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Turkeys and the critters who eat them

Wild turkeys are one of Pennsylvania’s great conservation success stories. When I was a kid, wild turkeys were like a fable, a mythical animal inhabiting far distant wild lands, that could be seen and maybe heard if you were one of the lucky few. They had been decimated by market hunting in the 1800s and early 1900s. When I took my hunter safety education course at the age of ten at the old Army Reserve building out in the farmland on the east side of State College, the Pennsylvania Game Commission staff proudly showed us films of their successful trap-and-transfer program, where wild turkeys were lured with bait into the range of nets, caught, and then driven to the far reaches of Pennsylvania’s rural areas. Usually State Game Lands with fields.

From the 1970s until the early 2000s, Pennsylvania’s wild turkey population grew and grew, until they seemed to be everywhere, including well south of I-81, the old imaginary dividing line between concrete civilization and wild man country. Apparently turkeys are adaptable to concrete wilderness, because they took up urban residence all over the east coast. Not content with being colorful freeloaders along with the ubiquitous and nasty pigeons and rats in these urban areas from Massachusetts to New Jersey, wild turkeys also provide much hilarity as they attack everything that moves in a display of misguided dominance, including mailmen, soccer moms and their kids, and dogs being walked. Look up the “incident reports” of wild turkey muggings of disbelieving urbanites; lots of funny videos to go along with them, too.

So when turkey populations began to decline in Pennsylvania and parts of New York starting ten years ago, people knew it was not due to the birds’ lack of tenacity. Something new and powerful in the old bird + habitat equation was having an effect.

And in fact in many places here in PA, formerly huge turkey populations are now really low or non-existent. I myself used to look out my windows and watch three separate flocks cycle through our clover-planted yards. When I hunted spring turkeys there (northcentral PA), I would start the day surrounded by gobbling toms, and usually had a couple different opportunities to harvest one within the first few days of the hunting season. It was exciting and fun and a great way to begin the work day, although I will say that by the end of May, I was a hollow shell of a human, having run myself ragged either chasing toms myself, or calling for friends who had not yet filled a tag.

Bottom line is, those old flocks of twenty to thirty birds no longer exist. We are fortunate to see one or two wild turkeys at all on our place. And we have excellent habitat with grouse.

What caused the loss of wild turkeys in PA has generated a discussion similar to the one surrounding the demise of the once amazing world famous smallmouth bass fishery in the lower Susquehanna River. It seems that almost everyone involved has a reasonable opinion about it, and the official experts are being second-guessed by people who have witnessed circumstances different than those described by said experts. The ubiquitous use of trail cameras since 2000 has accompanied this growth in sportsman observational opinion, and very often individual hunters will use their cameras’ footage to make very compelling arguments that contradict official wildlife managers’ narratives.

Something similar happens in the aquatic environment, when thousands of fishermen experience and see something different than what they are being told through official government channels.

So now PGC is toying with the idea of releasing martens into the wilds of Pennsylvania. Similar to the fisher that was released back in the 1990s, martens are a furry little weasel-type animal that, like all weasel type animals everywhere, has an insatiable appetite for everything they can catch and kill. Not necessarily kill and eat. All members of the weasel family (wolverines, fishers, martens, mink, otters, weasels) have periods where they become “surplus killers.” That is, they will kill many more animals than they can eat, just because they seem to enjoy the hunt and the kill. Question being now, What will the new marten do to our turkeys?

Will martens do more of what fishers have so clearly done to PA turkey populations, which is to climb up into trees and eat them while they are roosted and asleep? Will martens only eat turkey eggs? Who knows? And so it follows, why release martens into our forests and farms if we don’t know what impacts they will have?

The question I have, and which I know so many other sportsmen have, is: What kind of studies have been done to date that provide confidence that reintroducing marten will have a net-benefit result, and not a net-negative/cost result?

Most of us agree with government biologists that biodiversity in general is important, and we agree that increasing biodiversity is a worthy goal. But, what are the costs and benefits of doing so? What costs and benefits do marten bring to our forests? I can imagine quite a few costs, mostly impacts on ground nesting birds (like wild turkeys, grouse, pheasant, woodcock, and a zillion species of cute little migratory dickie birds) that are already under tremendous pressure from overpopulating (thanks to urban sprawl) raccoons, skunks, possums, feral cats etc., and I wonder if the benefit of a few hundred citizens annually catching a view of one of these cute and elusive furry weasel-like animals is worth the inevitable costs.

One of the things we must struggle with today is that, as much as we would like to return to the pristine conditions of three hundred or four hundred years ago, where humans had a measurable but relatively minor impact on the environment, the reality on the ground today is totally different. The social carrying capacity among different human groups is one consideration. The carrying capacity of other wildlife is another consideration. I imagine that before people go petitioning or pushing to have these newest predators released back into our forests, we should know what their likely impacts are going to be first. I am willing to sign a petition to have PGC thoroughly study this subject, but I would feel irresponsible to ask the agency to jump before knowing what lies ahead and below.

I will say that I like knowing fishers are in our forests, but I do not like the tremendous impacts they have had on squirrels, rabbits, and turkeys. Everywhere a fisher takes up residence, the small game and turkey populations drop dramatically. Personally, I would prefer to know that there were a few hundred fishers living across Pennsylvania, instead of the thousands we now have that are over-impacting a lot of other equally valuable wildlife (and I enjoy recreationally trapping for fisher every year).

I am not saying that adding martens to Pennsylvania will necessarily be pouring fuel on the fire burning up wild turkey populations, but we really should know. That is the responsible thing to do.

 

What happened to Earth Day?

Earth Day began decades ago, in 1970, when I was a kid. I remember it as a distinct point in time where the people around me spoke about raw sewage and chemicals being dumped and piped directly into American waterways. Up until that point, Americans had kind of unhappily or grudgingly accepted environmental degradation and pollution as an unfortunate necessity of economic and technological progress.

But fish kills in what older people then clearly remembered as pristine trout streams, and obvious losses of waterways with once- major fishing and waterfowl hunting to untreated, unfiltered, unmitigated chemical and physical waste dumping bothered most Americans. A great deal of this pollution was out in the open, unsightly, and an obvious reflection on Americans as a people. Then the Cuyahoga River caught on fire because of all the dangerous pollution in it, and that image galvanized Americans to clean up our act.

What was happening then was public waterways and air that were shared publicly were being used as a cheap dumping ground by production facilities of all sorts. The American public was bearing the burden of environmental waste, while the same processes that generated that waste also generated income that was privatized. I am 100% for private income, but I strenuously object to using shared waters and air as a cheap garbage disposal, and so did people of all backgrounds in 1970.

Thus was Earth Day born. Fair enough, understandable enough. And the environmental cleanup and protection movement followed closely on its heels. The US Environmental Protection Agency, where I began my professional career, was created soon after Earth Day to address the obvious problems resulting from carelessness with our shared environment.

But now, after decades of increasingly crushing environmental laws and regulations that ridiculously “protect” us down to parts per trillion of chemicals that already naturally occur at those levels in the natural environment….Earth Day represents something totally different than it did in 1970. Today, Earth Day is a celebration of an all-out assault on Western Civilization by people pursuing a ridiculously impossibly unattainable “Net Zero” goal. Meaning that humans should have zero impact on the planet. None. Which naturally necessitates a complete (and unreasonable, undemocratic, authoritarian) overhaul of our way of life, freedoms, choices, food, etc.

Earth Day is now marked and promoted by people who supposedly “know better” what is right for us. And in fact almost 100% of the environmental and even land conservation organizations are politically partisan and politically extreme, embracing all kinds of cultural and economic Marxism while rejecting American capitalism and individual freedom. This shift away from cleanup to directing us on what to eat and when and where is patently bad, unfair, wrong, and in fact is so egregiously foolish it is hurting the credibility of the environmental quality movement.

When environmental groups like Penn Future and Sierra Club always protect one political party and always attack one political party, they are shown to be about partisan politics and not about environmental quality. They are political shells. And when a local land conservancy embraces evil “Diversity, Equity, Inclusivity” policies that are actually against the founding principles of said conservancy, such as private land ownership and capitalism, then we know that even the once- wonderful land trust movement has been hijacked and turned against America.

So in 2023, Earth Day represented authoritarianism, out of control Big Government, cruel assaults on and corresponding losses of individual personal freedoms and choice, and a whole bunch of other bad stuff. The fact that Earth Day is now openly un-American and anti-America tells us that Earth Day’s promoters are not trying to protect us from pollution, they are trying to take control of our lives and destroy what had been the most free nation on Planet Earth.

Supposedly in the name of saving us from ourselves. To which I and a lot of other Americans say No Thanks.

Today’s “I know what is best for you better than you do” mindset of the environmental movement is what drove me out of working at the USEPA. It is unreasonable, unproven, and every day it is shown to be wrong and wronger.

Instead of all the anti-science climate hysteria sky-is-falling nonsense, Americans should be celebrating the incredible environmental cleanup and success we have had in the past 53 years since Earth Day was first established. Tilting at environmental windmills makes some people feel like they have meaning in their lives, and if they themselves want to take on the burdens they propose for the rest of us, then they can make that choice. But they have no right to try to take away my right of choice, your right of choice. And if there is one clear indication that the loudest voices promoting Earth Day are not serious and do not deserve to be treated seriously, it is the fact that absolutely none of these people do what they say the rest of us must do “to save the planet.”

 

Like AM Radio, this blog could save your life

So much official government effort is being poured into censoring information available to Americans, and providing them with misinformation and disinformation that serves the interests of people in power, that not too far off this blog might be one of the few places you can get actual, real, honest, truthful, accurate information. It might actually save your life.

The Twitter Files showed how under its previous ownership, Twitter was not much more than a government-run sock puppet, because not only was Twitter loaded with former FBI and CIA staff, but actual FBI and CIA, DHS, and other federal employees (like FBI agent Elvis Chan) were directing Twitter’s censorship efforts and purposeful lying from within federal office buildings across America.

But it is not just the illegal official censorship work implemented by the Biden Administration that is a threat to your safety, it is also the willingness of Big Tech (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram etc) to “partner” with government employees and help them shut down or muzzle their political opponents. This unholy fusion is really dangerous, as well as illegal and unconstitutional. It exists to steamroll you, to keep certain people in power.

Now the government is trying to eliminate AM Radio. As in, you can’t get AM Radio in your car. Why? Well, it is not that these control freaks in government have found an alternative to AM Radio, which has served as a nationwide emergency information outlet for over fifty years. Rather, the control freaks simply don’t want you listening to AM Radio news and opinion programs that reach tens of millions of Americans daily. They can’t stand competition in the marketplace of ideas, and so they do what they have done and are doing elsewhere: They are trying to eliminate AM Radio altogether to keep you from hearing ideas and information that the Big Media and Big Government and Big Tech will not provide you with. People with power are threatened by real information.

Consider how much of a financial loss FOX News is taking because of their termination of journalist Tucker Carlson today. But FOX News’ owners, the Murdoch Family, don’t care about the cost of eliminating Tucker Carlson. They have plenty of money already, so the financial cost of Bye-Bye Tucker is not that big of a deal to them. What they want more of is control of YOU, and the independent voice of Tucker Carlson stood in their way.

So…stay tuned to this independent blog and others like it. You see that there is no advertising here, just honest opinion and information. I am not going to lie to you. Why would I? What good would it do me to lie? It is actually much more rebellious and exciting to tell the simple truth here!

Given how laser focused the people currently running government are on controlling everything in your life, it might be difficult for you to get good information in the future. So, reading our little blog here and listening to AM Radio might just some day save your life, and keep you from making bad mistakes. Think of us as lifelines in a stormy sea of official lies and disinformation.

 

Did FOX News throw the fight?

Much left-windrow hay has been made over the past week over FOX News settling out of court with Dominion Chinese Voting Machine Co., which FOX News had correctly, accurately, and with great piles of evidence described as being inaccurate and likely corrupted by the machines’ illegal connection to the Internet and to flashdrives.

Plus there was Dominion’s Eric Coomer bragging about how he did or would or had used his position at Dominion to block President Trump from receiving the actual vote tally Trump had earned on Election Day 2020. Coomer was Dominion’s director of security and had unique access into and control of the voting machines across America, and so his threat or bragging really amounted to something substantial. Basically the guy was bragging about having tampered with the most important election in Western Civilization in the past 100 years.

Coomer’s many partisan gaffes and showing of illegal playing cards, so to speak, would play quite well in a court room in favor of FOX News. A jury would have a tough time discounting Coomer’s claims to have illegally thrown the 2020 election.

So why did FOX News suddenly settle with Dominion, when the legal eagle work, like depositions and evidence production and cross examination and arguments, had just begun? Normally, it makes no sense for someone who has the evidence on their side to suddenly roll over and give up. And again, on the left side of the hay windrow, this settlement is being purveyed as an indication that President Trump was wrong to criticize the 2020 election outcome. This legal settlement is being interpreted by some as a vindication of Biden’s claim to have won the 2020 election fair and square.

So here is what seems to be happening to my jaded eyes: FOX News sure looks like it is unnecessarily rolling over and dying in order to paint the widespread claims of 2020 election interference and vote fraud as baseless, empty, and without merit.

And why would FOX News do this?

Because FOX News is owned by never-Trumper Republican Rupert Murdoch and his two registered Never-Trumper Democrat Party sons.

Not too long ago the Murdochs had already gone to one great and painful length to hurt President Trump’s 2024 re-election possibilities by officially declaring Trump persona non exista and persona non grata on FOX News. That is, FOX News reporters and talking heads and hosts were/ are not allowed to even mention President Donald J. Trump’s name on air, unless it is in a negative context. The Murdoch family’s goal is to make Trump invisible and thereby politically irrelevant.

The Murdochs’ political declaration of war on Trump via a supposed news reporting channel is an open declaration of war against the politically conservative FOX News audience. This is not a bluff, this is literally laying all your cards on the table, come what may. It carries real risk to the FOX News brand and to the Murdochs’ financial future.

So…Dominion…when it has now become apparent to everyone watching American politics that all the bogus criticism of Trump and the fake lawsuits against Trump and the fake criminal accusations against Trump are not only having no effect on Trump’s standing with American voters, but are actually bolstering his claim among voters to be the greatest innocent political victim in human history, and thus bolstering his just demand to be the re-elected president in 2024, it appears that the Murdoch Family had only one card left to play: The Dominion card, which looks to me like either the Joker card or the Suicide King card.

The FOX News settlement with Dominion appears to be a last-ditch effort by Trump’s FOX-RINO enemies to undermine his complaints about the 2020 election.

Because normal people would not normally give up the princely sum of $787 million dollars to settle with someone they believe to be unworthy of the money, it appears that the Murdochs are falling on their sword here to create the very public impression that they were unable to press forward with the Dominion lawsuit. Because, you know, the 2020 election “was soooo secure” and “sooooo clean.” Because in truth it was not, but such is the Murdoch family’s collective hatred for President Trump that they will deliberately pop a sacrifice fly ball or throw the fight in order to help the other side win, even at such a great financial and credibility cost to themselves.

And here is the thing the Murdoch family members don’t realize about this crazy expensive gesture of theirs: Normal people are already hip to the crazy shit that super rich people like the Murdochs do, and this throwing of the fight with Dominion looks like just more crazy rich people shit.

And given how corrupt all the Never Trumper people have been, all the lies they have told and unethical things they have done to try to stop President Trump, who is to say that this “settlement” isn’t just an even bigger charade, where Dominion quietly signs the money back over to FOX News? These people, Dominion and FOX News and the Murdochs, have very little credibility with most Americans, because it already looks like they will sell their grandmas for ten bucks to try to hurt Trump, again.

Long Live King President Donald John Trump, mofos. Nice try, but We, The People are going to run the table next year and coronate our guy, our hero, our savior.

UPDATE: FOX News has terminated its employment relationship with host Tucker Carlson, one of the very few journalists remaining at FOX News who was trusted by at least half of America (conservatives). This is yet another act by establishment elites (Murdoch family) to limit the accurate information available to American citizens. Yes, the Murdochs are damaging their Fox News business by behaving this way, but they care more about getting control of you than they care about money. They already have a lot of money, and that has whetted their appetite for getting something even better…control of you. And they can most easily achieve this by limiting the information available to you and then shaping your opinions with the fake news and misinformation they dole out. Bye bye Fox News!

Fox News played its self-defeating last-ditch card, the so-called suicide king

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Potent symbol of freedom: A gas kitchen stove

Only in the purposefully chaotic and bizarre power politics of 2021 to 2023 do Americans discover themselves clinging not just to their Bible and their guns, but to the gas stove in their kitchen. Yeah, Ol’ Smoky is now a symbol of your personal freedom.

Why in God’s green earth is the federal government (and several state governments including New York and Washington) trying from several different angles (consumer protection regulation, legislation, and straight-up executive branch political fatwa confiscation) to eliminate stoves that burn natural gas?

Because of control! Of you! By the bureaucrats and the lawless control freaks in government!

They want you hooked up to the electrical grid matrix and completely dependent upon whoever controls that electrical grid. One false move by you, and -POW! – your power goes out and it won’t be restored until you delete that mean “right wing” tweet and stop attending that church down the street.

This debacle of bad governance and really bad government overreach is all because a gas stove provides Americans with independence from the electric grid. While the electric grid can be controlled with the flip of a switch or two, as can the power meters on our individual homes, a gas stove operates either from a huge natural gas main pipeline that takes a lot of effort to turn off, which effects multiple city neighborhoods, or from a large propane tank in the back yard.

Propane tanks for residences run from 100 gallons to 3,000 gallons in size, providing the careful homeowner with potentially several years of cooking and heating independence until a fill-up is needed. Hooked up to a non-stop 24/7 gas main, a home can heat and cook with a gas stove 24/7. And in fact, I have personally seen an elderly woman in my neighborhood huddled up in front of her gas stove to stay warm in the winter, while the electric power was down and unavailable. This ability to run your own kitchen and home disconnected from the electric grid is serious independence from control and monitoring!

And the control freaks hate it hate it hate it!

There is a good reason Barack Hussein Obama recently installed a 2,500-gallon propane tank at his luxury vacation beach front mansion on flood-proof Martha’s Vineyard Island. When you have a large propane tank and the power goes out, you can always run a powerful electrical generator off of that propane, as well as heat and cook with your gas stove. Some people even have the old fashioned style natural gas lights in their homes, and they work great! It is like whatever happens with the power grid doesn’t really apply to people with natural gas stoves. You are completely OK and independent.

Turns out, Obama did at least this one thing right in his life, although he won’t admit that he is a hypocrite about it, because the guy is constantly hectoring us about the evils of the propane gas in his tank. I say, if a serial liar Marxist Kenyan named Barack Hussein Obama can have a gas stove and the huge propane tank out back to keep the stove fired up and cooking 24/7 off-grid, then an honest-to-goodness genuine red-blooded American like you can have one, too. Just on principle, no questions asked.

What is truly interesting about this subject is the bogus and openly fake “study” supposedly done by the Rocky Mountain Institute that the gas banners and book burners supposedly relied on for their screams of horror and outrage about “the dangers of gas stoves“. Click the link above and see for yourself. This is not a study, nor does it rely on real studies. It is a political brochure with pictures. The concerns that RMI lists are based on the improbability/impossibility of people sitting inside a gas-fired oven while it is on fire, and do not take into account ambient air dilution, stove top hoods and exhaust fans, or the risks from alternatives to gas stoves.

It is as if the only thing that RMI cares about are the potential risks (none of which are proven with actual long term study data showing a strong correlation between gas stoves and related health problems); they don’t even talk about the benefits of gas stoves. Not the least of which is that clean burning natural gas emits far fewer and less pollutants than coal-fired power from the usual electrical power plants where we get most of our electricity.

This gas stove banning business is all about bureaucrats directly controlling your home life, which means your personal freedom. They used a fake “study” by a 100% partisan and ideologically driven activist organization called Rocky Mountain Institute to “inform” their chums in the partisan and ideologically driven activist organization called the mainstream media, who in turn created the (fake) astroturf political target for partisan and ideologically driven politicians who don’t give a fig for the actual scientific truth or for you or for freedom.

Whenever we see so-called “science” claims like this gas stove ban hype that cannot be challenged or debated with its proponents, then we know it is not science, it is propaganda.

Cling to your gas stove for dear life. Do not let go of it, do not give it up, and vote out of office any elected official who supports banning gas stoves. These are bad people, controlling people, who believe they know best how you must live your life. Even the life you live in your own kitchen, frying up chicken and plantains and sauteeing vegetables, all of which really do throw up a whole bunch of oily particles in the air that can get into your lungs. And believe it or not, this is a subject I know a lot about, because after finishing graduate school I took several courses on this subject at Johns Hopkins University Medical School, and got “A” grades.

Take it from me, the RMI “study” is BS, the supposed health issue about gas stoves is BS, and I’m not even a doctor. Keep your gas stove, and toss out the RMI study and its claim that your gas stove is dangerous. Live free, my friends. Breathe that free American air and rejoice.

Obama installs a 2,500-gallon propane tank at his luxury beach front mansion on Martha’s Vineyard, and so should you

Just so we are all on the same page about what a racist disgrace Obama is, here he is happily posing with racist disgrace Louis Farrakhan. Don’t listen to anything Obama says, he is a racist dirt bag.

PA lost a 2A warrior

Kim Stolfer died two days ago, and if you love freedom and liberty, you will miss him, even if you did not know him.

If you ever participated in an annual Second Amendment rights rally at the state Capitol in Harrisburg, then you responded to Kim’s call.

Kim was an effective fighter in every way, most especially for our individual Second Amendment rights. Among a bunch of effective organizations, he also founded Firearm Owners Against Crime, of which I am a life member. FOAC became the de facto PA-oriented 2A group in Pennsylvania, despite the presence of the NRA, PFSC, and other organizations purporting to represent gun owner’s interests, simply because Kim and his passionate FOAC members just would not ever back down. They lobbied and litigated for freedom at the municipal and state level, most notoriously to obtain, and then to maintain, state pre-emption for all firearm laws.

Thanks to Kim and FOAC, Pennsylvania does not have a crazy quilt patchwork of gun regulations and laws that change dramatically from one municipality to the other. Imagine (for example) driving the short distance from Wayne County to Northampton County with a normal gun permitted in one place, but which is outlawed in the other. Merely having such an outlawed gun in the latter location could result in your arrest, detainment, and life-changing prosecution, for the simple “crime” of casually changing your nearby venue. No society can exist this way with any regulations or laws, and thanks to Kim, you Pennsylvanians are not living this way, either.

I personally knew Kim from both 2A activism and wildlife management policy. As FOAC’s city-dwelling litigant against Harrisburg City’s illegal and lawless anti-gun ordinances, I was his devoted servant on the former; and as a conservationist, I was his opponent on the other. Kim advocated for leaving many more deer than I believe the farming and natural landscapes can sustain. We maintained a warm friendship nonetheless for a long time.

Below is a photo I took of Kim at the 2021 2A rights rally in Harrisburg. Kim is unfurling the incredibly long list of existing gun regulations Pennsylvanians (and citizens in most other states) are already subject to, making the point that even more plus additional plus extra gun control measures are not needed, because they don’t do anything to stop crime. If politicians want crime reduced, all they have to do is apply any number of existing gun control laws.

But as we already know, people advocating for more gun control are not interested in controlling crime. Many gun control advocates are actually against applying the law and reducing crime. Rather, they are fiendishly focused on controlling YOU.

Rest in peace, great warrior Kim. We appreciate everything you did for all of us.

It is important to note that throughout Kim’s many legal battles to protect your 2A rights, he had right at his side a devoted and exceptional lawyer, Josh Prince. Josh is a refreshingly competent candidate for Commonwealth Court.

Every Second Amendment 2A Gun Rights lover in Pennsylvania must cast their/ your vote for Josh Prince on May 16th.

Kim Stolfer unfurling a loooong list of existing gun control laws. At the podium next to him is attorney Josh Prince, now a candidate for Commonwealth Court. Photo by Josh First

 

 

 

 

Kim’s official obituary:

Kim Stolfer, age 68, of South Fayette, Pennsylvania, passed away on Saturday, April 15, 2023 at home surrounded by his family after a hard-fought battle with cancer.

Born November 7, 1954 in Pittsburgh, Kim was raised by his late mother, Charlotte (Moser) Stolfer.  Kim was a 1972 graduate of Carlynton High School in Carnegie.

At the young age of 19 Kim became a Marine sending money home to his then juvenile sister Rose to help care for their then ailing mother. The Marine Corps vocational test scores showed his aptitude in verbal skills, organizational skills, and problem-solving, so they put him through aircraft and powerplant mechanic school and he was assigned as a crew chief on a CH-47 Chinook helicopter. Like many veterans, war molded him from his late teen years into adulthood, and he saw and did more than he ever said.

Kim was crew chief of the last American helicopter to leave Vietnam.  Due to a communications error, military personnel and civilians were left behind at the American Embassy in Saigon after the “official” last helicopter departed with the Ambassador.  Kim’s CH-47 evacuated those left behind as Saigon fell in South Vietnam.

Following his military service Kim went on to work and serve his country as a body and fender repairman for the United States Postal Service. He retired in 2009 as shop keeper after 30 years of service.

Kim found a love for shooting sports through Greater Pittsburgh Trap & Skeet Club, where he participated in recreational and competition shooting including IPSC practical pistol, rifle and shotgun. He co-founded Shooters Active in Firearms Education (S.A.F.E.) and became active throughout the Pennsylvania region teaching NRA-certified firearms safety and concealed carry classes through various sportsman’s clubs and police departments.

Kim was a founding member of both the Greater Pittsburgh Trap & Skeet Club and the Allegheny County Sportsmen’s League (ACSL) club’s legislative affairs branch, which got him involved in leadership positions in the Allegheny County Sportsmen‘s League (ACSL) and the Pennsylvania Sportsmen’s Association (PSA). His efforts evolved into Firearms Owners Against Crime (FOAC-ILLEA).

Kim took his oath to defend the Constitution seriously and was an effective adversary of elected officials and government employees who violate their oaths. He was a well-spoken advocate for personal freedoms as well as for holding criminals accountable. Kim wrote and or co-authored, dozens of pieces of statewide legislation over the years, many of which are now current law, including the Castle Doctrine law and Preemption Enhancement law.

He is survived by his loving and devoted wife of 36 years, Michelle (Pozzi) Stolfer; his son, Jason Stolfer; his step-son, Michael (Emily) Pozzi; his granddaughters, Paige and Gabriella Pozzi; his beloved sister, Rose (Mike) Johnson; his niece and nephew, Samantha (John) Rothka and Paul (Jennifer) Milavec; and many loved great nieces and nephews.

The family will receive friends and patriots at Thomas-Little Funeral Home, 305 Main St., Imperial, PA on Wednesday, April 19th from 2-4 p.m. and 6-8 p.m. and on Thursday, April 20th from 12-2 p.m. A service to honor and remember Kim’s life will be held at 2 p.m. on Thursday at the funeral home.

The family would like to express their thanks for the wonderful help and care given by Gallagher Hospice.  He will be sorely missed by his family, friends, allies, and patriots. We are all diminished by his passing.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that donations be made to FOAC-ILLEA  https://foac-illea.org/ in memory of Kim’s life and legacy.

Biden’s Police State

The Police State Is Here and “Governed” by Joe Biden
Posted on April 4, 2023 at Natural Gas Now by Tom Shepstone

Joe Biden, the compromised plagiarist who Obama said could muck up anything, is now in titular charge of a police state once known as the land of the free and brave.

Western Civilization is collapsing at an ever increasing rate. The United States, the only remaining culture and force with the potential to reverse the decline, has now become a police state, with Joe Biden supposedly the chief. This chief of police really isn’t, though, as anyone above the age of five can see with their own eyes. He’s being tragically manipulated by the worst sorts of leftists and radicals, who couldn’t care less about him but need to use him to knock the U.S. down as many pegs as they can, while they can. Exactly who they are we can only speculate, but we know China and the deep state are in the mix and we know we are their enemy. They have created a police state over the last decade and we’re living in it, whether we realize it or not. Is there hope of reversing things?

The evidence we are living in a third-world police state is everywhere today. We are living in an Orwellian or Fahrenheit 451 world where offending someone in government or favored by government has now become a crime against the state. Consider the following:

 Douglas Mackey a/k/a Ricky Vaughn was just convicted of a Federal crime for Tweeting a perfectly obvious joke regarding Hillary Clinton where, with a MAGA hat displayed on his profile picture, he suggested Hillary voters could vote by text in 2016. There is no evidence anyone at all took it seriously, but humor is the worst of sins for leftists. The photo on the left below is Mackey’s Tweet and the photo on the right is by a Leftist telling Trump voters the same thing. Mackey was arrested and the one on the right has been ignored by the Biden Feds. This is brownshirt police state stuff:

 Senators from both parties have introduced a bill by the astoundingly Orwellian name of the RESTRICT Act, which is superficially about chasing TikTok out off the country but is really about empowering the Federal government by bureaucratic edict to shut any and all social media that doesn’t comport with the views of the state. It would further empower the outrageous deep state control of the media revealed in the Twitter files. Those files are only the tiniest bit of the wide-spread infestation of Big Tech by a deep state that is arm in arm with it as a result of the Section 230 protections Federal law gives to Big Tech companies.

 Thomas Jefferson said “No government ought to be without censors, and, where the press is free, no one ever will,” [meaning that the only censors should be the citizens holding accountable their government] but today the press and Big Tech are no longer the challengers of government, as should always be, but, rather, the censors for government when it is in Democrat hands. During Biden times, we’ve seen the press and Big Tech join hands with government to squelch supposed “disinformation” on COVID, vaccines and anything else connected with the Wu-Flu. These police state censor tactics extended not only to different opinions, but also to acknowledged truths the government simply didn’t want out there because they went against the police state’s agenda.

 The same censorship is increasingly evident with respect to the climate grifting scam. Government has not only merged with Big Pharma, but also Big Green, using edicts from the SEC, for example, to force us all into deals with the grifters through imposition of ESG investing policies. And, throw out documented hard-core facts about the climate, as Greg Wrightstone and the CO2 Coalition have done and you’ll be thrown off LinkedIn, as they were, and unable to advertise on Facebook. Only the official narrative of the power grabbers and grifters is now permitted if you’re big enough to attract attention. Meanwhile, John Kerry, celebrities and BlackRock executives fly into Davos on private jets for meetings that could be done on Zoom, but that wouldn’t demonstrate how they are elites well above the law and so the rest of us are left to pointlessly complain of hypocrisy that was deliberate.

 We are seeing the Biden Administration, Kathy Hochul and and others, at the prodding of tax-exempt ultra-wealthy NGOs, impose gas stove bans, EV mandates and other measures to strangle oil and gas are everywhere. All is wrapped in “energy transition” and “save the planet” lies that are without foundation. Instead, we are instructed that phony models and targets are the reasons for transferring every more wealth and power to elites. Farmers in the Netherlands are told they can no longer farm as politically favored Big Tech moves in to take the land, and that is but one example of the corporatism —merger of business and government—at work throughout Western Civilization.

And, so it goes. There are hundreds of other examples, but they all come to one thing; Western Civilization has lost its virtue. Life is now a “free for all” struggle for power and riches and the virtuous aren’t even in the struggle, they are cowered into corners by purveyors of political correctness. The police state is here because we have become afraid to speak out and our cowardice has empowered government to take drastic steps to squelch all speech with which it doesn’t agree, knowing our resistance is weak. And, they’re largely correct. Our legislatures and courts are too corrupted themselves to do anything about this. Oh, we’ll win battles here and there, but the trajectory is still downward and mostly has been for over a century.

Notwithstanding this heavy dose of cynicism and foreboding, there is hope to replace the police state with a return to virtue if common men and women rise to their feet. The COVID debacle awakened many. I now find myself in agreement with multiple people I could not have imagining admiring a few years ago. Virtuous individuals may yet be found, and in strange places. There are many, many people of all political persuasions who recognize the COVID lockdowns were pure police state, did enormous damage and serve as a warning that Western Civilization can be vaporized in a matter of days. More to the point, we now know the enemy ardently desires this and won’t be beaten with law, constitutions or sill taunts about the hypocrisy of elites who where it like a badge of honor.

No, we are in a spiritual war. It is a war against lies and, as I’ve noted here several times we cannot live by lies. That was the message in every one of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s books. Most of his life was a spiritual contest with communism in its many forms and he waged it by telling truths in every imaginable way he could. He suffered through imprisonment and exile by the Soviets and, later, much rejection from the West as a weak President Ford refused to even meet with him out of fear of communist backlash. Solzhenitsyn arguably prevailed when the Soviet Union collapsed of its own weight but, today, we’re dealing with even worse atrocities and threats vis-a vis Communist China, proving the battle for virtue is an endless one.

There will always be collectivists, grifters and power seekers for whom the virtue of the individual is forever an obstacle to their own quests. Indeed, the virtuous individual is the one thing that stands in the way for the triumph of lies. And, where does virtue come from? Man cannot create it. Only the Creator can, although man forever attempts to do so. This why a return to Judeo-Christian principles is the one hope on which the future of Western Civilization rests and has always rested. Can it happen? Yes. Will it happen? Perhaps it’s too early to tell, but the hour is getting very late. We are already living in a police state.

(the original essay can be accessed at https://naturalgasnow.org/the-police-state-is-here-and-governed-by-joe-biden/)

Passover & Easter messages of Freedom

Freedom has been the goal of human beings forever.

Freedom to be your own unique self as God created you, freedom to think your own thoughts, freedom to travel where you wish, freedom to worship God in your own way, freedom to speak your mind without fear of reprisal or punishment, freedom to pursue the work you like, freedom to read the books you want and etc.

And yet, despite all of the deepest yearnings humans have had for individual and communal freedom for tens of thousands of years, freedom has nonetheless been really tough to achieve or gain for any meaningful amount of time. Here in America, the concept of freedom as Americans know it today was achieved on the frontier, where European settlers, run-away and freed blacks, and American Indians lived in a sometimes mostly peaceful communal free-for-all, and most of the time in an ebb-and-flow of painful tumult and settlement. It was on the American frontier that Europeans finally broke the chains of feudal serfdom, because they were finally out of the reach of feudal overlords.

They lived as they wanted to live.

Along the American east coast British and Dutch militaries enforced iron laws that funneled money, goods, and loyalty to far distant monarchs in Europe. But within the American interior, what we call the frontier, a new kind of human was developing. European ideals of hard work and self sacrifice blended with American Indian ideas of self-reliance and communal reliance, free of overbearing overlords imposing their own selfish demands. And what resulted was pure freedom, now enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution.

While early in our nation’s history the American Indians were still largely nomadic, or at least seasonal travelers across wide landscapes, the European Americans brought a focus on permanent settlement. They also brought values and hopes from the Torah (Old Testament) and the Gospel (New Testament), what today we accurately describe as a uniquely synthesized Judeo-Christian ethic for daily life and expectations from our government.

Both Judaism and Christianity celebrate freedom, and in this week of Passover (tonight) and Easter (coming Sunday), and in this American time of great peril for individual freedom, it is important to note how both these faiths mark freedom and value it as the highest form of human expression.

Why is American freedom in great peril? Because bad people who crave control and dominion over everyone and everything have seized control of the American government. Like the early Americans did in their battle with Britain, we must think of these bad people as the Pharoahs in the story of Exodus, and think of the American citizen – you and me – as the ancient Israelites, escaping harsh bondage.

These bad people constantly demand that We, The People behave one way, while they conspicuously behave the opposite. They wear their double standard hypocrisy like a badge of honor. To them, it demonstrates their authoritarian power over everyone else, their ability to behave contrary to the way they demand everyone else behave. Behaving publicly in a hypocritical manner is a demonstration of their power over everyone else. I know this is sick and anti-democratic, but the Left is completely drunk on power and is anti-democratic. They think they know what is best for everyone, and that we must all live according to their supposedly brilliant ideas (that have already failed in so many other places like the Soviet Union, China, Venezuela, Cuba etc), so no freedom for us regular “little people.”

With the holiday of Passover, Judaism teaches about the centrality of physical freedom. Freedom from slavery, freedom from political overlords who control everything we eat, think, say, and do. While Jews always celebrate Passover, there are many Christians who also observe a “Last Supper” tonight among friends and family.

With the holiday of Easter, Christians celebrate the concept of spiritual freedom; freedom from earthly limits and earthly/ physical chains. One of the first steps any authoritarian government does is to break the link between humans and one another and between humans and God. The state must become God for the state to become all-powerful, and so spiritual freedom is a powerful antidote to evil people running government badly.

Both of these separate celebrations this week, Passover and Easter, are critical to Americans and to any human being anywhere who wants to remain free or attain freedom. America has a unique blend of individual freedom and individual opportunity that no other country has. It is why everyone in the world wants to move to America.

But if we Americans are going to hold onto the Constitutional Republic that so many men have died to create and hold onto, then we must make public our celebration of freedom and our demand for freedom. We must embolden one another and embrace one another and stand side by side with one another, because right now We, The People are facing a truly tyrannical and evil government that seeks to take away the freedom that we all have. All of it. Forever.

Only standing all together can we withstand their attack on us.

Freedom. Celebrate it, mark it, identify it, value it, cherish it, and never ever relinquish it. Whatever freedom the government people can take away from you they will never ever give back to you.

Happy Passover and Happy Easter freedom to all of my fellow Americans. Celebrate freedom as you will, but celebrate it by God and never ever stand down.