Posts Tagged → migration
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.
Movie review: “Avatar – Way of the Water”
If you can and also desire to endure three solid hours of anti-White racism, anti-Americanism, anti-Capitalism, and a whole host of other “woke” evils being jammed up your butt, by white American capitalists no less, then go spend your money to see “Avatar – Way of the Water.”
One of my kids persuaded me to go see it with him, encouraging me to do so in order to confirm in person my own impression that the movie was crap. Well, for twenty-eight bucks, I can now absolutely confirm by personal experience that Avatar is what many people might already think it is, and what I thought it is, and that is garbage propaganda and crap.
Avatar- The Way of Water is just crap. It is also a theft of major themes of at least half a dozen major movies, including Star Wars.
Nazi Germany was largely built on this movie’s same kind of colorful propaganda, however, so do not dismiss Avatar. Oh sure, Nazi Germany did not live beyond a dozen years, its “thousand year Reich” blown to bits in an orgy of mass murder and retaliation by Germany’s victims. So the woke world of Caucasian slaves serving communist overlords and whatever else pure crap Hollywood envisions for us won’t last very long either. But in Nazi Germany’s short twelve year time span, tremendous destruction was done to Europe and to the world. So, when the propaganda works, it works, and if you are on the receiving end of it, do not ignore it. Or, put another way, if you love a free America, you ignore this crap at your own peril. Like fentanyl and other scary drugs purposefully being allowed over America’s southern border by the current administration, it is powerful crap. Avatar is not innocuous. It is damaging America, as it is intended.
We all know that Hollywood is a cesspit of hideously evil people playing dress-up and make-believe on behalf of China, and Avatar has found a new way to use its power of evil suggestion with only voice actors. This movie, like its predecessor, is Computer Generated Imagery. Fake. Basically anthropomorphized Gumby people presented to us as human-enough-like humanoids that we can relate to them. The Gumby movie characters all have really nice big white teeth smiles, of course. Friendly racists.
In a nutshell, an American Marine Corps colonel, Miles Quaritch, is symbolic of everything that is supposedly bad in our life today – hoo-rah toxic macho masculinity, guns, military, America, technological culture, meat eating, natural resource extraction, Western invasions of supposedly “indigenous” lands, and overall Man vs. Nature. This very white Colonel Quaritch is the ultimate antagonist bad guy with a thoroughly American personality (in reality, the real Miles Quaritch Marine Corps people are right now protecting America and Americans so that people can enjoy their high end lifestyle and also continue to virtue signal about how aligned with the oppressed they are). We are instructed to hate him, because everything he does is wrong and bad and evil and…well, if you are trying to demonize an entire ethnic group, you would heap upon them all of the ills that he suffers from and brings to others, and Avatar does that to white people via Miles Quaritch.
That, despite the fact that in this Avatar movie, Quaritch returns to life as one of the genetically modified, lab-grown blue humanoids, along with a cadre of fellow former US Marines likewise re-animated, all of whom look the same as the natives, but who suffer from the same “bad” thinking as the white people they used to be. It seems that regardless of his skin color, Colonel Quaritch and his American Marines still represent everything that is bad: Bad ideas, bad whites, bad identity, bad values, bad desires, etc. while they invade this Garden of Eden planet where everyone and every thing lives in kumbayah.
Pitted against Colonel Quaritch and his cadre of all-bad all-white guys and gals, are a bunch of tall humanoids colored green and blue, depending upon which area of their planet they inhabit in their traditional pre-technology tribal ways. These things are presented as the innocent indigenous sentient beings whose sole purpose is to hunt, fish, make love, and get stoned together and also get stoned with the animals around them on deep love psychology via emotional tethers growing from their heads. Yes, yes, this is meant to demonstrate the peaceful interconnectedness of all things. Gaia. Peace. Their leader Jake was once a moron white guy, but he changed, and morphed into a blue guy at one with Gaia and all the animals.
None of this makes sense, logically, nor would it have made any sense to a Lakota warrior trying to take a squirming Pawnee’s scalp with a dull stone knife, but if functional Americans over the age of fifty are wondering what the hell just happened to America and why we can’t find young people to work at our businesses and why young people prefer to live in a virtual fantasy land rather than work and volunteer and support themselves and why they prefer to get useless college degrees and follow evil corporate media and pretend to be victims while drinking ten dollar coffees, then you need look no further than this movie, Avatar – Way of the Water.
This movie’s illogical woke bullshit is the reality our American kids believe they are living in.
Never mind that the movie’s plot has more holes than a piece of Swiss cheese, it is the feewings it induces that we all must entertain and service most. Feelings of hate for traditional White American males, feelings of hate for the people who mine natural resources for us (which logically must also include the little black African slave children digging in the rare earth mineral and cadmium mines right now so that child actor Greta Thunberg can pose with an EV car that is primarily an explosive bomb that only drives a short distance on Mondays, but don’t tell the makers of this movie), feelings of hate for technology, for human migrations, etc. etc. etc.
Never mind if the blue and green people migrated to the planet (we are briefly shown the giant rusted ribs of whatever spaceship they all arrived in), and killed each other to establish territories. Human migration and killing for territory is only wrong when white people do it. Dontcha know.
About the movie’s ridiculous plot: Why the hell is it OK for the blue people to hunt and eat animals, but it is wrong for anyone else to kill said animals?
And where the hell were all the green people during the end of the last fight? It is like they dropped off the face of their water world with spears held high, at the most crucial moment, and just gave up and went home to eat some dead fish that were once friends but had recently become food. Meanwhile the blue people were locked in a life-and-death fight with high technology that could easily have been won if the green people had stuck around to fight, which they said they were there to do. Crickets. Big plot hole.
My criticism of this racist and childish cartoon movie could fill buckets, rivers, oceans, entire planets, but my biggest observation about it is that it is effective propaganda designed to corrode America from the inside out, to demonize and pit people against white Americans. Probably done at the behest of the communist Chinese, America’s greatest enemy. Go ahead and mock Avatar, but don’t underestimate its negative effect on young Americans and America.
Or go ahead and mock me, late to the show here, but no one pays me to write this blog, and I do as much as I can with the time I have. And in that vein, sorry about the mis-alignment of the photos below. No idea why this happens, and I do everything I can to eliminate it and get them properly aligned.
Character “Jake” the once White guy who became a blue guy, here high on the Earth Mother (Gaia), no lie
Mrs Jake, also high on the Earth Mother and the oneness of all life (what movies have we heard this from before)
There are black blue people and Asian blue people, all opposed to the White people
Lots of current teenage lingo and hookem horns type hand signals meant to appeal to teens
US Marine Corps colonel Miles Quaritch, the representative white guy everyone racist and woke is supposed to hate. He actually looks a lot like my buddy Ron Boltz
About this “Friendsgiving” nonsense
Why is it so difficult for a bunch of people living the good life in America to say thanks, show appreciation, and have gratitude for what America has provided to them?
Among extremists, America is built on “stolen land,” and observing Thanksgiving Day is honoring a wicked country built on lies. Sorry to use that word “extremist,” but it must be used here, because it is flung repeatedly at anyone who disagrees with the nihilist, racist, genocidal, secular anarchist movement now inhabiting the Democrat Party body and its stinking mouthpiece, the Mainstream Establishment Legacy Media (CNNlol, CBS, ABC, NPR, MSNBC, PBS, PennLive etc et al).
People who posted “Friendsgiving” pictures to their America-censoring social media outlets may be wallowing like pigs in stinking mire and absolutely loving it, but why don’t or can’t they stop and look back over their shoulder? These most ultra of shallow virtue signalers are wearing clothing made by capitalists, living in nice homes built by capitalists, driving cars designed and built by capitalists and that run on fuel (electricity or petroleum) extracted and refined and provided by capitalists, using smart phones and laptops designed and built by capitalists, etc.
This is to say, If America is really so damned evil, and if you all are so really sorry about how we all got here, and you all are feeling so deeply such shame for your benefits and lifestyle, then why don’t you show how you really feel and throw it all away. Put your money where your mouth is, shallowcrats.
Don’t sit here and post these gleeful family pictures while simultaneously lecturing and hectoring the rest of us on how bad we all are. Christ, people, you shallow virtue signalers are the worst hypocrites on Planet Earth, not just in America. You enjoy all the benefits of capitalist America, all its luxuries (oh how Liberals love them some luxuries and swag!), its freedoms to criticize everyone else who is not in your tribe of hypocrites, but then also eschew it all. You get to have it both ways, when in reality we all must make choices in life. To be honorable people, anyhow.
Thanksgiving Day was established early on in American history because people who fought and worked hard to create a free nation showed their true gratitude for it all. For all the opportunities. If there is one defining American characteristic, it is freedom of opportunity, for everyone.
Yes, the American Indians lost their fight to hold on to America, against a seemingly endless tide of human migration. And it is sad, to me at least. I do feel badly for American Indians, what they lost, and most important, how they lost it to people supposedly representing Judeo-Christian ethics, and yet who had no scruples about lying to and deceiving the Indians at every turn.
But let us ask, How much land does a single person need? American Indians probably enjoyed a ratio of 10,000 square miles to each person. Contrast that to the cramped conditions in Europe, where serfs, peasants, and landless native Celts were confined to slums or as de facto slaves on their tiny “freeholds.”
Why was it OK for Asians to migrate to America, set up shop as a hundred different warring, torturing, human-sacrificing Indian tribes, but it was not OK for poverty-stricken landless Celtic tribes (Irish, Scots) to migrate to America and set up shop, as well? Were the Indians really so greedy and selfish that they could not share their incredible land wealth with other needy humans?
Why is it OK for endless illegal migration into America right now (maskless, no vaccine), but we have people celebrating “Friendsgiving” and lamenting the Indians’ stolen Americas?
And about the African slaves…yes, we know that was wrong, because America fought a bloody civil war over the issue, and America made many large sacrifices since then to rectify an issue that affected a tiny percentage of the American population.
Why are people who are living in million dollar homes and driving nice cars prostituting their skin color on this false narrative altar that America never gave them anything? Jesus Christ, people, look at the underpants you are wearing right now! I will bet that just your underpants alone cost more than all the clothes combined in one African village in the Congo or Nigeria. Show some damned appreciation. Show some gratitude for what you have. Don’t engage in this shallow virtue signaling, because all it does is draw attention to what a weak non-thinker you choose to be.
None of this makes a damn bit of sense. But then, making logical, reasonable sense never is important to people on the Left. They live a daily orgy of silly virtue signaling and mea culpas while simultaneously reaping the very best that American capitalism has to offer them, us, the entire world.
Just show some gratitude, some thanks for what you have. If you feel badly about the condition of the American Indian reservations, go help them. They need help and will appreciate your help.
And if you feel badly about the obvious plight of so many descendants of African slaves living in America today, then stop supporting bad policies that lock them into this horrible condition. Stop voting for people and one single political party that makes modern-day slavery to its movement and sacrifice by communal catastrophe an absolute requirement.
Will anyone who should hear these words listen to them? Like the people posting about “Friendsgiving” and how bad America is. Probably not. The fast-happy endorphins released in brains by silly virtue signaling “I am so damned right” are an addictive drug. People are hallucinating and fantasizing while high on endorphins, and while it isn’t real, they don’t care. It just feels so damned good, and they don’t have a care or a thanks in the world.
The boys of summer
In 1984, which was the best decade since 1884, Don Henley wrote a fabulous song called “The Boys of Summer.” The song is about teenage and early twenties summertime love, amidst the sunny outdoor environment in which so many American teens ONCE spent their summers, either as lifeguards, or as laborers, learning how to work. Socializing after working hours, the kids would sit around beach campfires showing off their deep tans, their touseled hair, their fit bodies, talking, sharing, competing, loving, opening up, becoming friends.
The song is about how the end of summer is coming, and how it arrives, and the singer just wants the girl to know that he loved her then and will love her again, even after the boys of summer have gone home, back to school.
So evocative is the music and the lyrics of this song, you can play it and immediately bring a room full of fifty-somethings to a standstill, as each person stops mid-sentence, mid-thought, mid-action, and immediately drifts back to fond summertime memories from their youth. There they will sit, as if frozen, deep in the best of memories, until the song ends. Doubt me? Here – listen to this song, and then report back on how the song affected you.
And so it is with me now, as I watch the boys of summer in the mountains, the fields, the back yards. No, these are not human boys. These are bird boys, specifically the male neo-tropical migrants who flew here, to central and northcentral Pennsylvania, from Venezuela, Costa Rica, southern Mexico and Guatemala, southern Florida, and other tropical places.
These migratory tropical birds have been migrating northward since the end of the last ice age about 10,000 years ago. And they probably migrated during the prior ice ages, too, only retreating from the repeated massive ice fields over 100,000 years, and then, as now, following the glacial retreat northward.
Some birds go as far as the Arctic Circle, nesting on cliffs and on tundra, where they compete, entice, mate, lay eggs, and hatch chicks before heading far back south to raise their young chicks into mature members of their own species. While most of this migratory behavior has to do with finding food and comfortable environmental conditions, it is nonetheless a magical time. When you see it, you can feel God’s presence with your eyeballs.
What my own boys of summer song is about, in my head, is how I already miss the springtime displays put on by the male members of these migratory songbirds. They are so impossibly vibrantly colorful, they look like little jewels in flight. Bright reds, yellows, blues, purples, greens, they are most incredible variety of natural creation. Who could create such a beautiful and tiny creature? And why, if not for our own viewing pleasure?
Almost every spring time Saturday will find me sitting on the front porch, bird book and binoculars in hand, a Thermos of coffee to my right, watching the incredible display that happens in swoops, rushes, ground-level and tree-top height courtship displays, and brief landings. One particular morning this spring I was sitting at a second floor window and saw a scarlet tanager, an indigo bunting, and a variety of yellow-to-golden birdies (warblers as well as multiple male goldfinches in one small space) all in the same immediate area. It was a huge visual delight. Magic, really.
And so as summer settled in, these colorful animals retreated to their own hidden responsibilities of feeding the chicks they had hatched, teaching them to fly and to eat, and then perhaps having another clutch or two. Depending upon how many of the first clutch were eaten by bluejays and crows.
I miss the spring time display of these songbirds, mostly the more-colorful males. A scarlet tanager or Baltimore oriole in a tree top is reminder of how beautiful the world really is, even though bad people in our cities have managed to make it as ugly as sin.
I miss my boys of summer.
Oriole by thebernebirdnerd
scarlet tanager
yellow warbler, wikipedia
goldfinch by Sarah Lynn
indigo bunting, wikimedia commons
Shockwave: from 1649 to 2019, 370 years of violent migration in America
Until 1649, the Huron Nation were a mighty Indian tribe, unafraid to use overwhelming violent force to take or raid the better hunting and trapping grounds of nearby Indian tribes who were not strong enough to withstand them.
For hundreds of years, from their fastness in Canada, the mighty Huron tribe had ranged deeply into rich hunting grounds that would become Vermont, Massachusetts, New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Ohio. But a now familiar combination of factors resulted in their loss of power, a retreat back into Canada, and a resulting cascade of westward Indian migration that did not end until 250 years later, when the very last battles of the Indian Wars played out on the Great Plains in what is today Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Nebraska and the Dakotas.
Beaten by imported cholera, smallpox, and an ad hoc alliance of lesser tribes, themselves the products of desperate starvation, loss of homeland, and mechanical pressure emanating outward from growing European settlement on the east coast, the year 1649 marked the defeated Huron Nation’s inability to project violent force beyond their original tribal base around the eastern Great Lakes in what is today southeastern Canada. It marked the beginning of their tactical retreat.
So in 1649, as the surviving Hurons retracted northward and westward, eventually southward, the demographic dominos really began to fall, as they already had along the east coast for the previous fifty years, but now en masse. One by one, two by two, smaller or lesser known Indian tribes in the Great Lakes region began to migrate westward and southward, pushed by those coming up from behind. One tribe displaced another along its southwestern migration path, with new tribes emerging and some old tribes merging. Some tribes were literally stamped out in genocidal raids. Historically, Indians colonized and occupied each other, and they always migrated because of “economic” circumstances.
The Oglala Sioux and the poverty-stricken, fish-eating Cheyenne (Tsi-Tsi-Tas in their own language) had emerged onto the Great Plains from the Minnesota lake district with a finely honed hunger for survival and unoccupied open spaces. We know them today as the most dominant and war-like of all the western Indians, but the truth is that they were simply of the few Indian tribes most determined to survive and prosper out of the stream of refugees fleeing ahead of the 1649 shockwave. And when we see magnificent and inspirational pictures of brave Plains Indians mounted on their war ponies, totally free on the prairies, we are not looking at thousands of years of cultural evolution. Rather, the horseback Indian is a modern creation of America and Europe.
On the southern plains, migrating Indians on foot had encountered the remainders of once-domesticated Spanish conquistador horses, subsequently gone wild and feral since the 1600s. By the 1750s herds of wild mustangs were being captured, broken, and ridden by Indians. Comanches, Sioux, Cheyenne, Pawnee, and many others used these new horses to keep pace with bison herds, to fight each other, and eventually to face off with mounted US Cavalry.
So in 1649 there was a demographic shock, a vacuum, and then an explosion which marked the fragmentation and full-throated migratory shift of Indian tribal power in the east, until the surviving results of their waves of westward migration then turned and fought the Bluecoats at the Washita and Little Big Horn in the 1880s.
The history lesson here is that already by 1630 European migratory settlement on the east coast had started a cascading migratory effect that only ended when the Oglala Sioux, Cheyenne, Crow, and Arapahoe were herded onto “reservations,” and spirit-starved of any remaining patriotic vigor and will to fight in the 1890s.
Which leads us to the practical lesson here: The uncontrolled mass migration invasion into America that we are witnessing right now is really nothing new. Mass migration has been a natural constant in America, started by the American Indians themselves, with subsequent migrants coming from all around the globe. The recent undocumented and hostile migration is illegal according to a “peace treaty” of sorts that the two major political tribes negotiated years ago, but that ‘treaty’ has now been openly violated and broken. Today’s mass migration into America is being orchestrated primarily by one political “tribe” in order to gain political power over the other political “tribe,” and over everyone else living in America, too. And once that power is gained, the illegal invader political tribe will use the coercive force of official government to wrest whatever control over the citizens they desire, to compel us to live as they believe we should. Needless to say, that particular tribe is hostile, and does not believe in any of the founding agreements that created America, like the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution.
You don’t like this? Don’t feel like being a demographic refugee in your own land? Don’t want your personal liberties forcefully stripped from you? Then act like an American Indian: Project your force and protect your tribal land. Because in fact, your back is already up against the wall. Many of us just don’t know it yet, don’t know how dire things are. Many of us are a bit too materially comfortable and complacent to recognize our actual situation.
And then again, maybe we do just want to live on political reservations, to go where we are told to go, think what we are told to think, do as we are told to do. It seems easier than messy freedom and personal liberty, doesn’t it?
Columbus Day: Just Another Human Migration Story
Humans have migrated all over the planet from the earliest days of our species-hood.
From Africa outward to the Near East, and then everywhere else in pretty rapid sequence, by foot, boat, and land bridge.
Extinct human populations have been found on remote islands, with no apparent descendants living on nearby islands. Neanderthals and Homo Sapiens did not intermix, as the DNA trail shows. What did happen is that humans wiped out their Neanderthal competitors
Or in the PC lingo of today’s anthropologists, humans “excluded” Neanderthals from the landscape where they found them, across Europe, the Russian and Asiatic steppe, the Near and Middle East, etc.
This natural human migration has never stopped, nor has the “exclusion” of competing humans occupying desirable hunting and farming lands.
Across the Americas, American Indian tribes savagely battled each other for hunting rights, with hideously drawn out, sadistic torture for survivors and captives not only commonplace, but highly enjoyed by the winners with the equivalent of popcorn. From the slavers and human sacrificing Aztecs and Mayans in South and Central America to the Creek, Blackfeet, Crow, and Pawnee of the Rocky Mountains and plains, to the Hurons and Seneca of the east. Every one of these tribes fought with neighboring tribes, and stole their land whenever possible.
Not to mention the fact that the “native” American Indians themselves migrated all the way from Asia, and there is archeological evidence that they out-competed some Caucasian inhabitants they encountered along the way, on both coasts.
Europe was no different up until modern times. Tribes battling tribes, empires built on tribal allegiances (think Alexander the Great) invading other tribal empires (Persia, the Assyrians, etc.). Think Prussia and German dutchies amalgamating around a common language.
Don’t even get started on Africa or Polynesia, where people literally ate each other until modern times. Africa alone has over 800 languages, with 800 tribal identities, all still competing with one another for natural resources. Think Hutus and Tutsis; think genocide. Think commonplace.
And really don’t get started on the modern Middle East, where one million Jews were forcefully ejected from their ancient homes by Muslims from Morocco to Iran, from 1929 to 1959. Their homes, farms, lands, businesses stolen, and occupied even today by squatters. And yet we are told repeatedly that it was the Jews who “stole” land from Muslims, when in fact they either bought it or won it in defensive wars. Muslims occupy Christian holy sites across the region, having killed and captured the former inhabitants.
So, according to the current narrative, Muslim aggression is OK, but Jewish and Christian survival among Islamic nations is not OK and is not expected.
These are obvious double standards without rhyme or reason, without justice.
Somehow, the idea that all of this migration was supposed to have stopped for Europeans alone is unique, and nowhere do we see this odd idea than with the war against Christopher Columbus and Columbus Day.
It is true that Columbus paved the way for slaving Spaniards, out-slaving the slaving Aztecs, and that his men took advantage of technologically inferior Caribbean natives, some of whom killed and then ate Italian for dinner.
But it is also true that Columbus was likely a Jew, fleeing the ethnic cleansing of his Spanish homeland, leaving ahead of the Catholic Inquisition (a great symbol of human frailty, as it was Catholicism that essentially built the Western Civilization that every human on Planet Earth enjoys in some way or another today) that tortured, murdered, robbed, stole and schemed its way from one end of Europe to the other, even landing in South America.
Aboard his ships were the names of many Jews fleeing for their lives, serving as carpenters, sailors, and so on.
So was Columbus wrong to have brought these refugees with him on his pre-migration scout around the Americas?
And why is it OK for SOME people today to invade, or “migrate” to Europe and America, but only Europeans and Americans must pay some heavy, even fatal price for their mere existence, much less distant alleged crimes? Why can’t Europeans migrate?
Human migrations are as natural and human as being a human as putting on your shoes in the morning. It is in our DNA to migrate, to fight, to test, to hunt. Biblical values put the brakes on our worst inclinations, but we still can move places.
Unless you are a Caucasian or American of European descent. Why then, you are a criminal.
If you ask me, something about this anti-Columbus Day business does not smell right.
In fact, it looks like genocide is being planned, in the guise of righting some fake historic wrong. But I guess that would just be one more story of how one group of humans out-competed another group.
Right?
Magic is in the air, and so is Spring
Today may be the first day of Spring, but you’d never know it, with all the snow that fell last night and today. Despite freezing temperatures all over the east, however, there is magic in the air. And it carries Spring on its wings. We can take heart. Nicer weather is indeed here.
Last night I stood way up north on a mountain side, surrounded by a silent, black, and deeply starry sky. Suddenly faint and quiet song and voices reached my ears. What started out as human sounds that put me on guard then became the distinctly identifiable gabble of migrating geese, high above, flying northward.
Magically migrating geese, ducks, raptors, and songbirds passing through our neighborhoods and yards tell us that Spring is here, even if our eyes and heating bills indicate otherwise. Migration is a mysterious thing. Some of it is now understood by scientists, and appreciated by novice naturalists, but much of it remains shrouded in utter mystery. How did these birds develop this pattern? Was it after the last Ice Age, ten thousand years ago, or was it after the previous Ice Age, 20,000 years ago? And if it was after the first one, how did they hold onto their knowledge of where and when to fly, when they spent so much time not flying at Spring time?
Migrating birds have a very thin margin for error. Go too far, too fast, and they run the risk of freezing to death, or starving, having burned too many precious calories to reach their Canadian and Arctic breeding grounds so far northward. If they are too slow, they will reach their destinations with too little time to raise their chicks to a size sufficient to survive the trek south again, when the winds get heavy on the border lands just a few months from now.
Yesterday, hundreds of geese and ducks shared the quieter eddies of the Susquehanna River in Liverpool.
Today, all around the borough of Dauphin, migrating black-headed vultures took up roosting positions like hunch-shouldered sentinels of death, harbingers of gloom and dead carrion, on trees, car tops, house roofs, power poles, and street lamps. This particular species of vulture is increasingly migrating into Pennsylvania in bigger numbers, and out-competing our more common (and “more” native) red-headed turkey vulture.
All of this magic is, to me, a sign of a the finger of God, with non-believers remaining perplexed, themselves, unable to draw upon human science alone to explain what is happening all around us. Surely my distant skin-clad ancestors stood upon a receding ice sheet somewhere, spear in hand, eyes skyward, hearts leaping for joy, as they, too, knew that this magic presaged abundant food, rebirth, new life, a new beginning for all.
Don’t take this magic for granted. Close your eyes at night and listen to the cries of the goose-honk music. Be part of this ancient cycle, if only by letting your heart be lifted with those of the excited geese, at the knowledge of the coming of Spring.
Am I off the radar screen? Pardon me while I follow the migrations
Across the Atlantic seaboard and throughout the eastern US interior, fish and animals are migrating, or following mating instincts as they prepare to mate or compete for mating rights.
Those of us who are hunter-gatherer-naturalists are following these natural pulses of animal life, as this is the best time of year to intersect with our prey. These movements and motions of our prey naturally lead us out into the ocean, onto river banks, hunkered down on field edges, along the beaches, or into the woods with a bow and arrow.
Striped bass, blue fish, deer, doves, and geese are all moving. Their calls may often be distant, or mostly silent, but they pull me nonetheless. If given the choice between writing about politics and culture, or hunting and fishing (and running a business and family), the blog always comes in last.
So please forgive me if I am off the Internet radar screen right now, as I follow these magical migrations happening all around us. Our ancestors did the same thing for tens of thousands of years, too. I will return…
Want to add beauty to the world?
If you want to add some beauty to the world, and who doesn’t, then do this simple thing: Let milkweed grow on your property.
Monarch butterflies follow the world’s most incredible migration, but they are increasingly challenged by unnecessary weed control and manicured lawns that eliminate milkweed.
Why milkweed became Public Enemy Weed #1 is probably lost to early 1900s history. But the negative association in most Americans’ minds keeps it suppressed far and wide.
In an urban and suburban environment, milkweed is no worse than the ailanthus (“tree of heaven”) growing everywhere, and it provides a home for beautiful butterflies that make our summers happier and more fulfilling.
So if you see a patch of milkweed growing on your back corner, please leave it. Beauty on wings will thank you, and that miraculous journey will continue for another year.