The Force is Still With Us

Yesterday was the 35^th anniversary of the premier of the first Star Wars movie, later dubbed Star Wars IV:  A New Hope.

Star Wars was a revolutionary movie, using age-old Saturday morning movie serial techniques merged with the latest (then) special effects to create a brand-new cinematic experience for movie-goers.  Today’s young movie patrons can scarcely appreciate the dearth of good movies back then, especially in science fiction.

Now and then, a good movie, like Jaws, slipped through the Progressive cracks, entertaining audiences instead of clubbing them over the head with dreary themes (2001:  A Space Odyssey), pornography (Ryan’s Daughter – when the previews came on for this upcoming film, my father removed us from the theater and thundered to my mother, who thundered to the theater management about showing X-rated previews during a children’s movie).

After 1965’s The Sound of Music, there wasn’t much you could take children to see.  Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was okay.  Rex Harrison did his best in Doctor Doolittle (which was far superior to its remake).  Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory was too subversive and incomprehensible for a young mind.  That was it.  If there were other movies, they’ve long since been forgotten.  A lascivious agency had taken over the cinema, giving us The Graduate and The Midnight Cowboy.

Star Wars woke us up with a bang.  We’d been prepared since Jaws for better movies and a few years later, there it was.  “A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away…”  My parents complained that it reminded them of the old adventure serials they’d go to see on a Saturday afternoon.  Spaceships instead of horses.  Otherwise, it seemed to them all much the same.

But it was new to us kids and young adults.  The movie, once franchised, was well-dubbed “A New Hope.”  Better movies were coming our way.  Movies were the heroes were the heroes and the villains were the villains.  Critics laughed, but audiences didn’t.  We couldn’t get enough of Star Wars.

Soon, better movies did arrive.  More and better science fiction.  Better dramas.  The enemies of good would not be gainsaid; in the Eighties a long list of dreadful movies came along, but so did Amadeus, The Terminator, and Back to the Future.  The movie universe had been saved.  Hooray!

Star Wars drew a galaxy of dedicated fans, some rather strange.  So devoted were they that they analyzed and overanalyzed every parsec of George Lucas’ six movies.  The prequels to the original did not go over well with his teenaged audience.  The movies – admittedly – were darker and not as much fun.  Since the stories were chronicling the life of Luke Skywalker’s father, Anakin, how could anyone expect them to be?

Fan-atics complained about the poor acting abilities of Hayden Christensen and the introduction of the detestable character, Jar-Jar Binks.  Whether Christensen had limited acting abilities or he was directed to act in an emotionless, almost robot-like manner is difficult for any fan to say.  As for Jar-Jar, maybe fans just need to get over it.  Lucas needed a fall guy.  It’s just a movie.  Fans can protest too much and you have to wonder if maybe they see something of themselves in Jar-Jar.

More mature critics have two complaints about Lucas – his writing abilities and his politics.  A perusal of the novelization of the first film settles that first issue:  Lucas was a film director, not a writer.  He was a conceptualist.  For a Saturday afternoon movie, that was enough.

Our times, and our perception of the times, read more into the film than Lucas had actually written.  Just when we needed a hero, Luke Skywalker showed up, followed a year later by Superman.  In 1977, we were tiring of the Progressive Act.  We were being controlled and we knew it.  Along came the Rebellion Against the Empire, with the feisty Princess Leia as its nominal head, to show us the way.

Lucas kept his politics secret for a long time.  Finally, he revealed that he wasn’t Luke Skywalker; he was a Progressive Darth Vader (so is his friend, Steven Spielberg), and many Conservative fans of the movie were appalled.  Perhaps Lucas and Spielberg had thought they were portraying themselves as the heroes through their alter egos and our federated, free market capitalist republic as the enemy.  Lucas had to set things straight, alienating many fans, even further.

Remember that Star Wars is a movie.  Cinema veritae.  We were founded as a free republic, with capitalist as its economic base.  Free peoples will eventually rebel against a totalitarian, centralized government.  No one can escape the truth.  Not Luke Skywalker.  Not Darth Vader.  Not George Lucas.  Not Obama.

Whether you’re battling a menacing behemoth of a bureaucratic government (“We must maintain the bureaucracy; otherwise how can the Emperor retain control?”), or in a galaxy far, far away, freedom will prevail.

Happy 35^th Anniversary, Star Wars!  And may the Force be with you – and us.

Speedway Bomber Blog Day

Once upon a time, there was a psychopath named Brett Kimberlin.  His tale is as long as any psychopath’s 20-page rant about the government, aliens, and the truth about 9/11.  This guy really killed people, including a grandmother, and spent only 17 years in prison for his crime.

He seems to have modeled himself after the chief villain, Cyrus the Virus, in the film Con Air.  Kimberlin earned his law degree while still in prison.  Once out, he started a Soros-funded non-profit in 2005 called “Justice Through Music.”   Journalists and attorneys who’ve tried to “out” this criminal have found themselves dragged down through the rabbit-hole of lawsuits, intimidation, false arrests, and defamation of character.

• Drug dealer, alleged child molester, and convicted perjurer, forger and Indiana Speedway Bomber (who is also believed to have played a role in the assassination of a grandmother), Brett Kimberlin spent 17 years in prison before his ultimate re-absorption into American society
• He started a non-profit dubbed “Justice Through Music (JTM)” that has, since at least 2005, been funded by George Soros’ Tides Foundation and Barbara Streisand among other leftists
• Along with his associate, Kimberlin also started an organization called “Velvet Revolution” that supports the Occupy movement
• JTM’s goal is to use music to foster “social justice” and fight Republican “voter fraud” (like the kind George Bush allegedly used to “steal” the Florida election)
• Any blogger — conservative and liberal alike — who has written the truth about Kimberlin has come under vicious attack by either Kimberlin or his minions, suffering death threats (veiled and unveiled), multiple lawsuits, loss of jobs and worse
• He has filed over 100 frivolous lawsuits against anything that isn’t nailed down and somehow is being allowed to continue unchecked
• This story has never been reported on in the mainstream media

Glenn Beck revealed the details on his news website, The Blaze, and his radio show this morning.  He’s asking all bloggers – even we fly-by-night bloggers – to lend our support and solidarity to the bloggers who’ve revealed the truth about this guy.

Being the victim of a Neighbor from Hell, the Tattooed Lady, who resorts to similar, litigious tactics to target even the Health Department for her various infractions, and who engages in smear campaigns around our neighborhood to gain undeserved sympathy, these bloggers have my sympathy and full support.

Engaging in retaliatory tactics never works with such people.  What does work is solidarity and telling the truth about these people until, eventually, no one will stand by them or sympathize with them.  Be brave and patient, Conservative Bloggers.  I would recommend speaking to your insurance agent about getting an umbrella policy on your property insurance that covers ugly neighbors.  Eventually, someone will offer insurance against such predators, to cover us for the costs of defending freedom of speech.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/readymeet-soros-funded-domestic-terrorist-brett-kimberlin-whose-job-is-terrorizing-bloggers-into-silence/

The Facebook Flop

If I’d been an investor looking at the IPO prospectus of Facebook, knowing that General Motors had pulled its advertising, claiming that the advertising didn’t work, I would have been suspicious of both Facebook and General Motors’ claim.

Although on the surface, Facebook seems pretty useless, there’s no denying its popularity.  That General Motors was advertising on Facebook – that GM, was in fact, Facebook’s biggest advertiser – is the real red flag, not whether its advertising was failing.  There, I’d want to hear from other companies.  General Motors itself was a failing company and is now, basically, a government entity.  I’d want to know why Obama – in the guise of General Motors – wants Facebook to fail?

Many Tea Parties and affiliated groups, including AgEnders, share their information over Facebook.  Facebook is the fastest, easiest way to share information the Administration doesn’t want you to know.  Pundits fear the power of Facebook to infringe upon the privacy of individual citizens, but it poses just as much of a danger to a totalitarian government like the Obama Administration.

Obama has to do something about all that information-sharing, and the best way to do so is to scare off other advertisers, using General Motors as the bait.  If such a large company would pull is advertising, it can’t be a good omen for Facebook’s future as an investment.

The Facebook Flop would be considered a “Black Swan Event,” a financial aberration that takes everyone by surprise but in hindsight, can be explained.  The Financial Crisis of 2008 was another.  Why anyone was surprised by that event is the real mystery.  9/11 was a non-financial Black Swan Event, of which we were repeatedly warned through Al-Qaeda’s press releases, but by which we were still horribly shocked (understandably).

The black swan theory is a metaphor that encapsulates the concept that an event is a surprise (to the observer) and has a major impact. After the fact, the event is rationalized by hindsight.

The theory was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a Lebanese-American essayist, to explain:

1. The disproportionate role of high-impact, hard-to-predict, and rare events that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance, and technology.  The non-computability of the probability of the consequential rare events using scientific methods (owing to the very nature of small probabilities)
2. The psychological biases that make people individually and collectively blind to uncertainty and unaware of the massive role of the rare event in historical affairs

According to Wikipedia, unlike the earlier philosophical “black swan problem,” the “black swan theory” refers only to unexpected events of large magnitude and consequence and their dominant role in history. Such events, considered extreme “outliers,” collectively play vastly larger roles than regular occurrences.

The term black swan derives from a Latin expression—its oldest known reference comes from the poet Juevenal’s  characterization of something being “rara avis in terris nigroque simillima cygno.”  In English, “a rare bird in the lands, very much like a black swan.”  When the phrase was coined, the black swan was presumed not to exist. The importance of the simile lies in its analogy to the fragility of any system of thought. A set of conclusions is potentially undone once any of its fundamental postulates is disproved. In this case, the observation of a single black swan would be the undoing of the phrase's underlying logic, as well as any reasoning that followed from that underlying logic.

Juvenal’s phrase was a common expression in 16th century London as a statement of impossibility. The London expression derives from the Old World presumption that all swans must be white because all historical records of swans reported that they had white feathers.  In that context, a black swan was impossible or at least nonexistent. After Dutch explorer Willem de Vlamingh discovered black swans in Western Australia in 1697,  the term metamorphosed to connote that a perceived impossibility might later be disproven.  Taleb notes that in the 19th century John Stuart Mill used the black swan logical fallacy as a new term to identify falsification.

Taleb stated in the New York Times:

“What we call here a Black Swan (and capitalize it) is an event with the following three attributes. First, it is an outlier, (In statistics, an outlier is an observation that is numerically distant from the rest of the data; an outlying observation, or outlier, is one that appears to deviate markedly from other members of the sample in which it occurs) as it lies outside the realm of regular expectations, because nothing in the past can convincingly point to its possibility.

Second, it carries an extreme impact. Third, in spite of its outlier status, human nature makes us concoct explanations for its occurrence after the fact, making it explainable and predictable.

“I stop and summarize the triplet: rarity, extreme impact, and retrospective (though not prospective) predictability. A small number of Black Swans explains almost everything in our world, from the success of ideas and religions, to the dynamics of historical events, to elements of our own personal lives.”

The Facebook Flop is very much an investment outlier.  The news that Facebook leaked information before issuing the IPO is more bad news for the social networking site.  The bad news is for the millions of Internet users who depend upon it to share information.  Obama knows he needs to get rid of this Black Swan before any further information leaks out to the general public about his Socialist agenda.

Facebook is no particular danger to the public, although Obama probably would like people to think so.  It is a tremendous threat to the Socialists and it’s expendable.  Obama is about to “Unlike” or defriend the United States of America

Birther Pangs

According to The Ticket, a website on Yahoo! News, Hawaii has yielded to a request by the Secretary of State of Arizona, Ken Bennett, to provide legal proof of Obama’s U.S. citizenship. 

The two states have tussled for nearly three months over Obama’s birth records.

Earlier in the Spring, Obama’s attorneys testified that the birth records they’d provided to New Jersey were falsified.  The news never really made it past the Garden State’s borders, along with a lot of other news that never gets reported.

Hawaii stated late Tuesday it has provided verification of the president's birth to Arizona's secretary of state, who claimed he needed proof of Obama's citizenship before he could place his name on the state's November ballot.

Joshua Wisch, special assistant to Hawaii Attorney General David Louie told the Associated Press Tuesday it has provided verification of the president’s birth to Arizona’s secretary of state, who claimed he needed proof of Obama's citizenship before he could place his name on the state's November ballot, and that the matter is now resolved.

“Hawaii didn't give in to the request quickly or easily,” says The Ticket, “pressing Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett for proof that the records were needed as part of normal business.  Wisch said Hawaii got the necessary proof, so it sent Bennett's office the verification.  In a radio interview last week, Bennett insisted he is ‘not a birther. I believe the president was born in Hawaii — or at least I hope he was.’”

“But, he said, ‘my responsibility as secretary of state is to make sure the ballots in Arizona are correct and that those people whose names are on the ballot have met the qualifications for the office they are seeking.’”

This proof won’t satisfy hard-core birthers, of course.  They still have issues with Obama’s parentage (one parent was not a U.S. citizen), his residency in Indonesia, and whether his U.S. citizenship was renounced while living there or whether he held dual citizenship.

Recently, Obama’s publicist published a dust-cover biography from the 1990s, which stated that Obama is Kenyan.  Initially, it was the Clintons who began the rumors that Obama was not a citizen.  Many of his rivals would like vengeance for his smear campaigns on them and find some dirt on him.

Trust no one in this matter.  Red herrings abound, and it’s more credible that he was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961, than anywhere else in the world.  Obama is a double-dealer.  Having been born on that date, in that place, makes him just as suspect, in fact, more so, to a smaller group of influential people than being born in Kenya does to The Birthers.

Trust yours truly on this one; being born in Hawaii on Aug. 4, 1961 is just about the worst time for the birth of a President of the United States than anyplace or any other time in the whole world.  It’s not so good for America, either.  Benedict Arnold had a better birthdate than this guy.  Chances are, he knows it, and has sent us all on a wild goose chase to keep us guessing until it’s too late to do anything about it.

When the time comes, we who know will be able to take grim dissatisfaction in the knowledge that there was something worse than having a Kenyan-born president of the United States.

 

Taking Totalitarian Teachers to Task

A North Carolina high school teacher gave an interesting lesson in bullying when a student dared to question her one-sided attack on presidential candidate Mitt Romney.  The student asked whether Obama hadn’t admitted to bullying a girl in school.

The teacher chided the student for “disrespecting” the President of the United States.  The student retorted that if she was going to “trash” one candidate, then she had to trash all of them.

“You won’t disrespect the President of the U.S.,” the teacher shrieked.

“I’ll say what I want.  It was a question.  Obama, he’s not a god.  All I asked was didn’t Obama bully a girl in high school.”

“As a teacher I’m not supposed to allow you to disrespect the President of the U.S.”  She then tells him that people can go to jail for disrespecting the President.  He reminds her that people who threaten his life are sent to jail.

“All I did was ask a question.”

According to The Blaze, “the teacher will not be facing any disciplinary action.  A local newspaper is reporting that she has been suspended with pay.  The school released the following statement:

 “’The Rowan-Salisbury School System expects all students and employees to be respectful in the school environment and for all teachers to maintain their professionalism in the classroom. This incident should serve as an education for all teachers to stop and reflect on their interaction with students. Due to personnel and student confidentiality, we cannot discuss the matter publicly.’”

The teacher went on to declare that Romney and Obama were not equals, as the student asserted, “as men.” 

“Not in politics,” she said.

By the end of the session, the teacher was at the student’s desk.  She manipulated him into a conversation where he wound up bashing former Pres. G.W. Bush, for which he was really not remonstrated at all.  He isn’t president anymore, after all.  The student learned his lesson:  tow the party line, or else.

A classroom is not a democracy.  Democracy in this classroom was neither practiced nor taught.  Freedom of speech, in general, is limited and not encouraged.  The teacher took full advantage of her power over her students and abused that power beyond its limits, as many teachers before her have done.  This is why Socialism lends itself so well to the classroom environment.  Where else can the domination of Communism be bored into young minds so efficiently and effectively, where the teacher has the power of discipline and the grade over the student?

The discipline of the classroom ought to have been relaxed during the “social studies” period when young students can exercise their freedom of speech.  Instead, it was stifled by hysterical yelling, manipulation, and intimidation.

As for a President being above his peers, when it comes to the next election, he is reduced to his original state; he is only a candidate.  Mitt Romney is running against an incumbent president who has the advantage of being in office for four years, but that’s all.

As for comparing the two instances of bullying, isn’t it interesting that Obama brought up an example of bullying in his own biography just before the news about Mitt Romney’s incident made the headlines?

Obama, of course, was sincerely sorry for pushing the girl down in the schoolyard, after being teased by classmates for having a “girlfriend.”  Whereas, Mitt Romney admits he was such a prankster that he hadn’t even filed the hair-cutting prank in his memory banks.  The other boy’s family says their son was not gay and had never even mentioned the instance, much less felt humiliated by it.

Still, Obama was just a little boy; Romney was a teenager.  However, let’s examine the situations a little closer:  Obama was playing happily with the little girl until he was teased, then pushed her down in an act of cowardice to appease the crowd.   The high school boy with the long hair knew he was defying the customs of the times by wearing his hair long.  He was ahead of time by about three years.  In 1965, though, long hair was still frowned upon, and this kid knew it.

Romney, having leadership genes, would not allow the defiance to pass.  He is reported to have said, “That’s just not right; we have to do something about that” and off he and his pals went, scissors in hand, to do something about that long hair.  The kid was apparently held down, but not injured, and as soon as the offending locks were lopped off, the incident was over.  Evidently, only the hair, and nothing else about this boy, caught Romney’s attention.  The long hair was enough.

To boys of 1965, long hair was not just a sign of effeminacy, but of cowardice as well, an unwillingness to fight.  Long hair, in battle, is a decided detriment which an opponent can grab hold of and use to his advantage.  Obama has now grabbed hold of the boy’s long, bleached hair to use in battle against Romney, while he stands in the glow of full abashment for his “crime” against the little girl in the schoolyard.

Romney still holds a figurative pair of scissors with which he can cut the excessive waste in our government.  That will be a definite advantage in the upcoming battle.  If more students like the one in the North Carolina high school will stand up for the truth, America stands a chance of surviving another four years as a free country.

That will mean battling more empowered, totalitarian teachers.  This student gets an A plus for his Americanism.

Welcome to America, Mr. Chen

On Saturday evening, Newark-Liberty International Airport received a most distinguished, and unusual, arrival:  Chen Guangcheng, the blind Chinese lawyer and dissident whom the Chinese held under house arrest for seven years.

Back in April, Mr. Chen made a dramatic escape from his home in Shandong Province, managing to get to the American embassy, only to be turned away by Hillary Rodham Clinton’s State Department.  He had been “granted” his “freedom” but was wary of accepting such a gift in a country where the word has no meaning.  At least, that’s the way the Media portrays the incident. If one recalls correctly, he was turned away and had to go into hiding again.  The captors who failed to prevent his escape were executed.

According to the Associated Press, using Hillary’s full prenomens – Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, if you please – who just happened to be in Beijing, “struck a deal that let Chen walk free, only to see him have second thoughts.”  What sort of deal SSHRC “struck” has not been made clear.

Part of the deal sent him to the U.S. to study law, “a goal of his,” at New York University.  Ironically, the Nephew’s girlfriend, with the very Conservative American Nephew in tow, is at this moment in Shanghai.  When he arrived, Chen thanked the U.S. and Chinese governments, as well as the embassies of Switzerland, Canada, and France for his temporary freedom.  The Associated Press line reads exactly as thus:  “Chen, 40, urged the crowd to fight for injustice, and thanked the U.S. and Chinese governments, and also the embassies of Switzerland, Canada, and France.”

You read those the second from the last line correctly; that was the error (if, in fact, it was an error) of the Associated Press, not this blog.  The newspaper article’s word is “injustice.”  The Progressive Media has so abused and confused the words “justice” and “injustice” that they know longer know the difference.

The AP said State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland “praised the quiet negotiations that freed him.”

“’We also express our appreciation for the manner in which we were able to resolve this matter and to support Mr. Chen’s desire to study in the U.S. and pursue his goals.’”

The Chinese government news agency, Xinhua, stated that Chen “has applied for study in the United States via normal channels in line with the law.”

Imagine how this will play out in the newspapers later in the summer or early fall when most pundits expect that Hillary Rodham Clinton will replace Joe Biden has Obama’s running mate.  “HRC rescues Chinese dissident from house arrest in China.”

Chen never wanted to leave China; it’s his home.  No home is a home, however, where you live under a roof of fear (Ask any spouse who’s ever had to endure abuse).  To live in fear in your own country is a hardship, one so difficult that freedom-lovers have braved every hardship to arrive on America’s shores.  Chen, however, will not be able to stay here indefinitely, nor would he want to.  He will certainly be sent back as soon as he’s finished his studies.  Sooner, if Obama is re-elected.

Chen and his family are staying with Chen’s personal friend, law professor Jerome Cohen, at New York University, where Chen is expected to study law.  Before Chen left China, he asked his activist supporters to understand his desire to leave front lines of the civil rights struggle in China.  “I am requesting a leave of absence and I hope that they will understand.”

They understand – all too well.