Flumageddon II: Medical Community Asleep at Wheel
Since 1918, when the first known flu pandemic (named “war fever” because it resulted from the trench warfare conditions of World War I) swept the planet and killed about twenty million souls, the Western medical profession has known all about the danger of flu viruses.
No mystery here. None. Everyone who is a doctor today is at least aware of the flu and has studied it to some degree. And since 1918, SARS, Swine Flu, and some other deadly flu viruses have swept through Asia and America, leaving tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of people dead as a result. We have had plenty of warning about dangerous flu bugs. Plenty of time and opportunity to prepare.
Now in 2020 enter coronavirus19, which is the 19th known iteration/ strain of the corona virus, a well-known flu bug. But this time, the medical community has been caught absolutely flat-footed, unprepared, deer-in-the-headlights surprised. World-respected “DOCTOR” Anthony Fauci at NIH has openly stated that America is not as prepared as other countries to deal with this, and he openly wonders why this is….
Hello, Doctor Fauci, you have been a self-declared expert on flu viruses and other mass diseases for decades. And now you say that America is not prepared? Have you looked in the mirror lately to find the answer about WHY we are not prepared?!
Who else was supposed to prepare America for these dangerous diseases IF NOT YOU and your fellow doctors? Where the hell have you guys been all these years?
I mean, was there a prior massive call by doctors for flu testing kits and masks and all the other protocols and preparatory steps to defend against a flu pandemic, and the elected officials neglected to meet that call? If so, then we need to know about it. We need to know who dropped the ball and placed Americans at risk.
And no, oh no, no, you cannot blame the guy who just walked into the room. The one guy who knew nothing about this until weeks ago, like the rest of the public. The one guy who has not spent his career in government, or in medicine, or in critiquing government and medicine and public health, but who has spent just over three years total in government, Donald Trump, THIS is the guy who is supposed to take the blame? No, no way.
Please excuse my all-caps here, but I don’t know how else to convey in writing the feelings of amazement and disgust I feel for seeing the supposed best and brightest in Western Civilization literally pass the buck to the least culpable person on the planet.
Coronavirus19 has become a political football, only because a single political party and its communications arm, AKA “the media,” has politicized this flu bug, just like they have politicized literally every other thing that this president has said or done. Only because this one political party and its propaganda arm want to create hysteria and blame for political gain is this hysteria and medical failure now happening. Every other flu that has come and gone and left tens of thousands of people dead in its wake have been left up to the facts of life. Already this “flu season” about 20,000 Americans have died from “the flu.” And another ten thousand Americans are expected to die before the flu season ends this spring. No one was ever blamed before for any of this, least of all an American president.
So why now? Hmmmm?
What really irks me about lazy and incompetent doctors is that their hospitals are the most dangerous places to go. If you want to really get sick, or even die unexpectedly, then go stay in a hospital. Not only will you be unnecessarily exposed to lots of germs that can kill you, but you will also be exposed to massive doses of medical malpractice and incompetence. Hospitals and the doctors in them are extremely dangerous to public health. That is a cold numeric fact. And it is a fact that Americans accept, because we presume that the risks of not having those very same hospitals is higher than having them.
Doctors make the worst policy people. The very worst. Because unrealistic and impractical zero risk is usually what doctors demand; from everyone else. They usually want to spend huge amounts of money to reduce minor risks to almost zero percent chance of happening. And yet they themselves are often walking, talking killing machines, dispensing oopsies and my-bads right and left as they step over the twitching corpse of their latest malpractice victim and go on to the next one. Look at the stats on this!
These are the same doctors who tell Americans that all guns are bad, and that guns kill by themselves, and that we cannot possibly have guns in our homes. Yet, statistically speaking, if you have a doctor in your home, you are at much greater risk for a whole host of gruesome deaths than you are from a gunshot.
These are the same doctors and medical know-it-alls who have dropped the public health ball with coronavirus19 and are now pointing their fingers at the American president.
You must be kidding me. No, you are not going to fool me, not this time. Not again. If any mistake has happened with coronavirus19, it is squarely on the shoulders of the medical and public health communities. And it is made worse by the silly media hysteria causing people to fight over rolls of toilet paper and to hoard canned vegetables. It is quite literally an insane situation, brought to us by lazy doctors, lazy bureaucrats, and evil political activists who will burn down America in order to get control of America.
Flumageddon shines spotlight on failed US bureaucracy
The Wuhan Flu aka coronavirus has resulted in a Flumageddon hysteria that has damaged America’s economy and forced millions of students to stay at home, supposedly “study online,” and pester their working parents.
Flumageddon has shut down public meetings, schools, and work environments coast to coast. Almost everything that Americans take for granted has been stopped cold by it. Entire cities on both coasts are entering constitutionally questionable lockdown status, where the citizenry may have to “shelter in place” just like the ancient Hebrews did in Egypt, as God’s death plague worked its way through the first born of humans and animals alike.
Why are we here? What on earth happened to bring the freest, most technologically advanced nation to this point?
Was America really, truly unprepared for this moment?
Two things happened that got us here.
First, China has been doing everything it can, in literally every way possible, to undermine, hamper, damage, and take over America. China is a socialist tyranny, and so they have been able to direct hundreds of millions of Chinese to sit at keyboards all day every day with the goal of filing fake Trademark applications with the US Patent and Trademark Office in DC, and to hack into credit card companies, and to hack into everyday websites, and to post antagonistic messages on websites, and to play around with ordering and then canceling American products and services, and so on. Not to mention the 500,000 Chinese fake “researchers” posted at American research institutions. They are spies, really, stealing our knowledge out from under us in the phony name of open-ness and tolerance and diversity and other meaningless nonsense.
The tentacles of China are long and many, its parasitic sapping of America’s strength a long-held accepted fact.
And nothing allowed China to wreak its havoc on Americans more than people in BOTH Democrat and Republican parties allowing it to do so openly and in plain view. Because a handful of ultra wealthy wanted to be even more ultra wealthy. And they share a bit of that wealth by giving it to re-election campaign funds of careerist politicians, who hold on to power and do China’s bidding in American policy and law. Thus were American jobs and factories outsourced to China, and basically everything good America has or had was literally handed to China. All for thirty pieces of silver, on top of the thirty pieces of silver that had already been handed out a million times before to just a handful of highly placed recipients. Traitors to America, really.
So China’s Wuhan Flu is a direct product of the artificial and unhealthy economic relationship between our two nations, maintained by a billion people in China and just a few thousand people in America. Wuhan Flu spread through the world, and into America, because of an unnaturally open one-way relationship, and a criminally porous American border.
Second, Flumageddon happened because American bureaucrats are an incompetent and lazy bunch, artificially protected by artificially way-way-way over-generous personnel rules.
Career bureaucrats at Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health and the Federal Drug Administration have been unprepared for this moment for decades, despite plenty of warning shots from SARS and Swine Flu before. Instead of developing flu testing kits and extensive steps for combating Wuhan Flu, career bureaucrats at CDC, NIH, FDA and a host of satellite agencies and state offices, all took long lunches on the forgotten taxpayer’s dime. They posed and preened and presented themselves as dispassionate arbiters of public health interests. And in fact, when the moment of truth arrives, we see that they are simply lazy and incompetent. In China, which so many of our federal bureaucrats love because of its ruthless efficiency and all-powerful government, they would all have been shot in the back of the head by now for their failure.
Instead, we are treated to a host of foolish talking heads from CDC and NIH who are, in fact, partisan political activists using their public positions to advance a political campaign to discredit the one person who has absolutely no blame for Flumageddon: President Donald Trump, who, unlike 95% of Congress and 100% of the federal bureaucracy, has NOT been in government his entire career.
Flumageddon is not even Obama’s fault, though he did experience at least one, arguably two, fatal flu public health events, and, therefore, Obama could have directed CDC and NIH and FDA to begin making testing kits and vaccines. In anticipation of future outbreaks. Nope, the fault really lies with our open borders mentality, which carries nation-ending risks, and with our lazy, incompetent, over-protected, entitled, unaccountable bureaucrats, who then cement the open borders risks into stone.
In order to pound down Americans even more, and make us more pliable, more amenable to their supposed solutions. Which are always more and bigger and more powerful government intervention into our lives.
Interesting how this works. The symmetry was so clean and easy. Until Trump came along and challenged it. Cue the hysteria…
Missing Vera
The lady had the grace of an angel.
An easy smile, a quick wit and light heart, yet with incisive comments that always supported someone in the room and advanced the discussion, Vera was new to me a couple years ago. And yet here I am writing a brief obituary about her because of her powerful life force.
Many other people were fortunate enough to enjoy her for much longer than I. And now that she is gone, probably from a heart attack at her home, Vera’s life and positive way serve as a reminder to make every moment we have on this earth count, take nothing for granted, and always do our best, with a smile on our face, if possible.
Vera Cornish has been described as an effective life coach, book author, education consultant, and a host of other professional activities that really just scratched the surface of her excellent personality and capabilities.
I met Vera two years ago at a Dauphin County commissioners’ meeting. She walked up to me afterwards and introduced herself, and immediately I felt I was in the presence of an angel. Nice lady. And not light and airy or phony, but very smart and direct.
We have served together on the Detweiler Park Steering Committee since its inception, and every single time she was there she had a calming effect, because she was so centered. Not that anyone is seriously disputatious at the meetings planning a new 411-acre county park, but Vera’s force could be felt there every time.
I did not really know Vera Cornish, not as a friend, not well, and that only by working with her for a year. But whenever she saw me outside of our meetings, she came up to say hello in the nicest way, her eyes sparkling, just 100% positive energy. She was just as positive and peaceful at our park meetings. She was said to be this way in all other public and private encounters.
I wish I had some of Vera’s impressive qualities. Heck, I wish the world were made of Vera Cornishes. Great lady, with attributes the world can use a lot more of. You will be missed, honey.
Purple woad. Or why hunting leases
Leasing land to hunt on is a big thing these days, and there is no sign of the phenomenon decreasing. Most of it is about deer and turkey hunting.
Hunting leases have been popular for a long time in states with little public land, like Texas, but the practice is now spreading to remote areas like suburban farms around Philadelphia and Maryland. So high is the demand for quality hunting land, and for just finding a place to hunt without being bothered, and so limited is the resource becoming, that leasing is a natural step for many landowners who want to get some extra income to pay their rent or fief to the government (property taxes aka build-a-union-teacher’s-public-pension-fund).
Having been approached about leasing land I own and manage, it is something I considered and then rejected. If a landowner at all personally enjoys their own land themselves, enjoys their privacy there, enjoys the health of their land, then leasing is not for you. Bear in mind that leasing also carries some legal liability risk, and so you have to carry sufficient insurance to cover any lawsuits that might begin on your land.
Nonetheless, some private land is being leased, having been posted before that. And the reason that so many land owners are overcoming the same hurdles that I myself went through when considering land leasing, is that in some cases the money is high enough. Enough people want badly enough to have their own place that they can hunt on exclusively, that they are willing to pay real money.
Makes you wonder what kind of population pressures and open land decreases America has seen over the past fifty years to lead to this kind of change in land use. Makes me think of one anecdotal experience.
On the Sunday of Memorial Day Weekend of 2007, I drove up to Pine Creek to dig the footers for our barn. All the way up I shared the road, in both directions, with two motorcyclists headed in my same direction. That is it. In addition to my pickup, a grand total of two vehicles out for a Sunday drive in the country were on Route 44 and Rt 414.
Fast forward 13 years and my gosh, Pine Creek Valley has nonstop traffic in both directions at all hours. It does not matter what the time of day or night is, there are vehicles going in both directions. And not just oversize pickup trucks possibly associated with the gas drilling occurring around the area. Little tiny dinky tin can cars are going up and down the valley, too. There are literally people everywhere here now, in what had been the most remote, undeveloped, quietest corner of rural Pennsylvania. Even if you go bear hunting on some sidehill in the middle of nowhere up in Pine Creek Valley, you will encounter another hunting gang or two. Which for bear hunting is actually a good thing, but the point being that there are people everywhere everywhere everywhere in rural Pennsylvania.
OK, here is another brief anecdote. Ladies, skip ahead to the next paragraph. About ten years ago I was fishing on the north end of the Chesapeake Bay. When I was finished for the day, I drove back north toward home. At one point I had an urge to pee, so I began looking for a place I could pull off and pull out, without offending anyone. Yes, I have my modest moments. And you know what? The entire region between The Chesapeake Bay’s northern shores and the Pennsylvania Mason-Dixon Line, is completely developed. Like wall-to-wall one-two-three-acre residential lots on every inch of land surface. At the one place that finally looked like I was finally going to get some relief, I stepped out of the car and was immediately met with a parade of Mini Coopers and Priuses driving by on the gravel road to their wooded home lots. There was literally people everywhere, in every corner, in every place.
So what happened here?
There are more people and there is more land development, both of which leading to less nice land to hunt, fewer big private spaces for people to call their own, and so that which does exist is in much higher demand.
Enter Pennsylvania’s new No Trespassing law. AKA the “purple paint” law.
Why was this new law even needed? Because the disenfranchised, enslaved Scots-Irish refugees who originally settled the Pennsylvania frontier by dint of gumption, bravery, and hard work had a natural opposition to the notions and forms of European aristocracy that had driven them here. Such as large pieces of private land being closed off to hunting and fishing. And so these Scots-Irish settlers developed an Indian-like culture of openly flouting the marked boundaries of private properties. Especially when they hunted.
And this culture of ignoring No Trespassing signs carries forth to this very day.
Except that now it is 2020, not 1820, and there are more damned people on the landscape and a hell of a lot less land for those people to roam about on. Nice large pieces of truly private land are becoming something of a rarity in a lot of places. Heck, even the once-rural Poconos is now just an aluminum siding and brick suburb of Joizy.
So in response to our collision of frontier culture with ever more valuable privacy rights, Pennsylvania now has a new purple paint law. If you see purple paint on a tree, it is the equivalent of a No Trespassing sign. And if you do trespass and you get caught, the penalties are much tougher and more expensive than they were just a few months ago.
And you know what the real irony is of this purple paint stay-the-hell-out boundary thing? It is a lot like the blue woad that the Celtic ancestors of the Scots and Irish used to paint their bodies with before entering into battle. Except it is now the landowner who has painted himself in war paint.
Isn’t life funny.
collusion with Russia meddling is real and happening
No doubt about it, Russia has been meddling in America’s elections for decades. It is one of the weaknesses that an open society like ours has, and which a closed, authoritarian society like Russia (and China) do not have. The nature of our democratic process leaves America vulnerable to tampering from without and to treason from within. And in our universities, our corporations, and our news outlets. And so it is not news anywhere that some Americans have been colluding with Russia in its meddling since forever, like since the 1920s.
Looking back on the 1930s responses to open treason and the 1950s “Red Scare” and the resulting Hollywood blacklisting of Americans openly colluding with Russia in the attempted murder of America, it seems the problem’s surface was only scratched then. Groups like the ACLU, founded by open communists (Roger Baldwin – “Communism is the goal”), are still active and incredibly destructive today.
And even more so, we have a a political party whose leaders now openly identify as “Democratic Socialists.” They are not even hiding their actual allegiances any longer.
Yes, we see the American young people flocking to this Democratic Socialism Free Stuff banner. It is surprising and painful, because it is so at odds with the self-reliance and independence that marked American culture from our very beginning.
It is a fact that my wife and I have been complicit with others in our generation and the generation before us in absolutely spoiling rotten our kids, and priming them for this Free Stuff movement. Giving them everything, demanding from them very little. And sonofabitch, wouldn’t ya know it, when the little bastards grew up to teens and twenties, they actually expected everything for FREE. We trained our own kids to be this way.
Even though I had done my best to require from my kids home chores before dinner, or before fun time, I think I was like a lot of other old fashioned dads who also collided with our beloved wives on this.
As dads, we were boys once. And as boys, we in our generation were expected and often aggressively forced by our dads to work our butts off all the time, to do chores, in order to earn TV time, to earn a bicycle, to earn telephone time after homework was done, and so on. God bless our good wives today, they love our children so very much, they can’t imagine hurting their feelings by always backing us up on enforced chores. Making the children do chores gets in the way of their homework, ya know…hey, are you doing your homework or scrolling through endless humorous memes over there?
God help the dad who demands chores from the kids! Even my own son, my pride and joy, a good kid, the ‘mini me’ who is supposed to grow up to be smarter, stronger, faster than me, when tasked with helping fill our wood sheds with enough split firewood for the winter said “Well, that doesn’t sound like very much fun.” And then pouted about not being able to spend that time with his buddy.
So now America has one, maybe two generations of young people who really expect everything to simply be handed to them. Without having to work for it at all. Free participation trophies for everyone. Contrast this to the old days, a mere thirty or forty years ago, where young people expected to eventually inherit from their parents, but only after working very hard to achieve much on their own.
And so here we are, Crazy Bernie Sandals and every single other Democrat candidate for president, is promising free everything for everyone, like free college tuition, free income, free housing, free health care, including for law-breaking illegal aliens who illegally invade America and who have neither put money into the collective taxpayer pot nor will they. America’s own material success and wealth are being used as a weapon against America.
Obviously this free stuff movement is financially and socially unsustainable, because resources have limits and it is innately unfair. But that is not the point for the Free Stuff movement. The point is to use that lure and false promise to buy enough votes from gullible kids and illegal aliens to attain communism in America through our democratic process. That is, to turn America into a communist country.
Crazy Bernie Sandals honeymooned in the old Soviet Union Russia, because he was and still is a proud authoritarian communist. But he is not alone in this view; every other Democrat candidate has said more or less the same things he has said, sometimes differing by a few shades of grey.
Leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917, which is when Russia became an authoritarian communist country exporting its cruelty abroad, there were two movements to achieve communism in Russia. One group was the Bolsheviks, whose belief in Bolshevism required a violent overthrow and replacement of the existing government. Their competitors were the Mensheviks. They believed in the eventual slow drip-drip-drip overthrow of the Russian government, one chip at a time, one government position at a time, one vote at a time, using the democratic process to slowly implement their goals until the government was dominated by communists. And only then they would use force to implement their authoritarianism.
Know what the Mensheviks were called?
The Russian Social Democratic Party.
Sound familiar to something happening today right here in America?
Book Review: Neither Wolf nor Dog
Given the recent road blocks by fake Indians (No, not presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren, but other white fake Indians inspired by her) in Canada, we have here a timely opportunity to look at a book about American Indians and the Caucasian people who purport to love them.
This is a Book Review of Neither Wolf nor Dog, about 1990s life on the rez, something I know a fair amount about, having seen it myself.
Kent Nerburn’s Neither Wolf nor Dog was kindly given to me as a gift by someone who knows I have a strong interest in American Indian history and welfare. And so I dutifully plowed through all 343 pages of this 1994 publication (reprinted in 2007 and 2017), a mysterious road trip set in the Dakotas. By the end of this book I felt like I, too, had been on a long, slow, arduous, winding trip. In fact, I felt sick from sitting in the back of the car.
This book does have some artistic merit. For example, the description of the lone Indian’s hands as “axe heads” at the end of his long, slender arms, actually conjures up some interesting images that ring true with some rural lifestyle body types. Here and there some creative writing exemplifies a writer trying to achieve more than racist propaganda.
At first I was intrigued by Nerburn’s first-hand narrative writing method. It sounds real enough, like this book is not fiction. But as he repeatedly decried other writers who falsely ascribe great mystical powers and innate supernatural wisdom to American Indians, Nerburn himself writes a book that is devoted to repeatedly ascribing great mystical powers and innate supernatural wisdom to American Indians. While openly mocking the contemporaneous movie Dances with Wolves for its many alleged trespasses against Indian history and culture, especially with Kevin Costner as the white liberal savior, Nerburn takes 343 pages to solidly present himself as the white liberal savior of the Lakota Sioux and of all other American Indian history, culture, and interests. A kind of keeper of the fire, he thinks. It is open hypocrisy, but for a meritorious purpose. Because his intentions are good…..
This method did not bother me at first, because I was certain that a writer so clearly violating his own red lines in the sand would surely have enough self awareness to not do it so blatantly himself. But as the pages plodded on and on, and the ‘Wise Sage Old One’, Dan, drones on and on in a preachy and accusatory voice, and with way more words than I have ever heard any Indian speak, I realized Nerburn was as one-dimensional as he appeared to be. Nerburn has just put his very white liberal guy words in the mouth of Dan the Lakota. And no un-truer words were ever spoken.
The writing problems here stem from Nerburn’s commitment to the publicly failed notion of “white guilt” and multiculturalism, that idea that everything Western and European is automatically bad, and that everything else is automatically good and legitimate, even cannibalism and violent criminal behavior.
To wit: ‘ “Forgive me.” The words passed from me like stones – hard, evil little balls of an illness that had stricken my soul, suddenly flung free, releasing me from years of torment. That was why I was here — not to help, but to earn forgiveness, to earn forgiveness for the shame in my blood.
“Forgive me,” I said again, confessing to unknown sins and transgressions , to my desire to leave, to my sense of righteousness and superiority, too my whiteness.’ (Page 135)
Multiculturalism celebrates the differences among Americans, instead of what unites them, while simultaneously trying to eradicate any sense of American-ness and painting as evil anyone here with “white” skin.
“...the shame in my blood…”? Who else carries a blood-guilt over generations that cannot be eradicated, hmmm? It’s nonsense.
Anyone trying to do something similar in say Poland, Russia, China, Zimbabwe, or Bolivia would be laughed out of polite company by the natives, who are quite proud of their own nations and histories. Only in a society as open and welcoming as America has the enticement to virtue signal at the expense of the nation been pursued and realized by people like Kent Nerburn.
For multiculturalists like Nerburn, history begins in 1509, when Europeans migrated to the New World. Neither Wolf nor Dog has history beginning in about 1889, and before that, it seems, the American West was a pastoral Eden full of peaceable Indians sitting around smoking sacred tobacco, beating drums, and occasionally having deep spiritual chats with bison before killing and eating them.
More nonsense. Indian violence, genocide, migration are ignored.
To multiculturalists, the human migration from Europe is a very bad thing, because it upset the inhabitants who had simply migrated there beforehand. Not to belittle the many crimes and grand thefts committed by the Conquistadores, the Portuguese, the Italians, the Catholic missionaries, or the US government in Washington, DC. But let’s be honest, the American Indians from the farthest reaches of the Arctic Circle to lowest temperatures around Tierra del Fuego did precisely and exactly the same violent things to each other, for far longer than the Europeans did them. And they did it without any remorse.
For example, the Cheyenne (Tsi Tsi Tas) took no adult male prisoners. Wounded enemies were summarily killed by Cheyenne warriors on the battlefield. Other Western tribes were much less merciful, and like almost all of the Eastern tribes, they made a great happy spectacle of slowly and sadistically torturing their captives to death.
The Aztecs and Mayans committed great acts of mass human butchery, to satisfy their gods’ bloodlust. Using captured slaves to build their cities and religious monuments, the great South American Indian cultures all raided, enslaved, massacred, and sacrificed one another for a long time. The Indians of North America also massacred, raided, murdered, and tortured one another for a very long time. That is, after they had all invaded, I mean migrated to the New World from Asia.
But to multiculturalists like Nerburn, none of this matters; because of “white guilt,” time and history artificially and inexplicably begin only when Europeans arrive in the New World. And so Neither Wolf nor Dog deals not in actual history, but in massive quantities of silly feelings over a very short amount of time. Sadness, shame, remorse, anger, and so on, all of it aimed at “white” people. It turns out that “white” people are greatly guilty. All of them, regardless of where or when they were born, lived, or did for a living.
If there is one theme that just repeatedly bangs the reader over the head in this book, it is that “we” “us” and “you” “white” people carry some great burden of sin, a terrible guilt, which can never be cleansed. Even if one is an Irish, Italian or Jewish American who arrived at Ellis Island by steamer in 1898 or 1910, without a buffalo nickel or Indian Head Cent in their pocket; or the descendant of one or all of these ethnicities. Pushing collective guilt of all “white” people is the primary purpose of this book. Even if your “white” skin carries the olive hues of the Mediterranean, or the pasty white of Europe’s lowest and most mistreated ethnic group, the Irish.
So in the name of being against racism, white guilt is a trans-generational racial culpability, not an individual crime committed on the Plains in 1876. It is the flip side of the white supremacist coin, and just as nonsensical.
What is wrong about this book is that it is possible for Americans to strongly support Indian treaty and land claims, and to relate to their bad feelings, without buying into the whole white liberal shame and guilt nonsense.
In real life, an animal that is neither wolf nor dog is a coyote. All of the Plains Indians regarded the coyote as the embodiment of crafty, sneaky dishonesty.
Cheyenne warrior George Bent relates first-hand one of General George Custer’s last personal encounters with Indians before he got his just desserts in a very real and up-close-and-personal encounter in 1876, was when he sought to entrap a number of Cheyenne to use as hostages in his negotiations to push the tribe onto various reservations.
Custer had invited the Cheyennes to meet and talk, supposedly, and as his troopers clumsily sprang their trap, most of the assembled Cheyenne jumped on their horses and fled. A few remained, foolishly trusting Custer to be a man of his word (they were all murdered in cold blood), but one brave rode his horse right up to Custer and waved his quirt in Custer’s face.
“You are nothing but a coyote,” said the young brave to Custer’s face, before galloping off to safety.
And I would say the same thing to Kent Nerburn: You are neither wolf nor dog, Nerburn. You are neither a strong, noble predator, the wolf, nor a useful, loyal friend, the dog. You are a coyote, Nerburn, like Custer and the government in Washington, DC. You have reduced these great Indian warriors to perpetual victim status, pathetically beating their symbolic drums and walking around with their heads down. Just like white liberals did to American Blacks – perpetual slaves, and victims, can’t help themselves, who must always be rescued by white liberals.
Talk about doing a disservice!
So there, I read this book for you. So you don’t have to.
Coloring in between the NRA lines
Last year the NRA experienced staff and leadership upheaval at its national office in Virginia. Internecine palace intrigue and open warfare cleared out some good patriots and some dedicated, accomplished professionals from NRA staff and leadership roles. Lots of hard feelings permeated the entire organization. Most of it appeared like a petty high school dispute, and asking people who are much more in-the-know about why things worked out the way they did only elicited vehement responses. I was angrily scolded for even asking.
We are not supposed to question why or what!
And that kind of emotion-heavy, non-intellectual response was enough for me to conclude that whatever had happened was a bunch of BS, shallow, power-tussle stuff. The kind of behavior that professional adults should be above, especially with so much on the line for everyone else who loves freedom and liberty.
This is not the first time the NRA has undergone civil war, nor have most other non-profit organizations avoided internal bloodshed for that matter. A supposedly lily-white non-profit I worked for many years ago saw incredible professional bloodshed as a power struggle unfolded. Lots of innocent people there had their careers demolished or severely sidetracked, as they became collateral damage. But the NRA has much more on the line, and we cannot afford these kinds of unforced errors. Power should always be shared, not hoarded; long-long-long time staff should maybe think about passing the torch to younger people; and disputes should be held behind closed doors. We gun owners have enough enemies in the media and the entire Democrat Party to take up all of our time; we don’t need, nor can we afford this kind of infighting.
What exactly happened at NRA HQ will probably never become public information, but the bottom line is that EVP Wayne LaPierre was outed for spending $30,000 of NRA member money a year on expensive suits, NRA president Ollie North tried to play hardball about it and then literally gave up and walked off the field when things didn’t immediately go his way. Collateral damage extended to Chris Cox, the effective longtime NRA/ILA director, who was publicly forced to resign. Over a meaningless text message into which only the most paranoid person could read evil intent. Was like watching Caligula or Herod off their own children to retain complete power.
My impression (impression, not direct knowledge) is that LaPierre brooks absolutely no questioning of his absolute authority and dominance of the organization. And that he will utterly crush anyone who dares to challenge him, even in private, even on small matters. I leave it to you to determine if this is a healthy management style. Or not.
At least that is the way that LaPierre’s illuminating lawsuit against North, Cox, and some others reads. Like a political manifesto, not a legal document. And don’t misunderstand me, I do appreciate Wayne’s long service to the Constitution and the American people.
Out of all this shake-up we (I am a proud NRA Life Member and always will be) got another NRA/ILA executive director. With Chris Cox gone and now operating his own lobbying outfit in DC, the hunt was on for a new face of NRA’s political activism. Out of all of the atomic energy emitted from the great shakeup, nothing really changed. We, the NRA, could have gotten a whole host of people in that position – women, Asians, Blacks, Jews, American Indians, because there are a large number of articulate, intelligent, knowledgeable, experienced, good looking, charismatic pro-Second Amendment activists from each of those groups who could have easily moved into the NRA/ILA position and immediately started moving the ball down the field.
No, I am not into “diversity.” I am into maximizing effectiveness and expanding the NRA’s appeal.
Having some different public faces at NRA would not hurt our beloved organization, and in fact those kinds of small changes would help it a great deal. Think of how a non-Caucasian face might help sell the Second Amendment to non-Caucasian people (and yes, I know this may be a surprise to some, but there are actually a lot of non-Caucasian people legally living in America). It’s a thought, maybe a radical one, but I am sticking to it. Out of love for the Second Amendment, and the NRA; and for America.
Instead of getting someone totally new and different in the NRA/ILA position, we got yet another cookie cutter Caucasian guy, Jason Ouimet. He looks like Chris Cox’s twin, and like Cox, Jason also seems like a very nice man. He is articulate, knowledgeable, and he is not shy (“step on the throat of your opponent”). These are admirable traits. But Ouimet is just another Caucasian guy out of a bazillion Caucasian guys walking the halls of Congress, wearing charcoal suits, and appearing in gunfomercials. NRA needs a little change in this area. We do, we really do.
This time, while we may have missed an opportunity to hire someone different than the usual at the NRA/ILA, and therefore to better promote and market our beloved NRA, I suggest that in the future we, the NRA, consider adding one or two of the following individuals to the NRA public face and payroll. Let’s start grooming them for it now, so their move into that very public role is seamless.
Candidate Number One: Colion Noir (born Collins Idehen, Jr.). Colion is an attorney, he is knowledgeable about all kinds of guns, he is charismatic, funny, chatty, personable, physically fit, articulate, a very good shot, relatable, and unafraid of debate. He is experienced in TV and press. And Colion is cool, like most black people are cool. Cool black people inspire 93.7% of America’s Caucasian and Asian and Hispanic youth to want to be just as cool, just as hip, so there is something to it. Try some of it, you might like it, stiff Caucasian people.
Candidate Number Two: Col. Allen West. Allen is a well-known political quantity , with a long history of bucking the political and US Army establishment for all the right red-blooded patriotic reasons. Allen West has served with distinction in Congress and the US Army, and he has been a tireless and outspoken fighter for civil rights and good governance. He is articulate, charming, plain spoken, experienced, conservative, independent-minded, a strong leader, and a very good speaker. He would be a perfect NRA/ILA executive director.
And that is what I have to say about that.
One call I won’t take
Phony, fraudulent telemarketer calls are super annoying, and like you, I am fed up with them.
Another phony call just arrived, called “Call of the Wild,” a new movie loosely based on a Jack London book by the same name.
Jack London’s stories of tenuous life in the Yukon and Alaskan interiors are the stuff of pre-internet American boyhood. Just like coonskin Davey Crockett hats were all the rage among American boys in the 1950s and 1960s after Fess Parker starred in the same-named TV show, so too did London inspire many young men to get their forestry degree, build a canoe, cut down their grandmother’s favorite apple tree with a hatchet, or move to Alaska. His stories of nail-biting survival and creeping or sudden death in the boreal forests and frigid back country rang true, and a number of movies have been made about them. Some better than others, but all of them pretty good just because the story line is great.
London’s story about a young man caught at sundown in the winter time Alaskan bush, unprepared for the minus-forty-degree night, who gets down to his last match and finally succeeds at lighting a life-saving fire, only to have the snow from the branches above fall and smother the fire, is classic.
This latest iteration involves an unrealistic CGI human-like dog that giddy un-wilderness urbanites will fawn over. It also includes Harrison Ford, a man blessed with poor acting skills who nonetheless has landed a huge list of Hollywood roles and who made a huge pile of money. Play acting and playing dress-up; not exactly brain surgeon level or even bank teller level stuff.
And to be fair, Ford’s best movie roles are those that fit his kind of simple, bland, taciturn persona, like the Jack Ryan character, or Indiana Jones, or the emotion-less Blade Runner cyborg cop. Or those roles that are actually enhanced by his lack of acting skills, like Star Wars‘ Han Solo. Whenever Harrison Ford is tasked with actually acting, his lack of nuance or depth shines through bright and shiny. One suspects that this Call of the Wild will be one such role and performance. Or maybe not, because the 2020 movie poster for it shows Ford looking all serious and taciturn.
Now, because I am a wilderness hunter, fisherman, and trapper, any new movie like Call of the Wild immediately gets my attention. Bad acting or no, evil corrupt anti-America Hollywood or no, CGI human dogs or no, it is a movie I would naturally be inclined to go see. It is about nature and outdoor adventure, my favorite things. However, Harrison Ford finally performed honestly the other day and thereby blew up any chance of me seeing his film, and probably many other people feel the same way.
Last week, Ford appeared on not-funny Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show, and blasted Preident Trump, calling him “a son-of-a-bitch.”
Out of nowhere, and for no particular reason. Other than pandering to Hollywood.
What a shame, because at one time Ford was a spokesman for Conservation International, a worthy environment protection organization. His other opinions about so-called climate change and carbon reduction are the usual Hollywood hypocritical hilarity, because Ford is also the guy who flies his own plane on a 400-mile round trip to get a single hamburger to satisfy his craving for fast food. Talk about a carbon footprint, and yet his lecturing never ends.
Now, everyone is entitled to their opinions, and like Ford, I am entitled to mine, too. And my opinion is that I will not support with movie ticket purchases those celebrity Hollywood actors who insult me, my values, my lifestyle, or the people I vote for. So I will not be answering Harrison Ford’s Call of the Wild. Though I might play it on one of the many black market bootleg websites, just so I can take from Ford a tiny bit of what Ford took away from me: A good feeling.
Below is just one video of Harrison Ford actually whining about his wild success, as if it ruined him as some sort of serious artiste. Oh please. Ford is just another out of touch, spoiled rotten Hollywood jerk. Where is comedian Ricky Gervais when we need him most? Every Hollywood actor like Harrison Ford should have to spend a week with Gervais following him or her everywhere they go, commenting on their vapid lives and stupid statements.
on Mayor Steve Reed
Steve Reed was the long-time Democrat mayor of Harrisburg City, and he died last week. I knew Mayor Reed and I feel compelled to say some things about him.
My uber-Republican grandparents Ed and Jane introduced me to Steve back in the early 1990s, when he was first running for mayor of Harrisburg. When I queried how such ardent partisans as they could support a Democrat, the response they gave was a life-changing truism that is worth everyone remembering:
“Support the best candidate who will do the best for The People, regardless of political party.”
And besides, the Republican Party had long since abandoned Harrisburg City, as the GOPe has chicken-out abandoned all other urban areas across America. So there was no real Republican to challenge Reed.
The truth is that Steve Reed really did have the best interest of The People, the citizens of Harrisburg City, at heart. Like a lot of gay men his age, he felt that his opportunity for personal companionship was self-limited, and so he had nothing else to live for than his citizens, the people he viewed as being under his care. And he did dutifully care for all of us to his best ability.
When a bad vehicle accident would occur in the city in the very dead of night, or a homicide, Steve would show up in coat and tie, maybe fuzzy slippers on his feet, to find out exactly what happened so that he could try to fix the cause. Or at least communicate to the city’s citizens what had happened, so that there was the least mystery possible. He was always on the job. The guy cared about his job in a way that hardly anyone ever cares about public service jobs any more. Reed was truly a public servant in every good sense of the phrase.
Long ago I joked with Mayor Reed that when he died, I was going to embalm his body, dress him up in one of his dowdy suits, put a cigarette in his hand, and prop him up in the window in his old office, so that the citizens below could look up and see Steve, The Mayor, still on the job, still doing his best for us, and that knowing all was well, they would all be consoled of all concerns and go on with their lives, happier and more confident. A perpetually stable Harrisburg.
He always smiled at that joke.
His attempt to build the nation’s premier cowboy / Western museum was a great idea, like his successful idea to build an incredible civil war museum. But that Wild West Museum did not happen only because it lost momentum, despite having a veritable mountain of wonderful bona fide Western frontier artifacts to show. When the museum lost momentum, questions began to arise about how all those wonderful artifacts had been obtained with scarce public funds, and where were they kept, etc. And once those questions were asked, it was the beginning of the end of Steve’s reign. Such was the public’s trust in Mayor Reed that he could really do no wrong, and when he demonstrated that even great people have weaknesses, the public mostly abandoned him.
The last I saw Steve was at a home in Uptown Harrisburg, down the street from where we live. It was a gathering of a political who-is-who in the area that I rudely barged into uninvited, and the hostess, Peggy, cheerfully greeted me with hugs and a hot drink nonetheless. The three of us, Peggy, myself, and Mayor Reed, were all back in a corner chatting while eating fresh fruit. Steve looked happy, and Peggy was her usual 100 MPH self. Until Steve asked me “Josh, you don’t support Trump, right?”
“Of course I do, mayor, I absolutely do support President Trump. He is doing a great job for America, and I think you of all people should appreciate how hard that is to do,” I responded.
Peggy exploded, poor thing. She was standing elbow to elbow with me, and her unhappy response was broadcast in bits and pieces across the side of my sweater and cheek. She was nearly foaming at the mouth with anger, indignation, her eyes were crossed, and a garble of unintelligible words poured forth from her mouth that I did not have to actually understand in their particular to understand in their overall gist.
Peggy disliked (still does) President Trump, and was ummm…frustrated that I would support him.
“Ignore him, Peggy,” said Mayor Reed. “He is just saying that to get a rise out of you.”
Mayor Reed looked at me, smiled, popped a grape in his mouth and walked off into the bigger party. He was politic to the end.
In our hunting camp there hangs a large moose head above the living room. It is named “Stephen” after Mayor Steve Reed, because it was purchased from the eventual auction of the Harrisburg Wild West Museum contents. When I picked up the enormous wooden crate with the moose head inside, I couldn’t wait, and I opened it up right away in the bed of the pick up truck. Inside was all the original documentation going back to the original purchase of the moose by Steve Reed, years before. He had acquired it from an old frontier saloon in southwest Minnesota, and apparently many cowboys had hung their hats on it over the decades. It was a real, bona fide emblem of the wild west; at least as the Western frontier was known in Minnesota.
Steve the Moose now looms over all our comings and goings at camp, provoking small children to squeal with delight and with fright, and grown men to pose all manly-like. No question the moose head is a symbol of the Big Woods and all that is wild in America, a proper companion to other real cabin furnishings like beaver pelts and traps. But to me, Steve the Moose symbolizes Steve Reed the mayor, the all-knowing bull moose, watching over his sanctuary, his people, his charges.
It is comforting to me.
Bye, Steve, you are gone but not forgotten. Here, let me dust off your ears for you. And have a light.
Mayor Steve Reed looks at one of the Remington bronzes he purchased for his Wild West Museum. The bronze was among the gazillion other real wild west artifacts sold at auction. Denver Post photo credit
Ammin Perry cartoon symbolizing about $7 million city dollars up in smoke, and Mayor Reed did like to smoke
Steve Reed the moose still oversees all
Great American Outdoor Show Day Six – Fired Up Trump Supporters
Having worked as a volunteer at two different booths and at a separate nearby event at the Great American Outdoor Show here in Harrisburg this week, there is one big takeaway: Attendees are overwhelmingly passionate about President Donald Trump and seeing him be re-elected.
At first the constant parade of Trump 2020 hats going past my eyes did not hit home. Ya know, it’s the biggest outdoor show and gathering in the world, and outdoors folk are naturally conservative, so why not expect to see them…is what I unconsciously thought.
And then as the first day ticked through the first hours, my mind began to start its own “clicker” count of Trump and Trump-Pence hats going by. And mind you, this particular booth is in the Fishing Hall, and a lot of GAOS visitors are there for the hunting guides, the demonstrations, and the opportunity to handle and try out lots and lots of firearms. So this spot I was in is hardly representative of the overall visitor population.
And the mental “clicks” immediately surpassed my ability to keep counting. Somewhere around 150 my mind said that it had had enough of trying to keep track of Trump hats while also greeting visitors and engaging with them on issues of wildlife policy and politics and raffle tickets for guns. So if I saw 150 Trump hats on heads in about 30 minutes, and the rest of the day was just as filled with them, then about 2,600 went by in the day in that particular location.
Another stint at another GAOS booth on another day reinforced the same observation, except I have to admit up front that it was the Trump Campaign booth I was volunteering in. And of course the visitors here naturally self-selected for visits, and about fifty percent had Trump hats. Even those visitors to the Trump Campaign booth who did not have Trump hats were just as FIRED UP as the hat wearers, however.
The Trump Campaign booth was a non-stop feeding frenzy of activity. If you sat down to take a breather, you had to get right back up again to help someone fill out a form. And at any given time there were half a dozen of us working that booth. We were constantly busy.
I know, I know, the GAOS naturally attracts exactly the kind of people who are going to support president Trump anyhow – outdoorsmen, gun owners, pickup truck drivers, etc. But, having attended and volunteered at this show in both of its forms for many years (I started the 2012 vendor boycott that ended the prior Reed Expositions representation of the show, and which eventually resulted in the NRA taking over) I have never before seen anywhere near this level of politicized, politically aware, FIRED UP attendees.
In fact, in years past, it was rare if you got into any kind of political discussion with attendees beyond wildlife policies. Even Second Amendment rights were largely passe to the vast majority of past attendees, who seemed to just want to look at new RVs, camping gear, duck calls, and hunting rifles without being hassled about politics. Politics was off everyone’s radar in the past.
So if this politicized crowd with its nonstop stream of Trump hats is any indication, Trump’s voter base is both larger than in 2016, and a lot more passionate and politically involved. In fact, all of the people I registered to vote or spoke with felt personally invested in the outcome of this November’s election.
And personally dedicated to Donald J. Trump’s re-election.
This bodes very well for President Trump’s re-election prospects.
So God bless flyover country and the NRA.
