Nom de plume: Rivrdog

Give.This.Man.A.Pulitzer.

No mortal ever wrote better prose, or painted a word-picture better than this post does.

It bears repeating

From an email, some catharsis for us...

If a conservative doesn’t like guns, they don’t buy one.
If a liberal doesn’t like guns, then no one should have one.

If a conservative is a vegetarian, they don’t eat meat.  If a liberal is, they want to ban all meat products for  everyone.

If a conservative sees a foreign threat, he thinks about how to defeat his enemy.  A liberal wonders how to surrender gracefully and still look good.

If a conservative is homosexual, they quietly enjoy their life.
If a liberal is homosexual, they loudly demand legislated respect.

If a black man or Hispanic is conservative, they see themselves as
independently successful.  If a black man or Hispanic is a liberal, they see themselves as victims in need of government protection.

If a conservative is down-and-out, he thinks about how to better
his situation. A liberal wonders who is going to take care of him.

If a conservative doesn’t like a talk show host, he switches channels.  Liberals demand that those they don’t like be shut down.

If a conservative is a non-believer, he doesn’t go to church.   A liberal wants any mention  of God or religion silenced.

If a conservative decides he needs health care, he goes about shopping for it, or may choose a job  that provides it.  A liberal demands that his neighbors pay for his.

These are all pretty much on the money, except for the factor of hypocrisy. For example, in the gun rights comparison above, wealthier liberals frequently HAVE guns, or employ bodyguards who do, and yet they STILL want to deny others that basic right.

Pitch YOUR favorite hypocrisy into the 'ol comments bin.

Tip of the chapeau to T-Bone, out in Montana country.

Animals are our friends

...most of the time.

Here's a story of one which wasn't. In the words of the man involved. He's a fishing guide in Soldatna, Alaska.

"Have I got a story for you guys!

King season is over, and since I had a day off before silvers start, I thought I would go for a walk!  This occurred at 11:16 am this morning (Sunday), just 2/10 of a mile from my house, ON OUR ROAD while walking my dogs (trying to get in shape for hunting season, ironically!) for the record, this is in a residential area-not back in the woods, no bowhunting, no stealth occurring...

I heard a twig snap, and looked back...full on charge-a huge brownie, ears back, head low and motorin' full speed! Came with zero warning; no woof, no popping of the teeth, no standing up, nothing like what you think or see on TV! It charged from less than 20 yards and was on me in about one-second! Totally surreal-I just started shooting in the general direction, and praise God that my second shot (or was it my third?) Rolled him at 5 feet and he skidded to a stop 10 feet BEYOND where I was shooting from-I actually sidestepped him and fell over backwards on the last shot, and his momentum carried him to a stop past where I fired my first shot!

It was a prehistoric old boar-no teeth, no fat-weighed between 900-1000 lbs and took five men to DRAG it onto a tilt-bed trailer! Big bear-its  paw measured out at about a 9 1/2 footer!

never-ever-thought "it" would happen to me! its always some other schmuck, right? well, no bull- I am still high on adrenaline, with my gut in a knot. feels like I did 10000 crunches without stopping! almost puked for an hour after, had the burps and couldn't even stand up as the troopers conducted their investigation! Totally wiped me out-can't even put that feeling into words, by far the most emotion I have ever felt at once!

No doubt that God was with me, as I brought my Ruger .454 Casull (and some "hot" 350 grain solids) just for the heck of it, and managed to draw and snap shoot (pointed, never even aimed!) from the hip! Total luck shots!

All I can say is Praise God for my safety and for choosing to leave the wife and kids at home on this walk! Got a charter tomorrow, so gonna TRY to get some sleep now!"

(Personal info of author witheld)

Here's a photo of the writer posing with the bear and his bear gun:

 

Awful small weapon to stop such a large animal, but it did it's job.

One question in my mind: where were the guy's two dogs? In a situation where the bear is charging, the dogs would at least be barking their fool heads off, and more likely, charging the bear themselves to save their master. Dogs do that sort of thing. Hard to understand why BOTH of their noses failed and they never detected this old monster when they came by it.

The obvious lesson: pack enough gun to take down the WORST enemy when you're sharin' the world with bad things.

We ARE enlightened here...

...by this Al-Reuters story on a strange agricultural custom in India.

Video immediately upon finding any....

Modern solutions for grief

The loss of the Air France plane somewhere over the middle of the Atlantic Ocean will bring about a strange situation.

That situation, in turn, will be brought on by the relatively recent Western culture trend of "closure".

Everybody must have "closure" when someone dies, because grief is now allowed to stop all semblance of a normal life, for an indefinite period of time, for one stricken with it.

It wasn't always this way. As civilization was struggling with the various new technologies of transportation in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries, lots of people lost their lives during transport from one place to another.

In the age of sail, when everything that went from one continent to another had to go in small sailing ships, some of which don't add up to a decent-sized yacht today, plenty of times the ship just never made port on the other side of the ocean. Small ship, big ocean, big waves, strong winds, you get the idea. Lots of folks boarded ships and were never seen again.

The age of sail gradually gave way to Robert Fulton's better idea, steam. The first steamships were not well built, as the technology for building strong & safe steam boilers lagged behind the technology of harnessing steam's power for propulsion. The result was many, many ships sent to the bottom by explosions of their steam boilers. All of this was before the days of radio, so unless there were witnesses, lots of folks STILL were never seen again.

Then, ocean transportation morphed into the semi-modern age. Boilers became reliable and safe, radio was invented, and most ships made their next port when they put out to sea, except during wartime (don't tell that to relatives of the Titanic).

We entered the age of air transportation, and started the process all over again. It was almost three decades after the start of engine-driven flight before an ocean was successfully crossed, but a mere ten years after "Lucky Lindy", Col. Charles Lindbergh first flew across the Atlantic, it was being done with regularity. Not always successfully, though. Aircraft of the day were not pressurized, and had to fly IN the bad weather instead of over it. Also missing from the safety picture was airborne weather radar AND weather satellites. Aircraft still disappeared from the sky, leaving widows and orphans behind.

After WW2, when high-altitude flight in modern airliners became common, and especially after 1970, when the weather satellites gave us a good idea of where the weather WAS, an expectation arose that an airliner would ALWAYS make it's destination. Since the mid-50's, only a handful of them haven't, as opposed to the hundreds of thousands or millions of them which have landed routinely.

Along with this modernization of air travel came the curious phenomenon of extended grief. Used to be, when you lost family, you grieved with those of you around you, then got on with your life. Life was hard, and if you took too much time off to grieve, you starved. Now, the government provides for everything, including "grieving time" off paid by the government (and lots of private companies as well) when you have lost a family member. Grief is now a big deal, and you are supposed to continue grieving over a lost family member until YOU feel like stopping, which might not be for years.

Combine extended grief with the absolute expectation of every single overwater flight landing safely, and you get this:

That's from this Associated Press story on the now-certain crash of the Air France jet from Rio to Paris out in the stormy equatorial Atlantic.

Grieving is hard on people, and extended grieving only extends the misery. We need to take lessons from our history, and consider moving yourself ANYWHERE to have some hazard, and when hazard seizes the day, all the relatives don't allow the grief to seize their lives.

That won't happen here. There will be inquiries, there will be "victim's groups" formed, there will be monuments planned and erected. There will be anniversary celebrations for years to come, all prolonging the grief. All because people can't learn to accept risk and it's consequences.

There's something wrong with that.

It's illogical.

What a waste.