Category → Fruit of Contemplation
Is “psychology” a real professional field?
After stumbling across the most fake of fake and partisan “science” websites, undergirded by the field of psychology, I just had to ask: Is psychology real and a valuable scientific tool, or is it subjective nonsense that can be whatever people want it to be?
Do you remember Bandy Yee? I do. She was the alleged psychiatrist who declared both her antipathy to President Trump and also her negative faux diagnosis of Trump, despite having never met him in person or having had a chance to do whatever it is that psychiatrists and doctors do when evaluating a patient. Six, seven years ago Bandy Yee started publicly announcing her medical opinion that President Trump was unfit for office and blah blah blah blah blah you can go look up her nonsense for yourself. She sounded shrill and crazy, violated basic medical ethics, and got herself fired.
The point being that this alleged doctor/ psychiatrist Bandy Yee followed none of the elementary rules of medicine or psychiatry, and rather instead wielded her supposed medical talents as a weapon against her political opponent, at that time President Trump. Based on her unprofessional behavior, a lot of Americans viewed Bandy Yee as the kind of “doctor” like Dr. Mengele was a doctor in the Nazi concentration camps.
Or like one of the Soviet Union’s cruel doctors who pronounced perfectly healthy and sane people to be crazy and subject to horrible psychiatric ward incarceration and treatment over simple ideological or values-based disagreements. Which in the Soviet Union was easy to have. All it took was some higher-up Communist Party person to declare you as a bad person, and then in would step a medical doctor psychiatrist to declare you insane and subject to crazy person jail. Where you would be mistreated for the rest of your sad life. This is Bandy Yee.
Bandy Yee behaved like a Nazi or Soviet political doctor, and yet…she is said to be “a doctor.” The pinnacle of science and healthcare, right?
Using Bandy Yee as our baseline highly trained “medical expert” (who cannot control her own feelings and who uses her training to attack innocent people), I really began wondering about the so-called “psychologists” who can also, I guess, maybe heal people and definitely also hurt people with their training.
Today I encountered through sheer accident the website psypost.org, a site that purports to be scientific, but which is in reality the Bandy Yee of websites: 100% politically partisan junk science and fake studies, designed to lend a veneer of scientific credibility to political claims about Republicans, conservatives, white men, gun owners, etc.
I read one of the articles listed at psypost.org, about a purported professor at my alma mater, Penn State University. A claimed “psychologist”, “Dr.” Piazza, wrote the fakest of subjective nonsense studies about how claims of election fraud heighten support for violence among Republicans but not Democrats. His takeaway from his garbage “study” was that discussing overt voting fraud is dangerous to democracy, because conservatives will get angry and commit political violence.
Seriously, Professor Pizza wrote this stuff. In other words, he is asserting that to “protect democracy” we have to restrain Republicans from investigating and talking about blatant voter fraud committed by Democrats. Which violates elementary Free Speech rights and the First Amendment etc. Which means Professor Piazza needs to destroy democracy in order to save democracy. But he’s a “doctor”…so listen to him.
And by the way, of course Democrats won’t get mad or violent about voter fraud…THEY are the fraudsters! They are the beneficiaries of voting fraud. Democrats commit vote fraud like I breathe air with every breath I take. Voter fraud is what Democrats do, or to be fair, it is baked into the DNA of the Democrat Party apparatus, and regular ol’ Democrat voters might not know about it, or might be comfortable thinking about it but not actually doing it themselves. I digress.
Another hint that psypost.org and its supposedly scientific writers and subjects are all completely fake is that while its past week or so is devoted to discussing political violence on the political right using really tenuous and outright dishonest fake studies, there is this really telling gap between an article posted on July 10th and one posted on July 17th…where nothing is written about the actual political violence attempted assassination committed against President Trump by Trump-hating Democrat donor Michael Crooks last Saturday, July 13th.
I also saw nothing about ANTIFA, the radical left Marxist crew and Brown Shirts implementing Democrat Party coercion at the street level. Apparently the crazy hyper violent trans people (well documented by gay journalist Andy Ngo) at ANTIFA are perfectly sane and fine to the writers at psypost.org. Mmmm hmmmmmmm…
In other words, America’s professional psychologists are just fine and dandy writing about the potential and alleged and promised political violence on the right, while completely ignoring the actual political violence (an attempted assassination of a leading presidential candidate) on the left.
I read a bunch of their articles on this website, and came away with the belief that psychology is not a scientific profession. That it is a dive, a fake pseudo-science hideout for the intellectually fraudulent and weak-minded among us, and especially for the ideologically angry left. That it is mis-used to deliberately create misinformation against the political opponents of the political left. That anyone believing this nonsense is a sucker.
If Bandy Yee is at all representative of psychiatrists (despite her unprofessional behavior she is still licensed and acting out as a psychiatrist, which means that her oversight board and fellow psychiatrists nationwide are just as full of shiite as she is), then how much more so are psychologists and the entire field of psychology full of cr@p.
If you don’t like what is being said here, go ahead and disprove the observations that have given rise to this essay. Go to the purveyors of psypost.org’s politically driven pseudo science trash and get them to stop, to tighten up, to behave professionally. Until then, my impression will remain that psychology is junk science populated by angry leftists, who themselves pose very real, substantive risks to the health of America, to our democratic norms, and to us individual citizens.
Photo of a bunch of obviously peaceful protestors said to be “violent” because they support Trump
Oh the irony of this ridiculous headline, because one day before a radical leftist almost killed President Trump
Conspiracy theory that can’t be true
Talk about a real, genuine conspiracy theory – a significant number of Americans who oppose President Donald Trump are actually saying publicly that his near-assassination was staged by Trump himself. To garner sympathy. For real.
What is the operational definition of this alleged conspiracy? How exactly did it happen? What are the actual working parts to the conspiracy?
Here is what we know: The shooter is dead, Corey Comperatore is dead, James Copenhaver and David Dutch are both critically injured. President Trump went from speaking live on TV with no wounds to suddenly bleeding, falling to the ground, and getting back up with blood streaming across his face, all in a few seconds.
You conspiracy theorists are saying that this attempted assassination is fake, staged, a lie, and yet you can’t explain the factual nuts and bolts of how it happened….
While on a regular good day the political Left suffers from terrible moods, an addiction to bad information, and black hate for their political opponents, now cheering and mocking the assassination attempt, mocking Trump’s wound, mocking the wounded and murdered audience members, and concocting a bizarre conspiracy theory to assauge one’s own blinding hate is a low spot in the annals of human politics. No wonder the political Left engages in so much political violence; their heads are brimming with hateful ideas and the violent images and desires that naturally flow from them.
Coming up with a physically impossible conspiracy theory is an embarassing statement about the demented frame of mind of too many Americans. I won’t say it’s all or even a majority of registered Democrats, but let’s be honest, a sizeable proportion of them have been so wound up and tuned up they willingly let their hateful thinking tangle up the wiring in their brains. Remember, registered Democrats, hate is a not a family value nor is it a proper component of our national political dialogue.
Here are the facts on the ground. How do you twist them into a believable conspiracy theory? Go! Do it! You are a crazy person!
The media industrial complex is trying to suppress these iconic photos of a wounded and defiant Trump
America as a garden or a bank account
With “Gardening Month” June behind us, our backyard gardens are starting to go into overdrive, and really produce the produce. The most popular garden items are zucchini and tomatoes, followed by cucumbers, green beans, other species of squash, lettuce, and herbs. Our own garden is well watered and well fertilized. Last year we put in over 800 pounds of horse manure and 160 pounds of lime, as well as a lot of home-made compost. This spring we put in about 100 pounds of our own back yard compost and another 160 pounds of lime, well-tilled deeply into the loam.
Every year we rotate the locations where the garden plants are placed. Repeated planting in the same spot results in both insect pests and fungi becoming settled there, and a constant problem. Well do I remember visiting Kokomo, Indiana, in the mid 1990s. I was there as a representative of the US EPA. We held a public hearing on the use of an anti-anthracnose/fungicide that posed some health risks, but also was saving the butts of the local and regional farmers. Kokomo County is where a huge portion of America’s summertime cantaloupes had been grown for a very long time, and the diseases attacking cantaloupes had become hard-baked into the soil.
I learned then and there not to keep planting the same plants in the same exact locations every growing season. Rather, rotate them around to different parts of the garden every season.
With daily watering, routine plant maintenance (e.g. zucchini plants should have the old bottom leaves removed every couple days, and checked daily for vine borer eggs) like lightly spraying soapy water onto garden plants and weeds around the garden edge, and regular harvesting, like a lot of other American back yard gardens, ours should be able to produce a lot of organic food for our family to eat all year long.
There is also a refreshing symmetry to the garden of having put in a lot of work on it, and then reaping a lot of benefits from it. Someone should write a book about gardening, traditional human values, and personal development. One thing I do see is a garden as a symbol of America, or as a bank account.
As currently run by corrupt career politicians in both political parties, America is not being well tended or maintained as a garden must be kept.
Said another way, if America is a bank account, it has not had any deposits made into it for a long time, and it is way over-drawn.
And no, I am not (yet) advocating for the garden to be watered by the blood of tyrants and patriots alike. But a garden must be watered, and its weeds must be pulled, if its plants are to grow and bear fruit. A bank account must have deposits if it is to have anything to withdraw from it when one requires money to buy food or clothing. There are a thousand individual public policy corolaries to the nation-as-garden theme.
Why is it that America is not being cared for and dutifully tended as a garden, or even as a basic child’s bank account, by the people who run it? Why is America being treated as a place where people, any people, can just take take take and keep on taking, as if there is no end to the garden produce or the money?
Yes, I think one political party is more at fault for this failure, but there is no ignoring that most of the Republicans have committed almost all of the same failures as their opponents, only just less so, because the Republicans are not as competent at purposeful mismanagement. Believe me, if they could do what the Democrats do, the Republicans surely would.
So why are American voters not demanding that their elected representatives follow really basic values and practices for maintaining America? Why is legislation that guarantees that only American citizens can vote being torpedoed? Why would elected representatives or American citizens want voter fraud? Voter fraud means that the garden will die! There will be no democracy or freedom to enjoy! There will be no money in the bank when we need it most!
Squash vine borer eggs on a zucchini leaf. Just tear or snip off the part of the leaf these are on. Check for them daily. These could be called illegal border jumping aliens, unjustifiably siphoning off our hard work.
a thousand points of light, a thousand glorious small cuts
Watching a boat sinking out on the water because it was deliberately holed by its occupants is a curious thing.
Watching the people in the sinking boat then continue to deliberately punch more holes into the ruptured hull, even as water is being taken on, which expedites the boat’s failure as a floating refuge on water, is more than curious. Now, we are pretty certain that the self-destructive people in the boat either are stupid, suicidal, or do not even realize what they are doing.
They might think that adding more holes in the boat actually lets the water out…?
Thus is the recent statement by political activist George Stephanopoulos that media personalities having live interviews on TV with President Donald Trump is “journalistic malpractice“ perfectly framed.
George Stephanopoulos is the longtime political director for ABC “News.” As a former extremely politically partisan political activist employed by President Bill Clinton, Stephanopulous somehow seamlessly glided into the awkward and disbelievable role of “news reporter” and “journalist” at ABC. You know, as the kind of news reporter and journalist that is supposed to be accurate, fair, balanced, fact-based, truth-seeking no matter where it takes him. Ideally, and probably much more so in America’s distant past, journalism is done by fair-minded arbiters of truth and accuracy, not political activists.
These two roles are mutually exclusive: Political activists are by definition not fair minded arbiters of truth and accuracy, and so they cannot possibly communicate anything but one-sided political propaganda, narrative, and self-serving lies to their viewers and audiences. Which is what George Stephanopoulos does…speaking of journalistic malpractice.
George Stephanopoulos is not a journalist, he is an aggressive political activist masquerading as a journalist. And the reason he wants to prevent President Trump from having live interviews on mainstream media outlets is that George Stephanopoulos wants to deprive American audiences of having an honest and unfiltered view of Trump. Because Americans seeing and hearing Trump in his own words, as his own self, is going to be completely at odds with the lies, propaganda, falsehoods, and partisan political narrative that political activists like George Stephanopoulos try to paint Trump with all the time.
George Stephanopoulos is actually a censor, the opposite of a journalist. He is someone who tries to stop, limit, or blunt the dissemination of inconvenient facts or truths that undermine the political goals of the censor. Censorship runs totally at odds with the spirit and intent of America’s First Amendment, as well as the open and sometimes raucous format for all of our political discourse since our founding.
Recall that American politicians used to give a “stump speech” literally standing on a fresh tree stump surrounded by interested citizens, such was the nature of America’s rapidly expanding frontier and European settlement. So, a so-called “journalist” trying to prevent a politician from giving his live “stump speech” is actually doing the opposite of journalism: He is conducting censorship, at war with America.
All censors will tell you they are blocking you from having access to the truth, the facts, a certain point of view, for your own good. But they are never really doing this for your own good, or for mine. Like George Stephanopoulos, all censors throughout history engage in censorship for their own good. Whether it is personal monetary rewards or a political outcome favorable to a censor’s political views, censorship is conducted purely for the benefit of the censor.
Censorship is evil, and so-called journalists who are actually censors, like ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, are evil people. Censorship is un-American. Don’t be a censor, don’t support censors, don’t engage in censorship.
Here is an interesting very brief little video of President Trump at a small town hall, with an audience of Americans who had not heard him in person before. The audience members are stunned by the difference between President Trump in person, the actual President Trump, versus the false and heavily filtered/censored image of President Trump they had been fed by the mainstream media, like ABC “News” and George Stephanopoulos.
Here is why censorious political activists like George Stephanopoulos are becoming so bold about their political efforts under guise of “journalism,” which in the past would have itself been a headline: Totally partisan and politicized fake news legacy mainstream media outlets like ABC, CBS, NBC, MSDNC, NPR, PBS, New York Times, Washington Post, etc. are being engulfed in a maelstrom of alternative information outlets, and they are becoming desperate.
Hence shameless George Stephanopuslous in effect knocking holes in his own boat in full public view, destroying his own credibility as a “journalist” and as an American, when he openly admits that he has no other defense against President Trump than artificially filtering Trump, censoring him, stopping the public from viewing him as he really is, and outright lying about Trump.
A thousand points of light (to beneficially borrow a phrase from one of the worst, most corrupt establishment politicians in modern history) are shedding unceasing light on the lies of George Stephanopoulos et al. A thousand small, independent alternative information outlets have sprung up across the internet and anywhere else they are not artificially repressed, censored, or suppressed. They exist because of the truth vaccuum left by George Stephanopoulos and his ilk, and the marketplace of ideas abhors a vaccuum.
Sites like www.breitbart.com, www.thegatewaypundit.com, www.zerohedge.com, www.dailycaller.com, www.rebelnews.com, and a million small websites like this one at www.joshfirst.com, not to mention an incredibly diverse, rich, and interesting constellation of independent political commentary and analysis at www.rumble.com, are each making a tiny cut into the corpulant, stagnant, odiferous, and pus-filled rotting meat that is the body of mainstream media.
This thousand points of light alternative news sources is making it impossible for liars like George Stephanopoulos to get away with his lies any longer. And this thousand tiny cuts of alternative information sources is slowly bleeding out the lying mainstream media, exposing them, weakening them.
Of course every information and news outlet has its own flair, its own bend, its own flavor and goals. This goes without saying. But when I read someone actually bragging about getting their news and information from MSNBC, NPR, and CNN, I wonder how anyone could be so incurious about the wider universe or galaxy they live in. If you are addicted to fake news, like NPR, ABC and George Stephanopoulos, you owe it to yourself to at least add a little cream to your coffee, and see what other people are reporting about the same whatever subject that ABC-NBC-CBS-NPR-ProPublica-CNN happens to be talking about at the moment.
Only censors try to blot out the light that other people need to be able to see clearly. Only fearful, close-minded, incurious, purposefully ignorant people steadfastly choose to support censors and remain behind their own artificial curtain.
Let the sun shine in, America.
UPDATE: Goodness gracious, I was in such a rush to get this essay up that I neglected to include all of the amazing podcasts that Amerians are dialing into every day. There are a whole bunch of podcasts and interactive radio/internet shows, too, that are a blend of Libertarian/freedom/ constitutional/ just askin’ that are just smokin‘ the mainstream media. Shows like Joe Rogan (who I disagree with about 45% of the time, and who has occasionally said some racist stuff that leaves me shaking my head, but who nonetheless addresses important issues head-0n), Dan Bongino, whose uncensored balls-to-the-wall New Yawk accented bare knuckle bulldozer of a daily show is one of the highest rated in America for good reason, can be found on Apple and on Rumble. Dinesh D’Souza is my favorite faux felon, who is incredibly smart, quick, witty, and insightful. Ace interviewer Jan Jekeliek has the most incredible people from all walks of life on his American Thought Leaders podcast. Russell Brand has grown on me over the years, and while he is in no way a conservative, he is a witty, quick, and funny advocate for transparency, accountability, and honesty, which are all good and necessary things in any government, and especially in a government of, by, and for The People like ours. Russell Brand’s mocking of the corrupt FBI agents stealing people’s gold watches is hilarious and cutting.
I could go on and on, and in the interest of time, this short list is a “starter pack” for intelligent, curious, open minded, patriotic Americans. Give these folks a whirl or two and see if you aren’t hooked. Each has a different style and really different content, and yet each of these independent-minded people is providing a life-saving end-run around the rotten and corrupt establishment media complex like ABCNPRCNN…this is the thousand points of light exposing the lying mainstream media and the resulting thousand glorious small cuts bleeding out the fake news media.
Commando summer vacations
Few things, few activities are as deeply satisfying to me as summer travels in America, especially across the northeast. Call these trips short vacations, commando vacations, traveling vacations, whatever, they are always fun and invigorating. I am always somewhat dispirited when these trips end.
The goals are to see new places, usually off the beaten path, meet new people, see old American architecture, and explore old towns, small towns, take in new sights. Small town America is quite fabulous, although they are all increasingly becoming “discovered” and populated by down-state summertime residents and tourists, and even the dreaded out-of-state tourists, like me. While there is less to “discover” in these “discovered” small old towns, one benefit of the summertime down-state residents is that they increasingly purchase and rehab the most beautiful Victorian and Federal homes that until recent years fell into increasingly sad disrepair. When these old hulking brick, stone, or beautifully complicated trim wooden buildings are fully returned to their original glory, they are really something to see, to behold, to bask in. Each is a work of art in its own right, and the investors deserve our applause and appreciation. I would like to have an ad hoc summertime picnic on all of their porches.
Although I do not always get the level of accommodation I would prefer on these trips, I can make up for poor overnight conditions by staying out late and getting out early, and bringing my own sheets and pillow cases, just in case. One lesson learned over the decades is Trust the Big Hotel Chains. If you can find them, not always possible in the more remote areas, they are universally clean, comfortable, hygienic, well kept, and generally safe. Whereas, bed-and-breakfast destinations are widely hit or miss, with the misses being gross and uncomfortable, and old family owned “spas” and grandiose Victorian or imitation French estates can be a little sticky and pretentious, or downright gross and pretentious with genuinely weird characters hanging about. Give me the universal American standard of three star or better hotel chain every night possible. Or a car-camping tent site at a state park with flush toilets and showers.
The term for exposing people to new ideas and objects, Education, emerged in 1918. It replaced the long term phrase popular instruction. As the keeper of this blog, I think about the differences between these two concepts, education versus instruction. One of the huge things missing in today’s “education” establishment (overrun with rote partisan indoctrination) is the act of instruction, the conveyance of new skills, new ideas, new ways of appreciating or thinking. And so I like to think that here the reader has an opportunity to encounter some instruction, something new. This sounds like a heavy burden, a heavy lift, until you consider what I am presenting as new here: An Upstate New York distillery, which makes various alcoholic spirits, which I had only read about in Mountain Home Magazine. On this most recent commando vacation, I was able to connect a variety of dots on a map in one afternoon, one of which being this distillery.
Situated above Seneca Lake, the Finger Lakes Distilling Company has a pretty nice pied-à-terre, from which we enjoyed our picnic lunch views over and across the lake. I had just enjoyed a very relaxed tasting inside, and being a lightweight with alcohol, I was in no condition to drive. However, I am no lightweight in terms of weight, and I am always ready to eat…so we sat, ate our food picnic style, and let the cool early summer breeze flow across us while the distillery operation ran all around us. Fascinating to me at least is that this distillery locally sources all of its own grains, flavors; everything they use in their many various products is grown right in the Finger Lakes region. And one of the great joys of connecting the various dots across the Finger Lakes region is driving through the great amount of scenic working farmland and beautifully kept farms that make up that special landscape.
Of the four bottles of rye whisky I sampled, and bought, only one really appeals to my taste; the other three are going to be gifts to friends. What can I say; I have friends with poor palates and poor choices in their friends; no fancy gifts from moi. What I greatly enjoyed is the McKenzie single barrel straight rye whiskey (80% rye and 20% malted barley) aged six years, and finished in a “Pommeau” cask. This is really an outstanding flavor, a world-class product. And at $42.50 a bottle, it is about eight to fifteen dollars less than one would expect to pay for a similar quality product in Scotland, Ireland, or in other parts of America. And though I am not a drinker, as I have become a serious lightweight with age, I do enjoy sampling on location the locally made, sometimes internationally famous, sometimes should-be-internationally-famous whiskeys made in Scotland, Ireland, and occasionally America.
One of my favorite related memories is watching small boats putting in at the Isle of Skye, where they would each buy a couple cases of delicious small batch single malt, and then move on up the coast to the next small distillery, unknown to the outside world, but coveted and seriously in demand among connoisseurs. I happened to be standing high up in the Black Hills of Knoydart with a historic double rifle over my shoulder, hunting red stag, at that moment, and so alcohol was that farthest thing from my mind. But the determined boats way down below, and their sophisticated whiskey buyers, will never leave my mind. What a life.
Anyhow, below are some photos from the Finger Lakes Distilling Company, which despite being a real ongoing concern for some time now, has (bizarrely) not trademarked their unique product or bottle labels. See? This is the real essence of small town, rural America: Family-owned-and-run high quality, with all of the refreshing, remote innocence one hardly ever sees any more. Except maybe in Papua New Guinea, where according to one guy the locals ate Joe Biden’s grandfather with a side of whiskey bottle.
The single malt lacks the peaty flavor of coveted single malts from Scotland. If Upstate New York has any peat for roasting the malted barley, McKenzie should get it and use it
Real strawberry milk by the half gallon at Buttermilk Falls… can a summer day be better spent?
Could Today’s Young Americans do a June 6th D-Day?
Today is the 80th anniversary of the June 6th D-Day assault by a combined military force of Americans, British, Canadians, free French, Australians, Greeks, Czechs, Belgians, and others, on the beaches of Normandy, which officially began the Western democracies’ response to the great evils being perpetrated by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, and their allies.
A tremendous amount of heroism took place by the attackers on and around the beaches of D-Day Normandy, and by the paratroopers dropped behind enemy lines, some of it memorialized by movies like Saving Private Ryan. But most of D-Day was just simple military work – logistics with food, fuel, ammunition, spare parts, temporary shelters, etc., driving boats or loading boats, or cleaning boats or preparing or repairing boats, etc.
The men who made D-Day happen, whether way far away from the battle lines or way up close in front of it and right in it, were up to the task, whatever their own personal task was, because they came from a generation of westerners, generally, and Americans, specifically, who valued and knew hard work, who were comfortable taking reasonable risks, and who understood the importance of freedom. They did what was expected of them, and eventually won the war for freedom.
And so as I wandered around this past week “behind enemy lines”, so to speak, in a college town rife with young college age men and older men alike mincing and swishing, all, gay and straight, mind you, I wondered if today’s young Americans would be up to the task of a June 6th D-Day assault on entrenched defenders at Omaha Beach or Utah Beach in Normandy. Or even in an elementary school playground sandbox.
Looking at the ubiquitous un-athletic, unnaturally skinny, occasionally obese men, whose universal gait contains little to no masculine movement, no blocky limbs brought abruptly to the end of their motion forward or backward by tight muscles, but rather includes a most unnatural widely and fluidly swinging arms, with the wrist bending and the hands and fingers swinging upward, and dainty steps, I am thinking No.
Judging by what I have been seeing this past week, I would be betting on the bad guys with this generation of American men. Our guys just are not up to any sort of warrior spirit, much less warrior behavior or warrior actions. Frankly, from what I see, a majority of both the straight and the gay men today are girly. They all adopt lilting and nasally girly voices, baby talk like girls, and almost seem to aspire to be perceived as feminine. These guys are never going to carry a rifle into battle, much less shoot the rifle at their enemy, much less work hard with their bodies and develop manly muscles.
Why is this unnatural feminization of men and artificial dumbing down of 100% natural and 100% healthy maleness happening? Well, we can’t discount the overt assault on masculinity (so called “toxic masculinity”) by government schools, college professor indoctrinators, and pop culture. Recall the disastrous Gillette advertisement. Jiminy crickets.
We also have to consider the overt assault on little boys and boyhood by the educational and medical establishments. Fist fights are a huge no-no now. Fist fights among school boys were common when I grew up, and many of those boys on the other end of my fists ended up close friends until right now today. This was common practice for oh, about eighty thousand years of human development, but suddenly the feminine and incapable men convinced the masculine and highly physically capable men that being masculine and highly physical is bad, unworthy, etc. And so, boys can’t play cops and robbers anywhere any more, can’t pretend to shoot each other even with finger guns (gun shape made by pointing a finger like a gun barrel), and certainly cannot engage in any rough-and-tumble outside of a carefully circumscribed place of athletic activity. And of course, football, being the most aggressive and most testosterone-fueled sport, has been under attack by the media and medical establishments for a long time.
Speaking of testosterone, we know that testosterone levels are way down across America, and across all other Western countries, too. Probably a direct result of the lack of physical activity by boys and young men, and the emphasis on looking and acting feminine, and the wars on boyhood, manhood, and masculinity. As a result, lots of young women are complaining about being unable to find a manly man for a mate, and the older women are complaining that “there are no real men left.”
Plenty has been written and surmised about the effects of ubiquitous hormone-blocking herbicides (causing alligators in Lake Okeechobee to become hermaphroditic, an issue when I first started working at the USEPA in 1991) on both boys and girls and their sexual development.
Plenty has been written and surmised about the effects of over-drugging American children for supposedly “hyperactive” and “attention deficit” problems, which are really just evolutionary adaptive solutions in traditional hunter-gatherer societies (and now liabilities in our modern sedentary society).
Plenty has been written and surmised about the effects of over-drugging American children and adults alike for supposed “anxiety” disorders, which are really just normal human responses to the sensory and stimulation expectation overload addiction that is modern America.
And of course, the elites’ establishment narrative is that guns are bad.
And so here we are, mid-2024, celebrating and marking the 80th anniversary of D-Day, where manly men, masculine men, strong men, brave men, charged right into hellfire so that the world could live free. That’s you and me, son. And I don’t think most of today’s young men would or even could do any of what happened on June 6th, 1944, even if they decided they want to. What a huge failure.
Not only is this failure a shame, it is a huge signal to the world that America is very weak. And weakness invites takeover attempts by those who are not weak. And what amazes me is that the effeminate, mincing, swishing young men, straight and gay alike, do not realize that their effete and artificially soft lives will end abruptly, if they cannot man up and begin to become real men. That takes both a strong mind and a strong body.
A big Thank You to the men of D-Day, whose valor gave us Americans and Europeans freedom unlike the world had ever seen before, and which is now under great attack and pressure by enemies who are not afraid of us.
Tyrant wannabe David Hogg inspires 2A resilience
I photographed this in a visitor guide to Ithaca, New York. Scientific fact that only females can menstruate, but the mentally disabled want to not only pretend that biological men can menstruate, but that everyone must bow down and acknowledge it and support this craziness. This picture is a big part of what is killing America, and one cannot help but wonder who is really behind this
Don’t bite the flag that feeds ya
Tomorrow is Memorial Day, dedicated to remembering the many many sacrifices of military service personnel who from the beginning of America to right now have protected you, me, our kids, our lifestyle, and enabled us to pursue the American dream.
Because we American citizens are not required to serve our fellow Americans in any way, it seems that a great many Americans have forgotten about what it takes to keep this huge country going, or maybe they don’t even care about it.
Extreme examples of Americans showing their purposeful disrespect to America used to be limited to smelly hippies from successful families, who could afford to pose and posture and virtue signal. Today, huge swaths of Americans outright trash their own country and actually call for its destruction. Across America we have daily reports of teachers banning the American flag from their classroom, American school administrators banning the American flag from school sports events and uniforms. We even have a report this week about Brooke Merrell, director of Denali National Park in Alaska, ordering a road construction crew to remove American flags from their vehicles.
This disrespect and bizarre virtue signaling is a sign of a deep sickness taking over America. You cannot possibly hate yourself and also simultaneously succeed. You cannot bite the flag that feeds you, and also expect to have plenty more to eat any time you want it. Americans hating America is suicidal.
A request: Young people who consider the American flag to be all bad and everything, racist and other nonsense, try giving your flag respect today and tomorrow. Take a 24 hour break from being careless with such a powerful and meaningful symbol, full of sacrifice for you, and instead show it appreciation. I guarantee doing this will change some things inside of you. Some good things. Some needed things. The people who died for your comfort would appreciate it, just as you would had you been the one to die in battle for America.
Monument to unknown soldiers at Valley Forge Military Park, 1777-1778. Photo by Author
“Peace” protestors don’t want peace
All of the so-called “peace” protestor people don’t actually want peace, they want endless conflict that gives them something to live for. They thrive on conflict, and so they actually work to promote conflict, even while they say the opposite.
The so-called “peace” protestor people started out back in World War I, as a mix of anti-America communists and socialists trying to hurt America, along with well meaning Mennonite non-violent resistors who nonetheless did their duty as medics and orderlies when called upon. But by World War II, the so-called “peace movement” had swelled to include pacifist Quakers (who were being taken over by leftists by the 1950s and then fully by anti-America hippies in the 1970s), communists, socialists, and generally disaffected liberals who said nothing about communist Russia’s misdeeds, but rather heaped increasing scorn upon the capitalist United States. The so-called “peace” people are really just America haters, not lovers of peace.
Today’s so-called “peaceniks” argue for “conflict resolution” conditions that, contrary to stated aims, are guaranteed to cause conflicts to fester and continue, not end decisively. And that is because these people are not interested in actual peace, which means the absence of conflict.
Rather, they want outcomes that are consistently against the interests of democratically run countries and against people there living in peace. And that is a hard thing to sell, the national suicide-by-peace thing. They know it, but they absolutely live for it, because the adrenaline rush of living for something so impossibly majestic and messianic is positively hypnotic.
Despite the ongoing invasion of Ukraine by Russia, which really started in 2014 when Ukraine declared full soverignty from Russia and claimed eastern regions that have overwhelming Russian citizenry, and which has resulted in catatstrophic environmental and human death and physical damage beyond belief, note that the so-called “peace” people are really nowhere to be seen. No campus riots, no shutting down bridges or highways. Pretty quiet. Same goes for China’s many brutal militaristic adventures, and Cuba+Venezuela+Nicaragua non-democratic authoritarianism.
Same goes for the UN and its anti democracy allies lowering flags to half-mast out of respect to Iran’s Butcher of Tehran, Ebrahim Raisi, who without due process or rule of law was personally responsible for thousands of political dissidents being tortured to death or executed by slow hanging for many years. Actual Iranians living in Iran have been partying since Raisi’s chopper went down and burst into flames.
But when it comes to ten million underdog Jews (worldwide) defending themselves against two BILLION bullying Muslims (worldwide) attacking them everywhere across the planet, why… stop the press, turn college campuses and streets and bridges upside down, and call out the law on those troublesome Jews.
So now, the so-called International Criminal Court and the so-called International Court of Justice are issuing their own anti peace demands and ridiculous arrest warrants for Israeli leaders who are in the middle of defending the sole democracy in the entire region from hordes of very non-democratic and very Medieval barbarians at every corner of the New Jersey-sized country.
Never mind that Israel is not a signatory to the Rome Convention (neither is America), and thus not subject to these self-appointed kangaroo courts’ purported jurisdiction. What is important here is that the so-called “peace” people have been trying to dislodge Benjamin Netanyahu by any means possible for years, and thereby greatly diminish Israel’s ability to defend itself. Like him or not, Netanyahu has proven to be a very tough and reliable defender of Jewish survival in a hostile world, while most of his would-be opponents are desperate to be international media darlings and… people of “peace” at any cost.
The so-called “peace” people want to force on Israel, and on the world, a so-called “palestinian” country beyond the one that already exists in the nation called Jordan (80% of the original Palestine Mandate, 75% of the population identifies as “palestinian”), which they say will bring utopian peace and happiness and an absence of suffering and conflict to the region. It’s always for some mystical “peace” or “for the children” with these people.
By pushing this idea of another “palestinian” state, the peace people are incentivizing Hamas and the other Islamic terror groups to keep on committing attacks on Israeli civilians and holding out for everything, instead of accepting what is reasonable. The “peace” people’s intervention and resulting continuation of this conflict, and their constant encouragement of so-called palestinians to remain defiant and demand everything, as opposed to settling for something, has left the Abraham Accords in tatters. So much for peace from the peaceniks!
If there is one thing we have all learned since October 7th, 2023, it is that the decades of genocidal indoctrination have turned the Muslims living in Gaza and nearby areas into gleeful bloodthirsty murderers. So if Hamas’ October 7th child raping and baby burning massacre were indeed bizarrely rewarded with a formal state from which Hamas could continue to launch more massacres and random rocket attacks, they would do so.
In other words, the so-called “peace” people will get their desired conflict continuation, so that they can continue to wring their hands and write sanctimonious op-eds and pass endless judgment upon people and situations they themselves would never find themselves in (because brave men guard them day and night), and basically feel all mission-driven and holier-than-thou.
And we know that all of the Islamic actors in control of the ICJ, ICC and UN are using these institutions to try to damage Israel. After all, there is no actual Muslim pro-Israel/ pro Jewish/ pro peace peace movement; because that would be actual peace, which we know the self proclaimed peace people both Muslim and non do not really want.
The adrenaline rush and personal meaning high that “peace loving” enabling white liberals get from conflict continuation must be a lot stronger than heroin. Heroin users are satisfied to shoot up and then fall down in a corner somewhere and sleep off their haze, whereas the so-called “peaceful” white liberals keep pouring gasoline on the conflict fire that threatens to consume the entire world.
Self-anointed peaceniks and judgmental hypocrites, the AFSC never misses an opportunity to lie about Israel. What is the alternative to a ground invasion of Gaza by Israel? Should Israeli citizens shoot random bombs onto the heads of random Gazans in retaliation for the October 7th massacre? Note that AFSC makes zero mention of the massacre. Because the AFSC does not believe in peace, it hates Jews
Notice how AFSC fails to mention that Hamas is the sole cause of all of Gaza’s problems, including the theft of daily international aid deliveries. No mention of Israeli hostages, no mention of daily Israeli victims of Gaza rockets. AFSC is just “Israel is bad Israel is bad” all the time. The AFSC people do not want peace, they want dead Jews
talkin turkey
Spring Turkey Season is almost upon us here in Pennsylvania, and around the country. A great deal of the wild turkey breeding season is already behind us, and the significant challenge of calling in a “lovesick tom” at the tail end of the breeding period is now laid before several hundred thousand dedicated and novice turkey hunters alike, here in PA.
Couple of reminders, and one big observation:
- Please do not drive up and down country roads making hen calls out the window of your vehicle, waiting to hear a gobble in response. While it may bring some hunters a premature auditory orgasm to hear the lusty gobbler responses, all this activity really does is educate turkeys about fake calls by fake hen turkeys. And when tom turkeys get unnecessarily educated by guys peeing in their pants with excitement, said toms become a zillion times harder to hunt and bag. It takes the fun out of an already difficult hunt. Don’t do it. Please.
- Clearly identify your male turkey’s red or white head before pulling the trigger on its neck. If all turkey hunters only pulled the trigger when they had absolutely positively identified their target, there would be no heartbreaking hunting accidents during spring turkey season. And when you read the facts surrounding those hunting accidents or negligent shootings, you realize that some people are about to pee in their pants with excitement and so they shoot a human being “in mistake” of a turkey. By only putting our trigger finger on the shotgun trigger when the gobbler’s head is both clearly visible and in range, we bypass a lot of dangerous excitement.
Finally, in a certain nook up north, I have been enjoying the sounds once again of spring gobblers sounding off for probably six weeks now. Few have been the wild turkey gobbles there over the past ten to twelve years, an absence always correlated with the physical evidence of a resident fisher. In other words, fishers have eaten the hell out of our wild turkeys, and only after someone traps the local fisher do the turkey populations begin to rebound. This fact has been driven home for me year after year across southcentral, central, and northcentral PA; fishers have been real hard on our wild turkeys.
Not to say that fishers don’t have a place in Penn’s Woods, they do, of course. But the policy implications of widespread fishers should have been better considered before the giddiness of super-predator 100% ecosystem saturation overtook wildlife managers in the late 1990s and early 2000s. And now Pennsylvania is contemplating releasing pine martens into Penn’s Woods…..knowing already that they eat the hell out of grouse, and that PA’s grouse are in very bad shape.
I don’t mind having a decent population of fishers and pine martens up north in the Big Woods, where they will have the least amount of impact on other wildlife across the entire state. What I do object to is sacrificing the enormous wild turkey conservation success story on the altar of “more predators are better than few” mindset of some wildlife managers. Sometimes, we just have to accept that we can’t wind the clock back to the year 1650, or even 1750, because the few successes we have managed to rack up, like wild turkeys brought back from extinction, is as good as it can get.
Sometimes, good is good enough, and the rest we just need to leave well enough alone.
A fisher in New Hampshire, from wikipedia. Fishers are giant weasels. They eat everything.
Guys (men), don’t be an idiot
Emergency Room staff: “Hi there, what can we do for you tonight?”
Me: “I’m an idiot.”
ER Staff: “Yeah, we see a lot of those in here.”
Two hours before, the dry white oak board was very hard, and the cutter blades were very dull, and so that board was giving the cutter fits. Never mind that I had been running the cutter all day to fulfill a large order of oak, and that I had already sharpened the primary blade once, hours before. When the board end bounced off the dull blades, I leaned into it to force the cut. The last thing I remember is a flash of white in the dusk that was enveloping my worksite, and suddenly I knew I was hurt.
Reeling backwards and clutching my face, I first checked my teeth, my eyes, and unhappily noted the gushing blood pouring out of my face. The pain was overwhelming, and the copious blood told me it was serious.
After leaning on the order of banded lumber, hunched over and collecting my wits, I again took stock of my injured face. All my teeth appeared to be in my mouth, and I could see through my heavy wire frame glasses with both eyes. A big pool of blood was congealing on the lumber below me, and blood was liberally dripping and splotching all around me, wherever I went.
“Broken nose, you idiot,” I said out loud, to no one in particular. Time was 7:40 pm and anyone who might have been around to help me during regular working hours would have been long long gone home by then. From March through October I work farmer’s hours, which means work only ends when there is insufficient daylight to work by. When you choose to work until dark and until after dark, which I actually greatly enjoy, you usually work alone. And if you make a stupid, idiot mistake, you will bleed alone. If you are really unlucky or a really big idiot, you will die alone.
So, guys, don’t be an idiot.
Here are the idiot mistakes I made, which you should learn from and not make yourselves:
- Working around machinery and powerful tools while tired is an idiot mistake. All week a cold had dogged me, and even before beginning to work very physically, I was already run down from it. Hinyucking huge gobs of nasty green mucus everywhere every five minutes is a signal that your body is not well, that it is fighting off some infection or cold, and that it needs rest. Take the hint and rest, even a little bit, here and there throughout the day. On top of being sick, I had worked hard all day, lifting and moving logs and lumber, and when the accident happened I was just deeply bone tired from the heavy physical labor work. Mistakes happen much more easily to tired people, because tired people have poor judgment and slow reaction time. I had all of this in spades, and paid for it.
- Don’t work with dull tools. That cutter was battering the last piece of oak, not cutting it, and yet I foolishly leaned in close to physically force the very last piece of wood through. Big mistake. The powerful motor kicked that wood back into my face before I had time to second guess my poor decision. And yes, I had just been telling myself that after this very last piece of wood, I would remove the cutter blades and sharpen them. Too late, idiot.
- Wear correct protective equipment. Gloves are a must around wood and power tools, but the job I was doing also required serious face protection. Because I wear large, rugged eyeglasses everywhere, every iteration of which shows the battle scars of years of hard physical work, I have become a little lazy about better protecting my eyes. That became apparent about ten years ago, when some grinding wheel metal incredibly ricocheted up under my eyeglass lenses at an impossible angle and stuck in my eyeball. Took a while for that junk to work its way out. Just like with the safety event that prompted this particular essay, that day at the grinding wheel I had lazily neglected to simply slop my big clear face shield on my lumpy head and enjoy the benefits of complete protection from flying fragments, impacts, etc. Had I been wearing the face shield, hanging up on the wall just twenty feet away, while running the dull cutter, I probably would have had a good bruise across my face from the kick back, but nothing broken and no lost work time.
Last time I had a broken nose was my senior year in high school. Like the young idiots we were, a bunch of us were playing full tackle pick up football, in the dark. Heavily rushed, the opposite QB had lateraled the football to Rafael Richards, who, being athletic as hell, rocketed straight up the middle. Playing safety position, I put my head down and aimed straight for him. Rafael also put his head down to punch through the defenders, and the two of us woke up a bit later in the Chester County Hospital ER on two gurneys, next to each other. Naturally, we each had a mirror image injury, which included a broken nose and a deep gash in the forehead that required 17 stitches in the meat and another 15 stitches in the skin above.
Rafael went on to get his MD from Harvard Medical School, long before DEI and wokeness there rendered such a degree a question mark, instead of the world class achievement it should be. Somehow I just know that Rafael does not run the risk of getting his nose broken while being a fancy Harvard trained physician in an air conditioned office.
Me? I’m an idiot farting around with penny ante wood orders in the mountains. Because I like it.
But guys, regardless of doing what you like or don’t like, don’t be an idiot.
Cheap but highly effective face shields are sold everywhere for twenty bucks. Buy one and wear it. Don’t be an idiot