Category: Space

Lakota Superintendent Discovers Mars: Public unions examined at Hillsdale College

I take great pride in knowing what the latest scientific discoveries are, but apparently, I missed a big one. Superintendent Mantia of the Lakota School District has apparently colonized Mars and has found a way to fly between earth and that red planet routinely. I read in the Pulse Journal from Thursday March 15, 2012 that Mantia said that the Lakota School District “Is being run better than most businesses.” Very interesting statement, however, you have to read such things with a discerning eye, and keep in mind that Mars doesn’t have any businesses. So what Mantia said was true—from a certain point of view–only if you consider that Lakota is operating better than most businesses on the planet Mars, because here on earth such a statement is preposterous.

I don’t know of any businesses that allow their costs to drive them, where the tail wags the dog like it does at Lakota. In that same article there are a lot of bullet points that read like a resume such as “reduced number of mailings, took advantage of bulk mailing—saved $25,000.” Or, “Implemented an in-house computer and battery backup repair process, instead of renewing warranty coverage, allowing for cheaper parts and no labor costs—saved hundreds of thousands of dollars annually.” There were 44 such points in that article most of them were things that the school should already be doing, yet Mantia puts out those facts as though she should get a pat on the head. The question still remains however—why is Lakota still hemorrhaging money if it’s operating as such an “effective business.” Well the answer is that out of all the costs discussed in the Pulse article, it only adds up to roughly 20% of the total budget.

The rest of the budget—the other 80%–is tied up in labor wages and benefits and according to that same Superintendent upon advice from the school’s legal counsel, are off the table for discussion. After knowing that it’s easy to see why Superintendent Mantia of the Lakota School District thinks her performance is so robust—because she’s not speaking from this planet. She’s comparing the business enterprise of her job with the microbial business of some undiscovered life form on the Martian surface, because there aren’t any other businesses there. On earth however there are, and even a local fast food restaurant would go out of business if it operated the way Lakota does.

But why is Lakota and public education in general in such a fix with their labor contracts? Well, the problem is rather epic in scope and it didn’t become that way over night. The best way to describe it would be the radicalization of the work force by national labor unions that have driven up education costs to unsustainable levels. This overview of how organized labor has taken over our education system is articulated very well in one of the latest Hillsdale College articles which can be seen at the link below, or in full text after the link.

As Superintendent Mantia was sending out her resume to The Pulse Journal hoping that nobody would ask the question—“but what about the other 80% of the budget,” and I was defending myself in the Cincinnati media as not being a sexist, due to Mantia and her “employees” saturating their email networks with links to this site and my controversial statements, (thanks by the way—a lot of people got an eyeful of good information) in an effort to discredit me, William McGurn was speaking at the Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Newport Beach, California. What follows is the result of that very informative discussion, and will explain clearly why Superintendent Mantia is either reporting her information from the planet Mars, or she has no idea what efficiency in the private sector means and is simply comparing her version of businesses to other government-run facilities—like perhaps the license bureau. It may seem like a lot to read, but it’s worth it and very good.

http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2012&month=03

March 2012
William McGurn
News Corporation

What Public Employee Unions are Doing to Our Country

WILLIAM MCGURN is a vice president for News Corporation and writes the weekly “Main Street” column for the Wall Street Journal. From 2005 to 2008, he served as chief speechwriter for President George W. Bush. Prior to that he was the chief editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal and spent more than ten years in Europe and Asia for Dow Jones. He has written for a wide variety of publications, including Esquire, the Washington Post, the Spectator of London and the National Catholic Register. He holds a B.A. from the University of Notre Dame and a master’s degree in communications from Boston University, and currently serves on the board of Notre Dame’s Center for Ethics and Culture.

The following is adapted from a speech delivered on February 15, 2012, at a Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar in Newport Beach, California.

MANY SCHOLARS ARE better versed on the history of public employee unions than I am, but there is one credential I can claim that they cannot: I am a taxpayer in the People’s Republic of New Jerseystan. That makes me an authority on how public sector unions—especially at the state and local level—are thwarting economic growth, strangling the middle class, and generally hijacking the democratic process to serve their own ends rather than the public.

Now in my experience, when one says the words “New Jersey,” people for some reason think it is a laugh line. Perhaps you know us from The Sopranos or Jersey Shore. You might think that such a state has nothing to teach you. If so, you would be very wrong. New Jersey offers something that can profit the entire nation: We are the perfect bad example.

As conservatives, of course, we believe in virtue. We like to point to policies and practices that work—low taxes and light regulation for the economy, a strong national defense to keep us safe from foreign attack, and social policies that favor community over government. These are all valuable. But the bad example has its honored place as well: It’s how we illustrate our warnings.

As parents, for example, selling virtue only takes us so far. To make our point when we see a character trait we don’t care for in our kids, we’re far more likely to say something like, “You don’t want to grow up to be like Uncle Bob, do you?”

This is the reason Governor Chris Christie’s reforms have had such resonance. Almost anywhere he points, he has before him an example of how New Jersey’s bloated public sector is hurting growth, limiting the efficiency of government services, and squeezing middle class families. How many state governors and legislators might be more inclined to do the right thing if before they acted they first said to themselves, “We don’t want to be like New Jersey, do we?”

These days, when conservatives get together to discuss the debilitating role played by government workers, we reassure ourselves with statements by FDR and labor leader Samuel Gompers about the fundamental incompatibilities between a union of private workers working for a private company and a union of government workers laboring for our city, state, or federal governments. We also trace the line of expansion to various events, including John F. Kennedy’s executive order that opened the path for collective bargaining for public employees at the federal level.

I don’t want to rehash that today. Today I want to talk about the situation as we find it, and suggest that the first step toward a cure is to diagnose the illness accurately. This means changing the way we think of public sector unions. And in what I have to say, I will concentrate on public sector unions at the state and local levels.

It’s not that I don’t consider the unionization of federal workers to be an issue. Plainly it is an issue when the teachers unions represent one of the largest blocs of delegates at Democratic conventions, when the largest single campaign contributor in the 2010 elections was the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, when union money at the federal level goes at an overwhelming rate to Democratic candidates, and when the Congressional Budget Office tells us that federal employees earn more than their counterparts in the private sector. Nonetheless, I believe that the greater challenge today—to state and city finances, to democratic representation, to the middle class—is at the state and local level. This is partly because state and city unions have the power to negotiate wages and benefits that their counterparts at the federal level largely do not. More fundamentally, it is because we cannot reform at the federal level without correcting a problem that is bringing our cities and states to bankruptcy.

When I say we need to change our understanding, what I mean is that we have to recognize that public sector unions have successfully redefined key relationships in our economic and civic life. In making this argument, I will suggest that the elected politicians who represent us at the negotiating table are not in fact management, that our taxing and spending decisions at the city and state level are in practice decided by our public sector contracts, and that when you put this all together, what emerges is a completely different picture of the modern civil servant. In short, we work for him, not the other way around.

Who is Managing Whom?

Let me start with the relationship between government employee unions and our elected officials. On paper, it is true, mayors and governors sit across the table from city and state workers collectively bargaining for wages and benefits. On paper, this makes them management—representing us, the taxpayers. But in practice, these people often serve more as the employees of unions than as their managers. New Jersey has been telling here. Look at our former governor, Jon Corzine.

You Hillsdale folks are a genteel sort. When you speak about the unions being in bed with the Democratic politicians, you mean it metaphorically. In New Jersey, we take it to Snooki levels: Mr. Corzine once shared a home with the New Jersey leader of the Communication Workers of America, Carla Katz. Back when he was running for governor, he was asked whether that relationship would compromise his ability to represent the taxpayers in negotiations with outfits such as CWA. “As the governor,” Mr. Corzine responded, “you represent eight-and-a-half million people. You don’t represent one union. You don’t represent one person. You represent the people who elected you.”

That’s the way it ought to be. In real life, it turned out that during heated negotiations over a contested CWA contract, Mr. Corzine and Ms. Katz had a long email chain—subsequently published by the Newark Star Ledger, despite the governor’s legal attempts to keep them private—in which she pressed him on the union issues.

But it wasn’t just the CWA. Scarcely six months after he was elected, Governor Corzine appeared before a rally of state workers in Trenton in support of a one percent sales tax designed to bring in revenues to a state hemorrhaging money. Not cutbacks, but a tax. Naturally, Mr. Corzine’s solution was the one the public sector unions wanted: Get the needed revenues by introducing a new tax.

The twist was that there was someone in the New Jersey government who understood the problem—who understood that a new sales tax wouldn’t do much to fix New Jersey’s problems, and that the only way to get a handle on them was to get state workers to start contributing more to their health care and pensions.

These were the pre-Chris Christie days, so the author of this bold proposal was the Senate president, Stephen Sweeney. Mr. Sweeney is not only interesting because he is a prominent and powerful Democrat. He is also interesting because in addition to his political office, he represents the state’s ironworkers. And what Mr. Sweeney proposed for the public sector unions was something private union members such as his ironworkers already paid for. It was also common sense: He knew that if New Jersey didn’t get a handle on its gold-plated pay and benefits for its government employees, it would squeeze out the private sector that hires people such as ironworkers.

If the leader of an ironworkers union could realize that, surely so could a governor who had earlier served as a high-powered executive for Goldman Sachs. But Mr. Corzine was having none of it. Instead, he told the crowd of state workers: “We’re gonna fight for a fair contract.”

The question is, whom was he planning on fighting? Wasn’t he management in these negotiations?
Six months later, Governor Corzine proved this was not simply a slip of the tongue. When workers at Rutgers University were planning to unionize, he turned up at their rally. This was too much even for the liberal Star Ledger, which—in an article entitled “Jon Corzine, Union Rep?”—noted that Mr. Corzine’s appearance at the rally raised the question whether he truly understood that “he represents the ‘management’ side in ongoing contract talks with state employees unions.”

Manifestly, the problem is not that Mr. Corzine and other elected leaders like him—mostly Democrats—do not understand. In fact, they understand all too well that they are the hired help. The public employees they are supposed to manage in effect manage them. The unions provide politicians with campaign funds and volunteers and votes, and the politicians pay for what the unions demand in return with public money.
In New Jersey as elsewhere, most leaders of public sector unions are not sleeping with the politicians who set their salary and benefits. They are, however, doing all they can to install and keep in office those they wish—while fighting hard against the ones they oppose. And until we recognize the real master in this relationship, we will never reform the system.

The Tail Wagging the Dog

My second point relates to my first. Not only have the public unions too often become the dominant partner in the relationship with elected officials, but the contracts and the spending that goes with them are setting the other policy agenda. In other words, even when we recognize that the packages favored by public employees are too generous, we think of them simply as spending items. We need to wake up and recognize that in fact these spending items are the tail wagging the dog—that they set tax and borrowing decisions rather than follow from them.

Take the case of Northvale, a small, affluent town of about 4,600 people at the northeast tip of New Jersey. Its median income is about $99,000, comfortably above both the New Jersey and national levels, and its budget is $21.8 million. Of this, $13.2 million—or nearly two-thirds—goes to the schools. The lion’s share of that, of course, goes to salaries and benefits.

Northvale’s school budget is voted on in the spring. That’s part of the scam, because turnout for these elections is much lower than it is in November for the regular elections. With lower turnout, it’s easier for teachers and other interested parties to dominate the elections. Thus the great bulk of Northvale’s budget is not determined in the regular elections, or by the mayor and city council. Effectively, it is determined by the education lobby and school officials—who in turn are chosen in elections involving only 20 percent of the electorate.

From the other one-third of the budget, Northvale has to run its police force and fire department, remove snow, arrange for garbage pickup, and so on. That means there is not much discretionary spending left. Even when voters rebel—last spring Northvale voters overwhelmingly repudiated the budget—they are frequently ignored, and the back door system ensures there is little in the way of accountability.
But there are consequences: This dynamic helps explain why, in the decade before Chris Christie was elected governor, the property taxes of New Jersey residents went up 70 percent.

Mr. Christie is not in charge of local spending. But he understands that this is part of an exceptionally unvirtuous circle. So he’s made some changes. Last year, for instance, with the help of allies such as Mr. Sweeney, he pushed a reform through the legislature that required public workers to start contributing to their health care and up their contributions to their pensions. It’s not nearly the same percentage as their counterparts in the private sector, but it’s a start.

Mr. Christie also put through a property tax cap that forces cities to go to the people for a vote if they increase property taxes by more than two percent. And just last month, he signed a bill that will allow towns to move their school budget votes to the November ballot—not only saving money, but also ensuring that more citizens vote, not simply those who have a vested interest.

At the same time, Mr. Christie has begun to campaign against abuses using language that people can understand. His most recent target is the practice of awarding six-figure checks to public employees who are allowed to accumulate—and cash out—unused sick pay. In New Jersey these payments are called “boat money,” largely because retired government workers often use the money to buy pleasure boats when they retire. Across the state, cities have liabilities of $825 million because of these boat checks.

And what’s been the opposition’s response? Instead of agreeing to reasonable cuts, the Democrats keep thumping for a millionaire’s tax. New Jersey being New Jersey, the millionaire’s tax aims at people making far less than a million dollars. But even if it didn’t, it’s hard to see how driving millionaires out of the state will help it meet its huge and growing unfunded pension liabilities.

To summarize my second point: You and I make spending decisions the way all households do. We take our income, and we live within our means. In sharp contrast, public employee unions have introduced a whole new dynamic: They negotiate pay and benefits in contracts we can’t rewrite. When the revenues to meet these obligations fall short, they push to raise taxes to make up the difference.

The Corruption of Public Service

That leads me to my third and final point: If I am right that the public employee unions are in fact the managers in the relationship with politicians, and that public sector spending is driving tax and borrowing policy, the inescapable conclusion is that you and I are working for them.

That’s not how we usually understand and speak of public service. Traditionally, the idea of a public servant is someone who is working for the public, with the implication that he or she is sacrificing a better material life to do so. But can anyone really define today’s relationship this way? Especially when health care and pensions are included, government workers increasingly seem to live better than the people who pay their salaries. How many of you walk into some local, state or federal office these days and leave thinking, “The men and women here are working for me”?

In some ways the change has been driven by larger changes in union life. From one out of three workers at its high point in the 1950s, today fewer than one out of 14 private sector workers belongs to a union, and the percentage continues to drop. Conversely, the unionization of government employees continues to grow, to the point where public sector union members now outnumber their private sector counterparts for the first time in American history.

In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Fred Siegel notes that public sector unions have
become a vanguard movement within liberalism. And the reason for that is it’s the public sector that comes closest to the statist ideals of McGovern and post-McGovern liberals. And that is, there’s no connection between effort and reward. You’re guaranteed your job. You’re guaranteed your salary increase. There’s a kind of bureaucratic equality.

“This vanguard,” Siegel continues, “becomes in the eyes of many liberals the model for the middle class. Public-sector unions are what all workers should be like. Their benefits are the kind of benefits everyone should get.” So instead of the private sector defining the public, the public sector is thought to define the private.

As public employees unionize, their dues—often collected for the unions by the government—fund a permanent interest constantly lobbying for bigger government. To pay for this bigger and more expensive government, they advocate for higher taxes on those in the private sector. Only when they are threatened with layoffs are they inclined to compromise, and sometimes not even then. That is what I mean when I say that we work for them.

Where to Go From Here

One of the few silver linings of our tough economy today is that it is forcing tough decisions. Big city mayors and governors are having issues with their public employees, because we’ve reached a point where we simply cannot afford business as usual. With a sluggish economy—and fewer taxpayers—the problems that have piled up are becoming too difficult to ignore.

Across the nation we have governors and mayors trying to solve their public employee problems with varying degrees of seriousness, from Chris Christie in New Jersey to Jerry Brown in California to the great experiments going on in the Rust Belt—in Indiana, which has done the best, and Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan. Only Illinois, led by Democratic Governor Pat Quinn, has opted for business as usual with a mammoth tax increase that is now being followed up, in today’s typical way of Democratic governance, with tax breaks for large companies threatening to leave Chicago because of the tax burden.

In most of these places, there’s probably little we can do about the contracts that exist. What we can do is bring in new hires under more reasonable contracts and pro-rate contributions for existing employees. Even marginal changes can have a big impact, as Wisconsin found out when Governor Scott Walker’s collective bargaining reforms for public workers helped restore many of the state’s school districts back to fiscal health.

My father was a federal employee, as an FBI agent. I spent some time as a government worker in the White House. I also know many fine and devoted people on the public payroll who work hard, are good at what they do, and earn everything they get. But there are also those who work without results. I believe Americans are a generous people who can recognize the difference. We need to restore our public sector to a place where those in charge can make those distinctions and allocate rewards and resources accordingly.

In the meantime, I think the best thing we can do is speak honestly. That is what Mr. Christie is doing in New Jersey. His style isn’t for everyone. Yet his popularity suggests that Americans appreciate a politician willing to talk about the reality of public employee unions today—and the unreasonable costs they are imposing on our society.

We’ll never return to the ideal of public service until the rest of us start speaking honestly as well.
________________________________________

Oh, and a special message to the public relations boy at Lakota.  You can’t make crap look like a diamond as much as you might try, and you can’t make a diamond into crap, as per your work on Thusday March 15th.  Bad move.

Rich Hoffman

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

 
 

Agenda: Grinding America Down–and The Naked Communist list of 45 goals from 1958

When I came home yesterday a Christmas gift was left on the front porch from one of my readers here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom. It was a large tin can filled with a multitude of presents which was a pleasant surprise after a rather difficult day topped off with a cold ride in the rain on my motorcycle. I had gotten caught without my rain suit and it was raining hard just days before Christmas, so my cloths were soaked to the bone. So as typical on such days I undress on the front porch so my wet cloths don’t ruin my wife’s carpet and hardwood floors inside the house, and that’s when my wife showed me the present.

Inside were a number of wonderful presents and cards for both my wife and I, but one of the gifts jumped out at me in particular. It was a DVD of the documentary film Agenda: Grinding America Down by Curtis Browers which won Best Film at the Jubilee Film Festival in 2010. It surprised me that I hadn’t heard about this film because it covers much of the content I’ve written about here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom, which is the history of the communist movement in the United States and how many factions instigated by the Soviet Union KGB in the 1950’s and 1960’s sought to dismantle American culture from within. Here is one of my many articles about this very important topic.

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/06/17/do-you-believe-in-spies-review-of-the-film-salt-and-how-sleeper-cells-have-corrupted-america/

I immediately watched Agenda and found it compelling and consistent with my own observations. I realized long ago that the sudden rise in the divorce rate, the ignorance of our youth, the rise in the welfare culture, the focus on sexuality, race relations, and feminism were suspiciously coordinated, and I have resisted, analyzed, and come to virtually the same conclusions as Bowers did in his very good film which you can see a preview of below:

One of the most potent aspects of that film was the revelation of the 45 communist goals outlined in the book The Naked Communist that Bowers learned about in a Communist USA meeting he attended at Berkley University in 1992. A lot of people don’t know that there is a very strong communist party in the United States and they have been around for much of the 20th century. As I have reported here even Ronald Reagan petitioned to be a member of the communist party in his youthful days, till he grew older and wiser. Read that article here:

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/08/25/ronald-reagan-was-a-communist-yes-the-president-was-once-a-union-leader/

But people don’t see communism in America because it is not part of their static patterns. Culturally, America sees itself as the opposite of any communist country, but that is partly by design. I have studied social cultures my entire life, so much so that I intended fully to become an archeologist or anthropologist in my life profession, and in 1992 while I learned that communism and smaller degrees of socialism was quite alive and well in modern America at many meetings that I like Bowers attended, I decided to dedicate my time and energy to not studying why cultures from the past failed, but I would apply my studies to preserving the American culture that I saw being destroyed in front of my eyes while it was still alive. To understand what I mean by static patterns refer to this article on the subject:

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/08/28/dynamic-intellectualism-and-the-tea-party-the-battle-between-the-spider-and-the-wasp/

The communist party in the United States was set up by the KGB during the Cold War had a two pronged plan to defeat America in that war. They planned to spend America into oblivion with the nuclear arms and space race, but while we were following rockets to the stars and sending men to the moon to beat the Soviet Union, KGB agents and sleeper cells were being established within the United States to destroy American culture from within. This is difficult for many people to see who only look at their own lives and the small part they play in American existence. But if you look at American culture with the big eyes of an archeologist outside the static patterns of normalcy it is easy to see how Communist USA has slowly over time accomplished many of the goals they set out to do way back in 1958. The list that Bowers addressed in the film Agenda is shown below for your convenience. As you look over the list consider what roll you have played in helping to make it possible and don’t lie to yourself and believe that the below information is a part of some radical conspiracy theory. Every one of these items is listed in the book The Naked Communist and has been routinely discussion in communist groups within the United States since the 50’s.
The following is the list of Communist goals contained in The Naked Communist 1958:[3]

1. U.S. acceptance of coexistence as the only alternative to atomic war.
2. U.S. willingness to capitulate in preference to engaging in atomic war.
3. Develop the illusion that total disarmament by the United States would be a demonstration of moral strength.
4. Permit free trade between all nations regardless of Communist affiliation and regardless of whether or not items could be used for war.
5. Extension of long-term loans to Russia and Soviet satellites.
6. Provide American aid to all nations regardless of Communist domination.
7. Grant recognition of Red China. Admission of Red China to the U.N.
8. Set up East and West Germany as separate states in spite of Khrushchev’s promise in 1955 to settle the German question by free elections under supervision of the U.N.
9. Prolong the conferences to ban atomic tests because the United States has agreed to suspend tests as long as negotiations are in progress.
10. Allow all Soviet satellites individual representation in the U.N.
11. Promote the U.N. as the only hope for mankind. If its charter is rewritten, demand that it be set up as a one-world government with its own independent armed forces.
12. Resist any attempt to outlaw the Communist Party.
13. Do away with all loyalty oaths.
14. Continue giving Russia access to the U.S. Patent Office.
15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
16. Use technical decisions of the courts to weaken basic American institutions by claiming their activities violate civil rights.
17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks.
18. Gain control of all student newspapers.
19. Use student riots to foment public protests against programs or organizations which are under Communist attack.
20. Infiltrate the press. Get control of book-review assignments, editorial writing, policymaking positions.
21. Gain control of key positions in radio, TV, and motion pictures.
22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms.”
23. Control art critics and directors of art museums.
24. Eliminate all laws governing obscenity by calling them “censorship” and a violation of free speech and free press.
25. Break down cultural standards of morality by promoting pornography and obscenity in books, magazines, motion pictures, radio, and TV.
26. Present homosexuality, degeneracy and promiscuity as “normal, natural, healthy.”
27. Infiltrate the churches and replace revealed religion with “social” religion. Discredit the Bible and emphasize the need for intellectual maturity which does not need a “religious crutch.”
28. Eliminate prayer or any phase of religious expression in the schools on the ground that it violates the principle of “separation of church and state.”
29. Discredit the American Constitution by calling it inadequate, old-fashioned, out of step with modern needs, a hindrance to cooperation between nations on a worldwide basis.
30. Discredit the American Founding Fathers. Present them as selfish aristocrats who had no concern for the “common man.”
31. Belittle all forms of American culture and discourage the teaching of American history on the ground that it was only a minor part of the “big picture.” Give more emphasis to Russian history since the Communists took over.
32. Support any socialist movement to give centralized control over any part of the culture—education, social agencies, welfare programs, mental health clinics, etc.
33. Eliminate all laws or procedures which interfere with the operation of the Communist apparatus.
34. Eliminate the House Committee on Un-American Activities.
35. Discredit and eventually dismantle the FBI.
36. Infiltrate and gain control of more unions.
37. Infiltrate and gain control of big business.
38. Transfer some of the powers of arrest from the police to social agencies. Treat all behavioral problems as psychiatric disorders which no one but psychiatrists can understand or treat.
39. Dominate the psychiatric profession and use mental health laws as a means of gaining coercive control over those who oppose Communist goals.
40. Discredit the family as an institution. Encourage promiscuity, masturbation and easy divorce.
41. Emphasize the need to raise children away from the negative influence of parents. Attribute prejudices, mental blocks and retarding of children to suppressive influence of parents.
42. Create the impression that violence and insurrection are legitimate aspects of the American tradition; that students and special-interest groups should rise up and use “united force” to solve economic, political or social problems.
43. Overthrow all colonial governments before native populations are ready for self-government.
44. Internationalize the Panama Canal.
45. Repeal the Connally reservation so the United States cannot prevent the World Court from seizing jurisdiction over domestic problems. Give the World Court jurisdiction over nations and individuals alike.

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

If you’d like to know more, see my article on The Ten Planks of Communism here:

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/04/24/if-you-vote-for-a-levy-of-any-kind-youre-stupid-the-ten-planks-of-communism/

As you read that list dear reader you are probably asking yourself, “how did I not see this?” Well, there were a lot of other exciting things happening that took up our attention. Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the Bell X1 in 1947, 11 years before the book The Naked Communist was released. The Soviet Union knew once they got a glimpse of American ingenuity breaking the sound barrier that they could not beat the United States on the front end directly, so they had to defeat what Americans thought of themselves from within and destroy the entire concept of Americanism. You can read more about this period of time here:

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/11/06/social-value-education-walt-disney-and-the-great-chuck-yeager/

Most people think of war in terms of bullets and violence, but that is not the case. Sun Tzu author of The Art of War says distinctly that “it is best to defeat those who are already defeated.” And the Soviet Union played this game with the long view of culture in mind. While America fought the Soviet Union with rockets, military, and Ronald Reagan bravado, the Soviet Union fought America with the feint of keeping up with the United States with all those topics, but knew they would lose in the end, so they sought to destroy American culture itself.

Enemies of America have done to the United States culture what scientists have done to a frog in experiments involving hot water. If a scientist puts a frog into scalding hot water, the frog will of course struggle and attempt to jump out. But if the frog is put into water at room temperature and the heat is gradually turned up slowly, the frog will stay in the water comfortably for a long time, until of course it’s too late. The gradual heat of the water will slowly rob the life of the frog till its muscles no longer work and it cannot escape. Defeating a culture is the same kind of thing and the Soviet Union knew this. They knew Americans would always fight and would beat them in a head on fight, so slowly over time communists have sought to dismantle what American Culture is so that the defeat of America will come not from China, Russia, Cuba or any other place of rampant communism, but it will come from college professors, school teachers, politicians, and media producers educated at the institutions the communists controlled as established in The Naked Communist.

But fret not dear reader, America is not gone yet, and the ideas that made it great will live on. It takes people like Curtis Bowers to make films like Agenda to teach how we arrived at this point in time. And I can speak for myself, I write here everyday so that American culture can be preserved and all those of you who are reading this that have forgotten what being an American is, can relearn. That’s why I write articles like this one:

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/12/18/the-flying-tigers-learning-what-america-is-by-looking-at-the-past/

I write here everyday to restore America and to counter the efforts of the pretentious communist academics of which our current president is a proud member. But it’s not just him; there are thousands upon thousands of these communist sympathizers functioning right out in the open these days. And I plan to be their worst nightmare in the years to come. Even if through the NDAA Act these communist lovers gain control of websites like this one, I am currently writing books that will compete directly with the propaganda they have inflicted upon our culture like The Naked Communist and Rules for Radicals. So the game is not up for America. We are learning that we have been scammed, and the wrath of that realization will be one of great anger. Right now it’s embarrassment, but as the truth comes out, it will evolve into anger and America will overcome this enemy from within. Hopefully this will be peaceful in a battle of ideas. But if the communist types with all their various names continue to stomp all over the United States Constitution I will promise that violence will be assured for their kind. Because our future under communist philosophy will look something like this–remember the frog.

So take head my dear American reader. Yes, communist have infiltrated our culture and has successfully destroyed much. But there are a lot of people who are waking up, and fans of this website, Glenn Beck, Alex Jones, and filmmakers like Curtis Bowers are starting to turn the strategy of the communists against them. After all, it worked for them against us, so the same can be used against them to destroy the communist culture. The difference between American traditional culture and communist culture is that their culture is built upon lies, and ours is built on history and in the game of culture building, America will always beat the lie of communism. It might take a little time, but the healing process is already beginning, which is evident in the very good film, Agenda: Grinding America Down.

You can do your part in fixing America by watching that very good film and taking some notes. I recommend it highly.

SEE THE WORLD THROUGH HOFFMAN LENSES:

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/socialists-live-hoffman-lenses-on-urban-meyer/

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

Kepler — 22 is Discovered by NASA: The pivot point of human history

A marvelous discovery was made by NASA, a new earth like planet called Kepler -22 was discovered by the $600 million Kepler observatory and is the first hint of what is to come regarding space exploration.  It has long been suspected that there are many unknown planets in space that will be discovered by this new space oriented observatory.  To date it appears that there are 2,326 potential planets that have been discovered within the first 16 months of Kepler’s observations.  Darryl Parks of 700 WLW discusses this exciting planetary find in a very fun broadcast on his radio program where he makes the information of how this planet impacts the everyday person understandable for those who don’t normally pay attention to news of a cosmic significance. 

To see the original press conference from NASA you can watch it below.  NASA is a government organization that I believe is the only one that actually is a good investment of our tax dollars.   Where I complain and point out the many discrepancies of all other government programs and how they are inclined to always fail, NASA is the one really big bright spot that gives back to our society much more than we put into it.  For an article about just how much NASA has given us refer to the piece I wrote around the time of the last Space Shuttle mission:

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/07/01/the-ghost-town-of-kerr-city-a-metaphor-for-planet-earth/

The rest of government seems obsessed with socialism which permeates virtually every activity and causes government to fail as a workable organization in virtually every capacity.  The reason governments enjoy socialism is because it benefits their ideology of being members of a superior political class.  Capitalism does not benefit career politicians.  Socialism does and that’s why they have been using it to virtually rob the wealth and resources of every organization they touch. 

I have reported to you dear reader many exciting developments in the realm of science that are very beneficial to a much brighter tomorrow for all of us.  The reason I am so angry with public education and the socialism that it teaches, as well as how government also subscribes to that failed political philosophy is because socialism is very corrosive to innovation, which are the needed components to continue with the kind of discovery that delivered us to this age of exploration and made Kepler observatory a reality in the first place.  To my mind socialism on a global scale is holding back Skycar travel which I have spoken in great detail about.  It is preventing regenerative medicine because socialism has made deals with the current pharmaceutical companies to maintain the current profit structure.  I have reported wonders in horticulture only to have socialism prevent food supply in agriculture.   I have spoken about the future of space travel and how deregulation at the level of NASA will create an explosion of off-world industry.  I have spoken at great length of the education options in innovation but the socialism of the teachers unions prevent innovation from being discussed.  I have spoken about how the archeology of our age is completely wrong and new discoveries are begging for attention, but the socialism of the university system prevents new information from being accepted into the fossil record.  I have demonstrated completely unexplored islands in the Pacific Ocean that hold keys to human civilization’s past, that are not even officially explored scientifically, I have brought to light the fossil record of just my home state of Ohio and how a species of giant human has been unearthed, yet the socialism of the universities and museums are not sure how to report the new findings since they don’t fit into established theories.  You can read some of these articles below for review.  (YES, I WROTE THEM ALL)

SKYCAR: WHAT IS IT?

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/01/22/fly-a-skycar-today-the-future-of-transportation/

REGENERATIVE MEDICINE

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/the-future-of-medicine/

GROWING FOOD THE CORRECT WAY

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/01/29/epcots-the-land-and-the-celebrity-farmer-a-look-at-the-wonderful-and-important-world-of-horticulture/

EXPLORING THE REAL BEGINNING OF THE HUMAN RACE

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/10/12/my-love-of-real-science-and-the-adventure-of-discovery/

WHO TAUGHT HUMAN BEINGS FIRST?

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/08/30/ancient-aliens-and-the-tea-party-koyannisquatsi/

THE SECRET OF MALDEN ISLAND IN THE PACIFIC OCEAN

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/08/13/secret-of-malden-island-why-public-education-is-hiding-history/

GIANTS IN OHIO

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/20/giants-in-ohio-the-hidden-history-of-the-human-race/

THE FUTURE OF EDUCATION

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/01/31/the-guts-to-be-bold-the-option-of-school-choice/

THE NEW AGE OF SPACE TRAVEL

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/10/22/jonathan-west-the-nameplate-god-be-thankful-for-virgin-galactic/

PRIVATIZATION OF SPACE!

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/03/11/the-space-race-is-just-beginning-as-the-space-shuttles-end/

Even though many who read here know this site as an anti-tax site, as an education reform site, as a whistle-blower site, my anger at all those government entities which are the targets of my complaints are because they stand in the way of scientific understanding and invention.  I see them as standing in the way of where mankind is, and where it needs to go and I am at war with their ignorance.  Even if I am the only member of that war on my side I will gladly take on every ignorant socialists there is because they are in my way to arriving at the human evolution that is our destiny. 

The discovery of Keplar – 22 is a big deal.  To put it in perspective, Keplar – 22 demonstrates that there are other earth-like planets out there, and the human race can continue on when earth ends, which it will eventually.  There is no question in my mind that much of the strange archeology our society has discovered, has it’s roots in a civilization much like ours who around 100,000 years ago saw earth from one of these sister planets that we share in this small arm of the Milky Way that is 600 to 1000 light years across and decided to attempt to explore our planet.  To understand how big everything really is and to begin to wrap your mind around inter-dimensional travel, watch this video:

Those other planets sent beings to check out earth, to land and interact with our culture at that time just like we are planning at this very moment to visit Kepler – 22.  If we could, we would.  There is no doubt in my mind that these other planets who are probably 2000 to 10,000 years more advanced than we are now have figured out how to travel to deep space and were able to visit us.  They explored us for their own benefit and returned back to their home planet to report what they saw here.  But while they were here, just like we will when learn to travel in the same fashion, they have a natural effect on the cultures they study just by being there. 

If you want to understand how space travel will evolve you can learn a lot by this documentary.  The last quarter of that documentary talks specifically about interstellar travel, the kind of travel that we will have to uncover before we can ever entertain traveling to places like Kepler – 22.  And it is possible, and we will figure it out, as sure as you are reading this.  In the documentary they introduce tachyons which are a hypothetical subatomic particle that always moves faster than light. In the language of special relativity, a tachyon would be a particle with space-like four-momentum and imaginary proper time. A tachyon would be constrained to the space-like portion of the energy-momentum graph. Therefore, it cannot slow down to subluminal speeds.
You can read more about tachyon’s here:

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

There is no question in my mind that civilization in our own past used anti-gravity devices to build massive structures all over the earth.  Somewhere along the line of human evolution we lost this knowledge.  If we understood it once, we can relearn the skill and uncover it once again.  When this happens escape velocity off earth will no longer be a problem.  And once we can perform science in space and travel becomes cheaper there, exploration into tachyon technology will be within reach, and from there, we will be able to travel to Kepler – 22 and all the new planets that the Kepler observatory is about to discover. 

The reason that societies fail however is they generally collapse on themselves when they become too top-heavy with government power, and the thief of science is always some variation of socialism.  The fact that anti-gravity technology existed on earth at one time and has been lost to all future science, probably in the burning of the library in Alexandria which I spoke about during the recent riots in Egypt demonstrates how artifacts and ancient understanding can be erased forever by the vandals of war.  See that article here:

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/02/02/the-real-crime-in-egypt-history-lost-to-ideology-and-quests-for-power/

The decision of our day is are we going to look forward to even more scientific discoveries like we are experiencing in Kepler – 22 or are we going to worry about the pensions of public workers who simply expand government?  Are we going to continue to work all our lives for an opportunity to retire and finally become free once our bodies are broken beyond repair, or are we going to embrace regenerative medicine and live for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years?  Are we going to focus on global warming for a planet that is going to be gone in 5 billion years anyway, or are we going to start the process of leaving mother earth and finally move out on our own as a human race………..I mean isn’t it time? 

Socialism is that overprotective mother who never wants her children to leave home, and progressives are those spoiled children who still cleave to their mothers breasts for milk, even though they are fully grown adults.  If left to socialism, no child will ever leave their mother and they will die still cleaving to their mothers warm embrace, never to have lived, never to have explored, never to have loved, never to have sorrow, but they will be safe in their mothers embrace.  Those who act in such a way are socialists and they do not speak for people like me who want nothing to do with that mother.  I want with every essence of my being to jump into space; to capture the mysteries of the tachyon’s so I can travel to far away stars and see what adventure awaits us there.  And for those scared children called progressive socialists who cleave to mother earth and say, “but you will die soon…..why worry about such things?”  My response would be, “I don’t want to live forever, but why can’t I live for 500 to 1000 years.  Noah was 950 years old.  Moses was 120 years old, it is obvious that human beings knew something then that they have forgotten as empires rose and fell around the concept of socialism.” We are on the cusp of being able to repair our bodies indefinitely, so why wouldn’t we?  And why would we not reach for the stars instead of a pension check and a slow death in retirement in a Florida condo? 

All that really is holding us back is socialism and other collective oriented philosophies.  Subscribers of those political theories are short-sighted scared children who wish to keep the world at a constant that they are comfortable with.  And such people do not have the right, or obligation to hold me to their lack of vision.  There are many Kepler – 22’s out there and I want to see human kind explore them all, even if it takes 5000 years to do it.  Our society is on the cusp of that kind of breakthrough.  The pivot point from which we all rest in the other direction is the kind of social de-evolution that will erase all the breakthroughs we’ve experienced of late and drift back into the mentality of the dark ages, which is what progressive socialism intends, to the demise of us all. 

The assumption of our day is that human kind will always advance forward, but that is not the case.  The evidence of modern archeology shows that our distant relatives actually knew more than we currently do about a great many things, and it is the cultures of empires that erased those sciences under the rule of tyranny.  And as we have just discovered or rediscovered a new planet very similar to our own earth, that same tyranny of the past is upon us again and threatens to halt our progress into a slow regression of thought and innovation.  The decision is ours to make, and the merit of that decision will determine thousands of years of future human existence.

SEE THE WORLD THROUGH HOFFMAN LENSES:

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/socialists-live-hoffman-lenses-on-urban-meyer/

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

The Key to American Exceptionalism: It’s not what you think it is

Fresh off a full day at my daughter’s house celebrating her 22nd birthday and indulging in a Pirates of the Caribbean movie marathon which was one of her birthday wishes, my thoughts returned to the genius of Walt Disney and his foresight to create the original ride of which that film series is based in his Disneyland amusement park so many years ago. This love of pirate lore has deep roots in American society and for good reason, because pirates are one of America’s parents, and to understand America, you have to understand the role that a pirate plays in the process.

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/11/26/avast-there-matey-birthday-pirates-and-freedom-at-all-costs/

Before indulging in that deep abyss of psychological exploration all one must do to witness the world as it always has been before rebellions of courage have lashed out against tyrannical static patterns of thought, the current Obama administration displays clearly why I have always considered it more important to teach my kids about the value of piracy than the importance of getting a doctorate in medicine, or political science. Because to me, the thieves, the scallywags, and the politicians of this world are those who seek to control others through rules and regulation and they should be fought as an enemy to individuality. President Obama to date has been the worst, yet best example of what such thieves and looters are capable of and why the world should run in the opposite direction of such moochers and social parasites.

Walt Disney knew what few people were ready to acknowledge when he designed Disneyland, then his much larger theme park Disney World. When I was a kid, I marveled at how Disney got away with having a theme ride about rapists, terrorists, and drunken bastards robbing and looting in an aimless life, and placed that ride within a very short walk from the Liberty Tree in Liberty Square as if both sections of his park were equal in some way. I always felt that Walt Disney was trying to tell people something important. Even though he sold the Disney image with Cinderella Castle there was something under the covers he wanted to instruct every American alive of the importance, and the sign posts are everywhere in Walt Disney World.

This became very evident to me about a decade ago when I was at Disneyworld with my wife and most of her family. The Park had closed except to employees and their families at 9 PM after the light parade, so for the next two hours the whole park was ours, since my niece was an employee at the time. So my wife, daughters my niece and two nephews went on a quest of adventure those next two hours that cleared up the whole problem for me. We had free access to the Pirates of the Caribbean ride, before Disney reinvented it with the film franchise, and the ghost of Walt Disney spoke to me as we rode that ride 8 times in a row from 9 PM till 10 PM. The line was so short we had it virtually to ourselves. We could get off, get back in line and do it again almost immediately. After 4 times in a row the employees let us just stay in the boat and continue on for the next 4 times.

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/05/16/pirates-freedom-and-key-west-whats-more-important-order-or-happiness/

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/05/23/pirates-of-the-caribbean-on-stranger-tides-a-movie-review-and-commentary/

At this time I was reading a book I knew populated the libraries of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams with considerable respect, and I knew that it was a key to the wording of the American Constitution. It was also the book that created the very first libel law suit in the history of mankind, so the Founding Fathers being interested in the laws of England were very much aware of its importance. The book was called The Buccaneers of America written by Alexander O. Exquemelin who served under Henry Morgan’s command on those Buccaneer exploits that took place on the Caribbean oceans of the 1670’s. Morgan was a privateer serving the kind of England with the profits from his loot in raiding the Spanish and their hold on Central America. To England, Morgan was a privateer. To every other nation Morgan was a bloodthirsty pirate. Since the King of England Charles II was becoming very wealthy under Morgan’s exploits the English Jamaican colony town of Port Royal was left alone from the long arm of English law and the Governor of Jamaica gave Henry Morgan free rein to do as he pleased. This was the birth of freedom, even though the results often ended in prostitution, drunken orgies, and other decadence, freedom from the laws of kings began in this small Jamaican port.

Well, another important figure to the foundation of the United States also played a part in all this. The very young John Locke who was serving as Secretary of the Board of Trade and Plantations for Anthony Ashley Cooper, 1st Earl of Shaftesbury a very close confidant to the king. Locke was in a unique position to see how the behavior in the far away land of Jamaica influenced the politics of England to the highest rank. What Locke learned in these observations became the Two Treatises of Civil Government which Thomas Jefferson and James Madison would use to modal the Declaration of Independence after. You see, John Locke became a philosopher based on all these observations, the most pivotal in America history up to that point, because John Locke and the exploits of Henry Morgan occurred a hundred years before the American Revolution and set the foundation of thought that would become America. The seeds of rebellion had been planted by Locke and nurtured along by patriots like Sam Adams and Thomas Paine. But the ship that carried the seed for Locke to plant was Henry Morgan.

After Charles the II died, England sought to make peace with the French, Spanish and Dutch, so English heroes like Morgan were suddenly cast into the light of piracy and were hunted down for crimes that just a few short years ago made them wealthy. Fortune hunters who sought to live the “pirate’s life” of Morgan took to the seas and found themselves bandits as the governments of the world outlawed the practice of privateering.

But the new world of America had attracted all the adventurers and discontent of the world’s countries, many of them coming to America to settle in the various pirate towns, such as New York, and especially New Orleans to be free of people like Obama’s contemporaries, they were every bit as alive and well back then let me assure you. Pirate captains like Black Sam Bellamy continued on in the tradition of Henry Morgan for as long as they could. Politics being the nature of static patterns attacked the dynamic social patterns of the pirates by settling the new world themselves, and buffering out the effect of the wild outlaws who occupied this strange new world called America.

But some men, the raw adventurers who would rather die than lose their freedom, even if it was the chains of hell itself they fought against continued to pillage and plunder long after the laws of civilization had pulled tight the noose of control. This is precisely the same pattern that occurred in the American West. Politicians used the adventurous spirit of its wild and wooly class to settle the frontier. Then once the blood of their enemies had been shed they turned on the adventurous and killed them. This is how Black Beard came to be. Black Beard just thirty to forty years prior would have been a hero for England. But in 1718, he was an enemy to the world because he refused to acknowledge the laws of politicians, and proved far too difficult to socially control.

The great classic movie The Buccaneer with Charlton Heston playing Andrew Jackson and Yul Brynner playing Jean Lafitte was about the unholy alliance between Jackson who teamed up with the pirate of New Orleans in Lafitte to fight off the English in the War of 1812. Jackson wisely used the unpredictable static patterns of the pirates around New Orleans to defeat handedly the English troops who occupied the city. Did you not know that Mardi Gras was brought to Louisiana by early French settlers and the rituals of wearing masks and bringing single women to elaborate masked balls was started by the French pirates and prostitutes of New Orleans?

This is why Walt Disney recreated a New Orleans town to place his new ride Pirates of the Caribbean into at the very first Disneyland. Being a natural patriot, who had dropped out of high school, and never had any formal education of any kind, Disney had taught himself, and this is what made him a unique thinker. Disney obviously loved The Buccaneer movie, but during that same period of time the great classic novel called Atlas Shrugged came out, in 1957. In that classic book one of the key characters is the pirate Ragnar Danneskjöld who serves as one of the three main protagonist’s who raids and loots the “looters” of society. In the case of Atlas Shrugged the “looters” were politicians like Obama in the very first clip. Ragnar stole back from the politicians the loot they plundered from those who had originally earned the money. There is no question that Ragnar’s character in Atlas Shrugged, Yul Brynner’s adaption of Lafitte in The Buccaneer, and the many stories of Henry Morgan and how the Founding Father’s adored Morgan and his band of Pirates led to the Pirates of the Caribbean ride. So as I was reading at the time of traveling down that boat ride for the sixth and seventh times that night the words of Exquemelin and Locke were clearly written on everything I was looking at.

In those two short years, 1957 with Atlas Shrugged, then in 1958 with The Buccaneer the static pattern of the pirate as a villain, as depicted in Captain Hook, or Captain Flint was suddenly shattered and a new way to look at piracy emerged, which was not shaped on Christian values of morality, but on the true intentions of the human soul. This is why the Disney ride is so popular, and why the movies are so enjoyable.

This is also why pirates are the keys to understanding what America was supposed to be, and what it still can be. This is also why films like Pirates of the Caribbean, and books like Atlas Shrugged are absolute keys to dusting off American Excepetionalism and becoming once again what we were in the beginning, when freedom was an idea created on a pirate ship, written down by a surgeon, witnessed by a philosopher, studied by revolutionaries, and translated for us by artists. It is why we root for blood thirsty killers like Jessie James even though publicly we chastise them. Deep in our hearts we know that the key to our inner desires is to not fall in line with what society tells us to do. The key is to cast off the control of the politicians and their rules, their laws, their meager attempts to control human beings as though they were cattle. The key to American Exceptionalism is in being…..well exceptional……exceptionally free, and living with a passion to protect that freedom, at any and all cost.

We like pirates and outlaws because they have the courage to question the rules that bind the human soul. We may call them unholy, unethical, unpatriotic, but deep inside we call them bandits and mean it as the highest compliment. I have yet to meet a man and especially a woman who doesn’t love a bandit in their lives whether they admit it in the light of day or not. Because the bandit seeks freedom as the highest goal, and adventure is but the vehicle that takes them to their destination. It is the rest of the world who watches in envy as those with courage take their freedom and live each hour of the day by the fruit of their valor. For the rest, they just watch Pirates of the Caribbean and fantasize about a world they could have lived, if only they weren’t such gullible fruitcakes with one foot already in their coffins.

For the answer to everything click the link below!

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/09/18/the-answer-is-c-who-runs-society-the-engine-or-the-boxcar/

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

Terror of the One-Trick Pony: Thoughts from a frozen roadway

The stars were unusually clear as I left for work on my motorcycle during the predawn hours of November 18, 2011.  With the temperature in the mid twenties, all the moisture in the atmosphere was frozen into solids which had fallen back to earth leaving a clear view of the sky above.  And with such clarity comes thinking of equal visibility.  The movie The Immortals came out last weekend.  That film had a production budget of roughly $75 million and as of November 16th, was just shy of grossing $40 million.  So the film is on its way to at least being considered profitable.  It won’t be a run-a-way success, but it will pay the bills of everyone involved and then some, which is good.  The reason The Immortals was on my mind during this crisp morning ride was because I had a hand in that film.  To see how, watch the fire whip section of the preview below. 

People close to the situation wondered if I was upset that the production team of The Immortals used film clips of my work on the Peter Facinelli short called The Delivery produced by Real D 3D in the footage shown at the link for the Daily Motion, instead of bringing me out to Hollywood to do the stand-in work.  Real D 3D was involved in both The Delivery and The Immortals.

(EVERYTHING YOU SEE IN THIS CLIP THAT INVOLVES A BULLWHIP IS ME, EXCEPT WHERE PETER IS JUST HOLDING THE FLAMING WHIP–and you may have to watch a 30 second commercial before the actual video plays.  Also, remember the whole purpose was to shoot the short with Real D 3D’s new camera system to show what it could do as a sample of 3D for studio investment)

http://www.dailymotion.com/embed/video/xbv52m_peter-facinelli-s-the-delivery-movi_shortfilms
Peter Facinelli’s The Delivery Movie Trailer by CullensNews

I also wrote about that experience at this link.

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/09/25/bullwhip-consultant-on-films/

Facinelli was on my mind because this upcoming weekend the new Twilight film is coming out where Peter plays Dr. Carlisle in that series so the two films share a bit of history together.  It was Peter who brought me out to Hollywood for the Real D 3D project.  Should I be upset that Real D 3D used my clips from that footage shot on The Delivery to allow CGI artists to create the whip effects digitally in The Immortals instead of doing the footage in live action?  Well, the answer is consistent with the rest of my comments stated at this site and just because it pertains to me, or some special little talent that I may have, the rule still applies.  No, it does not bother me if technology can replace my physical work.  In fact, I am happy that my footage was able to be used as reference for the animators to pull off such a feat.   

The typical response, especially in Hollywood is to carefully guard their crafts, just as most union oriented occupations are concerned in other fields.  The joke on the set during the making of The Delivery was that Hoffman is the only one guaranteed to get work off that feature.  At that time, before the first Twilight film was released, it was speculated that even Peter may be overlooked when actual casting took place, because in Hollywood, that’s the way it goes.  But the thought was that I was the only guy on the set who could do the whip stunts, and in the country there are only a handful of people to choose from, so I was certain to make a pretty penny off that film when it came out of development and went into production. 

But as I told the 6’8” former offensive tackle Mat Willig who was also on the set, “No, even the work I’m doing on this film can be replaced.  They’re getting great reference shots off what I’m doing here.” 

The first thing most people ask about such projects are, “How much does it pay?”  While doing work and getting paid is important, many of the best people I have known in life do not do things for money.  Money simply comes as a byproduct of being productive.  I seldom ever consider money, and I have often done work completely for free because it gives some little passion of mine an outlet.  So when people on that set and in other aspects of the entertainment business encouraged me to keep my talents close to the vest, or to fight the production companies in using CGI animators for live action whip work, such a thought is completely foreign to me and I do not participate.  If a production company wishes to not fly me out to a film shoot, pay my fee, my hotel, my travel expenses and all other associated costs, which is the normal expense for such a thing, and would rather hire an animator to sit at a computer and view my material from stock footage and interpret that to a CGI shot, then I’m happy to have provided the footage.  Because if a cost savings is achieved, then maybe more production companies will use more whip work in films, and that might encourage more of the public to take up whip arts as a sport, which is my ultimate desire anyway.  My goal is not to buy a new car, or take a trip to some foreign country with the money made on such a project.  It is to share the art with people who don’t know about it.

“But what if they put you out of business?  What if film companies never need a live stuntman to work a bullwhip in front of a camera ever again?”  Well, so what.  I’ll invent a new talent to use.  I’ll evolve into something else as I’ve done many times over my lifetime. 

I’ve heard the same type of comments about this site, Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom.  “You should charge money.  Who’s paying you to do all this?”  Well, people who ask such questions have missed the point. I do not write hundreds of thousands of words at this site to make money.  I do it to help educate my friends, neighbors and enemies.  My hope is that by sharing my knowledge and life experience that people MIGHT COPY IT.  In fact, I hope they do!  I have noticed that people who think like I do tend to charge money for their services, so the cost might be a prohibitive factor in obtaining the knowledge.  If my goal is to make society just a little bit smarter, just like with the whip arts it might be to create awareness to the art itself, I am willing to give away my talent so that others might be inspired to grab on and develop their own versions. 

Most of the activities I’ve spent my personal time on lately have been like this.  Companies do hire me to help them cut costs or find a savings.  When a publisher puts out a book I’ve written, like the one that will come out next summer, I will promote it because the book is not just a Rich Hoffman work, it’s the product of a company staffed by the publisher and editors, promotional departments, production divisions, book stores and the rest of the literary industry that are counting on my work to fuel their endeavors.  So I will have to focus on money during those times and I will fight to make money for them because money is needed to make the whole industry go forward.  But when it’s just me, I do not factor in money when I do something.  I do things because I feel a passion for those activities. 

I do not understand the union worker who holds back on their production output in order to drive up their wages.  I do not understand teachers who make too much and do too little.  I do not understand labor strikes, of any kind.  I do not understand the concept of stealing content from someone else so that I may profit.  I do not understand the whole back-stabbing behavior that goes on in Hollywood where writers hold every idea close to their vest in fear that someone else might steal it.  My experience is that the thief will screw up the idea anyway, because the quality of the project is a direct result of the quality of the people working on the project, and if a bunch of thieves and losers pour $60 million into a film idea they stole from another writer, while drinking at a bar in the Americana shopping complex outside of Burbank, the movie will still suck if the people who make the film suck.  It’s a very simple formula. 

My anger at politicians who cut deals with unions over money, or unions who protest over a 2% to 5% yearly increase forever, and any organization who seeks to put the light of attention exclusively on themselves make me absolutely sick.  They behave in this fashion because they have allowed their lives to be one-trick ponies, and they fear being exposed for their lack of adaptability and skill. 

If it has been said that I have more talent than I know what to do with, the reason is that I have always adapted to the world around me and constantly learned new skills.  I have never dug my fingers into the side of a talent and attempted to force the world to stop at my feet and embrace my talents.  I have always learned and adjusted and pushed to become better.  I’ve invented, I’ve managed, I’ve politicized, I’ve written, I’ve explored, I’ve fought, I’ve entertained, I’ve loved and I’ve hated.  I had chances to be wealthy for the rest of my life several times, and turned it away to maintain my freedom on a daily basis.  So as the cold of the morning passed through my cloths and the stars shown above which I observed at the many stop lights on my commute I thought about the hundreds of thousands of light years that light traveled to reach me upon the frozen vista of West Chester—-I silently rooted for the film The Immortals to have a strong second weekend while it competes with the new Twilight film, which I also hope has a strong box office showing.  I hope this even though it may mean I never have the opportunity to perform with a fire whip in Hollywood again. 

My thoughts simply go to the next project, and the next one after that, because once the mind stops leaning forward, it stops all together.  Life isn’t about retirement accounts and medical plans.  It’s about living, loving and fighting for the next great idea, which never comes when comfort is the focus of the human mind. 

Why do you think I ride a motorcycle in the cold and rain where only the stars can see me?  It’s not for my health………………….it’s for the ideas! 

The way to avoid being a one-trick pony is to learn more tricks, and that doesn’t just happen on its own.  It takes work and commitment, which is something that socialism does not account for, and is why all who live by that “ISM” is doomed to a frail, sickly, pathetic, life limited by the comfort of their personal illusions.

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

The Answer is “C”: Who runs society the engine or the boxcar?

In this article, which may seem long, but if you take the time to read and watch the videos here, I will promise you a new level of wisdom gained that will give you insight into a world that was once invisible to most of the population. Better than all that, I will tell you why. But for some reference you might want to refer to my articles on Static Intellectualism and patterns by clicking on this hot link.

To provide testimony for everything you will read and see in this article I would like to present to you a simple game called, “The Answer is C,” presented by Doc Thompson of 700 WLW. Listen to this short little contest and study the questions and answers by the public.

The lesson to that game is that the participants, 3 out of 5 were completely unable to see beyond the Static Patterns of what they understood a multiple choice test to be. When the callers were waiting on the line to go on the air they were focused on the hope that they would be able to understand the question and provide an answer so that they could win a gift card to Frisch’s restaurant. What the listeners didn’t consider, because their static patterns would not allow them to see it, was that Doc Thompson told them the answer ahead of time. In fact Doc told the callers the answer at least 20 or more times in that short 6 minute broadcast. The answer to the questions is even in the title of the game! Yet 3 out of 5 people missed the question even when given the answer. WHY? And what does it have to do with our current political trouble? Well everything.

In our fundamental education at public school, our first real experience outside of our parent’s homes, progressive philosophy imported from Europe has taken over the essence of that education, because the Victorians of progressivism marketed those values into curriculums at all levels. The traditions of our daily habits and lives still come from our parents, but our social values are largely shaped by our experience in public education, so in creating a static pattern for all human beings, if the progressive mentality wished to become accepted, it had to do so through education, which is why to this day so many who work in education are considered leftists, democrats, progressives and unionized radicals. It is because the people drawn to that field of endeavor, education, found that to advance in the static patterns of that culture they had to adopt those progressive ideas. This created a large group of teachers at all levels who tend to be progressive thinking people whom every child in America is then exposed to as a competing social idea in shaping the static patterns of the child.

This has created the trouble of young people being liberal leaning when they first leave school. It is after those children live life for a few years and raise a family of their own that they begin to see the error of progressive/liberal thought. Young people are attracted to characters like Van Jones and the kind of speeches people like him make at the below progressive conference. Government dependence is an attractive concept to young people who are uncertain about their ability to compete in a very competitive world.

Progressivism is attractive to the down-and-out also. The illegal immigrant, the welfare recipient, the unhealthy, all are the types who are drawn to the Van Jones message. After all, by looking at the receipt to the right which was found in a Menominee, Michigan grocery store parking lot you will see why. For the non-competitive, life under government security allows them to purchase lobster and steak with food stamps while the competitive fund it. The error of what Van Jones preaches is that the system only works so long as there are competitive people out there willing to produce. I shudder to consider what would happen if the truly innovative, and hard-working decided to do as the characters of Atlas Shrugged did in that classic novel, and that’s stop working just as those people who are collecting food stamps are doing. Progressivism fails when everyone in society just gives up trying. Progressives fail to understand that someone has to be the engine, the producer, the driver. Progressives are simply cars that are drug behind the train engine and the more cars there are just carrying passengers, the harder it is for the rest of the train to pull.

When Van Jones talks about the success of Germany and China taking care of their people what he fails to mention is that China is not exactly a free country. They do not share the same values as the United States. You are not even allowed to have more than one child per family, let alone decide all other aspects of their life. And Germany is just now recovering from the fall of the Berlin Wall where the West was finally able to merge with the Soviet controlled East. Once capitalism was able to work in Germany their country began to produce again. In China it was when Hong Kong was transferred back to China from the Capitalist tendencies of England in the year 2000. Back then there was a lot of fear as to what would happen to Hong Kong under Chinese rule. Would China bring down Hong Kong into a communist province or would the communists attempt to accept Hong Kong and the great economy that was flourishing there? China decided to adapt, reluctantly, and their economy is flourishing.

But Van Jones won’t tell anybody that, and nobody bothers to ask the question, because just like in the game that Doc Thompson put on, where he even gave the answer at the start of the question, the callers still got the answer wrong. The same types of people are at those progressive events. The goal of progressive public education is to make competition less attractive, except in sports which are used to fund the whole enterprise. But for the regular student, competition is being frowned down upon. Progressives have always known that by eliminating the competitive tendencies in a child, who will grow up into an adult and accept their philosophy, that stifling personal ambition was the focus all along, but ambition toward altruistic goals are greatly rewarded. Thus the static patterns of modern society have been shaped, and even when proof that the choices people have made are wrong, they generally cannot see why, for the same reason that people answered the questions wrong in Doc’s game.

But not everyone is falling for it. More and more young people are leaning in the direction of conservatism. I would say that in social representation, they are the 2 out of 5 who answered right. These people have the ability to see that there are serious errors to the social patterns that have formed around them and they are beginning to emerge, which was the topic of a recent discussion on GBTV.

Another young person who has emerged out of this public education static pattern of progressivism is the radio personality Matt Clark who is a freak of nature. He is way ahead of the curve at his young age. He is the type of person who would have gotten all Docs’ questions right immediately. He’d be the first to say, “Why are you asking me this question, Doc, because you already gave me the answer?”

This is the terrible condition people like Matt will always suffer from. Matt is a smart young man, but so are people who are progressives. I would venture to say that George Soros is smart, after all he’s a billionaire so he did something right. Van Jones is smart. Barack Obama is probably smart taken one on one. But all those people are suffering from a failed understanding built within their static patterns. Their failure comes from their education to begin with. So it’s not a matter of intelligence. I know a lot of smart people who are really, socially stupid. Some of them suffer from having traditional parents and a stable household, but try desperately to merge those values with the values they learned in public education and college and what happens is a mess of personal ideology which prevents them from seeing the obvious, because their static patterns are fundamentally broken.

Matt Clark however managed to come out of college recently much like the young people on GBTV, and they are fully aware of what is wrong and can see it clearly even if the rest of the world can’t. Even without a life of experience behind Matt, he can see the error of what Nancy Pelosi’s progressive philosophy is advocating, even though Nancy seems oblivious to her hypocrisy even as she says it.

If you’ll remember back to Doc’s contest, 2 out of 5 callers got the answer right. Well, if you think about it, that same ratio seems to be evident in the nation as a whole. The country leans slightly to the right of center. The people right of center to varying degrees are aware that something is wrong with progressives. The one’s who are close to the center know it, but can’t articulate it. But the further to the right that you get, the more obvious it is. Somewhere out there to the firm right is the libertarian who wants very little government at all, because they simply don’t trust government to do anything right.

This isn’t so much a question of does those on the left have a right to exist or not. People are free to believe whatever they want to believe. But when policy is formed to reflect one point of view over another point of view and the security of maintaining that philosophy requires the looting of everyone to maintain the philosophy of that one side, a big problem emerges. And that is what we have found has happened with the progressive leaning public sector service jobs we’ve created in our American culture.

The trouble here is that many police and firefighters seem to lean in a conservative direction politically, unlike teachers who overwhelmingly are liberal, yet all fall under the category of public service and are all guilty of the kind of explosive growth shown by Nick Gillespie from Reason Magazine.

All states must find a way to deal with this terrible situation. In Ohio the discrepancy of public workers versus private workers is 43.4% in favor of the public workers! Yet strangely people can’t see the answer even though it’s clearly spelled out. Just like Doc’s game, 3 people out of 5 still got the answer wrong, and in this case with public unions, the idea of a union is a progressive position which has been embedded in our culture through education. And when the static pattern of those beliefs are challenged, as they are in Ohio with Issue 2, the public unions even though they are politically represented by conservatives and liberals, all unite under the static pattern of union radicalism to protect the advancements their progressive unions have imposed on society for decades. Ohio passed a law to help close the gap in that huge disparity between public and private workers because after all the burden of paying for everything in the progressive platform requires the private citizen to carry the entire burden of an enterprise. The whole of any public sector position rests on the shoulders of private enterprise, and the same is true for government itself. Yet progressives routinely forget this and believe that they exist as an entity all their own. So police, fireman, and teachers all pulled together to collect 1.3 million signatures to repeal the bill passed by Governor John Kasich to close the disparity gap and make Ohio more economically attractive to outside investment and prospective homeowners (tax payers). Because of the repeal attempt by the unions, Ohio must vote to keep the bill known as Issue 2.

The solution is very easy for those of us who can see, just like many people listening to that broadcast with Doc Thompson were shouting at their speaker saying, “HE’S TELLING YOU THE ANSWER IN THE TITLE!!!!!!” Yet there are others, who are stuck in a learned static pattern who make up the progressive labor unions, which transcends political ideology in this case and have turned into a radical group who are insisting that the answer to our public problem still rest in some progressive solution when it is the progressive platform that has created our trouble to begin with. The equivalent to this would be one of the people in Doc Thompson’s broadcast insisting that the answer to the game was in fact A, B or D, anything but C, when the only correct answer is C.

And that’s the real problem. Progressive thought has devastated our country and 2 out of 5 people are seeing it. Those 2 people are beginning to make up the new group called the Tea Party, they are part of the 2 to 3 million people who make up the Glenn Beck audience, listen to talk radio, and read articles like my 500 readers a day here. They know something is wrong, and like Matt Clark, and the kids on GBTV are starting to look for ways to solve the complicated problem and they are doing it without of any hostility toward progressives. They just want to solve the problem.
But now we see what the real agenda has always been among progressives. Now that progressives see those 2 out of 5 people are starting to question them, the unions are seeking to use the other 3 to form an army to force the 2 to comply with their view of the answer even if their answer is wrong.

That’s where this situation has become out of control. Now that some of us are trying to fix the problem we are learning why progressives want unions to begin with, to not only fund political endeavors, but to use them as a civilian ground force. I think the young, and forward thinking Matt Clark has the situation nailed in this broadcast where he plays clips of the current leaders of progressive politics who are actually saying as much. Matt takes the situation and plays it a bit over-the-top, but I think it deserves to be.

It wouldn’t be the first time a political uprising formed under the nose of a current culture. Such things take place over a long period of time and do not happen quickly, and anyone who has studied the Art of War by Sun Tzu, which I have, understand that the most desirable way to conquer a country is without firing a shot is by using the “subtle” to overtake a culture. In this case it was the infusion of progressive politics almost a century ago which has led to a confused society that on one hand thinks it’s fighting for traditional American rights, like many of the cops and firefighters believe they are doing, but find themselves simply foot soldiers in a civilian army designed to topple American Capitalism. The way you perform the invasion is from within the country, not with planes, tanks and nuclear weapons. You do it while the passive citizens, trained under your progressive institutions paid for with progressive taxes, wave flags of peace in the air and greet those progressive invaders with open arms and perhaps even a place in their beds. Those young students so unsure of themselves won’t believe that the answer is “C” even if you tell them the answer until life proves to them that everything they believe is wrong, and over the course of their lives from age 20 to 50 they finally learn how wrong they were. They finally find out that being conservative was the way they should have always been, because traditional values worked in the past and they will always work in the future.

I can say it now because by the time this hits the net, my wife would have already given the present to my sister who is about to have baby twins. My wife has made a blanket for every baby that is born in our family. She’s done that for 20 years, and these twins are just the most recent. These blankets are unlike anything you could ever buy at a store, and they are intended to provide a sense of security for the young child as they form those crucial static patterns of their lives. It is the static patterns of life that people form their beliefs around and a blanket of security made with love from a treasured family member is extremely important to the life of any child. But when progressives started to attack those traditional values by undermining the family unit to be replaced by progressive education which created an unstable static pattern for these young children to grow up confused and pulled in a thousand different ways only to learn in their 50’s that the whole process was a mess and needs to be reformed completely from the ground up. That rebirth needs to be built upon the static pattern of American Tradition, which is a topic of its own. Click here to see a sample.

But the focus of this all along has been to weaken the United States with progressivism and to use its own people as the army. The recruits of this army are those 3 out of 5 who simply can’t see the truth even when you place it right in front of their face. You can spell it out for them implicitly, but they still won’t see, because their static patterns are wrong to begin with, so they cannot see it even if they tried.

The work rests on the 2 out of 5 to do all the work anyway. They must carry the whole burden of this failed philosophy called progressivism and replace it with what worked before progressives brought their nonsense to the whimsical Victorians of early New York City, to culturally launch the nation into a static pattern of degradation much to the pleasure of our enemies.

And yes dear reader, the United States has enemies. It has since the beginning. The War of 1812 was England’s last attempt to recapture its colony; for fear that the young nation would leave it behind, which it did, in just one short century. And that growth exploded upon the world scene and brought freedom to the far corners of the world, until progressives stopped that growth with litigation, unions, and social reforms centered on civil rights.

It wasn’t the progressives who initiated the civil rights movement, it was the American Transcendentalists, and I’m thinking of Ralph Waldo Emerson specifically. Progressives did what they always do, and that is to loot the idea from those who created the idea to begin with proving that the all-American novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand should be required reading for every single child in grade school because it is a work more important than any literary work produced in America since its inception. Because Atlas Shrugged provides the blueprint on how to live in an America free of progressivism and it shows what life would and should be like in absence of that philosophical disease called the progressive.

This entire essay is a sincere hope on my part to share with you, the reader a world that should be obvious. To those who already know that the answer to Doc Thompson’s questions is in fact, “C” thank you for bearing with the length of this article, for it will only confirm what you already know. But to those of you that don’t know that the answer is “C” but instead is “A,” “B,” or “D,” I hope you just learned something that can help you to not be such a drag on the rest of society, and to join the rest of us who are trying to make the whole thing work well into the future.

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

Ancient Aliens and the Tea Party: Koyannisqatsi (LIFE OUT OF BALANCE)

Do yourself a favor, after you read this spend the time to watch these videos then read this again.  After that, pass it to a friend and let them start a journey they will never forget.  I have included the entire film of Koyannisquatsi at this end of this post, which is one of my favorite films of all time.  Enjoy!

Remember the speech that President Obama gave right after the shooting in Texas where he wanted to give a “shout out” at the Native Americans of the area? That was an awkward moment which showed just how out of touch the President really was in that instant of crises. The President exhibited all the typical signs of an out of touch academic which is what he is. He was simply revealing the Static Intellectualism, of which the Progressive Platform is built around, specifically in this case empathy for the plight of the Native American without really understanding the beliefs of the culture they are empathizing with.

The modern academic however, of which Obama is a part is limited in their understanding of many things, particularly the study of mankind’s past. They are stuck in the Static Intellectual culture patterns of which they helped create, and that is all life emerged in one of two ways, through evolution, or creation. One theory is one of science, which the Static Intellectual controls; the other is controlled by the religious institutions which is another type of Static Intellectual control. To the Static Intellectual who created progressive politics no other options exists, because the cultural patterns they established are the rules they are living by. That leaves out one small problem with their love of the Native American; the foundation beliefs of the Native American Culture most likely came from another planet which is represented in many of the rituals of Native American culture which permeates most societies from the Hopi to the Iroquois of New England. It was the Iroquois Five Nations that greeted William Johnston in his frontier fights against the French during the French and Indian war and those Five Nations were unified by a being that landed on Earth and instructed them not to be a war with one another, and to unite their efforts under one nation, of which the Iroquois did. (See the book Wilderness Empire by Allen Eckert)

The problem with this is that through study of the Native American rituals clues to the origins of mankind can and should be studied, but the Static Intellectualism of our modern culture have built their cultural patterns around the history of Europe which does not study the Native American cultures. Instead they study the known regions of Africa and the Middle East as the cradle of civilization and assume with arrogance that it’s always been that way, which Europe and its imperial roots contained within the Roman Empire gave birth to the world. So the scientific premise regarding the origin of the human race which has been controlled by the Roman Catholic Church, as a direct descendent of the Roman Empire refuses to look at all the new scientific archeological evidence coming in from all over the world. See my article on The Secret of Malden Island.

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/08/13/secret-of-malden-island-why-public-education-is-hiding-history/

Progressives led by the Static Intellectualism of the Victorian Era, and their love of the Native American culture because of the terrible exploitation imposed upon them particularly by President Andrew Jackson, who was a frontier fighter, a rugged American, it suited their political purpose to smear Jackson, yet in their study of this political history as intellectuals they completely missed the beliefs of those Native Americans and the foundations behind their tribal mythologies.

Chief Standing Elk seen below shares a friendship with a person I know who is a shaman and lives in St. Louis. This shaman is a dream-walker and a spiritual healer and I find her fascinating because her belief system is so completely different from mine. I enjoy conversations with her, she is to my personal Static Pattern belief system a Dynamic which challenges those beliefs that I find valuable. Anyway, this shaman friend of mine invited me to a spiritual meeting at Serpent Mound a few years ago with this Chief who is an active spiritual leader attempting to carry on the beliefs of the tribes who inhabited America before the immigration of the European. Listen to what the Chief believes.

I became interested in Native American cultures through the film Koyannisqatsi, (SEE THE WHOLE FILM BELOW) which is one of my favorite films, and features a haunting Hopi Indian chant that has never left my mind. The word Koyannisqatisi means in Hopi, “life out of balance, crazy life.” I nurtured that understanding through the work of Joseph Campbell’s comparative mythology studies, so I have a pretty good idea of what they are all about and I’ve always been fascinated by the origin of their beliefs. For instance, my wife and I frequent the Serpent Mound Archeological site a couple of times a year for many years now and have watched the perception of that place change dramatically from one of hard archeology based on the Adena Indian culture to this new age Star Culture idea that Chief Standing Elk believes. One of our visits a few years ago had various Indian tribes and shaman types chanting outside the museum and I told my wife that the science of the place was reverting, not advancing. These primitive beliefs and tribal chants seemed silly to me, until I did some reading of my own.

The big mystery of Serpent Mound is that it not only is a mound structure of a serpent, which is a universal symbol of life renewal, but it is particularly designed to be seen from the air, and all over the world such as the Nazca Lines of Peru and several features all over England, this is a common occurrence where societies seemed to be preoccupied with impressing the gods from the air. But the biggest mystery is the location itself in the middle of a crypto explosion event which occurred during the Permian Period, about 248 to 286 million years ago. Read more about the mound here:

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

Check out this clip, right about the 2:30 mark:

The crypto explosion is mysterious because it was a violent occurrence several miles wide and would usually be a result of a meteor impact similar to the site in Arizona just to the east of the Grand Canyon outside of Winslow, but it doesn’t look like that. It appears that at least half of the force occurred under the ground as well, so it’s quite a geological mystery. The haunting thing about this mystery is why the Serpent Mound is located right in the middle of this very unique spot that occurred hundreds of millions of years before any builders of the Serpent Mound came along. How did anyone from the Serpent Mound Culture know that something extremely unusual geologically occurred in that exact spot, out of all the spots on the face of planet Earth, a so-called primitive culture knew that something unusual and astronomically significant occurred right there in the middle of a wooded area in Ohio, with no visual reference on the surface. You have to do some digging to see the results of the crypto explosion.

Well, the shamans are saying that a seed ship landed on Earth and brought visitors who inhabited this new land. Such comments make me think of how the European encountered the Aztec and Mayan cultures of Central America and also the Polynesian cultures of the Pacific Ocean, where they imposed their religion upon the primitive people they encountered. Those cultures were influenced by the goods brought from Europe and changed forever as a result of this interaction and in the case the Native American; their cultures were almost completely destroyed by this exchange with the European. It is this aspect of the exchange that the progressive celebrates out of guilt so they do not look any deeper.

Our current culture is only about 200 years from being able to jump from planet to planet itself, so such space travel isn’t very far-fetched taken scientifically. Modern human culture achieved this ability in just about 10 to 20 thousand years, so it’s possible there could be many cultures out in space that are many thousands of years more advanced than we currently are. It is starting to appear that Earth has been greatly influenced by much more than just simple evolution or even creationism, which certainly have played a part, but there are other influences which gave rise to the sudden explosion of technology upon the human race, and the Native Americans seem to have a better understanding of that process than the Anglo-Saxon.

But the Static Intellectualism of academia who has built their universities upon flimsy theories based on Darwin and the Archeology of the Middle East refuse to see it. They, like President Obama think only of the suffering of the Native American at the hands of the “white man” because if fulfils the mission statement of their political platform. But if they actually took the time to listen to the Native American mythology, passed the obvious concern for conservation which also fills another political platform of “green technology” the study of Native American mythology and their roots don’t seem to be examined at all.

This is why television shows like the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens are so poplar, because the Dynamic Intellectualism of our current culture sees that the Static Intellectualism of our education institutions are missing the point in their interrelationship with the progressive politics of the Victorians in America. We are beginning to question the basic premise of the whole religious and scientific premise of mankind’s origins and that’s a good healthy process. If our education system is wrong, then it needs to correct that wrong with new understanding and not resort to the methods of the Spanish Inquisition, or burning heretics at the stake for being non-believers.

The Static Intellectuals of Progressive politics will insist that any notations of aliens colonizing planet Earth and bringing technology to the Homo sapiens who already lived here are preposterous. This is similar to when the church was upset with Isaac Newton for declaring that the Earth was not the center of the universe, which seems laughable now considering what we have learned about not only our galaxy but the many galaxies that make up the universe. In fact, through our understanding of quantum mechanics we are now beginning to think of the concept of a multi-verse. So the church was wrong, and the Victorians who built the progressive politics of which the current Static Intellectualism is protecting, are also wrong. In fact they are way off, and the evidence is overwhelming.

And this is where the Tea Party comes into this whole thing. Progressives are the political entity that is holding the world to a Static Pattern that is flawed in it perception of virtually everything. As it turns out, they are not so “progressive” but have been caught assuming that they are the “enlightened” ones and that they would be the ones who teach the world everything. They currently hold an imperial like grip on academia, which we can see is wrong, because Dynamic Intellectualism is using its imagination to ask the hard questions, where did we come from? And the answer is not in the Static Intellectual offering, so the pattern is wrong and must be broken down and rebuilt with new data gathered up by Dynamic Intellectualism.

The same is happening in politics, where the Dynamic Intellectuals represented by the Tea Party are shattering the Static Patters of progressive politics, because those politics are turning out to be completely false and ridiculously naive. This is why both mystics who say that the Earth was influenced by alien encounters and those who say that America should return to the principles of the United States Constitution are kooks. Because it is the Static Intellectuals who are threatened by the Dynamic Intellectuals of interrupting the Static Pattern that modern science has been established on.

I don’t know if aliens did or did not visit the Earth and influence our culture in any way. But I do know that archeology and anthropology along with geology and other sciences are in their infancy of understanding our world history, and a lot of discoveries have not been reasonably explained by anything more than some Static Intellectual politically correct assessment. But Static Intellectual ideas have not explained how temples were built all over the Pacific, or the mystery of Easter Island, or the Temple at Baalbek, Stonehenge, the Great Pyramid, the Sphinx, the city of Tiahuanaco which may be as old as 16,000 BC, and many, many, many, many others. Only Dynamic Intellectuals have ventured into this territory of exploring explanations, and like Newton, they are ridiculed.

The Tea Party too knows that the Static Pattern of America is wrong and it needs to be corrected as they are called names by the Static Intellectuals such as “terrorists, assassins, kooks, radicals, uneducated fools,” and the like. The Tea Party is a threat to the Static Patter of the Static Intellectual who is clamoring to their education empire even in the face of overwhelming evidence that they have been completely wrong about most everything they believe. The path of the progressive is a dead-end and they refuse to see their error even when the evidence is right in front of them.

This is what they have done to the Native American. They took only the parts of their culture that they could use for the progressive political platform, but they rejected the aspects that didn’t support their political platform and this is most obvious in the words of Chief Standing Elk, who is a strict conversationalist, represents the thoughts and beliefs of his ancestors, but he also believes that the world co-exists with “star people.” If the Static Intellectual were honest about their assessments they’d call Chief Standing Elk a kook for his beliefs, but they won’t because he is a Native America and part of the progressive political platform. They’ll just ignore the rest of Chief Standing Elk’s beliefs like they do everything else they don’t understand and will remain just as ignorant as those who were in charge during the Dark Ages, because as Static Intellectuals, they are stuck with beliefs that are fixed to the foundations of their existence, and they lack the courage of the Dynamic Intellectual who will go out on a limb with a scientific theory, because the Static Intellectual is simply too timid to venture in unknown regions of the mind. That is why they call people names, and that is why they always fail in the end as history marches on without them.

Too bad there isn’t a word in the English language that sums of the statement, “life out of balance, or crazy life” like the Hopi have. The reason the Hopi have this word is because in their culture they saw a need for such a term. The European had to invent a series of words to mean the same thing, because their culture wasn’t advanced enough to understand the need for some kind of balance between the various forces that exemplify a culture. Most of the time that out-of-balance state is the war between the Static portions of society and the Dynamic portions, and the Hopi understood this and they invented a word to bring all the aspects of their life into focus so they could advance as a culture, and that word was Koyannisqatsi.

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

Road to Dystopia: The Canton Cops

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Source:

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

American Air Supremacy: But do we have the courage to keep it?

Zero’s Kates and Vals appeared over the crowd as explosions went off everywhere in the blistering July heat. The heat index was 115 degrees on the runway and the sun was relentless as the roar of World War II piston engine craft filled the sky with an unmistakable pulse. The re-enactment of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was underway by a group of stunt pilots flying restored fighters in a pyrotechnic reminder of just how badly governments of the world have desired to extinguish the power of personal liberty known as the United States. The show known as Tora! Tora! Tora was just one of the many shows displayed at the 2011 Vectren Dayton Air Show, but for me it was the best because of my love of piston engine aircraft. You can see my personal video of that show and other highlights here:

I’ll have to give Michael Emoff (Chairman U.S. Air and Trade Show Board of Trustees) credit; the seats from The Chairman’s Club were as good as it gets for a show of this magnitude. The catered food all morning and into the afternoon was wonderfully refreshing, as was the constant supply of 6 different beer selections. But the truckloads of bottled water were essential, and made the show a comfortable success. I cannot argue that the entire show took place in my lap from that vantage point, and it was a delightful endeavor. On the other side of the fence, the massive hoard of a crowd packed in close to see the action, and it looked hot over there, with no room to breathe for many people.

The Chairman’s Club is a section set up for exclusive guests and many in the aviation business comfortably packed the tables in front of the gigantic mess hall tent, which did lower the temperature considerably with its high vaulted ceilings that allowed the hot air someplace to go, and to cool. It was a good design. The ice cream prior to the Thunderbirds show was a nice touch even if it did melt in a matter of minutes. As is the custom, many of the pilots and parachutists come to The Chairman’s Club to refresh after their portion of the show and meet some of the guests who help put their planes in the air. It is a chance for both sides of the aviation business to meet each other up close and personal. I told one of the guys who had drug his parachute into the area to repack after he had landed just moments after falling from 16,000 feet, “Bet you wish you were still up there.”

He looked at me and laughed, “It’s about 50 degrees up there. It’s a scorcher down here.” Sweat dripped off his forehead as he folded his pack over tightly.

The F/A-18 pilots came and took turns taking pictures with many of the GE employees present. For many of them it was a moment of pride to see the Super Hornet’s take off from the tarmac and go almost instantly vertical. The clouds dotting the sky prevented long runs at the airstrip, so the F/A-18’s kept their speeds under the speed of sound, but the vibration and roar of those F414-GE-400 engines brought a line of high level employees to the pilots when they showed up for some relief from the heat and to provide the customary pictures and autographs.

It was obvious that even from the pilots faces that The Chairman’s Club was an oasis upon that landscape of blistering heat that was closest to the flight line and the first stop to recharge their bodies.

But even with all the high performance displays of the F/A-18’s, the Thunderbirds in the F-16’s, The B-1B Lancer with its 30,780 pounds of afterburner thrust, the fantastic modified stunt plane by Oracle called the Oracle Challenger, specially built for Sean D. Tucker and his fantastic aerobatics with jaw-dropping stunts, it was the World War ll era fighters that I found the most attachment to.

There was a Corsair in the air which set my mind back to the heroics of Tex Hill, after Hill completed his tour of duty with General Clair Chennault and the Flying Tigers over China. There was a B-25 Mitchell that I’ve always loved, the sound of the 2 Curtiss-Wright Twin Cyclone engines pushing out 1,700 hp each punching the air with American brutality. It was the B-25 that made up the 16 bombers who took off from an aircraft carrier to bomb Tokyo five months after Peril Harbor on a mission known as The Doolittle Raiders. I had the opportunity to get up close and personal with this plane during the show which I included in my video because of the distinctive sound of its engine. The plane is the prototype of what would become the fantasy of The Millennium Falcon in Star Wars, and it’s a favorite of mine. It was the display of Tora! Tora! Tora! That captured my attention the most.

During that re-enactment of the bombing of Peril Harbor the planes flew in multiple trajectories, crossing each other in complicated ways through smoke and explosions. Many of the planes made bombing runs 20 to 30 feet over the runway multiple times, which was impressive. A reminder of what governments are capable of cannot be ignored when anybody attending this air show can witness firsthand the power at play through the machines of aviation in defense of freedom.

America without any question invented aviation, and that birthplace was Dayton, Ohio, which gives the Dayton Air Show added meaning. It was the Wright Brothers who using good-ol’ America horse-sense invented flight with a kite like plane built on the principles of a bicycle. It was the bravery of people like Chuck Yeager, Tex Hill, The Doolittle Raiders and Howard Hughes who pushed what flight could accomplish in war to advance aviation to the levels seen in this show. Case in point, the B-2 Bomber made an appearance; it took off from Arizona that morning, arrived at preciously the correct time just a few hours later in Dayton. It made two passes of the air field blasting its engines on the second pass, then heading to Peoria, Illinois for another air-show just 45 minutes away for that craft, on schedule of course. The B-2 would then land back at its home base, it’s pilots home in time for dinner after traveling all over the United States in the course of the day. The B-2 is the culmination of years of bravery and technical innovation. It is evident when attending air-shows like this, that if an enemy of the United States wanted to attack America, like the Japanese did at Peril Harbor, and the Soviet Union attempted to do in the space race economically, and failed, that the heart of America, the spirit that advanced aviation to the modern levels of the B-2 bomber would have to be removed. No country in the world can compete with the United States because of America’s development of aviation.

If one cares to understand the mind of the enemy, and America will always have enemies, they will read what the enemy does. The most recent is the radical Islamic elements in the middle-east, those old empire builders of the Persian Empire who still despise America for its role in dividing up the Middle East after the Treaty of Versailles, or the Chinese communists who fought America in Korea through support of North Korea, and Vietnam with Russian support. There is no question that in many palaces and luxury meeting rooms all across this world the topic comes up, “How do we get rid of America.” It is clear in the Sun Tzu classic, which I personally studied for over 10 years, The Art of War, that the best way to destroy your enemy is by prevailing over those who have already lost. That is the essence of that classic piece of literature which is currently studied aggressively by Chinese and Japanese military, government and business leaders. And the way to beat America is to convince Americans to strap themselves down in debt, so they do not have the money to spend on their wonderful aviation and technological development.

The Space Shuttle Program just ended. Under the Obama administration NASA along with the Joint Strike Fighter have both been targeted for elimination because America has spent itself into catastrophe, and is no longer making investments into aviation like it has over the last century, culminating into the B-2 Bomber.

The F135 Joint Strike Fighter has also hit the chopping block, at least it’s back-up GE/Roll Royce engine. It is easy to see who America’s enemies are because they are against the construction of this next generation aircraft.

It is interesting to hear what people on the political left think are appropriate in debating budget negotiations. Listen to this simple-minded person talk about the budget battle taking place, and what is appropriate in that conflict. Obama and his people are big union supporters, and Lockheed Martin, GE and most in aviation that are behind the Joint Strike Fighter are giant unions, yet there are many who subscribe to the theories of cutting defense spending and NASA to pay for the destructive entitlement programs created by politicians to purchase votes. Those same people believe that the right thinks just as devious as the left. They are all off the mark in my opinion, but aviation to me expands America in every possible way, and should not be negotiated with by either side as some type of bargaining chip. Everyone wins in aviation no matter what the political affiliation left, right or middle. The only losers are other competing countries.

What is the RT? That’s an English-speaking progressive channel that stands for Russia Today. That’s why the temperature in Moscow is listed in the bottom corner. They are a propaganda arm of modern Russia, and if you think they don’t still have a grudge against America, they were one of the few countries to not accept the full title of the recent Hollywood film, Captain America.

As I watched the Dayton Air Show it was apparent to me that many of the enemies of America are now attempting to destabilize the United States not with stealth weapons, or even spies. They are trying a much more sinister weapon called progressivism, which is designed to lower American defenses, drain our wealth and keep us from spending money on the kind of technology on display at the air show, because the enemies of the United States cannot reach that level of technology. All they can really do is corrupt our youth into becoming lost adults who don’t remember Pearl Harbor or people like Tex Hill.

Progressives are attempting to inspire the youth culture to live aimless lives with an un-heroic pretense. Those enemies will do everything they can to topple the United States from the inside out, because that is the only way they can rule the planet, and their respective portions of the world. For now, they’ll use the United Nations for their own agenda, but once America is gone, and the money it puts into supporting world peace with it, the tyrants will have a new day and chance at spreading their tyranny across the face of the plant.

How can I say such a thing? Entertainment is always a great measuring stick to the values of a culture who produces it.


In some future air show, people will attend and wonder how a civilization who built such fantastic ancient machines like the Joint Strike Fighter, and the B-2 Bomber simply disappeared and stopped the technological advances that America seemed poised to create.

As I watched the F/A-18F pilots stand with a group of people in The Chairman’s Club under the elite protection of all the elements present, the people who build the planes and the pilots who fly them, I wondered how many of those people really understood the fight that was really happening outside those protected confines, out beyond the crowd of burnt up citizens scanning into the heavens at the fantastic aerial display going on in the sky, or the small children buying toy air planes from a vender proudly holding the toys as if they were treasures more valuable than gold, because the toys themselves represent power, and freedom. Who among anybody really understood the games being played and the stake of the games, which with all the proud patriotic celebration of the past that the future is in such jeopardy, did anybody really know?

I don’t believe many of those people out of the thousands around me really put much thought into it. As long as the beer was cold, the catered chicken and beef cooked to perfection, and the side dishes were immaculate, the politics of the day were other people’s problem. The air show was to be enjoyed and once over, we would all return to our VIP parking spots right outside the fence and be on Highway 75 before most of the other people would be headed to the vast parking lots packed with cars over a half a mile away. And of all those masses, the focus was on the past, at what we had done in that past both distant and recent. But the future is in jeopardy if that same American spirit that put those planes in the air does not survive the peril of progressivism, given to the United States from foreign enemies by spies and double-agents using the long proven instructions spelled out in Sun Tzu’s, The Art of War.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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