Welp, it’s the GOP vs. The People, again
Here in Pennsylvania, we have the annual GOP Stomp On The Little People Event happening again.
Mimicking the failed and useless PA GOP, which is pretty much a reflection of the failed and useless Ronna McDaniel and her ridiculous RNC, yesterday in Dauphin County and elsewhere across our Commonwealth was the county candidate endorsement meeting, where county committee people meet to endorse registered Republicans running for office.
Even before the ballot petition process has started.
Even before we know which candidates are going to be on the ballot and available to the voters.
Even before all the candidates have had an opportunity to present themselves for consideration to elected committee people and political activists.
In other words, this endorsement process is a charade designed to keep ironfisted authoritarian control over the choices available to voters.
If the GOP is wondering why so many people, so many voters, so many political activists are jaded and fed up with the Republican Party and elected Republicans, they might consider how the GOP treats said people, said voters, said activists, much less the Republican candidates, all of whom are Republicans because they believe in freedom.
One of the best ways the GOP shows its disdain and elitist mistrust of the great unwashed Republican Party masses is this endorsement process. Its endorsement process is 100% inside baseball, ultra insular, ultra inward looking. The party endorsement process is designed to keep the GOPe (Republican Establishment) in control of everything, including the usual milquetoast do-nothing stand-for-nothing empty suits who populate the Republican Establishment and its constellation of interest groups.
The Democrat Party is much better at this dance than the GOPe. The Democrats have made a science of both maintaining control of their base and also simultaneously giving a long leash to their base while feeding them plenty of red meat. It is a remarkable and terrifying feature of the Democrat Party that they are now so similar to how the German Nazi Party operated. They are way way ahead of the GOP, and it is no compliment to say that the GOP is unlike the Democrat Party.
The artless GOPe is both hamfisted and snobby, and so it finds itself with an ever shrinking sphere of influence. Its voters are in ever increasing revolt against their own political party.
Take for example the PAGOP’s fake “unanimous” endorsement of globalist RINO and tourist candidate for US Senate, Dave McCormick, whose leftist wife Dina Powell is up to her eyeballs in shoveling illegal immigrants into America.
Dave McCormick and his elitist leftist wife bear no resemblance to the Republican voter base. These two are everything that is wrong with the Republican Party establishment, with the GOPe, with American politics in general. Dave McCormick may have grown up as a tree farmer in central PA, but he long ago threw away those good values not just when he moved to Connecticut, but when he ran a New York City hedge fund and made his millions. Hedge funds operate by betting against and working against what is good for America, good for Americans, good for American workers and good for American companies. This makes Dave McCormick no good for America.
McCormick has an opponent. Her name is Brandi Tomasetti, and she lives in Lancaster County. Brandi is a study in contrast with Dave McCormick: She believes in America and wants to put America first, she is concerned about election integrity, she is concerned about the lawless flood of millions of illegal immigrants into our nation.
I spent about an hour and a half on the phone with her the other day, and I offered her as much help as I can provide in her effort to get on the ballot so she can challenge McCormick.
Brandi told me that she has been overwhelmed with an outpouring of offers of help, from Republican voters fed up with the GOPe and with the Dave McCormicks and the PAGOPs and the Dauphin GOPs and the games, the elitist attitudes, the constant resulting GOP establishment failure. I hope everyone who reads this essay contacts Brandi and helps her out.
First things first: In the next few weeks Brandi Tomasetti must get enough signatures to get on the ballot. She needs registered Republican voters to circulate ballot petitions for her. Hope you can help.
Why the GOP met to endorse Dave McCormick before ever considering Brandi Tomasetti, or any other potential candidates for that matter, is not a mystery. Rather, it is a sordid and pathetic story of insider elitist people lusting for power and control, and lusting for dirty money from democratic representational politics, and this crap is absolutely killing America. And they don’t care.
Put America first and help Brandi Tomasetti get on the ballot and beat the damned GOPe.
Some wonderful people gone
Jokes abound about aging, and quite a few are about those friends and family members who do not age with us, but who leave us all as we continue our own trajectory. Well, I am now definitely in the “aging” category and I am increasingly surrounded by people I enjoy and love who suddenly depart from this life. Recently two people here in Pennsylvania have left us all, and moved on to the spirit world, who I would like to mention. And it’s no joke, this dying thing. No matter what age a person is when they depart this life for the next, there is nothing funny about it.
Except maybe the last day on earth of European-Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, whose wild and often debauched Marxist Bohemian lifestyle made for intriguing movies and books. While some or maybe even a lot of the facts of Frida’s life may be funny depending upon the person considering them, her actual physical departure from this planet really is funny. I think.
After Frida died relatively young from cancer, or whatever it is that eventually afflicts the heavily debauched, her friends had her corpse dressed beautifully in her most customary colorful and flamboyant way, and prepared themselves all for a formal cremation send-off party in whatever crematory was present in Mexico City at the time. Her friends gathered in the crematory room while Frida’s corpse was ceremoniously loaded into the burn chamber, and as the roaring natural gas flames came to life, they all raised their glasses and toasted Frida.
And then the room erupted in gasps, cries, and people running for the exits, because suddenly Frida’s corpse stiffly bent at the waist, sat up, and made a wicked grin as her abundant hair caught on fire and created a demonic flaming halo around her yet untouched face. She wasn’t actually gone!
Yes, this was all her body’s muscular reaction to the sudden burst of 2,000-degree heat enveloping it, but apparently if you knew Frida, you kind of didn’t expect her to just die, you know, lie still and never move again. And indeed, she had lived up to all the hype about her, even while lying quite dead in the cremation chamber. I think this true story is funny, even though I did not know Frida and was not present at her cremation.
What is not funny and yet is not unexpected is the recent departure of Jim Brett, of Lenhartsville, PA, which for our geographically challenged readers is just north of I-78 and just south of Blue Mountain in Berks County, PA. Still confused where Lenhartsville, PA, is? OK, yes, it is the equivalent of East Succotash, PA, Nowheresville, PA, etc., and it is just about next to Hawk Mountain, the internationally famous sanctuary devoted to conserving birds of prey, especially on their annual migration south. There, solved this location question for you.
Hawk Mountain started as a simple land purchase to keep the shotgunners from standing on Blue Mountain’s highest Tuscarora sandstone boulder ridgetop and mindlessly swatting down out of the sky nearly every raptor that flew by on its way to South America. And in short order, more land purchases were added to what is now called the Kittatinny Ridge migration corridor. Hawk Mountain eventually became an educational organization and a destination for birders.
In the 1930s, birds of prey (hawks, owls, eagles, kites, vultures) were considered pestilential nuisances to farmers’ chickens and the rabbits and pheasants hunters enjoyed pursuing. In time, around the 1930s, raptors gradually became understood by some Americans as an important part of a healthy and properly functioning ecosystem, just as balanced populations of wolves, bears, mountain lions, bobcats and fishers have been subsequently understood today.
Hawk Mountain is now the world’s oldest continuously functioning conservation organization, but from 1934 to 1966 it was kind of a hidden gem, a hole in the wall of Blue Mountain that only certain initiates knew about or appreciated. It became much better known and more widely appreciated and much visited after Jim Brett became its second “curator,” as the chief executive position there is uniquely called.
As its leader, Jim Brett elevated Hawk Mountain to international status, built lots of buildings, hired lots of staff, attracted a lot of visitors, raised a lot of money, and he became a leading voice in bird conservation around our little blue and green planet.
On the outside, Jim Brett was a colorful Irishman, full of naughty jokes and a singular ability to imbibe liberally (often of his own make) and then hold forth to a captivated audience about biological and ecological science. But because Jim’s mother was Jewish, he had a separate interest in Israel, which, because it sits on a physical crossroads, is a lot like Blue Mountain. Israel is a birding Mecca.
A “sh*t ton” as Jim would say of raptors, storks, and other incredible and rare bird populations migrate through Israel, and Jim made their conservation from one end of their migration to the other one of his life’s missions. His Jewish half worked well with the Israelis, and his Irish half worked very well with the surrounding populations. One of his crowning achievements was working with Yossi Leshem to resolve bird strikes on Israeli fighter jets.
By finding ways to greatly reduce large rare birds being suddenly introduced to fighter jets at 1,000 mph, Yossi Leshem & Co. were able to save the lives of said rare birds, said giant titanium war eagles, and unsaid but implied young fighter pilots. It really was one of the great wild birds-living-with-modern-humans conservation success stories.
I met Jim Brett in 1998, when I had started working at PA DCNR in Harrisburg (having fled the corrupt and destructive US EPA in Washington DC). He was giving a presentation at an environmental and conservation education conference in Harrisburg, PA, and as the DCNR director of said polysyllabic educational field, it was my duty to both speak and to listen. Jim was standing up on the stage showing ancient stone tool artifacts and explaining the nexus between primitive hunter-gatherer lifestyles and the conservation or decimation of wildlife. I was hooked immediately.
Jim and I maintained a close personal and professional relationship until Fall, 2009, when I ran in a congressional primary (I was prompted to run by the devoutly corrupt and evil Manchurian Candidate Barack Hussein Obama, then president for nine months). My expressing my long quietly held political views educated not just Jim, but a sh*t ton of my “friends” and fellow conservationists alike about my true self. Gasp. Turned out that Jim did not know how conservative I was, and I did not know how liberal Jim was, and despite my desire to remain close, Jim had a hard time with it.
After 2009, our relationship involved less and less personal time, and fewer phone calls. I still have a generous gift that Jim gave me, which I occasionally take out and look at, admire, and then put it back in its safe place.
Jim and I stayed in touch through mutual friends for many years, including those who went on his African safaris he led. I can still recall Jim describing the funeral rite for a young son of a Maasai tribal leader, which he witnessed some time in the 1980s, I think: The boy’s body was ritually washed and then slathered in lamb fat, then put in the chieftain’s hut. The entire village was then evacuated and moved to an entirely new location, where a new settlement would be constructed. After the hyenas had entered the old village and consumed the boy’s body, the entire place was torched and left to become natural ecosystem thereafter.
Jim’s bright blue eyes flashed as he told this story, as indeed one would expect from someone so in tune with the endless hidden vibrations of our magical natural world. Though I know his spirit is now soaring with the majestic raptors, I doubt Jim’s liver will ever go the way of the hyena, Frida, or any mortal flesh for that matter. His official obituaries are here and here.
A second loss is someone I knew less closely, but with whom I shared a great deal in common and with whom I filled my buck tag this season: Phil Benner of Liberty, PA.
Until he unexpectedly died of Covid several days ago, the incredibly physically fit Phil Benner was a devoted father, a devoted husband, a devoted brother, a devoted uncle, a devoted son. He was a hard working small business owner, a risk-taking entrepreneur, and a pastor who saw God and felt Him deeply in the natural world around him, including the leaves rustling in the winter tree branches, and the quiet tinklebell sound of a small mountain stream’s clear waters falling over boulders. He appreciated everything and took nothing for granted.
Not only will I miss Phil Benner, the world will miss Phil Benner, because the world needs a billion more gentle, charitable, loving, devoted, kind, tolerant, peaceful Phil Benners. His loss is huge.
Phil Benner showing his son Nate how to remove a buck’s head with a large and sharp hunting knife
Phil Benner and his son Nate with a large bodied six point buck taken in Pine Creek Valley in late November, 2023
What would MLK say today?
Today is Martin Luther King Day. It’s one of just three days in America named for a person, and MLK earned that recognition. The guy was a force of nature and achieved a lot of healing and correction of injustice that America needed in order to live up to its full promise.
But it is a curious thing, now. What would MLK say today about race relations, voting rights for blacks, and the advancement of racial equality, the things he risked and sacrificed so much to achieve?
Obviously so many things have improved since MLK’s most active times, the early 1960s. Voting rights for blacks and other minorities are no longer a question, in terms of accessing polling areas and casting a vote in person. And racial equality is beyond a success, with blacks and most other minorities receiving enormous advantages in job hiring and college enrollment. In business, all minorities are doing fantastic, with the sky being the limit to what someone can achieve, if they but want it.
These are all wins for minority rights in America, and we can rest assured MLK would be proud of these achievements. There are blacks and other minorities well represented in every business sector, every level of government, etc. America has Thomas Sowell, Winsome Sears, Larry Elder, Carol Swain, and so many other roundly recognized leaders and thinkers.
And yet, even in our day of triumph, there is an evil attempt to not only pretend these achievements have not happened, but that 1960s-style and levels of racism and discrimination are still rampant and hurting minorities. Moreover, the proponents of this nonsense are promoting the message that all “white” people are bad, and racist, and inherently inferior, and worthy of experiencing severe depredations…for their skin color.
In other words, we need to be racist in order to correct racism. What would MLK say about this garbage, that flies in the face of his “content of character” test for achieving equality?
What would MLK say about the DIE business? You know, the so-called diversity, equity, and inclusion crap that is even more racist than the KKK was in 1960.
What would MLK say about NAACP President Derrick Johnson dismissing justified and well-earned criticism of brazen academic plagiarist Claudine Gay as “political theatrics advancing a White supremacist agenda“…?
And what would MLK say about black DAs Alvin Bragg, Kim Gardner, Fani Willis, and Letitia James falsely prosecuting “white” people as well as President Trump on absolute trash accusations that do not meet any real legal test? I mean, if you are a law-abiding “white” person anywhere near these four lawless DAs, you are going to flee. Run for your life. Because these people are not interested in standing up for the law, but rather illegally using it as a political and social weapon.
I think MLK would say “Whoa now, people. Do not do a disservice to what we stood for. We have come so very far, let’s not go overboard and become that which we opposed, and thereby destroy everything that has been achieved.”
And he would be right.
The man knew no hate for anyone. A real Christian
Hunter Biden is the Ouday Hussein of America?
Remember Uday Hussein?
He was the elder son of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein. Uday was known for driving around Baghdad with his bodyguards and grabbing pretty women, and young girls, off the street. Married, single, underage, pre-pubescent, it did not matter. He and his bodyguards would then take these kidnapped females back to one of his palaces or luxury hideaway homes, and rape them. Sometimes violently, sometimes fatally, but always brutal rape of an unwilling victim. And if they were released back onto the street alive, they were hurt, bruised, bloodied, humiliated, violated, emotionally scarred.
Islamic law sees no difference between a raped woman and a woman who has committed adultery, and no difference between a married woman committing adultery and an unmarried woman having consensual relations with a man. So no matter what, all of these kidnapped and raped Iraqi women were considered unclean and even worthy of death at the hands of their husbands or fathers.
However, to the credit of some of the husbands and fathers of Uday Hussein’s victims, quite a few men did protest against Uday’s evil behavior. And quite a few of them were then fed feet-first into plastic chipping machines, which have six inch steel spikes that tear recycled plastic and human bodies into shreds. Reportedly, the men fed into Uday’s plastic chippers lived for about thirty seconds, as their legs and hips provided more resistance to the spinning steel spikes than plastic would. And so Uday Hussein got two rounds of sadistic pleasure out of some victims, both the female he raped and then the horrific torture-murder their father or husband.
No one is alleging that Hunter Biden has fed anyone into wood chippers or plastic chippers. Nor has anyone yet alleged that Hunter Biden kidnapped females in any country. However, Hunter Biden has been photographed, usually by his own hand, lying naked in bed with clearly underage female children who are also disrobed. These are child prostitutes, available to people like Hunter Biden and Jeffrey Epstein’s friends and clients, and yet illegal in America and loathed by all normal, healthy people. Not only because child prostitutes are too young to make a life-altering decision like this, but because every single one of them has been sex trafficked and kidnapped and raped.
When Hunter Biden has sex with a child prostitute, he is engaging in sadistic child rape. That is a fact. It doesn’t matter how much money Hunter Biden pays the child’s pimp, or how much money he gives to the child when the ordeal is ended. Rape is rape, sadism is sadism, child exploitation is child exploitation, child rape is child rape.
But what Hunter Biden and Uday Hussein share in common is an absolute immunity to being held accountable for their outrageous, illegal, immoral actions. Both of them enjoy(ed) the protection of a dictator father who protected his son with secret police (the FBI and DOJ in the USA), so that each wayward son could continue victimizing innocent people to his heart’s content. And this is also a fact, that Hunter Biden is a known child sexual predator and yet he stays overnight at the White House, receives the protection of armed USA officials as well as the protection of America’s establishment media and elected Democrat Party officials everywhere.
And it is true that many of Hunter Biden’s opponents are being violently arrested by federal police, and locked up on spurious federal charges. This is a form of kidnapping, and official terrorism.
So, it is a fair question to ask: Is Hunter Biden the Uday Hussein of America?
He is a sexual predator, like Uday.
He is protected by his father’s secret police, like Uday.
He is protected and not held accountable by the legal establishment or the media establishment, just like Uday.
I doubt plastic chippers are in the immediate future for Hunter Biden’s opponents (freedom loving Americans who want the American rule of law applied to everyone equally), but for sure the FBI Gestapo agents are working hard to inflict pain on those who even just call out Hunter’s psycho behavior. And the DOJ is protecting him, and will not arrest him for Contempt of Congress, like the DOJ arrested Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro, and other political opponents.
So, like Uday Hussein before him, spoiled brat crack smoking lawless sex predator thug Hunter Biden is now a symbol of a failed state, a dictatorship, where just being The Boss’s son is all you need to do whatever you want to almost anyone you want. And again, to all the Democrats cheering this on, remember that the American People historically have rejected this kind of corruption and favoritism. Just like the Iraqi people did.
To borrow a phrase from Iraq, to Mister Hunter Biden, may the fleas of a thousand camels infest your armpits.
The Uday Hussein of America. Hunter Biden taking a nude selfie. I will not show the photo of him in bed with the naked child, but you can easily find it if you look online
The Hunter Biden of Iraq, Uday Hussein on the left, with his father, notorious dictator Saddam Hussein, and his younger brother Qusay on the right.
A tale of two fallen icons
Two icons have fallen today, one human and one a statue of a human. One event is good, the other is bad, and both represent the radical and opposing political forces pulling America apart.
Let’s start with the human icon, that being Wayne LaPierre, the now former executive vice president of the National Rifle Association (NRA). LaPierre became a human icon by his own hand, because for many years he placed pictures of himself everywhere he could in NRA literature, publications, TV programs etc. LaPierre did everything he could as the NRA’s senior executive to make his face and name synonymous with the NRA, and in many ways, superior to the NRA name and logo.
LaPierre did not rise to icon status by virtue of his own great skill and the resulting earned adulation by NRA membership and leaders. Rather, LaPierre artificially nurtured an almost Communist Party image of “Our Great Leader” by simply shoving his own face into everything he could that the NRA put out from 1991 until last month.
This high-visibility self-promotion activity picked up after LaPierre had ousted longtime NRA-ILA lobbyist Jim Baker in 1998, then brought him back in 2011, only to oust him again in 2012, and then it picked up more after LaPierre ousted longtime NRA-ILA lobbyist Chris Cox, and then the self promotion pretty much had maxed out when LaPierre ousted short-time NRA-ILA lobbyist Jason Ouimet, and installed a grandpa used car salesman-looking guy named Randy Kozuch in 2023. Kozuch looks like Father Time and has a fixed and perpetually unnerving entre nous wink. LaPierre’s truth is crazier than any fiction we could write; you can’t make this stuff up.
In other words, LaPierre has been in a constant power struggle and self-promotion mode since becoming executive vice president, with an iron fist that served his own personal power and not the NRA membership. Not only did LaPierre spend millions of NRA members dollars on himself, his family, his wardrobe, and other trappings of a self-indulgent communist party ranking official, he plastered his likeness everywhere he could to such laughably grotesque levels in recent years that no online hunting or gun-related chatboard was free of ridicule for LaPierre.
That emperor may have been dressed in the most expensive suits, but to NRA members he had no clothes. LaPierre may have long ruled the NRA headquarters like a cruel and petty tyrant, but a lot of his own members hated his guts. LaPierre represented everything wrong in Washington DC politics. So when LaPierre announced that he was stepping down yesterday in the face of a lawsuit over his illegally spendy habit, it came as a great sense of relief to those who have the most riding on the NRA – its members and donors.
The crashing of this (false) icon to the floor and shattering into pieces is a good thing.
Pivot to the City of Brotherly Love, the cradle of American freedom, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and the National Park Service is removing the statue of William Penn from a riverfront park (ironically called Welcome Park) owned by the citizens of America and managed by the NPS. The removal of this iconic statue of the most tolerant and accepting man of the 1600s-1700s, William Penn, is destructive.
William Penn was not just some European guy, he penned the Penn Charter, which outlined many of the open minded individual rights and government duties that we find a hundred years later in America’s founding documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights. William Penn was a broad minded, open minded, tolerant, kind, generous person. He sought to financially compensate the native Indians who lived and hunted in Pennsylvania, rather than use violent force to oust them and outright take their lands.
The reason why Pennsylvania had only one Indian reservation (which was eventually violently stolen from the Cornplanter Senecas by the US Army Corps of Engineers so the agency could make a new recreational impoundment lake for happy white people to drive their motorboats in the 1960s), was that most of Pennsylvania’s Indians were bought out and firmly moved westward as the frontier moved westward. Pacifist Quaker William Penn wanted to live in harmony with the Indians in his new colony, as much as he could, and his actions showed a humane approach that was unique in that period.
So removing the iconic William Penn statue from its position at Penn’s own home is a rejection of a tangible and meaningful symbol of peaceful coexistence and reconciliation. By people who claim to be all tolerant and peaceful. It is a bad thing.
(Thankfully, it was announced late today that the NPS had “prematurely” stated that it was going to remove the William Penn statue, which is going to stay in place for the foreseeable future. Apparently public resentment about this racist decision overwhelmed the NPS and the PA state government.)
As we can see, icons come in all shapes and sizes. Some are good, some are bad, some deserve a wrecking ball and others deserve flower garlands. One thing is certain about icons, as these two icons discussed here show, they bring out tremendous political and cultural passions because of what they represent. This is why they become such useful political tools, to the detriment of The People.
Josh and Wayne LaPierre of the NRA in 2016 at the Great American Outdoor Show. See? Wayne even showed up to argue about his tenure with me eight years ago.
Happy Patriots Day
Today is January 6th, now correctly dubbed Patriots Day. Happy Patriots Day, America.
A couple of links to help Americans understand what actually happened on January 6th:
Tucker Carlson interviews someone who was at January 6th
And now the DOJ just announced that peaceful January 6th protestors like me, who broke nothing, hurt no one, attacked no one, just stood outside in front of the Capitol where we thought we were supposed to stand to lawfully protest, are going to be arrested and charged. This is pure lawless evil, and all the people standing around cheering on this evil seem not to understand that when the government gets this arbitrary and capricious, everyone will end up getting bitten by that same rabid dog.
Is DEI really gone with Claudine Gay’s departure from Harvard?
So embattled plagiarist and Mein Kontext-touting DEI diversity-hire Claudine Gay resigned from her crazy person high perch at Harvard University on New Year’s Day 2024. Good. Apparently Harvard University’s board decided that setting their reputation on fire to save this incompetent buffoon was not such a good idea.
Interesting how those “reasonable man in the street” trade-off decisions work when unfettered free market forces are at work, right? I mean, Harvard could have decided that Claudine Gay was the ultimate symbol and pinnacle of American academic achievement, notwithstanding all of her now oh-so-public failures of scholarship and loooow moral character, and then staked the school’s reputation on their choice to keep her in place forever after.
But what Harvard faced with Claudine Gay as president was receiving eternal dismissive sneers of 90% of the America that Harvard deigned to sneer at. Being on the receiving end of moral judgment and intellectual mockery is not where Harvard’s caretakers see the institution or themselves, and so they had to cut loose the anchor that was dragging them down into the depths. Bye-bye Plagiarist President Claudine Gay, you will not be missed.
Is her dismissal the sign that normal, healthy, honest, hard working, tax-paying, meritocracy-loving America has been waiting for? You know, the beginning of the end of the evil DEI (diversity, equity, inclusion) fad that bizarrely swept across America? DEI, the racist, mean spirited, violent, anti-intellectual, Neo Nazi anti-meritocracy belief system touted as the utopian solution to all of the ills that America never experienced, was what Claudine Gay represented and symbolized most. And with her sudden departure, DEI has taken a big hit.
Others are pointing out the delicious irony of Claudine Gay having in effect been “canceled,” because she, Ms. Gay, was the ultimate canceler of innocent people at Harvard. She of low quality and even lower achievement was the destroyer of their hard-earned careers and lives, and the brutal enforcer of the arbitrary and subjective standards for which DEI is best known and despised.
If Harvard University had at one time been best known for rigorous intellectual debate and achievement, and academic scrutiny, Der Fuhrer Ms. Gay took the school back to the Stone Ages with her implementation of DEI’s racism and savage cruelty. It was one way or the other, and Harvard was definitely going backwards at rocket speed under her watch.
Whether or not DEI is now on the chopping block remains to be seen. My sense is that rumors of its sudden demise because Harvard’s Wicked Witch of The East is now gone are greatly exaggerated, because if there is one thing the Left does not like doing, it is going backwards in their Long March against Western freedoms. Claudine Gay may be gone at Harvard, but look to this so-called “school” to select someone just as horrible as Ms. Gay, or even worse, to make their point that they and they alone now own Harvard.
Book review: Secrets & Science of Primitive Archery
Ryan Gill’s book, The Secrets & Science of Primitive Archery, is a must-have for all stick bow hunters. You cannot find your way in the dark without a light, and this book is the illumination every traditional and self-bow hunter needs. I don’t care how long you have been hunting with your Osage orange self-bow or even a traditional bow by a small maker. If you hunt with something that does not have training wheels, then you need this book.
I must admit that I am almost ashamed it has taken me over a YEAR to review this book. Actually almost two years. Author Ryan Gill deserves much better treatment for all the hard work he put into this book. What can I say, Ryan. America has had a lot of ups and downs since 2021, and for political watchers and commenters like me, practically every day has felt like an all-hands-on-deck. All the political stuff has taken up the blog space. I am sorry, buddy. Hopefully I finally give you and the excellent book your due here.
As a traditional archery hunter since I was about fourteen, I have been enamored of bows made of a simple stick and a string. When us kids made our own bows out of saplings we cut in our woods (fifty years ago…), we would tie on a piece of baling twine and shoot arrows made of tree branches, goldenrod, whatever we could get our hands on, and practice with what we had. As the years went past, some of us were gifted compound bows, and others got simple recurves. I got a recurve, and some pretty sorry secondhand Easton aluminum arrows, to which I attached basic Bear broadheads.
If I had a nickel for every deer I collected hair from, I would have enough to buy a malted milkshake at the Lewisburg Freeze, which was fifty cents way back when, and costs five bucks now. That is to say, I never killed a deer with a bow, but missing didn’t stop me from trying.
Fast forward and I had my own kids, all of whom enjoyed shooting little fiberglass kid bows. When the boy attained the age of about seven, he demanded a “real bow,” and so off to the Eastern Traditional Archery Rendezvous we went. There we located a nice faux curly maple kid recurve with about 20 pounds of pull. Enough to skewer a squirrel or ball up a bunny in the back yard, which the boy kept after. Many years later we would go back to ETAR to get his real Big Boy bow, a reflex-deflex by the Kilted Bowyer. At 43 pounds pull weight at 26 inches, this is a true hunting machine, pretty, yes, but in all the clean simplicity a true bow should have.
But in between the little boy bows and the last big boy bow there were a lot of experiments over the years. Saplings cut, strings attached, arrows made, trials run. Like I did when I was a kid fascinated with the basic but powerful physics of archery. And this is where Ryan Gill’s fascinating book enters the picture.
Ryan Gill came to our attention by his YouTube videos. Because we were naturally looking for information about what we were doing right and doing wrong. Ryan doesn’t just cut saplings, attach a string, and shoot some crappy home made arrows. Au contraire! Ryan makes all kinds of powerful self-bows from all kinds of different woods, including Osage orange, hickory, black locust, and others, that will kill deer, bear, wild hogs, and even huge bison. And then Ryan strings the bows with real animal gut. And then he makes real cane arrows, tipped with real flint and chert heads that he himself knapped. Talking the real deal here. And through it all in his videos and his book, Ryan explains how primitive archery really worked tens of thousands of years ago, and how it can work really well for us today.
I learned a lot from this book.
Because I am a numbers guy, Ryan’s statistical analysis of his different bows, using different strings (animal and plant fiber), using different arrow shafts (river cane, wood) etc, really speaks to me. He does a great job of tabulating his data, which, when all his testing is said and done, tells us exactly where to go: Osage orange bow stave that is dried daily, using either a modern bow string or an animal gut string, and shooting properly made river cane shafts fletched with goose feathers and tipped with the proper and surprisingly small stone arrowhead, that go at least 130 feet per second, with 150 fps or better being the best and most likely to catch an unaware deer standing flat-footed.
If you are at all a traditional or aspiring primitive archery person, you need this book. This is a must-have resource that you will find nowhere else. It has an incredible amount of fascinating and directly applicable how-to information to every step and facet of primitive and traditional archery, as well as the historic and anthropological background to how primitive archery evolved. I read it twice before I felt qualified to write about it here, and I highly recommend it.
Happy New Year, America
I think. I hope.
Decolonize Islamic Imperialism
All this mindless jibber jabber about “decolonization” in the Middle East. Please. Spare us. The biggest colonizers in the Middle East are the people implementing Islamic imperialism there. And there is no bigger symbol of Islamic imperialism than the golden dome in Jerusalem, built on top of the indigenous Jewish temple.
You want to end colonization, occupation, and imperialism? Send all of the so-called “Palestinians” back to Turkey, where they came from, and send all the Muslims back to the Arabian Peninsula, where they came from. These people are not indigenous to Israel, they are interlopers, thieves, colonizers, occupiers, imperialists.
For those hard of understanding how chronology works, the first things, the things and people and events and religions and nations that exist first, are those whose stuff appears first in the timeline. In Jerusalem, the capitol of the Jewish People for the past 3,500 years since King David selected the site, a certain golden dome is built on top of the indigenous Jewish temple. This much more recent addition to Jerusalem is the ultimate symbol of imperialism and colonization by people who do not belong there. But they have no problem claiming other people’s stuff as their own.
All the nudniks and uneducated fools blocking traffic and yelling bigoted slogans against Jews and America should take a few moments to ponder their irony. They are actually advocating for the very colonization and imperialism they say they are against. No wonder most Americans think you are idiots.
