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Dogs vs. Drones in deer recovery Part 2

So you hit a deer, with an arrow or a bullet, and it ran, and now you want to find it. As is common, the critter crossed paths with you and your sporting weapon late in the day (deer especially move most at dawn and dusk), and now the sun is setting and daylight is fading. Finding the trail and following it is becoming less and less likely. After ten or fifteen minutes of looking for it, the sun is down and all you know is that you have some blood at the initial point of contact. Yes, the deer jumped high, mule kicked, and tucked its tail as it ran, all of which are good signs of a solid hit. But, you don’t have much of a blood trail and no light to follow one, even if you could find the spoor.

Archery hunters commonly back off at this point, and either wait an hour or two before resuming the search in earnest, using strong lights and extra eyes from friends, or they just leave the site altogether. Returning in the morning provides better light for trailing, and the good likelihood that the deer will have run only a short distance, bedded down because it is wounded and does not feel pressured, and then expired.

But what if you are worried about coyotes eating your prize overnight? And what if you think the hit was really good, and the ground cover is just so thick and difficult that there is a good chance the deer is lying dead just fifty yards away, and yet tough to see from where it was hit? Faced with these prospects, a lot of hunters will go after the deer, good blood trail or not, good visibility, or not.

Comes the question, what is the best way to find this wounded and probably dead deer: Should you stagger about in thick thorns in the dark, losing half your own blood and clothing in the process? Or should you call in the cavalry?

Today, calling in the cavalry means either getting a deer tracking dog (www.unitedbloodtrackers.org here in central PA), or getting a drone operator. Using either dogs or drones is not necessarily permitted in all states. After a ton of political wrangling over a twenty or thirty year period, Pennsylvania only got search dogs for finding wounded deer less than ten years ago, while for hundreds of years many southern states still use dogs to chase deer to hunters. So one state is worried about disturbing the hunting woods at all, while another state is OK with basically setting the woods on fire… for hunting.

Today, using drones to find wounded or expired deer in Pennsylvania is unsettled business. In fact, it is a mess. Here, too.

That is because the PA Game Commission worries about the misuse of drones for unethically looking for wildlife to hunt (gaining an artificial advantage), for herding and moving wildlife, etc. Fair enough, but what about the states that do allow drone recovery? Are those states just made up of unethical slobs who could never do a good job hunting or managing wild game?

And what about all of the cool videos online that show guys using drones to successfully find expired deer in the most improbable places that would have never occurred to even the most experienced band of searchers, or that would not have been accessible to a dog and its handler?

No question about it, recovery drones are both cool new shiny technology, and largely successful.

Deer dogs have their noses and the guidance of their experienced owners, while drones have infrared and thermal cameras that can go over a lot of territory quickly, at night, and often see a warm carcass through cover while the hunter simply stands and watches the video feed. Drones can often do the hours of work of a tracking dog in just a few minutes. On the other hand, dogs can pick up a two day old scent and follow it to the long-cold carcass, something a drone cannot do, unless the carcass is out in the open. In which case it will be but a pile of fresh bones.

But there are real concerns about drones, like spooking and pushing out an entire herd of deer, maybe by accident, maybe on purpose, or looking too soon and unnecessarily pushing off the wounded animal to even farther distances, maybe over property lines. Some drone operators mount big flat screen TVs in their vehicles, so the drone search becomes less about recovery and more about entertainment and snooping on trophy deer at night. Some states require that the hunter who wounded the animal not be able to see the drone search results, to eliminate a possible inducement to cheat (like going after another, bigger, animal in the dark).

Of course, in places with big swamps, pythons, and alligators, a drone might be preferred!

One suggestion that Central Pennsylvania tracking dog handler Vicky Church has: Get deer/ game animal recovery drone operators certified. Not just by the FAA, but also by the PGC. Make sure that drone recovery operators are behaving ethically and legally. It is hard to argue with some version of this, even though I am philosophically opposed to any more regulation on our already far overburdened society.

Vicky says the deer dog people had to do it, so the drone people should, too. Hard to argue with her.

Hunting is supposed to be fun, and no wounded wild game animal should be abandoned to the coyotes just because search options were artificially limited by over-anxious regulators. My opinion is drones should be allowed for finding wounded wild game. But let’s face it, it is a lot more fun to watch a dog work the scent and the field.

Nothing beats the happy look of a smiling dog, or the people with it.

Wild Game recovery dog handler, Vicky Church. Photo by Tom, a hunter who benefited from Vicky’s help

Vicky and her dog trailing a wounded buck. Photo by Tom

 

No way a human is going to do this easily or well. Oh, many of us have tried it, without success. A drone might achieve this, if the cover is not too thick

 

Don’t leave your records in the sun and other solid life tips

John Hartford played every instrument I could imagine – fiddle, guitar, banjo, harmonica, spoons, sticks, rocks, fence posts, and he played them all well. He was a 20th century artist from the days of the American frontier, or maybe the 1850s traveling circuses, with his crumpled top hat and tatty clothing. Only occasionally obliquely bawdy, most of his songs were silly and clean fun, done in the folk music style that every American enjoys on a sweaty summer day. Summer time is the time to forget all of your anxieties and frustrations, and let traveling entertainers like John Hartford make you laugh with gusto.

Golly, we are just about in summer time, aren’t we? Time for the Artists’ Fair (or is it the Artisans’ Fairies?) in State College, with non-fraudulent all natural ice cream from PSU’s The Creamery. Hot and sweaty guaranteed in the heart of summer. Time to start planning your summer trips, if you have not already done so. And if you find hotels full or too expensive, there is always the local county fair to fall back on, or The Grange Fair in Centre Hall.

Ahhhh, the Grange Fair in Centre Hall, a family staple of ours….My sister puked on one of those big spinny roundy roundy pill-shaped rides that make me sick just to watch, and her vomit hit everyone locked in the cage with her, as well as the many innocent bystanders running for cover. I have not been back to the Grange Fair since that Great Vomit Assassination On The Grassy Knoll in 1977. But I hear the fair is still great. John Hartford could have written a funny song about that vomit event.

Anyhow, John Hartford performed many silly songs, including my favorite, Don’t Leave Your Records in the Sun. For you young people, a record is a round shiny object we used to listen to for entertainment. Now I think you can find videos online of people eating them for entertainment. But they did make pleasing sounds, including music, and if played slowly backwards you might hear Satan’s voice saying something almost on the tip of your tongue. They sure were a lot more entertaining than the chip embedded in your skull these days. And if you left them in the sun, as John Hartford warned us not to do, they would in fact get warped, and they would skip and repeat and make all kinds of annoying sounds.

I have recently learned another piece of useful folk wisdom that John Hartford should have sung about: Don’t leave your butternut squash anywhere you don’t want them to die and make a mess. Because when a butternut squash dies, it takes the surrounding environment with it.

Some of my prized butternut squash (I grow them in my summer garden and eat them all year long; the Princess of Patience savors the seeds roasted with salt) were stored up high on a pine board shelf in a cold guest bedroom hardly used during the winter. I put them there in January, thinking I would pull one down as needed, but last week, when I went to get one, all I found were these horrible science experiments gone wrong. I think the best thing is to keep your prized squashes on a metal rack in the basement for maybe a month or two at longest, after they are picked in late October. Then you have to skin them and cut them up and freeze them in plastic bags.

Or if you have a warped sense of humor, you can deliberately let your butternut squashes die badly, and make a Rumble video about it. Maybe a video of some circus geek eating these dead squashes with a side of crushed record. You would probably get a million hits and become a famous influencer.

Dear John Hartford, we miss you. I saw him at his last performance in State College, when he was in the throes of cancer. I heard he wanted to write a silly song about that, too. Don’t do that, is my advice.

Don’t leave your records in the sun or your butternut squash on a board, shelf, or really anywhere

Kinda proud to say “I made that!”

No, you cannot even make a tea from this horror. Throw it away

 

 

J6 footage vindicates J6 protestors

Although I am not a fan of new US House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and I view his semi-release of the hidden 42,000 HOURS of January 6th video footage to just one opinion maker (Tucker Carlson) with skepticism, what little bit of this footage is beginning to drip out into the public domain already vindicates the January 6th protestors around the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021.

The day after the protest, I wrote about my January 6th experience in front of the US Capitol here, and over two years and an FBI interview later, my strongest, clearest recollections remain thus: The uniformed police rained an immense and unceasing barrage of physical and chemical assaults down upon the peaceful and lawful protestors standing out in front of the Capitol.

When I was asked 18 months later if I saw any violence or property destruction in front of the Capitol, I responded “By whom?

Because yes, I witnessed and personally experienced a tremendous amount of violence… by police against American citizens engaging in the most basic of our Constitutional rights of peaceable assembly to petition our government for redress of our grievances. I well recall standing huddled with friends, well behind the barricades that separated the legal protest from the no-go area, shocked by the police brutality, each of us asking one another “Are you seeing what I am seeing? Is this really happening?

Despite being far away from the barricades, I was repeatedly shot with rubber bullets and gassed or bombed with pepper spray. So were my friends standing with me. We did nothing wrong. We should not have experienced this treatment, and neither should the protestors standing at the barricades.

Now that Republicans control the US House, approximately 42,000 HOURS of police badgecam and vestcam video footage, CCTV footage, and related videos are being released to the American public. This footage had been hidden away by Nancy Pelosi in order to both create a false narrative of what happened on January 6th, 2021, and to prevent access to video evidence that runs contrary to the fake narrative Pelosi and the mainstream media have pushed since January 7th 2021. These videos include audio, and police officers can be heard gloating over how much illegal use of force they had engaged in, how much lawlessness they had turned against the protestors, how they enjoyed using blunt force weapons against helpless Americans who were physically swept up and away in a tide of angry humanity and who found themselves in places they never intended to go.

And that is the takeaway from the newly released videos. American citizens who are aggrieved about a blatantly stolen 2020 election are going to become enraged when subjected to even more illegal official mistreatment.

I do not condone what happened in the US Capitol, but I also know that angry people do angry things. I also know that a great number of the people who were actually inside the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021, were ANTIFA and US federal employees dressed as Trump supporters. There is already a ton of evidence of this at news outlets like The Gateway Pundit and The Epoch Times.

I hope America has some version of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission after this video footage comes out. Americans are going to see January 6th as it really happened, not as one side lied about how it happened and then hid away evidence to the contrary.

UPDATE: More J6 video footage  showing uniformed police ushering well behaved protesters into the US Capitol.

2021 Superbowl feted murderous cop Lila Morris

Last year’s Superbowl was used to fete a bunch of uniformed thugs who assaulted, beat, and murdered peaceful protestors at the January 6th rally in DC. No surprise at that, given that the NFL has gone all establishment woke, and was happily used to promote and coverup a bunch of violent criminals in police uniform drag. Recall that these were police officers who beat the hell out of citizens who didn’t deserve it, and who didn’t even even touch the BurnLootMurder people who vandalized DC and assaulted police officers and people on the DC streets in 2020.

I stood out in front of the Capitol on January 6th, nowhere near the barricades, with nothing in our hands and nowhere near the police, and even I and the people I was peacefully protesting with were gassed and shot with rubber bullets by the DC/ Capitol Police. The police were out to hurt us all, no matter where we stood, no matter what we did or did not do. Our mere legal presence there was cause enough for the police to illegally assault us (one wonders at the potential for a federal lawsuit on behalf of the hundreds of peaceful protestors who were nowhere near the barricades who were nonetheless directly bombarded with flashbangs, pepper and tear gas, rubber bullets).

Of particular note at last year’s final football game was the honored presence of officer Lila Morris, whose wanton, sadistic, and ultimately murderous non-stop assault with a steel baton on the prostrate and dying Roseanne Boyland was caught on video. From several angles.

You should watch these videos, because like all videos they give you a pretty good insight into the kind of person officer Lila Morris is. For one thing, she seems to be a violent anti-white racist. Second, she wouldn’t stop beating Roseanne Boyland even after her fellow police officers tried to stop her. Third, she showed no remorse for murdering Roseanne Boyland, and like all evil psychotics she has been reveling in her accomplishment.

I know, I know, there are people who actually say “Well, now you know how it feels.” And you know what? That is crazy talk. No, neither I nor any other innocent person understands how a black cop committing racially motivated murder against a white person is OK (nor is the vice versa). The old two wrongs don’t make a right thing comes to mind. Racism is still wrong. Murdering peaceful protestors is still illegal in America. Antagonizing otherwise non-violent Americans this way does nothing to advance racial harmony or understanding. It makes it go backwards.

Violent cops are usually kicked off the police force, reprimanded, and then charged. None of this applies to officer Lila Morris, who continues to proudly wear a gun and a badge on her police uniform. Her own department investigated itself about her murder of Boyland, and said it was “objectively reasonable.”

Can any of us imagine the death of George Floyd being said by the police department to be “objectively reasonable”? And mind you Floyd had several high-speed drugs in his body, was resisting arrest, and had committed a violent crime (out of many crimes in his violent career) at the time of his arrest. Roseanne Boyland met none of these standards, and so as we have come to see over and over again, there is a double standard in America: Violent leftists are not held accountable, criminal Democrats are not held accountable, violent Democrats are not held accountable, and police officers who are protecting or promoting violent Democrats and Leftists are not held accountable.

Why the state of Georgia doesn’t file its own criminal indictment of Lila Morris is a huge mystery, because the only way to hold DC Swamp monsters like Lila Morris accountable is in the states. States can administer their own criminal justice process when it is deliberately failed in a failed place like Washington, DC.

So here we are, on the eve of another rah-rah Superbowl, for a game of football I have almost completely lost interest in. The disrespectful kneeling thing, the NFL’s overt leftist political activism, the feting of racist murderer Lila Morris…these are the things I now see when football is brought up.

I will not be watching the Superbowl tonight. Too many other things I have to do. I can’t don’t and won’t support people and institutions who support racist murderers.

Officer Lila Morris would have made a good concentration camp prison guard, like Dachau or Auschwitz, where the guards enjoyed beating innocent people to death

Murdered peaceful protestor Roseann Boyland was guilty of “protesting while white” in Washington DC, and beaten to death by officer Lila Morris

 

 

 

Project Veritas vs. Entire Fake News Media

Few fights are more compelling than a lone Irishman facing off against overwhelming odds…and winning, and here we have this scenario playing out before our very eyes as James O’Keefe of Project Veritas keeps slam-dunking on mighty members of the totally fake news mainstream media.

As a New York State Supreme Court justice put it recently, O’Keefe is “a guy armed with a website and a cell phone taking on the New York Times,” and winning.

O’Keefe’s donnybrook started about twelve years ago when like so many other people he began to question the openly pre-digested mainstream “news” being shoveled out the door in an effort to manufacture consent among Americans. Consent to what? Trying to get us to consent to the utter destruction of American civilization, that’s all. The ‘complete transformation’ of America from a free society with free citizens making free choices because they have individual liberty to do so, to a genocidal, racist, totalitarian, anti-democracy, anti-citizen, centrally planned socialist Mother State that will make all of your decisions for you. All of them. And if you don’t like it, you can get checked into a re-education concentration camp to get your thinking “straightened” out. The mother state will crush you.

So O’Keefe began asking small, simple questions of people with great power and wealth, and when he got either no answers or blatant lies in response, he began to dig for the truth. O’Keefe single-handedly reintroduced Americans to investigative journalism, the kind of journalism that the mainstream media had done at one time. Before its members all began marching in lockstep with uniform daily messages and narratives meant not to report the news, but to shape Americans’ perceptions of reality.

Professor-activist Noam Chomsky wrote a book called “The Manufacture of Consent,” where he complained bitterly that the news media of 1970s America was too conservative and too aligned with essential American democratic values. But now that that same corporate media conglomerate Chomsky criticized is championing the anti-freedom message that Chomsky promoted, he is their biggest cheerleader. Turns out that Chomsky really only hates it when people who disagree with his undemocratic political views air their opinions. But when people who share his views get ahold of that same megaphone, he is right there next to them. Turns out Chomsky is all for the manufacturing of consent through the dissemination of false information, so long as he agrees with that false information. He may be a freedom-hating hypocrite whose American free speech rights gave him the ability to destroy the free speech rights of other Americans, but Chomsky did give us a hell of a catchy phrase.

And this is where we stand, each of us American citizens: We have a choice of either slavishly watching plain vanilla network TV fake news shows, or the same radio shows like NPR and BBC, that are run, scripted, and hosted by aggressive political activists trying to hide information from us on the one hand, and put us to sleep with false information on the other hand, or we can open our eyes and take in more. Breathe deep the free air and information…

If you are new to Project Veritas, watch some of these hidden camera videos they have done. The latest is a nuclear bombshell interview with a senior CNN executive, who gleefully admits on camera that CNN engages in “propaganda” (his word!) meant to favor one political party and to hurt the other. If you are truly interested in what is going on with the American fake news media complex, then watch this one video. It shows how a New York Times or a Washington Post will print something so outrageously wrong, and then how the rest of their political allies, like CNN, will pick up the fake story and push it all over the place. It is fake, it is not news. If you consume this junk, you are poisoning your brain.

If I thought of myself as a free thinking person (I do of myself…do you think of yourself as open minded?), I would want to know the truth. The facts. The actual reality. And that is where Project Veritas can lend a hand. No Joy Behar (TV show) or Noam Chomsky (anti-education academia) or Jeff Zucker (CNN) or Jeffrey Goldberg (The Atlantic) here to lie blatantly to your face and then foot-stomping demand that you believe them and turn off your own critical thinking skills. Just pure unadulterated videos of news media people saying what is on their mind.

If you like Project Veritas, if you value their service to freedom and accurate information, send them ten bucks. Your own free speech is worth that, surely. Your future freedom to think for yourself is what is really at stake here, and maybe that is worth a fifteen dollar donation to them?

If you value your freedom of speech and thought, that is. It is not clear if Americans take anything seriously any longer…or if we all just take America for granted, sitting on our couch eating nachos and watching Netflix, while our home is burning down around us.

100 years of Liberalism = mass shootings

Since the 1917 violent triumph of Socialism in Russia, communists have more aggressively spread their efforts world-wide. There is no secret about this. Lots of official information outlets of openly socialist and communist organizations precisely describe their goals and targets, past and present. Cambodia, China, Vietnam, Cuba, now Venezuela, all fell victim to socialism.

Where socialists have failed to openly gain control in democracies, like America and Britain, because their intended victims have more say through voting, they have mostly gone vague. Vagueness allows socialists to talk in circles and in generalities, avoiding the unpleasant hard realities their policies will truly mean for hard working Americans and Britons.

In that vein, for decades the Democrat Party purveyed a more palatable-sounding ideology than socialism or communism. They became Liberals. Liberalism, now called “progressivism” and its advocates “progressives,” is still the same old evil socialism; it is just more incremental than the overtly revolutionary form of the 1917 Soviet Union’s tyranny.

And so for one hundred years, liberals in American government have steadily introduced policy after policy, regulation after regulation, textbook after textbook, slowly changing American culture from the inside. For one hundred years liberals have used America’s democratic form of government (technically America is a republic, but loosely speaking we are governed by democratic principles) to achieve non-democratic outcomes. That is, liberals have used America’s freedoms and government to implement anti-freedom and anti-America policies and changes to our national fabric.

In general, American liberals have sought greater government power over the citizenry, a diminishment of individual rights, a lessening of the individual ability to stand up to and prevail against the kind of overwhelming government power America was originally founded to prevent. Their assault on America has at its core a determined corrosion of American identity and norms; that makes it easier to sell their anti-America, anti-freedom laws, regulations, and policies.

So, for example, by inverting the First Amendment, liberals have removed God from the public square. To liberals, any practice of religion in public is officially establishing religion. By gaining control of public schools through teacher’s unions, and then removing God’s values from those schools, liberals removed the ancient barriers and social mores that glued Americans together.

We can go down a list of liberal laws and policies that have been inflicted on America, and we can talk about how liberals have captured institutions like media, entertainment (Hollywood’s violent movies and ultra-violent video games), and academia, but let’s just say that after one hundred years of liberals tearing away at America’s social fabric, they have succeeded in destroying a great deal of what held America together.

Hearing liberals talk about more gun control is like watching people remove the wheels from my car, and then tell me how dangerous it will be to drive it and how I need to just give them the car keys.

I grew up in a rural community that had more guns, and more cows, than people. We all owned guns from an early age, and we suffered no gun crime. No mass shootings, no individual shootings. My 7th grade biology teacher reloaded my 7×57 Mauser rounds for me. In 7th and 8th grades I took my deer rifle on the school bus from home to Park Forest Junior High School in State College. The gun was placed inside my locker, and at the end of the school day, we students who had brought our rifles joined together to go deer hunting at some local farm or forest. Someone’s parent was in charge of picking us up and taking us to the hunt, and someone else’s parent was in charge of picking us up and taking us all back home at dark. It worked just fine.

Fast forward 40 years and America is a different place. School kids are shooting each other, unlike any previous time. The wheels have come off!

What changed is the American culture that supported responsible gun ownership was weakened by liberals, who have sought to eliminate private gun ownership. The founding American culture that created and reinforced values like self-reliance, personal responsibility, deferring immediate pleasure and gratification in lieu of future success, and making good choices was all tossed away in liberal-controlled public schools and colleges.

Instead of good solid time-proven American values, liberals taught bozo ideas like “challenge authority” — meaning disrespect your parents, having babies out of wedlock is fun, killing babies at will is freedom, who needs Home Economics and a hard work ethic when the government will just give you taxpayer-funded welfare money, and so on. So the culture of America changed, and now many of our youngest seem incapable of living up to basic American norms while still being presented with basic American freedoms, like gun ownership.

Liberals created this failed culture in which young Americans shoot each other. Just look at every major American city: They are nearly all run by liberals, home to the latest and best liberal ideas, and yet they suffer the greatest social failure, financial failure, and violence.

Liberalism is not the solution, but the cause of all that ails America today, especially the mass shootings in liberal-controlled schools.

And so liberals now demand gun confiscation, and phony “universal background checks” that are designed to create lists of who has what guns, to make gun confiscation easier.

Liberals created all these problems in the first place, and more liberal policy ideas like “gun control” are simply adding fuel to the fire.

Many years ago I worked with a woman who specialized in creating problems and crises in our office, and once the interpersonal conflicts were going hot, she would then swoop in and aggressively demand to “solve” the very problems she had created. Her proposed solutions always left her with more authority and direct control over everyone around her. This is what the liberals and the Democrat Party are doing with guns. They created all this mass shooting business, and now they want to exploit the violence crisis they created to further their assault on the rights of law-abiding gun owners, who have no connection to crime but who stand between liberals and their dream of absolute tyrannical control over everyone in America, like their socialist brethren everywhere else.

At a certain point normal Americans have to wake up to this obvious situation, and stop voting for liberals and their deceptive ideas. Liberalism is not good for America. Turn it back, restore our founding principles as America’s norms, take back our government and our institutions from destructive liberalism.

Here (below) is retired US Army Col. David Grossman talking about why children are now killing each other. Grossman was the guy who taught American special forces troops how to overcome their natural human inhibitions in order to quickly kill their opponents, and who then witnessed an alarming generational change in how American youth perceived killing. If you care about what causes mass shootings, watch Grossman’s fascinating videos.

 

Paddling with Hollywood

Cheerfully our little crew paddled down the river, enjoying small Class II splashy whitewater rapids here and there, swift enough currents everywhere else that we need not really paddle much, if at all.

Turning aft, I squawked captain-like from my otherwise supine perch in the bow “Hard to the oars, ye pack o’ worthless lazy bones!”

The kids would laugh a bit at my best captain o’ the high seas bit, tepidly dip their paddles in the water like they were thinking about trying to paddle, and then go back to chattering amongst themselves about school, fellow students in school, classes, interpersonal politics and Politics with a capital P in school. Overall it was what had been hoped for when I made reservations with the outfitter the week before. Time with my kids and their friends, in nature, floating down a river, watching bald eagles, osprey, mergansers, wood ducks, migratory songbirds, deer, and on the lookout for bear.

Pausing to listen for and then spot white waterfalls cascading steeply out of the high canyon walls, I, the lookout, would occasionally point out where the crew could perhaps look up to if but briefly admire these little moments of grandeur passing by us. They did look the first half dozen times, and then tired of being bothered to do anything. I ended up dragging my hands in the cold foamy water, hoping to create some drag that would necessitate some serious paddling. When my hands turned red and then a purplish blue and stopped responding to commands to open or close, I gave up on influencing the kids in any way and just quietly admired the ride.

About two and a half hours into the drift, the kids started to sing. At first these were summer camp songs, and then theme songs from movies complete with beat-box noises from my daughter, and then songs from movies, mostly being rap-like. Their voices were sweet, and they would constantly run over each other, and then good-naturedly correct someone, and then try to get back on track in harmonic unison. Being of free and easy spirit, the kids were into having fun, and they would individually or together abruptly break out into a song-ending editorialization about the singer, the performer, the musician, or the movie the particular song came from.

The Earth Day environmental song, apparently popular now, was a big hit on our boat. They sang it over and over and over.

“And the zebra, I like how he says ‘I’m a zebra, I am striped, and I don’t know if I am black or if I am white’,” said the girl of this apparently surprising revelation, unaware that Dennis Prager, Rush Limbaugh, Larry Elder, and a slew of other radio talk show hosts and conservative politicians have been preaching an equal opportunity color-blind society for many decades.

And after about half an hour of back and forth chatter about this environmental planet cartoon movie and its song, it dawned on me that these kids are deeply enthralled by Hollywood and its entertainment business. They and their young impressionable minds are completely captured by images and made-up voices from highly paid songwriters and movie scripters, whose lines become memorized as moral guide posts along their young lives.

Many adults over the past ten or twenty years have bemoaned the advent of and then exponential increase in realistic at-home video games, the prevalence of handheld devices, and the trance-like state our children have grown up in glued to and Matrix-like plugged into these things. Well, I saw that we have transitioned beyond the gluing-in-and-tuning-out stage where we had to scream two inches from our kids’ face to ask them what they wanted for dinner.  Now we see the fruits of others’ indoctrination labors playing out over a decade or more: Our kids are wholly owned little robots of the entertainment industry, which is vacuous, morally bankrupt, materialistic, shallow, value-less, corrosive, and meaningless. No wonder our kids parrot all kinds of silly nonsense that emanate from movies and popular music; they are constantly bathing their brains in it.

And people like me thought the fight for America’s soul was a political one in Washington, DC!

Nope.

I learned on that day-long raft trip through spectacular natural beauty that the fight for a solid America is still at home, where we thought we had some influence, and we still might, and on college campus, where our parenting has been outsourced to welcoming Marxist professors eager to turn our kids inside out.

Yes, on this trip I had been paddling along with my kids and their friends, enjoying their happy company, but really I had been secretly and unknowingly paddling with Hollywood that whole way, and did not realize it until the very end, when I could say nothing.

The sea captain and his crew taking a break in a wondrous, magical waterfall in the middle of nowhere, on the run from Hollywood and pop culture

Jon Gruber, AG Kane, Obama…we never thought they could actually get worse

Jon Gruber is the fast talking salesman of ObamaCare.

He made millions of dollars from state and federal government payments (that is taxpayer money) to travel America, selling a government-only healthcare system.  Gruber’s credibility has suffered mightily as video after video has surfaced of him mocking American voters and taxpayers as “too stupid” to understand how tricky the Obama administration is being while selling ObamaCare.

Obama disavowed ever meeting Gruber, or knowing anything about him, despite videos of Obama mentioning Gruber by name as a source of ideas for ObamaCare.  Are any of us surprised at yet more conniving lies from Obama?

Obama intended for ObamaCare to be government-run.  He never intended for you to actually “keep your doctor,” or “keep your healthcare plan,” as he originally promised, or lied for political gain.

Obama has zero credibility, for yet one more reason.

Here in Pennsylvania, Attorney General Kathleen Kane now has hired an attorney to defend her from charges of having purposefully leaked politically sensitive details from a secret grand jury investigation.

This isn’t the first time Kane has had to hire an attorney to represent her.  And she has even hired an attorney to represent her threat to sue the Philadelphia Inquirer for having the guts to report the factual truth about her behavior in the AG’s office.

Kathleen Kane is a catastrophe.  She uses the AG’s office for purely political purposes.  And for her own personal purposes: Refusing to indict or even really investigate PLCB officials who clearly broke the law served her family’s interest in not upsetting the PLCB, with which Kane Trucking has huge warehousing and logistics contracts.  Clearly a conflict-of-interest problem there, but don’t hold your breath waiting for the liberal, partisan Patriot News to write about it.

Just when we thought these folks had been served notice by the taxpayers and voters that their shenanigans aren’t wanted, Obama and Kane just keep on getting defiantly worse and worse.

Who would’ve thought that was possible?

America, you get what you pay for.  If you pay zero to get zero, you end up with zero, you end up with catastrophically bad government officials.

Time for a Muslim Peace Movement, Now

Muslims are not victims*.

However, the victims of Islam are many, and continuing, and today yet another was unveiled.

British peace activist David Haines was beheaded by a Muslim activist on video, which I watched both in horror and in solidarity with him.  David Haines knew what was happening, was absolutely composed, cocked his eyebrow and muttered some inaudible phrase to himself as his chin was lifted and the knife sliced into his neck.

David Haines died on his knees, his hands cuffed behind him, utterly vulnerable, not a threat to anyone.  This is pure sadism.

Whether Muslims will admit it, or not, this sadistic evil violence has become the face of Islam to Westerners.

In the absence of massive Muslim marches supporting Western civilization and individual liberties, one can only conclude that Muslims everywhere agree with this Koranic behavior.

Oh sure, there are some bland Takiya (religiously permitted deception) statements by Muslim infiltrators, but there are zero public demonstrations by reformers who wish to indicate their break with the parts of the Koran that proscribe this exact form of murder and mayhem for non-Muslims.

It is time for a Muslim Peace Movement.  A movement that supports Western civilization, that supports the rights of minorities such as Christians, Yazidis, and Jews, that will re-write the Koran to represent a Western mindset.

It is time.

* The Koran forbids any criticism of Islam or its founder, Muhammad, and yet the Koran is full of hate and vilification of every other religion around the Arabian Peninsula in the year 670 CE. Christians, Jews, and Hindus are specifically called cows, monkeys, pigs, and so on.  If this is not “hate speech,” I don’t know what is. This double standard must end.  You are not a victim if you are victimizing everyone else and they are calling you out on it.

Questions you’re not supposed to ask #2

Does Islam have a peace movement?

Is Iran representative of Islam? If so, the many barbaric, unjust public hanging videos  there that I’ve now watched speak for themselves, and for Islam.