Month: June 2012

How To Remove a School Levy: Taking tax money back from the schools

The Cincinnati Enquirer recently announced that Lakota Schools had lost nearly half of all their school principals due to the financial struggles of three failed school levies. These Lakota principals have jumped off the ship citing upon their exit that they are uncertain about their financial futures and are either retiring or seeking employment elsewhere. That information is of course contrary to what they say in school levy campaigns, which is that everything they do is for the children. The mass exodus of these administrators to school districts they believe will continue their premium salaries and benefits should be an insult to the surrounding schools, and reveals what the true feelings are from these school employees. Administrators are essentially saying that they would rather leave behind the children who count on them because the district is attempting to solve their financial difficulties in favor of districts that are still throwing money at their public employees like there is no tomorrow.

http://westchesterbuzz.com/2012/06/21/lakota-losing-principals-at-high-rate/

One of the downsides to the Lakota School District deciding not to put a levy on the ballot in 2012 is that I will not get to attempt what the taxpayers in the Westerville School District are doing. For many years, those of us who have fought against tax increases have felt like victims of an organized political plot arranged between local politicians on school boards, and the radical teachers unions who have created for themselves gold plated benefits and wages at the expense of the tax payer. I have often complained that the average wage for the Lakota employee is $63K per year, but in Westerville, in Central Ohio, their average wage is $65K per year and trending towards $80,000 by the 2014/2015 school years. The spending was not stopped at Westerville as it was at Lakota because voters there approved by a narrow margin a 51% to 49% passage of a 6.71 mil tax.

See video of the repeal move against this levy at this link: http://vp.mgnetwork.net/viewer.swf?u=9ad6b34aea08102f8fb5001ec92a4a0d&z=OHV&embed_player=1

Usually, the story ends there, as it did recently in Southern Ohio in districts like Fairfield, Lebanon, and Little Miami who barely passed their tax levies with the help of huge apartment dweller votes, and serious organized labor rhetoric. Many voters once they approve for levy passage and see how the schools spent the money on teacher raises and other employee costs often regret their decision. And that’s what’s happening in Westerville.

With the help of the 1851 Center as their legal representation tax fighters have began to collect signatures to place on the ballot a roll back of that recently approved levy which is a tremendous act. Westerville is doing what all school districts who fight higher taxes are doing, and that is utilize the philosophy of the “best defense is a great offense.” Don’t wait for the radical union elements to push for further tax increases. Go after the tax increases already wrestled and manipulated by the educrats in organized labor, and rob it back to give to the tax payers who had it stolen to begin with. Such a move means that no longer on Election Day can organized labor put levy after levy on a ballot till it passes, then roll their naked bodies in the piles of money once they’ve legally stolen it without recourse. The 1851 Center led by Maurice Thompson has revealed a little known section of Ohio Revised Code that makes what Westerville is doing possible for every school district in Ohio who has suffered a similar fate. Read more about Westerville here:

http://www.ohioconstitution.org/2012/05/07/westerville-taxpayers-move-to-repeal-march-tax-increase/

I had a chance recently to speak with Maurice Thomson for a bit and he let me know that a few Southern Ohio tax fighters had contacted him but did not follow through, and he was still waiting to hear from them. I was surprised because I know the people involved and it seemed like the kind of thing that they would pounce on. Thompson is the Executive Director at the 1851 Center and directed the Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions. Previously Thompson served as an attorney for the Sam Adams Foundation in Chicago and practiced privately in Ohio and Illinois. His legal fees on these education matters are free. He has successfully litigated cases in the Supreme Court of Ohio as well as intermediate courts of appeal and courts of common pleas throughout Ohio on issues such as property rights, regulation taxation, corporate welfare, search and seizures and smoking bans. He’s also the author of Presuming Liberty: Using Ohio’s Constitution to Limit Government, Defending Liberty in Ohio: A Roadmap for Protecting Freedom and Limiting Government with the State Constitution, and he wrote the forward for the current pocket copy of Ohio’s Constitution. You can contact Thompson at the following website:

http://www.ohioconstitution.org/

Maurice Thompson has actually written a citizens guide to reducing school district tax burden that can be found at the 1851 Center site. Basically, what Thompson is advocating is that there is a very little utilized R.C. 5705 and R.C. 5748 that allows tax payers to reduce or eliminate most types of school district property and income taxes enacted through local levy elections. Specifically it is R.C. 5705.261 that permits Ohioans to use local initiatives to win the reduction or repeal of qualifying tax levies. Some of the rules for reduce or repeal of a tax is the voters must have approved the levy. The levy must not expire, and there can only be one attempt every five years. Read it for yourself here:

http://codes.ohio.gov/orc/5705.261

So for those who want to attempt this, be sure to take a page out of the union playbook and collect the ballot signatures during the summer while all the school employees are on their Caribbean cruises and vacationing at Disney World so that they can’t match your signatures with an attempt of their own to reduce their own levies with a ballot attempt of .000001 mil just to keep residents from being able to strike back at them, since another attempt would have to wait 5 years before trying again.

The sum of these matters is this—tax payers do not have to be passive victims always waiting for a school district to attack them with never ending tax increases. There are measures right now in place to strike back at the labor union methods of placing levy after levy, after levy on a ballot until it passes—then attempting to put it on in the summer like they did in Pickerington to stack the votes in favor of the school employees since school was off everyone’s mind. That district finally passed their levy after several attempts. Lawyers at the 1851 Center like Maurice Thompson are licking their chops for an opportunity to help right the wrongs that are going on in Ohio Schools at the expense of children for the gain of extremely self centered public employees who are out-of-touch and just plain greedy. But people have to call them, and let them help. Tax fighters have to be willing to collect signatures, but most of the people I know who fight these things have done all this activity before, so it isn’t difficult. I plan to call Maurice if Lakota ever manages to sneak one by in my district. But for those who have had them sneak by, like Lebanon, like Fairfield, like Forest Hills, like Little Miami, I recommend you call Maurice today and begin the process of removing those levies and showing the school boards that the tax payers of your districts are not going to take it.

We do not have to sit around waiting for school districts to keep pushing and pushing and pushing a tax until they get it passed, forcing taxpayers to just endure the higher tax grudgingly for the next 4 to 5 years until they try to raise taxes again in order to pay for the extraordinary salaries of their public employees. Now taxpayers can strike back, and do so in a huge way. And the way is being paved in Westerville with the help of Maurice Thompson at the 1851 Center. The wave of the future is not in tax increases initiated by bloated school districts but in the removal of them by the citizens who refuse to take the initiatives lying down. Such vigilance is the best way to bring fiscal responsibility to school districts by forcing changes that the schools will not enact upon themselves because of the radicalism of the unions that infect them.

As for Lakota, they will learn that they can succeed quite well without those middle manager principals, and that all along many of those administrators were just useless positions that could easily have been picked up by the assistant principals or a promoted teacher. The urgency at Lakota is only because the residents have taken the effort to manage our costs by saying no to tax increases. But for the other districts around Ohio who have been unfortunate in having taxes raised behind their backs after intense struggles—such as Little Miami who put their levy on the ballot 9 times—there is now a tool that tax payers can use to shut down those levy increases so that there will soon be no place for the bandits to escape to, forcing them as public employees to deal with the facts of reality.

____________________________________________________________

This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon

“Just finished the book and am sweating profusely. Wow, what a ride !!!  Fasten your seat belts for one of the most thrilling rides ever in print.“

Visit the NEW Tail of the Dragon WEBSITE!  CLICK HERE!

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

Glenn Beck Gives Birth to a Nation: “COWARDS” a truly sexual experience

Because I’m in the process of doing the work with my own publisher of putting my second book into book stores and going about the task of obtaining blurbs and reviews prior to the book’s release, I was in Barnes and Noble about the time that Glenn Beck’s new book COWARDS was being stacked on the shelf. I had to take a minute to admire what Glenn Beck has done in America because in spite of what political opponents of Beck think about the popularity of his radio show and his TV work at CNN, Fox News, and now his revolutionary GBTV series, Beck’s real influence is elsewhere. They miss the power of Beck and what he’s been able to accomplish in just one decade of very hard work. Beck will go down in history for what he has done in the book publishing industry. His work as an author is tremendous but his work as a publisher will be imposing. I was impressed to hold his new book in my hand and examine the quality of it, and consider the cost of manufacture, the pricing, the ability to impact so many distribution outlets so quickly, but more than that—to fill the incredible demand for his books that sell in the millions.

I had spent three years preparing my latest book, and this sales phase that I’m in now is very time-consuming, and laborious, so I appreciate what it takes to deliver a book like COWARDS to book stores—how many advance sales must be generated, how much advertising is spent upon the book’s release, and all the people who are involved. Beck these days has many employees to help him get his message out, and much to his credit, he has not become complacent, or egotistical in his ability to deliver his message, but it wasn’t always that way. Beck wrote his first book in 2003, and has consistently produced books every year since. These days he puts out two books a year and now COWARDS follows his very good book Being George Washington. Glenn Beck’s books are wonderfully written and make complicated information accessible to the average person, so they sell like hot cakes.

Beck is close to my age, so I can speak authentically about the conditions that brought about the current revolution that is occurring which I credit primarily on Glenn Beck’s books. When books sell to millions of readers, the author will affect the culture of civilization and no author currently sells as well as Glenn Beck does, which truly must infuriate the political left. For many years the left through their penetration of the publishing industry, domination of television, and the film industry have been able to control the messages and take America in directions the majority didn’t want to go. But because many intelligent people in America liked to read, watch TV, and see movies, they filtered out the socialist propaganda as best they could, but yearned for entertainment that spoke about their concerns. The entertainment industry and other media outlets denied Americans what they hungered for.

I know many, many people my age who have been screaming at the top of their lungs for two decades now for the kind of material Glenn Beck is putting out. Back then there was nobody to listen. Media outlets would ignore press releases. Manuscripts were shoved into closets. Screenplays were rejected because they didn’t match the progressive vision of modern Hollywood, and nobody would book a public speaker with a conservative message. The progressive media outlets educated in the university system shaped by the modern socialists looked down their noses at anyone who spoke about traditional American values.

What Glenn Beck has done is give life to a movement that was long suppressed. The best way I can think to articulate the situation is to compare it to sex. I have often felt that the fight to penetrate that egg of American value of which the progressive institutions protected so furiously was like the egg inside a female body seeking to be penetrated by a sperm and seeded with the second half of what it needed to make a human being. In sex it takes millions of sperm to swarm around the egg and only one typically penetrates so that pregnancy can occur. The rest will fall short even if they reach the outer shell of the egg. For many years this has been the frustration. We would get to the egg, and find it nearly impossible to penetrate.

Progressives just like in sex would seek to use birth control to keep the sperm from ever getting to the egg. Instead the freedom fighters of tradition would find themselves caught in the end of a rubber condom to be thrown away uneventfully, or progressives would seek to keep an egg from even arriving, so that pregnancy could not occur. Glenn Beck from a Tampa radio station was one of the first to fully penetrate the egg in modern American culture. Before him a few got through, but the pregnancy did not take fully. With Beck, the egg became a much more complicated entity, and within a fairly short time, birth has been given to a new day in America. Traditional American values now have a voice and it is learning to talk, walk, and fight.

The growth of this movement is being fed by Glenn Beck’s books, and it’s very hungry. Progressives truly hoped that by denying food it would starve to death. But Beck through a combination of luck, and talent has used his abilities to his maximum range to create a new life for America.

Now that the new birth in America has occurred, those voices who have tried for so long to break through are suddenly finding they can penetrate eggs of their own. I know many freedom fighters now that are writing books, giving speeches around the country, and doing their own version of what Beck achieved. They are not copies of Beck, but simply following like angry warriors through the crack in the wall exposed by Beck’s penetration into the marketplace dominated by progressive politics.

By doing the math, the political left will not survive. That does not mean everyone can go back to sleep. The battles still have to be fought. But the amount of material that is pouring into book stores and media outlets are now beginning to overwhelm the sad little messages of socialism that progressives have been advocating against the conscious will of most Americans. Beck’s books would not sell if Americans rejected their message, and what has happened is like a hungry fetus, Americans were starving for what Beck had to say, and they buy his books by the truckload. No progressive entertainer has been able to achieve the same impact. No college professor, no rock star, no scandalous actress, no left leaning politician, no left leaning radio host, nobody. The reason is the message of the progressive is weak, and Beck’s material contains a truth that most people always suspected, but were denied by the controls within the media culture.

In 2004 when I released my book The Symposium of Justice, I had a God awful time getting it even made, let alone put into a book store. I had to self-publish it because no publisher in their right mind would attempt to place it on a book shelf or put their name behind it. Nobody would publicly say they liked it even though privately they spoke very highly of it. TV would not cover it, radio didn’t know how to discuss it, and industry professionals would proclaim that it was out of step with the “mood of the nation.” What they meant was that is wasn’t progressive enough. So I spent my own money and put it out myself, which was a good decision. It took enormous work to get that far, and because of it, to this very day it’s still available to people who have slowly taken to it—which I knew would be the case.

My new novel Tail of the Dragon was accepted by American Publishing as one of their 80 titles out of several thousand they are producing in 2012. As they sent me the contract, I realized that times had changed in America. Just 6 years prior a publisher wouldn’t even consider such a manuscript as mine that features a rebellious journey against the growing public sector, advocating smaller government–and even had a Spirit of 76 flag painted on top of the protagonist’s car to reflect his patriotic values. The acceptance of Tail of the Dragon by a legitimate publisher comes from a publishing industry that sees how Glenn Beck has changed the business of publishing, and book stores are learning what big business traditional literature is for a public hungry for it.

At a recent meeting I attended I held in my hand the 2009 book by Matt Meyer called Homeland Security and Federalism: Protecting America from Outside the Beltway. I had serious doubts that a very statistical book like that one could have been published much earlier than it was, because Matt is one of those freedom fighters that I share a lot in common. He had been knocking around for a long time trying to get into the egg only to find himself one of the many who were directed away from fertilization due to many opposing forces. Matt is important to me because it was his data at The Buckeye Institute that I used to combat the Lakota School Levy issues over the last couple of years, because Matt made the numbers accessible for others to analyze and act upon. Prior to The Buckeye Institute the information was much more difficult to get. Matt Meyer is part of a new group of freedom fighters that are filling the voids that Beck has not been able to cover–the individual statewide issues throughout the country. But he’s not alone. It is my opinion that because of Glenn Beck fertilizing that egg protected by progressive politics, America has a new defender in the form of a growing movement and it desires to be fed by Glenn Beck books and the fresh work by people like Matt Meyer, and Nick Gillespie of Reason Magazine, and Matt Kibbe of Freedom Works, who now boast over a million members. Before Beck’s astounding success, those voices were stuffed into the end of a condom and suppressed uneventfully, but they did not give up. They kept swimming, and trying to escape, and kept pushing away at the walls of progressive politics, and finally those walls are caving in.

Glenn Beck’s book COWARDS looks like it will have the same type of impact that his book BROKE had, which put on the table the crises of the national deficit well before time has run out. As Europe flounders in emergency status because of their commitments to socialism, America has a chance to turn things around primarily because Glenn Beck put the issue on the table with that wonderful book BROKE. Within a year of that book’s release congress put forward the Ryan Plan to seriously take a stab at solving the American debt crises—which is still a long way from being solved. But Beck’s books have a continuing impact on America and the people of our nation that truly deserves celebration.

Progressives have figured out how to manipulate voting by catering to women bloc groups, Hispanics and other minorities, along with civil rights issues to twist the desires of the average American into electing the kind of politicians they desire. But Americans truly vote when they plop their money down for a new book. And these days, most of the time the books that leave a book store are those written and published by Glenn Beck—and that is a very good thing. Because that is the indication of what the true feelings are in America, and what they still value in spite of 100 years of progressive undermining with prevention of cultural penetration. The penetration happened anyway, and now there’s no stopping it. The progressive way of life will be rejected by the masses of American culture, and our nation will recover much to the disappointment of the utopians who will wonder how their condom broke and they found themselves pregnant with a life they did not intend.

____________________________________________________________

This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon

“Just finished the book and am sweating profusely. Wow, what a ride !!!  Fasten your seat belts for one of the most thrilling rides ever in print.“

Visit the NEW Tail of the Dragon WEBSITE!  CLICK HERE!

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

France Will Fail Economically Within a Year: How to detect a socialist

Over the past weekend France had their elections and it was the Socialist Party behind President Francois Hollande who won the majority in the parliamentary elections. The first statements made from Hollande’s Socialist Party upon the news was that they plan immediately to raise taxes on big banks and oil companies, levy a 75-percent tax on incomes higher than $1 million Euro’s and hire 60,000 more teachers. Sound familiar?

Here in The United States, it is not a coincidence that Democrats specifically support almost identical measures. That is because raising taxes on the rich, and expanding the public sector with mindless contributions to the field of education are policies of socialists, so even though union leaders and politicians who call themselves progressives and Democrats laugh at the notion that they are socialists—their behavior identifies them as one. Their denial of their commitment to socialism is a conscious one. For many years they have attempted to sell communism to the American people by changing its name.

A similar comparison would be to declare that they are not football players because they actually play baseball. The commitment to a particular sport is the difference in the title. To those individual players the difference between the two is worlds apart. But to the spectators who attend football and baseball games we might consider all the players of both games under the designation of “athletes.”

In politics if a government believes that the playing field must be leveled so the creators serve the workers, we would call them socialists. Within socialist circles there are of course variations that have specific roles for specific games within politics, such as Democrats, progressives, Marxists, communists and so on. It is easy to become confused when left leaning politicians and political philosophers show different variations and differ from one another on the political left. Bertrand Russell for instance believed that all human beings should work a four-hour day and that managers of industry should not make more money than the workers who do the labor. He actually disagreed with Karl Marx on many points, almost as many points as he disagreed with capitalism. William Du Bois, the famous advocate of the civil rights movement was in many ways a rational pragmatist that I personally agree with on many issues, but then he would stick his foot in his mouth with tremendous praise for Soviet dictator Josef Stalin upon the death of that mass murderer. Noam Chomsky at times as a modern philosopher for the left advocates openly for complete anarchy and is the voice behind the current Occupy Movement. His comments easily betray the desires of presidents like Francois Hollande or Obama. Obama without question is a socialist. He may very well be a hard-core Marxist. He may be as extreme as an open communist. That is to say that if he were playing sports, he’d be a baseball player, a basketball player, and a football player. He’d be a jock in sports, an athlete of the highest order. In politics Obama plays all the sports, bits of Marxism, bits of socialism, bits of communism, all the while calling himself a Progressive Democrat.

What socialists always error in is their blanket assumption that a name plate position will execute the results of their desires. For instance, as in France, they intend to create 60,000 teachers. It is the belief of socialists that school teachers are important in expanding the desires of their philosophers such as Bertrand Russell who was born in Wales and taught at Cambridge University and influenced many of the current minds occupying the French Parliament as socialists. Russell was the big advocate that working less contributed to more human happiness, and used the Great Depression as a platform to attack capitalism and advance his cause. He had great influence on most of Europe at the time which migrated across the Atlantic to FDR’s ears. It is largely Russell’s ideas that shaped the modern European concept of such early retirement, which are bankrupting Greece, Italy and Spain with France soon to follow. Germany just rose their retirement age to 67 and they are currently the most stable of the countries in the European Union because of decisions like that. Yet all of Europe currently are looking at Germany to bail them out of their financial woes because somebody has to pay for all those benefits due to non productive citizens who are living till age 70 and 80 yet retiring at age 55 and 62. The math just doesn’t work out and rather than admit that their social engineering gods were wrong from the halls of the great Cambridge University, they would rather steal the money from their neighbors to balance their budget resulting from their failed philosophies.

In The United States Obama’s commitment to socialism has pushed the national debt to nearly $16 trillion dollars before the conclusion of his first term. He has blamed everyone but himself of course, because he is fundamentally flawed in his thinking. His Marxist teachers at the University of Chicago and at Harvard lied to him, and he can’t come to grips with it. Obama coming from a broken home looked to education as a stabilizing force in his wrecked life, and the tragedy for a person like him is the same as finding out that a dad is not superman, or a mom an angel. For too many evenings Barack Obama smoked dope with his Marxist college students and professors discussing the merit of philosophers like Marx, Russell, Du Bois, and Chomsky.

But the theories have fallen apart under practice, and a lack of emphasis on quality has destroyed even the basic premise of socialism. We have learned here in America that hiring 60,000 more teachers or spending $200 million more on education will not improve the intelligence of our youth. Because quality is not the emphasis, most of the teachers will be proven to be complete failures who shouldn’t teach a turtle to walk let alone help shape the fragile mind of a child. Yet politicians like Obama will say that his plan for saving the American economy is to “create” more government jobs and that will somehow fix everything.

Socialists forget that somebody has to create the things that they give away to the lazy, the stupid, and the diabolically lackluster. If all the money the rich make is stolen from them and given to a bunch of lazy loafers, then what incentive is there for a job creator to take a chance at creating something if they cannot reap the benefit of their labor? Socialist because of writers like Russell believe that the rich land owners and managers of enterprise are exploiting the workers unjustly by living lavish lifestyles off the backs of the oppressed while they live sumptuous lifestyles with beautiful women, fur coats and exotic cars. But the truth is, the rich person created something which gave a job to those who lacked that ability, and they deserve the benefits of ownership.

Socialists miss the entire concept of ownership, and without that ownership their utopian society fails 100% of the time. France will bankrupt themselves within the year and it won’t take long for them to be worse off than Greece, because the government philosophy they are functioning under is a failure. It’s a flash in the pan that was over before it ever got started. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that people will have a tendency to irresponsibly vote themselves gifts, and that is what happened in France. The French people want their guaranteed vacations, their early retirements at 62 years old, and their medical coverage. But they don’t care where the money comes from. They are counting on bailouts from Germany or even The United States if their country can’t balance their budget because now that all of Europe is in a union together nobody is incentivized to lead themselves. This is why socialism fails. Without personal incentive, countries, governments, and people will fail without exception, because their lives are built on the premise of looting from others who do the work, so that they can loaf in the comfort of collectivism.

A socialist can always been identified by their blind commitment to education, and a belief in shared sacrifice. Their mentality is a disease upon the face of the planet and there is no question that there are some in a neighborhood near you. Because socialism is the political philosophy of the weak, and timid pacifist, and those are not the type who create jobs—so their commitment to socialism costs them nothing. All they have to do is sit back, vote in favor of socialism and miraculously food falls into their mouths without their effort to obtain it. This is why any society that commits to such a preposterous concept will eliminate themselves from the economical game of life.

____________________________________________________________

This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon

“Just finished the book and am sweating profusely. Wow, what a ride !!!  Fasten your seat belts for one of the most thrilling rides ever in print.“

Visit the NEW Tail of the Dragon WEBSITE!  CLICK HERE!

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

Holder Found in Contempt of Congress: Now it’s in John Boehner’s court

Eric Holder has been found in contempt of Congress for refusing to turn over the documents Darrell Issa demanded.  Holder attempted to do the same type of evasion that we saw from Bill Clinton in relation to Kenneth Starr, and Richard Nixon over Watergate by turning in only 5% of the documents listed in the subpoena.  Then before the vote over contempt Holder asked Obama to grant executive privilege so the documents could stay in their possession. 

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/house-oversight-committee-votes-to-hold-eric-holder-in-contempt-in-fast-and-furious-investigation/

This is an epic coverup that is very consistent with the Chicago mob style administration that Obama has brought to America in his four years of rule.   These are guilty, bad people and they deserve to feel the complete weight of the law.  If they do not, then the law means nothing.   Now this issue is in the hands of my congressman, John Boehner.  In January I asked Mr. Boehner to proceed with the impeachment of President Obama for unrelated issues, CLICK HERE FOR A REVIEW.  Now, it is time to deal with these criminals, so I hope that my congressman Speaker Boehner will forget about the smear tactics that those who are guilty in this Fast and Furious case will be brought to justice and the long view of history will be kept in perspective.  It’s time to do what should have been done many times in the past, and raise the bar of expectation that will once again bring some measure of respect for our government offices, and take the reigns of power from  those activists who currently attempt to shape the law to their leisure. 

And to call Obama and  his employees criminals is not right-winged rhetoric designed to win an election.  It’s simply speaking the truth. 

____________________________________________________________

This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon

“Just finished the book and am sweating profusely. Wow, what a ride !!!  Fasten your seat belts for one of the most thrilling rides ever in print.“

Visit the NEW Tail of the Dragon WEBSITE!  CLICK HERE!

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

The Art of Water: Giving mother nature the middle finger

One of the great things about summer are the kind of days I just recently had where I spent the entire day swimming in my back yard as storms rolled through sporadically. The diversity of a hot steamy day from the vantage point of a Jacuzzi watching the clouds roll in swiftly overhead then experiencing the sudden 20 degree drops in temperature as the rain comes through blotting out the sunlight and within moments all signs of a blue sky are gone is invigorating.

During these some of these sudden downpours while the lighting streaked across the sky I would step out of my hot tub and jump into the cold water of my pool. The hot tub is approximately 102 degrees so sweat was pouring off my face. The rain was cold but not nearly as frigid as the 72 degree water. Jumping suddenly into such wild temperature fluctuations from the hot tub to the cold pool water are how I have spent many of my summers for over a decade. When I have those rare days where not much is expected out of my time, that’s how I enjoy spending it.

This year I had to do major structural work on my pool so after two months of rather extensive work, I finally have it back up and running just two weeks after the normal Memorial Day weekend openings. There were times during this major overhaul that I wondered if it would ever function again.

My wife has planted some rather extensive vegetation around our pool, so when swimming in the heat of the summer it reminds me of a bizarre tropical rain forest, especially when the rain comes down hard. Anytime in the summer when big storms come through I make a point to go swimming. There is something primal and necessary in the task that I find endlessly refreshing. With my body temperature over 100 degrees from the hot tub and only cooling off a little in the pouring rain, the sudden cold water of the pool has a tendency to quickly contract the surface of the skin in response.

But on this particular day in this particular storm there was added meaning. The pool water since I had to do such a major overhaul was all new. Not a single human being had been in the water before my leap into it during the ravishing storm. And not an ounce of chemical had been added yet. The water was pure, straight from the facet that was nearly as pure as the water falling out of the sky during. Water like that has a particular texture as you push your hands through it and when you dive underneath it is crystal clear. It’s fascinating to be under the water and feel the rumble of thunder outside and see the rain pelting the surface of the pool from under the water, then to resurface and see that the stormy winds are knocking around all the trees and kicking up the vegetation.

After my body cooled down to well below its normal body temperature I then went back to the hot tub and sat in it for another hour. In my duration there another storm came and went then I returned back to the pool for another 30 minutes of swimming. My wife kept a clear glass of water filled on the side of the pool for me to drink. Each time I passed by it I noticed how clear the liquid was and the ice cubes inside had a particular luster exhibiting luxury in a perverse way.

The trees around the pool looked majestic from inside the water. They loom up and over the pool just as my wife designed them to, giving the feeling of an eddy along a tributary of the Amazon, only without the dirty water or the piranhas. There just aren’t many places in the world where these things go together and are only the result of manmade creations. Watering holes like my pool do not exist in nature. The fact that you can walk in it without getting your feet dirty in the mud of a pond or river makes the experience truly soothing. The filtration system keeps the water crystal clear and scoops up the leaves from all the trees around the pool before they have a chance to sink to the bottom. That’s when it occurred to me that it is the filtration system that makes the unique experience of my pool so unique.

I’ve been on rafting trips and spelunking voyages where you crawl through the mud and water on your belly for yards as you freeze from being deep inside a cave and it’s very uncomfortable. Trees often grow along the sides of rivers, but in nature I never enjoy them quite the same as in my pool. You can never totally relax in the wild. It seems like you’re either always sweaty and dirty and the water of a river has all the garbage from everything that’s upstream. But after a hard day of hiking, it always feels nice to fill up your hat and pour it over your head to cool off.

My family and I have been a lot of places, and seen a lot of things, some of them quite startling. So I know the difference, and there is a time and place for adventure. I often ride my motorcycle in the hardest of winters, even when there is snow on the ground. And I’ve done and seen about everything there is to do outside in just about every condition it could be presented in. But there is nothing like a clean pool that has only had your body in it that is cleaned by a filter that you maintain that is in your back yard.

It’s a similar sensation as to why hot dogs on a back yard grill taste so good even though they are the same hot dogs that you can buy anywhere. It’s because the hot dog on the grill is the product of your private property. Your grill, your hot dogs, your back yard, cooked by your spouse—the operative word is in “Your.” There is a lot to be said about ownership, and those who do not have ownership are missing out on one of life’s great treasures. This is why when someone invites you over to grill out, they are so thrilled, but the food to the visitor just tastes normal. They are feeling the result of their property, while to the visitor; it’s just another hot dog.

My wife and I enjoy the Kings Island water park, but it’s never as fun as the pool in our own back yard. I always come away from the water park feeling dirty, and looking for a way to take a shower. I can enjoy the experience, but it’s never as refreshing. Even though the water in my pool has been swirling around the planet since the beginning of time, it has been in oceans, lakes, rivers and been drank by all types of animals even dinosaurs at some point in time. But the water that falls from the sky in the violent summer storms is as clean as it gets on earth, and I love to see it fall from the sky and bounce off my chest and run into my pool which is controlled and cleaned by me.

Most people would complain that the trees around my pool put too many leaves back into the water, but I don’t mind. It’s worth the extra cleaning to have the sharp contrasts, to have the diversified foliage mixed with the clean water, just as I enjoy the contrast of the hot Jacuzzi water with the cold pool water. The extremes are healthy and actually refreshing so long as they occur within the context of ownership.

As I swam in the storm and enjoyed the water most of the day, I thought of all the people in my life who told me that I should not swim when there is lightning flashing across the sky because it’s dangerous. I pity such people because they cling so resolutely to living when their form of living is just a fraction of life’s potential. If I could, I’d teach everyone in America to enjoy such afternoons of swimming in the summer storms, but that would require a majority of Americans to drop communism as an option, to drop the community pool with the dirty sidewalks and urine in the water, and give up apartment living. They’d have to buy their own homes and do what it takes to purchase property and maintain it. Then they could enjoy the food from their very own grill while they soak in their very own hot tub, and swim in their very own pool, because that is the way life is supposed to be in America. And it can be that way for everyone. All that’s required is context, and ownership, and the treasures of a person’s own back yard can eclipse years of adventures all over the planet which are always secondary in their fulfillment. I have done it all and seen it all, and there simply isn’t anything better than that moment when I get to jump in my clean pool after soaking in the hot tub for over an hour while heavy rain pours from the sky. It is an experience that the whole world should be able to realize at least for a portion of their lives, because within those simple actions are the highest aims in human existence—ownership and command over one’s destiny even as we mock the danger of Mother Nature by swimming in a pool of water while the jealous bitch hurls lighting down upon us. That’s when I love to swim on my back and give the good old middle finger to the angry clouds as they pass over head urging me to run for safety. No—it’s my pool and my time, and I will do with it what I please, in spite of what Mother Nature decides to do in protest.

____________________________________________________________

This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon

“Just finished the book and am sweating profusely. Wow, what a ride !!!  Fasten your seat belts for one of the most thrilling rides ever in print.“

Visit the NEW Tail of the Dragon WEBSITE!  CLICK HERE!

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

The Tea Party and Me: Politicians only have themselves to blame–“No They Can’t”

Just a bit of a disclaimer—I hope it wasn’t thought that because the Lakota Levy attempt of 2012 has been called off, and it would seem that the school district is going to take measures to solve some of their financial problems, that I was just going to go away. Maybe the belief was that I would just go swimming, or do cartwheels in my back yard, because that is not my plan. There have long been issues regarding local politics that I simply couldn’t get to because the Lakota information consumed so much of my time. Well, not anymore.

I have seen the spike in hits here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom no doubt from many of my political enemies around town who thought I might take a break as they looked at my latest article about the West Chester trustees. I thought I’d take the time to address them before their imaginations get away from them. When it comes to my involvement with the Tea Parties around town it is true that I do support them. But when it comes to the politics of the Tea Parties, we have many differences, so my relationship is not one where I take marching orders from any group of Tea Partiers. If my articles seem to be motivated by Tea Party ideology it is where I am on common ground with them that those articles reflect. Much of the Tea Party movement is simply dedicated to educating the public and peaceful protest of big expensive government. Their danger to the political process is that those who have been playing games in broad daylight with tax payer resources now have a group to fear who intends to expose those acts in pursuit of fiscal responsibility, and they have a right to do so. That is called, “management” of financial resources. Actually, they have an obligation to do so.

Regarding Catherine Stoker and Lee Wong, I’m sure they think it’s unfair to be at the center of these investigations, but they are public servants—with “servants” being the operative word. They are not part of any political class of rulers, as much as they might pretend to be amongst themselves.

Where I differ from most of the Tea Party members is many are just a bit too far to the political left for me. Many of them that I know quite well I disagree with their desire to even play politics with some of the obvious instances of corruption that are openly known, and if I had it my way, there would be much harsher treatment of those crimes than just exposing the stories with the light of awareness. While many might consider me a radical right-wing advocate, from my point of view that’s only because they are so far to the left they have lost perspective. The Tea Party members I know are good people who still believe in the system of government we have now, and they wish to work within that system to tweak the republic back into some sense of honesty, which I think is a noble cause, and I support if it’s possible.

Personally, I don’t see hope in such a process. I think the bad guys should be rounded up and confronted directly and left to fate to determine the result. I have no desire to play patty-cake with bad guys and to me, a politician who openly lies and manipulates a situation—even a minor one so that they might personally advance their positions are bad guys and gals and I have no tolerance for it. None.

I have nothing personal against Lee Wong, but he got caught manipulating “the system” to his advantage over the Eagleridge crosswalk. Lee’s wife is on the board of the Beckett Ridge Homeowners association and it is very obvious by the mountains of evidence that Lee worked with Cathy Stoker to get a crosswalk put in for personal use at the expense of the tax payers. It was a feather in everyone’s cap and they used a disabled person to advance the cause, and it was wrong.

I started watching the West Chester trustees and their actions more closely because of the comments by Stoker in the Enquirer article against me where she jumped on the band wagon to attack me, so I have been looking to return the favor. Why she felt she should include herself in the obvious school levy campaign against me indicates guilt to some extent, so it drew my attention to her activities. When I saw how the two of them treated, and disrespected Trustee Lang, who I do personally like, I took offense to their behavior. To watch in the videos how Trustee Lee became so defensive and attacked Lang as being “unethical” really pissed me off to put it mildly. It reminded me of how this same group of politicians attempted to paint me as a “woman hater” in the Cincinnati Enquirer because they could not answer the questions about school funding that I brought up. It’s an old political trick where something you do is taken out of context and twisted around by a political enemy to mount peer pressure against the provoker. In my case it was a blog posting were I blasted a select group of levy supporters in a negative way once I discovered they were protesting against me outside of the local Kroger grocery store. For Lang he went through a trial a few years back and Lee attempted to shut Lang down in their spirited debate with that bad memory because Lee was trying to cover up the collusion he had been doing to have the crosswalk built. And believe me; I understand what Lang went through. It’s partly because of it that I am happy to say he’s one of the few politicians I respect.

So Cathy and Lee only have themselves to blame for the attention that is headed their way. I wouldn’t have been looking too closely if Cathy didn’t make herself part of my personal story and Lee obviously does not have a working relationship with a person I respect in Mr. Lang. So they can be angry at the West Chester Tea Party for paying close attention to the happenings in their community and questioning the way funds are allocated. They can send the zoning people over to harass the Grand Ole Pub because it’s no secret that they have been hosting the West Chester Tea Party social gatherings, although I wouldn’t say the owner is a radical right winged guy, just a lover of American nostalgia. And they can consult their advisors about how to proceed next. But they only have one person to blame for the attention that is coming their way—themselves. The kind of political games I witnessed over the Eagleridge crosswalk is exactly the kind of thing that has virtually destroyed America, and to ignore it is wrong. Without question Stoker and Wong believe they were doing the right thing for the community, so they saw no harm in undermining the political process by initiating the allocation of funding 6 weeks before the issue was even brought to the board and Wong had his neighbor initiate the deal before the trustees so it would be recorded in the public minutes of the meeting officially. The trick from Cathy Stoker to sucker Lang into agreeing to hear the testimony at the conclusion of the meeting only to have it used against Lang weeks later as a way to say the project is already done and he agreed to it is underhanded at best, and represents bad politics in the purest way. It is not the job of these politicians to “rule” on our behalf as political elites, and that’s how these trustees behaved, and it deserves to be exposed.

To be angry at Lang, or the West Chester Tea Party—or any other affiliate is misdirected. Collusion in politics costs a lot of money, and years of that type of behavior has bankrupted our nation, and we have an obligation to fix it when we see it. So a note to the politicians reading this—you better get with the program. You can try to suck up to the local Tea Party groups all you want, but know this; I don’t work for them, or anybody. If I see bad things going on, I will expose it here for the world to see since our newspapers won’t do the task themselves. And I won’t stop until there are no more bad deeds going on in politics. It’s that simple. So choose your next moves carefully, and decide best how to serve your community. Because the methods of the past will not work in the future–the Tea Party wants to work with you to make a better world. I simply want to put every bad politician out of business and eliminate their job completely so we can all be free of them. Shaking hands does not achieve that for me. But life as it was will not be possible.

____________________________________________________________

This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon

“Just finished the book and am sweating profusely. Wow, what a ride !!!  Fasten your seat belts for one of the most thrilling rides ever in print.“

Visit the NEW Tail of the Dragon WEBSITE!  CLICK HERE!

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

Jerry Sandusky Trial: The pain of doing the right thing

Over the years I have gotten into a lot of trouble righting wrongs that in my view were pure evil. Sometimes in these conflicts the other side does not survive the worst case scenarios and sometimes the decimation of the wrong doer’s public persona is worse than death to them, because they care so much what others think. Sometimes the wrong doers are single advocates of terror, and sometimes the terrorist is a large organization. But as I reflect back on my life at this moment I can honestly say that even with all the pain it’s caused, with all the conflict, with all the broken hearts that follow—I am proud to have never turned away from a situation like Mike McQueary did when he walked in on Jerry Sandusky raping a young boy in a shower. McQueary did what the law says you should do, and that is report the incident to a higher authority. The trouble is, when our world is laced with massive amounts of self-serving corruption, and weaklings of spirit, such authority cannot be trusted. No, in reality by the rules of the human race, McQueary had an obligation to that little boy to save him from the domination of a much older man—but he didn’t. He took the weak way out and left the responsibility of justice to the mob of collective campus politics where it was swept under the rug at Penn State.

Of all the adults I know, most talk tough one on one over lunch, or at the local pub, but when it comes to action, they are often afraid to act on their knowledge of justice just as McQueary did. Only Darryl Parks at 700 WLW seems to have as much conviction over the Jerry Sandusky trial as I do. I believe what Darryl says in this broadcast seen below from his Saturday show because Darryl has taken a similar stand on school levies, which exploit children to pad the pockets of public employees, and he often goes on bold crusades against wrong doers calling them out by name on the 50,000 watt flamethrower known all over the Eastern United States as the Big One. He does those things because often it’s the right thing to do, and these days very few people feel secure enough with themselves to take a stand of any kind. And this has led to the kind of evil that occurred at Penn State for a very long time where hundreds, probably thousands turned away from justice in blind servitude to the might of Penn State as an institution. Listen to what Darryl has to say on the matter.

Right now, there are children who are desperately looking for adults to emulate, to show them that becoming a man or a woman is not a cheap suit of depravity. When a child is being abused and it is well known, yet good people turn away from the situation then evil is allowed to rule and goodness has lost. It does not matter if it is a beloved sports franchise, a business, a neighbor, a boss, even a parent. If evil is allowed to rule without being challenged, then the word “good” has no meaning.

Darryl is right. Mike McQueary should have beaten the living shit out of Sandusky on the spot when the rape was occurring. McQueary should have turned Sandusky into a bag of broken bones, which he could have done. Without question McQueary probably would have lost his job, he would have been sued; he would have been castigated in the sports community and may not have found another coaching job. But he would have saved that little boy and perhaps many others over the years. He had a moral obligation to that child, and he turned away from it trusting “the system” to do the right thing for him—which of course did not happen. Everyone in “the system” chose purposely to do the wrong thing to save themselves and their careers. In the sporting world, every person that knew about Jerry Sandusky’s rape of children is guilty. And many did know, because as Darryl pointed out, nobody offered Jerry Sandusky a job after he left Penn State, because they didn’t want the baggage. Nobody will ever admit it in the light of day, but they knew which was revealed in their silence.

I’m sure Mike McQueary like many people in his position wish they could go back and do it all again. I’m sure he’s played it out in his mind thousands of times what he “should have” done, but didn’t. When people ask me why I’ve taken the positions I have, or said the things I have, or done the things I’ve done to people who have done wrong and accuse me of being extreme, and over-the-top, I would point to issues like this situation at Penn State. I will not have on my conscience the kind of torture Mike McQueary has experienced. Lucky for me, I’ve had court judges who think of these matters similar as I do, and could have put me in jail many times over, but didn’t because they recognized the situations for what they were. But that doesn’t always happen, and some of those old judges from my past are long retired and have been replaced by lifetime ambulance chasing lawyers just looking for steady work, and have very little ethics. So it is possible they might throw the book at a freedom fighter just because they can, so they don’t have to feel the guilt of their own decrepit lives by equal measure.

Right now, many reading this know of some little tyranny in their own lives that they are doing nothing about, and they are letting down the innocent with their inaction. They eat, they watch too much television, they rent too many movies in a hope to push those thoughts from their minds, but it doesn’t work—does it? No amount of alcohol or any other drug can fully push it from the mind once the imprint of a coward makes its mark. And that makes them diminished human beings incapable of running their own lives, raising children, running businesses or serving as politicians. In fact, my hatred of most politicians is over this very issue. Most of them are cowards who are seeking to redeem some little Mike McQueary moment in their lives by serving on a school board, or becoming a township trustee. But what they bring with them to the table is more of their cowardly behavior and they seek to make deals with other cowards because like minds think the same, and soon they have made victims of thousands instead of just a few leaving behind destruction and psychological mayhem in their wake. No amount of tax money stolen from the tax payers can purchase their ticket into heaven making up for the sins of their past. There isn’t enough money in all of human potential that can erase the sins of inaction once they’ve happened.

I won’t lie to you dear reader, life is much easier if you just turn away from the tortured children of the world, or avoid the punks, the losers, the dirty politicians who at every turn seek to make a new victim at the hands of their aggression. But in the act of turning away, your mind records it, and you will never forget the pieces of you that are lost by each transgression. It is not just depleted cellular growth that makes people old; it’s the pieces that fall away as we must remember all the times we’ve turned away from evil to save our own skins leaving another to perish at the hands of a monster. So personally speaking, there is much less damage in kicking the shit out the monster right then and there and letting the chips fall wherever, because the inaction will cost you more in the long run.

____________________________________________________________

This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon

“Just finished the book and am sweating profusely. Wow, what a ride !!!  Fasten your seat belts for one of the most thrilling rides ever in print.“

Visit the NEW Tail of the Dragon WEBSITE!  CLICK HERE!

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

The West Chester Township Trustees Play the Shell Game: Meet the pinball of Beckett Ridge

Step right up—gather around—the West Chester Township Trustees of Ohio under the presidential leadership of Catherine Stoker and initiated by Lee Wong are giving away $4,690.00 to anyone who can claim they have been hit by a car at intersections like the one at the corner of Eagleridge Drive and Eaglet in the community of Beckett Ridge. If an example of why government fails time and time again at all levels requires proof, the new crosswalk which now crosses Eagleridge Drive is the perfect example. It shows how good intentions end up consuming tax payer resources because the parties involved are functioning from a failed philosophy of collectivism as opposed to individualism. In the case described below it would appear that Trustee Lee Wong colluded with a Mr. Cho to arrange before a West Chester Trustee meeting to have a crosswalk built at tax payer expense and Trustee Stoker was in agreement. The two trustees used the West Chester Township meeting simply as a formality to play out their intentions and within 19 business days the concrete was poured and the lines painted for yet another cross walk in the community of West Chester.  The Township paid Jackson Construction, Inc., $4,690.00 for the job. 

The problem with projects like this crosswalk is that no matter how it’s looked at from any angle, whether it is from the politicians, the residents, the taxpayers, or to eyes from outside the community the situation appears to be well justified. During the meeting where Mr. Cho made his case to the trustees, he stood before them claiming to be blind from diabetes, desiring to live a full life by being allowed to walk around his community but couldn’t because he is was getting hit by cars all the time. He claimed he could not walk on the grass to arrive at the sidewalk on the west side of Eagleridge for some unknown peril, and that even if he did attempt such a thing the cars driving up and down the road would mow him down without concern. So he asked for speed bumps or some other measure to ensure his “safety.” The suspicion of the entire speech manifested when Mr. Cho showed up late for the public comment portion of the meeting and Trustee Wong personally identified Mr. Cho. Trustee Wong and Stoker then put Trustee Lang on the spot to ask for an exception that Mr. Cho be allowed to speak, which no fair-minded person could turn down. But after Mr. Cho spoke a woman who came with him also took to the podium which according to Trustee Stoker was very unprecedented, yet she encouraged it happily as though she already knew the content of the speech—which of course she did. The woman’s name was Ms. Bentley and she has children who attend Freedom Elementary at the top of Eagleridge which is one of the Lakota Schools in the area that has suffered from the busing cuts made by that school district to cover their extraordinary salaries leaving many children walking to and from school. Ms. Bentley stated that she was worried for the safety of her children—and who can argue that?

After listening to all the comments made by Mr. Cho, Ms. Bentley and Trustee Wong it painted a picture in my mind that Mr. Cho was simply a pinball in the dangerous pinball machine of Beckett Ridge, West Chester. Every time he stepped into the street he was being run down by vigilante motorists. Trustee Wong even stated that at times Mr. Cho had been hit by cars so hard that he ended up on the hoods of the cars that ran him over. As the proceedings went on during that first meeting occurring on April 24th of 2012 it became obvious to me that Trustee Stoker knew all the facts before the meeting even started and simply used the trustee meeting to build official consensus for a project she planned to use later as a bullet point to her work as a trustee. Building a crosswalk is simply too tempting for a politician who can spend $5000 of tax payer money on a blind man like Mr. Cho. Politicians after all must appear to have compassion for members of the community, which I believe Wong and Stoker do, but for all the wrong reasons. The problem here is not the compassion; it’s the obvious attempt by Trustee Wong to use his influence as a trustee to help his friend Mr. Cho with a personal problem that is the responsibility of the private citizen.

There are many options available to Mr. Cho. The street he lives on is a quiet boulevard. He should be able to walk down it with no problem. And when it comes to crossing the perilous Eagleridge Drive I sat at that intersection on my motorcycle during rush hour and counted 7 cars in a 15 minute period. Mr. Cho volunteered to paint the lines on the road himself so he can see well enough to paint; he should be able to cross Eagleridge Drive without any trouble. But then on the other side there would be a problem for Mr. Cho. Eagleridge has a tremendous curb that rises about 4 inches and would require Mr. Cho to step up and over onto the treacherous grass extending a few feet to the sidewalk beyond. God forbid he be forced to walk in the grass, for he might slip and fall, and get a boo-boo upon his elbow. Then he might sue the township for not providing adequate safety for him every time he leaves his home.

When I drive from my home to the Tri County area which is a ten-mile stretch of road I pass no fewer than 10 traffic lights on my way. Most of those traffic lights are the result of situations just like this crosswalk issue where a minority of public speakers came forward and spoke about how dangerous a particular intersection was, then over dramatized the situation for theatrics on behalf of the politicians involved. The politicians looking for easy political points and a pile of tax payer money at their fingertips often can’t resist the temptation to capitalize on such requests and over time, these parasitic politicians have given our society an overly regulated world with stop lights, stop signs, and cross walks at virtually every turn. The situation in Butler County is so extreme that it is now impossible to travel from west to east or east to west intersecting the very long road of By-pass 4 since the engineers of that redeveloped thoroughfare have taken a page from the progressive California playbook in trying to eliminate left turns completely—to save driver side impacts from crashes. The situation is insane on By-pass 4 as a result of pandering politicians and the safety addicts who speak at these public meetings. Little by little, these timid creatures of suburbia destroy the world around them with their requests to be insulated from all danger, which the pandering politicians are more than happy to oblige so they can pat themselves on the back with money they consumed from the public treasury to paint some lines on a road, and pour a little concrete so people like Mr. Cho don’t have to walk in the grass.

The crime here is in the politicians themselves looking to use township money to show off for their neighborhood friends exploiting handicaps so that they can be heroes at the expense of the unfortunate. The deal with Mr. Cho had already been worked out by Mr. Wong and Stoker before the trustee meeting even took place. The speech at the meeting was just the formality of building public consensus. The same behavior goes on in school board meetings where the decisions are already made by the board before the meetings ever take place. The public meetings are only designed to give the illusion of public transparency. That’s what is called in Washington politics a “back room deal.” And nobody ever questions it because it would be political suicide to draw attention to a blind man who simply wants the “freedom” to walk about his community and is just asking the local politicians to help him. But that’s not what is going on. Not only was the political process compromised in the creation of the crosswalk at the corner of Eagleridge and Eaglet by pandering to the few at the expense of the many, but the message to the community itself is wrong. Yet again a few, weak and feeble individuals have been allowed to dictate the shape and pace of our community, using compassion to disguise narcissism. Politicians use the weak and feeble to advance their social status with tax money to do the deed. In government, nothing happens as fast as this crosswalk did. The speed is the indicator that it was Trustee Wong and Trustee Stoker who desired to exploit Mr. Cho so that they could score political points not just with the community at large, but with themselves. Building the crosswalk to them is just the form of social justice that may open the gates of heaven using $5000 of tax payer money to purchase the ticket—and that is why the newest crosswalk in the community of Becket Ridge is one more example of tyranny migrating like a blob across the individual lives of West Chester citizens everywhere who surrendered a subtle freedom they didn’t even know they had till it has been erased forever.

Oh—and for those reading this who think this is like the Shakespeare play Much Ado About Nothing, let me direct your attention to one final fact that reveals the strings of manipulation and who pulls them–the request by Mr. Wong for the crosswalk at Eagleridge and Eaglet in front of the West Chester Trustees took place on April 24th as stated. Yet six weeks prior there was communication with Greg Wilkens of the Butler Country Engineer’s office which said:

Greg, Thank you for the returned call re: crosswalk at Eaglet and Eagleridge, I understand the situation.

I asked Tim Franck to contact Matt and see what a crosswalk would look like with all its approach requirements and about how much it would cost. I know your staff is so busy so I hope you don’t mind me asking. If Matt can’t, no problem, please just let me know.

I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner, but we took a long weekend and we are down in Clearwater, FL.

That communication was written by Judi Boyko West Chester Township Administrator.  Here is the actual email, just so it cannot be said that what has been stated is a fiction. 

 

Now, with what you have seen here, go back and watch the collection of videos above so you can listen to the West Chester Trustees for yourself.  Notice how Trustee Wong uses the standard progressive mode of class warfare when he can’t answer Trustee Lang’s questions.  Anyone who lives outside of West Chester would find it absolutely laughable that Wong would even attempt to describe Beckett Ridge as a community of less economic statues.  But, these are the standard progressive arguments no matter what the situation, and the facts speak for themselves. 

Mr. Cho in the end got his crosswalk. The cement was dry before the final meeting was concluded. It is my opinion that all the trustees were extremely nice about the entire ordeal, especially Trustee Lang. I can’t say I would have been so sympathetic. My suggestion to Mr. Cho, the self-professed pinball of the treacherous Beckett Ridge pinball machine would have been to wrap him in bubble wrap for his own protection so he could bounce off all those cars without causing injury to himself, or the cars.

  ____________________________________________________________

This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon

“Just finished the book and am sweating profusely. Wow, what a ride !!!  Fasten your seat belts for one of the most thrilling rides ever in print.“

Visit the NEW Tail of the Dragon WEBSITE!  CLICK HERE!

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

American Families Lost 40% of their Wealth: The little bits of socialism in West Chester

I received a Twitter feed the other day indicating American families had lost 40% of their wealth during the recession (depression) that occurred from 2007 to 2010. The same people who are scratching their heads now wondering how this has happened are still not talking about the obvious problem in Europe where similar numbers are being reported. The common problem that permeates all the economies involved in this world-wide recession is a global commitment to socialism that has caused these losses, yet nobody will call it out by name.

The depression of 2007 to present has been caused by socialism and the commitment to Keynesian economics. For the same reason that academics have been reluctant to reveal scientific discoveries that shatter their previously published studies, academics have been very reluctant to take responsibility for their commitment to socialism and communism in our public schools. Millions of college students have went through communism basic training in college, and are now expected to function in a capitalist economy, and they don’t know how—so the American economy is failing, because education failed The United States population, just as it has the people of Europe. European socialists actually expect to retire at age 55 only to become leeches for the second half of their lives off their collective societies.

To provide an example of how socialism has impacted our local economy I’ll repeat a story I heard from a business owner while having lunch the other day. The owner complained to me that he had advertised for his business in his parking lot on Sundays, just like many of his neighboring businesses have; only he was stunned to find that one of the zoning employees for the Township of West Chester cited him for the infraction. The owner asked why he was being picked on instead of the other businesses, and there wasn’t a good answer, because it is a commitment to socialism that the young zoning employees are committed to, not capitalism, and this particular business was being targeted because two of the three trustees of West Chester do not like the kind of people who come to this particular business, so regulation is used to make the act of doing business difficult. The politicians involved hope that the owner will eventually give up and go out of business. So in this way, local politics can pick winners and losers and those who want to stay in business learn that if they want to play ball, they have to grease some squeaky wheels in politics.

There are 5 zoning employees in West Chester, most of them hired during the building boom of the last decade. Many of them are no longer needed, but because they are government employees, they are nearly impossible to get rid of, so now they have nothing to do but create needless regulation and enforce those regulations on the businesses they see their bosses—the trustees—do not approve of, so they can maintain their jobs and appear to be effective. In this case none of the individual players are evil. But the system they are functioning under is socialism, and the collective nature of that philosophy is evil, because it allows a hierarchy class to pick winners and losers. In the case of the business owner I was having lunch with, he was being punished for being the “wrong” kind of business as determined by the hierarchy of two out of three West Chester trustees and the zoning employees were using regulation to decide what kind of business succeeds or fails in West Chester.

http://www.westchesteroh.org/CDPlanning.cfm

This isn’t just isolated to West Chester where zoning employees use regulation to control the flow of business. Just to the north in Liberty Twp, a Frisch’s restaurant that is due to open in August of 2012 experienced similar harassment. That restaurant almost didn’t happen because the builders were at odds with the zoning employee in Liberty Twp over whether or not that particular restaurant could have the famous Big Boy statue in front of their store. A regulation created by Jonathan West who is heavily petitioned against by several builders to be removed from power because of his open abuse of building investment in the region prevented the construction of the new Frisch’s for well over a year basically due to the issue of the famous statue. This same Liberty Twp zoning employee has went to great trouble going around the township harassing businesses in the same way that West Chester zoning employees have.

I’ve spoke to non business residents about these zoning issues and they almost always say to me, “but if it wasn’t for zoning, those greedy builders could do whatever they want and would only get richer.” And there you have it. That is the cause of the 40% loss in American wealth—the American people have been taught to distrust businessmen and business women, corporations, builders, developers, inventors, anyone who is rich—they are all targets from all the little socialists who seek government jobs and a lifetime of justifying their jobs with coercion sucking up to the political class. In the case of the zoning employees, it is the majority rule on the Township trustee boards who decides what businesses will be heavily regulated and which will not just like cops pull over sports cars with young 25-year-old men more often than the middle-aged tax payer in a “family car,” because the regulation is a “nudge” created by the collective to help shape society into the vision of the political class. The trustees have to show the community that they are doing tasks the voters can see, so they use regulation to give themselves performance measures and they use those same regulations to pick successful businesses and failed businesses. The zoning people just like the police “enforce” the law of politicians so that socialism can grow.

None of this is intentional. Human beings do what they are taught, and unfortunately for more than 40 years, socialism has been taught to the American people, and they have accepted it thinking they were being patriotic American citizens. They did not see the red flag of the Soviet Union, or China, so they did not think they were advocating socialism on a clear path to communism when they embraced the tyrannical polices of township trustees and their zoning employees. But it is socialism that makes the cost of doing business either prohibitive or conducive, and if a business is out of favor with the “political class” even in a conservative area like West Chester or Liberty Twp they will be put out of business with excessive court costs and fines. There is simply too much government that have their hands in too many businesses, and there are too many people who believe that regulation protects them from “greedy” rich people who just want to make money.

Schools have taught generations of young people who “making money” is a bad, evil act. Yet the world is shocked when they learn that socialism in Europe is bankrupting the Eurozone and America has lost 40% of it’s wealth in just 4 short years. Lack of wealth creation is the natural byproduct of having an anti-wealth creation mentality in society, and most Americans are just a little bit guilty of accepting socialism without realizing they are accepting a parasitic political philosophy that is inadvertently destroying their lives. But the guiltiest of this serious crime are those who know better, but advance socialism anyway because they consider themselves good little Democrats, progressives, ex-hippies, or civil rights crusaders. They refuse to admit to themselves that it is their political philosophy that is ruining the world, and they deny the fact to themselves. They are no different from the overweight person who claims to be on a diet and orders a tremendous amount of fattening food at a restaurant but justifies their diet by ordering a “diet” soda. Those same types of people claim they are committed to capitalism, yet they want huge government employee expansion, wonderful federal pensions, and short—nonproductive work hours—then they wonder why no wealth has been created and businesses are failing. They also wonder why nobody is stepping forward to start a business when they have zoned land to attract such development. The reason is socialism. More often than not, the zoning administrator who drives around on a Sunday afternoon picking on businesses who break their zoning regulations are making more money than the owners of such businesses by the time the business owner follows all the federal regulations, state regulations, and community regulations, then pays for their accountants, their attorney fees and pads the pockets of the local politicians by donating tremendous amounts of money to the charities in fashion at the time. It is the little socialist government zoning worker who sits at their desk all day maintaining their Facebook accounts and little else who make much more money at the end of the day while the business owner worries each night before he goes to bed how he can stay open for one more day, or one more week.

Hmmmmm, I wonder why America is losing its wealth?

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This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon

“Just finished the book and am sweating profusely. Wow, what a ride !!!  Fasten your seat belts for one of the most thrilling rides ever in print.“

Visit the NEW Tail of the Dragon WEBSITE!  CLICK HERE!

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

The Moai of Easter Island HAVE BODIES: More unlocked mysteries for the human race

For many years the mysterious statues of Easter Island have been shrouded in secrecy. Over 1000 Easter Island statues litter the tiny island completely devoid of trees and life. These statues have been best known to be giant heads sitting on the surface of the island and defied logic because many of them were so large they would have required thousands of human beings to maneuver the giant statues.

The pictures shown here are from the Easter Island Statue Project website, www.eisp.org where they have managed to excavate two of those giant statues and discovered that the only part of the statues seen were not just heads sitting haphazardly across the surface of Easter Island, but that the heads had bodies with torsos over 7 m tall. This is an astonishing archeological discovery. It is further evidence that life in the ancient South Pacific was not a primitive one, but a very sophisticated society capable of great technology, sophisticated religion, and multicultural cooperation. For more information see my article on Malden Island. CLICK HERE.

As archeologists excavated these giant statues they found that the tall bodies actually rested on a kind of pavement many feet below the earth’s surface, and many theories of the Eastern Island people were shattered. We were to believe that a primitive people left South America in canoes traveling 2,300 miles off the coast of Chile across the Pacific Ocean to arrive at a tiny island that could be missed easily with an airplane. To find such an island with a boat is an extraordinary feat, but to find it and begin erecting these giant statues for no particular reason defies logic. The revelation that most of these statues have been buried beneath more than 15 feet of soil indicates a truly spectacular geological disaster that would have covered the island with sediment on a scale that was epic. But in so doing, it preserved a lifestyle that might have otherwise been wiped away from the earth forever with natural erosion.

This archeological discovery is just more proof that much of what we believe we have achieved in human science, has not yet began to scratch the surface. The statues on Easter Island have been available for study for over 100 years, yet it is only now that we have discovered that they have these vast complicated bodies submerged below the ground of the island. The question begs to be answered, if such large statues were ignored for over 100 years under heavy scientific scrutiny, and the terrain was so easily altered upon which the sculpture of the Eastern Island statues existed, then what lost relics exist upon the earth that are completely lost to human eyes and have yet to be discovered?

As I look at the photos of these statues that I have gazed upon all my life, and I note that what I saw was only a fraction of the overall statue, as most existed under the surface it serves as a metaphor for our infantile science that is only scratching the possibilities of understanding that await mankind. The statues themselves are situated on the triangular-shaped island upon the rim of a volcano of which the island has three, Rano Kau, Maunga Terevaka and Katiki. Easter Island once bestowed lush vegetation and timber, but today that is all but gone. Seeing how the statues are buried now makes me think that one of the three volcanoes erupted violently killing all life on the island including the vegetation. The soil compositions burying the statues so deeply are probably the result of many volcanic eruptions and tsunamis that rushed into the craters of the dead volcanoes and flooded them.

Now that archeologists have dug to the bottom of these statues to the original plaza of these temples which apparently housed these statues geologists should be able to properly date the Easter Island culture, which I predict will now be several thousand years old instead of the original date somewhere between AD 400 to AD 690. The statues were called moai and range in weight from 20 tons to 90 tons. Some are up to 32 ft tall. The complexity of the statues are odd for such a remote island, but if taken in the context of the nearby Malden Island appear to be a part of a very vast and complicated network of Polynesian societies that were far more advanced than previously thought.

Once the Eastern Island culture was destroyed centuries of new settlers made the island home, some of which were cannibals, and it would appear that European travelers encountering Easter Island for the first time assumed that it was a version of the cannibals who had built the Easter Island statues. The statues seen in the photographs here are from the quarry at Rano Raraku. It cannot be ignored how these seemingly primitive groups of human beings were so obsessed with moving vast stone works. Such a mystery was difficult to imagine before it was revealed that the statues were much larger than originally thought. Now the prospect is simply mind bending.

A similar assumption was made at Serpent Mound, Ohio where early archeology quick to report findings for their universities, and thus validate their scientific funding determined that it was the Adena Indians who had built the strange mound structure on the rim of a cryptoexplosion dating 248 million to 286 million years ago. Cryptoexplosions are extremely rare on planet earth and are debated to be caused by meteor impacts or volcanic forces from under the earth’s crust. The builders of Serpent Mound appeared to understand in a primitive time where no society could have known what happened more than 200 million years ago, that the ground upon which mound was built was very unique. More archeological research has been conducted over the last couple of decades and Serpent Mound appears to be much older than originally thought, well into the thousands of years ago. The Adena Indians simply did as apparently the cannibals of Easter Island did, they settled the area long after the original builders had left or been destroyed and were given credit for being the descendents of the original culture.

There is a yearning to display the learned power and command over natural resources that just is not evident in primitive, collective societies at the Easter Island archeological site at Rano Raraku. The ability to find a tiny island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and build these tremendous standing statues is the work of more than nomads or hunters and gatherers. The recent discoveries at Easter Island is further proof that we are simply on page one in understanding the vast history of the human race that has been hidden by education monopolies, religious insistence, and human impatience to quickly smash the world’s facts into the meat grinder of domestic understanding. Ultimately the answer was always right in front of us, as it usually is. But it took someone to actually do some digging to get “to the bottom of it” so to speak, and discover that there is much more to the story than we ever thought, or conceived.

____________________________________________________________

This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon

“Just finished the book and am sweating profusely. Wow, what a ride !!!  Fasten your seat belts for one of the most thrilling rides ever in print.“

Visit the NEW Tail of the Dragon WEBSITE!  CLICK HERE!

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