Happy Fourth of July to everyone on our blog and other blogs. The Turleys held our annual Fourth of July celebration with fireworks last night (tonight we are going to see the Washington fireworks). We had a ball at the end of our street with our neighbors in a perfect celebration of our Independence Day . . . apple pie, burgers, and a huge box filled with fireworks.
Leslie serves as the adult supervision on these occasions. I am known to have an insatiable appetite for fireworks. This year, I pulled into a huge warehouse in Pennsylvania and purchased some really amazing fireworks (though Leslie made me put back the commercial quality mortars etc). This place looked like a Russian blackmarket arms bazaar. I am very careful, however, and I hope everyone exercises great caution for a safe holiday.
We have already seen our annual stories of terrible accidents.In one report, a man in Long Island, N.Y., had his arm blown off at the shoulder after he fired a mortar firework. Eric Smith, 36, was using a 3-foot metal tube to launch the fireworks near his home when he leaned over the explosive.
I hope that everyone has a fun time this weekend to celebrate our Republic.
HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY!!!
Belated happy 4th of July Turley contributers.
Happy X-Day (Church of the SubGenius)too!
We were out canoeing and hiking. What a beautiful and bountiful country we live in.
Has earth been visited by Murry, Bertram or Stanley the three frogs of the apocalypse?
Peace
Ahh … Hamlet
Poor Henry was a Tory, reborn … then an Anglophile … and finally a Copenhagenophile?
From my read of Revolutionary War history, a great many Tories switched sides and became revolutionaries when The King offered freedom to any colonial slaves who would join the British Army.
If war hadn’t come over “taxation without representation” (simplistic, I know, I know) then, I suspect, it most certainly would have when The King attempted to interfere in the great colonial money-maker called slavery. Many powerful men were accumulating wealth through the practice of buying and selling human beings and many other lesser industries of support depended on the slave trade for their daily bread and butter.
henry:
“I was telling them not to bother, as I would have been willing to take my chances living under British rule.”
*************
I rescind my comparisons between you and the noble house of Plantagenets. No, you remind me more of the Danish royals. Here’s a soliloquy that you could easily perform:
How all occasions do inform against me,
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man,
If his chief good and market of his time
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse,
Looking before and after, gave us not
That capability and god-like reason
To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple
Of thinking too precisely on the event,
A thought which, quarter’d, hath but one part wisdom
And ever three parts coward, I do not know
Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do;’
Sith I have cause and will and strength and means
To do’t. Examples gross as earth exhort me:
Witness this army of such mass and charge
Led by a delicate and tender prince,
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff’d
Makes mouths at the invisible event,
Exposing what is mortal and unsure
To all that fortune, death and danger dare,
Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great
Is not to stir without great argument,
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw
When honour’s at the stake. How stand I then,
That have a father kill’d, a mother stain’d,
Excitements of my reason and my blood,
And let all sleep? while, to my shame, I see
The imminent death of twenty thousand men,
That, for a fantasy and trick of fame,
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause,
Which is not tomb enough and continent
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth,
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!
On part wisdom and three parts cowardice, indeed, my good Henry.
“Tyranny stands only on the shoulders of the spineless.”
and sometimes even on the shoulders of those with spines…Tyranny is not picky
Tyranny stands only on the shoulders of the spineless.
mespo727272, I did not denigrate the colonists who fought the Revolutionary War; nor did I express a lack of gratitude to them. My concern was for THEM; I believe that they need not have gotten themselves killed in a cause that may have prolonged slavery (though I of course do not blame the Revolutionary War soldiers for that, as they did not write the 3/5 Clause into the Constitution).
In light of the fact that I do not think that the colonists should have fought the war, it makes no sense for you to accuse me of having let them fight for my rights. I was telling them not to bother, as I would have been willing to take my chances living under British rule.
I just wish we had also declared our independence from British Petroleum.
Yes mespo and his teen wife said let them eat cake, as she [was] sliced. Louie Lou I, ah ah…..
Henry:
“Lives without self-government are not necessarily unpleasant.”
*************
Sniff, sniff. Sitting from the perch as a beneficiary of that sacrifice, you seem unbelievable ungrateful to me. You would have made a very good colonial Tory: Let others fight for your rights then denigrate them for their stupidity or lack of morality about the war. Shameful, if you ask me.
Tell me Henry do you have a Roman numeral after your name?
http://www.juancole.com/2010/07/on-fourth-of-july-let-iraq-go.html
Vince,
I, of course, share your opposition to colonialism, but I do not think that colonialism is an evil worth dying for. The only things worth fighting a war for are to save lives (as stopping Hitler did) or to save people from having to live lives hardly worth living; i.e., lives in slavery or in concentration camps.
Lives without self-government are not necessarily unpleasant. The American colonists prior to 1776 were not slaves; rather, they held slaves, and their enshrining slavery in the Constitution with the 3/5 Clause may have helped to perpetuate slavery for longer than it otherwise would have been around.
It is true that the idea of self-government caught on after the American Revolution, but ideas like that are usually in the air, and it is unlikely that, without the American Revolution, hereditary monarchs would exist throughout the world today.
Good point. I don’t think republicans want any more people of color having the vote.
Henry,
I wish you had been there in 1776 to explain to the English people that the “Revolutionary War was not worth a single person’s death,” and to ask how many of them would be willing to die, or have their children die, in order to have the right to tax and govern people thousands of miles away. By that standard, the American Revolution was not worth a single English life. Perhaps they would have directed their government to let the colonists go in peace, and to negotiate a lucrative treaty of commercial benefit to both countries.
But, of course, the English people had little to say to their government at the time. They were saddled with a hereditary monarch, a hereditary House of Lords, and a House of Commons elected by the wealthiest citizens. That government had little to do with the consent of the governed, even in England, let alone in the colonies.
After all, the Declaration had less to say about taxation than self-government: “Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
The idea caught on. The Spanish colonies in South America followed. Eventually the entire British Empire, to Churchill’s dismay, dissolved. The nations behind the Iron Curtain shrugged off Soviet rule. It would appear from history that most people in the world believe that countries should be governed by their inhabitants, not by other governments, however benign. That appears to have been a principle worth fighting for down through the years.
Ironically, while the rest of the world has abandoned colonialism, the U.S. is today left with the largest collection of unrepresented territories on the planet, with millions of people in Puerto Rico, Virgin Islands, and Pacific territories having no vote whatsoever in the national legislature that rules them.
But the Americans who revere the Declaration seem completely blind to this jarring contradiction.
Former Fed,
We used to have a yellow lab who hated the fireworks and tried to hide under our bed every year. Happy Fourth of July to all of my fellow Turleyites! Remember our soldiers who are in harms way on this Fourth of July!
I oppose celebrating the Fourth of July. The Revolutionary War was not worth a single person’s death. How many of you would be willing to die, or have your children die, in order to have no taxation without representation? (I don’t see any D.C. residents dying for that cause today.) It’s not as if the British kept the colonists enslaved.
Speaking of slavery, the British ended slavery in their colonies decades before the Civil War, so, if they had defeated the colonies in the Revolutionary War, slavery here might have ended decades sooner. Of course, if the British had won the Revolutionary War and later tried to end slavery in the colonies, that might have prompted another revolutionary war (for “freedom,” of course).
11 Pets Who HATE The 4th Of July (PHOTOS)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/07/04/11-pets-who-hate-the-4th_n_631280.html#s108068
Anonymously Yours
From personal experience never ever load a mortar upside down. Nothing good comes of it, except, well experience.
Happy Fourth of July. Question, why do we celebrate the 4th when it was Declared on the 2nd?
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Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and Benjamin Franklin all later wrote that they had signed it on July 4th and Abagail Adams notes it in her diary.
Forgetting Hollywood movies and Da Vinci Code type books, the Founding Fathers’ belief in “Masonic Astrology” (especially B. Franklin who fancied himself an expert astrologer … “Astrology is a one kind of the whole ancient sciences, in custody far above the ground with high regards to old, by the intelligent and the noble.”) is true.
At least fifty out of the fifty-six signers of the Declaration of Independence, including John Hancock, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson, were Freemasons. Franklin and Jefferson had both been initiated into a French Masonic lodge, and Washington was initiated into the Masonic Lodge of Fredericksburg, VA.
According to Abigail Adam’s diary/calendar the Declaration of Independence was signed around 2:15 AM, and whatever sign was rising at that time would have been very important to the Masons as they were “birthing” a new country.
Also, Masons often performed “rituals or ceremonies” early in the morning and let’s not forget that signing this document was illegal, and an act of treason against the Crown … so let’s do it under cover of darkness.
Try to grab some “Sky Rockets in flight” of “Afternoon Delight” before tonight’s 4th of July Sky Rockets in flight.
From the Declaration of Independence: “A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”
I hope that we will peacefully show that we are still a free people.
An Odd History of the 4th of July!
http://hubpages.com/hub/4th-of-July