Category: Teacher Unions

Dystopia of Public Union attachment to our Government.

I have spoken about groups like Progress Ohio that are progressive oriented groups in states built on advancing progressive ideas. Until 2010 I didn’t even know there were groups dedicated to such a cause. I was still wondering if the word “progressive” was something Glenn Beck made up to support some conspiracy. As it turned out, Beck probably didn’t say enough.

There has also been a lot of discussion about state budget shortfalls and how on earth our local, state and federal government is going to pay for the massive revenue problems that are occurring. Well, these budget problems are caused by public sector unions that have managed to negotiate an average salary of approximately $79,000 per year per employee. That is more than the average American tax payer makes by over $20K per year. The formula is all messed up; where the public servant makes more than the public it serves. And as government has grown larger and employed more and more people, adding more employees to that fantastically high pay scale and the wages in the private sector have been frozen to deal with the recession.

Now listen below to the suggestion from Progress Illinois of how to cover the budget problems. (LAUGH OUT LOUD)

Can you believe that? That’s how out of touch progressives are. That is their solution to the irresponsible spending problem we’ve allowed in government.

The high wages promised government employees create a government that is revenue hungry.

And this video is hilarious. Didn’t these people go to school? Why do they think the steel mills went overseas? Unions drove the costs too high, so those jobs left the country.


Now they have done the same cost increase of labor as they did in the American Car companies and steel industries. But now those costs are in government and government can’t pick up and move to another country. Government exists to serve the people, so the only thing to do is to cut the jobs or reduce dramatically the salary of those employees in order to justify their existence. The videos below are by Armand Thiebolt of the Cato Institute. This isn’t Fox News, but the Cato Institute. It’s an attempt to present the problem cleanly.


Now this is Fox Business, a piece done by Jon Stossel, but I think it explains things very clear.


This is serious business!

What needs to happen is public sector unions should return back to the legal status prior to the Kennedy Administration. That needs to happen in 2011 while a conservative congress can address the issue. Only by dealing with the issue directly can we hope to avert catastrophic budget failures.

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Desperate Cries Over Budget Collapse: A preview of what’s to come.

Coming to a budget meeting near you starting in 2011, complete chaos!

It was sadly humorous to listen to the Cincinnati City Council meeting in their vain attempts to arrive at a budget before the New Year. Cincinnati is running serious deficits and in spite of their desire to build a street car, because there isn’t enough money to pay for the current staff of police and fire department personnel. Tax increases to pay for extremely inflated public sector wages is not an option. That has been the type of band-aid fix that has always bailed out these types of problems in the past. But it is not going to fix the problem going forward.

Those two public sectors police and fire departments are essentially in the same boat as teachers. Too much money is tied up in personnel at too high of a cost per employee. And all across the nation public sector employees that are making over $70,000 a year on average are strangling the budgets of states to the point of bankruptcy.
The audio of this clip is particularly revealing about the nature of everyone involved.


The unions are refusing to see that they need to rethink their contracts. In the audio clip, the head of the police union is reacting violently to the facts presented by council and how much of the budget is taken up by her union. Just like teachers, they are all well-intentioned people who have become accustomed to a certain level of income. And the city council is ill-equipped to make the hard decisions needed. Just like school boards, and township trustees these local level political entities are not able to handle complicated problems. Public sector unions have had their way with these naive political bodies for such a long time that the budgets have bulged to these critical levels.

In 2011 I see that teachers are going to deal with this reality as well. Striking won’t help because there are too many job shortages, so teaching vacancies could quickly be filled with teachers that make far less than tenured teachers do. But it will be painful. During the Lakota Levy of 2010, a slight reduction in state funding caused a fiscal crisis at Lakota, because the step increase schedule was plotting the Lakota Budget on a perilous collision course. In 2011, that same step increase schedule is in place, but under the Kasich administration, public education funding may decrease another 15 to 20%. And local communities will not cover that large discrepancy with tax levies, because it doesn’t fix the problem and is a completely unreasonable cost to communities. It only buys a little more time for the tenured teachers to hopefully get to their own retirements while their pensions and wage rates are still intact. That is the desperation you hear from the head of the Police Union, it’s the realization that life as they have always believed it, is coming to an end. And that desperation is only a preview of the neurotic fits that public education employees will soon reveal.

It’s not that I don’t have sympathy. But remember that public employees chose their professions, and the time that’s coming will be bad for all people who work in public sector work. However, those of us that have stayed in the private sector, which pays less because competition sets the costs, will find that these desperate cries won’t affect us. The cries will come from those employees wanting to be paid from our tax money. And the noise will be intense, but it’s not members of government employment that support our society. It is the tax payer that does. So don’t let that noise confuse the situation. The pain is simply a result of necessity. Our nation needs a smaller, less intrusive government so our economy can expand. Once the smoke clears, it will be a stronger state, and a more resolute nation.

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

It’s the End of the Road: Budget problems for everyone!

We have arrived at the impasse, the point where life as we know it will change. The car is headed toward a massive financial cliff and the point of no return is near. We’re all packed into the car together, and the arrogant driver won’t heed the warnings that they are about to kill us all.

I’ve always been particularly good at directions. My reputation is that you could drop me anywhere on the face of this planet with a blindfold and I’d find my way home within a few days.

I once had a vicious argument with a former friend of mine over the movie, ALIVE, where a soccer team crashed in the Andes Mountains and resorted to cannibalism as a way to survive. It would have been far easier for those people to just send one or two people to walk down hill, and follow the water till they hit a village. There isn’t any place in this world where a village cannot be found within a three day walk, give or take the strength of the walker.

I had the same argument with another former friend over the film Castaway. Again, the main character knew he crashed in the middle of the Pacific Ocean and was east of Hawaii. Grab a log, start swimming east. If a shark comes to eat you, kill it. Eat the shark and keep swimming. End of movie.  You don’t spend years of your life stuck on an island!

I had similar argument with a family member over the Blair Witch Project when I proclaimed that there was no way a group of teenagers could get lost in the woods of Maryland. There are no virgin forests that large, where they could walk all day and arrive back in the same spot.

All those people that argued with me had in common a blind trust in the social structure, and what the characters of these films shared with them, and apparently the common audience is a similar sense of helplessness. I on the other hand have learned to trust nothing resembling structure, because it’s prone to fail at some point.

Back in September 2010 I went on WLW radio and proclaimed that the course the Lakota School System was on was unsustainable. I received a lot of criticism for proclaiming the obvious. And to my critics I felt sorry for them. These were the same sad people that saw films like ALIVE, CASTAWAY and THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and could relate with the plight of the protagonists. They would be the type of people that would freeze under duress and not be able to make a decision.

Instead of heeding my warning, and the warnings of people like Darryl Parks, and Scott Sloan both of WLW radio, the established thinking insisted on maintaining the finance model they had achieved through several generations of threats and coercion only to find out that there isn’t any money left. And they willingly held the children they are teaching as hostages, cutting busing at the first sign of trouble even though busing is only 2% of their costs. It is the same sad game.

I was doing some reading the other night about the history of union activity in the United States and how many union bosses were proclaimed communists and code word “progressives,” much of this literature coming from sources prior to Glenn Beck, much of it from the late 70’s to early 80’s. I read about how the entertainment unions of 1946 attacked Warner Brothers and turned over cars in radical behavior that predated Saul Alinsky. Alinsky the author of Rules for Radicals is actually endorsed reading by the NEA. These simpletons have been at this behavior for a long time, entrenching themselves into our government as public workers unions, teachers being one of the largest sectors of that unification.

Forward thinking people like me and several others have been saying that it’s coming to an end. The inflation rate in the United States, a weaken US dollar, and our debt to other countries such as China have tied our hands behind our backs. We couldn’t even go to war with North Korea to help South Korea if we wanted to, because China would slap us silly for even thinking about it. They own us now!

And these derelict thinkers of public unions cleaving to the edges of reality like desperate survivors craving to eat their own people instead of truly doing something productive like reconsidering their entire life style and benefits packages, because they are causing massive economic failures due exclusively to their extremely high expectations, are digging in to their beliefs.

They are the kind of people that would stay on a remote island eating coconuts and developing a relationship with a soccer ball called “WILSON” instead of getting on a raft and to start swimming, again I’m thinking of CATAWAY here. Or ALIVE, or THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT. Every time I see a scene for CASTAWAY I gag! I can’t believe Robert Zemeckis directed that film. What happened to him!

But everyone has been warned well in advance. For Lakota, they have a 160 million dollar budget. The time for the LEA to approach the school board about saving the district came in November. Instead, they dug in their heels and chose to play the same old game of cutting busing.

For the rest of Ohio, Kasich budget cuts are going to be deep, and painful. And 2011 will be very difficult for people that make a living off the public dollar.

Turning over cars, or holding massive strikes and work stoppages won’t help you. All that will happen is that we’ll realize how little you really do, and you’ll prove that you’re over-paid. But radical behavior is what caused this issue. The public paid you too much to shut you up. But now they don’t have it to give you without drowning themselves, so they will now tell you no. That’s the way of things.

You should have listened when we told you to re-think your situations. Now, you will suffer much greater than you needed to.

You will suffer because you trust in the social structure that you helped to create, and it’s failing under its own weight.

Below is Darryl Parks from WLW discussing many of these issues. Remember this when we get into the hard months of April, May, and June of 2011. It’s not like the information wasn’t out there for people to act upon.

Below is the 60 Minutes interview that Darryl was referring to. I think these two interviews are loud warnings that should be heeded while there is still time.

The cynic in me knows that most people will just plant their heels where they stand and grip blindly onto what they know best, even if what they know and trust is wrong.

Those of you that have been “gaming” the system for many years whether you’re a union leader or member, a real-estate agent, a developer, an investment manager, or just a measly politician, or any innumerable guilty parties, you know who you are, somebody had to pay eventually. Our current crises are because of your collective irresponsible actions, and that’s why our county is now suffering. So now it’s time to get off your ass and help out. Stop crying and start swimming, because you’re holding back the rest of the country that wants to survive.

One of the most frustrating things in life is knowing your going in the wrong direction but being unable to tell the arrogant people driving the car that they are about to drive you over a cliff, especially when you’re better at directions than the driver. And now we are at the point of turning around and going back where we came from, or we go over the cliff. And the point of no return sign comes when we hit the metaphorical year of 2011.

If the car doesn’t stop soon and turn around, I’m going to jump out. I don’t need a car, or a GPS, or even a road to find my way back. So I’ll let the car go right on over the cliff with all the arrogant idiots that don’t listen in it, because I won’t let them make a decision that ruins my life too.

And I won’t sit in the desert at the edge of the cliff waiting for someone to come and rescue me. I’ll start walking back within seconds, not wasting a moment of time.

Because I can.

Rich Hoffman

http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

The Lie of Feminism: A Mountain of Work that has to be Undone.

Women have been ripped off!

It has been brought to my attention the ProLakota website on Facebook labeled me as a sexist during the campaign. I was made aware of it because I’m a pretty busy person and such things are trivial in the grand scheme of things. However, because the accusation is leveled in my direction, I need to address it.

Jake Greers is the young fellow that is running things for Pro Lakota. It is sad that he doesn’t understand how he’s being used, but that’s a topic for another article. He’s in much the same situation as this sad little boy in London.

As far as being a sexist, I find those types of accusations to be tripe. How can some kid of his age have any knowledge of what a sexist is? All he knows is what his environment, shaped by MTV, and organized labor through the mouths of the teachers around him, and his own experience, which is greatly lacking under the age of 18. In fact, he has a whole lifetime of learning to do before he even has the right to make statements like that. All he is doing is repeating what the adults around him, who have much to lose in the structures they’ve created at taxpayer expense, have been saying to protect themselves.

A sexist! Me? I have been married for a long time. I’ve raised two daughters. And I’ve watched over 40 years of feminist experimentation……………………I have my opinions on the matter. And my opinion is that the social experiment of feminism is a ridiculous failure now in the context of some historical test data.

The data for those test results are in. Women are collectively unhappy in the roll they’ve attempted to live up to. The promises given to them by the media, such as fashion commercials, their parents that swallowed the whole blue pill and the rest of society that just wanted to try something new were complete lies. The root of some of these beliefs can be seen in this old Enjoli commercial.


What happened was that while women proved to men that they weren’t needed and a woman could in fact survive on their own without a man, men have stopped being men. The destruction of the traditional roles perpetuated by the feminist movement has cheated women out of relationships with men that were truly nurturing.

Nobody is saying that it was always perfect. Men that took to drink and abused their wives and children are the extreme crises in the other direction. But feminism has not been the answer.

Human beings need to understand what their jobs are not only in a relationship, but also in society. All the blurred lines have only caused enormous amounts of confusion.

My experience with women, which as noted, is extensive, informs me that deep down inside, most every woman desires in her relationship with a man a role similar to the role she plays in sex. That is a passive, receiving role. Women who profess otherwise are neurologically off balance. Every woman I’ve ever known which argues the fact will fit in this description. Is it any coincidence that so many in this modern age are taking medication for depression and similar disorders?

I am aware that this is a controversial statement. And my position on this is clear under my Ten Rules to Live by. Respect for women is a paramount concern for me.

But being a man requires understanding what a woman expects. A man needs to know what the rules are. In all times in human history there are important rituals that inform the men and the women what society expects of them.


In order to satisfy the ideology of people like Margaret Sanger, politicians, and pharmaceutical companies as well as cosmetics proposed that a woman can be everything at all times.

Here is a Revlon commercial from 1979. Here the woman is doing just that, she’s everything to everyone.


Here’s another from 1973.


And here is Brooke Shields reading from a book to appear that she is studying. But the way she crawls on the floor it’s all about selling her assets.

Over the years, film has informed our society what is the correct behavior for women. It is inescapable that Hollywood has handed out Academy awards to women who do nude roles in their films. And a large amount of actresses have portrayed hookers, or otherwise loose women. How is this good for women’s self esteem? Isn’t this a contrary message from what feminism professes?

Yes!

The box office is the way society votes, and the bottom line is that society will only buy into feminist roles if the woman takes off her clothes. It’s that simple. It’s not the feminist ideas in the films that sell tickets. Its breasts and women naked in a bed, the bottom line is the mother goddess model will always sell a movie ticket.

Anne Hathaway has learned that.   I’m really dissapointed in Anne.  But she wants an Oscar.

For complete stats Click here:
In fact, since 1990, of the 20 actresses that won an Oscar for their roles in film, 19 of them took their clothes off for their roles.
http://www.suite101.com/content/nudity-in-movies-a146816

This is the result of feminism, the end result, the accomplished objective. This is what has been accomplished after almost a century of feminist pursuits. Note the woman at the end of this next video. She has been reduced to wearing Trojan stickers over her breasts. A young boy casually smacks her butt, without respect at all. This young girl will have to explain to her children someday why she did this video, and what was on her mind at the time. The tragedy is that what small child would ever look up to a mom with a past like this? The girl thinks it’s funny now, because all the boys are paying attention to her. But she won’t in a few years when she’s a used up piece of flesh that nobody will take serious.


If young girls make it easy for young boys to have sex with them, all the young boys are going to do is be done with the act of sex quicker, so they can go back and play XBox with their friends.

When feminism struck our nation like a disease, the pursuit of equality for women resulted in diminishing them to the level of man. Therefore, the man no longer has anything to live up to, because now the woman is at his level. That behavior is evident in the above video. The boys don’t respect that girl. They just want to have sex with her then move on to something else leaving to fill her to the role of basically a used up condom.

How does this improve society?

Margaret Sanger and the gang have failed miserably in their beliefs. The evidence is all around us. Her father Michael Higgins was a strong advocate of women’s suffrage and free education, sound familiar? Margaret was a frequent contributor to the socialist party paper called The Call. These are the types of people that shaped the opinions of our modern age, opinions that were not filtered with intellect, but with emotion.

It is not Margaret Sanger’s name that a woman cries out in climax when she is with a man. It is in the act of the man to penetrate the woman spiritually and physically that does the trick. Women that insist otherwise have rear ends the size of barns, and skin that looks like unkempt leather, and men do not chose to be with them, for obvious reasons. For there are plenty of sleazy women laying about on the beach willing to bare their breasts for free, thanks to feminism. And why would a man fight for an old used up woman that everyone has conquered when a young, relatively unused woman makes herself available to all.

Here is the hero of feminism.


So call me a sexist all those of you that don’t have a clue what it means. And you young people saving up your money for spring break and a chance to pluck young girls like coins off the beach, because MTV says it’s cool, I’ll stick to my way of doing things, because my way works.

Yours doesn’t.

The following may seem unsophisticated to the modern audience, but I will promise you one thing. Twenty years from now, nobody will care about 2 and a Half Men. But even thirty years later, people still love Little House on the Prairie. Because the idea of family, a mom, a dad, and kids that love their parents is an idea that people will always hunger for.


All the other ideas that we now have to undo in our society, ones created by feminism and atheists, and radical drug addicts have to be undone. The trouble is now we have an entire generation that is corrupted with the negative effects of marketing companies riding the wave of feminism and Marxism.

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Where’s this Little Boy’s Mother? The truth behind the London Riots

Where is this little boy’s mother?

You can dig into more of this story at The Blaze.com.

But here’s the core of the issue, these are children. They don’t know anything about the world yet. These kids are too young and naive to understand that they are being used by the real corruption of large institutions, and leftist mentalities to do their dirty work. There aren’t any guarantees that college will even give a young person a chance at success. Mass college participation is a fairly new idea. The world hasn’t seen the results yet. So far the results aren’t very promising. It’s usually schools that are involved in radical behavior. That’s how it was in the United States during the 60’s, and that’s where this radical behavior in London is coming from.

That leaves the question as to whether or not society should even endorse the current form of higher education, if all it can produce are radicals like these students, who don’t have basic understanding of economics, and young people with extremely high social expectations.

Again, the belief from all these people is that money just grows on trees. What good is protesting if the money isn’t there? It’s not the government’s responsibility to provide an education!!!!!!!

It is up to you! If you can’t afford it, work and earn it! Don’t be a bunch of spoiled brats looking for a hand out. And don’t be a pawn to socialist professors that are looking to use student protests to protect their very LUCRITIVE wages.

It’s all about money. Education is a service and if that service out prices itself that is the fault of the institution. Don’t look to government to solve the problem of excessive perceptions.

And that kid needs a spanking from his mommy. He certainly doesn’t belong on world wide news!

Rich Hoffman

http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Waltz of the Emo’s

Why call it a waltz, those patrons in our society that use emotion to justify the use of public money for their private needs? Because when the hard facts are put on the table, the emo’s dance around the issues, call names and attempt to side step the primary issues.

There was a wonderful disagreement on the Big One between Doc Thompson and Paul Daugherty of the Cincinnati Enquire over public education dollars being spent on special needs children.

Listen here:

This initial argument reminded me so closely to the disagreements taking place in virtually every school system across Ohio. For me, in the Lakota district when I put myself in the line of fire against the recent proposed school levy, it was stunning how similar the reaction people had towards me. The impulsive reaction of the otherwise cerebral Paul Daugherty and his literal intellectual attack on Doc Thompson, stating, “you could not write my article,” and “do you want to be quiet while I educate you or not,” speaks of the mentality behind such statements. 

Doc Thompson is understandably ruffling the feathers of established thinking and that is a very good and healthy thing. His position on this particular issue is one of questioning the validity of the costs in public education that are proving unsustainable. The comments Doc is making are the first honest examination of an avalanche which is about to fall upon us in programs created by government in recent history, that were well-intentioned, and are now accepted by the population in general, such as Paul Daugherty, and believe are “rights.”

When Paul attacked Doc, the motive was clearly one of intimidation, which is a normal strategy from parents that have become dependent on the services schools have been offering. Special needs children certainly bring about that reaction, but so do the children that want to participate in sports, or band. The standard defense reaction from people wanting those services from public money is to attack anyone that even brings up the question. In this case Paul came on the air, basically told Doc he was “wrong,” and that Doc lacked the intellect to write a column for the Enquire and that he needed to be educated. The unspoken desire is to impress upon Doc that if he speaks about something that is sensitive then maybe he’ll shut up next time and not ask the question.

I went through the same process during the Lakota Levy. “You couldn’t teach a class of students.” “If you have all the answers, why don’t you run for the school board,” were just a few of the comments. Anyone close to the story will note that during the Lakota Campaign, angry parents and teachers actually threatened WLW with very similar inflammatory comments because I had went on the air and revealed the real budget buster, that the wages of the top 30% exceeded 65K a year, and that was the reason the district didn’t have proper funding.

In 1990 a well-intentioned Congress passed the ADA act which is described below.
The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990[1][2] (ADA) is a law that was enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1990. It was signed into law on July 26, 1990, by President George H. W. Bush, and later amended with changes effective January 1, 2009.[3]

 
The ADA is a wide-ranging civil rights law that prohibits, under certain circumstances, discrimination based on disability. It affords similar protections against discrimination to Americans with disabilities as the Civil Rights Act of 1964,[4] which made discrimination based on race, religion, sex, national origin, and other characteristics illegal. Disability is defined by the ADA as “a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits a major life activity.”

Quote by George Bush, “I know there may have been concerns that the ADA may be too vague or too costly, or may lead endlessly to litigation. But I want to reassure you right now that my administration and the United States Congress have carefully crafted this Act. We’ve all been determined to ensure that it gives flexibility, particularly in terms of the timetable of implementation; and we’ve been committed to containing the costs that may be incurred…. Let the shameful wall of exclusion finally come tumbling down.”

People now have forgotten what life was like before the ADA was enacted. And because it’s such an emotional issue, taken individually, the feel good stories are used to sell it. But now in hindsight, can we not say that the ADA has had a devastating effect on our expanding economy. Our competing nations don’t regulate themselves in such a way. People also assume that the Department of Education has always been in place, when in reality it’s only been implemented since 1979. Has the Department of Education made our students more successful? Or has the Department of Education only increased the cost of education? Is legislation like the ADA the government’s solution to fairness, if the cost is at the expense of our nation? And in sports, how did we arrive at a place where sports are considered an entitlement? Should public schools offer sports so children can have a crack at a scholarship? Is that the requirement of public education, so resident parents have the opportunity to have their children pursue a scholarship to higher education? Or preparing a child for college with electives offered by the district, is it the public’s responsibility to help a child accomplish their college goals once they’ve graduated? Who benefits, the community, or the parents of the community that save the extra education costs because pubic education assisted the cost of post-graduate prep? These are the emotional issues that instigate the type of character assassinations that are eerily similar to the exchange between Doc Thompson and Paul Daugherty.

Traditionally, it was churches, friends and family that cared for members of society that couldn’t care for themselves. When government injected itself into the situation, they have created a culture of entitlement, which we can not afford, and now the remnants of good intentions are crippling the very foundations that our society is built upon.

The only way to understand those foundations is to strip away all the things built upon it, and re-examine the condition. Again, I’d have to point out in the case of special needs issues; the total cost is but a fraction of staff wages that are excessively high across the entire school system payrolls. In Cincinnati the average per family income is $58,000 per home. At Lakota, it’s $62,000 per teacher. That is the bulk of cost, and no union member has yet to step forward and suggest restructuring their contracts. Instead, for weeks the Cincinnati Public School system negotiated with their teachers union over the cost of health care. So dealing with wages is a long way off. And the reason nobody asks the hard questions are because of what Doc went through on WLW on December 9, 2010 when a fellow member of the media took him to task on the air in an attempt to silence him.

And that is a waltz few sane individuals want to dance to. But let’s all be thankful that Doc can dance with the best of them.

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.NoLakotaLevy.com

The Nature of Government

On the morning of December 8, 2010, I went to work as I normally do, only the temperature was hovering just above 10 degrees with a wind chill shaping up to a goose egg. I was riding my motorcycle, as I do all year, rain, snow or tornados, and the explanation for our governmental troubles came to me in the beauty of simplicity.

Many people wonder why I do things like riding motorcycles in sub-zero temperatures, and the explanation I could give them isn’t something they typically would understand from their perspective. I do it for what comes to my mind in the pain and endurance of the exercise. Often, being in such a predicament, which takes a person out of their comfort zones, will clarify thoughts. Since I do a lot of thinking, there are a lot of thoughts to clarify, so driving to work in extremely cold temperatures helps.

On this particular morning, I looked at the cars around me. At a stop light the woman next to me had her heat turned all the way up and she had on a hood, windows rolled up firmly. She looked at me like I was nuts. At the next light was a man in a pick-up truck. He looked like a man that fancy’s himself as a rough and tumble individual, had mud flaps with the silhouette of naked women on them. He refused to make eye contact. I could see his hair blowing in the warmth of his cockpit from the turned up heat, again windows rolled up tight.

I thought this morning of all the books I had read about Native American culture, of Tecumseh, Blue Jacket, the great Shawnee nation, the Five Nations of the Iroquois. I thought of Chief Pontiac of the Ottawa’s eating the heart of his enemies like they were just apples, many times while the victims were still alive. I thought of Chief Seattle and his great speech. And as I thought of those men, and the nature they revered, I thought of President Obama and his famous speech to the Fort Hood victims, “I want to put a shout out to the Native American’s,” or something to that ridiculous effect. It was another car that pulled up next to me at yet another light, with the exhaust from his vehicle dancing around his car and whipping around me in the swirling frozen wind. This guy was a typical suburbanite, well-shaven, clean cut, and looking straight ahead at the road ahead. Again, he didn’t make eye contact, and he reminded me of Obama, just going through the motions of living keeping his eyes on the road ahead, but not willing to look at things to the side of him that didn’t fit his learned behavior. For all I know the guy could live in my neighborhood.

On the rest of my journey to work, I thought of the train trolley down in Cincinnati, Strickland’s letter to Kasich on the high speed rail deal, Obama agreeing to the Bush Tax cuts, I thought of the TSA situation, and I thought about the Lakota Levy that is sure to come again, especially once the unions discover that they will not be able to maintain the level of income they’ve negotiated for themselves when Governor Kasich cuts education even more to get Ohio back on a balanced budget track.

Who is to say that riding a motorcycle in the extreme cold is wrong? Only in relation to the rest of orthodox society is it looked down on. To me, it makes perfect sense. It clears my head, like I discussed, and it saves a ton of fuel. With fuel climbing up over $3 bucks a gallon, I don’t want to pay more for fuel, so I’ll buy less. I have a perfectly nice car in the driveway, but I don’t like to use it for all the reasons described.

Big government types have associated themselves with the green initiative to save the planet from human impact. These are the same individuals that roll their windows up tight to protect their skin from the cold weather. They are not what in my opinion an environmentalist is.

Nature is not a fragile organism. Nature lives in the extreme cold, and the excessive heat and it sends hurricanes to destroy entire cities that humans build for themselves. Yet if you consider what the modern progressive minded person asserts with their big government ideas, you would at first think these people have mankind’s best interest at the front of their minds. But when you look at their actions from the perspective of a motorcycle in the brutal cold of a sunless morning, you see how infantile these people are.

Which is more beautiful, the nature that can be seen from the Appalachian Trail atop Mount LeConte or the nature in someone’s back year where all the bushes and trees are trimmed nicely, and the grass is cut, and every rock placed in the yard was put there by the owner of the property.

The degree to which human beings attempt to alter nature is called government. If you look to the forest, where mankind has not put their feet, nature thrives. Trees grow, animals eat each other, and water flows in the path of least resistance. Trees in the forest compete for light, the smaller ones get pushed aside by the bigger ones, and survival of the fittest is the general rule. In the forest, the will to survive is so great that a tree will sink roots into rock in order to get what it needs. The nature of human beings is not different from the organism of a tree.

In the back yard garden, trees are pruned and sculpted to fit the contours of homes, or other trees. Plants are mulched to assist them to grow, and shrubbery is trimmed and controlled. The grass is cut to a desired level, and in some cases watered to ensure its survival.

Our government is simply a garden of which we all have different ideas of where the plants should go, or what flowers we need to plant and where. But the understanding of it all is that it is purely cosmetic. All the rules of mankind are simply made up in the minds of the human being. In the global neighborhood, what is happening in America, is pruning, where the branches are being cut away so that the other trees in the neighborhood can grow, because the big tree of America sucks up all the water, at least according to these green thumbed gardeners called politicians.

The fertilizer and various chemicals we use on our lawns are simply equitable to the stimulus money government has issued to grow the economy.

From the cold morning of December 8, 2010 it became excessively clear to me that the same people tucked away in their warm cars are the same people that buy flowers for their gardens in the spring, and cut their grass on Saturday afternoons in the heat of a summer day. And they’ll plant a tree in this location or that location hoping that one day the tree will provide some shade. And these people take this same mentality to their business, whether they directly work for government, or if they simply vote in the grand idea of a republic, and the politicians they elect do all those things and more to their lawns. And they believe with all their hearts and souls that the work they’re doing is important, and that they must trim trees, and cut grass or use fertilizer in order to make our world grow.

What they fail to understand is that nature doesn’t need human assistance at all. We are simply guests that have arrived like a pimple on the face of geologic time. Our duration on the plant will come and go without the earth hardly noticing. Global warming and every related issue are only musings from human beings that have an unhealthy belief of their universal importance.

For all the gardens those humans build for themselves will be wiped away in time by the true brutality of nature and its selection of what is beautiful or not, what lives what dies, and what is strong and what is weak.

It never made sense to me why so many atheists and others without some sort of faith to ground their terrestrial selves seemed prone to migrate to the conservation movement so embraced by the left, and why so many young people seem attracted to those mentalities. It’s because their undeveloped minds have not yet worked out their place in the universe. This is why so many senior citizens tend to vote conservative, while the young tend to vote liberal. The young still cleave to the ego based notion that they are all there is. The old know better and have learned after a lifetime of living. This is the difference. The silly, small minded politicians think they can actually improve nature with their juvenile influence. But all they really end up doing in the scheme of things is move some rocks around and plant some trees, most of which are quickly uprooted as soon as a major storm comes.

All the policies of mankind fall under this description. So is this a proclamation of anarchy? No. When I go to the forest, I walk the trail, which is not natural, but created by man. I build a fire with the wood that falls from the trees. And I leave the campsite looking the same as it did before I arrived. If I build a home with what the forest provides, I do it understanding that within 100,000 years everything I create will return to nature including every item a human ever created.

Notions like Social Security, Wiki Leaks, Communism, teacher contracts, health care, all laws, all government and every roadway built will be swallowed by nature in a relatively short time geologically speaking.

If the human race wanted to truly survive, it would copy nature. Not try to corrupt nature with their undeveloped ego desire to build a better garden. America was modeled after nature, as envisioned by John Locke in the late 1600’s. But during the growth of government periods, particularly in the 20th century, America has become a land of gardeners instead of the natural element.

Our society needs to ask how much we want to spend in taxes to supply a garden that is purely cosmetic to begin with. Because that’s all any of it is. It’s just gardening by gardeners that have the audacity to believe they can do it better than nature.

I ran into a community once that reflected some of what I’m talking about. It was a little neighborhood on top of Mt LeConte that serves tourists wishing to climb that mountain. I’ve been to Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge many times and Mt LeConte is the big mountain approximately 10 miles from downtown Gatlinburg which looms over the town. It is the highest peak visible from Pigeon Forge and is an unmistakable monster of a mountain. From the ground you’d never know that speckled across the top is a community of cabins, with some residents that work up there, and guests renting cabins to stay for the night. There’s a mess hall and a couple of rest rooms to facilitate everyone’s needs.

From the top of the mountain, in that little village, all the great monuments of Pigeon Forge are almost completely invisible. The community resides over 6000 feet which doesn’t sound like much compared to mountains in the west, or in the Himalayas but the top of Mt LeConte has its own weather patterns. Its peaks are often submerged in a cloud layer and take the full brunt of weather patterns migrating across Tennessee and Kentucky from the west. But at such a height all the monuments of tourism are just little specs. Nothing looks too complicated from that vantage point.

From atop that mountain, the world makes sense. The people you meet up there say hello and are generally happy to see you. What everyone shares that arrive at the distant land is they had to work hard to get there. There’s only three ways that will get you to the top. You have to walk and climb, you can take a llama, or you can be dropped off with a helicopter, which brings supplies to the top of the mountain. It’s as primitive, yet as civilized of a place as anywhere I’ve ever been. On that mountain perspective is easy, just like in the harsh cold on a motorcycle in mid December. That rugged paradise is virtually a stones throw from downtown Gatlinburg with all the tourist spots, yet the two worlds are diametrically opposed.

That’s when it is easy to see the only difference between the two is the inventions of man, which are transitory at best. In Gatlinburg you run into thousands of people and say hello to nobody. On top of the mountain you say hello to everyone because everyone respects each other because everyone worked hard to get there.

Nature requires one thing and that’s respect. Respect for yourself. Respect for the power of nature. And respect that each moment could be your last.

In the politics of mankind, their laws mean nothing because politicians cannot create respect. And no amount of tax money or social program will give someone respect for anything. They can make a garden look nice, but nobody truly respects the garden because it’s contrived and manipulated by the gardener, and artificially watered and fertilized.

Nature is the only true gardener.

Rich Hoffman

http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior

www.overmanwarrior.com

Ted Strickland and the Passenger Train of Doom

Below is a letter from Ted Strickland pleading for John Kasich to reconsider stopping the passenger Train of Doom idea that has been in the works for a number of years, and is a progressive project embraced by that philosophy.  There is more to the letter than just words.  What Strickland and progressives in Ohio are doing is setting the stage of creating doubt as Kasich works on the 2011 budget. 

I had no idea prior to David Little being hired to come after me for the Lakota School levy, that there was even a Progress Ohio group. I discovered it while looking over Little’s resume.

Sure enough, Progress Ohio is a progressive group dedicated to progressive ideas; another aspect to our government that I hadn’t known was a major legislative influence working diligently within the State of Ohio toward goals the electorate is not aware of.

When considering how to simplify and reduce the size of government, or to reform education, groups like Progress Ohio place themselves as a barrier to that goal.

So it is with no surprise that Progress Ohio was one of the first to publish the letter from current Governor Strickland to Governor-Elect Kasich written on December 7, 2010 about all the reasons in the world why the 3C&D passenger rail service should not be cancelled. The letter was hand delivered to Kasich, but was posted in digital form on the Progress Ohio website within hours. That is how the game board is set up.

You can read that letter here before my comments below.

The trouble with these progressive groups and politicians, just like the trouble with organized labor, is that they are eternally focused on what was, and their measuring sticks are in the past. They need conflicts like racism, and the traditional labor strikes to advance their position.

The passenger rail is one of those items, built by a long string of progressive minded politicians, and yes, Bob Taft, a republican is one of them, passenger rail is part of a dying culture. The world is growing away from regional things like rails, and even highways and buildings, and moving toward more electronic, home based applications. Yet Progressives have entrenched themselves around such concepts and they stand firmly in the way of true progress which can only be explored in innovation and much, much smaller government.

Virtually everything mentioned in the letter from Strickland is an echo from the past where the true intentions are control and restriction, not options.

Ohio’s youth won’t stay in Ohio because there is a train. They’ll stay here if there are jobs, if there are opportunities, and if they can have a good quality of life. None of those things government can provide truly. Only private industry and individual innovation will solve our problems.

Such letters as the former governor sent only serve to cloud the issue with contrived facts and distorted opinion rooted in a lack of intellect.

I hope Kasich does for Ohio what Chris Christie has done for New Jersey. 

Letters like this dribble from Mr. Strickland show what is wrong, and Progress Ohio is the foundation people like Strickland stand on.  And Progress Ohio is what is standing in the way of real progress by holding on to the past.

Forget about trains!

Remember, Strickland was governor when Glenn Beck covered this issue on his radio show last summer.

Getting things under control will be painful, but if we do it now, we can fix it. If we wait too long, the damage will be too great.

Rich Hoffman

http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior

www.overmanwarrior.com

Ten Rules to Live By

I do sympathize with the many who question my intent as they try to ascertain my motivations and political positions. “Do I want a political office,” writes one beleaguered email sender. “You want publicity,” writes another. “You want to stay in the times of the caveman,” says yet another.

I read and listen to such things with humor because it would take a lifetime for many of those people to understand what and why I think the way I do. I was doing much of this work before I ever entered the Lakota School Levy issue, and I’ll be doing the same work long after it passes. It just so happens that time and fate have intersected over the issue of education funding.

So as a contribution of insight I offer something I wrote back in 2004 in my book, The Symposium of Justice. It’s the Ten Rules for Living as displayed in the back of the book and discussed in the chapter called, The Overman. (Hint, this is where the term Overmanwarrior comes from, the term reminds me of these ten rules) It is my hope that this list might provide the needed insight for those that seek an answer to their lingering queries.

The following appears on page 187 of The Symposium of Justice, Cliffhanger’s Ten Rules to Live by

1. To honor women, they are the pillars of society.

2. Stand as an example of the highest moral order.

3. Avoid mental depletion such as intoxication, and ignorance.

4. Pursue learning like a person on fire pursues water.

5. Live with integrity, where values are in line with behavior.

6. Live the given life, not the dreams of others.

7. In a crisis handle everything calmly and without confusion.

8. Be capable of firmness in the heart.

9. Sorrow is everywhere, accept it with a smile.

10. Resist hiding in numbers, stand as an individual contributor.

I wrote the Symposium of Justice to teach my kids the values I wanted them to carry into adulthood. But I offer it to anyone looking to improve their life. I live by those values and it has always worked for me. When you are living by those principles, no amount of money, no official title, and no peer acceptance can surpass the benefits. The key to fixing the world is within you. Fix that and you fix the world. . All such things are purely cosmetic aspects to a social existence. Participation in any and all will ultimately lead to an empty life laced with dissatisfaction. So read of the above list what you will. Live your life and maybe make your own list. Because one thing is certain, and that is nothing is truly certain. All you truly ever have is what you build inside yourself and can therefore offer others in the form of relationships.

No school, political party, or career choice can give you that

Those are the values I live by.

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior www.overmanwarrior.com

Individuality and Thinking Outside the Box.

I never planned to become so involved in education policies. By contrast, the things I’m interested in are so far away from structured education that they might as well be from another planet.

Fortunately, I understand why I feel this way. And I’ve covered it elsewhere in my other bodies of work. Google (institutional failure Rich Hoffman) and you’ll find much of what I have said about the dismal failure of thinking from within the conventions of a box.

My endeavors against the school levies are not an anti-education position for me. I’m not looking to destroy the schools, or to single handedly defeat communism, as some have said. But where my personal work and the work of standing up against the deceit of school systems looking to wrestle property tax money from residents in order to feed an institutional monster intersects with my personal interests and that is why I am involved. That is where the cowboy hats, and bullwhips come into the picture, because for me, those are symbols of individually and freedom. I think I’ll let Nicholas Cage explain it best for me. The following clip is from Wild at Heart, one of David Lynches greatest.

Individuality is what I’d consider to be the paramount trait of the human condition. Through individuality everything can be fixed. If everyone cared for themselves, there wouldn’t be a need for large institutions.

Progressives look at government as a job creation measure that assists the masses. I view the progressive kind of help to damage the individual gumption of mankind. And much of that progressive teaching is going directly to our youth through the school system. And that is where the schools cross over and interfere with my interests as an artist.

In my art, the promotion of bullwhips, cowboy hats, firearms, motorcycles, etc are all rooted in individuality, which I see being the elements lost in our American culture, and the key to the preservation of society. It is a long standing American tradition of one person making a difference. When a majority of Americans believe such things, they will therefore vote and participate in the republic. Films used to display such individuality, are embraced over a long span of time. Progressive themed films come and go and people quickly forget them. But films rooted in American tradition and individuality have staying power. In the following clip, Clint Eastwood takes over an entire town and punishes it for its corruption in the film High Plains Drifter.

Another American idea of one person taking on several others when grossly outnumbered, Clint Eastwood, Fistful of Dollars.

Star Wars was essentially a western set in space. One of the most popular characters in the entire Star Wars saga by most every survey was Han Solo. Another was Boba Fett, and Fett only has a couple of lines in the entire six film series. What both characters have in common are that they are both faithfully individualistic characters. This provides some insight into what the psychology of mankind if analyzed without filters will chose. In a classic scene from 1977, Han Solo kills a bounty hunter in a cantina. Notice Han shoots first and in cold blood. Solo is a survivor. He has a bounty hunter there to kill him, so why not shoot first.

However, later, and under pressure from his progressive friends, Lucas changed this scene 1997 to where the bounty hunter shot first, which turned out to be a joke among Star Wars fans that felt betrayed by the edit.

Here is one of the most humorous satires on the subject.

What this tells me is that people see through the thin vale of progressive thought. Movie goers do not like “team” players. Look at the James Bond franchise. In the modern era, Bond has been watered down as they have tried to make him more “human.”

But the James Bond that I grew up with was a survivor that always had a smart answer and enough wit to escape any situation.

Bond single handedly takes on some of the world’s most dangerous villains. He doesn’t work well with others and frequently thumbs his nose at his superiors. That is the key to Bond’s success.

Yet, in socialism, it is desired to remove such individualist traits. Here is the reality of socialism expressed well in the film Brazil.

Here is another scene from Brazil of an individual getting revenge on a symbol of the STATE.

In fact, Brazil should be seen by everyone. What are you waiting for? Go rent it now!

The fact is movies are boring when they involve flat characters that don’t have individual attributes that are defined and charismatic. The only way socialist principled films work is when shown in a negative light.

This clip from THX-1138, another GREAT FILM!

Here is a great speech by Jeff Bridges playing the wonderfully individualist Preston Tucker.

The point of all this is that collectivism does not work. It never has, and never will. And telling society to get into a box that it doesn’t want is wrong.

In my own work, I’ve dedicated my life to living, thinking, and teaching people to live outside the box. So I am not a fan of funding an education system that is teaching people to live inside a box. I’m fine with teaching reading, writing, arithmetic, college prep, and basic social skills. But the sex education, the counseling, the physical education crosses the lines, because all those types of social concerns have been reduced to a level of collectivism that paves the way to a much less individualistic society.

I already felt that public education leaned in a direction that went too far in that direction. But I put up with it because my community desires the services, so I go along with it for their sake. But, I see many, many aspects that are wrong with public education because the emphasis is not being applied to individualism. Only in sports does our society embrace individual traits fully, and that is a failure in social value.

I have spent a lot of my time figuring out what those values are, and have committed my life to preserving individualism. And I was doing this well before the Lakota Levy ever came to be.

Being involved in a political issue, I will tend to have a different approach because personally, I despise politics. The films I have displayed here provide some insight into my belief structure. The people I look up to are not the types that do what they’re told without question. I have no desire to become a politician, a board member, a congressman, even a governor or president. None of those jobs would be enjoyable for me.

As a concerned citizen, I’m fine to call things as I see them. But being a lover of individualism, I don’t require the approval of anyone else to act. I don’t need the approval of another to approve of my attire. And I don’t require any approval to weigh my comments in the context of history.

I am happy to share that lack of burden with others in order to free them of such shackles, because the answers are outside of the box. Not in it. But you have to enjoy the freedom of living shackle free.

So it is not of any offense to groups like unions, and political organizations that are wishing to maintain the status quo. I don’t pass judgment on your collective actions until you ask me for money, because at that point, you are involving me in your action. At that time, action on my part must be taken to eliminate the grip of your collectivism on my life style.

So criticize and belittle from your perspective the images of the traditional cowboy. But as evidence to what the true nature of mankind enjoys from the psychology of the darkened theater, I know that my position is supported by the infrastructure of individualism embraced by the masses from the vote of the movie ticket and film history.

The concepts taught by modern progressives are simply flimsy musings of sociological theory. And as for the direction of a one world identity, I would direct the world to the cowboy, not Al Gore or any like him.

And that is the platform I stand on. And that is my commitment for every endeavor I become a part of. There isn’t any class that can teach you to defend a position held within the institutional box-like thinking. The only kind of thinking I truly value is from outside the box.

Rich Hoffman

http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior

www.overmanwarrior.com