Category: Literature

A Gaze Back and Looking Forward: Education Funding is Changing Forever

The gravy days are over. The citizens are paying attention to many aspects of education that were never discussed, like teacher salaries being excessively high, and buildings with luxurious amenities. In a recent survey from Braun Research Inc. who conducted phone interviews with more than 3,400 Hoosier registered voters November 12-17, 2010, that firm’s president, Paul Braun, expressed confidence in the accuracy of the study’s results, due to “thorough briefings stressing objectivity, heavy monitoring, sample performance reviews, verifications and post-data-collection checks on each survey by interviewer and phone center.” Of the many conclusions of that survey Indiana voters lacked awareness and information about how much is spent in public schools. Nearly two out of three respondents (64 percent) underestimated per-student spending in the public schools.

As usual, Doc Thompson did some great work on this topic that he covered on the January 12, 2011 broadcast that is worth listening to. It is refreshing to have real discussions about these issues now. The gist of this discussion is that things are going to change, and change rapidly for public education funding.

But know the door has been opened. I know how difficult it was and I felt the wrath of attacks when I first started the enterprise of enlightening the public about education funding. The organized labor behind these tax levies attempted to apply The Delphi Technique on me, like they do everyone who speaks against wasteful spending, so I understand first-hand how the information has been kept quiet all over the nation for such a long time.

I countered that technique by using aspects of my personality that are entertainment oriented, something I’ve developed over the years performing in wild west shows and interviews for other projects, to throw a curve-ball at their strategy and start the ball rolling so others could hold the door open, and then others behind them could start pouring in to get control of the out-of-control spending that has been occurring in schools. It took that initial surprise from the organized unions by my approach to pry the door open. They really believed that by painting me as some hick cowboy running around with a whip that I would be made into something of a fool, which they counted on. What they didn’t know was that I have a business background, and I’m better at understanding difficult concepts than I am with the whip work. So because of their one-dimensional understanding of people, they were unprepared. And much to my surprise, people enjoyed the image I was projecting, of rugged individualism, and standing firm in overwhelming odds.

The truth of the matter was that it felt that way to me, like I was against the world. But I actually had hundreds of people behind me supporting the structure of everything, people who put up the money for the yard signs, people who went to all the meetings and took notes that they’d pass to me. People from inside the school system that was tipping us off to what was going on, and people who were going door to door to pass out literature. There were other people who worked the email campaign, and helped in so many other ways. But since I was the face of it, the wrath came at me, and I deflected it with the cowboy image while the business side worked with some very smart people to crunch numbers and get to the truth.

At the end of the day, that cowboy image says more about me than the business side. My children and grandchildren won’t discuss someday how good I was at working with numbers in a spreadsheet or negotiated a contentious point in a dispute. They’ll talk about the speed and accuracy competitions at cowboy events, and the many times I’ve shocked audiences with my fire whip displays, including professional stuntmen. So that image is far from just some conjured up image for marketing reasons. But it did help in this case, to overcome the opposition in a unique way.

What usually happens in management is that once you show people how to do something, they’ll then take that information and put their own spin on it. And that’s what’s happening by people who are far more passionate about education reform than I am. I have discovered now through correspondence from people who have been fighting this fight for many, many years, that all some of these people needed was a crack in the door. And they understand more about how the game is played than ever, now that we’ve started having really intelligent conversations on WLW.

Darryl Parks has been talking this talk much longer than I have, so it wasn’t difficult for him and me to feel some passion about the shake-down that occurs. But I think everyone was surprised when I went on WLW with our treasurer, Dan Varney and discussed the wage levels back in September, because that information was straight out of the newspaper. But the game that is played is that information is released in March, when the last things people are thinking about are schools or elections. Spring is on their minds, and coming out of a long winter. So most people would wad up the paper and toss it in the trash.

But my good buddy Graham George, who is a senior citizen, and is always organized kept that paper from March of 2010, and we went on the air at WLW and discussed it with Scott Sloan. The reaction from the public was so violent and sudden that I was surprised that nobody had done this kind of thing before.

Fortunately I had scheduled with the Cincinnati Enquire to have a backyard interview with me because of my YouTube video, A Whip Trick to Save America the very next day, and they wanted to do a feature about that and how it applied to my resistance to the school levy. So when that story came out, the gloves came off. The progressives all over the state that were listening to WLW decided to make me out to be some illiterate cowboy, which of course didn’t fit the facts I was able to put out on the radio broadcasts. People saw how the game was played and when I didn’t turn away and hide, but only increased my activity, it allowed people to see the structure of the game.

Now that the deed is done, the School Board is struggling to figure out what to do next. They are talking about solar panels, which is fine, but still doesn’t address the largest cost to the budget which is wages, and should be explored regardless of a budget crisis. The board is now fighting for the president position arguing over who should lead. Ray Murry is talking the right type of issues, discussing whether or not the district should have spent 90K on an employment search for a new treasure and superintendent. Those are nice discussions and I’m happy to hear the debate on both sides, but in reality, it’s just politics because the numbers are just peanuts compared to the elephant eating them.

However, the problems will only get tougher, so while the School Board is struggling with each other to figure out what the community wants, they would be very “wise” to accept the help of our local business leaders that have offered to assist.

I have placed the offer to the board and was told that “most business people would probably become frustrated by the restrictions.” That was a polite way to say that the situation is too complicated for most businessmen to deal with. Well, that complication has been made complicated for a reason, and it’s to prevent “outsiders” from being able to offer fixes. It’s all part of the organized labor strategy, and the community knows it.

And I can promise that the education of those types of methods will only increase as more and more people send me information hoping that I’ll articulate it on the radio or on this blog.

So it is advisable that the games stop now. Grab the hands that are offering to help and be ready to do things you’d consider unthinkable 6 months ago. If you do it now, you can save the district and yourselves, and many, many jobs. If you don’t we will go off a cliff as a district.

The next levy attempt will not be about Rich Hoffman the cowboy whip cracker. Too many people want to be involved and I will gladly accept their help. I have enough personality and success that I don’t need the attention. I’ll put myself out there if people don’t feel comfortable doing it themselves, but I don’t see that being a problem in 2011. Because I see a wave of volunteerism, and other people who can speak coming boldly forth to push that door open even wider. So the decision doesn’t just sit on the shoulders of Lakota, but every public school everywhere.

So stop the games. Embrace the public, because they are your employers anyway, and be ready to do what’s right. Things are at a point where many things can be fixed and nobody has to be contentious enemies. It’s just business, and there are people who can offer that assistance for free, and once it’s done, Lakota could serve as a bright light of hope for all others to follow. But it takes one school to courageously step forward and be the first to open the door. Everything else will take care of itself.

But cling to the way things have been done, and the world will soon swallow you up.  So make a decision…..quick!

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Organized Labor and Why They Fail: My Personal Account

I received an interesting comment from a union supporter over the weekend, it said, “like your weekend. Thank a union.”

Obviously, this person is saying that the reason we have weekends, and 8 hour work days, and basic benefits, and all that kind of thing, it’s because of the union influence.

The sad thing about that argument is because unions stuck their noses into the matter, we can’t say how things might have evolved under the free market. Things may have actually been better as companies developed more and more incentives to attract quality employees.

My experience on both sides of the management argument is that if you are a good or a very good employee, it is not difficult to sit down in front of your employer and ask for a day off, or adjust your work hours, or get the compensation that you need. I’ve been down the whole gambit on the organized employee issue, and my opinions are rooted in experience.

When I was the tender age of 19 a union rep was trying to get into the manufacturing facility I worked for, and I was identified as a person that could articulate an argument. So many of my co-workers probed me to head up the union attempt.

I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a part of a union. My grandfather and several of my uncles were involved in the auto unions, I had listened to their stories over the years while growing up, and to be honest, I didn’t know if I wanted to grow up with their world outlook, so a union was something I was skeptical of. Never-the-less, I did take the challenge from my co-workers to approach the company president about bringing a union into our facility.

Basically, what happened was I arranged to have a meeting with the company president, and during the meeting I asked him squarely what his reaction would be if the employees brought a union into the shop. He smiled trying to cover a bit of panic, and replied, “We would shut down this facility.”

“Really,” I asked. “Just like that?”

“Yes” he said. “I couldn’t afford to operate under organized conditions.”

I stared him down and assessed whether or not he was lying to me, and I concluded that he wasn’t. The man wasn’t the brightest bulb in the box, but he had married into money and that was the basic path he had taken to become president of the company. He didn’t earn it by being the best executive. In fact, he often excelled at getting into trouble running around with other women, wrecking boats on the Ohio River, and all that kind of non-sense. That man was not motivated to keep the doors open to that manufacturing company because he really wasn’t interested in the challenge of management. He was only in the deal for a pay check and his father-in-law knew that. So I concluded that the fear in the man’s eyes was that he knew that about himself, that if he had to deal with a union, and shop stewards, and a lot more regulation and strikes, that the job would simply become too hard, and he’d be prone to just get drunk somewhere and collect his pay check in some other manner.

I told the employees all this after my meeting with the president, and they elected to not vote for the union.

Now, twenty years later, that company is one of the few companies around that is still in manufacturing and owned by the same people. Many of the guys that still work there and decided not to vote for a union that day are approaching retirement age and have made a decent living for a number of years because they still have a job. If they had voted, it’s highly likely that the company would have shut it’s doors and left taking those jobs with it, which is what happened to countless manufacturing jobs during the 80’s and 90’s.

To say over the years that I’ve worked in and around organized labor is an understatement. I decided long ago that if I needed representation, I’d do it on my own, so I never joined a union, even though I worked in shops that were a part of unions.

I was able to do that because all those shops had suffered difficult labor disputes that had weakened both sides. The union labor force had engaged in strikes that cost the companies a lot of money but they hurt themselves in the process. And the companies responded by hiring temps as part of a screening process. What these companies were really after was employees that were motivated, and not a part of the union. That’s where I came in.

Once I had my foot in the door, and could easily out-work my co-workers that were often “milking” the clock and holding back their production numbers, on purpose, I would become a management favorite, and this caused tension with the other employees.

So there would be fights in the parking lots, and in bathrooms, and on the shop floors. Not just once, or twice, but many, many times. What I didn’t tell many people was that I had a martial art background. I also rode my bicycle to work each day and have always been in fantastic shape. Many of those people that challenged me to fights smoked and within 15 seconds of a high adrenaline fight, were out of breath. So it really wasn’t difficult to prevail in these conflicts. Fights don’t occur in real life like they do in movies. Most people don’t get in too many fights, so their only experience is what they see on TV, and once they feel bones break in their faces, or in their hands when they punch incorrectly, and their lungs start burning for oxygen when the fight is just beginning they often panic when things don’t go their way within the opening seconds of a man to man conflict.

What I did that is probably different from other people is that I didn’t report these fights to upper management or try and get the perpetrators fired. I figured the embarrassment in front of their co-workers was enough, so I had the respect of many of my co-workers even though I wasn’t in the unions. This allowed us to co-exist to some extent. And what happened in every one of those companies, and I’m talking about at least three major companies in the area over the years, is the companies were sold to foreign investment. Because I wasn’t in the unions, members of management would speak to me, and would express their frustration at the inefficiencies of these companies, and ultimately all of them were sold to foreign companies, primarily in Europe. And the workers on the floor would stand around the coffee machine and complain to each other in a futile attempt to hold everything together. They’d complain to me as I rushed back to my job as soon as the break bell would ring and tell me how the company was “using me.”

Whatever, I was using the companies to make money for my family. Because the union people weren’t interested the productivity of the company, and believed that if they held back the production of these companies that the work would always be there. Instead, what often happened is once contracts went delinquent, other companies picked up the work because the people that bought from us weren’t going to hold up their operations because the supplier union labor couldn’t provide product on time. So our sales people lost as many contracts as they secured. And when they got the contracts I was always standing there with my hand up to work weekends and other overtime to make sure the company could deliver its customer requirements.

And the union guys would stand around the coffee machine and tell me, “Son, this company is using you. You just don’t see that.”

My common reaction is, “You aren’t my dad, but thanks, I’ll keep it in mind.”

I was happy with these labor arrangements, until the companies would ultimately sell off to the foreign buyers. That’s where I’d get into trouble, because under many union contracts, work reductions had to be done by seniority, and as a temp, or new guy on the totem poll, I was always at the bottom. And that was the first reaction of all the companies that were purchased, is they’d seek a work reduction to send a message, and get finances under control.

So I’d be out of a job while the union guys would still be standing around that coffee machine complaining. “We told you, son. They were just using you.”

I’d shake my head at how stupid they were, and how they failed to see how their actions had caused the sale of the companies to begin with, because of their lack of efficiency. In essence, the heads of these companies were reacting just like the president of the first company I mentioned. If things were too much of a pain in the ass, their reaction is to take the money and run. Secure a contract that is lucrative to investment, and get out while the getting is good. Move to Florida and play golf. Let the new buyers deal with the union.

At one of these last companies mentioned tensions had gotten really out of control, because it was well known that the company that was seeking to take over was very anti-union from England. They were hiring a head-hunter to come in and smash the union. So of course I was an instant favorite of the head-hunter. I could walk into his office the way I did with the President many years before and ask, “Are you going to have a lay-off. Everyone on the floor is tense and wants to know.”

“Young man,” he’d say to me, “If I have my way, you’ll be running this place. You are the hardest working son-of-a-bitch I’ve ever met, and I’ve met a lot. You routinely have an efficiency rating of 150% and that’s outstanding, but, your buddies out there that are operating at 50% efficiency and 60% are killing this company, and I’m going to weed them out.”

So I’d go back out on the floor and tell everyone what was going on. This made the shop stewards extremely angry, because I was affecting their power base. And they didn’t want their union members coming to me for information instead of using them.

Of course the head-hunter knew what he was doing. He was using me to break up the unity on the floor, because I had the guts to come directly to him and open dialogue, while the union chose to play silly games. This led to a stand-off between me and four of the shop stewards.

These were sappy guys who thought that because they were over 230 pounds that it somehow made them tough. Most of the weight was in their stomachs. One day while I was using the restroom, all four shop stewards came in and gathered around me while I was doing my business, and was in a vulnerable spot.

“Better shut your God damn mouth, son.”

I finished my business and once I had my zipper up and my vulnerably nicely tucked away, I could reply. “You ain’t my dad, punk.”

Shocked the four guys looked at each other, and then the 1st shift steward stepped in front of me. “You want your ass kicked! We’re sick of your Fu**ing act around here. We’re sick of you undermining us. We’re sick of you exceeding rate, even though we’ve told you to stop, and we’re sick of you’re god-damn-bicycle-riding-symphony-orchestra-listening ass!”

“Too bad, punk.” I never broke eye contact with any of them, and I made sure to meet each one during the exchange.

One of the third shift stewards, I have no idea why there were two because there were fewer people on third than any shift, chimed in, seeing that this conversation was going south fast, “if we fight in here we’ll all be fired.”

The man in front of me looked at me. “You’d like that wouldn’t you? That’s probably you’re plan…..to get us fired. You’ve planned this out with your buddy. We all get fired, and then he rehires you when he gets the union out of here.”

“You’re just trying to cover up the fact that you’re all a bunch of pussies.” I meant it when I said it. Such a conversation had never occurred with the Head-Hunter, but these guys knew I was ready to fight all four of them right there, and they were looking for a way out of the conflict and a way to explain their reluctance to fight me to the rest of the shop. And I wasn’t going to let them off the hook.

“You can’t call us that!”

“I just did……punks!”

“Fine, you want your ass kicked, let’s meet after work.”

“Ok,” I said, “Let’s meet at the vacant lot across from the apartments.” There was an empty lot near our facility that we all knew about.

The four of them started back slapping and getting themselves all psyched up for the fight that would occur after work.

The whole building knew this fight was going to go on between me, and those four guys. So at the end of first shift, everyone rushed over to watch. I was the first one there and stood in the center of the empty lot waiting for the fight to begin.

The four guys drove up and down the road leading to the lot revving up their engines and screeching their tires like some silly peacocks fluffing their feathers. But they never pulled into the lot. After about 15 minutes they drove off in frustration, and the whole company knew what had happened. They failed to meet the challenge.

The next day, and there-after, things got quiet. The union fell to disarray and nobody believed in those four guys any longer.

I ended up leaving that company on my own and went to work for a company that wasn’t run by an English parent company.

Now for a number of years I’ve been on the other end of things and have had to hire employees myself. The employees you hire are the sum of their previous experience. In some cases, the best employees are the ones that are fresh even if they don’t have physical experience, because they haven’t been corrupted by those meetings around the coffee machine yet.

I’ve hired many people that have worked for major unions, particularly from the steel industry, and all of them have had problems of some kind. They have skills that are desirable, but culturally, they have problems. They are the employees that cause the most trouble with other employees, and it appears they learned those tactics from the radicalized union behavior they experienced in their previous employment. Several of these employees have sat in front of me during reviews and demanded money comparable to what they made as union employees, and you have to be tactful how you explain to them that if they hadn’t made so much money in those positions, they would probably still be working there. These are the first employees to try and create legal trouble for you if you hire them and then find they are trouble, because they believe in the radical notion of it’s “us against them” “them” being management and ownership.

I have tried to help these types of employees under my leadership, and I have been burnt every way possible by them. My belief are that if you show them honesty, trust, empowerment, and those kinds of traits, they take it as a sign of weakness and seek to manipulate events behind your back.

I can only compare these former union employees to dogs that my wife and I have adopted from the pound. Now I am all for adopting pets, so don’t let my next comments discourage you from adopting an animal. Love can go a long way to helping those animals, and they need it. But, every dog I’ve ever risen that I got from a pound, which was an adult, I’ve had trouble with, because raising an animal from a puppy allows you to establish good patterns with the animal. Once they are adult dogs, those old habits are hard to break. Not impossible, but difficult.

My soft spots for abandoned animals sometimes moves over into people, and I have tried to help many lost people that have stumbled through life and had what seems like hard luck. But what you often find is just like those stray dogs, people are sometimes broken beyond repair, at least from a boss’s good intentions, and they will turn on you in a second no matter how kind you are to them.

Because at heart, they are broken, those union employees have been radicalized and truly believe that they are “owed” something and they seek to manipulate the world around them and will use your good will as empowerment to do mischief.

So in the future, I will be cautious of hiring union employees. I will if they are qualified, but I will look hard at their resumes and ask them extremely probing questions, because now I’ve seen union behavior at many levels, including how it works out in Hollywood, which is something outside my normal experience.

I did a thing for a friend of mine that involved fire whips, so they flew me out to work on a promo piece for some of the major studios to help develop a Real D 3D camera system. It was supposed to be an informal deal. During the shoot, I had a bit of an argument with the set “grip” because he insisted on handling my fire whip equipment, which was the fuel I used, the fire extinguishers and the whips themselves. Since there were only a handful of people in the country that handle fire whips, it was impossible for the guy to safely do anything with them, so I had to swat him back to the camera track and out of my way while I set up the shot, which he did an excessive amount of complaining to the director. But during that experience, I sat and listened to the make-up people complain just like the fabricators standing around the coffee machine, the camera people making tremendous demands on the producers, people complaining about the food that the catering truck brought, and actors complaining about having to share trailer time. After that experience, I can see clearly films that have been ruined because the people behind the films stayed to strict union rules. California’s labor unions have pushed films into other countries. I now understand why George Lucas makes his films in Australia, and England. He doesn’t want to deal with all that mess, and it shows in the films he’s made. You can actually tell if you know what you’re looking for.

Organized labor is a nice idea. But what ends up happening is that the worst in human nature is allowed to exist protected by the lack of competition. I can name numerous incidents where people like the Lakota Teacher that was busted for child pornography became corrupt because he doesn’t have to worry about his job and being terminated, and his income is secure so he didn’t have to worry about money, and the mind denigrates over time to the vices that exist in the backs of a broken mind. It works the other way too, I’ve known many, many born-again Christians that were former drug abusers or alcoholics that can use the extra time reading the bible and becoming clean. But most of the time, the security provided by organized labor breeds contempt and allows the employees minds to slide into a corrupt state of mischief. And for those of you who will say I’m not a psychologist and not qualified to make that statement, I’ll tell you this. I earned my opinions from the power of knowledge and observation, not some pin head without any life experience. And I’m a lot more qualified than most to cast an opinion because of my experience.

When the mind is void of competition, it rots. When a human being does not have to worry about losing a wife, he tends to abuse her either physically or mentally or both. When a person does not worry about losing their job, or competing to stay valuable, they become lazy. And when they don’t have to worry about where their money is coming from or the limits of not having enough, their minds have time to meditate on their vices.

Those are facts of life. My strategy has always been to show my employers how much money I can make them, then ask directly for the days off I need. So this is my answer to the question posed as to whether I like my weekends or not. I would have negotiated my own deal, so I do not have a union to thank for those things in my life. And I don’t see ANY value in organized labor based on my personal experience. They collectively bargain in mass and intimidation to hide their own laziness and have cost this country millions and millions of jobs and loss of GNP. They can’t argue directly. All they can do is make threats of violence or work stoppage, or vandalism. And that makes them thugs.

They can write me the nasty letters which I’ll laugh at, because I know the mind behind them is rotten. And I’ll keep those letters to prove my point at a future time when it will matter. (wink)

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Arizona Shooter Wanted to “be a Woman Someday”

It is terribly sad that Clarence Dupnik and Keith Obermann quickly seized the shooting tragedy in Arizona to attempt to erode the progress of the conservative movement.

Hey…………….guys, the kid was a screwball. One of his favorite books was the Communist Manifesto! That’s as far from the Tea Party movement as you get. Look at his Facebook page. He worked for “Children Protective Services, and wanted to be a woman someday.” Does that sound like a conservative leaning, tea partier?

Yet while the poor victims were still on the operating table, these two irresponsible people chose to seize the opportunity to take a shot at those who want to see the county return to traditional American values.

Here is the Sheriff in Tucson, Clarence Dupnik.

And here is Keith Obermann jumping quickly to capitalize on the progressive position well before the facts were in, hoping to erode away the effects of the recent conservative gains in popularity.

Who confuses who? Listen to this Socialist in Ohio spewing confusing rhetoric that is intended for young people.

 This guy openly speaks of moving away from the American Constitution.

If the kid was confused, it’s because of the effect people like Bernadine Dorn, Bill Ayers, Francis Pivan and many, many others that have infected our schools like termites with leftist ideology that doesn’t hold much water when someone does some investigation into the truth of the matter. The kid was reading all the wrong stuff at a tender age where leftist rhetoric had obviously manipulated his reason. Not to mention the Daily Show. That could be equally to blame. It targets kids in his age group. Click here to see for yourself how young people are being manipulated by the left.

And in tragedy those same leftists try to assign blame away from them, quickly, onto a faction of society that is trying to help young people like this kid desire to do something more important with their lives than trying to become a woman. Don’t let the facts get in the way of your opinion.  I’ve been to a lot of Tea Party events and ALL of them are like this.  CLICK HERE!

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Hard Road Reveals the Truth of all Things

Most of the time, doing the right thing, and I don’t mean the cosmetically correct thing, but truly the right thing, you will find that such an act is lonely and perilous. When I came up with the term Overmanwarrior in my novel The Symposium of Justice I was thinking a bit of Nietzsche’s Übermensch and Ayn Rand’s position in some of her fiction written in the late 1940’s through the 50’s. Because doing the right thing is not obvious and can only be seen best by those who have the ability to look with eyes beyond self gain.

The definition of the Übermensch according to Wikipedia is: The Übermensch (German; English: Overman, Above-Human, Superman) is a concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche posited the Übermensch as a goal for humanity to set for itself in his 1883 book Thus Spoke Zarathustra (German: Also Sprach Zarathustra).
There is no overall consensus regarding the precise meaning of the Übermensch, nor one of the importance of the concept in Nietzsche’s thought.

The trouble with such a concept is people like George Bernard Shaw, and Adolf Hitler and even Ayn Rand used the Ubermensch idea to justify their thoughts of purging society of a weaker race. Shaw and Hitler hungry with power and their own neurosis obviously misread Nietzsche and used their fragmented understanding to evil ends.

I’ve read Thus Spoke Zarathustra extensively and I don’t take from it that a dominate race should be established and the strong overman will rule all others. Such a thought is still rooted in the human need for control. What Nietzsche is trying to get mankind to understand, which the character Zarathustra frustratingly attempts to bring to the village from his mountaintop perch, only to have the village make fun of him and reject his ideas, is to help mankind see past their didactic necessities and consider the larger scheme of things.

I have found that much like Zarathustra, who had tremendous revelations to share with mankind, that the same mankind routinely rejects such advice in favor of the much more short term fixes of material need. And the journey of understanding what others refuse to grasp is a lonely one.

When critics point out to me such as in the Lakota Busing cuts issue about how they are supposed to get their children to school since the levy failed, or challenge me to teach a class of students and that if I did I would somehow see that teachers are worth over $60K a year and justify the enormous impact on community budgets, they truly, and naively believe that they will somehow catch me in a lie, where I say one thing and do another. So I thought I’d take a minute to provide a bit of background history, and how I arrived at this term overmanwarrior as the only title I find value in.

My daughter reminded me just prior to Christmas that she didn’t know how I did it when she was growing up, how I managed to work 80 plus hours a week and she still remembered me being a huge part of her life as a kid, most dads according to her that would work that much would be brain-dead and uninvolved.  (Check out my daughter, Brooke here)  I did the extra work so my wife could afford to stay home with my kids and be available for them as a stay-at-home mom. My mom was the kind of woman who got stuck on the edge of the women’s rights movement where a career helped define the modern woman, and she painfully resisted falling into that social trap. The result was that all the kids in my school wanted my mom for a mom because all their mothers had bitten into this modern notion of a woman can do and be everything to everyone, and kids were being neglected. So I made sure my wife had the same chance with my kids because the impact on young children of having a mother around was obviously extremely positive.

It was a rough road, but we managed. We could only afford one car at the time, and I didn’t want my kids to have to ride the bus if they didn’t want to, so my wife drove them to school. The school bus can be a rough environment for children, especially girls. So I wanted my kids to not have to worry about that kind of thing. But that meant that my wife would need our car. So in order for me to get to work, I used to ride a bicycle to and from work which was 8 to 12 miles one way. I did that every day for about 10 years. While doing all this I worked an average of 16 hours per day, sometime 7 days a week.

Yet I always spent time with my kids. I never resorted to any kind of alcoholic abuse or any other substance abuse like smoking or over-eating. I managed to read approximately 1 book a week during all this time, depending on the book. Some books were so involved that they sometimes took a month to complete while reading on my 10 minute breaks and lunch periods.

I’ve always reached for more beyond my primary income however and have been a part of many business startups, many of which failed for various reasons. These experiences put me in contact with many people that consider themselves powerful and I learned that in comparison to the life I was living, many of these people were soft, and being soft costs money. When looking at a balance sheet, it quickly becomes obvious that luxury written in a contract is money. And every day off, every compensation statement centered on self-preservation and unproductive time off, costs money.

I managed during all this time to go to college three different times, each of them felt like a waste of time. The environment was too juvenile for an institution that was supposed to take people to the next step. I observed when I was in college the intent of the exercise was to learn a trade, achieve a reasonable income for that trade, and allow that convenience of income to provide leisure time activity. What many of my peers were doing with that leisure time was wasting it on pop culture activities. I decided I learned more through trial and error of doing things, and had no desire to convenience, because it was making the people around me soft mentally and physically.

I’m still married to the same woman after over 20 years. We’ve had plenty of up’s and downs in our relationship but we never let those issues keep us from putting our children first. Many of those up’s and down’s were caused by lack of money, and social expectation pushed upon us by family members who wanted the best for us, but their unit of measure was a faulty social model shaped by progressives.

Even after all these years, I still ride a motorcycle to work, even in the rain and extreme cold. I do it to stay tough. It’s all too easy in middle age to get soft, and I won’t allow that to happen to me.

I’ve been injured numerous times, sometimes where steel pieces would go through one side of a finger and come out the other, I’ve been cut so bad that the end of my fingers were completely pulled away from the bone, and I spent over 5 years walking around with a torn ACL suffered in a basketball game where it was just me against three other guys, a bet I made for the right to play basketball at a park. Until I tore my ACL, I was winning. During that time I still rode my bike to work; I never missed a single day of work, or took workman’s compensation. I’ve changed primary jobs over 5 times yet never took a single unemployment check and my part-time jobs have literally been everything under the sun, everything from janitorial work to sales. I worked part-time for about 7 years as a tree climber and trimmer, and that was difficult work when you already put in 8 to 10 hours at a primary job. I’ve thrown my back out, torn muscles in my back, and had it seize up from stress and overwork so bad that I couldn’t even get off the couch. Yet I always managed to get to work and suffer through the pain without missing a beat. To this day I don’t take a single item of medication. My blood pressure is child-like and healthy. My weight is fine. I can still run and touch my toes. I can still crawl on the floor and play with the dog or little kids. I seldom if ever get sick. Everything mentioned is true without any exaggeration. I’m actually holding back a lot of information so not to sound pompous. Needless to say, I set the bar extremely high for myself.

The benefit of all of the above is that my wife and I have always craved to keep our debt obligations minor both financially and emotionally because our ultimate goal and the goal we’ve tried to teach our children was to pursue freedom. Not to become a slave to an occupation. You use the occupation to secure your finances, but you don’t use the occupation to create your identity.

As you might imagine trying to teach your children such a concept sounds easy, but consider that most of our society uses that measuring system of occupational value to establish the hierarchy of human value. Trash collectors are at the bottom, and powerful politicians are at the top. So taking such a position leads to big trouble, leaving family members baffled. When someone introduces themselves they often say, “I’m a CEO,” or “I’m a data entry technician,” or “I’m an investment broker.”

So to do the right thing and to go for the lofty goal of true freedom, not just financial freedom but emotional freedom as well is a lonely course to plot.

It’s not as if you can sit down and have a beer with someone and explain to them that what is most important to you is complete freedom, to be free of the burdens mankind gives itself.

Zarathustra realized that the people’s ears were not yet ready for what he had to say. So he returned back to his cave.

When you make decisions that leave it so you can’t rely on a mom or a dad, a brother or a sister, a friend, a boss, a politician, or anyone else, you find that you have to always dig deep and rely on yourself, that is a overmanwarrior. A warrior because it is always an uphill battle because all those types of people, even though they may mean well, have something corrupt in their nature, usually. It is difficult to separate a person’s inner desires for themselves from the needs you have. So when we talk about an overman, someone trying to be more than just a human being it is easy to see.

Films like the old Porky’s, or the modern version of that, American Pie, I find myself lost to the humor. I’ve seen people I know well laugh profusely while watching those films, but I don’t understand why. Sex is fun, but I don’t see making an entire film about the adolescent notions of sex and passing gas. Those types of grotesque human behavior are disgusting to me, just as I have absolutely no clue why a person would desire to get drunk, or high. I don’t understand bachelor parties or lap dances when you have a perfectly good wife at home. Why would you do that?

Those are just a few of the differences that I have with most people in social interaction. Now the “normal” person will look at what I wrote above and say, “That guy is a stiff. No fun!” And that’s why an overman concept is a lonely road, because there is no way you could ever explain to a person the value of being free of vices like alcohol, sex addiction, social acceptance, free of craving power, free of fear because fears are used to control you, free of self-doubt, I could go on and on. And from what I understand of Nietzsche that is how you get to god is seeing beyond the vices that hold mankind back. And religion often plays to people’s fears. A belief in religion is better than nothing. Spiritual faith is extremely important. But when Nietzsche proposed the idea of the Übermensch that’s what he was talking about, moving beyond the things that hold back mankind.

The benefits of developing that position are that thinking outside the box is easy because of the freedom from all the things that hold people back. That thinking outside the box is how you solve the social problems that inflict the human race.

That’s why I use the term overmanwarrior.  Don’t think when I make a statement about how something could or should be fixed that I can’t back it with action.  Failure is not an option……ever.  It is not acceptable to say, “I’m only human,”or “I’m no superman,” as proclaimed in the song from “Scrubs,” or “I’m not strong enough.”  My basic feeling is that if the situation calls for a superman, then you better learn to be one.  Leaning on the frailties of imperfection as an excuse for inefficiency and justification for corruption is never an acceptable answer and will not be tolerated. 

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Meet Ayn Rand: My Kind of Woman

Here is one of my favorite writers. For those that think the current push against the intellectual controlled advancement toward of collective society based on Sir Thomas More’s book from the 1500’s is a recent development, here are some old interviews of Ayn Rand.

I enjoy her work even though she wrote in the 1950’s. It is quite refreshing to hear her speak thanks to this old footage, another one of the great miracles of the internet, and another reason Net Neutrality would enjoy regulating the content that we can find on the internet using the FCC.

Here you can see a person from the 50’s talking about the collectivism push from “intellectuals” prior to the pathetic riots on the campus of Berkeley on December 2nd 1964. It is extremely unfortunate that liberal professors stand at the gates of higher education, and that the push for moving society in that direction is a form of programming for entire generations.


Saying such things as Ayn says here or someone like me 60 years later may sound conspiratorial, or even paranoid. Yet the evidence of what Ayn speaks about then is all around us now. Look carefully and the evidence is abundant.

Are we lambs or the wolf? If you identify with being a flock of sheep waiting to be led, you can be led to a slaughterhouse. If you are the wolf, you hunt the sheep and even the shepherd.

Social programs are designed to make people identify themselves into sheep.


Where Rand proclaims herself as an atheist I think that is too general of a term. She puts her faith in reason. I would say that currently the idea of god exists within the 11 known dimensions of our existence, so it is foolish to proclaim that there isn’t a god. But her message of self-reliance is a key to personal happiness and social responsibility.

I like this following clip because the guy makes some nice arguments. However, I would say that he became sensitive to social issues while in college, like has happened to many college attendees instructed by liberal professors which over time has had a devastating effect on our populations ability to vote intelligently.


The institutions of control and social sensitivity use Colbert and the Daily Show to appeal to younger audiences so to diffuse free market tendencies like the increase sales of Rand’s books in response to the Obama presidency.

Maybe the guy makes a nice sentimental point. After all, it is easier to be accepted in a group environment as one would be in a flock of sheep. There is safety in numbers, and many would be willing to trade away their freedoms for a chance of such a safety net.

But I am something of a wolf, and I don’t have any desire to hunt in a pack. The concept of such flock like behavior is disgusting in the confines it places on personal liberty.

And I would say that Ayn Rand was a fellow wolf.

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Speed! Update on the Tail of the Dragon

I saw a video today of a Corvette accelerating to 195 mph, supposedly. It’s a 1000 HP modified car that the guy is trying to sell by showing off its speed. I understand that he was given citations for his speed which will have to be contested in court because he was not actually pulled over by an officer.

This reminded me of a book that I’m working on. I’m talking to a couple of different publishers right now, so it’s on my mind. The book is the Tail of the Dragon, and it features a car that is a 700 HP car that runs off a diesel conversation to vegetable oil. Anyway, watching that Corvette reminded me of what the acceleration would look like in my car chase book.

Here’s a reading from me of the first couple of pages.


This morning I had to revise part of the package of questions one particular publisher sent me for some market analysis of my novel to figure out if it fits into their 2nd quarter lineup. It’s a long time consuming process, but I thought for the sake of fun that I’d put up the contents of my correspondence today in tribute to that speedy video.

Dear Gail,

It occurred to me after I sent back the questionnaire for publication of my Tail of the Dragon novel, that the answer to item 24, what is the most compelling aspect of your novel, was not fully explained until I thought about it over the last few weeks.

The answer I provided was decent enough, don’t get me wrong. I would like to add to what I provided.

The most compelling aspect of the novel is something equally grand, but philosophically less obvious. Its felt more than explained, which explains the lack of articulation on my part. Tail of the Dragon involves our heroes going on a destructive romance through the entire state of Tennessee and North Carolina that results in the deaths of many police and National Guardsman. Not on purpose or maliciousness, but as a by-product of the experience. It also results in hundreds of millions of dollars of property damage and captures for a time the entire nation. Such events traditionally end in the death of the characters, such as in Bonnie and Clyde, but not in Tail of the Dragon.

In my novel the heroes live happily ever after. In fact the lead character gets a contract to begin racing in NASCAR because of his sudden fame and marketability. What happens is the same public relation firms that are criticized heavily in the Tail of the Dragon are employed at the end to re-shape public opinion, and within days of the destructive incidence, the same people that suffered at the hands of the heroes, are now in line to get their autographs, and that is the true parody to the story, and is the most compelling aspect to the Tail of the Dragon.

I hope that you will send this forth to be included with the other information I provided in regard to publication of my Tail of the Dragon. And I hope that you and your family have a delightful Christmas and fantastic New Year.

Rich Hoffman

http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Net Neutrality is the Villian from Tron

The following line is NOT a bit of dialogue from the new Disney film Tron.

“We must take action to protect consumers against price hikes and closed access to the Internet—and our proposed framework is designed to do just that: to guard against these risks while recognizing the legitimate needs and interests of broadband providers.” FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski

What?

Who do these people think they are? That’s almost as audacious as trying to regulate the air. But that statement almost sounded like the uttering’s of the character Clu as he addresses a sea of program soldiers about to be unleashed upon society in the new Tron Legacy film.

This is clearly a power grab by the FCC to further attempt to justify their existence. It must be terribly frustrating for them to have a part of the media that they don’t have any control over, and this is an attempt by a government agency to get control.

If you don’t understand what NET NEUTRALITY is, listen to Bill Cunningham of 700 WLW discuss it here:

As far as the platform the FCC is using to justify this move, the prices on the internet have regulated themselves. Prices too high are beat out by companies that offer better rates. It’s pretty simple really.

I can remember when the internet was new, and charged by the hour, then service for the month for a flat fee. There were many different combinations of price packages that were created along the way, but ultimately cheaper prices in a competitive fashion created the internet we have today, where a single user can talk on their Smart Phone, while talking on a headset over their XBOX and answering their email on a laptop, all done on the internet. The bandwidth drop that the FCC is talking about is a complete fabrication.

It has regulated itself and is one of the only aspects of society that is free. The internet is the model for what society should mimic.

But the FCC under the disguise of “fairness” is attempting to get their little feet in the door, and once there they will unleash many, many, many more regulations, just as they have for television and radio. It won’t take long for everyone that wants a website to have apply for one to the FCC just as a radio broadcaster does. And if you violate their terms, you’ll lose your license.

You have to consider what we’re talking about here, and that is access to the internet. Since the internet is just a bunch of computers talking independently of each other, it might as well be air. It has no central location and does not stop at a nation’s border. Therefore, the only way a government can get control of the internet is to control the on-ramp to the World Wide Web. In this case the FCC is using “fairness” to begin a relationship with internet providers that will become a much more parental relationship down the road.

This power move is so audacious that they by-passed congress to do it. We can’t even blame the incompetence of our congressional politicians on this one. This is a raw power grab from a branch of government functioning without any checks or balances, and in the context of things, is very serious.

If you dear reader scanning over these words don’t find this whole NET NEUTRALITY issue to be EVIL, and doesn’t provoke you into an outrage of forced accountability of the FCC, you can count the days that you soon won’t be able to read these words, because I will, along with this entire Blog Site will be found in violation of the FCC regulations, and will be shut down. And you will have to get thoughtful comments from an “orthodox” source that the FCC has given an approved license to.

That’s what’s at stake. As always, government sells itself as having your best interest in mind. It’s all about fairness, according to them. But history says otherwise.

The internet has thrived without any government regulation. And now, those public employees that have their socialist tendencies toward securing their own wallets in a collective utopia desire to hang themselves like parasites from internet commerce.

As always, it’s about the money.

While I write this there is a court case against WLW for setting up a Christmas manger at their tower in Mason, Ohio. The reason for the law suit is because they have a FCC license and that the argument is any government entity should have a separation of church and state.

Also, the FCC is using AL Sharpten to crack down on conservative talk show hosts like Rush Limbaugh, because the bottom line is people like Rush need to be shut down in order for government to expand, which is the goal of these types of regulators. They desire to secure employment for themselves from tax dollars. That’s all there is to it. The whole concept is incredibly short-sighted and selfish. But that’s what you usually find are the quality of people that desire to make a living off government work.

Once this line is crossed, these parasites of government regulation will embed themselves like a tick on a dog to suck the life-force of the creature.

Without Net-Neutrality, an entire industry, which young people are quite aware of has risen. These sad politicians wouldn’t know much about that industry because they are too busy pursuing lobby supplied prostitutes on K-street, or exotic dinners where they believe their discussion will pave the way for the nation.

No.

You can see the future by simply turning on a Nintendo Wii. The interface of either the Wii, the XBOX or the PlayStation 3, which is all internet based, provides at a glance Netflex, weather updates, news from around the world, and a portal to play Black Ops with a friend from half-way around the world in real time. That is the world of tomorrow, and it was created without governmental control.

Before I went with my family to see the new Tron film, I watched my kids swordfight with each other on the Wii, and many of those images came to me while I was watching that very interesting film. Tron is all about the world of cyberspace and the empires that can rise and fall within that world. And every new game created is a new experience for each and every human being on this planet to be a part of. But the overall theme of Tron was the perilous course of pursuing perfection.

In Tron, Jeff Bridges created an exact opposite of himself called Clu to implement the perfect world, a utopia. What it turned out to be was a hellish digital fascism that Bridges was unable to control and that society completely turned on him. It was heady stuff, not intended to be watched with just a light eye for entertainment.

Net Neutrality is in our world the fictional villain of the Tron film. Initiated with good intentions, but resulting in a hellish existence.

Art becomes reality, most of the time. “Your focus will determine your reality,” a line from another great science fiction film proclaims, and it’s true. Too bad human beings don’t think through things and learn from their art, instead of repeating the same mistakes over, and over, and over, and over, and over, and over…………………………………infinity.

We don’t remember what life was like before social security, or Medicare, or any number of government programs. But every one of us knows what the internet was like before the government decided to stick its nose in it. And it has thrived.

Don’t believe the lies. Encourage the new congress to escort the FCC to court for this gross imposition on our freedoms and liberty, and instruct them to stay out of our nation’s way.

Guess who is the main man behind this push………………..George Soros.  Listen to Rush Limbaugh discuss it here. 



Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

It’s the End of the Road: Budget problems for everyone!

We have arrived at the impasse, the point where life as we know it will change. The car is headed toward a massive financial cliff and the point of no return is near. We’re all packed into the car together, and the arrogant driver won’t heed the warnings that they are about to kill us all.

I’ve always been particularly good at directions. My reputation is that you could drop me anywhere on the face of this planet with a blindfold and I’d find my way home within a few days.

I once had a vicious argument with a former friend of mine over the movie, ALIVE, where a soccer team crashed in the Andes Mountains and resorted to cannibalism as a way to survive. It would have been far easier for those people to just send one or two people to walk down hill, and follow the water till they hit a village. There isn’t any place in this world where a village cannot be found within a three day walk, give or take the strength of the walker.

I had the same argument with another former friend over the film Castaway. Again, the main character knew he crashed in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and was east of Hawaii. Grab a log, start swimming east. If a shark comes to eat you, kill it. Eat the shark and keep swimming. End of movie.  You don’t spend years of your life stuck on an island!

I had similar argument with a family member over the Blair Witch Project when I proclaimed that there was no way a group of teenagers could get lost in the woods of Maryland. There are no virgin forests that large, where they could walk all day and arrive back in the same spot.

All those people that argued with me had in common a blind trust in the social structure, and what the characters of these films shared with them, and apparently the common audience is a similar sense of helplessness. I on the other hand have learned to trust nothing resembling structure, because it’s prone to fail at some point.

Back in September 2010 I went on WLW radio and proclaimed that the course the Lakota School System was on was unsustainable. I received a lot of criticism for proclaiming the obvious. And to my critics I felt sorry for them. These were the same sad people that saw films like ALIVE, CASTAWAY and THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and could relate with the plight of the protagonists. They would be the type of people that would freeze under duress and not be able to make a decision.

Instead of heeding my warning, and the warnings of people like Darryl Parks, and Scott Sloan both of WLW radio, the established thinking insisted on maintaining the finance model they had achieved through several generations of threats and coercion only to find out that there isn’t any money left. And they willingly held the children they are teaching as hostages, cutting busing at the first sign of trouble even though busing is only 2% of their costs. It is the same sad game.

I was doing some reading the other night about the history of union activity in the United States and how many union bosses were proclaimed communists and code word “progressives,” much of this literature coming from sources prior to Glenn Beck, much of it from the late 70’s to early 80’s. I read about how the entertainment unions of 1946 attacked Warner Brothers and turned over cars in radical behavior that predated Saul Alinsky. Alinsky the author of Rules for Radicals is actually endorsed reading by the NEA. These simpletons have been at this behavior for a long time, entrenching themselves into our government as public workers unions, teachers being one of the largest sectors of that unification.

Forward thinking people like me and several others have been saying that it’s coming to an end. The inflation rate in the United States, a weaken US dollar, and our debt to other countries such as China have tied our hands behind our backs. We couldn’t even go to war with North Korea to help South Korea if we wanted to, because China would slap us silly for even thinking about it. They own us now!

And these derelict thinkers of public unions cleaving to the edges of reality like desperate survivors craving to eat their own people instead of truly doing something productive like reconsidering their entire life style and benefits packages, because they are causing massive economic failures due exclusively to their extremely high expectations, are digging in to their beliefs.

They are the kind of people that would stay on a remote island eating coconuts and developing a relationship with a soccer ball called “WILSON” instead of getting on a raft and to start swimming, again I’m thinking of CATAWAY here. Or ALIVE, or THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. Every time I see a scene for CASTAWAY I gag! I can’t believe Robert Zemeckis directed that film. What happened to him!

But everyone has been warned well in advance. For Lakota, they have a 160 million dollar budget. The time for the LEA to approach the school board about saving the district came in November. Instead, they dug in their heels and chose to play the same old game of cutting busing.

For the rest of Ohio, Kasich budget cuts are going to be deep, and painful. And 2011 will be very difficult for people that make a living off the public dollar.

Turning over cars, or holding massive strikes and work stoppages won’t help you. All that will happen is that we’ll realize how little you really do, and you’ll prove that you’re over-paid. But radical behavior is what caused this issue. The public paid you too much to shut you up. But now they don’t have it to give you without drowning themselves, so they will now tell you no. That’s the way of things.

You should have listened when we told you to re-think your situations. Now, you will suffer much greater than you needed to.

You will suffer because you trust in the social structure that you helped to create, and it’s failing under its own weight.

Below is Darryl Parks from WLW discussing many of these issues. Remember this when we get into the hard months of April, May, and June of 2011. It’s not like the information wasn’t out there for people to act upon.

Below is the 60 Minutes interview that Darryl was referring to. I think these two interviews are loud warnings that should be heeded while there is still time.

The cynic in me knows that most people will just plant their heels where they stand and grip blindly onto what they know best, even if what they know and trust is wrong.

Those of you that have been “gaming” the system for many years whether you’re a union leader or member, a real-estate agent, a developer, an investment manager, or just a measly politician, or any innumerable guilty parties, you know who you are, somebody had to pay eventually. Our current crises are because of your collective irresponsible actions, and that’s why our county is now suffering. So now it’s time to get off your ass and help out. Stop crying and start swimming, because you’re holding back the rest of the country that wants to survive.

One of the most frustrating things in life is knowing your going in the wrong direction but being unable to tell the arrogant people driving the car that they are about to drive you over a cliff, especially when you’re better at directions than the driver. And now we are at the point of turning around and going back where we came from, or we go over the cliff. And the point of no return sign comes when we hit the metaphorical year of 2011.

If the car doesn’t stop soon and turn around, I’m going to jump out. I don’t need a car, or a GPS, or even a road to find my way back. So I’ll let the car go right on over the cliff with all the arrogant idiots that don’t listen in it, because I won’t let them make a decision that ruins my life too.

And I won’t sit in the desert at the edge of the cliff waiting for someone to come and rescue me. I’ll start walking back within seconds, not wasting a moment of time.

Because I can.

Rich Hoffman

http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Where Evil Hides

Truly one of the great writers of our time is Edmund Morris. I loved his work in The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt, and Theodore Rex. So did Ronald Reagan, because he picked Morris to be his personal biographer during his presidency due exclusively to the work of the first Roosevelt book.

That book became after many years of writing, Dutch. I’ll get into more on that book later. But for now a caption from it I think is particularly revealing. It is in regard to a raw footage viewing of the film Lest We Forget, which was a done by Warner Brothers and filmed by Bill Graf. Ronald Reagan was slated to do the narration. Bill had managed to get some incredibly terrible footage of the tragedy that occurred at Bergan-Belsen.

The following description of Bergan-Belsen is from Wikipedia:

http://www.bergenbelsen.co.uk/index.html

Bergen-Belsen (or Belsen) was a Nazi concentration camp in Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle. Originally established as the prisoner of war camp Stalag XI-C, in 1943 it became a concentration camp on the orders of Heinrich Himmler, where Jewish hostages were held with the intention of exchanging them for German prisoners of war held overseas[1]. Later still the name was applied to the displaced persons camp established nearby, but it is most commonly associated with the concentration camp it became as conditions deteriorated between 1943-1945. During this time an estimated 50,000 Russian prisoners of war and a further 50,000 inmates died there,[2] up to 35,000 of them dying of typhus in the first few months of 1945.[3]

The camp was liberated on April 15, 1945 by the British 11th Armoured Division.[4] 60,000 prisoners were found inside, most of them seriously ill,[3] and another 13,000 corpses lay around the camp unburied.[4] The scenes that greeted British troops were described by the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby, who accompanied them:

“…Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which… The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them … Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live … A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms, then ran off, crying terribly. He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days.

This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life………”

Once Bill’s footage was gathered it was taken to Warner Brothers to be shown to a select group of people, Reagan one of them because he had to do the voice-over. The following quotation is from the great book, Dutch, page 215.

In the projection room Col. MacDuffie took the seat of honor and next to him were Bob Carson and Ronnie Reagan. I was up front with a few other enlisted men. Together Bill Graf’s footage took us on a journey out of reality, into hell.

We saw gaunt emaciated living skeletons, wondering around like lost souls in some kind of purgatory. Some of them stood naked and shit where they stood. We saw a skull complete with face sliced in half like a melon so the camp doctor could study the special conformation of the Jewish brain. If my grandfather from Krakow hadn’t emigrated here ninety years ago, that might have been mine. We saw stacks of cured and flattened human skins. The commandant’s wife had selected inmates with colorful tattoos to be killed and flayed for lamp shades. I guess these were the rejects. Somebody told Bill Graf that she liked skins with large nipples, because of the pleasing aureole effect when light shone through them. We saw—I don’t want to tell you what else we saw. It makes me want to puke, even now. When the lights went on, I felt chilled to the bone as if I were in an ice house. I feared I was going to freeze and smother at the same time. I had trouble swallowing and desperately needed water and warmth. I rushed out into the sunlight and looked around to make certain I was not dying in Germany but was here alive, in Culver City.

The others shuffled out of the projection room more slowly, like men who had seen ghosts. Reagan was strangely silent, buried in thought. It was if we had attended a mass funeral, and that in some way we were the ones that had died.

The film Lest We Forget, made a lasting impression on everyone that had to see it that day. As for Ronald Reagan, he made his sons Michael and Ron Reagan see the film when they turned fourteen as a kind of rite of passage into adulthood.

The reason I bring all this up and show these pictures is because the human race has forgotten. When the crises of the world are these immature, half-developed children protesting in London for free education, or children in the United States that won’t get up off the couch to get exercise, or the power grab by politicians to get Net Neutrality passed, none of them understand real pain, real suffering, and the blackness capable in the human heart corrupt with evil.

These modern politicians like their predecessors from 1945 did not understand how a woman could desire a prisoner to be skinned and turned into a lamp shade so the light coming off the nipples would cast an interesting light. Such thoughts are truly evil. And such evil cannot be legislated from existence. You cannot change what hides in the soul of a human being with more laws.

You have to address the real issue of personal responsibility, and not allow evil to hide behind legislation, and black-hearted politicians corrupt with their own desires for power. And such people populate the earth in abundance, outnumbering even the stars in the sky.

Never forget Bergen-Belsen. Because in the context of history, it wasn’t the only time terrible things like this have happened to human beings, and it won’t be the last. Never take it for granted that the earth has seen the end of evil, quite the opposite. Evil hides where people are afraid, or too lazy to look. And from those places the next terrible events to be inflicted upon the human race will attack.

Here is Ronald Reagan revisiting that terrible place many years after he had seen the footage that had impacted him as a much younger man.

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Nameplate Gods: The Royalty of Politics

Something Doc Thompson said the other day sent me down a dark abyss of contorted anger. He mentioned Roxanne Qualls, who was at a budget meeting he attended.

Roxanne used to be Mayor of Cincinnati, and I have some experience with politicians in that grand city hall. It was in that building that I learned at the early age of 25 the principles of politics.  (Pictures referenced from Wikipedia.  CLICK HERE to learn more.)

It was refreshing to hear Doc talk about his experiences with a city council member that gave him the cold shoulder at that budget meeting, when in fact that very same day, Doc had that council member on 700 WLW to explain how important his integrity was to him.

Doc’s comments were classic, and refreshing, because it confirmed in me that I am not alone in my experiences with politicians, and that at least one other person in the world had virtually the same opinion of them.

I sat in front of Roxanne Qualls in her large, opulent office while her staff worked outside the door and watched Qualls giggle smugly at my suggestion that she support lower taxes. Her look made me feel as if she were telling me, “you poor naive young man, you don’t understand that we’ve already made all the decisions. We only have the public meetings to facilitate the public into believing they play a part of the process.”

I learned much later that the technique used by virtually every politician is the Delphi Technique, or some variation of it. I received the same look when I explained to Todd Portune in his office how my idea for a non-alcoholic night club would benefit the pleas of desperate moms pleading with Cincinnati City Council to do something about the under aged drinking that was going on at the University of Cincinnati campus, specifically a nightclub called COOTERS.

A few weeks after my meeting with Mr. Portune the Corryville Business Association put pressure on the owner of the building I was trying to lease, and I couldn’t figure out for the life of me how they found out what I was up to. I knew they would be upset with my non-alcoholic nightclub idea, because back then, bars had to close at 2 AM. If I operated an establishment without a liquor license that would put a lot of pressure on the surrounding bar establishments that would lose some of their under-aged business to me, because kids under 21 don’t like the hassle of possibly being turned away, or getting caught with a fake ID, and I’d be able to stay open all night.

But my business idea died as quick as it rose. I found out that Mr. Portune at the time, a council member was also the attorney for that nightclub. So it had to be him that tipped off the nightclub to what I was doing.

It was a hard lesson of the nature of politics. It struck me hard with disillusionment and anger at the process that crushed fresh ideas before they ever had a chance to move forward. You find in every council meeting across the nation, every trustee meeting, every school board, every state congress and senate, and each federal congress and senate is that same blank elitism that Doc described.

I think it starts with a love of titles, and people who love them tend to crave positions of power, and the perception of politics is that being elected is a reception of power. It’s a puerile idea which appears to be inherited through the collective learning process gained over the centuries of human development.

The United States Constitution was designed to alleviate the need for much of this political trouble. But, unfortunately the weaker human minds, the ones that crave power, that crave material things, that crave the adoration of the public, they are the ones that run for office, and they are the ones that want to sit behind a desk and decide the fate of many. In their hearts, they truly want royalty and the false respect that comes with it.

As I’ve said, I’ve sat across the table from many of these types of people, and they all have the same glass-eyed blankness that seems more appropriate of a jack-o-lantern two weeks after Halloween.

I shouldn’t say all. I’ve met a few here and there that had a light on behind their eyes. Rob Portman is one; I had several long talks with him in the early 90’s back when a thing called the Reform Party was making news in the papers. I also met a few of Ross Perot’s children and they were all bright-eyed and unspoiled. I could see the light on there as well. But those people are the very rare exceptions. Most of the rest are ready to make a deal, for there is no ethical avenue to guide their movements. After a public meeting the voting public just looks to each other for a moment of disbelief as if to wonder what just happened, because the deals had already been made well before anyone showed up for the meeting.

I once attended a meeting the Cincinnati City Council had with the public to figure out what to put on the river. They wanted ideas, this was sometime around 1993. I watched my friend and several other citizens give very impassioned speeches about how to develop the riverfront. The council members would scribble stuff down and nod their heads, and thank the speakers for their input.

After the meeting, the common people would go up and try to speak to the council members, but the council people were only interested in speaking to the developers, or in other words, the people who may contribute future campaign funds. My friend had made by far the best speech of anyone, and not a single council member wanted to shake his hand or would even look him in the eye. They shunned him because his input wasn’t really wanted. The whole process was just a show for the papers, to report to the public that the council people were listening to the people speak. The real deals were going on elsewhere.

I saw the same thing in zoning issues all over Liberty and West Chester Twp, and I’ve recently seen it within the Lakota School district at school board meetings.

Politicians are dangerous because most of what they crave is false, honor through title, respect by name plates, and wealth through side deals. In too many cases, they are hungry attorneys who use political contacts to bring business to their practice. They aren’t interested in being public servants.

That’s why they cower behind their little desks and office doors and cling to the frail appendages of reality they shape through public opinion. Because if you get too close to them, and gaze upon the soul that drives the body, you’ll find the seat vacant. Instead you’ll find the wires and gears responding to a remote control, and the real pilot no place to be found.

So goes the future of our country while the weak seek to govern the strong through the weapon of name plates.

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com