Tag: Down the Rabbit Hole

The Sykes-Picot Agreement: How the Krak des Chevalier caused the modern violence in the Middle East

When you visit a hospital dear reader you likely didn’t know that you were visiting a concept started by the Knights of the First Crusade—particularly in the Middle East to care for the poor and unfortunate during their conquest by Christianity against Muslim forces.  The term is derived from the Hospitallers who built one of the largest castles in the world located in present day Syria exclusively for the purpose of allowing the Crusaders to have a stronghold in the Middle East and force tribute from the surrounding area.  I have explained previously the hostilities in the Middle East which have their origin in establishing a Biblical prophecy around Jerusalem.  To review that previous article about the Middle East and the undercurrent of the present situation CLICK HERE to read it again and watch the videos.  But to understand the crux of the current trouble in that war-torn Biblical area and how Europe and the Middle East would arrive at their current hatred of each other the history I am about to convey must be understood.

Perched on a giant hilltop above an impoverished community of the extreme poor in present day Syria is the Crusader castle Krak des Chevaliers which displays the extreme amount of energy that the Crusaders where willing to expel in defeating Islam with their Christian backed philosophy.  The First Crusade (1096–1099) started as a widespread pilgrimage (France and Germany) and ended as a military expedition by Roman Catholic Europe to regain the Holy Lands taken in the Muslim conquests of the Levant (632–661), ultimately resulting in the recapture of Jerusalem in 1099. It was launched on 27 November 1095 by Pope Urban II with the primary goal of responding to an appeal from Byzantine Emperor Alexios I Komnenos, who requested that western volunteers come to his aid and help to repel the invading Seljuq Turks from Anatolia. An additional goal soon became the principal objective—the Christian re-conquest of the sacred city of Jerusalem and the Holy Land and the freeing of the Eastern Christians from Muslim rule.

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

The castle itself was a massive enterprise that would take thousands of laborers more than half a century to build and when concluded it was an impenetrable fortress only vulnerable to political deceit.  The castle was perched to hold off the entire Muslim aggression for centuries in their own homeland so it was built to represent Europe in the Middle East as an unmovable force that would not be eradicated.  Krak des Chevaliers kʁak de ʃəvaˈlje]) (Arabic: قلعة الحصن‎), also Crac des Chevaliers, is a Crusader castle in Syria and one of the most important preserved medieval castles in the world. The site was first inhabited in the 11th century by a settlement of Kurds; as a result it was known as Hisn al Akrad, meaning the “Castle of the Kurds”. In 1142 it was given by Raymond II, Count of Tripoli, to the Knights Hospitaller. It remained in their possession until it fell in 1271. It became known as Crac de l’Ospital; the name Krak des Chevaliers was coined in the 19th century.

The Hospitallers began rebuilding the castle in the 1140s and were finished by 1170 when an earthquake damaged the castle. The order controlled a number of castles along the border of the County of Tripoli, a state founded after the First Crusade. Krak des Chevaliers was amongst the most important and acted as a centre of administration as well as a military base. After a second phase of building was undertaken in the 13th century, Krak des Chevaliers became a concentric castle. This phase created the outer wall and gave the castle its current appearance. The first half of the century has been described as Krak des Chevaliers’ “golden age”. At its peak, Krak des Chevaliers housed a garrison of around 2,000. Such a large garrison allowed the Hospitallers to extract tribute from a wide area. From the 1250s the fortunes of the Knights Hospitaller took a turn for the worse and in 1271 Mamluk Sultan Baibars captured Krak des Chevaliers after a siege lasting 36 days, supposedly by way of a forged letter purportedly from the Hospitallers’ Grand Master that caused the Knights to surrender.

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

Well, of course the last remnants of the Roman Emperor operating in Europe were not going to stand for being driven from their former territory.  For the next half of a millennia they plotted amongst themselves for a resurrection of their power in the Middle East and during World War I they would have it.  Once Lawrence of Arabia had united the various tribes of Arabia to the common cause of destroying the Turks of the Ottoman Empire—promising freedom for their assistance—England and France were thinking of revenge for their previous Crusader attempts in the region—to recapture Jerusalem and gain control of Damascus the large capital near Krak des Chavalier.  It was T.E. Lawrence from England who developed the guerrilla tactics of terrorism against the Turks which were so effective in destroying train supply lines.  The psychological impact of the terrorism had defeated the long handed occupation of the Turks backed by Germany allowing the Arabs to drive them from the Middle East.  Riding on the coattails of T.E. Lawrence’s guerilla warfare tactics were the English who during that war reclaimed Jerusalem with great fanfare.

But secretly there was an agreement among the forces of diplomacy which would hearken back to the type of mentality shaped by the Roman Catholic Church centuries before during the time of the Crusades  unknown to T.E. Lawrence until the very end which pained him greatly.  The Sykes–Picot Agreement, officially known as the Asia Minor Agreement, was a secret agreement between the governments of the United Kingdom and France,[1] with the assent of Russia, defining their proposed spheres of influence and control in the Middle East should the Triple Entente succeed in defeating the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The negotiation of the treaty occurred between November 1915 and March 1916.[2] The agreement was concluded on 16 May 1916.[3]

The agreement effectively divided the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire outside the Arabian Peninsula into areas of future British and French control or influence.[4] The terms were negotiated by the French diplomat François Georges-Picot and British Sir Mark Sykes. The Russian Tsarist government was a minor party to the Sykes–Picot agreement, and when, following the Russian Revolution of October 1917, the Bolsheviks exposed the agreement, “the British were embarrassed, the Arabs dismayed and the Turks delighted.”[5]

Britain was allocated control of areas roughly comprising the coastal strip between the sea and River Jordan, Jordan, southern Iraq, and a small area including the ports of Haifa and Acre, to allow access to the Mediterranean.[6] France was allocated control of south-eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, Syria and Lebanon. Russia was to get Istanbul, the Turkish Straits and the Ottoman Armenian vilayets.[6] The controlling powers were left free to decide on state boundaries within these areas.[6] Further negotiation was expected to determine international administration pending consultations with Russia and other powers, including the Sharif of Mecca.[6]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement

The Bolsheviks of course were the communists who intended to conquer the world with their Karl Marx philosophy of soulless collectivism.  The Arabs betrayed turned toward the philosophy of the Bolsheviks because of their exposure of the Sykes-Picot Agreement and to this day in the Middle East behind many of the Muslim radicals are a combination of tactics shown to them by T.E. Lawrence and the communist Bolsheviks.  They intend to reclaim the Middle East from the impact of the Treaty of Versailles conducted after the conclusion of World War I which allowed for the Sykes Picot Agreement to manifest into reality.  Now Germany who suffered greatly after the Treaty of Versailles used communism born of their philosopher Karl Marx to eradicate the rule of the Russian  Tsarist government given control of Turkey—their former partner during World War I and destroy them as a world power.  It is why to this day many hope to resurrect the Ottoman Empire with a Muslim caliphate.

To further exacerbate the Muslim world–after World War II–after Hitler had attempted to eradicate the Jews from the Holy Land now residing in Poland the long-planned Zionist possession of Jerusalem was made possible by the creation of Israel in 1947.  This was only possible because of the Sykes Picot Agreement which still held the Middle East as European occupation forces in a foreign land.  Hitler as a soldier during World War I knew what the Sykes-Picot Agreement did in the Holy Land and wanted his own revenge on behalf of Germany.  The Muslims furious of the Israel creation refused to give possession of the Temple back to the Jews.  It was well-known that the Jews sought to rebuild the Temple of Solomon for a third time.  The Muslims still hold the spot of the temple to this day essentially to prevent rebuilding the temple.  Muslims claim the Dome of the Rock as the sacred site of Abraham’s sacrifice temptation of his son and where the Prophet Muhammad ascended to heaven accompanied by the Angel Gabriel.  (I’m not a fan of Gabriel.  CLICK HERE to read why)    

So what’s missing from this history?

In no part of it is the United States even remotely involved—not in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, not in the Crusades or the building of the Krak des Chavalier.  Yet due to the failures of the English and French to maintain their military strength due to their adoption of socialism originally advocated by the old Bolsheviks they have called on their friends in American government to support them militarily—whether it is out of obligation through some Masonic order derived from European history, or Illuminati participation—again a secret society from Europe created during all this mess—America has been coaxed with the same manipulation from Europe that created the Sykes-Picot Agreement.  Now after Iraq and countless other follies in the Middle East conducted by America—pushed by Europe like a little brother being shoved into a fight by a weaker older brother so to defend the family name—America finds itself trying to restore the Middle East on behalf of Europe not for oil, occupation, or religion, but to maintain the intentions of the First Crusade and has failed.  The deceit at Krak des Chevalier that caused them to lose their stronghold—and the tributes gained through the Knights of Hospitallers.

Now the enemy in the Middle East are Islamic radicals driven by a communist philosophy and they are very dangerous.  Even the communists are a creation of Europe who trained Lenin to overtake Russia to soften them up for conquest by a vengeful Germany.  Lenin launched his campaign of communism from Munich and London heading to St Petersburg with the knowledge that Germany was at his back.  Communism was created by European tampering with passive aggressive rule from distant lands and the Middle East was created by the same intentions.  A quick look at the link below will show how deeply rooted communism now is in the Middle East hidden carefully behind the face of Islamic religion.   All these failures are due to Europe, that big brother and its Roman Catholic tampering through religious justification and secret society handshakes.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Communist_parties_in_the_Middle_East

The global media knows that behind the Muslim radicals using the terrorist tactics of L.E. Lawrence that Islam represents the hope that through a caliphate economic communism will spread to the entire world.  So the media conducts soft reporting on the terrorist behavior.  The loyalty between communists and Islamic faith points back to the Sykes-Picot Agreement, they were fused together in 1917 forever in the wake of betrayal following the Treaty of Versailles.

The United States and its capitalism are being used as pawns by Europe to fulfill the Last Crusade against the Holy Land and allow for the construction of a third temple in Jerusalem.  The Seven Pillers of Wisdom by T.E. Lawrence which is read by United States officers stationed in the Middle East will not help because Muslim radicals there are reading the same book and were actually taught by the English how to drive out foreign invaders for good—just as the Turks were years before.  The unseen force at work is communism sponsored by Germany behind the mask of Islam and it is for that reason that it goes unnamed because the intentions for those provocateurs is not to regain the Holy Land, but to spread communism to every corner of the globe depleting the United States of resources in defense of its big brothers in European partnership.  This will leave no resistance to the kind of radicalism that the Bolsheviks long hoped for.  The game being played is not the game being shown—like he Sykes-Picot Agreement in betraying T.E. Lawrence and his Arabian army driving the Turks out of the Holy Land to fulfill long-held Crusader objectives.  The real game is to spread communism adopted out of Arab loyalty to their defenders—the Bolsheviks who replaced Lawrence as their new master by revealing the truth which is so important to the Arab world.  The aims of global communism benefit.

Think about all of that the next time you visit a hospital dear reader.  At that point look at the duel serpents of the medial logo and think of Krak des Chevalier and the Knights of the First Crusade and realize that we are just as primitive now as we were then and just as naive.  (As usual, the videos above are there to provide supporting evidence.  Watch them, even though it will take much of a whole day, and you will learn a great deal which supports the text provided.)  Communism is the modern letter sent behind the walls of America to encourage surrender in the Middle East–metaphorically of course.  Behind ISIS, and the Muslim Brotherhood are the old revolutionary communists of Europe, and eventually Stalin driven by the same Crusader forces from the First Crusade broadcast from the castle of Krak des Chevalier.

Rich Hoffman www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Jim Vieira’s Giants of North America: The reason for the vast cover-up of mankind’s history

One of the reasons I write all these articles is to ignite the thought process of inquiring minds.  It has always been my hope that those inquiring minds will see the information I present and be inspired to take the next steps.  Of all my articles one of the most popular is one from way back in 2010 called Giants in Ohio which many people have read and been inspired to do further investigation.  Even prior to the Giants of Ohio article I have written an entire award-winning screenplay on this type of subject matter titled The Lost Cannibals of Cahokia—which is a horror story grounded by an analysis of why societies rise and fall.  Hollywood represented by Wilshire Blvd told me that the story was too violent for film production—and they told me this as they funded and distributed the Kill Bill films.  But it gives me great satisfaction to see some of the stories that I have discovered deeply suppressed in our intellectual society revealed by hungry minds uncovering further aspects and over the last couple of years Stonemason Jim Vieira has done the hard work of collecting the evidence of the giant skeletons of a pre-human race that inhabited the world.  Specifically Jim’s giants were a major part of the mound builder culture in North America.  Vieira has collected over 1100 accounts of discovered giant skeletons 8’ to 10’ tall featuring double rows of teeth.  Watch the video below of an interview with Vieira as he presents voluminous amounts of evidence.  Also, be sure to watch all the videos presented here—they will help with understanding the text.

In that video Jim answered the question that has most plagued me, why aren’t these skeletons on display in museums—because many throughout the country are sitting in back rooms and private collections ready to be displayed to the world?  Jim’s answer was the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act.  The ( NAGPRA), Pub. L. 101-601, 25 U.S.C. 3001 et seq., 104 Stat. 3048, is a United States federal law enacted on 16 November 1990.  That act makes such displays of Native American bones illegal assuming that Native American cultures are the proper caretakers of all things archaeologically and anthropologically viable regarding the North American Mound Builders.  Even as there is strong evidence that most Native American Indian cultures were interbred with traveling Chinese fleets from the treasure boats of Zheng He during the Ming Dynasty of emperor Zhu Di and encountered a previous race of people already operating as advanced cultures in North America that was dying off.

The Act requires federal agencies and institutions that receive federal funding[1] to return Native American “cultural items” to lineal descendants and culturally affiliated Indian tribes and Native Hawaiian organizations. Cultural items include human remains, funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony. A program of federal grants assists in the repatriation process and the Secretary of the Interior may assess civil penalties on museums that fail to comply.  For instance if a particular set of discovered bones cannot be traced back to a lineal descendent because they are in fact “giants” a museum is forced to sit on the display for fear that a Native American tribe might lay claim to the remains putting the museum in violation of the law.

NAGPRA also establishes procedures for the inadvertent discovery or planned excavation of Native American cultural items on federal or tribal lands. While these provisions do not apply to discoveries or excavations on private or state lands, the collection provisions of the Act may apply to Native American cultural items if they come under the control of an institution that receives federal funding.

Lastly, NAGPRA makes it a criminal offense to traffic in Native American human remains without right of possession or in Native American cultural items obtained in violation of the Act. Penalties for a first offense may reach 12 months imprisonment and a $100,000 fine.  So in other words, any giant remains in private collections cannot be published because such a violation could be a punishable offense leaving people to hide such things in their closets and only talk about them around family dinner tables.

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

The arguments against the type of reporting that Jim Vieira was using to support his hypothesis is that the multitude of newspaper reports taken from all over the country saying the same things about giant human like bones are hoaxes typically created by sensational journalists trying to sell newspapers completely unsubstantiated by orthodox science—and cannot be therefore trusted.  For instance the accounts of the Conneaut Creek settlers of 1813 who begin unearthing the “Conneaut Giants” that had skulls so large they could fit over the heads like helmets of the amateur archaeologists at the time.  These discoveries have been ridiculed by orthodox science as a hoax even though there is much written about them.  Like many discoveries at the time the bones were discovered while farming and building railroads.  Religious belief and treasure hunting contaminated the study, as well as poor scientific practice.  However, the lack of knowledge and preservation cannot erase the discoveries.

“…when the roadway of the Philadelphia & Erie road, where it passes through the Warfel farm, was being widened, another deposit of bones was dug up and summarily deposed of as before (Thrown in a neighboring ditch). Among the skeletons was one of a giant, side by side with a smaller one, probably that of his wife. The arm and leg bones of this native American Goliath were about one-half longer than those of the tallest man among the laborers; the skull was immensely large; the lower jawbone easily slipped over the face and whiskers of a full faced man, and the teeth were in a perfect state of preservation. Another skeleton was dug up in Conneaut Township a few years ago which was quite as remarkable in its dimensions. As in the other instance, a comparison was made with the largest man in the neighborhood , and the jawbone readily covered his face, while the lower bone of the leg was nearly a foot longer than the one with which it was measured, indicating that the man must have been eight to ten feet in height. The bones of a flathead were turned up in the same township some two years ago with a skull of unusual size. Relics of a former time have been gathered in that section by the pailful, and among other curiosities a brass watch was found that was as big as a common saucer. 


An ancient graveyard was discovered in 1820, on the land now known as Dr. Carter and Dr. Dickinson places in Erie, which created quite a sensation at the time. Dr. Albert Thayer dug up some of the bones, and all indicated a race of beings of immense size.” (History of Erie County Volume 1; Warner, Beers and Co., 1884, pp. 166-169)

http://www.examiner.com/article/the-giant-mound-builders-of-erie

I wonder who has that large brass watch?  And the reports of such things go on like that for mountains of documented evidence—some of which are probably hoaxes.  Some are from aspiring writers wanting to make a name for themselves, some hoping to be some version of an Indiana Jones discovering the origins of mankind—but what they all have in common from a time where communication was not easy was that giant bones were found—poorly preserved by farmers, religious fanatics hoping them to be the lost tribes of Israel, and fortune finders.  The bones were given to respected scientists who set up make-shift exhibits at first but took them down by the 1990s hoping to get federal money for their research and not wanting to be found in violation of NAGPRA.  This is why there are no modern discoveries appearing—even though there are likely occasional instances—they are suppressed hoping not to violate any federal funding by their institutional backers.

The dominance of such discoveries during the settling of North America are unique in that a technology was brought with this new early American culture which could dig up land, build road and railways, and quickly erect homes.  Once much of states like Ohio had been dug up and manipulated by construction methods and farming, the explosion of excavation revealing these giants subsided somewhat.  Many farmers seeing some of these bones likely tossed them aside so not to prevent their work from getting done and might have casually talked about them to their families over dinner-but not taken any formal measures of preservation or study.  I know how these people think, both of my grandparents were farmers.  When they discovered things, they didn’t do anything with them if it impeded their work.  One of my grandparents traveled only once in their life out-of-state.  Their world view was entirely composed of life on their vast farm.  They wouldn’t have taken bones discovered to a local museum or college.  They’d toss them in a ditch so to milk the cows on time—which they had to do every day.  By the time modern science had a chance to credibly conduct a study; modern politics was riddled with guilt over the treatment of Indians which prevented any intelligent contemplation of the matter.  Like race relations, the Native American cultures laying claim to all ancestry of America—particularly mound building cultures prevented intelligent discussion in favor of feel good politics.  Even though it is likely that the Hopewell and Adena Indians only inhabited many of these mound cultures as second-handers, the evidence of an advanced astronomical culture which felt compelled to build strange earthworks aimed at the heavens was much more sophisticated than the typical Indian and points to a deeper history yet unexplored.

Anyone who knows anything about modern education, politics, and general human behavior and a tendency to regulate themselves into second-hander compliance is that many things are hidden in broad daylight these days by sheer manipulation of facts in favor of federal funding.  Nobody wants to lose their access to a tax payer funded gravy train, and most science exploration is very concerned with fitting their discoveries around the criteria of federal grants and other government revenue streams.  And that is the real conspiracy.

People like Jim Vieira are doing the hard work out of passion—likely inspired by Indiana Jones films to uncover some great treasure unknown to the human race.  What makes him more pure than say a Smithsonian scientist who is likely much more qualified is that Jim is not corrupted by federal money.  He’s not out trying to sell his discoveries within the confines of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) so to qualify for financial support.  Recently when Jim’s video presentation to TED Talks was pulled from YouTube these were the reasons cited by Stacy Kontrabecki Curator of TEDx Shelburne Falls as written to Jim Vieira:

Basically, TED’s fact check found that your talk is based on a debunked popular hoax from the early 1900s and promotes a well-known and widely discredited fringe theory, while misrepresenting the existence of legitimate research on this issue. (TED/TEDx is not a platform that allows unsubstantiated claims to be put forward as science.)  Here are just a few specific examples of the unsubstantiated claims in your TEDx talk:

  1. At 2:03 — You claim: “These structures are so staggering that people don’t even think they exist still.” In fact, there is a general archaeological consensus about the impressive civilization demonstrated by the mound builders in Cahokia and similar sites.
  2. At 4:05 — You claim:  “The mound builders who built all kinds of structures.” All evidence for the mound builders’ architecture suggests that they built with sod packets and wood.
  3. At 4:19 — You mention carbon-dating but do not specify what was carbon-dated. You cannot carbon-date stone. Again at 6:00.
  4. At 7:26 — You mention Mayan theories. Since the recent deciphering of almost the full Mayan script, the astronomical preoccupation attributed to Mayan writings has been largely discredited. Most of the numbers found in the Mayan script are now believed to be dates of births, coronations and wars.
  5. At 9:15 — You share newspaper clippings from the 19th century, including quotes from Abraham Lincoln, and claim they are evidence of giants. In fact, as one of our experts writes, “Skeletal hoaxes were common in the 19th century (e.g., Piltdown Man, the Cardiff Giant, and Barnum & Bailey Fiji mermaids [now at Harvard’s Peabody Museum]). If (and this is a big if) the 8-foot skeleton is real, it could be a case of medical gigantism, but it is more likely a case of exaggeration.”
  6. With respect to the theories of gigantism, the TEDx fact checkers spoke to an expert who researched Middle Woodland and Mississippian skeletal collections at the Center for American Archaeology (CAA), based in Kampsville, IL, in 2007. The CAA is one of the largest repositories of excavated Woodland and Mississippian skeletal remains in the nation, and their osteological collections are available for student and scholarly study. One expert stated “I can assure you that the archaeological Woodland and Mississippian populations were not giants. In some cases, one can observe a slight decrease in average height (a few centimeters) with the transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture. This is a trend that is observed in many cultures that undergo an agricultural transition, and is likely related to shorter nursing times and increased early childhood grain consumption (maximum height is highly correlated to childhood protein consumption, so a high reliance on grain during childhood tends to result in shorter stature).”
  7. At 12:49 — “Bones crumbled away because they weren’t mummified.” Skeletal preservation and mummification are unrelated processes. Plenty of skeletons survive in New England, and the disappearance of any and all skeletons that could lend evidence to these claims today is highly suspect.
  8. With respect to repeated claims that the Smithsonian is hiding or covering up evidence, the fact checkers also heard this, as well: “In 2007 I was a visiting scientist at the Smithsonian Museum Support Center, and while it is full of amazing and bizarre material (e.g., an entire herd of elephants that Teddy Roosevelt shot occupies one floor), there is no conspiracy to cover up or hide Native American giant skeletons or artifacts. Like most museums, the Smithsonian displays less than 1% of its collections at any given time, meaning that a lot of material spends decades (or sadly centuries) in its vaults awaiting exhibition. We can debate whether or not this is responsible stewardship (a debate that would also have to include a discussion of the chronic underfunding of public museums and the economics of public education), but to portray the Smithsonian today as part of some sort of a conspiracy of ‘misinformation and corruption’ to cover up Native American history by hiding giant moundbuilder skeletons excavated in the 19th century is ridiculous. Smithsonian physical anthropologists have published an impressive body of literature on the analysis of their collections.”

The bottom line for me, Jim, as a TEDx curator, is that I need to support the criteria that all science-based TEDx talks I hope to present must be fully substantiated. Unfortunately, as a result of TED’s research, we will be removing your talk from the TEDxTalks YouTube channel.

http://tedxshelburnefalls.wordpress.com/2012/12/14/jim-vieiras-talk-removed-from-internet/

As I typically support TED Talks it becomes quickly evident what established scientific substantiation considers relevant which was mentioned by Stacy Kontrabecki after informing him of the above removal of his presentation.  Similar presentations by Jim Vieira can be found on this site which are every bit as informative as the TED Talks seminar—but the essence of her summation comes down to funding as discussed in point 8.  According to Stacy Kontrabecki—and she’s correct, most museums only display 1% of their finds due to underfunding.  In the case of Native American exhibits, no curator even if they wanted to—would dare display their giant skeletons of a race of people from North American that predates Columbus by thousands of years—because it doesn’t fit the dialogue of the museum’s reputation and would in fact put their funding mechanisms at risk.  If they decided to exhibit the remains through a private entrepreneur then the finds would violate the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) and time in a federal jail would be on the table—and nobody wants to risk that.  So inaction is the choice and the evidence of the giants is suppressed.

Recently I did a story about the Ghost Ship of Cincinnati hidden in plan site across the river from a major casino and metropolitan area.  The ship was abandoned on private land so there was no way for proper research, restoration, or even examination to take place.  The ship is left in a quagmire of indecision—the owner of the ship doesn’t have the money to do anything with it, and the current owner of the land is an ex-wife who would have to coordinate with the ex-husband who isn’t even any longer in the country but is residing in Mexico City.  Then there is the LaRosa pizza family who is trying to raise money for the restoration without many takers because nobody sees the point—so the endeavor has fallen on deaf ears.  The entire history of the ship and the restoration effort consists of about 100 years of effort.  It is technically hidden in plain site.  CLICK HERE TO REVIEW.  Now think of how difficult it would be to unearth thousands or millions of years of history with the same difficulties, private land ownership standing as a barrier, politics, funding, and conceptual adherence to history.  It becomes much more difficult.  

There is no question that many cultures of ancient origin are as well hidden in America camouflaged by misconception, education failure, and static pattern ignorance.  Right under our feet is the evidence of a completely alternative version of human history that is likely not even close to the one we have been shown in museums and educations institutions.  If over the years I have been too hard  on public education, politics, and the human race in general it is because I learned about these unspoken truths many years ago and know why they are suppressed—and it is something that would make any sane person angry.  We have been lied to by virtually everyone, including the foolishness in signing the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) by President Bush in 1990 under progressive pressure to honor the Indian people out of guilt from their treatment by American governments in the past.  Native Americans were not so “native” but were like most Americans—they came from somewhere else and when they arrived, they came in contact with people who were already in North America—in this case a race of giants who likely died of disease, lost themselves due to cultural contamination, or bred with the women of the smaller race and gave birth to a new people altogether.  But the evidence says they were around in massive cultures, not just remote tribes scattered about.  They were advanced and rose and fell as a society well before Europe printed their first Bible.

As for people like Jim Vieira I write every day for people like him.  My hopes for the future of the kind of work that Jim is doing—which must be done can be seen at events like the 2014 Gen Con in Indianapolis.  It may seem off topic, but they are related.  Many of the gamers who attend that convention are participating in that kind of strategy gaming because the static education culture has failed them and they are seeking answers in mythology—whether it is in the various role-playing games taking place in the Middle Earth of the Lord of the Rings novels, or if it is Netrunner a game of monolithic megacorps colliding with netrunners in a dystopian future–the crux of their experience is in answers to a world short on them.  Netrunner specifically is a creation of modern myth concerned greatly with the problems of our day which hide carefully the evidence of a past race of giants.  The game itself is not about giant humans, but of corporations that can scan the human mind and interface it directly with electronic data, more data moves every second than was ever processed in the first five-thousand years of written language.  The network is omnipresent, the crux of modern human civilization, and while visionary corporations seek to secure their most valuable data on the network, the elite hackers known as netrunners seek to steal it.  The type of people playing those games are on a search for the truth and they can only find it in the imagination of fiction.  Jim Vieira is also trying to bridge the facts he has uncovered with research by unlocking a fiction that has been perpetrated unhindered for years by the scientific community and he is being attacked for it.  His life is the plot of the type of games being played by individuals on a similar quest and it is only a matter of time before those two worlds collide—that of the fringe inquisitor and legitimate science standing against federally backed institutional funding intent to sell a false story about Indian origins to justify 200 years of case-law built by their emotional plight.  As Gen Con grows so do the minds conducive to the type of talks that Jim Vieira is giving on Giants in North America.

It is my job to help bridge those various groups together while setting the stage for the next breakthroughs in science which will shatter the known world.  When I first wrote about these kinds of things—especially my Cahokia script—nobody talked about them.  Orthodox science was not to be challenged by anybody, which was made abundantly clear to me during a visit to the National Geographic Headquarters in Washington D.C. during the 90’s.  Perplexed by their reaction and conclusions 20 years ago, I have learned the reason—and like most things it points back to federally backed money.  As most everyone these days except people like Vieira, museums have their hand out as second-handers for money and they will do whatever they must to obtain it—except work harder and stand individually against the current trend—set by the federal government.

There were Giants in Ohio—heck there were giants all over the world.  There were even other cultures and major cities that have been covered by construction development that are likely larger than Cahokia and much more grand—and sophisticated than the pyramids of Giza or the structures at Chichen Itza.  And the evidence is right under our feet, but we don’t have the minds to see them.  Fortunately—slowly, we are unlearning what we learned in public government schools and are reawakening to our ancient past through creative thought as it mixes with historical documentation.  Jim Vieira is doing the hard leg work of uncovering that past—conventions like Gen Con are preparing the minds of mankind to deal with the revelations which will eventually change all the text books, all the religious beliefs, and alter our knowledge about ourselves to a truth that has always been present—but has been avoided out of fear and greed for a few federal dollars and a corrupt lie that has been present since the dawn of archaeology.   Ironically at the start of the progressive era in politics was about the same time that these stories about giants began to be suppressed because they didn’t fit the dialogue of that political movement.  The two go hand-in-hand and are reflective failures of each other.  Knowledge of these failures is more than justifiable cause for anger at an institutional system built on manipulation and bold-faced lies.  Their punishment will be in their much-needed undoing.

Take a look at the participants of Gen Con-because it will be they who buy the books of Jim Vieira a decade from now.  And history will be amended—finally, and properly.

Rich Hoffman

 

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

HOW TO BE A LEADER: Tales from the rain at Camp Friedlander

It is time to have a straight conversation about a delicate topic.  After my previous article on Leadership 21 it is excessively evident that a definition of leadership must be established aside for context to mature.  For me, the pivotal realization I gained about leadership came from the referenced C.O.P.E. leadership development training mention in that previous article.  CLICK HERE TO REVIEW.  Like the Leadership 21 group, I had to spend a weekend at camp with a group of people intent on the same aims—to bond with the fellow participants through a common experience driven by rigorous endeavor deigned to break down physical and emotional barriers—a kind of mini-boot camp.

Before I say what I will next keep in mind that I came from a time where it was very important to participate in sports activities so that a letter for your school jacket could be obtained.  I’m sure this is still a concern with young people, but when I was growing up in the 80’s, this was extremely important—and I was on a search as to why.  Having tremendous physical aptitude I was successful in any sport I wished to participate in, but elected not to after a run-in with my junior high coach who took the fun of sports and distorted it into a maze of social control.  I didn’t approve of the tiered system of social development emerging in grade school where letters of extracurricular participation earned social merit.   Those letters determined what kind of girls you could date, what kind of friends you had—and ultimately what type of job and personal life one might hope to obtain, so I was on a search as to why and to question that reality.  The sales pitch from that junior high coach was that the more letters on a jacket, the higher on the pecking order of life you could obtain.  I rejected this from the outset—which caused major conflict.

Looking for adventure that did not involve the public school a friend talked me into joining his High Adventure Explorer post—a kind of post-graduate Boy Scout program that was co-ed.  It was just the kind of thing I was looking for—a quirky group ran by aerospace engineers, school teachers, and bank managers who could set the table for many weekends of adventure which I excelled at. I gave them many headaches and scares as my natural leadership ability and physical aptitude brought a wake of personalities behind me that could get into a lot of trouble.  But within two years I was elected vice-president of the Cincinnati Dan Beard Council—which wasn’t exactly the direction I wanted to go in.  It was just the current of events that carried a fate to that destination.  Like most things when I believe too many people attach themselves to me directly I find a way to shake them off whether it is some controversy, conflict, or direct infusion of animosity freeing me from obligation into their affiliation.  The reason why points back to that C.O.P.E. experience for which I am about to explain.

For a rainy spring weekend members of several local Explore Posts attended the Challenging, Outdoor, Physical, Experience otherwise known as (C.O.P.E.).  It was a series of obstacles such as large walls, zip lines, and barriers designed to develop leadership skills through joint venture.  I attended already being very familiar with Camp Friedlander where C.O.P.E. was held.  For two consecutive prior years I attended the Explore Post Olympics they had each summer where all the area Posts competed against each other in events like swimming, softball, obstacle courses, and other acts of stamina.  Among them were Police Posts and Fire Fighter Posts which began a rivalry that started way back then and persists to this day.  Out of hundreds of area kids my friend and I as 16-year-olds dominated the obstacle course and other physical events against our rivals which paved the way for some very intense and positive experiences.  So returning to the camp for a weekend of C.O.P.E. activity was an experience I looked forward to.  The event involved pitching a tent and sharing the campground with the fellow participants who would endure the rigors of many challenges over the weekend.  As the events proceeded over the next 48 hours natural bonding of relationships occurred and people participating formed friendships—except me, and a few of the same friends who attended the yearly Olympic event.  We stayed to ourselves as we usually did—in spite of the bonding activity which drew the attention of the activity directors in a negative way.

On the second day after proving to be among the most physically proficient and creative problem solvers the camp directors had enough of my anti-social behavior.  It was time for a celebration lunch to wrap up the weekend and the directors had planned a small feast cooked over Colman stoves and water jugs.   Our campsite did have some picnic tables which were covered with a pitched tarp and all the cooking was done under them as a heavy afternoon spring rain rolled in.  I socialized in a healthy way, but maintained my distance during the preparation of the food and when it came time to eat; there wasn’t enough space under the tarp to eat at a picnic table along with the other 25 participants.  So a friend and I sat at a picnic table out in the rain.  We took our food and sat down only shielded by a cowboy style hat which dripped water into my food consistently.  But it was better than being cramped at a table with all the other participants trying to eat with no elbow room to move.  But, that is exactly what the event directors wanted to see—everyone meshing together cozy and assimilated under their tarp eating together.  Ridicule came in my direction for picking up my food to eat in the rain rather to sit with the rest of the group.

It wasn’t that I didn’t like the other people, or that I was trying to take a particular anti-social stand—I just wanted to be comfortable and it was more enjoyable to eat in the pouring rain than to sit crushed together on a bench with other smelly adolescents after a weekend without showering in the woods.  For me, the rain was a shower and I enjoyed the cleansing effect of the water.  But for the event directors, I saw from them the same kind of animosity that I saw from the junior high gym teacher, kids who valued lettered school jackets and social mechanisms of assimilation as opposed to individual development.  The longer we sat in the rain, the angrier the event directors became especially when their condemnation became harsher, but did not change my behavior.  The more they said, the more I wanted to sit in the rain.

To this day when groups get together for drinks—I usually don’t go.  When they conjugate for whatever reason, I am usually not a part of it.   Now as then I would rather sit in the rain than huddle up with perfect strangers to stay dry, and I could spend entire weekends not speaking to anybody and be completely happy.  I would say that I could handle months of that type of activity, but can’t conceive that it would ever be possible.  People like me are always viewed as suspicious and called things like “lone wolf” and “anti-social” but what is behind those names is resentment that I put up barriers to being looted mentally by those who seek to do so.  The camp directors knew that I was one of the stand-outs of the weekend leadership exercise called C.O.P.E. and they needed my buy-in for everyone else to assimilate together into their concept of a “team.”  To do that they must get everyone to chase after the goals they set—whether it is letters on a school jacket to show how much extracurricular activity one has participated in—which tells all the girls that you are a socially acceptable male that has future earnings power—or whether the camp directors give you an award for outstanding leadership that can get you elected into higher office politically.  The system only works if the best and brightest buy into their interpretation of reality.  It takes people of value to endorse those activities.  I knew early on that I was one of those people of value and I have never desired to give it away to those trying to curry favor. Not to be mean, or anti-social, but to preserve it for myself to use as I saw fit.  In the world of the 20th century, and so far the 21st, that type of mentality is considered selfish—but I would call it sustaining.  I learned at those leadership camps the opposite of what they intended.

At Camp Friedlander my Explore Post and those of the police and fire groups fought like cats and dogs.  We raided their camps at night with harassment knowing that they were future authority figures and we beat them in the competitions handedly.  They were always ran by parents who were cops and firefighters so it gave us great pleasure to throw bug spray into their campfires to explode unexpectedly—so to defy them as authority figures.  Sure we got into trouble, but it was well worth it.  They were always the most arrogant, so they were the most fun to beat.  And I will always be grateful for the experiences I learned there even if it turned out to be the opposite of what the camp directors intended.  Most people are taught early in their lives to fear the “lone wolf.”  When a crazed gunman unloads bullets into a crowd, the first conclusion usually drawn is that the assailant was one of those dreaded “lone wolfs” who are “anti-social.”  But the real fear of such people and anger which comes from that fear is that “lone wolfs” are simply people who refuse to be physically and intellectually looted.  Sometimes the pressure of social castigation causes them to crack and they go on some rampage, or seek relief in suicide, or substance abuse.  But the cause of that pressure is the invisible barrier between being willingly molested intellectually by the empty vessels of existence or fighting them.  Real leadership is in understanding this, not in surrendering to those who wish to do the molesting.

About 15 years after my Camp Friedlander experiences I worked at Cincinnati Milacron and was moved to a repair facility in Lebanon, Ohio.  I worked third shift and would spend gladly vast amounts of time alone.  I got along well with the five or six other guys who worked with me on that shift, but when it came time for breaks, they all ate together, whereas I would sit and read my books alone.  Often, I climbed to the top of a tall hill that was in the back of our facility and look out over the city while reading by a small pocket flashlight.  This angered the other guys and they thought of my behavior as “anti-social.”  They would say, “do you think you’re too good for us,” or “do you think your shit don’t stink.”  In truth, they had hit the nail on the head—but I cared enough about them to not rub their nose in it.  On my breaks, I had no desire to talk about drinking, bagging and tagging women, and uttering every other word as a curse term.  I had personal higher standards than them, and didn’t wish to surrender those standards in exchange for their approval. Time with them was not worth what I lost in the process.

Leadership is in having values that are likely well out in front of everyone else and acting on them even when it means you have to stand alone.  Being a leader is in sitting in the rain when social pressure says you must assimilate, or in joining with the other guys on an off-shift so that they don’t have to feel guilty about their deplorable values when they look at you.  In truth they want to hear that you have an extramarital affair, or that you got drunk on a Saturday night because it releases them from judgment based on their own insecurities and behavior.  There were times that I climbed up that hill to read my book knowing it brought great pain to my co-workers minds as they chugged away with cigarettes below knowing that I was out of their intellectual reach and that if they wanted to converse, they’d have to step up to my level, not me down to theirs.  Their anger is that you—as a leader—set a value judgment that they were too lazy to meet.

At Camp Friedlander it was leadership to be one of the outstanding forces at C.O.P.E. in line to receive a special award from the directors, but to make a value judgment that the other kids stunk after a weekend in the woods and much physical activity without deodorant—and that sitting in the rain made more sense than being locked arm and arm with others just because the event directors wanted a picture of assimilation on the wall of the Friedlander mess hall to show how successful they were in training tomorrow’s leaders to follow directions.  Leadership is not in making others feel good, following directions, or making people feel like they are just as good as you are by bringing down your standards to meet theirs. Being a leader is in either bringing others up to your level, or making them look at the contrast so that they might want to improve themselves—or even best you in natural competition.  The gym teacher in junior high was wrong in his emphasis on school jacket lettering.  Everyone one of those kids today is a mess because the values that were taught to them were not conducive to being the leader of a family—and their lives with spouses and children have disintegrated for the most part—universally.  Years proved me right even though at the time the teacher conducted quite a smear campaign against me with terms like “lone wolf” and “social outcast” to coax me into his group assimilation.  He wanted me to run track and be on his basketball team, and thought this was the best way to encourage me.  The other members of C.O.P.E. who followed directions and ate under the tarp found their lives thereafter less than fulfilling.  And the kid who ate with me in the rain more or less had a nervous breakdown a year later.  The pressure of what I was teaching was just too great compared to the other forces in his life preaching compliance.  We haven’t spoken in 26 years because he turned to drugs for relief which I am vehemently against.   The third shift people all lost their jobs soon after I moved to another position and no longer carried the pace of that shift.  Without my presence, those workers took longer smoke breaks, and were much less productive because there was nobody to set a standard for them to meet.  Ultimately this is what a leader is—someone who sets a standard for others to live by—not one who can be moved through peer pressure to act against their observations.

I learned leadership at Camp Friedlander although not the way they designed it.  When I was elected Vice President of the Dan Beard Council it wasn’t because I sat huddled under a tarp with smelly kids, or had a run of successes with my Explore Post in the summer competitions—it was because I was dating the girl whose father was on the council and she begged him for my inclusion.  But the reason she liked me above the other competition was because I sat in the rain alone, and I was the first to jump over a wall, climb a tree, or trudge through a cave without a flashlight in neck high water.  And every success I have had since that time to the present has been of a similar type.  The world is hungry for leaders—but leaders must lead—and not get tricked into being followers—and that is exactly what is happening at the Leadership 21 courses.

I served all of one day as the VP of the Dan Beard Council.  Looking back on it the times were murky and it wasn’t always obvious which way was correct.  But what I knew I didn’t want was to become another board member bureaucrat so I sabotaged the relationships that put me in that position with malicious action to free me so that once again I was free to sit on top of a hill with my books and look out over a city without the expectations of others trying to pull me into some social context.  I have done the same thing many times over the years when I get pulled too closely into the collective thoughts of others.  Most notably recently would be the other members of No Lakota Levy.  It takes leadership to know when gears need to be shifted and when action must take place.  Leadership is not in getting along by yielding values for some perceptual greater good defined by the corrupt.  Leadership is seeing and acting on events before anybody else can—and to see clearly often a leader must isolate themselves from the chaos of living and view unhindered the forces amassed on the battlefields of life and make decisions based on their solitary judgment.  This runs counter to every other teaching method in public schools and government orthodox, but it takes a leader to understand it.  It will be for others to confirm much later on.   The pressures of being a leader are enormous and most who try will fail.  Those are the “lone wolfs” who go on rampages or falter into drug induced stupors.  But for those who make it, and survive, they are what make the world tick—and that cannot be taught in classes like Leadership 21, or C.O.P.E.  It has to come from the heart and mind of a real leader and by nature, the masses are not equipped for the task.  Instead, they stay hunched under a tarp waiting for the rain to stop while the leader waits for nothing and is a product of their own creation in spite of whatever forces might stand in their way.

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

The Chamber Alliance Error: Leadership 21 efforts to make a community of followers

Many years ago I attended a leadership course called C.O.P.E. (Challenging Outdoor Physical Experience) which was an early, hard-core version of the same type of thing that members of the West Chester Chamber Alliance conduct through their Leadership 21 course.  See the below video for testimonials by the Class of 2012 where Lakota Treasurer Jenny Logan attended.  The goal of the endeavor was to force participants to realize that they could not achieve certain tasks alone—but needed to find ways to work together to achieve objectives. Among the tasks was the fall from a ladder, having to work to climb a tall wall with nothing but the people on your team as support, and having to move 15 people across a series of tree stumps using only two 2X4’s without anybody touching the ground.  The exercise was designed to destroy the illusion that individuals can go it alone and must rely on others.  There were some useful elements to the program, but conclusively what I learned was that as a natural leader I had to bend people to my will to use them to my effect—to get over a wall without tools—and that most everyone else had very little else to contribute to the problem solving efforts.  I had to bend them to my will for their own good and the intentions of the task at hand.  That is the heavy responsibility that leaders have—but the issue of why some people are leaders, and some not—and why everybody can’t be one is the topic of obsession revolving around the parameter of the Leadership 21 course and public education in general.  Over the years I have rejected most of what the C.O.P.E. organizers implemented in their course and proven their theories inaccurate.  Sadly, the organizers of Leadership 21 have not yet realized this error in leadership study—and are contaminating the many minds of the West Chester and Liberty Township communities with out-dated tripe.

For those who now understand what Agenda 21 is, and how buzz words like “sustainable development” are indications of the United Nations attempt to supplant local government with government from the United Nations and the progressive politics driving them, it should be easily recognized what Leadership 21 is—it is leadership training for the 21st century.  The point of emphasis and I know this first hand—is the recognition that individuals must integrate themselves into collective assistance and that only team building exercises have any social merit.  The new class for Leadership 21 2015 is coming up and begins in September of 2014 running through May of the new calendar year and will likely include more involvement from Lakota schools under the guidance of Superintendent Karen Mantia and school board vice-president Lynda O’Conner.  In the above video Jenny Logan the Lakota treasurer provided testimony as to the effectiveness of the course saying “this process allowed me to let go…..to learn.  I learned more about me, and to let go.”  Of course when she says to let go she is referring to the process undermining an individual’s desire to be in control of one’s destiny and to fall into arms of the collective group—the team assembled for the Leadership 21 course.  This is most elaborately exhibited in the fall from the ladder backwards into the waiting arms of your teammates with the message that it’s OK to fall, because someone will catch you.

Over the last 20 years I have rejected the things that such leadership courses tried to teach me understanding that the bottom-line to their message was a greater dependency on the social safety net of public services.  In my adventures with C.O.P.E. there were many police and fire department organizations who took the exact same course and the message to them was that a social safety net had more power than any one individual.  That conclusion of course has proven to be complete, unmitigated hogwash and it is incredibly disappointing to see that one of the wealthiest areas in the State of Ohio—if not the United States—has so little understanding about the nature of entrepreneurship than to adhere to this foolish idea of leadership in the 21st century as it was disseminated by some idiot in Geneva, Switzerland.

The exercises given in Leadership 21 of recognizing certain values in your co-workers—or team members is one to obviously pull the awareness of individuals away from themselves and onto others—to get to know their names, to see changes in their appearance, to pay attention to “others” as a valuable trait.  But this has nothing to do with real leadership other than making people feel good about themselves in the presence of others.  Leadership is not about making people feel good, or softening the human race’s desire for intense competition.  Leadership is about decision-making ahead of a given problem and mathematically there are not many people capable or willing to stand at the cutting edge of a decision-making process to perform a leadership task—otherwise there would be more good leaders.

Business cannot breed leaders through such a class to believe that through collective collaboration and multiple viewpoints that a correct decision about anything can ever be reached.  What they are teaching at such courses like Leadership 21 is to follow, not lead.  The purpose of Leadership 21 is the same as the C.O.P.E. course I was involved in, and that is to teach that the new leader of the 21st century is “consensus,” and that everyone needed to let go, and surrender to it putting aside their individual needs.  The end result, and falsehood of their premise is that following is more important than leading and that the business community needs to adopt these measures to better serve the collective hive of society through public enterprise.  Where the emphasis of C.O.P.E. was to ultimately develop firefighters and police officers, Leadership 21 is also concerned with public education and law enforcement.  It is ultimately those services which become the pace setters of modern society—according to them—and that is just wrong.

Leadership 21 has an intention of teaching their yearly class of students to migrate out into the community to spread the message of what they learned—and the crux of that consensus always points to more taxation, more legislation, and an expansion of government in general.  The purpose of the Leadership 21 alums is to convince all resistance to such expansion to step aside and bend to the will of consensus because it is the collective sum of their merry band of followers who set the course for which society must obey.  And this is the primary philosophy taught in public schools—and the reason that Jenni Logan as Treasurer at Lakota was accepted as opposed to another applicant.  But another alumni of Leadership 21 is the former superintendent of Lakota Ron Spurlock.  The leaders of the 21st century are everyone, not just the few exceptional people with skill and aptitude.  In the world of the Leadership 21 types, everyone has a chance to be a leader through collaboration masking their personal incompetency of individual judgment.  They intend to end the top down model of a solitary innovator, and entrepreneur who goes it alone and drives GDP with their cutting edge leadership—they hope to attach to such people a host of parasites who can hold such a person up if only they could convince them to fall into the arms of the community from atop a tall ladder.

But leaders are supposed to avoid falling altogether, and if they do their jobs right, there should never be any arms to fall into.  They should never have the need.  The world of the real leader is out on the edge of perception well in front of the rest of society who watches like timid animals about to step out of a hole where a snake is feared to be perched.  A real leader already has gotten by any danger and found the way forward—and followers tow behind as they should—and they need to keep their mouths shut so that the leader can think about what is yet ahead and not be encumbered by some encounter group trying to build the self-esteem of a weak-kneed group.

Leadership 21 is just another instance of how public sector jobs such as police, fire, and education are hanging their star onto the business community through local Chamber of Commerce organizations and taking credit for the good work done by real job creators.  The bridge between the two worlds is the West Chester Chamber Alliance and when it comes time for tax increases, the Chamber expects their Alliance members to give generously—after all they have had the chance to sleep with Jenni Logan at camp and helped push her over a wall, and she was there to catch business leaders as they fell from a tall ladder—and when it comes time to pass a school levy—they’ll think of Jenni, Ron, Karen, and Lynda and remember what nice people they were at Chamber dinners and Leadership 21 events—and they’ll support that school levy every 5 to 7 years—even if it costs them a lot of money in additional taxes.  The public pressure through the Chamber Alliance is more painful than the money spent.  They’ll support that police levy because through the Chamber, they have met some of those public servants and had their political, social, and otherwise individual opinions stripped away from them through Chamber consensus building exercises—like Leadership 21.

The product of Leadership 21 is a loss of intellect and aptitude because both have to be surrendered to participate fully.  When Jenni talks about letting go, this is part of what’s lost—and for some there is relief in losing that responsibility.  It is much easier to allow a herd to make decisions than to take full responsibility on an individual basis.  What starts with a few people at Camp Joy becomes a community of followers willing to take the leadership of public service as their guiding light.  And public officials such as school administrators, police, and many others get to use the shield of the productive to protect them from scrutiny because the Chamber Alliance has arranged for a scam to take place where the productive freely give their efforts to the incompetent.   Awards are given and dinners celebrate the exchange, but the general objective was and always will be the theft of value from job creators to shield the failed philosophy of those who wish to advance government and the money it consumes.  Leadership 21 is just a fancy way to say that the desire of a 21st century world is that everyone has the opportunity to be a leader—but first the real leaders of society must be convinced to give up their claim to such a title.  Then they must accept the help of their fellow community participants with the reduced expectations of competency and replace those expectations with a trust in the team building exercises that Leadership 21 is designed to establish with physical reliance as opposed to intellectual aptitude.  Thus the message of Leadership 21 is to surrender thought to physical trust and understand that value judgments are relative to individual position which is subservient to the collective will of consensus.  And it is for that reason that I reject the entire premise and believe it to be one of the greatest threats disguised behind good-will that we have before us.

Rich Hoffman www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

A “Kick-Ass” Satire of Rich Hoffman: Living authentically–against the current.

I have a lot of readers and obviously the kids who made the video below were satirically bringing their perspective to my content and life as viewed from their California neighborhood culture.  Their comedy skit against bullwhip superheroes also looks to be shaped by the movie Kick-Ass 2 which wasn’t nearly as good as the first one—but did make some good points.  My novel The Symposium of Justice was a work of philosophy written at a fairly young age molded after my personal experiences with politics and bullwhips during the 1990s.  In those years I was in my twenties and knew what I thought about things, but couldn’t yet understand why just because there wasn’t enough contextual information.  About a year ago I wrote an article titled Taking the Mask off Once Again, (CLICK HERE TO REVIEW,) which put a kind of end cap on that period from my twenties to current—which essentially came to a similar conclusion as the ending of Kick-Ass 2—superhereos aren’t needed on movie screens and behind crazy costumes and masks as much as they are in real life.  Fictional characters are fun for telling stories but the world is in desperate need of real life people who are willing to do heroic things without a mask of any kind—whether the mask is literature, an entertainment personality, or a literal costumed avenger.

From the culture of young people taught to not have any values or a code of ethics I’m sure a lot of the things I do seem to them the way they were presented in that video—they cited a Midwestern lifestyle, a grandfather’s bullwhip, and the desire to save America by using it in their plot.  They are products of public school peer pressure shaped by the politics of our day—which is crumbling in virtually every social category.  Of course they hold the belief that America doesn’t need a bullwhip wielding superhero from the Midwest—because they don’t yet see the crises before them.

After I wrote The Symposium of Justice I didn’t feel comfortable performing the normal role of author.  Scholarly pursuits centered on philosophy were a pretty new concept for me and wasn’t exactly the direction I thought my life should go.  I was used to performing actual physical feats, and doing things that were actually very dangerous.  So it felt strange to write about things as opposed to doing things.  In my neighborhood—bad things were happening—and the lag period between books was just too great to solve problems in real-time.  When presented with those kinds of problems a person should use every skill they have to solve problems.  The results often mean the revelation at the ending of Kick-Ass 2—that the world needs real people to do extraordinary things and to do it without the concealment of a mask.

As an author of a couple of books now and using this blog site to tackle problems in real-time instead of the long publication periods it takes to move a novel through the normal process of going to print most of what I have written can be confirmed by some real life experience.  I have never been satisfied telling stories or providing content without experience lending perspective to my work.  And to get experience you have to do things—as a person.  Watching that satirical video I can’t help but feel sorry for those kids—like most young people they are finishing a long career of public school education shaped by a statist government and they believe they have the tools of assessment needed to enter the world.  But they don’t—instead they will travel through the normal cycle that most people go through, they will start their lives voting for people like Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (if they vote at all).  They will then support all the liberal causes, “Global Warming,” economic socialism, gay rights over traditional marriage, and collective value over individual merit.  By the time they hit their late 20s and early 30s they’ll discover that to have children of their own—they’ll become more conservative.  At that time they will often support a presidential candidate like Mitt Romney (soft Republican), they’ll start becoming frustrated with larger government once they see their taxes increase once they purchase a home, and they’ll start thinking like a Republican after cutting grass in their own yards each week.  They’ll spend their lives trying to make their bosses happy, will stare at their high school senior yearbooks wondering where all their friends went and will discover that they now have resentful teenagers who do not show respect for them during their 40s and 50s.  The kids of course will be angry at their parents for not providing a good role model as their parents will spend most of their lives as social boot-lickers instead of admirable parents, and homeowners.  During their late fifties their children will reconcile with them as those young people then realize that their liberal educations and salty outlook on life has not prepared them for the needs of their individual lives—and the parent and child will likely sit in a restaurant embracing each other on how mysterious life is and how screwed up their preparation for it was.  In their 60s the parent will likely then become a real conservative who will want to see the world they are leaving behind restored in some fashion to what it was when they were children because they see how detrimental everything has become during their lifespan—and they will at that point regret it—hoping to improve that life while they still live.  During their 70s and 80s those parents will find themselves abandoned by their children, overlooked by their grandchildren, and completely despondent to their great-grandchildren.  They’ll watch in frustration as the world of politics spirals out of control in spite of all their efforts and the last days of their lives will shrivel away into oblivion.  Not long after, nobody will visit their grave sites and history will forget them.

That cycle is a standard one for anybody who follows the shaped life of a statist government where the service and attention of that entity takes precedence over individuality.  There is no other ending for most of the people in our society—who follow that path.  My hope has been to maybe change the lives of a few so that such a miserable existence could be avoided and I use the skills I have in all their capacity to perform that task.  The kids who made that video have no other path in their life but the one described above they will live it nearly word for word and there is nothing I or anybody else can do to help them.  They are simply too far gone.  Even in comedy, much about reality is revealed.  Nothing is just a joke—everything has a cost associated with it—and you can’t cheat life without cheating yourself in some fashion.

Recently I told a bit of the story of the movie Bronco Billy by Clint Eastwood and for me, it taught me early on that people only get one chance to live their unique life the way they see fit.  That choice may run counter to the culture of society—but the goal is to be authentic to your individuality—and to not yield to the social pressure of conformity.  I made my choice long ago to live an authentically personal life in spite of the social pressures to serve a bind system led by sightless bureaucrats.  I have lent my support to many causes of the day in real life, a spokesman against taxes, Tea Party groups, talk radio, business,   and countless other endeavors—but I have never stopped being who I uniquely am even as those movements have ebbed and flowed.  And it always comes back around to the term “Justice Comes from the Crack of a Whip” from The Symposium of Justice.  In that novel the justice that most of us seek does not come from the laws of politicians, it comes from our own personal authenticity and those destinations can only be found by living life honestly even when the currents of civilization seem opposed to the task.  To be the last living things left on a receding beach, you have to stand against the current because then and only then—will you discover what was always hidden from view.  I communicated what I saw in my novel but felt I needed to dig deeper and to do that—it required real physical action instead of just observation to discover the concealment that holds many of life’s real answers.   And a tool for getting at those answers can be obtained with a bullwhip if you know how to use them.  A mask isn’t required.

Even though those kids thought they were making a satire of Kick-Ass at my expense, they obviously missed the point of the movie.  But that doesn’t surprise me.  It won’t hit them for another 25 years but eventually they will look at how they saw the world now and regret it.  They’ll also learn that they were woefully wrong—America does need such a hero and that even though they changed the title to avoid direct slander “The Crack of Justice” the proper way to always frame the situation is that “JUSTICE COMES WITH THE CRACK OF A WHIP”—because it does.

Rich Hoffman www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Bernie Sanders the Socialist: A strategic plan involving immigration, economics, and the Vikings

Because of his work over the Veterans Affairs scandal and trying to rectify the errors of management directly on the doorstep of Washington politics, Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont has been receiving a lot of press—even being featured on the O’Reilly Factor.  Noticeably he is listed as one of the rare “Independents” in the Senate as he doesn’t recognize himself as neither a Republican nor a Democrat.  Many who do not know the real story might think that Sanders is an Independent in the way that a Tea Party candidate might be—but they would be woefully mistaken.  Instead, Sanders is the exact opposite, he is so radically to the left that he doesn’t even call himself a Democrat, or a Progressive to hide his real intentions.  Instead, he is a devoted Socialist, but lists his party affiliation as an “I” instead of an “S.”  His interest in the VA issue is one to defend the role that government can play in managing social needs—to protect the brand of socialism he supports most, Scandinavian socialism—which unknown to most of America—is all the rage in the Beltway of Washington.

Scandinavian socialism is a mix of high taxes to support cradle to grave welfare mixed with lower regulations against business to churn growth.  These types of socialists have learned that to generate tax money for government to loot off of, they must have businesses that can generate things to tax.  So they lowered barriers for businesses to start so that they could tax them to support their welfare state.  Their primary focus is to eliminate the gap between the “rich and the poor” so to provide an equalitarian society under the managed care of government.  But what Sanders and his fellow socialists in the Democratic Party and Progressive caucuses refuse to learn is that the success of such societies are far from being equalitarian, but have more to do with their Viking past and low immigrant population—which will be explored at the end of this article.  But first let us learn more about Bernie Sanders and the tremendous push from the progressive invasion that is intent on insurgency in the United States starting in such bastions of liberalism like Vermont, Massachusetts, and New York. The following information is from none other than the New York Times in 2007.  After the election of Sanders they were very happy and produced a very long and glowing story on Sanders as they felt their kind of candidate had just been elected into the Senate—an open and honest Socialist who refused to run from the designation—unlike Chuck Schumer and at the time Barney Frank.

Sanders has always been an easier fit in Vermont than in Washington. Being a Socialist in the seat of two-party orthodoxy will do that. While he has generally championed liberal Democratic positions over the years — and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee endorsed his Senate campaign — Sanders has strenuously resisted calling himself a Democrat. And he has clung to a mantle — socialism — that brings considerable stigma, in large part for its association with authoritarian communist regimes (which Sanders is quick to disavow).

But he does little to airbrush the red “S” from his political profile. On the wall of his Congressional office hangs a portrait of Eugene V. Debs, the Socialist Party presidential candidate of the early 20th century. A poster in a conference room marks Burlington’s sister-city relationship with Puerto Cabeza, Nicaragua — one of a few such alliances he forged with cities in Marxist states during his 10-year stint as mayor of Vermont’s biggest city in the 1980s.

Socialism brings Sanders instant novelty in Washington and, in many circles, instant dismissal as a freak. But Sanders’s outcast status in Washington probably owes as much to his jackhammer style as to any stubborn ideology. It is a town filled with student body president types — and Sanders, for his part, finished a distant third when he ran to be president of his class at James Madison High School in Brooklyn.

“I’m not afraid of being called a troublemaker,” Sanders says, something he’s been called many times, in many different ways, many of them unprintable. “But you have to be smart. And being smart means not creating needless enemies for yourself.”

In this regard, Sanders has not always been smart, especially when he was first elected to the House in 1990. He called Congress “impotent” and dismissed the two major parties as indistinguishable tools of the wealthy. He said it wouldn’t bother him if 80 percent of his colleagues lost re-election — not the best way to win friends in a new workplace.

“Bernie alienates his natural allies,” Representative Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat, said at the time. “His holier-than-thou attitude — saying in a very loud voice he is smarter than everyone else and purer than everyone else — really undercuts his effectiveness.” The late Joe Moakley, another Massachusetts Democrat, waxed almost poetic in his derision for Sanders. “He is out there wailing on his own,” Moakley said. “He screams and hollers, but he is all alone.”

Frank says he came to like and work well with Sanders, with whom he served on the House Financial Services Committee. His early objections were over Sanders’s railing against both parties as if they were the same. “I think when he first got here, Bernie underestimated the degree that Republicans had moved to the right,” Frank told me. “I get sick of people saying ‘a curse on both your houses.’ When you point out to them that you agree with them on most things, they’ll say, ‘Yeah, well, I hold my friends up to a higher standard.’ Well, O.K., but remember that we’re your friends.”

Among his House colleagues, “Bernie’s not a bad guy,” is something I heard a lot of. “You appreciate Bernie the more you see him in action,” says Senator Chuck Schumer, the head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, who served with him for several years in the House. A fellow Brooklynite who is nine years younger, Schumer attended the same elementary school as Sanders (P.S. 197) and the same high school (James Madison, which also graduated a third United States senator, Norm Coleman, Republican of Minnesota). “Bernie does tend to grow on people, whether it’s in the House or in Vermont,” Schumer says.

But again: Could Sanders be elected to the Senate anywhere else?

No, not as a Socialist, Schumer says. “Even in New York State it would be hard.”

Massachusetts? “Maybe this year he could,” Frank says, meaning 2006. “But if he were running in any other state, he probably would have to comb his hair.”

Leahy says that just any Socialist probably couldn’t get elected in Vermont, either. But Sanders has made himself known in a state small enough — physically and in terms of population — for someone, particularly a tireless someone, to insinuate himself into neighborly dialogues and build a following that skirts ideological pigeonholes. Indeed, there are no shortages of war veterans or struggling farmers in Vermont who would seemingly have no use for a humorless aging hippie peacenik Socialist from Brooklyn, except that Sanders has dealt with many of them personally, and it’s a good bet his office has helped them procure some government benefit.

“People have gotten to know him as Bernie,” Leahy says. “Not as the Socialist.”

Sanders calls himself as a “democratic Socialist.” When I asked him what this meant, as a practical matter, in capitalist America circa 2007, he did what he often does: he donned his rhetorical Viking’s helmet and waxed lovingly about the Socialist governments of Scandinavia. He mentioned that Scandinavian countries have nearly wiped out poverty in children — as opposed to the United States, where 18 to 20 percent of kids live in poverty. The Finnish government provides free day care to all children; Norwegian workers get 42 weeks of maternity leave at full pay.

But would Americans ever accept the kinds of taxes that finance the Scandinavian welfare state? And would Sanders himself trade in the United States government for the Finnish one? He is curiously, frustratingly non-responsive to questions like this. “I think there is a great deal we can learn from Scandinavia,” he said after a long pause. And then he returns to railing about economic justice and the rising gap between rich and poor, things he speaks of with a sense of outrage that always seems freshly summoned.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/magazine/21Sanders.t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Economic inequality is caused because some people don’t wish to do things productively that others do.  The ratio of those who have versus those who have not is not manageable by comparing their social or economic output which is typical of socialism.  The value of initiative is always ignored—but it is because of initiative that some have wealth and others don’t in a capitalist society.  Some show up to invent, create, and do productive work while others wait for the products of that enterprise to enhance their lives.  But in their quest for equality—they hope to be labeled with sameness with the productive through socialism.

In Scandinavian socialism the big secret of their success is that they are a series of small countries that have not had massive quantities of immigration—due to their regional location largely.  They also benefit from their heritage of a hardy people who descended from the enterprising—and war like Vikings.  Scandinavians are not lazy, but are used to tribal rule, which is why their collective socialism works somewhat for them.  They aren’t producing massive new inventions carrying mankind into space, or developing new medical breakthroughs, but they are producing enough economic activity to support their welfare culture—to some extent that can be viewed as not catastrophic.  They get this from their heritage as Vikings who served kings and other nobles in spite of their independence—and they did it willingly.  Their culture has not changed demographically a great deal because of their lack of an immigrant population.  To a large degree, the people of Scandinavia are the same hard-working Vikings they were in the past.  For more proof of this the following captions from Frontpage Magazine will further illustrate the point:

Because the US, Canada, UK, France and Germany are large countries, the absolute numbers of their immigrants are also very high, not just in percentages.

So is poverty low in Scandinavian countries because their “socialism” works, or because they have relatively few poor immigrants entering?  And if poverty is low because Scandinavian “socialism” works, should it not be working for migrants in those countries as well?

Separate poverty data for the migrant populations in Scandinavian countries are available and there are numerous indications that these are quite high. According to one study, “While first and second generation immigrants constituted 44% of the poor children in 1997, they were 65% of all poor children in Sweden in 2008.  Only 5% of native Swedish children live in poverty. For immigrant children with both parents born outside of the Sweden, the child poverty rate is 39%.”  Poverty rates have also been shown to be high for immigrants in Denmark.  According to a recent study of poverty rates among immigrants in all Scandinavian countries, “While native children face yearly poverty risks of less than 10 percent in all three countries and for all years investigated the increasing proportion of immigrant children with an origin in middle and low-income countries have poverty risks that varies from 38 and up to as much as 58 percent.”

So Scandinavian “socialism” is doing a remarkably poor job in eliminating poverty among non-Scandinavians living in those Scandinavian utopias.

The conclusion can only be one thing.  The low poverty rate among Scandinavians in Scandinavian countries is thanks to the fact that Scandinavians work.  It is NOT because socialism works!

http://www.frontpagemag.com/2011/steven-plaut/does-scandinavian-socialism-work/

For a guy who has a portrait of the extreme socialist Eugene V. Debs and maintained a relationship with Puerto Cabeza, Nicaragua during his stint as a mayor, the intentions of Bernie Sanders political affiliation is evident.  The difference between him and Chuck Schumer or those like him in the Democratic Party is that Sanders is honest about his intentions while the others feel they must deceive and change the names of things to avoid the backlash of an American society built by capitalism.  Sanders and the Democrats who work with him through progressive caucuses desire socialism—specifically Scandinavian socialism—and they know what they are doing.

In America, the people are not like Scandinavia—the people who have settled North America are uniquely from every corner of the world.  Their heritage is not built by a Viking past but by pasts that caused them to flee wherever they came from in favor of the opportunity to work and produce without government intrusion.  The secret behind the open boarder policy that many Democrats support is they hope to create a more equalitarian world by bringing immigrants in from Marxist countries, like Nicaragua and Honduras—and integrating them into American society to water down the immigrants who have come to North America with a hard-driving work ethic.  Democrats achieve two things with this method, they destroy the work ethic that is making most immigrants desirable hires for a society built by capitalism, but they also bring with them the conditioned socialism which has impoverished their native lands.  Slowly over time, these new immigrants from socialist sources will change America from a capitalist country into a socialist one paving the way for people like Bernie Sanders to initiate his version of Scandinavian socialism.

Not even Fox News will put the “S” next to Bernie’s name and call him what he really is, or talk about what he truly stands for.  They allow the charade of politics to continue because as part of the New York culture, they see this push for Scandinavian socialism coming from virtually every politician, from Mitt Romney to Chuck Schumer—so they ignore the stereotypes against socialism that persists all across the flyover states.  Bernie hopes to repair the relationship that the government has with the VA so that other government programs will not receive scandalous appraisal in the future as the Democratic immigration assault performs their strategic effect.  But now, for those who didn’t know it, you know dear reader what Bernie Sanders really is.  He’s not an “Independent.”  He’s a socialist, and the media does not put an “S” next to his name because they hope to deceive viewers from the real intentions of the Democratic Party.  Since Bernie is so unapologetically “socialist” the media helps him by changing the “S” to an “I” so not to scare voters.  And the deception is so great that it was even perpetrated on the O’Reilly Factor—which shows just how deep socialism has already penetrated American culture for a destination of full-fledged Marxism which is supported so fervently by the New York Times and every other political figure in entertainment or public office that calls themselves “progressives.”  The crime in this case is that a willing deception has taken place and virtually everyone is playing along—even Bill O’Reilly.

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Why to Buy a David Crain Whip: The ‘Ohio Bullwhip Fast Draw’ in slow motion

I have won the Ohio Bullwhip Fast Draw competition for several years during its decade of existence. I don’t win it every year, but most of the time I either win it, or I’m climbing around the top contenders and if I lose it is because of a miss. I can’t ever recall being beat to a target. In 2014 the whip maker David Crain told me before we paired off against each other that he had built a whip just for the annual event and showed it to me. As I looked it over it was built of nylon, which is his style, and was very springy. It had nice movement and was well balanced—but it felt light. I’m used to my whips built by Terry Jacka in Australia which are a nice balance between heavy and the weight of the nylon whips so I had my doubts that his whip would be fast to the target in spite of his efforts. But when we paired off, and the judge called “draw” it looked to me that our whips both reached the target at the same time. It was too close to call, but the judge gave him the win as seen below.

I was impressed by how his whip sprang into action from about the 11:00 position over his head and jumped toward the target like a rubber band.   It moved differently than my whip which could be seen in the slow motion breakdown. Crain’s nylon whip launched toward the target and got there quick. The effect was impressive and demonstrated that the “roo” hide whips from Australia were not the only ones capable of winning at the Ohio Bullwhip Fast Draw.

I have used Crain’s whips often and can testify to their quickness, my grandson has three of them. They are great for two-handed vollies and general technique. But after seeing them perform at this year’s Annie Oakley event in Greenville I am convinced that they perform excellently in competitions as well. David Crain’s whips are well made and unique featuring finely finished wooden handles making them easy to manipulate and excellent to look at. But in the hands of an expert, they are proving to be as quick as whips like the ones I use which cost $600 to $800 dollars. Crain’s whips typically cost a third of that but are every bit as accurate and many times are faster cutting through the air.

For me the elation of life is in the moments of time when a judge announces “draw” and when the whip hits the target. I find bullwhips more fascinating than firearms because all of the movement of the whip is done by a human being transferring the power of momentum through several strips of leather brought together by a whip maker to provide a focused force at the point of impact. By watching the coil of my whip strike its target in slow motion it is easy to see the world the way I do—first in the fast form, then slowed down the way it works in my mind. I live for those fractions of moments in time—those moments between seconds where decisions and momentum come together to define an objective. The same skills are used when driving a car, or making decisions that might affect millions of dollars in profitability—often we are only given a fraction of a second to make a decision and to act. The beauty of the bullwhip quick draw is all the decisions that have to be made in far less than a second, the uncoiling of the whip, the calculation of where the end is in space and time, the rotation of the handle to get the lay of the whip pointed in the right direction on the upswing from the coiled position—because if you go against it, the whip will push-off its mark during the strike, then finally the projection of the target cut with the whip in the air and pointed in the right direction, the flip of the wrist to get the coil started and finally the pop of the whip hitting the target squarely.

It was easy to see how I pulled off my side of the target cut, but David’s shot was a bit different. I looks like in slow motion that he was able to skip a few steps in the process. His whip being made of nylon didn’t have to be rotated in his hand to prevent working against the natural direction of the belly inside the whip that is formed to the coiled direction of a leather whip. From the extended position above his head it looks that he was able to launch the whip toward the target with a sling shot type of effect which can be seen the way the end of the whip turns into waves after it meets the target. What is easy to see in the very slow motion of the bullwhip fast draw above is that the nylon whip and kangaroo whip behaved very differently during the bullwhip fast draw but the goal is to reach the target first. In slow motion it looks like there is great advantage in using a nylon whip in the bullwhip fast draw.

For those who want to win the bullwhip fast draw in the future, a David Crain whip might be very wise. As it can easily be seen in the video, a lot happens in the span of time that two whip experts attack a target in the moments fragmented by such occasions. And like regular life that often feels slow and mundane it is those fragments of time that dictate the direction of success or failure—so the bullwhip fast draw is an excellent way to train the mind into the types of decisions that accompany such moments.

When people wonder how I do some of the things that I do in regular life whether it is under the guise of a suit and tie, or torn cloths hunting ghost ships in the back woods of river tributaries, the secret is not in a book, or a college, or any institutional influence. It is in the lessons learned in the fragments of time seen in the Ohio Bullwhip Fast Draw and how those lessons can be applied to problems others might find overwhelming and impossible. Even with all my years of experience I still see new things and learn from them as I did from David Crain this year—lessons that I will carry with me that will prove very valuable. But for others contemplating such a thing in the future consider that last year David didn’t think he had the experience or skill to perform such a feat—but only one year later, he has proven himself to be a contender of great repute. And part of his journey in getting there was in building a whip that would do supernatural things under great pressure and as it can be seen by the video, he was successful.

David Crain can be found at the following link:

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Heartbeat-Artistry/169569816413486

 

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

A Needed Circus Tent: ‘Bronco Billy ‘dreams that could resurrect a nation

At an annual dinner conducted by the participants of the Annie Oakley Western Arts Showcase there was much discussion about the new location in 2014 at York Woods in Ansonia, Ohio—just north of Greenville.  The reviews of this new site were very favorable, but I wasn’t so sure when we were driving there for the first time.  York Woods was founded in the mid 1800s and today is the site of the Greenville Steam Thrashers—a group dedicated to maintaining antique farm equipment.  Once we arrived I said to my wife that this country was so much God’s that you felt like you could reach up and scratch his beard.  It was amazingly remote and full of character.  It was the first location of our annual Western Arts Showcase which has now been going on for well more than a decade that could justify a circus tent for our shows.  Here is a video of the event:

We had the idea by seeing what kind of tent the drama group had up and for the first time considered that we should hold our future shows in just such a tent.  In previous years our shows were in the Coliseum at the Darke County Fairgrounds about 10 miles to the south.  Several times during the day weather threatened to alter our outdoor show, so it put in our minds the need for adjustments in the future if the York Woods site continued to be the destination.

We hoped that it would because there are things we could likely do at York Woods that we would never be allowed to do at the Fairgrounds, such as using firewhips and live ammunition for portions of our shows.  I typically don’t perform for the exhibitions due to the many restrictions and my lack of interest in living within too many boundaries.   I admire those who do, but I’ve always thought that our shows should incorporate more live fire—as was seen in one of my favorite movies, Bronco Billy.  At York Woods the Annie Oakley Committee actually had shooting contests on site which greatly enhanced the event for the crowd.  The Fairgrounds was in a fairly dense population area, but out in York Woods, there wasn’t much by way of residential living for at least a mile—maybe two.  The farmland was vast and very open giving a truly ideal location for improvements to the Western Showcase.

We could continue to do the shows outside as we have for years, and just work around the weather, but it may well be time to have our own circus tent.  Where space was always in short supply at the Fairgrounds, there was no shortage of space at York Woods giving our group for the first time some creative ability not seen before—so a small circus tent is something that we should pursue in the upcoming year.

 To do this we are looking for corporate sponsorship that could pay for some of the costs and would be proud to feature all benefactors prominently.  There are opportunities here that are unexplored for both parties, the Western Showcase participants and advertisers—so discussion would have to take place to make sure everyone gets what they want.

Interested parties should contact my friend Gery at:

http://geryldeer.com/

As for my the movie Bronco Billy, it has always been a dream of mine to do for kids what the Clint Eastwood character in that film wanted to achieve.  In that film Bronco Billy was operating his life upstream of the current in society and was functioning by a traditional set of rules that were grossly outdated even by the 1970s standards.  It has always been a dream of mine to step into a circus tent like the one shown at the end of that movie made of American flags.

Americans for too many years have felt guilty for their history, their art, and their success.  The tent at the end of Bronco Billy was a kind of statement of honor in preserving all those things.  But it wasn’t real.  Bronco Billy was just a movie character and the story was fictional.  When the shooting was done, the tent was scrapped, and packed away forever forgotten, except on film. Well, 35 years after that film became a favorite of mine, I’m in the strange position of knowing really the only people left in America who have the ability to put on a show like what Bronco Billy did in that film.  Gery Deer is the closest thing alive to Clint Eastwood’s fictional character in that movie and is the reason he and I have had a friendship that has went on for over a decade now.

The people in Gery’s shows are some of the most genuinely good people I have ever met and the gifts they have to offer the world extend well beyond the yearly shows at Annie Oakley’s festival each year in Greenville.  But you have to start somewhere and it would appear that the York Woods location is the perfect spot for such an audaciously American fantasy.  There were enough crowds at York Woods to fill the stands of a small circus tent and resurrect not in Las Vegas, Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, or Orlando, Florida the lost arts of the cowboy, but Ansonia, Ohio the literal birthplace of Annie Oakley herself–one of the best trick shooters anywhere and a person all women should think of as a role model.  Annie Oakley used to say, “Aim at a high mark and you’ll hit it.  No, not the first time, or the second and maybe not the third.  But keep on aiming and keep on shooting for only practice will make you perfect.  Finally, you’ll hit the bull’s eye of success.”

I read those words on the back of the brochure the Annie Oakley Committee passed out to visitors of their festival as I watched our group perform their knife throwing exhibitions, and whip tricks and thought of the possibilities if firearms and other—more audacious elements could be added to the show in York Woods in the future.  And I couldn’t help but think of that Bronco Billy circus tent which has been bouncing around in my head for more than three decades now.  There is no reason to aim high in this case because we have the firepower at many levels of hitting this target—a new target that was presented through a change that could very well be for the better.

These days it doesn’t matter if a show is ten miles outside of a town that is already many, many miles away from the rest of civilization.  This is actually a plus, especially when the performers also have the ability of bringing the show to the rest of the world through “media.”  Gery is a television producer—and he is also the producer of the only real Wild West Show left in the world.  There are a few theme park types of acts out there, but nobody has the ability to pull the most talented people in the industry in for a real honest to goodness Wild West Show like Gery.  All he needs to pull off the chance of a lifetime is a circus tent and a few sponsors.

Rich Hoffman www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

The 2014 Annie Oakley Western Showcase: Bringing Lash LaRue off the silver screen into reality

As usual it was a marvelous weekend at our annual Annie Oakley event.  What started as a large group that originally met at Las Vegas each year is now just a handful of whip crackers, knife throwers, trick ropers and magicians intent to put a smile on the faces of young people and wow the adults who graced the grounds of the 2014 Annie Oakley Festival in Darke County.  The venue this year was moved from the usual fairgrounds in town to a more remote location just to the north.  It felt a long way out and even deeper into “God’s Country” but a very large crowd turned out and what they found there were shooting contests, fast draw contests from the Single Action Shooting Society, theater drama, and the 12th Annual Annie Oakley Western Arts Showcase accompanied by the many venders selling goods.  Most of the venders very unique with little booths set-up mingling among the trees of York Woods.  For over ten years now some of the best whip crackers in the country have gathered to meet with their own kind at the event and as usual it was a marvelous enterprise.

I said many times during the day which was absolutely perfect for July weather with mild temperatures and occasional rain bursts erupting just to the north and south painting a menacing sky at times across the vast plains of farmland extending out into Indiana—that my love of this event was yearly maintenance; it restored my faith in humanity.  The people who attend are some of the few people left in the entire world who do these kinds of things which used to be common place during Annie Oakley’s time.  A few are in long-term marriages which are inspiring, and most have spouses that they bring with them where they enjoy each other in a healthy way and it is just good to associate with people of that character.  I’ve said it before, but it is applicable, the people in our group are nearly identical to the characters shown in the Clint Eastwood film Bronco Billy—which is a favorite of mine.  They are a small group of people who are all that is keeping a way of life in America alive for the next generation.

There are many in the world who might say good riddance to classic American arts—particularly those residing around large metropolitan areas—which is why attending each year restores my faith in humanity.  It is so refreshing to spend time around genuine people who truly love something rooted in classic Americana.  But to lose these values, the whip cracking, the gun spinning, roping, and knife throwing—with vaudeville type shows conducted from corn fields in the middle of nowhere—U.S.A would be treacherous.  The heart of what it means to be an American is in those shows, I have now known the ring master of the Annie Oakley event—Gery Deer for over ten years and each year he finds new ways to change-up the show to always keep it interesting.  At first there were concerns over moving the Annie Oakley Festival to the outskirts of Greenville—but quickly those worries proved pointless.  Large crowds attended and the celebration was nothing short of inspiring.

It took me a while to get warmed up but by the time we got to the Speed Switch contest which allows bullwhip artists to strike at ten targets as fast as they could–first with one hand then with the other on the way back up the target row, I had hit my stride.  This year it was obvious that everyone was a bit smoother and had been practicing.  The times were faster generally for everyone which made for an exciting show for the people watching from the bleachers.  I had my fastest time ever on the Speed Switch—just a bit over 11 seconds which is fast for even the Speed and Accuracy contest so well-known to seasoned veterans.  I enjoyed the location, the vast open spaces all around the touring bus of the Brother’s and Company set up as a backdrop for the stage as a generator provided all the power needed for the show.  The crowd sat in the beginnings of the York Woods where shade gave them shelter from the sun which peaked out often around menacing storm clouds.  If anything pushed my speed a bit it was a combination of those elements.

Many of the same people who came last year came this time around again traveling from far away destinations to arrive.  Some couldn’t make it, but the beauty of the event is that each year there are opportunities to do it again and recharge their batteries from a punishing year.  It is punishing to stand behind these classic American art forms when the current trend is to run away.  Often the skeptics will stand on the outskirts of the roped off area and watch with curiosity as most of their thoughts were created by pop culture—but after a few moments, they can’t help but smile at the cheesy jokes and purity of the type of Western Showcase that Gery routinely puts on.  There is a playful innocence in it that is unmistakable and it doesn’t take long to reach into the inner child of the typical viewer to touch that part of themselves which has long ago been ignored—and suppressed.

I saw some of that at the end of the day when my wife and I went to the restaurant we normally gather at in Greenville to make reservations for the back half of the dining room.  The rest of our group was on the tour bus coming down from the York Woods location so we wanted to have everything set up for when they arrived.   As the manager arranged tables I saw some of that modern cynicism in the bar where my wife and I waited.  A corner contained a group of young twenty-somethings watching a baseball game and as I stood silhouetted in the doorway between the bar and dining room a young kid with his date looked my way and started texting his friends sitting next to him murmuring—it’s “Crocodile Dundee.”  I stared at the kid just to make him feel uncomfortable and to let him know that I could hear him, which he hadn’t expected.  He wanted anonymity from the security of his reality among his friends so I made a point to not give it to him.  This isn’t the first time this has happened and it won’t be the last.  On more than one occasion in that same bar we’ve encountered worse but quickly converted them over into fans.  One year Chris Camp took a skeptical woman outside and made her into a whip target stand in the parking lot in front of her husband cracking straws from her outstretched hands.  Moments before she had been similar to the kids in the corner, but after about five minutes was gushing all over herself at the coolness of having a weapon break the sound barrier right next to her face.  The only references modern people have toward such things outside of the type of events that Gery puts on, is music, movies, and television which has turned dramatically against the American Western, or any form of rugged individualism.

The clash of cultures is one where the values of two groups of people crash in places like that bar.  At the Annie Oakley Festival the context is already presented.  It is not unusual for members of the Western Arts Showcase to roam around the event in costume.  I typically wear my whips with me, and nobody bats an eye—they expect it because of the context of the show.  When our members used to attend the Fairlawn restaurant in years prior the strip of road separating it from the Darke County Fairgrounds was filled with people attending the festival.   This year there was no late night activity in town, because the Annie Oakley event had moved far to the north—so the Fairlawn was filled with regular people living their regular lives watching baseball games and trying to show how well they fit into the modern world of the big nearby cities like Dayton, Columbus and Cincinnati to the south.  So for the kids in the bar they had no idea there was an Annie Oakley event in town as it had moved.  The boy who made the Crocodile Dundee comment likely hoped that his girl friend would be impressed by his remark and the laughs and giggles among his friends would earn him an honor of some kind, to prove that he was just as much of a douche bag as the next guy.  What kids like that don’t know, because it’s not part of their experience, is that the heroes of old, which the Ohio Western Arts group is dedicated to preserving are people like Lash LaRue, Douglas Fairbanks, and of course Annie Oakley—people they have no experience with.  If they did, they’d have a much more fulfilled life—their marriages would last longer, their lives would be richer, and they’d be generally happy people.  Some of the members of our group travel in trucks and vans that are twenty years old filled with stage props.  Often they sleep in a cramped back seat traveling from gig to gig in a hope that their sheer charisma might improve the lives of just one person with the kind of hopes and dreams born from the mind of America.  Most of the time they get paid decently, but are drained from the experience only to dust off the feeling and do it again weekend after weekend year after year.

I have never seen a young girl who didn’t melt away into butter when a confident whip handler removed a target from her lips.  If the kid wanted to impress his date—and I wanted to tell him this—the best thing he could do for himself is to learn the skills our group brought to the Annie Oakley Festival.  As our group arrived and filled the back of the room, the kid stood in the doorway wondering who all those people were sitting with that same guy in the Australian style outback hat.  His perplexed look was one of realizing that there was a group of people in the world functioning around him who were different from the patterns he had learned—that certain music was popular, certain modes of dress acceptable, and that there were people out there who considered non-conformity to be far superior to social conformity.  It is that trait that the Annual Annie Oakley Festival in Darke County, Ohio appeals to best, and the primary reason that so many make the yearly pilgrimage.

I certainly have a lot of experience with such things measuring public temperament.  Unlike the other attendees I have chosen a more controversial roll using my desire to preserve the Western Arts in a way that I think the real Lash LaRue would have done in his day—I have made it part of my political discourse.    I have fought higher taxes and known political corruption using the skills nurtured along over the years with the bullwhip to have the same effect the young guy in the bar experienced.  When it comes to traditional American art, I feel that the best ground to defend it is outside of the shows where viewers can watch comfortably from behind a roped off area.  I take great pleasure in bringing the show to the safety of the herd because it is there that they need to see it most.

At the end of the night there were jokes about how out-of-fashion we were as a group and pride was taken in being so out of style.  I remarked that all we needed to do was wait another 50 years and there will be hordes of people desiring deeply the traditional American arts displayed yearly at the Annie Oakley Festival—it will at that time become fashionable again.  But right now, especially with the failure of the Lone Ranger at the box office last year, nobody in movies or television is going to produce a film like Zorro or Lash LaRue in the jaded culture we have now.  But for those who still desire such things, the way we do who perform them, the yearly event of Annie Oakley is a real treat.  It recharges my batteries with meaning after a year of typical cynicism in a way nothing else does.  I typically wear my hat year round everywhere from Michigan to Florida and in every possible venue from wealthy to poor—so it is routine to get the kind of reaction I received from the kid in the bar.  But what is unique is that a horde of people dressed similarly who share my values don’t often come walking in behind me.  And while I might want to take Lash LaRue off the silver screen and plop him down into America in 2014 with my real life antics, it is the one and only time a year that I get more from everyone else than I typically give leaving me feeling uncharacteristically fulfilled.  In that regard, I hope that Gery gets the circus tent next year that he’s talking about—because that would be absolutely grand and a good next step to the new venue at York Woods marking of the start of a second decade in a long march toward eternity.

Rich Hoffman   www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

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The Decline of Hueston Woods: Capitalism versus statism sponsored conservation

It had been a while since I had been to the Oxford area; the last time was to give an on campus speech last year, so it had been some time since I had made my way into Hueston Woods State Park.  However, for likely the 60th to 70th time in my life red lights were filling my rear view mirror and a patrol officer  was at my window telling me I was driving too fast—as determined by some cry baby, wimpy, leather faced, cheating whore of a politician afraid of riding the Merry-Go-Round at a summer fair.  I was being pulled over for going 40 in a 25 MPH zone.  My answer to the State Officer when asked if I knew how fast I was going was that I had no idea the speed limit was so slow.  For me, it was impossibly slow.  I can ride a bicycle faster than 25 MPH.  That is simply too slow for a long series of roads.  What are they protecting at the park with such a slow speed limit, turtles, rabbits and squirrels?  Worse yet, where I was pulled over was right at the entrance where fisherman and boaters were pulling in for some early morning access to Action Lake which is currently undergoing a $15 million dollar face lift at the damn.  The lake receives roughly 1.8 million visitors per year so Huston Woods still gets a lot of activity after many years but during my recent visit, it was easy to see that there was a lot more that they could do if they only had the right attitude.

I grew up with Hueston Woods so I know its history very well and am in a position to offer some criticisms that are needed if it wants to sustain itself into the future.  As a kid I spent many summers at camp there between Boy Scout groups, my church and in my teen years I was actually part of the chain gang that had to walk the entire park and pick up trash around the entire loop.  That is a long story but the short of it was that I was loaded onto a van from the Hamilton jail and driven with all the other juvenile convicts to the lake to spend the day performing “community service.”  I learned to hate the pompous over-weight delinquency officers who rode behind us in the van playing music as we picked up trash around the lake for everyone to gawk at.  I took the point position and walked faster than everyone else on purpose just to drive things along and put pressure on the people behind me.  I was yelled at a lot that day, and I noticed that the state employees seemed very comfortable at the park.  Our chain gang launched from the left side of the lodge and it didn’t take long to realize that one of the two guys in the van was having an affair with a woman who worked in the gift shop who was married.  So I had an opportunity to see the underpinnings of the park at a young age where the seeds of apathy had clearly been placed—which was reflected 30 years later in the visit I had with my family in the middle of a summer week.

I always loved the lodge and wanted to marry my wife there, but her parents talked me out of it in favor of the Becket Ridge Country Club, of which they were members.  For most of my youth up until that event with the chain gang I loved the lodge and used it as a base station for many adventures.  So it was a good pick for a wedding to my wife.  This time returning I was with my grown family and was introducing my grandson to the place—visiting the game room it literally hadn’t changed much since I had been a teenager.  In fact, it looks like the Ms. Pac Man machine was still in the same place.  Instead of the reunion with the lodge being something of reverence, it saddened me to see the place going downhill quick.  It was still nice, but had the tired look of a place uncared for.

Elsewhere in the park the marina looked wore out and the wildlife exhibit was in disrepair.  They still had a nice mountain lion on display and some large birds including an eagle, but the passion had obviously left the management of the area.  Hueston Woods has plenty of opportunity for revenue not directly related to tax payers; they of course have the lodge traffic year round which attracts many lodging dollars for people taking in-state vacations.  There are also cabin rentals, horseback riding opportunities, boat rentals on the lake and other similar activity—so the park should not look like it did—run down and tired.

Granted, since I was a kid my worldly vision had dramatically opened.  The lake used to look really big to me and it seemed impossibly large to walk the entire route around it as a member of the chain gang.  Now it looked small, I have walked a lot further for a lot less reason, and have seen places much, much nicer than the lodge in far away locations around the world.  As I played many video games from that lodge I used to wonder what kind of adventures I’d experience in life, but none of them seemed to have the capability to surpass Hueston Woods. But within a few years of my chain gang experience I quickly learned that just about everywhere was nicer which was sad, because there were opportunities in Hueston Woods that other State Parks simply didn’t have—particularly the proximity of Miami University nearby.  Students use the Hueston Woods beach as a natural sun bathing destination and place to play volleyball and study away from their congested dorm rooms.

So you’d think that the State Officer pulling me over would understand that sitting on the side of the road pulling people over for going 40 MPH under the guise of safety would understand how negative his presence was to financial investment into the area—which it badly needed.  The guy literally had nothing better to do than to sit in his squad car and pull people over all day so that their speeding cars might not run over some ducks.  In fact, elsewhere around the park are the typical greenie weenie messages that come straight out of the Al Gore handbook of progressive political discourse such as having people clean seeds off their shows before walking into a forest to minimize the transference of hostile plants that crowd out the sunlight to more delicate vegetation.  I took my grandson and daughter to the fishing pier which was a long walk for his little feet, but was perplexed by the message on the trail signs.  If state officials could make such statements about plant life then why couldn’t they make the same judgments about human beings—there are certain groups of human beings who behave just as aggressively as the plants they were talking about at the ODNR advisory board?  The same mentality could be declared in neighborhoods where welfare recipients’ crowd out private investment because they tend to present themselves as unkempt and destructive pushing out people who wash their cars, care for their lawns and generally try to improve their surroundings.  And as that thought crossed my mind it appeared that those same types of people were at Hueston Woods.  The lady in front of us at the nature walk was with a group of kids who looked like they climbed out of the trunk of a car covered in garage sale items.  She was a beat up woman who had a cheap shoulder-blade tattoo of some kind of flower and a bleeding heart.  It was hard to tell because she was about my age and the ink had smeared over time all running together.  As I looked around there were a lot of people like her there and a lot fewer of the type of people I remembered as a kid who had boats at the marina who would come to the park to go sailing on the weekends.  It appeared that the parasitic humans were crowding out the contributing humans and the park was suffering.  Yet the park rangers could make that distinction with plant life, but not with their human visitors—very interesting and much to their own detriment.

As I waited for the State Officer to return with my driver’s license and insurance card I couldn’t help but think of all the lost opportunities at Hueston Woods compared to a place like Disney World.  Both parks are roughly the same age but one looks as new as the day it was built and the other looks like it is a few years away from decaying away into nothing.  The difference really is the people, at Disney World the employees look happy to have a job and be working.  At Hueston Woods the employees give off the impression that they’d rather be watching afternoon tabloid television or sitting in a patrol car giving tickets so they could save some tree frog that might jump into the road—just because they have nothing better to do.  At Disney World there is plenty of wildlife and they reproduce robustly, and there are not unfriendly park rangers running around trying to issue tickets every five feet—because they want visitors in Disney World.  But at Hueston Woods the general impression is that humans are intruding on a natural habitat and that they aren’t welcome unless they follow certain parameters of rules.

High quality people look to have left the park or have gotten old and died off leaving behind the dregs.  The dregs were part of the Hueston Woods experience of my youth but with them were people who had new cars, boats, and were business professionals in their private life who enjoyed the recreation at the lake.  So both types of people were there, but these days, it appears that one type of person is coming far less than the other which is driving down the quality of the park.

Growing up I saw both types of people on a regular basis.  The criminals that I had to do community service with likely all grew up to be the dregs of society now.  It was easy to see them then, and now they were like that girl with a thirty year old tattoo on her shoulder which had sagged and become distorted with age.  And I went to Hueston Woods with my church groups and Boy Scout organizations where suburbanite parents at least attempted to care about the value of things.  Clearly one group was missing and the other had multiplied over the years—and Hueston Woods was suffering for it.  Making it worse was the patrol car discouraging me from bringing my family to Hueston Woods for the day because they guy had nothing else to do but sit in the grassy area off the side of the road by the mountain bike parking lot and pull people over.

My reaction to the State Officer was that I wanted out of the park as quickly as possible.  When we were done with each other I took the nearest road out and left.  Our day at Hueston Woods had concluded and it’s likely that I won’t return for another dozen or more years.  25 MPH is simply too slow for a car of any kind, and is not friendly to visitors.  The park and its employees gave off the impression that visitors were lucky to be there and that is simply the wrong attitude.  In response quality people are not visiting the park in the kind of numbers that can sustain it as the dregs are continuing to come because they have access to a free beach.  That problem is one of management where the effort into saving trees from hostile plants failed to take the same measures to preserve their internal economy leaving the place to devolve into a sad state of disrepair only to be devoured by the dregs of society and their parasitic nature.

Rich Hoffman

www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com