An 11-year-old girl apparently from Yemen made an impassioned online plea for her parents to stop pressuring her into an arranged marriage which gained international attention. In the video, brown-eyed Nada Al-Ahdal chastised her parents whom she called “criminal” and said she would rather die than be married off and throw her life away at such a young age. For many Americans, the idea of arranged marriage is a radically foreign concept. In America, the typical marriage arrangement is one of choice where two individuals pick one another for a shared life. However, in many countries, even to this very day, marriages are arranged with the belief that the sacrifice of a bride to a well-connected groom is acceptable so that a family can prosper through the marriage. Daughters are often traded away into marriages to perceptively strong families so that collectively the whole family will rise in public stature.
The idiocy of this belief may seem remote in The United States, but it is closer to home than many believe. As England produced from the Royal Vagina a new baby, the world clamored to the news like mosquitoes in an early summer evening after a heavy rain. Just for being born to a member of the Royal family, a future King of England was born. The future King did nothing to earn the merit, yet the people of England chose to believe that there was something special about the Royal blood flowing through the new-born baby who has done nothing to earn such a social role. There are many thousands of Englishmen who are far more qualified to be King of England based on merit, yet a baby born of Kate Middleton was given the title because of the family he was born in.
When parents attempt to arrange the marriage of their children, they are attempting to create social alliances that will benefit them in the economic world through politics and status. The individual desires of the marriage party are of a secondary concern. Young women in many cultures throughout the world are expected to marry spouses chosen by someone besides themselves. In the case of this young 11-year-old Yemen girl, she only wanted the opportunity to be a little girl. She does not want to be a wife. She does not want to be the bed partner of a perfect stranger who can do by law whatever he pleases to her body any time he wishes. Yet her parents were willing to trade her away in an arranged marriage so that they could earn through her life improvements to theirs.
People, who think like this, even in The United States, are the type of people who become progressives. They are collectivists who believe that the sum of the social whole is greater than any individual. The parents of Nada Al-Ahdal believe that the little girl’s life is subservient to their needs as a family. The situation with this family is more obvious than the American socialite who tries to get their daughters married to some perceived powerful person like a doctor, a lawyer, or a politician because of the influence of pull that the arrangement will provide. These mentalities have their origin in Europe and are of the same type who camped out for weeks in London to witness the birth of a Royal Prince. The willingness to believe that a family has more merit over other families just because society has said so is the kind of belief that drives a statist society. The belief that value is something that some people are born with as opposed to others is to not understand what gives people value—but to assume that it is granted by chance, political pull, or even heredity. Arranged marriages, belief in Royal blood, or astrologers who believe the character of a child is shaped by the position of the sun, moon and stars in the heavenly sky are the cheerleaders of statism. The hidden epitaphs of this statist behavior is a fear of taking responsibility for their lives, and instead are happy to throw their lives away on chance so that some mystical powers beyond their knowledge are responsible for the misery they issue to their existence.
For any Englishman to behold beyond tabloid amusement the realization that an unproven baby is qualified to be King of a nation is to shrug responsibility away from their lives and surrender their very souls to the state. For a family to wish away their 11-year-old daughter in exchange for some alliance with another family is to shrug away their responsibility as individuals to bring fortune to themselves by their own merit. Their actions are the same as the head-hunters of New Guinea who believed that by eating their enemies, they could gain power over their rivals.
In America these goofy ideas of arranged marriages and worshiping kings was rejected by the Declaration of Independence. Collectivism in all forms was rejected. In Europe the Troubadours from France in the 13th Century were among the first people in the world to reject this collectivist notion of arranged relationships and their evolution became the norm in America. CLICK HERE FOR MORE. The behavior of families in Yemen who have no value for the lives of individual women, even children who are only 11 years old, is a pre-evolution social behavior that belongs in the camp ground of a Neanderthal. And the behavior of England who collectively chanted behind their facades of socialism for the birth of their future king, they are only a step outside that same campfire as they yearn to elect a village chief to instruct them of their life’s direction. The reason that America is the greatest country on earth is because it has a tradition of appreciating merit, and merit is obtained through individuality, which is nurtured by embracing such factors in their relationships. In America the family traditionally is designed to invoke individual growth in their children. In collectivist societies, the children exist to serve the collective family—who is just a microcosm of society at large. The individuality is removed, and sacrifice is the dominate belief.
I would say that 11-year-old Nada Al-Ahdal is no longer a little girl from Yemen, but has taken the bold steps into becoming an American and claiming her life for her own right. It is the American concept of individual recognition that she seeks, and because of her social refusal, she deserves it as she speaks for a countless horde of unfortunate young women who find themselves arranged in marriage by a social structure that sees them as needed sacrifice for the gods of benefit to rain upon an ignorant society. Any society that believes such arranged marriages are a positive practice for their citizens is clearly functioning from ignorance, and thank goodness that within such seas of corrupt fools there are bold young women like Nada who are more like Americans living in the country of Yemen than most Americans living in New York City who are behaving like Yemenites.
I spoke about this a bit the other day, but now that the dust has settled more details are necessary in regard to the Detroit bankruptcy. Darryl Parks during his Saturday program on 700 WLW did a wonderful couple of segments about the Detroit situation which deserves to be highlighted, and can be heard below. Darryl as he usually does comes to these types of topics armed with many facts and in this case many I did not know about the Motor City. I have family who lived in Michigan and worked in the auto industries who were big union supporters. Every year my family visited them at least once, so I learned a lot about Michigan during these childhood adventures, especially during the 70s and 80s when I was growing up. I watched firsthand the decline that Darryl Parks articulated during his program. I watched Detroit go from the richest city in the United States in 1965 to currently the poorest. I knew that Detroit was at one time a source of entertainment as The Lone Ranger radio program was launched from Detroit and the city still owns the rights to the Howdy Doody puppet. Detroit at one point in its very recent history was a center for art, entertainment, and manufacturing—which drove the entire economy. But what destroyed Detroit is a reoccurring theme everywhere in modern America, the notion of collectivism framed within the labor union movement which is failing on a massive scale. Click Darryl’s broadcast below to begin to understand how many labor unions are listed as creditors in the Detroit bankruptcy and it will quickly become clear how destructive unions have been on the American economy, the role they’ve played in wage inflation, and the way they’ve prevented the proper management of Detroit’s resources.
When Michael Moore made his first big film Roger and Me, I enjoyed it as I shared with Moore a love of the Midwest. His film was about the decline of the auto industry in Flint, Michigan and the loss of entire neighborhoods becoming a gigantic ghost town. But Moore lost me all those years ago in 1989 when he assumed that General Motors CEO Roger Smith had a duty to the people of Flint to give back to the community his large wages so that fewer jobs would be lost. Moore’s position in the film was typical of most union households in Central and Lower Michigan from the 70’s to the 90’s that was raised on soft communism disguised as American patriotism. Moore’s beliefs were harder than socialism, and shy of Russian, or Chinese communism but were certainly anti-capitalism in their nature. Moore failed to understand that it was capitalism that brought jobs to his town of Flint which is just north of Detroit. It was communism that had infiltrated the labor unions and made Moore believe that Roger Smith owed Flint, Michigan anything.
The film launched Moore into the national spotlight as a left leaning media was hungry to team up with someone who could capture their instructed beliefs into a film format. But the parasitic nature of the type of contracts the unions negotiated for themselves continued. Jobs left the Detroit area for destinations that were not friendly to labor unions, like China, and Mexico, countries already utilizing a social philosophy of socialism and communism. I liked my family members, but found myself in contention with the adults who had cars in the driveway with bumper stickers stating, “Buy American” which was a typical union slogan at the time even though the Japanese were making better cars cheaper. Their assertion was the same as Michael Moore’s, and that was people had an obligation to buy an American car built with union labor because of some misguided patriotic duty. All those elements never added up to my mind, even at the ages of 8 through 15 when my years in Lower Michigan were most active. No matter how much the adults from that side of the family yelled their philosophy never made sense to me.
When I was 18 years old I worked in a metal stamping plant while I was majoring in economics in college. The economic professors didn’t seem to understand the real world of manufacturing the way I did because I worked in a real metal stamping plant known as the meat grinder at the time. I saw many very serious injuries and I learned quickly that the parts we made at this facility required salesmen to sell them to a distributer somewhere in the world and that purchasing had to find the metal coils somewhere so we’d have materials enough to manufacture the goods. I worked with some tough, rough neck people and fights on the shop floor were common. When I first started at this place a man older than me by about 10 years picked a fight in the break room. I launched a full can of Coke at his head and luckily missed his forehead by only a few inches. The can exploded against the wall and after the man saw how serious I was about winning the fight decided to befriend me, and we remained friends for all the years I worked there. There were many other fights that involved serious cuts, broken bones, knocked out teeth and eyeballs that were actually removed from their sockets. The foremen would look the other way, especially in my case because I without question out produced everyone in the building. My manufacturing rates were very high. I didn’t work so hard because of fear for my job, or to earn praise from the foremen, but because I enjoyed it. I liked working fast—I enjoyed pushing myself with sweat pouring off my body. The fights came from the workers who were trying to unionize this facility and wanted to bring me in line with everyone else.
The college professors had no advice for my young mind as they leaned toward labor’s position in the matter when I asked about it. Their arguments I know now were Keynesian in their nature and rooted in European socialism, but at the time, I assumed they knew what they were talking about. Because of the economic professor at the college I was attending I tried to understand the union mentality so I listened to the advocates instead of fighting them. This led them to ask me to present a list of union demands to the company president. Even though everyone in the company was much older than I was, they wanted an 18-year-old kid to approach management and negotiate on their behalf. So I did.
I sat across from the President and gave him the grievances from the workers but as I sat there I saw the man who ran the company with his hands that were too smooth from lack of work, a belly that was too fat from eating in too many nice restaurants and was having an affair with his secretary who was half his age. But I also saw a guy who was taking all the risks in the company. If sales were down, it was his fault. If supply could not be meant, it was his fault. If he didn’t grease enough wheels at OSHA politically, then it was his fault. In essence I felt the grievances from the workers were stupid, short-sighted and childish. At the end of the day the “workers” were able to go home and forget about the work they did while the president was always tuned in to what was happening, even when he was on the golf course—because he was the risk taker. For the employees to declare that their labor was worth the same as those who took the risks it was preposterous.
I gave the demands back to the union organizers and told them I would not represent them. They attempted to reorganize without my help and fell flat on their face. Whenever they tried to cut back on their labor hours to force reductions in manufacturing rates the foreman would give me extra overtime to cover their slack. When they tried to paint me as a “scab,” we went out in the parking lot and solved the problem, and a lot of people got hurt. But I never yielded my beliefs on the matter and everyone ended up shaking hands in the end, even over broken bones and busted lips. It was these types of people who made America a manufacturing powerhouse—but only as individuals. The collectivism of labor unions destroyed this trait, which makes America less competitive globally, which is why the labor movement was introduced to America by European insurgents wanting to level the playing field for all economically. And this is what happened in Detroit. The unions got what they wanted and nobody fought them on it. When the companies gave a little, the unions asked for more. The companies became frustrated and just packed up and voted with their feet and behind them all the competent workers left to follow the jobs and Detroit went from being the wealthiest city in America to the poorest in just a few decades of bad policy and bad social philosophy.
To this very day I despise labor unions because they fight against individual responsibility and merit. They are simply gangs of thugs who attempt to extort away from the companies they work for values they have not earned. Collective bargaining is the absolute dumbest idea in economic theory. All people are not of equal value, some workers are faster, stronger, smarter, more efficient, more technically savvy—and they are not all deserving of equal pay. To force companies or governments to pay wages on collective bargaining takes away the incentive of the very good to perform well, because slugs, malcontents, and the ungifted receive the same wages for doing much, much less. This is what killed manufacturing in Southern Michigan and more specifically destroyed Detroit.
The disease of economics that destroyed Detroit is the same idiocy that is at work in our public schools, the IRS scandal, and virtually every branch of government as it is only in the public sector that unions have managed to survive as they have embedded themselves on financial supply that cannot pack up and move out of the country to flee the parasites of economics. This put the burden on tax payers to cover the labor costs and in Detroit’s case, smart people moved leaving behind a city of dependents that did not pay taxes. In just the last five years Detroit went from having a balanced budget to being billions of dollars in the hole—because they do not have a tax base to support their unionized legacy costs. They ran tax payers out-of-town with tax rates that were too high and attempting to sell the concept with “shared sacrifice” which is to say, “wealth redistribution” stolen from the earned and given to the unearned.
Detroit is the first major city in modern America to see such an impact of their mismanagement, but many cities are short in toe. Michael Moore in his film Roger and Me stumbled around revealing his utterly failed philosophy about the way life works as his arguments are only based on observations and not the cause. Further, Matt Damon’s new film Elysium set in the year 2154, where the very wealthy live on a man-made space station while the rest of the population resides on a ruined earth, never really covers what ruined earth. Damon like Moore has been given the progressive task to communicate the union message to mainstream America which continually falls short on logical thinkers who know better. In Damon’s film he takes on a mission that could bring equality to the two polarized worlds. The nature of the story might as well be the same as Detroit versus the suburbs where smart people of value flee the type of people who make themselves social parasites and consume much more than they contribute productively. Progressives somehow think the math will just work out in the end, but it never does. Even as a child I saw what was happening to Detroit and I wanted no part of it in my life—and I have lived by those terms. But not everyone is as combative as I am on issues they believe in, and most will think what I do, but they will not fight. They will simply pack up and move to someplace else that offers less imposition on their lifestyles, which is the root cause for why Detroit has failed as a city. Detroit imposed themselves on the productive, forcing them out-of-town leaving behind only the destitute like Michael Moore to look about their neighborhoods and wonder what happened. The only word their failed philosophies have for the tragedy is “greed” but it is much more complicated than that. The real villain is “financial incentive” and in the case of Detroit, the lack thereof.
There is a lot that is very wrong about the recent revelation that Lakota West High School math teacher George C. Merk paid $66,173 by the tax payers was placed on a 45 day license suspension beginning over the summer months. The teacher admitted to inappropriate communication with students of a sexual nature which was revealed during a conference with district staff Jan. 11, 2012, concluding with a consent agreement dated June 26, 2013. That is a long-span of time to resolve one human resources issue. Merk’s five-year teaching license was suspended from June 12 through July 26 but he is clear for 2013-14 school year. This case does not surprise me as I have verbal confirmation of many such stories, and usually the press does not investigate them. However, in this case, Michael Clark broke the story in the Cincinnati Enquirer which did surprised me as it required a public records request to get to the facts. As the story broke, both the Enquirer and the Journal had well-written stories which explained the facts in great detail by Hannah Poturalski and Michael Clark that was a great service to the community, and can be seen in their entirety below for the convenience of the curious investigator complete with original links to the stories as they appeared in online form.
Michael D. Clark reports: in The Cincinnati Enquirer
A Lakota West High School math teacher’s license has been suspended for “inappropriate” communications with students, including exchanging recollections of sexual experiences and orientation.
But the teacher, George C. Merk, will return to the classroom at the start of the school year next month.
Merk, 41, was previously suspended without pay in March 2012 for 10 days for what Lakota Schools Superintendent Karen Mantia described as “unacceptable, insubordinate, deceitful and unprofessional” behavior.
According to a Feb. 15, 2012, reprimand issued by Lakota officials, Merk “admitted” to communicating with students via text messages, and other means, of disallowed subjects, including:
“(Students’) sexual orientation and their sexual experiences.”
“Your sexual orientation and your first sexual experience.”
“You denied receiving a picture of a condom box through text message from a student.”
Mantia wrote: “This behavior is unacceptable and will not be tolerated.”
A report on Merk’s behavior and suspension was then submitted to the Ohio Department of Education’s Office of Professional Conduct for further investigation. That investigation ended last month under a consent agreement between Merk and the ODE.
The agreement, obtained by The Enquirer through a public records request, revealed that Merk agreed to have his teaching license suspended during the summer break for 45 days, ending July 26. Moreover, he has to complete 24 hours of training “on appropriate teacher-student boundaries” by Sept. 1 and he will no longer “communicate with current students using social media or by other electronic communications.”
Merk’s actions were not considered criminal and did not initiate an investigation by West Chester Township Police, police said.
Merk, who previously taught at Wilmington Schools, declined to comment.
His attorney, Julie Ford of Dayton, said, “(Merk) signed the consent agreement not because he believes he was guilty of any wrongdoing but to put this matter behind him and avoid any delays in the renewals of his current teaching licenses.”
“Both the Lakota school district and Ohio Department of Education are satisfied with this resolution, and Mr. Merk looks forward to resuming his teaching work in the fall,” Ford said.
Diane Brunsman, Lakota’s executive director for human resources, said “the findings of the Ohio Department of Education investigation are not grounds for termination.”
Both Brunsman and Mantia declined to comment further.
Merk was hired by Lakota in 2002 and his current salary is $66,173.
A review of Merk’s personnel file since 2002 showed no indications of previous transgressions and overall he has received high performance reviews by Lakota officials.
Under the state agreement, Lakota is also required to submit “detailed reports” every three months for the next two years to the ODE on Merk’s conduct.
A Lakota West High School teacher whose teaching license was suspended for actions with students described as insubordinate and deceitful by the district will be returning to the classroom this August.
George C. Merk, 41, of Loveland, was placed on a 10-day unpaid suspension in March 2012 following an internal investigation by school officials. He has since been approved for teaching math in the 2013-14 school year at a salary of $66,173.
During a conference with district staff on Jan. 11, 2012, Merk reportedly admitted to:
having text message communication with students regarding sexual orientation, first sexual experiences and other personal issues
failing to report a student was bullied
providing a student with his cell phone number through a Facebook message
posting Facebook statuses about students’ academic levels and disparaging Lakota West High School administration
receiving a text message from a student offering to buy him an iPad
denying having received a picture of a condom box in a text message from a student.
“This behavior is unacceptable and will not be tolerated by Lakota Local School District employees,” wrote Superintendent Karen Mantia in a formal reprimand from Feb. 15, 2012. “Mr. Merk, your actions described above were insubordinate, deceitful, unacceptable and unprofessional.”
The district then submitted a report to the Ohio Department of Education’s Office of Professional Conduct. As part of the investigation, Merk entered into a consent agreement — dated June 26, 2013 — with ODE that outlines several stipulations.
The terms of the agreement include:
Merk’s five-year teaching license being suspended for 45 days, from June 12 through July 26
detailed reports on Merk’s conduct will be submitted to ODE every three months for two years
completing 24 hours of training on appropriate teacher-student boundaries
not communicating with current students using Facebook, text messages and other electronic means.
Merk’s attorney, Julie C. Ford, of the Dayton firm Doll, Jansen, Ford & Rakay, said her client fully cooperated with the investigation by ODE.
“Mr. Merk was not accused of having a sexual or otherwise inappropriate relationship with any students; at most, the school district concluded he had discussed topics that might have been considered inappropriate,” Ford said.
The investigation ended last December, but a proposed penalty wasn’t reached until the end of the 2012-13 academic year, she said.
Ford said her client didn’t attempt to negotiate a lesser penalty or go through a full hearing process before his current teaching and principal’s licenses were to expire at the end of June.
“He therefore signed the consent agreement not because he was guilty of any wrongdoing but only to put this matter behind him and to avoid any delays in the renewals of his licenses,” Ford said. “Mr. Merk continues to be a model teacher and employee at Lakota. Mr. Merk looks forward to resuming his teaching work in the fall.”
Merk joined the Lakota teaching staff in 2002, after six years teaching at Wilmington City Schools. Merk’s personnel file at Lakota doesn’t include any other disciplinary or performance issues.
“Mr. Merk is an outstanding teacher who takes great pride in his profession,” reads an evaluation dated May 16, 2013. “He goes above and beyond the district’s expectations, and his students are successful as the result of his efforts in the classroom.”
Now that this story is out, I will have a lot more to say about it in subsequent articles. But the gist of the situation is this– George C. Merk is not worth $66,173 as a public employee and I resent having to pay such people so much money with my taxes. People like him are low quality personalities who are instructing kids to be low-quality adults. The very nature of Merk even desiring to inquire about the sexual nature of his students as a 41-year-old man is disgusting. In a sexual context people are often attracted to others who share their intellectual values even though much is focused on physical attributes. Merk’s tendency to desire juicy gossip about the sexual nature of his students indicate that Merk intellectually is equal to his students, which disqualifies him as any kind of intellectual leader by my measure and he should be terminated from the Lakota school district. Teachers should not have access to students outside of a classroom whether it is Facebook, Twitter, or any other social network tool, because as instructors, teachers should be operating at a superior intellectual position.
However, as critical as I often am of the Lakota school board, and Superintendent Mantia, they have no real control over any disciplinary action against Merk because the Lakota math teacher is protected by his labor union—which is why his punishment was just silly words issued by Mantia and his suspension was carried out when the school was already shut down for the summer. The teachers and their labor union run the asylum where the Zombies of Lakota know that bad behavior cannot be punished, yet the tax payers are “forced” to support such behavior through force with their property values just because the school exists near their homes.
The punishment to Merk for his disgraceful actions is essentially nothing but a little embarrassment. He has still been paid a salary that is 20 to 30% more than the average Lakota resident for a job that is only active for 7.5 to 9 hour per day, five days a week, nine months out of the year. Merk does not appreciate his job otherwise he would not have engaged in the behavior outlined above displaying a low intellectual understanding of sexual context that is closer to high school kids with thriving pituitary glands not yet acclimated to adult life. George Merk, and people like him should not be in a class room because they lack the intellectual high ground with their students, and have lost their ability to teach. A teacher is not an equal to the student; they should be the type of people students aspire to become. When a teacher demonstrates that they are no better than the rest of the puberty bound young people, then moral authority is lost, and instruction is nearly impossible. Worse than that, the people of Lakota should not be forced to pay for such employees with tax increases and social extortion.
Of course I will have more to say on this issue, but for now just the contents of Merk’s actions should be considered with the punishment he received—which is to say virtually nothing. When Merk’s attorney Julie C. Ford stated that “He (Merk) signed the consent agreement not because he was guilty of any wrongdoing but only to put this matter behind him and to avoid any delays in the renewals of his licenses, she was saying that Mr. Merk did not recognize that he did anything wrong. When Ford said Merk was not accused of having a sexual or otherwise inappropriate relationship with any students; at most, the school district concluded he had discussed topics that might have been considered inappropriate.” Merk and his attorney Ford in this case do not consider having text message communication with students regarding sexual orientation, sexual experiences and other personal issues to be inappropriate between a student and a teacher. Further, failing to report a student was bullied is not negligent behavior as indicated by Merk–or providing a student with his cell phone number through a Facebook message. Posting Facebook statuses about students’ academic levels and disparaging Lakota West High School administration is apparently acceptable behavior with these professionals based on their statements. It is also OK to receive a text messages from students offering to buy Merk an iPad which should be considered an obvious bribe. Those are the kinds of actions that Ford stated Merk might have performed inappropriately leaving the door open for anti-concept interpretation declaring innocence at the same time.
These are the types of employees that tax payers are told are invaluable to Lakota’s community. When the Levy Zombies take to the streets in the fall of 2013 for the November tax increase they are fighting for teachers like George C. Merk to continue the kind of behavior that occurred under the classroom tutelage of a Lakota West math teacher who will return to the classroom for the 2013/2014 school year. Teachers like Merk are more interested in being “cool” to their students instead of actually teaching them anything, as the boundaries between teacher and student have been intentionally blurred by a failed education system that produces teachers who would rather be 15-year-old kids than 41-year-old adults making $66,173 a year. The teacher is paid to be better than the children, so that students will try. The teacher is not paid to be one of the “cool guys” in an ocean of subservient children who would rather manipulate their way to a good grade instead of actually working for it. It is that second example that Merk is so guilty and the reason he should not be employed as a teacher in any public school anywhere.
Who cares what Eric Holder said about the George Zimmerman acquittal or Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law? Isn’t Holder a criminal? Isn’t he guilty of deaths from his own actions, and destruction of individual rights performed on a mass scale? If Holder were not the top cop of the United States Government wouldn’t he find himself in jail for the same types of crimes he accuses others of? Of course a criminal is going to wish that “Stand Your Ground” laws were obsolete, so that their crimes can be committed against others more easily. So his comments have no merit as he should be the one on trial, not George Zimmerman, who already had his day in court. But Holder’s foolish comments were not the most ridiculous comments that came forth in the wake of the Zimmerman murder trial in Sanford, Florida. The dumbest comments of all came from those crying for an end to racism in America upon the Zimmerman acquittal. Out of all the news outlets and commentators who make millions upon millions of dollars giving statements and providing opinions no one has delivered a way to rid America of racism when the accusations have been so extreme once Zimmerman was found not guilty. So I will provide the answer where others have failed.
The way to end racism is to stop using skin color as a weapon to advance collective causes and level the playing field for all individuals by allowing merit to determine all benefits in society. When any collective group demands “equality” they are asking for thuggish democracy to take away resources from someone and give to another so that all can have equal value. This allows people of low value to make themselves appear to have a higher value by lowering the value of others through legalized theft (income redistribution). People of low value may have such a status because they made bad decision in life—such as drinking too much, smoking marijuana so that they cannot hold good paying jobs that require drug tests, or having children where there is not a responsible male in a household to help provide family structure. People who do dumb things in their lives often seek the protection of social collectivism to hide their crimes and the only way vacant personalities can find value where they have squandered it away is to take it away from someone else.
Racism has given such collective groups the illusion of value. By seeking equality they really mean “wealth redistribution.” This is why such groups who advocate racial inequality always fail to identify the value of human beings as a criterion for equality. Rather the true meaning of equality is to allow all races, all sexes, all shapes, sizes, and backgrounds of all people to have equal access to success. Racial groups wish to stack the odds of success in their favor with democratic force through collectivism rather than individual merit. This is why racism advocates for more power and so-called “equality” do not support political candidates like Herman Cain, or Dr. Ben Carson. In the racism debate men who have achieved success based on individual merit no matter what their skin color are always overlooked, because the goal of the equal rights movement is not equal access to success, as men like Carson and Cain represent, but in the ability to level the economic playing field of society by cutting down the high spots and filling the low spots with displaced value.
To end racism tomorrow, all society would need to do would be to recognize the value of merit. Those who work to achieve good merit in their lives would all have equal access to value, while those who chose not to work in such a way would find themselves lacking. If the entire world functioned from a desire to be good ethically, morally, socially—good in every respect of the word, there would be no racism because there would be no advantage of one gang of thugs over another. No group would have dominance over any other, as they would all be irrelevant. After all, isn’t it the desire of the black groups to take power from the perceived, “white man” or the “white supremacists” to take power from the “one world order” or the women from the men, or the men from the women, or the children from their parents, or the public sector worker from the private—all the mentioned are aspects of society that are lacking individual merit and seek their value in the safety of collectivism. That is where the trouble begins and ends. The way to end racism is to judge others on individual merit, not by any group affiliation. When the incentive to gang rule is removed, the issue of racism will be put to rest.
In the wake of the Zimmerman verdict, gangs took to the streets at all political levels to exploit the tragic death for their own social positions, using democratic imposition to force rules on society that is ultimately designed to rob value from once social sector to provide another what it’s missing. The behavior is as stupid as a village of hunters and gathers fighting over the watering hole of an animal both are hunting, or a bunch of foolish Europeans fighting over one version of religion over another. Collective groups are the source of the trouble because they seek to hide individual merit behind their social blanket allowing poor behavior and decisions to be supplemented by the value of others in their group. In every case, such as the would-be criminal Eric Holder, or the members of the Black Panthers, or any of the radical demonstrators who took to the streets to vandalize property like a bunch of malcontents when Zimmerman was found not guilty—the demand is not for justice of a slain kid, the demand is for an improvement in social status without the work of actually earning it. Behind the actions of the hoards who are declaring “equality” are drug addicts, womanizers, jobless buffoons, welfare recipients, child molesters, victims of the molested, and a whole host of characters who are lacking personal value for one reason or the other and find it is much easier to steal value from others to fill themselves than actually doing the work of being good people of good merit. That is what racism is all about, and why it will never go away so long as groups of any kind are given sway over other groups in a perpetual battle for value that is unearned.
When The Lone Ranger is introduced as a young lawyer traveling from the East Coast by train the first bits of dialogue which come from Armie Hammer who was confronted by a religious group advocating Bible studies, was to hold up his copy of John Locke’s The Second Treatise of Government and declare, “This is my Bible.” Upon that startling declaration I immediately knew why the film reviews were so terrible as The Lone Ranger was in love with America, and was making no mistake about it. The film was setting out to attack many misconceptions about events which took place during a period of almost perfect capitalism in The United States, during the late 1800s. The Second Treatise of Government was one of the foundation books which people like Thomas Jefferson used to help shape the argument about the kind of country that America would be. Modern Americans who regularly attend Tea Party events know that John Locke is one of the philosophers who opened the door to the way of thinking that distinctly became freedom loving. To altruists, this is a major social danger as any message that exhibits freedom as one of the highest human endeavors also seeks to be free from social stupidity, the self-determined poor (lazy people), and the malcontents of civilization. Social progressives have desired for years to shape American thought into reflecting European sentiment of sacrifice, shared suffering, and a focus on the “greater good” while steering the educated masses away from a personal love of individual freedom. Opening the film with a direct node to John Locke was a bold declaration that I was surprised made it past the Disney executives screening the film. It’s possible that some of them did not know what the book meant to American foundation, but it is unlikely to have slipped by so many eyes without anybody knowing, especially Johnny Depp, who has been known to show up to film screenings showing his open support of Che Guevara. I thought the John Locke reference was quite extraordinary but the references did not end there so I know that it was not an accident.
The film continued on as a fantastic western that was often a cross between the old Sergio Leone westerns composed musically by Ennio Morricone and the hysterical romp through the old west that was touched on by Back to the Future III. The movie was very funny at times as Johnny Depp’s Tonto was brilliantly eccentric. The film was wonderfully photographed, evenly paced, and was very passionate about its subject matter. It was an unapologetic western that might have been an early episode of the TV show Davy Crockett, only with Industrial Light and Magic doing some spectacular visual effects. The stunts were ambitious, and the scope of the project was mammoth. It was the largest scale western I think has ever been attempted. But The Lone Ranger himself does not drink, does not curse, does not use tobacco (he refused when offered), he does not want to kill people, and is a naively good guy from the beginning to the end of the film. The only character arch that John Reid embarked on evolving from the beginning to the end was in hardening up from a naive lawyer to a man who isn’t afraid to pull the trigger on a bad guy by the end of the film. Reid never had a moment of weakness in the film where he got drunk, caved into the seductions of a woman, or lost his moral compass. He was firmly focused on justice from the beginning of the film till the very end.
The bad guy in the film however was Cole played brilliantly by Tom Wilkinson. I suspect that many of the reviewers who wrote such bad things about The Lone Ranger as a movie saw themselves as the evil character Cole, who spoke often very flowery about the need for “social sacrifice,” the “greater good,” and destroying entire groups of people if they stood in his way of vision for progress. The film showed the Indian rebellions with extraordinary glory which was much more epic than Dances with Wolves ever managed, and even captured how the United States cavalry found itself caught in an uncompromising position of picking sides. It was a complicated series of events that were manipulated by the villain Cole who appeared to be a good guy though 2/3rds of the movie.
But what was different about this Lone Ranger as opposed to other renditions was that Tonto was extraordinarily good. Johnny Depp created one of the best characters of his career with Tonto and I found the scenes that took place in 1933 as the old Tonto was telling The Lone Ranger story to a little boy to be emotionally captivating. These scenes were simply Johnny Depp at his absolute finest as an actor. Tonto was a social outcast to his tribe that was living life with one firm foot planted into the spirit world and saw reality all too clearly giving the impression that he was insane through most of the film. But he wasn’t, and it was obvious by the end of the film that Tonto as an extremely old man was deeply committed to the actual reality of justice that is hidden to most of the world, portraying a Yoda quality from The Empire Strikes Back that was captivating as a performance all by itself.
The only regret that I have about the movie is that I feel like it was made for people like me in mind, traditional Americans who love westerns, and characters who are uncompromisingly good. It will not make a billion dollars at the box office like Iron Man and the last Pirates of the Caribbean film. It will be lucky to recover its $215 million dollar budget, which is unheard of for a western. Only a company like Disney could have made a film like this, which was risky, so it is unlikely that Armie Hammer will have the chance to reprise his Lone Ranger role in the way that Robert Downey Jr has for Iron Man, and make future films. The film by Jerry Bruckheimer and directed by Gore Verbinski using music by Hans Zimmer pulled out all the stops to make a great film under the penmanship of Ted Elliott, Justin Haythe, and Terry Rossio. Everyone involved with The Lone Ranger is among the best in their fields of endeavor, and it is a shame that the magic will probably never be seen again, because the box office will prevent it. The Lone Ranger is one of those films that will percolate in America culture for a long time. It will not have a big pop at the box office, but will be watched and loved for many years in a quiet way as viewers find it wonderfully good, but unsure why they like it so much while critics and industry professionals declare that it is such a bad film. It is not the film that is bad for progressive types, but the message. Most people seeing The Lone Ranger cannot identify with the hero. But they will identify with the villain, and that tends to make people angry. Angry people do not throw down nearly a hundred dollars to see The Lone Ranger, which is what it cost me by the time we bought tickets and snacks, a rarity for us as a family. I spent extra money at the theater knowing that a majority of the movie goers were not spending money on The Lone Ranger, so we broke our rule and bought the overpriced popcorn and drinks anyway, to support the film, and theater showing it.
Those critics missed the points and represent most opinions……………
Disney can roll the dice on movies like The Lone Ranger because they have so many other profitable revenue streams, which is just another benefit of capitalism. I think the film will make its money back in the worldwide market so Disney won’t lose its money and Johnny Depp won’t lose face from his production credit. Jerry Bruckheimer will continue to have successful films, including Pirates of the Caribbean 5 which is coming up in 2015. But this will unfortunately be the last ride of this particular Lone Ranger, and that is unfortunate. But if not for Disney, it would have never happened to begin with. And because it did, I am very grateful.
One of the greatest collapses that is headed for American culture is the education bubble, which I would argue burst a long time ago, but is just now being felt by the general population. Every time I hear the nonsensical statements by my home public school of Lakota demand more money for a teaching profession that is antiquated at best, to provide results for students in their future college endeavors, I think of how sadly blind they are to the conditions of our day. Colleges are too expensive; the professors charge too much money for teaching children left-leaning political views. The skills children learn in college are nearly worthless to producing a positive GDP in The United States and with a tuition growth of over 7% a year; the funding model has become impossibly too expensive as it has outpaced the general consumer index that rests just over 3%. For every parent who has spent their life savings on a child to go to college, they have wasted their money. They have been scammed by progressive thieves’ intent to reshape American culture from self-reliance, to one of dependency, and they have charged our society into debt to fund our own demise. An entire generation of children who believed the great college lie that has been advocated by public education institutions to justify their ever-increasing taxes on property values has sold America a car without an engine. It looked good on the outside, but will take nobody anywhere, except down a hill. College graduates in 2013 are leaving their schools with debt in the six figures and unable to find jobs that will help them pay back their massive debts. The problem is articulated well in the below video. Watch and take plenty of notes. This information is critical.
Not only are young college graduates from age thirty-five to twenty-five leaving college with six figure debt, they are discovering that they cannot make enough money to buy a home because they cannot find jobs that will pay them anywhere close to a value that would allow them to do both, pay their college loans, and pay for a mortgage. That means that financing a car is out of the question. It means that yearly vacations are not a possibility. It also means that getting married and having kids is the last thing on their mind, as their only means of survival is to hopefully live with their parents until some of their college debt is paid off. If those same young graduates have to spend $500 to $1000 a month on an apartment, then home buying will be out of the question for them, as they will never crawl out from under the massive pile of debt placed upon their heads by their parents who advocated the Great Society of Lyndon Johnston. That society turned out to be just another failed progressive experiment, and the debts are coming due on our current college aged graduates.
Recently the government school in my town, Lakota, announced that they were going to try for yet another tax increase even though they are experiencing declining enrollment. The number one reason that Lakota has for asking for more money is due to the new teachers’ union contract that is coming up in 2014. In the education field public schools all across America like Lakota are on an unsustainable path of finance. They have no idea how to pay for their extraordinary teacher wage rates of over $60K per year. They simply ask for more taxes every couple of years as collective bargaining laws prevent proper management of those rates of pay. Colleges have been doing the exact same thing, but instead of hitting the tax payers for more money with property levy increases, they have simply raised tuition rates each year by 7% or more. The cause of the increases is not new buildings, more text books, or better technology, but the impact of having too much staff that makes over six figures per year. Kind-hearted suburban parents have been conned into saving $50,000 to $100,000 over a 20-year period to basically flush it down the toilet on over-paid liberal teachers who attempt to teach everything those same parents spent a lifetime teaching their children. Those poor children who do not drop out of college as they quickly discover that higher education is not going to take them where they wanted to go, enter the job market unable to participate in adult society as they are so saddled with debt that the concept of having children, or grandchildren is simply out of the question. And those who do have children have absolutely no way to save money to pay for college for their grown children. There is no way they could do what their parents did and save money for twenty years to flush down the toilet on their own offspring once they’ve grown. These poor saps will still be paying their student loans which are sometimes bigger than their home mortgages.
If educators were so smart, then why can’t they see that the money they are consuming today will not be there tomorrow? After all, doesn’t it make logical sense? Well, again looking at the Lakota school system which has for years shown a distinct arrogance toward finance, as though their personal desires and wishes could overcome reality, currently they are asking for a tax increase of an additional $168 annually per $100,000 of home when their student enrollment has dropped 9% since 2010 and is projected to decline at the same rate for the next decade. That kind of math is why all public schools are failing, whether they are in Lebanon, Forest Hills, Fairfield, or any government school in the nation. They are all failing because they do not apply value to their employees treating them all with equal pay, which is not tied to results. This mentality has carried over to college professors who see themselves as more important than public education teachers, so their pay is noticeably higher. At Lakota the average teacher pay is over $63K per year which provides some perspective on why college tuition rates are so enormously high. The education bubble has expanded just as discussed in the video above, to the point where it has burst leaving everyone with a gooey slime behind to clean up.
There is no way to save the system at this point. Public education is just as complicit as the colleges in the matter of the mammoth scam performed against the tax paying public. Both are concoctions of large government sadism as it was devised by command of the Department of Education. They are the result of failed policies, failed philosophy, and failed politics. The money wasted on property taxes by the same tax payers who have saved up fortunes to send their children to college have been hit from two directions and there is no savings left for them to spend anywhere. When Medicaid and Social Security run out of money in 2026 and their children are filing massive bankruptcy for homes they can’t pay for because they can’t pay off their college debts, the parents won’t even be able to turn to their kids for help. Nobody will have any money…………that is except the teachers who have all retired at age 55 with the vast fortunes they’ve looted from the tax payers.
The bubble has already burst, and the system has already collapsed. The people who don’t yet want to admit it are the members of the teaching profession who are 5 to 10 years away from that glory day of retirement, and the absent-minded parents who want free education for their children because they either lack the self-esteem to teach their own kids, or the financial horsepower to send them to private schools that do a far better job than the government does. Everyone else is dealing with the tragic reality of such a terribly failed system that was concocted by such half-baked minds. For those poor debt-ridden college students who cannot find a job to pay for their educational studies in women’s peer groups, or green-house conductivity, the best jobs they could hope to enter are those that put food on the table for their grandparents, whom they most likely hardly ever met–the plumbers, the car manufacturers, the electricians, and the warehouse workers. The best thing a prospective worker could do is to work at something that actually has value, and produces something, instead of another worthless benchwarmer sitting in another cubical in a leased building that will rise and fall in business prospects within a 10 year time. A society cannot be successful in this fashion, and that is what colleges and public schools have been instructing our society and charging a fortune for the service which has collapsed on itself in our present time.
The cute picture of the little boy shown is of my grandson. That photo means more to me than just a sentimental moment of time captured by a gifted photographer at 9 months of age. Within that picture there were many contributors to the photograph, my daughter of course made the little boy with her husband, my wife made the white blanket by hand, and my other daughter took the picture in the back yard of the home that she owns with her husband. Virtually everyone in my immediate family played a part in that photograph. My imprint of course is that I put the gift of adventure in all those individuals, which is represented by the stack of books off to the side. That is what families are supposed to do and be for each other as the benefactors are little children like my grandson dressed in his little hat awaiting the tools of cognition to be put before his mind so that he too can live a life of adventure, discovering for himself all the potentialities that come from breathing air, and living life.
As another 4th of July came and went, I thought about my little grandson. When people wonder why I do some of the things I do, the first answer is because I want to. I enjoy fighting; debating, and philosophizing—pretty much in that order. But there is always a sub-plot in the back of my mind which drives me with purpose. When I was raising my children, it was fighting to make sure they tasted enough freedom and independent thought that they could grow up and live good lives. I have been successful in that. Now, it is the generation that comes after which I focus upon.
I have been an inspiration to many young people for many, many years. I still associate with many of those grown adults who looked as children toward someone to teach them how to be good people, how to face their fears, and live righteously. I have always offered myself in that role, even when I too was younger than they were. But there comes a benefit in living, surviving, and arriving at a time when not only you think you know more than everybody else, but you are sure of it. You know it because the reality around you has proven it time and time again. You don’t realize it because the intention is to be haughty, arrogant, or considered a God among men, but you just are because nobody else is trying.
Every child is born with the opportunity to become anything. Even children who are not genetically gifted or otherwise healthy have more potential in their minds than most living adults. For them their stories are not yet written and it makes me sad to see so many young children who don’t have adults to pour thoughts into their minds, to give them the ability to think on their own as young adults, and finally as grown adults. Most children the age of my grandson are doomed to a life of failure not because they lack any ability, but because they lack people in their lives that can help them develop into fully realized human beings.
My grandson will not have to worry about that. He has so many people in his life with very interesting traits of their own, that he has no choice but to pick up on those unique attributes while he forms his own character which is already evident. Looking at him it reminds me of what the 4th of July is all about. It’s why we fight to keep our country free so that little boys like my grandson can have the right to think and develop freely on their own, to bring their own unique gifts to the world. Someday, my grandson might decide that the bullwhip is not for him, but he will make that choice on his own, after he has had exposure to it and filled his mind with the value it brings to him through practice, and a bond with me, his grandmother, his aunt and uncle, and his mom and dad.
The fight for freedom is more than just a token message created by the Tea Party movement to hijack elected offices and become tomorrow’s tyrants through the desk of a bureaucrat. For me it is sincere, I believe in the things I say here with every cell in my body and beat of my heart. I believe in it for myself, and the joy it brings me in seeing the lights of freedom igniting in another human being, like the innocent eyes of my grandson, as it was captured so eloquently in the photograph my daughter took. I will teach his young mind in a way that was only available to my own daughters, but with the self-assuredness of having experience, to be a legend among mankind. When most people say they want their children and grandchildren to grow up to be lawyers, doctors, or God forbid—politicians, I frown at all those types of jobs. All of them are less than what I want for my grandson. I want for him to be a living legend, a character of such charisma, determination, and moral aptitude that there has never been another like him. Such a goal is a lofty one, but it’s what I will contribute to his mind with all our future time together. I can see the sparkle in his eye already, and soon, he will begin to take the form of a character unlike the world has ever seen.
And it will come from individuals like my daughter—his mother and her vast creativity, his aunt—my other daughter and her photographic genius and forward thinking vision, my two son-in-laws, one a former MMA fighter, the other a bullwhip champion in his own right, and my wife who reads hundreds of books a year, makes blankets for every member of our extended family, and is willing to spend countless hours on the floor playing with children. Then of course there are my contributions–in a few years I’ll have him jumping through walls of fire, cracking whips faster than lightning, crawling through caves that a snake couldn’t fit through and facing life with a fearlessness that every young man dreams of. Ladies and gentlemen viewing that picture—you are seeing a future legend that will know an unlimited life free of any shackles created by deficient human minds.
As I watched the fireworks on the 4th of July in 2013, that is what I thought of. And I will venture to make it so.
I love the 4th of July and frequent displays of patriotism that is displayed on America’s unique holiday celebrating freedom. But I am weary at the same time of such festivities because I know what’s coming. Ladies and gentlemen reading these words right now, the perils that faced the founders of America pale in comparison to the challenges of our current time. There is a reason that for the last 10 days or so I have provided many articles showing readers what America looked like before the implementation of The New Deal which was essentially socialism in its design long supported by progressives disguising their love of European communism, and the grand climax of The Great Society which became possible due to the 1964 election of the most liberal congress in American history with the exception of the one in 1938. Those elections were purchased from a gullible American public with deceit, and now the bills for those errors are coming due in our current time. America is about to hit a brick wall, and for anybody to survive, they need to understand that America was a great country before those terrible programs, and they need to understand that for America to survive for future 4th of July holidays the fight of our lives is currently before us. The video below sums up the problem in the simplest way possible.
At the end of May of 2013 the Social Security and Medicare Board of Trustees published a little known report that was generally ignored by the media, because in it was a very kind warning that by 2026, which is in essence only a decade away, those programs run out of money. They cannot be sustained without raising taxes and taxes cannot be raised without crippling the American way of life. We are at an impasse that cannot be avoided and there is no compromise with that fiscal cliff. It is a fact of reality that nobody wants to look at. Politicians are terrified of it, and the public does not wish to face the summary of their years of neglect in American politics where they paid attention to everything but one of the most important parts of their society—their government. So below is a portion of the report along with a link that will take you dear reader to the more specific information. I suggest you read this carefully and pass it along to a friend. It is important to understand the severity of the problem.
A SUMMARY OF THE 2013 ANNUAL REPORTS
Social Security and Medicare Boards of Trustees
Published 5/31/2013
A MESSAGE TO THE PUBLIC:
Each year the Trustees of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds report on the current and projected financial status of the two programs. This message summarizes the 2013 Annual Reports.
Neither Medicare nor Social Security can sustain projected long-run programs in full under currently scheduled financing, and legislative changes are necessary to avoid disruptive consequences for beneficiaries and taxpayers. If lawmakers take action sooner rather than later, more options and more time will be available to phase in changes so that the public has adequate time to prepare. Earlier action will also help elected officials minimize adverse impacts on vulnerable populations, including lower-income workers and people already dependent on program benefits.
Social Security and Medicare together accounted for 38 percent of federal expenditures in fiscal year 2012. Both programs will experience cost growth substantially in excess of GDP growth through the mid-2030s due to rapid population aging caused by the large baby-boom generation entering retirement and lower-birth-rate generations entering employment and, in the case of Medicare, to growth in expenditures per beneficiary exceeding growth in per capita GDP. In later years, projected costs expressed as a share of GDP trend up slowly for Medicare and are relatively flat for Social Security, reflecting very gradual population aging caused by increasing longevity and slower growth in per-beneficiary health care costs.
Social Security
Social Security’s Disability Insurance (DI) program satisfies neither the Trustees’ long-range test of close actuarial balance nor their short-range test of financial adequacy and faces the most immediate financing shortfall of any of the separate trust funds. DI Trust Fund reserves expressed as a percent of annual cost (the trust fund ratio) declined to 85 percent at the beginning of 2013, and the Trustees project trust fund depletion in 2016, the same year projected in the last Trustees Report. DI cost has exceeded non-interest income since 2005, and the trust fund ratio has declined since peaking in 2003. While legislation is needed to address all of Social Security’s financial imbalances, the need has become most urgent with respect to the program’s DI component. Lawmakers need to act soon to avoid reduced payments to DI beneficiaries three years from now.
Social Security’s total expenditures have exceeded non-interest income of its combined trust funds since 2010, and the Trustees estimate that Social Security cost will exceed non-interest income throughout the 75-year projection period. The deficit of non-interest income relative to cost was about $49 billion in 2010, $45 billion in 2011, and $55 billion in 2012. The Trustees project that this cash-flow deficit will average about $75 billion between 2013 and 2018 before rising steeply as income growth slows to the sustainable trend rate after the economic recovery is complete and the number of beneficiaries continues to grow at a substantially faster rate than the number of covered workers. Redemption of trust fund asset reserves by the General Fund of the Treasury will provide the resources needed to offset Social Security’s annual aggregate cash-flow deficits. Since the cash-flow deficit will be less than interest earnings through 2020, reserves of the combined trust funds measured in current dollars will continue to grow, but not by enough to prevent the ratio of reserves to one year’s projected cost (the combined trust fund ratio) from declining. (This ratio peaked in 2008, declined through 2012, and is expected to decline steadily in future years.) After 2020, Treasury will redeem trust fund asset reserves to the extent that program cost exceeds tax revenue and interest earnings until depletion of total trust fund reserves in 2033, the same year projected in last year’s Trustees Report. Thereafter, tax income would be sufficient to pay about three-quarters of scheduled benefits through 2087.
A temporary reduction in the Social Security payroll tax rate in 2011 and 2012 reduced payroll tax revenues by an estimated $222 billion in total. The legislation establishing the payroll tax reduction also provided for transfers from the General Fund to the trust funds in order to “replicate to the extent possible” payments that would have occurred if the payroll tax reduction had not been enacted. Those General Fund reimbursements amounted to about 15 percent of the program’s non-interest income in 2011 and 2012. The temporary payroll tax reduction expired at the end of 2012.
Under current projections, the annual cost of Social Security benefits expressed as a share of workers’ taxable earnings will grow rapidly from 11.3 percent in 2007, the last pre-recession year, to roughly 17.0 percent in 2037, and will then decline slightly before slowly increasing after 2050. Cost displays a slightly different pattern when expressed as a share of GDP. Program cost equaled 4.2 percent of GDP in 2007, the last pre-recession year, and the Trustees project that cost will increase to 6.2 percent of GDP for 2036, then decline to about 6.0 percent of GDP by 2050, and thereafter rise slowly reaching 6.2 percent by 2087.
The projected 75-year actuarial deficit for the combined Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Disability Insurance (OASDI) Trust Funds is 2.72 percent of taxable payroll, up from 2.67 percent projected in last year’s report. This deficit amounts to 21 percent of program non-interest income or 17 percent of program cost. A 0.06 percentage point increase in the OASDI actuarial deficit would have been expected if nothing had changed other than the one-year extension of the valuation period to 2087. The effects of recently enacted legislation, updated demographic data, updated economic data and assumptions further worsened the actuarial deficit, but these effects were completely offset by the favorable effects of updated programmatic data and improved methodologies.
While the combined OASDI program fails the long-range test of close actuarial balance, it does satisfy the test for short-range (ten-year) financial adequacy. The Trustees project that the combined trust fund asset reserves at the beginning of each year will exceed that year’s projected cost through 2027.
Medicare
The Trustees project that the Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) Trust Fund will be the next to face depletion after the DI Trust Fund. The projected date of HI Trust Fund depletion is 2026, two years later than projected in last year’s report, at which time dedicated revenues would be sufficient to pay 87 percent of HI cost. The Trustees project that the share of HI cost that can be financed with HI dedicated revenues will decline slowly to 71 percent in 2047, and then rise slowly until it reaches 73 percent in 2087. As it has since 2008, the HI Trust Fund will pay out more in hospital benefits and other expenditures than it receives in income in all years until reserve depletion.
The projected HI Trust Fund’s long-term actuarial imbalance is smaller than that of the combined Social Security trust funds under the assumptions employed in this report.
The estimated 75-year actuarial deficit in the HI Trust Fund is 1.11 percent of taxable payroll, down from 1.35 percent projected in last year’s report. The HI fund again fails the test of short-range financial adequacy, as its trust fund ratio is already below 100 percent and is expected to decline continuously until reserve depletion in 2026. The fund also continues to fail the long-range test of close actuarial balance. The HI 75-year actuarial imbalance amounts to 29 percent of tax receipts or 23 percent of program cost.
The modest improvement in the outlook for HI long-term finances is principally due to: (i) lower projected spending for most HI service categories especially for skilled nursing facilities to reflect lower-than-expected spending in 2012 and other recent data; (ii) lower projected Medicare Advantage program costs that reflect recent data suggesting that certain provisions of the Affordable Care Act will reduce growth in these costs by more than was previously projected; and (iii) a refinement in projection methods that reduces assumed per beneficiary cost growth during the transition period between the short-range projections and the long-range projections. Partially offsetting these favorable changes to the projections are somewhat lower projected levels of tax income that reflect lower-than-expected tax income in 2012.
The Trustees project that Part B of Supplementary Medical Insurance (SMI), which pays doctors’ bills and other outpatient expenses, and Part D of SMI, which provides access to prescription drug coverage, will remain adequately financed into the indefinite future because current law automatically provides financing each year to meet the next year’s expected costs. However, the aging population and rising health care costs cause SMI projected costs to grow steadily from 2.0 percent of GDP in 2012 to approximately 3.3 percent of GDP in 2035, and then more slowly to 4.0 percent of GDP by 2087. General revenues will finance roughly three-quarters of these costs, and premiums paid by beneficiaries almost all of the remaining quarter. SMI also receives a small amount of financing from special payments by States and from fees on manufacturers and importers of brand-name prescription drugs. Projected costs for Part B assume an almost 25-percent reduction in Medicare payment rates for physician services will be implemented in 2014 as required by current law, which is highly unlikely.
The Trustees project that total Medicare cost (including both HI and SMI expenditures) will grow from approximately 3.6 percent of GDP in 2012 to 5.6 percent of GDP by 2035, and will increase gradually thereafter to about 6.5 percent of GDP by 2087.
The drawdown of Social Security and HI Trust Fund reserves and the general revenue transfers into SMI will result in mounting pressure on the Federal budget. In fact, pressure is already evident. For the seventh consecutive year, the Social Security Act requires that the Trustees issue a “Medicare funding warning” because projected non-dedicated sources of revenues primarily general revenues are expected to continue to account for more than 45 percent of Medicare’s outlays in 2013, a threshold breached for the first time in fiscal year 2010.
Conclusion
Lawmakers should address the financial challenges facing Social Security and Medicare as soon as possible. Taking action sooner rather than later will leave more options and more time available to phase in changes so that the public has adequate time to prepare.
Read the rest complete with charts and diagrams at the following link:
To understand how we got into this mess it is also important to study The Great Society policies which culminated in the 1960s by Lyndon Johnson, and was the work of Democrats from the 1930s as a progressive platform rooted in global communism. Even though it is long, it is important to read. Some reading this have actually supported The Great Society and are currently avoiding dealing with the errors of their past by praying to some finance God that relief will magically appear. It will not. It is important to understand the problem, and then work to remove all these elements from our society so that we may save it. In previous documents I have shown how America used to be, and can be again. Those who support The Great Society look at such times as antiquated and a step backwards. In a way they are right, I do wish to step back in time—to a time before the socialist imposition of The New Deal, and The Great Society. I don’t want to pay for them. I don’t want to deal with people who are addicted to those government services, and I want to steer away from the collapse of those programs in 2026.
The Great Society was a set of domestic programs in the United States announced by President Lyndon B. Johnson at Ohio University and subsequently promoted by him and fellow Democrats in Congress in the 1960s. Two main goals of the Great Society social reforms were the elimination of poverty and racial injustice. New major spending programs that addressed education, medical care, urban problems, and transportation were launched during this period. The Great Society in scope and sweep resembled the New Deal domestic agenda of Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Some Great Society proposals were stalled initiatives from John F. Kennedy‘s New Frontier. Johnson’s success depended on his skills of persuasion, coupled with the Democraticlandslide in the 1964 election that brought in many new liberals to Congress, making the House of Representatives in 1965 the most liberal House since 1938.[1]
The Voting Rights Act of 1965 assured minority registration and voting. It suspended use of literacy or other voter-qualification tests that had sometimes served to keep African-Americans off voting lists and provided for federal court lawsuits to stop discriminatory poll taxes. It also reinforced the Civil Rights Act of 1964[10] by authorizing the appointment of federal voting examiners in areas that did not meet voter-participation requirements. The Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965 abolished the national-origin quotas in immigration law. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 banned housing discrimination and extended constitutional protections to Native Americans on reservations.
The most ambitious and controversial part of the Great Society was its initiative to end poverty. The Kennedy Administration had been contemplating a federal effort against poverty. Johnson, who, as a teacher had observed extreme poverty in Texas among Mexican-Americans, launched an “unconditional war on poverty” in the first months of his presidency with the goal of eliminating hunger and deprivation from American life. The centerpiece of the War on Poverty was the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which created an Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to oversee a variety of community-based antipoverty programs.
Federal funds were provided for special education schemes in slum areas, including help in paying for books and transport, while financial aid was also provided for slum clearances and rebuilding city areas. In addition, the Appalachian Regional Development Act of 1965 created jobs in one of the most impoverished regions of the country.[citation needed] The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 provided various schemes in which young people from poor homes could receive job training and higher education.[15]
The OEO reflected a fragile consensus among policymakers that the best way to deal with poverty was not simply to raise the incomes of the poor but to help them better themselves through education, job training, and community development. Central to its mission was the idea of “community action“, the participation of the poor in framing and administering the programs designed to help them.
Programs
The War on Poverty began with a $1 billion appropriation in 1964 and spent another $2 billion in the following two years. It spawned dozens of programs, among them the Job Corps, whose purpose was to help disadvantaged youth develop marketable skills; the Neighborhood Youth Corps, established to give poor urban youths work experience and to encourage them to stay in school; Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), a domestic version of the Peace Corps, which placed concerned citizens with community-based agencies to work towards empowerment of the poor; the Model Cities Program for urban redevelopment; Upward Bound, which assisted poor high school students entering college; legal services for the poor; and the Food Stamp Act of 1964 (which expanded the federal food stamp program).[16]
Programs included the Community Action Program, which initiated local Community Action Agencies charged with helping the poor become self-sufficient; and Project Head Start, which offered preschool education for poor children. In addition, funding was provided for the establishment of community health centers to expand access to health care,[17] while major amendments were made to Social Security in 1965 and 1967 which significantly increased benefits, expanded coverage, and established new programs to combat poverty and raise living standards.[18] In addition, average AFDC payments were 35% higher in 1968 than in 1960, but remained insufficient and uneven.[19]
Education
The most important educational component of the Great Society was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, designed by Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel. It was signed into law on April 11, 1965, less than three months after it was introduced. It ended a long-standing political taboo by providing significant federal aid to public education, initially allotting more than $1 billion to help schools purchase materials and start special education programs to schools with a high concentration of low-income children. The Act established Head Start, which had originally been started by the Office of Economic Opportunity as an eight-week summer program, as a permanent program.
The Higher Education Facilities Act of 1963, which was signed into law by Johnson a month after becoming president,[20] authorized several times more college aid within a five-year period than had been appropriated under the Land Grant College in a century. It provided better college libraries, ten to twenty new graduate centers, several new technical institutes, classrooms for several hundred thousand students, and twenty-five to thirty new community colleges a year.[21]
This major piece of legislation was followed by the Higher Education Act of 1965, which increased federal money given to universities, created scholarships and low-interest loans for students, and established a national Teacher Corps to provide teachers to poverty-stricken areas of the United States. The Act also began a transition from federally funded institutional assistance to individual student aid.
The Bilingual Education Act of 1968 offered federal aid to local school districts in assisting them to address the needs of children with limited English-speaking ability until it expired in 2002.[22]
In 1966 welfare recipients of all ages received medical care through the Medicaid program. Medicaid was created on July 30, 1965 under Title XIX of the Social Security Act of 1965. Each state administers its own Medicaid program while the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) monitors the state-run programs and establishes requirements for service delivery, quality, funding, and eligibility standards.
Arts and cultural institutions
National endowments for arts and humanities
In September 1965, Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act into law, creating both the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities as separate, independent agencies. Lobbying for federally funded arts and humanities support began during the Kennedy Administration. In 1963 three scholarly and educational organizations—the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Council of Graduate Schools in America, and the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa—joined together to establish the National Commission on the Humanities. In June 1964, the commission released a report that suggested that the emphasis placed on science endangered the study of the humanities from elementary schools through postgraduate programs. In order to correct the balance, it recommended “the establishment by the President and the Congress of the United States of a National Humanities Foundation.”[24]
In August 1964, Congressman William S. Moorhead of Pennsylvania proposed legislation to implement the commission’s recommendations. Support from the White House followed in September, when Johnson lent his endorsement during a speech at Brown University. In March 1965, the White House proposed the establishment of a National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities and requested $20 million in start-up funds. The commission’s report had generated other proposals, but the White House’s approach eclipsed them. The administration’s plan, which called for the creation of two separate agencies each advised by a governing body, was the version approved by Congress. Richard Nixon dramatically expanded funding for NEH and NEA.[24]
Public broadcasting
After the First National Conference on Long-Range Financing of Educational Television Stations in December 1964 called for a study of the role of noncommercial education television in society, the Carnegie Corporation agreed to finance the work of a 15-member national commission. Its landmark report, Public Television: A Program for Action, published on January 26, 1967, popularized the phrase “public television” and assisted the legislative campaign for federal aid. The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, enacted less than 10 months later, chartered the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as a private, non-profit corporation.
The law initiated federal aid through the CPB for the operation, as opposed to the funding of capital facilities, of public broadcasting. The CPB initially collaborated with the pre-existing National Educational Television system, but in 1969 decided to start the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). A public radio study commissioned by the CPB and the Ford Foundation and conducted from 1968–1969 led to the establishment of National Public Radio, a public radio system under the terms of the amended Public Broadcasting Act.
Cultural centers
Two long-planned national cultural and arts facilities received federal funding that would allow for their completion through Great Society legislation. A National Cultural Center, suggested during the Franklin Roosevelt Administration and created by a bipartisan law signed by Dwight Eisenhower, was transformed into the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a living memorial to the assassinated president. Fundraising for the original cultural center had been poor prior to legislation creating the Kennedy Center, which passed two months after the president’s death and provided $23 million for construction. The Kennedy Center opened in 1971.[25]
In the late 1930s the United States Congress mandated a Smithsonian Institution art museum for the National Mall, and a design by Eliel Saarinen was unveiled in 1939, but plans were shelved during World War II. A 1966 act of Congress established the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden as part of the Smithsonian Institution with a focus on modern art, in contrast to the existing National Art Gallery. The museum was primarily federally funded, although New York financier Joseph Hirshhorn later contributed $1 million toward building construction, which began in 1969. The Hirshhorn opened in 1974.[26]
In 1964, Johnson named Assistant Secretary of Labor Esther Peterson to be the first presidential assistant for consumer affairs.
The Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965 required packages to carry warning labels. The Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 set standards through creation of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The Fair Packaging and Labeling Act requires products identify manufacturer, address, clearly mark quantity and servings. The statute also authorizes HEW and FTC to establish and define voluntary standard sizes. The original would have mandated uniform standards of size and weight for comparison shopping, but the final law only outlawed exaggerated size claims.
The Child Safety Act of 1966 prohibited any chemical so dangerous that no warning can make it safe. The Flammable Fabrics Act of 1967 set standards for children’s sleepwear, but not baby blankets.
The Wholesome Meat Act of 1967 required inspection of meat which must meet federal standards. The Truth-in-Lending Act of 1968 required lenders and credit providers to disclose the full cost of finance charges in both dollars and annual percentage rates, on installment loan and sales. The Wholesome Poultry Products Act of 1968 required inspection of poultry which must meet federal standards. The Land Sales Disclosure Act of 1968 provided safeguards against fraudulent practices in the sale of land. The Radiation Safety Act of 1968 provided standards and recalls for defective electronic products.
Environment
Joseph A. Califano, Jr. has suggested that Great Society’s main contribution to the environment was an extension of protections beyond those aimed at the conservation of untouched resources.[28] In a message he transmitted to Congress, President Johnson said:
The air we breathe, our water, our soil and wildlife, are being blighted by poisons and chemicals which are the by-products of technology and industry. The society that receives the rewards of technology, must, as a cooperating whole, take responsibility for [their] control. To deal with these new problems will require a new conservation. We must not only protect the countryside and save it from destruction, we must restore what has been destroyed and salvage the beauty and charm of our cities. Our conservation must be not just the classic conservation of protection [against] development, but a creative conservation of restoration and innovation.
— Special Message to the Congress on Conservation and Restoration of Natural Beauty; February 8, 1965[29]
At the behest of Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, the Great Society included several new environmental laws to protect air and water. Environmental legislation enacted included:
Clear Air, Water Quality and Clean Water Restoration Acts and Amendments
Amendments made to the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act in 1964 extended the prevailing wage provisions to cover fringe benefits,[30] while several increases were made to the federal minimum wage.[31] In addition, a comprehensive minimum rate hike was signed into law that extended the coverage of the Fair Labor Standards Act to about 9.1 million additional workers.[30]
For those who wish to save America, the government must be removed from public education, from medicine, from science, from labor relations, from retirement financing, and from environmental preservation. For that last many will say it is because of government that America has National Parks and a conservation movement at all. For them I point toward Disney World who took capitalism and converted an environmental marshland in the hot Central Florida region and made it a haven of environmental awareness producing money that was poured into science that no government on earth could duplicate. The Walt Disney property in Florida is better managed than any National Park, and serves the same purpose of preservation of valuable land. Similar examples could be provided to every topic mentioned above and more. But first Americans must dust off their tendency to self-reliance and embrace the past that built such characters and reject the past that paved the way to dependency, the policies of The Great Society.
It is good to enjoy fireworks on The Fourth of July and celebrate a time when America declared its independence. But America through trickery, deceit, and political barbarism is more dependent on foreign forces than ever and the strings to that dependency are in the programs of The New Deal and The Great Society. The fight before us will be much more vicious than in any other time in American history. It will be far from easy. That is why am turning my focus on a period of American history that had touches of true independence whether it was in the films of Douglas Fairbanks, or the various renditions of the Lone Ranger. For me those times are represented by the bullwhip and speak of an American attitude that is rooted in justice constantly pursuing freedom. CLICK HERE TO READ MORE. But it is time to take off the masks of convention, and politeness, or patient understanding then declare that the hands of time need to be reset in America to a time before the destructive programs that a vast majority of citizens in The United States have become accustom to. A failure to take off those masks of politeness will result in the end of American civilization as a fiscal powerhouse. It may continue on as Russia currently does, as an impoverished former superpower crushed by communist ideology, but it will not be the nation that we all know and love today. So the fight that is the responsibility of our times is before us, and simply igniting fireworks off on the 4th of July is not enough. An American revolution that has not yet been given a name is before us now, and will occur on all our watches who read this now. When history views us, they won’t celebrate our polite masks that are worn in society when oppressors wished to imprison us with more entitlement programs which only serve politicians in Washington and their ability to stay in office by selling votes through tax payer resources. It is time to dust off our American individuality and get mean and nasty to those who wish to put shackles about our necks with financial slavery. A failure to do so will actually bring more harm to others than it ever averts.
Press Release as sent: Liberty Township Tea Party Joins in Law Suit Against IRS
Today June 25, 2013 the Liberty Township Tea Party official joined a law suit with the ACLJ, American Center for Law and Justice, in seeking action against the IRS.
The ACLJ filed the amended complaint in our lawsuit against the IRS and the government officials involved in the unconstitutional targeting of conservative groups.
“Plaintiffs seek a declaratory judgment that the Defendants unlawfully delayed and obstructed Plaintiffs’ applications for a determination of tax-exempt status by means of conduct that was based on unconstitutional criteria and impermissibly disparate treatment of Plaintiffs in violation of Plaintiffs’ rights under the First and Fifth Amendments to the United States Constitution and the Administrative Procedure Act. Defendants unlawfully delayed and thereby effectively denied approval of Plaintiffs’ applications for tax exempt status by means of a comprehensive, pervasive, invidious and organized scheme that purposefully established unnecessary and burdensome inquiries and scrutiny of Plaintiffs’ applications based solely upon Plaintiffs’ political viewpoints (or Defendants’ assumption of Plaintiffs’ viewpoints, based on their organizational names). “
The Liberty Township Tea Party applied for 501c3 status with the IRS in May of 2010. Our Tea Party was modeled after the League of Women Voters with the goal of encouraging the community to educate themselves in the political process. After three years and answering the one hundred seven questions asked of us the application has been neither approved nor rejected. The Liberty Township Tea Party began the process of applying for this application with faith in the government agency to process the application in a timely manner. That faith in the government’s ability has been tested. Our group is premised on the goal of smaller government. The IRS’s inability to make a decision, their intrusive, illegal politically motivated questioning prove to us that our bureaucracies are bloated and our representatives have failed miserably in controlling the agencies they have created. Our right to free speech and free assembly has been a bridged.
Liberty Township web site: libertytownshipteaparty.org
One of the reasons I like movies so much, especially ones like Man of Steel is that they challenge social beliefs and the standards of our day. Prior to the release of Man of Steel, progressive statist lovers who relish themselves in the entertainment industry like maggots on spoiled food had written poor reviews about the new Superman movie basically saying that Kal-El, as he was portrayed in the film, was too good to be believable. This is a remarkable statement and if one takes the time to let it sink in just a bit, is it any wonder that our society is so broken, so crime ridden, so morally and financially bankrupt? In spite of the critics, Man of Steel has soared to extraordinary box office success which for me is a social vote against the attempt of progressives to steer our society into more statist philosophy. When as many people show up to see a movie like Man of Steel in such a short period of time, it is a flat our rejection of the kind of statist culture that is being offered by modern-day intelligentsia. But the king of negative reviews that I found absolutely intriguing is the one below from Alexandra Petri from The Washington Post. Apparently the Man of Steel hit a really raw nerve with her, which is good because it shows what these types of people really believe in their hearts. If I had to guess based on the review by Alexandra, I would say she came from a broken home, found herself passed out and drunk at a party more than once not able to find her cloths, and is having a hard time maintaining a stable relationship with a man. She is a product of the progressive era, and the public schools that raise millions of children to believe in the same types of diabolical behavior patterns. Because she thinks in such a way is why the Washington Post hired her to begin with, as she can write articles in a way that the masses can understand—or at least thinks they understand until something like Man of Steel comes along and shows society how far they have fallen from the tree of goodness. For some, they yearn to take steps in their life to be closer to the ideal of Superman. For others like Alexandra Petri, they find the idea of Superman to be utterly perplexing, out-dated, and an image that fills them with guilt, instead of hope. Read her article for yourself. I put the whole article up with a link at the end.
Man of Steel — have we outgrown Superman?
By Alexandra Petri, Published: June 20, 2013 The Washington Post
I dislike Superman.
Let me rephrase that.
I don’t like Superman.
I understand that he is America, or Jesus, or both at the same time, with Maximum Levels of Allegory and slightly better hair.
But who is he? A concatenation of catchphrases with perfect teeth and rippling muscles.
He’s perfect, and like anything perfect, he’s bland.
And here I thought it was just Brandon Routh that was the problem.
No, even in the gritty reboot “Man of Steel” currently In Theaters near you, he’s a problem. I saw the movie feeling a sense of obligation. It’s Superman. We love Superman. Of course we’re seeing Man of Steel.
But he feels dated. Everyone else these days is custom — flawed, just like you and me. Superman is one-size-fits-all perfection.
It’s not that he possesses so many virtues. As W. H. Auden said, “A vice in common can be the ground of a friendship but not a virtue in common. X and Y may be friends because they are both drunkards or womanizers but, if they are both sober and chaste, they are friends for some other reason.”
Superman lacks vices. At a critical moment in this summer’s “Man of Steel,” trying to sap his fighting spirit, someone yells, “OH YEAH? Well, you have a MORAL COMPASS and I DON’T!” As taunts go, this is only marginally more menacing than yelling, “OH YEAH? WELL, YOU HAVE REALLY NICE TEETH!” There’s nothing to insult.
Superman is your friend with a truck.
You cultivate his acquaintance in case you ever need help moving or a ride to a wine tasting in the country or defense against alien attack. But you wouldn’t want to sit next to him at dinner. You invite him to your wedding on the off-chance he will turn some of the water into wine. But what do you say to him?
Superman is genetically gifted to the point that he has never actually been required to make conversation. Late in the film, he whips a drone out of the sky, and an officer smiles blandly at him. “He’s kinda hot,” she says. What else can you say?
Let me insert the caveat that I am a fair-weather comics fan. I am the sunshine patriot and summer filmgoer. I didn’t grow up reading the issues or even watching Smallville; maybe there is an iteration of the hero that answers these questions satisfactorily.
At least in the film, his back story is depressing because it turns out he’s not just special for Earth — he’s special for his home planet Krypton, too. “The first natural birth in centuries!” his Space Dad, Russell Crowe, proclaims. Apparently he contains the lives of all future Kryptonians encoded in his body somewhere. It is a pity they forgot to include any personality with that.
But what personality could you fit?
Personality is something you are forced to develop to make people like you in spite of your inherent deficiencies. This is why when people say, “He has a wonderful personality,” it is usually shorthand for “He resembles a fat stoat.” If you are attractive and flawless, like Superman, what personality do you need? This is why Cyrano de Bergerac, with his giant hideous nose, has a rapier wit and is the life of the party, and Christian de Neuvillette, so handsome that people fall in love with him spontaneously across rooms, cannot complete a sentence to save his life. Adversity builds character. If you’re a diamond living among pumice, good luck being shaped into anything. No wonder Superman’s bland. When he gets bullied as a kid, his greatest struggle is not melting the bullies with his eyes. Forget first-world problems; he’s in a category by himself.
Of course, being in a category by yourself is its own kind of pain. He is the last of a species, alone, isolated, orphaned — but we don’t see that in the movie, except in brief flashbacks. If anything, he has too many living family members to be a high-functioning superhero. There’s nothing to latch onto in this Clark Kent, just a flying grin and a lot of explosions.
My understanding of myth structure, from Joseph Campbell, is that the essence of most hero stories is as follows: the hero Goes To The Father To Seek The Boon (getting help from a variety of archetypal figures and overcoming a variety of obstacles on the way), the hero obtains the boon, the hero returns and uses the boon to Save the People.
The trouble with Superman is that he already has the boon. He’s faster than a speeding bullet, capable of — yadda, yadda, yadda. As a consequence, the movie consists of numerous people delivering inspirational speeches to Superman about his unique capacity to save the world, and then he goes and does it. He doesn’t have to struggle to get where he is. But hey, there are a lot of explosions.
Still, is that enough?
What do we need from our myths?
Superman has always been a decently heavy-handed allegory: somebody’s only son sent to dedicate his life to save the human race? Gee. Who might this be?
Everyone else these days is so flawed. Iron Man has something resembling PTSD. Poor Captain America has come unstuck in time. Batman — don’t get me started on Batman. “Hey guys,” Superman says, sitting down at the bar next to them. “Rough day. I’m completely invulnerable to all earth substances, but also, I can fly!”
“Please leave,” Bruce Banner says, turning a little green.
The other superheroes filling our screens this summer have had a process of becoming. Superman doesn’t become. He just lands. He’s just super. He’s all the fun of playing Make Believe with a 6-year-old who keeps changing the rules on you so that he’s invulnerable and always wins.
Superman is the hero we don’t deserve but need right now. Here he comes now with that truck of his, just in time to help.
It is because of people like Alexandra Petri that we have Barack Obama as president, more scandals in Washington in just a couple of years than all of them combined during the last century, and the moral compass of America that is faltering under rudderless leadership by beta men who eat out of the hand of alpha women, who secretly are always on the lookout for the alpha male—who using Petri’s metaphor–is always the guy with the truck. It not that she’s a bad person, or even a devious progressive. In her article, she was honest, so I won’t rip her to shreds over what she wrote. But she represents a great sickness that is destroying entire generations and is what people like me see as philosophically worse than catching the bubonic plague.
Of course people like Alexandra Petri have to live in their bodies and the minds that have molded them, so they have no other point of reference but to look at a film like Man of Steel and find reasons to make fun of it, because she can’t relate. It isn’t her opinion that is the problem, but the fact that she cannot relate to a person who does not have vices, or rather that she believes that vices are what built relationships in the first place. Her statements are as ridiculous as two businessmen who are nurturing a deal, who go out drinking to become intoxicated so both can see weaknesses in each other so that trust between the two can be shared with a common secret. Any relationship built upon such foundations is doomed to fail, just as a society built on vices, and personal failures will collapse on itself.
I blame the creation of people like Alexandra Petri not on a disagreement over social philosophy, but of the origin of her thoughts to begin with, to the parents who obviously instructed her wrong, to the life situations that shaped her mind to believe that virtue is inferior to vice. To each and every teacher in her public school that helped mold her mind to believe that having a “moral compass” is an out-dated ideal, and that it is appropriate to be nice to someone just so you can use them to help deliver something with their truck.
Alexandra Petri from The Washington Post represents the common demographic of 20 to 35 year olds in 2013 America—a lost generation that is hopelessly misplaced, and teetering on the precipice of disaster. The only thing that keeps these rudderless beings afloat is the socialist mechanisms of the previous generation who gave them the New Deal and the Great Society, which are not sustainable financially. Alexandra Petri is a child of those two progressive concepts and for her Superman is not about hope, but an unrealized ideal of what mankind is supposed to be. Man is not supposed to be perfect, they are to be flawed, scandalous, and judged not by the merit of their work or quality of life, but by their vices.
Ironically lost to Alexandra is the metaphor that the type of qualities she found important and lacking in Kal-El, are the kind of values that General Zod proposed in the film. An America led by people like Alexandra Petri are doomed to live out in real life what the fictional fate of Krypton turned out to be. Yet she didn’t see that parallel. She just saw her anxiety over the kind of perfection that was presented by Superman with a concept that was so foreign to her that the magic was lost. For her, she needs people with fault to feel they have a personality, and she is far from alone. If I had to put a number on the amount of people in society who think the same way she does, I’d say that it’s as high as 85%. Many of them most likely left the Man of Steel movie feeling the same way, like they know they are supposed to like Superman, in the same way that people are supposed to like church—with a rebellious reverence to the idea of goodness that can be pushed back against with rejection, even though their bodies go through the motions of attending.
Alexandra Petri is allowed to think whatever she wants. But she is forbidden to make decisions on my behalf, and that includes burdening me with goof-ball presidents like Barack Obama, unmanaged public education costs, government scandals, NSA spying, and more socialism in our current government with more entitlement programs. Because she can vote, and does, and supports a democratic mode of government, then Alexandra’s bad ideas are in direct competition with my ideas, and those thoughts about reality are not compatible. When she complains that she wants to see a flawed Superman, she speaks to a desire to create a flawed society—and she votes accordingly. I on the other hand expect Superman to be flawless, and I live my life in a way to represent that idea. When Alexandra Petri makes fun of the virtuous perfection that Superman represents, she is stating that my expectations human beings should strive to be all that they can be, and still push for more is too difficult, and unrealistic since such people lack personality, which is more important than value.
When it is wondered why the world is so screwed up, just read the article above and imagine millions of people like Alexandra Petri living their lives looking to hire, befriend, and interact socially not with the best that the human race has to offer, but the worst, because vices, imperfection, and perilous human weaknesses are endearing personality traits that people like Alexandra can relate to—which makes them good. It should come as no surprise then when our society fails, because it is led in a mob-like democracy by people like Alexandra Petri who have been taught that all the things that are valuable are the things that make human beings the most disgusting.
With all the lead up to the movie being so intense here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom my lack of a review for The Lone Ranger was simply due to the fact that I was on vacation with my family when the film was released and there wasn’t time to physically go see the movie. On two occasions while I was vacationing in Florida I intended to take my family to see The Lone Ranger, once at Downtown Disney, but had to withdrawal because the day was already overbooked, and then again at Merritt Square Mall which was down the road from our Atlantic Coast condo
With The Lone Ranger I expected to see even after the extremely negative reviews, a movie from Disney that was just good ol’ fashion fun—I did not expect yet another film with very heavy opinions against the government position of collectivism over the traditional rugged individualism that built America from the start. Coming from the Disney Studios I expected a more disguised effort, especially with Johnny Depp staring as Tonto, and sharing a producing credit. But if the nation is divided equally down the middle with Tea Party type Americans on one side, and welfare collecting altruists on the other, Disney usually makes films that all types of people will enjoy. This is good for their box office numbers, but runs counter to the type of messages that Walt Disney himself believed who actually testified before a congressional committee against communism during the height of the McCarthy Hearings. But this Lone Ranger was made by Disney to show favor toward the former of those demographic groups and not the later.
The Second Treatise of Government was one of the foundation books which people like Thomas Jefferson used to help shape the argument about the kind of country that America would be. Modern Americans who regularly attend Tea Party events know that John Locke is one of the philosophers who opened the door to the way of thinking that distinctly became freedom loving. To altruists, this is a major social danger as any message that exhibits freedom as one of the highest human endeavors also seeks to be free from social stupidity, the self-determined poor (lazy people), and the malcontents of civilization. Social progressives have desired for years to shape American thought into reflecting European sentiment of sacrifice, shared suffering, and a focus on the “greater good” while steering the educated masses away from a personal love of individual freedom. 
Opening the film with a direct node to John Locke was a bold declaration that I was surprised made it past the Disney executives screening the film. It’s possible that some of them did not know what the book meant to American foundation, but it is unlikely to have slipped by so many eyes without anybody knowing, especially Johnny Depp, who has been known to show up to film screenings showing his open support of Che Guevara. I thought the John Locke reference was quite extraordinary but the references did not end there so I know that it was not an accident.
It was an unapologetic western that might have been an early episode of the TV show Davy Crockett, only with Industrial Light and Magic doing some spectacular visual effects. The stunts were ambitious, and the scope of the project was mammoth. It was the largest scale western I think has ever been attempted. But The Lone Ranger himself does not drink, does not curse, does not use tobacco (he refused when offered), he does not want to kill people, and is a naively good guy from the beginning to the end of the film. The only character arch that John Reid embarked on evolving from the beginning to the end was in hardening up from a naive lawyer to a man who isn’t afraid to pull the trigger on a bad guy by the end of the film. Reid never had a moment of weakness in the film where he got drunk, caved into the seductions of a woman, or lost his moral compass. He was firmly focused on justice from the beginning of the film till the very end.
It will be lucky to recover its $215 million dollar budget, which is unheard of for a western. Only a company like Disney could have made a film like this, which was risky, so it is unlikely that Armie Hammer will have the chance to reprise his Lone Ranger role in the way that Robert Downey Jr has for Iron Man, and make future films. The film by 
Everyone involved with The Lone Ranger is among the best in their fields of endeavor, and it is a shame that the magic will probably never be seen again, because the box office will prevent it. The Lone Ranger is one of those films that will percolate in America culture for a long time. It will not have a big pop at the box office, but will be watched and loved for many years in a quiet way as viewers find it wonderfully good, but unsure why they like it so much while critics and industry professionals declare that it is such a bad film. It is not the film that is bad for progressive types, but the message. 
Most people seeing The Lone Ranger cannot identify with the hero. But they will identify with the villain, and that tends to make people angry. Angry people do not throw down nearly a hundred dollars to see The Lone Ranger, which is what it cost me by the time we bought tickets and snacks, a rarity for us as a family. I spent extra money at the theater knowing that a majority of the movie goers were not spending money on The Lone Ranger, so we broke our rule and bought the overpriced popcorn and drinks anyway, to support the film, and theater showing it.
