Wrong decision! Howard County Circuit Court Judge Lynn Murray either cannot read plain English language or someone got to her when she approved the ENGIE Emerald Green Solar project for eastern Howard County. This project will take 1,800 acres of prime agriculture land — some of the best and richest in the world — and put it under solar panels for decades.
Murray’s decision flies in the face of crystal clear language in the county zoning ordinance itself. Under the Agriculture (AG) District section, the Board of Zoning Appeals is directly addressed. The language states , “Board of Zoning Appeals: allow a special exception use (which specifically includes “power generation facility”) only when it is clearly a benefit to the adjacent properties”. How is that in this instance?
Further, under 7.08 Special Exception language states, “…. will not permanently injure other property or uses in the same district and vicinity….”.
How Murray concluded all of this language, which is very clear, can be violated is seriously in question. A grade school student would understand what is meant by “clearly benefit” and “will not permanently injure”; words in the zoning ordinance.
It is obvious to me that someone got to the Board of Zoning Appeals when they approved the ENGIE Emerald project in the first place. Even Board membership was manipulated. Their approval, too, was in direct contradiction of zoning ordinance language. Did someone get to them, too? I think so. Money talks.
No reasonable person could conclude that adjacent properties will “benefit” and that they will not suffer permanent injury. But, Judge Murray did exactly that. She and the Board of Zoning Appeals should be ashamed of themselves.
It is my hope that the property owners who took this case to court will continue on to the Court of Appeals. Maybe there they will find judges who can read. If Murray’s ruling stands, it becomes even worse given there is another solar project of 1,700 acres right behind it. Again, hundreds of acres of prime agriculture land will be taken out of production for decades and, frankly, probably ruined for much longer.
[Kristi Noem is the Governor of South Dakota. This article is adapted and edited from testimony delivered before a recent hearing held by the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Agriculture.]
I come before you today as the 33rd Governor of South Dakota. My home state is known for the gorgeous Black Hills, rolling plains, and, of course, the historic and iconic Mount Rushmore. If you haven’t visited us yet, consider this a personal invitation.
Agriculture is our number one industry, followed by tourism, so protecting our land is incredibly important to our people.
Today, the focus of this committee hearing is “The Danger China Poses to American Agriculture.” Over the years, I have witnessed this hostile communist country work to systematically take over more of America’s vital food supply chain. Decades ago, I watched China start buying our fertilizer companies and making us more dependent on them for this crop care product. Then, they went after ownership of our chemical companies. I watched our government offer citizenship to members of the CCP in exchange for investment and ownership of our food processing systems. Now, they’re buying up our land.
Flag of China
Between 2010 and 2020, the Chinese Communist Party’s holdings of U.S. agricultural land increased by 5,300%. Reports show China owns about 384,000 acres of U.S. ag land valued at about $2 billion. This should be alarming to all of us. The USDA admits this may not even account for all of the land that has been purchased.
Why? Because the federal government does not monitor and track foreign interests in these large transactions. There is little reporting and very few consequences for allowing countries that hate us to buy up our assets.
Just this past summer, my Department of Agriculture and Natural Resources was contacted by Chinese nationals wishing to meet, tour, and have conversations about how we process and grow our food. We declined those meetings, and within days, the State Department contacted us to notify us that those individuals were Chinese spies trying to steal our intellectual property and crop genetics.
Make no mistake, the CCP will do anything to control our food supply. The Chinese Communist Party is not our friend. It is not our partner. It is not our ally. The CCP is our enemy – a rapidly expanding national security threat that cannot be ignored.
Let me be clear. China is buying up our entire food supply chain.
When America can’t feed itself and relies on another country to feed us, it becomes a national security issue. The country that feeds us controls us.
Let me remind you of why we do a Farm Bill. In the past, the Farm Bill has always been a bipartisan issue. I had the opportunity to work on two of them as a member of Congress. A Farm Bill is simply a safety net. America decided years ago that our nation’s security needed a safe and affordable food supply that we grow. Every family in this country should be able to afford to go to a grocery store and buy their family’s necessities.
The Farm Bill ensures that. Farmers who get up every day to make sure there are groceries on those shelves can have one good year and pay their bills and look forward to the next planting season, or have one bad year and have drought, hail, or flooding and lose everything. It is a risky business, and I’ve often said some of the biggest gamblers I know are our family farmers.
The Farm Bill should be designed to help farmers, not environmental extremists. Our farmers don’t want President Biden dictating their agriculture practices to fulfill his extreme climate agenda. As a conservationist committed to protecting the abundance of natural resources in my state, so-called “climate-smart” agriculture dictated by the Biden administration does not help farmers who need help developing conservation, natural resource, and wildlife habitat solutions that best meet their needs at the local level.
It is in our nation’s best interests that those farmers exist because we do not want one entity to eliminate their ability to keep prices low for our families. The Farm Bill manages that risk and is their safety net. I implore you to do your jobs and get it done.
Recent media reports show the largest Chinese holder of American ag land is shipping food and medical supplies to China to be stockpiled by the Chinese military. We all saw when China purchased land in North Dakota that they claimed it was for a corn processing plant. But there wasn’t enough corn around to support that kind of a facility. And it was just a few miles from a U.S. Air Force base.
South Dakota is home to Ellsworth Air Force Base, the B-1 bomber, and the MQ-9 Reaper drone. It will soon be home to our next-generation bombers – the B-21s. This platform will protect our nation for the next 50 years. As governor, I refused to let what happened in North Dakota happen in South Dakota.
For almost two years, I worked with our legislature, our ag community, and our business community to stop China and five other evil foreign Governments from buying ag land in our state near our military assets. I’m happy to report that we’ve banned them – and strengthened reporting requirements to identify and stop illegal purchases in the future.
China doesn’t allow American companies to own their land – they don’t even allow their people to own land. Why would we allow them to purchase our most significant asset?
It’s clear President Biden does not have a plan to protect the American people – not against crime in our major cities, not at the southern border, and not against the threat of China. So, today, I’m here urging Congress to stop the CCP and other nations that hate us from infiltrating our country.
In summary, let me remind you that for decades, China has manipulated their currency, stolen our IP, spied on us, mistreated us in trade practices, is purchasing our nation’s debt, controls our nation’s prescription drug supply chain, is poisoning our children with Fentanyl, unleashed a deadly virus on the world, uses Tik-Tok to spy on and control our nation’s population and is willing to put their people through horrific situations to fulfill the plan they have had for thousands of years to be the dominating world power.
The only thing standing in their way is us. America. If we lose this country, where will we go?
The time is now to ensure that every policy we pass and champion puts America First. Our safety depends on it. Our security depends on it. Our American way of life depends on it.
“We Indians know about silence. We are not afraid of it. In fact, for us, silence is more powerful than words. Our elders were trained in the ways of silence, and they handed over this knowledge to us. Observe, listen, and then act, they would tell us. That was the manner of living.
With you, it is just the opposite. You learn by talking. You reward the children that talk the most at school. In your parties, you all try to talk at the same time. In your work, you are always having meetings in which everybody interrupts everybody and all talk five, ten or a hundred times. And you call that ‘solving a problem’.
When you are in a room and there is silence, you get nervous. You must fill the space with sounds. So you talk compulsorily, even before you know what you are going to say.
White people love to discuss. They don’t even allow the other person to finish a sentence. They always interrupt. For us Indians, this looks like bad manners or even stupidity. If you start talking, I’m not going to interrupt you. I will listen. Maybe I’ll stop listening if I don’t like what you are saying, but I won’t interrupt you.
When you finish speaking, I’ll make up my mind about what you said, but I will not tell you I don’t agree unless it is important. Otherwise, I’ll just keep quiet and I’ll go away. You have told me all I need to know. There is no more to be said. But this is not enough for the majority of white people.
People should regard their words as seeds. They should sow them, and then allow them to grow in silence. Our elders taught us that the earth is always talking to us, but we should keep silent in order to hear her.
I picked these up from a post on Substack. They are profound. I disagree only with numbers 9 & 10 regarding population. It is my opinion that the entire world crisis with migration of hordes of people is due to high fertility rates in many countries around the world. This has been going on for decades. Earth can support only so many people in a reasonable standard of living. Now we see those that don’t have migrating to countries with lower populations and that do have. This must stop. Dr. Stephen Emmott, the head of Computational Science at Microsoft Research, believes we have already passed the human population level the Earth can sustain. I totally agree.
The way down the toilet for our country:
Open borders & illegal immigration
Rampant crime and unsafe cities
Mass addiction and Fentanyl
Election insecurity and interference
The educational indoctrination of children
The asymmetrical weaponization of justice
The destruction of private property rights
Inflation and debt
The global depopulation agenda
Record low fertility and birth rates
Unaccountable federal bureaucracies
Toxic food supply
Vaccine and pandemic disinformation
The trans-contamination and sterilization of children
Over prescription of pharmaceuticals
Destruction of the nuclear family and parental rights
DEI and the new racism
Moral and societal decay
Financing of endless foreign wars
Sprawling surveillance state
Centralization and consolidation of government power
Destruction of trust in institutions
Censorship industrial complex
State media propaganda
The smearing of those who challenge it
Paul Harvey, a journalist from our past, said, “History promises only this for certain: We will get exactly what we deserve”.
We have been warned. Dr. Geert Vanden Bossche, a widely known Belgian virologist, tells of a Covid “Imminent Tsunami of Death” coming. His warning has been pooh-poohed by some, but we will soon see what happens.
Bossche believes there will be massive illness and deaths among highly-vaccinated populations with compromised immune systems. He predicts a huge wave will cause collapse of hospitals and cause financial, economic and social chaos.
His prediction is the hyper-acute phase of sickness will begin within a few weeks and likely extend through the 2024 election period. Bossche explains that the gigantic global scale of the medical establishment’s experimental COVID vaccine campaign will make the accelerating illnesses and deaths impossible to cover up.
Bossche’s advice: don’t get reinfected with COVID. Take anti-virals prophylactically; not wait until symptoms appear.
This whole possible scenario goes right back to the creation and use of mRNA experimental vaccines, a vaccine construct never before injected into humans. The COVID mRNA vaccine and its boosters cause the human body systems themselves to create proteins found in COVID itself; the spike protein of the capsid encasing the virus. This protein causes an immune system reaction seemingly without end. The coding in the mRNA vaccine could find its way into the primary body DNA causing disruption and unintended consequences.
Bossche warns the COVID mRNA vaccines result in compromised immune systems in the long term. He warns the next wave of disease will be catastrophic. This to be most felt in highly vaccinated countries.
Believe him or not. Your choice. Your choice to get vaccinated or get boosters. Again, we will soon see what happens. Bossche has put his reputation on the line.
Louisiana is taking a stand….a strong and courageous stand. The Louisiana State Senate has passed a bill with a unanimous vote that shouts state sovereignty. Senate Bill 133 is now in the hands of the Republican-controlled Louisiana House.
This bill was crafted to block the implementation or enforcement of any rules, regulations, taxes, policies, or mandates from the United Nations, the World Health Organization, and the World Economic Forum. It shouts states’ rights and state power.
The United States of America is made of States; independent States. The federal government has only limited power over states. Louisiana has in effect, when passed by the House and signed into law, given the double middle finger to the Biden administration and the federal government when it, the state, does not agree with what is being pursued by the federal government.
Senate Bill 133 states “The World Health Organization, United Nations, and the World Economic Forum shall have no jurisdiction or power within the state of Louisiana. No rule, regulation, fee, tax, policy, or mandate of any kind of the World Health Organization, United Nations, and the World Economic Forum shall be enforced or implemented by the State of Louisiana or any agency, department, board, commission, political subdivision, governmental entity of the state, parish, municipality or any other political entity.”
The folks of Louisiana are making it crystal clear that no one is taking away the power of nor the freedom of Louisiana citizens. This clear message comes as the Biden administration makes noise and moves toward trying to cede decision making and enforcement power to such as the WHO, UN, and WEF. Isn’t going to happen in Louisiana.
It is my hope that other states will follow the lead of Louisiana to protect their own citizens.
United States Supreme Court 1 First Street NE Washington DC 20543
Justices:
Forgive me for not being polite…. It is time for you to get off of your collective asses and take charge!
The court system under you is failing and you seem to do nothing when you do have the power to address matters. The lawfare against former President Donald Trump stinks to high heaven. You know it and I know it…. and millions of US citizens know it.
Time is wasting. If you do not take bold action there is a chance our Constitutional Republic will not survive. That will be on you.
The trust in the federal government including the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches is fast eroding. I predict if it gets to a point there well may be civil war.
It seems much of the corruption of the judicial system began with January 6th, 2021. Now it is rampant and getting worse by the day. Again, you and I both know there was no terrorist attack or insurrection on January 6th. And hundreds who are in jail are there only due to a corrupt judicial system. Yes, some deserved conviction, but the vast majority did not. Even many in jail are not getting timely due process. You know it and I know it.
You and I both know the court cases against Donald Trump are crap. They are costing taxpayers and Trump millions to pursue. Any baboon can see the Georgia case and New York cases are total farces. They are election interference by a Democrat machine that is attempting to bleed Trump of resources and prevent him from even being in the 2024 election for President.
Again, you have the power to intervene. If you choose not to, the consequences for the country are dire.
There is a chance that solar sanity will ultimately be brought to Howard County. A ruling by Howard County Circuit Judge Lynn Murray for or against the development of a 1,800 acre solar field titled “Emerald” by ENGIE, a French multi-national company, is expected sometime in May.
This comes as a result of several Greentown area residents, who own properties adjacent to the prime agriculture land proposed to be covered with solar panels, taking their case to court. They challenged the legality of the approval of the solar project by the Howard County Board of Zoning Appeals on several grounds.
The ENGIE Emerald project had been denied twice earlier by the BZA. In the interim, one Board member who voted “no” was replaced by a Board member who voted “yes”. This member replacement or maneuver was questionable at the time. The final “yes” vote was a 3-2 yes/no vote; so the Board was split even in its final approval vote. Earlier it had been a 3-2 no/yes vote which denied the project.
The primary case for denial of the special exception for a solar field made by adjacent property residents rests in language found in county zoning ordinance itself. Under the Agriculture (AG) District section the Board of Zoning Appeals is directly addressed. The language states, “Board of Zoning Appeals: allow a special exception use (which specifically includes “power generation facility”) only when it is clearly a benefit to the adjacent properties.”
Further, under 7.08 Special Exception language states, “…. will not permanently injure other property or uses in the same district and vicinity….”
Any reasonable person would readily conclude the presence of a 1,800 acre solar field next door would not be “clearly a benefit” to adjacent properties, but would definitely damage adjacent properties in value and likely in physical ways. Judge Murray, however, need only conclude damage would come in the form of lower value for adjacent properties and not “clearly a benefit”. Who, really, would want to live right next to 1,800 acres of solar panels. The case is really simple as should be the decision by Murray.
Then there is yet another solar field proposal by another company to cover about 1,700 acres more of prime agriculture land. So, the decision by Murray is critical.
And as a former newspaper publisher, there remains a nagging question in my mind. That question is whether any local official or citizen, other than the landowners whose fields would be covered with solar panels, had financial gain from BZA approval of ENGIE: Emerald.
With a ruling on Friday, February 16, the Alabama Supreme Court has in effect shut down all IVF (In-vitro Fertilization) across the country. The Court concluded that frozen human embryos kept in fertility clinics are “children”. The ruling has a devastating impact on couples having to pursue IVF as a way to have a child.
In-vitro fertilization is really in concept easy to understand. A couple has not been able to have a woman become pregnant by way of the usual sexual coming together for whatever the reason may be. The only option is to seek medical help in creating a fertilized human egg which subsequently is implanted into a woman’s uterus for the growth of a child until the moment of birth.
This all happens under medical supervision and treatment. Under normal circumstances, only one egg is released each month from an ovary and pregnancy results when a man’s sperm joins this egg inside the woman’s body. Under medical treatment, a woman undergoes a series of hormone injections that results in multiple eggs being released from an ovary. These eggs are collected and fertilized in a laboratory with sperm provided by a man. The process is called “in-vitro fertilization” as opposed to “in-vivo fertilization” which is inside a woman’s body. Many eggs are typically fertilized.
The fertilized eggs, now called oocytes or embryos, can be kept viable (alive) when frozen at negative 320 degrees Fahrenheit, which is the temperature of liquid nitrogen. This extremely cold temperature halts all metabolism (biological development) of the embryo allowing embryos to be safely stored for an indefinite period of time.
When a woman has been cared for medically and the time is right, one of these eggs is carefully thawed and implanted in her uterus resulting in a pregnancy. If the woman whose eggs were collected has physiological issues (problems with her uterus), sometimes a surrogate woman is chosen to carry the pregnancy to term.
The giant issue comes with what to do with the unused fertilized eggs that are frozen. There may be several not used eggs. And across the country, there are likely tens of thousands of such eggs being held frozen in nitrogen. To now, these eggs have later been destroyed or given for biological research. With the Alabama court ruling the fertilized eggs (embryos) are children, this could create potential criminal charges for murder for the IVF clinics and even for the couples who have agreed to either dispose of unused eggs or donate them to science.
What are we talking about here. When egg meets sperm and joins, there is one egg, one cell. Within about 5-7 days later, there are something around 200-300 cells in a scientific arrangement called a blastocyst. I have included graphics to illustrate these. The underlying question is when does a fertilized egg become a person. The Alabama Supreme Court decided it is at the moment of an egg joining a sperm cell.
If this ruling stands as an absolute across the country, it could well mean the end of all abortion including that resulting from the “morning after” pill. It could mean the end of abortion even in cases where it has been medically determined such a genetic error has occurred that the fetus inside the woman has no chance of being born alive but is alive at the moment. Certainly, it ends any choice of abortion in the case of rape or incest. Maybe one abortion choice that does remain is when the woman’s life is at risk.
So, all sorts of religious and ethical issues now really have to be dealt with. The answers are not clear or easy ones.
One side on the abortion issue would applaud the Alabama court ruling. The other would condemn it and has taken the position abortion should be available to a woman to the moment of birth of a child. It seems to me neither absolute is tolerable. Where lines are drawn is not clear. It is up to our society to figure that out.
Reuters News Service is reporting the US government is spending more than $7,000,000 a year to maintain a Russian super yacht, the Amadea, that was seized by authorities in May 2022 when it made port in Fiji in 2022. The yacht was subsequently moved and is now and has been docked in San Diego ever since.
The super yacht was seized pursuant to a US warrant alleging it was owned by Suleiman Kerimov, a Russian multi-billionaire sanctioned by the US Treasury Department in response to Russian activities in Syria and Ukraine.
The big problem is that ownership of the yacht is under debate. Eduard Knudainatov, another very rich Russian, claims ownership. He is not under sanction by the US and, therefore, the US is claimed to have seized the yacht illegally. The issue is in US federal court.
The federal prosecutors told the court that the average monthly maintenance bill for the yacht sitting in dock has been $600,000 per month. Reportedly, this has been for both the yacht and crew expenses. Prosecutors claim the maintenance payments have been essential to preserving the Amadea’s value.
The feds want to auction the yacht and have asked the court to permit that. If the court determines Kerimov owns the yacht, that may be possible. If Knudainatov owns it, then auctioning becomes not possible.
If sold, it is said proceeds would be sent to Ukraine!
This whole story shows again the incredible stupidity of the Biden administration. US taxpayers have been paying $7,000,000 a year to maintain a yacht since 2022 docked in San Diego. There is no talk of reimbursing the US taxpayers even if the yacht is auctioned off…. And that is even in question.
If the court determines the ownership is really by Eduard Knudainatov, there is nothing but total loss to the US taxpayer. The yacht is released to return to Russia.
