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Boston’s Fourth may see ‘tropical downpours’

By Kiera Blessing and Martin Finucane | GLOBE CORRESPONDENT AND GLOBE STAFF JULY 02, 2014




NOAA VIA GETTY IMAGES

Tropical Storm Arthur is threatening Fourth of July plans along the East Coast.

In a prelude to the stormy weather expected later this week, strong to severe thunderstorms began rolling across Western Massachusetts this afternoon, forecasters said.

Strong winds brought down trees and power lines and caused stream flooding in communities, such as Shelburne Falls, Greenfield, and Northfield, according to damage reports fielded by the National Weather Service.

The thunderstorms came rumbling through as all eyes have been focused on Tropical Storm Arthur, which was still swirling off Florida today, but was expected to sweep swiftly up the East Coast later in the week, potentially ruining holiday fireworks shows and backyard barbecues.

Related
Tropical storm warning in N.C.Boston to hold concert, fireworks Thursday

Arthur is projected to develop into a Category One hurricane by the time it arrives off the New England coast. That’s the weakest kind of hurricane, but it is still expected to bring the possibility of “tropical downpours” for the Fourth of July.

“It’s hard to pinpoint the exact timing,” said meteorologist Bill Simpson of the National Weather Service, “but we want to emphasize periods of tropical downpours for Thursday into Friday. The storm passes east of Cape Cod late Friday night, but what’s well out ahead of it ... could be causing problems here.”

Although Arthur will be passing more than 70 miles east of the Cape, the system will push heavy rainfall and potentially damaging winds into the region, he said.

“Generally speaking, winds will have the biggest impact across the Cape and islands,” Simpson said, with gusts reaching up to 45 miles per hour. Wind gusts inland will be weaker - around 30 miles per hour in Boston.

As for rainfall, Simpson said, most of Eastern Massachusetts could expect an inch or two of rain, but “in some areas there will be some bands of higher amounts.”

“We won’t have river flooding, but you could have poor drainage flooding” in urban areas, Simpson said. He also warned that the periods of tropical downpours expected Thursday into Friday could result in low visibility.

Simpson said he didn’t expect winds to be a problem by Friday night, when many Fourth of July fireworks shows are planned, but he said rain might fall and low-hanging clouds could obscure the displays.

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Happy Fourth of July 2013

The Declaration of Independence

IN CONGRESS, JULY 4, 1776

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America

hen in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

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, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. 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.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. — And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

New Hampshire:
Josiah Bartlett, William Whipple, Matthew Thornton

Massachusetts:
John Hancock, Samuel Adams, John Adams, Robert Treat Paine, Elbridge Gerry

Rhode Island:
Stephen Hopkins, William Ellery

Connecticut:
Roger Sherman, Samuel Huntington, William Williams, Oliver Wolcott

New York:
William Floyd, Philip Livingston, Francis Lewis, Lewis Morris

New Jersey:
Richard Stockton, John Witherspoon, Francis Hopkinson, John Hart, Abraham Clark

Pennsylvania:
Robert Morris, Benjamin Rush, Benjamin Franklin, John Morton, George Clymer, James Smith, George Taylor, James Wilson, George Ross

Delaware:
Caesar Rodney, George Read, Thomas McKean

Maryland:
Samuel Chase, William Paca, Thomas Stone, Charles Carroll of Carrollton

Virginia:
George Wythe, Richard Henry Lee, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Nelson, Jr., Francis Lightfoot Lee, Carter Braxton

North Carolina:
William Hooper, Joseph Hewes, John Penn

South Carolina:
Edward Rutledge, Thomas Heyward, Jr., Thomas Lynch, Jr., Arthur Middleton

Georgia:
Button Gwinnett, Lyman Hall, George Walton

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Ship of Fools? July 4th Protest Sets Sail

WEDNESDAY, JULY 03, 2013

By Staff Report





Reddit, Mozilla, WordPress, and others plan July 4 protest against NSA surveillance A large coalition of civil rights and privacy groups and potentially thousands of websites will stage protests on the Fourth of July to protest surveillance programs at the U.S. National Security Agency. As part of the Restore the Fourth campaign, many website members of the 30,000-member Internet Defense League plan to display a protest of NSA surveillance and the text of the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Websites participating include Reddit, where Restore the Fourth originated, WordPress, 4chan, Mozilla, Fark, and Cheezburger.com. – PCWorld

Dominant Social Theme: Finally, corporate America stands up and cries out for independence.

Free-Market Analysis: PCWorld is owned by IDG, a huge conglomerate that solicits advertising from the entire spectrum of Silicon Valley tech companies. These companies are have been cooperating intimately with US intel for a decade or more.

We are supposed to believe that these same companies plus the organizational entity for this July 4th gathering are going to represent the concerns of US citizens when it comes to privacy?

Mozilla is integrated with Google, which in turn is closely integrated with US intel. Reddit is owned by Condé Nast, which owns Vogue, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker. Condé Nast has never been known for a commitment to individual liberties.

The reason that these protests sprang up so quickly is that they are apparently using the organizational backbone of Occupy Wall Street, in part funded by uber-globalist George Soros.

OWS is best known for its lamentable attempt to pit the "99 percent" against the one percent. (We helped a good deal with the demise of OWS as a credible activist movement by pointing out this was the same sort of strategy that led to the bloody French Revolution.)

The "one percent" – comprising millions of wealthy and semi-wealthy individuals – are NOT responsible for the lamentable state of US freedoms.

It is a system of fiat money and central banking run by a tiny handful of individuals that is the problem. The formulation of the "one percent" was an attempt to direct attention away from this system of monopoly money and privilege. It was a deliberate and false paradigm and remains so.

But this is the group, nonetheless, that is organizing the protests, from what we can tell. No doubt organizers hope to derive additional or renewed credibility by hitching OWS's divisive message to more credible July 4th protests.

Here's more:

Organizers of Restore the Fourth are ... planning live protests in dozens of U.S. cities, including New York, Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Boston, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Houston and Atlanta.

"How long do we expect rational people to accept using terrorism to justify and excuse endless executive and state power?" actor John Cusack said during a press conference announcing the protests. "Why are so many in our government, our press, our intellectual class afraid of an informed public?"

Representatives of the NSA and the U.S. Office of Director of National Intelligence didn't immediately respond to requests for comments on the planned protests. The protests come after former NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked information about widespread NSA surveillance of U.S. residents and other people to media outlets, with the first details published last month.

... Cusack, a board member of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, complained that many defenders of the NSA surveillance programs are focusing on supposed character flaws of Snowden and the journalists who broke the story instead of on the surveillance itself and questions about its legality.

The spotlight on Snowden is a "big distraction to avoid focusing on the invasions that have actually been occurring," added Harvey Anderson, senior vice president business and legal affairs at Mozilla. The lack of transparency about the surveillance programs "undermines the openness of the Internet," he added. Efforts to downplay the surveillance and suggest that the U.S. public doesn't care won't work, added Craig Aaron, president and CEO of digital rights group Free Press.

Wikipedia tells us about the Freedom of the Press Foundation:

The Freedom of the Press Foundation is a non-profit organization founded in 2012 to fund and support free speech and freedom of the press. The organization is headed by both mainstream and alternative journalists such as Daniel Ellsberg and Xeni Jardin as well as activists, celebrities, and filmmakers.

The mission is to help "promote and fund aggressive, public-interest journalism focused on exposing mismanagement, corruption, and law-breaking in government", and it offers a way to crowd-source funding for WikiLeaks and independent journalistic organizations. Supported organizations includes WikiLeaks, MuckRock News, the National Security Archive, The UpTake, The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the Center for Public Integrity and Truthout.
Many of these names have ties to mainstream journalism, or mainstream funding, and constitute a kind of controlled opposition. Even the goals of the July 4th protest are depressingly modest:

1. Enact reform this Congress to Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, the state secrets privilege, and the FISA Amendments Act to make clear that blanket surveillance of the Internet activity and phone records of any person residing in the U.S. is prohibited by law and that violations can be reviewed in adversarial proceedings before a public court;

2. Create a special committee to investigate, report, and reveal to the public the extent of this domestic spying. This committee should create specific recommendations for legal and regulatory reform to end unconstitutional surveillance;

3. Hold accountable those public officials who are found to be responsible for this unconstitutional surveillance.

The July 4th demonstrations seek to demand an end to the unconstitutional surveillance methods employed by the U.S. government and to ensure that all future government surveillance is constitutional, limited, and clearly defined.

These protests are being sponsored in part by the same technologists that have a history of cooperating with US intel, have been badly intimidated or have generated considerable wealth from their cooperation.

They are being organized by OWS, which is funded in part by George Soros and which has tried to create the conditions for a kind of second French Revolution in the US. The goals of the protest are to reform the unconstitutional PATRIOT Act (instead of doing away with it) and to "define and limit" further surveillance.

But ... change will not come via protests organized by a controlled opposition. Change will come as individuals begin to rediscover the freedoms on which the US (confederation) was initially based and take appropriate individual action to change their OWN circumstances.

Petitioning the US Congress will likely have little or no effect. There is a reason the US Congress has a favorability rating of about 10 percent ...

Change is hard. Protests are easy, especially violent ones.

Conclusion: They take us for fools?

Source

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