Category: Pirates of the Caribbean

Road to Dystopia: The Canton Cops

My editor is in the process of cutting the massive manuscript of my Tail of the Dragon down to under 100,000 words, which will be a difficult rewrite process, but the topic of that novel was on my mind as Doc Thompson spoke with State Rep. Danny Bubp about gun control.  The case of the Canton Police officer who openly abused a man because he had a concealed carry permit was the primary topic.  Tail of the Dragon is all about how politicians use police to impose policy that is not good for the general society, but purely for the good of the politicians who write the law.  Even though abusive cases such as theCantoncop are not the usual situation, it does happen more often than it should, and points to the danger of giving police officers too much control over the general population.  You can hear that discussion here:

To see the officer in question and exactly what was said you can see the entire video below.  This occurrence happened in June of 2011 and is deeply disconcerting for a number of reasons.   

I believe many of the police officers across the country are very much like the other guy in this video, the partner of the primary officer.  That officer seems to be pretty level headed, and is certainly the recessive officer in this search and arrest.  I can understand the initial suspicion of the officers pulling over a questionable vehicle with a known prostitute, her pimp and a guy carrying a gun.  Everything about that situation spelled out trouble. 

However, such a situation requires a coolness that comes from a battle tested individual that can handle the stress of any situation.  Not a panic prone officer who has obvious problems psychologically.  And before I launch into what those problems are I must report that I’ve been shot at, threatened, and I’ve walked into dangerous situations willingly time and time again.  Danger is not something that bothers me, and when I hire someone to work a dangerous job, I expect that person to handle it with cool collectiveness.  I do not expect over-reaction of any kind.  The officer in that video is a dangerous man for many reasons, but the primary reason is that he’s a “pussy.”  Sorry ladies, but that’s the only term for a man like that. 

There are two reasons for the officer’s behavior; first he may be psychologically damaged and ready for the rubber gun squad.  If that’s the case, he should not be on the streets.  If he is such a shell shocked person, if he’s been shot at, or threatened one too many times that he can no longer function in that position, he should not be carrying a gun, driving around in a car, and have the ability to pull people over.  The second and most probable explanation is that the officer is simply a bully, the type I write about in Tail of the Dragon. 

The officer obviously works out a lot, so he has an obsession with his looks.  There isn’t any problem with this, but such people often have a tendency toward narcissism and to satisfy that narcissism they pursue positions of authority to satisfy their hunger for self-admiration.  These types of people are naturally insecure, because real life cannot fill the image of themselves that they’ve built, so they seek a collective consensus of like minded “brothers,” which he referenced twice in this recording to the other officer.  This is a tendency toward insecurity that is unmistakable, which he seeks to cover up visually with body building.  This officer uses the law to beat people into his own self-gratification.  Any level headed individual would approach the driver who did reveal that he had a gun with caution but not be so easily threatened.  The officer obviously used the situation and timing of the gun revelation to satisfy his hunger to abuse someone. 

I propose that the officer had full intention as he pulled up to the car to abuse somebody.  He had set his target on the prostitute, knowing that she was a repeat offender.  This was his clear intention.  But when he came to the driver, who was not the original target, and the driver revealed that he had a gun permit and was carrying, the officer realized that he had a better target to satisfy his narcissism, so he let the girl and her pimp go.  

At this point the narcissistic officer proceeded to harass the driver profusely threatening to “execute him.”  Obviously the officer had crossed the line several times in this exchange.  The driver showed no inclination toward violence and any officer with any experience with violence would know that.  Instead, it is obvious that under the guise of a proposed danger, the officer used this entire situation to satisfy his need for a power trip. 

Every police department in the country has a percentage of their officers who exhibit similar narcissistic behavior.  In fact every class in school, every office, every business, has a few of these abusive types.  Narcissists are a natural by-product of the human race, so we must contend with them.  But we must also use caution on how much power we allow them to have, because such personality types are prone to seek authority positions.  They will fill jobs with police departments, TSA agents, and mall security guards and like positions because those are the most obvious places where they can live out their distorted self-images.  This is why it is a very dangerous tendency of Homeland Security to give more and more police powers to these departments under the guise of protection.  A society who changes itself ideologically out of panic is no different than this foolish police officer who used his cleverly disguised fear of being shot, as a self-fulfillment of his desire to harass another human being with fear.

When terrorists attacked the United States, they sought to create a situation where the narcissists of our culture could be used against the population in general.  By creating a situation that justified panic, we handed more power to the least trustworthy of our citizens in a flimsy trade for national security.  And that situation isn’t getting better, it’s getting worse.  The Fourth Amendment, like the Second Amendment has been distorted and revised for years to gradually wear away the effectiveness through case law of these Constitutional provisions.  The Fourth Amendment (Amendment IV) to the United States Constitution is the part of the Bill of Rights which guards against unreasonable searches and seizures, along with requiring any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause. It was adopted as a response to the abuse of the writ of assistance, which is a type of general search warrant, in the American Revolution. Search and arrest should be limited in scope according to specific information supplied to the issuing court, usually by a law enforcement officer, who has sworn by it.

Source:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution

The real tragedy of this entire event is that our society has forgotten the meaning of the Fourth Amendment to such an extent that it has actually fed the kind of tyranny present in this video.  All three of the occupants in the car completely submitted to the officers without even questioning their rights, and this only accelerated the narcissistic officer in his search for a weakness to exploit.  The person being harassed should have been upset, not where he put the officer in any danger, but he actually fed the fire by saying, “yes sir.”  That officer didn’t deserve any such recognition for he did not earn it.  A uniform is not enough to give up everything a person is in their life, or to have the threat of that life extinguished to fulfill the fantasy of a mini tyrant under the guise of security.  When a society accepts this behavior as normal, and acceptable, the steps toward a complete loss of personal freedom are not far behind. 

If I had been in the same situation, which I have been on several occasions, there wouldn’t be anything close to the submission shown in that video.  But unfortunately, people who question these policies are fewer than they ever had been and those willing to put their whole life on the line by saying “yes sir,” hoping to appease a tyrant are a growing segment of our population. 

Rich Hoffman

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

Diana Frey and Fraud: The Face of the Public Sector Union

Of course it is a terrible tragedy the entire situation emerging around Diana Frey President of CODE (Cincinnati Organized and Dedicated Employees).  She is being indicted for a wire tapping charge and embezzlement of more than $750,000 from her union members.  You can hear all about the case by Doc Thompson, Scott Sloan and Tracy Jones on 700 WLW.  For people not familiar with Frey, you might remember her famous quotes during the December 2010 budget talks; “I’d rather be a laid-off municipal employee than a private sector worker.”  That comment earned the attention of several council members who later revealed, “The city unions are determined to protect its members regardless of the impact on the city’s budget.”

As I watched Sheriff Jones of Butler County speak at the recent West Chester Twp Tea Party when he told me that all union employees are not “thugs,” that many of them are good hard-working people, I was thinking of the Frey case that was breaking at the time.  The Sheriff is a spokesman for the repeal effort of S.B.5.  Jones is the spokesman for the repeal effort for a couple of reasons.  He’s outspoken, and has done a good job managing his county compared to other sheriff’s counties.   He’s one of the best in the country and by coming out against S.B.5 he gets to put a light on just how good he is at his job.  He’s also been a public sector employee his entire life.  The world of milking the system for everything its worth is part of the job culture he has grown to understand as being the only way.  So he’s hardly an impartial observer.  Without question if he was asked about his thoughts of Frey, he’d say, “That wouldn’t happen in my department,” because it wouldn’t.  But when he speaks out against S.B.5 and Governor Kasich specifically, he is sabotaging the attempts by the Kasich administration to actually do something about the corruption that is going on in the public sector unions. 

I can’t speak for Kasich, but he behaved the way I would have in his situation.  He has no desire to sit down with people like Frey and negotiate.  When union leaders make comments like what Frey did in December, there isn’t any discussion with people like that, so Kasich cut them out of the process and did what he thought he had to do. 

With Jones, I listened to him carefully and as he spoke about how he viewed the public collective bargaining system as a good system that should be preserved, my mind drifted back to the Journal News article from April 11th 2011 that was about Chief Deputy Anthony Dwyer, a double-dipper working directly for Jones.  Dwyer was listed as taking a 15% pay cut to keep his job which put his current rate of pay at $90,050.48.  Dwyer had just retired at 48 years old and was receiving his pension based on his previous rate of pay of $105,941.48, so that’s a very good pension to draw along with his salary of just over 90K.  This is the same game that superintendents are playing with school districts, and this whole scam was negotiated under collective-bargaining, so of course Sheriff Jones thinks the system works.  It works for him, his family and friends who are working under him.  These are people who are making great livings off the tax payer. 

When asked about the merit of double-dipping Dwyer said “many people don’t understand the retire-rehire process.  It’s not uncommon for people to reach retirement age and take other jobs.  That was an option that was open to me and I was looking at that option, quite frankly.”

Sheriff Jones said, “He’s got his time in and was looking to draw his retirement and put his time in elsewhere.  I need him right where he is.  He’s a very valuable employee to me.”  So Sheriff Jones is perfectly fine with this whole double-dipping situation.  He’s fully aware of it and actually views Dwyer’s situation as “putting his time in.”  And like I said, Jones is one of the most responsible public employee managers in the country.

Jeff Gebhart who is the president of Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 101 said of the Dwyer situation, “It’s what the system allows.” 

All these high-ranking officials have the same dear-in-the-headlights look when they are questioned about how public officials are receiving extraordinary benefits from the taxpayer.  And that system Gebhart is talking about is the lobby power of the unions who have created through legislation the ability of management officials to retire at such a young age and double-dip as a specific strategy to pay-off those managers legally.  This is why superintendents of schools do not combat the teachers unions, but instead side with them in negotiations.  Because it’s all about the money, it’s about the money with teachers, and it’s about the money with cops, even the very good ones like Sheriff Jones. 

So if Jones is the best example of the public worker and Diana Frey is the worst of what public sector unions bring to the table, what does that say about the need for reforms?  It’s no wonder with all the scamming the system that is going on by these people why the need for tax increases is constantly brought to our attention. 

President Obama, who allows big labor into the White House each week won’t take a stand against this corruption in his budget battles because he needs the money extorted from union membership for his re-election campaign.  Obama and his wife have lived an extraordinarily opulent life on the tax payer dime.  Click here to see just one example of Michelle Obama’s spending habits.  But locally, the good Sheriff Jones is covering his 48-year-old second-in-command who is making nearly 200K per year with benefits with rationalizations of employee need.  Geez, no wonder it costs nearly 50K per year per prisoner in Ohio.  The labor for watching those prisoners is extraordinarily high!  But now we have the president of a union who was very vocal in the budget talks with Cincinnati who was stealing money from fish fry’s, and sucking money off her members for her personal use.  No wonder people like her want to see S.B.5 overturned.

Diana Frey appears to have been a bad person if the allegations leveled against her are true.  As of this writing she is missing and hiding out someplace with three-quarters of a million dollars stolen from her unions membership, many of which are the same simple-minded people who are screaming at anti-S.B.5 rallies “This is what democracy looks like,” and the most famous quote of all, “protect the middle-class.”  It is obvious that without a bill like S.B.5 continued abuse of the taxpayer will continue.  Because in reality what we are talking about here is a society of thieves, who are taking what does not belong to them to consume for their own selfish agenda’s.  It doesn’t matter if it’s legalized theft, like what Chief Deputy Anthony Dwyer is participating in, just like most of the superintendents of most of the school districts in Ohio.  Or they are just outright stealing, like it appears Diana Frey has been doing for a long time in front of everyone to see, but nobody had the guts to question her.  It all comes back to the ultimate mistake of the Kennedy Presidency in 1963 where through an Executive Order, made public sector unions legal, enabling the people of those unions to give themselves raises and cheat the system for everything that the law would allow, and where the law didn’t allow, those same unions made it legal through hungry, greedy politicians looking for stable campaign donations.  It is the system itself that is the real thief, for it takes too much money from the public it serves and feeds an army of thieves who nourish themselves with the vast wealth consumed by the malcontents.  And when the money runs low, they just ask for more so deputies can collect two incomes for the work of one, and corrupt union bosses who give themselves lavish vacations on their theft and will steal from a fish fry to buy clothing yet continue to roam free.  That may be what democracy looks like, but it’s not what the Republic of America is supposed to be.  Anything that resembles something besides a republic should be scrapped completely because anything less is a tempting playground for looters and thieves.

Rich Hoffman

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

Learning what a Republic is: The Continued Lessons of Star Wars

I could not help but notice at my favorite book store that many of the works that I used to only find online, are now in stock, on the shelf. Work by Thomas Paine, John Locke, and all the works of Ayn Rand are easy to find, and this is fantastic news because people are hungry for knowledge. The Federalist Papers are even now stocked on the shelf in abundance. Ten years ago it was only law students who bought copies of it, now it’s an older man in his upper 60’s as I watched him thumb through it’s pages prior to purchase.

Political discussion is often not just about the topics on the nightly news. Recently, a friend of mine gave me a copy of The Original Argument, which was endorsed by Glenn Beck as a way to explain in today’s language the meaning of The Federalist Papers. I enjoyed The Original Argument so much that I read it twice while on vacation recently, and it occurred to me that The Original Argument was not a rule book so to speak intended for lawyers, but it is a political philosophy that speaks a truth established by 4000 years of human history. It does not belong in the political science section in a book store, but in the philosophy section.

But as a friend of mine uttered in frustration the other day, “what are we to do about all this!” The frustration of thinking all their lives that everything was OK in the world, and that politicians were sleazy, but not considered downright evil, and finding out that in fact there are many things that have been going on that people are just learning about because they are reading again, can be very overwhelming. Catching up on 200 years of American history in the span of a year or two like many Tea Party enthusiast are doing can send a person to burn out quick. So it’s important that people remember to have fun along the way. It’s even better if people can learn while they are having fun. Fans of Glenn Beck will notice that Beck is an obvious Star Wars fan. It will also be noticed that there are a lot of Tea Party patriots who are increasingly creating Twitter accounts along the lines of “Jedi Patriot” and “Empire Fighter” in an obvious homage to Star Wars. In our modern age, Star Wars has become a form of modern philosophy, not just simply entertainment. Star Wars is a great way to think about all the things that are going on in the world around us, while also taking a vacation from the intensity of those revelations. After all, the film The Phantom Menace was not about a young boy who grew up and became Darth Vader. That is just one of the sub plots. The Phantom Menace was all about a senator who wants to be emperor, and he uses many people in obscure ways to create the circumstances that will allow him to grab power for himself. It’s all in good old-fashioned fun, but the sincerity behind The Phantom Menace is actually incredibly sophisticated, which is the genius of Star Wars.

The films of Star Wars consist of only 6 two-hour movies and that is what a majority of the fans think of when they hear the name of Star Wars. But for fans who wish to dig deeper, Star Wars tackles many of the problems of our modern times using the language of mythology and the latest entry to that mythology is the MMO computer game called The Old Republic due out later this year and it’s something my wife and I are looking very much forward to.

Glenn Beck uses Star Wars metaphors to explain many of the complicated topics of our day because Star Wars is the only work of art in modern times which attempts to tackle the complicated nature of human failure and evolution as a species. Star Wars is a basic tale of good and evil, but it goes much deeper. With over 100 books, the 6 movies, cartoons, video games, comic books, amusement park rides, Star Wars is a formidable aspect of modern culture which I’ve written about in detail at this article: CLICK HERE

What is even bolder within this Star Wars mythology is this whole new path the franchise is taking in exploring The Old Republic. There are now two novels and two videos games with the addition of the computer game being previewed here, which explores what life was like in The Old Republic which takes place over a thousand years before the events shown in the films most people are familiar with. The idea of the Sith, the villains in Star Wars is to explore the influence of evil and this is done not just in a spiritual way in these stories, but also in a political way. It is the first work of art that I can think of which has mass appeal that attempts to do anything like this. It does not limit itself as an examination of religious influence, or political study, but as an all-encompassing investigation through the story lines of what causes the rise and fall of civilizations.

I am a fan of the works of writers like Thomas Mann and his Magic Mountain, and Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West, and I will state in that context the collected works of Star Wars are every bit as sophisticated and meaningful. In Star Wars the entire galaxy is part of a republic. Not a democracy, but a republic. This is similar to what planet Earth is facing in whose political philosophy will emerge as the world shrinks, will it be a republic like what the United States has had so much success with, or will it be various degrees of socialism similar to what Europe and many eastern countries have experimented with.

The most important contribution is that in the galactic government of Star Wars, it’s a republic that is pursued, and provides an interesting model for how Earth should proceed. It is the Republic of the United States of America that should teach the rest of the world how to be a free people, produce their goods under the umbrella of capitalism, and interact with one another with respect under that accepted philosophy.

What gives me hope is that Star Wars is the best education device that young people have to counter what they are learning in public education, and politicians who crave socialism where the philosophy of a republic is not taught to them. It is entertainment that is providing the best education to society, and because of the popularity of Star Wars it is evidence that many people are learning about it.

Glenn Beck understands that Star Wars is a modern work of political philosophy and science. When people who love freedom want to know how America is supposed to function, books like The Original Argument are fantastic. But it cannot be disputed that free life will always stay within the confines of the United States borders. As the evidence of illegal immigration have shown, millions of people all over the world want to become a part of the Republic of the United States and we owe it to those people in America to help not just open our borders to them, but to expand the freedom we experience to those far reaches of the globe so that there can be a grand Republic of Earth. And to get an idea of how to do that, Star Wars is the best work of art available to help show how that process should look, and what type of hurdles will stand in the way, so that freedom can be experienced by anything that breathes world-wide.

So before going crazy, choking on all this information that has always been there, but is being re-discovered, it is good to have a device that can give your mind a vacation. For me, it’s a love of pirates, and Star Wars. Star Wars allows the mind to swell without limits without becoming lost in the fantasy. And I look very much forward to the age when the kids who are growing up with this expanded universe of Star Wars start to run the country, because that is a time when things will dramatically change for the better, because they will understand that America is a republic and not a democracy and the only hope the entire world has for freedom.

Rich Hoffman

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

Matt Clark and the Sails Filled with Adventure: Slaying the beasts that reside under the surface

If there is one aspect of human endeavor that absolutely disgusts me, it is that of the politician. I can’t stand them! I hate politics. I hate family politics. I hate corporate politics. I hate neighborhood politics. And I hate elected politics. I hate the entire concept. Politics is the ultimate failure of Greek society. It should not be celebrated in any fashion. It should not be endorsed, propped up, or even passively accepted as a human attribute. Politics is far more dangerous than all the guns in the world, nuclear disasters, or environmental catastrophes.

So my comments about politics radiates from these pages, and the things I say in a fashion that is more aggressive than what is generally accepted. There aren’t many people who understand my extreme dislike of politics, because most people find themselves wrapped up in the political system to one degree or another and may agree with me, but in practice they simply can’t because their lives are built around politics, even if it’s just within their family structure. However, like minds are naturally bound to find each other in this vast sea of human experience because unlike politics which hides their true intentions below the surface, to sneak up upon their victims like carnivorous sea creatures just trying to feed their bellies, men of thought, of history, of philosophy prefer to sail upon the open sea, above all that nonsense. And such vessels at sea can easily spot each other upon the open water, above the murky depths of politics. This is how I met Matt Clark, a young man more youthful than me, so he is a newer vessel of a similar design, but none-the-less he is another vessel of knowledge sailing the seas of life, studying the depths below him, and pursuing life as an adventure with his sails open to the world and the wind that propels it. As fate would have it, he invited me on his weekend show to discuss the dangerous sea creatures that are eating each other below our vessels and we discussed the balance of power that is emerging in politics.

Matt is running that WAAM show out of Ann Arbor, Michigan from 1 to 3 on Sunday’s as tens of thousands of listeners grill out in their back yard, men change the oil of their cars in their garage, and avid boaters sail the open waters of Lake Michigan and Lake Erie and contemplate the musings of a young historian uttering the ridiculousness of the politicians who just insist on eating each other in the murky water of politics. The Clarkcast, as Matt has named it is competing for air time with the big radio names of Glenn Beck, Laura Ingram and many others on the Fox Radio Network and he’s holding his own. But what Matt has that the others don’t is the freshness of his voice, of his experience, of his generation. He is not a fallen star, but a rising one, and if he’s smart, he can stay that way. There is simply no reason for thinking men to be failures at some point in their life in order to gain wisdom. Wisdom comes from the observance of experience, and experience does not have to be earned from the murky waters of the deep.

So many young people in their twenties these days believe they have not lived until they’ve gotten a tattoo, or colored their hair, or had vicious and promiscuous sex with strangers in some dirty dungeon. Or gotten drunk with friends and shared indiscretions which they believe bond their friendships for life. All that activity is in reality simply the life of sea creatures, the acts of the underworld beneath the surface of life in those murky depths of politics. It was the politician who invented this perception, and created for themselves food to feed on. It is their desire for the masses of society to remain small fish so they always have a food supply. Those same predatory fish eye those vessels like Matt Clark sailing on the surface of the water with jealousy because Matt is traveling where the politician cannot go. Matt and all the other people of the mind are above them and free of their power and intimidation.

I always have felt this way about politics. Even as a young boy with barely any memory, at 4 and 5 years old. In kindergarten, my teacher Ms. Mays, an old sea hag, most likely former siren of the sea chastised me for not following her specific instructions on an art assignment. I remembered thinking even then, that her way looked wrong, and I couldn’t bring myself to do the wrong thing, especially in art. Art doesn’t have definite rules. I didn’t know that at the time, but I felt that there was something wrong with what she was telling me. It was politics. Ms. Mays was so furious with me that she called my mother in and chastised her for my insolence to her instructions, a process that would be repeated until I was too big to stand over in a chair sometime in the 8th grade when my English teacher noticed one of my drawings in the newspaper from a contest I had won and cut it out and showed it to the class admiring my artistic ability.

I learned from Shakespeare that humans were essentially broken beings at heart, obsessed with politics. Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, all the Henry’s, The Tempest, Romeo and Juliet, and my favorite of all, Titus Andronicus, spoke to me of the depths of human failure, and my love of history told me that this behavior wasn’t specific to the late 1500’s to the early 1600’s. Shakespeare had learned to be one of those vessels in his life who rode upon the surface and observed the bizarre tendencies of the creatures of politics and how they pray on one another. I rejected politics because of Shakespeare, having no desire to swim with the sharks of this world. I’d rather catch them like a hunter and display their savaged jaws upon my headboard to look at when adventures in bed are called for.

What I see in the young Matt Clark is one of those thoughtful people who have discovered the joy of fishing into the depths of politics and exposing those treacherous creatures to the light of day, of cutting them open to expose all that they’ve eaten, and studying them the way a historian examines all of history, with curiosity and wonder at what motivates such barbaric tendencies. There is always a bit of sadness that those beasts of politics cannot be taught the merit of life above the depths, and Matt has that same compassion. But at an early age he is not fool enough to jump in and attempt to save them from themselves for that is not his job. His job is to catch them and eat them himself, and possibly save the smaller beasts from the larger ones, so they can have a chance at living even if their life is limited to the treacherous depths of ignorance and politics.

All adventurers young and old hold reverence for one another when they meet on the open sea where Matt Clark and I shared a few stories on a Sunday afternoon, then parted to our separate ways to go hunting and observing once more the behaviors of those tyrants of the deep, those ignorant fools of politics, who hide in the darkness and consume everything in their path with mindless abundance, until they are caught by someone like Matt Clark and his Clarkcast radio program during the hours of 1 to 3 pm every Sunday, in Ann Arbor, Michigan. The winds of adventure fills his sails and the revelations permeate the minds of others who desire life above the sea who might wish to quit that tragic life of politics and live the life of a thinker and enjoy the freedom of the open sea where wisdom has the answer to everything and the fate of mankind is clear to the Earths horizon.

http://www.clarkcast.com/

Rich Hoffman

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

Me………..Too Hard on Cops: The buffoons of politics

The people who have read my early draft of Tail of the Dragon, my new book due out in 2012 all have had a common reaction, “Great story, but wow, you really hate cops!”

No, it’s not that I hate cops. I hate politics, and police officers enforce the law of politicians. I see many of the laws that are currently on the books in any city, state, or federal ledger to be simple work creation measures designed to give law makers something to do, a way to justify the enormous amounts of money we pay them in public office. Sometimes, the police that are hired to enforce, “the law” have legitimate claims to danger such as bank robberies, drug busts, and armed confrontations. But most of the time and we all know this, police offers don’t have a whole lot to do, so they become the minions of the bloated politician and the rules they have created who have lost all common sense. Case in point, the video below is of a group of young girls who want to raise money to go to a water park by selling lemonade. The police shut down the stand because it is against “the law.”

The permit process is largely created under the guise of authenticating an endeavor. The original thinking is that if people will take the time to get a permit, then some measure of control can be enforced by whoever issues the permit, and that is for the public good. But like all things in politics, permits have become a cash cow and a form of abuse culminating into complete breakdowns of rationality, such as what happened to these poor little girls.

But it doesn’t end there. Police are law enforcement created to enforce the law. They are not law contemplators. They take orders like blind machines and do not question the authenticity of their superiors. If a law is bad, they have no opinion. If a prosecutor or some other law-maker wants to twist the wording of a city ordinance for their own ends, then the police can be called in like a private army to wreck the lives of whomever is at fault, whether those at fault are even aware of their illicit deeds. Because nobody can claim ignorance to the law, even if the wording is something you think you understand. If the prosecutor “interprets” the wording differently than you do, then you will be in court to battle out the definition and case-law will be created off your case. This is the situation with the woman in this next video; she is building an organic garden under what she believes to be the law. But a politician looking to make a name for himself doesn’t like it, so he is shutting it down, or trying to.

A common occurrence in dealing with any large organization private or public is that accountability is often less enforced because of the sheer number of people employed. This makes dealing with them a real problem especially when a mistake is made on their end. In the video below the homeowner went to jail and lost everything because of a bank error and it was the police who showed up and put him in jail. Because the interpretation of the law almost always favors lawmakers and those lawmakers are closely tied to those who give them campaign donations for their elected office, the police can be made to completely serve the needs of those with power.

Meanwhile it is all of us who pay taxes that fund the entire enterprise. We are funding our own demise.

Without some sort of check’s and balance system which is what court is supposed to be, the law will grow itself out of control. Small ordinances created with good intentions will shut down the lemonade stands of little girls trying to learn to become entrepreneurs, or people participating in self-reliance by growing their own food. Or homeowners who get stuck trusting the system and being caught in the middle of an error, spending the weekend in jail and having their assets seized while a bunch of public employee buffoons try to figure out what to do and how to cover up their mistake. It is the police that these public officials use to perpetuate their activity. We are headed toward this type of situation which can be seen in Greece, where secret police dressed in plain clothes are able to arrest people from the crowd, because “the law” states it’s for the public good.


So is my story, the Tail of the Dragon anti-cop. No. But it does question the validity of law enforcement and the entire process from which law is created and then used against the tax payers who paid for it. All too often what we discover in any reasonable investigation is that the law was used to make somebody wealthy, and law enforcement was there like a personal army to advance the strategic position of those in power to gain an advantage over those they seek to crush.

Police are needed to some extent to keep some order in the world. But how much is too much, and what power should they be given? For me, as a general rule, if a cop has time to sit on the side of the road and pull people over for speeding, or for not having on a seat belt, then that is one cop too many. If that is all that officer has to do but harass the public for more money, then we are wasting our money on that employee. Because it’s such people who will come to your house to arrest you for some run-in with the law, whether it’s your child setting up a lemonade stand, or you not growing in your front yard what the politicians think you should be, or worse and most likely, you’ll find yourself in the middle of a bank error. It will be the cop who’s doing nothing on the side of the road who will be on call to serve the needs of corrupt politics, and the scam is ultimately on you, the tax payer. Because it was you who put that cop on the street to begin with, with a great salary, and attractive pension under the watchful care of a public sector union, the FOP, which is so closely tied to politics they might as well be the same thing. No, I’m not too hard on the police in my book.

Just hard enough……………………

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

HUD Power Grab: The Intent behind entitlements

They try at every turn to embed themselves into your life any way they can. Government’s latest attempt is in the expansion of public housing in Cincinnati.

Doc Thompson covers the HUD issue that is being imposed on the city of Cincinnati which is a detrimental power-grab instigated by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. Doc covers some of the flaws in this plan from a social stand point on his 700 WLW radio show.

Channel 9 also did an article on the fine details of this situation listed below.

______________________________________________
Posted: 06/06/2011
• By: Tom McKee
CINCINNATI – The Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA) will know by the end of the week how much it will expand its public housing in Hamilton County to settle a discrimination finding with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD).

A Voluntary Compliance Agreement (VCA) is expected to be signed between CHMA and HUD that will stipulate where some of the housing will be located.

HUD found that CMHA failed to put public housing units that it owns in numerous Hamilton County communities, including Green Township, where the agency’s former board chairman lives.

Green Township currently has 27 CHMA-owned units within its borders, but may be required to add more as a provision of the settlement.

Also this week, Hamilton County Commissioners are expected to approve a Cooperation Agreement with CMHA that will add 375 public housing units to the 482 already in suburban communities.
Scheduled meetings include…

MONDAY – June 6
–11 a.m. – Hamilton County Commissioners staff meeting
– Cooperation agreement to be discussed
–11 a.m. – Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority special board meeting
– Executive session to discuss voluntary compliance agreement
WEDNESDAY – June 8
–11 a.m. – Hamilton County Commissioners regular meeting
– Cooperation agreement approval expected
THURSDAY – June 9
–9 a.m. – Cincinnati Metropolitan Housing Authority regular board meeting
– Approval expected on voluntary compliance agreement

The cooperation agreement does not affect the City of Cincinnati, which has 5,269 public housing units.

_________________________________________________________

Public housing is one of those topics where government has exceeded its reach. It has no business in creating housing for citizens, because to do so, it must take resources from productive people and give them to people who are not productive. Government can only do this as a kind of theft.

Listen to this professor in the clip below. I can’t believe people pay him to teach, because he has a lot to learn.

The mentality is similar to the type of government that is bankrupting Greece, where their retirement age of 55 is drowning the country with expectations which is collapsing the country. I have friends in Europe that have 4 plus weeks of vacation and are working under this assumption of a retirement age. When they travel the world, even though they have moderately low-level jobs, I ask them “who does your work when you’re gone?”

They just give me the deer in the headlights look. “That is not my concern,” is the reply. That answer continues to baffle me every time I hear it. How can a country like Greece, England, pick your European country, subsidize vacations and retirement plans. Who pays for it, because while these people are on vacation, or retired, they are unproductive citizens? They are citizens of their home country, yet they are doing nothing to contribute to the positive growth of the nations GDP.

Nobody is arguing that people shouldn’t be able to take a vacation. But the amount of vacation or the retirement should be contingent on how much that citizen has saved up to be able to give themselves a break. Because if they can step away from their jobs so easily, then they are not productive enough, and in government, this is very often a case, the idea of a job is one that is created so that a worker can clock into their position, do their time, productive or not, then go home to their regular life. If they want to take a day off or go on vacation, they do so without a drop in performance from their employer. This is totally wrong, this whole entitlement culture.

That is the kind of mentality behind HUD. Government is in a business it should not be in, giving out Federal dollars as contingencies to implement their policies that don’t belong to them. And because the housing is provided and not earned, it is not respected. This leads to abuse of the property, and it leads to the decline of the citizens that live there. Crime runs rampant in such communities; drug sales and prostitution are the norm.

Public housing is something that we should be cutting back on, not expanding. It is a road that leads to one place, utter failure both financially and socially. It does not catapult people back on their feet, but more often than not, flattens their tires in life keeping them from advancing themselves. Because it pays to sit still and collect the check, the housing and the food. The entitlement concept is rooted in foolish European socialist ideology. It has appeal because it basically provides something to people for nothing but what doesn’t get discussed is that something comes from a nation’s wealth, or potential wealth. No society can function sufficiently when people just retire at 55 and stop being productive, relying on a workforce that is under 55, which might only be a fraction of the employed citizens to support everyone else.

The entitlement culture is a lie……it was a scam to get politicians elected into power, and the check is due but nobody wants to pay. People naturally want the free ride that was promised to them from people who didn’t have the right to make the promise in the first place. Entitlements are a premise based on nothing, and they are undeniably wrong and must be removed from the vocabulary of human beings……….All entitlements.

 

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