Friday, January 30, 2026

Going Feral: Questions hunters, fishermen, and public lands users need to ask political candidates. Addressing politicians in desperate times, part 2.

Going Feral: Questions hunters, fishermen, and public lands use...: Something similar was mentioned on a companion blog to this one just the other day, that being that it was never the intent to make this a p...

Questions hunters, fishermen, and public lands users need to ask political candidates. Addressing politicians in desperate times, part 2.

Something similar was mentioned on a companion blog to this one just the other day, that being that it was never the intent to make this a political topic blog.

But these are not ordinary times in Wyoming, or anywhere else.

Most real outdoorsmen, and by that I mean the sort of outdoorsmen who have the world out look that those who post here do, not guys with excess cash who are petty princes like Eric Trump, would rather be hunting or fishing, or reading about hunting and fishing, than thinking about politics.  But just like duck hunter (seriously) Leon Trotsky once stated; “You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you,” and that applies to politics as well as war.

Trotsky.  Bad man, but he was a hunter and fisherman.

You might not be interested in politics, but politics is very interested in you.

And frankly, given the assault on everything hunters, fishermen, and the users of public lands hold dear, you don't really have the luxury, and that is what it is, of ignoring politics.

Nor do you have the luxury of ignoring your politicians.

Donald Trump was embarrassing his first term in office, but in his second unrestrained term in office, he and the Republican Party have been a disaster for outdoorsmen, nature, and the environment.  Last year there was a diehard effort by Deseret Mike Lee to basically sell off massive parts of the public domain. That effort was supported by all three of  Wyoming's Congressional delegation in spite of massive public opposition to it.  This year a Freedom Caucus member, Rep. Wasserburger, is trying the same thing in the state with state lands.  None of this should be any surprise as Freedom Caucuser Bob Ide, who campaigned on less government, more freedom, but who is a big landlord depending on the government to protect his property rights, sponsored an effort to grab the public lands the legislative session before that.

When put right to it, the Freedom Caucus hates government ownership of anything, and by extension, just flat out isn't really very concerned about the collective good on anything at all.  They're an alien carpetbagging force in the country, but the sort of dimwitted views they have on nature and land are being expressed all across the country.  Hunters, fishermen, farmers, ranchers, campers, hikers and other users of the land who had reflexively voted for one party or another based on some belief on what those parties held can absolutely no longer afford to do that.

Part of this is because politicians just flat out lie.  People who naively thought that Donald Trump was a supporter of the Second Amendment, and therefore supported "gun rights" are finding out right now that he never believed any of that. Why would he?  He's an old, fat, wealthy, New Yorker.  It's not like you saw him at the range, now is it?

But chances are, you haven't seen California Chuck Gray there either, have you?

So, some questions that you, dear feral reader, really need to ask your politicians.

1.  Do you have a hunting or fishing license right now, and if you do, can you pull it out of your wallet so we can see it?

It used to be standard in Wyoming and Colorado, and I bet other Western states, to see a politician dragged out in front of a camera for an advertising campaign wearing brand new hunting clothing and carrying a shotgun (interestingly, never a rifle).  It was a little fraud that we all participated in. We knew that the politicians would probably wet his pants if he had to fire the gun, but we took that as a symbol of support.

Don't.

Find out if they really share your values. Do they hunt, or fish? What's the proof?

And if they answer yes, find out what that means.  Does it mean the politician goes sage grouse hunting every year or does it mean that he waddles on to a pheasant farm once a year to shoot some POW pheasants?  Worse yet, does it mean that he went on a catered "hunt" in Texas with fat cats.  

How often does he go, where does he go, does he use public land to hunt?

Same thing with fishing.

If he doesn't do either, and regularly, don't vote for him easily.  Chances are he cares as much about hunting as Elon Musk does about marital fidelity.

2.  Do you use public land for anything, and if so, what?

Nearly every feral person worth his salt uses public land.  Does your Pol?  And I mean for anything. Hunting, fishing, camping, running cattle, photography, running nude through the daisies.  Anything.

And ask for proof.

If that proof is a photograph of a cleanly shaved pol with brand new clothing, it's proof he doesn't use it, or that she doesn't use it.

And if the answer is the typical "I love Yellowstone National Park", be very careful  National Parks are great, but a lot of them aren't really very wild until you get off the beaten path.  Going on an auto tour of Yellowstone and seeing all the geysers is great, but that's not proof of much.  And quite a few of the "I support public lands" political class limits that support to parks. Everything is fair game for development in their view.


3.  Do you shoot?

I don't expect every outdoor users to be a shooter, although in the West, if you are a user of wildlands and don't have a gun, you are a complete and utter fool.  Having said that, I'll be frank that I have known fishermen who had one gun, probably a revolver, that they carried in some places.  They probably went years between shooting it.  I don't regard owning a gun as a precursor to all feral uses of land, particularly by people who don't hunt, but who do fish, or camp, or hike (but if you do any of these things, please get a handgun and learn how to use it).  

A lot of people in the West vote for pols based solely on "I support the Second Amendment type statements".  Lots of people allowed themselves to be duped into voting for Donald Trump that way, although we never believed his claims to be a Second Amendment supporter.  We're sorry that we were so right.  Anyhow, ask them if they have a gun and if they shoot.

No matter what they really believe, they're going to say yes.

I'll note I've seen this question asked just once, and when I did the female candidate, a native Wyomingite with a rural background, went on to qualify that she was just familiar with .22s.  Okay, that's an honest answer. 

She was, I'd note, a Democrat.

You do need to follow up on the question.

Right now, if you asked this question of Chuck Gray or John Barrasso, they'd both undoubtedly say yes.  I don't know if either of them owns a firearm, but my guess is that if they do they own it in the way of people who have bought or been given a handgun that's gone in a drawer, and that's where it stays.  Ask for proof.  What do they own, where do they shoot, how often, and are there photos.  And not photos from a gun show, like Reid Rasner posted the other day.

Take them to the range and have them shoot a box of .375 H&H.  If they run to the SUV crying, they're out.

If they can't back this stuff up, I'd assume they really don't care about the Second Amendment. There are people who don't shoot at all who do care about the Second Amendment, but they're are rare as people who are interested in stock cars but don't follow NASCAR (this would describe me).  Not too many.

4.  Do they believe in man made climate change?

This gets to the land ethic. Educated people, and most politicians, are educated who say no really don't give a rats ass about the planet or they're engaging in diehard self delusion. They're comfortable with everything being destroyed as long as they're dead before it happens or they just can't face the hard task of addressing, correcting, and reversing it.  They're not worth voting for.

Aldo Leopold.

5. Do they have a land ethic?

I've known a lot of people who have a very strong land ethic. Absolutely none of them didn't make use of wilderness in some ways.

That's a big clue.

Anyhow, more than anything else, do they have a land ethic?  That is;

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

Aldo Leopold.

Do they support that?

A huge pile of Western politicians really don't.  Some, however, who would surprise you do.  This is a hard question to really explore, because an existential question isn't necessarily easy to question on.  In a collegiate debate, you'd just state the proposition and ask if they agreed, or didn't and follow up with examples.  That may be the best way to do it.

Nobody should vote for a politician who doesn't support the Land Ethic.

Last edition:

Addressing politicians in desperate times. A series.

Tuesday, January 27, 2026

Lex Anteinternet: Saturday, January 26, 1946. Horse Power.

Lex Anteinternet: Saturday, January 26, 1946. Taking over the packi...: It was Chinese New Year. The Department of Agriculture took over 133 striking meat packing plants. In the same issue of the Rocky Mountain N...

Saturday, January 26, 1946. Taking over the packing plants.


The same issue had this advertisement, showing how important equine power still was.

Monday, January 26, 2026

Tuesday, January 20, 2026

Rejecting Avarice. Some radical rethinking.


Cease being intimidated by the argument that a right action is impossible because it does not yield maximum profits, or that a wrong action is to be condoned because it pays.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

We just published this item here on Donald Trump's insatiable lust for the destruction of land, lands even beyond our borders.
The Agrarian's Lament: Lex Anteinternet: Manifest Destiny and the Second ...: Lex Anteinternet: Manifest Destiny and the Second Trump Administrati... : Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, dramatizing Manifest ...

In the movie The Patriot, which is okay but not great, commences with these lines:

I have long feared, that my sins would return to visit me, and the cost is more than I can bare.

In a lot of ways, that opening scene is the best one in the movie.

No nation has a singular linear history, even though people tend to hear things that way. "This happened, and then that happened, resulting in this. . . ".  In reality, things are mixed quite often, and things are quite fluid with juxtapositions.  

Shakespeare claimed:

“There is a tide in the affairs of men

Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;

Omitted, all the voyage of their life

Is bound in shallows and in miseries.

On such a full sea are we now afloat;

And we must take the current when it serves,

Or lose our ventures.”

Perhaps.  But in reality the tide in the affairs of men drags everyone along with it. But it's a rip tide.  People's individual goals, desires and aspirations often are quite contrary to the tide on the surface.

That's certainly been the case with the United States.

If you have a Trumpian view of the world, the history of the United States looks like this, sort of:

This again.  It never occurs to many that the mines and cities aren't really everyone's dream.  It particularly doesn't occur to a rich real estate developer who isn't smart and whose values are shallow.

Lots of people have that view.  We came, we saw, we exploited, and everyone got happy working for Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk.

Trouble is, that's not true for a lot of reasons, a core one being it doesn't comport with who we really are.  The entire worship of wealth and what it brings, and the wealthy and who they are, is deeply contrary to our natures, and frankly men like Jeff Bezos, Donald Trump, and Elon Musk are deeply perverted.  Not because of their relationship with women, or because their names appear in the Epstein files in some context, although in the case of Trump, we really still don't know what context, but because of their shallow avaricious acquisition for and desire for wealth.

Timothy warns us:

Those who want to be rich are falling into temptation and into a trap and into many foolish and harmful desires, which plunge them into ruin and destruction.  For the love of money is the root of all evils, and some people in their desire for it have strayed from the faith and have pierced themselves with many pains.

And not only have their pierced themselves, but they pierce others, and entire societies with them.

So let's look at a few concrete things that we feel should be done.

Among the rich you will never find a really generous man even by accident. They may give their money away, but they will never give themselves away; they are egotistic, secretive, dry as old bones. To be smart enough to get all that money you must be dull enough to want it.

G.K. Chesterton, A Miscellany of Men

Revisit the Homestead Act.

Right from the onset of English colonization of North America, there was a pull between business exploitation and the simple desire for an agrarian place of one's own.

The truth of the matter is that when the nation started off, most people weren't "Pilgrims" seeking shelter from religious oppression.  Nor did they wish to be servants of big mercantile enterprises.  Most of the early English colonists were from agriculture or the trades and wanted to just work for themselves.  That's about it. 

The American Revolution was as much about that as anything else.  When American Colonials dumped tea in harbors, they were protesting taxes, but what they were also doing is dumping mercantile controlled property into waste.  It was grown somewhere else and it belong to rich remote classes.

The struggle was always there. The American South in particular had the planter class which depended upon enslaved labor to raise a market crop.  That was about generating wealth.  Most Southerners, in contrast, were Yeoman who had small places of their own.  When the Civil War came the wealthy had the South fight the war.

The analogies to the present day are simply to thick to ignore.

The Homestead Act came about during that war, and in real ways, it expressed a Jeffersonian dream. People willing to invest their own labor could acquire a place of their own.

The drafters of the Act never envisioned the wealthy controlling the land.  In some very real ways it was wealthy landowners that the North was fighting at the time.

Over the last few days residents of Wyoming have read about Chris Robinson, CEO of Salt Lake City-based Ensign Group, L.C., buying the Pathfinder Ranch.  I have nothing about him personally, but the listed price for the ranch was $79.5M due to its giant size.

I can personally recall when it was owned by locals  At that price, rather obviously, Robinson isn't planning on making money from cattle.  And to make matters a bit worse, residents of Natrona County got to read about another local outfit going up for sale, which is much smaller, for $9M.

Even into my adult years, by which time it was already impossible for somebody not born into ranching or farming to buy a place such that it could be their vocation, most ranches were owned by locally born ranchers.  This trend of playground pricing is making the status of the land the same as that which English colonists were seeking to escape from.

This could be fixed by amending the Homestead Act. The homesteading portion of that is fixed, but it would still be possible to go back and amend it such that land deeded to individuals under it, had to remain in agricultural use, and had to be held by families that made their money that way. exclusively.

I know it won't be, anytime soon, but it should be.

Revisit "Ad coelum ad damnum"

One of the absolute absurdities of the original Homestead Act is that it gave away not only the surface of the land, but the mineral rights as well.  This made the system sort of like buying lottery tickets. Some people got rich just of because of where they'd chosen to homestead.

I really struggle with the concept of private ownership of minerals, including oil and gas, in the first place.  I understand private enterprise exploiting it, but owning it?  Why?  It's not like private enterprise put the minerals in the ground.

Addressing this creates real constitutional problems, but ideally the mineral wealth of the nation should belong to everyone in it, not private parties.  And it should be exploited, or not, in the national interest, not in the primary economic interest of those who claim to own it.

I know that this brings up the cry of "that's Socialism".  It probably really is, but an unequal accidental distribution of mineral wealth on lands taken from the native inhabitants isn't just.  At a bare minimum, something needs to be looked into.  Indeed, as there was no intent to transfer that mineral title in the first place, perhaps it could collectively be restored and held in truth for the descendants of those original inhabitants.

Tax the wealthy

Every since Ronald Reagan there's been a ludicrous idea that taxing the wealthy hurts the economy. We know that this is completely false.  We also know that a certain percentage of the wealthy will allow themselves to become obscenely wealthy if allowed to, and that they'll harm everyone else as a result.

There's no reason on earth that anyone ought to be a billionaire.  Indeed, if you have more than $50M in assets, you have too much and something is potentially wrong with your character.  High upper income tax rates and wealth taxes can and should address this.  Elon Musk can be nearly just as annoying if his net worth was $50M as whatever it currently is, but he'd be a lot less destructive.

An alternative to this, if this is simply too radical, is to prevent corporations from owning most things, and to provide that once they get to be a certain size, at least 50% of their ownership goes to employees of those corporations.  It'd at least distribute the wealth some, and keep avarice from defining our everyday existence.

Final thoughts

What seems to be clear in any event is that we cannot keep going in this directly. Today's "conservatives" serve the very interests that the American Patriots rebelled against, remote wealth.  In spite of their tattoos and car window stickers, they'd form the Loyalist Militia trying to put down an an agrarian revolution in 1776.  The thing is, that those conditions always lead to revolution. They did in 1776 in North America, and then again in more extreme form in France a few years later.  They lead to the uprisings of 1848, the Anglo Irish War in 1916 and the Russian Revolution in 1917.  It's time to address this while we can, as it will be addressed.


Monday, January 19, 2026

Lex Anteinternet: Manifest Destiny and the Second Trump Administrati...

Lex Anteinternet: Manifest Destiny and the Second Trump Administrati...: Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, dramatizing Manifest Destiny.   Over the weekend, the real imperialist thinking behind Trump...

Manifest Destiny and the Second Trump Administration. What's going on with Greenland.

Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, dramatizing Manifest Destiny.
 

Over the weekend, the real imperialist thinking behind Trump's avarice for Greenland was revealed, and not by Trump, but by Ted Cruz.

Look, the whole history of America has been a history of acquiring new lands and new territories, whether you go back to Thomas Jefferson making the Louisiana purchase — about half of the United States of America today — or you go back to America purchasing Alaska from Russia. You want to talk about — at the time they called it ‘Seward’s Folly’ — It turned out to, to be an extraordinarily consequential purchase, Greenland has massive rare earth minerals and critical minerals. There are enormous economic benefits to America, but like Alaska, it is located on the Arctic which is a major theater for major military conflict with either Russia or China,

In short, it's a naked imperial land grab whose intellectual justification dates back to the 19th Century.  The age of alliances and of the United States representing hope and freedom is over. The age of grabbing lands to exploit because we can is back. 

It's deeply immoral, but Donald Trump is a profoundly immoral man.

He probably also didn't come u pwith this idea, but it was a natural for him.  He's not smart enough, or learned enough, to know of manifest destiny.

We've never covered the concept of Manifest Destiny here before, although we've covered some of the latter stages of the exercise of it.  We probably should have, as we've mentioned the Indian Wars fairly frequently, which are tied to it.  Having said all of that, it's worth nothing that there was never a time at which the concept had anywhere near universal American approval, and it was often hotly contested.

Manifest Destiny had its origins to some degree in the earliest history of the Republic, but less than is sometimes imagined.  The term itself was coined in 1845 in an editorial by later Confederate propagandist John L. O'Sullivan, although an earlier editorial by the adventersome Jane Cazneau entitled Annexation is credited by some with being the first work backing it.  That advocated for the annexation of Cuba and was penned about the same time.   O'Sullivan had used the term "divine destiny" as early as 1839.  O'Sullivan entered the scene advocating for the annexation of Texas, and then in an editorial about the Oregon Boundary Dispute wrote:

And that claim is by the right of our manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent which Providence has given us for the development of the great experiment of liberty and federated self-government entrusted to us.

The entire concept is patently absurd, but it had a strong pull on people as an excuse for aggressive expanding.  God, the concept holds, made the United States unique and it the country was charged with a divine mission that included expanding its territorial control.  It had opposition right from the beginning.  None other than U.S. Grant stated:

I was bitterly opposed to the measure [to annex Texas], and to this day regard the war [with Mexico] which resulted as one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation. It was an instance of a republic following the bad example of European monarchies, in not considering justice in their desire to acquire additional territory... The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war. Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.

An obvious problem with the concept is that once the United States reached the Pacific, the expansion should have been over.  It was used to justify everything about the worst of American expansionism up until that point.  Thomas Jefferson had seen the acquisition of Louisiana as a 1,000 year long preservation of agrarianism, but everything the country could do to exploit the West and its resources started nearly immediately.  The expansion not only left room for yeoman farmers to expand into, the country forces the native inhabitants into reservations and began destructive extraction of minerals nearly immediately.  The mixed legacy of expansion can be seen in contemporary illustrations, such as the often seen painting Manifest Destiny, showing a barely clad angelic woman pointing the way west, while in the shadows a Native American family (with fully topless Indian women) look back as they're pushed off the land.  Wyoming's state seal has a cowboy and a miner.  Colorado's features mountains and a the phrase, Nil sine Numine, Nothing without Providence.


By the time the Frontier closed in 1890, the entire concept was really losing its appeal.  The Battle of Wounded Knee that same year raised questions about the morality of Western Expansion in a new bloody way, although the questions has always been there.  A sort of national angst set in with nowhere to expand to.  That soon found the concepts old backers urging war with Spain.

Supposedly the Spanish American War was over Cuban freedoms and dissatisfaction over Spain's reaction to the explosion on the USS Maine.  In reality, McKinley was forced into it, or at least ended up going along, as it looked like the US could grab Cuba and add it as a new territory.  Opposition in Congress, however, . . . which affords us a roadmap now, statutorily kept that from happening.

What was wholly unanticipated, however, is that the US would brilliantly deploy its Navy to position it to take the Philippines.

Painting depicting Dewey in the Battle of Manilla Bay. Why, exactly, did we want the Philippines anyway?

Congress hadn't precluded the US from adding the Philippines, or Gaum, as U.S. territories.  The Philippines had a long running independence movement and a well educated class that thought of the American arrival as guaranteeing their immediate independence, which they were quickly disabused of.  The U.S. ended up fighting to keep the Philippines as a colony, although the war was deeply unpopular and lead to Theodore Roosevelt simply declaring that the US had won it, when in fact it had not. Some part of the Philippines contested for independence all the way into December 1941, when they then took up the cause against Japan.  Indeed, some other elements of the movement to gain independence, which by that time had been promised by the U.S., welcomed the Japanese as liberators and collaborated with them, something that was not held against them by the Philippine people later.

Up until the end of the 19th Century the US had been hostile to Great Britain for historical reasons.  The UK, however, immediately saw what was occuring, and was in its high colonial phase.  The reality of what the US was doing was portrayed in Kipling's poem, The White Man's Burden.

Most Americans had a strong distaste for colonialism, and had it before the Spanish American War.  The population bought off on the concept that we need to "Remember the Maine", but that didn't mean owning Cuba.  The war did bring the US into the Caribbean like never before, and for four decades the US fought an endless series of Banana Wars, often to secure the interests of American business, that has made us hated in Central America to this day.

The US intervention in Venezuela was a page right out of that book.  The US intervened in a foreign nation that really isn't a problem country for us, and now the Administration is busy trying to figure out how to profit from its oil.

Greenland is the same sort of thing.

The justification routeinly features the same sort of rationalization that was used to shove Native Americans off their land.  They'd be "better off" with the kind entrepreneurial American hand guiding them, and they would "get rich" with their country more efficiently exploited, never mind if they didn't' want to get rich and they didn't want to exploit their land.  In Greenland's case, it's now bitterly clear that part of real estate developer Donald Trump's desire to steal the country is so that rich American enterprises can exploit its mineral wealth.

What if they don't want it exploited?

That though never enters the minds of a certain branch of American capitalism.  Maybe most people don't want endless economic exploitation.  Maybe we don't want to mine everything.  Maybe we don't want endless business growth.

By World War One the US had moved very much away from colonialism.  The country started a series of "good neighbor" policies with countries to our south.  At the end of the Great War we favored self determination for nations.  World War Two's results emphasized this even more, with the US now favoring collective security against nations that were fundamentally opposed to democracy.

Trump has thrown that all in the trash.

People, myself included, have been struggling to figure out what on Earth Trump is thinking, and if he's being paid to destroy the US position in the world.  Nobody really knows, but all this does point back to the lunacy of National Conservatism, which looks back on a world that never was.  National Conservative thinkers see the US in much the same way the members of the New Apostolic Reformation do, and both forces are at work here.  National Conservatives want the US to crawl into the Western Hemisphere, making it solidly Christian, and shut the door behind us. They figure Europe will do the same, if its not too late, in their view, with many looking at authoritarian regimes like those of Orbán and Putin as Eastern European models.  Putin, they imagine, will advance Orthodoxy, although there's no reason to believe that his alliance with the Russian Orthodox Church is anything other than convenience.  Orbán is supposed to do the same with old world values in Hungary and Eastern Europe.  Immigrants to Europe and foreign influences are to be exterminated and tossed out.

That's what's going on in the minds of the National Conservatives, and that's partially what's going on with Greenland.

At this point, I frankly feel that its nearly inevitable that the US is in fact going to invade Greenland.  Europe can't really stop us from doing it, although it'll result in bloodshed.   It'll destroy the post war order completely. The Trump Administration will set about trying to exploit the minerals of Greenland immediately.

But that won't be the end of the story.  It's taken this along, amazingly, for people to get a concept of how horrible Donald Trump and his backers really are, but it's finally occuring.  Americans don't want to invade Greenland. They didn't want to invade the Philippines.  If, and I feel its a when, we do this, it'll be followed by several realities.

The first will be that exploiting a nation takes time, and those backing this move do not have it.  The House will flip in November, even though Trump will in fact take a run at suspending the election.  The Senate might flip in November as well, although that's doubtful, but Senate Republicans, their own careers on the line, will begin to back away from Trump.  In 2028 a disgusted populace will elect Democrats into office.

The US will leave Greenland, and in a big hurry.  It'll be independent.  The Trump legacy will be the pile of shit it deserves to be.  The US will begin the process of rebuilding itself, but as a much, much, weaker country than before.  That will be Trump's legacy.

May God grant that I'm wrong on all of this, and that somebody intervenes to stop this insanity before it's too late.

This again.  It never occurs to many that the mines and cities aren't really everyone's dream.  It particularly doesn't occur to a rich real estate developer who isn't smart and whose values are shallow.

Sunday, January 18, 2026