I wrote yesterday about Richard Best and his Black Lightning Wild West Show. But the location where we shot the video displayed in that article deserves its own mention, The Whip Artistry Studio of Gery Deer in Jamestown, Ohio is a one of the kind temple dedicated to the art and preservation of the bullwhip. Gery is currently a freelance television producer and writer in Dayton, but his heart centers on the preservation of Western Arts—particularly the bullwhip. Like me, he has worked with whips most of his life, and traveled the world providing shows. Gery and his wife Barb have been on major television shows and have been personally endorsed by “A” list celebrities and stuntmen. Gery’s Whip Artistry Studio is a museum of old westerns, autographs from Halle Berry, Antonio Banderas and many others, and a tribute to the golden age of cinema. Gery’s whip holstering systems were used in a film done by The Rock called The Rundown and it was because of that film that Gery specially designed my Cliffhanger quick drawl holster which I wear every day. My bullwhip holster is the only one of its kind and was made by Gery specifically for my use.
It is sometimes impossible when you know such people to revere them properly for what they are. I have known Gery for a long time, and we have so many things in common that I don’t often consider how unusual his life and his studio are. But in a world obsessed with preserving every species of animal that is on the brink of extinction, Gery is fighting to keep alive something that many more progressive modernists hope to force into distant memory, the American cowboy.
As unlikely as it is, Gery’s Jamestown, Ohio studio is all that stands between extinction and advancement of the kind of America that was so beloved by viewers of old Republic Saturday morning matinees, and wonderful silent films like Don Q, Son of Zorro. As many Hollywood producers these days bulk at such things, it was George Lucas who adopted these very Republic serials and made Star Wars, and Indiana Jones. Students at Gery’s studios want to learn to crack a whip like Indiana Jones, because those films inspired them.
Gery and I share a great reverence for Douglas Fairbanks, particularly the old film Son of Zorro. Of course we’ve always loved Indiana Jones, but that character never went to the whip handlers of old, like Douglas Fairbanks, Lash LaRue, and all the Republic Serials—especially another favorite of mine, Zorro’s Fighting Legion. When I wrote my book The Symposium of Justice I dedicated it to that old Republic serial including naming the restaurant Fletcher Finnegan worked at, “Republics.”
My current love of Star Wars is because Lucas shot those films in the way of those old serials—and that just isn’t done by any other film studio. And all that harkens back to Douglas Fairbanks and his whip tricks from Don Q, Son of Zorro. Gery Deer’s whip studio in Jamestown, Ohio is really the last gasp of air holding on to that past attempting to preserve it. Gery and I both came into our love of bullwhips the same way but he choose to actually move into show business. At age 46 I have lived my life much the way Don Diego did in Zorro’s Fighting Legion, only I haven’t pretended to be foppish to save my family and reputation from villains. Gery has taken a non-violent approach to the art, where I’m all about the violence. Even when I was writing The Symposium of Justice, I didn’t feel comfortable writing about the bullwhip heavy action scenes if I had not done all the stunts in real life to confirm their viability. And with stories like that, I have never felt comfortable writing about characters like Fletcher Finnegan (Cliffhanger) from behind an author’s stories. I always felt a responsibility to actually be those characters in real life, otherwise the task was hypocritical. In that regard, I am a lot more political than Gery. Gery has made his living often with a whip, as I have not. But I have used mine to confirm the stunts of Don Q, so that I could write about them knowing what was possible and what wasn’t and what really went on in the life of Zorro in a quest to fight evil.
But in a confusing world where every other influence is competing for attention, that old past ushered in by Douglas Fairbanks is most alive in Jamestown, Ohio, and I love it every time I get to visit. It is like a farmer returning to his land after plowing a field and smelling the fresh soil, or an artist during a late night epiphany—Gery Deer’s The Whip Artistry Studio is grounding to the roots of cinema, justice, and the genuine pursuit of goodness triumphing over evil. I never get tired of visiting, and I suspect that I never will.
Not far off from a personal request from the NBA star LaBrone James to entertain his children, Richard and Donna Best asked me to spend a little time with them freshening up their media presence online. As a traditional couple deeply committed to western arts for several generations now they needed some updated footage to continue offering their Wild West show to audience everywhere continuing a tradition they advanced for more than 3500 live performances. Another mutual friend of ours David Crain has become a prized bull whip maker for Richard’s shows so we all met up at Gery Deer’s studio to film some of Richard and Donna’s act for a new video featuring some of their highlights.
The show is called the Black Lightning Wild West Show and it is a throwback to the old vaudeville performances that were so popular a hundred years ago, to a period in America where value still ruled. So I didn’t have to think twice to help them. Their goals are my goals, and they do a lot of good traveling The United States advancing western arts keeping that tradition alive.
Richard and his wife are regulars at the Annie Oakley Western Showcase that I attend every year and unfortunately we are all so busy, especially David, Gery, and myself that we seldom can align our schedules to meet together outside of Annie Oakley. David Crain from Heartbeat Artistry has emerged as a top whip maker in the field of nylon whips. Being a normally kangaroo hide whip guy who nearly exclusively uses Terry Jacka whips out of Australia, Crain has won me over. His whips are very fast, and balanced. He was the same whip maker who built my grandson his first three bullwhips which were given to him when he was born, and can be seen practicing with below at age 1 and a half.
Nylon whips are really optimal for indoor performances which Richard Best has a great deal of experience with, so he and David Crain have become quite well acquainted with each other. It was good to get together with them for a day of whip cracking, eating pizza and catching up on stories that have occurred for the last several of months. Of their most unusual adventures since we all last spoke at the 2013 Annie Oakley festival was the Labrone James party for his children where Richard and Donna were brought in along with live circus animals particularly a giant elephant to personally perform for James and his entourage.
One of the coolest new tricks done by Richard and Donna was one where his wife held a dime in her fingertips that Richard cut out fearlessly. That trick was also seen in the promotional video put together above. They were very good at it, and before filming routinely littered the floor of the studio with dimes knocked from his wife’s fingers. A dime is a pretty small target.
There is a lot wrong with the world, but the Black Lightning Wild West Show is not one of them. Just knowing they are out there doing the good work of preserving western arts makes me very happy. It was a pleasure to assemble some of their footage for marketing purposes demanded by our modern times. Business cards and word of mouth referrals are no longer sufficient in our high-tech world, so western arts must adapt accordingly. The tradition is still very low tech, but the method of letting employers like Labrone James know about them must compete directly with everything else out there. So I was happy to help.
We ended the day with the typical reserve. I can’t think of a single time that we’ve all gathered where I didn’t leave feeling like I under-anticipated the level of fun that we’d all have. This time was no different. We found ourselves stalling for time once I had gathered up all the shots I needed. We extended the day unnecessarily for another hour, but eventually it did come to a close. I spent the rest of my evening playing X-Wing with my brother at my niece’s birthday party, David Crain and his family went back to his whip making shop in a Middletown backyard, and Gery went back to being an independent television producer in the Dayton area where he just recently completed a segment with Phil Donahue. The sun set on the day, but it rose just a bit higher for the art of the Wild West. And in that field, the Black Lightning Wild West Show is carrying proudly a tradition in America that is nearly as old as the nation, and important to its very soul.
Those pesky zoning people are back at it in West Chester, Ohio picking on Danielle Richardson who recently moved to one of the most successful and financially lucrative areas in the Midwest. Like cowards in the night, they left a message on her door informing her that she would not be able to keep the nine chickens that she has in her back yard because it’s in violation to a ridiculous zoning resolution. Richardson was told that her pet chickens would have to go because West Chester Twp. does not permit farm animals in residential neighborhoods, according to spokeswoman Barb Wilson. “In our definition, when you talk about farm animals, poultry are clearly identified as such, chickens, horses, cows, sheep, goats would be considered farm animals.”
What Danielle Richardson doesn’t know is that the zoning terrorists who left the note on her door are using zoning to carry West Chester Twp. into a city classification as local progressives understand that before such a measure can be made, references to West Chester’s rural past must be erased. Farm animals have been a part of West Chester’s past for as long as I can remember. I remember when cows came up to the fence behind the Wendy’s restaurant by the corner of Cox Road and Tylersville, and half a dozen homes between there and the Lakota high school had farm animals around their homes. That symbol of self-reliance, of the farmer and country living is what made West Chester attractive for development, because people did not want to live in a city and liked driving by large fields, cows, horses and other farm animals—images that they couldn’t get in a city environment.
But slowly these new residents have changed the nature of West Chester from a rural community to one of a progressive New England suburb, and with that image has come a zoning adherence to ICLEI, (International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives) which is the architect behind the United Nations Agenda 21 strategies. The eventual goal of Agenda 21 is to pull residents out of the suburbs and back into the cities where their behavior can be carefully controlled through regulation—which is what is happening to Richardson.
Zoning officials do not want residents to be self-reliant, to have chickens where they can produce their own eggs. In Richardson’s neighborhood she gives her neighbors free eggs as a gift. This is something the ICLEI people do not want to see—because they want to control the issuance of eggs. They want Richardson to get her eggs from the local Kroger where regulators have their hands in on the action. They certainly don’t want to support self-sustaining lifestyles—which is the real message behind their angst toward farm animals. They certainly aren’t protecting the home values of neighborhoods with such zoning regulations, because the homes were built around the farm culture that is at the roots of West Chester.
My grandparents had a farm on Seward road very close to the Erie Canal which was some of the best farmland in the world. The valley below Beckett Ridge which flooded often had some wonderful farms which extended all the way to the west into Fairfield. My grandfather married my grandmother by taking a canal boat to the east where he met her at a dance at Port Union, which was next to the current drive-thru that is diagonal from the United Dairy Farmers at the corner of Port Union Road and 747. Many people have no knowledge that the Erie Canal ran right along those railroad tracks and is still visible as a relic to West Chester’s past. I grew up knowing many of the farmers in the region. They bailed hay, slaughtered cows, had horses, goats and just about every kind of animal imaginable. At a minimum they had chickens—because that is how they had eggs for breakfast. Over the last 30 years, people who wanted to be close to these activities moved to West Chester, people like Danielle Richardson.
With the new homes came pretentious progressives and their big government regulations and social tampering trained in the ways of ICLEI. The far away entity of The United Nations is jealous of American self-reliance, and they certainly find the farmers of North America repulsive—and through Agenda 21 wish them regulated out of existence. That is how zoning ordinances like the one Barb Wilson cited came to be. But that is not how it’s supposed to be. Those ICLEI worshippers desire to change West Chester, not preserve it, and getting rid of chickens in a neighborhood are part of their strategy.
Danielle Richardson made some good arguments in her reasoning for keeping her pet chickens. She used all the ICLEI buzz words, like “sustainable living” and “green” friendly which are the weapons zoning typically uses to alter behavioral lifestyles. After all, what is greener than raising chickens and eating the eggs produced by them? But that is not what zoning has in mind when they talk about “sustainable living.” They wish to handcuff human beings so that nature can prevail and incorporate all living into city-state control and regulation. And they plan to pay for their offensive through taxes that adversely destroy private ownership of property. Danielle Richardson took the spirit of West Chester back the other way—toward self reliance, which is what ICLEI finds so repulsive about American lifestyles.
West Chester has within its zoning administrators, as does virtually every community in America—progressive terrorists who salivate for the opportunity to regulate society into a direction of their strategic choosing. That choosing was not shaped by the traditions of a community like West Chester but the far away fools at The United Nations and their ICLEI arm of bureaucrats. It is likely that Richardson had no idea that she would cause so much of a ruckus over her personal desire to have chickens on her property, but ICLEI seeks to regulate how private property owners use their land. The strategy at ICLEI is to impose themselves on private property ownership to the point where taxation and heavy regulation make investment not attractive. At that point government will own those properties and control what goes on there—and chickens will be a thing of the past. Government regulators want to be the one to place eggs on the doorsteps of neighbors instead of Danielle Richardson because they want to gain control over what people eat and when they eat it. In that way, they want to change West Chester, not preserve it. They want to remove from its past the image of self-reliance and personal sovereignty and change it into a city of tax producing citizens under the control of petty regulators and zoning officials.
I have a personal recommendation for Danielle Richardson–at the zoning hearing, tell those idiots what you really think of them. Let them have it, because the next step in that process is in your favor. There are friendly ears above the zoning bureaucrats who know exactly what is going on, and you’ll get to keep your chickens. Just don’t yield to the zoning people. This fight goes far beyond chickens and eggs—but to the heart of what it means to be a property owner in America—during a time when the rest of the world wants to be the supplier of the eggs. Yet they wish to do so without having chickens to lay them. ICLEI is about to discover which comes first, the chicken or the egg. Danielle Richardson already knows that answer—and the rest of the world is about to find out. They want to control the eggs, but they don’t respect the chickens that make them.
First of all, once the current hippie generation of gun grabbing statist oriented big government slugs begin to fade away into the sunset, public schools are going to find themselves with a major crisis. They have moved way too far to the political left to properly serve American children and their families. Schools in the very near future will be forced into major overhauls of their thinking. Current public school overreaction to everything related to personal firearms will prove destructive to their future survival. Most of the young people schools are picking on now will become very pro gun in their 20s and 30s, and they will become voters and will lash back against these overly liberal tax funded institutions. The reason is that during all the progressive experimentation that has went on around their lives, the feminist issues that removed their mothers from the home leaving kids to raise themselves, the global peace progressive tripe taught to them in their schools, and their television shows laced with deep left-leaning political arguments–video games have been their only refuge—and guns are a big part of that world. Most young people love guns because of movies and video games and will grow up to be different adults than the current hippie driven relics from the American 60s and that will spell doom for public schools.
The situation is so out of control in current government schools that in New Jersey recently, Glen Meadow Middle School has added its own bizarre entry in the ever-lengthening list of public school policies not aligned with American society according to an article shown below by Legal Insurrection. According to Ethan Chaplin, he was suspended for twirling a pencil in math class. He says that a student, who had been allegedly bullying him, yelled to the teacher that “He’s making gun motions, send him to juvie.” The school responded by suspending Chaplin and the Vernon Schools Superintendent Charles Maranzano insisted that it is the only appropriate response.
The kid’s father, Michael Chaplin, was so outraged that he took the step of recording a conversation between himself, the school’s principal and a guidance counselor — and then posted it on YouTube. It is not clear from the article if this was done with consent but the absence of any allegation of unlawful recording suggests that it was a legal or consensual taping.
The mention of the word “gun” was evidently enough of a “red flag” to launch an investigation onto Ethan. He was put through 5 hours of psychiatric testing, where his mental state was evaluated to determine if he was a threat to other students.
When I was in school I carried around chrome cap gun in my pocket every day, and I often shot it off in the cafeteria during lunch period. The explosion was so loud that it reverberated all through the school. Usually, it would only provoke some startled glances for a few moments, and then everyone would go back to what they were doing. Today, if a kid did what I used to do, the school would be put in lockdown as the FBI would be called in to investigate. Today if a kid would be caught doing the things I did as a kid; they would be locked away in a straight jacket and labeled a menace to society.
Every single day in grade school during recess I played war with my friends on the playground. We made gun shapes with our fingers and would shoot at each other. Every day! It was part of growing up as a boy. We were doing far worse than what Ethan Chaplin did. Public schools have used every tragedy to advance their crusade against the Second Amendment, but eventually it will be to their own detriment. Today in 2014 there are sympathetic ears to listen to their panic driven neurosis. But what has happened is that the gun culture is more alive today than ever before. It is likely that most children know more about guns and ammunition because of video games like Call of Duty, and Gears of War than I did because the games they play tell them all they need to know—and that is a good thing. The closest I could ever get to automatic weapons as a kid was seeing them in movies and my own imagination. Kids toady can fire them in a virtual environment—and they do so for countless hours—more hours than they spend in schools. Progressivism has taken away their parents so video games have raised the children of an entire generation. Most video games have some element of violence to them. But what it always comes down to is kids are playing the same games I did when I was young. But instead of pretending to shoot with their fingers, they do it on video games. The role and human necessity is the same—testing prowess against others, facing down an enemy, and finding ways to win against impossible odds. Most young males have these types of thoughts—they are testosterone driven natural reactions to the role of being a man.
Public schools ran by former hippie generation statists have gambled with human civilization and lost. They assumed that they could socially engineer out of human desire a need to play with guns and test courage and bravery against other people. The results of that experimentation are a huge failure. More than ever, young people are playing games of prowess against each other either online, or in massive gaming tournaments like Warhammer, X-Wing Minatures, or Magic the Gathering. This government school in New Jersey is just the latest in a long list of public schools caught in their failed support of progressive ideology, and social engineering to manifest into the exact opposite reaction. When young people like Ethan Chaplin become voters—how does anybody think he’s going to vote? Is he going to support the statist school that suspended him for no reason at all? Of course not.
Public schools would have served American society far better if they embraced the Second Amendment instead of fighting against it. They should actually teach gun responsibility in schools, because guns will be a part of the lives of American children either directly or indirectly. But the government schools picked ideology over logic and it will be to their own doom. They took a risk and decided to use tax payer money to radically transform society, and all they have achieved is out-of-touch panicky failure.
Young boys in a capitalist society, which is what America is supposed to be, will always seek to improve themselves in competition with other boys. They will pretend to shoot each other in combat, they will play sports against each other, and they will concoct games of every type to develop their skills against an opponent. Some of the best games I have seen today are the community of X-Wing players that is emerging on the tabletop gaming market. The goal is to blow up each other in combat, but always before and after the games the players like and respect each other—because deep down inside everyone knows that the end game is to get better, and that can only happen when the competition is good. The same tendency is seen in business. Competition is good. Not everyone can be the best, but it is fun to play the lottery ticket of life and try to be the best. And it is even better to respect those who do become the best because competition drove that excellence out of the individual.
Public schools have chosen to align themselves with global equality—which is a long desired tenant of socialism. And they have doomed themselves. 10 years from now, the sympathy that parents have toward these panicky school reactions will only increase. There will be more fathers like Michael Chaplin who will stick up for their children. The answer to the Chaplin family is to homeschool their son, instead of waiting for the school to accept the young man back into the collective student body only to be brainwashed by more progressive tripe. It is the school that’s wrong, not the child. It is the schools that are on the wrong side of American teaching, not that kids that make gun shapes with their hands. It is the schools that are instructing the wrong version of history and have been caught doing it. And the failure is their responsibility completely. The inevitable doom is on their shoulders only—and the pain they will experience is a result of their lost gamble.
Do not feel sorry for the public schools when they cry for mercy in the years to come. They did it to themselves.
A lot of people who do not know history well, think that the term “Winter Soldier” is an invention of Marvel Comics for the recently released Captain America movie. It is however named after the 1971 Winter Soldier hearings held during the Vietnam War where veterans talked about the atrocities they had imposed on the enemy and civilians that made them feel terrible. America had a hard time with the information because it took away the illusion of feel good patriotism that many wanted to believe about American troops and showed that given guns, superior firepower, and a typical bureaucratic chain of command typical human beings American or otherwise will abuse their power easily even under conditions of minor stress. Things get much, much worse under major stress. On a previous article about Agenda 21 I showed the video published by the socialist organization Democracy Now featuring another Winter Soldier conference held in 2008 where a former member of the 8th Marines from the Kilo Company of the 3rd Battalion revealed all his war crimes to a panel and audience. Democracy Now of course was salivating over the testimony because it was proof of how corrupt American imperialism was throughout the world, and put pressure on American military figures to withdrawal from engagements. As much as I do not support socialists, tree hugging hippies, communist greenie winnies, and environmental wackos, the video of Jon Michael Turner at the Winter Solider testimony was brutal, and evidence to a much larger impending problem centering on The United Nations and their pursuit of Agenda 21. No matter how well-trained, no matter how well equipped, no matter how morally correct one might think that they are—when powerful weapons are put into the hands of kids like Turner and rewarded for killings just to get a 4 day pass by his superior officers—lots of innocent people will be harmed. Under the United Nations proposed Agenda 21, which they hope to keep under control at the local level of government—globally through ICLEI (International Council for Local environmental Initiatives) the end game is massive control of the population by police using force to instigate fear and respect.
Now that some time has passed and people are somewhat ready to deal with the reality of Agenda 21—largely because of Glenn Beck’s recent novel which has been stewing about for a few years now, it is time to declare that America should abandon the United Nations Agenda 21 proposals unequivocally. That means that local politicians who support ICLEI must be harassed so to find themselves between the desires of the U.N. and their friends and neighbors who elect them—so to prevent future Winter Soldier events that eclipse those of the Vietnam and Iraq experiences. The atrocities have not yet been committed, and to prevent them all participants who support ICLEI must have the fight taken to them before we find future Winter Soldier’s on our doorsteps shooting men in the head so that they can rape their wives and daughters. If all the elements of our present day are added up, that is the end result for our eventual futures. The atrocities won’t happen in some far away land but right in our back yards in America and it will be our local politicians trained to support ICLEI who will bring it to us.
In my local community there is a police levy that is up for renewal. Just six months ago voters passed a tax increase against themselves to support the local school, which is largely committed to The United Nations backed Common Core program. Public schools seek to place all children under the control of government nurturing and away from individual instruction by parents. Now the police want more money which is desired because government jobs are overpaid so to get viable candidates to hold those positions even when they suspect that organizations like ICLEI are up to no good in relation to American sovereignty. When school teachers and cops make $75,000 to $85,000 a year with a nice pension that they wouldn’t get anywhere else, they tend to put on the blinders to potential dangers—because knowledge of those dangers is inconvenient to their paychecks. So like the bored idiots that they are, they have blanketed my community with their campaign signs asking for residents to sign up for another ICLEI initiative, an expansion of law enforcement. In Liberty Township where all this is taking place, there are two large developments that the trustees are promoting which indicates an increased need for police in the future, the Carriage Hill development and the Liberty Way development, both of which I support as economic engines—but detest the Agenda 21 type of ICLEI initiatives promoted by the zoning department headed by Jon West.
Jon West once went to Hilton Head Island to make his argument against the newly built Frisch’s restaurant just off Cincinnati Dayton in Eastern Liberty Township. He lobbied as Director of Planning and Zoning for the Liberty Township Zoning Commission to prevent a Big Boy statue from going up in front of the proposed restaurant. His background is as a planner for the Butler County Planning Division. He worked previously at Entran PLC, and was educated at The University of Cincinnati. He is associated with the American Planning Association and the American Institution of Certified Planners. Jon West likely has no idea what Agenda 21 is, but he has been accused of advancing it into Liberty Township. What he does know is that the U.C. fully supports the Climate Protection Action Plan, (The Green Cincinnati Plan) published on June 19, 2008 and that the alliance between the University of Cincinnati and ICLEI is centered on that document which is the presiding reason behind the streetcar project in Cincinnati. As young zoning planners full of career zeal and gumption this is how local bureaucrats are trained to move into their communities so to invoke Agenda 21 strategies. Jon obviously doesn’t care about the minds behind ICLEI, he has simply taken what was taught to him and applied it to the world, just as thousands just like him are making a real menace of things in America to this very day. He’s certainly not alone in this assault, he is but one of many—but is the example here because of my reference to the politics of my community as a sample.
Of that same community, even though the Carriage Hill development is a community of upper priced homes, there are apartments designated to fill that land use plan which was established many years ago on that section of 747. The way West softens up developers to the ICLEI philosophy is to pick small fights with them over things like Big Boy signs in front of Frisch’s restaurants, or leaving the garage door up at West Chester Lawn and Garden store giving zoning a position of authority to harass business owners on, a similar way that police harass political targets. This makes developers much more willing to bend a little when constructing projects so to fulfill the Agenda 21 desires of zoning and planning. There will be Agenda 21 implementations into Carriage Hill and Liberty Way which is a concession that European planners anticipated twenty years ago when they came up with all these schemes through ICLEI and Socialist International advancing the dialogue. What European planners really wanted was wealth redistribution and a plan to return development projects back to the earth by removing human beings from it. With such planned expansions come higher taxation and market drivers such as apartment dwellers who tend to vote in support of school levies which feed programs like Common Core at Lakota with mind numbed teachers to teach what the state tells them to. Liberty Township currently doesn’t have a police department. The Butler County sheriff’s department patrols the area and this new levy is being sold as a way to continue that application of police resources. However, Liberty Township Trustee Christine Matacic is supporting this police levy because the new developments will need increased police coverage and the local public schools of Lakota need officers to protect students from school shootings—which is all the rage from recent news reports. But all these demands on resources were caused by land use plans created by planners trained to support ICLEI and its parent group Socialist International long ago before the money was even lined up to develop Carriage Hill and Liberty Way.
The results of those planned developments are more cops in future elections. Liberty Township will desire to have its own police force, which will then cause more taxes on property owners. And of course Lakota will be looking for another school levy sometime around 2017, then again around 2023. Eventually, after another 20 years when the economy collapses under the weight of all that taxation, and businesses flee the heavy regulations that people like Jon West spent his life creating in Liberty Township guided by the invisible hand of ICLEI for the entire duration of a career, everything will spiral out of control. When that happens property values will drop, like they have in modern-day Evendale, Fairfield, Mt. Healthy and Lincoln Heights, the nice apartments of Carriage Hill today will become tomorrow’s “Fountains” and crime will move into the neighborhood as businesses flee high taxes. Jon West will by then be retired and living in a condo somewhere, Christine Matacic will also be retired as well as all the current police officers. But new ones will replace them—and these will be trained to Common Core standards, and will get even more exposure to ICLEI than West did—and they will tamper more with local government than ever, crushing innovation and basically turning nice Liberty Township into another version of dilapidated Detroit. Yet the police will still try to sustain themselves and will be looking for something to do, and will become tomorrow’s Winter Soldiers.
If Clinton has his way, his wife will be President of the United States and he can then bring America under full control of The United Nations ending Constitutional sovereignty and upon command those Liberty Township cops will answer U.N. mandates which is when the really sinister aspects of Agenda 21 kick in. At that time police will kick in our doors, have their way with our families, steal our property and begin the process of pushing citizens back toward the cities where Cincinnati will have new apartments and a streetcar waiting on them for transportation. The developments of Liberty Township will be bulldozed flat so that the earth can reclaim the world and people will be heavily regulated with a kind of religious zeal to protect the environment from human minds. The religious freaks at Socialist International, the people ultimately behind ICLEI, the University of Cincinnati involvement with Climate Protection Action Plan, (The Green Cincinnati Plan) and the training of zoning planners like Jon West will then achieve their preservation of Mother Earth—which was always the goal.
Meanwhile the United Nations will get their army paid for by the American tax payer as the demand was created by American politicians artificially through zoning and planning. New rules at a feverish pace will be enacted against human impact with the earth and to enforce those laws will be the police officers of today’s levy attempts. They are tomorrow’s Winter Soldiers, the armed United Nations gatekeepers who kick down doors, rape innocent women, cut off the heads of our neighbors and steal everything we ever built and desired to build in our lifetimes. These new Winter Soldiers will do it because they can, because there is inherit in human beings a desire to abuse power especially when they have guns, and the rest of society doesn’t. And mankind will regress backwards into the mold of a primitive.
The only way to stop all that was mentioned above is to stop people like Jon West now, before the damage is irreparable. The path is already established. The government workers like Jon West, Christine Matacic, and Butler County Sheriff Jones do not have the ability to think so deeply into things, because they are government workers—they are just cogs in the wheel of progress—only that progress was not designed in Philadelphia during the Revolutionary War in America, but in Europe under the organization Socialist International inspired by the communist attempts of the Soviet Union and the philosophic works of Immanuel Kant, and Karl Marx. The European will not be sympathetic to the stories of the future Winter Soldiers who will testify that they cut off the arms and legs of men as they slowly bled to death watching police and military personally rape the women they love before killing the women too—for no other reason but to get a few days off by their division commander. That is the future of Agenda 21 and if it is not rejected completely—every green initiative included—every electric car, every smart car, every smart meter, every instance of Common Core, every carbon credit—it will be in your very near future. If you are under 40, you will see it for sure. If you are under 60, you will likely see it. If you are under 30, you will wonder how we arrived at a place where you are forced to live in a downtown apartment sharing space with three other people and suffering through water rations even though there is a river 500 yards away that will be illegal to drink from. Places like Liberty Township will be gone and all their developments bulldozed flat becoming vast sums of farmland once again. And the lives of the humans will be regulated to that of a dog managed by their masters at the United Nations and their blind, zealous dedication to the goddess Mother Earth and the sacrifices she demands. The Winter Soldiers of tomorrow are the cops looking for levy support, and are suing current trustees because they dare to stand in the way of Agenda 21 initiatives. This is not wild fantasy, or anti-levy propaganda—it is a fact of life as clear as an open window with the glass removed. It is yet another way that communists seek to destroy capitalism—this time they are coming under the disguise of compassion and safety—but behind their smiles are the teeth of a wolf looking to consume us all.
The European socialists are coming after American life–they are in fact at war with it. You better defend it before the Winter Soldiers arrive at your door. You stand a better chance now than you will then.
I didn’t read Glenn Beck’s novel co-authored by Harriet Parke Agenda 21 at first because I was already well versed with the danger of that United Nations strategy, and wasn’t in the mood for another dystopian novel. Soylent Green, Brave New World, and Atlas Shrugged are quite enough so another one didn’t have much to contribute to my intellectual expansion. However, as my favorite book store recently closed, and Agenda 21 had been on a list of mine to read for a long time—I picked it up as the last book that I bought at that local treasure. Recently I had a small window open to read that novel, so I took it and was impressed with the results. Written from a first person perspective as a teenage girl coming to age behind the concentration camp lifestyle of a possible earth future, the novel attempts to speak at a level that most 15-year-olds understand, and was quite successful. It was a good novel that tells the masses what is really going on with many of the FEMA camps and conspiracies that are swirling around through very secretive government circles. Many mainstream pundits believe falsely that the topics surrounding Agenda 21, the novel is conspiracy theory—but they’re not. They are quite real and have their birth in Europe and have in fact happened in that beleaguered conglomeration of war-torn nations many times. However, to many Americans, the premise of Agenda’s 21’s concentration camps for United States citizens seems unfathomable. That is another mistake because the foundations are already established—not as a primary objective, but a failsafe in case everything goes terribly wrong—which it will.
If you have ever dealt with a zoning department dear reader, you have dealt with agents of Agenda 21 so slickly trained; they don’t even know that they are part of the conspiracy. CLICK HERE TO REVIEW PREVIOUS ARTICLES ON AGENDA 21 PUBLISHED AT THIS SITE. For instance, many of them receive their training at college universities for their professions and approach their jobs with the same slanted view of the world that attorneys do—people who spend a lot of time in typically liberal institutions are trained to think in the way of the European. In the case of zoning professionals, the concepts of carbon credits and micromanaged government imposed social living is not a foreign concept—they are often very receptive to progressive sentiments because of their training. In my community it is the tendency to put roundabouts at major roadways typically found in Europe that is the most dominating giveaway. Roundabouts are stupid and only slow down traffic—but are concepts quite common in Europe. Just across town at the famous By-Pass-4 scenario “improvements” are the bright idea of bureaucrats in Fairfield who came up with the foolish concept of preventing no left turns into traffic for safety reasons. So now east/west traffic wishing to intersect with By-pass-4 have to turn south then do a U-turn at special intersections to turn back north. The reasoning proposed was to prevent driver’s side accidents—but the traffic flow is an obvious regression of human transportation. Older people like me hate it, but younger people like it, because they have already been trained at public schools to accept such government tampering, and human micromanagement. I have many times traveled down that road back in the good ol’ days where I could travel 100 MPH with no problem. Not anymore. You can hardly get up to 60 or 70 before there is another traffic light that stops progress. These are the methods of the highly educated government bureaucrats who often are attracted to jobs that will help them with Agenda 21 type advancement. They see such “improvements” as being good for society because they “slow” people down for their own good—and save lives.
All anyone need do is take this behavior out several decades toward the logical mathematical conclusion, and that becomes the events of Glenn Beck’s Agenda 21 novel. Out of a reverence to nature—as an effort to put Mother Nature before the needs of mankind, government has regulated everything that are inventions of a human mind. The paradox is that government does not yield completely to the forces of nature as they do not consider that man’s mind is a force of nature. Human beings in the Agenda 21 novel have been essentially placed in cages so that nature can prevail, and all human beings who have not been killed in purges are forced to serve the earth primarily and without question. This of course is harder for people who remember what personal freedom used to be like. But for children taught under the new United Nations “Republic” where American sovereignty has long been extinguished—it is no problem at all. They are essentially taken from their parents at an early age to be raised by the state—the community. Traditional child instruction by two parents—one male—one female is prohibited because the foundation beliefs of a child must be built on the needs of collective salvation, not the individual’s family connections.
The evidence to this behavior is already present, public schools want parents to admit their children into pre-school classes much earlier than age 5 now. It wouldn’t take much to mandate that children must attend pre-kindergarten classes from birth. President Obama has already alluded to this sentiment. It’s already mandated that children must attend school at age 5, so it wouldn’t take much to continue driving that number the other way until babies are taken from a parent at the hospital upon their birth. Guns are another Agenda 21 concern; The United Nations does not want to deal with an armed public—because they are difficult to manage. They want to be the only ones armed, so The United Nations is seeking at every turn to erode away American love of The Second Amendment. They also seek the destruction of organized religion so that serving Mother Earth becomes the primary concern of earth’s human population. They fully plan to make earth conservation into a religious cult so that those two values are aligned—this trend is already well underway. Another big Agenda 21 item that happened overnight really is the switch of light bulbs from the good incandescent light bulbs starting in Europe and being followed closely by America. At Home Depot yesterday my wife wanted me to pick out new ceiling fans and I looked hard and there was not one incandescent light bulb to be found in the store. Every light bulb now on the market is the new coiled energy-efficient fluorescent light bulbs that do not come on right away and take a moment to light up. Who are these light bulbs good for—not the human race? It only took five years for incandescent light bulbs to become extinct. They were regulated out of existence and there was barely a whimper among the populations of the world. People predictably picked up the new coiled Agenda 21 bulbs to use and went back to their televisions and internet porn giving the matter not a second thought.
Ohio and several American states are sitting on vast reserves of coal, oil, and natural gas, but the government will not allow the exploitation of those resources because their goal is to drive up energy costs pushing people away from traditional fossil fuel sources which pollute the earth instead of viewing such energy methods as a jumping off point for taking human beings to a future of newer cleaner methods. The governments of the world, trained under Agenda 21 guidelines believe they must micromanage this process so to save the earth from the terrible human being, the entire economy of places like Kentucky and West Virginia have been artificially altered to prevent the extraction of coal as an energy source by government bureaucrats raised by their college institutions to believe in Agenda 21 values.
The new Common Core standards in public schools are confirming all the things I have said about government schools for three decades. They aren’t trying to teach children to be smarter and good free loving adults—they are programming them to be servants to Agenda 21. These children compared to traditional pre Agenda 21 children are explored at length in the new Glenn Beck novel. The government raised children have all types of insecurity issues directly related to the micromanagement by corrupt government institutionalism and have lost the ability to even sexually reproduce. By the time the events of the Agenda 21 novel take place, human beings have lost every major freedom they ever had—including eating—in trade for the security provided to them by the state—the desire to be universally equal to everyone else. This is an attractive prospect to the masses who are either not skilled enough, or too lazy to work so to be exceptional, and they are the ones who win democratic elections. As public schools train kids under Common Core standards to think more and more toward Agenda 21 values, their individuality is less and less valuable to them—until it is eventually gone. At that point in time, the events of the novel Agenda 21 will be in effect and the governments of the world will go through their purges, implement their concentration camps and enact their next planned phase which has been in place since essentially the 90s, during Bill Clinton’s administration. Heck, to be fair, it goes back to Bush the Senior really—he was one of the first American presidents to fully embrace these United Nations global desires. A lot has happened in full support of The United Nations Agenda 21 strategy in just 20 years. 20 more years, America is at risk of being everything contemplated in Agenda 21 the novel. Virtually every human being trained at a public school and instructed within the liberal university systems throughout the world are at risk of being lost to this new religion of Agenda 21. We see it presently in our roads, our zoning, our light bulbs, smart meters, and war against coal. We will see it tomorrow in our brain-dead youth taught through Common Core standards how to be “good citizens” as exhibited in Agenda 21 the novel.
There is still too much private investment that prevents governments from doing exactly what occurred in Agenda 21, the novel. But that is eroding by the day. Ultimately, the events in the novel were caused by government mismanagement—which is a mainstay of all their activities so a predetermined conclusion is self-evident. When they decided to organize society into concentration camps killing those who refused to adhere to Agenda 21, they had lost control and sought to imprison the human race to preserve the earth. That is not a farfetched proposition when compared to the actions of governments witnessed just over the incandescent bulb controversy. I have no doubt that FEMA as a contingency plan has all the crazy concentration camps set up all over The United States as Alex Jones fears. There is one outside of Indianapolis which I’ve seen, and another up in Lima, part of a converted prison. The masses won’t be at these facilities, only a select few to try to keep society going after the government screws up human kind completely, destroying the economy with Keynesianism, ruling with socialism, and removing religion in favor of worship of the earth. They won’t have a choice but to attempt self-preservation with the methods described in Agenda 21, the novel.
I know beforehand my role. I will not be in one of those camps, and I will not be disposed of during the eventual purge. I will be the organizer of the resistance also described in the novel. I will be the one wrecking supply chains, harassing government officials in their sleep and driving them insane with worry. And I’ll enjoy doing it—believe me. I am actually looking forward to it. I can build my own stuff; I don’t need them, or their grid to do whatever I want—so the terror of the Agenda 21 novel is not something I can relate to. I will never walk an “energy board” or support the “Republic” named in the book. I am simply waiting for the eventual screw-up to occur before I pull everyone together. Legally, obviously, we must wait for the government to cross the line—and when they do, it will be time to go to work—because the writing is on the wall. Unless people change their behavior, the terrors of the Agenda 21 novel are an inevitable conclusion—which is why Glenn Beck published the novel. He hoped that it might wake people up in time to at least save America. However, the rest of the world can’t be helped. They are too far committed already. They will suffer for it. America is still up for grabs. There will always be resistance in America even if the masses throw themselves before the feet of government officials in trade for security—and ease of work. But there is a small hope that Common Core will be eradicated, that taxation reduction will destroy the money which these government bureaucrats feed off of, and that our youth won’t be lost to Agenda 21 programming. I have hope for them yet, where I don’t think Glenn Beck does. I believe the youth will rise up to revolt, and when they do, I’ll be there to help them achieve their objectives and teach them how to do it. Because I will never live the life of the people in Agenda 21—heck, I couldn’t stand modern-day Europe for all the same reasons. It’s just a matter of time—and if you want to know more, then you should read Agenda 21 by Glenn Beck and Harriet Parke. It is an accurate portrayal of a very possible future projected by the information of our current social path of self-imposed destruction.
One really stupid misconception that modern American workers have is this nutty notion that doctors and lawyers run the businesses that employ them. They do not. Doctors may wish they did run business, but they don’t. A doctor’s note may legally get an employee off their job for some sniffle, but the desire for the productivity needed by the job vacancy while that excused employee is recovering from their illness persists in spite of whatever a doctor puts on a piece of paper. A doctor’s note does not make productivity go away, just the responsibility that an employee has to fulfill the parameters of employment. This is a situation that has been compounded by attorneys for many years that have successfully brought law suits to companies trying to employ people, but finding that they have employee rebellions driven by public school socialism that believe jobs exist in nature and that people have a right to them. Ambulance chasing lawyers have proven in sympathetic courts that jobs should be protected and have inadvertently brought about a situation of catastrophe in American business—mountains of paperwork compliance and armies of employees protected by law for every sniffle, sore muscle, and mental anguish that unproductive human beings can concoct so that they can sit on a couch and watch tabloid daytime television. Lawyers and doctors have very nearly destroyed American productivity.
I am reminded of this trend as the arguments for higher minimum wages are cast forward by the same foolish politicians who gave rise to lawyers manipulation of the medical industry—who handed to doctors the power to write a note to excuse unproductive behavior. Advanced by activists lawyers looking to make a name for themselves and their eight years of study to be accepted into a BAR association of similar such parasites, the intention has never been protection of capitalism, individual sovereignty, but collective salvation and the slow spread of socialism through trusted doctors to insecure patients. Those parasites have taken American ingenuity and strangled it into a nearly lifeless corpse and they could care less as they travel for month-long vacations to Bahama vacations destinations—oblivious to their detrimental impact of their legal activism.
Government regulations of every kind from zoning to safety compliance officers trained also with six to eight years of college socialism believe they are doing the American worker good by defending their lives and limb from the evil tyrannies of the employer. But all they have really done is destroy the desire to hire extra employees and replace those they do employ with machines to avoid the pain-in-the-ass of providing a job to an employee planning to sit home under a doctor’s excuse.
A machine does not show up after five days of missing work with a doctor note excusing their adventures on the couch expecting the work that needed to be done to still be sitting there waiting on them. It was attorneys who painted companies into corners with lawsuits giving doctors so much power over modern productivity.
Every company in America is now terrified of the pharmaceutical stooges known as doctors—those drug dealers who pass out treatments in the form of “medication” to keep large lobby groups in Washington rich and well equipped for District of Columbia strip joints. These same doctors get kids addicted to methylphendate (Ritalin), adults onto high blood pressure and thyroid medication, and older people onto regiments of pills that their tattered relics of bodies depend on for substance once addicted. Most doctors are agents of a slow death making every ailment seem like a catastrophe that will bring the world to a close if their advice is not followed. Who gave these people this authority–lawyers and sympathetic socialist courts.
About six years ago I had ACL surgery to repair an injury I incurred playing basketball. The torn ACL was something that caused me all kinds of issues. The loose knee gave out on me when I’d run up and down stairs and one time while I jumped through a wall of fire with my bullwhips my feet slipped in the wet grass. My knee popped out of socket so badly that my Femur drove directly into the ground where my knee was supposed to be leaving a strange dirt stain in the middle of my thigh from where the skin stretched. We wrapped the knee to hold it together and I finished the stunt anyway, but shortly thereafter I sought out the latest in ACL surgery methods—the kind that was putting professional athletes back on the field within a year. I eventually found a good one and had the surgery done. That doctor was so proud of his work that he told me I’d be able to walk out of the hospital—technically, but legally, I’d have to stay off it for a few days—which I did. I was assigned to 12 weeks of physical therapy at a cost to my insurance company of around $200 bucks a visit. I went for two weeks, learned all the exercises they were having me do and I made a tremendously quick recovery. At 9 weeks I was ready to stop wasting my time on physical therapy but of course the technicians were giving me all the reasons I needed to continue coming. Little did they know I wasn’t taking any of the drugs they were prescribing to me, and I was doing extra work on my knee at home against their advice. They were perplexed that I had gotten better so rapidly. At 9 weeks I told them what I had been doing and it would seem that I had thrown Holy water on a demon from the 10th dimension by the recoil of revulsion that they exhibited—and keep in mind that this was a very highly respected organization that works on professional athletes—not some hole in the wall in a second-rate establishment.
I stopped attending therapy and they hassled me to no end once I canceled the rest of my appointments over the next 8 weeks. They had been counting on that money coming in three times a week for that duration. They were terrified of law suits in case my knee regressed and used this kind of dialogue as a way to make me cast doubt on my decision. But I was done, I could walk and run fine and I knew better how to manage my body than they did. I could do what the physical therapists were doing to me at home—but faster.
In my entire life I have never used a medical condition as an excuse to not do a job. I have never taken a doctor’s note to an authority figure hoping to get out of a task I was responsible for. I have had major surgeries, dislocated bones, plastic surgery and major illnesses—and I have never used a doctor note to get out of work or even excuse a day off. Never. Based on my experience most diagnosis, most prescriptions, most excused days off, are needless. Yet they occur because of activist lawyers trained in socialism from their law schools who gave doctors power that they couldn’t get any other way. Lawyers interpret the law given by the political system and have directly been a conduit to destroy American individuality in favor of collectivism. Free market doctors have been pulled into government control through regulation, their long periods of training within socialist institutionalism, and enticed with the power to stop or start the world with a doctor note. That power was given to doctors by the legal system for the purpose of gaining control of the workplace by government. Lawyers write and interpret the law which feeds government growth.
The result has been catastrophic for American productivity. Too many people believe falsely that a doctor has authority over a company, or the need to produce or not produce. That power has been protected by lawyers as agents of greed in full support of government growth and economic statism. Aside from the corrosive labor unions who expect to be paid for sitting on their unproductive asses, the doctor note is the next greatest contributor to American inefficiency and lack of job creation. No employer in their right mind wants to hire more people who expect to be paid a $10 dollar minimum wage only to take off several times a year because a doctor excuses them. Usually, minimum wage workers tend to take full advantage of doctor notes to get them out of work—which they are being paid to do. Their position as an employee means that an employer has a need for their labor. If they are at home with a doctor note, they are not able to perform that task. But that doesn’t make the necessity for those tasks to wait for the employee to get better and return to work. This isn’t France. People do not get paid unless production occurs, and it doesn’t occur if nobody shows up for work to do it. And a doctor’s note and the lawyers who protect them with the arm of government at their back do not trump the strategy and needs of the American job creators—the businessmen.
That is typical in these gaming environments, there is such a love of creativity and boundless imagination which I find refreshing. Comic book stores are great places to recharge after all the dread of reality has done its best to erode away logic. Some of the best people I have known over the years find solace in those kinds of places, so it was nice to celebrate my birthday there with my kids.
I can’t say enough about the X-Wing Miniatures game. As often as I reference it, it continues to impress me. Nostagic Ink had on hand an impressive array of Y-Wings, and X-Wings. The Y-Wings have been mostly sold out on Amazon because players buy them up for their durability during combat and Ion Turret ability. My son-in-laws’ had their Imperial Aces on the table for the first time which was a sight to behold. Those new Imperial ships have a curving barrel roll effect that is really valuable and is yet another wrinkle in an otherwise highly imaginative and innovative game that is ever-changing forcing constant adoption.
Way back when I was 13 to 14 I was involved in military war simulations which were tabletop games that I found very stimulating, intellectually. Back then, West End Games was producing some great stuff and eventually the realistic simulations of actual World War II battles, and Civil War engagements gave way to a game called Assault on Hoth, which was a Star Wars strategy game done in the spirit of those battle simulations. It contained a map with the traditional game hex-and-counter mechanic and played well. Imperial Walkers attacked the Rebel base on Hoth and Rebel Snowspeeders had to meet them to prevent the shield generator from being destroyed. During the early days of our marriage my wife and I played it three to four times a week and it set a pace for our relationship that would last for decades.
When I learned war gaming as a young man I quickly learned that much of what was being studied were battle tactics no different from what military generals had been taught at West Point for generations—only without all the politics of the position. By role-playing battle field formations set against values players had to make the same kind of decisions that military generals had to make in wars from the past. In this modern age of gaming—for the first time in the history of the world, war gaming wasn’t regulated to the military elite—but to hobbyists and history enthusiasts. Of course the emotion of the battlefield is not present, and the threat of death not a factor, but the same types of decision-making that George Washington had to make during Revolutionary War battles, or General Lee had to make during the Civil War were available to anybody curious enough to play a game. Most modern war games are very sophisticated and take into account the many factors which are required for such strategic thinking.
Nostalgic Ink has in the middle of their store an entire section of these military war simulations that are much better than the ones I played as a kid. They are fascinating and players routinely set up in the back of that store to play them. But for me, Fantasy Flight Games has changed the entire field of miniature war gaming with Star Wars X-Wing. It has all the battlefield tactics of many of those traditional war games, but it has the added element of flight. I find myself thinking about that game all the time these days.
This is a good thing because real life often requires the same kinds of hard decisions that X-Wing forces players to realize. American society has the Second Amendment to protect themselves from an overzealous government. But it also has freedom of thought, and this has given rise to a culture emerging in these comic book stores where tactical decisions are available to regular people outside of any orthodox political class. For instance, this year’s FFG world champion is Paul Heaver a software engineer from Northern Virginia who is married with two kids. He plays online CCGs and computer games, but X-Wing Miniatures is the first game of its type that he’s gotten really serious about. Before going to the World’s competition—where literally people from many countries all over the world came to battle it out in Minnesota during February of 2014, Heaver paid close attention to the battle reports on the game forums and saw that Tie Swarms were dominating tournaments so he calculated a strategy of using two low pilot value X-Wing fighters and two moderate pilot rating B-Wings to slowly whittle away at the low pilot rating Tie Swarm strategy. The effectiveness of this approach can be seen below in the video of his championship game. If you watch the video it has the visual quality of a golf game. People cheer when ships are destroyed the same way an expert golfer sinks a long birdie. The same skills that Heaver used to win the Worlds championship at FFG are the same skills it takes to manage large companies, run military maneuvers, and run countries. I would put Paul Heaver against Vladimir Putin any day and I’d put my bets on Paul. But in this emerging X-Wing popularity there is Paul Heaver types popping up everywhere and this is a very good thing. There are a lot of very smart people coming up in these gaming circles.
The tactic that Paul used to win his championship will be destroyed with all the new ships and rules coming out quickly, like the new rules involving the Imperial Aces ships. They can now barrel roll out of a firing arc and right into the side of a targeted ship taking away their shot, while performing theirs with deadly effectiveness. So what works today may not work tomorrow, which is why I love X-Wing. It is why I spent my early birthday with my kids at Nostalgic Ink eating chicken nuggets and playing tactical table top warfare. Back when I was introduced to these miniature war simulations I learned from a Green Beret who was so obsessed with military tactics that these war games were the only way he could experience battlefield excitement, that the only real difference is that you don’t hear the bullets whizzing by your ears and possess the obvious knowledge that every breath might be your last. Otherwise, this is what it is like. Fantasy Flight has done with X-Wing Miniatures something that is new—it has turned up the heat considerably and no longer is reliant on the Star Wars brand to sell the game. It’s great by itself as its own thing. Tactically it is complex, and is a wonderful way to pass the time for those obsessed with strategy. And that would be me. It is my ideal of a fun time and how I prefer to spend my leisure because all too often real life calls on those skills—and because usually what we do in our recreational time directly contributes to how we conduct ourselves professionally. And because of Star Wars: X-Wing, the future looks very bright to me.
Watching Bill O’Reilly lately, with his support of Tesla Motors, government bailouts, yet maintaining strong traditional stances against socially downward trends, I had the feeling I’m was watching a generation’s excuses for bringing socialism to America. O’Reilly represents a majority American opinion for those above age 35, which is why he is so popular. However, there is a tremendous undercurrent that is coming under this age barrier and they think radically different from the generation of Bill O’Reilly about most everything. These are people from a generation that does not understand what it meant to have a mother in the home. They had the “state” in charge of most of their education, and they don’t have great prospects for social monetary gains, and they are not particularly happy about it. I associate with these people in gaming circles. They are often Star Wars fans, Doctor Who fans, and they play a lot of video games—hours and hours of video games. They don’t know or care who their politicians are—because they don’t trust them. The system has let them down in every way possible and they are well aware of it. They will likely support Rand Paul for president, but otherwise have quit the real world—because to them—it sucks—and lacks opportunity. They are not like Bill O’Reilly’s generation, and have no desire to be.
Adult Swim on the Cartoon Network traditionally puts out cartoons intended for adults, and it is a favorite channel in my house. Cartoons I find are able to tackle complex adult problems without the pretense of serious drama—so I find them very enjoyable. I was a fan of The Simpsons until the direction of their show moved too far to the political left, I enjoy The Family Guy in spite of their obvious progressivism, and I love Robot Chicken. There is a lot of imagination and creativity in adult oriented cartoons that speak honestly about the direction of human civilization. But I have a new favorite it’s called Rick and Morty and aside from the gaseous expulsion jokes, I absolutely love it.
Rick and Morty is an American animated television series created by Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon that premiered on December 2, 2013 on Cartoon Network‘s late-night programming block, Adult Swim. Roiland voices the eponymous main characters: Rick, a scientist and alcoholic, and Morty, Rick’s grandson. The series was announced during Adult Swim’s 2012 Upfront presentation, and has been picked up for 10 half-hour episodes; the series has been renewed by Adult Swim for a second season. The show has received critical acclaim.[1]
Rick is a mentally-unbalanced but scientifically-gifted old man who has recently reconnected with his family. He spends most of his time involving his young grandson Morty in dangerous, outlandish adventures throughout space and alternate universes. Compounded with Morty’s already unstable family life, these events cause Morty much distress at home and school.
Cast and characters
Rick Sanchez (Justin Roiland) – A genius scientist whose alcoholic tendencies are the source of concern for his daughter’s family over the safety of their son Morty.
Morty Smith (Justin Roiland) – Rick’s good-natured but easily influenced 14-year-old grandson, usually dragged into his misadventures.
Jerry Smith (Chris Parnell) – Morty’s insecure father, who strongly disapproves of Rick’s influence over his son. His marriage is jeopardized by Jerry’s poor relationship with father-in-law Rick. Jerry works at a low-level advertising agency.
Beth Smith (née Sanchez) (Sarah Chalke) – Morty’s mother, Rick’s daughter, and a cardiac surgeon for horses. Level-headed and assertive, she struggles with her husband over his ego, which thrives in defiance of his proven mediocrity.
Summer Smith (Spencer Grammer) – Morty’s older sister, a more conventional teenager who values her image and constant access to cell phones. She occasionally expresses jealousy that it is Morty who gets to accompany Rick on his inter-dimensional adventures.
Of course I relate most with the grandfather Rick, except when he belches, farts, and drinks. The kind of physics stories that the show is tackling correctly identifies the topics of concern that America is currently facing. I have covered here the predictions that the world will experience over the next 20 years, and Rick and Morty is right on track to help the minds of this new generation deal with those complex issues.
I simply love the story lines. They are some of the cleverest topics I have seen attempted by a television show with the exception of Doctor Who, only this show goes a few steps further. There is an episode where Morty convinces his grandfather to buy him a sex robot while traveling to an intergalactic pawn shop which was truly bizarre, but as I watched it I couldn’t help but think that the future of the sex trade industry was being shown. The human race is only a few decades away from these very issues, and that same episode dealt with extremely difficult subject matter centering on problems with feminism—and the nature of life. In spite of the crazy over-the-top conduct of the show, it was very intelligent and well written. If it wasn’t so controversial, it would be nominated for an Emmy because it is actually dealing with hard topics that most writers would avoid like the plague.
It doesn’t happen often, but Rick and Morty is one of those rare exceptions on television that is well worth watching. It certainly took me by surprise. The goodness of it is not so much in what it is now, but in what it will be as the Bill O’Reilly generation fades off into the sunset with all their 60’s hippie rhetoric, big spending debt, and labor union stagnation—yielding to a new generation that will have to solve cures for cancer, their own mortality, and new issues involving the mind-bending discoveries about our universe that will come directly from the computation services of modern artificial intelligence being hatched before our very eyes. Many of the problems that Bill O’Reilly deals with nightly will soon washed away like high-tide striking a sandcastle on a Florida beach. This is the attitude of Rick from the show, where he protests to his granddaughter, Summer that now he has to take over a planet because of her boobs. I don’t understand Bill O’Reilly’s support of Tesla Motors. But I do understand the grandfather Rick, and that is why Rick and Morty is a breath of fresh air seen only on Adult Swim on the Cartoon Network.
Miraculously, there was a “surge” of enrollment in the closing days of Obamacare March 31st 2014 leaving President Barack Obama to announce a total of 7,041,000 during a Tuesday April’s Fool’s Day a press conference, heralding it as proof that the Affordable Care Act was successful and here to stay. Only Obama never said………”April’s Fools.” He actually expected to sell that line to the public and to not be questioned about it. After months of avoiding hard numbers, the moment The White House got the figures they were looking for they took them expecting as all Keynesians do, to use belief and faith to make fiscal assumptions.
The White House had not provided answers to key questions about the numbers, including how many enrollees were previously insured, how many Americans have actually paid their first month’s premium or how many Americans have seen their costs increase. They just took the target number of enrollees off their website, held a press conference and declared victory without having any idea if they had in fact had a victory of any kind.
The big problem for Obamacare is that the numbers from the RAND Corporation study reportedly has suggested that just 23 percent of enrollees had no insurance previously. Further, the study reveals about just 53 percent of previously uninsured Americans have actually paid for their new plans. If the numbers hold, the actual net gain of paid policies among Americans who lacked medical insurance in the pre-Obamacare days would be just 858,298, the Daily Mail reports. That is hardly a victory considering that for such a system to work, more people have to pay into it for it to be sustainable. It’s not hard to give away free things. But it is hard to get people to pay money so that other people can have free things—and The White House has simply ignored the hard task and taken the figures off the easy task. What the Obama White House has done is essentially give away health care on a street corner and considered that everyone who took it was a viable vote in favor of success—and the truth is far from it.
What is more troubling is that people operating at such a high level of authority with so many eyes about the world watching them are so easily willing to deceive the public. The press conference about Obamacare on April’s Fool’s Day was quite aligned with the spirit of that Holiday, but had nothing to do with the truth—and that should be troubling to everybody. Obama and his supporters wanted to see good news about their socialist health care mandate so they did everything but give away the kitchen sink to get people to sign up for it. Their hope is that by preserving the law, future presidents and congressional houses will restore the portions of the law that Obama had to give up on in order to get the numbers where they wanted them.
The goal of The White House was not to provide a health care system, but to enroll enough Americans so that repeal of the law would be difficult. Their entire goal in this whole fiasco has been to make the law stick and let future law makers figure out how to make it viable. Their goal was to simply change American culture toward socialized medicine, not to actually fix health care. That is the deceitful application of their manipulative forecast numbers and why they have been so disingenuous.
If Obama and his supporters will lie and cheat on such small and obvious issues—just imagine what else they are lying about. When it comes to really big topics that are much murkier, just imagine the level of manipulation they are willing to pursue to preserve themselves. That is why it is so shocking that obvious con artists are in such positions of power and voters are so apathetic to it. Obama believes, because he does not respect the electorate—that he can give press conferences on Obamacare and nobody will question him—because nobody really has the courage to stick to the real issue of their intentions—the alteration of American culture further down a path of socialism at the expense of economic viability. And it’s no April Fool’s joke.
