Posts Tagged → organic
The ultimate climate change symbol
Humans everywhere on our planet are bothered badly by hypocrisy and bee-ess (this means bullsh*t for those in Rio Linda), especially in high trust societies, like America.
Sophisticated, highly evolved, well balanced societies, like the America I grew up in, are built on informal but iron-clad mutually interlocking commitments between the society members.
If everyone agrees that stop signs and traffic lights mean what they say, then the society moves and functions like a well oiled Swiss watch (Switzerland being known as the ultimate in high trust societies). Few people to absolutely no one cuts in line or runs the stop sign, and, therefore, for example, when it is your turn to drive your car past the stop sign or traffic light, you have a very low expectation of being T-boned by another driver who simply ignored the opposing traffic signal because he simply didn’t care about it.
Same rule goes for waiting your turn in line at the gas station, at the grocery store, at a restaurant, etc. A high trust society requires a large amount of giving in to others, making room for their reasonable needs, instead of always trying to claw in everything you can get your hands on for yourself. Which is why poor and dysfunctional venues, like Gaza, Haiti, London, Detroit, and Chicago, are defined by their chaos: Anarchy rules, quality of life plummets, and, well, climate change.
These days, few subjects, no, let us be exact, no subject, involves more hypocrisy, more bee-ess, than so-called climate change.
Few subjects corrode societal trust more effectively than climate change. Climate change is the destroyer of high-trust society, simply because its loudest proponents blatantly do exactly the opposite of what they tell all of us to do. You cannot avoid the hellacious beating they give you about climate change while they are simultaneously gobbling up all of the climate they can stuff into their pants pockets. You are meant to notice this, because you are meant to accept and acknowledge that these people are our masters, our betters, our superiors.
Greta Thunberg, John Kerry, Al Gore, Leonardo DiCaprio, these are the red light runners, the single-seat jet-setters, the limousine liberals sipping champagne inside a gas guzzling armored car, the hypocrites who deliberately rub their double-speak in our faces, to show us they are in charge. They get to wildly carbonize the climate, while you and I are the carbon they want to eliminate.
Remember when Barack Hussein Obama bought a twenty million dollar beach front mansion on Martha’s Vineyard, having just spent eight years haranguing Americans about supposedly rising oceans from climate change? He must not have had much confidence in his own climate hoax. But he said it all anyways, and tried to guilt or frighten us into complying with his commands. But he did not have to follow the climate rules, did he…
By the way, Obama’s Martha’s Vineyard home is stocked with TWO one thousand-gallon propane tanks. Which are – you know this already – filled up with natural gas. Which was another climate change thing Obama was working against before he simultaneously needed half the world’s supply in his own back yard, so that his home would function just as he likes.
I know a guy who spent most of his career as a lawyer representing the coal industry. Nothing wrong with that, and they paid him very well. He lives in a beautiful house with an immaculate back yard, filled with manicured flower beds. After he retired, he re-invented himself as a climate change activist and environmental book author. No, he did not give back or donate to charity his decades of payment by the coal industry. Of course he didn’t, because that would un-do all the hypocrisy he is rubbing in our faces. The virtue signal about climate change is the key achievement, not the actual doing anything substantive about it.
Many years ago, the Princess of Patience and I stayed at a delightful rental home in Shrewton, England, while we enjoyed nearby Stonehenge and its magnificent surrounding landscape. In the rental home’s back yard was a small market garden, and also the biggest anti-climate change contraption I have ever seen: A tall, folding clothes hanger, made of aluminum and strung with plastic coated cables. A collapsible drying rack, standing all alone where the sunshine will hit it.
While sharing a bottle of Fireball at sundown with our hosts in said back yard, I inquired about the simple outdoor aluminum clothes rack dryer thingy.
“Why, everyone in England has one,” said they.
And in fact, we began to notice that, yes, these things are everywhere. And when we returned home to America, we bought one and installed it in our back yard.
Fast forward yourself to last summer, and a very sweet, jappy, exceedingly liberal and climatey-changey kind of friend of the Princess asked, while plucking juicy organic tomatoes from our garden, what the collapsible aluminum clothes rack dryer thingy in the back yard was all about.
Like, why would you hang your personal clothes out in public to dry?
Said the Princess in response: “Josh tries to conserve electricity. Hanging out our clothing in the sunshine means not burning up electricity unnecessarily in the electric clothes dryer inside.”
To which the jappy friend said “Oh, I would never do that.”
Which is the most hypocritical thing ever uttered on Planet Earth, except for the garden-less neighbor who once came over while I was tending my summertime garden and said (and no, I am not lying nor embellishing here), “You Republicans are causing climate change.”
Nope, he doesn’t have a garden, or a collapsible aluminum clothes rack dryer in his back yard, either, and he also just doesn’t give a damn. To him, invoking climate change as an accusation is the ultimate symbol of moral superiority.
To me, the ultimate symbol of being against climate change is the collapsible aluminum clothes rack dryer thingy in my back yard. If you don’t have one, I don’t trust ya and I ain’t buyin’ what yer sellin’.
My personal anti-climate change weapon. No, not my organic garden, the folding aluminum clothes dryer rack that magically dries clean clothes in the sun’s rays
Life and Love of the Knife
Since God created us humans, either in one quick master stroke or through a series of evolutionary steps (I don’t know which one and I don’t really care, because God is all powerful and can do anything He wants, and all we puny humans can try to do is figure it out as we muddle along), we have had a love affair with sharp edges. Blades, that is, which give our amazing but soft and weak hands the ability to cut, slice, stab, and pierce dangerous foes and animals, and render them into delicious roasted brontosaurus steaks. As Mogli says in “A Jungle Story,” his antagonist, the massive male tiger Shere Khan, may have his big teeth, but “I have my own tooth,” a sizeable steel knife blade affixed to a sturdy and dependable handle, with which Mogli is indeed a significant foe to all who would eat him.
To humans, the knife in all its forms – skinning blade, meat slicing blade, spearing blade, or stabbing sword blade – is our tooth, claw, and fang. It is our defense, a lifeline, and third arm in a world where most of the critters we have hunted, eaten, and clothed ourselves with often have a mouth full of knives as well as heads and hooves adorned with sharp and pointy edges, any one of which is instant doom to us. As a brief visit to the dinosaur and modern reptile exhibits in any respectable museum will show, we humans inhabit a world where history has had most of our battles and warfare with men and beasts alike determined by who had the bigger, faster, longer, sharper knife blade.
The Pleistocene is where modern humanity and our knives and spear blades came into Yin and Yang fusion, resulting in the extermination of even the largest and most dangerous of wild animals. And well into the 20th century, men everywhere across the planet daily adorned themselves with blades both practical and beautiful. In a world that is still always dangerous, blades have always represented us humans, and men in particular, as both useful and dangerous.
So is it any surprise that even today, in our sickly society filled with Toxic Femininity, men, particularly men, still have a love affair and deep personal connection with knives and blades of all sorts? It’s almost spiritual. Knives and sharp blades have been our constant companions since our species gained consciousness, and knives have been all that stood between us and death for over a hundred thousand years. Often in a hunter-gatherer society, a good knife is all a man needed to live a comfortable life. Nowadays, we habitually carry small pocket knives by Case so that we can accomplish small home chores easily. Serious blade length reduction! How far we have fallen! Are we still men, armed only with our tiny folding pocket knives?
I say yes, we are.
Because like so many millions of others, I am a masculine man and a not a Low T feminized and pathetic freak of self-loathing nature, and because I am an outdoorsman, and because I am against being or feeling helpless and defenseless, I use sharp blades all the time. A sharp edge is always on me or near me, so that a threatening saber toothed cardboard box can be quickly broken down and put into the recycling bin. That always makes my woman feel like the tipi is properly sorted out. Like thousands of generations of men (M-E-N of nose, ear, and back hair variety) before me, my appreciation and love of the knife has resulted in a life of the knife, and I celebrate that. It keeps me thoroughly human.
If you are a guy (born a man with a penis) or a practical woman (a human born with a vagina and female reproductive parts), or even someone caught in between both genders and yet nonetheless afflicted with a strong streak of self preservation and practical ability, I strongly suggest carrying the largest and most robust blade you can legally and practically use every day. Or just get some CutCo knives for your kitchen. It will make you feel like a million bucks, at night your hands will naturally paint beautiful primitive cave art on the walls of your basement, and you won’t ask yourself where that innate skill suddenly came from….because you will be acting organically like a natural and properly kitted out human being. These things naturally flow from one to the next.
Just be careful not to get too carried away with this knife thing. Buying knives easily becomes a habit or even an addiction. All for the right reasons, of course. It is hardwired in us.
My buddy Irv has a knife problem. As an electrician, he has many opportunities to seriously test all kinds of pocket knives and knife steels. But he yearns to strap a dozen sheath knives on and prowl the woods. He has significant back hair, too, because he is a man.
Two original Stone Age tools. A flint hide scraper (top) and a chert butchering knife from Upstate New York
A very small slice of the hunting knives we have at our reach here, including a matched ivory micarta handled pair of Randall copies for my son and I by Perry County maker John Johnson each complete with over-the-shoulder baldrics and belt sheaths.
Pronged spears and sharp arrows (sharp blades on flying sticks) from about twenty thousand years ago. Still the best hunt around.
Super cheap WalMart special faux Damascus steel Japanese style kitchen knife is still very sharp and an an incredible tool
USA-made CutCo, definitely not a cheap kitchen knife, with excellent blade steel and bombproof handle material. Highly recommended.
Most of the knives in our kitchen. All CutCos except for two Old Hickory high carbon blades at either end. Old Hickory is an excellent USA-made kitchen knife at a very low cost that can easily be an outdoor knife
Hunters Sharing the Harvest sets the Holiday Season tone
Pennsylvania is a long time big time hunting state, with such a great and famously known outdoors sports tradition that the iconic red and black “buffalo check plaid” wool coat made by Woolrich, Filson, and other long established wool clothing manufacturers was dubbed the “Pennsylvania Tuxedo” back in the 1920s.
Today our clothing may have improved since then, or may not have improved, depending upon whether you like your hunting pants to be flammable, or not, and I do not (which means I prefer wool in all outdoor clothing), but one thing remains steady: Pennsylvanians rightly love to hunt.
And just as much as we love to hunt, we are also generous with the fruits of our time afield. We have a long tradition of sharing the fruits of our hunting labors.
Well do I recall as a kid waking up in late November or early December to find some fresh venison left on our doorstep by one or two of our neighbors, all of whom had big farms and all of whom were big time hunters.
Back then in that area, kids brought fresh venison jerky to school to share and trade with other kids during and right after deer season; everyone had their own proprietary jerky recipe that they liked and were proud of. Sharing venison is a real longstanding Pennsylvania tradition.
Back in 1991, local hunter John Plowman had a vision to harness that generous spirit among Pennsylvania hunters and use it to provide for the needy. He started Hunters Sharing the Harvest, which today annually supplies well over a hundred thousand of pounds of fresh, free range, wholesome, lean, natural, organic meat to Pennsylvanians in need. That translates into about 667,000 annual “meals” for individuals and families in need.
Yesterday my son “harvested” his first Pennsylvania deer (see photo below), a young spike buck that junior hunters are allowed to take, as the rest of us are limited to bucks with at least three points to a side of the antler rack. As we had incredible good fortune yesterday, and took other deer, my son decided to donate his deer to Hunters Sharing the Harvest. My boy is enjoying the act of charity and contributing towards the basic welfare of his community.
Both Deimler (Cumberland County) and Sensenig (Dauphin County) are deer processors close by our home, so either one would be the logical place to drop off the young buck. But Deimler has the advantage of being right down the road from Johnson’s Furs, where we have our furs tanned and where we buy our trapping supplies, so that is where the critter has been dropped off. Mutli-tasking, ya know?
And that is the neatest thing about this Hunters Sharing the Harvest option: We get to share our cake, and eat it, too, in the charitable spirit of the Holiday Season.
