Posts Tagged → YouTube
Book review: Secrets & Science of Primitive Archery
Ryan Gill’s book, The Secrets & Science of Primitive Archery, is a must-have for all stick bow hunters. You cannot find your way in the dark without a light, and this book is the illumination every traditional and self-bow hunter needs. I don’t care how long you have been hunting with your Osage orange self-bow or even a traditional bow by a small maker. If you hunt with something that does not have training wheels, then you need this book.
I must admit that I am almost ashamed it has taken me over a YEAR to review this book. Actually almost two years. Author Ryan Gill deserves much better treatment for all the hard work he put into this book. What can I say, Ryan. America has had a lot of ups and downs since 2021, and for political watchers and commenters like me, practically every day has felt like an all-hands-on-deck. All the political stuff has taken up the blog space. I am sorry, buddy. Hopefully I finally give you and the excellent book your due here.
As a traditional archery hunter since I was about fourteen, I have been enamored of bows made of a simple stick and a string. When us kids made our own bows out of saplings we cut in our woods (fifty years ago…), we would tie on a piece of baling twine and shoot arrows made of tree branches, goldenrod, whatever we could get our hands on, and practice with what we had. As the years went past, some of us were gifted compound bows, and others got simple recurves. I got a recurve, and some pretty sorry secondhand Easton aluminum arrows, to which I attached basic Bear broadheads.
If I had a nickel for every deer I collected hair from, I would have enough to buy a malted milkshake at the Lewisburg Freeze, which was fifty cents way back when, and costs five bucks now. That is to say, I never killed a deer with a bow, but missing didn’t stop me from trying.
Fast forward and I had my own kids, all of whom enjoyed shooting little fiberglass kid bows. When the boy attained the age of about seven, he demanded a “real bow,” and so off to the Eastern Traditional Archery Rendezvous we went. There we located a nice faux curly maple kid recurve with about 20 pounds of pull. Enough to skewer a squirrel or ball up a bunny in the back yard, which the boy kept after. Many years later we would go back to ETAR to get his real Big Boy bow, a reflex-deflex by the Kilted Bowyer. At 43 pounds pull weight at 26 inches, this is a true hunting machine, pretty, yes, but in all the clean simplicity a true bow should have.
But in between the little boy bows and the last big boy bow there were a lot of experiments over the years. Saplings cut, strings attached, arrows made, trials run. Like I did when I was a kid fascinated with the basic but powerful physics of archery. And this is where Ryan Gill’s fascinating book enters the picture.
Ryan Gill came to our attention by his YouTube videos. Because we were naturally looking for information about what we were doing right and doing wrong. Ryan doesn’t just cut saplings, attach a string, and shoot some crappy home made arrows. Au contraire! Ryan makes all kinds of powerful self-bows from all kinds of different woods, including Osage orange, hickory, black locust, and others, that will kill deer, bear, wild hogs, and even huge bison. And then Ryan strings the bows with real animal gut. And then he makes real cane arrows, tipped with real flint and chert heads that he himself knapped. Talking the real deal here. And through it all in his videos and his book, Ryan explains how primitive archery really worked tens of thousands of years ago, and how it can work really well for us today.
I learned a lot from this book.
Because I am a numbers guy, Ryan’s statistical analysis of his different bows, using different strings (animal and plant fiber), using different arrow shafts (river cane, wood) etc, really speaks to me. He does a great job of tabulating his data, which, when all his testing is said and done, tells us exactly where to go: Osage orange bow stave that is dried daily, using either a modern bow string or an animal gut string, and shooting properly made river cane shafts fletched with goose feathers and tipped with the proper and surprisingly small stone arrowhead, that go at least 130 feet per second, with 150 fps or better being the best and most likely to catch an unaware deer standing flat-footed.
If you are at all a traditional or aspiring primitive archery person, you need this book. This is a must-have resource that you will find nowhere else. It has an incredible amount of fascinating and directly applicable how-to information to every step and facet of primitive and traditional archery, as well as the historic and anthropological background to how primitive archery evolved. I read it twice before I felt qualified to write about it here, and I highly recommend it.
DuckDuckNoGo
Like oh, so many Americans seeking digital refuge from the combined forces of tyrannical government partnered with the Big Tech industrial complex, I too began using DuckDuckGo as my primary search engine about three years ago. Before that I had used some other search engine that was not Google, because Google has been overtly evil since 2015.
Evil because Google did not perform as advertised, and in fact it sought to undermine its users.
When a search engine deliberately skews its search results to fit a particular political view or goal, then it is no longer a search engine. It is an information censor, shaper, editor. But it is not a search engine in the sense that we type in some term, hit the ENTER key, and sit back as the most relevant results are presented to us. Nope, that is oh, so 2010, and we are living way beyond that innocent time now.
Enter DuckDuckGo, a high tech response to the outpouring of consumer frustration with Google providing laugh-out-loud fake results like “Hillary Clinton’s awesome fabulous answer to rising crime!” to the search “Hillary Clinton Criminal.” Instead of providing accurate results that would enumerate the many criminal wrongdoings and run-ins and cases of Arkancide associated with Hillary Clinton, Google still to this day provides a list of dodgy and patently false narrative misinformation to actually obfuscate and cover up Hillary Clinton’s long trail of criminal wreckage.
DuckDuckGo presented itself as an alternative to this about-face by what had been the world’s greatest search engine and source of arcana, with the additional promise of hiding user information and providing privacy. It was a great sell, and millions of people flocked to the Duck, happy knowing they were not propping up evil Google and also were getting more accurate information with greater privacy.
I was one of those users, and had DuckDuckGo installed on my smart phone and my laptop. In a small way, it made me feel all renegade and subtle dissenter against Google’s all-knowing, overbearing Big Tech.
About a month ago I noticed search results were suddenly fitting the same kinds of patterns I expect to experience on YouTube, where censors and book burners have been running unabashedly wild for several years. A kind of smooth uniformity and consistency of results that you could one and all fit into a thimble, due to their repetitive and simulacra nature. No more outliers, no weird blogs you’d never heard of before, no more….diversity.
For example, searching a loaded political phrase, term, or name was suddenly giving 100% mainstream media results, that almost all read exactly the same as one another, regardless of the outlet name (MSNBC sounds the same as CNN sounds the same as NPR sounds the same as ABC). This had become both the Google model and more recently the YouTube model, a shameless effort to block your access (my access) to the wide variety of information sources and opinions out there on the Internet, and to instead serve up a particular and purposefully misinformed narrative, related in numbingly same phrases and terms, regardless of the source (NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS… they all sound the same).
I kind of wondered aloud to myself when I encountered this the first few times. And then the bird was let out of the cage the other day by DuckDuckGo’s founder and owner, Gabriel Weinberg. Weinberg published a tweet on Twitter, admitting to having changed the once freedom-embracing DuckDuckGo into Google Junior. No more honest search results. Nope. Instead, in the name of “fighting misinformation” DuckDuckGo would join the rest of the Big Tech lackeys and do whatever evil manipulation and spread whatever misinformation their political masters demand of them.
So now, I am like so many millions of other Internet users, former DuckDuckGo users betrayed by Gabriel Weinberg and the sick, dishonest, woke ideology he serves, searching for a fair and unbiased source of Internet search results. Right now I am using Brave’s search function, because Brave is the browser I use. I suppose that when someone offers the owner of Brave enough money he will sell it and we will be looking once again for a fair and unbiased browser.
Bottom line is I have ditched DuckDuckGo, because I will not participate in its evil lies and deception. It is now DuckDuckNoGo.
Fly away, Duck, and do not come back here. You are a dead duck to me, now.
(And while I am on the subject of individuals in Big Tech who make bizarre decisions that promote the spread of disinformation and false narratives, can I ask what the hell is in the water that Gabriel Weinberg (DuckDuckGo), Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Serge Brin (Google), and a zillion other Big Tech Jewish guys drink? Do they all drink the same poisoned water, together? Why is it that we have no Jewish radicals in Big Tech? Like, why are there no pro-freedom, anti-censorship, pro-democracy, anti Big Government, pro-individual rights Jewish people running these Big Tech companies? Instead, it seems like every. single. one. of these guys thinks exactly the same, and it is a horribly shitty sameness they push. I ask this earnestly, because I am a male version of Pippy Longstocking, and my intentions cannot be ascribed to evil. Raised in the wilds of America with a pack of howling malamutes, with few social distancing norms to guide my thoughts or my mouth, I am asking this question honestly. For a friend. For my wife. For my kids. Hey Serge, Gabe, Mark…what the f*ck is wrong with you?)
UPDATE: Today, March 14, 2022 DuckDuckGo is running ads on WHP580 AM radio. Never heard a search engine run ads before, anywhere, but the immediate and deserved ass-kicking that DuckDuckGo must be taking to inspire the company to purchase these ads is probably magnificent.
Wise words for 2022
One of the positive results of Demedia overreach, lies, dumbing down of “science,” and overt propaganda is the wisening up of Americans. People are catching on to the lies, and they are becoming upset regardless of their political party registration.
Political party used to define many Americans’ identity, and when the political parties once stood for dramatically different ideas and values, that made sense. But today, so many Americans see right through the propaganda emanating from one political party, the current White House, that is aided and abetted by the other political party, and spread by the Demedia. Individuals are hurt by official misinformation and propaganda regardless of what their party registration is, or was. People of all political inclinations want the freedom to choose their health, and to have their health choices be private.
Although YouTube, Google, Fakebook and Snapchat and so many other social media sites have done their best to stomp out debate and dissent about covid, The People are fighting back. If you are interested in seeing what political dissent scratched on a bathroom wall looks like, go to any of the Demedia outlets promoted on YouTube: CNN(LOL), NBC, CBS, MSNBC, NPR, PBS, ABC etc and click on one of their covid videos. Look at the comments below, and marvel at how the wisdom of The People greatly outweighs and outshines that of fraudulent “experts” like Dr. Mengele Fauci. It shows how politicized science is not really science at all; it is just politics, and everyday people know it. They are not fooled.
While it’s a sad truth that YouTube recently removed the “Dislike” button count because The People greatly downvote the Demedia state propaganda, another battle wages right beneath the headline surface. The comments submitted by random, average, everyday people from around America and around the world often take down and pop the leftist propaganda with just a few wise words.
Below are some comments I copied from several Demedia propaganda videos about covid. These are wise words to begin our new year 2022 with, and hopefully the sentiment in these everyday commonsense comments spreads far and wide among general populations. Freedom and liberty depend upon this happening.
America just experienced an insurrection, not an election
With all of last week’s midnight ballot dumping, deliberate vote miscounts, and voting software “glitches” relentlessly coming to light, we are faced with the fact that America did not have an election last week. Rather, we experienced a massive nation-wide vote fraud scheme aimed at literally taking over the American government under the guise of having an election.
This is not an election, it is an illegal insurrection against the laws, people, and sitting government of America.
Last Tuesday’s election was not open, it was not fair, it was not legal. The more people dig, the more fraud is found. A fraudulent election is not a legal election, and an election that is not legal does not count.
One of the most incredible things ever in American electoral history happened this year. Both the national media (Big Media) and the Silicone Valley technological and social media firms like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube (Big Tech) have waged an open war against transparency and information flow. The blatant de-platforming of people, censorship, and blocking of certain information by Big Media and Big Tech is nothing other than partisan electioneering on behalf of one political party and one candidate, the Democrat Party and Joe Biden.
The media is entitled to First Amendment protections when they act as the media. But when the media becomes an active and aggressive participant in the effort to elect one person and to protect one political party, then the media is no longer the media. It has become a political antagonist, a partisan actor, whose actions are regulated just like every other political donor. The undeclared, unregulated in-kind donation value to the Democrat Party and the Biden Campaign of Big Media and Big Tech must be in the billions of dollars. This is hugely illegal and hugely criminal.
Big Media and Big Tech are right now waging what can only be called an all-out war against the flow of information that shows voting fraud and that casts material doubt on their collective claim that Joe Biden won last week’s campaign. In every way possible, Big Tech and Big Media are de-platforming, hiding, shadow-banning, and suppressing people and information that runs contrary to their attempt to coronate Joe Biden as the inevitable winner of last week’s election. Nothing about this effort is honest, or fair, or careful. When a US Postal Service worker files an affidavit about what he has seen with his own eyes and heard with his own ears, Big Media and Big Tech immediately attack his character and also spread the lie that he recanted his affidavit.
CNN’s Jake Tapper has gone so far as to begin to threaten the livelihood and career of every single person who has served in the Trump Administration, by personally identifying them and broadcasting their home address and other personal information, for the express purpose of having other people attack them physically.
Do you, dear reader, believe that this is the legal function of the media? To serve as an information hub to direct a physical and legal and personal war against American citizens who are otherwise lawfully engaged in their jobs and careers?
Folks, we are witnessing an illegal attempted takeover of the United States government through a fraudulent election by one political party and its allies in media and technology firms. They are trying to physically intimidate everyone who stands in their way. We are right now way far away from any kind of election at this point, and we are now seeing a substantive effort to take over the government and to eliminate all opposition, all people, who disagree with it. This is a war effort, not a debate about policy or even legalities.
When people stop using words, they reach for their swords, and at this point Big Media, Big Tech, and the Democrat Party are aggressively eliminating the opportunity for using words to resolve this conflict. Words they oppose are censored out of the public square. They are trying to crush all resistance to their control of everything in America. This is an insurrection, which is illegal under existing American law.
The existing Insurrection Act allows the sitting, lawfully elected president of the United States, to quell this warfare before it becomes bloody battles in the streets of America. Mister President, I encourage you to invoke the Insurrection Act and bring stability to America, end this illegal mutiny against the sitting government, and bring calm and honesty to the effort to count all LEGAL votes that were cast in last week’s election.
America is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people, and just because some other people decide they will commit a crime and then crush all dissent and transparency with an iron fist does not make them legitimate. Their behavior makes them mutineers, insurrectionists, traitors.
Save our Republic, Mister President, or say goodbye forever to the free America that existed as of just a few days ago.
Note*: For readers who think I am either totally nuts, or partisan (ha ha that would be funny), or mislead, or confused, or emotional, or any other number of possible causes for this post, you are encouraged to step outside the mainstream media box in which you are probably getting your information. Go to the Epoch Times and see what they have to say about the election fraud and questions we are living with right now.
Illegal billions: Big tech & national media’s undeclared in-kind political donations
For twelve years at least, billions of dollars worth of undeclared in-kind political contributions to just one political party have been made by the Big Tech companies and our national media.
Owners and staff at Google, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and all of the national media (NBC, CBS, ABC, NPR, PBS, MSNBC, the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, the Patriot News and Capital Star here in Harrisburg, etc.) have gone out of their way to treat one group of people one way, and another group of people a totally different way.
Big Tech and the media go so far as to report only good things, even fake good things, and not report the negative things, about one group. Yet Big Tech and the media only report negative things, especially fake negative things, about the other group, and never report the good things. This artificial treatment of the two groups has had a hugely disproportionate effect on the flow of information to American voters, and, therefore, a hugely disproportionate effect on election outcomes.
Who are the two groups who receive such different treatment at the hands of Big Tech and the national media?
Why, they are Democrats/ liberals/ anarchists/ socialists on the one hand, the favored fair-haired child, and then Republicans/ conservatives/ patriots/ constitutionalists on the other hand, the hated red-headed stepchild. Because the treatments these groups receive are so totally over the top different from one another, you could almost swear that Big Tech and the national media are owned and run only by Democrats and liberals, to the point where they are acting like they are part-and-parcel of Democrat political campaigns.
Today, the Republican National Committee FINALLY filed a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission about Twitter’s obviously one-sided effort to suppress damning information and news articles about the Biden Crime Family. I say finally, because this issue has been out there in the wide open for many years, and the GOPe never acted on it. It is hard to believe that it took this long for someone to file a complaint, when for years people like me, and much higher profile than I, have documented the unfair one-sided treatment conservatives and Republicans have received from Big Tech and the national media. For my own part, posts on the Josh First Facebook page were mostly shadow banned, and my paid political campaign ads had dubious reach, which appeared to be fraud by Facebook. They took my money, and then launched weak ad campaigns into which I had limited views. Facebook has been doing the same thing to the Donald Trump campaign, too, by the way. Activist Laura Loomer, now a candidate for Congress, has been completely de-platformed from all of these services, without any explanation why. But her political opponent, communista yehudia Lois Frankel, enjoys all the benefits of Facebook etc
It is just not fair. And it is not legal.
All of these one-sided activities by Big Tech and the national media amount to an enormous undeclared political campaign contribution effort that by the simple reading of the statute is blatantly illegal.
During the Obama administration, conservative political activist Dinesh D’Souza was sent to prison for a long time for giving someone money to make political contributions with. About twenty thousand bucks total, if I recall right. Here we have Big Tech and the national media donating billions of dollars worth of free political advertising and political information suppression to the Democrat Party, without ever disclosing it. If D’Souza went to jail for a couple years, then how many decades in jail do Facebook’s Zuckerberg, Twitter’s Dorsey, Google’s Brin, and so on for the many other Big Tech owners and content managers, now face?
All of the Big Tech and national media owners and managers deserve to pay huge fines and go to jail for long times.
I have written about this before, and it is worth it to write about it again. That is because America’s election rules and laws are supposed to apply to everyone equally. No one person or group in America is supposed to receive special treatment, the way Democrats and liberal socialist anarchists do when it comes to our election laws and campaign contributions. That kind of special treatment up-ends the rule of law on which America is based. One rule is supposed to apply to us all equally.
So, if Hillary Clinton is finally going to face the music for her wild crime spree, then the Big Tech and national media activists and political donors, should too.
Lock them all up. They earned it all.
YouTube II: What I like
For those who might have misunderstand the last post, I do like YouTube, and below are just a few examples of what I like about that site to prove it.
Why do I visit YouTube? For one, I like to learn new things, gain technical information, find ways to do things that I regularly do and yet struggle with, like professional-level chainsaw maintenance. Then there’s the endless entertainment – humor, music, and especially the unintentionally funny videos where people representing themselves as experts instead prove the complete opposite.
First, we begin with down home redneck humor and part 2
Next up: seems like every week there’s a new political analyst from South Succotash USA who is light years better than all the tarted up partisan political activists in mainstream media. Here is Matt Christensen analyzing people casually calling for government-led civilian gun confiscation , and here is Laurel commenting along with liberal professors discussing a possible civil war , and finally the brave and actual for real news reporter Laura Loomer
Probably the best outdoor channel, Leatherwood Outdoors; here John is hunting edible mushrooms
Incredible instinctive bow hunter and spearer of grizzly bears Tim Wells
Funny black guy Terrence Williams talking about how he is not moving to Africa and how American blacks hurt American blacks
Serious black guy Malcolm X, speaking about how white liberals destroy American blacks
Somehow YouTube presented this guy to me as suggested viewing, and my first impression of his “intense face” was that he was a maniac. Which of course I had to see for myself. Turns out he is one of the people who makes a living off of his YouTube videos, and he is in fact interesting and knowledegable. We present “Wranglerstar”
RCBS reloading because every patriot should know how to reload ammunition
Assorted music: la femme d’argent by Air Safari, and Itshak Perlman playing Mendelssohn
For those who remember what it was like once (before people showed up literally everywhere all the time on planet Earth) to drive on a country road and actually find a quiet spot where you could…without being interrupted, a song about the joys of that by Jason Aldean
And of course Blake Shelton’s Kiss my Country Ass, just because if they are at all curious, big government control folks like those listed above ought to know how a lot of us really feel about their anti freedom policies
Rimsky Korsakov Schehezerade, which can only ever be the 1969 recording by the official USSR symphony orchestra, whose world-class members played out of both genuine love and understanding of great music and out of great fear of official punishment for perceived failure.
And finally, My Pretty Pony just to throw that monkey wrench into your digital profile, especially if you watch country music and reloading videos and you want to at least appear eccentric to the digital watchers.
And no, this is not a complete list by a long shot, so don’t think you are profiling me at all by looking at this. Heck, it could all be fake just to make people think I think a certain way, when I don’t actually…
Everything I know I learned from YouTube
YouTube is way beyond me, but what little I do know about it has shaped my life.
Every day people are vying for upvotes and clicks on YouTube, posting everything from my favorite “Idiots with Chainsaws and More Epic Tree Fails” to biting the heads off of chickens and the ubiquitous smart pet tricks. Guys (it is always guys) post all kinds of wildly incorrect videos about reloading and shooting old guns, and of course they are disinterested in helpful (knowledgeable) comments aimed at keeping all their fingers and eyeballs. They are, after all, posting on YouTube; therefore, goes their thinking, they are automatically experts at what they are posting about.
YouTube sensations might be a flash in the pan, a momentary glamor shot, or they might become an overnight millionaire. While I still do not understand how that works, my children assure me it actually happens. And then, my kids gleefully tell me, the overnight millionaires become dogfood as some perceived slight they are said to have committed is mob-magnified into the worst thing since Hitler, and then back down they go into the seething pit of unknowns…
Me, I am just a super unsophisticated user of YouTube. Listening to Mozart and Beethoven on endless play loops is probably my biggest utilization of the site, followed by leaving “My Pretty Pony” series on auto-play for hours while I am working or doing chores, just to throw monkey wrenches into the digital portfolio being built around my online habits and preferences.
But then there is the creeping recognition that just about every chore I do these days is prefaced with a visit to YouTube, just to find out the best way to screw in a light bulb, or to rake Fall leaves, paint our basement walls, or to do some other small thing that in the dinosaur days we just figured out ourselves through small trials and error, or we called Dad and asked how he did it.
Now, because I have come to rely on it so much, I walk around daily with a head full of YouTube, even if I am not necessarily spending much time on the site itself. Could I even live without it?
This reliance on YouTube has spawned all kinds of urban myth jokes, usually self-directed by surgeons, dentists, and car mechanics, who all begin their work on your open heart surgery by saying “Don’t worry, I learned to do this by watching a video on YouTube,” and then their big toothy smile is the last thing you see as your brain succumbs to the anesthetic.
And your last thought is “I’ll bet she did use YouTube!” for the simple reason that all of us have become YouTube junkies for even the mundane things we do. To the point where just about everything that is in the front of my brain, that is, the frontburner of my life, has YouTube images floating all about them. It seems that everything I know I learned from YouTube.
And it does not help balance things out, you know, leaven out the evolutionary YouTube gene, that when the tractor tire went flat, I reflexively turned to YouTube for help on how to re-inflate it. Yes, videos show you how you can use an overabundance of lighter fluid to inflate the tire back onto the rim. Lots of videos about this, with varying levels of success, that usually being inversely proportional to the level of entertainment. Because, while trying that lighter fluid thing, you might also accidentally and very explosively send the steel rim flying across the barn and out through the wall into the woods, too. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, because even if you fail to inflate the tire onto the rim and send it sailing into the next county, if you are smart and you filmed the resulting fiery disaster, you still have a cool YouTube video that will get you lots of clicks. That’s your fallback plan with the lighter fluid.
About the tractor tire: I opted for the sedate old guy’s video that showed how to use trailer ratchet straps to squish the tire onto the rim. After applying a lot of used motor oil to the tire bead, which helped slide the tire up, I did what the guy did on his video with ratchet straps. And I’ll be damned, when I turned on the compressor and injected air into the tire, it fully inflated then and has stayed inflated for months.
No, I did not film my own attempts to re-inflate the tire using the ratchet straps, and that is because the truth is I just don’t really know much about YouTube. I am there for the music, which come to think about it actually sounds like a never-ending cacophony symphony.
The civic benefits of Biden’s war on America
The comments section of just about any article or online discussion video has a surprisingly large number of insightful comments. YouTube has become heavily censorious, so the usefulness of their comments sections are diminishing, but consequently the comments over at Rumble are improving.
Below is one mid-June 2022 comment on a Dan Bongino video that really caught my attention, and while this blog here is intended for original analysis and commentary, it is also a platform for sharing ideas that others may find helpful. Especially as rule-of-law America is under all-out lawless assault by the federal government bureaucrats. So read the comment by “Bullwinkle” who I suppose is of the Bull Moose Party, Theodore Roosevelt’s response to being unable to run for a third term as a successful and popular Republican president. That is a political party I can relate to!