Category: Organized Labor

The Cincinnati Bengals, School Levies, and Health Care: Why they all suck!

As I was watching football, my favorite team the Tampa Bay Buccaneers was on one channel, and the Cincinnati Bengals were on the other, I received several emails from some of my valuable contacts who supply me with a stream of information daily. One was about the Health Care Freedom Amendment. Another was about Sycamore Schools and their thoughts about going to the tax payers for more money, both of those I’ll include here to share with this audience, and retain their value for future reference.
The Tampa Bucs led by Raheem Morris looked fantastic. The Cincinnati Bengals looked absolutely pathetic. Actually, terrible was more like it. Considering how much the tax payers of Cincinnati are paying for the stadium that the Bengals play in, it was a slap in the face to see such a pathetic display of complacency taking place on the field in what the Bengals showed. As I watched the Bengals stumble around during the game I could not help but think that they are the perfect example of why throwing money at a political problem does not work.
Also, yesterday morning it was revealed that even with all the court challenges by Progress Ohio, the Health Care Freedom Amendment, which will allow the State of Ohio to challenge Obama Care under the rights of state sovereignty. Getting the issue on the ballot in November is the huge first step to knocking back the intrusive hands of government bureaucrats who are aggressively advocating the rapid expansion of government with even more far-reaching impositions. Read all about it below:

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August 12, 2011 9:51 AM Ohio high court: Healthcare signatures valid COLUMBUS, Ohio — Opponents of a federal health care overhaul scored a key legal victory on Friday that should clear a proposed ballot measure for a fall vote.

The chance for voters to reject portions of insurance changes championed by President Barack Obama will appear Nov. 8, alongside a ballot issue seeking to repeal a contentious re-write of Ohio’s collective bargaining law. One is expected to bring out Republican-leaning voters and the other is expected to bring out Democrats in a state closely divided along political lines.

In a unanimous decision Friday, the Ohio Supreme Court rejected a liberal policy group’s lawsuit challenging certification of the so-called Health Care Freedom Amendment on the grounds petitions carrying 69,000 signatures were flawed.

ProgressOhio executive director Brian Rothenberg argued that Secretary of State Jon Husted counted signatures on petitions that contained technical errors, including the way paid circulators listed their employment.

Husted, a Republican, argued the challenge revolved around petitions carrying extra information, a practice government should not discourage.

Justices said the secretary of state is “entitled to deference.”

They found that Rothenberg’s charges lacked legal merit, noting “even if his challenge had substantive validity, Rothenberg’s evidence is insufficient to establish that the part-petitions do not have enough signatures.”

Husted announced July 27 that the coalition of tea party organizations and other groups behind the measure that submitted 427,000 valid signatures, well over the roughly 385,000 needed to get the amendment on the Nov. 8 ballot.

The proposed amendment to Ohio’s Constitution would keep people from being required to buy health insurance or face penalties. The federal mandate would go into effect in 2014, when new competitive insurance exchanges are scheduled to open.

Opponents say the federal government is overreaching by requiring individuals to purchase a product. The Obama administration counters that Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce squares the constitutionality of the mandate.

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The Bengals are such a terrible as a team for all the reasons the government screws up everything it touches, whether it’s education, or health care. The ownership of the Bengals believes as government does, that money spent equals value on the field, and that clearly is not the case. Carson Palmer gave up over 40 million dollars to leave the organization because he was so embarrassed to be a part of the Bengal organization, because at least he wants to retain his soul moving forward. But many in government have given up their souls long ago in trade for financial security.
These soulless creatures of bureaucracy are why government believes that “they” have the right to force us to buy their health care plan, and of course why public education simply doesn’t understand that they will have to learn to decline their revenue streams to match the declining wages, declining property values, and less money coming from outside community sources because the education bubble has burst. They believe they have a service so valuable to society that they should be exempt from any decreases in value.
This next article displays the extreme arrogance of the Sycamore School District, which is similar to what has been going on at Lakota where almost the same terminology was used to justify a 4.75 mill levy they voted on early this past week. It is not by accident that all the districts seem to be saying the same kind of thing. It is the Ohio School Board Association, a centralized organization in Ohio who helps provide the guidance to these school boards in times of crises, and it is this OSBA that is seeking to fulfill the type of education agenda that Progress Ohio, (the same group against the Health Care Freedom Amendment) wish to implement, at the tax payer cost. Check it out:

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Update five-year forecast

Regarding the July 13, 2011 article “Sycamore schools: Some light at the end of fiscal tunnel.” In order for the taxpayers and board members to understand the significance of the lost state revenue, the district’s May, 2011 Five Year Forecast must be updated now.

The lost state revenue needs to be looked at in the context of the five-year plan. The five-year plan would show the new revenue, planned expenditures and new cash balance for each year.

The development of a revised plan should not wait until the next state mandated October forecast. This revised forecast will provide the school and community four more months to consider the consequences of these changes.

Twice in the article, Diane Adamec, board president referred to a planned tax levy in 2012. The school has promised not to approach the community for more money until at least 2012.

She said, “What the regular citizen will not see is a request for an additional tax levy sooner than planned.”Later she adds, “By holding expense growth to an average of 1.5 percent annually, this district will maintain its promise not to go back to the community until at least 2012 for new taxes for operations – an eight-year span.”

Based on what I read and hear about the worldwide fiscal crisis, the possible U.S. financial default and constant deficit spending, there is no “light at the end of the fiscal tunnel.”

All government entities at the Federal, state, local levels including public schools, and citizens are facing a huge challenge ahead. Thinking that we might see some light ahead may be a comforting thought, but it is more akin to burying one’s head-in-the-sand.

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I like that article because that is precisely what these schools are doing; they are burying their heads in the sand. They are pretending to “sacrifice” and maintain a lower rate of growth, in this case only 1.5%. They pretend that they are doing it “for the community” and at a great sacrifice to themselves. Preposterous!

I heard multiple times last week in regard to Lakota Schools that it’s been since 2005 that Lakota has had a revenue increase! It was only two years after that increase that the teachers union mounted a strike against the school which drove up costs 10.1% over the next two years, so some of us have learned that putting more money in the basket doesn’t get better results, or even maintain the old ones, because the union once they see the money, will threaten to walk off the job anyway in order to get at the extra money the community has supplied. It is in these modern times, where all the inflated costs are contracting, and education falls under that category, that plans must be made along that contraction. It is only natural that revenue should be less than the 2005 numbers because the financial supply, (which was inflated) is contracting, so it is not growth that should be expected, but decline, and their budgets should reflect that.
Yet with all the discussion Sycamore Schools articulates the dilemma wonderfully. They think it appropriate to present to the public that they only expect a 1.5% increase in revenue per year, like they are doing everyone a favor, by not going to voters for more money more often!
The value of something cannot be measured in some transitory monetary figure. Teachers have overpriced themselves and with the absence of elusive state and federal money, it is obvious now. Arrogant academics like these superintendents who think the voting public to be fools, just like the academic oriented president who has tried to force the nation to buy into his Health Care Policy, in order to fulfill the political whims of progressive groups like Progress Ohio, are simply out-of-touch and living their lives buried in the sand while their bodies are visible, but their heads are not. And if anyone doubts that there are people in the world who are just so heartless and outrageous by their actions yet friendly and conciliatory in their public presentation, (just like school systems are) just have a look at the ownership of the Cincinnati Bengals.
The Bengal organization threatened to move to a different city, just like teachers threaten to strike to get their money. The city voted to give The Bengals a new stadium, which is now bankrupting the city for a game that is played 8 times a year in a stadium that is average at best compared to other NFL homes. And the product the Brown family puts on the field is terrible…….absolutely terrible with no sign of getting better…….ever! I look at that team as proof that money spent does not acquire the desired results, it just fills the pockets of those who care for nothing else but money.
The city is under contract, and obligated to fulfill that contract. And the schools are under contract too, with their unions who have extorted enormous sums of tax payer money into their pockets out of sheer greed…….and they talk down to the public like they are children! This election of November 2011 will have a lot to deal with, but more than anything it will say what kind of society we are to become. Because in voting for these school levies, allowing President Obama to mandate that citizens must “purchase” something from the womb to the tomb, and that unions should continue to have the right to drive up costs even when market factors show their expectations should be declining, are all at play, and depending on the outcome of that vote, our society will be shaped accordingly. This is not one where people can sit back and let somebody else make the decisions. Ultimately, that is why the Bengals are such a bad team, because the contract was forged from the blood of the community and it lacks accountably, or even reality and that has infected the leadership, which infects the players, and ultimately infects the fans. The same happens in a school, and it always will until the public puts a stop to it. Until then, everyone is guilty just a little.

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

Secret of Malden Island: Why public education is hiding history

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Blood Drunk Apoligists: The Lost Fools of Modernism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SEIU Visits John Boehner’s Office: GIVE ME A JOB, or I’ll cry!

Tea Party Terrorists! That was one of the many signs outside of John Boehner’s West Chester office on August 9, 2011. A group of protestors had gathered to demand jobs from the House Speaker and the organizer of this illustrious event which involved kicking the doors to the office requiring the doors to locked by the staff, was none other than Gabe Kramer from the Service Employees International Union, otherwise known as SEIU.

Gabe is the Chief of Staff of Operations and Administration for SEIU District 1199 representing West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio and was the point person for this event which I think is an excellent example of everything that is wrong with our nation. I don’t mean to pick on poor Gabe, I’m sure he’s a nice guy if one were to sit down and have a beer with a guy like that. I’m sure he emits many noticeable, human qualities that are quite admirable. But proving to be a philosophic fool on completely the wrong ideological path is no excuse for intentionally attempting to mislead people into a thought process which is destructive to American Culture. And that is what Gabe and his little army of lost souls is guilty of.

It is not hard to gather up a multitude of the very lazy, the uneducated, the pompously altruistic, the unemployed, those who are afraid to compete in the world marketplace to rally behind a cause like those SEIU hosts. SEIU uses shock, and the force of mass to influence legislation, and have done so for many, many years. But the foundation of everything those “types” of people believe is flawed.

Rather than go into all the ways that SEIU is a communist organization following religiously the Ten Planks of Communism as established in the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, the followers of SEIU, even if they are only a member and unaware of the basic philosophy because they are simply interested in their own personal incomes, the fundamental error is in their lack of understanding of how economics work. The roots of their entire philosophy rest in loose soil with no foundation but feelings. That is why they fail and everyone who follows them is doomed. History proves it.

Where I should have been angry that SEIU was in my home district, on soil that is sacred because it’s in my home land, I couldn’t help but laugh, for the comedy displayed at that event belonged on Comedy Central with full intention to make people laugh, which is until it is realized that these protestors are serious. They actually believe the things they say!

When the protestors demand jobs of Speaker Boehner what are they asking for? Do they really believe that John Boehner can pluck jobs from the “job” tree and pass them out like candy on Halloween, because that is the implication of their utterances? Do these same capitalist malcontents believe that it is the Tea Party that prevents them from getting a job? Apparently, they do! They believe that government creates jobs and gives them out, and that it is John Boehner’s job to “give” them a job…………………………….I’m serious!

The fact that so many people in the Republic of the United States believe this is evidence that our public education system has completely failed, because too many grown adults have no idea how their government, or their country work. Between my laughter at the protesters of this event, I have to admit a tinge of pity for these poor people. It must be terrible to see the world with such narrow vision, through the spectrum of naivety and ignorance. To be so terribly uneducated and foolish that the truth of the matter might as well reside in a whole different solar system from the one we all live in.

My wife and I were discussing this issue on the other day, at how small the world to such people must actually feel. My wife reads a three hundred page novel every two and a half days. It takes me about a half week to a week depending on my obligations. Our hobby together is to read. We read, and read, and read! In my books I have seen the rise and fall of civilizations and religions hundreds of times. And I am grateful for that knowledge, because it is easy to see through such thinly veiled smoke screens like those people like Gabe Kramer proclaim. Only an empty mind waiting for someone else to fill it with ideas is prone to follow blindly to an office like John Boehner’s and be foolish enough to stand with a sign and proclaim to the world that they are but children repeating what some bully have instructed them to believe. After the laughter at the audacious ignorance of the event, I felt pity for all those empty minds that have never discovered the joy of obtaining knowledge, who are so quick to grab a sign and follow somebody like Gabe into a fruitless battle pursuing the ideas of a poverty-stricken, promiscuous fool like Karl Marx who has infected the world with some of the most destructive philosophy mankind has ever entertained, and this includes the corrupt emperors of the world like Nero, and Gangus Kahn!

It is the mushy minded who are attracted to these communist ideas of Marx. Those girls of PITA who will stand naked in a public place to protest those cute little animals being killed because the girls themselves are only a few years grown away from their stuffed animals they slept with in their beds. But now that they have the bodies of women, somehow they have merit to their voice, as if their bare breasts and naked buttocks contained years of experience and intelligence. The radicals of SEIU or the teachers unions are no different from the radical behavior of those young naked women, they resort to emotion and sign stimuli to influence cultural policy, and that’s all those poor, empty citizens were doing at the Speaker’s office. They have no idea where jobs come from unless some politician passes out a new branch of government to buy votes, but the creation process does not come from government. They simply use the money that was created by others to create the job. It was not the government who created the job. It was the tax payer. And that is why government has grown to be too big now, because government was irresponsible, because it listened to the mindless fools of organizations like SEIU where they should have ignored them.

This fault is an innate reaction. Most of us are mature enough to become parents and know how embarrassing it is to take a child to the store only to have that child scream and cry when they want something, like a toy, at the store. If the parents says no, and the child begins crying, it is tempting to just give in to the child to save yourself from the embarrassment the children draw to the parent with the noise they make. The squeaky-wheel-gets-the-grease syndrome is what that is. The parent is in control, has all the resources, the only thing the child has in its favor is the ability to draw attention to itself with loud noise. A bad parent will tend to give in to the child and will allow that child to grow up spoiled. A good parent will withstand the embarrassment for the child’s own good, and will not buckle under the pressure. Communism as outlined in the SEIU handbook, The Communist Manifesto teaches grown-ups to be like children, to yell and scream for things till they are given “something” by government. And the unfortunate circumstances of our age are that the politicians have been like the weak parents, all too quick to appease the children.

And that’s what I saw outside of office of John Boehner, is a bunch of children screaming for candy from a parent busy with other things, “adult stuff” and bewildered by the ungratefulness of those children. So while the behavior of the SEIU children was humorous from a distance, the behavior itself is pathetic. The fact that SEIU believes these screaming rants actually work is because it has in the past. They have used such behavior to harass our public officials and business community for a long time to the will of small, immature minds without any sense of how things work in the real world. With all the tools of modern society at their disposal, they still insist on being small-minded little children motivated to scream and cry for food to drop into their mouths, instead of taking advantage of the freedoms they enjoy and earning for themselves limitless opportunity in a capitalist republic under attack by cancerous, socialist peons from a declining European landscape that left to its own devices would still be rolling around in the Dark Ages.

People like Gabe Kramer would be more at home in 1112 AD outside a European palace with a soiled robe, burning a torch crying for the benefits of the Roman Empire to the political nobility, and wondering why Rome as a power went away, because he is just as clueless in 2011 when he cries for a job that it’s his job to create, and certainly not the job of John Boehner.

 

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

The Devil of Public Education: The Mask of School Pride

I was on the air with Doc Thompson of 700 WLW to discuss the meeting at the Lakota School Board from August 8, 2011 where a 4.75 mill levy was placed on the November ballot. Click below to listen to that electrifying broadcast where I reveal that many people within the school district consider me the “Devil of Public Education.” So I returned from the confines of my hellish existence to have a lively discussion about the state of public education in Ohio with Doc.

(There is about 2:40 of this recording that overlaps toward the end. It’s not your computer; it’s a defect of the original recording. Just stay with it, because it will pass.)

There has been a lot of tension at Lakota over the last couple of levy battles, and now that Lakota is attempting to pass yet another levy, that tension is returning. I spoke to quite a few people from the education side of the school district after this particular meeting and tension was the general atmosphere. The fights of the past have been contentious to say the least. That was when it was revealed to me that many of the employees in the district consider me the incantation of the devil himself because I hate public education!

Well, I’ve heard that kind of thing before. The most obvious circumstance under which I’ve heard that kind of rhetoric is at football games where the Cleveland Browns come to play at the Bengals stadium or worse yet, the Pittsburg Steelers. For me the emotion is even greater when my favorite team the Tampa Bay Buccaneers plays New Orleans or the Atlanta Falcons. In fact when I heard that Troy Evans the linebacker for the Saints was providing busing to residents of Lakota, which is an idea that I think is great, my first thought was “darn” why did it have to be a guy who played for the Saints!!!!!! I HATE THE SAINTS!!

But why do I hate the Saints or the Bengals hate the Browns or Steelers? Because emotion is what sports is all about. The drama of a sporting event is all about picking a side and rooting for your team to win.

Schools do this also. The game between Lakota East and Lakota West is always a big game. It used to be that a game against Princeton, or Colerain was always a big game. There’s always been a lot of rivalry in these games. Fights occur between players in movie theater parking lots and parents will fight with other parents from other districts in the stands. It’s an innate response to the human desire for competition.

So it is only natural that a school district will use “School Pride” to unify the students and parents to the goals of the school, and will use that same pride to pass a school levy and make those out who are against the increased spending of taxes as “The Devil.” Such relative generalizations are indicators of a frail psyche. I indulge in them for competitive events like football games, or any other type of conflict, but in the grand scheme of things, I keep focused on the “big picture,” where my counterparts cannot.

The organized labor element of public education has a cleaver little scheme going, of which they are entirely aware of, they use this “School Pride” issue to drive up the wage levels of their personal incomes, because while human beings participating in that school as employees, students and parents are functioning under the spell of “School Pride” no amount of money is too much so long as their school system WINS. Rational discussion that might otherwise occur in any other business environment are ignored in favor of the passion for the fight!

This is how school levies have migrated out of control. Organized labor has used “School Pride” to pass tax increases which has translated to exceptionally high incomes for the members of those unions. Administrators strapped by legislative rules negotiated by organized labor cannot manage the costs of the organized labor, so they resort to “School Pride” to sell the public and cover up their weakness of administrative influence.

This is the state of all schools, and “School Pride” to the people outside the functioning mechanisms of the school doesn’t work so well, and now that wage levels have reached a “diminishing marginal return” on the tax payer investment, people are turning down school levies, because they see no end in sight from schools asking for more money. That is why 85% of all school levies across the State of Ohio failed in the August elections of 2011, because “School Pride” as a spell doesn’t work when the pockets of the people supporting school are empty.

With the Cincinnati Bengals, Mike Brown has obviously taken advantage of the taxpayers and he makes no apologies for it. His contract is bankrupting the city, yet he doesn’t care. And he continues to put a terrible product on the field giving fans very little to cheer for. Yet like mindless fools, there are still fans that show up and tailgate for the Bengals when the Steelers or Browns come to town and will proclaim that the Bengals will be victorious! The facts don’t matter at that point, because the game is about emotion.

And that same emotion is at play at Lakota and schools all across Ohio. The LEA (Lakota Education Association) has negotiated a contract for itself that is bringing extreme financial hardship to the district. And they, like Mike Brown, don’t appear to care one bit because their actions prove so. And all Lakota can do is make a guy like me, appear to be the “Devil of Public Education” because they have no other card to play. The truth is too painful and admitting that they are helpless to control their costs is just embarrassing. Calling me names is far easier, so that’s what they resort to.

That is also why schools fail time and time again. Because the solution is not in the emotion of the fight, it’s in the business of the numbers. And once the game is done, the reality is difficult to deal with. So like a drug addict needing another fix, those in education who rely on emotion to manage their business find themselves always in need of more, because the reality has not been addressed properly and never will while those in charge use “School Pride” as a mask to cover the real problem.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that’s not what’s going on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Symposium of Justice: The gamble of Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

———————————————-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VOTE YES ON SENATE BILL 5: If you don’t the results will be your fault

There is a strong desire among many who support Senate Bill 5, to meet those opposed to S.B.5 squarely on the battlefield, which means going behind them on their door to door campaign and telling voters to vote “Yes” instead of “No” which those opposed are advocating. The intent of course is to harass the harasser, to fight back! To be just as creepy, deceitful, manipulative, scandalous, thoughtless, egocentric, yet altruistic all the same, as those who chant, swarm, lobby, and intimidate their opposition to S.B.5 in favor of a spoils system which has enriched them.

The desire to fight back is strong from many who realize that we’ve been scammed for years by public sector unions. The greed of these public union organizations is grossly evident to those of us who dare to look, and many feel that they have been openly robbed, and want to lash out in the same fashion that one might wish to lash out at a thief who had stolen our money in a back alley.

I would say to those people to not wear yourselves out chasing after those harassers. Do not attempt to run into the hiding places that those thieves reside in. Do not play their game their way. Play the game the way we dictate on ground they cannot defend, ground based on the truth. Rip away their hiding places all together and shine light where it has not shown for generations, for the truth will do this to the con artists who are in hiding. It is they who have something to hide from. Playing the game the way they dictate is only an advantage to those who are guilty and must hide themselves behind illusions of good-will to protect the greed evident in their actions. Does anybody really believe Diana Frey acted alone, and is the only case of robbery going on in public sector unions?

The battle to save Senate Bill 5 is a battle for the heart of America. It is nothing less than that. Those opposed to Senate Bill 5 are clearly against the kind of America I want to live in which is one where taxes are lower, government is smaller, and localities have more control over their lives. Opponents believe that they can use a flash mob like behavior to inundate the voting population in mass, getting their message across. It is this behavior that has worked for them in the past, and has placed their wages about 30% above the tax payers who pay their salaries.

In 2008 the teachers of Lakota, the school district I pay my taxes in, threatened to go on strike which is one of the issues that Senate Bill 5 addresses. The threat of that strike is a direct result of the current crises of that district asking for more money from the tax payers. In fact, the same behavior has went on in Ohio for years and is why over 50% of all school districts in Southern Ohio are going to the tax payers for more money in November. In fact, Mt. Healthy, a district to the southwest of Lakota had their levy turned down on Tuesday and by Wednesday morning had made the announcement that they were going back to voters just 3 months later with another request. That’s ridiculous!!!! In Lakota the average teacher makes over 60K per year. Lakota is a district that resides within West Chester, Ohio which was number 33 out of the top 100 of CNN’s best places to live in the country.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/bplive/2010/snapshots/CS3978246.html

The AVERAGE median family income in West Chester is $97,971 per year and is considered one of the most affluent districts in all of Ohio. That means in a two income household, which is most homes, the average rate of pay is 49K per year. Yet because of the union extortion which has taken advantage of the good will of the community, they have negotiated wages that far exceed the average in an affluent community! In fact, the average rate of pay for a teacher in Ohio is 55K per year! That makes teachers one of the highest paying professions, yet they are completely supported by the tax payer. One good teacher or one bad teacher they all get paid the same, and a district with a lot of employees will naturally find their payrolls bursting with excessive expectations which leave those districts one option, to go to the tax payers with higher taxes to pay for the union greed.

Many people are angry with the school boards for not regulating these costs, but as many school board members will tell you, and I know many of them all over the state, their hands are tied by state revised code, much of it created under pressure from a union lobby, and they can’t do much to control their costs. That’s why people who want to get control of these costs support Senate Bill 5. That’s also why people who want to continue to take advantage of the tax payer and the chaos of an out-of control system want to say NO to Senate Bill 5. Because they want to continue to plunder the public for everything they can, it’s that simple.

These same influences are what keep the debt ceiling issue from being solved on a federal level. There are just too many hands taking too much out of the cookie jar. The public has to make too many cookies to feed everyone, and that’s not fair to the people making the cookies.

The decision to keep Senate Bill 5 is a decision to do the right thing. It will be a personal choice made by common people. Not a bunch of thugs running around in flash mobs holding up signs to manipulate a lazy public, who spend most of their time watching Dancing with the Stars. The decision to save Ohio from financial ruin will fall on those who are intelligent enough to see where we are, and have the guts in the privacy of the voting booth to do the right thing.

I believe there are 2 to 3 million people in Ohio who are able to vote that understand the problem. And they will all have to show up and vote on Election Day, because those who benefit from the chaos of public sector unions number in the millions, and they won’t vote against themselves. They don’t have the courage for that. The YES vote can see through the tactics, the mob behavior of the unions, the mailings, the “feel good” commercials to the truth. Many of those public sector unions are just after our money and are no different from a Vegas casino. They advertise themselves very similar to a casino, with bright lights and feel good slogans such as “save the middle class,” yet their true intentions are to get you intoxicated so they can convince you to give them all your money.

Those of us who will vote YES, and I will be one of them, know that S.B.5 is the needed measure to save our state and country. Those who vote NO will be exclusively responsible for the chaos that follows, because the problems of the day will not go away.

When the school levies fail this fall all over Ohio, those schools will still need money to fulfill the financial obligations of their contracts to those unions. And the only way they can make payroll is to raise taxes on families who are already paying too much. And those tax requests will come every two years for the rest of your lives if you don’t put a stop to it right now. School boards must be given the ability to keep their districts within the budget the community sets for itself. Those budgets cannot be left to the control of union radicalism, because the end result is uncontrollable budgets which are what is happening everywhere.

Foreclosures on homes, on people’s dreams, are happening all over Ohio. People do not have the expendable income to have their taxes increased, so further increases in taxes are not an option. So we are on the precipice right now of a serious financial collapse. Senate Bill 5 is the only way out of this problem. It’s the only solution to a devastating problem. It’s state law right now, but voters will have to vote YES to keep it. Anyone who does not vote to keep it will be responsible for the misery that will follow.

The best way to fight this battle is to reach out to those voters who are intelligent, and can see the problem. They won’t be reached with rhetoric. The public unions already have the other type on their side, those who are overly emotional and don’t understand basic finance. Instead, we have to provide those who have intelligence and a mind to see it with the proper information because the truth is on the side of Senate Bill 5. And we have to trust the truth, and that there are enough people left who can understand the problem and have the courage to act on it.

The alternative won’t be pleasant, but if you vote YES, at least you won’t be a party to the misery that follows. Saying YES to S.B.5 is the only responsible choice!

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

The American Ruling Class: Turning down a seat at the table

I received from Phil, a frequent visitor to this forum an article from The American Spectator by Angelo M. Codevilla written July 2010.  I had not read that article but ironically it summed up nicely many of the issues that Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom is dedicated to, the identification of, dissemination of, and understanding of what is rotting the foundation of America.  Whenever I receive evidence that independent minds have arrived at virtually the same conclusion I have in a fashion 100% separate from my personal experiences, validation of those similar conclusions is refreshing.  You can read that article here.  It is well worth the time of anyone who wants to understand what the problem is behind the picture below.  The picture of the newspaper article is an editorial from a Michigan publication and articulates the growing frustration between the two classes of people who exists in American, the ruling class, and the country class, as identified by Codevilla in The American Spectator article. 
 
American Spectator article:  CLICK BELOW

http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-class-and-the

Matt Clark, also from Michigan, like the articles above contemplates the bizarre behavior of Harry Reid, and Barack Obama from his radio program on WAAM.  Two weeks ago I was on the air with Matt and he asked me to predict what would happen in the debt crises.  I told him that Boehner would cave, even though I believed that Boehner had all the best intentions, he is now part of the ruling class, and he thinks in that fashion.  Any other thinking is foreign to him.  Listen to that broadcast here:  Listen to Matt’s most recent broadcast by hitting play below: 

I haven’t thought of naming these different class types by what Codevilla has.  To my mind America doesn’t need social class structures.  Such things get in the way of creativity, and have no place in society.  The desire for human class qualifications is to me, an archaic desire of an infantile mind.  Such desires are something that the human being is destined to outgrow, and America is the first step of that growth.  The idea of self-government, even though it never quite got off the ground where even the founding fathers struggled with their own European roots.  They knew how freedom should look on paper, but failed to implement it into their culture, and infantile minds craving power have occupied positions of power for two hundred years and created the classes illustrated above. 

I have dedicated thousands and thousands of words completely free of charge, with no intention at profit for myself to exposing this class structure in America. I do write books, I have written a book called The Symposium of Justice which was dedicated to exposing how the system worked at a psychological level.  You can see that book by clicking here:

I am currently working on another book that my editor is currently scrutinizing through called Tail of the Dragon.  The early comments about that book is, WOW, there is a lot of political chaos in this story, hard-hitting stuff!  My response is that the point of all the death, the billions of dollars of destruction, the violence, the love, and the adventure is to arrive at the scene inside the White House at the end of the book where the president gives a mighty speech.  Early readers have stated that it reminds them of a shorter version of the John Galt speech from Atlas Shrugged, which I consider a high compliment, because that’s the point.  Because my intention behind all this free content that I put out each day, and the intention behind my books, is to put a light on this ruling class, and once understood, for common American’s to take that power away from the ruling class by cutting the money which funds the whole enterprise. 

The path which took me to this place is a long one.  But what confirmed in me the final straw was an experience I had out in Hollywood, while working on a project with a production company.  Up until that point I had assumed that politics was a separate thing from entertainment, but when I worked on the set of a development project for a rather high-profile actor, I learned that the same politics were at play in the film industry as in politics, and this is why Hollywood and politics are often holding hands, because both believe they are part of the ruling class.  So to illustrate that story I’ll talk about my experience on the set of this project. 

This actor is a good guy.  I personally like him quite a bit, as I do the director.  So I won’t mention them here by name.  I’ve worked with entertainment types before so past reference isn’t necessary.  What is important is that even in a simple thing like entertainment, politics is very important. 

I was flown in to a job to be a stunt stand-in, so I had to be made-up to look just like the lead actor.  The lead actor was producing this production so it was his money that paid for my expenses.  He really wanted me specifically and he went out of his way to acquire my services.  When I arrived on set, I was given my trailer and the producer had accidentally not ordered the correct amount of trailers for this production.  So I was asked to share a trailer with the lead actress who wasn’t scheduled to arrive on set till after my make-up was complete.  This producer was relieved when I shrugged my shoulders and stated, I’ll dress in the parking lot, it doesn’t make any difference to me.  The director and the producer looked oddly at each other like I spoke from another planet.  They assumed I’d be very upset. 

The actor really wanted to meet me when he arrived on set and came to shake my hand.  He assumed that I would take great privilege in shaking his hand.  Now to those who know me, I make a point to treat everyone the same.  I show no special honor to anybody.  I would treat the President of the United States with the same attention as a street beggar.  To me they are all Americans.  And I like to be treated the same.  It’s a sign of respect to me.  So I shook his hand without a lot of worship.  I simply said, “Hey, what’s going on?”  He looked at me oddly, with a bit of obvious disappointment.  About two hours later he brought his family to me between takes and asked me, “Hey, Rich, do you have your whips, can you show my kids some of your stuff?” 

“Sure,” I grabbed my whips and demonstrated some single and double-handed routines and the kids loved it.  One of them had a little hat and he held it out to me.  I took it from him and put it on his head.  His mother, who was a popular television actress, said with a smile, “I think he wants your autograph.” 

I smiled at the kid and grabbed his hand.  “How about a handshake.”  I thought it was the right thing to do, since autographs seemed so presumptuous.  I don’t feel comfortable giving them.  I never enjoyed doing book signings with my book The Symposium of Justice, and I certainly didn’t think a child of two famous parents should want autographs.  If anything, I would think his parents would appreciate downplaying such a thing, since they get bombed with requests every time they go out someplace.  So by downplaying the incident I thought I was doing them a favor.  The actress looked uncomfortable at me with a smile intended for television and gathered her kids up and left the set. 

For the rest of the shoot I caught the actor looking at me oddly anytime he had a free moment.  It made me feel like an animal in a zoo the way he was examining me.  I blew it off, but the look reminded me of the many similar looks I had received over the years by politicians and company presidents who felt betrayed that they had invited me to the table and were hurt that I refused their invite by not participating in their hazing rituals.  It was at the lunch break on the set where all the technical people sat at one table, the support actors sat at another, the stunt men sat at another, the agents at another, and the director, producer and the lead actor sat at the same table closest to the catering truck.  Since it was those people who I knew the most out of everyone present I sat at their table.  The director and producer were warm to me, but the actor who had been very talkative until I arrived suddenly claimed up.  The director following his lead after a few moments stopped talking so openly.  All the people at that table finished up their food quickly and left saying they needed to get ready for the next set-ups. 

I was left at the table by myself, but the stunt coordinator who was sitting at a near-by table and had struck up several productive conversations with me came over and sat down.  “Do I stink of something” I asked him mockingly smelling my armpits. 

He laughed.  “No man, you have to understand something out here, everything is politics.  You are either in, or you’re out.” 

“So I’m out?” 

“No, you’re in, or they wouldn’t have called you.  I think they aren’t sure what to do with your Midwest like behavior.  Don’t worry about it, you’re cool.  They’ll come around.  Give them some time.” 

That conversation confirmed what I had been thinking, and it was disappointing.  I completed my tasks for that project and when it came time to break and wrap, the actor insisted on driving me back to my hotel to personally thank me for helping with the project. 

As he drove me through several neighborhoods back to my hotel there was awkwardness between us.  I realized that he did not want to drive me back, but was simply doing it because he had told the crew he planned to.  He was simply fulfilling his role in Hollywood politics.  He personally driving me back was supposed to be considered part of my payment, and to me it was expected by a friend, or potential friend.  When I stepped out of his car I wished him luck on his next project.  He said to me, “hey man, you have my email address.  Feel free to contact me anytime.”  As he drove away I felt relief of being out of that uncomfortable situation.  I was happy to be a part of the project, but glad to be away from the politics that was very evident. 

About 3 weeks later I wrote him curious to see if he’d respond. His email, which I had used dozens of times before bounced back.  He had canceled his account. 

It didn’t bother me; I was as uncomfortable as he was once we realized that we were functioning from completely different ideologies.  For me, I can deal with people who think different from me, even if I don’t like it.  But for people like him and his wife, they had looked for the signs, just like Codevilla spoke about, and I showed that I was not part of the ruling class and had no desire to learn how to be.  They were disappointed in losing a potential friend because unless I was willing to join their class, they could not associate with me.  When they realized that I wanted to stay on the outside, they stopped investing in our relationship.  It’s that simple.

This process is what school board members encounter when they get voted in by the public.  Congressional freshman also go through this process.  It is very tempting to say yes, because in saying yes, financial security is almost guaranteed.  Because it is the ruling class who has the power, and resources to give you, so when they invite you to the table, you accept it as an honor.  But for me I see shackles at that table, and I’ve always turned away from it, much to the horror of those who invited me.  To them it is a terrible insult to have their helping hand slapped away.  They become angry at themselves for ever thinking that they were willing to put their reputations behind someone who doesn’t want to play the game, which is a mere commoner, a peasant destined to be ruled by the ruling class. 

I could tell several dozen stories just like that one, and they all have in common the same pattern, an invite to the table of power, only for me to downplay the invite as worthless.  Not to slap down the value of the invite, but to display my reluctance to accept power and the game that follows.  For me the real value in life I can say I’ve felt on many occasions, and I feel sorry for those in the ruling class who grab so diligently that such concepts for which they are committed are a path of decline and they do not know it.  It is why so many politicians are corrupt and so many in Hollywood develop destructive addictions, it is the power of politics that corrupts the mind, because the pursuit of a class of any kind is like trying to fit mankind into the cloths of their youth.  The pants just don’t fit, mankind has outgrown such small-minded notions, they just don’t know how to articulate their beliefs.  So the questions come out as they do in the newspaper article from Michigan, as a frustrated rant about the way the world should be and the way it really is. 

This is the battle of our age, the reluctance of those who know better to join those who have bitten from the forbidden tree, the knowledge of good and evil, the pairs of opposites where politics ruins society from a lifetime of enchantment and understanding where the citizens do not need a ruling class, because they govern themselves. The politician uses duality to split the otherwise bright mind desiring freedom into bondage of opposites where the ruling class can conduct a psychological war to launch themselves as the peacemakers, and power holders.  It’s a game as old as time itself, and it is now outdated and worthless, for the philosophy of our time is not of Aristotle, Plato, or Socrates, but of Ayn Rand.  Time does not lie, even if the politics of power and the ruling class that resides in that power do lie.  America is at a point where we must go back to the beginning again, and start fresh with the knowledge we have now, and allow the European influence of peaking order and power grabs to leave our society under the guidance of modern philosophy which is specifically American. 

We must do this without pause, without the guidance of history, because we are writing that history right now.  The home of the brave and land of the free is alive in the hearts of those who do not seek the security of the ruling class.  That class, is the path to decline and rot and everything that is opposite of true freedom.

 

 

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