Category → Fruit of Contemplation
Why we hunt
Deer rifle season starts Monday (tomorrow) morning, and for about three quarters of a million Pennsylvania hunters, this is an early Christmas. The excitement is palpable at every gas station, outdoor store, and hunting area.
I’m hoping my son will get a deer, either a doe or a buck, because last year he was twelve and slept through the taking of a buck we had planned would be his to harvest. Now that he’s thirteen and feeling more focused, we are both excited about his prospect of becoming a man. The hunting rite of passage is as old as humanity, and is more meaningful than just about all others I can find. This is a big step for my boy, and I’m operating as his guide, spotter, coach, and cheerleader. It’s tough to tell who is more excited, he or I.
I myself hunt because it makes me feel fully human. Asking some newer hunting buddies who hail from big metropolitan areas why they hunt yielded these responses:
“Hunting off the beaten path makes me feel more connected to the food we eat. I enjoy the strategy, teamwork, cooperation and effort that it takes to put together a successful hunt.” -Shai
“I hunt for the chase, the mystery, the outdoors and to outwit.” -Jon
“I hunt because it brings a tremendous sense of honesty to my life. Although I keep kosher and do not eat the animals I harvest, I donate the meat to friends and to the homeless through state programs. Participating in every step of the process, from field to table has given me an appreciation for and honest perspective of the meat I do eat. Furthermore, a hunt that ends without game is still a success because it gives me the opportunity to honestly reflect on everything else in my life.” – Adam
“I hunt to understand what it means to provide for oneself. While living in a major city, it is very easy to exist but no way to understand what it means to provide for oneself. Hunting is a way to force yourself to think about what’s really important and how to refocus our efforts to accomplish it. Plus it allows for a really really great stories knowing I have certain skills that will help me in certain circumstances is a necessary endeavor.” -Max
“I hunt because it’s real. Not some video game or some movie or tv show. Although the ultimate goal of hunting is to kill, hunting makes me appreciate life. It reminds me how rugged and yet precious life can be. It makes me feel alive. It makes friendships more meaningful, time more valuable. Hunting reminds me to live, not just exist.” – Irv
These are men fairly new to hunting, but their answers likely speak for the millions of other more experienced hunters in America.
Bottom line: Hunting is a deep, often spiritual undertaking.
Recently I hosted a hunter from Scotland, where it is actually illegal to bow hunt. He came to America to hunt buck, turkey, and bear at our cabin in the Pennsylvania “Big Woods.”
After nine days he had passed on some nice bucks, because they were not what he wanted. After a lifetime of killing deer with silenced rifles in Scotland, this man came that far distance just to experience a more primitive, more challenging way of hunting.
Though he returned home with no heads or hides to show for his remarkable diligence, he tells me “I am haunted by whitetail deer, I even dream about them now” because they are so cagey, wary, beautiful, difficult to kill. His sensory experience alone in the woods with one of humanity’s oldest weapons, and his memories of that, were sufficient satisfaction for him.
Good luck tomorrow, hunters. Enjoy our sport, which is safer than cheerleading, basketball, football, soccer, and a host of other recreational pastimes Americans readily accept as part of our culture. Except hunting is not a pastime. It is us, it is human.
End University Tenure, Now
College professors enjoy employment-for-life called “tenure.”
Long ago tenure was created to attract the best and brightest educators, and to buffer them from the whimsy of changing administrations by ensuring they could remain in their ivory tower and continue to think Big Thoughts.
The tenure process is pretty much an in-house show, where the most senior fellow academicians in the particular department pass judgment upon an applicant’s teaching and publishing history, as well as her personality, professional demeanor, and other considerations that are utterly forbidden in the rest of the hiring process everywhere else in every other line of work.
Once tenured, a college professor is more or less untouchable. Even egregious violations of basic workplace conduct, such as sexual harassment of students and colleagues, are usually swept aside in the interest in of preserving face. Department standing usually trumps actual productivity and usefulness. Toxic cruelty, viciousness, and unprofessional “bomb throwing” by university staff are behaviors now not only expected but nearly de rigeur to establish street cred, irrespective of field.
Galileo comes to mind as someone who could have benefited from tenure. The great ground-breaking Italian philosopher and astronomer was constantly harassed, victimized, physically threatened, and nearly bankrupted by a religious-political establishment unhappy about Galileo’s deviation from the conventional narrative.
Other free thinkers like him in his day were publicly flogged into a screaming bloody pulp before then being burned alive atop a pile of fresh green boughs, which give a low, slow heat that hurts and does not char. Slow-roasting in the public square was a risk Galileo ran to improve science, a benefit we all today enjoy.
Today, many Galileo-type educators and researchers find themselves professionally stranded by a ring of fire commanded by a politically correct band of tenured faculty who behave much like Galileo’s tormentors back in the 1400s.
Real academics and researchers are now trying to understand “global climate change,” but they reach scientific conclusions contrary to the politically acceptable talking points propounded by tenured faculty who themselves are funded by extreme foundations far outside the mainstream. Free thinkers and real scientists today stand much less of a chance of getting their PhD, much less achieving the protection of tenure in which to pursue their scientific research. The careers of intellectuals who do not conform with the left’s narrative about human-caused global climate change find their careers abruptly terminated.
Political orthodoxy trumps actual scientific curiosity. Science has become heavily politicized. This condition marks the end of science. Galileo’s attackers could not have done any better, and in fact just today anti-Trump, anti-democracy agitators from within the Hillary Clinton campaign are publishing personal details and home addresses of professionals who do not toe the Left’s line on the outcome of the election. They have done the same with college professionals who dare to stand alone, to think differently.
This week my daughter received two wild anti-democracy, anti-Trump emails from two of her biology professors at a nationally prominent university. Fearful of being degraded, humiliated, harassed, or literally downgraded for disagreeing with them, she found herself browbeaten and feeling coerced into showing up at a political rally having nothing to do with the subject of microbiology, for which our family is paying a princely sum. She did not show up at the rally her two biology professors urged her to join, and she now anxiously awaits their judgment that she somehow “failed” because she did not join in something she finds detestable.
This is the decayed state of academia today, and this is why tenure must end. Tenure no longer serves its original purpose, and in fact the beneficiaries of tenure have themselves become the very thought police and public executioners they were supposed to be protected from.
Tenure is a liability, and it allows university educations to become an expensive farce. Tenure is a benefit no other employee enjoys in any other line of work, and instead of being the outlaw exception, academia should be exceptional, derived through competition and the rise of excellence.
It is time to put all university faculty on five-year contracts, and judge them objectively: How well their students enjoyed their classes, how useful their publications are to their field and to larger American society. Professors who believe it is their role and right to harass and coerce students into politically correct thinking can be let go to find better work, and actual productive professors can stay on another five years and continue to bring real value to society.
Let’s start with the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, and set a national trend. Pennsylvania taxpayers deserve their money’s worth, because God knows, I am not getting it at my daughter’s school.
Voting for Hillary?
Voters who select Hillary Clinton now forever disqualify themselves from criticizing any future candidate. There has never been nor is there likely again to be a candidate as unqualified and as corrupt as Clinton.
Knowingly choosing Clinton means a voter forfeits their ability to credibly attack future candidates. If Clinton is worth your vote, then anyone is worth voting for, because a candidate cannot be worse than Hillary Clinton.
Sure, you could disagree on policy with a future candidate, but you could not fairly accuse that person of being flawed. If Hillary isn’t too flawed for you now, then no one can ever be flawed again.
Hold Hillary to the same standard you have for other candidates, or forget being taken seriously.
Hypocrosy corrodes credibility. Don’t be a hypocrite. Vote for Trump and hope he’s happy to leave after one term.
End of Summer, Beginning of Cool Fall Begs Question: How Do People Live in Hot Climates Year-Round?
Temperate environments offer everyone something: Hot, cold, cool, warm, damp, dry, etc., at any given time of the year. It is true that at some points on the calendar, the heat or cold there may be intense. But those moments are but a temporary blip. A week or two this way or that way. Better weather always awaits, not too far around the corner. In temperate climates, Spring and Fall are typically the most enjoyable times of the year to be outside, with moderate temperatures lulling us to sleep under blankets at night, and refreshing us with gentle warmth during the day.
The margins around Summer and Winter always promise something better, and are full of natural hope. When Winter ends, the world here begins to grow. Life! Anew!
When someone cheerfully says “Yes, we are moving to Florida,” I wonder what the hell they are thinking. Not even the Seminole Indians truly appreciated or enjoyed the brutal heat and humidity there. Until they were driven into the Everglades at first, and then off the land entirely by Europeans, the Seminoles daily used the coastal waters to cool off during the Summer heat. Natural air conditioning worked for a semi-nomadic, highly mobile society like theirs. Today? Good God y’all, the place is a sweat factory from May through October, and only livable during the winter months. It is 100% artificial living.
Yes, I understand, many Americans are now so delicately sensitive to cold that they must be surrounded by expensive artificial air conditioning nine months of the year in order to remove themselves from three months of cold up north.
What is lost there is a natural, innate resilience our forefathers enjoyed. An ability to put up with brief extremes and discomforts. One must naturally wonder what sort of character traits are bred into or out of a people so devoid of natural discomforts that they shoehorn themselves into an unnatural environment.
That said, I am right now listening to a political rally going on at the otherwise sedate and beautifully historic Dixon University Center two blocks away from here. Tired old saws through a bullhorn like “What do we want? Justice. Now” are disturbing Harrisburg’s one remaining nice neighborhood. Delicate little snowflake people there are demanding some special treatment or other which they have neither earned nor deserve. Apparently the artificial environment created for them by taxpayers and hard working Americans is insufficiently comfortable, and they want MORE, NOW! [, Mom]
Please go to Florida, fake protest people. We deal in real here. It’s a temperate zone, dontcha know?
And boy, does Hurricane Matthew now entering south Florida add a whole new meaning to “hot area.”
NFL is Just too Masculine for Media Sissies
NFL is Just too Masculine for Media Sissies
By Josh First, www.joshfirst.com
National Football League player Colin Kaepernick has put on a moron show for the past couple of weeks, unwilling to stand for the national anthem, and wearing socks picturing pigs wearing police uniforms.
Millions of Americans are angry at him for being so gullible, selfish, and shallow, and they are buying his team jersey so they can publicly burn it. But his behavior is only a symptom of the larger problem facing America, and the rest of the West, too.
The problem is that more and more men are effete sissies, and more and more men think that being a rough and tumble guy is just so un-hip. Why, it is an obstacle to world peace. This message is seen not only in day to day life, but in the media, from which so much of the Hollywood entertainment and politically correct culture is broadcast.
Let’s face it, with the onset of Second Wave and Third Wave feminism, it wasn’t enough for women to have equal access, equal rights, equal opportunity, and equal pay. Nope, feminism is now an assault on man-ness, on guys being guys, on masculinity.
Note the popular male fashions being pushed today: tight pants and tight shirts on a lanky, thin body housing an effete metrosexual attitude, neither male nor effeminate enough to be called flaming gay. Being a guy is just not in fashion with the people who are looked to for fashion direction. Guys must be more feminine, more female, softer, gentler, we are told. We have to share our bathrooms. Our military, police, and firefighters no longer have to be the strongest and toughest possible, which are innately male physical standards. Some kooks even now bizarrely assert that men menstruate, and wallow in weakness.
When liberal activism outlet Mediaite spends time lamenting the potential injuries a quarterback might have sustained in a game, it is a sign that the left’s mainstream media is gearing up for war against masculinity with the NFL front and center. As the NFL is probably the last bastion of real masculinity remaining in popular culture and the entertainment world, it is presently the most important symbol in the left’s crosshairs.
Yes, we have wrestling (not the fake “pro” wrestling), but it is not a widespread fad, nor is it a big moneymaker, or a team sport with jerseys. I wrestled from grade school into college, and despite the many injuries my body sustained from it, I would not have given it up for anything. It is a true test of a guy’s individual masculinity, a controlled test of buried savage and primitive battle urges residing under the thin veneer of civilization. It is painful, and pain helps you grow, find your limits, and be stronger. It is good stuff, necessary stuff and I miss it. But it is a thing for redneck kids and a few urban schools. No one really pays attention to wrestling, yet.
Now, the NFL has been infiltrated by basic political correctness, with players like Kaepernick serving as Trojan Horses for the bigger assault to come. First NFL players start with actions that are openly anti-America, which is classic political correctness. After that becomes the standard behavior, then the team owners and players will go along with whatever feminizing, “cultured and refined” norms are demanded by the tiny speck that is the mainstream media.
Kaepernick and the rest of the NFL will still get paid millions of dollars a year, but the masculine, competitive, fighting spirit will be gone from the game, and with it a symbol of America’s own fighting culture.
Right after that is a kumbayah hand-holding session with Russia, China, and ISIS, where we can be told how to behave and what to do by our enemies, because that is what good little effete sissies do. They play nice. They do whatever is necessary to avoid pain, to avoid conflict, to not be “mean.”
And you can guess what I have to say about that pain-free play-nice stuff: F#ck that!
BRING IT ON, Mediaite sissies.
Friends in low places
Several years ago several ambitious construction projects were begun, where the building material would come from our own oak trees on our property. Oak may not be the best or easiest building wood, because when it dries it is heavy and as hard as iron, and thus tough on tools and shoulders alike, but it is what we have there.
So oaks were cut, skidded, piled, and then milled in situ over about a five year period. An injury and subsequent surgery prevented me from continuing this remote effort, which then moved forward in fits and starts over several years. When we finally got around to completing the actual projects, much of that beautiful oak had been sitting out for a long time, and in some cases too long. After using up much of that oak lumber, a large amount yet remained in piles, where it had air dried.
Last week was my final drive to get under roof thousands of board feet of two-inch-thick oak boards, heavy beams, and smaller posts, before they started to rot. It was a lot of work. The unusual heat and blazing sun made the work go slower. One thing that surprised me was the absence of mice living in these outdoor piles. Normally mice run and scurry as the wood is moved, having nested among the boards in perfect little hidey holes.
The last pile of drying lumber was finally put away, with just a few boards remaining at the very end, butted up against a huge boulder that makes up part of a stone wall around the yard. As I dismounted the tractor, stepped over to the board ends, and reached down to grab them, a sound caught my attention.
It was a sound that set off primitive alarm bells in my brain.
At first it sounded like a cricket, and then a grasshopper, and then a second later my mind concluded it was a timber rattlesnake. After stepping back, well, let’s say it was an inelegant, well, ugly (it’s a big fat man jumping, after all) leap, minus my usual little girl scream that seems to accompany most of my unplanned and close-up rattlesnake encounters, I looked down.
A long black snake with a yellow diamond pattern was stretched out next to the boulder, about six inches from where my boot heel had settled moments before. The long grass against the boulder had concealed the snake from my eyes, which, frankly, had not looked there, but had rather been focused on the heavy boards, and how I was going to pick them up and manhandle them to their destination across the yard.
The snake’s angular head and erect tail with rattles confirmed it as a timber rattlesnake.
While it was not a huge male rattler, the likes of which I have caught and moved to safety off of roads and trails a number of times since I was a kid, it was nonetheless big enough to permanently remove a chunk of leg muscle. So I admired it for a minute, and then went on to other work elsewhere. When I returned an hour later, it was gone, though I thought I could see it coiled up right under the boulder’s edge. Instead of reaching down with my hands, I used the pallet forks on the tractor to pull out those last boards.
Over the course of the next two days, my mind kept replaying the encounter. In July 2001, when we had owned the property for seven months, DCNR forester Jim Hyland and I had scoured our property, as well as the adjoining State Forest and part of the adjoining private land, looking for rattlesnakes. That day we found a corn snake, a garter snake, a ring neck snake, and two green snakes. No sign of rattlesnakes among the rock and old slate quarries up high. Not even a shed skin.
So for sixteen years we had enjoyed our property without being mindful of rattlers. Our children had been born and raised around the cabin, running freely around the property. Sure, I spent a lot of time in our woods, a certified Tree Farm, and I have always been on the lookout for rattlesnakes, as well as other snakes, but I had seen few snakes at all, and never a rattler.
Snakes are awesome, they are awesomely cool creatures. I bear them no animosity whatsoever. In high school and college a pet boa constrictor kept me company, until she had grown so large that she was regularly breaking out of her cage and hunting our house cats. When I last saw her, she filled up one side of the man’s living room, and he regularly fed her rabbits and squirrels he trapped in his yard. She weighed about 150 pounds then, and was ten years old. I hugged her, but she just laid there, limp and dozing. Snakes…what can you do? Love em the best ya can.
And so now I am confronted with the fact that a potentially dangerous animal shares our camp with us. All around us we have seen rattlesnakes over the years, mostly run over by cars down on the highway, and increasingly I see them all over central and Northcentral Pennsylvania while cruising timber and looking at land. At some point I did expect them to join us as tenants of one sort at the cabin. Under the front porch is where I thought they would first show up, because it’s good cover and the mice like it there. Struggling emotionally to adjust to this new arrangement has not been painful, but it has been harder than I thought it would be.
The absence of mice under the wood piles reminded me why I accept and even welcome the presence of timber rattlesnakes, intellectually if not emotionally. Mice are a major pest, and they are destructive little bastards. Hearing them chirp and run inside the walls of the cabin at night, right next to my bed, is a source of aggravation. When they eat porch and barn furniture for nesting material, it is infuriating. They pee everywhere, and it stinks. We regularly trap them around the buildings and poison them inside the barn. Help reducing their numbers is most welcome, and anyone or anything that helps achieve that goal is a friend of mine.
Timber rattlers are beautiful to look at, and they are normally pretty docile, requiring a lot of pestering and rough handling to elicit a strike. But like all wild animals they are unpredictable, and the risk they pose to little kids playing outside is significant. Fortunately, our kids have reached ages where they can think carefully for themselves, consciously avoiding areas where rattlers would naturally congregate. And we now infrequently host families with little kids as guests, as most of our friends have kids the same ages as our own children, able to take guidance, if they are with their parents at all.
So the risks versus the benefits works out in our favor. The benefits of rattlers sharing our property are high, because they eat the hell out of mice. Rattlesnakes are my new friends, in low places, where they are needed most.
Welcome, friends.
Castle Dundas…a Must-See
Nothing competes with an experience so new and profound that it changes your views on a host of subjects. Thus was my recent introduction to Dundas Castle in Edinburgh, Scotland.
On the outskirts of historic Edinburgh (today pronounced “Edinboro,” as if the Vikings and Saxons had not come through previously. Think of pronouncing Pittsburgh as ‘Pittsboro’…), and just barely within view of the mighty Edinburgh Castle, is Castle Dundas, complete with spectacular grounds, English (Scottish) gardens, new and old sculptures (including an old one of Oliver Cromwell) and stone fountains, and a 1400s stone keep designed to withstand the best of catapults in its day.
Parapets ringing the high walls of Dundas date from the 1800s, 1700s, and 1600s, and the keep is centered inside it all.
Were I to be married again, to the same wonderful woman (Vivian), of course, I would do it at Dundas.
The laird there, Sir Jack, has made Dundas an unusual and meaningful destination for couples seeking to be wed, as well as a place for shooting parties, indoor and outdoor family and corporate events, and golfing.
There is a generous helping of tartan drapes hanging from twelve-foot ceilings; but unlike most places, it fits because it belongs there.
It’s the inside of that 1400s stone keep that is the main attraction, and a place the likes of which you will never see again in your life, and I don’t care of you are a Duke somewhere with your own castle, because few of these old keeps remain intact.
Yes, it is a bit dungeon-y, and the only entrance is through a massive iron door turning in on four-inch-thick iron spindles. Now THAT is a door.
The interior of the keep is a series of large and small rooms with arched ceilings, all connected by a single corridor and a gently winding staircase. Occasionally a secret staircase drops off and down out of sight, presumably for easier escapes in times of war and invasion. Each room has its own decor, but all have the ancient, sombre stone walls that remind us of old tymes in a way that no theme park, no 1800s Rhode Island copycat stone mansion can ever capture.
For example, in the stone steps somewhere between the second and third floors were drill holes, where someone hundreds of years ago had repeatedly spun a distaff or spindle. Perhaps making yarn from sheep’s wool, or breaking down some foodstuff into constituent parts, or mixing some foodstuff, a person had sat in that one lonely spot in the staircase, contributing their share of labor to the household, and by all appearances others had sat there, too.
If those steps could only whisper, much less talk…. I swear I heard the clank of armor, the rustle of silk, and the faint whispers of palace intrigue echoing.
My favorite room was no, not the armory, though that is a neat room, surely. Rather, deep into the heights of the keep lies a large chapel room where weddings are held. Another smaller, distant room is where the couple signs their wedding contract.
May I suggest, Sir Jack, that you have made a copy of the most Celtic Kilchoan Cross, now found at Inverie, with the hole in the middle, where the new couple can extend their betrothal vows and pass through their wedding contract. That would complete the wedding experience at Dundas, and introduce what should be a common and most beautiful practice.
If you live anywhere in England or Scotland, or America and Canada, for that matter, and you are considering unusual and rare places to get married, may I recommend Castle Dundas.
Wow.
The empowered, independent feeling of eating less and doing much more
After ten days hiking through the Adirondacks’ most remote wilderness areas with our 18 year-old daughter, I had plenty of take-aways and contemplative thoughts that came home with me.
One of which was the empowered feeling of eating far less than I usually do, while performing at a far increased level than normally challenged. More on this in a moment.
Another take-away was that I am never too old to make mistakes, and one of the mistakes I made was taking an incredibly heavy pack on a rugged through-hike, where every extra ounce can make or break the trip.
My damned pack weighed 70 pounds and had everything but a Democrat in it. Some of that extra weight was due to Nina’s unusually specialized diet, due to a disease she has had all her life. We had to plan for every food contingency, within the constraints of great dehydrated trail food I make at home. Dehydrated means it weighs a lot less, keeps longer, and is limited to certain meats, fruits and vegetables. Nonetheless, the extreme weight really beat on my feet on the rugged downhills, and it slowed us down.
About that food: As I have typically experienced in all of my past days afield, hunger feels a lot different at the end of a tough day. A handful of salty nuts and a handful of sweet dried fruit is usually sufficient to make me feel full and put me soundly to sleep in the tent. Breakfast is usually a large cup of dark sweetened tea and either oatmeal with dried fruit and brown sugar, or the same cold dried fruits and nuts. Then I am off with my kit, about to burn another 10,000 calories.
The meals I eat on these trips are at most a couple hundred calories, so there is a tremendous imbalance between output and input. That results in an extreme burn of body fat, among other positive effects.
So I wonder why I feel the need to eat so much more, so much that is physically unnecessary, when I am at home, or at work, and I am not churning through huge caloric burns?
As I stink at pop psychology, not venturing into the guesswork of why any person, particularly Americans, enjoy over-eating / binging will prove a relief to us all.
But I will say this: What an empowered feeling it is, what a sense of independence I had, from hardly eating a thing, while literally moving a small mountain on my back many miles each day. Each day I was able to successfully plow through the East Coast’s most remote wilderness on just a handful of home-made jerky, some salty nuts (salt is a necessity for our bodies), and some home-made dried fruit.
In the spirit of Independence from want, or mere feelings of want, I am committing to eating a hell of a lot less every day than I used to, not because it makes me look better, but because it makes me feel a hell of a lot better, more empowered, more in control, like I have achieved more with less than expected. That is a very good feeling.
The spy on my trusty old laptop
Microsoft Windows may be the industry standard for personal computers, but with the advent of the much-hated Windows 10 operating system, the company has sought to join the data spying craze afflicting nearly every digital user.
This forced spyware is driving users batty.
Who wants to click the “YES – SPY ON ME” Windows 10 install button? Not many people. At least not people who value their privacy.
One of the reasons cell phone users are going back to flip phones is because they are tired of being spied on by the various software companies that run the “smart phones” like iPhone.
Likewise, I am joining the growing number of non-Internet-connected PC users.
A personal computer is a valuable tool, an effective tool, and between the spreadsheet and writing software on it, it does a lot for my life and business. However, once connected to the Internet, that same PC becomes a spy turned back on the connected user. Some of the hacking involves using the PC’s camera to surreptitiously watch the user. For that reason a small piece of sticky note pad paper covers the never-used camera on my PC.
Now I have a cheap PC for Internet use, a PC with nothing on it but basic software. And then another PC with my data and files.
I found a way to stop Windows 10 from installing, and it’s actually easy to do. I highly recommend it. Reports over the past year about Windows 10 are not flattering. It is designed simply to turn your PC into a spy, to pick apart and report on not only your online habits, but your personal software uses and writing content.
And Microsoft is allowed to spy on you because you hit the YES – SPY ON ME install button.