Maybe Jim Stiles wasn't all wrong, and not just about Utah's red rock country

These thoughts were provoked by this Substack piece about a Wilderness Study Area on the South Fork of the Crooked River. 

For the unknowing, here are two definitional points.

First, here's what a wilderness study area is:

Wilderness Study Areas (WSAs) are lands that have outstanding features such as naturalness, opportunities for solitude and recreation, and other qualities that make them suitable for inclusion in the National Wilderness System. Other factors used to determine eligibility as a WSA were historic, scientific, geological, ecological, or scenic values.

There you go.

Second, there are several activities prohibited in actual wilderness lands. (Unfortunately, per the piece above, cow shit is not one of them. "Mr. Reclamation," per Marc Reisner in "Cadillac Desert," Colorado Western Slope Congresscritter Wayne Aspinall, insisted that shitting cows be allowed to remain inside wilderness areas before he'd let the eventual 1964 Wilderness Act see the light of day. 

One of them is "mechanical transport," which, per this federal law site, has always been understood to include bicycles. Mountain bikers hate this. Too bad. 

With that said, yes, a wilderness study area is not wilderness. But, it's preserved in wilderness-like status.

So, why the hell is the Oregon Desert Land Trust promoting mountain biking in the South Fork of the Crooked WSA? I quote:

Spanning both sides of the river, the South Fork Crooked River parcel helps ensure public access to fishing, hunting, hiking, mountain biking and horseback riding in the basin.

Yeesh.

And, I have emailed both their "info" general contact email and their executive director. I've heard nothing back. 

As in, I started writing this piece two weeks ago, before I went on vacation, and have heard nothing back.

Friend Lyle Lewis suspects they want their capitalist piece of the action, so that's surely why. 

So, that gets me to where I say the late, long-term Moabite curmudgeon Stiles was maybe more than half right. 

Or maybe still less than half right.

Directly relevant to the current environmental and land preservation situation, Stiles went apeshit, not over Trump shrinking Bears Ears, but Dear Leader wanting to preserve it better (sort of) a decade ago. 

And, on that part of the story, Stiles was dead wrong. As of 18 months ago, 65 percent of Utahns wanted to keep both it and GSE as is, as part of expressing support for all monuments "as is." That said, I'm not sure if that means size unchanged, or just keeping them rather than eliminating them. Of that, 51 percent were "definitely" in favor. And, 54 percent of Utah Republicans were in favor, with 30 percent definitely in favor.

The Substack that comes from fudged a bit. Yes, more than 71 percent approve of keeping Bears Ears, but that's without the "as is," which is for all national monuments. 

Speaking of? My comments on this Substack that "branding" by naming both GSE and Bears Ears National Park Service national monuments from the start might have helped is getting a lot of support. And, several commenters agree with my take on the modern Democratic party.

Texas Progressives round up the news of the region

Off the Kuff goes back to the future with the latest school finance lawsuit, filed by Midland ISD.

Neil at Houston Democracy Project Blog said Hitchcock City Council in Galveston County voted to reject formal cooperation with ICE. They said it would tank local trust in law enforcement & placed concern for people of Hitchcock over Abbott & Trump.

SocraticGadfly wondered if, post-Trumpian world, more and more public radio and TV that are university-affiliated or owned will sever ties. 

Texas Monthly celebrates Butthole Surfer Summer.

CultureMap introduces us to the 2026 State Fair of Texas' music lineup.

Gwen Howerton is being driven insane by crappy AI-generated flyers around Houston.

D Magazine is done with the Alamo Drafthouse.

Deceleration reports on anti-ICE activity in San Antonio.

Law Dork recounts the many screwups of the Trump Justice Department in their effort to subpoena reporters from the New York Times.

Franklin Strong finds a whole bunch of classic books that have been removed from school libraries, and says that was an intended effect of the school library censorship law.

Texas Progressives

The Texas Progressive Alliance hopes that the Guadalupe River takes a nice long break from flooding in the future as it brings you this week's roundup.

Off the Kuff enjoyed the political theater of an illegal voting complaint filed against Ken Paxton for his incorrect voter registration. 

SocraticGadfly talked about how data centers have their expansions all planned in advance. . 

Your Local Epidemiologist answered your cyclospora questions. 

City of Yes celebrated rowhomes.  

Deceleration lauded human-created art. 

 The Austin Chronicle reported on the Texas GOP's obsession with IVF and surrogacy.

 Texas Monthly examined the longstanding fight to keep Galveston wild. 

 In the Pink Texas found the week's most important news.

Snowden and "his" files and the Intercept

I've never been a 100 percent fan of Edward Snowden. While noting that, in balance, he did a service to the country, he also has his fair share of lies and more, stuffing full the pages of "Permanent Record," as I noted after reading it. 

That said, I had long wondered what his reaction was to Glenn Greenwald, with agreement of Jeremy Scahill and others at The Intercept, but withOUT advance agreement from Laura Poitras, turning over the 95 percent of the files that had not been used, to Intercept owner and Nat-Sec Nutsacks™ techdudebro player Pierre Omidyar.

I already knew that Glennwald had kind of "used" him, while still wondering if somebody in Russia had honeypotted him in the first place. 

Turns out, on Snowden, per a Blogger site called Electrospaces that I stumbled upon while doing some searching on teh Google for stuff related to Scahill's time at The Intercept, he didn't know in advance, and reading between the lines, didn't fully like it. 

That said, while we still haven't seen those other documents, per pieces at Electrospaces in both 2023 and earlier this year, we have had new writing about at least bits of those other documents. (That latter is more about peering around the edges of already published files that may have had bad redacting work.)

R/AskHistorians mods are pretendian leftists as well as unethical

A couple of years ago, I was banned from the subreddit because I challenged their claims that every European interaction with American Indians was genocidal. Read more here.

About 9 months after that, one of the mods — without disclosing that they were one of the mods — used Reddit research tools to ask me and other people banned from the sub about our experiences.

I reported that person, Sarah Gilbert, as a Cornell prof, to the people overseeing the research project. Those people said it was an accident and did nothing further, including not throwing out my responses. As I noted, this meant, accident or not, that the research was not appropriately "blinded."

OK, I had already thought their leftism was kind of an identitarian tribalism. I actually, before being banned, called them "librulz" and "pseudoleftists."

A few weeks ago, looking up possible critiques of Edward Baptist's "The Half Has Never Been Told" and Sven Beckert's "Empire of Cotton," I come across a piece from R/AskTribalistHistorians. [sic]

And, they throw both under the bus, specifically using a critique by a pair of economic historians who are clearly mainstream neoliberals.  Here's an academic piece on the same subject by the pair, Alan Olmstead and Paul Rohde. Interestingly, they list Beckert among people assisting them, but not Baptist. From my own email interactions with him, he probably told them to fuck off.

Further refudiating these non-leftists and neolibs and upholding the broad thesis of Baptist and Beckert? Mark Peterson, in "The Making and Breaking of the American Constitution," notes that in 1860, MISSISSIPPI had the highest per-capita income of any state. Yes, today's "at the bottom" Mississippi. Also, remember that, whether at 100 percent or 3/5 a person, that per capita included Black slave numbers. Toss that out, and it's even worse. (Note: The Census had per capita income estimates by region, not cold facts by state, but the Lower Mississippi, led by Mississippi cotton and Louisiana sugar, led the country.)

In any case, my first impressions of r/AskTribalistHistorians got confirmed. 

Post-Trump, will public media stations with university ties reconfigure?

I say this over Austin's KUT firing its general manager last month. Indirectly, at least, the firing seems related to the political big chill that has descended on the UT System, as well as the A&M and Texas State university systems, in the past 18 months.

This:

Is the nut graf.

The festival dispute raised questions about UT-Austin’s relationship with KUT. The university holds the station’s broadcast license, KUT employees are university staff and the newsroom is housed in the Moody College of Communication. But the station says it operates with editorial independence and relies almost exclusively on donations rather than university funding.

Does KUT think it still has editorial independence? 

That's especially with the Evangelist [sic, see story name] who fired Hiott telling PR lies in a folo story. 

If not, what are its options? Note that I said "post-Trump." Before then, it surely has no options.

After that, unless we get an even bigger wingnut, it can either try to wrest the current license from the university, or apply for a new one, and if it gets it, set up shop on its own. 

That said, KUT is nowhere near alone in this predicament, per another public station, KISU, affiliated with Idaho State:

More than half of NPR’s 1,000 member stations are licensed to or affiliated with colleges or universities, according to NPR’s website. A 2019 PBS article listed 49 university and college public television licensees, a majority of which belong to public institutions—many of them flagship or public land-grant universities, but some community and technical colleges as well.

Ouch. Now, as the likes of Dick Tofel have written about nonprofit-status newspapers, any situation with a nonprofit boss is fraught. But, the media landscape? Even more.

And, no, it's not just "red" states. I don't know if Harvard or other Ivies have NPR stations or not, but we're at two-plus years and counting of their Zionist-based anti-Palestinian stances.