Category: Glenn Beck

The Worth of Warren Buffett’s Opinion: Looters demand more taxes!

About a decade ago, I was in a wedding party for my brother and we were dining at the Grand Finale in Glendale when he gave me my gift for being in the wedding party. It was a book by Warren Buffett, a man my brother greatly admired, so while the conversation of the evening drifted from tales of marriage and hardship, I read the book at the table.

My thoughts about Buffett were that he was “lucky” to have become rich as an investor. Like many of his type, he became wealthy not by creating, but by a manner of deception, playing on the behavior patterns of the timid and foolish. This isn’t illegal and is a natural part of capitalism, where predators take advantage of those not as ruthless, cunning, or even greedy. The threat of these predators encourages the very good to become better in order to compete, and this is where ideas are born.

But people like Warren Buffett and George Soros did not gain wisdom from the creation of something new. They gained wisdom by dealing with fools and this is the net result of books like what Buffett has put out, and Soros. They gained their wealth by being bottom feeders. They did not earn their wealth the valid way, like a Bill Gates, by creating something from nothing. They simply capitalized on the mistakes of others in a quest for wealth pursuits. So if the goal is simply to “get rich” no matter the method, then the works of these types of “investors” is commendable.

Their wealth however does not make them experts in all things involved in money and value however. Buffett and Soros are not experts on the art of living, and advice from them must be taken in context. If one wishes to become rich by climbing over the backs of others with a sense of ruthlessness and cold-hearted rancor, then their advice should help the hungry investor. But if an advice seeker wishes to know more about the complexities of existence, then these characters will leave that seeker very hungry for more, because they do not understand themselves the nature of society.

When Buffett says that more taxes are needed, he is making the statement of a progressive, not a traditional American. So it is only natural that Buffett would want to continue to fund the social programs created by his fellow “progressives.” The feeding of taxes with the money of the people in American society is a reckless enterprise that if the goal of that society is to have a smaller government that is less intrusive, then of course fewer taxes will be needed to maintain that infrastructure.

If the goal however is to have a larger government well then of course more taxes are needed, so when Buffett and Obama speak about raising taxes, and that people of wealth like them are willing to pay, it must be considered what kind of men they truly are. They value money based exclusively on the merit of the dollar value in relation to other things. These progressive types mistakenly believe that their money has equal value to those who actually create something, and this is the reason they tend to dislike actual producers, like oil tycoons, and “big business” owners. They exhibit a jealousy toward their fellow wealth peers hoping that they can be seen as “equal” to those producers because deep in their hearts they know that their wealth was created by a measure of looting, where they took advantage of someone not quite smart enough to hang on to their money, and not by the benefit of invention.

This is why these types of people do not understand the value of what they are asking. Buffett might understand the value of stock prices, but he does not understand the value of the merit behind the company which holds the stock. He understands the nature of speculating the behavior of ownership and the way the public will perceive the actions of a company, but he does not understand the value of creation, obviously, otherwise he wouldn’t say such naïve concepts as blindly tossing tax money into the tax monster that is government.

Much of the corruption in government is due to the money that flows in it. The reason politicians will do anything, say whatever, and make any promise to get into public office is because they want to be in control of the money that comes to them in the form of taxes. Public union’s exist for one reason, and that is to gain control of the money which comes to the public worker. It is money which corrupts government and it is money that ruins the attempts of any country to maintain a reasonable, trustworthy republic. So when a progressive makes the statement that they support higher taxes, what they really are saying is that they wish to maintain the structure of corruption from which they have enriched themselves. For people like Warren Buffett, this is perfectly acceptable. But for people who want to see government become more trustworthy and for politicians to become more representative, cutting the amount of money that is tossed into that black hole of government consumption will make public office much less attractive to the thieves and miscreants who are currently attracted to public office.

To improve the quality of government, society must take away the incentive of those bottom feeders to migrate into public service, and the only way to do that is to take away the waste from which they flock to.

I closed the book at The Grand Finale and kept my opinion about Buffett to myself because the men at our table were all gushing over themselves regarding the achievements of Warren Buffett. The nature of Buffett and those like him are elusive to their minds, because in society, we are trained that the value of something is contained within a fixed dollar amount. So we are trained to believe that Buffett’s wealth gives him immediate value as a person of the mind, after all, he was smart enough to amass massive amounts of wealth, so he must know something important, and the men at my diner table were hungry to unveil that knowledge so that they too might achieve some measure of success, and take care of their own families with some wealth of their own.

As I sipped the remaining contents of my wine that night I knew that the real genius is not in the indulgence of a fool and the advantage taken from them, but it is in the restraint. For the way to truly build society is not always to indulge and roll about like pigs in a mud pit, but to refrain from the impulse to indulge with an eye on the greater good, even when that good appears to be bad to the pig wishing to roll in the urine and feces of it’s own kind to accumulate merit earned by decadence.

And that’s what I think of the opinions by Warren Buffett.

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

Public Unions Should be Illegal: They are simply too expensive and too demanding

CLICK HERE TO SEE AN ARTICLE I WROTE CALLED PAYING FOR PROTECTION: THE ORGANIZED CRIME OF TEACHERS UNIONS FOR MATERIAL SIMILAR TO THE ONE BELOW.

Leslie Ghiz of Cincinnati City Council goes ballistic on 700 WLW while talking to Doc Thompson about the lack of interest in dealing with the Diana Frey case, the public union president accused of stealing over $750,000 from her members. The source of the complacency she is upset about is the very reason why public positions simply cost too much money to the tax payer. Click here to listen to that broadcast:

There is a disconnect between the reality of the public union leader and the rest of the world. Doc Thompson recently did another show where the average tax payer would have a lot of difficulty coming up with $1000 if they needed to without going into debt. Yet the public union expectation when their contracts demand more money is just to raise taxes to fund their demands, and they don’t care at all that they are draining the communities of their wealth, who simply don’t have the money. You can listen to that broadcast here:

The public sector unions have shown no restraint, no sense of economic understanding, no compassion for their employers, which are the tax payers. They have been excessively greedy, corrupt (Diana Frey and she’s not the only one), manipulative, and perfectly willing to walk off the job if management doesn’t see things their way. Their behavior has driven up the cost of their employment simply to the point of being very unattractive as a labor option.

When the public union representing the teachers at Lakota in 2008 went on strike, and a deal was made to appease them, to keep the teachers from walking off the job, I decided that I would not support another school levy until the public sector union was out of the equation. They simply drive up the cost of education too much. The unions make it impossible to have an intelligent conversation about cost controls, because the direction of the negotiations always migrates back to the welfare of the employee, and not the product they create.

I have noticed that the television stations lately are focused on the catastrophe of public funding and are resorting to the feel-good stories of emotion, which plays straight into the kind of manipulation the unions have used to extort massive sums of money, (tax money) for themselves. It is never asked by the established media why all these public employee jobs are going bankrupt, because the answer is simply too painful. Public employees, particularly teachers are too expensive. They cost too much money to employee, and they did that to themselves with extreme labor practices such as threatening to walk of the job with strikes.

The legislators who made it law that a teacher should have a master’s degree to keep their teaching certificate helped perpetuate the situation with legislation. They did as they always do; they created laws without considering the cost of compliance. That is the problem with electing small-minded people into positions to create laws, because they are unable to take in the whole picture. Since they too are public employees and not responsible for creating the funding, they don’t make the connection but simply take money from the public in the form of taxes, so they bare no responsibility.

Public employees do not exist for the benefit of job creation. They are not there for the convenience of the employee. But that is the expectation. The tax payer is expected to jump through hoops to figure out how to appease the high expectations of these out-of-touch employees.

If I were the superintendent of a school, which I could never be because there are actually laws to keep people like me from being hired by a district, the unions have covered their tracks in every direction, I would simply let the teachers walk the next time they attempted a strike, and I’d hire cheaper labor. It is the cost of labor that is the problem and is creating the demand for more taxes in every sector of government service. Government in no capacity should ever be paid more than the average wage of the public, because it creates an incentive for people to attempt to become a government worker that will do anything to become employed by the government because it’s simply too lucrative.

Teachers should be paid fairly, and if they want to make a lot of money, they should work for a private institution that will pay them according to their expectations. If the United States were the best in the world, I might buy into the union argument that we need to pay for the best to have the best, but the United States education system is not the best. It’s average and that’s being generous, and I think it fails in entirely too many ways. It certainly isn’t worth the amount of money we are pouring into it.

Politicians and news organizations looking to simplify their stories focus only on dollars spent equals’ value to the child, but that simply is not true. We could pour all the money the United States produces into education and the result would still be a flat line. Education is an elusive quality that comes from the strength of a family and the mentors that surround a child. Children just do not learn on an assembly line and making the factory more expensive won’t improve the results.

I’m not against public education. I think it’s a good thing for people who come from broken homes, or poor families. In those conditions, it is possible for a teacher to have a major influence on a child, because the teacher can fill the role that the parent is neglecting. But in families that are strong where there are two parents, grandpa’s and grandma’s and the family has a middle to upper income, there isn’t much a public school has to offer in the development of a child but a baby sitting service. I know that hurts the feelings of many “sensitive” guidance councilors and teachers, but those are the facts. As a tax payer, I’m happy to employee some of those people in my district for some of the underprivileged, but having hundreds and hundreds employees all making extremely lucrative incomes is simply not good business.

But it is the unions who have high-jacked the entire process, allowed no management control on a run-away train that just goes faster and faster requiring more and more money to fuel. To me, they are not worth the money. They are guilty of being too greedy and out-of-touch. To be honest, I have never seen a system so screwed up, as wrong as you find when you lift up the rocks of public sector unions. The entire situation is terribly out of control which directly affects the overall cost. I believe the teachers for the most part believe they are in the profession for the kids they teach. But the union leaders are clearly out for the greed of the position and have shown no restraint on their demands. And the teachers who have voted to keep those types of leaders in place are all guilty of putting themselves over their job to the children and the more I learn, the angrier I become.

Being foolish is not against the law. If the union leaders wish to be so foolish as to be out-of-touch with the rest of the world, that’s their prerogative. But when they ask me to fund their foolishness, that is passing the fool baton to me, and I’m not going to carry it. They make it my business when they ask me for more money to support their folly, and I know better. Therefore, I will not support public sector unions with any more additional taxes until they remove themselves from the process. They are getting in the way of proper management of public employees and should be outlawed. We have tried that little public employee union experiment started by President Kennedy and it has failed, and needs to be abolished as a practice.

The unions will call it union busting. I call it practical. I do not recognize the authority of any union to take my money out of my pocket and do what they please with it. Such a practice is simple robbery. It’s nothing else and needs to be outlawed at every level in government. Until that happens, there will never be any management of government costs which is just plain foolishness when money is the primary concern.

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

Secret of Malden Island: Why public education is hiding history

I’ve read a lot of books, and they are all special in their own way. But every now and then a book comes along that provides information so compelling that it changes your world view and makes you see things in a broader spectrum. For me, one such book was Forbidden Archeology. Click here to see an article I wrote about this book complete with video from the author. Well worth your time and investigation.

Recently a school board member upset with me on my stance with public education, where I question the merit of college education, and the seemingly infinite amounts of money educators ask for public education without any proof of results, I thought of that book and realized that this professional education specialist, who holds a master’s degree and considers themselves, “enlightened” wouldn’t begin to understand my point of view because they simply haven’t explored the same topics about cultural studies that I have. For a lot of people, the book Forbidden Archeology is a life shattering event, because not only does it challenge the beliefs of those in the education industry but the religious assumptions that people hold dear. So they won’t read Forbidden Archeology because they aren’t willing to accept new scientific data that may challenge their current belief system, which is unfortunate, because it is that trait which holds back our society exclusively.

Yet the fossil record established in Forbidden Archeology is stellar. The book tells the story of various universities who have openly suppressed archeological evidence because the discoveries simply don’t fit into the facts their schools have published. Colleges who fund excavations usually do so with a mind for results just like businessmen who look for profits. The selection for funding a dig usually has an intended result, such as digging up the city of Troy to prove the ancient stories, and biblical archeology to satisfy the biblical references, because such excavations have a similar effect on a university as does a college sports program. Scientific discoveries are selling points for the university just like a sports program, they attract new enrollment which is revenue. I have watched the struggle for archeological funding for many years since I maintained a subscription to Biblical Archeology Review at 10 years old till the advent of the internet. In that magazine scientists offer cruises and group trips to find ways to fund their excavations outside of the college funding structure, but there simply isn’t enough money to do proper investigations all over the world. The political climate in the Middle East is a serious determent to scientific discovery. So when a university makes a significant find, they hang onto it with everything they have, even if it means they ignore new evidence that invalidates their previous finds. That’s what Forbidden Archeology is all about. The politics of science are holding back proper understanding of human existence. It is exactly the same problem as we see in the school funding structure itself. The high pay rates they’ve given themselves dictate high enrollment, which drives up taxes, and also incentivizes the educational institutions to mislead any factors that may not allow the institutions to continue to grow or sustain their financial expectations. I suppose my anger, and “anti education” position has its roots in the simple fact that I know that education institutions routinely have lied to protect their interests.

 

They cheat in sports to maintain their excellence, and they will cheat in academic accomplishments for the same reason. Forbidden Archeology as a massive book of fossil records that simply are ignored by the establishment proved to me that institutional scholarship cannot be trusted as a soul provider of scientific understanding, or the funding representation needed to supply it.

There are many mysteries all over the world that do not have logical explanations behind the cultures that built them. I am convinced that there is a lot more history to the human race than what we currently accept and this evidence is coming in fast and furious.

Malden Island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is a remote, desolate place which costs about $10,000 for a one way ticket just to get there, so archeology there is very difficult to explore because the sheer cost of the enterprise is cost prohibitive, so only casual observations have been made. There are 40 stone temples on Malden Island that are described as similar in design to the buildings of Nan Madol on Pohnpei, some 3,400 miles (5,475 km) away. In fact, there is a basalt road that runs along the bottom of the Pacific Ocean which connects these islands under hundreds of feet of water. This suggests a culture that is more than 50,000 years old and that this entire land mass was once above water supporting a civilization that had no trouble moving around tremendous stones to build very large, complicated societies which we know absolutely nothing about, other than the fact that someone built them and they are older than biblical history. Yet, nobody discusses them because they don’t fit into our understanding of the human race and their origins. Scientists have their diffusion theories of how migrants arrived in North America using the land bridge of the Bering Straight and they are sticking with it.

Source articles
http://mitchtestone.blogspot.com/2008/12/malden-island.html

But there are more discoveries of strange, “very old” archeology spread all over the world that don’t fit nicely into conventional explanation. Here’s just a few from source link:

http://www.world-mysteries.com/mpl_10.htm

• A pyramid explored by Dr Ray Brown on the sea floor off the Bahamas in 1970. Brown was accompanied by 4 divers who also found roads, domes, rectangular buildings, unidentified metallic instruments, and a statue holding a “mysterious” crystal containing miniature pyramids. The metal devices and crystals were taken to Florida for analysis at a university there. What was discovered was that the crystal amplified energy that passed through it.

• Ruins of roads and buildings found off Binini Island in the 1960’s by the photographed and published expeditions of Dr Mansan Valentine. Similar ruins were also photographed off Cay Sal in the Bahamas. Similar underwater ruins were found off Morocco and photographed 50 to 60 feet underwater.

• A huge 11 room pyramid found 10,000 feet under water in the mid Atlantic Ocean with a huge crystal top, as reported by Tony Benlk.

• A 1977 report of a huge pyramid found off Cay Sal in the Bahamas, photographed by Ari Marshall’s expedition, about 150 feet underwater. The pyramid was about 650 feet high. Mysteriously the surrounding water was lit by sparkling white water flowing out of the openings in the pyramid and surrounded by green water, instead of the black water everywhere else at that depth.

• A sunken city about 400 miles off Portugal found by Soviet expeditions led by Boris Asturua, with buildings made of extremely strong concrete and plastics. He said “the remains of streets suggests the use of monorails for transportation”. He also brought up a statue.

• A marble acropolis underwater across five acres of fluted columns raised on pillars.

• Heinrich Schilemann, the man who found and excavated the famous ruins of Troy (which historians thought was only a legend), reportedly left a written account of his discovery of a bronze vase with a metal unknown to scientists who examined it, in the famous Priam Treasure. Inside it are glyphs in Phoenician stating that it was from King Chronos of Atlantis. Identical pottery was found in Tiajuanaco, Bolivia.

The discoveries of the strange and unexplained could fill libraries of text books, and the reason for the suppression of this information is the monopoly of academia on scientific understanding and religious politics.

Of all the articles I’ve written here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom one of the most popular is Giants in Ohio. Click here to read that article. Since I produced that article it has seen over 10,000 hits alone! That surprises me greatly, but shows that people are very hungry and desiring to understand these strange entities. Giant bones of a hominid type of species standing between 8 to 10 feet tall are found everywhere on Earth, but Ohio has a fair number of burial sites. There are bones, so we know something lived that was excessively large, yet nobody has an explanation, because it doesn’t fit into our understanding of Native American migration and evolution. Modern scholarship is focused on the Mound Builders and why they built the mounds, without having any assumption of a culture older than those mound cultures. It’s kind of like looking for the keys to your car that you lost under a parking lot light at night because you can see. But where you really lost the keys were someplace else entirely out in the darkness. Our study of human history is along the same type of theory. Our education institutions find and publish the artifacts that fit best into the preconceived notions of the scientific discoveries of which they’ve built their reputations. All the other ones are put into a back room someplace or sold to a private collector as a conversation item. You can find more evidence of this history in Indian Hill, Cincinnati or Beverly Hills from the fireplace mantles of private collections than in any museum, because the museums sell these treasures away to their foundation supporters rather than let them sit in a drawer collecting dust and making the museum no money.

When I first came out against the increased taxes of our local tax levy, because my thoughts are that as a society we are spending too much on education to get only very basic results, we are not getting a bang for our buck. The education culture believes we don’t spend enough, because they simply live in a different world than everyone else, and I don’t see much value in that world because even where they should excel, such as in the realm of science, they have proven they cannot be trusted. A president of a local union sent me a very nasty email because I had went on WLW and discussed the salaries of the personal that was demanding more money, and they called me a “tin hat” because I entertain these scientific notions that there are mysteries out there that we don’t understand, and I recognized instantly the same type of character assassination that I read about in Forbidden Archeology, which angered me greatly. In fact, and you can read my response to that person here: CLICK. I started Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom shortly thereafter because I realized that these “education types,” are more concerned about protecting their income than finding the truth about anything finance or otherwise, and they use intimidation and character assassination mixed with peer pressure to control criticism of their behavior.

I fight people like that union person openly because unless they’ve done the work I have to get at the truth of the matter, unless they’ve read even a fraction of the books I have, done one tenth of the exploration that I have, and they haven’t, they have no authority from which to speak. They are simply mouth pieces of corruption attempting to mislead civilization. My love of life is not for any transitory age of the present and the rituals of that culture, such as we find in the education monopoly of this current age. The education culture is pretentious and vastly corrupt and approach the world with their eyes straight on the subject to the point that it is all they can see and even that is out of focus, when what is required is to pull back and see the world for all it’s vastness, and the depths of the history which created it.

This education class can’t even understand the nature of the planet earth while they stay hell-bent on explaining global warming from a former hippie like Al Gore. When a guy has smoked as much marijuana as Al has how much credibility could he possibly have? But that same education class gets behind the uneducated rants of Al Gore because he brings money to their universities and just like a K-Street prostitute, the education class will say anything, support any theory they are told to believe so long as the money is good. And religion will fight over a singe spot in Jerusalem for which religion can claim possession of that spot on the ground from which “sacred things” happened. But to one who studies with open eyes, the entire world is a sacred spot of which only a fraction of the mysteries of the past have revealed themselves in a blossoming understanding of the true history of the human race that is opening before our eyes.

When that understanding blooms the education class will find themselves on the outside looking in because they were slow to adapt to that new understanding. They will be on the outside because they have lost all credibility to the public once it is revealed that they are more interested in their own enrichment than the sacred pursuit of science.

If you want to know the truth the start of that path should be in the book, Forbidden Archeology. From there the evidence will lead the way.

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

Blood Drunk Apoligists: The Lost Fools of Modernism

I was on 700 WLW with Matt Patrick on August 10, 2011 indulged in the topic of whether or not Bert and Ernie of Sesame Street are in fact homosexuals. However, on a more serious note, the topic of the day was school levies and whether or not they should be passed or declined as a way to force change. Prior to my appearance Matt had received many callers that proclaimed passing a school levy is the “patriotic, and caring” thing to do if one loves their community. I argue the opposite.

Channel 9 News always in my opinion, does a fantastic job of covering topics. Brendan Keefe’s I-Team stories are great benefits to our city in the hard reporting that he does. However, and this is the nature of television versus talk radio, there isn’t much time to get into the heart of a matter, because attention is spent on the visual appeal of the stories. In an attempt to bring balance to the story of why schools are failing all over the state, Channel 9 is sitting down with various superintendents all over Cincinnati to put a face to the requests for more money. Channel 9 sat down with the new Fairfield superintendent to explore the topic of why funding was needed for his district.

As seen in that interview, the direction of the story took an emotional turn. It was never asked, why is Fairfield unable to balance its budget based on the current tax supply. It is often discussed that federal money is declining, and state money is also on a downward trend, especially in affluent school districts. So it is only natural that financial expectations must be scaled back, but that is not what’s happening.

I had an argument with family members and friends about a year ago, who are functioning along the same assumption as the school superintendents, the reporters, the teachers, the unions, the radical protestors in London, school board members, parents, protests in Greece and everywhere else, that the world will always continue on as they always believed it would, like their own educations ensured them of a continuity in social existence that was as solid as concrete. The foundations of everything they have been taught since childhood is at stake because their beliefs are failing!

One person who considers themselves “worldly” said to me, “manufacturing jobs are leaving America. That’s a fact. America has to serve “high tech” interests. We have to get used to the fact that our role is changing. We must start saving for our children’s college now, so they can compete in that marketplace!” His utterances were straight out of the union playbook. The talking points are the same everywhere, and predictable.

“But how can you save for something that the cost is raising at an insanely dramatic rate? Is college worth 50K per year? Should 4 years of college cost 200K? Should kids go into debt to go to college? Should public education that is preparing all these kids for college charge 9 to 10K per pupil to educate? Does public education need a teacher with a master’s degree to teach 1st, 2nd, or 3rd, grade? Can public education afford to pay all their teachers over 50K per year?

At this point in the conversation fury builds in the eyes of the apologists, for they do not have answers to these questions. In fact, they find themselves caught in their own dreamlike haze. “Without college a kid has no chance! If you don’t have a degree, you are doomed these days!”

“That’s what you’ve been told,” I’ll reply. “But businesses are learning the hard lesson, which over the past 20 years that a college educated person does not guarantee them a job ready employee. In fact, many young people are proving to not be mature enough to handle the rigors of life until their 30’s these days, and it is costing companies billions of dollars in lost productivity each year, to deal with the learning curve of these immature college graduates who lack common sense, because it has been “taught out of them,” during the education process.

I have a name for these types of people, the ones who argue the obvious; I call them “Blood Drunk Apologists.” The trouble with these types is that they have drunk the blood (metaphorically speaking) of left-wing education concepts and are under the spell of a social order designed to be everything to everybody. They started drinking this blood in their own education process so it is difficult for them to see the truth of the situation now as adults. They are under a kind of voodoo-like spell that prevents them from seeing the truth even when it is right in front of them, because they have built their entire lives around a preconceived notion regarding social structure.

I’ve always questioned education and the methods. When I was a younger guy I wanted to be an archeologist or an anthologist because my interests were in the “big picture” studies of civilization. But I was also interested in politics. I was also interested in other sciences. I was also interested in fiction and literature. I was also interested in fast cars. I was also interested in adventure and danger, and like I mentioned before I looked for jobs in my teens that allowed me to explore all those things at the same time. I read a lot, and it was in those books and the studies of civilization that I was insulated from the spell that was cast on the world around me. While I was reading heavily, the person who was arguing with me about the current state of education was walking around with his pants down around his ankles being paddled by his fraternity brothers in college. Others who have argued with me about this topic were stepping off a bus in boot camp and having their heads shaved and forced to do push-ups each time they answered a question wrong to their drill sergeant. These soldiers signed up for the military so they could qualify for the GI Bill, which would help them go to college, so they could grow up and get a good job!.

There are a lot of ways that people arrive at the pain of adulthood, where at some point they drink the blood of orthodoxy. It is usually brought about by pain, where the instigator of the pain is also the one who provides the relief from the pain, making the victim falsely trust their antagonist. By drinking the blood, they find the pain of life is eased.

Proudly I have advocated to those I care about that such a life of blood drinking is unnecessary, even foolish. Because all one has to do is study history, even passively to see the course of where their actions will take them. And this whole education situation is a major crisis in our country. Education is not the end all-fix all for society building. We have a whole culture of lost souls roaming around like they are under a voodoo daze, unable to think critically. And even if education did work well, it is simply too expensive. Cost controls must be put in place to reign in the out-of-control costs, because even if people determine for themselves that they do want to go to college, and do want to maintain the current direction of public education, the cost increases of 5% to 10% every year cannot continue. There isn’t money to pay for the financial expectations of education even if we taxed our citizens at 100% of their entire incomes, at some point; our society will hit that wall. Because only a very rich society can afford luxuries, and a society cannot be rich if everyone is going to school. Some people have to actually be in the trenches fighting to make something that can be sold to someone else for a profit, that’s the only way wealth is “created.”

Civilizations who forget that facts point to a right and wrong answer and pretentious arrogance that causes critical blindness find themselves extinct, and the face of the earth is a chronicle of such failures. Some of those societies fell so hard they aren’t even in our written records, but all had empires that were vast and complicated, only to be crushed by their own arrogance, because they were under the spell of the blood they had drunk all in the name of social comfort.

Debates such as this current one over education are as old as time itself on a social wheel that has spun repeated time and time again like the scratch on a turntable record. And the current direction is as predictable as a movie we’ve all seen the end of, and those who have drunk the blood and use it as sustenance are foolish enough to believe that somehow the ending of the movie will end differently because they are the current players. Such is the effect of the voodoo spell of Blood Drinking Apologists and their Ignorance of Doom.

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

LAKOTA TAX INCREASE of 2011: If the superintendent wants to be paid like a CEO, act like one

On July 12th of 2011 Michael D. Clark covered the Lakota School Board meeting for the Cincinnati Enquirer about the inevitable tax increase the school district is planning to impose on the tax payers. Here is what he reported:

Voters, who in November 2010 rejected a 7.9-mill school levy, will see the 4.75-mill, continuing operating levy on the Nov. 8 ballot once the board conducts another, state-mandated vote next month.

If voters in the Lakota School System approve the 4.75-mill property tax hike, it will cost the owner of a $100,000 home $145 more in annual school taxes. That will of course be $290 per year on a $200,000 dollar home.

“The schools are the community’s schools, and it will be up to the community whether we continue to move forward or slide backward,” said Lakota Board of Education President Joan Powell.

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Here is the problem with what Joan said in that statement. Lakota has no choice but to continue to be a good school. Speaking for myself, I pay thousands of dollars a year into the school system, and I expect nothing less than an excellent district. Going backward as Joan suggests is not an option. Excellence and quality is required. It is completely expected by me as a tax payer. In other words, I am not spending a lot of money in taxes to get a crappy school system.

However, the school board is citing that a loss of state and federal revenue dictates that the district must go to the voters for more money, and if Lakota wants to maintain a great school, then the property owners of Lakota must pay the difference.

But that’s not what’s going on.

The reality goes back to an October evening in 2008 when hundreds of teachers packed the Lakota School Board Meeting with black shirts showing unity and demanding a 3% increase in pay or they were walking off the job. They were going to strike! You can see the news cast of that video here. You have to click on the link because Channel 5 has disabled the code. It is the events in that video which has caused our current financial crises at Lakota just 3 short years later.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kvPQPJ_F1A

Here’s another link, again this one will take you away from this page, but it’s worth the look.  Listen to Kit Andrews report that Lakota’s per pupil amount was just over $8,000 per child.  Now it’s almost $10,000 per child in just three years.  How long does anybody think this can go on?  What’s the plan to reduce the per pupil cost because that costs is almost completely driven off the labor cost of the employees, not brick and mortar costs?

http://eplayer.clipsyndicate.com/cs_api/iframe?windows=1&va_id=726521&show_title=0&wpid=0

To demonstrate just how quickly Lakota salaries went up after the strike attempt of 2008 the No Lakota Levy group has assembled the spreadsheet below.

Now, what does all that information mean? Well…..the average teacher’s salaries by school from the time of the strike threat in 2008 to the present look like this. The year of the strike the average teacher salary was $56,633. Just two years later the average salary was $62,331. The spreadsheet above shows the average rate of pay per school and the amount of increase at those schools. In essence, there was a 10.1% increase in the cost of an employee at Lakota right after the strike.

2007-2008 $56,633
2008-2009 $59,041
2009-2010 $62,331

Lakota currently has over 600 employees who make over $65,000 per year which ties up over $47 million dollars in budget costs. CLICK HERE TO SEE WHO AND WHAT LAKOTA STAFF MADE IN 2010-2011.

The way to fix the budget at Lakota is simple. It must be decided to not have as many employees making such large sums of money, because asking the district to carry that many highly paid employees in a district simply destroys any attempt a district of any kind has of balancing its budget.

To provide an idea just how quickly these costs can migrate out of control in 2009-2010 Lakota started the year at 59K per year and ended at 62K per year. During that year the district carried 434 employees who were paid over 65K per year. However, just one year later, that number jumped to 625 employees who made over $65,000 per year. I’m sure some of those people retired, or moved on to new jobs, but they still showed up on the payroll for that fiscal year and must be counted. The amount of increase in payroll demands from one year to the next, just one year, was $15,647,689.00. (The source for that information comes straight from the Pulse Journal wages edition published each March. Add the numbers up and that’s what you get) It is that number which causes the need for school levies.

Now recently the teachers union came up with a 3 year agreement so they could avoid the effects of Senate Bill 5, which was signed by Governor Kasich early in 2011, which puts a stop to the out of control “step increases” which has caused much of the trouble, because under a step plan, even though the teachers agreed to a “wage freeze” in August of 2009, they still received a wage increase under the “Step” plan which is why the salaries of the teachers went up so much over the course of one year. The teachers union at Lakota and other unions who have negotiated similar contracts plan to get S.B.5 repealed before their current contract expires, thus allowing them to resume back to their normal spending addictions, such as in 2008.

Having teachers making 65K or more is not a big deal if they only consists of the top quarter of your workforce, and in a district like Lakota which employs over 2000 staffing positions for more than 18,000 students the costs can get out of line quickly if not watched carefully.

Lakota has managed to bring their budget under the $160 million mark consistently on their 5 year forecast, but if it doesn’t balance the budget, then it’s not enough.

Tax rates at Lakota are already too high. There are too many homes going into foreclosure and higher taxes just aren’t attractive to potential home buyers. So the task at Lakota is to maintain its excellent rating, while also bringing down their costs and providing some relief to the tax payers, not more burden. If the loss of state and federal revenue forces the budget under $120 million a year, then that means the administration at Lakota needs to tackle their expensive costs, the amount of employees they have that are exceptionally well paid, to balance the budget. If that means letting those positions move someplace else so they can make more money and replacing them with cheaper labor…….fine. That’s the way the process works. Over paying employees is not good business, and does not make a district great. It makes fools of the management to even entertain such thoughts.

But statements that Lakota will be going backwards if we don’t pay more taxes are eerily similar to the kind of nonsense Lakota went through in 2008 when the labor threatened to strike, and got their pay raised as a reward, which the cost was passed down to each and every member of the community. If we are going to have to pay our new Superintendent Mrs. Mantia $165,000 a year, and the school board will justify that cost by stating that she is operating like a CEO of a company, well then we’ll expect her to drive down the costs in the same manner as a CEO does for their shareholders. I expect Mrs. Mantia to maintain Lakota’s excellent rating and current quality while driving down the labor costs to balance the budget. If she must let go of some of the expensive labor in favor of less expensive labor, then she must do that. But raising taxes is not an option. Any fool can do that. I could put my dog in charge of the school district and he could wag his tail to proclaim taxes need to be increased to meet a budget.

In the end, the Lakota Administration has not had the heart to do the right thing. They were outsmarted when it came to the labor dispute of 2008 and they are seeking to hide their shame with tax increases. The revenue produced by the community is more than sufficient to run an “excellent” school, but it is not sufficient to pay employees 20% to 30% more than the average income of the taxpayers themselves. The math just doesn’t add up.

Tax increases are an irresponsible measure by minds that lack the wisdom to see where they have made an error. And the greatest error is in pretending that more money will somehow fix the debacle. Lakota needs a long term plan for dealing with “declining revenues” because that is the fact of our age. People will be making less, properties will be worth less, there will be less coming from government and the bubble of tremendous benefits for public workers is at an end. And during this transition Lakota has an obligation to the millions of dollars our community produces to have a great school to maintain that service. Because failure is not an option! Lakota will not go backwards, and it cannot raise taxes. It must do the hard things that balance the current budget, or step aside so people who know what they’re doing can do it for them.

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

The Symposium of Justice: The gamble of Rich Hoffman

If it is once again one against forty-eight, then I am very sorry for the forty-eight.
Margaret Thatcher (b. 1925), British Conservative politician, prime minister. Quoted in: Daily Telegraph (London, 25 Oct. 1989), referring to the 1989 Commonwealth Conference.

That quote from Margaret Thatcher accurately sums up my reasons for putting out the book, The Symposium of Justice back in 2004. Recently at the Annie Oakley Wild West Showcase in Greenville, Ohio many of my friends from there had been talking about my 2004 book and how prophetic it now seemed in 2011, and it took me on a journey down memory lane about the content of that artistic work. As I ate Chinese food from a fairground vender my wife and I had a discussion about just how crazy many of the things I wrote about in The Symposium were at the time of its publication, and ironically how true many of those things had become in a world that is clearly headed in the direction of events written about in The Symposium of Justice.

My publisher back then was against the entire book. There were many arguments about content, which resulted in a rushed publication date. The editor who was working from an office in Paris quit altogether leaving the entire editing process to my wife, who can read and edit basically, but she wasn’t a professional editor but she stepped in to meet our deadlines. The conflict basically went like this, “Mr. Hoffman, what are you thinking? You open the book with the attempted rape of a young girl by a disgusting pedophile. You have old women who are terribly rude dissected by some future race of aliens thousands of years in the future. You go off on some tangent where there is a dragon slayer hunting dragons! Then you have a group of rebels launching an attack on Washington D.C. with flying cars! ARE YOU CRAZY! You’ll get no positive reviews within the United States. No paper will provide an endorsement. No TV station will touch this material. I mean you’re main plot point is that you have this vigilante running around in the night like some kind of Batman character using bullwhips to punish criminals, and trying to free society from a mind control device that is emitted in radio waves which affect the brain and make people do things they wouldn’t otherwise do! Mr. Hoffman, we advise you to rewrite this material, to stick with the primary storyline of the vigilante and expand on that character arch. You need to make this novel much more contemporary (progressive). As it is now, it belongs in a dime store saloon in Nevada, 1890. This type of pulp literature won’t even resonate with young people in the comic book market! The main character, this CLIFFHANGER/Fletcher Finnegan has absolutely no weaknesses. He seems to be a superman able to fight off thousands of enemies all by himself! Where is the conflict in that? What is he afraid of? Even Superman had Kryptonite which gave him human appeal. Your character is the perfect man, and there are no perfect men, so how can the audience relate?”

I remember that conversation so well because I was standing on the phone in the middle of Comp USA at the time buying a new computer and the French editor, exasperated with me put her boss on the line, another French guy who spoke good English, but definitely had a French accent as he spoke, every word had a kind of accentuated thrust at the beginning of each sentence. My publisher at the time was a Canadian company. Being my first book, I couldn’t get the big New York publishers interested, so I turned to Victoria, Canada, capital of British Columbia to a publisher who would carry the title if I put up the upfront cost of publishing, which I did. My editor and company contact however was in the Paris, France office which is why they even took the time to speak to me, because I was paying them upfront. That company was purchased by an American firm a few years ago and they are now located outside of Indianapolis, Indiana, and they still carry the title only under different ownership. But even under those conditions, the publisher of my book had serious concerns. They hadn’t seen anything like it and weren’t sure what to do about bringing it to the market place.

In duress prior to a rewrite my wife and I took a trip to Niagara Falls and stayed at the Marriott Fallsview Hotel and Spa to get away from our normal environment for the weekend and talk about what to do about the book. We went to Canada because the publisher was in Canada and I wanted to put my mind in a unique setting so I could think clearly on the issue, and Clifton Hill like Gatlinburg and International Street in Orlando, Florida is a hotbed of commercialism, audaciousness, and imagination. Walking around the commercial districts targeting an international audience which seemed appropriate since The Symposium of Justice was an international publishing effort my wife told me, “It’s your book, your vision. I think it’s great. It’s our story, it’s about our struggles. It’s your autobiography, your heart, your soul. If you want to change it to match the publisher recommendations it’s your call. It’s also your writing career.”

I remember looking at the Ripley’s Believe It or Not exhibit as she said this and thinking what a monstrosity of commercialism it was. “If I stick with it, my writing career may be a short one.”

She looked at me, the blinking neon lights of Clifton Hill glittering in the slight chill of an October, Canadian evening and said, “it was you who ran around in the night with your whips trying to catch that rapist and protect your family, it was your family the police targeted because you wanted to expose that drug trade they were covering up, it was you who worked that second job as a cook to make up the financial difference of what we needed as a family, so you could spy on the local teenagers and find out who the dealers were, it was you who have spent nearly two decades reading mythology and philosophy in your “spare” time. If you want to listen to some French chick that’s about five years older than your own kids, just so you can sell more copies of the book, then do it. It’s your writing career. But think about what you admire, the artists you’ve enjoyed who society sometimes takes a century or even more to appreciate because the writer is so far out ahead of the rest of the world. The ideas you stick by in this book will follow you all your life and then some.”

We returned from that trip and I had decided to throw all the dice out there and keep the book pretty much the way I had written it.
________________________________________________________

Chapter 1: Scarface the Rapist: A convict is released from jail and encouraged by law enforcement to harass the pubic with fear by raping a young girl, so the public would support more law enforcement. The rape is interrupted by a vigilante named Cliffhanger who beats the rapist to near death with two bullwhips leaving the community split on how they feel about it. Cliffhanger gives the young girl a manifesto called “The Symposium of Justice” to be published in the local newspaper which includes Cliffhanger’s Ten Rules for living, and numerous stories written by Cliffhanger to make the argument publicly on the merits of the vigilante versus the rule of law.

Chapter 2: Stereotypical Reality: is the story published in the town paper of two vain women who are contemplating why they should live forever. One of the women is extremely wealthy and is considering a new technology called cryogenics, to freeze her body upon death to be awaked at some future time when technology can revive her. This woman realizing that she is virtually immortal becomes audaciously arrogant and rude to other people as the natural wisdom of age is interfered with the illusion that death is not on her horizon, so she reverts to a teenage mindset. When the public has had too much of her rudeness she is killed and revived in the distant future to find an alien race has found her body and is using it to perform genetic engineering to build slaves for themselves.

Chapter 3: The Veil Master: The mayor of the town hires an assassin to kill Cliffhanger for interfering with his plans with the rapist. The assassin is an arm of “The System” a progressive global group of which the mayor is attempting to climb in political power. The mayor reveals that the entire town is under a scientific experiment he is developing for “The System” which emits a radio wave that directly affects the pituitary gland in the human brain and makes citizens behave impulsively in ways they can control. The mayor explains to the assassin that if the results of his town are positive, then “The System” will be able to employee the same “mind controlling” methods all over the world.

Chapter 4: The Perilous Bed: Another story published in the town paper which Cliffhanger introduces his Ten Rules for Living to the community, hoping to fight off the mind control methods of “The System.” It’s about a young knight who wants to marry the daughter of a much respected noble. He thinks that by cutting off the head of a dragon, it will earn him the right to ask the noble for permission. The noble turns the dragon head offering down, but invites the kid to attempt to stay on a magical bed, in a magical room that will hurl three perilous tests at the young man. If the kid survives, he earns the right to ask the nobles daughter to marry him. (This was a story intended for my son-in-law which he understood)

Chapter 5: The Overman: A grill cook, the fastest man around who is mysteriously wealthy and married to the much respected town council woman Misty Finnegan, works with the local teenagers at a popular restaurant in town. Fletcher Finnegan has frequent duels with the local teenagers who respect the older man very much, but consider his thoughts “out dated” for the times. Fletcher seems to be particularly interested in a young girl who works at the restaurant as a cashier, who is the older sister to the little girl who suffered the rape attempt. The cashier is currently dating a kid who also works at the popular restaurant called, Republics. That kid is a known drug dealer and argues often with Fletcher Finnegan about morality.

Chapter 6: Return of the Flying Tigers: Another story published in the local paper to justify the vigilantism of Cliffhanger. America is in a civil war. The coastal regions have turned against the interior of the nation. A group of video game freedom fighters are recruited by an old man to lead a rag-tag offensive against the nations forces stationed over Washington D.C. Using M400 Skycars, the old man hopes to have a tactical advantage over the best defense the military has in scoring a psychological battle for the resistance by bombing the air craft carriers stationed at Annapolis Military Academy.

Chapter 7: Fran Calls: A follow-up story in the newspaper is about Hurricane Fran when it hit Chapel Hill, North Carolina and a group of tree trimmers head to the region to help with the clean-up and get rich over the insurance claims. As the work dries up, fights break out among the workers that could lead to death as everyone fights for the remaining money left as civilization returns to the region in the wake of the disaster.

Chapter 8: The Veil of Knowledge: The town mayor takes the assassin and the assassin’s personal army of specialized killers to the location of the mind control device, which is hidden in a water tower just outside of town. They are all given medallions which absorb the invisible radio waves leaving them immune to the effects of the powerful impulses. A plan is set to capture and kill Cliffhanger brutally by setting a trap.

Chapter 9: Tabernacles of Joyless Lust: A newspaper story about a real-estate agent trying to repair a deal gone bad. The agent is in an affair with her boss who is using the relationship against the woman plunging her into a law suit against her clients whom she is particularly fond of.

Chapter 10: River Dual: The mayor and his assassins raid the riverside home of a local gunsmith for two reasons. They want to make an example of the man for his support of firearms, and they hope to lure Cliffhanger out into the light of day for an epic battle which is exactly what happens. The mayor and all his assassins, except for the primary one, are killed in the battle. The primary barely escapes with his life.

Chapter 11: The Other Side of the Fence: The last newspaper story to be seen by the public, a young divorcee has found herself in the arms of a very abusive man. The man appeared to be everything a young woman dreams of until she leaves her husband and lets the new man move in. Once the man is in her home she finds he’s not what he advertised, and is now in fear of the man not only for herself but her young child.

Chapter 12: Salad Bar Goddess: The assassin is sent to an upscale restaurant near the town where his career took a nose dive. This “hit” given to him by “The System” is a chance at redemption for his failure at the river. His target is the outspoken Fletcher Finnegan who has been all over the newspapers and television recently speaking out against the policies of “The System.” The assassin’s job is to locate the man, kill him in a highly public place in front of his family, and send the subtle message to the town that resistance is futile. At the restaurant where Finnegan is reported to be at, the assassin sees the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen at the salad bar. He recognizes the woman as Misty Finnegan, whom he remembered the slain mayor had been trying to get into his bed, and was denied much to his frustration. The assassin is then shocked to find that the woman is strangely unconcerned about his presence as she returns to her table where her small children are eating with her husband, making eye contact with the assassin several times with pity on her face. Then the assassin makes eye contact with her husband and discovers it is he who is the target of his assassination. It is Fletcher Finnegan himself, and he is aware of the assassin’s presence also, as he stares him down from across the room. The assassin looking into the eyes of Finnegan is startled to see absolutely no fear there, which is an emotion he is not prepared for. He had never met a man without any fear behind his eyes of any kind. It was at that moment that the assassin had seen that same look in the eyes of Cliffhanger, and that the two men were one in the same.

The assassin is filled with envy, at the direction of his sad and pathetic life. He suddenly realizes that his entire life has been nothing more than slavery to “The System.” He is jealous of Finnegan for being enough of a man to be able to have a woman like Misty Finnegan, because such a woman could have her pick of any man. And she didn’t pick Finnegan because of money, prestige, or any level of power. She picked him because he was good. And no woman of any worth would ever want the assassin for anything other than being a thug, a brute, a mere puppet to his masters.

The assassin realizes that if he wanted to do one good thing in his life, he’d let Fletcher and his family live, because he was on the wrong side, clearly. He nods to Fletcher and proceeds to leave the restaurant where he throws himself in front of a truck on a highway to commit suicide. The assassin knows that “The System” will hunt him for not completing the contract so he’ll be killed eventually anyway. At least this way, he can do it on his terms.

———————————————-

I remember when the Pulse Journal came to my house to do an interview about my book when it came out in the spring of 2004. He wanted to talk about my whips but wasn’t sure how to make such depressing topics appealing in a newspaper article to the general population. I had the same trouble at book stores and other media events, where the focus of the story was on my use of bullwhips, but nobody wanted to touch the content of the story, rape, murder, civil war, mind control, drug trafficking, spies, global conspiracies, it was just too much for the general public to accept, and the media was lost in how to cover it.

The book was obviously extremely anti-progressive, which was well before anybody was talking about what a progressive was. It sold to my friends in the Western Arts community who bought it because the hero had a whip and it reminded them of Zorro, but they were uneasy with the heavy political overtones and scientific basis behind the mind control plot, as were many people who weren’t prepared to deal with such things.

I reminded them that the old Republic serial called Zorro’s Fighting Legion had a similar story line. It was over the top stuff and fun, but it also taught kids valuable lessons about fighting for what they believed in. But as many of them told me then, society has “outgrown that kind of entertainment.”

It took me a while to get over some of the self-criticism I had about the book because every aspect of it was uphill. But as my wife had told me, “why are you writing this? Is it to become wealthy, is it to have a career as a writer, or is it to create a work of art that will stand the test of time?” I picked the later.

It has been only recently where people who have bought it have made excited comparisons to Atlas Shrugged and other kinds of art work that has direct appeal to those in the Tea Party movement. Well, I didn’t even know about Atlas Shrugged when I wrote Symposium. I wrote Symposium based on observations I had been making about the direction of the world, and I wanted to put those observations into a format of “pulp fiction” that people understood and could relate with to articulate that message.

A cowboy friend of mine approached me at The Annie Oakley Festival last weekend and told me, “I thought you were a little off the deep end when I read that book 7 years ago, but you know what, it don’t seem so crazy now.”

I smiled at the guy. “Who would have ever thought?” He was there when I did book signings of that book all those years ago and the public bought it because they saw me performing and wanted something of mine to take home to their friends with my signature in it. Most people didn’t understand the book at all, and told me as much the following year. But the people who did were people many would consider “conspiracy theorists.” I had people travel the length of the country to meet me the following year just to shake my hand because my book, “spoke to them.” But in talking with these people, it was obvious they were the social extremists out there and while I appreciated their support, I was frustrated that the general population just didn’t get it.

At a film festival a few years ago Gery Deer laughed at the small line of people who seemed to follow me everywhere I went, he’d call them “Hoffman’s radical groupies.” He knew the obsessive type; they were similar to those who frequent Star Trek Conventions, and Star Wars events. Only these were “conspiracy theory nerds” and they would line up to have their picture taken with me.

“I feel like an idiot posing for pictures with these guys,” I’d say to Gery.

“Hey, they’re fans. Be happy you have them. Some artists work their whole life to get one fan that will drive across the country to have their picture taken with them.” He’d pat me on the back. “You have a nice little handful.”

My wife would sit back and smile, knowing that those types of activities were something I didn’t enjoy doing. “I didn’t want to appeal to just the radical fringe,” I’d say to her.

At the hotel in Cleveland, at a film festival where I won a screenwriting award for a different project, but had been receiving a lot of comments about The Symposium she said to me at the pool while I was swimming, “Do you remember the homeless guy in the movie Always, who Richard Dreyfuss as a ghost was talking through. The homeless guy was one of those guys who just saw too much, and was close to the edge of death, so close that he could see beyond his surroundings. You’re like that only you have learned to function in the world like a normal human being. Many of these people haven’t learned to do that. They see TOO much, so they seem crazy to the rest of the world that is really just half asleep. That is the pain of being too awake, is that you run the risk of having your brain fried.”

She was right, and this comment went back to the one that started it all back in Niagara Falls, that time and perception would catch up if I let it. The important thing was to put it down on paper and let the art speak for itself.

This is fresh on my mind now, because more and more people are thanking me for writing The Symposium of Justice and even though I have put that book on the shelf and am moving on to new projects, it gives me great pleasure to know that it is touching people’s lives. So to those of you who wanted to know the story of how that book came to be, and why I don’t talk about it much, it’s because for one, I think it’s cheesy when involved in high-profile cases like I am, to always be pimping a book. That book for me is something that has meaning beyond these current years, so it’s not important to me to have my ego massaged with a boost in sales. It’s more important to deal with the issues of the day, which currently is protecting S.B.5 and fighting school levies which are obvious crimes against the tax payers. But the creative side of me does enjoy knowing that people are touched by something that was extremely difficult, and controversial to create, that fell short of my quality standards because of the circumstances under which it was produced, but the heart of the project remained uniquely in place because I had angered everyone involved in publishing and marketing to bring to being something that was WAY out in front of the political curb.

And for that I’m very proud. When you take on an endeavor where you are outnumbered by a lot, and you stick to your guns because you know in your heart that you are right, it feels wonderful to have that weight lifted off your shoulders as the times prove that the numbers against you were wrong, as usual.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE SYMPOSIUM OF JUSTICE AT AMAZON.COM:

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

S&P Downgrade America: Crack Whores, Politicians, and Scumbags wreck a Superpower

ALERT! ………………………BIG SURPRISE……..CHINA LECTURES AMERICA ABOUT DEBT!!!!!!

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/China-flays-US-over-credit-rb-3974888722.html?x=0

Thanks Timothy Geithner, Barack Obama, Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Al Frankin, Barney Frank, George Bush senior and junior, Bill Clinton, Lyndon Johnson, Franklin Roosevelt and many, many, many others, your dream of ruining America is nearly complete. With the official downgrade of Standard & Poor’s credit rating from a AAA to a AA+ America woke up Saturday morning with the dumbfounded look of a mere teenager whom had just been dropped off at college with his parents credit card and racked up an enormous amount of debt on that card only to find out he now had too many commitments to too many debtors and he has now lost his ability to borrow. Or more accurately, that his ability to borrow has been downgraded, not only is this news unfortunate in that it presents new financial restrictions, but it shows that the foolish teenager can’t be trusted.  Again for the second week Darryl Parks of 700 WLW had a fantastic broadcast about this whole issue.  Toward the end, I come on Darryl’s program to discuss the difference between “crack whores” and politicians, and we can’t think of any!  Click below to have a listen:

Anyone with even a partially functioning brain could have seen it coming. I mean, look at the charts! Yet politicians have developed the habit of purchasing power for themselves by giving stuff away without having an eye toward the day when they’d have to pay for it, just like the foolish teenager spending his parents money. The teenager has no understanding of money because they didn’t earn it. They do know that they can impress people by buying them dinner, or that they can get dates by buying presents for the opposite sex, but they don’t understand why doing these acts has so much power. That’s because the people receiving these gifts know that money is hard to get, because you must do something to earn it. Something somewhere must be produced to get something. Nothing is produced from thin air, so when someone partakes in a pleasure, and the person enjoying that pleasure didn’t do anything to earn that pleasure, then somebody somewhere is getting ripped off, because they did the work which generated the money of which someone else is enjoying the benefits. With the teenager, his parents did the work, while the kid had the fun. In government, it is the tax payer who does the work, while the government spends the money on impressing their friends.

What Standard and Poor just did was let the child know that the government has misused the money. The trouble is the government is a reflection of the taxpayer just like the teenager is a reflection of the parent. And now that the United States has been downgraded, we all look foolish.

Look at these charts!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What are those idiots thinking!!!!!!!!!

We all know politics in Washington has been a joke for a long time. But it’s only been very recently that our debt has been out of control. The debt in 1990 was hovering around 2 trillion after a long Cold War with Communist Soviet Union. Yet the moment that George Bush Senior took office, the spending skyrocketed for the next 20 years, with the exception of a period at the end of Bill Clinton’s second term as president, while he was in trouble with the Monica Lewinsky situation, where the President actually worked with John Kasich, Ohio’s current governor to balance the budget. Other than that, it’s been a spending binge with no eye on reality. Obama is only the latest, and most obvious big spender, and America is now a nation of spoiled brats, educated to believe all the wrong things matter. It is actually the education system itself that I blame, because the emphasis for three decades now has been on social issues, not economics. The result is that we have a society of people who will update their Facebook account religiously, but won’t pay any attention to how money is spent, how it’s generated, or what makes something better than another thing. Therefore, these people function with the assumption that America is great, it will always be great, and they have to do nothing to maintain it.

This is no different than the spoiled teenager saying, “Do you know who my dad is,” as a way to leverage some power over someone else. What the teenager should say is “Do you know who I am?” The teenager should have worked hard to build a name for himself, so being “somebody” has value.

The same thing is going on right now in our country. “We are America.” Well, so what! That doesn’t mean anything if teachers are more concerned over their “union rights” promised to them by LBJ, than actually working hard to leave their own mark in the world from their own efforts. It means nothing if the caretakers of America will spend more time updating their Facebook status while out to dinner with friends or family rather than paying attention to what is going on in the world around them. America means nothing if the people elect a politician to represent their beliefs in their state or in Washington, then don’t pay any attention to what that representative is doing. The value of America is lost in the complacency.

The debt crises is about one primary thing, aside from the obvious immaturity of the action involved in spending beyond our means, it is about a failed philosophy.

Being an American means something, but it loses its meaning if the aspects behind the definition are lost, poorly maintained, or simply squandered away carelessly. It is the philosophy of self-reliance that built America, and it is the children of prosperity, these fool politicians and academics who like immature teenagers have questioned their parental guidance in search of their own identity. But in the process, they have destroyed the family name of America.

That is what the downgrade means to America. It is embarrassing, and signals that the teenagers we’ve turned loose to run our country are simply not equipped to do so. They have learned the wrong philosophy for being a caretaker of the greatest country in recorded history, and they need to be removed quickly.

 
When I listen to the politicians complaining about the Tea Party being “terrorists” and other derogatory terms, again I think of the immature teenager, who complains about how “mean” their parents are, because that’s what’s happening. The teenager, who does not understand the value of things, who does not understand why the family name is so important because it’s just always been good, ridicules their parents for all the same reasons the politician ridicules the Tea Party. The Tea Party has evolved in American society as the responsible parent who has come back to the college to pick up their kid, take away their credit cards and teach them a hard lesson for their own good.

The teenager may cry about it, they may call the parent names, but it is for their own good in the end.
It is our responsibility to reel in the neglect these politicians are inclined to indulge in, because we have seen what they will do on their own accord. This most recent president is simply a spoiled child who is displaying the roots of many psychological problems. Donald Trump stopped short of calling the guy stupid, but I’ll say about him the same as I’ve said of many young people I’ve seen drunk and choking on their own puke after drinking way too much, or the young girl passed out on a sofa, completely nude who has urinated all over herself from her irresponsibility and personal neglect, that this current president and the congress, and the senate, especially the house led under Nancy Pelosi are a bunch of stupid teenagers who should all be gathered up and dropped into the middle of a desert so they can learn what real hardship is, and learn to overcome adversity, and grow up to have some sense.

Because the philosophy for which they are functioning under is reprehensible, destructive, and embarrassing, and I personally will not provide excuses for the behavior of those children.

The answers to these problems are along the lines of this John Stossel segment. I agree with everything except his view on drugs. What John does is similar to the parent who sits their child down to explain the rules they are expected to live under. If America was smart, it would use Stossel’s guide to hold all government to a level of expectation which will then improve the family name to the value we all expect it t be.

Source for picture:
http://www.federalbudget.com/
Other picture references:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_public_debt

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

Save us from Embarrassment: Mt. Healthy levy fails and like all government is asking for more

Doc Thompson covered the results of the debt ceiling increase on 700 WLW the same day that President Obama signed the bill which passed the house late in the night, the senate early in the morning and arrived on the president’s desk a half hour later.  While all this was going on Doc contemplated the winners and losers about a deal that essentially does nothing but allow the government to increase it’s debt to 16 trillion from the 14 trillion it is now, which amounts to a joke suitable for a comedy club. 

The same day the debt ceiling was increased voters went to the polls for local school districts asking for more money, Mt. Healthy being one, which went down to defeat. Before the ink was dry on the newspaper announcing the headline all over Cincinnati, Mt.Healthyadministration officials were declaring that they would try again in November of this year! 

This has left many of us scratching our heads, what don’t the Mt. Healthyofficials understand about the voters rejecting the levy?  Isn’t that a clear sign to the district that the residents have sent a clear message to cut their spending?  Yet the district like a bunch of mindless ants only know how to do one thing and that’s ask for more money. 

At Lakota we are getting ready to defend ourselves from yet another levy increase when it has been made clear that the residents do not want to increase their taxes.  It has been established that the source of the problem of all these school districts is that the teachers unions have taken way too much money from the community to pay their salaries which are extraordinarily high.  At Lakota the average teacher makes over 60K a year.  That’s the average! 

Nobody is asking teachers to make low amounts of money, but by any scale anything over 55 K per year is a good living, and a teacher should be happy with a reasonable living, especially if the tax payers are being required to pay for it off their property.  But the trouble is that the teachers unions force dues upon their teachers, and other costs are deducted from their paychecks without the teachers consent.  The NEA is taking money from its members to re-elect President Obama, and in Ohio the OEA is taking money away from teachers to help repeal S.B.5 this November.  So the real income of a teacher isn’t quite as high as their salary because they have these political deductions coming out against their will. 

More and more often I am getting notes like the one below from teachers who desperately want to see reform and they want out of their unions.  They want to see the school boards have the teeth to solve their financial problems and they don’t support the politics of their union, however, if they want to work as a teacher in the state of Ohio, they HAVE to be in the union.  And the unions continue to drive up the cost of education using their members as a shield and revenue stream to fulfill a political agenda which they place on the backs of the property owners. 

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  1.  I am a teacher, and I would give anything to not be a member of the union. I am so sick of them. They are hijacking children’s education and tying it up in endless bureaucracy, squabbling over funds that don’t exist. Unions served their purpose, but now federal labor laws have covered what rights the unions once fought to protect. Now my rights are being violated when I am forced to join (and pay, which is all they care about). It is a complete scam, a giant monopoly of power, and completely counterproductive in this period where transition to new models of education is key if we want our children to be competitive globally.

(Oh, AND SCRAP TENURE. Terrible system that stagnates positive growth.) I don’t want to secure my own job by throwing kids under the bus. If I’m not good enough, I should be fired, plain and simple. The idea of protecting yourself from hostile workplace politics is not enough of a pro to save that outdated concept.

Sara

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The trouble with schools and the trouble with the federal government are the same.  They are all built on a model of Keynesian economics which has turned out to be a scam, and the people who have supported this economic theory have egg on their faces.  They insist on more “revenue” which is just a fancy word for “taxes.”  More revenue, more TAXES is the only way the Keynesian economists which fill the rank and file labor union leaders and politicians with great abundance can save themselves from the embarrassment of financial failure. 

That’s what we’re dealing with here, it’s a complete failure of political and economic philosophy that has been tried, and has failed.  And it’s embarrassing.  That’s the sum of the entire situation. 

What tax payers at all levels are being asked to do is to save these people, who were taught and believe all the wrong things, the embarrassment of facing the music which they have played upon our culture.  By throwing money at these situations these advocates of higher taxes hope to delay the ramifications of their failure to a future time when maybe they won’t be present to accept the blame, where the burden will be transferred to some unfortunate public servant onto a generation that is still playing with toys and watching Nickelodeon on TV. 

To those of us who know better, who never believed the merits of Keynesian economics the answer is obvious.  Costs must be brought in line to live within the budget established by the community.  In the case of schools, it’s the wages that are inflated and encompass every teacher of a district and the union monopoly which have driven up those wages that are the problem.  The union middleman option is simply too costly to a district.  At the Federal level it’s the entitlement programs which were created to buy bloc voting sectors to gain political power that is causing all the trouble, and all these parties are now caught in the lie they have built their entire lives around, and it’s time for someone to face the music. 

When any school district or politician asks for more “revenue” what they are really asking is for you to bail them out of the embarrassment their own actions have created.  And they expect you to bail them out at your own expense.  How does that make any sense, when the proper thing to teach our young people is that if you make the wrong decisions in life, you must face the music and change direction?  Not look to others to bail you out of your trouble so your feelings won’t be hurt, because such a position is not only expensive, it’s detrimental to the human condition, which is evident in the ideological positions of all who want a tax increase.  

How out of touch are these people?  Listen to Harry Reed, majority leader of the Senate; ask if he can go home to care for his fig tree.  That’s the mentality we’re dealing with.

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

The Wisdom of Darryl Parks: What congress and the senate don’t want you to know

It was nice to see that Gabbie Gifford was able to make a vote on the house floor for the epic vote on raising the debt ceiling, but in the back of my mind there was something wrong with the timing and ceremony of the whole affair.  I didn’t want to admit it to myself, because I don’t want to believe that Congressman Gifford would participate in such a thing, but it seemed to me that Gifford’s return to the house was designed to take the edge off all the fighting that had been going on in congress about whether or not to raise the debt ceiling, and whether or not there would be “revenue” involved. 

Such a thought actually makes me feel bad, to question the honesty of congress.  I’m sure in her case she has probably wanted to come back for a while.  But it was her friends in the house who probably “encouraged” her to return for this big vote in order to show “unity” to the American people.  The games of politics are nasty and costly, but I think the treachery and manipulation that these people are capable of has been dramatically underestimated, and based on what I know now about their activities, I would not put it passed congress to attempt to use Gabby Gifford to help make the American people forget about how ugly business in government truly is.  When I think such things I wonder if I’m the only one who sees it, that is until I hear Darryl Parks talk on 700 WLW every Saturday morning from 9 AM to 11.  While all this government ugliness was unfolding over the weekend I was on my way to The Annie Oakley Festival and had the opportunity to listen to Darryl on my hour and a half trip to Darke County,Ohio. Darryl Parks thinks much the way I do about most things, so it was refreshing to hear him speak with incredible clarity about our nation’s problems as the summer sun began to heat up the day of that momentous broadcast.  I think this particular broadcast was so good, and so historic that it deserved over an hour of transition over to podcast for the convenience of those who haven’t heard it, or to be listened to again for those who did hear it and want to listen again.  So do yourself a favor and hit PLAY on the link below.  Grab a snack and sit back and listen with the clarity of hindsight, now that the crisis has been averted for the moment, and marvel at the wisdom of Darryl Parks. 

Politicians have been a joke for a number of years and culturally we have dismissed them as irrelevant aspects of our lives.  Seldom if ever whether it be a Looney Toons cartoon from the 30’s and 40’s, or a film, television show, or novel, is a politician portrayed in a trustworthy manner.  It is universally accepted that as a group, politicians are deceitful, life-sucking aspects of our society who have virtually no benefit to our culture.  They make rules that we all have to live by, and they make decisions that cost us money.  Yet we listen to the same speeches every election cycle and hope that somehow things will be different with the next politician.  Then we act surprised when we find out that politicians have enriched themselves greatly while working in public office.  This is the gist of what Darryl was talking about, how can a politician like Mitch McConnell get rich as a politician?  Or how does Barack Obama becomes a millionaire between the years of 2004 to 2008 while he was just another senator?  The answer is they are making deals, and benefiting from insider trading, many of the conditions they create legislation to help along, a practice that should be illegal, but isn’t because it is the law makers committing the crime who would have to create the law. 

Many politicians I believe start their public careers with good intentions, where they really want to help.  But the money and power available to them is just too lucrative and they quickly turn to corruption for that age-old pursuit of financial security.  There are always exceptions of course, but as a general rule in a governmental body that depends on majority rule, if a majority is corrupt, then the body itself is also corrupt, and that is the case with our general government.

I listened carefully to the complaints of politicians on both sides of the political spectrum as the debt ceiling issue came to a close.  They are grossly out of touch insisting on even more money to support a political system that is obviously full of thieves.  Those thieves don’t consider themselves looters of course, because they are the law.  They see themselves as citizens who deserve the highest respect for their service to their country, but by their actions they are simple thieves, seeking for themselves plunder at the expense of the people they represent no different from a pirate.

You can learn a lot by watching people under duress, and America learned a lot about its politicians as the debt crises unfolded.  The demand for more “revenue,” a term used to disguise the real meaning which is “taxes,” from the voting population as a way to manipulate the situation to their advantage from a public guilty of trusting them, rang out from many politicians like drug addicts crying for another hit of “speed.” 

The level of corruption and financial addiction has shocked even me, a long time big government skeptic. I did not know it was this bad, I simply suspected as much.  But the proof is there for all of us to see.  We have a big problem in America.  We have to rethink the whole political process and the kind of people we want to fill those seats. 

We know the enormity of the problem because the vote that just occurred over the debt ceiling increase amounts to nothing.  It solves no problems, it still allows government to spend more than it takes in, and the solution of these parasites is just to send more money to them to cover the gaps.  Yet there is praise among the thieves and much back slapping going on for all those law makers are proud of themselves and they cheered in unison when Gabby Gifford came to the chamber and changed the story in the media from a “combative congress finally passes a vote,” to “Congressman Gifford cast her first vote since her tragic accident.”  And the nation looked at the image of Mrs. Gifford waving her hand to the crowd, collectively all the fights of the last week dropped away from the memory of voters in favor of the more pleasant story of Gabby Gifford’s amazing recovery. 

While all this was going on the thieves took a deep breath of relief as the media attention focused on the recovering congressman and allowed them to scurry away to the cracks they all hide in to figure out some way to spin the situation to their advantage, and attack those darn “tea baggers,” “talk radio hosts,” and “TV personalities” who are telling the public all about the scam they have been employing for decades. 

Yet the whole structure is supported by the “revenue” that Americans give those thieves, so we are guilty of subsidizing criminal activity knowingly.  After this episode and the information available to the American public if they allow it to continue, they are guilty of a real crime, not one created by corrupt law making politicians, but one of the moral code of the human race, where we are supposed to treat each other fairly, and with honesty and not with the heart of a predator in favor of a life of respect and valor.  Because if that’s the case, then all those corrupt politicians are accurate representatives of the demons which reside inside each and every voter, which makes us all guilty in the eyes of the universe. 

Thank goodness people like Darryl Parks gets it…………what’s wrong with everyone else?

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

Memories, Friends, and 8 X 10’s: The Annie Oakley Western Showcase!

The yearly meetings at the Fairlawn Steak House in Greenville, Ohio are becoming something of an American tradition, where a nearly extinct breed of human being, who do things because it puts a smile on the faces of children without ever considering money as a primary concern, gather.  The Fairlawn looms directly across from the Darke County Fairgrounds and every year during the last weekend of July the City of Greenville celebrates the life of Annie Oakley with a tribute to the western arts that made her an American treasure, and most of the western performers in the nation make the pilgrimage to Greenville each year to run their act, compete against each other, and gather at the Fairlawn at the end of the day for beer, steak, and tales of the years adventures.  See a montage of the weekend’s events here: 

The air conditioning in the Fairlawn works nicely in the little side room where this group of western arts performers gathers late into the steamy night.  Outside the setting sun fills the big sky in this part of the country in a spectacular way.  The orange neon lights that advertise the steak house to passers-by on Sweitzer St was a welcome sight to all of us who spent the day cracking whips, throwing knives, spinning guns, throwing ropes, singing, performing magic and answering questions to a curious crowd.  As we stagger up the path to the restaurant and the cool air inside greets us, nostalgia is the overwhelming emotion.  This year the bar’s television had on a Reds game, just like last year only this time as my wife and I ordered a beer, there was a news flash that came up over the bartender’s head to announce that congress and the senate is close to a debt ceiling deal. 

“Thieves,” an old man uttered over his beer looking from the TV to my wife then to the sweat soaked Australian outback hat on my head that has seen the world and looks like it.  “They’re all a bunch of crooks and thieves, every damn one of them.” 

“You’re right,” I said to him.  I noticed that old man was looking at my whip holster on my belt and he was curious.  Then behind me came the rest of our clan, all western performers openly wearing knives, whips, and guns as they wearily went to their seats in the party room where our reservations placed us away from the rest of the crowd in the main dining room. 

The old man watched them approvingly.  Then looked back at me, “You all from across the street?” 

“Yeah,” I replied as my wife smiled a bit at the man.  My wife likes older people because they no longer feel the need to engage in personal politics, and they have a life-time of wisdom to pass on to a generation who throws them away like trash.  She likes older people for all the same reasons that I like my western art friends.  There is truth in their eyes and wisdom in their hands.  And I could see the wisdom in the hands of the old man as he nursed his beer and looked over the rim at an image of President Obama talking about how people need to work together to solve this national crises.  “Damn thief,” he uttered again his eyes on the screen.   

And he’s right.  Many people have asked me how I can speak out on the tax topics the way I have, and go on TV speaking out so openly about how broken our political system is, my roots in those statements come from the type of friends I have, the people with me at the Fairlawn Steak House, who live life with honesty and perform an art form rooted in valor and goodness.

As the night wore on, there were stories from the old days, back when old Hollywood stunt men and Las Vegas performers were the guiding lights for all of us young guys, a torch that has been handed to us to preserve.  But that was a different age.  Divorces, financial hardships, and entertainment politics have put western arts on the downside of American priorities and what used to be many thousands of western art performers is down to a mere handful, many of them at Annie Oakley and eating steak at the Fairlawn.  We talked about the many personalities who have come and gone over the years, some still working in western arts, some giving it up because of financial necessity, but many of us sitting there at the end of a day of performing have the feeling that we are the end of a breed.  A kid whose mom drove him up from Alabama named Luke and was just 16 was a bright spot to the rest of us who are all 40 and older.  Having young people wanting to get involved was refreshing. 

The reason these western artists gather at The Annie Oakley Festival, and not Las Vegas or some other place like it has in the past is because of my good friend, Gery Deer who runs a bullwhip training facility in Jamestown,Ohio.  It is because of Gery, who is a western arts supplier and occasionally provides material for the film industry, has worked with me for over a decade on independent features, he has a band who performs folk music all over the Midwest by tour bus, and he has the only indoor studio in America dedicated to the training of bullwhip artists.  So as the western has declined in Hollywood, and the need for Vegas shows with a western theme declined as well, it is Gery’s studio in Jamestown that has kept that tradition alive in America, because he is the only guy around who has a studio designed to preserving that tradition, and that includes Hollywood. 

Most of the top Western Performers in the country have passed through the Annie Oakley Western Showcase at some point in the last 9 years since the event was first implemented as a supplement to the big event out in Las Vegas.  But over time, the Vegas event finally folded when the great stuntman Alex Green, who was a big part of organizing that event, passed away.  That left only The Annie Oakley Western Showcase and Gery Deer to keep the torch lit. 

Many of the most dependable participants travel the country in their motor homes and live like gypsies much of the time.  Robert Dante, a long time bull whip performer and World Record holder fits this lifestyle.  His van was parked outside of the performance area and in between acts he simply goes back to his van to catch up on sleep.  Leading up to Annie Oakley he traveled from Minnesota to South Carolina performing shows then “stopping by” Ohio to spend time with us, as he usually does.   When I asked him about his lifestyle, if he got tired of always being unsettled waking up in different cites all the time and living out of a van he said, “Variety is the spice of life.”  He said it like a seasoned Shakespearian actor knowing full well that he was part of a dying breed and he wasn’t about to apologize for if.

Kirk and Malodee Bass are also long time friends of my wife and I.  Kirk started throwing knives the same weekend I did at an Annie Oakley event about 7 years ago.  He stuck with it where I didn’t and he’s now one of the best in the country and has his own show called Bass Blades.  They are old theater veterans from the great outdoor production called Blue Jacket which went out of business almost a decade ago after its critically acclaimed performances that featured live gunfire during the show couldn’t support itself financially.  They are very dedicated parents who are home schooling their kids which impresses me greatly.  They assembled the curriculum for their children’s education based on a friend of theirs who has a master’s degree in education.  Their kids are lucky to have such interesting, and dedicated parents who happen to spend their spare time throwing knives at each other. 

Richard and Donna Best were there as usual.  Richard was hired by the Annie Oakley Committee to be the official Buffalo Bill for the week since he looks so much like Buffalo Bill.  Richard and Donna are old timers in the Western Arts and have performed everywhere, particularly in Vegas.  Their act is an archeologists dream for it is an authentic recreation to the type of entertainment that thrilled audiences in the 40’s and 50’s.  They are wonderful people and occasionally their grandchildren have come to Annie Oakley with them and participate in rope tricks and whip work.  You can’t help but look at those young children and think how lucky they are to have grandparents who travel the county, where grandpa makes a living cutting targets out of the mouth of grandma.  Such figures in a child’s life are paramount to positive adult development.

In the outside world, away from the smiling faces, the cotton candy, the hot dogs, popcorn, corn dogs, snow cones and other carnival food, the world looks down its nose at this group of aging cowboys.  For the world has become more progressive.  The art of American tradition is something the political establishment has frowned down on. 

After my trip to the Fairlawn last year it was Chris Camp who put the idea in my head about performing The Whip Trick to Save America (see that video by clicking here).  Chris is such a fantastic whip artist that he travels the country full-time and stays booked, which is why he couldn’t make it this year, because he was simply too busy.  The trick I did in that video is one that he performs in his live show, and he told me how to do it, and I put my own spin on it.  It was conceived in the dining room of the Fairlawn using cups and salad plates.  After I did that video and released it to the public it got the attention of The Cincinnati Enquirer and I used the metaphor from that video to explain why I was against higher taxes, because like the old man said to me at the bar, “they are all thieves.”  Why would we give a thief more money?  It’s easy for us to see who the thieves are at the Fairlawn in the late hours of the night as the sweat from a whole day are caked to our bodies in need of a shower, where the beer tastes good because we earned it, and even a simple salad before a steak dinner tastes like exquisite cuisine, because freedom is openly celebrated at Greenville, Ohio and everyone can feel it.  And freedom is best celebrated in the art of freedom, and that is the western arts of my friends. 

As society has moved away from freedom and those celebrations, progressives have looked down their noses at the western arts in an attempt to rewrite history with a focus on the civil rights movement of the 60’s where progressive policies really began gain acceptance.  Celebrating the arts of westward expansion was not what progressive politics desired; they simply want to move beyond those memories to more recent times. 

But I don’t.  One of those life altering decisions happened for me shortly after The Enquirer did a feature on my Whip Trick to Save America where the organized elements of the unions and other progressive groups came after me calling me a “hick,” “hillbilly,” “kook” and other derogatory terms simply because I wore a cowboy hat and used bullwhips to help explain the need to cut taxes on an over-taxed society.  (CLICK HERE TO READ ALL ABOUT IT)  The personal attacks infuriated me to the level that convinced me to create this website, Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom.  The personal attacks persuaded me that traditional arts and lifestyles needed a voice that I was in a unique position to provide, because of my background in western arts, so I started this site as a result. 

The art of a culture reflects the culture itself.  This is how anthropologist and archeologist come to understand ancient cultures.  But using the same measurement with our present culture we can see easily the state of our country in our art.  That is why the old men sit at a bar and utter “thieves” to the TV over their beer glass because their values were built by the type of arts my friends perform on a regular basis.  But the young people who were watching the Reds game, noticeably turned away from the TV when the President came on, and were indifferent to what was being said.  They were also the type who looked oddly when my friends arrived at the restaurant and eyed mysteriously at how they were dressed, because those young people have been taught to reject tradition, so traditional art is something to ridicule. 

But in the grandstands all through the day, the crowd that gathered young and old enjoyed themselves thoroughly as the politics of the age dropped away at the gates, and visitors were able to forget themselves on a stroll back through a more innocent time, where cowboys weren’t afraid to be men, women were proud to be women and a young lady named Annie Oakley set the imaginations of American’s everywhere with the values of the greatest nation on Earth by her trick shooting in the Buffalo Bill Wild West show.  A century later the same type of performers touched that same spirit in all who witnessed this unique event through smiles and bright eyes regardless of age, for the jaded judgment of the age was suspended as the crack of whips and the fire from guns ran out often across the Darke County Fairgrounds to a public hungry for substance in their art. 

For my wife and I that substance came with our dinner and the friends we shared it with as the night encroached the evening and reality returned to those western artists who faced the loneliness of an art form which transcends the greed of money, or the power of politics but is simply about memories, friends, and 8X10’s.

 

Rich Hoffman

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