Here in Minnesota, the most reliable supporters of Republicans are gun owners, hunters, and fishing fanatics. Even our Democratic governor made appeasing that demographic a key part of his electoral success, and I don’t mind — it’s a bridge to environmental action, you know. I also have roots in the Western US, where a major issue is individual liberty to use local resources.

Here’s an interesting case of private interference in individual liberty.

OnX is an app that’s intended to help hunters find public land so they can go after deer, elk, or whatever they happen to be hunting. At first glance, that may not seem like news, but users of that app get an invaluable view of just who owns the property around them, which is critical when trying to reach public lands where hunting is legal. They have also gotten a very clear view of something that is otherwise hidden from the public: how corporations, millionaires, and billionaires have blocked out huge chunks of public property so that they alone can access it—without paying a dime.

They do this by creating public land “islands,” areas that are surrounded by privately held property. The public lands in these islands become de facto parts of the surrounding property. In most states, there is absolutely no rule that says the property owners have to do anything to allow access to that island of land.

One of their tactics is to divide the land into a checkerboard — squares of private ownership around public land that are in contact at only their corners. The rich want to make it illegal to step across any of those corners!

Well aware of how prickly many land owners are about hunters crossing their property, Cape located an area of “checkerboard” control. That is, the land is divided into one mile-by-one mile sections, half of which are public property, half of which are privately owned, like the black and white squares on a checkboard.

At one place on this checkboard map, Eshelman controlled two squares that met at a corner. The other two squares were public property. Using OnX, Cape mapped out the exact location and led three friends in stepping across the corner from one public square to the other. They not only didn’t step on Eshelman’s land, the area of his property they crossed was infinitely small. Not one state has laws against this “corner crossing,” which is common in areas where grants of public land were once given to railroad companies in an effort to “open up” the West.

The rich guy who has bought up these parcels of land, drug company executive Fredric Eshelman, is upset at this simple privilege. He’s an extraordinarily greedy person.

Eshelman owns 23,277 acres near Elk Mountain, but in prosecuting this case against corner-crossing, he attempted to block access to 1.6 million acres of public land.

So he’s suing four hunters who stepped across the mathematically infinitesimal corner boundary for $7 million. He lost a criminal trial against them — it would have been difficult to show that they’d deprived him of anything — so he’s making a civil case of it, and since he’s rich, he can harass the hunters with lawsuits until he wins. Sadly, people in Wyoming (Wyoming! Deeply Republican Wyoming!) think the hunters will eventually lose.

No matter how ridiculous this may all seem, and no matter the quick outcome of the jury trial, Wyoming officials are convinced that the landowners will win in the end. According to a Republican attorney who formerly worked for the state attorney general’s office, if the hunters win, “it would not surprise me at all that the Legislature would come back and pass a law saying corner crossing is illegal. It’s sort of if you win, you lose, and if you lose, you lose.”

This is the kind of case that ought to unite everyone, Republican rednecks, environmentalists, Democrats, people who want to look for spiders, just everyone, in opposing this scheme. I don’t like the idea that filthy rich assholes can wall off huge chunks of public land to create private game hunting parks for themselves. Unfortunately, there are also lots of ranchers who exploit the Wyoming checkerboard for their personal gain.

By the way, Eshelman is a hard right Republican donor.

Yet more good news? Be still my heart.

A federal jury on Tuesday convicted Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes and a top deputy of seditious conspiracy for leading a months-long plot to unleash political violence to prevent the inauguration of President Biden, culminating in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.

The panel of seven men and five women deliberated for three days before finding Rhodes and lead Florida Oath Keeper Kelly Meggs guilty of conspiring to oppose by force the lawful transition of presidential power. But three other associates were not convicted of the historically rare and politically freighted sedition count. All five were convicted of obstructing Congress as it met to confirm the results of the 2020 election. Both offenses are punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Lock him up!

Although, I’m sad to say, it looks we can anticipate a little less happy news from these court cases in the future.

Rhodes and his co-defendants were the first accused of seditious conspiracy and the first to face trial and be convicted on any conspiracy charge to date in the massive Jan. 6 investigation. He is the highest-profile figure to face trial in connection with rioting by angry Trump supporters who injured scores of officers, ransacked offices and forced lawmakers to evacuate the U.S. Capitol.

What? That angry dork is the “highest-profile figure” arrested in the insurrection plot? That doesn’t seem right. I can think of a few members of congress and one ex-president who ought to be on the docket.

In case you’re wondering about the fierce pirate fashion statement, Rhodes did not lose an eye in gallant action. He dropped a loaded gun, it went off, and put out his eye. Yeah, he’s one of those bumbling gun-fondling dumb-asses.

The war in Ukraine is draining American stockpiles of things that blow up, so the defense industry has come up with a clever scheme: take a bomb we have in plentiful supply, strap a rocket motor to it (also plentiful) and send those off to a war to blow more stuff up.

The Pentagon is considering a Boeing proposal to supply Ukraine with cheap, small precision bombs fitted onto abundantly available rockets, allowing Kyiv to strike far behind Russian lines as the West struggles to meet demand for more arms.

U.S. and allied military inventories are shrinking, and Ukraine faces an increasing need for more sophisticated weapons as the war drags on. Boeing’s proposed system, dubbed Ground-Launched Small Diameter Bomb (GLSDB), is one of about a half-dozen plans for getting new munitions into production for Ukraine and America’s Eastern European allies, industry sources said.

Although the United States has rebuffed requests for the 185-mile (297km) range ATACMS missile, the GLSDB’s 94-mile (150km) range would allow Ukraine to hit valuable military targets that have been out of reach and help it continue pressing its counterattacks by disrupting Russian rear areas.

How am I supposed to feel about this? I am entirely sympathetic to the Ukrainian cause and opposed to the militaristic imperialism of Russia, but our solutions to the conflict all seem to involve more, bigger, longer-ranged bombs…which leaves defense contractors chortling in glee, and may be necessary to throw invaders out of a foreign land, but I am repulsed by the idea of more effective killing machines.

It doesn’t help that everyone is so blithe about the cost. It’s cheap, they say.

The M26 rocket motor is relatively abundant, and the GBU-39 costs about $40,000 each, making the completed GLSDB inexpensive and its main components readily available. Although arms manufacturers are struggling with demand, those factors make it possible to yield weapons by early 2023, albeit at a low rate of production.

They don’t say how much the M26 costs, but I’d guess that the total cost of a single GBU-38 + M26 is going to exceed the yearly salary of a college professor, so sure, I’ll just visualize it as every shot is a teacher’s or scientist’s career being lobbed at a couple of soldiers to explode into fragments, and the money instead finding its way into a lobbyist/contractor’s pockets.

It’s fine. Everything is fine.

We have a little tradition here at Chez Myers for Black Friday: we stay home, refuse to do any shopping, and god forbid we would be caught dead in a shopping mall. We have never seen the point of going into a frenzy of spending money just because it’s a day off, and because corporations have spent the past week dunning us with ads for “sales” that are really just them flogging the same old merchandise with greater intensity.

However, we’ve lacked a patron saint for this day. We haven’t had anything like a Santa Claus to represent the true spirit of Black Friday. We needed an icon of failed, lying, greedy capitalism run amuck, and what do you know, one has dropped into our lap.

Samuel Bankman-Fried.

Bankman-Fried had become a legend by pushing an image of monkish aloofness, vowing to forsake the allures of his extraordinary wealth — sleeping on beanbag chairs, driving a Toyota Corolla — and to give away his fortune for the greater good.

Yet in April, when Avedisian was hired as a master of ceremonies for a conference in the Bahamas sponsored by FTX, Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange, she saw how the 30-year-old billionaire really lived: in a guarded island compound, every need closely catered to, the world’s elite at his beck and call.

That’s our boy. What better avatar of the spirit of the corporate world than a frumpy, disheveled, arrogant man-child who presents himself as a benevolent wise master, pretending to live a life of denial of the material world, while simultaneously indulging in the grossest excesses of greed and extravagant luxury?

Best of all, this month his lifestyle has undergone a magnificent pratfall, seeing billions of dollars evaporate, and reversing his image from wunderkind to poster child for incompetence.

“Never in my career have I seen such a complete failure of corporate controls and such a complete absence of trustworthy financial information,” said Ray, who once oversaw the liquidation of Enron, one of America’s most infamous corporate frauds.

Poof, all gone. His Bahamian penthouse is on the chopping block, his island refuge is exposed as a shallow scam, his philosophical pretensions revealed to be a lie.

The odd behavior did not stop Bankman-Fried from building a brand as the volatile industry’s voice of reason. He’d been celebrated for pushing for crypto regulation on Capitol Hill, donating generously to pandemic-prevention efforts and Democratic politicians, and preaching a dogma known as “effective altruism” that used math and logic to determine where their donations could accomplish the most global good.

We can only hope his downfall cripples that “effective altruism” bullshit, too.

It’s also the case that SBF exposes the incompetence of investment bankers and venture capitalist. What brought him down was stupidity and greed and a lack of skill in running a big company — he was a cocky child handed a whole bunch of money by luck and persuasion, and he lost it all with the usual tawdry criminal failings. And he still has people fooled!

Pack said his firm declined to invest in Alameda after learning that Bankman-Fried had hidden $10 million in losses and planned to use their money to fund FTX, not Alameda, without telling them. The episode, he said, had many of the same issues that ultimately led to FTX’s bankruptcy: Bankman-Fried’s secrecy and deception about how money was spent; his cryptic messages and shoddy record-keeping; his excuses for losing clients’ funds.

“They were very brilliant traders. They made a lot of money … but they also lost it almost as fast as it came in,” he said. They had a “cold, emotionless, calculated approach to playing with other people’s money.”

Not brilliant at all. Give me $10 billion dollars and an indifference to the suffering of others, and I could throw it all away just as quickly by buying over-priced real estate and being stupid.

Sam Bankman-Fried is the perfect symbol of Black Friday: a dumpy, dead-eyed schlub wandering about in a vast, sterile penthouse, staring at a cell phone, going nowhere. The anti-Black Friday is sitting down in a home with your grandchild drawing and playing games and not spending a penny for the happiness of your existence. Maybe we’ll go outside later so she can ride her scooter around the block.

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Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg are also runners-up for this distinguished symbolism. We have an embarrassment of idiots!

Meet the Club Q murderer’s father. You’ll immediately regret it.

The Colorado shooter’s dad on finding out his son murdered people: “They started telling me about the incident, a shooting… And then I go on to find out it’s a gay bar. I got scared, ‘Shit, is he gay?’ And he’s not gay, so I said, phew… I am a conservative Republican.” (@CBS8) pic.twitter.com/7Zw4vpLtjE

— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) November 23, 2022

He goes on to say, “I praised him for violent behavior really early. I told him it works… You’ll get immediate results.” He’s definitely among the Republican base, emphasis on “base.”

Here are the immediate results his son got.

Peter Thiel funded it. Candace Owens promoted it. I had never heard of this GloriFi bank until it collapsed.

It’s whole deal was that it was “anti-woke,” whatever that means. Since it was run by a gang of rabid capitalists who didn’t know what “woke” means, that doesn’t matter. What it really was was an ideologically driven attempt to prove that conservative principles were profitable and practical. They weren’t.

As The Wall Street Journal, which first reported on GloriFi’s shuttering, puts it, the business was “anti-woke.” While GloriFi itself never publicly described itself as anti-woke, the company had no qualms about marketing itself as a service provider for right-wing America. In a July press release, the company described itself as “a pro-freedom, pro-America, pro-capitalism technology company . . . empowering members to put their money where their values are and preserve the Country they believe in.”

In other words, its foundation was built on far-right paranoia and their bizarre obsessions.

Pitching itself as a financial institution that allowed one to be “free to celebrate your love of God and country without fear of cancellation,” GloriFi’s marketing read more like a campaign ad than an enticing APR offer on a new credit card. Highlights from the “about us” page include: “OUR BILL OF RIGHTS IS NON-NEGOTIABLE” and “WE ARE ONE NATION UNDER GOD.”

In its short tenure GloriFi, managed to launch checking and savings accounts as well as credit cards, with plans to offer mortgages and insurance in a future that will no longer take place. Founder and CEO Toby Neugebauer pitched plans to offer gun owners discounts on home insurance, credit cards made of shell casing material, and assistance paying legal bills if customers shot someone in self-defense. Over the summer, GloriFi secured conservative commentator Candace Owens as a co-founder and spokesperson for the brand.

Guys. Guys. GUYS. I know this is news to you, but regular banks won’t cancel your account if you announce that you love god and America. That’s not a sound basis for differentiating yourself from the competition. In fact, it makes you look weird, and especially stuff like the special privileges for gun-owners and people who shoot other people was probably counter to profitability. Having a controversial freak like Candace Owens (what? Laura Loomer was unavailable?) as the face of your company didn’t project seriousness, either.

Predictably, it imploded.

But GloriFi was unable to translate ideological grandstanding into functional corporate management. Even before its public launch, the startup was plagued by reports of chaos amongst staff and financiers. GloriFi missed its planned launch date several times, at one point due to clashes with Texas financial regulators. Reports emerged of unpaid invoices and erratic behavior from Neugebauer, who had converted his home Dallas mansion into the company’s main office.

According to the Journal, the company was eventually forced to hire a law firm to investigate workplace issues, particularly around Neugebauer. In one memo reviewed by the Journal, GloriFi’s former Head of Human Resources Britt Amos described several employees at Neugebaur’s mansion telling him to “make sure I leave around six,” and explaining that “after 5 p.m. Toby starts drinking and things at the house deteriorate quickly.” Amos also described a meeting where a visibly drunk Neugebauer was “drinking Red Bull and putting alcohol in it.”

You know, being “woke” just means you’re aware of the social shortcomings of the existing system, and are concerned about fairness and equality. Declaring yourself “anti-woke” implies that you’re ignorant of reality and want a system that will screw people over, things I do not want in a financial institution.

Customs agents can steal your money if you don’t report it accurately.

The traveler, a U.S. citizen male who CBP is not identifying because he was not criminally charged, verbally reported to officers that he possessed $20,000 and completed a U.S. Treasury Department form for his reported amount. During a baggage examination, CBP officers discovered a total of $33,868. Officers seized the currency and released the traveler.

OK, there is such a crime as structuring, when you play games with bank deposits and withdrawals to avoid reporting large sums that might be taxable, or suggestive of criminal activity — that’s what got Kent Hovind sent to prison for 10 years. That’s naughty. It’s a red flag. So it’s fair to regard under-reporting with suspicion.

But note: “he was not criminally charged.” They just saw a discrepancy and used that as an excuse to promptly rob this guy in plain sight. Maybe he was a bad guy, we don’t know, because there was no investigation and no trial — for all we know, US Customs just ruined a man’s vacation on a whim. They make no other explanation, other than to prominently note that he was going to Egypt, one of those Islamic nations, so Republicans will assume he’s fair game.

Seriously, why would anyone vote for a guy who says, If we was ready for the green agenda, I’d raise my hand right now. But we’re not ready right now … What we need to do is keep having those gas-guzzling cars, ’cause we got the good emissions under those cars? It makes no sense. It’s stupid.

Republicans understand it, though, because that’s how stupid they are, and they will vote for him.

They are called “Texians” or “Texans” or something like that. They are a cruel and nasty people who have just announced a set of brutal laws.

It is now open season on brown-skinned people.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has invoked the Invasion Clauses of the U.S. and Texas Constitutions to formally declare illegal immigration at the state’s Mexico border an invasion. In a letter sent out Monday, Abbott notified county judges along the Texas-Mexico border that he will “fully authorize Texas to take unprecedented measures to defend our state against an invasion.” The recently reelected governor also shared portions of the letter on Twitter Tuesday morning.

In the letter, Abbott outlined steps that will be taken by the state under his constitutional authority to “keep the state and country safe,” which include deploying the National Guard and Texas Department of Public Safety to arrest and turn away immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexico border, building a border wall along counties on the border, deploying gun boats to secure the border, entering agreements with other U.S. states and foreign powers to enhance border security, and providing resources for border counties to increase their efforts to respond to the border “invasion.”

They’ve progressed from immigrants and refugees to illegals to, now, “invaders” which now requires armed Nation Guard units and gunboats to fend off. He has officially declared it an invasion that requires mobilizing military force. Look at these scary “invaders”!

The one thing that might spare us the savagery of the Texians is that they are also a chickenshit people who wet their pants in terror at the sight of brown children and the sound of Spanish.

But there’s more! They’ve also filed a bill, HB672, that criminalizes gender affirming care. If parents support their trans kids, they can be arrested and thrown in prison, and those kids would then be rounded up and place in the care of a state that hates them.

Once again, for some mysterious reason, these Texas barbarians are terrified by children. Unfortunately, this means we Northern states might soon face a flood of families fleeing the oppression, and we’ll have to defend our borders with Texas…not with military might, but with aid services and food banks and relocation assistance and the dreaded social workers. We can’t build a wall, though, because we have to let people escape the misery that is Republicans of Texas.

The one worry is that there are forces at work in Greater America that want to turn all of the country into Little Craven Texas. One of the chief architects of such a belittling change just announced that he’s running for president yesterday, when he should be in jail or a mental institution. Don’t let the puling maggots of the Right win!