Day: July 11, 2022

Insurrection Act Of 1807

Since the failed coup by insurrectionists on 06 January 2022 there has been lots of concern over the actions of a few…..and of course that made me think about history….there was a time when the president was in fear of a popular insurrection against the government of the nearly formed American government…..and he did something about the rise of insurrection…..

There has been some recent talk in Congress about changing the Insurrection Act of 1807. This act empowers the president to send federal troops to quash “any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy.”

Although altering the law has been caught up in the politics surrounding the end of the Trump administration, when the administration considered invoking it several times in 2020, the statute has always been dangerous, is outdated and unneeded, and should be either completely repealed or amended to restrict severely presidential actions.

In 1807, President Thomas Jefferson signed the congressional legislation when rumors abounded that the scurrilous Aaron Burr, his former vice president, was raising a personal army. During American history, it has since been used to send active U.S. military forces to both support and impair civil rights and quell a riot. In the latest case, President George H.W. Bush used federal forces to quell the 1992 Los Angeles riots in the wake of the acquittal of four policemen in the beating of Rodney King.

Yet one of the major fears of the nation’s founders—which continued well into the 20th century but has now been forgotten—was the dread that a standing military would impair Americans’ liberty. Because of the anxiety in American society about the depredations of the British military on civil liberties before the American Revolution, George Washington, the first president, had trouble getting Congress to give him enough forces to fight Native Americans on the frontier.

Only after two major defeats at the hands of the Indians did Congress even marginally increase the U.S. Army. And this skepticism of a standing military lasted through the 19th century and well into the 20th century. It was American tradition that when a war was over, most of the U.S. military demobilized—even after the sizeable conflicts in the Civil War, World War I and World War II.

https://www.independent.org/news/article.asp

If you are interested there is more background on this attempt by Jefferson…..

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/insurrection-act-explained

https://www.history.com/news/insurrection-act-thomas-jefferson-aaron-burr

This is the law that Trump was considering to use to try and stop the count of the electorate ballots…..lawful exercise of government.

This law needs a major overhaul…..but that is for another day because there is too much plaguing the nation for this to be a concern.

Class Dismissed!

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”

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Dawning Of The ‘Age Of Stupidity’

There has got to be a song in there somewhere……

This new ‘Age’ has been a long time coming….although the basics have been rumbling around since about 1980…..and in the last dozen years it has become a full blown epidemic.

The stupidity has invade all aspects of our government and people….but for this post I will basically write on our foreign policy…..

The role of stupidity in determining the course of history is often underestimated by historians. They neglect it as too crude and shallow a factor to be the cause of crucial events, preferring to unearth more sophisticated and intellectually respectable explanations. Calling a leader “a fool” may be pervasive as abuse, but is seldom accepted as the underlying reason for a calamitous decision.

This is surely a mistake. “Never lose your sense of the superficial,” said the newspaper publisher Lord Northcliffe and his advice applies as much to historic trends as it does to daily news. Yet pundits like to feel that they are digging deeper than a personal failing, and seldom focus on plain and simple stupidity as the reason why leaders make unforced errors.

This kind of individual inadequacy is not equally present in all periods and it may be that in some eras the scope for chronic blunderers to do damage is higher than in others. It was certainly high in 1914, for instance, when dim-witted leaders such as Kaiser Wilhelm 11 in Germany, Tsar Nicholas 11 in Russia and the Austro-Hungarian monarchy were making the decisive moves leading to a European war that more intelligent leaders might have avoided as being much against their interests and putting at risk the future of their regimes.

The Age of Stupidity: From Johnson and Biden to Putin and Xi Jinping

After all the wars that were a failure….and yet the rhetoric is to prepare for yet another war we will suck at in the future.

Both Russia and the US have poked at each other over time until Ukraine has to pay the price…..now we are poking the Sleeping Dragon that is China….right now it is over Taiwan….

How much longer will this ‘stupidity’ continue?

Well my guess is it will not end any time soon….as linger as the Congress and the White House can be bribed this will continue until this country is completely bankrupt and the people living in squalor so the oligarchs can have their yachts and free money from the government….

I wish I could live long enough to see a government ‘of the people and by the people’…..but that is a lie that will not be achieved in my lifetime.

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”