Maggie's Farm

My wife and I have done about 500 miles of the AT, through Georgia and the Carolinas. The longest was a four day trek+camping ..I feel your pain......what stretch did you hike? Did you camp? Encounter any black bear? See any trees?

I won't ask if it was worth it .. you may be hurt'n but I bet you're smil'n too!

Great Job

THOSE OLD BONES WE PICK

Most Americans who give any thought to how are nation is run and who are not heavily sedated most of the time end up with a bone or two to pick with the government.

I'd like to go after two very well entrenched bones of our contention with government that need another good gnawing. The first is judicial review.

We have three coequal branches of goverment, that's COEQUAL meaning no branch has more weight than another. And yet since almost from the the beginnig of our nation, 1803, in the case of Marbury versus Madison, the "fact,precedent,entitlement" has obtained to the Judicial Branch that it shall have the power to rule on what is law and what is not law i our country. Will of the people in Congress be damned, along with the concurrent signature of the President. Five judges can negate the work of the other two branches. The Constitution provides the Judicial Branch with no such power.

In fact in setting up the Constitution the Congressal form and function was first, the Executive second, and the Judiciary third. This was done specifically because the Founding Fathers recognised that the first two were more important in governing the country eqiutibly than the Supreme Courts role in doing so. Judicial review is not mentioned in the Constitution and yet over the past two hundred plus years the will of the people can and often is twarted by five justices. And not to their finest hour as we see in cases such as Dred Scott.

What brings me to this subject is the recent FISA laws and their need for revision in fighting terrorism. A judge, yes that's A JUDGE whose name we still do not know decided that the constitutional protections of our people extend overseas to potential terrorists, whose "right of privacy" might be violated by an intercept. Well there is no "right of privacy" mentioned in the Constitution for one and IF by some chance they was when did our Constitution become the supreme law of the planet?

The Constitution states in Article III that:

“ The judicial Power of the United States, shall be vested in one Supreme Court, and in such inferior Courts as the Congress may from time to time ordain and establish… The judicial Power shall extend to all Cases, in Law and Equity, arising under this Constitution… ”

Because it is Congress that ordains and establishes both the Supreme Court and inferior Courts, it can from time to time change the number of justices, their responsibilities and the rules whereby cases come into the jurisdiction of the various courts. The Judiciary can't review a case unless the Congress has ordained a rule that a court can use to process it. Congress has not granted that power.

There it is, Congress establishes the Courts, all except the Supreme Court. They could just as easily abolish all lower courts and we would have only a Supreme Court. Yet the Supreme Court receives many of it's cases from the lower courts. Judicial review is a usurpation of the Supreme Court of the Power of the Congress and the Executive Branches to debated,pass, and sign into law the laws we live under.

In the case of FISA,national security, and the changes in tecnology this is more evident that ever. As stated previously at this writing we do not even know the NAME of THE judge that extended our Constituational rights to terrorists on foreign soil. Judicial review needs to be thrown out.

The other bone I am still gnawing on and will produce the shards when I've finished.
Best
Habu

To dilate on the above gnawing given to judicial review allow me to quote from James Hamiltion, writing as Publius to the People of New York in explaining the proposed Constitution during it's debate for ratification. This appears in Federalist Paper #78, Saturday , June 14th 1788 in The Journal.

Whoever attentively considers the different departments of power must perceive, that, in a government in which they are separated from each other, the judiciary, from the nature of its functions, will always be the least dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution; because it will be least in a capacity to annoy or injure them. The Executive not only dispenses the honors, but holds the sword of the community. The legislature not only commands the purse, but prescribes the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated. The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments

( I would recommend reading the entire #78 for it illuminates the limitations of the Judiciary nicely)

Errata:

Seems I managed to originate an entirely new Founding Father in the person of James Hamilton, whom I'm sure would have been a slendid addition to the other good chaps but nonetheless never made a mark on the Federalist Papers.

Federalist # 78 was written by Alexander Hamilton.

"I'll take mythical Founding Fathers for $500"

What boob invented the Founding Father James Hamilton?

"Who is Habu?"

You still have the board .....

"I'll take tubers for $1000"

The Judiciary,the Commerce Clause, and the Magic Castle

In Los Angels there's a nightclub called the Magic Castle where very good amateur magicians highlight their stuff.
See the stiff ,unbendable cane one minute and poof, the next it is a a beautiful Hermes scarf, light, diaphaneous , and very pliable. It's just that you never saw it there prior to it's appearance. Thus is the Delphic nature of our Supreme Court.

We have a document, our Constitution, along with it's meaning as outlined in the Federalist and anti-Federalist Papers, not to mention the copious Farrand notes. But miraculousls the Supreme Court can "find the hidden Easter Egg" in the meaning of some part of the Constitution, turing the stick into the Hermes scarf.

One of the most fertile areas for this assault by the Supreme Court on the states and the constitution lies in it's ability to devine "a truer meaning" or discover The "Dormant" Commerce Clause, also known as the "Negative" Commerce Clause, which refers to certain implications of, or inferences from, the Commerce Clause of the United States Constitution (Wiki).

I sincerly hope that another "unknown federal judge" doesn't rule that we are violating the rights of terrorists under the commerce laws to containerize and ship from foreign ports to US ports nuclear bombs, chemical weapons, and other death dealing instruments because it would violate the"Stick to Hermes Scarf Dormant law" the rest of us can't see in the written Constitution.

THE WAY WE USE TO DO IT..IT WAS DECISIVE AND BETTER

Japan bombs Pearl Harbor Dec 7, 1941 in a sneak attack.
Bad, very,very bad.

USA drops atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Aug 6, 1945 after dropping leaflets telling everyone to get out of town.

USA forced to repeat process over Nansaki Aud 9, 1945

Japan gets message and surrenders. WWII ends.

Better, much better.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LKX2B5Jq8lY&mode=related&search=

Remember Worries About Global Cooling
Why scientists find climate change so hard to predict.

Oct. 23, 2006 - In April, 1975, in an issue mostly taken up with stories about the collapse of the American-backed government of South Vietnam, NEWSWEEK published a small back-page article about a very different kind of disaster. Citing "ominous signs that the earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically," the magazine warned of an impending "drastic decline in food production." Political disruptions stemming from food shortages could affect "just about every nation on earth." Scientists urged governments to consider emergency action to head off the terrible threat of . . . well, if you had been following the climate-change debates at the time, you'd have known that the threat was: global cooling.

More than 30 years later, that little story is still being quoted regularly—as recently as last month on the floor of the Senate by Republican Sen. James Inhofe, chair of the Environment and Public Works Committee and the self-proclaimed scourge of climate alarmists. The article's appeal to Inhofe, of course, is not its prescience, but the fact that it was so spectacularly wrong about the near-term future. Even by the time it appeared, a decades-long trend toward slightly cooler temperatures in the Northern hemisphere had already begun to reverse itself—although that wouldn't be apparent in the data for a few years yet—leading to today's widespread consensus among scientists that the real threat is actually human-caused global warming. In fact, as Inhofe pointed out, for more than 100 years journalists have quoted scientists predicting the destruction of civilization by, in alternation, either runaway heat or a new Ice Age. The implication he draws is that if you're not worried about being trampled by a stampede of woolly mammoths through downtown Chicago, you don't have to believe what the media is saying about global warming, either.

But is that the right lesson to draw? How did NEWSWEEK—or for that matter, Time magazine, which also ran a story on the subject in the mid-1970s—get things so wrong? In fact, the story wasn't "wrong" in the journalistic sense of "inaccurate." Some scientists indeed thought the Earth might be cooling in the 1970s, and some laymen—even one as sophisticated and well-educated as Isaac Asimov —saw potentially dire implications for climate and food production. After all, Ice Ages were common in Earth's history; if anything, the warm "interglacial" period in which human civilization evolved, and still exists, is the exception. The cause of these periodic climatic shifts is still being studied and debated, but many scientists believe they are influenced by small changes in the Earth's orbit around the Sun (including its "eccentricity," or the extent to which it deviates from a perfect circle) and the tilt of its rotation. As calculated by the mathematician Milutin Milankovitch in the 1920s, these factors vary on interlocking cycles of around 20,000, 40,000 and 100,000 years, and if nothing else changed they would be certain to bring on a new Ice Age at some time. In the 1970s, there were scientists who thought this shift might be imminent; more recent data, according to William Connolley, a climate scientist at the British Antarctic Survey who has made a hobby of studying Ice Age predictions, suggest that it might be much farther off.


But in any case, climatologists now are mostly agreed that human impacts will swamp the effects of the Milankovitch cycles. The question has been, which specific impacts? In the mid-1970s, scientists were focusing on an increase of dust and "aerosols" (suspended droplets of liquid, mostly sulfuric acid) in the atmosphere. These, the result of increased agriculture and burning of coal in power plants, lower the Earth's temperature by reflecting sunlight back into space. Ironically, clean-air laws in North America and Europe had the effect of reducing aerosols (which cause acid rain), so the predominant influence on climate now is the buildup of carbon dioxide—which traps the Earth's heat in the lower atmosphere and contributes to global warming.

As late as 1992, in a story that for some reason has gotten far less attention, NEWSWEEK revisited the Ice Age threat, this time posing it as a perverse consequence of the greenhouse effect. Citing the theories of an "amateur scientist and professional prophet of doom named John Hamaker," the article raised the specter that a small increase in air temperature could cause more snow to fall in places like northern Greenland, where the ground is often bare. (Extremely cold air doesn't hold enough moisture for a good snowfall.) Increased snow cover, by reflecting more sunlight back into space, could trigger a return of the glaciers to North America. Although the intricate web of positive and negative feedbacks that control climate are still not fully understood, that particular scenario hasn't gotten much attention in the last decade.


The point to remember, says Connolley, is that predictions of global cooling never approached the kind of widespread scientific consensus that supports the greenhouse effect today. And for good reason: the tools scientists have at their disposal now—vastly more data, incomparably faster computers and infinitely more sophisticated mathematical models—render any forecasts from 1975 as inoperative as the predictions being made around the same time about the inevitable triumph of communism. Astronomers have been warning for decades that life on Earth could be wiped out by a collision with a giant meteorite; it hasn't happened yet, but that doesn't mean that journalists have been dupes or alarmists for reporting this news. Citizens can judge for themselves what constitutes a prudent response-which, indeed, is what occurred 30 years ago. All in all, it's probably just as well that society elected not to follow one of the possible solutions mentioned in the NEWSWEEK article: to pour soot over the Arctic ice cap, to help it melt.

She carved him a new after life.

You know Thomas "Common Sense" Paine was over in the thick of that revolution too..the guy must have had some big cajones.

Sandman starting to kick my butt....

Apple Pie gonna say another prayer for ya then to bed.

Buddy stay safe..more later
H