Category → Government Of the People…
To What and to Whom are you loyal?
Couple of interesting conversations in the past 48 hours about loyalties, one in the Juneau, Alaska airport with a guy distributing whisky around the world, and the other guy a lawyer back East. Both educated but practical, both smart and articulate, neither particularly ideological, and neither a consumer of Breitbart or Gateway Pundit news information. Which is to say, both are opinionated but not well informed, and their loyalties show it.
Both men say they are Republicans or the admittedly endangered species Kennedy Democrats (John F. Kennedy today would be a far-right America-First conservative Republican, but I digress) both say they are moderates, both say they want a “centrist” or a moderate to be the next president. Their joint political loyalty is to the idea of bipartisan and moderate political philosophy.
The lawyer takes great umbrage at President Trump taking on the executive branch’s administrative state, saying that “Trump wants to make himself monarch of America.”
The whisky salesman wants “a return to civility.”
As far as I can tell, both these very different men are devotees of ideas or images of ideas that were last seen dead on the side of the road America has traveled in the past ten years. Americans chose Donald Trump precisely because of the so-called “political moderates” standing for nothing in particular and constantly making self-serving “bipartisan” deals amongst themselves that always, always exclude Mister and Missus America. It’s what prompted the America First/ Make America Great Again movement.
As a great sage once said, If I am not for myself, who will be for me? In other words, you can’t live in America and be concerned more about people and places outside of America and still have America thrive and survive or even last as America for long. Thus MAGA and Trump enduring and actually thriving despite an unrelenting attack by the establishment media, Hollywood, academia, the Federal executive branch’s administrative state, corporate America, Wall Street, and the American Bar Association and the American Medical Association, to name but a few of America’s domestic enemies.
The American people know their survival and freedom is on the line, and they have stuck with their only true advocate through thick and thin.
The notion of “civility” also died when the establishment media came out of the closet in 2008 not as ideological crossdressers, but as war-painted cannibals bent on wanton, bloody destruction of everyone they opposed. Compare the openly partisan fake news media now to 2008 and it’s like they aren’t even the same species; that is how much toxic political poison the mainstream media “news reporters” have drunk since going all-in for non-vetted Barack Hussein Obama back in 2008. The un-civil establishment media is so openly un-civil and fake that the Biden White House issued an open memo demanding that all Fake Newsdom rally ’round the Biden Crime Family and attack Republicans instead of reporting on the treasonous international bribery the Biden family has engaged in for years.
As they say, you can’t make this stuff up, because this truth we are living is crazier than any fiction we could write. And I don’t know what planet a grown, intelligent, experienced adult American is living on to want or expect civility and moderation in a heavily one-sided toxic atmosphere like this. Trump isn’t the cause of this environment, he is the victim and the symptom of the corrupt sickness assailing America by way of “moderate” divided loyalties.
You – an American citizen of voting age – cannot both be loyal to America as a sovereign nation with the rule of law applying equally to all citizens and also support a wide-open southern border with millions of illegal immigrants coming in. You – the proverbial reasonable citizen in the street – cannot be loyal to an America where the rule of law prevails in all things, and also support a federal bureaucracy that is untouchable, unreachable, and that insubordinately does not answer to its Chief Executive, who was (and still is) Trump.
Trump a monarch? Yes, it sounds ridiculous, but…well, the US President is Chief Executive of the Executive Branch of American federal government. The Chief Executive is in a way, I suppose, a sort of monarch in his executive domain there. He is the boss. When the taxpayer-paid staff of that same executive branch openly rebels against their chief executive and acts insubordinately, it is they, not the President, who is acting like a monarch. Trump was elected by The People to run the executive branch, and the staff people of that executive branch are supposed to abide by their oaths of office, and follow the orders of their chief executive. When those staff people do what they want, and not what the elected chief executive wants, then they are each acting like petty kings. They are in open rebellion against The People of America.
So here we are, a people of divided loyalties. We want things that can’t possibly exist, and we are loyal to fake news media outlets because we still want the taste and smell of the old civility and moderation we once enjoyed. We want an unelected, unaccountable federal bureaucracy to continue on as if its continuing rebellion against the President was no big deal, while simultaneously telling ourselves that we are the good Americans. After all, we want stability and security and moderation and civility. And so we support the true villains in American politics, instead of the champions of a free America with the rule of law for all, the MAGA America First advocates like President Donald Trump.
If your hunting club suddenly turns anti-gun, would you stay loyal to it? If your work place suddenly throws you out into the street for no good reason, would you stay loyal to them? If your children’s school suddenly became disloyal to your children’s best interests and to you, would you remain loyal to that school?
I myself am loyal only to the founding first principles for which American government is supposed to stand. When the government ceases to represent or implement those principles, then that government and the individual staff people in it no longer have my loyalty. They are loyal to themselves and to their power, not to me and my rights.
I am loyal to Power To The People. We, The People own the federal bureaucracy, not the rogue, corrupt, violent, lawless staff at the FBI, ATF, DHS et al. who are the Gestapo KGB strongmen of the Biden fascists seeking to bend all people to their evil will through illegal midnight raids on the homes of their political opponents. These people cannot ever have the loyalty of the American People. And people who are loyal to these vile anti-freedom alphabet organizations are no longer Americans, because they have abandoned the basic principles of fairness and due process that used to make America America.
Whither America right now is a question of loyalty, your loyalty, to whom and to what.
Impeach, impeach, impeach
Impeachment is a powerful tool provided in the US Constitution as well as in every state constitution. Over the past 100 years, America and American citizens have enjoyed a historically unprecedented veritable explosion in food security, home security, financial security, and almost endless creature comforts that just a couple decades ago were considered unimaginable luxuries. And so in the past 100 years of increasingly corpulent self-satisfied hourly comfort, Americans have lost their sense of purpose, necessity, hunger, their edge. And so the use of impeachment has pretty much died, as few people saw or sensed the need to use such a drastic tool in such comfortable times.
Americans now view political corruption and official abuse of the law as a cost of doing business, a cost of having such a luxurious lifestyle available to so many of us.
Why rock the boat with something like impeachment when everything is going so great? President Richard Nixon was threatened with impeachment for behavior that by today’s standard was positively Girl Scout level, and President Bill Clinton was understandably impeached for having brazenly lied under oath. There have been only a small handful of state level impeachments over the decades, usually against aberrant judges whose behavior is so brazenly corrupt that people overwhelmingly agreed that removing them from office was an obvious necessity.
Then President Donald Trump was supposedly impeached in a process without any procedural integrity, without the right to call witnesses in defense, without the right to file motions or submit evidence. His first “impeachment” was a political circus, not a real court proceeding with all the seriousness the dignity of all the offices involved require.
The second so-called impeachment of President Trump was even more procedurally flawed than the first attempt, including the absence of the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court, whose daily presence is constitutionally required for an impeachment to go forward. Chief Justice Roberts’ absence did not hinder the lawless circus from continuing, though, so it was not really an impeachment. This process was in fact just the mis-use and mis-appropriation of the impeachment name applied to a set of theatrical political activities.
You would think with all this one-sided impeachment-lite activity that the “other side of the aisle” would be ready to apply the same medicine now that they have the power to do so. And you would be wrong. The elected eunuchs have no intention of fighting back at all.
And so we now find America in the throes of widespread lawlessness by one political party, whose judges behave like theatrical political tyrants while ignoring all legal precedent and legal process requirements of their court rooms. For example, this week Federal Judge Chuktan scolded the Trump legal team in DC that they should have spent the prior year reading through the 12,000,000 pages of discovery material in preparation for a defense they only found out about a few weeks ago, and whose access to the related documents only began a week ago. This is absolute lawlessness by Judge Chuktan, whose lawlessness makes an absolute mockery of the very idea of a legal process.
In case you are not understanding this, the judge refused to allow the Trump defense attorneys adequate time to read through and use in court over twelve million pages of material being used to falsely prosecute President Trump for his mere political speech. Nope, Trump’s team is expected to arrive in court fully prepared within a couple months. This is a grotesque and corrupt abuse of the federal judge’s powers and discretion.
Another example is the Pennsylvania State Supreme Court majority that – crazily, corruptly, partisanly – held that unilateral last-second changes to Pennsylvania election law, right before the 2020 general election, by unelected people in the executive branch, and in open defiance of the Pennsylvania constitution which places all election law only in the hands of the legislature, were just fine and would stand. These state supreme court judges were wildly abusing their authority and discretion to implement a plainly flawed election process that defied Pennsylvania’s legal process for establishing election law, and which subsequently allowed a huge amount of voting fraud to occur in the 2020 election.
Other examples of grotesque courtroom malfeasance by politicized judges can be found ad nauseum in the federal courtrooms in Washington, DC, where jurisprudence and respect for the rule of law have been thrown away in the interest of obtaining patently illegal political outcomes that benefit one political party and that are designed to hurt President Trump and anyone around him. Tainted jurors, tainted judges, conflicts of interest, abuses of courtroom decorum and legal procedural law, the list of malfeasance there is incredible.
The one answer to all of these politically active judges is impeachment. Real, honest-to-goodness impeachment that includes all the bells, whistles, and fixins of a gen-u-ine courtroom hearing. Just like the US Constitution and state constitutions have a process for fraudulent elections to be challenged, so they also provide for impeachments.
And while one political party is riding the impeachment horse all over the place, the other political party wants nothing to do with impeachment. Why that would upset the apple cart, or some such nonsense, is what we hear from elected Republicans across America. Most of the federal judges involved in the January 6th cases have abused their positions and should be impeached. More than half of the Pennsylvania state supreme court members deserved impeachment and should have been impeached. What was lacking in the political process was the political willpower from among the “other” political party to mount a response, to resist the lawlessness.
The response of impeachment that should have met every single one of these lawless judges was taken off the table before any real discussion of it began. The co-equal branch of government that is by design supposed to be able to impeach and then remove aberrant officials is completely out of this fight, and so the official lawlessness continues.
As in any fight, if one side is throwing haymaker punches and the other side is simply standing there taking all of the punishment, eventually the guy standing there taking all the punches is going to lose the fight. There is only so much abuse that any person or body can take before it breaks, and in the case of America, the abuse of lawlessness being inflicted on our body politic is beginning to crush our nation. Our political and professional institutions are collapsing under the onslaught. American citizens are beginning to lose trust in their official institutions.
The natural answer that is hard-wired into our various constitutions is impeach, impeach, impeach, and thereby hold lawless officials accountable and restore balance to our crumbling political system.
I do not know why in 2020 and 2021 former state senator and president pro tem of the Pennsylvania Senate, Jake-The-Snake Corman, and PA House leaders Kerry Benninghoff and Bryan Cutler, refused to even consider impeachment of the lawless PA state supreme court members who threw the rule of law out the window to immediately benefit one political party. It made no sense from a political perspective or from a let’s-uphold-the-basic-law perspective. Their impotence simply made no sense.
Nor does it make sense why US House leaders Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan refuse now to impeach the lawless federal judges and bribe-taking Joe Biden, the lying-before-Congress FBI Chris Wray, the endlessly lying and obviously lawless chief law enforcement officer US AG Merrick Garland, and a whole host of other corrupt federal employees whose job #1 is to uphold The Law.
Isn’t it curious that the people who are supposedly standing on “the other side” of the lawless people are unwilling to take a stand, to implement those impeachment processes that are spelled out in our various constitutions? By their unwillingness to fight back, every one of these politicians – Jake Corman, Kerry Benninghoff, Bryan Cutler, Kevin McCarthy, Jim Jordan etc et al – is enabling and abetting their supposed opponents. By refusing to fight back in any meaningful way, these elected officials are actually allowing America to descend into not just lawlessness, but one party domination and the destruction of America as a political entity that naturally follows.
Only one explanation for GOP weakness makes any sense: How many pieces of silver have these elected officials taken to have their loyalties swayed away from their oath of office? How many elected Republicans across America are owned by China?
The mugshot heard ’round the world
President Donald J. Trump, the most illegally persecuted man in American history, had a mugshot taken late yesterday. This first-ever-in-American-history moment was associated with yet another fake lawfare prosecution by yet another lawless elected Democrat. This small but symbolic mis-use of the justice system is the loudest shot yet the lawless Democrat Party and their evil RINO partners have taken at the American electoral system, and it has been heard ’round the world.
As if two procedurally faulty and thus phony “impeachments” (the Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court did not preside over the second fake impeachment, so that one was even phonier than the first), a host of hoaxes (RussiaGate, UkraineGate, whateva whateva whateva-Gate), seven years of nonstop lies from the mainstream media-Hollywood entertainment industrial complex, censorship by the mainstream media-Big Tech industrial complex, and three other fake and obviously politicized indictments and lawsuits were not sufficient, President Trump was just indicted in Democrat Party bastion Fulton County for having a political discussion with another elected official about an election in which Trump was a candidate.
Basic reasoning tells us you can’t have “election interference” when the election is over, but here we have it, another novel legal theory indictment that seems to run contrary to the basic tenets of all elections held in America, as well as our First Amendment right to free speech. What our reasoning tells us is that this fake indictment is illegally coordinated with the other fake indictments President Trump is subject to, in order to illegally interfere with the 2024 election, in which President Trump is already the clear front-runner against both Republicans and Democrats alike.
Meanwhile, hard evidence of Joe Biden’s longtime treasonous bribery is flooding Congress, and the GOPe running the show can hardly be bothered to talk about it, much less the Democrat Party mainstream media.
As many other people have commented, and as this blog has noted for years before it became common awareness, America is undergoing this illegal Democrat Party revolution because there is zero political opposition. The Republican Party is AWOL in this fight, and most of its members and officials seem to (erroneously) think that if President Trump is hung up on the cross, then no one else will be sacrificed.
What the Republican establishment does not realize is that if this illegal lawfare against President Trump is successful, then it will be implemented everywhere throughout and across America. Every single Republican will be subject to false charges, false arrest, false imprisonment, because the Democrat Party wants complete and absolute total control over every American. And why wouldn’t this be done? The Democrat Party seems to have an innate understanding of the Republican Party as a spineless, weak, feckless, fearful group of girly men and even girlier girls hiding under their beds. Only fools place their hope and trust in the GOPe.
Here in Pennsylvania we have very, very few elected Republicans who say anything about the January 6th political prisoners or about the lawless lawfare against President Trump. I get monthly emails from Republican state senator John DiSanto about things like dog collars, state grants, back-to-school events, and zero about election integrity or galvanizing citizens to protect our election system from further corruption. Nearby congressman Dan Meuser, a longtime GOPe puke, visited the World Economic Forum and fancies himself some sort of overlord, and says nothing about the J6 political prisoners or the lawless lawfare against Trump. My Republican congressman, Scott Perry, is one of the few members of Congress to say anything, to do anything, to fight back against the Democrat Party’s ongoing insurrection against the American People. But ever since the Democrat Party’s FBI thugs mugged Rep. Perry of his cell phone last year, he has been much quieter in his criticism.
We have already said it here a hundred times or maybe a thousand times, but it bears saying again: We, The People have only each other to rely on in the resistance against the Democrat Party revolutionary insurrection against our Constitution and self governance of, by, and for The People. Oh, we also have one important ally: President Donald J. Trump.
I intend to buy every Trump mugshot tee shirt and coffee mug the Trump folks are selling. I will wear them and use them with pride, because this one mugshot picture represents the most innocent man in politics being illegally persecuted for standing up for American citizens’ freedom and fair elections.

Sometimes a mugshot is a badge of honor. Like Martin Luther King, Jr. was, President Trump is being unfairly, illegally, lawlessly persecuted by Southern Democrats
Why we share wild food with each other
People around the planet enjoy sharing wild food with one another, and we always have since God above evolved our species, however it is He evolved it. It is an innately human trait to both enjoy giving and receiving wild food.
Wild food is a broad category, but it excludes anything we buy, especially in a big store. Foods from stores are almost always, or are always, plants and animals raised in intensive industrial environments, replete with chemicals everywhere and in everything. Wild food usually includes fruits, herbs, and vegetables grown in our own gardens; fruits we have picked in the wild, like berries and apples; and any wild game meat or fish we have harvested. Chemicals are either non-existent or are naturally occurring in minute amounts from the native soil.
All around the planet people put a high premium on wild harvested meat. In Africa and Australia, “bush meat” is highly valued as fresh, nutritious, free of human-injected chemicals and hormones. Everywhere bush meat is eaten, it is traded in lieu of money. And when a European bites down on a size 8 piece of shot in her forkful of grouse recently from the Scottish Highlands, where it was shot on a drive, hung for three days in a cooler, and then shipped off to Spain, Germany, England, or France, she knows she is eating something special, and it tastes even better. The same is said for the meat of hunted red deer, and occasionally wild boar, both of which are highly prized foods served in restaurants and home kitchens across Europe.
Wild food is better for us, we all know that, both in terms of what is in it and also what is not in it, because (except for poached bush meat from at-risk wild animal populations in Africa) it is environmentally sustainable. It also tastes better, because it has grown up under natural circumstances. Giving and receiving it as a gift is a symbol of real friendship and caring. Wild food is something most Americans can participate in, especially as growers and givers, and so I hope that someone reading this is inspired to take a corner of their luxury status symbol yard and turn it into an unruly food garden. The pleasure of sharing the harvest with friends and neighbors is quite enjoyable.
Humans began as hunters and gatherers and we remain such, even with our thin veneer of civilization inartfully separating us from the wild world around us. Much of our innate gender differences are centered on what hunting and gathering was done by our ancestors over the past few hundred thousand years. Gathering food by hand is a natural and innately human thing to do, and most people find gardening calming and enjoyable. I guess being a real human and not a false, contrived human can be pleasurable.
Last month I picked over six pounds of blueberries and another five pounds of blackberries and red and black raspberries, about a hundred pounds of peaches, and about fifty pounds of apples. I won’t share these hard-won prizes with you by the fistful, because then the berries would all disappear within a few minutes. Rather, I will share them by mixing them into muffins, pancakes, cobblers, pies, and preserves spread onto toast, ice cream, and cakes. This way these gems last all year long, and everyone gets to share in them.
Aside from being cleaner and tastier than industrial foodstuffs wrapped in plastic and styrofoam, wild food has the benefits of bringing us closer to nature, closer to reality, closer to self-reliance and self-sustainability, and closer to people we might not normally encounter. Nature can be the sharp berry bushes we must reach through to pluck our juicy berries, and it can also be the mother bear and her cubs waiting for you and me to clear out of the scratchy berry patch so they, too, can feed on Nature’s bounty.
Nature here can also include a variety of destructive garden pests like squirrels, rabbits, groundhogs, and chipmunks, and learning to cope honestly with these artificially overabundant animals teaches us important lessons about reality versus luxurious and silly childish feelings and notions of animal welfare that are terribly destructive.
For example, artificially high populations of pest species, like squirrels and ground hogs, spread high amounts of disease and physical destruction. And when vegans strut and brag about their reliance on industrial monocultures like soy beans, they ignore the tremendous environmental and habitat destruction wrought in their vegan names. There are significant environmental costs to veganism and vegetarianism that could be offset if those adherents participated in wild food, like growing their own and trading/ bartering for what they cannot grow themselves. Few things are more annoying than listening to someone from a wealthy lifestyle bragging up their veganism/ vegetarianism while simultaneously tearing open plastic wraps and environmentally damaging containers containing industrial foods. Food isn’t just about what you put in your mouth, it is very much about where it comes from, where it was grown and where it lived before your credit card brought it home.
Hunting in America and Canada produces millions of pounds of fresh, clean, natural, wholesome wild meat for more than just the people who pull the trigger. Hunters Sharing the Harvest is a well known program that enjoys widespread support from both givers and receivers. Schools, neighborhood soup kitchens and homeless shelters, and just simple low-income people, all benefit from receiving this wild meat. And farmers and forest owners benefit from having artificially overabundant deer and hog populations thinned out so their crops can grow in peace.
For those silly people who oppose hunting, jiminy crickets, people, wake the heck up. You are not living in a fairy tale book, and you are having your own huge impacts on the planet around you. An animal’s life is not just measured by how it died, but also how it lived. Almost all industrial meat comes from factory farms, enough said. However, wild meat comes from animals living their lives to their fullest before quickly falling over dead from a bullet or an arrow. Any modern educated human who believes that wild animals die naturally under antiseptic and peaceful conditions is a fool, enough said. Recreational and population management hunting (not poaching or market hunting) is a perfect way to provide environmental protection to wildlife habitat, conserve vulnerable wildlife populations, and harvest natural, sustainable wild food.
By mid-December of this year, I will have probably shared over a hundred pounds of wild meat, mostly venison, occasionally waterfowl, turkey, and small game. The people who receive my gifts of deer meat (that I have shot) are always grateful, and they often report back to me on what they made with the gift, who they shared it with, and how delicious it tasted. This exchange is true friendship, and in a politically fractured world, we all can use a little more friendliness, a few more friends. Wild food is my way of contributing.
In an hour I am dropping off a bag of peaches from my own trees, and picking up a bag of pears from my friend Ryan’s trees.
What wild food are you going to grow or harvest, eat, and share? If you have a big lawn, put away that lawn mower and start growing your own food. You will like it, I promise.

cucumbers from our garden don’t cost a dollar apiece like in the stores, and they are fresher and have no chemicals. Our home made pickles are far tastier than store bought, and have no chemicals. We use the overripe ones to make bread and butter pickles.

We have a bunch of peach trees. If the bears and the squirrels don’t raid them, we get to enjoy them, and cook with them, all year long

Sumac grows wild everywhere. Steeping a few heads in a bowl of warm water provides the most delicious drink possible. Chill it, serve it with sugar over ice, sumac tea is free, easy to forage, and chemical free

A hatful of red raspberries I foraged in July in the shrubbery of a public parking lot. IN a store you would pay twenty dollars for these wild ones, and they would be half as good. Go forage and pick your own food
PGC’s strange hunter survey
Today a Pennsylvania Game Commission email arrived, asking if I would participate in a brief hunter survey. Being 100% opinionated about everything, naturally I acquiesced. “Shy” was maybe used to describe me when I was young, but not as an adult. Because I consider myself a careful thinker, committed only to First Principles from America’s founding and to The Bible, and being relatively uncommitted to mass movements or parties, I enjoy sharing my perspectives with people who are open minded and interested in understanding different points of view than the prevailing narratives hawked by the Mainstream Media Corporate Industrial Complex.
The PGC survey consisted of really just three questions, all of which were about hunting waterfowl such as ducks and geese.
First question was did I hunt ducks last season, to which I responded No, I Did Not Hunt Ducks Last Season. The reason being that although I live just two blocks from that once famous migration route on the mighty Susquehanna River, the current duck migration down the Susquehanna River is not even a shadow of its former self. Rather, the duck migration here does not exist and has not existed for twenty years. I see more ducks lounging about and crapping on people’s yards in Italian Lake City Park across the street from my front yard than I see out on the Susquehanna River sitting on a bucket with a shotgun in my hand.
So, unless I travel to the Chesapeake Bay to hunt ducks, it is rare for me to get out after them any longer. Without Sunday hunting like all the surrounding states have, my opportunities for waterfowl hunting in Pennsylvania are pretty limited to what I can access quickly and easily. Like the dead Susquehanna River within sight of my dining room window.
Second question asked which Goose Zone I hunted in. Easy enough to answer.
Third question, which was broken down into three different alternatives, pertained to which of three unbearable and useless goose hunting seasons I liked or did not like, and how much I liked them or disliked them. All three alternative seasons PGC presented were unnecessarily fragmented from late October into February, and included very little early season but lots of late and really super late season. The problem being that the southward goose migration is heaviest in the part of October when the PGC shuts down our goose hunting, and the goose migration is entirely over by the time the PGC season opens back up. Fat lot of help these potential seasons offer!
This is a curious situation, which I have never had satisfactorily answered. Some hunters I know say that the Susquehanna River Waterfowlers, to which the PGC looks for hunter guidance, is made up of anti-Sunday hunting fuddy duddys who would rather give up hunting entirely than see Pennsylvania hunters get our share of the goose migration and also have Sunday waterfowling. True or not, this is what I am told.
Other hunters I know say that the PGC is hopelessly tangled up with the US Fish & Wildlife Service on all kinds of policies, not the least of which is that PA has a boatload of passionate hunters who, given the least opportunity, will, it is said by wildlife management officialdom, destroy, decimate, eliminate, and exterminate every duck, goose, gander, coot, loon, pimpernel, plover, and shoveler that flies, walks, waddles, crawls, or ducks through the migration route between New York and Maryland. And so, according to this view, Pennsylvania waterfowl hunters must be artificially hamstrung and kept from going afield when the birds are flying the most. Again, I do not know how much truth there is to this, though I will testify to the fact that Pennsylvania does in fact field a lot of hunters. A lot.
And so we get to my response to the three ridiculous seasons proposed in the PGC survey: Not one of them makes any sense; all three are equally nonsensical alternatives.
What is the point of giving me various dates to hunt if the animal we are hunting is no longer in the venue in those dates, but has long since flown the coop and is doing leisurely backstrokes in Florida and Louisiana?
It appears that the PGC knows its three silly seasons are indeed silly, and yet the agency is overtly committed to them.
“You can have a crap sandwich, a sh*t sandwich, or an imaginary sandwich,” is what PA waterfowl hunters are presented here.
This means Pennsylvania waterfowl hunters outside the Philly area southeast corner and outside a couple of interesting little “habitat and flyway bubbles” around Lake Erie and Shenango Lake in Western PA are officially SOL and just wasting their time sitting with a shotgun on a bucket and freezing solid past late December.
This current no-win situation begs for a bigger than life solution, but it also reminds me of the old Sunday hunting situation, where the PA Farm Bureau stole our private property rights for decades by artificially preventing any Sunday hunting. Only by marginally nibbling around the political edges did PA hunters finally get three weenie Sundays to hunt big game, and one suspects that such a small and unsatisfying “solution” is what is in store for PA waterfowlers, if a solution is to be had at all.
Maybe PGC will add more waterfowling days afield in March, when every single last duck and goose north of the Mason Dixon Line has landed in Costa Rica for the winter. Thanks but no thanks, PGC.
I for one, though I undoubtedly represent many others, would like to hunt ducks and geese in Pennsylvania at or closely around the same times/dates/days that hunters in New York are hunting them. But that would make sense, and if there is one thing I have learned as a PA waterfowl hunter, our seasons here are not intended to make sense.
Mike Pence is everything wrong in the GOP
If you read anything on this site about the Republican Party, you will not be surprised at how much of it is criticism. My criticism is always constructive, meant to help the Grand Old Party of Abolition and Opposition to Slavery be the best that it can be. God knows, the GOP needs all the help it can get, and no, I do not mean money.
What challenges the GOP and holds it back from fulfilling its former glory as the rampart of freedom against Democrat Party slaveowners is the party’s current internal culture. It is no longer the political party of Emancipation that gave voice to and freed the Negro slaves. If the Democrat Party is now a Marxist freak show of unsustainable, racist, destructive policies and violent, lawless traitors, the Republican Party is a sloth-like, money-based, money-oriented, money-everything, boring, uncreative, risk-averse assembly of staid careerists who never saw a lobbyist-paid fundraising dinner they didn’t want to participate in.
GOP culture is heavy on golf games, fundraisers, social events paid for by consultants and lobbyists. Waaaay back at the end of the line The People, the forgotten taxpayer, might factor in for some Republicans. My own congressman, Scott Perry, seems to be one of the few elected Republicans who thinks government should first and foremost serve The People, and that elected American officials should always put America first in all things.
Did you see Tucker Carlson’s recent televised discussion with Mike Pence? Pence here perfectly represents the GOP: “That [America] is not my concern.”
Like most if not all establishment Republican officials today, Pence is waaaaay out of touch with American citizens, and way way more oriented towards international business interests than with America-is-our-home interests. Pence just doesn’t care about us, you, me, my neighborhood, my neighbors, or America as a whole. And this doesn’t mean that Joe Biden does care; he doesn’t care, either. Heck, the Democrat Party is in utter and total war against America. The problem for us American citizens, as represented by Pence’s brutal honesty, is that NEITHER of these political parties cares about us. The Republican Party could be better. It could improve, if it but wanted to do so. Its leaders could care as much about saving America as the Democrats care about destroying America, but they don’t.
Which is why re-electing President Donald Trump is so important. He is the only non-politician running for president. He is the only candidate not inured to government, but rather recognizing that government is the problem, not the solution, and that our federal government is attempting a coup d’etat against the American people. Trump is the only person capable of saving America.
How’d that go? PA begins online hunting license & tag sales
Today at 8:00 AM marked the first day of the Pennsylvania Game Commission’s true entry into the modern world of home computers and the Internet. This probably sounds like an unnecessarily harsh or even a commonly outlandish criticism of the venerable PGC, but it is a technological fact that today marks the very first step by the 1895-founded-and-minded wildlife agency into directly integrating with its customer base.
And it has not gone well, although it could have gone a lot worse. Monday end-of-business hours analysis shows the PGC website processing about 7,090 license purchases per hour. That is about 118 per minute, which is a lot faster than the roughly 1,900 licenses per hour purchased in the early time frame I operated in. Given all of the little moving parts involved, especially that carefully measured doe tag purchase, I guess I can see why this is taking longer than the two to three minutes total that each person expected to spend on it. It still frustrated me and others who are not at war with PGC.
The process has been marred by exceptionally long waits, both in-person at brick and mortar retailers and online, with lots of “system crashes” and people standing in line for hours, spawning humorous memes like the old and now former pink doe tag envelope saying “Miss Me Yet?” I like the meme of the skeleton passed out over the desktop computer “Waiting for my 21st century Internet purchase from the PA Game Commission.”
The truth is that this day had to come, sooner or later. The old double-stamped pink envelope US Mail process was increasingly marred by the US Postal Service’s incredibly ever worse performance, to the point where people were photographing piles of time-sensitive pink envelopes sitting in heaps in some post office rooms, waiting for who knows what or who knows who. No one likes to be treated differently than everyone else, and the pink envelope lottery was an idea from 1945 that worked when postal employees did their jobs. These days, the Postal Service is notoriously unreliable. We can’t have a doe tag distribution process that relies on unreliable people and institutions. Even when the applying hunter does everything correctly, his or her pink doe tag envelope might take a wrong turn at Albuquerque and arrive days or weeks after the last doe tag was distributed. Which greatly impacts the hunter’s plans and prospects for that upcoming hunting season.
My own experience today had me first sleeping fitfully all night like it was hunting season, and finally dragging myself out of bed and hunkering down by the laptop well before the 8:00 AM beginning of the online purchase process at www.huntfishpa.gov. Almost like opening day of deer season and sitting down at an ambush site. Except this process revealed itself as having actually started well before the appointed 8:00 AM hour, as I was number 7,023 in line when I signed into my PGC huntfishpa account. With barely any coffee in my veins to buffer this unhappy revelation, an ice cold shock ran through me as I realized I was both early and yet already very late to the process. Thousands of hunters were ahead of me in an online process that was unknown, untested, and sure to have its ups and downs and delays.
The big ticket item for most of us early applicants is getting the doe tag of our first choice Wildlife Management Unit. It is why we stayed in the game til the very end. And the numbers tell the tale: My own first choice, WMU 2G, sold 17,000 doe tags by 5:00 PM today, about twice as many doe tags as any other WMU. There is a strong fear in a lot of guys that if you don’t get in line early either online or at a store, you won’t get your coveted doe tag in your primary hunt region. Fact is, with the ever popular northern “Big Woods” WMU 2G, that fear is well founded. There are many more hunters wanting WMU 2G doe tags than there are WMU 2G doe tags to hand out. The early bird gets this worm, every year.
[UPDATE: At 9:42PM I looked at the doe tag numbers and 23,502 WMU 2G doe tags out of the 35,000 total allocation for that WMU have been sold so far. A sale rate far beyond any other WMU. This means that 2G will be sold out by Tuesday early morning hours. The hunter demand for Big Woods 2G tags has always been high, we knew it, and now we get to see how that demand plays out when the hunters themselves are put in direct control of their tag orders]
Four hours and ten minutes later, having obsessively hovered over my laptop screen the entire time while emailing and bitchfest-texting with friends in both better and worse positions than I, I finally had ordered my general hunting license plus all of the additional license and permits I get, like furtaker (trapping), the annual elk application (I will take anything ya got anywhere ya got it), muzzleloader, archery, spear, atl-atl, sling, blowgun, black bear, fisher, bobcat, armadillo, hog, dog, rat, bat, and zinjanthropus tags. And yes, I got my WMU 2G doe tag, which enables me to hunt the way I enjoy most – solo pack and rifle and maybe an overnight and campfire somewhere way off the beaten path and far from roads and people, and the promise of a long and heavy pack-out of boned-out meat with a single doe’s ear and a completed tag attached. This kind of hunt is the most rewarding among big game hunters everywhere. Guys sitting in warmed box blinds overlooking fields and ravines have no idea.
So yeah, I waited and waited to ensure I got that 2G doe tag. A lot of my Big Woods hunting depends on it.
Anyone old enough to pick up on the Bugs Bunny theme above will understand where I am coming from; it was a loooong and kind of zany morning. In this day and age of Amazon and eBay and Gunbroker one-stop-shop badda bing badda bang badda boom go online and it’s yours two minutes later, Pennsylvania’s entry into the online hunting license world was practically Stone Age. New York has about as many hunters as Pennsylvania, and I have never encountered anything like this when I order my hunting license and tags from NY. It is usually immediate. Even Kentucky’s online hunting license and elk tag application process is faster than ours was today.
I am not picking on Kentucky….but come on, we all know it, Kentucky is not known for being especially technologically advanced. And yet….!
On the one hand, we must must give PGC credit for taking the long step out of 1895 and into the computer and internet age. This step the agency took this morning was one small step for PGC and one giant leap for hunterkind, or maybe the reverse, or whatever….. something like this. It is a big deal and I send you guys three cheers. Three grouchy cheers. Let’s not do this again, OK?
Yes, today’s license purchase has been marred by delays that seem unacceptable, but we all know that the PGC’s public employees have way too much pride to let this situation continue. It is a fact that a lot of employees and contractors will be working all night on this new system, and that by the time 8:00 AM breaks tomorrow, a lot of the glitches and delays we experienced today will be a bad memory for some, and a non-experience for a million others.
















