Archive → February, 2023
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.
99 Red Flags
Catastrophic Norfolk Southern train wreck in East Palestine, Ohio. “President” Biden still has not visited, but he has flown to Ukraine
Waterways and drinking water in East Palestine, Ohio, are badly contaminated. But the federal government says no aid is available to help
Train wreck mushroom cloud hangs over East Palestine, Ohio, whose toxic mess was greatly exacerbated by the way the federal government employees tried to mitigate the toxic chemicals in it
A red flag is used in car racing, team sports, and other activities to indicate a warning about something dangerous, or as a disqualification of some player or person, usually for breaking the rules of the game.
A new genre of “red flag” laws are being used to illegally disarm law abiding Americans, but that is a whole other subject. Even in this case, the term “red flag” serves the same connotation as elsewhere.
Recently America has experienced a whole slew of red flags as both warnings and as DQs. I don’t know how many red flags there have been, but there are easily a hundred of them. Let’s just say for argument’s sake that there are 99 red flags that we all should have seen in the past two years.
Examples of the warning kind include a handful of planes haphazardly and inexplicably flying into food processing plants out in the middle of nowhere, dozens of catastrophic mysterious fires breaking out at food processing plants and chicken farms, mysterious diseases striking large numbers of beef cattle and chickens at ranches and egg laying plants, adulterated chicken feed suppressing egg laying chickens from laying eggs across America for the past six months, and sophisticated attacks on electricity plants and on public water plants.
Now, when any one of these things happens, it is news. Or at least it should be news, and maybe it is news that such a freak event did not make the regular news. But when all of these things happen all of a sudden, across a relatively compact and short amount of time, with huge shockwaves sent through the American food supply chain that end up with empty super market shelves and very high food prices, it is all beyond news. This is happening on purpose. Each of these events is then a huge red flag that something is wrong. Something bad is happening to the infrastructure of our daily American lives, and if we do not understand what is happening, then we will not be able to address it. And if we do not address it, then we Americans will have little or no food to eat or clean water to drink.
When I talk to friends and strangers alike (I talk to strangers all the time) about these apparent overt attacks on our American food supply, I get a couple responses. One is “Wow, I had no idea. I guess that is why I see empty store shelves and high prices. Hmmmmm.” This response indicates the person is starting to think ahead about what this means for them, and what can they do about it. Self preservation in action.
The other response I get is “Really? I had no idea. Oh well.” And this indicates the person is so deeply asleep in the fat of the land that they cannot imagine either going without food, or how they can go about fixing their situation. Some joke about who will starve during a famine or domestic conflict, and it is no joke – these inattentive and incurious people will end up being the designated starvers. They foolishly take everything we have for granted.
The biggest red flag, both as a warning and as a DQ, was last week’s train crash in East Palestine, Ohio. Not sure why or how it crashed, but it happened in the middle of pristine farmland that grows a lot of important crops Americans rely on to eat every day. And then the Biden Administration’s impotent, uncaring non-response to the initial toxic chemical spill and then to the huge toxic mushroom cloud from the administration’s incompetent explosive “fix” that made the spill even worse said everything about what is happening to our country: HUGE RED FLAG alert. Joe Biden is either super incompetently or purposefully destroying American heartland farmland, and he must be disqualified from doing any further damage
Something bad is happening to America, on purpose. These serious domestic attacks are happening at a frequency too high for random accidents. As we see in other sectors, America’s domestic food production is being sabotaged. And this observation is not even taking into account the effect of giant industrial solar construction on pristine farmland all over the east coast. Farmland that is closest to America’s highest population centers is being destroyed, and will not be able to produce food or fiber (or quarry rock for public roads, or grow timber) for many decades to come, if ever again.
I see red flags all over the place. These red flags indicate that America is being failed from within on purpose, by people who are living inside our borders, who want to use their positions to destroy America. Hello, this is your country, and as it goes, so go you and your family.
As the 1970s bumper sticker read – “If you aren’t mad, then you aren’t paying attention.”
99 Red Balloons
If gigantic “unidentified” balloons are floating across Hawaii, bombarding its surface with green lasers, probably looking for hidden US missile silos and underground bases from which to repel an attack coming from Asia, and if gigantic “unidentified” balloons are floating from the north Pacific Ocean all the way across American military bases in Alaska and our ballistic missile military assets in Nebraska, Montana, Wyoming, etc, and nothing is done by America’s “leaders” in Washington, DC, then only one logical conclusion can be arrived at: These known Red Chinese spy balloons are studying American military capability up close and personal, and Joe Biden and the Pentagon are simply OK with them.
And for open borders advocates, this means treason. No leader and no national military ever allows the nation’s most dangerous enemy to surveil a nation from within its borders without having already, secretly, capitulated to that enemy. There is no other explanation for Joe Biden’s reluctance to even talk about the spy balloons, and there is no other explanation for our military’s acquiescence not only on these balloons, but on several others several years ago that apparently also went unchallenged. America has open traitors running our government and our military. They are not against China, they are working for China, either because of money pay-offs or because our officers are ideologically aligned with the communist Chinese.
Do you want China to take over America? If you do, you are a fool. All of the nice things, your fun vacations, the protests and the free speech and personal choices that you on the Left now enjoy will be taken from you, if the Chinese become the rulers of America. It is self defeating to want this outcome, but apparently a ton of money has changed hands at the highest levels, and people who should be guarding America are opening the door and letting the enemy walk right through our gates.
Treason is a capital offense (Article III, Section 3 of the US Constitution), meaning it is rewarded with death. Usually by firing squad or hanging, after a tribunal finds the accused guilty.
Americans have our founding documents to rely on in times like these:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” (Declaration of Independence)
Any American administration that allows Chinese spy balloons to float across our nation and collect God knows how much secret information about us and our defense capabilities is, by definition of the Constitution, “destructive of these ends [of government by The People]…[and] it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it.”
All Americans now find themselves in the crosshairs of a rogue administration that is daily doing everything it can to destroy America from the inside. The Chinese spy balloons are just the latest and most grotesque evidence. This is the kind of aberrant behavior we would expect from the same people who would steal a national election (explain the 800,000 Pennsylvania ballots counted in the 2020 election that are greater than there are registered voters here) and thereby steal a nation. We American citizens are now in our third year of being under siege by the government in Washington, including our most senior military officers.
We The People have every right to alter or abolish the Biden Administration, any time or way we choose. This is not a “revolutionary” or threatening thing to write, because these words are taken directly from the American Declaration of Independence, and they are the essence and core of being an American. What is revolutionary and threatening is the Biden Administration’s ongoing war against every corner or America, against every fiber of our national legal system, our rule of law, our access to daily food, our vehicle of choice, our job of choice, our children’s school of choice. The insurrection against America is the ongoing nonstop attack on America by this illegal and treasonous occupation force in Washington, DC, not legal protests against it by free and patriotic America-loving citizens.
How many Chinese balloons have there been across America? No one knows, really. The Pentagon stated that quite a few had been allowed to float across America in the past administration, and that the Pentagon’s senior military officers had chosen not to tell the president, or anyone else for that matter. Officers like Admiral Mike Mullen and General Mark Milley have publicly stated that they illegally broke the chain of command and committed treasonous insubordination against the American people because they did not like the former president. How many other officers are there like these two?
Let’s just round off the number of communist Chinese spy balloons at 99. It seems like a reasonable number because it is what the traitors in Washington want, which is the end of America.
If you are going to hunt flintlock, you must practice, practice, practice
Flintlock hunting season ended in southeastern Pennsylvania two weeks ago, and for those hunters who had either not yet harvested a deer or, who, in the alternative, are usually highly successful, it was a last ditch chance to fill a doe tag or the unused buck tag. I know full well from my own feeling, as well as from hearing from other hunters similar to me, that despite having a good season (I killed four deer in two counties. One with a percussion rifle in October, two in rifle season with an open sight 308 Ruger RSI, and one with a flintlock in January), that sense of lost opportunity hangs pretty heavy. Perversely, the more successful a hunter is, the more successful he feels he must be with all remaining tags and opportunities.
In the old days (of my youth and long before then) that lost opportunity was called the “horse collar,” and however we might describe this nagging feeling, it can be a pretty tough driver. Guys (definitely guys only; women are too smart or doing too much real, important work to act this way) will just throw themselves into the late flintlock season hard. That unused tag weighs heavier and heavier as the season winds down, the deer get so much more skittish, and we feel the last opportunities to prove ourselves slipping through our cold gloved fingers.
On top of the usual limitations listed above, I unnecessarily handicapped myself badly before flintlock season started: I failed to practice shooting with my flintlock ahead of time. If there is one hard fact chiseled in granite about flintlocks that everyone knows, it is that they require regular practice in order to shoot them half decently. Especially before hunting big game with one. Not just because they require lots of little pieces of metal and a rock to all quickly and seamlessly work together to make the barrel go BOOM, but because a big flash of flame and smoke goes off right in the shooter’s face.
And that big flash in the powder pan in your face makes those people who have not practiced and become used to the flash flinch badly. It is natural to flinch your face away from a fiery explosion. And when you flinch, you are sure as shootin’ gonna miss. Hence the moniker “flinchlock.”
And flinch-miss I did this past late December and early January. A lot. Missed a deer in Lycoming County, missed a whole bunch of times in Dauphin County, including a dandy buck. In fact there was one doe I missed three times on three days in one week with two different flintlock rifles, all from close range. All because I had not practiced before the season.
When I finally did take a deer in the late season, it was because I had patterned him, a huge buck, all year, and I had just encountered his tracks and knew where he was likely to come in to investigate the smell of a late season doe in heat. And in fact he did show up, right where he should have come. At first he was just a faint shadow within many shadows in the big forest’s early morning half light.
I wasn’t even sure he was a deer when he first showed up. He just appeared, then stood behind trees, then behind a bush, looking around intently, never offering a good shot on his vitals. When he finally stepped into a shooting lane, I knew it was him only because of his enormous body and the improved daylight that let me take in the steer-like curves of his shoulders and hindquarters.
His huge 150 inch class antlers had prematurely dropped (which this year seemed to be the rule across northern and even parts of southern Pennsylvania), and then he, too, dropped. The round ball hit him square on the ribs and took out his lungs and the very top of his heart. After a late season of many misses, it is OK to admit that I only hit him because I had the rifle on a solid rest and I was seated. And that by that time I was not surprised when the flash went off with the BOOM of the rifle, but rather I was cool as hell and stayed looking straight down the barrel with good hold-through, watching him kick a few times through the smoke cloud that enveloped us both.
I do not name bucks, because it does not appeal to me to do so. But I still knew who this buck was from having encountered him several times over the past eight years. Several years ago I saw him twice in bear season, and his rack was good. In 2021 he came in to investigate some doe pee on a remote hillside, alongside a smaller deer with an unbelievably symmetrical ten point rack. I took the perfect rack and watched the bigger one run off. By January 2023 he had not an ounce of fat on his entire brute body whose hide will square twelve feet. He also had a huge rotting hole in one hoof (his hooves were each the size of my hand), and no teeth left on his jaw. This sagacious deer, whatever his name was, had attained the rarity of great grandfather status in the woods, and regardless of how cagey he was, his days were numbered. One way or another, he was destined to die soon.
Despite looking several times in the right places for his shed antlers, they did not show themselves. Possibly because a utility line right-of-way clearing crew had come through ahead of me. But who cares about finding his big antlers, right? His immense estimated ninety pounds of meat is right now feeding two families, and I shook off the horse collar from all the prior missing I had done.
Learn from my mistake: Practice, practice, practice with your flintlock before the season. And then the day before season opens, snap a couple of pans of priming powder on an empty barrel while aiming at a picture on the wall. Just to keep from flinching and missing.
And one more thing: Flintlock hunting attracts me intensely because it requires all of the skills a real hunter must have to be successful. Open sights, hold through, stealth and good wood craft, patience, etc. This is real hunting. There are no unethical lazy long range assassinations of unsuspecting wild game with a flintlock.
Oh, and one more thing: Apparently the Super Bowl starts soon. Super Bowl? Never heard of it. The NFL lost me a long time ago, in 2016 to be exact, with all of the anti America kneeling crap. And apparently tonight there is supposed to be yet another woke racial song sung at halftime. My time is worth much more to me than to spend it on and with such useless people as this. Instead of watching this game played by spoiled brats, I will be building a new work table.
Huge old deer, taken fairly
Huge old deer had weirdly rounded hooves and this big rotting hole in one hoof. His entire leg above this was enlarged, probably infected. All of his teeth were gone, completely worn down. His belly was full of grass, because he was unable to browse brush any longer.
About James O’Keefe’s apparent ouster at Project Veritas
Because I have both served on numerous boards of directors and also worked for and with non-profit organizations that are subject to oversight by a board of directors, for many years, a kind of “sense of things about boards of directors” has developed in my mind.
My take on the apparent ouster of James O’Keefe at Project Veritas, the organization he founded and ran superbly for twenty five years, is that political moles were planted on his board in order to take down the organization.
Yes, James O’Keefe is probably a tough boss to work for. Given his incredible track record of real investigative journalism, he would have to be a tough boss. When I watch his videos and his reports and his hands-on real reporting from the street, I have no doubt that he drives his employees to work almost as hard as he works. And apparently in February 2023, having a tough boss who demands that employees strive for excellence and who holds employees accountable for failing, is now grounds for terminating the boss.
At least this is the standard for board members who want the tough boss gone so the organization can be greatly weakened.
And isn’t it simply amazing that the two board members who want James O’Keefe removed from his own Project Veritas are the two newest board members? One has to wonder just how much money is being secretly paid to board members by the targets of PV’s investigations, to incentivize them to take such a drastic step, especially as such new members. New board members are usually “back bench” and “learning the ropes” of the organization’s board they just joined. When someone new joins a board and immediately begins to significantly, even catastrophically dismantle the organization, then it is a clear sign that the person joined not to help but to hurt the group.
I once worked for an organization where a newly appointed and very married executive seemed to be having an open affair with a subordinate. Employees who obviously knew about the relationship were either summarily or eventually fired by the executive after he took power, and as a result the board became heavily fractured. Big time infighting on the board resulted, and about a year later the executive was allowed back into board meetings, held onto his job, cemented his power over the board and the organization, and survived.
When I see the apparent blitzkrieg coup d’etat against James O’Keefe at Project Veritas, I absolutely know that something is really deeply awry on the board. And the only explanation I can logically arrive at is that huge sums of money were paid by the enemies of PV to people on the board to act as moles and work directly against the interest of the organization.
For the record, I have donated to Project Veritas about a dozen times over the years. It is one of the very few investigative news outlets left on Planet Earth, and PV repeatedly showed a huge glaring spotlight on a lot of really bad, illegal, and immoral behavior by people in positions of public trust and power. As we all know, democracy dies in darkness, and the enemies of democracy and the advocates of darkness are now trying to turn off the lights at Project Veritas.
Wherever James O’Keefe goes, so goes my support.
18th Century Artisan’s Show a huge success
You know an event has to be good when someone who is not a part of the event’s culture enjoys it, and such was the revelation by the Princess of Patience as she walked out of the 18th Century Artisan’s Show after three hours. Our Brooklyn-bred, pavement loving, city-slicker Princess had mingled with the nicest, friendliest, kindest, salt of the earth people at the Carlisle Expo Center and come out smiling. As she always does.
This show, the 18th Century Artisan’s Show, is all about black powder firearms and related accoutrements, longrifles, 1700s period clothing and related materials, horn and tin mugs, bone handled forks, wood and leather items. All made by hand here in America, many in Pennsylvania.
For a guy like me, not of pavement or city, a show like this is an assumed success before I even set foot in it. This year was the best ever, however, and when I left on Friday afternoon it was absolutely thronged and jam packed with people. If I had another couple hours to spend there, it would have been time well used. After all, there was a new possibles bag to find, and none of what I had yet seen fit my need. The Leatherman is a good stand-by source for rugged and large possibles bags, and as I already use two made by Gary Fatheree, I was in the hunt for a bag with more flair, more color, more personality.
Problem is, all of the pizazz bags are the size of my shoe. Like, it doesn’t seem possible that anything more than a short starter and a ball bag will fit in there. And if there is one thing I want a possibles bag to do, it is to hold all of the possibles I might need, including the kitchen sink. (“possibles” include all of the stuff needed to load and clean a muzzleloading firearm)
This had to be the best 18th Century Artisan’s Show ever, because it was the most filled with cool stuff, the best laid out, and the best attended by artisans and the public alike of all prior shows. The old venue was the Country Cupboard in Lewisburg, PA, and it was kind of tight quarters, with too many passageways and steps, and a requirement that you walk outside to the next building to see more vendors. At the Carlisle site, it is just one gigantic room, with all of the vendors spread out and visible. Best possible situation.
The only “thing” missing at the show was “Yesteryer,” that big huddle of fabrics and mannequins, bonnets and shoes, leggings and pants, waistcoats and longcoats, all of weird hand-ground linens and free range flax and slow roasted tweed, and all of the related 18th century clothing accoutrements that seamstress extraordinaire Barb Shaputis could assemble on the fly as she outfitted entire regiments of reenactors across America. Barb made my own 18th century longcoat for me, absolutely perfectly, with the “RR” buttons for the Rogers Rangers outfit well represented in the Netflix show “Turn.” I wear it every flintlock season, but thankfully, without a tri-corner hat. I have not (yet) gone that far. Barb is no longer with us to sell or make me a tri-cornered hat, and so that part of my life will be left unfinished as a memorial to sweet Barb.
Below are some photos I took of this year’s show. Like a kid in a candy store, I could easily have spent both days there. But then again, the Great American Outdoors Show is in full swing now, here in Harrisburg. So many fun choices! Thank you to all of the fantastic vendors at the 18th Century Artisan’s Show, many of whom are by now my acquaintances or friends. They not only make beautiful things, they also gather up all of their stuff and make long drives to Lewisburg, now Carlisle, and other venues, to give us historically-afflicted people the opportunity to switch gears and live life a little slower and lot cooler than usual.
Gunmaker and president of the Kentucky Longrifle Association, Mark Wheland is a central Pennsylvania artist who has made a beautiful rifle for me. I grew up trapping muskrats on his dad’s farm.
Brad and Shane Emig of York County are known worldwide for their exacting historical work, including making long rifles from complete scratch.
From Rochester New York hails Irv Tschanz, his lovely wife, and Jim Dell, purveying all kinds of beautiful hand-made crafts from leather, wood, horn, and metal
Jymm Hoffman sold me my anvil from a special run he had poured at a Pittsburgh foundry about ten years ago.
Here artisan Jim Dell measures the first wallet he made for me in preparation for making a replacement. Jim has also made our family double thick belts, a belt axe and carrier, and other “Olde Tyme” things we enjoy so very much.
The Leatherman is a big fixture in the black powder world, with founder Gary Fatheree (left) offering all kinds of high quality possibles bags, gun sleeves, cow’s knees, and other items from rare leathers. Clayton Miller(right) is the new proprietor with big shoes to fill
R.E. Davis makes highest quality locks and triggers, like Jim Chambers, whose booth I did not see.
A beautiful rifle for sale with a price tag demonstrating that many firearms are a bridge between art and utility, uniquely blending form and function.
Blacksmith Simeon England makes beautiful tomahawks and knives.
Long Islander Mitch Yates has that whole corner of America to himself. Honestly, is there a gunbuilder artisan of Mitch’s caliber anywhere in New England or eastern New York? I don’t think so. Nice guy, too.
You can pick out a fancy gunstock and a nice straight ramrod from a myriad of choices. The problem is saying “I have enough already”
Historically accurate black powder tools and serving utensils for sale, probably made by Shane Emig of York County
Wow, the Democrat Party really hates Jews!
Watching the screeching and yelling freak-out among the United States House of Representatives Democrat Party members yesterday, it was impossible not be reminded of the same sort of deliberately over-the-top theatrical denunciations by the German Nazi politicians in the 1930s.
Why were the Democrat Party members of Congress universally screeching and caterwauling and turning cartwheels for the cameras? Because Jew hater supremo congresswoman Ilhan Omar was ejected from the Foreign Relations Committee, because she is a cheerful and public Jew hater.
Never mind that Ilhan Omar spends 98% of her time in elected office attacking America, which gave her shelter and a new home out of war-torn Somalia. Never mind that Ilhan Omar is openly corrupt and lawbreaking (like marrying her brother to qualify for certain American benefits). She is also and very much devoted to ragging on Jews. All Jews, not just some subset of “The Jews.”
And true to form, Ilhan Omar’s fellow Democrat congresspeople rallied around her in their best melodramatics, wildly denouncing the Republican Party leaders for having the temerity to finally inflict some civilization onto the august body. The Democrat Party must believe that hating Jews is good business practice.
Do you know who cares most about this grotesque display of solidarity with one of America’s leading Jew haters? Well we can see it’s not Jeremy Raskin, or Jerry Nadler, or Debbie Schultz, or any other Jewish Democrat member of Congress. They stand in solidarity with Ilhan Omar. Christians care; that’s who cares about ending Ilhan Omar’s public displays of antisemitism on the soapbox of the Foreign Relations Committee. America-loving, patriotic Christians are the ones most disgusted by Ilhan Omar’s bigotry, not liberal Jews, which is to say probably 70% of American Jews. America’s liberal Jews are devoted to Ilhan Omar and her political party above and beyond their own survival.
And now beyond any doubt so is the entire Democrat Party, which has openly and officially thrown in totally with an openly America-hating, Jew-hating immigrant from Somalia.
Sorry citizen, that’s “classified” information
One of many signs that America is sinking and sinking more into tyranny is the constant response inquisitive citizens receive from government at every level: “We can’t show you that information, because it is ‘classified’ “.
Transparency is at the very core of a representative government that is owned and run by the citizens. Transparency is how the citizens know what the government employees are actually doing with all of that power that the people have consented the employees to have. When government employees stonewall the citizens and refuse to show what is happening in government deliberations or in arrests of citizens, or in the massive amount of surveillance that government employees are conducting on innocent citizens, or in the elections that the corrupt bureaucrats claim were clean, then the government employees are hiding what they are doing. And when the government is hiding what it is doing, it is no longer accountable to The People.
If the government is no longer accountable to The People, then it is no longer a representative government. We have the textbook definition of tyranny.
This all might seem obvious, but given the incredible volume of government stonewalling and unaccountability across most states, counties, and especially the federal government in Washington DC, somewhere the people working for us in government seem to have forgotten the limits on their power and the duties they have to all of us. There is definitely a breakdown everywhere as government at all levels has accrued tremendous power that citizens increasingly find insurmountable, even when that official power is blatantly misused.
Probably the biggest example of this right now is the treasure troves of classified documents that are being pulled out of Joe Biden’s various homes and offices in Delaware and Pennsylvania. Joe Biden had no legal right to have those classified documents in his possession, he never had the legal ability to declassify them, and yet his Department of Justice and the FBI have deliberately blocked public knowledge of this criminality and treated Joe Biden like he did nothing wrong.
Contrast that with the way President Trump’s home was raided by the DOJ and the FBI last summer. As president of the USA, President Trump could and did declassify a lot of documents. No bureaucrat anywhere had or has any legal way of blocking or turning back the clock on the decisions that President Trump made to declassify documents. Whatever was in President Trump’s home at Mar-A-Lago was declassified by him and was his. And yet he was targeted by a lawless DOJ and FBI, who won’t divulge to the American people exactly what was so “classified” about the documents they say were at Mar-A-Lago. It is a ridiculous stance. No transparency, and no accountability for official malfeasance by DOJ and FBI employees. Who supposedly work for us, and yet who are using the federal government we pay for to help themselves.
“Federal Bureaucrats Gone Wild” might be the humorous title of a movie, but it’s not funny when 350 million people’s rights are at stake because a handful of federal employees think they are above the law. America is suffering from a significant destruction of the 240-year arrangement the people had with their government until just a couple years ago. If it goes on much longer, it will end up being fatal to democracy. And that is called a coup d’etats against the American People, which is patently illegal.