My very first post in on this site, after a very long time and after losing my username and password from long ago..
I am one of those long time lurkers, who in the past few years, usually sees posts as a result of internet searches. I was once a member but was unable to do a password reset due to my having registered with a U.S. government .gov email account. So here I am now, a new member again.
This thread here, I never read before. On reading the last 3 pages, I have the impression that one individual posting here could likely be the same individual that posts on a facebook webpage that is restricted to those military individuals who have a past or present occupation in INTEL / ELINT /SINGINT specialties. I am amazed at how similiar his posts are to those of that other facebook person. I suspect that he is not that other individual, but one that follows the same path of the one that I am more familiar with.
The individual in this thread posted a quote that seems to imply one thing, but without the rest of the letter the quote is from, I believe lacks context. Here is the paragraph from the letter that the quote was from.
Forgive me for my jumping right into what may be a political firestorm in my first, new post, of my new persona in this website. Or don't!
The question Whether one generation of men has a right to bind another, seems never to have been started either on this or our side of the water. Yet it is a question of such consequences as not only to merit decision, but place also, among the fundamental principles of every government. The course of reflection in which we are immersed here on the elementary principles of society has presented this question to my mind; & that no such obligation can be so transmitted I think very capable of proof. I set out on this ground, which I suppose to be self-evident, ‘that the earth belongs in usufruct to the living’: that the dead have neither powers nor rights over it. The portion occupied by any individual ceases to be his when himself ceases to be, & reverts to the society. If the society has formed no rules for the appropriation of it’s lands in severalty, it will be taken by the first occupants. These will generally be the wife & children of the decedent. If they have formed rules of appropriation, those rules may give it to the wife and children, or to some one of them, or to the legatee of the deceased. So they may give it to his creditor. But the child, the legatee, or creditor takes it, not by any natural right, but by a law of the society of which they are members, & to which they are subject. Then no man can, by natural right, oblige the lands he occupied, or the persons who succeed him in that occupation, to the paiment of debts contracted by him. For if he could, he might, during his own life, eat up the usufruct of the lands for several generations to come, & then the lands would belong to the dead, & not to the living, which would be the reverse of our principle.