Posts Tagged → fake
Is Robert Mueller Obstructing Justice?
Knowing what we know now, that the entire Trump-Russia collusion thing is totally fake, that in fact the Hillary Clinton campaign was up to their eyeballs colluding with Russia in their attempt to undermine Trump’s campaign, and that the Clinton campaign paid former British spy Steele to work with Russian spies to create and circulate the fake “dossier” about Trump, and that the fake “dossier” formed the basis of the now-illegal FISA warrant the Obama administration then obtained and used to illegally spy on the Trump campaign, and that the FBI agents and DOJ staff involved in the FISA warrant and all subsequent activity emanating from it were politically opposed to Trump and supportive of Clinton, and that these FBI agents and DOJ staff used their official positions to illegally promote and protect Hillary Clinton and to undermine and then attempt to frame Trump…and so much more…so
…knowing all this, why is special investigator Robert Mueller doing anything at all? He knows full well, especially after a year of “investigating” this fake issue with nothing to show for it, that the entire premise is false, and that in fact someone ought to be investigating the Obama administration and Hillary Clinton for obvious crimes.
So one must then ask the logical question: Is Robert Mueller now himself actively obstructing justice? How much information implicating Obama and Clinton has Mueller encountered in his investigation, and which he has not disclosed to FBI investigators?
All Mueller has to show for his political witch hunt is the mis-use of his position to wrongly bully and threaten three political opponents into crying “uncle,” one of whom, Michael Flynn, has been bankrupted by all of the fake legal assaults on him by Mueller’s office. And now Flynn is going to reverse his phony guilty plea, because it was utterly false – the FBI has said that he committed no crime. So with what crime was Mueller threatening to prosecute him?
Mueller is building a house of cards with all of his Clinton-donor associates. He has assembled a clearly political anti-Trump, anti-Republican group of investigators, all of whom have been publicly shown to be political activists using their positions in this kangaroo investigation for political payback.
Mueller is knowingly standing in the way of real justice, and he is knowingly implementing injustice. It is time that Robert Mueller be arrested and charged with criminal conduct and obstruction of justice. Take his law license, put him in jail.
Mueller is a one-man wrecking ball aiming to destroy America’s form of government. Hold him accountable
So, so many fake Japanese swords
A quick ebay search for “gendaito” results in dozens of purported Japanese katanas for sale.
Hand-made “art sword” gendaitos were very few in number to begin with, maybe a few thousand by 1944, and after 1945, when Japanese swords of all qualities were being melted down, there were a lot fewer left.
When I began collecting antique Japanese swords in 1993, it was a pretty structured environment with plenty of Vet bring-backs available through newspaper ads and at gun shows. But most of those swords were basic Showa shin-Shinto machine made swords of solid stock. Created en masse for Japanese NCOs, they were the great bulk of “samurai” type swords captured and brought back to England and America after WWII. Though justifiably iconic in their own right, as they are beautiful weapons by design, none of them were art swords. None were made by hand in 1562 by a famous swordsmith.
Enter China. And with her came all kinds of fakery of every kind of antique collectible you could ever want. Guns, swords, knives, bayonets, not to mention shoes, purses, clothes etc. The first faked Japanese swords from China were easy to spot. Some were laughably crude, some were pretty good but either missing or overplaying critical aspects of real antique Japanese swords. Either way, only the most gullible or inexperienced buyers took them.
Today, however, you can find practically mint condition gendaito or older swords, with a nice new reddish rust on the tang, selling for half or a third of what such swords used to bring. Lots of them. Most of these fake blades are in authentic WWII military fittings, giving them a false air of authenticity.
The reason for the price drop is that so many fake Japanese swords have been brought to market that the natural demand and market absorption is oversaturated. Thus, supply exceeds demand, and price drops accordingly. Greedy dealers looking to enrich themselves at the expense of would-be collectors have driven this dynamic.
Oh, there is a demand out there for real Japanese swords. People from all walks of life recognize how perfect these edged weapons are, and how refined and representative they are of the warrior ethos. Japanese swords are iconic, and therefore inspiring. They bring a lot of happiness to their owners, if only to serve as reminders of the old ways, like when men were men.
But sword dealers have now definitely overplayed their hand. The evidence of this fakery is overwhelming.
There is not only no possible way that one dealer can have so many authentic Japanese swords for sale at any one time, and there are dozens of dealers each stocked to the gills with fake swords being represented as authentic antiques, there is no possible way that this many authentic antique Japanese swords were ever available at one time in any one market, except maybe on the entire island of Japan in 1944.
After 1944 and Japan’s fall, swords were outlawed by the Allies, and they were destroyed by the thousands. Just like fabulous rifles in Germany and Austria were destroyed by the Allies. Though highly lamentable, it was all done to protect our troops. Very few Japanese swords or German rifles made it out alive, so to speak.
If I were to describe the ways these fake swords leap off the virtual pages of ebay and other sellers and scream “I am a fake,” I’d write a book. However, I’m just disgusted by it all, and writing a book is not in my future. However, here are some things to look out for: 1) tangs that have reddish rust. A true old worn rust is tough to fake. 2) file marks on tangs running the wrong way. 3) Tang inscriptions that are either perfect or that are cut over the defined edges. 4) Blades that are perfect, or that have a perfect yakiba or perfect hamon. This is the biggest red flag of all. Most Vet bring-backs were abused by the soldiers themselves, through horseplay. The swords were then used by kids in the 1950s for horseplay and cutting experiments. These swords were not then that valuable or collectible, so they were rarely protected from use or abuse. They were simply the artifacts and relics of brutal, cruel, sad warfare that their captors wished to forget. So to see so many shiny, smooth, perfect blades represented as antiques is a huge red flag. Very very few actual antique Japanese swords made it to 2017 unscathed, either through actual battle use or more likely, through abuse in American backyards at the hands of playful boys or demonstrative uncles in the 1950s-1970s. To see such incredibly distinct hamons on so many “antique” Japanese swords is a huge red flag. A real antique blade will naturally lose its luster over time, and the hardened cutting edge will follow that process, to the point where it becomes faint and barely distinct. Most blades will show clear splotches, discoloration, some rust, from having sat in a basement or living room for 70 years.
Guys, it’s tough to say this, but a lot of you are buying fake Japanese swords that are in reality made recently in China for the American collector market. It’s cliche, but caveat emptor. Ask yourself and your seller some really basic questions. The most important question to a seller being: How on earth do you keep finding these very rare swords, in such high quantities, in such incredibly good condition, to sell at such low prices?
You know the answer, or at least you should know it. The sad answer is the sad fact that it appears about 90% to 95% of the purported antique Japanese swords being sold today are fakes, most likely of recent Chinese origin (Pakistanis are getting better at making old looking edged weapons, too).
Do your research. Think hard about how each sword now for sale made its way to market. You’ll come to the natural and healthy conclusion. And you’ll run away, and save your money for real antiques.
Tidal wave vs. The People
When I was a kid at the New Jersey shore, I remember how some of us young boys would bob in the beach zone where the sandy bottom dropped off and the waves hit the hardest. If Jersey waves can hit hard…though they did to us kids.
We would square our shoulders and lean into the hardest waves, barely touching bottom, trying our best to withstand them.
It was a physical test and a test of willpower, kind of a test of our budding manhood. Man vs. Nature. Primal combat.
It was summer vacation, what can I say. We were kids and let our imaginations run. By today’s video games standard, it was quite wholesome and innocent.
Today I feel like we are all right back there facing down waves.
This time the waves are assaults on our society, civilization, by a media-political complex bent on crushing everything in its way. Especially the traditional people who represent or hold onto the old ways that built America and which are the foundation of Western Civilization.
A recent example of this was when Bill Clinton was elected president in 1994.
Clinton had a whole host of women accusers surrounding him. Accusations of rape, sexual assault, harassment, etc. And despite that, plus his shady business dealings, the media-political complex circled the wagons around Clinton and did everything possible to get him elected president.
In the course of that process, the media-political complex allowed Clinton to dodge, avoid, and lie about his actions, and get elected as a result. They attacked his accusers and protected him, because they shared his political views.
Another example of this was when Barack Hussein Obama was elected president in 2008. Obama had a whole host of questions surrounding him, including his shady business dealings and his overblown, shallow professional qualifications. As well as his citizenship qualification, which was raised first by his primary opponent Hillary Clinton, and recently resurrected by Obama’s own Kenyan brother, who last year was sending out a photo of Barack’s original Kenyan birth certificate.
In the course of that election process, the media-political complex allowed Obama to dodge, avoid, and lie about his actions, and to get elected as a result. The media-political complex circled the wagons around Obama and did everything possible to get him elected president, because he represented their values, their desire to “transform America.”
Today we are seeing this same old process unfold yet again, in the case of the US Senate election in Alabama.
There, a conservative anti-establishment candidate, judge Roy Moore, is facing an obviously contrived and coordinated attack by the media-political complex bent on crushing him and overturning the will of the people, the voters of Alabama.
That media-political complex is made up of BOTH political parties, as well as political and social elites.
Doubting that assertion? Consider that US Senate leader Mitch McConnell prefers a liberal Democrat over the independent minded Moore in that seat. McConnell can easily work with liberal senators. He knows how to horse trade with them. How to give in, roll over. He knows Moore will not roll over, and is not interested in the careerist perks McConnell can offer.
It may not be politically correct to be this honest, but the truth is, I do not believe the accusations against Moore. They are just way too conveniently timed, and are obviously led by GOP squishes like McConnell.
Where were these accusers decades ago? Suddenly now they’re available?!
And where was this same media scrutiny when rapist Bill Clinton was running amok and poised to become president? Where is that scrutiny now? Well, Bill Clinton is a hero to liberals. So he got the pass.
Where is the same media scrutiny for US senator Al Franken, whose damning photo shows him illegally groping a sleeping woman (who also accuses him of attacking her elsewhere)?
Where is the same media scrutiny for the dozens of Hollywood elite also accused of pedophilia, sexual assault, rape, and harassment?
Nearly crickets out there, folks, except in the unbelievable cases where the media-political complex is trying to protect Franken.
But Hell’s bells, you get an independent-minded guy like Moore, and the whole world is descending on him and demanding him to bow out of the race, with no proof other than these obviously well-timed political accusations.
So it is the Roy Moores of the world now, squaring their shoulders, standing in the surf where their feet barely touch the sandy bottom, and facing down the big tidal wave of contrived fake news designed to wipe them out of the only political process anywhere on Planet Earth designed to capture the will of The People.
Moore may not be a young kid, but it is the innocence of America that is at stake here.
Win, Moore, win.
Win for The People.
Derrier Dossier
“Dossier.”
Not an English word, but a loaded English term, nonetheless.
The word connotes evil Russian agents leafing through some poor guy’s secret intelligence file before torturing re-educating him: “Your dossier indicates you love liberty and freedom, and you are against the forced redistribution of private wealth. Vell, ve shall see how long you persist in these abominable ideas…ahhh haa haah haaaa!” <chains rattle>
In the world of mainstream media, these days the word dossier has come to mean fake intelligence.
Turns out the Hillary Clinton campaign paid twelve million dollars to have a fake “dossier” created about Donald Trump.
That “dossier” was then passed around Washington DC until it fell into the right hands through the “right” channels. Though it was obviously fake, it was treated as real, because of the surreptitious way it had been handled and clandestinely handed off.
Once into the hands of intelligence and law enforcement officials in the Obama Administration, it provided the basis for a FISA warrant and enormous wiretapping of and investigations into Donald Trump and everyone around him.
This wiretapping included the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, even the CIA. All of the documents we need to see this are now public. They all used publicly owned wiretapping technology to spy on a bunch of private citizens, because they are political opponents of the Obama Administration and the Hillary Clinton campaign.
Making the domestic spying complete, senior Obama officials (Susan Rice) then “unmasked” the American citizens being spied on so they could be personally revealed and discussed not as “Suspect A,” but as “Donald Trump.”
No crime was ever alleged.
No crime was ever suspected.
The “dossier” was known to be fake.
And yet the people running the American government used the “dossier” as a means to gain access into their political opponents’ lives, to try and frame them, ruin them, and possibly send them to jail, if for no other reason than they might answer “I don’t know” to a federal investigator.
Because they, the fake “suspects”-cum-subjects of the “dossier” would naturally have no freakin idea what the hell any investigator would be asking them about.
So a DC swamp holdover in the FBI, Rosenstein, creates a special investigator (Mueller) (who hires just about every Clinton and Obama lawyer ever known) to look deeper into anything at all about Trump et al, based on the fake “dossier.” The most wide-open investigation ever, about really anything they can find, whether it is related to Russia, or not.
And that’s where we are:
Fake dossier.
Fake allegation of Russian influence (though it is true that Clinton benefited mightily from Russian influence and largess).
Real domestic spying on domestic political opponents by the past administration.
Fake news that suppresses public knowledge of the illegal domestic spying and the illegal FISA warrant, but which does report endlessly the possibility, however remote, of Russian influence on America’s 2016 election.
A fake investigation that is based on a fake document\fake information is no investigation at all. It is, however, the very illegal use of government resources to advance a political agenda.
Domestic spying on political enemies is banana republic stuff, where “El Jefe” boss man uses state security services to undermine his political opponents so he, or his party, can maintain control.
This whole thing has been shameful, and much, much worse than Watergate.
All due to a derrier dossier.
Derrier; that’s French for “utter bullcrap.”
How far America has fallen. It is so bad we can only describe it in French.
First World Problem: Antique Arms Collectors Now Face Mostly Fakes
This headline is probably ho-hum to most people, at best.
To others, it is a “here we go again, another whine-fest by history buffs who spend their money badly on old rusty junk.”
But if you are indeed a history buff with a penchant for old weapons, both edged and those that go BOOM, you may be interested in this post.
My opinion is that most antique weapons collectors are facing an overwhelming amount of fakes.
Much more so with Japanese swords, so let’s discuss them first.
Used to be that finding a Gendaito blade was unusual; maybe one or two a year. Now, you go on eBay and find the same several sellers conveying dozens of them annually. Wakizashis, katanas, even various sized dirks and tantos etc.
These must all be fakes, as there simply were not this many Gendaito blades in existence before Chinese smiths began to create them in about 2011. Having watched these counterfeits move at an ever brisker pace, I simply feel sad. At some point the uninformed collectors will discover their money has been taken for what is a very good reproduction that is probably worth a thousand bucks, simply because it is that good of a copy. But it ain’t real.
Smith-made (hand made art blades) Shinto blades also fall into this counterfeiting scam by the hundreds annually. Again, there simply were not as many of these blades surviving WWII as there are now for sale on eBay.
With guns, it is harder to fake than a sword, because a gun is obviously a gun. A Winchester 1873 is a Winchester 1873, and its condition usually dictates its value.
What makes some gun values go crazy high are rare or historic marks (the ubiquitous spurious stage coach markings on rabbit eared double shotguns being the best example), which can be easily faked by anyone with good control of a metal punch. This is true fakery and it is an area most collectors know about and do more diligence about.
But let’s talk about the area where it is harder to see what has happened, and harder to call it fakery, though it is: The collectible antique sporting rifles.
Demand is high for antique sporting rifles, because their modern day equivalents cost about $35,000 to start and easily get to $100,000 and much, much higher. So in that context, it “makes sense” to pay $5,000 to $20,000 for an antique sporting firearm that functions as it should, rather than several times that amount for a brand new one that goes BOOM just like or nearly like the old one.
Antique sporting rifles are getting lots and lots of makeovers, both in England and here in America. They are marketed at auction and on websites as having been “period upgraded” or “period refurbished” (say from the 1870s to 1930s), when in fact they were very recently “tarted up” by a gunsmith to heighten their attractiveness to unknowing, unquestioning collectors.
I recently purchased – and immediately returned – such a rifle.
Oh it was a rare dandy, and looking past the hyperbole on the well-known seller’s website, which included an obviously fraudulent claim of “original condition,” there was still a fine gun that could take an American bison or a grizzly. If it worked the simple way a rifle should work, it was the gun of a lifetime. In a rare, hard-hitting caliber that I wanted.
So, I busted a move on it.
After joking on the phone with the salesman about the obviously fake claims of original condition, the seller and I eventually reached agreement on price, and the gun arrived in a couple days. Right out of its original 1895 leather and brass case with the original owner’s name and military rank on it (God, what a case!), the red flags were popping up: Improperly refinished wood had pulled the stock away from the receiver, leaving the stock to accept the heavy recoil on only one side.This meant the stock would crack soon after use.
A punch mark on the barrel lump was testimony to the cheap and meaningless effort to temporarily tighten the otherwise loose action. The list of el cheapo work went on. Yes, the bores were immaculate, but the fact is that this gun had been recently “tarted up” for re-sale, and it had been worn down quite a bit recently. Worn down more by the nature of its heavy caliber than by any misuse by previous owners.
Had the seller simply disclosed these facts, I might have made a more informed decision, and he would have received less money. We would have had full disclosure and an honest exchange. But within 48 hours of receiving it, I drove the gun all the way back to the sales room, three hours away, where the sales manager and the business owner tried to talk me out of the return. The refund check arrived ten days later, with none of the additional costs I incurred like shipping, transfer, gunsmith evaluation etc. They knew full well what had been done to that gun, and they simply got caught, and they punished me by withholding cash they should have covered.
This is one of the big names in high end gun sales.
Today I am looking at another uncommon rifle on a well known auction site. The gun has clearly been recently overhauled for re-sale. The wood finish is as bright and shiny as the new wood floor in a brand new home. The metal finishes look like they were done weeks ago, and not the 117 years ago that is the actual age of the gun. Yet it is marketed as having a “period” refurbish. Rubbish! Nonsense! Buyer be super aware!
This is not total fakery, as no fake numbers or markings have been punched into the metal or wood. Custer did not purportedly grasp this gun as he fell at the Little Big Horn.
Instead, until a few months ago, this gun’s metal parts were probably a mix of silvered and plum finishes, the welcome, honest patinas of hundreds of days afield in India or Africa, or the Scottish Highlands, chasing big game in the hands of a British, Indian, or Scottish Man of Importance. Until months ago, the wood probably looked like hell, was beat to hell, dented, dinged, and scratched, each a story in itself. Not any more! Now it looks so fake and shiny it about blinds the eye.
Shame, too, because under the fakery is a really cool gun.
Apparently the sellers believe that hiring “gunsmiths” to do quick and dirty upgrades to these collectible old sporting arms is more important than selling the actual honest gun, with its actual original wear and condition.
This means the sellers have gullible buyers who ascribe too much weight to new and fresh appearance, when the opposite is true: An original condition gun that has not been butchered or fooled with by a modern day “gunsmith” is actually more valuable.
The key to fending off the faking is educating new gun collectors and buyers to understand this fact: Fresh, new looking antique guns have been shined up to turn them into shiny objects. Don’t be a foolish fish and bite on them, unless you recognize a) what they are, and b) there are probably problems covered up by the new “improvements” that would have been addressed 100 years ago, but are now papered over, and thus, you are not getting what you paid for.
And as for the Japanese swords out there on eBay, man, what can be said? Be super wary. Ask yourself simple questions about production numbers, survivor numbers, and then answer your own question: How on earth is this one seller repeatedly finding so many of these should-be rare swords? Is every American veteran selling his prized Japanese sword to just these few dealers?
You know the answers to these questions. Run away, and hold on to your money.
In closing, buyer beware. Because there are gullible collectors willing to part with their money, there are unscrupulous sellers willing to sell them things that simply cannot be true. It behooves the smart man to ask the simple questions before biting.
Good luck and be patient!
New York Times Invents Time Machine
The New York Times was once the flagship news source in the whole world. It was the standard by which all other news sources and newspapers were judged.
What happens when a trusted news source becomes an active partisan in politics is inevitable: The credibility banked over decades is spent in a fury of attacks, which then blow away like dust after the contest is ended.
Partisans of all sorts inevitably find themselves clawing for survival, as it is the nature of choosing artificial sides in a world of holism. Sliding over the cliff, partisans act like a drowning victim on the way down. They’ll do anything to keep from going under, no matter how futile or self-defeating. It’s like using the wood from your home’s walls to run the fireplace.
So back in January of this year, the NYT ran headlines about how Trump was wiretapped. Why not? The NYT was one of the partisan proponents alleging an official investigation into Trump, and wiretaps are part of those kinds of investigations. The NYT was doing its best to damage Trump’s credibility, his standing, his ability to act as president. The NYT was trying to delegitimize Trump, and reporting that he had been wiretapped had all the trappings of a bad guy being surveilled by official law enforcement good guys.
Fast forward a couple months, and now “wiretap” has a whole new meaning: Today it means that the Obama administration illegally wiretapped and conducted illegal domestic spying against political candidate Trump. We now know there was no investigation of Trump, ever. But we also know there was eavesdropping aka wiretapping of Trump. The leaked transcripts of his calls prove it.
In this context, “wiretap” sounds awful, even damning when an Obama ally like the NYT reports it, and if you are in the business of bashing Trump and protecting Obama, which the NYT is, then you certainly don’t want to support evidence of the greatest political scandal since Watergate.
So the clever NYT invented a time machine. They went back in time to their January 2017 headlines that screamed “WIRETAP” and digitally altered them, on their website. No kidding. I do not lie. Check it out.
They “fixed” the NYT headlines, which might have a double meaning that applies here quite well. The NYT “fixed” its own headlines from months ago, so that going forward it would appear that the NYT had never said that Trump was wiretapped by Obama. Because now that sounds like an admission that Obama was conducting his illegal domestic spying on a US citizen and politician. The NYT retroactively changed its own history to support the narrative it currently promotes.
Being partisan, and not a news organization, the NYT will do whatever it can to support its allies (Obama) and damage its enemies (Trump, America, traditional values, Christianity, etc.), so the record has been forged to preserve a current version of events that are most favorable to Obama.
Now the forged January 2017 NYT headlines say that Trump’s name came up in “data intercepts” conducted by the NSA while spying on Russian officials stationed here in America.
Data intercepts. Doesn’t that sound a lot more acceptable, more palatable? A lot less invasive? A lot more normal than the actual spying via wiretaps we witnessed going on against Trump by the US government under Obama’s stewardship?
Like a drowning man, the NYT is going down the tubes. Its credibility is shot, gone, spent wildly like a drunken sailor during the recent political contest which saw Trump elected over the NYT’s favored Clinton. Trying to alter what it wrote months ago is simply fakery, forgery, really, and the NYT has been caught red-handed doing what it would never allow anyone else to do: Go back in time and re-invent reality to fit today’s immediate purposes.
If this isn’t fake news and alternative facts, then what is? But this is surely news.
Japanese swords — caveat emptor
Taking breathers from political screeds may be rare here, but this is an oddball necessity. One cannot see bloodthirsty fakery and sit silently.
To wit: A lot of guys collect old militaria. Swords, bayonets, guns, helmets, etc. Cool stuff. Inspiring. Evocative of sacrifice and bravery.
Most of this rusty old junk is tough to fake, and even more to the point, pointless to fake, as the rip-off scheme costs more than the item is worth.
Except in the world of old Japanese swords.
The iconic katana and wakizashi have been sought after for decades as both extremely appealing for a red-blooded man to look at, and as artwork; refined craftsmanship that’ll easily cut off an arm. What normal guy wouldn’t be attracted to such art?!
For the past ten years or a bit more, a certain well known, popular, big auction site on the internet has been filled with many obviously faked Japanese swords and daggers. There were and still are some for sale in the past week and presently, hawked as “gendaito” in shingunto mounts. These would be valuable hand-made art blades holstered in relatively rudimentary war-time (WWII) scabbards that saw service in the field. If they were actually old and authentic.
But these are not authentic, historic blades. They were made recently and are being sold as old.
So sad to see such obviously faked signatures, and faked blades, set into authentic WWII mounts and carriers, with blazingly brand-new shirasaya! It’s an obviously winning combination, as buyers pay thousands of dollars for something worth a few hundred at most.
C’mon guys. Use your heads. Do your research. How many gendaito blades really made it out, after WWII? So many that individual sellers seem to constantly, endlessly pull them out like white rabbits from black hats?
Alarm bells not going off?
If your hearts weren’t telling you Yes, your eyes would be telling you “FAKE!”
Run. Run away fast from these too-good-to-be-true bargains with new handles, purposeful minor scuffs, and signatures so clearly punched in by a modern Chinaman, not a Nipon-To maker sitting cross legged eighty years ago.
If nothing else, demand NHTK papers with each sword. Or consider your investment wasted. Sorry to say.
This Public Service Announcement has been brought to you by a fellow dude.
Good or bad, the cops have our backs
A society without a professional police force lacks the rule of law. No rule of law? No civilization.
Are there bad cops, violent cops, corrupt cops, abusive cops, escalating cops? Of course. I’ve seen it. Central Pennsylvania Attorney Devon Jacob has seen it, and he’s a former police officer who prosecutes police brutality. Even he says the bad cops are a minuscule fraction of the overall number.
Overall and overwhelmingly, the police across the nation are the best of the citizenry. They sacrifice their safety to bring a certainty to yours. Without police like American police, there’s no America. Not as we’ve come to know it.
That’s what gets me about the anti-police attitude so common now. What, you want anarchy?
Despite the fake and misplaced rage about criminals dying at the hands of the police they attacked, there is truth to the observation that police forces are too militarized. And too many police officers are quick to escalate situations to satiate an ego in need of control. These aren’t secrets and these are issues the left and the right agree on. It’s going to get resolved professionally through the political process.
The blips on the radar screen that get our attention most are momentary deviations from the standard behavior of nearly all police officers. The extremely high standard of care that the police in every community bring to all of us is second to none.
So, how any American identifies the police as the bad guys is beyond me. It’s a sign of deep cultural decay and failure. It’s time that stopped.
Who is a “sportsman”?
Sportsmen were the nation’s first conservationists, advocating in the 1890s for sustainable harvests of previously unregulated birds, fish and animals like deer and bear. Acting against their own individual self-interests, they banded together to place limits on wildlife and habitat so that future generations would have opportunities to fish, hunt, camp, skinny dip, sight-see, wildlife watch, and help wildlife recover from 300 years of unregulated market hunting and industrial exploitation.
By the 1920s, a culture of stewardship and natural resource conservation was cemented into the sporting ranks by leaders like Gifford Pinchot, Teddy Roosevelt, and Aldo Leopold. Hunting clubs across rural America incorporated stocking programs, tree planting, and facilitating public land purchases to improve and increase wildlife habitat.
Fast forward to today, where wildlife populations are largely stable, wildlife habitat is not in crisis mode, and hunters and anglers are experiencing the best opportunities to harvest trophy fish and game in many decades. We are living in a golden age of the outdoor lifestyle.
Riding on the successes of past generations, today there are some grumbling guys with guns, crabbing that they don’t have anything to hunt. The real shameful behavior is the recent abandonment by some of these men of the sportsman’s stewardship ethic and the conservation pledge that made the hunting community highly respected among the larger society. A group of disaffected users, takers, and malcontents calling themselves “sportsmen” recently endorsed HB 1576, a proposed Pennsylvania bill which would gut the very state agencies charged with protecting Pennsylvania’s natural resources, and remove from state protection those plants and animals necessary for healthy hunting habitat.
The question on the table is, Are these men sportsmen? Are they sportsmen like Aldo Leopold was a sportsman?
While I wait to hear back from others, my answer is No, these men are not sportsmen. They are simply men with guns, freeloaders, spoiled children living off the hard work of both past and present generations, while complaining it isn’t enough and they want more, now, dammit. Their behavior is short-sighted and embarrassing, nothing like the visionary selfless sacrifice of their forebears. They should be publicly shamed and drummed out of the ranks of sportsmen.
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“The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, “What good is it?” If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”
― Aldo Leopold