Category → Fruit of Contemplation
PA’s 2023 bear season
After hearing just one rifle shot all day (followed by the customary follow-up shot thirty seconds later, and the coup-de-grace shot a minute later) today, at 4:20PM, I felt compelled to write about what seems to be happening this bear season. In a nutshell, this is not your pap’s or even your dad’s Pennsylvania bear season in Northcentral PA. That long-hallowed experience of buffalo plaid Woolrich coats and moldy little hunting camps built in 1948 filled with men putting on big drives across the landscape, is now a thing of the past.
Some people blame the Saturday bear season opener that started eight years ago for the demise. Others blame the early October muzzleloader and archery seasons. Either way, what many hunters are calling the death of the famed PA bear season is actually a direct result of the incredible success of PA’s decades-long bear population conservation program.
When PGC biologist Gary Alt became the steward of the PA bear program in the early 1980s, he faced a problem. Hunters, nature lovers, and simple habitat and ecosystem health required more bears across Pennsylvania. And bears were not responding to the demand. In twenty years of hard and smart work, Dr. Alt turned the situation completely around. When Dr. Alt left the PGC twenty years ago, his life’s work was one of the great wildlife conservation success stories in America. Black bears then filled habitat niches in almost every county from Philadelphia to Erie, from Honesdale to Pittsburgh, and everywhere in between.
And then, almost overnight it seemed, PA had way too many bears. Bears were showing up in cities proper, turning over trash cans in suburban back yards everywhere. And so the PGC had to try and dial back some of Dr. Alt’s success. Increasing the number of bears taken by hunters was the solution.
Now looking at harvest data resulting from a half dozen years of early muzzleloader bear season, early archery season, regular bear season, and extended bear seasons running concurrent with deer season, it is easy to see why we only heard one rifle shot all day today in what probably still is the epicenter of PA’s bear hunting. And why none of our guys encountered any bears hanging from hunting camp porches on their valley run tonight.
Early muzzleloader and archery seasons combined now account for almost half of the overall annual PA bear harvest, even before “bear season” has begun. These early season hunters are mostly single men hunting near their homes. By the time the traditional bear season arrives in late November, half the licensed bear hunters who are likely to kill a bear are already tagged out, and the rest are looking forward to the concurrent bear-deer seasons in their home hunting territories. Few hunters feel compelled to make the historic annual migration north, and why would they?
Those of us, we hardy few, who do still come to the traditional bear hunting ground up north, are faced with an already depleted bear resource, and many fewer men pushing across the landscape to break free and push those bears that remain. And yet, despite our reduced opportunity, we enjoy the crisp Fall air, the camaraderie, the laughs, and the naughty food and drink our wives would never approve of, if they only knew.
Good luck this season, boys. You’re gonna need it.
A fabulous hunting trophy
Another PA archery season over (UPDATE: No, it wasn’t over, I have not kept up with new PA archery season dates), another season I did not arrow a deer or a bear. It’s not that I could not have killed a buck with a gigantic rack, I could have, a hundred times. It is that I chose not kill him. He isn’t necessarily tame, but he has been hanging around an awful lot. It would have been easy to send an arrow or a bolt through him from a porch or an upstairs window. But in my old-er age, I must be turning soft-hearted. He even came into a ground blind I was in with a crossbow, and puttered around. I decided to admire him, instead.
Just seeing wild beauty like his brings me real pleasure. I don’t need to put his head on the wall for him to make me happy.
Even without killing a black bear or a wolf, I still got an amazing trophy from my Alaska hunt in September. And no, I am not referring to the beautiful stones and colorful pebbles I bring home with me as keepsakes from all around the world. Alaska streambeds were loaded with all kinds of incredible geological samples, and I could have easily filled a pickup truck bed with the easy ones. Instead, I picked up a memento of someone else’s kill, and brought that home with me.
While I was stalking a salmon stream in the northernmost part of southeast Alaska eight weeks ago, cradling a 45-70 rifle in my arms and looking for black bear feeding on spawning fish with one eye, or a wolf, and watching out for the ever-present brown bears/grizzlies with the other eye, I happened upon a scattering of big bones up against a stream bank. Bleaching white on the top side, and staining green with algae and moss on the bottom side, these bones marked a kill site. From what I could piece together, a two-year-old moose had made a stand against a pack of wolves or a large grizzly on this site, and had lost. It was right here where he had died and had been eaten.
One bone in particular caught my eye, the hip socket, sitting concave-side-up to the sky. What made this individual bone stand out so much was both how perfectly round it was, and yet how it was also framed on three sides by heavily fragmented and fractured ends of bone. Something really big had broken this heaviest of bones, and the tooth marks are still on the socket. As artists are fond of saying about something that catches all of the visuals just right, it was a study in contrasts.
I bent down, picked up the broken socket bone, brushed off the dirt and leaves, and stuffed it into my backpack among the long underwear and my PB&J sandwich. Back home in Pennsylvania, it was cleaned off, lightly bleached, and re-purposed into a pipe holder and ashtray. It is actually incredible how perfectly my tobacco pipe fits into that hip socket. Now I can use the bone as both an ashtray and a reminder of being in some of the world’s wildest country.
As soon as it dried, I sat down to enjoy a bowl of cherry cavendish, and with the light tobacco smoke swirling up around my head, I was immediately lost deeply in thought about God’s magnificent creation, the amazing wild beasts that have inspired us wee humans since our dawn here on Planet Earth, and how a hunting trophy is what you make of it. It doesn’t always have to be something you killed yourself. Sometimes it is just a small piece of the wilderness we love that serves as a symbolic touchstone and a time machine that transports us back to a place and time where all that mattered was the wind direction and the smell of Fall in the air.
Looking at this ten thousand years ago or fifty thousand, any Neolithic hunter anywhere around the planet would have felt exactly the same way. This one piece of fractured bone connects us two hunters across time, even though we never met.
Are Israelis being tricked into another Roman Occupation?
Disclaimer: We don’t go down any rabbit holes here. This blog is filled with well-argued opinions and occasionally those of people who I believe need to be heard. My opinions are always backed by facts and Founding Principles, and if I can’t find facts to back up my particular opinion, then I fall back on principle (e.g. America is supposed to be a small government run by Constitutionally obedient and publicly responsive public servants). If no Founding Principle is at stake, then I usually don’t take a stand. Today, if you read further, you are joining me on my first ever rabbit hole exploration. But I am doing it out of commitment to truth, and I am asking questions that are the only questions that make sense to me.
Historically, about 2100 years ago, Israel/Judea became increasingly occupied by the expanding Roman Empire, because some Jews invited the Romans in to provide some protection from the invading Parthian Empire and to give some political stability among a divided Jewish populace. The rest is history, as it is said, as over the following decades the Romans increasingly asserted their own form of political control to the point where they ended up in a civil war with the entire Jewish population. The Romans destroyed the Great Temple in Jerusalem, as well as much of Jerusalem itself, enslaved and deported about half of the Jewish population, etc.
In their destructive romp across Judea and historic Israel, the Romans also unwittingly created two new powerful religions that would go on to shape the entire Western world, Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity, but this is a subject for another time. The key here is that the Jews invited in the Romans for their promised political stability, and ended up getting destroyed by them.
Is the same process now repeating itself in modern day Israel? Is America the new Rome about to politically occupy Israel? I ask because the same historic dynamics are playing out.
Consider the following facts:
- Hamas launched a massive and massively barbaric suicide raid on southern Israel that was destined to fail itself and destined to bring huge destruction down on Hamas and Gaza in response. It is self-defeating. Makes no sense.
- Neither Hizbullah nor Syria have opened up additional fronts, though they logically should
- Israeli security along the Gaza border was essentially a Ring Doorbell camera every hundred yards? Really?
- Contrary to Military Operations 101 since organized militaries began operating about five thousand years ago, no sentries, no sentinels, no guards, no watchmen were posted along any of the Israeli outposts along the Gaza border. Not one. As a result, the few IDF soldiers posted there were literally caught asleep in their underwear and gunned down as they scrambled out of their beds.
- Apparently, reportedly, Hamas has spent the past two years practicing their invasion and giddy child murders on a large mockup Israeli village. No one in Israel noticed this? No one in Israel thought this was strange, or a precursor or a warning?
- The Biden Administration just released Six Billion Dollars to Iran, for no good or logical reason, and to America’s serious detriment, which freed up Iran to spend their existing money on things like nuclear weapons aimed at America and arming Hamas and Hizbullah terrorists killing women and children in Israel (and probably coming to America soon through Joe Biden’s wide open southern border).
- Israel’s supposed “security failure” looks and smells and walks like an inside job by the security and military elites, who oppose Prime Minister Netanyahu’s popularism (just as the American elites and their pet security agencies like the CIA, FBI, DHS etc oppose President Donald Trump’s power-to-the-people popularism). Every day this supposed “failure” at Gaza appears more and more like an inside set-up of PM Netanyahu to blame him and turn the voters against him.
- Israel’s “security failure” at Gaza makes no sense on its face nor in hindsight. Israel can and usually does walk and chew gum at the same time. The IDF has always covered all three bases and Home Base simultaneously. Way way too many important parts of the Gaza security system failed all at the same time to be a mere coincidence. There has been no explanation for this failure, and indeed other than a deliberate act of self-sabotage and self sacrifice by Israel’s military and security elites (because of their power struggle with PM Netanyahu), there is no logical explanation.
- None of the senior officials responsible for Israel’s national security or for Gaza’s border have taken responsibility and resigned, as they normally would when committing such a monstrous failure in any other time. Hmmmmm, right?
- The defeat of Netanyahu and the elevation of America in Israel’s domestic politics would essentially place Barack Hussein Obama in charge of Israel’s next government.
- If in fact Hamas was allowed to go into southern Israel by Israel’s professional watchdogs, who are almost all Leftists loyal to the leftist elites, for basic domestic political purposes, it would be in keeping with the American Left’s practice of burning America to the ground in order to get and keep control of America. Examples of such treason in America include the 2020 “Summer of Love” Democrat Party violence, looting, burning, destruction of American cities, the allowed release of covid into the American populace by American health officials (Dr. Mengele Fauci) supposedly guarding us against such viruses, the deliberate destruction of law and order in many Democrat-controlled cities which has resulted in political and societal chaos in these same places, the suspension of electoral laws in 2020 that resulted in massive and brazen vote fraud in the most important swing states like PA, MI, AZ, GA, the continuing fraudulent and even illegal lawfare against President Donald Trump by the administrative state and Democrat politicians. I could go on, but we are on a time budget here. Looks like Israel just experienced her own “Summer of Love“.
So into this situation of Hamas possibly being goaded and sacrificed by Iran into its suicidal homicide attack sails the American navy. Into the Mediterranean Sea now comes a flotilla of American ships meant to buoy Israeli spirits and signal to American Jews that not only can the Democrat Party be occasionally trusted to help Israel, but today to actually save it. Recall that just weeks ago Joe Biden’s illogical payment of Six Billion Dollars to Iran signaled that the Democrat Party hates Israel and Jews and America because it is empowering their worst enemy, a nuclear powered Iran. Lots of “how the hell can any American Jew be a registered Democrat” arguments were resounding across American synagogues.
But now? We are shown that the Democrats actually looove Israel, and the actual savior of a democratic and secure Israel, PM Netanyahu, is cast as the bad guy who failed in Gaza.
Tell me this is not the beginning of the Roman Occupation of Israel Part Two. Nothing else makes sense to me.
And tell me this isn’t just too convenient of a relationship between the Biden Administration, which has spent the past three years destroying America, and a nuclear powered Iran, which was designated by Barack Hussein Obama to be the ultimate destroyer of America.
Americans, are you paying attention?
UPDATE: Yes, I am suggesting that the Biden/Obama Administration is working closely with Iran to remove PM Netanyahu, so Biden/Obama can install a puppet leader who will follow through on the failed Oslo Accords, implement a two-state “solution” and thereby gut and ultimately erase Israel as a sovereign nation, and certainly as a Jewish nation. Iran appears to be temporarily sacrificing Hamas and Gaza to achieve this goal, but they will certainly expect to get revenge on Israel’s Jews at some point in the future.
A few more thoughts on Alaska gear & public land
Even people who will never hunt in Alaska want to know what kind of gear a guy carried while he was there, and they might even have some opinions about it. Alaska is kind of the go-to place for all imaginary hunts, survivalist prepping, and bush homesteading, and you can go on YouTube and on any related video find endless debate about guns and gear by all kinds of people, 99% of whom have never been to Alaska. After the “Thousand Overnight Tragedies” essay here a week ago, I got some questions about my hunting kit from people who will never do anything more than a luxury cruise to Alaska. I know well that if a couple guys ask, there are more who want to know but didn’t ask. So here goes, my best advice on how to be properly kitted out for Alaska.
First off, before assembling your Alaska kit you have to determine if you are staying out in the Alaskan wilderness. Plenty of people get air dropped into a remote wilderness spot, tent up near the lake or river where the float plane landed to drop them off, and that’s their base camp they hunt out of every day. It is the same place the plane will pick them up from in a week or ten days. If this scenario is how you are heading into Alaska to hunt or fish, then you need all of the survival gear, various fire starting methods, a beacon, etc. kit that you would need while wilderness hunting anywhere else in North America. My Seek Outside tipi tent with the large titanium wood stove has made all of the difference for how I hunt in wilderness (thanks to Ranger Ian for his guidance on this years ago after I reported how I nearly froze to death in his service territory).
Second, the month of year really makes a difference in Alaska. I have been there in July, August, and September. July and August are usually quite comfortable. In September you are beginning to get some chilly nights, and possibly chilly mornings. Maybe a chilly day. Warm clothing you can easily layer on and off, like a Filson wool vest, becomes critical the later it gets after August ends.
Finally, where exactly in Alaska are you going? Central Alaska encompasses most of the state, and it is kind of the rugged classic interior Alaska everyone thinks of when they imagine Alaska. But all of the state’s coastal areas are really different from the interior, especially as you begin to head north or south of Anchorage. Southeastern panhandle Alaska is a temperate rain forest. It rains there even when it is not really technically raining. Something like fifteen to twenty FEET of rain falls there in the southeast. Obviously you have to be prepared for regular rain if you are hunting and fishing in the panhandle.
If you are hunting out of an Alaskan home, say your friend’s or your cousin’s, or from a lodge, and then driving or boating to your destination each day, with plans of returning before dark, then here is the kind of checklist you will appreciate:
- Rubber rain suit, jacket with hood and pants. My 25-year-old Cabela’s blue rubber rain suit worked fine for both repelling the constant light patter and sometimes more steady rain. It also served as my wind breaker with only a tee shirt underneath. Blue is a bad choice for hunting, because many animals see blue like humans see fluorescent orange. When my blue rain suit finally dies, I will get a green one.
- Good rubber boots and also good leather hunting boots. I used both, sometimes on the same day, the rubber ones in the morning and the leather ones later in the day, or vice versa. If you are hunting hard, you need rigid ankle support, and I have not found a better boot for hunting in steep, rugged terrain than the Danner Canadians. I especially relied on the Danners on the SE AK island we hunted for blacktail deer. For this recent trip I finally bought my first “good” pair of rubber boots, the only “hunting style” rubber boots that properly fitted my enormous duck feet, by Irish Setter. These worked great in all wet environments I encountered, many of which were the margins and shallows of salmon streams. A PEET boot dryer is a good thing to have waiting at home at the end of the day.
- A light day-use backpack holding extra clothing, extra ammo, food, water, GPS (I use a Garmin 62s with detailed mini SD card maps) a range finder, binoculars, etc is an absolute necessity. My LL Bean hunting pack has accompanied me on hunting trips from the Scottish Highlands to Alaska and a lot of places in between. It is a fabulous and extremely durable, well thought out piece of kit.
- Binoculars are essential in Alaska, because it is such big country. Doesn’t matter if you are hunting or fishing, you absolutely must be able to see what is happening around you, if for no other reason than Alaska serves up cantankerous grizzly/ brown bears by the minute almost everywhere you go. And occasionally mean moose. Plus binoculars help you see game you are after, or maybe circling marine birds distantly picking off scraps as larger fish feed at the surface, where you can easily catch them. Leupold has been my USA-made go-to binocular maker for a very long time, after using various Nikons for a while. Yes, you can’t go wrong with Swarovskis or Zeiss, but I am brutal on my gear, and I will cry like a baby if all 265 pounds of me face plants on top of the $3,000 binos strapped to my chest. So I use a pair that are almost as good as the $3,000 pair, but which cost about 800% less.
- Range finder. Any modern range finder is useful for hunting in big country like Alaska, except over water. If you are hunting directly over a large body of water, then you need to calibrate your piece, or it will give you whacky results. I use a Nikon Forestry Pro because I work in the forest products and land business, but it has also served me just as well in hunting. I have learned that this model is rugged, because I use mine so much, in so many tough environments.
- Knife. Yes, you need a strong, sharp knife to go hunting correctly. I won’t wade into the whole which steel is better than my grandma’s Old Hickory no-snob high carbon potato peeler knife. And if anyone ever says the word “bushcraft” within arm’s length of me, you’re gonna get a healthy serving of country whoop ass. Because I can’t take it any more. The whole “bushcraft” genre is such urban flatlander weekend warrior nonsense, for God’s sake, let it be, leave it alone, leave it behind. A hunting knife can be almost any shape, size, and steel type that has worked well for you in the past. The Inuit and Inupiat just south and north of the Arctic Circle use Old Timer pocket knives, grandma’s ulu made of whale penis and wrought iron, and occasionally a high quality modern “huntin‘ knife” left behind by an appreciative tourist hunter. And guess what…all of these various shape knives work just fine for the subsistence lifestyle a lot of Inuit and Inupiat live. And they kill, skin, dissect, and eat raw on the spot – with their varied assortment of knives – more critters in one month than you will kill in a lifetime of Lower 48 recreational huntin‘. I happen to use various JRJ knives made by John R Johnson of Perry County, PA, because his ATS-34 steel and overall craftsmanship were as good as any huntin‘ knife available anywhere on the planet. Unfortunately, John has not made a knife in almost ten years. Fortunately, for years I bought armloads of knives that he custom made for me, and I enjoy using every one of them every season.
- Rifle. Yeah, some guys hunt Bigfoot with a souped up .44 Magnum or 454 Casull handgun. So what. A rifle is light years better than a handgun in every way, and I hunt big game only with a rifle, especially in real big country like Alaska. On this recent trip I carried my friend’s Henry 45-70 lever action, loaded with the Federal Premium HammerDown 300 grain rounds. There are hotter, more effective 45-70 rounds available from CorBon and Grizzly, but I was happy with the 3″ 100-yard performance of this round out of my friend’s rifle. And I don’t know how up to snuff the Henry is with the hotter 45-70 loads. The problem with the Alaska panhandle is that the weather there absolutely eats guns. If the saltwater doesn’t kill your gun, the constant rain and moisture will finish the job. A stainless steel gun like the Marlin 45-70 SBL is probably the best possible hunting rifle for Alaska. And this gun can handle the hottest 45-70 loads. One comment about the Henry: Its rear sight was very frail and kind of sad. It moved around all by itself, which can result in a severe mauling or death by Griz, if you happen to not check up on the rear sight and adjust it as needed every ten minutes.
- Backup pistol and bear spray. Bear spray works very well in places without wind or breezes. If you use bear spray in a place with wind or strong breezes, you are likely to incapacitate yourself instead of the bear (insert stupid human hungry bear joke here). I happened to be hunting and fishing in a SE AK place with constant winds and breezes, so I dispensed with the bear spray and kept a .44 Magnum revolver on my hip, loaded with some bear-buster ammo and not the ubiquitous 240 grain JHP that is guaranteed to piss off Griz more than kill him. Speaking of backup, I carried an emergency beacon of unknown make or vintage on most of my hunts.
- Clothing. My old tried-and-true Cabela’s Gore-Tex hunting pants were perfect for the cooler days, and my old tried-and-true Columbia nylon zip-off cargo pants were perfect for the warmer days. A wool hunting shirt in red and black buffalo plaid (of course) with some thermal long underwear is all I needed in the early season. I wore a no-name fluorescent orange fleece hat as well as my 2020 Trump hat. Sometimes together when it was cold. Mid to late September and beyond, you need real cold weather gear.
Good luck if you go DIY hunting in Alaska. DIY solo is my thing, and I think it is the most fun way to wilderness hunt. The challenge with DIY in Alaska is it is so big, and the critters are so big, and the distances are so big, and the civilization is so small and so far away. You really can’t do a DIY hunt by yourself in Alaska. It is not safe, and a thousand things can go wrong after you are successful and kill the animal of your trophy dreams. Go with a friend, go with a guide. And be smart about balancing your kit with practical items you are truly likely to need. Hunting in Alaska is not automatically a survival test or a Bataan Death March. You don’t go to Alaska and automatically plunk yourself down in the woods and start doing a video on (puke) bushcraft. It isn’t all dangerous, nor is Alaska all wilderness. Plenty of good hunting and fishing is available a decently brief drive out of any of the major cities, but it does get better the farther out you go.
Speaking of going further out of civilization, all this amazing hunting and fishing and trapping in Alaska is possible only because of the huge critical mass of public land there. Yes, I agree that federal and state agencies sometimes mis-manage public land. And sometimes those agencies end up “mis-managing” their relationships with the American citizen taxpayers who pay the agency staff and who own the public land the agencies are supposed to steward. But I think that public land is one of the very few things that government does pretty well. And even when government staff screw it up, the public land is still there afterwards.
A thousand overnight tragedies
Normally, the smell of rotting fish is a signal to clean out the fridge or to leave the area you are in. It’s a universally bad smell, and no one normal wants to be around it. But it was a pervasive good sign where I happened to be standing, because it was associated with the freshly dead salmon heads and remains at my feet that had not been here the previous afternoon. A thousand individual tragedies had occurred along this stream bank overnight, as bears had picked muddy bank spots to grab spawning salmon and take them uphill where they could eat them without the fear of being ambushed by humans, or bigger bears.
We had hunted and fished along a roughly seventy mile vertical stretch of southeastern Alaska for over a week, and in addition to beginning to smell a little fishy myself, I had also saturated and possibly satiated a cavernous need inside me. It is an ever-present deep, clawing need that most wilderness seekers share, be they bikers, hikers, canoers, campers, photographers, fishers or hunters. Sorry, I am not going to quote Thoreau or Muir or Roosevelt on the tonics, joys, highs, or benefits of directly experiencing wilderness. My own wilderness pleasure is gained from simply not seeing a single other human being (except my hunting/fishing partner, when I have one) anywhere near where I am hunting or fishing. That unusual moment results in me feeling like I have better than average odds of achieving my goal, because I have the whole landscape to play without intervention.
On this trip, my “public” goal was a wolf, a blacktail deer, and/or a big black bear better than 300 pounds. Hides and skulls alone were going to come home with me. Edible meat was going directly into my buddy’s freezer. All of the many salmon I caught on the trip went into either my buddy’s smoke house, into his freezer, or into my stomach. It pleases me to report back that chum (dog) salmon directly out of the ocean taste damned good. It is also a fact that chum salmon do not keep well overnight, and that even halibut turn up their noses at it. I suppose freshly caught chum can be immediately canned, but given that there are usually better alternative salmon species to eat and can, I don’t see why a person would make this choice.
Incidentally, about those salmon: Alaska’s management of its salmon runs has been so good, so professional, so scientific, and so successful, that there is actually a glut of salmon in the streams and on the American market. Therefore, wild caught salmon prices are way down. A lot of commercial salmon boats were out netting, and the cannery we visited was in business, but with diesel fuel at about eight bucks a gallon there and salmon at eighty cents a pound, it’s hard to see how the netters will survive. But thanks to the Alaska Department of Fish & Game, the bears have plenty to eat before denning and hibernating for the long, cold Alaskan winter.
Goals are critical on a wilderness trip. Even stupidly simple ones. You have to have goals before you set out on a trip like this, or else you will wonder what the heck you were doing out there when you get back to civilization. My actual personal goal was simple: To fish and to hunt as much as I could, and this goal was easily met. On this trip, I was often able to do both hunting and fishing simultaneously: We slowly trolled salmon spoons behind the boat while glassing the shorelines for critters. A rubber dinghy towed in the backwash provided us the ship-to-shore transportation we needed. See a salmon stream that is calling your name? Go ashore and hunt it, and look for salmon-eating black bears to fill some tags; and look out for the griz. We saw a lot of griz.
Only saw wolf tracks in one very remote spot, and I passed up the one black bear I had a shot at. Only twenty feet across the salmon stream from me, he was either a genetic runt, an ancient-looking yearling, or maybe a female. Whatever kind of black bear he was, he was crabby enough to growl at me before shambling off to less crowded fishing spots. I wouldn’t shoot a bear that small in Pennsylvania, and I sure wasn’t going to fill my Alaska tag with it. Maybe I will go back for the spring bear hunt in 2024.
Despite fighting our way up into the interior of an island known to have blacktail deer, we saw none and feared the griz there more than we were willing to keep going after deer. Signs of griz were everywhere. I picked and popped high bush cranberry and high bush huckleberry while noting the increasing deer browse the farther in and higher I got. But it was a veritable jungle, and surprising a griz up here would mean my certain mauling, possibly my death, and so I decided to nicely frame my deer locking tag when I got home instead of risking life and limb to fill it. I headed back out and found Merlin asleep in the sunshine on the beach.
A loud thud on the bottom of the boat awakened me from my cramped sleeping position, and I rolled out of my sleeping bag onto the cabin floor, which was cluttered with gear and guns. Walking out onto the deck to look for the source of the thump, I saw a sea lion, a seal, and a pod of porpoises chasing salmon all around us in the early morning dimness. Mist rose from the water, and then the rosy tint of dawn’s first sunbeams lit up a nameless glacier high up in the crags across the water. I felt stoned on all this Mother Nature. Like I said, I was there just to hunt and fish, and whether or not I went home with the physically tangible results was not nearly as important as absorbing and sucking up the magic around me and filling that big, hungry, empty cavern in my soul. You just can’t have this magical experience without public lands, and some of that designated as wilderness. This, these, we had.
Cleaning a day’s catch of salmon, fresh in from the ocean
Overnight tragedies, spawning salmon scooped and eaten by bears
Alaskan salmon management has been so good that there are actually “too many” salmon, if there is such a thing
Reflected is the Chilkoot River, where we fished with the bears and a gaggle of international tourists following them up and down the river
Dawn on a glacier
Trolling spoons for salmon, towing our dinghy, and glassing the shoreline for critters. This is hunting and fishing at the same time
A picture like this is worth about a trillion words. Wilderness is freedom
Our boat, our beach
Captain, oh my captain. One of my heroes and a good friend
My hunting kit. A Henry 45-70 lever rifle (not crazy about the cheesy rear sight), a JRJ knife, rugged Leupold binoculars, home made dried fruit and jerky
Grizzly sow and cub eating salmon as they spawn upstream from the Chilkat River. I saw a lifetime supply of griz on this trip.
One other thing about the movie Oppenheimer
One other thought about the movie Oppenheimer: Unlike the current political narrative-driven world of politicized science, where complete lies are said to be scientific truth, or at least they are said to have the strength to displace truth, the movie Oppenheimer accurately depicts real scientific competition.
Remember when science was real? Remember when science was analysis, competitive, discussed, debated, respected, valued, and rewarded? Been a while, I know, I know, but it is true that at one time the real scientific method of discovery and progress involved serious disagreement among scientists. But ever since anti-scientific woke PC narratives took over everything being publicly discussed, including real science, science just has not been real, despite the woke bumper stickers proclaiming “Science Is Real.”
That’s the intriguing thing about “science” these days. Actual real proven science about X and Y chromosomes determining a human’s biological sex is not only forbidden in the classroom, but actually saying it as a science teacher will get you immediately fired from your job. And that phony climate change alarmist thing? If you step up as a scientist with real science that demonstrates what a nonsensical hoax and political hatchet job human-caused “climate change” is, you’ll get fired from your job.
Oppenheimer depicts the real scientific method as humans knew it for about a thousand years, up until the brazen lie that “99% of scientists agree that global warming/ climate change is real.” In the movie, we see scientists aggressively debating the then-new nuclear fission science, which was based on the pioneering scientific and mathematical work of Albert Einstein and which resulted in the atom bomb blowing up American military enemies. The movie has scenes of scientists caustically disagreeing with one another, mocking each other, debating one another, until someone provides sufficient proof of their position. And the scientists’ use of tobacco and alcohol to soothe their frazzled nerves is also real history. This is all uncomfortable but very real scientific process.
This historic competitive situation shown in the movie was especially stark between the “old” Einsteinian relativity scientists and the “new” quantum physics scientists. Both theories of how physics works – relativity and quantum – are mutually exclusive of one another, and yet they coexist simultaneously. Both theories have been conclusively proven, despite canceling each other out, and yet scientists continue today to try to figure out how this apparent contradiction can happen.
In a world of lying political propaganda narratives, including modern gender ideology and “climate change,” such scientific debate and dispute and progress are impossible. This is because scientists who disagree with the established political narrative will have their funding taken away, lose their jobs, have their credentials revoked, and will lose their careers, their homes, their families… everything they worked so hard to create and build over years and decades.
All because these real scientists disagree with political activists who want to control us, control our behavior, our choices, our thinking, our conscience, our food, our daily existence.
To me, the political activists here have no credibility. They are just a bunch of mean, sadistic little fascists, trying to brutally shut up real scientists who inconveniently disprove their pet unscientific political narratives.
When someone in the Oppenheimer movie states “That can’t be true,” you just know someone in the next scene is about to show the disbeliever that in fact, it is true. We see Science! From the long established scientific method! So the movie Oppenheimer is useful for at least showing audiences what real scientific debate and progress used to involve, and what it must involve, if we are to have real science about anything.
Oppenheimer reminds us that there is no such thing as “scientific consensus,” which is a made-up faketoid by the climate change alarmism activists to push their political hoax.
For this rare gem of reality from a business sector that constantly deals in deceit and falseness, I award the educational Hollywood movie Oppenheimer a refreshing A+.
Why are museums closed on Mondays?
Can someone reasonably explain why museums are still closed on Mondays? It is a longstanding tradition that defies common sense. You won’t find many people advocating for tradition more than I, but what tradition I argue for makes sense. Museums closed on Monday makes no sense. It seems to be an outdated, strange sense of special privilege that almost all museums are closed on Monday.
In a nation full of highly mobile travelers and vacationers taking long weekends, and where so many small towns and rural counties have worked hard and significantly invested to attract tourists, we still come up against the strange tradition of museums being closed on Mondays. No one I have spoken to can give a good reason for this educational shut-down. They are even shut on Monday during the summer season, when tons of tourists are traveling through town.
Going to visit your old uncle via an oddly zig-zagging road trip you will never do again in your life? Don’t count on seeing the local museums or historical society that Monday; they will be inexplicably closed. “It’s Museum Monday, dontcha know…..”
Taking a long weekend summer vacation on a whim to some remote place you will never visit again? Don’t make Monday your local museum day, because regardless of where you are, the museums are likely to all be closed. “It’s Museum Monday, dontcha know…..”
Every other business sector works hard to meet its customers’ needs, except the museums, when they are closed on Monday. The list of Open On Monday Despite The Terrible Hardship businesses includes funeral homes, libraries, car mechanic shops, pet care shops, and ice cream stands. Among most other businesses.
Every other business sector has to survive, and can’t afford to artificially turn away customers, except for museums with their “poor me” donation boxes that are inexplicably closed on Monday.
Every other business sector rotates staff in order to give workers a day off, a weekend off, except most museums, apparently. Only museums have staff that must get Monday off. Only Monday. Not Sunday. Or Wednesday. But Monday….
Yes, I recognize that a hundred years ago when museums were becoming a thing, they developed a common culture of being available over weekends (except those museums that are closed on Sunday…and also Monday, of course), which necessitated having a day off for facility cleaning, repair, exhibit updates, and rest for the staff. I suppose. But now? Every other business is open on Monday, and yes, museums can do it, too! They should do it.
Find some new staff or volunteers for the Monday shifts. Pay the museum staff more on Monday. Whatever it takes to meet customer demand, museums should do; this ain’t rocket science. The Smithsonian is open seven days a week, and if that gigantic place can be open on Monday, then so can small museums in Podunk USA across the USA.
I would like to thank the Ward O’Hara agricultural museum in Auburn, New York, and the Museum of the Fur Trade in Chadron, Nebraska, for being open on Mondays. We just happened to be passing through their respective rural necks of the woods on two given Mondays, a year apart, and lo! – a museum with an Open for Business sign! We happily paid their fees, left generous donations in the donation box, and had a really enjoyable time learning what they had to teach us. And no one involved turned into a pumpkin because it was Monday.
Dear museums, please join the 21st century, and make yourselves available for the highly mobile 21st century traveler. Arrange your open hours to meet the demand of your would-be customers; especially during the summer vacation season. And to those foundations who write big operating grants to museums, you should stipulate that the museums must be open when people are expecting to use it. That would definitely include all the week days, like every other business.
This hemlock log shows climate change
Climate change has been a normal and natural fact of life on Planet Earth since the planet was created. Volcanoes explode and the earth warms up as a result. Glaciers that build up covered entire mountain ranges underneath, then recede and create new mountain ranges, then melt again, and their flood waters created new rivers, several times. Pennsylvania’s Pine Creek in the “PA Grand Canyon” used to flow north into the Genesee River watershed, until a huge ice dam from the last glacial period melted, broke, and caused an enormous torrent of water to flood southward. In that brief moment about ten or twelve thousand years ago, naturally occurring climate change forced Pine Creek to flow south, where it has become a major tributary to the West Branch of the Susquehanna River.
Climate alarmism is quite another thing, a false thing, a made-up thing, a silly thing, a destructive thing, and it is ruining a basic scientific fact that should be easy to study and understand.
Climate alarmism is where political activists falsely claim that “scientists agree that humans are causing Planet Earth’s climate to change” and that all Americans and Europeans (not the Chinese or the Indians) must therefore make drastic changes to our lifestyles, to our diets, to our freedoms. This is a fake emergency, a fake crisis, designed to help political activists get political outcomes they can not otherwise get through the democratic voting process where informed voters choose elected officials and policy positions themselves.
To illustrate how climate change naturally occurs all on its own, I took a picture and posted it here. Below is a picture I took of a roughly 160-year-old hemlock tree that a logger I work with cut down in Clinton County, PA, a month ago. If we look at the growth rings in the base of this tree, we see clusters of rings that are very wide, where the tree grew a lot in one growing season (April – September), and we see clusters of rings where the tree grew very little in one season. What is really interesting about looking at tree growth rings is that we can easily understand the climate surrounding that tree at the time of each growth ring.
Wide growth rings are associated with both an open forest canopy and lots of sunlight reaching the tree, and also with years of plenty of rain and warm temperatures conducive to plant growth after the canopy has grown up and over.
Thin or narrow growth rings are associated with a dramatic lack of sunlight, a lack of water, and/ or colder temperatures.
As we can see from this picture, this 160-year-old tree has experienced several major climate shifts over its lifetime. Each colored box is a clump of similar growth rings, which represents a period of about ten to twenty years. See how this tree went for a decade or two subject to long stretches of either very wet and warm climate, or very dry and cold climate? And we know that this tree’s life experience was largely outside of the period where the climate alarmists say humans have had the greatest influence on climate.
This tree’s life, as we see it in its growth rings, clearly shows that northcentral Pennsylvania’s climate has naturally fluctuated on its own, with no meaningful human intervention, for a long time. The picture also shows that within periods of intense dryness, there were single years of abundant rain, and then the dryness returned for years.
Today, climate alarmists seize upon every dry spell, every rainy period, every storm, to falsely claim evidence of human-caused “climate change.” If what the climate alarmists say is true, then this poor tree has had both a schizophrenic life in a natural world where equilibrium is more the natural rule, and it also experienced a lot of human caused climate change while the planet had very few humans on it to affect the climate.
In other words, this tree shows that the climate alarmists are wrong. Really wrong. The trees don’t lie, but the political activists do lie. And that fact is alarming to me.
Hemlock log cut in July 2023, in Clinton County, PA. This tree has experienced widely varying climates over its long lifetime, especially while there were very few humans on Planet Earth. There is no such thing as human caused climate change. Environmental damage, yes, of course, but not climate change. Climate alarmism is a political claim, not a scientific claim.
We actually saw a movie
The other night, the Princess of Patience and I actually went to see a movie. Like the kind of movie that used to entertain, inform, and inspire Americans, instead of the dreck Hollywood has been excreting, lo, these past thirty years or more.
We saw “Oppenheimer,” a Hollywood movie that is based on fact, based on historic events, based on real people who did and said real things. It is not based on the vomitous Woke PC corrosive nonsense that Hollywood has specialized in for decades. We were entertained and informed by this movie, and inspired about the greatness of America. What a treat! This makes four movies we have seen in the past…five years? Or longer?
Oppenheimer is about a man named Robert Oppenheimer, a genius and socially inept physicist who is considered “the father of the atomic bomb.” Aside from all the sciency stuff about the why and how of developing the bomb, the movie also delves deeply into World War II, the ensuing Cold War with communist Russia, and the very real threat that communists living in America posed to a free America itself.
There is no spoiler alert here, because we all know that the atomic race against the Nazi Germans and the communist Russians resulted in The Bomb being dropped on a fascist Japan, thereby signaling America’s ability and willingness to use the Mother Of All Weapons. Genocidal Japan’s well-earned come-uppance in Nagasaki and Hiroshima also demonstrated how easily the entire blue planet we live on could be destroyed in a tit-for-tat use of atomic weapons, thereby ushering in the “Mutually Assured Destruction” doctrine of mutual atomic deterrence that shaped American, European, and Russian foreign policy for fifty years.
This strange conundrum of “I won’t blow up Planet Earth if you don’t blow up Planet Earth” became a strategic stalemate between superpowers, thereby forcing them to fight their battles in low-intensity conflicts around the globe.
I digress. But such is the force and pragmatic usefulness of such a movie as Oppenheimer that it naturally results in discussing all that came before, during, and after the film’s historic time.
The other important thing that this movie focuses on, but does not follow up on, is the communist takeover of the American universities. That really did happen, despite the Hollywood oh-so-sad depictions of meanie anti-communists trying to stop real communists from infiltrating American institutions. Today, sending your dear child to college is not likely to get them a real education, but rather an expensive indoctrination in (failed) cultural and economic Marxism at the hands of the successors to Oppenheimer’s fellow leftists.
Professor Oppenheimer was like not only a lot of his fellow Marxist academic intellectuals at the time, that is, exceedingly generous with other people’s money in order to vaguely “be nice to everyone,” but he was also like the many non-religious European Jews who had landed in America, abandoned their faith, and then embraced various degrees of Marxism in its stead. Some had already made this transition in Europe. This is a whole other subject, but it is very much threaded throughout Oppenheimer because a) so many of his fellow genius physicists and scientists on the Manhattan Project were former European Jews and b) so many of them were various shades of pink to bright red Marxist, and thus intrinsic threats to a free and democratic America.
While these brilliant minds were needed to make The Atomic Bomb from 1942-1945, they subsequently were very real security threats because of their….divided loyalties…or, said another way, their commitment to genocidal international communism rather than to the well being of their wonderful host country, our beautiful America. And Professor Oppenheimer captured this split or dual personality disorder very well. And so the Father of The Atomic Bomb ended up losing his security clearance in a ridiculous, procedurally deficient, dog-and-pony shadow kangaroo court proceeding that nonetheless had at its core the very real need to protect America from its own openness.
I could say more about this particular subject, but I am saving it up for an essay I have been writing for three years. Maybe longer. It is forthcoming here, because when I read yesterday about the ADL’s fascist Jonathan Greenblatt excoriating his political enemies for calling out American leftist fascism for what it is, I know I have to say whatever I can say to stem the tide of genocidal leftism that began in America in the 1920s, gathered steam among Professor Oppenheimer’s fellow academics in the 1940s, and is today utterly destroying America as a free and democratic country.
So…Oppenheimer. If you have not seen it, it is worth the nearly three hour watch and the ten bucks. I give it two thumbs up.
We saw Oppenheimer in a quaint old-time theater in rural America. Note the diametrically opposed movies: Puke -woke ninja turtles and Barbie vs. very real and important Sound of Freedom and Oppenheimer. Pretty good summation of where Americans are at right now.
Racist, violent, weird New York Times has to go away
When I was a kid, and we are talking over half a century ago, the New York Times newspaper was a daily thing, a weekend-long hit, a week of solid reading starting on Sunday morning, and a year-long fixed institution of America’s cultural and political landscape.
The NYT Sunday Edition was about six to seven inches thick starting around ten in the morning, and included incredible analyses of real estate markets, emerging technology, strange and interesting people and places in America and around the world. The Sunday Times Magazine had a fashion section that even a young boy could relate to, not because I liked fashion per se, but because the female models were beautiful to look at. And occasionally only semi invisible behind their colorful shmatas. Its real estate section was so good that even as a kid I enjoyed reading about stairs, table tops, and bars inside Long Island homes.
The NYT Sunday Edition had enough information for an entire week of fascinating reading on every subject known to modern civilization – science, technology, medicine, history, politics of course. Especially the obituaries and the wedding announcements, all of whom involved who’s-who people who we may not have even realized were major players in whatever given field they were in. Brilliant nuclear engineers who lived quiet lives in New Jersey, but who had invented something awesome that ended up powering all of suburban America suddenly had their great last reveal in the Sunday Edition obituary section. Who knew? He (and she) was a who’s-who!, we exclaimed to each other across the room. So much fascinating and rare information was contained in that one section among a dozen such amazing sections.
In our family, people grabbed their favorite section of the hot-off-the-press NYT Sunday Edition around 10:00AM and, with a plate full of lox and bagels, knish, and maybe some creamed herring with crackers, then grabbed a corner of a couch or a chair at the dining room table and sat and read deeply. Occasionally to exclaim something fascinating to the room full of other lox-and-bagel eaters equally entranced by their own compelling subject, pages turning with a rustle almost like a Fall wind rustling dry sycamore leaves in Central Park. And this weekly ritual involved kids and adults alike. Which I still think is a pretty fascinating statement about the complexity and value the NYT brought to the American table at one time. It was a real repository of valuable information, even if its fashion models occasionally had a nip-slip that intrigued a couple hundred twelve-year-old boys across America once a week.
To say that fifty years ago, and heck even thirty-some years ago when I was in grad school, that the NYT was the acknowledged and designated curator of American culture, literature, movies, arts, food, politics, etc. was no big thing. Conservative icons like William F. Buckley had no problem admitting the NYT’s supremacy, and he also admitted he was merely nipping at the NYT’s heels with his own National Review magazine.
While just a newspaper, the NYT was a massive institution with hundreds of intellectually curious people working in its busy beehive on just about every subject known to modern humans. While the NYT always had some sort of liberal-left tilt, it was mostly nuanced; that was rarely put on public display. Because to do so would be to reveal a deep bias at the great institution that would undercut the paper’s acknowledged claim to being the curatorial keeper of the American flame.
For the NYT to do a Big Political Reveal would be to alienate a large part of its audience, if not all of it. Because while traditionalist Americans did in fact revulse at the NYT’s hideous partisan caricature that greeted them especially in Sunday opinion essays in the 1990s, they still could find bits and pieces of meaning and value here and there in the capacious rubbish heap. Not so in the 2000s, when liberals-with-a-brain-and-a-conscience also began to recoil at the NYT’s ever more brazen partisanship, as seen daily in its “news reporting” that read like an English version of the Soviet Union’s daily Pravda: One political party was always bad, the other was always good. Republicans were always mean and stupid, Democrat politicians were always witty, smart, enjoyed the NYT cross word puzzles, and well intentioned if occasionally murderously drunk or rape-inclined.
You did not have to be a conservative to see the very low value in an outlet that makes no effort to tell the other side of the story. Every intellectual wants to know the full story, and while the NYT catered to people who saw themselves as intellectuals, they no longer (if ever) behaved or thought like intellectuals (curious people open to new information).
Well, well, well, how have times changed. No pun intended, the NYT has indeed really fallen badly since its heyday of the 1940s-1980s. Today, the NYT is a shell of its former self. In every way, including the slim to non-existent and almost meaningless Sunday Edition. Its owners and publishers have so garishly embraced a single corner in the boxing ring that they are in essence burning the wood from the NYT’s walls to keep their lights on and heat going, acting as their own termites gutting their own home to stay alive while simultaneously causing the home to collapse. They make no apologies for telling blatant lies and abusing their remaining readership.
Having avoided almost all things New York Times now for several decades, I still receive the paper’s emails. But what have we here in these digital missives, but cheap traders hawking an embarrassing array of cheap and weird goods: Sleep aids, insect repellant, protein bars, the Mediterranean diet available at a click here or there, and of course, everything imaginable that could be construed or cobbled together to be negative about President Trump.
However, if the once mighty NYT now stoops to deal in tawdry middle class diet aid clickbait and 100% fake news political red meat for its dwindling, clueless, bubble-and-silo’d ultra partisan readership, it has finally gone one too far: Yes, the New York Times supports calls for racial genocide against white/ European farmers (and everyone else who has white skin) in South Africa.
South Africa may have been a fundamentally unfair place for black Africans to live for a few hundred years, but at least it was highly functional and its quality of life for most people was a hell of lot better than the nomadic hunter-gatherer cannibals the Boers encountered in the 1600s. South Africa is now a dysfunctional, dystopian, genocidal racialist state that purposefully discriminates against the European people who grow the country’s food and who cater to the valuable safari tourist trade. South Africa is following in the steps of former Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, its neighbor, where racist and genocidal Africans tortured, murdered, and drove out the European people who grew all of the food and did all of the engineering stuff for the entire nation. Zimbabwe sucks. Its public water supplies have dangerous parasites. Its corruption and lawlessness are legendary. So this is where South Africa is headed? And the NYT is cheering it on?
I look at the NYT now with more than fifty years of readership under my belt. Where I used to count the Sunday Hirschfeld comic Nina names hidden among the artist’s slashing style (my own middle child is named Nina in large part because of my childhood-into-adulthood fondness for the Hirschfeld comic search each Sunday) as a kid, I now see not-so-hidden Nazi swastikas and revolutionary torches and pitchforks. How far this institution has fallen. It is a crumbled ruin, a shadow of its former self. It isn’t even a Pravda, whose grinning grotesques at least openly acknowledged the 100% lying propaganda fake news. No, this is a ramshackle, collapsing shell housing a few dozen racist maniacs pounding feverishly away at their typewriter keys, raw and hell bent on a violent and bloody racist revolution across the planet. The once curious and magical place is really gone.
The New York Times deserves to be canceled. Don’t drink water out of the toilet and don’t read the New York Times. Anyone subscribing to this garbage is a shameful person. An outed dingbat, a dumbkopf, a kook, a Nazi or at least a Nazi collaborator.
For shame.
An aggregate of Al Hirschfeld cartoons where his daughter’s name Nina was often hidden, the number told in the artist’s signature. This was the height of the NYT’s more innocent times