Gaza or everything you love: Your choice
Gaza. Poor, poor Gaza.
The ultimate self-victim, the impoverished and destroyed Gaza Strip is the compressed store house for every bad, wrong, foolish, selfish, suicidal, stupid, short-sighted, and self-defeating choice any group of humans ever made or could make.
Mentioned in the Bible as one of the great Phoenician strongholds (‘Aza), Gaza’s failure today is Biblical in every way. While the place and its present day human population do deserve better everything, and could have it if they but willed it, its human population has also consciously determined that being miserable, phony symbolic martyrs is their highest and best use. Gaza the ever-martyr serves one purpose: To destroy Western Civilization.
What is Western Civilization? Whether we call it Christendom, Europe, America, Australia, or Judeo-Christian values, it is a rare democracy of republican institutions that diffuse political power among its citizens, rewarding free choice with maximum individual liberty and minimal government power. Open societies, whose governments are owned by The People, not by warlords.
Nothing could be more different from Gaza (or Syria, Iraq, and other self-destroyed Middle Eastern nations etc) than Paris, London, St. Petersburg, Venice, Rome, Madrid, or Manhattan. Willful decay, poverty, and constant pointless warfare on the one hand, juxtaposed to great communal celebrations of freedom of thought and conscience, science, and mutual beneficence on the other carved in stone.
Gaza’s role is to worm its way into the mind of Western Civilization and play Iago, always questioning what our eyes and ears plainly see and hear, and placing the blame for their misery not on the merciless ideology of Gaza’s Hamas, or on the infestatious Arab colonialism that carved up the current Middle East, nor on brute Islamic imperialism, but on the world’s beacon of light, Western Civilization. Gaza’s siren song is playing to the shallow desire for many affluent Western people to virtue signal that they are not really as bad as they might be thought. That they are soft hearted for even the worst of murderers.
And so Western “journalists” — come on, they are open propagandists and partisan political activists, not arbiters of accuracy or truth — broadcast totally false images back into Western Civilization that blames us for what we see happening over there.
These false images are crying parents, grieving over the dead propaganda prop children they allowed Hamas to use as magnets hidden among their missile batteries that targeted children in Israel. Or the destroyed building that the Associated Press knowingly shared with Hamas’ most important people, in addition to missile batteries on its roof, raining down on kindergartens in Israel. None of the sadness for Gaza the media portrays back home is true. It is all false.
Truth represents the penultimate achievement in Western Civilization, and every decision we make is ideally for truth, for the common good. Few other civilizations now or in the past sought truth or common good. Most great civilizations sought power and domination, and most still do today. Democracy and freedom are outliers, and truth is anathema to most governments around the world.
So the idea that a tiny nation of seven million Jews is somehow an unjust outpost in an area a thousand times Israel’s size is a preposterous idea. Most Muslim Arab capitols house more Muslim Arabs than there are Jews on the entire planet, so how Israel’s Jews are a threat is another preposterous idea. Only the most simple minded, careless people can identify with Gaza or its self-manufactured unhappiness.
A month ago, when Gaza was bombarding its neighbor with thousands of missiles, a nice man emailed me. He asked what I thought of the situation. Knowing that my views are generally conservative, I believe he thought I was going to bend the knee and worship the false graven images being broadcast back into our homes by the lying media. And gosh, was the international media ever full of that junk! My response was:
*Flatten Gaza
*Defend Western Civilization
*Do not reward or give in to violent crybullies
The war between Gaza and Israel is the war between good and evil, Hitler and the West, all that is good versus all that is wrong and bad in humanity. Western Civilization cannot afford to cry for Gaza, especially because Gaza does not cry for itself. To allow Gaza to shape Western Civilization is for Westerners like the people who read this blog to throw overboard everything that our own civilization represents. I know this following statement is really difficult for a lot of Westerners today, especially the young, but grow a pair of balls and make a stand for what is right and just and good.
Support Israel, oppose Gaza.
You say you want an audit of the PA 2020 election?
Lots of Pennsylvania voters are saying they want an audit of the obviously fraudulent 2020 election. A big petition is circulating, digitally. Groups of citizens in almost every county are personally demanding their elected officials get up off their butts and do the audit. Several go-getter PA state legislators traveled to Arizona and toured the election audit taking place there.
OK, so you, too, want an audit of Pennsylvania’s 2020 election? Well OK, here is what you must do to get it.
The biggest hurdle to a genuine audit of the PA 2020 election is the GOPe itself (GOPe means the establishment GOP, not conservatives, not patriots, but careerists who look out for their careers first and foremost, not for their constituents). In particular, Republican PA legislators Jake Corman, Kerry Benninghoff, Brian Cutler and Seth Grove are stonewalling an election audit. State senator Dave Argall may be on board with an audit, or he may not be. He’s all over the place, which is no surprise for such a crafty old political survivor.
So, dear reader, while I admire your enthusiasm and optimism for the possible audit process that is right in front of us, the best path to getting an audit is finding serious primary contenders for these above GOPe RINOs in the near future. Getting primary challengers has the effect of scaring the GOPe into action now while possibly removing them later.
Off and on for five years, I’ve been trying to get someone to primary Corman. It’s tough. Three years ago I bombarded the super voters in his district with absolutely brutal emails detailing Corman’s nepotism, laziness, lack of care for his constituents, insider dealings etc. Feedback from super voters there was overwhelmingly positive, but I was unable to recruit an actual primary challenger.
However, the effects of that email carpet bombing showed clearly when Corman was challenged in the general election that Fall by a liberal Jewish kid from out of town who openly disliked PSU and guns. Which is sacrilege in Centre County. Nonetheless, Corman hardly had a big win. There was just single digit separation between this so-called “Republican leader” and the liberal idiot flatlander. For someone so tough and important, Corman should have had a huge lead over the kid.
One can only imagine how that race would have gone with a serious contender. Even more so a serious primary challenger before we have to let some leftist fool take a Republican seat. Corman among all of these RINOs listed above is vulnerable. No one likes him. He has no allies, outside of a few PAGOP staffers and “leaders.” Getting a solid primary challenger to face Corman next spring could really help Corman find a way to do the 2020 election audit.
This is my considered response to those voters who say they want an audit. You are going to have to work on tangentially related things – personnel changes in the Pennsylvania legislature – to come back around to getting what you really want. This approach prevents us audit advocates from relying on others to do the audit, and particularly unreliable and disinterested others. It keeps the heat on those who can do the audit right now, while giving us the possibility of removing them from elected office entirely not too far from now.
So, if you live in one of these political districts (seats held by Corman – Centre County, Benninghoff – Centre County, Cutler – Lancaster County, Argall – Schuylkill County, and Seth Grove – York County), then start talking to good candidates who can effectively challenge one of these failed elected officials. Set up an election committee, get your candidate on the ballot, and then get them more votes in the primary election than the failed incumbent we need to remove from office. You might just get two birds with one stone.
The GOP is the moderate wing of the Democrat Party
If there is one clear message resulting from all of the activity and inactivity surrounding the stolen 2020 election, it is that the Republican Party, on the whole, is filled with individual people who see themselves more as the moderate wing of the Democrat Party than as a separate political party that either exists to advance a core set of values, or, in the alternative, to at least seriously oppose the Democrat Party’s communist takeover of America.
Recall that the GOP was established as the abolitionist party to fight Democrat Party slavery. That is some pretty tough stuff, because America ended up fighting a bloody civil war over the issue. But somewhere after that, the GOP stopped standing for anything except early golf games, short hair, crisp blue blazers, and money…lots and lots of money. To the point where the GOP culture is so weak that few of its members will even stand and fight the other political party over their theft of the national election in 2020, the theft of the presidency, the theft of America.
In essence, the Grand Ol’ Party Republican Party is really just the moderate wing of the Democrat Party. The two political parties are two sides of the same coin, there really is that little difference between them. The GOP sees itself as existing to mouth a few different-sounding ideas than the other guys, and then leave their offices for the fundraisers and cocktail parties that make holding elected office or their staffer positions worthwhile.
Despite having deep GOP establishment roots, for many years now, my own involvement in Pennsylvania Republican Party politics has been as the self-imposed outsider. Like some other activists still working hard today for change that benefits We, The People, by late 2008 I was disgusted with the GOP’s shallow fawning and or weak cowering before the great impostor, Barack Hussein Obama. In 2009 into 2010 I ran in a Republican congressional primary to challenge then-congressman Tim Holden. At that point, the grass roots reaction to what has become known as the DC Swamp was informally called the Tea Party. As a so-called Tea Party candidate, at our many debates and public meetings I honed my own message: “We grass roots Republican voters want a bar-room brawl with the Democrats, while the GOP establishment wants at most a gentlemanly duel with them and chummy drinks together afterwards. Dear GOP, lead, follow, or get out of our way.”
Last month I had the great enjoyment to personally participate in the public political dismemberment of one of Pennsylvania’s great RINOs, State Senator Gene Yaw. Yaw represents everything that is wrong with the GOP. At a public meeting in Montoursville attended by a hundred impassioned voters, Yaw demonstrated his absolute lack of care for the citizenry, his contempt for his voters, his disgust with patriots and constitutionalists, and his serious resistance to actually rolling up his sleeves and doing the work needed to save America from pending doom. Full of weak excuses and a laughable reliance on “We held fourteen hearings,” Yaw was the equivalent of a defiant and lazy teenage boy who just won’t get his damned family chores done.
After an hour of increasing catcalls, hisses, boos, jeers, and earnest questions from the audience, newly re-elected Senator Yaw stood up, collected his things, and without a word stalked out of the meeting with his toadies in tow behind him. Gene Yaw is the state of the Pennsylvania GOP, which is the state of the nationwide GOP – weak, shallow, zero fight for his constituents, zero push-back against openly communist activists in his Lycoming County district, unremarkable, uncharismatic, boring, low-T, egocentric, and unrepentantly an enabler of Democrat Party treason and insurrection.
Yaw is, in effect, a perfectly representative member of the moderate wing of the Democrat Party.
So, here we are, two more political campaigns that I ran in and eleven or twelve years later after the Tea Party revolution of 2008 – 2009, which is an eternity in politics, and the GOP STILL will not lead, follow, or get out of the way of the grass roots American voters. It is difficult to tell which political party is more resistant to a transparent 2020 election, the Democrats or the Republicans. Some call them the uniparty, and why not; the two political parties are obviously joined deeply together in common interests that clearly exclude the best interests of the American people.
But it is probably more accurate to call the GOP what it behaves like, which is the moderate wing of the Democrat Party. No fight, no spirit, no guts, no passion, no opposition, just some feel-good mouthing of platitudes and then go home early. Let the Democrats do whatever they want, what me worry (Alfred E. Newman’s famous line from Mad Magazine).
What kind of patriotic pro-America voter wants this kind of bad performance from their chosen political party and its elected members?
Today’s GOP Republican Party mascot – Alfred E. Newman, late of Mad Magazine. “What me worry?”
Trump sends warning shot right into Pennsylvania GOP over 2020 election audit
Just yesterday worthless, useless, spineless GOPe hack state representative Seth Grove issued a defiant statement that Pennsylvania would not be holding any kind of election 2020 audit. He gave no reason. Representative Grove also ran into a friend of mine in the Capitol this week, tireless freedom activist Ron Boltz, and behaved arrogantly, and cocky, and defiant, and dismissive, and again gave no reason why an audit of the 2020 election could not be done, or should not be done. From Ron:
“Was there [at the PA Capitol this week] with a constitutional attorney who came up from D.C., with the issue being getting an forensic audit in PA. Of course you and I know they have no interest, and we won’t get one. That doesn’t mean we don’t demand it anyway, and use the issue to beat these assholes over the head. You know how this works…
Well, news of this malfeasance got back to Our Lord and Savior Donald J. Trump, who issued his own statement today:
“SAVE AMERICA
PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP
JUNE 4, 2021
BEDMINSTER, NJ
Statement by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America:
Great patriots led by State Senator Doug Mastriano, Senator Cris Dush, and State Representative Rob Kauffman went to Maricopa County, Arizona, to learn the best practices for conducting a full Forensic Audit of the 2020 General Election. Now the Pennsylvania Senate needs to act. Senate President Jake Corman needs to fulfill his promise to his constituents to conduct a full Forensic Audit. Senator Dave Argall, Chairman of the State Government Committee, has to authorize the subpoenas, if necessary. The people of Pennsylvania and America deserve to know the truth. If the Pennsylvania Senate leadership doesn’t act, there is no way they will ever get re-elected!”
Now this is big talk for anyone, even for Trump, because Trump and his advisors obviously have no idea just how backwards and dug-in the PA GOP is, just how snowed and easily fooled the PA GOP voters are, and how tenacious useless nepotist political hacks like Corman are. For example, despite his poor standing with the GOP voters, Argall has amazingly survived several attempts to dislodge him from his apparent lifetime seat in the PA Senate.
However, on the other hand, for five years I have been trying to find a primary challenger for the seat presently occupied by Corman, because he is very vulnerable, and maybe Trump’s words will help us get the right person. Corman is definitely weak. No one likes him. He has no friends. I am not exaggerating. Check out www.jakethesnake.us
In other words, we could see some real political change in Pennsylvania as a result of Trump bringing fire to the dark recesses of the GOPe electorate. Maybe. Even primarying-out one or two bunkered-in careerists like Corman or Grove would be a huge success, although to President Trump it might not seem like it. These names are all worth pursuing anyhow, for sure.
These corrupt Pennsylvania politicians mentioned above, and including people like PA reps Brian Cutler and Kerry Benninghoff, won’t conduct an audit of the corrupt and stolen 2020 election because they must have personally benefited from it in some way. Now the voters are beginning to see just how aggressively these audits are being fought, and how obvious the steal was, and how our votes are being bought and sold like a sack of potatoes so that political insiders like Jake Corman can get rich, and there is a justified rising tide of anger coming the way of elected officials who stand in the way of getting justice for the voters, for We, The People. Thank you, President Donald J. Trump.
Seth Grove’s ridiculous public statement about not having an election audit. Hey Seth, how do you know what went wrong with the 2020 election if you won’t audit it?
Memorial Day Part II
The most nagging thought this week, which dampened my excitement or sense of purpose or meaning for this year’s Memorial Day, is the realization that the Biden Administration is running hard and fast to build a new US military. This new military is in the process of excluding (firing existing and not hiring new) conservative Christian Caucasians, patriots, and Constitutionalists. The reason this new military is being created is not to defend America, but to occupy and subjugate America. It is a military designed to protect the coup d’etat in Washington DC, to cement into place the stolen election of 2020, to bring the force necessary to hold on to illegitimate power.
This is terrifying stuff.
So in terms of observing this week’s Memorial Day, I was tormented all week by the idea that so many Americans have died to preserve our freedom, which we American citizens are now pissing away because we are literally letting people steal it from us. We are sitting here watching America be stolen and lawlessly overrun, and what are we doing about it?
You think the 2022 or 2024 elections will be free and fair? Not if the Democrat Party and their collaborator Republicans get their way with the so-called “Fair Voting Act”, which is simply designed to let the Democrat Party continue to cheat and steal elections forever. This means America will be a one-party nation, a one-party state, which is what all totalitarian nations have. And when the last vestige of freedom-loving Americans finally do rise up in revolt, the Biden Administration will demand the citizens turn in all of their guns, or face martial law.
And then martial law will be imposed, and the new anti-America, anti-Constitution military will be in place to enforce it. Instead of American military personnel of old who have been willing to die to give us freedom here at home, we will have a new type of military personnel who is willing to make us die in order to enable the Democrat Communist Party to hold on to control and power over us.
So yeah, this week’s Memorial Day took on a whole new context and meaning for me. America is in huge trouble.
Memorial Day – who and what are we remembering?
I struggled with today, Memorial Day. Every other Memorial Day of my life has been straight forward – we remember the fallen military service members who gave us the freedoms we HAD until January 20th of this year.
Now, America is witnessing a terrifying tyranny emanating from Washington DC, as the entire federal government apparatus is lining up to illegally attack patriots and conservatives from every direction. It is clear that the American government has been hijacked by the worst enemies of everyday Americans. The Biden Administration and their holdovers in government are the avowed enemies of freedom, liberty, the very Constitution that binds Americans together and has protected our rights since 1787. They are bad people. Definitely not Americans.
The FBI and the DOJ are staffed by individual people who are running rampant, crazed with unfettered power, trampling the Constitution underfoot, making a mockery of their own oaths of office. FBI agents concocting phony charges right and left, based on their personal political opinions. And military service people being drummed out of their careers, simply because they are pro-America.
These are dangerous times, and so in this context, Memorial Day today takes on a whole other meaning. At least to me. Like, if our citizens, elected officials, and taxpayer-funded public employees will not fight for audits of the 2020 election, to ensure the election was 100% kosher, then Memorial Day is actually a joke. We are in actuality remembering nothing and no one, but rather we are just going through the motions. We are sitting on our hands while the greatest nation in the world is literally stolen from us, right in front of us, and our noses are being rubbed in it.
What would our fallen service members have said about this situation? Would they have said “Yeah, no problem, we died in vain and that is OK. Go ahead and just give away the country to these evil people who want to subjugate you”…?
It is doubtful the fallen heroes would have said this, right?
So again, what is it we memorialized today? The failure of democracy because the citizens were too lazy or complacent? The failure of the military to actually stand behind their oaths of office, and to defend the nation from enemies foreign and domestic? The really shocking failure of our elected leaders to stand up for forensic audits of every state’s 2020 election results?
I am still struggling with this question. “Happy” Memorial Day, everyone.
Koo koo for KoKo Puffs, Crazeeee for Covid
Having deigned to come down from the mountain and mingle with the lowlanders (‘flatlanders’ around here), I was immediately struck by how many people I know in my neighborhood who are still taking the mask thingy so seriously. Wearing the mask like a religious burka, looking all sincerely severe and all. My friends have struck a significant pose with all kinds of massive wrap-around masks that are nonetheless colorful and playful.
It is the ultimate virtue signal: Gotta be some joy in your self-imposed death march, right? Make sure your mask is cinched down real tight and has the requisite flowers or symbols of humor to show that you are not really taking it seriously. Yeah, right.
Recently former Arkansas governor and politico Mike Huckabee said that liberals don’t want to relinquish mask requirements, because they have achieved so much iron-fisted control over so many Americans. Big-government fascist governors Wolf (PA), Whitmer (MI), Newsom (CA) and others have no science on their side, but they are goose stepping down the mask wearing street every day anyway. “You will comply!”
These fascist governors are afraid of what the citizens will do when they rediscover their own freedom, Huckabee says. And while Governor Huckabee is correct, what about people like my friends who take on the onerous and bizarre mask self-requirement? These otherwise fine people are purposefully disfiguring themselves with these ridiculous masks.
Their mask-wearing has to be more than virtue signaling, and it has to be more than fear. Because the mask wearers are surrounded by maskless people going about their lives happily and healthily, there ain’t a whole lot of self-evident virtue or health to be gained from the mask. So it is something else that compels them.
Here is what I believe mask wearing means to mask wearers: It is the personal worship of something larger than themselves. Mask wearing has become the physical and very public demonstration of a belief in something higher and more important than the individual; a sublimation of the self to a higher good.
“Islam” means to submit, and mask wearing is a form of personal submission to some greater authority. It ain’t a coincidence that the Islamic burka and the covid mask both are symbols of personal submission and self-denial. And it ain’t a coincidence that 49.8% of the voters in Dauphin County voted yesterday to continue to grant the Pennsylvania governor the un-ending authoritarian power to keep fake emergencies and crises going for as long as the governor wants. The mask wearers don’t like freedom.
So while Governor Huckabee is correct that authoritarians like Governor Tom Wolf (PA) covet the power over people that the mask commandment has given them, there is another side to this power transaction too. It takes two to tango. That other side is the desire (not just the willingness) of everyday citizens to literally give up their freedom and comfort and happiness and sacrifice it on the Altar of Fake Covid Crises. The mask wearers literally believe they are worshiping something greater than themselves, and it gives them a sense of purpose they could not find when not wearing a mask.
This gets to another and bigger related issue, as if there could be anything bigger. It explains why so many Democrat Party governors engaged (and are still engaged) in the heavy-handed fake and unnecessary covid crisis lockdowns and mask edicts, and also why the Democrat Party stole the 2020 election in the first place. The Democrat Party knows that a large portion of Americans have become not just complacent and lazy, but willingly, almost slavishly devoted to silly causes and fake crises, to the point where they will happily sign over all their freedom for a very shallow sense of personal fulfillment.
The Democrat Party either believes or knows that the actual resistance to their forced and unlawful takeover of America will end up being very little, if anything at all.
Does anyone remember the movie The Matrix, and how the enslaved humans were living in a make-believe world created out of chemicals and human imagination? That is what is happening now. And if we add this Matrix -style method of ruling over Americans to Orwell’s 1984, which Democrats have embraced as a how-to manual, and not as a warning against totalitarian government, we can finally understand what the Democrat Party understands and is fully implementing: Humans just want to be lied to and led.
Mask wearers say: “Free will and free choice is just too damned hard. Just point me in the right direction and I will willingly obey. Gosh that feels good to have no more friction or hard decisions to make in my life!”
And this is why mask wearers are crazy for covid.
How’s Your Turkey Season Going? Yeah, Me Neither
Highly successful turkey hunters are as rare as hen turkey teeth, and they will earnestly tell anyone in earshot that it is a pursuit only for the crazy. Spring gobbler hunting is tough, for so many reasons. Very tough. The weather is often cold as hell in the dark pre-dawn, you must sit unmoving for hours, call perfectly, but then move very slowly and correctly only at the precise moment when the shot is offered, and then eventually the temperature warms up and the swarming bugs come out, ticks crawl up your butt crack and into your armpits, etc.
The wild turkey itself is a fickle and troublesome quarry with the tolerance for anything being even slightly out of sort measured by the millisecond, etc. Wild turkeys can go from standing still to 50 miles per hour in about a second-and-a-half. So when they detect something wrong with the set-up into which they have been lured by the hunter’s calling, they can get out of Dodge with amazing speed. They are also incredibly tough and can withstand tremendous punishment before actually giving up the ghost. Even when they are shot fatally, a wild turkey can run or fly out of reach of the hunter.
So turkey hunting is an almost guaranteed skunk right off the bat, with success rates in Pennsylvania just above zero percent. To really effectively hunt wild turkeys in most places, and especially in Pennsylvania where hunting competition is thick and fierce, a person must have the patience of Job, the grit of Rooster Cogburn, and the faith of Moses. Not to mention the time needed to finally orchestrate the one brief moment where all these qualities briefly line up with your shotgun barrel that is itself lined up on a turkey’s neck about thirty yards distant.
Because spring turkey hunting is more than a fad, something slightly less than a religion, and has the word “pursuit” in virtually all of the turkey hunting gear companies gear descriptions, I thought I would share with the three readers of this website my own recent turkey hunting experience. It was almost like a bad dream.
It started with me falling asleep in the blind I set up on the southern side of the ravine, through which Sheep Hollow runs. My two hen decoys were 30 and 40 yards distant, on the other side of Sheep Hollow, stuck into old stumps for extra elevation and visibility. I use a slate call, and am good enough to call in some turkeys who die at 40-45 yards out with the most skeptical looks on their faces. Turkey hunting is nothing if it isn’t an excuse to get some shuteye in some really uncomfortable surroundings, surrounded by annoying insects, with hidden tree roots exploring the hidden recesses of one’s posterior and lower back. It’s great!
So there I was, head lolling around like a Hershey Park kiddy ride, chin on my chest, alternately dozing and suddenly jumping awake with a start, wondering if that crunching leaf was a sneaky gobbler (it never is). This happened a dozen times until I fell deeply asleep.
Far into one of my deepest REM sleep modes, an uncommon noise on the far side of Sheep Hollow caught my slumbering hunter-sense, and my head automatically raised up. My eyes slowly opened to slits, to look through the bug netting. Suddenly my neck extended three times its normal length as my head craned to ascertain that in fact a mature gobbler was consorting with the decoys. Like most guys on the make, he was playing both and as yet uncommitted.
Slowly I brought the shotgun barrel from its resting place on my knees to a place where it was resting on the wooden crossbar and burlap, and generally pointing at the gobbler. Then my eyes were focused and working pretty well in concert with my head and hands to align the front barrel bead with the gobbler’s head and neck area. This happened in silent, slow-motion seconds.
But, turkeys being what they are, which is essentially a CIA spy satellite with wings, complete with the latest in high-tech optics and listening capabilities that miss absolutely nothing within a 300-yard radius, the amorous gobbler went from struttin’ his stuff to suddenly looking my way. Then, mimicking my own startled reaction just seconds before, his own head telescoped three times his neck’s normal length as he stared in alarm at the strange object thirty five yards away. His big eyes bulged as he saw through my contrived hiding place and into my very soul.
I fired just as he collapsed his neck in preparation for high-velocity lift-off, and the shot pattern just clipped his neck area. It was not the solid hit it would have been if the dang bird had just stayed focused on the rubber chicken thingies meant to deceive him. So he hit the ground, rolled downhill, and began to thrash wildly in what were either death throes or an intelligent effort to escape. Anyone who has hunted wild turkeys for a while knows this moment: The hunter is either a hero, or is about to behave like the clumsiest brute in the wild woods, because the turkey is either about to die on the spot and be tagged, or it is about to lead the hunter on a merry chase across hill and dell.
The bird opted to turn me into a clumsy brute as it staggered to its feet and began heading down Sheep Hollow in a drunken stagger toward Route 414 and Pine Creek beyond. And so I played my assigned part and I myself staggered out of the blind, swatting burlap out of my way, my legs numb from being asleep for two hours. Partially running, partially bouncing off of trees to steady myself until the blood flowed back into my independent-minded feet, I headed on a downhill sidelong trajectory meant to intercept the wounded animal and quickly bring it into my death embrace.
Almost like a cartoon rendering of a buffoonish hunter after a smarter prey animal, the turkey caught my drift and picked up speed, stumbling and rolling faster down the ravine and closer to the highway. I slid on my ass down a large smooth rock face just as the bird flopped out onto Route 414. From there it was literally all downhill. Instead of some locals driving by in their pickup and jumping out to grab the bird for me, no one happened by and the bird crossed Route 414, bounced off the guard rail, and then pitched down over the tree-studded sheer cliff face to the Pine Creek rail-trail below.
Meanwhile I was still trying to cross Route 414 while pulling clumps of leaves and twigs and other forest floor detritus out of my pants. Upon reaching the guard rail I looked down and saw the turkey laying in the middle of the rail trail. He was not looking real healthy and it was possible he was going to simply peter out there, if left undisturbed for a couple minutes. Then I could tag him and lie about what a perfect shot I had made on him to my friends.
But such are the plans of mice and men, or something like that. Because what is a rail-trail if not a place for humans to ride their bikes? Especially when it is the only brief moment in the year the place must be left undisturbed for just a couple minutes. The rail-trail is not the designated dying area for severely wounded wildlife. And so when the nice lady in her pink Gore-Tex get-up came riding her bicycle along the rail-trail, toward the listless creature, and making a gentle crunching sound in the fine pea gravel that even I could hear a hundred yards out, the bird felt like it was being pursued once again. And it decided that, in fact, rail-trails are not the dignified place to die. So it weakly flopped its way over the rail-trail and down to the edge of Pine Creek.
Meanwhile, I had seen what was coming. Determined not to lose the bird to the rushing water, I sat down and again rode the next steep incline down on my butt, and once again bouncing from tree to tree in an effort to slow down my headlong speed and prevent serious breakage of some part of my body. This stretch of the rail-trail is actually part of our property, and it is also about the most useless part of our tax parcel. Except for now.
Of course I reached the margin of the rail-trail in a dramatic flourish of flying leaves and branches, a mini avalanche of stones and dirt and curses, just as the pretty in pink lady on her bike arrived. The dying turkey heard the commotion and rolled down the stream bank and into the edge of Pine Creek. Now a dead animal at the water’s edge is nothing new and no big deal. But a dead or dying animal out in the current is something else altogether, and so not having time to explain my bizarre appearance to the nice lady, who had come to a stop to either gawk at the camo-clad madman or ask if I needed medical/ mental help, I bolted across the rail-trail and once again pitched head-first over the stream bank. Launching myself head-first at the turkey, whose carcass lolled gently with the stream current against the bank, my fingers came up just inches short as the rest of my not-insignificant bulk made its crash landing in the rocks and thorns along the stream’s margin.
With its last ounce of dying energy, the turkey rolled itself out into the stream current and immediately began floating away at a rapidly increasing clip. My friend Scott and I had just floated Pine the week before, casting for trout (thank you to the Big Brown Trout Club run out of Wolfe’s General Store at Slate Run for the amazing fish we caught), and the substantial rains over the past few days had turned a high but fishable river into a near-maelstrom with a really fast current. So I crawled on my hands and knees into the water and then rushed toward the disappearing turkey carcass.
Down through the run we went, bird, white caps, and human in pursuit. Under normal conditions, this part is a good fast stretch with trout under the trail-side cut bank and beavers denning on the far side bank. But today, it was practically a white water, with literal white caps from the high speed water slamming into boulders under the surface. Although at one time I had taught lifesaving and certified lifeguards, and I had been as comfortably aquatic as a human can be short of being a trained Navy SEAL, I was quickly beginning to doubt the wisdom of my ways. Pine Creek was at about 48 degrees that day, and despite my ample natural insulation against cold, I was beginning to really feel the chill tug at my willpower to continue. In fact, I was starting to wonder if I was going to drown. Making the situation worse, I passed an otter laying on the edge of the little island we had now reached. Never have I seen more disbelieving eyes in human or beast than the look on that animal’s face as the bedraggled human (me) splashed by.
Comical sounding yes, but at that point I was actually scared that the one minute I had presently spent swim-chasing after the now-dead gobbler was going to be my last on earth. My physical ability was rapidly diminishing. But all good things come to an end, and the powerful run quickly petered out at the end of the island, where Pine becomes a large pool below Miller Run Natural Area. It was here that the high-velocity turkey suddenly became just a piece of random flotsam that I was able to splash my way up to and grab.
With my prize finally in hand and dragging lifelessly in the stream behind me, I sloshed my way to the shore, clambered up the bank, dropped the turkey at my feet, and laid down on some large rip rap boulders. How long I huddled there, soaking wet in the thin sunshine, I don’t know. Probably fifteen minutes had gone by before I had the strength to look around and get up the nerve to collect the bird and head up to the cabin. But my wet camo and death-like stillness had fooled one more animal, the otter I had passed on the way downstream, who came in at a mad dash along the boulders, grabbed the dead turkey, and dove head-long back into the water.
And oddly enough, my only thought was “At least I didn’t fill out the tag yet, and my season is not over, so I get to keep hunting.”
Like I said, spring gobbler hunting is for either the mentally retarded or the crazy. Whichever I may be, go ahead and be the otter. Take your pick. I stopped caring.
This election map says it all
If you are shocked at how easily the 2020 election was stolen from the legal voters of America, then take heart. Two can play that game, and IF the Republican Party will only gain its nerve and assert itself half as hard as the Democrat Party, the tables can be turned.
After 300 Democrat Party lawsuits nationwide right before the 2020 election in dozens of states attempting to overturn established election laws, and about a dozen broad daylight unilateral and illegal usurpation of election law jurisdiction and plain-as-day constitutional limits by secretaries of state in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Arizona and other states that allowed unsupervised absentee ballots, ballot harvesting, delayed voting until the “right number” of votes are found, and a bunch of other non-transparent “voting” techniques that are all designed to steal elections, it is time for conservatives to quit whining and get with that program.
If you are in a lacrosse or hockey match, and one team is just high-sticking and high elbows right and left and beating the crap out of your team, and scoring on your team as a result, and the referees are not calling the illegal hits, then play the game to the referees. Play to the standard the referees are playing at, not to self-imposed rules that make you “better people” than the other team.
There is no need to be a martyr and to lose the entire game or match because you would not lower yourself to play (cheat) like the other team did. Forget that, play to win! Do whatever it takes, whatever the other team is doing, to win. That is fair. What is unfair is what happened in November 2020, where one political party changed all the rules at the last second, spammed the voting system in a bunch of swing states, and stole the election in a mass of vote fraud, and is now trying to shut down investigations into the obvious fraud.
If the 2020 election was fraud-free and clear, why is one political party doing its utmost to stop transparency into the voting process? In Arizona, the entire Democrat political party is seething around the Maricopa County vote recount, trying to stop it through legal channels, and also to infiltrate it and cloud its legitimacy.
And so, if you look at the map below, you will see that America is almost entirely red. That is, America is almost entirely conservative, patriotic, Constitutional, committed to the rule-of-law etc. Even in supposedly “blue” states like Virginia, Oregon, Washington State, and New York, the number of red voting districts far outnumber the blue ones.
This means that if the red voting districts have the same 150% voter turnout that the blue voting districts had in the 2020 election, and that 97% of that 150% voter turnout goes to the Republican candidates, then the Republican Party should win handily just about everywhere. Even in states that supposedly have a Democrat Party voter edge. And especially in the swing states that so magically had Democrat Party-dominated cities vote at about 150% voter turnout in November 2020.
This would not be cheating, per se, it would simply be following the lead of the Democrat Party and doing just as they do. Everyone following the same rules of the game, the same referees.
And it means that when some federal investigators show up to view that 150% voter turnout, your county sheriff and dozens or hundreds of deputies not only physically stop the investigators from viewing the ballots, they arrest them for attempted vote tampering themselves. Holding a couple dozen communist anti-America federal employees without bail in East Succotash County Jail for a few months will probably send a strong message to communist-occupied Washington, DC, that our votes will not be stolen or rigged. The only unknown here is whether or not the Republican Party actually wants to win elections, or are they happy to be the powerless perpetual minority?
If every red voting district nationwide has the same 150% voter turnout that the Democrat Party claimed in many swing state cities, the Republican Party should do great in the 2022 election.
Will the US Supreme Court go rogue in the Corlett decision?
The US Supreme Court says it will hear arguments in a major Second Amendment (gun rights) case brought by the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association (Corlett, docket number 20-843) against the State of New York.
These two opponents are now met in legal battle, and the US Supreme Court is the final battlefield upon which the outcome will be legally determined. Legal being a kind of tenuous word these days, as all kinds of government agencies have taxpayer-paid staff who now illegally behave any damned way they want, with no legal accountability. The illegal behavior of the “public servants” raises the question whether the official decisions the various government agencies are then issuing are actually legal, and whether or not citizens should give a fig about them.
The case facts (the policy question) of Corlett are right out of the Constitution’s Second Amendment: The right to keep and BEAR arms. New York State says no, citizens have no intrinsic or Constitutional right to carry concealed or unconcealed firearms outside of their homes, without the state’s approval. And thus has New York State made getting a concealed carry license very difficult, and the penalties for law-abiding citizens who do carry without a license extremely harsh.
As you might guess, the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association believes the opposite. They contend the plain meaning of the Second Amendment means what it says: To bear arms is to carry them in public, while the keep arms part is about having guns in your home. No license or government approval beyond what the Second Amendment says is necessary to keep or bear firearms, nor is government interference in such an individual Constitutional right lawful.
Moreover, they point out that the public policy question is on their side, because concealed carry permit holders are overwhelmingly law-abiding and safe. It does stand to reason that the people who go through the government red tape rigmarole presently needed to get a carry license are people who innately believe in following the law, in contrast to gang members and other urban scourges who carry and use guns illegally as part and parcel of their daily living. Therefore, New York’s stated purpose of limiting carry licenses for public safety and crime reduction is not only meaningless, because the current policy fails on both counts, it is actually having the opposite result. States with liberal concealed carry laws have seen a greatly reduced amount of violent crime, because would-be criminals understand they may encounter deadly force in response to their criminal behavior.
Many gun owners are excited about this case, after so many years of the Court declining to hear appeals of lower court decisions that were completely contrary to the Heller and MacDonald holdings (which were both strongly in keeping with the plain language of the Second Amendment’s very broad guarantee of individual gun rights). Well, hold your horses, people. The US Supreme Court has declined all kinds of appeals of lower court infringements of not just 2A, but what are in essence complete overturns of Heller and MacDonald precedents. The Supreme Court majority has allowed these lawless lower court decisions to stand. When the Court declined to hear appeals of lower court decisions on gun rights that were contrary to established Supreme Court precedent, the Court was more or less agreeing with the lower courts. The result has been a slow chiseling away of Constitutional Second Amendment rights by political activists sitting on lower courts, a slow erosion of the Supreme Court’s standing among and relevance to the citizenry, and a very clear message to Constitutionalists from all the courts: Do not hold hope for the American court system to protect individual American civil rights.
America’s court system is just as politicized and dysfunctional as the rest of our federal government. This is due to the divergent natures of the two types of people inhabiting our courts: Leftist activists for whom the law means nothing but a randomly opportunistic pathway to implement socialism and tyranny, and moderates who cannot be troubled to make a stand on hardly anything at all. So the moderates get swept away by the anti-law socialists. The Supreme Court is subject to these same forces.
Think about how America is still in the aftermath of the Court declining to hear enormously important cases about how some state administrative agencies (Pennsylvania’s Department of State being one) had unilaterally and illegally changed their state election laws right before the 2020 election, bypassing their own state constitutions and laws. And yesterday the Court sided 6-3 with a criminal illegal alien who fought his deportation on the grounds that the US Government had failed to give him “sufficient notice.”
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot.
If you are a convicted criminal illegal alien, the US Government and the citizen taxpayers empowering it owe you nothing but a swift kick in the ass on your way out of America.
To be blunt: Because the Supreme Court allowed the 2020 election to be stolen, and would not even hear the monumental legal and policy issues raised during the steal, why would any of us believe they will stand in the way of the government trying to steal our guns?
If any particular official government entity or group of individuals is responsible for the destruction of America’s rule of law, it is the Supreme Court. No wonder fewer and fewer Americans have confidence in or loyalty to this failed government entity.
So, if you are one of the people salivating over the prospect of the Court hereby upholding the Second Amendment rights of the citizen serf in Corlett, you are DREAMING. Do not raise your own or anyone else’s expectations about the Supreme Court now swooping in to set things right on the Second Amendment. If anything, we should be prepared for this lawless body packed with leftist activists and cowards, with just a couple of loyal patriots (the two Constitutionalists Thomas and Alito), to throw the Second Amendment overboard. If anything, we should be raising people’s preparation levels for defending our 2A rights by all means necessary. The US Supreme Court has gone rogue and no American should look to the compromised traitors in it to provide any relief to USA citizens.
So come what may, regardless of what will be the Supreme Court’s latest decision on the Second Amendment, New York State citizens may yet determine on their own what they believe their individual rights to be, and also what the limits are on government interference in the private lives and rights of citizens. After all, both government and these various courts were established to resolve differences in favor of citizen rights that are already very clearly spelled out in our founding documents, including in New York’s own constitution. All of America’s founding documents were written and established to limit government and to elevate the citizen over government, a situation now being reversed in a nationwide atmosphere of autocratic government totalitarianism. New York State being an Exhibit A. Which the Supreme Court may well reinforce in its Corlett decision.
New York citizens may choose to protect themselves as they see fit, perhaps with a concealed handgun minus the license part. Obviously this is presently at some risk to a person’s liberty, due to New York’s anti-Constitution state administration.
And this raises the bigger question here: Will enough Americans rise up and re-assert our collective ownership of this thing called government, which has gone totally rogue and turned against us, the citizen taxpayers? Unfortunately, blood is probably going to flow in answering this question. We freedom loving citizens are being attacked and damaged by anti-freedom people who want full control of everyone and every decision we make. Human history demonstrates that only brute force can determine who prevails in these kinds of contests.
UPDATE: Reading the Washington Post assessment of this case provides insight into the minds of tyrants. The Washington Post wonders aloud what will happen if the Court is “too broad” in its reading of what can only be plainly read as a very broad individual right to keep and bear firearms. As a mouthpiece for the radical Left, the Washington Post sends public messages from elected officials to everyone else, and so they wonder if a “too broad” interpretation of the Second Amendment will result in the Court being “overhauled” by the Democrat Party with an increase in the number of leftist activist justices sitting on the bench. You can’t make this stuff up, and they are proudly stating up front that if the Left does not get what it wants, which is official tyranny via the Supreme Court, then they will artificially install a new Supreme Court that will give them the policy outcome they want, democracy be damned. When people use democratic processes to achieve non-democratic results, you are dealing with pure evil. Well, what am I saying…these people stole the 2020 election in broad daylight, so what else should be expected? My advice: Gentlemen, prepare to defend yourselves!
UPDATE May 2nd, 2021: The Supreme Court discredits itself yet again. The Court has declined to hear one of the most salient lawsuits of our time, that brought by Laura Loomer, whose weighty complaint to the Court was that the Big Tech digital media are illegal monopolies who illegally discriminate against Americans, and thereby violate citizens’ First Amendment free speech rights. Loomer being the Exhibit A of the moment. And we all know an awful lot of “cancel culture” discrimination by Big Tech has been going on the past twelve months, affecting at least a third of the American citizenry, and you would think a reasonable Supreme Court would want to weigh in on this problem. But no, the Supreme Court continues to behave disgracefully and kick away the sniveling little wretches who keep showing up at the carriage door begging for some relief from their oppression.
This Court is daily diminishing its own usefulness and relevance to the American People, and the only answer why this is, is that the Court’s majority no longer sees themselves as part of the American republic or as guardians of the Constitution that holds the republic together.
If not us, We, The People, then who the hell is the Supreme Court working for? I think the Corlett case is going to demonstrate exactly who the Supreme Court is protecting and promoting these days: Tyrannical Big Government. I hope I am wrong, but looking at all these decisions the Court is making, including Loomer’s case, it is clear the US Supreme Court is AWOL.
Don’t you go and feel all alone if the Court’s anti-Constitution behavior leaves you thinking their decisions no longer have a binding effect on you. The Court is clearly now made of tyrants, and tyranny has no role or place on American soil, and they have no claim on the allegiance of the American citizen, much less our obedience.