PA’s 2023 bear season
After hearing just one rifle shot all day (followed by the customary follow-up shot thirty seconds later, and the coup-de-grace shot a minute later) today, at 4:20PM, I felt compelled to write about what seems to be happening this bear season. In a nutshell, this is not your pap’s or even your dad’s Pennsylvania bear season in Northcentral PA. That long-hallowed experience of buffalo plaid Woolrich coats and moldy little hunting camps built in 1948 filled with men putting on big drives across the landscape, is now a thing of the past.
Some people blame the Saturday bear season opener that started eight years ago for the demise. Others blame the early October muzzleloader and archery seasons. Either way, what many hunters are calling the death of the famed PA bear season is actually a direct result of the incredible success of PA’s decades-long bear population conservation program.
When PGC biologist Gary Alt became the steward of the PA bear program in the early 1980s, he faced a problem. Hunters, nature lovers, and simple habitat and ecosystem health required more bears across Pennsylvania. And bears were not responding to the demand. In twenty years of hard and smart work, Dr. Alt turned the situation completely around. When Dr. Alt left the PGC twenty years ago, his life’s work was one of the great wildlife conservation success stories in America. Black bears then filled habitat niches in almost every county from Philadelphia to Erie, from Honesdale to Pittsburgh, and everywhere in between.
And then, almost overnight it seemed, PA had way too many bears. Bears were showing up in cities proper, turning over trash cans in suburban back yards everywhere. And so the PGC had to try and dial back some of Dr. Alt’s success. Increasing the number of bears taken by hunters was the solution.
Now looking at harvest data resulting from a half dozen years of early muzzleloader bear season, early archery season, regular bear season, and extended bear seasons running concurrent with deer season, it is easy to see why we only heard one rifle shot all day today in what probably still is the epicenter of PA’s bear hunting. And why none of our guys encountered any bears hanging from hunting camp porches on their valley run tonight.
Early muzzleloader and archery seasons combined now account for almost half of the overall annual PA bear harvest, even before “bear season” has begun. These early season hunters are mostly single men hunting near their homes. By the time the traditional bear season arrives in late November, half the licensed bear hunters who are likely to kill a bear are already tagged out, and the rest are looking forward to the concurrent bear-deer seasons in their home hunting territories. Few hunters feel compelled to make the historic annual migration north, and why would they?
Those of us, we hardy few, who do still come to the traditional bear hunting ground up north, are faced with an already depleted bear resource, and many fewer men pushing across the landscape to break free and push those bears that remain. And yet, despite our reduced opportunity, we enjoy the crisp Fall air, the camaraderie, the laughs, and the naughty food and drink our wives would never approve of, if they only knew.
Good luck this season, boys. You’re gonna need it.
Speaker Johnson’s religious behavior
Speaker of the US House of Representatives Mike Johnson is being widely criticized in the mainstream media for kneeling in prayer while on the job the other day. I watched one mainstream media TV personality take Rep. Johnson to task in an interview, about minding the supposed “separation of church and state,” and “keeping prayer in private,” and not letting it out into the public sphere.
Pretty curious approach, given that across America and Europe hordes of bloodthirsty primitives have also recently knelt in prayer in public spaces, promoting baby butchery, baby baking, and gang rape with a huge helping of subsequent mutilation and torture on Israelis, to the great joy of mainstream media. Why all these sincere people, just look at them, bless their hearts. Get them some brown shirts and night sticks.
The Left’s love affair with radical Islam is no secret, and it is just and fair to say this love affair exists because both the Left and radical Islam seek absolute destruction of Western Civilization with a resulting dominion over everyone and every thing on Planet Earth. The Left and radical Islam have a common cause, and whatever differences they have will be settled between one another once people like Rep. Johnson and his religion are out of the way. Keep this foremost in your mind as the drumbeat about Rep. Johnson’s Christian practice goes on.
Couple of things about this Mr. Smith Goes To Washington’s religiosity.
First, Christianity is the founding belief system of America, albeit that was a nascent and broad minded Protestantism that immediately resulted in the anti-slavery abolitionist movement. America’s pilgrims and Founders also identified strongly with the Jews’ quest for freedom from evil tyrant Pharoah, and with the Torah’s value-laden story of that quest. And so thousands of towns and locales across America are named after Biblical places like Hebron, Shiloh, Judah, Bethany, and Zion. Christianity’s sacred Judaic touchstone places, and their inherent unspoken values, are interwoven into the cultural fabric of America from our very beginning.
Second, Christianity is still the main and largest repository of morality and right action in America. This is a cold numeric fact, not a defense of or advocacy for Christian theology. As sad and deflated as American Christianity is right now, it is nonetheless still the biggest single force for all things good and for learning about good values in our nation.
You oppose Christian theology? OK, so what is your suggested substitute in its absence here in America? Atheism? Well, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Stalin are all great advocates for atheism and horrible, unjust places to live. Judaism? You think 200,000,000 Americans are going to convert to orthodox Judaism? Never! There would be an immediate and everlasting shortage of pickled herring, and so the rabbis would never allow it. Radical Islam will cut your throat, cut off your head, or throw you off a roof, sometimes all three, so nah, hard pass on that, right?
So, I say an occasional annoying knock on the door by some nice church ladies is a small price to pay for living happily in the most successful nation in the history of humanity.
The Left’s attacks on Christianity are strategic. If they can brow beat, shame, drown, flood, and eliminate Christianity, they will eliminate America’s renewable, sustainable, organic cultural source of opposition to the Left’s tyranny, immorality, and evil.
The Left has gotten really creative about their attack on Christianity, and they have only succeeded to date because of the long flaccid acquiescence of American traditionalists and Christians, and by the Left’s official enablers, the GOPe. By accusing Christians of establishing religion when they merely practice it, a la Rep. Johnson, the Left has appealed to the First Amendment’s clear prohibition against establishing a formal state religion for America. And yet, the truth is Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Muslims all are merely expressing their First Amendment rights when they pray in private or in public. None of their public prayer behavior establishes any of these religions as the de facto state religion of America.
What the Left really objects to is anyone actually seeing the Christian religion practiced in public. Their message is it’s a dirty practice that people ought to keep to themselves behind closed doors.
Rep. Johnson’s public prayer on the US House of Representatives floor is an in-your-face to the tyrants and cultural Marxists in the mainstream media. And of course history is on the side of Rep. Johnson, because the US House of Representatives opened with public prayer for I don’t know how long, but for the vast majority of the chamber’s existence. And when inaugurated in 1789 as America’s first president in Manhattan, New York, George Washington led a grand procession to Trinity Church on Wall Street, where he led an hours-long prayer service.
It is only when America now finds itself in the throes of hypercoagulative materialism that its own long and deep religious roots, and religion’s fruit-bearing shading branches, become anathema. So what a breath of fresh air is this Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, this cherubic Rep. Johnson.
Don’t stop, Rep. Johnson, for all our sakes, I pray you, do not stop and do not back down, and may you shine as a beacon light to Christians everywhere, and may that rallying light shine and defeat the cruel darkness that is swallowing my civilization. I may not agree with you on the particulars, but by God I will defend your right and our collective necessity to have you pray in the US House of Representatives.
Either Christianity will save America as a free constitutional republic, or America and western civilization will die.
May God bless you, Rep. Johnson.
Tuesday election results: Voting machines are hacked
So many people are trying to understand what happened on this Election Day Tuesday, how Republicans got trounced across Pennsylvania and in many places across the country, as well.
I can’t speak for other states, where plenty of people are scratching their heads, but I feel quite comfortable speaking about central Pennsylvania. I looked at election results in central Pennsylvania, in Dauphin County, Cumberland County, Schuylkill County, and several others in Northcentral PA and Western PA, and there is a stark statistical signal emitting from Tuesday’s election results: Pennsylvania’s voting machines are not secure, they are being manipulated to achieve results that one side wants.
A couple examples stand out. Several Cumberland County school boards went 100% Democrat in areas where the voter registration cannot possibly support that outcome. In Dauphin County, long time and much liked moderate elected official Chad Saylor lost his county commissioner race by forty-some votes to a complete no-name. This kind of close race is a lot harder to identify as vote machine hacking, and that is why these kinds of outcomes are kept so close by whomever is doing the manipulation. But it is still not a believable outcome in a county that has consistently re-elected George Hartwick and Mike Pries for a very long time.
In the case of the Cumberland County school boards, I believe the outcome is so desperately needed for important political purposes that the manipulators go for broke. Having outposts of woke anti-America public schools in the heart of a conservative Republican County is strategically important, because the public tide has been strongly turning against this kind of outcome. Besides, these school board races are off of most people’s radar screens. It is a crime they can easily get away with.
And as we have just seen in our own PA election this week, verified reports of broken and malfunctioning vote machines (including flipping votes from R to D in front of people’s eyes) get a tiny amount of air time and then are buried and forgotten. Despite these reports being a huge red flag indication of a major systemic problem across the entire vote machine enterprise.
Voting machines are not secure. We saw that starkly in the 2020 election, in the 2022 election, and now we are seeing it absolutely blatantly displayed in the 2023 election. The incentive for hackers and manipulators to illegally use the voting machines is powerful, because most American LEADERS (not the voters, who know vote fraud when they see it and they complain about it) are in denial. So the push-back in the halls of power is minimal. Establishment Republicans like my own state senator John DiSanto are either too timid or simply disinterested in the subject, because there is no direct political gain for them. And so the crime continues.
The biggest impediment to having secure elections in Pennsylvania is the Republican Party itself. This is a group of absolutely useless individuals who by their actions must be heavily compromised. They put up zero resistance to the last second 2020 election law shenanigans (for example, the Republican-dominated House and the Republican-dominated Senate could have impeached and removed the PA Supreme Court members who blatantly disregarded both Pennsylvania law and the Pennsylvania constitution to achieve political outcomes that allowed their fellow Democrats to wildly cheat in the 2020 election), and they won’t even deal with the reports of voting machine problems this week.
Either the PAGOP has nothing to gain from fixing vote machine fraud, or nothing to lose by allowing it to continue. And the fact that the severely failed and purposefully deposed former PA senate “leader” Jake Corman has now set up a political consulting firm in Harrisburg, with no push back from PAGOP leadership, bodes poorly. These people all want business as usual, which definitely does not involve rocking the boat or fixing vote fraud.
A note about voting machines and others: Machines are so deeply mistrusted across the entire world population, especially in the West, that Hollywood movies depicting Machines vs. Humanity in all-out wars of extermination have been wildly popular for many decades. Artificial intelligence is widely believed to be the inevitable downfall of humanity, as stated by those who are most involved in developing it. In the popular and prescient 1965 sci-fi book Dune, computers of all kinds were outlawed because they became self aware and tried to kill off the humans. In Dune, in lieu of machines, a race of humans were cultivated, the Mentats, to perform computer-speed calculations for the benefit of humans, but without the inherent instability and high risk of computer machines.
Hacked and manipulated vote machines are now so blatantly misused to achieve criminal outcomes that we should do something about it. We must fix it, if voting is going to mean anything at all. And of course, with hacked elections and your vote meaning nothing, your representative government isn’t, and your vote isn’t, and your citizenship isn’t. What is the outcome is a single-party totalitarian country, and that very much is happening in front of our eyes.
The fix to this open problem is easy: Paper ballots, voter identification, and hand count if necessary. But that requires at least half of the political leadership to actually care about this subject, and if they won’t, then the electorate must vote in new leaders who do care about it. Or, you voters can go ahead and give up representative government.
Vote today!
Maybe this election is boring to you. Maybe Trump isn’t on today’s ballot. Maybe these are boring people and boring positions.
Doesn’t matter, because you have to vote. Every American citizen must vote every time there is an election. Or else we lose the country.
Today, the “hot” elections are for Dauphin County commissioners, and I recommend Mike Pries and Chad Saylor, (and George Hartwick for the two Democrats who read this blog). Despite having different letters (R,D) after their names, these three guys get along very well and have kept taxes from being raised in Dauphin County forever. Besides, no county commissioner anywhere else in PA is nearly as entertaining as George Hartwick. His news stories usually involve a well-drained bottle of Crown Royal somewhere along the line. I like a politician who knows his business.
I will vote YES to retain Victor Stabile as a judge on the Superior Court, and I am voting NO to NOT RETAIN Jack Panella on the Superior Court. Panella is the worst sort of judicial activists, and our judicial branch is in tatters as a result. No, no, no. Go sit in the corner and learn all about the law again, Mr. Panella.
Matthew Pianka is running for magisterial judge in Uptown Harrisburg. His mom Barb held the position for a long time. His dad Jim held the job for a long time before Barb. I am no fan of political dynasties, but in Harrisburg we get to choose, on the one hand, between normal Democrats like Matthew who are rational and logical, albeit they have different principles or values than someone like me, or, on the other hand, complete crackpots who peddle racial politics and who will throw the rule of law out the window in the place where justice matters most – your neighborhood. So vote for Matthew Pianka, he’s a nice guy with a cute kid and a nice wife, and a dog, I think, and he’s bright. And personable.
On principle, I cannot in good conscience vote for any other Democrats than those above. The Democrat Party has gone off the rails, politically, culturally, lawlessly, and while I won’t tell you the Republican Party is so great, I will say at least they are not actively trying to destroy America like the Democrats. It is true that the Republicans actually do not actively try to do anything, and in their defense, this might be a good thing in politics.
YES Carolyn Carluccio for PA Supreme Court.
YES Maria Battista and Harry Smail for Superior Court.
YES Megan Martin for Commonwealth Court
YES Courtney Powell for Court of Common Pleas (I met Courtney. She is the most normal, smart, professional Mom type ever, and America needs more people like her in our court rooms)
YES John McDonald for Dauphin County Clerk of Courts. I met John and he is a sweet, gentle giant of a man. And I think he will be the first black person in this position, ever. Very cool. Go get ’em, John.
The Recorder of Deeds and county treasurer have to be the most dull positions, but we still have to pay attention to who is running. Jim Zugay has been Recorder of Deeds for a thousand years and yes, that is exactly the kind of job a career politician ought to be in, so I hope you win, Jim. Nick DiFrancesco wants to be Treasurer. He’s crazy enough to fully embrace this mind-numbing job, and he has already done a bunch of other county jobs. OK, Nick, I hope you get what you want. No backsies!
Some Middle East FAQs
Wow is the Internet burning up as a result of the “troubles” in Israel and Gaza. And not just the Internet, but the public streets across Europe, London, Washington, DC, and New York City. Marches full of people shouting about killing the Jews and destroying Israel, and carrying signs about destroying America, and battering the gates of the White House in Washington, DC, and tearing down flyers on lamp posts showing the faces and names of Hamas’ hostages – innocent people from 28 different countries and multiple religions and aged from 6-month-old babies to 80-year-old grandparents – show us that the so-called “occupation” thing is just another fake excuse for the same old bullsh*t religious hatred and violence.
So in response to what I see and read on the news and on the Internet, here are some absolute facts. You will not hear these mentioned by the mainstream media, which is an arm of Hamas (which explains why the mainstream media is constantly trying so hard to destroy Western Civilization), but these are true facts, and honest people want to know the truth, however uncomfortable it is.
- Jews are the indigenous people of Israel/ Judea/ Samaria/ Judah. They have been living there in an unbroken chain for 4,000 years, albeit not always the masters of their own political fortunes. The region’s greatest history for 4,000 years is written the entire time in Jewish blood. This is their home and their land.
- Arabs are from Arabia, AKA the Arabian Peninsula.
- Muslims are from the Arabian Peninsula
- Most of the so-called “Palestinians” are Turks who arrived in the area with the Ottoman Empire, which oversaw and administered the area they called the “Sanjak of Jerusalem” from around 1500 to 1920
- Turks are from…Turkey, and its surrounding region. If you are a Turk living in Nablus or Jenin or Jabaliya or Gaza City, you are not indigenous to anywhere except Turkey, regardless of how you self-identify or what language you speak
- The “Apartheid” that exists in the Middle East is the Muslim Arab countries’ unwillingness to allow Jews to live anywhere in the Middle East, despite Jews living there long before any Arabs showed up.
- From 1946 to 1956, one million Jews were ethnically cleansed from across North Africa and Egypt and the West Bank and Jordan and Syria and Iraq and Iran, forced out of their homes by bloodthirsty mobs and greedy governments, and forced to take refuge hundreds of miles away in the new state of Israel. THAT is the true ethnic cleansing that has happened in the Middle East.
- There is zero “occupation” of Gaza. None. There were Israelis in Gaza from 1967 until 2005, but then any semblance of an occupation ended. In 2005, Israel pulled its own people out of Gaza, left everything behind, and Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin was killed by one of his own bodyguards over it and Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was struck down by a “hand of God” stroke as a result. There is no justification for Hamas, except what their charter explicitly calls for: The murder of all Jews and Christians around the world.
- Israel controls electricity and water to Gaza out of necessity, because Gaza diverts all of its money and resources into building terror tunnels and rockets out of public water pipes.
- Gaza could easily have been transformed into its own beautiful oasis, similar to what the Israelis had done with their part of it. Gaza has everything it needs to succeed – beautiful beaches, the Mediterranean, adjoining the majestic Sinai and close to the beautiful Red Sea, and next to high tech powerhouse Israel. When Israel abandoned their Gaza settlement in 2005, they left behind incredible greenhouses and seawater desalination plants. Entire communities that ran on sustainable re-use of limited resources, something out of Dune. What did the Gazans do when the Jews left Gaza? They destroyed the desalination plants and the greenhouses, they scrapped everything made of metal, and ruined everything beautiful that was handed to them for free.
- We must be honest. Gazans are a backwards people, educated to hate everyone and kill everyone, and live miserably amongst themselves. They are indeed a sad case, but they and their misery are of their own doing. Maybe they should go back to Turkey and start anew.
A fabulous hunting trophy
Another PA archery season over (UPDATE: No, it wasn’t over, I have not kept up with new PA archery season dates), another season I did not arrow a deer or a bear. It’s not that I could not have killed a buck with a gigantic rack, I could have, a hundred times. It is that I chose not kill him. He isn’t necessarily tame, but he has been hanging around an awful lot. It would have been easy to send an arrow or a bolt through him from a porch or an upstairs window. But in my old-er age, I must be turning soft-hearted. He even came into a ground blind I was in with a crossbow, and puttered around. I decided to admire him, instead.
Just seeing wild beauty like his brings me real pleasure. I don’t need to put his head on the wall for him to make me happy.
Even without killing a black bear or a wolf, I still got an amazing trophy from my Alaska hunt in September. And no, I am not referring to the beautiful stones and colorful pebbles I bring home with me as keepsakes from all around the world. Alaska streambeds were loaded with all kinds of incredible geological samples, and I could have easily filled a pickup truck bed with the easy ones. Instead, I picked up a memento of someone else’s kill, and brought that home with me.
While I was stalking a salmon stream in the northernmost part of southeast Alaska eight weeks ago, cradling a 45-70 rifle in my arms and looking for black bear feeding on spawning fish with one eye, or a wolf, and watching out for the ever-present brown bears/grizzlies with the other eye, I happened upon a scattering of big bones up against a stream bank. Bleaching white on the top side, and staining green with algae and moss on the bottom side, these bones marked a kill site. From what I could piece together, a two-year-old moose had made a stand against a pack of wolves or a large grizzly on this site, and had lost. It was right here where he had died and had been eaten.
One bone in particular caught my eye, the hip socket, sitting concave-side-up to the sky. What made this individual bone stand out so much was both how perfectly round it was, and yet how it was also framed on three sides by heavily fragmented and fractured ends of bone. Something really big had broken this heaviest of bones, and the tooth marks are still on the socket. As artists are fond of saying about something that catches all of the visuals just right, it was a study in contrasts.
I bent down, picked up the broken socket bone, brushed off the dirt and leaves, and stuffed it into my backpack among the long underwear and my PB&J sandwich. Back home in Pennsylvania, it was cleaned off, lightly bleached, and re-purposed into a pipe holder and ashtray. It is actually incredible how perfectly my tobacco pipe fits into that hip socket. Now I can use the bone as both an ashtray and a reminder of being in some of the world’s wildest country.
As soon as it dried, I sat down to enjoy a bowl of cherry cavendish, and with the light tobacco smoke swirling up around my head, I was immediately lost deeply in thought about God’s magnificent creation, the amazing wild beasts that have inspired us wee humans since our dawn here on Planet Earth, and how a hunting trophy is what you make of it. It doesn’t always have to be something you killed yourself. Sometimes it is just a small piece of the wilderness we love that serves as a symbolic touchstone and a time machine that transports us back to a place and time where all that mattered was the wind direction and the smell of Fall in the air.
Looking at this ten thousand years ago or fifty thousand, any Neolithic hunter anywhere around the planet would have felt exactly the same way. This one piece of fractured bone connects us two hunters across time, even though we never met.
Screamers America
A real sizeable portion of the American citizenry and even the American electorate do not understand or even care what the people in the federal government are doing. So many Americans are lethargic about their freedom that they don’t bother to vote, and some of them really say “If it is all taken away from me tomorrow, OK, whatever.”
Of course we all know these same people who are so laissez- faire about their own fates will scream bloody murder when they do in fact lose everything. This is the down side of all the unbelievable material success and wealth that democratic capitalism has spread so far and wide. People are asleep, unaware and uncaring about what is happening to their fate, to their futures. To them, America just keeps chugging along on autopilot. Doesn’t matter who is in Congress, doesn’t matter who is in the Oval Office, doesn’t matter who holds the local magisterial judge position in their township, doesn’t matter how political decisions are made.
A significant portion of our people are stuffing their faces full of processed junk food and living for the moment, absorbed in nonsense like “professional” sports. No country can continue successfully like this, when its people are not watching the road in front of them, but are distracted by shiny crap way off on the side somewhere. And in fact, America is not continuing successfully like this, as we see with high food prices and shortages, high gasoline prices, high mortgage rates, heavy official censorship of undesirable alternative perspectives, etc. And we also see a single political party in partnership with a real portion of the other political party doing everything possible to silence their critics and crush dissent. These political people are taking advantage of the lack of attention the American people are paying to what is being done in the name of the American people. Like how is government power and force being used and badly abused.
Is the IRS unfairly attacking opponents of the Joe Biden crime family? Is the FBI illegally targeting opponents of the Joe Biden crime family and protecting the corrupt Joe Biden crime family? Is the DOJ using official force of arms against innocent Americans to achieve political outcomes that the voters won’t grant them? The answers to these questions are a huge Hell Yes.
And yet I still encounter perfectly smart Americans who actually believe whatever the New York Times writes, whatever the MSNBC and NPR partisan political activists tell them. They are not curious about what is happening around them, what is happening under their feet. When a heavily armed FBI SWAT-type group descends on their neighbor’s home, these incurious people either say “Eh, he must have done something bad.”
Or, even worse, the neighbors say “Oh, he was a religious Republican who peacefully protested in Washington DC on January 6th 2021, so he deserves this heavy treatment.”
A 1995 movie called Screamers captures America’s current cultural landscape perfectly. Unintentionally, mind you. This is an allusion, a comparison, an allegory, intended to paint a picture using actual pictures from a movie so we can better connect dots in people’s heads and help them better understand what is happening to America. Screamers was not so much a political statement as a story about the cost of humans becoming lazy and incurious about what is happening under their feet.
In a way Screamers is probably based on the 1895 HG Wells book The Time Machine, where happy pretty Eloi people dancing in the sunshine with flowers in their hair without a care are occasionally grabbed by the evil Morlocks and dragged underground to a horrible fate. Either one of these stories, Screamers or The Time Machine, fit what is happening right now in America. And what, you ask, is happening in America right now?
America is becoming a violent, lawless police state, and it started right underneath our feet without us knowing it, or seeing it. Oh sure, it started earnestly enough, you know, the federal government staffers fighting foreign terrorism and against evil drug cartels. But then those government employees working so diligently behind the scenes, out of our view, eventually redesigned themselves, redefined their purpose, and they evolved into unrecognizable creatures preying upon us innocent citizens.
FBI, DHS, DOJ, CIA etc employees have become horror creatures drunk on raw, cruel power they derive from controlling what had been hallowed institutions set up to protect the American people. And now these government Morlocks and Screamers are coming for all of us who dare point out that they have become Frankenstein monsters intent on destroying a free America so they can control it. One by one, they pull innocent Americans down into DC dungeons where terrible tortures are happening.
A new movie is out, which I saw, that details exactly how America is becoming a violent, lawless police state run by the worst people. This movie is called … Police State. I highly recommend you see it, not because it will make you feel good, but because you and I definitely need a kick in the ass to get our attention off of the fun and shiny happy things Americans are so used to having endless supplies of. We are not living in the American reality right now, people. We are living in a very scary, dangerous un-reality. If you want to understand how this is happening, go see the movie Police State.
The federal Screamers and the government Morlocks are definitely coming to get you and your kids. Don’t let them succeed.
A pretty face don’t mean a pretty heart. Plenty of federal agents will destroy 100% innocent you just for the pleasure of it
Federal agents coming to help you find your way to a dungeon where they will deprive you of your constitutional AND your human rights
RIP my friend Nevin Mindlin
Nevin Mindlin was probably an annoying precocious kid. He was probably one of those kids in school who at a young age would constantly raise his hand to answer questions posed by the teachers, because he actually knew the correct answer and he also probably knew a great deal more about whatever the subject was. Although I did not know Nevin at the tender age of eight, I am certain this lovingly annoying ability of his was probably becoming pronounced right about then. And it never stopped and it served him well all the way up until his death this morning in south Florida.
I will miss Nevin, for a lot of reasons. A good friend is always tough to find, and human chemistry is always a mystery. Opposites attract is an old saying, and as opposite as Nevin and I were from one another, we always enjoyed one another’s company. Maybe it was because I, too, was the annoying kid in grade school, but without Nevin’s intelligence. Probably I secretly admired him and I also wanted to be like him.
Nevin went to college, not just anywhere, but at Goddard College, a hippie freak school in the 1970s. Which must have been an interesting experience for all involved, because Nevin was a conservative Republican. He got his MBA from Lehigh University. He served in the US Navy and learned to take apart radios and fix complicated things. This ability to deconstruct and reconstruct complex bits of wires and capacitors became one of his annoying habits as an adult, when he would describe whatever public policy we were grappling with as a radio or electronic array. Nevin could diagram a public policy like no one else, and as he drew on the blackboard in his mind he saw electric wires, capacitors, and other radio components. Maybe he was just overthinking stuff, but it was impossible to refute him on his own terms. He would stop explaining and ask for questions, and the people in the room would just sit there staring, unable to conjure the right response. He should have been a salesman.
After working in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives for a long time, where he was the executive director of the House Labor & Industry Committee, Nevin went on to be the policy director at the PA Department of Labor & Industry under Governor Tom Ridge in the 1990s. Of course Nevin was smarter and more experienced than most of the other appointees (except fellow appointee Tom Armstrong, whom he admired), and he always struggled with reconciling his clear headed and deeply held principles with impolite political necessity. This business of trading off principle for necessity would plague Nevin his entire life, and I don’t think he ever felt good about it. Maybe he should have been a philosopher. If he had been a salesman, he probably would not have been a rich one.
Nevin retired a bunch of years ago and ran for mayor of Harrisburg. As a candidate, he was very popular, especially among the Black population, even as a conservative Republican, and he scared the pants off the political establishment. I was in the courtroom when a now departed county judge held that Nevin’s reliance upon the official opinion of the county elections department was Nevin’s mistake, and not the mistake of the paid professionals who advised him, and thus was he disqualified from running for mayor at the last minute. It was a disgraceful moment in the history of human self-rule. Even the judge found his moment of political necessity distasteful, and his shame at having to remove this pure hearted, well meaning, popular man from the ballot and from threatening the political establishment was written all over his own unhappy face. I will never forget it.
Nevin served the Harrisburg Jewish community in a number of roles, including president of the Silver Academy Yeshiva. He never stopped dabbling in local politics, until he moved to southwest Florida a few years ago and said “What the hell, I think I’ll just go fishing from now on.” I always felt proud of having taught Nevin to fish, because it brought him great pleasure. We used to fish the Susquehanna River here in Harrisburg, back in the early 2000s, when a guy could catch 100-150 smallmouth bass in a day, and have a real shot at the huge muskellunge we had back then. Those were real good times together. He also enjoyed splitting wood with me, and fishing Pine Creek.
One Fall night on our way up Pine Creek Valley, probably twenty years ago, we encountered a wrecked SUV sideways in the road, the driver injured and hanging out her window. An enormous buck lay alive panting on the other side of the road. Despite having all four of its legs cleanly removed from its body due to the collision with the front of the SUV, and despite being hardly able to move more than a couple of feet at a time on its bloody stumps, the buck was full of fierce fight and aggressive lunges toward anyone who approached him. I was trying to maneuver into a safe angle where I could dispatch the suffering animal when the driver’s husband showed up. He barely noticed his wife in the driver’s seat of the steaming, crumpled SUV, and walked over to the buck. The man clearly admired the buck’s huge rack (I’m guessing it was in the 140s-150s) and tried to get ahold of it to twist and break the animal’s neck. That was a mistake, as the buck quickly lunged and speared the guy squarely in the gut with its long tines, drawing blood. The man was filled with rage, and I handed him my 9mm pistol that I had been prepared to dispatch the animal with. He damn near emptied that entire clip into the buck before he handed the gun back to me.
We left the dark wreck scene with its gory buck, steaming disabled vehicle, and the injured woman with her uninterested husband running his hands over the deceased buck’s rack, and Nevin said “You deer hunters are a really weird bunch of people.” He really should have been a philosopher.
Nevin was married twice. First to Gail, who gave him three great sons he was crazy about, Joshua, Avi, and Hillel, and then to Jean, who was with him when he died today. Nevin leaves a legacy of clear headed public policy, of absolutely beautiful principles based on America’s founding documents and the Torah, which he tried to follow, and memories among his friends of his explosive, joyous, easy laugh and always happy demeanor. I will miss my friend Nevin so very much. Godspeed, old friend. I hope you get to fish on your journey.
He will be buried this Sunday in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, where he grew up.
Nevin Mindlin fishing in south Florida, looking like an Amishman who had taken a wrong turn at Albuquerque and ended up in Heaven
As goes Israel, so goes America
Lots of my fellow conservatives are poo-poohing Israel’s war for survival, because “that’s over there, and we are doing just fine way over here, so why should we either care or get involved?”
I am an America-first guy. No ifs ands or buts, America comes first in all things. Behind this commitment is a simple calculus: If America falls, every other cool place will also fall. And when we say fall, we mean the end of individual freedom across the planet. America is the last bastion of individual freedom; there is no other place for freedom loving people to go. And no one else will bail us out if America does fail. So, America first means an absolute commitment to preserving the highest and best freedom on Planet Earth. It is here that I make my stand. I hope you do, too.
Years ago a reader of this blog asked me to write about Agenda 21, the United Nations targeting of individual freedom under the guise of better health and better environment and so on. Agenda 21 is the usual Marxist pablum of do-gooders without a thought for its inevitable negatives. The gist is that whatever the UN wanted to achieve with Agenda 21 was good, and no one was ever asking about the down sides, the costs, the consequences. The reason I neglected to address Agenda 21 until right now is that a literal hailstorm of attacks on America from top to bottom was well under way, and still is, and I believed then that while Agenda 21 might appear to be a big part of the problems the USA was experiencing at the time, the truth was that a lot of other hidden efforts were much more dangerous.
Well, fast forward almost ten years and here we are, a constitutional America literally under siege from every angle, from every corner, even from within our own government. Agenda 21 might be interesting, but there is a lot of other evil crap that will be fatal to the American republic literally right in front of our faces. Turns out that Agenda 21 alone is kind of quaint policy debate stuff. Fact is, America is under attack by much more, much worse crap that doesn’t even have a catchy name.
Three weeks ago, a lot of conservatives might have had truly mixed feelings and mixed thoughts about Israel. Most conservatives like that Israel is a democracy, that it is a Western nation with the rule of law, that the people there speak great English, and that Israel has always been a close and important military ally of America. On the other hand, a lot of conservatives are mistrustful of the tangled web of official relationships between Israel’s government and our own. And many resent their tax money going there for whatever (about 90% of the American taxpayer money that goes to Israel pays for Israel to buy American-made weaponry).
However, since the bloody October 7th Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, conservatives have had another growing concern: Will this latest war become yet another place for young Americans to fight and die, pursuing vague goals and intangible results…all while the war machine cha-chings up the bucks.
Here’s the thing, folks. All of the above is true, and it is also possible for America to support Israel without sending any troops, and really just being more of a cheerleader as Israel cleans up the trash. But don’t think that what is happening in Israel can’t or won’t happen here in America. Don’t think you can simply close your eyes and ignore what is happening “over there” because it is not happening “over here.”
Because the same kind of people trying to destroy Israel also live right here in America. And they want to destroy America for the same reason they want to destroy Israel.
I think it is just a matter of time before America is attacked in a hundred different locations by a hundred different attackers, all driven by Islamic supremacism. I am not alone in saying this, because you don’t have to have a great analytical mind to know that the hundreds of Iranians, Syrians, Lebanese, and Chinese literally walking over America’s southern border all pose a huge threat to our people. They are not here to hookem horns party hearty and watch a football game. They are here to hurt us, to kill us, to destroy our civilization, to strip us of our rights, and to make us submit and to force convert us all to some other belief system.
So, Israel is the canary in the coal mine for America. If Israel falls, then whoa, America, you are really on your own, and we had better be on our guard. The same forces that could destroy Israel could destroy America. Don’t get complacent and say to yourself “Eh, that’s happening way over there, it doesn’t involve me, and it can’t happen over here.”
Not only can it happen here, there are hundreds of Iranians and Syrians and others from known terrorist countries living here right now. They will blow us up for the same reason Hamas is trying to blow up Israel. There is no separating America from Israel in this regard; both countries are hated by primitive, evil savages for the same reason. Interestingly, while some of the $85 billion worth of American weapons summarily abandoned in Afghanistan by the Biden Administration are showing up in Gaza, used against Israelis, one can’t help but wonder if they will also show up back here in America, but this time in the hands of our enemies.
When I was a kid and got into fistfights, and someone’s older brother jumped in to help his jerk little brother kick my ass, and I found myself outnumbered, I always appreciated having someone unexpected jump in on my side to help even the odds. Teams have a way of reinforcing each other, increasing their chances of survival. Israel right now is doing OK and doesn’t need America to jump in militarily. America doesn’t have to necessarily fully jump in on Israel’s side right now, but we had better be watching closely what happens there and what is happening here at home. Because as Israel goes, so goes us, so goes America.