One of the best summaries of Rights – particularly the 2nd Amendment – I’ve ever seen.
Steel on target from a Constitution-loving hard rocker:
<a href=https://video.search.yahoo.com/video/play;_ylt=A0LEVkAVzhBV_hMAAi4nnIlQ;_ylu=X3oDMTBsa3ZzMnBvBHNlYwNzYwRjb2xvA2JmMQR2dGlkAw–?p=ted+nugent%2C+rights&tnr=21&vid=B7E246A05390B57A1F6BB7E246A05390B57A1F6B&l=198&turl=http%3A%2F%2Fts1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DUN.607999243128341000%26pid%3D15.1&sigi=11r81kv10&rurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DqUexKY8Blew&sigr=11b62r633&tt=b&tit=Ted+Nugent+on+Gun+Control+-+Some+Of+The+best+Words+Ever+Spoken&sigt=11uiqimvm&back=https%3A%2F%2Fsearch.yahoo.com%2Fyhs%2Fsearch%3Fp%3Dted%2Bnugent%252C%2Brights%26ei%3DUTF-8%26hsimp%3Dyhs-002%26hspart%3Dmozilla&sigb=130uammvo&hspart=mozilla&hsimp=yhs-002"Ted Nugent"
Captain Ned, the PROPER Bible was written in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. I can’t think of any thees and thous in any of those. I’m kinda fond of the NIV.
March 24, 2015 at 5:57 am
GWB
The NIV is alright. A better one (without so much effort put into making it copyrightable) is the ESV – English Standard Version. But most actual modern translations are better than the KJV because they come from the Hebrew/Aramaic and the Greek, not from the Vulgate version.
(None of the Bible was written in Latin. The “standard” version of it for a few centuries was the Latin Vulgate, however. It wasn’t from the best sources, though.)
March 23, 2015 at 10:52 pm
B Woodman
Christ also said to the effect to tolerate to 70 x 7 (=490, or, a lot). I think we’re at #489. All it will take is one or two more, we’re at our limit.
March 24, 2015 at 8:51 am
MAJMike
Certainly this is so. However, I believe that Christ would admonish us to start over again with our forgiveness.
That said, I’m not sufficiently Christ-like.
March 24, 2015 at 8:32 pm
B Woodman
AMEN! Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!
March 23, 2015 at 10:58 pm
B Woodman
And of course the Libtard statists think everything comes from gubberment (the state), this is their religion. They worship themselves.
March 23, 2015 at 11:52 pm
Wayne M
I don’t know about you guys but the left hand feels like someone else…!
Can I get a rimshot?
March 24, 2015 at 4:38 pm
Crotalus
Bah dump dump kssshh.
March 24, 2015 at 12:23 am
canuck49
Man’s Individual Rights do not come from either god or government but from his nature as a rational and volitional being.
As a reasoning being he must be free to pursue his chosen values and must be free to keep such values as he can freely earn. For a more complete explanation follow the URL below.
I shall ignore the opinion of one described as a “raging anti-Christian”, as is my right, and stick with knowing men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
March 24, 2015 at 5:57 am
Leo AutoDidact
Ah, “Faux Intellectualism” arguing against the PERSON, instead of the PRINCIPLE.
March 24, 2015 at 6:58 am
kadaka
That would be Argumentum Ad Hominem, arguing the person.
Principle:
Man’s Individual Rights do not come from either god or government but from his nature as a rational and volitional being.
Thus insane irrational people have no rights. There are scores of profoundly mentally handicapped people who have no rights. Then there are those with dementia or other brain damage who lose their rights, once they stop doing rational things of their own volition. Etc.
“Faux Intellectuals” like to quote Nietzsche, but don’t read his works for context, don’t try to understand the author.
Likewise Ayn Rand is good for quotes, some concepts. But the person themselves, doesn’t seem very likable, I don’t like their worldviews. I’m sure Mein Kampf could probably yield some good phrases too, but knowing what I know of the author, I choose not to read that either.
March 24, 2015 at 6:04 pm
canuck49
You really need to get a copy of The Ayn Rand Lexicon. You would be able to read for yourself that A.R. was neither Nietzschian nor Libertarian. She described herself as a Radical for Capitalism and that her battle was primarily against irrational ideas.
She said that she was glad that the Lexicon had been published because people would be able to look up babies and discover that she did not eat them for breakfast.
March 24, 2015 at 9:46 am
interventor
Not a follower of Rand. However, she experience communism in its worst visage, As a writer, she described the disease of leftism rather well. Didn’t have the cure, but was a good epidemiologist.
March 24, 2015 at 1:46 am
Snafu F. Ubar
maverickphilosopher, Pinker vs. Gray (& “Trotsky’s Faith”) :
“The ‘progressive’ doesn’t believe in God, he believes in Man. …”
“(Belief in Man) is a sorry substitute if not outright delusional. … The failure to grasp this is of the essence of the delusional Left, … But right here is the mistake. … The Enlightenment spoke piously of reason, but the light it casts is flickering and inconclusive … ”
” … Because there is no such thing as The People, ‘power to the people’ is an empty and dangerous phrase and a cover for the tyranny of the vanguard or the dictator. The same goes for ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’ What it comes to in practice is the dictatorship of the dictator. …”
Skye swam with hungry sharks to get where she is; and what she is is lucky to have fallen in with this lot. I hope rattlesnake chili has a curative effect. BTW, what goes well with r…s chili?
March 24, 2015 at 8:29 am
B Woodman
Le’s see. . . . would rattlesnake be considered a white meat, therefore pairing with a white wine or a rose’?
Or do you consider the chili, and pair it with a heartier red?
Choices, choices, decisions, decisions.
March 24, 2015 at 9:47 am
interventor
Chili and Indian food — best with a good cold beer,
March 24, 2015 at 10:42 am
John M
Dos Equis… or Corona – Mexican beer with Mexican food. (or quasi-Mexican food)
Both are horrible. It’s almost as bad as getting a can of Tecata. Ummmm… nah!
No, the beer has to bite back to offset the chili. I’m not a fan of IPA’s, but I think they might go better with the chili.
And, to answer B Woodman, if you do wine it’s also gotta be hearty to marry the tomato & beef base of the chili. So, I’d stick with a spicy Cab. 😉
March 24, 2015 at 6:16 pm
Pamela
Tequila
March 24, 2015 at 8:37 am
eon
“The ‘progressive’ doesn’t believe in God, he believes in Man. …”
Ultimately, the progressive believes only in his own perfection.
Hunter S. Thompson once said (re the Jesus Freak movement of the early 1970s)
“Entire empires have been destroyed by vengeful freaks claiming a special relationship with God”.
I’m sure he would have put this Islamists in that category as well.
But HST forgot the deadlier part.
The equal number of polities destroyed by even more vengeful freaks who believed that they, themselves, were God. Or at least the only equivalent to same that did, or could, exist.
Once someone convinces themselves that there is no higher power that they will ever have to answer to for their deeds, there is a great temptation to default to Anton Szandor LaVay’s dictum of the Satanist church;
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
To put it bluntly, they can operate on the principle of “as long as I can escape retribution for what I do here on Earth, I’m home free”.
In the past, this has made a lot of “socially progressive” types very dangerous. To the tune of about 100,000,000 dead in the 20th Century alone.
Sam, an agnostic, is open to the possibility of God in an infinite Universe. Which puts her squarely in the corner of Blaise Pascal (Google “Pascal’s Bargain” or “Pascal’s Wager”). And she lives her life accordingly.
The “I am the ultimate possible power” types are a very different breed indeed. And unlike Sam, Zed, & Co., they do not make comfortable neighbors.
cheers
eon
March 24, 2015 at 8:35 pm
B Woodman
Sounds like you’re describing Obaomao.
March 24, 2015 at 9:22 am
Bad Cyborg
Mr/Ms Fubar, not having back to Sweetwater (Tx, home of the largest rattlesnake roundup in the world) in a great while I can’t say for certain but I would suspect that beer (likely Lone Star or possibly Coors) is what usually is consumed with most rattler-based dishes. Perhaps wine is consumed in some places, but as a rule, folks who eat rattler chili (or rattleburgers, rattlerb-strips and suchlike) are just down-home country folk and as such likely to eschew hoity-toity crap like wine.
March 24, 2015 at 11:43 am
Don Edwards
Replying to a couple earlier posts…
Re Pascal’s Wager: Pascal erred in assuming that if there is a God, it must be the Catholic Christian version of God. There are only about a thousand alternatives in circulation. At least two others of whom promise eternal damnation if you pick the wrong one or try to worship more than one.
Re hoity-toity wine: I would mention that making wine is easier than making beer. (Making good wine/beer may be a different matter. Or may not. I’ve never tried to do either.) That is of course assuming ready availability of cheap ingredients, which is affected by climate and the primary reason why medieval Brits drank beer while their Mediterranean counterparts drank wine.
March 24, 2015 at 2:32 am
kadaka
Engineer Sam can’t figure out a better way to stir a pot for hours? Wow, you’re really limiting which of her natural talents you allow her to display.
Next time have her cook outside over a fire pit, use a windmill to directly drive the stirring mechanism. That’s what windmill power is good for, stirring chili pots, soup pots, eco-funding money pots…
March 24, 2015 at 5:49 am
Bill G
Wind is a variable source, so is a fire. Too uneven for cooking without attention, just as wind is too fickle for electricity on a constant basis.
Never having cooked snake I don’t know if there’s a reason a crockpot can’t be used, but it’s my choice for chili.
March 24, 2015 at 8:42 am
eon
Leonardo da Vinci came up with a rotary roasting spit powered by the rising hot air off the fire via gears and a belt drive, driven by a horizontal fan in the chimney. The hotter the fire, the faster the hot air rose, the faster the fan turned, and the faster the spit turned, thus avoiding a burnt roast. An early example of a feedback governor.
I bet Zed could come up with something similar. If not, there’s always a larger version of a Wianco stirrer for a lab setup…..
cheers
eon
March 24, 2015 at 9:50 am
interventor
Germans have Christmas decorations based on that. About two hundred years ago,, they used a treadmill driven by a dog to turn meat on a spit over an open fire.
March 24, 2015 at 10:13 am
kadaka
An early example of a feedback governor.
But the roast turning faster as the flames get hotter, can lead to a carbonized shell around undercooked meat. Heat travels inward at a certain rate, you can incinerate an outside while the inside is still frozen.
Better to use a fire pit or stove construction (high sides, a not-wide top exhaust hole with cooking grate) with a fixed bottom air inlet. Then use a fresh air damper, some sort of normally-open cover plate that closes down when suction increases, kept open just enough by spring or gravity. Fire gets hotter, draft increases, damper restricts combustion air and fire cools.
March 24, 2015 at 12:02 pm
RegT
With Leonardo’s set-up, the hot air rising off of a cooking pot would not generate enough force to produce the torque required to move the gears connected to the stirring mechanism. You would need at least a small version of a windmill catching a strong enough actual wind.
March 24, 2015 at 5:51 am
Bill G
‘Handoff’? So, Skye slid out of kitchen detail for stirring. But I can’t figure what she is doing, now. Scrubbing potatoes? Forming cookies?
March 24, 2015 at 8:33 am
B Woodman
“When the Constitution was man-made.”
The Constitution was WRITTEN by man, but is NOT man-made. It is the codification (look it up, Shiner) of God-given or Natural rights.
March 24, 2015 at 8:51 am
eon
The rights codified in the Constitution were really nothing more than the God-given rights accepted in English common law. It says a lot for how far the Crown had strayed from tradition that the Founders felt that their new nation needed them to be written down.
Not so the populace would understand them, but so that future governments, at all levels, would understand that “this far shall you go, and no farther.”
Somehow, I get the impression that, as RAH once said of reporters, there are a great many people in government today who are incapable of reading a simple declarative sentence for what it is, without “interpreting” it to suit themselves.
We don’t need a new or “different” Constitution. We need a better quality of government employees (both elected and CS) to run things according to the one we already have.
cheers
eon
March 24, 2015 at 9:20 am
Snafu F. Ubar
Like someone said, I need to get out more…
RAH is? CS is?
Thanks.
March 24, 2015 at 9:30 am
Bad Cyborg
RAH = Robert A(nson) Heinlein i.e. one of the most influential (arguably THE most influential) science fiction writers of the 20th Century.
March 24, 2015 at 1:01 pm
kadaka
CS is Civil Servant, even when not civil or not servile in attitude.
(Took me awhile to figure that one out BTW).
March 24, 2015 at 9:22 am
Chris Muir
This.
March 24, 2015 at 9:52 am
interventor
Common law, plus magna carta and Roman Republic law.
March 24, 2015 at 12:06 pm
RegT
Eon, what we need is a strong enough _punishment_ for those in government who don’t abide by the Constitution. Pubic whipping would be a good start, but for transgressions like those of Obama, I’m thinking hanging from a convenient lamppost.
March 24, 2015 at 8:41 pm
B Woodman
Where’s that infinite Klein bottle, to keep the politicians, reporters, and writers in? (which book was that from? To Sail Beyond The Sunset Seas? or The Cat Who Walked Through Walls?)
March 24, 2015 at 9:03 am
JTC
The left hand may not know (or understand) what the right hand is doing, but for better or worse the reverse cannot be said.
Unfortunately there is an apparent disconnect between knowing about it and doing something about it.
Oh, and about rights; God gives and man taketh away. Simple, but oh so complex.
March 24, 2015 at 10:02 am
Bad Cyborg
Man CANNOT “take away” another’s rights. He can VIOLATE said rights but no man can take away any other’s rights. The Constitution enumerates certain rights which the founders considered worthy of special protection but no document can grant rights.
Government has no rights – only power. As such it can neither grant nor bestow them. One of the truths which the founders considerer to be “self evident” is that the sole purpose of government is to SAFEGUARD rights.
March 24, 2015 at 10:13 am
JTC
BC, re-read my first two paras to see that “man” can and does take away rights unless and until the process is stopped and reversed by whatever means are necessary. That is/has happened some, 2A being a glowing if incomplete example. But if you think “we” have and enjoy all the rights we are born with and that were enumerated by the Framers, you ain’t paying attention; there are many forms of “taking” and gov in its many guises, far from safeguarding them, is tireless in that quest, in my view for the most nefarious and Godless reasons.
49 Comments
hmmm…the theology of chili…yummmmm
Is Sam becoming a Christian?
More like what Grunt GI said,I think…
One of the best summaries of Rights – particularly the 2nd Amendment – I’ve ever seen.
Steel on target from a Constitution-loving hard rocker:
<a href=https://video.search.yahoo.com/video/play;_ylt=A0LEVkAVzhBV_hMAAi4nnIlQ;_ylu=X3oDMTBsa3ZzMnBvBHNlYwNzYwRjb2xvA2JmMQR2dGlkAw–?p=ted+nugent%2C+rights&tnr=21&vid=B7E246A05390B57A1F6BB7E246A05390B57A1F6B&l=198&turl=http%3A%2F%2Fts1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DUN.607999243128341000%26pid%3D15.1&sigi=11r81kv10&rurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DqUexKY8Blew&sigr=11b62r633&tt=b&tit=Ted+Nugent+on+Gun+Control+-+Some+Of+The+best+Words+Ever+Spoken&sigt=11uiqimvm&back=https%3A%2F%2Fsearch.yahoo.com%2Fyhs%2Fsearch%3Fp%3Dted%2Bnugent%252C%2Brights%26ei%3DUTF-8%26hsimp%3Dyhs-002%26hspart%3Dmozilla&sigb=130uammvo&hspart=mozilla&hsimp=yhs-002"Ted Nugent"
Okay – mea culpa for fragging up the HTML.
Here’s the link without it:
https://youtu.be/qUexKY8Blew
(hey, I’m a grunt, not an IT tech……LOL)
From the proper Bible (at least to me):
But when thou doest alms, let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth
Captain Ned, the PROPER Bible was written in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. I can’t think of any thees and thous in any of those. I’m kinda fond of the NIV.
The NIV is alright. A better one (without so much effort put into making it copyrightable) is the ESV – English Standard Version. But most actual modern translations are better than the KJV because they come from the Hebrew/Aramaic and the Greek, not from the Vulgate version.
(None of the Bible was written in Latin. The “standard” version of it for a few centuries was the Latin Vulgate, however. It wasn’t from the best sources, though.)
Christ also said to the effect to tolerate to 70 x 7 (=490, or, a lot). I think we’re at #489. All it will take is one or two more, we’re at our limit.
Certainly this is so. However, I believe that Christ would admonish us to start over again with our forgiveness.
That said, I’m not sufficiently Christ-like.
AMEN! Praise the Lord and pass the ammunition!
And of course the Libtard statists think everything comes from gubberment (the state), this is their religion. They worship themselves.
I don’t know about you guys but the left hand feels like someone else…!
Can I get a rimshot?
Bah dump dump kssshh.
Man’s Individual Rights do not come from either god or government but from his nature as a rational and volitional being.
As a reasoning being he must be free to pursue his chosen values and must be free to keep such values as he can freely earn. For a more complete explanation follow the URL below.
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/individual_rights.html
Ah yes, Ayn Rand, the Nietzsche of libertarians.
I shall ignore the opinion of one described as a “raging anti-Christian”, as is my right, and stick with knowing men are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
Ah, “Faux Intellectualism” arguing against the PERSON, instead of the PRINCIPLE.
That would be Argumentum Ad Hominem, arguing the person.
Principle:
Thus insane irrational people have no rights. There are scores of profoundly mentally handicapped people who have no rights. Then there are those with dementia or other brain damage who lose their rights, once they stop doing rational things of their own volition. Etc.
“Faux Intellectuals” like to quote Nietzsche, but don’t read his works for context, don’t try to understand the author.
Likewise Ayn Rand is good for quotes, some concepts. But the person themselves, doesn’t seem very likable, I don’t like their worldviews. I’m sure Mein Kampf could probably yield some good phrases too, but knowing what I know of the author, I choose not to read that either.
You really need to get a copy of The Ayn Rand Lexicon. You would be able to read for yourself that A.R. was neither Nietzschian nor Libertarian. She described herself as a Radical for Capitalism and that her battle was primarily against irrational ideas.
She said that she was glad that the Lexicon had been published because people would be able to look up babies and discover that she did not eat them for breakfast.
Not a follower of Rand. However, she experience communism in its worst visage, As a writer, she described the disease of leftism rather well. Didn’t have the cure, but was a good epidemiologist.
maverickphilosopher, Pinker vs. Gray (& “Trotsky’s Faith”) :
“The ‘progressive’ doesn’t believe in God, he believes in Man. …”
“(Belief in Man) is a sorry substitute if not outright delusional. … The failure to grasp this is of the essence of the delusional Left, … But right here is the mistake. … The Enlightenment spoke piously of reason, but the light it casts is flickering and inconclusive … ”
” … Because there is no such thing as The People, ‘power to the people’ is an empty and dangerous phrase and a cover for the tyranny of the vanguard or the dictator. The same goes for ‘dictatorship of the proletariat.’ What it comes to in practice is the dictatorship of the dictator. …”
Skye swam with hungry sharks to get where she is; and what she is is lucky to have fallen in with this lot. I hope rattlesnake chili has a curative effect. BTW, what goes well with r…s chili?
Le’s see. . . . would rattlesnake be considered a white meat, therefore pairing with a white wine or a rose’?
Or do you consider the chili, and pair it with a heartier red?
Choices, choices, decisions, decisions.
Chili and Indian food — best with a good cold beer,
Dos Equis… or Corona – Mexican beer with Mexican food. (or quasi-Mexican food)
Both are horrible. It’s almost as bad as getting a can of Tecata. Ummmm… nah!
No, the beer has to bite back to offset the chili. I’m not a fan of IPA’s, but I think they might go better with the chili.
And, to answer B Woodman, if you do wine it’s also gotta be hearty to marry the tomato & beef base of the chili. So, I’d stick with a spicy Cab. 😉
Tequila
“The ‘progressive’ doesn’t believe in God, he believes in Man. …”
Ultimately, the progressive believes only in his own perfection.
Hunter S. Thompson once said (re the Jesus Freak movement of the early 1970s)
“Entire empires have been destroyed by vengeful freaks claiming a special relationship with God”.
I’m sure he would have put this Islamists in that category as well.
But HST forgot the deadlier part.
The equal number of polities destroyed by even more vengeful freaks who believed that they, themselves, were God. Or at least the only equivalent to same that did, or could, exist.
Once someone convinces themselves that there is no higher power that they will ever have to answer to for their deeds, there is a great temptation to default to Anton Szandor LaVay’s dictum of the Satanist church;
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
To put it bluntly, they can operate on the principle of “as long as I can escape retribution for what I do here on Earth, I’m home free”.
In the past, this has made a lot of “socially progressive” types very dangerous. To the tune of about 100,000,000 dead in the 20th Century alone.
Sam, an agnostic, is open to the possibility of God in an infinite Universe. Which puts her squarely in the corner of Blaise Pascal (Google “Pascal’s Bargain” or “Pascal’s Wager”). And she lives her life accordingly.
The “I am the ultimate possible power” types are a very different breed indeed. And unlike Sam, Zed, & Co., they do not make comfortable neighbors.
cheers
eon
Sounds like you’re describing Obaomao.
Mr/Ms Fubar, not having back to Sweetwater (Tx, home of the largest rattlesnake roundup in the world) in a great while I can’t say for certain but I would suspect that beer (likely Lone Star or possibly Coors) is what usually is consumed with most rattler-based dishes. Perhaps wine is consumed in some places, but as a rule, folks who eat rattler chili (or rattleburgers, rattlerb-strips and suchlike) are just down-home country folk and as such likely to eschew hoity-toity crap like wine.
Replying to a couple earlier posts…
Re Pascal’s Wager: Pascal erred in assuming that if there is a God, it must be the Catholic Christian version of God. There are only about a thousand alternatives in circulation. At least two others of whom promise eternal damnation if you pick the wrong one or try to worship more than one.
Re hoity-toity wine: I would mention that making wine is easier than making beer. (Making good wine/beer may be a different matter. Or may not. I’ve never tried to do either.) That is of course assuming ready availability of cheap ingredients, which is affected by climate and the primary reason why medieval Brits drank beer while their Mediterranean counterparts drank wine.
Engineer Sam can’t figure out a better way to stir a pot for hours? Wow, you’re really limiting which of her natural talents you allow her to display.
Next time have her cook outside over a fire pit, use a windmill to directly drive the stirring mechanism. That’s what windmill power is good for, stirring chili pots, soup pots, eco-funding money pots…
Wind is a variable source, so is a fire. Too uneven for cooking without attention, just as wind is too fickle for electricity on a constant basis.
Never having cooked snake I don’t know if there’s a reason a crockpot can’t be used, but it’s my choice for chili.
Leonardo da Vinci came up with a rotary roasting spit powered by the rising hot air off the fire via gears and a belt drive, driven by a horizontal fan in the chimney. The hotter the fire, the faster the hot air rose, the faster the fan turned, and the faster the spit turned, thus avoiding a burnt roast. An early example of a feedback governor.
I bet Zed could come up with something similar. If not, there’s always a larger version of a Wianco stirrer for a lab setup…..
cheers
eon
Germans have Christmas decorations based on that. About two hundred years ago,, they used a treadmill driven by a dog to turn meat on a spit over an open fire.
An early example of a feedback governor.
But the roast turning faster as the flames get hotter, can lead to a carbonized shell around undercooked meat. Heat travels inward at a certain rate, you can incinerate an outside while the inside is still frozen.
Better to use a fire pit or stove construction (high sides, a not-wide top exhaust hole with cooking grate) with a fixed bottom air inlet. Then use a fresh air damper, some sort of normally-open cover plate that closes down when suction increases, kept open just enough by spring or gravity. Fire gets hotter, draft increases, damper restricts combustion air and fire cools.
With Leonardo’s set-up, the hot air rising off of a cooking pot would not generate enough force to produce the torque required to move the gears connected to the stirring mechanism. You would need at least a small version of a windmill catching a strong enough actual wind.
‘Handoff’? So, Skye slid out of kitchen detail for stirring. But I can’t figure what she is doing, now. Scrubbing potatoes? Forming cookies?
“When the Constitution was man-made.”
The Constitution was WRITTEN by man, but is NOT man-made. It is the codification (look it up, Shiner) of God-given or Natural rights.
The rights codified in the Constitution were really nothing more than the God-given rights accepted in English common law. It says a lot for how far the Crown had strayed from tradition that the Founders felt that their new nation needed them to be written down.
Not so the populace would understand them, but so that future governments, at all levels, would understand that “this far shall you go, and no farther.”
Somehow, I get the impression that, as RAH once said of reporters, there are a great many people in government today who are incapable of reading a simple declarative sentence for what it is, without “interpreting” it to suit themselves.
We don’t need a new or “different” Constitution. We need a better quality of government employees (both elected and CS) to run things according to the one we already have.
cheers
eon
Like someone said, I need to get out more…
RAH is? CS is?
Thanks.
RAH = Robert A(nson) Heinlein i.e. one of the most influential (arguably THE most influential) science fiction writers of the 20th Century.
CS is Civil Servant, even when not civil or not servile in attitude.
(Took me awhile to figure that one out BTW).
This.
Common law, plus magna carta and Roman Republic law.
Eon, what we need is a strong enough _punishment_ for those in government who don’t abide by the Constitution. Pubic whipping would be a good start, but for transgressions like those of Obama, I’m thinking hanging from a convenient lamppost.
Where’s that infinite Klein bottle, to keep the politicians, reporters, and writers in? (which book was that from? To Sail Beyond The Sunset Seas? or The Cat Who Walked Through Walls?)
The left hand may not know (or understand) what the right hand is doing, but for better or worse the reverse cannot be said.
Unfortunately there is an apparent disconnect between knowing about it and doing something about it.
Oh, and about rights; God gives and man taketh away. Simple, but oh so complex.
Man CANNOT “take away” another’s rights. He can VIOLATE said rights but no man can take away any other’s rights. The Constitution enumerates certain rights which the founders considered worthy of special protection but no document can grant rights.
Government has no rights – only power. As such it can neither grant nor bestow them. One of the truths which the founders considerer to be “self evident” is that the sole purpose of government is to SAFEGUARD rights.
BC, re-read my first two paras to see that “man” can and does take away rights unless and until the process is stopped and reversed by whatever means are necessary. That is/has happened some, 2A being a glowing if incomplete example. But if you think “we” have and enjoy all the rights we are born with and that were enumerated by the Framers, you ain’t paying attention; there are many forms of “taking” and gov in its many guises, far from safeguarding them, is tireless in that quest, in my view for the most nefarious and Godless reasons.