I woke up on the morning of February 24, 2012 with the note you can see below. It’s from a parent in the Pickerington School district who has been watching the actions of Superintendent Mantia here in Southern Ohio. This parent is uniquely positioned to give a statement about Mantia because Pickerington is the school district that the current Lakota superintendent came from in August of 2011. It read as follows:
I’m a parent of students from Pickerington and let me tell you that Dr. Mantia will ruin your schools. She removed almost all music, art, phys ed teachers and librarians. Our libraries used the most current media material and the students loved library where they learned to use podcasts, they wrote book reviews and they had the greatest book clubs. The students loved to read because of the fantastic librarians. They are gone. She has combined music, art and gym together. They currently meet as a group at a school every 6-9 weeks. That means that they only receive physical activity for one week and it isn’t intense activity either.
She took a pay raise one month before she left after resigning. Please watch her and her agenda for the sake of your students, teachers, support staff and your wallet.
As my readers here know, I declared the Lakota School District officially dead after the February 13, 2012 meeting, so I saw no point in going to this latest meeting.It was as predicted more of the same strategy of protecting the wages of the school employees with the smoke and mirrors of fancy terminology that essentially meant nothing. The concession by the Lakota School System to retreat backward as a district with these three public school board meetings instead of restructuring their very expensive labor contracts is deplorable. With this third budget cutting school board meeting, the No Lakota Levy has officially begun the campaign to end this fourth levy attempt which appears to already be underway on behalf of the school board decisions. No Lakota Levy will soon announce a major initiative in reaction to these decisions by the school board. I am done with Lakota as a governing body. I officially cast my vote of no confidence in their direction.
Lakota under the leadership of Superintendent Mantia from Pickerington elected to eliminate 36 more jobs centering on art, music, and physical education, which is consistent with the behavior indicated above by the note from the parent. This is in addition to the 69 positions cut from last weeks meeting that caused me to regulate my opinion as a nail in the coffin to the Lakota educational body as a whole.
During the meeting last night several people were texting me and asking what I was doing, and why I wasn’t there. I told them that I was watching the DVR backups of Ghost Hunters, and my TV show was more important. I said that I thought the ghosts walking around on that TV show were more real than the ghosts walking around at the Lakota School Board meeting on stage, because both were just as effective as managers. In the TV show the ghosts make noise by banging on doors and sending out cryptic EVP recordings. The Lakota School Board does the same; they make a lot of noise with a stupid program named S.T.E.A.M (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) while at the same time cutting those programs with staffing and as Jeff Kursman said at the meeting,
“These aren’t efficiencies, these are reductions. Efficiencies will include things that hopefully we’ll hear about in the next week or two. Things like outsourcing of technology when it comes with dealing with the central office, cutting back on central office administrators…centralizing purchasing or negotiating a better rate in health care. What I see you talking about here today is a degradation of liberal arts education.”
All that was occurring at the school board meeting was a bunch of ghosts making noise to a captive audience. Just like the ghosts in Ghost Hunters the ghosts are powerless to do anything in real life because they are in fact dead. The school board is powerless to do anything but scare people, just like the ghosts in Ghost Hunters. So I see no difference between the school board meeting and an episode of Ghost Hunters. With that in mind I stayed home in the comfort of my home and watched the ghosts on TV rather than waste my time at the school board meeting.
I’m happy to see the comments from Jeff Kursman and others who are now beginning to question the merit of this entire money scheming operation known as the Lakota School System. The key to meeting a balanced budget is to reduce the cost of the services, and that is to drive down the labor costs. Cutting a few teachers here and there is only a band-aid to the situation. Only by making across the board cuts to the 80% of the $160 million dollar budget can the Lakota School System meet its budget supplied generously by the community. Anything less than a contract restructuring with the Lakota labor force will be sufficient.
Karen Mantia has brought with her to the Lakota School System a strategy used at her last job of Pickerington to diminish the quality of the district in order to force parents to pass a tax increase to sustain their inflated union contracts. And to execute that objective she and the school board are willing to destroy everything that is good about Lakota to protect the wages of their union allies. That’s what these ghosts of Lakota were doing, and why I’m not interested in anything they have to say any longer. Instead, the No Lakota Levy will be shifting gears to approach our tax fighting methods without the assumption that Lakota will see the light and come to their senses by listing to our arguments. Now, we must assume that they are not even relevant, and we must find ways to remove their impact from destroying our community in an extortion ring that is evidently well underway. If this fight for more taxes were for the kids truly, then these ghosts of Lakota would not use the kids by stealing from the community’s $160 million dollar budget and take away programs while protecting employee incomes at the expense of the children.
So for now on, I will treat these employees like the ghosts they are, as irrelevant to the land of the living, and powerless to us all if they are robbed of their ability to invoke fear. Because as far as usefulness, they are lacking completely in any ability required in the real world, and are truly manifestations from the land of the dead.
My normal readers might be mystified by my sudden fascination with The Hobbit, the film that is set to be released in December of 2012 for part one, then December 2013 as a two-part film adaption of the classic Tolkien novel. Well, aside from being a lover of great books, I love great movies, I love stories that articulate mythology because it is myth that builds or dismantles cultures. I concluded this during my 10 year independent study of comparative religion and mythology led by Joseph Campbell. My passion for life is in these topics, and my anger at politics at all levels is because I can see clearly that they are on a destructive path in the scheme of cultural understanding. Many people who share these passions with me withdrawal from political involvement. I see this as a flaw since observations seem wasteful if assistance to our current culture is not utilized.
But the more I interact with the people of the world the more I’m disappointed, which is why people who study such things retreat to mountain cabins or even caves to live out their days with stacks of books and very little social interaction. Because when you work hard to gain knowledge and elevate your consciousness, it becomes infuriating to deal with people who insist on being stupid, and insist on being at the back of the train.
When I meet people who insist on being in the front of the train, I find joy. And I begin to cheer for those people to be right, because it takes a lot of courage to exist at the front of the train of any mode of thinking. In regard to The Hobbit, it is a film production that is at the front of the train. It is a project of extreme quality as determined by Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality. Because of that, I will predict right now that The Hobbit will win Best Picture at the Academy Awards ceremony in the spring of 2013 as well as Best Director along with at least 5 other Academy Awards. Part 2 of The Hobbit will do the same in the spring of 2014. It is as clear to me as a freshly cleaned window that The Hobbit is a special film, because The Hobbit obeys all the elements of the Metaphysics of Quality, and anyone who wishes to study what it looks like in the real world as opposed to words on a printed page needs to just watch this Hobbit Blog from the set of that same film to study what being in the front of the train looks like and see quality before it’s creation.
The primary reason for The Hobbit’s success is Peter Jackson, the director. He functions from the front of the train as most successful people do. But the difference with Jackson is that he effortlessly is able to deal with all elements of his train, with ease. Keep in mind that the film he is working on has a budget of around $150 million dollars which is the same budget as the Lakota School System or any medium-sized corporation. The startling aspect of the above clip is that Jackson is not predatory in his dealings with his co-workers. He is loose, and addresses all departments of his film projects equally. Jackson knows he is way out in front of everyone else, that he’s on the cutting edge, but he does not feel the need to belittle the other members of the train, even those in the back who tend to bankroll these kinds of projects. Jackson deals with everyone well, and this is reflected in his films.
Movies to me are fascinating to study as little mini companies. They rise up like rain clouds then storm like there is no tomorrow then as quickly as they came are gone from the sky as though they were never there. They go through a typical business cycle in just a few years what a company like Boeing might go through over decades. In the clip above you are seeing the start of a company, the hiring, and basic implementation of the product by a small army of cast and crew. On a movie, thousands of people are suddenly employed; hand-picked by the producers to execute the product, so the quality of those decisions will ultimately determine the success of the venture.
Most film productions do their hiring from the back of the train. Jackson does his from the front. This is the prime difference in determining success or failure. It doesn’t matter if it’s a movie, a large company, or an advertising firm; they all share in the rules of the Metaphysics of Quality. If decisions are made by those at the front of the train they tend to work much better than those from the back. The science behind that concept requires study to understand the reason. But it does not take a mind from the back, middle or front of the train to observe quality and anyone with a mind can witness from the above clip that there is something special going on with The Hobbit.
Unfortunately people like Peter Jackson are rare. And I doubt that Jackson set out to learn and live the Metaphysics of Quality. Jackson is the benefactor of a number of unusual circumstances that prepared his mind to be simply the greatest film director in the modern world. And he is. History will prove it. Those two Hobbit films will bring joy to hundreds of millions of fans and will generate at least a billion dollars in revenue per film for a two-year period. The merchandising alone will carry the mythology of The Hobbit into mainstream culture that will transcend politics for years to come and society will benefit from that joy in immeasurable ways. And it all starts at the front of the train of thinking, in the clip seen above.
You see, because Jackson is at the front of the train he’s already achieved the success in his mind. He’s already arrived and it shows in his body language, his speeches, his general communication to the people under him. He doesn’t feel a need to comb his hair or dress in a particular way to impress anyone, because he doesn’t need to. Everyone else in the world is under him in thought and he knows it. But he doesn’t rub it in either. He knows that the people in the middle of the train, who are helping him make the films will understand where he’s going eventually, and they’ll arrive there of their own accord. The financiers in the back of the train with the media are scared as they always are. They are ready to jump off the train at the first sign of trouble. But when the box office receipts come in, they’ll be the first to take credit for the entire train. And Jackson knows it and does not show bitterness about the process. Because by the time all this happens, he’s already on to his next project well out of sight from those in the back of the train and Jackson doesn’t care. And society isn’t even on the train, they just watch it come and go in passive observation. Once it passes they might say they enjoyed it and will remember it far into the future. But they cannot take credit for its creation, or its motion. For them it’s just an experience.
So when I’m ready to fold up the chairs and take my books up to a mountain cabin and tell the world to go “fu** itself” these clips by Jackson remind me that not everyone is worth casting away as fools. Because Jackson reminds me that there are some good things to look forward to, and there are people worth knowing. Peter Jackson and his Hobbit films are examples of these. Traveling in the front of the train is usually a very difficult task because the rest of the train weighs you down. And most of the time it leaves those in the front feeling used and abused. But every now and then the situation works out really well, and Peter Jackson is among the best of the best at what he does, and I find his work refreshing, and his Hobbit Blogs more than entertaining. I see in them hope and it is how I recharge my own batteries for all the parasites that I feel I drag along behind me who refuse to move their feet or exercise their minds.
That’s why fighting from the front of the train is better than retreating off the train all together to read books and watch the worlds trains roll by in a valley below without being engaged. It doesn’t always feel that way, but it’s worth doing.
I have heard the criticisms coming from the pro levy people already who proclaim that it is easy to cast dispersions from the sideline as opposed to jumping in and helping to solve problems. These critics of course are attempting to highlight their volunteerism, or paid resolve as though they were helping to solve problems as opposed to someone like me who writes about what a bunch of fools they are. “Oh Rich Hoffman, you criticize but do not offer to help. Instead you throw in firebombs when you should move into an elected position or serve on a finance committee.”
This is a blanket statement that could cover any ground from the president of the United States, to my local school board of Lakota, but nobody can help people or their jobs if their beliefs are not grounded in reality. I have covered many topics and offered plenty of advice that I would hope some of these people might use to solve their problems. Particularly regarding the Lakota School Board, which I consider a microcosm of the federal government in general, I have identified the problem and determined that my volunteerism or even paid help will not help that body of government no matter how much money or good intentions I might invest. That is why I determined on February 13, 2012 that the school system was in fact effectively dead in its current form. It is my assessment that nothing can be done to save it because the parties involved in the process are in denial of their reality, and are therefore unable to alter it. So my involvement unless they would listen 100% to my direction would ultimately lead to their doom.
As I speak hereafter about Lakota as a school district I might as well speak about virtually all school districts and government in general, because all these public entities are suffering from the same problem. They are not functioning from a grounding in the rules of reality. I don’t mean that facetiously, but quite literally. It’s a philosophical problem that infects the very nature of civilization. And without having that philosophic problem fixed, there is nothing that can help those who do not live within the realm of reality. So with that said, the reality of the situation pertaining to the Lakota School System, and public schools in general is that they have built the entire structure not for the benefit of the students, (the product) but for the employees themselves. To exhibit this point please refer to this article on The Blaze about the Buffalo teachers union contract that has perks so outrageous that it covers plastic surgery, including liposuction.
I have been in Lakota School Board meetings where the teachers union has protested any increases in their health care benefits. I’ve seen them threaten to go on strike to drive up their wages. And their behavior is exactly in line with those of the Buffalo teachers union. The reality of the situation is that the employees of these public schools are a selfish lot who wish to loot from the community the wealth of the districts.
However, like a drug dealer tries to convince themselves that their actions do not harm people, or the prostitute who pretends they do not destroy families, or the drunk that convinces themselves that they are not a menace to their families, the public education teacher tries to convince themselves that they critical members of a community and important to a child’s life. They believe that they are providing a service that cannot be done by anybody else in society and that if they do not perform their task that our country will crumble to ash.
What teachers are professing with those thoughts are wishes, not reality. Reality says that even a stay-at-home mom without a teaching degree can teach their children better than public education can. The stats prove it. But the wish from these particular public employees is that all such evidence would be wiped away so that they can sustain their fantasy–that they are as important in reality as they are in their own minds.
This is called the Tinker Bell complex. These poor fools have been raised to believe that if they just wish upon a star, or rub Aladdin’s magic lamp that they will be granted wishes, and they wish to these invisible gods beyond reality to be important in the scheme of society. They believe that because they dream it in their small minds that reality can be bent to their wishes.
This is why they hate me, because they cannot argue against the facts that I’ve given them. They see my spreadsheets which point out reality and they react as though I just threw Holy Water on their demon infested souls. They whither in pain and protest and attempt to call me names and discredit my facts rooted in reality. They are like the small child who has just been told that the Little Mermaid is just a cartoon–that Ariel is not real. Or the Fairy Godmother will not turn their pumpkin into a magic carriage, because these are the actions of fantasy, of dreams, and wishes.
It might be fun to dream and make wishes. It might bring comfort to the mind to see a falling star and make a wish that something in our lives might be made better by asking the mysteries of the universe to help us with a problem. Or a birthday cake with lit candles where a wish is made before blowing them out. Our culture is built on wishes and pleadings to entities that exist outside of reality and this is part of our modern social problem. Too often people would resort to magic and wishes rather than hard work and wisdom, and this is the source of much social misery. So the public employee teachers are in good company, but their status in life is merely a wish outside the boundaries of reality. They wish themselves to be valuable and worth $63,000 a year because their unions have told them they have a value equitable to such a value. But the reality is that the average wage mentioned is about $20,000 more than the true market value. That entire amount of $63K per year is artificially propped up by hopes, dreams and wishes.
I know one of the daughters of a former union president locally and every time I see her she looks like she has a dead cat on her head which is intended to be fashionable, but in reality just looks ridiculous. She obviously gets her nails done frequently and is a continuous visitor to the hair salon. She always wears the latest fashion and is quite the socialite. Now none of those things are necessarily bad, but every time I see her I think of what she would have been if her mother had not been the union president who would twist the arm of a school board for everything they had in them. I’m sure this cat headed lady has a master’s degree and all the “qualifications” that the labor union deems important, but what is her real value? Is it $63K per year or $83K per year? Well, by my assessment of her talent and role in a school district I’d say it’s no more than $50K per year. She’s too young to make more than that off any pay scale and could have only arrived at a large salary by obtaining yearly increases exceeding 5% to 7% a year beginning with a very excessive starting point. Because of this inflated value this person gets to pretend they have true value and when she gets her hair done, and her other cosmetic work, she is functioning from a fantasy outside of realty. She did not earn her wealth. She stole it. Her mother stole it. Her mother stole it for all her union members, not just the daughter. The money wasn’t earned. It was gained through manipulation, extortion, and coercion by creating the illusion that all this activity somehow benefited children with the campaign slogan, “it’s for the children.” But in reality children have nothing to do with the actions or desires. The reality is that the members of the union, including the cat haired lady become wealthy off tax dollars without providing a service of real value. The real product was fear of what the world would be like without their service. Not the actual teaching of children.
This behavior is in no way exclusive to the cat haired woman or her mother. They are just playing the game of well wishers. They wish in their minds that their efforts in public education might actually be valuable, but the reality says teachers who make much less and with less experience could do the same work for equal outcome. The reality says that it is the participation of parents and the quality of them that makes all the difference in a child’s life. It is not the teacher no matter what the pay scale.
In order to fix the problem these participants have to stop wishing the world is one way when in fact it is another. Until that action takes place nothing I can do will help these poor people. They will continue to be lost in their own fantasies because they refuse to see the truth. I can place the facts right in front of their faces, but they will not see them because they are more attracted to the fantasies of their minds rather than the reality of their lives. The public employee teachers seek to cover the gap between their fantasy and actual realty with looted wealth and that is simply not acceptable. I am happy to help these poor people with their problems, but like an alcoholic, they cannot be helped till they realize that their wishes do not determine realty. And their wish is that they are indispensably important to the culture of public education. But the facts do not support this, and I am personally finished with trying to ease their minds back into reality. It is their task to get with the program, not society’s, and it’s not our burden to throw money at their fantasies in order to make them happy, so until they are prepared for the truth, they cannot be helped, and my time is too valuable to waste on looters of reality, so I will continue with the firebombs until they finally get the point. At that time when they ask, I will solve all their problems in about one month and at half the cost. But I will not be lured into playing their game their way in a land of illusion and fantastic wishes.
Sometimes the best way to see something clearly is to back up so you can put it in focus. It also helps to not view the world exclusively through one particular specialization of which one makes a living. Living life should be a constant adventure of always learning and expanding ones viewpoint, and not relegating a perception to just those within the field of one’s occupation. This is the role of philosophy and story tellers, people I enjoy spending time around more than any other, because they often see the bigger picture of things, excel in this skill and do society great justice when they share the fruits of their labor.
The dark story of making The Hobbit is one that has held the project up for years and is yet another story about how labor unions are corrosive organizations. And its statements like that which have blacklisted me from any future work within the Hollywood community. I made this choice consciously knowing that I will instead shift my attention in these middle years of my life to writing novels instead. So I am happy to let my whip work and other entertainment talents drift into the nature of that independent task of authorship. Because there is no going back now, I’ve said too much.
But what I said needed to be said. It’s the things that Peter Jackson doesn’t want, or need to say. It’s the things that the distributors at Warner Brothers can’t talk about even if their opinions are harsh on the matter privately. This is because a subtle harness is placed upon the entertainment industry and that harness is the exact same gag that exists on public education, and is preventing the open learning and creativity of millions of children from realizing their full potential. It is that of the labor unions.
During Lord of the Rings, the production could be said to be very successful because Peter Jackson as a director is extremely personable, grounded, and fantastic at multitasking. He kept his set fun which allowed for a bonding to occur between his technical staff and his actors which showed up on-screen in a tremendous way. It is unlikely that Lord of the Rings would have been such a great production if Jackson had not been the director, or if the entire film had not been shot in New Zealand.
My wife and I made serious plans to move to New Zealand in the early years of our marriage and live on a sailboat. So I understand the appeal of a country that as of now prides itself on rugged individuality. When one thinks of New Zealand government of any kind does not come to mind, just big open fields, mountains, horses and–sheep. But the one great thing that I’ll say about New Zealand that the film industry can’t say is that one of the reasons Lord of the Rings went together so impressively, and all members of the crew got along unusually well, and communication worked at all levels was the absence of a labor union in New Zealand involving the actors and technical unions. Before Lord of the Rings came out there were only a few major films to come out of New Zealand, The Man from Snowy River films, and the George Lucas spectacle Willow. So the labor unions didn’t protest too intensely when New Line Cinema aligned with Wingnut films to produce a massive three film adaptation to the Tolkien classic, the unions didn’t pay much attention. Jackson wisely shot the films back-to-back while Fellowship of the Ring was still in post production and had not yet hit theaters. The Lord of the Rings films were able to be made outside of the chaos of the usual Hollywood production without a lot of union influence in an almost campfire style production where everyone bonded on the set.
However, success breeds the looters, and after multiple Academy Awards the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance union from Australia decided it wanted to move over into the New Zealand market because they feared that such high-profile big budget films in the future would go to New Zealand instead of Australia where the Star Wars films were shot over similar concerns. These big productions could not be done in the United States, because there is too much hassle these days over labor disputes, so film companies run from unions out of necessity, and in this case New Zealand is the last far-flung corner of the globe without one of these labor unions controlling the industry, so The Hobbit will be the last of its kind. The unions took action against The Hobbit production joining with the Screen Actors Guild and four other international unions to boycott the production.
Peter Jackson in an effort to save his home country of New Zealand the thousands upon thousands of jobs The Hobbit would bring to craftsman and film personnel refused to buckle under the union pressure and called the union what it was, a bully looking for money, membership and power. He threatened to take the production of The Hobbit and its $300 million budget to Europe in order to make the film. You can read that article here:
Thankfully the whole situation settled as thousands of New Zealanders protested to keep The Hobbit production in New Zealand, so the unions backed off socially, and Jackson was able to go and make the film the way he likes to make them. For me personally it is very nice to see Peter walking around on his sets casually without all the egotistical authority that so many of his predecessors displayed. It’s Jackson’s directorial style to be very open, fair and forthcoming in his dealings with his cast and crew. Jackson is certainly a director who would suffer from too much outside control on his projects which is what the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance union was trying to do. They saw Jackson’s success and they wanted to loot off his back, off his creations, and his relationships so they could get a piece of the pie for themselves.
This is what teachers unions have done to our schools. It’s no different in any respect. A school cannot pick up and move like Jackson threatened to settle a union dispute. A community has a school and it’s fixed in place. So if a union infests it with their looting tendency, the community is forced to deal with the extortion measures they employ.
The Disney Company deals with the unions by tossing more money at the problem which is why the Pirate films are so expensive. Disney has the advantage of generating a tremendous amount of money through their subsidiary companies, so they can play that game. They are too big to fly under the radar like Jackson does today, or Spielberg and Lucas used to. Notice that as Spielberg became bigger and more successful over the years, that his films seemed to become more and more bogged down. He still makes pretty good films, but nothing like his final year as a master filmmaker in 1993 with the release of Jurassic Park and Schindler’s List. I know people get angry with Spielberg and Tim Burton (who I think is a fantastic director) for sucking up to the Obama administration now, and the Clinton administration’s back in the 90’s, but at the heart of that evil is a desire for creative people to make their movies as a wall of opposition known as the entertainment unions stand in the way. The union influence shows up in the final product and it does rob the production of some magic. The audience can tell the difference and it does affect Hollywood’s bottom line. They respond by making more comedies, and easy productions that aren’t overly complicated and can be shot around Los Angeles or Las Vegas–easy set ups. The creative minds behind the movies attempt to keep the protesting communists who run the labor unions at bay with appeasement. Disney throws money at unions to advance a project which works, but prevents smaller film makers from being able to compete on equal footing, because the unions hold all producers to the same standard as a company like Disney. Unless the filmmaker makes the film out of the country like Jackson has, they find themselves encumbered needlessly both creatively and financially.
As I see the previews and clips coming in from The Hobbit I am starting to get excited, because such films—stories of such depth are rare for all the reasons described, and are true treasures of our culture. I desire a world where people can speak and do business with each other without the looters standing in the way trying to make easy money for themselves. And yes, my comments here about the education unions have blacklisted me in entertainment which will go on forever. But I have other talents and I’ll use them to tell the story of how human beings get themselves into these fixes. It’s a difficult thing to balance out the need to make a living and then to make a living that is honest and true. Because the chances are, even if you are a wealthy film maker, if your love is to make movies you still need the industry system to make them, so you do your best to shut your mouth and put up with the parts you don’t like. You give money to the Obama administrations as a payoff to a mobster thug and hope they leave you alone politically. And the same holds true for the teaching profession. Or any profession that is controlled by labor unions, it’s hard to come out and speak against it, and to call it what it is, because the system is designed to exclude any voice of dissention. But I will do it, because I’ve already started the process, so I might as well see it through. And in the meantime, I will cheer with much vigor the upcoming film The Hobbit for all these reasons and more. Great stories are so few and far between, and I’m so excited about this one that I may just go get in line for it right now.
Alex Jones spilled the beans on why my favorite television show, Freedom Watch with Judge Napolitano is being cancelled from the Fox Business Channel. I have always enjoyed the work of the Judge and it was sad to see the decision by Fox to pull the plug on a successful show. It is even sadder to see that Fox News has been successfully undermined by the powers of control that have successfully implemented the 45 points from the book The Naked Communist. Anyone who thought that such concepts were fiction knows now that the media is dominated by those advocates of political theory, as stated in the book’s publication in 1958 and universally accepted as sacred social doctrine by the educators who taught that media. Control of the media is one of the 45 points, and with Fox News going down, it is obvious that those forces have been hard at work. Click here to read the 45 points for yourself:
I have experienced at virtually every level in my life over the last couple of weeks a push back from the progressive community of which the cancellation of Freedom Watch was simply the final act. In my school district I’ve seen it on the school board and the community at large as they attempt with a fever to suppress any negative stories so that they can make another tax request from the community using all the tricks mentioned in an article from The Blaze discussing how Saul Alinsky taught the unions to use children as propaganda tools in order to obtain funding. As I’ve been stating for years, it is now confirmed that the education unions all across the nation are using Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals as a way to drive up education costs, spread a communist philosophy against private property through excessive taxation, and control the flow of leftist political ideology in the education process. Read that story at the following link:
Even with the overwhelming proof I’ve provided the crazy PTA moms and their minions of latte drinking despots with diamond rings the size of car tires and asses to match, plot against me with an anger only estrogen can produce. They chant throughout my district’s neighborhoods that Rich Hoffman is their mortal enemy because I hate education and I am trying to rob from them the life they intend for their children. Yet they have no idea that they are just prostitutes to their husbands who do everything they can to be away from them aside from the occasional sex. Their husband’s roll them over at night and insert their manhood into these women of the bedroom and hundred-dollar bills find their way into their purses. The women don’t know what the man does to earn the money, nor do they care. They are busy saving the world one child at a time with howls of safety and more regulations as they rush to the polling places at election time to vote for Obama because he has a nice smile. Those women would do well to read that PDF file, but they won’t, because their minds are filled with shopping and have no room for a serious topic.
And my friend Doc Thompson lost his job at Clear Channel. The real story will be buried forever and the strings that pulled him off his job during his honeymoon are no doubt similar to those who removed Judge Napolitano from Fox Business, or even Glenn Beck from Fox News Channel. It’s not the ratings, it’s the controversy. It’s the rattling of the cage. The howls come from the same women as I mentioned above who plead with perfume still odorous from the previous day because it was stuck between the folds of their skin during showers who tell their executive husbands that the enemies of education, of labor unions, or smiling children are these men and they must be extinguished–cast out of society, which these queens control.
I’ve seen the same attempt in the print media, not by the male executives and their stay-at-home wives, but by the career climbing professional, the women who desire to prove they are every bit as strong as a man, so they too listen to these howling hoards of neurotic women and their estrogen based diatribes. “Shame on that mean Rich Hoffman. We will do more sports stories, and let’s cover the superintendent more—oh how about the new school board member. Let’s help bring the community together.” So the decision is made to put emotion in front of logic to paint a picture that supports the fantasy of the guilt ridden mothers. I speak of these things on the microcosm of my community because they are but elements of a whole that make up the macrocosm.
No, it’s not all women. There are plenty of men who have participated in pushing out entertainment personalities like Judge Napolitano, Glenn Beck and Doc Thompson. Those are the men who fear competition because their ideas are small and their brains cannot, or will not be able to keep up. They are too lazy to compete head to head with someone like Judge Napolitano, so they work to get rid of him. I’m sure Stossel is next. Those terrible libertarians are upsetting the Oprah audience, those same damn women and their brigade of latte drinkers. They don’t want a world built by the Constitution, they don’t want independence, and they want big government to take care of them like their husbands do. Or their bosses at work. Because the essence of these people is laziness, and they don’t want to exert the effort to act or make decisions, so they surrender to the parasites of control and advocate on their behalf. That’s why Soros has a contingent of willing participants to follow him on a tyrannical quest to rule the world with his billions of dollars spent to shape the culture of earth into his own image. Because it’s easy to just go with the flow that someone like Soros creates for the lazy, the timid and the mentally deficient.
Do I sound bitter? It’s an old story and I’ve seen it play out perhaps one time too many. I’ve seen it compressed more into the last 5 days then I care to, but that’s life. I’ve found myself in exactly the same position as Judge Napolitano too many times, where it is possible to do TOO good, that the apple cart gets upset and the enemies against quality come out in full force to inflict their fury. It’s because of those types that I write here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom to such an extent. It’s also why I’ve turned down entertainment venues, and other lucrative projects that have come my way in the last 5 years, because I don’t want to put myself in a position to have something taken away by looters. Like Glenn Beck, I have learned that I can do more good on my own than if I have a boss controlling my content–what I can say and when I can say it. And if I do too good, that I might become a threat to the powers that be, I might find myself fired to protect those threatened because they lack the fortitude to compete squarely on the battlefield of ideas.
The evils of the world are not all done by the mad mothers, the Opera watchers, the do-gooder, the church busy body who disguises their treachery with mountains of good tidings. It’s also done by the men of logic who turn away from reason to pursue peace in the household of vaginas who demand to be fed cosmetics and a beefed up ego so they can function day by day. The corrosion of the world is not all done by the mugger in a New York alley, the rapist, the drug addict or the child molester. It’s also done by those who see those characters coming and turn away from stopping them with broadcasts of peaceful perpetuity as displayed in the Michigan Education Association manual. As admitted in that union manual the intent is not honesty, it is not social valor. It is not spiritual sanctity. The intent is malice! The intent is manipulation! The intent is thievery! And we live in a time when millions have been taught that such things are (GOOD)!
Those millions will attack the few among us with the courage to see the activity for what it is, like Judge Napolitano, and Alex Jones, and Glenn Beck and many others. The millions believe that in silencing those voices they can continue to rob blind all of society by using those neurotic chatter boxes of estrogen as their weapons and the insolence of the men with muscle but no gray matter into drunken inaction. The belief from the vile bowels of social consciousness is that if the voices are silenced then the looting can continue infinitely.
Well no it can’t—I’ve personally fought it all my life. Before the invention of the internet I fought it in the darkness of night with bullets and bullwhips, court rooms, and police reports. For those who complain that forums like the old Fox News, or web sites like this one are doing damage to public education, to the network of looters that are out there and seek to put an end to the voices of warning that come from Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom, Info Wars, GBTV or Napolitano’s Freedom Watch, I don’t think you want the result from not having that voice.
My world before this voice was one that the bad guys will not like if I and these others return to that place. Violence is assured. Because there are people like Judge Napolitano who will not be turned to the evil of “not seeing” the treachery in the world around them. The answer for the good is to remove those who wish to commit evil among us so they are no longer a threat. The best and most obvious method of doing that is through education. But if the means of education are eradicated, then the thieving fools have left violence as the only choice.
I have seen this pretentious tendency first hand for many years so I know the aspects which add up to the sum. I’ve been in the boardrooms, the political offices, the brain-storming sessions and I know the heart of the enemy, and I won’t tolerate them with or without a voice. By removing the voices of reason, the world will not go back to the sleepy carcass that it was. In every human being is the desire to be free, and when tyrants impose themselves upon that desire, war will always break out. It is not for the tyrants like the billionaire Soros to decide the course of the human race and to eradicate all dissidents to his plan. It’s not his right to turn the arm of News Corp with legal proceedings so to put an end to shows like Freedom Watch and the Glenn Beck Program because the hungry public is buying up their books with a voracity which terrifies the looters of the world. Those tyrants are just one more in a long line of fools throughout history who suffered mentally from the ability to reason with the world around them, and comprehend the nature of freedom. And silencing the voices who call for freedom will not eliminate the desire. It only continues to rob young men of their wits and young women of their honor as they grow up in a confusing world designed by the tyrant types who desire to make the globe into their own fragmented images.
Losing Freedom Watch from the Fox Business Channel does not give me pause to despair. It just confirms in me that there won’t be a peaceful end to this reign of terror, this “rule by the stupid,” which is currently the case. Instead it infected me with the desire to run my flag out onto my front porch and look west in contemplation, to clean my guns, to oil my whips, to sharpen my knives and prepare them for a day that is coming, a day the media rulers of our day wish to postpone beyond their pensions–beyond their condo leases, to a day on the far horizon. A day they hope to push beyond their lifetimes by cancelling shows like Freedom Watch.
But that day is closer than they think, and as a western wind blew in my face I had to consider how pointless it is that such tyrants will plunge our nation into war with each other before they allow ideas to fight it out in honor for all to see, and for the winners to shape society. Instead, they have elected censorship of the worst kind, the cancellation of a popular show and the forfeit of financial profits in order to appease the foolish and latte drinkers surrounding public education.
A long time ago I used to be the guy who fed the string of exploding fireworks from the top of a Chinese restaurant that I worked at while the owners of the establishment put on an epic dragon dance like the one seen below. The fireworks were coiled up in a box that had over 50,000 tied to it and I’d have to stand on the roof and feed the lit explosions just over the dancing dragon below as it performed for a massive audience. My task was to keep the fireworks about two feet above the action but to protect anything from igniting the feed box, which was very dangerous work on my end, that I loved.
As I witnessed many oriental dragon dances I contemplated the difference in how oriental cultures viewed dragons and how the Occident, (western cultures) viewed dragons. They are very different ways of looking at the same thing. In the orient, dragons are a symbol of life renewing aspects. The dragon sheds its skin, and is seen as a serpent and life-giver in many respects. In the west, the dragon’s breath fire, are meant to be feared and usually sit on top of huge piles of treasure and are sought after to be slain. But why was this?
It was that primary question that sent me on a ten-year study and provoked me to quit college three times because nobody had a satisfactory answer for me in the field of philosophy. That might not have been the case if I had been able to attend Sarah Lawrence College where Joseph Campbell taught comparative mythology, or Leonard Peikoff’s philosophy classes at Long Island University, had I known about them when I was 18 to 28. But the books of those men were available, and I scooped up the work of Joseph Campbell and devoured them for the next ten years trying to figure out what was wrong with this whole problem of dragons in human society.
I spent many late nights at Waffle Houses all over Cincinnati reading till 4 to 5 AM over breakfast omelets pouring through all of Campbell’s classics meticulously, and it was this action that catapulted me into a lifelong study of myth, philosophy, and human culture that extended beyond the realms of classic anthropological and archeological study. The study of dragons in our culture actually is the skeleton key to understanding the conflicts of our age and it all begins with the grace of that dragon dance from my youth and the hypnotic fireworks I was tasked to feed during the ceremony. And it ends with the reason why I am so excited about the new Peter Jackson film translation of The Hobbit, which I so enthusiastically support at my site here.
My wife’s birthday was last night and my daughter, son-in-law and I went to our favorite Chinese restaurant in Liberty Twp to get my wife the only food she truly likes, Chinese from Panda King. My entire family loves the oriental family who run that restaurant and we’ve known them for years. The man and woman who operate Panda King are two of the hardest working people I know and their son grew up much like the sons I knew in my teenage years, working with the family business, doing their homework between orders and displaying a fantastic work ethic. It is that work ethic that I admire so much in the people of the orient. They have no fear of hard work and cannot be stopped once set in motion. So my wife wanted food from The Panda King for her birthday dinner and nothing else.
About that time a young man who I had fired from his job about 7 months ago came in to order food and appeared to recognize me. There was that tension where words cannot cross a void and nothing is said as a result. He didn’t know what to say to me, and there was nothing I could say to him to bring comfort. Asking how he was doing would have been inappropriate under the conditions of his termination, and asking for an appeal to me would have been degrading. So he avoided eye contact with me, ordered his food and left unceremoniously, as my daughter and I continued to talk about Smaug from The Hobbit.
Running into former employees that I’ve had to terminate happens a lot. It happens when I get gas, and at various shopping complexes as I am out and about, so I’ve learned to shift into the proper gear when those encounters happen. Firing an employee or letting them go as a reduction-in-force is difficult, but the situation is always in their control. It is a failure in job performance that does them in, and they either accept that fact or they don’t. So the choice to be angry is entirely in their control.
This guy in Panda King chose not to be angry and took responsibility for his actions, so his lack of desire to be confrontational to me earned some respect that he had won back just a little bit from how I felt about him upon termination.
When the food was done cooking the owners put it all in a giant box that it took to carry it all home. I joked to them about coming home with us to eat it all. The couple gave me an odd look not comprehending what I was saying as the thought of leaving their work in the middle of the evening was not even a consideration, even joking. And there-in-lies the fundamental difference between the east and the west, as much as I admire the oriental work ethic and their very dedicated preservation of strong families in their culture, they do not function very independently. Independence is not important to them culturally. The people of the orient think in terms of collectivism, as a complete organism of which they are but a single cell. They are naturally altruistic by their cultural heritage and as much as I admire them as a social organism, they think very different from the way I do. This is why their dragons are revered as life-sustaining, because the dragon to them is the state. This is why oriental cultures tend to fall toward communism. This is the case certainly in China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and if the politics is not literal communism, then it might be monarchy, feudalism such as what is found in Japanese cultures or an out-right dictatorship. The people of the orient are prone to sacrifice their individual lives for the benefit of the collective whole.
When J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings he set out to bring Great Britain a proper mythology for their culture, which England did not have. England through their reign of empire had a hodgepodge of many cultures as they imported the King Author legends from France, which had its roots in the troubadours of romanticism. But England lacked an authentic myth to unify its people, so Tolkien set out to give it one with his characters in the literary classics of Middle Earth. As a professor at Oxford he saw firsthand the spread of socialism throughout London society and as a veteran of World War I he had some very unique perspectives into the progressive conditions that spread after the Treaty of Versailles. Tolkien the intellectual kept his mind free from politics like many creative people and instead delved into creating his own world mythology which reflected the concepts of our actual life. Walt Disney and George Lucas have done that in the United States and in England Tolkien was taking his observations of human behavior and painting them against stories such as The Hobbit in 1936.
Tolkien was so prone to withdrawal from contemporary politics that he lashed out in anger at those who declared his Lord of the Rings as an anti-communist parable comparing Joseph Stalin to the Dark Lord. Tolkien saw his work as reaching beyond the politics of the day even though he was clearly reacting to the events through the mechanism of myth.
The Hobbit is in essence a treasure hunt, not too unlike that of Disney’s beloved pirates from Pirates of the Caribbean. Bilbo Baggins was conscripted from a group of treasure hunters led by Gandalf seeking to take back their kingdom and the treasure guarded there by the dragon Smaug. This takes the home-loving Hobbit Bilbo on an adventure of the lifetime and lead directly into the events that become Lord of the Rings, which is a much more sinister story about evil and the nature of its influence. In The Hobbit, Smaug is the perfect embodiment of the classic occidental dragon motif as seen in this clip from the 1977 cartoon adaption of The Hobbit.
Notice Smaug is a pompous, arrogant creature who uses brute force to guard his treasure taken from the surrounding kingdoms. And he sleeps atop it guarding each and every item. Bilbo the Thief, the (pirate) has been tasked to steal an item from the dragon’s lair. The dragon in these stories represents The State, the institutional control of an organization that takes and steals by force the wealth of the people who have their rights to their creations. So the dragon is the villain in occidental mythology where the creature represents a destruction of individual liberty, and the right to their personal wealth. The dragon does not have a right to hoard the looted wealth of the people in its lair. This makes the dragon slayer, the thief of Bilbo Baggins a hero in this case.
However, if the same story were told in China, Bilbo would be the villain and it would be the dragon who would be the hero. Because in that culture the dragon is the revered creature, the state and the survival of the culture is the paramount concern. But in European post renaissance mythology, before Karl Marx spread his disease across Europe, it was the individual desire for conquering one’s personal dragons that become the concern.
I put the quality of J.R.R. Tolkien’s thinking in line with the Founding Fathers by way of intellectual capacity in what he was trying to achieve. Tolkien had the ability to behold very large ideas much the way Ben Franklin did, and was able to see beyond the political trends of his day to tell very powerful myths in an attempt to hold his culture together. Tolkien was creating a mythology which directly leads to philosophy, two ingredients that are paramount to holding a culture together.
Political science and other feeble attempts to bypass the process of myth always lead to social decay. Mythology is needed in order to form complicated social concepts which give context to large ideas. This is why the new documentary called Finding Joe, which is about the power of Joseph Campbell’s scholarship in creating a new field of endeavor called comparative mythology which will soon become a major field of study like anthropology, sociology, and even physics is now, because there is power in myths and the words that form them. So much so that societies will rise and fall based on the strength of their mythological messages.
But that is the difference between the east and the west and these ideas are in open conflict with each other. The hippie movement of the 60’s and into the modern-day sought to study the east as the premier mode of thinking using examples of India, Tibetan Buddhism, and Japanese Zen to challenge the thinking of western thought. It was even Jane Fonda who basically made love publicly with communist North Vietnam using her sex appeal to win over millions of American’s into communism.
But it cannot be disguised what lingers in the heart of mankind. And all the open conflicts of our day could be seen in Panda King where my daughter and I were buying my wife dinner for her birthday. My friends who run the place genuinely enjoy seeing me when I come to place an order and our friendship exists completely in respect. But they do not understand my motorcycle riding, my cowboy hats or my outlandish dress on occasion. They do not understand my strong desire for individual liberty. And I do not understand their blind obedience to collectivism, or their selfless natures. I admire it in some respects, but I do not, nor do I wish to understand it. When I see a dragon I wish to slay it and mount it’s head on my wall so I can hang my bullwhips from its teeth. When they see a dragon they want to do a dance and celebrate its nature.
And the fellow who I fired was a young fellow who was confused by all this stuff. He thought that work was optional, that he could show up when he wanted. He often wore symbols of the Yen and Yang on his jewelry and had a fascination with the Peace symbol. He thought that he could make up his own hours and that if he lost his job he’d just collect unemployment. So I gave him directions to the unemployment office and told him to get in line because he was now on it. He huffed and puffed and bragged on Facebook about how was going to stick it to me and what a bad guy I was, but in the end he had lost his job because he did not perform the tasks he was hired to do. He was functioning from a faulty philosophy. He wanted the collectivism of the east without the hard work, yet he still wanted the individuality of the west, again without the work. That young man is a victim of no mythology, but rather a grouping of broken symbols that had lost their meaning leaving his mind vacant of resolution. This gives him little social value in that he cannot even be hired like Bilbo Baggins to steal treasure from a dragon resting atop a pile of gold.
If you want a long sustaining society that will always hold itself together, the orient has the problem licked. They are a stable people who can have a continuous society that lasts for generations, but they are willing to give up individual liberty to have it. The Occident, (the west) tends to burn itself out quickly in the absence of strong family values since the innovations of one generation to the next die out as the great minds of one age find the descendents of the next one much like that guy I had to fire. Without the work ethic to sustain an idea, they quickly die out and the culture disintegrates. But, it is in individual endeavor that innovation thrives, and it is in the Occident that we developed aviation, computers, the internet, electricity, and virtually all technological marvels. Because the keys to a good life, the treasures of mankind are underneath the dragons of society and those dragons must be killed to gain those treasures. You cannot dance around them and throw sacrifices at those dragons and expect the dragon to give you treasure. Instead the dragon will only ask for more. So the dragons must be killed, so that society can prosper and advance with each slain monster.
American society will thrive once it stops feeling guilty for the dragons it kills, because we are not like those in the orient. We are unique, and it is our task to kill dragons and steal their treasure for our use. That is the mythology of the west, and one that at a subconscious level, we all understand.
A person of considerable intelligence might ask why our current society with all the technological innovation available to us, behave in such a foolish fashion. Why do people not see what Barack Obama and the government in general are all about? How have labor unions and politicians built an organized crime style empire on the backs of tax payer money in plan sight right without punishment? Why is it that with all the news stories happening at such a feverish pace on the nightly news that all news channels seem obsessed with the Republican nomination for president? Well, the answer is one of science, and is proven beyond refute, and the thieves of our society use this science to openly rob society in legalized theft.
This science is similar to what makes a human being see “magic” during a magic show. It’s used heavily in such demonstrations and can be tracked with the increase in media devices such as radio and television, and now the computer to happen in day-to-day life. One would think that with the advent of these technological breakthroughs that society would become collectively more intelligent, but this has not been the case.
To understand why society is functioning at a low-level of intelligence I will use an example discussed in the book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand to exhibit the condition that is currently enslaving the human race. To understand the science of this enslavement we must look at how crows process cognitive information. Crows have been studied because they have shown to be comparatively intelligent for a grouping of animals, specifically birds. So they serve as an excellent example of displaying a complex problem.
A hunter goes into the woods to shoot a whole flock of crows that have gathered there, but upon seeing the hunter the crows flock to the tops of the trees to hide. The hunter frustrated that the crows won’t show themselves leaves the woods. After the hunter leaves, the crows come out of hiding from the top of the tree and resume their activity.
The hunter thinks about the problem and decides to try one more time. He grabs four other hunters and returns back to the woods. The crows see five hunters and flee back to the tops of the trees. The hunters have no clear targets. But the original hunter tells his four friends to now leave the woods which they do. The first hunter remains still. The crows see four hunters leave and they assume the threat has now left the woods. This is because the crows do not have the cognitive ability to see more than three threats at a given time, anything more than three sort of blends in to the surrounding environment. So the hunter has discovered the weakness of the crows. He has figured out a way to trick them into thinking the threat to their lives is gone. Once the crows believe this they leave the tree tops to resume their activity. At that time the hunter can then open fire and kill as many crows as his gun can destroy.
For human beings, we are considerably more intelligent than crows, but how much cognitive material can we process at any given time? Is it 7 items, 9 items, 20 items, how many issues can we deal with in our daily lives until everything becomes a blur to us.
Well to my knowledge developing cognitive ability is a skill built much like one builds a muscle. By doing the work of cognition often, the ability is improved. So I would probably be able to count more hunters than someone else, because I work the ability more than most people do. But at some point, we reach a saturation point in how much information we can absorb.
This is the strategy of the modern crook, the politician who seeks to swamp the human mind with so much detail that the average person cannot retain the information presented. This is why legal contracts tend to be too long, and sales people speak too fast, and the wording for products sold on TV for $19.99 are often too small to see, because the intent is to scam the public by presenting so many facts that no single person can understand the information. Just like the hunter sending the other four shooters out of the woods to trick the crows into coming out of hiding, the salesmen of the world wish very much to overwhelm their customers with too much detail.
The looters of our society do seek to overwhelm the voters, consumers, and demographic groups into behavior they know they can control. Obama has been very active with executive orders while the media focuses on the Republican debates. Looters know that most people arrive home at the end of their day with their minds filled with their business, their associates, their pleasures, their pains, and the essence of their survival—such as food, water and clothing. The human mind after being concerned with those primary things in their life have perhaps room for one or two major news stories before all the other information coming at them turns into a blur of data.
A person who has developed the ability to grapple more subjects at the same time might be able to pay attention to the needs of their family, make a living, pay their bills, read a newspaper, listen to the radio, then send texts to their friends while still maintaining the ability to read part of a book, watch the evening news, check their email and browse the internet for interesting topics pleasant to their minds. But somewhere in all that the modern human must develop some interest in the laws of their state and community, and pay attention to what the federal government is doing.
The looters know that most of the human beings they are dealing with do not have room for those other topics, let alone the notions of world economics and the spread of communism as a global political philosophy. Human beings have the tools available to them, in computers, the internet, and more books published per day than in any time in human history. There are numerous television programs that can teach everything from advanced physics to the history of particular battles. Yet society seems to not have the ability to handle very many topics at the same time and find themselves easy prey for the hunters in our civilization.
I watched this hunting of the human population just the other night at a school board meeting in my home district. The administrators wanting a tax increase from the public used all the key words to trick the large audience into believing that the hunters, (the administrators) were looking out for the residence of the district. The hunters know that the parents supporting the school had very full lives, and there wasn’t any room for these parents to learn much detail about why the school needed money. So the parents just wanted someone to tell them what to do, to vote yes on a levy or no. They don’t have the cognitive room to think, so they let the looters do it for them which was the plan all along as the meeting drug on for over two hours discussing so many little details that meant nothing, that the real intent of the meeting existed outside the cognitive ability of most of the audience.
The same thing goes on in our state and federal governments. This is why more people know the contestants to American Idol over who their representatives in government are. It’s because the American Idol knowledge is more pleasurable to know, and if the typical human must pick between the cognitive retention of one item or the other, they will almost always pick the one that is most pleasurable. That’s why sex sells. But since human beings do not have unlimited cognitive ability they cannot behold everything, just as the crows could not determine that all the hunters had left the forest if the number was greater than three. The human being, like the crow is vulnerable to an attacker if the predator attacks while the mind is being asked to function outside of its cognitive ability.
Much crime happens under these conditions, and the roots to evil seen in the human race can be traced back to this notion of limited cognitive ability in the human being as they find themselves continued victims of hunters who reside like the forest hunter, outside the human perception of cognition.
So be cautious of any being, governing body, or media outlet that attempts to overwhelm your mind with too many details too quickly. Chances are its being done on purpose. When you feel it happening, even if you can’t see the threat, duck your head, because there is a hunter in your midst’s ready to take a shot at you. Chaos is the camouflage of the predator, and camouflage does not always have to be cosmetic. Sometimes the camouflage can be within the mind as too many details flood the brain’s ability to reason through all the options and cognitive ability falters under the load. That’s when the attacks happen and the hunter’s show themselves. That’s when we wonder how it happened even though we couldn’t see it coming, but should have because the enemy was right under our noses.
I don’t have much thought about the death of Whitney Houston other than to say that her trajectory was predictable and self-imposed. It was easy to see where she was headed, and it’s frustrating to see and not be able to help such people. I live around and speak with future Whitney Houston’s every day and they are hell-bent on personal destruction. So I usually don’t commit much of my mind to their lives.
But Glenn Beck had a wonderful summation of the life of Whitney Houston on his GBTV show that many people who aren’t aware of his show might have missed. So I’m putting it up here so that it can be shared for its own merit.
A fate cannot be escaped. One plus one equals 2. 5 plus 5 equals 10. This notion that people can have whatever life they conger up in their minds no matter what they put into their head is utterly ridiculous and leads directly to these terrible tragedies whether it’s Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, or Elvis. Talent in life is not enough, and money cannot make you happy. It’s far more important to put quality into everything you do in life, than to just coast on a raw talent and hope it all works out. It takes work to live, and it takes a lot of work to live a good life. And sadly for stars like Whitney Houston, she not only deprived millions of fans a role model to look up to, but she denied herself a quality life that love, money, drugs, or any mindful fantasy could not give her. It’s a life lived in the pursuit of the wrong things that leads to such tragedies, and should provide a lesson for all the future ghosts that hover around us hell-bent on the same fate.
I’ll always remember Whitney Houston the for film The Bodyguard and her rendition of this song.
Too bad the words and actions of Whitney in that song only reflected an idea and not the actual words of a wise person. They are just sounds that come from the talent of a unique voice but lack the foundation of reality like so many stars of our age. Be cautious of what you let into your mind, because you are the sum of everything that you put into it.
Far over the misty mountains cold To dungeons deep and caverns old The pines were roaring on the height, The winds were moaning in the night, The fire was red, it flaming spread; The trees like torches blazed with light.
And this is the song from the book, The Hobbit, which much to my delight will finally be released as a film on December 14th 2012. After much debate and legal maneuverings, Peter Jackson has finally been able to bring this epic tale to life on the silver screen. Here’s the preview:
A long time ago I spent several weeks reading Lord of the Rings, of which The Hobbit is a prequel by candle light for the effect of climbing into the mind of J.R.R Tolkien and his world of Gandalf. It is Gandalf of whom I most notably identify with. And it was Tolkien and his world of The Hobbit, and Lord of the Rings that left me hungry for more of that type of material which naturally carried over into the work of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series.
But there is something soothing in the beginnings of things, and The Hobbit is one of those stories that contain a special treasure within the heart of imagination. “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” follows title character Bilbo Baggins, who is swept into an epic quest to reclaim the lost Dwarf Kingdom of Erebor, which was long ago conquered by the dragon Smaug. Approached out of the blue by the wizard Gandalf the Grey, Bilbo finds himself joining a company of thirteen dwarves led by the legendary warrior, Thorin Oakensheild. Their journey will take them into the Wild; through treacherous lands swarming with Goblins and Orcs, deadly Wargs and Giant Spiders, Shapeshifters and Sorcerers. Sounds like a trip into our own world outside of our homes, and is metaphorically similar in many ways. But this is a fantasy rooted in deep philosophy that is a story for eternity. And I can’t wait to see it!
But until then, here is the cartoon from 1977. I adore it. It will be wonderful to see this turned into a live action film!
John Kasich must be applauded for taking a very controversial stand against human trafficking in the early months of 2012. Human trafficking is modern slavery and it is an epidemic that I have covered extensively here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom.
It is always a good thing when a high-profile personality like John Kasich puts light on an issue that has been purposely kept in the dark for many reasons. To review my other articles about this very important issue, please refer to the following links:
Sex trafficking is not a victimless crime. It is 100% modern slavery and is every bit as evil as the slave trade in the 1600’s through the 1800’s here in the United States. No group should point at that time in American history as a sin while all the while letting it continue in the modern age.
I believe so much in this issue that I opened my novel The Symposium of Justice with a form of sex trafficking being broken up by a vigilante. My editor at that time was so upset with me for refusing to take this scene out of the book that it cost me my relationship with that editor. Few people realize just how wide-spread this modern human slavery penetrates our social network, but it is an epidemic without measure.
Thank you John Kasich for putting yourself out there to bring this very important issue to the front of people’s minds.
P.S. shortly after I posted this story, the Governor sent me an email. It is as follows:
Dear Rich: Thank you for your words of support. Human trafficking is a horrific crime and we are going to take strong action to stop this from happening. I am proud and humbled to be serving as the 69th Governor of Ohio. As your Governor I will work to unite all Ohioans, and work towards the common purpose of creating new jobs and improving Ohio’s economy. Ohio is a great state. I believe in the future of Ohio and have faith in the people of Ohio. We invite your continued input on the journey. If there is any way my office can assist you in the future, please do not hesitate to contact me.
During the meeting last night several people were texting me and asking what I was doing, and why I wasn’t there. I told them that I was watching the DVR backups of Ghost Hunters, and my TV show was more important. I said that I thought the ghosts walking around on that TV show were more real than the ghosts walking around at the Lakota School Board meeting on stage, because both were just as effective as managers. In the TV show the ghosts make noise by banging on doors and sending out cryptic EVP recordings. The Lakota School Board does the same; they make a lot of noise with a stupid program named S.T.E.A.M (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) while at the same time cutting those programs with staffing and as Jeff Kursman said at the meeting,
