The Bill Cunningham Show as it is today, and probably always was—is an act. Similar to how Cunningham runs his afternoon television show which has replaced the Jerry Springer Show as tabloid television of a salacious nature, the radio show that made him famous is also only a show. Cunningham has made a good living off pandering to various demographic types. Cunningham’s WLW conservative radio talk show is geared toward small government types. His television show is geared toward the typical school levy supporter and welfare recipient. But occasionally, Cunningham has on a good guest that says some really wonderful things. One such instance was the recent visit by Wayne Allyn Root representing his website, Root For America.com. Root is to the left of my political position, but nobody of any intelligence can argue with what he said during his appearance on 700 WLW recently. Have a listen.
Even though Cunningham waffles back and forth and stays in the current political center about where Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly is, broadcasts like that one are useful. The people to the left of O’Reilly and Cunningham are worlds away from where Root and I are. People like Obama and his kind might as well live on the tumbling asteroid of Pluto out on the edge of the earth’s solar system. Obama is not even close to being on the same planet of political ideology as most of America, particularly in the middle of the country from rural Pennsylvania to the mountains of Reno, Nevada. The only people who think the way Obama does are the conquered people who live in the big cities and are addicted to social government services, or people who work for the government. Most everyone else thinks and feels as Root does—they just don’t feel comfortable vocalizing it.
I agree with what Root said, but more than anything he was spot on in blaming most of America’s current problems on the failed public education system. He was right, there are too many liberal teachers ran by big labor unions with progressive political goals as their primary objective. It has been dangerous to allow those types of people to teach our generations of children, and the severity of that danger is evident in our present society. Education must be completely re-invented; it is a dismal failure in present form. It has delivered to a massive population all the wrong ideals, values, and political sentiments, and our nation is showing the damage. It is their fault primarily that nearly half the nation lives on Pluto with Obama while people like Root and I stand on the kind of ground which founded the freest country on earth in human history.
Wayne Allyn Root did not exaggerate about his comments on the state of America. The trouble is that most people don’t hear those types of comments often enough. Too many people are content to watch Cunningham’s afternoon television show, and skip the radio audience which broadcasts segments like the one with Root. Political diatribes with fierce conviction are seldom heard on television shows away from the cable channels—and that has allowed large portions of the nation to be pulled out into space away from the firm grounding of the American Constitution. But because of media like this website, those epic broadcasts can be shared with those who were watching television instead of listening to the radio. So dear reader, I would suggest you sent this to them, and enlighten them to the ways of the world from those who are sane and defending the world from those who aren’t.
After several years of levy fights in the Lakota school district I have heard the pro tax crowd call me personally every name known to the human mind in anger that I don’t yield to their social impositions. In response to their diatribes I have come up with a lot of names of my own to call them, such as “levy addicts,” “Lakota Zombies,” “Latté sipping prostitutes,” and “Levy Cheerleaders.” This last one reflects well most of the inner sanctum of school levy supports who treat the school superintendent as though she were a rock star for a musical group. Many of these levy “cheerleaders” seem to have replaced their youthful days when they attended rock concerts and tossed their undergarments at a stage advertising themselves for backstage adventures, to becoming enema plugs for Superintendent Mantia at Lakota. Their rambunctious social display of levy support is rather sickening and deserves that type of criticism. It is what came to my mind upon their booth set up at Lakota football games advertising their levy scheme like nighttime employees of K-Street working a hustle.
I am so grateful that the Lakota School District has finalized their plans for the levy funds. It has been eight years since the last levy passed. Lakota has experienced extremely harsh cuts over the past two years. In fact, it is now operating on $20 million less than it just three years ago.
They just shared that our per pupil spending is less than it was in 2005, when the last levy passed. While I want them to be fiscally responsible, I also don’t want it to go so far that it is compromising the great education we have been providing during the 20 years I have lived here.
Because of a change in how schools are measured, we will not be given an assessment by the state o Ohio this year. We will not know exactly how these cuts have impacted Lakota’s performance. We do know that some testing scores have gone down the reduction of class offerings at the high school and participation in sports throughout the district is significantly down.
So – we are starting to feel the negative impact from cuts we have experienced over the last two years. I know that Lakota has spent the last two years reaching out to the community to find out what it wants in a school district. After the board of education presentations, I feel they responded to this input and are meeting the needs of our students and also provide services that the community has identified as the most essential for student success. It is time to support this levy to secure solid futures for our Lakota students.
Pam Perrino
Liberty Twp,
That to me was a reasonable levy cheerleading argument that deserves an answer, which I provided to the paper. Even though Perrino in the past has been quite divisive in her participation of tax increase campaigns at the school, she brings up a lot of issues that need clarification. So here is my response to Perrino’s letter which appeared in the paper.
Say No to the Lakota Levy
The assumption that there is a time to support a Lakota levy based on the years since one last passed is a poor measure of fiscal management. Levy supporters at Lakota are starting their levy promotion efforts for the November election with the very weak argument that the best reason for a tax increase is that there hasn’t been one since 2005. The postulation is that time is the measure of levy necessity, not market conditions. Only a functioning monopoly could make such a claim.
Lakota does not need a levy; it is going through an approximate ten-year period of declining enrollment which will necessitate workforce reductions at Lakota do to the much smaller classroom sizes that will be needed. The $20 million the school has had to cut over the last couple of years is due to this declining enrollment and is part of the painful process of fiscal management which should be expected.
The best way to keep costs down at Lakota is to keep money out of their hands with “NO” votes, and force the school to reduce their work force in conjunction with the declining enrollment which is a natural part of a mature community. Under the pro levy argument they are saying that every couple of years forever Lakota will expect a tax increase no matter what the market conditions dictate. The proposed tax increase in spite of claims for improved security and technology upgrades are simply going to cover payroll increases for raises issued under an upcoming 2014 labor contract. Only an organization that is functioning as an antitrust would have the audacity to make such a claim which is all the reason that school levies should be defeated at Lakota for at least the next decade.
But to the levy cheerleaders, none of those facts matter. They propose an infinite amount of tax impositions upon the community with the short-sighted intention of perpetual approval. What they don’t understand is that when costs go up, businesses, and residents sell off their properties, and they move. Lakota as a district in Butler County has benefited from having relatively low taxes, particularly with sales taxes, and this is the real reason for the spawn of real-estate growth. It has little to do with Lakota schools. Many parents would love to send their children to Lakota schools, but few can afford to live in the district which is the byproduct of being a successful community. The natural impact on the school from that success is that there will be declining enrollment. And that fact alone is enough to put out the fire that the levy cheerleaders are trying to advance by blowing on the flames of consumption for higher taxes.
A major escalation of degeneracy by the modern statist regimes using meritocracy to propel mediocrity into every modern profession is a fairly recent trend inspired by the 1972 book A Theory of Justice, by John Rawls who was a professor of philosophy at Harvard University. Rawls argued in that popular statist book that a new theory of social justice demands that humans counteract the injustice of nature by instituting a corrupt and unthinkable concept upon mankind, equality at the expense of quality. Rawls believed that nature should be rebelled against depriving those favored by nature of the right to rewards they produce, and grant to the incompetent a right to the effortless enjoyment of the rewards they could not produce or imagine on their own. In other words John Rawls believed that justice should be redistributed into society to alter nature itself bringing different standards of justice based on social need, not individual desire. Under this thinking if a dirt bag raped a woman, or broke into a home and stole all the money of the occupants, the scales of justice would be altered for the man if he was a member of the poor, or minority because nature did not give him the proper tools to be equal to those he robbed, or raped. Under Rawls theory, the individual crimes are secondary to the greater good of social equality, so under his “Theory of Justice” the criminal is a useful tool of fighting against nature the tendency to make some people better than others.
A Theory of Justice is a work of political philosophy and ethics by John Rawls. It was originally published in 1972 and revised in both 1975 (for the translated editions) and 1999. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls attempts to solve the problem of distributive justice (the socially just distribution of goods in a society) by utilising a variant of the familiar device of the social contract. The resultant theory is known as “Justice as Fairness“, from which Rawls derives his two principles of justice: the liberty principle and the difference principle.
In A Theory of Justice, Rawls argues for a principled reconciliation of liberty and equality. Central to this effort is an account of the circumstances of justice, inspired by David Hume, and a fair choice situation for parties facing such circumstances, similar to some ofImmanuel Kant‘s views. Principles of justice are sought to guide the conduct of the parties. These parties are recognized to face moderate scarcity, and they are neither naturally altruistic nor purely egoistic. They have ends which they seek to advance, but prefer to advance them through cooperation with others on mutually acceptable terms. Rawls offers a model of a fair choice situation (the original position with its veil of ignorance) within which parties would hypothetically choose mutually acceptable principles of justice. Under such constraints, Rawls believes that parties would find his favoured principles of justice to be especially attractive, winning out over varied alternatives, including utilitarian and right-libertarian accounts.
Rawls belongs to the social contract tradition. However, Rawls’ social contract takes a different view from that of previous thinkers. Specifically, Rawls develops what he claims are principles of justice through the use of an artificial device he calls the Original position in which everyone decides principles of justice from behind a veil of ignorance. This “veil” is one that essentially blinds people to all facts about themselves so they cannot tailor principles to their advantage.
“no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like. I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities. The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.”
According to Rawls, ignorance of these details about oneself will lead to principles that are fair to all. If an individual does not know how he will end up in his own conceived society, he is likely not going to privilege any one class of people, but rather develop a scheme of justice that treats all fairly. In particular, Rawls claims that those in the Original Position would all adopt a max -min strategy which would maximize the prospects of the least well-off.
They are the principles that rational and free persons concerned to further their own interests would accept in an initial position of equality as defining the fundamentals of the terms of their association [Rawls, p 11]
Rawls claims that the parties in the original position would adopt two such principles, which would then govern the assignment of rights and duties and regulate the distribution of social and economic advantages across society. The difference principle permits inequalities in the distribution of goods only if those inequalities benefit the worst-off members of society. Rawls believes that this principle would be a rational choice for the representatives in the original position for the following reason: Each member of society has an equal claim on their society’s goods. Natural attributes should not affect this claim, so the basic right of any individual, before further considerations are taken into account, must be to an equal share in material wealth. What, then, could justify unequal distribution? Rawls argues that inequality is acceptable only if it is to the advantage of those who are worst-off.
The agreement that stems from the original position is both hypothetical and ahistorical. It is hypothetical in the sense that the principles to be derived are what the parties would, under certain legitimating conditions, agree to, not what they have agreed to. Rawls seeks to use an argument that the principles of justice are what would be agreed upon if people were in the hypothetical situation of the original position and that those principles have moral weight as a result of that. It is ahistorical in the sense that it is not supposed that the agreement has ever been, or indeed could ever have been, derived in the real world outside of carefully limited experimental exercises.
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First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.[1]
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The basic liberties of citizens are, the political liberty to vote and run for office, freedom of speech and assembly, liberty of conscience, freedom of personal property and freedom from arbitrary arrest. However, he says:
liberties not on the list, for example, the right to own certain kinds of property (e.g. means of production) and freedom of contract as understood by the doctrine of laissez-faire are not basic; and so they are not protected by the priority of the first principle.[2]
The first principle may not be violated, even for the sake of the second principle, above an unspecified but low-level of economic development. However, because various basic liberties may conflict, it may be necessary to trade them off against each other for the sake of obtaining the largest possible system of rights. There is thus some uncertainty as to exactly what is mandated by the principle, and it is possible that a plurality of sets of liberties satisfy its requirements.
Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that (Rawls, 1971, p.302; revised edition, p. 47):
(a) they are to be of the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society, consistent with the just savings principle (the difference principle).
(b) offices and positions must be open to everyone under conditions of fair equality of opportunity
Rawls’ claim in (a) is that departures from equality of a list of what he calls primary goods—”things which a rational man wants whatever else he wants” [Rawls, 1971, pg. 92]—are justified only to the extent that they improve the lot of those who are worst-off under that distribution in comparison with the previous, equal, distribution. His position is at least in some sense egalitarian, with a provision that equality is not to be achieved by worsening the position of the least advantaged.[clarification needed] An important consequence here, however, is that inequalities can actually be just on Rawls’ view, as long as they are to the benefit of the least well off. His argument for this position rests heavily on the claim that morally arbitrary factors (for example, the family one is born into) shouldn’t determine one’s life chances or opportunities. Rawls is also keying on an intuition that a person does not morally deserve their inborn talents; thus that one is not entitled to all the benefits they could possibly receive from them; hence, at least one of the criteria which could provide an alternative to equality in assessing the justice of distributions is eliminated.
The stipulation in (b) is lexically prior to that in (a). Fair equality of opportunity requires not merely that offices and positions are distributed on the basis of merit, but that all have reasonable opportunity to acquire the skills on the basis of which merit is assessed. It may be thought that this stipulation, and even the first principle of justice, may require greater equality than the difference principle, because large social and economic inequalities, even when they are to the advantage of the worst-off, will tend seriously to undermine the value of the political liberties and any measures towards fair equality of opportunity.
When it is wondered why there doesn’t seem to be any justice in the world of modern America, and why the court system seems to be failing, look to A Theory of Justice by John Rawls. Under the accepted terms of Rawls’ work, if a member of society daily injects themselves with heroin, pimps out stolen women into prostitution to pay for his drug habit, runs a theft ring and is a general menace to society, the social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are to be of the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society, consistent with the just savings principle. Meaning, all the good people of society who have made quality decisions in their life, worked hard, treated others with fairness are to pour some of their hard work into the degenerate so that social justice can look favorably upon the entire human race regardless of individual value. Isn’t it clear now why studying philosophy should be more important in your daily life dear reader?
Every courtroom in America with miles of case-law supporting them created by too many money-grubbing, parasitic lawyers have taken the work of John Rawls and made it mainstream thinking. It is why criminals believe they have rights to the merit of the good, and why they are not motivated to change their behavior because John Rawls new theories of justice instruct them that nature has given them an unfair advantage in life, and it is up to the intelligentsia of meritocracy to determine winners and losers in society arrogantly suppressing nature behind the rule of the academic class.
Until A Theory of Justice is rejected by the American population and the case-law built upon its failed philosophy is scrubbed completely, justice will be elusive in modern society. Criminals will continue to believe that they are “owed” something by somebody, and innocent victims will continue to search for justice among judges who sit upon their ivory towers and defend Rawls because through the meritocracy of the Harvard University elite, there is a power they dare not challenge. It is largely because of Rawls that the Second Amendment is being eroded away, that the NDAA Act was voted upon, that the TSA, the NSA, and every other government organization works against the vast amount of American population with violations against their personal liberty. Because under A Theory of Justice the rights of individual citizens is secondary to the rights of the under-privileged, the lazy, and the corrupt because nature selected them to be less, and it is the obligation of mankind to help them become better by giving them a free pass to continued behavior of a social menace. Sometimes it only takes a few generations to wreck a civilization and in the case of American justice it only took a few years from 1972 to destroy the logic of our legal system. The blame rests on the shoulders of John Rawls and his Harvard University meritocracy agenda driven psychosis of reshaping the world against the desires of nature to create a world molded by the morally bankrupt in a perpetual draining of wealth not just monetarily, but ethically till there is nothing left but a distant memory of a once great culture. America was a land built by rules yet was destroyed by A Theory of Justice, written in 1972, a college professor functioning from a failed philosophy that was never corrected in time to save civilization.
Lakota is currently trying to pass a 2013 tax increase so it probably will come as a shock that the school will be planning a 2017 levy attempt as soon as they can. In the chart shown in the following video, I use another “bullwhip economic” trick to demonstrate how targeted cuts to the Lakota school district could maintain the profitable trend they have shown over the last couple of years. Yet, the school apparently resents greatly their operation of maintaining a budget surplus and has very immediate intentions of escalating their spending as soon as they receive levy passage. In the following chart, the red line represents the tax revenue that the Lakota communities of Liberty Township and West Chester Twp provide to the school. The blue line is the budget for Lakota. Watching this video it will be clear that the recent levy defeats have forced Lakota to bring their costs in line with the tax revenue supplied. As explained, the teacher’s contract the district has with the Lakota Education Association has maintained a wage freeze lasting through 2014. This is why the district has operated in a surplus. However, it is also clear that the intention of the levy of 2013 is to throw money at the new teacher’s contract because the blue line spikes up dramatically and predictably until 2017. The green line is the amount of funding the school intends to inject into their financial dynamics upon levy passage in 2013. As it becomes terribly obvious, the green line and blue line intersect during the year 2017 meaning that Lakota will have to pursue another tax increase at that time.
It is terribly obvious that Lakota has been forced by the voting community to live within their budget with levy failures, which is good. Yet they have been promising that the summer of 2014 would reap a payday to school employees because the blue line spikes sharply upward countering all the positive gains that have been made since 2010 to the present. It was always my intention to bring Lakota’s operating costs in line with community revenue without raising taxes and this chart shows how well the effort has worked. The NO votes have been the most useful tool in forcing the school district to operate the way they should have always functioned, with a keen focus on their expenditures and operating with a slight surplus. But they seem to not have learned their lesson and have been promising their employees large raises in 2014. Their spending projections reflect this as the numbers making up the data on the chart are generated by Lakota’s own statistics. There is a reason they must disclose all their information to the tax paying public—it is for just this type of analysis.
Lakota has been able to maintain a positive balance by making the forced targeted cuts due to the levy failures, which is also reflected on the chart, which is why I find my “bullwhip economic” demonstrations to be so effective. It’s my own unique way of explaining such dry material that has a tendency to bore people to death when they are forced to attend the kind of meetings it takes to ascertain the data that makes up such charts. So I like to put a little metaphorical zip on the information to present it in an entertaining way, otherwise the information goes in one ear and out the other. But relevant to the Lakota levy of 2013 and all future levies, the information couldn’t be clearer. The data speaks for itself. Lakota plans to go on a spending binge in 2014 like pent-up sailors who have been at sea for many months approaching a whore house. The projected numbers that make up the blue line can be obtained from Lakota’s treasurer or anybody involved in the financing structure at the school.
The frustration, anger, and in-trench warfare that sometimes goes on behind the scenes with the pro levy crowd is predicated directly off their lack of desire to acknowledge the facts driven off numbers shown so clearly in charts like the example I used in the video. I call them “levy addicts, “levy zombies,” and more derogatory “latte sipping prostitutes,” because of their destructive desire to hurt an entire community with corrosive taxation as they belong to a group of people who desire to throw large wages at employees who aren’t needed, but for emotional reasons. The desire to increase taxes for the solitary reason of injecting money into a group of employees that have a perceived value which is too high, or are not needed is simply stupid. Many times the only reason is because the levy supporters are friends with those employees, or hope that by throwing money at the school, the money will off-set their terrible parenting skills. They hope the school will give their children what they can’t because they are plagued with so much self-doubt as individual people; they have nothing to offer their children but social connections and a big mouth that advocates bigger and better schools to teach them in. The root cause of the problem is that those levy advocates do not have faith in their own parenting and hope that they can hide the fact behind their chants for higher taxes, and more community spirit, and they have no restraint in demanding the community fund perpetual increases in the blue line based strictly on emotional neuroses.
So the tax increases will not end in 2013. They will continue until the school is forced to cut their costs the proper way with controlled cuts made without emotion. Since Lakota will not regulate themselves, they must be forced to with failed levies. The Levy Zombies do not run the community. They are often young people between the ages of 25 and 35 and are functioning from personal insecurities. It is dangerous to allow them to dictate budgets, which is why Lakota believes that nobody will ever challenge their blue line projections well into 2017. The same logic left unchecked will pillage the Lakota community until there is nothing left but a high tax zone of residents and empty business establishments driven away by the bottomless pit hunger of the levy addicts. Against those specimens targeted cuts is the only defense and I use bullwhip economics to highlight the point. But aside from the spectacle of my whip tricks the situation is actually quite serious, Lakota is a parasitic organization that is selling itself as the savior of community value when it is practicing the opposite effect. Under the Lakota plan seen on the chart, the financial imposition that public school will place on the community will be devastating and end the thriving business culture that currently exists. Anyone who supports a school levy is crazy, especially when given the facts that show the proof. The best thing anybody could do for Lakota and the community that surrounds the school is to vote “NO” on the levy and force Lakota to live within its means, instead of their projected path of deficit spending toward a future resulting in economic collapse. The data tells the story. All anybody need do is look at the data to reach the same conclusion.
We often think of welfare recipients as the inner city single mom who has had children recklessly in order to receive more government benefits. Or the retired crack addicts who spent their youth and money on drugs only to become born again in the eyes of God but penniless, toothless, unemployable adults. Or the reckless young people who have been taught that they should apply for welfare at every turn by their public schools serving as sign up centers for government assistance promoting reckless behavior so that recruiting for welfare programs is higher. There is another class of welfare recipient that very few talk about which costs more money than all those demographic stereotypes combined. That class would be the political class, of which people like Barack Obama and Speaker John Boehner are a part. In fact the most expensive public housing project in the country by square foot is The White House where the recipients who live and work there are all welfare recipients living off the public dime. For a breakdown of this political class of welfare takers listen to Darryl Parks from 700 WLW where he brought his usual stats to an epic broadcast which will forever live in infamy. Listen carefully!
After listening to Darryl is there any hope that any politician from the local trustee, to a federal senator or congressman will ever do anything to cut off the welfare from which they are empowered to give so much money to themselves? Does anybody think that John Boehner will reform federal spending which would take money out of the pockets of the House he resides over–of course not; otherwise they would not have picked him as their leader. Boehner was not picked by members of the GOP in the House because of his high ethical standards, his moral authority; his understanding of law—but rather for his ability to keep the members of the federal government firmly entrenched on welfare. Under no other operation could any worker anywhere hope to make as much money as people like John Boehner have made in the federal government.
As Darryl Parks stated, the reason politicians like Boehner have been in government for so long and is considered a leader of his party is because he has the ability to raise money. I personally know some of the people who give a lot of money to Boehner– I’m only picking on him because he is my congressman—so I have firsthand knowledge of the guy. I know Boehner is a nice fellow who my in-laws spotted in their early days at the Beckett Ridge Country Club where my wife and I were married. They knew him through his family as being an up and coming star in politics. Paul Ryan as a young whipper-snapper at Miami University down the road from John’s home actually put out yard signs for Boehner’s first congressional run in areas like Trenton, Lakota, Fairfield and his college campus. The speeches politicians give to get elected are all the same, but the result never changes either. In spite of all the campaign promises what the members who lobby themselves into the political class are really after is easy money where all they have to do is sign up for the vast number of welfare programs offered by the federal government disguised as salary.
I have been to fundraisers where the plates are $500 a plate so the welfare recipients can make appearances to the public. Knowing of John and his family most of my life as next door neighbors so-to-speak it shocked me recently to see some friends who were worth millions of dollars willingly pass out invites to one of these John Boehner fundraisers. These very financially wealthy friends looked toward the event as though they were school girls who had back stage passes to the latest boy band concert. Boehner had been made up to be a celebrity because he was the third most powerful person in the entire world—according to the media, and that designated celebrity status.
But when I look at John I only see a welfare recipient. He’s a guy who makes his living making rules, and that is a very parasitic existence. That certainly doesn’t make him a celebrity in my book. But worse, he does virtually nothing to earn the vast sums of money he takes as a congressman. Sure he does a lot of “wheeling and dealing” in Washington, but how much of it is for the good of the country? Not much. Most of Boehner’s wheeling and dealing is done for the good of his party, so that he can use the celebrity created by the media to generate money from my friends who are willing to pay $50 to $500 dollars a plate to raise money for his “war chest,” so he can win more elections and gain more welfare wealth.
Does any of this make John a bad guy? No. It just makes him a parasitic welfare recipient that our modern statist system of government uses to create celebrity status so more people turn to government for their riches, instead of private enterprise. To stay in power politicians like John need to convince people of real power—those who are wealthy, that their campaign donations are worthy of his celebrity status—an image created by the media for the benefit of all welfare recipients, from the crack whore of the inner city to the residents of The White House. Once John raises his money and stays in power, he then makes his money by appeasing the mob in congress who often gives themselves raises, while enriching themselves with insider trading and lobbyist bribes. John claims to have a clean record with lobbyists, but he wouldn’t be House Leader unless he turned his head the other way so others could abuse the system.
Yet the only way that the debt ceiling can stop climbing its way back from the $17 trillion dollar mark is for congress, and the senate to spend less money, and to do that, they have to stop taking so much themselves. At some point in time they have to stop viewing federal office as a treasure chest full of pirates looting and pillaging as though there were no tomorrow. The result of that behavior is what we have seen in modern Detroit. California is next, followed by the entire nation of America. Politicians robbed Detroit blind just as they are now against every taxpaying district where most of the money collected goes to inflated government pensions, and wages that are not representative of the skill level purchased. For most of these workers that in the federal government pay near six figures in salary, their actual work is only worth bare minimum wage in the private sector. There is a reason that Washington D.C. has the highest per capita worth anywhere in the country. It’s not because they make wonderful cars, or airplanes, or even computers. All they make in Washington are deals from one welfare recipient to another swapping money stolen from the American tax payer for the benefit of themselves.
To some degree or another anyone who is employed off tax money is a welfare recipient, including those who work at NASA. If the federal government is involved, the employees are welfare recipients. Not all of them are diabolical menaces to morality, and some actually contribute to the betterment of science. NASA has done many great things for America and the world, so in some cases, the money can be worth it. In most situations however, as in the present day political landscape, politicians were never intended to become so wealthy as social servants under elected office—and they were never intended to make life-time careers out of the election process. So long as the desire for easy money in politics exists, con artists, lawyers, social parasites, and comb over, insecure womanizers will desire to occupy those halls of power that are built off the sweat of the American tax payer—where looting off of goodness is so common that the violations are as frequent as the raindrops of a summer storm in a monsoon soaked region of the world prying for daylight.
The Bullwhip Fast Draw was invented by Gery Deer and Paul Nolan at Gerry’s studio in Jamestown, Ohio near Ceaser’s Creek. There is nothing like it anywhere in the world. The competition was literally born in Ohio out of a desire to display how fast bullwhips can be drawn from a coiled position and thrust out to hit a target. At our annual Annie Oakley Western Showcase competitions the SASS (Single Action Shooting Society) is set up in the next building performing their pistol quick draw events so it only made sense for the benefit of the crowd and fun for participants to do something similar with bullwhips.
At the Annie Oakley Western Showcase expert whip handlers from all over the continental United States have come to participate over the last decade and try their hand at Ohio’s very challenging competition. When the Bullwhip Fast Draw was first conceived by Gery the Wild West Arts Club had their big yearly meeting in Las Vegas led by Mark Allen and Alex Green so the smaller gathering in Ohio needed something to solidify its uniqueness. That is how and why Gery invented The Bullwhip Fast Draw. Over the years as older Western Arts acts with their aging participants left the field Ohio became the center of attention under Gery’s diligent work and enterprise. Every year when the Annie Oakley Days hit Greenville, Ohio in Darke County the Bullwhip Fast Draw has become increasingly a crowd favorite. It’s a very fast event that has plenty of drama and is the perfect kind of bullwhip activity to perform in front of an audience.
I won the event this year and several times in the past, but there have been many winners. My son-in-law is particularly good at it as he and I used to practice in the back yard against each other when he lived at our house during the early days of his marriage to my daughter. One year Richard Best’s 10-year-old granddaughter won the whole event beating everyone. Kirk Bass has done very well at it over the years which is why our stand-offs against each other are always exciting. As a knife thrower he has the proper movement ingrained in his head so he gets to the target quickly. Sometimes, like the instance in the video above the quick draw is so fast that the eye cannot see the result in real-time. Only slow motion can reveal the winner. The camera in that footage captures images at 30 frames per second, which is faster than a motion picture camera producing 24 frames per second. By watching the Bull Whip Fast Draw in slow motion it is clearly seen that only a few images of the whips in motion can be seen from the coiled position. As the entire Bull Whip Fast Draw takes place in a fraction of a second there are only a few images that are captured of the actual whip in flight. When the end of the whip strikes the cup it is traveling at well over 750 MPH because the crack is a sonic boom. The whip handler must calculate in their mind within a fraction of a moment the exact location in space and time where the end of their whip will strike the target.
Within the entire world there are only handfuls of people who are very good at the finesse aspects of whip handling. This means performing some of the complicated cracks using two-handed maneuvers. But when it comes to focusing those efforts on a directed point in space and applying the timing necessary to hit that point of space with all the calculations it takes to make a bullwhip arrive there is a whole different set of circumstances that has an even narrower range of experts. This is why even very technical bullwhip performers can have difficulty when they are put up against a clock or worse yet, another human being standing across from them. In the early days of the Bullwhip Fast Draw I always had the speed to hit targets quickly, but often found that if I tried to push out too much speed I would tend to crack the target off to the right—often missing. A bullwhip to work right is a matter of timing, the end of the whip has to be known within fractions of a second and projected to a directed spot in three-dimensional space. To win the Bull Whip Fast Draw a piece of the cup must be cut off, so the end of the whip needs to crack precisely on the target. It is not enough to just run the whip through the target using downward momentum to knock the target from the holder. To win the 750 MPH needed to obtain a crack of the whip needs to be focused in order to hit the target before the other opponent as fast as possible and that speed must be directed at the target. Kirk Bass is so good at the Bullwhip Fast Draw because he’s not only strong, but is accustomed to directing focused energy complete with timing because he is a professional knife thrower. Whip artists who are good at the Bullwhip Fast Draw are able to make all those calculations in fractions of a second using power, finesse, and impeccable timing to hit their target under the pressure of time. Not at all easy, but really fun to watch and try.
Unlike traditional firearm quick draw, such as what the SASS Society engages in, the calculation is in the hand/eye coordination but with the added pressure of creating the force needed to generate a sonic boom to destroy the target. The gun does most of the physical force work in traditional quick draw. With the whip the force is done by the same hands that make all the calculations in time and space which is why it is such a unique event.
Like all games of skill the benefits often carry over into other aspects of life. I find that the skills that allow me to be good at the Bullwhip Fast Draw help me in all aspects of my existence and that is the real reason for working hard to accomplish the needed skills. Every year I enjoy the opportunity to re-calibrate myself with the wonderful people who meet me at the Annie Oakley Festival and compete against me in Ohio’s very own Bullwhip Fast Draw. The crowd watching has a great time, but the competition for me is even better as a useful tool in measuring what works and what doesn’t. The ability to discover how fast is too fast, and how fast is just right is useful in making virtually all decisions about all things and this is what I like most about The Bullwhip Fast Draw.
After a good day of working with some of the best whip artists there are anywhere it felt good to return home at the end of a long weekend to find The Lone Ranger soundtrack waiting for me on my front porch. I had been humming the music in my head all during the whip competitions, especially the Bullwhip Fast Draw and my mind was in a good mood from the experience. It is one thing to enjoy music like Hans Zimmer’s latest soundtrack to a western film which is highly unusual, especially the song, “Red’s Theater of the Absurd.” Listen to it at the clip below.
I LOVE THAT SONG!
But it’s quite another to be able to actually participate in events that celebrate western arts, which are the foundations of American culture while listening to it. It was late at night but I opened the soundtrack anyway and quickly downloaded it onto my iPod. As I drifted off to sleep thinking of my day participating in Ohio’s very own Bullwhip Fast Draw I listened to the music of The Lone Ranger. Because Gery and Paul invented the Bullwhip Fast Draw, a unique event that has brought to my life a way of thinking that is highly unusual, and much appreciated, my life has been improved. The musical notes of The Lone Ranger are just a little bit sweeter when it is known that all the work done in the Bullwhip Fast Draw were invented in Ohio, and seen only at the Annie Oakley Festival every year at the end of July. It puts you in the kind of company that can be counted on only two hands as far as skill level. It’s all about speed, calculation, and force, skills that are often needed when life deals hard problems which are not quite as literal as the relationship between a target and a bullwhip.
When it was time to leave, President of VietnamTrương Tấn Sang, reportedly offered Obama a gift as the American President was visiting recently — a copy of a letter sent by Ho Chi Minh to Harry Truman. Obama stated “we discussed the fact that Ho Chi Minh was actually inspired by the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Constitution, and the words of Thomas Jefferson. Ho Chi Minh talked about his interest in cooperation with the United States. President Sang indicated that even if it’s 67 years later, it’s good that we’re still making progress.” I have told some of this story before. Review by Clicking Here. Of course Obama neglected to tell the rest of the story which he no doubt already knew but used this conversation with Sang to attempt to quell the newly fueled Tea Party movement which has gained momentum in the wake of the many Obama scandals with an obvious attempt to misdirect the current offensive. Read more at the source article at The Blaze.
In 1911, working as the cook’s helper on a ship, Nguyễn Ái Quốc (later known as Ho Chi Man) traveled to the United States. From 1912–13, he lived in New York (Harlem) and Boston, where he worked as a baker at the Parker House Hotel. Among a series of menial jobs, he claimed to have worked for a wealthy family in Brooklyn between 1917–18, and for General Motors as a line manager. It is believed that, while in the United States, he made contact with Korean nationalists, an experience that developed his political outlook.[7]As a young man Nguyễn had a problem, he wanted to get the French colonies out of his homeland of Vietnam and he wanted to learn from America by taking on odd jobs so he could perform the task. The French had colonized Vietnam in much the way that England had occupied America so the future communist leader of Vietnam wanted to learn how to remove them using America as his revolutionary model.
At various points between 1913 and 1919, Nguyễn lived in West Ealing, and later in Crouch End, Hornsey. He reportedly worked as either a chef or dish washer [reports vary] at the Drayton Court Hotel in West Ealing.[8] It is claimed that Nguyễn trained as a pastry chef under Auguste Escoffier at the Carlton Hotel in the Haymarket, Westminster, but there is no evidence to support this.[7][9] However, the wall of New Zealand House, home of the New Zealand High Commission, which now stands on the site of the Carlton Hotel, displays a blue plaque, stating that Nguyễn worked there in 1913 as a waiter. Nguyễn was also employed as a pastry boy on the Newhaven-Dieppe ferry route in 1913.[10] He was quite an adventurer stopping at nothing to learn all he could about the West so he could free his country from French occupation.
From 1919–23, while living in France, Nguyễn began to approach the political path, through his friend and Socialist Party of France comrade Marcel Cachin. Nguyễn claimed to have arrived in Paris from London in 1917, but the French police only had documents of his arrival in June 1919.[7] He joined in a group of Vietnamese nationalists in Paris whose leaders were Phan Chu Trinh and Phan Văn Trường, bearing a new name Nguyễn Ái Quốc (“Nguyễn the Patriot”). But before he contacted any of the radical socialists in France he attempted to gain audience with Woodrow Wilson during the Treaty of Versailles seeking help and advice from The United States as they divided up the world forming The League of Nations. Much to Nguyễn’s distress, Wilson wanted nothing to do with meeting anybody from Vietnam or going against the wishes of his French host, so Nguyễn was abandoned and left to seek political advice elsewhere which is how he came into contact with socialists which he had also met in the streets of Harlem in The United States as the progressive era was coming into full swing. Nguyễn naturally must have thought that socialism was the future of America as they spoke so highly of it during his visits, so he pursued that path as a way to free his nation from French occupation. Citing the language and the spirit of the U.S. Declaration of Independence, Nguyễn, had expected U.S. PresidentWoodrow Wilson to help remove the French colonial rule from Vietnam and ensure the formation of a new, nationalist government. The future ruler had no idea that Wilson was trying to undo the Constitution, not preserve it with his own academic overthrow. Since he was unable to obtain consideration at Versailles, the failure further radicalized Nguyễn, making him a symbol of the anti-colonial movement at home in Vietnam.[12] That is the part of the story Obama conveniently left out in his meeting with President of VietnamTrương Tấn Sang.
In 1920, as a representative in the Congress of Tours of Socialist Party of France, Quốc voted for the Third International and became a founding member of the Parti Communiste Français (FCP). Taking a position in the Colonial Committee of PCF, he tried to attract his comrades’ attention towards people in French colonies including Indochina, but his efforts were often unsuccessful. In this period he learned to write journal articles and short stories as well as running his Vietnamese nationalist group. In May 1922, Nguyễn wrote an article for a French magazine criticizing the use of English words by French sportswriters.[13] The article implores Prime Minister Raymond Poincaré to outlaw such Franglais as le manager, le round and le knock-out. While living in Paris, he reportedly had a relationship with a dressmaker named Marie Brière.[13]
The rest is history and within four decades The United State found itself attempting to defend their French ally in a war that was started because the Vietnamese people wanted independence from colonial rule in their country. Nobody had listened to General Claire Chennault after World War II regarding the spread of communism across China so the mismanagement of the American government through many errors had placed themselves in a Catch 22 with Vietnam. If they abandoned the French, they would have had to admit their mistake during the Treaty of Versailles and allowed the spread of communism across the entire Asian continent, funded by the Russians—America’s Cold War enemy. All Ho Chi Minh wanted was to do to the French what America had done to the English in their own revolution. Yet the help and support of freedom wasn’t there—instead, Ho Chi Minh ran into the statist progressive Woodrow Wilson who did not care about the individual rights of the Vietnamese, only the expansion of European dominance, which was the result of the Treaty of Versailles. Wilson had been bitten by the seduction of communism that was flowing through-out the world because of Karl Marx, leaving Ho Chi Minh to seek refuge from with the communists in Europe. Either way, revolutionaries by design only had communism to form their thoughts which was the strategy of communist expansion during the progressive era.
Obama hoped that nobody would know anything about the real story of Ho Chi Minh so that he could deconstruct the resistance to communism most Americans have due to the rhetoric of the Cold War. Nothing politicians do at the level of Obama is an accident, and the meeting with modern Vietnamese leaders highlighting the similarities between communist led Ho Chi Minh and the Founding Fathers is a deliberate attack on the beliefs of most modern Americans who have little knowledge of history, particularly of the Vietnam War. But the story is not that Ho Chi Minh was a communist who learned his behavior from the Founding Fathers, but was a revolutionary who was inspired by America—and even sought our help, but was turned away and miss managed by Woodrow Wilson at a crucial time in world history. Ho Chi Minh was ultimately a creation of Woodrow Wilson and the failure of the progressives—which is not the truth that Obama will tell under any circumstances—even though he knows better. Like most modern politicians with statist tendencies, they will lie and manipulate any fact to achieve their ends, and in the case of Ho Chi Minh, this is exactly what President Obama was trying to do.
The cute picture of the little boy shown is of my grandson. That photo means more to me than just a sentimental moment of time captured by a gifted photographer at 9 months of age. Within that picture there were many contributors to the photograph, my daughter of course made the little boy with her husband, my wife made the white blanket by hand, and my other daughter took the picture in the back yard of the home that she owns with her husband. Virtually everyone in my immediate family played a part in that photograph. My imprint of course is that I put the gift of adventure in all those individuals, which is represented by the stack of books off to the side. That is what families are supposed to do and be for each other as the benefactors are little children like my grandson dressed in his little hat awaiting the tools of cognition to be put before his mind so that he too can live a life of adventure, discovering for himself all the potentialities that come from breathing air, and living life.
As another 4th of July came and went, I thought about my little grandson. When people wonder why I do some of the things I do, the first answer is because I want to. I enjoy fighting; debating, and philosophizing—pretty much in that order. But there is always a sub-plot in the back of my mind which drives me with purpose. When I was raising my children, it was fighting to make sure they tasted enough freedom and independent thought that they could grow up and live good lives. I have been successful in that. Now, it is the generation that comes after which I focus upon.
I have been an inspiration to many young people for many, many years. I still associate with many of those grown adults who looked as children toward someone to teach them how to be good people, how to face their fears, and live righteously. I have always offered myself in that role, even when I too was younger than they were. But there comes a benefit in living, surviving, and arriving at a time when not only you think you know more than everybody else, but you are sure of it. You know it because the reality around you has proven it time and time again. You don’t realize it because the intention is to be haughty, arrogant, or considered a God among men, but you just are because nobody else is trying.
Every child is born with the opportunity to become anything. Even children who are not genetically gifted or otherwise healthy have more potential in their minds than most living adults. For them their stories are not yet written and it makes me sad to see so many young children who don’t have adults to pour thoughts into their minds, to give them the ability to think on their own as young adults, and finally as grown adults. Most children the age of my grandson are doomed to a life of failure not because they lack any ability, but because they lack people in their lives that can help them develop into fully realized human beings.
My grandson will not have to worry about that. He has so many people in his life with very interesting traits of their own, that he has no choice but to pick up on those unique attributes while he forms his own character which is already evident. Looking at him it reminds me of what the 4th of July is all about. It’s why we fight to keep our country free so that little boys like my grandson can have the right to think and develop freely on their own, to bring their own unique gifts to the world. Someday, my grandson might decide that the bullwhip is not for him, but he will make that choice on his own, after he has had exposure to it and filled his mind with the value it brings to him through practice, and a bond with me, his grandmother, his aunt and uncle, and his mom and dad.
The fight for freedom is more than just a token message created by the Tea Party movement to hijack elected offices and become tomorrow’s tyrants through the desk of a bureaucrat. For me it is sincere, I believe in the things I say here with every cell in my body and beat of my heart. I believe in it for myself, and the joy it brings me in seeing the lights of freedom igniting in another human being, like the innocent eyes of my grandson, as it was captured so eloquently in the photograph my daughter took. I will teach his young mind in a way that was only available to my own daughters, but with the self-assuredness of having experience, to be a legend among mankind. When most people say they want their children and grandchildren to grow up to be lawyers, doctors, or God forbid—politicians, I frown at all those types of jobs. All of them are less than what I want for my grandson. I want for him to be a living legend, a character of such charisma, determination, and moral aptitude that there has never been another like him. Such a goal is a lofty one, but it’s what I will contribute to his mind with all our future time together. I can see the sparkle in his eye already, and soon, he will begin to take the form of a character unlike the world has ever seen.
And it will come from individuals like my daughter—his mother and her vast creativity, his aunt—my other daughter and her photographic genius and forward thinking vision, my two son-in-laws, one a former MMA fighter, the other a bullwhip champion in his own right, and my wife who reads hundreds of books a year, makes blankets for every member of our extended family, and is willing to spend countless hours on the floor playing with children. Then of course there are my contributions–in a few years I’ll have him jumping through walls of fire, cracking whips faster than lightning, crawling through caves that a snake couldn’t fit through and facing life with a fearlessness that every young man dreams of. Ladies and gentlemen viewing that picture—you are seeing a future legend that will know an unlimited life free of any shackles created by deficient human minds.
As I watched the fireworks on the 4th of July in 2013, that is what I thought of. And I will venture to make it so.
I sometimes forget that a majority of the people in the world can only remember historical events ranging into the 1950s these days, so the history of how America arrived to where it is today is lost to them, except in history books and documentaries. Of those it has only been during the last ten years that both took a hard look at the liberalism that seeped into American culture by the boat load during the 1930s to the 1950s. For most people they have no concept of what America was like before The New Deal, or The Great Society–programs created by extremely progressive presidents. People are completely unaware of what life was like when Woodrow Wilson attempted to crown himself king of America, riding on the coat tails of Teddy Roosevelt who tried with every fiber in his body to make America like Europe with his love or royalty and political hierarchy.
Equally baffling to people is the reason I think of the 1920s as the premier time for American ideals to come into fruition under the hands-off leadership of President Calvin Coolidge. I forget that everyone does not practice with bullwhips and have a love for old movies that brought out the best of the Hollywood era, and paved the way for a future of mythmaking cinema that would deliver to the world ideals about freedom, honor, and tenacious respect. After all, we live in the year 2013 and the days of Calvin Coolidge were a long time ago. Society has “progressed” so much beyond those “primitive” times; at least that is the popular misconception of our day.
However, I would make the argument that American society has not advanced, as many believe, but is regressing toward the primitive mentality of mysticism, instead of away from it, and it is books, music, and movies that shape the politics of our age, which is why politicians have learned to control Hollywood with a short leash, and shared public relations resources. I forget that I am probably the only human being within a thousand mile radius who has as one of the treasured literary classics called The Curse of Capistrano otherwise known as The Mark of Zorro by Johnston McCulley published in August of 1919. That book is a window to a long forgotten time representing long forgotten and suppressed values that I cherish immensely.
I loved The Curse of Capistrano so much, as McCulley wrote the very first story of Zorro with such passion that I used his style as my template to The Symposium of Justice, which was my modern tribute to Zorro from The Curse of Capistrano. The Mark of Zorro is the classic adventure that not only launched a legend, but it built Hollywood with the very first brick. Johnston’s Zorro took place in a bygone era of sprawling haciendas and haughty caballeros who suffer beneath the whip-lash of oppression. Missions were pillaged, native peasants abused and innocent men and women were persecuted by the corrupt governor and his army. But a champion of freedom riding the horse-trodden highways at night, his identity hidden behind a mask, the laughing outlaw Zorro who defied the tyrant’s might. A deadly marksman and a demon swordsman, his flashing blade left behind the mark of the “Z” for all in authority to fear! Reading the novel is like reading the thoughts of people from a different time, and compared to how things are today, they truly were.
As fate would have it Douglas Fairbanks bought up the rights to The Curse of Capistrano and turned the book into a silent movie in 1920 called The Mark of Zorro. The movie was a smashing success as the Woodrow Wilson era of big progressive government came to an end, which without question found its way into plot of Johnston’s story. The Warren G. Harding’s presidency was filled with scandal but good intentions leaving the man to die in office during 1923 leaving Calvin Coolidge to take over as President until 1929. In 1925 Douglas Fairbanks made a sequel to The Mark of Zorro called Don Q Son of Zorro where he played not only the son of Zorro, but also the dad. About 7 minutes into the film, Don Q states that his father, “Zorro was the greatest American there was.” The film was essentially about a class of progressive European ideals intersecting with American individualism. It was a bench mark film for me and many of my whip friends because the stunts that Douglas Fairbanks did in the film served as the goal post for what all whip performers work off of to this very day. The bullwhip was so important to Douglas Fairbanks in Don Q Son of Zorro that it is essentially the most memorable part of his character.
Going back and watching that film is a time machine into a different time and place when people thought a lot differently about things than they do today. So to share that experience as I have been doing with other bullwhip related feature films lately, I have put the entire film Don Q Son of Zorro up here for your viewing pleasure. The first impression many people have about a silent film is that they can’t get used to not having people speak. A silent film relied exclusively on music and the action on a screen to make the performance come to life. It’s kind of like reading a book that is in motion. Douglas Fairbanks knew that the way to capture his audiences’ attention was to perform stunts that they could never think of doing. The stunt work he performed in Don Q Son of Zorro is unparalleled then and since. Since 1925 Zorro, has been associated with a bullwhip because of Douglas Fairbanks’ work in Don Q. This would go on in film for the next 80 years. I have watched Don Q Son of Zorro many times, and because of that, I have seen what the world was in the 1920s and studied hard what values built Hollywood before the incursion of communism that spread during the Red Decade as Ayn Rand warned about in the late 1940s along with Walt Disney. CLICK HERE TO REVIEW. So do yourself a favor and watch Don Q Son of Zorro parts one and two below, and compare the values shown in the film with the watered down valor of today.
Part II
It was on these kinds of films from Douglas Fairbanks that Hollywood would grow into what it is today a booming town of entertainment where left leaning politicians recognized more quickly the value of capturing a message and shaping it with influence so to achieve political gains. But things were not always so watered down. I know about these films and novels of this era because of my exposure to bullwhip art, and more specifically Western Arts. Actors, and stuntmen like Douglas Fairbanks are the kind of people who built the foundations of Western Arts, so they are revered in a similar way that progressives think fondly of such as Woodrow Wilson.
We live in an age where we think that movies are old if they were done in the 1970s, but in essence movies have been copying off each other since the 1940s. They are telling the same stories, but just telling them with a bit more polish then a silent film was able to capture. In Don Q Son of Zorro Douglas Fairbanks puts out a candle in one take with a 10’ bullwhip using an overhead flick move, not easy to do. For a project I did for a camera crew in Hollywood a few years ago, I was tasked with putting out a cigarette on the ground with a 12’ bullwhip and it took me 14 takes. (I was doing it backwards so I don’t feel badly about it.) But the whip stunts done in Don Q were simply light years ahead of their time and wouldn’t be even attempted again with such scope until The Mask of Zorro in 1998 starring Anthony Hopkins and Antonio Banderas. It took Steven Spielberg to executive produce the project through his Amblin studio. The film had been in the works as early as 1992 with Spielberg wanting to direct the film with Sean Connery playing the older version of Zorro. Even so, it took 6 years to get the film done with Spielberg working hard to make it happen even with all the strings available for him to pull. As good as the film was, it was essentially a dusted off version of Don Q Son of Zorro as both Spielberg and George Lucas are great lovers of classic cinema, and they worked damn hard to make TheMask of Zorro an honorable tribute to the late, great Douglas Fairbanks—particularly with the whip work.
Everything starts with an idea, and that idea started with Johnston McCulley writing the 1919 novel The Curse of Capistrano with so much passion against government statism that it practically built Hollywood with its effort. And if it wasn’t for that novel there would have never been a movie called The Mark of Zorro and there would have never been a Don Q Son of Zorro. There would have been no Republic serials, there would have been no Disney Zorro–there would have been no Lone Ranger. Without Douglas Fairbanks and his great effort in Don Q Son of Zorro there would not be a bullwhip movement alive today where a handful of people scattered throughout the world are keeping alive an idea of America how it was before politics shifted heavily to the slide of the progressives, and made reality what many feared during the time that The Curse of Capistrano was written, where oppression from corrupt governors was feared, and a clash with European nobility was at war with rugged American individualism. Don Q Son of Zorro is not just a film that has great whip stunts, but is a window into a time where America was on the brink of success, before the Red Decade, before World War II, before Vietnam, before most Americans even knew what the crazy concept of European socialism was. In Don Q Son of Zorro there is a hope that there will always be a hero who resists the tyranny of oppression with the charisma and physical ability of the great Douglas Fairbanks.
It is up to those of us who can look through that open window and learn from history, and do in reality what was thought of on the pages of Johnston McCulley’s The Curse of Capistrano, and keep the ideas of freedom alive that characters like Zorro represented, a champion of freedom riding the horse-trodden highways at night under a full moon, his identity hidden behind a mask, as the laughing outlaw Zorro defies the tyrant’s might with the crack of a whip, and the mark of a “Z”!
Joseph Strain supplied 3 whips for the 2013 production of The Lone Ranger, one black 10 foot, one black 12 foot and one brandy 12 foot.
The whip pictured below is the black 10 foot prototype. The whips were all made from kangaroo, had 10 inch handles, were a finely cut 12 plait with 2 plaited kangaroo bellies. The 32″ falls were alum tanned burgundy latigo and the poppers were black nylon. The whips also had a narrower 4 plait wrist loop measuring 7 inches long.
For a limited time, you can order one of these whips exactly as made for the movie by Joseph Strain. Production will take from 4 to 6 weeks from the time of order.
If you love the Lone Ranger, this is a must have item. You can order one at the link below!
