Archive → December, 2024
2024 in Review
Year 2024 was huge. So many changes for good have been achieved this past year. And despite big obstacles remaining for regular American citizens to overcome the Media-Military-Uniparty-Industrial Complex, I think we can see light at the end of the tunnel.
Back in 2008, the Tea Party started, right here in Central Pennsylvania, in response to then US senator Arlen Specter’s clear lack of principle. A town hall Specter was hosting erupted into widespread shouting and wide open frustration after just one person – Katy Abrams – stood up and denounced Specter’s loyalty to politics and self over the elementary interests of his PA constituents. It was the beginning of a grassroots voter rebellion against both the Republican Party establishment, and against the GOPe Uniparty.
That fight has taken on different names and wider meaning since 2008, including Tea Party Patriots, and then just Patriots, and Constitutional Patriots. By 2016 it was the Make America Great Again movement. Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign motto grew into the bipartisan/ nonpartisan “MAGA” take-your-government-back movement. MAGA includes a large portion of black and Hispanic voters, as well as frustrated whites of all income brackets, almost all rural voters, and growing numbers of disillusioned urbanites who bear a big burden living directly under failed Democrat Party policies.
This “populist” bottom-up political evolution-revolution has always been by and of We, The People, despite the Media-Military-Uniparty-Industrial Complex’s efforts to falsely brand it as “racist” or “homophobic” or whatever the silly name is du jour. Plenty of groups and organizations popped up to use, re-direct, or take advantage of our intense populist energy, like Americans For Prosperity. AFP was an early ally, then it merged with industry, and industry then went for open borders, and We, The People saw them as sellouts.
I ran for US Congress in 2009-2010, then state senate in 2012, and again in 2015 before dropping out from a bad hunting injury. Being part of this movement has been fascinating, frustrating, exhilirating, energizing, as well as draining tens of thousands of dollars from my own pockets. I always put my money where my mouth was, and believe now it was all well spent.
As a candidate, my political principles were those of America’s founding: Small, responsive, accountable government, and big citizen.
Because government exists solely for the benefit of We, The People, we are now heading into a direct head-on clash between the citizens who own the government – basically the Frankenstein federal bureaucracy, and the posh individual taxpayer-funded Marxist denizens of that Frankenstein bureaucratic behemoth.
Trump is our We, The People champion. Because Trump has suffered a martyr’s mistreatment as he seeks to return power, rights, and decision making to We, The People, he has taken on almost a god-like stature among so many people. The blatantly stolen 2020 election cemented what many Americans already knew in their gut, that we are in a deadly serious combat over raw power.
Despite intense censorship by government and corporations entangled together, new media outlets formed and grew wildly in response to the overtly corrupt establishment media. Americans are hungry for truth or at least an honest opinion. Now the alternative/ new media ecosystem is unbelievably rich, varied, diverse, and useful, while the useless old mainstream media is dying from its own self-inflicted wounds.
Looking back on 2024, it was a year of miracles, a year of difficult trials and tribulations, of intense fear and frustration, of growth and clarity. The difficultues made us Americans stronger. Despite facing immense odds in 2024, the good guys prevailed; hopefully, they are successful in 2025. Recall that some 65 million Americans voted for communism in 2024, so we clearly have real work to do. It remains to be seen if President Trump is as wise and willing to fight as we think he is. God knows, We, The People cannot afford to lose our combat with the Uniparty or its Frankenstein bureaucracy.
Only one of us can emerge victorious, and I hope it is the American citizenry and our Constitution.
[thanks to Ron Boltz for helping me remember a couple facts here]
[ps horrendous human being former failed US president James Carter became deceased in 2024, a net positive for America]
Without Chanuka there is no Christmas
Decades ago in graduate school, I was friends with a lovely classmate named Christine. Christine was from Kenya, studying graduate economics at Vanderbilt, with the expectation of returning to her country and taking up an important post in the Kenyan government. Smart, beautiful, articulate, kindly, Christine was the embodiment of what the rest of the world would like Africa to become, and what its leaders had hoped it could be.
One thing about Christine that surprised me was that, as religious a Methodist as she was (yes, Africa has more true blue religious Methodists than America, where Mainline Protestantism has become a Socialist anti-Christianity movement), she knew nothing of the Old Testament AKA the Torah. Christine thought that Christianity simply appeared to the world, and had its own kind of virgin birth, if you will. No connection to anything else, no roots in any other religion, or place.
One can easily blame the simple minded missionaries who taught Christine’s grandparents a Christianity devoid of its own history. As for Christine, you don’t know what you don’t know, correct? However, everyone has a responsibility for their beliefs, and now in our modern Internet age, where all questions can be answered to some degree of accuracy within a few seconds, and to a much higher degree of surety within a couple minutes, every one of us simply has to maintain some level of curiosity about the world around us, to stay informed. We must stay informed.
Christine taught me something that bears telling again today: Christmas owes its existence to the Orthodox Jews who successfully fought and won a brutal civil war against the Leftwing Democrats of their day, 2300 years ago.
Known as “Apikorsim”, Hellenists, Hedonists, whatever, the in-essence Democrat Party socialist Jews of 2300 years ago tried to impose a Godless paganism on the religious (Orthodox) Jews of Israel/Judea.
And the Orthodox Jews fought back.
Their leaders were known as the Maccabees/ Hasmoneans, largely drawn from the Jewish priests, and they prevailed against a much larger, better organized, better armed force by utilizing guerilla warfare. The Maccabees slowly whittled down the liberal Jews and their Greek allies through hit-and-run tactics and merciless head-long frontal attacks by highly motivated, battle-hardened warriors.
And so, when the Orthodox Jews prevailed on the battlefield, recaptured Jerusalem, re-dedicated the Temple there, and restarted the holy service in the Temple, Torah Judaism was saved. And because Torah Judaism was saved, a certain religiously observant Jew named Yeshua was born about 250 years later. And because that Jew went on to become a religious ascetic (a Nazirite like Samson), he became an outspoken critic of the religious ways or failings of his fellow Jews, and the occupying Romans, as he saw them.
The rest is history, if you know anything about the Second Temple period of Judaism or the early years of Christianity.
Point being, because Orthodox Jews fought the Leftist Jews of their time, Christianity was eventually born and eventually Christmas was created (observed the 25th day of December, just as Chanuka is always the 25th day of the Hebrew month of Kislev on a lunar calendar, which means Kislev 25th always floats around relative to the Gregorian calendar we use in America and Europe).
Tonight marks the beginning of Chanuka and the end of Christmas Day. Without Chanuka, there would be no Christmas. It is important for everyone to remember history, and to know how we all got here to where we stand today. I wish that Christine would have known history, or had been educated to want to know history, because that sensitivity or intellectual curiosity would have saved her life…a story for another day.
Happy Chanuka, America and world.
Judah Maccabee, the kind of unintentional but direct father of Christmas
Have a wonderful Xmas+ season, friends
Whatever your nationality, nation of origin, religion of origin or religious practice or faith, if you live in America, it is Christmas time. For orthodox Christians this time of the year has a special meaning, and for everyone else it absolutely must be just barely a notch below how orthodox Christians feel.
No Grinches allowed, only happiness and goodwill towards our fellow human being. You do not have to be Christian to enjoy Christmas, to go with the cheerful, happy flow, to give your annoying neighbor or co-worker a bit of leeway, to give someone the go-ahead at the opposite stop sign. Do it, it will feel good.
Wish people “Merry Christmas!” and see how happy they are to hear the earnest expression of our national holiday, two words that were almost obliterated from the American lexicon for fear of “offending” someone.
Hey, if you are actually offended by hearing Merry Christmas here in America, for a grand total of two weeks, then America is probably not for you. Take your unhappiness and lack of appreciation for our solid, stable society to someplace else.
Having just returned from some much-needed beach time and saltwater fishing, I am having to move fast into the snow, ice, and wood fire mode. Trapping season is upon me (I always wait for rifle season to end, so there are fewer people in the woods, and I also wait for bobcat and fisher seasons to start, so I don’t have to release those two prize species before their seasons start), as well as the late flintlock season.
Some fruit trees need major pruning, and a couple need a copper sulfate spray before spring arrives.
Good luck to everyone who is headed to the outdoors for more, whether it is skiing, hunting, ice skating, snow shoeing. Eat it up, drink it up, relish it, because in a few weeks it will all be over, and we will then be looking at Freezing February and then the glimmers of Spring in March.
Until then, Merry Christmas, everyone!
and you don’t have to be Christian to like Christmas
As much as I favor wintertime over all other seasons, there is no substitute for having morning coffee on a patio under a tropical sky, while everything back home is frozen solid
Everglades City Museum Xmas tree made of crab traps and trap buoys. This is folk art!
A limit of sea trout fed us well for several days
Even manatees can get into the holiday spirit
Rum and Coke time is never as good as when one is watching a tropical sunset over an ocean somewhere
Is sitting in a box actually hunting?
Hunting season is cold, and getting outside to seek deer or bear or really any other wild game animal requires a person to put up with some level of discomfort. You can put a lot of effort into hunting, and still come up empty handed. So to up the odds of escaping the attention of deer and bear, some hunters created hunting blinds up in trees. The least difficult ones were railroad sikes driven into a tree to be used as a ladder, and we would hoist ourselves up onto a stout lower limb, and there wait for a shot at a passing deer.
The truly old tree blinds from the 1930s and 1940s were ridiculously frail, made of random assortments of surplus lumber; practically death traps as soon as they were nailed up to living trees. The better old fashioned tree stands would usually be put on what we called an “Indian tree,” where someone a long time ago had deliberately bent over and caused a tree to grow parallel with the ground.
When the horizontal bent limb was at least a foot in diameter, enterprising hunters would find creative ways to attach a stable platform, usually reached by a dangerous rickety wooden ladder made out of woods trash and nails. Platforms ranged from plywood to rough cut boards, some with railings and tattered old olive drab canvas and maybe a stool. Deluxe versions had some sort of roof or covering to keep rain, snow, and sunshine off of the hunter. These elevated hunting blinds were usually eight to ten feet up off the ground, and if the rickety blind did not fall down and kill you, the hunter, then you could usually use it to kill a deer. Despite requiring skill just to stay in them, these blinds were always in demand, and elders got first dibs.
Here I am talking about the American Northeast, and Pennsylvania, specifically. Not about India, where the elevated machan gave hunters of dangerous game not only an opportunity to shoot before being detected by tigers and leopards, but a chance to get in at least one more shot or even a stabbing blow with a spear before the claws and fangs were at your throat.
Fast forward fifty years, and now elevated blinds are everywhere. But they are not like the old rickety kinds jimmied onto trees with long spikes us older guys fondly recall. Witness the rise of the elevated box blinds, which are light years ahead of the rickety wooden tree stands in use when I was a kid. These new ones look like Martian landers, and are sold along the side of RT. 15 from Duncannon to Williamsport, as well as anywhere farm machinery and grains are sold, or even in Amish farm yards.
These modern elevated hunting blinds are airtight, have windows that open and close, and safe ladders or steps made of treated lumber of metal. They are downright sophisticated, and one farm lease I know of has propane heaters in all of their elevated “huts” where guys literally cook their breakfast while waiting for a deer to show up out one of the sliding windows. Some of them are big enough to hold a whole family, and indeed these are like little remote hunting cabin outposts, where everyone from Pap to the youngest kids can comfortably take a poke at a deer from a steady rest with plenty of quiet encouragement around them.
The question is, Is this elevated box blind business actually hunting?
My four-plus-inch-thick 1987 Random House Dictionary (the resilient if lonely, unknown cornerstone of our written culture) says Hunt: To chase or search for game or other wild animals for the purpose of catching or killing.
How much chasing or searching do you see going on from the ubiquitous elevated box blinds?
Not a lot. Well, none. Shouldn’t hunting involve actual pursuit and physical exertion? Don’t we need to earn our kills?
Go on YouTube or Rumble, and you can watch hundreds of “hunting” videos of hunters sitting in elevated box blinds, overlooking crop fields and power lines. These hunters usually have a long period of self-discussion to their camera about what they are looking for, any shots taken and misses they have had, etc. They have tripods and bipods, heaters, shelves with food, windows, and are generally protected from the punishing elements that mark hunting season.
The most dispiriting of this video genre has little kids holding forth, as if experienced adults, about the relative merits of various bucks caught on cell camera trail cams that very morning, and whether or not any of them are good enough for our young camerman.
And so I think we have to ask if this elevated box blind is not really hunting, then is it good for hunting? If maintained as a hunting method after their first one or two confidence building kills, the little kids are for sure being ruined by this stuff. Because it is not reality.
People who think that hunting season solely involves sitting in one spot all day, especially an enclosed and elevated spot, and then stiffly climbing down to either bitch about the lack of deer or worse, to boast about one’s prowess whacking “the big one“, are not hunters. They are shooters. If they have at all practiced target shooting before season, and they have some huge Hubble Telescope mounted on their Million Magnum Blastem Rifle, then surely they can make that three hundred yard shot on some unsuspecting deer eating dinner in a crop field.
Sorry to be negative about this, but we are losing our souls to these elevated blinds. Yes, they make hunting season more comfortable, and they make ambushing and surprising our quarry easier, but they are really dumbing down and whittling off our hunting instincts and skills, our woodcraft that separates us from the flatlander slobs who have no self reliance abilities. Hunting is not supposed to be easy, or comfortable, it is supposed to test us and make us earn the trophies we kill.
In Europe and Asia, hunting was used until the 1800s by warriors to hone their combat skills. Nothing like dismounting your horse to face off at ground level with a mean 4,000 pound Gaur or a ferocious 1,000 pound wild boar, armed with a stout spear in hand and a short sword at your hip. Back then, hunters were tough. As were our own American Longhunters on our frontier.
You want to actually hunt? Go do a deer drive like the BNB Outdoors kids, or with The Hunting Public guys. Or take a quiet, slow still hunt woods walk like John does at Leatherwood Outdoors. These hunts take skill and effort, which is the heart and soul of the chase. Everything else is just a hands-on video game at this point. No thanks.
A deer taken while still hunting two weeks ago, with open sights. Don’t look too closely, it was hit between the eyes.
Checking nearby cell cameras to see where the deer are while sitting in a blind…
Not picking on anyone here, but you boys can do better than this
Calling Elon Musk, we have landed on Mars
The sneaky New Jersey drones
Drones are being reported all around New Jersey. Not the little plastic drones we can buy online, nor are they the expensive Mavic drones used by professional surveyors, real estate people, security personnel, etc. No, these things are reportedly six feet across, which is a small plane, by definition only of military origin and purpose.
These rogue drones are showing up everywhere in New Jersey there is important infrastructure, like power plants, dams, military installations, government buildings. During daylight. Whoever is operating them is not shy, nor are they trying to hide their information gathering operation. This is being done out in the open.
Lots of speculation about who owns these drones, and why are they operating them, and why are they operating them now. Federal and state government spokespeople in the past day have said that either they do not know what these drones are about, or that they are definitively not from some speculated Iranian “mother ship” supposedly far enough offshore to avoid detection but close enough to operate the aircraft.
None of these responses ring true, and they smell like the federal government knows exactly what the drones are, and they also do not want to tell us.
The American People are in a bad sitaution here. Because either our government doesn’t know what is going on with a blatant violation of our national security, or our government does know and does not want to tell us. Both situations are unacceptable, because both are dangerous. We civilians are supposed to own and run our governments, not the other way around. If someone hostile is flying drones around America, spying on us, then that is a declaration of war. It is very dangerous, especially if our government refuses to respond appropriately.
Here is what I think is the only real explanation for these rogue military drones: China is blatantly scooping up as much critical infrastructure information as they can get while their pet Joe Biden is still in office. Recall that Joe Bribem, who has accepted millions of dollars in Chinese bribes, allowed a Chinese spy balloon to glide unmolested over all of America two years ago, gathering intelligence on all kinds of sensitive nuclear missile sites and other military/national defense facilities.
Recall, Americans were slack-jawed incredulous while our federal government went about its daily business as if nothing was wrong while the blatant Chinese spy balloon slowly spied on America, from coast to coast. China would not stand for such an invasion of its sovereign soil or airspace for one second, and no self-respecting national government elsewhere on this planet would either.
But America does not have self-respecting or America-respecting leaders right now. Rather, our entire federal government is a swarm of traitors, all loyal to China. China has spent decades buying politicians, buying businesses, buying business leaders, buying philanthropic leaders, and buying real estate around sensitive American homeland installations. The wide-open American border is exploited most by China.
Those federal bureaucrats who were not purchased outright by China are already Marxists, committed to seeing the downfall of the American government, from inside their government offices. And it’s not just faceless bureaucrat people at the FAA who are our enemies, it is high ranking officers at the Pentagon. Lots of them.
Treason and traitors in official positions are everywhere right now, and these drones are a symbol of how badly our federal government has been gutted, captured, and at the very least turned into a torpid possum sleeping in the back of my woodshed in the middle of December (you could pick that thing up by its tail and swing it around your head, and it will remain fast asleep and non-threatening).
Such are most of the local, state, and federal bureaucrats in America. It is like the “go to sleeeeeep” line we used to say on midnight big game fishing boats anchored off the Atlantic coast, where big thrashing fish can do a lot of damage. Before boating them we would stick them in the head with a large knife or even a small harpoon, and whisper “Go to sleeeep” as their life force ebbed away and their danger to boat and crew drew down. Thus is America asleep while the Chinese are sucking away our life force, rendering us into harmless children.
The Chinese know full well that a government run by President Donald Trump will both shoot down these drones and also follow them back to where they are coming from, and then exact the full penalty for invading America. And so they are getting away with everything they can get away with while they can. New Jersey is a hub of electrical distribution for the whole east coast, and if something were to happen to a key power plant or distribution line…a lot of America would be sitting in the dark.
These invasive foreign drones looking for ways to attack America are the cost of having had our federal government bought and paid for like a sack of potatoes.
Choices: Principles vs Institutions
Humans create institutions to institutionalize our values, religious practices, hopes and aspirations, cultural identity, etc. Our institutions are created in order to make permanent and carry our values forward, a sort of vehicle. Schools, libraries, government agencies, religious institutions, family foundations, charitable foundations, unions, associations, etc, every single one created with a mission to implement certain principles.
Over time people naturally identify with a particular institution, become a champion of it, and a stakeholder to it. Again, private schools, public school PTAs, library associations, the National Ukrainian Club, various church and synagogue umbrella groups, Democrat Party, Republican Party, etc, you know those particular institutions in your own life, because they reflect your values.
What happens when the institution no longer represents or reflects the founding principles that breathed life and cause into it?
Examples abound: The United Nations works against the western democracies who founded it and currently pay for it. The Democrat Party has become a wild communist orgy of anti-Americanism; the Republican Party has forsworn its abolitionist roots and has become a bunch of establishment do-nothing fuddy-duddies; the National Rifle Association accretes multiple layers of bureaucracy into everything it does, instead of spending its limited money pursuing individual freedom; school teachers unions become outlets for destructive radical politics, far outside the mainstream of American families; a local church or synagogue is poorly run by a small group of self-reinforcing, self selecting, like-minded establishmentarians who cannot and will not respond to changes in their respective demographics…
The one that got me thinking about this subject is the Pennsylvania Federation of Sportsmen’s Clubs, a sportsmen’s group I had a long relationship with, which then attempted to take a hard left turn into climate alarmism and gun regulation back in 2020. In one quick weekend of fake votes and heavily manipulated elections, the PFSC leadership torpedoed the institution the leaders said they loved. Their far-left politics alienated their base, and the group has not yet recovered its former standing.
With PFSC, I took a hard and public stand, and while I succeeded in stopping the old group from becoming leftist stooges of the charitable foundation trust fund sector, I also lost a lot of friends. People who were loyal to the PFSC they remembered, and who they wanted it to still be. Some blamed me for damaging PFSC’s public reputation, while I blamed PFSC’s leadership for making unpopular decisions its base rejected. For sure the messenger got shot!
In 2020, PFSC’s leaders jettisoned the principles on which PFSC was originally founded, and a great portion of their natural base stopped believing in the institution.
Recently I stepped back from a formal leadership role in a local house of worship, as the venerable institution begins to crumble onto itself. Leaders there, who fondly remember this house of worship from their childhood, cannot make the tough decisions necessary to keep it alive, and in fact keep making decisions that guarantee few or no young people will join it and keep it going. This particular institution is beginning to greatly deviate from its own founding principles, and its base, its natural adherents and admirers, no longer recognize it.
One last example: The US Environmental Protection Agency was a place I badly wanted to work in while I was in college back in the mid 1980s. When I finally got to work at the USEPA, I realized that a great deal of the basic principle that had undergirded its founding had been long since tossed overboard. In place of the simple principle of a clean environment came a whole regime of anti-capitalism, anti-America regulations. After seven years as a policy staffer at USEPA, I could not wait to get out. I now think the agency needs a whole new name and a very clear mission change.
So should we be loyal to the hollowed out shells of institutions that now exist mostly in facade, gutted of what they once stood for, hopeful that they will somehow regain their former glory, or should we seek to create new institutions that are more representative of the principles that enervated the originals we so dearly loved and identified with?
Change is a constant, evolution is healthy, and institutions that do not change to some degree become stale, immobile, static, and fragile. But those that deviate from their founding principles are destined for a much faster devolution, because most people just simply stop believing in them.
The competitive free market will cause new institutions to spring alive, bringing hope and aspiration anew to old principles, replacing the old institutions as they dry up and wither away. For me, I am of two minds: Stay loyal to the old institution until that is no longer possible, on principle, and then help found a new one, on principle.
Another great Historic Harrisburg Association home tour
We really enjoyed the 51st annual Historic Harrisburg Association home tour today. Spent most of our time in the beautiful Bellevue Park neighborhood, where my grandparents lived and where I spent many holiday walks with cousins and other family.
Beautiful homes, holiday cheer and spirit with lots of decorations, kind homeowners opening their private lives and house nooks to the public, old memories revisited and relationships renewed as I bumped into people unseen for the past year or decade.
Harrisburg has a very high quality of life and a very low cost of living, it is a small town with a big heart, and I have a big Thank You to the volunteers at Historic Harrisburg Association for assembling this special day. This home tour reminds me every year of how great this place is.
Every street corner in Bellevue Park has these Art Deco signs
The Princess of Patience chatting with old acquaintenances in the Bellevue Park Community Association building
Breezy Hill, the oldest house in Harrisburg’s Bellevue Park, circa 1867, and I believe the original farm estate home that Bellevue Park was built on in the 1920s-1940s
Homeowner Jared Dozier and his wife Hilary bought Breezy Hill in 2021, and have regularly made the local news every time they undertake some new major overhaul of the place
Bellevue Park maps have been made regularly since the 1930s, I think, with individual homeowner names listed
I sat in a corner of Jeffery’s living room while someone played wonderful live piano music. I did not want to leave. Jeffreysflowers.org
Ballistics Lesson #439
Today I learned a ballistics lesson that I have learned before, that everyone under the sun knows, but which I always seem to forget every few years. Maybe it is not forgetting, but curious wondering that gets the better of me. If you are interested in reading about an old man making a foolish mistake, read on.
So late this morning I set out to still hunt a large section of reverting, regenerating forest. It is brutal stuff – blackberry, briars, weeds of every sort, and jungle-thick growth of oak and popar saplings and whips, all anchored in downed tree tops and branches from a timber sale we did about twelve years ago. It is hell to hunt, and that is why this place is full of hiding deer. So, we go to where the deer are, and if we do it right, we can still-hunt our way into close range of a fat doe or a decent buck just rising out of his bed.
When I finally got there after a fifteen minute hike, the wind was howling, tree branches were falling, leaves were flying, and the couple inches of snow on the ground made it all perfect. And so I set out very slowly walking into the wind, taking a few steps, then stopping to look all around, watching not to step on any big sticks that would make a loud crack, and also moving quickly when the wind raged. My own movements and sounds were masked by the crazy roaring winds and falling tree debris from above.
After about ten minutes of slowly picking my way downhill and into the wind, I was looking at a nice juicy doe. Probably two years old and plump, she was just 25 yards away and looking around. She probably was getting brief whiffs of me, but in the blasting seesawing winds she was not able to get a read on where the scent was coming from. Too late for her, I raised the rifle and bang, watched her standing there, unfazed. A clear miss.
Levering another round into the chamber, I took more careful aim at her, now acutely aware of the chunky backpack strap on my shoulder that was making it difficult to correctly anchor the buttstock to my cheek. With her right shoulder clearly centered in the ghost ring, I pulled the trigger and again, watched as she just stood there, stock still and unable to detect where the strange sounds and smells were coming from.
As I jacked a third round in, she suddenly jumped up and took off running fast, downhill, her head pointed low and her tail tucked. She was obviously hit by the second shot, but usually the 325 grain 45-70 caliber bullets just absolutely smash critters at that close range. I know from my own experience. But this running after the smashing blow was a new one to me.
And so I took my time to catch up to her clear trail in the leaves and snow. I searched around on the ground and found the two spent brass shells ejected from the Marlin, shook off the snow, and put them in my left front pocket.
Initially, no blood was visible, but her feet were going in all directions as she staggered. She was hard hit and struggling. A hundred yards later, large smudges of blood and hair appeared on trees. Then blood on the snow. Another hundred yards and we were out of the more open forest regeneration and back into the thick jungle. Her clumsy hoof marks were easy to see, and here and there was blood. This animal was dying and did not know it. At every turn I expected to find her lying there, expired. So much indication of impending death, and yet so much resilience to live on.
The long and short of this tale is, I ended up tracking her for over an hour, which is an eternity. During this time I had bedded deer up and running in all directions, including a large buck. If you really want deer, the thick, nasty, gnarly places are where they are hiding. But I was after this one wounded doe, and I had no eyes for any others, including one that stood up almost in front of me. After quickly checking that she was not bleeding, I let her leave.
Doing a 360 degree circle around where her last blood sign was located, I determined that she was either dead or close to dying in a large tangle of old rotting tree tops covered in Japanese stiltgrass, burdock, mile-a-minute, bramble, and briar. Nasty, difficult, not a place for a man to easily or comfortably move in, I marked where she was and moved on to the afternoon sit a mile away. Tomorrow morning I will return and find her frozen body. Unless the coyotes get to her first, she will feed a hungry family here in Central PA.
After withstanding the afternoon’s buffeting winds and feeling colder than I have in years on the edge of the crop field, I finally gathered my kit, ducked out of my friend’s blind, and headed back to the truck. He later sent me a trail camera picture of the local deer herd walking out into the crop field literally one minute after I had exited the blind. They knew I was there and were just waiting for me to leave.
Back home I emptied my pockets onto the kitchen island, including the two empty 45-70 brass cases I had emptied at the doe. Picking them up to look at them, I noticed that one of them had the Hornady stamp, and the other bore the Star Line stamp. I use the factory 325 grain Hornady FTX bullets for bear and deer hunting (very successfully with both species), and I reload the Star Line with 325 grain brass solids, from Cutting Edge Bullets, for grizzly self defense in Alaska and for black bear hunting here in Pennsylvania. Especially on drives through the laurel. These brass solids will absolutely and unstoppably smash their way through a tough grizzly bear with its heavy bones and super tough muscles, but they will ziiiiip right through a whitetail deer.
And suddenly it dawned on me. I had first overshot and missed the doe with the Hornady FTX, and then literally drilled her body through-and-through with the brass solid second shot. I had jumbled up the two loads in my pockets, and when loading the rifle I had failed to put a second Hornady FTX round in the gun as the initial followup shot. Instead, I had a grizzly bear load as the followup shot, and as one might expect, the grizzly bear load did not kill the doe on the spot. Nope. That brass solid at 2100 feet per second just zipped cleanly through her entire body like a small laser beam. None of its energy was dumped into her by the bullet mushrooming, with massive terminal shock, as the FTX is designed to do.
And only then, when back at home, did I understand why the doe had reacted that way, how she took a few seconds to realize that something bad had happened to her, but that while fatal, it was not something that was going to kill her dead right there. She was only mostly dead from the brass solid. By now, as I write this, she is most assuredly frozen solid in that tangled hell that I will go back to tomorrow morning. Hopefully the coyotes will not have found her.
Had I used the correct expanding bullet, I would have had nothing to write about tonight. It would have been just another successful slow stalk through the thick ‘n nasty, with the rifle butt up at my shoulder, the hammer back, and me ready to jump shoot a deer.
Instead, I had to re-learn a rudimentary ballistics lesson, which is if you want to kill thin skinned game, use expanding bullets that transfer all of their energy into the prey animal’s body. If you shoot a high velocity scalpel at the prey animal, it will cleanly and surgically cut it, even make neat clean holes through bones, but that wound might not bleed much and the animal might not know it is supposed to be dead until it has run a long distance away from the man with the gun, and into impossible cover.
Sign like this, blood smear and hair at deer chest height, says this is a dead deer running.
A 325 grain solid brass Cutting Edge Bullets 45-70 load I make for grizzly in Alaska is a terrible backup load for whitetail deer
A Tale of Two Different Approaches to Life, Government
We are witnessing a growing storm right now. Of historic, unprecedented proportion. Something out of a fantastical Hollywood CGI movie is taking shape in front of our eyes. Except this is no fake fantasy, it is the harshest of realities about to descend on all of us. God willing, and for good reason.
What started out as small dark clouds in 2016 has morphed into an enormous, growing boiling cloud mass with lightning shooting out of it, ominous rumblings became peals of sharp thunder. Pick your Armageddon or end-of-the-world SciFi movie, America and the entire planet are entering a new state of being, and this huge ever-growing storm of apocalyptic size and appearance is coming with it.
A Biblical parallel would be the Exodus story, where God’s holy Angel of Death went house to house, inflicting destruction, except on those pure souls who were favored. Or, America is about to witness a Noah-like flood that is going to wipe away all of the sinful grotesquery and leave a cleansed albeit forlorn and changed landscape behind, where green things can grow again in a purified world.
We are seeing the difference between two different ways of looking at life and government play out. And this Biblical clash of good vs. evil is about to get ugly, and disruptive. And beautiful. Change is constant, necessary, painful, and beautiful.
On the one hand is the Uniparty-Media establishment complex, with its ever expanding bloated, unaccountable, lawless, change-resistant, all-powerful federal bureaucracies. This huge, unholy carnivorous plant has been watered with the hard-earned tax money of the American people (taken at gunpoint) for about a hundred years, ever since progressive (Communist) president Woodrow Wilson began inflicting his vision for Big Government and Little Citizen on America.
Relying on the once-inspiring frontier mentality that America was always going to grow, expand, reach ever greater heights of achievement, progressives (statist communists, now Democrats) and their Uniparty GOP allies siphoned off ever larger amounts of American private sector achievement to fund their socialist horror experiment. And with everything on the line, they illegally manipulated voting machines and voting laws and looked the other way to steal the 2020 election, so they could cement their Uniparty rule over all of us once and for all.
And so here we are, about a hundred years after this slow growing cancerous fungus first took hold, and the American people are beholding this evil thing that was just about to take over our lives, eat us all up, and continue growing. Americans were slated to become permanent slaves to the Uniparty bureaucracy and its unelected functionaries who have been holding ever increasing power over our individual fates. And the American people said NO.
In response to the evil Uniparty bureaucracy, the American people just re-re-elected someone who believes in and is willing to fight fight fight at any cost for the original founding vision of America: A place of freedom and limitless opportunity for all of its citizens.
A place where the government exists to serve the citizens, not the other way around.
The coming shock as these two worlds collide is going to be cataclysmic. Yes, proponents of freedom and liberty are going to get the great cleansing they are hoping for, that America desperately needs. But do not kid yourself that the resulting fallout is going to be beautiful, or easy. No, it will be shocking to America’s core. We need this, but it will not be easy.
As the three readers of this blog already know, your dutiful author here is devoted to freedom and liberty at all costs, inlcuding the freewill donation of his own blood and life, need be. Minuteman at the ready, absolutely. Freedom from tyranny may be achieved, but it always comes at a cost, a true and measurable cost. And we are about to witness it, as the evil towers of Mordor come crumbling to the ground in a great shock. Hopefully without bloodshed.
What comes afterwards will be a weird quiet. The sound of one hand clapping, maybe. A thin, still blast of the shofar, heard at Sinai when the Law was given.
For those who are confused by this essay, take note of just one of dozens of such current policy situations: outgoing dementia-ridden White House resident Joe Biden has just signed a new contract with about 42,000 unionized federal workers, obligating the federal government to granting certain lush work conditions with these employees. Done as a business-as-usual end-run around the incoming storm, it ignores the catastrophic blast about to hit Washington, DC.
To wit: Every federal worker serves at the choice of the Chief Executive, who is The President. So all of these 42,000 federal workers can be immediately furloughed, their new gravy train contract rendered moot, and the incoming storm’s ongoing clean sweep will continue unabated. End of business-as-usual.
One man’s wreckage is another man’s treasure, I suppose. I am looking forward to picking over the smoking battlefield when this is over. But I bet I will find some distant kinfolk lying there, too. Painful price to pay, but necessary.
Joe Biden is a criminal liar and a thief
Joe Biden’s bribery schemes with China and Ukraine are epic. The biggest criminal endeavor in a public office in American history. A huge scandal.
That Joe Biden used his corrupt pedophile son Hunter Biden to do a lot of his dirty work is well documented. That Hunter Biden had already done enough criminal activity on his own with drugs, guns, tax evasion, underage sex trafficking, and other felonies is a testament to just how bad these guys are. Really, really bad people.
For two years Joe Biden lied to the American people, telling us emphatically that he would let the justice system play out with his son Hunter Biden’s many legal entanglements. And then suddenly, today, Joe Biden issued a broad pardon for his son going from 2014 to 2024 and including any crimes he might have done and has not yet been charged with. In other words, Hunter Biden has a thirty-day Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card.
One of the reasons I despise partisan politics is how being loyal to a broken brand makes people say ridiculous things. And so today we got a parade of Democrat Party loyalists pooh-poohing the pardon, trying to explain that all the lies that Joe Biden told us were not really lies, etc. Some people, notably Hollywood actor types, actually celebrated this historic pardon, as if it looks good for a corrupt father president to pardon his corrupt son for so many crimes over such a long period of time.
This pardon is in effect a confession of criminality. I just wish that all of the politically devoted partisans would try to hold onto a shred of integrity and at least be honest about this: It smells bad.
