Tag: Hollywood insight

A Whip Trick To Save Lakota: The real reason behind the 2013 tax increase attempt

To state that Lakota, like most government schools these days, is operating as a deceptive enterprise built upon open manipulation of the taxpaying public and are dangerously malicious is not inaccurate.  Lakota has said recently that without levy approval in the fall of 2013, the distinct “will” decline.  Those are words from an Enquirer article featuring statements by Lakota Superintendent Karen Mantia who told the school board, “We have balanced our budget but now we’re at a baseline and that is not a good place to be.”  This prompted school board president Joan Powell to declare, “We are in danger of becoming a second-class district.”  Lakota and its administrators are pushing a 5.5 mill levy for the upcoming November 2013 ballot which will raise the taxes per $100,000 in evaluation by $192 based on the premise that they have cut, and cut, and cut till they can’t cut any more, and if they cut any more, every citizen in the district will suffer.  Well, the Lakota members of the administration who have said these things are guilty of deception, manipulation, and malicious action, because there is a very important factor that they did not reveal to the public in these levy talks which they did discuss in the same newspapers at the start of the 2013 year.  However the issue is a bit complex prompting me to explain the situation with one of my bullwhip economic videos.  Check it out.   I explain to Lakota what they should already know themselves.  I use a bullwhip to cut a soda can in half as a proper metaphor to what is in Lakota’s employment future.

The cost of the levy for the average property owner is quite excessive.  The figures I used in the above video were off the top of my head, which I refined further below.  Most homes in the Liberty Township/West Chester area are well over $200,000 each.  The tax increases on homes per year at $200,000 with voter approval of a new Lakota levy will be $384 per year.  At $300,000 a year, which is not at all uncommon, the taxes will be $576 more per year.  And at $400,000 which is quite the standard in Wetherington, Beckett Ridge, and Four Bridges, the tax increase per year will be $768 per year.  But that’s not all.  Commercial property is taxed at the same rate as residential property.  Buildings that are valued at $5 million will go up on that one building $10,000.00 in additional taxes. Buildings valued in this range are typically small strip malls housing several small stores and that cost will be passed down to the 5-7 tenants, who are all small business owners.  Their costs per year will increase about $2,000.00 each, and that’s tough on people with small margins and continuing rising costs in other areas.  In many cases, a tax increase like what Lakota is proposing could shut the doors on many small businesses operating at minimum margins.

The assumption by the government school of Lakota who does not have to do anything performance wise to obtain their profit margins except beg for tax increases, is that if residents can afford a home that is $300,000 to $400,000 in value then they can afford to pay a little more for a tax increase to “help the community’s children.”  They also believe that a property owner with a strip mall or restaurant that is $1 to $5 million in value will happily absorb an extra $10,000 in yearly taxes because they are already “rich.”  What’s a few thousand dollars to a “rich” person?  As ridiculous as that sounds, it is precisely how the administrators of Lakota think, and those who jump on the bandwagon to support the levy.  This is why I call them Lakota Levy Zombies, because they mindlessly pursue tax increases without considering what the impact of that increase will have on the people who pay it.

But worse than anything is the carefully concealed study performed by the McKibben Demographics group who co-conducted an enrollment study for Lakota late in 2012 at a cost of $20,000.  The results of that study indicate that by the 2022-23 school year Lakota will have lost 2,300 students due to declining enrollment trends.  What this means in terms of jobs at Lakota is that the staff will have to be cut by at least 85.1 teachers who would normally teach 27 children per class.  By 2022 Lakota will have to reduce their work force to meet those new enrollment needs.  Over the next 10 years Lakota will save $5.1 million in just teacher salary at an average wage of $60K per year.  That does not consider all the six figure administrators that Lakota will not need to manage those 85.1 teachers.  Lakota will have to close down school buildings and consolidate resources that could easily save between $10 million and $15 million dollars without cutting a single program to the community just because the enrollment numbers will be less.  The projection numbers at Lakota were over 18,000 students during the 2010 school year but will decline to 14,950 by the year 2022.

In addition to those numbers Lakota’s treasurer Jenni Logan stated that Lakota has lost 672 students to other public, community, or private schools, which is a trend that is likely to continue.  Lakota has over the last couple of years taken away busing because their tax increases did not pass.  They have also cut electives for students, and they have raised sports fees.  Parents have reacted by voting with their feet and simply leaving.  Meanwhile Lakota administrators continue to brag about the “tens of millions” of dollars they have cut out of their operating budget attempting to sell those cuts as a “sacrifice” to the quality of their education service, but in all reality, the cuts have been on par with the reduction in enrollment.  In just the last couple of years from 2010 to 2012 Lakota has seen a drop of around 1000 students.  By 2015 the enrollment numbers will be around 15,913 and continuing down from there.  If Lakota continues to complain, and sell themselves as ineffective, more people will vote with their feet and simply leave the community taking their children with them, exacerbating those numbers further.  If that happens Lakota could see a yearly enrollment of 10,000 by the year 2020.

The cause of the decline in enrollment according to Mckibben is that the population in the Lakota district has aged.  Over the next 10 years most homes will be those of empty nesters as the current average age of the Lakota resident is 40.7.  McKibbean explained this trend to the Lakota school board at a January 28 2013 meeting by saying, “You have a very high graduation rate and very high post-secondary participation rate.  Your kids graduate, go off to college and don’t come back.”  However, McKibbean declined to finish that statement.  He didn’t want to insult the people who paid $20K for his study after all.  The reason kids don’t come back to the Lakota district after they graduate college is simple, they can’t afford to.  A twenty something with an average college debt between 50K and 100K cannot afford to purchase a home in the affluent Lakota community where average homes range between $200K to $300K. I know this first-hand because I have children in this age group, and they have moved back to Lakota to buy a nice home of their own in that price range and they looked all over the Cincinnati area for the best opportunity.  They are unusually successful as a professional couple.  They were able to buy a home in the Lakota district.  They are unlikely to use the Lakota school system to teach their children, however they are tax payers in the community.  But most young people their age are so saddled with debt; they can never hope to make enough money to purchase a home in that price range.  This means families with children who might want to use the Lakota school system will not be able to afford to move into the community because property values are so high.  Only successful adults with grown children will be able to continue living in the Lakota district.  That is what is driving the Lakota enrollment decline.

Yet, even knowing this information, Lakota’s administration is ignoring it choosing instead to pick and choose their facts.  They want to give their teachers who average in salary over $63K per year a raise when the collective bargaining agreement with the union is up in 2014.  They are not planning for any reductions in force, or even working their salary structure to meet the community budget established through the election process.  Instead, they are relying on fear tactics to win over voters which is dishonest, and negligent.  Fear tactics like saying “Excellent with Distinction” (at Lakota) is in jeopardy without new tax money.  We are in danger of becoming a second-class district.”

Without context the situation is complicated at Lakota, which is why I explained it with a bullwhip economics video.  Most people take these professional government workers at their word which is a mistake.  People are too busy in their lives to compare the notes of what was said in the media by Lakota eight months ago and what they say now after they examine Lakota’s need for more tax money not due to economic conditions of the Lakota community, but the administration’s own desire to cave under the union demands for a collective bargaining agreement in 2014.  To say anything other than the truth is misleading and after all that we’ve been through at Lakota the administrators still think the taxpaying residents are too stupid to see through their sham.  The facts of the matter is not that Lakota needs a tax increase, but rather they need a major employee reduction of nearly 100 teachers and administrators over the next 10 years.  They should be able to achieve such a reduction with tax decreases over the next decade instead of the other way around, but they will never utter such a truth—because that’s not what they are about.  As government workers they want to do one thing, and one thing only, to grow jobs through government off the backs of tax payers never putting their eyes upon reality in a hope that the formula will never collapse on itself.  But the formula is in serious jeopardy, not just at Lakota, but every school district in the country that is filled with an aging population that isn’t having as many children as they once did, and the children they do have aren’t making enough money to support the tax demands of the growing government.  The recipe for disaster is upon us, and is just now beginning to be seen in the embattled land of Lakota, in Liberty Township/West Chester, Ohio.

Click Below to see the source articles of this content:

Journal News, Janurary 2013

The Cincinnati Enquirer, July 2013

Here is the situation nationally, but featuring Columbus, Ohio from the New York Times, July 2012

Rich Hoffman

Contact me at www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

Matt Clark Calls Detroit: The cause of socially brain dead parasites

My friend Matt Clark of WAAM radio in Ann Arbor, Michigan had an interesting radio show this past Sunday afternoon.  Matt randomly called people who live in the Detroit area and asked them what they knew about the recent bankruptcy of their once prosperous city.  Expectantly few knew anything about the matter even though they live at ground zero of one of the most epically failed instances of Keynesian economics seen currently in the world.  Detroit is unique as an example because its failure is unequivocally driven by liberal politics inspired by philosophers like Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, and the economics of socialist England under the subterfuge of the Fabian Socialists where Keynesian economics was born.  CLICK HERE TO LEARN ABOUT KEYNESIAN ECONOMICS.  Detroit’s collapse is the fault of failed social and economic philosophy and even as the evidence is crumbling down around them, the people of Detroit are disconnected and uninterested.    The fire of thought has long since been put out of their ability to have opinions.  Have a listen:

It is impossible to have any kind of republic which is the governing principle of The United States if the people who make up that republic are not intellectually engaged.  There is no way to elect representatives to the republic if such disinterested manner is placed on elections.  The fault of this social awareness of course falls on the education system which has failed to ignite in the minds of the youth any interest in such things, even though a  passive interest in the affairs of the American Republic is more important than learning mathematics, English, or even general history.    Instead, schools have allowed their teacher unions to lobby law makers into watering down the education curriculums into radicalism against American tradition to fulfill progressive strategies—the same kind of strategies that have destroyed Detroit in the present day.  The public education system chose radicalism focused on social issues over republic representation of quality as a teaching method.  The result is a society of lost minds who do not know what to do with the facts of our day.  A vast majority of the American public is disconnected—and happy to proclaim it, because their public school institutions have taught them that such a social position was good.

I remember what it was like in public school and I hated every moment of it.  In my entire 13 years of attending I can’t remember a single day that I enjoyed.  At an early age I had the deep suspicion that the teachers wanted nothing to do with any truth.  They were intent to reshape minds into a direction guided by some invisible hand that went by the name of “legislators.”  The reason I didn’t enjoy school was because I liked my mind, and didn’t want it shaped by anybody but me.  I remember feeling this way even in kindergarten.  Naturally teachers didn’t know what to do with me because I wasn’t following the “formula.”  So I was in trouble all the time and being much more stubborn than they were, I held out like an  inmate in a prison for 13 years always looking for that graduation day where I’d be free of them once and for all.

I could tell many stories about my public school days, but the short of it was that I was always in trouble, my parents were constantly called with attempts to shove me in some direction which I continuously resisted.  I was constantly grounded as a student at home because of my rebelliousness at school making the experience a miserable one for my young mind.  And all along, I had a very keen understanding of what I was resisting.  I was resisting the tendency to be a social buffoon.  As I moved into high school the pressure escalated and I pushed back even harder and a lot of people were hurt.  Once I was able to drive and have a job of my own, the groundings at home, the constant peer pressure at school to be a mind numb debacle for the human race began to subside a bit because that long desired goal of being free of the public school system was near.  To let “them” know they had not beaten my mind into submission I routinely wore a sport coat to school with a tie to let the statist know that they had failed utterly in their breaking of me—and I relished the audacity.  The constant detentions, the threats, the many, many trips to the principal’s office, the calls to my parents, the attempt to pit other kids in the school against me had all failed spectacularly and I enjoyed seeing the looks of disappointment on their faces.

Back then I had a USA Today newspaper delivered to my first period class which I carried around with me and read throughout the day.  The newspaper was a window to the outside world.  It was like a light through the window of a prison cell that was way too small for me, and I enjoyed reading about disruptions in the Middle East while the students around me were passing around love notes to each other declaring how drunk they wanted to get at the next Friday night football game.  I had a few friends, and they thought like me for the most part—people brought together by common values.  In some cases those friends were intellectually smarter than the rest of the administrative staff with genius level intellects, and in some ways other friends were physically superior to even the best athletes, and were heavily recruited to play sports for the school which were declined out of sheer rebelliousness.  At the Friday night football games my friends and I would sell those same stupid kids cases of beer out of a car trunk saving them the disgrace of trying to buy beer from a convenient store only to be turned away by a clerk who carded them.  I enjoyed this because it allowed me to punch back at society from two fronts, I was thumbing my nose at the laws politicians made for underage drinking, and I was violating the stupid policy of letting the school believe football games were anything but an excuse for the kids to get drunk.  This would go on right in front of the school administration and the police both of whom had no idea what to do about the practice.   I had learned at an early age the hypocrisy of statism and knew that there was nothing they could do to me.  They had already punished me in every way possible for over a decade, and as a young high school kid I was making as much money as most of the kid’s parents between all my jobs.  Earning money was my freedom from the statism of public education, and the first minute I could do it, I did.  I mowed lawns, worked as a bus boy at an upscale restaurant for tips, and started dating girls who were in their mid-twenties when I was 15 and 16 who would then buy the beer I could sell to the high school kids.  Around the time I was doing all this the Tom Cruise film Risky Business came out and when I went to see it, I realized that I was living that life, except more violently.

My motives were to use capitalism to escape statism, and as a kid who grew up in the 80s under President Ronald Reagan, that was at least possible.  As I look around at kids today, having raised two of my own and meeting many of their friends, I don’t think they even have those same opportunities.  Instead of reading a USA Today, kids at least have the internet on their phones to escape from the statist environment, but instead of reading about current events, they keep their minds on entertainment related topics.  For me I was able to beat my captors by being smarter than they were.  And when that didn’t work, I was more willing to resort to physical confrontation than they were.  It was no secret then and it’s no secret now.  I still live by those same rules—because they work.  As I look at the public education system now, I am sure there are kids trapped there like I was, but even lack a president to admire.  Most of them have been put on Retalin or some other drug to numb their active minds, as public schools have found that the way to beat students like me was to get them on mind numbing drugs so early that nobody knows what kind of genius they could become.  They call this these days ADHD.  I openly campaigned for Ronald Reagan in the 7th grade when the other students were busy contemplating which bands were good over others, but since him, there hasn’t been a president that young people could even get excited about.

For me the fight against statism has always been present.  I fought it then as a captor stuck within the system.  Upon my graduation traveling back from UD arena in Dayton I passed the future superintendent of Lakota schools on I-75 south, a man who tried to pin me down with every trick known to the book of school administrators.  I slowed down to match his speed and look him in the face.  My friend sitting in the passenger’s seat toasted him with a beer.  Between him and me we were living the movie version of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.   The future superintendent had tried to catch me time and time again for doing something wrong and often I would do things just to prove to him that I couldn’t be caught.  On that day now that I was free of them, I slowed my car down behind his speed and dropped back about 200 yards.  Then I gunned the engine to my Pontiac Firebird and flew past him on the highway at 110 MPH.  I drove by him so closely that my passenger’s side mirror almost hit the mirror on his car.  I maneuvered so closely to him because I wanted the air from my car to rattle his at that high-speed.  Many reading this will wonder why I was so aggressive about this maneuver, and those that came before, and many that came after.  Because I hated him, I hated the school, I hated the administrators, and I hated the system they all represented.  For many, hate is a strong word, but for me, hate is the correct term.  I hated him, and I wanted him to know it.

I hated that system then and I hate it now because it produces the kind of people who can watch a city like Detroit die of progressive philosophy without feeling an urge to defend the city from the parasites.  There is no fire in the minds of the people Matt called on the air, because that fire was put out by their public schools, and that is why I hate them.  I like to see fire behind the eyes of human beings.  I like to see energy, passion, and imagination, and too often those elements are destroyed in children before they get out of their first year of kindergarten.  Some manage to retain some of those traits and not be destroyed completely, but virtually all lose massive amounts of their future potential in those first two years of public school.  I didn’t know in the early days why I fought, but just knew that I should. I am proud now that I have a grandchild to say that I have never yielded to statism, and I never will.  But it always makes me sad to see so many lights out in the minds of mankind.  And Detroit, as Matt proved, is bankrupt and morally lost not just because they ran out of other people’s money to give away, but because the light is out in the minds of the residents—a light that was put out during their years in public education.

Rich Hoffman

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

The Dangerous Intent of the Liberal: No ideas, no facts, and terrorists of emotion

In the video below Rush Limbaugh breaks down the mentality of the typical liberal nicely.  By his use, the word liberal covers everything from moderate Democrats to radical communists.  Between those book ends are socialist, progressives, race baiters, feminists, public school advocates, and statists of every kind, some of which have the term Republican next to their names.  Limbaugh’s conclusion is one that I have been beating the war drums to for many months now as I have discovered and reported on these pages what he is saying.  Liberals cannot in any kind of debate rely on facts to win their arguments.  The only way they can win anything is by applying emotion so that they can create an anti-concept for which logic can be distorted and manipulated to their liking.   In this way, liberals have re-shaped the world into the mess many of us have observed and felt regulated to shaking our heads at in hopelessness.  Listen to Rush Limbaugh’s very good summation of a liberal here:

I have been arguing for a while now that these liberal types must be treated as enemies against traditional America.  It has become fashionable to treat them with respect, honor, and civility because conservatives tend to be kind, religious, and never-the-less willing to display public humility to prove that they are not all the nasty things that liberals say about them.  In the school levy arguments around Cincinnati I have argued every level of logic there is.  In the winter of 2012 as I watched my district of Lakota proceed with cuts to their offered programs after three failed levies and a whole lot of charts produced, public arguments made, and meetings attended I saw firsthand the festering threat that the liberal represents, a parasitic existence that uses sentiments of kindness as a military maneuver against righteousness.  I learned that under no circumstances would liberals ever look at the facts that logic presented to them because solving problems is not what they are after, and it has never been.  The number one objective of the liberal is to destroy traditional America, the type of America that could be coined exceptional.  Liberals wish to destroy America by undoing its philosophy of self-reliance and reacquainting it with the philosophy of dependence known for centuries in Europe.  For the liberal the Revolutionary War never ended.  They are still trying to connect North America permanently to the European Union and they will stop at nothing to get there.

In my levy fights, as others all over Ohio have now done, I proved beyond reasonable doubt that the cause of the tax increase requests for public schools was 100% caused by unreasonable and unsustainable wages for the government employees.  At Lakota I told them as a representative of the 18,000 people who voted against the tax increases that they needed to take a 5% cut in wages to meet the standards of budget that the community approved at the ballot box.  Instead of complying, the government school collectively like an ant colony of mindless insects went on a public relations campaign that contained not one single fact about what caused them to run a budget deficit.  For anyone who stood in their way, they attacked without a care in the world for reputations, participated in friendship severances, boycotts, and any vile form of manipulation they could gather under their wings.  But they did not deal with a single fact even when pressed to the extreme.   This is because of what Rush Limbaugh stated in his broadcast—because they can’t.  They never can, and they never will.

This is why it is important to stop viewing liberals as equals on the battlefield of ideas.  To be equal, they would have to produce ideas—and they don’t.  All they ever advocate is collective re-distribution of wealth that someone else creates.  They are typically lazy specimens who do not like the act of creation, so they want what others create by proclaiming fairness.  In the case of my public school example, the teachers and administrators at the school have convinced themselves that they are an important social role to the construct of America even though what they teach children is mindless drivel and social collectivism setting students at an emotional deficit at an early stage of their adulthood of which many will never escape.  When it all comes down to it, those employees fear actual productive existences which is why they work for a government school.  They fear getting up in the morning and creating something at their job.  They just use the government to extract wealth from those who do all the creating and offer back emotional reasons for their lack of productivity.

There is no fair fight with a liberal.  They do not participate in the battlefield of ideas, because they can’t.  Their only strategy is to move every debate away from facts and logic and to replace them with emotional pleas.  It is time to end this practice in America.  It is time to view these strategies for what they are, maneuvers against traditional America for the purpose of destruction of our way of life.  It is time to treat the liberal as an enemy for the sake of self-preservation as a free nation.  Limbaugh is 100% correct, liberals are not for freedom.  They may in the short run advocate public nudity, open sex in every direction, drunkenness, mind altering drugs, godlessness, and the absolute destruction of the American family, but they are not for freedom.  They are only for the destruction of human values because they are too mentally and physically lazy to measure up.

Liberals do not want peace in that a deal could be struck with them to “live and let live.”  It is time that traditional America took the advice of the old Paul McCartney song, “Live and Let Die” and come to grips that the liberal can never be reasoned with, they can never be appeased, they can never be treated on fair terms because they are not about any of those things.  They simply want to destroy America as it was constitutionally built, and remake it into the land of Europe, the slums of Paris, the box houses of England, and the dinky housing shacks of Spain.  They want nothing else but destruction.  This is why the liberal must be seen as the enemy in a second revolution.  A distinct difference is needed to disassociate those types with the minds of reason before any problems can ever be solved and before that can happen it must be realized that the liberal has nothing to offer but more destruction and emotional chaos to camouflage their parasitic nature as a social organism more akin to termites than anything else.

Rich Hoffman

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

Charley Boorman Rides The Tail of the Dragon: Hollywood loves the Mountains of Tennessee

BoormanIn a lot of ways Charley Boorman was the inspiration for my novel Tail of the Dragon.  My son-in-law, Paul is from England and made me aware of Boorman’s infamous Long Way Round, and Long Way Down television series featuring mammoth motorcycle rides around the world and across Europe to the tip of South Africa with his acting friend Ewan McGregor.  Recently my friend Ron Johnston ran into Charley as he came to the Tail of the Dragon to ride it at night in the rain.  For a man who has literally rode a motorcycle around the world his Tail of the Dragon ride was appropriate.  Charley had spoken to Ron and his wife who runs the Tail of the Dragon store at Deal’s Gap, (CLICK TO REVIEW) 5 years prior in Toronto at an event and remembered the correspondence enough to visit them when he was near the area.  It was after this meeting with Ron that I learned about Charlie’s next plan for a motorcycle documentary called Long Way Up, where he plans to ride with McGregor from the tip of South America all the way up to the tip of Alaska.  For a number of years now, my son-in-law and I have been looking for a way to fund a very similar motorcycle adventure from the tip of Alaska to the bottom of South America largely because of Charley and Ewan’s adventures which we loved.  For me that passion moved from several long road trips of my own which then became the plot for my novel Tail of the Dragon.

Boorman was not new to the Tail of the Dragon area.  When he was 8 years old he spent some time just to the south when his father was filming Deliverance on the Chattooga River.  The plot of that famous adventure film was three Atlanta businessmen were intent on seeing the fictional Cahulawassee River before it was turned into one huge lake.  Outdoor fanatic Lewis Medlock takes his friends on a river-rafting trip they’ll never forget into the dangerous American back-country. The Chattooga River (also spelled Chatooga, Chatuga, and Chautaga, variant name Guinekelokee River) is the main tributary of the Tugaloo River. Its headwaters are located southwest of Cashiers, North Carolina, and it stretches 57 miles (92 km)[1] to where it has its confluence with the Tallulah River within Lake Tugalo, held back by the Tugalo Dam. The Chattooga and the Tallulah combine to make the Tugaloo River starting at the outlet of Lake Tugalo. The Chattooga begins in southern Jackson County, North Carolina, then flows southwestward between northwestern Oconee County, South Carolina, and eastern Rabun County, Georgia. Charley’s father directed the film with brutal honesty and a sense of adventure that has never been duplicated and is a film classic.  But Deliverance isn’t the only film shot in the area.  Hollywood is well acquainted with the Tail of the Dragon.

To those coming from the North Carolina side, the Dragon begins at Fugitive Bridge with a view of the Cheoah Dam where Harrison Ford jumped in the movie The Fugitive. It ends 14 miles across the mountain at the Tabcat Creek Bridge in Tennessee. From Fugitive Dam US129 climbs through The Slide, a steep series of “S” curves where one would not want to meet one of the tractor-trailers that comes this way at times. The road then levels and straightens until a series of curves approaching the Crossroads of Time, one of the main hangouts for visitors. Next is Deals Gap and the Tennessee State Line. For the next eleven miles most people just remember curve after curve after curve and the run of their lives.

In addition to the 1993 The Fugitive, three other movies have been filmed along this road. The first feature film made on US 129 was Thunder Road. This 1958 Robert Mitchum film about backwoods moonshining had scenes at the power line easement at about mile 4.5 on the Dragon map and you can see the old wooden “safety” posts on the corner. A few of the posts still remain.

Part of the 1971 classic movie Two-Lane Blacktop was filmed on the Dragon. There are scenes of the state line sign, some of the curves, the old Esso Gas Station, Crafton’s Motel and Café, along the Little Tennessee River and the original single lane bridge at Tapoco Dam. These scenes are at the end of the movie.  Then there was In Dreams (1998) with Annette Bening which was filmed on Moonshiner 28, Tapoco Dam and Calderwood Dam.

http://tailofthedragon.com/dragon_history_story.html

Charlie’s love of adventure would become a global endeavor and began with a father who directed one of the greatest adventure films of all time in the mysterious land which became the modern-day Tail of the Dragon that is synonymous with classic Hollywood adventure films.  So it was a bit of a book end that he would return to that area after all his globe-trotting escapades to see my friends Ron and Nancy Johnston at their Tail of the Dragon store.  In that store Ron has on the wall the story of how Deliverance was filmed in the area prompting Charlie to autograph it for all visitors to see in the future.  When I came up with the kind of personality that became Rick Stevens in the novel Tail of the Dragon I thought often of people like Charlie Boorman, but were not as fortunate as Charlie to be born into the entertainment industry where eccentricities can be openly explored.  Boorman has had opportunities that many men struggle to gain and he has not squandered them.  My character of Rick Stevens is one of those types who has the adventurous soul of a Charlie Boorman without the Hollywood connections to allow him to embark on such grand adventures.  Rick Stevens because of his limited options takes the first opportunity that came his way—a political coup between governors in a run for President of The United States.  Adventurers always find a way and don’t uses excuses as a crutch.

My son-in-law and I are still planning our trip from Alaska to the bottom tip of South America but if Charlie beats me to it more power to him.  I will enjoy his wonderful documentaries on the subject as I have enjoyed all his work.  Doing my own share of long distance hard riding, and riding a motorcycle every day even in snow, heavy rain and below freezing temperatures I have a grand appreciation for the work that Charlie and his friend Ewan have done for the sport of marathon motorcycle riding.  Charlie Boorman is the kind of man I wish there were many more of, a kind man, a passionate man, but more than anything a man who plays at life-like a kid yet with the intellect of an adult.  He is the kind of man who every young child should hope to grow up and become.

Charlie isn’t the only celebrity to visit the real Tail of the Dragon.  CLICK HERE to read of Larry the Cable Guy’s visit.

Rich Hoffman

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

‘Ender’s Game’ Book Review: Finally reading a book my nephew advocated for over a decade

Two of my earliest writing influences were Sol Stein whom I took a direct computer class with in the early days of the internet in the mid 1990s and the Science Fiction writer Linda Nagata.  Both writers helped me work on the craft of writing leading to The Symposium of Justice in 2004 and Tail of the Dragon in 2012.  During that time with Linda where she lived in Hawaii and I in Ohio I would mail her copies of my work in hard copy form back then—she’d mark them up and send them back with comments.  That went on for a while and at the end I had digested so much science fiction that I felt it had spilled over into my own writing interests.  I read all the books she recommended which tended to be Hugo and Nebula award winners and I read religiously the “Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy” so that I could take her advice and similar career path toward the realm of writing.  To learn science fiction and fantasy writing better I read a book she recommended called Hatrack River by Orson Scott Card and soon felt I was drowning in the genre.  As much as I enjoyed those types of works, my interest was in politics and philosophy to a much greater extent than I had imagined, and I found myself trying to go into a different direction than what Linda did.  I had to find my own path through the forest, and I wanted nothing to do with the paved road that she had taken which required winning Nebula and Hugo awards.  The more I thought about it, the less I was interested in appeasing a panel of judges who oversaw those award panels.

At the same time all this was going on one of my nephews whom spent a great deal of his childhood in my care was urging me heavily to read Orson Scott Card’s treasured Ender’s Game series starting of course with the first book, aptly named.  He declared to me that Ender’s Game was the best book he had ever read and that I would love it.  I had no doubt that he was correct, but I knew Orson  Scott Card from Hatrack River and wasn’t crazy about combining alternate history and fantasy together in that book.  But worse than that Orson Scott Card reminded me of Linda as he was a winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards which was a path I had decided not to take.  So I told my nephew that I would read the novel when I got around to it.

It took around 15 years but upon hearing that Harrison Ford was staring in the upcoming 2013 movie version of Ender’s Game I thought I should finally get around to reading the book before I saw the film.  I had written a few novels of my own and had picked a rather difficult path through the forest on a road of my own making that was well established, so I could easily now put behind me my reservations about letting those early writing influences contaminate my thoughts with their strong presence.  I bought the novel on my way to Florida to begin reading at the beach while on vacation, but more pressingly I wanted my nephew who lives near our vacation destination to know that I was physically reading the book after promising him I would for over a decade.

I started reading the book toward the end of my vacation and it took me a bit to get passed the much studied writing techniques that were so familiar to me from my writing instruction with Linda.  But after I let myself get into the story and drop away all the rules of plot, paragraph structure, and character development, I found myself enjoying the novel the way my nephew knew I would.  As many who follow me daily on my blog know I have put a major emphasis on the failures of societies that become philosophically committed to collectivism, especially lately.  The reason is that many of the modern political problems that defame the world currently have their root cause in social collectivism.  Once I learned that collectivism was the villain of our age I have been able to apply it to virtually every problem not because once learned the mind sees it everywhere by default, but because it is the cause of most human problems.  Ender’s Game is essentially about two societies that are colliding, an insect oriented species that uses collectivism as a military weapon to destroy their enemies and a society on earth that has attempted to duplicate the methods of the insect species to beat them.  Ironically, only one very promising student in world history figured out a strategy that would give earth a chance to destroy the alien threat and that is the young child Ender Wiggin trained from a 6-year-old boy to become a general of the International Fleet against their interstellar enemy.

The novel explored themes of sacrifice, honor, and individual integrity in ways that were more philosophy than science fiction.  Upon closing the book I felt I had read a remarkable story from Orson Scott Card which explains why there are 14 books in the series written from 1985 to 2013.  Now I understand why they are so popular.  If I had read them back when my nephew had first mentioned Ender’s Game I might have saved myself a lot of headache in working out my own explorations into the folly’s of collectivism.  Orson Scott Card certainly did a wonderful job of arriving at many very interesting conclusions that are without question deeply inspired from the Cold War of the Reagan years.

If the movie comes close to how excellent the novel was it should be quite a treat during the Holiday Season of 2013.  I’m glad that my nephew was so persistent in trying to get my attention with the novel because it was well worth my time.  My July has been an unusually busy month, so it took me a few weeks to get through it not because the pacing was slow, but rather I took my time to absorb it like a fine wine, which is exactly what I thought as I closed the book.  I had thought about many of the problems presented in Ender’s Game from much more terrestrial angles, so it was a real pleasure to read them in the context of a heavy science fiction story that has much more to offer any serious reader than just spontaneous entertainment.  Ender’s Game is an important work for our times that belongs right alongside Jules Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon.

Rich Hoffman

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

Being Proud of American Exceptionalism: Understanding what a “neocon” is and isn’t

After the interview I did with Matt Clark featuring the life of Walt Disney and more specifically, American Exceptionalism there was of course some upset listeners, as there always is.  Listen to that broadcast by CLICKING HERE.  The term “American Excepitonalism” tends to set off tempers from the type of people who have been taught their entire lives that America should follow the trends of the rest of the world and not proudly proclaim the wonderful attributes that have come out of the freest country in the world–such as capitalism, human rights, individual freedom, and a quality of life that is unmatched anywhere.  Americans on the world stage have been told by virtually every government that as one of the youngest countries they need to respect their elders and yield to the social philosophies of older cultures and disregard their own.  This kind of mentality inspired Barack Obama upon his presidential election to go on his famous bowing around the world tour apologizing to the countries of Europe and elsewhere for American arrogance that had been displayed over the last couple of centuries.  Americans were told by progressive activists that The United States was not a good country and that we should all be paralyzed by guilt for the slavery that caused the Civil War, and that somehow all the good things in America were to be erased due to civil rights violations.

Well, the types of people who utter such nonsense are the enemies of America.  They forget that America willingly freed its slaves, which the King of England had started in the colonies, and under the American Constitution, slavery was abolished—a move that happened nowhere else in the world.  To this very day there is still slavery in Africa, all through the Middle-East and spanning along the northern shores of the Indian Ocean.  Women’s rights in the same region are equally appalling.  Only in America were such rights granted to women without destroying the economy.  Capitalism gave men, women, and children options that exist no place else anywhere in the world and freedom for all races, shapes and sizes of people more equally than any other country—so what is there to apologize for?

Americans have been taught by their government that The United States gained everything it achieved by consuming too many resources, and stepping on the rights of others across the world.  Such claims are equivalent to jealous classmates who swear that America cheated because they cannot fathom how it accomplished such wonderful attributes competitively.  It is in those types of people who find the term “American Exceptionalism” an offensive term, and it was those who were angry at Matt and me for even discussing it on his radio show.  After the broadcast there was a comment from a guy named Ben Cowan who said:

(American Exceptionalism) “a neocon made up term.  American experience is the real name, the founders were never arrogant or braggadocios about this country.”

–Ben CowanScreen shot 2013-07-22 at 8.47.54 AM

Matt’s response to Ben I thought was very kind, and as a radio personality he gets those types of comments all the time—and his answers are usually very diplomatic.  However, in this case I’d like to answer Ben in my own way as the terms he used in his comment deserve scrutiny.  A Neocon by definition is a conservative who supposedly disliked the social freedom of the 1960s. A neoconservative equals someone who became conservative as a reaction to the social freedom of the 1960s and 1970s.  The term braggadocios are considered empty boasting and swaggering self-aggrandizement.  Since I fully support the term “American Exceptionalism” then this means that by Ben’s comment that I am a neocon that is practicing braggadocios—and that I shouldn’t do so because the Founding Fathers didn’t perform the behavior.  But Ben is wrong and here’s why.  The Founding Fathers at the start of the American Experiment of 1776 did not boast because their philosophical theories were unproven at the time.  However, in 2013 the aspects of their philosophy that worked can be seen in the many attributes described at the beginning of this article.  The benefits to capitalism and the American Experience produced a unique type of person that had only been contemplated by philosopher fantasies prior to The Declaration of Independence.   Unlike 1773 to 1782 there is now a history to show how such a small country was able to have such a major impact on the world without having kings or queens to take the credit for such productive output.  Life in virtually every facet is better in America because of the philosophy of personal independence that is much larger than the “American Experience.”  The type of person that is produced under such a system of government is what is meant by “American Exceptionalism.”  The example that Matt and I discussed was Walt Disney, a man who could have only been produced under the American style of government focused on self-reliance, creative enterprise, and a focus on the greater good by impacting the individual at the level of their imagination.  The proof of American Exceptionalism is in the track record of success by individuals in America directly compared to individuals in other countries, such as China, India, Spain, Russia or anywhere else.  No country has produced individuals like Walt Disney so Uncle Walt is an example of American Exceptionalism, the same kind of exceptionalism that invented airplanes, electricity, and the telephone.  The same county that walked on the moon and set the standard for space flight, is the same country where even the poor are comparatively wealthy when compared to the villages of Africa, India, and Southeast Asia.  That is something to be proud of which must be termed American Excpetionalism.

When those who find such terms inconvenient or even uncomfortably true based on their personal philosophies, try to refute such truthful statements as to point out American Exceptionalism they must use an anti-concept to attempt to remove such definitions so that there is no standard to measure against the failures of other belief systems.  This is what Ben Cowen did when he attempted to put Matt and me on the defensive with name calling such as neocon and braggadocios.  The automatic reaction might be to say, “No we’re not,” then spend the rest of the conversation attempting to prove that we are not neocons or braggadocios.  While it’s true that I find the social freedoms of the 1960s and 1970s despicable it is not enough to call my thoughts those of a neocon which somehow refers my beliefs into the realm of radicalism.  In the interview with Matt, we had spent one hour talking about Walt Disney and our love of a period well before the 1960s that we relish.  That period would be called “classic American” not a neocon.  The radicalism is only in reference to the severe psychological differences that are the result of the destructive period referenced during the Hippie Era.  People who use the neocon term are those who fear losing the social gains made during the 1960s which violate the type of classic America I honor.  The only radicalism present is the accepted period of the 1960s version of America as opposed to the 1920s when Presidents like Calvin Coolidge were burning the midnight oil doing America’s business and Walt Disney was trying to get his company off the ground.

As for being a braggadocios, I say why not?  When an NFL player scores a touchdown, they celebrate, when a basketball player hits a deep three pointer, or slam dunks over an opposing player, they celebrate.  When a NASCAR driver wins a race they do burn outs in the middle of the track to celebrate their victory.  So why would Americans not brag about the cultural aspects of their society that they know are superior, such as the aviation industry, the computer industry, and the entertainment culture.  Look how many literary works are produced in The United States compared to other countries.  No other country comes close to The United States in thinking production and that is something to celebrate. Of those thinkers nobody took the business of thought to the level of Walt Disney who is an example of American Exceptionalism.  It is OK to pump our fists in the air as Americans and be proud of what we are.  It is disgraceful to apologize for being too good and American has been.  Its time to stop that, the Founding Fathers didn’t brag about their good fortune at the time because they weren’t sure the experiment would work.  But now we do know and its time to stop pandering to the type of people represented by Ben Cowan.  They are free to think what they want, but not free to dictate our actions with name calling.  It’s time to call them names, like apologists, wimps, detriments to the human race and a number of other things I can think of right off-hand that are not fit to write down.   But it’s not acceptable to just take what the hippies, the progressive loons; the America haters declare is the new line in the sand of social value.  That line has been drawn way too far to the left and its about time to move it radically back to where it should have been all along, in an era represented best by the finest example of American Exceptionalism that is universally known to the entire world – Walt Disney.  For anyone who wishes to argue against American Exceptionalism point to an example anywhere in the world of a similar personality born under the flag of socialism, communism, or any form of statism.  I am confident that there isn’t one, and nobody reading this will succeed in providing a single example and that is ultimately what people like Ben Cowan are angry at.  Calling us neocons, which coming from them is like being awarded a badge of honor, declares that they hate our social position, painting on my face a smile from ear to ear.  Ben………..I am braggadocios about this country.  So you better get used to it.

Rich Hoffman

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

The Media Controversy: What Trayvon Martin and Barack Obama have in common

There are a lot of problems with Barack Obama’s past, which don’t matter much anymore as he won a second term with the help of the media that refused to report on those tribulations.  Their reasons were ideological and cohesive as they have displayed an alarming collectiveness about them that is like a symphony reading sheet music for their individual instruments.  The author of that sheet music is Karl Marx and before him it was Immanuel Kant.  The media learned this collectiveness in their education institutions that universally accept statism as the future of the human race—after all controlling the media was one of the strategies outlined in the 1958 book The Naked Communist, which has been fulfilled—make no mistake about it.  Barack Obama should not be president if the law were followed correctly.  He is however a concoction of that media control for the reasons they stated, so that a president like Obama could sit in the White House and bring to the world, global socialism.  But is what I’m saying just another “rant” from a disenfranchised voter who doesn’t like Democrats?  No, it’s a deeper problem than that.  The situation is far more sinister.  To understand how sinister, examine the latest media cohesive display of the Trayvon Martin case as articulated by Bill Whittle.  Watch this video and you will begin to see the problem.

The media, collectively from The View, to Ellen, to the CBS Nightly News read from the same Civil Rights sheet music, the same talking points which where practically invented as a work of fiction—yet reported as fact.  George Zimmerman was found not guilty even with all the other aspects of the Martin case that were left out such as the drug abuse, the violent Facebook postings, and the social demeanor of the young man just short of his 18th birthday.  The media wanted to believe that Martin was just a child going to get a harmless drink and some Skittles from the corner convenience store, not that the kid was an MMA obsessed drug experimenter.  Collectively the media projected the same Civil Rights message to the weakened masses which the typical person had little patience to understand.  They were caught wanting to trust those media sources because they were simply too busy in their lives not to.

The trouble with collectivism is that there is no individual thought, and the obvious evidence that so many in the media participated openly in the Trayvon Martin conspiracy as an attempt to sacrifice George Zimmerman to the altar of a progressive Civil Rights power grab shows how effective their propaganda machine is over just one court case.  Imagine what they can do on a large-scale, when Presidents and their administrations are involved.  A glimpse behind the collective façade has been seen with the IRS Hearings, the Benghazi killings, and the unconstitutional appointments that received very little initial reaction from the media until whistleblowers put the issues in front of the worlds’ eyes.  The hypocrisy was very obvious, and millions of Americans aren’t sure what to do with the information now that they know they’ve been lied to.  The Martin case and the Obama administration are connected not just in casual observation, but in this case Obama and his Justice Department activist Eric Holder personally became involved in a states’ rights issues for the simple attempt of inciting race wars in hopes of grabbing more group based power—with the media at their backs to blow wind into their sails.

To understand how this happens one simply needs to understand what kinds of things are taught in high schools and colleges all across the country, especial liberal arts type courses which often dangle from journalism degrees.  Collectivism is taught at these institutions and blind acceptance of memorized information.  Individual thought is rejected as critical applications are paid lip service to, but tucked out of sight in all reality.  If there are federal grants involved, or federal money of any kind such as Race to the Top, or Common Core instruction, that institution is teaching the desires of the government, and that is statism.  When over 90% of all journalists come from colleges particularly with liberal arts degrees, they were all taught the same methods of following orders and sacrificing their individuality to the good of the collective which is why they report the way they do.

Further, the culture on campuses, “the party life” is designed to rob away innocence and individual integrity so that the mind of the campus students can be brought into line with concepts of statism which is taught in the class rooms.  Wonder not why the campus presidents do not fret about the hundreds of rapes that occur every day at their colleges because the personal invasion of a woman’s personal space by sexual predators who are also students are part of the design of the campus experience.  When a young female journalism major wakes up in a strange apartment without her cloths facing people she has never met before at escapades that occurred the night before, when that young student gets a job at the New York Times, or The Washington Post she will avoid the stories of scandal about disgraced political interns who have been black mailed, or the many prostitutes who men of statist power utilize to allow extortion to move their mouths like marionettes, she will report on environmental concerns and social collectivism instead.  The idea of sin will stay in the back of her mind and she will pursue altruistic stories as social redemption might wash away her past, and all the mistakes she made in college.  The collectivism is a natural human reaction to individual shame, so statist desire to see individuals shamed so that they can gain control of individual actions in service to the collective is the typical social strategy that is learned in virtually all education institutions where government money is present.  That is how it starts.  The mistakes in college through drunken orgies are designed to remove individual identity from the participants and therefore critical thought generated from their mind.

After 10 to 15 years of this kind of practice, soon the marketplace of the media is filled with thousands of like-minded professionals who are ready to accept their marching orders from their editors who are promoted based on their left leaning philosophies.  The editor gives the slant and the reporter finds the angle and cuts up the story to fit the direction.  That is what happened clearly in the Treyvon Martin case, and is why President Obama is still president.  The withheld evidence about Treyvon Martin shows to what extent the media can work together without a lot of shared information to arrive at a universal collective strategy.  Critical thought has been stripped from their minds, and they cannot be trusted to provide the truth.  This has always been a problem, but it is worse today than it has ever been because the amount of social penetration progressives have had into college campuses since the 1950s has finally produced virtually every range of influence in the media from those about to retire, to those just entering the business.  For the first time, all ages of media employee have been through the college system after The Naked Communist established the desired strategy, and they all think the same way.

Bill Whittle made a compelling case about the Trayvon Martin evidence, and he was right to end his piece contemplating to what extent the same has happened with Barack Obama.    In an honest world where the media used the First Amendment to pursue truth, justice, and the American way there wouldn’t be a President Obama in The White House, and the Martin case would not have been reported the way it was—and George Zimmerman most likely would have never had to spend a single day in jail.  But the media isn’t honest, and we do have to worry about those types of statist strategies seen in Whittle’s video.  The evidence is audacious and the proof is beyond refute.  But the behavior continues because most people lack the courage to face the truth, even though it is painful.   And for many people their past is laced with the same shame that haunts many journalists—and hampers their decisions from one of individual value instead to collective embrace where judgment is vacant, and sins are revered, in an empire of statism that is protected by the modern gate keepers of the truth.

Rich Hoffman

“Justice Comes with the Crack of a Whip!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

“Duty”: A statist concept detrimental to America

Eric Holder said some things about the Zimmerman acquittal the other day that bothered me deeply.  It wasn’t his obvious activism as head of the Justice Department under President Obama, or the obvious lies, deceit, and manipulation that has occurred under his control.  Rather, it was his reasoning against Florida’s Stand Your Ground law where he reflected Obama’s belief that people have a “duty” to retreat from a conflict when conflict occurs.  This implies of course that public safety is more important than individual lives.  Holder referenced that the laws of The United States routinely reflect that citizens have a “duty” to always look for a way out of a conflict before engaging in self-defense.  For instance, a story I have told before, CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW, where the police came to the office complex where my wife was working as a receptionist at the time and asked her to cheat on me because she was such an attractive young lady meant that I had no right to engage those cops on any grounds of honor because all they had really done was utter some verbal communication.  They didn’t place any hands upon her, or force her into a car.  If they did, then I would still not be allowed to pull a gun on the police and defend our life together because they represented the state as representatives of the law, and they may not be using guns to apply the force.  The state’s position is that there is more honor in sacrifice, even if that means losing a wife, or the sexual molestation of her, than in the honor of defending our marriage and her matrimonial sanctity.  The burden of the law fell on me, the citizen because of some ridiculous ideal of “duty” to some cause that is greater than my individual interests, or my relationships that might only be valuable to me.  My thoughts about this matter are essentially what my novel Tail of the Dragon is all about.  CLICK HERE TO REVIEW.

I grew up wearing primarily military clothing that routinely was unkempt on purpose.  My army pants had large holes in the knees from all the crawling around that I did—and still do.  My shirts were always un-tucked and I have worn a cowboy hat with that attire since I was in the fifth grade.  My reason was that I planned to rebel against the government if they ever drafted me into the military and I wanted to be always in a state of readiness in case I was forced into combat by a statist government.  The military was always known for their rigidity with military uniform, and my position was to get used to the uniform without the formality.  It was my way of thumbing my nose at statist philosophy.  When I was a kid, the drafting of citizens was still on everyone’s mind from the Vietnam era where the government decided that individual citizens could be compelled into service to their country for something politicians called “duty,” and I never planned to participate in that activity.  I had many uncles, cousins, and other family members who swore to me that if I were drafted into the army that my rigid independent streak would be broken by the drill sergeants.   By the stories they told, there was no choice.  You either did what they told you, or you were thrown into the brig for insolence.  I had no problem with the danger, with shooting at other people, or having them shoot at me.  I found that part very exciting.  But I was never going to allow myself to get on a bus, get my head shaved, and have a drill sergeant yell at me for six weeks until I surrendered my individuality to the cause of collective salvation calling it “duty to my country.”

Statist use more frequently now than ever this term “duty” when talking about the military.  This is why it has become custom to tell military veterans “thank you for your sacrifice and service” when speaking to them.  I do not do that.  I have known a lot of people who went into the military, mostly because they couldn’t figure out what they wanted to do with their life, or they wanted money for college.  They decided to surrender their individuality in trade for security.  In high school a Marine recruiter was heavy after me knowing some of the dangerous escapades that I had been involved in, and the court cases that I had attended.  He told me that I would self-destruct in a few years with my attitude and that the Marines would bring discipline to my life that I needed.  Of course I didn’t buy into the scam, but some of my friends did, and they were never the same after four years in the military.  They came out of the military nice little foot soldiers who followed orders without question as they had learned to participate in life with a sense of duty, instead of thought and the statists of government wanted the world to thank them for it so more people would follow in their wake, without having to impose a government mandated draft.

My idea of military life was the flight group, The Flying Tigers during the early days of World War II.  If that was what the military was offering I would have signed up in less than a second just so I could fly planes and participate in danger.  CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW.  But the whole “yes sir, no sir” thing was not for me and I don’t respect those who give up their individuality to surrender thought to any group behavior—including the military.  When I attend events where I see formations, salutes, and blind recital of chants I feel sorry for the participants.  Yet I have witnessed that the usual emotion from my peers is envy.  They envy the sense of purpose that serving in a group the “duty” defined by a statist government provides them.  The government might say that soldiers in Afghanistan have a duty to defend American interests, or that soldiers have a duty to defend the world against failed political policies in the Middle East.  That duty means a sacrifice of life, limb, or at a minimum–time from their life based on the definitions of statist politicians.  The reasons are never considered, only the act.

The idea of a draft in America during the Vietnam era broke the conscious of many Americans.  Many men learned as 18-year-olds that the government can do as it pleases with the individual lives of their citizens, and this mentality carried over to the statist policies which came out of the sixties, the counter-revolutionary movement, the rise of labor union influence, collective bargaining legislation, and many other aspects of idiocy that were sold as a social “duty.”  The idea of duty had been driven into these men who were broken from the idealistic kids of the Howdy Doody Show growing up in the 50’s by their drill sergeants without a choice available but from their government to say that their life was owned by the federal government, and that the government was more important than their lives.    This has affected this entire generation for the rest of their lives and the children they spawned.  Eric Holder and Barack Obama know this and invoke the subconscious memory of America’s sense of “duty” when they speak.

When these draftees came out of the military they were told that it was their “duty” to help the poor.  They were told that it was their “duty” to help the middle-class.  They were told that it was their “duty” to send their children to public school.  They were told that it was their “duty” to vote for Medicaid and to sustain Social Security.  They were told that it was their “duty” to raise children who would serve their country with sacrifice and that honor was in paying the ultimate price—death.

Today the word “duty” is thrown around by statists of all ranks.  People like Eric Holder use the word “duty” which has been ingrained in most of the population through one of two methods, from a drill sergeant, or a college professor to justify a statist policy against self-defense even if sometimes the best defense is a good offense.   By invoking the idea of “duty” Holder attempts to overcome the Bill of Rights of The Constitution which are centered on individuality and slides under the door of the American mind an ideal of collective salvation that is artificially created by statists for statist principles.  By creating a social concept of thanking service men not with the money they were paid but with the honor of sacrifice, statists like Obama and Holder who stand opposed to traditional American concepts rooted in pure capitalism can advance their philosophy of collectivism by touching the psychological paralysis that is built into most Americans by the statist system of sacrifice in the name of “duty.”

It is clear to me these discrepancies because I have rejected such a sense of “duty” my entire life, including my childhood.  But it is not so clear to people who have had to negotiate in their minds the ideal of a military draft which took away their individual rights for the good of the “state” without question.  These same people find themselves unable to understand why they feel disarmed when Eric Holder invokes the concept of “duty” in relation to Florida’s Stand Your Ground law so to build up public consensus against the measure.  Resonating in their minds are the drill sergeants from their early years who stripped away all their thoughts, all their childhood memories with six hard weeks of basic training so that the mind of the soldiers thought not as individual Americans, but as cogs in a military machine that did not think, but simply followed orders.  When Eric Holder states that it is an American citizen’s “duty” to follow the orders of the state, this is what he means, and why such statements are the roots of tyranny established to advance the causes of the left through carefully selected phrases planted in American minds through statist philosophy.

Rich Hoffman

“Justice Comes with the Crack of a Whip!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

Walking School Buses: More dumb ideas driven by the Zombies of Lakota

Not everyone at the Lakota school system located in an affluent northern Cincinnati suburb is a levy zombie.  16-year-old Emma as a student was fourteen during the period of time Doc Thompson referenced as he was hosting Glenn Beck’s radio show from New York City.  On that very popular midday nationwide radio broadcast Doc Thompson thought back in time to our experiences fighting the Lakota school levy when the district retaliated against voters by cutting busing to residents wishing to impose inconvenience and turn, a “no” vote to a “yes” vote in the next election.   (CLICK TO REVIEW.)  Recently Michelle Obama advocated as part of her nationwide health initiative that school districts activate a really dim-witted program called Walking School Buses, which are essentially packs of kids who walk to school instead of riding in a vehicle.  It wasn’t lost to Doc Thompson the hypocrisy as he remembered the reason for Lakota’s busing cuts and thought it ironic that now Michelle Obama—as the queen of public education avocation was proposing that the very thing districts used as weapons against tax payers was now being sold as a healthy solution.  This prompted Emma from Lakota to call Doc Thompson at his New York City studio to poke some fun at the hypocrisy.  Click the video below to listen to the hilarious radio segment.

As crazy as the dialogue between Doc and Skip was in the radio bit they were not kidding.  The Walking School Bus program is real, and an officially endorsed theory of The White House.  From the website advocates declare:

“Studies show that fewer children are walking and biking to school, and more children are at risk of becoming overweight. Changing behaviors of children and parents require creative solutions that are safe and fun.

Implementing a walking school bus can be both.

A walking school bus is a group of children walking to school with one or more adults. If that sounds simple, it is, and that’s part of the beauty of the walking school bus. It can be as informal as two families taking turns walking their children to school to as structured as a route with meeting points, a timetable and a regularly rotated schedule of trained volunteers.

When beginning a walking school bus, remember that the program can always grow. It often makes sense to start with a small bus and see how it works. Pick a single neighborhood that has a group of parents and children who are interested. It’s like a carpool—without the car—with the added benefits of exercise and visits with friends and neighbors. For an informal bus:

  1. Invite families who live nearby to walk.

  2. Pick a route and take a test walk.

  3. Decide how often the group will walk together.

  4. Have fun!”

To verify everything you have just read and everything that Doc Thompson elaborated on with comic delivery—but was 100% true, you can see the link for yourself below.

http://www.walkingschoolbus.org/

Unbelievably the site is actually maintained by the Pedestrian and BicycleInformationCenter for the Partnership for a Walkable America, in cooperation with the U.S. Department of Transportation.  That means that tax payers paid for the employees who came up with this whole idea which was an obvious waste of money.

Public schools for years have done just what Lakota did when they did not pass their tax increases—they took away school busing putting the burden of transportation on homeowners to drive their children to school.  When that method failed to work, which began to happen in the summer of 2010 all across the country as per pupil averages in public schools climbed to around $10K per student, Americans had shown that they had enough and tax requests were being defeated in greater frequency as a diminishing marginal return had been reached.  Now the same kind of public employees who came up with the failed strategy of extorting tax increases against communities have changed their strategy completely and are now declaring that walking to school is good for children.

The foolishness of both stances taken by the government employees involved in these decisions is catastrophic to any society that wishes to advance.  Just for putting their name at the bottom of the Walking School Bus web site, The Department of Transportation should be eliminated.  If walking is what The Department of Transportation considers under their authority, or concern, then they are overstepping their boundaries tyrannically and must be stopped.  If this is the way they spend their time and resources, they are ineffective and worthless.

It was good to hear a young lady from Lakota call into a gigantic national show that has a footprint throughout that portion of the day which ranges between 7 million and 15 million listeners.  Doc is aware that Lakota is seeking another levy, and now that his exposure is national as opposed to regional when he was in Cincinnati his voice carries to many more ears.  It surprised me that a young lady was listening to the broadcast and cared enough to call in and offer some satirical commentary to a ridiculous problem.  The caller Emma was much younger when Lakota implemented the busing cut plan and she has seen, as many students have, the hypocrisy of those who are in charge, and it is good to witness that she cared enough to voice her opinion.  In past levies, the school has used children as pro levy advocates, and certainly Lakota has managed to recruit a fair number of Zombies of Lakota to carry on the progressive message of public education that Michelle Obama so hypocritically represents without any real thought.  But Emma was a ray of hope that not all children or even parents in Lakota are zombies and have the cognition to participate in an intelligent discussion, even on a large national stage that is heard by millions.

As for Doc, I hope he and Skip had a good time on the Flight Walk from New York.  If Michelle Obama and The Department of Transportation have their way we will all walk before we drive, walk before we fly, and find ourselves sitting around campfires awaiting orders from some village chief dictating our movements.  The march of the typical progressive is a regression to the time before invention so to not advance human kind into a new age, but to preserve Mother Earth for all time as a superior idea to the products of human intellect—which they detest.  That is why people who think the way they do are the Zombies of Lakota.

Rich Hoffman

“Justice Comes with the Crack of a Whip!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

How to Stop Racism: Who cares what Eric Holder says?

Who cares what Eric Holder said about the George Zimmerman acquittal or Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law?  Isn’t Holder a criminal?  Isn’t he guilty of deaths from his own actions, and destruction of individual rights performed on a mass scale?   If Holder were not the top cop of the United States Government wouldn’t he find himself in jail for the same types of crimes he accuses others of?   Of course a criminal is going to wish that “Stand Your Ground” laws were obsolete, so that their crimes can be committed against others more easily.  So his comments have no merit as he should be the one on trial, not George Zimmerman, who already had his day in court.  But Holder’s foolish comments were not the most ridiculous comments that came forth in the wake of the Zimmerman murder trial in Sanford, Florida.  The dumbest comments of all came from those crying for an end to racism in America upon the Zimmerman acquittal.  Out of all the news outlets and commentators who make millions upon millions of dollars giving statements and providing opinions no one has delivered a way to rid America of racism when the accusations have been so extreme once Zimmerman was found not guilty.  So I will provide the answer where others have failed.

The way to end racism is to stop using skin color as a weapon to advance collective causes and level the playing field for all individuals by allowing merit to determine all benefits in society.  When any collective group demands “equality” they are asking for thuggish democracy to take away resources from someone and give to another so that all can have equal value.  This allows people of low value to make themselves appear to have a higher value by lowering the value of others through legalized theft (income redistribution).  People of low value may have such a status because they made bad decision in life—such as drinking too much, smoking marijuana so that they cannot hold good paying jobs that require drug tests, or having children where there is not a responsible male in a household to help provide family structure.  People who do dumb things in their lives often seek the protection of social collectivism to hide their crimes and the only way vacant personalities can find value where they have squandered it away is to take it away from someone else.

Racism has given such collective groups the illusion of value.  By seeking equality they really mean “wealth redistribution.”  This is why such groups who advocate racial inequality always fail to identify the value of human beings as a criterion for equality.  Rather the true meaning of equality is to allow all races, all sexes, all shapes, sizes, and backgrounds of all people to have equal access to success.  Racial groups wish to stack the odds of success in their favor with democratic force through collectivism rather than individual merit.  This is why racism advocates for more power and so-called “equality” do not support political candidates like Herman Cain, or Dr. Ben Carson.  In the racism debate men who have achieved success based on individual merit no matter what their skin color are always overlooked, because the goal of the equal rights movement is not equal access to success, as men like Carson and Cain represent, but in the ability to level the economic playing field of society by cutting down the high spots and filling the low spots with displaced value.

To end racism tomorrow, all society would need to do would be to recognize the value of merit.  Those who work to achieve good merit in their lives would all have equal access to value, while those who chose not to work in such a way would find themselves lacking.   If the entire world functioned from a desire to be good ethically, morally, socially—good in every respect of the  word, there would be no racism because there would be no advantage of one gang of thugs over another.  No group would have dominance over any other, as they would all be irrelevant.  After all, isn’t it the desire of the black groups to take power from the perceived, “white man” or the “white supremacists” to take power from the “one world order” or the women from the men, or the men from the women, or the children from their parents, or the public sector worker from the private—all the mentioned are aspects of society that are lacking individual merit and seek their value in the safety of collectivism.  That is where the trouble begins and ends.  The way to end racism is to judge others on individual merit, not by any group affiliation.  When the incentive to gang rule is removed, the issue of racism will be put to rest.

In the wake of the Zimmerman verdict, gangs took to the streets at all political levels to exploit the tragic death for their own social positions, using democratic imposition to force rules on society that is ultimately designed to rob value from once social sector to provide another what it’s missing.  The behavior is as stupid as a village of hunters and gathers fighting over the watering hole of an animal both are hunting, or a bunch of foolish Europeans fighting over one version of religion over another.   Collective groups are the source of the trouble because they seek to hide individual merit behind their social blanket allowing poor behavior and decisions to be supplemented by the value of others in their group.   In every case, such as the would-be criminal Eric Holder, or the members of the Black Panthers, or any of the radical demonstrators who took to the streets to vandalize property like a bunch of malcontents when Zimmerman was found not guilty—the demand is not for justice of a slain kid, the demand is for an improvement in social status without the work of actually earning it.  Behind the actions of the hoards who are declaring “equality” are drug addicts, womanizers, jobless buffoons, welfare recipients, child molesters, victims of the molested, and a whole host of characters who are lacking personal value for one reason or the other and find it is much easier to steal value from others to fill themselves than actually doing the work of being good people of good merit.  That is what racism is all about, and why it will never go away so long as groups of any kind are given sway over other groups in a perpetual battle for value that is unearned.

Rich Hoffman

“Justice Comes with the Crack of a Whip!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com