Starvin Larry

Years ago, I saw the movie Timeline, itself an adaptation of Michael Crichton’s novel of the same name, and I was struck by one very profound insight in the otherwise atrocious film. Superior knowledge is not superior intelligence. Or put more appropriately: our predecessors were not morons.

In the film (and, I presume, the book as well), a band of time travelers wind up stuck in 14th century France, and find that all of their supposedly superior knowledge is useless. Only one man manages to utilize his future knowledge effectively at all, and that only gains him employ (quasi-slavery, really) as a weapons designer for a warlord. Think for a moment what you would really do if you were cast into the 14th century and left to fend for yourself. How much of what you know would be useful at all? Could you even survive?

Read the Meditations by Marcus Aurelius and try to come away from it with the notion that you’re a smarter man than he. And even where the ancients were demonstrably wrong, ask yourself very carefully if you, having been brought up in their time, would have done any better.

Contrary to the common belief that mankind is locked in an endlessly progressive trajectory, where each day humanity’s collective wisdom ever-increases, I suspect it has actually done the opposite.

Read the whole thing  @ Declination  here

Links to previous 3  parts…

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

The idea of Constitutional enforcement has been an undercurrent in American politics for a long time, almost as long as the Constitution has been in force.  Lysander Spooner in his essays entitled “No Treason” was not the first person to point out this issue, nor was he the last. Yet after over 200 years of increasingly obvious issues with the Constitution, we still have no enforcement clause.

Moreover, very few people are discussing what I consider to be the single most egregious flaw in the Constitution.  Neither Michael Farris in his push towards an Article 5 Constitutional Convention nor Mark Levin in his book “The Liberty Amendments” promote Constitutional ENFORCEMENT, preferring rather to propose adding still more unenforceable amendments to an unenforced, and unenforceable Document.  The only person I know that pushes the idea of enforcement of the Bill of Rights and the Constitution as the highest law of the land is Neil Smith.  Despite endless lip service about Constitutional Government, few people out of government, and nobody  at ALL in government seems to actually want to enforce The Document.  Why is that?  Cui Bono?

Well, not having an enforcement clause sure makes looting the taxpayer a lot easier, and it also makes it a lot easier to “enact a multitude of laws and eat out our substance.”  A country like ours, where over half of the people working actually work for one governmental agency or another, either directly or indirectly, does provide considerable incentive for those folks to vote in favor of keeping their jobs funded.  Enacting an enforcement clause is going to be damned difficult to do;  enforcement of the Constitution will break lots of rice bowls.  Both the Demopublicans and Republocrats see significant benefit in maintaining the illusion of legitimacy provided by the present myth.

Oddly enough, however, given the things the ruling oligarchy in this country have recently done, like having our military parade in red high heels and importing large numbers of 7th century barbarians in the hope that Western civilization will benefit therefrom,  I’m hopeful that the right combination of stimuli can make the average American politician vote for damned near anything, as long as the carrot of re-election is dangled temptingly enough in front of them.  But in any case, before we get hung up on the “how,” let’s think first about what an enforcement clause ought to look like.  So what should an Enforcement Clause do?  I have been thinking about this over the last two years, and here are my thoughts:

Read the whole thing @ Views From Liberty Hollow  here