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Koo koo for KoKo Puffs, Crazeeee for Covid

Having deigned to come down from the mountain and mingle with the lowlanders (‘flatlanders’ around here), I was immediately struck by how many people I know in my neighborhood who are still taking the mask thingy so seriously. Wearing the mask like a religious burka, looking all sincerely severe and all. My friends have struck a significant pose with all kinds of massive wrap-around masks that are nonetheless colorful and playful.

It is the ultimate virtue signal: Gotta be some joy in your self-imposed death march, right? Make sure your mask is cinched down real tight and has the requisite flowers or symbols of humor to show that you are not really taking it seriously. Yeah, right.

Recently former Arkansas governor and politico Mike Huckabee said that liberals don’t want to relinquish mask requirements, because they have achieved so much iron-fisted control over so many Americans. Big-government fascist governors Wolf (PA), Whitmer (MI), Newsom (CA) and others have no science on their side, but they are goose stepping down the mask wearing street every day anyway. “You will comply!”

These fascist governors are afraid of what the citizens will do when they rediscover their own freedom, Huckabee says. And while Governor Huckabee is correct, what about people like my friends who take on the onerous and bizarre mask self-requirement? These otherwise fine people are purposefully disfiguring themselves with these ridiculous masks.

Their mask-wearing has to be more than virtue signaling, and it has to be more than fear. Because the mask wearers are surrounded by maskless people going about their lives happily and healthily, there ain’t a whole lot of self-evident virtue or health to be gained from the mask. So it is something else that compels them.

Here is what I believe mask wearing means to mask wearers: It is the personal worship of something larger than themselves. Mask wearing has become the physical and very public demonstration of a belief in something higher and more important than the individual; a sublimation of the self to a higher good.

“Islam” means to submit, and mask wearing is a form of personal submission to some greater authority. It ain’t a coincidence that the Islamic burka and the covid mask both are symbols of personal submission and self-denial. And it ain’t a coincidence that 49.8% of the voters in Dauphin County voted yesterday to continue to grant the Pennsylvania governor the un-ending authoritarian power to keep fake emergencies and crises going for as long as the governor wants. The mask wearers don’t like freedom.

So while Governor Huckabee is correct that authoritarians like Governor Tom Wolf (PA) covet the power over people that the mask commandment has given them, there is another side to this power transaction too. It takes two to tango. That other side is the desire (not just the willingness) of everyday citizens to literally give up their freedom and comfort and happiness and sacrifice it on the Altar of Fake Covid Crises. The mask wearers literally believe they are worshiping something greater than themselves, and it gives them a sense of purpose they could not find when not wearing a mask.

This gets to another and bigger related issue, as if there could be anything bigger. It explains why so many Democrat Party governors engaged (and are still engaged) in the heavy-handed fake and unnecessary covid crisis lockdowns and mask edicts, and also why the Democrat Party stole the 2020 election in the first place. The Democrat Party knows that a large portion of Americans have become not just complacent and lazy, but willingly, almost slavishly devoted to silly causes and fake crises, to the point where they will happily sign over all their freedom for a very shallow sense of personal fulfillment.

The Democrat Party either believes or knows that the actual resistance to their forced and unlawful takeover of America will end up being very little, if anything at all.

Does anyone remember the movie The Matrix, and how the enslaved humans were living in a make-believe world created out of chemicals and human imagination? That is what is happening now. And if we add this Matrix -style method of ruling over Americans to Orwell’s 1984, which Democrats have embraced as a how-to manual, and not as a warning against totalitarian government, we can finally understand what the Democrat Party understands and is fully implementing: Humans just want to be lied to and led.

Mask wearers say: “Free will and free choice is just too damned hard. Just point me in the right direction and I will willingly obey. Gosh that feels good to have no more friction or hard decisions to make in my life!”

And this is why mask wearers are crazy for covid.

 

Earth Day Myths

Earth Day…talk about climate change, the climate and meaning of this ‘hippie holiday’ has really changed since it was first declared. What began as a plea for help and attention as so American rivers were so polluted that when the Cuyahoga caught on fire, it was only slightly more fascinating than the huge fish kills in the lower Hudson, is today a sort of Mother Earth May Day Against Capitalism. Gone are the clear lines in the sand that modern industrialization had gone too far with its pipelines dripping green goo direct from factory floor work aprons to the local waterway. Now, today, Earth Day is not about fixing polluted waterways, but about “fixing” capitalism to death.

Somehow the people pushing this attack are conveniently forgetful that the greatest industrial pollution has occurred not under capitalist markets, but under rigid authoritarian socialist governments. But people like me are not forgetful, because to forget is to see freedom dry up and vanish; capitalism is fundamentally about human freedom and choice. Socialism being “green” is a myth, because socialism is never about choices, like the choice to be free of pollution. Rather, socialism is about top-down control and coerced obedience, at any cost. And in Russia and China, the environment was the very first thing to be sacrificed for industrial mass production.

Here are two big Earth Day-related myths.

Myth Number One: Environmental Groups are About Environmental Quality. Sorry, hate to say it, but most so-called environmental groups today are not about the environment or protecting environmental quality. Rather, most environmental advocacy groups are politically partisan about implementing socialism, and attacking capitalism, and the environmental issues they talk about are just one pathway. Have you ever seen an environmental group criticize Democrat Party officials? Like really get after them and hound them.

Nope, not like they demonize Republicans.

Some years ago, Pennsylvania had a Democrat governor, Ed Rendell. Like all good liberals, Rendell could not stay away from money to buy votes with, and so he dropped the natural gas drilling bomb on Pennsylvania public lands. Environmental groups were silent as our state forests went from quiet hinterlands to super industrialized moonscapes in just months. Crickets chirped and not a human voice was raised in opposition to this huge damage to our public lands.

However, literally the day Rendell’s successor took office, Penn Future and other environmental advocacy groups were out in force at the Capitol with bullhorns proclaiming Tom Corbett to be “Governor Corporate,” because of his supposed unhealthy commitment to….natural gas drilling. The guy hadn’t been governor for one minute and already the supposed green groups that had looked the other way while Pennsylvania public lands were criss-crossed with pipelines and drilling rigs were proclaiming him the environmental anti-Christ. Corbett had made zero decisions about drilling on Pennsylvania public lands, but because he was a Republican and Rendell a Democrat, the supposed environmental groups lined up and attacked Corbett and protected Rendell.

So don’t be fooled; the environmental groups are not so much about the natural environment as they are about shaping the political environment inside the US Capitol and state capitols around America. They are mostly fakes. I give land trusts and conservancies credit for actually doing real environmental work, but even they have become infected with the PC buzzwords and partisan political nonsense to the point where their credibility is often at stake.

Myth Number Two: Climate Change is About Environmental Quality. Human-caused climate change, as it is propounded by the various bullies supposedly expert in it, is based only on really lousy computer models and scanty data at best, faked data at worst. Other than these two weak legs, the notion of human-caused climate change stands on literally nothing. The climate change movement has been riven with scandals (East Anglia University, my alma mater Penn State’s Michael Mann etc) and scientists who are facile about jumping back and forth over lines separating science and policy and politics. These scientists decided the cash was greener on the side of climate alarmism, and so they went with the corporate foundation money.

Earth’s climate is changing. It has always changed. Volcanos, huge storms, meteors, tectonic shifts, glaciers advancing and receding and advancing again without any human intervention…Planet Earth is a really dynamic place. Its climate is a product of all kinds of factors, most of which are outside human control. But this reality does not diminish climate change’s usefulness as a vehicle for advancing big government totalitarianism.

My main objection to human-caused climate change alarmism isn’t so much that it is obviously and shamefully fake, or even that it is another evil effort to destroy democracy and gain absolute control over free people. Rather, climate change alarmism detracts from the very real and potentially solvable problems of invasive species, ocean overfishing, surface water pollution, forest fragmentation, farmland loss, and other actual, verified environmental issues. That are not as sexy as the climate sky is falling message. Fake climate change casts its pall over all real environmental issues, and undermines their claim on people’s attention.

If the conservative movement is overly skeptical about environmental anything, to the point where deriding even real environmental issues has become its own form of conservative political correctness, it is because the very fake environmental advocacy groups gave up their integrity and believability, by polluting real environmental issues with fake climate change nonsense. Their adherence to evil climate change religion did it.

As scary media-creation child activist Greta Thunberg admitted, climate change isn’t really about the environment; it is about gaining political control and force-implementing socialism and changing a whole array of policies in Western Civilization, at great cost, while China, India and Pakistan move forward with their gushing pollution-based economies, at no cost.

What kind of normal job-holding American can really get on board with that?

 

 

Weis soda instead of Coca Cola Coke soda

“Woke” companies like Delta Airlines and Coca Cola Coke have been leading with their chins lately, daring their own consumers to punish them for having turned against their consumers. Leading with your chin means that you run the risk of being punched back on your chin, and really suffering.

I myself run a small business devoted to achieving public benefits using private markets. Whenever possible, I buy land and try to get it folded into the existing public lands around it. State Game Lands, state forests, state parks, etc; if we have a public partner on a given property, then we can conserve that land.

But I would be blowing up my own business if I directly attacked the very people I need to do my business with, like Delta Airlines and Coke have been doing. For some odd reason, these two companies have joined with the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, and now Major League Baseball to crap on the very people who they want to have as customers. Who they expect to be customers. It is the oddest thing, really. It probably stems from this notion that a certain segment of aggressive Americans have that all of these enterprises, including America itself, are just too big, too rich, too successful to ever fail. Which is, of course, foolish. Every enterprise can and will end at some point, but doing things that directly harm your own interests just serves to hasten your own end faster than it would naturally come.

So the latest with Coke and Delta Airlines is that they did what they could to punish the state of Georgia for passing a voting law designed to protect voting rights. Somehow, the decision makers at Coke and Delta Airlines were confused into believing that the Georgia law is a bad thing, when in fact it is a very good and important thing. Voting is the basis of our entire American enterprise, and if voting ceases to mean anything, the entire thing ceases to mean anything. So anything that can protect the concept and practice of one person-one vote is a good thing. Except in the eyes of Coke and Delta Airlines executives.

Maybe they are so tight with China’s leaders, who desire to use weak American voting laws to elect people in America who are favorable to China, that they have thrown America overboard.

So people like me, who value voting rights and counting all legal votes, are unhappy with Coke and Delta Airlines. As a result of our unhappiness, we have been looking for alternatives to these two products. After all, we would rather support companies that are at least not at our throats.

Therefore, I am happy to announce the discovery of a very refreshing alternative to Coca Cola Coke, and that is the Weis brand of sodas (see photo below) (I “discovered” these refreshing Weis sodas at my friend Scott’s house, in an ice chest cooler, on his porch). Most generic, off-brand sodas are not very tasty or refreshing. I mean, let’s face it, Pepsi and Coke spent decades perfecting their products to meet the widest taste acceptance possible. These two companies have been so successful they now completely dominate the soda market.  Very few competitors can even try to take some market share from them. And that means that most competitors who do show up have expensive alternatives, or their products are not very good tasting. Until now.

Whatever Weis is doing, their diet cola tastes a lot like diet Coke. It is very close to the same taste soda drinkers enjoy. It is also cheaper than Coke. Weis is a regional company, run by a family from Sunbury, Pennsylvania. Weis has been a part of my own food shopping experience since I was a child, and they still are now in my adult years. So see if you can find a local Weis, and try some of their sodas. I was more than pleasantly surprised at how good they are; actually, I was almost shocked.

If you are looking for a good alternative or substitute to Coke, try Weis. You will like it, and you will be supporting a local family run business, not some global corporation working hard to make friends with America’s worst enemies, and punish Americans for protecting America.

 

Keith Oellig, another American keeping America moving forward

Every day of his life, Keith Oellig was one of the few Americans who, rain or shine, kept America moving forward. He grew the crops and raised the beef that Americans across America take for granted every day that they simply buy and eat these products.

Raised on a central Pennsylvania farm with chores and work, work, work before play, Keith’s friendship was as strong as his nonstop work ethic. He was a dear and devoted friend to many fortunate people, including me, and he died unexpectedly last week from a life-long heart condition he managed as best he could until it caught him by surprise one last time. He was just 56 years old.

This essay is my way of memorializing this amazing human being, and saying goodbye.

Keith was a representation of everything the farming life is supposed to be – down to earth, honest, truthful, hard working, generous, natural, patriotic, devoted to community and fellow man. He served on many boards, including the Dauphin County Farm Bureau, the Central Dauphin East School Board, the Dauphin County Planning Commission, and others I can’t recall off the top of my head.

His heart was golden, always ready to do a kindness for someone, and the more distant the stranger the better. Almost every year he grew great patches of sweet corn and donated much of it to his church food pantry, and to any others in need. But they would have to pick it themselves. Straight out of the Bible, which is what inspired him, drove him, filled him.  (Those friends who merely enjoyed sweet corn got the phone call that it was ripe about three days after everyone else in true need had had a shot at it)

Keith was politically active, but he had mixed feelings and thoughts about politics, because so much of it is divorced from the sacred walk of life whose values he cherished.

Every election he and I would run around his farms putting up signs, especially really big ones along the road frontages and both sides of I-81 by Penn National Race Track/ Hollywood [!?] Casino.  And as hard as he worked putting them in, Keith would also grouse about career politicians, even about the person whose sign he was putting in. He even did it to me when I ran for state senate. Like out of a comedy movie: “Sure, I’ll help ya, and I’ll bet you’re going to be just as corrupt as everyone else. Now hurry up because we have a lot more signs to put in the ground.”

Here he is with one of two big banners we put up last October at his main farm, one on either side of I-81.  Every.Single.Vehicle.Driving on I-81 honked at us. We used a loader with bale spikes and twine, and it was hard but fun work. 
This is how many of us will remember Keith, with his innocent, gentle smile and loving eyes.

Keith and I worked as a team to fell dozens of dead and dying ash trees, and some oaks and poplars (see background), in an area where he wanted to expand the cattle pasture. I ran the chainsaw while he pushed with the front end loader. It was dicey and scary work, as his smashed windshield shows. A week later, a huge limb carved a gigantic V in that cab, but Keith just kept on, peering around either side of the destroyed metal and glass to see where he was going.

I am sure going to miss you, buddy

President Trump’s one mistake is the biggest

President Donald Trump is a fantastic American. He was a fantastic president; probably the best America has had since Theodore Roosevelt.

All of the fake outrage criticism heaped on Trump has been shown in just five weeks of the Biden administration to have been utterly partisan manufactured horse shit. Like the “kids in cages” boo hoo nonsense that had Democrat Party adherents branding Trump a cruel and evil man. Now corrupt financial criminal Joe Biden is doing the exact same thing, a policy that was begun in Bush II and perfected in Obama’s administration due to a Ninth Circuit court decision, continued on in the Trump administration with great fake outrage and crocodile tears by his opponents, and now is continuing on in the Biden criminal gang administration, with the US Democrat Party Media looking the other way.

This is to say, criticism of Trump was 99.98% baseless horse shit fake outrage nonsense meant to poison the political environment.

So yes, Trump was fabulous, brilliant, hard working, devoted to America and its un-appreciated citizens who are quickly turning into slave labor for the Democrat Party’s illegal alien troops being trucked in to our nation in order to displace us and steal our stuff.  Yeah, Trump was the one sole person standing between America’s citizens and the howling gulf of civilizational destruction now opening at our feet wider every day.

But as great as he is, and as devoted to him as I am, it is important to say that President Trump keeps making one mistake over and over, and it is a fatal one.

He is hopelessly loyal to something that does not deserve his loyalty.

He keeps playing politics by rules designed to hamstring him and other law-abiding American voters and that the other political party will never follow; he remains loyal to a political system that is hopelessly dysfunctional because it is filled with corrupt frauds in both political parties; and he remains party to a Republican Party that is utterly useless, filled with spineless jellyfish gutless political pukes whose sole purpose for being in politics is to enrich themselves and their chums, not to carry a political philosophy of freedom and liberty to fruition, or to oppose the Marxists.

When Trump was elected, he entered the White House expecting to run government like it was a business. He mistakenly presumed that American citizens working in taxpayer-funded government positions would be loyal to the Constitution, its process, the rules and regulations, and therefore, they would follow the directives from their legal boss Chief Executive in the White House. Trump’s White House did not immediately, or ever for that matter, dig into the executive branch and legally remove the politically partisan people who ended up deciding the outcome of his 2020 election.

Basically, Trump put up with a daily dose of illegal insubordination from within the executive branch, and he played nicey nice with the criminals who openly did it for the US media cheering section.

He mistakenly believed that the same corrupt bipartisan political establishment that stole the 2020 election from We, The People, and from him, would eventually treat him fairly in lawsuits and investigations into open vote fraud from coast to coast.

And now President Trump is mistakenly remaining loyal to the useless spineless jellyfish bottom feeding scumbag Republican Party (don’t get me wrong, I am not somehow in favor of the Democrat Party; I just recognize that the GOP is only half as corrupt as the totally corrupt and anti-America Democrat Party) that sold him out in Washington, DC, and in state legislatures across America.

President Trump has the rare opportunity to truly transform American politics. He tried to do so inside Washington DC, and despite succeeding wildly for four years, he mostly failed in the end. Because his re-election was illegally blocked so that the thieves and criminals could re-assemble their cozy little lair they had carefully constructed over the past fifty years. And despotic edict by despotic edict, the Biden crime syndicate daily tears away the hard work Trump did for America.

So Trump could start a new political party, a pure party, a party devoted to America First principles and policies. At least 50 million Americans are ready for him to do so. And yet, instead of starting this new political party, Trump wants to continue working within the existing messed up system, within the same Goddamned disgusting corrupt Republican Party that is run by the disgusting likes of PA State Senator Jake Corman, the political hack of all political hacks in the history of American political hackery.

Is there any way for Donald Trump to win this insider fight with the GOP ultimate insiders? Well, in the company of many other hard working, devoted political activists, I myself have spent over a decade in open and direct personal political warfare with the PA GOP establishment. And while I have some modest gains to show for all my effort, the fact is, vile Jake Corman (www.jakethesnake.us) has been promoted to “leader” of the Pennsylvania state senate.

By the same PA GOP that tonight voted NOT to censure RINO closet Marxist US Senator Patrick Toomey, who used his elected position to undermine and damage America at every turn, and to attack and hurt President Trump at every turn.

This is just one example of a billion such examples of how the GOP is hopelessly beyond help and reformation.

I would have to say that Trump has a very long row to hoe here; a very long uphill slog through slime and muck to turn the GOP around. A new political party (Patriot Party, MAGA Party) would have immediately gutted the useless GOP and sent it to the dustbin of history, where it belongs, but Trump has said he will not do this.

What can we say? President Trump remains hopelessly loyal to America and everything he knows about it. God bless the man. And God Damn the political hacks in both parties who have brought our great nation to the edge of fatal failure.

PA’s must-do 21st century deer management policy

When Gern texted me on November 12th “planning to plant the entire farm with grass next Fall… 100%  hay… can’t afford to feed wildlife. Going broke trying to make money,” I knew that my best deer management efforts had finally failed over the past 13 years.

Every year I work hard to make sure our deer season is as productive as possible. Because our tenant farmer pays us a per-acre rent every year, which covers the real estate taxes and some building maintenance, and for 13 years he has grown soybeans, corn and hay in various rotations across the many fields we have. Our arrangement has generally worked out well both ways, but that text message ended my  sense of satisfaction.

While I do wear dirty bib overalls when I run the sawmill and also when I try to impress people who don’t know me, Gern is the actual farmer who tills (broad sense), fertilizes, plants, and harvests a very large farm property in Dauphin County, some of which I own and all of which I manage. Our property is one of many that comprise about 30,000 acres of farm land that Gern and his family cultivate in Central Pennsylvania. To say that his family works hard is the understatement of all understatements. Gern embodies AMERICA! in flesh and spirit, and to see him so utterly beaten down by mere deer is heartbreaking.

Over the years I knew that both overabundant deer and bears were taking a significant toll on our grain crops (Gern’s primary source of family income), and so I worked hard to recruit the kinds of good hunters who would help us annually whittle down the herds, so that the pressure was taken off of our crops. About five years ago I proudly photographed one of our late-summer soybean fields, at about four super healthy feet high, indicating a minimal amount of deer damage. When I passed the soybean field pictures around to other farmers and land managers, nothing but high praise returned. And so I patted myself on the back for our successful deer management, and congratulated our guest hunters, who were killing about 25-35 deer a year on our property. Our hunters were filling an impressive 50% to 65% of the roughly 54 DMAP deer management tags we hand out every year, as well as some of their buck tags and WMU 4C tags.

But, change is life’s biggest constant, and while I rested on my hunting laurels, deer hunting changed under my feet. The past few years have seen a lot of change in the hunting world. First and biggest change is that hunters in Pennsylvania and other states are aging out en masse, with fewer replacements following them. This means that a lot less pressure is being brought to bear on the deer herd. Which means a lot more deer are everywhere, which is not difficult to see if you drive anywhere in Pennsylvania in a vehicle. There are literally tons of dead deer along the side of every road and highway, everywhere in Pennsylvania. We should be measuring this at tons-of-deer-per-mile, not just the number of dead deer and damaged vehicles. Frankly this overabundant deer herd situation is out of control not just for the farmers who feed Americans, but for the people who want to safely drive their vehicles to the grocery store. Hunters are sorely needed to get this dangerous situation under control, and yet Pennsylvania’s deer management policies favor overabundant deer herds to keep older hunters less crabby.

So, because I am about to break out the spotlights and AK47 to finally manage our farm deer the way they need to be managed (and yes, PA farmers are allowed to wholesale slaughter deer in the crops) (and yes, I feel the same way about our favorite forested places in the Northern Tier), here below is the kind of deer management/ hunting policy Pennsylvania needs via the PGC, if we are going to get the out-of-control deer herd genie back into its bottle and stop hemorrhaging farmland on the altar of too many deer:

  1. Archery season is too long. At seven weeks long, the current archery season lets a lot of head-hunters stink up the woods, cull the very best trophy bucks, and pressure the deer enough to make them extra skittish and nocturnal before rifle season begins. Even though rifle season is our greatest deer management tool. The same can be said of bear season, which is the week before rifle season. So shorten archery season and lengthen rifle season, or make the opening week of deer season concurrent with bear season, like New York does.
  2. Rifle season must be longer, and why not a longer flintlock season, too? Is there something “extra special” about deer come the middle of January, that they are prematurely off limits to hunting? Most bucks begin to drop their antlers in early February. Have three weeks of rifle season and then five weeks of flintlock season until January 30th, every year. Or consider flintlock hunting year ’round, or a spring doe season in May.
  3. More doe tags are needed. There are too few doe tags to begin with, and most doe tags sell out and are never used. This is especially true in WMUs 5C and 5D, where despite enormous tag allocations, tags quickly become unavailable. That is because individual hunters can presently buy unlimited numbers of doe tags, for some reason having to do with the way deer were managed in the 1980s…c’mon, PGC, limit of two or three doe tags for each hunter in these high-density WMUs, and at least two doe tags in Big Woods WMUs like 2G and 4C.
  4. Despite good advancements in reducing the regulatory burden on deer hunters this past season, there are still too many rules and restrictions. For example, why can’t our muzzleloading guns have two barrels? Pedersoli makes the Kodiak, a fearsome double percussion rifle that would be just the ticket for reducing deer herds in high deer density WMUs where the PGC says they want more deer harvests. But presently it is not legal. Another example is the ridiculous interruptions in small game seasons as they overlap with bear and deer seasons. This bizarre on-again-off-again discontinuity of NOT hunting rabbits while others ARE hunting deer is an unnecessary holdover from the long-gone, rough-n-ready bad old poaching days of Pennsylvania wildlife management. PA is one of the very few states, if the only one at all, with these staggered small game and big game seasons. Bottom line is hunting is supposed to be fun, and burdening hunters with all kinds of minutiae is not only not fun, it is unnecessary. Other states with far more liberal political cultures have far fewer regulations than Pennsylvania, so come on PA, give fun a try.
  5. Artificial deer feeding with corn, alfalfa, oats etc on private land during all deer and bear seasons must end. Not only does this “I’m saving the poor starving deer” nonsense lead to spreading deadly diseases like CWD, it artificially draws deer onto sanctuary properties and away from nearby hunters. Or it is baiting, plain and simple. Feeding causes overabundant deer to avoid being hunted during hunting season, but then quickly spread out on the landscape where they eat everything out of house and home when hunting season ends. This year up north (Lycoming and Clinton counties) is a prime example. We had no acorns to speak of this Fall, and whatever fell was quickly eaten up by early November. As the weeks rolled on through hunting season, the deer began leaving their regular haunts and unnaturally herding up where artificial feed was being doled out. This removed them from being hunted, and creates a wildlife feeding arms race, where those who don’t feed wildlife run the risk of seeing none at all. So either completely outlaw artificial feeding or let everyone do it, including hunters, so they can compete with the non-hunters. And yes, people who buck hunt only, and who do not shoot does, and who put out corn and alfalfa etc. for deer during hunting season, are not really hunters. They are purposefully meddling in the hunts of other people by trying to keep them from shooting “my deer.”
  6. PGC must better communicate to its constituency that too many deer result in unproductive farms that then become housing developments. Because the landowner and farmer must make some money from the land, if farm land can’t grow corn, it will end up growing houses, which no real hunter wants. So real hunters want fewer deer, at numbers the land and farms can sustain.

 

My Aunt Jess

A little birdy just flew away. It was always a small, gentle, and delicate little thing, and especially so in its final days here on Planet Earth. A lifetime of cigarettes and other things took a toll on her body that even the best of genes could not resist, and tonight there was so little of her left. Now she has spread her little wings and flown the coop, moving into a different place, perhaps a different dimension.

In her side of our family, most people live a long time. Like into their late 90s and well into their 100s; so long that the people around them are eventually like “Look, why don’t you just die already.” My Aunt Jess made it into her 80s, a young’n by our family standards, and had she not attacked her own body with cigarettes and too much other stuff, she would have outlived me and most of the rest of the family.

I owe so much to my Aunt Jess, because she is the one who introduced me to the great outdoors, to Mother Nature, to fishing for brook trout in small Berkshire streams, to patiently watching a humming bird flitting undisturbed among trumpet flowers, sipping nectar from each one. Nature has been the central focus of my life and career, really as a result of Jess’s introduction to it so long ago.

One of my most vivid childhood memories, from 52 years ago no less, is Jess walking along Route 8 with me in Blandford. She pointed out some raccoon tracks in the sand along the road edge, and we studied them closely for a long minute. The long claw marks sticking out from the toes, which were splayed out from the foot pad, really spoke about the kind of beast that owned them. All this fascinated me, and then she gasped and led me twenty feet further along the guard rail.

There, digging a hole in the sandy soil was a mother turtle. We watched her slowly scoop and push the soft dirt away while she created a pretty deep hole for such stubby little legs. She, too, had claws, and they dug deeply into the dirt, so that she could eventually squeeze out her little round, white eggs into the hole. In there they would remain hidden and cool, incubating until they hatched cute little baby turtles. Aunt Jess and I stood there for half an hour, just watching the mother turtle, until she eventually pushed the last bit of dirt over her clutch of eggs and then slid down the bank toward the small brook. Whether it was a wood turtle or a box turtle, I do not now recall, though I am inclined to think and also kind of remember the yellow squiggle pattern of a box turtle.

Another time Aunt Jess threaded the two of us back into the large bog in the woods behind the farm house where my grandparents had retired. Small little carnivorous plants lived there, and she showed me how they lured the ants and other insects into their acidic stomachs. All of this was fascinating to a little boy, and because it was not explained in an academic way, it was even better. Jess’s love for the outdoors and for all things great and small propelled her forward every day. Every little living thing (well, almost all) was a source of love and intrigue to her, though the bears that raided her bird feeders in later years occasionally got a good whoopin’ with a broom. She could tolerate only so much gluttony and welfare mentality.

To wit, one day she was volunteering at Bartholomew’s Cobble, the natural area near her home, and a lady brought in a starling with a broken wing in a shoe box. Jess met the lady at the main counter, and peered into the box. The lady insisted that Jess do something to help this poor starling. Jess resisted, and explained to the nice lady that the starling was a rude invasive bird that destroys a great deal of other birds’ nests and young. Not a bird worth “saving.”

Undeterred, the lady pushed the shoe box back at Jess across the counter and once again insisted that the starling be healed in some way. Jess reached into the box, picked up the starling, wrung its neck, placed it back in the shoe box, and pushed the box back to the lady.

“There. Now it doesn’t have to worry about its broken wing,” Jess said to the unhappy lady.

Despite her antipathy for starlings, or perhaps because of it, Jess enjoyed bird watching, and as a naturalist she racked up a great many bird sightings in her Audubon bird identification book. At one time she traveled far and wide to see some little dickey bird or another, including by canoe, but in later years she was content to put out a rich enough smorgasbord to bring in all of the cool ones, including grosbeaks and warblers that should be far, far away.

Jess taught me how to jig a garden worm on a size twelve Eagle Claw hook for tentative brook trout, so skittish that the slightest movement by any body part other than the rhythmic movement of the wrist and fishing rod would send them scurrying under cut-banks and submerged tree roots for cover. In my own wanderings, I had a fishing guide in Alaska and another in Montana tell me I was the best fly fisherman they had encountered, and I chalked it up to many days spent fooling wily brook trout in small Berkshire and Central Pennsylvania streams (confession here: as a kid I also poached the hell out of the Harpster stretch of Spruce Creek with a fly rod, which required real finesse with a rod and as a Scottish Highlands stalker staying out of sight of the humans; but let’s not talk about that now), all begun by my Aunt Jess.

Last week I told her on the phone that while I was deer hunting this winter, I had at one point been surrounded by juncos and chickadees, whose tameness around humans never ceases to amaze and entertain me. In their sweet chirps and happy flittings, I heard and saw Aunt Jess, and so I told her that whenever I am sitting alone some place and I hear juncos or chickadees, I will hear her voice. She cried, and then I cried, both of us knowing we would miss the other so very much. Gosh, what a gentle soul she has been.

The magic of Nature has never stopped inspiring me, and the passion for conserving it has never left me, to the point where I spend my days working to leave a scant legacy of bird and turtle habitat alive and well, so that future aunts and nephews can take walks and discover magical little moments like a mother turtle laying her eggs, or a rising brook trout in a small plunge pool. I owe all of this to Aunt Jess, who tonight left us, as all flesh must eventually do. But too soon for her clan, and so I must end with this admonition: Please do not smoke cigarettes. They destroy not only the body they enter, but also the hopes and dreams of the loved ones surrounding the smoker.

If you feel like you really have to walk on the wild side and play with fire to get a high, get involved in politics. Or feed the little brown dickey birds in your back yard. Just don’t leave your family too soon, for such an unnecessary reason as cigarettes. My Aunt Jess would heartily agree.

 

Democrat Party steals White House – A-OK, Americans briefly occupy their own Capitol – ‘arrest everyone’

America is in the rubber-meets-the-road period of a full blown authoritarian Marxist revolution aiming to destroy our constitutional republic.

The Democrat Party uses blatant election fraud to steal the presidency right in front of our faces, and then two Georgia senate seats, and we are told by the mainstream media that we must shut up, sit down, and do what we are told. Then, a few hundred thousand patriots assemble peaceably in Washington, DC, to air their grievances. A handful briefly occupy the US Capitol, which is known as The People’s House, four of whom are executed in cold blood by the US Capitol Police, and suddenly the Democrat Party-run media are telling us that every single protestor there must be rounded up and jailed as well as anyone who supported them.

No mention of the four executed protestors, or even an acknowledgement that quite a few ANTIFA guys got into the Capitol and raised hell.

The hypocrisy of this situation is glaring, because we just experienced a solid year of violent BLM and ANTIFA riots that were driven by Democrat Party politicians and their media and tech arms, like MSNBC and FaceBook. Entire cities were destroyed or set back on their heels for decades to come, without any repercussions at all. None, zero.

This situation is exactly how the Communists took over Eastern Europe in the 1940s. They used the appearance of democracy to achieve power and non-democratic results, like locking up their innocent political opponents on fake charges.

Folks, we have a full on illegal takeover of America happening right in our faces. How many Americans are willing to live under the Democrat Party’s ruthless tyranny is a big question.

Another big question is what the hell is the purpose of the Republican Party, if most of its elected members are unwilling to mount any kind of resistance but are actually all too happy to help the Marxist takeover happen?

Vice President Mike Pence is a shameful example of this spineless attitude. Pence said on Wednesday that “the Constitution constrains me” from sending the contested Electoral College votes back to the several states for a re-certification, and so he certified the utterly false Electoral College votes that gave the presidency to a fraud, Joe Biden.

Hey, Pence, the US Constitution and the laws from it actually enabled you to do exactly what was needed. And did you not notice that your supposed political opponents, the Democrat Party officials, do not feel constrained by anything? Not laws, not rules, not decency, not a democratic spirit, and certainly not the US Constitution. Now that you gave them the power, the Democrat Party and their allies in Big Tech are blowing up the Constitution.

Guess this end result makes Mike Pence really committed to the Constitution…

If elected Republicans continue to play nicey-nice by the most restrictive interpretation of the rules and laws, while their opponents are falsely accusing and jailing good people without any regard to law at all, then there is no official opposition to the Democrat Party’s evil. And so there is no purpose to the Republican Party. A political party that cannot stand up to what has just transpired is not worth being called a political party.

Let’s face it, as so many people have said for decades, the GOP is truly a country club, a gentleman’s club, a social club, an investor’s club, a blue blazer and short hair and and khaki pants club, an elitist snob club; it sure as hell is not a political club or political party.

I have run against the GOPe three times (in a Republican congressional primary in 2009-2010, a Republican state senate primary in 2012, and another Republican state senate primary in 2015 that I bowed out of after severely injuring my left knee while hunting), and each time the Pennsylvania Republican officials and GOP money men fought harder against me than empty suit VP Mike Pence or Senator Mitch McConnell just fought against this Marxist takeover of America. In 2012 the Pennsylvania Republicans actually gerrymandered me out of my own State Senate District #15 at the last second, and it took the PA Supreme Court to throw that out and put me back in, a historic decision. Then the PAGOP ran two people against me, and their chosen candidate beat me with I think 43% of the vote, only to lose to the incumbent Democrat state senator that fall.

If the GOP has more fight against America-loving conservatives than it does against open Marxists seeking to overthrow the rule of law, then what the hell is the purpose of the GOP? Not much. Seems like America needs a Patriot Party to supplant the failed GOP. Yes, third parties always enable the Democrat Party, but so what? So does the GOP!

The GOP welcomes all the hypocrisy, sedition, treason, and lawlessness that the Democrat Party and its adjuncts in Big Tech and Big Media can daily assemble, just so long as the existing GOP elected officials maintain their jobs…

Folks, this is not the political arrangement planned by America’s founders in 1776 or in 1787. If Americans wish to hold on to their most basic freedoms, then they must organize right now and plan on mass direct action against the lawless theft of our government. Think of yourself as living in 1776, and act accordingly.

US Supreme Court disgraces itself even further

In the past few weeks America’s social fabric has been deeply marred by a US Supreme Court unwilling to hear two critical lawsuits bearing directly upon the obviously fraudulent election results. One lawsuit was brought by Pennsylvanians, the other by Texans. Each suit on its face had incredibly compelling facts and merits, and yet the US Supreme Court declined to hear either of them, essentially saying that whatever bad election stuff happens in a state stays in that state (as if a state behaving illegally must be expected to go back and correct itself).

And then along comes a Kansas voting rights law, which protects the sanctity of “one-citizen-one-vote” in Kansas, and then the same exact US Supreme Court strikes it down just two days ago. So much for the Court’s prior statement that what states do with their individual elections laws is solely at the discretion of that state!

You would never know that this same Court was operating in this same universe, let alone in the same country at the same time period.  Because if its decisions about the Pennsylvania and Texas cases meant one set of principles were operating, the Court’s holding in the Kansas case means the exact opposite is now true. And there is no democratic institution anywhere on Earth worth its salt that can operate as arbitrarily and capriciously as our Court is right now, and expect to be taken seriously by the governed.

Arbitrary and capricious government decisions strike at the heart of democracy and representative government, and it sure looks like the US Supreme Court is trying to run a dagger through America’s very heart.

The Court is wildly swinging here, for everyone to see in broad daylight. Refusing to even discuss unimaginably evil fraudulent voting behavior on the one hand, and then making a decision that strips Kansas voters of their rights and their expectation that Kansas elections will be free and fair on the other hand….this is a Court that is quite clearly out of control. And a Court that is out of control is a Court that has impeached its own credibility and standing, and which will lose the support of the governed.

Dear US Supreme Court members: If you will not even hear our pleas for relief, then why should we listen to anything you say? You work for The People, not the other way around.

Why does the US Supreme Court exist? Was it not established in order to address the most pressing legal issues of the nation, to preserve the sanctity of the US Constitution, so as to avoid political bottlenecks that are otherwise always resolved through bloodshed? The entire purpose of democracy is to give all citizens equal standing in every way, and equal opportunities for making their voices heard. Citizens whose voices cannot or will not be heard become alienated from the body politic, and they must choose alternative routes for resolving their grievances.

Here the Court is making it abundantly clear to all Americans that at least five of its nine members can be just as volatile, just as unprincipled, just as un-serious, just as politicized and arbitrary, just as in-your-face unaccountable to We, The People, as either of the other two branches of government. Despite the past role of the Court to always serve as a serious and somber place to resolve our thorniest differences in the deepest contemplation. Which is so obviously lacking now.

Some people say the Court is behaving this way in order to shield itself against a Democrat Party super-majority that has promised to add more seats to the Court, or to dissolve it altogether. Others say that most justices cannot help but go native when they spend too much time in Washington, DC. Which is a kind way of saying the justices lose touch with the common citizen, and begin to view us all as mere serfs, with no rights.

I don’t know if anyone else was struck by Chief Justice John Roberts’ snitty little minority dissent in the California religious freedom case a few weeks ago, but his snotty and arrogant tone was shocking to read. This is a man who is completely out of touch with the American people and without a thought in his head for the US Constitution, upon which all of his decisions are supposed to rest. Obviously he has at least four other justices who share his arrogant feelings about us little people.

In just a few short weeks, the US Supreme Court has disgraced itself, made a mockery of the law, of our system of government, of the guiding processes that are supposed to be public and fair for all to see, of itself, and thereby impeached its own credibility, its believability, its wonder and respectability. A court has no army, and all it can do is rely upon its respectability and integrity to persuade Americans that its rulings are just and fair, and must therefore be followed. The Court of Chief Justice John Roberts gets an F-minus, and why on Earth should Americans give a fig for what this Court ever holds again?

This Court is an important public institution that has just bombed out and fatally failed America right in front of all of us. So help us God, may this failure not be fatal to the Republic.

 

US Supreme Court in neon: “We are irrelevant to Americans”

After first saying they would hear it last week, late yesterday the US Supreme Court then declined to hear Texas’ lawsuit alleging that the failure of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Georgia to abide by the elementary practices of democratic voting law had violated the voting rights of Texas voters.

This was a potential landmark case, because America is a union of states all bound together by the equality of each state’s laws. Over two hundred years of hard work has resulted in a United States of states that all give full faith and credit to one another’s state government apparatuses. Texas voters expect other states to follow the same basic rules and safeguards in their own elections, so that the votes of one state are not rendered meaningless by the cheating and sloppiness in another state’s elections. There really is no greater test of the ties that bind us Americans all together in unity than the symmetry of our voting on Election Day.

What the hell is the point of voting in one state, if a few other states allow corrupt voting that negates how your own state votes?

Yes, the US Supreme Court declined to hear the case for the simple reason that five of the nine justices want to see President Donald Trump gone from the Oval Office, and they will do anything to further that end. Even if it costs the Court its credibility and standing among half the nation.

By declining to hear the case, as they did last week with the Pennsylvania Kelly/Parnell lawsuit, these five justices block the compelling arguments from being officially made in court, and thereby raised amongst the citizenry. If the case is not heard in court, then these justices’ ideological allies in the mainstream media do not have to report on it, and can continue to scoff and mock those who are terrified at how quickly America’s government fell to the coordinated leftist attack.

But the real message of the US Supreme Court in all of this, and likely in all the other cases working their way to the US Supreme Court, is that the Court is no longer relevant to the lives of American citizens.

The five US Supreme Court justices who have done this incredible, unbelievable act are so ideologically blinded that they either do not realize or do not care what fallout is resulting. Their DC Beltway elitist opposition to President Donald Trump and his voters is simply about raw power and political control, and in this case, trying to block the populist president from rightfully returning to the White House and implementing the political agenda the American voters chose him to do. Even worse, these five rogue justices are simultaneously attempting to help usher in to the White House an illegal and un-elected candidate, Joe Biden.

Instead of becoming a solution of any sort to the greatest threat to the Union since the first Civil War, and instead of becoming even a simple sounding board for the legal arguments about our relationships with one another as law-abiding American citizens in different states, the Court has blocked that process and also removed itself from the entire discussion. These five rogue justices say that neither will America have a legal resolution, nor will it have healing.

If the eighty million voters who support President Donald Trump can learn anything from the five rogue justices yesterday, it is that we citizens are completely on our own. Literally every single organ and institution of government that is designed to protect the rights and core interests of the American citizen has failed, been overthrown, or been made irrelevant in the greatest struggle of our lives. The FBI and DOJ are sitting on their hands, doing absolutely nothing about all of the reports of vote fraud last month. The US Supreme Court is just the very last institution to have made it clear that Americans are now caught in a life-altering tug-of-war between liberty and slavery, and we have only ourselves to rely upon for a fair resolution in our interests.

Going forward, whatever happens (say, for example, if President Trump invokes his 2018 executive order about foreign interference in American elections, which America just experienced, and he invokes the Insurrection Act), the US Supreme Court will have no voice in the matter.

By blocking the Court from even hearing the Pennsylvania and Texas lawsuits, five rogue justices (Kagan, Breyer, Sotomayor, Roberts, Kavanaugh) have made the Court irrelevant to all related questions and have completely removed the Court from all related cases that may arise. The Court cannot dodge and hide and deflect and attempt to shape the outcome of Election Day on the one hand, and then turn around and try to block this president from shielding the republic from the coup d’etat under way when he finally decides to act. While I have no crystal ball, it is possible that this president will indeed act, because he will correctly question which is the worse outcome: A fraudulently elected criminal who represents the interests of our greatest foe, China, or a temporary dictator who merely extends his first term until all questions of law are investigated and resolved.

Some people on the right will cheer the Court’s abdication, as the Court’s fifty years of judicial activism and legislating from the bench have already gutted certain areas of the Constitution. And the left will cheer because it provides them with a concrete political result they want right now, the future be damned. But in truth, this failure by the Court is just another sign that America as a constitutional republic is breathing its last breaths at this very moment. And that is sad. Yes, the streets in your neighborhood will still have the same names, but you will not have anywhere near the same personal rights you had on November 2nd, 2020. And only too late will you realize what has truly happened.