination against users.

Presently, Google so obviously fakes its search results to favor political candidates and campaigns the owners of Google favor. Google’s politicization of search results on every subject and person is egregious.

Like Google, FakeBook also obviously discriminates against conservatives, engaging in shadowbanning and hiding messages its liberal owners do not want the public to see. Worse, Fakebook has made a lucrative business charging its users for advertising, but the person who pays for that service never knows just how far their investment went, because FakeBook deliberately withholds information about its actual efforts.  It is a blind item, exactly the opposite of what it should be: Open and transparent.

Twitter’s legendary war against non-liberals is the most public form of censorship. As illiberal as this censorship is, liberals still cheer.

These companies and the many other liberal book-burners in the digital media business have declared war on ideas and people they simply disagree with. It is time to end this assault on the First Amendment rights of American citizens who have entrusted these companies to abide by universal free speech standards.

It is time to regulate these companies like the public utilities they have become, to prevent them from illegally discriminating against people who merely disagree with their owners.

Treat us all the same legally.

The McCain in my soup

What seems like a hundred years ago, in the summer of 2000 I served as a volunteer at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia.

Staying with my old Philly friends Mark and Bill in their back bedroom, I was able to easily access the convention center by foot.

Being a burly lad, I was put on “security,” which involved wearing a special yellow or red shirt, standing at certain choke points and doorways in the convention center, checking credentials before allowing people to pass to some next destination, and answering questions about the location of bathrooms.

Most of my security role was done at the entrance to the main stage, where speakers and media activists (“reporters”) entered and exited. From this doorway, the speakers walked out onto the stage to speak from the main podium, and the media things sauntered, pranced, sashayed their ways to nearby desks set up to look at the podium and speaker.

Cameras were set up to capture both the speaker and the media commenters looking at the speaker.  Sitting en banc like a panel of judges, the media personalities were represented as a real-time source of expert analysis and useful commentary. Of course, that is exactly the role the mainstream media plays at a Republican convention: Judge, jury, and executioner, heavy-duty criticism. At Democrat conventions the same media people are giddy cheerleaders.

Why anyone thinks that these celebrity personalities add anything useful or valuable to the experience is beyond reckoning, except that the mainstream media have done a very good job of arranging their own roles at these conventions. The political parties do not necessarily need them there. The Republicans would do well to not have them at their conventions.

Anyhow, three distinct memories of that 2000 Philadelphia convention stand out in my head, all of them from my unique VIP security role at the entrance on to the main stage.

The first memory was NPR activist Cokie Roberts. Like all the other VIPs at that stage entrance, my job was to walk from the stage entrance and get her at the far end of the tunnel where a temporary FBI office was located in a small room. Police officers and FBI agents populated this end of the tunnel, providing heavy protection for the VIPs. From there I would then accompany her back down the tunnel to the stage entrance. Once there, the protocol was to look around and make sure everything was clear, no unpermitted people around, and then point the VIP toward their destination: the main podium, or, with Cokie Roberts, the press desk ahead and slightly off to the left.

Sharing the same physical space as Cokie Roberts is unpleasant. Her smug self-importance sucks up all the energy in the immediate vicinity. Cokie was like a saucy queen, and the air was full of expectation. I felt diminished in her presence. Yet I stayed close to her, walked her to the doorway, pointed her to the media desk, and there she sat, lips pursed, looking feline, watching her prey through slitted eyes.

OK, that is one memory.

The second memory is of that same exact location and security role. I walked Bob Dole down the tunnel to the stage entrance, looked around, and sent him out to the podium. I had never been in Dole’s immediate space before, but true to form he was clutching a pen in his damaged hand. Dole took a bit extra direction, and I had to step out onto the stage apron and take him by the elbow so that he was fully oriented toward the podium.

Dole spoke, and began walking back toward the doorway. I took a step forward and extended my hand to help him feel comfortable, and out of the corner of my right eye I saw a strange looking man slowly and very carefully edging his way toward us. I have no idea how this guy previously evaded my view, or how he even got there, given how well secured the back stage was. I am a keen hunter and my eyes miss almost nothing around me.

And yet here was this white haired but not terribly older man suddenly materializing out of nowhere and now bearing down on a frail Bob Dole. Dole was now a couple steps into the tunnel and heading back up toward the FBI office, where he would get an armed police escort to his next stop.

Like out of a movie, the white haired guy’s arm shot out toward Dole and the guy was suddenly hurtling through the air in a complete and very athletic dive towards Dole that did not match his somewhat older appearance.

Well, the old wrestler automatically took over in me, and just as the guy’s hand was about to grab Dole’s arm, literally just a few inches away, I was all over the guy. He was strong, but I was stronger, and within a couple seconds I body slammed him flat onto the concrete floor, his outstretched arm locked painfully sideways by my left arm, my legs intertwined with his and his struggling body splayed out and largely immobilized in a classic wrestling move.

The FBI guys came flying down the hallway and covered me in what is now called a dog pile. I was immediately suffocated beneath a steaming pile of heavy bodies smelling of dry cleaned suits and shoe polish. Whatever people may think about FBI agents today as a result of the corruption by Comey, McCabe, and Stzrok, those agents were super physical and aggressive. I loved it and hated it all at the same time. Loved it because the bad guy was stopped dead, hated it because I could not breathe, and then again happy to know the weird son-of-a-bitch underneath me was being turned into a pretzel by all the hands reaching around me. Within about twenty seconds I was pulled off by three FBI guys, while a uniformed cop and two other agents were cuffing the weirdo hand and foot.

The white-haired weirdo guy was trussed like a hog and quickly carried up to the FBI office. I, too, was hustled up there, pushed from behind as a wall of guys swarmed the tunnel and then pushed the weirdo and I into the little FBI room.

Once in the room, the guy was cuffed to a chair and the questions started flying. Within a minute or so he was identified as a Polish national who had a long history of stalking Bob Dole and trying to assault him, all around the world. The guy was an obsessive kook and already known to law enforcement.

I was asked my version of events, congratulated on stopping the weird guy, with one of the big Irish cops giving me a big smile and saying how much he enjoyed watching me slam the guy down so hard. A couple of the FBI agents said they didn’t know anything was amiss until they heard the guy’s body smack the concrete so hard.

During the melee just a couple feet away, Dole had shrunk back against the tunnel wall, still clutching his pen, looking scared (why not) and two agents took him by the arms and hustled him back up the tunnel. That was the last I saw of Bob Dole.

From the little FBI room, I was accompanied back down to my spot at the stage entrance, patted on the back, and instructed to stay vigilant. Hey, I was never so important before or again!

The third and last distinct memory I have of that convention also involved the VIP entrance, because it was from there that I got to watch Senator John McCain deliver an emotional speech about wanting the presidential nomination so badly, and yet being denied it.

McCain delivered an interesting and very personal speech. He had just been through hell, with the Bush team pulling a lot of dirty tricks to eventually stop McCain’s momentum late in that hard-fought primary race.

From my view at the edge of the stage, I could see in McCain’s adam’s apple a huge lump had appeared while he spoke. I actually watched it grow. I had never before seen such an enormous lump in someone’s adam’s apple. This moment was obviously much more emotional for McCain than I would have expected from such a battle-hardened candidate, and I doubt that the many TV cameras there captured it.

What that huge lump in his throat brought home to me was how heavily and personally invested McCain was in his pursuit of the presidency. As opposed to Senator Bob Dole, who had torpedoed the 1996 Republican challenge to Bill Clinton by insisting that it was “his turn” to run, despite his lack of emotion, lack of energy, lack of passion.

John McCain is now dead, and with him goes a large part of strange era in Republican politics.

Like a lot of American conservatives, I retain mixed feelings about McCain. He was good and bad. He was both patriot and sell-out, warrior against and enabler of our domestic enemies, and so on. I had supported him in 2000 and 2008, but in recent times I had really disliked the guy for his policy sell-outs. He was the fly in my policy soup.

But when I think back to that huge emotional lump in his throat at the 2000 Republican Convention, I think of a man passionate about America and his cause to protect and improve it. Whatever his reasons for taking such strangely contrarian, incongruent positions in the past couple years, McCain remains in my mind as a once-principled all-American who at one time had my strong support.

Rest in piece, Warrior McCain.

Mafia Mueller’s Illegal Inquisition

Newly made Mafia “don” Robert Mueller continues his Grand Inquisition into innocent Americans in his quest to deflect attention from his own crimes.

Robert Mueller has zero credibility, zero integrity. He belongs in jail.

Mueller is documented to have used his official positions to steer enormous Lockheed-Martin contracts to his friends (James Comey) and himself.

A raft of FBI agent whistleblowers are poised to testify against Mueller. One of their chief complaints is that as FBI chief, he threatened to actually arrest FBI agents who objected to his self-enrichment behavior.

Mueller is one of the biggest criminals in America. And his role as an appointed special prosecutor was made by one of his fellow criminals.

His entire Inquisition is designed to deflect attention from his crimes and the criminal enterprise of his enablers, like the Clintons.

His prosecution of Manafort was political, not legal. The warrant enabling Mueller to investigate people is based on some fake Russia collusion thing, and has nothing to do with any other crimes people may have committed. The US Constitution is clear, as is case law, that a person cannot be convicted with illegal evidence. The government cannot breaak the law to enforce the law; that is official lawlessness.  And yet that is all Mueller has against Manafort.

Making predictions is risky, but I am confident that Manafort’s legal appeal will be successful, and he will go free. For the simple reason that the evidence arrayed against him for crimes unrelated to Russia collusion was illegally obtained.

The same stands for Flynn, and Cohen and a bunch of other people who were coerced by arch Mafia criminal Robert Mueller into confessing to things they did not do. So that Mueller can move forward with his political persecution.

The historic Grand Inquisition was famous for torturing people into making false confessions. There is no real difference between what Mueller is doing and what the Inquisitors did to their victims five hundred years ago.

One would like to think that humans have evolved past such naked power grabs, but the Mueller witch hunt disproves that. Greed, ambition, and a lust for power and control over other humans has always driven people to do terrible things, and we are witnessing this happen right before our eyes right now.

Folks, if you like you democracy, then you will have to fight for your democracy. And do not make the mistake of pooh-poohing this, you are indeed in a fight. You did not pick this fight, you do not want this fight, you would rather be peaceful and not fight. But if you do not fight (vote, march, protest, write letters to the editor, post news reports on social media, attend political rallies, and go door-to-door for good candidates), then everything you take for granted is up in the air, up for grabs. Your good economy, your cheap food, your freedoms, your free speech. Everything is in play.

And behind it all is Mafia don Robert Mueller and his friends. If you want America to be run by criminals like Robert Mueller, then sit back, grill hotdogs, drink beer, go to your job, go out to dinner and watch movies, and pretend that you can’t make a difference.

PA deer hunters…spending 40 years in the desert

Last week, a guy in his late 50s posted a complaint on social media. He was both complaining about “not enough deer” to hunt in Pennsylvania, and also boasting about how he buys up as many doe tags as he can get, and then he tears them up, and then he uses them to file false deer harvest reports. He hopes this all will influence Pennsylvania’s science-driven deer management. One result of all this complaining by guys like this man is that the PA Game Commission is unable to get the license fee increase from the legislature that the PGC and most hunters want.

On the one hand, this self-defeating complaining and tearing up of doe tags is pretty much insane behavior, and a complete waste of one’s own precious time on Planet Earth.

On the other hand, that someone is so passionate about hunting and wildlife is a good thing. The question is, can this guy and the thousands of other unhappy hunters like him be educated about scientific deer management? Or are they so close-minded and emotional about this subject that they are immune to empirical evidence, logic and reason?

One result of our state’s scientific wildlife management is that we are now a major trophy hunting destination. Previously unthinkably enormous bucks and gigantic bears are within reach of those who are willing to hunt hard and smart. Bucks that rival and surpass those of the “best” whitetail states in the Mid-West. Black bears that are as big as Alaskan grizzlies. These are tangible signs of policy success, and that Pennsylvania is now an outdoor Promised Land after decades of hunters being happy with a pathetic forkhorn or even a spike buck.

On my westward drive along I-80 last week, and my drive south yesterday, from northwest Lycoming County down to Dauphin County, I saw dozens of dead deer littering the sides of the roads. Actually there were so many that I lost count. There may have been a hundred dead deer along the roads. Including along very rural roads in areas where many older guys complain there “ain’t no deer.” Obviously there are a lot of deer in these places, because they are not all being killed on the highway. These dead deer are the fruit of deer-car collisions, a very expensive and dangerous result of an overabundant deer population.

To be fair to the complaining hunters, the PA deer population in these places may be too high for the road system and not high enough for hunters’ desires. That is a very real possibility. It may be that the Pennsylvania road system is just too big, too widespread into rural areas, to allow many deer to survive into the Fall hunting season.

No, we are not going to shut down the public roads to stop the carnage, though it would make sense for Pennsylvania to put a moratorium brake on road building. We taxpayers cannot afford the operations and maintenance costs on the roads and bridges we have now, let along on any new roads and bridges. PennDot must re-direct its energies into safely maintaining the infrastructure we already have, like how about wildlife tunnels? And if the deer-car collisions are any indication, our public road system has been poorly planned and badly implemented; it has spiderwebbed out into the most rural areas and wildlife habitats. Thereby inviting expensive car collisions with wildlife.

I think this unhappy hunter situation is going to be like the ancient Hebrews’ 40 years in the desert. The older generation that cannot adapt to changing habitat, changing deer behavior, changing land use patterns and changing hunting methods is going to have to die off. Then the younger generation can get in the driver’s seat on deer management policy.

The younger generation understands and values science and biology in setting policy, like doe harvest tags, the crucial importance of getting buy-in and acceptance from the larger society around us (people unhappy about hitting overabundant deer; in Europe hunters are personally responsible for keeping wildlife populations at safe levels), the need to be multifaceted and flexible when hunting deer, etc. These complaining hunters represent the ex-slave mentality of those Hebrews who left Egypt and who could not learn to live as free men. Moses could not let them enter the Promised Land because they would infect everyone with foolish ideas and weakness. That would put the entire effort at risk. So he kept them wandering until that generation died out.

Sorry, old complaining guys, you are living in a broken past. You are slaves to an unproven, non-scientific, failed approach to wildlife management. If you cannot change your mindset and embrace reality, then you will be remembered as the lost generation that stood in the way of success and happiness.

And to be fair, this same broken thinking has haunted the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau’s approach to Sunday hunting. The older generation there has successfully blocked a 50% increase in hunting opportunity for decades, just because they think it is “wrong,” for no good, defensible reason. But that also is about to change, soon, as the fed-up younger generation of farmers, including religious Mennonites, takes this important policy issue in hand and directly bucks the older guys standing in the way of family success and happiness.

To enter the Promised Land, you must shed your slave mentality. I hope the anti-science hunters and the anti-freedom PA Farm Bureau folks will join us as we enter a glorious new period in Pennsylvania’s outdoor heritage.

CNN directly intimidates jurors

In case there is one American reader out there who believes that CNN is actually a news outlet, and not a partisan political activist group, you might consider CNN’s attempt to intimidate jurors last week.

For the past few days, the jury on the fake and illegal Manafort trial have repeatedly asked questions of the judge that indicate they are not entirely persuaded by Mueller’s politically persecuting prosecutors. After all, the entire prosecution case resulted from an illegal search warrant about something completely unrelated to the fake Russia collusion thingy Mueller is supposed to be looking into.

Suddenly just two days ago in steps CNN with a demand to know the names and home addresses of the jurors.

Now why would CNN want or need to know the names and home addresses of the members of an active jury? What possible news value would that provide? Think hard.

None, there is no value, of course.

Except here: That information can be passed on to  the world of violent leftwing mobs, where individual people could descend upon the jurors’ homes and scare them, harass them, intimidate them, threaten them and their children, and badger their employers, as has been done in recent years.

So that the scared jurors are coerced into making the “correct” decision and convict an innocent man who did nothing except be associated with a president CNN dislikes.

It is difficult to fathom how far American media have fallen, and when you thought it could not get any worse, well, CNN has now made it even worse. This is not the way America is designed to work. Nor the First Amendment. The press is not supposed to be in the pocket of just one political party. And the press sure as hell is not supposed to be using its First Amendment investigatory role to expose jurors to threats and harassment so they decide differently than they appear to be leaning at this point. That is outrageous. It is dangerous to our democracy.

No longer can CNN claim victimhood in its dispute with the president. CNN is acting like a mafia organization, engaging in jury threats and intimidation to get what it cannot otherwise get legitimately. If you ask me, CNN’s actions are criminal.

What is most irksome is that the liberals I talk to seem ho-hum about this. “It’s not my issue, and I don’t think it is a big deal” says an old-time liberal Democrat friend.

He thinks his ox is not getting gored, and he dislikes Trump, so he looks the other way and gives CNN a free pass here. He is being unreasonable, yes, but reason and logic do not seem to be in widespread use these days. Feelings dominate everything.

The danger in my liberal friend looking the other way on CNN’s jury tampering is the inevitable widespread instability that results from these extreme activities by news groups, rogue mayors, and their purposefully defanged police departments. One things leads to another. CNN does it today, and someone will eventually find a way to put that shoe on the other foot in some other fashion. There will be a pushback. No complaints then, liberal friends! You did not complain about CNN today, so you cannot complain when the shoe is on the other foot tomorrow.

The bigger takeaway for me is people are beating on each other with whatever thing is at hand, even things like the media and IRS which were never meant to be weaponized, or withholding police protection from political opponents so that streets thugs can attack them; this is a sign that we are at intensely each other’s throats.

Not good. This is not America.

Celebrating Whiteness, with Antlers and Runes

As much as real, tangible racism was in free fall and thankfully a long way out of style throughout America and Europe, Liberals could not live without it, and so they brought it back and breathed life into it like a Frankenstein monster. Newly created by the past president, Black Lives Matter is “the Klan with a tan.”

Racism and race consciousness (they are the same) is a powerful accelerant for liberals’ ever-offended victimhood, and a driver of demands for coercive Marxist “social justice” wealth redistribution and forced equal outcomes (not equality via equal opportunity, which is meritocracy).

Put another way, racialism is a powerful drug. Take a racial supremacy pill and you are on top of the world, feeling good about yourself simply for existing inside your own skin color; but take a racially aggrieved pill along with the first pill and you are ready to lay waste to the world in the name and image of your skin color. You feel personally righteous and motivated. Witness the BLM and ANTIFA street violence, the murderous hate of Jeremiah Wright’s followers, neo-Nazi Storm Front. True jihad.

For every Yin there is a Yang.

For every action there is an opposite and equal reaction.

For every black supremacist Louis Farrakhan and BLM kook and tone deaf NAACP functionary, there is now or will end up being a Neo Nazi or sympathizer, just as equally filled with foolish hatred, racialist supremacy, and racial grievance as their mirror image.

I do not know what “white” skin is, and neither do the strongest proponents of “whiteness” nor its  enemies and modern creators, the black supremacists like Black Lives Matter, Louis Farrakhan, Democrat leader Keith Ellison, or celebrated jihadia Linda Sarsour, et al.

There is simply no quantifiable or operational definition for whiteness, or blackness. But racism’s artificiality does not stop people from using racist ideas for political gain or personal aggrandizement.

A recent vacation trip through several once-sovereign nations in Europe showed that, like America, most “whites” there have accepted the idea that racist/racialist discrimination is a bad thing. This is a repeated empirical observation where one meets a friendly young mixed race German couple: the She is milk chocolate brown, herself of racially mixed parentage, and the He is a supremely blonde and genuinely “white” Teuton, what we jokingly refer to as the ‘Hitler Jugen’ in our own family. Together they are happily affectionate and in love, oblivious to the artificial divide that Black Lives Matter demands of them.

Repeat this scene a thousand times, as we did across the three nations, and the takeaway lesson is that the “whites” got it; they got the memo on being racially accepting. It seems they are alone, however, as the pendulum is swinging the other way now, driven by BLM’s fake racial grievance industry, enabled by the establishment media, as well as South Africa’s latest non-news African anti-Caucasian genocide.

An interesting child born of the Left’s destructive efforts to artificially separate humans, break them out, and pit them against one another along skin color lines are those Caucasians returning to early Norse language, religion, and identity. Now this is really, honestly, truly Caucasian in every way, and if you had to point to something and say “Yeah, this is what we would call ‘white’,” this would be it.

It is an affirmation of historic roots.

It is not symbolic of Aryan supremacy. Yet.

Fascinatingly and in a way frighteningly, because it is so contrary to America’s Biblical idea of color-blindness, which I myself exalt (even in the face of BLM and NAACP racism), this is something quietly growing in the shade between the glaring extremes of BLM and Storm Front’s 21 marching members. It is this truly authentic “white” identity, increasingly celebrated in real song and historically accurate, authentic costume, rooted in Scandinavia, Dane-Land, Germania, the true home area of Caucasian “whites.”

These resurrected ancient symbols send a strong signal to modern lost souls; a chill up the spine tells them they are back home, after a long absence.

These are Caucasians working their way back to a proto-Caucasian, pre-Christian tribal identity, something organic with and naturally arising out of the Western European and Scandinavian landscape, even before Beowulf. It is very much a part of their DNA heritage. At least of what they know of it, or think they know of it. But that is enough for this new identity.

This nascent identity movement ironically started with the 1980s nativist Celtic music revival. But it is now its own thing, complete with a signature public face, a highly literate music style based on old Norse poetry and Viking history, Old High German and Old Danish literature and myths, the use of runes, and native music emitting from natural Iron Age objects, plants, and animal parts. And those totemic tattoos!

Call it “Viking Rock.” Their musical style is a big Viking tent, encompassing chants, to entirely primitive instruments, to electronic everything, and all of that together. One thing for sure, it is energetic, mostly aggressive, very much a product of the Norse beginnings. We know this from archaeology and history.

With this activity we are approaching a clearer and more honest “white” identity that is probably irrefutable, if also unnecessary in my happy, peaceful, color-blind American life. Shallow Storm Front, it ain’t.

We had thought the Vikings were all buried in the shallow inland sands of the North Sea and the barrows and dolmens of England, and now today seen only in documentaries, but in fact they walk among us once again. An entire genre of music, language, religion, exemplified simply by old Norse tattoos, are emerging from Europeans participating in their own natural, organic responses to artificial demands of racial identification.

Perhaps the most visually gripping band is the newest, Heilung (and photos and music videos below).

Early Caucasian people did and said and danced and wrote and sang these things playing out on stage, while today in America we barbecue outside and throw a baseball to relax, instead of beating war drums.

Where this goes is anyone’s guess. Neo-Nazis have already tried to claim some of this turf, now harkening to Odin for aid and comfort and decrying Christianity as a ‘Jewish plot’. But there is a tremendous amount of well-intentioned bleed-over into fascinated onlookers and others justifiably fed up with being told over and over that they are racist bad people simply because of their skin color, or lack of it. Other adherents are just fed up with modern materialism and consumerism, and are looking for what can only be called authenticity. This movement is going to take hold and sink roots in different places.

If we must view this ‘PaleoScando’ style as something purely racial, then one question that immediately comes to mind is this: Can the other “whites,” i.e. the Irish, Scottish, English, Welsh, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Eastern Europeans also participate in this Viking celebration of whiteness? What if you are a typical American and you have a bunch of German, Austrian, and Irish DNA floating around in your veins? Under white racialism, these Celtic and Saxon strands are at war with one another. Do they cancel themselves out? Do you then cease to exist as a racial symbol? Should you be taken to a remote place and shot, or gassed, thereby removed from the gene pool? Or should you just shoot yourself?

A recent DNA-driven facial reconstruction of the 9,000-year-old “Cheddar Man” skeleton from southern England (near Stonehenge) gave him black skin and blue eyes, with a definitely unmistakable Irish mug. An Irishman with a deep tan. But wait, aren’t the Irish and English white?

Do any of these people above also qualify as ‘white’? Should they also be celebrating their whiteness with the modern Vikings? Or are they just onlookers, or cheerleaders, or cannon fodder and stepping stones?

The movement’s music and visuals are powerfully suggestive, and moving. If the Vikings and their incredibly creative, powerful, often merciless successful descendants were any indication, this movement will go somewhere. Hopefully it goes for good. God, I hope for good.

Some representative examples:

“Krigsgaldr” (“War-Magic,” a song or play about cruel Vikings getting some payback)

 

A Day of Infamy: The Day the American Media Declared War on the American People

Today is a Day of Infamy like the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor was a Day of Infamy, except that this day is marked by a treasonous insider attack by fellow Americans on the entire American people.

Today, the American press openly and joyously colluded and coordinated amongst themselves to attack the American president, for merely being the president they don’t like. This is also an attack on the American people, who overwhelmingly chose this president over another candidate.

After two solid years of openly biased and partisan media attacks on the president, something like a measured 97% negative reporting on President Trump across the print and cable media, today the establishment media dare to present today’s nationwide editorial attack as some sort of unbiased, carefully measured, well-deserved action.

But the media are not balanced, thoughtful, careful analysts, or fair-minded arbiters of fact and truth. Rather, the mainstream media are openly a partisan activist arm of ONE political party. They are completely one-sided. Their attack today is just one more partisan attempt to damage a president they did not cheer for, cover for, and promote in 2016.

As if the American media is above criticism!

The media deserve the criticism they have gotten, because they have earned it over and over. The American media are indeed the enemy of the American people, because that same media is not in the news business, it is in the partisan political activism business. The media has prostituted the glorious First Amendment, and hidden behind it while using it to launch partisan political attacks. This destructive warfare has severely damaged America’s social fabric, because the role of the press is supposed to be honest, holding everyone in government accountable. Not just politicians the establishment media don’t like. Even as Mueller’s fake and falsely justified witch hunt is under way, the news media will not report on that actual facts about the illegally obtained FISA warrant used to begin the investigation in the first place.

The political activists posing as “news reporters” on CNN, NPR, CBS, MSNBC, the NYT, Washington Post, etc. deserve every bit of criticism they have received, from the president on down to local citizens complaining that the Patriot News here in Harrisburg harangues, hectors and lectures people about subjects John Micek and the other editors there have no interest in learning about. These activist “reporters” are just a bunch of politically partisan liberals who think they are in charge of all information the American people receive, and these “reporters” get angry when people call them out on their falsehoods.

Without inflicting damage on the president, the American media has severely damaged American democracy and representative government. American democracy is damaged by the media because they constantly cover up for crooked politicians it favors (Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama), and constantly attack politicians they did not support, including politicians the American people do want.

Today’s nationwide editorial attack on the president only proves that he has been correct all along. It demonstrates that once again the media are not treating him fairly, that they collude, plan and plot among themselves. They are not delivering actual factual news to the American people. Rather, the media delivers one false narrative and fake set of facts after another after another, in an attempt to shape public opinion, not inform it.

The media have traded away their credibility in their drive to attain certain political outcomes, including damaging this president’s public standing so the mid-term elections will be better for the media’s chosen political party.

So today is just one more day of liberal propaganda, the same as yesterday’s propaganda and the week before and the month before that.

Today is a day of shame, a day of infamy, because it is the day the American media made it openly public that they are indeed the enemies of the American people.

Duly noted.

Will the real Ireland please get up, stand up?

Tramping the Temple Bar in Dublin with old friends, we were in search of native music, and a cold Guinness. Despite our best efforts, we could not find one authentic Celtic pub, that was open at lunch time, anyhow. Every place we went was either blaring the same exact mix of John Denver, U2, the Beatles, and Neil Diamond, or had someone playing those same songs on a guitar. Really loudly.

This was not the real deal Ireland we came to see and experience.

What the hell is all that incongruous music doing on native Celtic soil? So out of place was this alien cacophonous tumult that we finally fled to what we thought was a quiet spot, only to have the talking-level ambience be detonated by just one guy with a guitar. Singing John Denver, Beatles, U2, and Neil Diamond songs. Really loudly. So loudly that we could not speak to one another at the table, except in between his songs. And believe it or not, this pub had run out of Guinness.

No Irish music and no Guinness in this Temple Bar Irish pub….the heart and soul of Ireland. Supposedly.

This arrangement was, to us, utterly bizarre and not at all what these Americans wanted to hear, or experience. We had traveled back to the old country to hear the heart-felt authentic sound of the old country, either old or modern, not modern, plastic inversions from and for the New World. We put up with it and enjoyed each other’s company for a while, and then fled to greener pastures.

Now about that old time Irish religion…every Catholic church we visited there was a museum. They all had small charity shops, selling post cards. Dark and uninhabited, after a thousand years for some, they now sit mute. How sad to see the backbone of Irish morality, spirituality, and identity cast aside so abruptly.

While talking to anyone who would share their views with us about this, which included at least a dozen natives, from taxi drivers to cops on the street to the barber Seamus who cut me hair, we heard the following themes: The Catholic church overplayed its hand and alienated the very flock under its care. By being part and parcel of the public schools, the Church had a lot of control over people’s lives. But instead of being a positive force, the Irish we spoke to said that when they saw a priest coming, they ducked the other way. Their schooling was unhappy, not inspiring. The Church did not have to compete for the people’s trust and allegiance; it took them for granted and treated them like a captive audience.

And then there was the same molestation issue as here, except that it was bigger, known longer, and covered up in plain sight much longer in Ireland than in America. One man, Martin, our taxi driver on the way to the ferry to Holyhead, said “And you loved Pope John Paul, right?”

To which I naturally answered “Of course! He was a powerful force for good on Planet Earth!”

To which Martin replied “Yes, of course you would say this. All the Americans say it. But did Pope John Paul, the greatest pope in modern history, ever apologize for the molestation problem, here or in America? No, he did not, and it caused most Irish to turn away from him and the Church. Including me.”

I was then reminded of Sinead O’Connor’s bizarre outburst on Saturday Night Live decades ago. “Fight the real enemy,” she shouted at a picture of the Pope. Most Americans were stunned and unhappy about it, regardless of their religious affiliation or identity.

Apparently Sinead had a reason that the rest of us did not know. And at that time, Ireland was just an island a million miles away. We did not know what she was talking about, what Martin was telling us about. There were no social media to broadcast her message, just a brief appearance in front of a big TV audience. It was up to the audience members to dig deeper to find out what she meant.

Today, it appears that outside of the really rural areas, the Catholic Church in Ireland is being abandoned by the Irish. Like completely abandoned.

This terrifies those of us who believe in the supremacy of Western civilization. Without the Church, a cornerstone of Western Civilization, the whole falls. What fills that vacuum could be anything, and there are some powerful forces at play, playing for all the chips that spoiled, soft, fantasy-driven Westerners seem to be oblivious to. The Irish are not soft, or spoiled, but they are like children in a way. They are largely innocent children, in my eyes, unexposed to the harsh realities of the outside world, waiting to eat them up. Their guard is down, not up. The Irish are vulnerable, in the way that middle-income American kids are clueless and big hearted about the intentions of their enemies they call friends.

It is painful to see an Irishman drop his own music in Dublin, drop the source of his soul and family, and drop his guard when a fight for his culture is looming in his face.

Will Ireland please stand up? Will the real Ireland please get up? Yes, we know you are tired of fighting, but sadly, we all must fight to stay free. It is a constant thing. You Irish should know this better than everyone else.

For those who want to hear some authentic, modern, native Irish music, in the symbolic spirit of James Joyce; it is possible: