U.S. Government’s Presumption 

of Management  Kills Public Forests

Steve Kelly

May 23, 2025

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Clearcuts, Gifford Pinchot National Forest. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

Every Creation of Nature that inhabits a public forest governed by the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) or Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is being systematically displaced, seriously harmed, and murdered in cold blood by federal government agents.

Bulldozing roads and clearcutting our public forests is incredibly barbaric. Please try to imagine the homes of pine squirrels, pygmy owls, goshawks, or migratory, interior forest songbirds raising their young in a native forest being clearcut, masticated (mechanized pulverizing of trees and brush into “mulch”), and/or burned alive. Only scorched bare earth remains.

Government forest management operates like a plantation and land-management corporation. The U.S. empire was built to dominate and exploit, not coexist. Empire’s planned collapse is now in full liquidation mode, on the ‘downlow,’ but directed and relentless.

Federal and state agents and their paid collaborators in local government, industry, and Big Green corporations (controlled opposition) all march in lockstep to a legal concept I call Presumption of Management. Presumption of management conditions (brainwashes) managers (predominantly bureaucrats, foresters, and civil road engineers) and directors (politicians who write forest management laws) to believe they are acting in the best interests of the common good and public shareholders. Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. Presumption of management aims to preserve artificial (man’s imaginative fictions) and commercial decisions made by those in charge. In this Alice in Wonderland world of destruction and death, forest management contains no moral consideration whatsoever or any substance of the Natural Processes of Creation and Renewal.

In 1905, the management of the forest reserves (renamed national forests in 1907) was transferred from the Department of the Interior to the Department of Agriculture, which instituted our corporation nation’s colonial, utilitarian and commercial concerns. Our nation’s plantations were carved out of wilderness and expanded with criminal intent as expressed in behavioral patterns of bad faith, self-interest, reckless intent to deceive, acting beyond their regulatory authority, and blatant conflict of interest. Racketeering, corruption, and gross mismanagement is now practiced uniformly across hundreds of million acres of federal public land with relative impunity.

“It’s not personal, it’s strictly business.”

– Michael Corleone, The Godfather.

Right now, all of Nature, all of God’s Creation, is in a state of alienation when compared to government’s clear intent and actions. Instinctively, government feels it must conquer (recreate names and purchase) all of God’s Creation by naming each part with legal names (nouns) and titles (nouns).

“Forest Health” (noun)

National public forests are not sick. However, they have sustained serious injury caused by madmen and their machines. “Forest health” is a legal term of art of man’s imagination, or in other words, a euphemism used to justify clearcutting, thinning (exploiting) old growth forests and bulldozing roads into untrammeled forest land that has not yet been domesticated and usurped into government’s failed commercial tree plantation operations. Or in other words, machines and monsters kill the native forest to convert it to a perpetually managed monoculture. Killing it again and again ensures that every square inch of Nature’s Forest is dead and gone, forever domesticated (managed).

Falsification and omission of key research and historical fire frequency data has buttressed the government’s psychotic passion for mechanical forest torture and sterilization.^[1]

This demonstrates how government is only a dead thing (noun) and necromancer extraordinaire, which worships destruction, sterilization, blood sacrifice and exploitation of the dead to gain power over the Living. Government is never a Living Being (verb). It creates no life. It is important to understand that when Nature’s verb is nouned, it’s enslaved/subjected by its man-made name to a new, fictitious (virtual) status as a thing. It becomes (legally) lifeless property, flatteringly (insincere) titled commercial property.

“Restoration” (noun)

Restoration, commonly defined as renewal, revival, re-establishment, or recovery, is another commonly abused noun, which implies a directed government management action of returning colonized/domesticated, mismanaged forestland to a former, arbitrarily selected, static condition. Presumption of management cannot fathom Nature’s infinite, incredibly powerful restorative process (verb). Government’s insistence on domination and dominion over all living beings is the principle belief (foundational source) driving this 21^st-Century, secular-technocratic Death Cult. Western “civilization” can no longer conceive of Nature’s life-sustaining powers or its supremacy in all matters of Creation and Renewal.

“(Conifer) Encroachment” (noun)

To the 21^st-Century descendants of early western settler-colonialists, conifer encroachment is perceived as a threat to the commercial production of livestock (meat).

Encroachment is another example of government’s obsession with killing natural processes by nouning Nature’s verb. The BLM and USFS are at war with conifers which are entering gradually and quite naturally onto domesticated government plantation lands, specifically categorized, and renamed “range or rangeland” (noun).

This colonization process is better understood by simply revealing the nature of the East-India Company of Great Britain, the same corporation that colonized America. Not much has changed since Plymouth, Pemaquid Point and Jamestown first seized land to establish corporate colonies along the Atlantic coast.

Encroaching conifers threaten the imagined, so-called, man-made rights or possessions of God’s chosen elite and the federal government flunkies, which both see naturally expanding conifer forests, not as a gift from God, but rather as Nature’s unlawful intrusion into territories legally stolen at gunpoint from free and sovereign American Indian nations.

Range/Rangeland (noun)

The term “range,” and later “rangeland,” was first used (1870s-1900s) to describe the vast open spaces of the American West. Rangelands are primarily natural ecosystems with native vegetation of diverse habitat types, including natural grasslands, shrublands, woodlands, wetlands, and deserts that support domestic and/or wild grazing and browsing mammals – and a multitude of other lifeforms that are never mentioned. Rangeland is all about meat!

Juniper and pinyon pine are being burned (murdered) mercilessly in the arid and semi-arid Rocky Mountain region to expand livestock herds that graze prairie ecosystems down to the dirt at below-market rates on BLM and USFS lands.^[2]

Agencies and pseudo-green collaborators almost never acknowledge the cumulative consequences of multiple management actions (“treatments”) on the whole ecosystem. Severe ecological harm to natural ecosystems can ultimately lead to deforestation and desertification.

Fire

Clearcut logging and thinning large, mature trees to reduce the severity of wildfires at some time in the future often has the opposite effect by creating drier conditions, increasing fast-drying fine fuels, and opening the forest to high winds that drive fast moving wildfires – the ones everyone is most fearful of. It’s almost as if the government is doing everything in its power to encourage “catastrophic” fires so agencies can leverage mass fearmongering into congressional appropriations for bigger and bigger fire-suppression budgets.

Prescribed burns, the latest and perhaps the greatest government management “tool,” sterilizes Nature’s sacred landscapes, diminishes ecological integrity by reducing forest ecosystems to ashes. Biological diversity is incrementally destroyed one man-made fire at a time, the same way eugenicists covertly reduce human populations. Bulldozing roads and firebreaks into the remaining roadless forests fragments landscapes, reduces habitat quality and quantity and depletes diverse wildlife and fish populations. Extinction is the feature, not an unintended consequence.

The cumulative impacts of clearcut logging, burning, livestock overgrazing, road building, motorized recreation and mountain bike use are seldom taken seriously or analyzed cumulatively by federal land managers or Congress.

It’s beyond ignorant to destroy the last functioning native prairie and forest ecosystems just to save a few random homes from fire and grow more government-subsidized meat. Our western landscapes need more protection, not more Presumption of Management, which always generates great ecological harm and a tremendous loss of net public value which Nature has provided for millennia for free.

Nothing western colonizers say can be trusted. They never let go of the future prospect of managing their possession. Domination and exploitation of land and murdering all native lifeforms is their business, their only business. Our publicly owned western landscapes will only be free when “The West” can no longer operate with impunity destroying the native ecosystems and sacred landscapes upon which all of Creation depends.

What can an individual do?

Free our national public forests and prairies. Resist don’t collaborate. Dissent (verb) vs. the Death Cults (noun)! Remember, someday you will be the ancestor young people will come to with questions about the meaning of life. Imagine now, what will you tell them?

Steve Kelly is an artist, gardener, and environmental activist living in Bozeman, Montana.

Notes.

1. See: Baker, William L., et al. “Countering Omitted Evidence of Variable Historical Forests and Fire Regime in Western USA Dry Forests: The Low-Severity-Fire Model Rejected.” Fire, vol. 6, no. 4, 2023 ↑

2. https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-01-30/bureau-of-land-management-deforestation-pinyon-juniper-great-basin ↑

 

Steve Kelly is a an artist and environmental activist. He lives in Bozeman, Montana.  

Disgraced Televangelist Jim Bakker Warns of End Times and Pleads for $1 Million to Survive

by Bill Berkowitz / May 23rd, 2025

                       

      

One of the 20th Century’s most popular – and disgraced — televangelists is pleading with his supporters to donate $1 million dollars to save his ministry.

On the May 6 episode of The Jim Bakker Show, Bakker warned his viewers that unless they sent him one million dollars, he could lose his ministry. Never shy about fleecing his followers, Bakker once again played the “we’re in the End Times” card as he has many times before.

Bakker, an avid supporter of Donald Trump, bemoaned the fact that contributions to his ministry have dropped, saying “A lot of people have not been giving any more because it’s perilous times.”

“I believe if everyone who watches this program will give a thousand dollars, we’ll be able to pay our bills and stay on the air,” said Bakker. “… Otherwise, we’ve got about another month, I don’t know, to stay on the air. We’re at the end. God doesn’t have an end, He’s the same yesterday, today and forever.”

Bakker, 85, claimed that he doesn’t have any money saying that “For 40 years, I have not made a salary, … What we need is a miracle, and it’s gonna happen if a thousand people give a thousand dollars.” If he doesn’t get the money he could lose his house and be forced out into the street.

“It is hard to prove or disprove Bakker’s assertions, as his organization operates under Morningside Church in Branson, Missouri. Churches do not need to declare their financials or file a 990 tax form,” Liz Lykins pointed out at The Roys Report.

According to Lykins, Bakker’s “$125 million media empire was comprised of the PTL Network, which he ran with his then-spouse Tammy Faye Bakker, and the Christian theme park Heritage USA. …the third most-visited theme park in 1986 with six million visitors, according to the History TV network. It followed behind Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida, and Disneyland in Anaheim, California, in terms of attendance.

His empire came crashing down amidst a sex scandal and the fraud convictions.”

The Christian Post noted that “Bakker’s appeal comes against the backdrop of a televangelist career marked by both prominence and controversy. In the 1980s, he built a media empire with the PTL Ministry, including a TV network and the Heritage USA resort. He was indicted in 1988 on eight counts of mail fraud, 15 counts of wire fraud and one count of conspiracy. According to the New York Times, government prosecutors argued that Bakker bilked followers of his PTL Ministry out of $158 million by offering promises of lifetime vacations he could not provide).

“He was also accused of diverting about $3.7 million to support a lavish lifestyle, including an air-conditioned dog house and a fleet of luxury vehicles.

“He was found guilty on all 24 counts on Oct. 5, 1989, and sentenced to 45 years in prison. He was ordered to pay a $500,000 fine. Bakker later filed an appeal. In 1991, an appellate court upheld his conviction. But he was granted a sentence-reduction hearing, during which his sentence was reduced to eight years. He served almost five years before he received parole in 1994.

In 2020, Bakker sold a health supplement dubbed “Silver Solution” that he claimed would cure Covid-19. “A year later,” Liz Lykins noted, “the Missouri attorney general ordered Bakker to pay restitution of $156,000 to settle a false advertising lawsuit.”

Bakker has also been hawking a bevy of survival products, including long-term food buckets, while preaching about the End Times.

Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement. Read other articles by Bill.

Best Weather for End-Times

Stephen F. Eisenman

May 23, 2025

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Albrecht Dürer, The Four Horsemen, “The Apocalypse”, 1498, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public Domain.

Marking my calendar

I no longer have the luxury of certainty that I’ll be dead before the end-times. The actuaries give me 14 more years, maybe one extra for being a vegan. That means I anticipate expiring in 2040, preferably in summer. Winter in Norfolk is depressing enough without a funeral.

But President Trump and British Prime Minister Starmer are doing everything they can to bring about the end of human civilization before my appointment in Samarra. The former, Behemoth-like, by waging war on nature and hastening economic Armageddon. The latter, determinedly but less consequentially, by backtracking on environmental protection, slow-walking improvements to the NHS, and dismissing proposals that would improve tax fairness and reduce inequality. Reform UK, Nigel Farage’s barely updated version of Oswald Mosley’s 1932 British Union of Fascists, is poised to pick up the pieces of another failed British government and join forces with its big, strong American cousin, the Republican Party.

In a nod to Farage, Starmer’s has pledged to cut recruitment of health care and other low-skill workers (mostly non-white) from abroad. If he has his way, there will be no kindly South Asian and African nurses and carers for me. (The PM must think British-born workers will queue-up for demanding jobs paying £12 per hour). In 15 years, my poor wife Harriet will be stuck doling out my meds, tying my shoelaces, and combing my wisps of hair as we vainly await the Rapture – unless it all blows up first!

The four-horsemen are galloping toward us at speed: 1) pestilence. 2) war by autonomous AI; 3) economic collapse; 4) global warming. Don’t be depressed! Contemplating the end encourages us to enjoy the now. Carpe diem!.

Pestilence

Alfred Rethel, Dance of Death: Death the Strangler, 1850. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Public domain.

Under Trump, the U.S. suffered more Covid deaths than any other nation including China where the outbreak began. Before the pandemic, the U.S. president disastrously cut CDC staff in China, as well as cabinet level contacts with the country, making it nearly impossible to follow the early course of the disease. He also rejected mask use, after  initially supporting it, and promoted quack cures like chloroquine, Ivermectin, and bleach. The re-elected president’s recent withdrawal of the U.S. from the World Health Organization, and gutting of staff at the CDC, NIH and FDA mean that the nation – and the world – are ill-prepared for the next pandemic.

The Trump administration’s deregulation of animal agriculture — reduction of safety inspection and approval of industry efforts to speed up production lines — means there will be many more chances for viruses to jump from wild to domesticated animal populations. Republican abandonment of efforts to halt biodiversity decline, deforestation, and habitat loss – the consequence of climate change — mean that diseases formerly restricted to tropical zones will spread north as well as cross the wildland-urban interface. Risks from zoonoses such as dengue, malaria, ebola, SARS, and bird flu (H5N1) will continue to grow. In such a scenario, industrial production and consumer spending will freeze, and the global economy collapse. I have amassed a nice collection of N99 masks but have no illusions they will save a senior citizen when the next pandemic hits.

War by AI

As if we don’t have enough idiotic reasons for war – territorial disputes, control of markets, desire for resources, religious and ethnic differences, treaties and defense pacts, preemption and retribution, profit for the arms and aerospace industries, and humanitarian intervention – we now have another: the entertainment of our robots.

The imminent arrival of supersmart AI, also known as Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) has significant implications for war planning by the major global powers. One nation’s machines may soon possess the ability and desire to incapacitate its rival’s nuclear weapons or defenses. In that circumstance, both countries would have an incentive to strike first during a time of military tension – the one because it thinks it can win without suffering significant losses; the other because it thinks it needs to attack first before it is disabled. Mutually assured destruction (MAD), the fragile foundation of nuclear security for more than 60 years, may soon be rendered otiose.

And then there is an additional doomsday scenario that sounds like the stuff of science fiction – and is. Right now, a small set of AI companies including Open AI, Microsoft, Meta and about a dozen others, are pursuing AGI without significant (or any) controls by democratically elected governments. It’s just the smart machines and their dumb bosses in charge. (The U.S. and U.K. have no regulations on AI; the E.U. recently launched some.) The tech overlords may tell us their goal is a world of abundance in which robots work while humans play, but their real goals are the acquisition and enhancement of power and wealth. As Mel Brooks once said, “It’s good to be the king!”

Isaac Asimov, I, Robot, 1952 (first U.K. edition). Photographer unknown.

Once AGI is achieved, tech stocks will skyrocket and the oligarchs will celebrate, heedless of the fact that their new and improved robots remain prone to errors or “hallucinations,” potentially dangerous ones: think water systems, air traffic control, communication, and electric utilities. Inspired by Isaac Asimov’s famous First Law of Robotics, “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm,” the AI bros may add new safeguards, including Asimov’s Second Law: “A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.”. But will they ever get around to the Third Law: “A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.” Suppose a low-level programmer, told to enter the third law, gets distracted and forgets its second clause? In that case, a robot attacked by aggressive viruses and malware would be wise to eliminate every potential hacker; it would destroy all human life on earth. Oops!

Economic collapse

Tolstoy’s famous opening line of Anna Karenina can be adapted to describe capitalism: “All growing capitalist economies are alike; each failing one is failing in its own way.” Recessions and depressions have been triggered by bank and mortgage lender collapses, asset bubbles, liquidity crises, pandemics, supply chain snafus, aging populations, high interest rates, low interest rates, supply shocks (like disruption of the oil supply) and even just loss of consumer or investor confidence.

High tariffs, such as those implemented or proposed by Trump, could easily tip a fragile economy into recession. The tariffs on Chinese goods are potentially the most damaging, both because they are so high, and because they will impact consumer as well as capital goods essential for U.S. manufacturing. The effective tariff rate on Chinese products is now about 30% but may rise much higher when Trump’s 90-day tariff suspension expires this summer.

Recessions are common. In fact, stagnation is more the rule than the exception in American economic history, and has rarely caused major political upheaval, much less threatened apocalypse. But the American people are angry, and a sharp downturn could spur mass demonstrations. If protests were also directed at Trump’s immigration, Gaza, tax, civil rights and environment policies, he could respond with violence or martial law.

Hans Lützelburger (1495 –1526), (after Hans Holbein the Younger), Death and the Rich Man, ca. 1526, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Public domain.

That would broaden the resistance and worsen the recession. Strikes, boycotts and more repression would ensue. Chaos.

Global warming

The scientific consensus is that global warming is happening faster than previously thought. In 2024, the planet crossed the threshold 1.5-degree temperature rise that the IPCC didn’t expect to be breached until 2030 at the earliest. Last year was also the hottest year on record, and this year’s temperatures are following a similar trajectory. In fact, the last ten years have been the warmest ten ever recorded. Ocean temperatures over the last decade have risen even more quickly than land, leading to stronger and more rapidly intensifying hurricanes. Hotter ocean temperatures lead to more ocean evaporation and more rainfall.

Leonardo da Vinci, A Deluge Drawing, 1517, The Royal Collection, his Majesty King Charles III. Public domain.

Sea-level rise has also accelerated, meaning that more shorelines are disappearing and more islands are threatened with inundation. There is every reason to believe the trend will continue, and even speed up unless we stop burning fossil fuels. We are also rapidly approaching multiple tipping points that once passed, will further accelerate sea-level rise and make it unstoppable. One of these tipping points is the loss of Antarctic ice-sheets. The intrusion of warm ocean water between the ice and supporting bedrock is causing the former to become destabilized and slide toward the sea. When that happens, the sea-level will rise far more than previously expected – meters not just feet. Every major coastal city in the world will be impacted,

Other dire climate change effects are also becoming apparent. Heat and drought have made whole cities nearly unlivable. Phoenix, AZ in 2024, experienced 113 consecutive days of temperatures over 100 degrees. By 2050 or sooner, it will suffer about 50 days a year of temperatures above 110. Recent research indicates that over 104, the human body can’t overcome excessive heat and continue to function. A rise in heat-caused deaths is certain in the Southwest and South, indeed across the U.S.

Los Angeles, El Paso, Phoenix and other cities may run out of water within a generation. Miami too, though not so much from heat and drought as from the intrusion of rising sea water into the aquifer that provides the city its fresh water. Fires this year destroyed whole neighborhoods in Los Angeles County. Though not as severe in their human impacts, fires last year also plagued east coast cities, the Pacific Northwest, and even Minnesota, “the Land of Lakes”.

The U.S. is per capita the world’s worst offender when it comes to the burning of fossil fuels, the production and consumption of meat (a major source of greenhouse gases) , and the use of gasoline powered cars, trucks and buses. Here in Norwich, UK, the buses are mostly electric. In the U.S. few are, and the Trump administration is cutting grants that would have accelerated the transition from gas or diesel to electric. The consequences will soon be dire, and not just on human health. Climate change will inevitably lead to system change.

Günther Thallinger, chief executive officer, of Allianz Investment Management, and member of the board of Allianz SE, one of the world’s biggest insurance companies, recently said that runaway climate change will destroy the global capitalist economy: “Heat and water destroy capital. Flooded homes lose value. Overheated cities become uninhabitable…. Entire regions are becoming uninsurable.”

When that happens, mortgages and other financial services are no longer viable and whole asset classes – industry, agriculture and transportation as well as housing — will disappear form ledger books. Regions too will lose their asset valuations. What will be the value of Miami or Los Angeles without their booming housing markets?

When insurance is impossible, assets cannot be priced, and what cannot be priced cannot be bought. The consequence will be a general crisis of capitalism, far greater than any that came before. Those of us on the socialist left yearn for a rapid end to the extractive, exploitive, nature-destroying, soul hardening, creativity-denying, capitalist system. Will I live to see it’s unravelling? All I can say is that at the rate Trump, Starmer, their patrons and courtiers are going, the whirlwind may come sooner rather than later. Whether that storm is followed by fair weather or foul is anybody’s guess.

Stephen F. Eisenman is emeritus professor at Northwestern University and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of East Anglia. His latest book, with Sue Coe, is titled “The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism,” (OR Books). He is also co-founder and Director of Strategy at Anthropocene Alliance. He can be reached at s-eisenman@northwestern.edu