Topic: "New" regulations, Fish & Wildlife

[Pandora]

This category is titled "Politics/Legislation/Elections"; we really need another / followed by Regulations.

... Every day in this country tyranny's whimsy descends on some law-abiding person out of the blue. You buy an imported vintage car, and you wake up with Homeland Security agents surrounding your home and confiscating your property. This weekend it was two of my fellow Granite Staters - 17-year-old Campbell Webster and Eryk Bean, of Concord, New Hampshire.

Instead of enjoying meth and twerking like normal well-adjusted teens, they like bagpipes. Master Webster comes from a long line of bagpipers: his father Gordon was pipe-major for the 1st and 2nd Batallion the Scots Guards and personal piper to the Queen. So he passed on the 1936 family bagpipes to his son, and young Campbell uses them to play in pipe championships in North America and around the world. So this weekend he was returning to New Hampshire from a competition in Canada, which is how a newspaper story comes to open with a sentence never before written in the history of the English language:

    BAGPIPERS have expressed their fear over a new law which led to two US teenagers having their pipes seized by border control staff at the weekend.

They can chisel that on the tombstone of the republic. On the northern border, bagpipers are "expressing their fear", while on the southern border gangbangers have no fear and stroll through the express check-in. Putin has no fear of American power, the mullahs have no fear of American power, the Chinese politburo has no fear of American power, ISIS has no fear of American power, but the world's bagpipers fear it, and with good reason.

The figleaf of a pretext for seizing Messrs Webster and Bean's bagpipes is what The Scotsman (as usual, any real news about America has to be gleaned from the foreign press) calls "new laws" introduced a month ago. By "laws", they don't mean something passed by the people's representatives in a legislature - there's not a lot of that going on these days - but a little bit of regulatory fine-tuning by some no-name bureaucrats at the Department of Paperwork. The upshot of which is that, if you own a vintage bagpipe containing ivory and you wish to take it to a competition in Montreal, you have to get a Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) certificate from the US Fish & Wildlife Service.

Got that? You have to get your musical instrument approved by Fish & Wildlife.

Oh, but Messrs Webster and Bean were on top of that. They'd gone to Fish & Wildlife, gotten their CITES certificates, and presented them to the US Customs & Border Protection agent upon returning to the United States via a Vermont border crossing (presumably either Highgate or Derby Line, both of which I use frequently).

At which point the Commissar of Bagpipes said, "Ah, yes, the CITES certificate is valid but..."

Here it comes, boys and girls! Stand well back; it's the Bollocks of the Day from your friendly all-American Bureau of Compliance:

"The CITES certificate is valid but...it's only valid at 38 designated ports of entry." And this wasn't one of them. So he confiscated the bagpipes.

Why don't they just put a big sign up on the border? "US Government Paperwork Not Accepted At This US Government Border Post."

So Customs & Border Protection will wave through "unaccompanied minors", but if the minor's accompanied by a bagpipe the guy in the full Robocop will seize it and tell the kid he's "never going to see them again". And then the Robocop goes home having done a full and rewarding day of work.

Americans should be ashamed at what Mark Levin calls the "decomposition of the country". In all manner of areas from banking and health care to bake sales and bagpipes, US citizens now enjoy less freedom than those of countries they regard as socialist basket cases. When I've said as much before, I get emails from readers saying, "Ah, yes, but we have the First Amendment and the Second Amendment." But they're meant to be bulwarks against tyranny, so, if you never actually use them to defend liberty, eventually they have no more real-world meaning than all the theoretical freedoms listed in the Soviet constitution. It's easy to say, "I don't do home-baking. Or buy imported cars. Or play bagpipes" - or whatever next week's provocation is. But by the time they come for something you value, it will be too late. As Mark Levin says, "It's gonna get worse. It's not gonna get better."

[Glock32]

I'm guessing that is Steyn?  Sounds like him. 

And yes, it's an outrage.  I'm reminded of this video I just watched the other day.  I found it linked from WRSA.  The thrust of it is that our real problem is not so much the order givers as it is the order followers.  Yes, we rightly assign blame to the statists of both parties, and the state propagandists in the media.  But those statists would have nothing if they didn't have literal armies of obedient order followers.  Who is the border agent that would seize these kids' property, even though they had the correct paperwork (itself a ridiculous requirement) simply because the paperwork did not specify the precise border crossing?  You could do this stuff day in, day out, and have respect for yourself, proud of being an unthinking automaton?


Order Followers

[Pandora]

Steyn it is.

What the hell country do we live in that these kids even had to get government approval for the re-entry of their 80 year-old instruments just because they have ivory on them?  To have to worry in the same way about antique guitars because the provenance of the wood cannot be determined?

It's only the blind order-followers, it's the entities who have deigned to impose on us this way via their gawdam regulations.

[Alphabet Soup]

I'd love to take my musical instruments out of the country.........and never return.

[richb]

My dad collected a walrus tusk back in the 1960's when in the Air Force in Alaska.   It has an etching by an Eskimo artist on it.   They used to keep it displayed,  and everyone who comes in the house noticed it since it was hard to miss.   But due to the Obama regime and its attitude to items like it,  they decided that was no longer a good idea for people (even friends) to see it anymore.   So its been packed up and stored in a non disclosed place.    Maybe someday it can be displayed again,  but it won't be seen until at least Barry is out of office.   They know that even items collected before it was verboten is no longer grandfathered.