Cheer

Cheers to Sister John Paul Bauer. The 60-year-old Benedictine nun and school teacher from St. Marys recently bagged a 10-point, 200 pound buck — and posted a photograph on social media to prove it

A native of St. Marys, Sister John Paul grew up watching her father and brothers hunt.

“It’s a conservation effort,” she told the Erie archdiocesan news service. “You have to maintain the population that can be fed naturally off the land. If you get an overabundance, then the deer starve. Likewise, if you overkill, then that’s not good either. So there’s a balance. You don’t just hunt for the sake of killing. You are part of nature. You’re part of a cycle. You’re part of creation.”

Sister John Paul added, “I always pray the rosary in my tree stand. It’s a tradition.”

She had her buck butchered for sausage and steaks, and is sharing it with a couple of families. She teaches theology at Elk County Catholic High School, where her students reportedly were excited to hear about her hunting adventure.

The deer was the biggest of the three bucks she has killed. That’s not to mention the time five years ago when she took down a 200-pound bear.

Jeer

Is anyone else growing tired of the anti-fracking hysterians who hurt their own cause by overdramatizing the facts? Few if any empirical measures; just emanations of this or that study reporting a link, however so slight, to a health risk that compels us to conclude our children are going to die. It’s scare language.

The latest petition maintains this status quo. Its “hundreds of signatures” claimed by anti-fractivist Michael Badges-Canning (there were 208 as of Thursday) includes people from Michigan, Oregon, Kentucky, Arkansas, New Jersey and even Switzerland and Thailand. Only 157 of those who signed even purport to be Pennsylvanians, with no indication which county any of them call home.

Maybe that’s why Badges-Canning never actually got around to submitting the petition. If he had collected signatures so casually for his nomination as a Butler County commissioner candidate, his petitions would have been thrown out.

And speaking of thrown out, his sheriff’s escort out of Wednesday’s commissioners meeting was Plan A from the start. His prepared statement — you can read it on his Facebook page — is too long to be delivered in the alotted three minutes. And since the dismal showing of his “petition” signals lack of conventional political oomph, Badges-Canning resorted to civil disobedience — a quick, cheap and effective attention-getter.

Problem is, when you turn up the volume on a losing arument, it just becomes less appealing.

Cheer

A big cheer goes out to corrections officers Sgt. Tyler Tracey, Capt. Dave Winters and Officers Mat Edgar and Todd Walker for a life-saving procedure they performed Nov. 25, when an inmate at the Butler County Prison went into cardiac arrest.

The quartet performed CPR and used an automated external defibrillator on the inmate, who was talking with Winters through a food pass window about 6 p.m. when he fell to the floor, unconscious.

Shortly after that the inmate stopped breathing and a nurse couldn’t find his pulse.

The officers sprung into action: Tracey, Winters and Walker performed chest compressions while Edgar breathed for the inmate. The officers shocked the inmate three times with the defibrillator to revive him. The process took 15 minutes; it likely felt like an eternity.

Butler County is fortunate to have COs like these four. The professionalism, training and dedication they showed for the well-being of inmates under their care couldn’t be more clear.