Wake up: They want everyone off the land
Editor CJ Hadley tells me she’s planning to run two of my missives in her upcoming, summer edition of “Range” magazine — one of 2,500 words and another of 450. Here’s the shorter one:
Hi, CJ — I see where our beloved lame-duck Sen. Harry Reid took to the Senate floor again April 7. This week’s calumny? He insists that — with the “outrageous lawbreaker” Cliven Bundy and four of his non-violent sons now in custody (after a “deadly Oregon police shoot-out” in which the cops did all the shooting, as usual) — it’s time to renew the push to “preserve the scenic Gold Butte area northeast of Las Vegas.” Note that’s an area now open to the public as well as to the Bundys’ cattle, which the Green Extreme actually want to fence off from all motor vehicle access.
With summer temperatures soaring to 115 degrees and little surface water (the BLM have their hearts set on torching up and hauling away the Bundys’ water tanks -– they’ve already started) how many people do you think will be hiking in the 20 or 30 miles from the highway?
Furthermore, please note the number of “threatened” desert tortoises rounded up in Las Vegas golf courses and subdivisions (and turned in as required) is now so huge that authorities are “euthanizing” them. But in the official “tortoise recovery areas” where ranchers with their cattle and water tanks are removed, tortoises don’t “recover” – they “die out.” (See https://journals.uair.arizona.edu/index.php/rangelands/article/viewFile/10776/10049 .) The federals can’t document a single “recovered” population, except on the golf courses.
It’s interesting how this coordinates with the renewal of calls from the “Turn-the-Land-Into-a-Fire-Prone-Desert” extremists to “end the trespass of Bundy Cattle” on lands for which the Bundys hold the state-adjudicated grazing rights. (See April 5 press release from the Western Watersheds Project, the “WildEarth Guardians,” and “Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility.”)
Yet there are still ranchers in the West — lots of them — who seem to think everything will be fine, as long as every rancher “keeps in compliance” with the ever-more-restrictive, economically crippling edicts of the BLM and the USFS.
We drive the Red Rock Canyon road quite often, where the old “Spring Mountain Ranch” is now a “state park.” There are fences, and cattle guards at every entrance and exit from that valley . . . but not a single remaining cow or horse. New signs now threaten a $500 federal fine if you stop to feed a burro . . . or a non-existent horse.
Reminds me of the law-abiding Dutch Jews lining up to turn in their gold at a special “bank” as ordered (but they got a receipt!) after the German conquest, then later carefully writing their names in chalk on the baggage they were made to leave behind on the railroad platforms, so it could be “forwarded to them later” at the German death camps.
Just “obey.” How much worse could it get?
— Vin Suprynowicz
Pahrump
April 17th, 2016 at 9:44 am
Comes to that sort of thing, my “baggage” will be very limited… to the XD on my belt and the 30-30 carbine slung on my back. And all the ammo I can carry.
I’m glad nobody got shot at the Bundy place, but it might have been better if that’s the way it rolled. We wouldn’t still be waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Not sure anyone really wants a shooting war, but I suspect we won’t have any real choice eventually because the only “solution” our would-be overlords can even imagine is for us to quitly climb into the cattle cars.
April 17th, 2016 at 10:56 am
The tyrants won’t stop unless reminded… https://youtu.be/CjDHQ16MyKY
April 17th, 2016 at 10:59 am
“The tyrants won’t stop unless reminded” ???
Reminded of what? No, they won’t stop unless eliminated.
April 17th, 2016 at 11:11 am
REMINDED OF WHAT’S BEING PRESENTED IN THAT VIDEO. BUT ANYWAY, AN ARMED POPULACE THAT HAS ALLOWED THE TYRANTS TO GET WHERE THEY’RE NOW IS NOT GOING TO ELIMINATE THEM. MOST PEOPLE FEEL (NOT: THINK) THESE THINGS HAVE NO BEARING ON THEIR LIVES ANYWAY. IF THEY EVEN TAKE NOTICE AT ALL. AND THEN THERE ARE A SURPRISING NUMBER OF SHEEPLE WHO ACTIVELY SUPPORT AND DEFEND THESE POLICIES.
Sorry for the caps, no intention to shout. Typed my reply on mobile in the wrong box (search). That converted it to caps. Copied/pasted as I didn’t want to retype the lot.
April 18th, 2016 at 9:23 am
Uh well, since we refuse to demand that our elected state representatives act, we’re merely receiving the abuse we deserve.
So, either by demanding that our representatives enact the appropriate legislation or by ballot initiative WE can evict the Federal custodians. They’re not the owners, Arizonans are…
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1529
April 21st, 2016 at 5:16 am
Cody,
Would that we could just “demand that our elected state representatives act”. Been there, done that, in two different states, still pissin’ in the same pot.
First off, there are not enough people — who are invested in regaining control of our runaway governments — to make a difference.
Secondly, the governments have woven such a web of self-protection that it has become impenetrable by mere words or letters.
No, Cody, sadly we are now in the end-game, where either government starves itself, or it starves us.
Either way, it’s going to be a rough ride. Curiously enough, I actually hope that I do live long enough to see the outcome.
April 21st, 2016 at 11:36 am
More Agenda 21…
We’re still in that stage identified by Claire Wolfe: “America is at that awkward stage. It’s too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards.” – 101 Things to Do ‘Til the Revolution (1996).
Not enough ranchers being picked on for city folk to care…
“First they came for the ranchers, but I wasn’t a rancher.”
April 21st, 2016 at 9:30 pm
I was just saying, today, that urban folk who have never toured a western ranch with an actual rancher, to see the labor that goes into digging out a salt-cedar-clogged spring and then piping that thin stream of water downhill to a tank where it can help support an improved population of deer and quail as well as cattle and tortoise, will stand by and watch the uniformed, gun-wielding, tax-funded zealots of the Church of Deep Green sweep every human use from our Western lands — grazing, placer mining, forestry — swallowing the most transparent televised hokum about “dangerous redneck racists ruining the land” (where their own children and grandchildren live) and how this is all about “protecting the poor endangered (insert name of this year’s interchangeable newt, minnow, or bug)” . . . and wonder only later (as wildfires sweep the land) why we, once the wealthiest nation in the world, now have to start importing our minerals and metals as well as our timber, oil, and food. Why? Because they’ve forgotten the simple lesson of Pastor Martin Niemoller: “When they came for the ranchers I didn’t object, because I wasn’t a rancher. . . .”
— V.S.
April 23rd, 2016 at 5:32 pm
We’re a long way from exhausting our lawful remedies. Remember crisis are created to make people panic and do things that get concerned people in the news, in a bad light.
Anyway, start talking to your state legislators about this law that EVERYONE just wants to ignore. I guess because it would stop a lot of lawsuits…
Remember to read the finer print.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/1529
April 24th, 2016 at 2:16 am
Cody, you may be right there, definitely where provoking reactions to crisis is concerned. Problem with the lawful remedies is that the rulers made sure that path has become unaffordable to anyone but the rich and those living off wellfare, at least here in Europe. I’d expect the US not to be any different. The ‘justice’ system is rigged, like anything else the rulers have a stake in. Proceeding against the state eill bankrupt you long before the case is over, effectively handing victory to the thugs with the heavy armament.
April 25th, 2016 at 8:13 pm
Hartman,
The power to make changes in government is in participating in the legislative committee process. Have you ever counted the victories won by AZCDL? That’s why I keep reposting that law.
All the state has to do to get their lands back is to get their legislatures to pass a law. Here in Arizona, at least we have referendum and ballot initiative. Can you imagine the signatures we could get statewide, just through gun and prepper shows alone?
Thanks for the props.
April 28th, 2016 at 8:32 pm
Damn, Vin – I miss your columns in the R-J, as well as Tom Mitchell’s; and before that, those of the late Rafael Tamariello. The Review-Journal has, sadly, become a statist Republican newspaper – which is to say, the milquetoast counterpart to Brian Greenspun’s Sun.