As idiotic as these protesters are, the "rummaging" and "rifling" slant on this story is trying pretty hard.

Aside from their ill-conceived, unjustified armed occupation, don't the idiots have at least a tiny point about the poor preservation of those artifacts?

@Drachen_Jager

thats a pretty piss poor analogy.
while i can agree (and did in my original comment) that the militia is,by definition,engaging in terrorism.

i cannot agree to killing these men.

and to compare them to ISIS is a bit of a stretch.

1.they are american citizens.they are sovereign.ISIS are not.
2.while there has been an occupation of land,there has been no evidence of violence nor brutality.ISIS is notoriously brutal and violent.
3.while violence may be implied.they have consistently called this a protest against government over-reach and do not seek a violent resolution.ISIS not only threatens violence but engages on a daily basis.
4.when we consider incidents such as waco or ruby ridge,where there WAS government over-reach with tragic results.the federal governments tactics of standing down makes sense,and is fairly non-controversial and prudent.these nimrods are about to be run out of town by the very community they are proposing to be standing up for.

so how would YOU propose to deal with the situation in oregon?

Technically, the constitution allows the "United States" to own land. It does not name the government as an owner.

The government of the United States is not the United States. Being a republic, the United States is its citizens.

The government is a manager/caretaker of state's (people's) property, not an owner of property in and of itself.

Technically, the government doesn't even have any authority of its own. It's strictly a body that executes the state's (people's) will, and it does so by the state's (people's) authority - not its own authority (hence the Democracy part). (Officially, the government does nothing of its own accord - hence why in court it's 'the state vs whoever', not 'the government vs whoever').

So, technically, there is no 'government property' - there is only state (people's) property.

Actually, the reason that 'eminent domain' is 'eminent' (i.e. obvious - aka 'obvious domain') - is because the land has always belonged to the state - because the state is the only authority. You never actually own your personal land, you're simply entitled to be the sole occupant. You can buy/sell that right, but the land always has, does, and always will, belong to the state. So under eminent domain, the land is not actually taken from you, because it never belonged to you, hence why the state's domain is eminent (obvious).

In any case, land has this weirdness to it, where all land is state land, and everyone is the state, and no land is private, and all that ever happens is people are bestowed an authority to exclusively manage/reside on a given plot that they never really own. In any case, that authority ends up being functionally equivalent to actual ownership. The phrase 'if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck' comes to mind, because when you have a body of case law that treats property as if private property actually exists, then in a sense, it does exist for all practical purposes - so there is a disconnect between the practical nature of 'land ownership' and the official/ideological nature of 'the state (the people) having authority over all at all times'.

Also, this is why you can't have an allodial land title in the U.S.. So long as it's still U.S. land, it can never truly be privately owned. It's simply incompatible.

Interestingly, way back when before the U.S. was founded, private ownership of land was associated with monarchy - where some royal(s) individual(ly) literally owned the country. The path of events that eroded royal authority and empowered lower levels of society, was the same path that eroded [true] private land ownership, because it introduced the concept of inherent ownership/rights of some other groups (e.g. the people).

-scheherazade

Sadly, it really doesn't matter what they call them, because the term terrorist has become meaningless. I've said this all the way back when GWB "declared war on vague abstract concept"

The definition stated earlier is not wrong, but you can use that term for just about anything. Americans were terrorists against the British when we revolted. We also had the audacity to not march shoulder to shoulder against the Brits as was the standard for every "civilized" army back then.

The only difference is who wins and who loses. if you win, you're a revolutionary. if you lose, you're a terrorist. and if you're white, you're a militia group.

This was a calculated move by the terrorists though. I think they deliberately picked some piece of shit building of no value that no one cared about and was unused, made sure they didn't kill anyone but yet still forcibly occupied it with weapons. It's a dare...it's an attempt to goad. They want the feds or police to go in guns blazing. They want suicide by cop because it will ultimately benefit them and gain sympathy for them. They took something that is completely inconsequential other than it was owned by "the gub'mint"

The Fox pundit thinks they're peaceful? armed occupation is peaceful now? Just because they haven't physically hurt anyone doesn't make them peaceful. They stopped being peaceful the instant they picked up their weapons.

Love all the usual buzzwords and sound bites from the fox pundit without any actual specifics. Once again, who specifically is this "left wing media?" They never actually say who. more accusations of "big gov't" without any specifics. They keep talking about these intrusions into our lives, but yet, can't seem to name them.

All fear, no concrete issues. Standard geriatric (that means old, bob) Fox audience.

BWAAAHAAHAAAHAAHAAA!!!!!!!
I just love all the safety gear, food, and water safely hidden and completely inaccessible under the sturdy (to support a dropping mattress with occupants, it must be thick and unbreakable) dropping floor plate and your mattress. You can die in peace in your sealed, impenetrable metallic coffin knowing your salvation is unreachable a mere 6 inches below you.
Amazing level of *fail

These videos are pretty stupid. Geography is largely irrelevant to most people's lives and therefore qualifies as trivia. It's like asking someone how many bytes are in a kilobyte or how many bits are in a byte except that's actually relevant since knowing those things will help you see past the marketing BS of ISPs and hard drive makers.

Different people know different things and someone isn't automatically "stupid" because they don't know random facts that serve no purpose in their occupations or daily lives.

Is this our future? No more public gatherings? All it takes is a phone call and an abandoned suitcase. They don't even have to blow themselves up any more.

Sidenotes:

1. I learned there is a thing called a "friendly." Football is such a shared thing, you don't even have to say the noun. The adjective is enough.

2. Silly story -- I live in a small town that for years had only one prefix on the phone numbers. 385. Folks wouldn't even give the entire phone number. If your number was 385-1234, you'd just say 1234. The town grew, fax machines came into vogue, and they had to add a prefix 379 to handle the increased need for phone numbers.

But old habits die hard, yeah? I'm a 385-1234. The new assistant police chief got 379-1234. Guess who got his phone calls all the time? Because people were on autopilot when dialing?

Folks would leave a message on my answering machine and I would pass it on. After all, I knew his phone number.

My favorite message for a long time was this: "Hi Connor. This is Jim. Ted tells me you have the key to City Hall." Such a small town, I knew the occupations and last names of everyone named in that message. Still cracks me up.

My most favorite message, though, is the last one I ever got. "Connor, just wanted you to know that the bomb squad has been called. An abandoned suitcase has been found at the Post Office." Well! Talk about breaking news! I passed on the message, per usual.

There must have been bloody hell raised at the police station about such sensitive info being left on the wrong answering machine, because I never got another wrong number about official police business.

I love how stories build.

Obviously there would still be trials and investigations. Circumstances like self-defense and accidents would still be considered and evidence would still be a necessity. But instead of a slap on the wrist or pointless prison sentences (keeping people in prison is a colossal waste of money), the sentence for convicted criminals would always be death. This would be a pretty effective deterrent for people posting death threats on Facebook or Twitter.

This isn't an all or nothing situation. Adopting death sentences doesn't mean that we have to abolish the entire judicial system and become a fascist state that persecutes people without reasonable justification. Truth is, fear of death is a pretty compelling reason not to break the law and people who pose a physical threat to others should be punished accordingly.

As for custodians, I'm sorry if I offended you but it doesn't change the fact that the occupation is seen as undesirable by the vast majority of people. Nobody says "I want to be a janitor when I grow up!" It may pay relatively well and have flexible hours but the work itself is tedious and unpleasant. Granted, there are a lot of jobs that are tedious and unpleasant but when given the choice between being a janitor or an office worker, 99.99% of the population would choose the office job. Janitors are a necessity but nobody would ever want to be one if other options with equivalent pay were available.

The article linked above mentions Röpke and Eucken as champions of free market capitalism, so to speak. Ironically, Bernie Sanders is quite in line with many of Walter Eucken's core ideas. For instance, Eucken declared legal responsibility to be an absolute necessity for competition within a market economy. Meaning that under Eucken's notion of capitalism, US prisons would be filled to the brim with white collar criminals from Wall Street and just about every multinational corporation, including Volkswagen.

Ludwig Erhard, credited by many to be the main figure behind the German "Wirtschaftswunder" (nothing wonderous about it), postulated real wage growth in line with productivity and target inflation as an imperative for a working social market economy. Again, very much in line with Bernie Sanders. Maybe even to the left of Sanders. A 5% increase in productivity and a target inflation of 2% requires a wage increase of 7%, otherwise your economy will starve itself of the demand it requires to absorb its increased production. You can steal it from foreign countries, like Germany's been doing for more than a decade now, but that kind of parasitic behaviour is generally frowned upon. Minimum wage in the US according to Erhard would be what now, $25-$30? So much for Sanders' $15...

Sennholz further mentions the CDU as a counterweight to the SPD. Well, the CDU's "Ahlener Programm" in 1947 declared that both marxism and capitalism failed the German people. In fact, it put significant blame for Germany's descent into fascism at the feet of the capitalistic system and called for a complete restart with focus NOT on the pursuit of profit and power, but the well-being of the people. They called for socialism with Christian responsibility, later watered down and known as social market economy or Rhine capitalism.

As for the economic policies conducted by the occupation forces: German industry, and large corporations in particular, were shackled for the role they played during the war. If you work tens of thousands of slaves to their death, you lose your right to... well, anything. If they had stripped IG Farben, Krupp and the likes down to the very bone, nobody could have complained. No economic liberties for the suppliers behind a genocide.

Next in line, the comparison with Germany's European neighbours. Sennholz wrote that piece in '55, so you can't really blame him for it. Italy had more growth from '58 onwards, France had more growth than its devastated neighbour from '62 onwards. The third Axis power, Japan, had significantly more growth from '58 onwards.

Why did some European and Asian countries grew much more rapidly than the US? Fair Deal? Nope, Bretton-Woods. Semi-fixed exchange rates caused the Deutsche Mark and the Yen to be ridiculously undervalued compared to the Dollar, thus increasing German and Japanese competitiveness at the cost of the US. Stable trade relations created by the semi-fixed exchange rates plus the highly expansive monetary policy in the US – that's what boosted Germany's economy most of all. Sort of like China over the last two decades, except we were needed as a bulwark against the evil, evil Commies, so the US kept going full throttle.

Our glorious policians tried the same policies (Adenauer/Erhard) in East Germany after reunification, even though global conditions were vastly different, and the result is the mess we now have over there. The entire industry was burned to the ground when they set the exchange rate too high, thus completely destroying what little competitiveness remained. Two trillion DM later, still no improvement. A job well done, truly.

Anyway, if anything, Bernie Sanders' program is closer to post-war German social market economic principles than to the East-German bastard of socialism, state capitalism and planned economy imposed by an autocratic system. However, even that messed up system produced significantly less poverty, both in quality and quantity, than the current US corporatocracy. No homelessness, no starvation, proper healthcare for everyone – reality in the German Democratic Republic (East Germany). And despite the fact that they were used as cheap labour for western corporations, no less. My first Ikea shelf was produced by our oppressed brothers and sisters in the East. The Wall "protected" the West from cheap labour while letting goods pass right through – splendid membrane, that one.

PS: Since that article was written in '55, I have to mention one of my city's most famous citizens: Otto Brenner. He was elected head of the IG Metal, this country's most influential trade union, in 1956 after having shared the office since 1952. The policies he fought for, and pushed through, during his 16 years in charge of the union are very much in line with what Sanders is campaigning for.

Without knowing more, I don't have a lot of sympathy for the "sportsman" who may well have chummed the water and had lines out. The shark was just being a shark, and no danger to the kayak, nor its occupant. He should have just pulled in his line and left, enjoying the company of a beautiful wild animal.

I would say that example is a false dichotomy. You're never going to find a case in Palestine or elsewhere in the world that someone blows themselves up purely for the religious reasons. There are clearly political and social motivations at play in every terrorist attack.

This relates directly to my main point though. Some some pundits want to use a suicide bombing in the West Bank as proof that Islam is "evil" or "dangerous" without addressing the elephant in the room--that the Palestinians are living in the world's "largest open-air prison" (to use Chomsky's words) and are resisting what they see as occupation of their lands in any way they can. It is no where near as simplistic as the "Muslims good/infidels bad cuz Koran says so" argument that some people seem to want to make.

And let's be clear, I'm not saying there aren't passages in the Koran that are being interpreted by Hamas and others as justification for the use of terrorism as an acceptable form of resistance. I'm saying this isn't unique to Islam. During the height of fighting in Northern Ireland both sides were using the Bible to justify the car bombs, assassinations, and other violence that occurred during The Troubles (another complex conflict where religious, political, and social issues intertwined). Yet I think you'd be hard-pressed to find someone who would claim that Christianity is "evil" or "dangerous" based on what went down in Northern Ireland. It is a great example, though, of how any organized religion can be mobilized to support evil acts.

It really depends on your occupation, I suppose.

When I worked in the game industry we had monthly deadlines that had to get met or the publisher would pull their funding and the developer would go belly up. Sometimes we could meet those deadlines comfortably. Sometimes things would go wrong and we'd have to sleep at our desks or be out of a job because the company wouldn't be there in the morning if we didn't get the work done.

Other occupations, like firefighting, have the opposite problem--lots of downtime with sudden intense bursts of activity.

But I suppose any job that is a typical 9-5 gig could benefit from examining what the companies in this video have done.

A collision with two cars head on with a combined impact speed of 200km/h is not actually equivalent to this test at all. If you do the math you actually work out that two cars each travelling at 100km/h hitting head on generate the same forces on their occupants as a single car hitting a fixed barrier at 100km/h. (reference, sadly light on mathematical proof)

The 5th gear test at 193km/h resulted in occupant deceleration of 400g (100g is survivable, although you can expect injuries such as detached retina, and I have heard of someone surviving 179g). Robert Kubica's accident resulted in a peak g-force reading of 75g.

It will all be mine... MINE... the pitiful occupants of this miniscule blue orb we KNEEL before me...

Soon...

Yes... very soon...

Since you all know I'm a cop (because I'm not afraid of admitting it), please list your occupations below so that I can find videos of people in your occupations misbehaving, so then we can all criticize and generalize about everyone in your profession.

thank you