Daily Archives: March 2, 2022

Explosions rang out on in Kyiv and Kharkiv as Russian forces intensified their bombing campaign on Ukrainian cities Wednesday on the seventh day of the invasion.

The latest: At least 21 people were killed and 112 others wounded in the Kharkiv bombardment after Russian airborne troops landed in the city about 8:30pm Tuesday ET, according to Ukrainian officials.

State of play: Kharkiv has been the scene of some of the worst shelling by Russian troops since the invasion began. President Volodymyr Zelensky has denounced attacks on civilians, calling the striking of Kharkiv's central square Tuesday an act of state terrorism.

What they're saying: Zelensky accused Russian forces of wanting to "erase" Ukraine and praised Ukrainians as "a symbol of invincibility" in a video marking seven days of war on Wednesday.

What else is happening: Ukrainian authorities claimed they had foiled an assassination plot against Zelensky by a unit of elite Chechen special forces, in part thanks to tips from members of Russia's Federal Security Service who do not support the war.

Between the lines: A senior Pentagon official said seizing Mariupol and Kharkiv would allow Russia to cut off eastern Ukraine and pin Ukrainian forces away from Kyiv.

Other key developments: Kharkiv's historic Freedom Square one of the largest city squares in Europe was hit by a Russian missile strike on Tuesday, causing massive damage to the local city hall.

The big picture: Peace talks ended with no sign of concessions Monday. About 660,000 refugees have fled Ukraine, according to the U.N. Refugee Agency, which said "the situation looks set to become Europes largest refugee crisis this century."

Impact on Russia: Russia's currency is collapsing due to unprecedented, crippling Western sanctions. Massive corporations continue to announce said they will suspend or restrict operations in Russia, most recently shipping giant Maersk and oil titan Exxon.

Data: UNHCR; Map: Danielle Alberti/Axios

As Russia's economy unravels and its military suffers setbacks, military analysts expected the fighting to grow more intense and dangerous for civilians.

Meanwhile, the military convoy, estimated to stretch over 40 miles, moved to within 17 miles of Kyiv from the north by Monday afternoon, per satellite imagery from Maxar. The Pentagon official said it had slowed Tuesday due to logistical issues.

Russian forces have claimed the most territory in the south.

NATO countries continued to promise and provide hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of weaponry.

What to watch: Russia still has a good deal of capabilities "on the sidelines," including most of its air force, Kofman said. He's expecting a new scale of warfare in the days to come.

Go deeper: Get the latest with the Ukraine-Russia dashboard

Editor's note: This article has been updated with new details throughout.

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Russian forces land in Kharkiv as bombardment of Ukraine cities intensifies - Axios

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The Northern Territory's Biosecurity Zones will be lifted across Northern Land Councils at midnight tonight after the Commonwealth and Territory governments agreed not to extend the orders. Biosecurity Zones were enforced on February 2 to protect remote communities following a rise in COVID-19 cases across the state. Since the peak of COVID-19 had passed, governments had started reeling back restrictions including mask mandates, checking in and now biosecurity zones. Northern Land Council Chair Samuel Bush-Blanasi, said the biosecurity zones had done their job. "Traditional owners and community members wanted to slow down the spread of COVID out bush and give everyone a chance to get their second and third jabs. The Biosecurity Zones helped slow things down. They've done their job." The Biosecurity Zones in the NLC region will officially end at 11.59pm on Thursday March 3. NLC Chief Executive Officer, Joe Martin-Jard, said this meant non-essential workers travelling into and out of the Biosecurity Zones no longer need to get an exemption. "Even though the Biosecurity Zones end on Friday, people still need to follow the Chief Health Officer's directions. And people who want to enter Aboriginal land in the NLC area still need to apply for a permit in the usual way through the NLC," said Mr Martin-Jard. "I would like to thank everyone who has helped implement the Biosecurity Zones, in particular Larrakia Nation in Darwin and the Aboriginal community controlled and government health services across the Top End." Mr Bush-Blanasi cautioned against complacency. "COVID is out there now. We need to prepare for the next wave because COVID is not going away. That means everyone getting all their jabs and making sure our kids from five years old and up also get fully vaccinated."

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The Northern Territory's Biosecurity Zones will be lifted across Northern Land Councils at midnight tonight after the Commonwealth and Territory governments agreed not to extend the orders.

Biosecurity Zones were enforced on February 2 to protect remote communities following a rise in COVID-19 cases across the state.

Northern Land Council Chair Samuel Bush-Blanasi, said the biosecurity zones had done their job.

"Traditional owners and community members wanted to slow down the spread of COVID out bush and give everyone a chance to get their second and third jabs. The Biosecurity Zones helped slow things down. They've done their job."

The Biosecurity Zones in the NLC region will officially end at 11.59pm on Thursday March 3.

NLC Chief Executive Officer, Joe Martin-Jard, said this meant non-essential workers travelling into and out of the Biosecurity Zones no longer need to get an exemption.

"Even though the Biosecurity Zones end on Friday, people still need to follow the Chief Health Officer's directions. And people who want to enter Aboriginal land in the NLC area still need to apply for a permit in the usual way through the NLC," said Mr Martin-Jard.

"I would like to thank everyone who has helped implement the Biosecurity Zones, in particular Larrakia Nation in Darwin and the Aboriginal community controlled and government health services across the Top End."

Mr Bush-Blanasi cautioned against complacency.

"COVID is out there now. We need to prepare for the next wave because COVID is not going away. That means everyone getting all their jabs and making sure our kids from five years old and up also get fully vaccinated."

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Biosecurity zones to be lifted across Northern Land Councils - Daily Liberal

In the first real primary challenge of his roughly 30-year political career, Governor Greg Abbott rushed to the right on nearly every political matter possible in order to outflank a stable of conservative primary challengers.

That strategy proved effective as Abbott crushed his opponents in the Republican gubernatorial primary Tuesday, hauling in nearly 70 percent of the vote. His closest contenders, the former state Senator Don Huffines and former Texas GOP party chair Allen West, each got a paltry 12 percent of the vote.

Just 36 minutes after the polls closed, Huffines tweeted that he was conceding actual victory to Abbott while claiming victory for himself in the war of ideas. For over a year our campaign has driven the narrative in Texas and forced Greg Abbott to deliver real conservative victories, Huffines said, pointing to recent laws and policies enacted that include a near-total ban on abortion, a massive border security operation, the permitless carry of handguns, bans on teaching about race in public classrooms, and an attack on transgender childrens ability to access gender-affirming healthcare.

Abbotts handling of the coronavirus pandemic early on prompted a rash of criticism from the far right and spurred challengers to launch bids against him. But by the time primary season ramped up, Abbotts approval ratings among Republican voters were rock solid.

Meanwhile, the comically corrupt Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton failed to avoid a runoff in the face of serious challenges from three well-known and well-funded challengers. Paxton won about 43 percent of the primary vote with Land Commissioner George P. Bush capturing second place and the right to a runoff. Former Supreme Court Justice Eva Guzman and Congressman Louie Gohmert came in third and fourth places, though Gohmert did manage to win most of the counties in his East Texas congressional district.

Paxton spent the final days of the election blasting Guzman as a woke liberal, perhaps indicating he saw her as his strongest opponent in a potential runoff. All of Paxtons challengers relentlessly attacked him for his myriad legal challenges, warning Republican voters that the incumbent could be especially vulnerable in the general election and give Democrats their greatest chance at flipping a statewide seat in a generationparticularly if he ends up with another indictment or in jail as a result of his current FBI investigation.

Farther down the ballot, Agriculture Commissioner Sid Millerwho faced his own hemp-related corruption scandalhandily beat his opponent, East Texas state Representative James White, with roughly 60 percent of the vote.Railroad Commission Chair Wayne Christian fell just a few points short of avoiding a runoff Tuesday night in his race against his challengers.

Editors Note: This post has been updated to reflect results Wednesday at noon.

Originally posted here:

In GOP Primaries, Abbott Crushes Opponents While Paxton Forced into Runoff - The Texas Observer

APPLETON Milly Rugland remembers watching the Fox River when she was a child as ribbons of colored foam drifted past,green, pink and yellow.

Back then, it was an industrial river traversed by coal barges, polluted by paper mills and farm runoff.

There were no fish, other than resilient carp, and mothers would tell their children not to put even their feet in the water. One industry leader in the 1960s called it nothing more than a high-class sewer.

Most people dont realize how polluted the waters were, Rugland said. They dont remember foam and coal barges, dead fish floating in Lake Winnebago, but it was really nasty.

Ruglands father, Gordon Bubolz, a prominent businessman in the Fox Cities and conservative state senator, saw value in the states natural resources and used his position to help clean up the waters. A conservationist at heart, Bubolz often said he felt the need to preserve the waters and land because God doesnt make it anymore.

He was in business circles with people who were running the paper mills, but he was very vocal about the fact that the paper mills polluted the Fox River, and something needed to be done, said Dave Horst, a nature columnist and environmental grant writer for the Community Foundation for the Fox Valley Region.

The Wisconsin Conservation Hall of Fame will posthumously honor Bubolz, who died in 1990, with a virtual induction ceremony for his contributions to restore the river and for raising funds to preserve more than 4,600 acres of public land across the state. Hell join Alren Christenson and Kathleen Falk as 2022 inductees.

Horst, who wrote the nomination for Bubolz, said he was drawn to research the man because of the opposing forces he represented. He was a businessman and a conservative, and he was known to work with liberal politicians likeSen. Gaylord Nelson, who created Earth Day, and conservative Wisconsin governor Warren Knowles.

Party positions or party membership didnt matter to him, said his son, John Bubolz. It was about who people were, what their beliefs were and ideas they had in common.

Bubolz was so outspoken in his desire to restore the Fox River that he had to send his daughter to school with a police escort. Rugland said she wasnt exactly sure what was going on at the time, but she remembers people felt strongly that environmental regulations would be the death knell for the paper industry.

I was 10, and I remember one morning my parents came to me and said, 'Youre going to get a special ride to school today,' Rugland said. It was unmarked cars, and it didnt last very long, but there were definitely threats made against our family.

Bubolz was born in 1905 and grew up on a farm in northeast Wisconsin with five brothers and six sisters. His father started an insurance company in 1900 after a devastating windstorm hit the state in 1899.

Bubolz graduated from Lawrence University, studied business and insurance in Ohio and Pennsylvania and earned a law degree from the University of Wisconsin. He would go on to succeed his father as head of the insurance company, which is now called Secura.

John Bubolz said he believes his fathers passion for conservation came from his early life on the farm.

He knew the importance of the land and the need to preserve it, he said. Especially land that was in jeopardy of being developed.

Bubolz served as a state senator from 1945 to 1953, during which he was on the state Conservation Commission and chaired the advisory council of the Department of Resource Development. It provided oversight for the predecessors of the DNR.

He also served on the Legislatures Joint Water Resource Committee and co-authored legislation to implement in Wisconsins provisions of the federal Water Pollution Control Act of 1948. He was the first to chair what is now called the East Central Wisconsin Regional Planning Commission.

Rugland said her father was like a sponge, absorbing information on environmental causes. He believed that living things were interconnected, and he was excited to learn how things affect one another. Rugland remembers her father working with University of Wisconsin scientists to study how wetlands would impact future generations.

He walked in and said, Do you know what wetlands are? Theyre natures sponges do you know what they do? Rugland said. It was like telling a kid they could raid a candy shop. He was so excited, and he was excited about everything he tried to do.

Following his work in the state Senate, Bubolz started a nonprofitcalled Natural Areas Preservation Incorporated, or NAPI, which found areas with ecological significance to educate the public about conservation.

In 1990, hewas recognizedas a key fundraiser and organizer for the state to create four nature centers, three wildlife areas, two county parks and High Cliff State Park.

Bubolzs son and daughter agree their father wasnt a man who sought recognition. However, his induction to the conservation hall of famebrings to life a quote that he often referred to.

"That which we do for ourselves dies with us. That which we do for others lives on.

Bubolz worked to preservemore than 4,600 acres of public land. Below is a list of the properties Bubolz helped establish. The information was compiled by Horst for the Wisconsin Conservation Hall of Fame.

Contact Jake Prinsen at jprinsen@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter at @PrinsenJake.

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Fox Cities businessman, senator Gordon Bubolz to be inducted into Wisconsin Conservation Hall of Fame - Post-Crescent

Oligarchs under sanctions in the EU and US have been linked to almost 200m of property in London and the home counties, a Guardian analysis has found, as Boris Johnson came under mounting pressure from Labour to step up financial curbs.

Among those hit with sanctions by the EU in recent days over Russias invasion of Ukraine are Mikhail Fridman and Petr Aven, who separately own mansions in London and Surrey. Both men stepped down from the board of their private investment group, LetterOne, on Tuesday.

Aven attended a business meeting with Vladimir Putin at the Kremlin last week, which his spokesperson said he was required to do. He bought the plot of Ingliston House in Virginia Water in the 2000s for an estimated 8m, and he has spoken of housing a vast art collection there. The property is owned through a company.

Fridman bought and still owns Athlone House in north London, paying 65m for the property in 2016, according to the Land Registry.

A spokesperson for both men said the justifications for EU sanctions were simply and demonstrably false and stressed that the pair were in no way involved in politics, had condemned the war and would contest the allegations. Fridman has previously said he did not know whether he would face sanctions in the UK and hoped it would not happen.

Igor Shuvalov, a former Russian deputy prime minister who chairs Russias state development bank, is also said to be a London property owner under EU sanctions. He was named in the House of Commons by Labour as owning two flats in Westminster, bought for an estimated 11m.

On Wednesday Keir Starmer said the only reason Shuvalov was known to be the real owner of the flats was because it had been revealed by the jailed Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

Transparency is essential to rooting out corruption, the Labour leader said. It should be built into our law, but its not. And Im ashamed that we only know about Shuvalovs Westminster flats because a dissident risked his life. Is the prime minister?

Another billionaire oligarch, Oleg Deripaska, is under sanctions in the US and has previously challenged the restrictions in the courts.

He is listed by the US Department of the Treasury as residing at Belgrave Square in London. The property was bought in 2005 for an estimated 25m through Ravellot Ltd, a company based in the British Virgin Islands. A spokesperson for the businessman said the property was owned by members of Mr Deripaskas family.

The spokesperson added: As regards the US sanctions against Mr Deripaska, the grounds on which they were imposed are entirely baseless. No evidence has ever been produced to substantiate allegations of wrongdoing against him. I trust that Mr Deripaskas position on the importance of peace speaks for itself.

There is more of a mystery surrounding London property previously linked to Alisher Usmanov, who was put under EU sanctions this week and whose sponsorship links to Everton football club were recently frozen. He has for many years been reported as having owned two mansions one on the same Hampstead road in north London as Fridman and another in Surrey.

Usmanov bought the Grade-II listed Beechwood, which is set in 4.5 hectares (11 acres) of ground, for 48m in 2008 through Hanley Ltd, a company based in the Isle of Man. He has also been reported to be the owner of Sutton Place, a 72-room Tudor mansion near Guildford in Surrey that was once frequented by Henry VIII, and was bought for an unknown amount in the mid-2000s. It was marketed for 25m but is thought to have sold for less.

However, Usmanovs spokesperson on Wednesday disputed the information about his property ownership, without being specific about whether he was no longer the beneficial owner of one or both of the properties.

Usmanov previously said in response to the EUs move: I believe such a decision is unfair and the reasons employed to justify the sanctions are a set of false and defamatory allegations damaging my honour, dignity and business reputation. I will use all legal means to protect my honour and reputation.

Questions have been mounting from British MPs in recent days over why the UK has not matched the US and EU in some of its sanctions. So far, fewer than 10 oligarchs have been sanctioned by the UK in relation to Russias invasion of Ukraine. Sanctions have also been brought against Putin and his foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov.

A British official rebuffed suggestions that the UK was moving too slowly on imposing further sanctions against individuals close to the Russian president and their business interests.

The official pointed to measures such as a ban on all Russian-flagged ships docking in UK ports as an example of how the government was ahead of the EU, US and other G7 nations, but admitted there were quite significant risks of asset flights from those fearing they could have their finances frozen.

Analysis by the NGO Transparency UK has previously estimated that since 2016 1.5bns worth of UK property has been bought by Russians with alleged links to the Kremlin.

Amid a lack of transparency over the beneficial owners of London property, Labour wrote to the government on Wednesday urging it to change proposed legislation to give foreign property owners 28 days rather than 18 months to reveal their identity.

The Liberal Democrats called for the government to seize empty property in London owned by oligarchs with links to the Kremlin in order to house Ukrainian refugees. Alistair Carmichael, the partys home affairs spokesperson, said: Its time to freeze these assets and put them to good use, by temporarily housing Ukrainian refugees escaping this terrible war.

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Oligarchs under EU and US sanctions linked to 200m in UK property - The Guardian

In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: Up to and including 1889 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports. This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement.

With this, Frederick Jackson Turner began his essay The Significance of the Frontier in American History, based on a paper he gave at a meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago in July of 1893. The frontier, the outer edge of the wavethe meeting point between savagery and civilization, as Turner called it, had closed.

Turners essay has joined the ranks of classics on Mark Twains definition: books which people praise and dont read. But the fact remains that the basic idea of a closed frontier has overtaken its more nuanced origin in Turners writings and come to serve as a rhetorical signpost for discussions about American history. The frontier closed in 1890that somewhat dubious assertion (see Gerald D. Nashs brief 1980 essay The Census of 1890 and the Closing of the Frontier for a sketch of how slapdash a job the 1890 census was) has entered the American consciousness and worried the minds of those given to thinking about our national character, and how it was once tied to the taming of a wild land. I, too, have often fretted with Turner: Our frontier is closed.

Ive begun to think differently about the frontier, however. Contra the census takers, the frontier didnt close in 1890. It just got wet. America took a fateful swerve, from being a land power to a sea power, with consequences disastrous for our republic and the continent that nurtures it. We went and got a huge honking navy, and then it was curtains for our continental republic. John J. Mearsheimer lays it out very nicely in The Great Delusion: Liberalism abroad undermines liberalism at home. States that pursue liberal hegemony invariably damage the fabric of liberalism inside their own borders. This is precisely what happened when Americans elasticized their frontier and set about liberalizing all four hemispheres.

One can understand the expansionist temptation, to be honest. At the close of the 19th century the United States was very quickly becoming rich and technologically advanced. The Conestoga-wagon-LittleHouseonthePrairiefrontier had closed, but many East Coast Americanswho ironically never knew the Turnerian frontier or much of America apart from New York and Bostonwere dreaming imperial dreams beyond the United States. Progressives, mainly in the Republican Party, had their eyes, and their countrymens tax dollars, set on new frontiers, new wildernesses to allay. Pushed along by East Coast money and Washington political and military power, the frontier moved beyond the coast and out into the Pacificinto the Caribbean, too. With new imperial holdings in Cuba, Guam, the Philippines, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, Samoa, and Wake Island, American Progressives entered the 20th century flush with dominion, and whetted to even further acquisition. Just when you thought the frontier had closed, boom, you up and get an empire.

This new-frontierism has continued from that day to this. Americans went East and West, beyond the bookends of the Carolina and California coastlines. Our imperial-inflected frontiering led us to try taming Europe (good luck with that) by defeating the atavistic Hun in two wars, and to try driving a stake in the heart of Oriental superstition by forcing the Japanese Emperor to de-divinize on New Years Day, 1946. Weve frontiered in Somalia and Bosnia, frontiered in Grenada and Nicaragua, frontiered with the Siberian Expedition, frontiered in Saudi Arabia and Oman, frontiered among the Syrians and the Poles. The frontier didnt end in 1890, and it didnt end in America. It got stuck westerly in the mud halfway down the Korean Peninsula, where it remains today, and is now fluttering around easterly somewhere in the depths of Ukraine. NATO and the PACOM are the two farthest outposts of the frontier one hundred and thirty-two years after its putative closing.

But is this imperial adventurism really an extension of the American frontier? For Turner, no. The frontier was not merely advance along a single line, Turner wrote,

but a return to primitive conditions along a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating the American character.

In this passage, and in Turners essay overall, one can see that Turner is speaking of not one frontier, but two. There is the geographic frontier, the one that keeps moving westward. That, I argue, is the part of Turners idea that got telescoped out to the far western Pacific and the middle of Eastern Europe. But that is not really what Turner saw as the frontiers pulse and lifeblood. That would be the inner frontier, the process of men and women going out into the wilderness and being rejuvenated, reborn even, by baptism in the American continent.

It is this second frontier that we forgot about when we made the fateful transition from land power to sea power, from continental to maritime nation. We sold our soul for some cruisers and aircraft carriers. But our hearts are forever in the bayous, grasslands, and forests of our native soil. We Americans are not British, not islanders fated to roam the seas like Polynesians or Vikings. We are a landed people, tilling soil and making homes in the earth. In doing this we become ourselves. Our closest civilizational cousins are not Europeans but Mongolians and Navajo. We range land, not water. The Southern Agrarians and the Western cattlemen, then, and not the military adventurer or the imperial proconsul in Manila or Havana, is who we are at heart. We need the frontier, for it is only there that we know and meet our destiny to become Americans.

The wilderness masters the colonist, Turner wrote.

It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is, that here is a new product that is American.

Turner is at odds here, trying to birth the civilizational frontier out of the transmogrification of the European into the American in the wilds of the West. But it was always the interior transformation that we were after. Going native is who we are. And I think it is high time we came home from the deserts and jungles of the world and worked on becoming Americans again. At the burnt end of our empire, Minervas owl having flown off sometime during the Obama Administration, we can turn around and see that it was just half of Turners thesis that was ever worth keeping. It is not that we ought to civilize others, but that we ourselves must be civilized in the wilderness. We are Americans when we are in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois, when we are arrayed in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. Instead of hitching our American nature to an abstract, and after Turners heyday increasingly eugenicist, notion of progress, we should have stayed in the Indian clearings and on the Indian trails.

It is not too late to do this. It is not too late to reopen the American frontier in every heart by going into the American land and living on it like true sons and daughters of the continent. This time, though, instead of an inexorable westward wave, let there be an ingathering of the exiles, from all corners of the globe where the imperial diaspora has reached. The American continent needs saving, and we, who have become so civilized by our imperium that we are able to incinerate the planet many times over at the touch of a button and the turning of a key, need rewildingbad. Going among Indian clearings and meandering on Indian trails would go a long way toward teaching us how to be our own masters again, and to give up the cheap substitute of lording it over others.

It is not just Americans who need saving. Consider how the betrayal of our national character has hurt our homeland. When I drive across the country I see endless fields of corn and wheat and soybeans, for example. Virtually none of these crops are consumed locally. Oceans of chemicals are pumped onto Nebraskan and Iowan fields so that those fields will grow fat with grain, but then much of the bounty of the American heartland is put on trains and trucks and then on ships and ferried out to the wide world beyond. We poison our land and water to compete in a global grain market, when there are Americans on our streets who are hungry and destituteit is insanity squared. We dont realize it, but we have ourselves become colonized by our own imperial ambitions. And our land is made serf to the globalized world, a cog in a faceless machine. So many acres of wheat, bound for destinations far beyond the United States. This is no frontier. This is slow death and the dissolution of our national soul.

I propose a new initiative: Homesteading. On farmland. Anyone who wants to grow crops or raise livestock for personal or local consumptionwith local defined as anywhere you can see from the roof of your Cherokee log cabinshould be allowed to take over a part of a massive Big Ag latifundia. Farms are drowning in debtlet the federal government step in, maybe, and pay off the mortgage in exchange for title to the land. After, say, 30 years of homesteading, the recovered land could be deeded over to the homesteader, on the condition that it will never be sold to anyone who will not also live on the land and work it for personal and local sustenance. Homesteading is not the first step toward reconquering nature, but toward letting nature reconquer North America. As Big Ag is thus broken up, the spaces in between the homesteads will naturally rewild. And in this wilderness, communities will form, instead of the neo-feudalism of globalist agricultural conglomerates.

Hearts always brighten when hands are caked with a little mud and dung. It does a man good to hear coyotes bay at night and roosters crow at dawn. A horse on the hoof and lightning draping the horizon make us more human, more American. We wilt in office buildings, but come alive in Gods country.

Psychiatrists will probably go out of business in droves as we return to our American roots. Fringe benefits all over the place.

As the American maritime empire dies and the market for tankerloads of corn and soybeans diversifies, the swaths of the Big Ag latifundia not homesteaded should be laid open to the wild things that owned our continent until just a few generations ago. Gigantic herds of smelly, stampeding bison should kick up prairie dust across a thousand miles of inland America. And if anyone wants to Jurassic Parksome woolly mammoths back into existence, then that would be fantastic. Let the mammoth cry and the buffalo grunt be the muezzin of our land. A saber-toothed tiger or two would jazz up any township in this new dispensation. I envision an America snorting and roaring and free.

Im far from the only one advocating for this kind of thing. A 2020 National Reviewarticle by Santi Ruiz, for example, describes how bison are slowly making a comeback in the United States. Spurred on by megafauna nationalism, many on the American right are now calling for a rewilding of America. But the real work on the ground appears to be being done by some of the Indian tribes, which are dedicating parts of reservations for raising up bison herds. Ruiz mentions the Rosebud Sioux, who are bringing the buffalo home on behalf of the Great Sioux Nation.

This is a good start. But at the mention of the Great Sioux Nation we must pause and steel ourselves for what has to be done next. The rewilding of America will have no moral meaning without the restoration of America to the Native Americans. Our imperial project started with them, recall. Frederick Jackson Turner talked of Europeans going among the Indians and discovering what it means to be an American. This is all well and good if one is of European stock. It looks very different if one is an Indian.

Turner is conflicted in The Significance of the Frontier in American History about this, arguing that the effect of the Indian frontier as a consolidating agent in our history is important. To me, it is the Indian that will civilize the rest of uswe need not see Indians as a common danger, demanding united action, as Turner wrote of the westward-moving whites. The common danger was Europeans. Indians failed to take united action, and were overrun. This is a crime which must be set right.

The Great Sioux Nation is leading the way in bringing the bison back. Lets go whole hog and bring America back, too, by deimperializing the continent our forefathers wrested away while we deimperialize the government they bequeathed to us. Rewilding America has to start with smoking a peace pipe with the people who were here first. If the buffalo roam but the Sioux are still in corrals, then the same un-American sadness will still haunt our land, and we will all be the poorer for it.

We lose nothing, and gain everything, by becoming, in this way, Americans again, or for the first time. Remember that the European came out in us too strongly when we went west. We did not become Indian, did not become American enough, not nearly. White men tried to take the place of the buffalo, to go roaming off in glory instead of letting the wild beasts gallop towards the distant hinge joining land and sky. As if sensing an imperial competitor, white men slaughtered bison in droves and left their skinned carcasses to rot in the sun. There were 60 million bison in Thomas Jeffersons day, but just a few thousand left in Frederick Jackson Turners generation.

It is time to let those ghosts rise, and look on as the buffalo run free again. Let there be great swooping and stampeding fauna, the eagle and the mustang at play, and a revival of the prairie grass and the redwood, the flora fit for our land. The Louisiana delta shall stick its tongue out into the Gulf of Mexico, the swamps that sponge up the hurricane surge shall grow thick and pungent once more. Piney Appalachia and taiga-like Minnesota, all the patchwork of the landscape vibrant and alive again. MAGAby filling her with some good, old-fashioned savagery and so de-Europeanizing her forever.

Let us let the ghosts of the megafauna rise, but let us leave the old imperialists to lie in their graves undisturbed. The Progressive Republicans of yore, especially, should be left to molder in peace. Theodore Roosevelt made laudable attempts to protect the environment and preserve the wilderness. But imperialism undid those. The Progressives couldnt have it both ways. The American Empire was the last burning-off of the European in us, the final Hegelian turning of the transplanted Enlightenment. That was never our soul, all those sorties and bombing runs, all those freedom of navigation operations and forward operating bases. Lets sell our battleships to the Hawaiians, who will need them to defend against yet another land power in maritime imperial drag. As for us, lets go back into the depths of the continent, reopen the frontier in our hearts, and be, at long last, Americans.

Jason Morganis associate professor at Reitaku University in Kashiwa, Japan.

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Reopen the American Frontier - The American Conservative

Peter Gutwein,Premier

The Tasmanian Liberal Government is taking further action to ease the cost of living for Tasmanian families and put downward pressure on rents, with the tax-free threshold for land tax to double to $100,000.

This means land tax will not be paid on land valued under $100,000, and we will also lift the upper tax threshold to $500,000 and lower the tax rate for land valued between $100,000 and $500,000 from 0.55 per cent to 0.45 per cent to reduce tax payable.

We took action last year to relieve some of the costs of rental properties and put downward pressure on rents by resetting the land tax thresholds, which provided more than $56 million in land tax relief for landlords and property owners over four years.

There is no doubt our strong economy and desirable lifestyle has meant more and more people want to live, work and raise a family in Tasmania.

With house prices and rents continuing to rise, we know more needs to be done, and the new arrangements will save Tasmanians hundreds more each year, providing more money to spend in local businesses.

The changes mean around 70,000 Tasmanians will save on average approximately $800 every year, up to a maximum saving of $1625 - with close to 12,000 taxpayers no longer needing to pay any land tax at all.

When combined with the changes we made last year, it will provide about $220 million of tax relief for property owners over the next four years - to enable further reductions in the costs for rental properties and helping to put downward pressure on rent prices.

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Property owners and tenants to benefit from $220m of tax relief - Premier of Tasmania

A Liberal MLA wants P.E.I.'s government to use a new contingency fund to buy up all the fields where potato wart has been found in the last 22 years, and take them out of production.

This week's budget included a $15-million contingency fund to help farmers hurt by the November closure of the U.S. border to P.E.I. potato exports. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency ordered the halt in exports, saying American officials were about to closethe border themselves if Canada didn't act.

On Friday, MLA Robert Henderson said the newly announced fund should be used to expropriate the fields where warthas been detected a total of 33 instances since 2000 and compensate the owners at prices the land would have fetched before wart was found in the soil.

He aimed this question at Premier Dennis King: "Will you tell your minister to allocate that contingency money to buying the land of the 33 index classified fields where potato wart has been confirmed?"

Premier Dennis King replied that he "would be in the campthat would be supportive"of taking land out of production,but said questions have to be answered before any land is bought to be taken out of productionprimarily, whether that would make American and Canadian officials any more likely to let table potatoes from P.E.I. cross the border.

"I want to make sure if we go to these extreme lengths that our efforts are recognized by CFIA, by [its counterpart] APHIS in the United States," he said.

The premier went on to take aim at the federal Liberals and Henderson alike, saying he doesn't want to"get into the mess of a dance, of just giving things away like his party did in Ottawa during these negotiations, which have crippled this province."

Later in the exchange, Henderson pushed the province toleada class-action lawsuit against the U.S. government and theCFIA for damages associatedwith handling the potato wart issue,adding: "A number of comments have been made that there's been negligence on this file."

This is the second time this week that opposition parties have urged the government to take the fields in question out of production permanently.

At the moment, fields where the fungus has been found can be used to grow wart-resistant potato varieties afterfive years haspassed.The CFIA'swebpage on the fungus says it can stay dormant in the soil of a field for more than 40 years.

"This province has absolute jurisdiction over land use," Green Party Leader Peter Bevan-Baker said on Tuesday. "We can choose to take those fields out of production obviously compensate the farmers appropriately. "

More:

Premier urged to use aid money to buy potato wart fields, take them out of production - CBC.ca