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Yahoo
18-05-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
This land is their land: Trump is selling out the US's beloved wilderness
default In 1913, on a remote, windswept stretch of buffalo-grass prairie in western North Dakota, Roald Peterson was born – the ninth of 11 children to hardy Norwegian homesteaders. The child fell in love with the ecosystem he was born into. It was a landscape as awe-inspiring and expansive as the ocean, with hawks riding sage-scented winds by day and the Milky Way glowing at night. As a young adult, he decided to study the emerging field of range science in college, which led him to Louisiana – where he was so appalled by the harsh conditions faced by sharecroppers that he volunteered with a farmers' union. After serving stateside in the army air forces during the second world war, he took a job in Montana with the US Forest Service, monitoring cattle and sheep grazing on public lands. He took to his work with high morale. Unfortunately for Peterson, his career took off at the height of anti-communist hysteria, at which time the second red scare, also known as the McCarthy era, was well under way. In the midst of this culture war, Peterson's environmental advocacy and concern for exploited workers made him a glaring target, a man with a bullseye on his back. In 1949, two anonymous informants falsely accused Peterson of having been a communist, setting off an invasive loyalty investigation. Montanans from across the political spectrum rallied to his defense. So did the Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and conservationist Bernard DeVoto, who was so moved by the case that he penned the most controversial column of his 20-year run at Harper's Magazine: Due Notice to the FBI. In it, DeVoto delivered a bold defense of civil liberties in the face of growing authoritarianism – one of the earliest national articles to openly criticize both FBI director J Edgar Hoover and senator Joseph McCarthy. As the red scare escalated, Peterson's loyalty was investigated a second time, and then a third when another informant told the FBI he was 'behaving like a homosexual'. Peterson was fired from the Forest Service in early 1953. He lost his family's ranch in Montana's Bitterroot valley (not far from where the show Yellowstone is filmed). Peterson's wife left him and was committed by her family to an asylum. A judge awarded custody of his three children to the state, placing them in foster care. A granddaughter, whom I located and interviewed, told me the children were repeatedly sexually abused; the two youngest later died by suicide. Peterson's 2004 obituary, penned by his surviving daughter, states that he was 'blacklisted by the infamous Joe McCarthy, Roy Cohn and J Edgar Hoover group of legal thugs'. That the one in the middle was Donald Trump's mentor underscores the connection between then and now. *** Peterson was targeted during a low chapter in American history – one that feels eerily familiar today. It was a time when reactionaries in Congress plotted to sell off public lands – just as they do now. When the US Forest Service was under intense pressure to clear-cut more trees – just as it is now. When public lands faced destruction in the name of energy production – just as they do now. More than 14,000 people were forced out of government jobs during the red scare – a mass purge that mirrors the targeted layoffs we're witnessing now. Meanwhile, the Trump administration has made no secret of its ambitions: a ramp-up of logging and drilling across public lands, and a sweeping plan to shrink up to six national monuments in the south-west. Taken together, a larger strategy comes into focus: Republicans are laying the groundwork to sell off some of the nation's most treasured public assets. And it begins with gutting the numbers and the morale of the very people who protect them. Bill Wade boasts nine decades of perspective on the US's public lands. The son of a ranger, the 84-year-old was raised inside Mesa Verde national park in Colorado and went on to have a long career in the agency, eventually serving as supervisor at Shenandoah national park in Virginia. Related: These people protected US forests and lands. Their jobs have now vanished due to Trump Now retired, Wade serves as the executive director of the Association of National Park Rangers, which makes him an excellent ear to have on the ground. He has a bracing take on conservation workers and our public lands. Morale, he says, is probably the lowest he's seen in his 58-year career. That's a reasonable take, given that the message from the Trump administration is, to paraphrase the novelty slogan: 'Purging will continue until morale improves.' February 2025 brought the 'Valentine's Day massacre', when the misnamed 'department of government efficiency' fired 1,000 National Park Service employees and 3,400 from the US Forest Service. In March, courts ruled the firings lawless. More buyouts followed. In May, the administration signaled it would slash the agency's budget by 40% – the biggest cut in its 109-year history. With parks having boasted record visitation in 2024, this year they are already reporting shortages in visitor center hours; campground accessibility; sanitation; interpretation, such as ranger-led hikes; and environmental stewardship, such as trail maintenance and wildfire prevention programs with youth conservation volunteers. None of the personnel cuts make good business sense. The National Park Service oversees resources that cost $3.5bn annually to manage, yet generate more than $55bn in revenue. Protecting such a profitable national asset should be a no-brainer. Despite that, conservation workers have been in effect barred from buying new supplies costing more than $1. Already, the National Park Service has about one employee for every 17,000 visitors, said Timothy Whitehouse, the executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility. 'They're breaking the system,' he said. 'They're traumatizing the workforce.' Many worry about the brain drain that will follow. That younger generation's malaise was touched on in a poignant letter by the US Forest Service chief, Randy Moore, who announced his resignation in March. 'If you are feeling uncertainty, frustration or loss, you are not alone,' Moore wrote. 'These are real and valid emotions that I am feeling, too. Please take care of yourselves and each other.' Read between the lines: I understand the damage this all does to morale. His leaving was conspicuous, coming at the start of Trump's anti-diversity zealotry. Moore is the first Black person to lead the forest service. Was his replacement, Tom Schultz, chosen because he is the same race as every other chief in the service's 116-year history? Or because the former timber industry executive is the first chief never to have served in the forest service? (Or both?) Whitehouse explained that it wasn't just that the conservation workers were fired, it was how they were fired: the dismissed employees had received a form letter which stated that they 'failed to demonstrate fitness or qualifications for continued employment'. Conservation workers deal in hard, natural truths: the forest is on fire, the river is in flood, the bear is there. The 'failed to demonstrate fitness' letters are false by any degree of objective measurement. Related: 'Erased generations of talent': US public land stewards decry firings and loss of knowledge Wade, the experienced ranger, described it with a phrase used for totalitarian propaganda. 'All of this amounted to,' he said, 'a big lie.' We have been here before. *** The question goes, why are there public lands? Why protect them? The start of the answer is put nowhere better than the Bible. Genesis, 2:10: And a river went out of Eden to water the garden … When Europeans reached the eastern shores of North America, they found a climate with rain amounts similar to the lands they had left. Land ownership in Europe was feudal, with kings and lords controlling vast expanses. In democratic opposition, Americans distributed small farms and plantations to a far wider array of its citizenry. As the nation expanded westward from the original 13 colonies, Thomas Jefferson maneuvered the public domain into the control of the federal government, so states would not war with each other over land. So far as the rainfall remained similar to Europe, this American settlement system was tenable. But when settlers crossed the Mississippi River in the 1800s, they confronted a new climate: desert. Across vast expanses of the US west, the majority of the precipitation collects as wintertime snow on the tops of high mountains. As was figured out by the ancestral Puebloans, who irrigated farmland and built towns and cities in the American south-west for centuries before Columbus sailed, the key to survival is getting the summertime meltwater from mountain snowpack safely and cleanly down into the valleys where lie the farms, ranches, towns and cities. For this to happen – for our national garden to be watered – there must be healthy mountain forests and grasslands. These mountains and prairies, the vast majority of which were never claimed by homesteaders and never belonged to any state, would become the bedrock of public lands conservation. Federal conservation workers today may prove as resilient as those who withstood the red scare It is a wonderful fact of nature that some of the most magnificent scenery is where rivers begin: at the tops of mountain ranges. This is why our awe-inspiring national parks – Yosemite, Yellowstone – became the modern world's first protected public lands. It's always worth remembering the words of writer Wallace Stegner: national parks are America's best idea. But national parks proved far too small to protect all the water the dry west needs. At the turn of the 20th century, President Theodore Roosevelt made the US the first modern nation to enshrine public lands conservation as a national priority. He created 150 national forests in the west to ensure a consistent supply of water and timber. Soon followed the first national wildlife refuges and the first national monuments. Protecting only parks and forests proved tragically insufficient. Come the 1930s, farmers over-plowing dry prairies and deserts caused the Dust Bowl – the worst single-event environmental disaster yet in the nation's history. To protect the soil-saving, deep-rooted native grasses, in the 1930s President Franklin Roosevelt created the Grazing Service. The protection of grasslands, prairies, deserts and canyonlands heralded a completeness of conserved landscapes. The counterattack to undo public lands conservation began at that point. By the 1940s, some western cattle kings and sheep barons, historically used to monopolizing western ranges, attacked the Grazing Service. Their tool was the Nevada senator Pat McCarran – a role model for senator McCarthy. McCarran toured the US west staging hearings about public lands in which he brazenly gave priority and preference to cattle kings and sheep barons. A McCarran aide explained that a purpose of these hearings was to affect conservation workers 'psychologically' – to hurt their morale. McCarran would order employees to attend his hearings and forbid them to speak, while encouraging his curated audiences to shout insults at them. Mass layoffs followed – similar to the purge we saw this February. Disparaged and defunded, the service was amalgamated in 1946 into a new, enfeebled and industry-friendly agency called the Bureau of Land Management. The political exploitation of fear, paranoia, conspiracy, false accusations, show trials, refusal of fair play and apocalypticism could be called McCarranism as accurately as McCarthyism. McCarran's work still fills our headlines today: it was he who legalized peacetime concentration camps in the case that the president declares an emergency – which Trump does frequently. And it was he, over President Harry Truman's veto, who passed the 1952 law that Trump is using to jail foreign-born students without arrest warrants. *** If history offers any hope, it may be worth looking at what happened after McCarthy was shamed off the national stage. Related: The America I loved is gone In the 1960s and early 1970s came an American renaissance in conservation, and with it the passage of historic environmental legislation. With broad, bipartisan support came laws like the Clean Air Act, the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, the Wilderness Act and the Endangered Species Act. Federal conservation workers today may prove as resilient as those who withstood the red scare – who themselves proudly showed they had the same tenacity and psychological toughness as their forebears in other times of national duress. We only have to look back in time to see plenty of examples. In 1910, the forest service was in its infancy when its understaffed and under-equipped employees battled a deadly Northern Rocky Mountains forest fire as big as the state of Connecticut. In earlier decades, members of the army's famous all-Black cavalry, the 'Buffalo soldiers', showed the mettle to protect western national parks through an era of resurgent white supremacy. During the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps put more than 3 million poor, jobless and hungry young men to work planting 3bn trees. The morale and spirit they developed in those hard times is reflected in the unofficial motto they developed: 'We can take it!' But we are also running out of time. Trees take centuries to grow, ecosystems take millennia to congeal, and this climate is the only livable one humankind has ever known. An unmerciful fact about public lands is, like some store signs say: all sales are final. A few years after Peterson was fired, his case was re-examined; he was found never to have joined the Communist party. He was offered his old job back. Because of the way he had been treated, he refused. They had broken his morale. This is the point of what is going on. At stake is our Eden. The Bible also has a story about what happens if we lose that. Nate Schweber is a journalist and the author of This America of Ours: Bernard and Avis DeVoto and the Forgotten Fight to Save the Wild
Yahoo
27-04-2025
- Yahoo
Man Tries to Perform Exorcism, Instead Allegedly Murders His Mother
When it comes to battling demons trapped inside your loved ones, maybe it's best to leave it to the professionals. Take that from Alexander Valdez, a 23-year-old man accused of murdering his mother in a botched DIY exorcism in Fort Worth, Texas last week. Police rolled up to Valdez' house a little after midnight last Friday, tipped off about a "satanic ritual" which he allegedly recorded and sent to his friends on Snapchat. When officers knocked on his front door, a nonchalant Valdez emerged, coated in blood and clutching a bible. "It was an exorcism," he told police calmly, before allegedly adding — contradictively? — that "I was doing witchcraft to kill my mom." Asked if there was anybody else in the house, Valdez apparently admitted "there is a dead body in there. It's my mom." The cops then searched the house, where they indeed found the body of the man's mother, 58-year-old Teresita Sayson, as well as that of the family's dog. "Thank goodness for the people that were on Snapchat that said that he wanted to do this satanic ritual," Tracy Carter of the Fort Worth Police Department said, referring to the anonymous tipsters who passed the alleged posts off to local police. The horrifying incident is no doubt the result of a mental health emergency which went unaddressed — an all too common occurrence in the US, where nonexistent social services and ineffective mental healthcare exacerbate a systemic crisis of mental illness. And digging into the cultural aspect, the alleged murder also fits with a resurgence of the belief in exorcism and witchcraft in the US, a phenomenon which coincides with disruptions in "social relations, high levels of anxiety, [and] pessimistic worldview," according to social-economy researcher Boris Gershman. As American social norms fray, people aren't just turning to exorcism of their own volition. Rather, they're led to it by a growing clique of pseudo-religious influencers, who use platforms like Tik Tok and YouTube to cash in on wild ritual spectacles via social media. Sam Kestenbaum is a writer who embedded with Greg Locke, an infamous "Demon Slayer" in Tennessee. In a lengthy exposé on the resurgence of demonology for Harper's Magazine, Kestenbaum notes that Locke has used his sensationalist platform to tout vaccine skepticism, accuse Democratic politicians of being demons, and stoke claims that the 2020 election was stolen — topics which gel a little too well with those already prone to conspiracy hysterics. "The controversial stuff really drove traffic," Locke told him. The preacher's cushy media empire includes a team of cameramen to film his "exorcisms" as they happen, production assistants, a drone operator, regular demonology seminars, a podcast, and a publishing house peddling books on faith-based wonders — all to keep the magic alive for his flock of eager consumers. The draw for Locke is obvious enough. But when it comes to growing appeal of exorcism for the masses, Kestenbaum puts it well. "Who would deny that this cursed land is in need of a deep cleanse with a power washer?" he wrote. "This, our country of suburban satanic panics, active-shooter drills, and jump-scare franchises, of mob riots, hollowed-out downtowns, and tech paranoias... and lo, a cavalry of screen-ready revivalists has arrived to wage the End Times war against the satanic infantry." More on religion: Atheists Appalled as Elon Musk Embraces "Teachings of Christ'
Yahoo
31-03-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Warren Buffett Once Said He Could Hire 10,000 People to Paint His Face—And It Might Be the Most Brutal Economic Truth You'll Hear All Day
Warren Buffett doesn't flaunt it. He's not the type to show off his billions with a private island or 24-karat shoelaces. He still lives in the Omaha house he bought for $31,500 in 1958. Orders the same McDonald's breakfast. Plays bridge online. And yet—every once in a while—the Oracle of Omaha drops a flex so enormous it makes you question the entire economy. "If I wanted to, I could hire 10,000 people to do nothing but paint my picture every day for the rest of my life." That's the version most people know, reported by Harper's Magazine in 2010. Classic Buffett: deadpan, a little absurd, and sneakily insightful. But in The Atlantic a year earlier, they printed an expanded version of the same quote — one with more teeth. Don't Miss: 'Scrolling To UBI' — Deloitte's #1 fastest-growing software company allows users to earn money on their phones. Here's what Americans think you need to be considered wealthy. Buffett explained he doesn't feel guilty about having money. What he feels is awareness. His wealth is, as he put it, "an enormous number of claim checks on society"—pieces of paper he could trade in for anything. Including 10,000 personal portrait artists. That spending would technically boost GNP. It would create jobs. It would register as growth. But the value? Zero. Worse, it would pull those 10,000 people away from doing something useful—like teaching, nursing, or, say, researching a cure for cancer. Back then, it sounded like a clever thought experiment. Now? It hits a little differently. Today, entire industries revolve around work that's arguably just as decorative. Consultants hired to advise other consultants. Influencers selling productivity hacks they copied from other influencers. AI bots creating content for other AI bots to "engage" with. There's more movement than ever—but are we actually getting anywhere? Trending: Warren Buffett once said, "If you don't find a way to make money while you sleep, you will work until you die." Buffett's portrait-painting analogy is a gut check: not everything that counts as economic activity creates real value. Sure, those 10,000 painters would earn a paycheck. The GNP would get a bump. But in the end, we'd just be left with a warehouse full of Buffett portraits and a very weird museum exhibit. Nothing society needs—just money moving in a circle. And this isn't about judging jobs. It's about questioning incentives. Buffett was pointing out how easy it is to mistake busywork for progress when the system is built to reward volume over substance. "Inactivity strikes us as intelligent behavior," he once wrote, in the 1997 Berkshire Hathaway annual shareholder made billions sitting in a quiet room reading annual reports, while the rest of the world sprinted in circles. Inactivity, in his case, wasn't laziness—it was discipline. Focus. A refusal to chase the noise. And it worked. He could've had anything. Instead, he chose to think. That's the paradox that still echoes today: The man with enough wealth to do everything chose to do less—because he understood what real value looks like. Not just in dollars, but in impact. Read Next: Can you guess how many Americans successfully retire with $1,000,000 saved?. Inspired by Uber and Airbnb – Deloitte's fastest-growing software company is transforming 7 billion smartphones into income-generating assets – Up Next: Transform your trading with Benzinga Edge's one-of-a-kind market trade ideas and tools. Click now to access unique insights that can set you ahead in today's competitive market. Get the latest stock analysis from Benzinga? APPLE (AAPL): Free Stock Analysis Report TESLA (TSLA): Free Stock Analysis Report This article Warren Buffett Once Said He Could Hire 10,000 People to Paint His Face—And It Might Be the Most Brutal Economic Truth You'll Hear All Day originally appeared on © 2025 Benzinga does not provide investment advice. All rights reserved.
The Guardian
16-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Embrace of Indigenous artists reaches London thanks to influence of Venice Biennale
At last year's Venice Biennale, the pavilions were packed with indigenous art from around the world. Artists from the Tupinambá community in Brazil sat alongside work by the late Rosa Elena Curruchich, who made pieces about Indigenous women in Guatemala. The Amazonian artist Aycoobo was celebrated, as were carvings by the Māori artist Fred Graham. The eventual winner of the Golden Lion – the event's highest accolade – was the Indigenous Australian artist Archie Moore. The biennale's curator, Adriano Pedrosa, said the event's theme of Strangers Everywhere included 'the Indigenous artist, frequently treated as a foreigner in their own land'. Now Indigenous artists had seemingly taken over. The influence of Venice is reaching these shores. After the event, Tate launched a fund aimed at increasing the representation of Indigenous works in its collection. This year it will host a retrospective of the Indigenous Australian artist Emily Kam Kngwarray, while Ames Yavuz gallery, specialists in Indigenous Australian art, are to open a London outpost this spring. Curators and artists have spoken about this being a time of overdue recognition, while others are cautious about the longevity of this moment. 'It's definitely the zeitgeist at the moment,' said Dianne Tanzer of the Australian gallery This Is No Fantasy, which is exhibiting the Indigenous artist Johnathon World Peace Bush at Frieze Cork Street in central London from 27 February. 'At some stage who knows when it becomes unfashionable … it's like everything in life, it's not going to be forever but we hope we get the best of it while it lasts,' she added. 'It's not a bubble,' said Pippy Houldsworth, whose gallery is showing the indigenous American artist Mario Martinez's first UK show. 'Look at the huge excitement about black artists over the last few years. That hasn't come and gone by any means, it's just brought greater recognition to a greater number of people who have been sidelined in the past.' Since Venice, a backlash has emerged. In December 2024, Harper's Magazine ran a cover feature by the Spike magazine critic Dean Kissick. He observed that all the major biennale's he had visited in recent years had embraced 'overlooked artists from the 20th century and exhibited recycled junk, traditional craft, and folk art'. The art world's worthy fixation on all things 'identity' had, he said, replaced the 'spectacle and innovation' of work from a decade ago. Kelli Cole, a curator at the National Gallery of Australia, said in the context of a new Trump presidency and a political shift to the right, indigenous shows could face further criticism. 'Trump is in now and people are being accused of being too politically correct. Are we going to get questions at the Tate: has the gallery become politically correct because it's showing a black woman from Australia rather than a 'key' male artist?' For Indigenous artists such as Martinez, there's an expectation that they will create a certain type of art. His practice is focused on abstract paintings, some of which allude to his heritage as a member of the Pascua Yaqui Tribe of Arizona. 'Indigenous artists have always had abstraction, whether it's through spirituality or art,' said Martinez, who had a solo show at Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian. 'But people are often surprised by my work, even native curators.' But far from being a flash in the pan 'moment', curators and artists say the recognition of Indigenous artists around the world and a greater understanding of their work has been built up over the last two decades. Tanzer and Nicola Stein of This Is No Fantasy said they first took artists, including Michael Cook in 2015, to satellite events at the Venice Biennale rather than the main event, slowly attracting audiences and buyers. 'It feels like it's pivoted quickly but it's actually been a very slow burn,' said Stein, who praised Judith Ryan, a curator and academic, for collecting and writing about indigenous art years before it hit the mainstream. 'It's taken time for it to be celebrated and for it to find its place within the contemporary art world.' Johnathon World Peace Bush is at Frieze No.9 Cork Street from 27 February – 15 March; Mario Martinez is at Pippy Houldsworth gallery from 21 February – 22 March; Emily Kam Kngwarray is at Tate Modern from 10 July – 11 January 2026.
