Celebration

July 4, 2011

Another view of this particular day:

You profess to believe “that, of one blood, God made all nations of men to dwell on the face of all the earth,” and hath commanded all men, everywhere to love one another; yet you notoriously hate, (and glory in your hatred), all men whose skins are not colored like your own.
You declare, before the world, and are understood by the world to declare, that you “hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; and that, among these are, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness;” and yet, you hold securely, in a bondage which, according to your own Thomas Jefferson, “is worse than ages of that which your fathers rose in rebellion to oppose,” a seventh part of the inhabitants of your country.
Frederick Douglass

(Illustration found here).

And on this day of over-blown history from the past, US peoples might also take this time to ponder a future that doesn’t look too good at this point — no amount of fireworks and grand, pompous words will change the reality of this country.
This might be the last fourth of July of naive innocence.
From Business Insider and the effects of history at ‘peak government’:

Rome offers us a plausible model for the devolution of the Savior State.
While a sudden collapse similar to the Soviet Union is always possible, I suspect the U.S. Central State will devolve in parallel with the ancient Roman Empire: as the Empire’s costs exceeded the surplus generated by its remaining taxpayers, it issued flurries of edicts to the far-flung provinces, demanding more treasure and imposing ever more regulations.
The edicts from Rome were simply ignored.
In Yeats’ phrase, the falcon no longer heard the falconer.
Enforcement is expensive, and if the gains reaped by costly enforcement are marginal or negative, then soon the issuers of the edicts ignore them, too.
On this 4th of July, the idea that the Savior State could slip into irrelevancy is far-fetched indeed, as the Central State is currently at Peak Government: intrusive, invasive, all-controlling, even as it plays the role of benign Sugar Daddy issuing trillion-dollar bailouts to banks, trillion-dollar props to the stock market, food stamps and Section 8 to the poor, Medicare and Medicaid to the sick-care cartels, Social Security to tens of millions of retirees, unlimited funding to the National Security State and its Global Empire, and all the other programs funded with its $4 trillion budget ($3.8 trillion officially, but don’t forget the hundreds of billions in off-budget “supplemental appropriations”) and its $1.6 trillion annual deficit, fully 11 percent of the nation’s GDP.

After the so-called ‘peak,’ of course, is the down-hill slide, which ain’t gonna be pretty.
Due to the asshole-in-charge mentality in the US these days, where more money to the rich and much, much less to the actual operation of a peoples’ government leads to shooting oneself in the foot, and all of Americans should expect more and more of this:

The Oregon Department of Agriculture is eliminating its energy and climate change program due to budget cuts.
The program helps farmers with efficiency projects.

There’s handwriting on the wall here, as in: We be fucked.

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