Ecclesiastes 12:10

    Between 1875 to 1883, a professional thief known as Black Bart held a reign of terror for stagecoaches from northern California to Oregon.  He was responsible for at least 29 different robberies.  In all his robberies, Black Bart never had to fire a shot; he was only assaulted once beside when he was finally caught.  Most everyone was too afraid to dare to fight back against the notorious crook.  The fear of this notorious bandit was enough for most folks to hand over their valuables. The myth of Black Bart was in the end just that, a myth.  The man that all the people feared was a failed miner from Decatur, Illinois.  He arrived at his robberies on foot because he was terrified of horses.  In the end, He never fired his gun because he never had ammunition.  He was too afraid to load his gun.     Fear causes people to do strange things.  It can cause some to give over their valuables to a man with a ...

  In 1982, Gregory Watson was trying to find a topic for writing assignment for a government class that he was taking at the University of Texas at Austin.  While researching the Equal Rights Amendment, Watson came across documentation of another unratified constitutional amendment dating back to the 1st Congress in 1789 that had been authored by James Madison.  Madison's proposal would delay congressional pay raises until the electorate got a chance to respond.  Intrigued, Watson switched the subject of his paper and researched what was a still-pending constitutional amendment, despite 192 years having elapsed. Watson's paper argued that—unlike the ERA—the 1789 amendment had no deadline within which the nation's state legislatures must have acted upon it and that it could belatedly become part of the U.S. Constitution.  His report recommended—on policy grounds—that the amendment should be ratified, as delaying changes of congressional salary would be bene...