Re: "Usefull languages"

From: "John Cowan" <cowan@...>

| J Y S Czhang scripsit:
|
| >         b.> IMHO it is a better constitution than most - including the
| > American one.
|
| The American constitution is archaic.  It is surely the oldest
| written constitution in the world still substantially in force:
| in 200+ years it has only been changed 17 times, not counting the
| Bill of Rights, which is packaged as 10 amendments but is essentially
| a paper-bag-bug fix.  Of these, two are mutually canceling (Prohibition
| and Repeal), and only 6 by my count actually affected the machinery
| of government substantially; the rest were about extending civil rights,
| particularly the right to vote.

I don't expect a Constitutional Convention (which I think is advised in the
current one somewhere), since the document is venerated almost as much as the
Bible by Americans. Even of the 27 Amendments, the major ones are limited to the
Bill of Rights, the Thirteenth and Fourteenth (abolishing slavery and preventing
the deprivation of "L, L and P-of-H" based on race), and a few others. Though
many of us are still complaining about the Amendment that created the national
income tax.... ;)


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