I have written and said so much on this topic you’d think that the ridiculously arrogant teachers in the Lakota school system would have learned by now. However, they apparently have the memory span of Dory from the Finding Nemo movie, and about the same politics—and they can’t remember anything from five minutes ago, let alone five years. Like a bunch of children they protested in front of various Lakota schools over the implementation of merit pay—which is something that’s happening all over the nation, not just in Ohio—and is certainly not limited to Lakota. I’ve said it before, I don’t mind paying a teacher $200,000 a year if they are really good, but I don’t want to pay a slug $65K per year just because they showed up and fulfilled a step schedule established by the labor union. I want to see management deciding who gets paid what for an expected criterion. I do not want to pay for collective bargaining which favors the lazy at the expense of the hard-working.
Of course the impact of these entire teacher antics in attempting to wreck the budget at Lakota will provoke another levy attempt, which I have been saying all along will happen right around the 2017 mark—if not sooner—since the school board knows it will likely meet resistance and may take a few years to pass. What they are asking us to pay for is the same ridiculousness they have in the past—out-of-control employee costs that are directly linked to this kind of teacher behavior. Because the union is protected by state and federal law management often caves under the collective pressure of protests like this recent one at Lakota and the tax payers are stuck with the bill—which means an increase in property taxes. People new to the district don’t mind paying a bit more on taxes until they live in the area for a few years and are stuck with excessively high taxes. It is then that they get buyer’s remorse—meanwhile all these radical union employees retire and move away leaving the mess to the rest of us to clean up. I let the Pulse Journal know my thoughts about the Lakota protests with the following Letter to the Editor.
In a fair world every teacher who took part in the Friday April 24th demonstrations in front of the students at twenty of Lakota’s schools protesting merit pay, should have been terminated immediately. However, we don’t live in a fair world and are currently stuck with an out-of-touch teacher’s union culture in these schools that feel they are entitled to district resources without the judgment of their job performance being established through a merit pay system.
Defenders of the action will declare that their gathering was a “peaceful demonstration” and they (the teachers) have the right under the First Amendment to “assemble.” Yet the protesters in this case are district employees who consciously made a decision to impose their viewpoints in front of the same children they are supposed to be teaching which should be considered a breach of contract by attempting to radicalize students against value assessment—merit pay. It is insulting that they’d even contemplate the protest at Lakota after that district spent hundreds of thousands of dollars trying to repair their image after the last few years. Talk about short memories—and a lack of gratitude. The school board went to great measure to improve Lakota’s image and the teachers decided “collectively” to perform this task—in front of their students–amazingly short-sighted.
I’m looking forward to the further antics of the Lakota teachers over the coming summer. Since we can’t fire them, they will make fighting the next levy attempt that much easier.
Thanks,
Rich Hoffman
The judgment was so bad that all those employees should have been relieved of their duties and sent home on the spot. But we don’t live in a fair world—but one where public employees like these people are used to getting what they want, when they want it. They are spoiled brats—and that is putting it mildly. The Lakota teachers participating in this demonstration are easily replaceable, and should have been treated justly. They expect too much money for doing entirely too little—then they have the arrogance to be a disruptive force within the school.
It should be quite clear by now why I still think it was a teacher who left the note in the bathroom just days before the last election in Lakota threatening a shooting spree if voters didn’t pass a levy. Even though the levy was to throw money at these same teachers as appeasement for maintaining a wage freeze at the time, the levy was sold as a way to keep our “kids” safe in school. Conveniently, just days before the election a threatening note was left behind promising a shooting spree. The FBI and Butler County Sheriff’s office offered no leads, no hand writing analysis, no arrests in their “investigation” because they knew what I did—that the investigation would have taken them to the classroom of one of these radical teachers instead of some disgruntled kid. Heck, Sheriff Jones even put his name behind the passage of the levy. But if it was a kid, where could we place the blame for learning the behavior—look at their teachers?
Much is said about the millennial generation and how bad they are regarding work ethic—how pretentious they are relative to generations from the past. Granted, the parents are largely to blame for these screwed up kids. But the public schools have sold themselves as an option to parenting—as a viable substitute. Well, here is the proof of what kind of things those mentors are teaching kids. No wonder kids grow up expecting the world to be handed to them on a silver platter; they learn it from their teachers.
Until Ohio becomes a Right-to-Work state these radical nutcases will have all the leverage against tax payers—because management of them is simply not possible—if teachers will protest merit pay—where good teachers get paid based on how good they are—they’ll protest a turtle crossing the street. Their argument becomes so ridiculous that it’s almost science fiction. What’s encouraging is that these Lakota teachers have shown so early in the game that they are willing to behave like a bunch of Saul Alinskey radicals just as they did in 2008 with a strike threat, which I brought up continuously in 2010 through the first three levy attempts, caused the budget problems at Lakota. These latest actions by them will just give those of us willing to fight these idiots cannon fodder—so I welcome more of these antics. But there is a bit of me that feels sorry for the management of the Lakota school system—which is an entity I have been very critical of—because of their willingness to stay away from the hard decisions like this merit pay issue. They tried so hard and spent so much money extracting money from the community and this is how the teachers show their thanks. It has to hurt. But nobody can say they weren’t warned.
I have learned more about Israeli politics over the last couple of weeks than I had learned in the years prior combined. It started with the Netanyahu speech in front of the United States Congress and ended with the historic elections of this week. The great mystery for me was why Obama was so concerned about the Israeli elections, and why he was so insulted that Bibi was coming to America just a few weeks prior to the election. The revelation was that Obama was working against Netanyahu all along trying to remove him from power with the support of a leftist labor party influence. Now that Netanyahu is back in power, the two state solution in Israel is off the table. Obama and his supporters openly support the Arab Palestinians whereas Netanyahu and his conservative Likud Party are refusing to be divided up as a country. This explains a lot about Obama’s actions. Here is how Fox News reported the situation:
(Josh) Earnest acknowledged Wednesday that the U.S. would have to “re-evaluate” its position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in light of those comments. But he stressed that Obama believes a two-state solution is best. And State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki clarified that the administration “absolutely” will continue to push for this.
Further, Earnest chided Netanyahu’s Likud Party on Wednesday, saying the White House was “deeply concerned” about divisive language emanating from Likud. He said the party had sought to marginalize Israel’s minority Arabs, an apparent reference to social media posts the Likud distributed that warned Israelis about the danger of high turnout by Arab voters.
“These are views the administration intends to convey directly to the Israelis,” Earnest said.
Even worse, like a little baby, Obama refused to call Netanyahu and congratulate him on his election victory. His behavior is really unprecedented and reveals to what extent Obama and his army of progressives wish to change the world into something else. Netanyahu certainly didn’t refuse Obama because of the rhetoric the President uttered in his previous elections—the divisiveness and anger incited by the former community advocate and Saul Alinsky student. Much of the divisiveness in America currently is a direct fault of Obama—yet Netanyahu spoke well of the American president in public when he clearly didn’t need to.
The actions of Obama and the media in the wake of the Netanyahu election point directly to the greater strategy of modern progressives throwing their influence behind the two state solution of a perceived peace in the Middle East. They wish to carry the Middle East into the world before the Sykes-Picot agreement where their president of Woodrow failed epically in the region through the Treaty of Versailles. Now they wish to erase that error as if it never happened—and that means in this case the destruction of a Jewish nation bit by bit.
Ideologically driven, Obama can think of nothing but the aims of progressive influence. Using the same storm the border tactics happening right now in America where foreign influence and money shape American politics for the worse—the same has been going on in Israel with a quiet insurrection by progressives against conservatives like Netanyahu. Obama placed his bets against the Prime Minister. And he lost—and he’s upset about it—enough to make a national incident out of protest. That’s how radical and the media that supports Obama—truly are. They are radical to the point of meanness, and then they wonder why America is a divided nation.
The difference between us in America now are that some of us refuse to be lied to, and others go to the Obama lies like moths to a flame—hell-bent on their own destruction. So the nation is split down the middle between the lazy and stupid and the righteous and wise. Obama likes the stupid and hates the intelligent—because the later sees through his schemes. And it appears that the very same divisions are happening right now in Israel over an election that most Americans thought was inconsequential—but it wasn’t—was it?
Has anybody posed the question to Barack Obama recently if he still considers himself a member of the “middle-class?” I personally find the term degrading, and insulting. Who wants to be the “middle” of anything? Not me. So I don’t identify with the “middle-class.” I don’t want to be considered in the middle-class, and I don’t want to accept that there is even a middle-class of just average Americans. I believe in American exceptionalism. Acknowledging a middle-class says that we accept a society of average people. It’s like saying we want our football teams to be average, we want our cars and electronics to be “normal” and that there is no reason to compete against anybody else because we don’t care about the final score. It’s like saying to a video game player who is obsessed with a game like Call of Duty that they should be happy with their “average” score instead of playing over and over to increase their rating.
Yet Obama talks about the “middle-class” like its something good that he wants to expand—and accept more of. He is actually promoting it, and is trying to expand government education to actually make more “average” people. Yet it would be safe to say that Obama considers him and his family as part of the “upper” ruling class. Such behavior was always typical among the communists who wanted to be affiliated with the enforcers as opposed to the commoner. The ruling class always gets better living accommodations, and social status and Obama clearly enjoys his elevated political class status as President of the United States. He will never be considered a part of the middle-class for the rest of his life—so why does he want to promote it to so many people? It really doesn’t make any sense.
The answer comes from deep inside the type of collectivists that Obama is. If they can eliminate competition, they will never be challenged by anybody seeking to actually surpass their social status with actual aptitude. A gigantic middle-class means for people like Obama no challenge to his social status as a member of the elite. So he naturally wants to protect his status with more “middle-class” type people, and the way he performs the task is to propose that the effort is actually good for people.
This is the real nature behind Obama’s new education plan which he actually sent to me through an email. You can read that email promotion from Obama’s White House below where the intent of the proposal is to lower standards for children so that they will be further dumbed down into a compliant “middle-class” of adults giving the federal government more centralized control over students. Of course Obama’s people never tell the whole truth, just as in the first sentence below which attempts to state that students are functioning at a higher level than ever before and that the government education system is actually working. The secret is that the standards have been lowered to make students appear better—without actually achieving anything. For the government, they are successful because they are in the business of making more compliant—average—people. But for the hopeful parent who wants their child to be the next Einstein—there is nothing about the following proposal that will help their child achieve greatness. Obama simply wants to clip their intellectual wings so that in the future—those children will be happy in the middle-class.
From: Barack Obama <democraticparty@democrats.org> Date: Tuesday, February 24, 2015 Subject: Stand with me on education, Rich
To: Rich Hoffman
Just last week, Rich, we found out that our high school students are currently graduating at an all-time high, and last
year, our younger students posted the highest scores ever recorded in both math and reading. That’s great news! But ensuring our children get the most from their education in today’s ever-evolving economy
remains one of our most important responsibilities. It’s also a major part of my vision for a stronger middle class,
which I laid out in the State of the Union last month. That’s why I’m making the replacement of No Child Left Behind a priority. We need a better education plan — one that
cuts standardized testing to a bare minimum, invests in our preschools, and gives every kid in every corner of our
country a fair shot. I’m calling on Congress to pass a law that makes this vision of a brighter tomorrow for our sons and daughters a reality, Rich.
If you agree with me, then go ahead and let them know right now by adding your name next to mine. This plan is just common sense, and it deserves a vote in the House and Senate. But Republicans on Capitol Hill have their own ideas, and without support from people like you, it will be pretty darn tough to have a meaningful debate about any of this. I’m confident that we can work together and get this done, but I could use your help today to show Republicans that
Democrats are committed to making this level of progress permanent. So sign your name today, and tell Congress to pass an education bill that works for middle-class families: http://my.democrats.org/Better-Education-Plan Thanks for standing with me today, Rich.
I’ll be in touch again soon.
Barack Obama
Now, here is a message from the Liberty Township Tea Party describing what is really going on with Obama’s new education plan. To those who think that the Tea Party is still a group of radicals, the evidence below should be obvious.
The White House and government position in general is to make more compliant “middle-class” people through federal education programs. As any intelligent reader will quickly notice by reading the following additional information deliberately removed from Obama’s letter on the same subject, the attempt is to erode more state sovereignty issues at the level of educationand to give even more central control over education matters to the federal government. Read it for yourself:
ACTION ALERT: STOP THE STUDENT “SUCCESS” ACT (HR 5)
Congressional Leadership Is Bull-Rushing Through HR5, the 600 Page Reauthorization of No Child Left Behind (rebranded the “Student Success Act”)
The House votes on it this week. Call your Representative and call the Speaker of the House and tell them to vote “no” on HR 5!
202-224-3121. Below are just a few of the problems.
HR5 Denigrates Parental Rights and Seizes State Sovereignty
No program shall “operate within a State, unless the legislature of that State shall have . . . waived the State’s rights and authorities to act inconsistently with any requirement that might be imposed by the Secretary as a condition of receiving that assistance.” (Sec. 6561) (emphasis added).
Federal requirements will trump the rights “reserved to the States and individual Americans by the United States Constitution” to lead in the education of their child. (Sec. 6564)
Requires states to change laws and regulations to “conform” to HR5. (Sec. 1403)
HR5 Does Nothing to Relieve Children From No Child Left Behind’s (NCLB’s) Oppressive Testing Requirements.
Feds Will Effectively Direct State Education Policy through Enhanced Continuation of Heavy-Handed NCLB Policies
Requires states to demonstrate to the federal government that their standards, assessments, and state accountability systems meet the goal of “prepar[ing] all students to graduate high school for postsecondary education or the workforce.” (Sec. 1001)
Requires states to submit comprehensive state plans, which the Secretary can disapprove. (Sec. 1111)
Increases Federal Data Collection To Control Curriculum
Empowers the Department of Education to request individual student and teacher data from State and Local Education Agencies.
Just like the situation with Net Neutrality, Obamacare, or any other scandal, the Obama White House cannot be trusted with even small truths—because they will lie and mislead about virtually anything, particularly in regard to education. Their end game is not the same as the rest of the world. It’s rather selfish and full of presumption—they want an expanded “middle-class” to protect the seeds of progressivism created by their radical left-leaning predecessors. They care about the end because it justifies the means—and in this case they want a dumb population full of average, middle-class slugs so they can easily dominate their thoughts and actions over the next century. That in essences is what Obama didn’t say in his email. But if he wanted to tell the truth—he would have. Instead, it took the Liberty Township Tea Party to say what the truth really was by a political class who considers itself well above the middle-class and is protecting itself from future insurrection through poor education and centralized federal control.
Before the election results of 2014 are fully sustained, it is important to understand how the radical element of our society viewed those elections—which are represented below so clearly by the Huffington Post. The aforesaid article came out just a few days before Election Day 2014 and reveals a great deal of the underpinnings of progressive beliefs. Obviously, the concern is that American politics is moving back to the conservative right based on the polling of the Republicans taking control of the senate and defeating Democrats in several key races. Momentum is evaporating from the left and they realize it. The same desperation that has made Barack Obama into the king of empty forums and a White House backtracking on the importance of a midterm election—the political left is losing support rapidly. Have a read of the way progressive organizations viewed this particular election and what they are blaming their eroding support on.
There is still suspense over what will happen on Election Day, with control of the Senate hanging in the balance. But regardless of who wins, we already know the 2014 election belongs to the U.S. Supreme Court.
This is the first election where the country will experience the full impact of the Court’s recent decisions rewriting the ground rules of our democracy.
When the Court dismantled our laws regulating money in politics and gutted core voting rights protections, we knew those decisions would have consequences. But only now are we seeing the full scope of their impact: a return to pre-Watergate, pre-Civil Rights era practices. Cash from unknown sources is flooding the most important races, while state politicians have instituted new barriers to the ballot box for millions of Americans. Regardless of who wins, the integrity of our elections has been undermined.
For the first time in decades, citizens in nearly half the country will find it harder to vote. In 14 states, 2014 is the first major election with new voting restrictions in place. For many working class, minority, elderly, and young Americans, voting is now more difficult and expensive. For some, it is impossible. In Texas, for example, 608,000 registered voters do not have the photo ID now required to cast a ballot. A disproportionate number of them are black and Hispanic. Some have already been turned away at the polls.
While the voice of ordinary citizens grows fainter, the voice of the 0.2 percent of Americans who spend the vast majority of money in federal elections — often anonymously — is louder than ever. Outside campaign spending has shattered previous records, with new groups like super PACs and “dark money” groups that do not disclose their donors dwarfing the spending of ordinary citizens and sometimes even candidates themselves. In many key races it is impossible for us to know who is buying our elections.
Essentially, the Huffington Post is blaming their collapsing polices on the inability of their base to compete with money pouring into the political machine as if there was some type of unfair advantage being conducted. They seem to forget that Democrats have a nearly exclusive claim on minority voters, and the technically stupid. There are a lot of really stupid people out there and they mostly vote for Democrats. Democrats also have a lock on the public sector unions and all labor unions in general who pour many, many millions of dollars into candidates who obviously do not represent mainstream America. In fact, the progressive obsession with the whole photo ID issue is that it complicates the voting process too greatly for the typical Democrat. This means fewer voters for them who typically are sympathetic to the handouts given out by government.
What they mean by “pre-Watergate, pre-Civil Rights era practices” is that they successfully suppressed the influence of those who stand against them—and that now the pendulum is swinging the other way—and they don’t like it. It means they always intended to yank the nation radically to the political left with the intention to keep it there. But the nation doesn’t want to stay there; it doesn’t want the poor education practices, the hateful attitude toward business, the castigation of values and religion. It doesn’t want an abusive and top heavy government that will use the IRS to enact its will on dissenters. It doesn’t want Barack Obama or a Hillary Clinton who fails to understand that it is businesses that create jobs and nobody else.
I am personally not all that impressed by the election results. Sure the country is moving politically more toward my direction, but my representatives are far too pink to my blood red Republicanism. I live in a red state and a darker shade of that red than average—so many of the victories to me are just more wash-outs and future villains that need to be fought. But at least those are people worth fighting. The kind of politics the Huffington Post is referring to has deliberately been hidden from the view of the vast majority of Americans and it is now exposed. Now that people can see it, they are rejecting it—as many always knew they would. That is the price of deceit, and when elections are won by deceit—as they have for far too long now, progressive organizations like the Huffington Post should understand that any ground they have made will be lost in a whim just because their ground was not won by actual victory, but through deception. And this past election is only the beginning. There is a long way to go, but that direction is one that does not favor the progressive—that is for sure. Their arguments are tired, and now gleefully exposed.
Maybe you didn’t know it as the news is saturated with crises after crises attached to political affiliation. The marvelous news of America’s first spaceport in New Mexico has likely been lost to curious eyes. Perhaps you have just watched the movie Interstellar, or have watched a movie about space travel on a home theater system and were wondering why we aren’t doing more in space. Perhaps you just visited the Kennedy Space Center—one of my favorite places on earth and detected accurately that NASA seems to refer to itself in the past tense as opposed to the present. NASA used to be the best and brightest, but they have been defunded and mismanaged by the same federal government that can’t find their way out of a paper bag—so they are no longer what they used to be and you likely felt sorrow for the realization. You probably heard on the news that American astronauts have to pay Russia to journey into space with the same helplessness that travelers to New York City have to call upon the services of an overpriced taxi just to move four blocks in a crowded Manhattan. But you have not heard that in southern New Mexico innovation and space exploration is alive and well—and thriving.
Gateway to Space
Behold the headquarters of the first-ever ‘commercial passenger spaceline’.
Developed by the international design team of URS Corp. and Foster + Partners, the award-winning Virgin Galactic Gateway to Space is the iconic home of Virgin Galactic’s global operations and fleet of motherships and spaceships. Precision-engineered to exacting LEED Gold environmental requirements, the sinuous shape of the building in the landscape captures the drama and mystery of space flight itself, articulating the thrill of space travel for the first commercial space tourists. The Gateway’s many interior spaces, including its massive central super-hangar, astronaut multipurpose training rooms, and the exclusive astronaut lounge, may all be reserved in coordination with Virgin Galactic.
Literally, anybody who can afford a ticket can visit this spaceport and fly into space starting in 2015. It is available to the general public for the first time in human history and is a very exciting development. And it isn’t just Virgin Galactic which will operate at the spaceport, just as one particular airline doesn’t operate at an airport. Just a couple of days prior to this writing a new company has signed up with the spaceport to operate a new variety of space travel with a bit cheaper and more luxurious option. The following is from the Albuquerque Journal in New Mexico about this exciting new flight option from Spaceport of America.
World View Enterprises Inc. of Tucson, Ariz., plans to send customers on balloon flights that climb 20 miles into the stratosphere, allowing passengers to view the earth’s curvature and the dark of space while wining and dining in a luxurious cabin with 360-degree views.
No decisions have been made, but the company is in negotiations with Spaceport executives to launch its balloons from southern New Mexico, starting in late 2016, said Chief Technology Officer Taber MacCallum.
“We hope to have a home base at the Spaceport,” MacCallum told the Journal. “It’s an amazing facility.”
MacCallum and World View CEO Jane Poyntner were key players in the “Stratospheric Explorer” team that helped prepare Google executive Alan Eustice for his record-breaking supersonic skydive over Roswell last Friday. The team, set up by Paragon Space Development Corp., created the balloon technology that carried Eustice to nearly 136,000 feet, as well as the spacesuit Eustice used to safely leap back to Earth.
MacCallum and Poyntner co-founded Paragon and then launched World View as a separate company in 2013
World View has now acquired the balloon and spacesuit technology from Eustice’s jump for incorporation into the balloon flights that will eventually take paying passengers to the Earth’s outer edge.
The company expects to charge $75,000 for seats on a luxury capsule attached to a helium balloon. The capsule, which will carry six passengers and two pilots, willslowly ascend to 100,000 feet and then float in near space before returning to earth. The five-hour trip will include a meal and an open bar in the capsule, equipped with a lavatory and enough room for customers to walk around.
“The balloon will be the size of a football stadium once it’s fully blown up,” said World View Experience Manager Andrew Antonio. “Passengers won’t experience weightlessness, but that’s deliberate. The experience is about the spectacular views they’ll get while enjoying a leisurely flight and not even spill their drinks during takeoff and landing.”
The options being offered at this time from the Spaceport of America so far are just rides into space for the fun of it—for the experience. But with the construction and operation of the spaceport—and the type of people who will be the first to fly into space—new options will become available quickly. The area around that spaceport will soon become flooded with resident housing and commercial supplements to a new classification of human being, the first workers in space who will soon build hotels and launch platforms in space for future travel. At this phase, the Spaceport of America will allow investors into space to see the real-estate available to the ideas their minds create—the many factories, shopping destinations and resort communities that will soon float around the earth in zero gravity. It will not take long for the Spaceport of America to move from a novelty voyage to a daily commute to work as employees will fly up and down daily from that port building the next steps of human endeavor. In about the same time it took for the Wright Brothers Kitty Hawk plane to move into a thriving airport like O’Hara in Chicago, space travel will move from a gimmick of leisure to an act of function.
The gateway to it all is the Spaceport of America. It won’t take long for there to be spaceports in Japan, in Indonesia and other places so that voyagers can even use space travel to shave time off their flights around the world. A flight to Japan for instance from New York would be just a few hours instead of an entire day—which can be very valuable if the meeting requires a face to face encounter to fulfill the needs and speed of business. The degree to space travel that will occur will be directly tied to the amount of government intrusion there is into the surrounding culture. Large intrusive governments obviously will not be able to sustain such projects—and concepts, but those that allow entrepreneurial efforts to flourish will explode with opportunities. What is a desert now in southern New Mexico will soon become an oasis of capitalism and opportunity. The Spaceport of America will soon change the way everyone does business and spends their leisure.
You likely didn’t hear about this Spaceport of America because government considers its business of elections and chaotic micromanagement of tax payer resources as a priority—but to the world at large—its not. The true miracle of our age is there in the New Mexico desert growing by the day. In just a few short years it will be a hub of activity for all those scratching at the sky for an opportunity that only space can provide. If you are an older couple who has a few million dollars sitting in your bank account knowing that you likely won’t live long enough to spend it during your life time—what they Hell, get your tickets at the Spaceport of America for a memorable 50th anniversary in space from the luxury of a balloon cabin. Why not, the government will just steal all your money if you leave it to your children. Spend it on yourself and have some fun starting with the Spaceport of America and start a new club of romance called the “20-mile club.” The ticket office is now open so book your trip today!
Over twenty years ago I read a book by Kip Thorne about black holes and time warps that was a treasure I will never forget. In it the theoretical physics applied I knew would alter the way human beings relate to virtually everything in their lives. It has taken a long time, but finally that applied science is emerging into a film that I think will shatter the perceptions many have of their reality and I am ecstatic about its release in theaters everywhere on November 7th. I have been waiting a long time for this movie as the subject matter is one that excites great passion in me. The topic of black holes as a category of science is an obsession of my wife who spends most of her time contemplating them and how they relate to the universe. It makes for some interesting dinner conversation. As I pay attention to politics and social sciences to a large degree, she would rather not have her mind encumbered with such sluggish perceptions. But when it comes to theoretical physics and the morality of the universe—she blooms like a spring flower. The movie is called Interstellar and was developed by Steven Spielberg then taken over and directed by Christopher Nolan in 2010, whom I have said so many positive things about as a young film maker.
When the movie Back to the Future came out, the film left a mark on the public consciousness that changed social vocabulary. It was a Spielberg produced project that made discussions about the space-time continuum a topic of dinner time conversation. Mankind became smarter because of the comedy Back to the Future due to the presentation of the theoretical science involved. A few years later Spielberg did it again with Jurassic Park and the concept of DNA building of living creatures. Complicated discussion about DNA engineering soon filled the airwaves and mankind took another complicated step forward. Only through the popular action movie Jurassic Park was the hard debate about DNA framed for public dialogue. In the new film Interstellar the concept of space, time, and even the life of the earth will be brought into a focus yet unexplored properly. That is because Kip is the executive producer of this important film and Christopher Nolan along with composer Hans Zimmer are willing to take epic risks to portray these complicated elements on-screen for audiences who had been previously unaware of these scientific concepts.
Warner Bros., who produced and distributed some of Nolan’s previous films, negotiated with Paramount, traditionally a rival studio, to have a financial stake in Interstellar. Legendary Pictures, which formerly partnered with Warner Bros., also sought a stake. The three companies co-financed the film, and the production companies Syncopy and Lynda Obst Productions were enlisted. The director also hired cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema since his long-time collaborator Wally Pfister was busy working on Transcendence, his directorial debut. Interstellar was filmed with a combination of anamorphic35mm and IMAX film photography. Filming took place in the last quarter of 2013 in locations in the province of Alberta, Canada, in southern Iceland, and in Los Angeles, California. The visual effects company Double Negative created visual effects for Interstellar.
Thorne was born in Logan, Utah, the son of Utah State Universityprofessors D. Wynne Thorne and Alison C. Thorne, a soil chemist and an economist, respectively. Raised in an academic environment, two of his four siblings are also professors. He became interested in science at the age of eight, after attending a lecture about the solar system. Thorne and his mother then worked out calculations for their own model of the solar system.
Thorne rapidly excelled at academics early in life, becoming one of the youngest full professors in the history of the California Institute of Technology. He received his B.S. degree from Caltech in 1962, and Ph.D. degree from Princeton University in 1965. He wrote his doctoral thesis, Geometrodynamics of Cylindrical Systems, under the supervision of relativist John Wheeler. Thorne returned to Caltech as an associate professor in 1967 and became a professor of theoretical physics in 1970, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in 1981, and the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics in 1991. In June 2009 he resigned his Feynman Professorship (he is now the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus) to pursue a career of writing and movie making. His first film project will team him with Christopher Nolan.
Throughout the years, Thorne has served as a mentor and thesis advisor for many leading theorists who now work on observational, experimental, or astrophysical aspects of general relativity. Approximately 50 physicists have received Ph.D.s at Caltech under Thorne’s personal mentorship.
Thorne is known for his ability to convey the excitement and significance of discoveries in gravitation and astrophysics to both professional and lay audiences. In 1999, Thorne made some speculations on what the 21st century will find as the answers to the following questions:
Is there a “dark side of the universe” populated by objects such as black holes?
Can we observe the birth of the universe and its dark side using radiation made from space-time warpage, or so-called “gravitational waves”?
Will 21st century technology reveal quantum behavior in the realm of human-size objects?
Thorne has made contributions to black hole cosmology. Thorne proposed his Hoop Conjecture that cast aside the thought of a naked singularity. The Hoop Conjecture describes an imploding star turning into a black hole when the critical circumference of the designed hoop can be placed around it and set into rotation.[5] That is, any object of mass M around which a hoop of circumference can be spun must be a black hole. As a tool to be used in both enterprises, astrophysics and theoretical physics, Thorne has developed an unusual approach, called the “Membrane Paradigm“, to the theory of black holes and used it to clarify the “Blandford-Znajek” mechanism by which black holes may power some quasars and active galactic nuclei. Thorne has investigated the quantumstatistical mechanical origin of the entropy of a black hole and the entropy of a cosmological horizon in an inflationary model of the universe. With Wojciech Zurek he showed that the entropy of a black hole of known mass, angular momentum, and electric charge is the logarithm of the number of ways that the hole could have been made. With Igor Novikov and Don Page he developed the general relativistic theory of thin accretion disks around black holes, and using this theory he deduced that with a doubling of its mass by such accretion a black hole will be spun up to 0.998 of the maximum spin allowed by general relativity, but not any farther. This is probably the maximum black-hole spin allowed in nature. He, along with his mentor John Wheeler, additionally proved that it was impossible for cylindrical magnetic field lines to implode. Both Hawking and Thorne have theorized that a singularity exists in the interior of a black hole.
Wormholes and time travel
Thorne was one of the first people to conduct scientific research on whether the laws of physics permit space and time to be multiply connected (can there exist classical, traversable wormholes and “time machines“?). With Sung-Won Kim, Thorne identified a universal physical mechanism (the explosive growth of vacuum polarization of quantum fields), that may always prevent spacetime from developing closed timelike curves (i.e., prevent “backward time travel”). With Mike Morris and Ulvi Yurtsever he showed that traversable Lorentzian wormholes can exist in the structure of spacetime only if they are threaded by quantum fields in quantum states that violate the averaged null energy condition (i.e. have negative renormalized energy spread over a sufficiently large region). This has triggered research to explore the ability of quantum fields to possess such extended negative energy. Recent calculations by Thorne indicate that simple masses passing through traversable wormholes could never engender paradoxes – there are no initial conditions that lead to paradox once time travel is introduced. If his results can be generalized, they would suggest that none of the supposed paradoxes formulated in time travel stories can actually be formulated at a precise physical level: that is, that any situation in a time travel story turns out to permit many consistent solutions.
Relativistic stars, multipole moments and other endeavors
With Anna Żytkow, Thorne predicted the existence of red supergiant stars with neutron-star cores (Thorne–Żytkow objects). He laid the foundations for the theory of pulsations of relativistic stars and the gravitational radiation they emit. With James Hartle, Thorne derived from general relativity the laws of motion and precession of black holes and other relativistic bodies, including the influence of the coupling of their multipole moments to the spacetime curvature of nearby objects. Thorne has also theoretically predicted the existence of universally antigravitating “exotic matter” – the element needed to accelerate the expansion rate of the universe, keep traversable wormhole “Star Gates” open and keep timelikegeodesic free float “warp drives” working. With Clifford Will and others of his students, he laid the foundations for the theoretical interpretation of experimental tests of relativistic theories of gravity – foundations on which Will and others then built. Thorne is currently interested in the origin of classical space and time from the quantum foam of quantum gravity theory.
All of that complicated dialogue will be presented with a coherent and compelling story driven by the director Christopher Nolan. It will be an epic event to say the least as many of Kip’s theories described above will be presented in Interstellar. For my wife and I it will make for marvelous diner conversation afterwards—an event that is rare indeed. It’s the kind of thing that we talk about often and it will be a pleasure to see such obscure topics presented in a way that elevates the future dialogue of the human race. On November 7th 2014, mankind will take a new step forward toward a fate that has not yet been written.
For the sheer joy of it, I like to take some time out to relish each new release of X-Wing Miniatures particularly when it involves the Rebels. My new mediation chamber regarding that game is currently located in my basement which is permanently set-up so that I can play Star Wars: Miniatures any time I want. I often go to my Star Wars room and sit for hours and hours working out various strategies and mission scenarios because it relaxes my mind. I enjoy just looking at the models and their complicated paint schemes and browsing through all the cards that make the game so interesting. For a good part of a year I kept the game packed up in various containers which had to be set up on large tables whenever we wanted to play. But now, it just stays up and I come and go at will which is refreshing. The game is interesting enough to use a room for such a thing and it is quickly becoming my favorite place in my house.
The new release from Fantasy Flight Games which I am quite excited for is the Rebel Aces expansion pack which features a custom painted B-wing and an A-wing. There are a couple of new pilots namely Jake Farrell, Keyan Falander who are interesting, but what is best about Rebel Aces is the A-wing Test Pilot card and the Chardaan Refit which allows for eliminating missile tubes to save some point cost in using an A-wing in a combat listing. I currently don’t use A-wings very much because of their lack of firepower, but with the two mentioned cards, I may well consider it. Probably the most interesting part of these new expansions are the missions that come with them. With Aces it is a mission called “Jump to Subspace” which features a rebel operative who has captured a high-ranking Moff. This operative and his captive also happen to be adrift within an escape pod headed toward an asteroid field. As imperial forces close in on the escape pod, the Rebel Alliance races to the rescue, relying upon the agility of its A-wing and resilience of its B-wing.
It’s in those X-wing Miniatures missions that I find so much compelling drama that is every bit as interesting as a novel. The big difference is that the game requires your input whereas the novel is a passive experience. So spending time at my gaming table has for me become similar to reading books, only I love the tactical strategy involved—and with every new release from Fantasy Flight Games, new variations come into the game which have to be figured out. Rebel Aces as talked about in the Team Covenant video above is essentially a way to dust off the A-wing into new use now that the game has matured.
It’s a fun time to be a Star Wars fan, not only do I have the daily ability to now play X-wing Miniatures but coming up on Friday is the new Star Wars: Rebels premier movie on the Disney Channel. I have been proclaiming this as a game changer in entertainment media because it will be, just as Fantasy Flight Games has taken the Miniatures game and exploded it into this exciting new game which I can spend endless amounts of time contemplating in the privacy of my basement. The makers of that new series are essentially guys like myself who played with all those old toys as a kid and are now applying that kind of play to the real world of their adult lives. Kids watching the new Rebels show will then grow up with an even greater hunger for that kind of thing than I did—which is a positive.
Growing up I had a similar space in the basement of my childhood home and I often spent entire weekends down there playing with Star Wars toys and as I become older—building Star Wars models. When I hit driving age my parents felt I needed my own room in the basement so they finished it off which meant that my Star Wars set-up had to come down. They figured that I was big enough and it was time to out-grow that kind of thing as if it were a pacifier for a baby. But that space meant more to me than they realized and once the Star Wars set-up was destroyed and boxed up I pretty much left home. I immediately started traveling all over the country on wild adventures because the kind of imagination generation that I had been conducting in my basement no longer filled that void and I had to fill it with something. It had been my favorite place in the entire world and looking back on it, it was just a bunch of plastic, cloth, cardboard and glue. But it was a realm of endless imagination for me, and I simply relished it.
The popularity of the X-wing Miniatures game today is likely due to the fact that there are other people who feel that way about those types of things as I do. I am much happier now that I have a permanent set-up for that type of thinking. I was up at 3:30 AM on Saturday trying to get my CR-90 through an asteroid field dotted with Imperial mines all while being attacked by hoards of Imperial fighters and I had no idea that it was so late. The world was doing whatever it was doing outside, but I was happy to be enjoying the drama of strategy. Of course when I do return to the world from that place of fantastic mediation, I feel fresh to solve real problems so it is an enhancement to my life instead of a distraction. Some people have model trains in their basements; I have Star Wars—thankfully.
There are many things to feel negative about, but it is good to have a sanctuary where your mind can get away from the pressure and be itself. For me a space in the basement dedicated to my favorite mythology is the ticket, for others it may be the garage or the kitchen—but regardless of where or what it is, it is good to have one. For me, with all the exciting Star Wars news coming out constantly, this new expansion called Rebel Aces is more than a pleasure; it is an enhancement to my life. I’m really looking forward to it which I intend to pick up by the weekend. I will likely celebrate the upcoming Friday by watching Star Wars: Rebels on Disney, then playing X-wing until the sun comes up—and for me—the world will be just perfect in that little corner of my imagination personified by my personal temple of mythology.
(Yeah, I know that guy, really well). I was in Hollywood once where an unnamed actress wanted to pay me a handsome amount of money to treat her in this fashion and I tried to explain to her why she wanted to have it done and that she needed to correct that desire. Of course it angered her and she never spoke to me again—but let me be clear—I have a lot of experience in the how and why people desire BDSM, and I have always been against the practice. Unfortunately, a majority of the people in the world these days desire BDSM in some capacity and this is extremely unhealthy. The cause I will reveal at the end of this article, but first we need to understand why people do it—or want to have it done to them. The best example of course is Larry Wachowski who started messing around in the Dungeon in Los Angeles and his experiences there ruined his marriage and made him realize that he desired submissive sex—and that he was really a woman. No—that is not the reality—he just took it too far and misread his desires. So below are quotes from an article on the topic by dominatrixs who are paid professionals whose task it is to turn people into sexual submissives—particularly men—and their observations on why their clients came to them. Larry Wachowski’s story is actually one that too many people have, men and women and there is no way to solve the many riddles in American culture when these silly fantasies occupy the minds of a society the way that it currently does—so some attention must be given to it. The part where my opinions on it will enrage people is that it is clearly a mental neurosis built on poorly constructed values which causes it and is the direct result of a failed personal philosophy. If you dear reader are a man and have submissive fantasies—you are fu**ed up and need to be fixed. Here is why.
Many men who turn to submissive fantasies do so for precisely the sort of vacation from responsibility that Roiphe suggests women are seeking. Olivia Severine, a transsexual dominatrix living in San Francisco, says most of her clients were “very high-powered” men weighed down by responsibility. “They came to see me as a brief escape when no one was looking at them for direction or leadership,” she says. “The time with me is when they were told what to do, what to feel and how to act … and all the weight of their careers, families, lives, is lifted from them for a cherished few hours.”
Mistress Shae Flanigan, a Los Angeles dominatrix, says her clients are “CEOs, high-ranking managers, lawyers and wonderfully brilliant men from all over the business spectrum.” What they have in common is “that they come to me to create an environment where they don’t need to think,” she says. “Where they can trust me to keep them safe while I weave together an enticing, thrilling, euphoric and painful world where it is literally impossible to think.”
It isn’t that these guys wish they had less real-world power — it’s just, power is stressful, and submission provides a release. “BDSM is a hell of a lot more affordable of a vacation than the Bahamas, I promise you,” says Flanigan.
Melissa Febos, author of “Whip Smart,” a book about her time as a pro-domme, tells me, “As someone who spent nearly four years catering to the submissive fantasies of men, and who eventually had to acknowledge her own submissive fantasies, I can say with some certainty that I think all people experience anxiety about power,” she says. “Aren’t our objects of eroticization often the things we feel unreconciled about?”
Most of Febos’ clients “experienced an imbalance of power in their lives,” she says. For some it was “extreme disempowerment,” like child abuse, racism or poverty; for others, it was “an overwhelming burden of power,” related to everything from wealth to politics. (“During the Republican convention, business at the dungeon boomed,” she says.) All of that is to say that “eroticization stemming from anxiety is not gender-specific,” Febos explains — nor is it specific to the relative power one has in the real world.
“Everyone, regardless of career choice or level of importance, is saddled with the burden of making important decisions about their own lives and the lives of the people around them,” Domina Nyx of New York City points out.
While Natasha Strange, who has worked as a domme for almost 20 years, has had plenty of “men who are powerful and want to give up control for a bit,” she’s also had tons of “musicians, cab drivers, pharmacy reps, teachers and your basic blue-collar workers who are just kinky and want to feel desired for an hour or three.” Interestingly enough, she says, “The very first female client I had was a housewife and a mother of two.”
All of my creative written works up until this point have been focused on human sacrifice. It is a topic I have long been obsessed over. When I realized that becoming an archaeologist would not answer the questions I was asking I turned to comparative religion and philosophy to understand. In my 1997 screenplay The Lost Cannibals of Cahokia I directly explored the horror of this topic and the work bounced around Hollywood for a number of years. When I showed apprehension in joining the Writers Guild when directed by a Wilshire Blvd agent—the story died because with the promise of developing the script was a reworking of the sacrifice plotline and a refocus on the horror aspects. Well, the point of the story for me was to understand why human beings felt they needed to sacrifice themselves to other people. So I continue to retain the rights, but development died on the vine. My 2004 novel The Symposium of Justice was essentially about a vigilante who protects people from the desire of an “evil system” to sacrifice the good for the many at the expense of the individual. My 2012 novel Tail of the Dragon was essentially about a man who refused to allow himself to be sacrificed in any manner at all socially. His refusal caused the greatest car chase in American history—it became a kind of Vanishing Point type story except much more intense. But the central thesis was on sacrifice. I have had many publishers, agents, actors, financiers and the like convey their appreciation of my works, but there is always something left out of our dialogue which goes unsaid and prevents further interaction and development.
From 2006 to 2009 I conducted a number of onsite visits to areas known for their human sacrifice to understand better the cause. I visited the site of Cahokia outside of St. Louis and the subject of my 1997 screenplay. Based on some new information from that visit The Lost Cannibals of Cahokia screenplay won an award at the Indie Gathering Film Festival in the horror category. Shortly after my wife and I visited the Chichen Itza archaeological site in the Yucatan Peninsula to study the actual location of many human sacrifice examples. I had thought that the Mel Gibson film Apocalypto was actually one of the best Anthropological/Archaeological films done on the Mayan culture and on human sacrifice. So out of all the world’s sacrificial sites—Chichen Itza held the best example of the practice that was the most fully preserved. I had my thesis which was put into my books and screenplays and ironically, Mel Gibson was destroyed as a filmmaker after that film which came out during this period. There was something about the subject matter of sacrifice which made people feel uncomfortable. On one level they agreed—the Mayan practice of human sacrifice was terrible, and barbaric. On the other, human sacrifice still occurs; it is just much slower and doesn’t necessarily mean that a person must be killed—literally. Just metaphorically—the cause of most BDSM is to reconcile that metaphorical death within an individual life.
While helping Doc Thompson promote the first Atlas Shrugged film over AM radio, I discovered Ayn Rand and read all her books and found that she had already been down the road I was going in regard to human sacrifice. She had approached the problem philosophically where mine was archaeological, but the conclusions were similar. This helped me refine the argument from a big general thesis against sacrifice to a more pointed one backed by her previous work in Objectivism. So this lead me to establish the proper background in declaring that I have spent a lot of time on this notion of sacrifice and explored its nature as a corrosive social element and am fully capable to speak on the matter with authority.
The reason that men desire to “not think” and to surrender themselves to a dominatrix is because they have been taught that not everyone is a superman—that not everyone can support the world—and that weaknesses are virtuous. It is inconceivable to me that a “powerful” man responsible for the jobs of many people and the fiscal merits of a company he works for—or owns, would desire to have his pants pulled down like a child and be spanked—harassed, and dominated by another human being because they want a vacation from making hard decisions. The cause is a failed philosophy at the heart of their very minds. But the cause of the belief that not everyone can be a superman is that the notion of self-sacrifice has been embedded into such men from the time that they were children. If a man is too successful, he feels guilt about it and seeks to reconcile that guilt by being dominated—the way he dominates others. It’s a silly belief that a social balance must be maintained and that it can only be found through masochistic pain. That is the start, and like Larry Wachowski who went from zero to a 1000 after the success of his Matrix film—he did not have the mental capacity to deal with the success other than his instruction of self-sacrifice by a society still functioning like the now extinct Mayans.
When the actress asked me to beat her with one of my whips, I understood what she wanted. She sat with me at the catering truck talking about how tough it was to get roles in Hollywood, how relationships were tough to maintain, that everyone expected you to be one way or another and that if you didn’t fit those molds—you didn’t get parts. She went on and on about her father’s expectations, her mother’s feminist declarations—her agents typecasting—I don’t think I said a word during the entire lunch hour on set. It was like nobody had listened to this girl for a decade and for whatever reason she felt she could talk to me. At the end she put a stack of ten $100 dollar bills on the table and asked me to hit her with my whip the way I had been doing on set—only privately. She talked about the culture of Los Angeles and how much money I could make providing such a service to the frustrated actresses in Beverley Hills, the confused house wives of the studio executives up in the hills around Burbank and the cultural immigrants of Glendale looking for the kind of abuse they received in the countries they came from in the safety of a person they could trust would not hurt them permanently. She told me about places like the Dungeon where Larry Wachowski lost his mind and manhood. Apparently this nice clean-cut girl who was married to one of the producers with several of her children on the set spent a lot of time in those kinds of places. I told her I didn’t do that kind of thing—that my interest in bullwhips was inspired by Douglas Fairbanks and the old serials of the 30s, 40s and 50s. I hoped that by mentioning old Hollywood, we would find common ground—but instead she went cold and got up embarrassed from feeling so vulnerable in what she revealed to someone who wouldn’t jump to the dark side with her. “Fu** Douglas Fairbanks” she said as she took her tray back to the truck. She left the bills on the table, angrily dispensed her tray, then came back to retrieve the money and sat down next to her husband who had been doing his best to avoid my gaze—until his wife sat back down next to him.
These broken thoughts—these desires to be abused don’t just regulate themselves to the bedroom. They come out in voting booths where voters secretly desire to be dominated by a Barack Obama, or commanded around by a Harry Reid, or lied to by Nancy Pelosi. Men and women want to be seduced by Bill Clinton—they know he is a scum bag liar, but they have this notion of wanting to be abused by him to satisfy the internal need they have for insult—pain, and suffering. The more comfortable their lives are, the more they feel they must pay someone or something back to the universe to balance out existence. And non-thinking pain and abuse accomplishes two things, it does give them a retreat from responsibility, but also it equalizes the guilt they feel from being successful and having the ability to get their nails done, or play a round of golf at 1 PM in the afternoon until 5 PM while most people in the world are working.
Chances are dear reader you have these same thoughts and feelings and they were given to you by a failed society and its ridiculous philosophies built upon crumbled civilizations from the past. If you desire to be spanked, slapped around, have your hair pulled—to be called disgraceful names, to be handcuffed, raped, or have things clipped to your skin by someone else until it hurts—you are messed up. You are broken and need to be fixed. What you are feeling are ancient thoughts that should be eradicated. They are not healthy thoughts given to you outside of your control by some deity living in the hereafter. They are screwed up philosophies given to mankind by the past which always lead to failed societies. In the case of Larry Wachowski he destroyed his life and is seeking justification in the form of being a woman to excuse his mistakes. It is only because he is a progressive that the studio bosses keep him employed hoping that one of his films will be the next Matrix—which was a fluke—a one shot wonder. But the entire nation of America is seeking a similar punishment through self-sacrifice and under such a belief system nothing can endure.
Consider the absolutely stupid notion that we are supposed to thank our troops for their service to their country. The popular phrase—“some gave all” implies that giving one’s life to the freedom of everyone in the country is the noblest thing anyone can do—and that is just stupid. The sudden appreciation of our troops over the last decade of treacherous debt (nearly $18 trillion and counting) only confirms to individuals everywhere that the state is the highest authority and its continued preservation must be endured at any cost—even if it means death. Therefore, with that basic premise intact success is believed to be reconciled through pain and suffering. And because sex is a major part of every adult life, punishment has entered the bedroom to align the minds of warped individuals with the insanity they are being forced to contend with due to massive mismanagement and poor philosophical choices of the world’s governments—particularly America. It is worse in America not because it is a bad nation, but because there is a pretense of freedom which is assumed, but the old diabolical need for abuse still persists in the human mind forcing the behavior underground on a massive level. This duality causes many of the problems we are seeing.
In Asian countries where the governments are communist and abusive, the old desires to be abused by an authority figure satisfy their innate impulses so the sexual deviancy does not go underground the way the cultures of Los Angeles or New York conduct their affairs—living one way in the open, another when nobody is looking. But the causes are all the same—mankind has not grown up and away from the self-sacrificial nature of their ancestors and are still just as primitive. Until a mind grows up and away from such a desire of sacrifice—the evils of personal destruction through masochistic abuse and internal hatred will continue. And that will cause more movies like Cloud Atlas to be made instead of films about people who have overcome self-sacrifice—like in Atlas Shrugged.
I probably think of General Patton at least once every day of my life since I saw the movie about him when I was a very little boy. In the film when Patton was under strife by aircraft instead of taking cover like everyone else, he ran out into the street and poured his revolver into the planes as they flew by staring down the bullets as they hit around his feet without flinching an iota. Later, during 90’s while watching the historically accurate Young Indiana Jones Chronicles on ABC television I learned of a much younger Patton who was hunting down Pancho Villa on the Mexican border and challenged some of his men there to an old-fashioned duel. That clip is seen below. In the 80’s I was working at the restaurant ran by the Chinese mob out of Chicago and froze when I saw on the bar television the broadcast movie called The Last Days of Patton done once again by George C. Scott. I clocked out and the owner let me sit down at the bar next to two former Bengal players—Isaac Curtis and Gary Burly to watch the show—which floored me, because it seemed like such a bad end to such a glorious life that George Patton had. I never forgot it—in many ways Patton shaped my view of politics, military life in general, and the role mankind plays in the fate of its own history. I promised myself never to be stuck in the same situations that Patton found himself in—so have approached my own life much differently. But there is not a day where I don’t think of George Patton at least once.
Much to my delight the History Channel put on a miniseries after Memorial Day 2014 which captured the back story of the most important men from World War II and how World War I shaped their lives—and of course Patton was heavily featured which is why I watched the show. Much of the history shown in the program I already knew, but it was so wonderfully done that the context to the presentation was quite extraordinary. It was a stunning series done excessively well by The History Channel. And while I enjoyed the fresh perspective on George Patton, the rise of Adolf Hitler, the context of Mussolini—the newspaper man who wanted to rule the world—the wisdom of Churchill it was the sequences about Lenin and Stalin which hit me the hardest. Here is the press release material on the program. If you get a chance to catch the show—do so.
An assassination in Sarajevo sparks a global war. For the next 30 years, deadly fighting rages across Europe, Africa, China and the Pacific.
Hitler. Churchill. De Gaulle. MacArthur. Patton. Stalin. Mussolini. We know them as legends. But they first learn what it will take to rise to greatness as young soldiers, fighting for their lives on the frontlines.
This is the story of a generation of men who come of age in the trenches of World War I, only to become the leaders of World War II. The lessons they learn on the frontlines shape them as they rise to power—and haunt them as the deadly fighting breaks out again. Some become heroes, forged in courage under fire. Others emerge as the most infamous villains the world has ever seen.
Theirs is one story—the story of a 30-year global struggle. A fight that will either save the world—or destroy it.
Narrated by two-time Oscar nominee Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker, The Town), this three-night event series featured gripping dramatic scenes, stunning CGI visuals and interviews with contemporary leaders, including John McCain, Colin Powell, John Major and David Miliband, along with noted historians from around the world. The World Wars is a mini-series event that takes viewers on an epic and groundbreaking ride through the bloodiest century in history.
I knew that Lenin was in exile from Russia in Germany and that he had returned to Petrograd to ignite the Communist Revolution—but I didn’t have the context of the role the German government played in the expansion of that diabolical scheme which still haunts the world as the most devastating aspect of the 20th Century. The Germans sent Lenin back to Russia on a train with $10 million dollars and the philosophy of Karl Marx not to spread communism to the rest of the world for the benefits of mankind—but to destroy Russia so that Germany would not have to fight the war on two fronts. It worked—obviously The Communist Revolution in Petrograd has been covered by me extensively on these pages—but what I learned from the new History Channel documentary is that Germany intended to use Marxism to destroy Russia—not help it.
Later when Hitler would rise to power as well, it was socialism—a softer version of communism that he used to advance his position against the Allied powers which had crippled the German government into poverty after the Treaty of Versailles which has also been covered by me extensively. I have so many articles on this topic I wouldn’t even know which one to link to properly. What the History Channel documentary did so well was pull back far enough on the characters without emotion and tell their story correctly—and clearly in the early stages of Hitler’s rise—was a combination of two German philosophers, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche. One of them I despise, one of them I love—and Hitler got them both wrong just bad enough to nearly destroy the world. It quickly became quite clear that the Germans were vastly responsible for the creation of communism and played a major role on the defamation of the human race which persists to this day.
I am of German decent. Cincinnati was built essentially by Germans. The beer which established Cincinnati as a city came straight from Munich and was adored all over the nation. Yet some of the worst clashes I have had—business wise—have been against old German money in Cincinnati where my reverence for good ol’ Patton takes precedence over my German heritage. The Germans make great engineers, great philosophers, and a great productive society—but they are essentially collectivists whom I have grown to despise—first from my business experience—then from my knowledge of their history. And it gives me great satisfaction to know that Patton overwhelmed the German troops and caused the acquisition of Berlin ending both World Wars.
So many bad things have come out of Germany, specifically communism. For that alone, they deserve responsibility for one of history’s greatest follies. It is the modern Germans who still function under socialism and carry the rest of the European Union financially. It is because the Germans as so good at technical feats that they have managed to have a robust economy as socialists playing around in small ways with capitalism in the manner only collectivists can do. It is because of their collectivist nature that Hitler rose to power, and that Russia was destroyed as a rival in World War I. But in the end, Patton beat them twice—with a little help—but with the same gusto shown on a dusty street at the border with Mexico hunting down Pancho Villa. It is the Americans who function from bravery and the rest of the world through collective effort—and the two are radically different and can never be reconciled. These differences are on full display on the History Channel’s miniseries The World Wars. Watch it if you have not already.
What wins is Patton. What loses is Germany. It is better to face down a bullet than to hide from it, and when it comes to communism—it has to be stared down and dealt with directly. Not hidden from behind a barricade of cardboard capitalism. It has to be met the way Patton met things—head on, and with bravery—which is why I love that guy so incredibly much to this very day.
I wrote yesterday about Richard Best and his Black Lightning Wild West Show. But the location where we shot the video displayed in that article deserves its own mention, The Whip Artistry Studio of Gery Deer in Jamestown, Ohio is a one of the kind temple dedicated to the art and preservation of the bullwhip. Gery is currently a freelance television producer and writer in Dayton, but his heart centers on the preservation of Western Arts—particularly the bullwhip. Like me, he has worked with whips most of his life, and traveled the world providing shows. Gery and his wife Barb have been on major television shows and have been personally endorsed by “A” list celebrities and stuntmen. Gery’s Whip Artistry Studio is a museum of old westerns, autographs from Halle Berry, Antonio Banderas and many others, and a tribute to the golden age of cinema. Gery’s whip holstering systems were used in a film done by The Rock called The Rundown and it was because of that film that Gery specially designed my Cliffhanger quick drawl holster which I wear every day. My bullwhip holster is the only one of its kind and was made by Gery specifically for my use.
It is sometimes impossible when you know such people to revere them properly for what they are. I have known Gery for a long time, and we have so many things in common that I don’t often consider how unusual his life and his studio are. But in a world obsessed with preserving every species of animal that is on the brink of extinction, Gery is fighting to keep alive something that many more progressive modernists hope to force into distant memory, the American cowboy.
As unlikely as it is, Gery’s Jamestown, Ohio studio is all that stands between extinction and advancement of the kind of America that was so beloved by viewers of old Republic Saturday morning matinees, and wonderful silent films like Don Q, Son of Zorro. As many Hollywood producers these days bulk at such things, it was George Lucas who adopted these very Republic serials and made Star Wars, and Indiana Jones. Students at Gery’s studios want to learn to crack a whip like Indiana Jones, because those films inspired them.
Gery and I share a great reverence for Douglas Fairbanks, particularly the old film Son of Zorro. Of course we’ve always loved Indiana Jones, but that character never went to the whip handlers of old, like Douglas Fairbanks, Lash LaRue, and all the Republic Serials—especially another favorite of mine, Zorro’s Fighting Legion. When I wrote my book The Symposium of Justice I dedicated it to that old Republic serial including naming the restaurant Fletcher Finnegan worked at, “Republics.”
My current love of Star Wars is because Lucas shot those films in the way of those old serials—and that just isn’t done by any other film studio. And all that harkens back to Douglas Fairbanks and his whip tricks from Don Q, Son of Zorro. Gery Deer’s whip studio in Jamestown, Ohio is really the last gasp of air holding on to that past attempting to preserve it. Gery and I both came into our love of bullwhips the same way but he choose to actually move into show business. At age 46 I have lived my life much the way Don Diego did in Zorro’s Fighting Legion, only I haven’t pretended to be foppish to save my family and reputation from villains. Gery has taken a non-violent approach to the art, where I’m all about the violence. Even when I was writing The Symposium of Justice, I didn’t feel comfortable writing about the bullwhip heavy action scenes if I had not done all the stunts in real life to confirm their viability. And with stories like that, I have never felt comfortable writing about characters like Fletcher Finnegan (Cliffhanger) from behind an author’s stories. I always felt a responsibility to actually be those characters in real life, otherwise the task was hypocritical. In that regard, I am a lot more political than Gery. Gery has made his living often with a whip, as I have not. But I have used mine to confirm the stunts of Don Q, so that I could write about them knowing what was possible and what wasn’t and what really went on in the life of Zorro in a quest to fight evil.
But in a confusing world where every other influence is competing for attention, that old past ushered in by Douglas Fairbanks is most alive in Jamestown, Ohio, and I love it every time I get to visit. It is like a farmer returning to his land after plowing a field and smelling the fresh soil, or an artist during a late night epiphany—Gery Deer’s The Whip Artistry Studio is grounding to the roots of cinema, justice, and the genuine pursuit of goodness triumphing over evil. I never get tired of visiting, and I suspect that I never will.
