Not Independence Day.

[BillBoard]

Not Independence Day.

In the United States of America we celebrate the 4th of July as our Independence Day.

But I am damn sure that if you are living anywhere in the United States of America you are not feeling very independent, as a matter of fact if you are the typical American you are feeling very oppressed right now.

Have you asked yourself why? Why do we feel like rats in a cage in our own country when we are supposed to be the very example of freedom and Liberty?

Let me begin by giving you a small example of how we have degraded in America from Liberty to Tyranny.

It is 11:00 pm on the 4th of July, on your way home from your parents house, your wife and children are in the car with you , when you come upon a massive DUI (driving under the influence) check point that is being conducted by the local and state police.

As you wait your turn, you think only of getting home and putting the children to bed and getting some good rest yourself. As your turn comes up and the police officer signals you to pull up to him and roll down your window.

Officer: “Have you been drinking tonight?”
You: “No.”

Officer: “Where are you coming from tonight?”
You, surprised: “Why?”
Officer: “Why? BECAUSE I ASKED YOU!”
You: “Excuse me officer, but you don’t’ have the right to ask me that without reason…”
Your Wife: “Sir, we are coming from my in-laws.”

The officer no longer an officer but a mere bully cop. The cop annoyed and agitated signals to another cop and tells you:

Cop: “PULL UP TO THAT OTHER OFFICER OVER THERE!”

You pulled up to the area where the other cop is.

Cop2: “Give me your license, insurance, and registration.”

You pull out your wallet and hand over your license, then hand over your insurance card and vehicle registration.

Then Cop2 inspects your documents, looks at you with a non nondescript look and tells you to step out of the vehicle.

At this point, you would like to ask what’s going on, and why you are being treated the way you are being treated. But you know, better. You know better because you have served in the Army overseas and know what can happen to you and your family in an instant, even if you are in America.

Cop2: “Sir, how much did you drink tonight?”
You, reply: “Nothing.”

Cop2: “Sir, you are being stopped on suspicion of DUI, I will administer a field sobriety test, ok. Please step over this way and on the line.”

You notice that other cops now have your wife out of the car, and the trunk of your car is now open, while your children are still in the back seat of your car. You experience high anxiety, and decide just to grin and bear it. You know they have the power and upper hand in a situation like this, they know they can hurt you and hurt your family and you will not do anything about it because you would not like to have your family injured or hurt.

So you go through the motions, answer their questions and hope you are let go in peace without injury or harm to you or your family.

Cop2 administers her field sobriety test, asks you a few questions and tells you to return to your car.

You are signaled to proceed and pull out of the DUI check point.

Once you have left the check point, you wife is mad at you for not being attentive and deferential to the cops.

Wife: “ Why couldn’t you just answer him, why did you have to ask him why was he asking?”
You: “Because it is none of his ******* business where we are coming from.”

Wife: “Yes it is, he has a gun!”

You sit there stunned, you cannot believe what you just heard, yet, you bite your tongue and travel home in silence in order not to argue or ruin the rest of the night.

How did we get to this point in America?

HOW DID WE LOSE OUR LIBERTY IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA?

1. We lost our Liberty from simple ignorance.
2. Those that know all about greed and debt, stole our country from the rest of us.

What is the solution?

1. Learn who you are, and what a powerful legacy has been left for you as an American.

The few very rich people that run our country are very rich because they control our money system.

They control how much money is created and to whom it is given and for whatever purpose.

You and I can only get money by selling our labor or borrowing.

The rich control the money system through the use of government bonds and having the bank notes used printed by the government to give their scam the illusion of legitimacy.

Learn your rich history, know that you are a very powerful individual, learn law so you can defend and uphold your rights in court. Teach others so they can help you protect your rights while they are protecting theirs.

[Libertytree]

I used to love the 4th of July, the birthdate of our republic, but time and events have sucked that obviously misgiven notion from my mind. They've sullied those documents, defiled their meanings and intent, wiped their asses with them and rubbed our faces in it at every chance they could. There's no forgiving those actions.

That being said, I think this has weight and value even so so many years later.

The deliberations of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 were held in strict secrecy. Consequently, anxious citizens gathered outside Independence Hall when the proceedings ended in order to learn what had been produced behind closed doors. The answer was provided immediately. A Mrs. Powel of Philadelphia asked Benjamin Franklin, "Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?" With no hesitation whatsoever, Franklin responded, "A republic, if you can keep it."

[gunDriller]

it's true.

reminds me of that ad, "This is not your father's Oldsmobile".


well, this is not your father's USA.

the elephant saying otherwise - 9-11, the War of Terror, NDAA, Food Safety Act, Obama-"care" - is bigger than a normal elephant.

i know there's a July 4 'celebration' today, where they are talking about veterans, freedom, etc.

but until they talk about that big fvcking elephant ... it's just an excuse to drink beer and get a tan.


some US troops think they are protecting our freedoms. but as some veterans have discovered, those veterans pay very high prices, then find out that they are defending a government that is destroying our freedoms.

if US troops want to protect our freedoms, they need to disobey orders and roll the tanks into Washington DC.

[Libertytree]

That's another thing tat gripes my ass! All this gung-ho, hooraw BULLSHIT!! This day ain't (supposed) to be about any veterans but yet its marketed as yet another special fucking day to thank all those that have fought to protect our freedoms. What a crock of shit!! It was supposed to be the celebration of the birth of our country, a party day, a day to BBQ, drink, fire your weapons and shoot off fireworks.

WTF? I reckon they want 2 Memorial Days so we won't forget to say Hoo-Fucking-Raw.

[EE_]

The Lost Meaning of Independence Day

July 4, 2013 By Bruce Thornton


Independence Day is a time of backyard barbeques and fireworks, department-store sales and blockbuster movies, patriotic bunting and flying the flag––in short, a time of leisure and consumption, with a few obligatory nods to the momentous event that July 4 is supposed to celebrate. But as the years go by we have lost the significance of the Declaration of Independence, and that amnesia has made it easier for the progressive leviathan state to encroach upon our freedom.

Political freedom, after all, was the point of declaring independence. The thirteen colonies, having been denied their political freedom and citizen rights by England, announced the creation of an independent political community that reserved to its citizens the autonomy to chart its course and pursue its aims. This “state” would be free because it would not be subjected to any earthly power beyond the collective consent of the citizens as expressed through laws and political institutions to which politicians could be held accountable.

Bound up in this idea of freedom, however, was its dependence on the virtues citizens had to possess in order to use this freedom responsibly and for the proper aims. For freedom was not “doing as one likes,” which is not true freedom, but what the 18th century called license, a selfish indulgence that cares nothing for the state as a whole either now or in the future. To act on whatever appetites and passions arise in one is to enslave the soul to them and subject the self and the state to their destructive effects. As Russell Kirk wrote, “The worst enemies of enduring freedom for all may be certain folk who demand incessantly more liberty for themselves.”

True freedom, on the other hand, is defined by restraints and limits on destructive “passions and interests,” as James Madison called them. These limits were formally built into the government in the separation and balance of powers, and in a federalism that checked the centralized federal power and left the decisions directly affecting people’s lives as close as possible to those who would have to live with the outcome. Both these structures limited the ability of the ambitious or tyrannical to amass too much power at the expense of liberty.

And most important, government was limited by the notion of “unalienable rights” that were the gift of “nature and nature’s God,” rather than a privilege bestowed by earthly power. These ideas, of course, were famously expressed in the Declaration’s second paragraph: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.––That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

Ordered liberty, then, depended on the limited powers of government accountable to the consent of the citizens, and on the Classical and Christian virtues, particularly prudence and self-control. The political balance of powers and the personal practice of virtue make possible the “ordered liberty” the American political structure was designed to foster and protect––in the words of Orestes Brownson, “the sovereignty of the people without social despotism, and individual freedom without anarchy.” And “freedom from anarchy” required personal virtue: “Happy, thrice happy,” Madison wrote, “the people of America! Whose gentleness of manners and habits of virtue are still sufficient to reconcile the enjoyment of their natural rights, with the peace and tranquility of their country.”

Sadly, today such sentiments in our public culture are as quaint as powdered periwigs and silk knee breeches. Rarely do we hear about freedom and independence in the context of limits and virtue. Freedom means what horrified the Founders: doing what we want and indulging our appetites, regardless of the larger consequences for the whole political community. The transformation of political freedom into license has degraded our politics and paved the way for the “soft despotism,” as Tocqueville called it, of the progressive bureaucratic leviathan.

Plato observed this link between license and despotism nearly 2400 years ago in the Republic. Socrates scorns the “city full of freedom and frankness,” where “a man may say and do what he likes,” and everyone “is clearly able to order for himself his own life as he pleases.” The result of this state is “variety and disorder,” as each man is given over to “the freedom and libertinism of useless and unnecessary pleasures.” Eventually, drunk on the “strong wine of freedom,” these citizens will sell their political birthright to any tyrant who promises to allow them to continue indulging those selfish pleasures.

A few hundred years later Polybius carried this analysis further, connecting such tyranny to the attack on property needed to fund entitlement payments to the masses. Grown dependent on the gifts of the tyrant, Polybius writes, “the people have become accustomed to feed at the expense of others, and their prospects of winning a livelihood depend upon the property of their neighbors; then as soon as they find a leader who is sufficiently ambitious and daring . . . they will introduce a regime based on violence.” Social and political order will deteriorate until the people “degenerate into a state of bestiality, after which they once more find a master and a despot.”

Our modern tyrants, the big-government progressives, have become much more sophisticated and insidious than the tyrants of old, their “totalitarianism with a human face” as effective as violence in destroying true freedom. Ordered liberty has indeed been reduced to mere license, as the ancients predicted. The first step in this process in our time has been secularization, the driving of religion from the public square and the reduction of it to a private lifestyle choice. In this way the moral order sanctioned by “nature’s God” and the “Supreme Judge of the world,” as the Declaration describes the divine order, that enforced limits on license and self-indulgence can be marginalized and bereft of its power to sanction destructive behavior, leaving the state as the only authority for regulating people’s lives.

Moreover, the modern tyrants have understood that sexual license is the most effective appetite to exploit in order to distract people from their loss of autonomy. Hence the sexual revolution of the Sixties––with its cheap contraception, destruction of sexual taboos, pornography, and at-will abortion––legitimized sexual indulgence and eroded the classical political virtues of self-control and restraint. At the same time, by separating sex from procreation, it weakened the family as an intermediary authority between the individual and the state. Worse yet, government has encouraged this license with state-funded birth control and abortions, and with school curricula that legitimize and encourage it. Sexual freedom––which is in fact what the ancients would have called the enslavement of the mind to the body’s pleasures––has now replaced political freedom and autonomy as the highest expression of liberty.

Next, as Polybius says, the redistribution of property through taxation and entitlement spending also erodes the autonomy of the citizens by fostering dependence, at the same time the state has to grow ever more powerful and intrude ever more intimately into private life in order to manage and control this distribution. The citizens gradually become more and more hooked on various transfers from the state, even as they surrender more and more autonomy over their lives to ensure that the state-funded benefits keep coming. Thus the erosion of their freedom is masked by the short-term pleasure of getting something for nothing. Virtues like self-reliance and self-responsibility, vital for political freedom, disappear, even as the Constitution’s balance of powers is disrupted by an activist judiciary and by an overweening executive branch and its massive and minutely intrusive federal bureaucracy. The traditional limits on license thus disappear, paving the way for governmental tyranny and the decay of freedom.

This process has obviously accelerated under Obama and his bureaucratic minions in the Department of Justice, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Internal Revenue Service, and the other unelected, unaccountable factotums of the federal behemoth. His administration has attacked religion by forcing churches to fund abortions. He has “evolved” his position on same-sex marriage, contributing to its legitimation at the expense of the traditional limits on sexuality. He has accelerated the redistribution of property through a war on wealth, higher taxes, and multi-trillion dollar increases in entitlement spending, from Obamacare to the stimulus. He has fostered a new, punitive regulatory regime, from the 848-page Dodd-Frank bill to the EPA’s war against carbon. And he and his bureaucratic henchmen have, like a classical tyrant, abused this expanded power by targeting political enemies through the IRS and the DOJ, unleashing the EPA to stifle energy development, and spying on the press. Meanwhile half the citizenry is distracted by hedonistic license and the promise of even more entitlement transfers.

In short, the current administration has grown the state at the expense of economic growth and, more important, to the detriment of the ordered liberty and autonomy we are supposed to commemorate on July 4. That’s the sober lesson we should all contemplate as we munch our burgers, ogle the fireworks, and head for the Cineplex.

http://frontpagemag.com/2013/bruce-thornton/the-lost-meaning-of-independence-day/

[madfranks]

HOW DID WE LOSE OUR LIBERTY IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA?


1. We lost our Liberty from simple ignorance.


Bull. In every generation, there were folks like us who were not, and who are not, ignorant of what's happening. The thing is, many of these small moves TPTB make are not worth dying for. My grandpa hated FDR, but wasn't willing to die to stand up against the new deal, his wife and child (my mom) was too much to pay for political opposition. My dad hated Nixon and LBJ, but wasn't willing to die to stand against clad coinage and foreign wars. Here we are today, more oppression and wars, but I am not willing to die in order to make a stand against it. My family is worth more. The sad truth is, eventually all of these cumulative pushes will make it worthwhile to fight and die for freedom. We're not there yet, but we're getting close.

[Hitch]

Here we are today, more oppression and wars, but I am not willing to die in order to make a stand against it. My family is worth more. The sad truth is, eventually all of these cumulative pushes will make it worthwhile to fight and die for freedom. We're not there yet, but we're getting close.

I respect your values. Personally though, this is where I can honestly say, I'm happy and free. I'm single, I can die and it would not be any great loss. I don't have any young ones, or a wife, to look after.

I wonder if I'll be faced with a choice. Sail away, or fight and die for a perhaps losing cause.

[VX1]

Yes, I popped on FB, and I see the sheep thanking the troops for their "freedom", and all excited about the fireworks to come. I had to post this to give them something to think about:


Tonight’s the night the population goes out and celebrates “freedom”, yet less than one in ten could coherently explain exactly what that is. For today’s American, freedom is obedience to a government who only cheats and lies to them. Freedom is obeying countless laws written by corporations that bribe our representatives to pass without even reading them. Freedom is supporting the murder of millions of innocents abroad for corporate gain. Freedom supporting a police state at home that will arrest you and kill your dog, just for filming them in public. Freedom is to be viewed naked by the state before you may travel. Freedom is to ask the government permission and pay a fee to improve your property or do almost anything else out of your own free will. Freedom is to be constantly under threat of violence if you don’t pay a daily ransom or tribute to the king, but it’s OK, because they’ll call it “taxes”. Freedom is paying to live life in a self-imposed prison cell, on the couch, growing fat and weak on poisonous concoctions of chemicals sold to you as “food”, while watching a blinking inanimate box on the wall with mind-altering propaganda packaged as “entertainment” or “news”.

Oh, yes, enjoy that “freedom”. When you wake up from your slumber… if you want the future vision of freedom, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever.

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free. –J. Goethe

[steyr_m]

I'd like to wish my American friends a great Independence Day -- someday the US will be restored to it's former glory....

5081

[TRUTHseekr]

That's another thing tat gripes my ass! All this gung-ho, hooraw BULLSHIT!! This day ain't (supposed) to be about any veterans but yet its marketed as yet another special fucking day to thank all those that have fought to protect our freedoms. What a crock of shit!! It was supposed to be the celebration of the birth of our country, a party day, a day to BBQ, drink, fire your weapons and shoot off fireworks.

WTF? I reckon they want 2 Memorial Days so we won't forget to say Hoo-Fucking-Raw.
Exactly, there's all this talk about thanking veterans for their help protecting our freedoms, but maybe Im not patriotic enough in some people's eyes or maybe Im just not liking their sour Kool-Aid(last time we fought for our freedoms was the Civil War and through peaceful or political activism). I've lost two good high school buddies to the wars and have another in a wheel chair, and yet they use these holidays to promote their b.s. agenda even more and new generations of kids are quickly swept into the armed forces to "defend our freedoms". Don't for one second confuse my unwillingness to participate in your political wars with my patriotism. The second I see the U.S.A. invaded... I'm all arms, bring it!

[Serpo]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-WMn_zHCVohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-WMn_zHCVo

[collector]

That's another thing tat gripes my ass! All this gung-ho, hooraw BULLSHIT!! This day ain't (supposed) to be about any veterans but yet its marketed as yet another special fucking day to thank all those that have fought to protect our freedoms. What a crock of shit!! It was supposed to be the celebration of the birth of our country, a party day, a day to BBQ, drink, fire your weapons and shoot off fireworks.

WTF? I reckon they want 2 Memorial Days so we won't forget to say Hoo-Fucking-Raw.

To add to this - we had no military back then, it was the able bodied common man that fought for our independence so if people want to celebrate the birth of our nation, celebrate the spirit of those that were brave enough, smart enough and cared enough to do so. Celebrate those that refused to pay exorbitant taxes and refused to be disarmed by their government - it's no wonder the meaning is being changed to "support the veterans/troops" (big brother's military machine)