The same thuggish intentions which those officers displayed against Lewis are now being applied to their boss, George Lang, only this time without the police batons and “chemical irritants.” Instead, the cops are using the legal system to attempt to beat Lang into submission. The situation is just as ridiculous as a French labor union suing Goodyear for wanting to leave France over their unproductive workers—who only work 3 hours a day, the West Chester Police expect financial compensation, promotions, and community merit even when they exhibited errors in judgment. The West Chester Officers actually expected to be promoted, compensated financially and treated with respect after their disastrous mistake—which is laughably out-of-touch with reality.
Lang presented the reasons for the $265,000 settlement publicly. The lawsuit against him contends that Lang slandered the officers when he let it be known that the officers were “bragging about the beating back at the patrol room,” that the victim was taken to the hospital with severe injuries and that his face was very puffy and bloody—as if that fact could not be verified by the doctor who attended Lewis. The suit maintains all those statements were false and caused the officers to lose an opportunity for promotion. The township has not yet filed a response to the lawsuit alleging defamation, slander, “tortious” interference with a business relationship, intentional infliction of emotional distress and civil conspiracy. (Tortious interference, also known as intentional interference with contractual relations, in the common law of torts, occurs when a person intentionally damages the plaintiff‘s contractual or other business relationships. This tort is broadly divided into two categories, one specific to contractual relationships irrespective of whether they involve business), and the other specific to business relationships or activities (irrespective of whether they involve a contract).
In other words, the West Chester Police want to teach Lang a lesson for breaking ranks with them and are seeking to punish him with any means available. It wouldn’t look good to attack Lang with batons, as they did Jeremy Lewis so they are using the legal system instead. This is a long time tactic by labor unions to teach governing officials such as their bosses to shut their mouth. In this case, the West Chester Police conducted an internal investigation which essentially states that the training the officers received were in accordance with policy and that the beating was justified leaving the officers innocent. That is just as ridiculous as the many times Lakota teachers have been caught trying to have sex with students, or flirting with students only to be protected by the union with virtually no punishment—because the school board doesn’t want to get sued by the union—so they let the actions go without discipline. The same situation applies in this police case against Lang. The reason these crimes by public employees happen is because these unionized government employees believe they are above the law and exempt from ramifications for their bad decisions. In the case of Lang, he is the first public person in a long time to actually stand up to them—and the police are acting violently toward him as a result.
Nobody can ever know what really gets said behind closed doors, and when gangs of thugs get together and whisper off the record about things, they expect that those things cannot be used against them in court—because unless there is a recording, or it is written down—then it cannot be presented as evidence in court. Police unions because they control the legal process—at least the public interpretation of it–believe they have all their loose ends tied up in this case against Lang and that they have a right to attempt to ruin his life for standing up against them.
But there is always more to the story which will not come out in court—most likely. Lang as a trustee has voted against the mindless pay increases the FOP union wants out of West Chester, where the officers are already some of the most highly paid cops in this part of the country. If a bet had to be made in what the real motivation behind this lawsuit was, it would be that Lang would be discouraged to stand against future labor negotiations with the FOP union. The cops are using this law suit as a way to soften him up—to remove his opposition toward their upcoming contract negotiations. Most likely, this lawsuit has nothing to do with what the cops are saying it is—but rather its all about their contract. CLICK HERE TO SEE HOW MUCH THESE OFFICERS MAKE. The police are simply acting like a band of thugs who are above the law. Their behavior against Jeremy Lewis is obvious. But their behavior against their boss, George Lang is even more so—when the totality of the story is known. Whether the weapon is a police baton or the legal system the goal is suppression of the truth and the desire to inflict the desires of the Fraternal Order of Police upon a society of victims living in fear underneath their tyranny. If such desires are left unchecked, the situation will spiral out of control. This is why we must all stand with George Lang. If he goes down, we will all go down and the police will turn on private citizens like they did Jeremy Lewis in less than a moment. This lawsuit is about power and control and who really has it—and by the evidence presented by the West Chester Police against Lewis and now against Lang their lust for power is undeniable.
I have written about the failures of Keynesian economics many times, but at this junction in 2014 the issue is now beyond question. Any Keynesian advocate should be removed from American culture with the same voracity that a terrorist or drug dealer is dealt with, because the results are the same. Keynesian economists should be deported and sent to South Pacific islands where the head hunters of New Guinea are more likely to have success with their voodoo beliefs and faulty thinking. America is the land of the free and anybody has a right to voice their opinion, but they do not have a right to destroy the lives of others, and Keynesian economists do just that. They are the cockroaches of money, the scavengers that destroy commerce with unpleasant filth and mindless tenacity and they should be eradicated from any culture that desires to make money.
I ran across a wonderful article by James E. Miller about the failures of Keynesianism and thought it so articulate that I am reprinting it here for my readers with a link to the original article at the end. Europe is just now beginning to question the failures of Keynesianism as the evidence is impossible to ignore, as the old world is crumbling to the ground as we speak. Canada has a lot of very frustrated and terrified Europeans who are relocated to avoid the socialism of their home countries, so an article coming from the Institute of Canada has more direct validity.
So read Miller’s article below, it has power, conviction, and truth. Keynesianism should be outlawed with the same voracity as a domestic threat would otherwise be identified. The evidence is overwhelming and no longer a question up for debate. The facts just don’t support anything a Keynesian has ever stated about prosperity, economic growth, and the health of nations. The data points the other way clearly, and concisely.
It’s hard not to agree with the old aphorism “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme.” It’s nice to think we learn from our mistakes; yet we always seem to repeat them at some later date.
Reading the daily news, you would be hard-pressed to find mention that there is still an employment crisis unfolding in many industrialized countries. The New York Times recently reported that employers in the United States hired only 175,000 workers in February. This is apparently a cause for celebration among economists. The unemployment rate in the U.S. still remains at a historic high of 6.7%, and there appears to be no date in sight for a return of full employment, but no matter; the economy is supposedly gaining steam.
The only problem is, nobody seems to care much anymore. High unemployment is a constant reality now. Nearly six years of slagging job creation has created a cloud of apathy for most people. It’s just accepted that not everyone who wants to find work will be able to; or they will wander from low-wage job to low-wage job without any kind of security.
The current economic malaise is reminiscent of what the Great Depression was like. Persistently high unemployment with no conceivable end; massive government intervention in the marketplace; a changing industrial landscape; and even social and cultural transformation. We’re less than a century removed from the biggest economic hardship ever faced in America, and the same mishaps are unfolding in front of our eyes.
Then and now, something has remained perennial: the utter incompetence on government’s part to cure economic stagnation.
Newscasters, state officials, and academic economists all tell us government is capable of spending us into prosperity. No matter how much dough is thrown at the glob known as the “economy,” large numbers of people remain out of work. During the Depression, the glut of joblessness lasted for nearly fifteen years. Uncle Sam spent like a drunken sailor while swallowing up much of the economy in fascist scheme after fascist scheme.
The very same thing goes on today, all at the behest of Keynesian-type political actors who provide the intellectual ammunition necessary to justify government’s outstretched hand. With neatly obscure formulas and obtuse language, the apparatchik darlings of Keynes love branding themselves as deep-thinking scientists capable of engineering the perfect economy. When their policy is put to work, we get the opposite. Job creation stagnates, living standards slump, and misery spreads. The siphons of entrepreneurial growth don’t pump; they are bogged down with the grimy sludge of currency manipulation and government hubris.
After decades of constant failure, I mean this wholeheartedly: the followers of the Keynesian school don’t have a damn clue on how to fix the economy. Why my gauche phrasing? Their policy prescription is a complete and total failure. The Great Depression; the stagflation of the 1970s; the Great Recession we see today; in each instance, Washington was impotent to reverse the damage. Keynesians are either pathetically ignorant, or maliciously deceptive.
Taking rhetorical shots doesn’t mean much without some evidence. So let’s meet the Keynesians on their terms. First, economic science itself will be interpreted through the lens of positivism. That means data, in whatever form, will be used to justify whether something works or not. Of course the assumption will be made that spending is the driver of economic prosperity – not saving or investment. The same goes for boundless money printing, which is said to infuse the “animal spirits” with a rejuvenating elixir.
So what have they got for successes? Keynesians used to tout the efforts of Franklin Roosevelt (not so much Herbert Hoover, who was proto-Rooseveltian) during the Great Depression as vindication for their theory. I remember being told in no uncertain terms that Uncle Sam stepped up to save the downtrodden from excess capitalism in my American Presidency 301 class. Sure, it wasn’t an economics course; but it’s the same tale spun by economists anyway.
What does the data say? From 1931 to 1940, the unemployment rate never went south of 10%. From the onset of the Depression, Washington spending went up 97% under the Hoover Administration. According to the White House’s official statistics, the federal budget increased from $3.5 billion in 1931 to $13.6 billion in 1941, jumping in size year after year. A combination of deficit spending and tax hikes (admittedly not a Keynesian remedy) allowed for this gorge in consumption. Meanwhile, the Federal Reserve goosed the economy by first stabilizing the monetary base and increasing the supply of money after the initial contraction during the Depression’s early years. According to the Historic Statistics of the United States, the Federal Reserve increased its holding of U.S. securities from $510 million in 1929 to over $6 billion in 1942. During the same period, the central bank’s balance sheet went from about $5.5 billion to $29 billion.
That’s no small stimulus. And yet the unemployment rate failed to drop significantly during the Depression years. Most of Keynes’s disciples admit that nearly fifteen years of high unemployment leaves much to be desired on the part of muscular government. The counterfactual is then deployed that Roosevelt’s domestic efforts lightened the economic burden foisted upon America. What finally put the Depression to bed, they argue, was the incredible amount of spending during World War II.
But as economic historian Robert Higgs shows, measures of economic performance were highly skewed during wartime. Unemployment fell and production ramped up, but this was due to the draft and building of armaments. Rationing was widespread to the point where basic foodstuffs and toiletries were scarce. If a wartime economy counts as prosperity, then the homeless today are the living embodiment of luxury.
World War II is a bunk fantasy that in no way proves the Keynesian theory correct. The same goes for the fascist orgy known as the New Deal. Fast-forward to today, and the same charlatans are preaching from the gospel of government interventionism. They implore Washington to fight back against the Great Recession with the same blunted tools: spending and money printing.
When the housing bubble burst and the economy began to tank, then-Chairman of the Federal Reserve Ben Bernanke and crew nearly tripled the central bank’s balance sheet. As of right now, the Fed’s sheet stands at about $4 trillion. In 2008, it was at $800 billion. Not to be outdone, the federal government ramped up spending by running nearly-trillion dollar deficits year-after-year. Once again, all this effort has only made a slight dent in the unemployment rate.
From a strictly empirical perspective, the Keynesian theory is a disaster. Positivism wise, it’s a smoldering train wreck. You would be hard-pressed to comb through historical data and find great instances where government intervention succeeded in lowering employment without creating the conditions for another downturn further down the line.
No matter how you spin it, Keynesianism is nothing but snake oil sold to susceptible political figures. Its practitioners feign using the scientific method. But they are driven just as much by logical theory as those haughty Austrian school economists who deduce truth from self-evident axioms. The only difference is that one theory is correct. And if the Keynesians want to keep pulling up data to make their case, they are standing on awfully flimsy ground.
As a continuation on yesterday’s article about the divorce of America from Europe it is time that we had a heart to heart realization as confirmed by the Dutch speed skating coach from the Sochi Olympics. Jillert Anema said he wasn’t surprised the Americans were doing so poorly in speed skating in Sochi because The United States doesn’t support the sport the way it should be supported. He thinks we don’t support speed skating because we’re too busy watching stupid American football and that we are wasting a lot of athletic talent on a sport that is meant to kill each other. Anema confirms what I said previously, that the rest of the world does not understand American football because they do not understand the nature of capitalism. American football is a game of capitalism as European soccer and rugby are tribal games of domination and socialism. The premier reason that the rest of the world cannot compete with The United States in American football to the extent that they cannot even put a team on the field, is because they cannot grasp the concept of capitalism for which to train and play the game. Americans do think they are right, because they are, and they are better than the European, because they are………….because in America they are free and unconquered and a touchdown is symbolic of industrial success and achievement which prompts cheers from a ruckus crowd.
When I was a kid I played soccer. Later in life I realized I would have enjoyed football much better. At the time everyone told me that soccer was the game of the future and that football was on the way out. That was early in 1980. What I didn’t know at the time was that there was a desire by Europe to lead the world toward global socialism through The United Nations and that they desired to advocate a game that the entire world could play together which represented the economic and political structure of their design. They desired at the time to turn The United States away from American style football and onto European style football known as soccer.
I was so aggressive as a fullback in soccer that my teammates nicknamed me the “animal” because I often head-butted offensive players intentionally drawing yellow cards to prevent the other teams offense from getting set-up down the field. I learned very early that the best way to have a great defense in soccer was to pull our full backs up far away from our defended goal preventing the other team’s forwards from getting too close, because the other team’s offense was not allowed to begin a run at the goal by being behind the other team’s defense. This kept their offense from getting too close to our goalie. If our offense kept the ball on the enemy’s side of the field I could pull up our defense to leave a tremendous gulf between our line and the goal which the offense couldn’t exploit because of the rules. This is how soccer is a socialist game because forwards were regulated to staying in front of a defense. If they did get behind me they’d be called off-sides, so when a well placed ball was punched down the field toward the offensive player, and they would receive it a few steps in front of me, a well placed head-butt would plant them into the ground and make them think twice about doing it again.
By the time I got to high school I was so disenfranchised with the education system that I didn’t want to engage in any battle that the school would benefit from. I hated the coaches and most of the members of the team, so I stayed away even though it was a game I was naturally inclined to. Once I got away from my school days I found I enjoyed the game increasingly over the years and found it to be unique to America in many ways that are positive. In football the receiver can get behind the defensive backs if they are faster. The only off-sides there is goes against the defense. They cannot jump across the line until the offense led by the quarterback starts their play. This is the essence of the difference between soccer and football. In soccer off-sides favors the defense, in American football it favors the offense. In America the offense metaphorically speaking is of capitalism, industry, banking, invention, the defense is regulation, government, and political resistance. The intention is to beat those elements to score a goal. That is why Americans don’t typically cheer in football until yards are gained or a score is obtained. In soccer they cheer collectively during the entire match. In football it is typically when an achievement is obtained—this is a big difference.
I have been a Tampa Bay Buccaneer fan most of my adult life. I fly flags on game day and fire cannons from my porch when they score. I love the hard hits, I love the theater, and I love how it is specifically American. The rest of the world cannot play American Football. Rugby is a pretty close adaption and the players are tough in that they don’t use padding, but the concept of the game is still a version of Europe’s addiction to collectivism instead of an individual quarterback standing behind a battle line and delivering the ball down the field to ultimately score. In American football the quarterback is the CEO of an offense. He is a celebrated hero from Atlas Shrugged in every circumstance and his job is to rally his team to victory as an “individual.” In rugby the closest thing they have is a “fly-half position.” So there is no coordinated effort to get the ball down the field to score a goal—but like soccer it is a kind of chaos where the ball bounces back and forth between offense and defense with no plan or formation on how to execute a task. Soccer and rugby are European games that reflect their cultures, and they cannot grasp the ideal of a Football playbook where offensive and defensive schemes drive the ball down the field toward the promised land of scoring.
Europe cannot put a team on the field that can even remotely compete with an American team because Europe and the rest of the world cannot grasp capitalism. The differences are pure and simple. Who gives a rat’s ass about speed skating around a frozen lake when you can take off the head of an enemy player on the field of capitalism and are given points for ramming the ball down the throat of a defense to gain victory? In soccer and rugby a score just so happens almost by random chance, just like their stupid economic system—which is why the score is often 1 to 0 or 2 to 3 after over an hour of game play. In football you get 6 points plus a field goal attempt for scoring a touchdown. In soccer you get one stupid point. In America when a business hits it big, people often get rich. They get more than a silly point; they get SIX points just for getting across 100 yards of defense. Football is their game, it is the hopes and dreams of every American played out on the battlefield of capitalism. Soccer and rugby are games of socialism, collectivism, and way too many rules reflective of their societies. The difference between Europe and America is clearly evident in their games.
Needless to say soccer did not become a hit in America. I don’t even know where the nearest professional team is, so my teachers lied to me when they said that soccer would suppress American football in the future. They hoped that it would because deep down inside they recognized the differences which are clearly ideological. I would love to see London play the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, or socialist bitches from Paris. I’d like to see France find 11 men in the entire country who could meet the Tampa Bay Bucs in Raymond James Stadium—I bet they couldn’t do it. Let the speed skaters of the Dutch even think about putting a football team on the field against even American high school players. They would be destroyed. There wouldn’t even be remote competition, because the people from those places are so intellectually ruined because of their economic commitment to socialism that they can’t even comprehend the role of a quarterback, let alone train a player to perform the task. This is also why they fail economically, because they do not understand what makes industry work, what makes money, and how products are even created. They randomly sometimes get lucky and score a point, but often you have to wait an entire game to see a score—or in the case of Europe, an entire decade.
To Jillert Anema, let’s see you even come close to assembling a team that could play American football. America can at least put speed skaters in an arena with the Dutch but there is a reason nobody in the world can compete with American in football…………………….it’s because they can’t. Just like the battle between socialism and capitalism. It is that simple.
How about challenging the rest of the world to a little wager? Here is the contact page to the United Nations. Send this article to them and let’s see if they have an answer to it. Let’s see if they can pull all of the best players from around the world from soccer, rugby, speed skating—whatever, and see if they can even play against one American professional football team. I bet they can’t.
Better yet contact every country that is in membership at The United Nations from that same link. Send them a request as well and let’s see if all of them put together could build a football team……………American style.
(Shhhhhhh, they can’t.) I offer the videos on this article as testimony. Prove me wrong……………anybody in the entire world.
There are attempts in Europe to be like America. There are teams trying to learn the role of a “quarterback” and play the American game. They can all be found at this link. Building a proper team should start with them. But I bet all of them together would fall short of an American professional team. Because the basic concept of the game eludes Europeans.
I feel sorry for people who feel this way. The reviewer simply can’t relate. They have no concept of having the kind of passion for something where sleep, rest and comfort are secondary concerns. They don’t feel those kinds of things, so they think good characters are the type of people who strive to have faults, where they work simply to eat, drink, rest, and have sex. People like that are like monkeys at a zoo looking at human visitors across a gulf of intelligence, beyond the barriers of a cage, and can’t understand why zoo visitors have drinks, and strollers, and small humans in their arms with sunglasses shielding their eyes from the sun. They are primitives, sad and left behind lost forever to faulty thinking and stupidity.
That was a comment I made to an article published on Atlas Shrugged is a Ridiculous Book posted in the Galt’s Gulch site where I have quite a few friends. I read the review linked below and thought that the author Robert Nielsen did a good job citing his opinions, that he did thoroughly read the book and made an effort to have pointed comments. I thought the author was a generally curious person of above average intelligence. However, I also thought that the author might be a radical left winged oriented socialist (Democrat) who was a staunch Keynesian and after looking into the guy a bit, that is exactly what he was. He was a European born and raised amidst the socialism of Europe and simply had no mental mechanisms that could relate to the novel Atlas Shrugged and believed that through democratic consensus that just because a majority of the population on earth does not think like the characters in Atlas Shrugged, that the book is ridiculous and should not have an audience. Nielsen had a number of opinionated passages in his article, but the one below struck me as being the most revealing.
“All of the heroes have this absurd element to them. They don’t stop to eat or rest a single time in the book and it is casually thrown in that they haven’t slept for two or three days as though that would have no effect on them. They have no hobbies or interested (sic) outside work. Even when they are bleeding they don’t feel any pain. In other words they are soulless robots, machines good for working and nothing else. Atlas Shrugged bears a strong resemblance to Fascist propaganda in its treatment of heroes. There is a strong emphasis on the cult of personality, of worshipping men of action in contrast to the masses who are too stupid and cowardly to achieve greatness. Democracy destroys accountability whereas dictatorship is the only system where anyone is responsible. All of the best firms in the book are named after their owner and collapse without them.”
Nielsen says a lot here and represents a large portion of the world who have grown up for generations under kings, princes, fascist rulers, and tyrannical dictators who to them represent the “right” on a political spectrum and democratic socialists, communists, labor unions, and religious collectivists on the other representing the “left.” Yet for me personally, I don’t even consider any of the categories on that scale relevant and long ago designated Europe and its history to be corrosive to the human experience. My ideal of a good time is not sitting in a “pub” with my mates watching a socialist soccer game and thinking that James Joyce was an intellectual giant as the benchmark of good literature. The guy could write complicated metaphors—but to what end—to be haunted by dreams of a fragmented past as in Finnegan’s Wake or to visit a brothel in Ulysses. Nielsen is from Dublin, and so was Joyce and because of my experience with those works, I feel I have a pretty good feel for life in Ireland and what it represents—and none of those things are concepts that are attractive to me.
I find it utterly disgusting that so many Americans have been bred through the education system to believe that the cities of Europe are exotic destinations of culture and sophistication. To me the entire land mass from the shores of France to the end of Russia protruding out into the Bering Strait is a corrupt embodiment and continuation of The Dark Ages. The people from those lands have been conquered and beaten so many ways by so many tyrants that the only way out of the cycle was “democracy” through majority rule. And if the majority are idiots, than so be it. Visiting a BW3’s on a Friday night disgusts me as much as it would if I were in a Dublin Pub with a bunch of socialists banging mugs of beer together in communion around a soccer match—so my feelings are not specific to Europe. And before I say any more, one of my son-in-laws is from England, just outside of London on the eastern side. My other daughter dated a guy from the boarder of Scotland. I have family members from Europe, and I deal with people almost every day in every time zone from London to New Zealand, so I have a very good understanding about the lifestyle of Europe which leaves me shaking my head when Americans seek to mimic that cold landmass with a history of oppression extending from here to the dawn of man shown in the Caves of Lascaux. America was founded by people seeking freedom from Europe and they were willing to die to leave that place. In a lot of ways the pilgrims were the original Gaultchers from Atlas Shrugged they were looking to be free of the religious and political persecution of Europe, which still exists to this very day in Keynesian economics. The thought process moved from churches into the economy but the mentality is very much the same.
Once America was founded and Europe saw that they could visit without being killed by natives, they settled the New England area and brought their stupid European socialism with them in the form of “progressivism,” and started voting for Democrats while encourage America to give up football and making “soccer” the national game…………………………..NO. In many ways Europe is still stuck under the veil of tyranny that they have been confined with since there was an Ice Age and it is utterly disgusting. Atlas Shrugged is one of the first great American novels produced under a relatively new country with a new way of thinking. Now of course the jealous European trained in the liberal schools of Ireland, England and France will scoff at the characters of Atlas Shrugged because they are clearly outside of the European experience.
In reference to many of the successful Americans that I know, it is true that if they do not come to work, or leave a company after they have led it, the company does collapse. Making money is their hobby. I remember a lunch meeting that I had in downtown Cincinnati with some very influential financiers and patent attorneys where the bill was $11,000. These guys did this every day of the week. They made their money under an American capitalist system and could not have done what they were doing in Europe because people like Robert Nielson would think that they had equal rights to that money just because their mothers gave birth to them in Dublin. The people I had lunch with had a hobby that was “making money” which is why they had it. The wealth they produced carried over into every aspect of society from the nice waitress who tended to them daily to the people who imported the food required to feed them. If those types of people didn’t show up for work one day, or decided to go on a vacation, their businesses fell apart because “the people” working for them lost focus and drifted without proper leadership. That is not fascism that is leadership. Fascism is where such a human trait is taken advantage of.
America has created its own definitions and fascism is not even an option. A business leader of an industry is not a fascist, they are a job creator. People are free to leave that job if they discover they don’t like the direction of the company. But to allow a fascist to rule over the entire nation of America—that simply isn’t going to happen. Europeans can’t wrap their mind around that ideal; it doesn’t fit with their history and their foundations of education. To them the political “right” is fascists like Mussolini and Hitler and the “left” are people like Lenin, Stalin, and Marx. America rejected all those idiots because they are collectivists, and in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged she is introducing an entirely new way of looking at the old problems so that Americans can understand why their capitalist system is so superior to European socialism. Those in love with “democracy” (majority rule, even if a majority are fools) is to commit a political and economic structure around collectivism. In America where individualism is the foundation concept, collectivism is a curse. It is a waste of time to achieve group consensus because not everyone is capable of making proper decisions. The reason for this has been explored by Robert Pirsig in the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, another revolutionary work of philosophy done specifically in America. Slowly the old philosophers of Europe, people like Nietzsche, Marx, and Descartes are being replaced by Rand, Pirsig, and Adam Smith.
The characters of Atlas Shrugged are my kind of people. They represent my daily life and I do feel sorry for those who can’t relate. It must be terrible to wake up each morning in such a fog that human faults are the first area of focus. It must be terrible to even consider if “group consensus” is something to measure before taking action. I once went to Disney World with a large group and watched everyone standing in Tomorrow Land for an hour arguing about which thing to do first. Finally, I got sick of it and gathered up a crew who wanted to go with me and I left to explore the park. We had a blast because most people just want to have someone give them direction in life. They don’t want the burden of thinking, they just want to follow—and that’s fine so long as they don’t get in the way. But if they try to hold things up with indecision and personal insecurities, then it is unacceptable to me. The primary question explored in Atlas Shrugged is if the majority should be allowed to hold up the few, when it is the few who move the world, and the answer is no.
People like me do not reach out to the “democracies” of the world trying to sell Ayn Rand or Atlas Shrugged because I really don’t care if people like Robert Nielson accepts it or rejects it. I just don’t want Nielson in a position through his Keynesian economics to hold me up when I want to do something. If he wants to hang out in a Dublin pub watching soccer matches instead of being productive, that is his decision—but he does not have a right to hinder me. The point of Atlas Shrugged is that when this process happens, people like Nielson do suffer. Europe sucks…………..most everyone is stuck somewhere between fascism and communism. The topless beaches of France and Spain do not give culture to a society—it does not make them enlightened. French wine is not better than California wine and the Caves of Lascaux are representative of the same tribal collectivism as the Navajo of the American Southwest—both represent primitive collectivist cultures mired with a basic premise of tribal sacrifice. The America that took Adam Smith’s lead, and John Locke and was first commented on by Ayn Rand, then Robert Pirsig is one that exists outside of European definitions for things. It is not my task or those of my friends in Galt’s Gulch to “sell” Rand to anybody. Her books have sold for decades quite well on their own—people come to her work in their own time in their own way. The difference between a republic and a democracy is that a republic is supposed to represent different people as a representative as opposed to a democracy with majority rule. America is a republic not a filthy democracy! A group of thugs do not have a right to impose on me their beliefs just because they outnumber me. The stupid will always outnumber the intelligent—so the stupid should not have power over the intelligent. The intelligent should not be hampered by fools, lowlifes, and insecure collectivists. That is what Atlas Shrugged is essentially about and why it offendshttp://youtu.be/bWebZ_OqU_c so many people. I can understand that many people don’t like the book or the movies if they identify with the villains—nobody likes being called names. But for years in every movie and book that has attacked capitalism, they have attacked my values, which is what the artists have done to people like me—so Atlas Shrugged is art that I can relate to. I don’t expect the democratic masses to enjoy it—it wasn’t written for them.
It is sad that people like Robert Nielsen are stuck behind on an island of Keynesian economics, socialism, communism, and soccer matches over beer in 200-year-old pubs that smell like dirty feet and swamp ass stained to their wooden chairs after 50 years of use. Like monkeys stuck on an island display at a zoo designed to contain them they can only look across the void at America and wonder why we have it so good, why we have so much money, so many tools at our disposal. But they never get to the answer of why because they are lacking the intellectual tools to step across the barriers which contain them. If they knew how to swim or were not afraid of the water they could free themselves—but instead they spend their days grooming each other and beating on their chests in memory of their primitive ancestors and call those who have left them behind—cultists driven by “selfishness.” I would love to help those people, but not by coming to Europe to copy off them, to play their stupid soccer matches where the game resembles socialism with their ridiculous off-sides rules—where a forward cannot be behind a defense—give me a break! That makes for a boring game and a boring economy, and Europe has both. Atlas Shrugged, an American story, is about productivity, individualism, innovation, and the corruption of the masses and their need for leadership. John Galt is certainly not the next European fascists. He is beyond that kind of thinking—he is all about total independence where individuals are not compelled into imprisonment by the weakest links of society—because those weak links chose to be stupid, perilous, or otherwise reckless with their lives—then expect others to shield them from reality through collectivism. Atlas Shrugged philosophically is a divorce from Europe, and obviously in such divorces there are hard feelings and one side will always try to make the other look bad. But in the end, Atlas Shrugged is a change in thinking that the spouse left behind resents and in this case it is Europe and all its faulty past. Robert Nielsen might feel the chill of abandonment and call after their former lover with disdain and envy, but the merit is rooted in jealousy. The proclamation that some people, some economies, and some ideals are better than others, and that people who love Atlas Shrugged are willing to go off and do their own thing is a reality that the European and the Americans who love the dank culture of that haze covered land is simply too much to comprehend.
Atlas Shrugged is about a new way of thinking where the roots of productivity are not explored through mystical hocus pocus balancing limited resources against equal distribution to the world. It is about what makes resources in the first place so that new things can come to be which ultimately benefit everyone. The question must first be asked, who is responsible for productivity—is it the democratic masses or the few who possess leadership and ability? My trip to Disney World is confirmation that Atlas Shrugged is the only artistic work to properly identify the answer. At the end of that day, a majority of the people in the argument of what to do were still there. They had simply sat down at a few tables and ate food most of the day stuck in inaction driven by their indecisiveness. Me and my group, we rode Pirates of the Carribean—5 times, road the Thunder Mountain Railroad, did the Swiss Family Robison Tree House, saw a number of shows including the Presidents Showcase, ran all over Tom Sawyer Island, did everything in Fantasy Land, shopped, road Space Mountain—3 times and still had time to do more. The rest of the group had not even left Tomorrow Land except to get a place on Main Street to watch the fireworks. That is what has happened to Europe and every single Keynesian economist and every political socialist. They are still stuck in the politics of Europe and are chained to its dismal fate where America has moved on. The philosophy of that “moving on” is chronicled in Atlas Shrugged and is only growing as more and more of those monkeys on the zoo island learn to swim and discover a big bright world outside of their intellectual confinement.
Bill Gates is a creation of American capitalism and could only have become the richest man in the world in America. Unlike people like George Soros or Warren Buffet who are also billionaires, Gates became wealthy because of his creation of a superior product. To this very day I still consider Microsoft Excel to be the most important, and powerful invention of the 20th Century. The Microsoft Office bundle has literally changed the world and revolutionized business. I can send a Microsoft PowerPoint to literally any company in the world, and they can open it and view the information effortlessly through a simple email, and that is a real miracle. 20 years ago for a business meeting I would have had to carry a brief case with me everywhere I went, but now I can download all my documents for a presentation on a “stick” and open them on another company’s computer using Excel to show complicated financial formulas and forecasts that would have taken mountains of paper to do in the past. The cell design of Microsoft Excel is just brilliant. It is a real technical evolution for the human species, and is why Bill Gates is often the world’s richest man. I don’t agree with his views on Common Core education which he shares with another person I admire, George Lucas. I think in that category both men are out of touch to believe that any government is qualified to be in charge of a child’s education. But I would attribute their world view to a naiveté bred from their wealth and a remoteness created from their financial security and success in business. They believe that they can apply the same success they had in their business to government sponsored education which has proven incorrect, but I won’t fault them for those moments of faulty thinking, because they are right in their specific fields much more often. And to that assertion, Gates recently warned world governments of an impending crisis that they must get out ahead of, particularly in The United States. A serious shortage of traditional jobs is coming to every country in the world, and the need to reduce taxes, avoid any increases in the minimum wage, and to find ways to inspire entrepreneurs to create jobs that have not yet been invented is becoming the most important thing anybody can hope to do.
Microsoft Excel already does for one individual what a room full of accountants used to perform prior to the computer revolution. All those highly paid jobs have been eliminated and given to people who have not dedicated their life to finance and now perform the same tasks as a mere afterthought—people like me. I’ve always been a creative person, and an in-the-trenches worker, but now it’s not uncommon for me to do complicated spreadsheets in a movie theater before a film begins without much additional effort, because Excel does most of the heavy lifting. This tendency of software substitution will become greater, resulting in millions upon millions of lost jobs over the coming decades. Gates is warning now so that governments can prepare, but most of course will not listen.
Obama’s recent insult of an executive order for salary workers is the most obvious current failure of governments to understand just how behind the curve they are. Obama’s social beliefs were formulated by communists from the 1930s to the 1960s and are why he believes that the profits of the business owner should be shared by the “workers,” which is 100% false. A joke in our family while traveling through remote areas when we hear a song on the radio that is twenty years old is for me to declare that the song just came out in that location. I do this a lot in Louisville, Kentucky where we visit often. My reference is a comment on the backwoods foundations that are built around the city far away from culture centers like Los Angeles, New York and London. Obama’s thoughts are comparable to a song from 1890 just hitting Louisville and them thinking its revolutionary, that’s how far behind the curve, Obama is on what’s happening in the world. But Gates is the one who is writing the songs that aren’t even out yet, and will soon flood the world with their popularity once discovered.
It is only a few years away that drivers for over-the-road trucks will no longer be needed. The trucks will drive themselves. Nurses who monitor patients will be replaced by medical bots, and fast food restaurants will become dramatically automated. Human workers are simply too unreliable, they don’t show up for work enough, and cost too much once there. Insurance companies, financial centers, and most cubical based endeavors will go away. There isn’t enough work to keep workers busy now for 8 hours a day—as Facebook login hours are proving, and as technology increases, this will become much worse. Even manufacturing will change dramatically as 3D printers will increasingly do the task of manual labor for component parts. Gone will be the days where a worker sat in front of a punch press, a sewing machine, or an injection molding unit running production for 8 hours a day 5 days a week. The jobs in the future will be in material acquisition, and inspection, but not in the actual manufacture. Technical assembly will still be a human trait, but every job not requiring human reason which is adaptable by circumstance will be challenged by technology.
It is not that far off that building construction will be done by robots because hiring human workers will be risky and unreliable. It costs too much to hire a human worker with the threat of FMLA benefits, workman’s compensation cases, and the unreliability of momentary lapses in judgment. Software reliability will prove much more attractive to future manufacturing. Governments will strive to suppress technical innovation to protect their taxation structure, but it’s too late for them. A company that wants to make interior car parts for Toyota, Honda, or even Ford will likely move their shop to some African country to avoid the high taxes of developed countries and use 3D printers to make many of their component parts hiring a skeleton crew to perform actual assembly. As McDonald’s workers protest for unionization and a higher minimum wage the same robots working in the medical industry will prepare the food, drop the French Fries and work the drive thru. Humans will load the machines with new food, they’ll do most of the money transactions since intuition will still be required between human customers, and they’ll supervise the sandwich making exercises. But the actual sandwich making will be done by robotic hands. (Do you have any idea dear reader how much money is lost putting too much lettuce on Big Macs can cost McDonald’s per year? Too much! Human error destroys millions of dollars in profit potential.)
Big government people and unionized workers will declare that all this technology is bad for the worker, it’s bad for the human condition, and it is bad for the economy. These same people think that the sun comes up every morning to shine on their faces during their brief visit on earth and are out-of-touch with reality. They are way behind the times that are coming and ill prepared to deal with the realities Bill Gates is warning about. Education will change drastically! Personal pleasure and recreation will change dramatically! Manufacture and product delivery will change dramatically! Service of all kinds will leap into another dimension in just 10 years to something not even recognizable to today’s standards—so the warning as been given—and we’ll see who listens.
The world will not stop evolving just because human beings have not adopted their religions, their politics, and their moral compass to the tools of invention created for the use of advancing society from a perilous past. Every time I open an Excel Spreadsheet I feel privileged to live in such a time that I can use such a thing. What is even better is when I can open a spreadsheet with costs, delivery and material items on my iPad removed from a jacket pocket while waiting for food to arrive while dinning out. Apple Products are not typically compatible with Bill Gate’s Microsoft products but because Microsoft’s Office programs are so heavily used throughout the world, Apple has apps that can interpret them on their platforms. And in just a few years these Excel inventions by Microsoft will seem clunky and barbaric compared to what’s coming. Gates is right; most people are not prepared for those changes. Governments if they were smart would completely reorganize their financial structures to deal with these coming changes and not try to hold the world to outdated and archaic social models where people are chained to programs like Social Security and Medicare. Technology will create nanobots that will allow people to live for centuries instead of decades. Cancer will be cured with a computer program that solves the problem in the human DNA itself—who will retire at 65 or even 85 when they can continue working for 100 or 200 years? Why pay for Medicare when people can just become healthy like they were when they were young? Why pay for a UPS driver when the truck can drive on its own and a delivery bot can drop the package off on a doorstep? Why pay a tractor-trailer driver when it can be driven by GPS and a computer program that will even back the truck up to the dock of a destination? A human driver can only drive so many hours by regulation where an automated driver can continue forever without pause but to refuel. The world is changing–quickly, and Bill Gates is warning everyone as to the specifics of that change. Big government types at this point are way, way…………….way behind and at the rate of technical computation that is now multiplying by the day, they will soon resemble primitive natives throwing spears at airplanes flying 30,000 feet overhead. The choice to be a primitive is one that resists the inevitable and does not heed what Bill Gates is saying—and will be incurred with much peril that is completely avoidable.
Barack Obama has done a lot of really dumb things during his presidency and has shown himself to be a real novice when it comes to leadership. Obama is the premier reason that an unproven senator rather than a vetted state governor or a military general should have nothing to do with The White House. For those who foolishly voted for this fledgling idiot, the Percival of American politics, the video below is for you. What they thought they were getting in 2008 when they cast their votes for the openly socialist community organizer from Chicago with direct ties to domestic terrorists, FBI tracked communists and a mother who slept her way around the world, was far from a savor. The grim reality of their stupidity is self-evident. Six years later, most of them are discovering what the woman in the following video have—which is reflected in the current poll numbers in 2014.
As I have documented I have been employed just about everywhere and done everything in virtually every capacity. I have been at the very top and I have cleaned toilets—sometimes all at the same time. I have worked on multiple occasions 24 straight hours and then some and done just about every kind of job that human beings have created. At every place I have ever worked and all of the thousands of people I have worked with over the years, all of them with equal access to this site and the words I publish and can confirm if they wish to—because not a single one of them ever outworked me in all my years of productivity. I have always been “that guy” who excelled and strove to do more, get more done, and outwit competitors with cleverness, aptitude, and sheer willpower. What President Obama has declared with his diabolical executive order is that every other worker behind me has been equal to my efforts—the slug who sits in the break room too long, the imbecile who goofs off during the job too much, and the general bench warmer who can now sit at their computer while on salary and play on Facebook being unproductive during their normal work hours so they can milk the clock out and get paid for it by Uncle Government and pimp daddy Obama.
The primary reason an employer puts a worker who shows promise on salary is to avoid having to pay them overtime. For the restaurant manager who might work 65 to 80 hours a week, the owner does not want to break their budget by racking up all the overtime hours incurred by a manager, so they are put on salary to fix the costs. The motivation of the owner to the manager is to convince such people of responsibility to be more efficient with their time and to learn to delegate so that they don’t have to do all that work themselves. But if they chose to work the extra hours they’ll do it at their cost. For instance, if one of their restaurant employees calls off and there is nobody around to do the job, the manager is often stuck having to cover—and since they are on salary it will likely be free work to them. This will cause the manager to hire better people so that they won’t have to do such things. With this new overtime rule by Obama and his gang of government thugs, the manager won’t want to hire another person to delegate to, because they will want to do the job themselves to milk out overtime. Only idiots who have never managed anything at any point in their lives would think that such a communist concept could work in a productive society.
In my personal experience Obama has just declared with his ridiculous executive order that all the misfits, low-lifes, and lazy losers I have worked with in the past were equal to me—and that is just an insult. Compared to me, nobody does equal work for equal pay, because nobody puts the same level of effort into a task. Only a complete idiot with no work experience would believe such a thing, and this is confirmation that Obama and all the socialist knuckle draggers in Washington D.C. are clueless as to what makes an economy tick, and now they have increased the burden on American productivity, not lessened it.
Anyone who has had to manage hourly workers knows that because of the overtime laws created during the “Red Decade” where communism was being openly advocated by the high levels of society in The United States that the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 required most workers to be paid overtime in an effort to shuffle profits into the pockets of the common worker. Salaried managers were tasked to combat the kind of waste this created by making sure that most of the work needed by a company was obtained within a 40 hour work week. Without such management hourly workers typically stand at their jobs and string out their tasks so that they can obtain 5 to 15 hours of overtime a week supplementing their income. In union shops this is an epidemic problem which has ultimately destroyed their competitive swagger in the world. The federal government never had a right, or an obligation to determine what was “fair” for a worker in their relationship with an employer. The cost of their intrusion has been productivity.
I have worked for employers who were idiots, and they sought to take advantage of me at every turn. When I discovered this, I either moved on to someplace else, or I worked the situation to my advantage which is fair play. Never have I turned to government to protect me from an employer. It was always my task to handle that myself as it is for everyone. While it’s true that not everybody is so ambitions, they should be……and they will never yearn to be so long as they are compensated by government for work that they aren’t doing in an attempt to equalize their pay and benefits. This attempt at “fairness” by the Obama administration is one of the most obvious validations of their sheer ignorance and lack of worldly knowledge—at understanding what makes a person productive and what inspires them to sit on their ass. This new executive order will encourage a lot more ass sitting and much, much less productivity because now those with management power on salary can milk out a clock too, and will be far less likely to manage hourly workers who desire at every turn to do the same. This is the most foolish thing I have ever seen done by a politician……………which says a lot.
It is a personal insult to me to give workers who don’t put in the same effort that I do, equal pay. It inspires me to work less, not more—and those like me who work hard will decide to shrug off that effort since the government has made inferior employees equal. And that is the source of the problem because if the truly productive stop working hard, what is there that moves an economy……………….some proletariat worker? Give me a break!
What is expected out of politicians? Well West Chester, Ohio is becoming the epitome of good government and correct management. Traditionally, local politicians eat out of the hand of power players, developers, and social-climbing national politicians—but not this time when one of the most financially solid communities in all of Ohio rejected a developer submission for a Kroger Marketplace.
“The problem was not Kroger, it was the developer,” Trustee President George Lang said. Strong words more reminiscent of a fiscal manager than a political pet sent shock waves through the development community where a clear message of quality emanated beyond the business as usual approach many have come to expect over the years. Lang knows that West Chester is a lucrative spot for any business to locate, and if they wish to, they have expectations to live up to—and if they don’t—they will be turned away.
Late in January, the township zoning commission had recommended approval of a zone change to allow a 133,000-square-foot Kroger Marketplace store, along with a gas station and space for retail, offices and restaurants. That was expected as zoning commission officials are often corrupted with Agenda 21 type training, and are willing to bend over backwards for any type of development plan that reflects their world view. Those same zoning officials denied the development last year after neighbors voiced concerns about safety and traffic issues.
“They wouldn’t give us a timetable on the buffer — or even if one would ever be built,” said West Chester Trustee George Lang. “The property will eventually develop. It may even be a Kroger Marketplace, but this was not the right plan.”
Lang called the bluff on the developer who did exactly what always happens, they found major resistance to their development plans by local residents–the developer marked up their drawings to show a “compromise” then re-submitted expecting weak-kneed politicians to yield ultimately dejecting the protesters. In this case a buffer zone was needed between the residents and the development and the developer ignored those needs. Most trustees would salivate all over themselves to have a shot at a development like what the Kroger Marketplace would bring to West Chester and could pat themselves on the back for years at luring such a thing during their tenures. But what often gets left out of these types of discussions is a sense of quality that becomes part of the neighborhood instead of an imposition upon it. The West Chester trustees led by Lang are insisting on a standard that is high, but the results will yield a much higher quality community in the long run. It is to Kroger’s advantage to build a marketplace in West Chester—but it is up to the management of the area to make sure that when it is built, it is something the community can be proud of for decades instead of being outdated and useless 15 years from now.
Developers are often good people who bring a lot of good things to the table. Without them, nothing would happen. But often, because they are more interested in passing their projects through a maze of regulations, financial pitfalls, and political haggling, they are short-sighted by their very nature. They don’t see very far down the road or consider the philosophical impact of their projects—only the economic ones—and at that, only a few years beyond completion. However, proper management dictates having the long view in mind as well as the short, and in the case of this Kroger Marketplace the developer was only looking at the short–a nice new grocery store with all the bells and whistles, but without a buffer zone to protect real-estate investment 10 years and 20 years down the road, the negative impact of the development would be detrimental to residents.
It is refreshing to see that George Lang and his trustees are doing the job as good if not better than any community in America currently. West Chester, Ohio is the model of how every community across The United States and world should strive to mimic. The lifestyle of West Chester is robust, the personal wealth is extraordinary, the access to goods and services, job creation, and proximity to everything is as good as it gets, and Lang knows it. What is different is that the West Chester Trustees are not willing to compromise that quality to make developers happy for the sake of favors down the road. And for that, the people of West Chester have a lot to be thankful for. If Kroger wants to build a Marketplace in West Chester and enjoy the profile of the community which perfectly suits their business plan, they need to listen to the management of the community–the trustees like George Lang. They will find that if they do, they will profit as well as the residents he is protecting, and West Chester will become that much better. But the other options are simply not on the table, and that is something to be grateful for.
I have on more than one occasion wondered if Glenn Beck reads from this site and gets inspiration for his shows based on the content. Too many times I have said something on a particular day only to hear him discussing it two days, or two weeks later. However, the likely scenario is that I share with him the ability to calculate the future based on observational computations and can pinpoint at a particular point in space and time the need to address an issue. The accuracy of those computations for people able to perform them is as simple as 2 + 2 is 4 or 4 + 4 is 8, they represent a logic that is observable and predictable if the acknowledgment of reality is pure. This has never been truer than when Beck announced recently that he was done with politics because he saw it as a game, and that he had plans to run his company, The Blaze, as a culture building mechanism as opposed to a political pundit reporting service.
I have thought this for a very long time, and have pointed often to the modern Star Wars saga and Walt Disney from the past, as tools in this arsenal, which mankind needs desperately. One episode of a 30 minutes Star Wars cartoon is maybe 100 times more potent than a typical political speech which is often reported by the news in the same way that ESPN reports the happenings of a baseball game. The real power to change the world is to affect culture not the news that comes from the culture once it’s established. This is why The White House in a desperate push to get more health care enrollees by the end of March turned to YouTube in an attempt to reach young people. Most of society is not watching Fox News, MSNBC, or the nightly news on the primary networks—they are plugged into entertainment culture—which molds the ideals that we all function from everyday. As Beck said in the article linked above, the news is simply the tail of the dog—which is culture.
On so many occasions I have been asked to be a part of the political establishment, as my wife has railed in protest. She knows what my real talents are, and she doesn’t want to see me distracted with petty pursuits which waste time. Often elected office is responding to the tail of the dog as it wags it and I would rather deal with the dog. That is not to say that other people shouldn’t tend to those kinds of things, but everyone has to do what they are good at—and I am at my heart and soul, a culture builder. From the time that I was a little kid to the present time, I have been obsessed with cultural aspects and how they relate to one another. In my present form, many consider me to be the most manipulative person they know, because they sense fractions of what I often do to them upon interaction—but in the end they end up thanking me for the effort. Hind-sight often shows the logic, but foresight proves most will be lost—and I gave up trying to explain it to them a long time ago, because it just slows things down.
There is nothing more important than culture building whether it is a business, an educational philosophy, a family unit, a local government, or a national government, without a proper culture things always go amiss—100% of the time. It is never important to discuss the tail of a dog, it is important to deal with the dog and by the time a school board makes a decision, or a group of trustees takes action after many meetings and the collaboration of many minds, or a president signs an executive order, the opportunity to solve the problem occurred many decisions ago in the cultural aspects of the decision, not the decision itself. Culture determines the quality of a decision otherwise all decisions are like throwing darts—you can get close, but accuracy is often random and plagued with uncontrolled variables.
Glenn Beck has announced that he is producing motion pictures, specifically one about Christmas, which is important and another about just how bad Thomas Edison was in his climb to power and how he was used to give power companies a monopoly on every home in America—as designed by J.P. Morgan. For most of our lives in America we were told that Edison was a tireless worker and inventor who created electricity. But in reality, he was corrupt and motivated by greed when a pupil of his, Tesla showed far more promise—and innovation. That part of history has been suppressed culturally which led to the political acceptance of a financial system of electricity delivery designed by a wealthy financier in Morgan to expand his holds and influence in a negative way—a way that still persists to this day—even though lots of options exist. Beck instead of attempting to discuss this corruption through news outlets is going to take the message to the cultural level and make a movie about it. This has infinitely more power than thousands of hours of Beck standing in front of chalk boards trying to explain to a few intellectual types the error of their ways. A movie has the power to reach the masses, and actually change culture.
This is why Hollywood hates John Aglialoro’s efforts at making Atlas Shrugged into three films, the last of which is coming out in the fall of 2014. A movie is the captured turf of modern progressives, and they want to maintain their ability to impact culture without the competition of other ideals. Their hatred of the Atlas films is motivated exclusively by this realization. Beck will experience even more intense hatred as his projects begin to percolate into cultural competition—because the enemies of his work know what is at stake.
So it makes me very happy to hear Glenn Beck declare what his future plans are—because he is once again way ahead of everyone else. It may not be so obvious today, in 2014, but in 2100 it will be very obvious, and history will remember these efforts in how culture changed in dramatic ways. One of those molders of culture will be Glenn Beck, and history will owe him a lot of thanks.
I have no doubt there will be a one world government probably only a few years away. It is already that way in some regards, and the big resistance in the United States is to prevent a slide into socialism and communism which is the current intention of many United Nation members. It is America that breathes life into any hope of freedom percolating in the world, and that is under full assault everywhere it exists. The driver of that assault is an instinctual yearning to preserve the old way of doing things. By old way, I do not mean the traditions which I find valuable, such as a mother staying home with her children, a man who supports his family financially and with logic, low personal debt, and American self-reliance. My views about life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are very conservative, even by American standards. However, by the old way, I am talking about tribal rituals rooted in collectivism that are bring shattered at individual independence driven by technology that is replacing the old mythologies and are starving for new ones which will help humankind relate during an exciting and dramatic future.
Within the next 15 years, the cell phone you are currently holding and think to be the pinnacle of technology will become a clunky, useless thing. The power of it will be the size of a human cell, and it will be able to do far more and will likely function from within your own body. Aging will become a thing of the past as nanobots will do the work that white blood cells currently do. Cancer, disease and all forms of illness will be dealt with at the molecular level. Surgical augmentation will no longer be relevant. These are things that will happen and as we speak massive computers connected to the World Wide Web are building the artificial intelligence that will drive most of the Twenty First Century. There is no stopping this now, it is happening as you read this. In fact, this article is part of the creation of that intelligence as is every smut driven gossip column—it will all be a part of our tomorrow—which most reading will experience, even my readers who are in their 80s. The failed health care system, Social Security bankruptcies, Medicare depletions and the like will drive us all into these mentioned systems as soon as they become cheap enough to receive in prescription form at a local pharmacy. How do I know? Well, Ray Kurzweil has been right about 70% of everything he has predicted over the last 20 years and was on with Glenn Beck talking about his new book How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed which is a non-fiction book about brains, both human and artificial. First published in hardcover on November 13, 2012 by Viking Press[1] it became a New York Times Best Seller.[2] It has received attention from The Washington Post, The New York Times and The New Yorker. Watch Beck talk to Kurzweil below and be sure to watch all the videos on this article for your own education. What Kurzweil is talking about cannot be stopped, but it can be controlled. These new technologies require humankind to embrace new philosophies and that is the struggle of our day.
Kurzweil describes a series of thought experiments which suggest to him that the brain contains a hierarchy of pattern recognizers. Based on this he introduces his Pattern Recognition Theory of Mind. He says the neocortex contains 300 million very general pattern recognition circuits and argues that they are responsible for most aspects of human thought. He also suggests that the brain is a “recursive probabilistic fractal” whose line of code is represented within the 30-100 million bytes of compressed code in the genome.
Ray Kurzweil has made many predictions about the direction of society over the span of several books and has been a controversial character. He has however been right more often than not, and when he was wrong it has usually been a variation of his predictions that emerged. To begin to understand, below is a list of Kurzweil’s predictions made in his book, The Singularity is Near from 2005. It will become clear quickly the nature of his 2010 predictions because we are going through them right now. Many of those innovations have not yet become mainstream, but do in fact exists, such as computers being embedded in everyday objects, full immersion of audio-visual reality, and that kind of thing:
The Singularity is Near (2005)
2010
Supercomputers will have the same raw computing power as human brains, though the software to emulate human thinking on those computers does not yet exist. (IBM Sequoia)
Computers will start to disappear as distinct physical objects, meaning many will have nontraditional shapes or will be embedded in clothing and everyday objects.
Full-immersion audio-visual virtual reality will exist.
2010s
The decade in which “Bridge Two”, the revolution in Genetics/Biotechnology, is to reach its peak. During the 2020s, humans will have the means of changing their genes; not just “designer babies” will be feasible, but designer baby boomers through the rejuvenation of all of one’s body’s tissues and organs by transforming one’s skin cells into youthful versions of every other cell type. People will be able to “reprogram” their own biochemistry away from disease and aging, radically extending life expectancy.
Computers become smaller and increasingly integrated into everyday life.
More and more computer devices will be used as miniature web servers, and more will have their resources pooled for computation.
High-quality broadband Internet access will become available almost everywhere.
Eyeglasses that beam images onto the users’ retinas to produce virtual reality will be developed. They will also come with speakers or headphone attachments that will complete the experience with sounds. These eyeglasses will become a new medium for advertising as advertising will be wirelessly transmitted to them as one walks by various business establishments. This was fictionalized in Dennō Coil.
The VR glasses will also have built-in computers featuring “virtual assistant” programs that can help the user with various daily tasks.
Virtual assistants would be capable of multiple functions. One useful function would be real-time language translation in which words spoken in a foreign language would be translated into text that would appear as subtitles to a user wearing the glasses.
Cell phones will be built into clothing and will be able to project sounds directly into the ears of their users.
Advertisements will utilize a new technology whereby two ultrasonic beams can be targeted to intersect at a specific point, delivering a localized sound message that only a single person can hear.
2015
By now, it is likely that “clean a house” will be within the capabilities of a household robot.
2018
1013 bits (=10 TB) of computer memory—roughly the equivalent of the memory space in a single human brain—will cost $1000.
2020s
The decade in which “Bridge Three”, the revolution in Nanotechnology, is to begin: allowing humans to vastly overcome the inherent limitations of biology, as no matter how much humanity fine-tunes their biology, they will never be as capable otherwise. This decade also marks the revolution in Robotics (Strong AI), as an AI is expected to pass the Turing test by the last year of the decade (2029), meaning it can pass for a human being (though the first A.I. is likely to be the equivalent of an average, educated human). What follows then will be an era of consolidation in which nonbiological intelligence will undergo exponential growth (Runaway AI), eventually leading to the extraordinary expansion contemplated by the Singularity, in which human intelligence is multiplied by billions by the mid-2040s.
Early in this decade, humanity will have the requisite hardware to emulate human intelligence within a $1000 personal computer, followed shortly by effective software models of human intelligence toward the middle of the decade: this will be enabled through the continuing exponential growth of brain-scanning technology, which is doubling in bandwidth, temporal and spatial resolution every year, and will be greatly amplified with nanotechnology, allowing us to have a detailed understanding of all the regions of the human brain and to aid in developing human-level machine intelligence by the end of this decade.
Computers less than 100 nm in size will be possible.
As one of their first practical applications, nanomachines are used for medical purposes.
Highly advanced medical nanobots will perform detailed brainscans on live patients.
Accurate computer simulations of the entire human brain will exist due to these hyperaccurate brainscans, and the workings of the brain will be understood.
Nanobots capable of entering the bloodstream to “feed” cells and extract waste will exist (though not necessarily be in wide use) by the end of this decade. They will make the normal mode of human food consumption obsolete.
By the late 2020s, nanotech-based manufacturing will be in widespread use, radically altering the economy as all sorts of products can suddenly be produced for a fraction of their traditional-manufacture costs. The true cost of any product is now the amount it takes to download the design schematics.
By the later part of this decade, virtual reality will be so high-quality that it will be indistinguishable from real reality.
The threat posed by genetically engineered pathogens permanently dissipates by the end of this decade as medical nanobots—infinitely more durable, intelligent and capable than any microorganism—become sufficiently advanced.
The many variations of “Human Body 2.0” (as Kurzweil calls it) are incrementally accumulated into this and the following decade, with each organ and body system having its own course of refinement and development. It ultimately consists of a nanotechnological system of nourishment and circulation, obsolescing many internal organs, brain-extension and an improved skeleton.
2023
1016 calculations per second—roughly the equivalent of one human brain—will cost $1,000.
2025
The most likely year for the debut of advanced nanotechnology.
Some military UAVs and land vehicles will be 100% computer-controlled.
2030s
Mind uploading becomes successful and perfected by the end of this decade as humans become software-based: living out on the Web, projecting bodies whenever they want or need (whether in virtual or real reality), and living indefinitely so long as they maintain their “mind file”. Eventually, all human beings (including those with transbiological 2.0 or 3.0 bodies) will migrate to this postbiological state except for those who wish to remain unenhanced: the transbiological era giving way to the postbiological era.
Nanomachines could be directly inserted into the brain and could interact with brain cells to totally control incoming and outgoing signals. As a result, truly full-immersion virtual reality could be generated without the need for any external equipment. Afferent nerve pathways could be blocked, totally canceling out the “real” world and leaving the user with only the desired virtual experience.
Brain nanobots could also elicit emotional responses from users.
Using brain nanobots, recorded or real-time brain transmissions of a person’s daily life known as “experience beamers” will be available for other people to remotely experience. This is very similar to how the characters in Being John Malkovich were able to enter the mind of Malkovich and see the world through his eyes.
Recreational uses aside, nanomachines in peoples’ brains will allow them to greatly expand their cognitive, memory and sensory capabilities, to directly interface with computers, and to “telepathically” communicate with other, similarly augmented humans via wireless networks.
The same nanotechnology should also allow people to alter the neural connections within their brains, changing the underlying basis for the person’s intelligence, memories and personality.
The many variations of “Human Body 3.0” are gradually implemented during this and the following decade; It mostly likely lacks a fixed, corporeal form and can alter its shape and external appearance at will via foglet-like nanotechnology.
2040s
People spend most of their time in full-immersion virtual reality (Kurzweil has cited The Matrix as a good example of what the advanced virtual worlds will be like, without the dystopian twist).
Nonbiological intelligence will be billions of times more capable than biological intelligence.
2045: The Singularity
$1000 buys a computer a billion times more intelligent than every human combined. This means that average and even low-end computers are vastly smarter than even highly intelligent, unenhanced humans.
The technological singularity occurs as artificial intelligences surpass human beings as the smartest and most capable life forms on the Earth. Technological development is taken over by the machines, who can think, act and communicate so quickly that normal humans cannot even comprehend what is going on. The machines enter into a “runaway reaction” of self-improvement cycles, with each new generation of A.I.s appearing faster and faster. From this point onwards, technological advancement is explosive, under the control of the machines, and thus cannot be accurately predicted (hence the term “Singularity”).
The Singularity is an extremely disruptive, world-altering event that forever changes the course of human history. The extermination of humanity by violent machines is unlikely (though not impossible) because sharp distinctions between man and machine will no longer exist thanks to the existence of cybernetically enhanced humans and uploaded humans.
Post-2045: “Waking up” the Universe
The physical bottom limit to how small computer transistors (or other equivalent, albeit more effective components, such as memristors integrated into Crossbar latches) can be shrunk is reached. From this moment onwards, computers can only be made more powerful if they are made larger in size.
Because of this, A.I.s convert more and more of the Earth’s matter into engineered, computational substrate capable of supporting more A.I.s. until the whole Earth is one, gigantic computer, except for a few nature reserves set aside on the planetary surface for those humans who decided to remain in their natural state. “MOSH’s” (Mostly Original Substrate Human) who choose to remain purely organic would still possess virtual assistants that will act as their transcendent servants, living in the blurred real world (“foglet-reality”) and being provided with environments and everything they could possibly need as they live out the rest of their normal lives unless they enhance themselves.
At this point, the only possible way to increase the intelligence of the machines any farther is to begin converting all of the matter and energy in the universe into similar massive computers. A.I.s radiate outward from Earth, first into the Solar System and then out into interstellar space, then galaxies in all directions, utilizing starships that are Von Neumann probes with nanobot crews, breaking down whole planets, stars, moons, and meteoroids and reassembling them into computers. This, in effect, “wakes up” the universe as all the inanimate “dumb” matter (rocks, dust, gases, etc.) is converted into structured matter capable of supporting life (albeit synthetic life).
Kurzweil predicts that machines might have the ability to make planet-sized computers by 2099, which underscores how enormously technology will advance after the Singularity.
The process of “waking up” the universe could be completed well before the end of the 22nd century, provided humans are not limited by the speed of light.
With the entire universe made into a giant, highly efficient supercomputer, AI and human hybrids (so integrated that, in truth it is a new category of “life”) would have both supreme intelligence and physical control over the universe. Humanity will still not possess infinite levels of any attributes, as the accelerating change of evolution never reaches an infinite measure (though it moves rapidly in that direction), becoming, as Kurzweil writes, “moving inexorably toward this monotheistic conception of God, though never reaching this ideal”; even with theories such as the holographic universe. The final chapter however notes that, if possible, the ability to create and colonize other universes (and if there is a way to do this, humanity’s vast intelligence is likely to harness it, as with surpassing/bypassing the speed of light) could allow the intelligence of the human/machine civilization to extend indefinitely, akin to a mathematical singularity. If not, then saturating humanity’s own universe will remain their ultimate fate.
Some indeterminate points within a few decades from now
Space technology becomes advanced enough to provide the Earth permanent protection from the threat of asteroid impacts.
The antitechnology Luddite movement will grow increasingly vocal and possibly resort to violence as these people become enraged over the emergence of new technologies that threaten traditional attitudes regarding the nature of human life (radical life extension, genetic engineering, cybernetics) and the supremacy of mankind (artificial intelligence). Though the Luddites might, at best, succeed in delaying the Singularity, the march of technology is irresistible and they will inevitably fail in keeping the world frozen at a fixed level of development.
The emergence of distributed energy grids and full-immersion virtual reality will, when combined with high bandwidth Internet, enable the ultimate in telecommuting. This, in turn, will make cities obsolete since workers will no longer need to be located near their workplaces. The decentralization of the population will make societies less vulnerable to terrorist and military attacks.
When these things happen, it will be excessively important that humankind have a grip on those realities. In many ways, this is why I write so much about Star Wars, because it offers a mythology that will help religion, political science, science, economics and philosophy deal with these massive changes so that human beings remain in control. The authoritarian regimes around the world that wish to remain so will find themselves destroyed internally by their grip on traditional methods, such as North Korea, Russia, China and the entire Middle East. It is impossible for them to maintain control over the masses while individuals all over the world have access to so much information in the palm of their hands. The same is true of socialism and the desire to spread the wealth across the planet with redistribution. Such thoughts ignore the nature of productivity and will always fail. So in regard to these issues, I support a one world government so long as that government is driven by America and no place else. I am happy to recognize China as a state of America, or Russia, or the countries of Europe, but I am not happy to lose American independence, and economic power to the diatribes of socialism. I am happy to compete with other countries through capitalism, but not world socialism—primarily because socialism does not prepare the world for the changes coming as predicted by Ray Kurzweil.
Only America is poised to help the rest of the world deal with these changes, so it should be America, and the American Constitution that drives the world instead of the other way around. We are not talking about an American Constitution that wishes to return the world to 1776 and the conditions of human existence from that time, but the philosophic push to maintain individual freedom over governments so that each and every person on planet earth will have the discipline to behold such power within the realm of their control. Because if such control falls into the hands of authoritarian regimes by suppressing the flow of information on a world-wide scale, then humankind will regress backwards forever instead of embracing the kind of things that are coming to us within the next decade.
This is the state of our world today and the fight we are all involved with. It is the pinnacle moment in human history—and we are living it—now. Add some more stars to the American flag to represent other countries if everyone wants, but to disband America in favor of global socialism simply isn’t an option.
There are a lot of things in the world more important than the latest Star Wars news…….but then again, maybe not. I have declared before that The Clone Wars animated series on Cartoon Network is one of the best entertainment venues around. The work that Star Wars is performing in philosophy, science fiction, political science, and culture building I think is being conducted on an epic scale and is extremely important. When Disney bought Lucasfilm one of the first things they did was canceled The Clone Wars series because of the contract the show had on The Cartoon Network. Probably deeper than that, the series had actually become very serious and was dealing with very complicated topics that were clearly not intended for children—but the kind of adults who grew up watching Star Wars. I’ve watched and read a lot of science fiction over the years. I was a tremendous fan of the most recent version of Battlestar Galactica, especially the first two seasons. So I have pretty high expectations when it comes to that kind of entertainment, and I always felt that The Clone Wars was some of the best science fiction being done. So it was sad to see it canceled by Disney—because the show had gone to a very dark place not really suitable for the Disney Channels. The remaining season 6, called The Lost Episodes remained in limbo until Disney cut a deal with Netflix to release them on March 7, 2014 in 13 episodes which were designed to wrap up many of the story arches created through the first five seasons leading into the film Revenge of the Sith. Not expecting much my wife and I sat down together over the weekend and watched the new season and let me just say—it was absolutely fantastic.
Season Six of The Clone Wars is just simply some of the best science fiction ever done. The presentation of the material was just beautiful to look at, the scope of the show was phenomenal, the story lines were deeply complicated, and the content was epic containing many threads of contemporary value. I personally felt very sorry for the character called “Fives” in the series because I know a lot of people who are in his condition presently—conspiracy theorists that have deep inside knowledge to what is really going on in the world and are unable to communicate those concerns because of the sheer audacity of their claims. The fate of “Fives” was tragic, but wow, what a way to tell a story. The whole Kaminio cloning facility plotline was exceptionally beautiful and was science fiction of a top order. It had elements of the old Flash Gordon Republic serials done with modern sophistication and was graphically a thing of wonder. It was not just good stuff……….but great stuff! Nobody is making anything close in entertainment as the people at Lucasfilm have been performing on The Clone Wars television show.
It is easy to become overwhelmed with modern problems and to focus too intensely on all the issues of the day. But I have found that the most effective way to deal with extreme stress and anxiety is with good robust entertainment which is aligned with the things I’m trying to deal with in the real world. To that end I enjoy Star Wars video games, I simply love the Fantasy Flight game X-Wing Miniatures with a passion, and I of course love the movies—but the television show The Clone Wars is deeply sophisticated and a real treasure. I often find I have fresh perspectives on real problems after watching them—because the creative minds at Lucasfilm have the liberty to analyze hard problems without the immediacy of political alignments forged by realities.
One complaint that I read about the Season Six Clone Wars was the plotline about the Intergalactic Banking Clan’s financing of the war. I found that to be the most interesting of just about any aspect of Star Wars in any capacity. The writers of The Clone Wars were clearly drawing parallels between the real life situation that we have on earth with the Rothchilds, the Buffets, and the Soros types and how they play all sides to their own needs.
In Star Wars, according to Darthipedia.com, the Intergalactic Banking Clan, or IGBC, member FDIC, was a commerce guild organization of the Galactic Republic, headquartered on Muunilinst. It was a union of clans of bankers, proving that those anorexic losers managed to get at least three-fourths of their own damn title correct. Sadly for the pasty-faced goths, every single banker had delusions of grandeur the day they decided to name it “InterGalactic”. Honestly, they could be done by the Trades Descriptions Act. Y’know, the Intra-Galactic Trades Descriptions Act.
During the Clone Wars, San Hill was the leader of the IGBC. Hill became one of the founding financiers of the Confederacy of Independent Systems, then celebrated by “making it rain,” which did not amuse Dooku at all. The IGBC pledged its ships and battle droids to the Confederacy… wait, battle droids? Ah, well, the Banking Clan kept battle droids as part of its, er, collections division. Their most potent weapons were Hailfire droids. The resultant debts forced San Hill into hiding on Mustafar. Reports that he gained access to a Chameleon Arch and rewrote his biology to become a Human[1] during the Galactic Civil War are spurious to say the least.[2]After the Separatist Crisis ended, Palpatine offered the IGBC a massive, quadrillion-credit bailout and ended up controlling them.
The Clone Wars dealt with this whole subplot and I found it fascinating. A lot of fans of Star Wars just want to deal with the emotional story points, but Lucas years ago established in the face of much criticism why war often occurs and with his Star Wars, the situation is even more complicated than might be found in the real world of earth. Watching that kind of science fiction allows a curious mind to begin to understand the level of deception that is required to be a villain, which is the first step in solving actual problems. But before that can happen, a mind has to grasp the problem. The politics in Star Wars was always something that I found infinitely fascinating and the Season Six content is nothing short of amazing. If it was not an animated film set in a galaxy far, far away, but here on earth dealing with the Bilderbergers, it would likely win an Academy Award. It was that good.
I could go on and on, but the short of it is this, the Season Six Clone Wars: Lost Episodes are worth watching for a lot of reasons. They are great entertainment, they are involved science fiction, and they are commentary on many contemporary problems. They were a real treasure that took me quite by surprise. But more than anything they were food for inquisitive minds well worth the time to watch. If you have access to Netflix, there simply isn’t a better choice available than that show—so you should watch it and enjoy a work of modern art that is quite healthy and robust for its sheer quality and complexity. That is a series that I will forever miss, but am very glad to have seen the last 6 years worth of wonderful material known as The Clone Wars.
The ending of Season Six, the last three episodes featuring Yoda were deeply touching–and extremely bold. They will give great hope to people everywhere who desperately need it.
The Overmanwarrior 
