Michael Berliner of the Ayan Rand institute reminds us of the original reason we celebrate Independence Day: Freedom from servitude to empire.

Click this link, or watch embedded below: Michael Berliner on Independence Day.

From Garrison Keillor at The Writer’s Almanac:

Today is Independence Day. On this day in 1776, the Second Continental Congress unanimously adopted the Declaration of Independence, and the United States officially broke from the rule of England. The colonists were trying to persuade other nations of Europe to be on their side, so they included a long list of complaints about the king. The document said of the king, in part, “HE is, at this Time, transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to complete the Works of Death, Desolation, and Tyranny, already begun with Circumstances of Cruelty and Perfidy, scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous Ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized Nation.”

Twenty-four years later, in 1804, the explorers Lewis and Clark had the first Fourth of July celebration west of the Mississippi. They were traveling through a part of the Midwest that is now Kansas. They stopped at the mouth of a creek on July 4th, and named it Independence Creek in honor of the day. To celebrate, they fired their cannon at sunset and distributed an extra ration of whisky to the men.

There were unofficial celebrations of Independence Day from its first anniversary, but it really became a popular holiday after the War of 1812. On the frontier, it was the only time of the year when everyone in the countryside gathered together in one place. There would be parades and speeches, and the prettiest and most wholesome girl in the village would be named the Goddess of Liberty. Politicians would get up and call the king of England a skunk and challenge him to a fight. Drunk men in the streets would get into fights and call each other Englishmen. Soon, events like groundbreaking ceremonies for the Erie Canal and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroads were scheduled to coincide with July 4th festivities.

And now, for some fireworks, to the tune of a couple of my favorite songs: 4th of July Fireworks.

Read More: 4th of July, Independence Day

Conventional wisdom maintains that when it comes to children, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. That may explain the fascination with the family trees of John McCain and Barack Obama. So, what exactly do their family trees look like?

The Family Roots of Barack Obama

Barack’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, was an extraordinary woman, and by all accounts, way ahead of her time.

I’ll say this not because it should matter, but because the sad fact is that race still does matter to a lot of people: Ann Dunham was born in Kansas to a white father and a white mother. Like 100% of the baby girls born to white parents in Kansas that year, Ann was pretty white.

Anyway, Ann Dunham grew up, graduated high school and then went to Honolulu to study anthropology at the University of Hawaii.

There she met Barack Hussein Obama, Sr., who was a recipient of an economics scholarship, and also the University’s first black student.

The senior Obama was born in Kenya in 1936. He married at 18, and when he came to Hawaii on scholarship, he left behind an infant son and a pregnant wife.

Ann Dunham met Obama Sr. in a Russian language class in Hawaii. She didn’t know that he already had a wife in Kenya where it was acceptable for men to have multiple wives. When she was three months pregnant, against the objections of both hers and Obama Sr.’s parents, they got married. A few months later, on August 4, 1961, out popped little Barack.

Two years later, Obama Sr. was accepted at Harvard for graduate study and moved to Massachusetts. He and Ann divorced, he earned his degree at Harvard, and then he returned to his first wife and his family in Kenya. He only saw Obama Jr. once more, when his son was 10. Obama Sr. was killed in an automobile accident in 1982. Besides Obama Jr., he fathered six other sons and a daughter. Most of them live in the United States or Great Britain.

A few years after her divorce from Obama Sr., Ann married an Indonesian student named Lolo Soetoro.

In 1967, the new Indonesian dictator, Suharto, called all Indonesian citizens to return to their home country. At that time, Ann and her son, Barack, moved with Soetoro to Jakarta. In Jakarta, Obama attended local Catholic and Muslim schools. Both schools were open to people of all religious faiths, and only offered a few religious classes. Neither school taught radical Islam…nor radical Christianity.

When Barack Jr. was 10, he returned to Honolulu and lived with his maternal grandparents while he attended the prestigious private Punahou School from the fifth grade until he graduated in 1979.

Obama’s mother, Ann, returned to graduate school in Honolulu in 1974, while raising Barack and his new step sister, Maya. She eventually earned her PhD and become one of the world’s foremost authorities in micro finance before succumbing to Ovarian Cancer in 1995.

Obama’s half sister, Maya, received her Ph.D. in Education from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2006.

Maya is married to a Canadian-born professor of Chinese descent with whom she has a daughter. She teaches high school, instructs night classes at the University of Hawaii, and recently took two months out of her schedule to campaign for her big brother.

The Family Roots of John McCain

Unlike Barack Obama, John Sidney McCain III was not born in the United States. McCain was born on August 29, 1936, in Panama.

McCain’s paternal grandfather, John McCain, Sr., was born in Carrol County, Mississippi, to proud parents who owned a 2000 acre former slave plantation. McCain Sr. grew up, attended Ole Miss University, then moved on to the Naval Academy where he graduated in 1906. He served in both World Wars and died soon after returning home from the surrender ceremony in Tokyo Bay. He was posthumously promoted to four star admiral.

John McCain’s dad was also a four star admiral. He served in WWII and in later life was assigned to a series of posts at the Pentagon.

Unlike Barack Obama, who attended a small number of prestigious academically challenging grade schools in Honolulu and Jakarta, John McCain was frequently uprooted as his family (including older sister Sandy and younger brother Joe) followed their military dad around the Pacific, and he attended at least 20 different naval-base schools which were often substandard.

Despite being uprooted so often, McCain did get to spend many summer vacations back at the family’s 2000 acre plantation in Mississippi. After earning the nicknames “Punk” and “McNasty” due to frequent fights at school, he finally graduated and entered the Naval Academy like his father and grandfather.

Unlike Obama, who worked and studied hard to get into Harvard, then became the president of the Law Review, and then graduated first in his class, McCain was an average student who got into the Naval Academy on the name of his father and grandfather. McCain capitalized on his good fortune by graduating 894th out of 899.

Read More: Barack Obama, John McCain, Stanley Ann Dunham, family roots, University of Hawaii, election 2008

Lately, there’s been a backlash against adoption in the media. Maybe people are just tired of the media saturating their news with too many details about celebrity adoptions by the likes of Madonna and Guy Ritchie, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, Meg Ryan, Rosie O’Donnell, Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw, and the list goes on…there are tons of famous adoptive parents most people don’t even know about.

With the increase of international and interracial adoptions, maybe the backlash also has a bit to do with prejudice, xenophobia, and a fear of cultural genocide. Or maybe, as always, bad news leads and the adoptions clouded by corruption are more fun to report on than the hundreds of thousands of legal and ethical adoptions that turn out well.

And maybe it has to do with fear of change. Many people still believe the myth that a parent-child bond can only be formed between a child and their biological parent. They believe that adoptive parents and their adopted children can’t overcome dissimilar DNA. They believe that a child should only be raised by their biological mother, period, and that otherwise, children are doomed to emotionally chaotic and unfulfilling lives.

Let me just put that last myth to rest. While many people, myself included, have had a great experience being raised by their biological parents, many children would be better off if they had been adopted. For instance, the cases of more than 200 women in the United States who kill their children each year. Those children would probably have been better off if they were adopted.

Adoption Statistics

Here are some more sobering statistics from Adoption - A Family by Choice:

• Every 15 SECONDS, another child becomes an AIDS orphan in Africa
• Every DAY 5,760 more children become orphans
• Every YEAR 2,102,400 more children become orphans (in Africa alone)
• 143,000,000 Orphans in the world today spend an average of 10 years in an orphanage or foster home
• Approximately 250,000 children are adopted annually, but…
• Every YEAR 14,050,000 children still grow up as orphans and AGE OUT of the system
• Every DAY 38,493 children AGE OUT (never know a mother and a father)
• Every 2.2 SECONDS, another orphan child AGES OUT with no family to belong to and no place to call home
• In Ukraine and Russia 10% -15% of children who age out of an orphanage commit suicide before age 18.
• 60% of the girls are lured into prostitution. 70% of the boys become hardened criminals.
• Many of these children accept job offers that ultimately result in their being sold as slaves. Millions of girls are sex slaves today, simply because they were unfortunate enough to grow up as orphans.

So, don’t knock adoption too hard, because there are parents out there who desperately want a child, and there are children out there who desperately want a parent. And in the majority of cases, there’s nothing wrong with bringing them together and making happy lives.

Read More: adoption, orphans in africa, cultural genocide, adoption statistics, adoptive parents, biological parents

President Bush and his perennial echo, John McCain, are heckling Americans to end our ban on offshore drilling to ease the pain of gasoline-price growth and all the other necessities growing more and more expensive by the day due to the trickle down effect of $130-a-barrel oil.

But, like 99% of the air coming out of Bush’s pie hole the past eight years, his words are full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Offshore Reserves: 2.4 Years of Oil

The United States consumes 20 million barrels of oil per day.

Just for kicks, here’s the top 5 countries ranked by daily oil consumption:

1. United States: 20,730,000 barrels
2. China: 6,534,000 barrels
3. Japan: 5,578,000 barrels
4. Germany: 2,650,000 barrels
5. Russia: 2,500,000 barrels
6. (See the rest of the list…)

In his speech pestering Americans to let his oil buddies drill offshore, Bush said: “Experts believe that the Outer Continental Shelf could produce about 18 billion barrels of oil.”

At our current consumption rate, that comes to 868 days of oil for the United States, or 2.4 years.

And remember…drilling offshore ain’t cheap. It requires millions of dollars to lease offshore drilling platforms and pay huge CEO bonuses and invest in drilling technology and pay even more huge CEO bonuses. If you think that won’t be passed all the way to the price at the pump, you’re as delusional as Bush.

All for 2.4 more good years out of America’s fleet of 16-miles-to-the-gallon Hummers.

1969 Santa Barbara Offshore Oil Blowout

And let’s not forget the reason restrictions were placed on offshore drilling in the first place: The 1969 Santa Barbara Offshore Oil Blowout, which spewed a quarter of a million gallons into an 800 square mile oil slick that coated 35 miles of California’s coast in a blanket of toxic black slime.

Bush promises it won’t happen again.

Drilling the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge

Not to put a cap on his irrational pestering, Bush is also still heckling America to let his oil buddies drill all over the 19 million acres of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

For what, you ask? For the 8 billion barrels of oil estimated to lie below the surface.

That’s $1,040,000,000,000 worth of oil.

At current consumption rates, it’ll keep America running for 385 days.

Remember, if there’s an environmental disaster, your tax dollars pick up the tab and Big Oil keeps the $1.04 trillion. And either way, the oil’s all gone this time next year.

10 Years to Market

Did I say it would all be gone next year? Well, not exactly…

According to the American Petroleum Institute, if Bush and McCain get their wish and the ban on offshore drilling is lifted, it will be at least 7 to 10 years before a drop of that oil reaches the pump.

Let’s face it…U.S. Oil production peaked in 1971. It’s a fact. Cheap-to-drill oil is limited, runs out, and did run out in America over 30 years ago. It’s time to make the move to alternative sources of energy, not put off the inevitable a couple more years so Big Oil can completely bleed America dry.

Read More: offshore drilling, offshore drilling platforms, outer continental shelf, arctic national wildlife refuge, gasoline prices, offshore reserves, oil slick, daily oil consumption, George W. Bush, John McCain

Work has been eating up my bloggin’ time, and no, I don’t mean sneak-in blog time during regular work hours; I mean at 10 PM when I’m usually winding down and spilling some thoughts and refilling my sanity on this virtual page, but have recently been catching up on work overflow instead.

And, so I sit here wondering, did people really used to work a lot more? Or a lot less? How does the work time of different cultures compare today? And what other interesting things about working time might I find on, where else, Wikipedia?

Medieval Working Time Versus Today

First off, Wikipedia has these working hours statistics: in the 13th century, an adult male English peasant worked an average of 1620 hours a year. Today, an average U.S. worker works about 1949 hours a year.

Now, don’t feel bad if you’re working more hours than a 13th century peasant. If you’re average, you’re spending 24 minutes commuting to work in a futuristic machine blasting recorded music and rocketing an incredible 80 miles an hour on an Interstate highway! Don’t kid yourself; any 13th century peasant would work an extra 6 paltry hours a week if they could spend dang near an hour a day emmersed in the heretic miracle of canned rock ‘n’ roll at bullet speed.

And things could be worse…you could live in South Korea and work 2,390 hours per year.

And things could also be better: Working Americans average a little over two weeks of vacation per year, while Europeans average five to six weeks.

Birth of the 40 Hour Work Week

Until the end of World War I, most workers worked six days a week. Finally, during the Great Depression, in 1938, the unions got the Fair Labor Standards Act passed. It capped the workweek at 44 hours (it didn’t get shortened to 40 hours until 1940). Part of the reason for a shorter work week was to spread scarce depression-era work across as many employees as possible.

But then came WWII, and corporations wanted workers to work as much as possible to nurture the burgeoning Military Industrial Complex.

Today’s Work Week Confusion

Today, it’s just darn hard to guess what’s going on. Some studies show that average work hours have declined, but the addition of spouses to the workforce has increased work hours per family, and declining work hours per job don’t reflect the increase in people working multiple jobs. And then there’s the big move away from hourly jobs to salaried job, and all the tricks corporations are playing to get fewer people to work longer hours (that means you) because, despite what it does to your health, fewer workers mean less health insurance payments for the employer. And, by definition, corporations are all about making bucks.

Read More: 40 hour work week, work time