Tag: 700 WLW

Matt Clark and Rich Hoffman 2014 Prediction Broadcast: “Tapestries of Ideology”

If you were listening today across the vast frozen plains of Southern Michigan to WAAM radio in Ann Arbor you would have heard Clarkcast Radio host Matt Clark speaking to me about the future of America starting in 2014.  The theme of our discussion centered around “Tapestries of Ideology” which I mentioned as a way to explain whether or not people cared enough about anything to change the direction of the Republic away from the socialism, liberalism, and sometimes open communism that has infected the American way of life by rabid progressive influence.  When the “Tapestries of Ideology” are removed from people—the need for power structures to utilize pairs of opposites to herd people into a particular direction—people find they have more in common than less 100% of the time.  I have had elegant dinners with “hit men” who did what they did to keep their wives wrapped in gold and perils, but loved watching Davy Crocket on The Wonderful World of Disney as kids.  I’ve associated with judges who ran their entire local political structure ruthlessly—but discovered that deep down inside they loved the movie, “The Sound of Music.”  Presently some of my best friends are the kind of people who used to be professional educators and would have hated me a decade ago, but find themselves united with my present crusade.  Once those “Tapestries of Ideology” are removed, often it is discovered that people have more in common than not.  This led to a very interesting discussion as Matt recorded it with video.  He didn’t just want me to call in like a typical guest on talk radio, but he utilized Skype so he could have our discussion on a split screen—which turned out to be a really good idea.  Have a look:

Progressives are often given credit for propelling forward the Civil Rights movement, bringing equality to women, and creating a five-day work week with labor union pressure against their employers.  Using “Tapestries of Ideology” all those groups propelling so-called “rights”—actually exploited certain collective groups by focusing their energy on pairs of opposite duality so to steer their efforts toward progressive causes.  For Civil Rights, progressive groups exploited black oppression, for women, progressives sought to create a “war against women” perpetrated by evil, vile, dirty, heterosexual men.  For the weekend oriented work week, labor unions painted the pictures that corporations were evil and slave shops of doom that could not put a check on their selfish motivations.  However, once those ideologies are removed from people one on one, it can easily be discovered that most women yearn to have a man’s specific touch in their life and want to be cared for in a passive way, blacks integrate quite well with whites, and most union members are happy to have a job that was created by a corporation and are often grateful.  Progressive organizations can only advance their positions with duality and hate—which is why they never really wish to solve any problems.  Instead they are perpetually on the outlook for more problems so that they can exploit them to gain power from the process.

What I said to Matt during our half hour broadcast was that this power trick is changing—the old progressive behavior is altering exposing the game of duality that has been played behind the “Tapestries of Ideology” for decades.  When those tapestries are removed, people tend to find they have a lot in common—more so than politics would care to admit.  When Denver plays Seattle in the next Superbowl entire cities supporting those respective teams will find themselves united.  Ideologies of political and progressive nature will be removed because they find themselves supporting the exploits of Payton Manning or the terrific defense of the Seattle Seahawks.  However, when the game is over, those tapestries of ideology go back up and the duality nature of progressive politics will return.

I most saw this duality during a game I attended in Tampa, Florida when the Tampa Bay Buccaneers retired the jersey of Mike Alstott.  My wife and I flew down from Cincinnati for the game to watch the prime time Sunday night extravaganza.  Before the game I attended a tailgate party where firefighters, local girls from the Penthouse strip club, cops, teachers, radio hosts, former players and a number of colorful personalities were enjoying the extended hours before the game.  The event began at noon and lasted up until around 7 PM and featured great food, lots of drinks, and a very festive atmosphere.  Ideologically I was opposed to most of the people at this tailgate party—but on that day at that time, we were all dressed to kill with skulls, and pirate paraphernalia with the united goal of seeing the Bucs beat the Seahawks.  It was very exciting.  These are some of my friends from “What The Buc?”

Old School, you are looking good man……………the weight loss is fantastic!  l_d4cde2fe25e24b26ac058f1f2a06945c

The Bucs won that game and Raymond James Stadium was rocking as the palm trees inside the stadium waved from a slight breeze to the massive crowed juiced up from the victory.  But that wasn’t all, just across town at another stadium the Tampa Bay Rays baseball team was on a run for the World Series and were in the final innings.  The game was a game seven as they had been down 4 to 1 against the Boston Red Sox just a few days before.  Their comeback was one of the great sports stories at the time and if they won that particular game they’d go to the World Series against The Philadelphia Phillies.  In Tampa this was an electrifying moment.  My wife and I flew to Tampa essentially just for the Buccaneer game and the night before on a flight out of Baltimore the captain knowing that game 6 was so important to most of the passengers headed for Tampa piped in the game to the in-seat headsets.  I listened to the Rays win that game going to game 7 the following night and the plane erupted with cheers.   It was a phenomenal experience as perfect strangers were high fiving each other just because the game ended with the Tampa Bay Rays winning the game.l_fc1c8868d60d4eeba2028a22935cc084l_16cc485bd0f04fd3a096df3d785fe452

The next day prior to the Buccaneer tailgate party my wife and I had lunch outside at a nice restaurant at the International Mall.  On October 19th 2008, it was a warm day in Florida and very pleasant around noon.  We had stayed the night before at the same hotel where the Seattle Seahawks were staying.  Due to the collective hostility toward them, they stayed in their rooms confined to their wing, mainly for their own protection as Tampa was revved up for their sports teams everywhere anybody went.  It was a hostile environment for a visiting team to the Bay area.  My wife and I ordered up a fine bottle of wine since we arrived late into town and the hotel let us have the outside pool area to ourselves until 2 AM as a special favor.  We were having a nice time.  This carried over to a nice breakfast by the bay, some quick phone calls to my Tampa contacts at the tailgate party, then arrangement for lunch.  At the International Mall even that early in the day on a Sunday people were absolutely ecstatic having two massive sports events in town at the same time, the Buccaneer game and the Rays’ playoff game.  It was an electrifying lunch which just intensified as the day wore on.l_6ebeeb89e1104178874ea374bc7b23f3

Many hours later, the Buc game ended in a victory but the Rays games was still rolling on.  So the Raymond James Stadium crew turned on the rest of the Rays game onto the jumbotron scoreboards so the fans at the Buccaneers game could watch the Rays win that remarkable comeback performance against the Boston Red Sox.  When David Price got the final out of that game I have never heard such an eruption of fan excitement as I did that day.  The entire Raymond James Stadium exploded into cheers that were so intense that I thought the concrete of the place would shake apart.  And it wasn’t just inside the stadium, but outside as well.  The cars on the streets tooted their horns wherever they were and a rumble of cheers came from the city streets from as far away as sound could carry them.  The ceremony went on for many hours and lasted all the way back to our hotel.  The streets were clogged with people who stopped in the street and were dancing on their cars.  It was an amazing experience.l_1630061810e543ea8474970bbb97e326

l_dd1441e7d69b42cbbc015b54b255988dI found myself joined with those people as a rugged individualist even though many of the people who wanted to shake my hand and hug me were likely people who would find my politics and social stance reprehensibly too strict for them.  This was because the “Tapestries of Ideology” had been removed by the Buccaneer football game and the World Series entry of the Tampa Bay Rays.  That emotion lasted until we got on a plane the next day, on a Monday and flew home.  Once we landed back in Cincinnati, the “Tapestries of Ideology” were back in full force as Cincinnati had not experienced such a thing.  The Reds had lost yet again, and the Bengals still sucked and people had nothing to unit them away from their personal ideologies created for them by power groups and charlatans.l_f8c48975e4cf438cb20f71e427072117

As I told Matt, in 2014 the “Tapestries of Ideology” are coming down not because of a sporting event, but because information is so easy to receive from new media, video games requiring thought are outselling movies, television is being forced to produce thoughtful programming instead of sophomoric “booby humor” and the realization that most everybody has been lied to by a politician from both parties is impossible to escape.  Common non-political people are sick of politics because it’s in their face now that Obamacare is taking more of their money with unjust taxation.  For the same reason that the Seattle Seahawks had to stay in their hotel rooms in Tampa gazing from their balconies down onto my wife and I lounging at the pool below them trapped like convicts, politicians are finding that the world outside of Washington D.C. is not friendly to them.  The “Tapestries of Ideology” are no longer hiding the antics of Obama and his miscreants of duality.  They are exposed, and the things that normally divide people are failing, uniting unlikely souls toward uncharted territory.

I predicted to Matt that before 2014 ends this illuminating statistic would become more pronounced.  It may not be measurable month by month—like the hands of a clock.  If you stare at the situation, little movement will be observed.  But if you turn away and look again five minutes from now, a huge change in hand position will be noticed.  Thus, the same type of thing will occur throughout 2014.  Watching day by day throughout February, March, and April, little will appear to change, but by the time that we reach December of 2014, quite a lot will.  People are waking up and the old tricks executed with the “Tapestries of Ideology” are not working because people know what are behind those tapestries.  They now know what they conceal and it is no longer enough to just look at the surface of things.  People are looking deeper.l_c8c50126724d4bb7b9309a46298bd4f2


The top-selling books on the market are not the Steven King types as they have been in the past, they are Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Charles Krauthammer and Star Wars all works of tradition, thought, and rebellion against established thinking.  The time has come and gone for the progressive.  They have ruined the world, and are presently still in power, but the mess they made people resent—and they can no longer hide behind “Tapestries of Ideology.”  Without those tapestries, there isn’t anything to hide the true intentions of the progressive—and that is what 2014 in the context of history most will be known for.  Mark it on your calendar—because it will be a big year for truth, justice……………………..and the American Way as the “Tapestries of Ideology” come crashing down.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Skyfall: A motorcycle in a snowstorm and death breath’s threat

imageI get asked all the time why I ride a motorcycle in the dead of winter and the answer is because of the kind of days that I experienced this past week where a snow storm hit in the middle of the day while I was out in it.  Once the snow started blowing and covering the roads I realized I needed to head home because the temperature was dropping quickly.  As people drove over the snow it was melting then immediately freezing as the atmospheric conditions were perfect for that kind of tragedy.  Before I tell this story I spend a lot of time outside—and I thrive in extreme conditions as these pictures on this article show.  They were taken a few days after that same snow storm and reflect the desperate isolation that such extreme cold and terrible road conditions bring to the mind while in it on a motorcycle.

The snow was coming down hard and had covered my bike—a Suzuki 1500 V-Twin that weighs just shy of 1000 pounds.  It’s a big bike that I’ve had virtually everywhere.  In just a few years it currently has 45,000 miles on it if that paints a picture.  I had to dust off the bike just to not sit in snow.  As I started up the big engine snow blew out of the tail pipe from all the drifts that had piled up against the rear tire, and I was genuinely concerned whether I could even steer the motorcycle in such conditions.  But within moments I had the bike moving out of the parking lot and out toward the Back Porch Saloon racing home and realizing quickly that I should have stayed put and either waited out the storm or called my wife to pick me up.   But that didn’t seem right, I didn’t want to put her in danger and I didn’t want to leave my bike on the side of the road in hard weather—so I agreed with myself to take things slow and see what happened mile by mile.image

The temperature had dropped from the mid-30s to the mid-20s Fahrenheit within the hour.  I had hoped that once I hit 747 the road that for nearly 8 miles of travel would take me nearly to my home that it would be clearer since it was a major road.  It was not.  I couldn’t turn onto the road from another without my front tire slipping out from under me.  I could barely hold up my bike against the slippery road as my foot wanted to slide outward against the surface ice that I had already wasted 10 minutes navigating.  In that time I only traveled approximately 70 feet and it became clear that I may not survive this trip this time.  So I pulled into an urgent care facility to decide what to do.  Snow had fallen down my gloves after initially brushing off my bike and was beginning to melt against my skin.  My finger tips were freezing and the visibility was about half a mile and was accumulating against my helmet at a pace that I had to continuously wipe away the snow just so I could see.  It was an impossible situation.

I sat in the desolate snow storm for a moment on my motorcycle and just looked north into the vast gray sky and tiny black dots of snowflakes that extended to the edge of visibility.  And I decided that I was going to brave the snowstorm and head home even if it was the last decision I ever made.  Sure I could have called for help, sure I could have waited out the storm, but I did not want to wake up the next day knowing that I surrendered to a snow storm.  It didn’t matter if anybody would know—but I would—so I took out my iPod and set for repeat my favorite song from 2013—the theme song from the James Bond film Skyfall by Adele.  As she sung the lyrics, “this is the end………hold your breath and count to ten……feel the earth move and then…………………” snow fell to the beat of the music and I could feel the rhythm to the universe and I plugged myself in.  I pulled my face shield down, shook off the pain of my numb fingers and threw caution to the wind. I peeled out of the parking lot and out onto 747 throwing snow everywhere to a parade of shocked faces peering at me from behind their car windows.

imageAs I moved down into the Becket Ridge valley the roads had completely frozen and snow drifts were crawling rapidly across the packed ice hiding the terrible black ice that was underneath.  I could not stop with brakes but had to just coast to a rest at stop lights.  Once the light turned green my back tire would not engage the pavement.  It just spun freely.  I didn’t apply any throttle, just let out the clutch and the back tire would just spin going almost nowhere.  So I held the bike in place struggling to hold it up as my feet were slipping outward.  I let the tire burn through the ice till it reached dry pavement shooing me forward.  The friction from the warmed up tire was melting the ice under it propelling me along just a bit.  This process was repeated for the next 4 traffic lights.image

A West Chester cop pulled up alongside me trying to determine if he should give me a ticket for reckless operation.  But his tires were spinning too and he couldn’t pull in behind me as the car behind was struggling to stay on the road.  A car just in front of us had slid off the road and over a curb in front of a Wendy’s restaurant obviously trying to turn into that parking lot for a safe haven, but not being able to make the turn.  The cop was concerned about getting someplace safe and showed no desire to stand outside and issue a ticket.  He simply shook his head and I gazed back with Adele singing in my ear…………….”Let the Skyfall.”

In these kinds of moments the mind reaches a place where fear no longer has any influence.  It is a place I always strive to be but can only reach under extreme conditions and is the primary reason I ride a motorcycle every day no matter what’s going on if it is physically possible.  I’ve been to this kind of spot many times in my life and when I return I clearly see what everything is about.  At such times I pray for a time when the U.S. Government comes to my doorstep and tries to arrest me for defending the Constitution.  I pray for a pack of terrorists to make the mistake of attacking a location near me where I can turn them into mince-meat suitable for a pretzel sold at an airport dipped in liquid cheese.  In such moments the dominate feeling is that all takers could be challenged under any quantity and the enemies would all be eradicated.  People sitting in the warmth of their cars at the next stop light must have thought I was crazy as I pumped my fist toward the heavens and challenge all the elements of earth to throw what they had at me.image

What they didn’t know was my own inner challenges were rising up against the context of the storm.  In my ear, on the iPod Adele was singing, “Skyfall is where we start, A thousand miles and poles apart……………….Where worlds collide and days are dark…………………..” and I thought of the progressive schools and how they are rotting the minds of mankind, I thought of the arrogance of president Obama and an Attorney General who is an out-right criminal.  I thought of the feminist destruction of traditional America and their mindless support of Hillary Clinton—who is also a criminal.  I thought of the gays attacking Phil Robertson for his “homophobic” views which are now the mainstream making God-fearing Christians similar to the kind of sacrificial lambs thrown to the lions during the Roman Empire.  I thought of the stagnant economy directly wrecked by progressives like George Soros and his open border, open legalized pot mind, numbing existence so that America will become one of the least free places on earth as opposed to the most.  I thought of Warren Buffet’s rail line across Canada which is the real reason that there is no Keystone Pipeline.  Buffet makes hundreds of millions of dollars as Canada uses his trains to ship their oil to China.  If that same oil traveled across a pipeline through North America to the gulf, Buffet wouldn’t make money with his trains.  That’s why the train wreck and oil spill along that line a few weeks ago went away from the news cycle so quickly.  All these people are villains—and there are hundreds of thousands more—and standing in the snow and ice with my fingers numb remotely concerned about permanent damage, I wanted to throw all those villains into a ring of death and fight them swimming in their blood upon defeat.

Lucky for me sanity is my constant companion.  Such emotions can get away if they are allowed, but I never do. After nearly an hour in the extreme cold averting countless perils I arrived home triumphantly. I was soaked to the bone, my pants where dripping with melted snow and my skin was so drenched that water ran down my legs and filled my boots with water.  Freezing, I undressed on my front porch, poured the water out of my boots and went inside to warm up.  It was good to see home, and for a while I thought I may never see it again.  About that time I had pumped my fist to the heavens and yelled within my helmet……………..”is that all you f**king have you pathetic mother nature.  F**k you, you god damn pussy.”  My mind had shifted into that much desired gear where nothing is impossible, nothing is too big, no odds matter, because fate is in your control.  Under such a frame of mind a person could alter the gravity well of entire planets and implode them with the squeeze of a hand.  They could then sling black holes across the universe like Frisbees and grab the neck of inter-dimensional terrorists and pop them like zits on the face of an adolescent.  But at the moment a warm blanket and dry towel sufficed.image

“this is the end………hold your breath and count to ten……feel the earth move and then…………………” As my wife brought me some warm food and I shivered myself to warmth once again under a pile of blankets I could see on her face that she understood.  She knows me and how I think.  As she walked back into the kitchen and I watched the snow build up outside my window I counted to ten and whispered……………….”Let the Skyfall,” and when it does………………I can stay in that frame of mind perpetually as I never feel more alive than during those moments………………and I can’t wait till I can feel such a thing again.  Skyfall……………………….

imageRich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

The Carcass of West Chester: Silverman and Company Inc., try again

In a lot of ways fighting a developer who has invested many thousands if not millions of dollars into a parcel of property which was initially turned down by residents complaining about the change of use in zoning considerations is no different from fighting a school levy.  Both involve government and utilize the standard process of beating residents into the ground until they submit to social pressure.  This has never been truer than the re-emergence of the Kroger Marketplace proposal in West Chester, Ohio.  According to the Pulse Journal, Blue Ash-based Silverman and Company Inc. recently resubmitted a request to change 35 acres zoned for residential use to Commercial Planned Unit Development to include a 133,000-square-foot grocery store at the intersection of Tylersville and Princeton Glendale.  This was the same parcel of land in contention during 2013.  CLICK HERE TO REVIEW.

The first phase of the Crossings of Beckett shopping center would include a Kroger grocery store, a bank, a pharmacy with drive-through access–a Fred Meyer Jewelers, a small medical clinic, a Kroger fuel center, an additional 15,000 square feet of retail space alongside Kroger and three additional out-parcels along Ohio 747.  Basically, it’s just another strip mall with gas stations that are already just one mile further to the south.  And there is nothing in the Silverman proposal which helps fill the massive vacancies of the old Biggs retail center just two miles to the south—which to this very day is mostly empty.  The old Biggs center is comparable in size to a Kroger Marketplace, yet Silverman and Company Inc., do not own that property—so they aren’t interested.  They’d rather build on their property of course, at a location of their choosing and if the residents pose resistance—they’ll strategically wear them down the same way school levies from public schools have.

To try to take the edge off the community battle which took place the last time this endeavor was proposed and Tom Egger led the community to resist and suppress those plans the developer made changes to the plan to eliminate the three parcels on the north side of the site.  The new plan also calls for the creation of a buffer zone for residents to the north, according to Tim Burgoyne, Silverman and Company Inc.’s director of site acquisition and development.  This tactic is common for developers so that they can give the illusion that they have compromised.  It is the same stupid thing the local public school of Lakota did when they put their last levy on the ballot.  They spent hundreds of thousands of tax payer dollars to essentially convince the community that they “listened.”  But in reality they just imposed their government backed will upon the voters wearing down resistance.  The developer in this case is performing the same task—but showing the community that they are “compromising.”  They hope to take the edge off Tom Egger’s case and earn the zoning commission’s support of their endeavor with a kind of rigged election process.  Likely the deal was cut with zoning officials before Silverman and Company Inc made their recent announcement.  These guys always dip their feet into the pool before they jump in.

As stated to the media by Burgoyne, “The residents wanted nothing along there, so after meeting with the community and staff members and getting everyone’s input, we believe that we have substantially addressed their concerns and we’re excited to move forward.”  What Burgoyne means is that they moved around the architectural drawings from the original proposal, which deliberately asked for too much knowing they would get resistance from the public—then backed off to their original design so to show that they compromised.  Of course that is speculation, but I’ve been down this road many more times than once—and if that’s not exactly how the situation played out, then I have swamp land on Mars to sell you.

http://www.todayspulse.com/news/news/developer-submits-new-plan-for-kroger-along-ohio-7/ncjpD/

This is supposed to be why we have government, and zoning should look at their vacant properties at the old Biggs Center and evaluate that if they allow this Kroger Marketplace into the empty field of the proposed location, they can forget about ever filling the much more lucrative location at the corner of Union Center and 747 where there are already stop lights, double lanes of traffic and an artery directly into Fairfield, Beckett Ridge, Tri County and I-75.  At the Silverman property all those things will have to be built, which makes developers happy, but will erode away the lives of Tom Egger and hundreds of families in the area.

This of course puts the Trustees of West Chester into a difficult position as they will have to vote upon the zoning recommendations—which will likely fall in their lap this time around.  If they vote against the proposed site they vote against a developer who wants to bring something truly good to West Chester.  The trouble is—it’s in the wrong location.  If they vote for the developer then they doom the lives of many tax payers looking for protection from government—and they will doom the Biggs location.  Prospective businesses for that location will choose the new corner of 747 and Tylersville because it will be the latest and greatest development in the West Chester area.  But 15 years from now, it will be old like the current Biggs location is today, and homeowners like Tom Egger and his family will still be looking at an older building bringing tons of traffic and unseemly elements to his back yard once the media has moved on to the next new thing.

I’m all for developers making a few bucks off their investments.  But the West Chester zoning board said no once before, and here come Silverman and Company Inc., with some market up drawings to give the illusion that they give a damn about what’s best for the West Chester community.  Surely they are counting on the local residents to scratch their heads and declare, “hey–they listened.”  But they didn’t, they just think the people of the community are suckers who will buy into a scam that is as old as time—and they expect to use government to protect their investments.  When Silverman and Company Inc purchased the plot of land in question, their investment was a risk.  There was no guarantee that they would convince West Chester zoning into allowing their proposal to come to fruition.  But with the many games that go on behind the scenes, they use government to protect their investments, even if it goes against the will of the people.  That is what this second proposal is—it’s very disrespectful, and ultimately damaging to the West Chester community.  But Silverman and Company Inc., won’t care.  They’ll make their money, and move on to the next location like vultures picking clean the carcass of road kill.  And within two decades the corner of 747 and Tylersville will look like modern-day Route 4, and replacing the homes of people like Tom Egger will be section 8 designations as government picks up those properties because nobody wants to move into an area that looks down into a Kroger parking lot.  The only people who will want to move to a place like that are future economic despots and people looking for government checks and a nice corner of that parking lot to sell drugs to other treacherous characters and scumbags.  Only the carcass won’t be road kill that time—it will be West Chester.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Ditzy Braless Bitches and Enamored Weak-kneed Men: How public relation firms destroy society with ‘Social Proof’

In the original draft of my novel Tail of the Dragon I was extremely critical of public relations firms—especially those owned by foreign interests in the New York market.  This of course did not sit well with the public relations branch of my publisher.  During rewrites it was insisted upon that much of my harshest criticism be removed.  As the publisher, they had a contractual right to do that even though I wasn’t crazy about it.  Much of the public relations subplots of the novel did not make it into the final draft which didn’t hurt the story, but did not allow me to expose to the extent that I creatively wished to illuminating public relation firms as the propaganda arm of misinformation by exposing a vulnerable aspect of human nature—their ancient and very tribal need to travel in herds.  I was tapping into my reader’s intellectual desire to rebel away from such a manner in my novel, but with that publisher, it wasn’t going to fly.  Public relations professionals such as those who work to improve the image of government schools or run cover stories for corrupt politicians use a term called “social proof,” which Bill Whittle from PJTV covered during a recent segment.  Social Proof, used to be called ‘Peer-pressure,’ but has since taken on a new, less harsh name.   It is essentially a type of mob mentality that convinces people to go along with the herd.  President Obama is really President Social Proof–he convinced a slew of voters that to question him was racist through public relations mechanisms utilizing social proof. Now, several voices are crying out that the Emperor…President…is wearing no clothes, and all that’s left to do is run the hollow people into the river.  Watch Whittle’s explanation of that metaphor below.

Social proof is how the scam artists of public relations work their magic.  They convince the masses that a truth is not a truth because a majority opinion does not believe such a thing.  Once the masses invest into a belief public relations specialists can then direct social temperament to the molding of that belief—which is happening at virtually every level of endeavor in modern America.  Public relations are so corrosive that it could easily be assumed that almost nothing we hear today we can believe—because most of it has been formed to expose social proof as the mechanism of mental acceptance.

Years ago I worked with a girl on a project whose father ran a large downtown Cincinnati public relations firm.  This project involved WLW radio, major local politicians, and a wide range of very dynamic individuals.  I attended several meetings at this downtown location and as things became friendlier, she came to my house.  The more I came to know this young woman, the more I despised her.  I held my opinions in check for the good of the project we were all working on, but quickly, my desire to work with such a corrupt—formless personality became too great.  On an evening when I was set to go do a show on WLW during Willie’s time slot, I refused as the personalities involved had attempted to steer this project into the realm of social proof where a formless void of chaos was acting upon the development.  I quickly learned during this experience why large companies become faceless, spineless organizations as public relation firms and lawyers take their products down a similar path and once there they often have too much time and money invested to back out—so they withdrawal from the creative process leaving everything to the parasites of public relations—which is about as unproductive as an endeavor as there is.  They do nothing for a product except expose in consumers their need to satisfy a social proof which drives them to participate in the products represented by public relation firms.

My experience with this firm disgusted me, and it took me several years to get the bad taste out of my mouth, but I did learn a tremendous amount from them—which ended up in my book.  But as my publisher stated, damning public relations firms would surely damn the sales of the book because without public relations—how could I hope to sell a book in this modern climate.  My statements were the same as what they were all those years ago with the Cincinnati firm and WLW radio—I’d let honesty and the desire for a product that touched on the human desire for anti social proof carry the day.  It doesn’t always work so well, but I feel better about the things I do when social proof is not a factor—but the curiosity of the masses are instead driven by individual desire.  Those generated by public relation firms promoting social proof are essentially advocating falsification of reality.

One of the reasons I love Star Wars so much is that the love of that product is driven by individual freedom and recognition.  Social proof actually worked against Star Wars in the 70s, the studios were rebelling against the film and if not for Alan Ladd Jr., 20th Century Fox would have pulled out of the deal.  The industry did not want the product of Star Wars, but the internal desire of the human race did—which proves to me that such things are possible—and it gives me hope.   Every time we go to the movies and see a preview for a new film—most of which will not live up to the hype, we are seeing attempts by public relations specialists to expose to the mass public a demand created by social proof to obtain strong opening weekend sales.  Most films because they are completely social proof in their content fizzle out within two weeks of their box office take as the public turns away disappointed to their next hope for a successful movie going experience.  In 2013 to 2014 the films which defy social proof are the Disney film Frozen, and Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.  The product of those films exceeds the social proof of popular opinion and my excitement over those enterprises is because they overcome the falsification of social proof.  Those two films are the two best-selling films which still have strong box office support several weeks after their opening weekend release which means that the content of those films defies social proof.  People do not go see them because of peer pressure; they see them because the stories communicate to their individual natures.  There is a BIG difference.

The Disney Company utilizes social proof in massive droves to attract people to their television, movie and amusement parks.  But once there, Disney actually provides a good product and people come away generally happy and fulfilled on an individual level.  Barack Obama uses social proof to hide his many crimes and scandals.  This leaves society always feeling anxious and compelled to fill the void with conspiracy theories.  But the behavior does not change because social proof creates a paralysis among the human species which states that action cannot be taken against injustice if the masses do not recognize the peril.  This is why liberals, progressives, out-right communists and socialists have attempted to remove value from society using public relation firms to help them commit the deed, so that society would not have the intellectual tools to make such a determination.  So long as society is paralyzed with shackles of lost value, they cannot act out against political crimes because social proof prevents them from acting.

Social proof advocated by public relations firms are one of the worst aspects of modern society.  In my local school district of Lakota they are used to hide sex scandals from teachers against students, and advocate dangerously high tax rates among the property owners.  In the current White House, Obama uses social proof to hide the content of his past and the crimes of his present—such as Benghazi, Fast and Furious, and the IRS scandal.  Social proof does not hide the crime, but it does take away the means of holding conviction against it.  Individually, most people will declare under their breath that something is wrong, but due to their ancient tendencies toward collectivism, will not stand by such convictions in the light of day as social proof prevents them from openly advocating such a thing.  It is in this way that much evil is committed in broad daylight and suffering on an epic level is perpetuated.  And all such things begin with public relation firms and ditzy braless bitches lacking a soul propped up by cowardly men who would rather sip wine from their high-heeled shoes than stand on the ground of conviction for what’s right and what’s wrong.  They’d rather spin the facts with social proof and hide the crimes of existence behind that terrible form of peer pressure.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Old Spice’s “Momsong”: The importance of moms and the risk of destroying their children

Over the weekend I saw what I think is one of the most effective commercial campaigns I have ever seen while watching some of the NFL playoff games.  Old Spice aired its 60 second “Momsong” which was absolutely hilarious not just in a quirky way reminiscent of Monte Python humor or a Pee Wee’s Playhouse episode, but in a social metaphorical one.  It actually brilliantly points to a central problem in modern “Western” society and dares an entire demographic to challenge the premise.  That challenge will likely sell a lot of the Old Spice brand of deodorant, aftershave and soap.  “Momsong” deals specifically with the pain that women experience watching the little boys they spent and sacrificed so much for—growing up, and having to hand away that care to another woman—a much younger woman.  For most women, this is an epic crisis that they never fully get over and most will take that pain to their graves.  It is the primary cause of overeating and mental disorders centering on female neurosis in that age bracket and is a major contributor to many modern social problems.  The commercial had my wife and I laughing hard for a good part of the weekend and now several days later it is still funny.  Have a look for yourself.

I think being a mom is the most important job in the world.  There is nothing which more properly sets in motion the consciousness of a human being than the contributions of a mother.  I don’t care if it is the CEO of a company, or the president of a nation—being a mom is the number one job in order of importance among all professions in the human race.   There isn’t even a close second except perhaps fatherhood.  However, I have watched more moms destroy their children right out of the gate because they held on too long to the lives of their little babies when they should have played a role in the launching of their lives.  I say such a thing as I have walked two of my own children down the aisle of marriage—so I know something about this subject matter.  Thinking back on my own youthful years where I was the gravity well that so many other rebellious young men grabbed on to so to escape their overbearing mothers, I deliberately provoked those moms into occasional melt downs to pay them back for what I saw them doing to my friends.  One mother of a very close friend hated me so badly that she encouraged her son to hang out with known drug addicts and sexual perverts rather than Rich Hoffman who was symbolic of a virtual devil to their neurotic hearts. And this particular woman wasn’t the only one.  In many homes all across Southern Ohio as there still is, was a virtual voodoo doll of “yours truly” made by mothers who saw me as the single greatest threat to their happiness because I encouraged their children to rebel away from the safety of their safe embrace and to leap boldly out into the danger of the world.  I literally watched many moms behave not far off the mark of that Old Spice commercial—I watched more literal melt downs not much different from the mom who floated out of the couch at the end—across the floor and sorrowfully back into her seated position to conclude the commercial with a pathetic whimper.  Typically it is another female that provokes this reaction from mothers—but in my case it was my personality who delivered these overly coddled young boys to women through my charisma, fast driving, and overly perilous lifestyle that made me public enemy number one in their book.  And those emotions have lasted for decades, and nobody suffered more than my own mom who was very loving, very caring, and put a lot of effort into her thankless job.  For that reason I rebelled harder than any room full of testosterone driven virulent males.  The situation was so bad that literally every friend I had male and female behaved like the mothers in the Old Spice commercial to some extent or another.  As over-the-top as that commercial appeared—I have seen firsthand the same behavior from moms of almost every person I grew up knowing.

My reasoning for provoking these poor mothers was not to torture them into mental breakdowns—which some of them actually submitted to.  Even back then I had a very clear understanding of what I was doing and what my social role was in the greater society.  As advanced as American culture appears technologically, we are very primitive psychologically and I knew of other cultures considered primitive that had very specific rituals designed to deal with this specific problem—the initiation into manhood.  Girls do not have this problem as they become literal women the moment they develop breasts and begin having their menstrual cycle.  Boys to men do not have this coming of age moment—a ritual which announces to them that they have arrived to manhood.  Many cultures have circumcision rituals to mimic the menstrual cycle in women to allow young boys to have a psychological crisis which allows the mind to accept a new social role as a man.  Other cultures have rituals where the women play a role of coddling the young boys until other men of a tribe dressed as monsters steal the boys from their mothers and take them away from their homes terrifying them into manhood.  The message to the boys is that your mothers cannot save you, you must save yourself.  The introduction of a crisis launches the boys into manhood and after the ritual the other men of the tribe treat the boy as an equal warrior.

In American culture—especially with the introduction of feminism there is no ritual for young boys.  Young girls of course still have their menstrual cycles but boys are left to create their own manhood initiation and by default it is sexual experience which determines the men from the boys.  Once a boy has sexual intercourse he can then proclaim to other males that he has arrived to manhood.  It is this ritual that the Old Spice commercial is tapping in to.  Mothers know that their little boys are attempting to break away from their loving embracing by “bagging and tagging” a young female who will then become the new female in his life—away from mother.  Since the mother often these days does not have a loving relationship with her husband—a real male of her own sense feminism has taught her that she doesn’t need one—women have by default overly coddled their sons to fulfill their own maternal needs.

Women desire to love and be loved and in a healthy relationship with a husband—they can find that love which they desperately yearn for.  Without that love, they become miserable specimens often prematurely becoming old, ugly, and bitter—they become the moms in the Old Spice commercial.  Feminism has told women that they can substitute a man in their lives with a career—but they can’t.  Women in the work place are still looking for love wherever they can find it, whether it be in an office stockroom, on top of a copying machine, or in a hotel lobby while traveling on the road with perfect strangers away from their wives.  The career woman seeks such sexual conquests knowing they are stealing away men from their wives—their new mothers—and it touches a spot of joy lacking from their lives.  But once the cloths go back on and the woman goes through a decade or two of these kinds of relationships they are emptier shells of people than the mother who cleaved desperately to her son out of fear of having something in her life to live for.

Old Spice is doing what I have done to young men and mothers for most of my life—daring moms not to be so narcotic, and young men to shake off their moms by buying such a rebellious product.  I think the marketing is brilliant because it is tapping into a primal urge that is completely ignored in modern society—and is literally holding down our entire worldly culture.  I never saw my rebellious actions as harmful to the mothers of my friends.  I saw it as saving them.  In some cases those women reconnected with their husbands after pouring their attention into their sons for over 15 years—ignoring the poor chaps—and out of anger against me—dusted off their relationships.  Having a calculated crisis is much different from a crisis that happens without your control.  I see the need for a ritual that delivers boys to men not just for their sake, but for the mothers who love them—for their own psychological preservation so that they can become productive grandparents and healthy contributors to society.  I have seen many women carry grudges against the wives of their sons for decades because the moms never forgive the new women for how they wrecked their lives by tragically stealing away from them the object of their love—their sons.

The Old Spice commercial is brilliant in that they are even attempting to define this problem.  When I first saw it I knew that somewhere at the Old Spice marketing department was a guy or a group people who understood this crises the way I did and it brought a smile to my face.  The commercial will certainly help sales for Old Spice.  But it will also bring to light a problem that is as old as time itself—the crisis of a mother and her sons and the need of all males to understand when, how, and why they must become men.  Moms need to be a part of that process—not a hindrance and to that point—Old Spice has contributed not only a great commercial worthy of a Superbowl, but a work of art that speaks to a central problem in our very confused society.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

The Plans of the DHS: Advertising room on my metaphorical pirate ship

There is nothing wrong with being a tough guy—in spite of the current progressive push to turn everyone into a vagina.  Being a tough guy is expected by virtually all families.  They want strong males to bring stability to their lives within the family unit—so tough guys have a serious role in American society. Families who don’t have tough guys in them have learned to rationalize that such people are not needed.  But they are needed, however these days—they just aren’t very common.  That qualifier is necessary before sharing the story below by Doug Hagmann which I received just prior to the New Year Holiday of 2013 and deals with the planned intentions of the Department of Homeland Security—a branch of government created under George Bush in direct reaction to the 911 terrorist attack.

Every morning I ride a motorcycle even when it’s raining or is 2 degrees Fahrenheit outside and the ground is covered with snow.  I typically work at least 10 hours per day, sometimes as much as 18 hours and I’ve done that for over 25 years.  I have been shot at, and seen a lot of blood spilled during conflict.  Not my own—but other people—sometimes resulting in the loss of life.  I have been in disputes with cops, judges, lawyers, and politicians from local trustees to city mayors so I know what it means to state that if the events described below come to pass, that I will turn toward piracy rather than maintaining my position as a legitimate capitalist.  I have been personal friends with hit men, convicted criminals, and political outcasts—and understand fully the hard life of living in defiance to the established law. Yielding to statism is not in my cards—or my family.  If there is government force, loss of life, and terror—it will not be my family which feels it.  I will take what I need from the world one way or the other.  Under a free market system, the government benefits from my productivity through taxation.  If they destroy that, they will not benefit and I will have to turn toward piratical activity to maintain my lifestyle—and they won’t like that.  If such a day arrives they will have a memory of Black Beard’s terror of England where the entire nation and the most powerful navy in the world could not stop the antics of Edward Teach on his Queen Ann’s Revenge—until he made the stupid mistake of getting caught on a sand bar off the coast of North Carolina.  I won’t make those kinds of mistakes.  History is meant to be learned from, and I have studied it—and because of that—the DHS and their employees of incompetence won’t have a chance.  I know what it feels like to be wire tapped, spied on, followed, harassed, coerced and imposed upon to the limits of the law, so my statements are provided in that context.  Even though the DHS may plan the activities described below—I have my own plans.  Peace is kept so long as we share an understanding centered on the American Constitution and their desire to hide their real intentions behind it.  But once those basic laws are openly violated and they no longer care about maintaining it’s legal premise—then I have my own strategy already planned.

I don’t believe in sitting around a table, or over the radio air waves crying about impending doom.  I don’t honor any silly authority that Europe wishes to impose through financial institutions, or China fantasizes about through devalued currency.  Americans should do what Americans do best and that is defy authority—and push every day for freedom.  When the government comes to arrest you and show their teeth, they will learn they have walked to their own doom and the beginning of their educations can begin.  But I feel I must share these intentions with you dear reader so that you can come to terms with how you will deal with the issue.  If I had to put a finger on how the coming crises will manifest, it will likely come from the collapse of the health care markets as Obamacare takes full hold in 2014.  Even more likely it won’t be a direct reaction, but a passive secondary one inspired by that legal imposition.  When the idiots of government learn that they will have to impose fines upon Americans through taxation, and have to target the productive and hard-working the straw will break and open rebellion will occur.  There aren’t enough jails to hold everyone, and the American economy cannot afford to hold such productive people in jail cells.  I know this first hand. If there has been one thing that has kept me out of jail and serious trouble over the years, it hasn’t been my mouth, but my work ethic.  I work too hard to be in jail.

Years ago before I was 18 I was in a work program for troubled juveniles found guilty of causing general mayhem and chaos throughout Butler County.  Under court order I had to attend a community service program that was essentially jail for underage kids.  I was there with people who killed other people, stole cars, raped old women and other terrible crimes in the 80s.  The guards would load us onto buses to clean up trash around Huston Woods Lake and painting orange barrels in a fenced in prison ground warehouse heated by a single wood burning stove.  I got in fights every single day I was in this program because I refused to yield to the other criminals.  I also outworked them all by a ratio of about 5 to 1.  I painted more barrels than all of them combined most days, and while picking up trash around Huston Woods I had to have the guards tell me to slow down because I walked so fast and picked up so much trash that the other slugs lingered too far behind.  The guards admired my effort, just as bailiffs, clerk of courts and sometimes judges did.  They didn’t like my rebellious nature, but I certainly wasn’t a drain on society—so they often let me go, knowing that they were better off having me working on their side than against them.  One climatic day I got into a big fight with a very troubled guy who had killed his father just two weeks prior with a knife.  The guards pulled me off with my knuckles cut up from the kid’s teeth and told us to settle our dispute with a race around the detention grounds.  The guards told me that if I beat the kid to a distant telephone pole and back that I could go free and all my charges would be dropped.  They told me they’d fix up my case with my probation officer.  So we raced and I demolished the guy.  I was back to the finish line before the other guy even got to the pole.  He smoked cigarettes and started off even with me, but ran out of gas after about 30 yards because his lungs were starving for oxygen.  I went free that day and of course there were notes put into my files which still exist to this day.  Authority knows what to expect from me.  They have tried and failed for a quarter of a century to break me in every way that the DHS below plans, and failed.  So do not be terrified of the intentions of these idiots.  Just be aware of their motives.

   

DHS insider gives final warning: By Doug Hagmann

 

Under the cover and amid the distraction of the Christmas bustle, I had my last “official” contact with a source inside the Department of Homeland Security known as “Rosebud” in my writings. My source is leaving his position, retiring along with numerous others choosing to leave this bureaucratic monstrosity.

For this contact, my source took unprecedented measures to be certain that our contact was far off the radar of prying government eyes and ears. I was stunned at the lengths he employed, and even found myself somewhat annoyed by the inconvenience that his cloak-and-dagger approach caused. It was necessary, according to my source, because all department heads under FEMA and DHS are under orders to identify anyone disclosing any information for termination and potential criminal prosecution.

“DHS is like a prison environment, complete with prison snitches,” he said, referring to the search for leaks and leakers. And the warden is obsessed. Ask anyone in DHS. No one trusts anyone else and whatever sources might be left are shutting up. The threats that have been made far exceed anything I’ve ever seen. Good people are afraid for their lives and the lives of their families. We’ve all been threatened. They see the writing on the wall and are leaving. It’s not a joke and not hype.”

The following is a narrative from my source, prefaced with the instructions to “take it or leave it,” and “disregard it at your own peril.” He added that it’s now up to each American to act on the information themselves or suffer the consequences. “I’ve resigned myself to the fact that most [Americans] will never be convinced of the reality that is taking place right in front of them.”

The plan explained

“According to every internal document I’ve seen and read, and from the few people I’ve spoken with who understand what’s going on, preparations have been finalized to respond to a crisis of unprecedented magnitude within the United States. The response will include the use of lethal force against U.S. citizens under the instructions of Barack Obama.” But why?

“‘It’s the economy, stupid,’” he began, paraphrasing a campaign slogan coined by James Carville for Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign. “Just as I disclosed in our first meeting, the crisis will be rooted in an economic collapse. I told you last year, at a time when gold and silver were setting record highs, one specific indicator that time is very short. It is the final ‘smack down’ of the metals, gold and silver, that will presage the orchestrated economic collapse that is being planned by the bankers of Wall Street. Everybody needs to understand that this is a deliberate collapse of the U.S. economy with the oversight of the White House and the full knowledge of the Justice Department. Everyone seems to be waiting for some big, history making event that will signal the start of the collapse. The fact is that the collapse has already started. It’s incremental, like a snowball rolling down a hill. It gets bigger and rolls faster. Well, this snowball is well on its way down the hill.”

“I don’t mean to sound repetitive, but I can’t stress this enough. Contrary to what you hear, we’re already in an economic collapse, except that most people haven’t a clue. The ‘big bang’ comes at the end, when people wake up one morning and can’t log in to their bank accounts, can’t use their ATM cards, and find out that their private pension funds and other assets have been confiscated,” he stated.

“I’ve seen documentation of multiple scenarios created outside of DHS. Different plans and back-up plans. Also, please understand that I deliberately used the word ‘created,’ as this is a completely manufactured event. In the end it won’t be presented that way, which is extremely important for everyone to understand. What is coming will be blamed on some unforeseen event out of everyone’s control, that few saw coming or thought would actually happen. Then, another event will take place concurrent with this event, or immediately after it, to confuse and compound an already explosive situation.” I asked for specifics.

“As I said, there are several scenarios and I don’t know them all. I know one calls for a cyber-attack by an external threat, which will then be compounded by something far removed from everyone’s own radar. But it’s all a ruse, or a pretext. The threat is from within,” he stated. “Before people can regain their footing, a second event will be triggered.” Again, I asked for specifics.

“I’ve seen one operational plan that refers to the federal government’s response to a significant terrorist attack on U.S. soil. Information at these levels is compartmentalized. I don’t have specifics, just plans for the response. The response will be controls and restrictions on travel, business, and every aspect of our lives, especially gun ownership and speech that incites people against the government. I guess some people would call it Martial Law, and they would not be incorrect. But understand that this will be a process deployed in stages. How quickly of a process remains to be seen.”

The mechanics explained

As I said, people continue to look for something big to happen first, followed by a militaristic response by the federal government against U.S. citizens. Based on what I’ve seen, I don’t believe it will happen this way, although there is one unthinkable exception. That exception would involve a ‘decapitation’ of our leadership, but I’ve seen nothing even remotely suggestive of that. But I’ve heard and even read articles where that is mentioned. Frankly, though, that’s always been a threat. I suppose that if the leadership is deemed useless, or becomes a liability to the larger agenda in some manner, it could happen. The precedent exists. Let’s pray that it’s not the case now.”

“I don’t think anyone except the initiated few know the precise series of events or the exact timing, just a general overview and an equally general time period. I think we’re in that period now, as DHS has their planned responses finalized. Also, the metals are important because it’s real money, not Ponzi fiat currency. The U.S. has no inventory of gold, so the prices are manipulated down to cause a sell-off of the physical assets. China is on a buying spree of gold, and other countries want their inventory back. The very people causing the prices to drop are the ones who are also buying the metals at fire sale prices. They will emerge extremely wealthy when the prices rise after the U.S. currency becomes wallpaper. A little research will identify who these people and organizations are.”

“I’d like to add a bit of perspective that might help explain the events as I described. Do you remember former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld announcing that the Pentagon was unable to account for $2.3 trillion in the defense budget? That was on September 10, 2001, the day before the attacks of 9/11. Some suggest that 9/11 was orchestrated, in part to cover up the missing money, which is ludicrous. The result, however, was that suddenly the accounting issue took a back seat because of the attacks. The result will be the same. That’s a perfect example of the mechanics of what we are about to experience. It’s going to take years to sort out, and when it’s finally sorted out, the damage will have long been done.”

“Please note a few final things. The relationship that exists between DHS today and the executive branch is well beyond alarming. DHS and other organizations have become the private army of the Oval Office. The NSA, and I’ve got contacts there, is taking orders from the Oval Office. The IRS is under the virtual control of the Oval Office in a manner that would make Nixon cower. Even though all roads appear to lead to the Oval Office, they lead through the Oval Office. It’s not just Obama, but the men behind him, the people who put him there. The people who put him there are the ones who created him.” I asked who created him.

“First, ask yourself why there was such an all out effort to marginalize anyone talking about Obama’s eligibility in 2008. Even so-called conservatives pundits fell for the lie that such questions were nothing more than a diversion. They were following a specific drumbeat. That should tell every rational adult that he is a creation of the globalists who have no allegiance to any political party. He is the product of decades of planning, made for this very time in our history. He was selected to oversee the events I just disclosed. Who has that ability? He’s a product of our own intelligence agencies working with the globalists. He should be exhibit ‘A’ to illustrate the need to enforce the Logan Act. Need I say more?”

As often said by another of my sources, the U.S. is a captured operation. The lie is bigger than most people realize or are willing to confront. That is, until there is no other option. By then, it might be too late.

—

http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/60129

The reason I went free that day from the guards was because they realized that I didn’t belong in that environment—and the longer I was there, the less productive society was.  As I write this, the NFL playoff games are going on, and no team would dare sit their star quarterback in favor of a lesser athlete.  When you are a star, when you work hard, it is hard for statists to ignore that they live off your effort.  If they take you out of the picture, then they suffer.  That will be the reality of the DHS issue described above. I went free because I was obviously productive and that effort did not belong behind jail cells.  It belonged in sales, manufacturing and management of resources because with every breath I take, I make money for somebody—usually some parasite too lazy to even get up in the morning—let alone to ride a motorcycle in 2 degree weather.  So keep things in context and don’t let articles like that scare you.

The government is prone to failure.  The DHS without a doubt is making these plans—and they believe they can enforce them.  But in all reality they are a worthless organization ran by worthless, lazy, nobodies.  They don’t have the brains, the will, or the ability in any capacity to make good on their tactics.  But what we must be cautious of is their desire to even try.  That is where the problem begins.  And for those of you who desire to stick a finger in their eye when they do make their move—there will be room on my pirate ship—and I’m putting together a crew to stand against them.  But that move will come from them first—as they will be the one to break the Constitutional limits which protects not only us from them, but them from us.   Once they cross that line with an openness not yet seen or acknowledged, then the pirate flag seen at the end of every one of my signatures goes up, and the Stars and Bars goes into a drawer for some future time when all such organizations as the DHS, the IRS, and all other government agencies specifically rooted in tyranny are no longer a threat.

In the mean time if you are a man, be a tough guy or at least work to become one.  If you are a woman, help a man become one with your love and support.  America needs more tough guys—our future depends on them.  It’s not to say that women cannot be tough, but biologically, and psychologically, they have different roles—and men need them as a foundation and goal to strive for—a reason to desire to be “tough.”

Now, watch all these videos.  Take note…………………………………………….., and get ready.  I am on a lot of “lists” and I’m proud of it.  But, I have some lists of my own, and the people on them won’t like being there.  For those who want to help with that, I’m picking crew for when it comes time to sail as a pirate-a day I am looking forward to.

And to the Homeland Security people reading this and reporting it to your chain of command—f**k yourself.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

How People Learn: A test that proves public education is teaching incorrectly

When it is wondered why homeschooling is proving more successful than public school, or why Common Core education is so dangerous to the minds of young people, or even in determining the amount of money teachers should be paid, and how often—it must be understood how children learn and achieve.  The science of learning must be dealt with, and an assumption that the traditional top down learning system must be abandoned so that an open-minded analysis can be explored beyond cynical protection of the public education government sponsored empire building which has been enslaving children presently and entire societies globally.  For that analysis, let me provide a bit of evidence as provided by Delancey place.com regarding a 1999 study in India where Sugata Mitra conducted an experiment that should change the world if only government involvement in education would step out-of-the-way.  Governments create the kind of slums talked about in the article below, governments create ignorance, and governments create most of the roadblocks that stand in the way of innovation.  If left alone, society would advance much faster toward much more prosperous educational opportunities and social innovation as the proof below will display.  Please keep in mind upon reading this that the study was conducted well over 15 years ago as of this writing and that is simply appalling.  Sadly it has not been officially endorsed by any serious advocates of education.  The reason is that teacher unions do not want innovation, they do not want competition, and they don’t want any model of education that abandons their top down approach because it does not fit their long-term strategy of advocating dependence on government.  The purpose of education in public schools is not to teach independence among its students, but dependency—more specifically “interdependency.”  Thus, it is an educational system that deliberately works against the way human beings think, feel, and learn—it is in defiance of nature—and is the primary reason that it is a global failure not just in America—be everywhere in the world relative to the kind of educational methods described below.

Continuing Delanceyplace.com’s End of Year Encore Week: This year a full week on creativity.

In today’s encore selection — from Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandia and Steven Kotler. A creative approach to education:

“In 1999 the Indian physicist Sugata Mitra got interested in education. He knew there were places in the world without schools and places in the world where good teachers didn’t want to teach. What could be done for kids living in those spots was his question. Self-directed learning was one pos­sible solution, but were kids living in slums capable of all that much self-direction?

“At the time, Mitra was head of research and development for NIIT Technologies, a top computer software and development company in New Delhi, India. His posh twenty-first-century office abutted an urban slum but was kept separate by a tall brick wall. So Mitra designed a simple exper­iment. He cut a hole in the wall and installed a computer and a track pad, with the screen and the pad facing into the slum. He did it in such a way that theft was not a problem, then connected the computer to the Internet, added a web browser, and walked away.

“The kids who lived in the slums could not speak English, did not know how to use a computer, and had no knowledge of the Internet, but they were curious. Within minutes, they’d figured out how to point and click. By the end of the first day, they were surfing the web and-even more importantly-teaching one another how to surf the web. These results raised more questions than they answered. Were they real? Did these kids really teach themselves how to use this computer, or did someone, perhaps out of sight of Mitra’s hidden video camera, explain the technology to them?

http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001vln7_heHl4wTkvFZvHnwJl86tCteGzL-aT6KJSAiJTQUtXd7LPH_IKlZ6NkbJKbxQdw9LD_Xlhdt56PCxb5O9IRc80s-tb0AXFSvkWD5JCdDCFIqvuXCfjd_yMNUZMfOwAWQhf7kSbRkfDSvGofowpVo4OKaHTs0YfpFppwVG92eiDTVXvJVejiRzeCg1dTzzwqm-AUqB3awROuEYPllMPp8xemqL6w1cSKyCzKXj1ATmdjHrltBdHU71DLcKj626rPGWrn9ooDpruElprRIg4TIjWBO317G2k9_vTfi_-saUsbahILStrtwKGEo36T8yohzVg3Pb3euYg8vJZKfwG3ahyWSHZbfDqvgEZmawP2m0WGg9zWFyg==

“So Mitra moved the experiment to the slums of Shivpuri, where, as he says, ‘I’d been assured no one had ever taught anybody anything.’ He got similar results. Then he moved it to a rural village and found the same thing. Since then, this experiment has been replicated all over India, and all over the world, and always with the same outcome: kids, working in small, unsupervised groups, and without any formal training, could learn to use computers very quickly and with a great degree of proficiency.

“This led Mitra to an ever-expanding series of experiments about what else kids could learn on their own. One of the more ambitious of these was conducted in the small village of Kalikkuppam in southern India. This time Mitra decided to see if a bunch of impoverished Tamil-speaking, twelve-year-olds could learn to use the Internet, which they’d never seen before; to teach themselves biotechnology, a subject they’d never heard of; in English, a language none of them spoke. ‘All I did was tell them that there was some very difficult information on this computer, they probably wouldn’t under­stand any of it, and I’ll be back to test them on it in a few months.’

“Two months later, he returned and asked the students if they’d under­stood the material. A young girl raised her hand. ‘Other than the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes genetic disease,’ she said, ‘we’ve understood nothing.’ In fact, this was not quite the case. When Mitra tested them, scores averaged around 30 percent. From 0 percent to 30 percent in two months with no formal instruction was a fairly remark­able result, but still not good enough to pass a standard exam. So Mitra brought in help. He recruited a slightly older girl from the village to serve as a tutor. She didn’t know any biotechnology, but was told to use the ‘grand­mother method’: just stand behind the kids and provide encouragement. ‘Wow, that’s cool, that’s fantastic, show me something else!’ Two months later, Mitra came back. This time, when tested, average scores had jumped to 50 percent, which was the same average as high-school kids studying bio-tech at the best schools in New Delhi.

“Next Mitra started refining the method. He began installing computer terminals in schools. Rather than giving students a broad subject to learn-for example, biotechnology-he started asking directed questions such as ‘Was World War II good or bad?’ The students could use every available resource to answer the question, but schools were asked to restrict the num­ber of Internet portals to one per every four students because, as Matt Rid­ley wrote in the Wall Street Journal, ‘one child in front of a computer learns little; four discussing and debating learn a lot.’ When they were tested on the subject matter afterward (without use of the computer), the mean score was 76 percent. That’s pretty impressive on its own, but the question arose as to the real depth of learning. So Mitra came back two months later, retested the students, and got the exact same results. This wasn’t just deep learning, this was an unprecedented retention of information. …

“Taken together, this work reverses a bevy of educational practices. Instead of top-down instruction, [these ‘self-organized learning environments’] are bottom up. Instead of making students learn on their own, this work is collaborative. Instead of a formal in-school setting for instruction, the Hole-in-the-Wall method relies on a playground-like environment. Most importantly, minimally invasive edu­cation doesn’t require teachers. Currently there’s a projected global short­age of 18 million teachers over the next decade.”

Author: Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler

Title: Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

Publisher: Free Press

Date: Copyright 2012 by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler

Pages: 174-176

Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamand is by Free Press

So long as education methods stay as they are, human society will suffer, there will be continued poverty, continued subjugation to authority, and a level of ignorance that flat lines across the vast spectrum of society from the highest to lowest levels of archaic pecking order hierarchy.  That hierarchy is what public school is all about, and it is what holds back mankind the most from achieving a level of greatness that is on the tip of everyone’s tongue with a free mind able to comprehend that something is terribly wrong.  Public education does not work as well as the ‘grand­mother method’: just standing behind kids and providing encouragement. ‘Wow, that’s cool, that’s fantastic, show me something else!’  Kids, because of the tendency toward personal profit will work hard to get that personal encouragement from a figure of respect.  They do it for the same reason that a business owner tries to make money, or a video game player tries to score more points, or a man takes a woman to dinner hoping to have sex with her—it is the prospect of profit that drives the world, and for kids, all they usually need are the tools with limits removed and an encouraging voice to push them along—and “POOF” success is nearly 100% guaranteed.

Government schools are not about success, they are about combating this essential truth about human beings—they are at war with profit of every kind—the wish to socially engineer such desires from human minds and in so doing, they are destroying what it means to be human.  This is why they are detriments to society, and villains where they think of themselves as heroes.  They are in denial of the role they play in the destruction of mankind—and all those politicians who help them do it are as complicit to the act as a witness to a murder keeps their mouth shut, and provides a get-away-car for the bandits who committed the crime.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

‘The Desolation of Smaug’: A gift that only mythology could give–a film of GREAT importance

Until I saw the new Hobbit film The Desolation of Smaug my favorite dragon film was the old 1981 flick, Dragonslayer.  CLICK HERE TO REVIEW.  I have been waiting for this Part II of The Hobbit series for a long time—so much so that I have avoided talking about it to keep my excitement level in check.  The reason is that the attribute of human society that I most value is mythology, and there is no better exhibition of modern mythology than the Star Wars films and the Tolkien films by the great unpretentious filmmaker Peter Jackson.  Mythology in films and novels can communicate complicated aspects of human culture that cannot be communicated any other way and are the hinge pins of modern philosophy—which is directly created by a society’s mythology.  I don’t see The Desolation of Smaug as just another fantasy movie—I see it as a functioning mythology that says a lot about the state of our modern existence.  A great storyteller like Jackson can pour so much value into a film like this that years of a similar education under an orthodox system of instruction will fail after many years of trying.

There are two basic kinds of dragons in classic mythology, the oriental dragon which is largely a symbol of rebirth, and the European dragon.  I spoke about the oriental one the other day when discussing the upcoming film Godzilla.  Godzilla is very much an oriental dragon in a modern context.  Then there is the European version of dragon, the classic villain of so many movies from Sleeping Beauty to Fantasia, dragons in a European context represent human greed, arrogance, and corruption.  If one wanted to understand the major differences between Eastern and Western cultures, their basic interpretations of dragons in mythology would be the place to begin.  In the classic 1937 novel, The Hobbit, the dragon villain Smaug is a classic European dragon, and in this updated movie version, he is the king of all dragons ever filmed and put on a screen.

I would say that seeing The Desolation of Smaug is the most important commentary on modern politics that is available to anybody on planet earth presently.  A student of politics, philosophy, and social organization could watch MSNBC, Fox News, Politically Incorrect on HBO and achieve a doctorate in psychology, history, and political science—read all the books by Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, and Charles Krauthammer—listen to talk radio for the next 10 years, and there would not be a more accurate summation of the state of our world than in this Hobbit film.  The simple line of dialogue between two of the elf characters in the film upon deciding if they should fight on behalf of light or let the world fall to darkness was uttered by, “when did we let evil become stronger than us.”  That is what almost every human being is facing on the very day that you are reading this—what are the consequences of living our lives away from the light?  How does evil spread?  And what do we do about it when we are confronted with it?

The Desolation of Smaug is not just a simple morality tale speaking in generalizations about an ideal existence wrapped in fantasy.  It is a commentary—a mythology of the problems experienced in our modern times.  The setting has been changed to provide context in a similar way that Star Wars removed time and history with the opening, A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away.  The Hobbit is dealing with the very nature of evil, greed, and faulty living that is at the heart of every human being.  It is literature on film, and is marvelous to behold. 

Smaug as the centerpiece of this latest story is the embodiment of the kind of individual who has taken the world’s wealth by force and sits upon it guarding it religiously.  He is the kind of bourgeois that added fuel to the fire of the communist movement where the common man wished to wrestle power back away from such dragons so that they could have their riches away from such greedy bastards.  That is why Smaug is a European dragon that sits in this movie upon a pile of gold taken from the Dwarves and their mines.  He loves it so much that he has buried himself within it so that he can worship it like a rodent burrows itself into the ground.  Many real life wealthy people like Bill Gates, George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, and Warren Buffet give so much money to philanthropy advancing progressive causes because they feel guilt over their wealth.  They wish to prove to the world that they are not dragons like Smaug even though in their wealth building years they behaved just like Smaug—rolling their bodies into their confiscated wealth.  In the case of Gates, he made his money the correct way with a superior product—but discovered that the world saw him as a Smaug, just as the Dwarves in The Hobbit saw Smaug as a villain who took their wealth.  Gates wished to prove that he was not such a Smaug so he began to give mast amounts of money to the public education system in America feeding the teacher unions.  In many ways Gates became like the treacherous politicians in Laketown—living in constant fear of Smaug—scheming around the beast to carve their own way to power and wealth.  For Gates and his idealism, he became a major supporter of Common Core which seeks to centralize the education process for society.  A good intention with a sinister reality which allows corrupt teacher unions to control the kind of curriculum being taught to children—which opens the door for despots to shape the minds of society for the worst.  In the film, once the dragon was no longer a threat, the kingdoms of the world now without the fear of Smaug immediately launched themselves into a power play for control of Middle-earth.  Smaug as cruel as he was made out to be when confronted by Bilbo in The Lonely Mountain was caught between his own genius and ability to inflict cruelty, and his ability to keep the vast evil that the occupants of Middle-earth possess in check.  Only a proper and effective mythology could communicate such a complicated concept. 

Peter Jackson is such a great filmmaker.  He knows instinctively much of what I write about here because his understanding of mythology allows him to think of things in the large view.  He can make a film like the Hobbit movies with an ease that is unfathomable to most Hollywood directors—especially on the scale that this Desolation of Smaug is.  Jackson gets it—and people sense that something important is going on in the movie which is why it has made over $500 million world-wide dollars in just two weeks at this point.  When he completes the trilogy, of The Hobbit, along with the Lord of the Rings films, Jackson will have completed one of the greatest explorations into the nature of evil ever done by anybody anywhere.  Of course Tolkien started the process with his great books, but Jackson has taken the baton and ran with it in a way that few people could ever hope to do, and he does it with a lack of pretension that is simply wonderful.

People who love fantasy stories like this generally are aware that the real world does not have much to offer them.  Most of the time, they see too much, and can’t lie to themselves about the nature of reality.  So they bury themselves in fantasy where they can relate to the characters that stand for justice, righteousness, and a fight against evil.  Doing such things in the real world is considered unrealistic, naive, and foolhardy.  So they turn to fantasy and lose themselves to the efforts of gaming, movies, books, and any other attribute a story can bring to a mind hungry for understanding.  We all know a Smaug in our life—whether it is a rich uncle, an employer, or even a political power.  Most of us think that such dragons must be killed and slayed so that the wealth of the world can return to us.  But often—which is an ideal that the writer Ayn Rand was exploring around the same time that Tolkien was exploring Middle-earth—there is a need for such dragons as they prove to be more capable than the greed of the Dwarves, or residents of Laketown.  The masses may not like the dragon, but often the dragon is more capable than the masses in dealing with the overwhelming pressure of greed—thus the line at the end of this film by Bilbo—“What have we done?”  Bilbo means, we killed the dragon, but we seem to have slayed ourselves in the process.

The Desolation of Smaug is such an important film as it deals with a massive social commentary that is pertinent to our present time in such critical ways.  Smaug is one of Ayn Rand’s characters who have failed at life.  He is not an overman able to support the world without corruption who creates wealth with creative effort.  Smaug took the created wealth of the dwarves with force, not creative effort—and spent the rest of his life guarding that gold because he was unable to create more of it.  To Smaug, the wealth was finite, created by others and if he wanted to keep it, he had to hold it greedily with terror which of course everyone in Middle-earth resented.  But without Smaug, the people of Middle-earth would be at war with one another constantly.  Smaug focused their hate into a direction that only a fire-breathing massive dragon could carry.  Bilbo because of his ability as a thief was able to spot a weakness in Smaug and let the people of Laketown know about it.    Once that weakness was exploited, and Smaug was removed as a threat, the real work of Sauron, originally known as Malron the Admirable, could begin.  Mariron was turned to evil by the Dark Lord Morgoth in the early days of the world, and ever after remained a foe of the Valar and the Free peoples of Middle Earth.   We all know people like Sauron too.  In fantasy fun is made of combating such figures with magic and battles with fantastic monsters, but the content of such people can be found on a local school board, or machine politics at any level and on both sides.  The reason people flock to see these films is not an escape from reality, but to actually see reality as it is masked to us in the light of day. 

The second Hobbit film, The Desolation of Smaug is a movie that everyone should see; its great cinema, wonderful story telling, and a visual art of the highest order.  Nobody makes films better than these films, except for possibly the upcoming Star Wars films which deal with the same basic content, only in a future/past kind of way.  On a scale of 1-5 I give this Hobbit film a 100.  It is that good—but only if viewers enjoy exploring the hidden aspects of a society that is not so far away in Middle-earth, but right in front of us all—only not seen because of our educations, and prejudices–a world that can only be revealed to us through mythology.

To understand more fully how powerful mythologies are to all societies, CLICK HERE.  

To read more about what I’ve said about The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, CLICK HERE. 

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

The Michigan Education Association: Why teacher unions should be outlawed

I didn’t forget about the West Branch-Rose City school district case where the Michigan Education Association is going to arbitration to provide severance for convicted child rapist Neal Erickson with $10,000 of tax payer money.  As the former head of that union at the school, Erickson repeatedly raped the young son of the Janczewski family from 2006 to 2009.  The boy is now a man who turned 21 as of 2013.  During the hard years of the rapes by his teacher the young boy had a very confrontational relationship with his father, which makes sense—as without question the child was upset that his parents couldn’t protect him from such savagery.  This case infuriated me to such a degree that I had to put it on hold for a couple of weeks just to calm down.  I didn’t want to deal with it in this format during the Holiday Season.  When I first heard it, my lingering thought was to travel up to Michigan and clean house.  The law failed, the schools failed, government failed and the villain was the teacher’s union—clearly.  So I had to hit pause in my mind and calm down—but even so—I am thoroughly pissed off at this case—emphatically pissed off is more like it.

http://townhall.com/tipsheet/danieldoherty/2013/12/12/michigan-teachers-union-seeks-10000-severance-package-for-convicted-child-molester-n1761847

This case represents everything I have warned about on this site with hundreds and hundreds of articles.  Teacher unions are vile collectivist organizations that should have NOTHING to do with educating the future of America.  They shouldn’t be allowed to conduct business of such a degree as what is happening with the Janczewski case, and should be outlawed in all public institutions.  There is nothing good that comes out of a teacher union for a child’s educational growth.  The union is only good for the employees of a school, and if any public school states that it wishes for what is best for the children which attend it—then they should support the removal of teacher unions from all public schools—because of this Janczewski case.

To a lesser degree within the Mason school system in Cincinnati and my current district of Lakota—I have seen first-hand the kind of collectivism that seemingly logical teachers utilize when they circle the wagons for a cover-up.  When something goes bad at Lakota, the teachers generally cover for their fallen “soldiers” in the struggle for “solidarity,” and even if the crimes are vile—they still stick together against all outside judgment.  Such team uniformity is destructive and has no place where children are present. The number of cases where teachers are having sex with their students—sending sexually explicit text messages to students and other vile acts are horrendously common.  During all these vile circumstances, the teachers stick together through their union and support one another against the judgments of the “outside” world.  Some people believe that I fan the flames of discontent to keep property taxes low—and have my own political motivations for revealing the information.  But the truth of it has always been that I’ve seen the kind of solidarity that the Janczewski case has revealed under the worst possible circumstances.

Lori Janczewski was a teacher and volunteer at the school who worked closely with Neal Haviland Erikson, 5’ 10”, born in 1974 on the 8th of September, a brown-haired, blue-eyed teacher union president who was in charge of virtually everything.  With that power Erikson decided that he’d seduce and rape Janczewski’s child who attended his middle school math class.  Years later in 2012 an anonymous tipster alerted authorities to video and pictures on child porn websites of the Janczewski son engaged in sex with Erikson performing oral sex and various renditions of anal sex.  Janczewski was so arrogant about his rape that he recorded it to share with the world–an act that made his guilt vacant of any dispute.  But that’s not the worst thing that happened.

Once the Janczewskis found out about what happened to their son bringing an end to the mysteries of why the child had become so unruly at home, the teacher’s union threatened harm if the family went forward with prosecution suffering retaliation.  Apparently the threats were made good when the Janczewskis pursued justice—their garage was burned down and their home barely escaped the fire.  On the wall of their house was the message beginning with a declarative pronoun, “I told you—You will Pay.”  It shouldn’t be too hard to figure out who burnt down the garage and left behind the message.  The most ardent supporters of the child rape wrote letters in support of Erickson which you can see below—as well as their email addresses—in case any law enforcement wants to pursue the case.   (I already know the answer to that, keep eating your f**king donuts) 

At the trial it was some of these people who marched into the courtroom and seated themselves on Erickson’s side of the room and came to his defense even after the video testimony was shown and he plead guilty.  If you take the time to read their letters, it is absolutely stunning that these small intellects are actually teaching children—anywhere, let alone at a school.  I find them astonishing.  ASTONISHING!

I didn’t hear about this story when Glenn Beck first covered it in August.  I actually saw it on Bill O’Reilly.  Beck is always well out in front of these kinds of stories before they make it to the mainstream.  I was dealing with at the time the many local issues regarding the teaching profession, so I missed this story coming out of Michigan.  The local stories were sexting cases where Lakota teachers were attempting to seduce student in the same way that Erickson had done, but the cover-ups were the same.  The biggest difference is that Erickson got caught red-handed with video tape showing him doing the act—and it was beyond dispute.  Without that video, there would have not been a case against the teacher, and he’d still be teaching and doing the same thing to other kids—backed by the teacher’s union.

The anger over this issue is in knowing that these kinds of things are happening all the time and when they do there is no shortage of apologists from the teacher’s union who use the same arguments they utilize to pass school levies to defend such atrocities against children—such as “it was only one child, and “it happened so long ago.”  Given what I know about these kinds of stories I would say that they are common place—not exceptions and that teacher unions have shown a tendency to hide even the worst crimes to protect their collective hive.

How many other children are there out there like the Janczewski child?  I would bet dozens in every public school in The United States, tens of thousands if taken with a collective summation.  Teachers are well aware of the crimes, but they won’t do anything about it for the same reason that they threatened Lori Janczewski with her job and well-being if she told anybody what happened regarding her son.  The Janczewski family was supposed to contain the information and sit on it, sacrificing their child to the lust of Neal Erickson, and his wife who was the teacher of the Janczewski’s youngest daughter.  Even knowing the terrible things that had happened to her brother, the sister was forced to sit and witness the intended cover-up by the wife of the guy who did the deed and put it on video for the world to see.   The wife knew, the other teachers knew, and they did not have outrage and condemnation toward Neal Erickson—their former union president—but support, even to the sentencing phase.

The union was not angry with the Janczewski family because of the crime.  They were angry that they pursued justice for their son.  They expected to use force and intimidation to silence the family into a sacrifice of their child to the yearnings of Neal Erickson–acts that the teachers who supported him endorsed.

I have told similar stories of issues that have happened like this at my home district of Lakota.  I have gone to attorneys, media personalities, and the local paper with the scoop on the story—and the result is resounding silence.  Nobody has the will to engage these horrors directly—they wish to continue believing that schools are safe for children and should be paid limitless property tax money forever to cover the cost of employing these idiots.  The courts will do nothing about these crimes unless the perpetrator is caught blatantly like Erickson was.  If there is any doubt in the case, the police union will help the teachers union cover up the story the same way they do for police beatings and abuse—and the courts will play along because they don’t want their garages burnt down, or their daughters raped and pulled over by officers looking for revenge.  And if anybody thinks that is an inflammatory statement, I have swampland in Florida complete with a plug and play diamond mine to sell you.  The crimes committed by members of teachers unions is epidemic, they may not all be as openly bad as the Erickson case, but they are vile nevertheless. And we continue to fund them with our property taxes to slowly destroy the lives of the next generation with progressive tripe and sexual abuse—all in the name of job security and good pay in the public education system.  With these people it is all about solidarity—not a value system of behavior and that makes every member of a teacher union a danger, and menace to society.

http://theconservativetreehouse.com/2013/08/14/justice-for-the-janczewskis-their-son-repeatedly-raped-for-years-by-middle-school-teacher-neal-erickson-who-was-president-of-the-michigan-teachers-union-and-even-now-supported-by-the-teachers/

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

The Box of Christmas Past, Present, and Future: Important gifts from important people

Christmas gifts always mean more than the actual material value of an item.  They often represent how people see you and whether or not they value you or not.  I was proud to see that so many different people went well out of their way to give me gifts that held tremendous symbolic meaning.  The effort placed into each of them goes recognized by me—unfortunately it would be nearly impossible to include them all here one by one in a way that would not bore everyone reading.  However, two gifts jumped out at me as being exceptionally good and deserve some recognition.

The first gift was not given by any particular person, but was just a gift of life itself.  My wife and I were in our outside hot tub on Christmas Eve, the temperature was right around 15 degrees Fahrenheit with a bit of a chill to the air.  The clouds were moving quickly in the noon day sky and the sun was brilliantly bright.  We had a particularly quiet morning, which was a gift in itself and had no place particularly special to go that entire day—so I was very relaxed.  The mist was coming up off the water with an intense fog because the water inside the hot tub was 102 degrees Fahrenheit.  The zone of air about two feet from the surface of the water was well below freezing while a small bubble of warm air mixed around our heads like a miniature climate indicative of the Earth’s atmosphere.  I popped open a Mello Yello for breakfast which had been refrigerated at approximately 32 degrees Fahrenheit and a spew of cloud-like moisture erupted from the can.  It was a neat geyser effect that would have only occurred in those specific climatic conditions and was something to marvel at.  Watching the mist dance in the air I could only conclude that “life was good.”

The other thing was that my parents gave me an iPad Mini for Christmas.  That was a very nice gift but was not the climax of the entire ceremony.  My mom wanting to build up the anticipation for the gift had wrapped it with incrementally larger boxes so that the origin box was a rather large thing, kind of a matryoshka doll concept.  It was this first box that actually turned out to be the best gift.  When I was a kid in the 6th grade that box had a special Star Wars gift in it that was particularly significant.  It was just a normal box, but my mom had wrapped it in a special Star Wars wrapping paper that was common in 1979-1980.  After I had opened that gift my mom had kept the box.  She had wrapped it in a way that the paper was attached to the box.  Way back then she made a comment that someday when you’re old I’ll give you another gift in it.  When I was at such an age a time like that seemed so remote and beyond thought that I forgot about it.  Well, this Christmas my mom had done just that using that old box with the 40-year-old wrapping paper still on it looking like it did when it was new.  The paper itself would be the envy of anyone who goes to events like Comic Con, or Gen Con.  It was a rare item that was like a piece of archeology from another time and place—and it was. After seeing the box again after so many years I really didn’t want to open all the incrementally smaller presents inside—I was fixated on the box.  However, after some time, I did finally unwrap my way to the iPad after about six boxes of barrierimage

I immediately downloaded Star Wars Pinball onto the iPad with Star Wars Angry Birds and had the time of my life the rest of Christmas playing those games.  During the age of the original date of the Star Wars wrapping paper the biggest gifts under a Christmas Tree during those years were small little hand-held football games that were basically little digital sticks that could move across the screen with the rapid push of a button.  Now games much more graphically interesting and complicated can be downloaded like nothing for .99 cents onto an iPad and played with almost no moving parts to fail after so many button depressions like those old games were subjected to often.  Star Wars Pinball is phenomenally fun, and would be worth $2000 dollars to me just for the sheer delight.  It seems unfathomable that such a thing could be downloaded onto an iPad for almost nothing.  I knew that in 40 more years some future children would look at my iPad and wonder how on earth I could ever enjoy such a thing—but that box with the Star Wars wrapping paper would still be around to bring a smile to someone’s face—I’d make sure of it.  The iPad as cool as it was would have long-lost its value, but the box would be priceless to people who appreciate such things well into the future.

For me it’s those kinds of extra efforts put into gifts that I appreciate.  Readers here sent me CDs with special songs on them to remind me that they thought of me during the Christmas Season, and other people went well out of their way to throw me similar curve balls of thought picking out presents for me.  And of course my mom fulfilled a promise she made nearly 40 years ago and gave me the box with the Star Wars wrapping paper once again.  Getting an iPad is a wonderful gift, and cost a lot of money.  But the real value comes when such ceremonies are placed on the ritual to give it the added meaning—and that extra thought is what makes Christmas such a delight.

For those reasons and more I watched another Christmas drift off into the cold January tundra of snow, cold, and gray skies with short days and sidewalks covered in ice with a bit of reminiscent contemplation about a Mello Yello can that spews forth magical mist and a box from my distant past that has brought forth yet again a tool of value for my present age.

Christmas is a wonderful time—and this one of 2013 was one of the best for me.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com