Category: Policial Science

The Sad Extinction of the American Housewife: Family assult through institutionalized prostitution

I had the fortune of growing up in a time when the women’s liberation movement had not yet taken complete hold. My mother raised me as a traditional housewife and I was able to see firsthand the social destruction that was going on in America as a direct result of progressive social management. Both of my grand parents were farmers and my grandmothers were both traditional women, but outside of that family unit some of my aunts had started experimenting with the whole women’s liberation movement and lectured my mother often of her stupidity in pursuing a life of tradition when the world was on the move. At my school my mother was a room mother and used to make specialized crafts for the kids in my class—which everyone adored. Even thirty years later when I meet someone from back then, they still talk about the nice things my mother did for them when they were in the third grade. Their parents were also experimenting with the whole women’s liberation movement and the kids weren’t getting the nurturing that they needed at home.

 

This went on for many years; each one as we neared the 1980s became increasingly worse. The pressure on my parents to modernize was intense—it came from all directions—family members, neighbors, and especially peers. For my mother one woman was the most audacious feminist that there was, she was a school substitute teacher and had her children in all the extra curricular activities that they could possibly be involved in, and was a socialite on a scale that most adults in our region knew her name. Because she was always at my school as a substitute she knew my mother well, and there became a competition between the two women as to whom the best mother was—of course this was participated in only by the crazy feminist. My mom was so non-confrontational that she allowed herself to be ridiculed by this and many other women only to vent at home later. My mom had made a value judgment to stay traditional and the world was making it very difficult for her. Eventually she gave in a bit and got a job—as everyone had been telling her to do for years. Seeing how much pressure this one particular feminist rival put on my mother I took it out on her son who was on my soccer team. During a scrimmage I pummeled him, and it was he who gave me the nick-name, “Animal.” I left him damaged with a kick to the face not so much to hurt him, but to hurt his mother. I could see what was going on and I didn’t like it.

 

Back then there was an experimental neighborhood in Lakota named Dutchland Woods, which still exists today. It was a very progressive community and featured a White House in the middle of it where social events were conducted. I had several friends who lived there, and most of the families were of the new “dual income” type which meant that when the kids got off school, they didn’t have parents at home until 6 to 7 PM at night. It was the strangest thing during summer break, it was like a land of kids running the whole community—it was literally like a Charlie Brown cartoon where adults didn’t exist. My first girl friend lived there—a cute little girl from the fourth grade who was already letting boys feel her out even before she had breasts to feel. Sex was the predominate activity in Dutchland Woods as there wasn’t anything else for the kids to do. Everybody dated everybody else and the sexual standards of the entire community were notoriously lowered. Not one child raised in that neighborhood, my friends included grew up healthily to live productive lives—and there were a lot of kids. I could see it from the measuring stick of a traditional household where the father went away, made all the money, and mom took care of the house and everything in it—particularly the children. It was easy to see even during the 80s that Dutchland Woods as a social experiment was a disaster. These days it is a community of starter homes for parents looking for entry into the Lakota school district without the high price of the newer neighborhoods—every one of them built-in the same social philosophy as that experimental neighborhood from the 80s was. Thirty years later there are no more housewives, only a massive society of parents who are all dual income households leaving children to raise themselves—and the results are predictably disastrous.   There are a few women who stay home with their kids, but most of them these days are so socially insecure because of the social pressure to embrace progressive feminism that they seek to show their stripes in other ways—by hosting every Tupperware party offered to them, participating in every True Romance gatherings they’re invited to, and supporting school levies to show how much they value “education.” They become like the idiots in the opening video—cannon fodder for social experimentation that has failed.

 

When I met my wife, she was one of those rare people who lived that busy life—only she had the fortune of being raised by a great-grandmother, at least during her formative years. She lived in a big house and came from a family that was very successful, financially and socially. We were married at the Becket Ridge Country Club back when it was the premier social gathering place in the area. My wife hated that life and was looking for a way out of the downward spiral that was consuming all her friends. She lived in Rolling Knolls, which is still considered a respectable neighborhood. During the 80s it was considered wealthy, and I knew many of the kids who lived there as well. It was essentially like Dutchland Woods only on a more epic scale—kids ran the whole community during the day, sex was easy—way too easy—drinking, drugs, and other forms of disgusting behavior was the norm. The parents were too tired to do anything about anything by the time they came home from work—so nothing ever got addressed. My wife did not want that life, so when we found each other with her still in high school, the fireworks of social pressure began early as her life was planned out for her quite extensively—more along the lines of what the rest of society was doing reflected in the neighborhoods of Rolling Knolls and Dutchland Woods. Both of us wanted a different life than the one that was being offered so we married early and started our own family.

For over 25 years virtually every family member we have had no matter where they live in the country has attempted to coax my wife into “getting a job.” Well, this has been a problem because she has a job which I consider extremely valuable. Being a housewife if done properly is the most important job in the world. Of the three children my mother had, not a single one has emotional difficulties of any kind, and are quite successful people. They may not be as traditional as me, but they are successful in their own ways, and are certainly great parents themselves. We have a uniquely good family free of alcoholics, jail birds, and abusive personalities largely because my mother was there to raise her kids the right way—without outside progressive influence. My wife and I always strove to do better than that—and we have. I stood in support of what my wife wanted to do as a traditional housewife for many years and when family members became too pushy, we showed them the door. I simply don’t stand for it, and have supported my wife in her decisions—because in a lot of ways I wanted it as much if not more than she did. I wanted my children to know they had a mother always at home to help launch them into their lives. The net result is that my kids are two of the sanest people in our family and all the families they grew up knowing. This is not an accident. It’s a product of a good family that provides emotional strength instead of corrosive tumult self-induced by social neurosis. It was far from easy—in fact I’d say it was one of the hardest things to do that I’ve ever had to do—but it was certainly worth doing.

I have always viewed having a job as a secondary importance outside of a family. Jobs come and go, but a family is something that stays with you during an entire life-time. The job that really counts is the one that is done at home. Getting a job and obtaining income only fuels the life at home. The identity of ones existence is not the job itself and if it is—that is a bad parent. When all those people called my wife on the phone telling her that she needed to get a job to have social value—they were telling her that the work she was doing at home was meaningless without the positive appraisal of her peers. Even after our children were raised, my wife has still stayed home because we like it that way. When a person has a job, they sell a part of themselves toward the institutional aims of their employer. This is simply prostitution of a different type. People are being paid to trade their time for money and the false premise that is so popular today is that in this exchange success is in having the larger check book because peer judgment is all important. Well, I never forgot the trouble my mother had, so I never put such pressure on my wife’s shoulders. I don’t care the least about peer review, and I care less about what the national unemployment numbers are based on government statistics. If I had it my way every household that has children in it would designate one parent to stay home with their children and operate their homes like a business. The unemployment numbers then would be disastrously high as there would be suddenly many unfilled jobs. But most jobs these days are overfilled, just to fill the needs of a progressive society and their obsession with peer review—as if consensus can erase the sins of their terrible parenting ability and the many screwed up children they produced who grow up to become complete idiots.

 

If I had to do it all over again—in how we raised our kids, I wouldn’t change a thing. I had to work a lot more than usual to make it happen, but I always considered outside employment to be less valuable than inside the home employment. I never thought to tell my wife that “I make all the money and you have to do as I say.” It has never crossed my mind—because the work at home that she did with my children was much more important than making something new that would be sold to consumers in a global economy. Our lives are more important than any “service to society.” Hell with society, the world would be a whole lot better if more housewives took pride in their work in the house caring for their young than pandering to the idiots who think Fifty Shades of Grey is a great book as they lock themselves in the bathroom reading it after a long day at work pretending to be busy. I’ve done just about every kind of job there is to do over the last thirty years, and most jobs are unnecessary. Children are more important.

 

If you really love a person, how could you want them to serve others in exchange for money at the expense of time not spent toward family pursuits? Even now that my wife and I are empty nesters, my wife is free to meet with my daughters for lunch, or to go shopping during the week and on the weekends she is free to spend time with me. Parents who are always busy doing their own thing have a poor quality of life and that hasn’t changed over the years. It was like that when feminism started robbing mothers from the homes of children during the 70s and 80s—and it is worse now than it’s ever been. There aren’t any laws that politicians can come up with to fix the situation, and there isn’t any education that will solve the problem either. The abandonment of the American Housewife has been one of the worst decisions that was ever made. I have thought that for many years now, and feel more strongly about it now than I did as a young person. For all those people who tried to talk my wife into getting a job and selling herself like a Vegas whore to social pressure—I’m so glad she didn’t listen. It would have been a terrible decision. I used to say that “advice is only as good as the person who gives it,” well that is never more true. When people call and ridicule you for doing something you know is right, look at their life and decide if they are really happy and successful. If they aren’t hang up the phone and get away from them. They are more destructive than helpful.

Just because the masses of society believe something, does not mean that it’s good, or helpful. The abandonment of the American Housewife is proving to be detrimental to the continuation of our culture. Every supporter of progressive expansion of women’s liberation has only thrown housewives out of the home and into the meat grinder of social servitude leaving children at home alone to raise themselves based on primal instinct. Once a young girl is felt up and pranced naked in front of a boy well before they even reach the age of sexual awareness, that girl will grow up into a wreck of a young lady, and the kids she has will end up being raised in chaos at a local day care facility. The chain reaction of mental destruction begins in those unsupervised summer days where parents are busy in service to dollars through institutionalized prostitution. The next door neighbor might be impressed with the new car, or the wardrobe bought at Nordstrom’s, but the kids are suffering and will grow up to become idiots. Because the American Housewife is nowhere to be found—except in my home—and a few others scattered about as rare as gold supporting the money the Federal Reserve prints to paper during periods of quantitative easing.

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

2014 Values Voter Summit: How Glenn Beck is incredibly wrong

The Glenn Beck speech at the 2014 Values Voter Summit was very good and worth watching—which can be seen below.  There is a lot he said correctly—especially regarding Sykes-Picot agreement.  I was one of the first to cover that origin of trouble in the Middle East and if members of Beck’s staff passed it along to Glenn Beck to report—well, that’s why I write this stuff—to educate and help people understand the world around them.  It doesn’t hurt my feelings if Beck takes his big platform and expands it.  Click here to review my article on the matter.  It is the key to understanding the trouble and politics of the Middle East.  The rest of Glenn Beck’s speech was good as well and worth witnessing.  I agree with most of what he said, but in some parts of it he is vehemently wrong.  In those portions his life as a former addict crosses over into the realm of strategy and his advice is bad.  Specifically, it is in his self-sacrificial calls to surrender thought to God and to embrace Christen passivity in the face of evil.  Like many people who have found God late in life to redeem their self-destructive paths people like Beck fill their lives with scripture to plug the holes that were formed through drug and alcohol abuse.  It’s a survival mechanism that works better than personal and social destruction.  But for confronting evil, strategically, Christ is not the example and the kind of passivity Glenn Beck talks about in his speech will get a lot of people hurt, and or, dead.  So let’s explore the correct position below after watching the speech.

I understand that Glenn Beck is under tremendous media pressure to avoid being called a rebel rouser and is taking the Martin Luther King approach to solving problems when confronting evil.  Well—Martin Luther King ended up dead—killed by his rivals.  Beck also talked about Jesus, for many of the same reasons and suggested that Judas was frustrated with Jesus and his lack of ability to rally the troops against the Romans—which is why Judas betrayed Jesus.  Well, Jesus and his passivity caused him to be killed—assassinated as a religious rival to the power held in Jerusalem.   Beck and his utterances about Christ’s passivity obviously has not listened to the popular church song, “Onward Christian Soldiers, Marching as to War” which invokes a bit of battle balled.  Passivity of religion rolled over into politics will end your movement before it ever begins and sparks for rebellion is necessary if there are hopes of overcoming evil.  God will not come down from Heaven and break down the walls of Jericho to the sounding of trumpets and slay the enemies of King David through simple prayer.  Such things require action to square off against evil and to conquer it as it presents itself.

Without Sam Adams, his cousin John would have never been the second President of the United States.  The American Revolution would have never happened.  Without Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson would have been just another former European styled intellectual pointing out what should be as opposed to what was.  Without a rebel rouser, action against the enemy does not happen.  In his speech Glenn Beck brought up the criminal Barabus who was picked by the mob to save instead of Jesus.  Beck stated that the angry mob in Jerusalem wanted a rebel rouser to spark rebellion and Jesus just wasn’t that type of person to perform the task, so they picked Barabus whom history would have otherwise only remembered as a harmless, petty inciter against the vile institutionalism of the day.  However, it was the pressure from the mob that caused the Romans to even put in place a system of providing a choice to their subjects to take the edge off their tyranny.  Without the aggressive pressure of people like Barabus—the Romans would just slaughter anyone who disagreed with their power.  Because the Romans feared an uprising against them, they put in place mechanisms to appease the mob—just as what happens to this very day especially during elections.

Praying to God in front of an armed thug who wants to destroy you and everything you stand for will only get you dead.  Trusting in God to save your soul from evil might get you into the gates of Heaven, but it will destroy life on earth for you and all that you love.  Passivity is not the answer—aggression is.  The bad guys need to know that the mob is angry and that at any moment some rebel rouser will shout “let’s get them!”  The only messages such villains understand is force—unapologetic force at that.  It is nice if that force is backed by a value system represented by Christians or some other religion of value, but passivity toward aggression cannot be a plan for expanding goodness in the face of evil.  That is just dreadfully empowering for those who favor aggression and blind power over those who are easy targets.

The current role that America has in the world shows this—the foreign policy of those raised as peaceful Muslims—like Barack Obama in the country of his education Indonesia—has a hands off pacifist behavior that is also characteristic of the modern liberals and libertarians who think that they can smoke a joint and offer the peace sign to a radical terrorist and all will be well—that God will just sort it all out.  They are insanely wrong.  Religion is only good for a relationship to the after world and establishing some foundation beliefs that can build a civilization.  But it will not provide good advice on how to deal with an aggressor.

I’ve never been a pacifist.  I learned martial arts at a young age and learned how to make myself invincible from a one on one attack through blocking techniques.  You can’t guarantee that you will always win in such matches with the opposition, but you can force a stalemate by not allowing their force to overcome you.  This has been a very successful position, and I’ve had many people—most of them bigger and stronger try to impose their will over the years—and they have not succeeded even after nearly five decades.  I’ve been in a lot of fights from young to old, the most recent one was actually a few years ago in front of several Butler County police officers which took place in the Hamilton Court House parking garage.  When confronted with vile evil, God won’t swoop in to help you.  You have to help yourself and confront it directly.  They have to know that if they make a move against you, or the things you care about—that you will pummel them.  That is the only way to achieve peace without being the victim of slaughter.  I’ve never been a drug user or a person who uses evasion techniques to avoid thinking—so have never had a need to turn to God to fill holes in my background.  I have always acted upon the moral appraisal that my mind produces based on the conditions of the world around me.  So I can speak from experience, pacifism feeds aggression against goodness, it doesn’t make it go away.

It took several hundred years after the death of Jesus for Christianity to begin taking hold.  In the meantime, many innocent people were murdered and lives were destroyed needlessly because mankind was too willing to surrender their life on earth for a perceived entry into the afterlife.  This allowed evil to manifest on earth and rule the planet for the last several thousand years.  And it was a stupid strategy that was supported by people like Glenn Beck over the years who get their messages mixed up—on one hand they stand aghast at the depravity of the world but then think that the situation will be solved by putting trust into God without any direct action taken by the victims of violence.  God made evil as well as the good, and places them into the battlefield of life for purposes yet defined.  However, in that transaction, goodness cannot yield to villainy and pacifistic behavior will not lead to victory for Christians.   When you see the actions of a bully, you have to be willing to look that bully in the face and destroy it if needed—and you can’t hesitate—you have to be willing to turn evil into a pretzel if need be and to end its life on earth if the situation calls for it.

As a person who has looked directly into the eyes of evil for many years and challenged it with force of my own, I can report that pacifist behavior feeds them leading to violence not avoidance.  I once confronted evil by taking on the entire police department of a local city who was using their power to sell drugs to kids through a local school.  The police gained these drugs through raids and instead of the evidence sitting on the shelves in a FBI lab somewhere, the cops were selling it back on the streets for extra cash—and everyone knew about it, including the mayor at the time.  How do you dear reader think that confrontation went?  Praying to God certainly didn’t help.  Many of those same cops were influential in the local churches, and gave a lot of money to the donation plates.  That evil had to be confronted directly—and it was.  I’m still around—many of them aren’t.  So who does God favor?  Does God favor the meek and weak, or the one who will spit down the throat of evil when pressed?  My experience tells me that God does help, but only when evil is confronted by the good—not yielded to.  Many of those police officers referred ended up destroyed by car accidents or health ailments within a few short years so fate does play out to some extent, but in my experience, meekness leads to the destruction of good, not the furtherance of it.

It is also in my experience that disguised behind the sermons of peace are people generally afraid of confronting evil, and they use the excuse that God is the ultimate mitigation of justice to avoid needed confrontations.  Born again Christians are particularly of this type as they must believe that their sins from the past will be rewarded through meekness toward God, by surrendering their lives to ancient provocation.  It is easy to do such a thing and still appear to be tough in standing against evil—without actually having to perform the task.  But it doesn’t work.  Evil must be confronted.  You have to be willing to look it in the eye and beat it down.  Without such a position, evil grows through embolden observation of pacifism.  Glenn Beck says a lot of things that are right, but on the issues of aggression and the inevitable confrontations with evil, his past taints his strategic thinking for the future. And his opinions about tactics against aggression by mixing religion with observed thinking is wrong.

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Star Wars: Commander–How the Apple Company greatly increases the quality of life

I have predicted and discussed much of what is happening today in virtually every category over the last 4 years.  Some listened, most didn’t.  For those who didn’t—hopefully you learned your lesson and will in the future. However, for me, which has been the case all of my life, humanity has let me down.  People do not aspire to be what they should, and the times are often regulated and maintained by the laziest of our species.  This is why I often turn to mythology for inspiration, because the Wall Street Journal doesn’t offer much inspiration—just raw news.  Contemporary real-life characters fall short of my expectations—so I don’t even bother.  Thus, my love of Star Wars and the reason I discuss it so much—especially lately is because it provides such motivation.  It is the creation of minds in need of something bigger than the human race is currently offering.  So I often vacation there to recharge my own batteries.  As such, it should come as no surprise that I had a viewing party at my home for the new Disney television series Rebels, which premiered with an introductory movie on Friday, October 03, 2014.

To celebrate I spent the day in the world of Star Wars in one fashion or another.  My wife and I played the Old Republic’s Galactic Starfighter online—which is always fun.  I then spent the morning playing X-wing Miniatures which is of course my latest passion.  I rounded out the time between those events up until the airing of Rebels playing a new game downloaded for free onto my iPad called Star Wars: Commander.  My brother texted me excitedly about it recently and after a few weeks of prodding, I finally downloaded it.  I didn’t give the free app much though because I didn’t think it would be any good—that it would be a kid’s game.  Let me say that it is far from a kid’s game—it is a wonderful war simulation of resource management and I have been wonderfully consumed by its contents.

Years ago—way back in the 90s I once spent an entire week playing an old game similar called Armada 2000—or something to that effect.  One of my nephews introduced it to me and it required the building of fleets by mining raw materials and going to war to conquer planets.  The graphics were rough, but the game content was wonderful.  Around that same time I started enjoying the various Sim City games which developed into a game called Outpost, which required you to terraform an entire alien planet by using the resources there to build a civilization.  I have also been a fan of the various Civilization games over the years including the most recent introduction.  Those are endlessly fun games of strategy and construction that are designed for those with a keen eye for productivity.  Never before in the history of the human race were such tools of resource management available to so many people.  The new Star Wars: Commander is all of those games wrapped up into one.  It is incredible—especially for a free app. It’s a whole new age that we’re living in where such a thing is offered as a simple download.  I can’t recall a time when I enjoyed blowing stuff up so much.

Star Wars: Commander lets you as a player pick a faction—either Rebel player or the Empire and build a base that must maintain an economy through your credit vaults while continually mining alloy for the construction of everything from factories to starships.   You have to build and maintain troop strength, engage in research and development, and deploy defense strategies as your base will constantly be attacked by other player’s bases looking for credits and alloy, and shield generation.  It is fairly involved for a game designed to be played on the go—anywhere and everywhere.  I’m used to playing those types of things on a PC locked in my room and not dressing for days.  This ability to put such a thing on a computer device that I carry in my jacket pocket is unreal to my previous generation eyes.

On that note as I have been playing Star Wars: Commander all week diligently—everywhere that I can really, in restaurants, in shopping malls, in the fabric stores as my wife shops for supplies for the many blankets and craft items she makes, I have been fascinated by how portable this new age of ours really is.  Commander is really a game that must be played against other players so it requires interaction.  The brilliance of the game is that the designers created the basic template, but most of the way the content is used is created by other players—leaving players to essentially let the game evolve through competition.  But it is the portability that I find so strangely interesting.  While shopping at Kenwood Mall with my wife and daughter at the Eddie Bauer store, I stood outside across from the Apple Store and marveled at how busy it was at 7:30 PM on a weekday evening.  Business was thumping inside and a line requiring service was outside the door.  It was amazing.  People were very active in looking at the various Apple products—everything from iPads, iPhones, to new computers.

I’m a huge fan of the iPad as I use mine everywhere for everything.  I use it primarily for maps, and for processing data on spreadsheets.  It is a remarkable device—there is no question about it.  I’m not so keen on the iPhone as I like to separate those two functions.  But Apple and its innovations are game changing aspects to human civilization.  Most of the people shopping in the store were there to pick up devices to allow them to have more versatility in texting their friends or updating their facebook accounts.  They weren’t looking for performance as much as being fashionable.  But, their interest is driving the market in new directions regardless of the quality of their desires.  It is largely because of that swarm in the Apple Store that Disney put out the new game Commander.  It’s the perfect game for a touch screen device.

The new game only enhanced my Star Wars day experience leading me up to the Disney Channel airing of the new Rebels cartoon—which was fabulous I might add.   I’ve been talking about it for a year now—and it was worth the wait.  Cartoons like that and content on the Apple products like what Commander is certainly elevates the expectations of entertainment.  But what’s more important is the reason people like Star Wars so much—as I’m far from alone on the topic.  Star Wars offers hope and expectations on human potential that is higher than it otherwise would be.  And Apple is there to provide a format to further the mythology into ways that were unfathomable a decade ago.  Star Wars: Commander just seven years ago would have cost $50 dollars for a PC title sold in a store like Gamestop.  Now it’s a free app.  The game makes its money off the impatience and mismanagement of its players.  For those who don’t know how to manage resources, they will pay extra for crystals to build up their defenses or increase their offensive mobility.  Many of the upgrades take several hours to implement, especially shield generators and alloy depots—but they can be sped up through the consumption of crystals and Disney sells them by the bag which I’m sure is generating millions upon millions of dollars.  I typically launch an attack from my base every three and a half minutes—and I have yet to meet the same player twice—that’s how many people are on the game.  I would say that it’s a successful enterprise.

For those who want to play, you can look me up when you arrive by typing in the name of Cliffhanger—the character from my first novel The Symposium of Justice.  Of course you know—I’m playing for the Rebels.

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Why Gordon Ramsey is so Good: The difference between Jags and everyone else in West Chester

One thing that Gordon Ramsay has brought to my life is an appreciation for fine food.  I have a background that involves working in several Cincinnati restaurants as a grill cook and waiter and have seen many of the troubles featured on the Gordon Ramsay television show Kitchen Nightmares firsthand.  I learned a lot from those places of secondary employment—most notably how to handle trouble when short of expected staff.  It created in me a lack of professional rigidity that serves me very well now.  So needless to say, my wife and I nearly exclusively these days make it a point to watch the several Gordon Ramsey television shows that are in production, Hotel Hell, Kitchen Nightmares, MasterChef, The F Word, MasterChef Junior and Hell’s Kitchen.  After watching so much of Ramsay it is impossible not to critic my food when I eat out—especially in the upscale places.

In Cincinnati it is Jags in West Chester that represents the best that the culinary arts have to offer.  It used to be the Maisoniette in downtown Cincinnati which finally closed in 2005 after maintaining a five-star culinary rating for several consecutive years, and the Celestial in Mt Adams which continues to a wonderful restaurant.  I used to be a fan of the Celestial after plays at the Taft Theater and days spent at the Art Museum—but Jags has replaced it. The drawback to Jags is that there isn’t much to look at outside the windows as the Celestial has a wonderful view of the city and the river.  But Jags for its exclusivity is better in that you can tune out the outside world and enjoy culinary art with some much needed isolation.

It’s not like I plan for days to embark on fine restaurant adventures, they just sort of happen out of necessity.  However, prior to Chef Ramsay I would usually prefer McDonald’s to the complicated—long winded dining experiences at the Celestial.  For instance, the Celestial Oscar is priced just under $40 and had dainty portions as opposed to the Oscar at Jags which costs $59 currently—and is more than enough to fill you up.  When it’s just me looking for food, I often want the quickest bang for the buck just because I’m so busy, but Ramsay has shown how wonderful food can be, that I find myself more and more enjoying the finer dining options around Cincinnati—as opposed to the quickest.

It’s not a fluke that Fox has so many Ramsey television shows featuring the award-winning chef.  Gordon Ramsey is a very effective manager—and it is a pleasure to watch him cut through problems quickly to get to the core of a problem.  Usually, the trouble with food ends up being psychological as opposed to knowledge based.  A lot of people know how to make great food, but they lack the sanity to put it on a plate.  This is what is fascinating about Ramsey—is his ability to break people down and rebuild them in such a short period of time.  In Kitchen Nightmares, Ramsey usually only spends a week figuring out design changes to a struggling restaurant, confronting owners who are struggling with personal problems which come out directly into their products, and re-launching with aggressive marketing campaigns from the local community.  The same process can be seen more articulately in Hell’s Kitchen where most of the candidates appear to be floundering messes at the beginning of the episodes, but as the season progresses, Ramsey pulls out of one or two of them, a potential culinary master by pounding out their inner psychosis into something that can produce masterpieces on a plate.  Ramsey films Hell’s Kitchen at the same time as the MasterChef shows which are incredible as the participants are forced to become greater through competition until they are master chefs.  It is amazing how quickly Ramsey is able to get to the source of a problem—and helps people overcome it.

Ramsey even though he is from the United Kingdom is one of the finest examples of capitalism that there is currently.  In essence, beyond all the personal problems of the people he helps, he forces them to accept capitalism or to perish—which is really the best thing he could possibly do for them.  Most of Ramsey’s enterprises succeed, although a few fail—his ratio is incredibly successful—which is why my wife and I enjoy watching him so much.  But because of Ramsey I can now spot the quality of people’s minds based on what they cook for me, which is something I never considered prior to watching so much of Chef Ramsey.  I can now spot in a little dive of a restaurant in the middle of Tennessee that the owners are having marital difficulties based on the way they prepare the food, and I can tell when a little over-priced Bistro on Lake Ontario is full of self-inflated egos based on the quality of the food.  Like Gordon Ramsey, Chef Michelle Brown at Jags has a background in sports and that competitive spirit finds its way onto the plate with every serving.  The food is often served meticulously, even in large groups.  Recently while in a large group it was easy to see even during the appetizer that great care comes out of the kitchen as we ordered three raw bar sea food samples.  They were brought out in massive fountain-like containers, and within each were oysters, jumbo shrimp and crab legs not haphazardly thrown in with clots of ice, but meticulously spaced.  I measured them in their spacing and each serving was equally distributed.  This to me was remarkable and is why I prefer Jags over something like the Celestial.

Compared to other area restaurants like Stone Creek and Bravo! Cucina Italiana which are franchise establishments that give nice middle of the road dining experiences disguised as upper crest—I can now eat in places like that and know much that there is to know about the kitchen and personalities involved.  The standard procedure in Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares is to sit down and eat the food—once he’s done that he attacks directly the root of the problem which is usually psychological problems between owners, managers, and staff—or food prep laziness.  In Jags you can feel that the victory of the meal is won during food prep, in those critical hours between 2 PM and 5 PM when dinner rush is planned for vigorously in the kitchen, and those other places where things are frozen because they are purchased in bulk for all the area restaurants by deals cut with food suppliers.  The employees at second-hand restaurants pretending to be exquisite is that they show up for work an hour before dinner service and expect to make great food—and it just doesn’t work that way.

Critics of Gordon Ramsey are often  the same people who think that capitalism is unfair—and they are also the same type of people who would rather eat at Bravo! Cucina Italiana as opposed to Jags where the individual meticulousness of Chef Michelle Brown comes out in virtually every meal leaving her kitchen.  They are the ones Ramsey cusses at as opposed to receiving his praise.  But I continue to be amazed at the playfulness and hard work that Chef Ramsey is able to conger up all while maintaining a family, traveling the world, and hosting four television shows that involve intense management techniques.  He is a remarkable person which is also why his food is so magnificent.  West Chester, Ohio is one of the best areas in the United States to live and its per capita income make it affluent enough to support a Gordon Ramsey restaurant.  Until he does that, Jags will likely be my top pick of dining experience.  And under the benefits of capitalism, it would be a great day indeed to have the difficult choice of Chef Ramsey or Chef Brown.  I like Chef Brown so much that I might have to pick her over Ramsey.

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Why the Rich get Richer and Poor, Poorer: Eric Holder’s “Alinsky” Strategy

With all that is and will be said about Eric Holder’s resignation from the Justice Department, it must be noted that as the wave of scandals continuing to rise against his many crimes and fallacies that his move is simply another trick learned from Saul Alinsky’s popular leftist book Rules for Radicals.  Eric Holder, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and virtually every other mainstream radical activist from the political left have used that book as a modern religion to attack the premise of America.  The essence of their position is to steal wealth from the rich, and give it to the poor without considering why the rich are the “haves” and the poor are the “have nots.”  They as leftist radicals, because of their sympathies toward communism, which was quite popular during their marijuana smoke induced youths, failed to understand that wealth in America is not a finite resource like coal or natural gas.  Just because it exists does not mean that it runs out.  In America wealth is created, so if wealth is stolen and given to a lazy slug who would rather sit on a couch all day than work at a job, the wealthy person can still make more money while the poor person will typically blow all their looted treasure on cigarettes, alcohol, and lottery tickets. This is why the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.  Alinsky taught a small army of functioning communists to attack those with money in American culture and redistribute that money to those who didn’t have it.  It was a scam that has proven a failure, and Eric Holder has been caught many times playing the activist role for President Obama using Saul Alinsky’s book as their personal Bible.  Holder is doing essentially the same thing that Hillary Clinton did after the Benghazi scandal—leaving office following Saul Alinsky’s methods of diffusing a target until people fixate on the next shiny object.  Here is Hillary’s personal letter to her mentor Saul Alinsky in 1971—just to provide a backdrop of how important the old radical was to the future staff of the White House.

Much has been said about Alinsky and his dedication of his book to Lucifer.  Alinsky died at the age of 63 of a sudden, massive heart attack in 1972, on a street corner in Carmel, California. Two months previously, he had discussed life after death in his interview with Playboy:[4]

ALINSKY: … if there is an afterlife, and I have anything to say about it, I will unreservedly choose to go to hell.

PLAYBOY: Why?

ALINSKY: Hell would be heaven for me. All my life I’ve been with the have-nots. Over here, if you’re a have-not, you’re short of dough. If you’re a have-not in hell, you’re short of virtue. Once I get into hell, I’ll start organizing the have-nots over there.

PLAYBOY: Why them?

ALINSKY: They’re my kind of people.

Rules for Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals is the late work of community organizer Saul D. Alinsky, and his last book, published in 1971 shortly before his death. His goal for the Rules for Radicals was to create a guide for future community organizers to use in uniting low-income communities, or “Have-Nots”, in order to empower them to gain social, political, and economic equality by challenging the current agencies that promoted their inequality.[1] Within it, Alinsky compiled the lessons he had learned throughout his personal experiences of community organizing spanning from 1939-1971 and targeted these lessons at the current, new generation of radicals.[2]

Divided into ten chapters, each chapter of Rules for Radicals provides a lesson on how a community organizer can accomplish the goal of successfully uniting people into an active organization with the power to effect change on a variety of issues. Though targeted at community organization, these chapters also touch on a myriad of other issues that range from ethics, education, communication, and symbol construction to nonviolence and political philosophy.[3]

The Rules are artfully presented in the seventh chapter, “Tactics,” in thirteen specific headings. Those are: Power is not only what you have but what you make your opponent think you have; stay within the confines of your expertise; take the opportunities presented to go outside the expertise of your opponents; make your opponent live up to their own rules; ridiculing your opponent can be a most potent weapon; make the tactics used by your own people enjoyable to them; do not employ a tactic so long as to drag it on; always keep pressure on your opponent; the threat is usually more terrifying than the actual thing; develop tactics to keep pressure on the opponent; push a negative long enough to turn it into a positive; always have an alternative solution, lest the opponent accuse you of having no solution; and, pick the target, preferably a person, then freeze it, personalize it, and polarize/isolate it from sympathy.[4]

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

  • RULE 1: “Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have.” Power is derived from 2 main sources – money and people. “Have-Nots” must build power from flesh and blood.

  • RULE 2: “Never go outside the expertise of your people.” It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone.

  • RULE 3: “Whenever possible, go outside the expertise of the enemy.” Look for ways to increase insecurity, anxiety and uncertainty.

  • RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.” If the rule is that every letter gets a reply, send 30,000 letters. You can kill them with this because no one can possibly obey all of their own rules.

  • RULE 5: “Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon.” There is no defense. It’s irrational. It’s infuriating. It also works as a key pressure point to force the enemy into concessions.

  • RULE 6: “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.” They’ll keep doing it without urging and come back to do more. They’re doing their thing, and will even suggest better ones.

  • RULE 7: “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” Don’t become old news.

  • RULE 8: “Keep the pressure on. Never let up.” Keep trying new things to keep the opposition off-balance. As the opposition masters one approach, hit them from the flank with something new.

  • RULE 9: “The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.” Imagination and ego can dream up many more consequences than any activist.

  • RULE 10: “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.” Violence from the other side can win the public to your side because the public sympathizes with the underdog.

  • RULE 11: “The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” Never let the enemy score points because you’re caught without a solution to the problem.

  • RULE 12: “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions

It wouldn’t take much imagination to see how all those rules from Alinsky’s book have been applied directly to every single human being in America in one way or another.  Labor unions have also used Alinsky to advance their cause greatly expanding the radicalism of the political left’s communist foundations.  By attacking righteousness from the position of Lucifer himself, Alinsky started a process in America which would eventually destroy the good country that it was and make it into the mess that it currently is out of a premise that open theft of created wealth would be considered virtuous.   Anyone who attempted to stand against them would see Rule 12 thrown at them in large doses making their military advancement against goodness an unchallenged path to social destruction.

If you’ve ever dealt with a school board in your local community you have surely been a part of the Delphi Technique which is an offshoot of the Alinsky Method.  It is designed to bring a community into consensus with the facilitators driven in the case of government schools toward the same leftist agenda points.  Alinsky is taught and used virtually everywhere that anyone from the political left operates.  He is their religion and purpose for existence and all this work is in dedication to Alinsky’s mentor—Lucifer.

When people catch themselves shaking their heads in wonder at the vast evil coming from the Obama White House, the actions of Hillary Clinton, and the epic failures and crimes of Eric Holder look no further than what they were taught by Saul Alinsky, and why.  They have a hatred for productivity so intense that they actually believed that the type of people destined for Hell, should be the type of people in charge of everything—Saul Alinsky said it himself.  And while it has been occurring, the virtuous, the productive, and the politically conservative have been exposed of their natural kindness to believe they did something wrong and needed to open themselves—and their check books to these liberal vagrants.

Eric Holder and his resignation is simply a variation of Rule 12—as the scandals and investigations mount, a liberal radical whether it be Hillary or Holder removes themselves from the polarizing result of such investigations to stop the network of anger from brewing further.  This is how the left typically diffuses trouble for themselves and they learned the trick from Alinsky—directly.  With Holder off the radar and a pardon waiting for him by Obama a year and a half from this writing, the conservatives of Washington will back off and lose interest—at least that is the plan.  Why—because it says so in Rules for Radicals.  They are that predictable—so it deserves to be asked—why don’t we stop them?  The answer to that is worse than the question—because we are still playing by social rules that were in place before Alinsky turned the political world on its head serving Lucifer by his own admission.  Those who stood for goodness, and justice did nothing but look for excuses so they could avoid the impact of Rule #3—which has paralyzed them into inaction for nearly a half of century letting evil have its way unchallenged.

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Up for Whatever Happens: Tampa Bay Beats the Steelers in an improbable win

There hasn’t been much to cheer about the last couple of years, and first part of this new season as I’m a diehard fan of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers football team.  It has been a transition period for them as they have sought after their correct player/coach combinations.  With the addition of Lovie Smith as the new head coach, I have been optimistic until the thrashing that took place in Atlanta.  I am also a fan of the Bud Light commercials, “Up for Whatever Happens” which I featured during the last Super Bowl.  So even after a terrible start to the new season, it was wonderful to see Warren Sapp grant a Tampa Bay resident with a dream “happening” by converting his living room into a pirate themed amusement park at the beginning of the game against the Pittsburg Steelers.  This is usually how it looks at my house on each Sunday that the Bucs play.

Football is a celebration of capitalism and the type of people who have assembled on the outskirts of society to attack the NFL are the same idiots who believe in global warming, the income disparity between men and women, and that it is better to have a president in the White House because of skin color rather than content of character.  These intrusive big-government, anti-capitalists want to step into the private affairs of Ray Rice, and Adrian Peterson along with coming after the Washington Redskin franchise name—as they do every “citizen” of the world for reasons that have nothing to do with justice.    These characters are not so interested in protecting women from domestic violence or children from abusive punishment—or honoring the name of a conquered people—but rather in moving the progressive bar further to the political left by attacking a mainstay of American capitalism—the NFL.  So I tend to support American football as a leisure activity in spite of their altruistic obsession of appeasing those same radicals with the pink ribbon campaigns and 60 minutes of exercise per day for children.  I believe that the Madden Football on Xbox and Playstation does more for children than an entire year of public school as far as teaching them how to think—so I love and support the NFL.

I also love Lovie Smith who has always been and continues to be a stand up guy who coaches in a unique way as a mentor first, and a leader desiring to win second.  This could be said of the Glazer ownership as well which I have spoken about in great detail over the years.  The Tampa Bay Buccaneer organization from the top to the bottom is a class act and a great enhancement to the Tampa Bay region.  Lovie Smith is the perfect kind of fit for the type of coach the Glazers had been looking for.  But after a terrible, embarrassing loss to the Atlanta Falcons—a division rival, I had no hope that the Bucs could bounce back and beat the Steelers playing in Pittsburg—where the home team almost never loses.  The mountain of improbability was just too high.  I didn’t even put my flags out for the first time in about 8 years.  I watched the game out of loyalty but I didn’t want to put too much emotional investment into a team that was obviously struggling with Lovie’s team philosophy. I didn’t even get excited much when the Bucs came out and sacked Big Ben in the opening moments jumping up to a 10-0 first quarter score.  The Steelers made some adjustments and came back to get the lead and held it until the closing moments of the game—but with 7 seconds left on the clock, the Bucs mounted a valiant comeback—held their poise and won the game.  It was very impressive, and if I had my cannons out, I would have shot them as seen in that Bud Light commercial.

I don’t care if the Bucs win another game this season—that win was one that I’ll never forget.  Hopefully the organization will build on that victory and step will into the future.  For all the talk about the recent Hall-of-Fame inclusions of Warren Sapp, Derrick Brooks, and soon John Lynch, Ronde Barber, and probably Mike Alstott, Tony Dungy, along with many others—the Bucs have been living in the past—happy to have their one Super Bowl win in 2002.  The ownership has tried to recapture that magic, but the results have been average.  There have been some great wins, and some fun Sundays, but the Bucs have not been able to rekindle the magic of their Hall-of-Fame players.  The Steelers on the other hand have a whole hallway of Super Bowl wins and a legacy of success that is unmatched.  Their current head coach is a former Buccaneer coach and has had great accomplishments in Pittsburg.  The reason it is so hard to win in Pittsburg is because the fans expect success from their team—and nothing less.  That is obvious when Pittsburg comes to Cincinnati to play which is four hours away to the south—there are nearly as many Steeler fans in the stands of a home game with the Bengals who follow the team to away games with great enthusiasm.  They do the same in Cleveland, and Baltimore creating a very intimidating fan base that rattles visiting teams during every Steeler home game.

It would have been very hard for Lovie Smith to prepare his team after such a daunting loss to get back on the horse and prepare for the Steelers—where the odds were against them in every category.  The NFL world was shocked to see the Bucs steal a win against the valiant Steelers—yet it happened in a convincing way.  Even when I thought the game was over with only a minute left—Pittsburg had the ball forcing Tampa to use all their timeouts—the defense put the screws to a very good Steeler offense.  The big difference in the game was that Gerald McCoy was back in the middle forcing the Steelers to attempt to run the ball to the outside where speedy linebackers were there to pick up the attempt.  The defense held, and the Bucs got the ball back with 30 seconds left to march down the field and score a touchdown.  Mike Glennon—the back-up quarterback throwing to a guy who was signed only the week before—who was cut after the pre-season, caught the ball on a slot reception and nearly made it into the in-zone.  Two plays later Vincent Jackson caught a touchdown stunning the football world.

After the game the Bud Light commercial featuring Warren Sapp and the Buccaneer themed living room came on again and it was just more revered the second time—because of the win.  There are a lot of metaphors in football that can be applied to life and it is games like the one between the Bucs and Steelers that serve as testimony to all of them.  Even when the odds are terribly stacked against you and you appear to be out-classed in every category—if you believe you can win, it’s the first step in marching down the field to get a victory—against all odds.  And in such times it takes a coach who is willing to spit in the wind of convention and not surrender to the temptation to lose his cool that can convince his team of young saplings that they can achieve the most audacious feat only a week after receiving the most embarrassing loss of their lives.  Lovie Smith is a great coach if for no other reason than the way he handled himself before and after the Pittsburg Steelers game of 2014.  It was a game that belonged featured in the Bud Light commercial “Up for Whatever Happens” because in the closing seconds on a brilliant autumn afternoon in the Midwest—it did.

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

How to be a Great Parent: The importance of mentors through leadership

If there is one skill that I have which is strongest, and most valuable, it is that of mentoring—or providing leadership.  I’ve had that ability virtually from the first breath I’ve ever taken.  When I was younger I naturally knew what the next possible action of every situation was, but I often respectfully wasn’t presumptuous enough to disrespect the older generation who thought it was their job to provide leadership.  So I yielded a lot to their failures and figured that I’d just fix things when they were out-of-the-way eventually.  Part of the reason for that decision was that I have always believed it is best to allow people to arrive at conclusions on their own and that the leadership provided by me was to point the flashlight where they needed to go empowering them to take possession of their own destinies.  It is not good to have vanity in such an activity where others feel they owe you gratitude for showing them the way.  A good leader should leave the smallest footprint possible so that the minds affected feel that they arrived at a destination on their own—therefore getting their buy-in as individuals.  Of all the leadership roles that are most important in the human race, the relationship between parent and child is the most important—so naturally I have always been a great parent to my children.  But I’ve never sought to beat them over the head with my parenting ability, but rather allowed them to carve out their individuality based on their own predilections.  The results have been spectacular of course and highly unusual by social standards.  Of all my kids, some who are biologically connected to me, and those who come in by marriage—they are all unique.  However, my oldest daughter has put herself out there a bit and is emerging as one of the best photographers in the Cincinnati area doing many weddings and coverage shoots for expensive real-estate.  For those who are curious, here is my oldest daughter providing a sampling of her outlook on life which obviously makes me very proud.

I never look at those types of things and reflect of my input into helping to shape her.  It was my leadership ability which helped pull out of her way the obstacles that might otherwise encumber her, and to show her what could be achieved.  Since I don’t practice the social evasion of a second-hander there is no secret yearning for public recognition for doing a wonderful job as a parent—not even within our own family structure. The reason is that those receiving mentorship by me should arrive at their destinations on their own merit taking possession of their lives individually without the vanity of public recognition.  No other person, particularly those un-enlightened oafs lacking direction, has the right to take credit for a person’s destiny.  There should never be a temptation from one to another to say, “I made you what you are.”  To do such a thing is to rob from the recipient of your leadership the right to declare their own life for themselves—and thus all decisions which trickle from them in the thereafter.

In this next clip my kids took my grandson on a day trip for no other reason than just to give him the experience.  They left after breakfast and drove across the state for a day of adventure and were back before dinner.  It was the kind of thing that most people never attempt—because they have such poor time management in their lives, they don’t even provide the effort.  When my kids were little children, I always provided them with similar adventures which squeezed everything out of life that there was available—because it is always in those efforts that the gold nuggets of existence reside.  As a leader you never quite know where or when those nuggets might turn up or in what quantity.  What you do know is that the treasures are hidden off the normal path of life and that if mankind wants some of that treasure that they have to step off the paved roads we are all taught to stay on to find them.  I taught my kids to look for treasure off the main roads—and as adults they have done just that.  I can’t take credit therefore for their wonderful lives—they own the right to their decisions and how they spend their time and energy.  So it gives me great pride to see them take my grandson on a simple adventure designed specifically to his age and ability knowing that what they are doing is providing leadership to the young man—which will empower him to wonderful things during his lifetime.

If leadership is done right, it should be as invisible as possible, only recognizable in your absence.  If people don’t learn to do for themselves, they will forever become prisoners of other people’s opinions—which is a chaotic mess of discombobulating thoughts.  If they learn to do for themselves, the potential that is unlocked is endless.  When I was younger I was the hated target of many parents who were doing their jobs incorrectly—and they hated me for the light I shed on their lives which they desperately hoped to conceal.  I was always—and still am—that guy who said to everyone chained to those types of circumstances not to listen to their parents out of obligation or loyalty—but only if they offered leadership that was valuable.    Don’t follow their light if they lead you to the doors of a mental prison or the mouth of a lion.  When I was younger I’d say these things but would often not take it to extreme measures because I wasn’t sure back then if my thoughts were correct as experience had not proven my path to be the right one.  However, as an adult I know without any doubt what the correct path is, and no longer feel that I should hold back.  So I don’t.

In a lot of ways this blog is doing the same things I have always done, only it allows me to do it on a larger scale—giving more people access to the types of things I have always said and done.  I offer the elements of this blog as insight into self-empowerment.  It’s the best parenting tactic that there is.  It is one thing to teach a kid not to touch a hot stove by allowing them to come to that awareness on their own.  The lazy method is to put the fear of God into them scolding them upon an attempt.  The proper method is to make them aware of the danger without fear by getting down on the floor with them—at their level so not to rob them of initiative and let them discover through you that the oven is hot by a simple demonstration—by pretending to be burned.  Of course you as the leader would not actually allow yourself to be burned—but you pretend to be so that they can see the pain on your face and equate that experience to something they’d rather not embark on giving them the self-empowerment to make decisions.  Once they learn to observe the conditions of their environment and make value judgments based on reality—you will have shown them how to overcome any obstacle, anywhere, at any time.

My daughter featured in that first video is the type of person that I don’t worry about getting a flat tire in the middle of nowhere—because she can figure out how to get out of that situation.  I don’t worry about people assaulting her—because she has been taught how to think for herself and adapt to the circumstances given to her—even if they are aggressive.   I don’t worry about her making money, because she has been taught how to gather treasure off the paved roads of life and knows what to do with it once she gets it.  I don’t worry about her because she has the ability to provide leadership of her own to others and can do so as an endless stream of motivation.

Parenting should never be like an Academy Award ceremony where all the members of your life turn out to provide recognition for a job well done.  Most of the time it is a completely thankless job—most of the people most affected by it will not have the ability to understand what it is that you’ve done—if a parent does a truly good job, they will likely be the scorn of the family making everyone else feel a level of guilt for their own inadequacies—that’s alright.  Being a leader is a lonely job that must cut through public opinion with the clear sense of direction that comes from the person holding the light—and trusting their ability to find the proper way in the darkness whatever the obstacle.  The best of these leaders do their job without anybody even knowing that they are doing it.  And there is no greater role for the leader than the parent.  It is important not to shatter the confidence of a young person just to exert a feeling of control over another human being—which happens in most relationships between parents and children unfortunately.  Children are treated disrespectfully primarily because the parents are corrupt with the wrong type of thinking.  And those children often grow up to become menaces of society in various forms.  The failure can most of the time be traced back toward parenting failures and severe lack of leadership.

I only used this example of my daughter because it’s hard to know what a real human being is supposed to be like for those who don’t know any.  By social standards my daughter is exceptional.  But to my standards she is normal—and it makes me angry to see so many people surrendering their lives right out of the gate because of the mental restrictions placed upon their lives by poor family leadership.  Most of the world’s problems begin with that very primal concept—the parent/child relationship.  Most of the world’s problems start with poor leadership and a lack of understanding how important self-empowerment is to each and every individual on planet earth.

And for those who want to utilize the services of my daughter—here is how you can find her:

http://brooketownsendphotography.com/

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

White House Activism Against Corporations: A ridiculous argument against inversions

This is what happens when you get activists who think like communists in the White House. I received this email from them recently trying to build a consensus against the American corporation desire to create tax inversions for themselves to avoid the incredibly high corporate tax rates found in North America.  This is also what happens when corporations are demonized by a political class who wishes to believe that everyone underneath them is in the “middle class” and willingly submits to their gross miss management of national resources.  What the idiots who wrote the below letter conveniently forget is that it was they who spent too much money—not corporate desire to hang on to the profits they’ve earned that is the cause of the problem.  Read their ridiculous utterances here:

Here’s What Inversions Are Costing Us

You don’t get to pick your tax rate. Neither should corporations.

That’s why, earlier this week, the Treasury Department took initial steps to prevent U.S. corporations from using a tax maneuver to avoid paying taxes in America. This loophole — known as an “inversion” — lets a company avoid taxes by relocating their tax residence overseas while changing very little else about its operations or business.

And it’s costing Americans nearly $20 billion over the next decade — critical dollars that could grow and expand the middle class.

Take a look at why we are taking action to close the inversion tax loophole — then share it with everyone who needs to know.Inversions

Notice what type of presidents were in the White House during the periods of time shown on the graph.  Big government socialist types as opposed to conservatives.  When the White House says that it will cost $20 billion in lost revenue over the next decade what they really mean is that they have already promised too much money through mismanagement to future endeavors that cannot be paid for but through higher rates of taxation.  This is the same lunacy that comes from public school mismanagement when they sneak through school levies to pay for unfunded desires—like inflated wages, elaborate buildings, and ridiculously wonderful benefits packages.  What they all have in common is that they are government enterprises built by government minds that spend too much money so to remain in power—then expect tax payers to cover their costs out of some patriotic obligation.

No…………..

What this is called ladies and gentlemen is “mismanagement” of tax payer resources—not obligatory sacrifices to strengthen a middle class of subjects worshiping the feet of the political class.  When they say this “is what inversions are costing us” they don’t mean……”us” as in you, me, rich and poor—they mean the political class who desires under a socialist mentality to rule over everyone else.  They also want a blank check to waste as much tax payer money as possible then expect payment by their subjects without complaint.  But to make matters worse, because corporations don’t have the ability to vote except through lobby power—the government targets them to pay a disproportionate amount of corporate tax by demonizing them into compliance.  However, corporations in this new international trading system that the government so proudly sponsored is voting with their feet and leaving America for oversea tax shelters to protect themselves from a grubby government desiring to steal all the profits gained through production.  This is the inversion process that the White House is complaining about and rather than deal with the problem they caused they are using email activism to attempt and build an argument of democracy against corporations to protect the financial burdens they already committed America to through mismanagement to pay.

These same fools in government almost in the very next sentence promise that they want to create jobs—yet their proposal is to create more government positions paid for by tax payers forgetting that the only real jobs that directly contribute to the GDP of a nation come from corporations and small businesses.  They neglect to inform anyone that it is their mismanagement that is not only spending too much money, but also pushing jobs out of America making unemployment un-naturally high.  Government is the cause of both problems.

It is truly arrogant for a political class to assume that nobody sees what they are up to, yet there it is directly from the White House to my email inbox.  They are that audacious to complain about the life blood of the American economy—corporations—then promise jobs to people was if they had them tucked away in their back pocket like a condemn intended for use in a whore house.  They are that ridiculously foolish.

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Corrupt Politics Behind Lakota’s Boys and Girls Club West Chester: The exploitation of children to fulfill fantasies of vanity

The essence of the Boys and Girls Clubs across America is really an excuse for altruistic latté sipping prostitutes to bath themselves in perfume and take selfies at award dinners to celebrate their bailout of failed parenting and offerings of all day babysitting services to families too busy and ignorant to perform the task of mentoring for their own children.   In spite of the hoards of celebrities which participate in commercials for the Boys and Girls Clubs, the basic message of the organization is that parents fail at raising children and that there is a social safety net out there to catch all those lost children who would otherwise fall through the cracks of civilization.  The idiocy of the message is that an alliance with government schools will somehow miraculously overcome bad parenting and make children complete citizens who will then grow up and “serve” their communities.  Needless to say, I think the whole premise is a bad idea.  So it should come as no surprise that I’m against the one that is being built in West Chester, Ohio in partnership with Lakota schools, which can be seen at the two articles below, one from the Journal News, the other from me where I break down the essence and politics of the deal telling the behind the scenes story of how that ridiculous endeavor came to be and who the personalities involved are.

http://www.journal-news.com/news/news/lakota-looking-to-lease-land-to-new-boys-girls-clu/nhSHs/

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2014/06/26/the-emperor-of-aldersonville-lakota-becomes-the-new-clothes/

However, the focus of this present article should be on the strategy of the Lakota superintendent Karen Mantia—as I am in a unique position to tell the story—which of course she will deny when pressed—but actions always do speak louder than words.  Karen when she was hired and overpaid by Lynda O’Conner, current Vice President of the Lakota school board, came to Lakota to pass school levies.  Up until that point Lakota residents had a strong resistance against tax increases proposed by the school.  So she set to do as she had in Pickerington, Ohio, to unite the business community and get their buy-in to her school system—as school superintendents like to see themselves as CEO’s who run vast corporations.  Coming to Lakota she sought to convert members of the opposition from No Lakota Levy—my group—into her way of thinking but first she had to know the political lay of the land.  She met with us and she and I had a nice conversation about my motorcycle and recent trip to Key West.  She was smooth and unassuming and made my partners believe that she had a head on her shoulders and that she just might approach school business with a mind to savings.

However, what Karen knew and discovered during that meeting, and through subsequent dinners through Lynda O’Conner with members of my No Lakota Levy group was that the builders and developers who were a part of the tax resistance were scorned by the school and not getting any work.  After all, Lakota schools is one of the largest employers in Butler County so it is hard to be in the business of developing things when you are on the shit list of local government employment group, so some of those members of the No Lakota Levy group wanted to repair their relationship with the school because they needed the work and felt vulnerable being on the wrong side of politics.  Mark Sennett was the first to defect out of pressure applied to him, which was revealed during the summer of 2011 when he misspoke to the media that No Lakota Levy would support a 2012 levy under certain conditions.  Of course I corrected that to the media and Mark was pushed out of the No Lakota Levy group.  Other developer types joined Mark, while others stayed with me.  Mark being a former government employee himself didn’t have strong convictions about things and was a member of No Lakota Levy because his affiliation with me saved him a lot of money in taxes—so we agreed on that much.  But on other matters, his reasons for being a part of the group were not as strong as mine.

During her meeting with No Lakota Levy Karen learned who the leaders of the group where and who the moderates were and quickly went back to the drawing board to figure out how to divide and conquer our group.  I warned our guys that this was her intentions and that she wasn’t such a nice old lady as she seemed.  For that particular election, they listened to me, but after the third levy defeat for which we orchestrated again saving local business owners millions of dollars—they began to feel the heat of being on the political out within the community and wanted desperately to repair their inside relationships for the exclusive purpose of gaining work from Lakota.  As developers, they couldn’t afford a sustained resistance to Lakota’s constant tax requests and Karen knew it.  So she attacked them where they all shared common ground—through the local socialite Patti Alderson.

Karen nurtured a friendship with the West Chester version of Lovey Howell from the Gilligan’s Island television show which cut directly to my No Lakota Levy members, because many were involved in the Community Foundation with her.  After discovering that Karen seemed like a reasonable women—a titan of industry much like herself–Alderson formed an alliance that would continue well into the next two years.  The purpose of this alliance was to pull the business oriented support of No Lakota Levy away from the ideological elements—represented by me.  I warned our members that this was what was going on, and told them that Karen planned to ignore the voters by going for another levy attempt in 2012 during a meeting right before Christmas in 2011.  They held tight for as long as they could, but really could not stand up to Alderson who put a lot of social pressure on them to buckle, because in essence they needed her more than she needed them.

On cue, Karen made her moves and positioned Lakota for an early 2012 levy push for either May or August when everyone was thinking about summer break—a tactic she tried in Pickerington.  Patti put pressure on my No Lakota Levy guys to separate from my radicalism and join the political moderates who were under the thumb of Karen Mantia joined together through the Community Foundation. Sensing the separation, Karen then worked the radical elements of her levy supporters to come after me personally and smear my name leading to the now famous Kroger Survey incident.  CLICK HERE TO REVIEW.   Reports of the survey came to me from No Lakota Levy supporters who directed me to the website “Yappi Sports,” which naturally infuriated me.  I agreed to a plan by the other No Lakota Levy members who were direct friends with Alderson to help them with a charity type organization called Yes To Lakota Kids.  Originally, we were planning to join Alderson’s group—but since her real objective was not to help kids, but build alliances against No Lakota Levy in favor of Karen Mantia’s efforts—she couldn’t work with me.  So we started our own group which touched off a firestorm of panic.   Immediately school board member Julie Shafer whom I debated on 700 WLW scoured through my articles and pieced together some of the worst things they could find that I had written to smear me publically—because the Yes To Lakota Kids foundation strategically cut too far into Lakota’s turf—which I knew it would all along.  So they had to take action.  I stood by my comments and felt good about it until the No Lakota Levy guys in direct alliance with Alderson left me stranded at the altar.  I knew the temptation was strong from them to end the levy fight, but I didn’t think they would side with her against me—but in the end, the politics of the deal was stronger than friendships and the rest is history.  Because of the damage on both sides—as I was intensely furious about the incident even more so than what caused me to say the things I had said in the first place—a short cease-fire was agreed upon.  Karen took that time to lick her wounds and try a different approach using a strategy of friendliness to counter all the vile things I had said about them.  Lakota spent many thousands of dollars on publicity to re-invent their image, and tried again for a levy in the fall of 2013 which they won by the slightest of margins.  Karen knew she had to try to get the money during a low year of voter turnout, as there weren’t any big state or national races on the ticket—otherwise she might not get another chance until 2015.  At the rate of spending Lakota already needs to try for another levy in 2017—so her time to take her one and only shot was in the fall of 2013.  My old friends and I joined together once again to resist the levy, but without me in the formal role of spokesmen—the effort failed.  I was better working in front of the scenes than behind and among them they couldn’t find anybody else to do the job the way I had.

I did what I had to do shortly after the levy passage to reduce my tax burden to absorb the cost of the levy, because I simply wasn’t going to spend the extra dollars out of my pocket to pay Lakota.  But for the rest of the members, who sided with Patti, they now have a substantially higher rate of tax to pay because of their wishy-washy behavior and failure to stand for their convictions—which leads us to this whole Boys and Girls Club at the old Union Elementary school.  What’s in the deal for Alderson—she gets to attend more dinners that worship her wealth as spotlights will douse her with attention—which she desperately seeks.  Karen gets a partner to support her in the next levy attempt as Patti pulls a lot of the local Republicans off their small government positions and into her fold just because of the wealth and political influence she commands. The local levy supporters get a free babysitting service so that they can feel the lack of guilt from being such sucky disconnected parents and my best friend from the No Lakota Levy days gets to build the whole thing.  He stood up to them for a while, Lynda, Karen, and of course Patti, but in the end he was locked arm and arm with West Chester’s Lovey Howell after the school board meeting finalizing the deal several months ago.  He was finally, conquered by Karen Mantia’s strategy implemented carefully and patiently.

So when people say about the Boys and Girls Club deal that there is corruption involved, now you know dear reader what they are talking about.  The inside deals are voluminous and run to the deepest cores of politics in Butler County.  Karen came to Lakota paid by O’Conner to do just this kind of divide and conquer tactic—but what all these elements have in common is their exploitation of children to commit the deeds.  Lakota routinely does this to gain money and leverage for their collective bargaining contracts, but in essence the Boys and Girls Club is no different.  They use children and the unfortunate victims of bad parenting to bath themselves in vanity for self recognition that has its roots in their personal religious outlooks.  Children and their misfortunes by all these parties are continuously exploited for the gains of adults who deep down inside want to be adored and loved by the masses for reasons that trace back to their own childhoods and the failures associated there.  That is why when the next levy is attempted by Lakota it won’t be the old cast of characters from No Lakota Levy this time—it will be a much more ideologically driven base that stands in defiance.  I knew what Karen was up to all along, because it takes one to know one, and I am well at work on the next campaign against them and will not again be vulnerable to wavering souls driven only by tax savings and not rooted in firm convictions.

Rich Hoffman   www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

“Fat Han” in X-wing Miniatures: “I’m in it for the money”

When I participated in my first tournament for X-wing Miniatures I was still learning all the rules—but knew enough to build a squad of ships that would be competitive against even the most seasoned players. However, when I revealed my squad to my opponents, they immediately assumed that my use of Han Solo on the Millennium Falcon which encompassed a point build of 55 points out of 100 meant that I was a rookie player who did not trust my piloting ability. The Falcon fires in a 360 degree arc as most of the other ships fire in a 90 degree arc coming off the front of their ship. Most seasoned tournament players at the time if they did use the YT-1300 were using Chewie or Lando and using two B-wings or some other assortment of support ship to save points. Nobody was using Han, which made no sense to me. He was after all one of the highest pilot rating cards in the game and he has a wonderful re-roll ability that makes him very powerful. His card on the Millennium Falcon looked to my eyes to be one of the most powerful combinations in the game, and I thought it would be crazy not to use him in a tournament.

Well, about three months later some of the best X-wing players in the world used almost the same build at the Nationals played at Gen-Con 2014. In reaction to the new TIE Phantoms released at the end of June 2014 a new type of Rebel build called “Fat Han” emerged in the meta game to deal with the incredible maneuverability and fire power of the new Empire faction ships. In fact Paul Heaver who is the current world champion used nearly the same build as I had to climb into the top four at the nationals.

I never published my build anywhere and Paul and I never spoke—yet to his experienced eyes he picked that particular build to deal with the new elements coming into the X-wing game. And he wasn’t alone at the nationals; there were many other top players who were flying “Fat Hans” in competitive play which changed the game for the better. It is doubtful that Paul Heaver received the same sideways glances that I did when I placed my YT-1300 on the board. I was a newbie, Paul was a seasoned champion. But it made me feel good to see that even in a game where I am not comfortable with all the rules and certainly lack the experience of that kind of competitive play, that I’m able to fairly quickly jump in and identify trends that are out on the edge and not yet fashionable.

This was an important observation as I spend a great deal of time pointing out trends that are coming as opposed to the ones that currently exist. If the ability is gained, it can be applied to virtually everything in life even in areas where others are much more proficient. The “Fat Han” builds are now the complaint of the X-wing Miniatures world because of their extreme effectiveness and they will continue for some time until something else knocks them off in the months to come. But for me the experiment was very telling, and useful.

I left my tournament feeling like I could have done better and that I was close to something big as far as a strategy. The other players were so polished and knew their stuff—citing the rules from top to bottom quickly and were certainly at the top of their game. So I thought there might have been something to their complaints about using Han Solo and the Falcon in such a way as I was. But as it turned out, the best X-wing players in the game soon after turned to the very same strategy because the meta game pointed tactics in that direction. What I’m proud of is in seeing the trend before it occurred. Part of it is that I have a personal preference toward the Millennium Falcon, but when all the cards are looked at, it is beyond refute that the YT-1300 is by far one of the best tactical pieces in the game and that it should be included in any Rebel build.

I know much more about X-wing Miniatures now than I did during my first tournament, and I will know a lot more in a year than I do now. But the trend of seeing strategies and cycles beyond the curve of orthodox thinking is something I have been able to maintain even when others knew a great deal more about something than I did. It’s not some magic act, but simply a confirmation that Robert Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality strategies are employable on every level of endeavor, even in gaming. I do pretty well in life staying in front of the curve of social trends in most everything I do—even leisure. So it was fun to feel the scorn of the X-wing community—even though it was friendly jousting at the time—then find just a few months later that the entire meta game is moving in that direction.

I remember what it was like when I was a kid and I was the one who loved Star Wars above all the other social trends that were occurring at the time. It was considered very “uncool” to like the science fiction epic publicly. But I knew at the time—even as a very young kid, that there was something unusual about the stories and that the values conveyed in them had meaning beyond the social trends of the time. Now, 30 plus years later Star Wars fever is everywhere even to the extent that drones have been flying over the filming locations looking for a hint at the storyline. The only people now who think Star Wars is “uncool” are the backwards thinking lost in time souls who can’t identify with the values of the stories. They are people stuck in the past—in the policies of the New Deal, and progressive utterances inspired from the pages of Karl Marx.

I have a shirt that I like to wear when playing X-wing Miniatures with Han Solo on the front of it—not unlike the kind of shirts I used to wear as a 9-year-old kid that says, “I’m in it for the money.” It is a very capitalist message and I first saw it in Hollywood Studios, Florida while coming off the Star Tours ride. I was surprised that Disney did not filter that pro capitalist message as there are many progressive executives who work for the large entertainment company. But, Han Solo is an unequivocal capitalist—an Ayn Rand type of capitalist in the Star Wars saga and he is one of the most popular characters there is. In fact, while downloading the new Star Wars game Commander onto my iPad I noticed that the characters on their load screen featured Han Solo, not Luke Skywalker because Disney knows where the money comes from in the series. It’s not the altruistic Luke Skywalker that people want to emulate; it is the capitalist Han Solo. This is a trend which will increase now that Star Wars is socially cool—altruism is out, capitalism is in.

That capitalist philosophy has spilled over into the X-wing game as the designers were careful not to weaken the message when designing the Han Solo game card. If played right, a “Fat Han” build can take being shot by opponents while dealing consistent damage during an entire match. It’s a very capitalist build and I think that the hatred for the build early in the game meta can be traced back to the fact that so many people are trained from their educations to hate capitalism. But—the meta of the game has moved by need of competition to utilize “Fat Han” builds just as the new Star Wars films and television shows soon will do the same on an epic level under Disney’s care. They know there in the hallowed halls of “Mouse Town” that capitalism is the key to social order and I could see that emergence as far back as the release of that Han Solo shirt featured at Hollywood Studios. We’re all in it to win, we’re all in it for the money—and that is why “Fat Han” builds have risen to popularity and why capitalism will emerge triumphant from 2020 to 2030 in ways that have never been seen before.image

I’m so sure of it that I’d bet everything I have. With the same assurance that I built a “Fat Han” build in X-wing Miniatures during a time when it was considered too novice-like to even think of bringing it to a tournament—I can see that capitalism will crush socialism under the care of the Disney handling of the Star Wars franchise. Some people may bellyache and complain, but the trend is already emerging. I can see it as plain as a sun in the noon day sky on a cloudless day around the equator. It’s so bright that it burns. Meanwhile, I have to change my tactics to stay competitive. “Fat Han” will no longer work because everyone is using it. So my new build is something I’m called “Dashing Han” which is more akin to how the Falcon actually flew with Han Solo at the controls. It is very difficult to fly, but should provide an advantage that will last a while. Because the name of the game is to always stay out in front of the meta.

Rich Hoffman   www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com