Category: Mystery

Pirates and Politicians, Same Thing: One uses a cutlass, the other uses a pen to force us into serfdom

Doc Thompson of 700 WLW discusses all the various ways politicians are misspending our tax dollars.

This is a rich country. We have plenty of money, and if you don’t believe me, ask Halliburton. There’s plenty of money out there; don’t fall into the trap of this whole deficit argument. The only question is how to spend it.

Van Jones, Former Obama Administration Green-Jobs Czar

It is not a false statement to call people like Mr. Van Jones a simple looter. Comments like what he has made, such as the one in the example, are statements rooted in sheer ignorance. But this is not an article to condemn only Van Jones. This is an article about condemning all those like him that look to the tax payer to fund their looter mentality. I write this on the heals of watching the new Pirates of the Caribbean film, which I liked a lot, but when watching the behavior of the pirates, and their mentality, I fail to recognize the difference between any official that asks the tax payer for more money to fund their “big ideas” when the reality of what they are doing is stealing the money outright. Yes, stealing is the correct term.

Why is stealing the correct term? Well, politicians are using tax money in many cases to buy votes. Lyndon Johnston was doing that as president. He was openly creating government programs that had to be funded with tax payer dollars to care for voter demographics beneficial to him politically. In other words, he took money from people who wouldn’t openly support his programs, but took that money in the form of taxes. If the tax payer refused to pay taxes for the programs he created then the tax payer would be arrested under force and thrown in jail. FDR did the same thing in the 40’s. Roosevelt wasn’t interested in being a president; he wanted to be a king. How is that any different from a pirate stealing the resources of a vessel at sea under a black flag? It’s not. LBJ justified this theft by declaring a war on poverty, which he lost, because if the war on poverty truly wanted to be won, the free market would be more openly embraced. Capitalism would be the goal, making money would be the goal, because if a society desires not to have poverty, it would be more in the business of making money so there is more money to be had. Not just simply printing money, like the Fed is doing now to cover the looting they have been doing for years, but actually producing goods that can be exported to a buyer in another country. That’s how you fight poverty.

Karl Marx spent most of his life in poverty, so it is no wonder he looked with jealousy at the world around him and wanted to steal from them. So he came up with communism as a way for people like him, that didn’t know how to make things, and didn’t want to work for a living, to loot money from those that do make things. Since he was a poor man himself, he didn’t understand the value of money. He thought like Van Jones does, that money just existed out there in the world and he needed to find a way to take it from those that have it and give it to people like him, in other words, outright theft.

Each week portions of our pay are taken from us without our consent. This money is taken under the justification of caring for the government. But if you are a person like me, that won’t use Medicare, that won’t draw a Social Security check, that doesn’t want government to be so big. That doesn’t want to support a system that breeds “legal” piracy, you don’t have a choice. I want government to be smaller, so it can be better managed. I don’t want my money taken and used for such purposes as to the expansion of government. In other words, my money is taken and used for purposes I’m against. It is not for the greater good of government, or the country, it is for the looting and plunder of pirates that instead of dressing as Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean they wear a suit and tie. In function they are no different. I will debate anyone that wishes to challenge me otherwise. If they do they are fools, because they are simply covering for crimes they know to be true and are complicit in that crime either through ignorance or their own corruption.

Want some proof? Of the 62 members of Congress that left office in 2008, 16 of them now work as lobbyists. Of those 16, 13 are Republicans. Between 1998 and 2004 43% of those former lawmakers became lobbyists. What is a lobbyists? A lobbyist pushes law makers to pass laws that give the organization that hires the lobbyist to have a competitive advantage over either the government itself, which is essentially a pay-off to avoided excessive regulation, or to gain an advantage over another competitor. This isn’t happening in isolated cases. This is the law of the land. It’s common practice! Think about it, why do we need so many laws? We already have a constitution. With every new law passed, there is money involved, money for attorneys, money for tax collectors, and a reason for politicians to be in session and not off doing something actually productive. Law makers are no different from a fry guy in a local fast food restaurant. If there aren’t any customers, they don’t have anything to do, so they’ll just shuffle the French Fries around the fry bin to look busy. Law makers create new customers with our money so they can have something to do and a reason to exist. And in the complicated laws they pass, lobbyists will then hire them for the knowledge on how to comply with that legislation. That’s how a thief gives value to nothing using the plunder of our resources.

To put the whole looting scheme into terms we can all relate with, lets look at school funding, and something we all must send our children to, so it affects virtually every single one of us. The teachers union lobbies law makers for legislation that protects their members. This is why in Ohio school boards can only negotiate approximately 15% of their total budget costs. The 75% to 85% are completely off-limits because they involve wages and are the largest cost of a school system. This means every time a teacher gets a higher degree, they must be compensated according to state law, because the OEA lobbied for the creation of that law. So when a school like Lakota is told that a $160 million budget is not enough and the question is asked, why? The answer is that labor costs that have no limit in their ceiling value are exploding the budget. Since in Ohio property tax is the primary way of funding schools, a school system has no choice but to ask property owners for more money. For a property owner like me, that thinks an average wage of 63K per year is too much to pay a teacher, I’d favor something more reasonable like 49K to 55K, but that doesn’t matter because the contracts were negotiated with the lobbyist not the tax payer. The politicians made the deal to buy votes from the OEA members in order to secure a deal to put the politician in office so he can collect tax money of their own in a different way. It’s lucrative otherwise they wouldn’t be fighting so hard for the opportunity to loot the public. And all the money used is coming from the tax payer. In this case my property value is looted to support values and education I think are mediocre and too expensive. But I have no choice. If I don’t pay, I would be prosecuted. Yet a prosecutor won’t touch the illegal activity that goes on in schools to pass a levy because a deal is made with the money the members of the teacher’s union supply. The prosecutor won’t touch the issue because they don’t want to deal with the political fall-out involved. The teachers union is too powerful, and not worth the political fight.

Why is the teacher’s union so powerful? Because they have many members and if you want to teach in the state of Ohio, you must be in a teacher’s union. There is no choice. So for every school built, and every teacher hired, a new union contributor is born. Each member contributes money to the union through their checks to feed the system. They do this because teachers know that the union has negotiated a larger than average wage for them, about 30% more than they’d earn in the private sector for the same job. The union knows it must negotiate wage levels that high because teachers are less likely to complain about spending their money on union dues if the teacher has a money surplus each week. As long as the union collects the dues from its members it can then dangle that money in front of politicians to achieve their goals. If teachers made less money, they’d be less likely to openly pay a portion of their check to union dues. But since the teacher is paid with taxes and the dues paid lobby the tax payer’s representatives who then make deals with the unions which then turn around and drive up the costs of the service on both ends, the cost of education goes up, and the elected representative has wasted tax payer’s money. The tax payer is spending money on the politician for making deals and not doing the business of the people. The money is stolen from the property owner and then used against the property owner in the form of higher taxes to support the structure of the scheme.

The tax payers just want their children taught. They want their children to read, write and know how to do math. But educators have made the whole business so complicated that they know in order to rally tax payers behind their cause they must hide the shell game behind local sports, like football, or basketball, things that the whole community values, while the real problems lurk under the façade. That is why sports are the first things districts cut, it’s to loot from the community the thing the whole community values in order to extort a vote in the next election to increase taxes. The message is “you will have something taken from you. You’ll lose your social event, (football games) or you’ll lose money from your property value.” Pick your poison.

But what if I don’t want to pay the extra cost? The answer from them is that “you aren’t patriotic,” or “you don’t like children,” or “are you so poor that you can’t afford the higher taxes.” These are the same games played with our politicians to convince them to work against us. But what if you still don’t want to pay? “Then you will be prosecuted.” The money will be confiscated from you one way or another. That’s why such people are simply looters. They are modern pirates out to loot our wealth. They take from us and give to their whore houses, liquor and other scandalous behavior. And by whore houses, that doesn’t always refer to sex. There is a lot of ways people whore themselves.

That’s just on the local level, in your school. Such things are happening in the building of bridges and highways. In the transfer of property from residential to commercial use, in the creation of every new federal program. If such looting wasn’t going on, K Street and the corrupt activity that goes on there in Washington D.C. would dry up like a mountain town in the Wild West that only exists for the benefit of the gold rush. When the gold went away, the town died. In Washington, the prostitutes that walk the streets with police officers driving by them all day long, the pimps that stand in the middle of the street watching over “their girls” all night, the drugs and bribe money that passes hands across the dinner tables would go away. But all those things are thriving to this very day, at this very hour just steps in front of the White House while Obama practices shooting basketball on the White House basketball court, that we pay for too. Stand on the corner across from the Days Inn on K-Street from 9 to 12 PM and watch the prostitutes standing there with their fish net stockings, their skirts that are so short you can see their panties standing up. Their long high heels force their butts to strut unnaturally as they get into a car, drive off and 15 minutes later that same car comes back around the block and pulls up. The girl gets out, joins the other girls, if any are left, then within 10 minutes, depending on how good she is, she’s back in another car and back around the block. I watched one night the same girl get into 5 different cars over the course of an hour and a half.

Who are the customers, lobbyists out-of-town and away from their wives, spending the money that comes easily for them. They are some of our elected representatives. They are mostly men enjoying their plunder, the same as pirates did in the sinful town of Port Royal. What’s the difference? The plunder was stolen whether it was at gun point on the high seas or under threat of jail. What’s the difference? Very few of us would choose to support this activity. So why do we, because we don’t want to be harassed by the government that we pay for?

Through taxation we have created a political class that believes just as kings and queens did in Europe that they are our rulers. They are entitled to loot from us, to rule us as they see fit. And to pay for their service we are taxed on virtually every movement we make in society. We are taxed for every item of food we eat, every gallon of gas we buy. We are taxed for the cloths we wear and the cars we buy. We are taxed, taxed, and taxed working toward goals that are not our own objectives to sums of money we don’t agree with, to support a public social class that thinks it rules us. There is only one term that describes such a person and that is a serf.

What is a serf by definition?

1. A member of the lowest feudal class, attached to the land owned by a lord and required to perform labor in return for certain legal or customary rights.
2. An agricultural laborer under various similar systems, especially in 18th- and 19th-century Russia and eastern Europe.
3. A person in bondage or servitude.

Doesn’t that sound like what we are? Like with the school systems, I am legally bound to pay for a school system against my wishes? My property is taken from me in the form of money so that I may retain my right to property in the form of land. That is theft. I don’t give willingly to my community, the way I’d prefer it. It is taken from me and spent in ways I find disgusting and sinful, unethical. Yet when I get up in the morning and go to work, I pay over 50% of my earnings as a serf.

The Road to Serfdom:

If we’re only a serf to them why not call them what they are. We may have to pay them as a legal obligation, under the threat of the law that they control with the money we give them, but don’t endorse their behavior with legitimacy. Don’t call them “sir,” or “your honor,” or any respectful designation. Call them pirates, thieves and liars, because they are. It’s not extreme to call them what they are. It’s not out-of-place just because they wear a suit and not a pirate hat and sword. They don’t need a sword, because they have a pen which truly is more mighty and dangerous. It is with the strokes of many pens that we are no longer Americans working for liberty and justice, but serfs working to support giant programs that our citizens are now addicted to like drug addicts that will never get enough. We are now committed serfs that are losing more and more of our wealth to support the extortion of radical pirates with only the mind of a looter. They are willing to take from us everything we have to give until we can’t give any more. It is the same thought process of the master against his slave that only has use for the slave as long as the slave is productive.

We are on the path to serfdom, and we are further along that road than many of us are willing to admit to ourselves. Until we are willing to admit to ourselves the reality of these impositions, and to call the conduct of the looters for what they properly are, we will continue down that path until it runs out. That is the nature of the pirate, they will loot and loot until it’s all gone because they lack the ability to plan from one day to the next. They are only concerned for the prostitute in front of them, or the food about to go into their stomachs. Planning for tomorrow’s sunrise is beyond their capacity, and they don’t need to, as long as they have serf’s like us that will continue to feed them.

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

Oh No, Did I Make Some People Mad…..TOUGH: Letters Attacking Me in the Pulse Journal

What you’ll read below is reflective of the stupidity happening in the City of Cincinnati where massive wastes in tax payer dollars are occurring.

Watch this I-Team Report.

What follows is the response to my editorial in the Pulse Journal which is found here: CLICK TO VIEW

Two letters found my comments in this week’s Journal disturbing about the school board and attempted to refute my statements. I’ll present those letters below with my response in parentheses. These two letters come on the backs of Lakota’s contract negotiation with the teachers union.


The 2 million dollars saved is almost the same amount saved from cutting busing. That’s how much money Lakota is saving just in freezing step-increases, which they should have done two years ago, to avoid the current crises. Because the school board did not act in a timely fashion, there are over 600 employees at Lakota that make over 65K per year. Click here to view who they are and how much they make.

Now the letters:

Wrong qualifications listed for No Lakota group

Rich Hoffman of the No Lakota anti-levy group presented an interesting request in his recent letter to the Pulse-Journal editor. His letter solicited new candidates for the Lakota Board of Education and it was striking for two reasons. It was striking to see what the anti-levy group listed as qualifications and it was equally striking for what it did not consider important.

The No Lakota group determined that ideal school board candidates “should be older than 55, be preferably retired or semi-retired, and not looking to use the school board position as a political platform for higher office or to enhance a real estate profession.” Evidently the ideal No Lakota group school board candidate does not need an education, budgeting skills, social skills, communication skills, or any interest in providing excellence in education for the community. Just say no and you’re elected.

The No Lakota group letter continued to infer that current board members “cave to the unions,” that they “intend to overpay the new superintendent” and they are perhaps guilty of “corruption and abuse of the taxpayer.” Our community is in long-term trouble if many of the No Lakota group actually believe those charges.

Although most area residents moved here specifically because of our quality schools, Lakota could still become the next Little Miami district. Imagine that scenario: one home out of every four for sale, property values decline by more than 40 percent in three years, parents paying thousands extra to educate their kids in private schools, and local school decisions made by the state.

No thank you.

With all due respect, Mr. Hoffman, the ideal school board member should be a local taxpayer, interested in providing quality education to the community, understand school funding mechanisms from both the state and local levels, have excellent two-way communication skills, and have the real interests of students and taxpayers at heart. Care and respect for your community does not have an old-age requirement and it is not necessary to be retired.

Al Miller
West Chester Twp.

(Notice that in this survey by Coldwell Banker that nobody mentions schools as being the decisive factor in buying a home. Kind of interesting.

Al, buddy………where did I say school board candidates do not need an education, budgeting skills, social skills, communication skills, or any interest in providing excellence in education for the community? Just say no and you’re elected? Don’t older people have those skills and do they miraculously lose them passed the age of 40? Is that what you’re saying? Al, I expect all those traits in a school board member. In fact, I expect all that and more. I also expect a school board member to be able to balance a budget. This school board has been tasked with balancing the budget and they aren’t doing it, so they obviously aren’t very good at “budgeting skills” as you put it. I could put a child on the school board and they could do the same job as this school board when tasked with a problem.

“Joan, we don’t have enough money to meet our budget needs,” says the Lakota treasurer.

Joan says to the board, “Ok, we need to ask for more money from the community.”

Now, how is that intelligent, wise, or in any way prudent? Like I said, that is the first response a child would have to the problem. Not any of the skills you listed. So what are you defending? Are you saying that indefinitely higher taxes are the way to go, that every time the school needs money, we just throw money at them no matter how much? And I didn’t say the school could fail either. I pay a lot of money in tax each year to that school and I don’t pay to have a crappy school. If those people don’t know how to balance a budget, then they need to be replaced, because we have provided plenty of money to be an excellent school, and continue to do so.

Now, here is the Definition of CORRUPTION, since you brought it up.

1
a : impairment of integrity, virtue, or moral principle : DEPRAVITY b : DECAY, DECOMPOSITION c : inducement to wrong by improper or unlawful means (as bribery) d : a departure from the original or from what is pure or correct

So as to the corruption at Lakota, it is illegal to use teachers while on the payroll of the tax payer to use tax payer resources to pass a school levy. That means a teacher can’t talk about it to students. They can’t pass out literature. They can’t even use a school printer, decorate a bus or design pro campaign literature while on the payroll of the school, yet they ignore the law and do it anyway. The No Lakota Group has statements that some teachers spent entire class periods lecturing their students about the merits of a levy passage encouraging those bright young minds to go home and tell their parents to vote for the levy. We also know of incidents where principals have openly threatened through their PTA organizations to boycott Liberty Twp and West Chester businesses that don’t support the levy attempt. Some of these calls were made during school hours by employees of the district paid for by the tax payer. In fact, I have a letter from a principle that was typed on his school computer and sent to all the teachers that work for him complaining about the community not supporting the levy. This was done during school hours with school equipment, and that is illegal. The school board knows about this activity yet does not do anything about it. That is corrupt. It’s also corrupt to call the token cuts to services as needed when the obvious strategy is to inconvenience parents to extort money from them. When busing was cut to save a couple million dollars under the mask of “needed” cuts when everyone knows that the payroll is simply too high and out of control is an open participation in bribery. Pay the levy or we’ll cut services you need. That is wrong. I actually have many such instances of this behavior that will be revealed should the district choose to pursue another levy. We’ve held back on this information for the sake of the community, but it will not be tolerated from here on out.

And since you seem to not understand economics here’s a free lesson for you. Notice that passing a levy doesn’t figure into the equation here. The value of your home is only worth the value it has to potential people who want it. Most people who bought on the back of the housing bubble bought too high, so you are looking at a collapse that has nothing to do with school funding. In fact, higher taxes make your home less attractive, not more attractive. If the school is expected to still be excellent, and taxes stay stable, your value will stay at market value, which is probably too high because you bought your home on the back of a bubble. Passing a levy will actually hurt your value.

Basically, Al, it is your decision if you choose to not see these things, and you have a mentality to throw more money into a bottomless pit. You won’t be one of the people we’d nominate to put on the school board. We already have too many people who think like you working for the school system already.)

This video could be Lakota, Sycamore, or Mason. The problems are all the same yet nobody wants to deal with the real issue.

Now, the next letter.

DO NOT PLACE BLAME WHERE IT DOESN’T BELONG

Let’s get the full story out there please. The Lakota School Board is acting to deal with teacher contracts the only legal way they can. They have canceled the second year of the two-year contract because it could not be funded. They are going back to the negotiating table with the teacher union to achieve the best result possible.

Do not place blame where it does not belong.

The board said they would deal with the situation through a three pronged approach — reduce expenditures, put a policy in place to limit future expenditure increases, and seek additional revenues. Students and families have given, administrators and staff have given, we need our community now to recognize the need, and participate in maintaining and preserving the investment made by this community in our schools. The fact of the matter is that our school district can not be sustained without a levy. There is nowhere else to cut costs. If we want our communities to continue to be a great place for families to live, a great place to raise children, then we have to pass the levy in November.

Back when the first levy failure happened, the “no” people said they wanted the district to make serious cuts before they would support a levy. The cuts have been made. The cuts continue to be made. What is their argument now?

We must recognize that our school district and the school board are limited by law and mandates. Dedicated and civic minded individuals who genuinely care about the future of this district and these students would be welcome to be a part of the solution. Please be a part of the future of our communities and support our schools.

We must pass the next levy in order to have a sustainable and continuously excellent school district.

Andrea Henderson
West Chester Twp.

(Andrea, those cuts have not been made. The school board cut buses, laid-off some newer teachers, and made sports a pay for play deal. All those cuts are designed by the OSBA to inconvenience parents and force them to vote for a levy the next time. These strategies are taught to school board members at Levy University in Columbus. I know many school board members that have taken this class, so I know what goes on there.

Now, as to the district being limited by law in what they can cut, what you’re talking about is the teacher’s contracts and the protections the OEA have lobbied on their behalf. That is the very reason that Kasich signed Senate Bill 5 into law, to give the school board the ability to control their costs. So technically it isn’t illegal any more to attack those contract costs. Unions are scared to death of this bill, which is why they are trying so hard to get the bill repealed. Notice how these teachers speak in extreme ways. “It will destroy what we fought for, for years.”

We can’t afford their union. We can’t afford their collective bargaining. These rights they are speaking about are a result of FDR and LBJ, and their big government policies. They aren’t rights granted by the US Constitution and we are not required to pay for them as property owners. It should actually be discussed that it’s unfair to property owners to be forced to pay for the high expectations of these union employees.

Once those current teacher contracts are up, school boards can deal with that 85% of their escalating costs that have been illegal. Besides the potential problem with the law restricting control of those employee costs, we also have the trouble with quantitative easing that is about to hit us all hard from the federal level, so asking for a higher taxes will destroy many families. Oh, you don’t know what quantitative easing is. I’m sorry. Here’s a lesson.

The sad thing is, and I don’t mean to pick on you, there are thousands of people who think the same way you do, and they’re all wrong; that you are willing to write these people a free pass. For a district to be forced by law to incur further taxation is insane, foolish, and pure extortion in the simplest form. Anyone that supports such measures has an education that has failed them completely. Supporting your school does not mean tossing money out the window of a runaway bus. Supporting your school means solving problems when they come up. Squeezing the property owners for everything they have while an aggressive teachers union has negotiated a scam on us all, to maintain an average wage of 63K per year is insane. People who say “good” and “money” in the same sentence do not understand the value of things, and are ignorant to what makes something better than something else. You cannot rape and pillage a community of its resources and expect it to last.

The No Lakota people have different degrees of resistance. For me, I want education reform completely. I don’t like the current system, and I want to see major changes. It’s not worth 10K per kid. The senior citizens in our group are on a fixed income, and they can’t afford the tax. And the business owners in our group are people who have been hit hard by the recession. They are sitting on property that they invested in years ago that should have been paying them back by now, but are currently sitting vacant. Further taxes on that property only drain more money from them. So when people who don’t value money say these people are rich, and should pay their fair share, they sound like fools because they aren’t the people who are building up the community. The people supporting these tax levies are typically people who have kids in the school, they moved to Lakota to be a part of a good community, they want sports for their kids and all the electives of a large school, but they also want it cheap. They want the “shared” costs of the entire community that pays these costs year after year. These are the same people who will move out of Lakota when their kids grow up and leave the community, and those parents will downsize to another home in Florida or someplace else. Meanwhile, they’ll leave people like me with the bill they racked up. So don’t lecture me about what makes a good community. The people who want this levy are people who want something good cheaply and you want it for your own selfish reasons. When your kids are done with the system, chances are you’ll move anyway. )

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

Don’t Wait for Superman, Look in the Mirror: KASICH HOSTS A STATEWIDE PARTY!

At the Republican Headquarters in Lebanon Thursday May 19, 2011 a unique event occurred. I was skeptical of this event at first, but once concluded, I will admit to a level of enchantment that is unprecedented in these modern times. Concerned citizens looking for options in education funding and content issues gathered to listen to the Governor of Ohio, John Kasich speak from Cleveland at a statewide showing of the film Waiting for Superman.

I wasn’t sure how such a thing would be done. I knew the technology was available. I’ve been involved in many conference calls for business meetings, but what Kasich was trying to do was unique.

I sat down in the lobby of the Republican Headquarters, a small converted house just behind the historic Golden Lamb. It’s an older building unpretentious in it’s nature. Several of my friends were there popping popcorn and eating pizza. At 6 PM a laptop on a desk in the corner played Kasich live over the internet as he introduced the film Waiting For Superman, a film made by the same people who did An Inconvenient Truth which made Al Gore so famous. Kasich spoke about the need for education reform and said that this film, made by liberals, touched him so deeply that he felt compelled to act. He also added that he didn’t like to speak after watching the film but said that we’d all meet back online to have a discussion. Then he said hit play, and enjoy the movie.

There were about 25 of us crammed in the lobby sitting in chairs and watching a widescreen television that was playing the movie, which follows a number of children on their quest for a voucher school. The film explained how devastated public school had become through union influence and kids weren’t learning what they needed to. There were many charts about how America is falling behind the rest of the world in education and there simply isn’t any reason for it. America is nationally spending close to 10K per student, yet the results have not shown up in the kids.

The movie was sad. It’s a film I had wanted to see for a long time, but just didn’t take the time to view. It’s on Netflix, so if you haven’t seen it yet, make it a point to do so. I truly felt sorry for the parents that had children crying because they weren’t able to hit the lottery, which is how kids get into these crowded schools. It’s amazing that these charter schools are so crowded, that there is such a demand for them, because public school is free, and is supposed to take care of this issue without the extra expense. But like anything that’s good, and like everything that’s government run, there are vast discrepancies. What’s good is driven by passionate people who care, and are able to see beyond the headlights, visionaries, and other creative people. Government produces complacency, mediocrity, and sheer dullness. The two different styles and their results are grossly evident in the film.

As I watched the closing moments of the film, the popcorn that was freshly popped just hours before still filled the room with its festive aroma. A screen door that was the threshold to the small building was blowing open and closed in a gentle evening wind as the sun was setting quickly outside. I watched traffic rolling aimlessly down the street outside as the credits ran and nobody spoke for several minutes, computing their emotions. I thought of the people driving those cars, how most of them were so easily manipulated, because they are too busy to think. They are the first type of person that believes the Lakota Administration when they proclaim that their recent contract negotiation with the LEA was done in good faith, and not the threat of S.B.5. Those people driving down the road can’t see the shell game being played against them, not because they are too stupid, but they aren’t willing to deal with the problem. They do like they do most things in their life, they throw money at it and hope the problems go away. Their car breaks down a lot, they throw money at a brand new one. Their neighbor gets new gutters that direct the water away from their homes, so they go buy new gutters. Their neighbor buys a new television, so they buy a new television. They work too much, they are on their second marriages and have step children that need educated, but they don’t truly care for their step children, because the children remind them of a previous spouse, so they avoid the children psychologically. They instead count on the schools to fill the emotional gap so they throw money at the schools.

At the end of the credits Kasich was back on live from Cleveland speaking from the laptop. He went on to perform an hour of questions and answers about his views on education reform. Educators, school board members and other concerned citizens spoke in the town hall-style meeting and I thought Kasich did a great job of opening himself up. I couldn’t recall any governor of any state attempting with such sincerity to do anything close to what Kasich was doing, let alone tackle the controversial issue of education with such direct frankness.

Around 9 PM everything wrapped up, I grabbed a handful of popcorn and headed back to the car with my wife. On the way home we talked about the experience. She looked at me as the darkened countryside passed by outside the window. “I understand with clarity what the problem is.”

“You do?” I asked.

“Yes, I felt sorry for those mothers, but the problem is many of those women have forgotten to be mothers. They had other options. Looking to someone else to educate their children is asking for a disaster.”

I thought about it. She was right. She is a woman who took a lot of criticism while we were raising our kids because she took a very active role in their lives. When we were first married we made the decision to have her not work, so when we had kids she would be able to commit herself toward their development. We didn’t want to do daycare. We didn’t want to rely on a family member, because there was a certain vision toward life I wanted them to have, and I wanted a mother there to make sure they got it. We didn’t raise our kids waiting for superman. We decided to be superman. I did the extra work to make sure my wife was free to raise my kids. And she did the extra work to make sure it happened even though society ridiculed her for it. Here was a woman who could have been a professional model, here was a woman who had a load of brains and was book smart, where school was easy for her. But to society, she was wasting her life in sacrifice to her children. She was giving up a career and everything that comes with it so she could be cooped up in a house with a bunch of little kids. To society, that decision was tragic.

My opinions on this matter where settled when I was very young. My mother was the kind of woman everyone wanted for a mom. She did all the things that kids fantasize about in having an ideal mom. She was always there for a little treat. She was always there to hand out a band-aid. Dinner was always ready around at 5:30 pm when Dad came home. She was a room mom in school that would make treats for every kid in my class. She did all the little things that are so important while children are still developing their consciousness from those tender ages of 1 to 12. My mom was the kind of woman who would give me books that she’d write little things in that I still have, and I may not read the book right then, but within the next year or two, I would. She still does things like that, just the other day while my dad and her were vacationing in Hilton Head, she brought me back a new book mark that had pirate skulls all over it in 3D. She wrote a little message on the back for me to remember, which I will.

For me, I was done cooking at age 12, because I had a dedicated mother, and a grandmother that was equally dedicated. I had a stable father, and a good positive family environment. It worked wonderfully. All the kids my mother had turned out well. Nobody has any deep psychological problems. We all handle stress well, and are successful at the art of living, not just financially, but emotionally as well. It’s not a surprise. It’s not a secret formula. All it took was a mom. As a man, I don’t have a single insecurity. Not a single inferiority complex. I don’t have a single doubt, or fear. I didn’t get that by age 12, but the foundation was set. The rest I had to do myself and that didn’t get completed till I raised my own kids. Because when you are raising kids, you may not fear for yourself, but you do fear for them.

I married a woman who wanted to commit herself in the same way to my own kids. That’s what I looked for in a woman, someone who would be dedicated to building a family. Someone that would always be there for my kids, someone who would make actual birthday cakes, and not buy them at Kroger, someone who would buy my kids little treats while they are out shopping, so the children would have something fun to greet them when they came home from school. I wanted a woman who would drive them to school everyday so my kids wouldn’t have to ride a school bus, because I remembered what happened to little girls on the school bus in grade school, and since I had girls, I wasn’t going to put them through the humiliation. I didn’t want them to accept humiliation. When the school system crossed the line and didn’t teach my kids what I thought they should be learning, or they didn’t teach enough, we pulled the kids out of school and taught them ourselves. I wanted a woman that would do that kind of thing, that would buy my kids books and would read to them every night.


As the countryside went black I looked at my wife. She had done all those things over a 20 year period. She endured ridicule from family members and friends that most people never experience, because most people don’t go against the grain as furiously as she did. Only in hind-sight can those same family members see the benefits. Only in hind-sight do we understand what we fought so hard for. Our children are evidence of all the hard work. They are brilliant and good in every way a parent hopes for.

We have occasional disagreements like when I recently argued with my youngest about applying to college in London. I told her those socialists would attempt to reprogram her and she’d be too far away from home to get her grounding again. “Oh, dad, I’m not a weak-minded fool.”

My kids don’t lack courage. They are secure. And there isn’t any problem that they think they can’t handle, at any level. Why is that? Because they had a fantastic mother.

In the movie, Waiting for Superman, I realized my wife had hit the core of the issue. Those mothers, crying to get their children in a charter school and away from the apathy of public school were making a fundamental error in raising their children. They were looking for the school to do the job of the mother. That is the fatal error.

Not everyone reading this can take pride in having such mothers as I describe. We are suffering through a hundred years of progressive brain-washing. I know how hard it was on my wife and me, so I understand why people give up, or don’t even get started on the commitment. However, no amount of money can be thrown at a situation to fix education. It cannot be the job of a school of any kind, especially a government-run entity, to replace the parent. There is no substitute for a mother, especially a good one.

My advice to people is don’t wait for superman to come and save you. Become superman and save yourself. If you really want your kids to have a good life, fight for lower taxes so you children can keep more of the money they make. And spending time with your children is a lot more productive than spending money. There is no substitute as much as lost progressive souls wish upon a star of illusion. Their legacy has left mothers trying to be fathers, fathers trying to be mothers, and fathers divorcing mothers and mothers marrying other fathers of other children while those fathers marry new mothers. Progressives drool over the hope that they can fill the social destruction with a teacher that we are asking too much of, what they don’t see is that it is their policies that created the mess to start with. Progressives are responsible for the whole mess. They are what destroyed the American family. They are what have destroyed education. They are what have left us taxed beyond existence, the blood is on their hands as millions of young people grow less intelligent the older they get.

I know a very bright-eyed young girl of about 7 that is full of hope and dreams. Everyone when they first met her thought “this is a young girl that will be something.” But the closer she gets to junior high, the closer she gets to older kids that are “giving up,” because they see where their lives are going in their messed up parents, the light in this young girl’s eyes is dimming. I told my wife that in a few years, the light will go out all together.

“Why, we must do something,” she said.

“You can’t help her,” I said. “You can only help your own children, your nieces or nephews. You can be kind and offer yourself as a mentor, but ultimately those kids will only be as good as their parents.”

She whiffed in frustration, but she understood what I meant. We both drove into the darkness of Monroe, passed the Hustler of Hollywood store and noticed that it was full on a Thursday night. We both knew what the other was thinking as we continued west back to our home. Government tried to replace the family and they failed, and public school is the evidence of that failure. More money won’t fix that problem until we fix our desire to have strong families again, as a society. Because it all starts with a mom and a dad. And if the mom and a dad don’t make it, the kids will suffer. No amount of money can wash away the guilt of what those parents put their children through, even though countless parents hope and pray that the sins of their lives can be purchased from the souls of their children. We now understand that it is impossible.

Become Superman, don’t wait for him. The greatest gift you can give a child is to give them someone to look up to, to emulate. Money won’t do it. Only what’s in your soul will work, and you can’t hide that with material goods. You have to be superman to the core of your being.

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

Changing a Flat Tire in the Wasteland: Those who take away S.B.5 will be responsible

We have a real problem. Public officials have paid themselves too much. They don’t want to surrender any of that funding now that they’ve looted our tax money for everything that has been sent in their direction, so their solution is to increase taxes to pay for their “public service.” This is true of mayors, city council members, coroners, teachers, superintendents, virtually every public official. Listen to Doc Thompson of 700 WLW talk to a Lance Burton from Channel 9 about their latest investigation into public employee salary problems.

Toward the end of this broadcast I came on with Doc to give an update to the new contract concession made by the Lakota School System with the LEA. The LEA still needs to vote on the concession, but the process has started.

This is one of the key reasons that Senate Bill 5 was passed by the Ohio House and Senate and signed by Governor Kasich just over a month ago. Public employee costs have sky-rocketed in recent years. There is no management control of the public’s money, and the only solution those public officials can come up with is higher taxes. This is the primary reason school districts all over Ohio are failing.

They all have one thing in common; their labor costs are too high, and when those labor costs are analyzed, it is clear that the public officials have paid themselves 30%, or more, above the average wage of the non-public sector employee. It was their lack of discipline that led to the budget shortfalls, not a shortage of cash supplied by the community. Public officials seem to all share the same mentality, tax more to pay for their big spending.

Look at all the police cars escorting Joe Biden to a fundraiser for his boss. Seems like a waste of money to me.

This is certainly Todd Portune’s solution to the stadium shortfalls in Cincinnati. Portune is a commissioner of Hamilton County. He was warned years ago of the potential problems with the stadium deals, but everyone just kicked the can down the road. Now it’s time to pay up, so Todd wants a sales tax on the fans, as if the cost for a professional sports ticket wasn’t already high enough. Todd does this because he doesn’t understand any other option, tax and spend. Or spend then tax. Same difference.

It is on the back of all this news that a recent Quinnipiac poll of 1,370 voters reported that 54% of Ohioians support repealing S.B.5 as opposed to 36% that support keeping it the law of the land.

I am proudly one of those 36%. I think S.B.5 is the only hope for the future of the state. It is the only tool on the horizon that will allow citizens to get these out-of-control costs under control. It is because of the passage of that bill that Lakota and the LEA even met at the table in record time and made a deal to eliminate the step increases. It is the LEA through the OEA (Ohio Education Association) that decided that S.B.5 would destroy their grip on politics and communities so they made a concession now to take the edge off. Because not only do they seek a new levy in November, but they also want to put on a softer face so enough Ohioans will see things their way and vote to repeal S.B.5. But consider that without S.B.5 as a threat, nobody would be talking. The LEA, the OEA or any government employee wouldn’t even consider negotiating. They haven’t in the past, and based on the rates of pay they have given themselves under the generosity of Ohio’s communities they won’t in the future.

I can only conclude that of that 54% those are the people that either work in government or want to. They are the type of people who look to some “jack pot” to solve their problems in life. They are those types of people that crave a “government job” because of the high compensation and security that is unheard of in the private sector. They are the reason that having too many people work for government is dangerous. Having a government that is too big means democracy, or even a representative republic dies, because people will not vote against themselves, and if government is the way they make their living, they aren’t going to cut their own throat, even if that is what’s best for the state or nation.

It really comes down to this, if S.B.5 is repealed, and everything goes back to the way things were, then the situation we are seeing, where schools are going bankrupt, cities are struggling to avoid bankruptcy, and deficits are percolating in every government position for lack of tax money, yet the society paying the taxes are already spending 50% of all their income on taxes in some for or another, and it’s not enough, only bad things can happen. Those bad things will happen soon, before the 2012 presidential election. And when those bad things happen, if the state of Ohio does not have S.B.5 to protect ourselves, Ohio will fail miserably. It will push out its residence and business community with excessively high taxes to meet the greedy public employee expectations, or those public employees will bankrupt the whole system. And the devastation will be on the backs of those 54% who voted to repeal S.B.5.

It won’t be on my back or the back of the 36%. We are trying to fix the situation. Those who want to take away S.B.5 essentially want to take away the tool we have to fix the problem.

Imagine that you were trying to change a flat tire. And our funding problem is flat. People can’t afford higher taxes so the air is out of the tire. So you want to change the old tire to a new tire, one that doesn’t require so much air to fill it. Air of course is the taxes we pay. So we jack up the car to change that tire. Senate Bill 5 is the jack we use to raise the car and replace the flat tire with a new one. And along comes a bunch of people that want the tire to stay flat, because they don’t want the car to move. They want to be stuck, because they benefit from the car being stuck. So they take away the jack.

Without the jack, how do we change the tire? You can’t. The tire will remain flat.

That’s what’s at stake. There are a lot of people like me that are willing to change the tire so we can move the car down the road. But if the car stays stuck, and stranded, broke and useless, it will be because of the fools that took away the tools to fix the car.

If that happens, the blame will be solely on the backs of the idiots that took away our jack. (S.B.5) People like me will survive. I’ll do like a lot of productive people will do; I certainly won’t look to open a new restaurant or business. I may not even want to live in the state. I might move to another state like Texas or Florida that doesn’t have such high taxes. Or I might just do the minimum to live so I don’t get taxed too much, because what’s the use in doing the extra work if some scumbag, politician is just going to pad their pockets with my hard work. Meanwhile, the public officials striving to do almost nothing to earn a six figure income all off tax money will find themselves far worse underfunded than they do now. And it will be their entire fault. They will be kings of their own wasteland, a kingdom of their own bankrupt making left scratching their heads and crying about how they arrived there. That’s when I’ll laugh in their face and remind them that they took the jack, so the car couldn’t move. Now they are stuck and rotting along the side of the road in a wasteland of parasites and will only have themselves to blame.

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

Pirates, Freedom, and Key West: What’s more important, order or happiness?

A week ago I shared a private family secret, our love of pirate ships, the constructible strategy game. Everyone that knows me well knows that I love pirates. It’s not the lawlessness nature of them that I like, but it’s the romantic idea of freedom that they represent.

I’m not normally a fan of liquor commercials, but I think I may have just seen the best one ever produced in this Captain Morgan advertisement. The makers of this commercial got it right. It may as well been ripped straight out of my mind. I LOVE IT!


The only thing I would have done different is the French vessel would have been sunk, the treasure looted, then Morgan’s crew would enjoy the drink. But, close enough.

Needless to say, I immensely enjoy the marketing strategy of Captain Morgan Rum. The key is to be honest with the sign stimuli that moves your heart to beat, and for me, this kind of stuff does it.

Pirates are one of the reasons that I ride motorcycles everywhere I go, its part of the attitude and culture of motorcycle riding that you can’t get when you just drive a car around. Here is that same woman from the Captain Morgan sword fight commercial doing the next natural thing, doing a motorcycle shoot for Harley Davidson.

That’s why I’ve said it more than once, progressives can attempt to ruin America through the schools, through legislation, through television and other social media, but deep within the human heart is a desire to be free. Motorcyclists today have a taste of that freedom, like the original pirates of the Caribbean did or the open range cowboy or frontier fighter. So in the end, progressives, socialists, communists, Marxists, and every group that wishes social control, will fail, and the reason they will fail is for the same reason the Captain Morgan ads work as visual eye candy, for the same reason that a man, or woman will spend all their extra money to buy a motorcycle, and will flock to a large motorcycle rally like Sturgis or Daytona.

The real Henry Morgan is one of my favorite historical characters. Now this might seem like an odd selection to people who read my work and think I’m a moralist. Morality to me is being authentic. Hiding one’s desires behind a drunken splendor does not take courage. To say that I did what I did because I was drunk is weak. To say I did what I did and I don’t care what you think about and I did it with full knowledge that you would not like it is more the proper attitude.

This is why I like modern-day Key West so much, because it is the closest thing on earth to Port Royal in Jamaica during Henry Morgan’s time. Here is a great documentary on Morgan and Port Royal. Again, I don’t enjoy debauchery, drunken acts, or illicit sex, but I do enjoy honesty, and there is a lack of politics in Key West and an honesty that comes with it that I enjoy. And Port Royal is what it was because it was free of politics and represents what people truly want and desire for themselves without government engineering.

We are at the point, as of this writing, just a week away from the release of the 4th Pirates of the Caribbean film, which of course my wife and I will be seeing on the opening day. Pirates of the Caribbean as a concept of course started as a ride at Disney Land and the interesting thing about the ride Pirates of the Caribbean, Walt Disney was making children films, yet he was obsessed with pirates. Why do you think that is? Listen to Walt Disney talk about his concept for the ride, where he talks about the crimes pirates committed in heroic ways. Nobody these days could get by with talking about this kind of stuff. Progressives have made everything so “touchy—feely” that creative types can’t even discuss the violence committed by a group of people like pirates, or frontiersman in any context by in feeling compassion for the victim of the violence. This is why the closest thing we have today to Walt Disney is George Lucas. Our society today would sue Disney for trying to corrupt children with this broadcast.

The key to Walt Disney is he understood that for imagination to work in the human mind, which is what he hoped to inspire in young people, is that they can’t get too hung up on rules. But young people needed to have their own set of values that they’d build with the mythology Disney gave them with foundation stories.

Modern business executives or politicians don’t understand how Disney thought. In fact, nobody does, because people get so hung up on the rules of living instead of the joy of it. Heck, even people in his family, friends and company don’t understand. We all understand the situation on a subconscious level, but people are unable to reach that understanding under conscious thought.

Oh, by the way, Walt Disney didn’t go to college. He didn’t even finish high school, only had one year. Maybe that’s the key to success. Tests do show that kids seem to become less innovative and imaginative with each year of public school. We seem to teach imagination out of kids.

So when Johnny Depp puts on this costume to play Jack Sparrow again, people will flock to see it, even though many of the people who work at Disney don’t really understand why. They are still milking Walt Disney’s ideas that are over 40 years old now without creating anything new, because the key to success is in the essence behind the myth.

If you follow progressive ideas, and a lot of young people do because it’s taught to them in their public schools and colleges, they hide the lie of their movement behind emotional truths, which then disguises the essence of any given thought. They seek to re-engineer what it means to be human by eradicating the desire for freedom. That desire for freedom to my relief is still able to reach young people. In fact, the new Lego Pirates of the Caribbean is something my wife and I are looking forward to playing with our young nieces and nephews where even those under the age of 10 can get that small taste for freedom manifested in the enjoyment of a game.

It is unlikely that any of the people working on the Pirates film including Johnny Depp understands what Walt Disney understood clearly when he came up with the idea for a Pirates ride in his children’s themed amusement park. Here at the premier, all the participants appear able to feel the energy evoked by the film, but aren’t sure how it translates to the art of living life. To them, the movie realm is a separate fantasy to be lived only with the price of a ticket and viewed in a darkened theater. To me, the movie realm is a reflection of human consciousness and represents the true desires of mankind.

That art is all about freedom, and not waking up in the morning worried about a government telling you what to do, what to eat, what to learn, or how you’ll make your money. It’s a genuine love of freedom, the right to succeed or fail to live or die in the pursuit of it. That’s the magic!

And it was nice to see that the director of the Captain Morgan commercial understood that freedom which he captured so wonderfully in that new clip. It’s one thing to copy off something you like and admire. It’s a whole other thing to understand it, and that commercial does.

These are my kind of people!

Rich Hoffman

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

Why Progressives Hate Westerns: Red Dead Redemption against Americans United for Change

I had four choices demanding my time Thursday night; one was a School Choice event at Van Gordon Elementary. That’s an event I wanted to attend more for moral support than anything. I am a believer in it, so there isn’t much I could learn from the meeting. The second was an invite to go see the premier of the new film Priest down at the Rave Movie Theater. I enjoy those kinds of things, but my primary occupation had my mind on overdrive, with many problems to solve over the next 24 hours, so a movie on a Thursday night wasn’t the most responsible thing to do when Excel spreadsheets should be filling my vision. The third thing is homework, for that same occupation. Sometimes you need more than 24 hours in a day, and this is one of them. But a person has to know how to manage their time, so I picked my fourth option, I played Red Dead Redemption.

Why????

Well, I love the game, I love the songs in the game, and I love what it’s about. For those of you that don’t know what Red Dead Redemption is, let me bring you up to speed. It’s a video game for Xbox that is set in the Wild West as the Progressive era is taking over the individuality that settled the country. The game is wonderfully done, and the action is set up wonderfully. Here is the way the game begins. Pay special attention to the characters on the train. They are wonderfully depicted to illustrate progressive era politics. The lone rider of course represents the main character, a loner, one of the last of his kind that is observing all these changes around him as an introduction to the clash of progressivism and American individualism.

Video games like this one have taken over what films used to do, and that is illustrating complicated themes into entertainment. Red Dead Redemption, while intended to be an action packed shooter, is wonderfully insightful, philosophical, and places the player into the context of history. The game is about, a world that is losing its innocence, and freedom.

What brought up my desire to revisit this beloved video game is a website I ran across in my research today. I discovered Americans United For Change, a very progressive group.

http://www.americansunitedforchange.org/

 

And they produce videos like this.


Americans United For Change is everything that’s wrong with our current country. When I read their mission statement, it reminded me of a letter I received last September from a union leader that accused me of wanting to take the country back to the days of the Wild West after I produced this video that was featured on www.TheBlaze.com.

This person reflected many of these progressive types that have worked very hard to pull America into a direction of their design, which I completely disagree with. Listen to the mission statement of AUFC in their words.

AUFC has challenged the far-right conservative voices and ideas that for too long have been mistaken for mainstream American values. In the process, we helped create a groundswell for a return to the traditional progressive values that have defined America—economic fairness, opportunity, national and economic security and democratic leadership.

Today we are building on that success through national campaigns that utilize grassroots organizing, polling and message development, earned and paid media, online organizing, grass-tops outreach and paid and volunteer phones to pass the transformational legislation coming out of the Obama White House.

After reading that, I usually have to take a minute to listen to music like this, which is the standard music on my IPod. The following songs are from Red Dead Redemption, which is heavily inspired by the Spaghetti Westerns of the late 1960’s.
Some sample music.


Progressives love to make things more complex then they need to be, that’s how they pull the con game on people. They are like Las Vegas card dealers that hope the pretty lights, easy alcohol and scantily dressed women will alter your judgment. The reason I like westerns is that they seek to get to the bottom of a situation, not to complicate things needlessly.
If I had a nickel for every time a progressive wrote me or left me a comment that “westerns are a simplistic view of existence,” I’d have vast amounts of wealth. My response to these people is, if something is too complex to understand, it’s because the con is hidden in the confusion. Everything in human existence can be explored into its simplest form. If it is not, then the philosopher, the scientist, the mathematician, the teacher, has not done their job correctly. That’s why the westerns done by Sergio Leone, Clint Eastwood and redone by the makers of Red Dead Redemption have a lasting impact in American culture. Those old westerns even to this day are loved by millions, and for good reason. They offer a truth that is hard to get, and progressives are scared to death of the truth. Progressives take great measures to avoid the truth even from themselves. They thrive in chaotic environments. They enjoy drunken splendors where avoiding the responsibility of thinking are honorable activities among their kind. In the western, a drunk is the fool that ends up dead. In the progressive mind, the drunk is the “party animal” that is honored with trophies. Such an example would be the film, The Hangover where four fools have a massive bachelor party in Vegas and end up passed out forgetting what happened. That’s the plot of the movie! That is also the result of progressive ideology. The myth of a culture, the kind of stories it tells, reflects the culture itself. In a progressive culture, such films, like The Black Swan, and The Hangover reflect the values of the culture. It’s quite understandable why people in a progressive culture wouldn’t understand the values displayed in a western. Because the concepts of individuality, and rugged conquest where life and death are only moments apart are far away from the progressive mind, which seeks with every breath in its body, safety. The progressive will trade freedom for safety whenever the two are offered together.

The reason why England has lasted as long as it has is because it has at least held on to its identity. They have their monarchy, and even though I think having a king is an archaic idea, it’s at least something they believe in as a cultural identity. The Japanese are in the same situation, they celebrate their samurai culture. The myths and traditions of the samurai are very sacred to the Japanese. In America, it’s the cowboy. The reality of frontier living isn’t what’s important. But what the cowboy represents to American culture is. Progressives have managed to discredit the myth of the cowboy with the plight of the Native American, just as they have done using the black man against the founding fathers, framing in American minds that the United States began after the Civil War, and not in 1776. Progressives seek to destroy the myths of our culture so they can replace them with new ones created by them.

Mythology is the most important aspect of a culture. Without a societies myths, the culture will fail.

The myths that the progressive propels as honorable is despicable, vile behavior of interdependence. This is why Hollywood is losing money and must resort to all the comic book adoptions to generate fresh revenue. This year it’s Thor, last year it was Iron Man 2. In years past it was Spiderman. Hollywood has tried twice to deal with The Incredible Hulk. The first was a good film by Ang Lee that I enjoyed, but it suffered miserably at the box-office. So Hollywood tired again and did a bit better the second time. But Sylvester Stallone was on to something when he said our action heroes got watered down when Tim Burton’s Batman came out in 1989. Batman fits the progressive model, a hero with some screws loose. So Tim Burton set the pace for future action heroes that didn’t have to have real muscle or strength, but could put on an outfit and become strong through technology. During this mythic journey over the years characters like Superman have become less about the American way, and more of a progressive. Recently Superman renounced his citizenship. I understand that the upcoming Captain America is following a similar path. We’ll see how that turns out.

But where are the fresh, ideas coming out of progressive Hollywood? Is anybody but Pixar, who ironically has the most iconic character in Woody, played by Tom Hanks, who is a cowboy, doing anything memorable? Where are the Davy Crockets, made popular by Walt Disney, or the Daniel Boone’s made popular in novels by Alan Eckert. Who is the modern John Wayne…………….Johnny Depp, who’s most iconic role to date is a drunken fool of a pirate? What about the next Clint Eastwood? Who can do those kinds of myths anymore? Robert Duval? He does a good job with westerns, but he’s also an old timer. Who are the people of the next generation? Gerald Butler?

For that matter, why are all the strongest leading men now in Hollywood these days Australian? Is it because the United States isn’t making men anymore? Why does Hollywood have to look to other countries for “men?” Where are the modern Harrison Fords? Burt Reynolds? Steve MacQueens? Lee Majors?

That’s the heart of the problem, America isn’t making them. Progressives have infected our culture to such an extent that we’ve finally hit a generation of lost children that have forgotten how to be men leaving women hungry in the sheets of their beds for the secret thoughts of a real man to rescue them. Hollywood used to satisfy that market need by putting men up on the silver screen so women would by a ticket. But not any more. Women are going to the movies to watch girly men, as Arnold Swarchenegger calls them. That’s why Arnold dumped his wife recently, to fill that market role as a reemerging action film star as a 60 something year old man. That’s also why Harrison Ford played a 70 year old Indiana Jones for the fourth time, because nobody else can. Spielberg and Lucas tried to put Shia Labeouf in position, practically placing the hero role in his lap with Transformers and Indy 4, but the kid just doesn’t have it in his eyes. He’s a good all American kid, but the problem is; it’s the wrong kind of American kid. He’s a kid from progressive America, and American’s don’t truly like those types of people in their movies.

Young Guns led by all the hot young actors of the day led like Emilio Estevez and music by Bon Jovi tried to resurrect the western with a bit of a progressive spin, but it didn’t hold up in a progressive mythology. People have rejected it after a few years, because westerns must fight the progressive in order for the plot to work. Not the other way around.

People don’t want to honor the weak with the price of their movie ticket. Unless they can justify their own bad behavior with a film like Something About Mary, or The Hangover. As far as the kind of film a family can sit down and watch together, and have the values of the culture ooze into the inquiring minds of the viewers, those kinds of things just aren’t being made anymore.

Except in some video games, where the tradition lives on.

That’s why I played Red Dead Redemption and let everything else fall by the way-side for an evening. It’s nice to roam around in an environment where things make sense, where the progressives are the villains instead of the heroes, and doing good is actually rewarded, and evil is castigated. Red Dead Redemption is just such a place, and I am thankful for it.

Rich Hoffman

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

The Magic of Pirates: Spending Mother’s Day at the Hoffman House

In my family naval battleships from the 1600’s through the 1800’s have a special place in our hearts. I’ve always been a fan of pirates, and that love has trickled down to my wife and kids over the years. Why do I like pirates so much? Well, Tenochtitlan which was the capital city of the Aztecs that sat in the middle of a lake which resided where modern-day Mexico City is started my love of pirates. It was a monstrously large city at the time of over 200,000 people divided into nobles and commoner groups. In Aztec culture, much like the modern Progressive, they lacked an inherit understanding of science so they relied on sacrifice to the gods hoping that magically the spirit realm would shine on their society and grant them life. They were such a foolish culture that over a four-day mass sacrifice in 1487 the Aztec king Ahuitzotl butchered 80,400 prisoners by shifts of priests working four at a time at convex killing tables who kicked the lifeless bodies of victims down the sides of their temple pyramids. (to see what this looked like click here) This established a killing rate of 14 victims a minuet over a ninety-six hour bloodbath. The Spanish encountered this group of Aztecs, saw that they were rich with gold, but lacked science, so Cortez took the city using superior technology and wiped out the Aztecs completely. So much for the gods saving Aztec culture, even with all the sacrifice.

Spain having wiped out the Mayan culture and now the Aztecs suddenly was very rich with gold, which scared the crap out of England and France. Those two countries hired “privateers” to intercept the Spanish vessels returning to the home country with the gold, so they could also have a share of the “new wealth.” This is a version of “redistributing the wealth” 1660’s style. Today we call them tax collectors.

Once much of the gold had been looted from Central America the three countries decided to be at peace with each other so they put a stop to their privateering efforts against one another and banned the practice with new laws. The only problem was those privateers were making good livings intercepting Spanish vessels from Central America. These were now sailors committed to living away from the “mother countries” so they had no real psychological commitment to a king or queen, so they decided to thumb their nose at their kings and become pirates. This was the start of the golden age of piracy.
It would be pirates who laid the foundations for America in breaking away from Europe. And it was on a pirate ship that democracy was first implemented, and concepts such as insurance were invented. In fact the very first law suit in the history of the world involved one of my personal mentors; Henry Morgan in a libel suit against Alexander Exquemelin who had written a book called The Buccaneers of America, based on Exquemelin’s adventures with Morgan, which exploited Captain Morgan as a ruthless cutthroat.

But Morgan had the king’s ear, and had made the man very rich in his spoils from Spain, and serving the king as a correspondence of sorts between Morgan, who had a base in Jamaica, and the king in England was none less than the philosopher John Locke, who Thomas Jefferson would base the Declaration of Independence off of Locke’s written work just a century later. There is without a doubt that the founding fathers held the book, The Buccaneers of America in very high esteem as a way to envision what freedom would look like. Many of the revolutionaries in the times of the founding fathers were sons of former pirates since New York had been a pirate haven once piracy was outlawed and those out of work privateers merged into legitimate fields of endeavor.

So anyone that knows me well knows that I love pirates, and the art of the swashbuckler. Here is video of the real pirate ship The Black Pearl firing its cannons.


A few years ago a game came out from Wiz Kids that combined model building, which I like, with military strategy, which I like a lot, with history, which I love almost as much as the air I breath, and touched on the fantasy of high adventure and pirate exploits on the high seas complete with treasure hunting, monsters, and supernatural events, all draped over actual historical context. So I introduced my family to the game and it became a family favorite.

The first release of the game was called The Spanish Main. Here is the original promotion video from that release.

Then Wiz Kids came out with a second series, with approximately a 150 new ships all themed around the period of the Revolutionary War.

The game combines the fun of model building with the historical facts that more mature players enjoy, and allows young players and older players to join together in a battlefield that everyone can enjoy together. It has not been uncommon from my son-in-law, my daughters and father-in-law and my wife to play a game at a big table for hours at a time, during an entire Saturday afternoon. My father-in-law who is a geology teacher for high-school students and lover of history in his own way enjoys telling my kids historic facts while they get the chance to blow up his ships and steal his gold. It doesn’t get any better than that for a young person. Here is what a pack of cards looks like when you buy them from the store and begin the process of building the ships.

The game has some simple rules, but the strategy is rather complex, involving thousands of decisions and possible variables. Here’s how the game is played.


There have been many releases over the years and literally thousands of ships to collect and build. These are just a few of the types of ships available.

So with this little introduction to put things in context my wife and I were out shopping yesterday for Mother’s Day. I wanted her to pick out a gift for herself, to treat herself to anything. My wife is the only person I know that can buy items from Victoria Secret, (She is really picky about this stuff, and Victoria’s Secret is the only quality she really enjoys as far as under garments.) then turn around and go over to another one of our favorite stores, Sci Fi City! It was her option to pick up a new bathing suit for the summer or to buy something from Sci Fi City, and she picked Sci Fi City. This is what she wanted The Pirates Constructible Strategy Game Expansion from Wiz Kids.

This is a role-playing expansion to the game we’ve played for years and opens things up a lot. Seeing how excited she got over this book made me proud to have her for a wife, because her priorities are clear. The pictures above are how we spent Mothers Day, enjoying her new book with the people she cares about most.

My daughter asked me yesterday, “What should we get mom?” I told her to come over, and bring your pirate ships for a day of adventure and probably some LaRosa’s Pizza. Nothing more is needed.

A few years ago Wiz Kids came out with an online version of the game which allowed people to play other players online using the same rules of engagement. This video will give an idea of how the game is played and how it looks in the minds of the players. The thing I don’t like about the online game is that you buy ships like you do in real life, but they only exist online. It is quite fun to build an actual ship and hold it in your hand and do battle. My family has spent many Saturday afternoons in comic book stores, book stories, gaming gatherings, looking for new decks of cards. The fun of these afternoon adventures is you never know what you’re going to get in a pack. I’ve bought hundreds and hundreds of ships, and I haven’t run into the problem of getting very many doubles of the same ship, so that gives some idea just how many ships were built for the game. Among my family, all of whom have hundreds of ships themselves, most of us have ships completely different from each other. The ships are broke down by color code, red (common), silver (uncommon), yellow (rare) and black (super rare. I have managed to get a fair number of rare ships and even a couple of super rare boats. Some of the most fun days we’ve all spent as a family together have been days were we’d find a fresh shipment at a comic store, a whole box, and we’d buy everything they had, and we’d go home and spend the rest of the day building ships, then the rest of the night playing.
Here’s what the action looks like online.


For people who are unfamiliar with the world of strategy gaming it’s very popular in an underground sort of way. When I was at Sci Fi City with my wife yesterday they have a gaming area in the back that was packed with about 30 people of all age brackets and demographic groups playing these games. I saw a mother and her daughter playing Magic the Gathering and the mother was well into her 60’s. Here’s video of Origins from the summer of 2010 in Columbus, Ohio. Origins is a big gaming convention done each year in Ohio. Some will make fun of these people, but let me provide a disclaimer. I’ve sat in front of some of the most powerful people in the country, or people who think they’re powerful anyway. I know the mind of people who wield great political power. And I know the power of people like this. I’ll pick them any day over the people who run the country currently.For all the reasons articulated in the book Atlas Shrugged, the people who play these games are much more intelligent, and able to construct a reasonable strategy than many of the people currently working in the White House and Pentagon. The difference between these people and those political types is that the people at Origins don’t wish to have limits placed upon their minds. So in strategy gaming their minds are free and not confined to “politics.” That’s why I’d pick these people as my friends any day of the week. The quality of their minds is superior to those who chose status quo complacency. I treasure knowing these types of people.

Here’s my family playing the game. This video was done by my son-in-law. We went as far to build actual three-dimensional islands replicas with great detail.

It’s a game that inspires imagination and to me that is the most important attribute to any form of entertainment.

So when we travel and visit a ship yard whether it’s in this country or another one, and one of these old ships fire their cannons there is a special place that I hold for them in my heart. Not only in the context of history, but in the memories of many battles fought with my family, where the mind does not know the difference between real or fiction because in this type of gaming, it is the minds process of thinking that is important. The Wiz Kids Constructible Strategy Game does all that at many levels, and it is a treasure to anyone that plays the game. For lesser minds, such as your typical politician, where they are always out for the end result, the better mind, the one of the strategy gamer, is out for the opportunity to think freely, without limit for the sheer process of doing so. The end result is secondary. That’s why it is not important to those gamers if people laugh at them for walking down the hall of a hotel dressed as a pirate or a dragon slayer, because they have freed their minds to engage in limitless possibilities, where the rest of the world is stuck on the rules and the achievement of victory. So when I see a sight like this:

I swell with pride in knowing that such minds exist out there in the world and it was such minds that conceived of the ships and the warfare they were intended for in the first place, that were given birth in the realm of imagination, where all great things humans truly enjoy emerge into the world either to be shared by many, or the sole gamer on a quest to solve the puzzles of their mind with limitless possibilities.

Rich Hoffman

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

THX-1138 A GREAT MOVIE: Where our current education system is taking us

“Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: if it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”

Ronald Reagan August 1986.

Politicians have to have something to do. They have been elected to a job, and to their small minds, small because they crave the power of a position, but in order to perform that job they pass laws and regulation so people hopefully see through the smoke screen they create to hide their true intentions. Rules and regulations are created to prove that politicians are doing something valuable or at least perceived to be important. And when they don’t have rules to create, they attempt to change American ideology.

A free society cannot endure this type of corruption and history proves it. Creative people, like George Lucas, George Orwell, and Ayn Rand have taken history and projected the results into the future. That’s been done in books like Atlas Shrugged and Brave New World, and in films like THX-1138.

If you haven’t seen THX-1138 you have missed a great film. It’s available on Netflix under Science Fiction. The film directed by George Lucas well before Star Wars hit the screen is a great look at a future that we will have if we leave our fate in the hands of politicians and avoid the responsibility of handling our own lives. If our society trades freedom for security we will see a society very much like THX-1138.

Most people know THX as the sound system that is a Lucas property, and yes, the origin of that name comes from that epic, break-through film. Here’s a trip down memory lane for movie lovers.

When the film came out, Warner Brothers hated it. They had no idea how to market the picture. It was a strangely dark film that involved thinking so it was a bit too cerebral for Warner Brother executives back then, which is a usual story for any project that is forward thinking. The creative mind creating something new is often on a lonely island of understanding and it may take years for people to gain an understanding of what the visionary was trying to say. That’s the case with this film. Released in 1971 it was taken away of Lucas’s control out of sheer anger from Warner Brothers who proceeded to cut 5 minutes from the film just to show Lucas that they could. The experience was so bad that Lucas started Lucasfilm so he wouldn’t have to rely on Hollywood to make the movies he wanted to make. Thank goodness he did, because we would have never had Star Wars and Indian Jones. Hollywood is incapable of making films like that on their own for all the reasons they cut 5 minutes of film from THX-1138. It was all about politics and control.

The THX-1138 hatred from Warner Brothers pushed Francis Ford Coppola into financial ruin because he produced the film. It also put the production of Apocalypse Now in jeopardy, which eventually got ironed out to become the classic Vietnam era film. Coppola revived his reputation with the Godfather series. Lucas saved his image with American Graffiti and Star Wars, so it wasn’t talent that was the problem. The people involved in THX-1138 were the best that the field of filmmakers had to offer then and even to this very day.

THX-1138 had problems because it hit too close to the fears people have about the culture of spoils and looting that goes on in politics. It makes people inwardly who participate in this diabolical behavior feel guilt. That’s why the Warner Brothers executives didn’t like the movie. That’s why the audiences didn’t like the movie, initially. It’s not a movie that desires to make people feel good and eat popcorn. It’s a warning of a possible future of which we are quickly heading.

It is a warning that if America continues to trade away our freedoms, as we have been…if we continue to tax ourselves heavily which is the same as regulating our freedoms….if we continue to hold back our business development because each and every politician wants to include their “two meaningless cents” on every matter available trading their integrity for a vote, we will become what is shown in vivid detail the life of THX-1138. That is the future that we seem unwilling to prevent in a mindless pursuit of security and laziness.

We’re not all fighting for the same thing in America. Whoever wins decides the future.

 

 

Rich Hoffman

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

Still the MOST POWERFUL WEAPON IN THE WORLD: Vote on Tuesday May 3rd to avoid further taxation

“Our problem is not merely to help the students to adjust themselves to world life, but to make them as unlike their fathers as we can. While we are followers of Jefferson, there is one principle of Jefferson’s which no longer can obtain in the practical politics of America. You know that it was Jefferson who said that the best government is that which does as little governing as possible…but that time has passed. America is not now and cannot in the future be a place for unrestricted individual enterprise. The people of the United States do not wish to curtail the activities of this Government; they wish, rather, to enlarge them and with every enlargement, with the mere growth, indeed of the country itself, there must come, of course, the inevitable increase of expense…It is not expenditure but extravagance that we should fear being criticized for.”

That is a quote from the father of modern education and president of progressive policy who along with Social Gospel soldiers such as John Dewey created the situation you see on the below chart. The quotes are from Woodrow Wilson.

Check out the source article of this chart at: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/the-charts-that-show-why-the-u-s-is-screwed/

The new strategy among school systems to pass levies is to not advertise them in the traditional way, to not put out signs, to not send out mailers, and to attempt to keep things quiet so that majorities of the voting people don’t show up. Those who do show up are usually the employees of the school system, or those radical parents that are hoping to use the school to mold their children into miracles of future productivity, which they as parents lack the ability to accomplish on their own. Listen to Darryl Parks of 700 WLW cover this warning along with the pressing coming from extremely high gas prices.

Government, and schools are part of the government, are in a perpetual state of attempted growth. This is why government officials are often concerned with unemployment numbers. Government, especially progressive government, seeks to create a job to be filled by a living body. The focus is not on the productivity of that employee, but simply on creating a position and filling that position with a warm body. This is why government is so extraordinarily inefficient. And schools are no different. They are heavily staffed with senseless positions so that the school system can flaunt the numbers as if the number of employees a district carries is a proper measure of productivity. It’s not. Schools carry too many assistants at the administration level; there are too many councilors, and media specialists. And the invisible culprits to a school budget are substitute teachers where the normal teacher takes one of their many personal days (3) at Lakota and 15 sick days and must hire a substitute teacher so the district is not only paying the teacher for not being in the classroom, but must hire a substitute teacher to fill in. Now remember that teachers are only in the classroom for 9 months out of a year, so every calendar year a teacher is able to take 18 days off with pay, which requires a substitute teacher. Consider that the average month on a 5 day work week is approximately 20 days.

For a better investigation of these numbers listen to Scott Sloan break down the teacher’s contract for Lakota on the air with some levy campaign supporters. Most school systems in Ohio have comparable contracts, because the standards are set by the Ohio Education Association.

Yes Lebanon, you are in the same boat. Your superintendent rushed through a new contract prior to signing S.B.5 so that the wages and contracts were secure for the teachers union. Mark North proved where his loyalty was and how little respect he had for the tax payers that employee him. What are you going to do about it on Tuesday, May 3rd, 2011?

Government is a corrosive, corruptible creature, and teachers are a reflection of everything that’s wrong with it. They take too much and do too little. Tocqueville proclaimed in 1840 “Having thus taken each citizen in turn in the powerful grasp and shaped him to its will, government then extends its embrace to include the whole of society. It covers the whole of social life with a network of petty, complicated rules that are both minute and uniform, through which even men of the greatest originality and the most vigorous temperament cannot force their heads above the crowd. It does not break men’s will, but softens, bends, and guides it; it seldom enjoins, but often inhibits, action; it does not destroy anything, but prevents much from being born; it is not at all tyrannical, but in hinders, restrains, enervates, stifles, and stultifies so much that in the end each nation is no more than a flock of timid and hardworking animals with the government as its shepherd.”

That’s what is coming out of our schools where the kids coming out of this public education system being taught by teachers that take 18 days off over a 9 month period and are off over the summer averaging a yearly salary of 55K in Ohio to 62K in some of the wealthier districts. Kids are being raised in this environment and they expect to be given a job like this when they graduate from college someday. Tocqueville was 100% correct in his assessment, the seduction of the weak, to become herded by a government shepherd in exchange for a good wage to perform in a mediocre way. This is what our tax money is funding, and essentially why schools continue to ask for more and more money in taxes.

Few tax payers ever really consider how much they actually pay in taxes, which robs them of money for themselves and gives it them to the mediocre only to feed a government monster with a big appetite.

If you listened to Darryl’s radio broadcast he also covered gas prices. There are two reasons for the dramatic increase at the pumps; one is that the Fed as driven up inflation, by printing too much money, and the second is that there are a lot of hidden taxes in our gas. In Ohio it’s between .47-.48 cents per gallon. This is why states like Tennessee and Georgia are .30 cents cheaper per gallon, because of the tax allocation between the states. Where is all that money going? What about all the sales tax we send to the state? And the federal tax. We are taxed on everything, and schools want to continue to tax our property to fund mediocrity when they’ve irresponsibly spent the money. All they know to do is to ask for more!

We have allowed ourselves to be herded around by the meek of society, people who are not the best we have to offer, but are the flocks of mediocrity that will bring a nation to its knees in lack of competition. We have thrown countless dollars at these flocks and they eat them mindlessly like cows eating straw from our hands with nothing to do with the energy the food gives but to convert it to fat.

Meanwhile the rest of us struggle to even fill up our cars to drive to work, to make a living so 57% of everything we make can go to taxes to pay these flocks of animals just grazing in a field while government proudly announces the unemployment rates without even considering if the job created has any real merit and adds to the productivity of the nation.

I’ve changed my primary job 6 times over my lifetime so far and I’ve never taken an unemployment check. Every time I’ve ever lost a job it was not from anything that was my fault. Yet it never occurred to me to file for unemployment. Heck, I’ve actually been impelled by sharp metal rods that went into one side of my hand and came out the other, I’ve had the skin ripped off the end of my fingers and pulled completely off, fingernail and all. I simply picked up the skin, cleaned it, and slid everything back in place, got my stitches and reported back to work by the time to leave for the day, and I never missed work for such things, and I never took a workman’s compensation payment. The people those Senate Democrats are talking to are those flocks of helpless little animals that just want a friendly hand to reach into the fence to feed them.

Compassion costs money, other people’s money and robs the people who receive the money the benefit of self-reliance. In this clip, Reid wants desperately to be a shepherd of the people because it gives him power over the meek. His secret desire is to be a manager of people and a hero to the less fortunate.

All he accomplishes in his ignorant grasp on society and history is a weakening of the resolve in the human spirit. He robs a man, or a woman, of their honor by placating their basic necessities.

How is what Harry is saying any different from what this farmer is saying?

To make this easy for all the teachers out there, the Senate Democrats, the progressives and media types looking for their next award covering “humanitarian stories” let’s go back to the basics and let Earnie explain to us all what happened to our tax money from these flocks of mindless animals that ate it.

And that’s where your tax money is going ladies and gentlemen. Remember, if you vote for a school levy, a social welfare levy, a tax increase of any kind…………………………..you’re stupid!

“If we can prevent the government from wasting the labor of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy.” Thomas Jefferson.

See, this isn’t a new problem. And here we are, the government is wasting the labor of the people both in unnecessary expansion of government programs and filling those jobs with warm bodies so it can claim a job creation statistic, and then wasting the money that the tax payer generates by robbing them of their labor and taking their money to spend carelessly on foolishness.

And to perform the scam this time, on this election on Tuesday, school systems, labor leaders, and bureaucrats everywhere are prying that nobody shows up to vote. Voting is still the most powerful weapon we have over the thieves that seek to rob us. Have the courage to use it and take the time to protect yourself from further tax increases on Tuesday. Only by cutting the revenue that feeds the monster which is government, can you hope to restrict the power it has to inflict itself upon your life.

Rich Hoffman

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