Tag: John Kasich

The War Already Started: Unions took the first shot!

The OEA (Ohio Education Association) is pushing to have portions of their members checks deducted so they can raise money to fight Senate Bill 5! One of the reasons the unions wish to make sure their members are so well compensated, at our expense, is so those members won’t blink when it comes time for payroll deductions to fight political battles against taxpayers.

It was not people like me that drew the line in the sand and started this war of larger government versus smaller government. Public worker against private worker. Freedom lover against the progressive. People like me were just living our lives, working hard, and acquiring property which is the staple of American life. There is no shame in that. Owning something is commitment to it. And without commitment, it is only human to witness neglect, because without ownership, neglect is the result. It is not people like me that decided that violence, coercion and political manipulation were acceptable practices. It was them.

Yet this is what unions have brought to our nation. I know firsthand the fights that happened in parking lots and bathrooms of manufacturing facilities. I have been guilty of spilling blood from attackers in labor only to have the police turn their backs to the violence because they secretly endorsed it. The cause of that violence, because I wanted to work at 100% efficiency when the union wanted to keep the rate at 50% unless more pay or overtime were given. I have seen firsthand the violence given to “scabs” that cross a picket line, only to be beaten beyond recognition and hospitalized for weeks. I have seen anti-union people in management attacked at their homes or employees friendly to management terrorized in ways that if the same happened to the black population, racism would be screamed collectively from the entire nation. The battle lines of organized labor have been one of violence with the intent of forcing more money to their pockets. It is simple extortion.

I know of stories from the early days of Warner Brothers, where members of the filmmaking community established the parameters still felt to this day, where cars were overturned outside of the Warner Brothers gate by cameramen, set designers and other production support personnel all in the quest for obtaining “property,” in the form of money. They seek to take it from someone else with the threat of violence, which is no different from a bully taking lunch money from some poor kid on a school playground. The intent is the same.

And things have not changed. A 26-year-old woman named Katherine R. Windels was charged with two felony counts and two misdemeanor counts for allegedly making email threats against Wisconsin lawmakers during the height of the battle over Gov. Scott Walker’s budget-repair bill.

She thought it was perfectly acceptable to send a letter to GOP lawmakers threatening to kill them and their families. For every person like her that does such an unspeakable thing, there are thousands, if not millions that are thinking about it. It’s part of the union culture. They are a threatening species intent on taking property from some and giving it to themselves.

In 2008 the LEA, the Lakota Education Association threatened to walk out on the kids they taught on a chilly October evening, for one reason, to obtain higher wages. The school board gave them what they wanted to keep the school open. Two years later in March of 2010, the LEA again initiated the threat of a strike, which forced the school board to quietly attempt to sign a contract over health insurance benefits while passing an operating levy to deal with the step increases forced from the last strike attempt. In August, the union announced they were taking a pay freeze to work with the district while attempting to pass another school levy. But the whole thing was smoke and mirrors. From 2010 to 2011 the top wage earners at Lakota, those making over 65K per year increased payroll to those employees by 15 million dollars all the while pretending to be on the “pay freeze.” Last year there were 434 employees making over 65K per year. This year there’s 625. That’s an increase of 191 employees that broke that barrier. Why, the threat of a strike. The union leadership would argue with the school board over every little thing so to frighten them from even considering arguing about a large issue, like wages. The intent is to take property and give to the union membership and to prevent anyone from questioning the motive.  (Notice in the chart below, the bottom line is what everyone else felt by way of CPI.  The top number is the amount that the LEA increased their own wages.  Notice the level off period in 2005.  That was during the levy attempt that year that took four times to pass.  Once it finally passed, look how the wages took off)

In Lebanon Schools we’ve seen the superintendent there make deals with the union openly violating Ohio’s sunshine law which states that interest of such a magnitude should be discussed in the open with the taxpayers that fund the whole business. Instead he along with the entire school board went into executive session to pass the union contracts. Why, because they fear the union more than the taxpayer, because it’s not the tax payer that threatens their comfort level. It’s not the tax payer that is turning over cars, vandalizing homes, and cars, or threatening physical violence to people who stand in their way. It’s not the tax payer that is threatening to strike and leave the entire school a lifeless entity full of kids but no teachers. It’s not the taxpayers that are sending death threats to law makers, so the tax payer gets screwed while the unions take all the money.

That’s what we’re dealing with here, violent thugs that have driven up their wages through pure extortion. And now they want to repeal S.B.5 so they can continue this game against the tax payer. Of course they are upset. They make good money that was earned with blood and violence, most of it they shed from others, and some of it they shed themselves. They like that government fears them. They like that the public avoids them so that the sham can continue. They want things to continue as they have. They have so far dictated everything and conceded nothing and it shows in their wages. It’s not inflammatory to say such a thing. It is a fact, the records are public, all one has to do is look at them. Well, look at them!   The chart below is an example of Lakota’s LEA and how they pushed up their salaries as opposed to the actual growth and consumer price index.  Notice they are way above the CPI. 

My purpose with these articles is to share with others what I have done all my life, so that they can take from it what they will and possibly adapt their own methods for dealing with the parasites that feed off all of us. I have no desire to avoid labels of “radical” or “brutal” in reference to my personality. I don’t care if I’m liked, or if I’m popular. I have no desire for public office. I have no desire for social acceptance. I care not to be a leader of the Tea Party. The leader of the Lakota School Levy. I care not who is leading the fight against the Lebanon Levy, the Mason Levy, S.B.5. I lend my help to all those groups because I lead myself and am firm in my own convictions and at the end of the day I have my books and I only care what they think of me. So I will not give unions and other government thugs what they ask for, and that’s the silent endorsement of complacency which gives them to power to rob us in the light of day. I will not make excuses for the conditions that allow the unions to think they have a right to exist, because I don’t support their right to any legal justification. They can have a club meeting in their back yard just like masons, or the Boy Scouts of America, because their value is just as important to me. They are just a bunch of silly people locked arm and arm advocating a “collective” society.

Now, I know what you’re thinking union thug. You’re thinking, “this guy needs his ass kicked, that’ll teach him.” Well, to you I say, join the long list of those that have tried. See there is a mathematical formula that dictates that a guy like me will always beat thousands of you and there is nothing in the laws of physics that falls in your favor. You only have power in a collective group shouting and screaming, and you have that power because you lack personal courage.

As I mentioned I used to be vice-president of a motorcycle club in Ohio. I know many hard-core bikers and gang leaders. I understand their thinking, and I like many of them, up to a point. That point ends when they call me “brother.” “I’m not your brother,” I’ll tell them. “I’ll wave to you as we pass each other on the open road, but I am not your brother. Just because we share a love of motorcycles, that doesn’t make us bothers.” I always get an odd look, but I don’t care. The reason is that saying the word brother affirms some sort of fraternity, which I find disgusting. It’s a collective identification, and that collective identification leads to a weakness of the heart.

One year I spent several months filming a documentary for an independent film company about motorcycle riders when I came to the realization that many of the bikers I liked so much belonged to a union of some kind and that collective mentality merged with the independence of riding motorcycles. They had this desire to ride in packs, and this drove me crazy, because it seems to me anti-American. So I dropped the project, because I could not truly show that motorcycle riders were the embodiment of a true American spirit, which I wanted to believe. Too many of them subjected themselves to collectivism. The group rides and motorcycle gangs were simply too similar to the kind of behavior seen in unions, which is not a pillar for which the United States is built. The country is not built by such fools. It is used by them. It is built by the individual and the individual’s ability to employ those people to some sense of direction.

Collectivism is weakness, and that is why the man, or woman who can stand on their own principles, are kings of their own internal kingdoms, and look in the mirror each day and like what looks back. Those types of people will beat those in collective societies one hundred percent of the time. The reason for the defeat of those in the collective as opposed to the individual is the individual that is secure in themselves find they are free of guilt. Guilt is what the collective uses to gain footing in people’s lives. And when you consider the strategy of unions they start with guilt. “Don’t you want the kids to succeed?” “Don’t you want your community to be safe?” “Don’t you want to pay the firefighter, because they run into danger when you run away?” They use the guilt that they calculate is sure to be there because we are all trained to feel guilt, and guilt is the pathway to the collective mind.

If guilt doesn’t work, then it’s violence, and the intention behind the violence is to make someone internally feel guilt for not standing up to the thugs, to hide from the disgrace and push it from their minds. That is why the public has thrown money for years at these people, to hide the guilt of their cowardly acts from themselves.

So it was not the tax payer that started this battle. It is a battle for all the reasons listed. The violence was started by the unions a century ago, and they’ve done to the tax payer what the progressive proclaims the United States did to the Native American, they encroached and broke treaty after treaty and pushed the Indian off their land inch by inch because they could. Because the Indian naively believed in honor and respect and they found themselves defeated repeatedly. Just as the tax payer does. The unions do not care for honor. They do not care for respect. They use collective might as their weapon of force to strike fear in the hearts of the human population seeking to expose the guilt they are sure to reside deep in our consciousness. And to cover that guilt with more money.

So remember that the violence inflicted is not just an attack on our personal sovereignty, but an attack on our very beings, because the attempt to is to inflict upon us guilt that if not felt in our compassion for children, or the safety of mankind, it will be the guilt of our own fear to act against the violence committed upon us. And that is the battle that they initiated and it is our task to defeat it in the greater war.

The first battle of that war was fought long ago, and many of us didn’t even know it was going on. We went to dinner with our families, to the movies with our significant others and followed the latest sports scores while these thieves robbed us under the cover of legality. Now that we know it’s a war that requires our attention, the first battle we’ve won was the S.B.5 Bill, and we must work hard to keep that ground, because there is much more of that ground that must be taken in order to return our nation to the healthy state that is required for the times we live in on planet earth.

So what do you think the unions will spend that money deducted from union member paychecks on? Manipulating the voting public and convincing people to tax themselves so the unions can protect the stranglehold they have on our political system. That is a fight that must be taken back to those that initiated it, and defeat must be in their horizon and retribution for years of looting against us all must be rectified.

Rich Hoffman

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

SALARIES ARE TOO DAMN HIGH: The public sector is out of control; the legacy of collective bargaining

A crime has been committed among all tax payers. We have been told by unions that we must support our firefighters and police without question as to the actual costs, because of safety, and a sense of righteous duty. We must support our teachers because we want to save our children’s future without actually looking at why the budgets are so expensive, and what they are actually learning. We have been played by our own guilt into a scam of epic proportions, a shell game that is the direct result of “collective bargaining.”

Doc Thompson discusses this vile evil on 700 WLW. It’s an evil topic because the perpetrators having knowingly committed the crime, no different from selling someone a car knowing the transmission would go out on the buyer 1 mile down the road. Is that a crime, to knowingly commit deceptive practices against someone else? Yes, because the taking of taxes is a theft no different from a robber that held you at gunpoint and said, “give me your money or I’ll shoot.” “Pass this levy to protect our kids.” Pass this levy police levy for ‘protection.’” The ethical standard is the same, because my question is, “or else what?” Why does the implication that more money means better service even come into play? My experience is that money does not always get you the best employees, so why do people think that more money gives us anything of value? The reason is that public employees have knowingly lied to the tax payers, manipulated them using emotion, in order to secure outrageous salaries for themselves without any care for the sustainability of the tax revenue system. It is greed at its absolute worst.

I’ll use the Lakota School District as an example because it’s my school district that I pay direct taxes to, but it is beyond reason that Lakota has over 625 employees that make over 65K per year.  No private business could be so irresponsible with their payroll and expect to survive, yet government workers just expect taxes to increase to pay for their unrealistic expectations. I pay a reasonable sum of taxes to them, and like everything I spend my money on, I expect performance. When I spend more than $50 on anything I inquire about the value of the task. When I spend thousands, the same kind of money I might spend on a new car, a new television, a high-end computer, or a trip to Europe, I will look closely at the situation, and when people waste my money I get angry. When they lie to me I become furious, and even vindictive. Because lying to me is not acceptable. Manipulating me is not acceptable. Attempting to ruin my community is not acceptable.

It’s not inflammatory to say such things. It’s calling the situation for what it is. What has to happen is America has to shrink its government, and you start that shrinking government in our local communities. The list that Doc is talking about needs to be reduced by about 2/3rds of what it is. Management control must be given back to “management.” It is abysmal that Bill Cunningham, Bill Seitz, and Sheriff Jones and these types of people even endorse collective bargaining. The Sheriff I understand because he’s a “cop.” But other conservatives that support such things are out of their mind, and have largely contributed to the debacle we are looking at. It’s corrupt…….it’s corrupt because we’re paying people too much for a government that is too big and inefficient. We’ve made our management systems in government to be inbred, inefficient and completely useless, especially with the presence of public sector unions. And it won’t get any better just leaving things as they have been.

We can expect a major fight this fall over repealing S.B.5. Every one of the government people making these extraordinary salaries will show up to vote. The rest of us won’t be so motivated, unless they understand what’s at stake. If we keep S.B.5 we’ll be on the march to drive these terrible government costs down, and we’ll be able to get control of the situation. If the unions and public workers get the bill repealed, then we’ll go bankrupt within a few years. That is a certainty. The people running things are not smart enough to regulate themselves. So it will take people with real management control to step into local government on a “volunteer” basis and actually lead. But the power-hungry people who want a big desk and a name plate need to go. Those people who have achieved nothing in their lives but an elected office by using fancy, manipulative words and must be removed, because those employees are ineffective and way too expensive.

This is a fight. Don’t kid yourself that it’s not. We are in a different kind of war, not one with guns, that is counted in casualties. But one of laws, one of money, and one counted in submission to new controls. One of those controls is high taxes and high taxes will kill American society, and there are MANY that want that. Some of those insurgents lead these unions. Many that serve in office and fund those campaigns, are at war with us. Call it that! I no longer have the patience for the enormous smallness of these self-inflated ego driven fools such as senator Schumer at the federal level, and big time progressives like what we had in Governor Strickland at the state level. They have created the system we are seeing clearly for the first time, that big government costs big money, and leads to incremental losses of freedom with every new law passed to give that big government some reason to exist.

The incredibly high wages in the public sector are a power grab which lures complacent soldiers with comfortable wages who gladly look the other way while the taxpayers are spent into oblivion. It has nothing to do with fairness, or actual rights. It is all about money, and using that money to purchase the souls of the complacent public worker to the demise of everything we trust.

The salaries of public workers are TOO DAMN HIGH. And it’s time we put an end to it before it’s too late.

Rich Hoffman

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

Pay Rate for the top 625 Teachers at Lakota Schools: Yes, the number grew!

Below is the 2011 Lakota Salary list, an update from the famous list exposed on 700 WLW just 6 months ago where everyone that heard the information was disgusted, upset, and compelled to take their anger to the voting booth. If you want to look at that list again and compare it with the one below click here. And remember, Lakota has not hired another superintendent as of this writing. So there is no superintendent on the new list.

What you will see will anger you much more than that. In fact, I have been paying close attention to this issue for over a year now and when I realized the severity of the issue I became furious.

A brief synopsis of the information is this. Last year I listed the top income recipients who made over 65K per year, which came out to 434 employees, which I thought was a lot. This year, even taking off the superintendent, who resigned one week after the original list came out, the amount of employees escalated 625 employees! That means that in just one year, when supposedly teachers took a pay freeze in August of 2010, 191 more employees broke past the 65K per year barrier and became a top wage earner just because of the step increases demanded by the union contract. Last year 120 million of Lakota’s operating budget of 160 million went to just salaries and wages. Of that 120 million $31,900,416.00 went to these wonderful employees making over 65K per year. I thought that was a lot. This year, that number exploded to $47,548,105.00! An increase in salary wages of $15,647,689.00. That does not include all increases in wages, just the wages for employees making more than 65K per year! The total amount of money saved in the emergency budget reductions for 2011 which is causing layoffs, busing cuts, elective elimination, pay for play sports, etc is $13 million. Lakota spent more money on the step increases on just the employees making over 65K per year than it will save cutting all the services mentioned to save a measly $13 million. If Lakota could have stopped the step increases they could have kept all the services, teachers would have still been paid well, and nobody would have lost their jobs. But that’s not what happened is it?

When a school district complains that it does not have enough money to operate the answer is not a tax increase to close the gap. In most cases, it is not the revenue that is declining, because the community is not taking its money away from a school system, unless they move out of the district and take their tax dollars with them. When the state, or federal government takes away their contributions, as they should, it should not be expected that a local district increase their taxes to cover the cost.

The expectation that such a thought is even a possibility is a serious flaw in the thinking of school districts that have turned education into their own “cash cow” business.

Any businessman looking at the budget of Lakota Schools would look at the operating budget of 155 million to 160 million dollars, see that the expenses are projecting higher than supplied revenue and would make the needed cuts to bring costs in line. And the very first thing that would be looked at is wages, because most often that is the greatest expense in a budget, especially in a service oriented business like education.

As I look at that list there are a few teachers that I think are worth 70K to 80k per year. But only a few. I would argue that a school district should be able to pay a few of their very best and most prestigious teachers a wage of this kind. But to pay EVERYONE with tenure that amount is ridiculously prohibitive, ignorant, reckless, selfish, and misguided.

Before any district asks for a levy from the community, they should reduce their wage costs. This does not allow those districts to perform at a lower level. A district must reflect the community it’s in, and in the land of Lakota, it is expected to be as excellent as the community that the school resides in. Unfortunately for the union personnel that have managed to extort these outrageous wage levels for their members, the community of Lakota, many of them run their own businesses, or manage businesses, and must make decisions as the school board is required to make.

The top wage earners shown here are what should be looked at before there is a levy of any kind. These positions should be consolidated eliminating personnel wherever possible. If it is decided that those personnel are absolutely essential to education operations, then these are the people who should take a 30% wage cut, because they are well above the average wage of residence of the affluent Lakota School District, and these amounts are just plain malicious.

Now, is there any question as to why we need Senate Bill 5? And is it not obvious what the unions are protecting?

Rich Hoffman

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

The Betrayal of Rock Ribbed Republicans: The faces behind the mask.

If Rock Ribbed Republicans such as what has been said about Senators like Bill Seitz are truly conservatives, then it is no wonder that our budgets are so out of control in government. If Seitz represents the best and most responsible of our state representatives then we’re in a lot of trouble.

I listened in disbelief to Bill Seitz on the Bill Cunningham show while the two of them spoke about how unfair S.B.5 is to the public worker. Cunningham has declared himself a supporter of the Tea Party and takes pride in the fact that he has spoken at rallies for the Tea Party. Yet his views, and policies are bewilderingly in support of big government, this coming from a man who has declared for over 20 years that Clinton is a fool, made a lot of fame calling John McCain and Bob Taft too liberal, big government politicians and is one of the first to call President Obama by his full name, Barrack Hussein Obama, so to remind Americans of Obama’s Muslim pride. Between these two men I heard two firm, establishment Republicans that love the old way of politics and can’t see the hard things that must be done to bring our government under control.

I was suspicious of Willie when he came out in support of the Lakota School Levy. Part of me understood that he was making a sound business decision, because it was well-known that Lakota administrators and teachers were threatening to boycott any business that didn’t support a school levy. Willie owning a sports bar in West Chester wouldn’t want bad things to happen to his business, and I understand. But I was disappointed when he came out openly on the air in favor of the levy right before the election. It seems that people like him are so in love with public education sports and all the ornaments of education that he is willing to overlook all the obvious problems surrounding education funding. At 10K per child who in their right mind wouldn’t understand that if you spend that much money on education, yet don’t see the results in the children, that something must be done and tax increases are not acceptable. Anyone that owns a business, and Willie does, knows that he could not afford to pay dishwashers, waitresses, cooks and hostesses $20 dollars an hour, because it would destroy his labor costs. He’d have to increase the price of his meals to pay for the wages. Yet from him, it seems acceptable to allow teachers, police and firefighters to make infinite amounts of money, because all you have to do to pay for it is to raise taxes. I can understand that people like Willie are in need of lots of police services and firefighters. I mean Willie is a guy that got stuck on his roof a few years ago, and could not get down on his own. So people like that represent a certain helplessness among people who will always vote for more and more safety personnel to save them from themselves, so their views are corrupted with their weaknesses.

But worst of all is Bill Seitz. Here is a guy that I watched stand on the steps of the capital building and demand Governor Strickland show leadership. He has over a decade in the state house and is considered a hard-core Republican. Yet, he believes that management should not be in charge of their costs. What is the purpose of management if not to regulate costs? The unions and management in the public sector are not equal, as he insists it should be!

This is troubling because people like me don’t even recognize the right of the unions to exist. If public money is involved, no union should be in place. If a private company wants one, and can afford one, they can have them. I can vote by buying a product from those businesses or not. But with pubic sector unions, I don’t have a choice. I don’t have a choice but to support a teachers union, which asks for too much. I don’t have a choice but to support a FOP organization, which will lobby to put more cops on the street than we need, and they’ll seek to justify themselves by setting up DUI checkpoints and speed traps. It’s a corrupt, bad system and I don’t want ANY of my money to go to a public union! PERIOD!!! End of the story! If those employees don’t want to work under those conditions, don’t take a public job. Now, people like the Senator and many media outlets that just accept blindly this whole idea that unions and management should coexist in some way, will call my views radical, or extreme right-winged. Those people are naive fools and have helped perpetuate this whole system of costly formalities that only serve to drive up costs to communities.

I listened to Seitz and Willie, both men seem intelligent, work in law, yet can’t grasp the basic principle that unions are a creation of people who occurred well after the Constitution of the United States, and the Constitution of Ohio. Those Constitutions were also the creation of people which we have all sworn to live by. Unions were not agreed by all. They just grew like weeds in a garden that nobody picked which rob the fruit of our labor from proper nourishment. They are an accident that should have never happened and were born of bribes and complacency, by people like Seitz that gave them credibility and lawyers like Willie that defended their right to exist. Such crimes as these are obviously difficult for them to admit in these late years of their life, because such an admission is simply too introspective. An admission would mean that everything they had built their lives around for over 50 years would be rooted in some small little corruption where deals were made at the expense of the public, and they played their part to a deep inner shame.

It must be terrible to view the world with such warped glasses so as to distort the true vision that is before us all. I can only speak for myself, I am glad that I am not corrupted with such distortions. It may be considered extreme by those that wish to see the warped fantasy of their lives and believe they have behaved ethically, but I am happy to have seen such weeds of thought for what they are, a corruption created from ineptitude and justified by the weak which chose to disguise their cowardly behavior with a shroud of conservatism when at their core they are no better than the collectivist oriented liberal.

That is why they don’t understand the intent behind S.B.5 and wherever they look they see “unfairness” because they are the types that find themselves stuck on the roofs of their homes needing help to climb down. It’s easy to talk tough and proclaim that one is a lover of freedom and propionate of self-reliance. It is easy to stand in front of a crowd and say we need a smaller government. But it is hard when you take money yourself or find yourself defending something that is inheritably wrong, because you have a past that benefited from that wrong, and chose to hide those evils behind patriotism. Those are the worst kind of people because they are never what they seem. Out one side of their mouth comes one thing, but out the other comes the despicable.

Rich Hoffman

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

Obama 2012 for President? The Sad Selection of People Who Think They’re Leaders

Obama announced that he is running again for the presidency of the United States. Gas prices are climbing out of control. We are in three different wars. The education system is collapsing under greedy union requirements while our children grow softer, and more progressive, and are losing the ability to think outside the box which is an American trait. The government is on the verge of a shut down while Democrats show that they are clueless in their ability to make the needed cuts to programs that feed their political base. Is it any surprise that Obama announced that his is running for office again? What other fool would want such a job that only the small-minded, unthinking, social engineer would even want?

On the below video clip Doc Thompson of 700 WLW discusses President Obama, and the union mentality that the President is committed to representing. He also discusses how the President has “punted” on the budget deficit, and how such a stand is an admission to failure. Doc covers a lot of ground in this radio spot, but the theme is that there are people who believe theft is their moral right. Obama is certainly one of those types. But surprisingly, so is Jessie Ventura, which surprised me. For a long time I thought Jessie was a freedom fighter, but it turns out that he’s one of those “justified theft” people. Listen to Doc and Jessie fight over the word…..”Compassionate.”

The Democrats don’t have a better candidate than Obama, which I consider to be a dismal reflection on the values of these mindless drones. The Republicans aren’t much better off. There aren’t too many people on that side of the aisle that could challenge Obama and his bloc voting securities, such as the immigration vote, the black vote, the women vote, the youth vote, the progressive vote, in short anybody that works for government or gets a check from government. Obama because of his skin color and the fact that he speaks, “hip talk” will get approximately 40% of the vote, because it is among those 40% that are the most weak and helpless in our society. In that 40% are the most intellectually lost, the type of individual that a guy like me might call “veal.”

I cringe each time I hear a report say that any of these people are our “leaders.” People like Obama are not leaders. They are representatives. Newt Gingrich is not a leader. Glenn Beck is not a leader. In fact, approximately half the nation doesn’t need a leader to make them safe, tell them how to think, or to wait for a check from the government. But people who want to be viewed as leaders want to give out checks so that people will become dependent on them, and that’s a terrible thing.

It really doesn’t matter to me who runs for the Presidency, because whoever sits in that chair is going to be required to get out-of-the-way. I have about had it with the mindless intrusion from such small minds who wish to impose some pathetic European rule, such as what we see in President Obama and the money of people like George Soros and his “open society.” No thanks George. Set up your new civilization in Antarctica. The penguins might enjoy your type of society. America doesn’t need people like that to hold back its ambitions. So my thoughts about Obama’s candidacy are that if he wants the job, if he wants to take the beating of that position, have at it. Because the royalty of that position is going out of style fast, and by 2016 the nation will have moved much further to the right and government will shrink by a lot, and if Obama wants that to be a part of his legacy, that a big government president scared the nation to reject progressive ideas, then I welcome his announcement with open arms.

But I’d rather vote for this guy.

Rich Hoffman

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

Darryl Parks Calls them Veal: The people that pave the path to socialism

Darryl Parks of 700 WLW had an interesting topic on his Saturday April 2nd, 2011 radio show. His question was, “Why is socialism bad?” After all, he argued, people seem to want it. They want social security, they want public unions, they want health care, government jobs, they want to be regulated by government for “safety,” etc. And he’s right, at least for half the country.

I was on the Big One with Darryl to offer my opinion:

I was going for a big topic there on a 7 minute radio spot, but I liked the question and the eventual debate that followed. I meant it when I said that I do not play the lottery, ever, because I wouldn’t want to come into any money that way. I would not keep money given to me in an inheritance either, or any other random act. In fact, once when my wife and I were at a casino cruise in Cape Canaveral, I spent .25 cents on a slot machine and lost my money. I was extremely upset so I spent .25 cents on one more try. I won back .50 cents and my wife and I spent the rest of the cruise eating from the buffet and watching sea gulls fly next to the ship while reading a book, happy I made my money back and was leaving with what I started with. I was done with gambling for the rest of my life. I simply will not gamble away anything loosely that I earned with my hard work for the fantasy of hitting some kind of collective jackpot. I don’t even do office pools for the same reason, which people think is strange because such things are very popular.

Why do I feel that way? Well, for the same reason I don’t accept help from people unless I can return the favor immediately with my work or mind. The reason is simple, because in my life, when I have to define it to future generations what I am, it will never be said that Rich Hoffman was bought and paid for. It will never be said that I kissed any ass to get my way through life. It can never be said that I didn’t earn every single dime I ever made with complete honesty. For everything its worth, to me, the highest goal a man can achieve is to be a self-made-man.

People will and have said that such a position is selfish. That taking such a stand deprives people of helping you. That it takes a village to make the world go round. Well……..no it doesn’t, it takes a bit of genius to come up with unique ideas, and people who are willing to do the work of bringing those ideas to life.

If I were to win the lottery I would have been robbed of the opportunity to earn the money with my skills and tenacity. It would be like winning a football game without the other team ever showing up and the score keeper just putting some points on the board, and you automatically win. For me, the fun is in beating an opponent, to taste the blood in my mouth from a hard-fought battle, to sweat droplets from my forehead in the hot sun, or to work late into the night to outsmart a competitor. If someone just handed me a check and said, “you win, the fight is over,” I’d feel deprived of a true victory.

I understand that my way of thinking is “old fashioned,” and probably is a complete foreign concept with today’s youth. Socialism is a big part of their life, and it starts in school when they are taught that nobody is better than anybody else. Everyone is the same. Except athletes and straight “A” students that can help a school system get funding from the community by putting those students on a pedestal. But for the most part, our youth is taught that it’s bad to excel. It’s bad to be the “best.” It’s bad to be strong, faster, or more creative.

Our government created millions of welfare recipients that have put out the lights of ambition in many people. When someone is given something, and they don’t earn it by giving back something of equal value, they are robbed of their merit. This might bother them at first, but once they accept the lack of merit they lose their ambition, and this is the cause of massive failure in the welfare system.

I once attended a trade show in Chicago’s McCormick Center for one of my products. I drove up from Cincinnati and was appalled that there were so many toll booths on the way into the city. Counting all the cars going through the booths, it was obvious that Chicago was ripping people off by generating enormous sums of money with the tool booths. So on the way back home after the trade show was over, I drove back through South Chicago and was stunned by how poor it was. My plan was to avoid the toll booths and get back on the highway far to the south. I drove through miles and miles and miles of slums and getting back on the highway that was built over the slums was nearly impossible. It seemed as if the slums were desired by the city of Chicago in order to keep everyone on the toll highway, and discourage what I was doing, by driving through a crime riddled neighborhoods to leave the city.

I looked at angry faces at every stop sign at every block. I had a few arguments with men and boys that shouted racist slurs at me and I expected at any moment to have a gun fight right in the street. It was obvious to me that the good intentions of socialism as implemented in the welfare system was a massive failure, and I felt sorry for the people I was seeing. I knew that if I could have a few of those angry young boys for a few weekends, and take them on a camping trip and teach them to value themselves, I could probably help some of them a little, because what was missing was a sense of value in their lives. They had learned and accepted to live off the government, and had lost their ambition. They had lost their merit. It is no wonder they turned to crime, trying to steal back from society what was robbed from them, which is their honor. The crime began with our government “helping them.”

Anytime you make someone dependent on you, a crime has been committed because you have stolen from them some merit.

This is why when people who have lost their merit, or never had it to begin with because their parents didn’t provide them with a sense of value, and they inherit money, or win the lottery, they go broke in just a few years. The money does not make them better people. Money cannot buy merit, or honor. Money is only as good as the people who hold it. Social problems cannot be fixed by throwing money at those problems.

The same thing happens when an owner of a business works hard to build that business, and then passes it on to his kids later in life, only to have the kids screw it up. The kids don’t work the business the same because they didn’t earn it.

This is my primary problem with the whole teacher salary issue. I would argue that a few teachers may be worth 70K or 80K per year, but because of the socialist tendencies of the teachers unions, all teachers with tenure, and certain degrees make the same “step increases,” so they all make that kind of money. That’s an insane idea. All it does is drive up the labor costs for the district! That’s why the S.B.5 Bill that Governor Kasich signed recently was so important, because it will allow school boards to stop that terrible imposition of their budgets. Money does not make a good teacher, just like it doesn’t make a good person. You may pay a good teacher not to leave you because of their merit, which makes you value them over others because what they bring to the table is valuable. But to pay everyone incremental amounts of money is built along the same lines as a lottery. You’re giving people something they don’t deserve. They are just getting money because they filled legal qualifications. Not because they fought hard and earned it in competition with others.

Speaking of Governor Kasich you can tell a lot about people when they are “tested.” Here is a great video from a couple of years ago with Bill Cunningham and John Kasich talking about what should be done to regain the principles of American value. It’s ironic that Cunningham seems poised to question the integrity of Kasich. “What kind of governor will you be, will you be like Regan, or will you be like Taft?” So far, Kasich has lived up to what he said here. He’s playing hardball, and being tough, doing the hard things Cunningham challenged him on, where Bill Cunningham once he realized that a smaller government meant reducing the strength of public sector unions backed off recently and has turned against Kasich over S.B.5. Cunningham has begun the movement to undo the bill encouraging a referendum as fast as Kasich signed it. This is the difference between “talking tough,” and being ”tough.”

Kasich is a self-made man, and he governs that way. Willie did work for the public sector, so he cannot see the socialist tendencies present, because he accepted them in his past. He can justify them, but cannot speak against them now, even when it’s the right thing to do.

There have been plenty of warnings about what socialism will do to people who embrace it. If you haven’t seen it, here is a version of George Orwell’s, Animal Farm. The British animation firm of John Halas and Joy Batchelor perform yeoman service in adapting George Orwell’s allegorical novel Animal Farm to the screen. As any high-school English student can tell you, the original 1945 novel was Orwell’s spin on the rise and fall of the Communist myth. A group of intelligent animals overthrow their corrupt human owner and set up their own self-sustained farm, predicated on an idealistic credo: “All Animals are Created Equal”, “No Animal Shall Ever Drink Liquor”, “Four Legs Good: Two Legs Bad” etc. But when Snowball the Pig (read: Trotsky) is overthrown by the despotic Napoleon (read: Stalin), all idealism goes out the window, and soon the pigs are ruling dictatorially over the other animals. Before long, Animal Farm operates on but one principle: “All Animals Are Created Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others.” Orwell’s ironic ending, in which it becomes impossible to tell the difference between the Pigs and the Humans, is blunted in favor of a grafted-on happy ending, perhaps to mollify the kiddie trade. Maurice Denham supplies all the character’s voices, while Gordon Heath serves as narrator.

The warning signs have always been there for us in literature, whether it’s from George Orwell, or Ayn Rand, the analysis on socialism as been conducted.

Socialism is a disease that robs society of ambition and takes us down only one path, our eventual destruction.

But there are those in government who use the excuse to “help” people in order to place themselves in the managing role, so their support is simply a power grab built on the backs of slaves. They will exploit millions of people’s integrity in order to feed their own egos for power. That’s why socialism will never work.

And before anybody says that my thoughts are part of a well-funded conspiracy from the right-wing, Glenn Beck, Ayn Rand, Rush Limbaugh, or Fox News in general, or even talk radio like WLW, guess again, because the Hollywood left is programming socialism into our kids at every entry point, entertainment, education, music, and there is a lot of money in the push for socialism. The conservative push back to the right is being done because of the years and years of propaganda from the left while we weren’t paying attention. That’s why they’re so mad at the Tea Party movement. Socialists don’t want to see the nation swing back away from what they worked so hard to penetrate our culture with by way of influence.

Here’s just one example from the Comedy Central cartoon South Park. Guess popular culture doesn’t want young people to read Atlas Shrugged……………..why do you think that is?

Here is Ayn Rand arguing against socialism and President Obama promoting it.

Socialism is a terrible concept which leads to all out communism and the eventual destruction of the culture that embodies it. If you don’t want to hear me yell about it on WLW, or Glenn Beck yell about it on Fox News, or Milton Freeman lecture about it try Ayn Rand from 1961. Ayn was a little girl when socialism took over her country of Russia and she dedicated her life to combating the disease of socialism because she had seen firsthand what it did to her home country. She fled to the United States and fell in love with skyscrapers, because such a thing could have never been built without American ingenuity and the power of individuals in a capitalist society.

Capitalism works because it allows for merit. Socialism doesn’t work because it robs people of merit. To see why just look at the high cost of education in your local community, and the blank look of our children coming out of those schools, and have the courage to ask the hard question……..why did I surrender our children to a blank, meritless life of socialism?

And why did I buy that lottery ticket hoping to escape the perils of life by wimping out when times are tough. Money won’t make a person better if they lack merit to begin with. And people with merit will find that money isn’t that difficult to obtain, because the world lacks people with true merit.

Darryl Parks is right when he says that only the weak, veal type people in our society are attracted to socialism. Let’s just hope that the weak don’t outnumber the strong, because that’s when freedom dies forever. And socialism knows it. So long as the welfare system expands, so long as government continues to be a primary employer, so long as public sector unions exist, the weak will continue to put representatives into our republic that will slowly convert our society into socialism.

How do we get more people strong in our society, so we can get the country moving back toward capitalism? You have to stop pandering to people. Stop coddling that child every time they bump their head. Stop dressing your kids in elbow pads and knee pads. Stop trying to breast feed your kids even when they are 16 to 17 years old. In fact, this is the path of socialism, watch this clip of Hugh Jackman zip lining into the Sydney Opera House. I think Jackman did well. He came in too fast, but so what. He was able to make his transfer to his rappel line. But look at the women’s reactions here.


All those girls and women are probably going to have kids, and they’ll be the ones to pander to their children’s every whims, and nobody will attempt to toughen up those kids creating a society of……..as Darryl calls them………………………….veal.

Veal is good for only one thing, to be eaten. And you can’t build a country on people like that and expect it to stay strong for long. That’s when socialism takes over.

Rich Hoffman

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

Mark North is Challenged to a Debate: April 9th on the Darryl Parks Show

Rick McPherson did the unthinkable. He went on the sacred airwaves of 700 WLW during the Darryl Parks show and challenged Mark North, superintendent of the Lebanon School System to an on-the-air debate over the actions taken by the Lebanon School Board to approve union contracts prior to Governor Kasich signing the S.B.5 bill which would eliminate collective bargaining agreements. If North had held tight he could have used S.B.5 to drive down the costs of his district and avoid a school levy.

It was a bold challenge given by a man who knows that the Lebanon Superintendent is guilty of subverting the confidence of the taxpayers in the school district while at the same time encouraging them to pass a levy on the May ballot. Listen to that interview and challenge here. Darryl Parks upon hearing this information declared his support toward defeating the Lebanon School Levy with the very powerful 50,000 Watts of The Big One radio station, one of the most powerful radio stations in the country.

Mark North has two choices. He can ignore the challenge and attempt to point his finger at those opposed to the increase in taxes as simple “bomb throwers.” He’ll do that because he doesn’t have the guts to face McPherson on WLW during the Darryl Parks show of April 9th. North knows he’s wrong and has been caught doing the unspeakable, making deals with the union prior to passage of a controversial bill and proving his loyalty to the unions, and not the tax payers of the district. He also knows that he and the school board members are guilty of violating the “sunshine law” which prohibits discussions and deals such as what transpired prior to the last Lebanon School Board meeting.

If Mr. North were innocent of such allegations, he’ll gladly be prepared to go on the Big One to defend the reputation of his district under his leadership. Because in the court of public opinion, silence means your guilty. The branch of truth has officially been extended for him to defend these actions for all to hear and to settle any misconceptions the public may have about the situation.

But, the video of the meeting speaks otherwise. Unless he can prove otherwise in a debate with McPherson on Darryl Parks show the proof of the despicable acts committed under his leadership will be confirmed in his silence.

Stay tuned, because we’re just getting started.

This isn’t a witch hunt to those of you that wish to think so. This is a demand of honesty, and for the system to work as it is supposed to. This is a demand to not perform illegal activity behind closed doors, and then ask tax payers to pay for incompetence. That’s all it is. If it’s painful, well……too bad. Your public officials and your boss want to know why you behaved the way you have, and you owe an explanation. Why not provide that explanation on the 50,000 Watt FLAME THROWER, 700 WLW for all to hear?

Declare your innocence…..if you can. After all, anyone that makes $149,937 a year should have no problem talking to half a million people over 38 states and part of Canada. Show up on April 9th and the debate will occur without a representative from the Lebanon School System.

The choice is yours…………………

Rich Hoffman

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

All I Want For My Birthday!

When S.B.5 was signed by Governor Kasich on Thursday March 31st I received one of the two gifts that I wanted more than anything for my birthday this year. S.B.5 because it showed me that there are people able to have courage and a backbone functioning at a political level committed to putting power back to the communities, to “decentralize” government. That’s what S.B.5 does. Darryl Parks of 700 WLW interviewed Mike Wilson of the Cincinnati Tea Party and Ohio Liberty Council about the multiple benefits of the S.B.5 Bill and the strategy of the referendum attempt. There are a lot of wonderful facts here that are worth listening to even after the Wilson interview.

The other thing I want for my birthday is for the government to shut down on April 8th, the day before my actual birthday. The reason? Because I want people to see how little the government actually does? I don’t want to see people’s lives be interrupted, but I do want to show that American life will continue without the government functioning. For those of us that want a smaller government, people need to see that the government is not essential to American life. In fact, it is a hindrance. And only a government shut-down will show that.

I want to see the Republicans hold a hard line to the budget, much like Kasich did in Ohio. The budget cuts proposed by the house, senate, and the president aren’t even in the ballpark as to what’s required. For the Democrats to only propose 8 or 10 billion isn’t even in the realm of reality. They are clueless parasites with that type of thinking. It’s not even worth discussion. One has to wonder if they didn’t land here from some other planet, because they are so out of touch. Again, listen to Darryl Parks of 700 WLW talk about just how much in debt the government truly is and how utterly ridiculous the cuts the current government is proposing.

I want to see Republicans do the right thing. To hell with the public relations, the public opinion, the traditional politics all together, those are the very things that have nearly ruined our society and they need to end.

I want the media to proclaim that the world will come to an end. I want Democrats to cry for all the dead and sick that will fill the streets, for the apocalypse that is sure to ensue. Then I want the American people to see what a lie the whole thing was. I want for my birthday to show the world that America doesn’t need a large government and that it can shut down, go on vacation, actually set up shop on the moon, and life will go on in America.

I already received one present. Now if I could just have the second.

Surprise me!

Rich Hoffman

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

We Get Paid To Ask For More Money: With education, it’s all about marketing and spin

The day after the Lakota School Board chose to take a bit more time to analyze the deep cuts that must be met there was an article in the Enquirer about unions rushing to get contracts passed before S.B.5 becomes law. Listen to Doc Thompson discussing this issue on 700 WLW in the video below. It is good that Lakota did not get into a hurry to buckle under the union pressure. That would have been very irresponsible. However, most school districts, such as Lebanon went ahead and made deals with the unions. In Lebanon, Mark North, who makes $149,937 a year showed why he’s paid so much. He twisted the wording of his real intentions to proclaim that it was to the districts advantage to lock down their costs because S.B.5 would be challenged in court anyway. He gets paid to spin information like that so voters don’t see the real intentions, which is to secure their union contracts. But his actions, like a lot of other districts looking to pad the pockets of their union friends are revealed. Isn’t it nice to know where the loyalties of your elected administrators are? After all, it’s not their money. It’s yours………and before you say that Mark North is not an elected official, he is appointed by the school board who is elected by the public.

Here is the Enquirer article:

http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20110328/NEWS0108/103290330/Unions-employers-fearing-SB5-rush-contracts?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

Under the comments section of that article there were a couple of the comments by the clueless types of people who inhabit the extraordinary costs of those collective bargaining agreements.

office1698
7:38 PM on March 28, 2011
Can’t wait for the referendum to begin! Gov Kasich and his Tea Party supporters have yet to see the power of unions.

ucfcltymbr
7:41 PM on March 28, 2011

Enjoy your Tea Bag Party reign. It will not take long for the public to come to their sense and run you and your pals out of Columbus and DC.

What we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks is that the unions and administrators have been most certainly in bed with each other. In casual talk we all make jokes about it to ease the tension, but in the back of our minds we want to believe that the administrators, whether it is a school board, or a city council, that they are acting in our best interests. With the rush lately to pass all these contracts before S.B.5 becomes law, the villains reveal themselves.

Villains? Is that the right word? Is that too harsh?

No. It’s not. Villains, looters, feeders, predators, are all words that can be accurately used to describe what the pubic worker has become to the American economy. They are those things because they have become too greedy, demanded too much, and are now in a position to make demands to the people who pay them. They have become corrupt to the point of treason if the word treason was used in a traditional capacity.

What are the definitions of treason?
treason
n
1. (Government, Politics & Diplomacy) violation or betrayal of the allegiance that a person owes his sovereign or his country, esp by attempting to overthrow the government; high treason
2. any treachery or betrayal

The unions, their strikes, their political manipulation, their raw extortion of the public tax dollar have engaged in treason, and they do it openly without fear of prosecution.

In the Pulse Journal report of the Lakota meeting of Monday, March 28, 2011 Lakota Education Association President Sharon Mays proclaimed that teachers have “stepped up” in these times of financial crises. She said, “We’re taking on more teaching responsibility-more class preps-in order to give students more opportunities. Delaying a decision is not fair to teachers or students.”

What does any of that mean? How have the teachers “stepped up?” Everything she stated is undefined, actually it’s expected. As employees of the district, everything she said is expected. Sharon makes $81,156 per year and at that pay rate, everything she stated is expected from someone in that pay scale. Everything and more! Yet she phrases it as though she were actually doing the district a favor of some kind that teachers are working longer than 7.75 hours per day.

Everyone I know that makes over 50K per year, including executives, company presidents, plant managers, sales managers etc, put in approximately 10.5 hours per day. They may spend 7 to 8 hours at the office and another 2 to 3 hours at home. Teachers take home papers to grade and do some class prep work as would be expected. And for Sharon to make $81K per year, I’d expect her to be on call 24 hours a day and do at least 4 to 5 hours of work per day at home. That is the value of that type of salary.

Yet that’s not what’s happening. Teachers are being paid extraordinary amounts of money to teach, which I’ve said should be in a range of pay between 40K to 70K. Any more than that is taking advantage of the tax payer. And the manipulation that union leaders commit against the community is a form of treachery, especially in the face of the last two weeks leading up to the S.B.5 passage.

The plan of these unions is to push hard to get their contracts signed, buy time, and then get their signatures for a referendum into the state by July 7th so they can freeze the bill and get it overturned in the November election. They truly believe that the public will be just as naive as they’ve been in the past, that holding babies and campaigns of “it’s for the kids” will work. They are counting on the same old strong-arm tactics to.

But what is the aim of those tactics. Are they protecting our children? Are they working on behalf of the greater good of the community? Are they working on behalf of a school system that is facing major layoffs?

No. They want their money. They want their money even if it costs their fellow union members their jobs.

I am proud that the Lakota School Board took some extra time to cut their costs. I would hope that once S.B.5 comes into play that they make full use of it to drive their costs down before the July 7th freeze, due to the referendum attempt.

For those union members at the top of the pay scale protecting your inflated salaries, you should be ashamed of yourselves letting others suffer so that you can continue a wage level you know is outrageous, and to hide such a fact behind children is despicable. If I were on the school board I’d set a cap on teaching salaries and for those that didn’t want to live under that cap I’d point to the door. You’re lucky I’m not on the school board. I hope the people we have there now can muster up a similar level of responsibility to protect the community. Teachers that put money before kids are not the type of people I want in my district anyway. We’ll pay you well, but not foolishly, and it is that foolish level of pay that causes the deficit.

It might be wondered or even considered malicious for me to include these wages in this article. The reason is that I know of no other way to balance a budget. How can you balance a budget without looking at the money you spend? Then you have to consider what that money buys you and assess whether or not you are getting the value for what you spend. And I don’t see it. I don’t think the money we spend on government is worth it. I don’t think the money we spend on education is worth it, because I see very little light on behind the eyes of our youth. And I get the sense that public education is simply an organized crime-like syndicate and they are charging the tax payer for protection of services the public values. If lightweights in the mind think my view is extreme, too bad. Everybody thinks it. They just don’t talk about it in order to maintain the status-quo. When people like Ms. Mays, and Mr. North, who makes a lot more money than the average taxpayer, says we need to increase taxes in order to continue to pay their salaries, I say to them, you’re not doing your jobs if all you can do is ask for more money. North as a superintendent should have put the community in front of the union. Mays as head of her own union should have brought her members to the table to take a pay reduction to save the teachers at the bottom of the totem pole and fit into the community’s budget. That would have been the responsible thing, but they didn’t do those things.

This is a fight that is just starting. We’ll see how much courage each side has when the smoke clears. One thing is for sure, I will be reporting every detail of it, because only one side is right. There is no left or right here. There is only right or wrong.

Rich Hoffman

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

Creators and Feeders: The blueprint to save America is at your local book store

To those that want to know the answers to everything they are right in front of you. Literature, even though considered a harbor for the liberal arts degree, thus creating just another damn hippie to cast their unproductive concepts of love and peace in a world that is quite the opposite, literature is about truth ultimately. It is in the interpretation of that truth that everything gets distorted.

This is what happened in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, which I’ve proclaimed openly, is my favorite book. Zarathustra came down out of the mountains to help “mankind” understand that they can become “better” than just human beings. That’s where the Ubermensch idea comes from translated loosely into English as “the overman.” I learned about Nietzsche reading a lot of Joseph Campbell and was drawn to Nietzsche’s anti-institutional ideas in quotes that littered the massive body of work known as The Masks of God, which is a four volume set that Campbell spent many years writing based on the course he taught at Sara Lawrence College. One thing that Campbell was doing in his comparative mythology work was breaking down the differences between collective societies, such as you find in the east, and individual oriented societies that you find in the Occident, otherwise the west.

Where the west fails, and I’m thinking of Europe in this case is when they attempt to copy the east with their own culture. Somewhere in that attempt progressivism was created, and has been and will always be a disease to the creative power of the individual which propels all society.

There is a reason that you don’t find development in Africa except what the American or European mind brought to it. There is a reason that China spent many years as a stagnate country. They had periods of renaissance, one such period during our European dark ages was quite explosive, but fizzled out only to be reawakened once England handed Hong Kong back to the Chinese in 1999 which they then decided to adopt their culture around which has helped create the renaissance they are currently experiencing. But ultimately collectivism, especially progressivism, is an idea killer that hinders society in terrible ways for the trade-off of social security.

Two bodies of literature jump out at me exhibiting these collectivism warnings. One is A Brave New World, the other is Atlas Shrugged.

I wrote my own book, The Symposium of Justice in 2004, many years before I eventually read Atlas Shrugged myself. I was surprised that Ayn Rand had created similar characters and themes as I did, and she did it over 50 years ago. It might have something to do with the fact that we both studied Nietzsche at some length. I’m thinking particularly of the diner scene, which seemed awfully close to something I did without knowledge of Ayn’s work. The reason? Because truth is truth. There aren’t these degrees of negotiation along some political lines where there are extreme right-winged views or extreme left-winged views and somehow in government these views must be compromised into some stew of thought representing everyone as best as possible. People who seek the truth and find it, come to similar conclusions that cannot be escaped.

Because of my kids, I get to meet a lot of young people, and I must say they are a very disappointing group, bent and distorted around years of progressive thought. I blame progressivism for their foolish behavior, the desire to get “trashed” as they put it, where their right of passage to adulthood is the ability to drink and lose consciousness. That is a pathetic goal. These young people are a soft species robbed of honor because they have been taught to be entirely too sensitive for their own good, indecisive, insecure, raised in broken homes where step parents are a major factor, the whole situation is a mess, and progressive thought is to blame. The most recent catastrophe cast upon the fragile psyche of today’s youth is a thing called Facebook Depression. Listen to Doc Thompson of 700 WLW talk about this mysterious new progressive illness here.

One young boy that my youngest daughter knows lost his job for sleeping and playing on Facebook during his work hours. The kid is a video game wiz so I know there is intelligence there. But he can’t handle basics of reality. For him, it is acceptable to fall off the horse and let the horse keep on running down the path leaving him behind. I feel sorry for the kid because his fundamental belief system will prevent him from seeing the truth of the reasons he continues to fail. You could sit the kid down and scream at him and it would be no different from yelling at a dog that wants to please you, but can only wag its tail or drop its ears, completely unable to understand what you’re trying to tell it.

This kid is just a product of progressivism. I don’t blame him as much as I feel pity, much like I feel pity of an insect that falls into a swimming pool and struggles to free itself, hoping a kind hand lifts it from the water before it drowns. There are millions upon millions of these kids functioning in the world today, most of them completely lost by adults that are just as lost. This is the result of progressivism. Progressives seek a level of fairness that is not earned, but is perceived as a right, which it’s not.

The world is built by people who produce. It is very simple. There is no room for interpretation or negotiation on that simple fact. There are those who create. Then there are those that feed off that creation. The trouble always occurs when those that feed off creation take too much, or stand in the way of that creation. And the problem with modern society is that we don’t create enough, and those that do create keep it to themselves so they can avoid the problems with progressive thought.

Ayn Rand’s book has been out there for everyone to read for a great number of years. There is no reason to reinvent the wheel here. When a congressman or senator says to the Speaker of the House, “you need to abandon the tea party,” they just don’t get it. They are as foolish as the young person I told you about that think something is going to fall out of the sky and somehow fix his life if only he drinks one more drink, or goes to school and gets a degree for a job that doesn’t exist. It is only by getting down in the mud and fighting, and creating a new job that anything happens. The tea party knows what Ayn Rand knew 50 years ago, that progressive thought will kill your country.

She wrote Atlas Shrugged at a time that socialism hadn’t failed yet. In fact, there was a real threat that the Soviet Union might overtake the United States and its capitalist ways. When Ronald Reagan took the gloves off for a bit in the 80’s, we saw how rapidly capitalism could work, and how quickly socialism failed. Reagan’s strategy worked and proved Ayn Rand correct. Now, in hind-sight we have the benefit to go back to her work and admire how she arrived at truthful conclusions that are truly American in their context. The critics talk about the 80’s as a selfish age, which ironically is explored in great detail in Atlas Shrugged from all angles. Selfish or terms like it are cast from those in the progressive camp, from their distorted perspective corrupted by a sense of entitled fairness which does not exist anywhere in the universe because the laws of physics prohibit such a preposterous notion.

One element in that book that haunts me is the discovery of a new type of engine built by a genius that turns his back on the world in a way because he knows that the world as it is designed through progressive thought will reject new ideas because all new ideas threaten the security of people. This engine runs off strictly static electricity. It would never need fuel, oil or any other element. It would run along the same premise that lightning is generated in the atmosphere. The sickening thing about that bit of science fiction is that it is rooted in fact.

I’ve told you on these pages about regenerative medicine. I’ve told you about the Skycar. There are many, many inventions sitting on the shelf right now, that are being held back from society for all the reasons that progressivism fails, and that failure is outlined beautifully in the book Atlas Shrugged.

If you haven’t read it and you want to know the truth of what is going on in the world. If you want to understand why the welfare system fails, why government regulation is bad, and how the feeders in life, called “the looters” in the book are destructive read that book. Forget the mindless politicians. They are looters, every one of them. We must have some level of government in this country, but we don’t need it to be nearly as large as it is now.

It is true that there will be suffering. Those that are feeders off society will have a difficult time adapting, but this process must happen. It is not a matter of right or left. It is literally right or wrong.

Nature does not lie. The reason progressives believe that the earth is so vulnerable is because at their true nature, their mentality, they believe that they can change the world. They can engineer thought. They can engineer control of the whole world. But with nature, it is survival of the fittest. Progressives seek to change that. The reason, well not everyone can be the fittest, so in the pursuit of fairness the strong are attacked, and the strong are what everyone feeds off of. If you bring down the strong, there is nothing for anybody to feed off of. And government, especially a large, progressive government that is extremely expensive is that there are too many people feeding off the strong and society will crumble.

The key is that if you want to be a feeder, or a “looter,” then find yourself a creator that is a fair-minded person that appreciates your labor, because through competition, the creator in order to get a competitive edge over other creators will adapt to necessity, just as a stream will always run downhill and find the path of least resistance. If you want the benefit of that flow, put yourself in that path of least resistance and you’ll always be employed and of a benefit to a creator. And if you are a creator, create. Don’t attempt to be a feeder if you are a creator. You will only frustrate the hell out of yourself.

Every single politician in existence is a feeder. They are almost completely worthless. Yet they believe that they have some kind of dominion over everything that is created. And that is what needs to change. This is a belief given to us from Europe, which is a corrupt notion. It hasn’t worked for them, and it won’t work for us.

If you want to know how to do that, understand what needs to be done or how to fix what’s wrong with America and you want the truth go to your local book store and read Atlas Shrugged. The movie will be out soon also. But if you really want to soak up something that won’t lie to you, go get that book! Today! Then watch the news armed with the truth and see what you think about comments over the federal budget and what we can cut or should cut.

The cost if you don’t take a step to understand the truth, as a taxpayer, is that we will find ourselves in the situation that London found itself over the weekend, which is ridiculous and pathetic, headed up by people like the kid I described above, someone who thinks they are entitled to a good life and everything will magically fall in their lap without them doing anything to create that reality. Because they believe the great lie of progressive thought, which is an audacious naïveté of human influence seeking to alter the behavior of nature itself.

Literature, especially literature that has stood the test of time, will cast light where the darkness of progressivism resides like termites deep in the foundations of our existence. Figure out who you are and be it. That’s the first step because we’re not all equal in the world of Mother Nature and never will be.

If there is a book that can give America a blueprint on how to rebuild the country, it’s Atlas Shrugged. Read it word for word and understand it sentence by sentence.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
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