The Freedom Outpost got it right when they captured a story about Dr. David Pook who is one of the co-authors of the new Common Core standards. Most politicians including Jeb Bush, and financiers like Bill Gates think that by just stating they are dedicated to better education is equivalent to a financial commitment, or a new policy. They fail to understand that the content of the type of education that government schools build by their policies will have a direct impact on the success or failure of education methods. It is not enough just to say you support something, and it is not enough to throw money at it. Education has to be of a type of content that is actually useful. And as many studies into Common Core have revealed, it is clear that its content was assembled by radical leftists who intend to instruct young people into become future radicals. In that regard, David Pook was caught—the details as reported are below:
According to Onan Coca, “Dr. David Pook is a professor at Granite State College in Manchester, New Hampshire. He’s also the chair of the History Department and one of the authors of the Common Core standards. He was a guest at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics when he opened up on his reasons for participating in the creation of the Common Core standards.”
So what were his reasons? You are about to learn the motivation behind Common Core.
According to Dr. Pook, he helped write it to balance the scales because he, and many others, are benefiting from some mythical ‘white privilege‘ that was not earned.
It is impossible for any hope nice guys like Bill Gates and Jeb Bush could obtain as far as education quality when they surrender Common Core to radicals like Dr. Pook who is an obvious bleeding heart liberal given extreme power to destroy the minds of young people through progressive nonsense.
White privilege in 2014 America is a myth—it does not exist. The quality of one people over another is completely dictated by the content of their character. It is impossible to build a productive culture when young people want to live a “narco” life as opposed to a Christian rancher, or an engineer with six years of schooling directly applicable to their field of study. Those two lifestyles are not compatible—one will be successful one will not and it has nothing—absolutely nothing—to do with skin color.
There is no way Common Core could work even under the best of circumstances—because government schools are run by progressive labor unions and the policies are set by pin-headed politicians. When radical liberals are allowed to set the pace for all the nations’ standards on education—then failure on a massive scale will be the direct by-product. This is what has happened even in these early phases and every governor who has signed up their states to operate under Common Core standards—they have doomed their youth through the education system to guaranteed failure unprepared for adulthood. Bill Gates Company Microsoft invented the Excel spreadsheet which I think is one of the most magnificent inventions of the 20th century. Using his spreadsheets the path to failure in public education is very easy to see—the numbers simply don’t add up to success when it is front loaded with progressive garbage and liberal jargon.
There is nothing positive which can come out of a belief in white privilege other than the belief that goods and services are dished out based on the color of one’s skin—which is absolutely not the case. It is the decisions that one makes with their life which dictates if they will live as a parasitic scum in a government slum, or a productive six figure earner living in a suburban neighborhood where the greatest crime occurring is the occasional toilet paper tossed across lawns during graduation periods.
David Pook is just another example of why it is dangerous to depend on one common standard set by government for students to achieve ignoring the benefits of competition to make those standards better. Without competition people like Pook look like geniuses—but with competition, they look like the idiot radicals that they really are. That is why they support a Common Core standard in the first place—and why it is wrong and vile taking American children backwards toward liberalism instead of forward to productive success—regardless of sex or skin color.
To get an idea of what the screenwriter was thinking during the development process of Interstellar—before diving too deeply into the contents of the story—read what he said to /Film.com which is a kind of industry insider blog site. Jonathan Nolan spoke openly about his motivations while writing Interstellar. He has brought his writing talents to the Dark Knight series which I have praised heavily because of the content and angle he chooses to provide in those films. In Interstellar his motivations were clear, persuasive, and as bold as anything that has ever been done before in a movie.
/Film question: So that was always the pitch that like it was set in the future where resources are, were our future’s looking bleak?
Nolan: Absolutely. I mean, look the reality is we stopped going to space because we’re too fucking wrapped up in whatever narcissistic bullshit, you know, as a sort of a collective. I mean, look, there’s an awful lot of things that still need to be fixed here on Earth, right? You know, problems that never seem to go away. Poverty, disease and a lot of stuff that we turned our attention to that is a good thing. We’re also just kind of sucked in the bullshit. I was talking downstairs, I grew up in Apollo space travel, we were promised jetpacks and fucking teleportation and instead we got fucking Facebook and Instagram. That’s a bummer.
But we don’t think of it in those terms. We think of ourselves as being the most magnificent, amazing universe ever and if we wanna go back to the Moon, sure, we could. It’s like no, those guys are all dead or retired. We’re not going back to the Moon. And if we wanted to, we’d have to spend billions of dollars and it would take years and years and years. We’re just done. We’re not doing that. We’re out of that business. And so people don’t think in those terms. We had to set the movie in the future in which that was abundantly clear.
Readers of this site will instantly recognize the angle Jonathan Nolan took in setting up the movie Interstellar. At the start he challenges the notion of public education when the government schools are caught lying to students about the Apollo missions—stating that they were only intended as propaganda against Russia. Public education in Interstellar is on Common Core overload as test assessments determine what kind of careers students can pursue as adults in the collective society.
Meanwhile, innovation is down, people are barely able to make food for themselves as a blight fungus similar to the current Ug99 strains that are currently moving across Africa into the Middle East-specifically target wheat and okra. Because the developed world has micromanaged the world’s resources—specifically the minds of their youth—there isn’t anybody anywhere who can stop the fungus as it thrusts the world into hunger slowly killing earth.
It was amazing how many reviewers on their first viewing of the film missed so many of the most important messages—many confused the fungus in the film to environmental recklessness supporting their global warming conspiracies when it is exactly that kind of stupidity which has lunched the world into regression. Interstellar is such an amazing film that people wanted to come away with something they liked in it, even if the premise of the film attacks many of the core beliefs that most of our current civilization holds. So there is some revisionist memory going on in almost every review I read. But it’s not fair to Interstellar because as a movie it is going to places that nobody ever has attempted before. It tackles 5th dimensional space; inter galactic travel, the nature of love, the transitory aspects of time, the foundations of religion, the deep human yearning for adventure, the magnificence of invention and the corrupt nature of politics most epically displayed in forcing NASA underground because public support could not fathom spending money on spaceships when the world needed food. The movie even tackles the premise and existence of poltergeists. There are so many big ideas harnessed in the movie that it really belongs in its own category. It seeks openly to advance the human mind—which is certainly no small feat and it succeeds on every level.
The best parts of the movie were the space sequences which reminded me so much of 2001: A Space Odyssey filmed in complete silence—just as they would have been. The catastrophes in space were just mind bogglingly beautiful. As I have also reported at this site I am a tremendous Koyaanisqatsi fan—even to the extent that I designed a line of t-shirts years ago as a tribute to the 1983 experimental film. But the problem with it was that it pointed to progress as a vile and evil thing ultimately and concluded with a rocket exploding on its way to space falling back to earth in complete silence to the score of a magnificent work by Philip Glass. Well—there was a lot of Koyaanisqatsi in this movie and the music by Hans Zimmer without being disrespectful to Philip Glass tackles the original Koyaanisqatsi score with a new level of boldness. The pipe organs from Hans Zimmer’s soundtrack gave narration to the silence of space in such a grand fashion that it will become the new standard for all filmmakers over the next century. If The Wizard of Oz brought color to film, Interstellar has brought music to space—and that is not an insult to the contributions of John Williams to Star Wars—but Interstellar is in a new category of its own that will become the new standard—it is that good. The flight sequences were so wonderfully done—they were like a concert set in space to silently floating images struggling to break the boundaries of not just earth—but previous human limitation. There were times when the thrusters to the ships kicked on and the music literally was blowing me into the back of the seat—it was jaw-dropping incredible.
I think most people seeing Interstellar will like something from it—but the movie was intended to be enjoyed by smart people—or at a minimum, those who strive to be. It is a thinker’s movie to say the least and deliberately reaches out into the audience to declare, “We feel your pain.” It is literally bigger than anything on earth, there is no mountain too tall, no ocean so great—by the time Interstellar is watched once, everything on earth seems small and silly—including the civilization we have so far built. This is easily the grandest production of ideas ever gathered for the silver screen and even challenges some of the greatest literary work put to print. Interstellar is a magnificent masterpiece assembled to please the mind—to see life beyond death, and to touch the true face of God.
When the main character Cooper finds himself in the fifth dimension it’s not aliens, or a “they” out there in space trying to help the silly ants of humanity with carefully placed worm holes next to Saturn or the rapture inside a singularity—it is us who have mastered multi-dimensional travel, who have left the door open to our former incantations so to achieve the task in a linier time—to tell the story of humanity as a struggling race beating an invisible clock against stupidity only to weave the universe into a canvas of our own creation. It is the mind of man who spills over outside of their bodies into the infinite and become the utterances of immortality. What is most unusual of all within Interstellar was the carefully constructed request from Christopher Nolan to Hans Zimmer to create music which would live up to such a lofty intention—and uniquely, the legendary composer did it in a fashion that is literally blowing minds too restricted to behold all the images with the must see movie not just of this year, decade, or era—but in the history of film both past and future. Interstellar is out of this world in every category that counts—especially in the swagger category of bolding going to places only contemplated by physics equations and warped imaginations. Now such places are available to anybody who can pay the price of a movie ticket and desire to peak beyond the shroud of impossibility manifested into the bold reality of a destiny that is there within reach, now.
Interstellar is simply a new standard of excellence and will be copied hundreds of different ways from now on. History has just been made with this masterpiece of modern cinema—it is everything that many films have tried to be. The difference is that Interstellar pulled it off.
Before the election results of 2014 are fully sustained, it is important to understand how the radical element of our society viewed those elections—which are represented below so clearly by the Huffington Post. The aforesaid article came out just a few days before Election Day 2014 and reveals a great deal of the underpinnings of progressive beliefs. Obviously, the concern is that American politics is moving back to the conservative right based on the polling of the Republicans taking control of the senate and defeating Democrats in several key races. Momentum is evaporating from the left and they realize it. The same desperation that has made Barack Obama into the king of empty forums and a White House backtracking on the importance of a midterm election—the political left is losing support rapidly. Have a read of the way progressive organizations viewed this particular election and what they are blaming their eroding support on.
There is still suspense over what will happen on Election Day, with control of the Senate hanging in the balance. But regardless of who wins, we already know the 2014 election belongs to the U.S. Supreme Court.
This is the first election where the country will experience the full impact of the Court’s recent decisions rewriting the ground rules of our democracy.
When the Court dismantled our laws regulating money in politics and gutted core voting rights protections, we knew those decisions would have consequences. But only now are we seeing the full scope of their impact: a return to pre-Watergate, pre-Civil Rights era practices. Cash from unknown sources is flooding the most important races, while state politicians have instituted new barriers to the ballot box for millions of Americans. Regardless of who wins, the integrity of our elections has been undermined.
For the first time in decades, citizens in nearly half the country will find it harder to vote. In 14 states, 2014 is the first major election with new voting restrictions in place. For many working class, minority, elderly, and young Americans, voting is now more difficult and expensive. For some, it is impossible. In Texas, for example, 608,000 registered voters do not have the photo ID now required to cast a ballot. A disproportionate number of them are black and Hispanic. Some have already been turned away at the polls.
While the voice of ordinary citizens grows fainter, the voice of the 0.2 percent of Americans who spend the vast majority of money in federal elections — often anonymously — is louder than ever. Outside campaign spending has shattered previous records, with new groups like super PACs and “dark money” groups that do not disclose their donors dwarfing the spending of ordinary citizens and sometimes even candidates themselves. In many key races it is impossible for us to know who is buying our elections.
Essentially, the Huffington Post is blaming their collapsing polices on the inability of their base to compete with money pouring into the political machine as if there was some type of unfair advantage being conducted. They seem to forget that Democrats have a nearly exclusive claim on minority voters, and the technically stupid. There are a lot of really stupid people out there and they mostly vote for Democrats. Democrats also have a lock on the public sector unions and all labor unions in general who pour many, many millions of dollars into candidates who obviously do not represent mainstream America. In fact, the progressive obsession with the whole photo ID issue is that it complicates the voting process too greatly for the typical Democrat. This means fewer voters for them who typically are sympathetic to the handouts given out by government.
What they mean by “pre-Watergate, pre-Civil Rights era practices” is that they successfully suppressed the influence of those who stand against them—and that now the pendulum is swinging the other way—and they don’t like it. It means they always intended to yank the nation radically to the political left with the intention to keep it there. But the nation doesn’t want to stay there; it doesn’t want the poor education practices, the hateful attitude toward business, the castigation of values and religion. It doesn’t want an abusive and top heavy government that will use the IRS to enact its will on dissenters. It doesn’t want Barack Obama or a Hillary Clinton who fails to understand that it is businesses that create jobs and nobody else.
I am personally not all that impressed by the election results. Sure the country is moving politically more toward my direction, but my representatives are far too pink to my blood red Republicanism. I live in a red state and a darker shade of that red than average—so many of the victories to me are just more wash-outs and future villains that need to be fought. But at least those are people worth fighting. The kind of politics the Huffington Post is referring to has deliberately been hidden from the view of the vast majority of Americans and it is now exposed. Now that people can see it, they are rejecting it—as many always knew they would. That is the price of deceit, and when elections are won by deceit—as they have for far too long now, progressive organizations like the Huffington Post should understand that any ground they have made will be lost in a whim just because their ground was not won by actual victory, but through deception. And this past election is only the beginning. There is a long way to go, but that direction is one that does not favor the progressive—that is for sure. Their arguments are tired, and now gleefully exposed.
There are too many in the wake of the two commercial space endeavors which tragically ended during the last week of October 2014 who still believe that the government are the professionals in space flight, whereas the private sector are the amateurs. First was the 140-foot Antares rocket operated by Orbital Sciences Corp that blew up 15 seconds after lift-off destroying $200 million dollars of investment. Then there was the even worse Virgin Galactic spaceship that suffered a structural failure and crashed killing one and injuring another pilot destroying over $400 million dollars of a very unique craft. There seems to be a belief that if the federal government had been involved that these accidents wouldn’t have happened and that only the deep pockets of a looting government can fund such endeavors.
Well, here’s the deal—if it were up to the federal government there wouldn’t have been any crashes, because they wouldn’t be going up into space in the first place. They would employ a lot of engineers to sit in a room and talk about theory, they’d go to lunch and perpetually build spreadsheets of data which politicians and administrators would look at and decide that the risk was too great to act—and that they’d need more data points. This would go on for decades until everyone retires and the program gradually falls away into disrepair—which is the current experience at NASA—which is run by the government. They would not be where Virgin Galactic is today—because there are too many government bureaucrats in the way of their development.
Space travel in the fashion that it should have continued after the Apollo programs—as the Space Shuttles were already well under construction at that point in time—diminished after the rival of Russia collapsed and governments were no longer worried about nuclear weapons falling out of space. The short-sighted government simply stopped worrying about space and lost their sense of vision. They—as a collective entity–were unable to conceive of the type of space activity that Virgin Galactic is pursuing. It is beyond their reach. It doesn’t matter that the government has the ability to throw virtually unlimited amounts of money at space, what matters is that they lack the vision to do so—whereas the private sector isn’t so encumbered.
Now that the federal government is involved in the investigation of the Virgin Galactic crash, it will likely take years to get another ship ready for take-off and testing because of the bureaucratic elements involved. Government does not move at the speed of business and when they stand in the way—very little happens and by the time it does—everybody looses interest. That is the great danger involved from the Virgin Galactic disaster.
Richard Branson was extremely skilled in his press conference stating that Virgin Galactic would remain on course—which was a relief. But even he knows that it will take a monumental effort to get another ship to the phase that SpaceShipTwo was on the morning of October 31st, 2014. Mindless bureaucrats and pin-headed statesman will stand in the way of galactic adventure with a boldness they display in no other endeavor. Politicians and government workers only have valor when they hold up progress.
If not for the movies of The Right Stuff and Apollo 13 what would NASA have used as a tourism hook for the last 15 years at Kennedy Space Center? And what is the Right Stuff—I know, but do you dear reader? I can tell you one thing, government doesn’t have it—and those who work for government either gets it by breaking the law, or by performing it before bureaucrats take over the administrative process. Would Chuck Yeager have broken the sound barrier in today’s Air Force? No. Obama and his senators would have cancelled the funding in favor of making the people in the Middle East, or Indonesia feel better about their collective contributions to science back in a day when some thought the earth was flat. Politicians have no reverence for valor, or appetite for danger. I would bet $100,000,000 dollars that the pilot who survived the crash of Virgin Galactic on Halloween would literally give everything he’s got to climb into the next plane to push the boundaries again—which is what the Right Stuff is all about. Politicians don’t understand that kind of valor. They are too busy figuring out where they want to go for lunch. They don’t risk anything, especially themselves. They are in the business of playing it safe. Test pilots and entrepreneurs like Branson are all about the risk. Politicians loot off the effort of that risk to skim tax money away for their pet programs of election security and demographic maintenance. The Right Stuff was when John Glenn told his wife she didn’t have to pose for a photograph with LBJ when she didn’t want to. Glenn’s effort was what made the voyage into space worthy; it wasn’t a worthless politician who wanted to pose for a photo-op so to gain a few percentage points of popularity to the voting public.
The people of Virgin Galactic have the Right Stuff—they show up for work when nobody cares about the thousands of decisions they have to conquer just to complete one phase of spaceship construction. When there are triumphs, they bang wine glasses together and celebrate. When they go bad, as they did on Halloween of 2014, they attend the funerals and scratch their heads to figure out what to do next. But they do what they do for the life of adventure that valor dictates. Government people don’t understand that yearning and are good for nothing toward that end—they simply get in the way.
So for those who think that these latest disasters could have been prevented if the federal government applied its extensive regulations to the task of space travel—you are sadly mistaken. The only thing that would come of that arrangement is nothing—just perpetual stagnation and a constant desire to reach two points of productivity in their tax payer funded days of employment—their lunch hour, and quitting time. Everything in between those two periods involves stalling productive output until the relief of those times present themselves. So nothing happens. That is why Virgin Galactic is the only hope for those who see space as the answer to so many modern problems. There is no plan B or no government on earth who can duplicate their efforts even with endless budgets. Because it takes the Right Stuff to go into space and Virgin Galactic is filled with them. The people who work in government aren’t.
I am likely to continue talking about the new movie Interstellar for quite a long time—because it is the latest and most exciting philosophic/scientific endeavor aimed at a mass audience that I can think of, and is a vastly important film. Below is one of the first reviews from Variety and should be read by anyone on the fence considering seeing the movie. It will tell you everything you need to know about the film. But more specific to the film and an equal part of its majesty is the music by Hans Zimmer. The score is mind-blowing good and may well eclipse the iconic music of 2001: A Space Odyssey as instantly recognizable. So it deserves to be known that Hans Zimmer, one of the premier musical composers of our age and on par in history to be known among the giants of Straus, Beethoven, and Mozart did poorly in school and did not attend college. Listen to the man himself talk about his education—or lack thereof—and what he believes is the path to success that most should take.
There isn’t a college in the country who can teach a student with tuition charges to be as good at conceiving and conducting music for films as Hans Zimmer is. There is not a band program out there who can teach an army of others to become another Hans Zimmer. The best way to become another Hans Zimmer is to get near him and start learning—then applying his techniques at decision-making and problem solving into the individual experience of the student. A school cannot teach those skills with memorization techniques. Only through natural aptitude and practice can one hope to become as proficient. There is no way to cheat the system by throwing money at a skill hoping that it can be purchased. The kind of skill that Hans Zimmer has is only obtained one way, through lots of hard work and dedication while maintaining his uniqueness on the curb of perception.
Yet government schools and colleges all across the world suggest that they can produce such people if tuition dollars are applied, and the results never come back with satisfaction. There are many who aspire to become like Hans Zimmer and they may even learn to play his songs at a high school football game through a band program, but they cannot teach a student to become a person equal to the skill of Hans Zimmer with just scholastic education methods. The aspiring artist if they have a hope of such lofty heights must apprentice themselves to someone equivalent to the value they wish to achieve and start with a total dedication of themselves to the craft. Advice is only as good as the person who gives it.
Once when I wrote an article about the failure of a band teacher from our local high school the parents of the students sent me many nasty emails about my opinions. It wasn’t hard to conclude that their vast anger was inspired by a deeply rooted fear that they had in realizing that money could not purchase skill for their children—as they wished to believe. When the famed band teacher fell from grace and was cast aside by the district as a vagabond it was feared that his students would fall as well—as if their success was attached directly to his star. Much to the terror of the parents the real answer was that their children were learning nowhere near enough about music to become anything but copycats in the music industry. They were learning to play the instruments, but they weren’t learning to make music that would play from them—which is a big difference. And these days, anybody can practice playing music with a software program. What needs to be taught are the ways that notes can be composed into new forms of music that reveals the inner sanctum of thought and all human possibilities.
It is for that reason that I seldom ever listen to any “pop” music. My iPod doesn’t have a single music track in eight gig of memory that is not a movie soundtrack of some epic intention. Over a third of my soundtracks on that iPod are Hans Zimmer scores. I still listen to Gladiator at least once a week which I think is one of his best pieces of work. Music should speak about possibilities and achievement, not just passive witnessing of the world around the listener. Band students and music classes in general are not learning about the epic scale of a subject matter, they are simply learning to repeat the work of Hans Zimmer.
If I were to attempt to teach such students I would not do so in front of a class in a stale government school with brick walls and blackboards with the smell of lunch drifting down the halls promising frozen pizza and tatter tots among several hundred other students emitting waves of pent-up rage at adolescent frustrations. I’d have them climb a mountain with sweat pouring off their foreheads then piping the Gladiator soundtrack into their tired ears as they sip for life-sustaining water from a canteen warmed by body heat. Then I’d ask them to compose the first notes that came to their minds based on their experience once the music had been silenced. That is how you learn to compose music, not just copy the notes of Hans Zimmer.
I can’t say how many times I have now listened to the Man of Steel soundtrack even in the minus zero degree temperatures on the back of a motorcycle as the snow was falling ever so ferociously—with my fingertips so frozen that they were in great pain. It has now been more than a dozen at least and each time brought the notes to a grand fortissimo inside my helmet that spoke of another world reality of possibility well beyond the grips of conventional manhood. While most men are first concerned in the morning with where they will use the rest room, what they will eat, where they will dispel their sexual appetites, and how they will earn the acclaim of their peers—such music under such circumstances dictate higher thoughts far more epic than the animal wants of flesh. It is only under those extreme conditions that Hans Zimmer can be understood as notes put upon a blank page as opposed to copied the way a band conductor of a local high school teaches students how to blow a horn and put on a show for their proud parents with their video cameras out to record the occasion—and a “yes” vote during levy time for the memory. On the way home from such concerts the parents foolishly declare that their child may become the next Hans Zimmer because they learned to play the Pirates of the Caribbean soundtrack. But the students never see the music as from the feelings of observation—they simply memorize the motions put in place for them by someone like Hans Zimmer.
Too many people believe wrongly that being “credentialed” equates to success. They believe that if a music instructor at a school somewhere says that a student knows something—that they know it. Yet they fail 100% of the time to create future Hans Zimmer types no matter how much money is spent on music programs and government school electives. Those good at music are still those with a natural appetite to take their skills to the next levels through extremely hard work and persistence. Credentialed these days has been regulated into being symphonious with security—and that is a path to average—which is not what Hans Zimmer’s music is about at all. His music is much more than that and is why I listen to it with great zeal and marvel at its uniqueness. That uniqueness is why it’s a joy to hear—and thus far, as admitted by Zimmer himself, is why schools cannot duplicate the efforts of the award-winning history making composer even with all the money in the world. That is because his music does not come from comfort, but experience, in a life lived and felt as opposed to copied and mimicked—and is why Hans Zimmer’s score for Interstellar will literally take people out of this world. Zimmer actually let his mind leave this world to write the music—and that is a grand achievement!
Governments seldom do anything right and when they do it is off the backs of individual effort. NASA is an example of this paradox, at least in the beginning. In many ways the government created Chuck Yeager by putting him into an airplane as an 18-year-old kid and letting him become a fighter pilot at their expense. Now as a 90-year-old man who still flies and has defied the odds of living in almost every circumstance it was because of his individual effort that so many doors to the future have opened. In Yeager’s case, government gave him the tools to become great and out of thousands of potential pilots, one or two here and there did—and because of it, the world is about to unlock an entirely new dimension of discovery. This has never been truer than Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic endeavors which I’ve reported on before. 2015 will bring many exciting things to the societies of the world, but nothing more than what Branson is about to unload. I suggest that the videos of this article be watched completely dear reader for the proper depths and context to seep in correctly.
I am the type of person who always jumps into cold swimming pools. I do not dip my feet in the water—I just jump in. Much of the work at this site is to help people jump into the rapidly occurring events of the 21st century—to drop the restrictions of the 20th century behind and acclimate themselves to the future. Sometimes it requires a bit of harshness while dealing with the chill and shock of such a cold reality, and that is the task of creativity to douse minds with the cold hard facts for their own good. While watching Star Wars: Rebels this past week the beginnings of that acclimation were in full swing. As a kid I had a toy, which I still have called a “troop transporter.” It never appeared in the original Star Wars films, but Kenner designed it to fill a market need for their action figures in the early 1980s. Well, the guys making the new Star Wars cartoons and films are about my age, and they played with the same toys as children, and they finally put the toy into a Star Wars show, the third episode of Rebels during the first season. It was a bit of rather profound evidence in how small things from a childhood can have a major impact on the mind of an adult. When I was a kid, just as it was for the kids who are now involved in Star Wars projects science fiction and video games were very primitive—nowhere close to how they are in the present condition. So mathematically, it becomes very easy to see that the impact of these mythologies will compound dramatically in the coming years driving actual science quickly as the public consciousness has been prepared for these breakthroughs.
In 2015 the new Christopher Nolan film Interstellar will break box office records and win many accolades from the Academy Awards. It will become available for home theater systems and will become an instant treasure and topic of many dinner conversations. That is how the year will begin. The year will end with a new Star Wars film which Disney will market to every corner of the earth in a positive way. The mind of mankind will be opened in many more profound ways because of these two entertainment events alone. But in addition to that some of the minds sparked by these events in the past, the original Star Wars movies, and the science opened up by Chuck Yeager, and the unequivocal playfulness of Richard Branson’s entrepreneurship, civilians will for the first time climb into space. The mind of mankind will be prepared to behold a bit of this explosive reality by art, Star Wars, Interstellar and other similar features, but those playful thoughts from childhood which inspired the creation of a “troop transporter” inserted into Rebels will jump several steps forward—and stay there forever. It is a very exciting time to be alive.
Once the celebrities of society are routinely ferried into space by Virgin Galactic starting next year the way we view the world will change forever. Competition is on the heels of Richard Branson and even more methods of space travel will emerge in the few short years thereafter. Not long after that will be hotels and manufacturing facilities in space because that is the next step for mankind and the generations brought up on Star Wars and all the byproducts of fantasy and science fiction will be there to recreate the dreams of their childhoods with a sudden infusion of such science made into a reality.
Two forces are emerging in tandem, the old world and its ways are so closely tied to the false belief that government expansion and influence will preserve the traditions of the past and all the philosophies created by those minds—where Karl Marx still has a place at the table. There is no place for Karl Marx in space, so the philosophies introduced by George Lucas and lived out by real people like Chuck Yeager—the bravado of adventure and discovery upon scratching the face of an unknown wilderness will bring out the best of the human race leaving behind those still clinging to the terrestrial remnants of the German radical stuck to regional concerns of economic fairness. That voice will quickly become eclipsed as the untouched potential of space becomes a reality for average people instead of the very few—in much the way that Chuck Yeager was the fastest man alive in 1947, but just a few years later, flying supersonic was a common occurrence. Travel into space for civilians by a civilian company will move at a speed that governments could never fathom, and an explosive growth period will follow by minds already thrown into the deep end of the cold water by entertainment endeavors like Interstellar and Star Wars.
It was a pleasure to watch the documentary of the creation of Virgin Galactic. Seeing their engineers do basic layup of their fuselage sections in a giant open room without EMA controls, or lab coats with all the ambition of children playing with Lego’s, then rolling the large tooling into a giant oven was a privilege. My first thought was that they’d be busted by a government auditor for such work practices, but then I had to remind myself that Virgin Galactic is not beholden to such things as they are the end-user of their product and do not need government to stick its nose into their business. While in the air they have FFA requirements and the like to deal with, but they can avoid many of the insane government red tape and bureaucratic nightmares that are often involved in large aerospace companies forced into compliance with government authority because they are still a small company with ambition filling their sails of innovation. What is going on at Virgin Galactic is very similar to the early days of Chuck Yeager’s flight tests in the X-1, when he broke his ribs and his friend and engineer Ridely cut off the tip of a broom handle to allow him to lock the door to the first supersonic jet ever flown. The government back then had no idea what to do about flight, or if it would even become a viable option, so they had not yet stuck their regulatory tentacles into the endeavor allowing Chuck Yeager to be the cowboy of the desert, a hell-raising test pilot given millions of dollars worth of tools to prove that he could become the fastest man alive.
Virgin Galactic for the small fee of $250,000 will take people into space traveling faster than anybody has ever traveled before if they have the money to pay it. At first it will only be people like Labron James, and movie producers like Steven Spielberg who will touch that virgin face of space in a way nobody has before—for 6 minutes of weightlessness. But shortly thereafter, the cost will decrease dramatically because of competition and once there is something to do in space, such as a resort to fly to and vacation at, space travel will become a daily occurrence.
It is easy to become depressed about the state of the world, especially for those trying to help fix it, no matter what side of the political aisle they reside. But if you know how to read what’s coming and can see it clearly, you can take refuge in the knowledge that everything is changing right before our eyes for the better. The water might feel cold to the touch, but it is just right for a refreshing plunge into the depths of adventure. Those growing up with the entertainment influences of the past will have a better time adapting—others will struggle to keep up, and many more will be left behind fearful of the giant leap mankind is about to make. But the correct way to approach this new age is with the gusto that 91-year-old Charlie Yeager displayed after climbing out of his F-15 after a supersonic flight over Las Vegas in October recently paying homage to his ground breaking supersonic flight in 1947. Arms crossed across his body, feet square with his shoulders his usual no-nonsense approach to life was in evidence to the type of individuals who must have the “Right Stuff” for this exciting period being delivered by Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. When a reporter asked Yeager when he was going to stop flying he remarked with his typical West Virginian, candor—“when I get too old.”
Yeager even as a very ripe old man still has in his mind the heart of a lighthearted child who just wants to play with toys—which I’d say is the secret to his longevity. Richard Branson beholds the same curiosity and playfulness. And today’s entertainment will breed more of those types through their endeavors creating in many millions of young people a deep yearning for life-long play and love of life that extends beyond the physical limitations of governments or previous philosophy. Virgin Galactic is on the precipice of a world-wide rejuvenation to an upcoming age of adventure that will go down in history as one of the most dramatic steps forward ever conducted by human minds. But, behind that glorious endeavor is a person I greatly respect not for his years of service in the Air Force, but because of his playfulness in life that ushered in the age of aviation to planet earth and all the wonderful inventions and discoveries that only comes from playing with expensive toys for the benefit of further creation—General Chuck Yeager. At 92 years of age, I can only hope that he can be one of the few first who gets to go into space on Virgin Galactic. I love that guy.
It was quite revealing to watch the real Tracie Hunter speak in front of a church and hear her justification for breaking the law and abusing her power as a juvenile court judge in Cincinnati. Her crimes involved using her position of power as an activist toward the black community without addressing what the cause of the problems were—which were on full display by Tracie Hunter herself at a Cincinnati church shortly after charges were brought against her as a sitting judge. Her antics and sudden revelation of her public persona as an activist was on full display in a shocking way. It wasn’t just in how she said it, but in what she said—which can be seen in the video below around the halfway mark. In short, she indicated that the crimes she committed were because God had healed her from a serious car accident, so has dedicated her life to God and his service. Among that service was her activism in abusing her power as a Hamilton County judge.
Seeing who she really was only confirmed the suspicions that many public officials like Barack Obama, and radicals like Eric Holder use their power to perform similar acts against the law purely out of an ideology of victimization that is common in such religious congregations as the one Tracie Hunter spoke to—and in the same radical manner. Her speech was a window into the mind of such nut cases—who actually believe in the merit of social collectivism and use God to hide their inner corruption behind a mask of virtue. Even more shocking were that many people around her during the speech were proclaiming, “YES,” and “I HEAR THAT,” as if what she was saying were things they all believed.
It is not racism, as there was a white guy on the stage with her—it was purely an ideological failure and a lack of understanding of how life really works, and what constitutes merit. People like Tracie Hunter, and her followers have surrendered thought to God and claim to be guided by his invisible hand. But with such an abandonment of logic, how can they ever be certain that the invisible hand guiding their lives toward corruption, perpetuation of violence in the black community through activism, and intellectual foolishness, isn’t the work of a vile devil? The real force at work is laziness at not even wanting to commit thought to the condition of their lives—but to follow emotional tides of sentiment based on village mentality collectivism propagated by ignorance. And they justify that ignorance, and their natural laziness propping up their lack of intellectual curiosity by claiming they have dedicated their lives to God—letting some invisible being residing in the folds of the universe as their guiding light to break the law and spread evil across the earth. This is essentially the defense of Tracie Hunter as justification for her crimes.
Rather than bring justice to the young juveniles of her court, Tracie Hunter only threw them back out into the rat race of government driven slums created by the welfare state. Not wanting to point out the social failures of the poverty programs of the LBJ administration during the mid-60s, they simply tossed the responsibility back toward God and pretended to be working on his behalf yielding young black kids back into violence against one another—then proclaiming that all her crimes were “for the children.” Such statements were then followed by a congregation of mind numb fools saying “AMEN.”
The church listening to Tracie Hunter are the same type of drones who believe that Eric Holder is not a criminal, and that Barack Obama is not a functioning communist. They are the same types in fact who are still falling for communist rhetoric all over Africa, which is keeping their countries in a state of decrypt economic conditions. When Tracie Hunter exclaimed the name of Nelson Mandela there was a roar of approval from the congregation—apparently those same enthusiasts were aware that the South African leader was a radical communist, which is why he was put in jail in the first place. It wasn’t for the color of his skin, but for the radical political beliefs he held to incite a communist takeover of South Africa.
The unspoken definitions for things often cannot distinguish the aims of 20th century communism from churches like the one that Tracie Hunter enunciated so voraciously from the podium. They often have the same goals and aims filled with good intentions. But their implementation often carries them into the realm of law breaking and counter-capitalist objectives. Tracie Hunter made the decision to break the law as a judge interpreting the conditions of the black youth dangling by her fingers for the fate of their lives through a lens of unspoken communist thought which runs rampant through many communities of color hidden behind the Sherman tank of racism. Nobody dares call out that communism for fear of being called a racist, but the definitions between communism and Tracie Hunter’s justice—just as it was Nelson Mandela’s, or Barrack Obama’s is indistinguishable. The kind of social activism reliant on communism to advance the cause as though inspired by God is what Tracie Hunter was speaking in her speech backed by several pastors.
It is the rejection of capitalism that causes the people under the spell of Tracie Hunter to suffer under other groups of people who are driven not by racist desires, but those of free markets and competition. It is the cause of the youth that appeared before her inciting her to use her power of position to manipulate as if to fight back against the vile evils of capitalism—as if she were marching to the very trumpets played by God himself from a cloud floating above the welfare office. But to clearer minds, it is not a God, but something of a vile evil which maintains shackles upon the legs of many youth tricking them into believing that it is freedom that they are chained to, instead of perpetual enslavement. Radical devotees to social change—from a capitalist society to a communist one is the hidden rhetoric of Tracie Hunter and her church followers. And they are not shy about their desire to penetrate public office to execute their aims—and when they are caught—to point toward God and toss the blame for their actions at that invisible ruler shirking all responsibility for their actions. It should then be of no surprise that their communities continue to fail as does everything they put their hands on. The reason Tracie Hunter failed is the same reason that Barack Obama continues to fail—and the reason that South Africa has floundered economically under Nelson Mandela for decades—it is because they are worshiping behind the mask of God a deity of collectivism. And when they are caught advancing evil as they do, they use God as their shield. And if that doesn’t work, they cry racism. Then they break the law and do anything they can to advance the intentions of evil for aims designed outside of the scope of the Holy Bible driven by words never printed upon a written page.
Over twenty years ago I read a book by Kip Thorne about black holes and time warps that was a treasure I will never forget. In it the theoretical physics applied I knew would alter the way human beings relate to virtually everything in their lives. It has taken a long time, but finally that applied science is emerging into a film that I think will shatter the perceptions many have of their reality and I am ecstatic about its release in theaters everywhere on November 7th. I have been waiting a long time for this movie as the subject matter is one that excites great passion in me. The topic of black holes as a category of science is an obsession of my wife who spends most of her time contemplating them and how they relate to the universe. It makes for some interesting dinner conversation. As I pay attention to politics and social sciences to a large degree, she would rather not have her mind encumbered with such sluggish perceptions. But when it comes to theoretical physics and the morality of the universe—she blooms like a spring flower. The movie is called Interstellar and was developed by Steven Spielberg then taken over and directed by Christopher Nolan in 2010, whom I have said so many positive things about as a young film maker.
When the movie Back to the Future came out, the film left a mark on the public consciousness that changed social vocabulary. It was a Spielberg produced project that made discussions about the space-time continuum a topic of dinner time conversation. Mankind became smarter because of the comedy Back to the Future due to the presentation of the theoretical science involved. A few years later Spielberg did it again with Jurassic Park and the concept of DNA building of living creatures. Complicated discussion about DNA engineering soon filled the airwaves and mankind took another complicated step forward. Only through the popular action movie Jurassic Park was the hard debate about DNA framed for public dialogue. In the new film Interstellar the concept of space, time, and even the life of the earth will be brought into a focus yet unexplored properly. That is because Kip is the executive producer of this important film and Christopher Nolan along with composer Hans Zimmer are willing to take epic risks to portray these complicated elements on-screen for audiences who had been previously unaware of these scientific concepts.
Warner Bros., who produced and distributed some of Nolan’s previous films, negotiated with Paramount, traditionally a rival studio, to have a financial stake in Interstellar. Legendary Pictures, which formerly partnered with Warner Bros., also sought a stake. The three companies co-financed the film, and the production companies Syncopy and Lynda Obst Productions were enlisted. The director also hired cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema since his long-time collaborator Wally Pfister was busy working on Transcendence, his directorial debut. Interstellar was filmed with a combination of anamorphic35mm and IMAX film photography. Filming took place in the last quarter of 2013 in locations in the province of Alberta, Canada, in southern Iceland, and in Los Angeles, California. The visual effects company Double Negative created visual effects for Interstellar.
Thorne was born in Logan, Utah, the son of Utah State Universityprofessors D. Wynne Thorne and Alison C. Thorne, a soil chemist and an economist, respectively. Raised in an academic environment, two of his four siblings are also professors. He became interested in science at the age of eight, after attending a lecture about the solar system. Thorne and his mother then worked out calculations for their own model of the solar system.
Thorne rapidly excelled at academics early in life, becoming one of the youngest full professors in the history of the California Institute of Technology. He received his B.S. degree from Caltech in 1962, and Ph.D. degree from Princeton University in 1965. He wrote his doctoral thesis, Geometrodynamics of Cylindrical Systems, under the supervision of relativist John Wheeler. Thorne returned to Caltech as an associate professor in 1967 and became a professor of theoretical physics in 1970, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in 1981, and the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics in 1991. In June 2009 he resigned his Feynman Professorship (he is now the Feynman Professor of Theoretical Physics, Emeritus) to pursue a career of writing and movie making. His first film project will team him with Christopher Nolan.
Throughout the years, Thorne has served as a mentor and thesis advisor for many leading theorists who now work on observational, experimental, or astrophysical aspects of general relativity. Approximately 50 physicists have received Ph.D.s at Caltech under Thorne’s personal mentorship.
Thorne is known for his ability to convey the excitement and significance of discoveries in gravitation and astrophysics to both professional and lay audiences. In 1999, Thorne made some speculations on what the 21st century will find as the answers to the following questions:
Is there a “dark side of the universe” populated by objects such as black holes?
Can we observe the birth of the universe and its dark side using radiation made from space-time warpage, or so-called “gravitational waves”?
Will 21st century technology reveal quantum behavior in the realm of human-size objects?
Thorne has made contributions to black hole cosmology. Thorne proposed his Hoop Conjecture that cast aside the thought of a naked singularity. The Hoop Conjecture describes an imploding star turning into a black hole when the critical circumference of the designed hoop can be placed around it and set into rotation.[5] That is, any object of mass M around which a hoop of circumference can be spun must be a black hole. As a tool to be used in both enterprises, astrophysics and theoretical physics, Thorne has developed an unusual approach, called the “Membrane Paradigm“, to the theory of black holes and used it to clarify the “Blandford-Znajek” mechanism by which black holes may power some quasars and active galactic nuclei. Thorne has investigated the quantumstatistical mechanical origin of the entropy of a black hole and the entropy of a cosmological horizon in an inflationary model of the universe. With Wojciech Zurek he showed that the entropy of a black hole of known mass, angular momentum, and electric charge is the logarithm of the number of ways that the hole could have been made. With Igor Novikov and Don Page he developed the general relativistic theory of thin accretion disks around black holes, and using this theory he deduced that with a doubling of its mass by such accretion a black hole will be spun up to 0.998 of the maximum spin allowed by general relativity, but not any farther. This is probably the maximum black-hole spin allowed in nature. He, along with his mentor John Wheeler, additionally proved that it was impossible for cylindrical magnetic field lines to implode. Both Hawking and Thorne have theorized that a singularity exists in the interior of a black hole.
Wormholes and time travel
Thorne was one of the first people to conduct scientific research on whether the laws of physics permit space and time to be multiply connected (can there exist classical, traversable wormholes and “time machines“?). With Sung-Won Kim, Thorne identified a universal physical mechanism (the explosive growth of vacuum polarization of quantum fields), that may always prevent spacetime from developing closed timelike curves (i.e., prevent “backward time travel”). With Mike Morris and Ulvi Yurtsever he showed that traversable Lorentzian wormholes can exist in the structure of spacetime only if they are threaded by quantum fields in quantum states that violate the averaged null energy condition (i.e. have negative renormalized energy spread over a sufficiently large region). This has triggered research to explore the ability of quantum fields to possess such extended negative energy. Recent calculations by Thorne indicate that simple masses passing through traversable wormholes could never engender paradoxes – there are no initial conditions that lead to paradox once time travel is introduced. If his results can be generalized, they would suggest that none of the supposed paradoxes formulated in time travel stories can actually be formulated at a precise physical level: that is, that any situation in a time travel story turns out to permit many consistent solutions.
Relativistic stars, multipole moments and other endeavors
With Anna Żytkow, Thorne predicted the existence of red supergiant stars with neutron-star cores (Thorne–Żytkow objects). He laid the foundations for the theory of pulsations of relativistic stars and the gravitational radiation they emit. With James Hartle, Thorne derived from general relativity the laws of motion and precession of black holes and other relativistic bodies, including the influence of the coupling of their multipole moments to the spacetime curvature of nearby objects. Thorne has also theoretically predicted the existence of universally antigravitating “exotic matter” – the element needed to accelerate the expansion rate of the universe, keep traversable wormhole “Star Gates” open and keep timelikegeodesic free float “warp drives” working. With Clifford Will and others of his students, he laid the foundations for the theoretical interpretation of experimental tests of relativistic theories of gravity – foundations on which Will and others then built. Thorne is currently interested in the origin of classical space and time from the quantum foam of quantum gravity theory.
All of that complicated dialogue will be presented with a coherent and compelling story driven by the director Christopher Nolan. It will be an epic event to say the least as many of Kip’s theories described above will be presented in Interstellar. For my wife and I it will make for marvelous diner conversation afterwards—an event that is rare indeed. It’s the kind of thing that we talk about often and it will be a pleasure to see such obscure topics presented in a way that elevates the future dialogue of the human race. On November 7th 2014, mankind will take a new step forward toward a fate that has not yet been written.
I had a history all through my youth of telling those in authority how they should conduct their lives. I was bored to death in school and had no interest in it outside of the 2nd grade. Everything after that was simply a gradual withdrawal from a sick and twisted system. Occasionally I would tell a teacher how they should teach better—and I would do so just to try to stay engaged—but it never worked. So I tuned those education elements out of my life completely. I deemed them completely worthless and wasteful. The moment I could escape from them, I did and I never looked back with an ounce of regret.
Right out of high school I made more money as a car salesman than any of the adults I knew at the time so their constant uttering’s about college made no sense to me. I did attend the higher institution several times, but it was just as ridiculously stupid as public school was, so I eventually left to start my own company. Back then, even at 22 years of age I had a history of telling the presidents and owners of the companies I worked for how they should conduct their business. Some of these were big companies with very wealthy and arrogant owners and the last thing they wanted to hear was some young kid telling them how they could maximize their profits, and create new product lines for their future. It was a kind of running joke among the work forces that were around me at the time that I would produce these lengthy, extravagant letters telling company owners how to do their job—and I often let them have it heavily when I did such a thing. One company I had worked at for a number of years (19 to 22 years old)—was good honest factory work, but was a hard place filled with hard people. It had a terrible morale problem. I wrote the president a letter telling him that he could solve the problem by coming down out of his office and shaking hands with the people who made him money. I told him such actions were free and that he could wash his hands off when he was done—and it would do wonders for his productivity. I sent the letter through my floor supervisor who thought I was out of my mind. But he couldn’t disagree with a thing I said, just that the letter was harsh.
The president took the letter hard, and became very angry but did the things I told him to do. He thanked me a year later for an increase in profit of nearly 10%. This was a combination of a lot of things—most of which was directly attributed to decreased employee turnover. So that president sought me out often to help make key decisions in the future. This is a relationship that I would take with me at virtually every place I was ever employed in the future.
I was bold with my words because I have never in my life feared losing a job. I have always viewed employment as a kind of consultation job where my real passions resided in my personal endeavors. I never intended to hold a traditional job, so I had no concern about pissing off my bosses, just as I never cared to piss off my teachers. Compliance to authority figures is just never something I had a desire to do at any point in my life. Maybe as a small child I wanted to make my parents happy during the learning stages of reading, identifying colors, and walking, but this quickly went away. I always did intend to be self-employed as my mind was an idea factory that never shut off. And I was tapped into it 24/7.
At the age of 19 I filed for my first patent, a new kind of tool called a torque socket extension. I had a very negative experience working with a company that markets new inventions determining it to be a complete scam. So I started my own company called Cliffhanger Research and Development. It was to be an R&D company that would do everything from advanced machining to advanced medical breakthroughs. Instead of telling other companies how to conduct their lives and businesses, I would just let them follow the lead of Cliffhanger Research and Development. It was called Cliffhanger because the ideas were from the cutting edge of reality.
I had a whole list of projects to develop under Cliffhanger Research and Development and the start of them took me on quite an adventure. I ended up in court many times, speaking to the mayors of cities often, and running up against a lot of resistance primarily due to my age. I wasn’t yet 25 years old, so there were always mountains of skepticism that had to be overcome just in the perception of other people’s realities. I was friends with people who took $10,000 lunches daily and had many of them eager to listen to my advice. They didn’t discriminate against me for my age; they just listened as they were always on the look-out for a competitive edge.
One of my Cliffhanger projects took me to a trade show at the McCormick Center in Chicago. It was a funding mechanism intended to drive revenue to all the other projects on the table, so it was a big deal to me. I risked everything to show up for this convention as it was one of those pinnacle life moments. I had quit my good job in Ohio and sent my family down to Gatlinburg, Tennessee to purchase property for the move of our company headquarters there. To cover income in the mean time I picked up two jobs until revenue from the McCormick convention started paying off—I was set to be a roller coaster operator at Dollywood, and at night I was going to be a waiter at the Pigeon Forge Shoney’s. That would cover the loss in income from my day job in Cincinnati.
While in Chicago I learned several harsh realities that were life-changing. Even though many of the rich friends that I had warned me, I hoped that my ideas would punch through their skepticism. But youth in this case worked against me, because what worked in my mind could not be applied to a society not functioning from the same illumination. What I learned at the McCormick Center in the summer of 1994 was that what mattered more than what you knew and could invent was who you knew and what they could do for you. That was a concept that I simply rejected, and it cost me a lot of money to walk away from. I would not allow Cliffhanger Research and Development to become hen-pecked by lecherous governments, corrupt deal makers, and barnacle like lawyers. So I walked away from a deal in Chicago that could have set me up for life, but destroyed my company with an infusion of influences that were not unlike the many company presidents whom I had insulted for being complete idiots. It became clear to me that what made those company presidents idiots was their allowance of these influences into their life and biting on the temptation to sell-out their origin ideals in trade for financial security. I did not have the money to take Cliffhanger Research and Development to the next level without help, and I couldn’t accept the type of help being offered because the conditions allowed for complete louses to piggy-back off my efforts for no other reason than they brought money to the table—money obtained through political maneuvers that were very disingenuous.
I knew a scam when I saw it. As a car salesman right out of high school there was money laundering going on at the highest level of that company meant to disguise drug sales. I learned a lot by watching that place operate from behind the scenes and would listen with interest how the local police were all in on the deal. Most of the money being made was not through cars, it was in the sale of drugs. I saw as a very young man how the top and bottom of society fed off each other. So I quit that job in favor of an honest factory job—there I saw much the same type of thing between the company president and the local political establishment. He’d often take politicians out onto his boat on the Ohio River to schmooze for tax breaks and shelters. He wrecked that boat and got into a lot of trouble with a young woman who wasn’t much older than I was at the time causing me to loose much disrespect for the guy. And even when I wanted to file a patent for new inventions, the leeches were there to suck off the top of other people’s ideas and water them down with their infusion. Now in Chicago the deals were epic—to get the money you’d have to sign away your rights essentially to the creative process—and this was the reason I created Cliffhanger Research and Development in the first place.
My wife and I had a hard discussion in a Gatlinburg restaurant to make. Our entire lives were at risk. We had sold our house; our realtor had screwed up that deal as well leaving us in a world of hurt. To make the deal in Chicago would essentially kill the other purposes I had for Cliffhanger Research and Development. It would be absorbed by a larger conglomerate not yet even arriving to an age of its own maturity. It was like feeding a child of mine to a dirty old sex pervert for their temporary gratification and it hurt. So we decided to abandon the Chicago deal, abandon the Gatlinburg headquarters, and go back to Cincinnati to fight it out to keep our home. That’s what we did for the next several years.
Coming back to Cincinnati I served as my own attorney in challenging our realtor. I served as our own attorney in covering several law suits which tried to prevent our exodus from the type of consumption being set up in Chicago and nobody understood why my wife and I were upset. All we had to do was take the money, and we’d be wealthy—which is why people went to college, built careers, and sold themselves out politically to others—was to get money. People in the know thought that my desire to preserve my intentions for Cliffhanger Research and Development was youthful naïveté and simply didn’t understand what drove our intellectual decisions. In the realtor case and the Cliffhanger case it was ownership that I was after, the ability to retain my rights so that I could navigate them to success. And in that process were hordes of second handers who simply existed as barnacles—parasites to creative thought.
There hasn’t been a good second opportunity to put the name of Cliffhanger Research and Development back into the competitive marketplace. As my wife and I discussed at the Gatlinburg restaurant many years ago, I had other things I could do so I was never desperate for the money—and was never in a strategic position where I had to sell out Cliffhanger Research and Development to lesser minds. So I turned to writing because it allowed an author to make the world not necessarily as it is, but as it should be. Making Cliffhanger the main character of these future stories about a vigilante who used to be a CEO of Cliffhanger Research and Development allows me to paint the world as I think it should have been that day at the McCormick Center. It allows me to correct the mistakes that humanity has made and to put the world as it should be within the context of Cliffhanger.
Needless to say, there is an edge to Cliffhanger that is uncompromising. I write things there that few publishers would allow today in our politically correct world. I write Cliffhanger with the same spirit that I operated Cliffhanger Research and Development under. My wife likes that character because he is uncompromisingly good—like herself. And when we talked about what to do about the R&D company while in Gatlinburg it was her idea to put all these stories into a fictional context so people might learn from them. It has taken a while to put the proper emotional distance behind me to deal with the type of plot lines that are involved in the Cliffhanger stories—and this is what has lead to these present decisions.
Now you know a bit about my past dear reader, that I have not previously revealed. It is the reason that I write so much on this blog and elsewhere, and why there is an uncompromising approach to the material. Much stronger forces have tried to quell that self-assuredness when I was much, much, younger, so there isn’t any chance now of reaching through to my sensitivities and con me into a lighter approach.
As I made the decision to preserve Cliffhanger Research and Development within my own heart and soul by turning down significant amounts of money to retain my intellectual property, I will do the same with Cliffhanger and all the stories that follow—because I can. I don’t need to bend myself to the shape-shifters of the times. I think it is ironic that H.P. Lovecraft the pulp writer from the 1920s is just now obtaining a marketplace respect. He died extremely poverty stricken because there was no value for his stories in the roaring twenties by an industry concerned about other types of things. Now it is impossible to go to a Barnes and Noble book store and not see some reference to H.P. Lovecraft. I suspect that Cliffhanger will have the same type of transition—the immediacy of the political moment will find him reprehensible. But history will come to love him long after our days have extinguished. And that will be fine with me. The reason to do anything is because it’s the right thing to do, and as often has been proven—the masses do not have a clue as to what that is. I use Cliffhanger to articulate that righteousness through the hazes of confusion that have been purposely placed to consume our thoughts toward irrationality. Some things are more important than social acceptance and it is in that long view that Cliffhanger Research and Development will exist in immortality.
Many think that because I’m a conservative that I naturally do not support conservation. These are the same types who think that the issue of slavery was only a white on black occurrence occurring in America from the 1600s until the mid 1800s. Of course slavery was a much larger social problem involving all races and sexes of that particular time period and it was America who was the first to take a moral stand against it—to such an extent that a war was fought over it—led by Republicans. The same type of manipulation has occurred to make conservatives into villains regarding conservation—and largely it has gone unchallenged. That is because the answer to the conservation question is again that it is capitalism which is the biggest spokesman for the conservation movement which is much to the frustration of the bleeding heart liberal types. So it is with some surprise that people learn of my love and support of the Newport Aquarium.
The primary reason that I am so excited about the upcoming Liberty Center development being constructed as we speak in my community of Liberty Township is because it is a Steiner project. The Steiner group twenty years ago envisioned a way to save the embattled city of Newport, Kentucky with a brilliant new development on the river built around a new state-of-the art aquarium. That aquarium was a game changer and to this day is worth an out-of-state visit just to see. Situated across from the Cincinnati skyline, it has changed life on the banks of the Ohio River for the culture of the Cincinnati region and it all started with the capitalist Steiner.
Years later during a week in mid October 2014 the Newport Aquarium brought in the Weeki Wachee Mermaids from the popular Florida resort to perform in an extravaganza that I thought was incredibly wonderful. To the music of the Little Mermaid from Disney thousands upon thousands of little girls lined up to meet the beautiful mermaids and see them perform in the Coral Reef tank—which was absolutely glorious. Capitalism was on display at its finest. Of all the little girls present many will find they have an appreciation of sea life because of that experience and will likely carry it with them their entire lives. Two Disney films dominate the exhibits in a subtle way at the Newport Aquarium, Finding Nemo and of course TheLittle Mermaid. Disney created the gateway into such stories by creating the mythology. Steiner and his group brought that mythology to reality. And the wonderful Weeki Wachee swimmers from Florida and their capitalist endeavor their brought mythology to life for profit which further intensifies the experience for countless lives touched by their endeavors.
Leaving the Newport Aquarium after seeing the exhibit of mermaids on a sunny day in October with the great Ohio River rolling by just feet away, with Mitchells, Barnes and Noble and the AMC movie theater looming above, it was the vision of the Steiner group which brought this experience to so many people and God love him for it. It took a lot of headache to bring that vision to reality and I am thankful that he did so twenty years ago. My brother is a diver at the Newport Aquarium and it has been an important place for my family for a number of years. I simply love the place, but without Steiner—the capitalist—it would have never happened. The Newport Aquarium is one of the best exhibits of its kind in the world and has maintained that status into its second decade. And it’s still going strong and is able to bring in talent like the Weeki Wachee Mermaids from such a distance to bring a bit of Disney World to the Midwest.
At the aquarium in Newport, conservation is on full display. It is evident why manufacturers would want to refrain from careless drilling, over deforestation, and a destruction of the earth’s natural resources by seeing the exhibits. Science driven by capitalism is the best conservation method that there is, and the Newport Aquarium is the perfect example of such an endeavor. I could sit in front of their exhibits for hours and just watch the animals—and appreciate the unique circumstances which made them possible as a life form. Without a profit motive however, there would be no Newport Aquarium, or a Newport Levee experience. Profit drives science and conservation. A lack of such formulas gives you the Middle East—sand, poverty, and stupidity. The Newport Aquarium is culture at its finest—it brings out the best in people and is a wonderful, magnificent creation of the Steiner group.
With the same epic vision the Steiner group is bringing its latest creation to Liberty Center. I expect that complex to dwarf what has occurred at the Newport on the Levee development. And because of the well-designed shopping complex the very popular outdoor store Cabela’s is moving in across the street on Liberty Way. I can’t think of any aspect of modern culture that most brings conservation to the minds of the masses than such a shopping experience at Cabela’s—an outlet dedicated to the outdoor experience and the preservation of those outdoors for future lives. Without Steiner, there would be no Cabela’s. And without Cabela’s the Bass Pro Shops down the road wouldn’t be expanding the way they are by necessity of competition. Because of those two retail outlets millions of people will become inspired to not only participate in outdoor activities, but to preserve them through the education programs that come as natural off-shoots of those shopping experiences. Because of the Steiner group and their use of capitalism to create profit driven experiences, conservation awareness will be greatly expanded dwarfing the great work done at the Newport Aquarium so many years ago even into the present.
If there are little ones in your family now is the time to see the Weekie Wachee Mermaids at the Newport Aquarium. I’ve seen the show in Florida and it was wonderful, but the Newport Aquarium provides a much more up-close and personal experience because of the tubular design of the display in the Coral Reef section. It was quite majestic. It was a brilliant move by both the Weekie Wachee crew and the Aquarium to pull those two elements together. They are playing only through this upcoming weekend, so make sure to see it. Better yet, take a day off work and visit during the day when the crowds are much less. Take your kids out of school for the experience. They’ll learn a whole lot more at the Newport Aquarium than they will in school, that’s for sure, and the experience you’ll share as a family will be unrivaled. It is that good, and is just one more reminder of how wonderful capitalism can be when it’s used properly in the hands of wonderful people in the Steiner Group. Their creativity and desire for quality has given thousands an experience in their own back yards worthy of a week-long vacation to a distant land. Only it’s right there at Newport on the Levee. So take your kids, eat at their fine restaurant, pet some sharks and thank a capitalist for the enriching experience.
