Category Archives: Natural Law

UPDATED: Land, Liberty And The Federal Occupier (Naturally, Positive Law Understates Natural-Law Violations)

Individual Rights, Law, libertarianism, Media, Natural Law, Private Property, Regulation, Taxation, The State

Other than Fox New, which probably staved off a Waco-style massacre in its vigilant reporting, US presstitutes have been silent about Cliven Bundy’s heroic confrontation with the federal occupier. Before him came the Hage family, another family of great Americans, whose travails were featured on “Fox News Reporting: Enemies of the State.” What inspiring individualists.

Kudos to Canada Press for “shining truth on government ranch invaders,” and thus broadcasting from the rooftops about one of the most monumental confrontations against federal tyranny to have taken place since Edward Snowden and before him:

Coming clearly through the throbbing of helicopters and the roar of the SUVS of the feds harassing the Cliven Bundy Ranch, patriots there for Bundy should “tell it to the judge”.

There is mainstream media-suppressed case history in Nevada the feds are desperately trying to keep under wraps.

Chief Judge Robert C. Jones of the Federal District Court of Nevada smacked down high-handed, abusive feds, sending the pretend cowboys riding roughshod over Western ranchers and property owners back to their cobweb-laced offices in 2013.

In spite of their 200 armed snipers with boy toys in tow, those Stetson-wearing feds hunkering down on Cliven Bundy’s Ranch are nothing more than a bunch of cowardly ‘cobweb cowboys’ doing duty for radical environmentalists.

In the upheaval of Bureau of Land Management bureaucrats caving in fear to the radical environmentalists of the day, the Rule of Law still works in court, and everyone of those feds brandishing weapons knows it down at heart.

“The court case, U.S. v. Hage, has been keenly watched by legal analysts and constitutional scholars—but has been completely ignored by the major media.”
(New American, June 3, 2013)

“As we reported last November (”Judge Blasts Federal Conspiracy; Ranch Family Vindicated — Again!”), in June 2012, Judge Jones had issued a scorching preliminary bench ruling that charged federal officials of the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) with an ongoing series of illegal actions against Nevada rancher E. Wayne Hage that the judge described as “abhorrent” and a literal, criminal conspiracy.??“Judge Jones said he found that “the government and the agents of the government in that locale, sometime in the ’70s and ’80s, entered into a conspiracy, a literal, intentional conspiracy, to deprive the Hages of not only their permit grazing rights, for whatever reason, but also to deprive them of their vested property rights under the takings clause, and I find that that’s a sufficient basis to hold that there is irreparable harm if I don’t … restrain the government from continuing in that conduct.”

No cowpoke cuss could ever transcend what Judge Jones openly called feds invading ranch land.??“In fact, Judge Jones accused the federal bureaucrats of racketeering under the federal RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corruption Organizations) statute, and accused them as well of extortion, mail fraud, and fraud, in an effort “to kill the business of Mr. Hage.”

Judge Jones bottom-lined what the government is doing to ranchers and property owners—end of chapter!

He, and likely other federal court black robes, know that the mainstream media goes into overdrive in trying to keep the truth from the masses.

Tragically, Fed-harassed rancher Wayne Hage was vindicated three years after he died. (Capital Press, Dec. 8, 2009).

While no one (mercifully) has died on the Bundy ranch—yet—the stories of Bundy,—-Hage, Wally Klump and others are a disturbing match.

“In a previous court decision, Senior Judge Loren Smith referred to the well-publicized Hage lawsuit as “a drama worthy of a tragic opera with heroic characters.”

“A federal judge has added $150,000 to the original $4.22 million judgment won by the estate of rancher Wayne Hage in a years-long battle over property rights.

“The federal government had asked Senior Judge Loren Smith to throw out the judgment. Instead, he increased it.

“Hage, a leader of the “Sagebrush Rebellion” against federal control of land, was the husband of former Rep. Helen Chenoweth-Hage, R-Idaho. They both died in 2006.

“The order is the most recent victory in a legal dispute that stretches back to 1991, when Hage filed suit against the government for taking his private property without just compensation.

“Hage’s 7,000-acre ranch in Nye County, Nev., bordered several allotments in the Toiyabe National Forest on which he built fences, corrals, water facilities and other rangeland improvements for cattle grazing.

“Tensions began to mount between the rancher and the U.S. Forest Service in the late 1970s, when the agency permitted the introduction of elk to the national forest, resulting in damaged fences and scattered cattle, according to court records.

“Over the next decade, other incidents aggravated the strain and eventually led to the lawsuit.

“According to court documents, the Forest Service excluded Hage’s cattle from forage and water in certain allotments, impounded animals that entered those allotments and prevented him from maintaining ditches needed to exercise his water rights.

“In his legal complaint, Hage claimed the agency had breached its contractual obligations and violated his constitutional rights.

“During the course of litigation, the U.S. Court of Federal Claims decided the Forest Service could legally prohibit grazing on the allotments without compensating Hage, since grazing permits are licenses and not contracts.

“As such, the impoundment of cattle was not an unconstitutional taking because the cattle had trespassed on government land, the court said.

“However, the court ruled that the agency had taken Hage’s water rights, ditch rights-of-way, roads, water facilities and other structures without just compensation and in 2008 ordered the government to pay him $4.22 million.

“The federal government asked the court to change or set aside the financial compensation, alleging there’s no evidence Hage actually built hundreds of miles of fences, trails, ditches and pipelines on the allotments.

“Under the law, Hage would qualify for compensation only if he had built the structures, the government said.

“Because his grazing permits only authorized Hage to maintain the structures, he was not entitled to their full value, the government said.

“The judge disagreed.

“In the context of the grazing permits, “maintenance” included placing or construction, he said in the most recent ruling.

“The government’s argument “cannot be squared with the language of the statute and the reality of range work and construction,” Smith said.

“In adding more than $150,000 to the award, the judge ruled that his previous decision had mistakenly omitted the value of ditches and pipelines taken by the government.” …

READ ON.

UPDATE (4/14): NATURALLY, POSITIVE LAW UNDERSTATES NATURAL-LAW VIOLATIONS. Of course Judge Andrew Napolitao is understating the violation of homesteader Cliven Bundy’s rights by the Bureau of Land Grabs. That’s because the Judge’s analysis is not from natural law, “the body of laws derived from nature and reason,” but from the positive law, which is “statutory man-made law, created through the state.” Still, Nap is better than most:

Napolitano characterized the resistance shown by Bundy supporters as a clear example of how Americans feel, “enough is enough with the federal government, we’re drawing a line in the sand right here – and it drew people from all around the country who basically said ‘quit your heavy handed theft of property and act like you’re a normal litigant and not God almighty’.”

MORE Nap.

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Obamacare An Abomination Whatever The Numbers

Healthcare, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Natural Law

There is not one non-statist bone in JONATHAN COHN’s body (of writing). On the healthcare beat, this New Republic writer finds ways to beat Obamcare data into shape around the premise that this medical juggernaut is working.

Thus, victory is declared on account that “new government figures show that slightly fewer than 1 million people enrolled in February” and that by “March 31 … the number should exceed 5 million.” No matter that over 6 million policies (and counting) have been cancelled, and that many of the millions scrambling for coverage and enrolling are those … whose so-called subpar plans were cancelled on them.

Are we not talking an overlapping population that needs to be teased out here? (Hence the Venn diagram.) Or are liberals too dumb to have figured that out?

Naturally, even if Obamacare signs up more people than it kicked out of the insurance market—this will not vitiate the law’s violations of individual liberties.

Redcoat Pillock, Piers Morgan, Axed

Britain, Constitution, GUNS, Individual Rights, Natural Law

I sincerely hope the smug mug of Don Lemon, one of CNN’s many stupid and sanctimonious activists-anchors, will follow Piers Morgan into oblivion.

Morgan has finally been axed. For three years this pillock preached treason from his perch at CNN. I say treason not because he was undermining the dead-letter US Constitution, as some have claimed, but for the following reasons spelled out in “The Peerless Malevolence of Redcoat Piers Morgan”:

Most people would define treason as a betrayal of one’s country or sovereign. In my book, the book of natural law, treason is properly defined as a betrayal of one’s countrymen—and, in particular, the betrayal of the individual’s right to life, liberty and property. (To your question, yes, this renders almost all politicians traitors by definition.)

A right that can’t be defended is a right in name only. If you cannot by law defend your life, you have no right to life. If you cannot defend your property, you have no right of private property. And if you cannot defend your liberty, you are not a free man.

It follows that inherent in the idea of an inalienable right is the right to mount a vigorous defense of the same rights.

Knowing full well that a mere ban on assault rifles would not give him the result he craved, our redcoat turncoat has structured his monocausal appeals against the individual’s right to bear arms as follows:

1) The UK once experienced Sandy-Hook like massacres.
2) We Brits banned all guns, pistols too.
3) There were no more such massacres.

Were Morgan agitating for the repeal of the 16th Amendment to the Constitution—I’d call him a patriot, although he’d be preaching against the Constitution. My Amendment bias, why? The Constitution itself, in places, undermines individual rights. Therefore, to the extent that the document comports with the natural law, to that extent the Constitution is a good thing; to the extent that it flouts natural justice, it is bad. Inescapably—and more often than not—natural justice therein has been buried under the rubble of legislation and statute.

Thus, it is not Piers’ “attack on the 2nd Amendment” per se that makes him a traitor; it is that the 2nd Amendment is natural law, namely, it is based on a universally accepted, timeless moral principle. Because he is undermining this immutable principle, Morgan is suborning treason against his countrymen.

MORE.

Even Piers’ friends at the “New York Slimes” had to concede that,

Mr. Morgan’s approach to gun regulation was more akin to King George III, peering down his nose at the unruly colonies and wondering how to bring the savages to heel. He might have wanted to recall that part of the reason the right to bear arms is codified in the Constitution is that Britain was trying to disarm the citizenry at the time.

The Mindset Of A Subject

Healthcare, Law, Natural Law, Reason

“It is the law of the land,” parrot the statists, whenever the notion of repealing Zero Care is raised.

But even the legal positivist, for whom the law does not have to embody the “ideals of justice, democracy, or the rule of law” to remain in force, must concede that Obamacare is destructive to all Americans.

Americans are certainly coming to this realization. Polls show that “82% of Republicans and 58% of voters not affiliated with either party view the law unfavorably.”

As one natural-law scholar put it, “The human person is not a means for the ruler’s use.” (p. 174.) “A rule that does not issue from the activity of reason, an arbitrary rule or an arbitrary decree would savor of lawlessness rather than law.” (p. 172.)