Posts Tagged → migrate
Broken Bow, Nebraska
Several years ago I did a drive out West and back East. Two different routes, two totally different landscapes, experiences, people, history.
While cutting across Nebraska, from its most northwestern corner to Omaha, a road sign caught my attention. Hard to miss it, as it was staring me in the face. It said “Josh, you can go that way, or the opposite way, these are your limited choices here.”
Picture of it below.
This sign at that “T” intersection symbolized then and even more so now the strange fulcrum America is balancing on. Back then America was undergoing the shock of the wide open borders, the mass migration of illegal aliens and their subsequent mass crime wave; the Biden DOJ’s declaration of war on everyone who was not part of their political “tribe.” The illegal invasion of President Trump’s home at Mar A Lago, based on the fake accusations of politicized lawyers. Etc.
At that “T” intersection, one could go one way to the tiny cow town of “Alliance.” The other direction was to “Broken Bow,” also a small ranching town in the middle on Nebraska, which is truly the definition of the Middle Of Nowheresville. No other choices were available. No straight ahead, just two completely opposite directions, left or right.
While we all encounter “T” intersections while driving, it was the names on the signs and the starkness of the empty surroundings out there on the American heartland prairie that caught my attention that moment. They were so evocative of the choices we faced then, before the 2024 election, and it reminded me of a popular meme from probably 2022 that says “You are here” at a “T” intersection, with your choice being “Communism” on the left turn and “America” on the right turn.
Broken Bow, Nebraska, gets its name from, yes, you guessed it, the 1860s Indian Wars. A broken bow is a symbol of failed war, lost battle, a lost war, defeat. I think “Broken Arrow” is the US Army call sign for a pending overrun of US positions by enemy infantry. The Fasces, the symbol of ancient Rome and Mussolini’s 1940s fascist Italy, is a bunch of arrows all wrapped up together, and thus unbreakable. So this kind of imagery is evocative to everyone, at all times in human history.
Out there on the Nebraska prairie that day, the other choice at the “T” was “Alliance,” a name also evocative of military maneuvers, strategies, tactics, and also cultural cohesion, different people agreeing to stick together for their common good.
What a juxtaposition: Defeat on the one hand, or survival on the other.
Maybe I see too much symbolism in things that are really just mundane, but it is how my mind works, and so I also envision that this upcoming election in America is representative of this kind of analysis or interpretation of the natural phenomena and the built world surrounding us. The ephemera of past human conflicts and choices and decisions around us are neon bright reminders that we repeat history, and hopefully have learned from it.
We all of us, each of us, have choices, every minute of every day, and we all have agency, our own unique ability to apply and implement ourselves, our passions, our desires, our hopes, our dreams into the world around us. Some aim high and think big, others less so. It is all important.
At our very individual best, we are capable of great changes at times when we and others least expect it.
To me, I see America right now at that crossroads out there in the endless Nebraska grassland, facing a stark choice, two opposing directions, mutually exclusive.
On the one hand, America can elect people to Congress who will implement policies that result in a broken American bow. Policies that resulted in the terrible destruction of the 2020 riots here, and also the terribly destructive riots in Europe the past week, to say the least. Open borders, Medicare for everyone who mass migrate walks across the border, “free” taxpayer funded stuff on top of “free” taxpayer funded stuff for anyone and everyone from around the world…this is not sustainable, it is not an adult or responsible way to think about limited money, or limited resources. It is inevitably destructive of our civilization, and why oh why would any taxpaying American citizen vote for their own, our own, destruction?
On the other hand, Americans can elect representatives to Congress who want an alliance, which is cultural cohesion, holding down the fort, protecting the fort, protecting the American People tribe from further defeat or damage. An American society built on mutual benefit, fairness, which to date our nation has been. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but even at our worst still infinitely more and better than any other nation on the planet.
Hopefully, my fellow Americans see this coming Election Day as the choice between Broken Bow and Alliance, and they choose Alliance. I won’t talk about political parties, because neither one impresses me. One is crazy, the other is lazy. But I will take lazy and non-destructive over crazy and totally destructive every day of the year. Especially on Election Day this year.
Your vote is your agency, your impact, and I hope you use it for the alliance, and not for breaking things.
Screenshot
Screenshot
America’s choice in ten days
Screenshot
PGC’s strange hunter survey
Today a Pennsylvania Game Commission email arrived, asking if I would participate in a brief hunter survey. Being 100% opinionated about everything, naturally I acquiesced. “Shy” was maybe used to describe me when I was young, but not as an adult. Because I consider myself a careful thinker, committed only to First Principles from America’s founding and to The Bible, and being relatively uncommitted to mass movements or parties, I enjoy sharing my perspectives with people who are open minded and interested in understanding different points of view than the prevailing narratives hawked by the Mainstream Media Corporate Industrial Complex.
The PGC survey consisted of really just three questions, all of which were about hunting waterfowl such as ducks and geese.
First question was did I hunt ducks last season, to which I responded No, I Did Not Hunt Ducks Last Season. The reason being that although I live just two blocks from that once famous migration route on the mighty Susquehanna River, the current duck migration down the Susquehanna River is not even a shadow of its former self. Rather, the duck migration here does not exist and has not existed for twenty years. I see more ducks lounging about and crapping on people’s yards in Italian Lake City Park across the street from my front yard than I see out on the Susquehanna River sitting on a bucket with a shotgun in my hand.
So, unless I travel to the Chesapeake Bay to hunt ducks, it is rare for me to get out after them any longer. Without Sunday hunting like all the surrounding states have, my opportunities for waterfowl hunting in Pennsylvania are pretty limited to what I can access quickly and easily. Like the dead Susquehanna River within sight of my dining room window.
Second question asked which Goose Zone I hunted in. Easy enough to answer.
Third question, which was broken down into three different alternatives, pertained to which of three unbearable and useless goose hunting seasons I liked or did not like, and how much I liked them or disliked them. All three alternative seasons PGC presented were unnecessarily fragmented from late October into February, and included very little early season but lots of late and really super late season. The problem being that the southward goose migration is heaviest in the part of October when the PGC shuts down our goose hunting, and the goose migration is entirely over by the time the PGC season opens back up. Fat lot of help these potential seasons offer!
This is a curious situation, which I have never had satisfactorily answered. Some hunters I know say that the Susquehanna River Waterfowlers, to which the PGC looks for hunter guidance, is made up of anti-Sunday hunting fuddy duddys who would rather give up hunting entirely than see Pennsylvania hunters get our share of the goose migration and also have Sunday waterfowling. True or not, this is what I am told.
Other hunters I know say that the PGC is hopelessly tangled up with the US Fish & Wildlife Service on all kinds of policies, not the least of which is that PA has a boatload of passionate hunters who, given the least opportunity, will, it is said by wildlife management officialdom, destroy, decimate, eliminate, and exterminate every duck, goose, gander, coot, loon, pimpernel, plover, and shoveler that flies, walks, waddles, crawls, or ducks through the migration route between New York and Maryland. And so, according to this view, Pennsylvania waterfowl hunters must be artificially hamstrung and kept from going afield when the birds are flying the most. Again, I do not know how much truth there is to this, though I will testify to the fact that Pennsylvania does in fact field a lot of hunters. A lot.
And so we get to my response to the three ridiculous seasons proposed in the PGC survey: Not one of them makes any sense; all three are equally nonsensical alternatives.
What is the point of giving me various dates to hunt if the animal we are hunting is no longer in the venue in those dates, but has long since flown the coop and is doing leisurely backstrokes in Florida and Louisiana?
It appears that the PGC knows its three silly seasons are indeed silly, and yet the agency is overtly committed to them.
“You can have a crap sandwich, a sh*t sandwich, or an imaginary sandwich,” is what PA waterfowl hunters are presented here.
This means Pennsylvania waterfowl hunters outside the Philly area southeast corner and outside a couple of interesting little “habitat and flyway bubbles” around Lake Erie and Shenango Lake in Western PA are officially SOL and just wasting their time sitting with a shotgun on a bucket and freezing solid past late December.
This current no-win situation begs for a bigger than life solution, but it also reminds me of the old Sunday hunting situation, where the PA Farm Bureau stole our private property rights for decades by artificially preventing any Sunday hunting. Only by marginally nibbling around the political edges did PA hunters finally get three weenie Sundays to hunt big game, and one suspects that such a small and unsatisfying “solution” is what is in store for PA waterfowlers, if a solution is to be had at all.
Maybe PGC will add more waterfowling days afield in March, when every single last duck and goose north of the Mason Dixon Line has landed in Costa Rica for the winter. Thanks but no thanks, PGC.
I for one, though I undoubtedly represent many others, would like to hunt ducks and geese in Pennsylvania at or closely around the same times/dates/days that hunters in New York are hunting them. But that would make sense, and if there is one thing I have learned as a PA waterfowl hunter, our seasons here are not intended to make sense.
Trans-conversation not allowed
“Trans” Definition: Across, beyond, through, changing thoroughly (Random House dictionary, 1987, the best printed book you can have in your home, because it represents the pinnacle of Western Civilization English language before it was thoroughly corrupted with non-definable nonsense which has resulted in the internal collapse of our nation).
To have a meaningful conversation and exchange of ideas (which results in increased understanding and personal growth) across, beyond, and through our natural personal and cultural differences and boundaries, all humans have historically talked to one another. Fifteen thousand years ago, the multitude of Mongolian tribes who had migrated across the climate change Bering land bridge into the Americas all ended up speaking different languages as a multitude of different Indian tribes, and yet interacting directly and honestly with one another across their differences.
In the 1400s, Chinese, Italian, Russian, Portuguese, and Dutch explorers sailed their ships across the planet to meet, communicate, and trade with other cultures with different skin colors and languages. In the 1600s, different European tribes (primarily Anglo-Saxons, Germans, Franks, and Celts) who migrated into the Americas all joined together and amalgamated across their cultural and linguistic boundaries to form a singular national and several regional identities.
All of these humans from the beginning of modern humanity crossed physical, cultural, and linguistic boundaries to exchange ideas and items with one another, often joining together, sometimes disagreeing, but always communicating. No artificial boundaries were allowed. If a boundary or difference between them was unnecessary or served no healthy purpose, then that boundary and difference was discarded. Albeit sometimes by force of arms, but discarded nonetheless.
So, knowing these demonstrable, measurable, definable facts about humans historically communicating with one another, let us ask this important question: What realistic, healthy purpose is served by the unnatural gag order and discriminatory bar on honest conversations about the sexual ideology movement and its resulting trans-sexual assault on women’s rights?
Why can’t the majority of Americans, Canadians, or Europeans presently ask questions and talk fully about this non-sensical, destructive, censorious movement that has taken over academia, medicine, law, and much of government services?
To not only stop Americans from having a conversation about “Trans” athletes destroying women’s sports, but for the pro-Trans movement to then also utterly destroy the personal and professional lives of those people who merely try to have these important conversations demonstrates that this is not a natural human experience we are having right now. Knowing that humans have historically crossed every sort of boundary to reach one another, how can it be said that this aggressive censorship and brutal blocking of communication about the subject is natural and thus healthy?
The simple and honest answer here is that the pro-censorship side is made up of evil, intolerant, discriminatory authoritarians relying on 100% subjective and unprovable nonsense (that has a lot of scientifically proven data contradicting it). People who cannot have an honest debate or discussion, and who try to destroy anyone who even questions much less challenges their orthodoxy, are by definition really bad people. Sure, they try to cloak themselves in righteousness, and they claim that honest discussions cause “harm” to some tiny fraction of humans somewhere. But they are the ones committing the greatest and most widespread harm to the greatest number of people.
These inhuman censorship people must be confronted, shamed, and stopped. As they have pulled out all of the stops to destroy us, so should we pull out all of the stops to fight back. They started this fight; they purposefully undermined every First Amendment right we citizens have enjoyed for 240 years, and so we have every right to fight fire with fire. We are waging a just war back against injustices imposed on us by violent authoritarians. I see our situation as eerily similar to World War Two, where the side representing human freedom and good waged a just war against evil Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy and Japan.
If you have a Woke university asking you for money, decline to contribute and instead support university board candidates who believe in the classical liberal idea of free speech. If you have a Woke township official making bizarre, un-American decisions about your property rights, or demanding that you accept their anti-English language pronouns while they reject your correct pronouns, then mount a strong effort to have them voted out or removed from office. If your kid has a Woke sports coach at school who makes scientifically indefensible decisions about sports competitions and shared locker rooms, then mount an aggressive effort to remove that coach (and similarly defend sports coaches who adhere to scientifically sound decisions). Same for school board members – Woke = bad = run for their seats.
Isn’t it ironic that the one crucial thing that the “Trans” movement does not tolerate is the full communication among all of us and across our different boundaries about the crushing slavery that the Trans movement truly represents and means for the vast majority of us? Even the gay and possibly Trans people in my own family, each of whom I love completely and welcome in my life absolutely and always, cannot tolerate an honest discussion about this subject. Such is the stuff of rigid religious ideologies!
This Trans movement – as it is currently structured and represented – is not a human thing. It is not an innately healthy or honest human experience. Rather, it is an anti-human artificial contrivance operating far outside historic human norms and much more aligned with Nazis, Fascists, and Stalinists.
Because the current Trans movement is an existential threat to you and your essential humanity, it is normal and justified for you to fear it and be phobic of it. It is just one more gruesome face of evil fascism that must be confronted and defeated to save our freedom of choice, freedom of conscience, and physical freedom.
