Category → Government Of the People…
Trump wants to be liked by the mean boys
President Donald Trump is a good guy, and it is why he keeps making the same mistake over and over with people who are not good. He understandably sees himself as a reasonable person, a respectable person, a responsible person, and he also desperately wants to be somewhat, even a little bit, inside The Republican Club.
This is why he endorsed politicians who were openly antagonistic to him: Mitch McConnell (Kentucky) and Brian Kemp (Georgia), to name just two. Trump keeps thinking, and hoping, that the Republican politicians who hate him and reject him will nonetheless ultimately come to like him, admire him, and appreciate him. This is why he keeps on trying to play their insider game, and he keeps on losing at it.
The problem is that the career Republicans are mean boys (and a few mean girls), occupying their own little tree house club house. And while they may have vicious squabbles amongst each other inside that tree house, their hideout remotes a closed club to outsiders. Closed even to people who may think the tree house is plenty big enough for more people, and in fact might benefit from having more people in it.
We have seen this exact same dynamic play out even down to the legislative staffers in Washington and in state capitals across America. A sense of elitist prestige and exclusive specialness. These people have spent their entire careers knitting together personal power by carving out a niche for themselves inside the bureaucratic spiderweb, and by God, they are never ever going to share that power with anyone they don’t have to share it with.
President Trump’s latest mistake is constantly weighing in on behalf of US Congressman Kevin McCarthy, a highly preened, plucked, scrubbed, and unprincipled careerist from California who desires to be the next Speaker of the US House. We can see by now, after seven failed votes among US House members, that McCarthy obsesses over and craves the Speaker’s gavel and office like various brainwashed victims in The Lord of The Rings who are caught caressing The One Ring and calling it “My precious.”
McCarthy even moved into the Speaker’s office despite not actually being elected Speaker!
Anyhow, President Trump. What a window into his mind this endorsement business has been, this public craving of his to be accepted into the mean boy RINO club, or at least to be publicly valued and acknowledged by the RINOs. It is why he keeps giving them unearned endorsements. And he knows that even if he helps McCarthy prevail and become Speaker, he will still be ignored and cast off afterwards. It is like Trump is so loyal, and so earnest, that he simply cannot fathom the treachery and selfishness endemic to career politicians like McCarthy and McConnell.
No, President Trump, these careerist jerks will never change. Stop thinking they will.
The good news is that a cool black guy, Byron Donalds, got the most dissident votes for Speaker today. Smart, articulate, brave Byron Donalds is exactly what the Republican Party needs from top to bottom. But the bad news is that instead of grooming Donalds for future leadership, the so-called “leaders” of the House Republicans (Scalise, McCarthy) are running around twisting arms and trying to hurt and threaten fellow House members for not supporting McCarthy for Speaker.
Kind of interesting how this mean boys club works. It is almost like it doesn’t matter which political party these people are in, at the end of the day they are all the same: Mean, coercive, uninterested in listening to people who disagree with them, unwilling to negotiate a settlement, and vicious. They never back down no matter how much people reject them, they are always selfish and demand that we all acknowledge their selfishness and reward it. In short, McCarthy et al are gross yucky people. Not nice.
President Trump, this is not your fight and these are not your people. Forget about it, let this play out without your participation. You can’t win here, no matter what you do. You are not a career-long mean boy and you don’t belong in this squabble.
Kevin McCarthy is an evil DC swamp thing
Congressman Kevin McCarthy is a corrupt career politician from the Marxist state of California. To be a Republican from California in 2023, you would by necessity have to be really slimy and corrupt. McCarthy has been in Washington DC for a long time, and his ties to the evil DC Swamp run long and deep. Heck, just look at his shielded face, his hooded eyes. You can easily read McCarthy’s crookedness by his outward facial appearance and body language. In fact, he has a lot of Justin Trudeau’s same body language going on (Canada). And Gavin Newsom’s for that matter (California governor).
These people above all share a common lust for power and control that overrides elementary human decency and empathy. Anyone who wants that much control should never be allowed to have it, and yet, if McCarthy becomes the next Speaker of the US House, then he will have it.
My congressman, Scott Perry, has been wonderfully vocal about McCarthy’s cozy relationship with the DC Swamp, and how McCarthy refuses to make commitments to transparency and accountability that would change the way Washington DC spends our taxpayer money. Thank you, Congressman Perry.
What is really amazing is how weak willed and sycophantic most elected congresspeople are. They each want power and control so badly that they fall all over themselves to elect someone dirty like McCarthy. The people supporting McCarthy for Speaker are not conservatives, they are career politicians in search of wealth and power through a public service job. And this list of lame-os now includes Marjorie Taylor Greene, a freshman congresswoman who has raised hell with Washington DC criminality since the day she arrived.
How did fake Republican Liz Cheney go to Congress for just six years at an annual $175,000 salary, and emerge as a multimillionaire? What kinds of illegal, unethical, anti-citizen, anti-America back-room deals did she make to earn that kind of wealth? And it’s not just Liz Cheney, it is the vast majority of the elected officials in Washington that use their official office for personal gain.
Yuck!
So here we are today with RINO Rep. Kevin McCarthy trying to gain the speakership at all costs and with no commitments to advancing Republican values like good government, limited government, accountable government and public employees. I wonder if USA arch enemy China has purchased McCarthy like a sack of potatoes, too.
Like a lot of Americans, I am fed up with the political parties. They do not interest me, because it’s like watching two criminal gangs fight each other. The citizens lose no matter which gang is in charge. What does interest me is limited government, transparent government, accountable government.
Like: Why the hell is the IRS now empowered to track our $600.00 (six hundred Dollar) purchases and incomes, along with enormous destruction of our individual constitutional rights, but We The People have zero control or information over how the federal government, like its IRS, spends OUR money?
Kevin McCarthy is an evil DC Swamp Thing. He cannot be Speaker, and if he does become Speaker through the weakness of most GOP congresscritters, then America is done for, because he will protect the DC Swamp from being changed or challenged or held accountable. And America will never have another opportunity after this Congress to hold DC accountable.
Happy 2023, friends
May all of us enjoy a 2023 far better than what we saw in 2022: Record inflation led by unnecessarily high energy costs caused by anti America policies in Washington DC, a federal bureaucracy out of control and at war with and not answering to the citizens who own it, and a cracking and fracturing of our unique American culture under the nonstop assault of anti America woke PC politics.
Twitter Files revealed an enormous and illegal government censorship of citizens that has violated the First Amendment of our Constitution.
May 2023 be the year the American citizen reclaims his government and borders. God bless America and God bless our citizens. Have a happy, healthy and prosperous 2023, friends.
Everything covid-climate-elections is settled, OK?
The dominant theme emerging from just about everything associated with one political party and its leftist allies is that everything they demand and want and pass and promote requires me and you to give up our rights, our freedoms, our choices, our privacy, our money. I cannot think of one Democrat Party legislative bill that isn’t prying into my private life and into my bank account, and taking things away from me. All with massive government coercive force and harsh penalties for even trying to resist or even question their government enforcers.
The other theme that has emerged from the blatantly stolen elections in 2020 and in Pennsylvania and Arizona in 2022 is the same theme we have been told by the Left about Covid and human caused “climate change” – the “science” is settled, the votes are settled, and the questions about any of these are settled. Now sit the hell down and do what we tell you.
Questioning elections, lockdowns, climate change is not permitted. That is the official message government employees tell us and that the mainstream establishment legacy media repeat unquestioningly like parrots.
Even while more and more evidence is being presented through non-traditional channels about how the American government response to Covid, with the destructive lockdowns, silly useless masks, and the murderous injections, was not guided by science of any sort. Rather, government’s response to Covid was to use it to implement a destructive political agenda of control, control, control. No science at all. But Dr. Mengele Fauci kept telling us to trust the science and that his ever changing decisions were the science. The unassailable technocratic science that we should all bow down to, and that we now see was absolute rubbish.
Climate change has been stuck in the same static claim of “the science is settled” since the 1980s, when there was literally zero science about climate. That was just a political agenda claim, not a scientific one. And since the 1980s a pile of work has been done on climate, but most of it has been political narrative, and bullying, and censorship, not real scientific work and progress. What science has been done has been mostly statistical, and based on blatantly manipulated data sets from the poorest possible data sources. E.g. the laughable “sea ice is melting” data even as ships cannot get through the intense sea ice that has in fact not melted, and the easily disprovable “increasingly catastrophic storms” lie. In other words, climate change is still not science two and three decades later, after the original “the science is settled” hoax.
But we are supposed to accept it and shut up.
Now we see elections across America fraught with incredible and blatant fraud. Ballots dumped into counting centers that don’t pass the basic ballot verifications, like matching signature checks, and the ballots all have blatantly mismatched signatures. Hundreds of thousands of these fraudulent ballots in Arizona and Pennsylvania. Mail in ballots are a huge path to election fraud and it is how so many elections are being claimed by….who else but Democrat Party candidates. And don’t you dare challenge them! The science of vote counting is settled and you had better just shut up!
Now we learn from the Twitter Files expose that the federal government, namely the FBI and the DHS, illegally mis-spent millions of our own tax dollars to pay Twitter staff to censor Americans who were telling the truth about Covid, about climate change, and about fraudulent elections. Our own American government has been spending boatloads of our own taxpayer money to promote outright lies and to prevent the truth from even being told. Yes this horrible behavior is illegal and evil and corrupt and unimaginable in a democratic nation. But because it benefited just one political party and its ideological allies, the mainstream media is almost silent about it.
Have you heard about these Twitter Files? You know, the internal documents and communications that reveal Twitter to be a corrupt FBI front organization designed to tell misinformation and lies to the American people, and to manipulate our votes and the information our votes are based on? Truly evil shit.
And it’s not just Twitter, but YouTube, Google, and Facebook, and Instagram.
No one has a crystal ball and no one can predict how human events will unfold and play out. But a lot of Americans are now beginning to have their eyes opened up. The consequences of all the government staffers engaged in criminal behavior and criminal acts have yet to be revealed, but there must be consequences for what we already now know. If no FBI staff are fired and put in jail over this, if no DHS staff are fired and jailed over this, then America as a free country run by The People – you and me – is dead. It is over. Voting is a meaningless charade.
Because the federal employees engaged in these criminal acts are not being held accountable, and then the rule of law is over and the government is despotic. The opposite of how and why America was founded.
And then We, The People have only our own Declaration of Independence remaining to guide our next actions:
“We hold these truths to be self evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles, organizing its Powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness…”
…and there is more about a long train of government abuses of The People, government usurpations of the People’s powers, government employee despotism against citizens like the J6ers being held in the Washington DC gulag, etc.
In other words, if there is no accountability, then The People of America can and should, even must rise up and take back their own government from usurpers and thieves. No matter what this takes, by any means necessary, whatever the cost.
Google and YouTube are trying their darnedest to censor and suppress this newspaper. But under Elon Musk’s ownership Twitter is allowing it to be debated, and read. Pfizer and the Democrat Party knowingly killed a lot of innocent, vulnerable people for financial gain…
SBF arrest timed to block his testimony
How many high crimes can one political party commit before people say “Enough already!”?
As if it wasn’t enough to have Sam Bankman-Fried (“SBF”) create, run, and crash FTX, thereby losing billions of dollars of Americans’ personal savings and retirements funds, now we see the evidence that FTX was actually a Democrat Party fundraising machine from the very beginning. Its entire purpose seems to have been to funnel enormous illegal donations to Democrat Party candidates and their allies.
But SBF was arrested the other day, just one day before he was scheduled to appear before the US Congress to answer questions about FTX. Now that he is arrested and in jail, conveniently charged by the Biden Administration with all kinds of financial crimes (that he did because the same exact people (like SEC chairman Gary Gensler) now charging him enabled him to do it in the first place), SBF cannot and won’t answer any questions. We will never know what he was thinking when he set up FTX with all kinds of help from people now running the Biden Administration.
Kind of interesting how this works, don’t you think?
And I think it’s rotten, too. America is being utterly raped in every way – financially, culturally, economically – right in front of our faces. And nobody does anything about it. The same perpetrators just keep on perpetrating.
Will DNC repay SBF illegal donations?
Sam Bankman-Fried (“SBF”), the badly misnamed would-be crypto Ponzi schemer who now will not be freed by the Bahamian court because he is a flight risk, was arrested two days ago because of his many criminal financial acts. Among the many criminal acts with which he is being charged are the tens of millions of stolen dollars he illegally donated to Democrat Party politicians.
SBF bypassed all kinds of well known and highly placarded legal restrictions on political donations so that he could be the number two largest donor to the Democrat Party. He was only slightly behind international villain George Soros, who reportedly donated about $40 million to Democrat Party candidates and causes in 2021.
SBF made his mega political contributions despite knowing that his Ponzi scheme FTX company was going down the drain. And many of his recipients accepted the tainted donations, despite knowing that the money was dirty and that something was gravely amiss with the baby-faced kid who had never made an honest dime in his young life, but who was now slinging mega cash like chipped beef hash at a greasy spoon diner.
And yes, SBF accepted all of the public accolades, speaking opportunities, awards, and mainstream media interviews even while he knew that FTX was dying and would soon be declaring bankruptcy. Sam Bankman-Fried is not just a criminal liar and evil destroyer of people’s hard-won savings and retirement funds, he is the extremely disappointing heir to a 3,000-year legacy of telling the truth, being straight in your business dealings, and living a clean and blameless life. It amazes a lot of people how so many of SBF’s ethnic kin have also recently fallen down on the job #1 of being a Light Unto The Nations, and instead traded in their inspiring religious heritage for a “mess of bank-note colored pottage.”
The danger SBF and his fellow financial rapists pose to the rest of the otherwise blameless members of the tribe is huge. SBF’s victims will be many for a long time to come, not just financial but also people who had absolutely nothing to do with him in any way. Such is the judgment received; as unfair as it is, so has it always been. What a huge piece of sh*t SBF is, as are those who enabled him in the first place.
What is intriguing is whether or not the Democrat Party will repay its ill-gotten gains blood money from SBF. Will the illegally donated money be given back to SBF’s creditors, so that they might be made whole? That would be the right thing to do.
*apparently Sam Bankman-Fried donated to some RINO Republican candidates, people who make a career-long living working hand-in-glove with the Democrat Party. To the working American taxpayer citizen, there isn’t a hill of beans difference between these RINOs and their chums the Democrats. Practically speaking, SBF’s political donations were 100% made to people who are either directly implementing the Democrat Party’s Marxist agenda, or who are enabling its implementation.
Samuel Bankman-Fried in handcuffs in custody of the Bahamas police. Soon to be extradited to America, this pasty faced, pudgy piece of crap deserves to spend the rest of his grotesque life behind bars for the incredible damage he has done
President Trump, a black guy, a Hispanic guy, and a Jewish guy go into a bar
Two weeks ago, if someone had posted a “news” headline that involved President Trump, a black guy, a Hispanic guy, and a Jewish guy having dinner, it would have sounded like one of the old time ethnic jokes that were once so refreshingly popular among Americans of different ethnic backgrounds.
One of the old strengths of America back when it was America were both its diverse workers and their enjoyment at laughing at themselves and their own peculiar ethnic foibles. They did not take themselves so seriously that someone could not make fun of them, so long as they could give it right back in equal measure. This form of humor was a great cultural leveler and communal uniter of universal American identity among people from all over the world.
Well, this headline really did happen, and the real joke is what a ridiculous outcome it has spawned. It is the Russia collusion hoax, Alexander Vindman Ukraine call hoax, serial liar Adam Schiff hoax all rolled into one brief dinner.
Yes, it is true that President Trump recently had dinner at his Mar-A-Lago FBI resort and spa with entertainer Kanye West and some guy named Fuentes, who tagged along unannounced with West. I still have not bothered to research this Fuentes (Nick Fuentes?) guy, but people in the mainstream media claim he is a “white supremacist,” while he replies that he is an American Christian, or a Christian American.
While I do not know Fuentes, I do know the mainstream media, and I know that they lie constantly, and so I am going to discount what they say about Fuentes. He is probably just a right wing guy who loves a constitutional America, and right there the mainstream media begin to boo and hiss. We will address Fuentes later, but for now, he is a tag-along uninvited dinner guest whom President Trump is too gracious to eject at his doorway, simply because he does not know the guy.
Let us get a couple life rules re-established here:
a) Americans of all backgrounds should be having dinner with each other and talking about whatever regularly, even if they disagree on some things or most things or all things. Talking, arguing, even…debating…are at the core of being an American. There are no sacred cows here. But somehow Americans have become allergic to debate. They would rather just push the little buttons on their smart phones and fire barrages of digital nuclear missiles at other people, which is weak bullshit. Talk it out, people, in person.
b) Americans should remember what it was like to have old friends drop by and bring along an uninvited cousin or buddy at dinner time. This is an American tradition as old as dirt, and yet, I don’t think Americans actually have dinner any more, certainly not together as a family around a table, and not at 6pm dinner time, and certainly not with unannounced guests and strangers. Nope, Americans are now too shielded from the outside world, and too busy looking inward and handward to have dinner or discourses in person any longer. Fakebook and Twitter and whatever else other vacuous social media nonsense has taken up all the space in our lives, including our family dinner time. For shame for shame for shame.
So, President Trump lives by the old American culture rules of having dinner with someone who asks to come over, and who then brings his awkward buddy along. Good for President Trump, a confident gentleman and a thinker. Just his willingness to have dinner with Kanye West reinvigorates my respect for my president, Donald J. Trump. Especially because West was in the process of being socially canceled, and President Trump could have easily just rejected him like the social plague he carried.
But again, President Trump is way too much of an awesome all-American guy to just reject people he has known for a long time, and especially someone who had supported him politically. Trump is no typical fair weather friend politician, and he let Kanye West in the door to have dinner, along with Kanye’s unknown pal.
So why is Kanye West suddenly now such a no-no canceled non-person, after being THE person who embodied modern American culture for so many years? Uh oh, yup, you know he did it: Kanye said BOO BOO WORDS! Yes, it is true, West was dumb enough…or vexed enough… to post publicly on social media his mixed admiration combined with envy and frustrated disbelief at the material success of so many American Jews…and a lot of frustration at the negative effect so many liberal American Jews seem to be having on everything around them, politics and culture.
Like serial rapist and big Democrat Party donor Harvey “Hollywood” Weinstein, Pedophile In Chief and big Democrat Party donor Jeffrey Epstein (who did not kill himself in jail), and crypto currency Ponzi scheme master and destroyer of Americans’ retirement accounts Huge Democrat Party Donor aka SBF Sam Bankman-Fried (yes his name really is Bankman, go ahead antisemites and rejoice along with the easily humored)…I am sure I have missed a few about whom Kanye is fretting.
Folks, we have to be able to have discussions about politics and culture again. Even about uncomfortable subjects, like why such a small minority of people fields so many wonderfully positive overachievers and so many recent evil supervillians like, oh yeah, Larry Fink at BlackRock. These discussions must happen in the open, around dinner tables, on back patios, at Mar-A-Lago, at hunting camp, among friends and political enemies, between cousins who disagree on politics and between neighbors who see life differently.
Because the alternative to transparent sunshine is that nasty things grow and fester in the dark. And yes, these nasty things are growing and festering. I am seeing it more and more. You cannot ignore it away, and you cannot wish it away, and you cannot cancel it away. The more you try these infantile efforts, the more it grows in the dark. Only sunshine will disinfect it.
The only people who want to socially cancel Kanye West and to illegitimately stigmatize President Trump for having dinner with West (and Fuentes) are people who want to control everything that you and I say and write and think and do, and how we live and what we drive and what is in our bank account and what we eat and what we read. These are not good people; they are bad people. Controlling people are always bad people.
It is a telling hypocrisy that these same people hating West and Trump never tried to cancel or stigmatize their evil messiah, Barak Hussein Obama, for being personally chummy with raving racists and Jew-haters Al Sharpton, Jeremiah Wright, and Louis Farrakhan. That is because they like what Obama says, and does. Trump is a savior of America and the West, while Obama is the evil angel destroyer of America and the free West.
As a result of this Kanye West-Fuentes BS, I now still and ever more strongly stand with my president, President Donald J. Trump. Not because I am blindly loyal to Trump, but simply because he is the only person who stands between a living Western Civilization and the whole thing going over the edge of oblivion, an edge on which we now precariously teeter.
The Kanye West thing is just another ridiculous distraction to what is really at stake.
And do you know who the Jewish guy was at their dinner? All of Trump’s Jewish family members, that’s who. They of his blood and who are always present in President Trump’s heart and mind, and whom he would never forget or sell out. They were at that table, too. Trump brought them to dinner, as well.
We are in a war for our civilization, people. Pick a side and stand firmly on it. I have carefully picked mine. It is the side of personal freedom and liberty, free markets, sunshine, family, open doors, friendship, and America.
And President Trump.
Evil angel Obama chumming it up with racist and Jew hater Louis Farrakhan in 2005. Why aren’t people stigmatizing or canceling Obama?
Advice from a deer
As sure as the sun rises, there is sure to be complaining among hunters about the state, condition, blood pressure, and dental hygiene of Pennsylvania’s deer herd. In fact, you can’t escape the topic if you spend any time, like even a minute or two, in the company of devoted hunters. No matter who I am standing around, next to, or in line with, the complaints begin to flow about the Pennsylvania Game Commission and its deer management.
Despite being highly skeptical about government in general, and therefore despite keeping an open mind to complaints about government failings, I find myself repeatedly unpersuaded by these deer management complaints. While not quite ranking up there with UFO sightings or insistence that PGC has helicopter-imported mountain lions and coyotes to eat the deer, the fretting and nail biting and angry denunciations always seem to lack key aspects of any serious argument.
For example, for twenty years I have heard that Sproul State Forest harbors no deer. Then last year I easily killed a deer standing right at the edge of Sproul State Forest, and saw many others. This November, I hunted elk in Sproul State Forest and State Game Lands 100 in northern Centre County, and found myself endlessly surrounded by deer, from dawn until way past bed time while driving. Conventional views that these deer do not exist are easily reinforced around bar stools, but I have found them easily and quickly disproven in personal contact with the deer habitat itself.
One of the real challenges to Pennsylvania deer hunters is the change in deer herd size and behavior since 2001, as well as the maturing of our forests since the 1970s, when a lot of today’s older hunters were really getting into the lifestyle. A hunting culture based on sitting in one place and watching unsustainably sized deer herds migrate by resulted, and now that most rural deer herds have been lowered, just sitting and waiting is not enough. Especially when the mature forests we now experience are devoid of any acorns for the second year in a row.
In 2021 a late frost killed the oak flowers in northern PA, resulting in no acorns up north and spotty acorn crops in the south. In 2022, rampant gypsy moth infestations across the entire state denuded entire oak forests of every leaf and flower, which has again resulted in zero acorn production across a great deal of Pennsylvania’s forests. If you are inclined to blame people for things that are mostly out of people’s control, then I suppose we can point out that PA DCNR seemed to hold back on gypsy moth spraying in 2021 and 2022. Had DCNR sprayed more, then the state-wide acorn crop failure we now behold probably would not have been as bad.
The fact is that a great many of us started sitting or walking in beautiful mature forests this past Saturday or Sunday as PA’s deer rifle season opened up, and found ourselves marveling at the incredible silence greeting us. Hardly any bird activity. Maybe one squirrel seen all day, and certainly no bears and few if any deer. This is the result of there being nothing for anyone to eat in the woods.
So, unless your woods escaped gypsy moth damage and has acorns, get the heck out of the woods and go find brushy and grassy areas where deer can browse. Utility rights-of-way and clearcuts are the best places to find deer this season, and in fact the only person I know of who killed a deer anywhere near me yesterday (Sunday) was an older guy in a deer drive through a beautifully overgrown overhead powerline right of way. His hunting party also reported seeing eight does with the now deceased buck, none of which they shot.
Yesterday, while I was sitting miserably sick in my covered stand and waiting out the miserable cold rain and wind, a deer in a top hat and silk gloves happened by and gave me the following advice:
In general, access your hunting area well before sunrise and start every deer hunt with a quiet Sit from 6:30-9am, overlooking some promising travel corridor, funnel, or feeding area. Then slowly and quietly Still Hunt into the wind or quartering into the wind until lunch time. Then Sit down and eat lunch quietly, while overlooking some promising location through which wildlife regularly pass or eat. At 1pm pack up the lunch stuff and Still Hunt again slowly until 3:30pm, and then find a good spot with good views and shooting lanes and Sit quietly until 15 minutes before shooting light ends. Then slowly and quietly walk out, and maybe kill something on your way back to your vehicle or camp, only unloading your firearm when shooting hours have officially ended.
I myself am about to suit up for a long and slow stalk through some brushy utility rights of way. Yes, they are now wet, and always steep, and the going is tough. But that is where the deer are, because that is where they can eat and survive, and I am hunting deer so that I might actually kill one.
The deer and I must meet in person in order for this transaction to happen.
As much as a covered hunting blind may be a necessity when the hunter is sick or the rain is pouring down, the fact is this not really hunting. Slowly and quietly walking into the wind through good deer habitat with your firearm at the ready is real hunting. Do it.
PA elk & bear seasons now behind us
You can spend all year excitedly anticipating a few days here or there, and before you know it, those days arrive, they happen intensely, and then they are over like a dream.
This dream we speak of here are the various big game seasons that are such a big part of so many peoples’ lives, entire families and communities, entire businesses (I think hunting is an annual $1.6 BILLION business sector here in Pennsylvania). Thus far we have had an elk season and now the main bear season pass along. Here are some of my thoughts on these two wonderful experiences.
First, the elk hunt.
I was fortunate enough to draw a coveted PA elk tag, after applying for many years and building up a lot of preference points. The lottery drawing was announced in late August, and I immediately began planning. The general elk season is just six days long, and unless you are going to engage a guide for a few thousand dollars, you have a lot of work to do before setting foot afield with a gun. If you draw a bull tag, paying a guide is worth it.
After a tremendous amount of analysis and planning, and some September scouting, I was fortunate to hunt for elk with some good friends and a .62-caliber percussion rifle over my shoulder in Elk Zone 13. We camped out on a log landing in Sproul State Forest, with elk all around us, and each buddy scouted hard each day, looking for elk that the sole hunter (me) could get after.
Elk Zone 13 is huge, and contains a lot of vast public land. And so the elk harvest data shows that it is a bit of a Death Valley in terms of hunters actually killing an elk within it. While a lot of Pennsylvania elk hunting takes place briefly where a lot of the local elk have pet names and are used to being around people, there are a few elk zones where the opposite is the case. Zone 13 is one of those opposite cases. It is a tough place to hunt under any conditions, and under the rainy, warm, and very windy conditions we had, it was just about impossible. In the end, just one of three bull tags there was filled, and as of the fifth day of the six day season, just one of the six cow elk tags had been filled. I was not one of those people lucky enough to fill my elk tag.
And it was not a harvest failure because we didn’t hunt smart. We hunted so smart that we were bumping into elk guides and their clients at every turn. We had done our homework ahead of time, and we knew where the elk were likely to be, which is where you will find an elk guide, too.
One of the things I did as part of the analysis and planning phase was was plot all of the past elk harvest data on the large Elk Zone 13 map the PA Game Commission sent me. Once your eyes see exactly where the elk are killed every year, almost always in large clusters, over the past seven years that Elk Zone 13 has been around, you recognize where to concentrate your field scouting efforts. And then our subsequent field scouting efforts confirmed the presence of elk, including the day before the elk hunt started.
Like I said above, the weather conditions were awful for any type of big game hunting, and especially with a primitive weapon such as I carried. My effective range was 110 yards, and 75 yards was a lot more preferable. But range doesn’t matter if you can’t get an elk to stand broadside for a few seconds. I did mix it up directly with an elk herd that was hiding in a forest, and I did call one close back to me, and I did get a couple good setups on moving elk. But the seesawing winds gave away my presence each time, and the elk stormed off each time. Like I said, I had a wonderful time with good friends in a beautiful place with a fantastic gun over my shoulder. Elk or no elk in the hunting bag, I had a great time hunting elk in Pennsylvania (an especial Thank You to the many private landowners who generously granted me access to their properties to hunt elk).
Now, bear season.
Bear season ended yesterday, and the last of the bear hunters grudgingly left the cabin today. As usual, we had a large crowd gathered here, with everyone happy to catch up with chums from years past, sharing good food and good drink and good cheer. One thing all hunters eventually begin to notice is that with age comes a mellowing of the spirit. The chase is not as important as simply being present in God’s creation, often communing with Him in the largest house of prayer anywhere, the mountain forest cathedral.
And so fewer and fewer guys are coming here to hunt, and more and more guys are here to relax. And that is OK.
We who both communed with God in the mountain forest cathedral, and who also hunted, saw no bears and only a few deer. Mostly because there are no acorns in the woods, and all wildlife must go where the food is. If there is no food here, there are no bears here. Gypsy moths devastated Pennsylvania’s oak forests this past summer, and so there were no oak flowers to turn into oak acorns to fatten up buck and bear, squirrel and turkey. The woods was totally quiet this week, and it made me wonder what a squirrel migration looks like. Do hordes of mountain squirrels move en masse into suburban yards in lean years like this one? And where the heck do all the bears hibernate?
Roughly 1,450 bears were killed in PA’s early archery and muzzleloader seasons, and so far just under a thousand bears total are reported for this week’s bear rifle hunt. Usually this week’s four-day hunt results in an enormous bear kill. We are now looking at an epically low bear harvest in a state with a huge and burgeoning bear population that needs managing (Just a few days ago New Jersey issued an emergency bear hunt approval, because The People’s Republic of New Jersey is being overrun with bears, which unfortunately cannot be trained to eat liberals but whom the liberals recognize as a natural predator and are seeking to reduce out of self defense).
Another thought a lot of people are sharing today is that the early bear seasons, archery and muzzleloader, are very effective, so that come the late November bear season, there are a lot fewer bears to be had. Bears that are facing both extreme hunger AND extreme hunting pressure will den up early to get out of the storm. It seems a lot of the bears that survived the early seasons arrived in a bleak foodless November and said an early good night until March, 2023.
Next up is deer season, another dream time. And our deer patterns are also all off kilter here, so it is going to be a very interesting deer hunt in the mountains. Again, it’s no acorns, no deer. Except for that one gigantic buck I saw a couple times….stay tuned for that report. Let’s hope it makes up for the no elk and no bear reports we already filed away for 2022…
An 1884 double rifle made for tigers in India would be great bear medicine. If only a bear would appear.
This remote old mine is one of dozens that dot our mountains. It is a fine place to hunt, take a nap, or write in a notebook. A couple times I have done all three in one visit.
Camped with friends on an old log landing in the Sproul State Forest is a wonderful way to spend life’s limited time, elk or no elk in the bag.
A great way to spend a day hunting elk, with a beautiful .62 caliber rifle (not a smoothbore) made by Mark Wheland here in PA. With its 335-grain round ball, it is easily capable of cleanly taking a hearty elk.