The sledging party of the second arm of the Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition reached Mount Hope near the Beardmore Glacier to lay down a depot for the first arm of the expedition that was expected to reach the location in the coming weeks, not knowing what had otherwise occurred.
Stockmen were concerned about the border.
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Montenegro surrendered to Austro Hungaria.
The Casper Record had a depiction of the new Burlington Northern depot.
A small ranch was advertised for same, and that would be small, then or now.
And a pneumatic sweeper.
The New York Times reported that Carranza was having a tiff with the residents of Mexico City, and he was threatening to move the capitol.
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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.
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.
The first attempt at a worldwide New Year's celebration was made via international radio when the United States sent out musical entertainment and New Year's greetings from the consuls general of various foreign countries in New York.
There was an effort in many locations in the US to rein in New Years celebrations, which if they were in compliance with the law, should be dry:
Today In Wyoming's History: December 31: 1925 The legendary Swan Land & Cattle Company issued its corporate holdings report for the year.
Last Edition:
All the men were well shod in good looking riding boots, except the cook. I learned that the boots were mostly made by a boot maker named Hyer, of Olathe, Kansas, and were generally black in color. All had seventeen inch tops, with a two or two and a half inch heel, slanted well forward, so that the weight of the foot came forward of the heel, and consequently the stirrup was held under the arch of the rider’s instep, as it should be.”
John K. Rollinson, in his 1941 memoir, Pony Trails In Wyoming: Hoofprints of a Cowboy and U.S. Ranger.
And the Federal Government gives a boost to the technology that's going to 1) take all our jobs, and 2), kill us.
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, it is hereby ordered:
Section 1. Purpose. From the founding of our Republic, scientific discovery and technological innovation have driven American progress and prosperity. Today, America is in a race for global technology dominance in the development of artificial intelligence (AI), an important frontier of scientific discovery and economic growth. To that end, my Administration has taken a number of actions to win that race, including issuing multiple Executive Orders and implementing America’s AI Action Plan, which recognizes the need to invest in AI-enabled science to accelerate scientific advancement. In this pivotal moment, the challenges we face require a historic national effort, comparable in urgency and ambition to the Manhattan Project that was instrumental to our victory in World War II and was a critical basis for the foundation of the Department of Energy (DOE) and its national laboratories.
This order launches the “Genesis Mission” as a dedicated, coordinated national effort to unleash a new age of AI‑accelerated innovation and discovery that can solve the most challenging problems of this century. The Genesis Mission will build an integrated AI platform to harness Federal scientific datasets — the world’s largest collection of such datasets, developed over decades of Federal investments — to train scientific foundation models and create AI agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs. The Genesis Mission will bring together our Nation’s research and development resources — combining the efforts of brilliant American scientists, including those at our national laboratories, with pioneering American businesses; world-renowned universities; and existing research infrastructure, data repositories, production plants, and national security sites — to achieve dramatic acceleration in AI development and utilization. We will harness for the benefit of our Nation the revolution underway in computing, and build on decades of innovation in semiconductors and high-performance computing. The Genesis Mission will dramatically accelerate scientific discovery, strengthen national security, secure energy dominance, enhance workforce productivity, and multiply the return on taxpayer investment into research and development, thereby furthering America’s technological dominance and global strategic leadership.
Sec. 2. Establishment of the Genesis Mission. (a) There is hereby established the Genesis Mission (Mission), a national effort to accelerate the application of AI for transformative scientific discovery focused on pressing national challenges.
(b) The Secretary of Energy (Secretary) shall be responsible for implementing the Mission within DOE, consistent with the provisions of this order, including, as appropriate and authorized by law, setting priorities and ensuring that all DOE resources used for elements of the Mission are integrated into a secure, unified platform. The Secretary may designate a senior political appointee to oversee day-to-day operations of the Mission.
(c) The Assistant to the President for Science and Technology (APST) shall provide general leadership of the Mission, including coordination of participating executive departments and agencies (agencies) through the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC) and the issuance of guidance to ensure that the Mission is aligned with national objectives.
Sec. 3. Operation of the American Science and Security Platform.
(a) The Secretary shall establish and operate the American Science and Security Platform (Platform) to serve as the infrastructure for the Mission with the purpose of providing, in an integrated manner and to the maximum extent practicable and consistent with law:
(i) high-performance computing resources, including DOE national laboratory supercomputers and secure cloud-based AI computing environments, capable of supporting large-scale model training, simulation, and inference;
(ii) AI modeling and analysis frameworks, including AI agents to explore design spaces, evaluate experimental outcomes, and automate workflows;
(iii) computational tools, including AI-enabled predictive models, simulation models, and design optimization tools;
(iv) domain-specific foundation models across the range of scientific domains covered;
(v) secure access to appropriate datasets, including proprietary, federally curated, and open scientific datasets, in addition to synthetic data generated through DOE computing resources, consistent with applicable law; applicable classification, privacy, and intellectual property protections; and Federal data-access and data-management standards; and
(vi) experimental and production tools to enable autonomous and AI-augmented experimentation and manufacturing in high-impact domains.
(b) The Secretary shall take necessary steps to ensure that the Platform is operated in a manner that meets security requirements consistent with its national security and competitiveness mission, including applicable classification, supply chain security, and Federal cybersecurity standards and best practices.
(c) Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Secretary shall identify Federal computing, storage, and networking resources available to support the Mission, including both DOE on-premises and cloud-based high-performance computing systems, and resources available through industry partners. The Secretary shall also identify any additional partnerships or infrastructure enhancements that could support the computational foundation for the Platform.
(d) Within 120 days of the date of this order, the Secretary shall:
(i) identify a set of initial data and model assets for use in the Mission, including digitization, standardization, metadata, and provenance tracking; and
(ii) develop a plan, with appropriate risk-based cybersecurity measures, for incorporating datasets from federally funded research, other agencies, academic institutions, and approved private-sector partners, as appropriate.
(e) Within 240 days of the date of this order, the Secretary shall review capabilities across the DOE national laboratories and other participating Federal research facilities for robotic laboratories and production facilities with the ability to engage in AI-directed experimentation and manufacturing, including automated and AI-augmented workflows and the related technical and operational standards needed.
(f) Within 270 days of the date of this order, the Secretary shall, consistent with applicable law and subject to available appropriations, seek to demonstrate an initial operating capability of the Platform for at least one of the national science and technology challenges identified pursuant to section 4 of this order.
Sec. 4. Identification of National Science and Technology Challenges.
(a) Within 60 days of the date of this order, the Secretary shall identify and submit to the APST a detailed list of at least 20 science and technology challenges of national importance that the Secretary assesses to have potential to be addressed through the Mission and that span priority domains consistent with National Science and Technology Memorandum 2 of September 23, 2025, including:
(i) advanced manufacturing;
(ii) biotechnology;
(iii) critical materials;
(iv) nuclear fission and fusion energy;
(v) quantum information science; and
(vi) semiconductors and microelectronics.
(b) Within 30 days of submission of the list described in subsection (a) of this section, the APST shall review the proposed list and, working with participating agency members of the NSTC, coordinate the development of an expanded list that can serve as the initial set of national science and technology challenges to be addressed by the Mission, including additional challenges proposed by participating agencies through the NSTC, subject to available appropriations.
(c) Following development of the expanded list described in subsection (b) of this section, agencies participating in the Mission shall use the Platform to advance research and development aligned with the national science and technology challenges identified in the expanded list, consistent with applicable law and their respective missions, and subject to available appropriations.
(d) On an annual basis thereafter, the Secretary shall review and update the list of challenges in consultation with the APST and the NSTC to reflect progress achieved, emerging national needs, and alignment with my Administration’s research and development priorities.
Sec. 5. Interagency Coordination and External Engagement.
(a) The APST, through the NSTC, and with support from the Federal Chief Data Officer Council and the Chief AI Officer Council, shall convene relevant and interested agencies to:(i) assist participating agencies in aligning, to the extent permitted by law, their AI-related programs, datasets, and research and development activities with the objectives of the Mission in their respective areas of expertise, while avoiding duplication of effort across the Federal Government and promoting interoperability;
(ii) identify data sources that may support the Mission’s aim;
(iii) develop a process and resourcing plan in coordination with participating agencies for integrating appropriate and available agency data and infrastructure into the Mission, to the extent permitted by law and subject to available appropriations, including methods under which all agencies contributing to the Mission are encouraged to implement appropriate risk-based security measures that reflect cybersecurity best practices;
(iv) launch coordinated funding opportunities or prize competitions across participating agencies, to the extent permitted by law and subject to available appropriations, to incentivize private-sector participation in AI-driven scientific research aligned with Mission objectives; and
(v) establish mechanisms to coordinate research and development funding opportunities and experimental resources across participating agencies, ensuring agencies can participate effectively in the Mission.
(b) The APST shall coordinate with relevant agencies in establishing, consistent with existing authorizing statutes and subject to available appropriations, competitive programs for research fellowships, internships, and apprenticeships focused on the application of AI to scientific domains identified as national challenges for the Mission, to include placement of program participants at DOE national laboratories and other participating Federal research facilities, with the purpose of providing access to the Platform and training in AI-enabled scientific discovery.
(c) The Secretary, in coordination with the APST and the Special Advisor for AI and Crypto, shall establish mechanisms for agency collaboration with external partners possessing advanced AI, data, or computing capabilities or scientific domain expertise, including through cooperative research and development agreements, user facility partnerships, or other appropriate arrangements with external entities to support and enhance the activities of the Mission, and shall ensure that such partnerships are structured to preserve the security of Federal research assets and maximize public benefit. To facilitate these collaborations, the Secretary shall:(i) develop standardized partnership frameworks, including cooperative research and development or other appropriate agreements, and data-use and model‑sharing agreements;
(ii) establish clear policies for ownership, licensing, trade-secret protections, and commercialization of intellectual property developed under the Mission, including innovations arising from AI-directed experiments;
(iii) implement uniform and stringent data access and management processes and cybersecurity standards for non-Federal collaborators accessing datasets, models, and computing environments, including measures requiring compliance with classification, privacy, and export-control requirements, as well as other applicable laws; and
(iv) establish procedures to ensure the highest standards of vetting and authorization of users and collaborators seeking access to the resources of the Mission and associated research activities, including the Platform and associated Federal research resources.
(d) The APST, through the NSTC, shall, to the extent appropriate, identify opportunities for international scientific collaboration to support activities under the Mission.
Sec. 6. Evaluation and Reporting.
(a) Within 1 year of the date of this order, and on an annual basis thereafter, the Secretary shall submit a report to the President, through the APST and the Director of the Office of Management and Budget, describing:
(i) the Platform’s operational status and capabilities;
(ii) progress toward integration across DOE national laboratories and other participating Federal research partners, including shared access to computing resources, data infrastructure, and research facilities;
(iii) the status of user engagement, including participation of student researchers and any related training;
(iv) updates on research efforts and outcomes achieved, including measurable scientific advances, publications, and prototype technologies;
(v) the scope and outcomes of public-private partnerships, including collaborative research projects and any technology transitions or commercialization activities; and
(vi) any identified needs or recommendations for authorities or interagency support to achieve the Mission’s objectives.
Sec. 7. General Provisions.
(a) Nothing in this order shall be construed to impair or otherwise affect:
(i) the authority granted by law to an executive department or agency, or the head thereof; or
(ii) the functions of the Director of the Office of Management and Budget relating to budgetary, administrative, or legislative proposals.
(b) This order shall be implemented consistent with applicable law and subject to the availability of appropriations.
(c) This order is not intended to, and does not, create any right or benefit, substantive or procedural, enforceable at law or in equity by any party against the United States, its departments, agencies, or entities, its officers, employees, or agents, or any other person.
(d) The costs for publication of this order shall be borne by the Department of Energy.
DONALD J. TRUMP
THE WHITE HOUSE,
November 24, 2025.
$$$
December 6, 2025
Construction companies lay off 123 workers in Gillette: The layoffs include employees at Hoskinson Contracting and Hoskinson Concrete. The concrete company will close permanently.
$$$
December 7, 2025
December 9, 2025
And Trump sold the US down the drain computer technology wise.
This is so bizarre Congress really ought to step it, but it won't.
This will be marked as the point at which the US consigned itself to being an also ran to China in technology.
Absolutely incredibly.
But wait, there's more.
Having destroyed the farm export market, Trump is taking tariff money, which is ultimately paid by Americans, and applying it to a farm bailout package.
Farmers voted overwhelmingly to screw themselves with Trump. Let them be screwed.
In terms of people getting screwed:
We're in a health coverage crisis nationally. It's time for a nationalized system.
Related threads:
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The Agrarian's Lament: Lex Anteinternet: CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 10...: Lex Anteinternet: CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 108th Edition. “The... : CliffsNotes of the Zeitgeist, 108th Edition. “The brave men and w...
In that item, I noted this:
Interestingly, just yesterday I heard a Catholic Answers interview of Dr. Andrew Willard Jones on his book The Church Against the State. The interview had a fascinating discussion on sovereignty and subsidiarity, and included a discussion on systems of organizing society, including oligarchy.
Oligarchy is now where we are at.
I've been thinking about it, and Dr. Jones has really hit on something. The nature of Americanism, if you will, is in fact not its documentary artifacts and (damaged) institutions, it is, rather, in what it was. At the time of the American Revolution the country had an agrarian/distributist culture and that explained, and explains, everything about it.
The Revolution itself was fought against a society that had concentrated oligarchical wealth. To more than a little degree, colonist to British North America had emigrated to escape that.
We've been losing that for some time. Well over a century, in fact, and indeed dating back into the 19th Century. It started accelerating in the mid 20th Century and now, even though most do not realize it, we are a full blown oligarchy.
Speaking generally, we may say that whatever legal enactments are held to be for the interest of various constitutions, all these preserve them. And the great preserving principle is the one which has been repeatedly mentioned- to have a care that the loyal citizen should be stronger than the disloyal. Neither should we forget the mean, which at the present day is lost sight of in perverted forms of government; for many practices which appear to be democratical are the ruin of democracies, and many which appear to be oligarchical are the ruin of oligarchies. Those who think that all virtue is to be found in their own party principles push matters to extremes; they do not consider that disproportion destroys a state. A nose which varies from the ideal of straightness to a hook or snub may still be of good shape and agreeable to the eye; but if the excess be very great, all symmetry is lost, and the nose at last ceases to be a nose at all on account of some excess in one direction or defect in the other; and this is true of every other part of the human body. The same law of proportion equally holds in states. Oligarchy or democracy, although a departure from the most perfect form, may yet be a good enough government, but if any one attempts to push the principles of either to an extreme, he will begin by spoiling the government and end by having none at all. Wherefore the legislator and the statesman ought to know what democratical measures save and what destroy a democracy, and what oligarchical measures save or destroy an oligarchy. For neither the one nor the other can exist or continue to exist unless both rich and poor are included in it. If equality of property is introduced, the state must of necessity take another form; for when by laws carried to excess one or other element in the state is ruined, the constitution is ruined.
Aristotle, Politics.
Corporations were largely illegal in early American history. They existed, but were highly restricted. The opposite is the case now, with corporations' "personhood" being so protected by the law that the United States Supreme Court has ruled that corporate political spending is a form of free speech and corporations can spend unlimited money on independent political broadcasts in candidate elections. This has created a situation in which corporations have gobbled up local retail in the US and converted middle class shopkeeping families into serfs. It's also made individual heads of corporations obscenely, and I used that word decidedly, wealthy.
Wealth on the level demonstrated by Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump simply should not exist. It's bad for average people and its corrupting of their souls. That corruption can be seen in their unhinged desire for self aggrandizement and acquisition. Elon Must acquires young white women of a certain type for concubinage Donald Trump, whose money is rooted in the occupation of land, has collected bedmates over the years, "marrying" some of them and in his declining mental state, seeks to demonstrated his value through grotesque molestation of public property.
Those are individual examples of course, but the government we currently have, while supported by the Puritan class, disturbingly features men of vast wealth, getting wealthier, with a government that operates to fork over more money to those who already have it. The MAGA masses, which stand to grow poorer, and in the case of the agricultural sector are very much already suffering that fate, deservedly after supporting Trump, continue to believe that the demented fool knows what he's doing.
This system is rotten to the core and it needs to be broken. Broken down, broken up, and ended.
The hopes of either the Democrats or the Republicans waking up and addressing it seem slim. The GOP is so besotted with it's wealthy leaders that the Speaker of the House, who claims to be a devout Christian, is attempting to keep the release of the names of wealthy hebephiles secret. Only wealth and power can explain that. The Democrats, which since 1912 have claimed to be the part of the working man, flounder when trying to handle the economic plight of the middle class. Both parties agree on only one thing, that being you must never consider a third party.
It is really time for a third part in this country.
In reality, of course, there are some, but only one is worth considering in any fashion, that being the American Solidarity Party. Perhaps it could pick up the gauntlet here and smack it across the face of the oligarchy. Or perhaps local parties might do it. In my state, I think that if enough conservative Republicans (real conservatives, not the Cassie Cravens, John Bear, Dave Simpson, Bob Ide, Chuck Gray servants of the Orange Golden Calf Republicans) it could be done locally. The U.S. has a history, although its barely acknowledged, of local parties, including ones whose members often successfully run on the tick of two parties. New York's Zohran Mamdani and David Dinkins, for example were both Democrats and members of the Democratic Socialist Party. Democrats from Minnesota are actually members of the Democratic Farm Labor Party, which is an amalgamation of two parties. There's no reason a Wyoming Party couldn't form and field its own candidates, some of whom could also run as Republicans.
Such a party, nationally or locally, needs to be bold and take on the oligarchy. There's no time to waste on this, as the oligarchy gets stronger every day. And such candidates will meet howls of derision. Locally Californian Chuck Gray, who ironically has looked like the Green Peace Secretary of State on some issues, will howl about how they're all Communist Monarchist Islamic Stamp Collectors. And some will reason to howl, such as the wealthy landlord in the state's legislature.
The reason for that is simple. Such a party would need to apply, and apply intelligently, the principals of subsidiarity, solidarity and the land ethic. It would further need to be scientific, agrarianistic, and distributist.
The first thing, nationally or locally, that such a party should do is bad the corporate ownership of retail outlets. Ban it. That would immediately shift retail back to the middle class, but also to the family unit. A family might be able to own two grocery or appliance stores, for example, but probably not more than that.
The remote and corporate ownership of rural land needs to come to an immediate end as well. No absentee landlords. People owning agricultural land should be only those people making a living from it.
That model, in fact, should apply overall to the ownership of land. Renting land out, for any reason, ought to be severely restricted. The maintenance of a land renting system, including residential rent, creates landlords, who too often turn into Lords.
On land, the land ethic ought to be applied on a legal and regulatory basis. The American concept of absolute ownership of land is a fraud on human dignity. Ownership of land is just, but not the absolute ownership. You can't do anything you want on your property, nor should you be able to, including the entry by those engaged in natural activities, such as hunting, fishing, or simply hiking, simply because you are an agriculturalist.
While it might be counterintuitive in regard to subsidiarity, it's really the case, in this context, that the mineral resources underneath the surface of the Earth should belong to the public at large, either at the state, or national, level. People make no contribution whatsoever to the mineral wealth being there. They plant nothing and they do not stock the land, like farmers do with livestock. It's presence or absence is simply by happenstance and allowing some to become wealthy and some in the same category not simply by luck is not fair. It
Manufacturing and distribution, which has been address, is trickier, but at the end of the day, a certain amount of employee ownership of corporations in this category largely solves the problem. People working for Big Industry ought to own a slice of it.
And at some level, a system which allows for the accumulation of obscene destructive levels of wealth is wrong. Much of what we've addressed would solve this. You won't be getting rich in retail if you can only have a few stores, for example. And you won't be a rich landlord from rent if most things just can't be rented. But the presence of the massively wealthy, particularly in an electronic age, continues to be vexing. Some of this can be addressed by taxation. The USCCB has stated that "the tax system should be continually evaluated in terms of its impact on the poor.” and it should be. The wealthy should pay a much more progressive tax rate.
These are, of course, all economic, or rather politico-economic matters. None of this addresses the great or stalking horse social issues of the day. We'll address those, as we often have, elsewhere. But the fact of the matter is, right now, the rich and powerful use these issues to distract. Smirky Mike Johnson may claim to be a devout Christian, but he's prevented the release of names of men who raped teenage girls. Donald Trump may publicly state that he's worried about going to Hell, but he remains a rich serial polygamist. J.D. Vance may claim to be a devout Catholic, but he spends a lot of time lying through his teeth.
And, frankly, fix the economic issues, and a lot of these issues fix themselves.
