Missing girl's family hires PI as Republican donor Sanford outed as pedophile

It's estimated that the United States foster care industry supplies some 88% of sex-trafficked children some of whom are raped for money at the annual Sturgis Rally. Former State Senator Lynne DiSanto spent loads of air time raising awareness of the abuses committed by the Children’s Home Society near Rapid City, South Dakota in the wake of the disappearance of Serenity Dennard. The Children’s Home Society has been under the regulatory microscope before for violations of trust. One former executive director is none other than Republican former South Dakota Governor Denny Daugaard. Mass incarceration fuels the white foster home industry: a pet project of Daugaard’s wife. 

Billionaire Republican Denny Sanford has given millions to the Children’s Home Society. As the story of his pedophilia broke Carmel, Indiana-based private investigator Veracity I-I-R confirmed that they were hired by Serenity’s family to revisit the steps that led to her disappearance and explore likely outcomes.

Websites for Sanford organizations show the billionaire frequently interacting with kids involved in his charitable programs, visiting a small girl in a hospital bed, smiling at drawings with a schoolchild sitting in his lap and passing out candy canes to a group of kids. A newsletter for the Children’s Home Society of South Dakota, which received a record $55 million from Sanford in 2019, featured an illustration of him drawn by a child in appreciation of his support. Affiliates of the health system have employed Kimberley Thune, the wife of the second-ranking Republican in the Senate, according to John Thune’s financial disclosures. Thune’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment, and a woman who picked up Kimberley Thune’s cellphone hung up on a ProPublica reporter. [Billionaire T. Denny Sanford Was Under Investigation for Child Pornography]

Over a year later there are only three possible outcomes for Serenity Dennard's "disappearance:" she hooked up with a Jeffrey Epstein-type character or with a representative of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) Church where minor girls are trafficked and raped or since South Dakota routinely falsifies lab records that means the state will pin Serenity's death on a mountain lion so Game, Fish and Plunder will just go out and kill one then close the case.

Prescribed burns reducing intensity of local blaze

 

Fire managers working the 3,200 acre Medio Fire on the Santa Fe National Forest are not sure what caused it but are steering it away from structures and into areas that have been burned prescriptively. According to Inciweb it's driven mostly by ponderosa pine understory and nearing the 2011 Pacheco Fire scar on the northeast. Rain showers are forecast for the weekend.

Fuel change to green quaking aspen should significantly reduce fire behavior and movement. Fire continues to work south and west above FS Road 102 in Pacheco Canyon. Fuel change to pinion and juniper will begin to limit fire.

The Trump Organization has blamed California wildfires on the lack of logging with statements typically devoid of facts but the real culprits are downed power lines and a warming climate. Over a half million wildfires are started by arsonists every year in the US and if you live in the wildland-urban interface government can't always protect you from your own stupidity. If counties and states just burned off their road and highway rights of way every year that creates substantial fire breaks.

 Forest Service Operations Section Chief Eddie Baca took journalists into the burn zone. 

This kind of low intensity burn is exactly what the crews hope to ignite all along the western edge of the fire, says Baca on the way back. It's very different than the acres upon acres of barren, black and ashy hillsides in the Rio en Medio drainage where the fire burned hottest. He shows me a video he took on his iPhone from a plane as he flew over the fire on the first day he arrived on scene with the type 2 team. The sight of so much blackened land as seen from above comes as a shock after watching tame little flames smolder beneath still-green oak brush off the 102. He says he expects crews will add at least another 1,000 acres of controlled backburn to the overall acreage of the fire. But if it looks anything like the fire line where the Medio Fire kissed the 102, in time it might hardly bear a scar.

Read the rest here.

Spearditch land owner could erect a cement Jesus in Rapid City trailer park

Rand Williams has worked his entire life for the fortune he's amassed. Rapid City Mayor Steve Allender's career has been spent languishing on the public dole.

 

Recall Mary Garrigan's piece in the Rapid City Journal that Williams almost built a Ceement Jaysus in Spearditch.

Rand Williams, a Spearfish real estate entrepreneur, said he is envisioning a multimillion-dollar statue along the lines of Rio de Janeiro's Christ the Redeemer, a 125-foot tall statue that draws tourists to the Brazilan city, that would sit on a two-acre parcel of city land.

Yes, Mr. Williams purchased the former Passion Play site and was divinely inspired to erect a ferro-cement statue on that ground seized after a treaty giving the land to Indigenous peoples was voided by Congress.

The statue, tentatively titled “Who Do You Say That I Am?” was initially proposed in February 2013 to be located on city-owned land near the Passion Play Amphitheater. “In order for it to be seen on the hilltop, it will have to be bigger than life-size,” Williams said in a prepared statement. Exactly how large, though, he declined to speculate. Williams is contributing $100,000 as seed money to the project and has started a 501(c)3 non-profit organization. [Mark Watson, New plan, location announced for Christ sculpture, Black Hills Pioneer]

Williams owns property all over western South Dakota and rents to Earth haters like John Dale. Dale joined fellow egomaniacs Sam Kephart, Gary Coe and others who have parachuted into Lawrence County expecting to change the good ole boy network Rand Williams actually helped to create. Williams' trailer park in Rapid City makes over $35,000 a month. 

After multiple complaints were filed in 2017 along with numerous letters and emails sent to the park owners about the situation, Williams was found guilty of six city ordinance violations and sentenced to pay fines and costs of $720 on Oct. 25, 2018. The city set a deadline for action on Feb. 1, 2020, but no action was taken. Another letter was sent to Williams noting the tenants would be notified that their water would be shut off April 8. [Mayor calls mobile home park owner a 'slumlord' in letter to City Council]

He bought the Moose Lodge property in 2005 when I was doing work at the Homestake Opera House in 2005 and we even talked about teaming up for a project but I fled South Dakota in 2006 for Montana. So, screw those tenants, Rand; clear those trailers and erect a Ceement Jaysus on that site instead! 

Learn more about Rand Williams and his passion for historic preservation linked here.

Steve @ChiefAllender has physically beaten scores of Native Americans under the color of law yet now as mayor has the temerity to damn others. https://t.co/smu2fZtZ7T

— interested party (@larry_kurtz) August 27, 2020

Trump Organization targeting feral horses

The modern horse was introduced to North America by the Spanish late in the 15th Century and then by other European colonizers. Acquiring the horse in the 1740s enabled the Lakota to win the Black Hills and today restoring and rewilding American ecosystems are parts of the Green New Deal.

After the Bureau of Land Management held livestock production scoping sessions in February the Trump Organization is ending protection for endangered species and public lands because ranchers insist grazing cattle reduces wildfire risks despite copious evidence and strong arguments to the contrary. Now, the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association and American Farm Bureau Federation are pushing for the capture and slaughter of some 130,000 feral horses over 10 years at an estimated cost of $1 billion.

Agency officials have said the appropriate number of horses roaming free — called “appropriate management level,” with the acronym AML — is about 27,000. Mustang advocates have said the roundups are aimed at placating ranchers at horses' expense, arguing that cattle do far more damage to ranchland than mustangs. [KUNC]

Democratic Montana Governor Steve Bullock has sued to remove a committed Earth hater from Herr Trump's BLM. 

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 Pecos 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, lease private land for wildlife corridors, turn feral horses from BLM pastures onto other public land to control exotic grasses and buy out the welfare ranchers Tony Dean warned us about. 

If the groupthinks in industry-friendly Miles City, Montana; Las Cruces, New Mexico; Elko, Nevada and Casper, Wyoming really ruled domestic livestock grazing reduces fuel loads why is extreme fire danger still a thing in ranch country?

Image: feral horses range freely on a Kewa Nation pasture.

Red flag warning, #firewx watch: https://t.co/OIZVQ4ad6n pic.twitter.com/sgjJkOkbVa

— interested party (@larry_kurtz) August 22, 2020

North Dakota town mulling change for park named for war criminal

A state park, a peak, a county and a town in the Black Hills, a county and national forest in Montana are named after a murderer. During the Battle of Greasy Grass on the banks of the Little Bighorn River in Montana George Custer attacked the encampment where the elderly, women and children were hidden and during the Washita Massacre he held a similar contingent as hostages and human shields. 

Crow Peak just outside Spearditch or Paha Karitukateyapi is translated as "the hill where the Crows were killed" stemming from a battle between the Lakota and Crow Nations. The Crow allied with Custer and the United States Army believing they would reclaim the Black Hills. Custer’s name is on a peak in the Black Hills National Forest and should be removed. It's time to strike his name from the Custer National Forest, too. 

George Custer, Phil Sheridan, George Crook and William Harney all committed crimes against humanity yet their names still besmirch numerous government and geographical features. Crook City near Whitewood and Crook's Tower, one of the 7000 footers in the Black Hills, were named after a war criminal. Revisionist history turned the Wounded Knee Massacre into a battle now Senator Mike Rounds (NAZI-SD) said he won't vote for the Senate companion to the Remove the Stain Act that would rescind Medals of Honor for twenty war criminals responsible for the slaughter of children, women and men in 1890 at Wounded Knee in occupied South Dakota. But he and the South Dakota Republican Party are hardly the only racists in the colonized American West. 

Now Bismarck, North Dakota is considering a change for a mal-named park. Read that here.

ip photo: a thunderstorm engulfs Mato Paha (Bear Butte). 

Cheyenne River Grassroots Collective holds space at Philip man camp

Genesee & Wyoming, the parent company of the Rapid City, Pierre and Eastern Railroad, conducts the business on the west end of its holdings and operates on the right of way that intersects the proposed Keystone XL pipeline at Philip. If the Quinn Dam just upstream of a RCPE washout fails one of its first casualties will be that pipeline where it's proposed to cross the Bad River. Rail cars carrying diluted bitumen could be loaded at Philip then be transported through Pierre, Huron and maybe Brookings then south through Sioux Falls to the depot at Cushing, Oklahoma but running a bomb train through white towns won't fly when you can build a leaky pipeline through stolen treaty ground so it's hard to imagine these projects going through cemeteries where people of European descent are buried.

The same geology that thwarts railroads and forces engineers to rebuild I-90 between Reliance and Rapid City and I-94 between Mandan, North Dakota and Billings, Montana every year also makes construction of the Keystone XL pipeline untenable but the so-called 'Americans for Prosperity' a Koch-funded group with a lobbyist based in Sioux Falls has signaled to legislators that they will lose campaign funding from the Kochs unless they act to reverse the progress the US Environmental Protection Agency has made in South Dakota.

Man camps are vectors for disease and violent crime. Montana and North Dakota have both suffered the effects of the camps that prey on women and girls where rapes and murders committed by predatory criminals have become commonplace.

 

Lujan Grisham wants to legalize

It's the view of this interested party that cannabis growers in New Mexico should be able to market their product like vineyards have tasting rooms and breweries have tap rooms where the customer determines demand for the various strains. The State of New Mexico should offer incentives to tribes, pueblos and others for organic cannabis grown with off-grid sources of electricity and rainwater harvest. Also, all grows and product offered for public sale, including cannabidiol or CBD, should be inspected by the state or tribal authorities. 

Last year the cannabis legalization task force established by New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham released details of its discussions to the media. Kelly O’Donnell, an economist and consultant who has studied the market, told participants New Mexico should expect increased tourism especially from red states like Texas and Oklahoma. Now the governor has doubled down.

“Legalizing cannabis would be a net benefit to New Mexico and transform the lives of so many people in this state,” she wrote. “… We can create a huge economic opportunity for New Mexico communities — but I want to make sure we get this right, which is why I’m turning to you for advice.” [Governor asks her supporters for opinions on cannabis legalization]

On Thursday New Approach Montana announced its two legalization measures will appear on that state's ballot.

"At $1 a seed, it was costly, but that wasn’t the surprise. The surprise was that when their $20,000 seed order arrived, it was enclosed in a plastic bag that fit in Matt’s hand." https://t.co/4I1OOQjfkM #cannabis #hemp

— interested party (@larry_kurtz) August 13, 2020

White Plume again the face of tribal cannabis in South Dakota

Since South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem has admitted white people are too stupid to grow cannabis, industrial or otherwise, tribal nations trapped in the state are on the path to economic growth. State law doesn’t apply to sovereign nations so the Flandreau Santee and Oglala Lakota Nations filed applications with the US Department of Agriculture to grow industrial cannabis (hemp). 

Alex White Plume of the Oglala Lakota Nation planted his grow/op on May 30 and on August 1st he tested the THC level to be sure his crop conforms to tribal code. He said the original law was 1% but the "lawyers got a hold of it and rather than act sovereign they went .3%." His clones are bred to be high in cannabidiol (CBD). In a Faceberg post White Plume told journalist, Tim Giago that growers are governed by heavy-handed policy from the federal government and the tribal councils so there is little free will to deviate from the rules.

CBD products being sold in South Dakota and other states are little different from raw milk, preserves, pies or juices that are often tainted with hormones, pesticides and worse but sold at farmers markets anyway. Giving the products as gifts is one thing but selling untested product especially through interstate commerce is completely different. Contaminated dietary supplements, vapes, ointments and edibles are unacceptable in a country with a long history of snake oil salesmen. 

Even in Canada using home grown seed is illegal and why anyone would want to buy genetically engineered seed from Bayer Crop Science/Monsanto or some other earth hater every year remains a mystery. This crop is not the benign introduced species it’s cracked up to be and stray pollen from the hemp industry can wreak havoc on growers of therapeutic and “recreational” cannabis.

In May the Red Lake Nation in occupied Minnesota voted to legalize therapeutic cannabis expanding the list of qualifying symptoms for tribal patients seeking treatment in the first application of cannabis flower in the state. On August 18, the White Earth tribe will vote to legalize for some patients and according to activist, Winona LaDuke hopes are high that voters will embrace the Oklahoma model, home to the loosest therapeutic cannabis rules in America. 

But in my home state of South Dakota the law enforcement industry is worried cannabis reform will lead to less revenue for police departments. Policing for Profit has allowed the Division of Criminal Investigation to provide military armaments for the industry throughout South Dakota where most believe prostitution will be legal before cannabis laws are amended. 

Think pesticide drift is destructive? Hemp is open range on meth. Medicine and a potential revenue source are being put at risk by an experiment that makes Jerusalem artichokes and Belgian endive look like safe investments.  Legalization, state inspections and regulation of a product that so many people enjoy is reasonable public policy that would align with our life safety goals. 

Cannabis is a safe, effective palliative so black market cannabis not tested or subject to regulation makes America and South Dakota less safe. But in a series of rants at the Dakota War Toilet LGBTQ activist, Miranda Gohn pleaded with readers to defy ballot measures legalizing cannabis for all adults while arguing her gender reassignment surgeries were essential to curing her dysphoria and clinical depression.

White Plume has a business relationship and grow contract with Evo Hemp.

"The email made it clear Lujan Grisham thinks legalization is a good idea." https://t.co/z08fDaWMby via @thenewmexican

— interested party (@larry_kurtz) August 12, 2020

South Dakota Democratic Party chair urges voters to legalize

South Dakotans for Better Marijuana Laws submitted over 50,000 signatures to a Republican secretary of state in support of a ballot measure that would allow adults 21 and older to possess and distribute up to one ounce and cultivate up to three plants for personal use. If passed the measure would direct South Dakota's whack job legislature to establish therapeutic and industrial cannabis (hemp) programs. Another group was able to submit petitions, too. Republican Governor Kristi Noem dropped her opposition to hemp to give voters fewer reasons to support Amendment A and if blue state legislatures like New Mexico's and Minnesota's can't legalize for all adults it's virtually impossible to see South Dakota's legislature doing it.

 

Noem sacrificing Black Hills and Native Americans to advance her national aspirations

We all know Republican South Dakota Governor Kristi Lynn Arnold Noem (KLAN) is a racist so now she is exploiting ethnic cleansing to advance her national aspirations. Noem is pushing the State of South Dakota to buy 266 Superfund acres of Forest Service land in occupied Lawrence County from the Trump Organization.

Acknowledging there will always be acid mine drainage in the Black Hills the Republican-owned South Dakota Board of Minerals and Environment is dealing with still another devil who wants to strip mine the Gilt Edge Superfund site as the US Environmental Protection Agency becomes a tool of the extraction industry and the Trump Organization plots moving the Bureau of Land Management to Colorado. South Dakota is no stranger to ecocide because it's a way of life in the chemical toilet. Under the General Mining Law of 1872 even foreign miners have carte blanche to rape the Black Hills, so they are. At least five transients want to poke the Black Hills but it's happening on the Santa Fe National Forest in New Mexico and throughout the Intermountain West.

One of state government’s first purchases at the Gilt Edge was 33 acres from the U.S. Forest Service for $10,600, according to state School and Public Lands Commissioner Ryan Brunner. The state Department of Environment and Natural Resources is acquiring land at Gilt Edge in preparation for when DENR will be fully in charge of upkeep, according to spokesman Brian Walsh. “After closure, the State of South Dakota is required to take over 100% of the responsibility of site operation and maintenance, including water collection, water treatment and implementation of institutional controls to ensure the effectiveness of the cleanup actions and minimize future environmental impacts,” Walsh said. [KELO teevee]

But wait, there's more.

Noem has taken a relaxed approach to the pandemic. Even as Republican governors in states like Texas have moved to require people to wear masks, Noem didn’t require physical distancing or masks at the July 3 celebration at Mount Rushmore, which President Donald Trump attended. Wednesday, Noem had similar messaging when on “The Ingraham Angle.” The governor said South Dakota’s lax COVID-19 restrictions has allowed the state to “enjoy their way of life.” [KEVN teevee]

‘Boxed Into a Corner,’ Residents Brace for Thousands to Attend Motorcycle Rally. This year’s festival may attract about 250,000 people despite an uptick in coronavirus cases across the state, city officials say. https://t.co/GYkfNHIoSz

— Mark Walker (@bymarkwalker) August 6, 2020

White Earth Nation will vote on therapeutic cannabis

In May the Red Lake Nation in occupied Minnesota voted to legalize therapeutic cannabis expanding the list of qualifying symptoms for tribal patients seeking treatment in the first application of cannabis flower in the state. On August 18, the White Earth tribe will vote to legalize for some patients and according to activist, Winona LaDuke hopes are high that voters will embrace the Oklahoma model, home to the loosest therapeutic cannabis rules in America.

According to a report released last year by the Minnesota Department of Health over 70 percent of survey respondents said therapeutic cannabis was helping to ease their post-traumatic stress and most showed “clinically meaningful” reductions in the severity of their symptoms. Also last year Minnesota-based Vireo Health expanded into New Mexico's therapeutic cannabis market where the number of enrollees is nearing 100,000 patients. Researchers at the University of New Mexico have learned cannabis is an effective treatment for depression. 

In my home state of South Dakota the law enforcement industry is worried cannabis reform will lead to less revenue for police departments. Policing for Profit has allowed the Division of Criminal Investigation to provide military armaments for the industry throughout South Dakota where most believe prostitution will be legal before cannabis laws are amended. 

Senator Tina Smith (D-MN) has introduced the Substance Regulation and Safety Act of 2020 in the US Senate but Republicans in Minnesota's legislature continue to block legal cannabis for all adults denying the state needed revenue and leaving a thriving black market in place to enrich police unions.

Oklahoma has as close to free market capitalism for medical marijuana as can be imagined. There are no restrictions on the number of permits to be issued, nor zoning restrictions. There are over 200,000 patients --more per capita than any other state -- and so far, licenses were issued for 2,168 dispensaries, 1,415 processors and 4,931 growers. The industry started in 2018, and in 2020 it’s already worth about $350 million. That’s real money, spread across a lot of businesses and a lot of patients. By comparison, Minnesota’s medical marijuana business is controlled by just two corporations: Minnesota Medical Solutions and Leafline Labs, associated with the Bachman Nursery’s business. Both are Twin Cities-based. Vireo Health LLC is the parent company of Minnesota Medical Solutions Company and is headed by Dr. Kyle Kinsley, a former ER doctor from Shakopee. [LaDuke, posted at INFORUM]

By opening schools Noem would commit genocide in Indian Country

We all know Republican South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem is a racist but now my home state has gone from being America's laughing stock to becoming a co-conspirator in hate crimes. Of course she knows Native Americans and other children of color are more at risk to Covid-19 so exposing them in greater numbers translates to fewer Democratic voters.

Democratic Attorneys General are gathering evidence that Donald Trump is committing crimes against humanity not just in New Mexico but in all of Indian Country.

The Obama Administration cut funding to the lab in Wuhan after teams from Australia, the US and China discovered this novel coronavirus strain in 2014 but it took Donald Trump to weaponize it. In past years the Trump Organization has used the federal courts to punish tribal nations who built casinos Trump said were competition but today the White House is slow-walking resources to reservations while deploying COVID-19 as a biological weapon in Native America.

That "Pocahontas" thing Trump does to Senator Elizabeth Warren doesn't just betray his hatred for women; it's a tell that he loathes American Indians no matter how much or how little Native blood a person has. That Republicans continue to prop up his assault on the courts and stoke his criminal race baiting is the most telling aspect of this march toward the abyss.

Make no mistake: Donald Trump and Republicans like Kristi Noem are targeting Indian Country for annihilation. His Tulsa trip and the Sturgis Rally in occupied South Dakota are spreading the virus all over Native America. It’s called ethnic cleansing even genocide elsewhere but in Trump’s America it’s called patriotism. Unless Republican Earth haters recognize the clear and present danger this president represents doom is imminent.

The institute was the brainchild of Trump’s longtime lobbyist and consultant, Roger Stone, and Trump himself was hands-on — not just paying the bills, but signing off on ad copy or radio scripts depicting the tribe as violent criminals and drug dealers. When Stone hired private investigators to dig up dirt on the Mohawks, Trump secretly paid the bills. [LA Times]

Gov. Noem has simply become a pinup for Trump and the Kochs so boycotting South Dakota is apparently the only language the Republican Party seems to understand.

More than 250,000 people are expected to rumble through western South Dakota for the annual motorcycle rally in Sturgis, sparking worries it could cause an unmanageable outbreak of COVID-19. https://t.co/OPWCw51juK

— MPR News (@MPRnews) August 3, 2020