The Fourth of July has become like Christmas – a kind of ersatz celebration with forms but not much significance.
What is it we’re celebrating, exactly?
A historical event – the successful separation of the colonies from the British empire.
The secession of the colonies. Their rejection of the arbitrary authority of the British king and parliament.
Good for the colonists.
What about us?
Do we not also live under the authority of arbitrary government? A president and Congress?
An endless conga line of bureaucrats and apparatchiks?
Sometimes, we get to vote for some of them. Our vote made effectively meaningless by the thousands – the hundreds of thousands and tens of millions of other votes.
The king or parliament would issue an edict and the colonists were legally required to obey it. Are we not legally required to obey whatever edicts the Congress pass and president decrees?
Can anyone explain the difference?
Moral law no longer governs. Only the law. And that can be anything. There are no limits whatsoever on what may be done to us; only that a law be enacted (and not even that).
We are bound to obey, regardless.
The king’s men could simply take our things, search our persons on whim. The colonists objected to such treatment and cited such treatment among the reasons for their decision to secede.
Is it not a fact that the government’s men (and women) can simply take our things? Search us on whim? Have you traveled recently?
Can anyone explain the difference?
The colonists under the king and parliament could own property. Meaning really own it. They were not required to send annual/regular payments in to the king in order to be permitted to remain in homes for which they’d paid or carriages they’d purchased.
We are.
The colonists – under the king and parliament – had an unquestioned right to own and bear (carry on their persons) firearms. Without permission.
Are we allowed such freedom?
The king and parliament did not concern themselves with the colonists’ “safety.” If a colonists wished, he could ride his horse as fast as he liked, eat what he liked, smoke what he liked. No authority pestered him about his choices. He was not told with whom he must do business, or forced to build his house a certain way or forbidden from planting a vegetable garden on his property. Check Shoprite Ad and Smart and Final Ad. He was not compelled to purchase insurance of any kind whatsoever.
How about today?
In most parts of the Land of the Free, you and I are not even free to purchase fireworks to celebrate our supposed freedom. We’re allowed “safe” sparklers and such. But nothing that flies or explodes. To possess or use such constitutes a crime in most states.
The irony of this is lost on most people.
So, celebrating our freedoms strikes me as hollow and pathetic. Like holiday greetings instead of merry Christmas!
I plan to stay home and read a book.
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I for one relish the fourth- it is still a celebration of freedom. Sitting outside in rural Minnesota where absolutely everything is illegal and lighting off lots of flying, exploding pleasure, and listening to most of your neighbors also flout the law and its enforcers, is gratifying. It proves once again that now matter how bad it is, that people still are willing to resist tyranny.
Too true Eric. Your piece here brings to mind a passage I read years ago at the age of eight that as been one of the guiding polestars of my world view since.
“I will accept any rules that you feel necessary to your freedom. I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.”
Me, I think I’ll spend the day watching Firefly.
Time again to re-read this oldie but goodie, as is my custom each year at this time:
http://www.harrybrowne.org/articles/JulyFourth.htm
lib, it should be the front page of every rag published not only in this country but everywhere. Of course it would be too liable to wake up the masses, might even cut into some of those holiday “bargains”. I read it yesterday and wish everyone would read it at least once…….maybe put it on the front of the fridge in extra large type.
I plan to stay home and read a book.
Bastiat’s The Law is nice and short. So you could read that and still take one of your cars out for a cruise. A little freedom, anyway, before they mandate a self-driving electric!
eric, you have an excellent idea and one I had already planned myself. Maybe we could read the same tome. Got any ideas you’d share? I’m currently rereading The Maker of Universes, a Philip Jose Farmer novel that lays bare the lies of “organized religion” along with gunvermin. I’ll be finished before the 4th though.
I had thought to reread a Carl Hiassen book since he rightly pokes fun at everything “official” and is hilarious in doing so. Sick Puppy and Star Island are right on top, both good reads for great entertainment.
I considered writing one but need Tor to complete it by tomorrow.
Hi Eight,
I am re-reading (last time was eons ago when I was a young’un) Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon. It’s stylistically masterful but hard going, as far as following the plot!
eric, I’m game. Of course for me, it will have to be a Kindle since I have no bookstore even remotely close. I know some people lament bookstores(me too)and lament Amazon, internet stores, etc. but for me it’s a boon. I used to kill a whole day to drive far enough to access a real bookstore, esp. one that had books other than classics and the new, latest read.
My wife hit a nearby Goodwill store and scored a couple Carl Hiaasen books in hardback for 99 cents each, others were 25 cents. A sack of books for less than 5 dollars.
I know I mentioned this before but I recently found a movie at Wally in the $3.74 bin, Cloud Atlas. Don’t let this one pass you by. It’s excellent with great actors and I wouldn’t even begin to describe it to you but it’s best watched with no getting up. If you need a break, even to turn around, turn it off and resume. There is a certain amount of anarchy there just like the Farmer book I’m reading now.
That little experiment begun 240 years ago has run its course. Like penicillin in a petri dish, it thrived for a short time, but now is dead.
Sadly unlike penicillin, nothing is to be taken away from our little experiment. No knowledge is kept as indoctrination and revisionist history scrub the results from the collective mind. 200 years of history are condemned to the incinerator along with all of the notes and journals. Nothing to remain but in the fading memories of a smaller and smaller group.
Are we not legally required to obey whatever edicts the Congress pass and president decrees?”
It’s worse than that, although that is bad enough. Hundreds (thousands?) of gunvermin agencies publish thousands of pages of fine-print ‘regulations’ daily, and we are expected to obey, even though no one knows everything in the Federal Register, and some of them contradict each other, so it is impossible to be ‘innocent.’
Number of federal agencies controlling one’s existence: 440 – https://www.federalregister.gov/agencies
And: There Are Now More Bureaucrats With Guns Than U.S. Marines – http://freebeacon.com/issues/now-bureaucrats-guns-u-s-marines/
That’s the point, actually.
A La Rearden Steel of Atlas Shrugged.
What good are laws if the “right” people DON’T break them? It’s all about leverage…
I still think my approach is better, for that very reason.
E.G., “Containment” has progressed to where it seems the CDC individual running the containment is the actual CAUSE of the outbreak of the (most definitely engineered) virus.
Previews for the next episode show she will turn the truth of her involvement into a reason for her to stay in power… (Managing a press conference.)
Whereas, had our hero simply taken her out back and shot her…? “No, I don’t know what happened to her, she was supposed to meet me at the docks, never showed.”
You destroy cancer by killing the cells. Not by “compromising” with it. We’re now living the results of “compromise.” Same thing happened here as happened in Rome. And China. And Etiopia (Kush). And it’s even reflected in the fall of the USSR… And Iraq (post Saddam), Iran (post-Shah), Egypt, etc. You compromise with the “Other” and soon you’ve compromised away all that made you worthwhile.
But most people have no concept of time, space, or history, and so we end up following the herd of lemmings over the cliff, even though we see what’s coming.
Creating fear between citizens is the ultimate tool for the state. You can never know for sure if someone isn’t part and parcel of the watchers so it creates a divide that ostensibly can only be filled by telling someone with govt. power. Eventually trust is gone in every aspect of society which eventually brings down the state. The main problem with this is so many people who could have been trusted to do the right thing have been murdered because someone else didn’t trust them. But at least there’s no shortage of coinage since everybody’s dropped a dime on everybody else.
8South,
“The main problem with this is so many people who could have been trusted to do the right thing have been murdered because someone else didn’t trust them.”
Not adequate.
People denounce enemies, even friends and family if they are threatened – and this situation of sousveillance makes for a massive threat. Denounce to prove your loyalty, or BE denounced by someone trying to keep themselves alive…
Effectively, it incentivizes bad behaviour (being an informant) and disincentivizes moral conduct (MYOB.)
I’d rather put Round-up on the clover and kill some grass, instead of allowing the clover to live. No parasites get a free ride, basically.
After all, no one is innocent. It’s the “locks” story: Locks keep honest people honest by removing temptation. Sure, you could come along with a crowbar and tear the lock off the door – but then, you already had the plans to do it. Intent marks you as a criminal. As a Scut Farkus (Scut Farkus and political theory, http://www.garynorth.com/public/15412.cfm, which someone was kind enough to link to already.)
That’s what the police are, too, by dint of carrying weapons and armor. Do you see the firemen walking around with gasoline and matches all the time? So, too, with lawyers and law makers – always SOMETHING going on, always some scam in progress, some argument that twists words and law and common sense. No different from a surgeon’s scalpel… Except, again, he doesn’t walk around with that razor-sharp blade in his pocket, JUST IN CASE he could use it on someone….
Police do.
And lawmakers have armed guards, “just in case….”
We can see who should not be trusted by their willingness to use force on others. Yes, I’d somewhat fall into that. But the Scorpion and the Frog was a teaching story to me… I’ll find a way to kill that scorpion, even if I have to become a scorpion…. Because, I can always be civil instead. Those who plan to walk around armed (when such right is restricted to those deemed “part of the system”, with those outside the system consequently finding other sources for their needs, but excluded from the numbers….) are the problem.
If everyone could carry, I don’t think the argument would hold. but since it’s selected individuals, and that is now used to negate veterans….? Old people (who most NEED alternative protection)? Etc?
There’s a gun rights story like this, where sheep armed themselves to defend the flock.
When the sheep were attacked, the defenders were able to kill the wolf. The shepherd asked, they admitted they’d done it and showed the fangs and claws – and the shepherd shot them straight away.
So, again, we either make that organization and become that scorpion, or we become the frog – and the shepherd eats well, whether on frog legs or mutton chops.
🙁
I have a simple, 2 word explanation for why Comey did not recommend prosecution of Hitlery – Vince Foster.
There is also a simple 2 word reason she should have been – Martha Stewart.
Nazis never got the long term chance to see if everybody telling on everybody else would have eventually been their demise but I’ve seen it happen in much smaller circles. The house of cards will finally fall to distrust.
PtB, does this mean TPTB want Hitlery badly enough to use other tools to rid themselves of Comey?
Hitlery is part of TPTB, and I’m sure she has access to tools of her own, if need be.
Compromise, that’s the spirit of bi-partisan legislation. If it is just a question of preference, or convenience, compromise is not wrong. But Congress should not be voting on such matters. If it is a matter of principle, then compromise is evil.
btw, have you ever noticed that the Ds always insist that their proposal is the correct ‘bi-partisan’ solution and the Rs are always the ones who yield – because they have no principles. Feed them all fish heads.
Yes, I have noticed the Republic*nts have a remarkable capacity to seize defeat from the jaws of victory… And they STILL only offer “Progressive LITE!” (50% less spine!) as an option.
I draw SOME hope from comments following the Hitlery investigation outcome, even Dems are saying it’s ridiculous and they won’t vote for her. (Not sure they’d vote Trump; maybe we could do a YouTube campaign for Ron Paul / Ted Nugent? If we could capture that vote, one to bring experience and a calm head, and one to be an incentive to NOT remove that first one…?)
I think it would be one hell of a fun party. 🙂
I’m amazed, in fact, that people think the Demoncraps aren’t far left enough. They think it’s going to work out JUST FINE if the government is the only force, and they cannot see that others won’t use the power “properly.” (Same as the Right theocratic types. Blinders on, always.)
Free Speech is OK as long as it’s the approved double-plus-good thoughts. Anything else is wrongthink and you will be assimilated and reeducated.
I must always seem off my rocker to most “sane” people. Problem is, it’s the “SANE” ones who create the problems – it’s us lunatics who need to then fix the mess. (Think of the Aflack commercial where the duck plugs leaks in the boat. But it’s the people in the boat who keep making the holes… )
Why work for free? If we have to shore up the walls all the time, why bother? Withdraw. Strike. Go Galt. (One place I think the Manosphere has REALLY got it correct, Q.V. Roosh & “flags.”)
We are the ones being compromised… So withdraw from that society to the maximum possible, and eliminate the occasional varmint when opportunity strikes…
Preferably someone stupid, and semi-visible. E.G., State Troopers who bring their car home….
Make it hard for them to sleep well, and the society will correct or crumble. Meantime, not a suspect – no reason to be one. And when TPTB over-react, someone else will capture it on film and the word will spread…
More will join (Isn’t that the argument for not using drone strikes against ISIS et al?).
If it works for them, it should apply here, too.
But no one seems to understand the Nice Nazi family up the street will hang you as readily as any (other) Jew… Because Das Boot decides who IS and IS NOT Jewish, you know.