As a fine example of what I have been talking about regarding good management of a town government, no finer example could be found than in West Chester, Ohio with the opening of Premier Shooting & Training Center in just a few weeks of this writing. CLICK HERE TO REVIEW WHY. Typically projects like Premier are crushed through the zoning process where pin-headed liberal activists too often apply the worthlessness of their lives behind a façade of community interest using the power of regulation to provide meaning to their collectivist world vision. Entirely too often developers have to donate huge amounts of money to politicians just so they can have the opportunity to build something halfway decent—and usually what they end up with is a long way off from the original vision once zoning chews up a project into pieces and leaves the consumer public with an end product far less imaginative than when it was conceived. Precisely to the point, since Mark Welch has joined George Lang as a trustee in West Chester things have finally started to move in a positive direction. At the Streets of West Chester a fabulous entertainment facility is about to open called The Main Event, which is essentially a very high scale bowling facility—among many other things. The Holiday Inn just built a wonderful hotel across from IKEA—and the steak house featured at that establishment is great for business lunches. But then there is the Premier Shooting facility which is a game changer for a target range in the Tri-State area. It’s so nice that people will drive into town just to visit it from other cities. It is a top class facility. I was happy to get an invite to a sneak peek that the owners were putting on to tour the facility behind the curtain, and all I can say is that it was extremely impressive—and that three years ago—before Mark Welch was elected as a trustee giving George Lang that critical second vote that he needed for the many previous years of struggle—that the Premier facility could have only have been built within the last year. West Chester has a lot to look forward to regarding entertainment and leisure activity—and the Premier Shooting and Training Center is just the exclamation point at the end of an extravagant pro-capitalist government culture that has been created under the guidance of George Lang. I personally like George, but too often people disappoint me because they don’t walk the talk. George talks a lot—more than most people, but he walks more than he talks—let’s put it that way.
A few years ago a gun dealer and very pro Second Amendment guy named Mike Reed tried to set up shop in West Chester. The zoning people gave the prospective employer a rough way to go so he went north and essentially set up his Right 2 Arms gun shop in my backyard. He is doing well and has a great shooting simulator in the basement of his shop that can get people a concealed carry permit—among other things. I recently bought my Vaquero from Mike and was impressed to learn that it was his parents who essentially put up the money for him to manage—so it was a nice little family business that they were conducting because the family believed very strongly in the values of the NRA and specifically the Second Amendment. In my sport of Cowboy Fast Draw we call that the Cowboy Way.
I was more than a little surprised to learn at the preview of the Premier Shooting & Training Center that it was a very similar story to Mike’s, a mom and dad, Myron and Tommie Rowland had put up a very large amount of money to create a shooting establishment that their son will essentially manage. He has a background in the military and law enforcement and is the martial arts instructor. When I spoke to him he specified to me that his mission was to provide the people least able to defend themselves against aggression the means to do so—which is a tremendous service to the people of West Chester. He could have said to me that he hoped to make enough money to break even after their first year of operating—and in the context of our conversation he could have easily have said such a thing without shame—but he was quite sincere. That’s when it became apparent that the Premier Shooting & Training Center was a dream for this family and that George Lang and Mark Welch had created a business environment that allowed that dream to actually be constructed—along with a determined and well-known developer.
You can see that the dream was easy to share for this determined family because walking into the foyer of the facility is a very proud tribute to the Second Amendment. I included pictures on this article to do the place justice because the entire facility is just a testament to very firm American values. There is nothing like the Premier Shooting & Training Center in the Tri-State area and beyond within several hundred miles. The shooting lanes for target work are certainly on the high-end up range, but down range it is just state of the art. For me the most noticeable luxury was their air evacuation system which was moving a lot of air during my visit. As all shooters know there is a lot of lead in gun smoke so at a range where several shooters are working with their firearms smoke can fill the room quickly. That air has to be moved to keep things fresh because you don’t want to breathe too much as a shooter. It smells nice, but isn’t good for you under sustained conditions.
The first thing I thought of after touring the facility was that the owners of the Premier Shooting & Training Center had certainly taken care of their target audience. The gun retail store in the center of the action will be a place that guns of all kinds can be purchased and shot on the premises in the kind of luxury setting that shoppers would expect to find at Victoria’s Secret. It’s a nice, clean environment that provides access to their stock. For men who love to shoot, it’s a dream come true. But better than that—they can bring their wives without having to worry about the environment being too intimidating for them to feel included. The shooting range is set right off the retail area and is clean and safe. There is even an office for the range master to supervise two separate ranges by looking out a central window to ensure that no trouble occurs for the sake of safety. There is even an armourer on site to help with gun customization or troubleshooting that is equipped for minor gunsmithing duties. Everything about the shooting experience associated with a target range was on the top end.
But that wasn’t all, the facility offers a gun safe so that if you have a firearm that you want to protect while you’re out of town, or that you have purchased and are awaiting a permit for—like a machine gun—or something of that nature—it can be stored at the Premier Shooting & Training Center. I can think of a lot of times where a service like that would be valuable. There is also a combat training area with mats on the ground to protect falling bodies while learning hand to hand combat—with additional physical training equipment typically associated with a gym. Then there are conference rooms and classrooms that can be used to advance understanding of firearms and other topics. One of their meetings rooms would be ideal for renting any event where 100 people or so wanted to gather for an instructional class of some kind. It was a very nice facility.
Of course there was a lounge area designed to get people talking with one another which was a nice touch. Additionally under various membership packages there was a VIP area that was quite nice. The first thought I had was that this was an ideal place to bring business clients. Instead of taking clients out for a round of golf which takes all afternoon, a trip to the Premier Shooting & Training Center was a better option for the kind of bonding that is often required during business meetings and power lunches. The quality of the place made it fashionable especially with the VIP lounge which has the look of Teddy Roosevelt’s living room in South Dakota. There is a very nice patio that looks out over a lake and the setting is luxurious for a shooting range. It was a wonderful place to speak with people and network within the community. It was a very smart idea to include as a bonus to an otherwise fantastic shooting experience.
The Premier Shooting & Training Center was just the most recent example of what the American people can produce if you just get government out of their way and actually help them achieve their dreams. Mark and George, even though they will not take the credit—had a lot to do with making it so that such a wonderful place could actually be built-in West Chester. The owners had been shopping around and were looking at three possible sites. Zoning just a few years ago in West Chester would have forced the Rowlands to go out into a more rural location where there were less college trained leftists actively working against the Second Amendment. For West Chester to now be able to offer such a wonderful gun range within a few miles of Jags, and the Main Event is really an advantage for the entire community. I can easily see a business afternoon with VIPs dining at Jags then swinging over to the Premier Shooting & Training Center to shoot a few rounds—maybe even let them shoot a machine gun—which Premier is licensed to handle—then conduct further business in the VIP lounge before dropping them off at their hotel for the evening. Not only will the Premier Shooting & Training facility help train people how to defend themselves, and to more fully utilize the Second Amendment, but it will also facilitate even more business activity which will proportionally improve the productive output of the entire area. It is the kind of place that makes you feel safely wrapped in the American flag and to realize that we live in the greatest country on earth. And West Chester has one of the best shooting facilities in that country—right in our own back yards.
Many who read here think that I am anti-government. I am in fact anti-stupid and often when politicians are attracted to government positions for the healthy benefits provided, what you get are the dumbest people in our society signing up for the job because high quality people have better things to do in their life. Government to me is all about management and I expect the best managers available to do the job of government who don’t need to personally enrich themselves in the process. With that said I can say that in my hometown of West Chester, Ohio I personally like four of the five people in the below video—which is a trustee meeting for the local government. One guy, Lee Wong is not one of those four. I remember very well how he behaved for over six years, especially over a sidewalk he was working hard to extort from public funds near his home across the street from Jags—relatively speaking. CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW. He and Cathy Stoker blocked George Lang from being a part of the voting process until George worked hard to get a partner on the board to serve with him resulting in the election of Mark Welch. When Mark was elected it knocked off Cathy leaving Lee to fend for himself. Now he’s a disgruntled West Chester trustee. His partner was eliminated in an election, beaten by Welch who is now the new President. So congratulations Mark. Watch the first two minutes of this meeting to see what I’m talking about.
Lee Wong said some very interesting things in that exchange; one was that he thought the process was “perverted.” Below is the technical definition of perverted and it obviously doesn’t apply.
Medical Definition of perverted
: marked by abnormality or perversion <perverted pancreatic function><relieve concepts or fears of perverted sexual interest—W. H. Masters & V. E. Johnson>
Where Lee is wrong about the process is that voters saw how he and Cathy had been running things so they elected somebody different in George Lang. George then went to work looking for a managing partner on the board to help him with the district—because the previous team of Wong and Stoker were functioning from a much more socialist origin position. You can hear some of that socialism coming out of Lee during the exchange at the meeting with Bruce Jones, the current fiscal officer. Lee cited that he believed the board was unfair and that he should be elected president by proper rotation. For George to agree to something like that it would assume that all the trustees were equal in value, and they obviously are not.
George obviously trusts Mark to be the president, but Lee has shown that his personal values are not aligned with either of the two other trustees. So to allow a seat of power to fall into Lee’s hands just so he could feel “equal” or “fair” is just ridiculous considering the voters just re-elected Lang doing things they way that he has now for a while. Then they voted for Welch who was operating as a companion to George. Between the two West Chester has really sprung into action bringing many exciting opportunities to an already lucrative area. A lot of the very good things currently happening in West Chester right now could be directly attributed to the four people sitting in that video—excluding Lee of course.
The world changed under Lee’s feet and he didn’t adapt to those changing circumstances. All through the last decade progressive viewpoints even among conservatives were fashionable. Now they are not—instead Lang has brought a free market flare to West Chester politics which is allowing economic growth to escalate proportionally. Lee is now a relic of the past and he doesn’t understand why. That is why there was the really awkward silence during the meeting where everyone except Lee understood what was going on. Lee Wong came out sounding like an out-of-touch grandparent demanding that people ride horses instead of cars as a mode of transportation.
Lee also invoked that he was the top vote getter over both Lang and Welch. Well, Bernie Sanders is also very popular—socialism is very popular among lazy people and there are some of those people in West Chester. Government workers and companies that suck up to government workers love socialism. That much was evident on Martin Luther King Day in January of 2016. One of the busiest roads through West Chester is 747 at the foot of Beckett Ridge. On that national holiday the roads were 2/3rds empty as too many people were off work. I couldn’t help but wonder what all those people were doing on that day off if not something productive. How could a vibrant society trying to achieve excellent GDP nationally afford to take off a day for the memory of a civil rights leader? It’s nice to recognize such people with a national day of remembrance, but to take a day off from productive enterprise seems pretty silly. The kind of people who were off on Martin Luther King’s Day are the type of people who voted for Lee Wong—they tend to be lazy, and too addicted to government services—so Lee represents their type of thinking. That does not mean that Lee should be in charge of the board. Competition and the marketplace of politics should do that and George Lang has easily outsmarted Lee to achieve what he thinks needs to happen in West Chester. The voters re-elected Lang’s vision and the businesses who are attracted to West Chester because of the vibrant economic environment that Lang has helped create along with the other four people at that trustee meeting, are a testament to his success.
I’m talking about this because I think every school board and trustee meeting in America should learn something from this form of government that George has envisioned to nurture along—with a lot of help from his friends. If all branches of our government worked as well as George and Welch have helped make West Chester function—we’d all be a lot better off. I don’t do as many local articles as I used to because honestly, I have readers in over a 170 different countries and the daily stats are quite good. The power of the written word is like water—people see it sitting there and in small amounts it looks soothing and docile. But over time it carves many of the rivers, oceans and continental barriers that we see and gives life to the entire planet. So I put an emphasis on fixing the mind of people who are broken by their educations and cultural references and it takes time for them to see the light of day. I write to eat away at what’s wrong, to propose that intelligence can imply on collective stupidity. What good is a large collective mass of rock if water can erode it away into a pebble with a constant presence and pressure to reshape it into something else over time? The written word has that kind of power. But in this case the West Chester trustees and the people behind the scenes that make it work—except for Lee Won–are examples of how all governments need to strive to be. They could take a lesson from George Lang’s playbook.
Lee Wong is lucky that everyone is so nice to him. As a functioning socialist George and Mark put up with Lee because they are respecting the voters—those same slack-jawed, lazy, losers who were off work on Martin Luther King’s Day when there were productive enterprises to embark on. And I think that’s pretty nice of them. They may not agree with Lee, but at least they let him sit at the table and aren’t ganging up on him the way Stoker and Wong used to do against George when he was still new to the board. George is a lot nicer to Lee than he needs to be. Lee’s definition of things needs to change from the kind of East Avenue activity that might actually be considered truly perverted. The government of West Chester is not an example of absolute power that corrupts. Absolute power is in working with another trustee to destroy another person while at the same time hunting for real perversions on the streets of Hamilton late at night. George and Mark aren’t doing that. Lee on the other hand can’t say the same. Yet they treat him fairly—so long as he stays out-of-the-way. West Chester is the example that other governments across the world should be copying. And before it’s too late for them they need to figure out who their functioning socialists are and brush them out-of-the-way so real people can do the real work that government should have always been doing. But they can’t allow people like Lee to be in charge just because it’s “fair.” That’s just not how things work in a capitalist society.
On the Democrats side of the political spectrum, they don’t really have a candidate for president. Hillary Clinton is a criminal and I have serious doubts as of this writing that she will be able to beat the socialist Bernie Sanders for the nomination. Then with that said, I really don’t think America is ready to elect an open socialist. I don’t think in 2016 the nation is ready to accept socialism the way that France has, and many other European countries. A large portion of America has been raised on socialism—especially victims of public school over the last two decades. They have been taught in their educations that socialism is the way to go—especially college graduates. It takes most young people at least a decade to start seeing the reality that they can only get once their parents cut them off from an allowance, and they pop out a couple of kids. Hopefully by that time they aren’t sick with venereal diseases and can actually live moderately healthy lives for two or three decades without overloading the doctor’s office every time they get a sniffle—which is another large contributor to insurance increases—the preponderance of so many people living their life with risky lifestyles—reckless sexual attitudes, chemical abuse through narcotics and alcohol—and high fat diets. What is remarkable however is how stupid most people are these days, and to exemplify it read the comments below from a recent CNN article about health care and the Bernie Sanders socialist approach. We all know they are out there, but it’s another thing to hear them speak so foolishly. Have a look and read the CNN article linked below.
DemandSider12 hours ago
@davidfour @sunny5280
We have let capitalism run rampant, to the point that we borrow money from Communist China, to subsidize the human resource budget of our largest private employer, so that they can profitable import from Communist China. Do you think this is wise?
I’m a Bernie fan but why even get people worked up about this, we all know Congress would never pass 99% of his ideas. What it would cost is irrelevant, he is just getting people talking about it longterm.
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medianone5 hours ago
@hardhatharry You never know…. Conservatives have done a great job of pushing their “anything but Obama” or “anything Obama does it bad, terrible, a failure” to the point that maybe people would consider something different that is not associated with Obama. Maybe?
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QuestionCNN5 hours ago
@hardhatharry What this article refused to mention is that Hillary will do the same thing – increase taxes under the pre-tense of providing Universal Health care, then divert it to pay for her police-state Marxist Utopia. But CNN is in the Clinton camp and is helping her by providing free negative campaign attacks on the other Marxist – Bernie Sanders
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DemandSider5 hours ago
@hardhatharry
This election reminds me a lot of the 1932 election The inequality, the Republican leaning Congress, the economic collapse due to middle class destruction and speculation. With FDR’s election, both Houses switched to heavily Democratic. Sanders’ views are very similar to FDR’s.
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RustyShackel1 hour ago
@DemandSider @hardhatharry Agreed, Bernie does seem like such a believer in the authority of government that he would take actions to throw Americans in imprisonment camps much like FDR did with innocent japanese-American citizens. I wonder who Bernie would target – conservatives? The rich?
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DemandSider1 hour ago
@RustyShackel @DemandSider @hardhatharry
No, you are confusing him with Chewbaca, The Confederate Republican nominee. He’ll probably just put another wing on in Cuba, call it Trumptanomo, and make a killing at tax payer expense, per usual with these “free market” parasites.
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DemandSider7 hours ago
sickforprofit.com/ceos
Stephen Hemsley, CEO, United Health Care, total value of unexercised stock options (Forbes): $744 million
“Hemseley returns $190 million in stock options acquired as as result of practices found to be fraudulent by The SEC” -American Medical News
Edward Hanway, Cigna CEO, total value of unexercised stock options, $28.8 million,five year compensation, $120 million “The family of a 17 year old girl who died hours after Cigna reversed a decision to deny her liver transplant to sue” -Oakland Tribune
Michael McCallister, CEO, Humana, total value of unexercised stock options, $60.8 million, “Humana abandons seniors in Florida; returns after Republicans pass new Medicare law, upping HMO payments by 25%” – NY Times
Has this Bernie Sanders fella no sense of decency??!? Who would hire these, ah, people?
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pulsecolo7 hours ago
@DemandSider Gosh, those salaries could be used to help pay to retrain and pay
all those insurance company employees mentioned earlier….
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JRCHICT6 hours ago
@DemandSider ” Bernie Sanders would LIKELY raise taxes,……”
“SOME experts say,…..”
Great journalism Tami
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medianone5 hours ago
@JRCHICT @DemandSider to be fair, or at least in cutting Tami some slack; we do live in a very litigious society.
Plus the article did say, “Sanders’ plan hasn’t been evaluated by the Congressional Budget Office or major think tanks…” which seems to be the standard for vetting candidate tax proposals.
But I agree with your thinking.
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DemandSider1 hour ago
@medianone @JRCHICT @DemandSider
Yes, for a person to have their medical bills reimbursed, they often MUST be litigious. SIngle payer would ease the burden on our courts.
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DemandSider12 hours ago
Insurance stocks rose with the passage of ACA. I don’t think they’ll rise with single payer. Manufacturers should rejoice, however, as their expenses will fall a lot.
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booboospal11 hours ago
Assuming a President Sanders could get his proposal through Congress, how would it affect (adversely?) the 50 million and increasing number of folks now getting Medicare benefits?
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CPR8 hours ago
@booboospal Well it would greatly impact the hundred thousand plus people that work in private insurance or in support of it.
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booboospal8 hours ago
CPR: Do you know the answer to my question?
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pulsecolo7 hours ago
it would do nothing to adversely affect those folks, the only thing that would happen is that the advantage plans would go away. But, there would no longer be a need for advantage plans as better coverage would prevail for all seniors as well as the rest of us with everyone in the pool. Keep in mind, that the Silver exchange plans under the ACA, that most Americans have with the subsidies, have much higher deductibles and out of pocket costs than traditional Medicare does without any advantage plan at all. The insurance industry successfully lobbied and sold America on the “snake oil need” for advantage plans. Advantage plans have a daily deductible for in hospital stays, and do not cover long term care. Plus, when seniors sign up for them, they may actually be paying more in the long run than had they banked the money they are spending for those plans.
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booboospal6 hours ago
pulse:
Would there still be Part B premiums?
Would retiree pension and investment income be taxed more than now to pay insurance costs?
Would there still be a need for supplementary coverage?
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JRCHICT6 hours ago
@booboospal all good questions.
I’m pretty sure though that we’ll have many who will expect to be perfect right out of the gate. Find any and all reasons to condemn it as we’ve done w/ ACA
Primarily use it as a political football.
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medianone6 hours ago
@booboospal Again, all good questions. And shouldn’t debate on universal health care also include looking at other countries who’ve successfully implemented such systems? Their costs, outcomes, sustainability, etc?
Seems like this debate has been ongoing for decades, at least since Hillary Care proposals. And if other countries have been successfully operating single payer systems and covering 100% of their populations, it is a wonder our “top men” haven’t been able to track these successes and implement them here.
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JRCHICT6 hours ago
@medianone @booboospal I’m not sure our “top men” care more about taking the money from the lobbyists of the health and insurance corporations for same old same old, or they’re interested in doing what’s right for us.
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booboospal10 hours ago
My former employer pays a fixed monthly amount (adjusted each year) toward employee AND RETIREE and dependent health insurance. So far it has been enough $$ to cover a Blue Cross supplemental policy AND the basic tier Medicare Part B premium for both my wife and me. Of course both of us paid for Part A (hospitalization) Medicare coverage by payroll tax while we were employed.
How would the Sanders proposal affect us?
Anyone?
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CNN User8 hours ago
@DemandSider
Republicans: you blame non religions christians, atheists,Muslims, blacks,Hindus, Obama,gays etc. for US weak middle class,but the real problem is no healthcare,expensive college, no paid maternity leave etc. —- -evil socialist countries all rank higher in median wealth(or wealth of the middle class) Source: http://www.middleclasspoliticaleconomist.com/2013/06/us-median-wealth-only-28th-in-world.html
(Before you republicans blame colored people, remember that UAE, Kuwait , Qatar, Singapore have a high percentage of colored folks but still have a richer middle class than us )
If you don’t believe my source just google “median wealth by country” and you will see similar results.
We dont have paid maturity leave, free healthcare or free or reduced college. We are the only developed country to not have this. Thats why we rank so low.
dem. states have a lower percentage of uninsured than republican states
Those are some really poorly educated theories shown above generated by a society raised on a terrible public school system which taught them all the wrong things. The basic instruction was that mixed economies such as what Scandinavian socialism proposes is the answer to equal distribution of resources without considering what the source of the value of what’s distributed entailed. For years the word on the street was that the United States would become more service oriented as other countries would become the producers. Otherwise, China and the Gulf States would make most of our American stuff and we’d have more time to think about things and have service jobs to sustain those “intellectual” pursuits. Well, that plan hasn’t worked out. The “money” jobs are now overseas and socialists think that by raising McDonald’s jobs to $15 an hour that the “middle class” will be sustained. Only idiot academics who live in a campus bubble could have concocted such a stupid notion. Only laissez-faire capitalism will solve our problems. Not crony capitalism which is what the pharmaceuticals and oil conglomerates have—I’m talking about open markets competing with each other to offer the most superior product for the lowest price.
All the countries mentioned above, places like UAE, Kuwait, Qatar, and Singapore are ultimately servicing the United States demand for products. The United States creates the global demand with their $17 trillion a year in gross domestic product. That GDP in order to survive by the way must increase by nearly double just for us to hope to survive as a country—and for the world in general to even have a chance. Without the United States all those mentioned countries wither away and die. So they are not examples of success or flowering epitaphs to managed economies. Socialism is the tombstone that the epitaph needs to be inscribed upon, because it has not worked. The United States is the only life support the world has. It is sad that more people don’t understand that.
The next president cannot be a Democrat. The House and Senate can’t just have Republicans; it has to have “conservative” Republicans the likes of Ted Cruz and Rand Paul. Whoever is in the executive branch will have to be willing to fight the world and idiots like those in the comments above from their instructed commitments to socialism and convince them to embrace not just capitalism, but the most open form of it imaginable– laissez-faire. We are no longer at a “theory” phase in this global economic struggle. We are at the rubber hitting the road phase and it’s not the time for games. If the situation doesn’t get fixed right here and now it will be over in the future. Because there are just too many socialists who are having kids and are raising them to be just as stupid as they are—the evidence is right above you—they do exist. Astonishingly they somehow manage to feed themselves, but they aren’t much good for anything else. But they do vote.
Little things matter to me quite a lot. I notice everything and of my many careers over a lifetime, one of them will be a cultural expert where psychology, art, religion, economics and all other forms of unnamed human ambition find their way into every created thing on earth. I grew up for as long as I can remember wanting to be a film director—but not being a very collaborative person—relegated that desire for more inward pursuits. Because of all that I can say with great provocation that the world is in a severe cultural decline. America obviously leads the world in culture—even though many academics might dispute it. The evidence is in our movie houses and our music with great audacious display. So rather than slide my predilections into the direction of the current pendulum swinging culture of global unification I am focusing much more these days on American westerns as a foundation philosophy that stands in contrast to the world currently presented to us.
I was born in 1968 and a few months after my birth one of the greatest films ever made was released—it was a Sergio Leone western called Once Upon a Time in the West. Leone was an Italian director interpreting American westerns for a country trying to fight its way back from cultural decay after World War II. CLICK HERE TO REVIEW. Leone at the time was best known for his “Dollars” trilogy which made Clint Eastwood into a star. Those films are and have always been fantastic. But for the director Leone they gained him the opportunity to make the western of his dreams off the success of the previous Eastwood films. Paramount Pictures tossed the world to him along with a host of first class stars and Sergio Leone along with his musical collaborator Ennio Morricone spun a masterpiece called Once Upon a Time in the West.
Some of my very first television memories were these spaghetti westerns by Sergio Leone replaying on Channel 19 in Cincinnati. My grandfather loved westerns and whenever I was at his farm-house he had them on, so my mother also watched them all the time as well because it reminded her of her dad. Of them the Sergio Leone westerns reflected my own observations about people even when I was very young—and I soaked them up. Before I was ever in the kindergarten I was a fan of Once Upon a Time in the West. I often confused all Leone’s westerns together until I was just shy of ten and it was then when I began to appreciate Once Upon a Time in the West as something of its own. The Leone films had hard-wired themselves into my consciousness. My very first time in front of a television camera was when I was sixteen during “tough guy” week on Channel 19. “Tough guy week” was a ratings grab at Channel 19 so they ran Steve McQueen movies along with a lot of Clint Eastwood to bump up their winter numbers. At a young age I had evolved into having a “reputation” and I was sitting at the dinner table of a prominent Sharonville judge, his wife and the biggest criminal of Northern Cincinnati at the time. The event was a Chinese New Year advertisement for a restaurant that I worked at. One of the owner’s sons was a guy who liked to dip his feet into that type of world where justice sits at dinner tables with known criminals and he used me even at that young age as one of his “heavies.” I enjoyed the experience because I was essentially living the life of the protagonists in Sergio Leone’s westerns and I discovered by living those characters in real life that one of my favorite film directors was in fact a genius. As I sat at that table during that day long commercial recording talking to the judge and the crime lord obviously working together with me in the middle and being told by that same judge that when I got into trouble—he’d take care of it–I knew for me there was no going back. At too young of an age I knew way too much about the way the world worked. I was then and still am about 60 years ahead of myself and it does really go back to Leone’s westerns and my young introduction to them. When the commercial aired on television my family was one of the first people back then to have a VCR so I was able to tape it. My television appearance aired with the judge and the criminal seated on either side of me during a showing of For a Few Dollars More. During that same Channel 19 “tough guy” week Once Upon a Time in the West was shown again and I was able to see it as a 16-year-old actually doing in real life much of what the Charles Bronson character was doing in that film and I watched it with new understanding for the first time. It was as real and honest of any motion picture I had ever seen—it was to my eyes much better than The Godfather which was still making cultural waves in that year of 1985. A month later I was involved in a fight with a bunch of people which led to a tragic situation and if I had not been sitting at that table with that judge on that particular day for that commercial, I’d probably have a much different life than I do now and my freedoms would likely be greatly restricted.
I felt it was important for my wife to be to watch Once Upon a Time in the West to understand more about me, so I tried to show it to her early in our relationship. At the time she was a country club girl so she wasn’t ready for movies like that—where the opening was so strange and dramatic. She made fun of it heavily after the first seven minutes and I never tried again to show it to her until January of 2016. I had meant to show the movie to my children at some point so given all my history with it I felt that they should see the movie. I bought the cut of the film that had been restored to 165 minutes as opposed to the version I had seen as a kid, the 145 minute version which was a bit more confusing, and relished being able to finally show it to my wife and at least some of my kids. It was a great experience. The music from Ennio Morricone was so good in that movie that I have used it often to raise my mind above times of incredible stress. Even though my wife didn’t like Once Upon a Time in the West at first I still loved it and thought of it often to carry me through tough times. I was 25-years old and in deep trouble. I had more legal problems and had law suits directed at me from several directions and I had to tap into that raw, primal civility that I had refined when I was 16, where I could walk into any situation and just take care of things no matter how bad the guys on the other side of the table were—or who hid in the shadows where you parked your car. I had for the first time a CD collection of Ennio Morricone’s music which featured a scene on the front from Once Upon a Time in the West. By the 1990s the film was considered an obscure classic and nobody remembered it much except for filmmakers and people who were particularly fascinated with cultural phenomenon. In the hardest days of my life I listened to the music from Once Upon a Time in the West to serve as my moral compass—and it has always worked for me. I sat in my office back then with the world coming down around me and would listen to those Morricone soundtracks and think of “The Man with the Harmonica”—that haunting melody which spoke of revenge, perseverance, and the growth of a human into an Übermensch (German for “Overman, Overhuman, Above-Human, Superman, Superhuman, Ultraman, Ultrahuman, Beyond-Man”; German pronunciation: [ˈˀyːbɐmɛnʃ]) As readers here know I think a lot of the concept which is from the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. In his 1883 book Thus Spoke Zarathustra (German: Also Sprach Zarathustra), Nietzsche has his character Zarathustra posit the Übermensch as a goal for humanity to set for itself. It is a work of philosophical allegory, with a structural similarity to the Gathas of Zoroaster/Zarathustra. I learned later that my love of Sergio Leone had more to do with the concept of the Übermensch than of the westerns themselves—but I can say that there is an honesty in Once Upon a Time in the West that is not present in any other form of art and it should be experienced—especially these days.
After directing The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Leone decided to retire from Westerns and desired to produce his film based on The Hoods, which eventually becameOnce Upon a Time in America. However, Leone accepted an offer from Paramount Pictures to provide access to Henry Fonda and to use a budget to produce another Western film. He recruited Bertolucci and Argento to devise the plot of the film in 1966, researching other Western films in the process. After Clint Eastwood turned down an offer to play the movie’s protagonist, Bronson was offered the role. During production, Leone recruited Donati to rewrite the script due to concerns over time limitations.
The original version by the director was 166 minutes (2 hours and 46 minutes) when it was first released on December 21, 1968. This was the version that was to be shown in European cinemas and was a box office success. For the US release on May 28, 1969, Once Upon a Time in the West was edited down to 145 minutes (2 hours and 25 minutes) by Paramount and was a financial flop. The film is considered by some to be the first installment in Leone’s Once Upon a Time Trilogy, followed by Duck, You Sucker!, called Once Upon a Time… the Revolution in parts of Europe, and Once Upon a Time in America, though the films do not share any characters in common.
The film portrays two conflicts that take place around Flagstone, a fictional town in the American Old West: a land battle related to construction of a railroad, and a mission of vengeance against a cold-blooded killer. A struggle exists for Sweetwater, a piece of land near Flagstone containing the region’s only water source. The land was bought by Brett McBain (Frank Wolff), who foresaw that the railroad would have to pass through that area to provide water for the steam locomotives. When crippled railroad tycoon Morton (Gabriele Ferzetti) learns of this, he sends his hired gun Frank (Henry Fonda) to intimidate McBain to move off the land, but Frank instead kills McBain and his three children, planting evidence to frame the bandit Cheyenne (Jason Robards). It appears the land has no owner; however, a former prostitute (Claudia Cardinale) arrives from New Orleans, revealing she is Jill McBain, Brett’s new wife and the owner of the land.
Meanwhile, a mysterious harmonica-playing gunman (Charles Bronson), whom Cheyenne later dubs “Harmonica”, pursues Frank. In the film’s opening scene, Harmonica kills three men sent by Frank to kill him. In a roadhouse on the way to Sweetwater, he informs Cheyenne that the three gunfighters appeared to be posing as Cheyenne’s men.
Back at Sweetwater, construction materials are delivered to build a railroad station and a small town. Harmonica explains that Jill will lose Sweetwater unless the station is built by the time the track’s construction crews reach that point, so Cheyenne puts his men to work building it.
Frank turns against Morton, who wanted to make a deal with Jill; Morton’s disability makes him unable to fight back. After having sex with Jill, Frank forces her to sell the property in an auction. He tries to buy the farm cheaply by intimidating the other bidders, but Harmonica arrives, holding Cheyenne at gunpoint, and makes a much higher bid based on his reward money for delivering Cheyenne to the authorities. Harmonica rebuffs an offer by Frank to buy the farm from him for one dollar more than he paid at the auction. As Cheyenne is placed on a train bound for the Yuma prison, two members of his gang purchase one-way tickets for the train, intending to help him escape.
Frank’s men betray and ambush him, having been paid by Morton to turn against him, but—much to Jill’s outrage—Harmonica helps Frank kill them, intending to kill Frank himself. Frank returns to Morton, only to find that he and the rest of Frank’s men have been killed in a battle with Cheyenne’s gang. Frank then goes to Sweetwater to confront Harmonica. On two occasions, Frank has asked Harmonica who he is, but both times Harmonica refused to answer him. Instead, he mysteriously quoted names of men Frank has murdered. This time, Harmonica says he will reveal who he is “only at the point of dying”. The two men position themselves for a duel, at which point Harmonica’s motive for revenge is revealed in a flashback:
A younger Frank, already a cruel bandit, is forcing a boy to support on his shoulders his older brother, whose neck is in a noose strung from an arch. As the boy struggles to hold his brother’s weight, Frank stuffs a harmonica into the boy’s mouth and tells him to play. The brother curses Frank and kicks his brother away, and dies.
Harmonica draws first and shoots Frank. As he lies dying, Frank again asks who he is, whereupon the harmonica is placed in Frank’s mouth. Frank nods weakly in recognition and dies. Harmonica and Cheyenne say goodbye to Jill, who is supervising construction of the railway station as the track-laying crews reach Sweetwater. Cheyenne collapses, revealing that he had been fatally shot by Morton during the fight with Frank’s gang. The work train arrives, Jill carrying water to the rail workers, while Harmonica rides away with Cheyenne’s body.
Leone’s intent was to take the stock conventions of the American Westerns of John Ford, Howard Hawks and others, and rework them in an ironic fashion, essentially reversing their intended meaning in their original sources to create a darker connotation.[22] The most obvious example of this is the casting of veteran film good guy Henry Fonda as the villainous Frank, but there are also many other, more subtle reversals throughout the film. According to film critic and historian Christopher Frayling, the film quotes from as many as 30 classic American Westerns.
The major films referenced include:
High Noon(1952): The opening sequence is similar to the opening of High Noon, in which three bad guys (Lee Van Cleef, Sheb Wooley and Robert J. Wilke) are shown waiting for the arrival of their leader (named Frank, played by Ian MacDonald) on the noon train. In the opening of Once Upon a Time in the West, three bad guys (Jack Elam, who appeared in a small part in High Noon, Woody Strode, and Al Mulock) take over and wait at a train station. However, the period of waiting is depicted in a lengthy ten-minute sequence, the train arrives several hours after noon, and its passenger is one of the film’s heroes (Charles Bronson) rather than its villain. The scene is famous for its use of natural sounds: a squeaky windmill, knuckles cracking, and Jack Elam’s character trying to shoo off a fly. According to rumor, Leone offered the parts of the three gunmen to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly stars Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef and Eli Wallach.[23]
3:10 to Yuma(1957): This cult Western by Delmer Daves may have had considerable influence on the film. The most obvious reference is a brief exchange between Keenan Wynn‘s Sheriff and Cheyenne, in which they discuss sending the latter to Yuma In addition, as in West the main villain is played by an actor (Glenn Ford) who normally played good guys. The film also features diegetic music (Ford at one point whistles the film’s theme song just as Harmonica provides music in West). And the scene in which Van Heflin‘s character escorts Ford to the railroad station while avoiding an ambush by his gang may have inspired the ambush of Frank by his own men in Leone’s film.
The Comancheros(1961): The names “McBain” and “Sweetwater” may come from this film. (Contrary to popular belief, the name of the town “Sweetwater” was not taken from Victor Sjöström‘s silent epic dramaThe Wind. Bernardo Bertolucci has stated that he looked at a map of the southwestern United States, found the name of the town in Arizona, and decided to incorporate it into the film. However, both “Sweetwater” and a character named “McBain” appeared in The Comancheros, which Leone admired.[24])
Johnny Guitar(1954): Jill and Vienna have similar backstories (both are former prostitutes who become saloonkeepers), and Harmonica, like Sterling Hayden‘s title character, is a mysterious, gunslinging outsider known by his musical nickname. Some of West’s central plot (Western settlers vs. the railroad company) may be recycled from Nicholas Ray’s film.[24]
The Iron Horse(1924): West may contain several subtle references to this film, including a low angle shot of a shrieking train rushing towards the screen in the opening scene, and the shot of the train pulling into the Sweetwater station at the end.[24]
Shane(1953): The massacre scene in West features young Timmy McBain out hunting with his father, just as Joey does in this movie. The funeral of the McBains is borrowed almost shot-for-shot from Shane.[24]
Vera Cruz(1954): In both films, Charles Bronson’s character plays a harmonica and is known only by a nickname.
The Searchers(1956): Leone admitted that the rustling bushes, the silencing of cicada chirps, and the fluttering pheasants that suggest a menace approaching the farmhouse when the McBain family is massacred were all taken from The Searchers. The ending of the film—where Western nomads Harmonica and Cheyenne move on rather than join modern society—also echoes the famous ending of Ford’s film.[24]
Warlock(1959): At the end of this film, Henry Fonda’s character wears clothing very similar to his costume throughout West. In addition, Warlock features a discussion about mothers between Fonda and Dorothy Malone that is similar to those between Cheyenne and Jill in West. Finally, Warlock contains a sequence in which Fonda’s character kicks a crippled man off his crutches, as he does to Mr. Morton in West.
The Magnificent Seven(1960): In this film, Charles Bronson’s character whittles a piece of wood. In West, he does the same, although in a different context. The Magnificent Seven was based on Seven Samuraiby Akira Kurosawa, whose film Yojimbo (“The Bodyguard”) was the inspiration (and later, litigation) behind Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars.
Winchester ’73(1950): It has been claimed that the scenes in West at the trading post are based on those in Winchester ’73, but the resemblance is slight.[24]
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance(1962): The dusters (long coats) worn by Cheyenne and his gang (and by Frank and his men while impersonating them) resemble those worn by Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin) and his henchmen when they are introduced in this film. In addition, the auction scene in West was intended to recall the election scene in Liberty Valance.[24]
Duel in the Sun(1946): The character of Morton, the crippled railroad baron in West, was based on the character played by Lionel Barrymore in this film.[24]
Sergeant Rutledge(1960): This John Ford Western, featuring Woody Strode as the title character, has a scene in which Constance Towers falls asleep in a chair with a rifle in her lap, just as Jill McBain does in Leone’s film.
My Darling Clementine(1946): In the trading post scene, Cheyenne slides Harmonica’s gun down the bar to him, challenging him to shoot – much like Morgan Earp (Ward Bond) sliding his weapon to brother Wyatt (Henry Fonda) in the Ford film when the Earps meet Doc Holliday (Victor Mature) for the first time. Also, a deleted scene in West featured Frank getting a shave with perfume in a barber’s shop, much like Fonda’s Wyatt.
Once Upon a Time in the West was itself explicitly referenced in The Quick and the Dead, when John Herod (Gene Hackman), faces Ellen (Sharon Stone), better known as “The Lady,” in a climactic gunfight. Ellen’s identity is a mystery until the end, when the audience sees Ellen’s flashback to Herod lynching her father, a sheriff. The sadistic Herod gives Ellen (then only a little girl) a chance to save her father by shooting through and breaking the rope wrapped around his neck, but Ellen accidentally kills her father by shooting him in the forehead. As with Frank, Herod yells “Who are you?”, and the only response he receives is an artifact from the earlier lynching—in this case, the sheriff’s badge that Ellen has kept all these years. The Quick and the Dead has another connection to Once Upon a Time in the West: It was the final film for Woody Strode, who died before it could be released.
Many other films have paid tribute to Once Upon a Time in the West over the years: Quentin Tarantino‘s Inglourious Basterds opens with a lengthy sequence entitled Once Upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France (a phrase also used as a tagline for the 2009 film) which introduces the film’s primary villain and features the mass shooting of a family at a farmhouse; Tarantino’s Kill Bill films utilize snatches of Morricone’s harmonica and guitar soundtrack; Back to the Future Part III recreates the station rooftop scene from Once Upon a Time in the West; Baz Luhrmann‘s Australia features several nods to Leone’s film, including a homestead with a squeaky windmill, an almost-identical funeral scene, and an antagonistic relationship between the film’s villains; and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End features a parody of the “Man With a Harmonica” theme on the soundtrack, as the film’s protagonists parley on a sandbar before the final battle.
A lot of people I think have the same reaction my wife had to Once Upon a Time in the West the first time they see it. Let me tell you that 25 years after she laughed at it the first time, she wasn’t laughing any more. Nobody is laughing any more, I can say that. She had grown to appreciate what the film had been saying for decades. She had learned by middle life what I had known as a 16-year-old, and once you know those types of things there is only one place for your mind to go. You either become an Übermensch of some kind or you go insane. There are a lot of characters in the world like Henry Fonda’s “Frank.” And there is only one way to deal with them and Sergio Leone knew how to capture that conflict on-screen like no other person I’ve ever seen in film. A lot of film makers have tried to capture the magic of Once Upon a Time in the West, but they never get it all. Now, nearly five decades later the extremely bright international culture that produced that great film is nearly vanished. It’s not a great film just because it’s a western—but because of the metaphors presented in the seemingly simplistic tapestry of the western—as it was invented in America.
It doesn’t matter that Sergio Leone took an American hero like Henry Fonda and made him into the villain—it’s that Leone knew how to take the strength of his characters whether it be Charles Bronson or Clint Eastwood and turn them into Übermenschs to deal with overwhelming evil captured quite accurately. I always think of that dinner table during that filming of the Chinese New Year commercial and how it reminded me so much of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly. But even more than that it reminded me of Frank from Once Upon a Time in the West. When Jill gets mad at Harmonica for helping keep Frank alive—it is for the reasons provided that many of the mysteries of our lives go unfulfilled. And yes I’m talking in a bit of a riddle here, but to get the answer watch the movie and remember the line, “time flies.” Knowing what to do with an enemy after you’ve identified them as such is what I have always found valuable about westerns. To understand that you have an enemy is to have a set of values that an enemy fights against and in Once Upon a Time in the West that conflict is poetically displayed in ways that no film has ever mastered as well. Many have tried but nobody has been able to hit it as well as Sergio Leone. Time does fly, whether it’s a 16 year old discovering the truth of how a childhood movie favorite applies to the real world of politics and intrigue and how rivers are often polluted with the remains of politics washed off the parking lot after a strong rain—with the personal stamp of approval from a kindly old judge—or a wife who had grown over the years to see something totally different from her young 20-year-old eyes were ready to appreciate. Some movies reflect culture—others like Sergio Leone’s films make it. And that is why I think so much of him and his films—particularly, Once Upon a Time in the West. If you haven’t seen it, you should. Because “time flies” and so do good ideas—you have to hit them when you get the chance for the motivations only you know about—even if the morality for it only exists outside of time and space in a mythical realm where justice truly does rule—not with blinders—but a six-gun and a lot of tenacity.
It is a small radio station but it is doing some of the best work in talk radio that’s out there. I used to do a lot with WLW radio in Cincinnati, but over time I’ve found WAAM radio in Ann Arbor, Michigan to be much more positioned to do the good work of conservative contemplation. I’d say it is far superior to 55 KRC in Cincinnati largely because WLW and KRC are both Clear Channel stations run by a large corporate board and WAAM is still family owned and managed by good, solid people. Of course I have been complimentary of The Blaze Radio but I have stopped listening to them because of their anti-Trump stance. That has left me guest hosting and serving as a guest on WAAM nearly exclusively, because I like the owners. It’s not so much the initial broadcast that matters these days, it’s the international reach that comes from the podcasts. People are able to listen online months after the original airing, and more people listen that way these days than they do live. So given that as the factor in a changing marketplace, WAAM is a considerable heavy hitter nationally as they carry Glenn Beck in syndication and Alex Jones—but they have legitimate on air talent like Matt Clark and Steve Crowder who are young guns that show great promise for the future. I’ve talked a lot about Matt, but if you’ve never listened to WAAM you should check out a contemporary of his, Steve Crowder. He has a unique comedy conservativism that is very unique and specific to his generation empowering him to do work like he did below in Detroit. Watch this.
Without people like Crowder, and talk radio in general, nobody would really know the truth about what’s really going on. Regarding Detroit—which used to be one of the most successful cities on earth—television used to be a big exporter from that city in the Midwest. Now it looks like the ruins of an ancient Mayan civilization. It is literally a city of an ancient past. Crowder exhibited this fact by driving into the center of the downtown area and driving out into the outer parts of the city to show how quickly things degraded. It truly is a shocking video shown above to see the facts as Steve Crowder presented them. By turning on the camera and just letting it run until they were in the slums and areas so depleted with population that there was already grass growing where there used to be buildings, Steve Crowder proved his point. The modern city of Detroit is already looking like a lost city in need of archaeological discovery. It is truly amazing to see the effects of a bankrupt city and its impact on the world around it.
As vibrant as Chicago looks today—it is headed in the same direction—as is the United States in general. Two decades ago only the most conspiratorial science fiction writers predicted that Detroit would become a bankrupt city hemorrhaging population and selling homes at a price of $100 dollars. Just one mile out of downtown the once great city of Detroit looks like the ruins of Troy or Giza—only a few religious monuments and fortunate homes have survived the vandalism and destruction of a declining population. You can’t operate at a deficit for so many years and expect to hold value for property. The United States at a nearly $19 trillion deficit as of this writing is where Detroit as a city was two decades ago. It wouldn’t take much for the United States at this phase to resemble Detroit within a decade of now. Nobody back in the heyday of Detroit ever believed it would look the way it does today. They assumed that all the prosperity would go on forever—but it didn’t.
I have a fascination with old western towns. At the time of their construction the residents could never imagine that those towns would ever become in decline. Yet most of them did. Residents of Rome and Egypt during the days of their powerful empires felt the same way; they never could imagine that there would ever be a society where their city or country was not the supreme in the world. The same could be said of modern England which only one hundred years ago had an empire across the whole of the world. Now they are a fraction of their former power and teeming with socialism as a changed society with only their roots into history as mere sympathy. Nothing stays the same if bad management is applied to the maintenance of it. In a car, if it is not maintained properly, it will decline in condition rapidly. In a marriage, if care is not given, it will die. Children require love and attention. Companies require good management to maintain their status as job creators. And for cities to survive, they must have good management.
Most of the failing cities around the world are run by liberals, because the demographic circumstances of mass populations make it so through democratic elections. Needy, dependent people tend to migrate toward each other as rugged individualists like elbow room. So cities tend to have people conglomerated into small areas who all share a level of human bonding and collective social services—and they elect people into office who think the way they do. Now that liberalism is a proven intellectual failure regarding proper management of resources and people—there is a track record to identify—whereas a few decades ago, there wasn’t. Detroit is the evidence of that failure—dramatically. But it’s not alone. As Steve Crowder drove the lonely crime ridden streets of Detroit in the above video, where a vast amount of the population was functionally illiterate—in spite of the free education provided to them—liberalism and its effects were on prolific display. Years ago I wrote a screenplay that made several Wilshire Blvd agents very animated with anger called The Lost Cannibals of Cahokia. That script featured a modern horror adventure story about discovering the mysterious reason that the ancient city just outside of St. Louis was suddenly abandoned of its culture and resources. The story was fiction but the premise of the characters was based on my observed opinions. My reason of course was one that certainly went against the Hollywood mentality and just about every academic back then. My proposal was that it was a form of liberalism that destroyed Cahokia and many other ancient cities from Chichen Itza to Ankor Wat. Liberalism centered on self-sacrifice for the greater good in whatever variation of it was presented was my proposal for the destruction of most ancient cities. Detroit is only the modern version of that destruction. Washington D.C. is headed along that path as is all of the state of California. They are on unsustainable paths that are closing in on them rapidly.
Many around the United States however don’t know much about places like Detroit. If they visit, they only see the immediate downtown and not what’s one mile outside the city. So radio guys like Steve Crowder are doing a great service to all of society and their political spectrums. Detroit is a disgrace and people really need to see it, because those problems are coming to a neighborhood near you dear reader. And if you really love something like I think Steve Crowder really loves Detroit—because he was born there—then the best way to save it is to tell the story in a truthful way—not just in tight television shots during a Detroit Lions football game. People need to see what’s just beyond downtown—artificially propped up by federal money and corporate sponsorship to attempt to not make things appear as bad as they really are. That’s the story in Chicago right now. It’s a dead city with only the mask of a living entity on its face. If you want to prevent further casualties from the same fate, it’s time to identify the liberalism that has caused those deaths. And if you want to hear Steve Crowder live on WAAM radio, check him out from 6 am to 9 am on Friday mornings.
I challenge anyone reading this article at any point in the future to give me one example of a liberal society that is successful. And that includes Scandinavia. Give me one example of success. I bet you can’t. They are all future Detroits in the making.
Apparently the GOP doesn’t get it. Why in the world they put Nikki Haley on as the response to Idiot Obama’s State of the Union speech from the standpoint of the Republicans is a mystery greater than the Bermuda Triangle. As I watched her I couldn’t help but think that it was Haley who had caved into progressives regarding the Confederate Flag issue at the South Carolina State House. Progressives applied pressure and she yielded giving them the victory. Listen Republicans—compromise is a dirty word–when something is wrong and something is right. The world is full of black and white—metaphorically—not literally, and compromising with wrong does not make it partially right. You’d think that the GOP would have looked at the current presidential frontrunners, Donald Trump and Ted Cruz and they’d put up someone to respond to the president that more accurately reflected the values of current GOP voters. Instead they put forward a RINO at best who said this:
WASHINGTON (AP) — Americans should resist “the siren call of the angriest voices” in how the nation treats immigrants, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said Tuesday as the GOP used its response to President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address to try softening the tough stance embraced by some of its leading presidential candidates.
The U.S.-born daughter of Indian immigrants, Haley said the country is facing its most dangerous security threat since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. That was a reference to the Islamic State group, which has taken credit for attacks in Paris and elsewhere and may have inspired last month’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, California.
“During anxious times, it can be tempting to follow the siren call of the angriest voices,” Haley, mentioned by some as a potential vice presidential candidate this year, said in her party’s formal response to Obama. “We must resist that temptation.”
No, the temptation against judgment where smart behavior must prevail over stupid behavior must not be compromised. Having an open border in the United States is a foreign desire to destroy American capitalism with social diffusion, and anybody intelligent would understand that. Instead, the GOP thought it was more important, and stylish to put a woman RINO who failed a contentious issue in South Carolina up as an answer to the GOP party platform going into the 2016 election season. We are well beyond this kind of nonsense and trickery folks.
I’m sure Nikki Haley is a nice woman. She’s somebody’s daughter, wife and mother. She has a little bit of history with sleeping around with political bloggers and lobbyists which she denies, but I’m sure there’s some truth to it. Funny things happen when people are in powerful positions and they share common values after hard-fought battles. When you mix males and females together they tend to want to stick things into one another for pleasurable outcomes unless they can control their emotions—and politics is an emotional endeavor—extreme emotional highs and lows. I actually knew a very driven political woman like Nikki Haley once and from 35 to 40 years of age, she was a bit of a sex addict—it went right along with the politics she was addicted to. Her husband wasn’t a part of that world, so he didn’t understand why she was always so charged up all the time. So there is likely some truth to the allegations against her—she fits the profile. I personally don’t care. She can do what she wants but with all things considered—she is what the Republican Party thought most represented their party? Seriously? Couldn’t they find anybody better—less controversial with a track record of success? Is she the best that they have?
Apparently so, which says a lot. I don’t think she’s done a bad job in South Carolina but I wouldn’t call her an example of excellence either. I think with Republicans they picked her because she’s young, not horrible to look at, and she is “inclusive” to the open border policies foreign insurgents like George Soros are conducting against American sovereignty—which keeps campaign donations flowing into their political machine. Maintaining borders in America is important to sustaining the value of American citizenship. There is a reason that some of the highest per capita incomes in the world are within the United States. It’s part of our “brand.” If you let anybody into a movie how can its worth be measured but in ticket prices? If everyone were just allowed to watch a movie how would anybody know if that movie is any good? The price of a ticket and how many people buy one determine a movie’s value. Even communist leaning liberals should be able to understand that. The public has limited access to the celebrities in movies which drives up the desire for the market brand of those actors. All that restriction causes increased value. Limited access causes a desire to pay for a ticket price to see a movie with a particular actor involved so the viewer can at least be close to that person.
When a woman like Nikki Haley has rumors of one night stands with political lobbyists it lowers her brand. The better thing to do is to be highly desired as a sex object without providing the sex—that way many people might yearn to be with her, they may even do what she wants them to do hoping to get access—but if people think she’s easy—sexually, her brand goes down because other people have already had her. Whether or not it’s fair, it’s the rules of the game. If a woman gives up sex too easily she is viewed as a slut. If she is faithful to a husband or her family in general her brand goes up enormously because that person is inaccessible. But if anybody can have sex with her any time they want, the value of sex with her is reduced to something much less spectacular. The same holds true with an entire country, the more restrictive the access; the more people value it when they get access. The less, the more they will want to abuse the situation to satisfy their personal whims.
Because of the rumors and the evidence by text messages and other aspects I have witnessed in real life, I think Nikki Haley probably has some trouble with maintaining her sexual poise in politically active climates. That might impress members of the GOP who want to sleep with her sometime knowing that she’s easy game to tag, but it doesn’t do much to deliver the confidence that the GOP knows what they are doing. Then to compound the problem it was only this previous summer where progressives had beat her to a pulp over the Confederate Flag leaving her to compromise under the pressure. The racist insurgents didn’t give anything up to have the flag removed, it simply forced Nikki Haley to come off her position more to the center strategically—which was a loss for her. Granted, it was a tough position for her to be in, and the GOP probably should have let a few years pass before they used her as the Republican answer to the President’s State of the Union address. But they used her anyway because they thought it was a good idea.
But knowing politics the way I do I’d say somebody had other ideas given Haley’s reputation. And that is just sad. The GOP should be able to put up better, more reliable people other than Nikki Haley. They didn’t—because they were unable to think of anybody—which shows why they are so far out of touch. Some of those same idiots were seeking Obama’s autograph after the State of the Union speech even though it was a terrible speech speaking about a terrible presidency leaving the nation horribly in debt and a laughing-stock across the world. It’s no wonder the GOP is failing just slightly less than the Democrats—they just don’t understand. But in 2016, they’re going to learn just how much they don’t know and why they are going extinct. And their extinction will make me very happy. Right now, I’m just embarrassed for them. They are so unimaginative and driven by primal urges—it’s just pathetic.
WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama’s do-it-himself plan for keeping guns away from those who shouldn’t have them falls far short of what he’d hoped to accomplish through legislation after a massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School shook the country in 2012.
Yet even the more modest steps Obama will announce Tuesday rely on murky interpretations of existing law that could be easily reversed by his successor.
Obama’s package of executive actions aims to curb what he’s described as a scourge of gun violence in the U.S., punctuated by appalling mass shootings in Newtown, Connecticut; Charleston, South Carolina; and Tucson, Arizona, among many others. After Newtown, Obama sought far-reaching, bipartisan legislation that went beyond background checks.
At that late hour with my gun fixed, talk radio broadcasting interesting debate, I felt wonderful not just for repair job successfully performed, but because the gun as a hobby was a reminder that in America I don’t have to worship at the feet of any aristocrat or noble character of any kind. If the President walked up to my home at that moment there wouldn’t be any bowing or pandering going on. I’d simply look at him like some little girl selling Girl Scout cookies—since he likes to cry so much. I’d listen to what he wanted then decide to help him or not. But I wouldn’t be compelled to do anything—and it is the gun that gives me that freedom and keeps us sanctimonious even as radical politicians create executive orders to make America into something they are more comfortable with—because they were essentially too lazy to embrace our culture and do the work themselves of adopting its values into their lives. That is why Obama’s executive orders are such an insult and why Brownells continues to be one of my favorite companies on planet earth. I just love those guys!
To further illustrate the level of the fight we are facing in 2016 have a look at this 2011 video of the White House Correspondence dinner. The first video is of Barack Obama roasting Donald Trump and the second is of Seth Myers from Saturday Night Live doing the same. The issue of tension was that Trump had been the one to push for Obama to release his birth certificate—which forced the White House to finally do it after stonewalling for over three years. It was quite a mystery and gave rise to the “birther movement.” Trump after a lot of persistence pushed, and pushed, and pushed until a document was produced leading to the victory lap in front of the media at the special 2011 engagement roasting Trump who was forced to sit stone faced in the middle of the action and take it.
I don’t think there is another radio or television broadcast where such an in-depth analysis of the situation concerning our modern problems can be heard. I was trained by Joseph Campbell to read and understand mythology—the same place that George Lucas learned it from, so I am uniquely positioned to provide commentary that nobody on cable, network, or radio news can provide regarding Star Wars, terrorism and the cultural responsibility of the Disney company to resist putting metal detectors at their entrance and banning toy guns from their properties. What is wrong in Disney and of course throughout the world is not related to security, it is in cultural values, which is what Matt and I focused on. Matt is in fact such a good radio guy that he knows how to set up the topics to extract it from me—which is why these conversations are so interesting.
The problem starts with culture and understanding what makes it, is it a reactive thing built from didactic desires, or is it a product of intellectual necessity? I would propose the later while Disney is currently functioning from the former. They believe that because they lack a strong CEO type who understands the complexity of culture building the way Walt Disney or George Lucas innately did. As a company of second-handers they have had to mimic the behavior of their former leaders, like Lucas and Disney, they are clueless in understanding how the responsibility for building culture falls on their shoulders. Similarly, they are clueless to understand when there is trouble how to deal with a crises. Because they are second-handers, people who live through others for their sustenance, they assume that somebody understands a situation better than they do, leaving them prone to put too much trust into governments and other collective forces to guide their decisions. That is why they prefer committees and boards of directors to make decisions instead of strong individualized leadership.
Disney made a huge mistake with The Force Awakens, every toy and commercial mostly featured the bad guy from the latest Star Wars movie to sell those products. In a desire to recover their investment into the film franchise and to get their market projections, they rely on marketing the villains as a way to guarantee their financial expectations. The net result is that the social impact on the population in general will be negative—kids are more interested in playing the bad guy when interacting with their peers than the good guys, which is a major problem. Just a few decades ago kids used to fight over who was going to be the good guy when playing among each other. Now nobody wants to be the good guy, and that is the fault of culture. What makes up that culture is every progressive who has pushed for less heroic characters in movies giving good reviews to flawed heroes as opposed to the squeaky clean types who don’t drink, smoke, or have sex before marriage. Our culture through music, movies, and television have put bad behavior on a pedestal and criticized good behavior. So it shouldn’t be any surprise that young kids fight over being the bad guy when playing instead of being a good guy. When there is nothing marketed for a new Star Wars movie but the bad guys, and the good guys are killed, or appear to be losing all the time, the behavior that children will mimic in their daily lives will reflect those priorities.
When Disney makes a film, or a television story of any kind, they must be careful not to allow the good guys to appear subservient to the bad guys in any way. The progressive experimentation with the gray areas of life is not healthy. It might make some Santa Monica bar slut feel better about her decisions in life for being a sperm receptacle during her twenties and early thirties, but it will not help young girls in the future not make similar mistakes. Hollywood is full of these young women who work in the industry and party at the bars around Wilshire Blvd and they think they are the smartest people in the world because they manage to show their boobs to Quentin Tarantino at a party, who is essentially the same little boy growing up in Knoxville, Tennessee that he has always been. I like Tarantino, we share a taste for Sergio Leone movies and car chases, but he’s not very sophisticated as a filmmaker. Yet because his movies feature good guys who go bad, often, and bad guys who do good, there is mass appeal to the gutter sluts and social misfits of our culture. But Tarantino currently sets the standard on Wilshire and those slutty Santa Monica types who put on heels during the day and strip it off for anybody at night create market value based on their intellectual assumptions. Marketing executives assume that those Hollywood filmmakers and the agents who dangle from the industry know what they are doing, so they follow right along, and soon the entire industry is copying off each other because nobody has an original idea about anything because nobody dare go against the trends of the day which are often set in those Santa Monica, and New York City bars by skanks, whores, and insecure social climbers.
Meanwhile a kid at Wal-Mart wants a new Star Wars toy and they see Kylo Ryn on the cover who looks like he’s always beating the good guys—otherwise he wouldn’t be featured so prominently on the marketing material. After five or six years of playing the bad guy, when the kid hits adolescence and has to make decisions about, drugs, and individual integrity, they stand on the foundations created for them by the toys they played with and the lessons they learned in their youth. If the message is confusing, that bad guys sometimes aren’t so bad and that good guys are often just as bad as good guys, then that person will grow up to be a messed up adult. And before anybody says they disagree, just look around at the adults you know dear reader, the world is full of such people—and this is how they were made. The instruction for proper intellectual value and social relationships is directly built from the type of stories that we tell our kids. It’s OK to market those stories under a capitalist banner, but there is a responsibility in doing so.
Now, I know the next thing the curious reader here will say is, if I had the opportunity to make millions of dollars selling stories featuring bad guys over good guys I would as well. Well, I have a long history with this, a background that had personal instruction by Sol Stein, Linda Nagata, and even a little help from Skip Press in putting me directly in contact with Steven Spielberg’s agent for a project I was working on. I have looking back on it a lot of experience with Hollywood, so I know what I’m talking about and let me say this. When given the opportunity to have a lot of money by writing bad guys, or sticking with my good guys, I have never surrendered my position. It may not be what the market desires right now, but I refuse to participate in the perpetuation of evil by promoting bad guys over good—and by supporting the gray over black and white morality, it accomplishes just as bad of an end result. I have forgone personal wealth to do the right thing, so I expect others to do so as well—especially the Disney Company. I’ve known quite a lot of those skanks, and whores in Hollywood and believe me, they aren’t all women—and I turned them away several times—because it was the right thing to do. So for the same reasons, I don’t have a lot of sympathy for those who do sell-out for some quick money.
As talked about with Matt Clark, the cause of the problems in our culture will not be solved with metal detectors and gun restrictions—the source is in broken culture perpetuated irresponsibility by the weakest and worst that our society has produced. If we really want to be safe and to have a good and productive society then we must focus on separating the good guys from the bad and avoiding designations of gray and muddied fantasies of equality where the bad are placed at the same level as the virtuous. The root cause of most of our societal misery around the world is in this very simple concept. And the only way out of it is to be good. That is why during my next show on WAAM I will focus on just that type of concept and will offer society something they won’t get anywhere else. A path toward virtue in America once again—be sure to tune in, because I will promise this, you won’t get this kind of show anywhere in the world in any media format. It will be one of a kind. My path through life is very unique and I am offering those important lessons for those who are best positioned to utilize them. I wouldn’t ask anybody to do what I have not been willing to do myself, if I can make decisions based on ethics for the benefit of culture building, then so can Disney—and everyone in entertainment.
In a capitalist society it was always supposed to be like this, the best and most competitive are supposed to be free to perform at their maximum potential without being restricted by inferior minds. The Internet may have been invented as a means for population control by government influence, but it has turned out to be one of the best aspects of laissez-faire capitalism to emerge essentially since Adam Smith wrote An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776). And in the United States, it has been one of the finest examples of free speech. It allows someone like me, who can run circles around most people with sheer effort to by-pass the gate keepers of the “professional” media to get a message out that would otherwise not be heard. I have known a lot of reporters over the years and I can’t think of any who live the way I do, where they may work 12 hours, read about two hours each day, then turn around and do 2 hours of live radio on WAAM in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Typically, they only do about a quarter of that work per day, and that’s why their reports often are terrible, and lazy. In that regard, largely because of the power of competition, new media, and the productive acquisition of massive amounts of information, I have the opportunity to be on WAAM radio with Matt Clark for three weekends in a row. Matt and I did a live radio show on Wednesday December 23rd which was used for the next two Saturday shows on WAAM 1600. Then on January 9th while Matt is in Disney World for his annual marathon run, I am hosting in his place with a very special guest. If you missed the Wednesday live shown, broadcast around the world, here it is—along with a few sample video clips as teasers of the content. As usual, we covered a lot of ground.
Regarding that special guest, of course when given the opportunity I’m going to give listeners at WAAM exactly what they want. I’ve done plenty of radio in my life, and I’ve listened to talk radio for longer than I’ve participated on the air. As a kid who grew up in sight of The Voice of America radio station towers in Mason, Ohio I understand the power of a voice over the airwaves. I also understand how wonderful it is to work on a car during Saturday afternoon in a well-lit garage next to a double stacked Craftsman tool box full of gadgets and gizmos accumulated over twenty previous Christmas seasons and to listen to the soothing sound of logic from talk radio. Both of my grandparents had farms and constantly had WLW radio on in their barns—it was for them a kind of verbal newspaper that they could listen to as they milked cows or prepped equipment for bailing hay. So to thank the WAAM audience and the technical crew at that fine “independent” radio station which is a rarity these days in the marketplace, I’m going to give listeners a special treat on January 9th at 1 PM. Click the following link to listen live at that time.
Quick Cal has been a competitive shooter since joining the Chicago Colts FDC in 1968, at age 15. He won his first World Championship in 1972 and in 1973 hosted his first contest. He went on to be the Match Director of two National Championships and three World Championships during the 1970s at the Hacienda Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas along with several state and regional tournaments. He served as an officer in the Mid-Western Fast Draw Association, Western Fast Draw Association and served as Chairman of the World Fast Draw Association.
In the 1980s he became very active in Practical Pistol Shooting. While competing at the top-level of the sport he built the largest IPSC club in the country and founded and served 9 years as Match Director of the Western States IPSC Championship in Reno. He was an original Range Master and Instructor for USPSA, while also being a top competitor and earning a spot on the National Team in 1990. He has been a firearms instructor for law enforcement and security companies and still teaches defensive shooting and is a NRA Instructor.
In the late 90s he started getting very involved in SASS and won a national championship as a top shooter. In 1999, he created the original SASS RO Program and served as Chairman of the RO Committee for 9 years, he was inducted into the SASS Hall of Fame in 2011. He also founded a SASS club, The High Plains Drifters, and built a shooting range that is still in use and created and served as Match Director of the Western States CAS Championship for 10 years.
In 2002, Brad Hemmah called Quick Cal for advice on guns and holsters in setting up what was to become CFDA. In 2004, Quick Cal attended the National Championship in Meridian, ID and won the event, and recognized the potential that Cowboy Fast Draw had. Fast Draw had been Quick Cal’s first love in shooting sports, he dreamed as a young man that the sport could somehow become much bigger than it was if only given the chance.
Quick Cal has always believed in giving back to the shooting sports because they have added so much to his life. He now serves as the Director of CFDA and is determined to give the Sport of Cowboy Fast Draw a chance to build itself into an organization that can last for future generations to enjoy.
To learn more about him, here are his résumés in greater detail.
As a fine example of what I have been talking about regarding good management of a town government, no finer example could be found than in West Chester, Ohio with the opening of Premier Shooting & Training Center in just a few weeks of this writing. CLICK HERE TO REVIEW WHY. Typically projects like Premier are crushed through the zoning process where pin-headed liberal activists too often apply the worthlessness of their lives behind a façade of community interest using the power of regulation to provide meaning to their collectivist world vision. 
Entirely too often developers have to donate huge amounts of money to politicians just so they can have the opportunity to build something halfway decent—and usually what they end up with is a long way off from the original vision once zoning chews up a project into pieces and leaves the consumer public with an end product far less imaginative than when it was conceived. Precisely to the point, since Mark Welch has joined George Lang as a trustee in West Chester things have finally started to move in a positive direction. At the Streets of West Chester a fabulous entertainment facility is about to open called The Main Event, which is essentially a very high scale bowling facility—among many other things.
The Holiday Inn just built a wonderful hotel across from IKEA—and the steak house featured at that establishment is great for business lunches. But then there is the Premier Shooting facility which is a game changer for a target range in the Tri-State area. It’s so nice that people will drive into town just to visit it from other cities. It is a top class facility. I was happy to get an invite to a sneak peek that the owners were putting on to tour the facility behind the curtain, and all I can say is that it was extremely impressive—and that three years ago—before Mark Welch was elected as a trustee giving George Lang that critical second vote that he needed for the many previous years of struggle—that the Premier facility could have only have been built within the last year. West Chester has a lot to look forward to regarding entertainment and leisure activity—and the Premier Shooting and Training Center is just the exclamation point at the end of an extravagant pro-capitalist government culture that has been created under the guidance of George Lang. I personally like George, but too often people disappoint me because they don’t walk the talk. George talks a lot—more than most people, but he walks more than he talks—let’s put it that way.
When I spoke to him he specified to me that his mission was to provide the people least able to defend themselves against aggression the means to do so—which is a tremendous service to the people of West Chester. He could have said to me that he hoped to make enough money to break even after their first year of operating—and in the context of our conversation he could have easily have said such a thing without shame—but he was quite sincere. That’s when it became apparent that the Premier Shooting & Training Center was a dream for this family and that George Lang and Mark Welch had created a business environment that allowed that dream to actually be constructed—along with a determined and well-known developer.
The shooting lanes for target work are certainly on the high-end up range, but down range it is just state of the art. For me the most noticeable luxury was their air evacuation system which was moving a lot of air during my visit. As all shooters know there is a lot of lead in gun smoke so at a range where several shooters are working with their firearms smoke can fill the room quickly. That air has to be moved to keep things fresh because you don’t want to breathe too much as a shooter. It smells nice, but isn’t good for you under sustained conditions.
It’s a nice, clean environment that provides access to their stock. For men who love to shoot, it’s a dream come true. But better than that—they can bring their wives without having to worry about the environment being too intimidating for them to feel included. The shooting range is set right off the retail area and is clean and safe. There is even an office for the range master to supervise two separate ranges by looking out a central window to ensure that no trouble occurs for the sake of safety. There is even an armourer on site to help with gun customization or troubleshooting that is equipped for minor gunsmithing duties. Everything about the shooting experience associated with a target range was on the top end.
