Category: Gamin

The Police Extortion of the Cincinnati Bengals: Communist labor unions always expect “the rich” to pay for their mismanagment

For me, and this has always been the case, there is a limit to how much of the thin blue line I’m willing to pay for. We need police in our society; we can’t function without them. We should not defund the police as Democrats have suggested. But when you are dealing with public sector unions that always want to expand government, “defund” is not an open checkbook that is beyond the reach of management. Throwing infinite amounts of money at police or any government employee is a bad idea. Society should pay for the police and to pay for them well. But not infinitely.

Traditionally, when police or fire employees insist that they always receive more money, they say, but we run into fires, we run into gunfire, so you don’t have to. I will volunteer to run into a burning building to save a dog any day of the week. I will gladly engage with a dangerous group of shooters any day of the week, any hour of the day. And I’d do it without pay because I would look at something like that as fun. So I’m not a big fan of that argument. Yes, police work is dangerous. But those who get into it understand that. It’s a privilege to wear the badge. The community should support the police enthusiastically. We should all live by the laws of our society, constitutionally supported. But the arguments of pay, such as what Dan Hils did on 55 KRC with Brian Thomas, is an exploitation of the standard union point of view, which is always communist in nature, to attempt to argue more pay in all the ways that the police unions expect it. There is a limit to what police are worth. When an FOP president makes the case from an obvious liberal point of view to a radio talk show host who is typically a small government kind of guy, it makes for an interesting debate that often hides in the cracks of our society.

Everyone knows I’m not a big fan of the Cincinnati Bengals. My favorite team is the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, and it has been since Mike Brown fired Sam Wyche as the head coach. My support of Wyche went with him to Tampa from Cincinnati, and I have never forgiven the Brown family for that firing. They are losers as NFL owners. They run a bad organization that does not represent the city well. Sure they went to the Super Bowl last year because they have really good players. But over the years, they don’t know how to close the deal, and if they win, it’s usually because they get lucky and the other teams overlook them. But I don’t like this Billionaire Bengals talk from the FOP president, Dan Hils. I also have to remind people that every labor union in America started as a communist idea. Every entertainment union, government sector union, and union that runs some manufacturing aspect are all Karl Marx’s products. With Trump he’s a former Democrat who has opened up the tent of the Republican Party to include labor unions. In politics, there are many viewpoints, and people often don’t get everything they want. So it’s worth discussing unions’ problems with the same people who now consider themselves MAGA Republicans. With that in mind, all this talk about the Bengals paying double time and triple time for traffic staff before and after games is a perfect example of how the same people who will talk about saving money with taxes on one topic find themselves nodding in agreement with Dan Hils on the extortion racket being played out with the Cincinnati Bengals and talked about on the air as if the Bengals should pay whatever it costs for safety because they have the money and can afford to. Just because someone like Dan Hils, from the perspective of a communist police union, thinks that the Bengals are rich, does that mean they should be obligated to pay some artificial value for more traffic cops at Bengal games? 

I go to Bengal games a few times a year, and I prefer the great seats when I go. When I arrive, it’s usually where the player entrance is, so I get to see all the security they have at these games from that point of view, and there is a lot of police there—a lot of security. I tend to think that the Bengals should hire their own security for their own events. But as Dan Hils points out on Brian Thomas’ broadcast, the Bengals can’t pay for their security on a city street leading to and from the stadium. Those are city streets, and the police union has it rigged so that only they can provide traffic services. It’s the same kind of mess that you deal with at any union where tasks are placed in silos, and restrictions to productivity are also associated with the labor assigned to that task. For instance, you might have a box of pencils sitting on a dock meant for the office area. But the unionized dock workers are on a break, or have called off work for the day. Or maybe they are on strike. So there sits the box of pencils. The office people need them. They can look through the window into the dock and see the pencils sitting there. But they are not allowed to go in and pick them up so they can get their pencils. They have to wait for the union to perform the task. That is the kind of political game the Cincinnati FOP has going on regarding city streets leading to and from the stadium. Because the unionized police want a monopoly on the work, they complain that the work just can’t get done because they don’t have the staffing or the money. But the Bengals aren’t allowed to provide a solution. Or perhaps the people attending the games might volunteer to help direct traffic. They are prevented from helping because they are not lawfully permitted to perform that task. 

Spoken like a true communist union president, Dan Hils places all the blame on the Billionaire Bengals because they are rich and can afford to pay whatever the members of the Thin Blue Line require. But the Bengals’ options are to use Dan Hils unionized employees at rates of double time or triple time to pay for the mismanagement of the police force in general at whatever cost they decide. Rather than hiring their own people at $15 per hour or less to perform a task that is only worth minimum wage for a few hours on a Sunday to keep people from running into each other. And because we are politically on a path to support the police no matter the cost, someone like Brian Thomas, who is a small government guy, gets pulled into a discussion about defending a government union’s ridiculous extortion racket. And from the perspective of Dan Hils, his argument is that the Reds pay for the security, as to other sports events in the downtown area. So why don’t the Bengals pay too? Well, because the police union is forcing a customer to pay for goods and services that they control exclusively, and they expect to pass their mismanagement off as an undisputed bill, which is ridiculous. The police are great to have, but I don’t like their labor unions. I’d volunteer to help the police if there weren’t so many dumb rules that keep people from helping them. In many ways, they create their own problems by forcing restrictions on themselves and then expect a community to pay for their mismanagement of financial resources. And at a certain point, when they ask for too much, the community should just get rid of them and form their own law enforcement that doesn’t have a union attached to it. And my argument would be that it would work far better and be a whole lot cheaper. Just because rich people can afford to pay, that’s not up to Dan Hils to decide. It’s up to market values to determine, and the FOP of Cincinnati clearly isn’t interested in that kind of discussion. They are just like everyone else; they want the most money possible for the least work produced. It’s up to management in all cases to determine the value of that ratio.

Rich Hoffman

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We Teach Cops to Panic and Exploit Every Little Danger: No wonder they are left vulnerable to the insurgents of chaos

I don’t talk about it much; much of it was a long time ago.  I wouldn’t say I’m lucky to be alive.  I would say it was mostly skill, so I made it through some wild and deadly years.  I didn’t think it was so unusual, but it was quite clear that it was an extraordinary life as I’ve grown older.  But needless to say, I’ve had lots of guns pointed at me, and I’ve been shot at plenty of times.  And I enjoy those kinds of things, so it disgusts me a lot to hear people being babies about how they fear for their lives when they are shot at.  Police unions spend much of their lives defending dumb things that their members do, and they have cried wolf too much on the danger that police officers engage.  As I said in the above video, I don’t relate to people who panic.  I don’t panic about anything, and I never have, so all these police shootings that are happening on what mobs want to make into riots result from a loss of masculinity in the gunfighter process.  There are lots of causes for it.  But with all that said, we still need the police to protect law and order in our society.  If the police make mistakes, I consider it collateral damage based on lousy training.  I believe in this topic so much that I wrote a book called Tail of the Dragon, published about a decade ago now.  My first book, The Symposium of Justice, published nearly two decades ago, was about this issue to a large extent also.  So, I have some passionate thoughts about police efforts, the need for police and justice, and the kind of cool persona needed when in a firefight or a fistfight that requires a lot of experience. 

I understand mistakes happen.  I don’t understand the female cop who didn’t know she had a gun instead of a taser and accidentally killed the kid they were trying to arrest. I’m sure she feels terrible about it.  Like many of these victims, the kid didn’t respect the police, which is a significant problem.  Police are trained to subdue their arrestees no matter what.  That power goes to the heads of a certain percentage of cops, and that is another problem.  And the kind of training we give cops just doesn’t fit the circumstances. I’ve been to lots of gun classes and been around many gun users, and there is a tendency among them to overplay the danger of the weapons, which makes the gun users into panicky messes by the end of it.  I prefer the stone-cold competence of the old cowboys who spent so much time with guns that they could spin them in their hands and never injure themselves or others while using firearms. I’m used to people who shoot in SASS and Cowboy Fast Draw who have guns as natural extensions of themselves, not some armed villain that might accidentally go off and kill people on a cross draw.  The female cop should have never had a chambered weapon in her gun otherwise would have never mistaken a taser for a real gun ready to shoot.  Yeah, I get it; mistakes happen, but these communist plotters who control these inner cities are looking to exploit every mistake for a change state in law enforcement, which is an even worse problem. 

However, for context, everyone always says that until you know the raised heartbeat of chasing down some dangerous kid down a back alley who may be armed and ready to kill you, you don’t know what you’d do.  Or some guy freaked out on drugs might resist arrest, meaning you need to use deadly force; I can relate.  And it doesn’t bother me in the least.  People then ask, well, why aren’t you a cop?  My answer is that police are too structured for me, and they don’t make enough money.  Doing a job for the thrill of it isn’t enough in a world full of options.  But deadly encounters are not a deterrent, and there are plenty of people in the world who feel the same way.  We need them as cops, not some of this progressive stuff we see today where we can’t discuss the necessity of courage in the workplace or the differences in the sexes.  Instead, to avoid the discussion, we give aggressive police training and turn them loose politically ill-equipped for the political circumstances.  And when corruption is detected, the police unions cover for their members, making the public suspect every deed was done with suspicion, which has, in the long run, worked against the police.

That’s where the parasite insurgents have come into the picture.  They are using these political elements of policing, and the overreactions typical of most police encounters to their advantage whenever a mistake does happen.  The people crying over all these black kids dying under police hands don’t care for anything about the black-on-black violence in Chicago every day and night.  They don’t care about the many abortions that happen in black neighborhoods all year long.  They don’t care about the gunning down of drugged-out thugs by police, only what they can exploit it for to gain political power.  And that is the hard truth of the matter. It’s a shame, but that’s what we have before us. It’s not a problem that will solve itself, but one that must be identified, even if the admission is difficult.

Even with all that said, we must stand by our police.  The system is imperfect because we are inspiring the wrong kind of people to work in law enforcement.  The cool cats who have ice water in their veins are not going to the police academy.  There is too much bureaucracy in police work, and people like that don’t have the patience for uniformed work.  Who wants the rigidity of police work for payment under 70K?  Not the kind of people born with ice water in their veins.  But the power-hungry, the overdramatized attention getters, they do. I’ve had excellent friends who went on to become cops, and they made a game of pulling over young girls and making them exchange sexual favors to get out of tickets.  Not something they are talking about in the mainstream news, but it happens in every community, and that is because we fail to distinguish the good from the bad and reward the tough and fearless.  And in the wake, we end up with a mess.  The communists and socialists in these black neighborhoods want to exploit these tragedies to collapse the American way of life.  And the media is there to throw gas on the fire to help make it happen.  They don’t wish to preserve law and order.  They only cheer on the destruction of our nation and the laws that should bring peace but instead usher in an age of terror. It’s a path to hell paved with good intentions, and despite the trouble, we must stand by the cops because it is evident that nobody else will.  They need us more than ever and should not be penalized because of their terrible training in the arts of panic rather than courage. 

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior


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War Gaming Tactical Entertainment: Birthday joy at Nostalgic Ink

It’s not quite my birthday, but usually my family makes a big deal about it always leaving me something to look forward to.  This year, because of my interest in the game Star Wars X-Wings Miniatures we all gathered at Nostalgic Ink in Mason to play a series of games.  My daughters brought their husbands and a tray of Chick-fil-A chicken nuggets and we had a blast.  The highlight of the evening was when the owner of the popular comic book store came back to watch our game overhearing a South Park reference that we had been talking about and performed a perfect reenactment of it.  It sounded just like this!

That is typical in these gaming environments, there is such a love of creativity and boundless imagination which I find refreshing.  Comic book stores are great places to recharge after all the dread of reality has done its best to erode away logic.  Some of the best people I have known over the years find solace in those kinds of places, so it was nice to celebrate my birthday there with my kids.image

I can’t say enough about the X-Wing Miniatures game.  As often as I reference it, it continues to impress me.  Nostagic Ink had on hand an impressive array of Y-Wings, and X-Wings.  The Y-Wings have been mostly sold out on Amazon because players buy them up for their durability during combat and Ion Turret ability.  My son-in-laws’ had their Imperial Aces on the table for the first time which was a sight to behold.  Those new Imperial ships have a curving barrel roll effect that is really valuable and is yet another wrinkle in an otherwise highly imaginative and innovative game that is ever-changing forcing constant adoption.image

Way back when I was 13 to 14 I was involved in military war simulations which were tabletop games that I found very stimulating, intellectually.  Back then, West End Games was producing some great stuff and eventually the realistic simulations of actual World War II battles, and Civil War engagements gave way to a game called Assault on Hoth, which was a Star Wars strategy game done in the spirit of those battle simulations.  It contained a map with the traditional game hex-and-counter mechanic and played well.  Imperial Walkers attacked the Rebel base on Hoth and Rebel Snowspeeders had to meet them to prevent the shield generator from being destroyed.  During the early days of our marriage my wife and I played it three to four times a week and it set a pace for our relationship that would last for decades.image

When I learned war gaming as a young man I quickly learned that much of what was being studied were battle tactics no different from what military generals had been taught at West Point for generations—only without all the politics of the position.  By role-playing battle field formations set against values players had to make the same kind of decisions that military generals had to make in wars from the past.  In this modern age of gaming—for the first time in the history of the world, war gaming wasn’t regulated to the military elite—but to hobbyists and history enthusiasts.  Of course the emotion of the battlefield is not present, and the threat of death not a factor, but the same types of decision-making that George Washington had to make during Revolutionary War battles, or General Lee had to make during the Civil War were available to anybody curious enough to play a game.  Most modern war games are very sophisticated and take into account the many factors which are required for such strategic thinking.image

Nostalgic Ink has in the middle of their store an entire section of these military war simulations that are much better than the ones I played as a kid.  They are fascinating and players routinely set up in the back of that store to play them.  But for me, Fantasy Flight Games has changed the entire field of miniature war gaming with Star Wars X-Wing.  It has all the battlefield tactics of many of those traditional war games, but it has the added element of flight.  I find myself thinking about that game all the time these days.image

This is a good thing because real life often requires the same kinds of hard decisions that X-Wing forces players to realize.  American society has the Second Amendment to protect themselves from an overzealous government.  But it also has freedom of thought, and this has given rise to a culture emerging in these comic book stores where tactical decisions are available to regular people outside of any orthodox political class.  For instance, this year’s FFG world champion is Paul Heaver a software engineer from Northern Virginia who is married with two kids.  He plays online CCGs and computer games, but X-Wing Miniatures is the first game of its type that he’s gotten really serious about.  Before going to the World’s competition—where literally people from many countries all over the world came to battle it out in Minnesota during February of 2014, Heaver paid close attention to the battle reports on the game forums and saw that Tie Swarms were dominating tournaments so he calculated a strategy of using two low pilot value X-Wing fighters and two moderate pilot rating B-Wings to slowly whittle away at the low pilot rating Tie Swarm strategy.  The effectiveness of this approach can be seen below in the video of his championship game.   If you watch the video it has the visual quality of a golf game.  People cheer when ships are destroyed the same way an expert golfer sinks a long birdie.  The same skills that Heaver used to win the Worlds championship at FFG are the same skills it takes to manage large companies, run military maneuvers, and run countries.  I would put Paul Heaver against Vladimir Putin any day and I’d put my bets on Paul.  But in this emerging X-Wing popularity there is Paul Heaver types popping up everywhere and this is a very good thing.  There are a lot of very smart people coming up in these gaming circles.

The tactic that Paul used to win his championship will be destroyed with all the new ships and rules coming out quickly, like the new rules involving the Imperial Aces ships.   They can now barrel roll out of a firing arc and right into the side of a targeted ship taking away their shot, while performing theirs with deadly effectiveness.  So what works today may not work tomorrow, which is why I love X-Wing.  It is why I spent my early birthday with my kids at Nostalgic Ink eating chicken nuggets and playing tactical table top warfare.  Back when I was introduced to these miniature war simulations I learned from a Green Beret who was so obsessed with military tactics that these war games were the only way he could experience battlefield excitement, that the only real difference is that you don’t hear the bullets whizzing by your ears and possess the obvious knowledge that every breath might be your last.  Otherwise, this is what it is like.   Fantasy Flight has done with X-Wing Miniatures something that is new—it has turned up the heat considerably and no longer is reliant on the Star Wars brand to sell the game.  It’s great by itself as its own thing.  Tactically it is complex, and is a wonderful way to pass the time for those obsessed with strategy.  And that would be me.  It is my ideal of a fun time and how I prefer to spend my leisure because all too often real life calls on those skills—and because usually what we do in our recreational time directly contributes to how we conduct ourselves professionally.  And because of Star Wars: X-Wing, the future looks very bright to me.image

Rich Hoffman   www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com