Interested in all things Oregon. Don’t Steal, the Government hates competition. #ENDtheFED to #ENDallWARS. Parody and journalist account (to avoid prosecution)
New America Priority #1. No one can deny the science. Russians are taking control of Magnetic North. Guvment needs stop this probably only cost another $100B. Maybe have to go to war. Don’t worry about the border, homeless, inflation, everything else is fine.
Your local farmer raises a healthy cow on grass, butchers it cleanly on the farm, and wants to sell you the steaks.
Federal law says no.
The same government that lets industrial meat packers process thousands of animals a day under “inspection” makes it illegal for that farmer to sell you a single pound of beef unless it goes through a USDA inspected plant first.
The workaround? You have to buy the live animal (or a share of it), then pay a custom butcher who stamps every package “NOT FOR SALE.”
Because apparently once the cow is dead and cut up, suddenly it’s too dangerous for free adults to trade.
This isn’t about food safety. It’s about control and protecting the big processors who love the regulatory moat. Small farms get locked out, local meat gets scarce and expensive, and you’re left buying from the same four companies that run the system.
A free country would let a farmer sell you the cow he raised.
We don’t live in one.
"By getting rid of paper files and replacing them with digital ones, they can erase history. One day you'll encounter the message 'page not found,' and the next day you'll see them deny that it ever actually happened."
- Julian Assange
The Dirty Little Secret of Wildfire
How America Traded Logging Jobs for a Perpetual Firefighting Economy
For much of the 20th century, the forests of the Pacific Northwest were managed as working landscapes. Private timber companies and federal land managers cut, planted, thinned, and tended the land with the understanding that the trees were an asset to be sustained across generations. Clearcuts functioned as firebreaks. Small crews routinely extinguished ignitions before they became news. The result was a regional economy built on living-wage jobs, steady tax revenue for schools and public safety, and forests that, for the most part, stayed green.
Occasional fires occurred. What did not occur were the annual, multi-hundred-thousand-acre, smoke-choked seasons that have become the new normal.
That changed in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The northern spotted owl was elevated into the most consequential bird in modern American policy. Scientists and environmental organizations argued that the species required large tracts of old-growth habitat. Petitions, lawsuits, and court orders followed. In June 1990 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the owl as threatened. Federal Judge William Dwyer’s rulings and the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan locked up roughly 24 million acres of federal forest across Oregon, Washington, and northern California.
Federal timber harvests collapsed—often by 80 to 90 percent from 1980s levels in the key regions. Mills closed by the dozens. Supporting businesses disappeared. Unemployment surged. Some communities never fully recovered. Private industrial landowners continued managing their own ground because they still had direct financial skin in the game. Federal and state lands largely stopped being managed for timber production or for systematic fuel reduction at anything approaching the previous scale.
The forests kept growing. Fuels kept accumulating. An ignition that once would have been contained by a small crew with shovels and a radio now found denser, more continuous fuel beds. Large fires (5,000 acres and up) went from relatively rare events in the 1970s to routine occurrences in the 2000s and 2010s. In multiple recent seasons, more timber has burned than the industry harvested in its heyday. The irony is difficult to miss: forests “saved” from chainsaws have been delivered to ash in far greater volume.
Meanwhile, the northern spotted owl’s population has continued to decline across much of its range. Logging was never the primary driver. Competition from the invasive barred owl has proven far more significant, and habitat loss from high-severity fire now ranks high among the threats. The original crisis was urgent enough to trigger listing and sweeping land-use restrictions. The promised recovery under the Northwest Forest Plan has been, at best, incomplete.
The economic and ecological bill arrived in the form of unmanaged fuels and repeated megafires. And that is where the dirty little secret begins.
Once the timber economy on public land was kneecapped, a new industry rose to replace it. Wildland firefighting—suppression, logistics, aviation, camps, contracts, and the supporting apparatus—became a multi-billion-dollar annual enterprise. Agencies and contractors employ thousands. Budgets are large and sticky. In government, “use it or lose it” is not a slogan; it is an operating principle. A quiet fire season is a budgeting risk. Early, aggressive attack on every ignition that could still be handled by a small crew is expensive in the short term and reduces the later need for the full apparatus. Allowing fires to grow until they justify emergency declarations, large incident management teams, and federal cost-share arrangements is, from a certain bureaucratic perspective, rational and financially advantageous.
Local structural firefighters and many ground-level wildland crews do not share this incentive structure. They want the fire out. Once a fire reaches a certain size or complexity, however, control shifts upward to state and federal incident management teams whose metrics, funding streams, and political realities are different.
Neither major political party has shown a strong appetite for fixing the underlying problem. One side treats any expansion of active management or commercial thinning as an assault on old growth and the owl. The other side speaks frequently about forest health but rarely forces the structural changes in litigation risk, planning timelines, and budget incentives that would actually move the needle at scale. Campaign contributions and jobs flow from the existing system. Admitting that the original policy overcorrected and produced a more dangerous landscape remains politically costly.
Climate change and longer fire seasons are real factors. Drier fuels and hotter summers make everything worse. But denser, less-managed forests on the public estate are the accelerant that policy deliberately chose. Private industrial lands are managed more intensively and still burn, yet the severity is generally lower. Young plantations and certain silvicultural choices create their own risks, but private owners retain a direct financial reason to keep fuels in check and respond quickly. Public lands under the post-owl regime largely do not.
Oregon and the broader region now hold more trees than they did in the 1920s, largely because private landowners continued to replant. They also experience more catastrophic fire. The government did not “save” the forest. It changed who controlled the management decisions and, in the process, swapped a productive industry for a perpetual emergency-response industry. The owl was the symbol. The lasting result is a landscape that burns bigger, rural economies that never fully healed, and a political class with limited incentive to alter the arrangement. Instead of market-driven capital allocation, the new system runs on taxpayer subsidies.
Households and businesses understand that money spent inefficiently is money gone. Government tends to treat the same dollars as an everlasting well. Until the incentives change—until early detection, aggressive initial attack, mechanical thinning where appropriate, and genuine long-term forest management are rewarded more than the sheer size of the suppression effort—the same pattern will continue every summer: more smoke, more lost timber, more money spent, and the same speeches about how hard everyone is fighting the fires that policy helped create.
Oregon business bankruptcies names and filing dates since Tina Kotek took office.
This is a partial list drawn from public court trackers and news reports.
Heniges Construction, LLC April 7, 2023
Hoodstock Enterprises, LLC May 14, 2023
Rollin Dirty LLC May 23, 2023
Country Cmns LLC June 20, 2023
Heritage Specialty Foods, LLC June 23, 2023
Saturno Design, LLC July 3, 2023
Vaughn Environmental, Inc. July 17, 2023
Sovereign Fields LLC August 31, 2023
South Coast Holdings, LLC September 11, 2023
Bob Belloni Ranch, Inc. September 15, 2023
Big Valley Builders, Inc. October 18, 2023
West Coast Hospitality Group, LLC October 27, 2023
Swift Couriers, Inc. October 31, 2023
Fortress Property Management, Inc. November 6, 2023
The Commission PDX, LLC November 13, 2023
Innings 150, LLC November 13, 2023
Backforty Ventures, LLC November 29, 2023
Magno, L.L.C. December 6, 2023
https://t.co/8rzMbRGCUA LLC December 8, 2023
Wizard, LLC December 21, 2023
Twistappel Ciderworks, LLC January 4, 2024
Willamette Valley Hops, LLC January 19, 2024
Zephyr Stoves Inc. March 14, 2024
Alpha Contractors LLC May 31, 2024
Janzen Legal Services, LLC – June 11, 2024
Reach Break LLC June 14, 2024
Wimmer Excavating, Inc. June 19, 2024
Green Oregon Enterprises, Inc. July 12, 2024
Attis Farms, LLC July 31, 2024
Phil’s Meat Market & Delicatessen, LLC
August 26, 2024
Aero Teardrops LLC August 26, 2024
Prestige Motors, LLC September 4, 2024
Green Mart, LLC September 6, 2024
CapTen Enterprises Inc. September 27, 2024
Mine Farm Buy LLC September 27, 2024
Rite-Way Heating & Air Conditioning Inc. September 30, 2024
Montana Prescott Holdings LLC
September 19, 2024
Hagen Construction LLC September 20, 2024
Azure Sky Leasing Inc. December 2, 2024
Allan’s Coffee & Tea, Inc. December 3, 2024
Richardson Creek, LLC December 18, 2024
Vitalidad Movement Arts Center, LLC February 10, 2025
Sherwood Hospitality Group, LLC February 17, 2025
Team MUV Fitness Troutdale LLC February 17, 2025
Metatron Health LLC February 20, 2025
Iron Shield, LLC March 6, 2025
H&T 19th Ave. Properties, LLC March 20, 2025
Monforte, Inc. March 27, 2025
Exceltech One, Inc
March 11, 2025
Tillamook Biogas, LLC April 18, 2025
H.O.T. LLC April 25, 2025
Alina Investment LLC, May 15, 2025
Ben Fackler Construction, Inc. May 15, 2025
Green Property Concepts, LLC May 27, 2025
Good Life, Inc. June 10, 2025
Rogue Smoothies, Inc. June 25, 2025
SICDRONE, INC July 2, 2025
Ninja Mountain Bike Performance, LLC July 10, 2025
Cross Town Movers, Inc. July 11, 2025
Wildfang Holdings LLC July 16, 2025
Top Rock Construction Services LLC July 31, 2025
Intevant LLC August 22, 2025
C-Channel Lofts, LLC August 19, 2025
Beyond Pulse, Inc. September 15, 2025
Oregon Construction 360 LLC September 30, 2025
Blackburn & Wynne Inc. October 1, 2025
Knitted Wit LLC October 17, 2025
Cushing Concepts LLC October 24, 2025
Hi Papa, Inc. October 28, 2025
Northwest Waterproofing LLC November 20, 2025
Oregon Brewing Company (Rogue Ales & Spirits parent) November 24, 2025
Rogue River Brewing Company November 24, 2025
Yaquina Bay Beverage Company November 24, 2025
Madison Furniture Inc. December 4, 2025
Columbia Components, Inc. December 8, 2025
Redefyne Moving, LLC December 9, 2025
Dairy Building, LLC December 15, 2025
Anderson Bio Group, LLC December 15, 2025
Tricor Print Communications, Inc. December 19, 2025
Kreasion LLC December 31, 2025
Sunrise Reforestation, Inc. January 12, 2026
Angelina’s Greek Gyros DT LLC January 29, 2026
The Green Seed LLC January 29, 2026
Dave Keyte Trading LLC January 30, 2026
Nineteen27 Smores LLC February 3, 2026
The Good Citizen, LLC February 7, 2026
Qualtik, Inc. February 17, 2026
Enlighten Financial LLC February 17, 2026
Independence Beverages, LLC February 19, 2026
Brink Investments, Inc. February 25, 2026
What barbarians/government school victims Americans still are 8 decades later.
Every year I post Ike, McArthur, Leahy, LeMay, Macnamara, Hoover, Arnold, Nimitz, Nitze, etc. etc., saying it was wrong/unnecessary to nuke Japan.
And every year the comments are all, "Nu-uh!"
Never Forget..
The government did more to stop the distribution of ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine than it ever did to stop the distribution of fentanyl..