Category: Policial Science

The Ebola Conspiracies: Warnings from ‘The Hot Zone’

I first learned about the Ebola virus from the 1994 thriller The Hot Zone. The disease has been around for a while and was contained successfully for over 20 years to the African continent. For reasons that seem to be pulled straight off the pages of that best-selling book, the level of stupidity regarding the containment of the disease over the last couple of months have only fueled the conspiracy theories that a massive desire to depopulate the world with a deadly virus are true. The failure to contain travelers from the hot zone of Africa is the first give-away. Then the failures to stop contact with infected victims in the United States has been the other indicator. There seems to be more to the story than just lackadaisical stupidity on behalf of the government workers at play. Conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones and musical artist Chris Brown have justifiable concerns to their active imaginations. It doesn’t take much to draw conclusions that something is array.

 

The Hot Zone: A Terrifying True Story is a best-selling[1] 1994 non-fiction thriller by Richard Preston about the origins and incidents involving viral hemorrhagic fevers, particularly ebola viruses and marburgviruses. The basis of the book was Preston’s 1992 New Yorker article “Crisis in the Hot Zone“.[2]

 

The filoviruses Ebola virus (EBOV), Sudan virus (SUDV), Marburg virus (MARV), and Ravn virus (RAVV) are Biosafety Level 4 agents. Biosafety Level 4 agents are extremely dangerous to humans because they are very infectious, have a high case-fatality rate, and there are no known prophylactics, treatments, or cures. Along with describing the history of the diseases caused by these two Central African diseases, Ebola virus disease (EVD) and Marburg virus disease (MVD), Preston describes a 1989 incident in which a relative of Ebola virus named Reston virus (RESTV), was discovered at a primate quarantine facility in Reston, Virginia, less than fifteen miles (24 km) away from Washington, DC. The virus found at the facility was a mutated form of the original Ebola virus, and was initially mistaken for Simian Hemorrhagic Fever (SHV). The original Reston facility involved in the incident, located at 1946 Isaac Newton Square, was subsequently torn down sometime between 1995 and 1998.[3]

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hot_Zone

With the sudden rash of cases dominating the news cycle—eclipsing all other stories including the ISIS debacles, IRS crises, the continued failures of the Obama administration at virtually everything—a bit of panic has ensued into the mainstream leaving MTV to actually discuss the issue. Below is a small article from MTV actually castigating a black artist for reckless comments about an Ebola conspiracy theory. Ironically, this is one of the few times a major progressive network has come out against the type of rhetoric that is coming out from people in the African-American communities like Louis Farrakhan.

 

“When it comes to updates on his new music, videos or graffiti, Chris Brown is a great source of information. But … if you’re looking for reliable, timely news on the Ebola epidemic, Breezy is not really your guy. See, on Monday (October 13), amid news that a second person in the U.S. had tested positive for the deadly virus after coming into contact with the nation’s first patient, who is now deceased, CB took to Twitter to spout his conspiracy theory on the spread of the disease that has killed thousands in Africa.”

http://www.mtv.com/news/1961927/chris-brown-ebola-tweet/

If Chris Brown had sent out a Tweet about the Ferguson riots, MTV would have been all over themselves in support of the celebrity—but on this case, they are oddly critical. This of course points to the kind of conspiracy that is a product of Alex Jones who is often bombastic in his predilections, but often makes some interesting observations that deserve investigation. His belief reflected on the Info Wars website seen below is that this recent outbreak of Ebola is part of a Globalist process conspiracy—meaning that the disease is being deliberately spread through bureaucratic means to depopulate the earth before medicine can possibly react to the danger—as shown in the quotes below.

“The specific object of the Globalist Ebola process conspiracy is here theorized to involve diminishing the linkage, in public consciousness, of Ebola with nationality status. Globalists have huge immigration plans for the U.S., and they do not want Ebola (or any other infectious disease, for that matter) getting in the way of those plans. That is why their Ebola policy protocols—as absurd as they are (discussed shortly)— read the way they do, that is why we have been exposed to a cloud of lies emanating from Dallas and dispersed through the MSM, and that is why Duncan was discharged with antibiotics soon after his first visit to the Emergency Room of Texas Presbyterian.

Because the theory is a process conspiracy theory and therefore rooted in subverted policy, it has application not just to Duncan, but to future Duncan’s as well. The argument proceeds as follows. First, a brief observation concerning risk is offered which, even though obvious, is necessary because without it the argument will make little sense. Second, the CDC’s Ebola Screening and Isolation polices are examined, and, on the basis of the risk observation, shown to be not only wholly inadequate to the task they were allegedly crafted to meet, but quite likely to make the Ebola contagion problem even worse. Third, evidence is provided in support of the idea that the Ebola process conspiracy theory offers a simple, and very plausible explanation, of certain important assertions of fact, and inconsistencies, emanating from Dallas that are otherwise rather difficult to explain. Throughout, the connection to the issue of nationality status will be obvious.”

http://www.infowars.com/the-dallas-ebola-case-an-immigration-related-process-conspiracy/

 

There are aspects to both conspiracy theories, whether it is a fear that there are forces who want to kill black people with the disease, or a global conspiracy by the elite banks to depopulate the earth so to save it from the thriving masses leaving mankind to begin again under the care and guidance of a rich elite—the stupidity in controlling the disease has supported those fears. But what is not a conspiracy is the reaction that Americans have had toward the disease, a shallow cowering fear that has emitted short of panic as the news coverage has intensified over the last couple of weeks. Any Jihadist terrorist who might desire to kill themselves and many others for Allah is likely already thinking of ways that they can contract the disease and catch a flight to the resort towns of Mexico where incoming customs are lax that detainment is nearly impossible. Mexican tourist towns think of only one primary objective, vacation dollars spent on their economy. They are too short-sighted in those cities to think of the implication of a world-wide Ebola outbreak. From there it is easy to walk across the American border to attend a college party or dance club at a nearby city. Two weeks infected and dripping with a feverish sweat, the terrorist could contaminant thousands of people in a single evening that would then infect many thousands more in the ensuing weeks. If someone wanted to create terror against the most successful capitalist country in the world, Ebola would be the way to do it, especially given the reaction to the few incidents already popping up in North America. Given the ease for which it was spread and the incompetence of the government to contain it the only logical conclusion would be conspiracy.

The reason that the 1994 book The Hot Zone was such a terrifying best seller is due to the theoretical proximity it has to reality through either incompetence or conspiracy. Either way, we are vulnerable to the grim realities of a devastating disease and must take caution. Part of that caution is in knowing how to avoid it. The second part is in taking action to replace the type of people who have shown such gross incompetence at their government positions to allow for Ebola to migrate from Africa to America either by purposeful design or sheer stupidity. Those responsible need to be removed from positions of decision-making so that proper managers can take their place with a level of competence that necessitates the performance expectations that Americans have in living free of such deadly diseases as those spawned in West Africa.

 

The conspiracies spawned off of this latest Ebola scare are rooted in incompetency—they are born when people suspect that they aren’t being given all the facts of the matter leaving their imaginations to fill the gaps. It is not they who are at fault—it is not Chris Brown or Alex Jones who are the nut cases in advocating conspiracies when it comes to Ebola. It is the idiots who let it leave West Africa for destinations on the continent of North America. The warnings were there from the start, but obviously those in charge had forgotten the warnings given in The Hot Zone. Now—it’s too late. Ebola has gone from a scare to a grim reality that is now non-fiction and beyond speculation.

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Mermaids at the Newport Aquarium: Thank a capitalist like Steiner for conservation awareness

Many think that because I’m a conservative that I naturally do not support conservation. These are the same types who think that the issue of slavery was only a white on black occurrence occurring in America from the 1600s until the mid 1800s. Of course slavery was a much larger social problem involving all races and sexes of that particular time period and it was America who was the first to take a moral stand against it—to such an extent that a war was fought over it—led by Republicans. The same type of manipulation has occurred to make conservatives into villains regarding conservation—and largely it has gone unchallenged. That is because the answer to the conservation question is again that it is capitalism which is the biggest spokesman for the conservation movement which is much to the frustration of the bleeding heart liberal types. So it is with some surprise that people learn of my love and support of the Newport Aquarium.

The primary reason that I am so excited about the upcoming Liberty Center development being constructed as we speak in my community of Liberty Township is because it is a Steiner project. The Steiner group twenty years ago envisioned a way to save the embattled city of Newport, Kentucky with a brilliant new development on the river built around a new state-of-the art aquarium. That aquarium was a game changer and to this day is worth an out-of-state visit just to see. Situated across from the Cincinnati skyline, it has changed life on the banks of the Ohio River for the culture of the Cincinnati region and it all started with the capitalist Steiner.

 

Years later during a week in mid October 2014 the Newport Aquarium brought in the Weeki Wachee Mermaids from the popular Florida resort to perform in an extravaganza that I thought was incredibly wonderful. To the music of the Little Mermaid from Disney thousands upon thousands of little girls lined up to meet the beautiful mermaids and see them perform in the Coral Reef tank—which was absolutely glorious. Capitalism was on display at its finest. Of all the little girls present many will find they have an appreciation of sea life because of that experience and will likely carry it with them their entire lives. Two Disney films dominate the exhibits in a subtle way at the Newport Aquarium, Finding Nemo and of course The Little Mermaid. Disney created the gateway into such stories by creating the mythology. Steiner and his group brought that mythology to reality. And the wonderful Weeki Wachee swimmers from Florida and their capitalist endeavor their brought mythology to life for profit which further intensifies the experience for countless lives touched by their endeavors.

Leaving the Newport Aquarium after seeing the exhibit of mermaids on a sunny day in October with the great Ohio River rolling by just feet away, with Mitchells, Barnes and Noble and the AMC movie theater looming above, it was the vision of the Steiner group which brought this experience to so many people and God love him for it. It took a lot of headache to bring that vision to reality and I am thankful that he did so twenty years ago. My brother is a diver at the Newport Aquarium and it has been an important place for my family for a number of years. I simply love the place, but without Steiner—the capitalist—it would have never happened. The Newport Aquarium is one of the best exhibits of its kind in the world and has maintained that status into its second decade. And it’s still going strong and is able to bring in talent like the Weeki Wachee Mermaids from such a distance to bring a bit of Disney World to the Midwest.

 

http://www.newportaquarium.com/What-to-do-in-cincinnati/Aquarium-Events/Mermaids.aspx?cid=ppc_000161

 

At the aquarium in Newport, conservation is on full display. It is evident why manufacturers would want to refrain from careless drilling, over deforestation, and a destruction of the earth’s natural resources by seeing the exhibits. Science driven by capitalism is the best conservation method that there is, and the Newport Aquarium is the perfect example of such an endeavor. I could sit in front of their exhibits for hours and just watch the animals—and appreciate the unique circumstances which made them possible as a life form. Without a profit motive however, there would be no Newport Aquarium, or a Newport Levee experience. Profit drives science and conservation. A lack of such formulas gives you the Middle East—sand, poverty, and stupidity. The Newport Aquarium is culture at its finest—it brings out the best in people and is a wonderful, magnificent creation of the Steiner group.

 

With the same epic vision the Steiner group is bringing its latest creation to Liberty Center. I expect that complex to dwarf what has occurred at the Newport on the Levee development. And because of the well-designed shopping complex the very popular outdoor store Cabela’s is moving in across the street on Liberty Way. I can’t think of any aspect of modern culture that most brings conservation to the minds of the masses than such a shopping experience at Cabela’s—an outlet dedicated to the outdoor experience and the preservation of those outdoors for future lives. Without Steiner, there would be no Cabela’s. And without Cabela’s the Bass Pro Shops down the road wouldn’t be expanding the way they are by necessity of competition. Because of those two retail outlets millions of people will become inspired to not only participate in outdoor activities, but to preserve them through the education programs that come as natural off-shoots of those shopping experiences. Because of the Steiner group and their use of capitalism to create profit driven experiences, conservation awareness will be greatly expanded dwarfing the great work done at the Newport Aquarium so many years ago even into the present.

If there are little ones in your family now is the time to see the Weekie Wachee Mermaids at the Newport Aquarium. I’ve seen the show in Florida and it was wonderful, but the Newport Aquarium provides a much more up-close and personal experience because of the tubular design of the display in the Coral Reef section. It was quite majestic. It was a brilliant move by both the Weekie Wachee crew and the Aquarium to pull those two elements together. They are playing only through this upcoming weekend, so make sure to see it. Better yet, take a day off work and visit during the day when the crowds are much less. Take your kids out of school for the experience. They’ll learn a whole lot more at the Newport Aquarium than they will in school, that’s for sure, and the experience you’ll share as a family will be unrivaled. It is that good, and is just one more reminder of how wonderful capitalism can be when it’s used properly in the hands of wonderful people in the Steiner Group. Their creativity and desire for quality has given thousands an experience in their own back yards worthy of a week-long vacation to a distant land. Only it’s right there at Newport on the Levee. So take your kids, eat at their fine restaurant, pet some sharks and thank a capitalist for the enriching experience.

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Capitalism as a Weapon: The peaceful conquest of our enemies without firing a shot

The Wall Street Journal had a wonderful little essay in their Saturday review section that sounded like something one might find at this site every day. The author Hernando De Soto wrote a nice little article titled The Capitalist Cure for Terrorism: Military might alone won’t defeat Islamic State and its ilk. The U.S. needs to promote economic empowerment. It was such a good article I place a portion of it below along with a link to the whole article for further review. In it Hernando talks about his experiences in Peru as communism was moving through South America and Central America during the 80s and 90s and how it was defeated with economic prosperity. He suggests that if the same strategy were employed in the Middle East, that it would be a lot more powerful than airstrikes and “troops on the ground.” The way to beat communism which is always floating around in between the sentences of progressive thought is to advocate capitalism. There is a lot more strength in that economic policy than in any military occupation by force of a people in a remote land. Here is some of Hernando’s article.

By 1990, a Marxist-Leninist terrorist organization called Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, had seized control of most of my home country, Peru, where I served as the president’s principal adviser. Fashionable opinion held that the people rebelling were the impoverished or underemployed wage slaves of Latin America, that capitalism couldn’t work outside the West and that Latin cultures didn’t really understand market economics.

The conventional wisdom proved to be wrong, however. Reforms in Peru gave indigenous entrepreneurs and farmers control over their assets and a new, more accessible legal framework in which to run businesses, make contracts and borrow—spurring an unprecedented rise in living standards.

Between 1980 and 1993, Peru won the only victory against a terrorist movement since the fall of communism without the intervention of foreign troops or significant outside financial support for its military. Over the next two decades, Peru’s gross national product per capita grew twice as fast as the average in the rest of Latin America, with its middle class growing four times faster.

Today we hear the same economic and cultural pessimism about the Arab world that we did about Peru in the 1980s. But we know better. Just as Shining Path was beaten in Peru, so can terrorists be defeated by reforms that create an unstoppable constituency for rising living standards in the Middle East and North Africa.

To make this agenda a reality, the only requirements are a little imagination, a hefty dose of capital (injected from the bottom up) and government leadership to build, streamline and fortify the laws and structures that let capitalism flourish. As anyone who’s walked the streets of Lima, Tunis and Cairo knows, capital isn’t the problem—it is the solution.

Here’s the Peru story in brief: Shining Path, led by a former professor named Abimael Guzmán, attempted to overthrow the Peruvian government in the 1980s. The group initially appealed to some desperately poor farmers in the countryside, who shared their profound distrust of Peru’s elites. Mr. Guzmán cast himself as the savior of proletarians who had languished for too long under Peru’s abusive capitalists.

What changed the debate, and ultimately the government’s response, was proof that the poor in Peru weren’t unemployed or underemployed laborers or farmers, as the conventional wisdom held at the time. Instead, most of them were small entrepreneurs, operating off the books in Peru’s “informal” economy. They accounted for 62% of Peru’s population and generated 34% of its gross domestic product—and they had accumulated some $70 billion worth of real-estate assets.

This new way of seeing economic reality led to major constitutional and legal reforms. Peru reduced by 75% the red tape blocking access to economic activity, provided ombudsmen and mechanisms for filing complaints against government agencies and recognized the property rights of the majority. One legislative package alone gave official recognition to 380,000 informal businesses, thus bringing above board, from 1990 to 1994, some 500,000 jobs and $8 billion in tax revenue.

 

http://online.wsj.com/articles/the-capitalist-cure-for-terrorism-1412973796

Of course President Obama would never consider the types of reforms which took place in Peru because as a progressive—his underlying philosophy is that of Karl Marx communism—the same brand that is behind the Muslim Brotherhood, the tyrants of South and Central America and in general the labor unions of the world. As enemies of capitalism, they are in paralysis to utilize it as a military objective and are thus forced to commit the type of imperialism that America is often criticized for. But that is entirely unnecessary—as capitalism is the best strategic mode of military conquest. Free people to their own economic success and they will have no need for a dictator. Make people wealthy in the Middle East, and they will have no desire to feed the resources of ISIS.

It is wonderful to see such strategic thinking coming out of the Wall Street Journal. New York, even though it was built by capitalism is a hard place these days comprehend such an economic philosophy. Progressivism is the ruler of that city these days. Yes capitalism still speaks loudly in Times Square, but the underpinnings of progressive philosophy are slowly destroying everything that city has meant to America which is a military objective coming from the other direction—from antagonists like ISIS and other Muslim radicals. They wish communism upon the earth and they use religion to hide it. So it is only fair to utilize the strength of the West—capitalism—to crush the enemies of our nation without firing a shot.

You’d think that Obama being the peace-loving old hippie follower that he was and is would love the idea of a peaceful solution to the world’s problems. But Obama is an enemy of capitalism, so he cannot use it to save the world, which is a shame, because it is the most effective weapon that America has against its enemies. And America has enemies not because of what it does to other nations through imperialism, but because it is always a threat to tyrannical control they wish to impose on the world. America because of its capitalism is an example to the world that tyrants hope to extinguish so that promises of a better life do not come from economic freedom, but through the support of the next rulers of a Karl Marx economy where each takes from confiscated wealth according to their need.

The solution to many of the world’s anxieties could be accomplished through the simple embrace of capitalism as an economic force. The continued desire to find the next subtle way to deliver world-wide communism is the root of much trouble that can be seen today whether it is the ISIS terrorism, or the border troubles with Mexico. At the heart of most third world economies and their hatred for America is the old relic of thought started by Karl Marx, the great destroyer. And the best counter measure to Marx and his communism is the fine essence of self-empowerment through glorious capitalism.

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean and why justice comes from a bullwhip

A recent comment about my site here, Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom contemplated my use of bullwhips and attempted to associate it with slavery in the typical progressive fashion. Of course I’ve heard all this before and each time I hear it only inspires me more to expose progressivism for the destructive force that it is more intensely. One of the reasons that bullwhip work is degraded as sadomasochism and instruments of slavery is due to this progressive marketing campaign that wants to divide up everything into just a few categories, fairness for women, fairness for people of color, fairness for the poor, and fairness for other countries. Of course that fairness is always defined by a political class of elites hungry for power and inspired by the communist movement of the 20th century. But that is always ignored. Instead this is the kind of intelligence we are to contend with:

‘Justice comes with the crack of the whip,” is the tag line. And he wields bullwhips as a hobby. Naw, he’s no overseer. What connotations could I even imply?

 

The implication there of course is that as an “overman” I want to be a slave owner ruling over a flock of black slaves. The bullwhip is part of the slave master tradition to the thinking of these political marionettes. But they would be wrong, in fact, they are part of a massive cover-up which seeks to highlight the effects of slavery in America—inherited from Europe—and the type of slavery that Thomas Jefferson himself attacked when he could—which was the start of the United States Marines. That slavery started it all in the modern world and involved Muslims in North Africa. The information and statistics are staggering of how many white people were enslaved by Muslims of color and were articulated in the 2004 book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean. Read about the study conducted in that book below:

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A new study suggests that a million or more European Christians were enslaved by Muslims in North Africa between 1530 and 1780 – a far greater number than had ever been estimated before.

 

Robert Davis, professor of history at Ohio State University, developed a unique methodology to calculate the number of white Christians who were enslaved along Africa’s Barbary Coast, arriving at much higher slave population estimates than any previous studies had found.

 

Most other accounts of slavery along the Barbary Coast didn’t try to estimate the number of slaves, or only looked at the number of slaves in particular cities, Davis said. Most previously estimated slave counts have thus tended to be in the thousands, or at most in the tens of thousands. Davis, by contrast, has calculated that between 1 million and 1.25 million European Christians were captured and forced to work in North Africa from the 16th to 18th centuries.

 

Davis’s new estimates appear in the book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500-1800 (Palgrave Macmillan).

“Much of what has been written gives the impression that there were not many slaves and minimizes the impact that slavery had on Europe,” Davis said. “Most accounts only look at slavery in one place, or only for a short period of time. But when you take a broader, longer view, the massive scope of this slavery and its powerful impact become clear.”

Davis said it is useful to compare this Mediterranean slavery to the Atlantic slave trade that brought black Africans to the Americas. Over the course of four centuries, the Atlantic slave trade was much larger – about 10 to 12 million black Africans were brought to the Americas. But from 1500 to 1650, when trans-Atlantic slaving was still in its infancy, more white Christian slaves were probably taken to Barbary than black African slaves to the Americas, according to Davis.

“One of the things that both the public and many scholars have tended to take as given is that slavery was always racial in nature – that only blacks have been slaves. But that is not true,” Davis said. “We cannot think of slavery as something that only white people did to black people.”

During the time period Davis studied, it was religion and ethnicity, as much as race, that determined who became slaves.

“Enslavement was a very real possibility for anyone who traveled in the Mediterranean, or who lived along the shores in places like Italy, France, Spain and Portugal, and even as far north as England and Iceland,” he said.

Pirates (called corsairs) from cities along the Barbary Coast in north Africa – cities such as Tunis and Algiers – would raid ships in the Mediterranean and Atlantic, as well as seaside villages to capture men, women and children. The impact of these attacks were devastating – France, England, and Spain each lost thousands of ships, and long stretches of the Spanish and Italian coasts were almost completely abandoned by their inhabitants. At its peak, the destruction and depopulation of some areas probably exceeded what European slavers would later inflict on the African interior.

Although hundreds of thousands of Christian slaves were taken from Mediterranean countries, Davis noted, the effects of Muslim slave raids was felt much further away: it appears, for example, that through most of the 17th century the English lost at least 400 sailors a year to the slavers.

Even Americans were not immune. For example, one American slave reported that 130 other American seamen had been enslaved by the Algerians in the Mediterranean and Atlantic just between 1785 and 1793.

Davis said the vast scope of slavery in North Africa has been ignored and minimized, in large part because it is on no one’s agenda to discuss what happened.

The enslavement of Europeans doesn’t fit the general theme of European world conquest and colonialism that is central to scholarship on the early modern era, he said. Many of the countries that were victims of slavery, such as France and Spain, would later conquer and colonize the areas of North Africa where their citizens were once held as slaves. Maybe because of this history, Western scholars have thought of the Europeans primarily as “evil colonialists” and not as the victims they sometimes were, Davis said.

Davis said another reason that Mediterranean slavery has been ignored or minimized has been that there have not been good estimates of the total number of people enslaved. People of the time – both Europeans and the Barbary Coast slave owners – did not keep detailed, trustworthy records of the number of slaves. In contrast, there are extensive records that document the number of Africans brought to the Americas as slaves.

So Davis developed a new methodology to come up with reasonable estimates of the number of slaves along the Barbary Coast. Davis found the best records available indicating how many slaves were at a particular location at a single time. He then estimated how many new slaves it would take to replace slaves as they died, escaped or were ransomed.

“The only way I could come up with hard numbers is to turn the whole problem upside down – figure out how many slaves they would have to capture to maintain a certain level,” he said. “It is not the best way to make population estimates, but it is the only way with the limited records available.”

Putting together such sources of attrition as deaths, escapes, ransoming, and conversions, Davis calculated that about one-fourth of slaves had to be replaced each year to keep the slave population stable, as it apparently was between 1580 and 1680. That meant about 8,500 new slaves had to be captured each year. Overall, this suggests nearly a million slaves would have been taken captive during this period. Using the same methodology, Davis has estimated as many as 475,000 additional slaves were taken in the previous and following centuries.

The result is that between 1530 AD and 1780 AD there were almost certainly 1 million and quite possibly as many as 1.25 million white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast.

 

http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/whtslav.htm

Of course nobody ever hears about this because under the re-education so fashionable under progressive interpretation, the slavery of whites doesn’t fit the communist motivated, anti-American imperialism that is the real target of the attack by those who want to destroy America and the capitalism that drives its economic power. So the slavery argument has been captured to only discuss the practice in America. What is ignored is that once America had freed itself during the Revolution it immediately went to work to free all men which started the Civil War. After the Civil War was a period of westward expansion which highlights the era typically rendered by the cinematic western. It is from this time that the bullwhip came into play not as a plantation guardian, but of individuals facing down the vast open spaces of the American West.

 

The tag line I use at this site is a quote from my own 2004 novel The Symposium of Justice where the main character Cliffhanger fights off modern slavery by destroying a mind control device designed to interfere with the thinking of a town’s citizens and guide them in the proper political direction. The use of bullwhips in the story has nothing to do with slavery or standing over other people—it is about freeing people so that they can think. The use of the bullwhip is to use force to punish bad guys for attempting to enslave civilization. My use of the bullwhip in that story context is to free people, not to enslave them.

Those who chose to revise history are far more dangerous than the perceived slave master who uses a bullwhip to control the black slaves at their southern plantation. The minds of these critics shown at the beginning of this article are made by modern progressives who make movies like Dajango Unchained and the ignorant masses believe wholeheartedly that the filmmaker Tarentino is a scholar who knows much about the slavery argument. But he doesn’t. For those who do know, slavery wasn’t a black or white condition, it was a product of the times, and white people were just as vulnerable to enslavement as blacks were—yet this is never discussed even though the evidence is quite extensive.

 

For my own lessons in history it is my proposal that it takes an “overman” to see past the limitations imposed on mankind through thousands of years motivated exclusively by ignorance. It takes such a position to understand why a 2004 book written about white slavery in North Africa by a professor of history at Ohio State was ignored—because it didn’t fit the progressive definitions meant to attack American imperialism. It is also meant to ignore the role that Muslims played in that slavery—as Islam is a religion that progressives are advocating as a volatile assailant against the bourgeoisie of world power, the North American continent. Those progressive definitions come straight out of the books of Karl Marx and have no other grounding in reality. To see such contradictions not only takes a student of history, but someone willing to step outside of the current human limitations of personal sensitivity and political concern to see the truth. And the truth is, America freed their slaves, but the rest of the world didn’t. Of those other places in the world that promoted slavery so intensely, it was the Muslims who then as they do now, seek to rule over mankind with an iron fist. For me, the bullwhip is a symbol of the American West and the only time in world history that a nation freed itself from a tyrannical past. That symbol needs to be propped up for the world to see so that they too can rise up against their slave masters with a projection of strength that can metaphorically come only from a bullwhip.

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

The Reach Out Lakota Charity Dinner: Invasion of the “Latte Sipping Prostitutes”

When you want to know what’s wrong with politics all you have to do is pull off the masks of events like the recent Reach Out Lakota charity event to know what it is. Sponsored by the progressive oriented Chamber members it was a dinner pitched in the following manner:

Imagine having a wonderful evening out with friends including cocktails, dinner and entertainment. For dinner, you and your friends will be seated at your table of ten, decorated in the theme or motif of your choice. And, you’ll be waited on by a TV news anchor or a morning drive DJ or the Police Chief or other celebrity! Now imagine having this much fun as you raise money for Reach Out Lakota and your community! No need to imagine…it will happen on Thursday, October 9, 2014 and you can be a part of this fabulous evening at the Savannah Center in West Chester.

I know most of the “celebrities” listed below who were the waiters at the event and can report to them that this is exactly why I don’t do many public appearances any more. Just as in the past when it comes time to rise up to fight against an issue, these types of crossing of the swords events prevent clear articulation of the crises at hand—which I’ll explain in a moment.

  • Justin Jeffre – 98 Degrees

  • Adam Marshall – WCPO 9 reporter

  • Karin Johnson – WLWT 5 reporter

  • Perry Schaible – WKRC Local 12 reporter

  • Kristen Bitonte – Liberty Township Administrator

  • Judi Boyko – West Chester Township Administrator

  • Margie Conditt – State Representative (District 52)

  • Joe Hinson – President/CEO at West Chester • Liberty Chamber Alliance

  • Ben Dibble – Lakota Board of Education Member

  • Lynda O’Connor – Lakota Board of Education Member

  • Julie Shaffer – Lakota Board of Education Member

  • Tom Ferrell – Liberty Township Trustee

  • Joel Herzog – Assistant Chief of West Chester Police Department

  • Rick Prinz – Assistant Chief of West Chester Fire Department

  • TC Rogers – Butler County Commissioner

  • Roger Reynolds – Butler County Auditor

  • Nancy Nix – Butler County Treasurer

  • Mary Swain – Butler County Clerk of Courts

  • Steve Mayhugh – Director of West Chester Library/MidPointe

  • Kevin Joseph – CEO at West Chester Hospital

  • Tony Pike – Former UC Bearcats and NFL quarterback

  • Paul Heintz – MOJO Running

  • David Armbruster – ‘Id Man’ from 700 WLW Reds pregame

  • Becky Wilber – CTI Restaurants

  • Todd Wilber – CTI Restaurants

http://reachoutlakota.org/celebritydinner.html

What the Reach Out Lakota people are doing is a good thing, and many of the names on that list—many whom I personally like—people like Karin Johnston, T.C. Rogers, Roger Reynolds, and Todd Wilber truly mean well. Such events are nice occasions where you put your political differences away from people like Lynda O’Conner, Julie Schafer, and Ben Dibble—all from the Lakota school board, along with Joe Hinson of the Chamber Alliance and break bread with them for a good cause. However, and this is true of many people on that list—when it comes time to stand against those people and fight them on an issue, the resolve is not there later to perform the task because of these events.

Many hearing the news reports from the event would think that the Lakota school system was raising money for itself. It wasn’t well reported that the Lakota Reach Out program has nothing to do with the government school itself, but was started by a group of Lakota moms who wanted to help some of the down and out within the community with charity. But, when such events of a high-profile such as this are performed, Lakota gets the credit which is why the school board members were there—to mooch as second handers off the positive public relations generated.

During the last four tax increase attempts and of course all future attempts–the first coming in the 2016/2017 time frame–events like this take the edge away from those who don’t want tax increases imposed on them. People like Julie Schafer who ride the coat tails of success by attending such events and feel privileged to hang out with people like Todd Wilber sipping wine and eating fine food will be the first to rally her tax fanatical supporters into boycotts against Wilber’s businesses if he doesn’t come out in favor of a levy attempt. I know it, because I’ve seen it first hand. People like Wilber have no choice but to play nicely because at events like the Lakota Reach Out program charity dinners break down the barriers of differences by their very nature, which is why all the usual villains of progressive influence are at the head of the organization. The goal for them is to take the edge off those who would otherwise fight their desires.

I often make reference to these types of people—the progressive manipulators at the front of these social orders as “latte sipping prostitutes” and here’s why—because there is much evil conducted at these types of dinners hidden behind the mask of goodness which translates out into a general degradation of our political, economic, and moral social manifestation. The organizers often prostitute themselves to progressive causes in trade for second handed appeal by way of social recognition. What gets traded away is the ethical position to stand against progressive tax increases and corrosive social policies proposed through organizations like the Chamber Alliance. Just as a prostitute losses the ability to stand for moral causes because they sell their bodies for money, the latte sipping prostitutes of such events lose their moral ground when Lakota schools proposes their future tax increases because the public has seen people like Wilber, Reynolds, and Rogers breaking bread with Schafer, Dibble, and O’Conner. And how did they see it, because Karin Johnston, and Adam Marshall brought it straight to their eyes and it will always be remembered. Just as it is uncomfortable for a prostitute to see one of their customers at a shopping center with their family after the dirty act is done and payment was accepted, the realization comes often too late at how paralyzed the prostitute is in such moments. They can’t go up to the spouse of their customer and report the moral depravity of the marriage, because they have no moral ground to do so—as they were the advocates of such an illicit act from the start. What might have been an enjoyable experience turns out to be a vice later when a moral position is required. At that time the names on the above list will be in paralysis. They might give money to someone like me as a mercenary to fight on their behalf—but they will also seek to keep the whores quiet when they start demanding more money through means of extortion. When the latte sipping prostitutes howl out in anger for more money, more attention, and more respect, those who use those whores are unable to stand against them because they crossed the line and lost the ability to cast moral judgment against such social disgraces.

It is for that reason that I have not been to social functions much in 2014. It is easy to see what is going on and what the strategy of the other side desires to accomplish. What is more important than the immediate gratification of wine banging and laughs shared for the benefit of the misfortunate in our community is the ability to stand on a moral principle when all the other vagrants have been hushed into silence by the latte sipping prostitutes. Lakota the school system is one of those whore houses—and most of the people who support it are the whores. They attach themselves to good groups like Lakota Out Reach just as a whore couples with a successful customer for all the reasons one can think of—but most prominently to gain emotional leverage at a latter date that will prevent action against evil when it matters most

It is important to remember that what makes us are not the friendships we maintain through fake smiles and forced acceptance of values that are compromises at best. It is in our ability to stand for something—otherwise society will fall for anything. The reason that politics in our society is such a disgrace is that it is filled with these kinds of events populated by these types of people. Strong candidates newly elected soon find after a few years of this type of sword crossing that they lose their ability to stand against the whores who come into their life nearly by force and plop themselves into their laps with offerings of delight and friendship. But at the end of the day what is learned always too late is that there is a price for that friendship—and at that point the ability to stand against injustice is long gone—pissed away like the fine wine drank at events like the Lakota Out Reach dinner.

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Lakota’s Standards Based Report Cards: Teaching children to carry brown bags of beer and purchase lottery tickets

Lakota like many other Ohio schools is experimenting with a new progressive education standard which seeks to remove the value of a grade and replace it with a new kind of report card. The essence of this new grading system is called standards based reporting, and features a measure of whether or not a student has obtained a level of competency in a learned task. The abandonment of the traditional grading system is the removal of quality from education which is the overall intent. Since modern education cannot properly measure quality through the top down learning structure assessed by a grading system to determine exceptional results from mediocre results, government schools are moving toward this new standard. Here is what it is and how it’s measured as reported by Lakota schools in southern Ohio.

STANDARDS BASED REPORT CARD

Lakota is pilot-testing a new kind of report card in several schools this year. Although the test of the “standards-based report card” is only in third grade at Cherokee; fourth grade at Heritage and sixth grade at Woodland, we want to share information about these report cards with all parents who have children in elementary school. This is part of a continuing weekly series of information about the new reports cards and the pilot test.

What is a “standards-based report card?”

 

A traditional report card (A, B, C, etc.) shows a single grade a student earned for all the combined work done – tests, quizzes, homework, classroom work, etc. — in one subject area, such as math, science or social studies. The purpose of the new report card being tested is to instead communicate student progress toward an end goal – mastering a specific learning standard. A standards-based report card identifies specific skills and content that a student is expected to master while in a certain grade. Then it uses a 1, 2, 3 grading system to show the child’s progress toward that specific standard.  A “1” means a student has not yet mastered the skill or content. A “2” means a student is making good progress towards mastery. A “3” means a student has mastered the particular skill or content.

It’s important to understand what a standard is. One standard for fourth grade, in English/Language Arts, is: “Compare and contrast the point of view from which different stories are narrated, including the difference between first- and third-person narrations.” When a student demonstrates he or she understands different points of view in story narration, and can compare and contrast those points, the student would earn a “3” grade, demonstrating mastery of that particular standard.

 

That all sounds very “educational” until it is realized that the entire education system will have to be dumbed down to allow for such acceptance gates of understanding as opposed to the traditional method of not only measuring knowledge, but the quality of that knowledge. This new standard only shows that a student has an understanding, but it ignores the quality of that knowledge. In the old method, an “A” stated that a person understood information at an exceptional level, a “B” at a moderate level, and a “C” meant one had a passable understanding. Anything less meant that a student was failing to grapple the information.

What has been abandoned is the quality of understanding during learning and therefore the expectation level of education in general. Under the cover of improvement, public education has found a way to protect itself from the increasing pressure of attaching federal money to funding based on performance when their government employees are failing to actually reach children by disguising the charade through removing the quality portion of education. They have done this by eliminating value judgment in a traditional grading system.

 

For those concerned about Common Core methods used in government schools, standards based report cards are attached directly to Common Core. The path to these teaching methods is inevitable failure in every category of human endeavor. This is why the most prudent method of combating these maniacal despots is to remove your children from all government schools and waive the free baby-sitting service. Parents who can afford to should home school their children because it is the only way to remove these progressive influences from a child’s education.

 

Government schools will continue for the next decade to reach for air in their struggle to stay relevant creating feel-good programs like these standards based report cards to repackage their failures into bright shiny boxes. But what’s at the core of Common Core is the embrace of the mediocre, the un-exceptional, and the lackluster to make the “common” the only standard that matters in a government run society infatuated with fairness for their democratic masses—the otherwise lazy, contemptuous, and the valueless.

 

Standards based report cards are the latest attempt to avoid any kind of measurement that actually expects learning to be achieved by the masses of children attending government schools. It is meant to camouflage failure with garments of success to conceal the rotten core that is at the heart of public education. It is meant to make future products of government schools even worse than they are today—thoughtless malcontents who laugh at every Beavis and Butt Head joke, but have no sense of wonder at a shooting star—other than to make a wish and pray for a winning lottery ticket.

 

I normally get gas for my vehicles during off times, when there are fewer people at the gas station during the day while the rest of the world is busy. I don’t like to get gas in the morning when most everyone is up and off to a job of some kind. But recently I had to, so I stood in line at 6:30 AM and watched ten people in front of me purchase gas, coffee, donuts and lottery tickets. If you wrapped all the minds of those ten people into a single person, you might have had enough intellectual power to generate a small pocket flashlight. But nothing else. Those are the products of public education as they stand today under the old grading system. Now, thanks to Common Core, those same types of people will only become dumber. But one thing that will increase will be lottery ticket sales. Out of those ten people seen at Mark Sennett’s UDF store in the affluent Liberty Township corner of 747 and Princeton Road, where people make reasonably high level incomes and have decent educations—relatively speaking, 4 out of 10 people bought lottery tickets hoping for a jack pot to free them of their financial bonds to productivity. Under the new standards based report cards, that future number will likely be 10 out of 10—along with a pack of cigarettes and a brown bag bottle of beer in the morning. That will be the result of these education changes.

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Life Under a Blood Moon: Zombies of exsistance and shadows of illusion

What a treat it was to be on a motorcycle in the cool morning air on October 8, 2014 to see a “blood moon” setting through patches of intense flog as the sun was rising. A lunar eclipse occurred on that day which is a rare event. I happen to live in a time zone where the sun was rising as the moon was setting at the highest point of the eclipse leaving the phenomena known as a blood moon. It was a Halloween oriented sensation accentuated by the motorcycle ride. I felt lucky enough to be up at that hour to see such a rare thing, but to also be on a motorcycle exposed to the various elements made it more memorable.

A blood moon is caused by the moon being on the exact opposite end of the earth in relation to the sun. The blood color is caused by the shadow of the earth cast against the surface of the moon. It’s infrequent that the position of the moon is in that particular location at the same time that the earth is positioned around the sun to cast such a shadow through space. It’s a fairly epic event if the science is considered. When that sensation is included to the man-made machinery of a motorcycle and the natural low-hovering dense fog coming from the thick cool air—it is an overwhelming sensation. Just days prior a massive storm came through my area saturating the ground with heavy rain that was still trying to escape back into the sky through the evaporation process. But with the weak rays of the sun during these fall months, there wasn’t enough energy to pull that moisture back into the formation of clouds. That leaves all those escapees of water molecules stuck in limbo in the form of fog until the next sunrise can finish the job on the following day. Because of all these elements together, it was a picturesque morning to ride a motorcycle that even the best Hollywood cinematographer couldn’t have conceived.

Yet in the cars sitting in traffic with me an additional element was present that was even more Halloween-like—the drivers were oblivious to these miracles. They sat stiff armed to their steering wheels zoned into their present condition of selling their day to employment like zombies seeking the blood of their next victim. Not a soul seemed inclined to view the blood moon through their windows as the fog hazed lazily on the horizon. Their minds were otherwise consumed.

Riding motorcycles has a way of heightening all the senses, so noticing such a thing had a more dramatic effect. But it had been a long time since I had been in the presence of so many people who were clearly tuned-out to the miracles of life. I was as alone as though I were on a deserted island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean without another person close by for hundreds of miles.

That suited me just fine. The blood moon seemed to understand as it hovered above the fog like a ghost that had once lived but was otherwise obscure, maintaining the ability to view the world while being invisible to the daily happenings of existence. But it isn’t we who are the ghosts, and brain-dead zombies. It is those moving about under the light of the blood moon, and the fog in the cool morning air that are unaware of the world around them in the same fashion that insects have no ideal that a human being is sitting nearby aware of their every move.

I thought of all the times I fished insects out of my swimming pool during the summer. From the perspective of the drowning insects, it must seem like a miracle to them to have a strange mass pull their bodies out of the water to the safety of a pool edge. To them, my saving them was a miracle—I gave them another day or two of life and they were probably grateful for about a fraction of a second. The same consciousness was apparent in the morning traffic of the blood moon. Like the insects, the people were unaware of the world above them, only that they had to get to work, to drop off their children at school, at the day care, and what radio station they wanted to tune in to. They were concerned about their coffee, and the temperature inside their rolled up windows and stared like zombies forward toward their work day and the trading of time for money.

Soon the blood moon was gone and the sun was up and the fog ran for the sky. The world of the night, the fog and the blood moon was gone to history, just as most of our lives rise and fall in the blink of an eye casting illusions to the world that appear to be one thing but are caused by something else. To the insects of the world they look up at such blood moons and think that the surface of the strange orb floating in the sky turned red. But what they don’t know is that the cause of the effect is the earth, not the moon and the change in hue is related directly to the sun which is stationed firmly in its place within the solar system floating around the Milky Way like a clock gear heading for destiny. The cause of the light cast upon our own lives is often obscured by shadows and our appearance often appears to be something that it is not. But for a brief morning in October of 2014 under a blood moon, there was honesty to humanity that cast insight beyond the illusions found in the light of day. That even with all the miracles of science and the scope of activity that made the blood moon, mankind was still insect-like in their perception of reality and curiosity about their environment.

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Cliffhanger is Coming: A tip of the hat to Johnston McCulley

It is a neat time that we live in, years ago when I first found the old Johnston McCulley novel, The Curse of Capistrano, I considered it a real treasure. Actually, I still do. But these days with the simple click of a mouse you can not only find the book, but you can have someone read it to you, which is the case in the below video. I have always loved that novel for its expressive language and colorful expose of righteousness. I didn’t understand when I was younger why critics ridiculed McCulley so intensely—but have since learned that a progressive push was well underway in the second half of the 20th century to steer society away from tradition and into something else. That something else I simply despise and it has been quite an ordeal for me to find entertainment that I enjoy because of it. So it is a treat to revisit McCulley’s work whenever I can and relish in his pulp fiction.

 

There was obviously a time in our history when that kind of writing was all the rage and considered masterful. These days it’s out of fashion, and ridiculed so nobody makes the attempt. But in McCulley’s day, many westerns were made to emulate his style which defined early cinema. Being the type of person that I am, a person who loves traditional American western arts, there just isn’t much that impresses me in regards to entertainment from music to movies. My love of the Star Wars films and books could be simplified by attributing that they are simply westerns set in space. The old western values started by Johnston McCulley are there, which is the key reason that they are so popular—because people now are the same people as they were in 1919, 1419, or 0019—they essentially have the same hopes and dreams as they always have and from Johnston McCulley, his character of Zorro epitomized those values.

In recent years those values have been under attack, and those assailants know that people have values in line with tradition—so their solution has been to kill tradition. They have entered publishing, movie making, television broadcasting, music, commercial art—virtually every category with the sole intention of destroying American tradition—an aspect of American life that I enjoy. So I have taken this slight quite personal, as is in evidence by my many words upon these pages

I am in a unique position as opposed to Johnston McCulley to add to these traditions of westerns even in a modern context. Most writers are good with the pen but shrivel up in real life at the slightest drizzle of rain upon their skin. So they tend not to be men of action. I am the opposite; I have developed a writing ability as a natural overflow of my life of action. I have been all over and done virtually everything and associated with people at every level of society. So my perspective on things is unusually hands-on which carries over directly into my writing style and content.

The villains in the old McCulley novels were corrupt governors and big government statists aligned through crony capitalists to exploit the efforts of the innocent. However, times these days are more complicated so a similar story dealing with the same type of material would naturally involve government labor unions, diabolical politicians, and grand conspiracies involving sacrifice to supernatural beings. These will be the types of stories that will flow from the upcoming Cliffhanger stories offered under the banner, The Curse of Fort Seven Mile.

For years I have put up with the political messages with a liberal/progressive slant in movies and music, so I expect the same respect from that sector of the population when they see that the type of villains in my stories are the heroes of theirs. Surely they didn’t expect that the flow of artistic enterprise would move in only one progressive direction? But my hunch says that they did, and they will find Cliffhanger repulsive. I’ve been through the meat grinder of progressive influence in entertainment and am in the very unique position to have never compromised with them—which means that the Cliffhanger stories will have a uniquely authentic attribute that is innocently filled with righteousness—in a similar way that McCulley’s work was when it first appeared. America was a more innocent place then, so people like McCulley were a little more common. But today, there is no innocence left; most people fall in either a category of being intellectually damaged, or naively removed from reality. In my life, I have managed to have neither infliction which gives quite a lot more thrust to my prose. Within that thrust there will be familiar themes that will likely incite the political left. I can only say to them that they’ll have to live with it. Their sensitivities are not something that society should be molded around—and they won’t be as far as I’m concerned

It’s taken quite a number of years for me to solve the riddles of these upcoming chapters in The Curse of Fort Seven Mile. I had a pretty good ideal what Cliffhanger was all about when he was first introduced in 2004, but I had some more living to conduct before I felt comfortable with the philosophical assertions that were to be made. I still had young children at the time, money to make, and political navigation to understand. For those who follow me here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom you have seen much of that first-hand. But it was always my desire to take those experiences and place them into a story context involving the character of Cliffhanger.

A lot of people have been patiently waiting for my next Cliffhanger additions, and now is the time. So it will be with great fun and fanfare as soon as we figure out the distribution channels which accommodate all the modern tools that Cliffhanger will return to print quite audaciously. But it should never be forgotten that the tradition of Cliffhanger is a direct tip of the hat to Johnston McCulley and his character of Zorro. Zorro was needed in the 20th century to define values—and he did that. But for the 21st century, a new hero is needed, someone who can deal with all the strange new influences indicative to the modern times. That character is Cliffhanger, and he is coming.

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

The Curse of Fort Seven Mile: Cliffhanger returns in an epic new way

A few years ago I made mention that I was working on a new book titled The Trial of Fletcher Finnegan, and that it would be ready for public consumption in around 5 years. That is still a goal I am working toward. However, changes to the publishing industry and the general market place dictate a more entrepreneurial approach. My publisher for Tail of the Dragon went out of business last year leaving me without a means of distribution in a traditional sense and I had so many requests for an uploaded version which my publisher didn’t offer that it caused me to re-evaluate the situation. I have been and will always be a physical book type of person—however, the industry certainly has moved away from that supply model. So while I work on the various means of distribution for my past works and pave the way for the future endeavors I have found a much-needed bridge to test out the market and give fans what they really want. For me right now, and filled in my email box from most of the people who know me as either friends, family, or acquaintances they will be delighted to know that this new endeavor will be essentially book two of the Cliffhanger series titled, The Curse of Fort Seven Mile.

For several years—nearly a decade now I have had frequent requests to return to the events of Fort Seven Mile and the vigilante antics of Cliffhanger—which is what the Trial of Fletcher Finnegan is to be about. However, as I’ve outlined the story there is a very ripe period that can fill volumes of material all on its own. I have said for quite some time that this blog site are my personal notes for these future stories. I share them with the public because there are things today that people can learn from and help navigate their lives. However, putting those ideals into a story context is another matter and is what I am going to do with these new Cliffhanger stories.

The plan is to publish a chapter each week of these further Cliffhanger stories and make them available for digital upload. For readers here they will essentially get the material of this blog site integrated into a narrative that is exciting and fun. For instance the first chapter consists of a labor union president for the Fort Seven Mile police who after the tragic events from my first novel, The Symposium of Justice is seeking to increase the police budget for his members to the city council. Misty Finnegan is now the mayor after former Mayor Goodman was killed during his encounter with the vigilante Cliffhanger. Misty on the other hand had been working to place on city council a more conservative presence so that she can gain legislative control of the governing body away from the progressive liberals who had made enticing deals with the local labor unions. The union president despondent with Misty Finnagan’s resistance to throw money at the police union so that they can go out and capture Cliffhanger decides that the new mayor needs to be removed from office and plans her assassination. The rest of the story evolves from there and will feature the type of material I write about often with the pulpy antics I tend to elaborate on with great enthusiasm. I love to write action, so each of these chapters will of course end with a great climax of an action sequence that is the norm of my style of writing.

This ideal came from two sources. First it was a recent visit to the Apple Store in Kenwood, Ohio. I was quite impressed with the high level of interest people had for Apple Products. I realized what many other people within publishing had been telling me for years, that the traditional way of publishing was moving to digital uploads. But these new Apple type customers don’t necessarily want a huge 1,000,0000 word novel to upload onto their devices—which is what the Trial of Fletcher Finnegan is slated to be. It could possibly dwarf Atlas Shrugged as far as size and scope. Many of the Apple users want things quickly so they can move on to the next thing—essentially because they want to be able to use all the features of their device.   They want to do a little reading of something that inspires them, they want to listen to some music, text friends, update their online accounts and check out current events. To carry Cliffhanger into the 21st century, all these considerations have to be taken seriously. The other source actually came from a favorite writer of mine, Johnston McCulley who wrote the original Zorro story The Curse of Capistrano. The original Zorro stories were published in newspapers as separate chapters nearly 100 years ago to the day. Douglas Fairbanks would take those stories and make them into a motion picture called the Mark of Zorro. Then there were the various Republic serials shown in chapters for the Saturday matinee editions. All this led to the Disney television show which was what I grew up with. I loved that show and still do. Like many people who have not been consumed by progressivism and yearn for these traditional American stories, it quickly becomes evident that nobody else in the industry will do them, so the task falls on the present to find a way to create a new market where there is no other path. This is no different from the type of path Johnston McCulley faced in 1919 when all his individual chapters of Zorro provided to All-Story Weekly a novel.

These types of things usually take time to work through and only in hind-sight does a pattern emerge. McCulley’s first Zorro novel emerged in 1919, his second in 1922, the third in 1931, and the fourth in 1941. We tend to think of all this work happening at the same time, but essentially they took place over a twenty year span. The style of writing I enjoy most is a pulp brand popularized by McCulley and Lovecraft from this time period. However, my subject matter tends to lean in a conservative direction making modern-day publishers weary of my work. It’s not a conspiracy, if they thought they would make a lot of money, they’d jump on board in a minute. But they don’t often have patience to allow a story like Cliffhanger to develop as the story goes against the grain of the progressive types who currently run most of the entertainment industry for many of the reasons described in great detail at this site.

A third influence is actually two-fold which has driven me to attempt something new with the Cliffhanger character. A dinner I had over the summer with Gery Deer, then a few discussions I had with one of my son-in-laws indicated what an extreme hunger a public who generally has traditional values that used to be realized in American westerns, desired material that they could relate to. I would tell them the story about how publishers are going belly up left and right—specifically thinking of my experiences with Tail of the Dragon and they’d just sort of listen patiently hoping that I’d come up with something. Well, now I have and I intend to have some fun with it.

Readers of this new series will instantly recognize the type of themes I write about in this blog. As I have said, I use this forum as a kind of note pad. So it should come as no surprise. Chapter two for the new Cliffhanger series is already in process and features a chapter on homeschooling as a teacher’s union is the villain in that particular story. It is one thing to tell literal news stories like I do every day on this blog site. It is quite another to put that subject into the context of a story, which often has more communicative power than a literal translation. It is that kind of contextual ability that made Zorro so popular, but for the complicated times that we currently live in, a more updated hero needs to help flesh out the anxieties that we all live with each day. For that, Cliffhanger is a character that can take many of these traditional American concepts and let them play out in story form in the kind of doses that a modern audience can enjoy.

There will be more news on this endeavor over the next couple of weeks, but I am already writing the chapters and having fun with the characters. For my readers, it should be a lot of fun. And it will be an inventive way to reach new fans in ways that have not been done before. It’s fun to revisit the Cliffhanger character and I’m sure it will bring a smile to the many faces who for a decade have coaxed me to write book two of a story that touched their lives as a throwback to the kind of character that started all of modern entertainment—Zorro. It is only appropriate in these current times that a new character emerge to convey our modern concerns articulated with great fanfare in the upcoming Curse of Fort Seven Mile.

 

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Nickelback’s Edge of Revolution: Communism hidden behind the Occupy Movement

There is a lot of talk these days about revolution. For those statists who want to pretend that their grip on the old world will remain, they are dreadfully in for some big surprises. There are two revolutions afoot across the world and often they are mixed together in the headlines of news reports. To novice eyes, it all looks the same, but that is not the case. There are moves toward capitalism, like what is going on in modern-day Hong Kong—where the people of that city hope to retain much of the type of government that is taken for granted in the West. Then there is the disguised communist push hidden behind progressivism centering on today’s youth and the Occupy Wall Street types. That is the type of revolution that the rock group Nickelback is presenting with their new 2014 album. The Edge Of A Revolution is the lead single from the rock band’s eighth album due in stores on Republic Records. “Edge of a Revolution” is political protest song sympathetic to radicals against capitalism. Here are the lyrics:

Head high, protest line Freedom scribbled on your spine Headline,New York Times Standing on the edge of a revolution Hey, hey, just obey Your secret’s safe with the NSA In God we trust, or the CIA Standing on the edge of a revolution Yeah, we’re standing on the edge of a revolution Revolution Revolution Revolution No, we won’t give up We won’t go away ‘Cause we’ll never thought to live in this mass delusion No, we don’t wanna hear it, another word that you say ‘Cause we know they’re out depending on mass confusion No, we can’t turn back, we can’t turn away ‘Cause it’s time we all rely on the lost illusion No, we won’t lay down and accept our fate, We’re standing on the edge of a revolution Wall streets, common thief When they get caught, they all go free A brand new yacht, and a finders fee Standing on the edge of a revolution Same shit, different day Can’t keep fed if I can’t get paid We’ll all be dead if this shit don’t change Standing on the edge of a revolution Yeah, we’re standing on the edge of a revolution Revolution Revolution Revolution No, we won’t give up We won’t go away ‘Cause we’ll never thought to live in this mass delusion No, we don’t wanna hear it, another word that you say ‘Cause we know they’re out depending on mass confusion No, we can’t turn back, we can’t turn away ‘Cause it’s time we all rely on the lost illusion No, we won’t lay down and accept our fate, We’re standing on the edge of a revolution

 

Nickelback is proving to follow their rock music diatribes against capitalism appealing to a life of excess while at the same time preaching against it, like they did in their single, “Rockstar.” The rock band is Canadian in origin and have quite a history making songs about excess sound appealing while sending a strong message to their listeners portraying capitalism as a vile evil. This is the same thing they are doing with their new single “Revolution.” Their suggestion is mixed truth, such the libertarian concerns about the NSA, but then features their focus on Wall Street thieves buying yachts and making livings off finder’s fees. Their appeal is directly communicating to the young people sympathetic to Occupy Wall Street. Whereas “Rockstar” was a self satirized attack against the life of excess that groups like Nickleback live while on the road, this new song paints the rich in America as something to revolutionize against and is a call to action.

 

The message from Nickleback is to use common anxieties such as the NSA to sell communism through the same type of revolution that the Bolsheviks used in St Petersburg in Russia during 1917 to bring communism to a newly formed Soviet Union. The Wall Street protestors called upon by Nickleback is demanding the same type of thing painting the bourgeoisie of American culture as something that must be overcome. Many of the same youth chanting with upraised hands to the beat of this new song have no idea that much of the political push behind the uprisings of the Middle East is communism using the religion of Islam as a mask for cultural penetration.

They don’t call it out by name but communism is the revolution Nickleback is calling for. The flags waved in their music video shown above are all modern manifestations of communism. There are no American flags waving toward the tyranny of progressive Europe, or support of the Hong Kong capitalists against communist China—the revolution Nickleback is advocating is one supporting communism.

 

So think about that when you hear the new Nickleback song on the radio and at nightclubs provoking you to dance a bit to the rhythm. Then consider where the voices in favor of capitalism are—they aren’t in the music and movie industry. They are alone and voiceless for the most part. Capitalists do not have advocates at the level of entertainment that Nickleback represents. The music industry certainly doesn’t support such artists, and lyrics that support capitalism against socialism. Pro capitalist messages certainly don’t get played on the radio. But if a group like the Canadian rock stars Nickleback want to sing against capitalism, they’ll get all the weapons of the media on their side to broadcast straight into the ears of America’s youth—so that they will demand change from a capitalist system to a communist one.

Nickleback doesn’t sing about what life will be like after the revolution when all their listeners are sitting around waiting for someone to give them a job. Or nobody is moving money on Wall Street to create new Apple stores in shopping malls to sell those same fans iPhones so that they can listen to Nickleback sing anti-capitalist songs against America. They just preach revolution against the American system of capitalism. They don’t say what comes next. For that, today’s youth only need to look at modern-day Hong Kong and see what happens after a communist revolution. Today’s Nickleback fans will give to their grandchildren a revolution going back the other way—the same as Hong Kong is currently—hoping to take some capitalism from a communist government after the freedoms of today are long gone.

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com