I’ve been thinking about the great cars we owned in Oakland. I believe – I WIN! My 1950 Dodge Corona was a a real Beauty! There wasn’t a dent on her/him. The interior was in pergect condition. But, it was the beautiful woman that rose shotgub, that takes the cake. Oakland never saw such a beautiful woman, In my return to San Sebastian, I am compelled to brag!
With the reelection of Donald Trump, my autobiograry has become – A GIANT! I now see a trilogy. Capturing Beauty will be the first to be published.
I heard on the news this morning, Trump called Putin about a truce. There is no evidence Putin and Trump talked. There is much evidence Donald USED USDA Choice Beauties to get what he wants. He is beyond being a pimp! This is…….SATANIC! Charlie Manson used women in the same way. Will evangelicals wake up to the truth they are member of a cult?
Everything I write in this blog, is copyrighed!
Farmers sue Trump administration to unfreeze USDA grants
President Donald Trump issued an executive order on Jan. 20, freezing all funds appropriated under the Inflation Reduction Act, which farmers say are necessary to keep their farms and certain projects running.
President Donald Trump speaks to reporters aboard Air Force One where he signed a proclamation declaring Feb. 9 Gulf of America Day as he travels from West Palm Beach, Fla. to New Orleans, Sunday, Feb. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)
WASHINGTON (CN) — A coalition of farmers sued the Trump administration Thursday to lift an indefinite freeze of billions of dollars in funding for programs created under the Inflation Reduction Act.
In the suit, brought in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, the farmers challenge President Donald Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order “Unleashing American Energy,” which placed an immediate pause on all funds appropriated under the 2022 statute.
The farmers — Butterbee Farm, One Acre Farm, Two Boots Farm, Red Fire Farm and Hendrix Farm — operate in Maryland, Massachusetts and Mississippi. They were joined in the suit by nonprofits Cultivate KC, Faith in Place and GreenLatinos.
“This is no mere inconvenience,” Faith in Place president Reverend Brian Sauder said in a press call on Thursday. “It is a complete betrayal of trust that will have lasting consequences for working families and already struggling communities. Our communities cannot afford continued delays and broken promises.”
On Jan. 29, White House Office of Management and Budget head Russell Vought issued a memo directing all federal agencies to pause disbursement of all funds to bring the government’s spending in line with the president’s agenda.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture promptly cut off IRA recipients’ access to payment portals, refused to process invoices, canceled meetings, and failed to respond to clarification requests from grantees.
The OMB order was quickly challenged and halted, with a federal judge in Washington ruling on Feb. 25 that the blanket freeze, which impacted up to $3 trillion in federal funding, was “ill-conceived” and well outside the executive office’s constitutional authority.
According to the farmers, the USDA has continued to withhold funds, citing Trump’s executive order as justification in emails requesting clarification or notices that reimbursement requests were rejected.
In response to a March 5 inquiry from Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen’s office, the USDA said approximately 6,000 grants under the Rural Energy for America Program were still under review per the president’s executive order.
When the farmers themselves tried to gain clarification, they had meetings with USDA representatives canceled, and in one instance, a farmer was told their USDA grant officer was not allowed to speak with grantees.
Sauder described how his organization received a $1.9 million grant for an urban forestry project in 2024 meant to address urban heat throughout Illinois, Indiana and Wisconsin.
Sauder said he spent months planning the project, hiring staff, building infrastructure, and following federal requirements, “expecting the government to uphold its commitment, as we did ours.”
“Instead, this administration is turning its back on our most vulnerable communities and putting the very organizations that make federal programs work in jeopardy,” Sauder said. “Our project was set to provide living-wage jobs, plant trees to reduct deadly urban heat and to increase green spaces and neighborhoods historically left behind. Now these efforts are stalled.”
Laura Resnick, owner of Butterbee Farm, said on Thursday that she applied for a Rural Energy for America Program grant to install solar panels at the flower farm to power their greenhouses.
“For over a decade, we have helped our communities both celebrate and grieve losses with flowers,” Resnick said.
She signed a contract for the program in August 2024 and paid her half — $36,000 — upfront and would request funding for the second half from the government after the project was complete.
Resnick said she requested the government funding a month after the solar panels were installed, which happened to be the same week the funding freeze was announced.
“We need our contract honored by the government so that we’re not deeply in debt,” Resnick said. “Farming has such slim profit margins as it is, and USDA assistance, like loans and grants, have been crucial to our business.”
The farmers asked a federal judge to declare Section 7 of Trump’s “Terminating the Green New Deal” executive order unlawful, enjoin the administration from implementing the freeze under another name, and order the release of all frozen funds.
Farmers put plans, investments on hold under Trump USDA spending freeze
Item 1 of 6 Sheep trek up a muddy hill, at Quicken Farm in Shanks, West Virginia, US., February 16, 2025. REUTERS/Leah Douglas/ File Photo
[1/6]Sheep trek up a muddy hill, at Quicken Farm in Shanks, West Virginia, US., February 16, 2025. REUTERS/Leah Douglas/ File Photo Purchase Licensing Rights, opens new tab
Summary
USDA grant freeze impacts farmers’ financial stability
Farmers face bankruptcy, economic uncertainty due to freeze
CHICAGO/WASHINGTON, March 10 – Nate Powell-Palm, an organic farmer outside Belgrade, Montana, was relying on a $648,000 grant from USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service to help build a feed mill – an economic lifeline for about 150 area organic grain farmers.
But construction is on hold following the Trump Administration’s freeze on some agricultural grants and loans as it conducts a broad review of federal spending.
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Now, about 500 tons of baled alfalfa sits untouched in stacks in his fields, and a bill from a Colorado equipment manufacturer is past due. Last week, he traveled with a group of farmers to Washington, D.C. to meet with lawmakers and try to get their frozen USDA grant funding released.
The highlight of my life was driving Rena around California in my Dodge Coronet. I thought it was a 1950 model, but, it may have been a 52. In researching the answer, I found it! Our Bohemian Americana Dream Wagon!
Police in Montana are more than aware of the white nationalists’ activities. But in the absence of criminal activity, there’s little they can do. “We’ve got a lot of dangerous guys in Kalispell,” Police Chief Roger Nasset said. “But as long as they are peaceful, we can’t hold [their beliefs] against them.”
On February 2, 2014, I made a prophetic blog about Rena Christianson-Easton. She was living in Montana when she wrote me a long letter on Christmas Day. When I responded, she had deputy, Dan Mayland of Bozeman, give me a call. He told me Rena had come into the cop station and accused me of stalking her.
“I don’t have her address, or phone number, just a P.O. Box. If she gets another letter from me, all she has to do is throw it in the wastebasket. Did you see anything that looks like stalking in my letter, that you tell me she reconstructed from memory – after she tore it into little pieces – that she showed you in a paper bag?”
“No. But, there is no accounting for women’s actions, sometimes!”
That day has arrived! In Britain, a million people signed a petition forbidding Trump to see ‘The Queen’.
“Donald Trump should be allowed to enter the UK in his capacity as head of the US government, but he should not be invited to make an official State Visit because it would cause embarrassment to Her Majesty the Queen,” the petition said.
In 1976 I said this to someone who asked me what I thought about Rosamond’s Art.
“Her women are proof even Nazis had girlfriends. They look down their nose at men, and declare “I don’t need you!”
Christine had let her father back in her life and was emulating his superior attitude. One of his secretaries called him ‘Vic The Nazi’ to his face, on a regular basis. She ended up dead after Vic took her on a date. If I had introduced Rena to Captain Victim, he would have knocked me out with his infamous sucker-punch, dragged Rena into his bedroom, and raped her – for the Fatherland!
Rena is seventeen in the image above that she gave me when I visited her in Nebraska. It appeared on a post for a Oktoberfest event at the University of Nebraska. At the museum she struck a pose. As Diana she knelt on one knee, and drew an invisible bow. I was familiar with Ideal Nazi Art. She was the finest specimen of Aryan Womanhood I have ever lay my eyes on. Her ancestors were Danes.
Bannon’s demand that the media shut up and listen, suggests T-REX ‘King of Monsters’ has a master plan full of his beautiful ideas – and beautiful Beauty Queens he has judged. He flew freely to other nations to judge young beauties. If PBS wants to save its federal funding, I suggest they produce…..
‘President Trump – The Beautiful Years’
Leave out that crap T-Rex walked in on teenagers in order to catch them, naked. Have naked women posing as statues (painted gold) come alive as he walks proudly down ‘The Trump Museum of the Greek Gods’. They will throw rose petals before him as he takes us behind the vaulted door where lie all the gold that was in Fort Knox.
“I brought it here because I am opening my War Tax Casino, where my Bright Youth Movement can invest in stocks, using their Social Security funds they will not have to pay into. Alas, Trump Casinos International, will be a big success. The more enemies we make, the more money White Americans have to invest. It’s a legal Ponzi Scheme that I only want my Loyal Republicans to benefit from. But, that would be selfish of me.”
In June of last year I began my fictional story ‘Lucky Victors’ co-starring Winston Churchill’s daughter. I love that sign in back of Richard Spencer that is dropped when he gets punched in the head…….
“WHITE LIVES MATTER TOO MUCH”
Christine was the model of her portrait of our mother ‘Rosemary’. At he funeral Vic sat in the back and avoided the woman who gave birth to his children, because he knew it was not safe. They had not seen each other in over thirty years. He paid a professional photographer to take pictures of the grief of his surviving children, who did not know he was present! Is this stalking? Or, is this Art?
Rena was Rosamond’s and my muse. I told her my sister took up art after she saw he painting I did of her in 1971. We are now officially in White Art World. How…surreal!
The FBI is reportedly reviewing the spate of harassing emails and tweets that have slammed residents of the small town of Whitefish, Mont., after the neo-Nazi site Daily Stormer put out a cyberhit on several members of the Jewish community there last week.
The call to “take action” against Jews in the small ski resort town was issued after Whitefish resident and property owner Sherry Spencer, mother of prominent white nationalist figure Richard Spencer, told the local ABC News affiliate earlier this month that mounting backlash over her son’s controversial political views had forced her to consider selling her property downtown. According to Spencer, pressure from Whitefish real estate agent Tanya Gersh and members of the local human rights group Love Lives Here caused her “financial harm.”
Alas I found the road that Rena and I traversed almost every day for fifty days. It was a miracle my 1950 Dodge held up. Mind you Rena grew up in Grand Island Nebraska where it is completely flat. There were some hairy turns and deep drop-offs that my love looked down with some unease. This was her High School graduation excursion her harrowing climb in the Swiss Alps. Coming down, my breaks would get hot and we stopped at the usual pullover. We wee healing for a swim in the Russian River, or a day at Victoria Beach.
In the bottom video, the water in the pond was much higher. Rena would swim here at dusk, in the buff. I made all the meals, and the camp coffee. I gave lessons about the Indian Religion around the campfire. Then we watched the sunset, and the milky way appear.
Rena was afraid to even look at the ocean. I took her to our beach about five times, and she was trying to brave, more than I knew. Looking at the video taken near Jenner, I can now put myself in her place, a flat safe, place.
I was concerned our Dodge would break down going up one of the greatest roads in the West. I was going to post a map, but changed my mind. We took a back pack with us in case we had to bail, and put our thumbs out and hitchhike to Nebraska. Rena was such a special cargo. She called her grandmother every time we went to town. Rena was part Nerd. She sure got her ticket punched for the California Dream Ride.
It was very uncool for a Hippie to get caught taking a pic with a camera, a rule I wished I had broke. This is a…….re-creation.
I found out a week ago that Springsteen reinvented himself and employed Nebraska. Never heard of the album. This political ad could be coming from a restaurant in Grand Island. I began ‘Golden Girls of the Corncob’ in 1972. My sister took up art after seeing the painting I did of Rena when I was Peter Shapiro’s roommate in Oakland.
One of the highlights of my life was to see Rena Christensen emerge from her quad at the University of Nebraska, and walk to me wearing a flowing velvet green cape. Nothing can spoil this image, or take it from me. Rena will forever be a Muse in this Artistic Circle.
One of my favorite examples of this is found in “Used Car” from 1984’s Nebraska.
My little sister’s in the front seat with an ice cream cone. My ma’s in the back seat sitting all alone. As my pa steers her slow out of the lot for a test drive down Michigan Avenue.
Now, my Ma she fingers her wedding band and watches the salesman stare at my old man’s hands. He’s telling us all about the break he’d give us if he could, but he just can’t. Well, if I could I swear I know just what I’d do.
I began Golden Girls of The Corncob when I lived with Peter Shapiro around 1971. This was my first attempt to be a writer. I worked on the painting I did of Rena – at the same time! I had just moved from Boston where I took the Mafia to court – and won! I had yet to see Rosemary’s home movie, and the photographs of the Black Mask authors. Thirty-fives years later I began to find Royal Rosamond’s books. My sister saw that I was on a roll, and took up art, she becoming world famous as Rosamond. Hence half of America has gone Redneck Cowboy. I saw it coming.
One of the highlights of my life was to see Rena Christensen emerge from her quad at the University of Nebraska, and walk to me wearing a flowing velvet green cape. Nothing can spoil this image, or take it from me. Rena will forever be a Muse in this Artistic Circle.
Michael Harkins suggested we go search for Rena in Grand Island Nebraska. We were going to take his Bentley and borrow cameras from Mill’s College. He had just seen me working on Rena’s portrait. He was asked to contribute to Stone’s movie about his good friend, Jim Morrison. I began writing my novelette ‘Golden Girls of the Corn Cob’. This was my first attempt at being a writer. It is about Rena being kidnapped by Amazon Lesbos, and held captive in the sand dunes of Nebraska. They believe she is the female Messiah, come to save womankind.
At the end of 2009, I began exchanging e-mails with Tomas Ensley, who went to school with Rena. All of a sudden he is attacking me. He accuses me of trying to make Rena a goddess, a real goddess. I showed him my ‘Birth of Venus’ that I sent to Rena. Deputy Dan Mayland told me Rena had discussed my letter with another person, and they both saw evil in it. I now suspect Tomas read this blog and saw her Christmas letter to me, and my letter to her – my goddess! A year later, my blog ‘The Democratic Bohemian Register’ crashed. I lost all my blogs. Tomas was a suspect because he was an expert with mainframes. Two months ago I discovered Tomas had been arrested for own child porn. Three of his computers were seized. Did he believe I finked on him?
What we got is the Diner scene from ‘Easy Rider’ where Tomas goes after Denis Hopper who has caught the eyes of the Country Girl of His Dreams. There is this psychedelic ritual going on in the middle of America in the year this famous movie was made. Was it a conscious act to conduct a Spring Ritual around the song ‘Peppermint and Incense’? I am reminded of the movie ‘The Wicker Man’ where everyone is in on the ritual burning of the chaste man. These girls have been in the back seat of a car, or two, and know all the ancient tales of incest and child molestation. Closed family systems results in closed towns. There’s white sex slavery going down. These girls never marry who they want.
Rena let me take her in, capture her beauty as we stood together looking down at the clear pool of water at the bottom of the waterfall. To behold her perfect face, her chestnut hair against the vibrant green of the forest, was overwhelming. I could not get enough of her. I knew I would never behold such a beautiful vision. I now plotted how to capture her, keep her with me, forever: for the world would no longer exist for me if she was not by my side.
Tow hours earlier we were naked in bed at Hell Hotel. Since our kiss two days earlier, we longed to make love. But, being homeless in a tent in a friends backyard, we put out there like animals, would not do. Now, we heard a maniacal scream of some hippie wanna-be having a bun trip at four in the afternoon that stopped me in my tracks.
“I can’t. I won’t make love to your here! C’mon. Let’s get out of here!”
Rena did not ask where we going. We put our clothes on, and we were out of there. I had to marvel at what I had just done. The perfect nakedness of Eve, was gone. As my Dodge Coronet went over the San Raphael Bridge, I felt Rena grow tense. She was afraid of the ocean, and even more afraid to be suspended over the San Francisco Bay.
In Nebraska, everything is flat, and safe. Now my vintage car was climbing a mountain. At the Zenith, I parked, and bid Rena to follow me.
“I have something wonderful to show you!”
I parted the barbed wire, and taught her how to do the same for me. We waked across a field of golden grass drying in the hot summer afternoon.
“Behold!” I said to the beauty I had rescued!
“I watched Rena intently as she took it in, the vast Pacific Ocean, and Stinson Beach below.
“Listen! You can hear the waves break from way up here! We are on Mount Tamalpais, which means ‘Sleeping Maiden’.
I watched Rena walk towards the bank of fog that lay offshore until the sunset, then it moved in an hugged the maiden, covering her in a blanket of down. To behold her beautiful form against this backdrop, was the painting of my dreams. Here was my masterpiece, that fate had a hand in. If we had not taken that late night walk on the Venice Pier, we would have never met. What are the odds.
Against the vibrant green of the moss on the trees, I was now in Eden, with Eve. My mind was racing, I filing threw mu brain looking for just the right trick, the perfect piece of magic that would make her mine – until the end of time! Rena turned to gaze at me. She trusted me because I did what no man had done before, when she got naked for them.
“Rena. I am having a very difficult time here. You are the most beautiful creature – any man has seen. Your beauty has made me very insecure. I feel so unworthy of being in your presence. I don’t know you. You don’t talk that much. Your beauty is like a mask that conceals your true identity. For this reason, I no longer want to make love with you.”
Rena, winced. I watched her demure, change. No one had done what I had just done. I had unmasked her. She changed before my eyes. The person before me was even more stunning. I knew I was in deep trouble, for now it would be impossible to let go that look upon her face. I looked at the deep pool of turquoise water and saw us naked there. It would be a Baptism. A spiritual experience. She had asked me if there was a place we could go swimming.
“Will this do?” I asked, hoping I would now be getting more direct answers.
“I don’t want to swim there. Is there a river nearby.”
For the next fifty days I spoiled her, the most beautiful woman in the world. After making her a wonderful dinner at Camp Laura Dell, we walked to edge of the world and watched a magnificent sunset.
Mimi Farina-Baez walked the earth as the embodiment of the Pre-Raphaelite Muse. She was a modern day Troubadour. I met her at the last Monterey Pop Festival, and fell in love. She owned the look I loved, that I found in other women, and loved these women. My ex-wife was Mimi’s friend, and did a life-size portrait or her. My late sister, Christine Rosamond Benton, has the same Madonna look. Arwen has this look. The Ring movies borrow from the world the Pre-Raphaelites rendered. Tolkien was obsessed with Queen Rosamond and might have modeled Arwin after this Queen. I am going have Mimi be my model for my images of several historic Rosamonds. With the snipping tool I can capture certain angles. The living muses I tried to get to be my model, could not grasp my ambition to make ROSAMOND a brand name. Here is a woman totally groking on the name Cordelia and Rosamond for the name of her baby when she is born.
“These are the people the president cares about. And he wants them to enjoy the American Dream just like all the people in the cities.”
I suspected this is what Rena was trying to tell me in her letter, that she and her rancher husband was deprived of “enjoying the American Dream”. Somehow, this is partially my fault, and, I got to pay. Did my muse think I was mocking her and her husband in my letter, and thus she tore it to shreds? It is not clear she is still married to Bruce, or, this is wishful thinking. Did he read my letter and fly into a rage, because, he is not a city-dweller, a eloquent man of words? Indeed, he is boring as all hell, as is most life outside the cities, out there on the vast plains. As to ownership, the white men killed all the buffalo and stole the land of ancient hunters who carved into hunks of meat twenty-thousand years ago. Being bored goes with the choices we make.
There is no place for grief in a house which serves the Muse.” ~ Sappho
I don’t think I heard Rena laugh. Nor did I see her smile that much. I think she thought these things ruined her good looks. She took herself very seriously. After reading about these Political Range Wars, I now understand that taking yourself seriously may be the only recreation and entertainment – for miles around! Then comes getting mean with outsiders who don’t take you seriously………and your American Dream.
Here is the ranch Rena lived on with her third husband. I think they may be divorced. They lived in a three bedroom trailer that has just over a thousand square feet that overlooks a cattle ranch that is owned by Bruce, and possibly his father or brother. This dream is up for sale.
in the CFP National Championship presented by AT&T at Mercedes-Benz Stadium on January 8, 2018 in Atlanta, Georgia.
‘Following the Trump victory and her [Hope Hicks] move into the White House, her friends and intimates talked with great concern about what kind of therapies and recuperation she would need after her tenure was finally over,’ the book states.”
I am going to write and submit a movie script titled ‘Fire And Furry’. It’s based on Rena and I starring younger versions of our cultural feud over cattle ranchers. Rena is an Fiery Aries born April 7th. and I am a Loving Libra born October 8th. She is a Witch, and I am ‘Tree Man’. We meet in Golden Gate Park. I have excessive body hair and spend most of my time in trees with my cat ‘Dog Chaser’. We end up being neighbors in Nebraska where there are few trees. We fight over trees.
Here is the crazy-ass video I made three years ago that convinced many who saw it, I was a ‘Psycho’. In it, I thank Rena for inspiring the Greatest Story Ever Told! I stuck my neck out. I was in a creative-prophetic trance. I knew I was on to something. I have surpassed, even lapped, the visions of Thomas Pynchon. As I wathed T.V. composing ‘Fire And Furry’ I am watching interviews with Michael Wolff, who may have written The Greatest Story of All Time. His ‘Fire And Fury’ may be bigger than Jesus right now. You can’t buy a copy!
Wolff claims Bannon chased Hope Hick’s around the White House, and, Ms. Hicks might be running the Office of the Presidency! I went into ‘Dream Time’. My visions of the future have now come dwell in the present. This historic story is writing itself. I have read the writing on the wall. Von Genius might have done his swan song. He used America as his personal stage – and court of law. He took his case to the American People beginning with the farmers, then he graduated to college football fans.
What I suspect, is, Hope Hicks is Donald’s Muse, his ticket to Immortality. Donald uses Hope to feel young again. He is showing off for her. He let’s her know he is all for the Hicks and Hayseeds. Then, he appear on the gridiron, doing it for the Gipper!
Deputy Dan……….Mayland, is a hunk. I’m sure Rena noticed.
I’m going to work more on my movie script ‘The Janitor’. It begins late one rainy and dark night. Deputy Sheriff Dan is working the swing shift when he jumps out of his skin. On a bench sits Rena Easton. Not able to speak, Rena breaks the ice,
“I wondered how long it would take you to notice me. I’ve been sitting here for exactly 22 minutes and sixteen seconds.”
“Why didn’t you approach the desk, say something to me!”
“I’m shy. I am the reclusive widow of Sir Ian Easton. Perhaps you have heard of me? I need your help. Someone I knew forty years ago got too close. I need you to back him off. No rough stuff. Just give him a scare. He owns a newspaper and is getting nosy. I hired some goon, who grabbed him by the neck and body-slammed him, but, that just roused his curiosity even more! He wants to see how I’ve aged. As you can see, I haven’t. He must not know. He painted my portrait. I was his muse. You know the drill.
On January 27, 2014 I got a call from Deputy Sheriff, Dan Mayland, that my Muse, and old girlfriend, Rena Easton – who I had not seen since 1970 – had filed charges in Galliten County Montana – saying I was Stalking her. Rena had written me a four page letter on Christmas Day. She made references to this blog. I do not know how she got my address. I did not know whether she was dead or alive.
After receiving my letter I mailed on January 10th. Rena became alarmed at all or some of the content, and showed it to a un-named person. This person confirmed Rena’s paranoia was spot-on, and she angrily destroyed my letter. In order to own proof I was Stalking her, Rena wrote a copy of my letter, and a copy of the letter she wrote me, and showed it to Dan Mayland. Dan assured me that both letters were written by Rena, and were summoned up by an amazing photographic memory that Ms. Easton owns.
Detective Dan Mayland grew up in north central Wyoming on a ranch that hosted multiple family businesses including a bed and breakfast offering guided fishing trips, 4-wheeler trips, rock hunting, hiking expeditions, winter snowmobile rentals, and guided tours. Not surprisingly, Dan is a passionate outdoorsman and enjoy hunting, camping, boating, fishing and anything outdoors. His hobbies include …photography, cooking, archery, mountain biking, reloading ammunition, shooting, and gunsmithing.
After graduating high school Dan attended the University of Wyoming and graduated with a double bachelor’s degree in Criminal Justice and Psychology. He focused on criminal psychopathology, criminology, forensic psychopathology, and forensic psychology. While in college Dan worked at a local ski resort during the winter months and as an equipment operator for a local construction company in the summer months. After graduation, he took a position as the Director of Sales at the ski resort, overseeing ticket sales, retail, ski school, and food services.
In 2005 Dan moved to Gallatin County, sticking close to the mountains and outdoor recreation he loves. He started his law enforcement career in 2009, to make use of his degrees. He chose Gallatin County Sheriff’s Office after extensively researching many departments throughout Montana and discovering that GCSO was a coveted office because they hired and staffed great people with great equipment in a beautiful fast-growing area. He tested for the Detective division in spring 2014 and was successfully promoted to the Property Crimes position. In the fall of 2014, the Crimes against Women and Children position opened and he successfully tested for that position; he took over that position in May of 2015.
Since joining the Sheriff’s Office Dan has been trained in Crisis Intervention Training, FBI Hostage Negotiations, Basic Police Mountain Bike School, Interview and Interrogation Techniques, Death Investigations School, Forensic Experimental Trauma Interview School, Bloodstain Pattern Analysis School, and Missing and Endangered Children Response and Investigation Training, among others. He is currently a certified hostage negotiator for the Gallatin County Sheriff/Bozeman Police Special Response Team, a certified MPAT Proctor and physical fitness coach for the Sheriff’s Office, and bike patrol deputy.
Divine destiny has given the German people everything in the person of one man. Not only does he possess strong and ingenious statesmanship, not only is he ingenious as a soldier, not only is he the first worker and the first economist among his people but, and this is perhaps his greatest strength, he is an artist. He came from art, he devoted himself to art, especially the art of architecture, this powerful creator of great buildings. And now he has also become the Reich’s builder.”
–Hakenkreuzbanner (The Swastika Flag), June 10, 1938
Graham Guest, the British lawyer who created the petition, said he had no specific issue or policy position in mind when he started the petition. It was just Trump the man, really. “Maybe Trump’s travel ban has angered people and they want him to know what it’s like to be banned from a country,” he wrote to CNN. The petition says Trump would be allowed into the country, but that an official state visit would “cause embarrassment to Her Majesty the Queen.” “Donald Trump’s well documented misogyny and vulgarity disqualifies him from being received by Her Majesty the Queen or the Prince of Wales. Therefore during the term of his presidency Donald Trump should not be invited to the United Kingdom for an official State Visit,” the petition states. This is not the first time Trump has faced such calls. In January last year, a petition to ban him from the UK after he made controversial remarks about Muslims gained almost 590,000 signatures and was debated in Parliament, with MPs from all major parties denouncing him. The proposed ban, however, did not go to a vote.
British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson has warned U.K. politicians against attempts to “demonize” U.S. President Donald Trump over draconian new immigration controls.
Speaking in the House of Commons Monday, Johnson said he felt “disquiet” over Trump’s “highly controversial” policy, adopted by executive order Friday, of temporary restrictions on immigration from some muslim-majority countries and a freeze on the U.S. refugee programme
But while Johnson reiterated that this was “not an approach that this government would take,” describing it as “divisive, discriminatory and wrong,” he said it would be counterproductive to “demonize” the Trump administration.
He said that the U.S. and U.K. work together “more closely than any other two countries in the world” on security, and that a strong alliance between the two was vital.
Pointing to UK Prime Minister Theresa May’s “highly successful visit to the White House” last Friday 27 January as evidence of “the strength of that transatlantic alliance,” Johnson claimed it had helped him to secure an “exemption for U.K. passport holders” that immunizes British dual citizenship holders from the measures.
Thornberry continued: “When it comes to human rights, when it comes to women’s rights, when it comes to torture and the treatment of minorities President Trump is already descending down a very dangerous slope.
“We need a prime minister who is prepared to tell him to stop; not one who simply proffers her hand and silently helps him along.”
Meanwhile Yvette Cooper, a Labour member of parliament, said that Johnson’s criticism of Trump did not go far enough.
“One of our closest allies has chosen to ban refugees and target Muslims and all he can say is ‘well it wouldn’t be our policy,’” she said, “That’s not good enough.”
“For the sake of history, for heaven’s sake have the guts to speak out,” Cooper said.
Around the nation, security personnel at major international airports had new rules to follow, though the application of the order appeared chaotic and uneven. Humanitarian organizations delivered the bad news to overseas families that had overcome the bureaucratic hurdles previously in place and were set to travel. And refugees already on flights when the order was signed on Friday found themselves detained upon arrival.
“We’ve gotten reports of people being detained all over the country,” said Becca Heller, the director of the International Refugee Assistance Project. “They’re literally pouring in by the minute.”
State Attorney General Bob Ferguson said he will file a federal lawsuit Monday seeking to invalidate key provisions of President Trump’s executive order temporarily barring all refugees and immigration by citizens of seven majority Muslim countries.
Ferguson said the lawsuit — the first challenge of Trump’s order to be brought by a state — will be backed by declarations from Seattle-based Expedia and Amazon.com, testifying to negative business impacts of Trump’s order.
“We are a country based on the rule of law. In a courtroom, it is not the loudest voice that prevails. It’s the Constitution,” Ferguson, a Democrat, said at a news conference in Seattle. He said his legal team worked through the weekend to prepare the complaint, which will be filed in U.S. District Court against Trump, the Department of Homeland Security and top administration officials.
Noah Purcell, state solicitor general in Ferguson’s office, said Washington’s lawsuit will argue Trump’s executive order violates constitutional guarantees of religious freedom and equal protection.
The attorney general was joined by Democratic Gov. Jay Inslee, who blasted Trump’s refugee ban aimed at several war-torn, Muslim majority nations — and giving precedence to Christians — as “un-American.”
“The fact is that its impact, its cruelty, its clear purpose is an unconscionable religious test,” Inslee said, pointing to the executive order’s provision calling for prioritizing the admittance of Christian refugees.
President Trump defended his executive action in a statement Sunday, accusing critics of misreporting it as a ban on Muslims. “This is not about religion — this is about terror and keeping our country safe,” he said.
While legal challenges already have been brought against Trump’s refugee ban, Ferguson said Washington’s case is broader in scope and, if successful, could strike some of its key provisions down on a national level.
The lawsuit would seek a temporary restraining order blocking the executive order — a ruling Ferguson said he hopes will occur swiftly.
Signed on Friday, Trump’s order sparked a wave of protests in Western Washington and across the country over the weekend, with huge crowds pouring into Seattle-Tacoma International Airport amid reports that refugees and immigrants from countries targeted by the travel ban were being detained there.
Right after Dan Mayland called me I had a sense that some white dudes were putting me in their cross-hairs. Does Rena Easton hang with White Supremacists? If so, the thing that could have ticked them off, was at the poetry reading, a black man invited me to come to the microphone with my image of Rena, and, Nisha reads Rena’s poem in front of a black man playing drums. Kenny Reed identifies Nisha as his daughter. This is because Kenny is married to a white woman, my childhood sweetheart, Marilyn.
BINGO!
“Can she be my must too!”
Everything fits, the trailer on the hill so you can see the enemy coming and be assured your neighbor – if they be black – are going to be a ways from you so you don’t have to LOOK AT THEM! That video is THE TARGET. That’s what they want off my blog, and will take down my whole blog to get it out of their lily white racist faces! This why Dan is relaying the message that Rena will not be sending me any more information because I misused the information she sent me. I defiled her, brought her down from her Tower of White Power.
This why Rena didn’t call me, send me a PERSONAL letter, because I had crossed the line of no return, and, these White Chicken-Shit Racists love to work in the dark, pretend they must conduct covert paramilitary operations in the name of White Folks – and their White Nazi Jesus.
Racist Bookburners for the White Killer Jesus are gathering in Montana for the fake End Time apocalypse invented by John Darby in 1840. Not once did Rena mention anything in this blog she has read. She says this;
“It amuses me a bit that I have become a SUCH a Red-neck woman.”
What Rena is saying, is, she used to a Liberal-Leftist, and the person she was beholds her now and see she IS SUCH a Red-neck Woman. I think my life is in danger. Has Dan Mayland heard things that might suggest I am, thus he felt he was doing me a favor in trying to get me away from Rena, and destroy all evidence I know her.
“He who accuses, excuses.”
If this is going on, then let me say this…Come get me you white Satanic deluded trailer trash!
“For two years in the mid-1990s, Judge Greg Mohr carried a gun and wore a bulletproof vest while presiding over his tiny courtroom east of Kalispell. Members of the Montana Freemen, an armed group of racist extremists, were regularly appearing before him, and they didn’t mince words. Some of them later sentenced Mohr to death in their own pseudo-legal “common-law courts.”
Yet another organization with a white supremacist agenda — this one packaged as a “white nationalist think tank” — has moved its operations to northwestern Montana, leaving Georgia to join a rag-tag collection of some of the country’s leading racists and extremists. The National Policy Institute (NPI), which enjoys tax-exempt status, now lists a post office box in Whitefish, Mont., where, public records show, its new director Richard Bertroud Spencer lives in a $3 million home. Spencer moved NPI to Montana after the late 2011 death of chairman Louis R. Andrews, documents filed with the Internal Revenue Service reveal. On those documents filed annually with the IRS, the white nationalist institute lists thousands of dollars in expenses for a conference, a book, an educational video and a website — all devoted to “subjects of the U.S. and international social and scientific issues.”
If you want to learn about the clusters of Aryan, White Supremacist, Neo-Nazi groups in Montana, take a look at the Hate Map on the SPLC website. Add to them a significant number of Freemen, Militia groups, and Sovereign Citizens followers and you will have a pretty clear but underestimated picture of what’s happened in Western Montana. Like-minded paranoid, conspiracy believers cling in loose woven relationships and tightly warped minds.
I’m not sure that I understand why this group is attracted to Montana…” I think the answer is fairly simple. When they first started coming to Montana and Idaho and nearby states, they were coming to very rural areas where there might be miles and miles between houses, and no worry about having to live near a “non-white”. But also, the very rural aspect makes it easier for them to set up their indoctrination camps. What better places than heavily wooded areas often accessible by only one road (if any). While there certainly are still wooded areas in Georgia, they are often much closer to big cities.
Oh, and it’s very simple to see that Montana is in no way part of the PACIFIC Northwest. Would you call Ohio part of the Atlantic Midwest? Ohio is much closer to the Atlantic than Montana is to the Pacific.
Nearly two decades later, similar types of antigovernment stirrings are frequently being felt again across Montana, especially in this nearly all-white city in the northwest corner of the state. Far-right extremists are vowing that if a war with the federal government comes, their base will be in the mountains here.
Chuck Baldwin, a Baptist preacher who ran for president under the Constitution Party banner in 2008, moved 18 members of his family to Montana’s Flathead Valley last fall after receiving what he called a divine message telling him the state was the “tip of the spear” in the fight for liberty. Stewart Rhodes, a Yale-educated lawyer, former Army paratrooper and head of the conspiracy-minded Oath Keepers, also moved here. Rhodes is laying the groundwork for a new militia and is calling for citizens to adopt a barter economy to escape the bondage of U.S. currency. Neo-Nazi April Gaede, also a transplant to the state, has issued a call for white nationalists to “come home” to the Northwest.
These extremists and others came for different reasons, but they are having a cumulative effect. Law enforcement officers and courts have seen a surge of antigovernment activity by “sovereign citizens,” radicals who believe that most laws do not apply to them. Rooms at the Kalispell Public Library host regular screenings of racist films. Christian Identity adherents are papering neighborhoods with their message that whites are the true chosen people of the Bible and Jews are directly descended from Satan. And, once again, so-called “Preparedness Expos” are being held so shoppers can get ready for the imminent collapse of government.
For Mohr, who got to know most of the Freemen long before their famed 81-day standoff with FBI agents in 1994, it’s the second act in a frightening drama.
“Here we go again,” he said with a nervous chuckle in September.
‘There’s a Fight Coming’ What is happening in Montana — thanks to this newest wave of extremists — is a convergence of two “separatist” ideas that have long fermented in the brew of Pacific Northwest extremism. The antigovernment “Patriots,” the larger of the two movements, want to establish a remote base of like-minded allies as a bastion of resistance for the day when, as they believe, the government will impose martial law. White supremacists are organizing around the idea of forming a long-desired all-white homeland far away from the multicultural cities.
The idea of staking a claim in the American West is tied intimately to Montana’s history and identity. The state is quintessentially Western, predominantly white, and home to a frontier ethos of militant individualism and support for the Second Amendment. Moreover, Montana’s residents tend to distrust the federal government, which is seen as a distant meddler, and they are vigilantly protective of the privacy afforded by the state’s remote location and rugged terrain.
Such an environment has historically drawn antigovernment and extremist groups — from the Freemen to the Militia of Montana, founded in 1994 by John Trochmann, a militant with white supremacist leanings. Unabomber Ted Kaczynski also was caught after years of hiding in Montana’s remote forests in 1996.
Now, it all seems to be happening again.
Karl Gharst Karl Gharst, a neo-Nazi activist
Karl Gharst, a former member of the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations and a Christian Identity adherent, is one example. He recently moved to Montana and is working to make a white nationalist presence felt in the Rocky Mountain West. In September, he sent an E-mail to the anti-racist Montana Human Rights Network threatening to convene a “citizens grand jury,” a tactic commonly employed by radical-right extremists, to investigate what he described as a “Jewish criminal organization working with other Jewish crime networks.” He made similar comments about the Southern Poverty Law Center and Media Matters for America after learning that both were preparing reports on the situation in Montana.
More recently, militia leader Francis Schaeffer Cox, now under federal indictment for a scheme to murder state troopers and judges, spent time in Montana building support for his nascent militia before moving to Alaska.
This past June, militia activist Dave Burgert — who spent eight years in prison for his part in the “Project 7” plot to kill judges to spark a revolution a decade ago — allegedly fired shots at a Missoula County sheriff’s deputy before disappearing into the Lolo National Forest. Officials believe that Burgert, a trained survivalist armed with only a handgun, is living in the woods on caches of food, ammunition and other supplies. He was still on the lam at press time.
The Flathead County Sheriff’s Department, the FBI and others have not associated Burgert with other radical groups now active in Montana, including those linked to Baldwin, Rhodes and Gaede. Nevertheless, Burgert represents the militant extreme that ideologies now pervasive in the state are capable of reaching.
During a speech to a packed house at Kalispell’s Outlaw Inn in January, shortly after moving to Montana, Chuck Baldwin strolled onto the stage like a lawman of old, promising to round up the “terrorists of Washington, D.C.,” and restore liberty to America. A firebrand Patriot and “constitutionalist,” he vowed to lead anyone who would follow him into the breach.
“We know there’s a fight coming,” Baldwin said. “We know there is a line being drawn in the sand, and we want to be in the right place. The good ground is right here in Montana.”
A Modern-Day Alamo Baldwin is by far the most visible of this new generation of extremists in Montana, a state he has praised for being thousands of miles from the “Orwellian machine” of government and for being more gun-friendly than most others. Last fall, he arrived in Kalispell after abandoning a church he led for 35 years in Pensacola, Fla.
“We are going [to Montana] to fight!” Baldwin wrote in a Sept. 15, 2010, letter to his followers. “The Mountain States just might become The Alamo of the twenty-first century, with, hopefully, much better results. But if not, I would rather die fighting for Freedom with liberty-loving patriots by my side than be shuttled off to some FEMA camp.” (Fears of government prison camps have long animated the radical right.)
Eighteen members of Baldwin’s extended family moved with him to Montana, most notably his son Timothy Baldwin, a writer and lawyer. The family has wasted no time in feathering a nest for what Baldwin has called a “gathering of eagles” — people opposed to oppressive “big-city liberalism and UN-sponsored globalism.”
The Baldwins established a new church, Liberty Fellowship, which meets every Sunday at Kalispell’s Red Lion Inn and claims to attract as many as 200 people every week, including Randy Weaver, a white supremacist who engaged in a famous standoff with federal authorities at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in 1992. Timothy Baldwin ran for the board of trustees of Flathead Valley Community College and, although he lost, received a surprising 20% of the vote. Together, Chuck and Timothy Baldwin formed The Baldwin Institute of Education, a school with a distinctly Patriot curriculum focusing on American Revolutionary War history.
It’s virtually impossible to accurately say how many extremists have heeded the call to come to Montana. Christian Identity adherent Karl Gharst, in an E-mail to the Intelligence Report, claimed, “For every one of us you know, there are 10,000 you don’t” — an obvious and wild exaggeration. But there are signs the numbers may be significant.
Chuck Baldwin has publicly said that dozens have already moved to the Flathead Valley and “scores” more are on the way because of his urgings. His speeches draw audiences numbering in the hundreds, and his family has made inroads with many prominent figures on the Patriot scene. They included Weaver; Stewart Rhodes, the Oath Keepers founder who since coming to Montana has embraced a host of conspiratorial fears, including the idea that the U.S. Army has trained soldiers to invade cities; and Dane Clark, a Constitution Party advocate known for wearing a gun on his hip to political functions.
The Baldwins’ move to Montana is part of a grand design to prepare the Northwest for an apocalyptic clash between “liberty-loving” Patriots and international agents of the New World Order. The idea of building a fortified home for “Christian Patriots” in the Northwest is known as “The American Redoubt,” a plan to strategically group people across five Western states (Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Oregon and Washington) as a “defensive reaction” to threats to liberty and the Christian way of life. It was first proposed by survivalist author and sovereign citizen James Wesley, Rawles. (The comma is part of his name; sovereigns often use such bizarre forms of punctuation.) “I am a separatist, but on religious lines, not racial ones,” Wesley, Rawles wrote on his website. “In calamitous times, with a few exceptions, it will only be the God fearing that will continue to be law abiding. Choose your locale wisely.”
What Wesley, Rawles casually ignored — as, for that matter, did the Baldwins — is the history of the idea. Others have chosen the Northwest for similar reasons. They were Nazis.
Coming Home In the mid-1980s, the idea of carving out a white homeland in the Pacific Northwest was highly popular among neo-Nazis and other white supremacists. The so-called Northwest Territorial Imperative, popularized by Aryan Nations founder Richard Butler, imagined enclaves of “racially conscious” white people. Two decades later, in 2006, April Gaede left her home in California for Kalispell, where she took up residence in a quaint, two-story house adorned with a sunflower garden. Not long afterward, she set out to breathe fresh air into that Aryan dream.
“I am formally making your [sic] invitation to ‘come home,’ she wrote on the white nationalist Web forum Stormfront in 2008. “Over 20 years ago some of the first White Nationalist pioneers started moving to this area. The numbers are not clear, but we are slowly but surely gaining ground.” Touting “wonderful neighborhoods,” “the best high schools in the nation” and a “state of the art hospital and care,” Gaede implored fellow white supremacists to move to Montana and form “Pioneer Little Europe” communities. The idea, first proposed in a 2001 pamphlet by H. Michael Barrett that was titled Pioneer Little Europe Prospectus, envisioned consolidating white residents in existing cities and towns and actively repelling racial minorities.
Gaede’s invitation drew apparently widespread but largely anonymous support online, despite the comical reservations of some detractors who feared that creating a white homeland in landlocked Montana, with no harbors, would make it impossible to ever secede from the Union.
Meanwhile, white nationalists are growing more visible to Montanans. British Holocaust denier David Irving gave a speech in Kalispell last May. Gaede and Gharst hold frequent white nationalist film screenings at the Kalispell Public Library, despite public protest.
Police in Montana are more than aware of the white nationalists’ activities. But in the absence of criminal activity, there’s little they can do. “We’ve got a lot of dangerous guys in Kalispell,” Police Chief Roger Nasset said. “But as long as they are peaceful, we can’t hold [their beliefs] against them.”
Gaede insists that people are coming, but the indications are that no more than a half dozen families have answered her call. And she has the Patriots to contend with. If the white nationalists are whispering their wishes in shadowy gatherings, the Patriots are yelling through a bullhorn. In June, a survivalist “Preparedness Expo” in Kalispell drew at least 1,000 people to learn about “resources and workshops to help you prepare for the unexpected,” as event fliers advertised.
Speakers included Stewart Rhodes, Chuck Baldwin and former Arizona Sheriff Richard Mack, a hero to many Patriots for challenging gun control laws in the 1990s. Such expos were frequently held during the first wave of the militia movement in the 1990s, when the Militia of Montana and other groups were hell-bent on preparation for a war that never came.
The current popularity of the expos is due largely to one group, the Flathead Liberty Bell.
Calling All Patriots Founded in 2009 with the help of Francis Schaeffer Cox, the boyish, self-made militia leader who spent time in Montana before leaving in March for Alaska, the Liberty Bell arguably represents the future of the Patriot movement in Montana. It is loosely organized, keeps no public records of its members and remains exceptionally secretive.
Francis Shaeffer Cox Francis Schaeffer Cox helped found the Flathead Liberty Bell, a Montana “Patriot” group, before moving on the Alaska. He has since been charged in a plot to kidnap and kill police officers and judicial officials. PHOTO CREDITS contributed from Francis Shaeffer Cox’s facebook page
Mike Greskowiak, a Kalispell barber who now leads the group and serves as its primary spokesman, bristles at the suggestion his Liberty Bell is anything more than a grassroots organization informing the community of constitutional rights that have been systematically dismantled. “We want nothing more than constitutional government and to get these sons-of-bitchin’ Marxists out of office,” he told the Report in September.
In reality, the group wants much more. The Liberty Bell clings to an ideology closely akin to that of the sovereign citizens movement, holding that modern government is slavery and that citizens can once again be free. “American’s Founding Fathers would say that Americans today are slaves. Wealthy slaves that enjoy luxury and tranquility, but slaves none the less,” its website states.
Members see government as a “Big Brother” figure meddling in the lives of well-meaning citizens, and the group offers primers on “living off-grid” through “solar power, alternative housing systems and herbal remedies.”
The mindset is distinctly survivalist and tied intimately to the origins of the group. In its early days, founding members met at a sprawling property on top of Big Mountain, near Whitefish, Mont. The property belonged to Sam Halpern, a tax protester, survivalist and sovereign citizen who went by the name Sam Bentacour de Valencia Halpern. His fears, in fact, led him to build a $500,000 hermetically sealed shelter underground on his property.
The Liberty Bell continues to work closely with many extremists in the area. Greskowiak appeared alongside Rob Blair at a Flathead County Commissioners meeting in February, during which Blair, who heads the Christian Patriot group Mountain Mission, asked the commission to investigate “invalid oath of offices [sic]” among county officials. Chuck Baldwin and Stewart Rhodes also routinely speak for the group.
On March 8, for example, Rhodes and Baldwin spoke at a Liberty Bell function at Valley Victory Church, just outside Kalispell. There, Rhodes issued a call, in front of a giant American flag, for citizens of Flathead Valley to help form his nascent militia. The collapse of the government was imminent, he warned, and the federal government would soon start rounding up American citizens. “You’re weak,” he admonished. “You’re militarily weak.”
This apparent militarization, or at least such rhetoric from many of the movement’s most visible figures, has grown increasingly worrisome. Several judges and law enforcement officers say the concerns are real, just as they were two decades ago. People are coming to court armed with a vitriolic distrust of government — and, on occasion, sidearms. Judge Mohr, who sees frequent sovereign citizens and Patriots in his courtroom, said many believe they have been sold a bill of goods. And they are rallying around what he calls “messianic” figures who would much sooner die than bow to a government they hate.
How dangerous does he fear it will become? Is he carrying a gun this time? Mohr just laughs. “I’m not talking about it. Not talking about it.”
I am Merlin with a crystal ball. I am a Futurian, who saw it all. My Muse of the Montana Ranch, became a BRANCH of the Queens Cyber Guards, who fell asleep on the job, while Victoria Bond, and her lover, were doing, The Midnight Creep.
“President Joe Biden added more Chinese companies to the off-limits list late Thursday making it a total of 59 in a move that updated an order signed by former President Donald Trump in 2020 where 31 were originally listed, the Associated Press reported. Biden said the update is to “ensure that U.S. investments are not supporting Chinese companies that undermine the security or values of the United States and our allies.”
Cyberattack on food supply followed years of warnings (msn.com)
Security analysts from the University of Minnesota warned the U.S. Agriculture Department in late May about a growing danger — a cyber crime known as ransomware that could wreak more havoc on Americans’ food sources than Covid-19 did. A week and a half later, the prediction became reality as a ransomware attack forced the shutdown of meat plants that process more than a fifth of the nation’s beef supply in the latest demonstration of hackers’ ability to interrupt a critical piece of the U.S. economy.
The hack of the global meatpacking giant JBS last weekend is also the starkest example yet of the food system’s vulnerability to digital threats, especially as internet technology and automation gain an increasing role across farmlands and slaughterhouses. But federal oversight of the industry’s cybersecurity practices remains light, despite years of warnings that an attack could bring consequences ranging from higher grocery prices to contaminated food.
Virtually no mandatory cybersecurity rules govern the millions of food and agriculture businesses that account for about a fifth of the U.S. economy — just voluntary guidelines exist. The two federal agencies overseeing the sector include the USDA, which has faced criticism from Congress for how it secures its own data. And unlike other industries that have formed information-sharing collectives to coordinate their responses to potential cyber threats, the food industry disbanded its group in 2008.
Now, food producers need to face the fact that disruptive cyberattacks are part of what Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack calls their “new reality.”
“Too often agriculture is dismissed as: ‘It’s important but it’s not that big a deal,’” Crawford said in an interview. “If you eat, you’re involved in agriculture. We all need to recognize that it’s a vital industry and this [incident] illustrates that.”
The North American Meat Institute, which represents meatpackers, declined to comment on the state of the industry’s cybersecurity measures or potential changes following the hack.
The downside of ‘enormous technology’ The cry of alarm from the University of Minnesota’s Food Protection and Defense Institute arrived in the most unassuming of packages: as one of more than 180 official comments filed to the USDA related to a presidential order about securing the nation’s supply chains.
“Fast-spreading ransomware attacks could simultaneously block operations at many more plants than were affected by the pandemic,” the institute warned in its May 18 filing, noting that Covid-19 last year forced a shutdown of slaughterhouses that prompted fears of meat shortages and price spikes.
It was just the latest in a series of warnings from national security and law enforcement agencies, private cybersecurity companies and academic researchers.
In November, the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike said in a report that its threat-hunting service had witnessed a tenfold increase in interactive — or “hands-on-keyboard” — intrusions affecting the agriculture industry over the previous 10 months. Adam Meyers, the company’s senior vice president of intelligence, said that of the 160 hacking groups or gangs the company tracks, 13 have been identified in targeting agriculture.
A 2018 report from the Department of Homeland Security examined a range of cyber threats facing the industry as it adopts digitized “precision agriculture,” while the FBI said in April 2016 that agriculture is “increasingly vulnerable to cyberattacks as farmers become more reliant on digitized data.”
The industry also offers plentiful targets: As the Department of Homeland Security’s cyber agency notes, the ag and food sector includes “an estimated 2.1 million farms, 935,000 restaurants, and more than 200,000 registered food manufacturing, processing, and storage facilities,” almost all under private ownership.
For decades, however, most farmers and foodmakers have prized productivity over all else, including security — trying to eke out profits in an industry with chronically narrow margins and meet the growing global demand for food. In the quest for efficiency, meat plants are ratcheting up their processing line speeds and investing in robotics to more quickly carve up carcasses. Farmers are adopting high-tech innovations like drones, GPS mapping, soil sensors and autonomous tractors, with vast data behind it all.
All that connectivity and automation comes at a cost.
Video: Alarming rise of ransomware attacks (ABC News)
Play Video Alarming rise of ransomware attacks Click to expand “This is part of the downside of having an enormous technology, enormous capacity to turn a lot of data and become more efficient,” Vilsack said. “There are risks associated with that.”
‘No industry is off limits’ The disruption to JBS, which controls nearly a quarter of America’s cattle processing, has raised concerns mainly about the impact on meat markets. USDA data shows wholesale beef prices have steadily ticked higher each day since the hack, with choice cuts climbing above $341 per hundred pounds as of Thursday morning.
Higher prices are just one of many potential consequences. Cyberattacks could also lead to the sale of tainted food to the public, financial ruin for producers, or even the injury and death of plant workers, according to the Food Protection and Defense Institute, a DHS-recognized group.
In its public comments to USDA, the institute highlighted gaping holes in the industry’s preparedness, including a general “lack of awareness throughout the sector” and scant guidance from government regulators. It also noted that large parts of the industry rely on decades-old, custom-written software that is essentially impossible to update, along with outdated operating systems like Windows 98.
“The agriculture industry probably lags behind some of the other industries that have been hit harder by cyber crime” like the financial sector, which has long been a prime target for criminals, said Michael Daniel, president and chief executive of the Cyber Threat Alliance, a nonprofit organization.
However, the JBS hack, just like the ransomware attack on Colonial Pipeline in May and the ensuing gasoline-buying panic, shows that “no industry is off limits,” he added. Ransomware operators “are going to go wherever they think they can extract money.”
Daniel, a cyber coordinator during the Obama administration, said he would recommend that industry executives take basic steps like assessing their companies’ digital preparedness and reviewing federal security guidelines.
“What I would be telling them is: You really need to be thinking about how you manage your cybersecurity risk, just like you manage commodity price risk, just like you manage natural disaster risk, just like you manage legal risk,” Daniel said.
The White House similarly advised all companies on Thursday to harden their defenses, including by installing the latest software updates and requiring extra authentication for anyone logging onto their systems.
Meyers, from CrowdStrike, said seriousness with which cybersecurity is regarded varies “depending on who you’re talking to in the ag industry.” He said multinational conglomerates that have intellectual property worth protecting make it a priority, but “as you get down the food chain, so to speak, they probably think about it less seriously.”
The JBS hack “is the big wake-up call for all these small, medium and large businesses. You can’t stick your head in the sand, and hope it’s not going to happen to you because it is,” Meyers said. “You need to be prepared, and you need to get yourself ready to fight. Because if you don’t, you’re going to be paying a ransom and somebody’s going to be eating your lunch.”
A call for Congress to act Congress may need to step in to help fix the situation, said Crawford, the House member from Arkansas, who reintroduced legislation earlier this year that would establish an intelligence office within USDA. The office would serve as a conduit for the department to keep farmers informed of threats to their livelihood, including espionage and cyber operations by malign actors.
A key reason the industry isn’t prepared against dangers like ransomware is that the U.S. intelligence community hasn’t considered the national security threats to agriculture as much as it should, Crawford argued.
He added that communication must go both ways: Companies need to have their cyber experts share what they see with their government counterparts. No such requirements exist for the food and ag industry.
“What I would advise the private sector to do is be proactive on these things as possible,” according to Crawford, who is organizing a “business intelligence and supply chain integrity” forum this summer that will feature cybersecurity experts, government officials and representatives from the clandestine community to educate local businesses about digital threats.
USDA has not proposed any significant policy changes following the JBS attack, instead asking food and agriculture companies to take voluntary steps to safeguard their IT and infrastructure from cyber threats. Vilsack on Thursday pointed to guidelines from DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency that companies can adopt for their own protection.
There’s no shortage of policy recommendations from experts in the field. Most proposals involve educating industry leaders and employees, setting minimum standards for cyber safety or improving coordination between companies and agencies.
Another step recommended by the Food Protection and Defense Institute: USDA and DHS should work with the industry to create a cyber threats clearinghouse — known as an “information sharing and analysis center” — to collaborate on studying and addressing digital risks.
Other critical industries, including the electricity and financial sectors, already have their own ISACs, but the food industry does not. Instead, some food and ag companies have joined a broader information-sharing group that covers the information technology industry, said Scott Algeier, executive director of the IT-ISAC.
“They wanted to engage with other companies but did not have an ISAC. So they applied to us,” said Algeier, whose organization also provides a threat-sharing forum for the elections industry.
The nonprofit Internet Security Alliance has called for federal grants and other incentives for food companies to step up their cyber defenses.
“Increasing cybersecurity will cost money, and finding the additional funding will not be simple for the sector since it is governed by tight margins and faces a highly competitive world market,” the group wrote on its website.
Helena Bottemiller Evich contributed to this report.
Though I still love Muse Belle and Muse Lara, I will use Muse Rena as my guide to the End of the World, and, the end of my life. She is so utterly provincial. She is The Female Spirit of America. She told Sherriff Dan that she did not want to interfere with my newspaper. She stood by her Cowboy Man who is going to be crushed by the Trump Tariffs. I believe she is sane enough, good enough, and smart enough to realize she made a huge mistake – and I am right!
In her letter she tells me how afraid she has been most of her life. It is she who comes through the ruined portal at the fountain in Algiers. Gone again, is her beautiful face, that lauched a thousand ships. There is no story to tell, but her’s. There will be no creative writing on my part. Just pure reporting. The Death of Beauty, is on hand. My belved muse looks over my shoulder, and says;
“You better get it right, or I will leave you! Don’t let King Bobo destroy the Great American Icon. Save the Cattleman, John!”
John ‘The Futurian’
“Businessmen abhor uncertainty,” said Max Baucus, who served more than 35 years as U.S. Senator for Montana and nearly three years as U.S. Ambassador to China. “They want to know what the rules are; and when the rules keep changing, it just causes that much more uncertainty for them. It makes it hard for them to make a decision.”
“I came out pretty strongly against the broad-based tariffs that were threatened initially by (President) Trump,” observed Greg Gianforte, founder of RightNow Technologies and Montana’s Republican Congressional Representative. “Although I tend to be a big supporter of Donald Trump I don’t think broad-based tariffs work.”
Do not forsake me, oh, my darlin’ On this, our weddin’ day Do not forsake me, oh, my darlin’ Wait, wait along
I do not know what fate awaits me I only know I must be brave And I must face a man who hates me Or lie a coward, a craven coward Or lie a coward in my grave
Oh, to be torn ‘tweenst love and duty Supposin’ I lose my fair-haired beauty Look at that big hand move along Nearin’ high noon
He made a vow while in state prison Vowed it would be my life or his, and I’m not afraid of death, but, oh What shall I do if you leave me?
I saw the attack on the Capitol coming years ago. Trump’s defense is – Democrats are natural born Haters of the Cowgirl, Renabelle, and thus they hate Mr. Natural ‘King of Cowboys’.
Being an A+ student born and raised in Nebraska, this bright and beautiful being had to believe in some of the propaganda-history that was dished out to herin High School. Rena had to have seen herself as the Beautiful Cattle Queen, who like Wonder Woman, was destined to protect the ‘Cattle Producers’ of Nebraska. This protection was aimed at me in her long letter she sent me two years ago. After she looked at my blog, she wrote;
“I see you are quite left-leaning. Please do not, in your urban world, be too hard on cattle producers. or, red-neck women. We are human…
Rosamond Press 
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