Archive → November, 2023
A fabulous hunting trophy
Another PA archery season over (UPDATE: No, it wasn’t over, I have not kept up with new PA archery season dates), another season I did not arrow a deer or a bear. It’s not that I could not have killed a buck with a gigantic rack, I could have, a hundred times. It is that I chose not kill him. He isn’t necessarily tame, but he has been hanging around an awful lot. It would have been easy to send an arrow or a bolt through him from a porch or an upstairs window. But in my old-er age, I must be turning soft-hearted. He even came into a ground blind I was in with a crossbow, and puttered around. I decided to admire him, instead.
Just seeing wild beauty like his brings me real pleasure. I don’t need to put his head on the wall for him to make me happy.
Even without killing a black bear or a wolf, I still got an amazing trophy from my Alaska hunt in September. And no, I am not referring to the beautiful stones and colorful pebbles I bring home with me as keepsakes from all around the world. Alaska streambeds were loaded with all kinds of incredible geological samples, and I could have easily filled a pickup truck bed with the easy ones. Instead, I picked up a memento of someone else’s kill, and brought that home with me.
While I was stalking a salmon stream in the northernmost part of southeast Alaska eight weeks ago, cradling a 45-70 rifle in my arms and looking for black bear feeding on spawning fish with one eye, or a wolf, and watching out for the ever-present brown bears/grizzlies with the other eye, I happened upon a scattering of big bones up against a stream bank. Bleaching white on the top side, and staining green with algae and moss on the bottom side, these bones marked a kill site. From what I could piece together, a two-year-old moose had made a stand against a pack of wolves or a large grizzly on this site, and had lost. It was right here where he had died and had been eaten.
One bone in particular caught my eye, the hip socket, sitting concave-side-up to the sky. What made this individual bone stand out so much was both how perfectly round it was, and yet how it was also framed on three sides by heavily fragmented and fractured ends of bone. Something really big had broken this heaviest of bones, and the tooth marks are still on the socket. As artists are fond of saying about something that catches all of the visuals just right, it was a study in contrasts.
I bent down, picked up the broken socket bone, brushed off the dirt and leaves, and stuffed it into my backpack among the long underwear and my PB&J sandwich. Back home in Pennsylvania, it was cleaned off, lightly bleached, and re-purposed into a pipe holder and ashtray. It is actually incredible how perfectly my tobacco pipe fits into that hip socket. Now I can use the bone as both an ashtray and a reminder of being in some of the world’s wildest country.
As soon as it dried, I sat down to enjoy a bowl of cherry cavendish, and with the light tobacco smoke swirling up around my head, I was immediately lost deeply in thought about God’s magnificent creation, the amazing wild beasts that have inspired us wee humans since our dawn here on Planet Earth, and how a hunting trophy is what you make of it. It doesn’t always have to be something you killed yourself. Sometimes it is just a small piece of the wilderness we love that serves as a symbolic touchstone and a time machine that transports us back to a place and time where all that mattered was the wind direction and the smell of Fall in the air.
Looking at this ten thousand years ago or fifty thousand, any Neolithic hunter anywhere around the planet would have felt exactly the same way. This one piece of fractured bone connects us two hunters across time, even though we never met.
Screamers America
A real sizeable portion of the American citizenry and even the American electorate do not understand or even care what the people in the federal government are doing. So many Americans are lethargic about their freedom that they don’t bother to vote, and some of them really say “If it is all taken away from me tomorrow, OK, whatever.”
Of course we all know these same people who are so laissez- faire about their own fates will scream bloody murder when they do in fact lose everything. This is the down side of all the unbelievable material success and wealth that democratic capitalism has spread so far and wide. People are asleep, unaware and uncaring about what is happening to their fate, to their futures. To them, America just keeps chugging along on autopilot. Doesn’t matter who is in Congress, doesn’t matter who is in the Oval Office, doesn’t matter who holds the local magisterial judge position in their township, doesn’t matter how political decisions are made.
A significant portion of our people are stuffing their faces full of processed junk food and living for the moment, absorbed in nonsense like “professional” sports. No country can continue successfully like this, when its people are not watching the road in front of them, but are distracted by shiny crap way off on the side somewhere. And in fact, America is not continuing successfully like this, as we see with high food prices and shortages, high gasoline prices, high mortgage rates, heavy official censorship of undesirable alternative perspectives, etc. And we also see a single political party in partnership with a real portion of the other political party doing everything possible to silence their critics and crush dissent. These political people are taking advantage of the lack of attention the American people are paying to what is being done in the name of the American people. Like how is government power and force being used and badly abused.
Is the IRS unfairly attacking opponents of the Joe Biden crime family? Is the FBI illegally targeting opponents of the Joe Biden crime family and protecting the corrupt Joe Biden crime family? Is the DOJ using official force of arms against innocent Americans to achieve political outcomes that the voters won’t grant them? The answers to these questions are a huge Hell Yes.
And yet I still encounter perfectly smart Americans who actually believe whatever the New York Times writes, whatever the MSNBC and NPR partisan political activists tell them. They are not curious about what is happening around them, what is happening under their feet. When a heavily armed FBI SWAT-type group descends on their neighbor’s home, these incurious people either say “Eh, he must have done something bad.”
Or, even worse, the neighbors say “Oh, he was a religious Republican who peacefully protested in Washington DC on January 6th 2021, so he deserves this heavy treatment.”
A 1995 movie called Screamers captures America’s current cultural landscape perfectly. Unintentionally, mind you. This is an allusion, a comparison, an allegory, intended to paint a picture using actual pictures from a movie so we can better connect dots in people’s heads and help them better understand what is happening to America. Screamers was not so much a political statement as a story about the cost of humans becoming lazy and incurious about what is happening under their feet.
In a way Screamers is probably based on the 1895 HG Wells book The Time Machine, where happy pretty Eloi people dancing in the sunshine with flowers in their hair without a care are occasionally grabbed by the evil Morlocks and dragged underground to a horrible fate. Either one of these stories, Screamers or The Time Machine, fit what is happening right now in America. And what, you ask, is happening in America right now?
America is becoming a violent, lawless police state, and it started right underneath our feet without us knowing it, or seeing it. Oh sure, it started earnestly enough, you know, the federal government staffers fighting foreign terrorism and against evil drug cartels. But then those government employees working so diligently behind the scenes, out of our view, eventually redesigned themselves, redefined their purpose, and they evolved into unrecognizable creatures preying upon us innocent citizens.
FBI, DHS, DOJ, CIA etc employees have become horror creatures drunk on raw, cruel power they derive from controlling what had been hallowed institutions set up to protect the American people. And now these government Morlocks and Screamers are coming for all of us who dare point out that they have become Frankenstein monsters intent on destroying a free America so they can control it. One by one, they pull innocent Americans down into DC dungeons where terrible tortures are happening.
A new movie is out, which I saw, that details exactly how America is becoming a violent, lawless police state run by the worst people. This movie is called … Police State. I highly recommend you see it, not because it will make you feel good, but because you and I definitely need a kick in the ass to get our attention off of the fun and shiny happy things Americans are so used to having endless supplies of. We are not living in the American reality right now, people. We are living in a very scary, dangerous un-reality. If you want to understand how this is happening, go see the movie Police State.
The federal Screamers and the government Morlocks are definitely coming to get you and your kids. Don’t let them succeed.
A pretty face don’t mean a pretty heart. Plenty of federal agents will destroy 100% innocent you just for the pleasure of it
Federal agents coming to help you find your way to a dungeon where they will deprive you of your constitutional AND your human rights
RIP my friend Nevin Mindlin
Nevin Mindlin was probably an annoying precocious kid. He was probably one of those kids in school who at a young age would constantly raise his hand to answer questions posed by the teachers, because he actually knew the correct answer and he also probably knew a great deal more about whatever the subject was. Although I did not know Nevin at the tender age of eight, I am certain this lovingly annoying ability of his was probably becoming pronounced right about then. And it never stopped and it served him well all the way up until his death this morning in south Florida.
I will miss Nevin, for a lot of reasons. A good friend is always tough to find, and human chemistry is always a mystery. Opposites attract is an old saying, and as opposite as Nevin and I were from one another, we always enjoyed one another’s company. Maybe it was because I, too, was the annoying kid in grade school, but without Nevin’s intelligence. Probably I secretly admired him and I also wanted to be like him.
Nevin went to college, not just anywhere, but at Goddard College, a hippie freak school in the 1970s. Which must have been an interesting experience for all involved, because Nevin was a conservative Republican. He got his MBA from Lehigh University. He served in the US Navy and learned to take apart radios and fix complicated things. This ability to deconstruct and reconstruct complex bits of wires and capacitors became one of his annoying habits as an adult, when he would describe whatever public policy we were grappling with as a radio or electronic array. Nevin could diagram a public policy like no one else, and as he drew on the blackboard in his mind he saw electric wires, capacitors, and other radio components. Maybe he was just overthinking stuff, but it was impossible to refute him on his own terms. He would stop explaining and ask for questions, and the people in the room would just sit there staring, unable to conjure the right response. He should have been a salesman.
After working in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives for a long time, where he was the executive director of the House Labor & Industry Committee, Nevin went on to be the policy director at the PA Department of Labor & Industry under Governor Tom Ridge in the 1990s. Of course Nevin was smarter and more experienced than most of the other appointees (except fellow appointee Tom Armstrong, whom he admired), and he always struggled with reconciling his clear headed and deeply held principles with impolite political necessity. This business of trading off principle for necessity would plague Nevin his entire life, and I don’t think he ever felt good about it. Maybe he should have been a philosopher. If he had been a salesman, he probably would not have been a rich one.
Nevin retired a bunch of years ago and ran for mayor of Harrisburg. As a candidate, he was very popular, especially among the Black population, even as a conservative Republican, and he scared the pants off the political establishment. I was in the courtroom when a now departed county judge held that Nevin’s reliance upon the official opinion of the county elections department was Nevin’s mistake, and not the mistake of the paid professionals who advised him, and thus was he disqualified from running for mayor at the last minute. It was a disgraceful moment in the history of human self-rule. Even the judge found his moment of political necessity distasteful, and his shame at having to remove this pure hearted, well meaning, popular man from the ballot and from threatening the political establishment was written all over his own unhappy face. I will never forget it.
Nevin served the Harrisburg Jewish community in a number of roles, including president of the Silver Academy Yeshiva. He never stopped dabbling in local politics, until he moved to southwest Florida a few years ago and said “What the hell, I think I’ll just go fishing from now on.” I always felt proud of having taught Nevin to fish, because it brought him great pleasure. We used to fish the Susquehanna River here in Harrisburg, back in the early 2000s, when a guy could catch 100-150 smallmouth bass in a day, and have a real shot at the huge muskellunge we had back then. Those were real good times together. He also enjoyed splitting wood with me, and fishing Pine Creek.
One Fall night on our way up Pine Creek Valley, probably twenty years ago, we encountered a wrecked SUV sideways in the road, the driver injured and hanging out her window. An enormous buck lay alive panting on the other side of the road. Despite having all four of its legs cleanly removed from its body due to the collision with the front of the SUV, and despite being hardly able to move more than a couple of feet at a time on its bloody stumps, the buck was full of fierce fight and aggressive lunges toward anyone who approached him. I was trying to maneuver into a safe angle where I could dispatch the suffering animal when the driver’s husband showed up. He barely noticed his wife in the driver’s seat of the steaming, crumpled SUV, and walked over to the buck. The man clearly admired the buck’s huge rack (I’m guessing it was in the 140s-150s) and tried to get ahold of it to twist and break the animal’s neck. That was a mistake, as the buck quickly lunged and speared the guy squarely in the gut with its long tines, drawing blood. The man was filled with rage, and I handed him my 9mm pistol that I had been prepared to dispatch the animal with. He damn near emptied that entire clip into the buck before he handed the gun back to me.
We left the dark wreck scene with its gory buck, steaming disabled vehicle, and the injured woman with her uninterested husband running his hands over the deceased buck’s rack, and Nevin said “You deer hunters are a really weird bunch of people.” He really should have been a philosopher.
Nevin was married twice. First to Gail, who gave him three great sons he was crazy about, Joshua, Avi, and Hillel, and then to Jean, who was with him when he died today. Nevin leaves a legacy of clear headed public policy, of absolutely beautiful principles based on America’s founding documents and the Torah, which he tried to follow, and memories among his friends of his explosive, joyous, easy laugh and always happy demeanor. I will miss my friend Nevin so very much. Godspeed, old friend. I hope you get to fish on your journey.
He will be buried this Sunday in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he grew up.
Nevin Mindlin fishing in south Florida, looking like an Amishman who had taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque and ended up in Heaven