Archive → September, 2023
A thousand overnight tragedies
Normally, the smell of rotting fish is a signal to clean out the fridge or to leave the area you are in. It’s a universally bad smell, and no one normal wants to be around it. But it was a pervasive good sign where I happened to be standing, because it was associated with the freshly dead salmon heads and remains at my feet that had not been here the previous afternoon. A thousand individual tragedies had occurred along this stream bank overnight, as bears had picked muddy bank spots to grab spawning salmon and take them uphill where they could eat them without the fear of being ambushed by humans, or bigger bears.
We had hunted and fished along a roughly seventy mile vertical stretch of southeastern Alaska for over a week, and in addition to beginning to smell a little fishy myself, I had also saturated and possibly satiated a cavernous need inside me. It is an ever-present deep, clawing need that most wilderness seekers share, be they bikers, hikers, canoers, campers, photographers, fishers or hunters. Sorry, I am not going to quote Thoreau or Muir or Roosevelt on the tonics, joys, highs, or benefits of directly experiencing wilderness. My own wilderness pleasure is gained from simply not seeing a single other human being (except my hunting/fishing partner, when I have one) anywhere near where I am hunting or fishing. That unusual moment results in me feeling like I have better than average odds of achieving my goal, because I have the whole landscape to play without intervention.
On this trip, my “public” goal was a wolf, a blacktail deer, and/or a big black bear better than 300 pounds. Hides and skulls alone were going to come home with me. Edible meat was going directly into my buddy’s freezer. All of the many salmon I caught on the trip went into either my buddy’s smoke house, into his freezer, or into my stomach. It pleases me to report back that chum (dog) salmon directly out of the ocean taste damned good. It is also a fact that chum salmon do not keep well overnight, and that even halibut turn up their noses at it. I suppose freshly caught chum can be immediately canned, but given that there are usually better alternative salmon species to eat and can, I don’t see why a person would make this choice.
Incidentally, about those salmon: Alaska’s management of its salmon runs has been so good, so professional, so scientific, and so successful, that there is actually a glut of salmon in the streams and on the American market. Therefore, wild caught salmon prices are way down. A lot of commercial salmon boats were out netting, and the cannery we visited was in business, but with diesel fuel at about eight bucks a gallon there and salmon at eighty cents a pound, it’s hard to see how the netters will survive. But thanks to the Alaska Department of Fish & Game, the bears have plenty to eat before denning and hibernating for the long, cold Alaskan winter.
Goals are critical on a wilderness trip. Even stupidly simple ones. You have to have goals before you set out on a trip like this, or else you will wonder what the heck you were doing out there when you get back to civilization. My actual personal goal was simple: To fish and to hunt as much as I could, and this goal was easily met. On this trip, I was often able to do both hunting and fishing simultaneously: We slowly trolled salmon spoons behind the boat while glassing the shorelines for critters. A rubber dinghy towed in the backwash provided us the ship-to-shore transportation we needed. See a salmon stream that is calling your name? Go ashore and hunt it, and look for salmon-eating black bears to fill some tags; and look out for the griz. We saw a lot of griz.
Only saw wolf tracks in one very remote spot, and I passed up the one black bear I had a shot at. Only twenty feet across the salmon stream from me, he was either a genetic runt, an ancient-looking yearling, or maybe a female. Whatever kind of black bear he was, he was crabby enough to growl at me before shambling off to less crowded fishing spots. I wouldn’t shoot a bear that small in Pennsylvania, and I sure wasn’t going to fill my Alaska tag with it. Maybe I will go back for the spring bear hunt in 2024.
Despite fighting our way up into the interior of an island known to have blacktail deer, we saw none and feared the griz there more than we were willing to keep going after deer. Signs of griz were everywhere. I picked and popped high bush cranberry and high bush huckleberry while noting the increasing deer browse the farther in and higher I got. But it was a veritable jungle, and surprising a griz up here would mean my certain mauling, possibly my death, and so I decided to nicely frame my deer locking tag when I got home instead of risking life and limb to fill it. I headed back out and found Merlin asleep in the sunshine on the beach.
A loud thud on the bottom of the boat awakened me from my cramped sleeping position, and I rolled out of my sleeping bag onto the cabin floor, which was cluttered with gear and guns. Walking out onto the deck to look for the source of the thump, I saw a sea lion, a seal, and a pod of porpoises chasing salmon all around us in the early morning dimness. Mist rose from the water, and then the rosy tint of dawn’s first sunbeams lit up a nameless glacier high up in the crags across the water. I felt stoned on all this Mother Nature. Like I said, I was there just to hunt and fish, and whether or not I went home with the physically tangible results was not nearly as important as absorbing and sucking up the magic around me and filling that big, hungry, empty cavern in my soul. You just can’t have this magical experience without public lands, and some of that designated as wilderness. This, these, we had.
Cleaning a day’s catch of salmon, fresh in from the ocean
Overnight tragedies, spawning salmon scooped and eaten by bears
Alaskan salmon management has been so good that there are actually “too many” salmon, if there is such a thing
Reflected is the Chilkoot River, where we fished with the bears and a gaggle of international tourists following them up and down the river
Dawn on a glacier
Trolling spoons for salmon, towing our dinghy, and glassing the shoreline for critters. This is hunting and fishing at the same time
A picture like this is worth about a trillion words. Wilderness is freedom
Our boat, our beach
Captain, oh my captain. One of my heroes and a good friend
My hunting kit. A Henry 45-70 lever rifle (not crazy about the cheesy rear sight), a JRJ knife, rugged Leupold binoculars, home made dried fruit and jerky
Grizzly sow and cub eating salmon as they spawn upstream from the Chilkat River. I saw a lifetime supply of griz on this trip.
To What and to Whom are you loyal?
Couple of interesting conversations in the past 48 hours about loyalties, one in the Juneau, Alaska airport with a guy distributing whisky around the world, and the other guy a lawyer back East. Both educated but practical, both smart and articulate, neither particularly ideological, and neither a consumer of Breitbart or Gateway Pundit news information. Which is to say, both are opinionated but not well informed, and their loyalties show it.
Both men say they are Republicans or the admittedly endangered species Kennedy Democrats (John F. Kennedy today would be a far-right America-First conservative Republican, but I digress) both say they are moderates, both say they want a “centrist” or a moderate to be the next president. Their joint political loyalty is to the idea of bipartisan and moderate political philosophy.
The lawyer takes great umbrage at President Trump taking on the executive branch’s administrative state, saying that “Trump wants to make himself monarch of America.”
The whisky salesman wants “a return to civility.”
As far as I can tell, both these very different men are devotees of ideas or images of ideas that were last seen dead on the side of the road America has traveled in the past ten years. Americans chose Donald Trump precisely because of the so-called “political moderates” standing for nothing in particular and constantly making self-serving “bipartisan” deals amongst themselves that always, always exclude Mister and Missus America. It’s what prompted the America First/ Make America Great Again movement.
As a great sage once said, If I am not for myself, who will be for me? In other words, you can’t live in America and be concerned more about people and places outside of America and still have America thrive and survive or even last as America for long. Thus MAGA and Trump enduring and actually thriving despite an unrelenting attack by the establishment media, Hollywood, academia, the Federal executive branch’s administrative state, corporate America, Wall Street, and the American Bar Association and the American Medical Association, to name but a few of America’s domestic enemies.
The American people know their survival and freedom is on the line, and they have stuck with their only true advocate through thick and thin.
The notion of “civility” also died when the establishment media came out of the closet in 2008 not as ideological crossdressers, but as war-painted cannibals bent on wanton, bloody destruction of everyone they opposed. Compare the openly partisan fake news media now to 2008 and it’s like they aren’t even the same species; that is how much toxic political poison the mainstream media “news reporters” have drunk since going all-in for non-vetted Barack Hussein Obama back in 2008. The un-civil establishment media is so openly un-civil and fake that the Biden White House issued an open memo demanding that all Fake Newsdom rally ’round the Biden Crime Family and attack Republicans instead of reporting on the treasonous international bribery the Biden family has engaged in for years.
As they say, you can’t make this stuff up, because this truth we are living is crazier than any fiction we could write. And I don’t know what planet a grown, intelligent, experienced adult American is living on to want or expect civility and moderation in a heavily one-sided toxic atmosphere like this. Trump isn’t the cause of this environment, he is the victim and the symptom of the corrupt sickness assailing America by way of “moderate” divided loyalties.
You – an American citizen of voting age – cannot both be loyal to America as a sovereign nation with the rule of law applying equally to all citizens and also support a wide-open southern border with millions of illegal immigrants coming in. You – the proverbial reasonable citizen in the street – cannot be loyal to an America where the rule of law prevails in all things, and also support a federal bureaucracy that is untouchable, unreachable, and that insubordinately does not answer to its Chief Executive, who was (and still is) Trump.
Trump a monarch? Yes, it sounds ridiculous, but…well, the US President is Chief Executive of the Executive Branch of American federal government. The Chief Executive is in a way, I suppose, a sort of monarch in his executive domain there. He is the boss. When the taxpayer-paid staff of that same executive branch openly rebels against their chief executive and acts insubordinately, it is they, not the President, who is acting like a monarch. Trump was elected by The People to run the executive branch, and the staff people of that executive branch are supposed to abide by their oaths of office, and follow the orders of their chief executive. When those staff people do what they want, and not what the elected chief executive wants, then they are each acting like petty kings. They are in open rebellion against The People of America.
So here we are, a people of divided loyalties. We want things that can’t possibly exist, and we are loyal to fake news media outlets because we still want the taste and smell of the old civility and moderation we once enjoyed. We want an unelected, unaccountable federal bureaucracy to continue on as if its continuing rebellion against the President was no big deal, while simultaneously telling ourselves that we are the good Americans. After all, we want stability and security and moderation and civility. And so we support the true villains in American politics, instead of the champions of a free America with the rule of law for all, the MAGA America First advocates like President Donald Trump.
If your hunting club suddenly turns anti-gun, would you stay loyal to it? If your work place suddenly throws you out into the street for no good reason, would you stay loyal to them? If your children’s school suddenly became disloyal to your children’s best interests and to you, would you remain loyal to that school?
I myself am loyal only to the founding first principles for which American government is supposed to stand. When the government ceases to represent or implement those principles, then that government and the individual staff people in it no longer have my loyalty. They are loyal to themselves and to their power, not to me and my rights.
I am loyal to Power To The People. We, The People own the federal bureaucracy, not the rogue, corrupt, violent, lawless staff at the FBI, ATF, DHS et al. who are the Gestapo KGB strongmen of the Biden fascists seeking to bend all people to their evil will through illegal midnight raids on the homes of their political opponents. These people cannot ever have the loyalty of the American People. And people who are loyal to these vile anti-freedom alphabet organizations are no longer Americans, because they have abandoned the basic principles of fairness and due process that used to make America America.
Whither America right now is a question of loyalty, your loyalty, to whom and to what.
Impeach, impeach, impeach
Impeachment is a powerful tool provided in the US Constitution as well as in every state constitution. Over the past 100 years, America and American citizens have enjoyed a historically unprecedented veritable explosion in food security, home security, financial security, and almost endless creature comforts that just a couple decades ago were considered unimaginable luxuries. And so in the past 100 years of increasingly corpulent self-satisfied hourly comfort, Americans have lost their sense of purpose, necessity, hunger, their edge. And so the use of impeachment has pretty much died, as few people saw or sensed the need to use such a drastic tool in such comfortable times.
Americans now view political corruption and official abuse of the law as a cost of doing business, a cost of having such a luxurious lifestyle available to so many of us.
Why rock the boat with something like impeachment when everything is going so great? President Richard Nixon was threatened with impeachment for behavior that by today’s standard was positively Girl Scout level, and President Bill Clinton was understandably impeached for having brazenly lied under oath. There have been only a small handful of state level impeachments over the decades, usually against aberrant judges whose behavior is so brazenly corrupt that people overwhelmingly agreed that removing them from office was an obvious necessity.
Then President Donald Trump was supposedly impeached in a process without any procedural integrity, without the right to call witnesses in defense, without the right to file motions or submit evidence. His first “impeachment” was a political circus, not a real court proceeding with all the seriousness the dignity of all the offices involved require.
The second so-called impeachment of President Trump was even more procedurally flawed than the first attempt, including the absence of the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, whose daily presence is constitutionally required for an impeachment to go forward. Chief Justice Roberts’ absence did not hinder the lawless circus from continuing, though, so it was not really an impeachment. This process was in fact just the mis-use and mis-appropriation of the impeachment name applied to a set of theatrical political activities.
You would think with all this one-sided impeachment-lite activity that the “other side of the aisle” would be ready to apply the same medicine now that they have the power to do so. And you would be wrong. The elected eunuchs have no intention of fighting back at all.
And so we now find America in the throes of widespread lawlessness by one political party, whose judges behave like theatrical political tyrants while ignoring all legal precedent and legal process requirements of their court rooms. For example, this week Federal Judge Chuktan scolded the Trump legal team in DC that they should have spent the prior year reading through the 12,000,000 pages of discovery material in preparation for a defense they only found out about a few weeks ago, and whose access to the related documents only began a week ago. This is absolute lawlessness by Judge Chuktan, whose lawlessness makes an absolute mockery of the very idea of a legal process.
In case you are not understanding this, the judge refused to allow the Trump defense attorneys adequate time to read through and use in court over twelve million pages of material being used to falsely prosecute President Trump for his mere political speech. Nope, Trump’s team is expected to arrive in court fully prepared within a couple months. This is a grotesque and corrupt abuse of the federal judge’s powers and discretion.
Another example is the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court majority that – crazily, corruptly, partisanly – held that unilateral last-second changes to Pennsylvania election law, right before the 2020 general election, by unelected people in the executive branch, and in open defiance of the Pennsylvania constitution which places all election law only in the hands of the legislature, were just fine and would stand. These state supreme court judges were wildly abusing their authority and discretion to implement a plainly flawed election process that defied Pennsylvania’s legal process for establishing election law, and which subsequently allowed a huge amount of voting fraud to occur in the 2020 election.
Other examples of grotesque courtroom malfeasance by politicized judges can be found ad nauseum in the federal courtrooms in Washington, DC, where jurisprudence and respect for the rule of law have been thrown away in the interest of obtaining patently illegal political outcomes that benefit one political party and that are designed to hurt President Trump and anyone around him. Tainted jurors, tainted judges, conflicts of interest, abuses of courtroom decorum and legal procedural law, the list of malfeasance there is incredible.
The one answer to all of these politically active judges is impeachment. Real, honest-to-goodness impeachment that includes all the bells, whistles, and fixins of a gen-u-ine courtroom hearing. Just like the US Constitution and state constitutions have a process for fraudulent elections to be challenged, so they also provide for impeachments.
And while one political party is riding the impeachment horse all over the place, the other political party wants nothing to do with impeachment. Why that would upset the apple cart, or some such nonsense, is what we hear from elected Republicans across America. Most of the federal judges involved in the January 6th cases have abused their positions and should be impeached. More than half of the Pennsylvania state supreme court members deserved impeachment and should have been impeached. What was lacking in the political process was the political willpower from among the “other” political party to mount a response, to resist the lawlessness.
The response of impeachment that should have met every single one of these lawless judges was taken off the table before any real discussion of it began. The co-equal branch of government that is by design supposed to be able to impeach and then remove aberrant officials is completely out of this fight, and so the official lawlessness continues.
As in any fight, if one side is throwing haymaker punches and the other side is simply standing there taking all of the punishment, eventually the guy standing there taking all the punches is going to lose the fight. There is only so much abuse that any person or body can take before it breaks, and in the case of America, the abuse of lawlessness being inflicted on our body politic is beginning to crush our nation. Our political and professional institutions are collapsing under the onslaught. American citizens are beginning to lose trust in their official institutions.
The natural answer that is hard-wired into our various constitutions is impeach, impeach, impeach, and thereby hold lawless officials accountable and restore balance to our crumbling political system.
I do not know why in 2020 and 2021 former state senator and president pro tem of the Pennsylvania Senate, Jake-The-Snake Corman, and PA House leaders Kerry Benninghoff and Bryan Cutler, refused to even consider impeachment of the lawless PA state supreme court members who threw the rule of law out the window to immediately benefit one political party. It made no sense from a political perspective or from a let’s-uphold-the-basic-law perspective. Their impotence simply made no sense.
Nor does it make sense why US House leaders Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan refuse now to impeach the lawless federal judges and bribe-taking Joe Biden, the lying-before-Congress FBI Chris Wray, the endlessly lying and obviously lawless chief law enforcement officer US AG Merrick Garland, and a whole host of other corrupt federal employees whose job #1 is to uphold The Law.
Isn’t it curious that the people who are supposedly standing on “the other side” of the lawless people are unwilling to take a stand, to implement those impeachment processes that are spelled out in our various constitutions? By their unwillingness to fight back, every one of these politicians – Jake Corman, Kerry Benninghoff, Bryan Cutler, Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan etc et al – is enabling and abetting their supposed opponents. By refusing to fight back in any meaningful way, these elected officials are actually allowing America to descend into not just lawlessness, but one party domination and the destruction of America as a political entity that naturally follows.
Only one explanation for GOP weakness makes any sense: How many pieces of silver have these elected officials taken to have their loyalties swayed away from their oath of office? How many elected Republicans across America are owned by China?