The Discovery Channel is about to celebrate their 25th year of presenting Shark Week on their popular television weeklong event. In front of that celebration a friend of mine suggested that sharks were a wonderful way to illustrate the merits of social engineering failures that have occurred among human beings. His reasoning was that sharks were a brutal prehistoric oriented species of sea life that are born violent hunters which make them a fascinating study. Their desire to hunt and destroy is natural. But what if they could be taught not to eat people? That would be a wonderful thing that would save many arms, legs and lives if only we could convince sharks from wanting to destroy the human population with mindless hunger simply to fill their bellies.
Well, as my friend suggested one possible solution for the sharks would be to go on a welfare program similar to what human beings use in their societies. If the sharks were just given food instead of developing their hunter instincts to track it down themselves, they might become “nicer.” Because looking at the life of sharks the way a progressive does, the reason that sharks are so mean is because they are always hunting for food. If someone just gave them food, they wouldn’t be so angry all the time, and wouldn’t desire to eat people at beaches.
If there were a welfare system for sharks, human beings could just feed them everyday to purchase peace. The sharks would learn that when the boats came, the boats would bring food, so the sharks would be inclined to stay away from the beaches where human beings enjoyed swimming. The sharks wouldn’t have to be so vicious having to compete with other sea life for food because the food would come to them. This would save the lives of millions of other fish and sharks in the ocean and of course the human beings who wished to swim in the ocean.
That makes perfect sense—if you’re a progressive liberal. Unfortunately, the fate of such a program would be the same as what has happened in the areas where welfare among humans occur. On land, the people on welfare become placated and unaggressive. They typically wait for their check to arrive in the mail so they can eat. But in their complacency they don’t tend to pass on good traits to their young. The youngsters not naturally desiring to wait for the check to arrive in the mail try to take their lives in their own hands and develop gangs to fight over the limited resources available in their communities that are built by placated adults fed by government. Much of the violence of gang behavior can be traced back to the creation of welfare, and the limited movement of the human population in ranges of thinking. That is the side effect of the human species that has lost its ability to fight for its survival. A welfare society becomes lazy, and inept.
Among the sharks, the unforeseen tragedy would be that the sharks would begin to travel in packs along the paths of the boats that brought food to them. Sharks being a solitary species would adjust their nature to that of collectivity passively waiting for the boats to bring them food. The younger sharks that hadn’t lost their desire to hunt would gather up in packs and attack the boats on occasion to take all the food destined for the rest of their shark society. But peace would be maintained for the most part, so long as the human population kept the sharks fed.
But what would happen if the food ran out? Or what would happen if the sharks became obese, and developed the need to eat more food than the humans could provide? What if it took two boats to feed a pack of sharks that used to take only one? That’s when the sharks would begin to attack humans again. But this time instead of only being solitary hunters, the sharks would attack in mass. On land in the human communities, this activity is called “protests.” Humans protest when the government doesn’t give them the amount of food they think they should have.
Sharks would do this as well when the boats did not bring enough food to keep them fat, dumb, and happy. It would become increasingly impossible to fulfill the expectations of the shark populations all over the world, because there would not be enough food to give the sharks.
This is what happens when progressives inject their “feel good” theories of social engineering into the natural world. They intend to do well, by feeding the sharks; to keep the human population from being eaten. But instead, the progressive makes the human population slaves to the sharks by spending all their time trying to catch free food to keep the sharks at bay. Inadvertently the sharks become a collective based society that becomes even more dangerous if they are enraged making the risk for future violence much more serious. Also within the shark society the progressive has created a rift within the young and the old. The old are happy to be fed since they have learned to let the food come to them. The young functioning from their youthful instincts wants to catch something and prove their worth, so they incorporate the collectivity taught to them by their parents and mix it with their natural impulse for violence—so they form gangs of sharks that are far more dangerous than what the single sharks used to be.
This is what humans have done to their own society. The creation of welfare was intended to be a helping hand to those less fortunate. But instead, it has created a society of lazy humans that have collected in mass in locations where free things are given to them to appease their natural aggressiveness. Welfare has created the culture of gangs that terrorize inner cities and the drug trade that is the lifeblood of such violence. The gangs created something in a desperate desire from limited resources within the welfare culture to gain something valuable. In a society where the limited resources are driven by how much food is on the feed boats the only way to advance in such a society is by inventing something else that has value. In the human case, it is drugs and illegal activity that creates an alternative economy within the welfare state. The ultimate villain is the welfare system because it is what robbed people of their ambition, and the desire to “create” wealth making them dependents on the suppliers of the welfare checks.
The sharks being dependents on the food supply of the boats would become far more dangerous as a collective unit who could then “collectively bargain” to gain more food from the boats. And if they didn’t get the food, they could protest against the boats threatening to kill all on board. So the humans trying to save the lives and legs of other human beings inadvertently would have created a much more dangerous species of shark by attempting to put the sharks on a welfare system. The appeasement would only be temporary, and might in fact keep the sharks from the beaches where humans like to swim. But ultimately, the sharks would become much more dangerous than they ever were as solitary hunters. As a collective herd of sharks, they could demand all the food they could eat, and if that food could not be supplied, they’d have the power to hunt down and destroy with much greater capacity many more humans than ever before. And it would all have started with the good intention of giving the sharks food for free in the hope that they would become less dangerous.
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This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon
The Obama campaign has been very active—and desperate to find cash for his presidential race. On Monday July 30th and Tuesday July 31st I received many emails from their campaign, two of which are shown below. They need money. That’s all there is to it. I can’t say that I’ve ever heard of a campaign that is this desperate so far out from the actual election. This information is indicative of the type of people who simply spend massive amounts of money without an appreciation of what that money’s value is. Here is the first email.
Rich —
I’m not interested in the money race, so I’m just going to tell you how it is.
Our strength heading into November is going to be determined in large part by how much money we raise now. That’s why the fundraising deadline tomorrow at midnight is so important.
We can’t afford to lose — the stakes are just too high.
Can you stand the thought of a president who would take away guaranteed health coverage from people with pre-existing conditions, would be “delighted” to sign a bill banning all abortions, and would raise taxes on the middle class while lowering taxes for millionaires and billionaires?
Me neither.
Donate $3 or whatever you can right now to make sure we can keep Mitt Romney and other Republicans out of office:
Jeffrey Lerner Political Director Democratic National Committee
Here is the second email:
Rich —
Tonight’s deadline will be the most critical so far. It’s all going to come down to these last few months, and the budget decisions we make in August could make or break campaigns across the map.
Can you chip in $5 or more before midnight?
I’m gnawing through my pen caps over here. Watching the numbers come in is not exactly a stress-free task, and that’s because of what’s on the line.
It’s not just who will be in the White House for the next four years or whether we’ll keep a Democratic majority in the Senate. It’s what our country will look like for years to come: if our kids will have access to quality health care, education, and the careers they dream of, or if they’ll grow up in a country whose leaders shrug and say “you’re on your own.”
It’s in your hands. And I want to give those Democrats and the President the resources they need to get this done. Please give before the crucial midnight deadline:
Hildy Kuryk National Finance Director Democratic National Committee
What this amounts to is panhandling. Obama and his campaign employees–which are incredibly overstaffed–are essentially saying to the mass population, “brother, can you spare a dime?” They are behaving like panhandlers on a city sidewalk looking for money to buy more booze and cigarettes. Asking for a dollar or three dollars to keep the Obama campaign afloat is a ridiculous proposition. I never get those kinds of emails from the Romney camp and I am in their system. They just don’t operate in the same fashion.
Where Obama is and why he is struggling to find money is that he has already spent the money from his big donors on tactics that haven’t worked, because the misleading activity the money was designed to cover cannot overcome the foolish behavior of the Obama Administration. Since Obama is a socialist, he has alienated most business owners with his preposterous Keynesian economic theory of expanding the financial system from the middle out. Obama is a complete failure as president because he believes in the wrong financial theories. The economy does not grow under the umbrella of communism, and Obama’s theories flow from that assumption. The middle-class does not create jobs. They work for people who do.
The people I know who have money for boats, long vacations, and huge retirement packages all work for government. It used to be the people I knew who possessed those kinds of benefits all worked for the car companies under the UAW labor unions—which is a communist concept. Those companies went out of business. The Firebird/Camero plant in Norwood was leveled in the late 80’s because the unions put them out of business. The Fisher Body plant in Hamilton went out of business around the same time, because the unions destroyed the business. Public unions that were implemented in Ohio around the same time as those automotive jobs were going away, were legalized, so today it is teachers, police and firefighters who have the kind of perky jobs that used to go to the automotive employees. Only the government employees can’t go out of business because government can simply raise taxes to pay for the extraordinary benefits they consume. When the auto manufactures went out of business it was because there cars were too expensive and didn’t last long enough. Nissan, Toyota, and Honda destroyed Ford, Chrysler, and Government Motors over market share because the Japanese cars were better and cheaper.
Obama and his gang of looters views union employees as the middle-class. But everyone can’t be a teacher, a cop, or a firefighter. We can’t have an entire society making up those jobs, because there has to be tax payers who have the money to fund it. Currently, we are at a time as is the evidence of all the school levies in Ohio, the layed off firefighters, cops are a direct result of public employees taking more money than their market value can support. Communists like Obama do not understand how to determine that value. They have an arbitrary value in their minds and they use the enforcement of government to make fiction a reality with higher taxes.
Obama is approaching his presidential campaign the way he has his last term as president. He spends money on theories that are economically unsound to force the middle-class to drive the economy. But it is not the middle-class that makes the economy work. They may spend the money they earn as laborers, but they do not begin those jobs from an idea in their heads. If they do, they are typically wealthy and are taxed at the highest tax bracket anyway. Obama’s plan is to tax those people more so the middle-class can believe they are equal economically to the job creators. And they aren’t.
The job creators have decided not to start new jobs because they don’t want to pay for Obamacare. They don’t want to pay higher taxes to all the community looters like teachers, firefighters, and cops who are simply overstaffed to “create” jobs. Job creators have stayed on the fence to avoid aggressive EPA regulations, a corrupt DOJ, and an overpowering IRS. If the money they work hard to make is simply going to be looted, they will not go to the trouble of creating those jobs. That is what Obama does not understand with his street bum attitude.
Obama has spent the country’s money into bankruptcy, and he has spent his campaign money into bankruptcy. His yield on that money has been a total failure by any investment analysis. He fails because he doesn’t understand the basics. The economists he listened to, the so-called experts were fools also. Just because they have a degree from some Ivy League school does not dictate their level of intelligence. It simply says they were members of an orthodox club of academics. It does not prove the merit of their theories. Only history can do that, and it has. Obama has spit in the face of the job creators and believes that the middle-class will fund the millions of dollars he will need to run a fall campaign. But they can’t, because they don’t have the money.
The real middle-class needs the job creators to provide them with jobs driven by market valued wages to provide them the money to spend on the economy. The money does not fall in the lap of the middle-class just because they show up at work, or while they are fishing on Cumberland Lake. Money has to be made, and if nobody is making the money, then of course the money will be hard to come by.
Romney is getting money for his campaign because job creators want Obama off their backs. It’s that simple. Nobody but the type of employees who want handouts wants a pan handler like Obama to be in charge of the Executive Office. All the money Obama has spent accomplished was putting a suit on a turd, to appear nice. But the money can’t make a turd into gold, and that’s what Obama thinks will happen. That is why he has failed and why all he can do is beg for money from people who don’t have it, and never will until somebody else gives it to them. Those people will not be giving Obama money this time. They already learned their lesson. Obama without all the fancy cloths and the White House as his residence is simply a bum. His mind is the same as a pan handler. Nice cloths and a staff of advisors could make a bum appear sophisticated if they shaved the bum and clothed him well. But such a person does not miraculously become intelligent because they dress nice. A bum is still a bum when all they know to do to make money is hold out their hand, which is precisely what the Obama Campaign is doing.
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This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon
Administrators aren’t in the OEA. Do your homework before making such claims. There’s absolutely no affiliation.
The above quote came to me over the last weekend July 2012 from a person who works in the education industry. I can tell because their email address came from a local education institution. With the Monroe School Levy one week out, an examination of that comment is deserved. Because if it wasn’t noticed by the general electorate, the whole reason a school attempts a summertime election for education tax increases is to catch people flat-footed and on vacation. The education employees who live in the district along with the radical parents who want free education on the backs of the entire community will show up for the vote, while most everyone else isn’t thinking about schools or politics as they vacation over the summer. The intention of an August election is not to seek the honest opinion of the community. It is to hope that only one side shows up for the vote. Do not allow yourself to become confused by the looters of your community.
Monroe as a school district needs money to pay for their high teacher salaries, just like every school district in Ohio. Those salaries are high because public education has no competition, so they don’t have to perform at a true efficiency in testing results or financial management because the entire system is built on government interference. Sure, politicians have set testing standards, but as Lockland Schools have shown, educators will simply fudge the numbers to get the testing results they need to get their state money. Public schools will lie, cheat and steal to preserve their tax scam against the public. Their intentions are evident for all to see. It’s difficult to admit that our trusted schools are that deceitful, but they are. That is why Monroe is placing a tax increase on the ballot in August. That is also why Lakota’s superintendent Mantia put a levy on the ballot in her previous district of Pickerington last August, which barely passed. And Lakota is not putting a levy on the ballot in 2012, because they are concerned that in Butler County, too many conservative voters will show up at the polls to vote Obama out of office, and that means they are also likely to vote down the fourth Lakota attempt to raise taxes on the community to pay for high employee salaries. It’s not because school administrators are kind, or have seen the light. It’s because they wish to attack the community again when the numbers are more favorable to levy passage. They are not interested in the real concerns of the community. That’s why the Lakota School Board is spending $40,000 dollars on “Community Conversations” to a progressive Cincinnati group to turn neutral voters into “Yes” votes so the district can legally steal money from the 18,000 who have voted “NO” in the previous elections. The intent of spending tax payer money on such a program is to manipulate the vote. Not to find the truth of how the community actually feels. It’s about manipulation, not truth.
The person who sent me that comment above is testing the water to see how much we know about their education scam. So I’ll explain here what I said to them. When it’s said that administrators are not a part of the teachers union, and that I should get my facts straight before speaking, they say it hoping that I don’t know how their trick works. But unfortunately for them, I do. Most administrators are hired from within the ranks of the teaching profession, meaning they were teachers at some point in their past. There may be a few exceptions but for the most part, all education administrators are inbred within the union structure. When they become administrators they do not have the stomach to manage their costs the way all other companies do, because they are broken horses that the union rides to easy contract victories over management. There is a reason that there are legal constraints on who can be a superintendent of a public school. For instance, if Lakota wanted to pay a person like me, or any member of No Lakota Levy to be superintendent of Lakota, it would be illegal, because there are rules on who can hold that position and those rules were created by the OEA lobby in Columbus to protect them from such radical changes. By law, Lakota must hire a broken ex-teacher like Superintendent Mantia who will deep down to her core be loyal to the teachers who work under her, instead of the community that pays the bills with their taxes.
The dirty little secret is that administrative management in public education wants the teachers to make $50,000 to $60,000 per year for a 7.5 work day 9 months out of the year because it’s assumed that administrators will make more money, otherwise teachers would never strive to become members of management. This inadvertently drives up the wage cost of administrators. Most administrators in public education are making between $75,000 per year to $100,000 so of course they support the high union contracts because it drives up their wages when they leave the union to join management.
Superintendents are even more notorious. Many of them make more money than the governors of entire states. They make more just to watch a handful of school buildings. In fact Superintendent Mantia did her doctorial thesis on the very subject of how the Superintendent pool was so bad in the country because the pay was not very good–that the gap between the teaching profession and the teachers were not wide enough. Her observation was that teachers were not showing a desire to move into management and ultimately into superintendent positions because there wasn’t enough money as an incentive to lure them into management. As a superintendent, she drives up her own costs by supporting teacher contracts that are high, because as a manager she is expected to make more money—a lot more money. Between Lakota’s superintendent and the amount of money the school board has spent just on public relations in a one year period, the cost to the community is a half million dollars.
The public education scam costs a lot of money and that is what Monroe is dealing with. They are in financial trouble because they did not manage their labor costs. The administrators had no desire to manage their labor costs because they were all bred into the system from within, they have no direct competition, they have political support who will create laws that support their unions, and everyone working in education is taking a lot of money out of the community pot, and when they run out, they demand more. Monroe as a school district has an empty pot and the school is demanding that it be filled. They hope that not enough people who watch the money are paying attention and the levy will pass without a complete vote from the community. That’s why the newspapers aren’t talking about the levy, because the only people who are intended to know about the tax attempt are the people the school wants to show up and cast a vote.
The levy in Monroe is about the lack of management of their labor costs. If voters don’t show up and vote the tax increase down, then no management of the community resources will occur. Like piranhas in an Amazonian river the education employees at Monroe will proceed to give themselves raises and dump money onto their lavish lifestyles in a magic trick performed against the community. And the magic trick begins in an August election when most everyone else is looking someplace else. A wave of the magic wand and—poof—more money will appear from the community for the looters of public education to plunder. Monroe will then wonder why the only business they have in their community is the Hustler store and Traders World as high taxes will push away current and future investment by those who pay the most taxes—the business owner—who is almost always the victim of the magic tricks and finds the rabbit in their laps hidden from the public who believe that the magicians of public education actually performed magic, when all it ever was—was a trick.
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This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon
I’ve known Gery Deer for around a decade now as he has put on the Western Showcase at Annie Oakley for about that long. It’s a thankless job that encompasses a lot of love for the Western Arts which ranges from music to period weapons. I was asked by many people who know me in other places besides my outback hat and bullwhips if I was going to the Restoring Love event down in Dallas, Texas over the same weekend. Even though there were many reasons for not going, most of them due to time constraints, my primary restraint was not to miss this wonderful event on the last weekend of July at the Darke County Fairgrounds.
It was nice to see Lash Luke back from Birmingham, Alabama. Luke came to his first Annie Oakley event last year as a 16 year old. His mom had brought him and he attended his first dinner with us at the Fairlawn. This year he was back, this time his dad brought him. He was much faster and sharper as a 17 year old, and had improved a lot in just one year of very hard work. He was so good that he won the heart of the young lady who was Miss Annie Oakley this year at the event that completely takes over Greenville, Ohio. She was so impressed with him that every free moment she had where she didn’t have to do “official” Annie Oakley business she was in the Coliseum at our Wild West exhibit to see him as we were cracking whips and throwing knives to a captive audience.
An impressive new whip maker named David Crain brought his act up from Middletown and set up a booth that had a lot of interest as he displayed his hand made nylon whips which were very, very good. I worked with them all day and they had wonderful balance and a lot of snap. His whips are also extremely creative as he custom turns all the handles on his own lathe. By trade he is an instrument maker—specifically drums and his whips look very much like instruments and for an extremely reasonable cost. I could easily have done two handed routines with my normal 6’ Terry Jacka 12 plait whip that costs nearly $600 in one hand and one of David Crain’s nylon whips in the other of the same length and not known much of a difference for around $130. His whips are perfect for people just trying to get into the sport as his whips are wonderful for beginners and professionals alike. In fact Richard Best who travels the country every year with his wife Donna Daring performing traditional western acts commissioned David to make a special nylon whip just for him. Richard has several nylon whips none of them he likes a whole lot, until he saw David’s.
During the whip competitions this year David Crain on behalf of his company Heartbeat Artistry donated the prizes for the Speed and Accuracy competition, the Speed Switch, and the Bull Whip Fastdraw. The prizes were 3’, 4’ and a 5’ custom made Crain whips. I was very happy with my performance this year even without as much time to practice as I normally do; I came away with my fastest time ever on the Speed and Accuracy competition of 11 seconds flat. The world record is 9 seconds hitting 10 targets. I hit 12 in 11 seconds which comes out to around .9 per crack. That was pretty good. If we had called Guinness for that attempt I might have had a world record, but I didn’t expect to come that close. Usually the winning time is 12.5 seconds to 14 seconds. I’ve won before with 12.6. I also did well on the speed switch this year with a time of 18.6 seconds which is more difficult because you have to use both hands going down the target stands one way with your right hand then back the other with your left. Times on that one are normally in the high 20’s because it’s hard to be accurate with both hands and time deductions for misses are very common. I also did well in the bull whip quick drawl, which I’ve had a problem with in the past. If you go too fast, you tend to pull the whip off to the right depending on how it’s coiled. So I backed off my speed a bit this year and hit the target squarely each time, something my son-in-law Paul is very, very good at. He has won the bullwhip quick draw more than any of us because he has the perfect combination of aggression, patience, precision and of course speed. That’s the trick of the fast draw which was invented by Gery Deer and Kirk Bass of Bass Blades.
Because of my good day with the whip competitions my grandson will be the recipient of the whips won from these competitions when he’s born. He doesn’t know it yet because he’s still kicking around inside my daughter, but the moment he’s born, he gets the 3’ whip. When he gets older, like age three and then four, I’ll give him the longer ones on his birthdays. The whip maker David had his daughter with him and she was 5 years old and cracking a leaf out of his hands. So my unborn grandson will be expected to do at least that much. Those whips will be the perfect size to learn on for a small child and they will all match and will take him well into his teenage years.
Kirk and Melodie Bass routinely energize the crowds with their knife throwing shows that are very unique. Kirk has been throwing knives for about 8 years now, and he is one of the best there is. The Bass family concentrates on knife throwing, but they do a little bit of everything, including whips. Melodie has always participated in the bullwhip competitions having fun as she goes. While we were eating at the Fairlawn her 5 year old curly haired son gazed at me over chicken sticks. I remember vividly 5 years ago when Melodie put up a respectable time on the speed and accuracy competition while pregnant with that child. They are an amazing family.
Gery Deer and his wife were as busy as ever. They are regularly booked for whip shows, and musical acts with Gery’s band titled The Brothers and Company who are most recently known for their controversial appearance at the Murphy Theater in Wilmington, Ohio. There they performed a song called “Big Butter Jesus Burned to the Ground” in homage to the famous statue in Monroe, Ohio that caught fire during a lightning storm. Gery currently does regular news segments for Channel 2 WTDN in Dayton as well as other television work in and around Dayton. Gery occasionally does convention and costume work for Indiana Jones because of his whip studio.Gery has most of the official costume items of Indiana Jones except for an authentic hat as it was designed for Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is a very unusual Fedora design. At Annie Oakley this year a custom hat maker from Cleveland drove down and met Gery to give him the most authentic Indiana Jones hat I’ve ever seen worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $500. It looks exactly like the Raiders hat that is in the Smithsonian, to every detail. It even has the varied brim widths around the hat to hang down over the face more than a typical Fedora. Gery was excessively happy about receiving this new hat as he wore it to dinner after their music performance.
Like all good things, they don’t last forever. The night had to come to a conclusion at some point in time. Most of us reluctantly sat around the dining table at the Fairlawn drawing out the evening even longer, but once we started paying checks, the indication that the marathon race to the next Annie Oakley event was about to begin for 2013 became clear.
A lot happens in a year and annually at the Annie Oakley Western Showcase I calibrate myself to the true values that hold everything up, the values that support family, friendships, and nations, and all those elements are present at the dinner table at the Fairlawn Steak House. The truth is easy to see for those who venture outside of their comfort zone just a little bit. For those who don’t, one can only feel pity as their lives are like compass needless spinning in perpetual search for true north. For me, north is in Greenville, Ohio and the friends I meet there every year. It’s in the whip cracks, the gun fire, and the sound of the knives sticking hard into a wooden backdrop. It’s the smell of fried streak fries and wood smoke from an open campfire. It’s the bright eyes of little children clapping at the magic tricks of Professor Karns, or the whip routines of Lash Luke, the roping of Richard Best and the bravery of Melodie Bass. But more than anybody it is Gery Deer who keeps it all together one year at a time performing western acts that are nearly extinct. In him it lives with perpetual hope, that tomorrow it will be alive for a new generation. And when my grandson is born, it will begin with a 3 foot whip from David Crain. Because if I need to do anything different in this upcoming year as opposed to years past, it’s more of what has worked and less of what didn’t. For me what works best are lots of bull whips and cut targets, with memories, friends and 8 X 10’s.
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This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon
I wanted to calm myself down before giving a review of Dark Knight Rises, the latest in the highly acclaimed Batman trilogy by Christopher Nolan, because as a movie it does nearly everything correctly as a motion picture experience, and I found it absolutely stunning. Dark Knight Rises would be a great film even if you watched it on an iPod, because it’s about as close to a perfect movie that can be made. However, knowing that this film was going to be a spectacle that deserved the biggest screen with the best sound system I could find, I watched the film from my favorite movie theater in the Cincinnati area—the Regal Theaters in Deerfield Township near Mason.
There are very good movie regional movie theaters, the Showcase Cinemas in Springdale come to mind followed closely by the AMC Theaters at Newport on the Levee. For a theater to be great it needs to place its movies on a pedestal to be watched in a temple of honor. The hallways taking the viewer to their movie need to help pave the way to a mythic experience, because that’s really what people expect from the price of an expensive movie ticket. I’m not a fan of the Rave Theaters simply because they are typically dirty from large amounts of teenage traffic, particularly at the one in West Chester. The floors are sticky, the seats feel used, and the events leading up to the movie are cheesy and low-class. I’d compare the experience to a drive-in movie only it’s inside instead of outside. They were built to be majestic, but they are just not cared for, they take the moviegoer for granted, which is a big mistake. The Regal in Deerfield Township is everything that a movie theater should be. They are clean; they have nice big theaters with very good screens. They have wonderful seats, large isles, wonderful pre-movie entertainment and large hallways leading up to the individual theaters. The theater itself sits on a large hill and has colossal columns outside the ticket windows to provide a majestic appearance. I’d liken it to a great temple designed for storytelling.
When Dark Knight Rises finished I sat till the final credits scrolled across the screen feeling that I had maybe witnessed the best movie I had seen in twenty years. It was a true masterpiece. The last time I enjoyed a movie as much as Dark Knight Rises was Jurassic Park in 1993 where I came away from that movie pleasantly surprised and deeply satisfied. There have been a lot of movies since then, many of them good to very good. But none of them have had the visual impact, and story line punch that Dark Knight Rises had. Being a fan of Christopher Nolan’s last film, Inception I expected this latest Batman film to be good. I also expected it to be good because of the previous two Batman films, The Dark Knight, and Batman Begins were very good, but Dark Knight Rises goes to the extra trouble of being simply fantastic.
It was more of a visual novel paying homage to such classics as Tail of Two Cities. But during the entire film I kept thinking that it was more of an action packed rendition of Atlas Shrugged. If it can be forgotten that Dark Knight Rises is based on a comic book character, the theatrics are very heady stuff. It’s a deeply intelligent film. It’s filmed with a philosophy that does not wish upon a star of blind hope, but is grounded in a gritty reality that hits the core of virtually every human being alive—the desire to be more than we are to serve a purpose that matches our imaginations.
I have read comic books all my life. But I didn’t follow the story of Batman very closely. I personally leaned more toward the character of Zorro over the years being more of a western oriented story which I prefer over the technical expertise of Batman—Don Diego and Bruce Wayne are essentially the same type of character. Zorro made the sign of the ‘Z’ whereas Batman had the Bat Signal. Both are wealthy men who work their bodies and minds into improvement to perform superhuman feats. Bruce Wayne and Don Diego are Nietzsche’s overman, they are Ayn Rand’s “men of the mind.” They are human like anyone else, but achieve a level of mental and physical prowess that exceeds what most human beings attempt, and they use their personal wealth to mask their social intentions of mankind’s preservation. But under Christopher Nolan’s direction, Bruce Wayne takes the next evolutionary step into a deeply compelling character.
The mentor of Bruce Wayne from Batman Begins is Ra’s al Ghul who is an international criminal mastermind intent on restoring perfect environmental balance to the world by destroying most of humanity. Ra’s al Ghul is at the head of an international terrorist organization called the League of Shadows which was the intended destination of Bruce Wayne in the first film. This is a very contemporary theme as there are many real life characters that have Ra’s al Ghul’s world view that the environment must be preserved at the expense of mankind. Actually this is the debate of our age and has led entire nations into communism, socialism, dictatorships and is in direct conflict with capitalism, which Bruce Wayne represents as a billionaire.
In Dark Knight Rises Batman’s ultimate nemesis is Bane, who comes out of the League of Shadows as an ‘evolved’ man himself, not afraid of anything, and presenting compelling problems. He presents to Gotham City an option of communism, while using it as a distraction to actually purge the world of human overpopulation. Bane immediately reminded me of Stalin in the former Soviet Union except with a theatrical overtone. Bane is the most effective villain since Darth Vader from the Star Wars films. Banes synthesized voice was striking and as a character. He won me over in his very first scene where he confidently put himself on death’s door in a plot as maniacal as the ultimate villains from any ten James Bond films. Bane was a wonderfully evil character. There is absolutely no mistake about it. He is the opposite of Bruce Wayne in every category except that both men were trained by the League of Shadows.
In the Star Wars films it is the conflict between the Sith and the Jedi that drives the constant yearning to always know more about those movies that has made them so enduring. There is a truth in Star Wars as movies and books that hold the essential arguments of our age about spirituality, heroics, sacrifice, and political structure. The Sith are evil as it might be typically portrayed and the Jedi are the good. But at times the Jedi are too sacrificial, and they allow evil to emerge because they are not aggressive enough to stop it. And the Sith have appeal because they are all about aggression to achieve their intentions at any cost. In these Batman films it is the League of Shadows which actually hits much more closely to reality than any work of fiction being produced today. Listening to the merits of the League of Shadows it is easy to draw modern comparisons to al Qaeda and the current Occupy Movement being driven by political anarchists, socialists, Marxists, communists and the environmental movement.
Bane’s character was fleshed out well before there was a current ‘Occupy Movement” on Wall Street. The call for these modern parallels comes from literature that has been pouring out of Europe for a long time, most recently The Coming Insurrection by The Invisible Committee. So Dark Knight Rises cannot be said to reflect those modern movements that has started to emerge in Greece and Spain with violence. Many countries in Europe are currently collapsing under the weight of socialism financially, which is driven by underground political groups reading The Coming Insurrection. Christopher Nolan definitely has his finger on the world’s pulse as he and his brother came up with a plot that is hauntingly timely considering much of the script to this latest Batman installment was written way back in 2004 and 2005. The creators of Dark Knight Rises observed the conditions of our modern world and saw that comic books had predicted much of our current trouble back in the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s so they brushed them off into the incredibly relevant motion picture adaption that take the next theatrical step.
Cat Woman played by Anne Hathaway was excessively gripping. Anne was caught herself last year as a ‘Wall Street Occupier’ disguised in the crowd before being caught on film. Cat Woman was openly a socialist at the beginning of Dark Knight Rises. She is built up as a character that the audience will most likely identify with. She like many young people have been taught that society owes them something and if they don’t get it legitimately, then they’ll take it. Cat Woman has some really terrific scenes with Batman, the ultimate capitalist about the nature of money and the social role of the rich. Bruce Wayne as Batman finds her compelling and doesn’t lecture her on her social errors which was a wise choice. Instead, Cat Woman learns like the rest of the audience what the horrors of her idealism can, and will lead to. Playing a kind of biblical Judas, she trades Batman over to Bane only to witness through Batman’s demise how Gotham City is destroyed by removing the only man who can protect it.
The question of why only one man can stop Bane is the general premise of the novel Atlas Shrugged, and it is explored in Dark Knight Rises epically. The personal quest of Bruce Wayne realizing that nobody but him can save Gotham from the mobs that have been collected under idealism is potent stuff in this film. There are some deep and meaningful insights that Bruce Wayne had to endure and overcome that are the themes to most of the articles I write here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom, and I was eating it up like popcorn. Specifically, the point in the film where Bruce Wayne is crippled, and barely kept alive—tortured into watching the violent demise of Gotham City from a hellish pit. It is in this pit that the classic mythic motif of death and resurrection takes place. Wayne faces down the ghost of his former mentor Ra’s al Ghul and discovers that Bane learned to be such a monstrous provoker of evil from this very same place, and the only way to beat Bane is to survive the way he did, to become even stronger than he was before. Batman discovers that his weakness was his success, and that he has been failing because he does not fear death. There is a part of Bruce Wayne who wants it all to end, who wants the pain to go away, and it is in that trait that is holding him back from defeating Bane.
It is in a love of life that we ultimately live and fight for each moment. Without that love, life takes on a darker meaning, and this is what poisons much of the world. Batman didn’t know it, but Bane was fighting from a position of love and therefore had more passion. It was in that passion that Bane had so much strength, and it is what Bruce lacked. At the beginning of the film, this is why Bruce Wayne is a broken man hiding as a recluse in exile. He has a broken heart, and his body and mind reflected it. To heel, he had to want to live. This is the heart of Dark Knight Rises.
As usual, Hans Zimmer conducted a masterpiece of film music. He is the next best thing to hit Hollywood films since John Williams. I enjoy all his soundtracks, and Dark Knight Rises was simply fantastic. The use of percussion was so pulsating throughout the film that my adrenaline often wanted to ram my head through a wall in excitement. Some of the combat scenes were simply epic in large part due to Hans Zimmer’s music. There were many moments that reminded me of Braveheart, and it was Hans Zimmer’s music that sold the scenes wonderfully.
Dark Knight Rises is filmmaking at its very, very best. Such a movie only comes along every so often, and will resonate in our culture for many years, and for good reason. I personally read many comparative religion books, political commentaries, economic theories, legal jargon, and world history. But I have always found a truth in comic book stores and national conventions that evades most social insiders.
There is a very good reason that young people flock to video games, movies, and comic books in greater numbers than they ever have before. They often don’t know the reason, but they are simply searching for a truth that they require to advance their lives. Many of them will not discover it. They will listen when someone tells them to ‘grow up’ get a job, and serve society. But the truth they are looking for is the one that Bruce Wayne was forced to discover in Dark Knight Rises. It’s a love of life that everyone must find. And before anyone can save anybody, they must first save themselves.
I was the last one out of the crowded theater at the Regal. My family had left me sitting right in the center of the large theater. I was happier at the conclusion of the film than I had been in a long time because when I am asked why I write all this work online for free, it is to cover many of the themes that were shown in Dark Knight Rises. I felt I had just watched a book that I had wanted to read for many years, and had been trying to get people to see by putting the information out for free just so people could discover their own love of life and not find themselves crushed by the Banes of the world.
I had so much positive energy flowing through me that I was reluctant to stand up because I might leap over the rail and bounce around the empty theater like an electron in a particle separator. I had to sit still to calm myself down. The projectionist looked down from his booth wondering if I was OK and seeing that I was left me alone. I sat in the theater for five full minutes in complete silence. No usher came in to clean since we had seen the last show of the evening. It was 11 PM. I have been hungry for Dark Knight Rises for such a very long time. I am glad that a director like Christopher Nolan had been given a chance, and the substantial budget to put on the big screen a spectacle that had all the heart of an independent film, with the epic scale that only a well-funded studio picture could provide. I know all too well how incredibly difficult it is to assemble anything close to what Nolan made for Warner Brothers and ultimately the world. But he did it, and I thank God that he did.
Dark Knight Rises is simply the best movie currently out. It is the best film I’ve seen in 20 years and that says a lot. There are many films that are very good, but Dark Knight Rises is on a level of its own. If you have not seen it do not waste another minute. While it’s true that we are all busy in life with projects of our own, work that must be done, families to raise, and social events to engage in, everyone should see this movie. Believe me—there isn’t a film that more accurately frames the problems of our day better than Dark Knight Rises. It is not a simple comic book adaptation. It is an epic myth that takes on virtually every major contemporary problem with a boldness that is unprecedented. It is the very best that Hollywood has produced and is a wonderful export of American ideas that can be shared with a world in deep need of the message. It is more than a movie; it is a life-sustaining essence that is deeply meaningful if the layers of entertainment are peeled away so that we can swim in a much-needed truth. If I had a ranking system of one star through five—one being the worst, five being the best—I’d give Dark Knight Rises TEN STARS (**********)
See Dark Knight Rises once—then see it again, and again, and again, and again, and again until they finally pull the film from theaters. I can say this; I will go out and buy an entirely new television and sound system so that when Dark Knight Rises is released to video, I can watch it on Blue Ray at least once a week using the latest technology and I will turn that sucker up all the way! I like the movie that much! But it will never be as good as the first experience in the Regal. That is why when the lights came up and everyone left the theater I was still sitting, because I did not want to leave that seat, or the theater. I wanted the magic to continue on forever, because I’m not sure I’ll ever in my lifetime see another movie as good as Dark Knight Rises.
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This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon
One of the reasons I wrote the Tail of the Dragon was because I wanted to read it. When I was a kid, I loved the movies Smokey and the Bandit and Hooper and have been waiting for three decades for film makers and authors to write an updated version of those classic stories—but I’m still waiting. I’m not alone in this. To this day millions of movie fans still adore those films and some even go to the measure of doing the Bandit Run in their restored Trans Am’s from Texarkana, Texas to Atlanta, Georgia duplicating the car chase from that 1977 Burt Reynolds film. This year a group of car restoration enthusiasts just completed their annual 2012 Bandit Run which began in 2007 to touch the magic of those classic films and relive the enduring memory they have in American film culture.
I happen to have one of those old Firebirds from 1977 in my garage and it’s a family treasure. It is that car and the memory of those great films that provoked me to stop waiting for someone else to write a modern, Smokey and the Bandit story. I think its wonderful that there are still enough fans of the old films, and there are still a few of those old Firebird Trans Am’s around that allow events like the Bandit Run’s to take place, but I couldn’t help but think that young people today need an updated story—a new story that speaks to their age and the concerns of their times. For sentimental reasons, I wanted the star of the story to be one of those old Firebirds so that in the future there would be old car restorers years down the road who would want to organize a Tail of the Dragon run because the story I wrote inspired them to do such a thing.
I picked the Tail of the Dragon road on US 129 in Tennessee because I think it has the makings of being the kind of nostalgic road to the American psyche that Route 66 was. The Tail of the Dragon is a very unique road that features 318 switch back curves in an 11 mile stretch that forms the western border of the Great Smoky Mountains. Exotic cars and motorcycles from all over the world come to this section of road to exercise the suspensions of their beloved automobiles. Below is a video of a Ferrari that came to the motorcycle resort at the corner of the Moonshiner 28 and The Tail of the Dragon to make a nice run on the switch back curves. The camera work will show how curvy this road is. The video only shows a fraction of the road, but it supplies a wonderful perspective of the dramatic scenery surrounding the Tail of the Dragon.
Police have made a habit of patrolling that thoroughfare to pick up speeders knowing that people are going to that section to push the limits of their vehicles. For instance, in our family minivan when I went recently to visit Darryl Cannon (AKA Killboy) I spent much of the time while on the Dragon at 37 MPH with the tires screeching constantly. That gives an idea how many curves there are, when 37 MPH is considered fast. In really nice exotic cars like Lamborghini, and the Ferrari shown above, speeds of 40 to 50 MPH could be achieved without too much trouble. But the nature of the road is a challenge for both car and driver alike. Brake timing is crucial because moving your foot from the accelerator to the brake is an ongoing battle. When I found Killboy parked on the side of the Dragon photographing riders as they passed by, I could smell my brakes from such aggressive driving. Our minivan wasn’t designed for that kind of run, but it was still fun.
I arrived to see Killboy right after he shot the video below. Every weekend he sits on the side of the road and photographs everything that goes by. He offers his photos on his site www.KILLBOY.com . Riders can purchase professional grade photos of themselves driving by, and yes–business is good. Thousands of riders pass by him every weekend and he photographs them all. He is the original photographer of the Tail of the Dragon, so when I decided to write a book about the area, I had to make sure that he was one of the characters. His photography is highly sought after by automotive and motorcycle magazines across the country as he has samples on his site of some of his work. His brand of photography is kind of like fishing. He sits on the corners of the Dragon and shoots his camera at everything that goes by, and every now and then he captures something really spectacular—just like fishing. A story about the Tail of the Dragon just wouldn’t be the same without Killboy being a part of it.
Killboy is his video gamer tag name and over the years it just stuck. Now, it’s what he’s known by. In my novel Tail of the Dragon Killboy finds himself in a lot of trouble with the law in Blount County. He is the spark that starts a whole lot of chaos with just the simple bet of a hot dog. The officers of the law take serious offense to the activities Killboy was participating in with Rick Stevens—the novel’s hero–which ignites the greatest car chase ever.
When writing the novel it made sense that a car chase that would be bigger than Smokey and the Bandit, bigger than the ending of Hooper, bigger than anything ever done in books or films with much more speed than the popular NASCAR film Days of Thunder, or the insane car chase in the Blues Brothers where part of the chase ended up in a shopping mall–which is taken to much higher heights in Tail of the Dragon–the chase needed to start at this historic road of US 129. And it’s in the spirit of those great classics that the future of the Dragon will host similar runs that will bring great joy to thousands of people as they make the Dragon Run Car Chase part of an annual tradition. Such a run will take them from Deals Gap at the resort, down the Dragon, across the Foothills Parkway, into Townsend, Tennessee over to Pigeon Forge, Sevierville, then down I-40 into Ashville, North Carolina where the novel comes to an electrifying conclusion. At every stretch of that chase along those roads and towns are events that are as big as the climaxes in most movies. The chase is exhausting, but Dragon Run Car Chase Runners will make their journeys through those landmarks in much the way that the Bandit Runners have, and it will allow them to take in some of the most spectacular sites available in and around the Great Smoky Mountains.
For me it’s fun to take a break from politics, and finance to just enjoy the finer things in life. Most often, I enjoy works of fiction that on the surface are tension relieving and just plain fun. That is why Smokey and the Bandit is still a beloved movie that provokes so much emotion. And if I did my job correctly in writing Tail of the Dragon it will bring to a new generation that same kind of passion, which I hope it does. Because I want to be there when the first Tail of the DragonCar Chase Run is made, which will be quite a sight. It’s the celebration of the fun things in life that often count most and give meaning to all the stuff in between.
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This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon
Bill O’Reilly is not alone in his confusion over the role that government plays in the gun debate. There has been a lot said about his heated debate with Rep Chaffetz over stricter gun laws. Bill O’Reilly the popular author and TV reporter on Fox News is typically a conservative leaning investigator, but due to his roots in working class Levittown, New York, he has a soft spot for labor unions, and due to the fact that he’s lived and worked around New York City for a good part of his life, where they have banned guns completely, his view of the outside world is somewhat tainted.
O’Reilly blew up recently on the air with Chaffetz stating that while he did support American ownership of firearms, O’Reilly thought that the FBI should be contacted when heavy weapons or ammo are purchased. On the surface, what O’Reilly says makes sense; law enforcement should know what’s going on and what they are getting involved with if they are required to apprehend a suspect like James Holmes who has been stockpiling assault rifles and ammunition ahead of an intended shooting spree. O’Reilly’s reasoning is that if the FBI had the ability to know that James Holmes was buying large amounts of ammunition that law enforcement might have been triggered to watch Holmes more closely and therefore might have stopped the Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooting before it happened.
People who live in gun banning cities like Chicago, Washington D.C. and New York share with people who live in gun banning countries such as Canada and England the naïve assumption that law enforcement is always on the side of the people they are sworn to protect. These people believe that law enforcement should have 100% of community cooperation yielding all freedoms to the scrutiny of those law enforcement officers. Typically the people who are worst in this complete yielding of their personal freedoms to government authority have lived in the coastal cities at some point in their life and already had to face the concessions of living in those gun banning zones, so the premise of their argument is corrupted by their experience.
In the fly over states, gun ownership is a fact of life. Virtually everyone I know who does not live in a metropolitan area treasures their guns. Many own 3 to 5 per household, and these are typically very intelligent people who have very good jobs, raise very good families, and are overall good citizens. There are probably as many guns within 10 miles of my home as there are on a small military base, and that’s good. That’s exactly how it should be. In my community there isn’t much for police to do except break up domestic violence situations and petty theft. People in my community do not shoot each other when someone cuts the grass over on the property of their neighbor. Generally, people get along nicely, even when some of those people support school levies and others do not. We take our differences out at the ballot box, but generally are kind to each other while in public. Part of the reason for the peace and prosperity in rural areas are because of the large amounts of guns.
Cops are not shot when they come to our doors in suburbia. They are respected even when all they really have to do is sit on the side of the road and give us traffic tickets. There is a respectful tension between the general public and law enforcement. But there is not fear, because we are armed, and so are they.
But law enforcement by its title takes their orders from the political system that is in place, and if the political system is corrupt, like we all know it is abuses are bound to occur. In areas where guns are confiscated, stories of police violence against citizens goes up dramatically. Now, in my family there are several members who are cops, and one of my nephews who I have always been close to wants to be a cop. So what I say is taken in context and from experience. I have personally employed cops, and have known some of them as good friends, and with all that said I would not surrender my life completely to them under any circumstance. I do not trust them to make decisions on my behalf that will dictate the direction of my life, the lives of my family, and my property. I respect them and the danger of their job, but that is also what they are being paid for. I don’t give them a right to my life and property in the name of safety, I don’t give them the right to molest my wife and daughters, and I certainly don’t give them the right to draw a gun on me because they have a tendency to overact with grand theatrics when danger is present. I’ve seen this kind of behavior in more than one fight outside of bars where they show up on the scene and see a person laying face down in a pool of blood and assume the guy still standing did something wrong. Cops just like most people panic at the site of blood and guns, and they let their fears get away from them often. Cops are dangerous under this condition. Many of the gun laws created have been created under the pretense of panic where law makers have pandered to police officer’s fears.
Before the baby shower that my wife and daughter where holding for my youngest daughter over the previous weekend they sent me up to the local convenient store to purchase ice for the multiple coolers that were to be filled with drinks. I found myself in line behind a derelict of a man who was buying lottery tickets. Once he had his tickets he left and I was able to pay for my ice and get the key from the attendant. I went outside to get my ice out of the freezer and found that the man with the lottery tickets was sitting in his car scratching off the numbers. As I pulled out my bags of ice, the man cried out in glee from his car. “I won—I won!”
He jumped out of his car as though he had just won a million dollars and held the tickets up for me to see. “It won me some big money today! I won twenty dollars! I was afraid I was going to have to borrow money from my brother-in-law for cigarettes, but now I don’t have to!” As I loaded up my ice I couldn’t help but smile at the man who wasn’t any older than I was. “Now, if that happened every day, you’d never have to work another day in your life,” I said. He looked at me with confused attempts to connect neurons in his brain and relate something in his life that would help him understand my context. But my comment was completely foreign to him. I might as well have spoken a foreign language to him, because his lifestyle and mine are so far apart they might as well be from different countries. As I watched him run in to cash out his lottery tickets and come back out with a box of cigarettes and a toothless smile from ear to ear I thought—that was a guy I don’t want to have a gun—because he’s not smart enough to carry one.
It is people like that guy who police worry about when they have to arrest them for domestic violence because they beat the hell out of their bother-in-law over cigarette money, or had sex with their wife’s sister because they were all drunk and passed out on the floor of their smoke infested trailer. The wife erupts into a violent range wanting to kill the man for his reckless sexual exploits. It is often the poor and destitute who have trouble with guns, just like they have trouble with money. I have tried to employee such people for years, and they often lose their jobs because of attendance—they just don’t have the ambition to get out of bed. Many of them would rather use government regulation and unemployment benefits to keep from having to show up for a job, and because they are essentially lazy, they have low quality people in their lives and a low quality life style, and it’s there choice.
I should not be restricted from owning military grade weapons because of people like that lottery ticket guy. I should be able to have the guns of my choice in case politics fail completely and I need an equalizer against tyranny. Hopefully, just by having the gun, it will mean I never have to use it. But in not having it, police abuse and political cover-ups will occur, because they do now—and always have. My life is more important than the collective sum of the lottery ticket guy, or the nature of a politician’s congressional district, or presidential reign. All those kinds of things are just blips on the radar screen and don’t mean much in the scheme of things.
The FBI, the CIA, the ATF, the Department of Homeland Security, the TSA and our local police officers cannot be trusted to do the right thing 100% of the time. The need for the gun is for the 1% of the time that humans fail their fellow-man with the knowledge that one group has power over another. When the officer cuffs a man for a traffic warrant late on a Saturday night and discover his wife is in a compromised position and is quite attractive and unprotected, they may offer to turn the man loose if the woman has sex with them. Yes it does happen. The wife may want not want her husband arrested, or maybe going to jail will bankrupt them so she might be inclined to do as the officers suggest. I know of cops who have sat in my backyard and bragged about this kind of stuff. The arrested man at that point should have the right to defend his wife, and is property from intruders. But because the man is handcuffed in the back of a patrol car and the law has taken possession of his home, the police are in complete command to dictate the terms of release or apprehension. If the police know that the man is not a registered gun owner who might seek revenge for the indiscretion, they are much more inclined to abuse their power and take advantage of the wife.
If the man is a gun owner, the police will treat the man with much more respect. They’ll be much more careful with any suggestions that man might interpret as threatening because after the court hearings are over, they don’t want that man to come after them for revenge. So they treat everyone with more respect. That respect comes because of the gun.
The bottom line is no government agency needs to know any more about our lives than they need for basic government operation. They do not need to have the ability to have complete control over the American population in times of martial law. The President of the United States does not have the right to impede our rights over some political panic. And the weakest links of our society cannot be allowed to create legislation to keep certain guns out of their hands which punishes all of society. If we allow the weak links of our culture to determine the levels of our freedoms then we might as well consider ourselves a conquered civilization.
People like Bill O’Reilly are well-intentioned, but they are corrupted with the gradual erosion of progressive politics that have made such slight indiscretions seem minor and reasonable. When gun grabbers suggest that the Constitution was written in a time when the only guns were balls of lead and single shot muskets they are missing the point. America is not a land of law run by lawyers, and the Constitution is not a legal document as typical lawyers might consider it. It’s a political philosophy that has law draped from it as decoration. The decorations can all be removed yet the structure is still intact. It does not matter if the gun is a single shot musket, or an automatic machine gun, the need for guns in society are to equalize all participants with the ability to wipe temptation from the minds of the would-be thief, the looting politicians, and the ruthless dictator.
The government does not need to know what, or when we buy something or what we intend to do with it. It’s none of their business. Having more law enforcement officers does not make me feel safe. Only a gun at my own hip, or the guns next to my bed, or in my garage make me feel safe, and the need for them is an acknowledgment of human philosophy that understands the true nature of people. Gun control is social engineering that assumes that the people who look over our records, and monitor our activities are superior in their decision-making skills to society in general, and that just isn’t the case. In fact, it couldn’t be further from the truth. For those who assume that dangerous weapons are OK to ban from the public the meaning of the weapons are lost in the discussion. No—we do not need an AK47 to shoot a deer. But we may need it if a major storm comes through and knocks out power for days on end and bands of looters roam from house to house to rape, pillage, and destroy the property and lives of the inhabitants while the police are overwhelmed with the emergency. That is the time when all you have is yourself, and your guns to keep tragedy from making another victim of a family that trusted the law completely even though all the rules of society changed the moment the power went out. In times like that, more than a .22 six shot rim fire will be needed. That’s when the big guns come out, and the threat of those guns becomes the true “Thin Blue Line,” that was always the reality but never acknowledged.
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This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon
I found it surprising that my congressman Speaker Boehner is not up to speed that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated our government. He along with others appear to be in denial that Muslim extremists are tied very close to progressive politics and are determined to destroy America from within. So to bring Speaker Boehner and many others up to speed on information they may not have had time, or the political stomach to comprehend I am offering a series of radio interviews to watch below. The first is from my personal friend Matt Clark in Ann Arbor, Michigan on WAAM radio where he begins to peel back the layers of just how serious the situation really is.
Speaker Boehner and Senator John McCain has threatened Representative Michelle Bachman that they will remover he seat on the Intelligence Committee if she does not apologize to Anthony Wiener’s wife for a letter Bachman wrote questioning Huma Abedin’s parents ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Anthony Wiener was the former combative progressive congressman who had to leave his seat because he got caught tweeting pictures of his actual wiener to women on the internet. His wife is a Muslim who is a direct aid to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Below, Glenn Beck sets the stage on how much of a storm was created by Michelle Bachman’s simple letter.
Where there is much anger over seemingly trivial issues, there is fire that nobody knew was burning. Whatever deals have been made between network heads and politics are not deals that are conducive to the American population if radicals wish to sing our nation to sleep with siren songs of peace while sharpening their swords on our chins. I would find it hard to believe that Speaker Boehner is on the direct call list of the Muslim Brotherhood. Rather, I would think that he believes he’s playing by the rules of politics. Unfortunately, those rules have been quietly established by those same Muslim infiltrators.
Playing nice politics will not lead America to victory which is what I think politicians like Boehner and McCain believe they are doing. They believe they should take the high road and not subscribe to wild theories. I believe they are simply naïve. But Michelle Bachman as a member of the Intelligence Committee has an obligation to defend the Constitution from enemies both foreign and domestic, and she is up in arms that known terrorists have been flown to The White House on the tax payer dime to meet directly with the President while she is being attacked from members of her own party for calling attention to the issue.
It is difficult to look at aspects of our friendships and political connections and assess the true value. Not the value we wish it to be, but the actual value. When a man wishes to sleep with a woman just for the sex of it, he might tell her he loves her, he might wine and dine her, he might buy her nice jewelry, but once the man has obtained his sex, the true nature of the relationship will be revealed. The woman may wish to believe the man loved her, but the reality is all he wanted was sex. In the case of the Muslim Brotherhood, they are very pleasant and say all the right things to the people they come into contact with. Members of the American government have been seduced by the charming Muslim Brotherhood radicals.
To people on the outside we can see clearly what’s happening. We don’t care if Weiner’s wife is the friend of John McCain. John may be letting his desire to believe his dear friend is completely clean and wants to be his friend because she genuinely likes him, taint his judgment. Other politicians who have similar friendships with Muslim Brotherhood members no doubt believe they are dealing with friends. But remember the story about the man who only wants to get a woman in bed, and once he does, the relationship goes downhill, and the woman will often find herself on the outside looking in used and abused. The Muslim Brotherhood wants an end to the American way of life and they don’t care how they bring it about. Like the man who simply wants sex, the Muslim Brotherhood will say and do anything to achieve their objective. It is the politicians who find themselves the targets of affection as their social simplicity leaves them defenseless against such charms.
I would suggest that Speaker Boehner not take for granted the evidence that is all around him. And he should not side himself against Bachman who is simply trying to do the right thing which her seat mandates. Playing politics plays into the plans of the Muslim Brotherhood. They count on such predictable behavior to launch their agenda against a sleepy society. But not everyone is asleep. And Speaker Boehner, it’s time to wake up and see things for what they are. These are not peaceful times conducted by peaceful people. And the Muslim Brotherhood is not your friend. All they want from you is your head on a pike, and they will do it the moment they get a turned back, and an open moment.
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This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon
After reading the George Costanza comments about the ‘Dark Knight’ shootings in Colorado chastising gun ownership, it is time to speak the truth about the reason we have the Second Amendment in the first place—the cold hearted truth which cannot be spoken about since progressives have turned the entire argument into an emotional one. Costanza isn’t the only one to say after the tragic shooting that there is no reason common citizens should have access to assault weapons and ammunition clips that allow over 100 rounds to be shot before reloading. Many sensitive types—other actors and politicians in the wake of the shooting were quick to express outrage that the American public should not have access to guns at all, let alone military grade firearms. They reason that we already have a military, and a police force, so the term “well regulated militia” as it’s described in the Second Amendment is already covered. We hire those defensive entities to do “protective” work for us, so the common population does not need to own firearms—in their view.
Pro gun people in reaction to the ignorance of the sensitive progressive types suffering from extreme levels of naiveté have tried not to hurt the feelings of their counterparts in direct argument by saying weapons are needed for hunting and self defense—but that’s not why we need the Second Amendment.
While people like George Costanza wish to believe that the security of our property can be hired out, just as they believe the education of children can as well, they fail to acknowledge a fundamental fact about human nature–the desire to control others. When one human being has more power than another human being, abuses will take place. It happens all the time with sexual abuse cases, and it happens all the time in regards to police officers abusing their right to assert dominance over civilians just because they have a gun. There are thousands and thousands of examples of police abuse over common citizens every year that are covered up because when law enforcement goes bad, there isn’t anyone to police the police.
Most of the actors who speak out against gun control live in social bubbles in the valley of land that rests between the mountains of California dividing Las Vegas with Los Angeles and the Pacific Ocean. Talking with some of these people as I have in the past, I doubt they know much about the world beyond those mountains to the east except when they travel to Vegas. They are not self reliant individuals, but they don’t have to be. They get paid good sums of money which helps isolate them from the outside world. If they are big actors they probably employ private body guards, so they can’t imagine a world where guns are needed. They use their money as a weapon in a different way, so they don’t need guns.
Politicians in Washington already steal for a living, so it’s to their advantage to have a society that does not carry guns. It makes it much easier for them to steal from the tax payers. Politicians use the civilian police force to enforce the money schemes they enact, so they have no need of guns to carry out their devastating desires. And residents of New York made a concession to their freedom to live on that island of concrete so they could see pretty lights and take their shot at success in the Big Apple. Politicians like Bloomberg who have vast amounts of wealth hire out all their protect duties, and when they need something from politics, they simply grease the wheels with their money, so they have no need of guns.
But for everyone else, the ability to own a gun is the only thing that stands between freedom and total control by an unruly government. The Second Amendment is there to protect the American population from an out-of-control government who can turn our police and military against us with a simple signature. For people like Costanza who was most likely having an enjoyable New Years Eve party in Hollywood with his acting friends, they weren’t aware, or didn’t want to be aware of the NDAA Act President Obama signed in Hawaii while nobody was watching on New Years Eve giving himself the power to call martial law and arrest American citizens for the suspicion of terrorism. In the case of the communist Obama, he could view people who advocate capitalism as a terrorist to his political agenda, so the NDAA Act gives him the power to use police and the military to carry out arrest and detainment of American citizens perpetually. This is a very dangerous situation, and most of our current Congress and Senate signed in favor of the law under the disguise of protecting America from terrorism.
Government cannot be trusted under any circumstances. When given power, they will take more than they are given 100% of the time. Only high quality minded people can handle such temptations without abuse. I believe there are a few such people in our current government, but not many. Our society just does not produce such people, not just in America, but anywhere in the world. When given the opportunity to abuse power, most people will. The only protective measure anyone can have is the ability to be just as armed as the military. That is the spirit of the Second Amendment.
When the people of America lose respect for the law, because the law has abused their rights, the American people are obligated to remove the corrupt from office and re-establish government. When politicians show they do not respect the vote and will lie, cheat and steal to obtain office so they can gain access to all the perks given by the tax payers, then more aggressive measure may be needed to restore the Republic. And that won’t happen with broom sticks and wooden swords. Currently the politicians can use our military against us, and the police now fall under direct Presidential authority because of the NDAA Act. If a United States President goes bad during their term they can use the police and military to keep them in office using martial law to stay in power.
Nobody wants to believe any President would be so bad, that such a thing could happen, but the precedent has been set in the latest trends of Presidents both Republican and Democrat to use Executive Order to by-pass congress. More and more, members of the Executive Branch seem inclined to believe that they are kings of America, rather than people’s representatives.
If America is unarmed, law enforcement would never have to worry about ramifications of abuse. The thought in their minds that a gun may be present when they knock on a door, or pull over a motorist gives them respect to uphold their side of law. If that threat is removed, abuse is a temptation that all too often will show itself, as it currently does on occasion. There are already eminent domain issues that arise where politicians use legal manipulation to obtain property they have no right to in order to build a shopping center or a new highway declaring “the greater good” as their reasons. But the real reason is to take care of a financial contributor who simply wants the property and uses the government and therefore the police to obtain that property so money can be made in the looting of it.
The Second Amendment is in our founding document to ultimately protect our property from foreign and domestic enemies. Domestic enemies are not always the kinds of people who hijack airplanes to run into buildings. They can be in our own government, put there by greedy interests to subtly steal American property and terrorize individual lives. Having a well armed population keeps everyone honest. Without that threat, evil will show itself.
I don’t want to believe it, but the Aurora shooting looks to be a “false flag” situation. We’ve seen it before where the CIA, ATF, and other government agencies get caught trying to manipulate circumstances in order to gain a public outcome designed to manipulate large numbers of people. That is what happened to Randy Weaver in the Ruby Ridge Massacre, and it happened under the direction of Eric Holder with Fast and Furious recently. That’s why Eric Holder has been found in “contempt of Congress.”Holder ignored the charge because he is head of the Justice Department working directly for President Obama. The only people who could prosecute Holder all work under him, so the contempt charge will go nowhere as long as Holder, and Obama are in office. Government has been caught several times attempting to manipulate people through coerced friendships into committing diabolical acts without being directly involved. It would not surprise me that this Aurora shooting is one of those times. The process is very similar to how sex trafficking works, where pimps use women to collect vast sums of money selling their bodies and out of fear; they turn that money over to their pimps. Such coercive measures have been utilized by government officials before and they will be done again. The reason that government must behave in a manipulative political manner is because they fear being caught by an armed public. If the guns are taken away, the actions of coercion will no longer be hidden; they will be out in the open.
The best defense against violence from all domestic enemies, which include the ‘Dark Night Shooter’, is a well armed population. It would have been much better if there were armed citizens in the theater to gun down James Holmes as he unloaded his ammunition into an unprotected audience. Progressives will say that this is not the Wild West, that we are a civilized society that should not be trying to kill each other with guns. But they are wrong, and in denial over the nature of the human being.
The old hippie notion of peace on earth is a utopian wish that is reckless, and stupid. It is that notion of peace that is behind the desire for gun control. Its social engineering which assumes that government can be trusted with complete power and control over the population, and it can’t. The people, who support guns, do not yield their lives and property to the blind trust of government. They want guns so they know that if the absolute worst case scenario comes about, that they can defend their property from an intrusive government. It hasn’t any thing to do with hunting, although that is a consideration. The gun is one of the reasons people are free. Fewer guns mean less freedom, and ironically, less economic activity because government without the threat of violence being present will inject itself everywhere with impunity, and that costs money by way of opportunity cost.
The people who want to ban guns in favor of a safe society are fools who are in denial of basic human instincts. The gun equalizes everyone, and is a necessary check on the many balances that are required in a thriving society. The quality of a country is not measured on how few people die; it is on the quality of life for those who live. The rest of the world does have it wrong, Canada, England and every gun banning nation have created docile civilizations that are easily conquered and do not have worldwide respect. America will not have world enemies if it continues to lose its economic power, but if it hopes to remain a superpower, it will have enemies both foreign and domestic because that is the nature of being the best. And the gun is extremely important to maintaining that superpower status. The gun is the symbol of everything being an America is. Those who wish to remove them from our society are the same who wish to change America into something else—which is not acceptable.
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This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon
Glenn Beck said two things that I agree with 100%. First, he thinks the new Batman film Dark Knight Rises is a fantastic movie that should be seen. So if you haven’t seen it and want to see a good movie—GO SEE IT! The other thing he said is that he is calling the presidential election already—Barack Obama will lose. Beck warns that everyone still has to do the work, they still have to get out and vote, but as it stands, Barack Obama has spent himself into bankruptcy before the campaign has really even started, his economy is a disaster, his justice department is corrupt, his health care is reckless socialism, and the Obama White House is guilty of security leaks. Obama has been a disastrous president, and as things stand now, the election shouldn’t even be close. Just keep the hammer down and hit hard, and we can get rid of the worst president in American history.
So keep your noses to the grind stone. Do the work, vote, vote and vote. Don’t stay home because all the derelicts looking for free Obama money will show up and vote. So don’t let them rob you by not showing up at the election. And in the mean time, go see Dark Knight Rises. Don’t let the actions of a loon keep a very good American made movie be tarnished by the actions of a Joker.
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This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon
This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon
