The Pasture is Prologue
by Mark Steyn • Apr 14, 2014 at 1:12 pm
Some unfinished business from last week to start a new week:
~I wrote on Wednesday about the " First Amendment Area" in Nevada to which twerp enforcers from something called the Bureau of Land Management have attempted to confine protesters in a dispute about grazing rights. The photo at right is from the showdown between the Bundy family and the BLM, which is to Nevada as the Red Army is to Eastern Ukraine. In the picture, hundreds of Bundy supporters, many on horseback, have in effect headed off the BLM at the (over)pass and have them surrounded. John Hinderaker's round-up makes some important points:
The Bureau of Land Management has announced that in view of the risk of violence, it is withdrawing its forces, which include snipers, from the area. (How many federal agencies employ snipers, anyway? Too many, it is safe to say.) The county sheriff negotiated the terms of the federal government's surrender with Cliven Bundy.
Look at the picture John puts underneath that paragraph, or at ABC's video. These are low-level bureaucrats from a minor branch of the vast bottomless alphabet soup of federal agencies, and they're running around pretending to be elite commandos. The county sheriff is supposed to be "the law". But he had to broker a deal to get the BLM out of there because in America every jumped-up pen-pusher from the Bureau of Compliance has his own branch of "the law", a personal SWAT team to act as judge, jury, executioner and, if necessary, as in Nevada, as army of occupation. In most parts of the developed world, there is "the police", and that's it. If a bureaucrat from the Ministry of Paperwork wants to have you seized, he has to persuade a judge to issue a warrant and then let the local coppers handle it as they see fit. There is an obvious conflict of interest when every tinpot regulatory agency has its own enforcement arm, and it imputes to even legitimate cases the whiff of something malodorous and, indeed, despotic.
John also notes:
The root of the problem is the fact that the federal government owns most of the Western states, including more than 80% of the State of Nevada. That strikes me as completely irrational, and I don't understand why there isn't a stronger movement to turn most of that land over to local management.
It reminds me of 19th century Ireland, when most of the big estates belonged to absentee landlords in England. It's an even less attractive arrangement when the absentee landlord is a distant national government. There is no need for the vast land holdings of the United States Government, especially given their ever more unpleasant and bullying attitude to public access to the land. As I've said, a 21st century America has fewer rights on "the people's land" than a 13th century English peasant had in the King's forest. If I ever do run for Senate in New Hampshire, my platform will include a pledge to return the White Mountain "National Forest" to the people of the state.
Jay Currie thinks the Nevada showdown reflects a shifting balance of power between the citizen and the state-media complex. He may be right. In the pre-smartphone era, I think the BLM snipers would have had few qualms about offing members of the Bundy family, anymore than their fellow bureaucratic enforcers at Ruby Ridge did about shooting Vicki Weaver in the head as she was cradling her baby and running for cover. Waco might have gone differently in the age of cellphone video.
~I wrote on Thursday, re the BLM " euthanizing cattle":
I'm all for government agents improving their skills at euthanizing bovine herds. It means they'll be really good at it by the time they move on to us.
So many things begin by being tested on animals. I noted a week or so back the new ObamaCow bovine flatulence regime, and I see Senate Republicans have now got the scent in their nostrils:
South Dakota Sen. John Thune and fellow GOP senators sent a letter to Obama administration officials urging them not to regulate livestock emissions as part of the president's crusade against global warming.
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