This hemlock log shows climate change
Climate change has been a normal and natural fact of life on Planet Earth since the planet was created. Volcanoes explode and the earth warms up as a result. Glaciers that build up covered entire mountain ranges underneath, then recede and create new mountain ranges, then melt again, and their flood waters created new rivers, several times. Pennsylvania’s Pine Creek in the “PA Grand Canyon” used to flow north into the Genesee River watershed, until a huge ice dam from the last glacial period melted, broke, and caused an enormous torrent of water to flood southward. In that brief moment about ten or twelve thousand years ago, naturally occurring climate change forced Pine Creek to flow south, where it has become a major tributary to the West Branch of the Susquehanna River.
Climate alarmism is quite another thing, a false thing, a made-up thing, a silly thing, a destructive thing, and it is ruining a basic scientific fact that should be easy to study and understand.
Climate alarmism is where political activists falsely claim that “scientists agree that humans are causing Planet Earth’s climate to change” and that all Americans and Europeans (not the Chinese or the Indians) must therefore make drastic changes to our lifestyles, to our diets, to our freedoms. This is a fake emergency, a fake crisis, designed to help political activists get political outcomes they can not otherwise get through the democratic voting process where informed voters choose elected officials and policy positions themselves.
To illustrate how climate change naturally occurs all on its own, I took a picture and posted it here. Below is a picture I took of a roughly 160-year-old hemlock tree that a logger I work with cut down in Clinton County, PA, a month ago. If we look at the growth rings in the base of this tree, we see clusters of rings that are very wide, where the tree grew a lot in one growing season (April – September), and we see clusters of rings where the tree grew very little in one season. What is really interesting about looking at tree growth rings is that we can easily understand the climate surrounding that tree at the time of each growth ring.
Wide growth rings are associated with both an open forest canopy and lots of sunlight reaching the tree, and also with years of plenty of rain and warm temperatures conducive to plant growth after the canopy has grown up and over.
Thin or narrow growth rings are associated with a dramatic lack of sunlight, a lack of water, and/ or colder temperatures.
As we can see from this picture, this 160-year-old tree has experienced several major climate shifts over its lifetime. Each colored box is a clump of similar growth rings, which represents a period of about ten to twenty years. See how this tree went for a decade or two subject to long stretches of either very wet and warm climate, or very dry and cold climate? And we know that this tree’s life experience was largely outside of the period where the climate alarmists say humans have had the greatest influence on climate.
This tree’s life, as we see it in its growth rings, clearly shows that northcentral Pennsylvania’s climate has naturally fluctuated on its own, with no meaningful human intervention, for a long time. The picture also shows that within periods of intense dryness, there were single years of abundant rain, and then the dryness returned for years.
Today, climate alarmists seize upon every dry spell, every rainy period, every storm, to falsely claim evidence of human-caused “climate change.” If what the climate alarmists say is true, then this poor tree has had both a schizophrenic life in a natural world where equilibrium is more the natural rule, and it also experienced a lot of human caused climate change while the planet had very few humans on it to affect the climate.
In other words, this tree shows that the climate alarmists are wrong. Really wrong. The trees don’t lie, but the political activists do lie. And that fact is alarming to me.
Hemlock log cut in July 2023, in Clinton County, PA. This tree has experienced widely varying climates over its long lifetime, especially while there were very few humans on Planet Earth. There is no such thing as human caused climate change. Environmental damage, yes, of course, but not climate change. Climate alarmism is a political claim, not a scientific claim.
We actually saw a movie
The other night, the Princess of Patience and I actually went to see a movie. Like the kind of movie that used to entertain, inform, and inspire Americans, instead of the dreck Hollywood has been excreting, lo, these past thirty years or more.
We saw “Oppenheimer,” a Hollywood movie that is based on fact, based on historic events, based on real people who did and said real things. It is not based on the vomitous Woke PC corrosive nonsense that Hollywood has specialized in for decades. We were entertained and informed by this movie, and inspired about the greatness of America. What a treat! This makes four movies we have seen in the past…five years? Or longer?
Oppenheimer is about a man named Robert Oppenheimer, a genius and socially inept physicist who is considered “the father of the atomic bomb.” Aside from all the sciency stuff about the why and how of developing the bomb, the movie also delves deeply into World War II, the ensuing Cold War with communist Russia, and the very real threat that communists living in America posed to a free America itself.
There is no spoiler alert here, because we all know that the atomic race against the Nazi Germans and the communist Russians resulted in The Bomb being dropped on a fascist Japan, thereby signaling America’s ability and willingness to use the Mother Of All Weapons. Genocidal Japan’s well-earned come-uppance in Nagasaki and Hiroshima also demonstrated how easily the entire blue planet we live on could be destroyed in a tit-for-tat use of atomic weapons, thereby ushering in the “Mutually Assured Destruction” doctrine of mutual atomic deterrence that shaped American, European, and Russian foreign policy for fifty years.
This strange conundrum of “I won’t blow up Planet Earth if you don’t blow up Planet Earth” became a strategic stalemate between superpowers, thereby forcing them to fight their battles in low-intensity conflicts around the globe.
I digress. But such is the force and pragmatic usefulness of such a movie as Oppenheimer that it naturally results in discussing all that came before, during, and after the film’s historic time.
The other important thing that this movie focuses on, but does not follow up on, is the communist takeover of the American universities. That really did happen, despite the Hollywood oh-so-sad depictions of meanie anti-communists trying to stop real communists from infiltrating American institutions. Today, sending your dear child to college is not likely to get them a real education, but rather an expensive indoctrination in (failed) cultural and economic Marxism at the hands of the successors to Oppenheimer’s fellow leftists.
Professor Oppenheimer was like not only a lot of his fellow Marxist academic intellectuals at the time, that is, exceedingly generous with other people’s money in order to vaguely “be nice to everyone,” but he was also like the many non-religious European Jews who had landed in America, abandoned their faith, and then embraced various degrees of Marxism in its stead. Some had already made this transition in Europe. This is a whole other subject, but it is very much threaded throughout Oppenheimer because a) so many of his fellow genius physicists and scientists on the Manhattan Project were former European Jews and b) so many of them were various shades of pink to bright red Marxist, and thus intrinsic threats to a free and democratic America.
While these brilliant minds were needed to make The Atomic Bomb from 1942-1945, they subsequently were very real security threats because of their….divided loyalties…or, said another way, their commitment to genocidal international communism rather than to the well being of their wonderful host country, our beautiful America. And Professor Oppenheimer captured this split or dual personality disorder very well. And so the Father of The Atomic Bomb ended up losing his security clearance in a ridiculous, procedurally deficient, dog-and-pony shadow kangaroo court proceeding that nonetheless had at its core the very real need to protect America from its own openness.
I could say more about this particular subject, but I am saving it up for an essay I have been writing for three years. Maybe longer. It is forthcoming here, because when I read yesterday about the ADL’s fascist Jonathan Greenblatt excoriating his political enemies for calling out American leftist fascism for what it is, I know I have to say whatever I can say to stem the tide of genocidal leftism that began in America in the 1920s, gathered steam among Professor Oppenheimer’s fellow academics in the 1940s, and is today utterly destroying America as a free and democratic country.
So…Oppenheimer. If you have not seen it, it is worth the nearly three hour watch and the ten bucks. I give it two thumbs up.
We saw Oppenheimer in a quaint old-time theater in rural America. Note the diametrically opposed movies: Puke -woke ninja turtles and Barbie vs. very real and important Sound of Freedom and Oppenheimer. Pretty good summation of where Americans are at right now.
Four years ago, Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself
Four years ago, Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself. He died mysteriously in not just any prison, but in New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, in the heart of and under the complete control of the Democrat Party political apparatus that he was a threat to. He was under 24 hour scrutiny by two guards and he was under 24 hour surveillance by multiple cameras.
Epstein had tons of horrible dirt on a ton of Democrat Party bigwigs and donors. Had he been allowed to stay alive, he would have talked, spilled the beans, disclosed the horrible secrets about these horrible people that would have disrupted the evil shadow world occupied by so many Hollywood and Democrat Party bigwigs.
Mysteriously, the guards watching his cell got up and disappeared from their guard duty at the same time Epstein died. No one was around to see how exactly he died.
Mysteriously, the cameras trained on Epstein’s cell also failed, did not record his cell, and had no backups. No one ever explained this coincidence.
A mystery visitor to the prison at that same time was never found. No one knows who the burly guy was.
Ultra-Democrat federal prosecutors then dropped the charges against the two guards for leaving their positions and for falsifying their log books that night. Everything was then hushed up. Someone with the information to destroy a political party conveniently died, and no one was held responsible. Not even the paid uniformed guards who were supposed to be watching him. The entire Epstein murder is one giant coverup in plain view of the American public.
Is anyone paying attention to this?
The deep mark on Epstein’s neck is the thin line of a strong wire or cable, nothing Epstein had access to. A ligature, the kind used by hitmen. But his cause of death was laughably and disbelievably recorded as death by hanging from his bed sheet, by a New York City Democrat bigwig, medical examiner Barbara Sampson.
Longtime Democrat Party donor and insider, Epstein was also a convicted pedophile and child molester leading a bizarre life of high finance and child rape on his “orgy island” in the Bahamas. Hundreds of children were illegally sexually trafficked on Epstein’s island, and at least hundreds of Democrat Party bigwigs and insiders joined him there, including Bill and Hillary Clinton. Apparently a few Republican Party bigwigs participated, too. This might account for why “Republican” US AG Bill Barr immediately and outright dismissed all the mystery surrounding Epstein’s death as nothing to see here, everyone just move along. Barr obviously covered for not just the Democrat child molesters, but the Republican ones, too.
Here is one good article about what a sham this murder was, and what a sham the coverup was.
No wonder so many Americans see this disgusting arrangement as a “uniparty” or a “deep state” or an “administrative state” that illegally operates separately from the We, The People, who are supposed to have complete control over our government. Both political parties are in on the sham. They cover for each other, they take care of each other. Meanwhile, the rule of law that is supposed to keep America operating is thrown out the window.
It is almost as if Epstein’s blatant murder was a run-up to the stolen 2020 election, that also happened right in front of our faces, and which the uniparty also told us to move along, forget about, nothing to see here.
Folks, America is in huge trouble from this crap. The only reason all this evil skulduggery has not destroyed us yet is that America is in effect a huge bank account. There is just so much of everything in America that it will take a long time before the rot inside begins to really show up on the outside. Our cultural, political, and financial wealth is all being quietly siphoned off, one political murder at a time, one dropped charge at a time, one official coverup at a time, one stolen election at a time. At a certain point, this corrupt rot will become so prevalent and so blatant that no one will believe in the system any more. And then all hell will break loose.
I do believe that is their plan.
We all fold bed sheets. Have you ever seen a bed sheet that could leave this very sharp, deep cut in human flesh? Neither has anyone else but the New York City Democrat political hack Barbara Sampson. Jeffrey Epstein did not kill himself. He was murdered to shut him up.
Racist, violent, weird New York Times has to go away
When I was a kid, and we are talking over half a century ago, the New York Times newspaper was a daily thing, a weekend-long hit, a week of solid reading starting on Sunday morning, and a year-long fixed institution of America’s cultural and political landscape.
The NYT Sunday Edition was about six to seven inches thick starting around ten in the morning, and included incredible analyses of real estate markets, emerging technology, strange and interesting people and places in America and around the world. The Sunday Times Magazine had a fashion section that even a young boy could relate to, not because I liked fashion per se, but because the female models were beautiful to look at. And occasionally only semi invisible behind their colorful shmatas. Its real estate section was so good that even as a kid I enjoyed reading about stairs, table tops, and bars inside Long Island homes.
The NYT Sunday Edition had enough information for an entire week of fascinating reading on every subject known to modern civilization – science, technology, medicine, history, politics of course. Especially the obituaries and the wedding announcements, all of whom involved who’s-who people who we may not have even realized were major players in whatever given field they were in. Brilliant nuclear engineers who lived quiet lives in New Jersey, but who had invented something awesome that ended up powering all of suburban America suddenly had their great last reveal in the Sunday Edition obituary section. Who knew? He (and she) was a who’s-who!, we exclaimed to each other across the room. So much fascinating and rare information was contained in that one section among a dozen such amazing sections.
In our family, people grabbed their favorite section of the hot-off-the-press NYT Sunday Edition around 10:00AM and, with a plate full of lox and bagels, knish, and maybe some creamed herring with crackers, then grabbed a corner of a couch or a chair at the dining room table and sat and read deeply. Occasionally to exclaim something fascinating to the room full of other lox-and-bagel eaters equally entranced by their own compelling subject, pages turning with a rustle almost like a Fall wind rustling dry sycamore leaves in Central Park. And this weekly ritual involved kids and adults alike. Which I still think is a pretty fascinating statement about the complexity and value the NYT brought to the American table at one time. It was a real repository of valuable information, even if its fashion models occasionally had a nip-slip that intrigued a couple hundred twelve-year-old boys across America once a week.
To say that fifty years ago, and heck even thirty-some years ago when I was in grad school, that the NYT was the acknowledged and designated curator of American culture, literature, movies, arts, food, politics, etc. was no big thing. Conservative icons like William F. Buckley had no problem admitting the NYT’s supremacy, and he also admitted he was merely nipping at the NYT’s heels with his own National Review magazine.
While just a newspaper, the NYT was a massive institution with hundreds of intellectually curious people working in its busy beehive on just about every subject known to modern humans. While the NYT always had some sort of liberal-left tilt, it was mostly nuanced; that was rarely put on public display. Because to do so would be to reveal a deep bias at the great institution that would undercut the paper’s acknowledged claim to being the curatorial keeper of the American flame.
For the NYT to do a Big Political Reveal would be to alienate a large part of its audience, if not all of it. Because while traditionalist Americans did in fact revulse at the NYT’s hideous partisan caricature that greeted them especially in Sunday opinion essays in the 1990s, they still could find bits and pieces of meaning and value here and there in the capacious rubbish heap. Not so in the 2000s, when liberals-with-a-brain-and-a-conscience also began to recoil at the NYT’s ever more brazen partisanship, as seen daily in its “news reporting” that read like an English version of the Soviet Union’s daily Pravda: One political party was always bad, the other was always good. Republicans were always mean and stupid, Democrat politicians were always witty, smart, enjoyed the NYT cross word puzzles, and well intentioned if occasionally murderously drunk or rape-inclined.
You did not have to be a conservative to see the very low value in an outlet that makes no effort to tell the other side of the story. Every intellectual wants to know the full story, and while the NYT catered to people who saw themselves as intellectuals, they no longer (if ever) behaved or thought like intellectuals (curious people open to new information).
Well, well, well, how have times changed. No pun intended, the NYT has indeed really fallen badly since its heyday of the 1940s-1980s. Today, the NYT is a shell of its former self. In every way, including the slim to non-existent and almost meaningless Sunday Edition. Its owners and publishers have so garishly embraced a single corner in the boxing ring that they are in essence burning the wood from the NYT’s walls to keep their lights on and heat going, acting as their own termites gutting their own home to stay alive while simultaneously causing the home to collapse. They make no apologies for telling blatant lies and abusing their remaining readership.
Having avoided almost all things New York Times now for several decades, I still receive the paper’s emails. But what have we here in these digital missives, but cheap traders hawking an embarrassing array of cheap and weird goods: Sleep aids, insect repellant, protein bars, the Mediterranean diet available at a click here or there, and of course, everything imaginable that could be construed or cobbled together to be negative about President Trump.
However, if the once mighty NYT now stoops to deal in tawdry middle class diet aid clickbait and 100% fake news political red meat for its dwindling, clueless, bubble-and-silo’d ultra partisan readership, it has finally gone one too far: Yes, the New York Times supports calls for racial genocide against white/ European farmers (and everyone else who has white skin) in South Africa.
South Africa may have been a fundamentally unfair place for black Africans to live for a few hundred years, but at least it was highly functional and its quality of life for most people was a hell of lot better than the nomadic hunter-gatherer cannibals the Boers encountered in the 1600s. South Africa is now a dysfunctional, dystopian, genocidal racialist state that purposefully discriminates against the European people who grow the country’s food and who cater to the valuable safari tourist trade. South Africa is following in the steps of former Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, its neighbor, where racist and genocidal Africans tortured, murdered, and drove out the European people who grew all of the food and did all of the engineering stuff for the entire nation. Zimbabwe sucks. Its public water supplies have dangerous parasites. Its corruption and lawlessness are legendary. So this is where South Africa is headed? And the NYT is cheering it on?
I look at the NYT now with more than fifty years of readership under my belt. Where I used to count the Sunday Hirschfeld comic Nina names hidden among the artist’s slashing style (my own middle child is named Nina in large part because of my childhood-into-adulthood fondness for the Hirschfeld comic search each Sunday) as a kid, I now see not-so-hidden Nazi swastikas and revolutionary torches and pitchforks. How far this institution has fallen. It is a crumbled ruin, a shadow of its former self. It isn’t even a Pravda, whose grinning grotesques at least openly acknowledged the 100% lying propaganda fake news. No, this is a ramshackle, collapsing shell housing a few dozen racist maniacs pounding feverishly away at their typewriter keys, raw and hell bent on a violent and bloody racist revolution across the planet. The once curious and magical place is really gone.
The New York Times deserves to be canceled. Don’t drink water out of the toilet and don’t read the New York Times. Anyone subscribing to this garbage is a shameful person. An outed dingbat, a dumbkopf, a kook, a Nazi or at least a Nazi collaborator.
For shame.
An aggregate of Al Hirschfeld cartoons where his daughter’s name Nina was often hidden, the number told in the artist’s signature. This was the height of the NYT’s more innocent times
Hollywood child abusers protest anti-child abuse film
A month ago, at a party celebrating my daughter’s impending marriage to a fine young man, a strange older man approached me. Me, of jovial mood and big hearted happiness upon this wonderful occasion, found myself backing up as the stranger puked up bitter venom and anger at me.
“I heard you are a big Trump guy. Well, he is morally reprehensible, reprehensible, I tell you, and degenerate. Trump is morally bankrupt, corrupt, and has broken every law known to mankind. And I can’t believe you support him.”
Some people, well let’s say it, liberals, have no class, because they live by their feelings, not their thinkings, and so they are like rabid dogs roaming about randomly peeing on and biting the guests at parties where happiness is supposed to reign. This old guy was true to form, and I must say, having myself grown up surrounded by liberals, I have yet to meet one, and I mean one liberal person, who is capable of calmly discussing or debating politics or culture. Their feewings always turn them into stark raving lunatics. And here I was face to face with Exhibit Number Eight Bazillion of that rule.
“Well, I see no evidence to support what you have just said,” said I. “And I am genuinely interested to hear what you have to say that supports your pretty radical statement just now, especially in light of all of the child sex slaves being trafficked across Biden’s open border. Not much more morally degenerate or bankrupt or reprehensible than selling child sex slaves. Right?”
And the man turned around and walked away.
Every now and then at the party that evening I would catch him glaring angrily at me from across the room. And days later, even as I, father of the bride, was giving my doting father of the bride speech at the wedding itself, this foolish old dolt of a well formed liberal dingbat sat and did his best disapproving scowl at me to let me know what he thought.
And so it is now with the Hollywood-Media Industrial Complex reaction to The Sound of Freedom, a movie about stopping child sex slavery. Turns out that all of the evil child molesting Hollywood-Media people really oppose a movie that shines an unfavorable light on their reprehensible, morally bankrupt, degenerate and corrupt child molesting behavior that is not just aided and abetted but actually jet-fueled by child sniffing Joe Biden and his court of freaks enforcing a wide-open southern border.
Who else am I thinking of here…hmmmmm well, let’s start with Jeffrey Epstein and all of his hundreds of close Hollywood chums raping underage girls at his dungeon island in the Bahamas. And the DAs and judges of one single political party across several states, mostly Florida, who went out of their way to enable and to protect Jeffrey Epstein after the fact was known that he was a reprehensible, morally bankrupt, corrupt child rapist.
After that example there is a laundry list as long as my leg of outed pedophile Mainstream Media personalities in England and America. These morally reprehensible people are trying to get normal people to accept the idea of adults having sex with underage children as a normal thing.
Isn’t it interesting that when you type in the words “pedophile” and “pedophilia” on your iPhone, the autocorrect and instant spell check don’t recognize either word? To the evil woke child-hating psychopaths at Apple, Inc. who programmed our iPhones, these two words should be canceled, they must not even exist, because they highlight and draw attention to a significant amount of morally reprehensible crap Hollywood, Corporate Media, and Silicon Valley people actually believe in and want to do, to children.
There is a sick and evil culture in one political party today, and it is infecting everything it touches. Turns out that party’s PR arm – the Hollywood-Media-High Tech Industrial Complex- isn’t just on the job for professional, financial, or even ideological reasons. These people are actually running interference and carrying water for sold-America-to-China Joe Biden and his administration’s dark den of child molesters because of their own personal immoral sickness and evil.
It is why they are all up in arms about this good movie, The Sound of Freedom. Qanon affiliated? What a joke that accusation is, because Qanon is at most just an idea, and one that is pushed more by liberals than anyone else; it’s not even a real group. It is just another liberal-created boogie man.
It is said that all it takes for bad people to prevail is for good people to do nothing….but sit and scowl, wordless and without evidence or cause, at the father of the bride at his daughter’s wedding. I don’t know how we break through to these liberal people. They are enabling and promoting pure evil, they badmouth a good movie for shallow political reasons, and yet they say it is all someone else’s fault when the problems cross our open border and show up in the “conservative” news.
Say, what is normally done with rabid dogs?
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.
Jerry Johnson & Johnson’s Furs
A fascinating and wonderful human named Jerry Johnson went to meet his Maker recently, and I would like to say why I am going to miss him so much.
Jerry founded and ran Johnson’s Furs in Enola back in the 1960s. Initially started to just buy, aggregate, and re-sell wildlife furs from foxes, coyotes, bobcat, mink, skunk, possum, raccoons etc., Jerry expanded the business to encompass everything possibly related to furs, like annually buying hundreds of thousands of deer and cattle hides, selling Hawbaker and Carman trapping lures, foothold traps, cage traps, Conibear-style traps, snares, cable restraints, and all of the steel fittings that go with those implements.
Jerry’s inspiration and logistical support came from the number one person in the trapping business back then, Stanley Hawbaker. A central Pennsylvania native, nationally recognized trapping expert and proponent Stanley Hawbaker was most active during the heyday of fur trapping, and he designed trapping lures and baits that are still in high demand today. Despite being a competitor for trappers’ business, Hawbaker saw in Jerry Johnson a rare opportunity to expand the trapping industry beyond its narrow focus at that time. And so Johnson’s Furs grew into a regional powerhouse.
I interviewed Jerry Johnson several times over the past fifteen years, and each time was fascinating. He and I were supposed to get together for some video interviews this spring, but his declining health prevented him from getting out or from talking for more than a few minutes. One of our most interesting times together was in his newly reconstructed log cabin, about five years ago.
The benefits enjoyed from Jerry’s incredible energy included having a one-stop shop for buying everything a trapper needs, as well as being able to drop off both pelts and whole critters. Johnson’s correctly processed everything brought in, and dealt with all of the big tanneries. During my last discussion with Jerry, just a few months ago, when I dropped off a huge elk hide for tanning, he reflected on the fact that only one tannery remains in eastern America that can tan an elk hide. He said he had witnessed the explosive growth of the hide and trapping industries in the 1960s and 1970s, and then had lived to see their eventual retraction and maybe even the demise of the cattle and deer hide businesses.
Jerry Johnson was the nicest person you would ever meet in your life. He was kind, patient, funny, and friendly. Like almost everyone of his generation in Central Pennsylvania, he did not know the word “quit,” and he worked very hard and long hours well into his 80s. And his prices were fair to the point of sometimes being unfair to him. When I ran for public office, he put my brochures up in the office and talked me up to interested voters.
Every year for a long time the District 8 PA Trappers Association held a Jerry Johnson Appreciation Lunch. Because it was on a Saturday and during the heart of hunting season, I never could participate. But Jerry knew I appreciated him because I told him so, so many times, over so many years of buying trapping equipment from him and having him process my furs.
I could write a short book here about what Jerry told me, about his youth, his education, his family, and his small business work. Maybe some day I will write a chapter about Jerry, but for now this is what I have to say: He was one of the last of a dying breed of Americans who grew up working hard, with his family, and who worked hard up until his death in his 80s. Jerry enjoyed and loved America and his fellow Americans, and never asked for more than a fair shot at doing business.
Among many other of your fans, I will miss you, Jerry Johnson. I will miss your advice, your quick smile, your quick wit, your outstanding service, and your kind personality. Thank you for all you did for me and my son, and for countless other trappers in the region.
Jerry Johnson and the Princess of Patience in 2021 in front of Johnson’s Furs
Jerry Johnson in 2020, minus mask and no social distancing, thank God.
Summertime harvests & roadside wisdom with strangers
Presently we are enjoying the height of the summer fruit and vegetable season. Berries wild and cultivated can be picked whenever you have time, often right along the road, and many are for sale at small roadside kiosks and shacks. Same goes for honey, sweet corn, and a host of vegetables. Most of which are organic and have not been sprayed with synthetic chemicals. It is really a wonderful time of year to both eat well, and participate in the natural gathering of food as humans have done since God completed our evolution a hundred thousand years ago.
One of the aspects of summer time food gathering that I enjoy is the natural gathering of people around the sources of these fruits and vegetables. Like roadside stands, selling fruits and vegetables picked that morning by the landowner, standing there wiping their hands on their apron, sweat beading on their forehead, and stuffing cash into their pockets or running off to make change.
The people who shop at roadside stands and kiosks are a pretty interesting group, and most of them are willing to strike up a discussion with the strangers around them with little more incentive than a good joke about the weather or an offering of just-purchased cherries from the stand down the road. At the stand where I bought our annual supply of sweet corn, the discussion centered on whither America given that so many young Americans do not want to work, can’t work, don’t know how to work. Everyone present shared their growing up story about how they learned to work hard, and to enjoy it, and where that strong work ethic took them in their life. This is real rural wisdom that keeps the wheels on America and turning.
As if on cue, a ragged bunch of older teenagers went braying by on Route 147, their dirt bikes drowning out the already damaged hearing of their elders gathered at the sweet corn stand.
“See?” said the proprietress.
“I told the neighbors they can’t ride on our farm without helmets because they are so foolish and are going to get hurt. They still ride through our crops anyhow,” she said with her hands on her hips and a furrowed brow darkening her attractive face.
I see it everywhere I go. Doesn’t matter the skin color: White, black, brown, yellow…today’s young Americans are seemingly all huffing endless free sh*t from their families like a recreational drug, and that lack of responsibility has led to a lack of focus, a lack of real goals, no work ethic, a lack of seriousness about life, etc. And yes, America will undoubtedly fail if these kids don’t grow up, wake up, and get serious about their lives and about their nation. Somewhere I saw headlines about half of the young people think “mis-gendering” someone should be a crime punishable by jail. Obviously these are not serious people, they are are adult-aged children stuck in perpetual childhood and whining about every damned little ridiculous nonsense thing.
It felt nice to have my own observations reinforced by the other elders standing around the corn stand. Anyone like me with a blog and strong opinions is bound to eventually live inside my own head. Getting out into the public and hearing from strangers that I am not alone in my worries about the upcoming generations of Americans is reassuring. No, I am not overly critical and demanding, I am just old fashioned because I believe that a strong work ethic makes you a better person, a more civic minded person, a better citizen, a more productive adult.
Some say that America could not be started over and built again today, with the toxic soup of all of the ridiculous and picayune regulations, rules, ordinances, etc surrounding us. But more than anything the challenge to America seems to be the lack of desire among our young people to want to achieve anything of substance, and their willing subservience to freedom-crushing government bureaucrats.
I wonder if these kids can learn to speak Chinese. At least “Please don’t shoot me” in Chinese ought to be a phrase they are taught, as the willing and easy victims they are building themselves up to be will need some memorable last words before their country is taken by force from them.
Enjoy your summer harvest, friends. I do, and I enjoy the old memories, too. When I was a kid, my mother would send me and a sibling out on hot summer days to pick gallons of blackberries, black raspberries, red raspberries, and blueberries that grew naturally on our property and on adjoining farms. We would return hours later red faced, dirty, scratched up, and with buckets fulled up, and unbeknownst to us, our can-do spirit filled up and stronger, too. We eventually ate what we picked; we earned what we ate. From the fruits of our labors Mom made jams, jellies, pies, and sauces, the Mason jars ever more lining up in the pantry nice and neat for us to eat throughout the coming year.
It is a shame that today’s young Americans are not learning such a simple life lesson.
Where are their parents? Where are the Americans?
Roadside sweet corn stand along Rt 147
As fast as the corn is brought up from the field it is stuffed by buyers into bags and spirited off to kitchens across the area
Rural America is full of iconic and inspiring scenic views like this looking at the Susquehanna River water gap
Quaint though they may be, the old-time country mouse values and principles of rural America trump the shallow arrogance of city mice every single time
Our fresh sweet corn was eaten a bit with butter and salt, but mostly stripped off the cob and put into ziploc freezer bags for eating throughout the year. Chicken corn chowder is a popular winter soup
While waiting for my daughter to finish getting her nails done for her wedding, I picked a hatful of red raspberries in the weed patch next to the parking lot. Unbelievably, a woman approached me and asked me for money to buy food. When I offered her my berries she became irate and yelled at me. Our family ate this delicious wild growing roadside fruit over three days.
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.
Midsummer report
My apologies for the long absence here. Summer is in full swing and our family has been operating at full tilt speed. Time only for doing things, and none for writing about it all, until now.
First off, our oldest kid was married on Independence Day. Held at a pretty and historic farm, it was a fantastic wedding, and we feel like we acquired a wonderful addition to our family. However, the preparation necessary for that event took up a lot of time and energy, for many months. And then there was the recovery week. And then there was the vacation week. Hence no blog posts. Full credit to my wife for all of the wedding planning.
At least I myself am back in the saddle, while other people around me are still recovering from their vacation. Not everyone does well with the surf fishing bum lifestyle, including sleeping on the beach, eating questionable food from a warm cooler that has been pawed over and drooled on by feral raccoons, and drinking fetid water. I myself thrive in this kind of environment, and so I am back to report back to our three readers.
What can I say about the wedding other than I fired our small black powder cannon seven times, for good luck. It was Independence Day, and while the venue does not allow fireworks, they did allow the cannon (it’s a cast iron, steel sleeved replica swivel gun with a 1.75″ bore). And in my speech as the bride’s father, how could I miss an opportunity to point out that Independence Day was brought to us by citizens with guns? That is a fact, is it not?
And (of course, I guess) I heard back afterwards that some of our wedding guests were offended by the cannon and also offended by my mention of the origins of American freedom – citizens with guns. You can’t make this stuff up if you tried, like it’s a Hollywood movie script caricature of spoiled rotten children who get everything that Planet Earth can provide and yet nonetheless complain about it. Something like “The food here is terrible and the portions are so small.”
Are Americans now really offended by Independence Day fireworks? Are they offended by displays of patriotism and mentioning of historical facts that unfortunately run contrary to some evil political narratives that privately owned guns are bad and our freedom was brought to Americans by a immaculately conceived federal government that descended from Heaven? Are some wedding guests now so crass that they actually complain about the bride’s father setting off his celebratory toy cannon for the enjoyment of all the normal fun-loving people in attendance?
I have a hard time believing these things, but I did get to witness this stuff. America is in big trouble when its own citizens, young and old, hate its founding and can’t give a proud father his one moment and some space to celebrate it. Jiminy crickets.
Just returned from a subsequent beach trip to a a long spit of federally managed property on the east coast. The National Park Service rangers were 99% normal, nice, intelligent Americans, thank you very much, Gage, Donald, and Stephen.
In this national park there is a problem with artificially high numbers of deer, foxes, and racoons. They have no natural predators and they are multiplying at breakneck rates and having huge negative impacts on the environment and local ecology. Vegetation shows a distinct deer browse line about four feet above the ground, and the racoons are everywhere, aggressive, and aiming to ruin your trip. I watched a red fox steal a camper’s breakfast sausage meal right off of his plate on the guy’s picnic table. We had raccoons patrolling our campsite and under our table as soon as we broke out our food. They will grab your food right out of your hand. It is a fact that raccoons are host to some nasty parasites they excrete in their poop, which was abundantly displayed all around the campsites. Raccoons are also the number one vector for rabies among wildlife.
Aside from posing health threats and incessantly badgering the humans who are trying to enjoy the park, the foxes and raccoons also eat the eggs of rare nesting shore birds. These rare birds enjoy huge swaths of cordoned off human-free dunes and beaches in the park (and also on federal and state lands out on Long Island, like Orient Point and Montauk). And yet the same exact NPS staff enforcing the human no-go dune zones policy are absolutely fine with the overabundant nest-raiding foxes and raccoons that render all the no-go zones meaningless. The staff do not support hunting or trapping these destructive pests, either to improve the park visitor experience or to protect the natural environment.
How can the rare birds successfully nest on the ground and hatch their chicks there when the artificially super overabundant egg-eating raccoons and foxes are allowed to roam at will?
Talking with various National Park Service staff about this problem resulted in exposure to various levels of education and serious/unserious mindset. Most of the NPS staff acknowledged there is a wildlife problem on site that must be addressed. Hunting the deer and trapping the foxes and raccoons is the normal and responsible way to deal with this artificial human-caused environmental problem. These are the responsible and serious ways of addressing a visitor problem on land that is owned by the US taxpayer and whose management is entrusted to taxpayer-paid bureaucrats.
However, when I mentioned the above normal solutions to a young, handsome, tall NPS Park Policeman patrolling our campground, he responded “The same can be said about humans — there are just too many humans. And your solution to the overabundant raccoon problem is not humane.” He would get rid of the humans and allow the artificially high numbers of nuisance wildlife to proliferate. With taxpayer-paid federal employees of this guy’s low caliber and high wokeness quotient, the park visitor experience is going to degrade. C’mon, NPS, you can screen your employee applicants better than this. This foolish people-hating young guy should never have a gun and a badge, much less wear an NPS uniform.
Overall the surf fishing was fun if mostly unproductive. Probably due to the high heat and ferocious sunshine. I can report that catching cownose/ bullnose rays on strong surf tackle is a hoot, but then safely decoupling that animal from the tackle is a whole other thing. They whip their barbed tails around trying to nail the fisherman, who is trying to release them back into the ocean (I learned to place something heavy on the tail while using heavy pliers to remove or break off the hook). We did witness a large shark violently feeding close to shore, and it would be a fair guess to say it was probably eating these rays, which we caught and saw in abundance on both the bay side and the ocean surf side.
So that is the mid-summer report. Fast action, lots of family, some big family celebration and lots of family movement across the beautiful American landscape for work and vacation. I hope that you the reader are also enjoying your summertime. Summer is such a glorious time to be with family and friends, to visit new places, to camp out under the stars and cook over an open fire, to think through life’s normal challenges and to spend time with people we love…and then it is over just when we are all starting to really get into it.
So make the most of your summer.
Campsite neighbor Steve, a PhD engineer ex-patriot Brit and defiant leftist, helped MAGA Maniac Josh fix my malfunctioning headlamp, demonstrating that it’s easy to be enemies when separated by keyboards and easy to be friends when living side by side
Nice level NPS campsites with fire ring and grill
Each campsite has a pavilion and a picnic table. Is this really camping?
Asbury Park Brewery is a local flavor that I was happy to support. No sign anywhere of Bud Lite or Budweiser anything, thankfully
Symbol of foolish National Park Service policies seeking to protect rare shore birds by excluding people from their habitat, but allowing artificially overabundant populations of nest-raiding raccoons and foxes to roam at will.
Beach goers nonetheless entered this area because there were zero nesting birds in it and there were literally tons of foxes running around in it. Come on National Park Service, you can do much smarter than this
Ahhhhh… summer vacation on the Atlantic Coast