Celebrating Independence on July 4th!

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Lone Star
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Celebrating Independence on July 4th!

Post by Lone Star » July 4, 2018, 6:03 am

July Fourth is the birthday of our nation. I believed as a boy, and believe even more today, that it is the birthday of the greatest nation on earth.

There is a legend about the day of our nation's birth in the little hall in Philadelphia, a day on which debate had raged for hours. The men gathered there were honorable men hard-pressed by a individual who had flouted the very laws they were willing to obey. Even so, to sign the Declaration of Independence was such an irretrievable act that the walls resounded with the words "treason, the gallows, the headsman's axe," and the issue remained in doubt.

The legend says that at that point a man rose and spoke. He is described as not a young man, but one who had to summon all his energy for an impassioned plea. He cited the grievances that had brought them to this moment and finally, his voice falling, he said, "They may turn every tree into a gallows, every hole into a grave, and yet the words of that parchment can never die. To the mechanic in the workshop, they will speak hope; to the slave in the mines, freedom. Sign that parchment. Sign if the next moment the noose is around your neck, for that parchment will be the textbook of freedom, the Bible of the rights of man forever."

He fell back exhausted. The 56 delegates, swept up by his eloquence, rushed forward and signed that document destined to be as immortal as a work of man can be. When they turned to thank him for his timely oratory, he was not to be found, nor could any be found who knew who he was or how he had come in or gone out through the locked and guarded doors.

Well, that is the legend. But we do know for certain that 56 men, a little band so unique we have never seen their like since, had pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. Some gave their lives in the war that followed, most gave their fortunes, and all preserved their sacred honor.

What manner of men were they? Twenty-four were lawyers and jurists, 11 were merchants and tradesmen, and nine were farmers. They were soft-spoken men of means and education; they were not an unwashed rabble. They had achieved security but valued freedom more. Their stories have not been told nearly enough.

John Hart was driven from the side of his desperately ill wife. For more than a year he lived in the forest and in caves before he returned to find his wife dead, his children vanished, his property destroyed. He died of exhaustion and a broken heart.

Carter Braxton of Virginia lost all his ships, sold his home to pay his debts, and died in rags. And so it was with Ellery, Clymer, Hall, Walton, Gwinnett, Rutledge, Morris, Livingston and Middleton.

Nelson personally urged Washington to fire on his home and destroy it when it became the headquarters for General Cornwallis. Nelson died bankrupt.

But they sired a nation that grew from sea to shining sea. Five million farms, quiet villages, cities that never sleep, 3 million square miles of forest, field, mountain and desert, 227 million people with a pedigree that includes the bloodlines of all the world.

In recent years, however, I've come to think of that day as more than just the birthday of a nation.

It also commemorates the only true philosophical revolution in all history.

Oh, there have been revolutions before and since ours. But those revolutions simply exchanged one set of rules for another. Ours was a revolution that changed the very concept of government.

Let the Fourth of July always be a reminder that here in this land, for the first time, it was decided that man is born with certain God-given rights; that government is only a convenience created and managed by the people, with no powers of its own except those voluntarily granted to it by the people.

We sometimes forget that great truth, and we never should.

Happy Fourth of July.
- President Ronald Reagan, Address to the Nation (1981)

=====

Happy Independence Day to all Americans, to friends and to allies.

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Shado
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Re: Celebrating Independence on July 4th!

Post by Shado » July 4, 2018, 7:30 am

A time for reflection and appreciation of the struggle and sacrifice endured by the founders of our nation. Wishing a safe and happy Independence Day to all.

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Re: Celebrating Independence on July 4th!

Post by colt1911 » July 4, 2018, 7:39 am

Happy Independence Day!!!! :D

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Re: Celebrating Independence on July 4th!

Post by thunder43549 » July 4, 2018, 7:42 am

Happy Independence day back to you, Bro. Anything going on in Udon today? I'm in Nong Khai looking to get together and celebrate today. Phone 065-064-8547.

Happy 4th.
Thunder.

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Re: Celebrating Independence on July 4th!

Post by AlexO » July 4, 2018, 8:47 am

Shado wrote:
July 4, 2018, 7:30 am
A time for reflection and appreciation of the struggle and sacrifice endured by the founders of our nation. Wishing a safe and happy Independence Day to all.
Just remember that most of the 56 were descendants of Brits who held good British Christian values as the basis of their lives and of the vision for the fledgling USA. Dont know when and where you lost those but you have. Quite a few were Freemasons as well.
Happy 4th July.

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Re: Celebrating Independence on July 4th!

Post by sometimewoodworker » July 4, 2018, 10:54 am

Jerome and Nui's new househttp://bit.ly/NJnewHouse

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Re: Celebrating Independence on July 4th!

Post by Giggle » July 4, 2018, 12:47 pm

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Ashli Babbitt -- SAY HER NAME!

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Re: Celebrating Independence on July 4th!

Post by Lone Star » July 4, 2018, 9:10 pm

Happy Fourth of July, You Wonderful Country

It has become fashionable to equate the French and American Revolutions, but they share absolutely nothing beyond the word “revolution.”

The American Revolution was a movement based on ideas, painstakingly argued by serious men in the process of creating what would become the freest, most prosperous nation in the history of the world. (Until Democrats decided to give it away to the Third World.)

The French Revolution was a revolt of the mob. It was the primogenitor of the horrors of the Bolshevik Revolution, Hitler’s storm troopers, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot’s slaughter and America’s periodic mob uprisings, from Shays’ Rebellion to the current attacks on White House employees and Trump supporters.

The French Revolution is the godless antithesis to the founding of America.

One rather important difference is that Americans did win freedom with their revolution and created a self-governing republic. France’s revolution consisted of pointless, bestial savagery, followed by another monarchy, followed by Napoleon’s dictatorship and then finally something resembling an actual republic 80 years later.

Both revolutions are said to have come from the ideas of Enlightenment thinkers, the American Revolution influenced by the writings of John Locke and the French Revolution informed by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. This is like saying presidents Reagan and Obama both drew on the ideas of 20th-century economists — Reagan on the writings of Milton Friedman and Obama on the writings of Paul Krugman.

Locke was concerned with private property rights. His idea was that the government should allow men to protect their property in courts of law, in lieu of each man being his own judge and executioner. Rousseau saw the government as the vessel to implement the “general will” and create a new man. Through power, the government would “force men to be free.”

As historian Ralph Hancock summarized the theories of the French revolutionaries, they had no respect for humanity “except that which they proposed to create.” To liberate man, they would “reconstruct his very humanity to meet the demands of the general will.”

Liberals dearly wish our Founding Fathers were more like the godless French peasants, skipping around with human heads on pikes. But alas, our Founding Fathers were God-fearing descendants of Puritans and Presbyterians. (And one Catholic!) individual George denounced the American Revolution as “a Presbyterian war.”

As Stephen Waldman writes in his definitive book on the subject, “Founding Faith,” the American Revolution was “powerfully shaped by the Great Awakening,” an evangelical revival in the Colonies in the early 1700s, led by famous Puritan theologian Jonathan Edwards, among others. Aaron Burr, the third vice president of the United States, was Edwards’ grandson.

There are books of Christian sermons endorsing the revolution. The barbaric attacks on the church by the French revolutionaries would later appall Americans and British alike, even before the bloodletting began.

Americans celebrate the Fourth of July, the date our written demand for independence from Britain was released to the world.

The French celebrate Bastille Day, a day when a thousand armed Parisians stormed the Bastille and savagely murdered a half-dozen guards, defacing their corpses and sticking their heads on pikes — all in order to seize arms and gunpowder for more such tumults. It would be as if this country had a national holiday to celebrate the Ferguson riots.

Among the most famous quotes from the American Revolution is Patrick Henry’s “Give me liberty or give me death!” Among the most famous quotes from the French Revolution is the Jacobins’ “Fraternity or death!” Or, as Jacobin Sebastien Nicolas de Chamfort satirized it: “Be my brother or I’ll kill you.”

Our revolutionary symbol is the Liberty Bell, rung to summon the citizens of Philadelphia to a public reading of the just-adopted Declaration of Independence.

The symbol of the French Revolution is the “National Razor” — the guillotine.

Of the 56 signers of the Declaration of Independence, all died of natural causes in old age, with the exception of Button Gwinnett of Georgia, who was shot in a duel unrelated to the revolution.

Only one other founding father died of unnatural causes: Alexander Hamilton, who did not sign the Declaration of Independence. He died in a duel with Burr because as a Christian, Hamilton deemed it a greater sin to kill another man than to be killed. Before the duel, Hamilton vowed in writing not to shoot Burr.

President after president of our new nation died peacefully for 75 years, right up until Abraham Lincoln was assassinated in 1865.

Meanwhile, all the leaders of the French Revolution died violently, guillotine by guillotine.

The Fourth of July also marks the death of two of our greatest Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, who died on the same day, exactly 50 years after the Declaration of Independence was signed.

We made it for nearly another 200 years. And then, for some reason, the Democrats decided to give our country away to the rest of the world.
- Ann Coulter, 4 July 2018
AMERICA: One of the Greatest Stories Ever Told.

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Re: Celebrating Independence on July 4th!

Post by Lone Star » July 5, 2018, 9:05 am



July 4th Address to the Nation
AMERICA: One of the Greatest Stories Ever Told.

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