Wow! Lest Darkness Fall is 99 cents? I have a hardbound copy - want to get one for my Kindle! ( Iam in the middle of rethinking Kindle accounts right now).

Jan

I saw a crucifixion explained presentation on the History Channel two or three years ago.
I've also read that victims were provided a little slack so they were forced to pull with their impaled hands/wrists and push up with their impaled feet in order to breathe.
Sometimes victims were impaled through the ankles on both sides of the support beam or post. I kinda felt a shudder go through me when I learned that.

It is an overlooked classic, knowledgeably and capably written. I am glad that you are enjoying it.

Jan

One of the foundations for Rome's demise was their dependence on plunder through military conquest. Their "greatness" was similar to the "greatness" of the Egyptians - it was unsustainably built upon slave labor - the worst combination of coercion and looting.

If I were Merlin giving advice to Marcus Aurelius, I would be telling him that Rome was doomed to fall without a wholesale ideological change. I would tell him it wouldn't happen in a day or a year, but it would culminate in a massive societal breakdown.

Crucifixion is generally hailed as one of the culminations of every form of torture imaginable short of burning and its invention is generally attributed to the Romans. The subject is simultaneously:

- impaled: stakes were commonly driven through either the hands or wrists (and sometimes both) but also the feet simultaneously (the feet being placed on top of each other). The stakes were of such size that they forced the bones in the feet and wrists apart, causing tremendous pain.
- sensory-deprived: the large nails were usually driven through the nerve centers in the wrists, severing or crushing their connections to the fingers.
- dehydrated/starved
- strangled - the arms were suspended at an angle that inhibits breathing. In order to struggle for breath, the subject would be forced to push up on the impaled feet.
- sleep-deprived: in addition to the pain from the constant agony of impalement and strangulation, there was no way to relax or rest as every movement caused agony

A subject of crucifixion was in constant, unbearable torture - sometimes for days. Many died from inflammation in the lungs and subsequent asphyxiation. Others died from shock. Not a pleasant way to go.

Agreed. Take a look at each of the first ten basic Amendments and one doesn't have to look far to see their infringement in the Federal Government. Then go look at the effects of several other Amendments and the consequences of each:

12th Amendment basically ensconces political parties by gutting the effects of a Presidential Impeachment and Conviction.
14th has been perverted to imply that non-citizens should enjoy the same rights as citizens.
15th has been used to bludgeon Southern States into getting their voting precincts overseen by a Federal elections board.
16th institutes the personal income tax. As soon as they did this they enabled a whole host of side-effects including the incentive for inflation, graduated tax rates to disincentivize producers and enable moochers, political persecution of dissenting opinions, government confiscation of money without due process, etc.
17th neuters the States as a check on a rampaging Federal Government. The Senate was always supposed to represent the States - not the People. As a result, States have nearly lost their sovereignty and Nullification ability.

Then there is the Commerce Clause, the Necessary and Proper Clause, the General Welfare Clause and many others which have been perverted to further the growth of government.

I find it interesting that he is a professor of chemistry. I'm a technical guy. I find that it's the technical people, not the "poli-sci" types, who ask the tough questions.

Thanks, a couple of comments. Not sure business is much admired today, certainly not in popular media, academia, the left, or by much of the political class. Also, maybe it was not termed "capitalism", but in Rome there was some trade going on, the foundation of capitalism. Third, a virtuous government encourages liberty, and protects individuals from injury. Regulation that accomplishes that is moral, regulation that mitigates freedom and/or benefits one individual or group at the expense of another is immoral. Simply put, if you look at regulations like traffic rules, including stop signs and signals, they should benefit our safe and free passage from one location to another, should facilitate more freedom. Excessive lights, stop signs or other traffic regulations that mitigate our mobile freedom, are excessive laws and at the expense of freedom.
Finally, maybe we are different in the oil patch, but when we meet we don't talk about how to tilt the playing field. We talk about getting the government out of the way, so we can fight fairly and compete in the free marketplace.

We can change the channel, but we are forced to send our kids to "Their" schools. And "They" control all formal education.

The Roman empire fell for the same reason the Pax Britannica and Pax Americana ended -- the empire was unable to maintain its lead in fighting technology over the rest of the world -- thus making it expensive to maintain dominance, and cheap to resist. What we have now is what we saw just before WW1 -- cheap tech that everybody knows about and that lots of sides can and will use. This is why I believe the next world war is close at hand.

I'm not at all sure who will win, but I'm not optimistic. Both the US and Europe have become police states that the average person isn't willing to defend.

There is probably a real answer to that: Has individual and non-conforming opinion increased or decreased since the Internet? I would suspect that it has functionally 'increased', since the Internet allows one to find low-incidence opinions in other parts of the world and interact with them.

Jan, typing in the Gulch

This is quantum mechanics, not free speech, MichaelA. OUCarl is talking about a Schrodinger's Cat sort of situation where someone could potentially time travel back into the past and change it, but only if he did not bring with him the knowledge of the original outcome.

Jan

There are various classes of 'parts that did not work'. Some things that were known at the time to be problems but were glossed over, some things that were not thought of.

If I had a re-write coupon for the Constitution, I would add things such as a 'definitions' page: man = sentient being (irrespective of race, religion, species, gender); tax = money taken by force for use by any level of government (including fees, permits, tariffs, etc); war = any encounter to which the US sends men or equipment for other than health related purposes.

I would also add that all government departments must use good accounting practices, those budgets are on public record annually; no bill may be modified in any respect after it is voted on; any public vote for an allocation of money for a particular purpose must be used for that purpose, even if it is not specifically so stated in the individual bill; all judgements are subject to appeal, even if the individual regulations do not include an appeal process.

Jan

You are right. I have a fairly good level of security against burglars; I can take a few easy steps and get to a decent perimeter against rioters/looters (I am waaaay out in the boonies of LA County, so not likely to get much of that). What I cannot defend against is 'tanks'. When the guys with the tanks come, I have to cave...which is what this Gulch is all about.

Your emails have inspired me to increase the priority for 'gates across my main driveway', however. I used to have some gates there [insert long story] but now do not. I will see if I can rectify that again, since having them really does help in perimeter security.

Jan

Thanks, Bbrigham, I appreciate the perspective, as I used to share it. If you read the histories offered here, though, you will see that our civilization is much different from Rome's in being a bourgeois society. In Rome, business was not admired. Conquest was. They did have merchants; every society does. But they had no capitalists, because capitalism had not been invented yet -- and it was not a social virtue. In other words - and one of Ayn Rand's main points - productive work was not a personal virtue. For us, it is.

It is easy to blame the government. I will not stop you from that. However, I do point out that early in The Wealth of Nations Adam Smith writes that seldom does any group of tradesmen meet for dinner without discussing how to restrict commerce for their own benefit.

I do not know enough about the technology, but it seems to me that all these wifi hotspots, and the fact that you can see your neighbors' home networks indicates that even if the "Internet" were locked down, people could link up ad hoc, eventually, all around the globe. In Africa, "everyone" has a cell phone and those who do not can pay some pennies to those who do for a few minutes' use. Telephone time is an alternative currency on the street. Just sayin'

... In fact, it may be that becoming totally interconnected is the new danger on the event horizon: one planet, one mind...

Thanks for the point. See my new topic, "Welcome to the Information Age."

Whether it's population growth, and alarmist fears of associated demands on agriculture, or other resources such as oil have been common. However, free men with cognitive ability and rational self interest innovate for higher productivity. Such innovation renders the bell curve overly simplistic, in the case of oil horizontal drilling and fraccing grew the resource (area under the curve) to a multiple of that imagined by Hrubetz. Though I'm not a historian I suspect Rome was afflicted by the same disease as our modern civilization and so many prior. Societies that embrace free trade then facilitate specialization which compounds value and generates prosperity, which we have in spades. Over time government, as a bureaucracy naturally seeks to grow, and ultimately in cooperation with aligned special interests colludes and coerces to plunder the society, ultimately at the expense of liberty and prosperity.

"Your crime is your happiness." There goes another, "I wish I had said that. And I will." There's the old psychologist phrase about the person who fights hard for an incorrect premise would "Rather be right than be happy."

And I prophesied that one of the companies I'd worked for was in a downward spiral when I'd left, but I acknowledged that a big company is a bit like a Big Flywheel spinning... it may take a surprising amount of time for it to succumb to internal friction and Stop.

Look at the continual devaluation of the US currency since some of those early events... and current complaints of how slow 'the wheel turns for many citizens today...' !