I spend a fair amount of time discussing the Giambattista Vico cycle as it pertains to the human race. You could say it’s a hobby of mine. That particular cycle effects mankind over a relatively short period of time lasting centuries to decades. However, for culture building, which is another hobby of mine, the Vico cycle can be seen easily in how money moves around any given city. Take for instance my hometown of Cincinnati. A century or so ago most of the good money and investment around the city was in the location of the current zoo, just north of downtown. Now those regions due to the insistent rule of micromanaged and mismanaged mayors and city councils demanding ever-increasing tax dollars, retreated into the suburbs, specifically the Springdale and Fairfield areas, along with parts of Sharonville. About thirty years ago, those were the parts of the city that were flourishing. But mismanagement drove out the good money there leaving behind high taxes and ruins. Now, and quite spectacularly, it is the West Chester and Mason area that has all the investment as those who create and drive culture have gathered in the rapidly developing West Chester corridor. Among those developments is the Liberty Center development with all the wonderful new commercial announcements coming from it. For me specifically, I am excited for the announcement of a new Rodizio Grill.
But there is of course a warning that twenty years from now, the Giambattista Vico cycle will strike. If taxes are allowed to migrate north and local governments lose sight of what the driving forces of the community truly are—the individuals like those behind the Rodizio Grill, the new Cabelas, and all the other new creations that are so exciting—and they start imposing unnecessary restrictions on creativity and penalize profit making—then all that will leave for more profitable destinations. What will remain is poverty and decline. Good people are often the first to leave from the corruption of bad people—so to avoid the Giambattista Vico cycle bad people require judgment and definition.
As we watch this new Liberty Center open, and everyone is excited for what will prove to be one of the finest examples of commercial development in the entire United States up to this point, it is important not to lose ourselves. It is important to understand that the hotels rising in West Chester by the Streets shopping complex and upcoming Bass Pro Shop are not there because of new investment so much. They located there because that’s where the profit is. There isn’t any profit in downtown Cincinnati because there isn’t any money there. Government is too intrusive and too costly meaning investment will always go elsewhere. But that investment money is not guaranteed, it is fragile. It can leave as fast as it came. It requires local government to keep their hands out of the cookie jar and to allow creativity to flourish.
Prosperity is possible for long periods of time if we are all willing to step away from the Giambattista Vico cycle. For Liberty Center and the developments to the south in West Chester, many generations of flourishing economic activity can commence if government resists the trend to regress backwards—as is always the trend when it comes to human beings. If West Chester can resist the temptation to become a city so that politicians can have supreme power over all this creative development—it has a chance to continue to grow. If the Lakota school system can hold off their radical government union and keep their unrealistic labor needs tucked away in a corner—keeping taxes on property reasonable—there is a chance that the Liberty Center will continue to fill its leased property and ever expand.
I remember well when Forest Fair Mall opened with great fanfare. The Tri County and Forest Park area was a boomtown of innovation and creativity. Now Tri County is loosing stores rapidly due largely to the quality of their clientele declining so intensely. And Forest Fair Mall which was once touted as the new Mall of America is nearly empty. The mall was mismanaged by allowing low quality people to take over driving the Giambattista Vico cycle toward anarchy. The dagger in their coffin occurred when they tried to turn the mall into an adult playground of sin—with nightclubs and other low intellect activity. Good money left, bad money stayed, and when the bad money was spent—the mall went bust and never recovered.
It’s an exciting time for those of us who live near the Liberty Center development. It will take time for the threat of Giambattista Vico to emerge. But once he does, it doesn’t take long, and I hope that government which currently is largely conservative to various degrees stays that way well into the future. Once democrats are allowed to corrupt the logic of creatively through development, it’s over, the Vico cycle will begin to destroy all that is currently being built. So for those who want to see the continued economic development of West Chester and Liberty Township flourish, an avoidance of the Vico cycle is absolutely essential. Never take for granted that everything will stay as it is presently. It will only continue to flourish so long as government takes a back seat and stays out-of-the-way of good people using good money to invest in new business opportunities, like the Rodizio Grill. When that place opens, I can see myself on its reservation list many evenings—and I hope well into the future.
You see dear reader here is the secret……people listen to songs from artists like Bruce Springsteen and his liberal ravings about the value of hometowns, but he fails utterly to understand what forces he is fighting against. He believes falsely that capitalists are the robber barons from his song “Death to my Hometown.” He thinks it is the developers, the bankers and the soothsaying realtors who destroy hometowns. But he’s wrong, and so is everyone else—because they don’t understand the cycle of Giambattista Vico. Hometowns don’t last without money, and money doesn’t stick around when government seeks to steal it and distribute it to low quality people in exchange for a vote. It is the Vico cycle which destroys hometowns, not developers, or capitalists. It is profit that is the blood of a hometown. Without profit, that blood leaves and the town dies. So Bruce Sprinsteen can dance on a stage with great fanfare and get millions of driveling idiots to follow his words, but until they step off the Giambattista Vico cycle hometowns will continue to die—and I don’t want to see that happen in my hometown.
Pseudoscience is a growing trend which I cover quite a lot, mainly because it is evolving out of a lack of trust in the current intellectual institutions. As it turns out the imagination of mankind is more reliable than its ordained collectivism—the level of reality that the masses are willing to accept. For those masses, their level of intellectual aptitude is not very high, and they are happy to relegate their trust to those they consider authority figures. But that trust quickly evaporates when it is discovered that those authority figures are extremely corrupt individuals lacking basic leadership skills, which is certainly the case when the Forest Hills superintendent was caught trying to manipulate his child’s individual test scores—because obviously those types of things are important to his family. This is not an uncommon occurrence. In my dealings with public schools I was amazed at how simple their thinking was, and how easy to corrupt they were. My net result of observation was that they cannot be trusted with much of anything—especially the framework that science and education in general are bound by. Here is the story of the superintendent as reported by Channel 5.
ANDERSON TOWNSHIP, Ohio —Forest Hill School Board members have released the results of their investigation into allegations that Superintendent Dallas Jackson is accused of invalidating a first semester exam score, because his son did poorly on the test.
It could be a packed house at the Forest Hills School Board meeting Monday night after the district’s superintendent was accused of tossing out a test because of his son’s grade.
The board met in executive session for more than three hours Monday night.
According to an unnamed investigator, Superintendent Dr. Dallas Jackson attempted to interfere with grades on a pre-calculus honors mid-term exam, but the Turpin High School principal addressed the exam grades without influence from the superintendent.
Teachers first sent a letter to the school board questioning the ethics of the superintendent’s inquiries into the test his son took.
WLWT has been pushing the Forest Hills district for the documents for days. The station obtained a copy late Tuesday afternoon.
Jackson tried to step in after 44 percent of the honors students, including his son, failed an exam in December.
An independent investigation found Jackson sent a text to the principal saying he was not happy with the way she was handling the issue.
The district reported Jackson met twice with the principal at Turpin about the exam. Jackson told the principal the failure rate was due to either “a bad test or bad teaching.”
The principal approached the teachers in charge of the exam about averaging out the test grade, but they refused. Ultimately, the teachers, the Turpin principal and assistant principal agreed on a plan to give students a chance to raise their grades.
Jackson disagreed with the plan, but it was implemented anyway.
In my experience at witnessing, writing, and researching many stories like the one above from Forest Hills, it is safe to say that I don’t trust much of anything that comes from institutions backed by government—especially if they have connections to international trade unions. There is just too much temptation to cover up bad human behavior, or interpretations of a strongly held static pattern—such as a religious preference—to alter and manipulate data intended to be involved in critical thought. As I say that I can’t help but think of a book a person I greatly admire wrote called The Demon Haunted World, by Carl Sagan. Sagan is not the type to jump into conspiracy theories and wanted very much to fight back the trend to take imaginations into pseudoscience. But the scientific data he often relies on to make proper decisions are known to be deliberately revised. Evidence cannot be considered if it is destroyed and proper assessment of data cannot be deduced if it is avoided to protect intellects from the challenges of new data that may be contrary to a static pattern of thinking.
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark is a 1995 book by astrophysicist Carl Sagan.
In the book, Sagan aims to explain the scientific method to laypeople, and to encourage people to learn critical or skeptical thinking. He explains methods to help distinguish between ideas that are considered valid science, and ideas that can be considered pseudoscience. Sagan states that when new ideas are offered for consideration, they should be tested by means of skeptical thinking, and should stand up to rigorous questioning.
Science to Sagan is not just a body of knowledge, but a way of thinking. The scientific way of thinking is both imaginative and disciplined, bringing humans to an understanding of how the universe is, rather than how they wish to perceive it. Science works much better than any other system because it has a “built-in error-correcting machine”. Superstition and pseudoscience get in the way of many laypersons’ ability to appreciate the beauty and benefits of science. Skeptical thinking allows people to construct, understand, reason, and recognize valid and invalid arguments. Wherever possible, there must be independent validation of the concepts whose truth should be proved. He states that reason and logic would succeed once the truth is known. Conclusions emerge from premises, and the acceptability of the premises should not be discounted or accepted because of bias.
Yet we live in a world where public schools have deliberately avoided critical thinking and reason—so that emotional decisions centering on collective endorsement can be utilized instead. The result of this action is an entire society that has lost the ability to think critically or to use reason to make determinations. When those types of people are in charge of an institution what you get is the kind of results seen in Forest Hills Superintendent Dallas Jackson. His son had a bad grade, he was a superintendent of an important public school, and he didn’t want the embarrassment of having his kid not performing at the top of his academic expectations………….what would the neighbors think? Worse yet, what about the rest of the family? So he used his power to abuse the system to his needs. This has happened within the IRS involving Lois Lerner. It happened in Benghazi. It happens every time a teacher decides they want to have sex with one of their students. It happens all the time and at all levels.
Its not unrealistic to imagine that some curators at The Smithsonian Institute, or The National Geographic Society who have poured their faith behind the Charles Darwin theories of evolution and built their careers around those assumptions would not stuff the bones of some giant discovered in a Ohio mound into some vault, or even destroy the evidence to preserve their scientific outlook. For instance, everyone knows that whatever wreckage was found in the Roswell incident was sent to Wright Patterson Air Force Base. Not long thereafter there were many UFO sightings around Southern Ohio probably related to new military technology either being developed at WPAB or the testing of alien technology found in the wreckage. Or perhaps somebody or something connected to the wreckage went looking for their stuff back. Supposedly the complex of this mysterious Air Force base was connected by tunnels to the Mound Nuclear complex nearby in Miamisburg. And in the middle of all this activity was the Masonic temple that looks down into downtown Dayton and the Great Miami River upstream from the nuclear site. Old buildings around Dayton all up and down the river in that area have lots of references to gargoyles and strange winged creatures that really don’t have a direct connection to the frontier development of those communities, so something really odd is going on behind the veil of the presented reality there. I probably wouldn’t think anything strange about any of this except that somebody decided to build the entire nuclear research facility right in the middle of a magnificent mound builder complex right in the middle of the site. At the Miamisburg Mound at least two skeletons of people over 8 feet tall were found, so any credible university it would be thought would seek to do some major excavations in Miamisburg to discover who and what they were. Instead, science and industry backed by politics built a nuclear research facility supposedly connected to the alien conspiracy theories of WPAB. If you take Carl Sagan’s scientific method at face value one has to ask—what proof is there of any paranormal, or pseudoscience behavior? Well, the mound itself there in Miamisburg is large, and the entire nuclear faculty was built around it for some reason—perhaps to give the illusion of having respect for Native American culture. Yet nobody has dared to do a proper excavation of the site in over 100 years. Why? The University of Dayton is literally just a few miles away—they have some anthropology courses that they offer. Nearby University of Cincinnati and Miami University both have respectable archaeology programs, yet nobody has pulled together the ability to do a suitable dig at the site—which would unquestionably produce many more skeletons—probably some of which were giants—relatively speaking. Science creates the pseudoscience speculation because of the various cover-ups which likely stem from a religious desire, or a European pride issue of maintaining that Christopher Columbus discovered America and that the cultures that were already in the New World were truly primitive hunters and gathers. The culture that built those mounds was more advanced than previously thought, and those in charge wanted to manipulate the facts to force reality to be shaped to their desire.
That’s why it’s a big deal when someone like Dallas Jackson abuses his authority to make his son look smarter to his peers. Jackson manipulated the science of critical thinking to create a desired outcome. When this happens in a local school system, you get mistrust and some chicken gawking toward righteousness. The teachers had a chance to push back against management and show what ethical people they are ahead of their next levy attempt, and the news outlets get a story to cover. But when the same thing happens on a national level with all the coordinating institutions protecting their version of realty—whether it is in preserving the illusion of European history and cultural superiority, religious orthodox, or even political alignments the only way to scratch at the truth is through the pseudoscience.
Public education institutions have lost their relevancy because they have shown themselves all too willing to behave as a filter to reality by programming the masses into illusions of understanding—so to preserve versions of reality they see as valuable. For Dallas Jackson it was more important to him to have his son look like a smart kid than in the actual fact of his son’s intelligence. So he sought ways to fudge the numbers in favor of his boy. This is how Carl Segan’s trust in the scientific method goes wrong because institutions and those in charge of any collective oriented enterprise are prone to doing just as Jackson did meaning that very little of what is produced and offered as truth can be taken as such without more evidence being sought out through speculation. Little things do add up to big things rather quickly and because of that pseudoscience is gaining ground where orthodox science is failing. And sometimes it all starts with a superintendent just trying to change the grade of his son to look better in a social setting. That is the damage that is done, and why it is so perilous a path to take.
The Lakota Education Association (LEA) continue their strikingly ridiculous revolt against the suggested merit pay portion of a new contract with the blind stupidity of Don Quixote from the rhetorical knighthood epic attempting to revive chivalry against a skyline of windmills. The world had moved on against Don Quixote, just as it has from the LEA, yet both are stuck in the past painting themselves as comic caricatures against reality. In Don Quixote’s neurosis, at least his reverence was filled with a clamoring for honor, and justice. The LEA nutcases with their black t-shirts and school protests come across as just greedy and out-of-touch. Like Don Quixote they are poised in a fight against technology represented by an unyielding and unemotional windmill which they attack as the rest of the world goes about their business unconcerned.
I’ve already been quite public about my opinion. All the participating teachers in these demonstrations against merit pay should be terminated from the Lakota school district. What the school board is trying to do is apply some management to the outrageous wages and benefits that the current employees enjoy—which puts way too much imposition on tax payers as one of Butler County’s largest employers. If Lakota were a private business, a corporation, or any other creation of the world the rest of us live in, the school would be out of business. But, since they are government employees and part of a government employment union which is a terribly out-dated model of doing business fed entirely by tax payer extracted funds they sustain themselves with the furtherance of levies faking effectiveness. The collective bargaining that they are fighting so mindlessly for is also a concept that will soon be extinct—which has started in the United States in Wisconsin where Scott Walker has successfully implemented many of these new concepts in the heart of the most progressive state in the union. All other states will have to follow, including Ohio leaving these black clad LEA teachers looking foolishly irrelevant.
Perhaps more stunning was the comment president Sharon Mays made to her members and the flyer which emerged from one of the recent protests. Mays stated to the school newspaper, Today’s Pulse that “In no way are we at a standstill here. We are continuing to meet and collaborate to reach an agreement.” Then there was the flyer which stated, “It has become clear that Lakota needs a different perspective on our board of education. Please see Constant Contact for a notice about searching for supportive, positive community members who may be running as a candidate this November.” True to the flyer, there are two seats coming open on the school board this upcoming fall of 2015, but those seats are not currently held by bastions of conservatism. Julie Shafer has worked on behalf of the labor union about as aggressively as these LEA types could dream of. What the union is talking about is a return to the good ol’ days in Lakota where union lapdogs were sitting on the school board behaving against the community to stuff the pockets of the union members with confiscated wealth from the district. Those days are over—forever. Lakota is too conservative of an area to put up with that kind of behavior leaving the type of current board members to adequately represent the most liberal aspects of the Lakota district. What the LEA has now is about as good as its going to get for them. And if that’s not good enough, they need to stop charging those windmills and hang it up.
Soon it will be summer and people will care even less about Lakota schools. And as the union pushes this whole thing into the fall, people will care even less as the new Liberty Center shopping complex will bring lots of nice stories to the district. Nobody is going to want to see a bunch of spoiled brat teachers dressed in black projecting unfairness when most people in the district are individually successful and know what it takes to make a dollar. Areas like Mt. Healthy or Over-the Rhine might have a more sympathetic public opinion for the LEA members, but they aren’t the ones who will vote for new school board members or future levies to pay for all these collective bargaining agreements. Those who do want to throw money at Lakota really just want to throw money at the school to take the burden of baby sitting their kids off their minds. These protests are reminders to them that their baby sitters aren’t so stable and might threaten to walk off the job at any time—which will only piss them off. Nobody with a sane mind thinks these Lakota teachers are “under compensated” or that they have a critical effect on their children’s future. Only idiots think that today. Everyone else understands that Lakota is just a baby sitting service.
To say it’s an insult to consider the highly degreed government employees at Lakota as mere baby sitters is to not be in touch with reality. Only in public work these days are those degrees of any real use, because only there can any value be provided that is equitable to the perception of importance. Schools like Lakota can only maintain that perception with looted wealth from property owners who do have value. Just like the bad teachers will cry out for the best teachers to share with them the net value of their hard work through collective bargaining and a lack of merit pay to hide their lackluster effort—government schools do the same allowing organizations like this LEA to charge those windmills with the illusion that they are fighting monsters of great importance. But they aren’t. They are only fighting rotten wood in a vacant field as the rest of the world does their own work oblivious to the lunatics on horseback fighting illusions of a threat that doesn’t exist.
Public schools if they were effective would be producing lots of little Einsteins, but all they make are over sexed children bored with life and lacking the basic work ethics to conduct their lives in a successful fashion. It is taking most public education graduates these days until age 35 to actually mature away from the nonsense they learned in government schools if they ever do. That is not a success story worthy of black t-shirts and protests against merit pay. My vote would be to shut down every public school and give every child in America a Leap Frog tablet replacing all these ungrateful teachers sending them to the unemployment line. The kids would be much better off and get a far superior education. So it’s quite humorous to watch them gallop about as if their work was somehow more important than it really is. The LEA should feel lucky that they have a current school board who will actually talk to them. I’d simply let their contracts run out and begin hiring replacements. Ohio will be a right-to-work state soon. Lakota will then be able to hire teachers for a fraction of the current cost. So fire all the protesting teachers at Lakota and let reality finally catch up to them.
Surprise, yet another commercial space flight company has punched through the relentless imposition of earth’s jealous grasp and touched the face of space. This time it’s the Amazon.com innovator Jeff Bezos whose company Blue Origin has built a commercial, reusable rocket to blast into space carrying passengers in a way that is similar to Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic. Here is a report from The Daily Mail about the historic flight:
The dawn of a new era of space travel may be upon us after Amazon’s Jeff Bezos successfully tested a vehicle that will take tourists into space.
Mr Bezos’ firm, called the Blue Origin company, has long spoken of its desire to take paying astronauts into the cosmos.
And now it has performed the first successful test of the vehicle they hope will make that dream a reality.
Called New Shepard, the vehicle consists of a main booster rocket and a six-seater capsule on top, standing 60ft (18 metres) tall.
HOW NEW SHEPARD WORKS
The New Shepard system will take astronauts to space on suborbital journeys.
It includes a Crew Capsule carrying six astronauts atop a separate rocket-powered Propulsion Module, launched from the firm’s West Texas Launch Site.
Following liftoff, the combined vehicles accelerate for approximately two and a half minutes.
The Propulsion Module then shuts off its rocket engines and separates from the Crew Capsule. The Propulsion Module will finish its flight, descend to Earth, and autonomously perform a rocket-powered vertical landing.
The Crew Capsule will go on to coast to the edge of space, providing astronauts with a view to the curvature of the Earth and the beauty of our planet.
After descent and re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, the Crew Capsule will land under parachutes no more than a few miles from the launch site.
In addition, the New Shepard vehicle will provide opportunities for researchers to fly experiments into space and a microgravity environment.
For this, the first test flight of the entire architecture, it was unmanned – but the company hopes to soon start taking customers into space.
The cost of a ticket has not yet been announced, but estimates suggest it will be around £130,000 $200,000 – similar to a flight on Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.
The difference, however, is that while Galactic relies on using a plane to slowly rise into the atmosphere, New Shepard takes off straight up and lands back on the ground.
This is known as vertical takeoff, vertical landing (VTVL).
And Blue Origin is also much more secretive – with this successful test flight taking many by surprise.
In video released by Blue Origin, the booster – using liquid hydrogen and oxygen – lifts the New Shepard vehicle to an altitude of 58 miles (94km).
This is four miles (six kilometres) short of the official boundary of space – the Karman Line – although there does not seem to be any problems with reaching this boundary in future.
Once it reached its peak altitude, accelerating at 3Gs, the booster separated from the capsule.
‘The in-space separation of the crew capsule from the propulsion module was perfect,’ Mr Bezso said in a blog post.
‘Any astronauts on board would have had a very nice journey into space and a smooth return.’
The booster is designed to be able to land on the ground and be reusable, much like rival SpaceX’s own reusable rocket system.
On this occasion, however, the booster lost pressure in its hydraulic system and was not recovered.
Mr Bezos said the firm was already working on an improved system to make sure the error doesn’t happen again.
‘Assembly of propulsion module serial numbers 2 and 3 is already underway – we’ll be ready to fly again soon,’ he said.
The flight of the capsule, however, passed without a hitch and it successfully landed on the ground with the help of three parachutes.
The company is keen on VTVL because it is ‘scalable to a very large size,’ according to Mr Bezos.
And he noted that the company was already working on a larger vehicle, New Shepard’s ‘Very Big Brother. Following this successful flight, many will be expecting the company to go from strength to strength.
It won’t be long now, there is a lot of competition for space and the world’s governments are well behind the curve. They cannot compete with minds like Bezos. For all the assumptions made about the construct of the Moon and all the hoopla about getting astronauts into space to a space station, the cost of such travel is coming down dramatically—significantly in just the next few years. This is a huge step forward.
I am very happy to see Bezos new test flight, and I wish him many successful returns. I want to see a fire lit under Virgin Galactic’s butt. Because we will all benefit from the competition.
BALTIMORE — After two weeks of tension over the death of Freddie Gray, Baltimore devolved into chaos Monday.
Roaming gangs clashed with police in the streets, seriously injuring officers, tearing open businesses and looting their stocks. Gov. Larry Hogan declared a state of emergency and called up the National Guard, and state police requested as many as 5,000 reinforcements from neighboring states.
Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake instituted a weeklong citywide curfew for all residents from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m., starting Tuesday, as rioters damaged neighborhood after neighborhood into Monday night.
Rawlings-Blake called those involved “thugs who only want to incite violence and destroy our city,” joining a chorus of other officials and residents — some of whom fought off rioters to defend their homes and businesses.
“Too many people have spent generations building up this city for it to be destroyed by thugs who, in a very senseless way, are trying to tear down what so many have fought for, tearing down businesses, tearing down or destroying property,” Rawlings-Blake said. “It’s idiotic to think that by destroying your city, you’re going to make life better for anybody.”
A statement from the mayor over the weekend prompted many of the accusations, with critics saying it showed she was taking a “hands off” approach.
“It’s a very delicate balancing act because, while we try to make sure that they were protected … we also gave those who wished to destroy space to do that as well,” Rawlings-Blake said.
Rawlings-Blake gave permission to the poor of her city to pillage. The next day after she saw the results of her bad decision she tried to tough talk her way out by calling the perpetrators thugs, but it was too late. She had already set the story in motion and made a bad situation much, much worse. She tried then to blame the media for twisting her words and attacked anyone who she could even remotely associate blame to, but to no avail. She failed as a leader and it will cost her city terribly in the future.
As I watched the CVG Pharmacy burn to the ground on television I couldn’t help but think of all the insurance companies and businesses who had been considering investments into that particular neighborhood—or the ones who would now consider leaving. Who in their right mind wants to deal with the “bloods and crips” and the drug culture that follows in their wake? Nobody, but thugs, losers, and the perpetually lazy. Anyone with half a mind would leave and move someplace where people don’t burn down their businesses as an excuse to violence. The people of that community are so short-sighted that they don’t even realize what they have done to themselves. If they thought economic investment was bad before the riots, they will be terrible after.
But the fault is squarely on these Democratic mayors and council members who obviously have mismanaged their cities with progressive beliefs that have created this whole mess. Most of the participants in those riots are in some way or another dependents on government, their family structures have been destroyed leaving them to look toward government for parental guidance placing all their trust into government to make their lives better. But it was government who like a bad parent who overly coddles their children who made a mess out of the situation by giving the protestors a license to destroy—publicly. Then when they were caught in the act, tried to backtrack and claim that what they said was out of context.
For progressives, this is why they are always on the prowl to destroy value, because the lies they live their lives by only work as long as there are no values to judge against. Rawlings-Blake could only hope to use a Saul Alinsky diversion tactic as long as society’s mind is empty and being filled by government propaganda. That might work in the poor communities that are instigating all these riots, but it will not work with the rest of America who looks on this kind of behavior with aloofness at the foreign nature of it. The behavior is so primal and collective that most rural Americans will just point and say—“I told you so.” In the future, no more financial investment in such high risk communities.
Rawlings-Blake is likely smart enough to know that the prospect of future investment into her city’s poor neighborhoods evaporated with her press conference, and I’m sure she regretted it. She should have revised her statement, but instead she did what all progressives do, she tried to manipulate the circumstances and use a position of victimization to shield her from her own mistakes. And it never, ever works when it comes to the type of people who really make up the American nation. That’s also why there are more guns per household in my neighborhood than most foreign governments have in their entire country. Because that kind of behavior isn’t tolerated in other places, and the smart money goes where there is some protection against such crazy behavior. Unfortunately the Baltimore Mayor is learning that lesson too late.
It’s important, so I’ll keep talking about it—the Star Wars Celebration showed the outside world just how much potential there is in the Disney owned movie franchise. I’ve been covering that topic for quite some time—I write about the Star Wars video games, the books, the television shows, and the movies often—but the essence of it and the longevity, is the extreme power of the mythology to shape the modern world. Mythology is excessively important to human beings. As thinking specimens of cell building technology, humans need mythology. Our childhoods are often rich with mythology, but our adult and old age lives are often much more limited to tabloid type concerns. Our lives are shaped by the kind of mythology that we think about. Star Wars as shown in the videos below by the filmmakers’ themelves from the Celebration event is the best offering that human minds have created in the world of mythology. To understand a bit about the why and how let me bring to your mind a nice little Cherokee Indian legend passed from a wise man to his grandson.
A Native American Cherokee Story – Two Wolves
One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people.
He said, “My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all.
“One is Evil – It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.
“The other is Good – It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.”
The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: “Which wolf wins?”
The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”
Star Wars is the modern update to stories like those old Indian legends. All cultures have some mythological comparison—so having a modern version is extremely important to young people—and old people. That is why the box office numbers for the next Star Wars film will be so outrageously high. There is a hunger for the type of mythology which places values into story form for humans to build their lives around.
Star Wars is essentially the story of the two wolves of Cherokee legend. It’s about feeding good and evil then watching the results. People are so desperately hungry for that type of story telling. There is a reason that westerns were so popular in American culture—because they were essentially about these perilous choices between the good wolf and the bad wolf. Mankind wants to know which one wins, because they want help in determining which wolf to feed.
I know, and have known a lot of bad wolves and I tried to starve the bad out of them in favor of the good. But so often the bad wolf eats the good wolf in these young people’s lives because behind my back they starve the good one and feed the bad. The bad wolf is the squeaky wheel in their life needing the most grease. Many from that side of the tracks of perpetual duality want to justify the actions and social perception of the evil wolf, the bad side of human sentiment, the anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego—as being misunderstood—as if understanding were required to justify the feeding of a bad wolf.
We live in an age where we are told not to judge others—we are told not to judge the good wolf or the bad wolf because they are all wolves and equal under the sky of mother earth. Well, they are not equal, and they cannot co-habitat on earth with one another in peace. Good and evil are at war and if there is any point to life in the realm of four-dimensional reality it is to determine which wolf people will feed—because that will determine the course of your very soul. That is the great test, which wolf will we feed?
Star Wars functions in a fashion as it puts the question toward mankind in the same way that the grandfather did for his grandson. The choice is ours always to make, Star Wars does not tell us which one to feed. It simply says what the results of one wolf will be over the other. That is the purpose of mythology and a society without it is lost—as we have all been for many years—in spite of a very rich culture of story telling. The quality of that story telling has not been very high. Star Wars however is very high quality story telling—it is mythology at its best.
Bob Iger the CEO of the Disney Corporation gave a surprisingly fluid clarification of his understanding of the Star Wars property. He understands quite clearly what his responsibility to mythology is as one of the largest entertainment companies in the world. As I heard him speak it was almost chilling because I can see how this will all play out and it will be earth shattering—just because there are so many people today who are such empty vessels. Star Wars will be like a drink in the desert for them, and it will fill them with choices. No longer will they wonder how to keep the two wolves from eating each other, they will learn to feed one and kill the other—and their lives will suddenly have meaning. That is the power of myth.
That is also why Star Wars: The Force Awakens will make so much money that the movie business will have to totally re-think how it does business. Next to Star Wars, average Hollywood movies will pale in comparison as the global measure made today will far surpass everything that many think are successes. Many bad wolves will speculate that Disney is evil and just out to make money, and that the world has had enough of Star Wars. Those will be those bad wolves who don’t want to share their food with the good—so of course they will say that. But Disney will increase their value to heights they never thought possible—and they’ll soon learn that the price they paid for Lucasfilm was a fraction of the real value. The power of myth is what drives Star Wars, and the hunger for it is in understanding which wolf to feed, the good one or the bad one. The world wants answers to those questions and these days only Star Wars is offering a clear answer. That’s why it is so successful and why I have so much to say about it.
If you really want to know what is behind the global push for $15 an hour wage increases at fast food restaurants and other entry-level jobs look no further than Robert Reich–the Clinton economist and academic liberal who has set the pace of the modern socialist movement using MoveOn.org as a platform for insurrection. MoveOn.org is the Soros funded enterprise and has in mind the fulfillment of the same brand of communism that was promised during the Red Decade only introduced with incremental bits of socialism over a long period of time. Professors like Reich are the reason that colleges are failing our young people because it is his nonsense that they have been taught. People like Reich funded by Soros are at war with American capitalism and seek to end it—and have from the very beginning. To understand why and how read the following article shown below from Reich where he introduced his economic theory in favor of a minimum wage increase. Because Reich is so “respected” and accredited, most people take his opinions hook line and sinker without considering the root implications, or source definitions. But to anybody who really understands money and how it’s made and measured, Reich is a functioning communist. He may not name himself that, but his actions define themselves. His major error in the following suggestion which apparently everyone misses is in properly defining productivity. I’ll explain more after the article and a bit of history about Reich.
WHY THE MINIMUM WAGE SHOULD REALLY BE RAISED TO $15 AN HOUR
Momentum is building to raise the minimum wage. Several states have already taken action – Connecticut has boosted it to $10.10 by 2017, the Maryland legislature just approved a similar measure, Minnesota lawmakers just reached a deal to hike it to $9.50. A few cities have been more ambitious – Washington, D.C. and its surrounding counties raised it to $11.50, Seattle is considering $15.00
Senate Democrats will soon introduce legislation raising it nationally to $10.10, from the current $7.25 an hour.
All this is fine as far as it goes. But we need to be more ambitious. We should be raising the federal minimum to $15 an hour.
Here are seven reasons why:
Had the minimum wage of 1968 simply stayed even with inflation, it would be more than $10 an hour today. But the typical worker is also about twice as productive as then. Some of those productivity gains should go to workers at the bottom.
$10.10 isn’t enough to lift all workers and their families out of poverty. Most low-wage workers aren’t young teenagers; they’re major breadwinners for their families, and many are women. And they and their families need a higher minimum.
For this reason, a $10.10 minimum would also still require the rest of us to pay Medicaid, food-stamps, and other programs necessary to get poor families out of poverty – thereby indirectly subsidizing employers who refuse to pay more. Bloomberg View describes McDonalds and Walmart as “America’s biggest welfare queens” because their employees receive so much public assistance. (Some, like McDonalds, even advise their employees to use public programs because their pay is so low.)
A $15/hour minimum won’t result in major job losses because it would put money in the pockets of millions of low-wage workers who will spend it – thereby giving working families and the overall economy a boost, and creating jobs. (When I was Labor Secretary in 1996 and we raised the minimum wage, business predicted millions of job losses; in fact, we had more job gains over the next four years than in any comparable period in American history.)
A $15/hour minimum is unlikely to result in higher prices because most businesses directly affected by it are in intense competition for consumers, and will take the raise out of profits rather than raise their prices. But because the higher minimum will also attract more workers into the job market, employers will have more choice of whom to hire, and thereby have more reliable employees – resulting in lower turnover costs and higher productivity.
Since Republicans will push Democrats to go even lower than $10.10, it’s doubly important to be clear about what’s right in the first place. Democrats should be going for a higher minimum rather than listening to Republican demands for a smaller one.
At a time in our history when 95 percent of all economic gains are going to the top 1 percent, raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour isn’t just smart economics and good politics. It’s also the morally right thing to do.
In an interview with The New York Times, he explained that “I don’t believe in redistribution of wealth for the sake of redistributing wealth. But I am concerned about how we can afford to pay for what we as a nation need to do…[Taxes should pay] for what we need in order to be safe and productive. As Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote, “taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society.”[25]
In response to a question as to what to recommend to the incoming president regarding a fair and sustainable income and wealth distribution, Reich said, “Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit — a wage supplement for lower-income people, and finance it with a higher marginal income tax on the top five percent. For the longer term, invest in education for lower-income communities, starting with early-childhood education and extending all the way up to better access to post-secondary education.”[25]
Reich is pro-union, saying “Unionization is not just good for workers in unions, unionization is very, very important for the economy overall, and would create broad benefits for the United States.”[26][27] He also favors raising the federal minimum wage to $15/hour over three years, believing that it will not adversely impact big business and will enhance the availability of higher value workers for companies.[28]
Reich is only a modern snake oil salesman trying to palm off whisky as a cure-all medicine. His economic product is Karl Marx communism and socialism implemented through twists and turns of Keynesian economics shaped by the philosophies of Immanuel Kant. And guess what—they are all wrong in their premise. Reich goes wrong in his very first assumption when he states above that “the typical worker is about twice as productive now as they were in 1968.” The worker isn’t more efficient or better, their productive output did not increase—their actual work, and the energy output to produce that work is statistically much less than it was in 1968. For instance, at a typical McDonald’s founded first in 1940 the amount of work a worker had to exert in 1968 meant that all the hamburgers had to be grilled by hand, the buns individually toasted, most of the labor had to be implemented with the touch time of a human hand. But by 2015 most of the food making operation was automated. The average McDonald’s today is very much more productive than the 1968 version, but it isn’t because the worker is better. Arguably, ethically, morally, and in all categories of make-up it should be easy to prove by some academic like Reich that the quality of people available to work is much lower today than they were in 1968. So his comment about the average worker being twice as productive is complete nonsense—it’s a statement made up in the halls of academia for the sole purpose of eating money out of George Soros’ hand and his aims for global communism.
The Reich formula for determining productive output ignores completely the value of individuals, whether those individuals are the CEOs of companies, or are hard-working employees who carry the rest of their workforce on their backs on a daily basis. The socialist utopia that Reich preaches about in his economic efforts is a theoretical fantasy that falls apart the moment that theory is applied to real people. And Reich has ignored these failures for years.
When Reich was Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton from 1993 to 1997 the economic success that Clinton and Reich enjoyed were not because of their socialist policies, it was because Clinton was forced to compromise with a Republican congress to get their fiscal house in order. Ross Perot was challenging both parties in 1996 so both wanted to squeeze him out of the debate and after the Lewinsky scandal “Bubba” played ball with House and Senate Republicans and things actually improved a bit economically. However the biggest contributors were the invention of the personal PC market and the spread of the Internet which was still a very new thing back then. The market expansion that occurred under tech sector economies happened on Clinton’s watch, and he got the credit. Most of that tech work was done in the 1980s under Ronald Reagan where the stage was set for such Silicone Valley creations—it didn’t have anything to do with Robert Reich.
Yet Reich stood in front of his Harvard and Berkley economic classes all this time teaching socialism to thousands of young students taking credit for that period of time without telling anybody the whole truth. The guy has lied and taken credit for the work of others for years, and now the communist utopia that George Soros wants to create needs the snake oil salesmanship of the con artist Reich. And that is how the minimum wage debate emerged and how the stage was set for the outrageous sum of $15 an hour fast food jobs. These are ideals proposed by shells of actual people who espouse anti-capitalist sentiments with the purposeful destruction of America’s economic power. They should be seen for what they are, and geniuses they are not. Reich can use a lot of big word and charts to explain his theories but in essence he is just a snake oil salesman proclaiming that whiskey has magical properties to a largely uninformed population. What’s worse is that he seeks to keep people in such a state so that not only he can resume gaining attention and accolades, but that he can advance a progressive agenda that seeks an end to our country as a capitalist power house. His failure is specifically in defining value in productivity assuming that all gains belong to human workers. Rather, the real truth in increases in productivity is from the minority of minds who invented the tools to increase productivity in spite of a declining social intellect. That trick is a masterpiece, and it has nothing to do with the American worker, or the gains made toward justification for a minimum wage hike first started in 1968 under deceitful measures.
If you are one of the many poor fools who have taken an economic class by Robert Reich, then you should ask for your money back. Because he sold you whiskey as medicine that only a drunk would accept as legitimate.
Somebody reminded me recently of a little factoid that I already knew, but hadn’t thought about in a while. Before there was ever a Tea Party in America there was an organization called the Three Percent, which was a reference to the amount of people who fought and won the American Revolution against England. The term is important as it indicates a truth to the winds of change that is pertinent to our times. In the modern media driven culture hell-bent on socialism and various aspects of democracy where majority rules, the Tea Party is viewed as irrelevant because it does not represent the masses of our society. Yet history proves time and time again that history is not shaped by the masses, but by the leaders who are often in the extreme minority. In this case pertaining to the Revolution and the modern Constitutional movement the term Three Percent is relevant. Here is how the actual group, the Three Percent describe themselves on a 2009 website—followed by the link to their material.
The Three Percent in 1775.
During the American Revolution, the active forces in the field against the King’s tyranny never amounted to more than 3% of the colonists. They were in turn actively supported by perhaps 10% of the population. In addition to these revolutionaries were perhaps another 20% who favored their cause but did little or nothing to support it. Another one-third of the population sided with the King (by the end of the war there were actually more Americans fighting FOR the King than there were in the field against him) and the final third took no side, blew with the wind and took what came. Three Percenters today do not claim that we represent 3% of the American people, although we might. That theory has not yet been tested. We DO claim that we represent at least 3% of American gun owners, which is still a healthy number somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 million people. History, for good or ill, is made by determined minorities. We are one such minority. So too are the current enemies of the Founders’ Republic. What remains, then, is the test of will and skill to determine who shall shape the future of our nation. The Three Percent today are gun owners who will not disarm, will not compromise and will no longer back up at the passage of the next gun control act. Three Percenters say quite explicitly that we will not obey any further circumscription of our traditional liberties and will defend ourselves if attacked. We intend to maintain our God-given natural rights to liberty and property, and that means most especially the right to keep and bear arms. Thus, we are committed to the restoration of the Founders’ Republic, and are willing to fight, die and, if forced by any would-be oppressor, to kill in the defense of ourselves and the Constitution that we all took an oath to uphold against enemies foreign and domestic. We are the people who the collectivists who now control the government should leave alone if they wish to continue unfettered oxygen consumption. We are the Three Percent. Attempt to further oppress us at your peril. To put it bluntly, leave us the hell alone.
I have for many, many years considered myself in an even more elite class going well beyond the Three Percenter types. In my family the push has always been to be a 1% percenter, not in measure by fiscal buying power, but by intellectual aptitude. I have absolutely no desire to be in step with the rest of society—but rather several decades ahead of the current democratic driven trends. So it’s not hard for me to feel an affinity for those who consider themselves in the Three Percent.
The philosophic stance between of the Three Percent and the modern Tea Party led by people like Glenn Beck and Matt Kibbe is where I’m at. I don’t feel a need to proclaim violent action against an out of control government because I think any of them can be easily beaten with intelligence. Conversely, Glenn Beck is a bit too evangelical for me—a bit too soft-spoken. I understand why he’s the way he is, but he’s too soft for my sentiments. But I’m with him on most things, and I admire the vigor of the Three Percent. If things get out of control, I would be ahead of the Three Percenters in resistance. However, I have little faith in the competency of government to even organize such a thing—so I don’t entertain much in the way of options in that direction.
The point of the matter is that minorities are what shape the future. It currently is a small minority of radical leftists who are shaping the modern world of politics starting with George Soros and trickling down of money to puppet politicians like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. They are in the minority, yet they behave as though they have always been in the majority—democratically speaking. They have committed a ruse—but they are vulnerable to the same tactics—which is what they have been seeing over the last decade. Even with all the George Soros money spent advocating on behalf of socialist/progressive policies—the gains they have made have been limited and the pendulum has swung toward groups like the Three Percenters and the Tea Party to show guidance away from the left-leaning minority domination of the national message.
One of the most frequent criticisms that I see leveled at my work is that it only has an appeal to the minority—in most cases one percenter types who are even more vigilant than the three percenters, or the more general and soft minded Tea Party types. An angry leftist will write me with proclamations that the masses are not behind my view points and suggest that I should abandon them in favor of a more popular view. I have a long history of this type of resistance and my hatred of public education can be traced back to my firm belief in going against the grain of popularity. For instance, when I was a kid it was very unpopular to like the popular Star Wars films in school. Showing an open love of those movies were guarantees at social castigation—even though privately most people enjoyed the films. I took great joy at stepping on the school bus with my Han Solo shirt on and feeling the parade of insults cast at me to make me want to change my behavior. The more the other kids threw insults at me, the more deeply into my convictions I planted myself. When verbal insults didn’t work, kids would resort to physical violence, which did not work with me—at all. I had some rather memorable fights in school which taught kids that they were best off to leave me alone. Meanwhile, I wore my Han Solo shirts well into my high school years and never stopped moving into adulthood.
Thirty years later, which seems like a long time, but it was only a few election cycles—Star Wars is openly enjoyed by just about everyone. Nobody looks sideways at me when I wear my Han Solo shirt out somewhere with my grandson. People actually respond favorably to it. The new movie, Episode 7 The Force Awakens is projected by the Hollywood Reporter to hit over $2 billion in global revenue during its upcoming Christmas run. I personally think the number will be higher, but it’s a start. It’s not that people all of a sudden started liking Star Wars—it’s just become suddenly fashionable to publicly say so as the years have traveled toward us. I knew when I was a kid that Star Wars was something special and I was certainly well within the 1% percentile who publicly stated it—proudly. It was quite a shock when I had a chance to date a girl in the 8th grade who was the most attractive girl in the school—and I gave up on that date to play Star Wars with a bunch of geeky kids who were younger than me. A lot of people thought something was wrong with me. Society in general didn’t understand. But I did, and that’s all that mattered. So I told the girl no and instead spent that Friday night in the basement of my parents house with four other kids playing Star Wars all night—and it was a lot better than a date with a pretty girl. Believe me. Pretty girls mostly come with rules aligned toward social values current to the day. They expect their boyfriends to get along and like the ordainment of their peers. Those are rules I was never willing to deal with. Star Wars was much better, and it still is. Trust me kids, after tens of thousands of sexual experiences—Star Wars is more rewarding.
Since those days I have felt the same pressure for a hundred million different issues, but I generally handled them all the same. I do what I know to be right in spite of what “society” thinks is correct. If the issue is controversial, so be it. Some of the worst and most violent fights I’ve had were when my wife and I were the only two people in a Mason neighborhood who were against the teenage drug dealing that was going on in front of our house. The issue got so out of control that the mayor of Mason had to get involved as the entire police department had turned against us—because they didn’t want to deal with the issue. Talk about pressure. We had the same kind of social rebuttal when we home schooled our children for a time. That was hard as everyone turned against us socially. It was harder than wearing a Han Solo shirt onto a hostile school bus full of rough neck kids from the Gregory Creek trailer park. If you wore a KISS shirt you were cool and didn’t get picked on. If you wore a Star Wars shirt, you got picked on bad. Put your kids in public school, and sign them up for every sports program available and you will be the star of your neighborhood. Home school your kids and you will be ridiculed. Publicly endorse all the modern big government entitlements and the news outlets will paste your face on every station. Stand against them, and you will be seen as a scourge on progress. But as we know, Star Wars is now popular—by virtually everyone, and the liberty movement has now migrated beyond the typically three percent of the population. It takes a leader to see these events way ahead of the masses—it is for the masses to follow the leader. There isn’t a cell in my body that desires to be a follower—to be a mere lamb in the flock herded by a wise and knowing shepherd. I only want to be a shepherd and typically only around three percent of an entire population feels the same way.
While many from the masses bulk at the topics on this site, I am certain that within twenty to thirty years—just like Star Wars—these topics will be popular among the masses. They hide their feelings now—those masses, but deep down inside they support them—they just don’t feel confident to proclaim those feelings in public. Three percent of the population understands that, and they are typically ahead of the masses. So there is no reason to bend the will of the leaders to the masses of any society. Because eventually, the masses will catch up to the leaders—and everyone can’t be a leader. Only the rare few—and it is among them that the world hinges. There is no other way—the only difference is in knowing what type of person you are. Sheep need to be herded—and they like it. Shepherds do not—and among those shepherds are the Three Percent.
Somehow the world has gone insane. I place the blame on our educations system, but that is even too general. It really comes down to the basic philosophies that we function from as a species—the thought processes which defines our motivations. The insanity is endemic from modern Greece to the local high school kid working at a fast-food restaurant. Most people today do not understand that money is a measurement of productivity and that without productivity it has little value. Matt Walsh from The Blaze incited great controversy during the third week of April 2015 when he properly articulated the demand from the workers of fast food—specifically in Seattle—to be paid $15 dollars an hour. Even Bill O’Reilly has come out in favor of a minimum wage increase to something in the ten-dollar per hour range—and the movement has migrated as far away as Brazil—which is a functioning socialist country. I can understand that Brazil doesn’t understand the economic value McDonald’s brings to their country, but Seattle, Washington should know better. They obviously don’t.
Fast food workers are being incited into a frenzy by socialist organizations to increase the minimum wage to $15 dollars an hour which is simply astonishing to me. By watching the videos on this site—all of them—especially the PBS video, it is just astonishing that so many people do not understand the value of money and have not been taught that their actions—their choices in life—have a direct impact on the results of their life. It wasn’t that long ago that I worked fast food and made only $6 to $7 dollars an hour. I have worked in those places—several of them, and I always appreciated the job. I have worked at McDonald’s, Frisch’s, Wendy’s and had success in those places. I worked hard and used those jobs as a platform to re-launch my life after devastating events that pulled the rug out from under my family at times. I have had much harder conditions in my life than the woman shown in the PBS video above, let me reiterate that. Yet I never contemplated that I should make $15 dollars an hour for that labor. I never contemplated, or lobbied to make $10 per hour. I never planned to live off a fast food job, just to supplement my income so I could keep my wife home with my children. I used fast food jobs as a second job—and I enjoyed the work. I love eating at McDonald’s—to this very day. I love all the places I ever worked, and I appreciated the opportunities they afforded me. Yet we are dealing with an entitlement culture that expects to sit around and get paid for nothing—no actual productivity. Instead, they always think to cheat the system to their advantage and wish to place the burden for their lives on their employer. And they have completely lost touch with how much $15 an hour is in our current economy and what measure it has in value to productivity. To comprehend that read the Matt Welsh quote below followed by the two links.
Dear fast food workers,
It’s come to my attention that many of you, supposedly in 230 cities across the country, are walking out of your jobs today and protesting for $15 an hour. You earnestly believe — indeed, you’ve been led to this conclusion by pandering politicians and liberal pundits who possess neither the slightest grasp of the basic rules of economics nor even the faintest hint of integrity — that your entry-level gig pushing buttons on a cash register at Taco Bell ought to earn you double the current federal minimum wage.
I’m aware, of course, that not all of you feel this way. Many of you might consider your position as Whopper Assembler to be rather a temporary situation, not a career path, and you plan on moving on and up not by holding a poster board with “Give me more money!” scrawled across it, but by working hard and being reliable. To be clear, I am not addressing the folks in this latter camp. They are doing what needs to be done, and I respect that.
Instead, I want to talk to those of you who actually consider yourselves entitled to close to a $29,000 a year full-time salary for doing a job that requires no skill, no expertise and no education; those who think a fry cook ought to earn an entry-level income similar to a dental assistant; those who insist the guy putting the lettuce on my Big Mac ought to make more than the emergency medical technician who saves lives for a living; those who believe you should automatically be able to “live comfortably,” as if “comfort” is a human right.
A monetary value is not a “human right.” If all those fast food workers were paid $15 dollars an hour the measurement of that money would be inflated beyond market parameters. That means that instead of an Xbox game costing $59 it would soon cost roughly $89 dollars because a disproportionate number of the economic population have been paid roughly double their market value without productivity matching it. The value of a video game would be the same, but the measurement of that value would be inflated. The numerical values would be $89 instead of $59—that’s called inflation. So raising the minimum wage does not create wealth. The “world government” will never defeat “poverty” as they pretend to by throwing good money at bad—unproductive behavior. It will never, ever, work—not in a hundred million years. The “rich” can never be looted enough to make the “poor” have value because the bad, unproductive behavior that makes people poor is never dealt with.
Take the woman in the PBS piece, described above. She seems like a nice lady—she’s a line trainer at McDonald’s and wants a “living wage.” She has a criminal background, children without a father in the home, an old car that eats up her money as fast as she makes it and a number of other conditions that she caused for herself to toss her life into an existence of poor productive value. The work she does at McDonald’s is entry-level work and does not command a respectable salary of $15 dollars an hour—which is roughly $29,000 per year. In a dual income home if both husband and wife make $29,000 per year the household income is roughly $58,000 per year which is actually above the average in the United States which in 2013 was $51,939. That’s not bad—it’s a respectable amount of money. To make that kind of money and still keep my wife home with my children I often worked two full-time jobs at approximately that value to bring home the average household median income needed to live off of. Obviously a job at McDonald’s did not pay $15 dollars an hour; it only paid something like $6.50. I would have to work a decent full-time job with some overtime on the weekends to close the gap. I never, no matter how hard things were—expected value for tasks that the market didn’t support.
When I had economics in college I don’t remember it being overtly liberal. At least there the professors seemed to enjoy money as a measurement of GDP and understood these things. So it is baffling how so many people these days believe otherwise. In my levy fights with teachers in the affluent school district I live in where the average median income is around $90,000—well about the national average, I have seen many of the same arguments. Those government employees believe incorrectly that because they teach in such an affluent area that they have the same worth to instruct children essentially liberal points of view. They ignore the laws of economics with the same disregard that someone who wishes to fly might ignore the laws of physics and jump off a cliff expecting to float. Their average wage rate at the government school of Lakota is upwards of $63,000 per year per teacher which is outrageously high for services offered which is essentially a glorified babysitter while those high income earning parents build their careers at the expense often of their families. The teachers in that case were like the fast food workers expecting a union wage that exceeds the market value of the task they offer. The reason I bring it up is because that same lack of economic understanding has been taught to our children so that by the time they enter the job pool they expect jobs at McDonald’s at $15 per hour which is just ridiculous. Such a wage rate breaks the laws of productive equity—the tasks of a burger maker at McDonald’s is not worth the market value of an average income earner in the United States. If McDonald’s were forced to pay such a rate the cost of their services would have to go up to meet the labor because the measurement of that productive effort has a fixed market presence that is rooted to the demand for the product produced—and the effort to produce it. Anyone who doesn’t understand that needs to re-learn everything in their life—because their foundation beliefs are totally incorrect.
I have heard for years what many wealthy people have heard often—why do I have things that others do not—why can I live in a nice area while others cannot? The answer is that it is unlikely that anybody reading this has the ability or the desire to out-work me. I’ve never met a single person who can outwork me. I’m sure somebody out there can challenge my efforts, but it’s highly unlikely they can constantly surpass my work ethic. And of the people I know who are affluent, that is the case in all of them. Very few people just fall off the wagon and make millions of dollars.
I shake my head constantly at the people who buy lottery tickets at a convenience store and actually scratch off the numbers on their steering wheels hoping to win $10 to $1000 dollars for nothing. The same agony is seen in any casino where desperate lazy people toss fate to the wind hoping to win a jackpot of money that thousands of fools have tossed a little bit into. What a stupid idea—lottery tickets and gambling. Everyone who wins such jackpots blows the money nearly as quickly as they made it because the money is not representative of any productive measurement—just wishful sentiment of being able to sit on their ass and buy things without doing anything productive to earn those things. That is not the American dream. That type of behavior is just as stupid as the fast food worker hoping to make an average income by doing nothing more than showing up for an entry-level job.
I blame our education system for these radial and stupid ideas that young people have today. Now we have several generations of people who don’t understand basic economic theories and they actually believe they are entitled to something because their mothers gave birth to them. Teachers believe the community owes them something because they baby sit their children, and the students of those teachers believe that everybody owes them something just because they are human beings—and they are all dreadfully wrong. Dreadfully! $15 dollars an hour is a lot of money—it’s higher than the national average. Just giving that monetary value to people won’t increase the purchasing power of those people. It won’t end poverty. And it won’t make the world a better place. The only way to make the world better is to get up off your ass and work. Work hard—do so every day, and never stop working—and you might earn the right to make $15 an hour. Anything less than that will cause inflation—and that is not beneficial to anybody, anywhere.
Essentially the argument in question revolving around the new Batman Versus Superman: The Dawn of Justice movie is a philosophic argument between Plato/Aristotle and Nietzsche/Ayn Rand. Batman represents the old human concept of law and order whereas Superman represents the overman. It is a compelling argument and one that I didn’t entirely expect to be conveyed so openly in a comic book movie—but here it is.
Of course it should be expected where my sentiments fall. And I’m sure Ayn Rand would be aghast that I compared her to Frederick Nietzsche. She would break things down by stating that she is more like Aristotle whereas Nietzsche is aligned more properly with the sentimental mysticism of Plato—but for this line of thought I’m breaking down philosophic development into the boundaries of western civilization itself. The minds of man have brought us into the modern age on the philosophy established in Greece. Ayn Rand and the concept of the overman is the future—it is the graduation of mankind from the boundaries of intellectual confinement driven by thousands of years of madness.
I have stated my love for both film franchises, of course the Batman films of Christopher Nolan and the Man of Steel film by the same producer. Both Christopher Nolan renditions of the comic legends have heavy doses of Ayn Rand in them—collectivism versus the individual. Yet Hollywood is directly opposed to Ayn Rand currently favoring heavily the Kantian philosophy of collectivism, altruism, and human depravity. The director of the Man of Steel films and the upcoming Dawn of Justice is Zach Snyder who obviously like Christopher Nolan, prefers Ayn Rand and even though Hollywood may not like it—the hot handed director is at the helm and is poised to deliver a powerful money-making franchise to Warner Bros that will compete directly with the wonderful Marvel Avengers films from Disney.
I’m actually going deeper into this line of thought with my Cliffhanger project, but for the masses right now at the start of the 21st century this Batman versus Superman battle needs to happen, and the trailer captured the essence of it very well. All through human history mankind has fallen in love with power and it has corrupted their minds. An overman on the other hand has no such love for power, because they understand the nature of it. Power is not given to other people through democratic measures. Just because one person can command hundreds, perhaps thousands from the lofty perches of a social title of some kind—there is no real power there—just an acknowledgment of collective will. Real power comes from an individual and will remain no matter what circumstances emerge.
In many ways in a modern since the director Ridley Scott surprisingly grasped this concept in his 2000 release of Gladiator, which won best picture that year along with a best actor award for Russel Crowe. Scott isn’t typically an Ayn Rand fan, but he did grasp the power of the individual in that film where Maximus—the protagonist had been the favored general of Marcus Aurelius due to his skill on the battlefield, but once the Emperor died, his son Commodus, deeply jealous of Maximus sought to put the general to death and kill his family. Maximus escaped, but not in time to save his family. The great man lost everything and is captured and toured around as a gladiator—one step always from death. Yet Maximus is so skilled at fighting that he quickly rose back to the top and eventually challenged again the Emperor of Rome as a masterful tactician. It is clearly one of the best films of its kind and is oozing with Ayn Rand strength centering on the individual over the collective. There is a truth in that particular film that Ridley Scott unintentionally released. I have put that truth to test many times and have discovered that it’s immensely accurate. You can take a great man and cast him onto a remote island in the middle of nowhere and he or she—will succeed in spite of the collective efforts to hold them down. Great people are not driven by collective salvation or sacrifice—they are creators of their own fates and can make success out of any situation—because success is an act of creation—not something granted by luck or the “gods.” A great person will always rise back to the top by default and there is a science to it that is predictable.
Zach Snyder seems compelled by this same resiliency and all the characters in his films embody some aspect of this. So it’s no accident that Christopher Nolan put Snyder in charge of the Superman franchise. There really is no better director today who knows how to handle the Man of Steel mythology. Superman is a superior being from another planet who simply wanted to help mankind become greater. He has absolute power, and came from a planet that collapsed under that power—not by his hand, but those of his people. Superman’s job is to ensure that the same thing doesn’t happen to earth. Batman on the other hand is a broken man who lost his parents at a young age and has spent his life righting wrongs essentially out of a vigilante need to rectify justice. But that justice is very terrestrial as it has been formulated around human perception. Batman is a second generation man of wealth meaning he inherited much of what his father made for him, but he is competent enough to sustain that wealth and apply it to fighting crime. Batman is always one step away from falling off the cliff whereas there is never any real danger that Superman would or could fall. Because no matter what happens Superman will always rise back to the top just like Maximus did from the Gladiator. So Snyder in the second film of his Man of Steel series is pitting these two heroes of entirely different philosophies against each other which is essentially the debate of our day.
The essential suspicion is that no man can resist the temptation toward corruption if given the opportunity. So Superman is a threat to the world even though all his efforts have been in trying to save it. But Superman is not a man of this world; he is essentially an alien functioning from an inner self-assurance that is a graduation of mankind’s limits. Yes, he has absolute power, but he also is immune to the desire to abuse it for the sake of social adornment. An overman knows where their power comes from so the appeasement of the masses does nothing for them. The only measure they have is themselves for success. Whereas the traditional western perspective is that if the masses support the power and authority of an individual that power is thus provided to control those people. This ultimately leads to a collapse of the individual ego upon itself because power is not generated from within, but from without.
It was the Fabian socialist George Bernard Shaw who termed the name “overman” or otherwise “superman” in his 1902 play Man and the Superman which would later inspire the comic. In the play established in Act 1 is the concept that the more things a man is ashamed of, the more respectable he is. This of course leads to a disastrous life making men miserable for most of their existence. As Shaw states in his play, “A lifetime of happiness! No man alive could bear it: it would be hell on earth.” This is the world of Batman—he’s never really happy and feels he is a Dark Night that stands in the shade between right and wrong. However Shaw was a socialist who did not believe in the abilities of mankind to overcome such faults so he regulated his sentiments toward collectivism being lead by the elite in charge—which of course took Nietzsche’s work and perverted it into the Nazi regime. A couple of high school kids from Cleveland, Ohio inspired by many science fiction writers from the early 20s—inspired by Shaw’s play—invented the comic Superman to fight for the rights of left-leaning causes during the Red Decade coming out in 1933. The big difference between Nietzsche’s overman and Siegel and Shuster’s “superman” was that one transcended the limitations of society, religion, and conventional morality while still being fundamentally human. The other was alien and gifted with incredible powers choosing honorable human moral codes, holding himself to a higher standard of adherence to them, purposely. Over time Superman has evolved ending up in the middle of those two viewpoints under Zach Snyder’s care. And that is a good and healthy thing.
So Batman versus Superman is more than another popcorn movie about superheroes. It’s a philosophy for our age that needs articulation. A lot of history has passed since Shaw wrote his play but what has come out in the end is a fully fleshed out philosophy that works. That philosophy is what the theme of this upcoming movie is between two of the most well-known and loved superheroes of our modern mythology. Under Zach Snyder’s care I think he’s going to produce something revolutionary and I’m very excited about it. But in that battle I know already who will win. The overman always comes out on top—because it’s in their nature to always do so.
