Archive → December, 2021
Rockville’s big tree
Every year over the past ten years around Christmas a family in the Rockville neighborhood north of Harrisburg has put up a beautiful light array on their yard tree.
It’s now so pretty that people come from all around to admire it. It’s one of those small local things that brings a community together. I like sharing it here.
Christmas, America’s Holiday
Whatever your religion, if you live in America, today is Christmas, our national holiday.
It’s at the very least a time of peace, goodwill, cheer, and merriment for everyone here. For religious Christians, it’s obviously more than all that.
Enjoy this time. Savor it. Every moment. Savor and be thankful for all the good relationships, the happy moments, the love each of us can share with others. Don’t take anything for granted, nothing: Not the people around us, the incredible opportunities that America uniquely gives us, not the unique freedom here. Cherish it all, celebrate it.
Merry Christmas, America, Merry Christmas, friends.
Steve Bannon: Good, bad, or ugly?
Steve Bannon has been a hero to so many of us in the conservative/ patriot/ constitutionalist movement. In 2016 he fought like hell to get President Trump a win that exposed what is really happening in America (federal bureaucrats, the bipartisan Uniparty, and globalist billionaires tearing America away from the citizens who own it), and even after he was booted from the White House for covering Trump’s back (and neither Trump nor anyone else but Bannon understood the game that was going on there until too late) he continued to be an advocate for America First and President Trump.
And for the past several years he has maintained a radio/TV show called Steve Bannon’s War Room that is like so many other political radio/TV shows. Every day, Bannon discusses the zeitgeist of political issues and personalities from his political perspective. Which is a perspective I share.
That’s the “good” Steve Bannon.
Then there is the “bad” and even possibly “ugly” Steve Bannon. And we are not talking about looks here, folks. I don’t comment on people’s looks, because that is irrelevant, immaterial, and often just shallow cheap shots. Rather, we are analyzing one of Bannon’s public activities and statements, and wondering WHISKY TANGO FOXTROT is going on in that War Room of his.
Below is a screen shot from Bannon’s War Room show as it appears on Rumble a week ago or so. As you can see from this screen shot, Bannon is actually lauding Pennsylvania GOPe careerist-political weasel-hack Jake Corman. This makes no sense, because it isn’t warranted because it’s not true.
Corman is a catastrophe for Pennsylvania, for the Republican Party, and for America in every single way. Corman’s many flaws are well known (directly associated with deep corruption, nepotism, RINOism, failing his constituents in favor of big money Democrat donations etc), and his opposition to a forensic audit of the stolen 2020 election is both public and subject to a behind the scenes battle. As leader of the PA senate, Corman stripped PA state senator Doug Mastriano of his senate staff. Because Mastriano has been working hard to fix the blatant election fraud that occurred here in Pennsylvania in 2020.
All of this and much much more (like Hey Jake, do you know what happened to Centre County DA Ray Gricar? Do you know what happened to his body? How did his mysterious disappearance help you? What criminality were you at risk of having Gricar expose?) makes Corman someone that a “good” Steve Bannon would naturally oppose.
Like, fiercely oppose, call out, expose, and challenge when Corman appears on his radio show and engages in totally obvious dodges and solipses. After all, we are all in the fight of America’s life right now. There is zero room for anyone like Jake Corman to be anywhere near politics or anything else that is important. Bannon is a political gate keeper and should be acting like one.
But instead, we get Steve Bannon actually heaping unearned and laughably incorrect plaudits on Corman on his show, and pitching him bizarre softball questions.
It is difficult to know if Bannon is just kind of playing along with Corman, so he can spring on him later, or if Bannon is bamboozled, or, in the worst and ugliest case, if thirty pieces of silver changed hands to buy Bannon’s fire. And it is this last possibility that strikes both fear into the hearts of constitutional warriors, and also deep resentment and anger. If Bannon has been bought by the enormous and enormously corrupt constellation of bad actors orbiting around their investment Jake Corman, then Bannon is not just “bad,” he is “ugly.”
So which is it, Steve Bannon? Are you good, bad, or ugly? If you are truly good, then you will side on the right side with the good people who are resisting the evil bipartisan takeover of America by the likes of Jake Corman and George Soros. You won’t post ridiculous headlines like this on your show. You will push back against bad people, phony people, dangerous people like Jake Corman.
Whose side are you on, Steve Bannon? Jake Corman’s side, or We, The People‘s side?
Steve Bannon actually wrote this laughably false headline.
Ellen Greenberg’s mysterious homicide
Ellen Greenberg was a sweet and happy teenager when I met her probably twenty years ago. She was first cousin to girls my own daughters were friends with, and while my path intersected with Ellen’s maybe a few times a year, usually at kid drop off or pickup, for ten years the one thing I remember about her is her joie de vive. The girl glowed with happiness and sheer joy at being alive.
“Hi Mister First! How are you? Your girls have grown up so much, and they are so nice!” is the happy, positive report I would get from Ellen just about each time we saw each other. Nothing mopey or morose or unhappy about Ellen then. And nothing about her classroom teaching style ten years later was, either. Ellen was a positive, happy person.
Ellen has been in the news the past ten years because she was brutally murdered with a kitchen knife in her own home, and after initially reporting her death as an obvious murder, the Philadelphia Police Department then ruled her death a “suicide.”
In her kitchen, where Ellen lay stabbed multiple-multiple times and lying in a pool of her own blood, all kinds of crime scene protocols were run roughshod over. For example, her computer was taken from the house by a relative of her fiance, like just handed to him by the police on the scene. Crime scene photos show her initially found slumped over, and then again sitting straight up, or with a knife protruding one place but then in another in other photos. That someone first on the murder scene tampered with Ellen’s body and the murder weapon is actually preserved by the photos the police took.
So how could the Philadelphia Police so strongly resist investigating both the crime scene handling, and the murder? Why did the Philadelphia DA’s office recently hide testimony by a physician that made it plain as day that Ellen was murdered with that knife?
Something is not just fishy here, something stinks to high Heaven of rotten corruption and cover-up. Somebody with a lot to lose is being protected by the Philadelphia Police and the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office. But why would the police and DA protect a murderer? It’s not like the sweet and happy Ellen I knew was a threat to anyone or anything, like, say, Jeffrey Epstein was. She was not politically active; she had no “dirt” on anyone. So why she was murdered like she had to be shut up and must remain shut up is a huge and very public mystery now.
Making the resolution of this blatant crime even more mind boggling is the indefensible way that PA AG Josh Shapiro has handled it. Shapiro is someone with a lot of skeletons in his closet. He is someone with a lot of wrongdoing to hide. He is allied closely with the Philadelphia Police and the city’s District Attorney. And although he has been presented with the latest evidence about how Ellen was stabbed after her heart had stopped beating (someone committing suicide cannot stab themselves after they are dead), as well as with the incredible picture below, he still will not open an investigation into the Philadelphia Police or the DA’s office or this murder.
Is Ellen Greenberg’s murder a case of “What happens in Philly stays in Philly“? A corrupt town with corrupt officials connected to other corrupt officials and unsolved murders because someone important has money and some allied politician somewhere can’t be questioned?
See this artist’s drawing of how Ellen was stabbed multiple times, the worst being from directly behind (the human arm does not bend this way), and ask yourself how on earth anyone could ever rule these wounds or her death a “suicide.”
Ellen Greenberg deserves justice, her family deserves justice, and frankly, no citizen can ever again trust any criminal investigation in Philadelphia if this blatant murder is not solved.
Philadelphia’s police say these severe bruises and stab wounds to Ellen’s body were self-inflicted. Does that make any sense to your eyes?
Ivermectin vs. political, cultural establishment
Among the many political battles now being waged for control of America and the soul of Western Civilization, there is one quiet fight that is beginning to break out into the sunshine. And it is the outcome of this little fight that is beginning to pack a really big punch in the much larger battle between the political and cultural establishment and The People.
The fight, or dispute, or whatever you want to call it, has to do with the use of the long-used anti-parasite drug Ivermectin. It is a real example of politicized/political science vs. science science. Ivermectin has been used for a long time to treat both humans and animals that are infected with parasites. Ivermectin as a treatment for covid1984 in humans has been derided by the Democrat Party’s legacy media (NYT, CNNLOL, CBS, NBC, ABC, NPR aka Demedia) as a “horse de-wormer,” and the Demedia has mocked people who have wanted to use it, or who have espoused its use, to treat covid1984.
This mocking of Ivermectin and its medical proponents, even long time medical researchers who are the leading experts in their medical field, is based only on a political narrative. That political narrative is that a) All Americans/ Canadians/ Australians/ Europeans/ Britons must receive an injection purported to be a vaccine against covid1984, but which we now know is not a vaccine at all, and b) any person’s hesitancy about receiving this unproven, unapproved, untested injection must result in social and professional blacklisting, firing from their job, home confinement, de-licensing, de-platforming from social media, etc.
This political narrative is not just being aggressively pushed by Demedia, but by political, corporate and social elites, who while only a tiny portion of the overall population are nonetheless fully in lockstep with just one political party, its political and social messages, and its anti-democracy centralizing statist goals.
So we have the popularized but false narrative that only the government and its non-vaccines can save us from covid1984, and anything else is a threat to that narrative. This makes Ivermectin a huge threat to the entire house of cards built by Dr. Mengele Fauci and all the other Big-Government-Control-Over-Little-Citizens advocates.
More and more reports are seeping out around the Demedia information blockade about Ivermectin being an immediate and conclusive treatment for covid1984. I myself know several people who contracted covid1984 in the past month, got sick from it, and who either had Ivermectin on hand as an ace up their sleeve, or who were able to order Ivermectin in time to treat their covid1984 symptoms. Using Ivermectin, all these friends of mine recovered very quickly from their covid1984 infection, and are now fully and naturally immunized against covid1984. They had it, and survived.
When people say that America or any other nation is suffering from a health emergency or crisis, they are lying. We are not in a health crisis, we are in a political crisis, whose beneficiaries are using the subject of public health and covid1984 to artificially advance their political goals, at the expense of democratic processes designed to place checks against government overreach.
When people say the covid1984 pandemic is a crisis of the unvaccinated lepers hurting the vaccinated, you have to laugh at them. Why? Because if someone took a vaccine, or two or three, heck it might end up being ten or twenty, then they should be fully protected against whatever the unvaccinated people are carrying. That is how a vaccine works. But we have the most coercive of vaccine advocates admitting openly that the vaccines don’t actually work to protect the recipients.
In other words, you must take your vaccine “because we told you to,” in the tyrannical words of Biden Regime spokesthing Jen Psaki. There are no real, demonstrable benefits from these so-called “vaccines,” other than probably blunting the effects of covid1984 on about 50% of vaccinated individuals. But the public health and societal costs of the vaccines are enormous!
So powerful is this political narrative, and so attractive is the potential to make $30,000 per ventilated patient, that even hospital administrators have taken on the role of God in this situation, condemning patients dying of covid1984 to almost certain death, because they won’t allow the last-ditch use of Ivermectin. As if a dying patient has anything left to lose! Well, apparently the hospitals prefer that you die and they not lose their profits, or demonstrate that a simple, cheap Ivermectin pill could have easily saved the patient without all of the other fu$$.
Even state medical boards are on board with the political narrative, to the point where they are aggressively de-licensing and firing medical doctors and researchers who have a second opinion about treating covid1984 that runs counter to the political narrative. Many medical doctors have been cowed into silence or acquiescence from these threats.
Political control of people, the destruction of democratic processes that protect individual liberties, in favor of granting a small group of government employees absolute control over formerly free citizens (you!), is behind covid1984. It trumps everything else. The false political narrative must be protected at all costs, even if thousands of innocent Americans die, because they are used as political pawns to advance Big Government control. The leftist politicos prefer that thousands of Americans die, rather than get good treatment.
But Ivermectin’s success in treating covid1984 is beginning to punch holes through the Demedia’s suffocating political narrative and the unconstitutional government overreach that has accompanied it. Ivermectin’s success is calling into question the entire propaganda narrative about vaccines and Big Government. On the one hand, the initially unproven and now dis-proven non-vaccine “vaccines” are clearly a strike-out, while on the other hand a very cheap and easily obtainable treatment (Ivermectin) works quickly.
Did the Demedia, its one political party, Big Pharma, Big Medicine, Big Tech, and Wall Street just place huge profits from requiring fake vaccines over the actual benefit of Americans? Was covid1984 really about giving a political establishment full political control, and not about public health? It sure looks like it.
These people nearly wrecked America. They have nearly stolen our liberty, our freedom, and our right to choose so many aspects of our lives, in the name of “protecting” us. Don’t you wonder what the political and social fallout from this outrage is going to be?
p.s. if you are curious about whether or not Ivermectin works to defeat covid1984, you can see right here that the US Food and Drug Administration approved it back in July of this year. This highlights just how attractive the grotesque financial profits are from requiring false vaccines, as well as the political profits from unwarranted fearmongering and stealing freedom from We, The People.
Anatomy of a deer season
It doesn’t matter if you archery hunt for deer religiously, from October 1 to mid-November; the archery season is always over way too fast.
It doesn’t matter if you archery hunt a bit for bear and deer, hunt the week of early muzzleloader for bear and doe, do some small game hunting, have the men up to camp for bear season for four days, and then hunt every day of deer rifle season. The ending is always the same: It ended way too fast. We wait all year for this time, and before you can blink an eye, it is over.
For many hunters, this time is about being afield, hunting. The occasional actual killing part is a welcome indication that the hunting part was done well. Proof that the time spent outside was not wasted.
Oh, we still have some late deer season remaining, which is the late archery and flintlock hunt. But by now, deer everywhere in Pennsylvania are on high alert. A twig falling out of a tree and rustling a leaf on the ground will send a nearby deer herd into panicked stampede into the next county. So getting deeply enough into the sensory zone of these intelligent animals to take one with a bow or a flintlock at this stage takes real skill, not just the usual luck.
Although I will hunt the flintlock deer season, because I have some DMAP tags left, looking back even now with a sense of longing has me thinking about the anatomy of a good deer season. Some take-aways:
- Eat good food. Whether it is home-made jerky and dried fruit we make ourselves for our own time afield, or it is the extra thick gourmet steaks we bring to hunting camp, eat the best quality food you can afford. Hunting alone or with friends and family is a celebration, so eat like you are celebrating. And because Man does not live on bread alone, make sure your drinks are of a commensurate high quality.
- Practice, practice, practice with your gun. Archery hunters practice non-stop, but for some reasons many gun hunters leave it to one box of ammo and the days right before the season to “practice” shooting. Well do I recall sharing a range with a guy from Lancaster County at the bench next to me. Friendly enough, he enthusiastically, if spastically, launched his one box of “extra” shells down range as rapid fire as a bolt action can fire. I had offered him the use of my spotting scope and Caldwell shooting sled, and he declined. He did end up relying on my spotting and calling his hurried shots, however, because he didn’t quite have his scope figured out. The old random “spray n’ pray” is the approach he packed up and drove off to hunting camp with. Do any of us think he hit what he shot at?
- Bring your best jokes, naughty or practical. Hunting camp is fun, and each of us must contribute to that festive atmosphere. Many years ago, I bent down to inspect a strange looking object hiding under the cabin’s kitchen counter. And just as quickly I jumped back and screamed like a little girl when the damned thing took off running. That it was merely a muskrat pelt attached to a fishing line being pulled by Bob and followed by uproarious laughter at my expense just made my revenge all the sweeter. As for naughty jokes and rhymes, the list is endless. Look them up and bring half a dozen. Maybe I am lowbrow, or maybe I have low expectations, but it sure seems that everyone present laughs at these men-only jokes.
- Get out into position early, like at least an hour before first light, and when you move play the wind (nose into the wind), go quietly and slowly, and carry your gun port-arms and not across your back. If you can get out into position at 4:30am, even better. Just bring a blanket and some Zippo hand warmers.
- Food sources matter for deer and bear, too. We humans are not the only ones who both enjoy and need food. In a year of abundant acorns, a stand of sweet tasting white oaks will draw more deer and bear, and you can sit down wind of that stand of trees. In a year of scarce acorns, like this year, any tree that had a decent crop will still draw animals pawing in the leaves for whatever may be left in early December. By this mid-November, almost all of the already scarce acorns were eaten up, and both bear and deer seemed to be moving widely across the landscape in search of any food. It makes for tough hunting, and so we have to team up with buddies and other camps to work together to scoop up what animals are out there. Be flexible and think outside the box of a permanent stand.
- Speak animal language. Last year I grunted in an Adirondacks wilderness buck after busting him out of his bed. He was a territorial and aggressive SOB. But the conditions were all wrong for playing around, and although his body was visible, I could not shoot through the beech brush to get him. This year I returned for Round Two with the same animal, which had probably never seen a human being, and after two days of tentative efforts, Day Three resulted in the furious huge buck storming right in to my position with leaves, twigs, snot and mouth foam flying. I shot him in the neck at five yards, five miles from my truck. Lot of work, totally worth it for that DIY hunt of a lifetime. My position was carefully chosen for what he could see or smell under a certain wind direction. I waited until it was all just right, and let fly. His response was immediate.
- Take pictures, send them in emails. While journaling is not dead, most people today do not write in a personal or camp journal. Instead, we take photos and email them around. The recipients always appreciate them. Especially when ten or twenty years has suddenly passed, our knees don’t seem capable of all those steep climbs and hard sidehilling drives any longer, and a lot of our best times at hunting camp are sitting around with dear friends and reminiscing together. So don’t forget to take pictures and share them.
Northern PA’s acorn crop largely failed in 2021, possibly due to a late frost that killed the acorn flowers. Acorns remaining on the ground looked OK from the outside, but were all rotten like this on the inside. Wildlife is hungry and moving widely to locate food.
My “Freedom Buck,” killed on Sunday November 28th at 7:45am, on private property in PA. The ban on Sunday hunting is an attack on freedom, and so I named this Sunday morning buck after my declaration of freedom.
The deer that got away, but shouldn’t have
Below is the buck after the second bullet, at about 140 yards, the hole of which is visible behind his shoulder; a classic behind-the-shoulder double lung/ top of heart hit. Usually it’s immediately fatal. Usually the animal is knocked down by the impact. But not that day. He absorbed the second soft point without moving, just standing there broadside, as if I had completely missed him. Even after he dropped he had a lot of life and fight left, as can be seen in his death spiral in the snow.
My challenge was that I did not see him fall, which happened while I was fumbling with my binoculars. Because I do not often use a rifle scope, I do not maintain a magnified field of view after my shot. Going back and forth between open sights and binoculars is my process.
As an aside, you may wonder why I use open sights, or you may be one of those people who deride open sights. Shooting instinctively with open sights is how I grew up and how I learned to hunt. Unlike a scope, open sights can take a lot more abuse in the field before they go out of whack. Unlike a scope, they cannot possibly lose their “zero” after spending eleven months in a closet. Open sights are absolutely reliable, and perfectly effective. Recall that American infantry are qualified on open sights out to 600 yards (or meters), so it is not like these things are relics from the past. Open sights are the best option, provided they are installed correctly and checked annually.
My preference for open sights is about more than performance, however. It has to do with how I like to hunt: On foot, getting close to the animal, within its sensory zone, and trying to kill it on its own terms, up close. This is a true contest of skill, not an assassination. And I hardly think an open-sighted center fire rifle is a disadvantage; it is a huge advantage over a spear or a bow. Scoped rifles are just that much more of an advantage.
So, I did not see the buck fall, and he fell into a small swale where I could not see him. Not wanting to stink up the woods and ruin further hunting, I sat on my butt and scoured the woods for signs of a deer. In fact, I saw a large buck a couple hundred yards away sneak into a thick tree top blowdown. It made me think the buck I had shot at was gut-shot and sneaking away to lie down, and so I did not push him. Only when the crows showed up over an hour later was it evident that the buck was in fact dead right where I had last seen him.