The Ghost Town of Kerr City: a metaphor for planet Earth

I have always had a fascination with civilizations that have eroded away into nothing. When I was a kid, I explored old grave yards, and dilapidated homes that were abandoned. I particularly enjoy exploring old cars that are rusting away in the middle of a field far away from civilization. The questions, where did it come from, and where did the people go always must be asked. I have also found entire cities like Chichen Itza in the Yucatan Peninsula and Cahokia outside of St. Louis particularly fascinating. With Chichen Itza we know it fell from power around 1000 AD about 412 years before the Spanish ever showed up. But Cahokia is a complete mystery. That entire city of over 20,000 people just vanished around 1200 AD for no apparent reason.

Society does not continue on forever, as much as people wish to believe. America is just a society like any other. Like any culture, the roots of the society are in their foundation. In America, the first 100 years set the course we all see today, and were built off the foundation documents of the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution. The second half, the last 100 years or so has other ideas that have entered into the American experiment, ideas imported from Europe and the east. Those ideas will change the longevity of our culture for good or bad. To be able to tell which one is to be able to study history and see how factors add up to push a society one direction or the other.

That’s why my family and I were scouring the backwoods of Florida through lush vegetation and natural springs searching for a ghost town that was only 90 years removed. We had taken a similar journey before where we were studying the lost town of Moonville, Ohio, which is now haunted.

Moonville was a mining town that rose and fell around coal mining and was formed in 1856 but by 1947 the last family had left Moonvile and to this day, all the buildings are gone, and foundations are very difficult to see. This is a fairly new town that had risen and fell within a few generations, so those types of places are fascinating and a lot can be learned from them.

When I learned that the ghost town of Kerr City, a town that had started in 1884 on 205 acres and consisted of 26 city blocks was still somewhat intact on the north shore of Lake Kerr, we had to go check it out. But it wouldn’t be easy; most of the town had abandoned their homes by 1941 when the post office finally pulled out after the winter freezes of 1894 and 1895 destroyed the citrus crop that had been a bulk of the town’s economy. The town had died because the economy of it had never recovered.

When my wife and I travel to Cancun to visit Mayan ruins the Mexican people supporting the town know that they have nothing to offer but tourism. They aren’t making anything substantial; they have no feasible export, so they rely almost exclusively on tourism, and are very kind to their guests, because people to Cancun are like the citrus trees to Kerr City. The Mexican people know that if the United States tourism dollars dry up, so will their economies. So they treat people well and offer them services they may not find in their home country. Most of those services revolve around decreased social regulation, which is why Cancun is a popular spring break destination.

My wife and I also travel to Cape Canaveral often, and it is easy to see that a majority of the economy of Cape Canaveral and Cocoa Beach are built around the Space Industry of the Kennedy Space Center, which is only a few decades old, 1958 to be exact. NASA is one of the only government programs that work. The amount of money that NASA creates in American wealth cannot be minimized. With an annual budget of $19 billion dollars it produces hundreds of billions of wealth in return. But politics doesn’t think in those terms. It is easier to pander to the poor, to the lazy, to the distraught because those voters are looking for someone to rescue them.

Instead of continuing to develop the Ares 1 and Orion rockets, the Obama administration wants to invest $6 billion over five years in a commercial space taxi to carry astronauts into low Earth orbit. The budget would also funnel billions of dollars into developing new space technologies, such as the ability to refuel spacecraft in orbit. What isn’t in the budget is a specific target for exploration. All that sounds fine from a distance, but when the Shuttle Program ends in July, the Space Center will lose 7000 jobs, which in the term of government money, the budget cuts proposed by the president are ridiculously short-sighted. More money is wasted each year in just Medicare according to Attorney General Eric Holder, “Although today marks a critical step forward in combating and deterring illegal activity, our work is far from over,” Holder said. Fraud has accounted for as much as an estimated $60 billion a year in the Medicare program. Wow, think what NASA could do with $60 billion dollars if somehow Medicare fraud could be controlled. Obama is reducing NASA to a support role where other nations build the actual space craft and the United States will ferry staff to them and refuel the craft. How exciting!

The Federal government spent a small fortune on the General Motors bailout, yet there is little desire to even maintain the budget of NASA. Why? Well, I believe that under the current form of government there is a desire to dismantle NASA so other countries can have the job of developing technology, just as those same types wish for America to not drill for oil, yet allow Brazil to perform the task. Those government types do not believe in the sovereignty of America, they are globalists, and elitists. I believe that these globalists don’t like the idea of setting up colonies on the moon because their focus is in on the political agenda of worldwide unification and planetary colonization does not exist in the progressive platform, so they are not certain how to deal with it, so they cancelled the plans.

As my family and I walked around the ghost town of Kerr City, once we found it by using latitude and longitude coordinates on our GPS unit, it was easy to see even among the ruins, that the city was overly reliant on its citrus groves. There were without a doubt people in the town back then that declared that Kerr City needs to develop other types of economic activity. But as is the tendency among human beings, the majority of the societies are followers, and if the leaders say to grow citrus, then citrus is what the town will grow. Just like today in the United States if progressives say global unification is important, and preserving the Earth are paramount concerns, then the followers in society will tend to accept such ideas without question. However, such people, like the farmers of Kerr City, believed that if they did everything right, planted their groves, or take care of the planet, that life will always be as it is in their short lifespan. But as seen in the video below, Earth is and will always be in a state of fluctuation.

This will of course continue until Earth as a planet comes to an end, which it will.

That’s not to say that human beings should purposely trash the planet. But, the context of survival must be understood. Earth is not a stable, eternal environment. If mankind wishes to continue as a species, it must continue to push the frontiers of space. It is that space technologies developed in those pursuits that will help our society become a master of our own fate.

The good people of Kerr City did not do that. They were happy to live off their citrus crop until a few hard winters wiped them out making all the hard work they spent building homes, buying cars and keeping them running, and generally doing the business of running a small town useless, because without an economy, there is nothing for anybody to do. And without their citrus crop, Kerr City was useless.
As sweat ran down my face, and ticks crawled up our legs, I stood on the shore of Lake Kerr and noticed what wasn’t there any longer. Only a few buildings still stand. This ghost town wasn’t like Moonville where that place was certainly haunted. Kerr City was only haunted in its lost potential as a town. The remaining buildings had been kept up by a person who had bought the property and rented out the homes to lake visitors. The dirt road leading to the site was prohibitive and far from inviting. But the owner’s endeavors had at least kept a shadow of the town alive, even if that shadow was fading as the encroaching forests were taking the town back, soon to erase it from memory all together.

I couldn’t shake the thought that Kerr City could easily become planet earth if we continue to listen to all the hippies, college professors, and politicians that simply can’t understand why space is important to the human race. These same fools will complain about coal production being devastating to the earth while pushing for electric cars to replace the combustion engine, forgetting that the energy for the electric car came from a coal-burning power plant. It is pathetic that America has not returned to the moon to mine it, to set up economic opportunities, to push transportation technology even further along. It is sad that those who are progressive leaning citizens look to high-speed rail which is the old technology of Europe instead of the efforts being created from those innovators of NASA. Those short-sighted visionaries who look at a village in Africa and wish it to be equal to the United States are the same types that only planted citrus trees in Kerr City, which led to the town’s eventual demise.

While the do-gooder environmentalists save the planet from the combustion engine, from oil technology, and from the human race, idiots who follow the misguided at Moveon.org and other George Soros funded organizations pushing for green technology, are planting the seeds to mankind’s end. Because green house gasses, and mass extinctions have no bearing when the earth is pummeled into a 100,000 year-long ice age after the next meteor impact blocks out the sun from the equator for centuries which freezes over the ice caps. Or the next ice age occurs and kills off most of the earth’s population. Or the sun burns out and becomes a red giant completely consuming the Earth as it expands outward and destroys at least the first four planets in the solar system.

Progressives, who are supposedly the scholarly among us can’t seem to get their minds around the concept that in 5 billion years the earth will not be here. Instead, they figure that they won’t be here, and prove that they are only concerned with their lives, because progressives in spite of all their concern for the environment and world peace are inherently selfish. Just like the people in Kerr City, who thought that the town would always be there, before an environmental disaster took the town by force leaving the humans to flee for their lives everything they had ever built.

The heart of the town was Beulah Avenue. Now, Beulah is a dirt street with four houses left on it with a Texaco gas station. I couldn’t help but look at our Town and Country mini-van parked next to a makeshift sign of Beulah Avenue to think how our vehicle looked like a space ship that had landed in the town to visit from some far away land only to return to that world when we had our fill of inquiries satisfied, which we did when had enough of the ticks and the sweat. And that’s where the whole planet is headed eventually, a future ghost planet leaving behind just small remnants of our existence. Future explorers will wonder why we all confined ourselves to progressive villages and stopped exploring space and using the natural resources available while we let our civilization go extinct out of well-intentioned, but limited understanding.

Nobody ever sees it coming, the extinction of a town, a civilization, or even a planet. The best way to prevent that stagnant extinction is by constantly leaning forward, by taking the reins off human kind and letting the explosion that created America continue as it did for the first 100 years, where no political power stood in the way of fresh ideas and advanced the world culture in ways never before realized on planet earth during this relatively calm stage of life of which all of human existence rose, hopefully not to just fall away into extinction like most of the species have met fate in a similar fashion. And like the winter freeze destroyed the town of Kerr City, politics is destroying the uniqueness of America, and the culture that can actually reach the stars and put fate in human hands instead of a passive submission to mother earth which the hippies of a thousand broken homes look to for psychological reassurance as a solid parent when the reality is far from so. Extinction is the path of the tyrant who is selfish with only their life spans in mind. Extinction is the path of the hippie, the greenie weenie, the hemp smoking loser holding up the peace sign. Extinction is the path of the 22-year-old girl who goes to a night club with a handful f her friends and allows a bar tender to pour “jelly shots” into her belly button to let strangers suck on in a sexual ritual resembling defiance to orthodox. Extinction is for the globalist that suckles to the breast of mother earth for all the same reasons that a youngest child seeks to undermine their older siblings for attention of the mother to fill a psychological void in their minds. Extinction is for those who seek security before adventure, for those who look to protect their pension, their income, before accepting a new adventure which would bring new experiences to their mundane lives of slow decay. Extinction is for the socialist and the elite bosses that dictate to the flock just who, what, and where to think as their promised utopia becomes a prison of constant supervision. The proof of these ideas can be seen in the buildings of Kerr City, once thriving with life, but within just a few years, all hope was extinguished because the town couldn’t see it coming, and when they did, they failed to act accordingly.

I see it coming from my visits to Cape Canaveral as 7000 NASA employees are about to lose their jobs while the Obama administration pours billions and billions of dollars of aid into his union brothers and sisters whom elected him in the position of a “social elite.” Extinction comes when the fools rule because they give away resources to the masses without tangible return on investment. And those fools sabotage a superior competitor such as the United States so that other nations can flourish in the world and will be thankful to those fools later when the world becomes globally united and one step closer to mass extinction because the society looked inward at a time that it should have looked to the stars.

 

Rich Hoffman

http://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Progressive Roots: The liars are calling the truth a lie, which is normal

 

 Progressives don’t know history, nor do they care about it.  All they seem to understand is that their bellies are full by some mysterious event called a job, which they seem not to know anything about how the jobs are created, just that they are there.  Like ants when they realize that a human being has just accidentally crushed a nest they had spent a lot of time building, progressives are seeing their dreams established by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Second Bill of Rights, erode away. Van Jones has been hired by some of those ants to attempt to hold their dream of America together.

These ants are now fluttering about in frantic fury, attempting a new way to present their old message as millions of Americans are beginning to finally reject the infestation that the progressive has created into the fabric of the United States.

Labor unions rooted in socialism and progressives trying to create a European Utopia, as envisioned by Sir Thomas More 1478-1535, have planted so many seeds into the United States quietly, that many people just blindly accepted that all these big government desires were the way it was always supposed to be. More was an English politician, humanist scholar, and writer who refused to comply with the Act of Supremacy, by which English subjects were enjoined to recognize Henry VIII’s authority over the pope, and was imprisoned in the Tower of London and beheaded for treason. His political essay Utopia (1516), speculates about life under an ideal government. More was canonized in 1935. Progressives love Thomas More. Notice that he was canonized during this progressive period where in the United States; Franklin Roosevelt was imposing his own form of Utopia on America through the New Deal. It was in this spirit of More, that progressives sought to rebuild society. 400 years later, the man who had been imprisoned and killed in England was suddenly a hero.

FDR had no right to impose on America his New Deal. Roosevelt endorsed numerous new federal programs and agencies to reduce unemployment and restore prosperity, resulting in increased government involvement in the lives of Americans. The intent was good, and at the time, people wanted the relief. Yet this was a moment that the United States Constitution was trampled with disrespect. It is this America that is being destroyed because it was a false America to begin with, brought to us by a president who was playing with socialism, but calling it, “The New Deal.”

(2) The stock market crash of 1929 marked the beginning of the Great Depression. Unemployment increased and economic security was threatened. Farmers lost their land, workers lost their jobs, and many Americans lost their savings as thousands of banks closed. Campaigning on promises of a new deal for the American people, Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt won the presidential election of 1932.

Upon taking office in 1933, Roosevelt immediately supported a flood of new legislation. Laws established federal inspections and insurance for banks and mandated regulations for the securities market. Several bills provided mortgage relief for farmers and homeowners and offered loan guarantees for home purchasers. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) employed thousands of young men, while the Agricultural Adjustment Act helped raise agricultural prices. Congress established the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to develop the Tennessee River region. The National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) provided for a vastly expanded public works effort and a program to regulate American business.

Hopes for early recovery proved illusory, and a second flood of legislation began in 1935. Sometimes called the Second New Deal, its measures included higher taxes for the rich, strict regulations for private utilities, subsidies for rural electrification, and what amounted to a bill of rights for organized labor. Guided by Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins, the National Labor Relations Act gave workers federal protection in the bargaining process and established fair employment standards. The federal Fair Labor Standards Act mandated maximum hours and minimum wages for many workers. The Social Security Act of 1935 created a retirement fund, unemployment insurance, and welfare grants for local distribution (see Social Security). After 1937 opposition to extending the New Deal mounted, and by 1939 public attention had become focused on foreign policy and national defense.

The New Deal expanded the role of the federal government— particularly in economic regulation, resource development, and income maintenance— and created a number of agencies that remain in existence. Although the New Deal failed to stimulate full economic recovery, it helped the government develop policies to limit the impact of later recessions. Where Roosevelt left off in domestic policy, trampling all over the U.S Constitution, Lyndon Baines Johnson picked up.

Johnson (1908-1973), 36th president of the United States (1963-1969). He became president on November 22, 1963, hours after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Texas. Johnson’s domestic program, which he called the Great Society, was an extension of the New Deal enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1930s and 1940s.

Within three months the new president had the satisfaction of seeing a new civil rights bill pass the House and a new tax cut bill get through the Senate. In February he asked for two further measures: a law to protect consumers from unsafe products and deceptive packaging; and a program known as Medicare, an extensive scheme for hospital and nursing-home care for the elderly through social security (see Medicare and Medicaid). The president’s greatest legislative triumph was the passage in June of a sweeping civil rights bill outlawing racial discrimination in public accommodations and by employers, unions, and voting registrars.

All these presidents were well-intentioned, just like most progressives are. However, there are plenty of thieves willing to take advantage of those political positions for their own quests for power. People like George Soros without question have plans to build their own social utopia, and they will use people like Richard Trumka, and Van Jones to get it. If you ever want to know the truth, always follow the money. Then it will become obvious what the motives are.

And now that those utopian dreams are in jeopardy, there is frantic movement hoping to pull everything back together again. Progressives are attempting to put on a kinder, gentler face now, where in the past they used extortion and protests to impose themselves on presidents like Johnson and Roosevelt. And the Constitution was trampled upon with well-meaning audacity and now those who reside in power fear losing that power to the strength of the Constitution, because that is the current trend.

This leaves progressives with car salesman like Van Jones to put on a good face to the movement and hope that Jones can sell America back onto progressivism by convincing them that lies are the truth and the truth are the lies. “We aren’t broke,” Jones says. “Just take money from the rich, and everything will be fine.” Such irresponsibility is the last resort of the insect that has spent its whole life building a nest for the security of society with the secret desire to being the king. Such is the desire of all propionates of any utopian culture, which brings to my mind the words of William Goldring.

“Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state. If they are to be treated as anything but trivial exercises of the imagination. I suggest there is a simple test we can apply. . . . We must forget the whole paraphernalia of social description, demonstration, expostulation, approbation, condemnation. We have to say to ourselves, “How would I myself live in this proposed society? How long would it be before I went stark staring mad?”

William Golding (1911–93), British author. “Utopias And Antiutopias,” address, 13 Feb. 1977, to Les Anglicistes, Lille, France (repr. in A Moving Target, 1982).

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Yes, Van Jones, yes, Richard Trumka, we need to take a wrecking ball to the world you are defending, because it is not American by the definition of America. Progressive views do not belong in the America I want to live in. The America you built belongs in the Soviet Union and Europe at large. The promises and rights progressives like Jones and Trumka talk about are simply the Ten Planks of Communism. Those are not part of America. They are the wonderings of humorists like Thomas More and Karl Marx.

But as the ant house is destroyed, and they all run around in anger, it is important to know that it’s good that they are so upset even if we feel sorry for them. They had no right to set up an ant colony in a capitalist system with the intent to wreck our lives. Their demise is purely their own fault and no amount of kind words and manipulation can cover up what they really stand for, an America that trades freedom for security, and independence for a big brother to hold our hand as we cross the street filled with dangers created by that same big brother in order to make their presence appear useful. It’s coming to an end in a battle that is about to end their experiment of destruction.

Rich Hoffman

http://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com