Keystone Tax Fraud

At first, I wasn't going to "dash into the fray" — as they say in Merry Old England — over the latest attempt by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania to defraud not only its 12 million residents but to defraud the nation, as well. But, someone has to point the finger at the guilty parties and squeal here, and I've already written my Fred Fortune post this month, so he's not going to do it.

When Pennsylvania taxpayers file their PA state personal income taxes in 2012 (for tax year 2011), they'll be asked by the Commonwealth to declare the sales tax on untaxed online purchases — now pay close attention to the creative fraud process here — as personal income that needs to be reported. Un-friggin'believable. Pennsylvania already leads the nation in taxation. Pennsylvanians are taxed by their state government more than any other Americans in the nation. It's been that way for decades.

That's right, we Pennsylvania residents line the state coffers for our money-grubbing bureaucrats in the state capital even more than they do in New York State or the State of Illinois. Even more than California. And now the fat cats in Harrisburg expect us to declare unpaid sales tax for online purchases as INCOME and pay state income taxes on it. Whoa! Stop the stagecoach! Before too long the robber barons we stupidly voted for will be holding out their hats to collect a tax when we pay our taxes. Somehow, someway, by some convoluted logic that only Pennsylvania politicians seem to understand, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania will no doubt, in the foreseeable future, consider all monies spent by its tax-paying residents as INCOME instead of EXPENDITURES.

Yeah, yeah. I know. Those on the state dole figure that the 6% sales tax that is not collected by online businesses for purchases made online by Pennsylvania residents is somehow due the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Hold the ponies! I even have a problem with that being a given. Here's an illustrative example. Shopping online at an out-of-state business is like buying salt water taffy in Atlantic City. What the hell right does the state of Pennsylvania have to any of that money? That's right, Pennsylvania has NO RIGHT to that sales tax. If New Jersey can't collect it online for itself, that's New Jersey's problem. But one thing that uncollected online sales tax definitely ISN'T is taxable income for that Pennsylvania online customer. Gimmee a break, already.

You guys and gals down in the state capitol building can shove that notion you know where. We didn't elect you to pick our pockets. If you need to find creative revenue somewhere why don't you let the state police actually fine truckers, Fed Ex drivers and UPS drivers when they break the speed limit or is the posted speed limit in Pennsylvania only for Mom and Pop and commuters? Do you state legislators want another creative revenue idea? How about foregoing the next pay raise you highway robbers automatically give yourselves each year and donate it to the online sales tax fund? There you go. Yeah, that hit you where it counts. Now you know how the rest of us feel.
Damn your worthless hides. What we need here in the Keystone State is to bring back tarring and feathering and the practice of running public offenders (which includes but is not limited to public officials) "out of town on a rail" and mandate both forms of punishment for anyone in Harrisburg who tries to slip their hands into our pockets and purses while we're not looking. When your bank-robbing asses are humiliated and run out of town for defrauding the public and for betraying the public trust, then maybe we can put some men and women back in the state legislature who actually know the most basic principles of accounting.

Until then, we Pennsylvanians are in for a pretty rough ride. Only in Pennsylvania can you be guaranteed not to get your money's worth. It's enough to make you ask for your money back.

Ice Fishing for Brown Trout

Thirty years ago I made the stupid mistake of renting an apartment in an old, historic building in State College, Pennsylvania, owned by a non-profit organization whose very name suggested trust and respect. Boy was I wrong.

That first winter I had no heat for weeks and, when I complained, I was told to sit tight. I did sit tight, by the way, snug as a frozen bug in my sleeping bag as I watched TV and tried not to think about how cold I was. But I was patient and I trusted them. After all, this was Happy Valley, where people cared about other people more than they did anywhere else on planet Earth.

But my patience began to wear a little thin when I used the toilet one day in a bathroom that was still colder than a witch's you-know-what. After I flushed, I was greeted by an effusion of my own excrement. Apparently, it had been so cold for so long that the sewer line had frozen. I decided to investigate.

What I found wasn't an entire frozen sewer line but a break in the historic terracotta sewer pipe under the front porch and there, unimaginably, was my own frozen sewage, staring me in the face like a brown rock monster from outer space. Then I found out that the electric hot water heater was still working, even though there was no hot water in the radiator heating pipes from the cold furnace. A pick and shovel proved to be no match for The Thing From A Frozen World.

But I didn't give up — or give in — to the unwelcome presence of this creature from beyond commonsense. Like a resourceful pack rat, I shuffled 30-gallon garbage bags full of hot water from the electric hot water heater to the poop monster under the porch. It took three bags of hot water and about fifteen minutes before the turd monster melted like The Wicked Witch of the West and disappeared down the earthen slope toward the front yard. Apparently, this was the only frozen spot in the sewer line.

That tears it, I said to myself that afternoon. I went upstairs and called the local code enforcement people. The next day a man arrived who immediately became fixated on a small crack in the kitchen linoleum. He pointed to the crack like it was alive and about to consume us both. He got out his clipboard and wrote feverishly. I managed to tear him away from the hideous breach in the kitchen floor long enough to show him where I had to pick and shovel and then melt my own poop in order to poop again. I showed him and then made him touch the cold radiators. I showed him my pajama sleeping bag. Undeterred, he wrote up the non-profit owners for their unconscionable, crack-in-the-linoleum violation and left.

Later that day, a creature sporting a page-boy hairdo showed up at my back door, full of piss and vinegar. I knew she was from the goody-goody non-profit organization because hell hath no fury like a snob whose soft underbelly of elitism is exposed to a common hamburger eater like me.

"This isn't Parkway Plaza," she seethed. What she meant by that remark was that I should have felt privileged to pay her uppity organization $200 a month plus pay all my own utilities instead of complaining about the freezing cold or my frozen poop under the porch because I had been spared from paying twice that amount to live in Happy Valley's most exclusive high-rise apartment building (at that time). Being a woman, she got away with that remark whereas a man might have found himself on my kitchen floor, face-to-face with that hideous four-inch crack for which he'd been so inappropriately fined.

Not only was I totally speechless, right then and there I prepared to make quick tracks out of Happy Valley forever. It was a shock but I'd get over it. For all its posturing as the coolest and most loving and the most cultured place in Centre County, Pennsylvania, I quickly discovered that Happy Valley was nothing but a ruse, a cover up for people whose true love in life, besides the almighty dollar, is exclusivity and the limelight that goes along with it.

That was 30 years ago. I put Happy Valley, PA in my rear view mirror and never looked back. Not even once. In fact, I wouldn't go back to Happy Valley to take a crap.

Another Day That Will Live in Infamy

Eight years ago today mass murderers who hate America murdered nearly three thousand Americans and foreign nationals in New York, Pennsylvania and the District of Columbia in a single day and ruined the lives of countless thousands of others worldwide.

What makes this heinous, monstrous and unforgivable crime against humanity so infamous is that the mastermind of all this murder, mayhem and destruction is still at large.

If we forget that, there's no point in remembering the dead.

Gooseport, PA

This is a recent picture of Gooseport, PA, a tiny haven in my Appalachian back yard for the two geese that live here year round.

It's also a place for summering ducks, wood ducks, egrets, herons, and king fishers, as well as the usual gathering of smaller song birds.

You won't find it on any map and maybe that's a good thing. I created it. But it's not mine. It belongs to the wild birds that live and summer here. And that makes me very protective of this little waterfront town.

Unlike the readership I never encountered as an independent author, the full and part-time residents of Gooseport, PA make me feel like I'm still living a full life, as the author of a different kind of creation, for followers of a very different breed.

At long last, I have finally been allowed to make a positive difference in the world. It's a wonderful feeling that you can't beat with a stick.

Author's Note 8-31-12: Our two geese "pals" are dead now. Broken Wing was killed in February 2008 by a nocturnal predator and I found Big Mouth dead one morning in September 2011. He probably died because there's too much sewage in our pond the past several years, running off people's overflowing septic tanks above us, right through our yard and into the pond. The ducks don't summer here anymore and neither do King Fishers or egrets or Blue Herons or other geese. I don't mow Gooseport anymore and I took the sign down in September 2011. I also removed the cracked-corn trough with the shingled roof (The New Gooseport Lunch Counter) in September 2011 because I don't want the birds to drink this pond water. Hell nobody likes sewage. Not even barn swallows.

My Kind of Guy

Robert D. Barry
E. T. Monitor Host

Back in the late 1980s I lived in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, where the summers were longer and hotter and the winters were shorter and milder than they are up here in Pennsylvania's Allegheny Plateau Region.

One of my favorite things to do on a Saturday night back in the Eighties was to stay up late and watch a really cool television show about UFOs, extraterrestrials, the solar system and outer space on a local TV station from neighboring York County.

This late-night TV show was called E. T. Monitor and its host was a guy named Robert D. Barry. The fact that this show wasn't broadcast from New York City or Philadelphia or Los Angeles or Chicago is what made it so appealing to me. It aired at midnight every Saturday night on WGCB Channel 49 from Red Lion, Pennsylvania. Only thirty or so miles from where I lived at the time.

Mr. Barry's show included prominent guests like Dr. Jack Kasher, professor of physics and astronomy at the University of Nebraska and Bob Lazar, a physicist who claimed to have worked at the secret government installation S-4, near the infamous Area 51 UFO research center at Groom Lake, Nevada, and Dr. Stanton Friedman, the man who blew the lid off the 1947 Roswell conspiracy. In addition, Robert Barry took phone calls from anyone who wanted to talk about UFO sightings or their UFO experiences. Mr. Barry's wife, Lucy, manned the phones during these broadcasts.

I was watching E. T. Monitor one night when the broadcast was suddenly interrupted and never came back on. A couple of weeks later Mr. Barry told his audience about a warning the FBI had given him about keeping his mouth shut, a warning that was followed up by the mysterious "plug-pulling incident". Bob Barry died not long after that and his dedicated wife, Lucy, tried in vain to keep the show alive. E. T. Monitor died the same undeserved death that its host had succumbed to and some of us dedicated viewers smelled a big, government conspiracy rat.

But the most intriguing thing about E. T. Monitor was the host. Robert D. Barry was an unpretentious, intelligent, inquisitive and brave man who dared to ask the questions I'd been asking myself since I was a kid and he confronted the skeptics and the authorities who are always there when the truth is about to be uncovered. They come out of the woodwork like insects, debunking and denying their lying asses off in an effort to keep mankind in the dark and to uphold business-as-usual as the true law of the land.

This simple blog post is my tribute, then, to Robert D. Barry, whose memory is kept alive by a few dedicated people at YouTube. Here's an embedded video from YouTube, the first of a 5-part video feature about E. T. Monitor with Robert D. Barry. My kind of guy.

Author's note: The very second I finished writing this blog post in WordPerfect 12, and before I could save the document, the power went out here in Snow Shoe, Pennsylvania, and I had to write it all over again from memory and then post it to Blogger. Now, that's no coincidence. And, no, I never get used to this manipulative nonsense. The feds who work with the alien-controlled "New World Order" are nothing but traitors who think they're above the law. Personally, I think they're worse than that. I think they're unconscionable, unrepentant, traitorous, rat-bastard, lyin'-ass dogs who should be jailed for life and fed dog food for breakfast.

Happy Valley Detour

There's a signpost up ahead: Next Stop - Happy Valley! No, this isn't about an episode of The Twilight Zone. The following tale has nothing to do with the boundless imagination of television writer Rod Serling. This is a sad-but-true (and somewhat disturbing) story of a regular guy from the real world who once found himself in the upside-down and inside-out world of Happy Valley, PA. And who lived to tell about it.

Back when I blindly believed in the goodness of people and the sanctity of old age, I used to volunteer my time at various senior citizen events. I fetched and carried like a "gopher", moved furniture, set tables, helped people to and from places, pulled out chairs and pushed them in again, and generally served and respected my elders the way I'd been taught as a boy. And I did this because I liked older people and old folks, felt at home around them, and always believed that none of them was getting a fair deal out of life anymore. I still believe that, although I'm a little more cautious nowadays about practicing that belief.

Anyway, several years ago I volunteered to hand out bingo prizes at a big senior citizen event "just a stone's throw" from Penn State University. Lots and lots of senior citizen women and even a few senior men attended this blowout and it was held in Happy Valley, PA. Where else? That's State College, Pennsylvania, USA, for those of you who, naturally, have no clue. Happy Valley is a "Marginal People's Paradise" that's presided over by Big-Sister, Penn State.

I found a folding chair behind an unused podium and sat down with my little Mini-Igloo cooler, containing a few snacks and some bottled water. I'd already prepaid for the big, sit-down lunch with the others but I had this little life raft with me, just in case. I happily waited in this spot, out of the way, until I was needed by the bingo caller. The room was soon filled to the brim with people well past their prime, guys and gals who'd finally had to turn in their lease on life for canes and walkers and electric scooters and restricted activity. My heart went out to them as it always did. Senior citizenship on planet Earth was no way to treat a lady, or a gentleman, but it was the best this backward world had to offer them at the present time.

No one in the room smiled or waved or nodded at me. What they did was stare. They stared and stared. And it wasn't because I was a lot younger than they were. I was in my early 50s and would be one of them before any of us knew it. Besides, there were plenty of volunteers and workers at this shindig who were my age or younger. Anyway, they continued to stare at me until I wanted to rush to a mirror to see if I had a smudge on my face or something objectionable peeking out of my nose. But I knew instinctively what it was, why they were staring at me like I was "a little green man from mars" or something worse. It was worse. It was my clothing.

My cargo shorts didn't say "Dockers" on them anywhere. My sneakers were not Nike or Adidas or Reebok. The crown of my ball cap was way too high by collegiate standards and it didn't sport a cool Nike logo or the name of a U.S. Virgin Island on it. My shirt wasn't an expensive golf shirt with a tiny Izod Lacoste alligator on the left chest. It was a teal-colored T-shirt that said "Penn's Cave" on it and that made it all too common in Centre County, Pennsylvania, Land of Penn State and Penn's Cave. That was it, then. That had to be it. An alien, redneck hick from The Mountaintop (that's anywhere in the Snow Shoe, Clarence, Moshannon or Pine Glen area of Centre County for those who, naturally, don't know) had entered their shallow world of superficial things and symbols and meanings, and they didn't like it one darn bit.

Then, before I could even hand out my first bingo prize, a short-haired female head appeared over the podium from the front. I craned my neck to engage her eyes with mine. She was somewhere in her late forties or early fifties, I imagined, maybe older, and I waited for her to speak. Maybe she was about to welcome me aboard or she wanted to introduce herself or thank me for my volunteerism. I waited patiently and quietly for what she had to say. Then she spoke. Her voice was chilling and clipped and her words were unforgettable.

"Don't mess us up," said the talking head. "Don't mess us up," she repeated, her carefully-controlled hostility making her point very clear to me. "Because, if you mess us up, I'll kill you." Her penetrating stare assured me that this was no joke, no prank. She was serious. And then she turned on her heels like a Gestapo Agent and disappeared into the mostly older female crowd. I was even more speechless than before. I wanted to open the little Igloo cooler and crack the seal on the first bottle of water in the worst way. But assuaging my sudden bout of "cottonmouth" might have been some act of "messing up", I wasn't sure. I wanted to consult someone, somewhere, about what I'd just been told but that might have also been some way of "messing up". So, until someone finally hollered bingo, all I did was just sit, sit, sit, sit. And I did not like it. Not one little bit.

I apparently "didn't mess up" and successfully verified each bingo winner's winning numbers and eventually handed out the last of the bingo prizes. But I was a little taken aback by the fact that no one spoke to me as I did this. No one said "Thank you." No one smiled or nodded his or her head. They just kept staring and staring at me as if staring at me would somehow make me go away and not come back. I tried to blame my own imagination or some hidden paranoia but I snapped out of that zone when I realized that seeing is believing and the sound of silence cannot be mistaken for anything else.

Afterward, I found out that the terrible little face at the podium with the great big warning for me belonged to none other than the person in charge of this big shebang. I found that very hard to believe, at first, but then I reminded myself that this shindig was taking place in Happy Valley, not the real world. I ducked out before lunch was served. They could keep my lunch money, like bullies on an elementary school playground. I'd lost my appetite.

When I tried to figure out what this misdirected hatred toward me was all about, the only thing I could come up with was the fact that this disturbing incident had transpired in Happy Valley, a locally infamous Shan-gri-La where little enclaves of dysfunctional people huddle together against the natural, normal, everyday, outside world. Beyond this unhappy bubble of screwed-up humanity which is incredibly called Happy Valley, telling a complete stranger out of the clear blue that you will kill him, is considered to be a terroristic threat. And inside this bubble (or outside of it, for that matter), any man telling anybody a similar thing means a swift and irrevocable trip to the slammer for him. But, in Happy Valley, PA, whenever a woman tells a man that she will kill him, it's considered to be therapy.

Did I ever volunteer to help out at subsequent senior citizen events? You bet I did. On numerous occasions. Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays a Baby-Boomer go-for from the swift completion of his appointed rounds. I just never volunteered for any more events of any kind in Happy Valley, PA, that's all. In fact, if I ever did volunteer to serve my fellow man and fellow woman in such a place as Happy Valley again, it would be either a cold day in hell or an unplanned and unexpected visit to The Real Twilight Zone.

The Deer-ly Departed

There are hardly any deer left in Pennsylvania. You can drive through Sproul State Forest for hours without ever seeing a single one. In fact, you can spend all day in the car in north central Pennsylvania and not even see a single grouse, pheasant or turkey, either. But back to the dwindling Pennsylvania deer population. The reason you hardly see any deer these days is because most of them are DEAD.

Most of them were shot and killed by salivating hunters who just have to kill something with their bows and rifles and rifled shotguns and muzzle loaders each fall or else they don’t feel like real men. I'm not talking about the traditional Pennsylvania deer hunters, people who really like venison and who want to put some of that type of low-fat, high protein meat on the dinner table. That's a whole different story.

I'm taking about the "trophy" hunters who are helping to put Pennsylvania white-tailed deer on the endangered species list. These are the habitually frustrated hunters who will kill a doe rather than leave the woods empty-handed. Especially now that the boneheads in the Pennsylvania Game Commission made it legal to kill a doe as well as a buck for the entire "deer season". The male and female deer that are still alive in the woods are hiding from the thousands of roaring ATVs that are tearing up the Pennsylvania landscape. What asinine crap. Doesn't anybody walk in the woods anymore?

The flip side of this true but sorry-ass story is the Pennsylvania Game Commission, itself, which takes advantage of the fact that there are lots and lots of feverish trophy hunters in Pennsylvania who want to kill animals just so they can feel like real men. So the state sells more and more hunting licenses each year. Ten times more hunting licenses than there are animals to kill.

And, as if that isn't enough, The Game Commission doctors the animal population statistics to make it look like there are a lot more deer in the state than there actually are. They do that because a false scenario like that sets the hook in the salivating mouths of the out-of-state trophy hunters who come in from Ohio, New Jersey and Maryland to hunt our Pennsylvania game. City slickers who just have to take a life somewhere in the Pennsylvania Wilds with their high-end rifles or else they don't feel like real men.

It slays me when I hear the "big buck" trophy hunters complaining about how there aren't any deer in the woods during hunting season. Well, hell, of course there aren’t any deer this year. You dumb bastards killed them all last year. Their constant complaining about no deer for them to kill is positively ridiculous. It's about as stupid as walking into a liquor store, killing the clerk, and then complaining that there's no one there to wait on you.

Sorry-ass losers. What stupid crap.

The Pennsylvania state government is all about making money. Anywhere and any way and at any time. And then turning it over to Governor Ed Rendell so he can help out his hometown, Philadelphia, with its sorry-ass infrastructure problems.

And this is why you rarely see deer anymore on a Sunday drive in the state of Pennsylvania.

Free Admission

The best things in life are free.

One day a few years ago my mother and I drove up to Smethport, Pennsylvania just to see the town and to enjoy the Allegheny Plateau scenery along the way. Smethport is an interesting little town with lots of well-maintained Victorian mansions near a beautiful little lake. It’s also the McKean County seat and there’s a magnificent stone courthouse across the main street from Smethport’s unique business district that lies almost exclusively on one side of the main drag.

We were eating lunch in the old part of the Smethport Diner, the part that faces the street, when four senior citizen men walked in the front door and just stopped dead in their tracks, right in the middle of the floor. They were well-groomed and fairly well-dressed so I didn’t suspect that any kind of robbery or nastiness was forthcoming. They briefly surveyed the few diners and then they broke into song.

The song was Zippity Do Dah and they rendered it with a barbershop-quartet precision that took us both by surprise and transported me back to a yesteryear that I had only read about in books. Mom put down her cheeseburger and watched while she listened in surprised fascination. I set the spoon back into my chili bowl and gave them my full attention, enjoying every moment of their impromptu summer serenade. I felt like I 'd been transported back in time to the Swanee River on a lazy, hot summer afternoon where I might be enjoying a picnic lunch of corn on the cob and southern fried chicken.

Then the senior quartet finished singing and a hearty round of applause erupted. Mom and I joined in the applause and, before I could reach for my wallet to extract a couple of bucks in case a hat was passed around, the four gentlemen disappeared into the back of the diner for an encore performance in front of the diners there.

On the way back home to Centre County we saw a mother black bear playing with her cub in the state forest along the side of the road. It sure was a nice trip and great day that I’ll always cherish, one that will always make me think that yes, indeed, the best things in life are free.

Talking with John Lee Hooker

It was either 1978 or 1979, I can't remember which year, that I met blues singer John Lee Hooker. He was standing on the concrete porch at the Scorpion in State College, Pennsylvania, which was a tavern with a nice stage and plenty of tables. He was wearing a big hat and he smiled broadly at everyone coming up the steps.

I shook hands with him and told him how much I liked his music and how unique and how stirring I thought his style of folk/blues was to experience and he thanked me for that. His eyes had a far off look to them as we talked, as if they were looking past me and scanning the horizon for someone or something, so I let him go. There were others waiting in line to greet him.

How a man of his stature came to play a small tavern in an alley in a Pennsylvania college town mystified me somewhat. I guess he needed the money. After I'd heard and experienced his incredible performance, I was mystified all over again by the fact that John Lee Hooker had been on a stage where mostly local and regional rock bands had played. His performance was so moving that I had goose flesh for a long time afterward.

And that's how I met John Lee Hooker.

Videos added on 6-15-12 to enhance the reading of this post

Wanted: Read or Alive

Wanted on all nine planets in this solar system and in three constellations in the Milky Way Galaxy for dealing in high probabilities and hidden truths.

Michael Casher, a.k.a. Jonco Bugos, last seen in the eastern U.S., makes his temporary home in Pennsylvania's Allegheny Plateau Region. Casher originally hails from the planet Mars.


If you see this man or his books, please contact the Illuminati immediately.