Bull Moose Rescued After Stuck For Hours In Montana Skate Park

 

Bull Moose Rescued After Stuck For Hours In Montana Skate Park

After Lightning Bolt Kills 220 Sheep, Carcass Composters Spring Into Action

 

After Lightning Bolt Kills 220 Sheep, Carcass Composters Spring Into Action

Holy Cow! Montana Rancher Spots 'Herd' Of 7 Grizzlies On Property

 

Holy Cow! Montana Rancher Spots 'Herd' Of 7 Grizzlies On Property

Citing Wyoming corner-crossing case, hunters sue Montana for public land access

Citing Wyoming corner-crossing case, hunters sue Montana for public land access

While not obvious at first blush, this risk creating a situation in which this issue goes to the United States Supreme Court which right now is rather far to the right.

 

In GOP Chaos, There May Be Hope For Public Lands

Lex Anteinternet: Voices of Kalaallit Nunaat: An open call to Greenlanders, and musings.

Lex Anteinternet: Voices of Kalaallit Nunaat: An open call to Greenl...:   An interesting blog entry by a native Montanan. Voices of Kalaallit Nunaat An open call to Greenlanders I note this in part because she...

Voices of Kalaallit Nunaat: An open call to Greenlanders, and musings.

 

An interesting blog entry by a native Montanan.

Voices of Kalaallit Nunaat

An open call to Greenlanders

I note this in part because she's a nature writer, and native Montanas are close to nature, like native Wyomingites.

Indeed, I've tended to find since Donald Trump reared his New York overfunded balding head that real Trump backers in my home state either lack education, or tend to be imports.  I know part of that is a really harsh judgement, but I don't find too many natives, in any demographic, who are fire breathing Trumpites who are exceptions to this rule.  There are, I'd note, educated Trumpites here, for sure, but they tend to be imports.  

I think people know what the unrestrained wealth and exploitation mean to Wyoming, and that helps explain it.  Wyomingites are, if they are real Wyomingites, conservative/libertarians but not populists really.  

Imports who move here, however, including some who claim to be us, or want to be us, often are Southern Populists at heart.  Indeed, a couple of years ago I was out in the sticks and saw a giant Stars and Bars flying above somebody's camp tent, something that, when I was young, would stood a good chance of having been ripped down by any native passing by.  

I've written a lot about how we got here.  The question now, is how we get out. We'll be getting out, one way or another.  The question is, however, whether a rational conservatism can emerge that's free of the horrific elements that Trump has interjected into what's passing for conservatism now, or whether it will pass the way the way that French conservatism did after Vichy.  I think, frankly, the latter is more likely.

If conservatism can survive Trump, which frankly I very much doubt, when it reemerges it's going to have to rebuild a lot nationally and internationally that Trump and his minions have utterly destroyed.  More likely, however, what will emerge after this era is a renewed liberalism countered only by a somewhat middle of the road liberalism.  Again, France provides the model.  After the Second World War the French Third Republic was dominated by the hard left, including a very powerful communist party, countered only really by a centrist to liberal centrist Catholic party.  The French right died. 

I suspect that's the country's political future, in a way.  Starting in 2026 the Democrats will regain the House and, if Trump is still in power, provide a block to an outraged and increasingly insane Trump.  By 2028, the Senate is likely to go Democratic too, assuming it doesn't in 2026.  The White House will have a legitimate President following the 2029 election who will almost certainly be a Democrat.

That President, whether he's Republican or Democrat, and who won't be J. D. Vance or Marco Rubio, is going to have a big task in front of him.  Part of that will be to repair the international damage done by Trump. 

Not all of it will be capable of being repaired.  A western world that had depended upon the U.S. to be the world leader of Western ideals will never, and I mean never, trust the U.S. again.

But the U.S. will also be much diminished in the Western Hemisphere, in spite of what Trump, Vance, and Rubio think.  In South American a new block will emerge, likely with former major rivals Argentina and Chile as the leadership, but with Brazil, a massive country in extent and population, more significant than the U.S.  Canada will be regarded as a serious, educated, intelligent nation by the Europeans.  The U.S. will still have weight in the world, but in the way that France or the United Kingdom do now, save for Asia where the U.S. will still be a major presence.  We will have been forced to look to the Pacific, as so many in the past have urged us to do in the past, by Trump and the Republican party soiling our relationships with our intellectual home.  

Basically, we will have been the kid that left home, got into drugs, and embarrassed everyone. We'll be the Hunter Biden of Western nations.

Domestically, we're going to have a lot of repairs to do.  A new President will quietly accept much of what Trump has done in immigration.  The damage done to trade economics will likely have repaired by them, the tariffs having by then settled into an economic background as part of a new system which will not generate all that much in income but which countries are by then used to.  Businesses won't come back to the U.S. due to them, and the Rust Belt dreamers will have gone on to despair.  The Agricultural sector will be barely reviving, I'd guess, from a Trump induced economic collapse by that time.

The U.S. will return to environmental and conservation sanity and begin to try to make up lost ground and lost damage, in part because its role in the world will have been so decreased that it will have no choice.  Fools who insisted that we had to grab Venezuelan oil as China was going to will wake up and find that China will, by 2028, be using largely electric, not gasoline, vehicles. Europe won't be far behind, and a U.S. auto industry that will wish to sell will have advanced in this direction, with U.S. consumers, less enamored with a 19th Century economy than Donald Trump, will have as well.

If Trump's "Travis, you're a year too late" petrol pipe dreams will have achieved little, and they will, perhaps a revival of nuclear power might actually make a difference.  Like many of Trump's policies, or those who used Trump to gain position, that policy on the margin of his larger policies, would be beneficial.  The pipedreams about coal and oil, however, will go nowhere and already are going nowhere.  Indeed, Wyoming's coal fortunes, so desperately pinned on Trump, are going nowhere at all, and the price of oil in the state is down in the disastrous levels.

In larger things, people sometimes ponder the existential "problem of evil", that being why does God allow bad things to occur.  A common answer is that God does not allow it unless a greater good can come out of it.  While I don't want to go so far as to claim to detect a Devine hand at work here, I wonder if a bit if we're going to see something like that occur.

The country that comes out of Trump Drunk in 2028 with a bad hangover is going to be a much lesser nation.  Maybe that's a good thing, particularly of Europe, where we derived our culture from, revives to claim a larger place.  We'll need to get used to being told what we will do, and like a bratty teenager, which we've proven ourselves to be, we'll have to get used to that.  Our Evangelical Puritanism which most Americans assume is Christianity will have taken a sharp hit.  Our botching foreign wars will end as nobody will really trust us much as a solo actor.  Nations that need alliances, and many do, will look to us only in concert with others, which will make them safer. Taiwan and South Korea will look to Japan, and perhaps to Australia. Europe will look to ourselves.  Nobody will care one wit about us, and we'll have to look, pleadingly, to everyone else.  Our environmental destructivism will start to come to an end.  Our cultural imperialism will come to an end, as nobody will admire a country that could produce such vile characters as Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, or Jeffrey Epstein.  Our absolute lust for the wealthy, that came in with Ronald Reagan, who looks less and less like a hero, will come to an end as well as we have to face a Republican ramped up budget crisis the only way we can, taxes, and taxes on the wealthy.

Not all of Trump's legacy, including the tiny positive portions of it, or the negative massive aspects of it, will go away.  Trump has destroyed the post World War Two United States.  But the country itself will survive, and rebuild, and probably be better than it was before.  

Perhaps the U.S. can get back to being the U.S.

Oh, and Greenland will be independent. Americans won't really be welcomed there.  The U.S. military won't be there.

National Guard pilot admits to landing Black Hawk helicopter to pick up elk antlers The Montana soldier entered a no-contest plea to trespassing charges for landing a UH-60 helicopter on a remote ranch to collect elk antlers.

What's the fun of having access to a helicopter if you can't use it?

National Guard pilot admits to landing Black Hawk helicopter to pick up elk antlers

The Montana soldier entered a no-contest plea to trespassing charges for landing a UH-60 helicopter on a remote ranch to collect elk antlers.

The Agrarian's Lament: Blog Mirror: Couple Donate Legacy 38,000-Acre, $2...

The Agrarian's Lament: Blog Mirror: Couple Donate Legacy 38,000-Acre, $2...:   Couple Donate Legacy 38,000-Acre, $21 Million Cattle Ranch To Keep It A Ranch

Lex Anteinternet: Five Republicans listening to their base.

Lex Anteinternet: Five Republicans listening to their base.:  

Friday, June 27, 2025

Five Republicans listening to their base.

 

The margin on this bill is so tight that five votes has a very good chance of sinking it in the House.

Good for the five.

And shame on Wyoming's delegation in Congress if it does not follow suit.

Ryan Zinke on public lands.

I don’t yield to pressure only higher principle.  I have said from day one I would not support a bill that sells public lands. I am still a no on the senate reconciliation bill that sells public lands. We did our job in the House. Let’s get it finished.

Ryan Zinke

Zinke's listening to his state. Why isn't Wyoming's delegation doing the same?

Blog Mirror: Steve Daines Is Stealing Your Land Here’s his phone number

 

Steve Daines Is Stealing Your Land

Here’s his phone number

Wyoming’s congressional delegation should follow neighbors’ lead on public lands

Wyoming’s congressional delegation should follow neighbors’ lead on public lands: Republican counterparts in Montana and Idaho are taking bold steps to protect public lands, writes guest columnist Pete Madsen.

Blog Mirror: This is why we can't have nice things. This National Crime.

 

This is why we can't have nice things.

 

I think, sometimes could be real. The battle for land and people owning that agricultural landscape. The pretty views that we have, the clean water that comes with it, the beautiful tall grass that’s waving in the wind. I mean, they want to buy it because they like that. And then they put a house on every 40 that we used to run cows on.

Montana rancher commenting on a big influx of people into Montana because of the claptrap soap opera, Yellowstone. 

It's not just Yellowstone, the moronic dipshit Western melodrama that has caused this, by the way.  A River Runs Through It, which is one of my favorite movies, had the same effect, as well as making fly fishing something that locals just did, along with using spinning rods, into some sort of elite yuppie thing in some quarters.

Here's the thing.  A lot of it has a lot to do with the lack of proper land use laws in the US.  Large blocks of land really shouldn't be owned as huge yards for hobbyist or the wealthy, but for agricultural production.  Agricultural land shouldn't be owned by anyone other than those who work it.  People who admire the wilderness, of any type, ought not to be building houses on it.

Blog Mirror: This National Crime

 

This National Crime

Going Feral: Illegal Sheep Cloning attempt.

Going Feral: Illegal Sheep Cloning attempt.: Arthur “Jack” Schubarth of Vaughn, Montana, age 81, is being sentenced today for illegally using tissue and testicles from Central Asian Mar...

Six months and $20,000. 

 

Yellowstone National Park expands access to allow for year-round fishing in two locations

Another lawsuit over wolves.

Ten entities intend to sue the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service for not extending protection for wolves under the Endangered Species Act.

When wolves were first introduced, it was my opinion that wolves themselves would not be a problem in the Rocky Mountain West, but the people who surround them.  

That has proven to be correct.

Going Feral: Heads Up! Hearing on bad Montana idea ballot init...

Going Feral: Heads Up! Hearing on bad Montana idea ballot init...:   SURPRISE BALLOT INITIATIVE WOULD ALLOW MONTANA LANDOWNERS TO HUNT BIG GAME WITHOUT PERMITS

The Commission came out in opposition to this initiative. 

Heads Up! Hearing on bad Montana idea ballot initiative to be held today.

 

SURPRISE BALLOT INITIATIVE WOULD ALLOW MONTANA LANDOWNERS TO HUNT BIG GAME WITHOUT PERMITS

This is why we can't have nice things:

 

The above is a case caption of a lawsuit brought in Montana in which Wilderness Watch is suing the U.S. Forest Service over the Forest Service program to use rotenone to take out non-native trout species so that cutthroat trout, the native species can be reintroduced in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness.

So, in the name of wilderness, Wilderness Watch, it acting contrary to nature.

Sigh.

Expansion of Migratory Big Game Initiative

The USDA announced that it is expanding the Migratory Big Game Initiative successfully used in Wyoming to Montana and Idaho. This allows farmers and ranchers across all three states to access money to protect big game migratory routes.