Quote:

"I have opinions of my own - strong opinions - but I don't always agree with them." - George W. Bush

Sounds like a symptom of introspection. I like it.

----------

Never trust a computer with anything important.

Consent for a Government can be withdrawn at any time, and not just at elections.

Greed for power does not equate with a withdrawal of consent.

For example in Romania in early 2012, consent was withdrawn, and the Government was overthrown.

The replacement Government proved to be those with a greed for power, and did not last 6 months.

Similarly Egypt. Consent was withdrawn, and the Muslim Brotherhood proved to be driven by a greed for power. So consent was withdrawn.

Et-bloody-cet-bloody-ra.

Until power is swept off the table and placed permanently out of reach, under the Rule of Law, consent will continue to be withdrawn. It's not a question of 'if', it is only a matter of 'when'.

----------

If the State was a Nanny, it would have been fired for incompetence, unreliability, and having its hands in the till, a very long time ago now.

Ribbit wrote..

Until power is swept off the table and placed permanently out of reach, under the Rule of Law

You realize that in all of human history, this has never been accomplished on permanent or even durable basis, right?

-Uwe-

----------

Uwe, any government made up of people is going to go wrong eventually. The only question is how long it will take. Doing the things that Ribbit has proposed can slow down the going wrong, but there is nothing that can prevent a group of people from taking and abusing power ... except another group of people who are willing to stand up to them, with force when necessary.

We haven't had that ``another group'' in this country for a very long time.

I was taught that slavery was on its way out due to technology. What I did not learn, or actually understand, was how much the Federal Government was dependent on Southern taxes until just a few months ago.

We drove to Vicksburg for a vacation this summer. The memorial park there had a damn victory mosque erected from Chicago. You read the brochures about how the park was supposed to be a monument to reunited brothers. All I saw was a bunch of "in your face" to the impoverished South. Many of those old veterans were still alive when it was built. Can you imagine the humiliation?

Another thing I noticed was how poor Mississippi is. You go to the old Court House museum in Vicksburg and you can see a bit of the other side of the story of the war. I was always taught what a vicious racist Jefferson Davis was. No mention was ever made of the worse racist talk from Lincoln's lips or how Davis was more like Washington. And it was shocking to see how wealthy Vicksburg was at the time! Those days are long gone and Davis's hometown was well and truly punished. And now Mississippi is nothing but a welfare state. Jackson, the capitol, leaches off whatever productivity is there. The Jackson museums were full of the usual lies and a healthy dose of Marxism.

Sometimes it feels like everything I was ever taught was a lie and I grew up in a mere echo of the United States.

FYI, if you want to vacation in Mississippi, try Natchez. It is charming and Vicksburg can be a daytrip. Every single person I met there was super friendly and I am from Texas, a friendly state already!

----------

Math is a Bitch and she don't care. - R.U.A. Slave
Man plans and God laughs.
We're not voting our way out of this.
Winter is coming but Spring will follow.

It's always about power and about "who watches the watchers?"

You cannot have a rule of law without sufficient power to enforce it.
But then, what prevents the enforcers from breaking the law?
Anyone who would control them, by the same logic, needs even more power. And so on.

Ultimately, paper doesn't stop people. Power cannot be placed out of reach.

Standby for another can of kiss-ass (opened quite willingly)
and maybe a ban hammer splat too ...

Because what we all know about Denninger's stuff is that on whatever subject the man addresses, you're gonna get a deep drill down on it.
Sort of an "inside baseball" version of the subject matter again whatever the subject matter might be. It's what I love about clicking the thread link.

But sometimes Karl gets so deep into the woods he can miss the trees all around him.

Yeah there were more reasons than one for the War Between the States aka The War of Northern Aggression.

But perception is reality and 99.9 percent of ALL Ame-ricans when they hear the words Civil War think it was fought over slavery.

Me included. And tho I'm sure plenty of M-T.o readers know more about that tragic bloody blunder than I, I have read up a bit on it over the years.
And visited the hallowed ground in the southeastern corner of Pennsylvania.
It is a sobering, disquieting, humbling but most of all, sad, place.
All the cannon smoke and deafening noise and fear and anger and blood and gore and WASTE of young men's lives.

A digression if you will ... How Lee gave that order to Longstreet to give to Pickett I will never understand. That order was a XXXKING War Crime. I admire Longstreet for delaying relaying it.

But bottom line: American Civil War & Slavery. They're linked forever.
And - no offense - rightly so.

Peace.

----------

PacificNW the hill on which I make my stand. Scout party member Trail Of Tears 2.0

Perception is NOT reality, particularly not if you're interested in avoiding making the same mistake twice!

----------

I've read an economic analysis of the conditions leading up to the Civil War. (Can't find it on my bookshelves. Too many piles of books and not enough organization.) One thing that I remember from it is the vulnerability of the North to the black market if the South seceded successfully. The North would have ended up with a tremendously long border that would have to be patrolled to prevent untaxed goods from entering the country. And high tariffs would guarantee that goods would enter the North through that border.

----------

Village Idiot

If perception were reality, conspicuous consumption would make you rich.

Lies can affect peoples' actions, but cannot change the underlying reality. You can ignore reality, but not the consequences of ignoring it. So we get to Karl's point that if we fail history we are doomed to repeat it.

I just recently went over this point about the actual causes of the war of northern aggression with with my middle child, who is now in high school. She is not a scholar, so I wound up getting her a little pamphlet titled A Confederate Catechism. It did a pretty good job of laying out the issues we've seen in this thread, at a level an intelligent but incurious teen can access. My oldest is more scholarly, and has read some of the original sources, but the English of 1840 through 1880 isn't accessible to most Americans today.