America – Page 2 – The Burning Platform

Gettysburg, Ghosts, Gifts and Gratitude

by Uncola for TheBurningPlatform.com

Earlier this week I posted a piece entitled “Thanks for Nothing, and Everything” which was generally political and fairly sardonic in nature. Today, on the eve of Thanksgiving, I thought I would give thanks again, but this time distilled into a form more pure. A Gettysburg Address of Gratitude, if you will:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Today, I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude to the founders of the United States of America. Thank you for mutually pledging to each other your lives, your fortunes, and your sacred honor. Thank you for sacrificing all so I could take part in the fountainhead of blessings flowing centuries into your future; none of which I either earned or deserved.

Continue reading “Gettysburg, Ghosts, Gifts and Gratitude”

JUSTICE IN AMURIKA

PATIENT SLOWLY DYING OF COMPLICATIONS

Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer

I stumbled across a short video commercial the other day of a morbidly obese woman doing yoga. The thrust of the commercial was that fat people are that way through no fault of their own, they are just as flexible and healthy as normal people and the only real problem is that people simply don’t understand how being morbidly obese is really a good thing.

That’s our situation.

We live in a world that has been systematically created, one mouthful at a time, deliberately, intentionally, understanding the entire time where it would lead. When it finally reaches the breaking point where the sickness is no longer deniable the only option is to blame anyone for noticing and to continue to pursue the same course of action that led to the problem.

The man who comes along and tries to point out the reality- say the surgeon who is going to have to amputate the fattie’s feet because of the diabeetus- is going to be seen as some kind of radical extremist.

Drastic times call for drastic measures. Sometimes there will be people willing to take advantage of the situation, like the companies that sell scoot-abouts or insulin pumps or adult diapers. Sometimes it’s people who really care and want to help out while profiting, like the folks who run fat camps and sometimes it’s just the steely eyed surgeon who has to saw through the bone and flesh to keep the patient alive.

Our nation, our entire late western civilization really is that morbidly obese lady in yoga pants telling everyone she’s just as healthy and limber as an 18 year old athlete. 100% Delusional and completely unable to stop the compulsive behavior that led to this point.

I wish that it were different, I wish we lived in a healthy and sane society where traditional values and decency prevail, but we don’t and we haven’t for a very long time. The degeneracy on every level has so permeated the fabric of the body politic that it is terminal. All we can do now is watch as the patient slowly dies from complications.

The Danger of American Fascism

An article in the New York Times, April 9, 1944.
From Henry A. Wallace, Democracy Reborn (New York, 1944), edited by Russell Lord, p. 259.

On returning from my trip to the West in February, I received a request from The New York Times to write a piece answering the following questions:
1. What is a fascist?
2. How many fascists have we?
3. How dangerous are they?
A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends. The supreme god of a fascist, to which his ends are directed, may be money or power; may be a race or a class; may be a military, clique or an economic group; or may be a culture, religion, or a political party.
The perfect type of fascist throughout recent centuries has been the Prussian Junker, who developed such hatred for other races and such allegiance to a military clique as to make him willing at all times to engage in any degree of deceit and violence necessary to place his culture and race astride the world. In every big nation of the world are at least a few people who have the fascist temperament. Every Jew-baiter, every Catholic hater, is a fascist at heart. The hoodlums who have been desecrating churches, cathedrals and synagogues in some of our larger cities are ripe material for fascist leadership.
The obvious types of American fascists are dealt with on the air and in the press. These demagogues and stooges are fronts for others. Dangerous as these people may be, they are not so significant as thousands of other people who have never been mentioned. The really dangerous American fascists are not those who are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power. Continue reading “The Danger of American Fascism”

2015: The Year of the American Identity Crisis

Guest Post by S.J. Kerrigan

Race and sexual identity now make up a good portion of all media distractions. According to political activists, “symbols of oppression” now include Halloween costumes, the Confederate flag, and the color of Starbucks coffee cups. So shallow is our collective identity, that this now defines our most passionate debate. While the global economy deteriorates and our government pursues endless conflict across the planet, this is what Americans are most concerned about.

Identity issues make the perfect media story. For the 24-hour TV and internet rage business, these symbolic, but mostly linguistic fights generate strong emotional responses while being non-threatening to advertisers or to the government.

These relatively innocuous symbols have become lightning rods for attention, while real issues go ignored. We wrote in a previous article back in June: “[R]eal problems like mass incarceration, torture, endless war, the end of privacy, and widespread poverty are ignored. This is more than just a corrupt media distracting us with meaningless trivia. Americans literally cannot tell the difference between symbols and reality.”

I have long maintained that these sham fights are a symptom of a society that collectively no longer has any sense of identity. What makes life worth living? Family? That hardly seems true for many Americans. Family cohesion has been disintegrating for some time. A few of us try to define ourselves by hard work and material gain. Maybe that works for some, but how far does that go in an economy with 46 million people on food stamps and a shrinking middle class?

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Wimp Nation: Poised to Fall

Guest Post by Fred Reed

An example of pathological masculinity, male privilege, substance abuse, and patriarchy with overtones of violence against women and people of color, as well as probable homophobia. May drive a truck.

Come morning, I receive emails from friends documenting the curious social transformation coming over the US. These missives usually accompany links to some new tragicomic antics. E.g., Harvard, once a university, lets students invent odd pronouns to promote gender equity. “He” and “she” represent oppression and lack of inclusion.

Recently a friend, a Harvard PhD, wrote and said, “It’s not funny anymore.” I thought, and realized that, no, it isn’t. Things that seemed the obsessions of the occasional lugubrious neurotic are so common that they represent a change in the national character. It is eerie. Something strange is happening.

What now is the national character? What sort of country is America today? A country of rugged individualism? Land of the free and home of the brave? A nation of the independent and self-reliant?

Let us start with Brave.

Continue reading “Wimp Nation: Poised to Fall”

If You Don’t Think Americans Have Lost Our Freedoms, READ THIS

Submitted by George Washington on 09/09/2015 13:37 -0400

Painting by Anthony Freda: www.AnthonyFreda.com

The Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave The Land of the Fleeced and the Home of the Slave

This post explains the liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights – the first 10 amendments to the United States Constitution – and provides a scorecard on the extent of the loss of each right.

First Amendment

The 1st Amendment protects speech, religion, assembly and the press:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The Supreme Court has also interpreted the First Amendment as protecting freedom of association.

However, the government is arresting those speaking out … and violently crushing peaceful assemblies which attempt to petition the government for redress.

A federal judge found that the law allowing indefinite detention of Americans without due process has a “chilling effect” on free speech. And see this and this.

There are also enacted laws allowing the secret service to arrest anyone protesting near the president or other designated folks (that might explain incidents like this).

Mass spying by the NSA violates our freedom of association.

The threat of being labeled a terrorist for exercising our First Amendment rights certainly violates the First Amendment. The government is using laws to crush dissent, and it’s gotten so bad that even U.S. Supreme Court justices are saying that we are descending into tyranny. (And the U.S. is doing the same things that tyrannical governments have done for 5,000 years to crush dissent.)

For example, the following actions may get an American citizen living on U.S. soil labeled as a “suspected terrorist” today:

Continue reading “If You Don’t Think Americans Have Lost Our Freedoms, READ THIS”