Category: Pirate Ship

We are UNDER ATTACK: United Nations supporters show their cards in a strategy tax payers fund

We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing and nothing is too great for Allah.
Osama bin Laden

Bin Laden is not the only terrorist that looks at the United States with jealous eyes, because in the US, the Constitution works better than any document for any nation in the history of the world, and those that wish to be kings, presidents and other leaders of eternal reputation desire as many parasites in world history have, to become the next great leader, and in order to do that they must destroy what the United States is to the rest of the world. Because in the United States the desire is freedom, not compliance to a leader, Americans don’t make very good subjects.

The following documentary was filmed in 1997. I ran across this information back then when I was a member of Ross Perot’s Reform Party. This video pre-dates the 9/11 Attacks, the George W. Bush presidency and the Obama Presidency. It predates the Tea Party, the 9/12 Gr…oups, it predates anything Glenn Beck has ever written or said. This video proves much of what Beck and many like him have been saying for a long time, America is under attack, but not with guns, but from economic terrorists. To understand fully where we are today, listen to the ghosts of the past as they speak a warning that was meant to be heard, but was ignored resulting in the crises we are currently on. The documentary is just under an hour, so go pop some popcorn, grab a nice beverage and make yourself comfortable……I’ll wait………………………………………………………………………………Go ahead…………………………..this is important…………………………………………………………

This video will show you how the green movement led by people like Al Gore, Bill Clinton, George Soros (not named in this video since he was still flying under the radar back then) were working for a power grab to strengthen the United Nations that is set to crush the United States through regulation and to redistribute wealth to the rest of the world and create power for themselves. It is interesting to see how the policies put in place over a decade ago have turned out to be true. The goal, as Osama bin Laden stated was to destroy the United States not with weapons, or direct occupation, but to drain America of its wealth, and therefore its strength by bleeding it to death to be resurrected under a UN flag.

We have seen through the NEA, (National Education Association; the national teachers union) that they have done their part in the last decade of adopting many of the United Nations policies. The radical teachers in both colleges and public education have been extremely well documented at this site. Just pick an article. We have also seen the activity of people like Bill Ayers, Cass Sunstein, Michael Moore and many other left-winged radicals acting just as dangerous as the terrorist who wishes to hijack a plane and run it into the symbols of America’s economic power, to undermine the United States in favor of a stronger United Nations to achieve their vision of a new world order constructed around liberal philosophy. We have seen in the wake of such devastating actions the radical undertone of American civilization that is actively seeking to bring down America as a nation from the inside through education, taxation, and regulation policy.

Many of those global rulers understand that the key to such a conquest is wrapped up in our entitlement programs such as Medicare, Social Security, and excessively high pay for public employees. They understood that by sponsoring entitlement programs they accomplish two things as a military attack strategy, they buy the votes of the American people who are all too willing to support politicians willing to give them something for literally nothing. This strategy then accomplishes the second thing which is put radicals into positions of power with the ability to influence legislation.

This has led to the current economic crises, which was created by design to place our nation exactly where it is. We all see it and are now concerned with the debt problems our nation is facing. Paul Ryan has figured out how to solve the problem, which can be seen here in his budget plan video.

However, the people who created this crisis will fight tooth and nail to prevent Ryan’s plan. These people want the financial crash to occur. They are not interested in positions of government in the United States. They are already maneuvering themselves for a position in the United Nations of tomorrow. Bill Clinton has already done his two terms as President of the United States, and he is one of the many that are currently lobbying to be the first President of the United Nations.

Programs created at the United Nations, just like local school levy issues, are done for purely the political capital of the politician and funded with the money they take from tax payers. That makes them simple looters by definition. In the case of the United Nations the United States is responsible for 22 percent of the United Nation’s regular budget, an amount that in 2009 was $598,292,101, according to a report from the United Nations Secretariat on member states’ contributions to the U.N. regular budget for 2009. So to put it simply, all the tax payers of the United States are funding our own destruction, and the rise of political power to those that seek to undermine our way of life and redistribute our resources where they see fit.

The intention established by the documentary at the beginning of this article is now nearly 15 years old, and much of what they said then has occurred right on schedule. But it doesn’t need to continue. Americans have the right and obligation to defend themselves from the elusive enemies that seek its destruction. America is the only hope for the greater good because it is the United States that is the only working model for freedom. The members of the United Nations are just as infantile as the local school boards, township trustees, kings, queens, and European nobility that simply want to make names for their worthless lives behind the plastic meaning of an engraved nameplate and an “important” position.
On July 4th 1821 John Quincy Adams explained America’s role in the world like this:

America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own….She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assumes the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.

By the way, if you aren’t sure who John Quincy Adam’s is meet him here played by Anthony Hopkins in Steven Spielberg’s Amistad. The speech in this film sums up nicely the foundation principles of the United States. It is only in the United States that such speeches would be made and such thoughts considered. And if America is wiped away by a United Nations that it created, then such speeches will be extinguished for possibly centuries, maybe millenniums until the courage to create a new America can rise again.

And rise again freedom will. It may not be on the continent of the United States, it may be in China, or Russia, or Australia. It may even be on a star ship headed for some distant plant by some future humans on a quest for freedom, because such quests are forever in the minds of man. And the only place it truly has ever existed is in the United States, and this is the source of the world jealousy, and the target of tyrants who wish to prove to their subjects that the mighty America can be brought down.

America still has freedom, but we must fight to keep it, because the effort to get it back again will look like these battle scenes. This is how badly people are willing to fight for freedom once they’ve lost it.


This is the Europe that has been striving to suppress freedom for ages and freedom has attempted many times to overcome it.

Freedom is an elusive quality that a majority of mankind strives for, but only a few have the courage to protect.

In this current fight, where foreign invaders are using the greed and ineptitude of our own public servants to destroy American culture, it is not required to gather up your arms and fight in battle. Not yet. What is required in this battle is to beat the enemy the way they have been beating us, with economics.

Take away the funding to such organizations. Watch where your taxes are spent and turn off the supply that feeds those organizations so that they may dry up and die away, and retreat to a place where they are no longer a threat to our national sovereignty. In this day and age, the vote and your tax money are far more powerful than the bullet from a gun.

So use your taxes and vote, so actual bloodshed isn’t required later. Use them now while you still can. Cut the funding, kill the threat. Keep funding them, and you will lose your freedom. It’s that simple.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Total Lifetime Grosses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Where am I going,” I’d ask.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is Hollywood at it’s best!


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

These are my kind of people!

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

Oil Shale is a Solution, Al Gore, Think Progress and the President are the Problem: why our economy is hurting

As you listen to Darryl Parks talk about the S & P dropping the credit rating of the United States on 700 WLW with Howard McEwen, who is an investment advisor, ask yourself why we’re in this situation to begin with.   

Below is a great article from the Daily Reckoning about Oil Shale in Colorado.  There is only one reason that our country is in a financial mess, and that is because fools are standing in the way.  I am thinking of a speech from John Galt uttered in the book Atlas Shrugged.  “You propose to establish a social order based on the following tenets: that you’re incompetent to run your own life, but competent to run the lives of others—that you’re unfit to exist in freedom, but fit to become an omnipotent ruler—that you’re unable to earn your living by the use of your own intelligence, but able to judge politicians and to vote them into jobs of total power over arts you have never seen, over sciences you have never studied, over achievements of which you have no knowledge, over the gigantic industries where you, by your own definition of your capacity, would be unable successfully to fill the job of assistant greaser.”

John Galt is right and evidence of it is in the following article.  This is available to our nation right now, but of course the holdup is in government’s lack of vision.  When you finish the article you will learn a lot about oil.  And you’ll learn that our financial problems are completely self-imposed. 

 

Oil Shale Reserves

Oil Shale Reserves: Stinky Water, Sweet Oil
A Daily Reckoning White Paper Report
By Dan Denning

You won’t think much of Rio Blanco County if you ever drive through it. In fact, unless you take a right turn off Interstate-70 West at Rifle, head north on Railroad Avenue and then west on Government road to Colorado state highway number thirteen, odds are you’ll never even step foot in Rio Blanco County.

But even if you keep heading west toward Grand Junction, through the town of Parachute and the shuttered oil shale refineries from the 1970s, you’ll see the Book Cliffs geologic formation on your right. For miles and miles. It’s a bleak landscape. Almost lunar. At first glance, it’s the kind of land you’d never want to explore, much less settle down in.

Oil Shale Reserves : America’s Strategic Future

In the small world of geologists, though, the region is well-known. In fact, you might even say it’s the single
most important patch of undeveloped, unloved, and desolate looking land in America. But you’d never guess this particular corner of the Great American Desert may play an integral role in America’s strategic future just by looking at it. You’d never guess that the whole stretch of brown, red, and orange land contains enough recoverable oil and gas to make you forget about the Middle East for the rest of time.

 

There are places in Rio Blanco County like Stinking Water Creek, named after the smelly mix of oil and water the first white settlers found there, that tell you oil’s always been around the Rocky Mountains. It’s just not always been easy to find. It’s one thing to find oil that bubbles out of the ground in liquid form. It’s quite another to drill a thousand feet down, and encounter oil locked up tight inside a greasy rock.

The first seeping pools of oil were discovered in Western Colorado as far back as 1876, the year the state entered the Union. But exploration didn’t get serious until drillers settled in the town of Rangely in Rio Blanco County.

By 1903, thirteen different drillers had come and gone in Rangely. According to the local museum, the only six wells that actually struck oil were producing just two to ten barrels of oil a day. Hardly a Spindeltop, the gusher that launched the Texas oil-boom on January 10th, 1901, and immediately began producing 100,000 barrels per day.

The energy reserves of the Piceance Basin, upon which Rio Blanco County sits, contain massive petroleum reserves of a very unusual nature: Oil shale.

Oil Shale Reserves : A Congressional Legacy

Most of the nation’s oil shale reserves rest under the control of the U.S. government – a legacy of a 95-year old Congressional Act. In 1910, Congress passed the Pickett Act, which authorized President Taft to set aside oil- bearing land in California and Wyoming as potential sources of fuel for the U.S. Navy. Taft did so right away. The Navy was in the process of switching from coal-burning ships to oil burning ships. And the U.S. military, conscious of the expanding role of America in the world, needed a dependable supply of fuel in case of a national emergency.

From 1910 to 1925 the Navy developed the Naval Petroleum and Oil Shale Reserves Program. The program became official in 1927 and President Roosevelt even expanded the scope of the program in 1942 as the U.S. geared up for war with Japan and Germany.

Several of the oil fields set aside for the nation’s first strategic reserve, particularly Elk Hills in California,
would go on to produce oil for the U.S. government. Elk Hills was eventually sold off to Occidental Petroleum for $3.65 billion in 1998 in the largest privatization in U.S. history. The shale reserves, however, still remain, locked 1,000 feet underground in the Colorado desert.

Unlocking The Future

The destruction of Hurricane Katrina shows the importance of a strategic petroleum reserve, or, more accurately, a strategic energy reserve. But the SPR in Louisiana only holds about 800 million barrels of emergency, enough to get the country through about 90 days of regular oil usage. That’s barely a band-aid for a country that faces a potential energy heart attack.

In other words, the future of oil shale may have finally arrived. Extracting oil from shale is no simple task, which is why the reserves remain almost completely undeveloped. But an emerging new technology promises to unlock the awesome potential of the oil shale.

“The technical groundwork may be in place for a fundamental shift in oil shale economics,” the Rand Corporation recently declared. “Advances in thermally conductive in-situ conversion may enable shale-derived oil to be competitive with crude oil at prices below $40 per barrel. If this becomes the case, oil shale development may soon occupy a very prominent position in the national energy agenda.”

Estimated U.S. oil shale reserves total an astonishing 1.5 trillion barrels of oil – or more than five times the
stated reserves of Saudi Arabia. This energy bounty is simply too large to ignore any longer, assuming that the reserves are economically viable. And yet, oil shale lies far from the radar screen of most investors.

But we here at The Daily Reckoning are on the case. Just yesterday, I caught a first-hand glimpse of a cutting-edge oil shale project spearheaded by Shell. I trekked out to a barren moonscape in Colorado to tour the facility with Shell geologists. To summarize my findings, oil shale holds tremendous promise, but the technologies that promise to unlock this promise remain somewhat experimental. But sooner or later, the oil trapped in the shale of Colorado will flow to the surface. And when it does, it will enrich investors who arrive early to the scene.

Can Oil Shale Change The World?

America’s oil shale reserves are enormous, totaling at least 1.5 trillion barrels of oil. That’s five times the
reserves of Saudi Arabia! And yet, no one is producing commercial quantities of oil from these vast deposits. All that oil is still sitting right where God left it, buried under the vast landscapes of Colorado and Wyoming.

Obviously, there are some very real obstacles to oil production from shale. After all, if it was such a good
thing, we’d be doing it already, right? “Oil shale is the fuel of the future, and always will be,” goes a popular
saying in Western Colorado.

But what if we could safely and economically get our hands on all that oil? Imagine how the world might change. The U.S. would instantly have the world’s largest oil reserves. Imagine…having so much oil we’d never have to worry about Saudi Arabia again, or Hugo Chavez, or the mullahs in Tehran. And instead of ships lined up in L.A.’s port to unload cheap Chinese goods, we might see oil tankers lined up waiting to export America’s tremendous oil bounty to the rest of the world. The entire geopolitical and economic map of the world would change…and the companies in the vanguard of oil shale development might make hundreds of billions of dollars as they convert America’s untapped shale reserves into a brand new energy revolution.

Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter may have been entertaining similar ambitions in the late 1970s when they encouraged and funded the development of the West’s shale deposits. A shale-boom ensued, although not much oil flowed. The government spent billions and so did Exxon Mobil. New boomtowns sprung up in Rifle, Parachute, Rangely, and Meeker here in Colorado.

And then came Black Monday. May 2, 1982. The day Exxon shut down its $5 billion Colony Oil Shale project. The refineries closed. The jobs left (the American oil industry has lost nearly as many jobs in the last ten years as the automobile and steel industries.) And the energy locked in Colorado’s vast shale deposits sat untouched and unrefined.

Oil Shale Technology – Old & New

Extracting oil from the shale is no simple task. The earliest attempts to extract the oil utilized an environmentally unfriendly process known as “retorting.” Stated simply, retorting required mining the shale, hauling it to a processing facility that crushed the rock into small chunks, then extracted a petroleum substance called kerogen, then upgraded the kerogen through a process of hydrogenation (which requires lots of water) and refined it into gasoline or jet fuel.

But the difficulties of retorting do not end there, as my colleague, Byron King explains:

“After you retort the rock to derive the kerogen (not oil), the heating process has desiccated the shale (OK, that means that it is dried out).  Sad to say, the volume of desiccated shale that you have to dispose of is now greater than that of the hole from which you dug and mined it in the first place.  Any takers for trainloads of dried, dusty, gunky shale residue, rife with low levels of heavy metal residue and other toxic, but now chemically-activated crap?  (Well, it makes for enough crap that when it rains, the toxic stuff will leach out and contaminate all of the water supplies to which gravity can reach, which is essentially all of ‘em.  Yeah, right.  I sure want that stuff blowin’ in my wind.)  Add up all of the capital investment to build the retorting mechanisms, cost of energy required, cost of water, costs of transport, costs of environmental compliance, costs of refining, and you have some relatively costly end-product.”

But a new technology has emerged that may begin to tap the oil shale’s potential. Royal Dutch Shell, in fact, has recently completed a demonstration project (The Mahogany Ridge project) in which it produced 1,400 barrels of oil from shale in the ground, without mining the shale at all.

Instead, Shell utilized a process called “in situ” mining, which heats the shale while it’s still in the ground, to
the point where the oil leaches from the rock. Shell’s Terry O’Connor described the breakthrough in testimony before Congress earlier this summer (And Congress may have an acute interest in the topic, since the U.S. government controls 72% of all U.S. oil shale acreage):

“Some 23 years ago, Shell commenced laboratory and field research on a promising in ground conversion and recovery process. This technology is called the In-situ Conversion Process, or ICP. In 1996, Shell successfully carried out its first small field test on its privately owned Mahogany property in Rio Blanco County, Colorado some 200 miles west of Denver. Since then, Shell has carried out four additional related field tests at nearby sites. The most recent test was carried out over the past several months and produced in excess of 1,400 barrels of light oil plus associated gas from a very small test plot using the ICP technology…

“Most of the petroleum products we consume today are derived from conventional oil fields that produce oil and gas that have been naturally matured in the subsurface by being subjected to heat and pressure over very long periods of time. In general terms, the In-situ Conversion Process (ICP) accelerates this natural process of oil and gas maturation by literally tens of millions of years. This is accomplished by slow sub-surface heating of petroleum source rock containing kerogen, the precursor to oil and gas. This acceleration of natural processes is achieved by drilling holes into the resource, inserting electric resistance heaters into those heater holes and heating the subsurface to around 650-700F, over a 3 to 4 year period.

“During this time, very dense oil and gas is expelled from the kerogen and undergoes a series of changes. These changes include the shearing of lighter components from the dense carbon compounds, concentration of available hydrogen into these lighter compounds, and changing of phase of those lighter, more hydrogen rich compounds from liquid to gas. In gaseous phase, these lighter fractions are now far more mobile and can move in the subsurface through existing or induced fractures to conventional producing wells from which they are brought to the surface. The process results in the production of about 65 to 70% of the original “carbon” in place in the subsurface.

“The ICP process is clearly energy-intensive, as its driving force is the injection of heat into the subsurface.
However, for each unit of energy used to generate power to provide heat for the ICP process, when calculated on a life cycle basis, about 3.5 units of energy are produced and treated for sales to the consumer market. This energy efficiency compares favorably with many conventional heavy oil fields that for decades have used steam injection to help coax more oil out of the reservoir. The produced hydrocarbon mix is very different from traditional crude oils. It is much lighter and contains almost no heavy ends.

“However, because the ICP process occurs below ground, special care must be taken to keep the products of the process from escaping into groundwater flows. Shell has adapted a long recognized and established mining and construction ice wall technology to isolate the active ICP area and thus accomplish these objectives and to safe guard the environment. For years, freezing of groundwater to form a subsurface ice barrier has been used to isolate areas being tunneled and to reduce natural water flows into mines. Shell has successfully tested the freezing technology and determined that the development of a freeze wall prevents the loss of contaminants from the heated zone.”

It may seem, as O’Conner said, counter-intuitive to freeze the water around a shale deposit, and then heat up the contents within the deposit. It’s energy-intensive. And it’s a lot of work. What’s more, there’s no proof yet it can work on a commercial-scale.

Yet both technologies, the freeze wall and the heating of shale, have been proven in the field to work. The freeze wall was used most recently in Boston’s Big Dig project. It was also used to prevent ground water from seeping into the salt caverns at the Strategic Petroleum reserve in Weeks Island, LA.

But still, you may be wondering, does it really make sense to heat the ground up a thousand feet down for three or four years and wait? Of course it does. In case you missed O’Conner’s math, Shell could harvest up to a million barrels per acre, or a billion barrels per square mile, on an area covering over a thousand square miles.

It’s still early days in the oil shale fields of Colorado and Wyoming, but it looks to me like someone’s gonna make a lot of money out there. I’m working hard to discover how we outside investors can play along.

Shell’s Mahogany Ridge

Last week, I paid a visit to Royal Dutch Shell’s oil shale project in Colorado. The visit left me with more questions than answers, but I came away from the place with the sense that this opportunity is very real…or, at least, it soon will be.

After driving across a vast expanse of “Nowhere,” Colorado, my brother and I met up with a few geologists from Shell. Of course it’s just those large, unpopulated tracts of high desert that make the area so appealing from a geopolitical point of view. Tapping into the oil shale 2,000 feet underground isn’t going to bother too many people. And there are no spotted owls around either. If the technology to turn shale into oil works, the entire area will become a new American boom patch.

Soon after we arrived, the geologists escorted us around the facility, chatting all the while about the successes and challenges of their venture.

The two trickiest aspects of oil shale development, as the geologists and engineers explained, are heating the shale to extreme temperatures, while simultaneously surrounding the heated area with a subterranean ice wall. Shell doesn’t know, or isn’t saying, which part of the project will be the most challenging. If you were about to change the world by making it economic to tap into as much as 2 trillion barrels of oil under the Colorado plateau, you’d be pretty careful about showing your competitors how you were going to do it.

First, anything that heats up rock around it to around 600 or 700 degrees Fahrenheit has to conduct electrically generated heat well. The most conductive metals on the Periodic Table of Elements are, in order, silver, copper, and gold. Naturally, the number of heaters you put in a place affects the amount of time it takes to turn the shale goo into API 34 crude. The more heaters, the more cost, though.

And given the fact that Shell does not know yet if the heaters will be recoverable, you can see that sticking
silver, copper, or gold heaters 2000 meters underground and then leaving them there once the kerogen has been pumped has a serious effect on the economics of your operation.

At the moment, Shell is not sure what the optimal size of production zones ought to be. The big issue here is how big can a freeze-wall be to be effective and freezing the groundwater surrounding a shale deposit? The test projects, as you can see, were quite small. Shell doesn’t know, or isn’t saying, what the optimum size is for a each “pod” or “cell”. That’s what they’ll have to figure out at the next stage…and the picture with the dirt is a football field sized project….where rather than creating the freeze-wall at 50 meters down…they will do it at 1,000 ft. down…. with 2,000 being the desired and necessary depth for commercial viability. I’m not sure anyone has ever created a freeze-wall at that depth….neither is shell. But we’ll find out. The oil itself that comes from the process looks like…oil. No heavy refining needed.

Shell thinks the whole thing is economic at a crude price of $30. So barring a major reversal of geopolitical trends, they’re forging ahead.

Since the Bureau of Land Management owns about 80% of the oil shale acreage in Colorado, there is no investment play on private companies that might own land with rich shale deposits. Although, if Shell and the DOE are right that you can recover a million barrels of oil per acre…it wouldn’t take much land to make a man rich out here.

Oil Shale: Testing Public Lands

The Bureau of Land Management recently received ten applications (by eight companies) for a pilot program to develop Colorado’s shale reserves. The program allows the companies access to public lands for the purpose of testing shale-extraction technologies. You see below an interesting mix of large, publicly traded oil giants and small, privately held innovators.

  • Natural Soda, Inc. of Rifle, Colorado.
  • EGL Resources Inc. of Midland, Texas.
  • Salt Lake City-based Kennecott Exploration Company.
  • Independent Energy Partners of Denver, Colorado
  • Denver-based Phoenix Wyoming, Inc.
  • Chevron Shale Oil Company.
  • Exxon Mobil Corporation.
  • Shell Frontier Oil and Gas Inc

There is dispute within the industry over how long, if ever, demonstration extraction technologies can become commercially viable. I’ve spoken with some of the smaller companies that have applied for leases from the BLM. Some of them will have to raise money to conduct the project. And some of them have been less than forthcoming about how exactly their extraction technology is different or better than previous methods.

How will it all unfold? Well, for starters, it could all utterly fail. To me, Shell’s in-situ process looks the most
promising. It also makes the most sense economically. There may be a better, less energy-intensive way to heat up the ground than what Shell has come up with. But Shell, Chevron, and Exxon Mobil clearly have the resources to scoop up any private or small firm that makes a breakthrough.

And there are a host of smaller firms involved with the refining and drilling process that figure to play a key
role in the development of the industry, should that development pick up pace.

The Energy Policy Act of 2005, otherwise known as a listless piece of legislation without any strategic vision, does, at least, make provision for encouraging research into the development of shale. But government works slow, when it works at all. It’s going to take an external shock to the economy to really ratchet up interest and development of the nation’s energy reserves…say…something like a nuclear Iran.

Dan Denning
for The Daily Reckoning

Source article: http://dailyreckoning.com/oil-shale-reserves/

Read more: Oil Shale Reserves http://dailyreckoning.com/oil-shale-reserves/#ixzz1KTuP22A0

So what do you think about that?  Here’s a cool video about the use of Oil shale.

So why aren’t we doing this?  Because of communist leaning politicians like the old hippie Al Gore who still thinks he’s smoking pot in college and forcing the world to drive electric cars. 

Gore is funny.  Talk about the “carbon lobby” look at the sponsor of the video he’s in.  “Think Progress.”  Oh…..that’s not a lobby of any kind.  Not for the United States anyway.  Think Progress is supported by people like George Soros who only wants to create a one world government, collapse the American economy so that we  won’t prevent a borderless world, and create an economy based on green technology. 

Al Gore and his friends of communism advocates want to stop the American economy and they are what is driving up our fuel costs by standing in the way of technological development.  Our country is being run by fools and idiots by our default, because while the rest of us work at real jobs, those thieves of our tax dollars are using our own resources to destroy us.  Those of us that think will never get along with communists.  I’m going to call them that for now on, because that’s what they are.  I don’t want the world they are advocating.  I want oil, fast cars and government off my back. 

Rich Hoffman

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

If You Vote for a Levy, of ANY Kind, YOU’RE STUPID: The Ten Planks of Communism

I have to give the disclaimer more and more these days because my comments are aggressive and as I see it. I see no benefit in dancing around the subject. There is no gain in a lie, such as, at the end of a movie you’re wife likes, and you didn’t, one might be tempted to say, “I liked the movie.” Well, regarding taxes here’s what’s going on, we are being robbed and forced to spend our money on things we don’t agree with. To get a taste of the problem have a listen to Darryl Parks on 700 WLW.

Now, a lot of people don’t want to deal with viewing tax collection as a form of robbery. So they put on the blinders and just try to forget about it. And if you make them look at it, they’ll be angry with you……….at first. Everybody knows the truth whether they speak it or not. Taxes are organized crime style extortion that is outright theft taken from us under a legal premise and sold as good intentions.

How do I know? It’s easy. You can conduct a simple test, the same type of test that you might use to check the chlorine content of your pool. Just take a sample of the water and check the chemical mix. For our society where education is the centerpiece of our social programs funded with tax money from funds collected and spent in our own communities, just take a sample and study the behavior patterns. It’s fairly easy to track. The superintendents of school systems are collecting enormous sums of money for phantom administrative needs while they actively cut teachers at the bottom of the pay scale. When they are directly challenged for their inefficiency and lack of control over school budgets, such as we have done in Lakota, and Mason, and now Lebanon, they scamper off in retirement or transfer to another system to maintain the façade rather than face the music of corruption that happens under their watch. (See the Channel 9 News story coming up on May 9th at 6pm.)

So if it’s happening right under our noses, what do you think is happening at the federal level? Where do you think all our hard-earned money is going? Well, let’s start at the top, with President Obama and his trip out to California to raise money for his re-election campaign. President Obama declared the 41st annual Earth Day as proof of America’s ecological and conservation spirit—then completed a three-day campaign-style trip logging 10,666 miles on Air Force One, eating up some 53,300 gallons at a cost of about $180,000. And that doesn’t include the fuel consumption of his helicopter, limo, or the 29 other vehicles that travel with that car.

http://www.usnews.com/news/blogs/washington-whispers/2011/04/22/earth-day-ends-obamas-53300-gallon-trip

Why does he talk out of both sides of his mouth? Well, he’s  practicing communism just like most of government. Communists, socialists, and progressives believe that as the ruling class they know better than you do, and you are their children to care for. But they have a “do as I say, not as I do attitude,” which doesn’t fly with me. I don’t need a single one of them for anything. There is isn’t anybody in any government position including education that I can’t do for myself and do it better. Oh, I heard that, you say we need the military. Well, I like the military and for offensive weapons and the expansion of American ideas, I’m ok with some money going to a military. But for self-defense, if I didn’t have to waste money on the taxes, I could easily have my own militia that would protect my community or even my city. I don’t need a third-party for that kind of thing. So every dollar of money I spend in taxes is going to some inferior person to do a job that I could do better. That’s not to say that they are bad people, but it means that they function from a different ideology than many Americans. For instance, Obama and his friends while smoking pot in college sat around reading The Communist Manifesto, which I’ve talked about in great length. I read the whole book in one evening while I was waiting for my wife to pick her supply of books for the week, but that’s beside the point. Myself, and the people I tend to enjoy spending time with read Atlas Shrugged, which is the polar opposite of The Communist Manifesto.

Now, to my reasoning mind, The Communist Manifesto has been proven to be wrong. Poor Ayn Rand who wrote Atlas Shrugged was a direct victim of the Communist Revolution when the Bolsheviks over took the Russian government in 1917 under the long arm of Lenin, who began the revolution while not even on Russian soil. That’s how it starts. Today in America it is George Soros who is playing the Lenin role, with the massive amount of money he pours into the cause and he achieves his objective with his media power. Only he’s not trying to overthrow a country, he’s trying to create a World Government, and to do that he must eliminate the United States. He’s said as much. It’s easy to find.

But in essence, it’s no different from what Lenin did. But the idea is to create an army from within our own nation. Guns and frontal attacks are such a messy business. People don’t engage in war like that anymore, especially against a technologically superior opponent. You have to bring them down from the inside out, and the first step is to undermine the economy so the superior enemy can’t produce those powerful weapons. That’s what’s happening to us whether the weak-kneed want to believe it or not.

How has that happened in our nation? Well, it starts in our education system. It has always baffled me how protective a mother is when she has a young child, but how willing that same mother just surrenders her children to the minds of strangers within a school system, as if the mother has no right to question a school district about what goes into their children’s heads for 7 hours out of a day. Not all teachers are socialists, but quite a few are. Is that what you want your children learning, and do you want to pay for it with YOUR money, and pay excessively well for it? This chart is what teachers are making in Ohio compared to what the rest of us make. What are they doing that is so special and unique that only they can do?  How did we let them get paid so much?  Because they threatened to strike, often, so we threw money at them so we wouldn’t be late for work if the school wasn’t open?

Ayn Rand’s family suffered greatly under communism and she came to America and told the story of how it happened in Atlas Shrugged, which to me is the answer to any theory that Marx worked up in his poverty driven depraved state while writing The Communist Manifesto. The problem is that Atlas is a big book. The Communist Manifesto is a very small book, and is easy to read by losers, malcontents, hippies, punks, creeps, and the very lazy, so they make it their kind of Bible of philosophy because of the ease in mastery of the subject.

And we all know that it is a majority of the people described above that are drawn to politics. So it is simply a math problem to deduce that communist leaning politicians have infested our political system like termites since the middle of the 19th century. And they have done their damage.

Don’t believe me. Ok, you want proof. Fine.

Here are the 10 Planks of Communism as listed in The Communist Manifesto. Does any of this sound like the kind of activity you’re pouring your hard-earned tax money in to?

The 10 PLANKS stated in the Communist Manifesto and some of their American counterparts are…
1. Abolition of private property and the application of all rents of land to public purposes.
Americans do these with actions such as the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution (1868), and various zoning, school & property taxes. Also the Bureau of Land Management (Zoning laws are the first step to government property ownership)

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.
Americans know this as misapplication of the 16th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, 1913, The Social Security Act of 1936.; Joint House Resolution 192 of 1933; and various State “income” taxes. We call it “paying your fair share”.

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.
Americans call it Federal & State estate Tax (1916); or reformed Probate Laws, and limited inheritance via arbitrary inheritance tax statutes.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.
Americans call it government seizures, tax liens, Public “law” 99-570 (1986); Executive order 11490, sections 1205, 2002 which gives private land to the Department of Urban Development; the imprisonment of “terrorists” and those who speak out or write against the “government” (1997 Crime/Terrorist Bill); or the IRS confiscation of property without due process. Asset forfeiture laws are used by DEA, IRS, ATF etc…).

5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.
Americans call it the Federal Reserve which is a privately owned credit/debt system allowed by the Federal Reserve act of 1913. All local banks are members of the Fed system, and are regulated by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) another privately owned corporation. The Federal Reserve Banks issue Fiat Paper Money and practice economically destructive fractional reserve banking.

6. Centralization of the means of communications and transportation in the hands of the State.
Americans call it the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and Department of Transportation (DOT) mandated through the ICC act of 1887, the Commissions Act of 1934, The Interstate Commerce Commission established in 1938, The Federal Aviation Administration, Federal Communications Commission, and Executive orders 11490, 10999, as well as State mandated driver’s licenses and Department of Transportation regulations.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the state, the bringing into cultivation of waste lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.
Americans call it corporate capacity, The Desert Entry Act and The Department of Agriculture… Thus read “controlled or subsidized” rather than “owned”… This is easily seen in these as well as the Department of Commerce and Labor, Department of Interior, the Environmental Protection Agency, Bureau of Land Management, Bureau of Reclamation, Bureau of Mines, National Park Service, and the IRS control of business through corporate regulations.

8. Equal liability of all to labor. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.
Americans call it Minimum Wage and slave labor like dealing with our Most Favored Nation trade partner; i.e. Communist China. We see it in practice via the Social Security Administration and The Department of Labor. The National debt and inflation caused by the communal bank has caused the need for a two “income” family. Woman in the workplace since the 1920’s, the 19th amendment of the U.S. Constitution, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, assorted Socialist Unions, affirmative action, the Federal Public Works Program and of course Executive order 11000.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries, gradual abolition of the distinction between town and country, by a more equitable distribution of population over the country.
Americans call it the Planning Reorganization act of 1949 , zoning (Title 17 1910-1990) and Super Corporate Farms, as well as Executive orders 11647, 11731 (ten regions) and Public “law” 89-136. These provide for forced relocations and forced sterilization programs, like in China.

10. Free education for all children in public schools. Abolition of children’s factory labor in its present form. Combination of education with industrial production.
Americans are being taxed to support what we call ‘public’ schools, but are actually “government force-tax-funded schools ” Even private schools are government regulated. The purpose is to train the young to work for the communal debt system. We also call it the Department of Education, the NEA and Outcome Based “Education” . These are used so that all children can be indoctrinated and inculcated with the government propaganda, like “majority rules”, and “pay your fair share”. WHERE are the words “fair share” in the Constitution, Bill of Rights or the Internal Revenue Code (Title 26)?? NO WHERE is “fair share” even suggested !! The philosophical concept of “fair share” comes from the Communist maxim, “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need! This concept is pure socialism. … America was made the greatest society by its private initiative WORK ETHIC … Teaching ourselves and others how to “fish” to be self-sufficient and produce plenty of EXTRA commodities to if so desired could be shared with others who might be “needy”… Americans have always voluntarily been the MOST generous and charitable society on the planet.

Source article:
http://www.libertyzone.com/Communist-Manifesto-Planks.html

Now, to me, it is totally unacceptable that America has been tricked into a direction of communism. Communists are now in every layer of our government and our lives, and people no longer remember the basic premise of American life. We have several generations now that think history is listening to “oldies” from the 50’s. Their minds and sense of history is shallow and easily manipulated. But my mind is not shallow. I see that the state of our nation is wrong and I don’t like it, and I certainly don’t want to pay for it. Why would I give my money to a system of education I don’t agree with, that I believe trains kids to become less intelligent instead of more so? Why would I want to pay any money in taxes that gets funneled back to a public sector union that then spends some of that money on union dues that finances democratic candidates that are preaching communism with different names? Why would I want to send money to a health care system that just throws money at people who smoke, drink, have illicit sex and allow their waistlines to form their own gravitational pull on the moon? Yet my money is taken from me and given to places I don’t want it to go. It is taken from me without choice, and the thieves are asking for more every year.

The poor and sick need help you say………then let me give them a job. Get out of my way and I’ll put them to work. Don’t waste my time in court over your silly laws and I might eliminate the poor class altogether. What about the sick and handicapped, or the elderly? Get the hell out of my way and I’ll solve that problem for you too. Why do people need to get sick and die? And why do people have to be handicapped? Genetic engineering and regenerative medicine eliminates those archaic forms of medicine completely. But that’s not the real motive here. The real motive is the same as the superintendents of these school systems. Government has token positions that are all about power. Nobody actually wants to solve a problem. They want a needy public addicted to their services. That’s all communism understands.
On a daily basis, how much tax is stolen from us to be spent on anti-American activities?

Item Rate Notes
Federal personal income tax 17%
(2011 est. – 18.2%) Top 25% rate. It ranges from a credit up to well over 40%. Source

State & local income taxes 10.1%
(2009 – 10.6%) State taxes range from under 6% to over 12%. Local taxes run from zero to 2.75%. Source, source, source, 2009 source

Sales tax 9.7%
(2009 – 10.3%) Figure is the average rate. State sales taxes range up to 8% and local taxes run from zero to over 5%. Source, source, source, 2008 source, 2009 source

Social security & Medicaid 7.65% Total rate is actually 15.3% since half is paid by the employer, but we’re ignoring that to be kind. Source, box 1

Federal corporate income tax share 3% Based on corporate taxes being approximately 1/6 of personal taxes, and that they are paid by individuals in the final analysis. Source

Property tax 2.5%
(2007 – 2.7%) Yearly average actual costs range from under $200 in Alaska to almost $1900 in New Jersey. Source

Fuel/gasoline tax .5%
(2009 est. – .6%) Approximately 23% of the 2005 gasoline price is for federal & state taxes. The federal excise tax is 18.4 cents per gallon. Per the CPI, about 6% of the average budget is for transportation. Estimated. 2010 estimate, $.45 per gallon average. Source

Other 5%
(2009 est. – 7%) Includes estate tax, fees, licenses, inflation losses, inheritance, deficit allowance, gift, and others too numerous to mention. Estimated.

Total tax percentage paid by the above average US citizen, 2005 – 54.4%
Total tax percentage paid by the above average US citizen, 2009 est. – 57.7%

It went up 3% points in just 4 years. With that type of trend what will it be like four years from now? How about 10 years from now? What about when your children are raised and trying to start a life for themselves.

Now ask yourself what you get out of any of these services. I mean, what do you really get? What if you were able to keep that 57% of your money, and you didn’t feed the thieves that are stealing it from you and placing it where they see fit. Have you considered how wealthy you’d be if you didn’t spend over 57% of your money on taxes. How much of that money do you think finds its way to a whore on K Street or a lobbyist pocket for a vacation to the Caribbean? You don’t want to know, do you? You just want to keep paying the bully and thieves so you don’t have to think about it. So you don’t have to act or carry any guilt, because inaction is safe.

Meanwhile today in my town, the union thugs were hard at work collecting signatures to repeal S.B.5 so they can put the issue on the ballot this fall for repeal, so they can continue to extort money from all of us, leaving us without any legal weapons to protect ourselves from their greed!

So this comes back to the school systems.

A school system is something that you still can control. And if you want to get your hands around this problem, you start with the corruption that’s in your back yard and you work from there.

This is why Darryl Parks says if you vote for a levy, a levy of any kind, you’re stupid. You’re stupid because you are allowing yourself to be robbed, extorted, and manipulated to feed an evil, tyrannical monster hell-bent on destroying the American way of life. And they are doing it with YOUR money.

Taxes are legalized crime. And if you have any doubts about what I put down here, go check out Marx and his list. I didn’t write it. He did. I know about it because I read and I know history. Unlike many out there that just wants to keep watching the box score of the latest ball game, and tries to figure out how they’re going to put their kid through college without even asking if what the kids are learning has any merit or value for their life-long adventure. Most people are content to dumb down their children’s minds so they can get a good job, as if the trade-off were an even exchange.

So, if you vote for a levy………………….any levy at all…………………………you’re……………………….well, you know the rest.

Rich Hoffman

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

Kasich’s Epic Clash with the Voice of the Common Man

It is rare that any state, locality, or federal entity runs into a politician that is competent and intelligent. It is rare to find a politician that is a self-made man not looking at politics as a stepping stone to career advancement. It is rare that a politician actually puts the honor of their office first, before anything else. It is rare to meet a politician that has the guts and fortitude to endure the criticism of special interest.

It also is rare to see a politician that will take on an old-time friend and conservative that prides himself as the conservative voice of the common man, and in the times when it really counts between those two old friends, it is obvious who meant what they said over the years and who was all talk.

That’s what the State of Ohio has in Governor John Kasich and it’s evident in this video shot at 700 WLW when Kasich was on the Bill Cunningham show for a fiery showdown of ideas over the casino issues, retirement and the controversial stance the governor has taken on “collective bargaining” specifically the S.B.5.

I’m not one that tosses praises around easily. So it is with great merit that I say that I can’t recall a politician in my lifetime that matches the passion of their mouth with actual action. John Kasich is a rare person that has greater ability in management than he does in his ability to speak, which is exceptionally good. I was deeply impressed with this exchange between Kasich and Bill Cunningham.

I suspect that Kasich is like many in Ohio and he doesn’t want casinos in the state. That would explain his behavior toward the casino deal that Cunningham is so against. I can remember when Cunningham in the mid 90’s was completely against the casinos so that would explain why Kasich is so surprised in Cunningham’s defense of a socially liberal concept, such as casinos are.

Kasich should be representing the position that all businesses have an equal opportunity even if he doesn’t like them. There is a Hustler of Hollywood store near my house that I can’t stand. I think it ruins the small town of Monroe, Ohio with its presence. But, every time I drive by it, it’s full of people looking for their pornography fix and all the tax collected through each sale is paying taxes. I don’t agree with the pornography, but I vote by not going, and I won’t be going to a casino in Cincinnati for many of the same reasons. If the business model fails, it fails. I’d be happy about it, but I won’t do anything to bring it about either, because it’s a business that has the right to attempt. If it finds a market, even if that market is evil, so be it. It’s not for me to decide what’s evil for someone else.

Kasich needs to have the same position on the casinos. You can’t expect to tax them out of existence like we attempt to do with cigarettes and alcohol. Those are all anti-business stances. But, that does not ruin the great banter that Kasich engaged in. It was refreshing to see such a person in the position of a governor.

This clash of ideas is something that will resonate for quite some time because of the truths revealed. And we are better for it.

Rich Hoffman

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

We Get Paid To Ask For More Money: With education, it’s all about marketing and spin

The day after the Lakota School Board chose to take a bit more time to analyze the deep cuts that must be met there was an article in the Enquirer about unions rushing to get contracts passed before S.B.5 becomes law. Listen to Doc Thompson discussing this issue on 700 WLW in the video below. It is good that Lakota did not get into a hurry to buckle under the union pressure. That would have been very irresponsible. However, most school districts, such as Lebanon went ahead and made deals with the unions. In Lebanon, Mark North, who makes $149,937 a year showed why he’s paid so much. He twisted the wording of his real intentions to proclaim that it was to the districts advantage to lock down their costs because S.B.5 would be challenged in court anyway. He gets paid to spin information like that so voters don’t see the real intentions, which is to secure their union contracts. But his actions, like a lot of other districts looking to pad the pockets of their union friends are revealed. Isn’t it nice to know where the loyalties of your elected administrators are? After all, it’s not their money. It’s yours………and before you say that Mark North is not an elected official, he is appointed by the school board who is elected by the public.

Here is the Enquirer article:

http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20110328/NEWS0108/103290330/Unions-employers-fearing-SB5-rush-contracts?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

Under the comments section of that article there were a couple of the comments by the clueless types of people who inhabit the extraordinary costs of those collective bargaining agreements.

office1698
7:38 PM on March 28, 2011
Can’t wait for the referendum to begin! Gov Kasich and his Tea Party supporters have yet to see the power of unions.

ucfcltymbr
7:41 PM on March 28, 2011

Enjoy your Tea Bag Party reign. It will not take long for the public to come to their sense and run you and your pals out of Columbus and DC.

What we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks is that the unions and administrators have been most certainly in bed with each other. In casual talk we all make jokes about it to ease the tension, but in the back of our minds we want to believe that the administrators, whether it is a school board, or a city council, that they are acting in our best interests. With the rush lately to pass all these contracts before S.B.5 becomes law, the villains reveal themselves.

Villains? Is that the right word? Is that too harsh?

No. It’s not. Villains, looters, feeders, predators, are all words that can be accurately used to describe what the pubic worker has become to the American economy. They are those things because they have become too greedy, demanded too much, and are now in a position to make demands to the people who pay them. They have become corrupt to the point of treason if the word treason was used in a traditional capacity.

What are the definitions of treason?
treason
n
1. (Government, Politics & Diplomacy) violation or betrayal of the allegiance that a person owes his sovereign or his country, esp by attempting to overthrow the government; high treason
2. any treachery or betrayal

The unions, their strikes, their political manipulation, their raw extortion of the public tax dollar have engaged in treason, and they do it openly without fear of prosecution.

In the Pulse Journal report of the Lakota meeting of Monday, March 28, 2011 Lakota Education Association President Sharon Mays proclaimed that teachers have “stepped up” in these times of financial crises. She said, “We’re taking on more teaching responsibility-more class preps-in order to give students more opportunities. Delaying a decision is not fair to teachers or students.”

What does any of that mean? How have the teachers “stepped up?” Everything she stated is undefined, actually it’s expected. As employees of the district, everything she said is expected. Sharon makes $81,156 per year and at that pay rate, everything she stated is expected from someone in that pay scale. Everything and more! Yet she phrases it as though she were actually doing the district a favor of some kind that teachers are working longer than 7.75 hours per day.

Everyone I know that makes over 50K per year, including executives, company presidents, plant managers, sales managers etc, put in approximately 10.5 hours per day. They may spend 7 to 8 hours at the office and another 2 to 3 hours at home. Teachers take home papers to grade and do some class prep work as would be expected. And for Sharon to make $81K per year, I’d expect her to be on call 24 hours a day and do at least 4 to 5 hours of work per day at home. That is the value of that type of salary.

Yet that’s not what’s happening. Teachers are being paid extraordinary amounts of money to teach, which I’ve said should be in a range of pay between 40K to 70K. Any more than that is taking advantage of the tax payer. And the manipulation that union leaders commit against the community is a form of treachery, especially in the face of the last two weeks leading up to the S.B.5 passage.

The plan of these unions is to push hard to get their contracts signed, buy time, and then get their signatures for a referendum into the state by July 7th so they can freeze the bill and get it overturned in the November election. They truly believe that the public will be just as naive as they’ve been in the past, that holding babies and campaigns of “it’s for the kids” will work. They are counting on the same old strong-arm tactics to.

But what is the aim of those tactics. Are they protecting our children? Are they working on behalf of the greater good of the community? Are they working on behalf of a school system that is facing major layoffs?

No. They want their money. They want their money even if it costs their fellow union members their jobs.

I am proud that the Lakota School Board took some extra time to cut their costs. I would hope that once S.B.5 comes into play that they make full use of it to drive their costs down before the July 7th freeze, due to the referendum attempt.

For those union members at the top of the pay scale protecting your inflated salaries, you should be ashamed of yourselves letting others suffer so that you can continue a wage level you know is outrageous, and to hide such a fact behind children is despicable. If I were on the school board I’d set a cap on teaching salaries and for those that didn’t want to live under that cap I’d point to the door. You’re lucky I’m not on the school board. I hope the people we have there now can muster up a similar level of responsibility to protect the community. Teachers that put money before kids are not the type of people I want in my district anyway. We’ll pay you well, but not foolishly, and it is that foolish level of pay that causes the deficit.

It might be wondered or even considered malicious for me to include these wages in this article. The reason is that I know of no other way to balance a budget. How can you balance a budget without looking at the money you spend? Then you have to consider what that money buys you and assess whether or not you are getting the value for what you spend. And I don’t see it. I don’t think the money we spend on government is worth it. I don’t think the money we spend on education is worth it, because I see very little light on behind the eyes of our youth. And I get the sense that public education is simply an organized crime-like syndicate and they are charging the tax payer for protection of services the public values. If lightweights in the mind think my view is extreme, too bad. Everybody thinks it. They just don’t talk about it in order to maintain the status-quo. When people like Ms. Mays, and Mr. North, who makes a lot more money than the average taxpayer, says we need to increase taxes in order to continue to pay their salaries, I say to them, you’re not doing your jobs if all you can do is ask for more money. North as a superintendent should have put the community in front of the union. Mays as head of her own union should have brought her members to the table to take a pay reduction to save the teachers at the bottom of the totem pole and fit into the community’s budget. That would have been the responsible thing, but they didn’t do those things.

This is a fight that is just starting. We’ll see how much courage each side has when the smoke clears. One thing is for sure, I will be reporting every detail of it, because only one side is right. There is no left or right here. There is only right or wrong.

Rich Hoffman

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

Understanding Multiculturalism: The Good Guys are the Bad Guys, and the Bad Guys are the Good Guys.

Multiculturalism is not a bad thing; in fact it is quite healthy and has most been successful in the United States. There is nowhere on Earth that groups as divers as the Amish and the most gang inspired African-American’s can co-exist in relative harmony.

America is proof that multiculturalism can work in the world as mankind moves toward an identity more akin to Earthlings as opposed to the national identities and religions known today.

With that statement, I may sound like I’m endorsing something like what George Soros stands behind, an “open society.” Absolutely not! I am all for a one world order if that one world resembles the success of the United States as opposed to the communist leanings that much of the world openly embraces. And with that said, I do not support American imperialism either. I have no wish to impose American will on other countries. I would prefer to take the high ground and lead by example and let the success of the United States inspire the world to be a freer and fair place. It is America that is the only opportunity for such a concept in the world, without exception. So if you truly want to see rights for women, equality of races, or freedom of religion, then you will support American philosophy with open arms.

But………..there are enemies that speak of American Imperialism and the evil United States as if America is the worst invention ever to befall mankind. And shamefully, this does not come from just outside our country, but from within it with almost equal force. Our universities and aspects of public education have been open freeways of hypocritical anti-American sentiment that we’ve funded generously with public funds, as though we wish to fund our own destruction.

I have argued for years with the mindless type that just wants to take the blue pill and eat at fast food restaurants. They don’t want to be encumbered with thoughts of deep scrutiny, and it is a crime in itself, because America has enemies that wish to destroy it, so that certain cultures can reign without opposition in an infantile quest to conquer the world. The radical Muslim culture is one of those groups, which have such a terrestrial understanding of spirituality which they seek to impose on others, that they have made themselves dangerous to others. And they have captured popular opinion in such a way to make society paralyzed to criticism. In America we have freedom of religion, because what someone does to have an understanding with their God is their business. But not something that is to be used to manipulate society. The same people who complain about our nation’s courthouses displaying the Ten Commandments are those that are preaching that radical Islamic rule is beneficial to mankind. The same people who advocate the rights of women in the United States are the same that will support the treatment of women in a way that would be considered inhuman for a dog in the Muslim culture.

None of that is our business in America, only that we find the limits of their spiritual understanding to be naïve and foolish compared to our own experience, even though we’ve been too kind to speak such things out of fear of hurting their feelings. God forbid we do something so devastating to the radicals throughout the world as to judge them on their merits.

The other issue that has paralyzed us all is this guilt over slavery. America ended slavery. England brought it to the colonies and America ended it. That’s all anybody needs to know. There is still slavery in much of the world including in Africa. Sex slavery is a MAJOR problem in the world still, and who is speaking out for those poor kids and women kidnapped and used like useless rags destroying their lives before they even get started. Where is Jessie Jackson on that matter? Or Louis Farrakhan?

The answer is that the civil rights movement is a power grab. Americans have always been good people that loved freedom and is a place where religious tolerance and slavery could actually be discussed. We had our Salam Witch trials which we’ve as a culture rejected. As an American culture we’ve rejected slavery. America did those things on their own, nobody else. So the time to feel guilty about it is over.

The time to allow small minds to continue to ruin American culture is over.

I’ve always worn a cowboy hat, even when I was a kid. And of course that got me a lot of grief from progressive minded people that thought cowboy hats were out of fashion. The cowboy is a symbol of what America used to be, not what it was going to be, so I heard plenty of giggles and Lone Ranger jokes.

I’ve heard comments about my hat from a group of kids not too far away that thought I couldn’t hear, and I noticed that all the males of that group nearly had their pants around their knees, as they were trying to emulate the “rap” culture given to them from MTV. So they accept that their pants can be worn so far down that they have to hold their pants with their free hand to keep them from falling off. Yet a cowboy hat is something to belittle. That’s the progressive work that is firmly in place and has been for a number of years, and it’s misinformed. We can argue forever that there is a collective mind behind this progressive movement that is intent on the destruction of American value and the advancement of Islamic fundamentalism, African-American heritage, and pro-socialist agenda’s originating from Europe, and is a malicious attack on our country without guns, and is intentional. But that has been the result, intentional or not. The Black Panther voter intimidation case that the DOJ ignored is a perfect example of this. Recently Chick-fil-A came under attack by gay marriage groups, and we continue to hear absurd defense of the radical Muslim faith. There are too many wrongs being committed that are off limits by radicals that are ready to call people names for doing what is right. These people are no different than the spoiled child that has parents that pander to their every whim. No group in America or the world should be able to scream and cry and get an audience of any weight, yet we foolishly listen to these children to our own peril and allow ourselves to be paralyzed with guilt.

I feel no such guilt. I see that the intent behind these attempts are to destroy what has been built of the greatest nation on earth. And the reason is that the competition to catch up to that nation is just too steep for these lazy radicals that know their ideas cannot match that of American freedom. They also know that there are many that share their laziness so there is always an army of screaming, child-like minds ready to protest, because complaining is easier than action. Rioting is easier than building, so there is no shortage of those squeaking wheels desiring grease.

It is time to stop putting oil on those wheels and proclaiming them broken, beyond repair. We must not bend the greatness of our nation to these mindless radicals. It is the great responsibility of our age and it must be met with more than thought.

The world is counting on us to do so. The hope for the African village being tyrannized by tribes of terrorists seizing food supplies to be sold on the black market sent by America to that village is not in the UN. It is in American culture that spills over our boarder to those unfortunate places as inspiration. Or the 9 year old boy in the Philippians stolen while fishing for food and sold into the sex trade of some wealthy businessman seeking only some decadent act to satisfy his darkest fantasies. America is the only place on earth capable of doing anything about such terrible acts. They are the only place that will even discuss it! Pick a spot on the map and name your evil. The only defender on the planet capable of even addressing it is America, or the idea of America. And the enemies of America know it. That is why they attempt to paralyze America with self-conscious fear. And that must stop before it’s too late.

America may not be perfect, and it may take several decades to work out all the details of multicultural evolution, but no country has made as much ground as the United States have in the history of the world. The ones that point out those small imperfections are the same that wish to use imperfection for their own climb to power so that they can illusion their minds with authority.

While this battle takes place, I will continue to wear my cowboy hats proudly so the right kind of people know where I stand in the confusing lines of multicultural association.

Rich Hoffman

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