Cattlemen and Libertarians

Fire on the Mountain, Donnie Shackleford, Stockvault

For the past couple of days, my libertarian-leaning friends in Clark County have been inundating my social media feeds about Cliven Bundy and his cattle:

A Nevada rancher's threat to wage a "range war" with the federal Bureau of Land Management precipitated a standoff today between supporters of the embattled rancher, Cliven Bundy, and law enforcement officials.

Bundy posted a statement on the Bundy Ranch website on Sunday night saying: "They have my cattle and now they have one of my boys. Range War begins tomorrow."

He invited supporters to show up this morning on his property, about 80 miles northeast of Las Vegas, near Bunkerville, just west of the Utah state line.

Another excellent article on the subject can be found courtesy of 8 News Now's I-Team:

BUNKERVILLE, Nev. -- Dozens of armed federal officers are preparing for a showdown with a Nevada cattle rancher regarded by some as an outlaw and a hero by others.

Rangers and agents from several federal agencies have surrounded a 600,000-acre section of public land and are preparing to move against rancher Cliven Bundy whose cattle have been grazing illegally for the past 20 years.

[...]

Bundy has had a long time to sharpen his message. The fight has been building since 1993, when the Bureau of Land Management changed grazing rules for Gold Butte to protect the endangered desert tortoise.

Bundy refused to go along and stopped paying his fees. Since then, the BLM and federal courts have ordered him to stop letting his cattle roam throughout Gold Butte, and he has ignored the orders because he does not recognize federal authority over the land.

"My forefathers have been up and down the Virgin Valley ever since 1877. All these rights I claim have been created through pre-emptive rights and beneficial use of the forage and water. I have been here longer. My rights are before the BLM even existed," Bundy said.

The Bundy family was already ranching here long before the Department of Interior was born, and long before tortoises were protected. But federal courts say he doesn't have a legal leg to stand on. BLM has long sidestepped the fight in part because of concerns about what might happen, if it tried to round up his 500 or so cattle that even now are grazing on forbidden public lands.

Read the whole thing - it's an excellent and reasonably evenhanded analysis of the situation out there.

To quickly summarize the situation, Cliven Bundy's family has been supporting cattle on a 600,000 acre stretch of federally owned land south of the Virgin River (map) since the tail end of Reconstruction. Back in the 1990's, however, the federal government began to severely restrict land use on public lands, even more so than they had historically - these restrictions ultimately led to a heating up of the Sagebrush Rebellion and the Jarbidge Shovel Brigade, among other acts of protest. In Cliven's case, this led to the BLM restricting access to Gold Butte, Cliven refusing to acknowledge this restriction, then two decades of court cases that have more or less consistently gone against Cliven each and every time. Now, driven in part by a potential suit against the BLM by environmental groups for failing to properly enforce the court ordered restrictions on Gold Butte, the BLM and the federal government have started to seize the cattle that Cliven left to graze on BLM property.

As often happens with situations like this, there's the small picture - the issue of Cliven and his cattle - and the larger picture. At a base level, the simple truth here is that Cliven and his family wouldn't be losing their cattle at all if they purchased the land that their cattle have been grazing for several years. Since Cliven does not own Gold Butte, it's up to the landowner - in this case, the BLM, which "inherited" the land from the General Land Office, whose existence can be traced back to The Land Ordinance of 1785 - to decide how to properly dispose of that property, and the landowner has decided that it would rather have tortoises on Gold Butte than cattle. One can stop their analysis of the situation here - and I did, at least for a little while - and safely conclude that Cliven is wrong, the BLM is right, and the BLM is well within their rights to defend their interests in their property by any means necessary.

But there's a catch - did Cliven's family ever have the opportunity to claim title to the land?

The answer to that questions is probably "no". Both the Desert Land Act and the Stock-Raising Homestead Act limited homestead claims to 640 acres; even if the Bundy family worked together to stake several claims, it would take over a thousand family members building shacks in the desert to successfully claim that much land. Furthermore, the federal government generally avoided selling range land outside of Homestead Act-style provisions to avoid charges of corruption. Finally, the federal government transitioned from homesteading public lands to leasing them in the 1920's with the Pickett Act and the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920. However, federal leasing requirements were relatively lax, at least initially - the US Forest Service and  US Grazing Service preferred to maintain a relatively "hands off" attitude regarding leasing fees and restrictions, lest they earn the legislative ire of powerful rural Senators and Congressmen. Consequently, the Bundy family undoubtedly assumed, and rightfully so at the time, that it was better to pay the federal government a nominal lease fee every 10 years than it was to own the property outright and pay Nevada property taxes.

Unfortunately, as so often happens when you rent, your landlord can change their mind - they can raise the rent, they can decide to use the property for something else, or they can just evict you because they think you haven't been a good tenant. In the case of Cliven's cattle ranch, as well as several other agricultural and mining operations in Nevada, all three happened more or less simultaneously when the federal government transitioned from an economically driven land management regime to an environmentally driven one.

In short, no, the Bundy family almost certainly did not have any opportunity to buy their range outright; even if they did, it probably made solid economic sense for over 100 years to let the federal government manage the land and lease it at extremely low rates instead.

However, that's not the end of the discussion - how did the federal government in general, and the BLM in particular, end up with 600,000 acres of range in the first place? I'll go into that in my next article.

An Older Man and a Young, Impressionable Woman

AV Club recently finished their retrospective review of the new Doctor Who's 2nd Season, which is as far as I've made it into the "new" series myself. Since the theme of the season was the nature and lasting power of 10/Rose's relationship, especially as the season moved along, I figured I might as well do the fashionable thing and chime in on the relationship as well. Granted, it's been several years since the season was initially released, so I doubt I'm going to break any new ground here, but better late than never, I suppose.

At its core, Rose's relationship with the 10th Doctor was pretty straightforward - he's an older (about 700 years older, more or less), well-traveled gentleman and she's a young, impressionable woman. Rose loves the Doctor in a near-obsessive, all-consuming way, the way a teenager falls in love with someone. She wasn't just willing to sacrifice her previous life - her family, her friends, her job, her neighborhood, everything - for the Doctor, she actively encouraged him, practically begging, to take her up on it. The 9th Doctor was reluctant to do that; he cared for Rose the way an father-figure or an older brother might, at least until the end, and attempted to preserve some distance between the two. The 10th Doctor, however, actively reveled in the attention in the same way that a 40+-year-old millionaire might appreciate the unbalanced devotion of a pretty 18-year-old - he enjoyed the way she made him feel, the way she encouraged instigated his long-forgotten, more youthful tendencies (hence the running gag with Queen Victoria in "Tooth and Claw"), and rewarded her accordingly.

Unfortunately, at least for Rose, the Doctor had 700 years of perspective to draw from. He could never feel the same way about Rose that Rose felt about the Doctor because the Doctor ultimately had a life outside of Rose. Rose's entire existence had become co-dependently wrapped around the Doctor's - she lived exclusively for him. The Doctor, however, had a life before Rose and he knew that he would have a life after Rose. Sooner or later, the relationship had to end, either through death, boredom, or Rose getting sucked into a parallel universe. The writing was on the wall after the "The Girl In The Fireplace" - as fun and eager and complimentary as Rose might have been, she would never be an intellectual equal to the Doctor, someone that he would be able to look at eye-to-eye and experience attraction from that connection. When the Doctor found the Madame de Pompadour, and when she clearly expressed interest in him, his reaction was not that of a man guilty of betraying a lover but instead a man lost in a desert, enjoying a rare, satisfying drink. Without the Doctor, the Madame de Pompadour was still the mistress of the King of France - Rose, however, saw herself as nothing without the Doctor and they both felt that acutely.

In the end, for Rose's health as well as the Doctor's, the relationship needed to end. Rose needed an opportunity to discover that there is life after the Doctor, though I wouldn't be especially surprised if, like a lot of people that endlessly yearn for a particularly intense, lost love, she never really recovers. The Doctor, meanwhile, needs someone that he can respect and can look him in the eye, someone that can hold him more or less responsible for his actions.

Now to see if he finds that in season 3.

Ikraine, Ukraine, we all scream for...

Crimea, Kerch - Shutterstock

Ah, the Ukraine - home to one of the more fetching politicians in recent memory, along with a few thousand Russian troops that have suddenly taken up residence in the Crimea. So, what should the United States do about it?

Well, before we answer that question, let's establish some background information:

• The Ukraine, or more specifically, Kievan Rus, is a foundational part of Russian identity. It was the power center of what passed for the Russian state before the Mongol invasion in the 14th century.
• The Ukraine, in its current form as a national entity separate from Russia, didn't exist until after the Treaty of Brest-Livotsk created it to better secure Ukrainian grain supplies for the German military.
• Russia has fought to secure and retain the Crimean peninsula more or less constantly since the 16th century, starting with the Russo-Crimean Wars that initially secured the peninsula from the Tatars (Turks, more or less), followed by the Crimean War, which didn't go well for anyone involved but definitely didn't go well for Russia, then followed by the Crimean Campaign in World War 2 and the counter-invasion.

Conceptually, the Ukraine's existence, at least in certain Russian minds, would be similar to how Americans would feel if the British "liberated" New England in the War of 1812 and it eventually turned into its own country. The story of the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock is a key part of the history of the establishment of the United States, along with the battles of Lexington and Concord - even if New England somehow became its own country, even if New England really wanted to remain its own country (and, after the Holodomor, the Ukraine really wants to remain its own country - that's a big part of the reason there were so many Nazi sympathizers in the Ukraine to begin with), it'd be very difficult for the rest of the United States to really respect that or see things that way. This would be doubly true if the United States built a rather important naval base in, say, Rhode Island and built a "company town" around the base that was filled with Americans.

Now that we have the mindset established, it shouldn't be hard to understand why Russia doesn't take Ukraine's independence particularly seriously, along with why Russia feels perfectly comfortable invading the Ukraine's version of our hypothetical Rhode Island. It also shouldn't be hard to grasp that, if someone were to attempt to guarantee the independence and integrity of our hypothetical New England, we probably wouldn't take it well - from our position, New England is an integral part of the identity and territory of the United States, regardless of how our hypothetical New Englanders might view the situation. If a few Bostonians want to riot against our cause, well, tough - they're supposed to be Americans, damn it, and if they think we're going to let anyone help them forget that, they're going to be in for an unpleasant surprise. A nuclear surprise, if necessary.

This is why Ukraine is screwed. 

Russia cares about the Ukraine far more than anyone else in the world does, including us. Russia - or at least those currently in power in Russia - are willing to go all in to get what it wants out of the Ukraine because, from their perspective, the Ukraine shouldn't be a country in the first place. Since Russia doesn't have the means to occupy all of the Ukraine, they probably won't, but they'll definitely "liberate" the parts of the Ukraine that are more or less amenable to Russian rule (the Crimea definitely fits) and there's not a thing the Ukraine or anyone else will be allowed to do to stop it. Putin will happily endure any embargo, any diplomatic tut-tutting, in return for bringing the Ukraine back into the fold - and by "happily endure", I mean Putin will happily remind everyone that if they even think of crossing him in any meaningful way on this subject, he'll make it his personal mission to make everyone else on the planet miserable. Russia, for all its myriad problems, still possesses the means to make the world an obnoxiously difficult place - I wouldn't put it past him to release a few nuclear weapons to Iran and North Korea, or at least threaten it behind closed doors should anyone suddenly feel brave enough to stand up to him on this.

To answer the original question - what should the United States do about this - we need to ask ourselves, How far are we really willing to go? In my mind, unless we're willing to go all the way to DEFCON 1, which we're not, we should just close our eyes, cover our ears, and accept that not all stories have a happy ending. Besides, it's none of our business anyway.

GMOs - Evil or Genocidal?

Image courtesy of Stockvault

In what can best be described as a "man bites dog" story, the normally reflexively crunchy-liberal Reno News & Review published as their front page article, "The organic food lie: What's up with this liberal war on science?":

The crowd stretched entirely around the front of the downtown Reno federal building. 

Protest signs attacked transgenic food. “Your food—brought to you by the makers of AGENT ORANGE.” “It’s a SAD day when ’NORMAL’ food is hard to find!” “HELL NO GMOS.” There were also angrier signs attacking Monsanto, and for other causes—Native American, veterans, the National Defense Authorization Act. 

It would have been easy to assume this was a group of flat earthers, and I suspect they were being characterized that way by plenty of observers on this day of coast-to-coast anti-transgenic food protests. But I knew some of these people as smart and sensible. Like a lot of science-oriented people, I didn’t understand why some of them were present. This was another sortie in what scientists have begun calling “The Liberal War on Science.” 

Many in this crowd cite the fact that there’s no known instance in history of death caused by marijuana but endless deaths caused by booze and tobacco. But they reject the fact that no one is known to have ever died from transgenic foods but plenty of people in history have died from natural, organic foods through salmonella, E. coli., etc. “Transgenic” is the scientific term for what activists call genetically modified food or organisms—GMOs. 

Many of those present are frustrated by the refusal of climate change critics to accept the findings of a scientific panel that has examined all the science and found that climate change is real and mostly caused by human activity. But most of them ignore the findings of a similar panel that upheld the safety and usefulness of transgenic foods (www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10977#toc).

Read the whole thing.

The RN&R isn't the first publication to wonder about this - The American Interest has published a number of editorials touching on the irony of "pro-science" liberals suddenly fighting the scientific consensus when it doesn't go their way. However, it's as good of a spot as any to discuss the topic of GMO food labeling.

The argument for mandatory, government-led GMO food labeling goes something like this:

• Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) are poisonous and evil.
• Government requires food producers to label other poisons in their food, so GMOs should be no exception.
• If people learn the truth about what's really in their food, they will stop buying GMO food, Monsanto will go bankrupt, and everyone will buy organic. The end.

This argument, however, assumes a false dichotomy: GMO Frankenfoods vs. All-Natural God & Gaia Fearing Organic Produce (available from Whole Foods or, better yet, the locally owned neighborhood co-op). The truth is, there are actually three kinds of foods:

• GMOs - they require fewer chemical inputs and are thus cheaper!
• Non-GMOs grown with the best chemical pesticides and fertilizers the Green Revolution has to offer, along with all of the well documented environmental side-effects tied to overuse of those chemicals. These were cheap enough to feed India and China in the '70s, and, depending on your age, would be what you or your parents were raised on while watching Scooby-Doo.
• Organic produce, which is more expensive since it produces lower yields per acre.

So, if GMO foods are labeled, people are going to be faced with three choices - cheap GMO-labeled food, slightly less cheap but unlabeled chemical-marinaded food, and already labeled and expensive organic food. Since we know that most people in America shop for food based on price (hence why Walmart's market cap is roughly 10 times Whole Foods'), we can safely assume that, if people actually do avoid GMO foods the way activists hope they will, most Americans will instead preferentially shop for the produce of the Nixon and Reagan administrations. How this will benefit the environment is anyone's guess, especially since we already know full well what high-chemical agriculture does to the environment. 

For that reason alone - without getting into the effectiveness of government food labeling programs, the added costs required to ensure compliance with such a regimen, the wisdom and morality of imposing upper-middle class consumption sensitivities on those least able to afford them, and so on - anti-GMO activists should seriously rethink their strategy if they care about the health and safety of the environment.

In Remembrance of James "Libertarian" Burns

Like many in the Libertarian community, I learned that James "Libertarian" Burns passed away weeks after he actually did so. This wasn't a huge surprise - he's been struggling with some serious health issues for over a year now. Nor was it a tremendous surprise that it took a month to find out about his passing; for someone so consistently outspoken about whatever was near and dear to him, he was a very private individual. Even so, learning of his passing hit me hard. That's why I wanted to kick off his memorial at the Libertarian Party of Nevada's State Convention and why I want to take a moment to reflect on how his life touched mine and how his presence will be missed.

When I first started getting active in the Libertarian Party in Nevada - seriously active at the state level, not just showing up to a few college and local events like I used to - one of the first people that introduced themselves to me at my first state convention was Jim Burns. He handed me a pamphlet, a tri-fold black and white on glossy paper, that detailed in tiny print and unerring exactness what he was going to do if he was elected to President of the United States. It was incredibly detailed, pie-in-the-sky Libertarian true believer agitprop - he was going to end the Fed, abolish all income taxes, eliminate pretty much any and every government agency he could list by name, send all the troops home, you name it. I remember looking through it incredulously. Later in the convention, I watched him attempt to run for Central Regional Representative for the state Executive Committee, only to lose to "None of the Above" twice. He was clearly distraught - here was a man that was campaigning for the 2012 Presidential nomination in 2008 and he couldn't even get elected to a near-meaningless state Libertarian Party position when running unopposed. What amazed me, though, was that, though he was clearly defeated and left not long after failing to secure the Executive Committee seat, his demeanor was not the demeanor of a defeated man. It was clear that he would be back, on his own terms, and ready to say or do whatever he felt needed to be said and done at the next convention.

I was impressed. A little confused, but impressed. I made sure we swapped contact information by the end of the convention.

It didn't take long before he started calling me. In preparation for the 2010 Senate race - the one that Senator Reid ultimately won - Jim Burns started actively campaigning throughout the state well in advance of the nomination convention. Though I didn't personally agree with his particular flavor of Libertarianism - I found it a little too old-school and dogmatic for my personal taste - I appreciated the fact that he was actually asking for my vote, instead of assuming it by default*. Consequently, I supported his efforts even when many around me refused to do so.

I'm glad I did - that loyalty was rewarded and then some.

In 2011, the local Libertarian Party chapter that represented Washoe County was disaffiliated for the second time in three years. In the process, I found myself largely shut out and isolated, in no small part due to some unfortunate choices on my end. One person, however, refused to give up on me and refused to let me give up on myself. That person was James Libertarian Burns. When most people in the Libertarian Party of Nevada refused to talk on the phone with me, he was always ready with a phone call, an inspirational speech, and a call to action. He was not going to let me go silently into the night - not if he had anything to say about it. For over a year, we discussed various harebrained schemes to reclaim the Libertarian Party of Nevada, each more implausible than the last. I knew deep down that all of the plans were doomed to failure - they required considerable capital outlays and a uniquely "libertarian" interpretation of existing campaign finance reform laws - but it didn't matter. Discussing the plans and putting them on the table gave each of us hope and, in the end, that's all that really mattered. That hope, and the circumstances that made that hope necessary, made us allies and brought us together.

It took a while, but our hope eventually paid off. It took our current chair, Brett Pojunis, getting effectively expelled from the Executive Committee himself, but we were finally brought in out of the cold. At our 2013 convention in November, I pushed to place the preamble from Jim Burns' draft bylaws into our own and succeeded:

People should be allowed to live as they choose so long as they neither initiate violence, coercion, nor engage in theft or fraud. We adopt the Statement of Principles of the National Libertarian Party.

It wasn't hard - it was a better preamble than anything anybody else came up with. It encapsulated the ideals and convictions the bylaws were designed to facilitate with the least adornment and effort possible. Even so, when the amendment to place his preamble into our bylaws was passed without objection, the look on his face told me everything that needed to be said - his struggle was done. In the end, he had won.

Looking back, I'm immensely grateful that I was able to help him witness part of his vision coming to life. I'm grateful that I was able to show him that his opinion was respected in the Libertarian Party once more. My only regret was that he wasn't able to continue to witness the hard-earned fruits of his labor of love, if only for a little longer.

James Libertarian Burns, you will be missed. Thank you for everything.

* Unlike major parties, the Libertarian Party chooses its candidates almost exclusively through conventions. Because there are never anywhere near as many Libertarian candidates interested in running for office as there are available partisan offices, oftentimes by several orders of magnitude, Libertarian Party nominations are effectively handed out in a "first come, first serve" manner.

Adventures in the 512 Sector

I'm going to talk for a moment about the importance of testing your backups. When I say you should test your backups, I don't mean just checking to see if the logs said they were successful, or restoring a file or two just to see if you can talk to them. That's a good start, don't get me wrong, but if you really want to find out how good your backups are, you need to try restoring everything, just to see what happens.

I did just that last week, though that wasn't the plan. I was putting together a virtual lab to test some performance issues we're having with a line of business application at work - essentially, I needed to know if the problem was our network hardware, our server software, our PCs, or the software itself. Incredibly mundane stuff. At the same time, I also wanted to find out how hard it would be to migrate our existing VMWare ESX 5 virtual machines to Hyper-V. We're already paying for Windows licensing through our educational Campus Agreement and we're not running a data center, just a couple of servers, so continuing to pay VMWare for maintenance and support is a little wasteful. At the same time, we recently rolled out a Storagecraft ShadowProtect-based backup regimen, and this seemed as good of time as any to find out if I could restore the VMWare virtual machines backed up with this software into a different virtualization technology and what that would entail.

Now, I'm a big fan of ShadowProtect - been using it for years in the field and its hardware independent restore functionality has saved my bacon more times than I'd care to admit. Because of that, I have the system restore procedure pretty thoroughly burned into my retinas:

1. Insert ShadowProtect Recovery CD into destination hardware. Boot to CD.
2. Attach drive that contains backup files.
3. Delete any partitions existing on the destination drive.
4. Create source partitions on the destination hardware.
5. Restore ShadowProtect backups to destination hardware, making sure the Hardware Independent Restore check box is checked.
6. Reboot and, if you're restoring SQL or Active Directory, hit F8, get into DSRM or Safe Mode with Networking, and remove any old network adapters from the device list.

So, the plan was to restore a couple of domain controllers (one of which doubles as a DHCP server), our line of business database server, and then get a couple of virtual Windows 7 hosts to connect to the restored network and do some testing. 

Things went sideways almost immediately.

First, I attempted to over-think the restore - instead of using ShadowProtect's built in drivers for the Hyper-V VMs, I added Hyper-V's drivers to the restore process. That didn't play with with VMWare Tools install that was already on the source VMs, so, upon rebooting, they blue-screened. 

Then I just gave up on thinking entirely. After repeating the restore with just the stock ShadowProtect driver package, I finally got the servers to boot into DSRM or Safe Mode with Networking. Enabled hidden devices, removed the old network cards, installed Hyper-V Integration Services, reboot... blue screen. Turns out VMWare Tools and the Hyper-V Integration Services don't play well together, in no small part because VMWare Tools tells Windows to boot from SCSI, while Hyper-V only supports SCSI boot in very narrowly defined circumstances.

Okay, fine. Perform the restore one more time, this time uninstalling VMWare Tools on the domain controllers while working in DSRM and disabling VMWare Tools using msconfig for the SQL server. Reboot. SQL server comes back to life without any issue; the domain controllers, however, blue screened again with the following error message:

STOP: c00002e2 Directory Services could not start because of the following error: 

A device attached to the system is not functioning. 

- Error Status: 0xc0000001

Well, that's new. I reboot the domain controllers back into DSRM and check the event log. There, in the Active Directory log*, was this:

Error: the log file sector size does not match the current volume's sector size (-546)

After a bit of sleuthing and running across this article on Exchange 2010 issuing the same error, along with this article on using VHDs on large capacity drives, it dawned on me - I was restoring to VHDXs, which report 4k byte sector sizes from backups that were performed from a 512 byte sector sized virtual drive. So, I converted the domain controller VHDXs to VHDs, mounted the VHDs as boot volumes, and then started the virtual machines.

Success!

The moral of the story, long as it is, is this - if you're using ShadowProtect to back up your virtual machines and you're restoring into another virtual environment:

• Uninstall or disable the previous virtual host's integration tools as soon as possible.
• Make sure you're restoring to a virtual drive with the same byte sector size as the host drive.
• Test your backups before things go wrong so you can get your environment-specific wrinkles documented and sorted out.

* I'm running from memory here. Unfortunately, I don't have the server sitting in front of me, so I'm not entirely sure which error log I checked specifically.