Category: Space theory

Public Unions Should be Illegal: They are simply too expensive and too demanding

CLICK HERE TO SEE AN ARTICLE I WROTE CALLED PAYING FOR PROTECTION: THE ORGANIZED CRIME OF TEACHERS UNIONS FOR MATERIAL SIMILAR TO THE ONE BELOW.

Leslie Ghiz of Cincinnati City Council goes ballistic on 700 WLW while talking to Doc Thompson about the lack of interest in dealing with the Diana Frey case, the public union president accused of stealing over $750,000 from her members. The source of the complacency she is upset about is the very reason why public positions simply cost too much money to the tax payer. Click here to listen to that broadcast:

There is a disconnect between the reality of the public union leader and the rest of the world. Doc Thompson recently did another show where the average tax payer would have a lot of difficulty coming up with $1000 if they needed to without going into debt. Yet the public union expectation when their contracts demand more money is just to raise taxes to fund their demands, and they don’t care at all that they are draining the communities of their wealth, who simply don’t have the money. You can listen to that broadcast here:

The public sector unions have shown no restraint, no sense of economic understanding, no compassion for their employers, which are the tax payers. They have been excessively greedy, corrupt (Diana Frey and she’s not the only one), manipulative, and perfectly willing to walk off the job if management doesn’t see things their way. Their behavior has driven up the cost of their employment simply to the point of being very unattractive as a labor option.

When the public union representing the teachers at Lakota in 2008 went on strike, and a deal was made to appease them, to keep the teachers from walking off the job, I decided that I would not support another school levy until the public sector union was out of the equation. They simply drive up the cost of education too much. The unions make it impossible to have an intelligent conversation about cost controls, because the direction of the negotiations always migrates back to the welfare of the employee, and not the product they create.

I have noticed that the television stations lately are focused on the catastrophe of public funding and are resorting to the feel-good stories of emotion, which plays straight into the kind of manipulation the unions have used to extort massive sums of money, (tax money) for themselves. It is never asked by the established media why all these public employee jobs are going bankrupt, because the answer is simply too painful. Public employees, particularly teachers are too expensive. They cost too much money to employee, and they did that to themselves with extreme labor practices such as threatening to walk of the job with strikes.

The legislators who made it law that a teacher should have a master’s degree to keep their teaching certificate helped perpetuate the situation with legislation. They did as they always do; they created laws without considering the cost of compliance. That is the problem with electing small-minded people into positions to create laws, because they are unable to take in the whole picture. Since they too are public employees and not responsible for creating the funding, they don’t make the connection but simply take money from the public in the form of taxes, so they bare no responsibility.

Public employees do not exist for the benefit of job creation. They are not there for the convenience of the employee. But that is the expectation. The tax payer is expected to jump through hoops to figure out how to appease the high expectations of these out-of-touch employees.

If I were the superintendent of a school, which I could never be because there are actually laws to keep people like me from being hired by a district, the unions have covered their tracks in every direction, I would simply let the teachers walk the next time they attempted a strike, and I’d hire cheaper labor. It is the cost of labor that is the problem and is creating the demand for more taxes in every sector of government service. Government in no capacity should ever be paid more than the average wage of the public, because it creates an incentive for people to attempt to become a government worker that will do anything to become employed by the government because it’s simply too lucrative.

Teachers should be paid fairly, and if they want to make a lot of money, they should work for a private institution that will pay them according to their expectations. If the United States were the best in the world, I might buy into the union argument that we need to pay for the best to have the best, but the United States education system is not the best. It’s average and that’s being generous, and I think it fails in entirely too many ways. It certainly isn’t worth the amount of money we are pouring into it.

Politicians and news organizations looking to simplify their stories focus only on dollars spent equals’ value to the child, but that simply is not true. We could pour all the money the United States produces into education and the result would still be a flat line. Education is an elusive quality that comes from the strength of a family and the mentors that surround a child. Children just do not learn on an assembly line and making the factory more expensive won’t improve the results.

I’m not against public education. I think it’s a good thing for people who come from broken homes, or poor families. In those conditions, it is possible for a teacher to have a major influence on a child, because the teacher can fill the role that the parent is neglecting. But in families that are strong where there are two parents, grandpa’s and grandma’s and the family has a middle to upper income, there isn’t much a public school has to offer in the development of a child but a baby sitting service. I know that hurts the feelings of many “sensitive” guidance councilors and teachers, but those are the facts. As a tax payer, I’m happy to employee some of those people in my district for some of the underprivileged, but having hundreds and hundreds employees all making extremely lucrative incomes is simply not good business.

But it is the unions who have high-jacked the entire process, allowed no management control on a run-away train that just goes faster and faster requiring more and more money to fuel. To me, they are not worth the money. They are guilty of being too greedy and out-of-touch. To be honest, I have never seen a system so screwed up, as wrong as you find when you lift up the rocks of public sector unions. The entire situation is terribly out of control which directly affects the overall cost. I believe the teachers for the most part believe they are in the profession for the kids they teach. But the union leaders are clearly out for the greed of the position and have shown no restraint on their demands. And the teachers who have voted to keep those types of leaders in place are all guilty of putting themselves over their job to the children and the more I learn, the angrier I become.

Being foolish is not against the law. If the union leaders wish to be so foolish as to be out-of-touch with the rest of the world, that’s their prerogative. But when they ask me to fund their foolishness, that is passing the fool baton to me, and I’m not going to carry it. They make it my business when they ask me for more money to support their folly, and I know better. Therefore, I will not support public sector unions with any more additional taxes until they remove themselves from the process. They are getting in the way of proper management of public employees and should be outlawed. We have tried that little public employee union experiment started by President Kennedy and it has failed, and needs to be abolished as a practice.

The unions will call it union busting. I call it practical. I do not recognize the authority of any union to take my money out of my pocket and do what they please with it. Such a practice is simple robbery. It’s nothing else and needs to be outlawed at every level in government. Until that happens, there will never be any management of government costs which is just plain foolishness when money is the primary concern.

Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Secret of Malden Island: Why public education is hiding history

I’ve read a lot of books, and they are all special in their own way. But every now and then a book comes along that provides information so compelling that it changes your world view and makes you see things in a broader spectrum. For me, one such book was Forbidden Archeology. Click here to see an article I wrote about this book complete with video from the author. Well worth your time and investigation.

Recently a school board member upset with me on my stance with public education, where I question the merit of college education, and the seemingly infinite amounts of money educators ask for public education without any proof of results, I thought of that book and realized that this professional education specialist, who holds a master’s degree and considers themselves, “enlightened” wouldn’t begin to understand my point of view because they simply haven’t explored the same topics about cultural studies that I have. For a lot of people, the book Forbidden Archeology is a life shattering event, because not only does it challenge the beliefs of those in the education industry but the religious assumptions that people hold dear. So they won’t read Forbidden Archeology because they aren’t willing to accept new scientific data that may challenge their current belief system, which is unfortunate, because it is that trait which holds back our society exclusively.

Yet the fossil record established in Forbidden Archeology is stellar. The book tells the story of various universities who have openly suppressed archeological evidence because the discoveries simply don’t fit into the facts their schools have published. Colleges who fund excavations usually do so with a mind for results just like businessmen who look for profits. The selection for funding a dig usually has an intended result, such as digging up the city of Troy to prove the ancient stories, and biblical archeology to satisfy the biblical references, because such excavations have a similar effect on a university as does a college sports program. Scientific discoveries are selling points for the university just like a sports program, they attract new enrollment which is revenue. I have watched the struggle for archeological funding for many years since I maintained a subscription to Biblical Archeology Review at 10 years old till the advent of the internet. In that magazine scientists offer cruises and group trips to find ways to fund their excavations outside of the college funding structure, but there simply isn’t enough money to do proper investigations all over the world. The political climate in the Middle East is a serious determent to scientific discovery. So when a university makes a significant find, they hang onto it with everything they have, even if it means they ignore new evidence that invalidates their previous finds. That’s what Forbidden Archeology is all about. The politics of science are holding back proper understanding of human existence. It is exactly the same problem as we see in the school funding structure itself. The high pay rates they’ve given themselves dictate high enrollment, which drives up taxes, and also incentivizes the educational institutions to mislead any factors that may not allow the institutions to continue to grow or sustain their financial expectations. I suppose my anger, and “anti education” position has its roots in the simple fact that I know that education institutions routinely have lied to protect their interests.

 

They cheat in sports to maintain their excellence, and they will cheat in academic accomplishments for the same reason. Forbidden Archeology as a massive book of fossil records that simply are ignored by the establishment proved to me that institutional scholarship cannot be trusted as a soul provider of scientific understanding, or the funding representation needed to supply it.

There are many mysteries all over the world that do not have logical explanations behind the cultures that built them. I am convinced that there is a lot more history to the human race than what we currently accept and this evidence is coming in fast and furious.

Malden Island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is a remote, desolate place which costs about $10,000 for a one way ticket just to get there, so archeology there is very difficult to explore because the sheer cost of the enterprise is cost prohibitive, so only casual observations have been made. There are 40 stone temples on Malden Island that are described as similar in design to the buildings of Nan Madol on Pohnpei, some 3,400 miles (5,475 km) away. In fact, there is a basalt road that runs along the bottom of the Pacific Ocean which connects these islands under hundreds of feet of water. This suggests a culture that is more than 50,000 years old and that this entire land mass was once above water supporting a civilization that had no trouble moving around tremendous stones to build very large, complicated societies which we know absolutely nothing about, other than the fact that someone built them and they are older than biblical history. Yet, nobody discusses them because they don’t fit into our understanding of the human race and their origins. Scientists have their diffusion theories of how migrants arrived in North America using the land bridge of the Bering Straight and they are sticking with it.

Source articles
http://mitchtestone.blogspot.com/2008/12/malden-island.html

But there are more discoveries of strange, “very old” archeology spread all over the world that don’t fit nicely into conventional explanation. Here’s just a few from source link:

http://www.world-mysteries.com/mpl_10.htm

• A pyramid explored by Dr Ray Brown on the sea floor off the Bahamas in 1970. Brown was accompanied by 4 divers who also found roads, domes, rectangular buildings, unidentified metallic instruments, and a statue holding a “mysterious” crystal containing miniature pyramids. The metal devices and crystals were taken to Florida for analysis at a university there. What was discovered was that the crystal amplified energy that passed through it.

• Ruins of roads and buildings found off Binini Island in the 1960’s by the photographed and published expeditions of Dr Mansan Valentine. Similar ruins were also photographed off Cay Sal in the Bahamas. Similar underwater ruins were found off Morocco and photographed 50 to 60 feet underwater.

• A huge 11 room pyramid found 10,000 feet under water in the mid Atlantic Ocean with a huge crystal top, as reported by Tony Benlk.

• A 1977 report of a huge pyramid found off Cay Sal in the Bahamas, photographed by Ari Marshall’s expedition, about 150 feet underwater. The pyramid was about 650 feet high. Mysteriously the surrounding water was lit by sparkling white water flowing out of the openings in the pyramid and surrounded by green water, instead of the black water everywhere else at that depth.

• A sunken city about 400 miles off Portugal found by Soviet expeditions led by Boris Asturua, with buildings made of extremely strong concrete and plastics. He said “the remains of streets suggests the use of monorails for transportation”. He also brought up a statue.

• A marble acropolis underwater across five acres of fluted columns raised on pillars.

• Heinrich Schilemann, the man who found and excavated the famous ruins of Troy (which historians thought was only a legend), reportedly left a written account of his discovery of a bronze vase with a metal unknown to scientists who examined it, in the famous Priam Treasure. Inside it are glyphs in Phoenician stating that it was from King Chronos of Atlantis. Identical pottery was found in Tiajuanaco, Bolivia.

The discoveries of the strange and unexplained could fill libraries of text books, and the reason for the suppression of this information is the monopoly of academia on scientific understanding and religious politics.

Of all the articles I’ve written here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom one of the most popular is Giants in Ohio. Click here to read that article. Since I produced that article it has seen over 10,000 hits alone! That surprises me greatly, but shows that people are very hungry and desiring to understand these strange entities. Giant bones of a hominid type of species standing between 8 to 10 feet tall are found everywhere on Earth, but Ohio has a fair number of burial sites. There are bones, so we know something lived that was excessively large, yet nobody has an explanation, because it doesn’t fit into our understanding of Native American migration and evolution. Modern scholarship is focused on the Mound Builders and why they built the mounds, without having any assumption of a culture older than those mound cultures. It’s kind of like looking for the keys to your car that you lost under a parking lot light at night because you can see. But where you really lost the keys were someplace else entirely out in the darkness. Our study of human history is along the same type of theory. Our education institutions find and publish the artifacts that fit best into the preconceived notions of the scientific discoveries of which they’ve built their reputations. All the other ones are put into a back room someplace or sold to a private collector as a conversation item. You can find more evidence of this history in Indian Hill, Cincinnati or Beverly Hills from the fireplace mantles of private collections than in any museum, because the museums sell these treasures away to their foundation supporters rather than let them sit in a drawer collecting dust and making the museum no money.

When I first came out against the increased taxes of our local tax levy, because my thoughts are that as a society we are spending too much on education to get only very basic results, we are not getting a bang for our buck. The education culture believes we don’t spend enough, because they simply live in a different world than everyone else, and I don’t see much value in that world because even where they should excel, such as in the realm of science, they have proven they cannot be trusted. A president of a local union sent me a very nasty email because I had went on WLW and discussed the salaries of the personal that was demanding more money, and they called me a “tin hat” because I entertain these scientific notions that there are mysteries out there that we don’t understand, and I recognized instantly the same type of character assassination that I read about in Forbidden Archeology, which angered me greatly. In fact, and you can read my response to that person here: CLICK. I started Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom shortly thereafter because I realized that these “education types,” are more concerned about protecting their income than finding the truth about anything finance or otherwise, and they use intimidation and character assassination mixed with peer pressure to control criticism of their behavior.

I fight people like that union person openly because unless they’ve done the work I have to get at the truth of the matter, unless they’ve read even a fraction of the books I have, done one tenth of the exploration that I have, and they haven’t, they have no authority from which to speak. They are simply mouth pieces of corruption attempting to mislead civilization. My love of life is not for any transitory age of the present and the rituals of that culture, such as we find in the education monopoly of this current age. The education culture is pretentious and vastly corrupt and approach the world with their eyes straight on the subject to the point that it is all they can see and even that is out of focus, when what is required is to pull back and see the world for all it’s vastness, and the depths of the history which created it.

This education class can’t even understand the nature of the planet earth while they stay hell-bent on explaining global warming from a former hippie like Al Gore. When a guy has smoked as much marijuana as Al has how much credibility could he possibly have? But that same education class gets behind the uneducated rants of Al Gore because he brings money to their universities and just like a K-Street prostitute, the education class will say anything, support any theory they are told to believe so long as the money is good. And religion will fight over a singe spot in Jerusalem for which religion can claim possession of that spot on the ground from which “sacred things” happened. But to one who studies with open eyes, the entire world is a sacred spot of which only a fraction of the mysteries of the past have revealed themselves in a blossoming understanding of the true history of the human race that is opening before our eyes.

When that understanding blooms the education class will find themselves on the outside looking in because they were slow to adapt to that new understanding. They will be on the outside because they have lost all credibility to the public once it is revealed that they are more interested in their own enrichment than the sacred pursuit of science.

If you want to know the truth the start of that path should be in the book, Forbidden Archeology. From there the evidence will lead the way.

Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

American Air Supremacy: But do we have the courage to keep it?

Zero’s Kates and Vals appeared over the crowd as explosions went off everywhere in the blistering July heat. The heat index was 115 degrees on the runway and the sun was relentless as the roar of World War II piston engine craft filled the sky with an unmistakable pulse. The re-enactment of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was underway by a group of stunt pilots flying restored fighters in a pyrotechnic reminder of just how badly governments of the world have desired to extinguish the power of personal liberty known as the United States. The show known as Tora! Tora! Tora was just one of the many shows displayed at the 2011 Vectren Dayton Air Show, but for me it was the best because of my love of piston engine aircraft. You can see my personal video of that show and other highlights here:

I’ll have to give Michael Emoff (Chairman U.S. Air and Trade Show Board of Trustees) credit; the seats from The Chairman’s Club were as good as it gets for a show of this magnitude. The catered food all morning and into the afternoon was wonderfully refreshing, as was the constant supply of 6 different beer selections. But the truckloads of bottled water were essential, and made the show a comfortable success. I cannot argue that the entire show took place in my lap from that vantage point, and it was a delightful endeavor. On the other side of the fence, the massive hoard of a crowd packed in close to see the action, and it looked hot over there, with no room to breathe for many people.

The Chairman’s Club is a section set up for exclusive guests and many in the aviation business comfortably packed the tables in front of the gigantic mess hall tent, which did lower the temperature considerably with its high vaulted ceilings that allowed the hot air someplace to go, and to cool. It was a good design. The ice cream prior to the Thunderbirds show was a nice touch even if it did melt in a matter of minutes. As is the custom, many of the pilots and parachutists come to The Chairman’s Club to refresh after their portion of the show and meet some of the guests who help put their planes in the air. It is a chance for both sides of the aviation business to meet each other up close and personal. I told one of the guys who had drug his parachute into the area to repack after he had landed just moments after falling from 16,000 feet, “Bet you wish you were still up there.”

He looked at me and laughed, “It’s about 50 degrees up there. It’s a scorcher down here.” Sweat dripped off his forehead as he folded his pack over tightly.

The F/A-18 pilots came and took turns taking pictures with many of the GE employees present. For many of them it was a moment of pride to see the Super Hornet’s take off from the tarmac and go almost instantly vertical. The clouds dotting the sky prevented long runs at the airstrip, so the F/A-18’s kept their speeds under the speed of sound, but the vibration and roar of those F414-GE-400 engines brought a line of high level employees to the pilots when they showed up for some relief from the heat and to provide the customary pictures and autographs.

It was obvious that even from the pilots faces that The Chairman’s Club was an oasis upon that landscape of blistering heat that was closest to the flight line and the first stop to recharge their bodies.

But even with all the high performance displays of the F/A-18’s, the Thunderbirds in the F-16’s, The B-1B Lancer with its 30,780 pounds of afterburner thrust, the fantastic modified stunt plane by Oracle called the Oracle Challenger, specially built for Sean D. Tucker and his fantastic aerobatics with jaw-dropping stunts, it was the World War ll era fighters that I found the most attachment to.

There was a Corsair in the air which set my mind back to the heroics of Tex Hill, after Hill completed his tour of duty with General Clair Chennault and the Flying Tigers over China. There was a B-25 Mitchell that I’ve always loved, the sound of the 2 Curtiss-Wright Twin Cyclone engines pushing out 1,700 hp each punching the air with American brutality. It was the B-25 that made up the 16 bombers who took off from an aircraft carrier to bomb Tokyo five months after Peril Harbor on a mission known as The Doolittle Raiders. I had the opportunity to get up close and personal with this plane during the show which I included in my video because of the distinctive sound of its engine. The plane is the prototype of what would become the fantasy of The Millennium Falcon in Star Wars, and it’s a favorite of mine. It was the display of Tora! Tora! Tora! That captured my attention the most.

During that re-enactment of the bombing of Peril Harbor the planes flew in multiple trajectories, crossing each other in complicated ways through smoke and explosions. Many of the planes made bombing runs 20 to 30 feet over the runway multiple times, which was impressive. A reminder of what governments are capable of cannot be ignored when anybody attending this air show can witness firsthand the power at play through the machines of aviation in defense of freedom.

America without any question invented aviation, and that birthplace was Dayton, Ohio, which gives the Dayton Air Show added meaning. It was the Wright Brothers who using good-ol’ America horse-sense invented flight with a kite like plane built on the principles of a bicycle. It was the bravery of people like Chuck Yeager, Tex Hill, The Doolittle Raiders and Howard Hughes who pushed what flight could accomplish in war to advance aviation to the levels seen in this show. Case in point, the B-2 Bomber made an appearance; it took off from Arizona that morning, arrived at preciously the correct time just a few hours later in Dayton. It made two passes of the air field blasting its engines on the second pass, then heading to Peoria, Illinois for another air-show just 45 minutes away for that craft, on schedule of course. The B-2 would then land back at its home base, it’s pilots home in time for dinner after traveling all over the United States in the course of the day. The B-2 is the culmination of years of bravery and technical innovation. It is evident when attending air-shows like this, that if an enemy of the United States wanted to attack America, like the Japanese did at Peril Harbor, and the Soviet Union attempted to do in the space race economically, and failed, that the heart of America, the spirit that advanced aviation to the modern levels of the B-2 bomber would have to be removed. No country in the world can compete with the United States because of America’s development of aviation.

If one cares to understand the mind of the enemy, and America will always have enemies, they will read what the enemy does. The most recent is the radical Islamic elements in the middle-east, those old empire builders of the Persian Empire who still despise America for its role in dividing up the Middle East after the Treaty of Versailles, or the Chinese communists who fought America in Korea through support of North Korea, and Vietnam with Russian support. There is no question that in many palaces and luxury meeting rooms all across this world the topic comes up, “How do we get rid of America.” It is clear in the Sun Tzu classic, which I personally studied for over 10 years, The Art of War, that the best way to destroy your enemy is by prevailing over those who have already lost. That is the essence of that classic piece of literature which is currently studied aggressively by Chinese and Japanese military, government and business leaders. And the way to beat America is to convince Americans to strap themselves down in debt, so they do not have the money to spend on their wonderful aviation and technological development.

The Space Shuttle Program just ended. Under the Obama administration NASA along with the Joint Strike Fighter have both been targeted for elimination because America has spent itself into catastrophe, and is no longer making investments into aviation like it has over the last century, culminating into the B-2 Bomber.

The F135 Joint Strike Fighter has also hit the chopping block, at least it’s back-up GE/Roll Royce engine. It is easy to see who America’s enemies are because they are against the construction of this next generation aircraft.

It is interesting to hear what people on the political left think are appropriate in debating budget negotiations. Listen to this simple-minded person talk about the budget battle taking place, and what is appropriate in that conflict. Obama and his people are big union supporters, and Lockheed Martin, GE and most in aviation that are behind the Joint Strike Fighter are giant unions, yet there are many who subscribe to the theories of cutting defense spending and NASA to pay for the destructive entitlement programs created by politicians to purchase votes. Those same people believe that the right thinks just as devious as the left. They are all off the mark in my opinion, but aviation to me expands America in every possible way, and should not be negotiated with by either side as some type of bargaining chip. Everyone wins in aviation no matter what the political affiliation left, right or middle. The only losers are other competing countries.

What is the RT? That’s an English-speaking progressive channel that stands for Russia Today. That’s why the temperature in Moscow is listed in the bottom corner. They are a propaganda arm of modern Russia, and if you think they don’t still have a grudge against America, they were one of the few countries to not accept the full title of the recent Hollywood film, Captain America.

As I watched the Dayton Air Show it was apparent to me that many of the enemies of America are now attempting to destabilize the United States not with stealth weapons, or even spies. They are trying a much more sinister weapon called progressivism, which is designed to lower American defenses, drain our wealth and keep us from spending money on the kind of technology on display at the air show, because the enemies of the United States cannot reach that level of technology. All they can really do is corrupt our youth into becoming lost adults who don’t remember Pearl Harbor or people like Tex Hill.

Progressives are attempting to inspire the youth culture to live aimless lives with an un-heroic pretense. Those enemies will do everything they can to topple the United States from the inside out, because that is the only way they can rule the planet, and their respective portions of the world. For now, they’ll use the United Nations for their own agenda, but once America is gone, and the money it puts into supporting world peace with it, the tyrants will have a new day and chance at spreading their tyranny across the face of the plant.

How can I say such a thing? Entertainment is always a great measuring stick to the values of a culture who produces it.


In some future air show, people will attend and wonder how a civilization who built such fantastic ancient machines like the Joint Strike Fighter, and the B-2 Bomber simply disappeared and stopped the technological advances that America seemed poised to create.

As I watched the F/A-18F pilots stand with a group of people in The Chairman’s Club under the elite protection of all the elements present, the people who build the planes and the pilots who fly them, I wondered how many of those people really understood the fight that was really happening outside those protected confines, out beyond the crowd of burnt up citizens scanning into the heavens at the fantastic aerial display going on in the sky, or the small children buying toy air planes from a vender proudly holding the toys as if they were treasures more valuable than gold, because the toys themselves represent power, and freedom. Who among anybody really understood the games being played and the stake of the games, which with all the proud patriotic celebration of the past that the future is in such jeopardy, did anybody really know?

I don’t believe many of those people out of the thousands around me really put much thought into it. As long as the beer was cold, the catered chicken and beef cooked to perfection, and the side dishes were immaculate, the politics of the day were other people’s problem. The air show was to be enjoyed and once over, we would all return to our VIP parking spots right outside the fence and be on Highway 75 before most of the other people would be headed to the vast parking lots packed with cars over a half a mile away. And of all those masses, the focus was on the past, at what we had done in that past both distant and recent. But the future is in jeopardy if that same American spirit that put those planes in the air does not survive the peril of progressivism, given to the United States from foreign enemies by spies and double-agents using the long proven instructions spelled out in Sun Tzu’s, The Art of War.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Liberty Twp Tea Party Turns Two Years Old: The Rise of a New Guard

The evening July 11,2011 sun beat hard upon the converted barn at the Niederman Farm where the Liberty Twp Tea Party met to celebrate their 2nd year.  There have been a lot of battles over the last couple of years, and as we gathered for the pot luck dinner it was evident that there would be a lot more. 

As this meeting was taking place Obama and the local Speaker of the House John Boehner were battling over the budget and the debt ceiling.  Obama is approaching the negotiations as though various sides, Tea Party Republicans, moderate Republicans, Rhino Republicans, Blue Dog Democrats, Progressive Democrats, and far left radical Democrats all are committed to 100% of their particular positions, and must be prepared to give a little so everyone can agree.  As I scooped up some potato salad that my wife had made I wondered how a person like Obama could ever become president and even say such a thing.  There’s only one right answer, and the president is missing it.  There isn’t money for the programs his party have given away to buy votes.  That’s the bottom line folks.  All those various politicians have for years purchased votes using our tax money, and now those fools are stuck trying to explain why they’ve bankrupted the system. 

The people around me at this gathering are all there for the same reason, we recognize that the government has let us down and taken the nation on a path it doesn’t want to go.  Not everyone has come to that realization yet, because they still hope that somewhere, there is a magical golden egg that will be laid by some golden goose.  Increasingly, these elected representatives are being seen not as leaders, but as con artists and thieves who have stolen from each of us and sold us back bath water claiming it to be an elixir of life. 

While the various ceremonies of this event were going on the Lakota School System was voting for yet another school levy attempt literally right down the road, not more than 3 miles from our location.  In this meeting, everything that is wrong with the government can be seen in the microcosm of public education funding.  Public sector unions, politicians using their education support for votes, and school administrators hoping to use school boards as a political launch pad to become noticed by leaders of one of the two parties have bought into Keynesian economics, like the rest of the government, and they were wrong. 

When John Keynes introduced his Keynesian economics model from the ever-increasing socialist tendencies of the rest of the world, politicians saw an opportunity to exploit that model for their own accents to public supported power.  Keynes was wrong, and every system using it is failing, including schools.  The correct answer is not more of the same theory, but something else completely.  In schools, the task is to convert over to that system without destroying the opportunities of the kids and parents who support the school.  But in education, just like all things in government, the prices of labor, of the services created by labor, and the revenue which supports the entire foundation are artificially inflated, because competition is not allowed to kill off the waste, because government protects those enterprises.  This drives up the costs everywhere for everybody.  And presidents like Obama and school boards like what we have at Lakota, only know to close that inflated value with increased taxes.  They can’t understand any other option because their brains are not wired to accept anything else. 

At Lakota they are going for a tax rate that is less than what they’ve asked for in the past. This is consistent with President Obama’s comments to Speaker Boehner, “You can’t get everything you’ve asked for.”  In the minds of these people bending a little on their political position is what the process is all about. 

But it’s not.  There is only one right answer, not a mixed drink of many tastes.  With something like a budget deficit whether you’re talking about a local school district, or a Federal government, there is a way you got there, and to get out, you must do the opposite of what put you in that position.  That’s the only way.  If you spent a lot of money-making political promises that you didn’t have the authority to commit the tax payers to, or you are a school district that allowed a public sector teachers union to drive up your labor costs recklessly, then you have to admit that you were wrong, that you spent money that wasn’t yours just as a person addicted to gambling must admit that they have a problem before they can get help. You can’t throw more money at the addict, because they’ll never get better.  You have to take away their money so they can’t go to the casino anymore to throw away our money on some jackpot they hope will fix all their problems. 

As I sat among friends and family I thought about the worst issue in the news of them all, and that’s the case of the murdered little girl in Florida, the Casey Anthony trial where the mother appears to have accidentally killed her little girl with an overdose of chloroform and drove around Florida with the body in the trunk for everyone to smell the decomposing body.  The girl was a reckless young woman, and the prosecution went for the death penalty for the severity of the crime.  Last week, Casey was found not guilty; the jurors didn’t have the inner compass of morality to be able to pass judgment on a peer.  Society has lost their ability to judge. 

Most have anyway, except for the people having diner in a country barn with me on that hot July evening. Of American society, these people who the radicals advocating Keynesian economics, progressive global government without borders, and idealists who have never found their way out of the soviet fueled radicalism of the 60’s, those people call my friends here “teabaggers.”  “Teabaggers, meant to be a term of peer pressure, of insult, an attempt by those who are advocating evil openly, to keep society functioning with their eyes closed and hope that somehow their failed theories will somehow come true in the final hour, and if they don’t, they’ll be remembered for their compassion, and not as the thieves they truly are. 

I feel privileged that after two years, the Liberty Twp Tea Party is still here, and it’s growing.  And it refreshes the soul to partake in these events, as the aroma of barn yard animals and community prepared food mixes in a unique waltz of perpetuity.  Because this is how it was in the beginning, and this is the way of the American, to always be ready for a fight, to roll up the sleeves and eat well before a hard day’s work, or the battle that looms on the horizon.  Because only by the path of those in this barn, is the path to liberty and freedom.  And the only right answer in the entire nation is present on the tongues of those in attendance, because they are the last of their kind and Americais waiting for them to fix the nation that has been hijacked by tyrants of good intention.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Home Away From Home: Beach bums, hippies, and strippers with their socialist dream

The difference between those who love capitalism and those who love socialism are displayed vividly while I stood on the balcony of our condo in Florida at Cape Canaveral. In our unit and units all along the coast are people who own the units to rent out to NASA personnel, or own them outright as second homes, a place to visit away from their primary residence. In some cases, the owners of the condos have made these paradise palaces their year round homes.

This year we had to be in Gainesville for a wedding anyway, and I was up against a writing deadline for my Tail of the Dragon novel, where my editor wanted a chapter breakdown with intended themes spelled out for production meetings, to make it easy for all the people who haven’t read the book to understand the direction of the editorial content. So the decision was to combine a sort of vacation while I accomplished that editorial task down at the condo.

The following video is something I shot while at that fine place, as a rolling storm moved in.

I spent a lot of time on this trip working on my tasks while looking out over the Atlantic to the south where frequent storms were brewing over the horizon of the Earth in the proximity to the Bahamas. It is easy to put things in perspective from such vantage points. I know many of the people who are in these units all up the coast experience similar emotions, that’s why they come, and that’s why they work hard to have a second home, because they want to have these perspectives, to relax from the rigors of their professional lives.

These condo units are only a building deep in this particular location. Down the coast at Cocoa Beach where hotel chains take over, there are more tourist oriented shopping along the primary roads. But up at the Cape, the area between the condos and the main road is a complex grid of single story homes and much smaller, less luxurious, residences. Typically the people who live in these homes are the people who work in the service of the various restaurants, hotels, and shopping centers. Some of those people are just beach bums, and they are that way by choice. They chose to spend their day surfing, riding skate boards around and smoking cigarettes.

All over this resort area are stores that sell memorabilia that have the “peace” sign on them. T-shirts, medallions, stickers for cars, magnets, you name the merchandise, there are plenty such items with the peace sign on them. If you look closely, and a lot of the people who stay in our condo unit don’t, as is the general rule all up and down the coast, these beach bums, skate boarders, strippers who are working at the gentleman’s clubs and sun themselves professionally all day long, that share the beach with the rest of us, are open socialists.

Many of those people don’t know they are socialists. Most of them don’t even know what country they are in. Most of them don’t even know much about the NASA space program except for the occasional rocket that takes off roaring into the heavens. What they know is that they have bought into a “hang loose” life style that is popular at all beaches. They like to “party” which involves frequent intoxication, and they like carefree sex. They despise commitments, and steady jobs.
From my balcony I watched these people pass beneath me to gain access to the beach, and I savored the fact that our condo kept me above all that activity. I couldn’t help but think that if the government offered these people free government jobs, free college, free housing, free food, they’d all take advantage of the programs and they’d freely vote for the politicians that gave them those things. They don’t want to work for nice things, but they are happy to receive nice things if someone in the government wants to give them something. I also noticed the jealous looks up at our balcony as my wife and I would look down upon them, or as my daughters would walk passed them in their journeys to the beach. They would look at my daughters like hungry dogs knowing that the women were well out of their league, and desiring to be equal in some way.

Studying these people for a couple of days it was very obvious that these beach bums were socialists. They would be very attracted to a government that came and told them they could also have a nice condo with a beach front view, that somehow they could be elevated to the level my family was experiencing because somehow they deserved to have the same thing we had by some socialist default.

It doesn’t matter to a socialist what it takes to have a home like those condos. They simply have nothing to lose. When they purposely make decisions in their lives to have nothing, to have no commitments, to have a “hang loose” attitude toward life they cannot expect to have the same things in life as a person that works 60 to 100 hours a week. Yet they do expect to be equal. And by experience, most people have some streak of laziness in them, which is why at this beach front property, the ratio is clear. There are more of the lazy types than the people in the condos. Because there are fewer people who want to work hard so they can have their own condo.

Now if they chose to live their life in this fashion it’s not for me to judge them. But the problem occurs when it comes time to vote, because these people will vote for candidates that will give them something for nothing just to purchase their votes. And that something given is something generally taken from someone like me, and to me that is robbery.

Personal decisions will lead a life to the sum of its exploits. But political tampering artificially props up people who would otherwise fail miserably at life, and would be forced to alter their lifestyle into something more constructive. I couldn’t help but notice in those jealous eyes the desire for welfare, and health care while they rot their days away as beach bums wearing the “peace sign” and singing hippie songs on the beach at night while smoking marijuana and thinking the whole of their existence is authentic. It’s not. Those lives can only continue because the government takes from those in the condos and gives it to those in the shacks even though the people in the condo’s worked hard to earn it, and the people in the shacks chose to live the life of the poor and un-ambitious.

Back home these differences aren’t so obvious. The people in the suburbs generally work harder so they can have a small palace outside of city limits. The un-ambitious tend to take up residence where the government gives them things and usually that is far enough away from the ambitious to not cause too much analysis. This is why there is a dispute with Hamilton County at expanding public housing, because nobody wants to live near public housing, just like people don’t want to live near a dump. And this is why we should have school choice because a parent who doesn’t want their kids to be surrounded by kids with parents who lack ambition should not imprison children trying to work their way out to a better life, so they can have a house in the suburbs some day, or maybe even their own beach front condo. But government won’t do that for them, and it won’t do it for the beach bums either. Government will only succeed in robbing those who live in the suburbs and the condos by giving that wealth to the socialists so that politicians can maintain their addictions to power in public office.

Remember wherever there is the sign of peace; it’s indicative of a political socialist. Like all sinister things in life, the truly dangerous are camouflaged with good intentions, like the idea of world peace that the hippies, beach bums and strippers find so appealing.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Wild West Heroes: The Foundations of America!

The following clip was taken from the Annie Oakley Wild West event that I frequent each year with some of my friends. When David P. Little a political consultant hired to attack me saw this video he attempted to take the confederate flags in this video as a way to portray me as a racist. What progressives who think like Little  simply don’t understand is that these Wild West events are important to American culture. Each year that I’ve participated in the Annie Oakley event it has been a way that I reset myself.

I consider the people in that video to be some of my best friends, even if we only see each other once a year. They are good people who know what America is supposed to look like. In American culture, the cowboy is very important. I like to use cowboy metaphors to explain complicated topics because using the premier symbol of individualism in the world, the cowboy; it helps put everything else in perspective.

Here are some examples of what I consider to be some of the best that America produces. Guns are very important to Americana. The six-shooter is as important to the United States as the Samurai Sword is to Japan.

Progressives and their globalist views, have sought to destroy American heritage which I find repulsive. I appreciate the beauty of a gunman that can handle a six-shooter effectively.

It is sad that progressives have successfully turned even the sight of a gun into a symbol of death.

Knife throwing is another heritage that is essential to American culture. I know several knife throwers personally and every one of them are wonderful people who appreciate life more, because they routinely dance with death.

So when you see a person that is keeping the Old West alive with a cowboy hat, guns, or a knife, thank them. They aren’t just paying homage to a time when people didn’t wear deodorant, had to kill their food daily just to eat, and water was hard to come by. They are keeping the spirit of liberty alive, a time that individuals sought freedom so badly they’d risk life on the frontier to have it. They despised the world of Europe so intensely, that all the discomforts known to man was more preferable.

You might recognize this guy from the first video. I’ve known Chris for a while, and he’s the real deal. He travels the world as an ambassador of the Western Arts.

That is what I think of when I think of the Wild West. And that’s why I enjoy events like the Annie Oakley Festival. In such places, America is alive and well, and simplicity reveals the truth behind the progressive deceptions that has sung our country to sleep like a patient on the operating table under anesthesia.

Here’s another guy from the video above. This is another one of my close personal friends. You may have seen the newscast Gery and I did for a Dayton TV station.

It is in fact quite healthy to consider that if the government proves too big to replace, as it is needed, and those who crave power so diligently refuse to take their hands off that power, as is proper in our republic, then it will be the very law enforcement and military that we have which will be turned against us. And in such times should they unfortunately come to pass, that the skills of the cowboy will come into play. So keeping those skills alive is essential to preserving the nation we call home.

Here’s an exhibition I did for the World Stunt Organization at a film festival.

If it all falls apart and the law is turned against us, then, well that’s the plot of The Symposium of Justice, a book I wrote several years ago. Back then, it seemed far-fetched. These days, not so much, but that is a story for another time.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

STAR WARS NEW RIDE: Star Tours and the discovery of a building on planet Mars!

Google Mars is a fascinating program. David Martines ran across a structure on the surface of Mars that makes no sense, yet it’s there. Did NASA build it? Did China build it? What about the Soviet Union? If not them, then perhaps another civilization all together, one that does not call Earth its home.

There are a number of unexplained phenomena that defy conventional explanation. Because some college professor with government grant money hasn’t yet discovered them, does not mean they don’t exist. In my opinion, I have seen human culture actually revert backward in this last century because of the stigmas of progressivism, so human invention is most often found best in science fiction and adventure films and books. Those are the realms the mind can comfortably explore possibilities beyond current human understanding.

I personally believe there are a number of archeological features on Mars that must be studied and when we go there, we’ll find out. I also believe that because of religious prejudice there are many eyes that have seen the same images that Mr. Martines has seen, but their belief system will not allow them to see truly what is there. It happens here on earth. We can’t even figure out if human’s have an impact on our own planet, or if the whole green movement is actually a socialist conspiracy, and this is happening on our home planet, let alone some plant next to us in the solar system, or even in another solar system, galaxy, or god forbid, a whole other universe.

It’s easy to get wrapped up in all the drama of all the important issues imposed upon us in these perilous times we are living in. But………………………………….all work and no play does not make an efficient human being. It is very, very good to take a minute and play from time to time.

For me, I have made my love of pirates well-known and I have wrote extensively about them here. But I’ve also wrote about Star Wars a lot also for virtually the same reasons. In such fiction there is a passionate love for freedom and an extreme dislike for tyranny. Tyranny to quote my teacher Joseph Campbell is all the “thou shalt not’s” in our life. It is in the realm of myth to become a dragon slayer to the “thou shalt not’s” and kill them boldly so that ideas may live and thrive without fear. Tyranny is anything that imposes itself on the free mind with intent to control, manipulate or engineer movement that is not authentic to an individual.

Star Wars is a wonderful invention of George Lucas that is a vacation for the mind. It doesn’t even take place in this in this Galaxy. So it is appropriate on the heels of this discovery by Mr. Martines, that George Lucas was in Florida to open the new ride, Star Tours 2, which closed last fall much to my displeasure. But I have been very eager to see the reopening which has just occurred over the last couple of weeks at Disney Hollywood Studios while news broke about the Mars discovery.

Among all the people on this planet, the hope I have for the human race comes from people like this. I go to events like this from time to time, and I adore the passion that is present. Every time Star Wars does something new, whether it’s a new book, video game, film, TV show, Fan Event, or a new ride like Star Tours, politics, prejudices, age stereotypes and gender affiliations are no longer a concern.

It is not an accident that people of all ages from all places love Star Wars. Star Wars is about all the purest notions present in the minds of humanity.

I’ve also talked a lot about this guy, George Lucas. Lucas is the creator of Star Wars, and has been on the forefront of most of the great innovations over the last 30 years. Our world is far better because of him. When Lucas says that his company, Lucasfilm started by a rebel from Modesto California and Disney, created by a guy that dropped out of high school are two of the most innovative companies of their kind in the world, he’s right, when those two companies get together, magic happens.

Whenever there is a big Star Wars event, such as this latest one at Hollywood Studios fans from all over the country show up in costume to celebrate unbridled creativity and the spirit of adventure.

As for the ride itself, here is a sneak peek at the actual ride itself.

During the opening ceremony officially commissioning the ride, George Lucas and Bob Iger join onstage to launch the ride. It was a grand spectacle worthy of the very best that the human imagination can produce.

Without question there are those out there that look at such events with bewilderment. I know such people and I feel sorry for them, because the magic of youth has left them. When I was young, I collected Star Wars toys, and I played with them even into my teens. Many of the young people growing up with me started to make fun of that kind of activity as they became interested in members of the opposite sex.

As a boy I was without question the fastest kid in my entire school. Nobody could run faster than me, in dodge ball I was always the last kid standing and I was one of the strongest. I won the pull-up contest in the winter Olympics event in the fifth grade; in fact I won the school equivalent of a gold medal. I was always really good at sports, all sports especially basketball and hockey, so of course a very pretty, very popular girl wanted to “go steady” with me, in the fifth grade. Now to the adults in my life, it looked as though I was headed in the right direction, cute girlfriend, the gym teacher was telling my parents that scholarships were in my future from any school of my choice because my physical abilities were unusually proficient, and aside from being very combative with my teachers, my future looked bright, except for that one small problem, I spent hours and hours and hours in the basement of my home playing Star Wars with my brother. My family couldn’t afford all the toys that Kenner was producing, so my brother and I built our own, all inspired from the Star Wars galaxy.

A very pretty girl who rode my bus was persistently letting me know she was interested in me. Under pressure from all the other “popular” girls that rode my school bus, and the boys that would soon become the “jocks” in later years, I told the little girl I’d go steady with her. Such a girl promised to be very adventurous. It was well-known that she would probably take off her clothes for me and let me do pretty much whatever I wanted, because she had said so to her girl friends intending me to find out. So I said yes.

At home that night I was doing the usual thing, eating my dinner as fast as possible so I could go downstairs and play Star Wars. During dinner that girl called me.

“Hello,” I said to her as my mom handed me the phone. My parents looked proudly at one another.

“Hey sweetie, what are you doing? I heard you said you’d go steady with me?” the little girl said.

I was looking at the clock. It was about 6:15 PM and I wanted to build a spaceship with some shoe boxes my mom had left in my room. I didn’t want to hang on the phone with some stupid girl. “Auh, yes.”

“So, can you get your mom to bring you over?”

“Tonight? To your house?” I said looking at my mom. I was thinking of the possibilities. This girl was one of those girls back then that had both parents with full occuapations so she was home by herself most of the time. In fact, during the summer, in her neighborhood most of the kids were home by themselves all summer because their parents were always working or too tired to pay attention to what the kids were doing.

“Yes silly, to my house. My mom is going to be gone till 9 and my dad is on a business trip. I’m here by myself and I want you to come over.”

I looked at my mom, my dad, and my brother who was ready to go downstairs and play Star Wars. “What are we going to do?”

The girl giggled on the other end of the phone. “We’ll think of something.”

I knew what that meant. This little girl had let quite a few of the boys she had “gone steady” with, see her naked, so that was what the girl had in mind. She figured that would seal the deal with me.

My life flashed before me. I realized that if I went to that girl’s house once, she’d want to do it again, and again. She’d also want to talk on the phone all the time like a lot of the girls from that time were doing. I did not want to spend my time talking to some stupid girl on the phone. I just wanted to see her naked, but not to get wrapped up in wasting my time. My heart’s desire was to go into the basement and play Star Wars.

“I don’t think I want to go out with you,” I said to the girl.

“What?”

“It’s a school night, and I’m busy.”

The girl started crying. My dad’s face dropped and my brother went downstairs knowing I was going to be off the phone soon. He was younger than me, in kindergarten at the time, so wanting to see a girl naked wasn’t even a relevant thought.

“Nobody has ever broke-up with me before. We’ve only been going out for a couple of hours. Is it because I’m ugly? I’ll do anything you want.”

“It’s not because you’re ugly. It’s just that I……..I’m busy.”

The girl hung up, I went downstairs and played Star Wars. The next day at school, all the girls’ friends were angry at me for breaking up with their friend. One girl who knew me very well because her brother played with my brother and I said, “You broke up with her so you could play that stupid, gay, little Star Wars thing you guys do. Isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I said honestly.

“I thought so. Well, I’m going to tell her why.”

She did, and from that day on, that girl and all her popular friends shut the door to me out of that rejection. She never really got over it, until we were seniors in high school and my friend and I had a ghastly reputation for excessive speeding, violent fights and other aggressive behavior, and were getting ready to leave school for the day when she came running across the parking lot to stop me. She asked me for a ride home from school.

I looked at the girl; she looked old at only 17. She had been having sex for many years, and virtually every popular boy in school had either seen her naked, or had sex with her in some form or another. She figured because of my reputation I’d want to spend time with her. I think she really needed a ride home, but she was looking for a chance I think. I instantly felt bad for her. She had been very attractive just a couple of years before, but now her skin was blotchy from where she went to the tanning bed too much. She actually had wrinkles around her eyes. Looking at her I couldn’t help but think she reminded me of a sperm suppository that had semen oozing out of the pores of her body.

“No, I can’t.”

I was surprised that her eyes actually welled up with tears. “Why, are you going to go and play Star Wars again?”

I looked at her to assess her pain. It was obvious she was trying to go back in time to fix something in her life, and I felt compelled to help her. But not compelled to stop doing what my friend and I were about to do.

“Sorry, but we’re getting ready to catch Rambo II. The movie starts in 45 minutes.”

I started up my car and skidded out of the school parking lot as was usual. That was the last time I ever saw or spoke to that girl.

The people who grew up successful and happy had little things like Star Wars in their life to help them through tough times. People like that girl, that filled the empty moments in her life with the penis of a young boy, in an attempt to steer that boy where she wanted ended up sick, diseased and terribly broken before they even hit 20 years old.

Mythology like Star Wars touches the mind beyond the animal hungers for sex, food, or the desire for acceptance, which is the first step toward tyranny. This is why I would rather shake hands with a Star Wars fan than any politician, or power player. The people who love Star Wars are creating, if only in their minds. They are creating costumes, they are collecting items, they are reading books and this makes them valuable people.


It is the child in all of us that must be kept alive, and not destroyed in some mindless pursuit of some perceived economic, or social value. The truth of mankind can be found in events like Star Tours.

Because there are many, many more discoveries that must be made for the human race to advance forward, we are a long way from completing the human adventure. So complacency of thought in the mundane realm of food and sex is not enough. When the entire world has the tools of academia at their disposal, it still takes the wondering adventurer, the outcast, the geek, to see what was always there.

Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Oil Shale is a Solution, Al Gore, Think Progress and the President are the Problem: why our economy is hurting

As you listen to Darryl Parks talk about the S & P dropping the credit rating of the United States on 700 WLW with Howard McEwen, who is an investment advisor, ask yourself why we’re in this situation to begin with.   

Below is a great article from the Daily Reckoning about Oil Shale in Colorado.  There is only one reason that our country is in a financial mess, and that is because fools are standing in the way.  I am thinking of a speech from John Galt uttered in the book Atlas Shrugged.  “You propose to establish a social order based on the following tenets: that you’re incompetent to run your own life, but competent to run the lives of others—that you’re unfit to exist in freedom, but fit to become an omnipotent ruler—that you’re unable to earn your living by the use of your own intelligence, but able to judge politicians and to vote them into jobs of total power over arts you have never seen, over sciences you have never studied, over achievements of which you have no knowledge, over the gigantic industries where you, by your own definition of your capacity, would be unable successfully to fill the job of assistant greaser.”

John Galt is right and evidence of it is in the following article.  This is available to our nation right now, but of course the holdup is in government’s lack of vision.  When you finish the article you will learn a lot about oil.  And you’ll learn that our financial problems are completely self-imposed. 

 

Oil Shale Reserves

Oil Shale Reserves: Stinky Water, Sweet Oil
A Daily Reckoning White Paper Report
By Dan Denning

You won’t think much of Rio Blanco County if you ever drive through it. In fact, unless you take a right turn off Interstate-70 West at Rifle, head north on Railroad Avenue and then west on Government road to Colorado state highway number thirteen, odds are you’ll never even step foot in Rio Blanco County.

But even if you keep heading west toward Grand Junction, through the town of Parachute and the shuttered oil shale refineries from the 1970s, you’ll see the Book Cliffs geologic formation on your right. For miles and miles. It’s a bleak landscape. Almost lunar. At first glance, it’s the kind of land you’d never want to explore, much less settle down in.

Oil Shale Reserves : America’s Strategic Future

In the small world of geologists, though, the region is well-known. In fact, you might even say it’s the single
most important patch of undeveloped, unloved, and desolate looking land in America. But you’d never guess this particular corner of the Great American Desert may play an integral role in America’s strategic future just by looking at it. You’d never guess that the whole stretch of brown, red, and orange land contains enough recoverable oil and gas to make you forget about the Middle East for the rest of time.

 

There are places in Rio Blanco County like Stinking Water Creek, named after the smelly mix of oil and water the first white settlers found there, that tell you oil’s always been around the Rocky Mountains. It’s just not always been easy to find. It’s one thing to find oil that bubbles out of the ground in liquid form. It’s quite another to drill a thousand feet down, and encounter oil locked up tight inside a greasy rock.

The first seeping pools of oil were discovered in Western Colorado as far back as 1876, the year the state entered the Union. But exploration didn’t get serious until drillers settled in the town of Rangely in Rio Blanco County.

By 1903, thirteen different drillers had come and gone in Rangely. According to the local museum, the only six wells that actually struck oil were producing just two to ten barrels of oil a day. Hardly a Spindeltop, the gusher that launched the Texas oil-boom on January 10th, 1901, and immediately began producing 100,000 barrels per day.

The energy reserves of the Piceance Basin, upon which Rio Blanco County sits, contain massive petroleum reserves of a very unusual nature: Oil shale.

Oil Shale Reserves : A Congressional Legacy

Most of the nation’s oil shale reserves rest under the control of the U.S. government – a legacy of a 95-year old Congressional Act. In 1910, Congress passed the Pickett Act, which authorized President Taft to set aside oil- bearing land in California and Wyoming as potential sources of fuel for the U.S. Navy. Taft did so right away. The Navy was in the process of switching from coal-burning ships to oil burning ships. And the U.S. military, conscious of the expanding role of America in the world, needed a dependable supply of fuel in case of a national emergency.

From 1910 to 1925 the Navy developed the Naval Petroleum and Oil Shale Reserves Program. The program became official in 1927 and President Roosevelt even expanded the scope of the program in 1942 as the U.S. geared up for war with Japan and Germany.

Several of the oil fields set aside for the nation’s first strategic reserve, particularly Elk Hills in California,
would go on to produce oil for the U.S. government. Elk Hills was eventually sold off to Occidental Petroleum for $3.65 billion in 1998 in the largest privatization in U.S. history. The shale reserves, however, still remain, locked 1,000 feet underground in the Colorado desert.

Unlocking The Future

The destruction of Hurricane Katrina shows the importance of a strategic petroleum reserve, or, more accurately, a strategic energy reserve. But the SPR in Louisiana only holds about 800 million barrels of emergency, enough to get the country through about 90 days of regular oil usage. That’s barely a band-aid for a country that faces a potential energy heart attack.

In other words, the future of oil shale may have finally arrived. Extracting oil from shale is no simple task, which is why the reserves remain almost completely undeveloped. But an emerging new technology promises to unlock the awesome potential of the oil shale.

“The technical groundwork may be in place for a fundamental shift in oil shale economics,” the Rand Corporation recently declared. “Advances in thermally conductive in-situ conversion may enable shale-derived oil to be competitive with crude oil at prices below $40 per barrel. If this becomes the case, oil shale development may soon occupy a very prominent position in the national energy agenda.”

Estimated U.S. oil shale reserves total an astonishing 1.5 trillion barrels of oil – or more than five times the
stated reserves of Saudi Arabia. This energy bounty is simply too large to ignore any longer, assuming that the reserves are economically viable. And yet, oil shale lies far from the radar screen of most investors.

But we here at The Daily Reckoning are on the case. Just yesterday, I caught a first-hand glimpse of a cutting-edge oil shale project spearheaded by Shell. I trekked out to a barren moonscape in Colorado to tour the facility with Shell geologists. To summarize my findings, oil shale holds tremendous promise, but the technologies that promise to unlock this promise remain somewhat experimental. But sooner or later, the oil trapped in the shale of Colorado will flow to the surface. And when it does, it will enrich investors who arrive early to the scene.

Can Oil Shale Change The World?

America’s oil shale reserves are enormous, totaling at least 1.5 trillion barrels of oil. That’s five times the
reserves of Saudi Arabia! And yet, no one is producing commercial quantities of oil from these vast deposits. All that oil is still sitting right where God left it, buried under the vast landscapes of Colorado and Wyoming.

Obviously, there are some very real obstacles to oil production from shale. After all, if it was such a good
thing, we’d be doing it already, right? “Oil shale is the fuel of the future, and always will be,” goes a popular
saying in Western Colorado.

But what if we could safely and economically get our hands on all that oil? Imagine how the world might change. The U.S. would instantly have the world’s largest oil reserves. Imagine…having so much oil we’d never have to worry about Saudi Arabia again, or Hugo Chavez, or the mullahs in Tehran. And instead of ships lined up in L.A.’s port to unload cheap Chinese goods, we might see oil tankers lined up waiting to export America’s tremendous oil bounty to the rest of the world. The entire geopolitical and economic map of the world would change…and the companies in the vanguard of oil shale development might make hundreds of billions of dollars as they convert America’s untapped shale reserves into a brand new energy revolution.

Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter may have been entertaining similar ambitions in the late 1970s when they encouraged and funded the development of the West’s shale deposits. A shale-boom ensued, although not much oil flowed. The government spent billions and so did Exxon Mobil. New boomtowns sprung up in Rifle, Parachute, Rangely, and Meeker here in Colorado.

And then came Black Monday. May 2, 1982. The day Exxon shut down its $5 billion Colony Oil Shale project. The refineries closed. The jobs left (the American oil industry has lost nearly as many jobs in the last ten years as the automobile and steel industries.) And the energy locked in Colorado’s vast shale deposits sat untouched and unrefined.

Oil Shale Technology – Old & New

Extracting oil from the shale is no simple task. The earliest attempts to extract the oil utilized an environmentally unfriendly process known as “retorting.” Stated simply, retorting required mining the shale, hauling it to a processing facility that crushed the rock into small chunks, then extracted a petroleum substance called kerogen, then upgraded the kerogen through a process of hydrogenation (which requires lots of water) and refined it into gasoline or jet fuel.

But the difficulties of retorting do not end there, as my colleague, Byron King explains:

“After you retort the rock to derive the kerogen (not oil), the heating process has desiccated the shale (OK, that means that it is dried out).  Sad to say, the volume of desiccated shale that you have to dispose of is now greater than that of the hole from which you dug and mined it in the first place.  Any takers for trainloads of dried, dusty, gunky shale residue, rife with low levels of heavy metal residue and other toxic, but now chemically-activated crap?  (Well, it makes for enough crap that when it rains, the toxic stuff will leach out and contaminate all of the water supplies to which gravity can reach, which is essentially all of ‘em.  Yeah, right.  I sure want that stuff blowin’ in my wind.)  Add up all of the capital investment to build the retorting mechanisms, cost of energy required, cost of water, costs of transport, costs of environmental compliance, costs of refining, and you have some relatively costly end-product.”

But a new technology has emerged that may begin to tap the oil shale’s potential. Royal Dutch Shell, in fact, has recently completed a demonstration project (The Mahogany Ridge project) in which it produced 1,400 barrels of oil from shale in the ground, without mining the shale at all.

Instead, Shell utilized a process called “in situ” mining, which heats the shale while it’s still in the ground, to
the point where the oil leaches from the rock. Shell’s Terry O’Connor described the breakthrough in testimony before Congress earlier this summer (And Congress may have an acute interest in the topic, since the U.S. government controls 72% of all U.S. oil shale acreage):

“Some 23 years ago, Shell commenced laboratory and field research on a promising in ground conversion and recovery process. This technology is called the In-situ Conversion Process, or ICP. In 1996, Shell successfully carried out its first small field test on its privately owned Mahogany property in Rio Blanco County, Colorado some 200 miles west of Denver. Since then, Shell has carried out four additional related field tests at nearby sites. The most recent test was carried out over the past several months and produced in excess of 1,400 barrels of light oil plus associated gas from a very small test plot using the ICP technology…

“Most of the petroleum products we consume today are derived from conventional oil fields that produce oil and gas that have been naturally matured in the subsurface by being subjected to heat and pressure over very long periods of time. In general terms, the In-situ Conversion Process (ICP) accelerates this natural process of oil and gas maturation by literally tens of millions of years. This is accomplished by slow sub-surface heating of petroleum source rock containing kerogen, the precursor to oil and gas. This acceleration of natural processes is achieved by drilling holes into the resource, inserting electric resistance heaters into those heater holes and heating the subsurface to around 650-700F, over a 3 to 4 year period.

“During this time, very dense oil and gas is expelled from the kerogen and undergoes a series of changes. These changes include the shearing of lighter components from the dense carbon compounds, concentration of available hydrogen into these lighter compounds, and changing of phase of those lighter, more hydrogen rich compounds from liquid to gas. In gaseous phase, these lighter fractions are now far more mobile and can move in the subsurface through existing or induced fractures to conventional producing wells from which they are brought to the surface. The process results in the production of about 65 to 70% of the original “carbon” in place in the subsurface.

“The ICP process is clearly energy-intensive, as its driving force is the injection of heat into the subsurface.
However, for each unit of energy used to generate power to provide heat for the ICP process, when calculated on a life cycle basis, about 3.5 units of energy are produced and treated for sales to the consumer market. This energy efficiency compares favorably with many conventional heavy oil fields that for decades have used steam injection to help coax more oil out of the reservoir. The produced hydrocarbon mix is very different from traditional crude oils. It is much lighter and contains almost no heavy ends.

“However, because the ICP process occurs below ground, special care must be taken to keep the products of the process from escaping into groundwater flows. Shell has adapted a long recognized and established mining and construction ice wall technology to isolate the active ICP area and thus accomplish these objectives and to safe guard the environment. For years, freezing of groundwater to form a subsurface ice barrier has been used to isolate areas being tunneled and to reduce natural water flows into mines. Shell has successfully tested the freezing technology and determined that the development of a freeze wall prevents the loss of contaminants from the heated zone.”

It may seem, as O’Conner said, counter-intuitive to freeze the water around a shale deposit, and then heat up the contents within the deposit. It’s energy-intensive. And it’s a lot of work. What’s more, there’s no proof yet it can work on a commercial-scale.

Yet both technologies, the freeze wall and the heating of shale, have been proven in the field to work. The freeze wall was used most recently in Boston’s Big Dig project. It was also used to prevent ground water from seeping into the salt caverns at the Strategic Petroleum reserve in Weeks Island, LA.

But still, you may be wondering, does it really make sense to heat the ground up a thousand feet down for three or four years and wait? Of course it does. In case you missed O’Conner’s math, Shell could harvest up to a million barrels per acre, or a billion barrels per square mile, on an area covering over a thousand square miles.

It’s still early days in the oil shale fields of Colorado and Wyoming, but it looks to me like someone’s gonna make a lot of money out there. I’m working hard to discover how we outside investors can play along.

Shell’s Mahogany Ridge

Last week, I paid a visit to Royal Dutch Shell’s oil shale project in Colorado. The visit left me with more questions than answers, but I came away from the place with the sense that this opportunity is very real…or, at least, it soon will be.

After driving across a vast expanse of “Nowhere,” Colorado, my brother and I met up with a few geologists from Shell. Of course it’s just those large, unpopulated tracts of high desert that make the area so appealing from a geopolitical point of view. Tapping into the oil shale 2,000 feet underground isn’t going to bother too many people. And there are no spotted owls around either. If the technology to turn shale into oil works, the entire area will become a new American boom patch.

Soon after we arrived, the geologists escorted us around the facility, chatting all the while about the successes and challenges of their venture.

The two trickiest aspects of oil shale development, as the geologists and engineers explained, are heating the shale to extreme temperatures, while simultaneously surrounding the heated area with a subterranean ice wall. Shell doesn’t know, or isn’t saying, which part of the project will be the most challenging. If you were about to change the world by making it economic to tap into as much as 2 trillion barrels of oil under the Colorado plateau, you’d be pretty careful about showing your competitors how you were going to do it.

First, anything that heats up rock around it to around 600 or 700 degrees Fahrenheit has to conduct electrically generated heat well. The most conductive metals on the Periodic Table of Elements are, in order, silver, copper, and gold. Naturally, the number of heaters you put in a place affects the amount of time it takes to turn the shale goo into API 34 crude. The more heaters, the more cost, though.

And given the fact that Shell does not know yet if the heaters will be recoverable, you can see that sticking
silver, copper, or gold heaters 2000 meters underground and then leaving them there once the kerogen has been pumped has a serious effect on the economics of your operation.

At the moment, Shell is not sure what the optimal size of production zones ought to be. The big issue here is how big can a freeze-wall be to be effective and freezing the groundwater surrounding a shale deposit? The test projects, as you can see, were quite small. Shell doesn’t know, or isn’t saying, what the optimum size is for a each “pod” or “cell”. That’s what they’ll have to figure out at the next stage…and the picture with the dirt is a football field sized project….where rather than creating the freeze-wall at 50 meters down…they will do it at 1,000 ft. down…. with 2,000 being the desired and necessary depth for commercial viability. I’m not sure anyone has ever created a freeze-wall at that depth….neither is shell. But we’ll find out. The oil itself that comes from the process looks like…oil. No heavy refining needed.

Shell thinks the whole thing is economic at a crude price of $30. So barring a major reversal of geopolitical trends, they’re forging ahead.

Since the Bureau of Land Management owns about 80% of the oil shale acreage in Colorado, there is no investment play on private companies that might own land with rich shale deposits. Although, if Shell and the DOE are right that you can recover a million barrels of oil per acre…it wouldn’t take much land to make a man rich out here.

Oil Shale: Testing Public Lands

The Bureau of Land Management recently received ten applications (by eight companies) for a pilot program to develop Colorado’s shale reserves. The program allows the companies access to public lands for the purpose of testing shale-extraction technologies. You see below an interesting mix of large, publicly traded oil giants and small, privately held innovators.

  • Natural Soda, Inc. of Rifle, Colorado.
  • EGL Resources Inc. of Midland, Texas.
  • Salt Lake City-based Kennecott Exploration Company.
  • Independent Energy Partners of Denver, Colorado
  • Denver-based Phoenix Wyoming, Inc.
  • Chevron Shale Oil Company.
  • Exxon Mobil Corporation.
  • Shell Frontier Oil and Gas Inc

There is dispute within the industry over how long, if ever, demonstration extraction technologies can become commercially viable. I’ve spoken with some of the smaller companies that have applied for leases from the BLM. Some of them will have to raise money to conduct the project. And some of them have been less than forthcoming about how exactly their extraction technology is different or better than previous methods.

How will it all unfold? Well, for starters, it could all utterly fail. To me, Shell’s in-situ process looks the most
promising. It also makes the most sense economically. There may be a better, less energy-intensive way to heat up the ground than what Shell has come up with. But Shell, Chevron, and Exxon Mobil clearly have the resources to scoop up any private or small firm that makes a breakthrough.

And there are a host of smaller firms involved with the refining and drilling process that figure to play a key
role in the development of the industry, should that development pick up pace.

The Energy Policy Act of 2005, otherwise known as a listless piece of legislation without any strategic vision, does, at least, make provision for encouraging research into the development of shale. But government works slow, when it works at all. It’s going to take an external shock to the economy to really ratchet up interest and development of the nation’s energy reserves…say…something like a nuclear Iran.

Dan Denning
for The Daily Reckoning

Source article: http://dailyreckoning.com/oil-shale-reserves/

Read more: Oil Shale Reserves http://dailyreckoning.com/oil-shale-reserves/#ixzz1KTuP22A0

So what do you think about that?  Here’s a cool video about the use of Oil shale.

So why aren’t we doing this?  Because of communist leaning politicians like the old hippie Al Gore who still thinks he’s smoking pot in college and forcing the world to drive electric cars. 

Gore is funny.  Talk about the “carbon lobby” look at the sponsor of the video he’s in.  “Think Progress.”  Oh…..that’s not a lobby of any kind.  Not for the United States anyway.  Think Progress is supported by people like George Soros who only wants to create a one world government, collapse the American economy so that we  won’t prevent a borderless world, and create an economy based on green technology. 

Al Gore and his friends of communism advocates want to stop the American economy and they are what is driving up our fuel costs by standing in the way of technological development.  Our country is being run by fools and idiots by our default, because while the rest of us work at real jobs, those thieves of our tax dollars are using our own resources to destroy us.  Those of us that think will never get along with communists.  I’m going to call them that for now on, because that’s what they are.  I don’t want the world they are advocating.  I want oil, fast cars and government off my back. 

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

The Space Race is Just Beginning: As the Space Shuttles End.

Darryl Parks of 700 WLW hit on something sensitive with me on his March 10, 2011 show. He was reminiscing about the recent Space Shuttle landing with just two more shuttle missions to go. Listen to that broadcast here.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, I think NASA in Florida and Epcot Center also in Florida are two of my favorite places on Earth. I am very supportive of massive cuts to the federal budget. But of all the programs that I think the government has done right it’s the work done at NASA that is the best. For NASA, I do not regret the tax money spent at all. It gives me a tremendous amount of pride to walk the NASA facility.

The work done at NASA directly propels our science and does create jobs making America much of what it has been regarding a technological powerhouse in the world marketplace. And it is a sign of the times that funding to our space work was one of the first things cut, well before the entitlement culture, which is a terrible shame. It will be a sad day when over 6,000 NASA employees are laid-off in the Florida facility and I will be deeply touched to watch one of the next two space shuttles land at Wright Patterson Air Force Base within the next couple of months.

So the obvious question that Darryl asks, and I’m asking and tens of thousands of aviation enthusiasts are asking is, “What’s next? What’s the plan?”

Well, the government is getting out of the space business and is turning it over to the private sector, which is the same thing many of us that are education reformers want to see happen with education regarding School Choice. I believe that once the government is out of the space business, private industry will suddenly find the chains cut and a technological leap will ensue.

So to give hope to that possibility read the below article from www.Space.com. This is the future, like School Choice is the future of education. While I am sad to see the great organization of NASA coming to an end as we know it, I am excited to see the unlimited possibilities that the private sector can unleash upon our civilization.

It looks to be a very exciting time. Many of the jobs at NASA should find work within the private industry within the next few years. It may not be as secure as the employment they had at NASA, but it will be filled with adventure!

Link for the below article: http://www.space.com/10548-private-spaceflight-ready-2011.html

The private space industry has long been viewed as fledgling. But this once-pejorative term has taken on new meaning this year, as a roster of successes and fast-paced growth throughout 2010 suggests private spaceflight is ready to take off in 2011.

This year saw the very first launch of commercial space company SpaceX’s Falcon 9 booster, and later the first liftoff of the firm’s Dragon spacecraft, which launched atop a Falcon 9 to Earth orbit and then was recovered from the Pacific Ocean. Another company, Virgin Galactic, achieved some major milestones, including the first glide test of its suborbital spaceliner, SpaceShipTwo. [Gallery: First Solo Flight of SpaceShipTwo]
Multiple private-sector space firms are moving into full power, going well beyond powerpoints and hand-waving. Still, the coming year, according to experts and analysts contacted by SPACE.com, is likely to feature battles between “same old space” and the ascension of “new space.”
Commercial landscape
“The space industry has never seen such a rich and varied commercial landscape,” said Carissa Bryce Christensen, managing partner of consulting firm The Tauri Group in Alexandria, Va. “New markets are emerging and established ones are changing.”
Christensen said that entrepreneurs are testing new launch and on-orbit capabilities in the real world, trying to move beyond development and demonstration and into sustainable, profitable operation. Large firms are changing their game plans in response.
“The successes and setbacks of 2011 are going to make it the most interesting year in the history of commercial space,” Christensen predicted.

Commercial space is finally coming into its own, and 2011 represents a year of enormous potential for this developing industry, said David Livingston, founder and host of the radio/Internet talk show “The Space Show.”

“The key will be to systematically move forward, building success upon success,” Livingston said. “I believe the coming year will reward patience, achievable goals, business fundamentals, reasonable business risks and a safety mindset.”
In terms of trends for the space industry, Livingston foresees a move away from big government programs in favor of economically managed and leaner commercial space ventures and projects.

“I believe this trend will continue through 2011 and beyond. That said, I do not think our space program should be one or the other, government or private,” Livingston said.”I believe we can now, more than ever, effectively create public/private partnerships to guide us into space and our future.”
Squarely in the spotlight

The scheduled retirement of NASA’s three-orbiter space shuttle fleet next year will also likely affect the landscape.
“I think the environment for 2011, although much improved from the religious war in 2010, will still see continued debate about the future direction of NASA with shuttle retirement,” said Brett Alexander, president of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, an industry group that includes commercial spaceflight developers, operators, spaceports, suppliers and service providers.

Alexander said he thinks commercial space will be “squarely in the spotlight” with an expected ramp-up of both suborbital flight testing and multiple orbital launches and re-entries under NASA’s Commercial Orbital Transportation Services (COTS) partnership agreements with U.S. industry.

NASA’s Commercial Crew and Cargo Program is investing financial and technical resources to stimulate efforts within the private sector to develop and demonstrate safe, reliable and cost-effective space transportation capabilities.
“So, with steady progress on the technical front, it should help to solidify NASA’s new direction to develop commercial capabilities,” Alexander said. Battleground “2010 was the year that war broke out between commercial and cost-plus space,” observed Jim Muncy, president and founder of PoliSpace, an independent space policy consultancy based in Alexandria, Va.

“A rational White House, which nobody can accuse of having an ideological bias in favor of commercial business and privatization, decided that the nation couldn’t do much, let alone everything, the ‘traditional’ way,” Muncy said. “To actually use the International Space Station and explore space, the private sector needed to play a greater role in both.”

Muncy said that as nasty and counterintuitive as the long debate of 2010 was, next year — especially in the context of the new Congress, which has vowed to cut government spending — will see “the rubber hit the road” in several fronts of this war.

For 2011, Muncy forecasts:
• At least two companies that operate suborbital reusable launch vehicles will fly science payloads for NASA, and piloted vehicles will have their first flight tests.
• A SpaceX Dragon will carry a mammal to low Earth orbit and possibly to the International Space Station.
• The effort to build a commercial crew spacecraft will move forward, while overall budget pressure on NASA will slow down Florida Senator Bill Nelson’s grand compromise (which, among other things, gave money to commercial companies and NASA to develop and build new rockets).
• The Commercial Space Launch Amendment Act’s “informed consent” regime for Federal Aviation Administration regulation of commercial human spaceflight will clash with some politicians’ desire to kill commercial crew efforts.
• The fight over human-rating of commercial crew will get heated, as will a scrap for control over this rating between NASA’s Johnson Space Center and the agency’s Kennedy Space Center.
“Not a prediction but a hope,” Muncy said, is that “Republicans will remember they like the private sector and stop mindlessly bashing commercial.”
Fiscal meltdown

Rand Simberg, a space policy and technology consultant and a former aerospace engineer, isn’t optimistic that Republicans will get fully behind commercial space.

“Despite the growing confidence in the ability of the commercial sector to do human spaceflight, the incoming Republicans may continue to wage war on the new NASA direction, in opposition to their usual stated principles of free enterprise and competition, for no reason other than it came from a weakened Obama White House,” Simberg said.
Overall, next year “may be the year that business-as-usual collides with budgetary reality,” he predicted.

Simberg said that “even the most pork-devoted politicians will have to recognize that the only way for NASA to have a viable human spaceflight program going forward is to rely on fixed-price launch contracts from new, more cost-effective providers for the now-mundane task of simply getting astronauts to orbit and back.”

On the suborbital front, Simberg said that 2011 may be the year that regular flights of fully reusable vehicles — both horizontal- and vertical-landing — will take off.

That being the case, Simberg added, such suborbital flights “will start to develop the experience in high-tempo launch operations that will inform the eventual development of cost-effective space transport all the way to orbit.”
Availability and schedule

Likely to be a nexus of private sector space action is Spaceport America, now under construction near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico.

Virgin Galactic will run commercial operations from Spaceport America, with billionaire founder Sir Richard Branson recently setting his sights beyond suborbital passenger takeoffs.

“Virgin Galactic has shown in the past few years how private sector investment and innovation can lead to a rapid transformation of stagnant technologies,” Branson said. “We are now very close to making the dream of suborbital space a reality for thousands of people at a cost and level of safety unimaginable even in the recent past.

“We know that many of those same people, including myself, would also love to take an orbital space trip in the future,” Branson added, “so we are putting our weight behind new technologies that could deliver that safely whilst driving down the enormous current costs of manned orbital flight by millions of dollars.”

Earlier this month, Branson revealed that Virgin Galactic will be supporting work done by Sierra Nevada Space Systems (SNC) and Orbital Sciences Corporation (OSC) on commercial space vehicles for NASA’s Commercial Crew Development Program.
Both SNC and OSC are pursuing vehicle designs featuring reusable lifting-wing bodies and runway landings, which Virgin Galactic sees as possibly revolutionizing orbital space flight.

Rick Homans, executive director of the New Mexico Spaceport Authority, said that the pace of activity continues to pick up throughout the industry — and Spaceport America is no exception.

“In 2011, we expect to be in the midst of our pre-operations phase — hiring contractors, developing policies and procedures and conducting all kinds of tests and drills to ensure we are ready to go operational in 2012,” Homans said.
Homans said that from the inquiries they have received, he anticipates Spaceport America’s vertical launch area should be very busy in 2011. Other companies such as UP Aerospace, Armadillo and other operators have already inquired about availability and schedule, he added.

“I see 2011 as the year to get ready for 2012, when I predict we will have our first commercial launches from Spaceport America,” Homans said.
• Gallery: Photos of the Dragon Space Capsule, Dragon Video
• Top 10 Private Spaceships Becoming Reality
• Photos: SpaceShipTwo’s First Solo Test Flight, Video of the Flight
Leonard David has been reporting on the space industry for more than five decades. He is past editor-in-chief of the National Space Society’s Ad Astra and Space World magazines and has written for SPACE.com since 1999.

_____________________________________________________________________

For those of us that want to see this grand adventure take place, we must support the commercialization of space with the same enthusiasm that we are pushing government budget controls and education reform, because the future is in front of us, if only we can muster the courage to embrace it.

Now, listen to Richard Branson talk about Virgin Galactic.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

The Future of Medicine: The Art of Regenerative Tissue Repair

I’d much rather cover positive topics than negative ones. My anger at many of the rants that can be found here has a common source. A student from Mason that is enchanted with Stacy Schuler, the teacher that was arrested for having sex with five students from her school, told me that she was sure that if she analyzed me the way I do other people, that there were sure to be Freudian slips reveled in my behavior too.

Well, she’s right. There is a pattern to my so-called rants. I have an extreme anger at institutions that stand in the way of exciting new scientific developments. So I tend to lash out at politicians, union leaders, corrupt employees that favor job security over innovation and universities that cling to their past discoveries and subvert new discoveries that are controversial. I even set my sights on religion that holds back civilization with a desire to control the masses like sheep of which they offer themselves as a shepherd. In general, I support religious activity because it gives people something to hold themselves together, and the fear of god will keep them from committing wasteful sins such as over indulging in sex, substance abuse, and being vengeful toward their neighbors. But I often get frustrated when religion stands in front of science, because science offers constant new information that requires frequent adoption adding to religious ideology. To become fixated on events that happened 2000 or 4000 years ago holds people back, because there are miracles happening right now in front of our faces, but people don’t have a spiritual mechanism that allows them to see it. And that can be a real crisis.

When the congress of 2010 marched Health Care Reform down our throats in March of that year without even reading the bill, and voted on it strictly on ideology started by philosophies begun in the 1960’s and even earlier while communism from the Soviet Union was making a push to replace capitalism. Those congressmen didn’t care if Health Care was in violation of the United States Constitution because their plan is to change the law with Supreme Court Case Law. They also didn’t care that Health Care, as we’ve been doing it is going out of style.

Health Care of tomorrow won’t be controlled by pharmaceutical companies like it is now, the days where our elderly will take drugs and have costly operations with artificial body parts as replacements will be a thing of the past within the next decade. People won’t take drugs to extend their lives and regulate their bodies as they age and stop performing normal function. Science is literally on the cusp of regenerating parts of the body with its own cells, and that is the future of medicine.

Doc Thompson had on a doctor promoting a new show being exhibited on Nat Geo 10pm on February 7, 2011. After its initial run, the program will run again and probably be on YouTube, so make certain to look for it. It’s about the science of regenerative tissue. But for now you can listen to that doctor talking to Doc.

By the time Health Care becomes a staple of normality in our society like Social Security and Medicare is now, assuming that it stands up to a Supreme Court Ruling, which I don’t think it will, this new science will be mature enough for average people to participate in. And I can tell you right now that all those companies that are looking to the Health Care Industry to make money will oppose regenerative tissue technology. I will also say that religions will violently oppose it, because suddenly the whole idea of life expectation will change. If people can continue to heal all through their lives and build their own regenerative tissue from their own cells DNA, then people will live a LOT longer, and that will force religion to catch up and adapt, which they will be reluctant to do.

That’s why the Health Care Bill is a foolish, pointless piece of legislation. It needs to be repealed and politicians need to start looking to these emerging sciences to solve the problems we have with Social Security, and Medicare. With regenerative science, the cost of keeping people alive will dramatically decrease, and people who have built their lives in the health care field will have to find other things to do for careers. We are on the cusp of true technical marvels that will change the ideology of the human race. And we need to embrace those changes boldly, and not cling to the status quo.

So that young lady is right. My purpose here is to let people know where I see the walls that are holding back that changing ideology. I do rant about the walls I see. And my overall Freudian logic behind those rants is to do my part to break down those walls so we can all enjoy the benefits of mankind’s science without becoming lost as godless heathens. It’s important to recognize what we’ve done right as humans, and what we’ve done wrong, and to boldly go to the next step, because we are standing at the foot of those steps. All it takes now is to have the courage to walk up them.

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com