Dogs vs. Drones in hunting recovery, part 1
If you hunt, you are going to end up tracking at some point.
Like it or not, even fatally hit deer, bear, especially elk, sheep, and other wild game animals can and often do run before they expire. Every single deer that I have shot through the heart has run at least 100 yards, sometimes two hundred, despite being mortally hit and having zero chance of recovering. Shot through the heart, a mammal is kaput, done for, 86ed, iced and dead. Nonetheless, all can run while the hydraulic fluid exits.
And the same holds true for animals hit through both lungs with an arrow, a shotgun slug, a bullet, a spear blade, or a round ball from a historic muzzleloader: All game animals can run, many will run, even while they are mortally hit and dying even more with each bound or step.
So, tracking hit game animals is as important a skill as is shooting them accurately with whatever your weapon of choice. Yes, deer often fall over and expire after being hit once, and that’s great if it happens for you. But for a lot of hunters, it just does not happen that way, and the critter runs a bit.
Depending upon the topography and ground cover of your happy hunting ground, your tracking job might be easy or it might be hard. Depending upon your tracking experience, your hunger pangs, your patience, your tiredness, and the amount of ground cover you have to fight your way through, this tracking job might be even harder.
When tracking gets hard to do, we hunters have four options: Call buddies to help us do a checkerboard search, use a buddy’s hunting dog to try to sniff out the hit animal, which rarely works in my experience, three use a drone with experienced operator, or four, bring in a dedicated tracking dog and handler.
Option one, hunting buddies, is the most common way to track down a hit animal. And it is generally successful. Most people just call in whoever is hunting with them, or whoever they know who is closest, and together they start on the expected path of the critter. Many hands make short work, and regardless of whether it is a night time recovery with headlamps or a brutal daytime slog busting through thorny brush, the more people a hunter has helping, the faster and better likelihood of success.
Option two, any dog, or even a “hunting” dog, almost never works. Yes, dogs can smell way better than us humans, but so what does that matter when the dog is excitedly sniffing and chasing every wild animal track it encounters? I recall using my friend’s duck dog to try to track down a gobbler whose head my Remington 870 had literally severed from its body. The headless beast ran unerringly straight across the field to the worst tangle of brambles, deadfalls, timber tops, regenerating forest, and Asian bittersweet on planet Earth, and then took wing. I have had some real bad luck with doorknob-dead turkeys running and flying away, but this one was the craziest example.
I drove to my friend’s house, got his dog Ori (my friend was at work), and drove back to the scene of first contact. Neck feathers and blood were all around where the load of #5s had separated the head from the body, and indeed, Ori started out strong there. She followed the running scent track into the jungle, and went into creep mode. Looked very promising. We stopped at a couple trees along our way, where she looked up the tree expectedly. I looked up too, because hey, I was just the puny human here among mystical animals with superhuman powers. I was just following directions.
Despite following a flight pattern, which has no scent that I can imagine, Ori took me on a pretty straight line through that jungle mess, that in fact directionally tracked with how the bird had run across the field. And also to her credit, at one tree blood and feathers showed where the turkey had crashed into the trunk. How she found that, I can’t imagine. At another tree, Ori found where the headless bird had lain or fallen at the base. I thought surely by now this bird is lying dead right around here. But the certainly dead turkey was nowhere to be found. Gone, vamoosed, vanished.
Another time, we used the purported “hunting” dog of the man whose son had hit a doe right before closing time. Scene of the hit was easy to see, and the initial tracking was easy. We hung bits of tissue paper along the blood trail and followed what projected as a straight death run.
Dark fell upon us, but blood was everywhere, the path seemed self evident, the deer was obviously hard hit, and our feeble head lamps gave us the impression that we could see. But no luck. The dog was then got from home and brought in. He started out on the actual blood trail, but then started going off in wide tangents. We quit at midnight, shaking our heads. When we returned the next morning, that damned dead doe was lying a few feet away from where several of us searchers, AND THAT DAMNED DOG, had walked many times the night before. It just blended in with the forest floor, and the dog’s nose never picked it up.
So, don’t waste your time with option two, a dog not trained to track wounded game, unless you enjoy telling hunting stories of woe and frustration.
Part Two on Dogs vs Drones coming up soon.
The drowning men of Europe
Most of Europe is drowning.
Drowning in debt they cannot afford, drowning in socialist economics like climate alarmism, drowning in power-mad authoritarianism that backwardly pits governments against the citizenry, drowning in cultural dissolution from uncontrolled mass migration by foreign people from failed nations who have zero interest in becoming European, but who simply want whatever quality of life goodies Europe can offer them for free.
Everyone around the world is watching this slow motion train wreck happen, and the worse it gets, the more the drowning governments refuse to change their policies to save themselves. This is the price of worshiping power and holding onto it at all costs. Drowning is the eventual cost.
Only a handful of European countries have resisted this drowning, namely Poland, Hungary, Russia. Border enforcement is the first and best method to ensure that Poland, Hungary, Russia remain themselves, and control their expenditures and streets. Russia obviously is a separate subject due to its invasion of Ukraine, but the fact is, Russia is still Russian, one of the greatest cultures in world history, in terms of art, literature, music, dance. There are no bongo drums at the Bolshei, yet, nor likely ever.
Spain, Ireland, England, and Germany are especially fraught, the water lapping at their lips, with their native citizens starting to engage in open street warfare with the invaders. But these same governments have strangely taken the side of the invaders, who do not pay taxes, commit endless violence, and are an unbearable financial burden. Censorship and repression of the native citizens for merely speaking about the lawless invasion is now common policy, so the governments can artificially, not legitimately, hold onto power. Everyone can see that confrontations between fed-up, repressed citizens and their corrupt governments are inevitable. And yet, the repression only tightens.
Governments in Germany, Spain, Britain, and France, especially, seem to be laser focused on Must…Hold…On…To… Power. At any cost. And so they continue to drown, going under from the weight of their increasing mistakes.
What do drowning people do, but grab onto anything or anybody around to keep from going under for the last time. A drowning person will pull down every rescuer with them, due to mindless panic and a primitive attempt at self preservation.
When I was young, I was a Water Safety Instructor. WSIs taught Red Cross lifesaving, and we certified lifeguards. I signed only those Red Cross lifeguard certification cards that I believed were truly earned. At any waterfront or pool, we WSIs were automatically the senior pro in charge, and I conducted many drills to prepare and train active duty lifeguards at many different lakes, pools, and beach fronts.
And I did rescue drowning people, many. Almost every time the drowning person would scratch me, claw at me, try to stand on me, in an attempt to climb on top of me so their lungs could reach the air. It is a dangerous moment trying to rescue a drowning person. Both the swimmer and the life saver can go down together, locked in a fatal embrace driven by panic.
The drowning men of Europe are doing the same thing right now as does a dying swimmer. They are all wildly splashing away at their own people, while trying to find something, anything, anyone, to prop themselves up onto. Here are some of the public policies the drowning men of Europe are doing that will in fact only hasten their death:
A) More unlimited mass migration, censoring and even jailing critics
B) More climate alarmism nonsense, censoring and even jailing critics
C) Siding with Islamic jihadis, the worst enemies of Western democracy, and thus pledging to “recognize” a new state of “palestine” in boundaries no one knows, under undefined conditions, with inevitably violent results. France, Britain, Spain, Ireland, and Germany are the leading proponents of rewarding jihadi terrorism by giving it another official place to call home. Just like they did with the new jihadi rulers of Syria.
That this new country would be created in the middle of an active war zone, not after the conclusion of a war as has been done in the past, does not daunt these drowning men. That it would be run by the avowed opponents of everything the drowning men used to stand on, does not daunt them. They are simply willing to sacrifice Israel and Middle East peace if it just buys them a few more minutes of life above the water closing over their heads.
I think Americans are going to end up riding in and saving Europe a third time, because the inevitable results of all of these self destructive policies by the drowning men is going to be that Europe goes under. And when Europe goes fully under water, all hell will break loose between the native Europeans and their would-be replacement invaders.
America is not going to stand by and let nuclear-armed England, France, and Germany become run by jihadis. Just ain’t gonna happen. We didn’t let Hitler drown Europe, and we sure won’t let the Mega Hitler jihadis do it, either.
Proving once again that Europe was always the rough prototype, and that America was the perfected implement, God’s gift to humankind.
A Day for Mourning…Doves
Satiricist + pianist + comedian-ist + mathematician-ist + Harvard-ist from a long distant past when a degree from racist + fakist + indoctrinationist Harvard used to mean something Tom Lehrer died the other day. He was 97 years old, and apparently laughing and humor were good for him, gave him longevity. Or maybe long life was due to him not having kids. Or being married…
Tom Lehrer’s silly music was a fixture on a radio show I was fixated on as a kid, from age nine to probably nineteen, called the Doctor Demento Show. This very silly, often demented, and highly entertaining show was the audio version of Mad Magazine, also a fixture of my mis-spent youth. My youth happened at a time when kids did actually read things to entertain ourselves. There were no videos, no constant and endless television shows, or, the horror, mind-evaporating video games. Mad Magazine was low brow humor, and forcefully informed two generations of American boys about the man-eating birds, killer bees, and fake female breasts available for only ninety-nine cents.
Aside from being chock full of hilarious and acidly cruel parody, long before Hollywooders started taking themselves seriously, Mad Magazine also had ads for mail order “variety” stores. For a pittance, these stores would sell kids fake vomit that was sure to make your mom jump sky high when strategically placed on her mother’s Persian rug. Also sold were palm buzzers, whoopie cushions sure to embarrass your mother’s friends over for tea, and toothpicks soaked in nitroglycerin.
Toothpicks soaked in nitroglycerin, you ask?
Yes, America was once such a cool and free country that little kids could buy through the mail from demented strangers things soaked in genuine high explosive in order to terrorize family pets and grandpas smoking their pipes or cigars. These explosive toothpick slivers came in an innocuous, small, round steel tin, and their gist was for demented youngsters to slip one into the end of a cigarette, cigar, or the stem of grandpa’s pipe, and then sit back and mock the unfortunate recipient of the inevitable explosion. Just the touch of a match or lighter flame was needed to set them off. They were truly explosive.
For one summer I did indeed use these things against my dad and my Papa Morris, to my great mirth and to their unforgiving unhappiness. But I also received my just punishment one day as I was running around in our yard, as mindless summer-minded boys used to do, and damned if the mere friction of my leg movement did not set off that whole tin of explosive toothpicks in my pocket. The loud report sounded like a gunshot, and the immediate pain was real. So I dropped to the ground, yelling “I’m hit, I’m hit!”
Not until I realized not another soul was anywhere near me or our home or our twenty-five acres surrounded by unbroken farmland and forest did I begin to explore the perfectly round hole in my pants. I had not received friendly fire from a neighbor kid, nor had my dad finally tried to take me out. So the cause had to be closer to home, like what the hell was I carrying in my pocket.
My thigh skin was badly bruised, already discolored and puffed up from the injury. And then I found it, the bottom half of the steel tin. Lodged halfway through the fabric in the pocket of my dungarees, it had been driven with great force against my body. Its lid had also been blown off with great force, through the fabric of my dungarees, and was lying somewhere out on our “lawn” as war shrapnel.
For decades I kept that little tin bottom in a small cedar box where I kept other childhood keepsakes, like old stone Indian arrowheads and beads I found in the tilled fields around our home. This little round piece of non-descript light-blue metal symbolized to me all that a boyhood in America used to be or could be: Free, foolish, exploratory, mischievous, silly, dumb, and filled with painful and sometimes near-death learning experiences. In a word, awesome.
Poor kids today have no idea how much fun we kids of yesteryear had. Yes, we had the Doctor Demento radio show, Tom Lehrer songs, and the scandalously mature kid reading material, Mad Magazine. But we also had access to small amounts of explosives, and dirt bikes, and often firearms. And whatever we did that did not permanently maim or kill us made us stronger and more interested in chemistry than any kind of textbook or classroom experiment could achieve. (I once blew off my eyebrows and eyelashes, the huge fireball also leaving my face an unnatural and alarming red color. Upon arriving at home late for dinner, my mother merely tossed my plate of food in front of me, wordless and by then immune to frighteneing answers and smart enough to no longer ask what the hell happened to you).
So, back to Mad Magazine, its crazy ads, and the related Doctor Demento Show, described on complete bullsh*t weakipedia as “Barret Eugene Hansen (born April 2, 1941),[1] also known professionally as Dr. Demento, is an American radio broadcaster and record collector specializing in novelty songs, comedy, and unusual recordings from the dawn of the phonograph to present. Hansen created the Demento persona in 1970 while working at KPPC-FM in Pasadena, California.”
From 1971 until, yes, college, I listened to the Doctor Demento Show. As a kid this was done quietly at night with the crusty old 1960s radio in my bedroom, after my parents had declared “lights out.” In high school, I listened to the radio show along with one or two other misfits also disinclined to be serious about homework. We sat there in silence, occasionally laughing hysterically. In college, I was joined by even more misfits, but by then we also had beer, hard alcohol, and would sing along together to our favorite silly songs spun by Doctor Demento.
Songs like Fish Heads, and of course every single song by Tom Lehrer.
Tom Lehrer’s songs were a mainstay of every Doctor Demento show, and sometimes his funny lyrics were woven into a Mad Magazine article. Adults found his song about pollution poignant and timely, as everyone knew by then that just about every summer the Cuyahoga River would actually catch on fire because of the wild amounts of combustible pollution dumped into it by unchecked industry (note to today’s young people: Water is not supposed to burn). Whereas urbanites, already surrounded by pollution, warped by it, dying early from it, creating it, and imagining themselves immune to it, were much more entertained by Lehrer’s song Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.
Because who the hell doesn’t hate urban pigeons?
Tom Lehrer, comedian, humorist, satiricist, and core of the beloved Doctor Dementow Show
My Eighth Grade school portrait, alarmingly alike to Mad Magazine’s Alfred E. Neumann, of What, Me Worry? fame.
Trump & Obama weird symmetries
Watching this strange symmetry unfold, again, where Barack Hussein Obama and his senior law enforcement and national security staff illegally concocted a hoax about Donald Trump and Russia in 2017, and where these same people, including Obama, have now been referred to the DOJ for criminal prosecution, because no one is above the law …. but, liberals tell me, this holding big name law breakers accountable “is just as wrong as what they did to Trump.”
This morally relativistic approach to the rule of law, which is really no approach at all, is repeated by US senator Adam Schiff and NY AG Letitia James, both of whom apparently committed mortgage fraud. Both James and Schiff say that them being prosecuted for breaking the law is just political warfare, the exact UNFAIR lawfare they themselves inflicted on President Trump.
Somehow this shallow claim and admission of their own former wrongdoing supposedly exonerates their actual lawbreaking. And for partisan Democrats, it is sufficient. People operating in sound bites don’t need anything more than sound bites.
As I was just told by a liberal who expressed his own opinion to me in person, “… but I don’t want to talk about it.” Apparently my own opinion was not desired
Looks less like what liberals want, and more like liberals can’t talk about politics with people who differ with them, because liberals are unable to engage in the critical thinking and analysis that is the core of any debate. If it is not gently spoon-fed, and concurred with, all liberal systems shut down and go into the fetal position.
And so, the same people who said nothing about the endless lawless lawfare attacks on Trump are now saying, in effect, “Some people are in fact above the law.”
In the past, Republicans melted at the first hint of liberal resistance. Republicans would say “It’s not worth fighting about. We will get them next time. We can’t have these fights getting in the way of getting things done in Washington,” and other similar spineless cop-outs.
However, there is a rage among the GOP base at the endless Democrat lawlessness and the endless lack of accountability for it. That rage is forcing the GOPe to at least make noises about holding liberal law breakers accountable. It is possible that the old asymmetry that for fifty years has marked the difference between Democrat and Republican accountability is about to break, and boomerang back onto the Democrats’ favorite sound bite, “No one is above the law.”
If the DOJ does bring charges against Comey, Clapper, Brennan, McCabe, Obama, Stzrok, Schiff, and James et al, it will mark a turn for the better, where parity, symmetry, and the rule of law are actually equally applied to all Americans. If America is about anything, it is about the equal application of the law to all of us. No one is above the law.
Re NPR & PBS
Looking like far-left wing opposition research and partisan propaganda outlets NPR, PBS, and CPB are finally going to stop having American taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars supporting them. Good! I mean, why not give taxpayer money to the National Rifle Association, too? The NRA has been around since 1857, making it America’s oldest civil rights organization. The NRA certainly qualifies for getting lots of American taxpayer money, if NPR and PBS do.
Fact is, the entire world has changed since the 1970s, and public funding of radio and television programs goes back decades before that. By the time of Sesame Street and its band of cute fuzzy monsters talking about racial harmony, correct English spelling, and counting numbers correctly, the tide of technology was already turning in other directions. More TV and radio channels were becoming available every year. By the 1990s, the Internet was born, access to all sorts of programming and information became 24/7, and NPR, PBS, and CPB had gone hard left and become fully an arm of just one political party (not the GOP).
The marketplace of ideas and information had changed as radically as the industrial revolution had changed hand labor and home crafts, demand for government funded programming had greatly diminished, and yet NPR, PBS, and CPB were fully addicted to big wads of free taxpayer money. They insisted they were still relevant, and also wanted to be independent of taxpayers, but still getting our money. Which seems like a strange asymmetry. Usually if you get money from someone, you are accountable to them.
Now, bills are passing in Congress to withdraw all taxpayer money from NPR, PBS, and CPB, and it appears this will actually come to pass. This is a just and good outcome. However, we cannot forget the intellectual property of NPR, PBS, and CPB that was also created with public funding. Things like trademarks, logos, copyrights are all intellectual property that belongs to We, The People American citizens.
It is not as if NPR, PBS and CPB can get scads of private cash and continue on with their far left attacks on American culture and politics. No. They will have to relinquish the use of all of their identifying logos and trademarks. They have no claim on this public property. Oh, NPR can go ahead and do it is whatever they want to do, but they are going to have to come up with new names and new logos. It’s not my problem if they are undistinguished and unidentifiable in the marketplace.
It is almost as if they really did need that public funding after all, despite telling Americans for the past thirty years that our tax money was only a small amount of their overall budget. I think they were most aware that removing the public money also meant removing all of the other public taxpayer investments made there over the years, too.
It is almost as if without all the taxpayer money, NPR and PBS will really in effect cease to exist…Welp, too bad, NPR. So long Screwy, see ya in Saint Louie!
Sorry, that won’t work either, because that’s a Looney Tunes Bugs Bunny line, already taken, and you NPR people are going to have to use something else. Good luck, don’t take a wrong turn at Albequerque!
Frank Biddle, I will miss you old friend
I have attained the age where all of my cohort seem to be skating on ever thinner ice every day. Anything, it seems, can jump the hell up and surprise grab you like a big Nile crocodile, and you have so litle time to react, to know what is happening before the curtain closes as the beast drags you down.
Cancer, heart attacks, car accidents, falling off cliffs (for real), and my own litany of self-inflicted near-fatal accidents while working or recreating in the remote mountains. It just seems that the odds at our age are ever more stacked against us. Which sends the message that we must live every day, every minute, with purpose and enjoyment. Take nothing for granted, leave nothing on the table. Give life and your friends and family everything you have, withhold no love, leave no bridge unmended. Even if we live to a ripe old age, it all flies by anyhow. So, make every day count.
Recently one of my high school + college friends died of something avoidable. GERD or gastric reflux disease is sometimes detected, sometimes silent, and always fatal if left to its own purpose of silently gnawing away at your esophagus or tongue. Eventually, the acid etching creates the conditions where cancer starts. My friend Frank was unable to get in-person medical care in 2020-2021, because of Covid. Doctors could not diagnose him from internet video calls, and so the cancer spread unbeknownst to anyone. By the time he was able to see a doctor in person and get hands-on care, it was too late. It was throughout his body. He died two weeks ago, peacefully, surrounded by his family. This should not have happened.
Frank was one of the most wonderful people I have had the pleasure of knowing. He had an honest charisma from his joie de vive that served him well in business. Handsome as the day is long, to paraphrase one of his own quips, Frank married well, raised two fine young men, and ran a successful business. He worked hard, played hard, was a model citizen, lived a life most Americans aspire to. Frank had more positive character traits that I wish I had than I can list here.
His obituary is here. I cannot attend the memorial service, but an old friend is reading my farewell to Frank. It is for the best, because left to my own time frame and guided by my horrible sorrow, I would regale gathered mourners with endless tales of hilarity, adventure, and friendship starting from from almost five decades ago. Frank and I covered a lot of territory together at the time of your life when you are developing most. After high school, we decided to go to college together because it was close to our central PA home turf and had a good wrestling team. We never stopped being friends, though we ended up living on opposite coasts and mostly staying in touch by text and phone calls.
I have had a few regrets in my life, and not spending more time with Frank is the newest and acutest. People, make time for your friends and family, no matter what. And if you can’t be with them in person, always remind them you love them.
Godspeed on your spirit journey, old friend. You have taken a piece of me along with you.
Frank in a 1960s Ford Bronco with “Bernard” in 1982
Show us the Epstein files, dammit
Jeffrey Epstein is known to be a convicted pedophile, at least. He had a private plane and a private island in the Caribbean, where illegal and horrible things happened to young women. How he afforded his wealthy high flying child molesting lifestyle is a mystery. No one knows where he got all his money.
Somehow, mysteriously, high school drop-out Epstein got all wound up with all kinds of high flying socialites and politicians, the wealthy “elites” who run the biggest companies and American politics. Why these elite people kept company with a creepy child trafficker is a black hole that a lot of Americans want to see into.
We deserve to see into this black hole and all other official black holes, because we suspect there are a lot of ugly official secrets hiding in there. And in our constitutional republic, those ugly official secrets belong to us, We, The People. Knowing those secrets will help us steer our own ship of state, and not be subject to mysterious tides, hidden currents, and unexpected winds that push us off course.
When Epstein died mysteriously in prison with a wire ligature mark on his neck, impossible to make with his paper bed sheets, while his guards were mysteriously out of the room, and the security cameras focused on his cell were mysteriously off, every person with a brain asked “Why?”
It sure looked like Epstein was murdered by an inside job, to shut him up to keep him from talking about who and what he knew.
Candidate Round 1 and Round 2 Donald Trump promised to open up all of the Epstein files so that we could see what the hell this guy was all about. But last week President Trump curiously decided to just let the Epstein Black Hole spin off back into the far corners of the universe. No peeky, no knowy. Tehran Tucker Carlson the pro Iran traitor says this was done to “protect Israel.” Of course Shmucker Qatarlson says this, because he blames Jews and Israel for everything, because he hates Jews. We can dispense with Tucker, simply because he cries “Jew wolf!” all the damned time.
Other people are blaming FBI director Kash Patel and FBI DD Dan Bongino, two stalwarts we MAGA people trust absolutely, President Trump, as well as DOJ AG Pam Bondi, who really does have her fingerprints all over the decision to suddenly shut the curtains on the Epstein Show & Tell. And this is bad, because now we are into the personal credibility realm of our beloved Donald Trump.
A couple theories hover over Epstein & Co. like a bad stink that just won’t leave a grisly murder scene. One is that Epstein was a Mossad and – or CIA and – or MI6 agent who blackmailed his guests, or who collected blackmail type information (videos, photos) on powerful people, so they could be manipulated and bent to do certain things, or not do certain things, by people in the various intelligence services. I forget what the other theory is, but even if it was a good one, the first one above is pretty much all that anyone is talking about. It is all that matters, and until we actually get to see what Epstein was all about, this theory is going to ooze and fester, spreading gross pus all over innocents and guilty alike.
It is clear that President Trump’s base is not happy with the decision to re-hide the Epstein files, despite President Trump himself suddenly publicly asking everyone to just let it go already and move along. But no one is letting it go, because there are already too many official secrets and too many un-arrested elites, and MAGA wants justice, and President Trump, beloved by his supporters, now runs the risk of alienating the people who love him and trust him the most.
The possibility of President Trump actually losing the confidence of his wildly supportive base would be an even greater tragic outcome from the Epstein files than the Epstein files themselves are or could be.
Imagine wrecking your beautiful yacht America on the Epstein rocks that everyone is telling you to watch out for, because everyone can see them jutting up out of the water. You just tell everyone to have a nice day and keep sailing straight into the disaster zone.
For the good of the country, for the good of this rare presidency, for your own good, please President Trump, let us see the damned Epstein files. We ask you out of love for you and for our one and only America.
PA gets full Sunday hunting!
Got a photo taken by someone standing front and center at the bill signing ceremony less than an hour ago, of Governor Josh Shapiro signing the Sunday Hunting legislation by PA Sen. Dan Laughlin and PA Rep. Mandy Steele into law. As of 45 minutes ago, Pennsylvania joins some forty-plus-other states with full Sunday hunting, which means full freedom and no artificial restrictions on Pennsylvania hunters.
For anyone and everyone who hunts, adding Sunday to the days available is an enormous opportunity. It is either 50% of the weekend, when most working people get to hunt, or it is 1/7th of the week, a substantial percentage of the total time allotted to us.
Yes, there were arguments against Sunday hunting, and none of them were persuasive. Most of them were flat out ridiculous, like suddenly the risk of “being shot” went through the roof, but only on Sundays. Even on posted private land! Many of the arguments were made in bad faith, by conservative religious people who nonetheless desired to aggressively control and deprive basic American freedom to law abiding hunters and families doing the most wholesome family stuff together. You know you can walk and chew gum simultaneously, and you can also pray on Sunday morning and then go hunt with a clear conscience… just like millions of American hunters do in almost all fifty states.
This was never a difficult policy question, it was a question of political power.
For the past 25 years that I have been involved in this, originally as the strongest plaintiff in a state lawsuit (which after argument was then kicked over to federal court like a political hot potato), the amount of political and social bullcrap we had to wade through was unbelievable.
Every nonsense complaint and argument was made against Sunday hunting, even though the states where it was already allowed had none of those problems as a result of it. No opponent ever conceded that private property should be unregulated in this regard. Heck, we could and often did target shoot all Sunday long on private property, and ride ATVs, which was perfectly fine, but one little .22 aimed at a squirrel was apparently Armageddon, the end of the world, oh, the humanity.
So here we are, with the PA Game Commission working right now to implement this freedom. I do not think it is likely that we will automatically see a bunch of Sundays open up in deer season this Fall, but I could be wrong. I hope I am wrong. More likely, we will see some small game and late deer season Sundays open up in January-February 2026, which will be most welcome. I imagine that by this time next year, we will get our printed hunting and trapping guide with probably close to every Sunday open to hunting from September dove and squirrel seasons through late flintlock and special regulations areas hunts into the end of January.
This means maybe an additional 16 days afield, total (four days each in October, November, December and January), but for those hunters who cannot hunt on Saturday, the weekend is finally theirs as much as it is anyone else’s to be free on. That is simple and long overdue justice.
Thank you to HUSH, to Senator Dan Laughlin, Rep. Mandy Steele, and to all of those who were in the trenches for these past twenty five years, namely Kathy Gehman (founder of HUSH along with Brad Gehman), Harold Daub, Kevin Askew, Robb Miller, and various Sportsman’s Alliance leaders.
FREEDOM!
PGC executive director Steve Smith on the Governor’s left
PA Governor Josh Shapiro signs Sunday hunting into law today, just an hour ago. Photo Credit goes to “mister anonymous” thank you very much
Traitor Tehran Tucker Carlson Gleefully Leaps Off Cliff
Tucker Carlson has been a fixture on the political middle and right for about six or seven years. For years he slowly built a real following while he was at FOX News, where he did journalism stuff. He earned his following because he asked good questions, he dug into people’s political backgrounds and background information on political and cultural issues of the day. He challenged all kinds of political blind spots and taboos and unhealthy “bipartisan” spaces where taxpayers and American citizens always seem to lose and corrupt political careerists always seem to make out incredibly well.
After Tucker Carlson left FOX, he seemed emboldened to break even more artificial constraints, to ask even tougher questions, and to promote more individual freedom in the face of an increasingly constitutionally questionable government apparatus. He was the quintessential “independent investigative journalist” that Americans want so badly.
Without question, the Biden Administration was his foil in his new independent role, and also probably his brightest time. With so much brazen Biden family corruption, protected and enforced by a brazenly weaponized federal bureaucracy, and so much more related stuff to chase down, Tucker Carlson found himself ever more squaring off against the entire estabalishment media enterprise. This “mainstream media” conglomerate made then and very openly today makes no bones about being completely aligned and in bed with just one political party.
So this was the boxing ring in which Tucker Carlson found himself. He then got a ton of money from Iranian businessman Omeed Malik, and if the Foreign Agent Registration Act documents dug up by ace investigative reporter Laura Loomer are true, Tucker also got substantial money from Qatar. And then he bought himself a classic hunting and fishing ranch in Montana, and started interviewing people in his flyfishing man cave.
Bit by bit, aspects of Tucker Carlson’s raging hatred began to seep through, then shine through, and then eventually poured out in these interviews. Probably due to open pressure to at least try to appear not to hate all Jews, Tucker hosted an interesting guy named Bret Weinstein. And throughout the entire interview, Tucker’s hostile face set barely changed an iota. Despite receiving fascinating new information from Weinstein that corroborated a great deal of conclusions that Tucker had come to on certain political issues, he never smiled or showed any warmth toward his guest.
Check out the photo below that I screenshotted from that otherwise excellent interview.
Contrast Tucker’s demeanor towards fellow Israel hater Rep. Thomas Massie, where they are all chummy, laughing, easy going during that interview. Which is also a fascinating interview, and were Massie not a hater of Israel and Jews, and not such a theoretician and purist, I could then see why his presence in Congress was so useful.
Anyhow, Tucker started racking up interviews with professional Jew haters, for whom publicly breaking this Western taboo is a source of professional income. People like US Lt. Col. Douglas Macgregor, and history-dabbler Darryl Cooper, neither of whom have anyting positive to say about Jews or Israel, and who make a living saying nonsense about them. Not even the Nobel prize winners, the leaders in economic, medical, or technological areas. Nothing good to say, period, which indicates they have a problem.
In his many hours interviewing them, and others like an Arab Christian in Israel, Tucker never challenges them. He does not ask them to more fully explain their questionable ideas. Rather, Tucker just lets them say whatever they want about Jews, the European Holocaust, and Israel, and then after encouraging them, agreeing with them, he moves on to the next thing.
And then Tucker himself became an open antagonist towards Jews and Israel. He recently sat interview-style across from US Senator Ted Cruz with cameras running, and instead of an interview, Tucker went on the attack, including the bizarre assertion that the Jews of today are unrelated to the Jews of the Bible and ancient Israel.
As an aside, if today’s Jews are not descended from the ancient Jews, then why does their DNA show them to be from the Near East, despite at least a thousand years living in white Europe? Why are they the only people on Earth who speak Hebrew, study Scripture in Hebrew and Aramaic, and practice Judaism? If not them, then who and where the heck are the Jews? Tucker does not bother to answer this simple question, as casting doubt on Jews is his only goal.
The final straw for a lot of former Tucker Carlson admirers like me just happened, days ago. If you thought the man had an atom of Christian belief, human decency, American loyalty, or even just some integrity inside of him, Tucker Carlson has aggressively, even wantonly, dispelled that notion. Tucker conducted a ridiculous, puffball questions, friendly “interview” with one of the most evil, violent, cruelly despotic autocrats on Earth today.
Yes, from his Montana man cave, Tucker Carlson interviewed the hand puppet “president” of Iran, Masoud Pezeshkian, who reports directly to Ayatollah Khameini, the “Supreme Leader” of Iran, on July 4th, American Independence Day. In his time with Pezeshkian, a true monster, Tucker has no interest in asking real questions, like can we go inside Evin Prison and interview some of the women your forces are raping and torturing right now. Nor did Tucker go to Iran and do a “man on the street” tour, where the journalist just asks random citizens their opinions on things. Of course, Iran is oppressive and is run like North Korea, where one small mis-step costs you your family, your home, your wife, your life, so even if Tucker would insist, he would encounter stone faces.
Instead, Tucker Carlson willingly, and occasionally with outbursts of that weird fake glee he has, served as an airbrushed mouthpiece for the mullahs who rule Iran with a brutal and unjust fist, and who threaten the world with their genocidal, homicidal death cult. Tucker makes excuses for them, he aided and abetted them, he gave aid and comfort to them, he put lipstock on their pig faces, he made common cause with them.
One utterly contemptible example: “Has Iran tried to assassinate President Trump?” To which Pezeshkian answers that this is an Israeli lie meant to rope America into forever wars. And Tucker Carlson simply nods in agreement and moves on! No second question, no aw c’mon ya can’t blame everything on Israel.
Apparently Tucker Carlson really meant it when he wrote in 2020 that he never liked Trump anyhow. Yeah, no kidding. You won’t even challenge this bold faced lie by your Iranian buddy.
They, the Iran of “Death to America!” since their 1979 revolution. They of at least a thousand Americans killed through Iranian terrorism in Lebanon, Argentina, Saudi Arabia, elsewhere. They of known attempted assassinations against President Trump and election hacking in 2020, documented by the FBI.
There is speculation that Tucker Carlson must have been paid a lot of Iranian money to do this, and that seems reasonable. Whether Tucker just sold out America for the symbolic thirty silver Shekels, or whether he was paid directly into a Swiss bank account, or whether he gets some syndication rights income from this, any way we cut this last horrendous act, “Tehran Tucker” Carlson is a traitor to America.
Interviewing Bret Weinstein on Covid policy vs Covid science
Bret Weinstein maintained his composure despite Carlson’s open hostility on a subject Carlson would normally be animated about
His face hardly changed from this unfriendly grimace the entire interview. Tucker just does not like Jews, not even Dr. Bret Weinstein, a conservative and risk-taking researcher willing to help Carlson
How much money was Carlson paid to be the airbrusher mouthpiece foreign agent for the evil Iranian empire that seeks to nuke America? What a traitor