In the fictional world of vigilantes like the Dark Knight from the Batman films and the upcoming Lone Ranger, the heroes wear masks to protect those they love from the revenge imposed by statist regimes who control the law as the protagonist imposes justice where needed. One of my favorite fictional vigilante characters of all time is Zorro, who wore a mask to protect his identity from the tyranny of government oppressors while he worked as the politician Don Diego pretending to be “one of them” all the while seeking justice from behind a mask. The need for these types of stories by the masses is innate, meaning the mind requires them to bring relation to the world it witnesses as justice is often abused by anti-conceptual reality. This internal psychological struggle plays out in acts of fiction, but reflects our internal despair in reality. The crisis is in the realization that those who control the law—the political class of the modern age—can make life very difficult for those who disagree with their desired social impositions. This kind of tyrannical behavior has recently been seen on a large-scale during the IRS scandal, the Benghazi debacle, and the NSA data collecting violations that have been splattered across the news of late. But most statist abuses by corrupt governments are done on a very small-scale creating the need for heroes to literally grab a mask not just in the story telling experience, but when opposing government in reality. This is why young Deric Lostutter of Winchester, Kentucky put on a mask and worked to instill justice when a crime in the small town of Steubenville, Ohio took place robbing the innocence of a young girl with a police cover-up to protect the very popular high school football team. I covered the controversy here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom back when it happened, CLICK TO REVIEW.
If Deric did not put on the mask and take up the torch of justice by going against the law, as the character KYAnonymous, the town of Stuebenville would have been able to successfully cover up the tragic rape that happened to an intoxicated young girl. Because of Deric two of those guilty star football players are doing time in a juvenile detention center and justice has been brought to the town. If Deric did not put on the mask and become KYAnonymous in a heroic effort to pursue justice as law enforcement attempted to use the law to hide the crime, the girl who was raped would have witnessed no justice and the boys who did the crime would have went free and believed that such behavior was socially correct, and the entire town would have continued to be complicit in a crime against the individual sanctity of a young girl.
The need for the mask comes after the justice is done of course as the statist government has the weapon of laws—they create—in their tool box of options to inflict suffering on those who stand against them. Deric Lostutter learned this first-hand when in mid April 2012 the F.B.I. had investigated his computer I.P. address extensively and learned where the masked justice seeker KYAnonymous lived. According to Lostutter a truck disguised as a delivery vehicle was parked in his driveway when there was a knock at the door. Deric expected a delivery so when he went to open the door 12 special forces operatives screaming profane names at him, cuffed him with M-16 assault rifles pointed at his head and detained him while the troops cleared out his home of the evidence they came to steal. Lostutter witnessed the S.W.A.T – like troops along with a couple of F.B.I. agents from Columbus, Ohio and the local sheriff securing his property. Once he was under cuffed control the troops lightened up and were less threatening actually joking with Deric telling him they had been watching him for a long time, and that he was a good guy. They even joked around a bit about the good things he had done, like exposing the rape in Stuebenville. All this was going on while they confiscated evidence for a case against him related to his work as KYAnonymous. The troopers left Deric’s belongings on the floor, his dogs shocked with teasers, his family handcuffed and nervous, his garage door battered open with a ram even though Deric told them he had a key, and the RV camper window outside broken open for entry even though Deric told them all they had to do was pull hard on the door.
Later it became known to Deric when he was unable to get his belongings back from the F.B.I. that they intended to indict him for a federal offense, most likely a felony and two misdemeanors. He was being charged with hacking into computers to steal the concealed pictures displaying the rape and putting the case into national headlines. After a year of a terrible ordeal Deric told his story on his website seen below written on June 6, 2013.
I have a lot of problems with the way the anarchic Anonymous freedom fighters conduct their business, as Deric is just one of them. I do not approve of their references to “WE” or the “HIVE” but I am willing to overlook those collectivist references knowing that all these kids are right out of public schools where they have been indoctrinated into hive-like mentality their entire lives. That aside, the work they are doing often is good, and their threat is real to the power brokers of control such as law enforcement agencies, corrupt politicians, and all statist regimes who wish to inflict force upon others to gain victory over their minds. What Deric Lostutter did may or may not have broken the law, but one thing is clear, if Deric didn’t do what he did, Stuebenville would have been able to cover up a crime against innocence sacrificing a naive girl to save the town the insult of harming its sacred football program.
The exact same reluctance by the authority in charge occurred at Penn State under Jerry Sandusky. Everyone knew Jerry was abusing young boys sexually, but nobody stuck up for the kids, because it was the sacred football team that was in trouble. Football, especially college programs like Penn State bring to academia funding opportunities a school can get no other way. Nobody wanted to jeopardize that funding, so the entire school covered up the decadent exploits of the famed coach of the Penn State defense. For those poor molested kids, there was no Deric Lostutter. There was no Anonymous freedom fighter to expose the crimes and come to their rescue. There were only cowards on a mass scale which ran all the way into the television networks who all knew that Jerry Sandusky was a pervert who loved to sexually abuse boys. This is the case most of the time when atrocities are seen by all. Very rare are there heroes who will stand without a mask and call a crime a crime. People like that are EXTREMELY rare, because such an act takes courage, and that trait is being breed out of the human race. Almost as rare are those who will put on a mask, as Deric Lostutter did to find justice where the law is used to hide crimes. Unfortunately, many millions of victims will find that there is no hero who has the courage to act on their behalf. The world is filled with oceans of individual souls who look from their right and to their left awaiting for somebody to have the courage to speak out for the innocent. But nobody ever steps forward. However, in Stuebenville, Ohio one young man did, and his name is Dric Lostutter. Once the authorities discovered who he was, they went after him to punish him to the furthest extent of their made up authority. For all those who think of fighting for freedom, take note of the lesson………now you know why such people wear a mask. Sometimes the pursuit of justice requires it—because the absence of such heroic people means oppression and sorrow will reign over planet earth so long as tribal human beings inhabit the globe and run their political system by the nonsensical diatribes of anti-conceptual rule.
If you’ve ever had to deal with a government school employee, be it a principal, teacher, or even a simple secretary, you surely know by now that they are typically arrogant, presumptuous, bastions of mundane complacency that act as though they are perpetually doing you a favor by giving you the time of day when forced to speak with them. Occasionally, there is a sincere teacher who is quite good, but the systems they work within handcuff them to an institution that relishes poor performance the way middle management executives relish the Golf Channel. Public school employees are generally horrendous at customer service, because they work for institutions that do not have to compete with anyone else for your business. They know that if a parent owns a home in their school district, then the parent has no choice but to send their child to that particular school or suffer prosecution by law. Public school employees really don’t care if they make their customers happy, or satisfied. They are able to put on a good show for the parent teacher conferences, or other meet and greet events so long as the parent doesn’t attempt to get too involved in their kid’s life at school, but this quickly erodes once the business of teaching migrates beyond formality. Then the real teeth of the wolves show as the not so subtle ownership of the children’s lives becomes clear. Public education employees believe that they are co-parents with the real parents, and they treat those real parents as an incompetent spouse that has eyes on an affair finding fault with everything the real parents do. The education professional believes their teaching methods are superior to that of parents, and they are not shy to make it known. That is why it brings my heart great delight to see that some parents are fighting back. Since they have no choice but to send their child to the public school of their home real estate, and typically cannot afford private instruction for their child, more and more parents are home-schooling their children at a rate that is justifiably alarming.
A little known fact since home schooled children represent only 4% of all school aged children is that home schooling enrollment has increased by 75% since 1999. Homeschooling has become increasingly popular as common myths that have long been associated with the practice have been debunked. Any concerns parents had about the quality of education children receive at home can be put to rest by the consistently high placement of homeschooled students on standardized assessment exams. Data demonstrates that those who are independently educated generally score between the 65th and 89th percentile on these measures, while those in traditional academic settings average at around the 50th percentile. In addition, achievement gaps between sexes, income levels, or ethnicity—all of which have plagued public schools around the country—do not exist in homeschooling environments. If you want to meet a smart child no matter what their background, you will almost 100% of the time notice that a parent is active in their life, and the best students come from homes where the parent does all the instruction, and does not send their child to a concentration camp called public school out of convenience in needing a tax payer funded baby sitter.
Recent studies laud homeschoolers’ academic success, noting their significantly higher ACT-Composite scores as high school aged students and higher grade point averages as college students. Yet surprisingly, the average expenditure for the education of a homeschooled child, per year, is $500 to $600, compared to an average expenditure of $10,000 per child, per year, for public school students. This is because the parent is invested in their child in a way that is biologically compatible. The public school attempts to defy the way human beings naturally learn with an artificial instruction that is rooted in radical labor unions that are too expensive not just monetarily, but mentally. In real dollars it costs ten times more to teach a child in a public school getting mediocre results at best, than the same child taught at home getting superior results.
The high achievement level of homeschoolers is readily recognized by recruiters from some of the best colleges in the nation. Home-educated children matriculate in colleges and attain a four-year degree at much higher rates than their counterparts from both public and private schools. Schools such as Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard, Stanford, and Duke Universities all actively recruit homeschoolers. They do this so they can bring their averages up in academic accountability and artificially show superior education results compensating for all the lack-luster students they are supplied with coming from public schools.
Similarly, the common myth that homeschoolers “miss out” on so-called “socialization opportunities,” often thought to be vital aspects of traditional academic settings, has proven to be false. According to the National Home Education Research Institute survey, homeschoolers tend to be more socially engaged than their peers and demonstrate “healthy social, psychological, and emotional development, and success into adulthood.” A home schooled child is more likely to be the leader of their “pack” than just a blind participant as their egos have not been crushed into mashed potatoes in public school for social assimilation into a collective.
Based on recent data, researchers such as Dr. Brian Ray (NHERI.org) “expect to observe a notable surge in the number of children being homeschooled in the next 5 to 10 years. The rise would be in terms of both absolute numbers and percentage of the K to 12 student population. This increase would be in part because…[1] a large number of those individuals who were being home educated in the 1990’s may begin to homeschool their own school-age children and [2] the continued successes of home-educated students.”
I have said it more than once, if a parent sends their child to public school, they must not care much for the child. Public schools are government schools, and they are not healthy places to raise children. Parents should never completely surrender their children to a public school and the employees who work in them, as the customer service is terrible, and the social implication is quite destructive. Based on the results, all parents should make it their number one objective in raising their children to instruct those children at home under their care, and to forego the public education entirely.
When parents look at their 16-year-old child and wonder what happened to the sweet little youngster they gave birth to, most of the fault can be placed at the feet of the public school which has sought to reshape children’s minds into some Frankenstein social experiment designed to make good citizens as unlike their parents as possible as viewed by the government. The rest of the fault rests on the parent who was too lazy, self-centered, or too stupid to instruct their own children, denying them an opportunity to be the best human beings they could possibly be. Years ago when I was deep in fighting Lakota schools which is in my local district I was told by the arrogant teachers and PTA Kool-Aid drinkers that if I thought teaching was so easy then I’d come and teach their classes. Well, on national radio, in the newspapers, and on television, even to members of the school faculty, I said I’d be happy to teach not just one class, but four at the same time. When I gave an interview to the Lakota East Spark Magazine, I told the young lady who interviewed me that I would be happy to teach all their classes at the school if anyone wanted to take me up on it. Ironically, that article never made it to print.
There are times when I truly do wish that I could home school everyone’s children, and teach them real knowledge, not the crap they get in public school. The public school employees and their followers thought they stumped me when they challenged me to teach their classes. They thought I would decline out of fear that I couldn’t match their “massive” intellects. Please…………….they think this way because they have no competition and do not know, or care to know that most people functioning in the world successfully know a whole lot more than they do. And thankfully for 4% of all school aged children, they have parents who understand that they are better qualified to instruct their own children than some arrogant government employee who is trying to use children to cash in on a cushy job. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, if you love your children, you’ll take them out of public schools, and teach them yourself. If you want to raise a social malcontent, a diabolical menace to society, a pot smoking, future alcoholic, a liar, a cheater, and unstable social bully, then send them to be instructed in public schools where those are the skills of the instructors. If you want a smart young adult who is kind, thoughtful and reliable to their future spouse and the children that come from that union……………..then teach them yourself!
Your only choice is whether you define your philosophy by a conscious, rational, disciplined process of thought and scrupulously logical deliberation—or let your subconscious accumulate a junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, but integrated by your subconscious into a kind of mongrel philosophy and fused into a single, solid weight: self-doubt, like a ball and chain in the place where your mind’s wings should have grown.
Ayn Rand — Speech to the United States Military Academy at West Point on March 6th 1974.
That was the first thought I had upon closing the book to Gavin Menzies masterpiece, 1421: The Year China Discovered the World or more specifically, discovered America. I had put the Menzies book on my “to read” list a long time ago, and recently found a window to give it the kind of attention I wanted. The birth of the desire to read Menzies book was sent my way when a strategy game my family enjoyed playing released a very rare constructible 10-Masted Jade Rebellion Treasure Ship called the Baochuan with Admiral Zheng He as the crew. The game was called Pirates: The Constructible Strategy Game. The objective was to buy cards at a local Wal-Mart or Target in the gaming section, take them home and build the ships that were in the packs of cards, then use those ships to wage war on other gamers by turning every kitchen table available into a roaring sea of treasure hunting, naval warfare, and epic drama, CLICK HERE TO REVIEW. My wife presented me with the valuable ship as a father’s day present in 2006 and to this day it is one of my most treasured possessions, as it can be seen from the picture below. The gift was more than a miniature card cut-out that gave me a dramatically tactical advantage in that game, but it was the first exposure I had ever had to the gigantic treasure fleets of Zheng He constructed by 3rd Emperor of the Ming Dynasty Zhu Di. The gigantic ships were over 400 feet long, half the size of the Titanic and were able to cross the oceans with sustainable living conditions which were absolutely unheard of with any sea fairing fleet anywhere in the world at that time. The treasure ship my wife gave me as a simple game piece placed upon my mind countless answers to questions I had been trying to piece together my entire life, so the gift was magnificent not for the material value, but for the adventure it carried my mind on as the wings of my imagination grew even larger than they had been previously.
The Wiz Kids gaming company had read Menzies book, and incorporated his theories into the overall mythology of the popular role-playing pirate game, which went to great lengths to unify sea fairing folklore with actual history. It took me some time to accept the reality of the giant Chinese ships because they made the European counterparts of the Portuguese and Spanish fleets look like child’s toys in comparison. So I did not run out and buy the Menzies book right away as I had a lot on my plate at the time professionally and such a concept of Chinese superiority that Menzies was making, would have long-range ramifications on world history, which would require special time to explore the concept. So for over six years now, I have looked at my model of the Boachuan and wondered about the giant Chinese junks which explored the entire world while all of Europe and the occupants of the Mediterranean Sea were paddling around comparatively in canoes. Finally, after many years, I had a window to read the Menzies book, and I took it.
The results were astonishing. One of the apprehensions I had about Menzies was that most of his statements in the book were based on educated conjecture formulated by his unique life. Once I started reading, the conjecture with which Menzies assembled his theories was no different from the failures of scholarship revealed so wonderfully in the great book Forbidden Archeology or the Leakey theories of mankind’s origin in Africa. Menzies as a retired British submarine lieutenant commander and author had already traveled every corner of the world prior to his multi-year research which went into 1421: The Year China Discovered the World but he did it again as a researcher plotting with great accuracy detailed analysis of the navigation maps which were generated well before Columbus ever set sail from Spain. Reading 1421 was like taking a trip around the world. I feel I know the currents and wind directions of the world’s distant oceans and understand how to navigate ships by the star Polaris. In the book, Menzies takes the reader on a journey at approximately 4 to 6 knots across the entire globe, from China to India, then to the coasts of Africa. The fleet of Zheng He which numbered in the hundreds, if not thousands divided up their efforts and traveled in many different directions from there. Some returned to China, some rounded Africa and moved up into the Atlantic splitting up once again near the Caribbean Sea. Some of the Chinese went on to North America, some went to South America. The fleet in South America split up once again to explore Antarctica traveling back to the East toward Australia. The remainder traveled around the tip of South America then proceeded to Australia to split up once again, some heading back out into the Pacific and circling around by Canada and the west coast of North America interacting with land and indigenous people the entire distance. Back to the journey of the east coast of North America, I learned of the Menzies theory off North Bimini Island which has long-held that the strange remains there are left over from Atlantis. Menzies using the same conjecture that he constructed the entire book with logic, evidence, and a vast knowledge of how life at sea works, provided the best explanation I have ever heard of those strange remains which I contemplate heavily every time I visit Florida and look off to the east across the choppy ocean at the ruins that are a day’s boat ride from our family condo.
Without question, Christopher Columbus did NOT discover America. Rather, he and his brother ripped off maps from the Portuguese government who had acquired charts of the world during trade with the Chinese in Calicut which were made during the Zheng He voyages. The Chinese at the time under Emperor Zhu Di wished to show their world domination of the arts, which at the time had no rival. After the Occident lost its power and influence during the terrible loss of the Library in Alexandria, which I have written about also, then lost Rome to the barbarians soon after, Europe and most of the northern Africa was plunged into the Dark Ages. If not for the Muslims, the works of Greek philosophers might never have seen the light of day again. China did not experience such an intellectual set-back, and instead progressed on only experiencing an invasion by the Mongolians that did not have the same effect as the European Dark Ages. The culture of China was not destroyed in the same way and once the Mongolians were defeated in rebellion, the Ming Dynasty took over and re-instated themselves as the dominate culture in the world. Emperor Zhu Di rebuilt the Great Wall of China, and constructed the Forbidden City. With the same zeal he built the largest fleet of ships ever constructed and the largest ever built prior to that time with only one exception, the tessarakonteres of Greek legend in the second century A.D. In doing so the Emperor nearly bankrupted China of its resources leaving his successors to erase the far-reaching scope of the heart-broken Emperor who lost his favorite concubine in a fire started during a lightning strike igniting the Forbidden City in flame. Upon the Emperor’s death, the records of the great treasure fleets of Zheng He were purged so that the taint of foreign cultures could not rot China as it had during Zhu Di’s reign. The mandarin overseers destroyed all evidence except for a few personal diaries of the mammoth voyages to put the walls up against the world which had shown itself to be backward, and lost to ignorance. This was a period where China would experience to a much less degree the loss of culture that the Occident experienced after the destruction of the Library at Alexandria. This was the great purge of the Orient.
Under Zhu Di, he had wished to show the world how powerful China was by trading with every country his fleets could reach using a tribute system to keep every nation on earth in debt to the glory of China. The Chinese would routinely give fine porcelain to villages along the African coastline and get in return jewelry of sea shells, which were worthless in comparison. But the Chinese didn’t care, because the debt between the values kept the African countries in perpetual obligation to the Emperor. It was this policy that the mandarins later would resent, and cause future Emperors to not duplicate the errors of Zhu Di by draining China of its wealth just to prove its superiority to the barbarian nations of the world who couldn’t even figure out how to use gunpowder.
The key to these wondrous voyages were the massive ships, the extremely large treasure ships half the size of the Titanic. But with those gigantic vessels were hundreds of support ships, most of which would still dwarf any European ship in the early 1400s. Most of the support junks were anywhere from 100 to 300 feet in length. For comparison, the Victoria, which Magellan used to circumnavigate the world was only 70 feet long. The treasure ships provided fresh water in gigantic tanks which actually housed sea lions which were used to herd fish into their nets at sea. The treasure ships held horses which consumed roughly 3 gallons of water each every day along with other animals from all over the world. The Chinese had the ability to desalinate their water while in transit keeping fresh water in plentiful supply. On the decks of the big ships were vast gardens so that fresh vegetables could be constantly grown to provide a balanced diet while months at sea between landfalls. If hostile nations attempted to attack the ships, the treasure fleets easily eradicated their opponents as these ships were the first to have cannons. A confrontation with the treasure fleet would spell doom to anyone who tried to stand in their way. With such ships 50 to 60 foot waves were much more manageable than the typical European vessel that would find themselves tossed about like toys. The key to accepting the voyages of Zheng He who clearly mapped the world while Europe was still in the Dark Ages is in understanding that the Chinese had the ability to build such large ships, which have been denied as an impossibility by traditional scholars. Yet the evidence is apparent, and even though the ships have long decayed, historians who have built vast careers on the myth that Christopher Columbus discovered America, or are willing to grudgingly concede that the Vikings entered North America as a bunch of barbarian hoards raping and pillaging wherever they went, the idea that the Chinese were trading goods and services all over the world well before the Europeans learned to put a sail to the wind on the open sea is not a pleasant one.
The reason I thought of the Ayn Rand quote stated at the beginning of this article after reading 1421 is because the evidence that Menzies provided convinced me beyond a shred of doubt that the Chinese were far superior to Europe during the same time, and had in fact most likely settled North America not just through migration across the Bering Strait tens of thousands of years ago, but were trading with the Mayans, and forming tribes in America that would later be called “Native Americans” such as the Shawnee, the Navajo, and the ancient Cahokians. Modern academia found the Menzies information “inconvenient” and an attack on their world view, so they have rejected him. Of Menzies 2002 release of 1421 historian Robert Finlay said in 2004 that “Unfortunately, this reckless manner of dealing with evidence is typical of 1421, vitiating all its extraordinary claims: the voyages it describes never took place, Chinese information never reached Prince Henry and Columbus, and there is no evidence of the Ming fleets in newly discovered lands.” The comments of Robert Finlay and many other academics that attacked Menzies for his extremely educated conjecture epitomize the quote stated at the start from Ayn Rand illuminating their fragmented minds built upon years of academic denials unable to accept that their own conjectures were incomplete upon their utterances and the new evidence provided by further research destroyed their previous theories. Columbus did not discover America!
Menzies to my mind has accomplished a level of expertise that many of the academic critics of his work are desperately lacking. Gavin Menzies as a British submarine lieutenant commander had a unique perspective shaped by years at sea. Then in his retirement under the finance of his wife, he spent years and years skipping around the globe gathering up evidence, reading maps and charts in a way that only an old submarine commander could, and touched the far corners of the world by following in the footsteps of Zheng He the way a blood hound catches the scent of a target they cannot see or touch but can smell. Academics and political progressives who wish to cover their faulty minds, their junk heap of unwarranted conclusions, false generalizations, undefined contradictions, undigested slogans, unidentified wishes, doubts and fears, thrown together by chance, have no choice but to slander the great work of Menzies from the comfort of their academic offices where the chill of the outside air gives them goose bumps. They are all too willing to abandon logic for belief, and they wish to continue believing that Christopher Columbus discovered America. To admit anything less is to change the way they see European history, and they might have to go to all the trouble of removing Columbus Day from their calendars which usually means a day off for government workers in the United States. Nobody wants to give up a free holiday, so it is much easier to attack Gavin Menzies for a theory that will change the way human history sees itself.
For me the journey started with the little model junk that my wife gave me for Father’s Day, which provided me a new idea taking me to Menzies book six years later. I have seen countless examples of modern academia standing in the way of science and the Menzies case is no different. Academic arguments are not built upon logic, reason, or even a strict adherence to scientific validation. Menzies has provided in his books the exact locations of several ship wrecks that are most likely the junks from Zheng He’s fleet, yet governments operate the waters of these wrecks, and governments work with academics to hold together the acceptable parameters of human thought. There is no desire to dive those wrecks by established science and governments to prove Menzies correct even though the evidence is right under the water and is known to all. Rather, governments and academics would rather drag their feet so to maintain plausible deniability of any truth that is contrary to their continued belief that it was the Europeans who settled North America not ships from half a world away. Menzies developed a rare ability in all his years traveling the world’s oceans and putting into exotic ports even in the most remote portions of the globe–he developed wings for his mind where imagination meets reason to logically conjecture the evidence which has been destroyed to hide truths from a public who are to look to academics and politicians with the grace of royalty. Those wings which the average academic lacks, takes Menzies to places where most historians can’t even dream to go, and upon reading 1421: The Year China Discovered the World the reader of that fine book has no choice but to grow wings of their own and follow on a journey that is epic in scope, and history altering in its implication. It is a book of writing that is the best of the best in every category for which the written word was ever intended to paint a picture with imagination that will change the way those with wings upon their own minds see the world forever. It is an epically brilliant book that is now one of my all-time favorites.
Now, please do watch the above documentaries so that the picture of this book’s importance can be placed in perspective. Then read the book! Out of ten stars, I give 1421: The Year China Discovered the World a perfect TWENTY!
You can get the book from Gavin’s website and follow all the latest discoveries which he continues to unravel each and every day.
The modern rebellion of the Tea Party against large statist governments was never more illuminated than in the below collection of clips from those liberty groups who testified before congress of their harassment by the IRS. Doc Thompson and his producer Skip LaCombe assembled the clip and played it during their show on Wednesday, June 5th culminating in a full week of aggressive coverage by the Blaze Radio Network regarding the tyranny of the government represented by the IRS in harassing genuinely good people. Unlike other places in the world, this modern rebellion in America is not being conducted by despots for control over the world’s resources—as might normally be the case—but by indisputably good people who are reclaiming their independence as sovereign citizens of The United States. It seems ironic that the rebels of our modern age are family people, church goers, and otherwise responsible citizens as opposed to the villainy of the modern progressive. The clip below captured the spirit of the week centering around IRS testimony in a way that was heard no place else but The Blaze.
The testimony was powerful stuff and gives the world a look into the way average Tea Party supporters think. With all the radical assertions which have been tossed toward the Tea Party with derogatory dialogue—particularly in calling them by the sexual reference as “Tea Baggers” which Obama himself has used on multiple occasions, the voices who gave testimony represent well the multitudes of people I have associated with in Southern Ohio who have lent their time and talent to American liberty. Those who support statist government have made themselves treacherously obvious to their cause because the contrast to the good people of the Tea Party movement is obvious. The only way Tea Party opponents have been able to maintain their moral high ground is to keep the Tea Party out of the news, and now because of the IRS debacle, the world can see what the rebellion in America is really about. The heart of the matter is good against evil, with the good represented by the Tea Party and evil represented by the ever-growing statist government.
The government is evil because “it” insists on imposing itself upon individual will. “It” requires blind submission of all individuals to the adherence of the political elite, and this is just not what America is about, and never has been. Many will point to the debacles which followed the Civil War and more specifically to the progressive events of 1913 where America turned basically into a large federal bank with the creation of the Federal Reserve, and implemented an income tax. Most people have forgotten that it was the work of Karl Marx and associates who advanced their views of communism through the Progressive Party represented so well by Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson allowing the philosophy of Marx into the American system of self-government. Since that time, the gradual erosion of liberty has steadily progressed through the entire 20th Century. The way America is today, and has been for several decades is not the way it was intended. The progressive political machine had cast its large sails to capture the global winds of communism and reshape politics in America in a way that is not sustainable or acceptable from even before Roosevelt was president.
When people have asked me what the goal of the Tea Party is, and more specifically, if I want to return America back to the period of the Old West, as I respect immensely traditional American arts, such as gun slinging, bull whip work, and knife throwing, I respond that it is not the period of the Old West that is the goal, it is the period well before that. For myself, I appreciate the values of the traditional Anti-Federalists of which Thomas Jefferson was one of the founding members. I more specifically appreciate the values of the American transcendentalists–people like Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. Even though many of their philosophical conclusions were still rooted in mysticism, the path they were on was the correct one for the “American Way.” These ideas were being worked out twenty to thirty years before Karl Marx and his despots of ignorance did their work through American newspapers advocating the philosophy of communism as a superior mode of political thinking over capitalism. Through newspaper journalists and editors, particularly Walter Lippmann who hung out constantly at the Long Island home of Roosevelt after the start of the Progressive Party, they changed the name of communism to progressivism, in order to make the concept more palatable to Americans who loved their freedom, and wanted nothing to do with statist governments. The ploy for the progressives was hatched by the Fabian Socialists of England of which playwright George Bernard Shaw was a respected member along with H.G. Wells. Their theory was that socialism; (soft communism) could be implemented not radically the way it was done in the Soviet Union during 1917, but slowly, over a long period of time. This was the best way to by-pass the American Constitution and deliver The United States back into the fold of European control. After all, as the Fabian Socialists reasoned, if global socialism/communism was the goal, America would have to go down and join in; otherwise it would always be an option for freedom lovers who refused the socialist collectivist aims of statism. For the English, they had tried one hundred years prior during the War of 1812 to retake America as an English colony, but that effort was not successful, so a more indirect—much more patient ploy needed to be implemented—this is how America ended up with progressive politics.
Many in America today have just accepted these little bits of statism provided by gradual socialism inspired by Karl Marx and the failures of collectivist thinking. Over a long period of time, as the Fabian Socialists schemed, Americans gave away bits of their freedom in exchange for “Social Security.” For the progressive who views their century of social gains the Tea Party is a tremendous threat to them, because those kind, innocent Americans of that patriotic group have dedicated themselves to learning how America was supposed to function all along, and know they have been scammed, and they want to undo the progressive advancements and return to the original principles of the Constitution. In that regard, my personal position is that I would argue with Alexander Hamilton who in 1780 was considered a major statist from the Federalist Party with the kind of Anti-Federalist arguments reflected by Thomas Jefferson. The modern Tea Party wants to return to the Constitution that was shaped by Hamilton in the Federalist Papers, which I consider “TOO EXTREME.” Compared to the modern Fabian Socialist, the progressives, the global communists, Alexander Hamilton’s views of government seem radical so the two sides are not reconcilable. Socialists and capitalists cannot live together. One wants to be left alone, the other needs collective participation to survive, so the two are not compatible.
The Tea Party rebellion as it is, are simply nice people who are waking up to the fact that the world they thought they were living is not what they were sold. They are discovering that progressives for their entire lives have gradually ruined the American idea for not only them, but their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and they are not happy about it. They are the sleeping giant of world society that are waking up, and they aren’t going to complacently go along with the scam any longer. This posses a major problem for progressives who have built an entire education system around statist principles, a government fueled by coercion for the benefit of the political class, and a hopeless tomorrow trying to return America back to the fold of European foolishness. The American of tradition—of ideology, have no intention of being serfs, even if they have served such a role unknowingly for many years. Through the Tea Party, they are learning what their rights should always have been, and they are learning more about the laws which founded the country than many of the current politicians holding office know presently.
One of the ways that slave holders in the American South kept free men and women obligated to serfdom were by keeping those poor souls ignorant. For slaves, an act of rebellion was to sneak away from their master’s gaze deep in the heart of night and to do the diabolical act of “reading” so to educate their minds so that they might come to know better than to live under the tyranny of a “master” of any kind. And so it is in our modern age, but the activity is not so secret. Tea Party patriots are getting together as education organizations to read, and intelligently petition a government the way all free people should be able to, and the statist regimes whether they come from big banking corporations, or Fabian Socialists require an ignorant population in order to sell their utopia of hopelessness to the world population. Statist masters cannot stand for the “slaves” to become educated, so they have done all that they could do to stop the process, and harass those who attempt such a rebellious act, such as reading the truth for themselves.
The biggest difference between the rebellion of 2013 and that of 1773 is that the rights were already won once with blood and bullets. Now there are freedom fighters like Doc and Skip on The Blaze Radio Network who are truly doing news reporting that is light years from anything ever done in America. For the first time in American history there are free people who are learning what their rights are because they are “reading” for themselves, and they are listing to Doc Thompson who drives home the point free of FCC regulation spouting out a truth that is equivalent to the escapades of Fredrick Douglass during the most noted revolution against slavery to ever occur in the world. Only in America would such a thing as the Civil War occur over the rights of man, even of another skin color and varied religions. But now that fight has extended to all men and women of all colors and religions who share in common a distinct desire to be exempt from the faulty morality of the diabolical progressive and their statist plans of doom. To arrive at that point, those freedom fighters are reading and learning what they have been missing with a revolution that is taking place not with bullets and bayonets, but books and bold speeches like the ones given against the IRS on Capital Hill captured so well in the summation by Doc Thompson and his crafty producer Skip.
I have always stood ready to defend my freedom from the statist controllers. But joining me now are the moms, wives, and patriots who want a good life for their children and have the courage to go against the progressive plans to achieve it. Instead of tuning in to the local music broadcasts on radio stations, or listening to sports oriented talk radio, they are discovering The Blaze Radio Network who is at the front of the freedom movement and the fuel behind the next steps toward freedom. Glenn Beck has reinvested vast sums of his personal wealth into this endeavor and just this past week hired Laurie Dhue from Fox News to deliver news on their Blaze Television which is now seen on The Dish Network. It is only a matter of time before Glenn Beck’s network, which is dedicated to education, is directly competing with ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and FOX. When that direct competition occurs, those other stations will discover that they cannot abate, or rationalize the rebellion of the mind which is happening beyond their control.
Americans are reclaiming their lives, and the potent moment which is the modern-day shot heard around the world are the clips from the IRS testimony given by the Tea Party patriots. In that testimony the previously obscured normal people who have been buried under progressive altruism have been given a voice, and they made full use of it. Their words are more powerful than bullets as the intended slave masters who wish to rule the world through various statist schemes require ignorance, in the same manner that southern plantation owners kept slaves unable to read, and always lacking of substance. Ignorance is required to advance statism no matter what the political method of attack, be it socialism, modern-day progressivism, or forceful communism. Before such methods can be employed, one must turn off their mind, and empty everything that it once held. This is why progressives want control of the education process and want children in their institutions of tyranny from the time of their first conscious thoughts. But the momentum has already shifted, and the Tea Party is doing things that nobody previously expected. The Tea Party is “reading” and learning the way the world is supposed to be, and they are acting on their own behalf to free themselves and others from suffering the same fate. It is too late to stop such a thing. Ignorance has been discarded in favor of intelligence, starting with a few Tea Party types who are now small in number, but growing through an evolving rebellion that is not centered on violence, but knowledge.
Thus, now all know why I write so much here upon these pages. I know that most readers browse these articles and quit reading after the first two sentences, and that I would be even more popular if I catered to traditional notions of journalism, by keeping the articles under 400 words and within the average person’s attention span. But a few read the entire 1500 to 2000 word works in their entirety and out of the 500 to 1000 who read every day, about 30 to 40 read every word, sometimes twice, and they come back day after day. Of those, I know several who read every day looking to these words as a lighthouse guiding their way through a thick ocean fog of modern life. Some of those people are very important and influential in modern politics, so the words are not wasted. My goal is to get people thinking so that their minds are prepared to ask questions, and to “seek” ending their chains to statism with thought leading to action. The act of rebellion is not a ruckus act of villainy, or violent attempt at suppression, but the diabolical notion of filling the mind with intelligence, which is the greatest weapon against the tyrant ever devised.
I thought it was a joke when I saw the video of IRS workers practicing their dance moves for an upcoming training conference in Anaheim, which lasts just under three minutes, and comes out weeks after it was revealed that agency workers produced two other videos parodying the “Star Trek” and “Gilligan’s Island” TV shows.
In the video at the link above where my local public school of Lakota was doing a large music video to raise money for Spina Bifda it doesn’t take much looking to see that the effort was driven by the adults of the school, in some bizarre attempt to be young again with their students. When it comes to acting silly, and being “crazy,” young people are allowed some behavior fluctuations as they are still growing. They’ve only been on earth for 15 to 18 years and have a lot to learn. But when adults crave with every essence of their bodies to be “young” again, there is a real problem when such people are put into positions of authority. There is a section of that Lakota video, shown below for review, where the school superintendent and the school board are seen dancing like a bunch of lunatics. The superintendent actually held up a sign saying something to the effect as “superintendents’ rock.”
If an adult has a desire to “re-live” their youth so they can enjoy the so-called best days of their life—there is something wrong with their minds. It wouldn’t take much effort to prove that those minds are suffering a varied degree of mental illness. These types of psychologically deficient people are often found running for school boards, chaperoning school dances, and hauling their children to every social event so they can be on the “inside” as much as possible with the lives of young people. The behavior really becomes a problem when it is considered that such neurosis is the root of millions of dollars of wasted money as such minds are incapable of proper management of their own lives, let alone guarding tax payer resources.
The IRS workers in the Anaheim training video is but a window into the world of the typical government worker—the undeveloped mind of the typical bureaucrat who craves desperately to return to the pubescent body of a 15-year-old child to be forever young. The workers thought their video was cool, and socially hip. Like a bunch of teenagers who have no value for money, or the worth of real life things, they saw no reason to avoid spending vast sums of money on a stupid video showing other IRS workers how cool they are, and how they can self-parody – which is the new cool.
The trend of a statist, collectivist oriented society is to declare to the world that one is imperfect and is in essence no better than the next person. The best way to do so is to perform public actions that display humility. This lets others know in a group that one does not take themselves too seriously, and are prone to self-sacrifice for the good of the many. This is the culture of government and why teenagers behave so badly in public after being taught by government schools for 10 years of their already short lives. They are taught by idiots to be idiots—so we shouldn’t expect anything less of them. But for years, the behavior was hidden from the outside world as only those who worked for such institutions saw what really went on. That was how life was before YouTube took away censorship, and put up honesty for all to see good and bad. That is what we can see in the IRS video, and the Lakota music video, government institutions who think they are doing good, that are actually displaying a gross desire to be simple teenagers.
The cost of the federal government as it is operated by these insufficient bureaucrats is incalculable. Leaving such people in charge of anything is similar to leaving teenagers alone at home while vacationing. As soon as any responsible party leaves the house, the teenagers want to have some kind of destructive party and the house gets trashed. These are the type of people who are running the government. They are grown adults who think like children, and they simply duplicate in their government offices replicas of their glory days in high school—the government institution that shaped their thoughts. The IRS officials saw no problem with their video production. They didn’t care what the cost was, because like teenagers, they have no value for such things. Their emphasis was completely on what’s “cool” and shows the greatest humility in a public setting.
I find the IRS video appalling. It’s not cool. It’s not cute. And the people dancing in the video look like idiots, I feel sorry for their kids who have been robbed of a proper role model—and given a tremendous disadvantage in life. The behavior points to how easily the culture of the IRS was able to turn the power and fury of the federal government toward conservative Tea Party groups as the odd balls in society just as children in a school are taught to identify children who are not “cool” as targets of social bullying, and peer pressure. The culture of complacency is in place by the very nature of the typical IRS worker, who is simply a grown teenager, and just as irresponsibly dangerous. Only those teenagers are given authority over our society in every context, and that is an abomination that needs to be revisited with a dedication to a flat tax that would allow us to dismantle the IRS as it is now so that taxpayers aren’t forced to pay for such silly employees with their hard-earned money. If there was ever a rally cry for such a need, the dancing training video done by the IRS is it!
“Flash, I love you, but we only have 14 hours to save the earth!” With that line of dialogue from the 1980 film Flash Gordon I knew what I wanted to be when I grew up. When Dale Arden said those words to Flash Gordon, Flash was battling a rival on a floating circular platform in a bullwhip fight to the death as metal spikes came up out of the floor to puncture the fighters. If the fighters fell off the platform they would fall from the sky for miles to their death. The movie was cheesy, and unrealistic as viewed by my adult eyes, but there is a swagger to it that I love to this day which is exhibited so clearly in the theme song done by the rock band Queen, which can be seen in the music video from that long ago time in a film forgotten to modern ingenuity.
It was Flash Gordon and the old Zorro films from the 40s and 50s Republic serials that captured my interest in learning to use bullwhips. After watching the 1980 version of Flash Gordon at least 10 times at the theater I set up a mock platform in my back yard to learn how to fight with bullwhips on a similar platform so I’d have the skills to save the earth the way Flash Gordon did in that famous movie. I was in the sixth grade at the time and my career choice was made for me after watching that movie. I didn’t want to grow up to be a doctor, a dentist, or a mechanic. I wanted to be a superhero who would save the world with my own two hands and a bull whip.
For three decades now I have played that Queen song from my car stereo and blasted it from my home theater system incessantly. At times I have played the song over and over for hours never growing tired of it—because I always identified with the message. As the rest of our modern world looks to the conspiracies of our day with anxiety, I am excited. I look for the black helicopters to circle the sky, and for the hummers to storm my neighborhood releasing me from the social shackles of order for which we all live day by day. I am eager for the day I can defeat the Ming’s of Merciless tyrants I hated as a youth, and still hate as an adult with more than fiction and metaphors, but with action brought from imagination to grim reality.
In that regard, I can report that I am in a blissful existence. The world is corrupt with evils beyond imagining, and they are obvious. The villains are as obvious as the sun in a cloudless sky at noon in the desert. And those villains require valor to defeat, and souls willing to meet them on the battlefield of life. It is in that spirit that I wait patiently with yearning at the first moves of the real life Ming’s of Merciless to advance their plots in a way that defies the law and provides license for action to extend beyond the realm of thought, to actual existence. I still practice on a type of “disk of death” in my back yard so that the skills are present when they are needed.
Most people supposedly grow up and away from these kinds of thoughts, the hero fantasies young people have of saving the world. Sadly, almost every living, breathing human being in the entire world stops growing physically and mentally by the age of 15. The typical 50-year-old wants the same things that the typical 15-year-old wants food, sex, and social status. Our current society considers this—maturity. But the higher needs and desires come from the youth of a mind uncorrupted by age and cynicism, which has not yet hit puberty and developed a desire for the opposite sex. In this phase, a young mind sees the big picture without interruption. It is during this phase that young people think that saving the world is realistic, and they endeavor to do so all by themselves.
However, once young people start submitting themselves to hazing rituals to belong to a sports team, or surrender themselves to a classroom bully, they start making concessions for which there is no return. Once they’ve kissed the feat of the Ming’s of Merciless’ in their life they turn their attention to their social status, sex and food once they’ve learned their place in the social peaking order. I have always felt sorry for these terribly lost fools. They have lost the magic of youth, the knowledge in their own minds that they are ruled by nobody but their own imaginations. Once they are broken—socially—they stay that way for the rest of their years nearly 100% of the time.
What I always loved about Flash Gordon—especially the cheesy 1980 version of the classic character was that he wasn’t afraid of anything. He also survived everything the bad guys threw at him and had to peel the girls off him with a pry bar. Flash Gordon was fearless, and he never felt he needed to apologize otherwise.
Years ago I worked for a conveyor manufacturer who had a big contract with Amazon.com. I was clearly one of the best assemblers out of the 400 person work force. It was a union shop, but due to a recent strike, they had allowed Right-to-Work provisions. I was one of the first after the agreement to take the job without accepting union representation. Because of my work ethic, I was put on the big sorter job, which was the most complicated conveyor segment this particular company built. They were big and had a lot of moving parts which had to be precisely measured. The very aggressive building hours on those units was 16 hours, which required two 8 hour shifts of a union employee building them at 100% efficiency to complete. However, most of the time, the union employees performed at a 40% to 60% efficiency, so even with two assemblers, the job still took two days. When the shop foramen put me on the job he warned me that if I worked too fast, that it would cause trouble. But he admitted to me that he was putting me on those units to expose the poor performance of the much more experienced assemblers. I gladly went to the cell and set up. Within one week of working on the very technical job, I was building those units every 7.5 hours. Within a month, I had the time down to 6 hours. When I worked double shifts, which was unheard of at this manufacturing facility I could build two per day by myself and have the next unit for set up for first shift construction. This earned me the nick-name, “SUPERMAN.” It’s a name that has traveled with me everywhere I’ve ever worked and people do not mean it in a complementary way. Quite the opposite, they mean it as an insult. The union employees believed that by signaling me out with such a name, I would feel self-conscious and stop trying to “be so good.” So in response to their “insult” I would start my shift every day with the theme song to Superman on my personal boom box sitting on top of my tool box. I put together a mix tape back then, and right after Superman, the Queen song “Flash” would come on to drive my point home. My co-workers would scratch their heads and try to turn up their radios onto classic rock to attempt to drown out my movie classics.
After a while of these music wars, they decided to step up their harassment by threatening to fight me in the break room, bathroom, and parking lot. Different groups of individuals attempted the deed until the whole plant had stacked up massive collective failure. When that didn’t work they tried to rally the whole plant against me with a giant fight in the parking lot imagining that the threat of a mob would put me in my place. But it never did, instead they learned the same lessons that many have had to learn about themselves under such circumstances—that they were cowards in their adult lives discovering that valor had left their lives. Those same adults tell their sons to “grow up,” not out of a desire for their children to have better lives than they had, but to prevent their children from stepping beyond them in social stature. Those adults tell their daughters “don’t hold out for a hero, because there are none.” The truth is not that society lacks heroes anymore, but that the hope is that those heroes will be suppressed so that guilt doesn’t riddle the minds of all the 15-year-olds who have stopped dreaming of honor, and traded in their ambition for social security as 40-year-old slobs whose new idea of success is to save the world by schmooze politically on the golf courses of life.
The plot of Flash Gordon would have been boring if Flash just did what he was told, and kissed the ring of Ming the Merciless. But he didn’t, and that’s why Flash Gordon is such a great and honorable character. The same holds true in real life—it is easy to kiss the rings of those who wish to rule us. But there is also opportunity for honor and adventure when such rings are offered and the ring is spit on instead of kissed. That is why I look at our current world and have a hard time containing my excitement. There are a lot of modern spiked platforms that contain a million perils upon them. The danger is what I yearn for—with the same ambition that a 7 to 8 year-old kid looks upon a fantasy film with wide-eyes declaring that when he grows up, he will also be fearless and heroic. For me the biggest difference between the adult and the child is that the child at such a young age has no choice but to dream and ascertain images which they find attractive, so they can set personal goals to live up to. The adult has to take the responsibility to live those dreams, and to have the bravery to stand on their own ideals even if the world or universe stands against them. It is in such moments that I hear the theme song to Flash Gordon, from Queen, and relish that I have fought on many dangerous platforms and heard in my mind the words of many metaphorical Dale Ardens without turning away from the danger. But I never get tired of hearing it, and yearn for more of it every day of my life.
When I was a child, I simply bought another movie ticket and watched the same movie over and over again. But as a man, I simply get out of bed and face the day with a smile on my face for the danger which awaits me. It’s a wonderful time to be alive!
As my old friend hosted festivities at his Cliffhanger Ranch and Adventure Outpost for the Spearhead Trail Blazers yearly event in Wise County, Virginia I had the privilege of speaking with David Nicholas who brought his General Lee 1969 Dodge Charger. David and I had more in common than just being the entertainment venues to the spectacle—he brought one of the most famous cars in the world known as the hero from The Dukes of Hazzard television show, and I performed bullwhip tricks for the participates. David is exactly the type of man I wished to highlight in my most recent novel, Tail of the Dragon, a grown man who still works in their garage to bring life to the dreams of their youth. In the video below you can meet David and his General Lee as he explained his love of that car and memorabilia from the classic television series. In a lot of ways David was a lot like the hero from my novel, Rick Stevens. The video covers many of the events which occurred at the ranch on June 1st including a special trip to the undeveloped portion of the property which my friend Nathan Ormes has big plans for in the years to come.
Just hours before meeting up with David at the Cliffhanger Ranch, which is named after the main character from my novel The Symposium of Justice, I received a very nice review of Tail of the Dragon from an unexpected source. I never tire hearing from people who have picked up Tail of the Dragon as anybody might from the store and read it feeling enough passion at the conclusion to leave a nice review. For me, it is the ultimate compliment and fills me with hope that I can ignite with that novel future David Nicholas back-yard mechanics who will feel enough passion for the material to pay homage in a similar way as David did with his General Lee.
Tail of the Dragon: Rich Hoffman Book review
Philosophy, Action, 228 pgs. ISBN 978-1-58982-694-6
A non-stop thrill-ride from beginning to end, this story lets you ride alongside an unrestrained road racer and his lover in a story that screams danger around every corner … A real page turner, the story is Smokey and the Bandit meets Road Warrior. One immovable unbending man takes on the tyrannical authorities in his quest to make a point, right a wrong, and help himself and a political ally. Risking all in a multi-state cannonball run style chase in a supercar, this fantastic smash-up derby takes Rick Stevens, his wife and Firebird into war with the police and military authorities while making history and changing the future.
A nice easy read filled with escapism, it was fantastic and fun.
As David showed me around his General Lee I kept thinking about that review from “O.A.” Some of the guests at the ranch attempted to articulate their feelings for the General Lee. I explained aloud that the old Dodge Charger was a symbol of rebellion and defiance. The bold Confederate Flag on the roof and front end, on the windows, even the name of a great Civil War general, were symbols of battle and of standing against tyranny. The car was never intended to be a casual project that the Duke Boys built to take girls out on dates – the car was to be a war machine – an agent of justice. My wife asked aloud what the bars were across the front of the General Lee, and I explained to her that those bars were for ramming bad guys off the road so that the front of the car wasn’t damaged. By bad guys in this case it was often the cops who were always wrapped up in the crooked dealings of crime in that imaginary town from the fictional television show. When visitors all day long approached the car, it wasn’t for the fantasy of a peaceful drive to church which stirred the imaginations of those who gazed upon it, but the war from which The General conducted its life. It was the battles fought and won that caused spectators to look on in awe and want to touch the car.
David and I had many philosophical discussions all day long as he demonstrated the air horn system which impressed me greatly, playing Dixie over and over to the point that we ran down the battery. We spoke about the old television show and surmised that the Duke Boys were good guys even when they broke the law because they always tried to do the right thing – even when the law stood in the way. That was the key to the success of The Dukes of Hazzard. When I was a kid and heard a souped up tractor at the Butler County Fair blow their air horn playing Dixie, it was the defiance of the General Lee which came to my mind – of the bright orange car fleeing from the law in order to save Hazzard County from the latest schemes of Boss Hog and his corrupt police force. The same spike of excitement I felt as a kid at the Fair came right back at the Cliffhanger Ranch when Dave hit the horn and revved up the big V-8 Hemi engine in his General Lee.
David Nicholas and his son who came with him were a delight to meet and speak with. I saw in them undefeated souls from Bristol, Tennessee who had an intense passion for everything related to The Dukes of Hazzard. As we talked about my novel, which is an obvious throw-back to The Dukes of Hazzard, Smokey and the Bandit and all those great classics, we joked about the big scene in the novel which took place in Pigeon Forge, and at the I-40 tunnels in the mountains. David lives in the area so he routinely travels all the roads where the biggest car chase in fictional human history took place and knew all the locations described in my novel.
The review I received reminded me that perhaps in 30 years time some back-yard mechanic might do for the Firebird from Tail of the Dragon what David had done for the General Lee, from The Dukes of Hazzard. The sheer joy that was easy to see from all who approached the car to touch it at the ranch could not be contained. Old men and their young sons, and grandsons enjoy the General Lee for the same reasons – because the General is a “war machine” dedicated to justice over tyranny. It is not about compliance, submission, or rigid rules of social structure. The General Lee is about good over evil in the most fundamental sense of the word and that is why the car had a special resonance which was unmistakably present.
On the way home from the ranch, my wife and I had to travel through the real life Hazard, Kentucky in the rugged mountains of Appalachia. We stopped in Jackson to buy my grandson and nephew a few mementos for upcoming events. As I looked at the people in the hardy small town there was a lack of fear on their faces which was similar to the kind of aura David Nicholas projected. There is a comfort in the people of Appalachia given to them from their strong faith in God, and ever-present readiness to slap down the federal government in less than a heart-beat. This was a quality that the show The Dukes of Hazzard successfully captured when they set the fictional show several hundred miles to the south in Georgia, instead of Kentucky. There is a reason that President Obama DID NOT campaign in Jackson or Hazard, Kentucky and it doesn’t have a thing to do with skin color. The people in these mountain towns do not like government bothering them about much of anything—and that element was as strong today as it was when America started as frontier towns in such remote wildernesses. It was the reason we stopped to buy birthday presents in Jackson as opposed to things we could buy at our home in Cincinnati. There is a swagger in the South that is represented by The General Lee from The Dukes of Hazzard. And by the tone of my most recent review, I had told a story that revisited that swagger with a whole new story that takes the action well-known by the Duke Boys and turns up the heat to levels modern society demands. And it delivers!
Comparing the video of Obama’s current scandals and those of Nixon’s, it is bewildering how such crocked men could have misled the American people right up to the last days of their offices. With Nixon we have the benefit of hindsight, and know that when the President was declaring to the public that he hadn’t done anything wrong—that he in fact did. He was impeached and forced from the American presidency in disgrace—as he should have. With Obama we are seeing the denials of wrongdoing in real time—before he has been forced from office as the multitude of thuggish political maneuverings executed by his administration are coming unraveled—leaving the befuddled current president to use the same silly excuses that Nixon used, because there simply aren’t any other excuses. Obama has been caught and he knows it. Watch the video for yourself.
Nixon continued to perform White House functions and speak to the press knowing that the end was coming, and Obama is currently going through the same thing. But watching them perform in the past and now in the present, it only proves how diabolically soulless these people truly are, and how little what they say really means. They are such good liars that they can get up in the morning and conduct their life as usual without being crushed under the sheer guilt of their arrogant stupidity.
As we are learning about the Benghazi murders, the first thing Obama did about the deaths 5 hours into the catastrophe was not to call in forces from the next town, or across the Mediterranean to provide assistance, it was for his own self-preservation. He called Hillary Clinton and the two worked out a cover-story for their sheer incompetence as they had been caught in an apparent gun running scandal far worse than Fast and Furious. Obama and his minions found a fall guy and attempted to blame the deaths on the maker of an anti-Muslim video—who was totally innocent of any wrong doing other than making a crappy movie. Obama was happy to lie about the terrorist event to cover up the lie of another lie his administration was embarking upon, and he didn’t think anything of looking the American people in the eye to propose the ruse.
Obama and his people are in a lot of trouble. The IRS scandal is directly tied to a union leader who met with the White House the day before the targeting of conservative groups, and the IRS is accountable to Obama. Eric Holder who has been found in “contempt of court” by Congress is guilty of spying on a Fox News reporter just a few weeks after stating before Congress that he would never think of doing such a thing, and he too works directly for President Obama. Hillary Clinton completely screwed up Benghazi causing the deaths of 4 Americans, and she worked directly for President Obama. Yet Obama claims he knew nothing about any of the incidents proclaiming just like former President Nixon did when he was caught in the Watergate Scandal that he learned about all these events on the news just like everyone else. Nobody with half a mind believes Obama.
If I were in Obama’s shoes, which I never would be as it would require a level of incompetence that seems impossible to me—but if I where, I would be so worried about all these events that I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. I wouldn’t be able to eat, enjoy television, or even reading a book. That is why it’s astonishing to watch Obama give fundraising speeches and addressing the public as if nothing were going on. But it just proves how much Obama participates in “evasion” in his personal life—how much Obama does not pay attention to the facts in the world around him—and to what extent he is simply a talking head who believes nothing, stands for even less, and will utter any word provided to him by his financial contributors. Such people are not real people—they are such good liars that they can continue to function because they have no sense of right and wrong to measure themselves against.
The only difference between former President Nixon and the current President Obama is that the former has not been forced from office yet for his crimes. In many cases, Obama’s crimes are far worse than Nixon’s because people died due to Obama’s mishaps. It also appears that Obama has many more shady people working for him than Nixon did, so the problem is exacerbated with even more incompetence. But other than that, Obama and Nixon are two peas in a pod. They are both crooks. One is a former president of the past, the other is a former president of the future.
For twenty years I have been puzzling out the reason for two things, why the first and largest city in America fell into abandonment by 1300 AD, and why to this very day thousands upon thousands of people drive by the ruins outside of St. Louis every day on a highway that passes by the third largest pyramid in the world by volume without paying any attention. I have the answer, and I write about that answer here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom. But my arrival to that answer took a long time so naturally the information here is extensive. It will take a while to read and watch all the material on this article, but its worth it to understand the complexity, and context of the claims. The result of my investigation was chronicled in a screenplay I wrote, which won a few awards but was not desired by Wilshire Blvd agents for the radical violence, heart pounding action sequences, and dire political revelations it contained. That screenplay was called The Lost Cannibals of Cahokia and was about two college anthropology students who are given a scholarship task of writing a thesis on the demise of the lost city of Cahokia—America’s first city, and was at one time larger than London which is to this day hidden in plain sight just a few miles east of downtown St. Louis.
The hero of my story was Cameron Loveless, a mixed martial arts fighter who was paying her way through college by cage fighting. Her rival was named Tina Lane, a young “progressive” beauty who decided to sleep her way to the top of the anthropology field instead of doing the hard work of digging. The story was based on my experiences at the time in college, my work with the Joseph Campbell Foundation—particularly my experiences in Washington D.C., and the many adventures I had been on in a particular region of the world with a good friend who sometimes shows up here as The Oracle. The point of the story was to explain my theory for why the ancient city evaporated from the earth as a region of immense political power to just a collection of abandoned earth mounds that developers wanted to build East St. Louis upon. The plot of the story would take Cameron Loveless and her friends to the deepest hells of earth, through dank caves flooded with cold rising water, dangerous insects, and many other perilous natural disasters as she puzzled out why the city of Cahokia had failed. But there was no danger that she or her friends encountered which would prepare her for the ultimate horror, the Lost Cannibals of Cahokia which were deformed descendents of the ancient city who needed to consume human flesh to abate their illness. At this point in the story, I took some creative liberty with the facts so to create a metaphorical analysis of the real evil which destroys our world then and today.
The story is a favorite of many who have read it, and it did bounce around Hollywood for a few years. The general opinion from the Hollywood community was the story needed to figure out what it was. Was the story a high adventure action story? Was it a horror story? Or was it a political drama? Ironically the number one problem that agents had with The Lost Cannibals of Cahokia was that Cameron Loveless was “too strong” of a character, and that she got along “too” well with her fiancé Shane. Several agents told me that I needed to re-write the story with an emphasis on one of those themes, and that Cameron needed to have more “conflict” with her relationship to Shane.
I couldn’t endure to do such a thing as make the story weaker to make it relatable to a general audience, so I shelved the story for some later time. My oldest daughter and my son-in-law love the story so much that they want me to turn the screenplay into a novelized version. After all it was my experiences with that screenplay that turned me to writing novels instead of movies as a passion. With a novel, there are no Brand Blvd parties to attend, and if people don’t like the book, they don’t buy it. Writing a novel is one of the most solitary things a person can do, which is why it is so appealing to me. Screenplays are much more collaborative, which I quickly lost interest in. But as to turning Cannibals of Cahokia into a novel, I had already passed my point of interest on that particular story. I wrote it in essence during my late 20’s and I have moved on. At the time it was freshly learned by me what ended the city of Cahokia that many scholars still debate. But where I succeeded and they failed, and still fail, are they ignore one key ingredient of what all societies that fizzle out have in common–a sense of “collective sacrifice.” A city like Cahokia during its growth phase embodied many of the attributes that would be considered “philosophic capitalism” at the time—an idea of growth, of individual profit, and a yearning to become better. The cycle usually takes 200 to 300 years, but eventually once the growth is done and the adventurers who establish such cities die off or move away, a parasitic political class is emerges in the wake, and these entities use religion to control the masses not with profitability, but a sense of sacrifice.
In Cahokia’s case, human sacrifice was as common as it was among the Aztec, Mayans, or any Mesopotamian culture. Once sacrifice becomes part of any community, the destiny of the society is in the hands of “the gods” and not the individuals who build pyramids, city walls, or perform warfare against their neighbors to gain new territory. While some of those activities might be destructive, they do involve thought—which is the lifeblood of any culture. But when a culture stops thinking, and starts sacrificing to the “Gods” they turn off their minds and return to the state of a typical primitive. Ayn Rand in her great little book Anthem described this process effectively, and it is the missing element in explaining why societies fail.
Modern scientists and political engineers wish to believe societies like Cahokia didn’t even exist, because it does not fit their version of what the American Indian was. When the lawyer and amateur historian Henry Brackenridge found the massive site of Cahokia in 1811 he tried to get his friend Thomas Jefferson to get the word out about the wonder he had discovered in the middle of the North American continent, a city that rivaled the Egyptian pyramids. But newspapers paid little attention to Jefferson’s wild ideas. After all, America was in the middle of the Indian Removal Act of 1830 and could not afford to think about the North American Indian being sophisticated and capable of building cities larger than any in Europe. Indians were to be considered savages. The result is to this very day, the evidence is right in front of millions, but nobody wishes to see it—because the evidence does not fit the anticipated reality.
In my story Cameron wanted to prove that Cahokia didn’t fail by lack of rain, or crop failure like many modern anthropologists suggest. Cahokia ended because its political structure collapsed on itself in the same way that modern-day Detroit is failing. The result of social sacrifice 100% of the time leads mankind back to the state of the primitive, not the sophisticate. Her rival Tina simply slept with her college professor, adopted the theory of those giving out the foundation grant she wanted, and played along like so many modern-day scientists who wish to have funding for their projects, surrendering their thinking to the politics of their institutions no matter what the facts indicate. Cameron wanted to prove otherwise, and did so with overwhelming evidence. To get a taste of my screenplay what follows are three scenes from it taken from ACT I, ACT II and ACT III. Scene changes are indicated below with terms such as “DISSOLVE TO:” and when characters are speaking, they are centered on the page and shown in all capital letters. It takes some getting used to, but is worth the effort. To make it even easier, I put all the character names in red so that the reader knows they can ignore that text as it is intended to be read by the actors only. All the action and crazy cannibal stuff is left out, featuring instead only the parts of the Cahokia story that are known to be true as they are relevant to the case at hand.
——————————————————————————-
The Lost Cannibals of Cahokia
By
Rich Hoffman
Draft 2
Current Revisions by
Rich Hoffman 4/15/2006
WGA #116135
CUT TO:
EXT. UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI – DAY
College students rush across the lawn to get to their classes under a splendid afternoon sun.
INT. ANTHROPOLOGY CLASSROOM – DAY
PROFESSOR TIPPIT is a tall, 55 year-old bald man dressed in a blazer that covers a t-shirt. He wears jeans and some dirty hiking boots. He’s poised confidently in front of a class of about thirty students pointing to drawings on the chalk board.
TIPPIT
Many of the 120 mounds at the
Cahokia site have been wiped out
by farming or modern construction.
On the sheet you have in front of
you, which I have drawn on the
chalk board, is a replica of the
site as we now know it.
We see all the students fumbling though their papers, looking for their diagram. Next to the window along the east wall we see Cameron sitting calmly in her chair studying her copy of the diagram, rubbing the fresh bruises on her face. She is clean and looks very well-groomed. Her hair is in a pony tail just like Jose who is sitting next to her looking pretty much the same as she did the last time we saw her.
TIPPIT (V.O.)
Only 92 mounds appear on this
diagram. The original shape of 47
of them are no longer
recognizable.
Tippit points to a group of object drawn on the chalk board.
TIPPIT
The remaining 45 fall into four
classes. Single platforms, double
platform, mounds marking the north-south,
east-west axis, and conical
mounds.
Josie nudges Cameron’s arm.
JOSIE
(whispering to
Cameron)
The “blond wonder” is checking you
out.
Cameron looks to her right on the far side of the room and notices TINA LANE gazing right at her. Tina is a woman about their age with dyed white/blond hair. She’s wearing black eye shadow and wears several earrings on her right ear. Her nose and lip are pierced. Her cloths sport the “grunge” look to a tee. Tina blows her a kiss.
TIPPIT (V.O.)
Now we need to address the issue
of Woodhenge.
Cameron and Josie give each other an anticipated look. Tippit points to a spot on the diagram to the west of the large square in the middle. Over the large square is labeled “Monks Mound.” the spot he points to is a circle. Above the circle he writes with ABRASIVE FRICTION, “Woodhenge.”
TIPPIT
Those of you that went on last
summer’s dig at Cahokia, know that
during the spring equinox you can
stand at this spot–
(pointing to a spot
in the middle of the
circle)
And witness the sun appear to rise
out of Monks Mound. This
astronomical observation device
was rebuilt several times over the
centuries and ended up over 400
feet wide, resembling an
elliptical shape. The Cahokians
used red ceder posts 15 to 20
inches in diameter and they stood
20 feet tall.
We can see that everyone in the class seems to be bored except for Cameron, Josie and Tina. One guy in front is asleep.
TIPPIT (V.O.)
I think it’s safe to say that the
current belief is that the
Cahokian leaders used this site to
prove they had mastery over the
sun to their people. They could
point to the horizon on a given
day and show which key post the
sun would rise on, and which one it would set.
The sleeping guy comes alive and rubs the drool from his mouth.
SLEEPING GUY
(sarcastic)
Wow.
A gentle RUMBLE OF LAUGHTER moves throughout the classroom.
TIPPIT
It’s really quite amazing. We
have a culture here in the
Mississippi valley dating 700 a.d.
To 1400 a.d. That is very similar
to early Mesopotamian culture of
3000 years earlier.
SLEEPING GUY
So what? I really don’t
understand why that’s important?
Every primitive culture seems to
recognize astronomical
observations.
TIPPIT
(laughs)
If you hadn’t been sleeping, you
may see the significance.
The class LAUGHS, this time louder. Tippit scores a point.
TIPPIT
(continuing)
Can anyone explain to our sleeping
friend here the significance of
this observation…keep in mind,
Mound 72.
(he turns and draws
more images on the
chalk board)
Those of you that didn’t go to
last summer’s extravaganza to the
sight wouldn’t know this, because
we haven’t covered it yet, but
when Mound 72 was excavated they
found an apparently important man
in his 40’s buried on a bed of
about 20,000 shell ornaments, and
about 800 unused arrows. With him
were buried four men, we think
they represent the four cardinal
directions of the compass. These
men were buried with their heads
and hands cut off indicating human
sacrifice.
The classroom gives a disgusted reaction to this news. The sudden shift in talk from numbers to human sacrifice has woken everyone up. Tippit senses this and runs with it. Cameron and Josie get a laugh out of the sudden shift in attention, a satire on the human condition.
TIPPIT
(continuing)
Also buried with this apparent
king was 53 women between the ages
of 15 to 25 years old. So imagine
this. You are living in Cahokia,
and your leader dies. You are
virgins—
The whole class BREAKS OUT LAUGHING at the impossibility that any girl in the classroom in that age group could possibly be a virgin. Cameron and Josie again laugh to themselves, it’s a private joke between them. Another satire on the human condition.
TIPPIT
(continuing; laughing)
You are virgins and you have been
summoned. You must escort your
king into the next life. So what
do you do?
A guy that looks like a mop sitting in the back of the room raises his hand.
MOP HEAD
Why would anybody willingly follow
some old dude into death? I still
don’t understand this whole mass
sacrifice stuff.
TIPPIT
As we’ve studied, it’s common in
all planting cultures. Human
sacrifice, whether cannibalism
mass graves or both, is a dominant
ritualistic practice.
MOP HEAD
We are European descendants, and
we didn’t do that kind of thing.
We planted sit and stuff just like
these people.
TIPPIT
Sure we do. Only our culture does
it symbolically. In the Roman
Catholic sacrificial mass, you
break bread symbolizing the body
of Christ, and drink wine, symbolizing the blood of Christ.
SLEEPING GUY
That’s not the same, man.
TIPPIT
Sure it is. The Roman Catholic
Church realized what these mass
grave cultures overlooked, that
religion requires subjects, and
the Catholics figured out that if
everyone died, nobody would be
left to go to their church and
give them money.
The class ERUPTS IN LAUGHTER.
TIPPIT
(continuing)
Back to the mass graves. In
Mesopotamia we have the Royal
Tombs of Ur, during 2500 to 2350
B.C. Here we have hundreds of
people going to death for their
kind and queen. They even buried
chariots, and horses, and courts
of musicians. So here in Cahokia
we have mass burials just the
same, right here in our own back
yard, just under a thousand years
ago. So again, imagine you’re a
young woman, the same age as most
of you now, and you look upon life
for the last time. You are
prepared with ornaments and then
strangled, most likely, ’till you
die. You do this so you can
accompany this great king, who
lived like a God atop Monks Mound.
Would anybody like to explain why
this is significant, and what can
we learn from this?
Cameron and Tina’s hands shoot up. Tippit isn’t surprised. He looks a little disappointed that the rest of the class is sitting on their hands.
TIPPIT
(continuing)
Funny, the only two students in
this class, the same two students
competing for the verbal
presentation on Cahokia’s demise.
By the way–
(looking from Tina to
Cameron)
After class I have information that will be useful to the two of
you in your research. So see me
after class.
(he looks at Tina)
All right, give us the
significance in the Woodhenge
construction for sleepy here.
(putting his hand on
the sleepy guy’s
shoulder)
TINA
Well, first, by showing that the
Cahokian leadership could predict
the movement of the sun, they
could prove to the citizens that
they were significant, and had a
special relationship with the
Gods.
TIPPIT
(looking at the rest
of the class, then
to Cameron)
Good. But why is that important?
CAMERON
It’s important to study the
primordial effects of dependency
upon the human psyche. By showing
their dominance, they justified
their existence and their desire
to abuse power at the hand of
their infantile ego systems. They
do this by using the public to
serve their needs, much like
modern-day politicians. They
created a sense of urgency and
then volunteered themselves to
fill that need.
Tina is looking angry as competitive aggression oozes from her eyes.
TINA
I’d like to add that by placing
the spring equinox at rising out
of the kings home, atop Monks
Mound, the people by default
identified the king as a heavenly
figure. This is why they
willingly subjected themselves to
the mass suicides.
Cameron and Josie look at each other shaking their heads at Tina’s need to outdo her.
SLEEPING GUY
This is all very interesting,
but we have cultures like this
already in Mexico. The Maya and
the Aztecs practiced the same type
of rituals.
CAMERON
(cutting in)
This is true, but Cahokia is
isolated from them. It seems to
have developed totally on its own.
The strongest argument made for
the rise of the Maya and later the
Aztecs is that they moved across
the Pacific from Mesopotamia, and
after a couple thousand years of
parallel settlement, established
themselves in Mexico. Most of
what we know of the Native
American Indian tribes of North
America would indicate diffusion
across the Bearing Straight,
coming from China, Siberia,
Alaska, Canada, then spreading out
into tribes into the rest of North
America. The Maya were on their
way out by 700 a.d. 200 years
before the slightest hint of
activity at Cahokia. The Aztecs
didn’t rise to power until early
1300 a.d. Cahokia is a mystery
totally self-contained, not
following the logic of its
neighbors.
The class stares open-mouthed at Cameron. Josie is laughing to herself as she stares out the window. It doesn’t matter if she’s in a boxing ring, or in a classroom debate, we see that Cameron Loveless will fight with everything she’s got. Tippit looks proud. But his proud look quickly dissolves as he turns around and writes “Spinden’s Correlation” on the chalk board. He turns around and smiles at Cameron. Cameron understands immediately and covers her face from mild embarrassment.
TIPPIT
You are forgetting Ms. Loveless,
that the Mayan dates when
translated to our own calender
gave us false dates. The common
practice is to use the Thomas-
Goodman correlation. When doing
so, add about 260 years. That being the case,
we can look at the fall of the Maya to be around 900
to 950 a.d.
The bell RINGS and the class jumps out of their seats wasting no time. Tina is smiling as she makes her way to the professor’s desk. Josie is already there, but Cameron is still sitting. After the last of the students leaves the room, Shane walks in looking secure. He is dressed in black swat team type pants and a t-shirt covered with cartoon characters. He makes eye contact with Cameron and that brings a smile from her. It’s a soft smile that we haven’t seen yet. She does the same for him. She gets up and meets Tippit at his desk where he is sitting down.
TIPPIT
(continuing)
Sorry Cameron, I was just keeping
you on your toes.
CAMERON
That’s ok. I ran right into that
one.
TINA
(staring at the
bruises on Cameron’s
face)
Looks like that’s not all you ran
into.
JOSIE
Why don’t you back off for a
change!
TIPPIT
Ladies! Ladies, let’s not fight
again. Chill out.
Shane steps up behind Cameron and puts his arms around her stomach giving her a gentle hug. Josie and Tina eye each other than give their attention to Tippit.
TIPPIT
(continuing)
Cameron. Tina. I have some bad
news, and some good news. I
waited ’till after class to tell
you because it really only affects
the two of you.
TINA
What is it?
TIPPIT
Well, remember Paul P. Jacobs from
last summer’s dig at Cahokia?
TINA/CAMERON
(together)
Yeah.
TIPPIT
Well, this may be tough. You two
are the only ones from this
University to take part in his
scholarship opportunity for post
graduate tuition.
CAMERON
Yeah, two years of paid tuition
for my masters. I’m depending on
it.
TINA
(to Cameron)
So am I. If I don’t get that
money I’m sunk.
TIPPIT
Well, this will make things harder
for you two girls than they
already are. I know you both need
that money, and only one can get
it. I wish I could change it, but
I can’t.
JOSIE
What about Jacobs?
TIPPIT
Well, you girls knew he’s been
missing since the fall.
CAMERON
I didn’t know that.
TINA
(to Cameron)
I did.
Cameron gives Tina a look of pathetic disgust.
TIPPIT
Yes, he’s been missing for about
six months. Well, he turned up
last week. At least part of him.
TINA
Part of him?
TIPPIT
A fisherman found his head in
a lake in Tennessee.
There is an uncomfortable silence among them.
TIPPIT
(continuing)
He was down there doing some
research for Cahokia.
JOSIE
(trying to lighten up
things)
Did his head still have skin on it?
Cameron pushes Josie in a playful attempt to silence her.
TINA
Why would he be doing work for
Cahokia down there?
TIPPIT
Before I answer that I have to
give you the rest of the news.
the Paul P. Jacobs foundation has
decided to have a funeral to give
closure to his family.
JOSIE
I hope it won’t be an open casket?
Shane can’t help but laugh, and Cameron fights back a smile.
Tina is horrified.
TIPPIT
I should think not. But I’m
afraid that something has happened
that will affect the scholarship
award.
Cameron and Tina’s faces drop to an expression of gloom.
TIPPIT
(continuing)
This weekend is the spring equinox
and the Foundation is gathering
there to pay tribute to his life’s
work at Cahokia. They’ve already
cremated his remain and they plan
to spread them over Monks Mound.
JOSIE
That’ll be a real small vase.
CAMERON
How’s this affect the scholarship?
TIPPIT
Next Friday, one week from today,
the Foundation is going to award
the scholarship to one of you.
TINA
But we haven’t turned in our
essays yet.
TIPPIT
They don’t want just an essay.
They are going to release some
unpublished work of Dr. Jacobs and
they are holding a special
ceremony to award the scholarship.
CAMERON
So what do we have to do?
TIPPIT
They are asking that you give a
verbal explanation on the demise
of Cahokia based on the incomplete
evidence of Dr. Jacobs’ latest
findings.
They will judge your presentation
and the winner will get all of
your post-graduate studies paid in
full for two years and your
presentation will be published in
the book their planning to release
in tribute to Paul.
CAMERON
(looking at her
friends, then at
Tina)
That’s not enough time.
(then leaning against
the desk, her fists
clinched)
I can’t afford to blow this.
TIPPIT
Don’t panic. You both know
Cahokia very well. Probably
better than the Foundation people.
Just do your best.
(beat)
I do have some information that
Dr. Jacobs E-mail me right before
he disappeared. I could forward
it to the two of you if you wish.
You may find it useful.
CAMERON
Why? What’s in it?
TIPPIT
Well, Paul was studying possible
trade routes from North Carolina.
You know, mica origins. He
stopped by a little store in some
tiny little town on the border of
Kentucky and Tennessee, close to
where he was found. Anyway, he
bought some jewelry.
JOSIE
Jewelry? So what?
TIPPIT
Sea shells…sea shell jewelry
mixed with mica figures dangling
from the shells. Very elaborate.
TINA
For once I agree with Josie. So
what?
TIPPIT
They are very similar to the kind
of ornamentation found in Mound
72. He believed they were
connected in some way.
TINA
In the middle of Tennessee!
TIPPIT
Like I said. He was looking for
trade routes, and he thought he
found one. These ornament were
far too elaborate, and primitive
to be made by the locals. At
least that’s what he thought. He
never was able to get a carbon-14
on them. Maybe if one of you
could get an age on those
ornaments, and put them at around
the time of Cahokia’s height of
power and influence, it could help
prove something, or make a
connection to your theories.
TINA
My theory can’t be proven like
that.
TIPPIT
Well the information is there if
you want it. I’ll E-mail it to you both. Also, I’ll be going to
St. Louis this weekend to meet the
foundation members. They want to
spread the ashes tomorrow, so
you’re both welcome to come along
and meet them. It might give you
some idea as to what they’re
looking for.
(beat)
I know this is short notice, but
you’ll both have to make the best
of it. I know you were going to
have all summer to put together a
theory, but this is the way things
work. Make it work to your
advantage.
TINA
(looking pale)
If you don’t mind, I’d like to go
with you Professor. I’m not about
to waste valuable time hunting
down sea shells.
Cameron looks up at Shane who stares back nervously.
JOSIE
(agitated)
Surely there’s some way to delay
this.
TIPPIT
I’m caught between a rock and a
hard place here. Both of you need
the money. Both of you expect to
win. All I can do is tell you the
rules. I’m not the one holding
the money. All I can say is there
are two possible options here.
You two can meet the people who
will judge you. You can get to
know hem, learn what they like. or
you can see if Paul was onto
anything new in this Tennessee
place.
(picking up his books)
But I have to go right now. I’m
late for an appointment. I’ll Email
the Dr. Jacobs message to
both of you as soon as I get home.
I’ll be leaving for St. Louis
around 3 P.M. If either of you
want to go, meet me here around
2:30 with whatever you’re taking
along.
Professor Tippit leaves in a rush. The atmosphere is tense.
CAMERON
Damn.
TINA
Please tell my you’re not planning
on going with me.
CAMERON
I’ll go where you don’t.
(getting closer to
Tina’s face)
I’d rather work than kiss ass.
TINA
Good. Then I won’t have to
compete for attention.
JOSIE
No, you can just take off your
clothes and dance for them, like
you do everyone else.
TINA
(to Josie then to
Cameron)
You guys are just in denial.
You’re mad because he money has
come easy for me, and you have to
struggle.
(beat)
Look at you. You actually think
your way is better.
CAMERON
I sleep better.
TINA
You haven’t been over to see me
sleep lately, now have you.
SHANE
No, but everyone else has.
Tina gives Shane a piercing gaze but quickly retreats when
she realizes it doesn’t affect him.
TINA
(storming out of the
room)
Good luck. You’ll need it.
(from out in the hall)
I’ll be sure to guarantee my luck.
SHANE
(looking at Cameron)
I just had to throw that in.
JOSIE
Man, is she a slut. You know what
she’s going to do don’t you?
CAMERON
(chews on her cut lip)
I’m not going to mingle with a
bunch of fruitcakes. That’s her
way. She bullshits. I dig.
that’s what anthropologists are
supposed to do.
Shane rubs the side of Cameron’s face. She yields to it. The tough talker suddenly melts like butter. She falls into his strong arms.
DISSOLVE TO:
INT. JEEP – NIGHT
It is dark outside the confines of the jeep. The only light is a soft glow given off by the laptop. Cameron’s face is excited, lit with a blue hue from the screen.
SHANE
So what’s our objective? I know
you have to prove how Cahokia fell
from power but how are we going to
do that?
CAMERON
Well, the theory I’ve been working
on deals with competition from
other settlements along with
Mississippi as being the primary
cause of Cahokia’s fall between
1200 a.d. And 1300 a.d.
(shaking her head)
Tina believes that a small global
cooling trend around 1250 caused
the fall by damaging the growing
season.
SHANE
Is there any validity to her
theory?
JOSIE
Sure there is. But Cameron’s idea
is far more practical.
SHANE
(to Josie)
Are you just saying that because
she’s your friend?
JOSIE
No, see even if the crops failed
around that time, we had buffalo
migrating across the Mississippi
in this same century. So that
should have made up for the poor
farming results.
CAMERON
Tina only clings to that theory
because Tippit suggested it last
summer. Mr. Jacobs on the other
handmade much more sense.
JOSIE
She’s got a crush on Tippit.
CAMERON
She’s got a crush on anything that
moves. That’s why she’s so
disgusting. She’s like water.
She’ll take on the shape of
whatever you put her in. That’s
how she gets her way.
SHANE
Is there anything in those notes
about where we’re headed?
CAMERON
Well, Dr. Jacobs says that he went
to a little gas station just south
of the Tennessee border and found
elaborated Cahokian style
ornaments on sale at a tourist
trap bait shop.
SHANE
Tennessee has a long border.
South of what. Give me a
reference point.
CAMERON
Looks like Monticello, Kentucky.
That’s the only major town he
mentions.
JOSIE
Are we going to stop and eat
someplace? I’m starving. I
haven’t eaten since this morning.
CAMERON
Monticello is probably the last
reliable place to eat, so we’ll
stop there. Everything south of
that at that time of night will
probably be closed. It’s the
Bible belt.
Josie opens a map.
JOSIE
You’re right. There’s like
nothing south of Monticello.
Definitely hick land.
SHANE
So what’s the back-up plan if this
turns out to be a dud.
CAMERON
We don’t have one. All I can say
is that this better work. I was
planning on working on this all
summer. Now we’re supposed to
come up with something out of the
blue. I need that money.
DISSOLVE TO:
INT. CONFERENCE ROOM – DAY
Six days later, it’s the same hotel the Foundation had been staying at for the funeral ceremony. They are all seated at a long banquet table situated in front of a single podium. They sit there like judges, determining the fate of the speaker at the podium. Tippit and Tina are sitting off to the side along the partition wall. Tina looks happy as she holds Tippet’s hand. Shane and Josie are sitting at the opposite wall, watching Tippit and Tina, shaking their heads. A sad example of the effects kissing ass can have on a lonely man’s heart. Alone, confident, and poised for greatness, Cameron gives her presentation at the podium. Behind her are drawings, pictures taken from the video tape they made, and enlarged copies of the pictographs she and Josie had discovered. Hanging on the front of the podium was a picture of Birdman lying on the bed of shells. With all the visual aids and the revelation of new discoveries about Cahokia’s demise, Cameron is a sure win for the scholarship.
But Tina seems too confident. The scene begins where the explanation left off at the cave. Cameron has already told the story we already heard in the burial chamber.
CAMERON(professional)
…and so we can say with
certainty, with all the given
evidence that I have provided,
that our friend here, Birdman, a
dissident of Cahokia’s rigid
political system, went south and
encouraged other settlements to
rebel against this great trade
center. We know this because he
traveled Cahokia’s trade routes
where he eventually settled into
this underground chamber to leave
his story behind…to us. And
than God he did.
The members don’t look impressed. Cameron notices this and gives an uneasy glance at her friends, then to Tina. Tina just closes her eyes smiling. Her look says “got ya.”
CAMERON
(continuing)
I think Dr. Jacobs would be happy
to know that his search and his
sacrifice in the name of
anthropology led to a great
discovery that will change what we
know of the fate of Cahokia.
Cameron expects an applause of some kind. What she gets is the cold shoulder, big time.
LARRY
(mechanical)
Thank you…miss…us…Loveless.
Nice job.
Cameron, Shane and Josie all have the same perplexed look.
CAMERON
“Nice job?”
MARY
Yes, very interesting theories.
Yet I’m not totally convinced.
I’m inclined to believe in my
husband’s earlier work. It’s a
little more proven. It still seems
more probable that a climate
change affected the farming.
Cameron’s mouth is hanging open. After all she went though, it comes to this. Shane is shaking his head in disgust. Josie jumps to her feet.
JOSIE
When Tina spoke, she had no visual aids and
a five-minute speech.
Are you trying to say that all the evidence Cameron has given
you has failed to make you question that original theory?
LARRY
Young lady. I don’t mean to sound
rude but…but this doesn’t
concern you.
Josie’s nostrils flair. Shane has to grab her before she takes off after the man. Cameron looks defeated, then perks up. She’s never been a quitter and she’s not about to start now.
CAMERON
With all due respect…sir…but
you’d have to understand what we
went through to bring you this
information. I don’t mean to
sound like a poor sport or
anything like that but…
TODD
But what? You expect us to
believe in these wild theories?
CAMERON
(shocked)
Wild theories?
(very animated)
You know, we not only uncovered a
completely unknown burial chamber
out in the middle of nowhere, and
found writing as reliable as the
Rosetta Stone telling us what
happened at Cahokia…which is
what this whole scholarship was
supposed to be about…but we also
found evidence of cannibalism
still practiced in the area as a
result of this Birdman, from tis
period, the Morrehead Phase…the
fall of Cahokia, between 1200 to
1250 a.d.
JOHNATHAN
So you expect us to believe that
cannibalism is still practiced.
Why?
CAMERON
As I’ve told you, as indicated by
the drawings and witnessed by me
and my friends, there are terrible deformities
among the people surrounding this burial chamber.
MARY
You’re saying that my husband was
a victim of this cannibalism?
CAMERON
These people have ceremonies every
fall and spring. Because of their
deformities they haven’t migrated
away from the area, and still
practice the same rituals as was
practiced in Cahokia.
LARRY
(laughing)
And they cut off people’s heads in
the fall and eat them in the
spring?
CAMERON
(determined)
Yes. Frazer in his book “The
Golden Bough” deals with this kind
of behavior by explaining “the
savage commonly believes that by
eating the flesh of an animal or
a man that he acquires not only
the physical, but even the moral
and intellectual qualities of that
life form.”
LARRY
So they killed Dr. Jacobs so they
could gain intelligence?
CAMERON
No! They wanted his body, to keep
the deformities from getting
worse. They cast away the head
hoping it would spring forth and
grow into new life.
The Foundation members all give each other impossible glances. Even Tina and Tippit participate. Tina feels her grip on the Foundation weakening.
TINA
Why this isolated little place in
the middle of nowhere?
CAMERON
(motioning to Josie
but addressing Tina)
This wasn’t. Cannibalism was
practiced in the area up to 1600 a.d.
The Foundation members are really rocked now. This is all new to them. Josie hands Cameron a picture. It’s a color photo of a circular object pale white in color. It’s a painted man, it looks like an archeological relic from mexico in design. In his right hand is a severed head. Cameron holds up the picture so everyone can see.
CAMERON
(continuing)
This is an engraved shell gorget.
this was uncovered from a mound at
Catlian Springs, in Sumner County,
Tennessee. It dates back to
around 1200 to 1600 a.d. The sand
Prairie Period.
LYNE
I didn’t know that.
CAMERON
That’s the point. There are a lot
of things we don’t know. we get
so wrapped up in trivial things.
(to Tina)
Like copying off a great man’s
work word for word because we are
not think for ourselves.
(to the Foundation)
We can get stuck by saying that
Cahokia, as a great city, failed
because of some crop damage. But
as the evidence suggests, that
would be the easy way out.
LARRY
So what’s this picture prove in
relation to your argument?
CAMERON
(amazed at Larry’s
ignorance)
Isn’t it obvious? In the next
period of the Mississippian
cultures, after Cahokia, we have
ceremonies similar to the city’s,
even off the main Mississippi
river way. This relic was
uncovered only fifty or so miles
west of this cave burial. This
goes along with Birdman’s cave
painting. He was a principal
advocate in leading other
Mississippi river cultures into
creating their own independent
societies, cutting out Cahokia,
weakening the ruler. It’s a
political upheaval.
There is confusion and tension among the Foundation members. Cameron reads it and addresses it like she does everything, directly.
CAMERON
(continuing)
You know…it doesn’t take a
genius to figure out what’s going
on here.
(pointing to Tina)
You’ve made buddies with her, and
you have made a conscious, or
subconscious decision to award her
the scholarship.
MARY
We haven’t made our decision final.
CAMERON
(holding up her hand)
It’s ok. I’ve worried about this
damn thing nearly all this school
year. I thought that by doing an
exceptional job, I’d surely get
it. But I’ve learned some real
lessons on this expedition…all
of these cities we’ve studied in
my four years of college have
something in common. They’re not
around any more. Most cities only
have a couple hundred years of
history…why?
She has everyone’s complete attention.
CAMERON
(continuing)
To me…this is why we study the
past…so that we can learn where
they failed and how we can
succeed. But there isn’t any
hope. Even in something as small
as us in this little room, in this
little hotel, we have political
upheavals and dysfunction.
LARRY
Miss!
CAMERON
(stern)
Let me finish! I bring you
overwhelming evidence of a great
number of key issues that not only
personally affect your supposed
goals, but also the issues that
greatly affect anthropology in
North America…and what do you
say? You attack me…hoping I’m
wrong so you can award your stupid
little scholarship to your new
friend.
Tina and Tippit look distressed.
CAMERON
(continuing)
I understand how the world works,
maybe all too well. I know deals
are made over important issues
that greatly affect our lives
every day over cups of coffee, and
a trip to an NBA basketball game.
And if you don’t participate in
those social activities, you’re
cast out. That’s how it works,
and I accept that.
The room is silent.
CAMERON
(continuing)
Just remember something. Remember
that if you give her this
scholarship based on how much you
like her, and not on the merit of
the work, you are participating in
an evil system that is tearing
apart the very world we live in.
If you want any evidence in that,
have a look at our political
system. Try to tell me we aren’t
falling right into our ancestor’s
foot steps.
(looking angry)
Go visit the White House, or
Capital Hill, and tell me they
aren’t different from this mound
at Cahokia…constructed to
impress, but serves nothing else
as a social function. Constructed
to manipulate a gullible public.
A tear rolls down Mary’s cheek. She is reminded of all the reasons she and her husband got involved in anthropology to begin with. How did she stray away from the path? How had they become so lost in a wilderness of lies and false smiles It takes a lecture from a young, idealistic woman…someone they’d all like to be, and were at one time…to remind them.
CAMERON
(continuing)
Just look where all the societies
that came before us ended up.
Then ask yourself if you want to
continue in their social
practices.
Cameron stands like a God above them on the podium and stares without fear. Then she turns around and RIPS down all her drawings and pictures. She KICKS over the podium. It falls with a HOLLOW THUD.
CAMERON
(continuing)
I’m outta here.
Shane puts his arm around her and leads her toward the back of the room. Josie gives the Foundation a death look as she passes them. Tippit looks distressed. He abruptly stands up.
TIPPIT
Cameron…wait!
Cameron stops at the back of the room by the door. It’s obvious that she’s been heartbroken and still clings to the hope that something positive will happen.
TIPPIT
(continuing; to Mary)
I think what’s happened here is
we’ve created a competition that
has brought out the worst result.
(to Tina)
It’s obvious that Cameron did
superior work on this project. I
think I have a solution where we
all benefit.
Cameron is interested, but totally confused.
————————————————————————–
I was not satisfied that Cahokia’s demise was the standard until my wife and I visited the ancient Mayan city of Chichen Itza on the Yucatan Peninsula. We had visited the Cahokia site before and I wanted to compare the ancient city with one of the closest neighbors to the south, the Chichen complex with its iconic stone pyramids all built with astrological recognition, just like at Cahokia.
See clips from that trip here:
At Chichen Itza human sacrifice was the norm and the site was magnificent as it had been abandoned by 1204 AD from a once thriving metropolis, rivaling any city anywhere in the world. Obviously, there was trading going on between Chichen Itza and the Mississippi Culture of North America that was quite sophisticated. Both societies rose and fell around the same time within 100 years of one another. In Cahokia the people there worshiped “Bird Man” and in Chichen Itza they worshiped Kukulkan the featherd serpent – otherwise, another “birdman.” Chichen Itza rose to power just as its large neighbor to the north Teotihaucan fell from grace. Teotihuacan (pronounced /ˈtɛɔˌtiwɑˈkɑn/),[1] also written Teotihuacán, was a pre-Columbian Mesoamerican city located in the Basin of Mexico, 30 miles (48 km) northeast of modern-day Mexico City, which is today known as the site of many of the most architecturally significant Mesoamerican pyramids built in the pre-ColumbianAmericas. Apart from the pyramids, Teotihuacan is also anthropologically significant for its complex, multi-family residential compounds, the Avenue of the Dead, and the small portion of its vibrant murals that have been exceptionally well-preserved. Additionally, Teotihuacan produced a thin orange pottery style that spread through Mesoamerica.[2]
The city is thought to have been established around 100 BC and continued to be built until about 250 AD.[3] The city may have lasted until sometime between the 7th and 8th centuries AD. At its zenith, perhaps in the first half of the 1st millennium AD, Teotihuacan was the largest city in the pre-Columbian Americas, with a population of perhaps 125,000 or more,[3][4] placing it among the largest cities of the world in this period.[5] Teotihuacan began as a new religious center in the Mexican Highland around the first century AD. This city came to be the largest and most populated center in the New World. Teotihuacan was even home to multi-floor apartment compounds built to accommodate this large population.[3] The civilization and cultural complex associated with the site is also referred to as Teotihuacan or Teotihuacano. Oh, and guess what, the consensus among scholars is that the primary deity of Teotihuacan was the Great Goddess of Teotihuacan.[30] Politics were based on the state religion; and the religious leaders were the political leaders.[31]
Teotihuacanos practiced human sacrifice: human bodies and animal sacrifices have been found during excavations of the pyramids at Teotihuacan. Scholars believe that the people offered human sacrifices as part of a dedication when buildings were expanded or constructed. The victims were probably enemy warriors captured in battle and brought to the city for ritual sacrifice to ensure the city could prosper.[32] Some men were decapitated, some had their hearts removed, others were killed by being hit several times over the head, and some were buried alive. Animals that were considered sacred and represented mythical powers and military were also buried alive, imprisoned in cages: cougars, a wolf, eagles, a falcon, an owl, and even venomous snakes.[33]
After our visit to Chichen Itza my wife and I had a very elegant dinner that night but I didn’t taste a morsel of food. From our seat the Caribbean Sea was brilliantly captured by nighttime broken clouds outlined by a full moon. My wife was wearing a very elegant dress that blew about carelessly in the constant breeze, yet I ate the food without tasting any of it as my mind was thousands of miles away on Cahokia. I told my wife after our visit to Chichen Itza that my theories about the demise of Cahokia were 100% correct and society did not have the courage to look itself in the eye and admit the truth—that sacrifice is the key to all social decline. The sense of giving things up is the sign that soon, mankind will resort back to spears and grass skirts as opposed to elegant food, silk dresses, perfumed bodies and the gusts of wind from the Caribbean Sea carrying the aroma a well-prepared food across open air elegant restaurants.
Without question when Cahokia, Chichen Itza and Teotihaucan were being built, the people had a sense of purpose. There was need for innovation, creativity, and much thought. But once the cities were built, the second-handlers came into play, the politicians, the religious leaders and the bureaucrats took over and attempted to claim the good work of the creators with mystic dedication and sacrifice to Gods only they could see, for devices only they could understand. Thus, the receipt for disaster is present whenever sacrifice is utilized in any society as the highest attribute. Social decline is a foregone conclusion.
Many times over the years out of need for money I considered making Cannibals of Cahokia into strictly a “horror” script. I thought about dumbing it down so the bar-hopping socialites in Santa Monica could get their minds around the story and accept it. I thought of doing all the things they suggested, but ultimately shelved it instead. By changing the story, I would be surrendering to the kind of evil that destroys society. I would be yielding to the kind of villains that Cameron was fighting at the end of The Lost Cannibals of Cahokia—and I couldn’t do it.
When I talk about the failure of education in modern society, or the villainy of communism, socialism, and all degrees of statism, it is not out of modern propaganda, but in a knowledge of history that has resulted from personal experience that took two decades to learn. I essentially made Cameron Loveless a female version of myself, and I couldn’t betray her for the same reasons I can’t betray myself.
I read in the January 2011 edition of National Geographic where writer Glenn Hodges provided a discouraged report of his trip to Cahokia by stating, “I’m standing at the center of what was once the greatest civilization between the deserts of Mexico and the North American Arctic — America’s first city and arguably American Indians’ finest achievement — and I just can’t get past the four lane gash that cuts through this historic site. Instead of imagining the thousands of people who once teemed on the grand plaza here, I keep returning to the fact that Cahokia Mounds in Illinois is one of only eight cultural World Heritage sites in the United States, and it’s got a billboard for Joe’s Carpet King smack in the middle of it.” Hodges is essentially dealing with a pain that I dealt with at the start of writing The Lost Cannibals of Cahokia.
I thought that by writing the screenplay and having it made into a movie, that I could bring awareness to Cahokia, and help Americans learn an important part of their heritage that had long been forgotten — and even ignored. But soon I realized that the ending of my screenplay reflected too accurately the reality of modern politics, which is persistent in virtually every human endeavor. And that reality wants to ignore Cahokia, not remember it. After all, there is nothing like a giant 100 foot pyramid sitting next to one of the busiest highway systems in world to tell everyone that it’s there. Yet people do not see it — they don’t want to see it — because they are inclined to make the same mistakes as the Cahokians did with a dedicated life to sacrifice instead of thinking creativity. Therefore, America as it stands now is in the declining epoch of its cycle, approaching 300 years of life, and failing because its philosophy of self-reliance and freedom has abated to the soothsaying mystics of Europe and their persistent desire to rule the world through regulations, paper, and legislation they control to the Gods only they wish to see. This is why when Europeans first came to America they saw the American Indian not in a state of peace with nature, but in a degraded state of primitive re-invention. This is also why Europe was cast into the Dark Ages after Rome fell to the barbarian hoards. The cycle repeats over and over and over again, because human beings never learn, and have no desire to even look at the evidence that is so obvious. The reason is that the information is inconvenient, and requires courage in thought, the kind of courage that made Cameron Loveless such a heroic character who lives in an age when she is hated for her goodness, and ability to see what is really there.
I continue to get a lot of email from people all over Ohio wanting to know how they can fight their local school levies and take controversial positions against fire/police levies. Without question the levy attempts will continue to be a problem in Ohio as collective bargaining agreements are wrecking the budgets of virtually every community. The idea of collective bargaining is a preposterous notion that only ignorant fools would support. They are a direct result of communist influence during the “red decade” reacting to extensive pressure from the Soviet Union, and should have never been brought to The United States in any form. The mistake of collective bargaining is that it pays employees value based on years of service, seniority and collective membership, not on individual merit which is essential to a capitalist system. Collective bargaining is the brain-child of Karl Marx and is anti-capitalism in its fiscal approach. The practice needs to be abolished before management of community resources can be performed properly. Collective bargaining is the single greatest cause of tax increases in any government endeavor. Employees are paid too much because of it, and too many people are paid with such over abundance—which recklessly drives up labor costs on a community forcing tax increases.
Although collective bargaining for private sector workers was adopted into federal Law in 1935, it was nearly 50 years later when public employees in Ohio obtained the right to negotiate workplace contracts. On July 6, 1983 Governor Richard Celeste signed the collective bargaining bill (SB133) into law, which went into effect on April 1, 1984 and is contained in Ohio Revised Code, Chapter 4117.
As a result of the collective bargaining law, six hundred thousand public employees including teachers, firefighters, police officers, state and local service workers, could not only form and join a union, but also enjoy legal rights in negotiating workplace contracts with the public employer (the taxpayer). The collective bargaining law also ushered in the State Employees Relations Board, principally charged with administering Chapter 4117 and resolving labor and management disputes through a three-member board appointed by the Governor, which almost every time favors the lobby power of the labor unions.
Until the mistake of Celeste in Ohio during 1983 and the 1935 federal law are abolished tax levies will continue. Many of the people writing me lack the network to fight the large well-oiled machines of community labor unions but I have been able to help some of them construct successful strategies to defeat their levies as they come up on the ballot. To date, the government institutions, particularly the schools simply ignore the election results when they fail and try again for another tax increase in the next business quarter. This scam is driven by collective bargaining agreements and unions flock to protect those agreements because it is the life-blood of their high wages. So, it is helpful to have a larger organization behind tax fighting efforts to match and surpass the scams proposed by labor unions in bed with statist government lovers.
I recently spoke with Hanna Faulkner from the Americans for Prosperity organization who is the Southwest Ohio filed coordinator. She offered the services of AFP to communities struggling to defeat their tax levies with the might of their dynamic group powered by incredible activists. They have organized and influential citizen leaders in every state who work at local, state, and national levels to embrace the principles of economic freedom. AFP understands that individual and entrepreneurial freedom creates a higher quality of life than government controls and excessive regulation. They also understand that efficient, effective and limited government protects hardworking taxpayer and allows the real economy to grow and thrive. AFP believes that genuine merit should determine success, not government cronyism or favoritism which is exactly what collective bargaining breeds everywhere it is applied. AFP knows that communities are healthier and more prosperous when personal responsibility is reward and dependency is discourage, so they are the perfect type of organization to help lend support when it comes to fighting tax increases.
According to Hanna, AFP is all about action. Throughout the year they crisscross the nation holding rallies, town halls, and grassroots events to inform, empower, and activate Americans to become influential voices in the battle for economic freedom. In addition to their aggressive stance on national issues, AFP frequently focuses on critical issues at the state and local levels. That’s why they mobilized massive resources to combat New Jersey’s Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), where they conducted nearly 50 special events and training seminars, resulting in Governor Christie removing New Jersey from the Cap-and-Trade scheme. AFP also played a major role in Wisconsin’s budget reform battle, where they defended those in the state who were fighting to balance Wisconsin’s budget. To that end, they took over the airwaves, rallied grassroots activists, and organized a statewide bus tour.
AFP’s North Carolina activists ensured passage of the first veto-proof budget without a tax increase in over a decade. The legislative success was the result of grassroots pressure involving AFP-North Carolina activists knocking on more than 56,000 doors and holding rallies as well as AFP’s large-scale paid media effort. AFP-Nevada activists logged a whopping 35,441 live, non-partisan, Get-Out-The-Vote calls leading up to the special election in Nevada’s 2nd Congressional District. In Wisconsin, AFP deployed their vertically integrated grassroots strategy, 110,000 activists who ensured that Governor Scott Walker’s crucial collective bargaining reforms and spending cuts carried the day by running a statewide paid media effort, hosting dozens of large-scale rallies, and logging tens of thousands of live issue advocacy calls to households across Wisconsin. In Michigan AFP helped thwart an unnecessary international bridge project between Michigan and Canada after mobilizing tens of thousands of calls to elected officials in Lansing. In Texas, AFP along with a coalition of state-based partners, helped wipe out a $27 billion budget deficit in Texas without raising taxes or draining the state’s rainy day fund. American’s for Prosperity is a group that offers fresh troops to the budget battles of the day—and they are quite effective.
This is why I was speaking to Hanna. When my school district of Lakota attempts to place another levy on the ballot, I intend to beat that levy so badly that it will change state dialogue in Ohio with a mandate setting defeat that is so high-profile that every district in Ohio, and the board of education at the state level will shudder. To do this I intended to defeat the next measure by 65% or more at the ballot box, and to do that it will require different tactics than I have used in the past. The activism record of AFP is just the kind of thing I’m looking for, so such an alliance looks to be forthcoming. However, in the meantime, AFP is there for other districts all across the state, and they should be contacted to assist with those battles.
Levies must be defeated if the collective bargaining debacle of Dick Celeste is to be reversed. Tax increases are slow intrusions on the value of private property that were typically imposed out of graciousness so long as the value of homes continued to artificially increase. Now that the housing bubble has burst, the taxes paid to schools are not paid out of falsified property increase values, but out of the real value of property that is not going to increase by means of miracle for the owner. For the entire duration of Celeste’s diabolical scheme of collective bargaining, property values have artificially inflated with the perception that it would go on forever. But now reality has set in, and the villain of collective bargaining must be dealt with first by defeating the proposed tax increases, then removing collective bargaining from all government jobs in Ohio so that proper management of tax payer resources can be conducted. Yet these reforms do not have to be terrifying enterprises where only a few must stand against the many. Americans for Prosperity is there to help provide support for just this sort of thing, and I’d recommend contacting them over ballot initiatives in Ohio whenever possible.
Hanna Faulkner at American’s for Prosperity can be contacted at:
The text of Menzies book contains castrations, gallivants with concubines, dangerous naval warfare, journeys to exotic lands, political intrigue, betrayal, cannibalism, and correspondence with the supernatural. 
The Overmanwarrior 