and eat hot dogs and hamburgers, and swim in oceans and try not to get eaten by sharks, and drink beer. Lots of beer.

Dunno about where you live, but people are always setting off fireworks where I live.

We are, however, not on the ocean. Have to go to Jersey to not get eaten by sharks.

-- Mal

noticed that the sun never set on the British Empire. Concerned as we were with the possibility of royal sunburn, offered to remove much of the Western Hemisphere from the British Empire, thus ensuring the sun would set every twelve hours or so on the British Empire, thus avoiding an imperial case of melanoma.

You're welcome.

and said it about freedom-but like everything about America it was really about $$$$$.

Eats lots of barbecue, go to ball games, sing patriotic songs, and generally fuck off.

I guess TJ was right: we should have just used Twitter. But Johnny was so keen to do his great big novelty signature...

(Anyway, it was something about political bands and UN aliens and a bunch of other stuff I can't remember right now.)

Stuff happens and, sometimes, some folks need to quit hanging with others. Maybe it was the long distance relationship. Maybe they just had problems communicating but the folks over here felt that nature and God meant them to free, independent and that government was meant as a means to secure man's basic rights. Folks here felt the existing government was better at taking rights more than it was at protecting them. The decision was made to try it being separate and form our own government.

It took quite a bit of time but after a few hundred years people here are free to watch their neighbors starve and lose their homes. We've advanced a great deal in medical capabilities and even acknowledged that medical care is a basic right but some folks still need to pay deductibles. We're doing better with that unless you're a Native American locked up for cashing a stolen check, then you may die from dehydration because you won't get enough to drink.

For years after we started running government we confined ourselves to running those Native Americans off the lands they knew and turning immigrants (some involuntary) into slaves. Once we tired of that we just got back into the world wide politics of messing with foreign governments for economic advantage or sometimes just to throw some weight around.

I think government may be a talent that's beyond most human abilities.

Happy Independence Day