Dear reader, if you go back to my arguments on the radio, in the newspapers, on television, and in public speeches about the state of education in 2010, then look around the colleges and public schools of our day now—you’ll understand what I was saying. It has come to fruition. And there is no going back. The tragedy will have to run its course. The situation was dire when I was talking about it then, but now that train has come and already left the station and the tracks that it’s on will take our country through one of its darkest periods. My children are members of this Millennial age that have had their minds nearly completely destroyed by progressive politics and public education. Only my children had the benefit of being home schooled for a time and had very traditional parents who helped them through the minefield of modern progressivism. All the things I write about on this site they’ve heard from me before in person. But most children weren’t so lucky, and it shows.
A lot has been said of this Millennial generation. I’m not a fan of them. I didn’t even like my own generation, or my parents generation. My favorite generation was that of my grandparents days, so I won’t rationalize my own generation or those of the idiot sixty’s flower children as being better than the present one. They weren’t, in fact they set the stage for the mess that the Millennials find themselves in. The parents of these poor children allowed themselves to be pulled into the lure of dual income homes leaving kids to raise themselves. The mothers allowed themselves to be emasculated into more of a male role within the home all in search for “equal rights,” which was a mistake. And the net result has been catastrophic. The Millennials are a self-entitled group who had to raise themselves by parents who felt guilty about what they’ve done to those poor children. The parents wanted to believe the government—that if they spent $50,000 to $100,000 on a college education that they could purchase success for their children—but it didn’t work. It only liberalized those kids into believing the platform of the Democratic Party. In just a few short years those kids will be voting and in charge of our nation—and they aren’t intellectually prepared for it.
And I will be there to tell everyone so. As the world walks toward that edge of social, economic, and intellectual destruction—I will not be with it. The current toward that destruction may be swift but I will continue to stand against it and will be there to rub everyone’s face in the dung of their own creation—just as I have for years against those who are openly making serious mistakes in their own families driven by social pressure. For instance, I had an aunt once who tried to emasculate my wife—since she was a stay-at-home mom who poured everything into raising our children—which I fully supported by working two full-time jobs and all the overtime I could get at them to make the money our family needed. Our social rejection of progressive engineering within the family structure made other family members uncomfortable with their own choices so some of the more radicalized feminists sought to undermine my wife behind my back—many times—with pressure lunches encouraging her to go build a life for herself outside of our home. Of course that angered me, but I always let my wife make her own decisions and eventually she always snapped into the right frame of mind without my input. I certainly gave my opinion, but I always let her make up her own mind—even if it personally cost me a great deal. Because if we weren’t both on the same page, it would flow over into our children—so I’d allow those types of manipulations knowing the intent hoping my wife would come to the same conclusion after our discussions. She always did and on that particular occasion that braless feminist angry at my wife for her life decisions threatened at the end of the meeting—uncharacteristically violent—“we women must stick together.” We haven’t spoken to that person in over a decade—only on the most polite of occasions, a death or some other unfortunate gathering. I never forget things like that, and neither does my wife, not for the sake of holding a grudge, but because it is people like that who have made this ridiculous generation of the Millennials.
Millennials are lazy, entitled, essentially neurotic spoiled brats. They take too many drugs, have too low of a pain threshold, and are messes politically. They pick government dependence over self-reliance because it gives them more game time on their Xboxs and social networks. They don’t make the connection between productivity and healthy living because nobody taught them anything about any of that. They are lost, weak, and intellectually soft. Their music is depressing, their world outlook shaped for them by public education is too liberalized, and they are going to make terrible parents because they don’t want to work at it. They want to buy a good child like a fast food hamburger. They make no connection between hard work and success—even though many of them will work hard to become proficient at Call of Duty. They certainly don’t work to keep a car nice, or to maintain a home, or a job. If they have they slightest little fever, the call off work and log onto Facebook. They figure the world will go on whether or not they show up for work and they take that attitude with them to everything in life.
I told the kids who interviewed me during the Lakota debates between 2010 and 2012 what was coming their way and they’d look at me like I was an out-dated old man warning them about it being too cold outside. Now just three years later many of them are in their early or late twenties and they are starting to see the writing on the wall. Rent is too high, jobs pay too little, relationships are too hard, and children soak up all their “me” time. Life is hard and they don’t know how to work on their own cars, they stay on their parent’s insurance plans too long, or they just get on government help having the honor of providing for themselves stolen before they ever get started in life, and their nation will soon be $20 trillion in debt with little to no hope in paying that money off with a declining GDP nationally, because those Millennials won’t fight to start a new business—it’s just too hard and regulations make it impossible for their short attention spans to muscle through. Government has loaded up opposition and they lack the will to fight back. So bad times are coming for their poor generation which has been excessively fortunate up to this point—but that will change rapidly in the years to come.
Unfortunately for everyone else, I am right most of the time. If I care enough about something to declare it in some sort of statement, then I know enough to give a warning. If people listened, they could save themselves a lot of trouble. But most of them don’t. I saw a fabulous looking young Millennial woman the other day. She had all the features of a top Victoria Secret model, and she couldn’t have been much older than 21. However, she had a nose piercing, tongue piercing, and an eye brow piercing–gauges in her ears and she had full body tattoos that were visible through her lace stockings and mid-section which was revealed to everyone as she stood confidently smoking on a lunch break. She was working retail selling perfume for a nice establishment and she looked far from a skank. Most of the men with me gave her that “I’d like to plow that” type of middle-aged stare, but I felt sorry for the girl. In just a few years those tattoos would start to look terrible. By the time she’s forty, they will be embarrassments on saggy skin. The holes she’s put in her body will never really heal, but will leave behind scar tissue. When she’s fifty she’ll look like she was a burn victim in a fire—her skin will stay stretched out in proportion for the rest of her life. And she’ll lose all her moral authority for her eventual children because her past will be on full display for them to see during those important impressionable first years.
The saddest thing of all is that she’s not alone—she’s actually quite common. She was prettier than most, but the results all lead to the same place. If her generation is detrimentally terrible, then her kids will be worse—because she will have proven herself to be a terrible role model and we now know that public schools and colleges are unable to complete the job of raising proper children. They ruin them. So her children will have no hope whatsoever of a happy and good life. I’m as sure of it as she was standing there. All of life is a math problem. You don’t put together a negative and a negative and get a positive. In fact, a positive and a negative lead to a negative. Only a string of positives can provide a net result toward desirable outcomes. If three negatives are introduced to a child’s life, then six positives are needed to overcome the quantitative effects toward a net gain. It’s not hard to figure these things out.
Now, as is evident in the videos above, it has started—and it will be a mess. The evidence is literally everywhere and its all coming unraveled much faster than anybody was prepared for. There will come a day when the kids of the kids of these Millennials will want to go back in time and fix everything. For them, I will write it all down so that they can have a playbook on how to get out of the quandary they inherited. I don’t blame the Millennials for being complete idiots. They were raised by my generation who listened to the generation before as those old hippies failed to maintain a proper national philosophy in favor of the family unit. But that is all water flowing under the bridge now. There is no stopping it, the damage is done. But once those waters recede, there will be a future who will want to rebuild, and for them I will proudly declare that I always stood on the right side of history, and will gladly show them how to live correctly toward the proper objectives that are best for themselves, and their society. Inwardly however, I will say proudly—“I told you so.”
I’ll have to admit that I was extremely disappointed with Ronda Rousey losing her UFC match with Holly Holm. Of course there was also the passive global response to the Paris terrorist attacks where a lot of tough talk came out sounding like two gay guys fighting over a pillow. Then I watched the Democratic debate on CBS primetime and it was clear that every one of those losers on stage was a bra burning socialist right out of a campfire song from Leningrad. I watched those idiots for as long as I could take it and went to bed realizing that it was no wonder that we are currently at an ideological civil war within the United States—and the globe in general. Even the mystique of Ronda Rousey was being consumed by a vortex of come latelys. The same forces that put her on a pedestal were the same pendulum swing masses that would throw their support behind Holly Holm and fling joyous gazes at another fallen hero. Nobody was perfect in this world of Democrats and to hide that reality they were most comfortable under the blanket of the masses voting in favor of government assistance, dishonorable lifestyles, and endearing sympathies that justified their short aims in life. Ronda had been pulled back down to earth with them, and most people secretly loved it.
But not me. I spent the next day shooting and it was very refreshing. After more than a decade of heavy use I have a new hat which I needed to get used to. This one is made of leather and it still had the strong smell associated with new products made with that durable material. After several hours of shooting about 300 rounds through a single action revolver, which takes some time, my temper had ebbed to the soothing smell of gunpowder mixed with leather—and all was right with the world once again.
My equipment from the Cowboy Fast Draw Association worked even better than I had previously praised, and for me that was a big deal. Out of all the broken promises that there are in life, out of all the things that fail to live up to their expectations, like the Ronda Rousey fight, sometimes a surprise presents itself at just the right time. I had recently had a nice night out with my kids to the local Cinebistro to see a good James Bond film, and had a rare day off to just shoot all day with my Vaquero and other Cowboy Fast Draw Association materials. I was able to turn on the football games and listen to them while I shot and it was just a heavenly experience.
My times were fast by traditional standards in Cowboy Fast Draw, as defined by movies, television and action stars from the 1950s. But not fast enough for the best that are out there, so I had a lot of work to do. I was shooting in the .650s of a second range and that time would have to be cut by more than half to be competitive in Cowboy Fast Draw. But that’s OK, its part of the fun and mental acuity that you have to go through while training. For me, it will be a long road, but at least I enjoy the elements of that path, gunsmoke and leather. The only other smells that might surpass those two is the aroma of a newly printed book.
For the rest of the day I had that great smell of gunpowder on my fingers. After every six shots in Cowboy Fast Draw you have to reload your equipment. First you apply a new wax bullet into your Colt .45 casings. I have a tool that pushes those bullets down to the proper depth that works wonderfully well—otherwise the constant reloading could be frustrating. Then you apply a 209 shotgun primer into a specially machined recess in your casing which propels the load. It’s all quite effective and soothing. The process of loading the ammunition is a special one that puts you in touch with the type of skills that built America to begin with. America wasn’t built by socialists, and liberal academics—they were the come-lately types. They arrived once everything was set and the land of a new world won by the heroics and bravery of frontiersman and their families. In Cowboy Fast Draw it was that America we celebrate–the one that won a new land for all to live freely in.
Liberals like the idiots on the primetime stage during November 14th 2015 hate the cowboy because they took land from the Indian whom they assume were the natives of the continent. But among those tribes were many land grabs and battles between each other. They fought and earned respect for one another like Ronda Rousey and Holly Holm in modern UFC fighting. What Holm had done was equivalent to Chief Pontiac cutting off the head of Tecumseh and mailing it back to the Shawnee to show their dominance—which if they could have—they would. But along came Simon Kenton, Daniel Boone and several other frontiersmen armed with muzzle loaders who beat the Shawnee and Ottawa then cultivated the land of their conquests. They won it fair and square, just as Holly Holm had done against Ronda Rousey. They were better equipped, and more adequately mentally prepared for the task. My hometown of Liberty Township was won in just such a way. The frontiersman who settled my home territory were direct descendents of this epic struggle. When I get excited about the new Liberty Center area I think of this massive transition of land use, from being a territory of Indian camps to a wilderness empire of frontiersman fleeing the religious oppression of Europe to live a life of risk in a New World. To what it’s become, an essentially Galt’s Gulch of productivity and industry—an epicenter of capitalism—glorious and as wonderful as it is in a raw form.
The liberals running for president of the United States would all be aghast at my shooting hobby, which I have set up inside my house with a perfectly safe range meant to suppress the sound of gunshots and prevent any danger to anybody. They favor the Indian in the conflict of the frontiersman whereas I favor Simon Kenton and Daniel Boone. We are a story of two Americas, liberals and their Indians, and conservatives and their cowboys.
As gunsmoke danced from my gun in the afternoon light and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers played football in Ramond James Stadium against the Dallas Cowboys I thought of Ronda Rousey’s defeat to Holly Holm as the surprise attack of Fort Pickawillany by French led Ottawa Indians who butchered everyone in the English trading settlement. I think of that battle often as it is just upstream from the very river I live on. Actually, I think of all the battles around the Cincinnati area as they paved the way west for mankind to step forward. If Indians had not been conquered the liberals of our modern age would still be in Europe and would be taking with them a land straight out of the Spanish Inquisition—back to the nomads and the huts of hunters and gathering people. The skills of Cowboy Fast Draw are a celebration of what made America great. It’s not the defeat of the Indian so much as freeing them as well from a cycle of destruction that was occurring on a different scale—only not measured by European eyes. These measurements are invisible to the fools of the Democratic Party. Ronda got caught looking, the celebrity of her success, the world eating out of her hand—it was Rocky III for her and she wasn’t prepared for what Holly Holms threw at her.
As I cleaned my gun and put it away for that session I thought about France and their role in the Pickawillany attack. As a country they were quite aggressive in their early days, but now they were dominated by liberals in politics that have turned them into a global laughing-stock. Now they are a clawless nation of pacifists and topless art—but little else. That is because they allowed themselves to be taken over as a nation by the same socialists that are trying to become president of the United States after eight years of Obama’s little “c” communism. If that’s allowed to happen—which obviously CBS television is hoping to help usher in, then America will follow France to being a laughing-stock nation. That’s not acceptable to me. Republican debates were shown on cable television, but the Democrats were put on the networks after only one previously boring diatribe of socialists, and communists wearing a mask of progressivism to take the edge off their presentation. But what stands in the way of those insurgents getting their way in America is in the gun. No wonder Democrats want to ban them. It was the gun which defeated the Indian during the frontier wars. And it was the gun that keeps the Democrats at bay now. It is the lack of guns that make France such an easy terrorist target—so what lesson do we have to learn here? Join Second Call Defense, clean your guns, and get some gun powder on your skin to keep your mind right. Because even superpowers can lose—just ask Ronda Rousey. Don’t take anything for granted.
Based on the Saturday Night Live skit, not the Fox Business Debate that took place on November 10, 2015, Donald Trump should be president. Of course I liked a little of what most of the candidates talked about during the debate—which was much, much better than the CNBC debate. (I’m still surprised that there is such a channel as CNBC.) But the real test of a modern president was not shown during the debates, it was on Saturday Night Live which I think was far bigger of an impact on the future of politics than anybody really has put forth in an analysis. If Bill Clinton had his saxophone moment to show he was a unique politician that launched him to victory in 1992, Donald Trump had his just a few days before the big Fox Business debate on SNL. The skit where America was a few years into the Trump presidency was bold, and powerful. Then for Trump to declare that all that was a mild forecast underplayed meant that America has to give the billionaire a chance at the big chair—if for anything else but to call his bluff. Trump is thinking big—really big, and that is exactly what we all need right now after 28 years of really small-mindedness coming from the Executive Branch.
As much as I like to deal straight with things to make objectives happen, most of the time I have to use every tool in an intellectual tool box to accomplish the intended task—whatever it is. Sometimes you have to be forceful, sometimes very diplomatic. Most of the time nobody understands what you are doing because they all have their own time frame of accomplishment built around their perspective—which is often limited. I find I have to do a lot of maneuvering around people to get anything done, and I take into account the weaknesses of the people I’m dealing with to accomplish it. I often view these occurrences like I would talk to someone who does not speak English as a primary language. I talk to them nice and slow almost like a child not to be demeaning, but because they can’t possibly understand what I’m thinking or my passion to accomplish the task. So you find that you have to talk to everyone in their language on their terms so that they can understand what it is you want to accomplish. Other groups of people watch this behavior and assume that you are catering to the wishes of others over what they want to do and conflicts often ensue. However, in the end, everyone eventually sees what I saw in the beginning, and everyone ends up living happily ever after. But not without a lot of back stabbing, squabbling, and social manipulation—and this is true within family structures as well as multi-million dollar business transactions. I never worry about the small stuff because it’s the big stuff that matters and by the time we get there, the small stuff naturally aligns with the overall strategy anyway. So getting stuck on the details will only stop the objective.
We have been taught in our education systems that the “devil is in the details,” and often he is. Small things can kill big things if allowed to manifest in such a way that they sicken the intention with stagnation. But often, that devil can be killed with sheer will and speed. Most of the time an intense approach to a problem will overcome those details quickly unifying everyone under a common cause—even though their viewpoints are radically different—it’s a bit of a trick that time and experience can teach. It’s not a good idea to get stuck on the details when the overall objective is the target. I think of the process comparable to target shooting. You don’t think about the detail of the bullet, or the workings of the gun. You just aim and shoot, and the best way is to do it quickly with muscle memory the way I have learned in bullwhip work—because most of the time there is no luxury of aiming and shooting to hit a target. The marketplace of life demands speed and accuracy. Not just one or the other. Life requires both to be successful.
Out of all the candidates on that stage at the Fox Business debate, only Trump understands the process of thinking big and getting people of many different backgrounds and political approaches to buy into his overall strategic objective. Here’s why, Trump was able to walk onto a very liberal show like Saturday Night Live and get a bunch of very liberal writers to put together a skit like the one shown above, which contextually showed a potential Trump presidency which answered all the questions that people have been asking about him. Trump as a big thinker doesn’t sweat the small stuff, so he can’t answer those questions in a way that people who worry about every little thing will be satisfied with. But in the context of a popular progressive show on NBC which is very mainstream, Trump was able to bend everyone to his will. That’s the kind of president he will be, and he essentially made a promise that put the burden on America to take him up on the challenge. It was an irresistible proposal.
No other person on the debate stage has that kind of power, or confidence. There really isn’t any other competition on the Republican side. You can pick the nice guy in Ben Carson, or the overachiever in Donald Trump. Everyone else is just more of those 28 years of lackluster executive office presence, and the United States likely won’t survive. It won’t hold four more years let alone another decade. The debt clock is ticking up to nearly $20 trillion and there is no way to recover from that. America has to give Donald Trump a chance or else. There is no more time for hopes, dreams and details. The next president will have to be a person of epic personality to pull all the radical elements together to achieve a strategic objective only they can see. Trump revealed what was in his head on Saturday Night Live and he connived the writers and producers to help him sell that vision.
I can only imagine how Trump would behave if he were in the White House and were wheeling and dealing with congressman, senators, foreign dignitaries, and business leaders every hour on the hour. I honestly think he’d be in heaven and the net result of his joy might just carry over into the results joked about in the Saturday Night Live skit. It’s a dare our country must take. All the issues of theory are now out the window. The Democrats only have socialists to offer and the typical conservatives only have more of the same that has allowed under their watch $19 trillion in debt and loss after loss on the global stage. At some point a leader within the Republican ranks has to be willing to call that behavior stupid and Trump is the only one really poised to do that without losing his ability to negotiate. If Trump can unite the entertainment community which is crazy leftist in their approach to all social problems, then he can do it with the world at large. I see no downside to a Trump as president. I only see positives.
I have never been a fan of Pink Floyd. First of all the name is ridiculously passive. Secondly, I associate them with the drug culture. But most of all, the music is just too depressing. It belongs in 1980s East Berlin or at the grave of Karl Marx as opposed to the vibrant white picket fences of Indiana, or Kentucky—the heart of the United States. While certain songs I understand, like “The Wall,” along with the music video from the movie—the front man for the group, Roger Waters, who is part of the British Invasion of that country’s contributions to American music—is a flaming socialist—by his own admission. So I have never liked them as a group. Actually, their music disgusts me, even when I was young and the music was popular. In a race between the suckest bands in history—to me the Grateful Dead and Pink Floyd are engaged in a homosexual coupling at the finish line. In my car at the height of Pink Floyd’s popularity during the 80s there were two things completely off-limits to anyone who rode with me. First, nobody was allowed to smoke. I had very strict rules against smoking. Given that I had one of the nicest cars in my graduating class, people forgave me for it—because they wanted to ride in my car. It was a place to be seen, so people didn’t smoke in my car. Second, Pink Floyd music was not allowed. I was sometimes violently opposed to it because it was so anti-American to me. It did not have the optimism I expected from American culture and I flatly rejected it. In regard to Roger Waters, I despise him as an artist and a human being because he is the face of Pink Floyd.
In that regard I find myself strangely agreeing with Howard Stern whom is another pop culture personality that I’m not a fan of. Regarding Howard, I don’t like his moral position, I don’t like his on-air belching, and I don’t like his sophomoric perversions. But I did like his movie Private Parts and his persistence within the radio industry. Knowing friends in radio who have been through what he has, I can at least respect what he did as a capitalist. Howard Stern may be a lot of bad things, but he is pretty smart and is a product of American capitalism. He stuck to and fought through a lot, so I can at least admire parts of him. But he’s not someone I share many opinions with—except lately when it comes to Roger Waters.
Recently, Stern and Waters have had a very public feud between them over the United States relationship with Israel. Waters is mysteriously anti-Israel—Stern pro Israel—definitely going against the grain within the entertainment industry. If Waters is so angry at Israel and the Jews for living somewhere, then he should be angry at his own country of England for their structuring of the Sykes-Pikot agreement right after World War I. That is what caused all the current mess. The United States was a reluctant participant. Both Stern and Waters are wrong to compare the eradication of Indian populations with the Jews living in Israel against Palestinian will. Jews have to live someplace and they have been driven from every land they inhabited at sometime or another. The Indians were at least given the time of day after they were conquered. The reason for the conquest was out of necessity—but compassion was at least provided to them. They were invited to assimilate into American culture and given a seat at the table through cultural integration. You don’t see Southerners protesting the town of Cherokee, North Carolina because it is largely ran and operated by Indians. Tourists flock to the region and enjoy Indian culture. Nobody is trying to kill them just because they existed or still hold property in America. Americans and Indians worked out their differences and shared the wealth as much as possible, so its time to stop complaining. The two issues are not comparable, Jews and Indians.
The feud has gone on over the last several months largely through progressive publications. Readers here likely didn’t notice the remarks in Salon, or Rolling Stone as the two pop culture icons have fought it out over support of Israel within the left-leaning entertainment sources. Waters even went so far to send an open letter against Bon Jovi for performing in Israel recently—which is how radical his position is. Clearly to me when you understand Middle East politics beyond the Sykes-Pikot agreement the underlining issue to the political right and left regarding Israel is one of support of capitalism over socialism. The Palestinians and much of the radicalization of the Middle East from ISIS to Iran comes from the Iranian Revolution during the 70s where Russian-backed communists overtook the country. The American CIA and other forces tried to off-set the communists with dictators to fight them off and keep the region from forming a communist caliphate using oil to fund another global power directly connected to Russia. The fights in the Middle East were not about oil so much as it was about keeping oil out of communist hands to feed Russian aggression toward the United States during the Cold War. Out of all the areas of the Middle East, really, only Israel has embraced capitalism. Every other region is a dust pit of repressed people broken and poor because of the failures of Marxist philosophies that have been carefully hidden behind radicalized Islamic religion. That is precisely why those on the political left are anti-Israel and anti-American in regard to Middle East involvement. Here is how Rolling Stone reported this issue in a way that the masses can understand.
Roger Waters may not want to “waste a single precious breath on that asshole” after Howard Stern accused the Pink Floyd co-founder of wanting “Jews to go back to the concentration camp,” but on Stern’s radio show this week, the host made it clear he wasn’t going to lay off the subject. “I’m not the only asshole,” Stern said. “I’m just the only asshole brave enough to take him on. For some reason, it’s become very important to Roger to tell artists where to perform. There’s so many countries with histories of abuse and slavery, but he’s very focused on Israel. To me, he comes off like an anti-Semite.”
“Defending Israel isn’t fashionable, I know,” Stern said. “It is a tremendous distraction for Arab leaders to say, ‘Let’s get the Jews, let’s get Israel, it’s all their fault.’ As long as their poor people are focused on Israel they don’t wake up and realize who is stealing their money. Their lives aren’t getting any better from all this crap, so don’t be fooled by Roger and his statements.” Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/howard-stern-on-roger-waters-he-comes-off-like-an-anti-semite-20151105#ixzz3qznpVfDz
If you doubt dear reader what I’ve said about Roger Water’s open support of socialism keep in mind that he currently supports Bernie Sanders for president and he has said so glowingly in that same Rolling Stone magazine, only in a different article. You can read that in the section below along with a link to the source. This is what the front man for Pink Floyd is all about. This is the person you have supported all these years by listening to Pink Floyd music. Isn’t that nice to know?
I just think the term “socialist” freaks a lot of people out.
Socialism is a good thing! What is wrong with socialism? You are the only country that I’ve ever heard of that buses its kids to school in the morning. What is that if not socialist? I am serious! I know nowhere else in the world. Then you go, “What the hell is that about?” “Well, we don’t want our kids to walk through dangerous neighborhoods to get to school, so we send a bus to pick them up at their front door and take them home afterwards.” And you go, “Wow, great.” That is pure socialism, and it is correct.
If you had socialized medicine as well, then we could really start calling you a socialist country. At least you have a better medical system now, thanks to Barack Obama, thanks to the executive branch of this administration that we are now seeing draw to a close. But it’s nothing like the healthcare you get in any of the other 30 major civilized countries in the world. Your healthcare is great if you are very, very, very rich and you have some rare form of cancer. You have the best brain surgeons or whatever in the world, but they service a tiny, tiny proportion of people. But by and large, your healthcare is dreadful, and the cost of it is almost double anywhere else in the world, and you get half the service for it. You know why?
Why? Because it goes to the fucking insurance companies and to the profits of the drug lords and drug companies. It has skimmed off its profit, and it shouldn’t be! Medicine should be provided to all the people, all of the time, for a moderate cost. Of course the drug companies should make moderate profits and of course insurance companies should make moderate profits, but they don’t. They are like loan sharks. They are ripping the heart out of everyone, and they are gouging as hard and fast as they can. That is the world we live in.
That should do it, Roger. Thanks for doing this. You know what you need, don’t you?
Could the situation be clearer? Here is a person who has made vast amounts of money selling the same damn album for thirty years to millions of drug induced idiots then he takes that money and the platform provided to him through capitalism and advocates socialism—which is currently crippling Europe economically.
It is because of Roger Waters that I have always hated Pink Floyd—as it was always the product of his radicalism. I hated the movie The Wall—it was not a work of genius the way kids used to think it was—it was a loser’s opinion on a life out-of-control largely because the artist was a victim of socialism and used capitalism to launch his opinion to the world. By the way, Roger Waters is terrified that Donald Trump will become president of the United States—which he talked about in that same interview. That is even more of a reason that I so adamantly support Donald Trump for president—because if he does nothing else, he will make Roger Waters angry—and terrified. An upset member of Pink Floyd is a wonderful thing. They may have legions of fans that grossly outnumber conservatives on this issue, but one million insects really isn’t much of a fight against one large conservative foot.
Listen, America has endured constant attacks by thousands of people like Roger Waters over the years and capitalism has held up, as well as the United States, under really intense scrutiny. Waters is right about school buses picking up kids and taking them to school. Parents should drive their own kids, and parents should have the ability to pick the best school for their kids with open competition. I won’t argue with Waters that our education system is corrupted beyond repair with socialism—vast amounts of it. I’m ready to end it all and rebuild it completely with free market alternatives. But its time for America to stop apologizing to idiots like Roger Waters and his radical leftist friends who need you to smoke a lot of dope to think their music is brilliant, and to advocate the things you like without guilt—such as support for Israel and guns—a very armed public loaded to the teeth with guns, guns and more guns. Because the socialists are out there in just about every mode of entertainment and industry, and they want the fruits of your labor. And they are more open about it now than ever before. It’s time to show them the results of that approach and what it does for them. It’s nice to see Howard Stern doing the right thing. In the case of speaking out against Roger Waters, I am a Howard Stern fan.
It’s been about five days and I think my temper has calmed down enough to talk about this activist liberal at the Lady of Lourdes elementary school in Cincinnati, Ohio. Claiming to have a zero policy toward violence, imitated or otherwise, principal Joe Crachiolo over reacted to a 6-year-old pretending to be a Power Ranger at recess with a pretend bow and arrow shooting another kid during play. The suspension lasted three days and is in effect as of this writing. The parents, obviously better than the average public school participant because they cared enough about their school to send their child to something other than a public school—which is far worse than Lady of Lourdes—took an active role in defending their child from the progressive activism of Crachiolo.
Now, I know Crachiolo has a cat named Snowball, so he’s seen that animal as a kitten play with yarn—or mock hunt a piece of paper from a gift wrap. Hunting and defending oneself is part of every living things most primal instinct. What the young Miele boy was doing was perfectly normal and should be encouraged. Yet Crachiolo decided to accept the modern passive stance in favor of collectivism and radically impose on a first grade child something he obviously knows nothing about. Crachiolo’s concept of a valiant human being is one embodying passivism that does what they are told. The young boy from the Miele family wants to be a hero, where the individual helps society from the benefit of personal decisions and aggressive action. That’s what such young children are pretending to be when they play aggressively from the vantage point of a hero.
I share in common with Crachiolo a love of Disney World. For a time he taught 7th and 8th grade religion and social studies at Mother Teresa Catholic Elementary in West Chester—so he can’t be all bad. He grew up in Loveland and graduated from St. Columban. He also went to Moeller and studied at U.C. and Northern Kentucky University. Apparently he and his wife only have a cat in their family named Snowball, as they have not had the opportunity to test themselves as parents actually raising a child through the furnace of reality. Joe instead had done the next best thing after receiving a lifetime of progressive education in primarily religious institutions—he has taught young people. But at the end of the day, unlike the parents of the Miele boy, he goes home to his wife and his cat with his hands clean of the actual responsibility of raising a child.
Abusing his power as a principal at Lady of Lourdes elementary school hoping to cash in on some brownie points as a defender of violence so prevalent these days in schools of all kinds—as society has lost it’s values and is turning toward death and destruction as a by-product of mismanaged lives—Joe is trying to destroy in children their innate need to defend themselves. What Joe is attempting to do to the Miele child is equivalent to de-clawing his cat Snowball after raising it from a baby to be fed every day in the luxury of their home then suddenly dropping it off in the woods to fend for itself from other cats, raccoons, and coyotes and expecting that cat to live through the night. These modern educators at virtually every level have been taught incorrectly how to prepare children for a world they know nothing about. They live in a bubble of academia that has been shaped by progressive sentiment, and they are destroying entire generations of young Americans in just this very way.
In spite of educator’s efforts to “manage” society away from violence through either religion, or institutions of learning, all they have achieved is the weakening of valor among our otherwise gifted youth leaving them like that example of Snowball de-clawed and helpless in the woods at night to hunt for itself in a world wanting to eat it. Snowball wouldn’t last two hours in a hostile environment, unable to hunt for its own food because it had no claws, or defend itself from other predators. Joe and similar educators are attempting to do that same thing to our youth by taking away the weapons of their minds and altering them to be nice pets that do what they are told by a society who manages their lives.
Like most educators Joe Crachiolo gets to live through other people’s children. The parents of the kids he teaches take all the responsibility for actually raising the children. Joe just sits on an intellectual pedestal untested in reality like his cat Snowball and pretends to be an authority on what’s best. By teaching he gets to give himself the illusion of shaping the minds of young people, but without the burden of having the responsibility of actually doing it. People like Joe—who list their cats as actual family members—have very little understanding of what it takes to raise a child outside of an education institution. Within that world of religion and intellectual Starbucks philosophizing—he may be a hero for attempting to de-claw a child from pretending to be a hero at recess—but in the world outside of institutionalism—he is just another vile activist destroying our American children.
I’m proud of the Miele parents for standing up for their son in the face of so much national attention. It is embarrassing that such a thing is actually happening in Cincinnati. You might expect it in liberal cesspools such as San Francisco and New York, but not in Cincinnati. But the mood of instruction most taught these days to our youth is this de-clawing method of breaking down children into a kind of mush for public consumption—wealth-redistribution, social justice, and all the trappings of the Pharisees who prosecuted the defenseless Jesus Christ. Turn society into the weak and meek so that they can give people like Joe and his cat Snowball a seat at the table of valor—without having a cell in their body behold the value. When we allow overly educated activists to destroy the values our children need to have to live in a capitalist society, then we have crippled those young minds for no reason but to bridge over the insecurities of intelligentsia. The real motive has always been to de-claw children starting with their minds with the hope that our capitalist society would fail leaving nobody able to act aggressively against anyone else. But what they’ve done in the process is destroy the essence of what it means to be a human being.
The world needs more heroes not less of them. I commend the young six-year-old in playing Power Rangers. He’d fit in well around my house where I openly play shoot em’ up with my grandson quite a lot. Good luck in stopping that—a lot of people have tried. Activists know what happens when they sneak around my house looking for ill intentions of submission and blind compliance. They don’t get close to what they came for—quite the opposite. I think every child in the world should be required to play cowboys and Indians, cops and robbers, or Power Rangers, whatever invokes in them the spark of learning self-defense so when they are confronted at some future time with actual violence, they know what to do.
Further people like Joe Crachiolo should be required to carry a gun otherwise they would be unqualified to manage a large contingent of youth gathered under his care. If a bad guy came into that school, it would be his job to eliminate that threat, not sitting in his office planning his next Disney vacation. Anyone who loves Disney World, especially the Frontierland understands that Uncle Walt fully intended that Americans not forget about their past in fighting for their freedom. In Frontierland, playing with guns is something the place naturally invokes. Modern progressive management at Disney World may think as Joe does, that violence needs to be eradicated from our society with a gradual emphasis away from such tasks and on to more intellectual pursuits. But they’d be wrong—of course. All they are really doing is de-clawing children needlessly and to their own future demise. Just ask Joe’s cat Snowball. I doubt that poor animal could hold its own against a wild raccoon. And in the future, neither will the children taught under Joe’s care. When they fail, it will be his fault and many people like him.
The night before I watched the very exciting Battle of Ohio at Paul Brown Stadium where the Bengals continued to have an impressive season. It was Thursday Night Football and the nation was watching. The night was long and the crowd was rowdy, but it was enchanting to watch the game from the Club section with the same demographic type of people who will enjoy the new Liberty Center. However, once the game was over, I shared with tens of thousands of other people a strong desire to get back to our cars and get on the road—which clogged up I-75 all the way back to West Chester. The highway really didn’t begin to move until we moved north passed the I-275 bridge. We were all going home from the Bengal game to the same place. It was well passed midnight and we just wanted to get to our beds. That was a persistent thought that I had all evening during the football game. Take away the Bengals, the Reds, the museum and an occasional theater play and there isn’t much that downtown Cincinnati has to offer. Sure they have nice dinner options, but downtown is such a pain in the neck to travel around. For the people who can afford it, such as the people in the Club section at the Bengal game, once the fun was over, they wanted to get back to their homes—north of Cincinnati in the suburbs of West Chester, Liberty Township and Mason.
For years I have enjoyed going downtown for the exotic experiences that you can have there, but have more than once been dismayed at how trashy it was. For instance, when you’re walking around with your date in front of Fountain Square with the Westin Hotel in the background, you want to enjoy the luxury and options of the setting, but then some dude walks by with his pants half down cursing up a storm looking like he just crawled out of the gutter—which most of the time he has, it tends to alter an otherwise good mood. You may have just spent $400 at Ruby’s Steakhouse and had an otherwise nice time until something like that happens. Cincinnati, because of the environment they’ve allowed to percolate just wasted your money on the experience you were trying to have. At the Bengal game, money flowed better so long as there was a set-up that allowed people who wanted to enjoy the game without a lot of ruckus to do so with a pretty decent guarantee that the exchange would be worth it. Those same people didn’t want to spend much time not getting to their car and were eager to get back to friendlier territory as soon as the drama of the game was done. So much of the imagery shown on the television of the downtown cityscape was an illusion, it wasn’t real. Downtown was dead because the people best able to support it wanted to get as far away as possible once it came down to putting money on the table for a nice evening. Snobby, sure it is and there is nothing wrong with that. People of value enjoy association with other people of value. If other people don’t share those values, then there will be tension, and in this day and age where political correctness is choking off our opinions, people vote with their wallets.
That brings us back to the wonderful Liberty Center downtown that is privately managed by the Steiner group which essentially gives people the Club option of shopping and dining. It has the same appeal as going to an NFL game in the Club and Box seats—it puts everything on a pedestal, keeps the riff raff at bay, and ensures that the money you spend will be worth as much as possible. And so far, I have discovered that the Rodizio is the best value of all those elements. It’s just a top class place—it reminds me of the type of place you’d find in South America without the language barriers, the sweaty hotels with half working air conditioning units, and the modern socialism that is crippling their current economy. When I walk into Rodizio each time, I think of the ancient cultures which seeded planet earth well before any established religion laid claim to history. There is an ancient truth to the place that first appealed to me. Now I find it sustaining to attend their salad bar which is only $12.99 for lunch including all the hot dishes, and pick from some very healthy selections of food prepared by a kitchen staff that really cares. But for lunch at only $19.99 you can have the whole Rodizio experience which is a business lunch bargain. So I had to try it out with those thoughts of the Bengal game fresh on my mind.
Yes Captain Hook was there and he personally cared for our table. We were very happy and the management at the Rodizio made it a very memorable experience. Our waitress, Crystal was exceptionally professional and poured a lot of passion into our experience. I had stated previously that I considered Rodizio a great business lunch option and it has certainly lived up to that assessment. This wasn’t a VIP evening, this was an actual business day in what I consider paradise—a well managed downtown where I don’t have to worry about my car, or nasty people ruining my investment dollars with degradation. To say anything less would be dishonest just for the stylishness of being politically correct. Thus far, I don’t have to worry about wasting money at Liberty Center or Rodizio. If you are taking clients or associates out to lunch to impress them, you need the whole experience, the food, the atmosphere, the people—everything that your senses perceive. It all has to work or really you are just wasting your money.
The Rodizio crew understands that investment which is why I am so glowingly supportive of them. If Liberty Center were the kind of shopping destination that John Galt would have built from the novel Atlas Shrugged, then Rodizio is one of the unique places that would belong on the pages of that classic story for all the right reasons within it. It’s better than reality, which is what I feel each time I visit the Rodizio Grill. They do a good job of caring for their customers with an experience that is better than the reality of the outside world—the world beyond the parking lot of Liberty Center.
It’s not being snobby to enjoy nice things. For me it’s all about the Metaphysics of Quality. I love a quality experience and when variables create mundane results, I often resent whatever investment I’ve put into the endeavor—whether that may by time, money, or emotion. I don’t like to waste resources—so if I do something, I like to see a return on that investment in a quality experience. When I get that I do enjoying talking about it. There is nothing wrong with setting the bar high for yourself. There is nothing wrong with playing above your head, because it can make you a better person. And there is nothing wrong with eating the best food that you can for the best price in the best place. At Rodizio Grill at Liberty Center, quality is what the experience is all about. And with that, I’m pleased to report that they are the real deal, not just a flash in the pan. If you are looking for a good place to grab lunch, they should be at the top of your list.
I was a strange kid—which should have been assumed based on a casual reading of my millions and millions of words. There are a lot of people who get paid decent amounts of money for writing far less than I do about far, far fewer topics. Yet I know that I have to write otherwise my head would explode with too many thoughts. I have too many hobbies, too many passions, too many philosophical quandaries that reside at the root of politics that if I don’t get them out and onto some kind of page to look at I may well explode with enthusiasm. So I have to write because I opened the door to something when I was very young that I have never closed. I only wanted to be one thing when I grew up—but I was caught between two worlds really. There was no other job that I wanted to be involved with than a director of movies. The trouble was I also had a pretty powerful physical aptitude. Creative types tend to enjoy escaping from reality and creating what they do in a vacuum of contemplation—whereas I didn’t. I wanted to be in the thick of reality at all times, which flew in the face of the film industry. But at age 13 in 1983 when that 20/20 episode came out on John Williams I wanted to be a film director so that I could work with people like him. What I learned eventually, and much later that there really isn’t anyone like John Williams, the great composer and conductor for some of the most powerful and important movies our American culture has ever produced. So that 20/20 episode was very important to me—I watched it over and over again on a new device called a VHS video tape. I had recorded it and showed it to every member of my family whenever there was some gathering trying to share with them the passion I felt for John Williams music. Most of them didn’t understand.
John Williams is the most important musical personality of the millennia—more so than Beethoven, Mozart, Bach or anybody else. Many years later as I worked at Cincinnati Milicron in Oakley, just north of downtown Cincinnati I listened to all those composers religiously on NPR radio while I worked as a tear-down person for rebuilt machine lathes. The other workers had a typical unionized approach to work, they watched the break clock closely—paced out their day making sure not to produce too much too quickly, and they listened to a lot of classic rock. I wasn’t adverse to rock and roll—there is a certain magic to it blaring from a radio in a machine shop—a freedom that is healthy and defiant in all the right ways—but its not very intellectual. Rock music is very linier—which has never been something I was interested in—rock music equals a can of beer resulting in unstable personal relationships. I enjoyed it for its ambiance, not for the lifestyles that draped off it—the limited vision of the world and lack-luster ambition typical of its fans. So I listened to my radio tuned to NPR’s classical station in Cincinnati and listened to the greats for hours on end while I worked. I was the only one who did this within the entire facility which eventually was dismantled and is now covered by the upgraded development occurring around the Rockwood shopping complex. I have always thought that if more people listened to that classical station with me that the employees would have been smart enough to see the writing on the wall years ago, and Cincinnati Milicron would not have eventually closed down their Oakley facility—but that’s a story we’ve covered before. For this purpose, I considered classical music to be the supreme type of music a human being can listen to—and among them at the very top is John Williams. There is nobody better—and I’ve listened to them all.
Most classical composers wrote their music for some play centuries before they ever appeared on NPR radio. So to me it was not deficient to look at John Williams as one who will eventually surpass the memory of all the obvious musical minds in the future. Movies are modern plays, so a film score is tomorrow’s classical music that will play on NPR radio in the future, all the time. These days however if anybody happened to look at my iPod they would only see two primary names on the entire 10G device, John Williams and Hans Zimmer. There are a few others, but 95% of my iPod is filled with those two musical film composers. Of those two, Hans Zimmer is clearly the student of the master, John Williams. I don’t see them as comparable in any way—other than they both make music. Nobody writes music like John Williams—I listen to him nearly every day in some fashion or another and I never get tired of the way he strings together compositions.
As we were sitting at the bottom of the hour trying to get Matt’s guest on the air, I thought about why I was eager for The Force Awakens by thinking about what I liked most about the recently released trailer—the final one before the film opens on December 18th. It was the scene from a series of clips where the Millennium Falcon was entering hyperspace from the inverted direction speeding into blue light accompanied musically by an upgrade from the previous Han and Leia theme. That was fresh music made just for this trailer and it was stunning in how it helped invoke curiosity. John Williams understands just the right notes to put on a page for what is happening on the screen. The way he tells stories through music is extraordinary, and it was his music that I wanted to hear most regarding the new film.
I meant it when I said it on the air, the Disney Company could put hand puppets on the screen for The Force Awakens and I wouldn’t care so long as I had yet another opportunity to listen to a film score by the great John Williams. He enjoys making swashbuckler type of compositions and really thrives in the type of story that Star Wars is, so it typically brings out the best in him. If the story is not something I can get into, I will at least enjoy the John Williams music—which is what I am looking forward to most. It’s not often that the entire world will attend a musical concert that is classical in nature. Literally the entire planet will be attending a John Williams concert when The Force Awakens opens just ahead of Christmas 2015. And there is nothing negative about that.
Music doesn’t need language—it transcends social limitations and reaches for the pit of our very souls for understanding. Based on that 20/20 clip, it was obvious then that John Williams was on a crash course with destiny as the greatest composer of all time—at least over the last 1000 years—because there has been nobody like him ever. He’s just the right mix of everything musical. No matter how much I listened to Bach, or Mozart on NPR radio, when they would occasionally put on some John Williams music—from any movie—it was clear that a master had assembled the notes. With that in mind there isn’t much Disney can do to ruin Star Wars so long as John Williams is the man behind the music. Star Wars will always be good so long as the music from those movies are made by the 83-year-old composer who was always ahead of his time and is the best that ever occupied nostalgia. Film music is considered low-brow entertainment among the art critics of our day—but that’s because they’re in the back of the train. Eventually those art analyzers will catch up to what I’m saying today—that John Williams is the primary reason that millions will love the new film and it will be the largest and most diverse opening to an orchestral concert in the history of earth—and that is enough to give anyone goose bumps because the impact it will have on shaping our future generations will be paramount. I suspect that The Force Awakens score will be the grand fortissimo to a long and prosperous career. But more than that, it will be the last act of a brilliant mind, who would rather write alone all day behind a piano than do anything else—which is why he has been and will always be the greatest.
The very first movie I can remember seeing was A Fistful of Dollars when I was four years old. I had seen it a year before on Channel 19 but it was something I had watched with my mom while she canned tomatoes. Our house didn’t have air conditioning but I didn’t care. Our television back then was color, but it barely had good enough reception to see what was going on through the static. But when it did Sergio Leone’s westerns were the coolest thing on television and I watched them in pools of my own sweet as my first conscious memories. If it could be said that I had a primary influence on my life it was in those moments of watching Leone westerns with my mother well before I ever turned five. Back then all I remembered of A Fistful of Dollars was the end where Clint Eastwood chained a steel chest-plate to his chest hidden under his poncho and taunted Remon Rojos to aim for his heart. Each time a bullet struck Eastwood he’d fall down but keep getting up again until he closed in on the villain with honor and killed him with a great final standoff. I used to watch the entire film not understanding anything anybody was saying just so I could see that ending over and over again. Back then there were no DVDs so you’d have to wait for it to come back on television at some unforeseen time. So I learned to read by going through the TV guide and looking for old Sergio Leone westerns looking hoping A Fistful of Dollars would come on again. To learn more about Leone as a person and director watch this fantastic documentary on him to understand why I enjoyed his work so much.
Sergio Leone had more influence on me as a result of those continuous viewings than I’d typically give credit. Because I was always looking for A Fistful of Dollars I’d sometimes confuse the films with For A Few Dollars More, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, and Once Upon a Timein the West because I learned that they were directed by Sergio Leone which was easier to remember than the title of the movies. So I watched them all often disappointed that they weren’t the one where Clint Eastwood kept getting shot, yet continued to get back up. Sergio’s impact on cinema was incalculable. He directly influenced the Star Wars films and literally hundreds of future directors, actors, cinematographers and many others not even in the show business industry. His westerns were stunningly passionate yet dystopian. He did so much with so little money that each frame of film was made as if it were his last. His use of sound effects, music and the visual medium of film is something that very few directors were ever able to achieve. He was simply stunning.
Like me Sergio Leone loved classic American westerns, which were a primary export to his home country of Italy. Unlike me, he didn’t live in the United States, so when he met Americans for the first time coming to Rome as conquerors after World War II they didn’t live up to his expectations and the director sought to reconcile that disappointment with his westerns. After all Leone was living in a Marxist oriented European mindset looking to the West with a bit of hope—but the people from that land were less than valiant which put his unique spin on the American western—famously known as the spaghetti westerns.
That disappointment was never more clear than in Once Upon a Time in the West where the primary villain was the clear-eyed Henry Fonda—the star of many American westerns. He was a classic bad guy cast against a break-out role for the young Charles Bronson. The anger I felt toward Fonda because of the scene where the hired gun for the railroad tycoon known as Morton killed the land owner McBain and his children with a brutal hanging was excessive. That anger lasted most of my life, because I have since seen that type of evil firsthand. Sergio Leone as an Italian who was in love with the image of America was poised to make films that criticized the western while at the same time relishing in them. Leone captured the raw personality of evil in his films in a way that nobody else had or has since—never with such grandiose passion. But for me, the trilogy of films that embodied the “Once Upon” films, which would make eventual stars of many actors were not the best work of Leone. As he became older and had attended several film festivals, he leaned more toward Marxism—which was the home philosophy of Italy. The hope of his youth had left his films by the time he made Once Upon a Time in America. More and more Leone was obsessed with the evils of crony capitalism as if to justify his Marxist leanings which essentially helped fuel the Hollywood insurrection more toward the political left.
Quentin Tarantino who is about to release the modern western The Hateful Eight, which I’m eager to see and shares with me a love for Leone leans more toward the later part of Leone’s career as opposed to the front with the Fistful of Dollars trilogy. Most of Hollywood for that matter saw how Leone turned the American western on its head and thought that prevailing trend was “high art.” So they turned their eyes to Europe and made movies that punched even deeper holes into the American mythology of the Old West. But that approach was misguided and doomed from the start. While I really enjoyed Leone’s later work, especially his Once Upon the Time in the West, it was his Dollars films that I think are the hopeful musings of a would-be capitalist and his yearnings for the kind of America that it should have always been—as represented by the self-reliant individualist Clint Eastwood. Tarantino pays many tributes to Sergio in his films, but he never quite gets it, which I’m sure will be a continued problem in his The Hateful Eight. Tarantino is a broken person because he loved the wrong Leone.
But I didn’t, I saw through that conflict before I was age 7 and was beginning to understand these strange western films from a foreign director who couldn’t even speak English. People like Tarantino and his producers at the Weinstein Company gravitated toward the Marxist Leone, not the hopeful treasure hunter of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly—where the good guy played by Clint Eastwood gets the treasure, gets his revenge, and rides off into the sunset alone. He does the same thing in For A Few Dollars More and to a lesser degree in A Fistful of Dollars. In that first film released in 1964 Eastwood has more of a classic showdown with the bad guys as he comes back to town to save a friend of his from hanging. Hanging in these western films which are now 50 years old represented the brutality of unjust application of authority and the abuse of the strong against the weak. In those films Eastwood played a classic avenger, which he would go on to build a career on. Smartly, Eastwood turned down the role of the lead protagonist in Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West—which was a brilliant film wonderfully shot, but did not have the capitalist message that had made Eastwood such a superstar. Good move on Eastwood’s part because even though Sergio Leone had larger budgets to work with and studio backing that he never dreamed of a decade before—like George Lucas his vision began to be tainted as his hope for America moved from tradition to progressivism. When most of their Hollywood friends were jealous European sympathizing Marxists and are all left-leaning at film festivals, the lens of their vision changed from hopeful capitalists to regulated Marxists. As a result the American public generally began to reject Leone films whereas critics began to praise them—because they were moving toward the left as well. American however stayed center-right and just stopped paying attention to Leone.
This was on my mind because I was shopping with my wife at Liberty Center and couldn’t help but notice a fashion trend that was emerging—perhaps 40 years too late, but it’s emerging. The influence of Leone’s spaghetti westerns is rising into the mainstream as many of the high-end clothing designed for affluent types look like they are coming straight off the screen of Leone’s classic westerns. This is a great thing as they are not the type of westerns that Tarantino loved, but the kind that I did. America is slowly beginning to wake up to the sleep it has been under and is turning back to its origins—sharing that bright-eyed hope that Sergio Leone once had that America could be a place for personal gain and intact justice. Clint Eastwood’s character in the Leone westerns never had doubt in himself and was always able to slug through any situation presented to him. He just kept getting up and up which my four-year-old eyes never forgot. That movie is as part of me as anything else is and it all started with my mother watching that film with me knowing that it would somehow be important. That’s why she’s such a good mom. She launched me in the right direction which apparently the rest of the world is just starting to understand—perhaps not deeply, but at least emotionally as it is started to show itself in our fashions.
For a long time I’ve had the hunch that all aspects of American culture needed to go back in time to that precipice of history to when A Fistful of Dollars was released, and start over. Instead of hating the crony capitalists Rojos as a reason to steer society toward Marxism we should focus on the capitalist that played both sides against the other for the personal gain of reward while doing good for those around him as a natural by-product. In those days nobody in the world understood capitalism better than Sergio Leone and his good friend Ennio Morricone. America should have listened then. But it’s not too late. I saw several women standing at the corner of Bales Street and Haskell who looked like they stepped right off the set of For A Few Dollars More. They may not have been aware of it, but it was obvious to me that the fashion designers for their clothing were clearly fans of early Sergio Leone westerns likely for the reasons I just mentioned. European Marxism has taken the world nowhere. So its time to re-evaluate our philosophy and to step back to that very first film, A Fistful of Dollars and see it through the eyes of its maker—and not make the same mistakes going forward. I received the message the first time, and I have never looked back and been with any doubt. Tarantino and the modern films schools have it wrong—they need to go back to Leone and understand what it was in the beginning that made him so great—and its not that he cast Henry Fonda as a villain.
I’m not a fan of all the Republican presidential candidates, but after listening to some of the questions by the CNBC moderators, each of them—even Governor Kasich sounded like rock solid Republicans. Trump’s lambasting of CNBC at the end of the debate was spot on—and so was Marco Rubio’s comments—as were Ted Cruz’s—even Jeb Bush looked like a conservative next to the crazy lunatics on the CNBC moderations panel. Where do these people come from—Hugo Chavez’s personal bathroom? The presidential nominees had a right to be upset, during the recent Democratic debate the questions were so much easier for them—but for the Republicans everything was a gotcha question. They were deliberately designed to make Republicans look bad.
Although I generally liked all the Republicans on the stage that night for different reasons I am still a firm Trump guy at this point. The whole system needs a Teddy Roosevelt type who may very well yank the nation back away from progressivism—whereas Teddy pulled the bar so far to the left as a Republican. By the end of his 7 years in office, Roosevelt was more like Grover Cleveland than he was Abraham Lincoln. The Republican Party now needs the opposite to happen and it will take a bombastic personality like Trump to do it. No soft talking Ben Carson will work, or soft faced Marco Rubio. Cruz is too hated by insiders while Rand Paul is not worldly enough. Fiorina is too weak—she is a good debater, but her track record as a CEO is not robust enough. Jeb Bush is too establishment and way too nice. John Kasich is too far behind the times, he’s like those marathon runners who cross the finish line three hours behind all the top-tier runners and then puts a picture of himself on his office desk showing that he’s a marathon runner. He confuses participating in a marathon to being a contender. Huckabee is a nice guy—a pastor type but is way too passive to slug it out with the greasy slime of K-Street—which is where the real fights for the next president are really at. Nobody but Trump has the right stuff to be president on behalf of the Republican Party. Nobody likes to fight as much as Trump does, and the next president will have to LOVE fighting.
It would be my hope that either Ben Carson or Ted Cruz would be the Trump running mate so that a president Trump could set the stage for a 2024 election of a real conservative for perhaps the first time since Calvin Coolidge. Ronald Reagan was an actor playing the part of a conservative that he acquired late in life. I want a conservative that is that way in their marrow of their bones, and within Cruz, I think there is one. But he’s not ready yet and the environment is all wrong for him presently. The day after the debate Paul Ryan was elected Speaker of the House which many people think is the same as electing an establishment candidate, and he is. But the bar is at least headed to the right again as opposed to the left. Ryan is at least an Ayn Rand fan and deep down inside will lean in that direction if allowed. Under a president Trump I think he would move more conservative than he is under an Obama president, much more so than John Boehner. Like his friend Kasich, Boehner is another hour behind him in the marathon puffing away on cigarettes. The sun has set on Boehner a long time ago only nobody told him that the flashlights at his feet were from his supporters who didn’t have the heart to tell him that the sun had already set—and the race was over and the finish line was already disassembled. They didn’t want to hurt his feelings. Paul Ryan is not the best choice, but he was a Tea Party darling at one point, and is proof that the needle is moving back to the political right.
So that’s the trend yet CNBC seemed so far behind the times that they hadn’t even started that marathon race that Boehner and Kasich were already proudly running well behind the front-runners. I mean, it was disgusting—that people actually think as liberally as those idiots at CNBC. I can’t imagine how they even pay for the cameras to keep the network on cable—unless those people work for nothing. It’s a good thing they had the debate because I didn’t even realize they were a channel—I had mistaken them for MSNBC which I used to give some credit to just because I liked Microsoft. But that loyalty went away after Bill Gates became the face of Common Core—and Jeb Bush with it. Microsoft’s influence on MSNBC is gone now, whereas in the early days it was on the tech side of news coverage with was good. But now they are all about progressive politics and are just ridiculous. I had no idea there was even a channel to the left of them!
I supposed I’m grateful that now I know, because of the debates, but I am seriously embarrassed for them as a network. There were so many stupid things that they said that even in hindsight it seems unfathomable. Yet they are real, and the questions they asked were to—all of them with a liberal spin. If there was ever any doubt that The Naked Communist had predicted such a thing successfully, that the media would be controlled by communists in the future—then CNBC is the proof as to that reality. But even that terrible reality isn’t anywhere as sinister as it was a year ago. Now liberals are more of a joke than ever—their policies have been proven ineffective and rejected by sane voters everywhere. They just haven’t paid attention to the memo yet. And that was never more evident than at CNBC. Wow, they are out there and are a dying breed. Watch them before the go extinct, because in this climate, they are well on their way.
I have written about the Liberty Center development for a long time because I had the fortune of knowing quite a lot about it during the early stages, and have been fascinated by the people building it. I have had the opportunity to travel a lot and know what’s out there, and what’s good and bad about the places I’ve been. Of course since it is in my community I have spent a considerable amount of time there over the last week—and I have to say that I really enjoy it. But if people want a politically correct review of Liberty Center, they can go to the Chamber sites, or read about it in the newspaper. Since my concerns are more philosophically based regarding humanity, and I’m not so concerned about my social status within my community—I can say things that other people can’t—so I will in regard to the monstrous success that Liberty Center has seen during its first week of operation, and the subsequent months and years that it will enjoy, articulate the reason and necessity for its construction.
I was a bit surprised that Tom Farrell who is a trustee in my community and a pretty good guy revealed a bit about why he thought Liberty Center would be successful in the mainstream news. He quite flatly stated that from a trustee point of view—the management of the community—that Liberty Center provided a city-like experience without the crime. I thought that was a bit bold for an area Republican, and it gave me hope that he and others just might be learning something from Donald Trump. It’s far better for everyone if you just tell it like it is. It might hurt some feelings but in the end, it will help everyone. After all, if you take your car to the shop to figure out what’s wrong with it, because its ticking in the engine someplace unseen—it doesn’t do any good for the mechanics to tell you your tire pressure is too low—because those things are not connected. If you want to fix the problem, an accurate diagnosis is needed. Tom hit on a very, very important point that I hope the rest of the country will learn from—because within Liberty Center is the solution to much of what’s wrong with America—which is why I’ve been so excited about it for such a long time.
Lately as I puzzled through my thoughts about Liberty Center I spent some time in downtown Cincinnati. After a recent Bengal game my family walked around the Banks development just as we have enjoyed Newport on the Levy a lot over the years. I have also spent considerable time at Fountain Square, Mt. Adams, Kenwood, Eastgate, Florence and many other places that I consider to be quality “living centers” where shopping complexes and living are brought together in unique ways. I also have the fortune to have in-laws who live in one of the most unusual communities I’ve ever seen in Brevard County, Kentucky right near the intersection of I-265 and I-71. Most of the homes are million dollar bits of real-estate that contain their own office park, shopping and restaurant experience providing a very self-contained experience. Residents can go to the doctor, shop, eat and live within a mile of their home and crime is non-existent. If some slug walks around that community, there is security that runs them out post-haste—no fooling around. You don’t see slackers standing around on street corners, you don’t hear cursing, and you don’t get “undesirables.”
What are undesirables? Well let me define it for you with an example of the new Over-the-Rhine renovations that the city of Cincinnati has spent a lot of money trying to resurrect. My daughter is a professional photographer who spends a lot of time there because people want to capture the history of the area with a photographers spin on the topic of downtown. Her customers want the romance of downtown without the garbage. What her camera doesn’t pick up are the thugs standing on street corners with their pants half down cursing every other word making embarrassments of themselves. Yes Cincinnati has a nice streetcar they are building, yes Over-the-Rhine has been cleaned up a bit—they have some nice restaurants, and during the days it’s a pretty nice place-now. But there are still undesirables standing around everywhere—and that’s not race related activity. If people like Ben Carson were standing on the street corner there would be no problem. But when people who look and act like they want to kill you are standing around looking like detrimental thugs it takes away the fun of going out on the town. Undesirables are people who have personal conduct that is equitable to animal behavior—where their primary objectives are sexual pursuits and pecking order mentality. People of a higher level in life don’t want to deal with undesirables—because they have other things on their mind than just primal desires.
Liberty Center understood this problem from day one in their design. They intended to do something similar to the development I mentioned in Kentucky—which is primarily occupied by horse racing families close to the sport—certainly the upper crest of Louisville society—and do something on a much larger scale in Liberty Township. The residential buildings at Liberty Center are all around five stories to give the illusion down below that people walking on the streets are within a city-scape. The buildings are positioned around the shopping complex so that the area within feels removed from the rural landscape on the outside. Also, useable living space is stacked to utilize bridges and staircases to provide the illusion that there is more complexity to the area than there really is, which is actually a video game programming trick that is quite effective to giving the impression that there is a lot more to something. For what Liberty Center is trying to do, it’s enormously effective.
The sum of the experience is to provide a city simulation without the crime and displeasure of an actual urban environment. My mom for instance stopped going to Tri-County over ten years ago when undesirables essentially pushed her out. I know many people who won’t even go the Costco in Tri-County just because they are afraid of the type of people who now reside around that old shopping district. Undesirables come in all shapes, sizes, sexes and colors—but what they all have in common is that they function from the basic animal instincts of a pubescent teenager. Teenagers are supposed to grow out of that phase with careful parental supervision, but in our society of today—where being a forever teenager is desired, there are just too many people out there who are grown-up teenagers functioning from raw animal instincts, and older people with money and success in their life don’t want to be around those low life scum bags.
After working really hard at your life and making smart decisions—it is fun to dress up with your spouse and go have a nice dinner—and a movie. Liberty Center allows me to take my wife to a nice place and be around nice people. I can go to a movie where only adults can attend, who are older than 21 keeping the teenagers out, so you don’t have to worry about bratty kids kicking the back of your seat, or giggling at boobies on the theater screen. You get to have an experience free of undesirables as much as possible. It’s a free country so low life scum bags can come to Liberty Center, but unlike a real city ran by progressive city governments, the shopping complex is privately owned as opposed to publicly owned. Liberty Center management can hire their own security to make sure that nobody causes any trouble as they are more competent than a city council or a mayor to deal with such issues.
The real benefit of Liberty Center is that it’s a private enterprise managed by competent people who are motivated by profit as opposed to elected bureaucrats. It will stay looking nice and will give everyone what they want from a city without the mess of mismanagement. Liberty Township doesn’t even have a police department which is wonderful. Trustees aren’t running Liberty Center; they just enjoy it with everyone else. The Steiner Group runs the place, and that puts it in the hands of competent management who provide their own security—much better than a bunch of unionized, expensive government workers who are politically accountable to a mayor and city manager. The presence of competency is what makes Liberty Center feel different. It’s not a public park or a community owned monstrosity where thugs, derelicts and panhandlers will be allowed to accost the affluent from Wetherington. Those types of people will not be allowed to bring down the level of quality within Liberty Center. In America being a derelict is a choice. There are too many opportunities for people, all it requires is for people to reach out and grab them. For those too lazy to reach for anything, they will become undesirables because they are parasites on those who aren’t lethargic.
I remember well what it was like when Forest Fair Mall opened over two decades ago. It was like Liberty Center in many ways—it had high hopes of appealing to the upper-class while maintaining the lofty goal of elevating the standard of living for Forest Park and Fairfield. Unfortunately, people who work hard to have money do not like conversing with people who are on welfare, or are just plain lazy, and the two demographics just didn’t mix. The money went to Tri-County for another ten years, or to Kenwood. Forest Fair Mall died slowly because the people around the community were not the type of people who financially affluent people wanted to spend their leisure time with. People are not just people—some are better than others and that is usually determined by their ambition. The Mall was directly reliant on city governments to create the demographic who would shop at their establishment, and the politicians screwed it up. The Mall out of desperation turned toward the nightclub crowd to bring life back to the once promising palace. But that brought more undesirables and pushed out the money. Soon all the Mall had to offer were cheap pieces of crap aimed at teenagers or adults who wanted to be teenagers leaving everyone else to shop somewhere else.
Liberty Center is not reliant on city government for its success. They bring their own management to both living and commercial enterprises and take care of both. And like everything else, things run better as a private sector enterprise than they do as public endeavors. The local government gets to collect a little bit more tax money each year, but they don’t have to make any management decisions about the complex itself. That’s up to Steiner’s people and they are a whole lot more motivated to make sure consumers get what they want—as opposed to professional politicians who seek to coddle the masses to get votes to stay in office. In a lot of ways Liberty Center is a creation out of necessity. People don’t want to associate with undesirables. They want to be around people with shared values and Liberty Center promises that type of experience, without the hassle of low-level people. Not everyone in the world is equal. Some people work harder and more valiantly than others and they deserve a place to go where they can enjoy life. For them, Liberty Center is that place. They get all the benefits of a city without the hassle of cat-calls, and panhandling. And for people in Liberty Township who have been losing their children to the exotic nightlife of New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, Liberty Center has just given those kids an alternative without being too far away from home and can have all the fun without the downsides of crime. It is the way of the future, and the reason for it is a direct response to the gross mismanagement of public officials as opposed to private ones. That is why Liberty Center is so special and why it will become the standard everyone else in the future will have to live by. Cities will have to clean up their act or they will lose everything to private sector driven developments—which is fine with me.
