2/25/19

Just say it: Republicanism is Nazism

How frustrating it must be for principled conservatives to have establishment Republicans in the South Dakota legislature encouraging intellectual diversity on campus while ridiculing it in the statehouse.

It’s difficult to imagine a movie version of Mein Kampf that's any more terrifying than the one showing right now in Pierre during the 2019 legislative session.
The voters who put Trump in office and endorse him have gotten what they want and have reshaped the country. The United States is experiencing the kind of moral and intellectual transformation that Germany did in the 1930s. The parallels of what the Germans did to the Jews and what Americans are doing to Latinos and other immigrants are striking. We now understand that Hitler had many collaborators in Germany and in the countries he invaded that desired the Holocaust and all the persecution of minorities that were part of it. Trump has a lot of help and approval in the Nazification of America. One of his most effective henchmen is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. [excerpt, David Newquist, If you wonder how Nazis and the Holocaust happened, the American Reich is putting on a demonstration]
The United States was founded on the backs of slaves as systematic genocide became a way of life for white christians quoting scripture as they slaughtered their fellow humans. After colonizers realized enslaved American Indians had no resistance to diseases brought from the Old World, Africans were imported to do the dirty work.

In 1888 L. Frank Baum began editing the South Dakota newspaper The Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer where he advocated for the extermination of American Indians.
Let’s take a close look at some of South Dakota’s more nefarious history because this part of it is synonymous with Hitler’s efforts at genocide. Think about it: He, just like Adolph Hitler, called for the genocide of a race of people. Now what is the difference to what Hitler wrote and what L. Frank Baum wrote? There is none. But then keep in mind that Hitler was just writing about Jews and Baum about Indians, totally inconsequential to the Master Race and the white settlers. [Tim Giago]
In the early twentieth century after President Theodore Roosevelt invited Booker T. Washington to the White House white supremacists began erecting statuary commemorating and celebrating treason in the United States.
When West Virginia House of Delegates member Eric Porterfield, R-Mercer, called the LGBT community “the modern-day version of the Ku Klux Klan” in an interview with a Charleston Gazette-Mail reporter last week, it drew condemnation not just in the state, but nationwide. But Porterfield, in fact, joined a long legacy of right-wing evangelicals who have conflated legal protections for lesbians, gay men, bisexuals and transgender people with white supremacy and domestic terrorism. [When W.Va. Delegate Compared LGBT to KKK, He Highlighted the History of Religious Right Prejudice]
After Orson Welles' 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds Adolf Hitler cited the ensuing panic as "evidence of the decadence and corrupt condition of democracy" then modeled his final solution on the Native American Genocide. General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Joseph Stalin actually used the radio play to his advantage.
The Horten brothers were involved in the flying disc crash in New Mexico. And that is from a single source. ... There was an unusual moment where that source became very upset and told me things that were stunning that's almost impossible to believe at first read. And that is that a flying disc really did crash in New Mexico and it was transported to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and then in 1951 it was transferred to Area 51, which is why the base is called Area 51. [Area 51 'Uncensored': Was It UFOs Or The USSR?]
In South Dakota Moody and Pennington Counties struggle with racism on daily and local levels. Confederate flags routinely fly in Rapid City showing support for racism in like-minded states, South Carolina and Mississippi. Many more come out during the Sturgis Rally as bikers in the Black Hills flaunting their racist bents fly the flag of slavery from their machines. Gettysburg, South Dakota remains a white supremacist stronghold.

Rosebud rapper, Frank Waln, is a survivor of the genocide visited against tribal nations. Over eight hundred people were arrested outside Standing Rock during the Dakota Excess demonstrations, 155 arrested in Ferguson and only four were arrested in Charlottesville.

South Dakota's Republican congressional delegation and legislature embrace white privilege every day.
But this process has a rather Reichstag feel to it. A governor, the head of the executive branch of government, gets to appoint whom he or she wants to the legislative branch. Get enough appointments and you’ve basically captured another branch of government that’s supposed to be a check and balance on you. The state Legislature in South Dakota already has a built in disadvantage vis-à-vis the executive. The legislature meets for about 40 days a year in the first quarter of the year. Meanwhile, the Governor and his or her administration runs state government 24/7. Like they are supposed to in a democracy, not a Reichstag. [Todd Epp]
Right to life? Not if you're non-white or noncomforming in America or South Dakota.

Republican is not just another word for earth hater; it's another word for Nazi.

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2/23/19

Amid USAF pollution woes Ellsworth could have role in new 'space force'


Ellsworth Air Force Base near Rapid City was an alternative emergency landing site for the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration's Space Transportation System.
Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said in a visit to Capitol Hill in June 2017 that she opposed the creation of a “Space Corps,” a service some lawmakers had proposed to oversee military operations in space. Wilson favoring U.S. military investment in space isn’t a surprise. The service has warned about national-security issues there for years, and released a report in January that laid out a landscape where anti-satellite weapons increasingly are becoming a threat to national security. [Heather Wilson’s commitment to Trump’s Space Force was questioned. Now she leads the effort to build it.]
A former US Representative from New Mexico's 1st District with nefarious ties to Sandia Labs and Gazprom, Republican Wilson was defeated in the 2012 US Senate race by Democrat Martin Heinrich then in 2013 became president of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City.

She recently addressed a conference of the Western Governors Association in Rapid.
A big challenge, she said, is modernizing the force’s aging fighter jets, bombers, helicopters and space assets while simultaneously modernizing its soldiers, too. [Wilson lays out modernization plans for Air Force]
But she neglected to mention (publicly anyway) the report that some 126 bases in the US have water supplies contaminated with potentially harmful levels of perfluorinated compounds.

Ellsworth is on the list and Denny Daugaard hosted the gala. Mountain Home AFB in Idaho is on the list and Gov. Butch Otter was in Rapid. Peterson AFB, Colorado is on the list and Gov. Hickenlooper was there. Hill AFB in Utah is on the list and Gov. Herbert was there. FE Warren in Wyoming is on the list and Gov. Mead heard Wilson's talk. Despite being homes to Superfund sites, Malmstrom in Montana and Minot in North Dakota aren't on the list but Govs. Bullock and Burgum were in Rapid. All these bases participated in the now-suspended Combat Raider exercises in the Powder River Training Complex over parts of four states.

Burgum has committed troops to the Trump Organization at the southern border as has South Dakota's newest Republican governor while Democrat Bullock has refused and Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham has pulled most New Mexico National Guard troops.

Splashed across the front page of the Las Cruces Sun News is a spread of an area dairy operator who has been dumping milk and has to destroy his herd because toxins known as PFAS have been spewing from nearby Cannon Air Force Base: home of the plane that dropped a Massive Ordnance Air Blast or 'Mother of all Bombs' on Afghanistan.
The chemicals also leach into groundwater from wastewater plants, industrial sites and landfills. As a result, drinking water supplies for more than 6 million Americans are contaminated with higher-than-recommended levels of PFAS (or above 70 parts per trillion, the non-enforceable limit set by the Environmental Protection Agency in 2016). [Groundwater contamination devastates New Mexico dairy — and threatens public health]
But how i do go on.

Donald Trump may be a career criminal, a crisis actor and this space force dealio is hardly his idea but it does make one wonder what intel he's seen that would make Heather Wilson want to accelerate it after she opposed it. The 45th Space Wing has been around since my dad's days in the USAF. Los Alamos and Sandia both do mountains of work for the Department of Defense.

I actually emailed Senator Hillary Clinton after the 9/11 events that an Astral Trade Center built around a space elevator constructed on the property once occupied by a center of world trade in New York City might have made a fitting memorial. Build a space port at Ellsworth instead of practice-bombing parts of four states and creating radicalized survivors by actually bombing them.

If Trump doesn't destroy the planet there will come a time when it will be routine to launch waste too hot for humans to handle into the sun and space cowboys will be living in western South Dakota like there are at Spaceport America in New Mexico.



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2/20/19

Abandoned mines pose continued threats to water supplies


Much to the frustration of locals, the US Environmental Protection Agency moved most of the contaminated soil from above Rimini, Montana to a mine in upper Basin Creek where it was encapsulated.
The community of Rimini was added to the Superfund list in 1999. Contaminated soil in residents’ yards was replaced, and the EPA has provided bottled water for a decade. But polluted water still pours from the mines and into Upper Tenmile Creek. Estimates of the number of such abandoned mine sites range from 161,000 in 12 western states to as many as 500,000 nationwide. At least 33,000 have degraded the environment, according to the Government Accountability Office, and thousands more are discovered every year. In 2017, the EPA proposed requiring companies still operating mines to post cleanup bonds or offer other financial assurances so taxpayers don’t end up footing cleanup bills. The Trump administration halted the rule, but environmental groups are scheduled to appear in federal court next month in a lawsuit that seeks to revive it. [US mining sites dump 50M gallons of fouled wastewater daily]
New Mexico's Democrats in congress and the Navajo Nation just secured $4 million to fund water quality monitoring of the San Juan and Animas Rivers contaminated in the 2105 Gold King Mine spill.

Recall that in 2011 a portion of the highly toxic slag pile owned by Canadian miner Barrick collapsed into Whitewood Creek below Deadwood. The force of the cave-in caused ejecta to partially block the adjacent roadway and dammed the creek for approximately thirty feet.


After an interested party reported the incident to the Lawrence County Sheriffs Department Stan Michals from South Dakota Game, Fish and Plunder called me and said he had only just heard of the incident from my voicemail to him. He said the Department of Ecocide and Natural Ruination dispatched an inspector and GFP would act on its recommendations. DENR's words to Michals were that the metals in the slag are "not very mobile" and "they don't immediately impact the fishery." The creek ultimately pushed through the dam spewing slag down the streambed.

The Board of Minerals and Environment is an arm of the South Dakota Republican Party that ceded regulatory authority to EPA for uranium mining after the state's moocher state legislature realized there is no competent oversight from state agencies.

Acknowledging there will always be acid mine drainage the board recently met in Pierre to announce its plans to continue the war on the Black Hills Gilt Edge Superfund site as EPA becomes a tool of the extraction industry.
Because rail lines in Butte and Anaconda were built using slag – waste from smelting – the ground underneath Mitchell Stadium could contain arsenic and lead contamination not previously discovered. EPA declared Anaconda a Superfund site in 1983 due to more than 100 years of copper smelting. Despite the fact that the sandbox at Benny Goodman Park came back with arsenic levels at 725 parts per million and lead at 817 parts per million in 2017, EPA said last year that the sandbox was still “safe.” [Montana Standard]

If the slag in Whitewood Creek was harmless or benign it would be added as aggregate to concrete destined for highway repairs.

Nearly a century of residue from the Black Hills Mining District affects millions of cubic yards of riparian habitat along the Missouri River all the way to the Gulf of Mexico even after the Oahe Dam was completed in 1962. The soils of the Belle Fourche and Cheyenne Rivers are inculcated with arsenic at levels that have killed cattle while catfish and most other organisms cope with lethal levels of mercury.

Tintina is a Canadian miner like Barrick and Mineral Mountain are.
Environmental groups and anglers have lined up in opposition to the mine, arguing that it could harm water quality in Sheep Creek, an important spawning stream for Smith River trout. Tintina maintains that their operation will use the best mining techniques and won’t harm either stream. [Bozeman Daily Chronicle]
On the east side of the Continental Divide Barrick also operates the Golden Sunlight Mine near Whitehall, Montana. Effluent from that mine goes into the Jefferson River also a tributary of the Missouri and much of it lies in repose within Canyon Ferry Reservoir.

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2/14/19

Legal cannabis advances in New Mexico Legislature

New Mexico's flag has been named the coolest in America. This image was captured at Mount Rushmore National Monument in the occupied Black Hills.
At the center of the debate is a 140-page bill that would legalize, tax and regulate the recreational use of marijuana for adults. The state now allows cannabis only for medical purposes. The proposal, House Bill 356, cleared its first committee Saturday on a 5-2 vote along party lines, with Democrats in support. “Prohibition simply does not work,” Democratic Rep. Antonio “Moe” Maestas of Albuquerque said, “and the country is coming to the realization of that.” As it stands now, the proposal would include:

 ⋄ Imposing taxes of up to 19 percent on recreational marijuana sales. Annual tax revenue would be in the neighborhood of $56 million, legislative analysts said. The money would go to health, law enforcement and research programs, in addition to city and county governments.

 ⋄ Allowing cities and counties to opt out of allowing commercial sales of recreational cannabis.

 ⋄ Expunging criminal records on marijuana arrests and convictions.
Read the rest here.

Speaker of the New Mexico House Brian Egolf not only supports legalization for all adults he serves as legal counsel for the state's therapeutic cannabis leader, Ultra Health. Calling itself "New Mexico's No. 1 cannabis company" Big Dope Ultra Health has broken ground in Clayton near the borders with Texas and Oklahoma. Keeping the industry from the clutches of a monopoly is expected to be contentious.

My preference is craft growers would also be marketers like vineyards and brewers subject to state inspections. The revenue debate needs to be done in committee in concert with tribal officials interested in forging compacts with the state and acknowledgement the future of value-added cannabis is grown outdoors, organic, geothermally heated indoors and powered by off-grid sources of electricity.

Democratic then-Representative from New Mexico's First District, now-Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham worked with Republican-now-Libertarian former Gov. Gary Johnson to legalize cannabis for some patients but Gov. Bill Richardson, a Democrat, signed it into law.

Participants in New Mexico's therapeutic cannabis program are now at 70,000 patients.

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2/9/19

NM Governor Lujan Grisham: fuck Trump's wall

Calling Il Trumpo's militarization of the southwest a charade Democratic New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham is pulling some 118 NM National Guard troops from the state's border with Mexico but leaving some personnel in place to assist with humanitarian efforts.
Also Tuesday, Lujan Grisham directed 25 troops from other states — Arkansas, Kansas, Kentucky, New Hampshire, South Carolina, and Wisconsin — to withdraw from the New Mexico border. [Las Cruces Sun News]


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2/3/19

Rewilding the West critical to reversing the extinction of Native America

The Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas resulted in a human-driven global impact on the Earth System in the two centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution. [Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492]
The name has been bastardized from Cyprian to Siparyann to Slippery Ann Creek. It has become a safe refuge where elk gather as they leave summer grazing in the upper Missouri River Basin and migrate downstream to escape the winter. Managed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the area is at the extreme west beginning of the Fort Peck Reservoir in eastern Montana.

An Odd Goddess and an interested party counted a hundred wapiti in the meadow while another hundred browsed and bugled concealed by the cottonwood and willow stands on the riverbanks. The waxing gibbous moon extended our viewing time well beyond twilight and long after the line of humans in cars and trucks on the road below us had dispersed. Then, coyotes harmonized in a chorus that continued until dawn. Spring flooding sustained stands of grass that still hid calves and cows while they lazed about.
Undeterred by its local unpopularity, last year the nonprofit bought an old storefront in downtown Lewistown for an office. [American Prairie Reserve]’s Laura Huggins said the building will eventually become a “gateway” to the APR, much like the community of West Yellowstone welcomes visitors to neighboring Yellowstone National Park. [Rural heart of Montana confronts change at Lewistown conference]
Global warming has been accelerating since humans began setting fires to clear habitat, as a weapon or just for amusement. Evidence that we humans have eaten or burned ourselves out of habitats creating catastrophes behind us is strewn throughout the North American continent. European settlement and the Industrial Revolution in the New World took hardwoods for charcoal then humans allowed fast-growing conifers to replace lost forests. Desertification driven by agricultural practices, overgrazing, concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs) and urban sprawl have turned much of the United States into scorched earth.

The Anthropocene is now and time to rewild some of the American West eventually becoming part of a Greater Missouri Basin National Wildlife Refuge connecting the CM Russell in Montana along the Missouri River through North Dakota to Oacoma, South Dakota combined with corridors from Yellowstone National Park to the Yukon in the north and south to the Canadian River through eastern Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, western Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas.

Clear the second growth conifers and restore aspen habitat, prescribe burns, begin extensive Pleistocene rewilding using bison and cervids, empower tribes and buy out ranchers or lease private land for wildlife corridors, turn feral horses from Bureau of Land Management pastures onto other public land to control exotic grasses and elect Democrats to lead the way.




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