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Why flintlock hunting mistakes happen

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

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

This is the theory, anyhow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy hunting and good luck!

 

The Spirit of the Season

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Deer season mostly in the rearview mirror

All year we hunters wait for deer rifle season like excited little kids holding our breath for some big, special treat. And then rifle season arrives, we run ourselves ragged, and suddenly…a switch is thrown…it is all over.

Where did all our fun times and friends and family go? Why, they were sitting with us having dinner and laughing just minutes ago, and adventuring around the beautiful woods together just hours ago…and now…now my life seems so very quiet, and humdrum.

Like the three days of bear season, the two weeks of deer season are so highly anticipated, and yet they are also then over so, so quickly. I guess this is the way of all fun times.

This year I can’t think of any woods I hunted in that had many or any acorns. This absence of food literally caused mountain deer to migrate. It was wild to see, or not see, as the word “see” can be taken to mean, because we hardly saw many deer in the mountains. Sure, we took some, and I have no complaints, as I know plenty of people who did not even get a shot at a deer, much less see any. I was able to pick and choose some shots, and one that I declined on a very nice buck I regretted soon after. That shot was not a “good” shot, but would have hit him right in the middle of the ribs. A liver shot, and almost immediately fatal. But a tracking job nonetheless, and not a shot I would have been proud of.

And so that buck lived to see another day, and because I had not filled my buck tag in 2019, I felt both very grown up for having made the correct decision and also very foolish for having not taken what was given to me.

But the mountain hunters did not have a lot of luck in rifle season, the best hunting having happened in October and early November during archery season. Plenty of browse and some few acorns were available for the deer then, and they were not feeling so pressured and anxious about food as they are now. No, the mountain hunters sat and waited, or did drives and yet still waited to see deer. But the deer, desiring not to starve to death, migrated on to whatever food sources they could find, and there they still sit.

Well, the fact is that the north country is seriously socked in with deep snow. Like a solid two to almost three feet in most places. The deer can hardly move through this, let alone paw or browse for food under it. Additionally, as soon as warm temperatures arrive, or a few hours of rain, that deep snow will have a thick, hard crust on top of it. And the deer will not be able to walk on it, stand on it, feed on it. Like we had in 2005, we will probably see a serious deer die-off across big parts of the Big Woods north country from this deep snow in the coming week. In 2005, after a similar deep snow with a heavy crust, I recall finding dozens of deer carcasses all over the mountains around us. In some instances the coyotes were able to close the distance and just pull them down, but in a lot of situations, the deer just laid down on that crusty snow, curled up, and starved to death.

Pretty sad, even for conservationists who know the mountain deer herds needed to be thinned out for the sake of forest health.

Down in the farmland, the deer seemed to be doing just dandy. In farm country, edge habitat browse and waste grain are so abundant that the plague of four-legged deer locusts have no trouble making a living, deep snow or not. Flintlock season cannot come too soon for the farm country, where our own tenant farmer informed me a few weeks ago that the deer have eaten all of our profit to the point where we can no longer afford to grow corn or soybeans. Going forward, we will only be growing hay.

For hunters having trouble understanding what this means, let me explain. If the farmer cannot make money from farming because the over-abundant deer eat up his profits, then the farmer cannot afford to pay the land owner a healthy per-acre rent that pays the land taxes and covers many annual maintenance costs. If farming won’t pay the costs of farm land, then maybe a few house lots here or there will pay…and thus is beautiful, sacred farmland slowly, inexorably, sadly converted to pavement. By deer no less.

And so in farm country, deer managers like me see deer more like rats than like deer. Rats are vermin, the overabundant deer become vermin, and deer hunting becomes less of an adventure, and more of a chore, or a jihad, to protect the beautiful landscape from becoming one more housing development.

These are some reflections on deer season. I have not killed a deer with a flintlock in many years, and hopefully this season I will. God knows, the farmland needs all the help it can get.

US Supreme Court disgraces itself even further

In the past few weeks America’s social fabric has been deeply marred by a US Supreme Court unwilling to hear two critical lawsuits bearing directly upon the obviously fraudulent election results. One lawsuit was brought by Pennsylvanians, the other by Texans. Each suit on its face had incredibly compelling facts and merits, and yet the US Supreme Court declined to hear either of them, essentially saying that whatever bad election stuff happens in a state stays in that state (as if a state behaving illegally must be expected to go back and correct itself).

And then along comes a Kansas voting rights law, which protects the sanctity of “one-citizen-one-vote” in Kansas, and then the same exact US Supreme Court strikes it down just two days ago. So much for the Court’s prior statement that what states do with their individual elections laws is solely at the discretion of that state!

You would never know that this same Court was operating in this same universe, let alone in the same country at the same time period.  Because if its decisions about the Pennsylvania and Texas cases meant one set of principles were operating, the Court’s holding in the Kansas case means the exact opposite is now true. And there is no democratic institution anywhere on Earth worth its salt that can operate as arbitrarily and capriciously as our Court is right now, and expect to be taken seriously by the governed.

Arbitrary and capricious government decisions strike at the heart of democracy and representative government, and it sure looks like the US Supreme Court is trying to run a dagger through America’s very heart.

The Court is wildly swinging here, for everyone to see in broad daylight. Refusing to even discuss unimaginably evil fraudulent voting behavior on the one hand, and then making a decision that strips Kansas voters of their rights and their expectation that Kansas elections will be free and fair on the other hand….this is a Court that is quite clearly out of control. And a Court that is out of control is a Court that has impeached its own credibility and standing, and which will lose the support of the governed.

Dear US Supreme Court members: If you will not even hear our pleas for relief, then why should we listen to anything you say? You work for The People, not the other way around.

Why does the US Supreme Court exist? Was it not established in order to address the most pressing legal issues of the nation, to preserve the sanctity of the US Constitution, so as to avoid political bottlenecks that are otherwise always resolved through bloodshed? The entire purpose of democracy is to give all citizens equal standing in every way, and equal opportunities for making their voices heard. Citizens whose voices cannot or will not be heard become alienated from the body politic, and they must choose alternative routes for resolving their grievances.

Here the Court is making it abundantly clear to all Americans that at least five of its nine members can be just as volatile, just as unprincipled, just as un-serious, just as politicized and arbitrary, just as in-your-face unaccountable to We, The People, as either of the other two branches of government. Despite the past role of the Court to always serve as a serious and somber place to resolve our thorniest differences in the deepest contemplation. Which is so obviously lacking now.

Some people say the Court is behaving this way in order to shield itself against a Democrat Party super-majority that has promised to add more seats to the Court, or to dissolve it altogether. Others say that most justices cannot help but go native when they spend too much time in Washington, DC. Which is a kind way of saying the justices lose touch with the common citizen, and begin to view us all as mere serfs, with no rights.

I don’t know if anyone else was struck by Chief Justice John Roberts’ snitty little minority dissent in the California religious freedom case a few weeks ago, but his snotty and arrogant tone was shocking to read. This is a man who is completely out of touch with the American people and without a thought in his head for the US Constitution, upon which all of his decisions are supposed to rest. Obviously he has at least four other justices who share his arrogant feelings about us little people.

In just a few short weeks, the US Supreme Court has disgraced itself, made a mockery of the law, of our system of government, of the guiding processes that are supposed to be public and fair for all to see, of itself, and thereby impeached its own credibility, its believability, its wonder and respectability. A court has no army, and all it can do is rely upon its respectability and integrity to persuade Americans that its rulings are just and fair, and must therefore be followed. The Court of Chief Justice John Roberts gets an F-minus, and why on Earth should Americans give a fig for what this Court ever holds again?

This Court is an important public institution that has just bombed out and fatally failed America right in front of all of us. So help us God, may this failure not be fatal to the Republic.

 

President Trump must stay in the White House until the election is resolved

Donald Trump won the 2020 election hands-down. If we take away the four massive illegal late-night ballot dumps in Democrat Party-run cities in key swing states, President Trump won the election with about 320 electoral votes.

Joe Biden did not win the election, except by counting millions of illegal fake ballots that the courts mostly refuse to adjudicate, because the various court members are themselves partisan activists trying to help Biden cross the finish line.

The 2020 election was stolen, or at least a major heist of the election has been attempted. That is crystal clear from the thousand-plus affidavits submitted in filed lawsuits, the photos and video footage, the sworn public testimony given by eye witnesses in Michigan, Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, the audits of various Dominion voting machines in Georgia and Michigan, tons of overt statistical data like more votes being cast in many Democrat Party-run places than there are living humans there and 18 of the 19 bellwether counties going for Trump, Biden NOT having coat tails and NOT leading a “blue wave” to overwhelm Congress (the opposite happened, as Republicans picked up congressional seats), and Trump increasing his overall votes by at least ten million and no president before having gained so many new votes and still yet losing the election, and so on.

The evidence of vote fraud is plain as day for anyone who is interested in seeing it. I have not yet met a Democrat friend, and I hunt with a bunch of Democrat Party members, who gives a crap. They just don’t care. If the roles were reversed, they would care. And if President Trump decides to play by the same rules as the Democrat Party, why then these people will certainly care. But right now, they just don’t care about their political party’s cheating and lawlessness.

The problem America faces is a lawless Democrat Party that will break every law to “win,” and then demand that its enemies follow every law and then some more in order to force them out of power. And so it is time for President Trump to weigh out the situation we face, and make the ultimate executive decision: Trump must stay in office and refuse to leave.

President Trump can do this by implementing his 2018 executive order against foreign interference in our domestic elections, invoking the Insurrection Act, and using the US military to take over the voting process, as it is our most vital national security issue.

Would this throw a monkey wrench into the perceived order of things? Yes it would. And so what? On the one hand we have a fraudulently “elected” Joe Biden, who has no right to claim the presidency. On the other hand, we have a duly elected sitting president who is going to have to stay a little bit longer in order to ensure that the rule of law prevails, and not the election-by-media-acclamation that has occurred.

Constitutional crisis results? Yes, and so what? If Biden is sworn in, we have a constitutional crisis, too. Biden’s control of the federal government apparatus will mean the end of free and fair elections in America ever again. It will mean the quick and overt use of supreme government coercive force to disarm law-abiding citizens so that they may never again rise up and challenge the Democrat Party’s plans to absolutely control all of us, Constitution be damned.

Yes, if President Trump does this, and I sure hope he does, then there will be fighting in the streets of America. So what? If Biden does what he says he is going to do, we will have much worse fighting in the streets of America, as patriots become the ultimate resistance against liberal Democrat Party tyranny. Either way, violence is inevitable. With Trump in the Oval Office, the violence will be much more contained. With Trump out of office, the violence will be widespread as patriots, backed into a corner, fight back with all they have in their possession, because to lose is to lose America as a free nation.

Donald Trump is the resistance movement. He is the bulwark against lawlessness, treason and tyranny and foreign powers (China, Iran) who have secret treaties with Joe Biden. Like the pro-democracy Oliver Cromwell did in England four hundred years ago, President Donald Trump must become a sort of temporary Lord Protector of America, in order to keep America from dissolving into secession, lawlessness, big government coercion and slavery, and the end of our rule-of-law system.

After weighing out all of the options and possible outcomes, it is a reluctant conclusion that this is what must happen in this lawless election saga. Donald Trump must stay in office until every legal vote is counted.

US Supreme Court in neon: “We are irrelevant to Americans”

After first saying they would hear it last week, late yesterday the US Supreme Court then declined to hear Texas’ lawsuit alleging that the failure of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia to abide by the elementary practices of democratic voting law had violated the voting rights of Texas voters.

This was a potential landmark case, because America is a union of states all bound together by the equality of each state’s laws. Over two hundred years of hard work has resulted in a United States of states that all give full faith and credit to one another’s state government apparatuses. Texas voters expect other states to follow the same basic rules and safeguards in their own elections, so that the votes of one state are not rendered meaningless by the cheating and sloppiness in another state’s elections. There really is no greater test of the ties that bind us Americans all together in unity than the symmetry of our voting on Election Day.

What the hell is the point of voting in one state, if a few other states allow corrupt voting that negates how your own state votes?

Yes, the US Supreme Court declined to hear the case for the simple reason that five of the nine justices want to see President Donald Trump gone from the Oval Office, and they will do anything to further that end. Even if it costs the Court its credibility and standing among half the nation.

By declining to hear the case, as they did last week with the Pennsylvania Kelly/Parnell lawsuit, these five justices block the compelling arguments from being officially made in court, and thereby raised amongst the citizenry. If the case is not heard in court, then these justices’ ideological allies in the mainstream media do not have to report on it, and can continue to scoff and mock those who are terrified at how quickly America’s government fell to the coordinated leftist attack.

But the real message of the US Supreme Court in all of this, and likely in all the other cases working their way to the US Supreme Court, is that the Court is no longer relevant to the lives of American citizens.

The five US Supreme Court justices who have done this incredible, unbelievable act are so ideologically blinded that they either do not realize or do not care what fallout is resulting. Their DC Beltway elitist opposition to President Donald Trump and his voters is simply about raw power and political control, and in this case, trying to block the populist president from rightfully returning to the White House and implementing the political agenda the American voters chose him to do. Even worse, these five rogue justices are simultaneously attempting to help usher in to the White House an illegal and un-elected candidate, Joe Biden.

Instead of becoming a solution of any sort to the greatest threat to the Union since the first Civil War, and instead of becoming even a simple sounding board for the legal arguments about our relationships with one another as law-abiding American citizens in different states, the Court has blocked that process and also removed itself from the entire discussion. These five rogue justices say that neither will America have a legal resolution, nor will it have healing.

If the eighty million voters who support President Donald Trump can learn anything from the five rogue justices yesterday, it is that we citizens are completely on our own. Literally every single organ and institution of government that is designed to protect the rights and core interests of the American citizen has failed, been overthrown, or been made irrelevant in the greatest struggle of our lives. The FBI and DOJ are sitting on their hands, doing absolutely nothing about all of the reports of vote fraud last month. The US Supreme Court is just the very last institution to have made it clear that Americans are now caught in a life-altering tug-of-war between liberty and slavery, and we have only ourselves to rely upon for a fair resolution in our interests.

Going forward, whatever happens (say, for example, if President Trump invokes his 2018 executive order about foreign interference in American elections, which America just experienced, and he invokes the Insurrection Act), the US Supreme Court will have no voice in the matter.

By blocking the Court from even hearing the Pennsylvania and Texas lawsuits, five rogue justices (Kagan, Breyer, Sotomayor, Roberts, Kavanaugh) have made the Court irrelevant to all related questions and have completely removed the Court from all related cases that may arise. The Court cannot dodge and hide and deflect and attempt to shape the outcome of Election Day on the one hand, and then turn around and try to block this president from shielding the republic from the coup d’etat under way when he finally decides to act. While I have no crystal ball, it is possible that this president will indeed act, because he will correctly question which is the worse outcome: A fraudulently elected criminal who represents the interests of our greatest foe, China, or a temporary dictator who merely extends his first term until all questions of law are investigated and resolved.

Some people on the right will cheer the Court’s abdication, as the Court’s fifty years of judicial activism and legislating from the bench have already gutted certain areas of the Constitution. And the left will cheer because it provides them with a concrete political result they want right now, the future be damned. But in truth, this failure by the Court is just another sign that America as a constitutional republic is breathing its last breaths at this very moment. And that is sad. Yes, the streets in your neighborhood will still have the same names, but you will not have anywhere near the same personal rights you had on November 2nd, 2020. And only too late will you realize what has truly happened.

Pursuing power vs. pursuing pleasure

If people are mystified by the US Supreme Court’s recent inability to address a textbook example of violated federal voting law in Pennsylvania, they need to understand how this has come to pass. Because that deadlocked Court is now just as corrupted as every other institution in America.

For sixty years at least, maybe eighty years, the Democrat Party has been waging a war to capture America. That political party has been focused on infiltrating every institution in America, capturing each one, and then bending it to its will and using it for further political gains. This has happened with the mainstream media, colleges, grade and high schools, Hollywood and the entertainment industry INCLUDING the National Football League and the National Basketball Association, the American Bar Association, the American Medical Association, the Boy Scouts, the Girl Scouts, charitable foundations, Big Tech, federal government agencies, the Papacy and the Catholic Church, Mainline Protestant churches, etc ad nauseum.

All of these institutions have been captured by the Left and they all now represent a politically and culturally united front. In America, their leaders and staff members work hand in glove with the Democrat Party to promote and implement leftist policies, to attack all opposition, and to ensure that future generations of Americans will no longer share the cultural identity and traditional American values of their own parents and grandparents.

The US Supreme Court was just the last of the targeted institutions to fall. And that is what this week’s unbelievable decision represents. In the Kelly/Parnell case this week, the Court was presented with several clear violations of state law and constitutional requirements that ensure that a FEDERAL election is clean and fair. But the Court was unable to muster a 5-4 majority to correct the illegal and unethical last-minute shenanigans committed by the Wolf Administration and the PA supreme court. The US Supreme Court was unable to muster this bare majority because only four justices on the bench believe in an America that has existed since its founding in 1776. A fifth justice, Brett Kavanaugh, is an ethereal dreamer of intellectual musings. Like he did with the recent North Carolina voting law case, he punted, saying that what North Carolina does with its election laws is a state’s prerogative; despite the fact that we are dealing with a FEDERAL election.

Kavanaugh would have been a better professor than he is a justice. Kavanaugh represents the modern Republican Party at its core: A group of people devoted to theoretical living and what-me-worry laissez faire policies with no direction to them. They believe in hedonism, and that probably is what Justice Kavanaugh is, an intellectual hedonist. His dreamy thoughts lack anything concrete, so no one is offended by him. Let the party roll on…

The Republican Party and its ideological allies and affiliates have long worshiped and pursued money and pleasure at all costs.  This is why elected Republicans largely have no fight in them today, while President Donald Trump and his 80 million supporters are doing all of the heavy lifting in this election fight. Meanwhile the Democrat Party was busy gaining control of every institution so that elections will be meaningless and they will have sole dominion over all Americans. Under the color of law, of course, but also, as we have seen, with great official and unofficial coercive force, too. You will obey!

And that is how we got to where we are today.

And for those people who believe that the US Supreme Court will be able to muster five votes for any case related to fairly resolving this illegal election, like the Texas case now before the Court, you are dreaming. If this week’s Pennsylvania case didn’t wake up five Court members that their republic is in cardiac arrest on the gurney, then no other case will.

Dear Americans, we are going to have to find other solutions to solving the Democrat Party’s systemic evil and illegal lawless behavior.

Did Justice Kavanaugh Just Torpedo America?

Probably a majority of Americans believe America is too big to fail, too financially successful, too militarily powerful, too much of an economic powerhouse.  Our lives are just too comfortable and everything is just so orderly. How could it ever fail?!

Surely the last survivors of every failed civilization before us asked the same things, probably right before their lives and cities burned to the ground. Civilizational failure is systemic to humans. The question for America is not if we will fail, but when.

American citizens can prolong failure, perhaps indefinitely, by participating in their own governance and electing wise leaders who represent the USA’s founding principles. Because tyranny is only one generation away at any given moment, and America has had one and maybe two heavily propagandized generations, it sure looks like failure and tyranny are about to descend upon us momentarily.

The 2020 election is being stolen from the voters right in front of our faces. The evidence of vote fraud and unconstitutional laws and policies designed to enable fraud is overwhelming. And every taxpayer-funded public institution designed to protect the citizen taxpayer from injustice is now sitting on its hands, doing absolutely nothing to stop this theft and the tyranny that will follow. In particular, the FBI and DOJ staffs and leaders are actually looking the other way while mounds of new evidence are disclosed daily. These agencies have the legal purpose to intervene, but they do not act. This is because they are run by people whose political views no longer mirror the nation’s principles nor the citizenry’s interests.

Earlier this year commentator Mark Levin called this “the elites rebelling against the masses.” And how else could it be described? The masses voted overwhelmingly to send President Donald Trump back to the White House, and the entire federal government did everything it could to prevent that, or to allow vote fraud to succeed.

The US Supreme Court is America’s backstop, the last bulwark of democracy. Of all the government institutions designed to look out for and protect the individual rights of the citizenry, the US Supreme Court is and always has been the last line of defense. And yet it, too, is now staffed by people who do not share the vision or purpose of our founding documents, nor the interests of us, We, The People. At least half of the Supreme Court justices are Big Government liberals, whose answer for every public policy question is to say “We know better than you how to live your life, and so we are going to put the federal government in charge of your life.”

This has become glaringly evident as ObamaCare was deemed a tax, when it was legislatively not passed as a tax, and when over the past few years failing to intervene when lower courts aggressively ignored the high court’s Heller and MacDonald precedents in protecting individual Second Amendment rights, and recently when a narrow 5-4 majority ruled that California’s subjective and unscientific fatwa against church attendance violated We, The People’s First Amendment religious rights. And now yesterday, the US Supreme Court was unable to muster five justices to fix the most obviously faulty Pennsylvania election procedures and results.

Until yesterday afternoon, most political observers believed that Justice Alito had sufficient support from four other justices to back up his prior demand that Pennsylvania segregate the roughly 650,000 ballots counted AFTER Election Day. But late yesterday we learned that the Court had declined to change the faulty outcome, with no decision issued and no dissents. What this means is that the justices were deadlocked 4-4 and one hold-out justice refused to join either side.

Chief Justice John Roberts has increasingly sided with the Big Government leftists Kagan, Sotomayor, and Breyer, to the point where the Court now has a solid four-vote leftist bloc. That has become quite obvious.

On the other hand, the Court has two reliable originalists, Thomas and Alito, who have been or are reasonably expected to be backed by Gorsuch and Barrett. Justice Kavanaugh will probably join this group of four about 60-70% of the time, because Kavanaugh is not an originalist. Justice Kavanaugh is, more than anything, a Washington, DC, Beltway guy. When nominated, people were amazed that he was spending something like $80,000 annually on major league baseball tickets. He gave them away as gifts to “special people.” In other words, Kavanaugh is very much a DC elitist, and very much tied into the DC political web. His allegiance is to intellectual pyrotechnics and gymnastics, nuanced opinions written for law school students and professors to marvel at for generations to come. Unlike Scalia, Thomas or Alito, Kavanaugh is not a fighter. He is an effete functionary with a strong sense of duty to The DC Machine. He has no loyalty to the president who stood by him and who put him on the Court. Rather, Kavanaugh wants to ingratiate himself with DC elites and special people, at whatever cost.

So given yesterday’s deadlocked Court and the resulting rubber stamp given to PA’s fake election results, it is likely that Kavanaugh removed himself from the entire discussion. He punted. Like with his recent decision on the North Carolina voting law case, he probably erupted once again with intellectually flowery language designed to mask his unwillingness to commit to anything.

The end result of this is that every single similar or related case now brought to the Supreme Court is going to meet the same logjam. The American people will find no justice being served there. Which means the stolen 2020 election is likely going to be affirmed and Joe Biden sworn in as the next president.

Which means that America will overnight become a vassal to China. The long lawless Democrat Party will move swiftly to cement its power and control of all federal agencies, including law enforcement, and in short order dissent will be illegal, domestic political spying will be routine, the FBI will become the STASI, and America will never again have a fair or free election.

So, spineless Justice Kavanaugh just torpedoed America. The nation you grew up in, identified with, perhaps fought for, will be completely gone in another month’s time. It will resemble California shortly after.

What this all means for patriots is a big question. Will enough people be willing to use political violence to restore the Republic? Short of sufficient political violence to overturn this coup d’état against We, The People, America is officially a failed state, a tyranny, and God only knows who will fill the political power vacuum.

China?

 

 

 

 

Halfway through PA deer season

We are halfway through deer season, and I, having hunted in several counties in Northcentral and southcentral Pennsylvania, have a few observations. These might be helpful to those seeking to fill tags this coming week, or to policy makers trying to mould a better season next year.

a) Despite the “purple paint law,” which is Pennsylvania’s new private land trespass law that carries severe penalties for trespassing, PA hunters continue to trespass and poach and shoot deer on private lands they have no business being on. So far this season I have been witness to the deliberate taking of deer on private land by people who have no right to hunt there, both a buck and a doe.  One incident was just plain sloppy woodsmanship; the other was purposefully crafty. Some trespassers are habitual lawbreakers, who trespass more to get one over (in their warped thinking) on someone who has land, rather than to actually pursue a specific trophy animal or meat for their family. This blurs into the mental illness category. Others are defiant individuals, who have always had authority problems both at work and elsewhere. This also blurs into the mental disease category. The antidote to all this miserable behavior is the joy of hidden trail cameras, which have caught several malefactors in flagrante. Yeah, Jon, you….again. To be continued!

b) Pennsylvania is now a huge deer trophy destination. The trophy bucks that are being taken from archery season, when deer are at their most vulnerable, right through rifle season, would have been unimaginable twenty or forty years ago. The enormous heads (antlers/ racks scoring 140 inches and above) that are being taken by hunters everywhere across the state are easily on par with famous trophy destination states like Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, and Kansas.

This development is a looooong way from the spike bucks and “trophy” fork horns of my youth, and frankly to which too many older hunters would gladly return.

This exciting development is primarily a result of top-notch deer management by the Pennsylvania Game Commission over the past twenty years. Along that twenty-year-way, PGC has suffered a lot of abuse for its deer management, which always involved reducing the number of over-abundant does and retaining a high number of mature bucks to return again next year, with racks that have gone from OK to spectacular. People upset with PGC were long accustomed to “seeing” lots of deer. These people incorrectly equated overabundant deer with a healthy deer population, because, in fact, the truth is the opposite. Too many deer is unhealthy for not only deer, but for a boatload of other animals, and plants, that everybody other than deer needs. Deer diseases like TB and CWD are a result of deer populations too high for their own good. So is the deer-car-collision disease, which is crazy high in PA.

We have to kill a lot more deer. PGC knew that and started it in 2000, and it was a slow and painful process that necessitated an entire cultural shift among tradition-bound hunters.

However, PGC alone doesn’t get all the credit for these big bucks, even though the agency has carried the torch of scientific wildlife management through a hailstorm of undeserved crap. Another reason Pennsylvania has so many massive trophy bucks roaming around is that we have a lot fewer hunters and less hunting pressure over the past five years, and over the past fifty years. There is a big difference between someone who buys a hunting license, because he has been proudly buying a license every year since 1962, as it is part of his personal identity, and someone who buys a hunting license with the intention of squeezing out many of its benefits and opportunities, such as climbing high into remote places in pursuit of huge bucks.

Buying a hunting license is a tradition among many older Pennsylvanians, even if they don’t actually hunt much or at all with it.

If I can think off-hand of five hunters I know who will comment on the dearth of deer hunters seen in the more remote places, I can probably easily find five hundred others who will testify to far less hunting pressure in most places, not just the remote ones. This means that old bucks with big trophy racks have more secret places to go where they can go on growing old, without dying of sudden acute lead poisoning from a hunter standing downwind behind a tree. As the population of really older bucks continues to climb, they begin to spill out into more accessible and less topographically challenged places, where the average Hunter Joes can now occasionally pick one off for the local newspaper’s front page.

c) I miss John R. Johnson as my long time knife maker of choice. John took a break from making his beautiful custom knives about five years ago, and fortunate are those of us who bought his highest-quality products while we could. While it is possible to hunt with a hunk of basic soft steel half-assedly made into a rough knife shape in China, why should we? Ever since the dawn of our species, a hunter-gatherer species, our hunters have ALWAYS prided themselves on the high quality of their weapons and accoutrements. Having a nice rifle and a nice knife is a source of great pleasure for every hunter I know, and most aspire to having the best they can stretch to afford. That is to their individual credit and to our collective credit, as a sign of sophistication and high performance. So if you are fortunate enough to find a JRJ hunting knife somewhere, buy it right away. Cherish it, keep it sharp and well, and use it. It is a product of one of our central Pennsylvania native sons, and a true embodiment of the rugged character and values we here in central Pennsylvania cherish.