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Previously: Militia Occupies Federal Building in Oregon After Rancher Arson Convictions
Russia Today reports:
Ammon Bundy, the leader of the armed group occupying a federal wildlife refuge near Burns, Oregon, and four others have been arrested by law enforcement amid gunfire, according to the FBI.
At 4:25 pm on [January 26], the FBI and Oregon State Police "began an enforcement action to bring into custody a number of individuals associated with the armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. During that arrest, there were shots fired", the Bureau said in a statement.
The FBI said one person who was "a subject of a federal probable cause arrest is deceased". He said they are not releasing any information on the person "pending identification by the medical examiner's office".
One person suffered non-life threatening injuries and was taken to a local hospital for treatment. He was arrested and is in custody.
The arrested individuals include:
- Ammon Edward Bundy, age 40, of Emmett, Idaho.
- Ryan C. Bundy, age 43, of Bunkerville, Nevada.
- Brian Cavalier, age 44, of Bunkerville, Nevada.
- Shawna Cox, age 59, of Kanab, Utah.
- Ryan Waylen Payne, age 32, of Anaconda, Montana.
CNN, NYT, Washington Post, BBC, OregonLive.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 27 2016, @03:17PM
I'm from that part of the world and can perhaps offer a little perspective on the subject of grazing. Many of the ranching families like the Bundys homesteaded the land a long time ago before there were states there. There was no federal land per se, just lots of open prairie. They grazed their herds all over. Much later when the federal government came along and started putting up barbed wire fences and allotting itself land, letting the ranchers continue to graze their herds on the land they always had was a compromise so the people in those areas would accept what the federal government was doing. So it's really the opposite of what most people from the cities or the coasts assume, which is that the ranchers only exist because of the good will of the federal government letting them graze on federal land.
That said, ranching is a tough, tough life with razor-thin margins. The only guy who ever really got rich from it was Conrad Kohrs, who sold fresh animals to the wagon trains headed west on the Oregon Trail, at the cost of 2 worn-out animals for 1 fresh. But for the ranchers today, if you cut off their access to the lands they've always needed to graze on, you kill them. It's make-or-break for them.
Bureaucrats sitting inside the Beltway or oblivious city dwellers who get their dinner from the magic supermarket don't get that. But if they drive the ranchers out of existence one thing they will not continue to get from the magic supermarket is steak, ribs, and hamburger at a price they're willing to pay.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Wednesday January 27 2016, @03:28PM
Bureaucrats sitting inside the Beltway or oblivious city dwellers who get their dinner from the magic supermarket don't get that. But if they drive the ranchers out of existence one thing they will not continue to get from the magic supermarket is steak, ribs, and hamburger at a price they're willing to pay.
And that's exactly what those elites want to happen. They don't want the unwashed masses eating meat at all - they would prefer to feed them bugs. [nationalgeographic.com] They are turning up the heat very slowly, until they have the proles subsisting on Soylent [soylent.com].
I am a crackpot
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 27 2016, @03:51PM
Yeah, I read the "trend" toward entomophagy the same way, another way to put the screws to the proles.
But I think driving those people to consider non-traditional sources of food is quite risky. I hear champagne- and caviar-fed plutocrat has a delighful flavor.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by SanityCheck on Wednesday January 27 2016, @03:51PM
Right on Phoenix. The land should not be owned by the Government, but should return to the original owners so they can live off the land peacefully as their fore-fathers once did.
At that point any White* ranchers can petition to join their tribe so they too can live off the land, too...
*Disclaimer: I am White.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday January 27 2016, @04:34PM
I'm OK with that, too. But it's not so much about land ownership, but that previously there was no ownership. It wasn't that the federal government came along and took the land away from the ranchers, but that nobody "owned" the land the federal government "took." It wasn't ever an issue until the farmers came along and got upset that the free-roaming herds would trample their crops; that brought barbwire fences, the force that truly ended the Old West, and suddenly all the open land was parceled off and inaccessible.
Only, for the record, those guys you're referring to were not peaceful. Especially not these guys [wikipedia.org] or these guys [wikipedia.org]. They were not morally superior. They were not idyllic natives displaced by the evil white man. They were people, who were displaced by other people, who had better guns.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by SanityCheck on Wednesday January 27 2016, @05:04PM
True enough, I should not make the claim that the party was peaceful (which was not intentional), but rather I would expect them to be peaceful going forward.
So in the end it's bunch of people (Ranchers vs Farmers) arguing over who has what rights to what land, the outcome being decided by the Government, and then the losers not being happy with the fact they lost. If I were them I would never make the claim that the land had no ownership, there is no such land anywhere, and to expect that to be true is naive. The Government had more incentive to have the land farmed rather than grazed I'm sure, that is why it sided with the Farmers. It may seem oppressive to the Ranchers, but we are dealing with the standard form of Government oppression which only doesn't exist in Anarchy.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday January 27 2016, @09:49PM
The idea that First Nations peoples didn't have a concept of land ownership is total nonsense. As in, they fought wars with each other and later the US government over it.
The old story of selling Manhattan for a few beads was not about a lack of understanding of land ownership, but because the Dutch who made the deal paid the people who were in charge in Brooklyn, not the people who owned Manhattan. As you can imagine, the people from Brooklyn were pretty happy with the deal, just like you would be if somebody paid you a bunch of money for your neighbor's house. And the people who actually owned Manhattan reacted about as well as your neighbor would if the people you just sold his house to showed up and started moving in.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday January 28 2016, @02:22AM
I think it's more accurate to say they had a sense of territory rather than ownership in the sense we mean it, whereby you have legal title to it and pay taxes on it. That sense of territory was quite fluid. Even tribes that farmed, like the Iroquois, would pick up and move the whole village every once in a while to give the land a chance to rest.
Nevertheless I was talking specifically about the land in the West that became federal land, upon which the ranchers grazed their herds before the federal government came along, surveyed discrete parcels, and declared it theirs. What obtained for the ranchers before that was much closer to the sense of territory the Indians had, in that there were no surveyed parcels for which you owned a deed and on which you paid taxes. That's what I meant.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Arik on Wednesday January 27 2016, @11:47PM
Is that a medical condition?
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?
(Score: 3, Funny) by SanityCheck on Thursday January 28 2016, @02:04AM
I wouldn't characterize it as such, but apparently I "suffer" from it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 27 2016, @10:44PM
You left out the really big part about the territories having conventions to decide if they want statehood and to join the Union whereupon they voted to join. You seem to have this Dances With Wolves view of homesteading where you make it sound like they were just doing their thing and this all happened to them. It didn't. Some of the biggest issues were between big ranchers and small ranchers, between big farmers and little farmers, between ranchers and farmers, etc. It wasn't all peaceful free herding until the Big Evil Gmen came, it was Big Evil and Rich Ranchers who wanted all the land or the herds, etc., that there was a desire to have the resources of the Government to bring order. If the Bundys actually did think along those lines, then they really are dumbasses because you can't just ignore 150 years in-between like they do in the Middle East (or sometimes 1500 years in-between).
(Score: 3, Touché) by Phoenix666 on Thursday January 28 2016, @02:42AM
No, I have a "grew up in the Rockies and have known ranching and farming families all my life, whose ancestors homesteaded; and my own family which homesteaded across America before crossing over into being scientists and engineers" view of homesteading. So I have first-hand accounts from my grandparents, who grew up in homestead households, and my great-grandparents, who lived on until I was 20, first-hand knowledge from friends and acquaintances who still ranch and farm, and formal education in school about the history of "how the West was won."
There were lots of forces that drove the passage of territories into statehood, including but not limited to Manifest Destiny, Gold rushes, the Indian Wars, the railroads, and cultural inertia, but none of them obviate the transition from open grazing land to federal lands ranchers could still graze their herds on.
And for what it's worth, Dances with Wolves was a movie about Indians, not about homesteaders. If you're gonna cite movies to belittle someone's contribution to a conversation about ranching in the West, you'd better brush up on your Westerns.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2016, @10:12PM
Yeah, well apparently your argumentative skills are VERY narrowed down to single-topic. Dances With Wolves reference was about how a remarkably one-sided, idyllic, and over-simplified view of Native Americans vs. Evil White Guys approach is being applied by your remarkably one-sided, idyllic, and over-simplified view of homesteaders vs. Evil Gubmit views. Sorry if it was too nuanced; I included the words "view of" immediately in front of "homesteading" to show that I was applying the tenets of that movie to the topic of homesteading, but I apologize and I will refrain from complicated forms of expression.
And yes, you are right, there were many reasons that drove the population to want Statehood, but quite frankly, your deeply rooted ancestral views going back three generations don't mean shit because they are irrelevant to the subject owing to the fact that they were already living in a state of the US. You see, when the territory became a state, it became subject to the conditions of being a state. Your revered grandparents can't say "50 years ago this is what we did". If you want to take your specific state as an example, they became a state under a number of conditions including:
I don't question whether you have the same misguided, self-serving and selfish beliefs as the Bundys, but get off your fucking high horse with your attitude if those were the conditions in fucking 1876 that they signed on to, and I think it is very easy to say that they've reaped far more benefits from being a state than they lost. So contrary to your myopic beliefs, it isn't an urbanite outlook looking down on ranchers, it is calling out blatant and unabashed entitlement attitude.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 28 2016, @04:55PM
So, because they started using that land when they were territorres, that somehow gives them magic powers? Some asshole from spain stuck a flag in central america and claimed the entire Nrtoh American landmass for the spanish queen. Should we honor that? Should we petition England for readmitance?