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Father’s Day

Today is Father’s Day, the day we celebrate our dads, the people who helped us grow into young men and women. For thousands of years, fathers have been the protectors and providers for their families, and they have traditionally been the source of life-saving wisdom and decision making. The lessons and skills they teach their children, especially their sons, are essential for living life properly.

Thank you to my dad, for teaching me to use a chainsaw and an axe from a young age. For giving me the childhood chore of splitting and stacking firewood all summer long, so that our family would have heat and comfort all winter long. Other chores included weeding the garden and shooting pests like chipmunks, squirrels, and groundhogs, all of whom could easily do tremendous damage to the garden in just minutes. And while these chores trained me in self-reliance, hard work, and planning ahead, it was the one thing that dad would not let me do that probably shaped me the most.

Although my dad comes from a hunting family, he himself did not and still to this day does not hunt. Oh, he appreciates wild game and will eat it over everything else, given a choice. But when I started taking my BB gun on deer hunts with neighbors at age eight, my dad always told me I had to get close to the animal to shoot it. As I grew into a young Indian or frontiersman out there in the wilds of southern Centre County, I was prohibited by dad from topping my rifles with scopes. Only open sights were allowed. He said using only open sights taught me woodcraft, requiring me to get close to the wild animals I wanted to harvest, before taking their lives.

“It is only fair,” he said. “You can’t just assassinate unsuspecting wild animals from hundreds of yards away. If you hunt, you must be a real hunter. You must get close and take the animal with skill, on its own terms, where it can see, hear and smell you. That is fair.”

And so last deer season, on a steep hillside deep within the Northcentral PA state forest complex, all of those lessons and preparation came together in one quick, fleeting second. I did the Elmer Fudd thing all alone, quietly sidehilling into the wind, trying to live up to Dad’s dictum. One cautious, slow step at a time. Eyes scanning ahead, downhill, and especially uphill. Ears on high alert for any sound other than the wind in the leaves. Big bucks that are bedded down high above where the puny humans might slip, stumble, and walk, are most likely to flee to higher ground when one of us Pleistocene guys shows up too close for comfort. Deer might hear or smell us coming a long way off, or they might see us at the last second because we are being quiet and playing the wind right, but they know that within a hundred yards or so, we can kill them. So they flee uphill, and in stumbling up against gravity and slippery things underfoot they give us shot opportunities we would not otherwise have.

And so when the strange <snap> sounded out ahead of me, just over the slight rise that led into the large bowl filled with mature timber and rock outcroppings, and an odd looking animal bolted down hill almost bouncing like a fisher, I quickly backpedaled.

Anticipating where the deer would emerge about 130 yards below me, I quickly and also carefully walked straight backwards to where a natural slight funnel in the ground provided a clear enough shooting lane down through the forest to a small stream bed. Anything passing between me and the stream would be broadside at moments, providing a clear shot through heart and lungs if I took careful aim.

And sure enough, the big doe filled one of those spaces so briefly that I don’t even recall seeing her. All I do recall is how the rifle butt fit carefully into the space between the backpack strap over my shoulder and the thick wool coat sleeve, and how the open sights briefly aligned with her chest. The thumb safety had been snicked off already without thinking, and the gun cracked. I fired the gun instinctively.

Quickly raising the binoculars to my face, the doe was clearly visible way down below me, lying fully outstretched on the forest floor just above the stream bank, like in mid-leap with her front hooves and rear hooves completely extended ahead and behind, except she was not moving. She was laying still, her neck fully stretched out on her front legs like she was taking a nap. I watched her tail twitch a few times and then knew she was dead.

Sliding on my butt down to her was more challenging than climbing up to where I had been still hunting her. Northcentral PA mountainsides are the most difficult terrain for humans, in my experience. It is topped with a layer of slippery leaves, then wet twigs and branches waiting underneath to act like oil-slicked icicles, ready to throw a boot way ahead of one’s body. If the wet leaves and branches don’t make you fall down, then the rotten talus rock waiting underneath the leaves and twigs will slide, causing you to either do an extra-wide wildly gesticulating split, or fall on your butt, or fall on your back.

So I scooted downhill to the doe, tobogganning on my butt on the slick forest floor, cradling the rifle against my chest, keeping my feet out ahead of me to brake against getting too much speed and hurtling out of control.

Arriving at her body, I marveled at how she resembled a mule. Her long horse face and her huge body were anything but deer-like. Her teeth were worn down, and she must have been at least five years old. The single fawn hanging around watching me indicated an older mother no longer able to bear twins or triplets. This old lady had done her job and had given us many new deer to hunt and watch over many deer years.

Normally, in such remote and rugged conditions I will quickly bone out the deer, removing all of the good meat and putting it in a large trash bag in my backpack, leaving the carcass ungutted and relatively intact for the forest scavengers. But this doe was so big that I just had to show her off to friends, and so after putting the 2G tag on her ear, I ran a pull rope around her neck and put a stick through her slit back legs, and began the long drag out.

This hunt has stayed with me almost every day since that day. I think about it all the time, because it was so rewarding in so many ways, and emblematic of being a good hunter. Not the least of which was the careful woodcraft that led up to the moment where the smart old doe was busted in her bed and then brought to hand with one careful shot as she loped away, far away. Just as easily I could have been a hunter clothed in bucksin, using a stick bow and arrow five thousand years ago.

Thanks, Dad, for all the good lessons, the chores, the hard work, the restrictions and requirements that made me the man I am today. Without your firmly guiding hand back then, I would not be the man I am today. And what kind of man am I? I am a fully developed hu-man; a competent hunter with the skill set only a dad can teach a son, even if it takes a lifetime.

[some will want to know: Rifle is a 1991 full-stock Ruger RSI Mannlicher in .308 Winchester with open sights. Bullets in the magazine were a motley assortment of Hornady, Winchester, and Federal 150-grain soft points, any one of which will kill a deer or a bear with one good shot. Binoculars are Leupold Pro Guide HD 8×32 on a Cabela’s cross-chest harness. Boots are Danner Canadians. Coat is a Filson buffalo check virgin wool cruiser. Pants are Filson wool. Backpack is a now discontinued LL Bean hunting pack, most closely resembling the current Ridge Runner pack. Knife is a custom SREK by John R. Johnson of Perry County]

Judging the “judges”

One of the reasons I vacated the Quaker faith was that group’s persistent identity as the self-appointed scolds of the world.

Wherever there was conflict, the Quakers and their policy arms (e.g. the Friends Service Committee) would descend uninvited from on high and proclaim loudly about who was the guilty party, who was the victim, and how to fix the problem. Quaker “fixes” almost always were unjust and created winners and losers just as much as the original conflict had squared things up.

Nine times out of ten, in my experience and witness, Quaker involvement made those conflicts worse, because they had this tendency to self-identify with who they thought of as the “underdog,” who then deserved their protection and advocacy, at the cost of reason, history, etc. This advocacy enabled the “underdog” to adopt more rigid positions, thereby prolonging and worsening the conflict.

But the sick irony that really drove me out was that the Quakers are the parasites of the Western world: They get to live happy and secure lives protected by Western militaries, that they in turn decry and directly undermine.

Being party to that un-earned mass judgmentalism and myopic self-indulgence was not something I wanted, and so I eldered out.

The idea that people can form a group and pass judgment on everyone else is not new, nor unique to the Quakers. That same exact thinking has, however, infused, enthused, inspired, and enabled a great number of other individuals and groups who have followed in the Quakers’ crooked footsteps.

Take the oddly named Southern Poverty Law Center, for example. Begun as a group to defend the legal rights of blacks in the South, a worthy cause indeed, SPLC has itself now become America’s biggest hate group. So bent on utterly destroying its enemies is SPLC, that the group now has zero boundaries in its unbridled, unfounded accusations against those who it uniquely judges to be bad or unworthy of living in America.

Concurrently growing longer every year is the SPLC’s list of lost defamation lawsuits, where SPLC is paying millions of dollars to people and groups it has wrongly defamed. Who are SPLC’s enemies, deserving of its worst ire? Oh, just Christians, reformed Muslims, non-jihadi Muslims, religious Jews, and regular Joe Americans who believe that the US Constitution means what it plainly says. That’s all…

Among those sharing the SPLC and Quaker-type thinking are the people who are now attacking Judge Kavanaugh. Blasey Ford and her creature-lawyer, Debra Katz, are exemplars of the lying, cheating, fake Fake FAKE accusers wreaking havoc from one end of America to the other. Blasey Ford is not only a proven liar, she has now been caught tampering with the witnesses she said were present at her so-so-sad (and very very fake) moment with Kavanugh. Her witnesses have stated that they do not agree with Ford’s recollection and that they were not present, as she says they were. She has been directly pressuring them to change their minds.

Debra Katz set out to destroy a boy’s athletic team at a top university. When proven wrong and a defamation award loomed over her head, Katz shrugged her shoulders and said “Well, it was important to bring attention to the possibility of gang rape,” even if it had not actually happened, and even though she had destroyed the names and reputations of a whole group of completely innocent young men in the process.

Why Blasey Ford is not being charged with perjury is a mystery.

Why Debra Katz has not been disbarred is a sign of how weak average Americans have become.

To allow these cancers to walk among us, to judge us, to pass judgment upon us, while lying, Lying, LYING the whole time is unconscionable. It is un-American. It is inhuman. It is simply wrong and it must end.

When We, The People in turn finally judge these self-appointed judges like SPLC, Blasey Ford, and Debra Katz, we find them to be unfair at least, and to be happily corrupt most of the time. We find that these self-appointed arbiters of truth and justice are unworthy of the role, and they should be held accountable.

Some Westerners still adore Imperialism despite their protestations

If there is one hotbed of kooky political extremism in Western Civilization, it’s England.

As it was in the 1920s and 1930s, England is full of self-proclaimed “peace” activists and anti-imperialism yellers and screamers.

Their weak righteousness brought on World War II, and paved the way for massive treasonous infiltration of English government at all levels.

Many Soviet Russian spies were warmly welcomed by these activists to set up shop and undermine the individual rights and liberties that mark the strongest European democracy.

Anti-British sentiment ran and still runs quite deep in Wales, Ireland, Scotland, the Falklands, and many other far-flung places unassociated with England proper.

Yet where were those activists then, when those nations next to England yearned for their own self-determination? Sure, the activists accused everyone else (America, Israel, the actual anchors of Western freedom and tolerance) of vicious imperialism, but they themselves loved the unfair, artificial, imperialistic, forced notion of a UK. Scotland, Ireland, Wales were independent places with unique languages, cultures, and religions. They were hardly “united” with England by choice.

The Falklands? WTH?!

Why now that Scottish citizens are finally waking up to their own freedom are the British trade unions, left wing activists, and self-appointed bosses of equality silent on Scotland’s chance for true opportunity?

I’m not Scottish, Welsh, nor Irish, I am an American, but I do know that my country fought British imperialism many times, and that Americans greatly benefited from their Constitutional republic’s individual liberties.

It is time for Britons to act in a consistent, civilized way, and set aside their imperial self-interests.

As a former Scottish freedom fighter once said on film, FREEDOM!

The sad irony of Zimmerman’s right to self-defense

The sad irony of George Zimmerman having a right to self-defense is that now roving gangs of thugs are beating Americans on the street in the name of “justice for Trayvon,” while others call for lynching of anyone “white.”

So because a jury considered the facts, someone now wants to go hurt and kill people of different skin color? Does anyone else see the sick irony and hypocrisy? Al Sharpton admits that Zimmerman cannot be charged on “the merits,” which is to say that he is innocent of having done something wrong, but he wants him charged nonetheless.

America is witnessing an orgy of feelings and anger. But these are misplaced feelings, it is unjustified anger.

Attacking and hurting people because of their skin color is racist, and here we have people supposedly opposed to racism doing just that.

This is not good, my fellow Americans, not good at all.