Tag: overmanwarrior

Great Society Entitlements Will Be Bankrupt in 2026: Time to get nasty to save everyone

I love the 4th of July and frequent displays of patriotism that is displayed on America’s unique holiday celebrating freedom.  But I am weary at the same time of such festivities because I know what’s coming.  Ladies and gentlemen reading these words right now, the perils that faced the founders of America pale in comparison to the challenges of our current time.  There is a reason that for the last 10 days or so I have provided many articles showing readers what America looked like before the implementation of The New Deal which was essentially socialism in its design long supported by progressives disguising their love of European communism, and the grand climax of The Great Society which became possible due to the 1964 election of the most liberal congress in American history with the exception of the one in 1938.  Those elections were purchased from a gullible American public with deceit, and now the bills for those errors are coming due in our current time.  America is about to hit a brick wall, and for anybody to survive, they need to understand that America was a great country before those terrible programs, and they need to understand that for America to survive for future 4th of July holidays the fight of our lives is currently before us.  The video below sums up the problem in the simplest way possible.

At the end of May of 2013 the Social Security and Medicare Board of Trustees published a little known report that was generally ignored by the media, because in it was a very kind warning that by 2026, which is in essence only a decade away, those programs run out of money.  They cannot be sustained without raising taxes and taxes cannot be raised without crippling the American way of life.  We are at an impasse that cannot be avoided and there is no compromise with that fiscal cliff.  It is a fact of reality that nobody wants to look at.  Politicians are terrified of it, and the public does not wish to face the summary of their years of neglect in American politics where they paid attention to everything but one of the most important parts of their society—their government.  So below is a portion of the report along with a link that will take you dear reader to the more specific information.  I suggest you read this carefully and pass it along to a friend.  It is important to understand the severity of the problem.

 

A SUMMARY OF THE 2013 ANNUAL REPORTS

Social Security and Medicare Boards of Trustees

Published 5/31/2013

 

A MESSAGE TO THE PUBLIC:

Each year the Trustees of the Social Security and Medicare trust funds report on the current and projected financial status of the two programs. This message summarizes the 2013 Annual Reports.

Neither Medicare nor Social Security can sustain projected long-run programs in full under currently scheduled financing, and legislative changes are necessary to avoid disruptive consequences for beneficiaries and taxpayers. If lawmakers take action sooner rather than later, more options and more time will be available to phase in changes so that the public has adequate time to prepare. Earlier action will also help elected officials minimize adverse impacts on vulnerable populations, including lower-income workers and people already dependent on program benefits.

Social Security and Medicare together accounted for 38 percent of federal expenditures in fiscal year 2012. Both programs will experience cost growth substantially in excess of GDP growth through the mid-2030s due to rapid population aging caused by the large baby-boom generation entering retirement and lower-birth-rate generations entering employment and, in the case of Medicare, to growth in expenditures per beneficiary exceeding growth in per capita GDP. In later years, projected costs expressed as a share of GDP trend up slowly for Medicare and are relatively flat for Social Security, reflecting very gradual population aging caused by increasing longevity and slower growth in per-beneficiary health care costs.

Social Security

Social Security’s Disability Insurance (DI) program satisfies neither the Trustees’ long-range test of close actuarial balance nor their short-range test of financial adequacy and faces the most immediate financing shortfall of any of the separate trust funds. DI Trust Fund reserves expressed as a percent of annual cost (the trust fund ratio) declined to 85 percent at the beginning of 2013, and the Trustees project trust fund depletion in 2016, the same year projected in the last Trustees Report. DI cost has exceeded non-interest income since 2005, and the trust fund ratio has declined since peaking in 2003. While legislation is needed to address all of Social Security’s financial imbalances, the need has become most urgent with respect to the program’s DI component. Lawmakers need to act soon to avoid reduced payments to DI beneficiaries three years from now.

Social Security’s total expenditures have exceeded non-interest income of its combined trust funds since 2010, and the Trustees estimate that Social Security cost will exceed non-interest income throughout the 75-year projection period. The deficit of non-interest income relative to cost was about $49 billion in 2010, $45 billion in 2011, and $55 billion in 2012. The Trustees project that this cash-flow deficit will average about $75 billion between 2013 and 2018 before rising steeply as income growth slows to the sustainable trend rate after the economic recovery is complete and the number of beneficiaries continues to grow at a substantially faster rate than the number of covered workers. Redemption of trust fund asset reserves by the General Fund of the Treasury will provide the resources needed to offset Social Security’s annual aggregate cash-flow deficits. Since the cash-flow deficit will be less than interest earnings through 2020, reserves of the combined trust funds measured in current dollars will continue to grow, but not by enough to prevent the ratio of reserves to one year’s projected cost (the combined trust fund ratio) from declining. (This ratio peaked in 2008, declined through 2012, and is expected to decline steadily in future years.) After 2020, Treasury will redeem trust fund asset reserves to the extent that program cost exceeds tax revenue and interest earnings until depletion of total trust fund reserves in 2033, the same year projected in last year’s Trustees Report. Thereafter, tax income would be sufficient to pay about three-quarters of scheduled benefits through 2087.

A temporary reduction in the Social Security payroll tax rate in 2011 and 2012 reduced payroll tax revenues by an estimated $222 billion in total. The legislation establishing the payroll tax reduction also provided for transfers from the General Fund to the trust funds in order to “replicate to the extent possible” payments that would have occurred if the payroll tax reduction had not been enacted. Those General Fund reimbursements amounted to about 15 percent of the program’s non-interest income in 2011 and 2012. The temporary payroll tax reduction expired at the end of 2012.

Under current projections, the annual cost of Social Security benefits expressed as a share of workers’ taxable earnings will grow rapidly from 11.3 percent in 2007, the last pre-recession year, to roughly 17.0 percent in 2037, and will then decline slightly before slowly increasing after 2050. Cost displays a slightly different pattern when expressed as a share of GDP. Program cost equaled 4.2 percent of GDP in 2007, the last pre-recession year, and the Trustees project that cost will increase to 6.2 percent of GDP for 2036, then decline to about 6.0 percent of GDP by 2050, and thereafter rise slowly reaching 6.2 percent by 2087.

The projected 75-year actuarial deficit for the combined Old-Age and Survivors Insurance and Disability Insurance (OASDI) Trust Funds is 2.72 percent of taxable payroll, up from 2.67 percent projected in last year’s report. This deficit amounts to 21 percent of program non-interest income or 17 percent of program cost. A 0.06 percentage point increase in the OASDI actuarial deficit would have been expected if nothing had changed other than the one-year extension of the valuation period to 2087. The effects of recently enacted legislation, updated demographic data, updated economic data and assumptions further worsened the actuarial deficit, but these effects were completely offset by the favorable effects of updated programmatic data and improved methodologies.

While the combined OASDI program fails the long-range test of close actuarial balance, it does satisfy the test for short-range (ten-year) financial adequacy. The Trustees project that the combined trust fund asset reserves at the beginning of each year will exceed that year’s projected cost through 2027.

Medicare

The Trustees project that the Medicare Hospital Insurance (HI) Trust Fund will be the next to face depletion after the DI Trust Fund. The projected date of HI Trust Fund depletion is 2026, two years later than projected in last year’s report, at which time dedicated revenues would be sufficient to pay 87 percent of HI cost. The Trustees project that the share of HI cost that can be financed with HI dedicated revenues will decline slowly to 71 percent in 2047, and then rise slowly until it reaches 73 percent in 2087. As it has since 2008, the HI Trust Fund will pay out more in hospital benefits and other expenditures than it receives in income in all years until reserve depletion.

The projected HI Trust Fund’s long-term actuarial imbalance is smaller than that of the combined Social Security trust funds under the assumptions employed in this report.

The estimated 75-year actuarial deficit in the HI Trust Fund is 1.11 percent of taxable payroll, down from 1.35 percent projected in last year’s report. The HI fund again fails the test of short-range financial adequacy, as its trust fund ratio is already below 100 percent and is expected to decline continuously until reserve depletion in 2026. The fund also continues to fail the long-range test of close actuarial balance. The HI 75-year actuarial imbalance amounts to 29 percent of tax receipts or 23 percent of program cost.

The modest improvement in the outlook for HI long-term finances is principally due to: (i) lower projected spending for most HI service categories especially for skilled nursing facilities to reflect lower-than-expected spending in 2012 and other recent data; (ii) lower projected Medicare Advantage program costs that reflect recent data suggesting that certain provisions of the Affordable Care Act will reduce growth in these costs by more than was previously projected; and (iii) a refinement in projection methods that reduces assumed per beneficiary cost growth during the transition period between the short-range projections and the long-range projections. Partially offsetting these favorable changes to the projections are somewhat lower projected levels of tax income that reflect lower-than-expected tax income in 2012.

The Trustees project that Part B of Supplementary Medical Insurance (SMI), which pays doctors’ bills and other outpatient expenses, and Part D of SMI, which provides access to prescription drug coverage, will remain adequately financed into the indefinite future because current law automatically provides financing each year to meet the next year’s expected costs. However, the aging population and rising health care costs cause SMI projected costs to grow steadily from 2.0 percent of GDP in 2012 to approximately 3.3 percent of GDP in 2035, and then more slowly to 4.0 percent of GDP by 2087. General revenues will finance roughly three-quarters of these costs, and premiums paid by beneficiaries almost all of the remaining quarter. SMI also receives a small amount of financing from special payments by States and from fees on manufacturers and importers of brand-name prescription drugs. Projected costs for Part B assume an almost 25-percent reduction in Medicare payment rates for physician services will be implemented in 2014 as required by current law, which is highly unlikely.

The Trustees project that total Medicare cost (including both HI and SMI expenditures) will grow from approximately 3.6 percent of GDP in 2012 to 5.6 percent of GDP by 2035, and will increase gradually thereafter to about 6.5 percent of GDP by 2087.

The drawdown of Social Security and HI Trust Fund reserves and the general revenue transfers into SMI will result in mounting pressure on the Federal budget. In fact, pressure is already evident. For the seventh consecutive year, the Social Security Act requires that the Trustees issue a “Medicare funding warning” because projected non-dedicated sources of revenues primarily general revenues are expected to continue to account for more than 45 percent of Medicare’s outlays in 2013, a threshold breached for the first time in fiscal year 2010.

Conclusion

Lawmakers should address the financial challenges facing Social Security and Medicare as soon as possible. Taking action sooner rather than later will leave more options and more time available to phase in changes so that the public has adequate time to prepare.

Read the rest complete with charts and diagrams at the following link:

http://www.ssa.gov/oact/trsum/

To understand how we got into this mess it is also important to study The Great Society policies which culminated in the 1960s by Lyndon Johnson, and was the work of Democrats from the 1930s as a progressive platform rooted in global communism.  Even though it is long, it is important to read.  Some reading this have actually supported The Great Society and are currently avoiding dealing with the errors of their past by praying to some finance God that relief will magically appear.  It will not.  It is important to understand the problem, and then work to remove all these elements from our society so that we may save it.  In previous documents I have shown how America used to be, and can be again.  Those who support The Great Society look at such times as antiquated and a step backwards.  In a way they are right, I do wish to step back in time—to a time before the socialist imposition of The New Deal, and The Great Society.  I don’t want to pay for them.  I don’t want to deal with people who are addicted to those government services, and I want to steer away from the collapse of those programs in 2026.

The Great Society was a set of domestic programs in the United States announced by President Lyndon B. Johnson at Ohio University and subsequently promoted by him and fellow Democrats in Congress in the 1960s. Two main goals of the Great Society social reforms were the elimination of poverty and racial injustice. New major spending programs that addressed education, medical care, urban problems, and transportation were launched during this period. The Great Society in scope and sweep resembled the New Deal domestic agenda of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Some Great Society proposals were stalled initiatives from John F. Kennedy‘s New Frontier. Johnson’s success depended on his skills of persuasion, coupled with the Democratic landslide in the 1964 election that brought in many new liberals to Congress, making the House of Representatives in 1965 the most liberal House since 1938.[1]

The Voting Rights Act of 1965 assured minority registration and voting. It suspended use of literacy or other voter-qualification tests that had sometimes served to keep African-Americans off voting lists and provided for federal court lawsuits to stop discriminatory poll taxes. It also reinforced the Civil Rights Act of 1964[10] by authorizing the appointment of federal voting examiners in areas that did not meet voter-participation requirements. The Immigration and Nationality Services Act of 1965 abolished the national-origin quotas in immigration law. The Civil Rights Act of 1968 banned housing discrimination and extended constitutional protections to Native Americans on reservations.

War on Poverty

Main article: War on Poverty

The most ambitious and controversial part of the Great Society was its initiative to end poverty. The Kennedy Administration had been contemplating a federal effort against poverty. Johnson, who, as a teacher had observed extreme poverty in Texas among Mexican-Americans, launched an “unconditional war on poverty” in the first months of his presidency with the goal of eliminating hunger and deprivation from American life. The centerpiece of the War on Poverty was the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, which created an Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO) to oversee a variety of community-based antipoverty programs.

Federal funds were provided for special education schemes in slum areas, including help in paying for books and transport, while financial aid was also provided for slum clearances and rebuilding city areas. In addition, the Appalachian Regional Development Act of 1965 created jobs in one of the most impoverished regions of the country.[citation needed] The Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 provided various schemes in which young people from poor homes could receive job training and higher education.[15]

The OEO reflected a fragile consensus among policymakers that the best way to deal with poverty was not simply to raise the incomes of the poor but to help them better themselves through education, job training, and community development. Central to its mission was the idea of “community action“, the participation of the poor in framing and administering the programs designed to help them.

Programs

The War on Poverty began with a $1 billion appropriation in 1964 and spent another $2 billion in the following two years. It spawned dozens of programs, among them the Job Corps, whose purpose was to help disadvantaged youth develop marketable skills; the Neighborhood Youth Corps, established to give poor urban youths work experience and to encourage them to stay in school; Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), a domestic version of the Peace Corps, which placed concerned citizens with community-based agencies to work towards empowerment of the poor; the Model Cities Program for urban redevelopment; Upward Bound, which assisted poor high school students entering college; legal services for the poor; and the Food Stamp Act of 1964 (which expanded the federal food stamp program).[16]

Programs included the Community Action Program, which initiated local Community Action Agencies charged with helping the poor become self-sufficient; and Project Head Start, which offered preschool education for poor children. In addition, funding was provided for the establishment of community health centers to expand access to health care,[17] while major amendments were made to Social Security in 1965 and 1967 which significantly increased benefits, expanded coverage, and established new programs to combat poverty and raise living standards.[18] In addition, average AFDC payments were 35% higher in 1968 than in 1960, but remained insufficient and uneven.[19]

Education

The most important educational component of the Great Society was the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965, designed by Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel. It was signed into law on April 11, 1965, less than three months after it was introduced. It ended a long-standing political taboo by providing significant federal aid to public education, initially allotting more than $1 billion to help schools purchase materials and start special education programs to schools with a high concentration of low-income children. The Act established Head Start, which had originally been started by the Office of Economic Opportunity as an eight-week summer program, as a permanent program.

The Higher Education Facilities Act of 1963, which was signed into law by Johnson a month after becoming president,[20] authorized several times more college aid within a five-year period than had been appropriated under the Land Grant College in a century. It provided better college libraries, ten to twenty new graduate centers, several new technical institutes, classrooms for several hundred thousand students, and twenty-five to thirty new community colleges a year.[21]

This major piece of legislation was followed by the Higher Education Act of 1965, which increased federal money given to universities, created scholarships and low-interest loans for students, and established a national Teacher Corps to provide teachers to poverty-stricken areas of the United States. The Act also began a transition from federally funded institutional assistance to individual student aid.

The Bilingual Education Act of 1968 offered federal aid to local school districts in assisting them to address the needs of children with limited English-speaking ability until it expired in 2002.[22]

Health

Medicare

The Social Security Act of 1965 authorized Medicare and provided federal funding for many of the medical costs of older Americans.[23] The legislation overcame the bitter resistance, particularly from the American Medical Association, to the idea of publicly funded health care or “socialized medicine” by making its benefits available to everyone over sixty-five, regardless of need, and by linking payments to the existing private insurance system.

Medicaid

In 1966 welfare recipients of all ages received medical care through the Medicaid program. Medicaid was created on July 30, 1965 under Title XIX of the Social Security Act of 1965. Each state administers its own Medicaid program while the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) monitors the state-run programs and establishes requirements for service delivery, quality, funding, and eligibility standards.

Arts and cultural institutions

National endowments for arts and humanities

In September 1965, Johnson signed the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act into law, creating both the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities as separate, independent agencies. Lobbying for federally funded arts and humanities support began during the Kennedy Administration. In 1963 three scholarly and educational organizations—the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS), the Council of Graduate Schools in America, and the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa—joined together to establish the National Commission on the Humanities. In June 1964, the commission released a report that suggested that the emphasis placed on science endangered the study of the humanities from elementary schools through postgraduate programs. In order to correct the balance, it recommended “the establishment by the President and the Congress of the United States of a National Humanities Foundation.”[24]

In August 1964, Congressman William S. Moorhead of Pennsylvania proposed legislation to implement the commission’s recommendations. Support from the White House followed in September, when Johnson lent his endorsement during a speech at Brown University. In March 1965, the White House proposed the establishment of a National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities and requested $20 million in start-up funds. The commission’s report had generated other proposals, but the White House’s approach eclipsed them. The administration’s plan, which called for the creation of two separate agencies each advised by a governing body, was the version approved by Congress. Richard Nixon dramatically expanded funding for NEH and NEA.[24]

Public broadcasting

After the First National Conference on Long-Range Financing of Educational Television Stations in December 1964 called for a study of the role of noncommercial education television in society, the Carnegie Corporation agreed to finance the work of a 15-member national commission. Its landmark report, Public Television: A Program for Action, published on January 26, 1967, popularized the phrase “public television” and assisted the legislative campaign for federal aid. The Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, enacted less than 10 months later, chartered the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as a private, non-profit corporation.

The law initiated federal aid through the CPB for the operation, as opposed to the funding of capital facilities, of public broadcasting. The CPB initially collaborated with the pre-existing National Educational Television system, but in 1969 decided to start the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). A public radio study commissioned by the CPB and the Ford Foundation and conducted from 1968–1969 led to the establishment of National Public Radio, a public radio system under the terms of the amended Public Broadcasting Act.

Cultural centers

Two long-planned national cultural and arts facilities received federal funding that would allow for their completion through Great Society legislation. A National Cultural Center, suggested during the Franklin Roosevelt Administration and created by a bipartisan law signed by Dwight Eisenhower, was transformed into the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a living memorial to the assassinated president. Fundraising for the original cultural center had been poor prior to legislation creating the Kennedy Center, which passed two months after the president’s death and provided $23 million for construction. The Kennedy Center opened in 1971.[25]

In the late 1930s the United States Congress mandated a Smithsonian Institution art museum for the National Mall, and a design by Eliel Saarinen was unveiled in 1939, but plans were shelved during World War II. A 1966 act of Congress established the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden as part of the Smithsonian Institution with a focus on modern art, in contrast to the existing National Art Gallery. The museum was primarily federally funded, although New York financier Joseph Hirshhorn later contributed $1 million toward building construction, which began in 1969. The Hirshhorn opened in 1974.[26]

Transportation

Transportation initiatives started during President Johnson’s term in office included the consolidation of transportation agencies into a cabinet-level position under the Department of Transportation.[27] The department was authorized by Congress on October 15, 1966 and began operations on April 1, 1967. Congress passed a variety of legislation to support improvements in transportation including The Urban Mass Transportation Act of 1964 which provided $375 million for large-scale urban public or private rail projects in the form of matching funds to cities and states and created the Urban Mass Transit Administration (now the Federal Transit Administration), High Speed Ground Transportation Act of 1965 which resulted in the creation of high-speed rail between New York and Washington, and the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 a bill largely taken credit for by Ralph Nader, whose book Unsafe at Any Speed he claims helped inspire the legislation.

Consumer protection

In 1964, Johnson named Assistant Secretary of Labor Esther Peterson to be the first presidential assistant for consumer affairs.

The Cigarette Labeling and Advertising Act of 1965 required packages to carry warning labels. The Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966 set standards through creation of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. The Fair Packaging and Labeling Act requires products identify manufacturer, address, clearly mark quantity and servings. The statute also authorizes HEW and FTC to establish and define voluntary standard sizes. The original would have mandated uniform standards of size and weight for comparison shopping, but the final law only outlawed exaggerated size claims.

The Child Safety Act of 1966 prohibited any chemical so dangerous that no warning can make it safe. The Flammable Fabrics Act of 1967 set standards for children’s sleepwear, but not baby blankets.

The Wholesome Meat Act of 1967 required inspection of meat which must meet federal standards. The Truth-in-Lending Act of 1968 required lenders and credit providers to disclose the full cost of finance charges in both dollars and annual percentage rates, on installment loan and sales. The Wholesome Poultry Products Act of 1968 required inspection of poultry which must meet federal standards. The Land Sales Disclosure Act of 1968 provided safeguards against fraudulent practices in the sale of land. The Radiation Safety Act of 1968 provided standards and recalls for defective electronic products.

Environment

Joseph A. Califano, Jr. has suggested that Great Society’s main contribution to the environment was an extension of protections beyond those aimed at the conservation of untouched resources.[28] In a message he transmitted to Congress, President Johnson said:

The air we breathe, our water, our soil and wildlife, are being blighted by poisons and chemicals which are the by-products of technology and industry. The society that receives the rewards of technology, must, as a cooperating whole, take responsibility for [their] control. To deal with these new problems will require a new conservation. We must not only protect the countryside and save it from destruction, we must restore what has been destroyed and salvage the beauty and charm of our cities. Our conservation must be not just the classic conservation of protection [against] development, but a creative conservation of restoration and innovation.

— Special Message to the Congress on Conservation and Restoration of Natural Beauty; February 8, 1965[29]

At the behest of Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, the Great Society included several new environmental laws to protect air and water. Environmental legislation enacted included:

Clear Air, Water Quality and Clean Water Restoration Acts and Amendments

Wilderness Act of 1964

Endangered Species Preservation Act of 1966

National Trails System Act of 1968

Wild and Scenic Rivers Act of 1968

Land and Water Conservation Act of 1965

Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965

Motor Vehicle Air Pollution Control Act of 1965

National Historic Preservation Act of 1966

Aircraft Noise Abatement Act of 1968

National Environmental Policy Act of 1969

Labor

Amendments made to the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act in 1964 extended the prevailing wage provisions to cover fringe benefits,[30] while several increases were made to the federal minimum wage.[31] In addition, a comprehensive minimum rate hike was signed into law that extended the coverage of the Fair Labor Standards Act to about 9.1 million additional workers.[30]

http://www.ask.com/wiki/Great_Society?o=2800&qsrc=999

For those who wish to save America, the government must be removed from public education, from medicine, from science, from labor relations, from retirement financing, and from environmental preservation.  For that last many will say it is because of government that America has National Parks and a conservation movement at all.  For them I point toward Disney World who took capitalism and converted an environmental marshland in the hot Central Florida region and made it a haven of environmental awareness producing money that was poured into science that no government on earth could duplicate.  The Walt Disney property in Florida is better managed than any National Park, and serves the same purpose of preservation of valuable land.  Similar examples could be provided to every topic mentioned above and more.  But first Americans must dust off their tendency to self-reliance and embrace the past that built such characters and reject the past that paved the way to dependency, the policies of The Great Society.

It is good to enjoy fireworks on The Fourth of July and celebrate a time when America declared its independence.  But America through trickery, deceit, and political barbarism is more dependent on foreign forces than ever and the strings to that dependency are in the programs of The New Deal and The Great Society.  The fight before us will be much more vicious than in any other time in American history.  It will be far from easy.  That is why am turning my focus on a period of American history that had touches of true independence whether it was in the films of Douglas Fairbanks, or the various renditions of the Lone Ranger.  For me those times are represented by the bullwhip and speak of an American attitude that is rooted in justice constantly pursuing freedom.  CLICK HERE TO READ MORE.  But it is time to take off the masks of convention, and politeness, or patient understanding then declare that the hands of time need to be reset in America to a time before the destructive programs that a vast majority of citizens in The United States have become accustom to. A failure to take off those masks of politeness will result in the end of American civilization as a fiscal powerhouse.  It may continue on as Russia currently does, as an impoverished former superpower crushed by communist ideology, but it will not be the nation that we all know and love today.  So the fight that is the responsibility of our times is before us, and simply igniting fireworks off on the 4th of July is not enough.  An American revolution that has not yet been given a name is before us now, and will occur on all our watches who read this now.  When history views us, they won’t celebrate our polite masks that are worn in society when oppressors wished to imprison us with more entitlement programs which only serve politicians in Washington and their ability to stay in office by selling votes through tax payer resources.  It is time to dust off our American individuality and get mean and nasty to those who wish to put shackles about our necks with financial slavery.  A failure to do so will actually bring more harm to others than it ever averts.

Rich Hoffman

“Justice Comes With The Crack of a Whip’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

Yes, The Disney ‘Lone Ranger’ has the William Tell Overture: Past meets present with a glorious spectacle.

Many kids these days have no idea that the character of Woody from the popular Toy Story films was directly inspired by The Lone Ranger television show that was so extremely popular immediately after World War II.  The last time the Lone Ranger made any kind of legitimate appearance in either television or motion pictures it was in the 1981 film The Legend of the Lone Ranger which had mild success, but involved the tragic injury of Terry Leonard, the famous stuntman from Raiders of the Lost Ark.  In the 1981 film, a stagecoach accident ran over both of Terry’s legs which tarnished the film a bit to even my young eyes.  The scene made it into the movie, but was difficult to accept as I always related more with the stuntmen in films than I ever did the actual actors.  There was a time in my life where I wanted to be a stuntman more than anything else, but that idea subsided a bit after several violent car crashes, encounters with actual villains who shot real bullets, and a few years of marriage.  But deep in my heart is the love of the Lone Ranger and his code of moral conduct that helped shape America’s identity with his classic white hat, black mask, and silver bullets.

My primary exposure to the Lone Ranger came from Saturday morning serials. For me it was always a toss-up between the Lone Ranger, and Zorro who I loved more.  One of those classic Republic serials can be seen throughout this article.  I’m sharing it in the same way that I shared the Republic serial, Zorro’s Fighting Legion.  These types of programs made a point to teach children and adults values they could both share.  This is why I am so eager to see the new Lone Ranger film by the Disney Company.

The Lone Ranger is a fictional character: a masked ex-Texas Ranger who, with his Indian companion Tonto, fights injustice in the American Old West. The character has become an enduring icon of American culture.[7]

He first appeared in 1933 in a radio show conceived either by WXYZ radio station owner George W. Trendle[3][4][5] or by Fran Striker,[8] the show’s writer.[9][10] It has been suggested that Bass Reeves, a legendary Federal peace officer in the Indian Territory (1875 – 1907) was the inspiration for this character.[11][12] The show proved to be a hit, and spawned a series of books (largely written by Striker), an equally popular television show that ran from 1949 to 1957, and comic books and movies. The title character was played on radio by George Seaton, Earle Graser, and most memorably Brace Beemer.[8] To television viewers, Clayton Moore was the Lone Ranger. Tonto was played by, among others, John Todd, Roland Parker, and in the television series, Jay Silverheels.

Departing on his white stallion, Silver, the Lone Ranger would shout, “Hi-Ho, Silver! Away!” As they galloped off, someone would ask, “Who was that masked man, anyway?” Tonto usually referred to the Lone Ranger as “Ke-mo sah-bee“, meaning “trusty scout” or “trusted friend.”[13] These catchphrases, his trademark silver bullets, and the theme music from the William Tell overture have become tropes of popular culture.

In every incarnation of the character to date, the Lone Ranger conducts himself by a strict moral code put in place by Striker at the inception of the character. Actors Clayton Moore[6] and Jay Silverheels[citation needed] both took their positions as role models to children very seriously and tried their best to live by this creed. It reads as follows:

I believe…

  • That to have a friend, a man must be one.
  • That all men are created equal and that everyone has within himself the power to make this a better world.
  • That God put the firewood there, but that every man must gather and light it himself.
  • In being prepared physically, mentally, and morally to fight when necessary for that which is right.
  • That a man should make the most of what equipment he has.
  • That ‘this government of the people, by the people, and for the people’ shall live always.
  • That all things change but truth, and that truth alone, lives on forever.
  • In my Creator, my country, my fellow man.[14]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_Ranger

The most updated version of The Lone Ranger comes out on July 3rd, and I can’t think of a better film to see which celebrates the 4th of July.  The Lone Ranger is a special kind of film and I sincerely hope that Jerry Bruckheimer is able to do for the American western what he did for swashbuckling pirate films. If he does, then western values have a real chance at re-emerging in American culture.

It is about time that children learn clean speaking cowboys are not just playthings in a toy box like Woody was in Toy Story.  The Lone Ranger is the original Woody, and I relish that the film is coming out around such a patriotic holiday, because the Lone Ranger is a uniquely American creation for a uniquely American audience that is being exported to every corner of the world by one of the largest and most successful companies in the world.  It should go without saying that I will be seeing it at the earliest possible screening.

Now, one of the most heavily searched items on my site here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom for the last three months has been the question, “Is the William Tell Overture in the new Lone Ranger.”  Well, for the answer, you can hear it from Han’s Zimmer himself.

Don Steinberg from The Wall Street Journal — Ok, so over to “The Lone Ranger.”  And speaking of theme music: there’s probably never been any audible version of the Lone Ranger that didn’t use the William Tell Overture. Do you nod to that?

Hans Zimmer response – I was listening to a Billy Connolly quote, and he said the definition of an intellectual is if you can listen to the William tell Overture and not think of the Lone Ranger. Ok, we didn’t go the intellectual journey.  We fully embraced the William Tell. Needless to say, we couldn’t leave well enough alone, so it has a little tweak. Actually it’s tweaked quite bit.  I don’t know how long the Overture is — it depends on how fast you play it — but that Lone Ranger bit is two minutes long, at the most. And, as I found out, Mr. Rossini felt that was all he had to say. So there are some expansion opportunities. Plus, needless to say, they don’t hire me just to orchestrate Rossini. They want a bit of my dirty fingerprints all over it.

Read the whole interview here:

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2013/06/12/listen-to-the-music-that-makes-the-man-of-steel-soar/

………………………………….YES!  I am damn happy to not call myself an intellectual by the way that Billy Connolly coins the term.  For me, the William Tell Overture is what the Lone Ranger is all about.  CLICK HERE FOR MORE.  Enjoy the movie!

Rich Hoffman

“Justice Comes with the Crack of a Whip’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

Springboro Schools Seeks a Renewal Levy of $9.2 million: More reasons why public education is a waste of money

A couple of things occurred lately on the education front concerning my friend Kelly Kohls and the labor union interest centering on the contract being negotiated at Springboro schools.  A labor supporter who writes me often passed along a letter he sent out to public education teachers encouraging them to work less, if districts are not going to pay wage increases.  Not only did he name me in the letter but other education reformers in Southern Ohio as well who stand against tax increases.

I am very disappointed that Kelly is asking for a renewal levy.  I would like to see her walking taxes backwards, not trying to maintain the current tax amount, which should be the goal of every governing body.  I hope that voters will take this chance and vote down the renewal levy so that Kelly can then take that mandate from the community and further cut salaries in the Springboro schools system bringing down their per pupil costs.

As to the perception of value that the letter writer represents he forgets what I have told him privately many times, that I do not have a value for the teachers he’s advocating for.  I would like to see competitive options to public education that would drive down the cost of education, and give families alternatives to left-leaning education practices.  When labor unions declare that their teachers are the pillars of a community, the question that must be asked is for whose version of “community.”  My version of community is far different from William Schmidt.  He sees his treasured teachers as a value to children; I see them as parasites that rot the minds of creativity and puts chains upon their thoughts before they can hardly read a book.  Test scores and social observation support my opinion.  I would like to see public education dismantled and for parents to take responsibility for educating their own children with the saved money that roll-backs would provide them.   If Kelly’s district of Springboro defeats their levy forcing the school board to make financial adjustments, the tax money saved by residents could be applied to a charter school that teaches something other than progressive education.

When Schmidt says below that nobody has come up with “creative” ways to fund education that is because the value of education is in question, not the dollars that should be found to pay for it.  The type of education is the current problem.  That must be solved before ways of funding it can be analyzed.  In the most simplified form, teaching and the responsibility of education must shift back to the parents and away from government, particularly at the state and federal level.  The collective summation of all a community’s children thrown into a big pot of stew while the parents run around doing whatever they feel like as community funded baby sitters take care of their offspring is not working.  The parents get lazy because public teachers are raising their kids.  Teachers get lazy at their jobs because there are no measurements of quality to keep their job.  They get paid pretty much the same whether they are good or bad teachers because their collective bargaining agreement says so, an agreement that robs money from every home in a school district for a system that is a complete failure.

I’m including the letter Schmidt sent to me so that it can be seen how the other side thinks.  I don’t think he’s a bad person, just as a lot of people on that side are not bad.  But they believe that the wrong things are important.  They hide their misconception about reality behind a shield of children.  Regardless, I am disappointed that Kelly is putting a renewal levy on the ballot.  That’s why she’s a school board member and I’m not.  She still wants the system to work, and I don’t.  I want it defunded, and re-invented with competition as the foundation.  And that answers the second issue to Mr. Schmidt, it is not my job to find a way to raise the “community’s” kids, and pay for the labor of it with a government school.  I support private tutors, and if people can’t afford that, then home school the children.  Children are better off with a parent who has limited knowledge about the world, but a lot of love to give them than a teacher with a doctorate who makes too much money and is instructing children to vote for progressive causes ruining the mind of young people for the first 15 years of their life, till they wake up at age 35 and realize that all the leftist causes they believe in were the creations of their public schools.  They spend the rest of their lives unlearning all the garbage they learned in K-12 education.  It would save them a great deal of headache later to not learn those things at all and let a computer at home teach them the basics like math, English, science, then letting The History Channel teach them everything else.  That would be much more effective than even the best public schools paid for with stolen property tax money.

Sent by William Schmidt:

 

 

During its meeting on June 19, the Springboro Community City Schools Board of Education (BOE) voted in favor of placing a $9.2 million renewal levy on the November ballot.

 

“We want to underscore that this is a renewal levy, and we are not asking for new money. As a result, taxes will not be raised for residents,” said Kelly Kohls, BOE President. “The renewal is necessary to continue to fund the academic programs that have helped our school district achieve an Excellent with Distinction rating. We are committed to operating the district within the budget that Springboro taxpayers have approved. With the renewal levy, the board believes the district will be sustainable until 2017.”

 

This renewal levy announcement comes while negotiations are in progress between the Springboro BOE and the Springboro Education Association (SEA), the union representing the teachers and support staff employees.

 

“The board and administration have worked diligently together to manage the budget,” Kohls added. “By applying fiscally prudent measures across the school district, we have been able to reinstate textbook purchasing, technology upgrades, bus replacements and facility improvements. We have also provided necessary intervention at the elementary grade level, as well as enhanced services for gifted children.”

 

For more information, visit www.springboro.org.

 

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What I find interesting is that somewhere in Springboro’s past, this money that is suggested to be renewed was new money.  Originally, why didn’t Springboro live within their means and  and sustain their Excellence with Distinction without this money?  I can’t find out when this levy (now needing renewal) was passed.  But since then it seems that Springboro has needed these funds.  

Now, however, Springboro seems to not need any new money.   The logic is lost to me.  It seems that as long as the labor force is willing to accept pay freezes and no step increases and many other concessions, the district can sustain itself without  asking for new money.  Why didn’t it do that before passing the levy (now needing renewal) in the past?  Why does it need this renewal to fund academic programs to remain excellent?

 

The real fact is there is an assumption that the labor force will sustain their current efforts of sacrifice and working extra hours in the face of pay freezes and dwindling benefits.  I contend that this assumption is what is truly not sustainable.  

 

Once again, I call on the teachers of Lakota and now Springboro to stop working outside of the borders of their contract.  Work a normal day and then use time that used to be devoted to school outside a 40 hour work week and seek employment elsewhere with that time or devote it more to their own families.  Once a plan is in place to sustain the extra efforts that teachers have provided in the past, then they can go back to a more professional approach.  School budgets can always be sustained without new money and levy passage as long as the increased burden is placed on the labor force.  North Coast, No Lakota Levy, Educate Springboro, Sharon Poe, Arnie Engel, Rich Hoffman, Kelly Kohls and other like-minded groups and individuals have never looked into the future and tried to solve the issues of school funding.  They have only used ideas, void of creativity, to find ways not to raise taxes, regardless of the burden they place on the labor force.  Will any of these groups or people ever suggest that new money for schools be needed?  

The fact that Springboro needed a new money levy some years ago and needs it renewed now seems to suggest that The Springboro School Board policies are not forward thinking.  They need to consider if their current dealings with the teaching staff are truly sustainable.  I think not.

 

William Schmidt

Rich Hoffman

“Justice Comes with the Crack of a Whip!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

Don Q Son of Zorro: A window into the past to see American history firsthand

I sometimes forget that a majority of the people in the world can only remember historical events ranging into the 1950s these days, so the history of how America arrived to where it is today is lost to them, except in history books and documentaries.  Of those it has only been during the last ten years that both took a hard look at the liberalism that seeped into American culture by the boat load during the 1930s to the 1950s.  For most people they have no concept of what America was like before The New Deal, or The Great Society–programs created by extremely progressive presidents.  People are completely unaware of what life was like when Woodrow Wilson attempted to crown himself king of America, riding on the coat tails of Teddy Roosevelt who tried with every fiber in his body to make America like Europe with his love or royalty and political hierarchy.

Equally baffling to people is the reason I think of the 1920s as the premier time for American ideals to come into fruition under the hands-off leadership of President Calvin Coolidge.  I forget that everyone does not practice with bullwhips and have a love for old movies that brought out the best of the Hollywood era, and paved the way for a future of mythmaking cinema that would deliver to the world ideals about freedom, honor, and tenacious respect.  After all, we live in the year 2013 and the days of Calvin Coolidge were a long time ago.  Society has “progressed” so much beyond those “primitive” times; at least that is the popular misconception of our day.

However, I would make the argument that American society has not advanced, as many believe, but is regressing toward the primitive mentality of mysticism, instead of away from it, and it is books, music, and movies that shape the politics of our age, which is why politicians have learned to control Hollywood with a short leash, and shared public relations resources.  I forget that I am probably the only human being within a thousand mile radius who has as one of the treasured literary classics called The Curse of Capistrano otherwise known as The Mark of Zorro by Johnston McCulley published in August of 1919.  That book is a window to a long forgotten time representing long forgotten and suppressed values that I cherish immensely.

I loved The Curse of Capistrano so much, as McCulley wrote the very first story of Zorro with such passion that I used his style as my template to The Symposium of Justice, which was my modern tribute to Zorro from The Curse of Capistrano.  The Mark of Zorro is the classic adventure that not only launched a legend, but it built Hollywood with the very first brick.  Johnston’s Zorro took place in a bygone era of sprawling haciendas and haughty caballeros who suffer beneath the whip-lash of oppression.  Missions were pillaged, native peasants abused and innocent men and women were persecuted by the corrupt governor and his army.  But a champion of freedom riding the horse-trodden highways at night, his identity hidden behind a mask, the laughing outlaw Zorro who defied the tyrant’s might.  A deadly marksman and a demon swordsman, his flashing blade left behind the mark of the “Z” for all in authority to fear!  Reading the novel is like reading the thoughts of people from a different time, and compared to how things are today, they truly were.

As fate would have it Douglas Fairbanks bought up the rights to The Curse of Capistrano and turned the book into a silent movie in 1920 called The Mark of Zorro.  The movie was a smashing success as the Woodrow Wilson era of big progressive government came to an end, which without question found its way into plot of Johnston’s story.  The Warren G. Harding’s presidency was filled with scandal but good intentions leaving the man to die in office during 1923 leaving Calvin Coolidge to take over as President until 1929.  In 1925 Douglas Fairbanks made a sequel to The Mark of Zorro called Don Q Son of Zorro where he played not only the son of Zorro, but also the dad.  About 7 minutes into the film, Don Q states that his father, “Zorro was the greatest American there was.” The film was essentially about a class of progressive European ideals intersecting with American individualism.  It was a bench mark film for me and many of my whip friends because the stunts that Douglas Fairbanks did in the film served as the goal post for what all whip performers work off of to this very day.  The bullwhip was so important to Douglas Fairbanks in Don Q Son of Zorro that it is essentially the most memorable part of his character.

Going back and watching that film is a time machine into a different time and place when people thought a lot differently about things than they do today.  So to share that experience as I have been doing with other bullwhip related feature films lately, I have put the entire film Don Q Son of Zorro up here for your viewing pleasure.  The first impression many people have about a silent film is that they can’t get used to not having people speak.  A silent film relied exclusively on music and the action on a screen to make the performance come to life.  It’s kind of like reading a book that is in motion.  Douglas Fairbanks knew that the way to capture his audiences’ attention was to perform stunts that they could never think of doing.  The stunt work he performed in Don Q Son of Zorro is unparalleled then and since.  Since 1925 Zorro, has been associated with a bullwhip because of Douglas Fairbanks’ work in Don Q.  This would go on in film for the next 80 years.  I have watched Don Q Son of Zorro many times, and because of that, I have seen what the world was in the 1920s and studied hard what values built Hollywood before the incursion of communism that spread during the Red Decade as Ayn Rand warned about in the late 1940s along with Walt Disney.  CLICK HERE TO REVIEW.   So do yourself a favor and watch Don Q Son of Zorro parts one and two below, and compare the values shown in the film with the watered down valor of today.

Part II

It was on these kinds of films from Douglas Fairbanks that Hollywood would grow into what it is today a booming town of entertainment where left leaning politicians recognized more quickly the value of capturing a message and shaping it with influence so to achieve political gains.  But things were not always so watered down.    I know about these films and novels of this era because of my exposure to bullwhip art, and more specifically Western Arts.  Actors, and stuntmen like Douglas Fairbanks are the kind of people who built the foundations of Western Arts, so they are revered in a similar way that progressives think fondly of such as Woodrow Wilson.

We live in an age where we think that movies are old if they were done in the 1970s, but in essence movies have been copying off each other since the 1940s.  They are telling the same stories, but just telling them with a bit more polish then a silent film was able to capture.  In Don Q Son of Zorro Douglas Fairbanks puts out a candle in one take with a 10’ bullwhip using an overhead flick move, not easy to do.  For a project I did for a camera crew in Hollywood a few years ago, I was tasked with putting out a cigarette on the ground with a 12’ bullwhip and it took me 14 takes.  (I was doing it backwards so I don’t feel badly about it.)  But the whip stunts done in Don Q were simply light years ahead of their time and wouldn’t be even attempted again with such scope until The Mask of Zorro in 1998 starring Anthony Hopkins and Antonio Banderas.   It took Steven Spielberg to executive produce the project through his Amblin studio.  The film had been in the works as early as 1992 with Spielberg wanting to direct the film with Sean Connery playing the older version of Zorro.  Even so, it took 6 years to get the film done with Spielberg working hard to make it happen even with all the strings available for him to pull.  As good as the film was, it was essentially a dusted off version of Don Q Son of Zorro as both Spielberg and George Lucas are great lovers of classic cinema, and they worked damn hard to make The Mask of Zorro an honorable tribute to the late, great Douglas Fairbanks—particularly with the whip work.

Everything starts with an idea, and that idea started with Johnston McCulley writing the 1919 novel The Curse of Capistrano with so much passion against government statism that it practically built Hollywood with its effort.  And if it wasn’t for that novel there would have never been a movie called The Mark of Zorro and there would have never been a Don Q Son of Zorro.  There would have been no Republic serials, there would have been no Disney Zorro–there would have been no Lone Ranger.  Without Douglas Fairbanks and his great effort in Don Q Son of Zorro there would not be a bullwhip movement alive today where a handful of people scattered throughout the world are keeping alive an idea of America how it was before politics shifted heavily to the slide of the progressives, and made reality what many feared during the time that The Curse of Capistrano was written, where oppression from corrupt governors was feared, and a clash with European nobility was at war with rugged American individualism.  Don Q Son of Zorro is not just a film that has great whip stunts, but is a window into a time where America was on the brink of success, before the Red Decade, before World War II, before Vietnam, before most Americans even knew what the crazy concept of European socialism was.  In Don Q Son of Zorro there is a hope that there will always be a hero who resists the tyranny of oppression with the charisma and physical ability of the great Douglas Fairbanks.

It is up to those of us who can look through that open window and learn from history, and do in reality what was thought of on the pages of Johnston McCulley’s The Curse of Capistrano, and keep the ideas of freedom alive that characters like Zorro represented, a champion of freedom riding the horse-trodden highways at night under a full moon, his identity hidden behind a mask, as the laughing outlaw Zorro defies the tyrant’s might with the crack of a whip, and the mark of a “Z”!

Rich Hoffman

“Justice Comes with the Crack of a Whip!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

‘Zorro’s Fighting Legion’: Celebrating Disney’s ‘The Lone Ranger’ with a tribute to Yakima Canutt

Many industry professionals have cautioned me that due to my Tea Party like beliefs, I will have limited opportunities to work in film, either in front of the camera as a whip consultant, as I have done a time or two, or behind the camera as a writer.  My specific attitude toward collective oriented labor unions is the nail in the coffin as today’s Hollywood for the most part has become an arm of the federal government, and the policies of statism advocated there.  But there are rare exceptions, and of late Warner Brothers with Legendary Pictures have produced fantastic films like Man of Steel and Dark Knight Rises, while Disney Studios is putting out pictures like Iron Man, the Avengers and now the upcoming The Lone Ranger.  It is the Lone Ranger that has me extremely excited because that character as I have mentioned before goes deep into my past.  I love the old versions of the Lone Ranger, the old Saturday morning serials that were recaptured by George Lucas when he made Star Wars and Indiana Jones.  I love the old serials so much that I have seen many of them, even though they are way before my time.  While they lack the polish and sophistication of modern films, they are filled with heart and soul.  Many of the film techniques used today in all the popular blockbusters were developed during the period of the popular Republic serials.  And of those serials there was none I love more than the 1939 series called Zorro’s Fighting Legion.

For readers of my novel The Symposium of Justice, I pay tribute to that 12 chapter serial in three different ways.  The first is that the character conflict of Fletcher Finnegan is much like the fight that Don Diego had with Don Del Oro in Zorro’s Fighting Legion.  I even went to the trouble of naming the antics of my protagonist in the novel Cliffhanger’s Fighting Legion.  The third is that the restaurant that Fletcher Finnegan worked at as a grill cook so that he could learn the movements of the towns politics behind the scenes was named Republics, after of course the company that produced Zorro’s Fighting Legion.  It was Zorro’s Fighting Legion that inspired me to take up the bullwhip to the extent that I have, and make it part of my life, almost as important to me as an arm or a leg on my body.  There is a lot of whip work in Zorro’s Fighting Legion and I wanted to learn every single trick, which I did.  I came to learn about Zorro’s Fighting Legion because I learned at age 12 while watching a documentary about the making of Raiders of the Lost Ark that the great stunt performed by Terry Lenard during the famous “Desert Chase” scene was first done by the great stuntman Yakima Canutt who I feel virtually built Hollywood on his back.  Without the great work of stuntmen like Yakima Canutt and Republic Pictures there would never have been a modern-day Star Wars, an Indiana Jones, or even movie versions of Man of Steel, Iron Man, or Dark Knight Rises.

Hollywood was not always liberal.  Communism slowly seeped into the Hollywood movie machines in the late 1930s during The Red Decade, but studios resisted.  Hollywood Black Friday is the name given, in the history of organized labor in the United States, to October 5, 1945. On that date, a six-month strike by the set decorators represented by the Conference of Studio Unions (CSU) boiled over into a bloody riot at the gates of Warner Brothers‘ studios in Burbank, California. The strikes helped the passage of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1947 and led to the eventual break up of the CSU and reorganization of the then rival International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE) leadership. The Conference of Studio Unions was, at the time, an International union belonging to the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners and represented the Carpenters, Painters, Cartoonists and several other crafts working for the Studios in Hollywood.

Seventy-seven set decorators broke away from IATSE to form the Society of Motion Picture Interior Decorators (SMPID) and negotiated an independent contract with the producers in 1937. The SMPID joined the CSU in 1943 and the CSU represented the SMPID in their contract negotiations. After the producers stalled the negotiations for nine months, IATSE questioned CSU jurisdiction over the Set Decorators which led to a further five-month delay as the CSU and IATSE fought over jurisdiction. When the Producers refused to acknowledge an independent arbitrator appointed by the War Labor Board‘s assessment that the CSU had jurisdiction over the Set Decorators in February 1945, it set the stage for the strike

By October, money and patience were running low as some 300 strikers gathered at Warner Brothers’ main gate on October 5, 1945. Temperatures were abnormally warm for the already hot LA autumn. When non-strikers attempted to report for work at 6:00 in the morning, the barricades went up and tensions flared. As replacement workers attempted to drive through the crowd, their cars were stopped and overturned.  Hollywood would never again be the same as a gradual erosion of value began to leave Hollywood projects as the labor unions were backed by communist sympathizers with eyes favoring the Soviet Union during the Cold War.

Reinforcements arrived on both sides as the picket increased to some 1,000 people and Glendale and Los Angeles Police came to aid the Burbank Police and Warner Security attempting to maintain the peace. When more replacement workers attempted to break through to the gate, a general melee ensued as strikers mobbed them and strikebreakers responded by attacking the strikers with chains, hammers, pipes, tear gas, and night sticks. Warner security rained more tear gas down from the roofs of the buildings adjoining the entrance. Warner firefighters sprayed the strikers with fire hoses. By the end of the day, some 300 police and deputy sheriffs had been called to the scene and over 40 injuries were reported.

The picketers returned the following Monday with an injunction barring the police from interfering with the strike while Warner retaliated with its own injunction limiting the number of pickets at the gate. Although the violence would continue through the week, national exposure forced the parties back to the bargaining table and resulted in an end to the strike one month later but the CSU victory was a Pyrrhic one, where contentions over wording dictated by an AFL arbitration team would lead to further questioning as to CSU and IATSE jurisdiction on the set.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_Black_Friday

 

Zorro’s Fighting Legion was created during this turbulent period but was still free of unionized influence.  That makes it much more special to me for the sheer fact that the foundations of American story telling were built upon these Republic serials.  It was film projects like this one that helped slow the erosion of communism in America with the western that so proudly articulated American values of justice, and Zorro’s Fighting Legion is certainly that type of film collection.  I see the Republic serials as Hollywood’s response to the growing tension forming ahead of the Cold War between the communism of the Soviet Union and the capitalism of America.  The struggle of this philosophical debate is all over the story of Zorro’s Fighting Legion, and has resonated with me for decades.  One of the greatest days in my life was when the emergence of DVD technology allowed me to purchase the entire series to own for myself to watch over and over again, which has only been possible in recent years.  But even better than that, Zorro’s Fighting Legion is now available on YouTube, so to share this unique treasure with my readers here, and to share my vision of what Hollywood is all about in celebration of the upcoming Lone Ranger by Disney, please do enjoy all twelve episodes shown below.  They are kind of slow and boring compared to today’s entertainment, but try to watch them the way I do, for their purity of purpose, simplicity in design, and sheer bold stunt work by the great Yakima Canutt.  Mixed through the rest of the article between the episodes is information that is needed to compliment the films.

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Zorro’s Fighting Legion is a 1939 Republic Pictures film serial consisting of twelve chapters. It features Reed Hadley as Zorro. The plot revolves around his alter-ego Don Diego’s fight against the evil Don Del Oro.

A trademark of this serial is the sudden demise of at least one native informant in each episode. The direction was identical for each informant’s death, creating a source of unintentional humor: each informant, upon uttering the phrase, “Don Del Oro is…”, is shot by a golden arrow and dies before being able to name the villain’s alter ego. The serial is also unusual in featuring a real historical personage, Mexican President Benito Juárez, as a minor character.

The mysterious Don Del Oro (“Lord of Gold”), an idol of the Yaqui Indians, has emerged and attacks the gold trade of the Republic of Mexico, planning to take over the land and become Emperor. A man named Francisco is put in charge of a fighting legion to combat the Yaqui tribe and protect the gold, but he is attacked by men working for Don Del Oro. Zorro comes to his rescue, but it is too late for him. Francisco’s partner recognizes Zorro as the hidalgo Don Diego Vega. Francisco asks Diego, as Zorro, to take over the fighting legion and defeat Don Del Oro.

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zorro’s_Fighting_Legion

Republic Pictures was an American independent film production-distribution corporation with studio facilities, operating from 1935 through 1959, and was best known for specializing in westerns, movie serials and B films emphasizing mystery and action.

The studio was also responsible for financing and distributing one Shakespeare film, Orson Welles‘ Macbeth (1948), and several of the films of John Ford during the 1940s and early 1950s. It was also notable for developing the careers of John Wayne, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers.

Yakima Canutt (November 29, 1895 – May 24, 1986), also known as Yak Canutt, was an American rodeo rider, actor, stuntman and action director.

Born Enos Edward Canutt in the Snake River Hills, near Colfax, Washington; he was one of five children of John Lemuel Canutt, a rancher, and Nettie Ellen Stevens. He grew up in eastern Washington on a ranch near Penawawa Creek, founded by his grandfather and operated by his father, who also served a term in the state legislature. His formal education was limited to elementary school in Green Lake, Washington, then a suburb of Seattle. He gained the education for his life’s work on the family ranch, where he learned to hunt, trap, shoot, and ride.[1]

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He broke a wild bronco when 11. As a 6-foot-tall (1.8 m) sixteen-year-old he started bronc riding at the Whitman County Fair in Colfax in 1912 and at 17 he won the title of World’s Best Bronco Buster. Canutt started rodeo riding professionally and gained a reputation as a bronc rider, bulldogger and all-around cowboy. It was at the 1914 Pendleton Round-Up, Pendleton, Oregon he got his nickname “Yakima” when a newspaper caption misidentified him.[2] “Yakima Canutt may be the most famous person NOT from Yakima, Washington” says Elizabeth Gibson, author of Yakima, Washington.[3] Winning second place at the 1915 Pendleton Round-Up brought attention from show promoters, who invited him to compete around the country.[2]

“I started in major rodeos in 1914, and went through to 1923. There was quite a crop of us traveling together, and we would have special railroad cars and cars for the horses. We’d play anywhere from three, six, eight ten-day shows. Bronc riding and bulldogging were my specialties, but I did some roping,” said Canutt.[4]

During the 1916 season, he became interested in divorcee Kitty Wilks, who had won the Lady’s Bronc-Riding Championship a couple of times. They married on July 20, 1917 while at a show in Kalispell, Montana; he was 21 and she 23. The couple divorced about 1922.[2] While bulldogging in Idaho, Canutt’s mouth and upper lip were torn by a bull’s horn; but after stitches, Canutt returned to the competition. It wasn’t until a year later that a plastic surgeon could correct the injury.[2]

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World’s champion

Canutt won his first world championship at the Olympics of the West in 1917 and won more championships in the next few years. In between rodeos he broke horses for the French government in World War I.[5] In 1918, he went to Spokane to enlist in the Navy and was stationed in Bremerton. In the fall he was given a 30-day furlough to defend his rodeo title. Having enlisted for the war, he was discharged in spring 1919. At the 1919 Calgary Stampede he competed in the bucking event and met Pete Knight.[2]

He traveled to Los Angeles for a rodeo, and decided to winter in Hollywood, where he met screen personalities.[4] It was here that Tom Mix, who had also started in rodeos, invited him to be in two of his pictures.[2] Mix added to his flashy wardrobe by borrowing two of Canutt’s two-tone shirts and having his tailor make 40 copies.[4] Canutt got his first taste of stunting with a fight scene on a serial called Lightning Bryce [6]; he didn’t stay, and left Hollywood to play the 1920 rodeo circuit.

The Fort Worth rodeo was nicknamed “Yak’s show” after he won the saddle-bronc competition three years in 1921, 1922 and 1923. He had won the saddle-bronc competition in Pendleton in 1917, 1919, and 1923 and came second in 1915, and 1929. Canutt won the steer bulldogging in 1920, and 1921 and won the All-Around Police Gazette belt in 1917, 1919, 1920 and 1923.[2] While in Hollywood in 1923 for an awards ceremony, he was offered eight western action pictures for producer Ben Wilson at Burwillow Studios; the first was to be Riding Mad.

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Actor

Canutt had been perfecting tricks such as the Crupper Mount, a leap-frog over the horse’s rump into the saddle. Douglas Fairbanks used some in his film The Gaucho. Fairbanks and Canutt became friends and competed regularly at Fairbanks’ gym. Canutt took small parts in pictures of others to get experience.[2] It was in Branded a Bandit (1924) that his nose was broken in a 12-foot fall from a cliff. The picture was delayed several weeks, and when it resumed Canutt’s close shots were from the side. A plastic surgeon reset the nose, which healed, inspiring Canutt to remark that he thought it looked better.[2]

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Stuntman

When his contract with Wilson expired in 1927, Canutt was making appearances at rodeos across the country. By 1928 the talkies were coming out and though he had been in 48 silent pictures, Canutt knew his career was in trouble.[5] His voice had been damaged from flu in the Navy. He started taking on bit parts and stunts, and realized more could be done with action in pictures.[2]

In 1930 between pictures and rodeoing, Canutt met Minnie Audrea Yeager Rice at a party at her parents’ home. She was 12 years his junior. They kept company during the next year while he picked up work on the serials for Mascot Pictures Corporation. They married on November 12, 1931.[2]

When rodeo riders invaded Hollywood, they brought a battery of rodeo techniques that Canutt would expand and improve, including horse falls and wagon wrecks, along with the harnesses and cable rigs to make the stunts foolproof and safe.[4] Among the new safety devices was the ‘L’ stirrup, which allowed a man to fall off a horse without getting hung in the stirrup. Canutt also developed cabling and equipment to cause spectacular wagon crashes, while releasing the team, all on the same spot every time.[4] Safety methods such as these saved film-makers time and money and prevented accidents and injury to performers. One of Yakima’s inventions was the ‘Running W’ stunt, bringing down a horse at the gallop by attaching a wire, anchored to the ground, to its fetlocks and launching the rider forwards spectacularly. This either killed the horse, or rendered it badly shaken and unusable for the rest of the day.[4] The ‘Running W’ is now banned and has been replaced with the falling-horse technique. It is believed that the last time it was used was on the 1983 Iraqi film al-Mas’ Ala Al-Kubra when the British actor and friend of Yak Marc Sinden and stuntman Ken Buckle (who had been trained by Yak) performed the stunt three times during a cavalry charge sequence.[7][8]

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It was while working on Mascot serials that Canutt practiced and perfected his most famous stunts, including the drop from a stagecoach that he would employ in John Ford‘s 1939Stagecoach. He first did it in Riders of the Dawn in 1937 while doubling for Jack Randall.[2] In his 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark, Steven Speilberg paid homage to Canutt, recreating the stunt when a stuntman, Terry Leonard, (doubling for Harrison Ford) ‘dropped’ from the front of a German Army transport truck, was dragged underneath (along a prepared trench) and then climbed up the back and round to the front again.[9]

John Wayne

While at Mascot, Canutt met John Wayne while doubling for him in a motorcycle stunt for The Shadow of the Eagle in 1932. Wayne admired Canutt’s agility and fearlessness, and Canutt respected Wayne’s willingness to learn and attempt his own stunts.[10] Canutt taught Wayne how to fall off a horse.[11]

“The two worked together to create a technique that made on-screen fight scenes more realistic. Wayne and Canutt found if they stood at a certain angle in front of the camera, they could throw a punch at an actor’s face and make it look as if actual contact had been made.”[10]

Canutt and Wayne pioneered stunt and screen fighting techniques still in use. Much of Wayne’s on-screen persona was from Canutt. The characterizations associated with Wayne – the drawling, hesitant speech and the hip-rolling walk – were pure Canutt.[12] Said Wayne, “I spent weeks studying the way Yakima Canutt walked and talked. He was a real cowhand.”[13]

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In 1932, Canutt’s first son Edward Clay was born and nicknamed ‘Tap’, short for Tapadero, a Spanish word for a stirrup covering. It was in 1932 that Canutt broke his shoulder in four places while trying to transfer from horse to wagon team.[2] Though work was scarce, he got by combining stunting and rodeo work.

In 1934, Herbert J. Yates of Consolidated Film Industries combined Monogram, Mascot, Liberty, Majestic, Chesterfield, and Invincible Pictures to form Republic Pictures, and Canutt became Republic’s top stuntman. He handled all the action on many pictures, including Gene Autry films; and several series and serials, such as The Lone Ranger andZorro. For Zorro Rides Again, Canutt did almost all the scenes in which Zorro wore a mask, and he was on the screen as much as the star John Carroll.[14] When the action was indicated in a Republic script, it said “see Yakima Canutt for action sequences.”[4]

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William Witney, one of Republic’s film directors, said:

“There will probably never be another stuntman who can compare to Yakima Canutt. He had been a world champion cowboy several times and where horses were concerned he could do it all. He invented all the gadgets that made stunt work easier. One of his clever devices was a step that attached to the saddle so that he had leverage to transfer to another moving object, like a wagon or a train. Another was the “shotgun,” a spring-loaded device used to separate the tongue of a running wagon from the horses, thus cutting the horses loose. It also included a shock cord attached to the wagon bed, which caused wheels to cramp and turn the wagon over on the precise spot that was most advantageous for the camera.”[15]

In the 1936 film San Francisco Canutt replaced Clark Gable in a scene in which a wall was to fall on the star. Canutt said: “We had a heavy table situated so that I could dive under it at the last moment. Just as the wall started down, a girl in the scene became hysterical and panicked. I grabbed her, leaped for the table, but didn’t quite make it.” The girl was unhurt but he broke six ribs.[5]

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Ramrod

Canutt tried to get into directing; he was growing older and knew his stunting days were numbered. Harry Joe, Canutt’s second son, was born in January 1937. Joe and Tap would become important stuntmen, working with their father.

In 1938, Republic Pictures started expanding into bigger pictures and budgets. Canutt’s mentor and action director for the 1925 Ben-Hur, Breezy Eason was hired as second unit director, and Canutt to coordinate and ramrod the stunts. For Canutt this meant hiring stuntmen and doing some stunts himself, but laying out the action for the director and writing additional stunts.[4]

“In the five years between 1925 and 1930, fifty-five people were killed making movies, and more than ten thousand injured. By the late 1930s, the maverick stuntman willing to do anything for a buck was disappearing. Now under scrutiny, experienced stunt men began to separate themselves from amateurs by building special equipment, rehearsing stunts, and developing new techniques.” – fromFalling: How Our Greatest Fear Became Our Greatest Thrill by Garrett Soden.[16]

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John Ford hired Canutt on John Wayne‘s recommendation for Stagecoach, where Canutt supervised the river-crossing scene as well as the Indian chase scene, did the stagecoach drop, and doubled for Wayne in the coach stunts. For safety during the stagecoach drop stunt, Canutt devised modified yokes and tongues, to give extra handholds and extra room between the teams.[4] Ford told him that whenever Ford made an action picture and Canutt wasn’t working elsewhere, he was on Ford’s payroll.[2] Also in 1939, Canutt doubled Clark Gable in the burning of Atlanta in Gone With the Wind; he also appeared as a renegade accosting Scarlett O’Hara (Vivien Leigh) as she crosses a bridge in a carriage driving through a shantytown.

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Second Unit Director

In 1940, Canutt sustained serious internal injuries when a horse fell on him while doubling for Clark Gable in Boom Town (1940). Though in discomfort for months after an operation to repair his bifurcated intestines, he continued to work.[2] Republic’s Sol Siegel offered him the chance to direct the action sequences of Dark Command, starring Wayne and directed by Raoul Walsh. On Dark Command, Canutt fashioned an elaborate cable system to yank back the plummeting coach before it fell on the stuntman and horses; he also created a breakaway harness from which they were released before hitting the water.[17]

It was in 1943 while doing a low-budget Roy Rogers called Idaho that Canutt broke both his legs at the ankles in a fall off a wagon.[2] He recovered to write the stunts and supervise the action for another Wayne film In Old Oklahoma. In the next decade Canutt became one of the best second unit and action directors. MGM brought Canutt to England in 1952 to direct the action and jousting sequences in Ivanhoe with Robert Taylor. This would set a precedent by filming action abroad instead of on the studio lot, and Canutt introduced many British stuntmen to Hollywood-style stunt training.[2] Ivanhoe was followed by Knights of the Round Table, again with director Richard Thorpe and starring Robert Taylor. Canutt was again brought in for lavish action scenes in King Richard and the Crusaders.[18]

Canutt directed the close-action scenes for Stanley Kubrick‘s Spartacus, spending five days directing retakes that included the slave army rolling its flaming logs into the Romans, and other fight scenes featuring Kirk Douglas, Tony Curtis and John Ireland.[19]

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Ben Hur

For Ben-Hur, Canutt staged the chariot race with nine teams of four horses. He trained Charlton Heston, (Judah Ben-Hur) and Stephen Boyd, (Messala) to do their own charioteering. He and his crew spent five months on the race sequence.[20] In contrast to the 1925 film, not one horse was hurt, and no humans were seriously injured; though Joe Canutt, while doubling for Charlton Heston, did cut his chin because he did not follow his father’s advice to hook himself to the chariot when Judah Ben-Hur’s chariot bounced over the wreck of another chariot.[21]

Walt Disney brought Canutt in to do Second Unit for Westward Ho, the Wagons! in 1956; the first live action Western Disney feature film followed by Old Yeller the next year, and culminating in 1960’s Swiss Family Robinson which involved transporting many exotic animals to a remote island in the West Indies.

Anthony Mann specifically requested Canutt for Second Unit for his 1961 El Cid, where Canutt directed sons Joe and Tap doubling forCharlton Heston and Christopher Rhodes in a stunning tournament joust. “Canutt was surely the most active stager of tournaments since the Middle Ages” – from Swordsmen of the Screen.[18] He was determined to make the combat scenes in El Cid the best that had ever been filmed.[21] Mann again requested him for 1964’s The Fall of the Roman Empire. Over the next ten years, Canutt would continue to work, bringing his talents to Cat Ballou, Khartoum, Where Eagles Dare and 1970’s A Man Called Horse.

For his contribution to the motion picture industry, Yakima Canutt has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 1500 Vine Street. In 1967, he was given an Honorary Academy Award for achievements as a stunt man and for developing safety devices to protect stunt men everywhere. He was inducted into the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum (Hall of Fame).

1985 – Yakima appeared as himself in “Yak’s Best Ride” directed by John Crawford. Produced by Clyde Lucas and Ed Penny

Yakima Canutt died of natural causes at the age of 90 in North Hollywood, California.[22]

He is buried at Valhalla Memorial Park Cemetery there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yakima_Canutt

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Now you might understand why dear reader that I feel the way I do.  The kind of Hollywood, and adversely the kind of America I want is the one that made movies like Zorro’s Fighting Legion which were populated by men like Yakima Canutt.  My admiration for George Lucas is that he kept this type of America alive for the world by paying direct tribute to the old Republic serials, particularly Zorro’s Fighting Legion with his creation of Indiana Jones.  Like Republic Studios, George Lucas’ Lucasfilm made movies with the same level of independence which fashioned the Republic serials to be so important in American storytelling.  Raiders of the Lost Ark, not to take anything away from the visionary story of placing a globetrotting archeologist in a high adventure setting which has advanced science in so many wonderful ways, borrowed heavily from the old Republic serials and because it did, made me aware of their existence across time and space.   And now you too dear reader have seen one, the best one in my opinion.  One of the big fears that many current day Star Wars fans has is that Disney will ruin the Saturday morning serial feel to the films that mean more to people than even modern religions can duplicate.  The reason is that the stories have values that are not provided in modern society, and movie fans are hungry for films with value.  But Disney, even though it is a large company has not forgotten where it came from.  It knows what Uncle Walt told them from beyond the grave and Star Wars is in good hands.  The evidence is in The Lone Ranger which Disney is producing to re-invent the western the way they re-invented the pirate stories.  But it cannot be forgotten that what came first, was the great Republic serials like Zorro’s Fighting Legion where truth, justice, and the American way were plot points of value not avoided by a growing consensus toward world-wide communist domination.

The Don Del Oro of our time is all those statist lovers who would destroy all who attempt to stand for goodness.  They reside among us in reality with masks hiding their true intentions from behind the desks of union leadership, political office, even movie studio heads.  But not everyone is playing by the rules, and like Don Diego from Zorro’s Fighting Legion there are film producers like George Lucas who kept the old serials alive for a new generation, and Jerry Bruckheimer who is making the modern version of The Lone Ranger possible.  But more importantly, it is the work of men like Yakima Canutt, and Terry Lenard who gave wings to the ideas of freedom, which motion pictures have traditionally stood for, and still do in isolated cases like Disney’s The Lone Ranger, and Warner Brother’s Man of Steel.

It is worth taking a day or two to watch all these clips.  So make up some snacks in the kitchen and take some time to enjoy the foundations of American film and the heroic ideals that accompany them.

Rich Hoffman

“Justice Comes with the Crack of a Whip!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

Doc Thompson Rips the IRS: NTEU labor union gives employees $70 million in bonuses

If you want to hear some absolutely hilarious radio commentary, listen to the clip below, it is well worth your time.  Doc Thompson and Skip LeCombe during their usual Blaze Radio Network show from 6 AM to 9 AM broadcast all over the world twice a day blasted the IRS for the recent issuing of over $70 million dollars in bonuses to their unionized employees.  Many people do not realize that the IRS is unionized work force under the National Treasury Employees Union otherwise known as the (NTEU).  So even though there is government furloughs and closed tours through the White House due to financial constraints, the IRS regardless of performance by its employees through their ridiculous collective bargaining agreements are receiving bonuses of an extraordinarily high amount.  Doc breaks down the math in the broadcast below, about 5 minutes into the segment.  But first Doc and Skip bring news of a terrorist summer camp that is quite serious, but is delivered with the usual Doc Thompson ability to make even the most sinister concepts more digestible with his rambunctious sense of humor.  For long time readers here who remember Doc Thompson when he was on 700 WLW, he was functioning under severe handcuffs.  Now that he is with The Blaze and reporting to Glenn Beck at Mercury Entertainment, he has freedom that any radio personality would love to have, which is to the benefit of listeners everywhere.  The Blaze is available 24 hours a day through streaming audio, and is an experiment from Glenn Beck which broadcasts like any other radio station with news at the top and bottom of every hour.  So enjoy this small sample from Doc’s recent show about the IRS bonuses that will make you laugh, but at the same time make you extremely angry.

Doc and Skip were one of the first news outlets to break the IRS bonuses story, but Forbes had a wonderful article about it written by Kelly Phillips Erb which can be seen in its entirety at the link below:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2013/06/20/defying-directive-irs-set-to-pay-out-70-million-in-employee-bonuses/

I included this link not just because the article was good, but the comments at the end were fantastic.  One comment summed up the situation at the IRS remarkably well, even though I don’t agree with the writer at all—the comment reminded me of the same types of diatribes that were uttered when we begin to analyze collective bargaining agreements among public school teachers as being the cause of continuous tax increase requests.  The comment from Peter Reilly shown below made the argument that the IRS needs incentives like great bonuses and pensions to attract “top talent.” This brings up a whole list of problems.  But before getting into them, have a look at what he said:

Peter J Reilly, Contributor 1 day ago

For its top people the IRS has to compete in a labor market that pays much better than the IRS. There was recently published list of the top 1,000 paid federal employees. Number 1000 made just over $200,000 per year. Nobody on the list worked for the IRS.

In a regional accounting firm I know of there was a term for partners who made around $200,000 – the bottom quartile. The top quartile probably made about what the lowest paid partners in national firms make. And this is mere CPAs, never mind tax attorneys.

I think very few people go into tax work of any sort based on the sort of inner call that might lead someone to be a physician, a priest or a soldier. It’s clean work with no heavy lifting that pays pretty well. You’ve got to do something to feed your family.

Part of the tax profession is an arms race between people gaming the system and people trying to keep the gaming with reasonable bounds. Both sides require the same knowledge base, education and some common skill sets. In a free democratic society the top gamers will always make more money than the other side.

Working for the IRS might get you a better life work balance and a pension which might make it a better deal at the lower and middle levels, but the Service is at a huge disadvantage in retaining top talent.

For those of us who want a smaller, and more efficient government no matter if the employee is a local school teacher working in public school, or an IRS agent, when the pay and compensation to government work is equal or better than private sector work, then top talent will seek the government job.  Reilly’s comment assumes that the IRS needs to have top talent in order to function efficiently.  Without question, the NTEU union has made the same argument for its union members that the school teachers, police departments, and other unionized federal workers have made, that the service they provide is important, and that only through collective bargaining does America get the highest quality product.

Well, anybody with a brain knows this kind of thinking is ridiculously foolish, and the fun that Doc Thompson and Skip had in picking the theory to pieces was well justified.    The way the system works now is that top talent is seduced to work for government because the pay is so good, and the retirement packages are better than anywhere in the world.  That top talent is ruined in the non-competitive government environment where collective bureaucracy rule and individual achievement is frowned upon.  Even the best top talent in the world will never make a collective oriented organization function miraculously well when all individuals serve the system of employment rather than the system serving the individuals that make it work.   Within a few years of employment, most of the bright-eyed top talent which is employed by the government learns their place in the pecking order, and stop trying to be ambitious, and instead just bide  their time, collect their paycheck, and prepare for their retirements, and eventual deaths.

The way things should work is that no federal employee should be unionized.  Government also should not pay more than the private sector.  Government work offers a security that is not duplicated in private sector work, so the pay should be much lower.  Pay should be assessed based on risk level, not statist power.  In this way, the private sector should pay a lot more than any government work so that those who wish to make more money will leave government, not join it.  If any worker wants to waste their life as a government employee, they should be paid a bare minimum wage in trade for the security of the job.  Then and only then will government ever get smaller, and government workers will vote with their minds and not their pocket books.  It is the government type employees who vote to keep people like President Obama in power not because they like his socialist policies, but because he is their boss.  So long as big government politicians are in office in Washington, job security is ever-present in their positions.  And so long as government employees are in a union, they can act as a socialist collective to get bonuses, pay and pensions that they do not deserve.    There will always be apologists like the commentator Reilly who believe that the IRS needs top talent to function—to catch those who are “gaming” the system.  Well, this isn’t true.  Turn the tax collecting system to a flat tax, and simplify the code, and suddenly sophisticated accountants with a broad knowledge of the complicated tax code wouldn’t be needed.

I was at a dinner event recently where a retired FBI agent was attempting to grab the same bottle of wine that I was out of a chilled bucket.  I wasn’t in the mood for beer, or any kind of soft drink and the food was too good to just have water with it, so I wanted wine.  The agent pointed at the bottle I had in my hand and asked, “Is that Chateau d’Yquem Sauternes?  Here let me open it for us.”  I looked at the label and tried to identify the label which was written mostly in French and replied, “Here’s your crushed grapes.  You tell me.”  The old federal worker of course wanted to display to me his knowledge of wine, and inform me of his extensive knowledge of them gained from around the world.  All he succeeded in doing was reminding me that he came to such knowledge not by the merit of his work, but by years of kissing ass to work his way up the FBI chain attending little gatherings where expensive wines were tossed into chilled buckets like water bottles in a cooler for a picnic.  That mentality does not make the people individually evil, just instruments of collective statism.  I felt sorry for that particular FBI agent.  His years of work had brought him to a retirement where he knew the names of French wine, but was unable to help a child thread twin string through a kite.  He was very happy to joke about his lack of aviation knowledge declaring that such an endeavor required the services of an engineer, not an old FBI agent—then everyone laughed, except for me.

I have seen the same behavior in retired school teachers, retired military personnel, and especially retired bureaucrats.  They want to feel that their life has some meaning, especially at the end of it, because their careers offered them nothing of any intellectual substance.  They simply showed up at work every day and their labor union did all their fighting for them, so all they had to do was collect their pay, and plan social events with their co-workers using their discretionary income to purchase bottles of wine that other people didn’t have access to–get drunk and reminisce about their wild and crazy days during high school.  Those same federal workers plan their vacations each year to Key West where they attend Fantasy Fest living out their most pent-up sexual fantasies.  Walk Duval Street every October and interview the topless 50-year-old women, or the pot-bellied IRS cubical worker of 30 years who has traded in their suit for a woman’s dress and wig pretending to be a girl during the famous parade.

Check it out for yourself at the following link.  The people who attend that event are upper middle-class types—and those are a creation of government, former FBI agents, school teachers, cops, IRS employees, politicians, adults who spent their entire adult lives adapting to a collective hive who can retire at age 55 and have money to spend because tax payers gave it to them through their labor unions.  If I had to bet, I would say the number of people attending Fantasy Fest in Key West were just over 80% government employees.

http://www.fantasyfest.com/

The situation is endemic in all federal agencies, but is especially prevalent at the IRS which should be completely dismantled and replaced with a flat tax.  But it won’t because the NTEU union has too much power, including organizing a campaign against the Tea Party from The White House.  The next step with these types is to get together over sundown meetings in each other’s back yards and squabble about what bottle of wine to pull from the wine bucket, as such trivia is all that matters to their bureaucratic mindsets after a dozen or more years of employment by the federal government.  Just think how many bottles of Chateau d’Yquem Sauternes the IRS workers will be able to purchase with their $70 million dollars in bonuses on top of a salary that is already pushing six figures.

If it’s not evident why the Tea Party wants to reign in the costs of the federal government it is to get control of this kind of statist mentality from employees who should be working for the private sector instead of government.  The only beneficiaries to such unionized arrangements is the political machine of Democrats (socialists) who collect the union dues for the re-election of statist candidates, the union workers who get paid a lot of money to do very little, and the wine makers in France who sell most of their stock to retired federal workers because that’s who buys their product.  It is in times like these that we should all be thankful that there are people like Doc Thompson on the radio to bring stories about such abuses to light, because without such a radio personality, the abuse would continue on unreported.

Rich Hoffman

“Justice Comes with the Crack of a Whip!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

‘Coolidge’ by Amity Shlaes: Government wanted Stalin, the Tea Party wants Calvin

So what is it that the Tea Party wants in a president, or for that matter in a government?  Do we want a royal prince to fly all about the world to kiss the rings of kings, queens and ass clowns?  No.  Do we want a political class of acadmianuts to dictate to us a morality derived one half from unproven faith, and one half scientific scholarships based on incomplete analysis from intelligentsia?  No.  Do we want a government with no concept of growth, who can do nothing but over consume until they are bed-ridden mounds of flesh that cannot even get up to walk?  No.  But when in history was there ever a president who did not exhibit these traits?  The answer of course is Calvin Coolidge who took office as vice-president in 1920 and became president in 1923 when Warren Harding died.   Coolidge is one of the few presidents who left office in 1929 with a government smaller than when he came in.  His time in the White House was quit and relatively uneventful.  However, his handling of the economy led to a surge in laissez-faire capitalism after the over-reaching years of the Woodrow Wilson regime took American into the roaring twenties.  My good friend Matt Clark interviewed Amity Shlaes who wrote a wonderful biography on Calvin Coolidge simply titled Coolidge.  Watch the video of that interview here to learn more.

John Calvin Coolidge, Jr. (July 4, 1872 – January 5, 1933) was the 30th President of the United States (1923–1929). A Republican lawyer from Vermont, Coolidge worked his way up the ladder of Massachusetts state politics, eventually becoming governor of that state. His conduct during the Boston Police Strike of 1919 thrust him into the national spotlight and gave him a reputation as a man of decisive action. Elected in his own right in 1924, he gained a reputation as a small-government conservative, and also as a man who said very little.

Coolidge restored public confidence in the White House after the scandals of his predecessor’s administration, and left office with considerable popularity.[1] As a Coolidge biographer put it, “He embodied the spirit and hopes of the middle class, could interpret their longings and express their opinions. That he did represent the genius of the average is the most convincing proof of his strength.”[2] Some later criticized Coolidge as part of a general criticism of laissez-faire government.[3] His reputation underwent a renaissance during the Ronald Reagan Administration, but the ultimate assessment of his presidency is still divided between those who approve of his reduction of the size of government programs and those who believe the federal government should be more involved in regulating and controlling the economy.[4]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_Coolidge

Critics of the way Coolidge shrunk the federal government of course were in love with the severe micromanaging of the government that was being displayed by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union.  Coolidge would get the blame for The Great Depression which began in the United States in 1929 after Coolidge’s presidency ended.  However, the cause of the depression was the global fascination with socialism, and hard-core communism which extended to every corner of the world prior to World War II.  In the United States, the period after Coolidge’s White House term was called The Red Decade, because of the spread of communist ideas into mainstream thought.

The Red Decade was a term coined by journalist and historian Eugene Lyons to describe a period in American history in the 1930s characterized by a widespread infatuation with communism in general and Stalinism in particular. Lyons believed this idolization of Joseph Stalin and exultation of Bolshevik achievements to have reached its high point in 1938, running deepest amongst liberals, intellectuals, and journalists and even some government and federal officials.

Lyons argues that American intellectuals gave the then-Stalinist Soviet Union (and by extension, Stalinism) a certain international goodwill and respectability that it did not deserve.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Decade

Much like the failure in modern America to identify the threat of radical Islamic government ambitions, the political left during the Coolidge years failed to identify the downside of communism which was not reported to the public in the newspapers they controlled, and radio broadcasts they voiced.  Stalin represented the opposite form of government that Coolidge ran, which has delivered America to the doorstep of tyranny ever since the 1930s.  Intellectuals training America’s youth in colleges all over the world had bought into the seduction of Joseph Stalin as they found Calvin Coolidge’s small-government ideas appalling to their statist desires.

Joseph Stalin or Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin (Russian: Иосиф Виссарионович Сталин; born Ioseb Besarionis je J̌uḡašvili, Georgian: იოსებ ბესარიონის ძე ჯუღაშვილი, pronounced [iɔsɛb bɛsariɔnis dze dʒuɣaʃvili]; 18 December 1878[1] – 5 March 1953) was the de facto leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. Among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who took part in the Russian Revolution of 1917, Stalin was appointed General Secretary of the party’s Central Committee in 1922. He subsequently managed to consolidate power following the 1924 death of Vladimir Lenin through expanding the functions of his role, all the while eliminating any opposition. He held this nominal post until abolishing it in 1952, concurrently serving as the Premier of the Soviet Union after establishing the position in 1941.

Under Joseph Stalin’s rule, the concept of “socialism in one country” became a central tenet of Soviet society. He replaced the New Economic Policy introduced by Lenin in the early 1920s with a highly centralised command economy, launching a period of industrialization and collectivization that resulted in the rapid transformation of the USSR from an agrarian society into an industrial power.[2] However, the economic changes coincided with the imprisonment of millions of people in Soviet correctional labour camps[3] and the deportation of many others to remote areas.[3] The initial upheaval in agriculture disrupted food production and contributed to the catastrophic Soviet famine of 1932–1933, known as the Holodomor in Ukraine. Later, in a period that lasted from 1936–39, Stalin instituted a campaign against alleged enemies of his regime called the Great Purge, in which hundreds of thousands were executed. Major figures in the Communist Party, such as the old Bolsheviks, Leon Trotsky, and several Red Army leaders were killed after being convicted of plotting to overthrow the government and Stalin.[4]

In August 1939, Stalin entered into a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany that divided their influence within Eastern Europe, but Germany later violated the agreement and launched a massive invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Despite heavy human and territorial losses, Soviet forces managed to halt the Nazi incursion after the decisive battles of Moscow and Stalingrad. After defeating the Axis powers on the Eastern Front, the Red Army captured Berlin in May 1945, effectively ending the war in Europe for the Allies.[5][6] The Soviet Union subsequently emerged as one of two recognized world superpowers, the other being the United States.[7] The Yalta and Potsdam conferences established communist governments loyal to the Soviet Union in the Eastern Bloc countries as buffer states, which Stalin deemed necessary in case of another invasion. He also fostered close relations with Mao Zedong in China and Kim Il-sung in North Korea.

Stalin led the Soviet Union through its post-war reconstruction phase, which saw a significant rise in tension with the Western world that would later be known as the Cold War. During this period, the USSR became the second country in the world to successfully develop a nuclear weapon, as well as launching the Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature in response to another widespread famine and the Great Construction Projects of Communism. In the years following his death, Stalin and his regime have been condemned on numerous occasions, most notably in 1956 when his successor Nikita Khrushchev denounced his legacy and initiated a process of de-Stalinization. He remains a controversial figure today, with many regarding him as a tyrant;[8] however, popular opinion within the Russian Federation is mixed.[9][10][11]

Stalin, as head of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, consolidated near-absolute power in the 1930s with a Great Purge of the party that was justified as an attempt to expel “opportunists” and “counter-revolutionary infiltrators”.[42][43] Those targeted by the purge were often expelled from the party, however more severe measures ranged from banishment to the Gulag labor camps to execution after trials held by NKVD troikas.[42][44][45]

In the 1930s, Stalin apparently became increasingly worried about the growing popularity of the Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov. At the 1934 Party Congress where the vote for the new Central Committee was held, Kirov received only three negative votes, the fewest of any candidate, while Stalin received at least over a hundred negative votes.[46][47] After the assassination of Kirov, which may have been orchestrated by Stalin, Stalin invented a detailed scheme to implicate opposition leaders in the murder, including Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev.[48] The investigations and trials expanded.[49] Stalin passed a new law on “terrorist organizations and terrorist acts” that were to be investigated for no more than ten days, with no prosecution, defense attorneys or appeals, followed by a sentence to be executed “quickly.”[50]

Thereafter, several trials known as the Moscow Trials were held, but the procedures were replicated throughout the country. Article 58 of the legal code, which listed prohibited anti-Soviet activities as counterrevolutionary crime, was applied in the broadest manner.[51] The flimsiest pretexts were often enough to brand someone an “enemy of the people“, starting the cycle of public persecution and abuse, often proceeding to interrogation, torture and deportation, if not death. The Russian word troika gained a new meaning: a quick, simplified trial by a committee of three subordinated to NKVD –NKVD troika– with sentencing carried out within 24 hours.[50] Stalin’s hand-picked executioner, Vasili Blokhin, was entrusted with carrying out some of the high-profile executions in this period.[52]

Many military leaders were convicted of treason and a large-scale purge of Red Army officers followed.[54] The repression of so many formerly high-ranking revolutionaries and party members led Leon Trotsky to claim that a “river of blood” separated Stalin’s regime from that of Lenin.[55] In August 1940, Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico, where he had lived in exile since January 1937; this eliminated the last of Stalin’s opponents among the former Party leadership.[56]

With the exception of Vladimir Milyutin (who died in prison in 1937) and Joseph Stalin himself, all of the members of Lenin’s original cabinet who had not succumbed to death from natural causes before the purge were executed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin

The Great Depression was caused by communism and the over-tampering of economies by left-leaning governments.  Stalin was the exact opposite of Calvin Coolidge who presided over one of the best periods of economy the United States ever experienced even handcuffed with the Prohibition policies created during the Wilson Progressive Era.  Stalin and his influence throughout the world articulated by seduced journalists created the Great Depression during the Red Decade in America as the statist architects of government wanted to carry America as far away from Calvin Coolidge as possible.

The political left and even many on the political right have found themselves shaped in 2013 intellectually, philosophically, morally, and even ideologically by the events mentioned above.  America never recovered from this period of the The Red Decade, because immediately after was World War II, then a brief period of economic boom built off post war economics in the 1950s.  Then the communists were back at it with more statist plans coming again through American colleges during the 1960s.  The rest is history and indicate a very gradual slide toward complete statism exulted by Joseph Stalin who many intellectuals are glad to support the death, destruction and economic depressions so to witness the equality given to all by communism.

Calvin Coolidge was the shining example of what America could produce in a manager in the Executive Branch.  He wasn’t a glory seeker, nor did he in any way desire to be viewed as a king.  He simply wanted to work hard on behalf of the country and leave his office better than he found it—and smaller.  If history tells any kind of coherent story it is that no matter how good a president is, or no matter how efficient the government, there will always be those threats to individual liberty who will gladly trade tyranny for some measure of security.  There is safety in collectivism that is appealing to the weak heart and mind, and there will always be these types of people in a democracy who will vote for more statism through perpetually bigger government.  And when things go wrong with their plans, even if they occur in an entirely different decade, they will blame somebody else.  In our modern-day it is the incompetent manager in Barack Obama who still five years after taking office is blaming George W. Bush for his failing economy that is cause by his socialist tampering.  And so too has history as it was written by liberals, college professors and social scum bags portrayed Joseph Stalin as a saint in spite of the millions of deaths caused by communism, and placed the blame of The Great Depression on the doorstep of Silent Cal, the American president who knew to stay as far away from government tampering as possible to give the economy a chance to grow, which it did.

It is important to know history, and those in the Tea Party are learning.  It is for that reason that they find Calvin Coolidge so appealing, and the model for how government should be run going into the 21st Century.  Without the methods of a future Calvin Coolidge type as President of the United States, all projected government activity in America is destined to bankrupt themselves because of their roots in socialism that began as far back as The Red Decade—a period of time created by the political left to answer the prosperity of Calvin Coolidge, one of the greatest presidents that America never knew about—which is how it’s supposed to be.


You can find Amity Shlaes book Coolidge at the following link:

http://www.amazon.com/Coolidge-Amity-Shlaes/dp/0061967556

Rich Hoffman

“Justice Comes with the Crack of a Whip!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

Liberty Township Tea Party Joins in Law Suit Against IRS: Seeking justice from an uncontrolled tyranny

Press Release as sent:  Liberty Township Tea Party Joins in Law Suit Against IRS   

 

Today June 25, 2013 the Liberty Township Tea Party official joined a law suit with the ACLJ, American Center for Law and Justice, in seeking action against the IRS.

 The ACLJ filed the amended complaint in our lawsuit against the IRS and the government officials involved in the unconstitutional targeting of conservative groups.

Here is a copy of our press release discussing our amended complaint and our now 41 clients involved in the legal challenge: http://aclj.org/free-speech-2/jay-sekulow-aclj-now-represents-41-conservative-groups-in-federal-lawsuit-against-irs

Here is the online link to the redacted version of our amended complaint: http://media.aclj.org/pdf/tea-party-complaint-amended.pdf

 “Plaintiffs seek a declaratory judgment that the Defendants unlawfully delayed and obstructed Plaintiffs’ applications for a determination of tax-exempt status by means of conduct that was based on unconstitutional criteria and impermissibly disparate treatment of Plaintiffs in violation of Plaintiffs’ rights under the First and Fifth Amendments to the United States Constitution and the Administrative Procedure Act.  Defendants unlawfully delayed and thereby effectively denied approval of Plaintiffs’ applications for tax exempt status by means of a comprehensive, pervasive, invidious and organized scheme that purposefully established unnecessary and burdensome inquiries and scrutiny of Plaintiffs’ applications based solely upon Plaintiffs’ political viewpoints (or Defendants’ assumption of Plaintiffs’ viewpoints, based on their organizational names). “

The Liberty Township Tea Party applied for 501c3 status with the IRS in May of 2010.  Our Tea Party was modeled after the League of Women Voters with the goal of encouraging the community to educate themselves in the political process.  After three years and answering the one hundred seven questions asked of us the application has been neither approved nor rejected.  The Liberty Township Tea Party began the process of applying for this application with faith in the government agency to process the application in a timely manner.  That faith in the government’s ability has been tested.  Our group is premised on the goal of smaller government.  The IRS’s inability to make a decision, their intrusive, illegal politically motivated questioning prove to us that our bureaucracies are bloated and our representatives have failed miserably in controlling the agencies they have created.  Our right to free speech and free assembly has been a bridged.

           

Liberty Township web site:  libertytownshipteaparty.org

Rich Hoffman

“Justice Comes With The Crack of a Whip’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

Looters of Lakota Are Back At It: Doing all they know……………asking for more money to spend on teacher contracts

The Looters of Lakota are at it again.  They are planning to toss another tax increase on the fall ballot, as expected.  Read the rest of the article from The Enquirer below.

LIBERTY TWP. — Voters in Greater Cincinnati’s second-largest school system will likely see a tax hike on the fall ballot.

The Lakota Board of Education voted unanimously Monday evening to place a combination operating levy and a permanent improvement tax on the Nov. 5 ballot.

Voters will decide on a 3.5-mill operating levy and a 2-mill permanent improvement levy combined into a single 5.5-mill school tax hike issue.

The board’s vote is the first of two required under Ohio law to place school tax issues on the ballot. Lakota officials have until Aug. 7 to file with Butler County election officials for the Nov. 5 ballot.

If approved, the levy would cost an additional $168 annually in new school taxes on a $100,000 home.

http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20130625/NEWS/306250099/Lakota-voters-could-see-tax-hike-fall-ballot?nclick_check=1

Needless to say, they were warned.  They can expect a very nasty fight on this one.   Much more to come………………………………………………

Rich Hoffman

“Justice Comes With The Crack of a Whip’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

Wisdom from Fletcher Finnegan: Ten years of observation read ten years later

I wrote the below quoted passage while fleshing out the protagonist in my novel The Symposium of Justice.  It was written ten years ago and is fun for me to revisit.  Since I wrote that passage I have engaged myself in the reality of those accusations to prove that my thoughts were not just theory.  Unlike other writers, I am not happy making observations of reality, then simply writing about them in some creative context.  For me, I have to prove them—which then leads me to experiments validating the observed reality.

I am proud to report that the observations I had made about the human condition in the ten years leading up to the below passage have since been proven in the subsequent ten years leading to the present time.  When I write a novel I often write hundreds if not thousands of pages of back up material for the characters, which was the case during The Symposium of Justice.  I had to understand the character, and one of the ways in doing so was to provide background material that may not directly find its way into the text of the story.  The below passage is one of these types of works.

I can report in June of 2013 that re-reading the ten-year old material brought a smile to my face, and I now understand the why behind the action, instead of just observing the action.  In many cases, the observation by creative types is enough.  But for me, I require that next step.  Now reading over the old material I have to say, the passage was extremely prophetic, and exceptionally socially relevant.

Wisdom from Fletcher Finnegan

 

I say to you who work with those small-minded fools, and aspire to greatness through the open doors of your superior officers, that greatness or financial gain will never be obtained through those simple trickles in the oceans of life.  Those men that pride themselves on their position and tenure are dangerous.  More dangerous to themselves, for ill-health and neurosis, and will gladly pull down anyone about them. 

 

I can say for myself that I fear no human being or living entity on this planet or elsewhere.  To fear the mediocre tendencies of the feeble ones is a crime against yourself.   They will seek to use fear to place you about in invisible shackles of bondage.   The villanies upon you by these beings are a crime.  It is an assault against the nature of life which desires freedom and the impulse to live. 

 

This notion that one should not strive to be superior is preposterous.   What gain is there in pretending to be a fool so those in power don’t feel the threat?  I tell you this, that this mythology was invented to suppress the strong, and prevent challenges to phantom thrones that make up the mind of a tyrant’s thoughts.  Pretending to be a fop with thoughts about the weather, foreign and domestic policy, and sports so to stay under the radar–to what avail?

 

I have been told many times to maintain such a low profile.  I’ve been told to not be so good.  I have seen men applaud other men for showing weakness with women.  I have seen much back slapping to the drunk that collapses unconscious on a Friday night, as opposed to the hard worker that stays behind a book all night to gain an advantage over their opponents.  I have heard many preachers of peace proclaim honor in such a mundane embrace of values. 

 

Think how preposterous it sounds to hear tales of a night with friends where everyone became “trashed” and so much so that they cannot remember the evening.  Compare this to the heroic figure that donates their evening to helping people, or improving themselves.  I say that it is the times formation around control that endorses idiotic behavior and encourages us all to pursue that course.  The trick to all is that there is profit in failure, which you will succeed if you stay under the radar and not become a threat to the current administrations by being the well-behaved lamb.  Look at the established religions, where the behavior of Jesus is shown to be the way to everlasting glory.  Jesus is even referred to as a lamb.  Does no one question these motives?  With the fine mind provided to humans, why are humans so susceptible to bondage?  Does it not seem strange that so-called Christians, Hindus, Muslims, even Buddhists seem so preoccupied with enduring the pain of this current life in order to reach some evasive light at the end of the tunnel.  That we should joyfully endure our masters in this life for trade of everlasting glory in the next. 

 

So you ask me what an Overman is.  I say to you that it is embracing the concept of being more than just human.  It is in accepting your fate that life is meant to be lived now as well as later.  At all times, as an individual, you are in control of your vessel as you navigate through a jagged life.  At times, when you meet with another independent soul, that you may come into conflict with them by the will of nature and that this conflict is needed and healthy.  When you come to these times of war, you should fight with all your vigor and enjoy the spilling of blood, especially if it is your opponents.  You should enjoy it because if their goal was to stop your ability to exercise free will then you have used your free will to destroy their devices that could hinder you. 

 

Read more: CLICK HERE

 

For even more read The Standoff by CLICKING HERE.

2003 draft for The Symposium of Justice

Rich Hoffman

“Justice Comes with the Crack of a Whip’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com