A World Pushed Apart

In the beginning there was plenty of farmland and only a moderate number of people to support. But slowly the surrounding green sea of maize and forest gave way to a city of white and red plazas—with fine structures of stone, wood and thatch—all jostling for position. Soon, social standing and proximity to the dynamic pulse of the city became more important to these exuberant people than their own food production. Meter by meter, over the centuries, they usurped their richest cropland, constructing their lineage compounds on acreage that used to be fields, gradually forcing the farmers up into the margins of the valley.

Over generations, expanding residential zones covered the best agricultural lands, forcing farmers into the foothills and then onto the mountain slopes. There they were forced to clear more and more forest to produce maize fields. Clearing, in turn, caused erosion. Shorter fallow periods were depleting the usable soils at an even faster rate, just when the kingdom was required to feed the largest population in its history.

The cutting down of the forest also affected climate and rainfall, making it yet more difficult for people to sustain themselves. With an insufficient food supply came malnutrition and its resultant chronic diseases, rampant conditions that affected the nobility as well as the common people. The quality of life, which was never very good in the preindustrial cities of the ancient world, fast deteriorated toward the unbearable.

A world fallen apart: There were too many people, there was too much of the forest gone, too little rain, and too much death.

Within two centuries, 90 percent of the population in the Copan Valley system was gone. They left a land so ravaged that only in this last century have people returned to build the population back to the levels it knew. Today, the people of Copan destroy their forests once more.

Schele and Freidel, A Forest of Kings (mod.)

[Keywords: environment, geocide, Green, overpopulation, population, sustainability ]

SCOTUS: Cities and Counties Can Drive Citizens Out of Their Homes Without Trial

Our Constitution is our supreme law, short of the-people-by-Amendment. It says so itself, and was so adopted. Our national leaders and officers including the military swear allegiance to the Constitution, not any leader or even the government. Not President, not Congress, not Court can overturn or nullify it, separately or together. It defines the basic architecture of our system as well as certain fundamental powers and limitations on government, many rights of the people, and its own rules of interpretation. It is a trump card for ordinary citizens in the courts, before the people and before history. 

Me, in a closed international forum about two years ago

Cities and counties can Constitutionally drive citizens out of their homes—and kill their pets—as a matter of administrative-bureaucratic routine without trial by—or even warrant from—the independent Judiciary established by and integral to our Constitution.

So ruled the Supreme Court of the United States on April 20, 2015 (Friday before last), in refusing even to hear my three-year-old Federal case focused on that issue.

Hair-split how you will about how that refusal to hear that appeal isn't a ruling:

Local machines or Mobs all across America don't, and won't.

More to follow.


[References: United States District Court, Eastern District of Kentucky, Northern Division at Ashland, Civil Action No. 12-28-HRW; United States Court of Appeals
For the Sixth Circuit, Case Number 13-5406 (In); United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, Case Number 14-5246 (In); Boyd (Kentucky) Circuit Court,  Division II, Civil Action No. 11-CI-00896; Supreme Court of the United States, Docket No. 14-8466 ]


[See also

"Reasons"

"Second Appeal"

"Second Round"

]

[Keywords: animal personhood, aristocracy, Ashland, Bar, Boyd County, bureaucracy, citizenship, code enforcement, Constitution, Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, due process, family FBI, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Fifth Amendment, Fourth Amendment, harassment of a Federal civil-rights plaintiff, home,  home-right, human rights, Judiciary, Kentucky, machine, Mob, pets, plutocracy, poverty, privacy, property, retaliation against a Federal civil-rights plaintiff, SCOTUS, security, Sixth Circuit, US Federal District Court for Eastern Kentucky, Northern Division at Ashland, United States Attorney for Eastern Kentucky ]

"Code" and Bureaucracy

Grand Prairie, TX — A hard-working Texas man was thrown in jail after a warrant was issued for his arrest for an overgrown lawn.

Rick Yoes is the campus electrician for Tarrant County College and usually works from before sun-up to after sun-down.

In September of last year, he and his daughter had been hard at work and were unable to cut the lawn on their Grand Prairie home. The local government then claimed that because Yoes could not mow his lawn, he now owed them $1,700 for his grass that achieved a height of over six inches.

A warrant was subsequently issued for his arrest and police were dispatched to keep us safe from the dangers of this man’s lawn. Yoes turned himself in on Saturday.

Unable to pay the fine, Yoes was forced to use up all of his vacation days and find a replacement for his position as he serves out his 17 day sentence in the county jail—to pay his debt to society . . . .

http://www.alternet.org/texas-man-thrown-jail-weeks-because-his-lawn-was-overgrown

The American people constitute the most timorous, sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages, and they grow more timorous, more sniveling, more poltroonish, more ignominious every day.

H. L. Mencken

When "code enforcement" pushes past regulation of the commercial and the publicly-accessible to arrogate power over private citizens on private property, it exceeds its Constitutional boundaries:

Congress by the Ninth Amendment has not the slightest power to tell us how high to grow our grass, and what Congress cannot Constitutionally legislate the Executive cannot Constitutionally enforce, decree or order, and the courts cannot Constitutionally interpret, find or order, and our freedom from any such all-encompassing and niggling bureaucratic totalitarianism on the Federal level as Federal citizens is extended to us on the State level as State Citizens by the Fourteenth Amendment—and States cannot delegate to lesser jurisdictions, such as cities and counties, powers they do not have.

But a nation of sheep will be shorn.

And ruled by foxes and wolves.

Keywords: bureaucracy, code enforcement, Constitution, Fourteenth Amendment, liberty, Ninth Amendment, Tenth Amendment, totalitarianism