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January 16th, 2021

PA’s must-do 21st century deer management policy

When Gern texted me on November 12th “planning to plant the entire farm with grass next Fall… 100%  hay… can’t afford to feed wildlife. Going broke trying to make money,” I knew that my best deer management efforts had finally failed over the past 13 years.

Every year I work hard to make sure our deer season is as productive as possible. Because our tenant farmer pays us a per-acre rent every year, which covers the real estate taxes and some building maintenance, and for 13 years he has grown soybeans, corn and hay in various rotations across the many fields we have. Our arrangement has generally worked out well both ways, but that text message ended my  sense of satisfaction.

While I do wear dirty bib overalls when I run the sawmill and also when I try to impress people who don’t know me, Gern is the actual farmer who tills (broad sense), fertilizes, plants, and harvests a very large farm property in Dauphin County, some of which I own and all of which I manage. Our property is one of many that comprise about 30,000 acres of farm land that Gern and his family cultivate in Central Pennsylvania. To say that his family works hard is the understatement of all understatements. Gern embodies AMERICA! in flesh and spirit, and to see him so utterly beaten down by mere deer is heartbreaking.

Over the years I knew that both overabundant deer and bears were taking a significant toll on our grain crops (Gern’s primary source of family income), and so I worked hard to recruit the kinds of good hunters who would help us annually whittle down the herds, so that the pressure was taken off of our crops. About five years ago I proudly photographed one of our late-summer soybean fields, at about four super healthy feet high, indicating a minimal amount of deer damage. When I passed the soybean field pictures around to other farmers and land managers, nothing but high praise returned. And so I patted myself on the back for our successful deer management, and congratulated our guest hunters, who were killing about 25-35 deer a year on our property. Our hunters were filling an impressive 50% to 65% of the roughly 54 DMAP deer management tags we hand out every year, as well as some of their buck tags and WMU 4C tags.

But, change is life’s biggest constant, and while I rested on my hunting laurels, deer hunting changed under my feet. The past few years have seen a lot of change in the hunting world. First and biggest change is that hunters in Pennsylvania and other states are aging out en masse, with fewer replacements following them. This means that a lot less pressure is being brought to bear on the deer herd. Which means a lot more deer are everywhere, which is not difficult to see if you drive anywhere in Pennsylvania in a vehicle. There are literally tons of dead deer along the side of every road and highway, everywhere in Pennsylvania. We should be measuring this at tons-of-deer-per-mile, not just the number of dead deer and damaged vehicles. Frankly this overabundant deer herd situation is out of control not just for the farmers who feed Americans, but for the people who want to safely drive their vehicles to the grocery store. Hunters are sorely needed to get this dangerous situation under control, and yet Pennsylvania’s deer management policies favor overabundant deer herds to keep older hunters less crabby.

So, because I am about to break out the spotlights and AK47 to finally manage our farm deer the way they need to be managed (and yes, PA farmers are allowed to wholesale slaughter deer in the crops) (and yes, I feel the same way about our favorite forested places in the Northern Tier), here below is the kind of deer management/ hunting policy Pennsylvania needs via the PGC, if we are going to get the out-of-control deer herd genie back into its bottle and stop hemorrhaging farmland on the altar of too many deer:

  1. Archery season is too long. At seven weeks long, the current archery season lets a lot of head-hunters stink up the woods, cull the very best trophy bucks, and pressure the deer enough to make them extra skittish and nocturnal before rifle season begins. Even though rifle season is our greatest deer management tool. The same can be said of bear season, which is the week before rifle season. So shorten archery season and lengthen rifle season, or make the opening week of deer season concurrent with bear season, like New York does.
  2. Rifle season must be longer, and why not a longer flintlock season, too? Is there something “extra special” about deer come the middle of January, that they are prematurely off limits to hunting? Most bucks begin to drop their antlers in early February. Have three weeks of rifle season and then five weeks of flintlock season until January 30th, every year. Or consider flintlock hunting year ’round, or a spring doe season in May.
  3. More doe tags are needed. There are too few doe tags to begin with, and most doe tags sell out and are never used. This is especially true in WMUs 5C and 5D, where despite enormous tag allocations, tags quickly become unavailable. That is because individual hunters can presently buy unlimited numbers of doe tags, for some reason having to do with the way deer were managed in the 1980s…c’mon, PGC, limit of two or three doe tags for each hunter in these high-density WMUs, and at least two doe tags in Big Woods WMUs like 2G and 4C.
  4. Despite good advancements in reducing the regulatory burden on deer hunters this past season, there are still too many rules and restrictions. For example, why can’t our muzzleloading guns have two barrels? Pedersoli makes the Kodiak, a fearsome double percussion rifle that would be just the ticket for reducing deer herds in high deer density WMUs where the PGC says they want more deer harvests. But presently it is not legal. Another example is the ridiculous interruptions in small game seasons as they overlap with bear and deer seasons. This bizarre on-again-off-again discontinuity of NOT hunting rabbits while others ARE hunting deer is an unnecessary holdover from the long-gone, rough-n-ready bad old poaching days of Pennsylvania wildlife management. PA is one of the very few states, if the only one at all, with these staggered small game and big game seasons. Bottom line is hunting is supposed to be fun, and burdening hunters with all kinds of minutiae is not only not fun, it is unnecessary. Other states with far more liberal political cultures have far fewer regulations than Pennsylvania, so come on PA, give fun a try.
  5. Artificial deer feeding with corn, alfalfa, oats etc on private land during all deer and bear seasons must end. Not only does this “I’m saving the poor starving deer” nonsense lead to spreading deadly diseases like CWD, it artificially draws deer onto sanctuary properties and away from nearby hunters. Or it is baiting, plain and simple. Feeding causes overabundant deer to avoid being hunted during hunting season, but then quickly spread out on the landscape where they eat everything out of house and home when hunting season ends. This year up north (Lycoming and Clinton counties) is a prime example. We had no acorns to speak of this Fall, and whatever fell was quickly eaten up by early November. As the weeks rolled on through hunting season, the deer began leaving their regular haunts and unnaturally herding up where artificial feed was being doled out. This removed them from being hunted, and creates a wildlife feeding arms race, where those who don’t feed wildlife run the risk of seeing none at all. So either completely outlaw artificial feeding or let everyone do it, including hunters, so they can compete with the non-hunters. And yes, people who buck hunt only, and who do not shoot does, and who put out corn and alfalfa etc. for deer during hunting season, are not really hunters. They are purposefully meddling in the hunts of other people by trying to keep them from shooting “my deer.”
  6. PGC must better communicate to its constituency that too many deer result in unproductive farms that then become housing developments. Because the landowner and farmer must make some money from the land, if farm land can’t grow corn, it will end up growing houses, which no real hunter wants. So real hunters want fewer deer, at numbers the land and farms can sustain.

 

By Josh • Posted in Family, Fruit of Contemplation • No Comment
January 15th, 2021

Official lawlessness about to become unimaginable

Once a political party is willing to risk everything by stealing a national presidential election, they are willing to do everything else necessary to cement that conquest into stone, so that they are never held accountable in the future.

And as we have seen in just one week, the now official merger between the national mainstream Big Media, Big Tech (facebook, twitter, youtube, etc), and the lawless Democrat Party is about one thing: Absolute control over every single American.

Worse yet, every institution is now assisting the official lawlessness: The various state bar associations are trying to eject and dis-bar attorneys who have stood up to the official lawlessness, state licensing organizations are trying to de-certify professionals who have had their own opinions that are different than the Democrat Party narrative. And so on. There is an all-out war being made on free speech, free thought, freedom of association by the Democrat Party and their allies.

And this assault on America is about to become unimaginable in the weeks after criminal Joe Biden is sworn into office on an oath he will immediately break.

One of the things that has really bothered me over the past five years is that I did not get to write more about the events, trips, sights and natural features I have experienced. Summer time is usually devoted to family trips to pretty places, national and state parks, etc., and there is so much cool stuff to write about. Some of the most-read posts on this blog have been about exactly those family trips and adventures. Our readers were probably other mothers and fathers looking into potential travel plans for their own families.

But instead of getting to write about the fun stuff, with pictures of our kids holding up their biggest bass or standing at the edge of some scenic vista, the whirlwind of forced culture war and endless Democrat Party lawlessness has demanded that anyone who gives a whit about democracy and Constitutional government stay on top of the sustained assault on our rights and way of life by responding to it.

In the coming week I will do my best to lay out a list of steps the average American can take to repulse the assault on a free America. It is nothing you will hear on talk radio, because all the radio hosts seem to have been immediately cowed since last week into recommending extra prayer, longer showers, brighter clothing, and more better coffee as the antidotes to the constitutional crisis America now faces. The best radio host, Rush Limbaugh, seems resigned to playing Josephus and simply documenting the downfall of American civilization.

We can each do better than that.

Remember, America belongs to us, We, The People. America is not about government, it is about free individual people, making their own choices, free of Big Government, and a government that is heavily restrained by the Constitution. What we had six months ago is worth fighting for, because the looming alternative is a nightmare no free American wants to live under. In the meantime, I will do my best to post essays about the fun stuff, the neat stuff, the natural history stuff that makes living so much fun and interesting.

By Josh • Posted in Government Of the People... • No Comment
January 12th, 2021

My Aunt Jess

A little birdy just flew away. It was always a small, gentle, and delicate little thing, and especially so in its final days here on Planet Earth. A lifetime of cigarettes and other things took a toll on her body that even the best of genes could not resist, and tonight there was so little of her left. Now she has spread her little wings and flown the coop, moving into a different place, perhaps a different dimension.

In her side of our family, most people live a long time. Like into their late 90s and well into their 100s; so long that the people around them are eventually like “Look, why don’t you just die already.” My Aunt Jess made it into her 80s, a young’n by our family standards, and had she not attacked her own body with cigarettes and too much other stuff, she would have outlived me and most of the rest of the family.

I owe so much to my Aunt Jess, because she is the one who introduced me to the great outdoors, to Mother Nature, to fishing for brook trout in small Berkshire streams, to patiently watching a humming bird flitting undisturbed among trumpet flowers, sipping nectar from each one. Nature has been the central focus of my life and career, really as a result of Jess’s introduction to it so long ago.

One of my most vivid childhood memories, from 52 years ago no less, is Jess walking along Route 8 with me in Blandford. She pointed out some raccoon tracks in the sand along the road edge, and we studied them closely for a long minute. The long claw marks sticking out from the toes, which were splayed out from the foot pad, really spoke about the kind of beast that owned them. All this fascinated me, and then she gasped and led me twenty feet further along the guard rail.

There, digging a hole in the sandy soil was a mother turtle. We watched her slowly scoop and push the soft dirt away while she created a pretty deep hole for such stubby little legs. She, too, had claws, and they dug deeply into the dirt, so that she could eventually squeeze out her little round, white eggs into the hole. In there they would remain hidden and cool, incubating until they hatched cute little baby turtles. Aunt Jess and I stood there for half an hour, just watching the mother turtle, until she eventually pushed the last bit of dirt over her clutch of eggs and then slid down the bank toward the small brook. Whether it was a wood turtle or a box turtle, I do not now recall, though I am inclined to think and also kind of remember the yellow squiggle pattern of a box turtle.

Another time Aunt Jess threaded the two of us back into the large bog in the woods behind the farm house where my grandparents had retired. Small little carnivorous plants lived there, and she showed me how they lured the ants and other insects into their acidic stomachs. All of this was fascinating to a little boy, and because it was not explained in an academic way, it was even better. Jess’s love for the outdoors and for all things great and small propelled her forward every day. Every little living thing (well, almost all) was a source of love and intrigue to her, though the bears that raided her bird feeders in later years occasionally got a good whoopin’ with a broom. She could tolerate only so much gluttony and welfare mentality.

To wit, one day she was volunteering at Bartholomew’s Cobble, the natural area near her home, and a lady brought in a starling with a broken wing in a shoe box. Jess met the lady at the main counter, and peered into the box. The lady insisted that Jess do something to help this poor starling. Jess resisted, and explained to the nice lady that the starling was a rude invasive bird that destroys a great deal of other birds’ nests and young. Not a bird worth “saving.”

Undeterred, the lady pushed the shoe box back at Jess across the counter and once again insisted that the starling be healed in some way. Jess reached into the box, picked up the starling, wrung its neck, placed it back in the shoe box, and pushed the box back to the lady.

“There. Now it doesn’t have to worry about its broken wing,” Jess said to the unhappy lady.

Despite her antipathy for starlings, or perhaps because of it, Jess enjoyed bird watching, and as a naturalist she racked up a great many bird sightings in her Audubon bird identification book. At one time she traveled far and wide to see some little dickey bird or another, including by canoe, but in later years she was content to put out a rich enough smorgasbord to bring in all of the cool ones, including grosbeaks and warblers that should be far, far away.

Jess taught me how to jig a garden worm on a size twelve Eagle Claw hook for tentative brook trout, so skittish that the slightest movement by any body part other than the rhythmic movement of the wrist and fishing rod would send them scurrying under cut-banks and submerged tree roots for cover. In my own wanderings, I had a fishing guide in Alaska and another in Montana tell me I was the best fly fisherman they had encountered, and I chalked it up to many days spent fooling wily brook trout in small Berkshire and Central Pennsylvania streams (confession here: as a kid I also poached the hell out of the Harpster stretch of Spruce Creek with a fly rod, which required real finesse with a rod and as a Scottish Highlands stalker staying out of sight of the humans; but let’s not talk about that now), all begun by my Aunt Jess.

Last week I told her on the phone that while I was deer hunting this winter, I had at one point been surrounded by juncos and chickadees, whose tameness around humans never ceases to amaze and entertain me. In their sweet chirps and happy flittings, I heard and saw Aunt Jess, and so I told her that whenever I am sitting alone some place and I hear juncos or chickadees, I will hear her voice. She cried, and then I cried, both of us knowing we would miss the other so very much. Gosh, what a gentle soul she has been.

The magic of Nature has never stopped inspiring me, and the passion for conserving it has never left me, to the point where I spend my days working to leave a scant legacy of bird and turtle habitat alive and well, so that future aunts and nephews can take walks and discover magical little moments like a mother turtle laying her eggs, or a rising brook trout in a small plunge pool. I owe all of this to Aunt Jess, who tonight left us, as all flesh must eventually do. But too soon for her clan, and so I must end with this admonition: Please do not smoke cigarettes. They destroy not only the body they enter, but also the hopes and dreams of the loved ones surrounding the smoker.

If you feel like you really have to walk on the wild side and play with fire to get a high, get involved in politics. Or feed the little brown dickey birds in your back yard. Just don’t leave your family too soon, for such an unnecessary reason as cigarettes. My Aunt Jess would heartily agree.

 

By Josh • Posted in Family • No Comment
January 10th, 2021

FBI now officially a Democrat Party political weapon

Over the past twelve years, the Federal Bureau of Investigations could not prosecute open sedition or treason against the United States of America. “Sanctuary cities” in clear violation of federal and state laws were allowed to flourish and corrode our body politic from within, producing violent South American drug cartels operating freely in American towns that included unsolved beheadings of American citizens and murders of entire families.

FBI leaders and agents have blatantly used their official positions to protect political allies like Hillary Clinton, while using their official positions to attack, threaten, punish, jail and fine innocent people who just happen to be not their political allies. Peter Stzrok, James Comey, Andrew McCabe and many others have used their official taxpayer-funded jobs to politicize law enforcement, thereby destroying the foundations of the rule of law, the equal protection of the law, and official accountability for official malfeasance. In America, all citizens are supposed to be equal, but at the FBI some citizens are “more equal” than others.

The FBI couldn’t find the time to investigate blatant voter fraud in the November 2020 election, in order to promote the fraudulent candidacy of China Joe Biden, nor could it self-police its own rogue agents, nor could it investigate the criminal contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. In contrast, now the FBI has agents immediately scouring America for their so-called “MAGA Most Wanted” list of people who briefly occupied the US Capitol building last Wednesday, and the FBI is even now rounding up Republican law makers in Tennessee on obviously fake charges stemming from political differences.

Can you imagine if the FBI had lifted a finger to confront the year-long violent rioting, looting, arson, murder, and vandalism conducted by Black Lives Matter and ANTIFA members? How many lives and businesses might have been saved! And can you imagine if the FBI had compiled a “Black Lives Matter Most Wanted” list of suspects from the various riots around America in 2020?

No, you cannot imagine that? Right, because had the FBI engaged in that kind of overt political statement, all hell would have broken loose. People would have rightly asked “What kind of a federal agency is targeting an activist group by name?” And yet, here we have the very purposeful political statement by the FBI that it is specifically going after “MAGA” people (Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again supporters).

This is not only not right, it is a crystal clear declaration by the FBI that it is an illegal political tool firmly behind one political party, the Democrat Party. The agency does not represent ‘the law,” it represents the un-law, the authoritarian coercive and selective use of illegal and immoral laws for political and personal gain. The agency is now an aggressive political tool for the Democrat Party, much like the East German STASI and the Russian KGB secret police were for their respective authoritarian regimes, acting illegally to advance a partisan political agenda. The FBI is abusing and misusing the law in order to achieve political goals.

This is nuts; it is totally un-American, because it destroys the foundations of any democracy. And yet we have a lot of Americans openly cheering for it. If the shoe were on the other foot, they would be openly rioting over it. So these presently cheering Americans will have to move aside or forgive the others if they riot; this would be consistent behavior, and not the double standard Democrat Party people have become addicted to.

I do not know how much more stomach at least half of American citizens have for this disgusting behavior by our nation’s pre-eminent law enforcement agency, and the political party it has been protecting and promoting for the past twelve years. We have already endured four years of brutal partisan FBI political machinations, including no-knock 4AM raids on innocent people like Roger Stone and General Michael Flynn, and other overtly political statements with guns drawn under color of law by those taxpayer-funded law enforcement professionals. Now we are watching the agency move lightning-fast to round up political opponents and turn them into political prisoners.

If last Wednesday’s peaceful protest in Washington, DC, was any indication of what can happen in America these days, it is plausible to believe that all civilian taxpayer Second Amendment hell can break loose right back over the zero-credibility FBI and its political party. Thomas Jefferson wrote that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time by the blood of patriots and tyrants,” because he probably envisioned a time like right now when one group of people would seek official tyrannical domination over everyone else. Jefferson knew human nature back in 1776, and now the FBI is showing us the worst of it all over again.

Enter the Spirit of 1776, you motherfuckers. But the difference between 2021 and 1776 is that in 2021 American citizens will not be staging a revolution against established authority, they are beginning to resist an illegal Marxist revolution implemented through grievously corrupt and audacious political over-reach by the Democrat Party, due to the complete failure of the other supposedly counter-balancing political party to perform its basic functions.

I put all my money on the American civilian resistance, despite the FBI being supported by Big Tech (FaceBook, Twitter, Google, YouTube, Apple etc) and Big Media (NPR, NYT, CBS, NBC etc.). At the end of the day, we have free minds and able bodies. Welcome to your own resistance, FBI-ocrats.

By Josh • Posted in Government Of the People... • No Comment
January 8th, 2021

Democrat Party steals White House – A-OK, Americans briefly occupy their own Capitol – ‘arrest everyone’

America is in the rubber-meets-the-road period of a full blown authoritarian Marxist revolution aiming to destroy our constitutional republic.

The Democrat Party uses blatant election fraud to steal the presidency right in front of our faces, and then two Georgia senate seats, and we are told by the mainstream media that we must shut up, sit down, and do what we are told. Then, a few hundred thousand patriots assemble peaceably in Washington, DC, to air their grievances. A handful briefly occupy the US Capitol, which is known as The People’s House, four of whom are executed in cold blood by the US Capitol Police, and suddenly the Democrat Party-run media are telling us that every single protestor there must be rounded up and jailed as well as anyone who supported them.

No mention of the four executed protestors, or even an acknowledgement that quite a few ANTIFA guys got into the Capitol and raised hell.

The hypocrisy of this situation is glaring, because we just experienced a solid year of violent BLM and ANTIFA riots that were driven by Democrat Party politicians and their media and tech arms, like MSNBC and FaceBook. Entire cities were destroyed or set back on their heels for decades to come, without any repercussions at all. None, zero.

This situation is exactly how the Communists took over Eastern Europe in the 1940s. They used the appearance of democracy to achieve power and non-democratic results, like locking up their innocent political opponents on fake charges.

Folks, we have a full on illegal takeover of America happening right in our faces. How many Americans are willing to live under the Democrat Party’s ruthless tyranny is a big question.

Another big question is what the hell is the purpose of the Republican Party, if most of its elected members are unwilling to mount any kind of resistance but are actually all too happy to help the Marxist takeover happen?

Vice President Mike Pence is a shameful example of this spineless attitude. Pence said on Wednesday that “the Constitution constrains me” from sending the contested Electoral College votes back to the several states for a re-certification, and so he certified the utterly false Electoral College votes that gave the presidency to a fraud, Joe Biden.

Hey, Pence, the US Constitution and the laws from it actually enabled you to do exactly what was needed. And did you not notice that your supposed political opponents, the Democrat Party officials, do not feel constrained by anything? Not laws, not rules, not decency, not a democratic spirit, and certainly not the US Constitution. Now that you gave them the power, the Democrat Party and their allies in Big Tech are blowing up the Constitution.

Guess this end result makes Mike Pence really committed to the Constitution…

If elected Republicans continue to play nicey-nice by the most restrictive interpretation of the rules and laws, while their opponents are falsely accusing and jailing good people without any regard to law at all, then there is no official opposition to the Democrat Party’s evil. And so there is no purpose to the Republican Party. A political party that cannot stand up to what has just transpired is not worth being called a political party.

Let’s face it, as so many people have said for decades, the GOP is truly a country club, a gentleman’s club, a social club, an investor’s club, a blue blazer and short hair and and khaki pants club, an elitist snob club; it sure as hell is not a political club or political party.

I have run against the GOPe three times (in a Republican congressional primary in 2009-2010, a Republican state senate primary in 2012, and another Republican state senate primary in 2015 that I bowed out of after severely injuring my left knee while hunting), and each time the Pennsylvania Republican officials and GOP money men fought harder against me than empty suit VP Mike Pence or Senator Mitch McConnell just fought against this Marxist takeover of America. In 2012 the Pennsylvania Republicans actually gerrymandered me out of my own State Senate District #15 at the last second, and it took the PA Supreme Court to throw that out and put me back in, a historic decision. Then the PAGOP ran two people against me, and their chosen candidate beat me with I think 43% of the vote, only to lose to the incumbent Democrat state senator that fall.

If the GOP has more fight against America-loving conservatives than it does against open Marxists seeking to overthrow the rule of law, then what the hell is the purpose of the GOP? Not much. Seems like America needs a Patriot Party to supplant the failed GOP. Yes, third parties always enable the Democrat Party, but so what? So does the GOP!

The GOP welcomes all the hypocrisy, sedition, treason, and lawlessness that the Democrat Party and its adjuncts in Big Tech and Big Media can daily assemble, just so long as the existing GOP elected officials maintain their jobs…

Folks, this is not the political arrangement planned by America’s founders in 1776 or in 1787. If Americans wish to hold on to their most basic freedoms, then they must organize right now and plan on mass direct action against the lawless theft of our government. Think of yourself as living in 1776, and act accordingly.

By Josh • Posted in Government Of the People... • No Comment
January 7th, 2021

January 6th DC Protest: I was there, what really happened

Getting the entire January 6th DC protest story out is going to take time, but it is important to address the totally fake narrative about it being pushed by the fake news media, the entertainment industry, the Big Tech industry, the lawless Democrat Party, and even the cowed Republican Party establishment.

For the record, I arrived at the Washington Monument around 10:00am and worked my way down the slope until there was no room left between us and the White House.  From there we marched to the US Capitol, where I was in the Rotunda [the outside rotunda, not the one inside the Capitol building] but about twenty feet behind the barricades. I stayed in that general location for a couple hours until later. My story here begins in the Rotunda.

The US Capitol Police used peaceful protestors for target practice. All around me and just in front of me, US citizens who were legally, peacefully protesting were shot in their faces by explosive flash bangs, rubber bullets, pepper gas bombs, tear gas bombs, and bean bags. I have video and photos of all of this activity that I took on my own phone, which I will post here later today [Update: Now that the FBI/KGB is on an illegal witch hunt to make examples of even lawful, peaceful protestors who were there, using pictures taken at the event to identify 100% innocent people to hunt them down and unlawfully prosecute them, I will not be posting them].

I saw nicely dressed men in business suits and dress shirts with their faces blasted by explosives. The Capitol Police were not aiming for our feet, but for our faces. I was shot right under my chin with a large rubber bullet by one of the police officers who we watched take careful aim at individual protestors who did nothing more than sing the national anthem, chant, and wave signs and banners. I was also hit with many other rubber projectiles, and I was gassed three times, once badly.

At no time did I or anyone around me throw anything at the police or try to attack them. We were exercising our Constitutional freedoms, and the Capitol Police attacked us. On our way out of the protest and back to our bus, we met a nicely dressed man with blood on his hands and clothing, who calmly told us that he is a physician and had been standing with the tiny woman who was shot in the neck by a Capitol Police officer. He, the doctor, tried to resuscitate her, but he described how purposefully mortal her wound was, and how he had personally witnessed the police officer taking careful aim at the woman’s neck. She has now been identified, but I cannot now recall her name [UPDATE: Ashlii Babbitt]. She was a peaceful protestor who could have been easily neutralized with any sort of non lethal force, had the police officer really felt threatened. He chose to execute her, instead.

If anyone is curious about why presently free Americans reacted to official violence with some force of their own, then this description of events explains it. We peaceful protestors were violently attacked by the US Capitol Police for doing nothing more than peacefully protesting. Violence will beget violence, and nothing stokes a violent response more than un-earned official violence against innocent civilians, like yesterday.

Fresh in our memories yesterday were the many violent riots in 2020, where ANTIFA and BLM destroyed entire cities, violently attacked police, passersby, counter demonstrators, and business owners… WITH NO ACTION BY THE POLICE. And with total support by the mainstream media and big tech, whose members stood in front of burning buildings and pronounced the violence as “mostly peaceful protests.”

Fresh in our memories were the Code Pink invasion of Congress, followed by the shrieking howls of the mad as anti-Kavanaugh people invaded the US Senate chamber. Again, with no consequences from either political party or from law enforcement or the media or from Big Tech.

So I witnessed a double standard yesterday that is being promoted today by the mainstream media industry and the Big Tech industry, which is that conservative peaceful protestors are actually “domestic terrorists” and “racists” and “white supremacists.” In fact, about 25% of the protestors around me were black, Latino, and Asian. There were a lot of Asians with us, I would say evenly split between Vietnamese and Chinese. Not a white supremacist movement at all, but a simple freedom movement.

This double standard is obviously evil on its face, but it serves an even more evil political purpose. Patriots and conservatives are being set up to be de-legitimized so they can be attacked by both BLM and ANTIFA people, and soon by the official state apparatus, like police forces everywhere, the FBI, the ATF etc.

If you have read this blog for any time, you know my positions on most political issues of the day. You know that I believe the 2020 election was stolen in an ultimate act of Democrat Party lawlessness, a lawlessness that has defined that pro-slavery political party since 1860 and which in modern times has led to so-called “sanctuary cities” and a widespread failure to enforce the laws on the books to protect American citizens. A suspension of the most basic civil rights.

To me and others like me, we believe the Democrat Party to be a certified domestic enemy of We, The People. The Democrat Party’s lawlessness and attempt to enslave us all to Big Brother Government must be resisted at all levels by Americans everywhere, or else America will turn into an authoritarian state with Big Brother telling us what to think, what we may do, where we may go, what we may read or write. This authoritarian establishment narrative has become quite clear during the China flu covid shamdemic, as unconstitutional authoritarian lockdowns and police actions against free citizens have become commonplace.

Some take-aways from yesterday and the ensuing hours:

  • the Republican Party establishment stands for absolutely nothing, because its members believe in nothing, except their own power. They have no fealty to the US Constitution, nor to any of us citizens. They believe in process over substance. The Democrat Party knew this before the election, and were emboldened in their theft of the presidency by the GOPe’s weakness. No one better exemplifies this than outgoing Republican senator Kelly Loeffler, who only two days ago announced that she finally stood with The People against the farcical Electoral College count, and who yesterday denounced President Donald Trump and withdrew her objection to the farcical Electoral College count. This GOPe woman represents everything wrong with the Republican Party – no backbone, no spine, no guts, no commitment to the rule of law, and so easily manipulated by the Big Media/ Big Tech industry narrative.
  • the Democrat Party is enabled by the Big Tech industry and the mainstream media industry, which either suppress different perspectives from being aired, or which suppress actual facts from being exposed, if they run contrary to The Narrative. This makes Big Media and Big Tech certified mouthpieces for authoritarian oppression, and, therefore, certified enemies of We, The People. However people choose to resist Big Tech and Big Media, only the members of Big Media and Big Tech have themselves to blame.
  • Probably 99% of the political pundits on both the left and the right issued definitive statements about yesterday’s protest without themselves actually having been there. They watched selectively edited and commented videos shown out of context, and drew understandably inaccurate conclusions. But these same pundits have shown zero interest or curiosity about actual events, choosing instead to show their true yellow color by standing shoulder to shoulder with the oppressive authoritarians.
  • Yesterday’s protest was nothing more than an Occupy Congress, which is The People’s House. It belongs to US, not to the political elites. If the various Occupy movements were legitimate, then yesterday’s Occupy action was the most legitimate of all.
  • Finally, this whole situation is boiling down to a showdown between the entitled elites who have stolen our entire country’s government apparatus on the one hand, and the citizens who populate the country and fund that apparatus on the other hand. When I witnessed several hundred thousand unarmed protestors yesterday staging a forceful protest against tyranny, I saw the beginning of a citizen army doing its dry run, its practice run, for a takeover of the nation’s capital. As brute force has always been the ultimate arbiter of natural selection, only one side can prevail here. This is totally an Us vs. Them situation, not of the making of We, The People, but forced on us by authoritarians who crave control over us.

Much of this will probably start to play out in the coming weeks. God save our great Republic.

More to come here in the next couple of days.

UPDATE: Today every effort is being made by the political elites to destroy President Donald Trump and as many peaceful protestors as they can get their hands on. Mind you, absolutely none of this was done to any politicians or their supporters over an entire year of wild, violent BLM and ANTIFA riots across the country, including in Washington, DC. This is an indication of what is coming to America in just a couple weeks: Everyone who stands for the Constitution and our traditional American values and freedoms will be officially targeted for forceful removal and silencing. This is why patriots must organize, hope for the best, and prepare for the worst.

 

 

By Josh • Posted in Government Of the People... • No Comment
January 4th, 2021

2021: Dictator Biden or Dictator Trump, take your pick

America is entering a lawless new era. Historically, it could have been predicted, but for me and mine, it sucks crap to actually live during this “interesting time.”

I so very much liked the America of 1985. Nothing wrong with that, everything good about it. Unfortunately, our material wealth and success put many Americans to sleep. Endless entertainment on TV, and now on the internet, cheap food, lots of booze…what is to worry about? Life is good! Let someone else run the country.

And thus the greatest nation in history rotted from inside, stultified, fell asleep, forgot itself. And so now we are just days away from a dramatic schism, where Americans will have to choose their preferred dictator, President Donald Trump, or so-called president elect Joe Biden.

Biden ran for the presidency multiple times over his 47 languid years in government, and each time he could not get enough votes to be elected Dog Catcher in East Succotash, Nebraska. Suddenly in 2020 he gets ten million more votes than the historic election of Barack Obama…I don’t believe so. The 2020 election has been stolen, and just like Hillary Clinton has not been held accountable for her many crimes, so once again a bunch of Democrats are not held accountable for their crimes. In a tyranny, everything is legal for authority figures, and over and over Democrat authority figures get away with every crime they commit in broad daylight. Like the execution of Seth Rich in broad daylight. And just to prove that they are untouchable, they also use the force of law to persecute innocent political opponents, like Roger Stone, General Michael Flynn, George Papadapolous, et al

“When exposing a crime is treated as committing a crime, you are being ruled by criminals,” wrote US citizen on the run, Edward Snowden. And so we now have federal judges seeking to sanction lawyers for daring to bring election-related lawsuits into their courts. Obviously these judges, like James Boasberg and Chief Justice John Roberts, prefer official criminality to lowly citizens appealing to the law. Why else do these judges make laughable decisions based on ridiculous procedural nonsense that throws the concept of due process out the window, and installing huge legal walls to block our understanding of what happened, instead of addressing the very real merits of each case? Why are these people scared of transparency?

America has been run by criminals for a while, with the 2020 election being their best effort yet. They had to knock out Trump, because another four years of his administration would have corrected the many problems and criminal behavior now deeply injected into every institution.

And as a result we are about to face a tough choice: Allow President Donald Trump to stay in office until an actual investigation of the stolen 2020 election is completed, or seat the fraud Joe Biden. If Biden is sworn in, the Democrat Party will move at warp speed to crush all of their opponents, cultural and political. As always, their activities will be under the color of law, if not actually legal or constitutional.

Americans will have to choose who they follow, a benevolent dictator, Donald trump, or a lawless dictator and tyrant, Joe Biden. I vote for Donald Trump. Hopefully I have a few million unshakeable patriots beside me to get the job done.

By Josh • Posted in Government Of the People... • No Comment
January 3rd, 2021

on Qanon

Probably inevitable that Qanon and I would meet. Not in person, generally speaking here. Don’t get excited.

This ‘Qanon’ “thing” is a thing that has taken the patriot/constitutionalist/ conservative movement by storm, and as I am definitely in that movement mix, I would naturally mix it up with Qanon at some point.

A friend who is a forester implored me to look into Qanon last week, and so I did. Foresters tend to be steady hands, droll, unexcitable, not terribly political. But this guy suddenly became political, and as he is a steady hand, I listened to what he had to say:

  • Qanon is a person or small group of people working for US military intelligence
  • Qanon is/are the Good Guys, duking it out behind the scenes with China, Russia, and our own anti-America CIA
  • Qanon wants Patriots to leave the actual fighting for America to them, which is supposedly the military, and to leave our AR15s at home when we take to the streets

This last item is what caught my attention the most. I mean, what kind of pro-America group would encourage America’s last hope, its native patriot militia, to stay at home or at least leave our Second Amendment at home?  Does not sound like a pro-America group to me.

Can you imagine if some Qanon group had encouraged patriots to leave their muskets and long rifles at home in 1775, and to just “peacefully protest” against the tyrannical British? There would be no America, as the ridiculous ‘peaceful protests’ would have been crushed mercilessly, and tyranny firmly entrenched thereafter.

My sense of Qanon is that it naturally attracts hopeful believers, who want to feel like the US military has not been overthrown from within (it has), and that the US military will not sit idly by while the illegal Biden fraud is installed as an actual sitting president (they will), and that everything behind the scenes is just fine n’ dandy (it’s not). It is understandable that good people do not want to go to war within their own country, and that they want the actual paid warriors to do it for us all. It is understandable for normal Americans to believe that not ALL of our institutions have been overthrown, but if all indications are accurate, even the American military is deeply corrupted, and run by people who do not love a constitutional America.

But ask yourself, what kind of an operation tricks its followers into lowering their guard and waiting until it is too late to fight back?

Yes, it is true that the anti-America mainstream media hates Qanon, tries to denigrate anyone associated with Qanon, has no interest in Qanon. But that just tells us that Qanon as a positive rallying point for patriots bothers the Chinese media (America’s mainstream media), for the simple reason that patriots are involved.

I was asked for my opinion, and I think Qanon is probably a Chinese operation to undermine America from within. Because it is so well done, and so complex, this is the only explanation that makes sense from all of the confusion that has come from it. Maybe this view is confusing to people, but that would be well in keeping with the whole Qanon thing.

Who knows? Who cares? Keep your AR15 handy, a well-kitted day pack, your boots and warm clothes. Whatever Qanon says, you know what YOU say, and that is all that matters.

By Josh • Posted in Fruit of Contemplation, Government Of the People... • No Comment
December 30th, 2020

Why flintlock hunting mistakes happen

Last Saturday Pennsylvania’s flintlock deer season started. A surprising number of people take to our winter woods with primitive flintlock rifles in pursuit of super skittish deer. After two weeks of rifle season, which ended two weeks ago, our deer are as wary as possible. They are either burrowed into hillsides, or yarded up in suburban back yards, hiding from anyone that looks like a hunter. Deer are surprisingly good at separating people shoveling snow from people carrying rifles, so you might see a pile of deer in the oddest places right now.

Flintlocks involve pouring gunpowder down the barrel, followed by a small piece of cloth and a round lead ball. Then a small amount of fine gunpowder is put into the flash pan, and is then hopefully ignited when a piece of flint hits a piece of steel, thereby making sparks, ultimately igniting the powder that was poured down the barrel. That pushes out the lead ball with enough force to kill an animal.

This is the theory, anyhow.

Because there are a bunch of moving parts in a flintlock, each one of which is necessary for the whole to function properly, a lot of things can go wrong after the trigger is pulled. Here are a few problems that happen to flintlock hunters every year, and some suggestions on what flintlock hunters can do to fix the situation up front, before the trigger is pulled on a deer and the gun does not go “BANG.”

Problem One: Flint does not spark well or at all.

Solution one: Make sure the flint has a sharp edge; after lots of practice shooting, the flint edge gets chipped and dulled. If yours is dulled, then replace it with a new one, or re-sharpen the edge with a piece of steel.

Solution two: Ensure the frizzen is clean and dry; if it is oily or wet, it will not spark.

Solution three: Ensure the flint squares up exactly with the frizzen. The two must meet one another directly and perfectly aligned so that the flint edge scrapes evenly down the frizzen face. If only a corner of the flint connects with the frizzen, then very few sparks will result. This is probably the most common mistake associated with no or poor sparking.

Solution four: Ensure your lock is properly tuned and timed. This is both easier and harder than it sounds. It is common for people to buy inexpensive off-the-shelf flintlocks (especially the really cheap plastic and stainless steel ones) and expect them to work at the same high level of functionality that a comparable budget-level center fire rifle operates. This is misplaced trust, because unlike a modern rifle, a flintlock’s lock is full of tumblers, bars, levers, and springs, all moving in precise harmony with one another in a millisecond. If any of these moving parts is not tuned to work smoothly with the other moving parts, then your lock will have timing issues. You will pull the trigger, and only small hints will tell you that something is wrong, like hang fires, or many failures to ignite the flash pan powder. But each time you pull the trigger, you will not hit your deer. After a lot of heartache, you will eventually ask a competent flintlock expert to evaluate your gun’s issues, and he will immediately diagnose it as “Your lock don’t work.”

It is important to use only a trained flintlock gunsmith, and not a regular “gunsmith.” Most modern gunsmiths know as much about a flintlock as they do about maintaining mechanical Swiss watches, which is absolutely zero. Many modern gunsmiths will sell themselves as being able to do the work on a flintlock, but they will be overwhelmed when they pull the lock plate off and behold the incredible “primitive” inner machinery. I have seen a modern gunsmith actually destroy either the lock mechanism or the inletted stock wood, or both, so only take your gun to an actual flintlock gunsmith, and an experienced one at that. Here in Central Pennsylvania, we are super fortunate to have a lot of flintlock experts, including people at Dixon’s near Lenhartsville, and Fort Chambers in Chambersburg, Mark Wheland in eastern Huntingdon County, and many, many others sprinkled around.

When I had my first flintlock made, the new “gun builder” I hired actually ground off critical pieces of the lock, and then tried to blame me when the gun would not fire properly. It cost me a deer. I also had to pay Bill Slusser (now in Kentucky) $220 dollars to rebuild the lock and then properly re-attach it to the wood, which included him TIG welding back on metal that had been unnecessarily removed by the first guy. The lock is a delicate piece of machinery, and the bargain basement ones are very rough, so take your new gun to a competent flintlock gunsmith to get it tuned before you take it hunting. If you bought your flintlock new from a gunmaker, like Mark Wheland or Bill Slusser, then it is guaranteed to be fully tuned and ready to kill. Same goes if you had a gun custom built for you. Just don’t use the bargain basement “gun builder” guy who promises a quick turnaround, or a regular gunsmith who says “Yeah, I can do those.” They can’t do it, but they can do it in.

I learned that expensive lesson so you don’t have to.

Happy hunting and good luck!

 

By Josh • Posted in Family • No Comment
December 25th, 2020

The Spirit of the Season

Today is Christmas Day, America’s national holiday at least as much as Thanksgiving Day. It is a day of good cheer, happiness, kindness, family, acts of charity, rest and relaxation; a Sabbath of sorts. Across Western Civilization this day has played several different roles and in different formats over the past thousand years, the earliest being solely religious and quite somber. The later versions of Christmas being a non-offending marriage between Christianity and northern European paganism, and being more celebratory.

Christmas as we know it now is largely a creation of Englishman Charles Dickens, who decried the caste system’s forced poverty and lack of Christian charity in his own land, and whose 1843 book A Christmas Carol championed the triumph of kindness and generosity to all over greed and miserly wealth. A literal ghostly spirit of Christmas invaded old man Scrooge’s otherwise selfish life, and left him a changed man. Scrooge’s personal changes, in the true spirit of Christmas Day, then resulted in a domino effect of increasing happiness and beneficence spreading outward from the formerly unhappy and mean old man to all those around him and beyond.

Dickens’ powerful message was a seed that grew wildly in fertile soil, as the contemporaneous Industrial Revolution had created a great amount of wealth and also a great many have-nots. And a hundred years later downtown Manhattan USA at Christmastime was full of powerful images and themes drawn directly from Dickens’ writings. That resulting Christmas culture has spread far and wide, and is now a mix of all the good stuff, including spirituality and morality, along with some old fashioned American consumerism. This has all morphed into the modern version of Christmas most Americans practice or at least enjoy today. It is kind of a third version of Christmas.

But if we go back to its beginning, Christmas Day is closely linked to Christianity’s predecessor, Judaism, and its own festive holiday of Chanuka. Christmas Day always starts on the 25th of December, which is usually right around the Hebrew date of 25th of Kislev, the start of Chanuka. While Chanuka has eight days, Christmas has twelve (similar to Passover having eight days and Easter’s Holy Week having seven at least, and possibly more, depending upon where one lives). And if we then immediately fast-forward back to the present, we see that Christmas has profoundly influenced the practice and understanding of Chanuka. Chanuka now being a heavily mysticized and joyful celebration of a vague miracle involving some olive oil. If you dig deep, you might get an American Jew to tell you that Chanuka is generally about individual freedom, and freedom of religion specifically.

Truth is, Chanuka was indeed originally about freedom, but the kind of freedom we Westerners no longer seem to value, or which we seem to take for granted.

Chanuka is described at hebcal.com as “Hanukkah (Hebrew: חֲנֻכָּה, usually spelled חנוכה … in Modern Hebrew, also romanized as Chanukah or Chanuka), also known as the Festival of Lights, is an eight-day Jewish holiday commemorating the rededication of the Holy Temple (the Second Temple) in Jerusalem at the time of the Maccabean Revolt of the 2nd century BCE. Hanukkah is observed for eight nights and days, starting on the 25th day of Kislev according to the Hebrew calendar, which may occur at any time from late November to late December in the Gregorian calendar.”

OK, but what was the Maccabean Revolt, you ask? Ah ha, here we have suddenly discovered the true spirit of Chanuka! And one could surmise, the true spirit of Today’s Christmas Day, as well, heir as it is to Chanuka.

The Maccabean Revolt was a true-life rebellion by a small group of totally dedicated, religiously pure Jewish families against an enormous Assyrian empire that was then occupying then-Israel/Judea, roughly 2,200 years ago. It is the triumph of the little guy over the big bad bully; the triumph of monotheism over evil paganism; morality over immorality. Chanuka is the story of winning freedom by the edge of the sword, at total risk of one’s own survival. Those Jews who then strapped on a sword and successfully fought to the death over several generations to rid themselves of the yoke of Assyrian slavery, then set in motion so many future events. Like the subsequent existence of Jesus, the eventual creation of Christianity, and the resulting creation of Christmas Day by people seeking to directly link the day with Chanuka.

Early Christmas was observed by religious Christians as a day of spiritual freedom, similar to the Chanuka celebration of national freedom and sovereignty, without which there was no spiritual freedom for the Jews, whose Temple service had been disrupted by the Assyrian occupation. Which makes one wonder, in the context of where we are right now, December 25th 2020 , as America is poised to be captured and subjugated by China through its secret treaties with Joe Biden, Big Media, and Big Tech…. what was and is the true, original spirit of Christmas Day, and does it have relevance for us right now?

Religious Christians will provide an orthodox Christian perspective, but it is no stretch to say that today’s Christmas spirit could use a heavy dose of the original Chanuka spirit. We need some of that old time religion. We need a modern equivalent of the Maccabean Revolt against the fraudulent, illegal election that just took place, in which America as we have known her for 244 years is about to collapse and be replaced by repression and slavery.

So, I will raise a glass of eggnog to everyone in the spirit of good Christmas cheer. Salud! And I will also raise the American symbol of freedom, defiance, and sovereignty in salute of the brave American citizens who we know are the last hope of restoring our republic: The American longrifle and its updated equivalent, the AR15.

Merry Christmas! May the ancient spirit of the Maccabees fill every patriot heart.

 

By Josh • Posted in Family, Government Of the People... • No Comment
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