Posted on 05/07/2015 10:58:10 AM PDT by Kartographer
Why did Rome and Byzantium fall apart after centuries of success? What causes civilizations to collapse, from a dysfunctional 4th-century-B.C. Athens to contemporary bankrupt Greece?
The answer is usually not enemies at the gates, but the pathologies inside them.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.investors.com ...
One of the best explanations of why ethics is essential comes from one of my favorite westerns ‘A Thunder of Drums’. In the movie the wise old Captain Stephen Maddocks tells a troubled junior officer:
“I’m no bible thumper, but one thing I do believe; the sum total of man’s experience with morality is The Ten Commandments. If we don’t try to live by them we throw away the God given chance for decency.”
As pointed out in this article ethics is one of the first things to go when civilizations fail. Seems in today's society as long as you steal small, kill small, commit adultery small and so on that it is close enough, but how is that working out for us?
Ping!
Democracy has a semi fatal flaw. It is democratic. That means obvious viruses like communists and perverts are allowed to speak their mind, own media channels ,etc. and spread their disease. It is a conundrum.
Bring Cruz into the game and we can alter course...
Under King Obama’s reign it is well under way to become a full communists Country with a dictator using most his corrupt communists Administration to control its people.
How Civilizations Collapse — Is U.S. Next?
Oh, and the answer is yes and probably quite soon. But then, I’m just paraphrasing my tag line.
bump
Look at what liberals have accomplished over the last several decades as I heard it discussed by Glenn Beck:
Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
Life - 60 Million abortions is all you need to know on this one.
Liberty- Look at the attacks on free speech, efforts to regulate radio content, regulate the internet, to prohibit school choice, control health care, gun ownership, diets, vehicle choices and so much more.
Pursuit of Happiness - Talk to anyone who has dared to start and run a small business in America.
... 'nuff said?
The corollary to that is:
You can not use freedom to abolish freedom.
You can not demand liberty to end liberty.
You can’t claim freedom of speech to yell fire in a crowded theater.
Last month, someone dropped a significant wad of cash in a Chick-Fil-A. The employee (Jacob King) who found the money returned it to the owner, and his comment stuck:
“You only really have two ways to go about things,” King said, “there’s the right way and there’s every other way. And that’s pretty much all there is to it.”
More people raised like Jacob King would go a long way toward solving America’s “Me & Mine First” attitude.
Going further - how many of us would be preppers if our fellow Americans were more like Jacob,and less like the takers? I know I would be less inclined, if those in power and all the way down to those just living around me were like him. The right way and then there’s everything else. So simple and yet so very powerful.
Alas, that is not the case, and will explain much when SHTF here. And that, FRiends, is why I prep quietly, cache accordingly, exercise & train myself, my kiddies & even my dogs.
...Because there are too many takers and not enough Jacob Kings to save the good old USA....
U. S. could be next. The government is corrupt and incompetent and too many of our citizens are poorly educated, resulting in apathy and selfishness. Today, EVIL is on the throne and GOOD (decency and truth) is on the gallows.
good points. I guess the offset to depraved Hollywood and media were the decency laws. But decency has really been defined down the past 50 years.
The loss of these rights happened when the government denied the existence of the Creator. No creator, no endowment of rights.
- Go figure.
An important question is “How do civilizations thwart the threat from within and survive?”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nika_riots
“The Nika riots, or Nika revolt, took place over the course of a week in Constantinople in AD 532. It was the most violent riot in the history of Constantinople, with nearly half the city being burned or destroyed and tens of thousands of people killed.”
Their empire in danger of collapse, the emperor Justinian I and his wife, empress Theodora I, created a plan by which the the more moderate Blues (comparable to today’s Democrats), and the radical Greens (comparable to today’s leftist-socialist radicals), were assembled in a vast stadium (like the Democrat National Convention), in “peace talks” in which they assumed the emperor would relinquish power to them.
Instead the emperor sent a trusted slave to deliver a bag of gold to the Blue leaders, with the idea that they were to leave the stadium immediately, and they took him up on the deal. So all the Blues left. The Greens assumed this would mean all the power going to them, instead of sharing it with the Blues.
Little did they know that the army under two loyal generals had quietly surrounded the stadium. About thirty thousand Greens were reportedly killed.
Justinian also had the pretender emperor executed and exiled the senators who had supported the riot. He then rebuilt Constantinople and was free to pursue his ultimate dream of a united Roman Empire.
By this action alone, their empire was preserved for another 200 years. Both Justinian and Theodora are now considered saints in the eastern Orthodox churches.
And in the absence of the radical Greens, their nation politically thrived. It turned out that they served no useful purpose at all.
A lesson from the past.
It takes voters to destroy America.
John F. Kennedy had a dream to replace the American people with foreign voters, a different kind of voter, the importation of an endless supply of democrat voters.
“However, if there is one man who can take the most credit for the 1965 act, it is John F. Kennedy. Kennedy seems to have inherited the resentment his father Joseph felt as an outsider in Boston’s WASP aristocracy. He voted against the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952, and supported various refugee acts throughout the 1950s.
In 1958 he wrote a book, A Nation of Immigrants, which attacked the quota system as illogical and without purpose, and the book served as Kennedy’s blueprint for immigration reform after he became president in 1960. In the summer of 1963, Kennedy sent Congress a proposal calling for the elimination of the national origins quota system. He wanted immigrants admitted on the basis of family reunification and needed skills, without regard to national origin.
After his assassination in November, his brother Robert took up the cause of immigration reform, calling it JFK’s legacy. In the forward to a revised edition of A Nation of Immigrants, issued in 1964 to gain support for the new law, he wrote, “I know of no cause which President Kennedy championed more warmly than the improvement of our immigration policies.” Sold as a memorial to JFK, there was very little opposition to what became known as the Immigration Act of 1965.”
JFK and the democrat party were pushing chain immigration, generations ago.
Here is the Democratic Party Platform that JFK ran on in 1960:
Immigration:
We shall adjust our immigration, nationality and refugee policies to eliminate discrimination and to enable members of scattered families abroad to be united with relatives already in our midst.
The national-origins quota system of limiting immigration contradicts the rounding principles of this nation. It is inconsistent with our belief in the rights of man. This system was instituted after World War I as a policy of deliberate discrimination by a Republican Administration and Congress.
The revision of immigration and nationality laws we seek will implement our belief that enlightened immigration, naturalization and refugee policies and humane administration of them are important aspects of our foreign policy.
These laws will bring greater skills to our land, reunite families, permit the United States to meet its fair share of world programs of rescue and rehabilitation, and take advantage of immigration as an important factor in the growth of the American economy.
In this World Refugee Year it is our hope to achieve admission of our fair share of refugees. We will institute policies to alleviate suffering among the homeless wherever we are able to extend our aid.
We must remove the distinctions between native-born and naturalized citizens to assure full protection of our laws to all. There is no place in the United States for “second-class citizenship.”
The protections provided by due process, right of appeal, and statutes of limitation, can be extended to non-citizens without hampering the security of our nation.
We commend the Democratic Congress for the initial steps that have recently been taken toward liberalizing changes in immigration law. However, this should not be a piecemeal project and we are confident that a Democratic President in cooperation with Democratic Congresses will again implant a humanitarian and liberal spirit in our nation’s immigration and citizenship policies.
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