Category: Religion

Obama 2012 for President? The Sad Selection of People Who Think They’re Leaders

Obama announced that he is running again for the presidency of the United States. Gas prices are climbing out of control. We are in three different wars. The education system is collapsing under greedy union requirements while our children grow softer, and more progressive, and are losing the ability to think outside the box which is an American trait. The government is on the verge of a shut down while Democrats show that they are clueless in their ability to make the needed cuts to programs that feed their political base. Is it any surprise that Obama announced that his is running for office again? What other fool would want such a job that only the small-minded, unthinking, social engineer would even want?

On the below video clip Doc Thompson of 700 WLW discusses President Obama, and the union mentality that the President is committed to representing. He also discusses how the President has “punted” on the budget deficit, and how such a stand is an admission to failure. Doc covers a lot of ground in this radio spot, but the theme is that there are people who believe theft is their moral right. Obama is certainly one of those types. But surprisingly, so is Jessie Ventura, which surprised me. For a long time I thought Jessie was a freedom fighter, but it turns out that he’s one of those “justified theft” people. Listen to Doc and Jessie fight over the word…..”Compassionate.”

The Democrats don’t have a better candidate than Obama, which I consider to be a dismal reflection on the values of these mindless drones. The Republicans aren’t much better off. There aren’t too many people on that side of the aisle that could challenge Obama and his bloc voting securities, such as the immigration vote, the black vote, the women vote, the youth vote, the progressive vote, in short anybody that works for government or gets a check from government. Obama because of his skin color and the fact that he speaks, “hip talk” will get approximately 40% of the vote, because it is among those 40% that are the most weak and helpless in our society. In that 40% are the most intellectually lost, the type of individual that a guy like me might call “veal.”

I cringe each time I hear a report say that any of these people are our “leaders.” People like Obama are not leaders. They are representatives. Newt Gingrich is not a leader. Glenn Beck is not a leader. In fact, approximately half the nation doesn’t need a leader to make them safe, tell them how to think, or to wait for a check from the government. But people who want to be viewed as leaders want to give out checks so that people will become dependent on them, and that’s a terrible thing.

It really doesn’t matter to me who runs for the Presidency, because whoever sits in that chair is going to be required to get out-of-the-way. I have about had it with the mindless intrusion from such small minds who wish to impose some pathetic European rule, such as what we see in President Obama and the money of people like George Soros and his “open society.” No thanks George. Set up your new civilization in Antarctica. The penguins might enjoy your type of society. America doesn’t need people like that to hold back its ambitions. So my thoughts about Obama’s candidacy are that if he wants the job, if he wants to take the beating of that position, have at it. Because the royalty of that position is going out of style fast, and by 2016 the nation will have moved much further to the right and government will shrink by a lot, and if Obama wants that to be a part of his legacy, that a big government president scared the nation to reject progressive ideas, then I welcome his announcement with open arms.

But I’d rather vote for this guy.

Rich Hoffman

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

Darryl Parks Calls them Veal: The people that pave the path to socialism

Darryl Parks of 700 WLW had an interesting topic on his Saturday April 2nd, 2011 radio show. His question was, “Why is socialism bad?” After all, he argued, people seem to want it. They want social security, they want public unions, they want health care, government jobs, they want to be regulated by government for “safety,” etc. And he’s right, at least for half the country.

I was on the Big One with Darryl to offer my opinion:

I was going for a big topic there on a 7 minute radio spot, but I liked the question and the eventual debate that followed. I meant it when I said that I do not play the lottery, ever, because I wouldn’t want to come into any money that way. I would not keep money given to me in an inheritance either, or any other random act. In fact, once when my wife and I were at a casino cruise in Cape Canaveral, I spent .25 cents on a slot machine and lost my money. I was extremely upset so I spent .25 cents on one more try. I won back .50 cents and my wife and I spent the rest of the cruise eating from the buffet and watching sea gulls fly next to the ship while reading a book, happy I made my money back and was leaving with what I started with. I was done with gambling for the rest of my life. I simply will not gamble away anything loosely that I earned with my hard work for the fantasy of hitting some kind of collective jackpot. I don’t even do office pools for the same reason, which people think is strange because such things are very popular.

Why do I feel that way? Well, for the same reason I don’t accept help from people unless I can return the favor immediately with my work or mind. The reason is simple, because in my life, when I have to define it to future generations what I am, it will never be said that Rich Hoffman was bought and paid for. It will never be said that I kissed any ass to get my way through life. It can never be said that I didn’t earn every single dime I ever made with complete honesty. For everything its worth, to me, the highest goal a man can achieve is to be a self-made-man.

People will and have said that such a position is selfish. That taking such a stand deprives people of helping you. That it takes a village to make the world go round. Well……..no it doesn’t, it takes a bit of genius to come up with unique ideas, and people who are willing to do the work of bringing those ideas to life.

If I were to win the lottery I would have been robbed of the opportunity to earn the money with my skills and tenacity. It would be like winning a football game without the other team ever showing up and the score keeper just putting some points on the board, and you automatically win. For me, the fun is in beating an opponent, to taste the blood in my mouth from a hard-fought battle, to sweat droplets from my forehead in the hot sun, or to work late into the night to outsmart a competitor. If someone just handed me a check and said, “you win, the fight is over,” I’d feel deprived of a true victory.

I understand that my way of thinking is “old fashioned,” and probably is a complete foreign concept with today’s youth. Socialism is a big part of their life, and it starts in school when they are taught that nobody is better than anybody else. Everyone is the same. Except athletes and straight “A” students that can help a school system get funding from the community by putting those students on a pedestal. But for the most part, our youth is taught that it’s bad to excel. It’s bad to be the “best.” It’s bad to be strong, faster, or more creative.

Our government created millions of welfare recipients that have put out the lights of ambition in many people. When someone is given something, and they don’t earn it by giving back something of equal value, they are robbed of their merit. This might bother them at first, but once they accept the lack of merit they lose their ambition, and this is the cause of massive failure in the welfare system.

I once attended a trade show in Chicago’s McCormick Center for one of my products. I drove up from Cincinnati and was appalled that there were so many toll booths on the way into the city. Counting all the cars going through the booths, it was obvious that Chicago was ripping people off by generating enormous sums of money with the tool booths. So on the way back home after the trade show was over, I drove back through South Chicago and was stunned by how poor it was. My plan was to avoid the toll booths and get back on the highway far to the south. I drove through miles and miles and miles of slums and getting back on the highway that was built over the slums was nearly impossible. It seemed as if the slums were desired by the city of Chicago in order to keep everyone on the toll highway, and discourage what I was doing, by driving through a crime riddled neighborhoods to leave the city.

I looked at angry faces at every stop sign at every block. I had a few arguments with men and boys that shouted racist slurs at me and I expected at any moment to have a gun fight right in the street. It was obvious to me that the good intentions of socialism as implemented in the welfare system was a massive failure, and I felt sorry for the people I was seeing. I knew that if I could have a few of those angry young boys for a few weekends, and take them on a camping trip and teach them to value themselves, I could probably help some of them a little, because what was missing was a sense of value in their lives. They had learned and accepted to live off the government, and had lost their ambition. They had lost their merit. It is no wonder they turned to crime, trying to steal back from society what was robbed from them, which is their honor. The crime began with our government “helping them.”

Anytime you make someone dependent on you, a crime has been committed because you have stolen from them some merit.

This is why when people who have lost their merit, or never had it to begin with because their parents didn’t provide them with a sense of value, and they inherit money, or win the lottery, they go broke in just a few years. The money does not make them better people. Money cannot buy merit, or honor. Money is only as good as the people who hold it. Social problems cannot be fixed by throwing money at those problems.

The same thing happens when an owner of a business works hard to build that business, and then passes it on to his kids later in life, only to have the kids screw it up. The kids don’t work the business the same because they didn’t earn it.

This is my primary problem with the whole teacher salary issue. I would argue that a few teachers may be worth 70K or 80K per year, but because of the socialist tendencies of the teachers unions, all teachers with tenure, and certain degrees make the same “step increases,” so they all make that kind of money. That’s an insane idea. All it does is drive up the labor costs for the district! That’s why the S.B.5 Bill that Governor Kasich signed recently was so important, because it will allow school boards to stop that terrible imposition of their budgets. Money does not make a good teacher, just like it doesn’t make a good person. You may pay a good teacher not to leave you because of their merit, which makes you value them over others because what they bring to the table is valuable. But to pay everyone incremental amounts of money is built along the same lines as a lottery. You’re giving people something they don’t deserve. They are just getting money because they filled legal qualifications. Not because they fought hard and earned it in competition with others.

Speaking of Governor Kasich you can tell a lot about people when they are “tested.” Here is a great video from a couple of years ago with Bill Cunningham and John Kasich talking about what should be done to regain the principles of American value. It’s ironic that Cunningham seems poised to question the integrity of Kasich. “What kind of governor will you be, will you be like Regan, or will you be like Taft?” So far, Kasich has lived up to what he said here. He’s playing hardball, and being tough, doing the hard things Cunningham challenged him on, where Bill Cunningham once he realized that a smaller government meant reducing the strength of public sector unions backed off recently and has turned against Kasich over S.B.5. Cunningham has begun the movement to undo the bill encouraging a referendum as fast as Kasich signed it. This is the difference between “talking tough,” and being ”tough.”

Kasich is a self-made man, and he governs that way. Willie did work for the public sector, so he cannot see the socialist tendencies present, because he accepted them in his past. He can justify them, but cannot speak against them now, even when it’s the right thing to do.

There have been plenty of warnings about what socialism will do to people who embrace it. If you haven’t seen it, here is a version of George Orwell’s, Animal Farm. The British animation firm of John Halas and Joy Batchelor perform yeoman service in adapting George Orwell’s allegorical novel Animal Farm to the screen. As any high-school English student can tell you, the original 1945 novel was Orwell’s spin on the rise and fall of the Communist myth. A group of intelligent animals overthrow their corrupt human owner and set up their own self-sustained farm, predicated on an idealistic credo: “All Animals are Created Equal”, “No Animal Shall Ever Drink Liquor”, “Four Legs Good: Two Legs Bad” etc. But when Snowball the Pig (read: Trotsky) is overthrown by the despotic Napoleon (read: Stalin), all idealism goes out the window, and soon the pigs are ruling dictatorially over the other animals. Before long, Animal Farm operates on but one principle: “All Animals Are Created Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others.” Orwell’s ironic ending, in which it becomes impossible to tell the difference between the Pigs and the Humans, is blunted in favor of a grafted-on happy ending, perhaps to mollify the kiddie trade. Maurice Denham supplies all the character’s voices, while Gordon Heath serves as narrator.

The warning signs have always been there for us in literature, whether it’s from George Orwell, or Ayn Rand, the analysis on socialism as been conducted.

Socialism is a disease that robs society of ambition and takes us down only one path, our eventual destruction.

But there are those in government who use the excuse to “help” people in order to place themselves in the managing role, so their support is simply a power grab built on the backs of slaves. They will exploit millions of people’s integrity in order to feed their own egos for power. That’s why socialism will never work.

And before anybody says that my thoughts are part of a well-funded conspiracy from the right-wing, Glenn Beck, Ayn Rand, Rush Limbaugh, or Fox News in general, or even talk radio like WLW, guess again, because the Hollywood left is programming socialism into our kids at every entry point, entertainment, education, music, and there is a lot of money in the push for socialism. The conservative push back to the right is being done because of the years and years of propaganda from the left while we weren’t paying attention. That’s why they’re so mad at the Tea Party movement. Socialists don’t want to see the nation swing back away from what they worked so hard to penetrate our culture with by way of influence.

Here’s just one example from the Comedy Central cartoon South Park. Guess popular culture doesn’t want young people to read Atlas Shrugged……………..why do you think that is?

Here is Ayn Rand arguing against socialism and President Obama promoting it.

Socialism is a terrible concept which leads to all out communism and the eventual destruction of the culture that embodies it. If you don’t want to hear me yell about it on WLW, or Glenn Beck yell about it on Fox News, or Milton Freeman lecture about it try Ayn Rand from 1961. Ayn was a little girl when socialism took over her country of Russia and she dedicated her life to combating the disease of socialism because she had seen firsthand what it did to her home country. She fled to the United States and fell in love with skyscrapers, because such a thing could have never been built without American ingenuity and the power of individuals in a capitalist society.

Capitalism works because it allows for merit. Socialism doesn’t work because it robs people of merit. To see why just look at the high cost of education in your local community, and the blank look of our children coming out of those schools, and have the courage to ask the hard question……..why did I surrender our children to a blank, meritless life of socialism?

And why did I buy that lottery ticket hoping to escape the perils of life by wimping out when times are tough. Money won’t make a person better if they lack merit to begin with. And people with merit will find that money isn’t that difficult to obtain, because the world lacks people with true merit.

Darryl Parks is right when he says that only the weak, veal type people in our society are attracted to socialism. Let’s just hope that the weak don’t outnumber the strong, because that’s when freedom dies forever. And socialism knows it. So long as the welfare system expands, so long as government continues to be a primary employer, so long as public sector unions exist, the weak will continue to put representatives into our republic that will slowly convert our society into socialism.

How do we get more people strong in our society, so we can get the country moving back toward capitalism? You have to stop pandering to people. Stop coddling that child every time they bump their head. Stop dressing your kids in elbow pads and knee pads. Stop trying to breast feed your kids even when they are 16 to 17 years old. In fact, this is the path of socialism, watch this clip of Hugh Jackman zip lining into the Sydney Opera House. I think Jackman did well. He came in too fast, but so what. He was able to make his transfer to his rappel line. But look at the women’s reactions here.


All those girls and women are probably going to have kids, and they’ll be the ones to pander to their children’s every whims, and nobody will attempt to toughen up those kids creating a society of……..as Darryl calls them………………………….veal.

Veal is good for only one thing, to be eaten. And you can’t build a country on people like that and expect it to stay strong for long. That’s when socialism takes over.

Rich Hoffman

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

S.B.5 Passes: The “GOOD” of Money! What’s missing in our culture.

Congratulations to all those who passed Senate Bill 5 late in the night on Wednesday March 30, 2011. Your good work will always be remembered.


To the foolish looter’s……………there is only one passage I know from all of literature to describe my anger at your short-sighted rhetoric and I will quote it after these two statements I read in the paper. Among that rhetoric, is the belief that money is somehow free and easy to get, and that only the greedy rich are sitting on piles of money, that if removed could be taken by all and shared. People who believe such things have no idea what the “good of money” even means. So I will draw from literature to provide a definition that every American should be required to read in high school. That quote is listed below.


But first, meet a couple of looters, as described in the literature quote.

• Rep. Connie Pillich, D-Montgomery, said: “I am disappointed that my colleagues across the aisle voted against having the bill read in its entirety…. It undercuts veterans and attacks the middle class. It is unconstitutional and is public policy at its worst.”

• Rep. Denise Driehaus, D-West Price Hill, said, “As a Catholic, I strongly believe we have an obligation to respect the dignity of all workers. We also have a duty to protect their right to organize so they are able to collectively work to ensure justice and dignity in their workplace.’’

The reality of what S.B.5 is can be seen here in this video. This is what the “education establishment,” and that includes politicians, union leaders as well as teachers and superintendents, are afraid of.

Those two representatives truly represent a portion of our society that has become everything warned about in the passage below from Ayn Rand on the good of money.

More and more, Rand’s work comes to my mind as I see what is going on in the world around us. When you ask the obvious question, “Why are people so foolish,” only literature provides an explanation. Not TV. Not music or any popular form of entertainment. No Hollywood actor or politician, nobody has any real answers. Only Literature, because in literature, the proper amount of time is given to an idea, and the blank page is there to hear it. And in Ayn Rand’s case, time has proven her 100% correct in all aspects over half a century.

To quote the passage, the following comes from a character in Atlas Shrugged who is at a wedding party attended by very powerful people. The speech is given when questioned about the evil of money, and those that make it.

“So you think that money is the root of all evil?” Said Francisco d” Anconia. “Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can’t exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

“When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor—your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?

“Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions—and you’ll learn that man’s mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

“But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man’s capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made—before it can be looted or mooched—made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can’t consume more than he has produced.

“To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss—the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery—that you must offer them values, not wounds—that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men’s stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade—with reason, not force, as their final arbiter—it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability—and the degree of man’s productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?

“But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality—the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.

“Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he’s evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with purpose, if he’s evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with the money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats of the frauds come flocking to him drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

“Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth—the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

“Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men’s vices or men’s stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment’s or a penny’s worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you’ll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?

“Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?

“Or did you say it’s the love of money that’s the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It’s the person who would well his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money—and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.

“Run for you life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper’s bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another—their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

“But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich—will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt—and of his life, as he deserves.

“Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard—the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money—the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals and the statues are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law—men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims—then money becomes its creator’s avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob the defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then the society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

“Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society’s virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion—when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing—when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors—when you see that men get you against them, but protect them against you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice—you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as a half-property, half-loot.

“Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men’s protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked: ‘Account overdrawn.”

“When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, ‘Who is destroying the world?’ You are.

“You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it’s crumbling around you, while you’re damning its life-blood—money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men’s history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves—slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody’s mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer. Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers—as industrialists.

“To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money—and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man’s mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being—the self-made man—the American industrialist.

If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose—because it contains all the others—the fact that they were the people who created the phrase ‘to make money.’ No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity—seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words ‘to make money’ hold the essence of human morality.

“Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters’ continents. Now the looters’ credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialist, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide—as, I think, he will.

“Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns—or dollars. Take your choice—there is no other—and your time is running out.”

Ayn Rand 1957

Feel free to print that and read it again and again and again until it makes sense. It is the state of our nation, and it speaks about the very things we must fix immediately, or we’ll lose it forever. With all that said, S.B.5 will take these steps to begin the march back to a system of value, where looters and moochers no longer establish the precedents of financial flow.

What Senate Bill 5 will do:
• Makes public employee strikes illegal.

• Generally restricts the topics on which unions can bargain to wages. Police, firefighters, nurses and other public workers may still bargain for safety equipment.

• Eliminates step raises or automatic raises based on years of experience and years of training.

• Reduces seniority rights. For example, it would prohibit workers from being laid off solely because they are new.

• Bans “fair share’’ fee charged by unions for bargaining-unit members who don’t join the union or pay dues but receive negotiated pay and benefits.

• Eliminates automatic union deductions for political campaigns without employee’s written consent.

It will be up to us now to defend this bill from those same thieves that have now for decades eroded the value we have in virtually every aspect of American life, and return to the stage of concern the true assessment of how good money truly is and what role it has in the greatness of our nation.

Rich Hoffman

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

Creators and Feeders: The blueprint to save America is at your local book store

To those that want to know the answers to everything they are right in front of you. Literature, even though considered a harbor for the liberal arts degree, thus creating just another damn hippie to cast their unproductive concepts of love and peace in a world that is quite the opposite, literature is about truth ultimately. It is in the interpretation of that truth that everything gets distorted.

This is what happened in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which I’ve proclaimed openly, is my favorite book. Zarathustra came down out of the mountains to help “mankind” understand that they can become “better” than just human beings. That’s where the Ubermensch idea comes from translated loosely into English as “the overman.” I learned about Nietzsche reading a lot of Joseph Campbell and was drawn to Nietzsche’s anti-institutional ideas in quotes that littered the massive body of work known as The Masks of God, which is a four volume set that Campbell spent many years writing based on the course he taught at Sara Lawrence College. One thing that Campbell was doing in his comparative mythology work was breaking down the differences between collective societies, such as you find in the east, and individual oriented societies that you find in the Occident, otherwise the west.

Where the west fails, and I’m thinking of Europe in this case is when they attempt to copy the east with their own culture. Somewhere in that attempt progressivism was created, and has been and will always be a disease to the creative power of the individual which propels all society.

There is a reason that you don’t find development in Africa except what the American or European mind brought to it. There is a reason that China spent many years as a stagnate country. They had periods of renaissance, one such period during our European dark ages was quite explosive, but fizzled out only to be reawakened once England handed Hong Kong back to the Chinese in 1999 which they then decided to adopt their culture around which has helped create the renaissance they are currently experiencing. But ultimately collectivism, especially progressivism, is an idea killer that hinders society in terrible ways for the trade-off of social security.

Two bodies of literature jump out at me exhibiting these collectivism warnings. One is A Brave New World, the other is Atlas Shrugged.

I wrote my own book, The Symposium of Justice in 2004, many years before I eventually read Atlas Shrugged myself. I was surprised that Ayn Rand had created similar characters and themes as I did, and she did it over 50 years ago. It might have something to do with the fact that we both studied Nietzsche at some length. I’m thinking particularly of the diner scene, which seemed awfully close to something I did without knowledge of Ayn’s work. The reason? Because truth is truth. There aren’t these degrees of negotiation along some political lines where there are extreme right-winged views or extreme left-winged views and somehow in government these views must be compromised into some stew of thought representing everyone as best as possible. People who seek the truth and find it, come to similar conclusions that cannot be escaped.

Because of my kids, I get to meet a lot of young people, and I must say they are a very disappointing group, bent and distorted around years of progressive thought. I blame progressivism for their foolish behavior, the desire to get “trashed” as they put it, where their right of passage to adulthood is the ability to drink and lose consciousness. That is a pathetic goal. These young people are a soft species robbed of honor because they have been taught to be entirely too sensitive for their own good, indecisive, insecure, raised in broken homes where step parents are a major factor, the whole situation is a mess, and progressive thought is to blame. The most recent catastrophe cast upon the fragile psyche of today’s youth is a thing called Facebook Depression. Listen to Doc Thompson of 700 WLW talk about this mysterious new progressive illness here.

One young boy that my youngest daughter knows lost his job for sleeping and playing on Facebook during his work hours. The kid is a video game wiz so I know there is intelligence there. But he can’t handle basics of reality. For him, it is acceptable to fall off the horse and let the horse keep on running down the path leaving him behind. I feel sorry for the kid because his fundamental belief system will prevent him from seeing the truth of the reasons he continues to fail. You could sit the kid down and scream at him and it would be no different from yelling at a dog that wants to please you, but can only wag its tail or drop its ears, completely unable to understand what you’re trying to tell it.

This kid is just a product of progressivism. I don’t blame him as much as I feel pity, much like I feel pity of an insect that falls into a swimming pool and struggles to free itself, hoping a kind hand lifts it from the water before it drowns. There are millions upon millions of these kids functioning in the world today, most of them completely lost by adults that are just as lost. This is the result of progressivism. Progressives seek a level of fairness that is not earned, but is perceived as a right, which it’s not.

The world is built by people who produce. It is very simple. There is no room for interpretation or negotiation on that simple fact. There are those who create. Then there are those that feed off that creation. The trouble always occurs when those that feed off creation take too much, or stand in the way of that creation. And the problem with modern society is that we don’t create enough, and those that do create keep it to themselves so they can avoid the problems with progressive thought.

Ayn Rand’s book has been out there for everyone to read for a great number of years. There is no reason to reinvent the wheel here. When a congressman or senator says to the Speaker of the House, “you need to abandon the tea party,” they just don’t get it. They are as foolish as the young person I told you about that think something is going to fall out of the sky and somehow fix his life if only he drinks one more drink, or goes to school and gets a degree for a job that doesn’t exist. It is only by getting down in the mud and fighting, and creating a new job that anything happens. The tea party knows what Ayn Rand knew 50 years ago, that progressive thought will kill your country.

She wrote Atlas Shrugged at a time that socialism hadn’t failed yet. In fact, there was a real threat that the Soviet Union might overtake the United States and its capitalist ways. When Ronald Reagan took the gloves off for a bit in the 80’s, we saw how rapidly capitalism could work, and how quickly socialism failed. Reagan’s strategy worked and proved Ayn Rand correct. Now, in hind-sight we have the benefit to go back to her work and admire how she arrived at truthful conclusions that are truly American in their context. The critics talk about the 80’s as a selfish age, which ironically is explored in great detail in Atlas Shrugged from all angles. Selfish or terms like it are cast from those in the progressive camp, from their distorted perspective corrupted by a sense of entitled fairness which does not exist anywhere in the universe because the laws of physics prohibit such a preposterous notion.

One element in that book that haunts me is the discovery of a new type of engine built by a genius that turns his back on the world in a way because he knows that the world as it is designed through progressive thought will reject new ideas because all new ideas threaten the security of people. This engine runs off strictly static electricity. It would never need fuel, oil or any other element. It would run along the same premise that lightning is generated in the atmosphere. The sickening thing about that bit of science fiction is that it is rooted in fact.

I’ve told you on these pages about regenerative medicine. I’ve told you about the Skycar. There are many, many inventions sitting on the shelf right now, that are being held back from society for all the reasons that progressivism fails, and that failure is outlined beautifully in the book Atlas Shrugged.

If you haven’t read it and you want to know the truth of what is going on in the world. If you want to understand why the welfare system fails, why government regulation is bad, and how the feeders in life, called “the looters” in the book are destructive read that book. Forget the mindless politicians. They are looters, every one of them. We must have some level of government in this country, but we don’t need it to be nearly as large as it is now.

It is true that there will be suffering. Those that are feeders off society will have a difficult time adapting, but this process must happen. It is not a matter of right or left. It is literally right or wrong.

Nature does not lie. The reason progressives believe that the earth is so vulnerable is because at their true nature, their mentality, they believe that they can change the world. They can engineer thought. They can engineer control of the whole world. But with nature, it is survival of the fittest. Progressives seek to change that. The reason, well not everyone can be the fittest, so in the pursuit of fairness the strong are attacked, and the strong are what everyone feeds off of. If you bring down the strong, there is nothing for anybody to feed off of. And government, especially a large, progressive government that is extremely expensive is that there are too many people feeding off the strong and society will crumble.

The key is that if you want to be a feeder, or a “looter,” then find yourself a creator that is a fair-minded person that appreciates your labor, because through competition, the creator in order to get a competitive edge over other creators will adapt to necessity, just as a stream will always run downhill and find the path of least resistance. If you want the benefit of that flow, put yourself in that path of least resistance and you’ll always be employed and of a benefit to a creator. And if you are a creator, create. Don’t attempt to be a feeder if you are a creator. You will only frustrate the hell out of yourself.

Every single politician in existence is a feeder. They are almost completely worthless. Yet they believe that they have some kind of dominion over everything that is created. And that is what needs to change. This is a belief given to us from Europe, which is a corrupt notion. It hasn’t worked for them, and it won’t work for us.

If you want to know how to do that, understand what needs to be done or how to fix what’s wrong with America and you want the truth go to your local book store and read Atlas Shrugged. The movie will be out soon also. But if you really want to soak up something that won’t lie to you, go get that book! Today! Then watch the news armed with the truth and see what you think about comments over the federal budget and what we can cut or should cut.

The cost if you don’t take a step to understand the truth, as a taxpayer, is that we will find ourselves in the situation that London found itself over the weekend, which is ridiculous and pathetic, headed up by people like the kid I described above, someone who thinks they are entitled to a good life and everything will magically fall in their lap without them doing anything to create that reality. Because they believe the great lie of progressive thought, which is an audacious naïveté of human influence seeking to alter the behavior of nature itself.

Literature, especially literature that has stood the test of time, will cast light where the darkness of progressivism resides like termites deep in the foundations of our existence. Figure out who you are and be it. That’s the first step because we’re not all equal in the world of Mother Nature and never will be.

If there is a book that can give America a blueprint on how to rebuild the country, it’s Atlas Shrugged. Read it word for word and understand it sentence by sentence.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

The Presidential Fool: The Office of Barack Obama

One thing regarding authority is that most of the time the people who end up in positions of authority are addicted to the power that comes from it and become corrupt in some way or another. There are people who are good at authority, and leadership, and there are people who are inclined to follow. So it is difficult to distinguish between competencies at a leadership level when most of the focus of authority is to obtain it. The specific skills of managing authority often become lost in analyses.

This is the problem with police officers. Many of the people drawn to the profession possess a deep down hunger for authority. Larger social goals are used as the mask for their agenda, but the face behind the mask is one yearning for authority. Since human beings are a group of people who are comfortable being compliant to the laws they create for themselves, police officers regardless of their qualifications are looked upon with respect because they are symbols of authority. But this is a defective strategy of figuring out who in our society is actually capable of handling the kind of authority that police officers have access to, because there are corrupt measures that enter into the equation. Some of those measures and examples of the problem with blind acceptance of authority can be heard in this report from Doc Thompson on 700 WLW.

With all that in mind I thought about what President Obama said about Gaddafi over the weekend by saying that “Gaddafi needs to step down. He has lost the confidence of his people who means he should turn over power.” Well, Obama has lost the confidence of his people, at least a majority of them. Doesn’t that mean he should step down too?

 

 

The question doesn’t get out because as American’s we accept blind authority. President Obama is considered American royalty so people aren’t comfortable breaking down the performance of a president too deeply, so the analysis either gets explored by radicals that distort the information, or it doesn’t get considered at all. I don’t have such a problem. So I’ll ask the question. Obama is a socialist even if he doesn’t call it that and America is supposed to be a capitalist nation. He is openly working with union leaders that want to overthrow the capitalist nature of America. That’s the first problem. The second is that he worked with congress to pass Obama Care with no regard for the Constitution he is sworn to protect. He and his staff figured they’d circumvent the system using the famous “commerce clause,” and “supremacy clause” which is just manipulation of the legal intent hoping that nobody with half a mind challenges them in court. Their intention was to get enough people addicted to Obama Care, as what has happened with Social Security that public opinion would affect the eventual Supreme Court ruling that will be coming in the years to come. Obama has openly worked with other subversive groups, such as the Net Neutrality issue, and the Department of Justice has become a complete joke under the Presidents administration. That’s just in two years.

But worse of all, in my view, was his “vacation” to Brazil during a time of crises. Anybody with half a management mind knows that leadership sometimes means changing your plans. I’ve done it when bad things happen where I work; I changed my plans to show leadership and support for the people who work for me. But Obama doesn’t have ANY management experience, not even of a video store, and it’s clear he doesn’t understand these basics. Instead he goes to socialist leaning countries and coddles with their leaders then declares war while on the road in a tent saying that the “World Community” supports it. He’s clearly a President that is over his head. He is slow to make decisions because he waits for someone to tell him what to think. He is a nightmare of leadership and because of our respect for authority, we’re stuck with him. If he had went to congress and said, let’s get rid of Gaddafi and save those rebels that are being brutally killed, most of congress would have signed up. It’s not decisive action that’s the problem here. It’s the hesitation for weeks, then the sudden boldness while on foreign soil that’s the problem. He behaves like a king and America does not want a European king. And for me, I want very little identification with Europe at all.

Obama should step down out of office and admit that he’s not “the guy.” It’s time for us all to admit that we hurriedly elected him because of his skin color so we could prove to the world that we were not a racist country, which we’re not. We have the most diversity of ANYONE in the world. Nobody even comes close to our cultural diversity in a nation, so criticism is not permitted. It was in our lack of confidence in ourselves that we put an inept president into office that is simply a puppet to socialist interests. There is no question to that now. Anyone that argues it doesn’t know anything about history or definitions.

I used to be ashamed of Bill Clinton and couldn’t imagine a worse president, but at least he had been a governor and knew some basic management skills.

I’m not crazy about either of the Bush’s. I think they wanted to be president for too many of the wrong reasons. The first clue that you have a bad president is that if a man gets a surge of power just by sitting in a chair, he’s the wrong guy. A president should not be enamored by power of any kind. In fact, the office of the president should be a step down to what they’ve accomplished in their private lives. The popular myth is that it’s the most powerful position in the world, but it’s really not. Ronald Reagan breezed through his presidency just on his ability to act and a single-minded ability to believe he was right and on the side of God. There are many, many, many more people in our nation more qualified for the presidency than Reagan was, but he could speak well. So he goes down in history as one of the greatest presidents in American history. His greatest gift was that he didn’t listen to everyone around him.  He knew what he wanted to do and he did it, which makes him distinctly American.  American’s are not naturally collaborative.  I know that might bust the bubble of many that think very highly of Ronald Reagan, but those are the facts.

My favorite president in recent history is Calvin Collage. That’s my idea of a manager president. Everyone else has fallen short, and that covers the entire span of the 20th century. Teddy Roosevelt was my next pick for a great president, but he became too much of a monarch lover by the end of his presidency and had the fatal flaw of craving power. He could not turn away from the power, so much so that he became a progressive in order to run against his friend President Taft. Many of the presidents have done their share of good things, but not enough. Not what we should expect out of an American president.

But Obama, he’s an absolute joke. He does not represent me as an American. I mean look at his website. What are we supposed to be “fired up” about? What change? And what are we organizing? He’s the president. His message is one for children in school and people without wit to know better.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/ofasplashflag/

If he believes Gaddafi should step down in Libya because he’s lost the confidence of the majority of the people, which I agree with him on that point, then Obama should step down voluntarily and admit that the job of the presidency is too big for him. Maybe he could try again in a few years after he works as a manager of a McDonalds and gets some experience under his belt. Because he is an absolute embarrassment that makes me look at the decadent days of Bill Clinton with yearning. The only reason he wouldn’t do it is because he’s in love with his authority, no different from the cop that flunks his test and doesn’t belong on the force because he’s not smart enough to be a cop. This President isn’t qualified to be a president. And the people of America respect authority too much to admit it to themselves.

Rich Hoffman

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

The 53% Against the 47%: A Lesson in Leadership

Kasich’s approval rating is at 40 percent just two months into his tenure as governor of Ohio. Doc Thompson was critical of Kasich’s marketing of himself and the confusing messages coming from the governor’s office. Doc also discusses the West Chester Police and Fire Department wages from the article at this site. The overall consensus is that expectation among all federal workers, from the governor all the way to the desk worker expects too much compensation from the tax payer, and many are guilty of taking advantage of the bureaucracy in government to make very good jobs for themselves. Listen to broadcast here.

I’m actually amazed that Kasich’s approval rating is as high as 40 percent considering how bold he has been on many of his policies. There is no question that Kasich’s budget is going to be painful for many people. I would have to say that if I were governor, I probably wouldn’t do things much different from Kasich is doing. I personally wouldn’t think too much on the pain of the moment, because what’s right is right. It’s not Kasich’s fault that so many people have become addicted to public money. It’s like taking the bottle away from an alcoholic while they are trying to get drunk. Of course the drunk will be upset, and they usually protest that they are not alcoholics. I’d probably hire people to serve under me at good business wages so I could get the best people and not the typical “kiss ass” political climbers, I’d probably want to control the video of my presentations so they couldn’t be used against me in the future, and I’d probably be caught numerous times calling police that pulled me over, “idiots” because it would make me angry. I’m a very aggressive guy and I keep my eyes on the end result, and I see in Kasich the same traits.

Now people aren’t used to that. They are used to wishy-washy politicians that spend their own political careers not displaying any real courage. They carefully watch the poll numbers and can be moved from a position within days of stating something, depending on the power of the lobbyist.

I would say that Kasich understands like many people who are in leadership positions that a vast majority of any given group will be lost no matter how much you try to explain it. And those types of people don’t like to waste time explaining their vision to people who won’t get it anyway.

Is that the best way to present material, of course not. But it is a symptom of real leadership. Kasich knows that approximately 53% of all people in America have some leadership ability or at least the ability to grapple with difficult issues. They can see where the headlights are pointed and what’s in the light of the headlights, and they get it. 46% of all Americans can’t even see the headlights without glasses. They need assistance, and these are the people who have a tendency to be attracted to public sector jobs, unions, and welfare. No matter what you do, they won’t understand until they can look at a problem in hind-sight.

It was reported that Kasich’s approval rating is below the levels enjoyed by the last three governors when they were in their start of their administrations. The Ohio Poll registered 68 percent approval for Democrat Ted Strickland in May 2007, 49 percent approval for Republican Bob Taft in March 1999 and 61 percent approval for Republican George Voinovich in February 1991. The reason for this is because those governors spent much of their time pandering to the 47% and therefore accomplished very little as leaders. They mistakenly assume that the 53% will always be there for them, which is unfair because the 53% get overlooked as they are the good citizens that work hard to support the nation. Unfortunately the squeaky wheel does get the grease, and those squeaky wheels are that 47%.

People aren’t used to a governor that has a reversed position and targets his governorship at the 53% that understand, even if they don’t agree. It appears that Kasich isn’t the only governor showing these tendencies. Scott Walker certainly appears to be the same way.

Now of that 53%, there is no doubt that those are the people who are usually on the fence on any given issue, and the number in Ohio appears to be about 13%, which are finding themselves affected by all the negative press surrounding S.B.5. That’s where the 40% comes from.

In the end, when the policies Kasich enacts solves many of the budget problems that Ohio finds itself in, it just might become the model that the greater nation will want to follow. But Kasich really doesn’t appear to be interested in opinion. You know the old adage, “opinions are like assholes, everyone has them.” A leader has to do what they know is right because they have the ability to see beyond the headlights flashing in the darkness. Their fault is that they don’t care to explain themselves to the 47%. Those people will never be happy anyway. But they will jump on the bandwagon when better times come along.

Kasich deserves an elevation of his man card if anything, for doing what many only talk about. He is doing what leaders do, they lead.

Rich Hoffman

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

The Sheep and the Lion: How much is public education worth?

There is a term called “going down the rabbit hole” that is used to understand abstract and deep concepts. Depending on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go can determine your resolve for understanding a problem. This article is a “big picture” view of going down a rabbit hole more than some people are willing to go in regard to public education and the value it has for society.

The following radio broadcast from Doc Thompson is very good, and comfortably sits on the edge of that rabbit hole, where even this much people are unwilling to go. But I offer it as an alternative to the text that follows. Or I offer it to help the rest of the text go down more easily. But beware, if you want to maintain any illusions about education, then turn away from this page immediately. I talk about some of my personal experiences again, partly because there has been much speculation. But the opinions will not be comfortable for the reader wanting to continue “not seeing.”

The first thing that teachers assume of school reformers is that they must not have done very well in school, or that they had a hard time in college, or that they are simply social outcasts that have some vendetta against public education. What they fail to consider, because such a thought is outside of their “bubble” of experience is that there is a portion of society that think for themselves and have seen the scam for what it is, deciding to not take part in the whole process.

In my case, I decided long ago that the system didn’t work. It never worked for me because I’ve never been happy in a follower position. I’ve always questioned authority, my entire life. In fact, in kindergarten, I missed several of my recesses for arguing with the teachers. It became apparent to me early on that education wasn’t so much about learning arithmetic, language, and art, as it was about learning how to take direction.

I have had great success in life by being a leader. To date, the only thing I’ve received from family, friends or “others” is a workbench vice I inherited from my grandfather when he died. Money, or money gained from property sales passed down through my family have never found their way to me, and on purpose. I resist any relationships where I take a passive role and where a gift can be used as leverage against me down the road.

Now to many people who may seem extreme. However, if you want freedom, you must have freedom of such predatory relationships. And, unfortunately teachers, by design, form a predatory relationship with their students the way the system is currently set up.

When I was younger, I will admit that there was a blood bath that followed in my wake. I spent a lot of time in court, in fights with other students, and in general trouble with officials in school. Much of that trouble came simply because I refused to submit to an authority figure. That’s it. I never looked for trouble. I just didn’t like authority figures and since socially, submission of some kind to authority is required, I was in for a constant barrage of trouble which found me.

It has never occurred to me that I was in the wrong for taking this position. It doesn’t take a brilliant mind to sit in one of the many parties that I attended and see the failure of public education. Many of the kids back then when speaking of Pink Floyd would proclaim, “Man, you have to be wasted to understand The Wall.” At those parties stoned classmates would watch MTV with awe as “We Don’t Need No Education” played displaying a bunch of kids being processed in a factory, faceless and being cast into a meat grinder. Such a metaphor was very similar to my own thoughts, but I never did drugs and I certainly wasn’t wasted. I went to parties back then to pick up girls that were, but I did not partake in that behavior.

If you want to understand a culture, study its music, and you will learn a lot.

You would think that many parents would have wanted their kids to spend their time with me. After all, I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke, I didn’t use curse words, I helped people when I could, I was polite and well spoken. But I was also defiant, inquisitive, and perpetually skeptical. In fact there were two rules that people riding in my car had to live with when I was 16.  (And note that I did not have a shortage of people wanting to spend time with me.  It was the parents that didn’t want their kids around me.)  First, there was no smoking allowed. Second, we would not play Pink Floyd on my car stereo, because I understood the stuff all too well and thought it was depressing to meditate on such things, where many of the youth back then did. One of my best friends back then was told by his mother and father to stay away from Rich Hoffman. He’s not the kind of kid I want you to be friends with.

His mother’s preferences were the drug induced kids from the neighborhood, whose parents she knew. My friend became addicted to drugs and was lost eventually, but not because he was friends with me. If he had been friends with me, he wouldn’t have done drugs, or stolen from people. He wouldn’t have contracted a variety of STD’s and probably would have entered adulthood with his head on straight.

My head has always been on straight, even when authority figures wanted me to believe otherwise.

The next question that arrives is that why would authority figures wish to convince a person that they are in need of care. The answer to that is easy. Authority figures are perpetually in need of justifying their existence. Since their lives and careers are embedded in the lives of others, they are terribly insecure of people who don’t need them.

College wasn’t any different. When I was there, young people were more interested in the social aspects of college life than the scholastic and the whole thing seemed like a money pit to me. Professors were seeking to drag out studies that could be done in weeks into events that went on for months so they could charge $10 per credit hour or more. The charge alone for books was an obvious scam. That’s how it appeared to me, and I still feel that way.

I’ve lived a life full of education, but also free of authority figures. And I’ve had success in life when I became old enough to be sought after as a leader, because that is my natural impulse. I don’t wake up in the morning looking for power or influence. But when I’m in a collaborative effort with others, I am only comfortable in a leadership role. That’s my nature and I understand it.

So I understand the frustration people who have committed, and submitted their lives to such things as to my motives and their speculation of my back ground. The idea of cutting all ties into their lives that are corrosive and manipulative is a completely foreign concept to them and something they cannot fathom.

Even knowing that the public education system was seriously flawed, I sent my kids anyway. My wife always liked school, until she met me, and she felt our children should have school in their lives. I argued that the kids could learn faster if they took a more independent route, but I listened to her opinion on the matter. The result, my kids breezed through school. I taught them not to take the whole thing too serious and not to submit to any authority and they navigated through the experience very well without all the pitfalls that most kids go through regarding peer pressure and social-climbing.

The reason for this explanation is that there is a story in mythology that I learned a long time ago that I think about a lot. It goes something like this; a lion was separated from his parents and was discovered by a herd of sheep. The sheep took the lion in and raised it for many years.

The lion grew to full size and was roaming around in the herd with the other sheep where a pack of lions hunting the sheep saw the lion and called him over whispering.  “Hey, what are you doing? You’re roaming around with the sheep.”

All the Sheep trained Lion could say was, “Baaaaahaaahaaa.” Because his instruction came from the sheep all his life, he didn’t know any better.

The lions took the Sheep/Lion to the river and said, “Look at your reflection. You’re one of us. You’re not a sheep. You’re supposed to eat those creatures.”

The story goes on where the Sheep/Lion rediscovers his true identity and becomes in the end what he was meant to be.

Human beings are no different. We all are lions in sheep’s clothing. It’s a cultural phenomenon indicative of authoritarian culture created when humans moved from a nomad society to an agricultural society. Europe and all its problems are derived from attempting to maintain human beings in an agricultural society, including their attempt at education.

Those that settled the United States left that behavior behind in Europe in favor of a Lion’s life in the New World and it was so important to them that they’d risk their life to have it.

My oldest daughter and I had a long talk under the stars till about 3 AM one night a few years ago and she asked me what she was supposed to do with all the stuff I taught her. After all, it’s a fine line between enlightenment and insanity. The slopes to insanity are steep if you are not within the safety of the herd. It’s not that she questioned the truth of it, but co-existence with others becomes difficult when you insist on living awake when the people around you insist on being asleep.

I told her that most of the people who think in such a way as I do, end up going insane by their early 40’s, or they become abusers of drugs in order to maintain that reality to themselves against the current of sheep, that secretly wish the safety of the herd, so they turn to chemical abuse to numb them.

“How do you keep from going crazy?”

I smiled at her, “You have to start with being grounded to begin with. You read a lot and study other Lion’s that have lived full lives and witness how they did it. You don’t abuse alcohol or drugs or sub come to other human weaknesses. But you have to not compare yourself to the sheep around you, because relative to them, you will seem crazy. The life of a sheep and the life of a lion are completely different. The sheep grazes in the field, and travels in a pack. They mate and give birth occasionally. They run away when a predator comes near and if they live to old age, they die eventually as their bodies break away. The Loin travels in a pack when they find hunting that way more convenient, but they stay solitary animals most of the time. Like most cats, they are happiest when they are alone.”

That took the conversation into a different direction, the difference between dogs and cats.

I personally like dogs. They are always happy to see you. They are intensely loyal, even when you abuse them. Cats, they only come around when they want a lap to lay in. If they get mad at you, they’ll avoid you. They never seem to sink deep roots in their owner. They seem to choose their loyalty carefully and that loyalty leaves quickly if the relationship is strained. Those types of differences can be found in people too. Society expects dogs and the loyalty of them. But some people are just cats. We might sub consciously call those types a “cool cat.” I would make the psychological argument that what the nation is experiencing with Charlie Sheen right now is that very complex. It’s no secret that public characters like Snoop Dog, Charlie Sheen and Dennis Rodman are dear to the deep recesses of the human condition. Socially those characters are rejected, but when the doors are closed and the arms of a woman are wrapped around them, the truth is revealed.

To my observation of public education is that it fails at a fundamental level. It teaches our youth to be sheep and not lions. My view is taken in the context of philosophy, and I understand that many people in our society aren’t ready for that line of thought. They want to be sheep, and they want their kids to be sheep.

So the argument then becomes one of business. Can we afford the current form of public education? No. The way the unions have structured their contracts have turned the whole funding of education into a Ponzi scheme much like Social Security. The step increases that were negotiated require higher and higher taxes to maintain the funding, and we’ve hit the wall.

One of the benefits of being a leader type is that I don’t have the burden of appeasing any group. So I can look objectively at the situation and name the problems for what they are, because I’m not looking at any part of the problem with emotion. I already think the system is broken; I am not looking for ways to justify the behavior. And I have no illusion that by throwing more money at the situation that it will solve anything. All it does is push the wall a bit to delay the crash that’s happening. It’s hard for many people to see the wall because they don’t want to believe it’s there, because public education has become for them much more than basic education services. Sports provide the possibility of college scholarships, and school social events provide opportunities for young people to “interact” and discover themselves.

Teachers that truly believe they are the saviors of society are particularly arrogant in their thinking on this issue. But much of their work can be replaced with a computer in this new century, where the computer is ironically much more personable. I don’t say that out of a dislike of teachers, which I’ve admitted that I personally don’t like authority figures, but the idea of a solitary figure speaking to a class where the weakest link of the class sets the pace is archaic.

In truth, my dislike of public education was based on that one principle. I couldn’t stand the pace of the learning. I’m a person that enjoys doing things at a fast pace. And the classroom was always just too slow for me. Now I may be the exception, but it is apparent that it doesn’t work very well for other students either. The difference is other students were content to learn how to “game” the system, get their passing grades and move on to the next grade. Most of the time they forgot what they learned by the next semester because their goal was not to learn the material, it was to get a passing grade and advance to the next level.

When you learn to be a lion, a leader in the world, you will find that your services are always in high demand, because such people are rare when they are in great need. So career worries go away, where the sheep of the world are always concerned if the farmer will feed them, or if a predator will attempt to hunt them down and kill them, the lion doesn’t concern themselves with such matters. And thinking like a lion does not mean that I automatically support a sports team like the Cincinnati Bengals.

My favorite football team is the Tampa Bay Buccaneers so when my wife and I want to go to a football game, we fly down to Tampa to watch them play. It is more practical to me to fly 1000 miles to see a good team than to drive 20 miles to see a bad one. If I’m going to pay for the NFL experience, I’m going to enjoy it, and not just do what’s convenient. A few years ago, when we were waiting for a night game to start, we were killing some time at The International Mall, which is within walking distance to Raymond James Stadium, one of my favorite places in the world. We spent half an afternoon needlessly shopping and still had some time to kill before the gates opened, so we stopped by a very elaborate booth for Rosetta Stone Software located in the middle of the mall.

The attendant at the booth gave me a head set and computer and let my wife and I play with the foreign language software for several hours. When I finished, and we headed over to the game, I realized that the way we are currently learning foreign language and just about everything in public education is outdated. That Rosetta Stone Software had made learning much more practical and interactive, and that the only reason public school did not leap into this style of learning was because the teacher unions would stand in the way of that innovation.

They’d stand in the way because public education had become more about creating jobs than actually learning. The current focus was maintaining the system along the same fashion that education had been embarking on since schools were a one room building. The only thing that’s changed is the school became larger, but the teacher at the front of the room is the same, and it is no longer as necessary.

One of the arguments for this big system is that poor students don’t have access to computers and they need a teacher to help them, because they don’t have a family to take care of them at home. This is the way the unions sell their service now and why they insist on the current costly form of education. It has more to do with social structure and social ills, than actual educational performance, which shows in the students.

It’s easy for me to see all this because I wasn’t happy with the system to begin with. But I’m happy to pay my taxes and participate if the rest of the members of my community want it. And we do pay a lot in property taxes. But when I hear schools lie to people, and I see teacher unions manipulating the situation and attacking people for questioning their motives, then it changes the argument.

To participate in a system blindly costs money, not to mention social consequences. My view of those social consequences might be extreme to many, even though privately most people agree with me once they close their eyes at night and can read their thoughts across the backs of their eye lids. But the financial burden of the public education system needs to be broken down and restructured, and unions stand in the way of that, so that is the reason for the adversarial relationship. The more hate mail and comments I receive, the more convinced I am of the lack of merit in public education.

The intent behind the name calling, and the attempt to silence any critics are to continue to ask for more money to keep a broken system functioning. As I’ve established, I am an employer, and I’ve heard every possible justification and excuse from employees over the years that wish to convince me that they are special, and that they and only they can do a particular job. After several hundred of those statements you learn to see what truth is and what fiction is. As an employer you must have an understanding of the job you are asking people to do, otherwise you are guilty of not being able to make a proper assessment, and are 100% reliant on your employees to tell you how valuable they are. And they will try, and if you don’t know, they will take advantage of you 99% of the time.

With public education, I’ve been there and done that. I learned a lot more when I finally got out of public education because the barriers to learning were removed, and I was able to attack it at the fast pace I enjoy. I have had to provide instruction to people myself, and teach, lead and assess talent, so I understand what works and what doesn’t. And I’ve had success outside the classroom. Many of the professors and teachers that I’ve known over the years fit the description, “those that can’t do, teach,” meaning that people who can do are in the world working and producing, those who aren’t comfortable with producing stay in the safe world of academia, and they teach, or they attempt to be professional students. I have known more than a few of those types and have actually given a few of them jobs much to my frustration, because they are so timid. They tend to be the type of person that will stand at the side of a pool and stick their foot in to see how cold the water is. I’m the type that will jump in regardless of the temperature so they frustrate me to no end. But it takes all kinds of people to make the world go around, so I put up with them. The question is not whether or not those people have worth. They do somewhere. The question is are they worth six figures? No!

Public education if we look at it for what it is it’s for many people an opportunity for their kid to get a scholarship for higher education. For others it’s a day care facility, because parents are busy with their lives and don’t have anywhere to put their kids while they are at work. Let’s face it and call the situation what it is.

My goal is to see kids actually learn something. I think the whole idea needs to be turned upside down and rebuilt, because as I look around, the people functioning in the world around me are failing. The divorce rate is too high. The moral standards are too low. People’s understanding of politics is abysmal. Their understanding of geography is pathetic, some people actually don’t even know where India is! Their confidence in themselves is terrible and they pass that along to their children, which raises more insecure children. All these are social failures which to me start with a failure of public education, and more money does not solve it. We’ve poured a lot of money into the situation, and it has not worked.

It is easy to attempt to maintain the status quo by proclaiming that its critics “don’t like” education, or some other loose term. It would be expected for sheep to make vicious proclamations of the lion, because deep down inside, the sheep wish they had the courage to be lions, but they don’t. All that’s left is to hurl insults in an attempt to cover the fat life of the herd animal that just seeks more and more feed to provide nourishment to its virulent existence within the confines of the barn yard. My concern is the larger issue of actual performance as a primary concern, and secondly, of the financial stability, which is proven to be not well thought out.

The old games are no longer effective because the sheep in the barn yard have noisily protested for years and now we see that they are all fat and need to be sheered. And it is my hope that once we start doing the sheering that we will find beneath all the hair that some of those sheep are actually lions, and can return to their natural state and teach others to be lions and return the nation to what it started as, and avoid a fate of a depleted, crushed Europe full of glory from some ancient time while the future leaves it behind.

Unfortunately only leader types are able to see that far ahead. The sheep are only looking at their next meal, but the big cats, the lions lay perched in trees and look out over the savanna to what is far off and they will be the first to see what is invisible to everyone else.

Education needs reformed for more reasons than one and we will have it, because it’s what’s good for America, not just those that have built lives off it.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
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The Communist Manifesto: SEIU ATTACKS OHIO SENATORS WHILE THEY EAT!

 

Isn’t this a great quote?  Guess where it’s from, The Communist Manifesto. 

My wife and I have a secret hideaway that we like to dine at, hidden from the world and its worries.  Friday March 4th, 2011 was a glorious spring like evening complete with pouring rain, as we sat together in a cantina like setting waiting for our food to arrive.

She had been reading much about quantum mechanics and the latest theories of universal theory rejecting some of the work most recently proposed by Stephen Hawking and was discussing the topic vigorously as the aroma of our food cooking in the kitchen was overtaking our senses.  My mind however was on a discussion I heard on the radio between Bill Cunningham and Sheriff Jones earlier in the day where they were critical of Senator Jones and Governor Kasich for their aggressive support of S.B.5.   Their position is of the old Republican guard view of “gaming” the system as greedily as the Democrats over the years ever had and it is hard for some of those guys to admit it to themselves.  They are uncomfortable with this “new conservativism” and spent much of their discussion belittling the lack of political understanding of Kasich and the aggressive nature of Senator Jones, as if they hoped that they could somehow turn the tide of anger that has been building for a long time back into some manageable form. 

My mind was also on the Easy Street Café from Wednesday night where Senator Niehaus, Senator LaRose, Senator Bacon  along with several others were harassed by members of SEIU District 1199 led by Monica Moran for passage of the S.B.5 bill just hours before.   Monica stepped into that restaurant with 10 other SEIU members and began chanting at the Senators until the police had to arrive with a helicopter to whisk away the protesters. 

http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2011/03/03/union-supporters-disrupt-gop-senators-restaurant-meal.html?sid=101

The owner of the restaurant had to endure pushing and shoving until the police came, and Moran was not apologetic.  In fact she was quite defiant saying, “The moment of discomfort Senate Republicans may have felt as a result of my expressing my opinion pales in comparison to the extreme discomfort and financial hardships that public employees will endure as a result of SB5.”

My wife and I ate our own food I thought about Moran’s statement.  I have absolutely no tolerance for bullying, and I couldn’t help but wonder how anyone brought up in America couldn’t see that the public workers using such strong-arm tactics for nearly three decades have painted themselves in this corner they find themselves in.   I find it amazing that so many Republicans are weak kneed, including Cunningham and the Sheriff when it comes to taking a hard-line on this issue, insisting on more collaboration, more political procedures, and really more of the same behavior that has delivered our nation to the precipice of destruction.

When Nancy Pelosi and her Congress under the urging of President Obama, where former SEIU head Andy Stern visited the White House several times a week, pushed through the Health Care Bill, and Net Neutrality, and the bail outs, etc, there were many in America that decided that a push back was in order.  That the bullying that had been going on for a long time had gone on for too long, and it’s time to set things straight. 

Senator Jones and John Kasich are doing what many people, me included, want.  I don’t want any collaboration with the type of people who will barge into a restaurant and shout profanity at Senators in an attempt to scare them into “proper legislation.”  That kind of behavior has no place in the American landscape.  It will take the bold actions of Kasich and Senator Jones to do the job. 

Senator Niehaus had to display boldness for removing Senator Sietz who was stalling the vote under the guise of “compromise” and many other measures to undo much of the damage that has already been done by the actions and influence of SEIU and the politicians they control.  The time for negotiation is long over; it’s been a one way street against the American tax payer from the inception of Executive Order 10988 under President Kennedy in 1962.  Since then, the unions functioning with authority have behaved like an organized crime element in our society.  And if politicians don’t fall in line they are intimidated and harassed until they change their views and therefore their votes.   Monica Moran was just reading from the company handbook and her followers truly believe they are wrapped in the flag of the United States fighting for worker rights. 

After the food was done, and our drinks were drained into our bellies, our date was far from over.  Check paid, tipped placed on the table, we left our cantina and proceeded to our other favorite spot, the most romantic place on the face of the planet………the book store. 

We usually spend two or three hours picking out our supply of books for the week, and my wife was intent to find more information on her quantum mechanical theories.  So I went to one of my favorite sections, philosophy.  There wasn’t anything new, I’ve read them all.  They did have the little blue book, The Coming Insurrection in stock which I read and despised as tripe from a bunch of French fools lost in their own elitism.   I saw a copy of my favorite book from Nietzche Thus Spoke Zarathustra which Hitler would distort under the assistance of Nietzche’s power hungry sister while her brother suffered from insanity shortly after the book was completed.   There was also a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, also written by someone who suffered a major intellectual breakdown enduring electro shock treatment to “cure” him of his thoughts.  Zen was written about 5 years later.  Great book, but nothing new there for me, so I headed to the Social Science section. 

In the Social Science section, again I have read many of them.  There is of course all of the Glenn Beck books.  Wonder why they are so popular?  They are right next to all the liberal books; in fact Ed Shultz’s book was right next to Glenn’s.  There was one copy of Ed’s book with 7 of Glenn’s book Broke.  I asked the attendant if the reason was because Ed’s book was selling like “hot cakes.” 

She said, “No, we’ve had that copy since August.” 

I asked her about Glenn’s book.

“We just got those in on Monday.  Can’t keep them.” 

I took a mental note and continued to look over the titles looking for something new.  There are all the Fox people, Bill O’Rielly, the Judge, Morris, Ingraham, all of them selling well.  They must be doing something right.  I saw some liberal books, The Audacity of Hope was there, the cover was torn and looked like it had been looked through a lot, but not purchased, and had experienced another lengthy shelf life.   What becomes clear when traveling through a book store when all the covers are slickly done by professional book publishers and editors is that Americans vote with their wallet.  Once the message gets out in the world of competition the better argument will win, and people will buy that product.  People bought President Obama’s Audacity of Hope when they thought they were reading the book of American’s first black president.  Not someone who was a mouth piece to powerful union interests.  They rejected the idea and the sales have dropped off.  Compare that to Glenn Beck’s An Inconvenient Book,published in 2007, a year before Obama’s book. 

“How often do you order this book?” I asked the attendant.  I noticed there were five of them on the shelf. 

“Once a month,” she said.  “We usually order about 10 at a time. 

My wife found me in the isle and informed me she was going to be a while.  She was having a tough time with her selections. 

I told her to take her time, that there wasn’t any hurry.  As she left my eyes fell on a book of evil, one I read years ago and there it was on the shelf with a new, hip cover designed to entice young hippie impersonators, The Communist Manifesto. 

This version of The Communist Manifesto was just over a hundred pages by the time you read through the forwards and introductions.  So I stood and read the book again while I waited for my wife over the next hour and a half.  And when I got to that last page I thought it was particularly revealing the line they chose to place there, “forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions.  Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution.  The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains.  They have the world to win!  Working men of all countries unite!”

Suddenly the behavior of Monica Moran doesn’t seem so out of place, if you take it in the context of The Communist Manifesto.

I put the book back on the shelf and thought about what I had just read. 

The attendant came around and asked me, “Are you going to buy it?”

I gave her a disgusted look.  “Hell, no.  I have to go home and take a shower now that I’ve touched it,” I said half-joking.  The girl was a younger girl in her early twenties.  “Tell me something, does this book have any appeal to you?”

She looked at it and said, “The cover is pretty cool.  I’ve heard it talked about by my literature professor in college.  I don’t know.  I think I probably would read it if I was pressed for time and had to do a report on a book.  It’s short and would probably get me some points with the professor because of the subject matter.”

I smiled and nodded knowingly.

The girl looked self conscious.  “Did I say the wrong thing?”

“No, you answered perfectly.” 

My wife was back with an arm full of books.  “I couldn’t make up my mind.”

I just smiled as we proceeded to the counter; my mind was on what the attendant had said. 

The Communist Manifesto is a book for fools and lazy minded youth that lack true worldliness.  It’s designed for the masses because the intent is to create an insect like response to arms, to overthrow the establishment and create a communist world draped in fairness.  It’s a naïve notion born first from Plato’s Republic then glorified in Sir Thomas More’s Utopia written in 1516.  The book has power because it does two things, it’s easy to read because it’s so short, and it appeals to the lazy. 

Capitalism is for competition, but for it to work everyone needs to have a hunger for competition.  Competition brings out the best of the best, and gives those who aren’t the best something to reach for.  It is obvious that one of the imperfections of capitalism is that it leaves behind the lazy, because the lazy do not wish to work in order to better themselves and compete.  To the lazy, the corporations will always be evil entities, because they represent difficulty in competing with others that are “competitive.”  To those lazy citizens communism will always be attractive because it is far easier to hide in the masses under a collective association than to stand as an individual which is how America was founded. 

The Tea Party shows that groups that associate themselves with individuality can come together and work as a unit and function socially as the Constitution intended.  The philosophy that produced The Constitution has produced a successful country, the United States, where we have such a rich and diverse society that it is the only place in the world where all the races of the world actually work together without tribal warfare and even our poor are well off compared to the rest of the world.  The American system works better than anywhere in the world with no exceptions. 

Communism has only produced misery everywhere it’s been implemented.  Everywhere!  It is a half cocked idea created by a mad man soaked in poverty.   He pulled together information from the British Museum to construct his theory along with Friedrich Engels study on the working class struggles.  Marx was hardly a popular person.  You can tell a lot about a person based on who comes to their funeral.  Well, Marx had 11 people at his funeral.

When unions discovered that Marx’s short little book could unite the sectors of society that didn’t read much and tended to have the hobby of drinking, eating and pursuing women, the simplicity of The Communist Manifesto had a great deal of power.   This helped give rise to the Labour Party in England by the 1920’s which destroyed England as an imperial power, which was the goal. 

It should be remembered that the United States broke away from England to avoid imperial control, and our capitalism worked were England was an imperial tyrant.  The United States never sought to become an empire, which is the system Marx studied.  There wasn’t enough data in the mid 1850s to provide any data on capitalism in the United States without empire status. 

But what did the Labour Party in England do to their country?  Well, I have friends in England so I know firsthand.  Also, my son-in-law is from England, and when he found out what kind of opportunities were available to him in American, he wasted no time coming here and working his butt off so he could provide my daughter with a good life.  In England, there weren’t any opportunities for a kid his age.   The townhouses in the country are incredibly expensive.  They aren’t creating any new jobs because nobody is locating there.  It was a big deal to him to see a McDonald’s so close to our house.  He had to go to London to see one.   But they aren’t producing anything and exporting anything.  The Democratic Socialist Party, (the Labour Party) shut down the country and created the kind of European socialism that President Obama and others want to bring to the United States. 

I don’t want that in my country.  I want NOTHING to do with it.  And I want NOTHING to do with ANY unions.  Period.  They were created with socialist intent, and socialism does not work. 

Now, for those that don’t understand how I went from talking about communism to socialism, it’s because socialism is the gateway to communism.  Here are the definitions provided by http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_difference_between_socialism_and_communism

” Socialism is the idea that the working class, the class that produces the profits, the wealth, the cars, houses, planes, steel, should take over and run things collectively, democratically, for the benefit of the majority (who also “just happen” to be workers too).

Communism is the idea that society should not have classes – exploiters and exploited oppressors and oppressed, and so on. ”

  • Socialism generally refers to an economic system, while communism refers to both an economic and political system.
  • Socialism seeks to manage the economy through deliberate and collective social control.
  • Communism seeks to manage both the economy and the society by ensuring that property is owned collectively, and that control over the distribution of property is centralized in order to achieve both classlessness and statelessness.
  • Both socialism and communism are based on the principle that the goods and services produced in an economy should be owned publicly, and controlled and planned by a centralized organization. Socialism says that the distribution should take place according to the amount of an individual’s production efforts, whilst communism asserts that goods and services should be distributed among the populace according to individuals’ needs.

Collective bargaining is a form of socialism that has been perpetuated by communist sympathizers.  That’s not anybody on Fox News saying that.  It’s not Glenn Beck, or Rush Limbaugh or anyone else.  They are just stating the facts and history that is available to everyone.   For too many years we’ve allowed these parasites of philosophy to attempt“European Style” socialism to America and we’ve all just let it happen.  We haven’t taken pride in ourselves and defended our way of life properly so those groups that want to bring about socialist ideas took us for granted. 

Republicans are traditionally as I mentioned regarding Bill Cunningham and Sheriff Jones, conservatives that align themselves with other conservatives and built business and helped create laws.  They tended to be nice, God-fearing people.  But on their watch, these parasites which hold The Communist Manifesto in such high regard have reigned free from impunity.   Many of those Republicans are guilty of what they are accused of, being out of touch and spending too much time on the golf course, and they are partially guilty of letting these labor unions get out of control.  So it’s not just the labor unions fault.  Unions are made up of common, everyday people who are more interested in what Charlie Sheen is doing, or whether or not Lindsey Lohan has on any panties when she gets out of a car.  Such minds are easy to fool and they have been fooled by power-hungry manipulators like SEIU, and the AFL-CIO and the NEA .  Those unions made pay good through collective bargaining which allowed the lazy of our culture to continue to be lazy.  It allowed them to get what they wouldn’t get in normal competition.   And Republicans, the same Republicans that took a soft stance on S.B.5 let them do it because they didn’t want to think about the larger problem.  Those Republicans were lazy themselves taking for granted that the United States would always be here, and that threats to our way of life existed on foreign shores.  They took the labor movement as pests that had to be appeased and went back to their golf game.  So they are guilty too, and still are!

But the urgency we are seeing now comes from a new group of conservatives that are not looking at long political careers, golf games, and fancy dinners with powerful people.  In many cases like Kasich in Ohio, and Christie in New Jersey they are already successful and are not looking at being two term governors, and that’s how it’s supposed to be.  Be bold, and fix our problems.  If the people don’t like it, let them change things with a vote in the next election. 

S.B.5 is not Health Care Reform.  It’s actually the opposite.  S.B.5 is about ripping control from the state and putting it in the hands of communities where it belongs.  It’s not creating more central control like Health Care did.  If the passage of S.B.5. seems aggressive, well that’s because it is.  Time is running out.  There isn’t time to sit down with a bunch of labor leaders and “collaborate.”  That is how things were done in the past and it hasn’t worked.   The union strategy is to just stretch out the negotiation process until public opinion turns against the Republicans.  That’s how Democrats and unions have beaten the crap out of Republicans for years.  That’s why those idiots in Wisconsin fled to the border, because it’s their “mode of operation.”  By delaying the Wisconsin vote, the unions hope to turn the public against Scott Walker, only this time Scott Walker isn’t putting his finger in the air and checking the wind direction.   He’s doing what he thinks is right. 

So of course when Shannon Jones introduced S.B.5, and there was three weeks of testimony, Kasich knew he needed to implement his changes quickly so he can fix all the holes in Ohio.  Everyone played fair and by the process, but they didn’t allow themselves to get bogged down, deliberately.  And Senator Sietz, the rock solid Republican that asked Strickland to lead last year, was one of the Republicans from yesteryear that helped create the problem.  He helped legitimize the labor movement that is intent on implementing a new social order.  Not the rank and file members, they just want a pay check.  But the leadership is certainly after a larger political agenda and that is not acceptable.  So I am deeply proud of Senator Niehaus for not allowing Sietz to stall the vote and play politics with S.B.5. 

Timing is important.  All across this state school levies are threatening to break the backs of property owners everywhere, and once S.B.5 is signed into law, school boards will have a tremendous amount of ability to control their costs and take those levies off the ballots.  Schools like Little Miami can renegotiate contracts and become solvent again, and that’s just the beginning.

Kasich’s motto is moving at the speed of business, and that’s what he’s doing.  Let the unions put the issue on a ballot in November.  Because Kasich will have by then put Ohio on a successful path and if the voters decide to go backwards, so be it.  It won’t be because our Governor didn’t do the job.  It’ll be because Ohioans failed to recognize a threat and take responsibility for the condition of their state.   There won’t be any slack-jawed politicians to blame this time, only a preference for the status quo. 

My wife and I closed out our evening with details I won’t reveal on these pages.  But I personally stayed up till the small hours of the morning reading and thinking. 

This is a battle not between left and right, young and old, rich or poor, but of those that truly want the American way of life, and those that simply want a “kick back.”  And both sides are guilty of playing that game. 

Rich Hoffman

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

White Blood Cells: The Mystery of the Tea Party

The budget battles are waging across the county, most recently in the states drawing a hard-line in the sand, such as Ohio, Wisconsin, and Indiana, trying desperately not to become the next California. The most intense battle hasn’t even arrived yet however, and that is the battle at the Federal level, where tax and spend liberals like President Obama, and Harry Reid are coming up against a new element that runs deeper than typical, placid conservative Republicans. That new element is the Tea Party, referred to by the media, and all those rampant tax and spend happy politicians, as Tea Baggers.

The Tea Party has brought an element to the political landscape that is difficult for the establishment to understand. Greta Van Susteren of Fox News recently attempted to get her mind around the Tea Party ideal and interviewed several people who tried to understand how a movement as large as the Tea Party is, can function without a leader. The left, who can’t function without a leader, is perplexed as they reach for icons like Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin. It’s not about them. If they were removed from the discussion there are hundreds of capable people waiting patiently if needed. The real heart behind the movement cannot be seen in such terms.

The best way to explain the Tea Party movement is that you have to consider the United States of America as a human body. It has a life of its own, eating, breathing and interacting with other nations. Now we all know what happens when a body gets sick. We don’t feel well, our temperature may increase, and we may fill chilled, weak, and have a runny nose. When we have a cold we tend to lay down for a bit, take off work and let our immune system fight off the virus. Such sicknesses might be called in America as “recessions.” Our immune system is the election process, and given time, minor illnesses can be overcome.

But there are other viruses and diseases that cannot be easily overcome by our immune system. Viruses like AIDS actually disguise themselves as healthy cells in the body till they are strong enough to attempt to take over the healthy cells in a body.

Cancer is the same kind of subversive disease that hides quietly in the body till it sees an opportunity to strike, and take over the surrounding tissue. We count on our White Blood Cells to identify a disease and to kill it, before it has an opportunity to take over and kill our body’s tissue.

Watch this video of a white blood cell chasing bacteria. Notice that the white blood Cell does not take time to watch TV, or eat at McDonalds. Such concerns are completely irrelevant to the life of a white blood cell. Yet, study the conscious movement of the cell, it is aware of the threat to the body and it is taking action to protect that body.

The United States of America, if looked at like a human body is plagued with many cancer cells attempting to destroy the tissue of the American body. To the cancer cell, this process is not a bad thing. The cancer cell just wants to live like any other cell. The quest for life is what all life shares. But the white blood cell is dedicated to protecting the body from such intrusions so a conflict is expected; we often refer to our immune systems as “fighting off a disease.” We expect it as a natural occurrence. But the cancers that we have in the American body have penetrated our education institutions, so they train the new cells of our body to duplicate the cancer cells. They have penetrated our political system, so as to infect all the cells there to become corrupt and distorted. They have penetrated our families, so the production of strong white blood cells cannot occur so there is no defense in the body to resist them.

Some white blood cells are aware of the cancer cells, and are attacking them directly now. And that is what you might call the Tea Party. The white blood cell is void of attention, concern for power, and greed. That is unless it has been corrupted by a cancer cell or other disease. We know many politicians on Capital Hill that have been corrupted in this way by the disease of “lobby influence.”

But most of the Tea Party people are as pure to a white blood cell in our society as we have to offer. They are selfless defenders of the body called America. They don’t expect financial compensation, powerful positions, or disproportionate amounts of wealth. They are unified by a common cause, and that is the preservation of the body America.

For that reason, the white blood cells called “The Tea Party” do not need a leader to tell them where to go or what to do. All they need to know is what the cancer cells look like, and to attack them the way America expects them to in order to restore the body to health.

The white blood cell is often out-numbered and must take on larger, much scarier cancer cells and bacteria, such as was seen in the video. They will often be outnumbered. But the white blood cell more often than not prevails and life continues for the healthy body. The body can only be measured by its health depending on the strength of its immune system, or otherwise, based on its ability of white blood cells to destroy attackers. This is important because a body is always under attack from foreign invaders.

In America, diseases that the white blood cells called The Tea Party are on the lookout for are socialism, which consumes healthy growth of the body’s tissue by cutting off the flow of blood in the body. Blood to America is its corporations. Other diseases are trickster cells that attempt to weaken the resolve of the white blood cell by disguising itself, such as AIDS. In America such comparisons are in the body’s lack of ability to embrace religion, social norms, and healthy living habits. Such trickster cells will attempt to kill off the white blood cell population with unhealthy pointless endeavors so the resistance is not in place for disease growth. Greed is a specific kind of disease that might be found in the union movement where those cells expect larger amounts of substance to maintain their own existence, tricked by diseased cells into behavior that puts their own lives at risk by overconsumption. This behavior takes away the body’s ability to furnish its other white blood cells with proper nourishment which inhibits healthy growth.

The Tea Party is doing the job expected by the Constitution. The spending habits of government now must be looked at as a disease. And all elements that are attempting to crush our American body must be dealt with. There is no longer time to have the type of compassion that allows cancer cells to live next to healthy cells because we now know with clarity that the cancer cells will 100% of the time attempt to take over the healthy cell.

That leaves just one question. Where do you fit in? Are you a cancer cell, or a white blood cell?

I know what I am. And I know many Tea Party people who are pure white blood cells. The goal of this site is to identify cancer cells and attack them so that we can return to a healthy body, because there is so much cancer in this body we are trusted to protect, that we need to relearn what the diseases are, and what the healthy cells look like, so that the epic battle to overcome our sickness can be resolved and our America can return to health.

Where do you stand?

That also brings up the logical question many have leveled at me. Am I a white blood cell Tea Party guy?

I name this site after a term I wrote about in 2004 called a Overmanwarrior, which was in my mind before there was a Tea Party. I am, as a person most happy in conflict. I am not a turn the other cheek, peace-loving type of person. I respect people who are, and many in the Tea Party reflect that position which I support.

Since I am one of those types that do find myself in conflict, usually under the radar, I operate as I have for many years, alone, so not to incriminate the people around me that I care about. But my best friends are just to the left of my ideas and those are the Tea Party white blood cells that understand what’s important and what to do about it when they see the threat to that importance.

I would consider myself a white blood cell that will 100% of the time take on the largest diseases without endangering my friends. And such endeavors are not the types of battles that peace-loving people are best at. So we all have our role in curing the diseases of the body. My role is different, but very similar. It is just a variation of the white blood cell role intended for the most vicious cancers.

That’s all I’ll write about that role since further revelations will reveal the strategy to the diseases who read my site every day. As I said, the Overmanwarrior role from my 2004 book is based more on fact than fiction. And that’s all I’ll say. But it is a kind of ultra-white blood cell.

The best writers write what they know about. I’ve been doing this kind of thing for a long time, and I am relieved to see that there is now help which I welcome with enthusiasm.

If there is anything we’ve learned from our first 200 year history in the United States it’s that having checks and balances of elected representatives are not quite enough in this American experiment. Waiting from election to election to act is not enough. What is needed in the body of America are those interested in fighting off disease as soon as they show themselves and keeping those elected representatives honest with diligence, so those political representatives don’t buckle under the temptation of disease to become corrupt and work against the body of our nation. Such a thing should never happen again once America’s immune system kicks in and restores our health once again so the real American dream can be experienced by our descendents.

Rich Hoffman

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