Thanksgiving
While fortunately spending a great deal of time out of doors over the past two weeks, often with old friends, in beautiful natural environments, I found myself feeling thankful over and over. What an incredible nation we live in, this America, to have so much opportunity and food and cars and clothing and so much else that it is easy to take any and all of it for granted.
If there is one thing that this debacle of a presidential administration in Washington DC is showing us Americans, it is how fragile our lives and indulgences really are here. In just ten months, the election-stealing Biden Administration has managed to joyfully throw America’s economy into a whirlpool, with spokesthing Jen Psaki laughing out loud and mocking questions about rising food prices, inflation.
“Sorry the treadmill is slowing down,” Psaki mocks, as the administration does everything in its power to keep ships off our coasts from delivering their cargo to us, to turn America from energy-independent to energy-weak and energy-dependent, with soaring gasoline prices as a result.
And in a bizarre way Psaki has done working Americans a favor. She and her confused boss Biden have shown us how thankful we should be. It is a fact that we should not take any of this incredible lifestyle for granted. Not even toilet paper, right? Look at what evil people can so easily do to us, if we just give them the opportunity!
Here below is George Washington’s original proclamation, establishing Thanksgiving Day. Remember that George Washington was one of our leading Founding Fathers who risked everything he had 245 years ago to bring us the opportunities and freedoms we enjoy today. When I read this, I wonder if enough Americans today feel the same way General Washington felt then; do we deeply appreciate what we have. I hope you all enjoyed this day of Thanksgiving as much as I did.
“Thanksgiving Proclamation
New York, 3 October 1789
By the President of the United States of America. A Proclamation.
Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor—and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me “to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.”
Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be—That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks—for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation—for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his Providence which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war—for the great degree of tranquillity, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed—for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted—for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.
And also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions—to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually—to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed—to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shewn kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord—To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease of science among them and us—and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.
Given under my hand at the City of New-York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.
Go: Washington”
Freedom Sunday
Aaaaahhhh, the swell feeling of freedom.
A few days ago, I sat up in a tree stand in Perry County with a loaded crossbow, waiting for a legal buck to walk by. A legal buck in this area of Pennsylvania has at least three points on one side of his antler rack.
The most distinguishing feature of this afternoon deer hunt was that it was occurring on a Sunday. Sunday hunting (beyond coyotes and foxes) is a new addition to Pennsylvania, and as of 2020 we have three Sundays to hunt deer or bear. People like me prevailed in obtaining these mere three Sundays to hunt only after a protracted 25-year battle with the Pennsylvania Farm Bureau, whose nonagenarian board members constantly shook their canes at freedom lovers.
We lovers of freedom are also by nature opponents of government overreach, and yet while the PA Farm Bureau is against all kinds of government overreach, they were all fall-on-their-sword supportive of a government ban on Sunday hunting. Even on private property, where land owners could make their own personal choice about how to spend their weekend. The PA Farm Bureau would not, and still will not, budge one inch in their opposition to any sort of Sunday hunting. And incredibly, Pennsylvania’s laundry list of career elected officials went along with the PA Farm Bureau’s twenty nonagenarians, and against the wishes of just about everyone else.
So while we await the day when the Liberty Bell shall yet ring again and proclaim liberty throughout the land, granting Sunday hunting from October 1st through February 15th, we must enjoy what crumbs we may glean from the grips of the power and control obsessed.
This present gridlock situation made my three hours of Sunday afternoon archery hunting bittersweet. On the one hand, I was in fact experiencing one Freedom Sunday. Better than nothing, right? On the other hand, sometimes a taste of honey is worse than none at all, and while I sat there my mind kept involuntarily counting the number of Sundays we were being unfairly excluded from enjoying.
If you are curious, the number of Sundays we hunters are being deprived in Pennsylvania is nineteen (19). That may seem like very few days to the person who gets to do whatever they want to do seven days a week, 365 days a year, and without false moralists looking over their shoulder in hypocritical judgment of whatever their choice of entertainment may be on any particular day. But to us hunters, whose season runs from early October to mid February, and again the month of May’s turkey season, those nineteen days are a huge deal. We can’t make up for them in the summer months. We can’t get them back once they have passed.
This means that we Pennsylvania hunters are missing a significant percentage of freedom in our lives as otherwise free citizens. This freedom is being unfairly deprived to us, stripped out of our hands, out of the lives of our children. It is a bizarre situation, when we look at the states around us that have unlimited Sunday hunting.
For example, a week ago I began an annual wilderness hunt out of state on a Sunday morning. The trail head parking lot I started out from was packed with the pickup trucks and SUVs of fellow hunters, many of whom I learned later are tradesmen and contractors, whose work loads are heavy all week long, and whose weekends are their real opportunity to pursue their hobbies and pastimes. Our presence as free hunters, free citizens, in the Sunday woods bothered no one, impacted no one. Pennsylvania needs a lot more of this same Freedom Sunday.
Freedom Sunday: Me deer hunting on private land last Sunday. Hurting no one, bothering no one. Why not more of this Sunday freedom?
Veteran’s Day speech 2050
“Today is Veteran’s Day, in the year 2050, and I would like to acknowledge and thank our armed services veterans for their dedication and selfless loyalty.
This year of 2050 marks the thirtieth anniversary of our party’s glorious revolution against the old racist and capitalist United States of America. Our beautiful revolution that began with the party’s righteous overthrow of the corrupt old election system in 2020 could only have been made sure by the joining of the American military with the party. As I said, it is the military veterans of our many difficult but ultimately successful campaigns against domestic terrorists to rid America of racist capitalist oppression who made the party dominant and who brought peace and equity to our shores.
Without our glorious veterans today, we could never have re-made America into what it was meant to be: A unified, centralized, single party nation that serves all people equally. The antiquated and racist so-called Constitution of the old republic was made irrelevant by the dominant forcefulness and sacrifice of our party’s military forces and the many veterans of the several branches who gave their all to ensure that the party became the supreme source of all that is good in America today.
So I want to acknowledge and thank from the bottom of my heart on this Veteran’s Day all of you who have served the party and America so well.
Hakeem Jeffries, Secretary of Peace, Socialist Nation of America”
If we want to avoid some semblance of this speech from becoming actuality, then we Americans ALL must join together as the founders of America joined together in 1776 to fight the tyranny that daily threatens to dismantle America’s foundation. Witness the Biden DOJ and FBI committing an unconstitutional pre-dawn raid this week against journalist James O’Keefe’s home, where his personal computers and phones were stolen and whose contents were illegally downloaded. Nothing in them had anything to do with any crimes. In fact, just like the January 6th political prisoners rotting in DC jails solitary confinement who have not been officially charged, O’Keefe has not been charged with anything. This is just a political fishing expedition to uncover what O’Keefe knows about powerful people.
Apparently O’Keefe’s Project Veritas is so successful at outing Marxist hypocrisy and domestic threats to America that the full coercive weight of the federal government had to be brought down on him, illegally.
The DOJ and the FBI are now so crystal clearly just arms of the Democrat Party. A political party that is seeking sole dominance by any means necessary. By crushing all dissent that has always been constitutionally protected. But the Constitution is only a piece of paper, and if one party no longer respects it or agrees to abide by it….then it becomes meaningless.
America is in for a real fight to stay as a free nation. A fight against the Biden federal government. Thank you to all the real military veterans who have served, fought, been wounded, or died over the last 240 years, while in the pursuit of keeping the Constitution alive and our freedoms real.
My childhood friend John S. broke out and dusted off his service medals today. It is people like John who created the military deterrent to invasion of America. And it is veterans like John who Americans will probably need to call upon again to create a deterrent to the domestic terrorists and enemies now in control of the federal government. Thank you for your service, Johnny. You make us proud.
Citizen wave arrests aggressive elites
If yesterday’s amazing election results show anything, it is that Mister and Missus America have had enough and are fed up with aggressive cultural elites. It also shows that stolen elections have consequences, because when election thieves actually believe that their un-just, unconstitutional, coerced, forced, aggressive policies are justified by the fake “mandate” they never got through the election they never won, they get some come-uppance.
And this, despite their best efforts to steal yet more elections, as in Fairfax County, Virginia, being oh-so-sadly unable to show their election results on Election Day. The corrupt Democrat Party stronghold county did their level best to hide, manufacture, fake and lie and cheat and steal more votes to get candidate governor Terry Macauliffe over the finish line, but they failed.
Republican Youngkin won the Virginia governorship, and Republicans swept Virginia’s other offices from stem to stern. And again, this is despite the rampant vote stealing there that a corrupt judge OK’d at the last minute yesterday.
Republicans won in Democrat Party strongholds across the east coast yesterday, showing that regular old Americans are fed up, even Democrat Party members, with the wild communist policy overreach that has come to mark the Democrat Party today. This is the proverbial “citizen wave” that anyone with any connection to working people could see coming ten miles away, and which is still building up steam and coming even harder in 2022.
Here in Harrisburg outgoing mayor Eric Papenfuse attempted a write-in campaign to hold on to his office. Despite doing well as write-in efforts go, he nonetheless gathered about 33% of the vote, and Wanda Williams will move in to the mayor’s office. I give Eric credit for trying, as he cheerfully handed out literature at our polling place yesterday. But after eight years of indistinct presence in the mayor’s office, it is time to let someone else have a try at it. Hopefully Wanda will do better than Eric, and do better than her Democrat Party would want her to do.
Outgoing Harrisburg mayor Eric Papenfuse cheerfully running a write-in campaign for mayor on Election Day 2021.
Election Day now and a year later
A year ago today I was working a poll in Paxtang, I think. Handing out Trump for President literature (Trump won, everyone knows it), and some US Congressman Scott Perry lit, kibbitzing with other poll workers, chatting up voters and asking for their vote. One thing that really hammered home to me the difference between the Trump supporters and the regular county GOP committee members is the energy level we brought.
I was high energy and on my feet for hours, walking up to voters and asking for their vote, explaining the differences in the candidates. The GOP committeeman was lounging in a folding chair most of the time, occasionally standing, handing out literature for PA rep. Sue Helm if voters walked by close enough to take it from his hand.
When I engaged in discussion with the Democrat Party poll watcher, a woman attorney from northern Maryland, it became clear that she was an unapologetic communist. After she flew into a rage over some “Proud Boys” Latinos who showed up in their Trump socks, Trump pants, Trump hats, Trump shirts, and Trump underwear, I asked her why she was a communist. And at that point the Dauphin County GOP committeeman sprang into action, consoling the Democrat Party poll watcher with giggling assurances that I was a lone kook, my own special kind of far-right lunatic, and not at all representative of the Republican Party.
Yes, the GOP committeeman had more in common with the communist poll watcher than with me, the President Donald Trump advocate and poll watcher. Think about that. I still haven’t shaken it. For a long time I wanted to write a letter to this Dauphin County Republican Party committeeman, and among other things ask him if I was wrong in asking her (the lady poll watcher) why she was a communist. Turns out I was correct, that the Democrat Party is now an open and unapologetic communist movement. Do GOP hacks ever admit they were wrong?
Today is Election Day once again, and we have more of a local race to look at now. Our spring primary election yielded an unusual outcome in Harrisburg, a black woman winning the Democrat Party nomination for mayor of Harrisburg City. Usually the white liberals have it all locked up by mesmerizing and lying to their modern-day slaves to vote for the white liberal candidate. But after decades of white liberal mayors failing to do a single thing to improve the lives of black people in Harrisburg City, black voters here decided to try something different. They voted for a black candidate.
Talk about a step on the road to recovery! Congratulations to my fellow Harrisburg citizens for shaking off their white liberal slave masters!
Eric Papenfuse is the sitting white liberal mayor who was ousted in the spring primary by Wanda Williams, a forever member of the Harrisburg City Council. Eric Papenfuse touted his long list of policy and financial failures and concluded with a communist pledge of a guaranteed minimum income for certain city residents. Yep, the white liberal promised yet more government dependency for a community that is drowning and dying in white liberal dependency. If you ever wondered why urban decay is filled with drug addiction, consider where that addiction started: White liberal crack aka public dependency programs that made black people dependent on white liberal handouts.
Wanda’s election signs proclaim her a “lifelong Democrat,” which is hardly anything to brag about. I mean, look at where the Democrat Party has gotten urban black people across America – generations of failed churches, failed schools, failed families, but by God, they reliably vote for continued Democrat Party failure like good slaves!
Despite Papenfuse’s desperate write-in effort, Wanda is likely to win today. I hope that she grows into the Mayor job with an epiphany that causes her to shrug off the built-in failures of the political past she has lived and worked in.
Dear Wanda, please forgo political parties. Forgo political payback or pay-off of any sort. Please help our city citizens climb out of the poverty and failure that white liberals like Eric Papenfuse deliberately put them in. There are a million creative solutions to the mess here in Harrisburg City, and none of them are loyal to any political party or derivative thereof, such as teacher’s unions.
What have we got to lose by trying something new? We already know all of the current players bring nothing but failure and misery. Break free; break the bonds of injustice, Wanda!
A year from now, at the 2022 Election Day, I hope to write a different retrospective than “Yep, the new mayor immediately embraced all of the failed policies handed to her by the outgoing administration and made them her very own.”
And goodbye Eric Papenfuse. I won’t miss you and your cozy cronyism one bit. You did absolutely nothing but hurt Harrisburg even more than it was hurting when you took office eight years ago. Your mayoral Skid Row proved once again that graduating from Yale (and any other Ivy League school) is a damning millstone hung around the necks of the puffed up unfortunates who brag up these worse-then-useless diplomas. You couldn’t think yourself out of a wet paper bag if an entire city depended upon you for it.
Alec Baldwin’s snuff film
Hollywood goof Alec Baldwin just gunned down an innocent person on the mismanaged set of his new movie in the making, “Rust.”
There is all kinds of analysis and hand wringing and wonderment about how this murder ever happened, and who is really responsible for it. Let’s take a look at this issue, and in the end I will present my own take on ‘what probably really happened’.
Some people say that Baldwin is 100% responsible for the murder of Galina Hutchins and the serious injury of Joel Sousa, because he ignored Rule #1 of gun use: Never point a gun at something or someone you do not want to destroy (shoot). And of course it is difficult to argue with this line of reasoning. I agree with it. But others have sought to dilute and undermine this thinking.
Other people, notably the establishment press, are trying to find anyone to throw under the bus to save a bona fide Hollywood actor from being held accountable. Remember how much effort went into protecting Hollywood scumbag Harvey Weinstein? And Weinstein really was a lecherous monster who was feared and loathed by most of Hollywood. So how much more so will the establishment wagons be circled to protect a just regular kind of gay-hating, violent jerk like Baldwin?
For example, the establishment press keep writing that the revolver was a “prop gun.” Ummm no, no it wasn’t. It was a real gun. Obviously. But that doesn’t stop the mainstream media from trying to pretend this away as some sort of non-gun-gun-non-crime.
The establishment press also tries to say that other people were more responsible for the gun and how it was loaded etc etc than Baldwin could be. Again, no, because that danged real gun was used for target practice by many of the actors and set workers in the desert surrounding the movie set. They all knew it was a real gun and that bullets had been shot out of it a lot.
Here is what I think probably really happened: Rust was a snuff film, a la Jeffrey Epstein’s way of just having fun and never being held accountable for it, no matter how evil and wicked.
Recall ol’ Jeffrey Epstein, the child sex slave trafficker whose pedophile island hideaway was frequented by the rich and famous like Bill Gates, Hillary and Bill Clinton, and others. The same Jeffrey Epstein who was strangled with a wire garrote in his prison cell while the cctv cameras were turned off and the guards mysteriously walked away. A guy with a lot of names and knowledge in his head, who had to be shut up before things got public and messy.
This is to say that with incredible wealth and power comes incredible debasement and debauchery. Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein epitomized the more openly grotesque aspects of it, as well as Epstein’s teenage girl sex party guests, and I think the murder of Galina Hutchins was probably a more subtle expression of one untouchable person’s secret desire to do something unimaginably evil, in the open, and then get away with it.
If this is true, and why not, then Alec Baldwin purposefully murdered Galina and then tried to blame it on everyone else. But inwardly he is gleefully laughing — he got away with it! With murder. And no one will ever try to hold him accountable for it. Because bully boy Baldwin is one of the many untouchables in America these days. People who commit pedophilia rape, murder, treason, and simply walk away from the scene of the crime because the entire cultural and political establishment surrounds them and protects them.
It is quite probable that Rust was actually a cheap and slovenly run movie set because it was never meant to actually be a movie. It was probably just an elaborate opportunity for Baldwin to live out one of his many sick fantasies, and never be held to account for it.
Just my theory, anyhow. It certainly is possible, because if we look at all the insane crimes that all the other American elites have gotten away with (and I am not even mentioning innocent young Mary Jo Kopechne, the sweet girl murdered by Democrat senator Ted Kennedy, another untouchable elite), murder in the open was just the next logical thing for one of them to do and then go laugh about behind their closed doors.
Talk about rust, this murder is an example of how America is becoming a diseased, corroded hell hole from all this unaccountable elitism. Like a bunch of Emperor Neros prancing around, hurting people and hurting America, with zero consequences…but unlike the Roman citizenry, we Americans do have the means to take matters under control.
But do we have the will power?
Lawless DC prison city vs. America
America is a republic, which is a highly fractured political body with checks and balances built in to the system from one end to the other. It is all spelled out in the US Constitution, as well as in almost fifty state constitutions: Local governments, state governments, the federal government, plus three co-equal branches of government (executive, judicial, and legislative) all make up a pretty messy and purposefully inefficient government.
Which makes the Biden Administration’s anomalous punch-you-in-the-nose efforts to centralize power and decision making in Washington, DC, a curiosity. Isn’t it curious that people who say they are Americans who are devoted to America are doing their utmost, including overt violent coercion of their political enemies, to rip power out of the hands of citizens across the continent and concentrate it in just a few hands in Washington, DC?
It isn’t very American to do this, is it? Because America is about sharing power, sharing decision making, and respecting the rule of law so that everyone is held equally accountable under the same law. America was founded in response to abuses of power and official coercion in Europe, and so America has no kings or untouchable aristocrats…right?
What is happening right now in America is a tremendous multi-pronged effort to tear away power and decision making from regular voters across America, and weld that power in place in a handful of government buildings inside Washington DC and its immediate environs. This absolute concentration of power and decision making is what all tyrants do, what all totalitarians have done, be they Adolf Hitler or Joseph Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot or Fidel Castro or whomever. It is fundamentally antithetical to how America was founded and why America was founded.
You could easily say that this effort to concentrate the power of We, The People into the hands of a handful of federal bureaucrats is anti-America, un-American, unconstitutional, treasonous, treacherous, villainous, evil, immoral, illegal, wrong, dumb, catastrophic, destabilizing, divisive, foolish, bold, and a crazy mad power grab, and you would be correct about every one of these words and phrases.
That is because America is undergoing an anti-America, anti-democracy revolution from within that is using the trappings of democracy to semi-legitimize itself. It is bold alright, and just boldly pure evil.
Essentially we are seeing Washington DC as the erstwhile symbol of America and American unity shoot its tentacles out across the nation and grab its political opponents, and reel them back into the clutches of the lawless bureaucratic mess and corrupt judges within the Beltway. As we know well from reporting by The Gateway Pundit and Breitbart, and some pathetic attempts to explain it all away by the Washington Post, a whole lot of political prisoners remain hidden away in secret jails deep inside Washington DC. Many of these Americans rotting in solitary confinement have never committed a crime in their lives, did not commit a crime for which they were grabbed by the Stasi-FBI-DHS-KGB, and remain uncharged by the lawless Dept. of Justice lawyers who are at the core of the coup attempt against the American voters.
Basically, Washington DC is now a prison city, where political prisoners from across America are snatched by FBI SWAT teams brandishing fake warrants from a Cracker Jacks box, and then taken to be deprived of their human rights and their constitutional rights, beaten bloody by racist prison guards, and used as political intimidation puppets.
The greatest antidote to the Biden Administration’s illegal behavior is to fall back on the greatest strength of America, which is our small towns and communities, our municipalities and counties, our state governments spread across the nation. Each one of these levels can resist and push back against the Washington DC thugocracy.
For example, county sheriffs can refuse to cooperate with FBI/DOJ/DHS thugs, can tell them to stay out of their counties, and county sheriffs can deputize thousands of county residents to take up arms to defend the county against attack or other lawless activity, as well as make arrests.
State police can outright arrest FBI/DOJ/DHS thugs engaged in patently illegal behavior within a given state. State police can also issue arrest warrants for specific FBI/DOJ/DHS thugs, making them unable to travel across the United States and extend those poisonous DC tentacles into the lives of otherwise free citizens.
Can you imagine if Florida issued arrest warrants for the seven state and federal agents who outrageously and publicly deprived Brian Kolfage of his due process and civil rights? That would send a strong signal about American checks and balances, wouldn’t it?!
There is no way that a hundred thousand armed federal employees are going to dominate a nation of 350 million legal citizens. It just is not going to happen, despite AG Merrick Garland’s best attempts to Bolshevize the DOJ and the Washington DC prison city. Every federal employee has a home, and those federal field employees engaged in this violent coup d’etat against the American voters and citizenry are especially vulnerable to being charged and arrested by either a county sheriff or a state police agency determined to bring the rule of law back into play.
There may be a hundred million enemies of the Biden state, but there are only a few hundred thousand enemies of We, The People. The power balance here actually favors We, The People so overwhelmingly and in such an enormous quantity that it is only when we contemplate this huge disparity that we understand just how big the political blinders are on Biden’s Marxists. They really do believe that all roads lead to centralized power in Washington, DC, and that they can arrest us all and throw us all in rancid dungeons and beat us and destroy our families at will. But there are not enough jail cells in DC or anywhere else for that matter to hold all of the enemies of Biden’s state apparatus.
Eventually the Washington DC prison city is going to run into a wave of people, of We, The People. That this will happen is as natural as home made apple pie. It is already happening at local school board meetings, where despite being ludicrously labeled as “domestic terrorists” by AG Garland, justifiably outraged parents are continuing to follow the law and bring accountability to their tax dollars and public schools.
It is just a matter of time before the We, The People wave builds bigger than anyone in DC can imagine. The tighter Biden squeezes, the bigger the wave becomes.
PA’s Forester Jim Finley Enters the Forest Cathedral
Penn State forestry professor emeritus, department head, and all-things-forestry guru Jim Finley died yesterday. I was told that he was either felling a large tree on his property, or he was trying to dislodge a large tree that had been felled but was hung up on another tree. Whatever the actual facts are, Jim died from the tree falling on him. It is a reminder that even the best, most experienced forestry professionals are at grave risk.
As trite and awkward as it sounds to write here, the fact is that Jim Finley died doing what he loved in the environment he considered sacred. I am quite sure that had he been asked about whether he would like to die from a tree falling on him, or some more peaceful and less traumatic way, he would have given us the look he is giving below. It is that knowing “Why are you saying that, you know it is wrong” look. In his mid-70s, Jim was nowhere ready to leave us, and we were nowhere ready to let go of him.
His death is a huge loss.
Jim was a remarkable man, who I admired, and who left a way outsized hand print on Pennsylvania conservation and the practice of forestry in eastern America. He was a force to be reckoned with, an institution in his own right, a political-cultural movement, a gentle soul with a will of iron, kind and easy but also passionate and unrelenting.
He did not suffer fools easily, though he accepted honest debate and earnest dissent exactly the way an academic ought to: His eyes took on this hard laser focus, and you could tell he was actively listening and processing, not always ready to give an answer, either. His response might come tomorrow or next year, and if your argument was good, you could tell it had moderated Jim’s perspective.
Jim Finley was an academic, and sometimes prone to the idealism that academics naturally grow into. However, he also had the ability to be hands-on practical, and even more important, he had the ability to support aggressive, hands-on, totally practical forestry practices. You know, the kinds of visual impacts that most urbanites recoil in horror from, and which many land conservation groups really did not want to see, either, no matter how scientifically they were needed or justified. It is an admirable and rare trait to be able to be honest about unpleasant things, and Jim could look at a heavily cut tract with tree tops lying all over the place, and cheerfully explain all of the wonderful things that were now going to follow on the heels of all that disturbance. Because of Jim, conservation easements in Pennsylvania are now a lot more forestry-friendly than they used to be. And a landowner who is able to manage his or her forest as aggressively as they need to under a conservation easement, is a landowner who is much more likely to sign that easement and protect their land in the first place.
Jim invited me to speak to his classes a couple of times, and we worked together when I was at DCNR and the Conservation Fund. I knew him when I was a kid in State College, I knew him as a professional forester and academic at Penn State, and I knew him as a colleague of land conservation legend and Penn State forester Joe Ibberson, whose PSU forestry department endowment Jim presided over at the end of his formal career. It is always a huge loss when someone of Jim’s high caliber leaves us, but it is even more so when he was just starting to become mature, as he would put it in the terms of a tree.
So long, old friend. Happy travels in your peaceful forest cathedral. We who are left behind mourn your untimely departure and we will miss you greatly. You were a hell of a guy, Jim.
Wooden bowls and a vase turned by Jim Finley. Photo kindly provided by forester Dale G.