Category: Johnny Depp

TAKE AWAY THE CREDIT CARD OF CONGRESS: Yes, Obama actually blamed the current congress for the debt crises

If you are concerned about the direction of this country, and want to contribute to the solutions, the first thing you should do while reading this article is give yourself the time and watch all these videos completely at least once.  Then take your time and let it soak in.   Then send this link to your friends in an email and spread the word. 

I started my Saturday morning like almost all of them, at 4:30 AM where I catch up on my reading, emails, news I missed, etc.  My daughter sent the a picture she took of herself before she and her friends went to see the new Harry Potter film on Thursday.  In the picture she is magically levitating all her favorite things, the mask her mom and I gave her from the Yucatan, a can of Coke, a toy of Yoshi, and her XBox controller.  Her picture was intended to be fun but it made me think of President Obama, how he seems to believe that everything can be solved with the wave of some magic wand.  I spent some time reviewing material from a friend of mine in Ann Arbor, Matt Clark who does a radio show on WAAM and was hitting some very good points on his podcasts about the federal problems with the debt limit, which can be heard below.  Then Darryl Parks of 700 WLW really impressed me with his dead-on take of the same situation.  I mean he nailed the situation precisely!  Listen to that here:

While I was listening to Darryl, I received an email notification by David Plouffe on his new blog post from the White House website.   View it for yourself:

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/07/15/compromise-isn-t-dirty-word?utm_source=email121&utm_medium=graphic&utm_campaign=compromise

It told me to watch a video that President Obama did several months ago where he was sitting down with a group of students to explain the merits of compromise.  In that video I saw a man who shows what he is really good at, being a teacher.  And that’s where he belongs. 

What is happening in that video is The White House is trying to do damage control to the mess the President has created for himself.   They dusted off a video from a few months ago where the president is very likeable, and speaking honestly, and they released it today to build him up politically so he can establish consensus against the Republicans in this most recent budget battle.  What the video, and blog post is in essence is more of the same kind of politics that have buried this nation in debt with smoke and mirrors and side-show acts.  The facts cannot be ignored with emotion, which is what The White House is attempting on the heels of the very arrogant press conference given by the President yesterday. 

Did he really say that? Obama at the beginning of the press conference below said that congress had run up the credit card so the debt ceiling needs to be raised? What congress is he talking about, because that debt hasn’t been ran up in the last 6 months? How misleading…………………………

President Obama wants to raise taxes on the rich and he thinks that he is one of those “rich guys.” Twice in the President Obama’s speech Friday, July 15, 2011 he stated in his official statement regarding the debt ceiling negotiations “A person in my position,” as though the wealth he has he created himself. He thinks he is equal to all the job creators out there who actually take risks with their money to create an industry. There is a vast difference between a well paid politician like Obama, and a job creator, and he doesn’t understand that difference.

This tendency of politicians to believe that they are “special” in some way, or even equal to people who actually create jobs is preposterous. At Hollywood parties, which tend to lean toward the left politically, people like Steven Spielberg and Jeffery Katzenberg usually donate large sums of money to the presidential campaigns of people like Obama. And what they pay for with their donations is the ability to be close to the President. They get to sit up close in fund-raisers, and they get to shake hands with him, and usually get a picture taken with him.

Back in the 90’s Bill Clinton used to rent out the Lincoln Bedroom to his celebrity friends as a way to raise money for the DNC. The cost of that access is expensive. The problem is the White House is not the Presidents to sell, especially for political reasons. It wasn’t under Clinton, Bush, or Obama. The White House is the people’s house, and we let the President live there while they do the countries business.

One of the problems in America is this tendency of the rich and powerful, to desire to be close to a powerful politician. This doesn’t make any sense. Because the rich and powerful like Spielberg and others who create things from nothing, and employee thousands and thousands of people with their efforts are different from the politicians, and under no circumstances should have to pay to see their elected representatives.

America goes wrong by letting Presidents like Obama think they are royalty of some sort. When powerful people pay money to see a President something is wrong.

Could President Obama produce a film like Transformers? Could President Obama run a manufacturing facility? Could he even make payroll for the employees who count on him to make good decisions for their livelihood. No.

Obama should be the one to pay to see people like Spielberg. President Obama doesn’t make anything, he doesn’t do anything. He doesn’t even make decisions. Why do we honor him by throwing money in his direction? What does he have of any value but the title of President?

How valuable is the title of President?

It’s not valuable at all. It’s ceremonial, but otherwise virtually worthless. Politicians do not create jobs. Presidents don’t, governors don’t, no senators or congressman, none of them do. They are simply managers hired by the public to manage. They are not leaders. They are not lords, or elites. They are certainly not royalty. Anything they do make they take from a tax payer. It is not “they” who make it. It is someone else. The politician simply gives it away.

It is laughable that Barack Obama thinks that somehow he is equal or even superior to the other wealthy people he is calling for to pay the taxes he wants to increase. How hard is it for Barack Obama, who gets paid to do a management job, to ask for more money? The money comes easy to people like Obama now that he’s president. And like a lot of politicians, they have lost touch with reality because real money makers throw money at politicians hoping for a legislative favor later. That is because the politician has the power to legislate, to create new rules.

Those new rules are often the kind we don’t need. The politician makes legislation to pay back his contributors. Where the process fails is that the politician believes that there is value in their legislation. They begin to believe that they actually produce something, which of course they don’t.

Nobody should be idolized who creates nothing. Yet this is the culture of politics. When you shake the hand of one of these creatures, they almost seem to expect you to kiss their hand. They all sound like Barack Obama when he says, “I’m one of the elites. I’m willing to make the sacrifice. I’m not asking people to do anything I’m not willing to do myself.” They are willing to make that sacrifice because they didn’t earn the money to begin with. Everything they have has been given to them by someone else and they are like spoiled children who arrive at adulthood without a concept in their brains of the value of anything, because everything came easy to them.

It is easy for such valueless people to insist on more taxes because for them, all they have to do is agree to let Steven Spielberg take a picture with them and they generate millions of dollars. What they forget is that they are no different from the parent who pays money to have their child take a picture with Santa at Christmas, or the Easter Bunny. They are just props of authority that have symbolic meaning. They are employees in a costume and that costume can be taken off and put on another without the children being any wiser.

The President of the United States does not have a right to demand taxes for the rich. Nobody can even make a case for why tax payers should fund the current level of government. I’m looking for a tax cut, not a tax increase. How is the President taking money from me and giving it to some program that supports his political base my responsibility. That’s theft. All this talk about people paying their “fair share” is coming from the type of people who have no value and steal money from people to begin with, then tell us that the richest of all must pay more…………….for what reason, to pay for what? Medicare fraud, Social Security retirement benefits when the age of retirement is going to be going up for my generation to 70 perhaps 80? To pay for a Department of Education that is a complete waste of money, or an EPA that is driving up the cost of energy, a Department of Justice that is abusive and is picking winners and losers? What about the FCC who is advocating Net Neutrality. Why would I want my hard-earned money spent on any of that government waste? Why is supporting that waste my responsibility in paying my “fair share?”

Only a person who has no value for anything can make such requests. And President Obama is such a person. He’s a token representative of the same value as the guy we hire to play Santa Clause at Christmas time. The trouble starts when Santa starts believing that he actually lives in the North Pole and can circle the globe in a single night giving everyone presents. President Obama is suffering from his own delusions believing that he has such power and it is sadly revealing to hear him speak with an attempt at authority. Why doesn’t someone tell him he’s wearing the clown costume and is in a circus, and he’s only being laughed at. Because he doesn’t seem to know that’s what he actually is. He at least needs to understand the occasion that he’s entertaining for. Because his idea of raising taxes in even the slightest degree belongs in a carnival with the rest of the scams of a summer time festival complete with cotton candy, popcorn and hot dogs.

I hate to rub it in, because a lot of people in the establishment do not like John Kasich, who is the current governor of Ohio.  But you balance a budget doing what he has done, granted he’s not very popular, but then again most real managers aren’t. 

It doesn’t take magic, it just takes guts, and the will to do the hard things even when they may be unpopular, or hurt people’s feelings. The nation needs politicians to do what we hired them for, and that’s to manage the government, not think about how they can keep a job on the gravy train to the carnival.

Rich Hoffman

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

Liberty Twp Tea Party Turns Two Years Old: The Rise of a New Guard

The evening July 11,2011 sun beat hard upon the converted barn at the Niederman Farm where the Liberty Twp Tea Party met to celebrate their 2nd year.  There have been a lot of battles over the last couple of years, and as we gathered for the pot luck dinner it was evident that there would be a lot more. 

As this meeting was taking place Obama and the local Speaker of the House John Boehner were battling over the budget and the debt ceiling.  Obama is approaching the negotiations as though various sides, Tea Party Republicans, moderate Republicans, Rhino Republicans, Blue Dog Democrats, Progressive Democrats, and far left radical Democrats all are committed to 100% of their particular positions, and must be prepared to give a little so everyone can agree.  As I scooped up some potato salad that my wife had made I wondered how a person like Obama could ever become president and even say such a thing.  There’s only one right answer, and the president is missing it.  There isn’t money for the programs his party have given away to buy votes.  That’s the bottom line folks.  All those various politicians have for years purchased votes using our tax money, and now those fools are stuck trying to explain why they’ve bankrupted the system. 

The people around me at this gathering are all there for the same reason, we recognize that the government has let us down and taken the nation on a path it doesn’t want to go.  Not everyone has come to that realization yet, because they still hope that somewhere, there is a magical golden egg that will be laid by some golden goose.  Increasingly, these elected representatives are being seen not as leaders, but as con artists and thieves who have stolen from each of us and sold us back bath water claiming it to be an elixir of life. 

While the various ceremonies of this event were going on the Lakota School System was voting for yet another school levy attempt literally right down the road, not more than 3 miles from our location.  In this meeting, everything that is wrong with the government can be seen in the microcosm of public education funding.  Public sector unions, politicians using their education support for votes, and school administrators hoping to use school boards as a political launch pad to become noticed by leaders of one of the two parties have bought into Keynesian economics, like the rest of the government, and they were wrong. 

When John Keynes introduced his Keynesian economics model from the ever-increasing socialist tendencies of the rest of the world, politicians saw an opportunity to exploit that model for their own accents to public supported power.  Keynes was wrong, and every system using it is failing, including schools.  The correct answer is not more of the same theory, but something else completely.  In schools, the task is to convert over to that system without destroying the opportunities of the kids and parents who support the school.  But in education, just like all things in government, the prices of labor, of the services created by labor, and the revenue which supports the entire foundation are artificially inflated, because competition is not allowed to kill off the waste, because government protects those enterprises.  This drives up the costs everywhere for everybody.  And presidents like Obama and school boards like what we have at Lakota, only know to close that inflated value with increased taxes.  They can’t understand any other option because their brains are not wired to accept anything else. 

At Lakota they are going for a tax rate that is less than what they’ve asked for in the past. This is consistent with President Obama’s comments to Speaker Boehner, “You can’t get everything you’ve asked for.”  In the minds of these people bending a little on their political position is what the process is all about. 

But it’s not.  There is only one right answer, not a mixed drink of many tastes.  With something like a budget deficit whether you’re talking about a local school district, or a Federal government, there is a way you got there, and to get out, you must do the opposite of what put you in that position.  That’s the only way.  If you spent a lot of money-making political promises that you didn’t have the authority to commit the tax payers to, or you are a school district that allowed a public sector teachers union to drive up your labor costs recklessly, then you have to admit that you were wrong, that you spent money that wasn’t yours just as a person addicted to gambling must admit that they have a problem before they can get help. You can’t throw more money at the addict, because they’ll never get better.  You have to take away their money so they can’t go to the casino anymore to throw away our money on some jackpot they hope will fix all their problems. 

As I sat among friends and family I thought about the worst issue in the news of them all, and that’s the case of the murdered little girl in Florida, the Casey Anthony trial where the mother appears to have accidentally killed her little girl with an overdose of chloroform and drove around Florida with the body in the trunk for everyone to smell the decomposing body.  The girl was a reckless young woman, and the prosecution went for the death penalty for the severity of the crime.  Last week, Casey was found not guilty; the jurors didn’t have the inner compass of morality to be able to pass judgment on a peer.  Society has lost their ability to judge. 

Most have anyway, except for the people having diner in a country barn with me on that hot July evening. Of American society, these people who the radicals advocating Keynesian economics, progressive global government without borders, and idealists who have never found their way out of the soviet fueled radicalism of the 60’s, those people call my friends here “teabaggers.”  “Teabaggers, meant to be a term of peer pressure, of insult, an attempt by those who are advocating evil openly, to keep society functioning with their eyes closed and hope that somehow their failed theories will somehow come true in the final hour, and if they don’t, they’ll be remembered for their compassion, and not as the thieves they truly are. 

I feel privileged that after two years, the Liberty Twp Tea Party is still here, and it’s growing.  And it refreshes the soul to partake in these events, as the aroma of barn yard animals and community prepared food mixes in a unique waltz of perpetuity.  Because this is how it was in the beginning, and this is the way of the American, to always be ready for a fight, to roll up the sleeves and eat well before a hard day’s work, or the battle that looms on the horizon.  Because only by the path of those in this barn, is the path to liberty and freedom.  And the only right answer in the entire nation is present on the tongues of those in attendance, because they are the last of their kind and Americais waiting for them to fix the nation that has been hijacked by tyrants of good intention.

Rich Hoffman

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

The College Scam: The cost of bad sex, bad education, and the hook hidden in the bait

TAKE YOUR TIME WITH THIS POST. WATCH THE VIDEOS AND LEARN FOR YOURSELF. WHAT YOU WILL SEE WILL CHALLENGE JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING YOU THINK. SO IT WILL TAKE TIME TO ACCEPT. TAKE YOUR TIME AND ENJOY YOURSELF. THINK ABOUT THIS INFORMATION OVER A PERIOD OF DAYS, NOT HOURS.

By far, out of the three hundred or more articles I’ve written here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom this article about the most successful people who never went to college is the most popular. You can view that article here. I just received the results that the article has reached over 60,000 views up to this point.

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/successful-people-that-didnt-go-to-college/

To me, creative geniuses such as Walt Disney, who didn’t even make it out of high school, and Steven Spielberg who didn’t finish college till after he made all the top movies in film history or Bill Gates who dropped out of college to start Microsoft all tell a similar story; creative genius is what drives our society. It is what makes the United States better than other countries. It is exclusively an American trait, the ability to think “outside the box.”

There’s a distinct reason films like Star Wars, and Pixar’s animated films are so distinctly good in the world marketplace.

I mean think about it, what is the last great film you saw from Russia, Germany, China? I can think of a lot of independent films I personally enjoy, but what about the blockbusters that make billions of dollars worldwide, like Avatar, Titanic, Star Wars, or the Pirate of the Caribbean films. Take Pirates of the Caribbean just as an example, as of this writing, On Stranger Tides, the fourth Pirate film, has been out just over a week and currently sits at:

Total Lifetime Grosses

Domestic: $124,447,000 26.1%
+ Foreign:
$352,700,000 73.9%
________________________________________
= Worldwide: $477,147,000

So the foreign market spent $352,700,000 on the new Pirate’s film in just one week? Yes! So where is the great blockbuster coming from China? (crickets) Why? Because American’s think outside the box and are able to make such films as a form of art and entertainment. I use films as an example because we all see them, America is overwhelmingly better at making them, where the rest of the world lags noticeably behind. But the same could be said about virtually any industry, aviation, computer science, (Microsoft wasn’t invented in some foreign land) industry, America is the place where good ol’ horse sense has been the father to the mother of necessity, which gives birth to invention.

But why? Why is America different? Well, I would offer two books to explain the problem to the curious observer. One is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. And Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Both works of literature explain why something things are better than other things and how the process works.

What doesn’t work is college. How is college a scam? College is a European concept and since America has adopted it as a way of educating our population, we’ve lost much of what makes America great. If you do nothing else today watch this documentary by the National Inflation Association called The College Conspiracy. It’s just over one hour-long but it is well done and loaded with important facts which supports what I reported in my article about why some the most successful people in human history didn’t go to college, or dropped out while there.

The bad news for all you education minded people out there, that have spent your entire adult lives either paying for your own college debts, or saving money for your children’s college like a “good” parent is encouraged to do, you are wasting your money. You are being scammed in one of the greatest scams in human history. History will remember this scam in future text books and future human beings will laugh at the blind obedience American’s placed at the feet of this phantom foe.

Of the people I mentioned above, George Lucas did go to USC, and from there he was able to network with other filmmakers, so the college did produce a networking opportunity. But USC did not give George Lucas his genius. USC did not make George Lucas. George Lucas made USC. Lucas also used the model that Walt Disney started, and Uncle Walt has never even graduated High School let alone going to college. Jim Cameron was a drop out from a two-year community college; saw Star Wars from George Lucas while he was a truck driver and decided he wanted to be a filmmaker. Jim got a job at Roger Corman’s studio as a special effects hand and learned by doing. Steven Spielberg snuck onto the lot of Universal Studios and pretended to work there so he could network and learn from working professionals. College had little to do with the success of these people. The success came from their inner creativity and could not be given to them or bought with money in the form of tuition.

I talk about film because I understand that business and people can relate. These are names we all know, so the stories are relevant. Colleges using the names of people like George Lucas, or sports programs like Ohio State, use entertainment to market their product and sell the relevancy of their service which is further education. Film schools were put on the map because everyone wanted to be George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, but to date, with thousands of students enrolled over a twenty year period; nobody is able to mimic their success. College is actually making people less intelligent, not more. I could tell story after story after story about people I’ve either hired that have a college degree, or people I’ve worked with that I had to retrain just so I could deal with them in a productive manner.

I’ve worked in Aerospace and other manufacturing facilities for a number of years. I walked out of college after trying to go three times. I went for a lot of the reasons described in the film above; I wanted to qualify for a higher income bracket. But I realize while going that the professors were actually stretching everything out and trying to waste my time. I wanted to learn 3 times faster, but the professors were working by the class and had the same mentality as someone who works in a union that gets paid by the hour. They weren’t in any particular hurry to launch me on my course. And I realized that the value of the degree had less meaning because everyone was getting one. So I chose the traditional path, and worked my way up through hard work. I learned by doing and I’m glad I did, because I notice that I have an advantage over others my age that seem to lack common sense, because it has been trained out of them. I literally walked out of a philosophy class where the professor was teaching from a book I had read years before on my own. I wrote the whole thing off as a tremendous waste of time and energy so I cut my losses before I put too much money into a worthless enterprise.

College is in the process of coming completely undone. Its funding expectations are too high. It’s not able to give students the level of service they are trying to sell. It is in every sense of the word a complete scam.

Teachers unions use college in two ways; they have created state legislation that pays their union members according to their education level. This ensures that new teachers will continue to further their education and support the system to some extent. Then the wage rates are predicated based on the degrees obtained which costs the taxpayer more to fund. Teachers also use college as a justification for why they are needed in high school, and why they should be paid so highly. “Don’t you want your child to get a good education so they can do well in college, and therefore get a good job? You’re a bad parent if you don’t do these things.” Well, I’d say you’re a bad parent if you do send your kids to college.

I have argued for many years with virtually every member of my family that college is a stupid idea. Of course people told me that I just hate education, that I always have and my opinion was skewed against it. They’d say that I hate authority which is true, but not for the reasons they think. (Authority kills imagination which I consider the most important human trait.)

People assume that if you dislike education it’s because you can’t do the work. Well, there’s also another reason, a better reason to dislike education; that’s because it’s a massive lie that has been perpetuated on our society which has made us a worse nation, not a better one. And, it robs individuals of the opportunity, the supreme achievement, of becoming “self made.” There is no higher quality of human endeavor but to produce from an individual’s own inclinations and education. The way education functions now prevent it. Education has within it a whole social class of looters that live off the public dime and provide virtually nothing that a good parent, aunt, uncle, or grandparent can’t provide for a child. I despise college education so much that when my kids want to make me mad they don’t threaten to sneak out of the house on some drunken binge with a bunch of low-life’s, or to get a tattoo in some embarrassing region of their bodies, they threaten to go to college in a place like Oxford, out of the country and in the hot bed of socialist teaching.

My wife went to college for a number of years even though she didn’t need to. I always made sure she didn’t have to work, and could stay home with our kids, and now that our kids are raised, she has the whole day to herself, which I consider valuable. For instance, it gives me great pleasure when she takes a day to go shopping, buys new items at Victoria Secret; perfume from Nordstrom’s and is ready for action when I step into the house at the end of a long day. Yes, I expect it. With her not having to work, dinner is made, the laundry is done, she is happy without the headache of some foolish boss or co-worker that is irritating her, so her mind is clear for a good romp in the bed when I get home, or maybe in the kitchen. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with throwing everything off the kitchen table and doing your business there either. Everybody thinks this way, but socially they don’t admit it unless they are intoxicated. Men can drop their worries quickly and sex actually relaxes them. Women worry about more things, so the more you give them to worry about, the longer it will take them to arrive at a point where they are ready for sex. So it only makes sense, if you’re a guy that wants lots of sex from your wife, wouldn’t it makes sense to keep her mind as relaxed and free of worry as possible? If people drop the crappy social progressive feminism agenda, they’d be a lot happier, take fewer drugs for mental problems and their sex life would be a whole lot better. (Just some advice for those with the courage to take it.) But anyway, I’d ask her, “Why do you want to go to college.” Her reasons were those that her mother gave her, “Once you have that degree, it always goes with you. She wants me to have that degree in case something happens to you, so I will be ok.”

“Where am I going,” I’d ask.

“Well, in case we get divorced, or you die or something.” ??????????????????????????????

Her mother is one of those people who bought into the lie of what college will do for you. She grew up in the time of Lyndon Johnston and all the Great Society talk that has all-but ruined our country now. These ideas of college, feminism, security and even divorce are all born in that age, so that’s why she thinks the way she does. People like her believed that by simply obtaining the document of a diploma there was some sort of infinite security that extended to the horizon of human existence until death which is a preposterous notion.

I could tell personal stories all day long about why colleges fail, and their professors fail worse in most cases. I know a few truly brilliant minds that are professors, they write books I enjoy, and I like their lectures. The problem with them is that mostly, everything is cerebral. They can say something without understanding how it can be practically applied. There was much discussion in the Western Arts Community of making my book The Symposium of Justice into a movie. A college professor from Ohio University that was the instructor of the media program there approached me at a bullwhip competition and said he loved my book and wanted to produce a short from it to distribute at film festivals. I agreed thinking it would be a good publicity spot for my book which would involve intense action scenes and it sounded fun.

I arranged to have an actress flown in to play the female lead; we brought in a stunt coordinator, cast a big guy to play the villain and assembled a crew. The professor was set to direct. He showed up on the set and I turned the action over to him.

He was completely lost. He had been teaching people for years how to direct television and film productions, he had stood in front of countless creative minds and proclaimed authority, and here was his chance to actually do it for a real production when it mattered.

We managed to get some good whip stunt shots, and as I pressed him on assembling a final cut that we were set to present to a film festival, he kept delaying. Eventually, after I pressed him to great lengths, he confessed that he didn’t have any good shots from our two-day shoot and hadn’t even compiled any usable footage after two months of editing a 5 minute fight sequence. I was furious on the phone with him and after I hung up told my wife who tried to be a voice of reason for the poor fool, that I could have cut together that footage in a weekend. It took him two months and he produced not one useable shot! What happened to him was he was embodying the long said notion of those who can’t do, teach. He was turning out to be a guy that couldn’t practice in reality what he was teaching students to achieve. Even with placing in his hands great quality whip work, he couldn’t even assemble footage that he had the confidence to send to a film festival. I was as furious with him as I’ve ever been with anybody I’ve ever worked with on a project. He sold me his talent based on his academic credentials, I invested time and money into him, and he failed to deliver anything of any use. I ended up finishing the clip myself in what became The Overman, which won best experimental micro film at the India Gathering Film Festival. It took me several months to get a new crew together and to recover from the previous folly, but it worked out well.

The short of it is that I have personally witnessed that much of the money poured into college, and public school is being completely wasted. Education is fine if people want the traditional education options, but it is not worth the amounts of money we are spending. College certainly cannot, hedge the inflation wave that is about to hit it. What it is selling cannot match the value of the end result that is increasingly becoming much less valuable. The students are learning the wrong things and paying too much for it, the value isn’t translating to real economic value. It’s just currently a system that everyone that works in education benefits from, so of course they don’t want it to change.

Traditional education is needed for the sciences. It’s needed for some art and computer oriented technology. But that’s about it. Everything else could be learned on the job someplace, including economics. One of the examples of this supersaturation of degrees is in lawyers. We have way too many that expect to earn good livings off divorces, law suits, DUI’s, and politics. None of those items are positive for our culture, yet we encourage young people to become them! Why would you tell your kid to become a leech on society, so they can make a good living? Yes, many parents would admit to as much. They would push their children into a law degree hoping their children could become a leech in a service industry, because that’s all legal work is. Legal work doesn’t produce anything. It doesn’t make something you can sell to another country. It only allows one person to take wealth from another; it’s simply an exchange of existing wealth. If we wanted society to be better, we’d produce fewer lawyers, because it’s the lawyers that have trouble making a living in the private sector that are drawn to politics so they can live off the public dime and make the kind of money they were promised in college. It’s a vicious cycle of non-productive thinking that is rooted in a looter mentality.

Economics is another service oriented field. What is it? What does it produce? It tells people how to move funds from one account to another or one investment to another, but it doesn’t actually make anything. So why so much emphasis? Parents will say, because I want my child to become rich. They say those things because the busy parent believes the college literature that their child will be successful at life if the parent spends 30K a year on higher education regardless of the usefulness of the field of study.

That same parent will be mystified why their child listens with so much interest to what Uncle Larry has to say, because Uncle Larry even though he’s all grown up still plays with the children on the floor, still talks the kid’s language. Years later when the child grows up and is sitting in court watching his assets being divided up because he’s going through his first divorce due to his wife’s affair with her boss and  left him for the price of simple cruise in the Bahamas, it isn’t the professors in college the man will think of, or even his parents who cast him like trash into the garbage can of college where all that’s in that dump are the inflated minds of highly paid fools that if they had any real value they’d be out producing in the world somewhere. The man will think of Uncle Larry and all the times they played together in the floor, and how wise Uncle Larry seemed. He’ll think of the time that Uncle Larry was having sex with Aunt Rose and the whole neighborhood could hear the noise through an open bedroom window. The man will think, yeah, Uncle Larry was cool then, and he’s cool now………….and he’s still married to Aunt Rose. Uncle Larry kept Aunt Rose feed so there was no boss to run off with. Uncle Larry thought like other kids, only he was in a grown-up body and seemed to be an equal back then. Now Uncle Larry seemed like a genius because the man was less of a person in the courtroom than he was when he was a boy. Somehow over the years he had regressed instead of growing and it was public education and college that killed his spirit making him less of a man than the boy he had been while playing in the floor with Uncle Larry.

As the judges gavel comes down and the ex-wife takes half of their combined wealth and the kids wonder what it’s going to be like to live in a house with a new daddy, the man watches his wife leave the courtroom and wishes he had listened to Uncle Larry, saved his money, not went to college, had more sex with his wife, worried less about silly things, and not allowed so many people who only wanted to make money off him to scam his existence to this monumental moment in court. The man will wish he was back in his childhood playing with Uncle Larry while all the other adults sneered at the immature Uncle and his antisocial antics. The man will wish that he never poured a dime into college that in an indirect way destroyed everything he ever hoped to be by taking the bait cast by an elusive fisherman, that life will be prosperous if he’ll only bite down on the hook.

Once you bite down, you’re caught. The following video is no different from a typical fundraising campaign for education institutions. Whether its fish or tax payers, the lure is all the same.

All too late many realize as the man does in his failed life, that college was but a simple lure no different from fishing. The fisherman is the education institutions that dangle the lure of a good comfortable life. The fisherman promises food for hungry fish. And we are all fish just swimming around trying to mind our own business. We want to eat, and colleges offer us food that only turn out to leave us stuck on the hook.

It is time to take a hard look at not just public education, but also the value of college education, because as it stands, it’s an over-inflated scam filled with looters that are actually weakening our society and a budget break is heading our way as the bubble is soon to burst. Our society will need to be psychologically ready for the fall-out of such an implication.

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

Pirates of the Caribbean, On Stranger Tides: A Movie Review and Commentary

It doesn’t happen often, where I walk out of a movie theater at 2:30 am and feel as awake as midday. It’s been a very, very long time since I’ve seen a movie I enjoyed as much as the new Pirates of the Caribbean film, On Stranger Tides.

People who read my work frequently know that I cover school levies, political corruption, and legal maneuvering to great extent on these pages. However, I do an occasional story about football, motorcycles, and films also. My very first love in life is mythology, the stories of cultures. Stories tell you the true nature of the culture you are studying. This is why I know so much about the inner workings of politics, is because I understand the myths of the culture. So I can see through the stories politicians attempt to tell to sell the idea they are portraying. I know mythology from books. I know mythology from my life. And I know mythology from actually doing work in the entertainment business on occasion. So I understand all too well the difficulties of bringing a vast mythology to life that reflects more than what visuals can speak of, that speaks to the human heart. I learned when I was very young that some of the most accurate votes cast occurring in human culture is happening at movie theaters with the price of a ticket. What people chose to see at a movie theater is an accurate gage of the psychology of the over-all culture.

When it is all-encompassing, especially for people like me and the friends I associate with, to be politically active, to have concerns of George Soros and his “Open Society” of communist thought, or Barrack Obama’s latest faux pas, it is good, and revealing to step into a darkened theater and witness truth in the form of fiction. Even though many in Hollywood are leftists, the good stories they tell are not. Not the ones that sell tickets anyway. There are ideas in stories that contain truth because the mythology of that story has innate value, which transcended the political view points of the actors and directors because it’s the story that matters. It is the story that communicates. The actors are but vehicles that take you to the story.

The success of The Pirate of the Caribbean films reflects a deeper yearning in human society that moves beyond the political direction of power players such as what you might find in politics. The desire for individuality cannot be overlooked when the characters in films ooze such traits, and the recent surge in this last decade in the amount of young people who are getting tattoos is testimony to a social desire to “be unique,” to have something they choose themselves to place upon their bodies that they did not inherit from their parents. Something they decide to give themselves as a way to mark their bodies in an individual way. This is the inner pirate in all people, the desire to be unique, free, and left alone. The human need for this is very strong, and even though I, or anyone in my immediate family do not have tattoos of any kind, I understand the need. Tattoos are something I’d discourage someone from getting, because there are better ways to communicate individuality. But the human spirit craves authenticity. I have seen this same behavior in Key West where women completely undress at the Adam and Eve, the nude bar that sits above the Bull and Whistle and have body paint artists paint their bodies in such a way that they can walk down Duval Street completely nude, yet appear from a distance to be wearing cloths. The women get the sensation of being publicly nude and fearless, without openly breaking the law. This is an act of rebellion brought on by the necessity of an over-regulated society, a perversion of nature where an inner fantasy must be aligned with the living person because in daily life the two aspects function too far from each other.

I have acquaintances that work in show biz that are very liberal and often times they see me as their political enemy in matters of social value, but on a set or at the lunch table over a pizza, we have more in common then they’d wish to admit. I often shake my finger at them and remind them that they are living Doctor Jeckle and Mr. Hyde existences, and they won’t be happy as people until they unify their thoughts with their reality. But they don’t listen. Instead, they get tattoos and paint their bodies in drunken rages on occasion, because the social engineering doesn’t work, and their true natures only come out in drinking binges or in darkened theaters.

And that brings us to the success of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. I know why I love pirates. I’ve talked about it on these pages at great length. I like them so much that when Branden Keefe of Channel 9 News came to my house recently to do a story he asked me, “Are those cannons?”

“Yes,” I replied. He was looking at the cannons I have on my porch that I use to fire off during football games in the fall, or to announce the start of a new meeting at my house. I fired these cannons off at the start of a Tea Party meeting of the State Sovereignty Committee much to the amusement of my guests because they had never seen anything like that before. But my neighbors are used to it. Such things are part of the “pirate’s life for me.” It’s part of living the mythology of existence instead of just being a passive observer.

So am I alone in this love? No. People love The Pirate of the Caribbean movies. They love them for the high adventure. They love them for the spectacle. And they love them for the character Johnny Depp created in Captain Jack Sparrow. I was concerned when I learned that On Stranger Tides was going to have a more toned down budget then the previous film At Worlds End. Well…..in each of the previous three Pirate films, there were moments that I didn’t like. I enjoyed the overall story line, the high adventure, the sets, the visual effects, but I always felt there wasn’t quite enough swashbuckler in the series that should be oozing out of it. I always attributed this problem with too many characters and Disney-like sappy sub-plots that belonged in a different kind of movie. Critics like those sub-plots, but I don’t. A pirate film should be all about the swashbuckler and much less about emotion.

On Stranger Tides I expected to be not so good. I thought that if Disney pulled in the budget, that the franchise would suffer. But then I saw the budget, and noticed that even this scaled down version of the Pirates of the Caribbean series was north of $200 million, I was curious.

My wife and I planned to see the movie on Friday night. But, this is a film we wanted to share with our kids, because my kids grew up with a love of adventure films. I showed them every action film ever made when they were growing up, and they understand my passion for Pirates. Plus, in my family, our favorite past-time that we do together is playing the Pirates Constructible Strategy Game by WizKids, so my wife refused to go without the kids, and they were all working. So finding an open window where we could all get together and see the movie was very problematic, and I was getting irritated at all the various schedules.

During Saturday, May 21, 2011 I started checking the numbers from Box Office Mojo and saw that On Stranger Tides on Friday had pulled in $35 million which was good. Plus it had pulled in $92 million worldwide, so that was even better. The total take up to Saturday morning was $127 million, which is very good. If the film cost just over $200 million and Disney poured another $200 million in promotion, which means by the time everything is said and done, On Stranger Tides will be close to $500 million in total upfront investment, then Friday’s take puts it on target to recover its money, which is important, because for people like me, if a film like this doesn’t make its money back, more films like it won’t be made in the future. Plus, like I said, the amount of ticket sales is to me a kind of worldwide vote on the type of values our culture embraces, so I found such numbers much to my liking.

My wife and I entertained guests from across the pond on Saturday for a good part of the day. I kept looking at the clock all day for an opening that wouldn’t present itself. I told my wife, “We have to see the new Pirates movie this weekend! And we’re running out of time!”

She got on the phone and arranged to get my kids all together after everyone finished work and all their own social engagements were completed and we met at Showcase Cinema Springdale at 11:30 PM Saturday night, the last showing of Pirates for the day.

Again, I expected a fun film. I expected to be a little let down, but to enjoy the over-all tone of the film. What I saw surprised me.

The film was fantastic! It was a lot better than the other three. All the sappy sub-plots, the love story, the social commentary and all the confusing characters, were gone. What On Stranger Tides did was accomplish the perfect swashbuckler that would have made Errol Flynn or Douglas Fairbanks proud. It was the best movie of its kind that I had seen since The Mask of Zorro in 1998. On Stranger Tides had great stunt coordination with the sword fights, and action sequences, it had compelling characters that you either loved or hated, the visual effects were fantastic and not over-the-top and the plot was a simple treasure hunt that had old-fashioned appeal. It was obvious the Pirates franchise had either discovered itself again, or had just re-invented itself into a mature adult. From the kind of film On Stranger Tides is, it is the perfect movie. I can’t think of a frame of film that I did not like. Maybe the sequence with the palm tree, I understand what they were trying to do, but the physics didn’t work for me. But other than that, everything was fantastic.

It was such a good movie, I actually have to place it somewhere between Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as far as a film that captured the spirit of high adventure. It was that good of a film.

Those things aside, the move would have been awesome all by itself. But for me personally something else held my heart dearer than anything I’ve seen for years on a movie screen, or even in real life. When it first hit the screen around 12:20 in the morning I thought I had died and gone to heaven, for I had seen something that had only existed in my mind up to that point.

My wife and I have lots of secret places we like to run off to. I’ve talked about Key West, Newport on the Levy, our favorite book store among many things. One of our favorite places is Raymond James Stadium in Tampa Bay, where the Tampa Bay Buccaneers play football. We love to stay in the Hilton on the Bay, eat at the International Mall, and catch a game at Ray Jay when we can get away for the weekend in the fall. Now, I love my wife. But one of my other great loves in this world is the Pirate Ship inside that stadium. I am utterly in love with the big skull that hangs off the bow of that ship, and has red glowing eyes and breathes smoke during the football game. I’ve told the Glazer family myself how much I admire them for building such a thing and I fly the Buccaneer flags they gave me personally every Sunday afternoon during football season in tribute to their pirate ship, because I think it is so innovative, creative, and such a good tool that engages the fans in the game. It certainly raised the bar in the NFL as to the fan experience. So what happened at 12:20 took my breath away, because it was obvious to me that Rob Marshall, director of On Stranger Tides feels the way I do about pirate ships with skulls on the bows.

The Queen Ann’s Revenge is a ship I know from our Pirates Constructible Game. I know the ship from history too, as the ship that Blackbeard died on when getting stuck on a sand bar off the coast of the Carolinas. Well, in this film, Blackbeard is alive and well, which he is fantastic to look at, and The Queen Ann’s Revenge is a haunted ghost ship that is absolutely spectacular. And I don’t mean spectacular with a little “s.” I mean SPECTACULAR! Nothing short of jaw dropping spectacular!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Disney crew actually built a life-sized ship that they filmed on. There was no cheap visual effects shortcut here. They built an actual life-sized ghost ship that oozed pure sinister evil over every frame of film. It is worth the price of a ticket just to see this ship on the screen. It’s that good!

The story worked at every level. It was fun, romantic, thrilling, mysterious, and historically authentic. The costume design was first-rate, and I mean Academy Award winning material. If On Stranger Tides doesn’t get Oscars for best Visual Effects, Sound, and Costume Design, I would hate to see the film that beats it, because those categories were all top-notch, and I mean top.

When the film ended, I felt refreshed, completely rejuvenated even in the small hours of the morning. The film took my family on an unforgettable adventure that is of a quality I have not seen in well over a decade. There have been good movies since the films I mentioned, like the Mask of Zorro, and the first two Indiana Jones films, but On Stranger Tides is the first that comes to my mind probably in the lifetimes of many young people going to see this film to have such an experience.

This was not a tired old recycle of a franchise. This was a stand-alone first film that would be forever remembered if it was part one and not a fourth film. Any fears of not having the characters of Elizabeth and Will in the film are dismissed. The film is about Captain Jack, but the supporting characters such as Penelope Cruz as the old flame of Sparrow and Blackbeard’s daughter was perfect. She fit the role as though she were born to play the part. Barbarossa was still perfectly played as he was in the other three films, but Blackbeard in this film could go down as a classic villain as popular as Darth Vader. He was that good in this film.

Will people go see this movie three, four, ten times like they did in previous films? I don’t know. We live in a pretty cynical age. Film goers are pretty jaded these days, so whether or not they appreciate what at good film On Stranger Tides truly is will remain to be seen. I was just complaining the other day that nobody was making films like this anymore, and Disney actually pulled it off and they did it by trimming down their budget and expectations. They put restrictions on themselves to make their funding model more viable and not attempt to be everything to everybody. They focused on just doing a good job and letting the chips fall where they may. And it worked.

This film should be a lesson to everyone. Sometimes, less is more. Put the money where it counts and decide what you don’t need than make everything count. On Stranger Tides does that very well and will go down in film history as one of the very best films that Hollywood has to offer in a long tradition of evoking modern mythology to reflect the consciousness of the human spirit.

This is Hollywood at it’s best!


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