People vs Government

For his protest against rising tourism, Utah rancher lets his cows do the, uh, talking

Boulder rancher Mark Nelson has a beef with his town’s touristy direction, so he did what Americans typically do: He protested. But he did something else that Americans typically don’t do: He turned his own cows into message boards. Last week, as he prepared to turn eight head of cattle loose outside the scenic southern Utah hamlet he calls home, Nelson took some black paint and a brush and went to work, crafting a note for fellow residents of Garfield County. “COWS NOT CONDOS,” he splashed on the left side of one cow and the right side of another before putting them out on State Road 12. “Tourism is an extractive industry,” he said. “There’s no such thing as eco-tourism. The dark side of that is you make people think it’s OK to overrun an area if they are bird-watching.” While they may disagree over the national monument’s reduction, probably every one of Boulder’s 240 or so residents wants to see the town’s quality of life remain intact...MORE

DuBois column - Elections count, will Zinke survive and Trump on fire

Elections count, will Zinke survive and Trump on fire

Grimness under Grijalva

Elections do make a difference.

How would you like to have the Co-Chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the former Chair of the Congressional Environment Task Force with a 100 percent voting record according to the Sierra Club, as the new Chairman of the House Resources Committee? That’s the Committee with jurisdiction over livestock grazing, wilderness, national monuments, endangered species and other land use activities of the Forest Service, BLM, USFWS and other entities of the Interior department. Well that’s what you are going to get with Raul Grijalva.

The Center for Biological Diversity says Grivalva has “championed efforts to protect wilderness areas, protect endangered species and advance the National Parks Service Centennial Initiative and ensure oversight of the operations of national parks, forests, and public lands systems. Most recently, he worked to protect the Grand Canyon from the threat of expanded uranium mining, advance ecological restoration on federal lands, and address the need for a budget fix for wildland fire-suppression funding. Grijalva has provided environmental leadership in Congress through his participation as co-chair of the Congressional National Landscape Conservation System and as chair of the Environment Task Force from 2003 to 2006. He has demonstrated a strong commitment to improving environmental policies.”

Grijalva just voted against the “Manage Our Wolves Act” saying on the House floor, “The bill before us today, H.R. 6784, is a piece of legislation we have seen time and time again to undermine wolf populations in the United States, but this would deliver an even more devastating blow to the continued recovery of gray wolves across the lower 48.” Grijalva continued, “Congress should not be making decisions on which species to list or delist. What we need to be doing is properly funding the Fish and Wildlife Service to implement measures to strengthen ESA and protect species and their habitats from permanent extinction, given the fact that we are facing an ongoing extinction crisis”.  

Grijalva recently signed on to an amicus brief challenging the President’s authority to diminish the Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments. About the brief, Grijalva said, “"President Trump and his enablers don't seem to care what laws stand in the way of their anti-environmental agenda, and they need to be stopped here and now.”

About Trumps attempts to change the ways the Endangered Species Act is administered, Grijalva called the proposals "a favor to industry". He stated the Trump administration "doesn’t seem to know any other way to handle the environment" than "as an obstacle to industry profits".

None of this environmental championship is new for Grijalva.

Prior to being elected to Congress, Grijalva served on the Pima County Board of Supervisors where he was generally depicted as the prime mover behind the Sonoran Desert Conservation Plan, which is a county “program for planned land-use, and biodiversity conservation.”

To show just how far he will go for the environmental cause, in 2015, as ranking member of the House Resources Committee, Grijalva sent a letter to seven scientists who questioned the evidence of man-made global warming, demanding to know what funding they received from oil and gas companies, “as well as copies of all emails concerning the content of their congressional testimony.” A University of Colorado Professor responded that he had already testified to the committee he had received no funding from fossil fuel interests, and called the letter a politically motivated "'witch-hunt”. The executive director of the American Meteorological Society told the Congressman his action "sends a chilling message to all academic researchers," and "impinges on the free pursuit of ideas that is central to the concept of academic freedom.”

Grijalva has already announced he intends to bring Secretary of Interior Zinke before the Committee to testify on a Montana land deal that may have benefitted Zinke’s family foundation and on other environmental decisions made at the department. 

You can see what we are in for. Investigations and more wilderness, national monuments and other restrictive land use designations, all of which cause harm to federal lands ranchers.

Zinke’s future

With the midterm elections now behind us, there is much speculation about changes in Trump’s Cabinet. Attorney General Jeff Sessions is already gone. Invariably, Zinke’s name pops up as one of the five most likely to depart, citing his numerous ethical conduct investigations. Politico has reported that Zinke is exploring other opportunities for employment and has even discussed being a consultant and commentator for Fox News.

Zinke denies this, saying the numerous investigations are “vicious attacks”, that he loves his current job and President Trump is behind him “100%”.  The Interior Department’s Inspector General has referred one of Zinke’s actions to the Department of Justice for investigation, and we’ll probably have to wait to see the progress or outcome of that before knowing of Zinke’s fate. Trump will, though, want as scandal-free Cabinet as possible going in to 2020.

Trump on fire

The horrible fires in California have killed at least 88 people with 203 people still on the unaccounted for list. The town of Paradise is gone with over 14,000 homes destroyed in the 120,000 acre Camp Fire.

In the midst of this President Trump tweeted, “There is no reason for these massive, deadly and costly forest fires in California except that forest management is so poor.  Billions of dollars are given each year, with so many lives lost, all because of gross mismanagement of the forests.”

Thumbs up for Trump. I never thought I would live long enough to hear a President say that.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all.

Frank DuBois was the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003, is the author of a blog: The Westerner (www.thewesterner.blogspot.com) and is the founder of The DuBois Rodeo Scholarship and The DuBois Western Heritage Foundation

This column first appeared in the December editions of the NM Stockman and the Livestock Market Digest 

U.S., Russia, Saudis balk at endorsing key climate change report

A diplomatic standoff over a single word could set the stage for a bigger showdown during the second half of this year's U.N. climate summit. Negotiators took time out Sunday to rest after the first week of talks ended on a sour note the previous night, when the United States sided with Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait in blocking endorsement of a landmark study on global warming. "I think it was a key moment," said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists. "The fact that a group of four countries were trying to diminish the value and importance of a scientific report they themselves, with all other countries, requested three years ago in Paris is pretty remarkable." The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's special report on what would happen if average global temperatures rise by 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit), and how to ensure they don't go higher, was widely regarded as a wake-up call for policy-makers when it was released in October. "The United States was willing to note the report and express appreciation to the scientists who developed it, but not to welcome it, as that would denote endorsement of the report," the U.S. State Department said in a statement. "As we have made clear in the IPCC and other bodies, the United States has not endorsed the findings of the report." Russia, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait also called for the study to be "noted" but not "welcomed."..MORE

Ranch Radio Song of the Day

Its Swingin' Monday and we have Memories of Old San Antone by Playboys II from their 1994 CD Back in the Swing of Things. THE WESTERNER https://thewesterner.blogspot.com/ Ranch Radio on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/RanchRadio4U/

https://youtu.be/v3DUhqlVTtk

LIMBAUGH: Environmentalism, Pantheism, Statism And Pessimism

ByDavid Limbaugh
 

Meaning no disrespect to climate alarmists of the past half-century, who have been quite formidable in their doomsday warnings, the modern era has ushered in a new wave of scaremongers who threaten to eclipse their predecessors.
This shouldn't discourage the original enviro-wackos of the 1970s, who hadn't accumulated sufficient empirical data to support their burgeoning secular religion. Give those people a break; how were they to know they'd have egg on their faces for predicting apocalyptic global cooling? We're much more advanced now, so it's not fair to judge them.
Admit it. A full week doesn't pass without some cataclysmic news about climate change. The meteorological activists are brilliantly adept at shoehorning any weather event or natural disaster into their ominous narrative. If world temperatures are cooling — or warming — they attribute it to overall warming. If there's a severe hurricane, it's because of evil capitalist carbon emissions. If California forest fires are caused or exacerbated by their asinine environmental policies, they blame them, too, on the "deniers," because one thing is certain about global warming blowhards: Their supposedly having good intentions means never having to apologize for their consistently failed prophecies. Al Gore, after all, is still an icon of this movement despite his embarrassing record and his unconscionably stratospheric personal carbon footprint.
Have you ever noticed that all proposed solutions for climate change require massive expansions of government control, reduced reliance on free market entrepreneurship, and the surrendering of our national sovereignty to global entities that are hostile to the United States and its founding principles? Is it simply a coincidence that the undying adherents of this pantheistic religion are political leftists who want to control every aspect of our lives? If these collectivists believed that the optimal solutions for our alleged environmental problems were market-based, do you think they would obsess over climate change? Ironically, the best remedies have arisen from the free market, but that's a topic for another column.
Just know this: There is a reigning pessimism in the humanist worldview that undergirds climate hysteria, and it has been around for a half-century. When I was in college in the '70s, a labor economist bemoaned the scarcity of the world's resources and said we'd have to tighten our belts because substantial economic growth was no longer possible. In his defense, we were then living under Jimmy Carter's malaise.
It is always a zero-sum game for statists, who seem incapable of imagining the wondrously creative solutions human beings are capable of if unencumbered by the vise of government control and the mandates of elites. Happily for America, Ronald Reagan believed human ingenuity could develop innovative processes to compensate for finite natural resources. Thankfully, he rejected the dismal notion that there's a finite economic pie. (Fast-forwarding to today, thank goodness President Trump rejected President Obama's similarly fatalistic pronouncement that only a magic wand could restore manufacturing jobs and robust economic growth to the United States. Do we see a pattern here?)
As the left ceaselessly bombards us with climate fearmongering, it's no wonder many have bought into hopelessness and despair. It was hardly surprising to see MSNBC anchor Katy Tur telling her audience this week that her life will be meaningless unless we start addressing the climate change problem. "I read that New Yorker article today, and I thought, 'Gosh, how pointless is my life?'" said Tur. "And how pointless are the decisions that I make on a day-to-day basis when we are not focused on climate change every day, when it's not leading every one of our newscasts?"

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GAO report raises concern over the health and safety of child farmworkers in the U.S., " often exposed to dangerous pesticides, heavy machinery, and extreme heat, and they are being killed as a result."

In the wake of a new child labor report by the Government Accountability Office, the Child Labor Coalition joins Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard,-Calif., and Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., in voicing concern for the health and safety of 2.5 million U.S. children who work for wages, particularly those who toil in sectors like agriculture with elevated injury and fatality rates. "The scourge of child labor still haunts America," said Sally Greenberg, executive director of the National Consumers League and a co-chair of the CLC. The new report "Working Children: Federal Injury Data and Compliance Strategies Could Be Strengthened" (November 2018) updates a 2002 GAO report on child labor in the United States. The GAO found that while fewer than 5.5 percent of working children in the United States toiled on farms, the agricultural sector accounted for more than 50 percent of child labor fatalities. In the years 2003 to 2016, 237 children died in farm-related work accidents, representing four times the number of deaths of any other sector (construction and mining had 59 over the 14-year period). "The GAO report's findings are damning," said Roybal-Allard and Rep. DeLauro in a joint statement. "This report confirms that child labor is contributing to a devastating amount of fatalities in the United States — disproportionately so in the agricultural sector. In that industry, kids are often exposed to dangerous pesticides, heavy machinery, and extreme heat, and they are being killed as a result. That is unacceptable."...MORE

Interesting that Roybal-Allard is so interested in farm kids. Her district, which includes East LA and South LA, over a similar period of time experienced 179 deaths caused by street racing. 10 percent of teenagers in her district don't attend school or work, and there are 5,685 children in her district with special healthcare needs. Perhaps she should address those problems before meddling with farm kids.

UPDATE 

Just as I suspected. Both Delauro and Roybal-Allard have a 97 percent rating by the AFL-CIO. The unions don't like teenagers working and taking up jobs in the workforce.

Cowgirl Sass & Savvy (revisited)

Camp cookie and the fire truck

By Julie Carter


“You ain’t never seen a hawk on the wing,
ain’t never heard old camp cookie sing.”

Ranchers are not immune to the romance involved in cowboying. Many of them spent years working up from the hired-hand to owner status.

Some cowboys, not wanting to give up enough of their freedom to become owners, have gone down other roads.

Tommie was such a cowboy. However, even Tommie needed to make a living, and so at some point in his cowboy life, he took an honest job as a firefighter in town.

But even in that, he never quite got away from the cowboy spirit and recalled that there was a tradition among ranch and rodeo hands. Many of them became cooks on the wagons at the big ranches.

This enabled them to still be part of the atmosphere, take their part in the fun, and not have to ride the broncs or flank the calves.

The bonus of the job was that nobody, or at least nobody in their right mind, ever crossed the cook. Everybody who wanted to eat would listen attentively to Cookie’s stories and praise his abilities as a cowboy and a cook. Tommie thought that would fit him just fine.

Incorporating his former cowboying with the town job seemed easy enough. He would cook from a fire truck and capitalize on the mystique of the cowboy and the firefighter.

Kids and adults alike would be fascinated with the truck as well as him. He just knew he would make a fortune. All that was required was his own personal fire truck.

There was only a slight problem with the one he found to buy – it was in Missouri and that was a far piece from home. Seemed like a small step for a stepper because his wife Sally had a nice big pickup truck that could easily pull a trailer loaded with the fire truck.

He had somehow miscalculated. While focusing on the usefulness of the truck, he not factored in the detail that it belonged fully to Sally.

It took some begging and pleading, but cowboy charm prevailed. Sally finally agreed to make the trip, drive her truck and haul his personal fire truck home so Tommie could enjoy cooking.

She had done her share of “camp cooking” and figured the fire truck would also come in useful watering the arena down faster than her current methods. While planning the trip she also hoped her kid would be over his stomach virus before it was time to leave for Missouri.

The trip was 13 hours long, one way and the stomach virus seemed to last about 100 hours. To top that off, the weather produced the proverbial hundred-year snowstorm. There are no words to describe the tension felt by the fair-weather cowgirl driving that distance on black ice.

The trip back with the fire truck loaded on a flatbed trailer didn’t seem to be any shorter. Again, driving every foot of the way with a sick kid, a sleeping husband, a snowstorm and a too-heavy tow package did not put Sally in a happy mood.

Everything seemed to be going pretty fairly well until Tommie, waking up just as they arrived at the driveway to their home, stretched and told her, “I think I’ll treat myself to a big breakfast this morning – I’m tired.”

We may never find out how cooking from a fire truck would have worked out, but there is a new big red water truck for the arena with Sally’s name painted on the door.

Ruralicide

The Weekly Stories

Ruralicide

Policies have Implications

By Stephen L. Wilmeth

            Benny Peiser sent me another invitation to attend one of his lectures on climate change policy.

            In this case, it will be a discussion presented by Rupert Darwall and a band of renegade MPs (Members of Parliament) entitled Climate Change Act at 10. From the synopsis, it appears the audience will be entertained with the dismal results of the British domestic version of ‘save the world’. The outcome is fuel poverty of poor Brits has worsened, the country’s industrial base has withered over the life of the legislation, and the social divide has deepened.

It has been an epic failure.

Darwall’s mission to expose the green tyranny with its totalitarian roots of the climate industrial complex, though, should be riotous. He is a hound dog on the hunt.

            My only regret of not being able to attend Dr. Peiser’s highbrow junta is the carefully choreographed and fashionably late entrance with a normal and customary standard western starched look that would be expected.

“And, what is that?” you may ask.

It would be full western regalia replete with my custom fitted Jim Spradley hat with Wranglers stuck down in a new pair of El Paso vamp tooled, 18” boots with glaring New Mexico red and yellow Zia crafted tubes not with the words Land of Enchantment, but, rather, Land of Ruralicide running down the off and near sides.

            I’d bet a $100 Benny would know who had arrived!

            Policies have Implications

            If anybody still reads a newspaper, three or four issues should have made the front page last week.

            The first would be France set itself on fire. The second would be that a $15 minimum wage in Seattle has gutted the low wage earning capacity in Seattle. The third would be the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish has officially declared humans no longer the alpha predators in the food chain in the state, and the last and fourth article would be that the United States Forest Service has reactivated the entire logic of Sherwood Forest. Henceforth, perpetrators of harm to the Crown’s protected animals would not just be ruined they would be subject to being drawn and quartered when such allowance is finally signed into law.

            Policies have implications.

            The French bourgeoisie has had its fill of leaders who have never started a lawn mower or fished a merde out of a plugged toilet. They demonstrated they would not tolerate a public heist that would run the applied tax on fuel to 65% (collected by their government that would not be satisfied even with a 100% tax).

President Macron played it tough until he saw his little ambition threatening to start a civil war. Blinking back outright fear, the French Prime Minister, Edouard Philippe declared, “No tax is worth putting in danger the unity of a nation.”

Seattle has done something politically similar.

Implicitly suggesting minimum wage earners should be satisfied serving coffee forever, a study has found low wage earner rolls have tumbled. It is also robbing each of them another $125 per week in adjusted scheduling. What Seattle has embraced runs the risk of eliminating service industry jobs completely. Have you been in one of the automated McDonalds yet? Push hard enough and entrepreneurs will figure out how to rid themselves of labor costs.

Then, there was the case of the New Mexico Department of Game and Fish Commission agreeing to green light the release of more wolf/dog hybrids into the wilds. They joined the howlers! They agreed unanimously to move forward with the underlying mission statement that hunters, with their purchase of licenses and paraphernalia, are not going to be the alpha predators in this green state.

No sir! That is going to be reserved for the wolf, and, if hunters don’t believe this, just hang on.

That was demonstrated with the eviction of New Mexico rancher, Craig Thiessen, from his forest allotment stemming from his admission of killing a wolf in 2015. Short on details, the key point of the report was the letter sent to “New Mexico Congressional Representatives” by Regional Forester, Marie Therese Sebrecht justifying her actions. One must assume that as long as she got the sympathy of those wolf advocates nothing else matters. We can only guess what Mr. Thiessen’s mortgage holder might think, or his banker, or his family, or his pastor. Take a man’s livelihood and what does he have left?

It certainly isn’t life.

Ruralicide

Unlike Thiessen’s plight, somebody is recognizing lives of rural Ireland.

Facing ruin in carbon taxes similar to the French, Ireland’s rural society can’t afford arbitrary, regulatory imposed fuel taxes. A statement issued by an advocacy group is exactly what the majority of rural Americans feel and face.

Reality of Farming’s (Agriculture) importance to the rural economy must be given equal consideration to the “scientific and environmental” (implications) of climate change.

The statement continued.

Farming and food production is not just a part of rural economy. To a large extent, it is the total of rural economy.

The real implication is rural cleansing.

In 1944, the Polish born, U.S. jurist Raphael Lemkin coined a new word in his book, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. From the Greek word, genos, and ‘cide’ borrowing from Latin meaning “act of killing”, genocide was created. He was trying to describe “the killing of a tribe”. The word is now universally used.

So, it is time to do characterize something similar regarding the rural component of society. Policies have implications and the incessant pursuit of separating the human element from the natural, rural world has become an accepted cause. Since we started with the French, let’s borrow from the old French word “Rural” and add the component of “killing” as created by Lemkin.

Ruralicide is what we are experiencing, and it has systemic and poisonous implications.

Stephen L. Wilmeth is a rancher from southern New Mexico. “My state is again facing the consequences of political and legacy lunacy.”