Category → Fruit of Contemplation
409+
Last week, under pressure to perform at an adult, professional level, the senior staff at the NCAA folded right before appearing in court.
The discovery phase of a lawsuit brought against the NCAA for its disproportionate over-correction of Penn State University was about to begin, and with a handful of damning NCAA emails already in hand, the meaty part of discovery would have exposed the heavy handed NCAA overlords for what they are: Incompetent, vacuous bullies.
The fictional Louis Freeh “report” aka Hit Piece and Flaming Bomb Meant to Humble Penn State has gradually yielded to the collective bits of disbelief and basic deductive logic surrounding the Joe Paterno Assassination aka The Oxbow Incident.
Knowing now what we already knew two years ago, the NCAA storm trooper and tactical nuke assault on one of the very few pristine colleges in the nation has blown up in the NCAA’s own face.
Yes, we got our 409 wins back, but we deserve so much more.
And to have undergone so much knee-jerk reaction injustice…..Penn State deserves compensation, to be made whole, to get back what we lost, if it’s remotely possible.
I want blood.
I want guts.
I want a shred of public justice for Joe Paterno and Penn State, and for the student athletes immorally saddled with faux guilt from the sick, distant actions of a man they’d never met, let alone heard of (Jerry Sandusky).
To begin with, the Joe Paterno statue immediately goes back to its original prominent place on campus.
Then, every member of the PSU board involved in the debacle issues a personal, hand written apology. And then each resigns. I’ve got a few names to go with that demand.
Then each NCAA staff member associated with the debacle issues a hand written apology, and then resigns.
That’s what real leaders do when they fail badly.
And for those folks who really want to demonstrate their earnest attitude, I’ve got some old Japanese swords you can fall on. I’m tempted to serve as your second….to ensure a clean ending, of course.
A clean ending to a tragedy, a failure to protect little boys, a failure to act like grown men and women and apply justice carefully, a failure to protect the grown boys on the team and the many professional educators and students unfairly tarnished by the NCAA’s hasty, shoot-first-ask-questions-never attitude.
And then there’s the scholarships, the bowl money PSU lost. The opportunities unfairly crushed. How do we get all that back?
And Mr Louis Freeh, you may be ex-FBI, but I’m ex-Penn State Nittany Lion. Don’t meet me in a dark alley.
Kudos to Filson clothing
Filson is a clothing manufacturer in Seattle, making pretty much the most basic American clothing styles for the past 130 years.
Little has changed in their styles or fabrics. Boring? Maybe.
Flannel and wool shirts, wool and canvas coats and pants, wool long underwear, leather boots with wool insulation, tote and carry bags and purses, every item is made in America of virgin wool or different weights of canvas.
One short phrase describes Filson products: Brutally tough.
Or, “Last a lifetime.”
In an era of cheap Chinese crap and Asian sweatshop “designer” clothes, Filson stands alone, or probably alone. I am a consumer of top-quality outdoor clothing, and I cannot think of another manufacturer who makes anything like Filson’s clothing line.
Oh, sure, there are plastic and Gore Tex outdoor clothes galore. Eddie Bauer, LL Bean, Mountain Hard Wear, and others make some pretty good ones, which our family wears. Fleece coats, mountaineering parkas, super-sophisticated PhD plastic fiber clothes for the outdoor lifestyle. Some are married to goose down, which is genuinely warm.
But all of these synthetics catch on fire and turn the wearer into a large, running, screaming torch when exposed to flame. Or at the least they wilt, melt, smell very bad, and cease being useful when exposed to a camp fire hot enough to dry your damp undies and wet socks. In other words, the newfangled modern synthetics may weigh next to nothing and stop wind faster than a speeding bullet and locomotive, but they lack certain basic physical properties necessary to truly enjoy or survive the outdoors.
Wool and waxed heavy cotton canvas are nearly fireproof and can withstand tremendous force before tearing. Wool keeps the wearer warm even when wet. Yes, it is heavy compared to synthetics, but it is a lot quieter, actually it is silent, whereas even the best of synthetic fleece hunting clothes will leave a telltale “zip” sound when dragged across a sharp branch.
Filson forms a big part of my winter clothing selection. Mackinaw vests and coats of different colors and patterns form the core of the selection, and the double mackinaw coat in “Pennsylvania Tuxedo” red-and-black buffalo check plaid has kept me toasty warm in sub-zero temperatures day after day. This past week I wore the double mackinaw coat while flintlock hunting, and I never got cold. It was sub-zero every day.
Other wool clothes I wear are heavy camouflage Columbia hunting pants, Bass Pro Redhead heavy wool socks, Danner wool socks, knee-high SmartWool ski and hunting socks, and SmartWool long underwear. Yes, once in a while I break out the Eddie Bauer and Woolrich Adirondock plaid pants, jackets, and so on. They are real testaments to a world long gone, which dinosaurs like me cling to in misty eyed memories.
David Petzal is the gun writer for Field and Stream Magazine, and among many other witticisms and pithy one-liners, years ago he noted that all synthetic long underwear makes you smell like someone slaughtered a cow after a day, but wool long underwear can be worn for days without you or them being cleaned, and yet you don’t smell…too badly.
That’s the thing. Wool is natural. Like leather and fur, it is natural and fits the human body perfectly. We can sweat into wool for days on a hunt, and it just doesn’t smell bad. Oh, it may not smell fresh, but compared to the polypropylene synthetics, it does.
My Filson Mackinaw coat accompanies me on all my Adirondack wilderness hunts, serving as a blanket at night when the temperature inside the tent dips to 18 degrees. And yet after many years of being worn through thorn patches and rugged mountain brush, it shows zero signs of wear. That says it all.
Other favorites include the now discontinued styles of Tin Cloth logging jacket and Double Tin field coat, both of which I wear when hunting for small game in January and February, when thorns are a big part of the day. Some of these discontinued tin cloth coats have become collector’s items. Each one will last you your entire lifetime, and if you wax it at the end of the season, it will serve your kids, too.
So, kudos to Filson for making Best-quality, “old fashioned” clothing for a tech-happy generation. www.filson.com
An outdoor lifestyle, halfway through the season (to hunt is human)
Most of the readers who visit this blog are not outdoors folk. Feats, exploits, and the inevitable tales of woe, cold, and misery from the field would naturally bore, or at best morbidly fascinate, the non-hunter.
Nevertheless, here we go, for the first time here, on a midway retrospective of a singular hunting season still unfolding.
Hunting for most hunters is a way of life literally built into our genes. We do what humans have done since the rise of Homo Sapiens upon Planet Earth: Hunt animals that we eat, wear, and admire. While the Pleistocene ended only 20,000 years ago, it is marked by the full arrival of adept hunter-gatherers who had spent tens of thousands of previous years perfecting their lifestyle.
Humans have been hunters and gatherers for 100,000 years, or 60,000 years, depending upon how long one believes Homo Sapiens has been human.
We have been agrarian for what…10,000 years at the most generous definition of the sedentary lifestyle, but closer to 5,000 years for most humans.
After that, the most modern, most technologically advanced, most “civilized” humans have lived through the Industrial Revolution (400 years), the Technological Revolution (150 years), the Information Revolution (50 years and ongoing). Combined, that’s a total of 600 years out of a total of 60,000 years.
At our core we are all hunter-gatherers. Scratch our civilized surface, and right underneath we are all spear-toting, skin-clad hunters.
To hunt is innately human. Hunting makes us human.
In other words, although many people today look at our current effete, energy-intensive Western lifestyle and think of it as being the peak of human civilization, some of us see this civilization as becoming complacent, detached from the reality of natural resource management necessary to support this modern lifestyle, hypocritical.
When someone believes it is morally superior to have an assassin kill their meat for them than to kill it themselves, you’ve got an unsustainable logical break. Similarly, people want “the government” to protect them, and they want to prevent citizens from protecting themselves, and those same citizens cannot hold the same government accountable when it fails.
Western civilization is full of this weak thinking. In my opinion, Western society is becoming hollow, a shell, full of contradictions.
The hunting lifestyle is a powerful antidote. It is a dose of reality inserted into a cloudy drugged up dream.
So far, this season has been marked by time afield in the most beautiful places in several states with long time friends, new friends, my young son, other kids, and by myself. Like our Pleistocene ancestors, the feeling of the pack on my back and the game-getter in my right hand is about the most natural and satisfying feeling possible.
A number of deer have fallen to various firearms, a Fall turkey, a colorful pheasant; there’s a bunch of photos commemorating the times for the results-oriented. My best moment was late at night, checking a trap with my boy, and finding a large bobcat. There for about four hours, it had really no taste for humans and represented the wilderness in all its wildness.
Catching a bobcat is a real achievement in the world of hunting and trapping, and I confess it was with great mixed emotions that we dispatched it and brought it to Butch at Blue Mountain Taxidermy. Even if a bobcat is again in one of our traps during the short bobcat season, we will release it. One is enough for a lifetime.
One bobcat trophy represents a lifetime of time afield, or 60,000 years.
Hallelujah, fur is back in style
A wonderful evening stroll down Fifth Avenue reveals that among the world’s top fashion professionals, natural fur has made a 100% comeback.
Clothing that even I recognize and admire as stunningly beautiful is covered, trimmed, made of, and surrounded by natural furs from many species of animals.
Recall that animal fur was denigrated as cruelly gotten, and bored activists would scream at people wearing fur, sometimes throwing red dye on them. The shallow activists never addressed how their leather shoes and belts and purses and car seats squared up with their public opposition to people wearing other sorts of animal skins.
If hypocrisy is a hallmark of screechy activists, fur was the best example.
Fur is, after all, natural, biodegradable, renewable, and under modern wildlife laws, sustainable. Those are all rare qualities in a world filled with cheap plastic junk manufactured in an enormous prison camp called China.
The luxurious furs I looked at represented incredible skill. From the trappers who artfully snared the critters without damaging the pelt, to the tanners who carefully turned them into soft leather capable of being worked, to the cutters and seamstresses who took the supple leather (with the hair on, like a cow hide) and turned them into gorgeous clothes, throws, and warm accoutrements, the entire process is a long chain of long-enduring skills and appreciation of natural beauty and utility.
If fur was long politically incorrect, but now it is acceptable among the PC elites who run the fashion industry, what does this say about the philosophical leanings of the individuals behind this surge? One cannot help but think that the many gay men in the fashion industry, once emancipated in general society, would eventually hew to a more pragmatic view of life and politics.
After all, once you own a home and work for people willing to spend thousands of dollars on a single garment, you really do have a stake in the capitalist enterprise.
Perhaps the fur on display at Bergdorf Goodman, Saks, and other stores I looked at is a social statement by a bunch of quiet pragmatists, who have also had it with the faux anger and the overwrought hostility and the ubiquitous unhappiness that characterize Leftist politics.
Well done, chums.
And as a pretty bad but committed trapper myself, thank you.
Seasonal weather changes are natural, welcome
Seasonal changes are natural tick-tocks on the world’s clock.
Following a natural cycle keeps us in tune with nature, even if the conditions aren’t always to our liking.
Cold arrived today.
Driving north on Friday, I photographed the “polar vortex” front as it closed in on central Pennsylvania. It was a dramatic sight, indeed, and heralded the coming of winter.
Right away, I spoke out loud to myself about the need to buy new knobby tires for the truck. A long, cold, snowy winter is ahead, and I need to be as prepared as possible. Winter isn’t too challenging, if I’ve prepared for it.
Tonight we got our first wood fire going, after cleaning out the wood stove and adding new fire bricks. About a cord of last year’s split oak remains before we begin burning the oak that Viv, Isaac and I split this past spring. By the time we burn through the left over wood, the new wood should be completely dry. We will burn between three and four-and-a-half cords this winter at home.
Wood is a natural, sustainable, renewable heat source whose carbon is part of the planet’s natural cycle. We plant a lot of trees, and they absorb carbon to grow big. It’s a closed loop, which is appealing.
Living life according to the planet’s rhythms is natural and healthy. Will you get cold? Sure. That’s part of living. And if you think it’s cold here, check out Minnesota or Wisconsin or Idaho. Not to mention Alaska.
Just put on long undies and get some Filson wool jackets and vests. You might end up enjoying the cold weather. I certainly do.
The morning after the morning after
One cannot help but wonder how liberals continue on with their destructive policies after such a thorough rejection by the voters of their icon and patron saint, Barack Hussein Obama.
I mean, my God, if JFK returned from the dead today he’d be a right-wing Republican on every count, on every policy.
JFK would not recognize his Democrat Party.
Where did this leftist madness come from?
I have some answers, but insufficient time to write about them, now. If you are politically interested enough to be reading this, then you are probably literate enough to imagine what any patriot might say.
Two words help us make this succinct: Marx, Utopia.
The psychology behind utopianism walks a fine line between religiously-inspired fervor and a self-destructive insanity that sees no reality in front of its face.
The idea of giving away gifts of free stuff to everyone who is some sort of a victim is psychologically gratifying. There are few bigger thrills than being generous to those in need. You just know it’s the right thing to do.
But government’s coercive theft of taxpayer money and redistributive policies are not charity.
And when those goals become entangled with a political party’s hunger for power, my goodness, the next thing you know a nation’s national security is thrown out the window so that millions of takers can walk in and vote themselves more gifts from the makers.
That is unsustainable insanity, and it will lead to a civil war and the end of our incredible nation.
So now that it is the morning after the morning after, and sane people, however deluded by a quest for power they may be, are wondering aloud about how this political earthquake happened, may I make a small request?
Ask this: What would JFK do?
It is likely that you will come to the conclusion that JFK would have done nothing that Obama has done, nor Harry Reid nor Nancy Pelosi. JFK would not have recognized these deceitful characters as Americans. And you shouldn’t either.
Their destructive, power-mad binge has damaged the Democrat label more than helped it, never mind what it has done to America.
Please come home, my dear Democrat friends. Please return to America, as it was founded, not as the “transformed” utopia you would have it be.
Why deer hunting is good for the environment
This past week was the early muzzleloader season in Pennsylvania. Instead of the modern inline muzzleloaders, I use an old fashioned flintlock. It is more challenging, and honestly, it’s just plain beautiful to look at.
Up at a relatively small piece of land I’ve been cultivating for twelve years, this fall marked the first time I’ve seen young oak seedlings survive deer browsing. Across the forest floor a plethora of oak seedlings – white, red, chestnut – create a carpet effect that indicates a future of young oak trees….if they can avoid being eaten by deer.
While I was casually walking through the forest, I saw a young doe looking at me. I raised the gun and fired. I will take any opportunity to help the little oaks become big oaks. They do, after all, produce the acorns necessary to feed deer, bears, turkeys and many other wild animals.
Then as if on cue, one of my very next steps was right into an enormous pile of bear poop. Colored brown from all the acorns, this fresh pile represents a great modern conservation success story, Pennsylvania’s population of huge black bears.
How ironic that deer can eat the trees needed to feed both themselves and their predators, the bears. How ironic that humans, who have dramatically shaped our planet over the past 20,000 years, do all we can to help an animal that might want to eat us (the bear), due to our recreational desires, and in doing so eat the deer sought by the bear.
Life is intertwined. Our futures are intertwined, humans and wildlife. Deer hunting is good, and good for the environment.
Am I off the radar screen? Pardon me while I follow the migrations
Across the Atlantic seaboard and throughout the eastern US interior, fish and animals are migrating, or following mating instincts as they prepare to mate or compete for mating rights.
Those of us who are hunter-gatherer-naturalists are following these natural pulses of animal life, as this is the best time of year to intersect with our prey. These movements and motions of our prey naturally lead us out into the ocean, onto river banks, hunkered down on field edges, along the beaches, or into the woods with a bow and arrow.
Striped bass, blue fish, deer, doves, and geese are all moving. Their calls may often be distant, or mostly silent, but they pull me nonetheless. If given the choice between writing about politics and culture, or hunting and fishing (and running a business and family), the blog always comes in last.
So please forgive me if I am off the Internet radar screen right now, as I follow these magical migrations happening all around us. Our ancestors did the same thing for tens of thousands of years, too. I will return…
Fifty years of designated wilderness
Two weeks ago marked the fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Wilderness Act.
It applies to federal designation of remote areas, not to states. States can create their own wild areas, and some do. States closest to human populations and land development seem to also be most assertive about setting aside large areas for people and animals to enjoy.
I enjoy wilderness a lot. Hunting, camping, hiking, fishing, and exploring are all activities I do in designated wilderness.
Every year I hunt Upstate New York’s Adirondack Mountains, in a large designated wilderness area. Pitching a tent miles in from the trail head, the only person I see is a hunting partner. Serenity like that is tough to find unless you already live in northern Vermont, Maine, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming or Alaska. It’s a valuable thing, that tranquility.
This summer my young son sat in my lap late at night, watching shooting stars against an already unbelievably starry sky. Loons cried out all around us. A gentle breeze rustled the leaves on the birch trees above us and caused the lake to lap against our rocky shore.
Only by driving a long way north, and then canoeing on a designated wilderness lake, and camping on a designated wilderness island in that lake, were we able to find such peace and quiet. No one else was anywhere around us. We were totally alone, with our camp fires, firewood chores, fishing rods, and deep sleeps in the cold tent.
These are memories likely to make my son smile even as he ages and grapples with responsibilities and challenges of adulthood. We couldn’t do it without wilderness.
Wilderness is a touchstone for a frontier nation like America. Wilderness equals freedom of movement, freedom of action. The same sort of freedoms that instigated insurrection against the British monarchy. American frontiersmen became accustomed to individual liberty unlike anything seen in Western Civilization. They enshrined those liberties in our Constitution.
Sure, there are some frustrations associated with managing wilderness.
Out West, wilderness designation has become a politicized fight over access to valuable minerals under the ground. Access usually involves roads, and roads are the antithesis of a wild experience.
Given the large amount of publicly owned land in the West, I cannot help but wonder if there isn’t some bartering that could go on to resolve these fights. Take multiple use public land and designate it as wilderness, so other areas can responsibly yield their valuable minerals. Plenty of present day public land was once heavily logged, farmed, ranched, and mined, but those scars are long gone.
You can hike all day in a Gold Mine Creek basin and find one tiny miner’s shack from 1902. All other signs have washed away, been covered up by new layers of soil, etc. So there is precedent for taking once-used land and letting it heal to the point where we visitors would swear it is pristine.
Out East, where we have large hardwood forests, occasionally, huge valuable timber falls over in wilderness areas, and the financially hard-pressed locals could surely use the income from retrieving, milling, and selling lumber from those trees. But wilderness rules usually require such behemoths to stay where they lay, symbols of an old forest rarely seen anywhere today. They can be seen as profligate waste, I understand that. I also understand that some now-rare salamanders might only make their homes under these rotting giant logs, and nowhere else.
Seeing the yellow-on-black body of the salamander makes me think of the starry night sky filled with shooting stars. A rare thing of beauty in a world full of bustle, noise, voices, and concrete. For me, I’ll take the salamander.
Chautauqua’s shame
Chautauqua Institution was once an intellectual’s dream destination: Opera company, symphony orchestra, book stores, authors and noted speakers every day for the summer. Gated and safe. Nice people. Beautiful homes next to quaint Victorian gingerbread boxes, all adhering to a commonly held design ideal. Chautauqua Lake, at 32,000 acres a real big body of water to fish, swim, boat, and otherwise enjoy.
Chautauqua was also a unique symbol of community building, and education. The institution spawned The Chautauqua Movement, which was big from the 1890s through the 1930s, with places like Mount Gretna in Central Pennsylvania dedicated to comfy living, higher entertainment, tolerance, and learning.
Now, Chautauqua Institution is the antithesis of its founding ideals and original mission. Overthrown, captured, and jealously guarded by political extremists, its summer programming is now carefully groomed to exclude dissent and include well known jihadists. It’s pretty much extreme political indoctrination 24/7 there.
And yes, you read that above correctly. Chautauqua Instituion is now so tolerant of intolerance, the place regularly hosts pro-Jihad, pro-Sharia Law advocates (think of the people behind Jim Foley and Steve Sotloff having their heads sawn off while on their knees), who lie lie lie to adoring audiences, who in turn shout down questioners asking the right questions for the liars during the appointed Q&A periods.
I myself have been nastily hissed at and yelled at there, for clapping in support of a speaker or statement I like, while the endless sea of extremists in the audience uproariously cheered on their favored speaker.
The place is now ruthlessly run by intolerant, close-minded control freaks, serving up anti-Americanism by the bucketful, pro-Jihad by the boatload, and dissent-crushing manipulation by the truckload.
How sad. How utterly shameful.
Farewell, fair maiden of Chautauqua Lake’s shores. We once knew ye.