Tag: Glenn Beck

The Flip Flop of Steve Chabot: Who is the media?

There are so many things wrong with the Steve Chabot town hall meeting on Monday, August 22, 2011 where he had the police confiscate the cameras of citizens recording his speech.  Before I get into the details of this listen to Doc Thompson of 700 WLW cover the two videos he put on his blog site, both of them from Progress Ohio which shows the terrible act being committed.

After the whole issue blew up, and Doc was covering it on WLW, Chabot attempted to clarify that in the future, he would make the policy clear that only the media would be allowed to have cameras during a town hall meeting.  Well, that created so much of an uproar on 700 WLW that later in the day Chabot came out and said that there would not be any rules about cameras in the future.  The reason it created an uproar is that the media cannot always be trusted, and politicians for way too long have learned to manipulate the media to make themselves look better.   

One of the greatest benefits of this modern age is that everyday people can also be part of the media.  With all the video cameras out there, and cell phones, and blog sites like this one, politicians can no longer wine and dine members of the media to mold their public image.  People have to actually be what they say they are, and that’s a great aspect of our current age.  This is why schools can’t get away with ripping off the tax payers anymore with fluffy terminology, because it is no longer just newspapers and television that are covering the “feel good” stories that shape public opinion.  Because of the internet and YouTube specifically a political blunder can now be seen, and not pushed under the rug so bad behavior can continue.  Stories like the Stacy Schuler case in Mason can no longer be “controlled” by a public relations media personality, because there are other ways for the public to get at the truth, or at least remember the event.  So politicians like Steve Chabot who are aware that his enemies, Progress Ohio are in attendance at his town hall meeting have tried to control their public image just like the policy shown in the video, of police confiscating the public video cameras.   Progress Ohio clearly was looking to rattle Chabot and get video they could use against him in a future campaign. Chabot has to be a good enough of a politician to stay away from double-talk and not give those people any ammunition.  But no politician has a right to “censor” their public image in a public forum.  That just isn’t something that can be allowed to happen.

Now, here’s the worst aspect of this situation……..it’s the fact that without any knowledge of the law, the police on the whim of a politician, can instruct the police to do their bidding.  Those police officers had no right to confiscate one single video camera.  If Chabot wanted to enforce a video camera policy, it was up to his staff to provide that security.  The police department cannot be used as his personal enforcement service.  And as to the early comments that Chabot uttered about only the media would be allowed to film events, that brings up the question, who is the media?  Is it the media that only the politician likes?  Is it the media that represents the major television stations?  Is it just the media like newspapers who have reporters that are kind to the political entity, of course not.  The media are the people who chose to cover it, so in this day and age, every member of society is a member of the media, and that’s the way it has to be.  So no politician has a right to pick and chose who covers them if they are a public official. 

I’m happy that Steve did the right thing in the end.  I’m sure his intentions were good, because he knew the sharks were in the water.  But this is a perfect example of how good intentions can pave the path to hell, because police powers were abused, private rights were abused, and trust in the government was violated all because a politician wished to control his public image with censorship.  That is the path that has placed our current political system into such a shambles, it is decades and decades of this kind of “censorship” that is just now being challenged because it is only in the last decade that virtually every citizen in America has their own video camera and access to the internet in order to convey the truth as they see it.  So the dynamic has changed for the better, and politicians must adjust to that dynamic because the dishonesty of politics can no longer be shoved under the rug to hide which just mounts up to a hugely expensive government full of dishonest people who stay in office because they had control of the media.

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

Ronald Reagan was a Communist: Yes, the president was once a union leader

I received a video link from a big-time pro union fellow who thought somehow I would be devastated to learn that the Great Ronald Reagan had been president of the Screen Actors Guild, early in his career. He wrote to me, “Your hero used to be a union leader. The idol of the Republican Party was an actual leader of a union. Do you still hate unions?” Well, the answer to this guy is…………….YES! Here is that video: 

Click the link,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rWvGMPhBVSI&feature=channel_video_title

 

 

 

This guy exhibited all the reasons why I dislike unions so much in his statement. People like him are stuck in a fixated emotional level of social development, and they will always stay in a kind of stagnate existence because of it. This person believes that because at some point in Ronald Reagan’s life, when he was a young man still unwise to the ways of the world, the fact that he was a union leader would somehow erase all the good the man did as a “Great Communicator” at the end of his life, or that by somehow me finding out about it would invalidate my claims against unions because “my hero” once supported unions so because Ronald Reagan is my leader, I should support unions too.

Here’s the issue, and the big difference between a guy like me, and a guy like this union person, who is very similar to most of the type of people who join a union or even a political party……..I read. Most of them do not.

I did know about Ronald Reagan’s early life because I read about him in the great book Dutch, by Edmund Morris, the very controversial book about Reagan that many Reagan supporters despised because it took away many of the myths about the man and focused on his real talent, which was “communicating,” and I learned all about the communist phase of his life. Reagan when he was an actor in Hollywood wasn’t much different from someone like Matt Damon is now, a naive, idealistic guy who has a decent intellect, but became wealthy and popular at a young age and lacks truly hard work in his life. Reagan coming from the Midwest had plenty of common sense, but becoming an actor and hanging out with starlets and all the powerful people in Los Angeles did go to his head. Communism was migrating into the United States in the 20’s and 30’s and it was the new fad in Hollywood, much like it is today. And Ronald Reagan loved it; he even applied to join the Communist Party of the United States. Reagan’s friends were communists, and even though his wife Jane wasn’t very interested in politics, she did go with the flow of communism because that was what people talked about at dinner parties, so she was too.

And the unions that formed at the time were heavily infected with communists. Several of the entertainment unions took a page of activism directly from the Bolsheviks during the Russian Revolution of 1917. At the Warner Brothers lot set designers had suddenly become aggressive mobs turning over cars and protesting over pay. Reagan was the reluctant leader of these mobs and was a sympathizer.

It was when Reagan had to go to England to film a movie at Elstree Studios that the impact of socialism, which leads to communism shocked him to his Midwestern core. Karl Marx had done much of his work while in London and it is also in London that Keynesian economics was being experimented with. The result was a landscape of culture that had an oppressive sameness to it, and was a dreary environment for the very imaginative young Ronald Reagan. It was during this film at Elstree Studios that Reagan decided that communism was the great evil of the world.

Reagan came back to his Hollywood friends a changed man; it was so noticeable that his wife lost interest in him leading to their eventual divorce. Reagan stayed on as the President of the Screen Actors Guild but had lost interest in the politics of communism. As Reagan’s acting career came to an end due to his age, he used his position within the guild to stay in the loop and carry him to the next phase of his life, politics.

Reagan had a very strong sense of right and wrong and he did name the communist sympathizers during the McCarthy hearings within his union, because he saw that communism was a serious threat to the United States and felt it was his obligation to the security of the country. That doesn’t make him a traitor; it makes him a person who had been sick and had healed through growing knowledge and understanding. By allowing his mind to expand with new information he grew as a person who eventually was able to go from a union president to a President who stood against the unions in the air traffic control controversy where he fired them for trying to strike.


 

The reason Reagan was so good was because he grew in intellect and political theory unlike this guy who sent me that video, as though “Union Brother Reagan” should always behave like a fool with limited perspective like the rest of his brothers and sisters stuck in a communist funk. The assumption was because Reagan turned against the union, he was somehow a trader.

This is another reason why unions always fail. They behave with this tribe-like behavior which limits personal growth. Since their focus is on group oriented, collective behavior they are doomed to fail as individuals and their thoughts will remain fixed on a period of their lives which had their last explosive development, and for many of them that will be high school. I know many adults who are 40 and 50 years old who are still as mentally immature as they were when they were 15, 16, and 17 years old. That is because they stopped growing as people and are “stuck” emotionally in that time period.

In my own life there isn’t a single human being on planet Earth that I’d consider my “leader.” There is no voice that could call to me and demand my time and attention for some task outside of my individual desires. This does not mean I can’t work with people toward a common goal, because I do in many ways, but that form of collaboration is completely foreign to the mind of the “union” type who is “stuck” in some archaic form of thought which belongs to the mentality of a child. Most of my friends are 20 and 30 years older than I am because I relate to those people more than most people my age, because through a life-time of living they have grown to understand what’s important and what’s not, and how to think for themselves instead of some collective group of fools stuck in some static thought pattern craving communism.

This is the triumph of Ronald Reagan, he made the journey from a small-town, clean-cut Midwestern kid, to a Hollywood movie star, a communist leaning union leader, then “learned” that communism was the path of decline and adjusted his thinking which cost him friends and a wife, and to a large extent his career as an actor. But Reagan took what he learned and rebuilt himself as an advocate of capitalism, becoming a spokesman for GE, then Governor of California, then the communist fighting President of the United States. It was the journey of a complete human being who halfway through realized that he was on the wrong path, so he made the corrections and became a great person who helped preserve the United States of America during a tough period of the cold war.

Great personalities aren’t necessarily born straight out of their mother’s womb. Such assumptions are the thoughts of fools hoping for a savior to rescue them from a mundane life because the fool is too lazy to save themselves. Great personalities are forged from the fires of life, through a lifetime of experience that learn which ideas of theirs are good, and which are bad to arrive at a place where it is wisdom that rules, not the diatribes of some mad politician fixated on a set of ideas created by the minds of infantile children.

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

Meet Lakota’s Mrs. Mantia: Is a superintendent of a school system the same as a CEO?

John Halase is a frequent contributor to the West Chester Tea Party and since he attends many school board meetings for the Lakota School System, and has a technical background, he is the perfect candidate to take some of the obscure fiscal information dressed up in the legalism of education terms and explain them in a way everyone can understand. John is one of the most neutral human beings I know. His only goal is fairness, but a firm understanding of the facts involved in any particular situation. This can be seen clearly in his presentation of August 16, 2011 to a crowd of approximately 200 to 300 people eager to understand why Lakota has placed another levy on the ballot. Central to this new discussion was the new superintendent Karen Mantia and the justification of the one-quarter of a million dollar annual cost she is to the district.

My argument when it comes to costs, which dictate to the tax payers whether or not more funding is needed to fund a school is how much is the public supplying, and if it’s sufficient, then why is there still a requirement for more funds. If the revenue is insufficient, then what criterion determines the level of funding? Well, that answer is what the community can afford, and that is determined in a vote. If the people of the district vote no, then it is the school boards job to go back and trim the budget to the level of revenue that the tax payers approved. It’s that simple.

But how it is currently is a ridiculous situation. If the community votes no, then the district just puts the issue on the ballot. Most school boards do as Lakota did, and that’s drop some staff through attrition, cut small costs like busing and sports programs because it punishes the people for voting no, and they’ll keep putting it on the ballot however many times it takes till it passes. That is a foolish business model. Lakota is on its third attempt in a two-year period, and Little Miami is on their 9th over a four-year period. Most of the schools in Southern Ohio can tell a similar story.

That’s why it becomes necessary to look at just what the costs at a school like Lakota are, what they are spending their money on. Lakota has a total of 1,976 employees at an average wage of over $62,000 per year. 600 of those employees make over $65,000 per year. Of that employee matrix there are 1,192 teachers, 712 support staff, and 72 administrators serving 18,458 students. In 2010, Lakota brought in $157 million and it spent $167 million.

Now to regulate those costs, which were obviously at a deficit even though the revenue coming in is over 150 million dollars, which is nothing to balk at; it is the job of the superintendent to manage those costs. I keep hearing that it is the superintendent, who often makes over six figures and deserves to be paid like a CEO at a corporation, should be paid so much money because as in the case of Karen Mantia, she is responsible for over 24 buildings and 2000 employees with budgets in the tens of millions of dollars. Ok, fine, but with all that responsibility I see a trend with these superintendents where they don’t behave like CEO’s at all. They behave like spoiled union workers where there’s never enough money coming in, and that’s the big difference.

Karen Mantia is no different. She started off as a teacher at Northmont City High School where she worked for 24 years as a law/economics and government history teacher. While there she was a principal, Director of Curriculum, then Assistant Superintendent. She took a job at Sycamore Community Schools as Superintendent from 2000 to 2006 for 100K per year overseeing 5,710 students. In 2006 she retired when she turned 55. She then took a job at Piqua City Schools double dipping from her retirement at Sycamore while making 117K per year managing 3,750 students. She wasn’t at Piqua long, because by 2007 she took the Superintendent position at Pickerington School District making $144,000 managing 10,500 students. It was from this position that Lakota spent $42,266 to recruit Mantia from her Pickerington position where Lakota paid her $165,000 to manage 18,458 students.

Mantia’s contract pays her a base salary of $165,000 a year plus an annual deferred compensation of a $30,000 annuity. She gets an annual performance award, retirement contribution and STRS Membership “pickups,” health and dental along with vision insurance, “known as a Cadillac plan,” Life insurance based on 2.5X her base plus annuity. She is required to work 227 days a year, she gets 23 vacation days, 15 sick days in addition to 3 personal days during that span of time. She also gets all the administrator paid holidays. She is also paid for any professional membership meeting expenses. The over-all cost of Superintendent Mantia is one quarter of a million dollars, ($165 + $30K + $61K (31.7% benefits) per year. Mantia also has a severance package that is 3 years her base salary plus annuity up to the 5 years or less remaining on her contract for contract termination.

Now, to me, those are wonderful benefits. I think it is extremely generous. And what I expect a person so well compensated to do is to manage the district costs like a CEO, because she is currently paid higher than the Governor of Ohio.

But already, the indications are that she will provide a “business as usual” approach. On her first meeting as a superintendent, was the meeting where the school board voted to go for yet another school levy this November. So why?

The problem is, Mantia like all the other superintendents come from a teaching background and seem to be sympathetic to the union. In Ohio, because by law every teacher must be in a union and as a teacher Mantia was a union member, and she will not choose to take a hard-line against union demands, because it is because of those union demands in the past that she is able to receive the tremendous benefits she has received at Lakota. This is the big difference between superintendents and CEO’s. Mantia is a functionary and not making hard decisions about labor costs and management of them. Her primary function is that of a politician, not a cost reducer. Her job is to secure more revenue from the community, and make cosmetic cuts to convince the tax payers that they are doing everything to reduce costs, when in reality she is protecting the integrity of the union contracts which just continue to grow without any mechanism at reduction, which is needed.

If a superintendent could promise the community that the revenue needed by the district could decrease year after year, and at a certain point when we realize that we’ve minimized staff, wages, and contracts to a level that actually jeopardizes an excellent school, it is only then that any tax increase should be explored. But with education currently it is perceived that every year an education budget will increase and that just isn’t going to work as a long-term sustainable model. That is the reason why there is so much fuss about what Mantia makes as far as compensation. The education industry sells the superintendent position as a CEO, and in comparison to other CEO’s she holds a “lame duck, powerless” position that is carefully regulated by union contracts. It would be the CEO’s job to operate the corporation at a profit, which would be met with an increase in sales, and a decrease in costs. With a school superintendent, they are regulated to only dealing with 20% of the costs that are not covered by a union contract which means they cannot control their costs, and can only ask for more revenue in the form of taxes to cover the disparity. That is why such high compensation for administrators in education positions are considered too high, and why Lakota should have looked for a superintendent that was much, much cheaper.

It is decisions like those made in acquiring a new superintendent at Lakota that drive up the cost of education for everyone, and display vividly for all to see where the real problems truly are.

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

The Worth of Warren Buffett’s Opinion: Looters demand more taxes!

About a decade ago, I was in a wedding party for my brother and we were dining at the Grand Finale in Glendale when he gave me my gift for being in the wedding party. It was a book by Warren Buffett, a man my brother greatly admired, so while the conversation of the evening drifted from tales of marriage and hardship, I read the book at the table.

My thoughts about Buffett were that he was “lucky” to have become rich as an investor. Like many of his type, he became wealthy not by creating, but by a manner of deception, playing on the behavior patterns of the timid and foolish. This isn’t illegal and is a natural part of capitalism, where predators take advantage of those not as ruthless, cunning, or even greedy. The threat of these predators encourages the very good to become better in order to compete, and this is where ideas are born.

But people like Warren Buffett and George Soros did not gain wisdom from the creation of something new. They gained wisdom by dealing with fools and this is the net result of books like what Buffett has put out, and Soros. They gained their wealth by being bottom feeders. They did not earn their wealth the valid way, like a Bill Gates, by creating something from nothing. They simply capitalized on the mistakes of others in a quest for wealth pursuits. So if the goal is simply to “get rich” no matter the method, then the works of these types of “investors” is commendable.

Their wealth however does not make them experts in all things involved in money and value however. Buffett and Soros are not experts on the art of living, and advice from them must be taken in context. If one wishes to become rich by climbing over the backs of others with a sense of ruthlessness and cold-hearted rancor, then their advice should help the hungry investor. But if an advice seeker wishes to know more about the complexities of existence, then these characters will leave that seeker very hungry for more, because they do not understand themselves the nature of society.

When Buffett says that more taxes are needed, he is making the statement of a progressive, not a traditional American. So it is only natural that Buffett would want to continue to fund the social programs created by his fellow “progressives.” The feeding of taxes with the money of the people in American society is a reckless enterprise that if the goal of that society is to have a smaller government that is less intrusive, then of course fewer taxes will be needed to maintain that infrastructure.

If the goal however is to have a larger government well then of course more taxes are needed, so when Buffett and Obama speak about raising taxes, and that people of wealth like them are willing to pay, it must be considered what kind of men they truly are. They value money based exclusively on the merit of the dollar value in relation to other things. These progressive types mistakenly believe that their money has equal value to those who actually create something, and this is the reason they tend to dislike actual producers, like oil tycoons, and “big business” owners. They exhibit a jealousy toward their fellow wealth peers hoping that they can be seen as “equal” to those producers because deep in their hearts they know that their wealth was created by a measure of looting, where they took advantage of someone not quite smart enough to hang on to their money, and not by the benefit of invention.

This is why these types of people do not understand the value of what they are asking. Buffett might understand the value of stock prices, but he does not understand the value of the merit behind the company which holds the stock. He understands the nature of speculating the behavior of ownership and the way the public will perceive the actions of a company, but he does not understand the value of creation, obviously, otherwise he wouldn’t say such naïve concepts as blindly tossing tax money into the tax monster that is government.

Much of the corruption in government is due to the money that flows in it. The reason politicians will do anything, say whatever, and make any promise to get into public office is because they want to be in control of the money that comes to them in the form of taxes. Public union’s exist for one reason, and that is to gain control of the money which comes to the public worker. It is money which corrupts government and it is money that ruins the attempts of any country to maintain a reasonable, trustworthy republic. So when a progressive makes the statement that they support higher taxes, what they really are saying is that they wish to maintain the structure of corruption from which they have enriched themselves. For people like Warren Buffett, this is perfectly acceptable. But for people who want to see government become more trustworthy and for politicians to become more representative, cutting the amount of money that is tossed into that black hole of government consumption will make public office much less attractive to the thieves and miscreants who are currently attracted to public office.

To improve the quality of government, society must take away the incentive of those bottom feeders to migrate into public service, and the only way to do that is to take away the waste from which they flock to.

I closed the book at The Grand Finale and kept my opinion about Buffett to myself because the men at our table were all gushing over themselves regarding the achievements of Warren Buffett. The nature of Buffett and those like him are elusive to their minds, because in society, we are trained that the value of something is contained within a fixed dollar amount. So we are trained to believe that Buffett’s wealth gives him immediate value as a person of the mind, after all, he was smart enough to amass massive amounts of wealth, so he must know something important, and the men at my diner table were hungry to unveil that knowledge so that they too might achieve some measure of success, and take care of their own families with some wealth of their own.

As I sipped the remaining contents of my wine that night I knew that the real genius is not in the indulgence of a fool and the advantage taken from them, but it is in the restraint. For the way to truly build society is not always to indulge and roll about like pigs in a mud pit, but to refrain from the impulse to indulge with an eye on the greater good, even when that good appears to be bad to the pig wishing to roll in the urine and feces of it’s own kind to accumulate merit earned by decadence.

And that’s what I think of the opinions by Warren Buffett.

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

Blood Drunk Apoligists: The Lost Fools of Modernism

I was on 700 WLW with Matt Patrick on August 10, 2011 indulged in the topic of whether or not Bert and Ernie of Sesame Street are in fact homosexuals. However, on a more serious note, the topic of the day was school levies and whether or not they should be passed or declined as a way to force change. Prior to my appearance Matt had received many callers that proclaimed passing a school levy is the “patriotic, and caring” thing to do if one loves their community. I argue the opposite.

Channel 9 News always in my opinion, does a fantastic job of covering topics. Brendan Keefe’s I-Team stories are great benefits to our city in the hard reporting that he does. However, and this is the nature of television versus talk radio, there isn’t much time to get into the heart of a matter, because attention is spent on the visual appeal of the stories. In an attempt to bring balance to the story of why schools are failing all over the state, Channel 9 is sitting down with various superintendents all over Cincinnati to put a face to the requests for more money. Channel 9 sat down with the new Fairfield superintendent to explore the topic of why funding was needed for his district.

As seen in that interview, the direction of the story took an emotional turn. It was never asked, why is Fairfield unable to balance its budget based on the current tax supply. It is often discussed that federal money is declining, and state money is also on a downward trend, especially in affluent school districts. So it is only natural that financial expectations must be scaled back, but that is not what’s happening.

I had an argument with family members and friends about a year ago, who are functioning along the same assumption as the school superintendents, the reporters, the teachers, the unions, the radical protestors in London, school board members, parents, protests in Greece and everywhere else, that the world will always continue on as they always believed it would, like their own educations ensured them of a continuity in social existence that was as solid as concrete. The foundations of everything they have been taught since childhood is at stake because their beliefs are failing!

One person who considers themselves “worldly” said to me, “manufacturing jobs are leaving America. That’s a fact. America has to serve “high tech” interests. We have to get used to the fact that our role is changing. We must start saving for our children’s college now, so they can compete in that marketplace!” His utterances were straight out of the union playbook. The talking points are the same everywhere, and predictable.

“But how can you save for something that the cost is raising at an insanely dramatic rate? Is college worth 50K per year? Should 4 years of college cost 200K? Should kids go into debt to go to college? Should public education that is preparing all these kids for college charge 9 to 10K per pupil to educate? Does public education need a teacher with a master’s degree to teach 1st, 2nd, or 3rd, grade? Can public education afford to pay all their teachers over 50K per year?

At this point in the conversation fury builds in the eyes of the apologists, for they do not have answers to these questions. In fact, they find themselves caught in their own dreamlike haze. “Without college a kid has no chance! If you don’t have a degree, you are doomed these days!”

“That’s what you’ve been told,” I’ll reply. “But businesses are learning the hard lesson, which over the past 20 years that a college educated person does not guarantee them a job ready employee. In fact, many young people are proving to not be mature enough to handle the rigors of life until their 30’s these days, and it is costing companies billions of dollars in lost productivity each year, to deal with the learning curve of these immature college graduates who lack common sense, because it has been “taught out of them,” during the education process.

I have a name for these types of people, the ones who argue the obvious; I call them “Blood Drunk Apologists.” The trouble with these types is that they have drunk the blood (metaphorically speaking) of left-wing education concepts and are under the spell of a social order designed to be everything to everybody. They started drinking this blood in their own education process so it is difficult for them to see the truth of the situation now as adults. They are under a kind of voodoo-like spell that prevents them from seeing the truth even when it is right in front of them, because they have built their entire lives around a preconceived notion regarding social structure.

I’ve always questioned education and the methods. When I was a younger guy I wanted to be an archeologist or an anthologist because my interests were in the “big picture” studies of civilization. But I was also interested in politics. I was also interested in other sciences. I was also interested in fiction and literature. I was also interested in fast cars. I was also interested in adventure and danger, and like I mentioned before I looked for jobs in my teens that allowed me to explore all those things at the same time. I read a lot, and it was in those books and the studies of civilization that I was insulated from the spell that was cast on the world around me. While I was reading heavily, the person who was arguing with me about the current state of education was walking around with his pants down around his ankles being paddled by his fraternity brothers in college. Others who have argued with me about this topic were stepping off a bus in boot camp and having their heads shaved and forced to do push-ups each time they answered a question wrong to their drill sergeant. These soldiers signed up for the military so they could qualify for the GI Bill, which would help them go to college, so they could grow up and get a good job!.

There are a lot of ways that people arrive at the pain of adulthood, where at some point they drink the blood of orthodoxy. It is usually brought about by pain, where the instigator of the pain is also the one who provides the relief from the pain, making the victim falsely trust their antagonist. By drinking the blood, they find the pain of life is eased.

Proudly I have advocated to those I care about that such a life of blood drinking is unnecessary, even foolish. Because all one has to do is study history, even passively to see the course of where their actions will take them. And this whole education situation is a major crisis in our country. Education is not the end all-fix all for society building. We have a whole culture of lost souls roaming around like they are under a voodoo daze, unable to think critically. And even if education did work well, it is simply too expensive. Cost controls must be put in place to reign in the out-of-control costs, because even if people determine for themselves that they do want to go to college, and do want to maintain the current direction of public education, the cost increases of 5% to 10% every year cannot continue. There isn’t money to pay for the financial expectations of education even if we taxed our citizens at 100% of their entire incomes, at some point; our society will hit that wall. Because only a very rich society can afford luxuries, and a society cannot be rich if everyone is going to school. Some people have to actually be in the trenches fighting to make something that can be sold to someone else for a profit, that’s the only way wealth is “created.”

Civilizations who forget that facts point to a right and wrong answer and pretentious arrogance that causes critical blindness find themselves extinct, and the face of the earth is a chronicle of such failures. Some of those societies fell so hard they aren’t even in our written records, but all had empires that were vast and complicated, only to be crushed by their own arrogance, because they were under the spell of the blood they had drunk all in the name of social comfort.

Debates such as this current one over education are as old as time itself on a social wheel that has spun repeated time and time again like the scratch on a turntable record. And the current direction is as predictable as a movie we’ve all seen the end of, and those who have drunk the blood and use it as sustenance are foolish enough to believe that somehow the ending of the movie will end differently because they are the current players. Such is the effect of the voodoo spell of Blood Drinking Apologists and their Ignorance of Doom.

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

SEIU Visits John Boehner’s Office: GIVE ME A JOB, or I’ll cry!

Tea Party Terrorists! That was one of the many signs outside of John Boehner’s West Chester office on August 9, 2011. A group of protestors had gathered to demand jobs from the House Speaker and the organizer of this illustrious event which involved kicking the doors to the office requiring the doors to locked by the staff, was none other than Gabe Kramer from the Service Employees International Union, otherwise known as SEIU.

Gabe is the Chief of Staff of Operations and Administration for SEIU District 1199 representing West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio and was the point person for this event which I think is an excellent example of everything that is wrong with our nation. I don’t mean to pick on poor Gabe, I’m sure he’s a nice guy if one were to sit down and have a beer with a guy like that. I’m sure he emits many noticeable, human qualities that are quite admirable. But proving to be a philosophic fool on completely the wrong ideological path is no excuse for intentionally attempting to mislead people into a thought process which is destructive to American Culture. And that is what Gabe and his little army of lost souls is guilty of.

It is not hard to gather up a multitude of the very lazy, the uneducated, the pompously altruistic, the unemployed, those who are afraid to compete in the world marketplace to rally behind a cause like those SEIU hosts. SEIU uses shock, and the force of mass to influence legislation, and have done so for many, many years. But the foundation of everything those “types” of people believe is flawed.

Rather than go into all the ways that SEIU is a communist organization following religiously the Ten Planks of Communism as established in the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx, the followers of SEIU, even if they are only a member and unaware of the basic philosophy because they are simply interested in their own personal incomes, the fundamental error is in their lack of understanding of how economics work. The roots of their entire philosophy rest in loose soil with no foundation but feelings. That is why they fail and everyone who follows them is doomed. History proves it.

Where I should have been angry that SEIU was in my home district, on soil that is sacred because it’s in my home land, I couldn’t help but laugh, for the comedy displayed at that event belonged on Comedy Central with full intention to make people laugh, which is until it is realized that these protestors are serious. They actually believe the things they say!

When the protestors demand jobs of Speaker Boehner what are they asking for? Do they really believe that John Boehner can pluck jobs from the “job” tree and pass them out like candy on Halloween, because that is the implication of their utterances? Do these same capitalist malcontents believe that it is the Tea Party that prevents them from getting a job? Apparently, they do! They believe that government creates jobs and gives them out, and that it is John Boehner’s job to “give” them a job…………………………….I’m serious!

The fact that so many people in the Republic of the United States believe this is evidence that our public education system has completely failed, because too many grown adults have no idea how their government, or their country work. Between my laughter at the protesters of this event, I have to admit a tinge of pity for these poor people. It must be terrible to see the world with such narrow vision, through the spectrum of naivety and ignorance. To be so terribly uneducated and foolish that the truth of the matter might as well reside in a whole different solar system from the one we all live in.

My wife and I were discussing this issue on the other day, at how small the world to such people must actually feel. My wife reads a three hundred page novel every two and a half days. It takes me about a half week to a week depending on my obligations. Our hobby together is to read. We read, and read, and read! In my books I have seen the rise and fall of civilizations and religions hundreds of times. And I am grateful for that knowledge, because it is easy to see through such thinly veiled smoke screens like those people like Gabe Kramer proclaim. Only an empty mind waiting for someone else to fill it with ideas is prone to follow blindly to an office like John Boehner’s and be foolish enough to stand with a sign and proclaim to the world that they are but children repeating what some bully have instructed them to believe. After the laughter at the audacious ignorance of the event, I felt pity for all those empty minds that have never discovered the joy of obtaining knowledge, who are so quick to grab a sign and follow somebody like Gabe into a fruitless battle pursuing the ideas of a poverty-stricken, promiscuous fool like Karl Marx who has infected the world with some of the most destructive philosophy mankind has ever entertained, and this includes the corrupt emperors of the world like Nero, and Gangus Kahn!

It is the mushy minded who are attracted to these communist ideas of Marx. Those girls of PITA who will stand naked in a public place to protest those cute little animals being killed because the girls themselves are only a few years grown away from their stuffed animals they slept with in their beds. But now that they have the bodies of women, somehow they have merit to their voice, as if their bare breasts and naked buttocks contained years of experience and intelligence. The radicals of SEIU or the teachers unions are no different from the radical behavior of those young naked women, they resort to emotion and sign stimuli to influence cultural policy, and that’s all those poor, empty citizens were doing at the Speaker’s office. They have no idea where jobs come from unless some politician passes out a new branch of government to buy votes, but the creation process does not come from government. They simply use the money that was created by others to create the job. It was not the government who created the job. It was the tax payer. And that is why government has grown to be too big now, because government was irresponsible, because it listened to the mindless fools of organizations like SEIU where they should have ignored them.

This fault is an innate reaction. Most of us are mature enough to become parents and know how embarrassing it is to take a child to the store only to have that child scream and cry when they want something, like a toy, at the store. If the parents says no, and the child begins crying, it is tempting to just give in to the child to save yourself from the embarrassment the children draw to the parent with the noise they make. The squeaky-wheel-gets-the-grease syndrome is what that is. The parent is in control, has all the resources, the only thing the child has in its favor is the ability to draw attention to itself with loud noise. A bad parent will tend to give in to the child and will allow that child to grow up spoiled. A good parent will withstand the embarrassment for the child’s own good, and will not buckle under the pressure. Communism as outlined in the SEIU handbook, The Communist Manifesto teaches grown-ups to be like children, to yell and scream for things till they are given “something” by government. And the unfortunate circumstances of our age are that the politicians have been like the weak parents, all too quick to appease the children.

And that’s what I saw outside of office of John Boehner, is a bunch of children screaming for candy from a parent busy with other things, “adult stuff” and bewildered by the ungratefulness of those children. So while the behavior of the SEIU children was humorous from a distance, the behavior itself is pathetic. The fact that SEIU believes these screaming rants actually work is because it has in the past. They have used such behavior to harass our public officials and business community for a long time to the will of small, immature minds without any sense of how things work in the real world. With all the tools of modern society at their disposal, they still insist on being small-minded little children motivated to scream and cry for food to drop into their mouths, instead of taking advantage of the freedoms they enjoy and earning for themselves limitless opportunity in a capitalist republic under attack by cancerous, socialist peons from a declining European landscape that left to its own devices would still be rolling around in the Dark Ages.

People like Gabe Kramer would be more at home in 1112 AD outside a European palace with a soiled robe, burning a torch crying for the benefits of the Roman Empire to the political nobility, and wondering why Rome as a power went away, because he is just as clueless in 2011 when he cries for a job that it’s his job to create, and certainly not the job of John Boehner.

 

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

The Symposium of Justice: The gamble of Rich Hoffman

If it is once again one against forty-eight, then I am very sorry for the forty-eight.
Margaret Thatcher (b. 1925), British Conservative politician, prime minister. Quoted in: Daily Telegraph (London, 25 Oct. 1989), referring to the 1989 Commonwealth Conference.

That quote from Margaret Thatcher accurately sums up my reasons for putting out the book, The Symposium of Justice back in 2004. Recently at the Annie Oakley Wild West Showcase in Greenville, Ohio many of my friends from there had been talking about my 2004 book and how prophetic it now seemed in 2011, and it took me on a journey down memory lane about the content of that artistic work. As I ate Chinese food from a fairground vender my wife and I had a discussion about just how crazy many of the things I wrote about in The Symposium were at the time of its publication, and ironically how true many of those things had become in a world that is clearly headed in the direction of events written about in The Symposium of Justice.

My publisher back then was against the entire book. There were many arguments about content, which resulted in a rushed publication date. The editor who was working from an office in Paris quit altogether leaving the entire editing process to my wife, who can read and edit basically, but she wasn’t a professional editor but she stepped in to meet our deadlines. The conflict basically went like this, “Mr. Hoffman, what are you thinking? You open the book with the attempted rape of a young girl by a disgusting pedophile. You have old women who are terribly rude dissected by some future race of aliens thousands of years in the future. You go off on some tangent where there is a dragon slayer hunting dragons! Then you have a group of rebels launching an attack on Washington D.C. with flying cars! ARE YOU CRAZY! You’ll get no positive reviews within the United States. No paper will provide an endorsement. No TV station will touch this material. I mean you’re main plot point is that you have this vigilante running around in the night like some kind of Batman character using bullwhips to punish criminals, and trying to free society from a mind control device that is emitted in radio waves which affect the brain and make people do things they wouldn’t otherwise do! Mr. Hoffman, we advise you to rewrite this material, to stick with the primary storyline of the vigilante and expand on that character arch. You need to make this novel much more contemporary (progressive). As it is now, it belongs in a dime store saloon in Nevada, 1890. This type of pulp literature won’t even resonate with young people in the comic book market! The main character, this CLIFFHANGER/Fletcher Finnegan has absolutely no weaknesses. He seems to be a superman able to fight off thousands of enemies all by himself! Where is the conflict in that? What is he afraid of? Even Superman had Kryptonite which gave him human appeal. Your character is the perfect man, and there are no perfect men, so how can the audience relate?”

I remember that conversation so well because I was standing on the phone in the middle of Comp USA at the time buying a new computer and the French editor, exasperated with me put her boss on the line, another French guy who spoke good English, but definitely had a French accent as he spoke, every word had a kind of accentuated thrust at the beginning of each sentence. My publisher at the time was a Canadian company. Being my first book, I couldn’t get the big New York publishers interested, so I turned to Victoria, Canada, capital of British Columbia to a publisher who would carry the title if I put up the upfront cost of publishing, which I did. My editor and company contact however was in the Paris, France office which is why they even took the time to speak to me, because I was paying them upfront. That company was purchased by an American firm a few years ago and they are now located outside of Indianapolis, Indiana, and they still carry the title only under different ownership. But even under those conditions, the publisher of my book had serious concerns. They hadn’t seen anything like it and weren’t sure what to do about bringing it to the market place.

In duress prior to a rewrite my wife and I took a trip to Niagara Falls and stayed at the Marriott Fallsview Hotel and Spa to get away from our normal environment for the weekend and talk about what to do about the book. We went to Canada because the publisher was in Canada and I wanted to put my mind in a unique setting so I could think clearly on the issue, and Clifton Hill like Gatlinburg and International Street in Orlando, Florida is a hotbed of commercialism, audaciousness, and imagination. Walking around the commercial districts targeting an international audience which seemed appropriate since The Symposium of Justice was an international publishing effort my wife told me, “It’s your book, your vision. I think it’s great. It’s our story, it’s about our struggles. It’s your autobiography, your heart, your soul. If you want to change it to match the publisher recommendations it’s your call. It’s also your writing career.”

I remember looking at the Ripley’s Believe It or Not exhibit as she said this and thinking what a monstrosity of commercialism it was. “If I stick with it, my writing career may be a short one.”

She looked at me, the blinking neon lights of Clifton Hill glittering in the slight chill of an October, Canadian evening and said, “it was you who ran around in the night with your whips trying to catch that rapist and protect your family, it was your family the police targeted because you wanted to expose that drug trade they were covering up, it was you who worked that second job as a cook to make up the financial difference of what we needed as a family, so you could spy on the local teenagers and find out who the dealers were, it was you who have spent nearly two decades reading mythology and philosophy in your “spare” time. If you want to listen to some French chick that’s about five years older than your own kids, just so you can sell more copies of the book, then do it. It’s your writing career. But think about what you admire, the artists you’ve enjoyed who society sometimes takes a century or even more to appreciate because the writer is so far out ahead of the rest of the world. The ideas you stick by in this book will follow you all your life and then some.”

We returned from that trip and I had decided to throw all the dice out there and keep the book pretty much the way I had written it.
________________________________________________________

Chapter 1: Scarface the Rapist: A convict is released from jail and encouraged by law enforcement to harass the pubic with fear by raping a young girl, so the public would support more law enforcement. The rape is interrupted by a vigilante named Cliffhanger who beats the rapist to near death with two bullwhips leaving the community split on how they feel about it. Cliffhanger gives the young girl a manifesto called “The Symposium of Justice” to be published in the local newspaper which includes Cliffhanger’s Ten Rules for living, and numerous stories written by Cliffhanger to make the argument publicly on the merits of the vigilante versus the rule of law.

Chapter 2: Stereotypical Reality: is the story published in the town paper of two vain women who are contemplating why they should live forever. One of the women is extremely wealthy and is considering a new technology called cryogenics, to freeze her body upon death to be awaked at some future time when technology can revive her. This woman realizing that she is virtually immortal becomes audaciously arrogant and rude to other people as the natural wisdom of age is interfered with the illusion that death is not on her horizon, so she reverts to a teenage mindset. When the public has had too much of her rudeness she is killed and revived in the distant future to find an alien race has found her body and is using it to perform genetic engineering to build slaves for themselves.

Chapter 3: The Veil Master: The mayor of the town hires an assassin to kill Cliffhanger for interfering with his plans with the rapist. The assassin is an arm of “The System” a progressive global group of which the mayor is attempting to climb in political power. The mayor reveals that the entire town is under a scientific experiment he is developing for “The System” which emits a radio wave that directly affects the pituitary gland in the human brain and makes citizens behave impulsively in ways they can control. The mayor explains to the assassin that if the results of his town are positive, then “The System” will be able to employee the same “mind controlling” methods all over the world.

Chapter 4: The Perilous Bed: Another story published in the town paper which Cliffhanger introduces his Ten Rules for Living to the community, hoping to fight off the mind control methods of “The System.” It’s about a young knight who wants to marry the daughter of a much respected noble. He thinks that by cutting off the head of a dragon, it will earn him the right to ask the noble for permission. The noble turns the dragon head offering down, but invites the kid to attempt to stay on a magical bed, in a magical room that will hurl three perilous tests at the young man. If the kid survives, he earns the right to ask the nobles daughter to marry him. (This was a story intended for my son-in-law which he understood)

Chapter 5: The Overman: A grill cook, the fastest man around who is mysteriously wealthy and married to the much respected town council woman Misty Finnegan, works with the local teenagers at a popular restaurant in town. Fletcher Finnegan has frequent duels with the local teenagers who respect the older man very much, but consider his thoughts “out dated” for the times. Fletcher seems to be particularly interested in a young girl who works at the restaurant as a cashier, who is the older sister to the little girl who suffered the rape attempt. The cashier is currently dating a kid who also works at the popular restaurant called, Republics. That kid is a known drug dealer and argues often with Fletcher Finnegan about morality.

Chapter 6: Return of the Flying Tigers: Another story published in the local paper to justify the vigilantism of Cliffhanger. America is in a civil war. The coastal regions have turned against the interior of the nation. A group of video game freedom fighters are recruited by an old man to lead a rag-tag offensive against the nations forces stationed over Washington D.C. Using M400 Skycars, the old man hopes to have a tactical advantage over the best defense the military has in scoring a psychological battle for the resistance by bombing the air craft carriers stationed at Annapolis Military Academy.

Chapter 7: Fran Calls: A follow-up story in the newspaper is about Hurricane Fran when it hit Chapel Hill, North Carolina and a group of tree trimmers head to the region to help with the clean-up and get rich over the insurance claims. As the work dries up, fights break out among the workers that could lead to death as everyone fights for the remaining money left as civilization returns to the region in the wake of the disaster.

Chapter 8: The Veil of Knowledge: The town mayor takes the assassin and the assassin’s personal army of specialized killers to the location of the mind control device, which is hidden in a water tower just outside of town. They are all given medallions which absorb the invisible radio waves leaving them immune to the effects of the powerful impulses. A plan is set to capture and kill Cliffhanger brutally by setting a trap.

Chapter 9: Tabernacles of Joyless Lust: A newspaper story about a real-estate agent trying to repair a deal gone bad. The agent is in an affair with her boss who is using the relationship against the woman plunging her into a law suit against her clients whom she is particularly fond of.

Chapter 10: River Dual: The mayor and his assassins raid the riverside home of a local gunsmith for two reasons. They want to make an example of the man for his support of firearms, and they hope to lure Cliffhanger out into the light of day for an epic battle which is exactly what happens. The mayor and all his assassins, except for the primary one, are killed in the battle. The primary barely escapes with his life.

Chapter 11: The Other Side of the Fence: The last newspaper story to be seen by the public, a young divorcee has found herself in the arms of a very abusive man. The man appeared to be everything a young woman dreams of until she leaves her husband and lets the new man move in. Once the man is in her home she finds he’s not what he advertised, and is now in fear of the man not only for herself but her young child.

Chapter 12: Salad Bar Goddess: The assassin is sent to an upscale restaurant near the town where his career took a nose dive. This “hit” given to him by “The System” is a chance at redemption for his failure at the river. His target is the outspoken Fletcher Finnegan who has been all over the newspapers and television recently speaking out against the policies of “The System.” The assassin’s job is to locate the man, kill him in a highly public place in front of his family, and send the subtle message to the town that resistance is futile. At the restaurant where Finnegan is reported to be at, the assassin sees the most beautiful woman he’s ever seen at the salad bar. He recognizes the woman as Misty Finnegan, whom he remembered the slain mayor had been trying to get into his bed, and was denied much to his frustration. The assassin is then shocked to find that the woman is strangely unconcerned about his presence as she returns to her table where her small children are eating with her husband, making eye contact with the assassin several times with pity on her face. Then the assassin makes eye contact with her husband and discovers it is he who is the target of his assassination. It is Fletcher Finnegan himself, and he is aware of the assassin’s presence also, as he stares him down from across the room. The assassin looking into the eyes of Finnegan is startled to see absolutely no fear there, which is an emotion he is not prepared for. He had never met a man without any fear behind his eyes of any kind. It was at that moment that the assassin had seen that same look in the eyes of Cliffhanger, and that the two men were one in the same.

The assassin is filled with envy, at the direction of his sad and pathetic life. He suddenly realizes that his entire life has been nothing more than slavery to “The System.” He is jealous of Finnegan for being enough of a man to be able to have a woman like Misty Finnegan, because such a woman could have her pick of any man. And she didn’t pick Finnegan because of money, prestige, or any level of power. She picked him because he was good. And no woman of any worth would ever want the assassin for anything other than being a thug, a brute, a mere puppet to his masters.

The assassin realizes that if he wanted to do one good thing in his life, he’d let Fletcher and his family live, because he was on the wrong side, clearly. He nods to Fletcher and proceeds to leave the restaurant where he throws himself in front of a truck on a highway to commit suicide. The assassin knows that “The System” will hunt him for not completing the contract so he’ll be killed eventually anyway. At least this way, he can do it on his terms.

———————————————-

I remember when the Pulse Journal came to my house to do an interview about my book when it came out in the spring of 2004. He wanted to talk about my whips but wasn’t sure how to make such depressing topics appealing in a newspaper article to the general population. I had the same trouble at book stores and other media events, where the focus of the story was on my use of bullwhips, but nobody wanted to touch the content of the story, rape, murder, civil war, mind control, drug trafficking, spies, global conspiracies, it was just too much for the general public to accept, and the media was lost in how to cover it.

The book was obviously extremely anti-progressive, which was well before anybody was talking about what a progressive was. It sold to my friends in the Western Arts community who bought it because the hero had a whip and it reminded them of Zorro, but they were uneasy with the heavy political overtones and scientific basis behind the mind control plot, as were many people who weren’t prepared to deal with such things.

I reminded them that the old Republic serial called Zorro’s Fighting Legion had a similar story line. It was over the top stuff and fun, but it also taught kids valuable lessons about fighting for what they believed in. But as many of them told me then, society has “outgrown that kind of entertainment.”

It took me a while to get over some of the self-criticism I had about the book because every aspect of it was uphill. But as my wife had told me, “why are you writing this? Is it to become wealthy, is it to have a career as a writer, or is it to create a work of art that will stand the test of time?” I picked the later.

It has been only recently where people who have bought it have made excited comparisons to Atlas Shrugged and other kinds of art work that has direct appeal to those in the Tea Party movement. Well, I didn’t even know about Atlas Shrugged when I wrote Symposium. I wrote Symposium based on observations I had been making about the direction of the world, and I wanted to put those observations into a format of “pulp fiction” that people understood and could relate with to articulate that message.

A cowboy friend of mine approached me at The Annie Oakley Festival last weekend and told me, “I thought you were a little off the deep end when I read that book 7 years ago, but you know what, it don’t seem so crazy now.”

I smiled at the guy. “Who would have ever thought?” He was there when I did book signings of that book all those years ago and the public bought it because they saw me performing and wanted something of mine to take home to their friends with my signature in it. Most people didn’t understand the book at all, and told me as much the following year. But the people who did were people many would consider “conspiracy theorists.” I had people travel the length of the country to meet me the following year just to shake my hand because my book, “spoke to them.” But in talking with these people, it was obvious they were the social extremists out there and while I appreciated their support, I was frustrated that the general population just didn’t get it.

At a film festival a few years ago Gery Deer laughed at the small line of people who seemed to follow me everywhere I went, he’d call them “Hoffman’s radical groupies.” He knew the obsessive type; they were similar to those who frequent Star Trek Conventions, and Star Wars events. Only these were “conspiracy theory nerds” and they would line up to have their picture taken with me.

“I feel like an idiot posing for pictures with these guys,” I’d say to Gery.

“Hey, they’re fans. Be happy you have them. Some artists work their whole life to get one fan that will drive across the country to have their picture taken with them.” He’d pat me on the back. “You have a nice little handful.”

My wife would sit back and smile, knowing that those types of activities were something I didn’t enjoy doing. “I didn’t want to appeal to just the radical fringe,” I’d say to her.

At the hotel in Cleveland, at a film festival where I won a screenwriting award for a different project, but had been receiving a lot of comments about The Symposium she said to me at the pool while I was swimming, “Do you remember the homeless guy in the movie Always, who Richard Dreyfuss as a ghost was talking through. The homeless guy was one of those guys who just saw too much, and was close to the edge of death, so close that he could see beyond his surroundings. You’re like that only you have learned to function in the world like a normal human being. Many of these people haven’t learned to do that. They see TOO much, so they seem crazy to the rest of the world that is really just half asleep. That is the pain of being too awake, is that you run the risk of having your brain fried.”

She was right, and this comment went back to the one that started it all back in Niagara Falls, that time and perception would catch up if I let it. The important thing was to put it down on paper and let the art speak for itself.

This is fresh on my mind now, because more and more people are thanking me for writing The Symposium of Justice and even though I have put that book on the shelf and am moving on to new projects, it gives me great pleasure to know that it is touching people’s lives. So to those of you who wanted to know the story of how that book came to be, and why I don’t talk about it much, it’s because for one, I think it’s cheesy when involved in high-profile cases like I am, to always be pimping a book. That book for me is something that has meaning beyond these current years, so it’s not important to me to have my ego massaged with a boost in sales. It’s more important to deal with the issues of the day, which currently is protecting S.B.5 and fighting school levies which are obvious crimes against the tax payers. But the creative side of me does enjoy knowing that people are touched by something that was extremely difficult, and controversial to create, that fell short of my quality standards because of the circumstances under which it was produced, but the heart of the project remained uniquely in place because I had angered everyone involved in publishing and marketing to bring to being something that was WAY out in front of the political curb.

And for that I’m very proud. When you take on an endeavor where you are outnumbered by a lot, and you stick to your guns because you know in your heart that you are right, it feels wonderful to have that weight lifted off your shoulders as the times prove that the numbers against you were wrong, as usual.

CLICK HERE TO SEE THE SYMPOSIUM OF JUSTICE AT AMAZON.COM:

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

VOTE YES ON SENATE BILL 5: If you don’t the results will be your fault

There is a strong desire among many who support Senate Bill 5, to meet those opposed to S.B.5 squarely on the battlefield, which means going behind them on their door to door campaign and telling voters to vote “Yes” instead of “No” which those opposed are advocating. The intent of course is to harass the harasser, to fight back! To be just as creepy, deceitful, manipulative, scandalous, thoughtless, egocentric, yet altruistic all the same, as those who chant, swarm, lobby, and intimidate their opposition to S.B.5 in favor of a spoils system which has enriched them.

The desire to fight back is strong from many who realize that we’ve been scammed for years by public sector unions. The greed of these public union organizations is grossly evident to those of us who dare to look, and many feel that they have been openly robbed, and want to lash out in the same fashion that one might wish to lash out at a thief who had stolen our money in a back alley.

I would say to those people to not wear yourselves out chasing after those harassers. Do not attempt to run into the hiding places that those thieves reside in. Do not play their game their way. Play the game the way we dictate on ground they cannot defend, ground based on the truth. Rip away their hiding places all together and shine light where it has not shown for generations, for the truth will do this to the con artists who are in hiding. It is they who have something to hide from. Playing the game the way they dictate is only an advantage to those who are guilty and must hide themselves behind illusions of good-will to protect the greed evident in their actions. Does anybody really believe Diana Frey acted alone, and is the only case of robbery going on in public sector unions?

The battle to save Senate Bill 5 is a battle for the heart of America. It is nothing less than that. Those opposed to Senate Bill 5 are clearly against the kind of America I want to live in which is one where taxes are lower, government is smaller, and localities have more control over their lives. Opponents believe that they can use a flash mob like behavior to inundate the voting population in mass, getting their message across. It is this behavior that has worked for them in the past, and has placed their wages about 30% above the tax payers who pay their salaries.

In 2008 the teachers of Lakota, the school district I pay my taxes in, threatened to go on strike which is one of the issues that Senate Bill 5 addresses. The threat of that strike is a direct result of the current crises of that district asking for more money from the tax payers. In fact, the same behavior has went on in Ohio for years and is why over 50% of all school districts in Southern Ohio are going to the tax payers for more money in November. In fact, Mt. Healthy, a district to the southwest of Lakota had their levy turned down on Tuesday and by Wednesday morning had made the announcement that they were going back to voters just 3 months later with another request. That’s ridiculous!!!! In Lakota the average teacher makes over 60K per year. Lakota is a district that resides within West Chester, Ohio which was number 33 out of the top 100 of CNN’s best places to live in the country.

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/bplive/2010/snapshots/CS3978246.html

The AVERAGE median family income in West Chester is $97,971 per year and is considered one of the most affluent districts in all of Ohio. That means in a two income household, which is most homes, the average rate of pay is 49K per year. Yet because of the union extortion which has taken advantage of the good will of the community, they have negotiated wages that far exceed the average in an affluent community! In fact, the average rate of pay for a teacher in Ohio is 55K per year! That makes teachers one of the highest paying professions, yet they are completely supported by the tax payer. One good teacher or one bad teacher they all get paid the same, and a district with a lot of employees will naturally find their payrolls bursting with excessive expectations which leave those districts one option, to go to the tax payers with higher taxes to pay for the union greed.

Many people are angry with the school boards for not regulating these costs, but as many school board members will tell you, and I know many of them all over the state, their hands are tied by state revised code, much of it created under pressure from a union lobby, and they can’t do much to control their costs. That’s why people who want to get control of these costs support Senate Bill 5. That’s also why people who want to continue to take advantage of the tax payer and the chaos of an out-of control system want to say NO to Senate Bill 5. Because they want to continue to plunder the public for everything they can, it’s that simple.

These same influences are what keep the debt ceiling issue from being solved on a federal level. There are just too many hands taking too much out of the cookie jar. The public has to make too many cookies to feed everyone, and that’s not fair to the people making the cookies.

The decision to keep Senate Bill 5 is a decision to do the right thing. It will be a personal choice made by common people. Not a bunch of thugs running around in flash mobs holding up signs to manipulate a lazy public, who spend most of their time watching Dancing with the Stars. The decision to save Ohio from financial ruin will fall on those who are intelligent enough to see where we are, and have the guts in the privacy of the voting booth to do the right thing.

I believe there are 2 to 3 million people in Ohio who are able to vote that understand the problem. And they will all have to show up and vote on Election Day, because those who benefit from the chaos of public sector unions number in the millions, and they won’t vote against themselves. They don’t have the courage for that. The YES vote can see through the tactics, the mob behavior of the unions, the mailings, the “feel good” commercials to the truth. Many of those public sector unions are just after our money and are no different from a Vegas casino. They advertise themselves very similar to a casino, with bright lights and feel good slogans such as “save the middle class,” yet their true intentions are to get you intoxicated so they can convince you to give them all your money.

Those of us who will vote YES, and I will be one of them, know that S.B.5 is the needed measure to save our state and country. Those who vote NO will be exclusively responsible for the chaos that follows, because the problems of the day will not go away.

When the school levies fail this fall all over Ohio, those schools will still need money to fulfill the financial obligations of their contracts to those unions. And the only way they can make payroll is to raise taxes on families who are already paying too much. And those tax requests will come every two years for the rest of your lives if you don’t put a stop to it right now. School boards must be given the ability to keep their districts within the budget the community sets for itself. Those budgets cannot be left to the control of union radicalism, because the end result is uncontrollable budgets which are what is happening everywhere.

Foreclosures on homes, on people’s dreams, are happening all over Ohio. People do not have the expendable income to have their taxes increased, so further increases in taxes are not an option. So we are on the precipice right now of a serious financial collapse. Senate Bill 5 is the only way out of this problem. It’s the only solution to a devastating problem. It’s state law right now, but voters will have to vote YES to keep it. Anyone who does not vote to keep it will be responsible for the misery that will follow.

The best way to fight this battle is to reach out to those voters who are intelligent, and can see the problem. They won’t be reached with rhetoric. The public unions already have the other type on their side, those who are overly emotional and don’t understand basic finance. Instead, we have to provide those who have intelligence and a mind to see it with the proper information because the truth is on the side of Senate Bill 5. And we have to trust the truth, and that there are enough people left who can understand the problem and have the courage to act on it.

The alternative won’t be pleasant, but if you vote YES, at least you won’t be a party to the misery that follows. Saying YES to S.B.5 is the only responsible choice!

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

Save us from Embarrassment: Mt. Healthy levy fails and like all government is asking for more

Doc Thompson covered the results of the debt ceiling increase on 700 WLW the same day that President Obama signed the bill which passed the house late in the night, the senate early in the morning and arrived on the president’s desk a half hour later.  While all this was going on Doc contemplated the winners and losers about a deal that essentially does nothing but allow the government to increase it’s debt to 16 trillion from the 14 trillion it is now, which amounts to a joke suitable for a comedy club. 

The same day the debt ceiling was increased voters went to the polls for local school districts asking for more money, Mt. Healthy being one, which went down to defeat. Before the ink was dry on the newspaper announcing the headline all over Cincinnati, Mt.Healthyadministration officials were declaring that they would try again in November of this year! 

This has left many of us scratching our heads, what don’t the Mt. Healthyofficials understand about the voters rejecting the levy?  Isn’t that a clear sign to the district that the residents have sent a clear message to cut their spending?  Yet the district like a bunch of mindless ants only know how to do one thing and that’s ask for more money. 

At Lakota we are getting ready to defend ourselves from yet another levy increase when it has been made clear that the residents do not want to increase their taxes.  It has been established that the source of the problem of all these school districts is that the teachers unions have taken way too much money from the community to pay their salaries which are extraordinarily high.  At Lakota the average teacher makes over 60K a year.  That’s the average! 

Nobody is asking teachers to make low amounts of money, but by any scale anything over 55 K per year is a good living, and a teacher should be happy with a reasonable living, especially if the tax payers are being required to pay for it off their property.  But the trouble is that the teachers unions force dues upon their teachers, and other costs are deducted from their paychecks without the teachers consent.  The NEA is taking money from its members to re-elect President Obama, and in Ohio the OEA is taking money away from teachers to help repeal S.B.5 this November.  So the real income of a teacher isn’t quite as high as their salary because they have these political deductions coming out against their will. 

More and more often I am getting notes like the one below from teachers who desperately want to see reform and they want out of their unions.  They want to see the school boards have the teeth to solve their financial problems and they don’t support the politics of their union, however, if they want to work as a teacher in the state of Ohio, they HAVE to be in the union.  And the unions continue to drive up the cost of education using their members as a shield and revenue stream to fulfill a political agenda which they place on the backs of the property owners. 

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  1.  I am a teacher, and I would give anything to not be a member of the union. I am so sick of them. They are hijacking children’s education and tying it up in endless bureaucracy, squabbling over funds that don’t exist. Unions served their purpose, but now federal labor laws have covered what rights the unions once fought to protect. Now my rights are being violated when I am forced to join (and pay, which is all they care about). It is a complete scam, a giant monopoly of power, and completely counterproductive in this period where transition to new models of education is key if we want our children to be competitive globally.

(Oh, AND SCRAP TENURE. Terrible system that stagnates positive growth.) I don’t want to secure my own job by throwing kids under the bus. If I’m not good enough, I should be fired, plain and simple. The idea of protecting yourself from hostile workplace politics is not enough of a pro to save that outdated concept.

Sara

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The trouble with schools and the trouble with the federal government are the same.  They are all built on a model of Keynesian economics which has turned out to be a scam, and the people who have supported this economic theory have egg on their faces.  They insist on more “revenue” which is just a fancy word for “taxes.”  More revenue, more TAXES is the only way the Keynesian economists which fill the rank and file labor union leaders and politicians with great abundance can save themselves from the embarrassment of financial failure. 

That’s what we’re dealing with here, it’s a complete failure of political and economic philosophy that has been tried, and has failed.  And it’s embarrassing.  That’s the sum of the entire situation. 

What tax payers at all levels are being asked to do is to save these people, who were taught and believe all the wrong things, the embarrassment of facing the music which they have played upon our culture.  By throwing money at these situations these advocates of higher taxes hope to delay the ramifications of their failure to a future time when maybe they won’t be present to accept the blame, where the burden will be transferred to some unfortunate public servant onto a generation that is still playing with toys and watching Nickelodeon on TV. 

To those of us who know better, who never believed the merits of Keynesian economics the answer is obvious.  Costs must be brought in line to live within the budget established by the community.  In the case of schools, it’s the wages that are inflated and encompass every teacher of a district and the union monopoly which have driven up those wages that are the problem.  The union middleman option is simply too costly to a district.  At the Federal level it’s the entitlement programs which were created to buy bloc voting sectors to gain political power that is causing all the trouble, and all these parties are now caught in the lie they have built their entire lives around, and it’s time for someone to face the music. 

When any school district or politician asks for more “revenue” what they are really asking is for you to bail them out of the embarrassment their own actions have created.  And they expect you to bail them out at your own expense.  How does that make any sense, when the proper thing to teach our young people is that if you make the wrong decisions in life, you must face the music and change direction?  Not look to others to bail you out of your trouble so your feelings won’t be hurt, because such a position is not only expensive, it’s detrimental to the human condition, which is evident in the ideological positions of all who want a tax increase.  

How out of touch are these people?  Listen to Harry Reed, majority leader of the Senate; ask if he can go home to care for his fig tree.  That’s the mentality we’re dealing with.

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

The Wisdom of Darryl Parks: What congress and the senate don’t want you to know

It was nice to see that Gabbie Gifford was able to make a vote on the house floor for the epic vote on raising the debt ceiling, but in the back of my mind there was something wrong with the timing and ceremony of the whole affair.  I didn’t want to admit it to myself, because I don’t want to believe that Congressman Gifford would participate in such a thing, but it seemed to me that Gifford’s return to the house was designed to take the edge off all the fighting that had been going on in congress about whether or not to raise the debt ceiling, and whether or not there would be “revenue” involved. 

Such a thought actually makes me feel bad, to question the honesty of congress.  I’m sure in her case she has probably wanted to come back for a while.  But it was her friends in the house who probably “encouraged” her to return for this big vote in order to show “unity” to the American people.  The games of politics are nasty and costly, but I think the treachery and manipulation that these people are capable of has been dramatically underestimated, and based on what I know now about their activities, I would not put it passed congress to attempt to use Gabby Gifford to help make the American people forget about how ugly business in government truly is.  When I think such things I wonder if I’m the only one who sees it, that is until I hear Darryl Parks talk on 700 WLW every Saturday morning from 9 AM to 11.  While all this government ugliness was unfolding over the weekend I was on my way to The Annie Oakley Festival and had the opportunity to listen to Darryl on my hour and a half trip to Darke County,Ohio. Darryl Parks thinks much the way I do about most things, so it was refreshing to hear him speak with incredible clarity about our nation’s problems as the summer sun began to heat up the day of that momentous broadcast.  I think this particular broadcast was so good, and so historic that it deserved over an hour of transition over to podcast for the convenience of those who haven’t heard it, or to be listened to again for those who did hear it and want to listen again.  So do yourself a favor and hit PLAY on the link below.  Grab a snack and sit back and listen with the clarity of hindsight, now that the crisis has been averted for the moment, and marvel at the wisdom of Darryl Parks. 

Politicians have been a joke for a number of years and culturally we have dismissed them as irrelevant aspects of our lives.  Seldom if ever whether it be a Looney Toons cartoon from the 30’s and 40’s, or a film, television show, or novel, is a politician portrayed in a trustworthy manner.  It is universally accepted that as a group, politicians are deceitful, life-sucking aspects of our society who have virtually no benefit to our culture.  They make rules that we all have to live by, and they make decisions that cost us money.  Yet we listen to the same speeches every election cycle and hope that somehow things will be different with the next politician.  Then we act surprised when we find out that politicians have enriched themselves greatly while working in public office.  This is the gist of what Darryl was talking about, how can a politician like Mitch McConnell get rich as a politician?  Or how does Barack Obama becomes a millionaire between the years of 2004 to 2008 while he was just another senator?  The answer is they are making deals, and benefiting from insider trading, many of the conditions they create legislation to help along, a practice that should be illegal, but isn’t because it is the law makers committing the crime who would have to create the law. 

Many politicians I believe start their public careers with good intentions, where they really want to help.  But the money and power available to them is just too lucrative and they quickly turn to corruption for that age-old pursuit of financial security.  There are always exceptions of course, but as a general rule in a governmental body that depends on majority rule, if a majority is corrupt, then the body itself is also corrupt, and that is the case with our general government.

I listened carefully to the complaints of politicians on both sides of the political spectrum as the debt ceiling issue came to a close.  They are grossly out of touch insisting on even more money to support a political system that is obviously full of thieves.  Those thieves don’t consider themselves looters of course, because they are the law.  They see themselves as citizens who deserve the highest respect for their service to their country, but by their actions they are simple thieves, seeking for themselves plunder at the expense of the people they represent no different from a pirate.

You can learn a lot by watching people under duress, and America learned a lot about its politicians as the debt crises unfolded.  The demand for more “revenue,” a term used to disguise the real meaning which is “taxes,” from the voting population as a way to manipulate the situation to their advantage from a public guilty of trusting them, rang out from many politicians like drug addicts crying for another hit of “speed.” 

The level of corruption and financial addiction has shocked even me, a long time big government skeptic. I did not know it was this bad, I simply suspected as much.  But the proof is there for all of us to see.  We have a big problem in America.  We have to rethink the whole political process and the kind of people we want to fill those seats. 

We know the enormity of the problem because the vote that just occurred over the debt ceiling increase amounts to nothing.  It solves no problems, it still allows government to spend more than it takes in, and the solution of these parasites is just to send more money to them to cover the gaps.  Yet there is praise among the thieves and much back slapping going on for all those law makers are proud of themselves and they cheered in unison when Gabby Gifford came to the chamber and changed the story in the media from a “combative congress finally passes a vote,” to “Congressman Gifford cast her first vote since her tragic accident.”  And the nation looked at the image of Mrs. Gifford waving her hand to the crowd, collectively all the fights of the last week dropped away from the memory of voters in favor of the more pleasant story of Gabby Gifford’s amazing recovery. 

While all this was going on the thieves took a deep breath of relief as the media attention focused on the recovering congressman and allowed them to scurry away to the cracks they all hide in to figure out some way to spin the situation to their advantage, and attack those darn “tea baggers,” “talk radio hosts,” and “TV personalities” who are telling the public all about the scam they have been employing for decades. 

Yet the whole structure is supported by the “revenue” that Americans give those thieves, so we are guilty of subsidizing criminal activity knowingly.  After this episode and the information available to the American public if they allow it to continue, they are guilty of a real crime, not one created by corrupt law making politicians, but one of the moral code of the human race, where we are supposed to treat each other fairly, and with honesty and not with the heart of a predator in favor of a life of respect and valor.  Because if that’s the case, then all those corrupt politicians are accurate representatives of the demons which reside inside each and every voter, which makes us all guilty in the eyes of the universe. 

Thank goodness people like Darryl Parks gets it…………what’s wrong with everyone else?

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