Matthew McConaughey = Hollywood Idiot #1,367,189
So an actor named Matthew McConaughey has stepped into the freedom debate, advocating for stripping law-abiding citizens of our Constitutional rights because of what certainly appears to be a remarkably well funded and coordinated attack on the Uvalde, Texas, elementary school.
None of what McConaughey advocates for would have stopped the attack, although “hardening” the school would have easily defeated the mysterious gunman. McConaughey did not advocate for hardening public schools. He wants American gun owners to be at the mercy of unaccountable bureaucrats and vindictive neighbors who disagree with private gun ownership, period.
Why the hell does any American in their right mind care what this actor guy says? McConaughey is a paid actor, someone who engages in silly dress-up and make-believe fairy tales for a living. This ain’t rocket science stuff, it is childish. McConaughey is just one more idiot from Hollywood, whose forte is definitely not public policy. And we all know that lawless, goofball, doped up, Marxist Hollywood has been at war with a Constitutional America for fifty years, in any case. So of course people from Hollywood will come up with all kinds of ridiculous policy ideas like McConaughey has.
I for one do not care about McConaughey’s opinions, nor do I care for his acting. Actors are a dime a dozen, generally unimpressive to seriously failed as individuals, and they depend upon the support of their audience to make the ridiculous millions of dollars they get for simply fooling around in front of a camera.
McConaughey has definitely lost a lot of his audience with his publicity stunt. But then again, he probably already has so much money in the bank from ticket-buying gun owners while he has play-acted being a violent gun owner in his movies that he doesn’t have to work for a living.
If only some Hollywood script writer would write this whole farce up into a movie…it would probably make a lot of money as a macabre comedy.
Excuse our Covid1984 time-out
Please excuse the lack of productivity here. It is a result of everyone in the house having the Wuhan Flu AKA Covid1984 simultaneously, and everyone having gone through the same infection process at their own speed.
Covid is essentially a flu, as I have experienced several flu bouts over my adult life. Tired beyond tired, bedridden sleeplessness pocked with an hour here or there of restless shuteye and bizarre dreams that are as disturbing as any bad dream could be. Feeling like I have a fever, my actual body temperature is a Nature-approved 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Aches and pains in old wounds reveal the virus to be a digger. My taste buds converted sugar in my coffee to salt for one day, and now thankfully sugar/ substitute tastes sweet again.
Fifteen minutes of assured energy and hope that it has passed give way to a lethargic drag back upstairs and a dramatic Hollywood movie unceremonious flop head-first into the bed covers. People I love in different stages of their own Wuhan Flu misery take my temperature, bring me food, drink.
If there is one aspect of the Wuhan Flu it is that it is not what it seems. This is probably my third bout with some version of it. Or it may be my only bona fide experience with it, as the two positive tests have shown it is inside me.
Hopefully tomorrow finds me on my job sites. Just writing this takes all the energy I can muster.
Everyone keep vitamins D and B, and zinc, on hand, in case you get this. Drink fluids nonstop, and take over the counter Mucinex etc to keep the mucus moving through and out the body. Good luck.
Please do not pet the landowner
A few weeks ago, my wife looked up, startled. Her eyes were fixated on something over my right shoulder, and then she said “There are some men on the porch. Were you expecting visitors today?”
Uh, no, I was not only not expecting any visitors that day, I was not expecting any visitors the entire weekend. Because I was alone with my wife and relishing our rare private time together in a quiet out of the way dead-end location.
Just as I stood up from the table and turned towards the front door, an older guy with a greying stubble knocked. Another guy in his fifties was standing near him, and both were dressed in casual-to-ratty-on-the-crick clothes. I did not recognize either of them, and reflexively felt for the grip of “Biden’s Lung Buster” at my side.
Opening the door and stepping outside, I buried my rumbling fury under a big steaming pile of humor: “Hi boys! You can put the free beer here on the porch and help yourselves to load of firewood on the way out.”
With big smile, of course.
The two men were nice enough, and laughed at my joke. They explained that they had been fishing down in the creek that morning and had heard a gobbler up above them on the mountain. And that had set them in motion trying to figure out a way to get to the gobbler, to hunt it, without trespassing on what they acknowledged is very clearly posted private land all around the gobbler.
After what they said was a lot of driving around and walking and consulting maps, they determined the best way to attain their goal was to drive up the posted and very long gravel driveway to the remote home nestled way the hell back in the woods, and then to knock on the door and ask permission to both hunt the gobbler at present time and in the future cross over our property to access state forest land farther up the mountain.
“You two bastards are lucky as hell I didn’t come busting out here buck naked with an AR to run you off, because the angry naked old man thing is about a hundred times worse than the gun,” I half joked.
The two interlopers chuckled at the joke, and started getting the hint. After all, the land AND the driveway are all posted for a reason. Privacy is a valuable and rare thing, and because many Americans today seem to have been raised without any manners or a sense of self-preservation, big yellow posted signs, buckets of purple paint, and gates are now a necessity to preserve what shreds of privacy people have remaining to them.
But these guys had purposefully ignored all of the legal and physical barriers designed to keep them out of my private life.
“Yeah, I have had that same bird in gun range twice this week, including earlier this morning, and I have decided to let him live, because he is a rare survivor up here,” I explained, truthfully.
Wild turkeys used to be plentiful in Northcentral PA, and for the past fifteen years they are now as rare as hen’s teeth, due to a combination of factors like mature forests and craploads of nest-raiding predators.
“Well, could we at least cross over your land to get to the state land?” the second guy asked, having taken a step backwards off the porch and onto the steps.
To which I replied with bare naked contempt: “Why would we let strangers walk through our best hunting ground so they can go hunt where they want? We leave that area as a sanctuary so we can hunt it carefully, and having people walk through it would just ruin it for our hunting, to say nothing of our privacy up here. And it is remote and quiet up here…right? Guys, there are over two million acres of public land within an hour’s drive of here, and you guys need to be here, right here, on us?”
The second guy looked chagrined, and I felt only the slightest twinge of regret for having spoken so plainly.
“Well, we thought it wouldn’t harm anything if we asked,” said the first guy, who was studying his feet.
And that’s the thing. The signs around the property and at the gate on the private driveway do not say “Hunting By Written Permission Only” or anything similar about asking for permission to hunt on the land.
Rather, the myriad signs and purple paint say keep out, stay out, do not enter, do not trespass, no access, no anything, private land don’t even ask. And frankly, every square inch of private land in the valley (which is about 93% public land) is heavily posted and jealously guarded, so physically asking anyone for permission to hunt is both a fool’s errand and a deliberate theft of someone’s valuable privacy. It is an invasion of someone’s sanctuary.
Folks, don’t try to pet the landowner. He is likely to bite, because he was sleeping comfortably in his quiet little corner when you came up to him, woke him up, and acted like petting him was the best thing he could have ever expected or wanted. When in fact all he wants is to be left alone in his quiet little corner. He never asked you to pet him and doesn’t want you to pet him. He doesn’t want to see or hear you, either.
For some odd reason, a lot of people across America believe that public land sucks to hunt on, and that private land is where all the wild game is holed up. Nothing is farther from the truth than this incorrect notion; almost all of the trophy deer and bears I have killed were on public land. If getting to a piece of public land is difficult, then you should do everything legal you can to get there, because in my extensive experience, hardly anyone else will be hunting that area. But one thing you cannot do is badger the adjoining private landowner. Sending a letter explaining yourself, or placing a friendly phone call, is the only correct way to ask permission.
A Uvalde Memorial Day weekend
In the spirit of this Memorial Day weekend, it is important to recognize and acknowledge the 19 child students and two teachers sacrificed in a school in Uvalde, Texas, last week, to advance the Democrat Party’s pursuit of absolute and total control over every American.
No deaths are ever too many in the Democrat Party’s pursuit of the latest bloody crisis they can leverage into illgotten political gains. From late-term abortions where the living child is literally euthanized after having been born, to innocent school children gunned down in defunded police-free schools, the Democrat Party stands proudly for one thing: Death to children every day. Because God knows, the Democrat Party must always have a crisis to exploit to help them move otherwise unpopular and poorly considered legislation, and no sacrifice for that is too big or too sad.
We must also acknowledge the importance here of the Child Molesting and Pedophile Groomers’ Lobby, aka the National Education Association and its many state and local affiliate teachers’ unions. They, too, wish to exert unchallenged control over all taxpayer-funded government schools, where they exploit small children in psychopathic social experiments pitting the kids against their loving, devoted parents. Nothing happens in public schools without the teachers’ unions lobby say-so, and so their well considered decision to leave public schools as vulnerable soft targets is implemented everywhere across America. They can’t have their bloody crises without the soft targets inviting them.
The teachers’ unions are A-OK with sacrificing children and even some teachers to move their political football down the field. Recall that a great many of the teachers and politicians and basketball coaches demanding gun confiscation today are the very same people who demanded that local police forces be defunded and also stay the hell out of schools yesterday.
Yes, it is true that these teachers’ unions and their political allies speak out of both sides of their mouths, but what is the point of being logical and reasonable when your end goal is the total collapse of American civilization?
We have learned some disturbing facts about the Uvalde massacre over the past few days: A teacher propped open a door that cross-dressing murderer Salvador Ramos then walked through unopposed, after he had spent TWELVE MINUTES shooting his guns at the school building with no apparent return fire or police response. He must have realized that the school was undefended and also welcoming to mass murderers, and so he literally waltzed in.
And apparently the law enforcement officials who did eventually respond milled about outside for an hour like a bunch of scared school girls, and not like the trained burly men with firearms they actually are. What a bunch of cowards. And then these same cowardly law enforcement officials turned their violent attention onto the terrified parents they were blocking from the school, tasing one father and handcuffing a mother.
In other words, the police at Uvalde were too busy “saving” the parents outside to go inside the school to actually intervene and save the kids from Ramos.
You can’t make this stuff up, but a lot of this failure has to be associated with the Democrat Party’s efforts to defund and defang the police across America. As a result, a lot of police everywhere these days feel confused and uncertain about what they are supposed to do, and how much trouble they will get into with angry Democrats if they actually shoot a child murderer dripping blood from his hands. Because a heroic police officer to you and me is always a cold blooded murderer to the Democrat Party….
Gun confiscation from law abiding citizens is the Democrat Party’s goal here, for the simple reason that an armed populace is impossible to rule over the way that the Democrat Party intends. So, what’s a few sacrifices here and there in the pursuit of absolute and total control of all 350 million Americans?
Those of us inclined to think of and memorialize bloody American sacrifice differently than this cynical Democrat ploy can recall that our Memorial Day tomorrow is not just about those military personnel who gave their lives abroad for our freedom here at home. We also recall that in our own War for Independence, many unarmed heroes gave their lives right here on American soil so that future generations might live in freedom from government.
And this is how I prefer to think of the Uvalde kids and teachers now, as domestic heroes whose sacrifice will not have been in vain. Because so many Americans are catching on now to the Democrat Party’s anarchic lawlessness, and they see through their calls for more government control over our law-abiding lives.
Democrat Party 100% owns Uvalde school shooting
The mass shooting in yet another school, this time in Uvalde, Texas, is like all the others: It was preventable and is 100% the result of the Democrat Party and its subsidiary, the teacher’s unions, who control government schools with an iron fist.
As we have seen over the past year, the Biden Administration’s DOJ and FBI have been treating justifiably angry parents of school children as “domestic terrorists.” Relying on the First Amendment, these parents formally object through long established democratic processes to the hijacking of their taxpayer-owned schools by anti-America indoctrinators posing as teachers and school administrators.
But because the Democrat Party is using the power of government to try to silence its political critics, and to protect the government school system from being taken back by the taxpayer citizens, they have teamed up with various private anti-America groups like the National School Board Association and the National Education Association to “inform” the DOJ and FBI on who to illegally target. While this behavior is obviously un-democratic and a grotesque misuse of government power and authority, it is in and of itself not the focus of today’s essay.
What the forgoing means is that government-run “public schools” are just another captured outpost of the Democrat Party and its anti-America, bizarro sexual and cultural groomers who must be defended at all costs from the peaceful citizens who actually own the schools and underwrite them via hard-paid taxes out of their pockets. It means that public schools are wholly owned subsidiaries of the Democrat Party and its primary educational arm, the National Education Association teacher’s union and its affiliates. And what this means is that pretty much everything that happens inside public school grounds is either OK’d or enabled by the teacher’s unions and the Democrat Party.
Including school shootings.
Believe me, if the Democrat Party and its teacher’s unions did not want racist Critical Race Theory taught in public schools, it wouldn’t be. If they didn’t want school shootings, there would not be any. Teachers’ unions have an absolute lock on public schools, and so whatever happens in these schools happens because of careful decisions the Democrat Party and the teacher’s unions have made. They own all of these things.
One conscious decision they have made over and over is to leave public schools as purposefully soft targets, easily accessed by murderous criminals who wreak mayhem and bloodshed in school buildings almost at will. In the wake of previous school shootings, Democrats in Congress have voted to prevent armed police from being in schools. Just the other day, Democrat Party US Senator Chuck Schumer blocked legislation that would make public schools a thousand times safer by allowing administrators and teachers to be armed.
Why would there be a constant effort by the Democrat Party to keep public schools as soft targets, their school children, staff and employees disarmed and sitting ducks? Because the Democrat Party is addicted to bloodshed and crises, at any cost. Nothing moves the political ball down the field like a scary crisis with tons of innocent blood spilled, and so the Democrat Party and its teachers’ unions have cultivated the kinds of circumstances that allow these shootings to easily occur. Such is the Left’s desire for full control over America that no sacrifice is too big, there are never enough dead children and blood soaked headlines. Anything to gain control.
The Uvalde massacre shows once again that the Democrat Party is both arsonist and then fireman.
I know this might sound nuts, but given how much official skullduggery we have already seen aimed at illegally expanding the federal surveillance state against law abiding American citizens, I would not be surprised if we learn that some of these school shooters were paid to commit their crimes.
In the Uvalde massacre, the shooter (possibly an illegal alien) Salvador Ramos, 18, posted direct online threats that no one acted on, murdered his grandmother, then drove to the school and easily overcame an armed but untrained School Resource Officer. The police on scene did not enter the school to stop the shooting out of fear for their own safety, and a mother on the scene who did try to enter the school to help was arrested and handcuffed by one of the useless cowards carrying a gun and a badge there.
There are a lot of failures at Uvalde, and not one of them has to do with lawful, law-abiding gun owners anywhere in America. But as we have seen, the Democrat Party and its media establishment is hijacking this latest massacre that they created in order to generate the next crisis that can be leveraged into more anti-constitutional behavior by the federal government, namely gun-grabbing from law-abiding Americans who form the only real bulwark against federal government lawlessness and control. And we see that the Biden Administration is 100% all-out for full control of all of us through online media, controlling our bank accounts, etc.
And so we just have to ask this logical question: If the FBI, DOJ, National Association of School Boards, and the teachers’ unions are willing to repeatedly sacrifice innocent school children on their altar of disarming and completely controlling America, then what do they really have planned for the rest of us after they take our guns?
Probably a lot more bloodshed, and all for the Leftist cause.
Ten take-aways from my Election Day experience
With the Kerwin men, quality people
Primary elections are more important than the general election every November, because voters choose who is going to be representing them at the November election. And in the case of Republican Party voters, if you don’t vote for constitutional America-First candidates, you are guaranteed to have a Republican In Name Only (RINO) liberal running against the Democrat Party liberal in the November election. There’s not a whole lot of philosophical difference between the Republican liberal and the Democrat liberal, and after that November election between a RINO and a Democrat it’s just a question of how rapidly America is destroyed under your feet, slowly or quickly.
On Tuesday I volunteered at four different election polls, handing out brochures for Kathy Barnette, and I spoke with a lot of voters. Here are some take-aways from my experience during and after Tuesday’s Primary Election here in PA:
- Unsurprisingly, voters make both simple and complicated choices in voting for candidates. Simple choices can be lazy or principled, and complicated choices can be bizarre or carefully thought out. Candidate selection is as complex as any other choice in life, and I think that is a good thing.
- Party establishment endorsement is a negative among Republican/ conservative voters, who appear to increasingly view the GOP as a force for bad and not for good. For example, Lou Barletta’s campaign unleashed a tidal wave of Republican establishment career politician endorsements in the days before Tuesday’s election, and if anything these endorsements seemed to hurt Barletta at the polls, not help him; Doug Mastriano crushed Barletta.
- On the other hand, Democrat voters seem highly attuned to and in synch with their establishment, as witnessed by political newcomer Justin Fleming’s trouncing of long time Democrat Party activist Eric Epstein in the newly created 105th Legislative District (PA House). For at least ten years, and probably closer to twenty years, independent-minded liberal Epstein has run for everything from dog catcher to school board to state senate, almost always unsuccessfully but always with close-call results. Not this time. Apparently ten unions and the House Democrat Campaign Committee aggressively weighed in to stop Epstein from finally capitalizing on his well-known household name in southcentral PA. Fleming the unprincipled “electoral pragmatist” won with 61% of the vote.
- Money is not all that it used to be, but it can still matter in elections, no surprise. Case in point is a very small amount of money (like $157,000 total), old fashioned shoe leather, and reasonable social media networking got conservative grass roots favorite Kathy Barnette up to 25% of the vote in an eight-candidate race. This is a huge statement about the lack of importance of money. However, when the wildly false negative attacks against Barnette started pouring in during the last week from McCormick and Oz and their supporters, like Sean Hannity, Barnette lacked sufficient funds to get out her last-minute rebuttals on TV and radio that could have gotten her over the finish line to win. Enough confusion and obfuscation was created by the attacks to blunt Barnette’s position at the top, and allowed both Oz and McCormick to grow their own voter returns at her expense. Had Barnette possessed a million dollars to do last-minute TV and radio ads, she probably would have won the election.
- Negative advertising does work, and it also greatly suppresses voter turnout. At all of the five polls I was at yesterday, voting was down between 10% and 20%, and I believe many voters were just fed up and confused by all of the negative advertising. SO they stayed home and said “I will just vote in November for whoever wins this primary race.”
- Conservative voters are much more oriented toward ideology and principles than political party.
- Almost every primary election has one winner and some losers, and almost always the losers say they will take their ball and go home if they don’t win, and they won’t back the winner of their race. For weeks before and even after the election was over, I heard unceasing complaints from Republicans about how Mastriano is “too conservative” for Pennsylvania, and that his win will automatically hand the governorship to Komrade Josh Shapiro. I also heard unceasing complaints from Republican voters that Lou Barletta was too milquetoast to appeal to anyone in November, except for blue haired suburban GOPe Republicans. Folks, get used to these competitive races. They are good for us. This competition is just the nature of real and healthy primary races, something that Republicans really need, and something that the GOPe HATES. The Republican Country Club Party hates hates hates sharing decision making with the unwashed dirty masses, who keep gumming up GOPe dreams of easy ill gotten wealth and posh fundraisers. Sorry not sorry, GOPe, get used to ceding more and more decision making to the actual people you claim to represent. It is a good thing, and it is why Mastriano won by an enormous margin.
- For the most part, the GOPe got its ass kicked in PA and elsewhere in America. RINOs like Jake Corman (the sitting President Pro Tem of the PA Senate!!), Jeff Bartos, et al either dropped out or finished below 5%, while underdog candidates like Kathy Barnette and Dr. Oz scored big time vote returns against the establishment’s wishes. We are witnessing a power shift away from GOP party bosses, which is a good thing, because party bosses are corrupt and self-serving people.
- Charlie Gerow is still a good guy, and still not a catchy candidate. Once again, voters enjoy Charlie as an articulate proponent of conservative values, but not as a representative in government for their needs. Charlie is a salon intellectual in the mold of William F. Buckley, one of the 20th century’s great conservative crusaders. Not winning elections doesn’t mean Gerow isn’t relevant, it just means his strength is in policy debates and in the conservative salon of ideas. Nothing wrong with that.
- Finally, yard signs and road signs do not mean anything close to what they used to represent even ten years ago. At one time yard signs and roadside signs were a big part of electoral public outreach, but in this digital age, they are becoming less important. I would not say they are unimportant, because in some ways they can be used to get a sense of voter engagement. Like, lots of signs for Candidate X in a county or in a region probably means that Candidate X is well known there. But it does not mean that Candidate X is necessarily going to convert that name recognition into an Election Day win. Information is now moving so fast and so far across the political landscape, that just one gaffe or one slip-up by an otherwise reasonable candidate can mean the end of their lead or presumptive win. No amount of yard signs can counter a fifteen second video of a candidate doing or saying something ridiculous.
Thank you to all the voters who spent time talking with me on Tuesday. I promote candidates at polls on Election Day every year because these are people I believe in, and I believe in sharing the why and how I have arrived at my decision on whom to vote for. One thing that has not changed among voters at polls since I was a teenager is this: Liberal voters at polls are always surly, grumpy, dismissive, or disrespectful. Do not ask me why this is, but it does hint at how some people think.