Did the last humorist die yesterday?
Blazing Saddles was a movie that still defies categorization. In 1974, movies in America were highly regulated, and there were all kinds of seemingly artificial limits placed on what you could and could not see, or say, for people of all kinds of age groups. OK, normal people recognize that foul language, violence, and nudity are not appropriate for young people, but the censors then went far beyond these basic limits.
Somehow, Blazing Saddles made all kinds of end-runs around the film censors, without showing any naked bodies or using four-letter words, while still carrying a very adult social theme. One word in particular that is used throughout the movie is “The N Word“, and it is used to great effect in stabbing racism against blacks straight in the eye. And that’s the beauty of good art. Left to function properly without censorship or outside meddling, good art maximally tells its story and makes its best point.
Blazing Saddles may be funny, but it also addressed racism straight on in a way that has never been done since. And it moved the discussion about race relations farther ahead than all of the serious blather about feewings ever could. You couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today, though, because of the censorship, and so you’d never benefit from its valuable message.
This subject of censorship and free speech has been brought to the fore by (among other direct assaults on free speech) recent revelations that PC Woke book publishers are going through existing books by Roald Dahl and other authors and actually, unbelievably, incredibly, re-writing them to fit today’s snowflake boo-boo word fearing man-child.
It seems that today’s censors and book burners are the same people who are publishing books, and they have taken it upon themselves to be like the scientifically illiterate church censors of old re-writing Galileo’s scientific theories. They are destroying important art in the name of protecting people. These same people today would never have allowed Blazing Saddles to be released, because of the “hurtful” boo boo words nonsense.
This is civilization-destroying stuff, because when the people who publish the books are also burning the original books and then re-writing the books, you really end up with, in effect, no books worthy of being called books. Real books of original creative content carry real messages and real information, real insights, not artificially dumbed-down, white washed, or filtered content that misses the entire purpose and point of the author’s original work.
Yesterday a man named Norman Steinberg died, at the age of 83. He was the humor-filled screenwriter for Blazing Saddles, among other funny and powerful message movies. I wonder if he died of old age or of a broken heart, because he surely must have been America’s last humorist. Today’s censors say that no one is allowed to say or depict certain things (except for pedophilia, or cross-dressing, or biologically impossible and socially implausible gay/trans/etc beings which all seems all the rage among the Left), because somewhere in the universe a person’s feewings will be hurt.
Today’s censors don’t mind hurting the feelings of religiously observant Christians, Muslims and Jews, the people who keep modern society functioning, but God help you if you hurt the feelings of some pathetic 20-year-old weenie college kid somewhere. Burn that book!
You couldn’t build America today with all of the outrageous and useless regulations (which I had a direct hand in when I worked at USEPA in Washington, DC) weighing down our nation, and you couldn’t film or write Blazing Saddles today, because of all of the censorious book-burning crap coming out of Hollywood and from the supposed caretakers and curators of American culture.
Rest in peace, Mr. Steinberg. Wherever you are now, I hope you have been able to travel across artificial boundaries and achieve your highest and best abilities and purpose. Lord knows, you couldn’t do any of that here on earth today.
Today’s cultural censors would never approve this silly poster because of the gun (“guns are bad”), the rope (supposed violence), the horse (supposed animal abuse) etc
New York City is dangerous and dirty
In the past three years I have had the unhappy necessity of visiting Manhattan a number of times for business and family. Last June was the last time I went, and hopefully the last time I have to be there until the place is cleaned up from top to bottom.
Last June I took the pickup to move our daughter out. She lived in New York City for eight years, from undergrad through dental school, and until the last couple of years she enjoyed her experience tremendously. But when we had loaded the last of her things into the bed of the truck, she got into the cab and said “I can’t wait to leave Manhattan. It’s so sad, because I used to love this place. But now it is dangerous and dirty and I want out. Let’s go.”
Manhattan is now looking like its worst days back in the 1970s and 1980s before Rudy Giuliani was elected mayor. Trash is blowing around everywhere, thugs hang out and loiter and saunter along every street and park bench, homeless bums are living in the parks and on building steps. People are being attacked on the sidewalks by demented mental patients prematurely released before their treatments are completed. People exit a restaurant and are immediately punched, kicked, and robbed by young people who laugh about it.
The police do nothing about this dangerous chaos because the Manhattan district attorney believes that holding criminals accountable for their violence and destruction is somehow mean, or wrong. And so the criminals now rule the streets, as an official policy.
The old Diamond District on 47th Street is a shell of its former self. A thousand years of jewelry making and watch making and world class talent all concentrated into one city block is now gone, because some communist in power decided that all this material excess violated some notion of “equity,” and so the jewelers and watchmakers were driven out. It is a sad ghost town now.
An old friend of mine who lives in Manhattan complained about how her own restaurants, which her architect husband had designed, and into which she had invested great amounts of time and money, were torched and looted in the riots of 2020. When I asked her if this destruction was a result of political failure, she went straight to blaming the Bad Orange Man. Who does not live in NYC, was not on city council or mayor of said city, and who had no control over the policing of Manhattan’s streets. It is impossible for me to understand the mental state of a person who appears sane but who reflexively blames their own mistakes on someone hundreds of miles away with no involvement in the matters that have made said person so unhappy.
So long as the citizens of New York City continue to believe they can vote for self-destructive policies and for the political candidates who promote them, and yet expect a different outcome than the mess we see, then Manhattan will continue to descend into madness and filth.
Making matters worse, the prior administration of mayor “Bill DeBlasio” (this is his fictitious name), had embarked on one of those “It only makes sense on paper and in terms of vague feelings” massive landscape changes. Such as turning streetside parking all over the city into un-used bike-only lanes and on-street dining for restaurants. Even going so far as to fill in empty spaces where people used to park with gigantic flower pots and concrete containers. Anything to make NYC unfriendly to car drivers.
This makes no sense, because Americans in general and visitors to New York City in particular still drive cars. But such is the power of blind ideology: “Because all cars are bad, then places to park cars must also be bad.” This is crazy stuff, and it has resulted in a congested city being even more congested, even less user friendly and less accessible than it used to be. Which was difficult enough. If this gigantic failure is how you measure success, then further natural failures will continue to follow. As we see even right now today, failure is considered success in Manhattan.
I am glad I do not live there and don’t have to go there.
The concrete planters need a place to park where cars should be able to park. Because “cars are bad”
Median areas that used to offer car parking and delivery vehicle offloading are now clogged with concrete in order to stop “bad cars”
Rental bikes lined up in the most expensive and colorful virtue signal possible. No one uses these. But someone somewhere feels good about the symbolism
An empty and unused bike lane where cars used to park. Cars still need parking spaces, but don’t expect to find them in Manhattan, where virtue signaling is most important
Go ahead and make sense of NYC’s parking regulations. Try.
Restaurants have fully enclosed “outdoor” dining in the street, where cars used to drive and park. The cars still need to drive and park. Just more congestion and more exhaust fumes trying to navigate all the pointless virtue signaling
Trump or DeSantis for president?
The question is being asked about which candidate we should support for president, Donald J. Trump or Ron DeSantis. The other compelling candidate is Vivek Ramaswamy, whose simple yet articulate promotion of basic American and Western values is a welcome breath of fresh air amidst all of the GOPe RINO DC Swamp trash talk coming from Chris Christie (career politician), Nikki Haley (career politician), Mike Pence (career politician and proven traitor to America) and other washed-up has-beens.
To me this is a super simple choice. On the one hand we have a proven warrior who has suffered terrible persecution for his love of our nation (which is seen as a threat by the enemies of America, both foreign and domestic), and who yet stands firm and unwilling to bend or break against a huge tide of evil and corruption. We know everything we need to know about this candidate, and we know his capabilities. This is President Donald Trump, a political savior and hero of historic importance.
On the other hand we have a guy who is doing an outstanding job as governor of Florida, just now starting to really prove himself. I like Ron DeSantis’ policy positions, and he has earned my admiration for all of the political heavy lifting he is doing in Florida. Recently re-elected Governor DeSantis is showing every other governor who cares how to effectively fight back against the culture war being imposed upon us.
The problems with DeSantis are: In order to run for president he must break Florida’s Resign to Run Law, which requires him to resign from the governorship he just won. Instead of resigning, DeSantis is trying to get the Florida legislature to eliminate the law. This law serves a valuable purpose of keeping power-hungry career politicians from using their current elected office as a power base from which to climb ever higher without taking some real risk of losing that same political power they have already achieved.
What this tells us about DeSantis is that he is yet one more young man in a big hurry. And frankly I can’t stand these kinds of people. If we have seen one we have seen a thousand of them, mostly young guys in love with themselves, with their image, just desperate to validate their grandiose self image by being elected to office. And whatever office they do get elected to is never enough. Their egos and ambitions are just too great, and we have all seen a thousand times before how there is no room for We, The People in the lives or thoughts of these self-centered guys. Unfortunately, the openly ambitious DeSantis falls squarely into this demographic. Time will tell if he is able to shake off the ambition and focus solely on public service.
Some other concerns about DeSantis: Where was his voice about the lawless FBI raid on President Trump’s Mar-A-Lago home in Florida? Why didn’t DeSantis use the Florida state police to physically block the FBI Brownshirts? And where is DeSantis’ voice now that President Trump is being threatened with a totally phony arrest warrant from the blatantly corrupt New York City DA? Doesn’t DeSantis realize that whatever happens to President Trump is what is going to eventually happen to him, Ron DeSantis?
Governor DeSantis can tell any and all tin star lawless thugs from NYC that they will be arrested the minute they set foot in Florida. But he doesn’t. It is almost like DeSantis is happy to see President Trump be attacked so that he, DeSantis, will have the field cleared for him. Nope, Ron, that is not how this is going to work out. If you do not stand up for Trump now, then you will find yourself attacked similarly and you will have no one there to defend you when your own time arrives.
Finally, the people supporting Governor DeSantis are the usual GOPe suspects America cannot afford ever again. The Bush family, RINO Paul Ryan, you name it, DeSantis’ supporters are a league of war mongering DC Swamp uniparty villains. Again, this says everything about DeSantis’ intense ambition, and his lack of understanding about how the 2024 election is not about him, but rather about the well-being of America. So, no thank you, on this count, too.
President Trump is the only person who stands between us American citizens and the utter dissolution of our nation at the hands of self-interested politicians in both political parties and the Washington DC Swamp industrial complex bureaucracy. We have just this one last election in 2024 remaining to us voters before we are totally washed away in a tidal wave of lawlessness and vote stealing that will gut our constitutional freedoms and turn us all into slaves of big government.
For these reasons, President Donald John Trump has my unfettered support in his last and most important political campaign, the 2024 election for president. This is a campaign to save America, not just to make it great again.
The Uniparty. Corrupt Joe Biden with GOPe Kevin McCarthy palsing around together on the American taxpayer dime
General Robert E. Lee was a Democrat Party bigwig. The Confederacy was the Democrat Party. Slavery was a Democrat Party institution.
American hunters need an accurate round ball shotgun
Lt. James Forsyth wrote a fabulously prescient and useful hunting ballistics book in 1861 from his unique perch in Colonial India, “The Sporting Rifle and its Projectiles.” Using single shot and double barreled muzzleloading rifles, with mere black powder as the propellant, Forsyth squared off against the most dangerous wild animals modern humans have met in battle since the end of the Pleistocene, when our forbears wiped out all of the even more dangerous and ill-tempered megafauna with mere stone tipped spears.
Hold this thought for a minute.
Today’s hunter thinks he needs a soulless, faceless, characterless Three Million Magnum plastic and stainless steel rifle getting 1/8″ accuracy at three miles when topped with the Hubble Telescope, capable of blasting a twelve-inch gaping hole in a steel plate at that same three miles. But the truth is these modern gee-whiz gizmos are dumbing down, blunting, ruining and corrupting the most beautiful, honest, and pure hunting instincts and abilities we have inherited from our fur-clad ancestors.
Sniping animals from impossible distances with weapons they cannot possibly detect or withstand is nothing more than aerial bombing or target shooting at vulnerable living creatures who deserve our greatest respect and admiration, and upon whom we should only inflict our will when we are offensively at their own level of defense.
That is, what honest sport is there in assassinating an unsuspecting wild animal whose honed instincts protect it from every other natural predator, whose own predatory skills must be equally or better honed in order to close the distance and survive another day on the flesh of the prey animal?
What honor is there in these long distance assassinations? I say none.
You say you like to hunt? Okay then, hunt, dammit. Actually hunting means: Get outside on the landscape of your choice and perfect your actual hunting skills. Learn to play the wind, move quietly, use the topography to your advantage, be patient, be attentive, coordinate well with other hunters, and understand the life and habits of your quarry. Then and only then will you be an actual hunter worthy of the honorable name of hunter.
Enough of this hochsitz heated shooting box overlooking a planted field while waiting for some pet buck to step out five minutes before shooting light ends crap. This is not hunting, it is sitting on your lazy ass and relying on high technology to do the real work for you. Unless you are physically disabled or elderly, a status I myself am approaching and fighting hard every step of the way, do not dishonor yourself with this beyond early morning and late afternoon times. Or at least do not dishonor real hunters who actually hunt by calling yourself one of them when you do it exclusively.
Back to Forsyth, who though slight of stature was of immense bravery and manly stoic British character. (Oh, the British…a great people, once, and with some yet living among them who remember the old ways and who could lead their people forward through these dark days…if they would but will it.) Anyhow, Lt. Forsyth was a small but tough little bastard who faced down 8,000-pound rogue elephants, 3,000-pound gaur bison, and 600 pound male tigers, with mere black powder muzzleloading rifles at powder-burn distances.
Regardless of how fatal his shot might be, or not, Forsyth’s hunting adventures were very often enriched by the smell of burning fur as locomotive-powered horns and fangs sped close by him on their way to trying to stamp him into a little red puddle. Gunpowder that is still burning as it exits the gun’s muzzle is likely to catch something on fire if it is close enough, including the hide of charging Death. Forsyth embodied the spirit of the hunter, at least the truly manly hunter willing to take a real risk to gain a genuine and truly earned prize. We who are hunters today must all admire Forsyth, and we must seek to emulate him as much as we can in today’s sad world of toxic femininity and low testosterone. Sniping unsuspecting animals with magnum firepower is gay, or lame, or pathetic; choose your own appropriate adjective, but don’t do it. If Forsyth could trust his life and limb to a round ball, then we can trust our tame deer hunts to it, too.
The singular principle of Forsyth’s sporting rifles (not military weapons, which operate on different principles with different goals) was the use of the round lead ball. Like Sir Samuel Baker in Africa and Ceylon, Forsyth found that large round lead balls sufficiently propelled and accurately placed would utterly crush the life force out of dangerous animals, as well as more demur animals one might simply bag for the pot. Bear in mind again that these two men, in particular Baker, discovered the effectiveness of the round ball by literally shooting dangerous game at such close distances that any small mistake would probably mean life-changing injury or death. They got this close in order to ensure the proper placement of their ball, not to test themselves and see if they could cheat Death.
For mere deer and elk, Baker used a shortened Claymore sword. Yes, he hunted and killed deer species of all sizes (including Highland red stag) by hand, at close quarters combat. So, again, do not lower yourself to shooting unsuspecting animals at long distances with gigantic magnum calibers. Be a man and a hu-man, and get out on the landscape within spitting distance and earn that critter. Archery hunters know and do this innately, and are thus justifiably proud of their kills. Same for traditional muzzleloading hunters, spear chuckers, atl-atl launchers, and handgun hunters.
Today, to implement both Forsyth’s hunting spirit and technological advances in ballistics, so that we might be the best firearm hunters we can possibly be and also be the most practical hunters we can be in an increasingly regulated environment, we need a modern firearm that achieves multiple goals simultaneously.
To that end, I propose the single shot and double barreled shotgun, rifled with Forsyth rifling. Any well made utility grade shotgun will do just fine. Most of the old but trusty utility double barrel shotguns like the Savage Fox Model B or the Stevens Model 311 should take a slight rifling just fine, because their ridiculously thick barrels could be just as easily used to club baby seals as seal the explosive gasses of fired ordnance.
OK, pump and semiauto shotguns could have Forsyth rifled barrels, too. It’s just that our skills improve when we are challenged by (self-imposed) limitations.
Forsyth rifling is specially designed for the round ball at black powder velocities between 1,100 and 1,900 feet per second. This rifling has very shallow depth grooves, like 2/1000 of an inch to 3/1000 of an inch, as well as a very slow twist rate. Like one full turn of the cut rifling in 72-90 inches. With appropriate powder charges in modern steel barrels, either black powder or smokeless powders can be safely used, and both fabulous accuracy and devastating knockdown power achieved. The perfect “brush gun,” at the least.
Using black powder, Forsyth satisfactorily tested his rifling and round balls out to 250 yards, saying that within 150 yards it was exactingly accurate. Probably consistent 1-2 inch groups. With big lead balls. Imagine what can be done using smokeless powder.
To my knowledge, nothing like Forsyth rifling is employed in modern shotguns today. Despite or perhaps because of the ongoing craze for shotguns accurately shooting massive slugs (like TarHunt), sabots, and conicals, it seems the lowly but easily obtained and highly effective round ball has been shelved because too many of them were ineffectively shot at deer and bear out of smoothbore shotguns, or shot out of tightly rifled shotgun barrels designed for conical bullets and sabots.
Round balls have received bad press because here in America they have not been correctly matched with proper rifling except for smaller deer and bear caliber-sized single shot muzzleloading rifles. Time for a change!
One constant and legitimate knock against “punkin balls” is that they were terribly under powered, meant more for imprecise point blank shooting at animals in thick cover. This problem can be easily fixed by correctly loading round balls into shotgun hulls for use in appropriately rifled barrels that will give deadly accuracy and destructive force to round balls. Meaning, add more powder! Pap’s old “punkin balls” would have actually shot incredibly accurately had they gone through barrels with Forsyth rifling.
So let us return to a simpler, cheaper, and frankly more manly and effective firearm: The modern shotgun with Forsyth rifling, designed to very accurately and effectively propel a 20, 16, or 12-guage round lead ball (only 350 to 600 grains weight 😳) around 1,500 feet per second. Put these velocity-times-mass kinetic energy numbers in your pipe and smoke it! You will smoke every deer and bear you hit with such powerful projectiles!
And for those hunters concerned about the cost and availability of hunting projectiles and reloading, there is nothing simpler than pouring your own lead round balls and reloading shotgun hulls. Push come to shove with components, you can most easily obtain lead and black powder, and shotgun hulls are reloadable about twenty times each.
Shooting round balls might feel like going backwards, but in many ways the simpler ways and days were better.
Today I submitted a written request to Henry Repeating Firearms, makers of sturdy, accurate, no-frills shotguns perfect for employing Forsyth rifling, that they please consider undertaking such a project. Let’s say to start, manufacture 100 Forsyth rifling single shot break-action shotguns, tested with correct diameter round balls fired from common shotgun hulls with commonly obtainable smokeless and black powders.
If the 100 single shots sell well, then try a few dozen double barrel shotguns that have received some elementary “regulating” whereby the two barrels are brought into pointing harmony with one another. Each barrel should place its ball at or near the landing point of the other barrel, fully converging together within a 75-120 yard distance.
In conclusion, let us say we pursue this particular goal if not for efficiency, effectiveness, and ease of reloading, then to restore our rightful place and reputation as American riflemen, long hunters, frontiersmen with pluck and the best hunting skills on Planet Earth bar none. Shooting round balls within 200 yards is true fair-chase, ethical hunting.
Lieut. James Forsyth of the British Bengal Riflemen Corps posing with some of his well-earned Asian hunting trophies in about 1860. All of which he took with the black powder round ball. Look at the tiger skull that is the size of Forsyth’s entire chest. Note the tiger skin into which quite a few full-sized Forsyths could be stashed all at one time. We hunters today would do well to use Forsyth’s properly arranged round ball technology.
Sir Samuel Baker, gentleman, ultimate stud, patriot, hunter, fearless adventurer and most tender, devoted, and loving husband to a slave woman he liberated. We should all yearn to be like Sir Samuel in some way or another. Maybe it will just be hunting with a powerful round ball instead of a hyperkinetic missile.
Digital currency’s iron slave chains
Oh, the irony of a bank that is now insolvent in part because it illegally gave unsustainable amounts of highly regulated investor money to the domestic terrorist group “Black Lives Matter,” due to the weird political and anti-historic narrative that present day huge cash transfers (so called reparations from people who never owned slaves to people who never were slaves) are required from all other Americans to American blacks alone, above and beyond the past seventy years of gigantic taxpayer funded welfare programs and affirmative action preferences that ignored merit and rewarded skin color and that have benefited American blacks almost exclusively at enormous financial cost to America.
It is illegal to give away bank assets, or structure investing strategies, if it damages the bank’s ability to fully ensure its fiduciary duty to its shareholders and clients. The sole purpose of a bank or investment firm is to maximize its clients’ financial benefits.
This failure of Silicon Valley Bank has already created a ripple effect in the banking industry that is threatening a whole host of banks, including industry giant Credit Suisse. So it is not just one bank, but many that are being destroyed by Black Lives Matter. Turns out one of the primary reasons so many banks are in big trouble is because they contributed some 73 BILLION DOLLARS to Black Lives Matter and related spin-off organizations. None of these donations were legal, because they put the banks’ balance sheets in jeopardy, but as we know already from the related failure of Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX fund (which now appears to have been created primarily to launder money and funnel it into the Democrat Party and BLM), illegal massive political donations due to the need to virtue signal is a Big Thing.
What is not ironic but scary about these bank and investment fund failures is the crisis opportunity it is creating for advocates of digital currency. And digital currency means just one thing: Slavery. Slavery through government control of how, when, and where you spend your own money.
Digital currency has nothing to do with convenience. No one really cares about that. I mean, how inconvenient is it really to pull a twenty dollar bill out of your wallet or purse and pay for gas, groceries, or lunch out with a business colleague? Paper money and coin is not only plenty convenient, it is the hallmark of a free person making free market decisions. No one else controls how much of your own money you decide to spend.
On the other hand, digital currency will always be directly controlled by the government. No matter what empty promises are made about digital currency’s privacy, there is only one reason for it to exist, and that is to put government bureaucrats in charge of your own finances. And as soon as you have digital currency, the government can turn it on or turn it off, take it away with the push of a button, or block it from being transferred to a person or business because someone in government does not like what you are trying to buy. Like maybe a gun, or a gasoline powered car, or firewood, or clothing made by a particular manufacturer.
Government control of your spending choices is slavery. You will not be able to make your own decisions. This arrangement is being pushed by the same exact people in government (the current administration) who wanted to monitor every withdrawal and expenditure above $600.00 that you and I make, and who wanted to limit your bank account, and who now have the Internal Revenue Service digging deeply and illegally into every financial decision we make, looking for the smallest of discrepancies to then come down like a ton of bricks upon each of us.
Digital currency is government gone wild, driven by bad people who do not like your freedom. These are people who really truly believe that they know best how you should spend your own money, and they are now trying to use government to set up everything so that you are hemmed in on every side and can only do what these bureaucrats tell you you can do.
It is difficult to tell how many Americans are catching on to this situation. So many Americans wrongly believe that America is too big to fail, even while America is failing right under our feet and under our noses, right in front of our faces. The Silicon Valley Bank failure is bad enough, and its reasons for failing are bad enough. But the ripple effect and bigger outcomes from its failure are really, really bad. Incredibly bad. Much worse than just a handful of banks going insolvent. The use of this growing banking and “financial crisis” to implement digital currency so that we go from being a free people to an enslaved people is the worst part of it.
Say No to digital currency. Say Yes to your freedom to decide how and where and when you will spend your own money. Resist and push back against the evil people who are seeking to take over your life by controlling your financial decisions. Or, don’t resist, and then don’t complain when you find yourself suddenly enslaved to totalitarian government in heavy chains of iron.
And if you are thinking ahead about your own freedom and ability to be self-reliant and independent, then you will be growing a substantial garden, keeping some chickens, and thinking of ways you can participate in a barter system that keeps government hands off of you.
Life and Love of the Knife
Since God created us humans, either in one quick master stroke or through a series of evolutionary steps (I don’t know which one and I don’t really care, because God is all powerful and can do anything He wants, and all we puny humans can try to do is figure it out as we muddle along), we have had a love affair with sharp edges. Blades, that is, which give our amazing but soft and weak hands the ability to cut, slice, stab, and pierce dangerous foes and animals, and render them into delicious roasted brontosaurus steaks. As Mogli says in “A Jungle Story,” his antagonist, the massive male tiger Shere Khan, may have his big teeth, but “I have my own tooth,” a sizeable steel knife blade affixed to a sturdy and dependable handle, with which Mogli is indeed a significant foe to all who would eat him.
To humans, the knife in all its forms – skinning blade, meat slicing blade, spearing blade, or stabbing sword blade – is our tooth, claw, and fang. It is our defense, a lifeline, and third arm in a world where most of the critters we have hunted, eaten, and clothed ourselves with often have a mouth full of knives as well as heads and hooves adorned with sharp and pointy edges, any one of which is instant doom to us. As a brief visit to the dinosaur and modern reptile exhibits in any respectable museum will show, we humans inhabit a world where history has had most of our battles and warfare with men and beasts alike determined by who had the bigger, faster, longer, sharper knife blade.
The Pleistocene is where modern humanity and our knives and spear blades came into Yin and Yang fusion, resulting in the extermination of even the largest and most dangerous of wild animals. And well into the 20th century, men everywhere across the planet daily adorned themselves with blades both practical and beautiful. In a world that is still always dangerous, blades have always represented us humans, and men in particular, as both useful and dangerous.
So is it any surprise that even today, in our sickly society filled with Toxic Femininity, men, particularly men, still have a love affair and deep personal connection with knives and blades of all sorts? It’s almost spiritual. Knives and sharp blades have been our constant companions since our species gained consciousness, and knives have been all that stood between us and death for over a hundred thousand years. Often in a hunter-gatherer society, a good knife is all a man needed to live a comfortable life. Nowadays, we habitually carry small pocket knives by Case so that we can accomplish small home chores easily. Serious blade length reduction! How far we have fallen! Are we still men, armed only with our tiny folding pocket knives?
I say yes, we are.
Because like so many millions of others, I am a masculine man and a not a Low T feminized and pathetic freak of self-loathing nature, and because I am an outdoorsman, and because I am against being or feeling helpless and defenseless, I use sharp blades all the time. A sharp edge is always on me or near me, so that a threatening saber toothed cardboard box can be quickly broken down and put into the recycling bin. That always makes my woman feel like the tipi is properly sorted out. Like thousands of generations of men (M-E-N of nose, ear, and back hair variety) before me, my appreciation and love of the knife has resulted in a life of the knife, and I celebrate that. It keeps me thoroughly human.
If you are a guy (born a man with a penis) or a practical woman (a human born with a vagina and female reproductive parts), or even someone caught in between both genders and yet nonetheless afflicted with a strong streak of self preservation and practical ability, I strongly suggest carrying the largest and most robust blade you can legally and practically use every day. Or just get some CutCo knives for your kitchen. It will make you feel like a million bucks, at night your hands will naturally paint beautiful primitive cave art on the walls of your basement, and you won’t ask yourself where that innate skill suddenly came from….because you will be acting organically like a natural and properly kitted out human being. These things naturally flow from one to the next.
Just be careful not to get too carried away with this knife thing. Buying knives easily becomes a habit or even an addiction. All for the right reasons, of course. It is hardwired in us.
My buddy Irv has a knife problem. As an electrician, he has many opportunities to seriously test all kinds of pocket knives and knife steels. But he yearns to strap a dozen sheath knives on and prowl the woods. He has significant back hair, too, because he is a man.
Two original Stone Age tools. A flint hide scraper (top) and a chert butchering knife from Upstate New York
A very small slice of the hunting knives we have at our reach here, including a matched ivory micarta handled pair of Randall copies for my son and I by Perry County maker John Johnson each complete with over-the-shoulder baldrics and belt sheaths.
Pronged spears and sharp arrows (sharp blades on flying sticks) from about twenty thousand years ago. Still the best hunt around.
Super cheap WalMart special faux Damascus steel Japanese style kitchen knife is still very sharp and an an incredible tool
USA-made CutCo, definitely not a cheap kitchen knife, with excellent blade steel and bombproof handle material. Highly recommended.
Most of the knives in our kitchen. All CutCos except for two Old Hickory high carbon blades at either end. Old Hickory is an excellent USA-made kitchen knife at a very low cost that can easily be an outdoor knife
Riverdance 25th Anniversary Show A+
Last night the Princess of Patience and I drove to Reading, PA, to watch the 25th anniversary show of the much celebrated Riverdance show that took western countries by storm 25 years ago. We enjoyed the show very much, especially the tap dancing part, which is the height of dancing talent.
The venue was the historic “Rajah” theater, now the Santander Performing Arts Center, in downtown Reading, Pennsylvania. The theater’s interior is nicely artistic and harkens to an earlier time in American history, when design and materials were stone, stained glass, crafted metalwork, and did not include ubiquitous bright neon and loads of plastic. Parking was abundant, whether on the street or in lots or in nearby parking garages.
Comfortably parking my fat butt in one of the old seats was another matter, and I tried to joke with the tall lady to my right whose elbow kept bumping into my arm. Or maybe my arm kept bumping into her elbow, with the result that each of us watched the show with one arm stretched across our chest to avoid discomfiting the other person. Point being that these are smaller seats and could use a few inches added to either side to comfortably accommodate larger, wider, broader bodied people. If you are pint-sized like the Princess of Patience, then you will be more than just fine. The venue was clean, tidy, well maintained, and had no weird old smells.*
Riverdance is fundamentally about Irish tapdance, or at least it was 25 years ago. Back then people commented that this kind of tap dancing was not really culturally Irish per se, but the fact is that it is its own thing and the people doing it and promoting it are mostly Irish dancing to lots of Irish music. So I call it Irish tap dance, and it is a lot of fun to watch. Beyond the outstanding tap dancing abilities of the individual performers, the audience is also entertained by the choreography and the perfectly executed timing of the performers as a troupe. Add in some Celtic-themed music, with Irish musical instruments like the Uillean pipes and drums, some traditional Irish style clothing, some songs sung in Gaelic, and you have the entire package. Excellent light show and dry ice fog for effect.
My favorite performance was the eight men executing some sort of intensely high energy quasi military exercise, with yelled commands from one to another. It was so perfectly timed and crisply done that the audience roared when they finished. Wow. Impressive!
My least favorite (as there is bound to be in almost every kind of theatrical performance) scenes are the singing. Because of the sound system, I can never tell if this is piped in and mouthed by the performers, or is, in fact, their own world class singing voices. I have my suspicions. The sole acoustical instrument scene was outstanding, but again, like the singing, sometimes it is hard to believe that the world-class fiddling is being done by the leaping nymph in front of me, and that it is not being piped in. No question that the percussion guy is incredibly talented. One request: Someone at some point in the show should wear some woad on his face, like Michael Flatley occasionally did. Show some true Celtic pride.
Probably the most entertaining dance routine was near the end of the show, when the backdrop (digital screen, as is standard now on stages almost everywhere) switched from the Emerald Isle countryside to a Downtown-to-Brooklyn B Train station and Manhattan cityscape, with a Hispanic guy and a black guy each doing their own ethnic styles of tap dance. Then the Irish guys enter in a mock-up of the old West Side Story confrontation, and the two groups have a series of dance-offs against each other using their different styles. And then of course they dance together. Lots of performer humor and mugging for the audience, as well as amazing dance, and the audience enjoyed it a lot.
I counted about thirty dancing performers and six musicians last night, and both the Princess of Patience and I felt like we had experienced a full evening of high talent entertainment. During intermission a bunch of little girls who had come to watch the show did their best Irish tap dance in one of the aisles, to lots of praise and cheering by the audience. And naturally, the entire audience was a sea of shades of green and various family green plaids and the famous Black Watch plaid, including tartan caps, shirts, coats, a kilt and sporran, and more than a few shilleileighs.
Riverdance 25th Anniversary Show is an A+ fun and impressive night out for anyone and any family. You will leave feeling energized and positive. When we first saw Riverdance decades ago, it was a kind of “If you weren’t Irish when you showed up, you will feel Irish when you leave at the end” experience. The updated version is truly a representation of America 2023, with plenty of Ireland’s best along with “culturally updated” themes that are fun.
*A note about the Santander Performing Arts Center: Like almost every other performing arts center I can think of, Santander Performing Arts Center does not allow its patrons to carry any defensive weapons on its premises. This means that patrons must disarm before entering the building, and then we exit into downtown Reading at night unarmed and vulnerable. Downtown Reading, PA, is not a safe place. The streets are dirty, trash is blowing around everywhere, and there are aimless or homeless people walking around, standing around, everywhere. When we entered this venue, we had to go through metal detectors carrying our keys and cell phones with our hands held high as if we were being detained by law enforcement. It is a humiliating experience. When I broached the idea to a security guard at the entrance of having lock boxes available inside the foyer to concealed carry people, he responded “That is an excellent suggestion, but it is never going to happen. With the current management never, it will never happen, I am sorry to say.” Which raises the questions of why these performing arts venues do this, and what responsibility do they have if you are mugged or beaten while approaching their building or after exiting it. Do they really have our safety at heart, if they disarm us and then turn us loose vulnerable on the city streets at night? I do not like being disarmed, especially when I do not see realistic alternatives being provided by the hosting venues.
Intermission time, showing some kids tap dancing in the aisle, and showing some of the theater’s old crafted ornamentation
Ceiling of the old “Rajah” now the Santander Performing Arts Center
When performers ask the audience not to record them, I do as they ask. So the best I can show is the empty stage with the show logo. Several extra rows of chairs up front were added to accommodate the audience.
Russia & Ukraine & the West a year later
A year later after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a few realties emerge.
1) Massive scale wars with massive landscape-scale complete smoking rubble destruction and muddy trenches did not end after World War One (“The War to End All Wars“), or World War Two. Now, our entire beautiful blue and green planet appears to be on the edge of World War Three, and the carnage in Ukraine that right now seems so unimaginable is just the beginning.
2) Russia may harbor grievances against Germany for two back-to-back invasions in the past hundred years, but there is no avoiding the fact now that Russia is the aggressor here with Ukraine. No one likes a bully, and Russia cannot reasonably claim to be any sort of a victim while behaving this badly. No, sorry, few people in Europe or America accept the silly notion that Russia is entitled to invade and subdue and rule with an iron fist every nation near it. It is not right and it should not continue.
3) As rotten as Russian dictator Vladimir Putin may be, there is no denying that he loves Russia and he believes in basic European/ Western values. Yes, it is easy to lose sight of the value of these facts in the face of so much Putin-led barbarism and destruction. But very few European/ Western leaders love their own countries; in fact most of them seem to be at war with their own countries and with their own countrymen, and the West is collapsing as a result. Isn’t it an oddity that of all places on Earth, Russia actually looks like one of the more stable places to live and raise a family?
4) Ukraine became America’s corrupt whore during the Obama administration, and Ukraine was being run by the Biden family when someone named Donald Trump came along in 2017 and shined a bright light on the disgusting mess. Hence all of the stops being pulled out by the corporate media and their Democrat Party masters to stop Trump at any cost, even the price of stealing the 2020 election and turning the American federal government against the American people. All of the fake Russiagate hoax, the Ukraine phone call hoax, the two fake impeachments, were to keep President Trump from digging into the really bad and illegal American corruption farming operation in Ukraine. And now, corrupt Joe Biden is dumping hundreds of billions of dollars into Ukraine to prop it up to keep his corrupt operation from being fully exposed.
5) Ukraine isn’t really about defending a small, innocent country from a big bully neighbor. It is mostly about American politicians hiding and protecting their political and financial equivalent of a “black ops” country from further scrutiny. At least this war did not start out this way. Like all wars, this war is becoming about other things now.
6) The other thing that the Ukraine war is becoming is a firmer and much more organized alliance between Russia, China, and Iran as they seek to destroy the West. For those of us who love America, freedom, lots of delicious food and beer and easy weekends and endless entertainment and fun fun fun after a hard work week, this emerging alliance aimed at our throat is a really big problem. But as much as the Russia-China-Iran challenge to the West is more visible and threatening, a huge proportion of Americans ignore it and still take America and their safety for granted, still have their heads in the sand, and still want to keep voting for people who are aggressively undermining America from within. A weak America is how Americans will suddenly lose everything they enjoy and take for granted right now.
This war in Ukraine and how Americans understand it is how empires and cultures end. No, America is not too big to fail. But our own nation’s failure is beginning to happen right in Ukraine.
And isn’t it strange that the American Left, which spent 100 years undermining the American military and our national security in the name of “peace” is now hell bent on starting World War Three?
Another past war in an obscure European nation, and more dead beautiful young men with grieving parents. The yellow caption on this is incorrect. See the more accurate description below. It is heart breaking.
I dug around the Internet to find this bit of obscure history to help our own generation understand what is happening now in Ukraine. The parallels between 1912 Serbia (which became Yugoslavia) (does anyone today even remember that country?), the resulting World War I, and the current war in Ukraine are eerie as hell. History often repeats itself, but it doesn’t have to…
J6 footage vindicates J6 protestors
Although I am not a fan of new US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and I view his semi-release of the hidden 42,000 HOURS of January 6th video footage to just one opinion maker (Tucker Carlson) with skepticism, what little bit of this footage is beginning to drip out into the public domain already vindicates the January 6th protestors around the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021.
The day after the protest, I wrote about my January 6th experience in front of the US Capitol here, and over two years and an FBI interview later, my strongest, clearest recollections remain thus: The uniformed police rained an immense and unceasing barrage of physical and chemical assaults down upon the peaceful and lawful protestors standing out in front of the Capitol.
When I was asked 18 months later if I saw any violence or property destruction in front of the Capitol, I responded “By whom?”
Because yes, I witnessed and personally experienced a tremendous amount of violence… by police against American citizens engaging in the most basic of our Constitutional rights of peaceable assembly to petition our government for redress of our grievances. I well recall standing huddled with friends, well behind the barricades that separated the legal protest from the no-go area, shocked by the police brutality, each of us asking one another “Are you seeing what I am seeing? Is this really happening?”
Despite being far away from the barricades, I was repeatedly shot with rubber bullets and gassed or bombed with pepper spray. So were my friends standing with me. We did nothing wrong. We should not have experienced this treatment, and neither should the protestors standing at the barricades.
Now that Republicans control the US House, approximately 42,000 HOURS of police badgecam and vestcam video footage, CCTV footage, and related videos are being released to the American public. This footage had been hidden away by Nancy Pelosi in order to both create a false narrative of what happened on January 6th, 2021, and to prevent access to video evidence that runs contrary to the fake narrative Pelosi and the mainstream media have pushed since January 7th 2021. These videos include audio, and police officers can be heard gloating over how much illegal use of force they had engaged in, how much lawlessness they had turned against the protestors, how they enjoyed using blunt force weapons against helpless Americans who were physically swept up and away in a tide of angry humanity and who found themselves in places they never intended to go.
And that is the takeaway from the newly released videos. American citizens who are aggrieved about a blatantly stolen 2020 election are going to become enraged when subjected to even more illegal official mistreatment.
I do not condone what happened in the US Capitol, but I also know that angry people do angry things. I also know that a great number of the people who were actually inside the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021, were ANTIFA and US federal employees dressed as Trump supporters. There is already a ton of evidence of this at news outlets like The Gateway Pundit and The Epoch Times.
I hope America has some version of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission after this video footage comes out. Americans are going to see January 6th as it really happened, not as one side lied about how it happened and then hid away evidence to the contrary.
UPDATE: More J6 video footage showing uniformed police ushering well behaved protesters into the US Capitol.
PAGOP a gutless, soulless, heartless pile of
The Pennsylvania Republican State Committee met last week. Annual meetings can be useful, and they can be indicative. My impression is the meeting was more indicative than useful.
One of the indicators standing boldly and studiously ignored in every room like an elephant, or something, was the reality that the PA GOP is financially broke and filled up with “decision makers” incapable of breathing life back into the dying body. The PAGOP sold its downtown Harrisburg headquarters that was but a short walk to the PA Capitol and all the elected officials therein, and it now occupies rented space on the outskirts of town in the PA Dental Association building. Truly a downfall measured in miles.
The reason the PAGOP is in financial trouble is that it has lost its raison d’etre, its purpose for being, its reason for existence. Few people are left to support it. Like most Republican Party apparatuses across America, the Pennsylvania Republican Party exists for the sake of its own existence. That is, the group has no discernible set of principles or even values outside of electing people from deep within its own ranks. More or less a social club.
It is a group not only living in a van down by the river, not metaphorically speaking, because the Pennsylvania Dental Association is actually right next to the Susquehanna River, it is also a trademark in search of a product. What was accomplished at this gathering of PAGOP muckety mucks and who’s whos? Endorsement votes, that’s what! Yes, this group of three hundred-and-some people gathered together to vote repeatedly against the interests of their own voting base. With millionaire GOPe consultants taking notes on the rollcall votes.
See, the PAGOP specializes in endorsing establishment caricatures, I mean characters, who are people most closely aligned with the personal pocket books of the members of the PAGOP. These endorsed candidates need not necessarily stand for anything of substance. Rather, they must be socially acceptable to the gathering. That is to say, non-threatening, genial, kind of milquetoast, definitely not making any waves.
And it is this kind of political candidate whom the Republican voter despises most of all. Over and over, Republican voters say they want the Republican party to stay out of primary elections and just let the Republican voters sort it out. No unfair advantages to be given to any particular candidate, just because, say, they happen to be golfing buddies with some PAGOP muckety muck. Instead of genial personalities, the Republican voter base wants barroom brawlers, candidates who say unvarnished truths, people who are like the voters and who actually stand for something and who are willing to take risks and make sacrifices to see those beliefs through to the end.
Nope. The PAGOP held its annual ritual seance behind closed doors, to hell with the broken hearts and shattered dreams of the actual voters who get Republicans elected. To wit: Not one mention of election integrity at the gathering. Not one mention of the mechanics by which actual living citizens vote for the candidates they support. And this is important because ever since the election of 2020, all the basic rules of fair, transparent, accountable, and democratic voting have been thrown out the window in Pennsylvania. Our state has no voting laws. Instead, we have a gigantic vote stealing scheme vs. a bunch of milquetoast, genial, go-along-to-get-along weenies who are all too happy to say “Awww shucks” when they lose so they can get back to their expensive fundraiser or dinner out, tab paid by the lobbyist host.
Republican voters have been screaming about election integrity, and absolutely no one at the 2023 PAGOP state committee gathering said a damned thing about it. And until something is done about the lawlessness engulfing Pennsylvania elections, Republicans will continue to artificially lose election after election. And the PAGOP seems perfectly OK with this fact. Think on that….
One more example of the cost of this official spinelessness: Last year someone submitted a draft resolution to their X__ County Republican Committee, stating that the committee would stand in solidarity with the roughly one hundred January 6th political prisoners being held illegally in dangerous conditions, uncharged, beaten by the Washington, DC prison guards. Not a peep was heard in response, and so the resolution was submitted yet again to the committee leaders. Months went by, and nothing was heard.
If county Republican Committees cannot stand in solidarity with Republican political prisoners illegally held in dangerous and filthy jails, then the county Republican Committee stands for nothing. Zero. Contrast this weak stance to the way the Left bailed out even the most felonious of their arsonists and murderous looters in 2020, across America. No one was too violent or evil to be bailed out of jail by Kamala Harris and the Democrat Party.
If the PAGOP and its 67 county subsidiaries will not fight fire with fire, or at least try to put out the fire, or at least show some back bone and support for its base, then the PAGOP will cease to mean anything. And as we see, the PA GOP does nothing except police its own internals. So it really stands for nothing.
Heads up: Josh Prince is running for Commonwealth Court, and he deserves your vote. Josh has represented me in years-long litigation with Harrisburg City over its illegal anti-gun rights ordinances. So far, Josh has won every round with the city’s lawyers. See? Josh Prince embodies the fighting spirit that the Republican voters crave, and so Josh deserves your vote. Please vote for Josh Prince on Primary Election Day, which is May 16th, 2023.