Tag: overmanwarrior

The Goodness of Being “White and Nerdy”: An untapped resource waiting to explode

Since receiving the new game X-Wing Miniatures, I have been reading the rule book extensively and mock playing several games against myself so I can understand all the different scenarios.  I find the game endlessly intriguing, and an amazing achievement.  It is fun, fast, and free in many ways that sustain the best attributes of a gaming experience.  I simply love it.  My wife with a polite jest asked me as we were logging on the other day to play Star Wars: The Old Republic as I was reading the X-Wing rule book, if we were being “White and Nerdy”—a reference to the old Weird Al Yankovic satirical song.  I told her, “absolutely, and proud of it!”  At the current moment I have a number of very key strategies in real life that are being played out and I have learned that over time, the best way for me to stay engaged and keep my mind sharp enough to deal with things on a large-scale is to give my mind a vacation while in the heat of the events.  By means of vacation I don’t mean a physical vacation which we take often enough—and costs many thousands of dollars every time we do it.  I mean a vacation that the mind enjoys, and during the year 2013 that has been The Old Republic which she and I play often.  We enjoy our short trips to the Star Wars galaxy and they are always beneficial.  But of late, I have found the new X-Wing Miniatures strategy game to be even more intriguing, and infinitely fascinating.

It can’t be missed that even though Weird Al is poking fun at nerds in his music video of “White and Nerdy” that many of the attributes exhibited in the video are good ones, intelligence, moral aptitude, social innocence, creativity among them.  And the humor of that video is that it is more or less true.  I know, and have known a lot of nerds, and they are like the people in the “White and Nerdy” video.  However since that video came out, “White and Nerdy” types have not declined in number throughout American society, but have rather increased.  To get a sample, just visit Gen Con in Indianapolis each August and meet the members of the “gaming” culture, people who enjoy strategy games to a larger extent than I do.  They are people who spend even more time playing The Old Republic than my wife and I, and they are every bit into the new Star Wars Miniatures strategy game.

Outsiders might say that the gaming industry is being driven by a desire for escapism—that many of those “gamers” would rather play Dungeons and Dragons than participate in the political process.  It is highly likely that many of the people who attended this year’s Gen Con did not vote for Mitt Romney or Barack Obama in the last election, and instead played games from Fantasy Flight around their kitchen tables.  So that demographic is being overlooked in poll counts.  These “White and Nerdy” types are not watching Fox News, CNN, or showing up for President Obama’s latest diatribes about education funding.  Most of them find the entire political process repulsive, and have elected to drop out of it all together.  They are either currant Ron Paul supporters, or future supporters of his son, Rand.  And until the political machine gives them the kind of candidate they can get excited about, they will spend their time and effort of leisure playing the kind of games sold at Gen Con.  Listen to the following broadcast about gaming from the guys at Mos Eisley Radio to get some perspective.

Playing these kinds of games is not an escape from reality in the same way that watching television is, or watching sports.  I know a lot of mainstream people who get very excited about their Fantasy Football picks or their latest score on a golf course.  The people who play games like Star Wars X-Wing Miniatures are choosing to spend their leisure time in a very thinking type of scenario.  You have to enjoy thinking to be good at a game like X-Wing Miniatures.  For me that is the grand appeal.  I simply love that game.  At 2013’s Gen Con Fantasy Flight Games who produce the X-Wing Miniatures game made a grand announcement, displaying for the first time they are taking the epic table top game and “going big” with it.  They are producing the Tantive IV corvette and the Rebel Transport in a scale that has not been seen in any strategy game.  The enthusiasm present upon that announcement can be seen in the interview below.  The prospect of playing a game that features those large ships in a strategy format is very exciting to me.  I am already planning giant matches that take up specially made tabletops taking up entire basements.  It was in reviewing these recent announcements that provoked me to read so intensely the X-Wing rule book.

Tantive IV

“Tear this ship apart until you’ve found those plans and bring me the passengers. I want them alive!”
–Darth Vader, Star Wars: A New Hope

The Tantive IV is perhaps the most famous of all CR90 corvettes. Not only that, it is the first starship to appear in the classic Star Wars trilogy. We see it fly across the screen, racing from right to left across the bright surface of Tatooine, firing its rear lasers, until the shape of its hull is nearly lost behind the glow of its eleven ion turbine engines.

Coming soon to X-Wing, the Tantive IV Expansion Pack allows you to command the starship that first hooked us into the greatest space opera of all time!

Designed for use in Cinematic Play and the new Epic tournament format, the Tantive IV miniature doesn’t match the 1/270 scale shared by those starships legal within the game’s standard tournament format. Instead, this carefully detailed and pre-painted miniature is sculpted at a relative scale that feels good on the tabletop, alongside the game’s starfighters and other huge ships. In addition to the miniature, the expansion features new missions that promote deeply thematic play experiences, whether played individually or linked into a larger campaign, and Imperial players will have their chance to try to capture this notorious Rebel blockade runner.

The Tantive IV won’t be legal for standard tournaments, but you’ll be able to bring it to battle in both the Cinematic Play and Epic tournament format. Furthermore, you’ll gain the opportunity to crew it with the indomitable Rebel hero, Leia Organa!

Rebel Transport

“The first transport is away.”
–Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

When the Empire launched a massive assault against the Rebellion’s Echo Base, it dealt the Rebel Alliance a tremendous blow. Still, the Rebellion’s losses could have been much greater. They were lucky to escape with the majority of their command structure intact, and the very fact the Rebellion was able to continue its liberation efforts after the battle owed much to the GR-75 medium transport and the role it played during the famous evacuation effort.

With new rules, one Rebel transport miniature, one X-wing miniature with an alternate paint scheme, and a wealth of new ship cards, upgrades, and missions, the Rebel Transport Expansion Pack allows you to recreate the drama of the Rebellion’s desperate escape from Hoth.

Like the Tantive IV, the Rebel transport is too large for standard tournament play. Smaller than the CR90 corvette, the GR-75 medium transport is nonetheless large enough to dwarf its starfighter escorts. Even though the Rebel transport is depicted at a scale that allows you to maneuver it in battle, it is still so large that it comes with multiple new damage decks to track hits against different sections of its hull.

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_news.asp?eidn=4312

I thoroughly enjoy the kind of people who attend Gen Con, even though they tend not to be intensely social, or politically active.  For them, playing those types of games are done for the same reason I do it, to preserve their mind in a rebellion against a society that looks down on those who are “White and Nerdy,” or otherwise, those who wish to think, and be genuinely good people.  I have seldom encountered another person who attends Gen Con regularly and spends their spare time playing games like this to be overtly “bad,” or “malicious.” They are genuinely good, as their hobby is “thinking.”  These games just give them the mechanism to do so in an entertaining format.

If games like X-Wing Miniatures were not so popular then the game would not be expanding into a large format with the new ships discussed above.  So the delight is two-fold when hearing these kinds of announcements.  First, it is nice to see creativity permeating our culture in such a positive way.  Second, it is nice to see so many people excited about it.  It is nice to see people genuinely happy about something that doesn’t involve drugs, sex, or debauchery, but does involve thinking.  The demographic of “White and Nerdy” types who love Gen Con, and share with me a passion for X-Wing are a group who at some point will become interested in what is going on in the “outside world.”  That time will come when they don’t have money for Gen Con any longer, or have the ability to stay up all night playing X-Wing or The Old Republic.  For a government addicted to statism, many of these game players use fantasy strategy to give themselves a vacation away from the types of people who are not “White and Nerdy” and are willing to avoid them to keep the peace.  But, when it comes a time that those “White and Nerdy” types can no longer enjoy their leisure time, then the ramifications will not be pleasant for the establishment. The future largest demographic growth sector is not women voters, Latinos, or even African Americans…………it is the “White and Nerdy” types who simply want to be left alone to think, but if prevented, can become the statist’s worst nightmare.    It is unwise to ignore them.  Because they are smart!  And they “think” as a hobby, something that modern politics requires people to avoid.

Mechanisms like these types of games work in tandem with difficult real life strategies because they are essentially “concept” building exercises.  As I’ve explained in these pages on previous articles, before any idea in real life can be understood, it must be held as a “concept.”  A concept is like a bowl holding water.  The bigger the bowl, the more water it holds.  If the bowl is too small, it can only hold so much water.  If a concept is too small, it cannot hold big ideas or strategies that are required to solve complicated problems.  These days, small concepts are advocated by statism so much of society does not have the ability to hold large concepts in their minds.  They cannot wrap their thoughts around them.  By playing games like X-Wing Miniatures or some other variation of strategy game the practice of “concept building” is exercised allowing a mind to hold larger ideals.  This is why these kinds of games are a tremendous benefit to the people who play them, and those who don’t are always at a tactical disadvantage.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

State of the Union at Lakota: The compliment of silance

I know a great deal about human behavior and would happily argue with the most respected minds in the fields of psychology and psychiatry regarding their theories wherever they came from in the world.  I learned what I know because I’ve been around the block so many times that I have every brick, and crack memorized around that block.  On my blog postings I openly invite comments, but there often isn’t any.  This isn’t because people aren’t reading—they are.  Just watch the daily counter off on the sidebar.  However, in the world of strategy, silence is the best compliment.  When “they” can’t beat you—whoever “they” may be, the only tactical option available to them is to ignore you and hope that social castigation will dislodge a deep-seated insecurity taking you out-of-the-way of “their” objectives.

Over the summer while on vacation in Florida my nephews and I had an intelligent conversation about human nature while throwing football in the condo swimming pool.  One of my highly educated nephews argued that human beings are social creatures and needed to be brought together in optimal ways to manage peace and harmony in society, even if those instances are sometimes coerced by government.  Of course I disagreed vehemently with that statement, not because he was wrong, but because that is only part of the issue.  He is right; human beings are a social species.  They learn from babies to mimic others and this is how we all start in life.  99.99999999999999999999999% of all human beings continue that destructive practice well into their adulthood—so he is right, humans are a social species.  But my argument is that humans are destined at some point in their life to graduate from this way of thinking as the mind takes over what the social connections cannot provide and becomes a freely functioning entity of its own.  I am this kind of person.  I do not need the approval of anybody to make a decision, and this is a radical concept to most.  I am able to function without social input based on the product of my own thinking.  I do not need to consul, collaborate, or gain assurances about my decisions about my private life.  It is a learned trait that I would argue every human being should strive for—but it takes courage—like a child learning to walk on their own for the first time.  Human beings need to be able to function off the products of their own mind—but often they don’t.  Instead, they gather together in clumps of social organisms like our primitive ancestors around a fire and wait for some village chieftain to instruct them what to do next.  This is how we get into the political messes we are currently in.

The reason for this elaborate introduction is to explain this next phase in the Lakota school district levy fights and why things are the way they are.  It might be noticed that the newspapers and I have very little to say to each other these days.  I have thoroughly insulted the press and would not expect them to solicit my thoughts, but at this point it no longer matters.  I have made my decisions based on the observed conditions, and the strategy of current was formulated on those observations.  With that said, I offer this small article as an explanation for those curious.  It gets back to me what Lakota administrators say when they think the doors are closed and the phone lines are secure.  I know they are frustrated with me for being a “bomb thrower” and working from the outside instead of partaking in their structured manner, so this is more directed at them than my normal readers so that they can understand what is happening and why.

In past levy attempts I tried to work with Lakota in the traditional way.  I came to the school board meetings and allowed compliance of their silly two-minute rule where the board members pretend to be in control of a courtroom setting by “allowing” members of the community to speak to them as though they were royal nobles of some sort.   When I was acting as a spokesman for No Lakota Levy I put up with this behavior to respect the wishes of the members who wanted to see the levy defeated without fracturing their social relationships with Lakota.  I did not like the social schmoozing that went on in the early days of my involvement.  I also took note that as I began to go on the radio and television to argue the case of No Lakota Levy, those members did not want to sit near me at the school board meetings as they feared members of the Lakota community recognizing that we were all on the same team.  They enjoyed the benefits of my tactics but wanted to maintain their social status with the same people from the other side of the political aisle.  After a couple of levy defeats under my strategy, those fears began to relax a bit.  People were less resistant to acknowledge their association with me as I had several victories under my belt at that time—and people love a winner.  So people began to sit next to me at meetings and say hello in public.  But not until then.

I went out of my way to speak with people from the other side like Ron Spurlock who was the acting superintendent until Mantia came along, Jenni Logan, the treasurer, and Linda O’Conner.  I was happy to speak to them in a civil manner even though we agreed on very little.  But I knew it wouldn’t last because the behavior wasn’t changing which put them in trouble.  As nice of a man as Ron Spurlock was, he felt woefully slack during handshakes and he looked away a lot when I spoke to him.  This was because he was in internal conflict.

At this point everyone in town was trying to advocate that I run for school board and become politically active.  They still suggest the same when it comes to trustee spots and other high-profile political offices locally.  Yet the strategy to the kind of victory I am after cannot be obtained in that fashion, so I never had any intention of indulging in that activity which frustrated people who want changes to the system within the system.  When Mantia was hired essentially by Linda after all the discussions we had, I saw the direction that the school board was going.  They hired a political divider who would come in and play all ends against the middle where Lakota would control the strategic high ground.  Immediately that is what Mantia went on to do leaving Ron Spurlock to retire and stay on at Lakota as a consultant.  Mantia came to a late night meeting with the key people of No Lakota Levy assuring us that she would do one thing if the levy failed, then she did another when that reality presented itself.  Within a month of the levy failure Lakota was in full political mode.  Mantia did not perform as a business mind, but as a progressive radical politician, and went straight to the type of levy passing tactics that was taught at the OSBA’s Levy University.

I came to one of the meetings announcing Lakota’s cuts and as Channel 19 was interviewing me in the main hallway at Lakota East, Mantia stood off to the side like she wanted to speak to me.  When I made eye contact after the interview she looked away and hustled into the auditorium.  It was a strange engagement that I noted for later.  Then I saw Ron Spurlock who was approaching a man who was well-known at Lakota in the band circles—a popular guy who was well-respected.  That man had come to the meeting with me, which I had known would cause trouble—which is why I did it.  I wanted to confirm the moral position that I suspected about the school.  After my television interview this “respected man” stepped next to me and Ron, who had been working his way through the crowd to a warm greeting, immediately stopped and turned away.  Out of all the bad things that were said about me behind the scenes at Lakota, the much discussed Lakota Kroger Survey, the Letters to the Editor in the Pulse Journal, it was this event that bothered me the most.  I liked Spurlock.  I thought of him as a good man.  But he was so terrified of the internal politics at Lakota, even though he was officially retired, that he didn’t want anybody of any authority at the school to see him even shaking hands with me.  It was at that moment when I knew what Lakota was all about, and that the path to fixing it would not be by running for school board, or any other “respected” position.  More extremes would be necessary.

A month later my group started Yes to Lakota Kids under tremendous pressure from community groups to bring No Lakota Levy away from being such a negative social influence on the community.  I agreed to the charity group creation because it was a kind of checkmate against Lakota.  This was confirmed when I organized a press conference.  We were giving a $10,000 check to Lakota to help pay for student participation in sports.  Both sides were talking and were going to be present to issue and receive the money.  I brought the media.  Nobody from Lakota showed up, instead excuses were provided as to why they couldn’t come.   Anticipating this, we staged the press conference within walking distance of Lakota East where many officials especially from the athletic department were.  Even better, the board of education was literally four miles down the road.  It was a 15 minute drive for them, yet nobody showed.  Channel 5 was there, Channel 19, The Cincinnati Enquirer, The Pulse Journal, but there wasn’t any Lakota representatives.

This didn’t surprise me at all.  It simply exposed what was already known.  Lakota couldn’t take a donation from their enemy No Lakota Levy, even to help children and they knew it.   They needed the extortion of children to execute their demands, and would not stand for losing that emotional leverage against the community by my group.  Lakota did exactly what I expected; they went on a full court press to smear me personally because they knew they would never pass a levy as long as I was intimately involved in the process.  If I had been the kind of person who needed group reassurance as the foundations of my thinking, some of the moves made against me at this time might have destroyed me for life.  This appears to certainly be their intention.  They did not care who they hurt, or to what extent they executed their plans, as long as they preserved their strategic objectives, which was a tax increase.  Mantia and others put a lot of pressure on the other No Lakota Levy people to publicly pull away from any association from me.  The reason was that it was believed that in so doing I would feel the bite of being an out-cast and either change my behavior, or be ignored by the public.

Little did they know but I was choking under the “in” crowd and desperately wanted those shackles off so that I could be an out-cast once again, to have the freedoms that come with such a position.  That is where the best strategy is, and what I desired.  I did not want to be a school board member and fuss with people who constantly played things both ways every day of their lives for some perceived “greater good” and at the point I had arrived at, there was no desire to see public education preserved in any fashion.  It’s a bad idea that should have never been implemented, and that is the direction I wanted to argue.  I did not want the burden of being a spokesman for a system I think is destroying our youth even in protest against taxation.

Peer groups are learned in public schools primarily.  The kids who are “in” and “out” are designated quickly.  Kids who are “in” have something to bring the “greater good,” of whatever group is involved.  Kids who are “out” do not.  When I was in school I was certainly on the “out” group because I did not want to be in service to any group.  I enjoyed thoroughly being on the “out” because there are many more opportunities for a colorful life outside of group comfort, which is what I’ve always strived for.  Of course back then nobody really understood what I was rebelling against.  My parents encouraged me to buy a class ring which they said would mean something to me later in life.  It doesn’t.  I never wore it, but simply gave it to whatever girlfriend I had at the time.  They also told me I needed a school jacket, which I never wore—favoring my leather jacket instead.  They also told me I needed to go to my five-year-reunion that was at Coney Island.  So I did and while there they had the usual contests, who had been married the longest, who had the most children, who had the oldest children and that kind of thing.  Out of the five categories in the contest I won three of them, I had been married the longest, (four years at that time), I had two children, three and two years old, clearly the oldest of the participants.  In fact my children were running around playing tag around the podium where the Class President was speaking from.  Yet I didn’t win a single category formally.  I was sitting in plain view of everyone, my wife was there, my kids playing and screaming in delight running around the tables which everyone could see, yet I was as invisible to them all as a ghost on Christmas morning.  Apparently it was frowned upon to bring children and spouses to the Class Reunion and socially I was supposed to know that.  But I wasn’t about to go to Coney Island without taking my children.  I never did things like that without them.  So I brought them without asking if I could.

My wife and I laughed about that event for years.  It was a clear example of the social need for groups of pack mentality to preserve their thinking on an issue in order to maintain a pre-conceived notion.  The evidence of who had the most and oldest children was running around the podium during the award presentation, yet I did not win a single category.  That was because I was an outcast even then, and very proud of it.   The only retaliation they had to offer to me was to hope being castigated from their group would make me feel some level of shame, and desire to comply socially.  Of course that concept is horrendously preposterous to anyone who knows me.  Just yesterday I was having a nice lunch by myself taking some time to read a book and enjoy my day.  Another man dressed in business attire sat down next to me, first asking if I was dining with anyone.  I said no.  So he sat down and started talking about the upcoming Bengal season, the quality of the food, the weather, about anything and everything.  The guy was a real chatterbox.  I was trying to be polite, but there was a reason I was eating lunch alone.  I wanted to read my book.  Nothing the guy said was of any value to me, and it was really getting on my nerves.  After about five minutes I told the guy as politely as possible, “You know, it’s hard to read a book and have a conversation.”  He looked at me as if I threw Holy Water upon his forehead.  “Sorry, I just thought you wanted some conversation.  I saw you sitting here by yourself and thought you wanted company.   I guess you don’t…….right?”  I replied as nicely as possible, “that’s right.  I don’t want any company.”  He got up in uncomfortable silence and took his food with him and disappeared into the restaurant.  I was so happy that he left and for the next hour and a half I was alone with just my book, my food and the nice outside air of a late summer August day.  When I was ready to leave, that guy was inside the restaurant sitting at the bar talking to the bartender and anybody nearby who would listen.  Three businessmen were comparing Fantasy Football picks with him and they were all happy as sluts at a navel port gabbing at each other with much fanfare.  The man didn’t look at me even though I had to pay the remainder of my bill with the bartender.  It was easier not to acknowledge each other, and I was grateful that he felt that way.

That same mentality was present when Ron Spurlock turned away from me in the halls of Lakota East to preserve his position in the social structure of Lakota.  Well before I called the levy supporters at Lakota “Latte sipping prostitutes with asses the size of car tires and diamond rings to match” in the Cincinnati Enquirer the wheels of castigation were well in place.  I had tried to work with the Lakota school board and the superintendents to bring down their costs.  I worked with the media nicely to give them entertainment within the context of their acceptability, and I was gloriously successful at it.  I even played the charity game to make my friends happy who stood against the tax increases, but still wanted to maintain relationships with members of the Lakota administration.   But none of them wanted to stand by the truth and deal with the severity of the situation in the manner it called for.  They all separated into their various groups and expected me to facilitate myself to their whims, which simply wasn’t going to happen.  When I didn’t, not even good people like Ron Spurlock wanted to be seen speaking with me in public out of fear that it would put him socially on the “out.”  People fear more than most anything in the world being rejected from their respective “groups.”

I learned a long, long time ago that these groups are more destructive to the human psyche than all the mental deficiencies available to insanity.  They are as my nephew argued part of the human condition generated upon the human mind during childhood when dependency is the only option.  Good parents never allow their children to feel the bite of this dependency so that as maturity sets in, those individuals grown into self-driven entities reliant on their own thoughts and motivations and cast away group participation like a snake sheds its skin.  The human race cannot survive with the mode of thinking that drove Ron Spurlock to walk the other way under the Mantia regime at Lakota, or the class president ignoring my children as they ran around playing at her feet.

When groups of people are at wit’s end and cannot strategically deal with the impact of an individual, they attempt to look everywhere that they aren’t.  They attempt to ignore such people so to preserve their own thoughts and feelings without a challenger.  Shortly after No Lakota Levy and I parted ways after the events described above, I received the following note from a radical levy supporter at Lakota.  The contents are particularly revealing as it confirms everything stated:

richhoffmanhateskids@gmail.com

208.102.50.136

Submitted on 2012/03/19 at 4:40 pm

HA HA HA!  LAKOTA DOESN’T WANT YOU…HA HA HA! Its a sign that you are a nobody when groups start running away from you.

ha ha ha ha ha!!!

That letter writer was an adult who holds a very responsible position within the Lakota school system, and provides insight into the kind of mentality that Ron Spurlock feared so much on a cold February evening at Lakota East.   As mature and sophisticated the participants of the education profession pretend to be, they are still functioning human beings that are deficient of self-reliant thinking, and as far as I’m concerned, behind the evolutionary curve.  The money they ask for with tax increases is to cover the gaps of their thinking and mask their internal neurosis.  It has nothing to do with reality, but only the primal need for group behavior to separate social tasks into blocks of consensus building.  The very foundations that they have built their institutions upon is set to sink in the sand during high tide as it has no philosophical foundation to plant roots of thought.  All they can do when such a reality is presented to them is to ignore the facts to preserve their warped illusions.

That is why this next levy attempt of 2013 will be different.  I will not try to solve the problem from the inside, because it clearly will not work under any condition.  This is a problem that must be solved from the outside—in, because the root of the problem is on the inside and must be starved out of existence.  They cannot see the problem because they refuse to look at it and nobody on a school board or through the mechanism of politics can solve the problem in that insider fashion.  So my new tactic will be to launch the attack from the outside in, to famish the antagonists from within their own walls by starving out their supply chain.  Such strategies brought down the rule of the Mongols in China, and it brought down the Roman Empire.  It can bring down little ol’ Lakota, which is what I intend.  It’s not against education that I rebel; it is the institutionalism of individual minds that I despise.  I love education.  I just can’t stand the process that is currently accepted, and I don’t like the politics connected to it.

As it should be clear by now, at no point in my life did I care to be on the “inside.”  I have been at times when groups wanted to use my talents, but I do not volunteer to go.  They come to me.  And they can go away just as well, but my position does not change, as it has been built upon the foundations of logic and my personal observations.  I will not surrender that position to the illogical perspective of group consensus to preserve the neurosis of established thinking if that thinking is wrong.  My nephew was right from an academic standpoint, human beings are a social species.  They need each other, and seek to speak, touch and interact with others of their kind.  But I am right too, that such behavior is for the human race equivalent to a small child learning to walk for the first time afraid to let go of what props them up.  A human mind needs to learn to walk on its own, free of emotional shackles to inferior intellects and it must grow from there perpetually over a lifetime.  What Lakota does, and other institutions like them is artificially constrain thinking so to preserve political beliefs forged by group consensus, and that is a recipe for disaster that I cannot, and will not support—but will fight as though it was the most corrosive organism in existence—because it is.

Now, if anybody who has read this wish to argue with me, feel free to leave a comment below.  I won’t chastise or belittle you for trying.  I like the mental exercise.  But if you don’t, your silence will confirm all that I have said above.  So have at it……………….

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

What the Blue Indications Mean at Lakota: Home Foreclosures and the threat of high taxes

Lakota forclosuresAt Lakota and hundreds of other school districts all over Ohio school levies are on the fall ballot, and many people will find themselves torn between how they should vote.  The trouble with teachers and public education in general is that most voters know at least one person close to them who works for the industry.  Like any dedicated friend or loved one, it is typical to put blinders onto the reality of public education so not to betray those cherished members of our lives.  This has allowed the radical elements of the teaching profession to capture the message of statism and sell it as value to the communities from which they behave as raw parasites.  Lakota forclosures 6Because of the paralysis in judgment typical toward the teaching profession this has allowed complete falsehoods to be introduced into common language and social acceptance about public schools necessitating continuous higher taxes to substantiate levy requests.  Newspaper reporters, television newscasts, and neighbor to neighbor discussions about public schools tend to always focus on the same union bullet points without ever exploring the harsh realities.  Typically employees of such schools who speak in defense of their industry will say things like:

  • “Due to lack of money things are not well.”  “Of course there is waste and bad teachers, but they are the exception and not the norm, our children need our support.”
  • “If the schools are not supported, the community we are so proud of will end up in deterioration.”
  • “Because of the failed levies morale is low.   The excellent teachers and administrators are jumping ship.”
  • “With the latest cuts, elementary kids get one class of gym or music or art once a week on a rotating basis.  They used to get each one once a week.”Lakota forclosures 7

Such comments go on to infinity from there with the commentators never contemplating openly the causes.  There is a willingness to take the cause and effects of public education at the presented value allowing the radicals of government schools to get away with crimes of extortion driven by anti-trust violations.  So often the reason is because most people have somebody close to them who works in the business and nobody wants to hurt the feelings of those people.  This is how the crimes are committed, crimes of open looting of the public treasury for the solitary purpose of plunder by the state for the goal of statism.  The truth about school levies and higher taxes are easy to see for those with the courage to see them.  It has been proven that the best thing a community can do to maintain a healthy district is to vote down higher taxes, not cave into the emotional arguments provided by the employees of public education.  (CLICK HERE for more detailed explanations) The reason is that higher taxes destroy property investment, the higher the taxes, the less investment into business and residences.Lakota forclosures1

In my community of Lakota the result of a harsh economy is quite evident.  On the surface of course everything looks nice, there are well-kept homes, the roads are paved well, there are lots of consumer options, the schools are rated well—everything appears to be in order—and in relation to other places in America it is.  But if the façade is pulled back just a bit the reality can be seen for what it truly is.  The pictures shown here are from Zillow and display with red markers property that is for sale.  In the Lakota district there are quite a lot of homes for sale, some of which is normal.  Some of it is driven by occupational changes, and changes to household income.  But a lot of it is driven by taxes that are just simply too high.  The more alarming indicator shown in the included pictures are those marked in blue.  These are homes that are being foreclosed upon—meaning their owners could not keep up with their mortgage payments.Lakota forclosures2

When first checking, it would be assumed that there would be a few of these, but the actual number is quite shocking.  As shown, there are a lot of homeowners who have been barely hanging on through tough economic times who are finding themselves going through the disgrace of losing their properties to circumstance.  Because I have made myself a spokesman against higher taxes, pro tax advocates see me as being in the way of their goals, and get very angry with me.  This causes them to send all kinds of useful information out of anger.  One such note was from a typical levy cheerleader who has placed their own personal neurosis into the care of their children out of guilt for a series of other mistakes they’ve made in their life.  CLICK HERE TO REVIEW.   That particular person said to me, “I pay $5400/year in taxes. How much do you pay? $2800? If you don’t want to live in an affluent community with good schools, then move!”  What they were clearly attempting to do was make me feel like they had the upper hand because they pay a higher tax on a home that is over 300K in value.  The thinking is flawed because what they miss is that many of the people suffering foreclosures are people in the most affluent neighborhoods in the Lakota district–their neighbors.  Seen in the picture here, several foreclosures are occurring in the Four Bridges community and there are a few that are in the $1.1 million dollar range in other neighborhoods.  Because Lakota is on a downward trend with enrollment as only well-to-do families can afford to live in such an affluent district, there are fewer children to attend the schools, leaving many homeowners regulated to selling off their homes to move to areas of the country where taxes are not such a burden.  The only people who want to pay large taxes are the type of neurotic parents like that letter writer who are using the public schools to mask their deepest insecurities about their parenting ability.  Once that same type of parent has children leaving the public school they will typically pack up and move to some other district in the United States to carry out their social psychosis—their innate desire to be busy-bodies.Lakota forclosures3

The cost of allowing people like that to run a community into the ground uncontested is the unseen result of these Zillow pictures—too many people selling homes by choice flee the high taxes, or are forced out of their homes because they can’t keep up with the payment.  The frightening aspect is what is not shown on Zillow are the many thousands of homeowners who are just barely hanging on, where one more increase in taxes will either push them into the red indications, or worse yet—the blue.  When Lakota cheerleads the value that a school has on the community, they are speaking union bullet points that mean nothing.  The value of a community is in its ability to make people want to live there.  A school only attracts one kind of investor, people like the spoiled brat letter writer indicated above.  Those types come and go within a ten year span during their children’s upbringing.  They are not long term investors in a community unlike people such as myself who lived here before many of them were even born and will still be here long after they’ve bought up Florida condos and put those same children through college as empty-nesters. The way to ruin a community is to lure too many neurotic parents to a community to pay for homes they otherwise couldn’t afford if not for a strategic FHA loan from the government, or purchased with a variable interest rate that drive up their monthly payment quicker than the tax impositions of the public school.  Or fools who think paying $5400 a year in taxes gives them emotional leverage in an argument.  In discussions with their neighbors upon hearing such things nobody would reveal that they are struggling to pay their taxes, so they silently allow themselves to be foreclosed upon becoming one of the unfortunate blue indications on Zillow.  Not wanting to admit failure to their friends, family, and neighbors who utter such half-baked endorsements of public education monopolies, they quietly purchase lottery tickets hoping for a winner right up to the last day when the bank comes to reclaim their property for default.  Then and only then do they move and disappear from the earth and away from circles of Jabba the Hutt like socialites who think paying $5400 in personal property taxes is “good” for a community.  Zillow has the truth. Lakota Forclosures4

Being polite will not save a community from the destruction of parasites who think public education under the current funding model and anti-trust operation is sustainable.  But silence will destroy it, the kind of silence seen on these Zillow pictures.  Most people living near the blue indications have no idea that their neighbors are struggling because nobody takes the time to really get to know each other.  One week everything looks fine from the outside, the neighbor is mowing their lawn, wearing an Ohio State t-shirt while doing some minor landscaping, and the children are playing outside.  Nothing seems amiss.  Then the next week there is a bank owned paper stuck to the garage and the family is nowhere to be seen.  The home is empty overnight and an uncomfortable sensation engulfs the entire neighborhood as though a death just took place.   Lakota forclosures5In a lot of ways one did, a bit of the life that makes up a community died—the hopes and dreams of property ownership that was robbed from them by changes in finance.  Among those changes are the difficulties in keeping up with their taxes among all the other concerns they have in their lives.  Paying $3000 to $6000 a year in taxes just to send a bunch of spoiled brat kids raised by neurotic parents to a free education starts to wear on the mind when it is realized that having that money for personal needs is much greater.  Upon that realization, homes go up for sale or are lost because the admission that such properties cannot be afforded comes too late in the game.  Luckily for the Lakota district the residents have managed to fight off the corrosive public school since 2005.  It can only be imagined how many new blue indications will show up on Zillow if Lakota manages to raise taxes the way they desire.  But one thing is for sure, it will be a big number, and that is not conducive to a thriving community.    The value of a school district does not come from the school, the teachers, or the buildings themselves, but from the people who invest their money, and are motivated to continue due to financial incentive.  Higher taxes are not an incentive, they are detriments—ones that have a direct relationship to the blue indications on Zillow.

 

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

The Lakota Levy of 2017: After they try the 2013 attempt

Lakota is currently trying to pass a 2013 tax increase so it probably will come as a shock that the school will be planning a 2017 levy attempt as soon as they can.  In the chart shown in the following video, I use another “bullwhip economic” trick to demonstrate how targeted cuts to the Lakota school district could maintain the profitable trend they have shown over the last couple of years.  Yet, the school apparently resents greatly their operation of maintaining a budget surplus and has very immediate intentions of escalating their spending as soon as they receive levy passage.  In the following chart, the red line represents the tax revenue that the Lakota communities of Liberty Township and West Chester Twp provide to the school.  The blue line is the budget for Lakota.  Watching this video it will be clear that the recent levy defeats have forced Lakota to bring their costs in line with the tax revenue supplied.  As explained, the teacher’s contract the district has with the Lakota Education Association has maintained a wage freeze lasting through 2014.  This is why the district has operated in a surplus.  However, it is also clear that the intention of the levy of 2013 is to throw money at the new teacher’s contract because the blue line spikes up dramatically and predictably until 2017.  The green line is the amount of funding the school intends to inject into their financial dynamics upon levy passage in 2013.  As it becomes terribly obvious, the green line and blue line intersect during the year 2017 meaning that Lakota will have to pursue another tax increase at that time.

It is terribly obvious that Lakota has been forced by the voting community to live within their budget with levy failures, which is good.  Yet they have been promising that the summer of 2014 would reap a payday to school employees because the blue line spikes sharply upward countering all the positive gains that have been made since 2010 to the present.  It was always my intention to bring Lakota’s operating costs in line with community revenue without raising taxes and this chart shows how well the effort has worked.  The NO votes have been the most useful tool in forcing the school district to operate the way they should have always functioned, with a keen focus on their expenditures and operating with a slight surplus.  But they seem to not have learned their lesson and have been promising their employees large raises in 2014.  Their spending projections reflect this as the numbers making up the data on the chart are generated by Lakota’s own statistics.  There is a reason they must disclose all their information to the tax paying public—it is for just this type of analysis.Historical & Projected Revenues & Expenditures

Lakota has been able to maintain a positive balance by making the forced targeted cuts due to the levy failures, which is also reflected on the chart, which is why I find my “bullwhip economic” demonstrations to be so effective.  It’s my own unique way of explaining such dry material that has a tendency to bore people to death when they are forced to attend the kind of meetings it takes to ascertain the data that makes up such charts.  So I like to put a little metaphorical zip on the information to present it in an entertaining way, otherwise the information goes in one ear and out the other.  But relevant to the Lakota levy of 2013 and all future levies, the information couldn’t be clearer.  The data speaks for itself.  Lakota plans to go on a spending binge in 2014 like pent-up sailors who have been at sea for many months approaching a whore house.  The projected numbers that make up the blue line can be obtained from Lakota’s treasurer or anybody involved in the financing structure at the school.

In October of 2013 Lakota will have to produce a new five-year forecast which will involve many of the same numbers seen in the chart discussed during the video.  However one thing that has not been yet included in Lakota’s blue line forecast is the grim reality that I have covered extensively which is that Lakota is set to lose another two thousands students between the present time and the year 2022.  This will force the layoff of around 80 teachers.  CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW.  It will be interesting to see if Lakota includes these declining enrollment numbers into their projections, which they will have to address at some point in time.  But for their pro-tax levy attempts, they will hope to bury that information deep in their forecast because it will clearly show that they do not need more money.  Instead of the blue line projecting upward, it needs to be in a further decline from where it currently resides.

The frustration, anger, and in-trench warfare that sometimes goes on behind the scenes with the pro levy crowd is predicated directly off their lack of desire to acknowledge the facts driven off numbers shown so clearly in charts like the example I used in the video.  I call them “levy addicts, “levy zombies,” and more derogatory “latte sipping prostitutes,” because of their destructive desire to hurt an entire community with corrosive taxation as they belong to a group of people who desire to throw large wages at employees who aren’t needed, but for emotional reasons.   The desire to increase taxes for the solitary reason of injecting money into a group of employees that have a perceived value which is too high, or are not needed is simply stupid.  Many times the only reason is because the levy supporters are friends with those employees, or hope that by throwing money at the school, the money will off-set their terrible parenting skills.  They hope the school will give their children what they can’t because they are plagued with so much self-doubt as individual people; they have nothing to offer their children but social connections and a big mouth that advocates bigger and better schools to teach them in.  The root cause of the problem is that those levy advocates do not have faith in their own parenting and hope that they can hide the fact behind their chants for higher taxes, and more community spirit, and they have no restraint in demanding the community fund perpetual increases in the blue line based strictly on emotional neuroses.

It is a shame that so many young reporters who work for the local papers cannot see the benefit of the numbers shown in charts like this example, because many of them are children themselves.  This is why they support school levies.  If they are under the age of 35, they are likely still new to the ways of the world and do not understand how things connect, so they make their decisions based on pure emotion—on the backs of children who are used by the levy addicts to hide the reality of the blue number—the desire to throw money at district labor based on an anti-trust criteria. (Click Here to Review)  Then of course many people find such information daunting, and beyond their grasp.  So rather than do the hard work of analyzing data, they choose to subscribe to the emotional position of the levy addicts.  That is why the Lakota administrators are working blindly toward a 2013 tax increase knowing full well that another attempt will have to be made in 2017, because they do not target cuts unless forced to with levy failures.  Beyond 2017 there is no question that there will be more levy attempts and that within 15 years of this current time Lakota plans to add at least 10 more mills of levy to the current rate of 33, pushing the rate of taxation to a level over 40 mills, which is very unattractive to long-term real-estate investment or business growth.  That is why it is reckless, and devastating to a community to insinuate uncontrolled taxation, which is what Lakota is guilty of.

So the tax increases will not end in 2013.  They will continue until the school is forced to cut their costs the proper way with controlled cuts made without emotion.  Since Lakota will not regulate themselves, they must be forced to with failed levies.  The Levy Zombies do not run the community.  They are often young people between the ages of 25 and 35 and are functioning from personal insecurities.  It is dangerous to allow them to dictate budgets, which is why Lakota believes that nobody will ever challenge their blue line projections well into 2017.  The same logic left unchecked will pillage the Lakota community until there is nothing left but a high tax zone of residents and empty business establishments driven away by the bottomless pit hunger of the levy addicts.  Against those specimens targeted cuts is the only defense and I use bullwhip economics to highlight the point.  But aside from the spectacle of my whip tricks the situation is actually quite serious, Lakota is a parasitic organization that is selling itself as the savior of community value when it is practicing the opposite effect.  Under the Lakota plan seen on the chart, the financial imposition that public school will place on the community will be devastating and end the thriving business culture that currently exists.  Anyone who supports a school levy is crazy, especially when given the facts that show the proof.  The best thing anybody could do for Lakota and the community that surrounds the school is to vote “NO” on the levy and force Lakota to live within its means, instead of their projected path of deficit spending toward a future resulting in economic collapse.  The data tells the story.  All anybody need do is look at the data to reach the same conclusion.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

Lakota Should Be Prosecuted for Anti-Trust: Public Education is exempt from monopoly status through “state action”

If Lakota as a public education institution were viewed with the same standards as Microsoft, Apple, or the railroads of the 1890s, they would be guilty of anti-trust violations according to the Sherman Act.  Lakota as all public education institutions backed by the federal government are monopolies, and the cost imposition that they inflict against communities is directly related to their anti-trust status.  Using logic, Lakota should be judged by the same standards that private industry has been prosecuted under.  CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THE SHERMAN ACT of 1890.  Public schools are monopolies and they openly stand against competition which is why they cost so much in tax money.  The obvious solution to this dilemma is to prosecute public schools under the Sherman Act or something like it so that competition could be implemented.  Yet it would appear that all government entities under state control are exempt from The Sherman Act.  This means that government can prosecute private business behaving in an anti-competitive fashion, but private industry cannot prosecute government for performing in a same manner.

In 1943, the Supreme Court first created the “state action” exemption to federal antitrust law in a case called Parker v. Brown. The California Agricultural Prorate Act of 1933 had established special marketing programs for agricultural commodities to restrict competition and raise prices for producers. Porter Brown, a raisin packer, sued W.B. Parker, the California Director of Agriculture, charging, among other things, that the California statute violated the Sherman Antitrust Act. The Supreme Court disagreed: “We find nothing in the language of the Sherman Act or in its history which suggests that its purpose was to restrain a state or its officers or agents from activities directed by its legislature. . . . The Sherman Act makes no mention of the state as such, and gives no hint that it was intended to restrain state action or official action directed by a state.” States are thus exempt from federal antitrust law, even though California’s agricultural producers would certainly have been in violation had they made a private agreement to restrict production and increase prices.

The result of that 1943 Supreme Court case is that government has been allowed to monopolize as an anti-trust entity against the public without fear of ramifications.  In the case of public schools, property owners have no choice but to pay for the public school that happens to be in their district, as designated by government—the state.  The state created a monopoly status for these public education institutions to ensure their continued funding regardless of performance because there is little to no competition against them.  This allows public schools like Lakota to continue to raise the prices of their service as no other competition exists to drive down their per pupil costs except for other public schools also set up with monopoly status and protected by the state under the “state action” exemption.

In a just world where the courts pursued “fairness” this practice would be highly illegal.  But the courts are not intent on justice.  They are intent on protecting such monopolies for their own preservation as even the courts are part of the monopoly process.  They too are protected from cleaver lawyers by the “state action” exemption, and are free to provide support to the anti-trust practices of government—particularly public schools like Lakota.  Lakota and their fellow public schools are every bit as guilty of anti-trust practices as the railroads of 1890 provoking the creation of the Sherman Act in the first place, as statism philosophy in government desired to control the capitalism being unleashed by the industry tycoons of the era.

For the protection of private business and residents who pay the taxes there needs to be a version of the Sherman Act introduced that protects society from the monopolies of public education.  Personally, I don’t believe there should have ever been a Sherman Act—that the government overstepped it’s boundaries upon its creation.   But as the current Supreme Court looks upon the case-law of the like–1943 Parker v. Brown case, they provide a way out for prosecuting their fellow public workers with anti-trust.  Such excuses for statism need to be removed.  If the government can prosecute industry for anti-trust violations than private interests should be able to prosecute the government with the same intention—to influence competitive options and supposedly keep costs down to the consumer.

The solitary reason that costs are out-of-control in public education institutions like Lakota is because they are monopolies.  They are functioning anti-trusts protected by government to eliminate competition which drives up their costs against the communities they supposedly serve.  For the protection of all tax payers, anti-trust legislation should be brought to fruition protecting all against the violations of monopoly status in public education.  If the Sherman Act exists to prosecute businesses supposedly guilty of anti-trust, then a new act needs to be created so that future Supreme Courts do have the language to prosecute public sector interests that is operating as an anti-trust—such as public education.

Lakota in 2013 is seeking a new levy and they expect that nobody will question the merit of their tax demands.  They can issue any financial information to the public they wish and we are stuck with the results because there is no competition.  If a property owner has possession of a business or residence near the Lakota school system, they must pay taxes to the public school because of their monopoly status and lack of competition mandated by the school.  When Lakota states that they have done everything they can to save money and in order to continue being a good school, they must have more money; they make those kinds of comments knowing that they have no competition to prove otherwise.  Private schools and neighboring schools are not competition when they are not working to solicit the business of the same student base and when it comes to public education at Lakota it is not Lakota East against Lakota West regarding finances.  One does not try to outperform the other in a race to perform the best service for the lowest cost.  The reality is that Lakota as a district is under the control of a monopoly.  Their costs are driven by a labor union and that group does not want ANY competition.  Their mandates are created by politicians, not the free market.  They are the worst kind of anti-trust there is, and it is criminal that they are allowed to exist as monopolies under different rules than what the private sector witnesses.  If there were any justice, Lakota and all public schools would be prosecuted as monopolies by the federal government with the same fanfare that was shown against the railroads, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, or Microsoft.   The trouble is the prosecutors would be the same people who built the current monopolies, the public workers who are the employees, lawyers and politicians who built the public education system.  With the same vigor that the government proved in court that Rockefeller and the other “monopolists” who fell victim to the Sherman Act would not do the right thing and allow fairness in the marketplace, the public workers will not regulate themselves—so they must be made to do so with law—or some other method.  To stand as an illegal entity with the backing of the federal government to impose their will against the tax payer as a monopoly is simply unconscionable.

For more on this issue read about it extensively at the links below:

http://apps.americanbar.org/dch/committee.cfm?com=AT320250

http://www.byupoliticalreview.com/?p=192

http://reason.org/news/show/1013238.html

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

The Class of 2005: Rise of Adam Winrich and the majesticy of bullwhips

You know pivotal moments in life when you see them, especially in hind-sight, and for me the Class of 2005 at the Annie Oakley Western Showcase was one of them.  In the picture below, some of the best whip crackers, knife throwers and western performers in the world were gathered together in 2005 at the Darke County Fairgrounds in Ohio.  CLICK HERE TO SEE THIS LATEST YEAR.  Many of the people shown in that photograph are the people who mean the most to me.  I thought of that year while in Burbank, California not long after the picture was taken as I spoke with a stunt coordinator on a film production about whip work, and his fear of Anthony DeLongis discovering that he was working with me—who had taken over the whip work in Hollywood after the passing of Alex Green.  I didn’t understand the concern, even as the young actress I was teaching offered me a thousand dollar bill for our short half hour class on cracking a bullwhip.  I turned it away to her shock as she declared that Anthony would have never turned away money—who was a personal friend of hers.  As much as I loved bullwhip work, and the people in the business, there was a nagging feeling in the back of my mind that all was not right with the world.  I had just published the novel, The Symposium of Justice but for me it was not enough to write about the pursuit of justice, I had to carry out the traits of my characters in real life, and I expected myself to act and behave in much the same fashion of Fletcher Finnegan.  I didn’t want to be someone who just acted like a dynamic character from a writer’s imagination, I wanted to actually be one, and use my skills to that effect.  But that didn’t stop the need for people especially of the next generation from taking up the task and pushing the whip cracking sport to new limits.KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERA

I didn’t think much of it at the time because he was so young, not much older than my own kids, but Adam Winrich was one of those guys who worked out with bullwhips with the intention to become one of the best that the world has ever seen.  Adam can be seen in the picture between my wife and children in 2005.  I was very happy with that group, but always felt people like Anthony should have been a part of the festivities.  There just aren’t many of us out there in the world.  However, reflected in my discussion with the Hollywood stunt coordinator, there aren’t many films being done with bullwhips in them, so the competition is fierce on who will get the jobs when they do come about.  KONICA MINOLTA DIGITAL CAMERAI had no plan, or desire to challenge Delongis for a film coordination job as a master whip handler when I knew that people like my friends Gery Deer, and Chris Camp worked much harder at the technical aspects of whip work than I and should be doing those types of jobs over me.  My interest was in actually doing some of the things I was writing about, so my destiny trailed off and away a bit into the realm of politics—where real threats are actually happening.  Without giving away too much, I have spent my time since that Class of 2005 living life in much the same fashion as Don Diego did in one of my favorite films, Zorro’s Fighting Legion.  I lost touch with some of those members of the Class of 2005 in the process, and one of them was Adam.

I feel I have accomplished many of the political tasks I intended, and recently announced that I was going to put more of my personal emphasis back on the bullwhip as it has been such a large part of my life for over thirty years.  The yearly Annie Oakley event still takes place, and some of those faces from the Class of 2005 still return every year, to meet up and tell stories of their previous year.  But some of those faces have found it difficult to return as they are continuously busy working in the business.  Adam is one of those guys, which isn’t a surprise to me.  Adam worked very hard, and it shows.  Since the Class of 2005 Adam has done shows everywhere from The Conan O’Brien Show, to football halftime demonstrations and everything in between and I think he is one of the most technically proficient bullwhip artists that there is anywhere.  Many of the whip masters who learned from people like Alex Green and Mark Allen felt they had taken whip work to unforeseen heights and they had.  Young guys like Adam then took the work several steps further breaking records and delighting audiences in ways that have never been done before.

I am very proud of Adam Winrich who has taken the sport of whip work to new levels.  I knew there was something special about him when he was cracking his 100’ whip in the main path in front of the Darke County Fairgrounds Coliseum, only to get a reprimand by Gery because the activity was going on outside of the yellow tape danger indicators.  Gery was right; the whip was very dangerous and could have removed the head of a person who wasn’t paying attention walking by.  But Adam’s custom made whip couldn’t have been cracked anywhere else because it was so big and I enjoyed his constant enthusiasm to try new innovative ways to advance the sport.  So Adam and I had the big whip in the crowd trying to crack it which was very reckless, and very fun.

One thing that is different with me from virtually everyone seen in the picture of the Class of 2005 is that I am not nearly as campy as everyone else, especially Adam Winrich.  I am a serious person almost all the time and have to work hard to crack jokes when performing in front of people.  That is why I don’t do shows in the way that Gery and Adam do.  I’m much happier in my back yard working with my whips in private than touring around the country doing stage acts.  That’s also why I had no desire to cut into Anthony DeLongis gig in Hollywood.  I’d rather write stories and have a creative influence on producing material that gave those guys work, than sitting around waiting for some producer to come up with the idea on their own.  But that doesn’t stop me from enjoying good work when I see it, and Adam is simply one of the best that there is.  He has done remarkable things with a bullwhip and that innovation continues.

I hope that in the future he can align his very busy schedule to returning to Annie Oakley as a new class of young whip crackers is emerging and could use his mentorship.  The kind of enthusiasm that Adam brings to the world of bullwhip art is the type of thing that makes legends out of raw talent.  I am very proud of the Class of 2005 because of people like Paul Nolan, my own children, and especially Adam Winrich.  It is wonderful to see that the fire that burns deep inside a mind can translate to the end of a whip with antics that have never been done before by anybody.  And it is my hope that such innovation and technical skill will continue to advance in subsequent Classes of Annie Oakley graduates.

Nice job Adam.  I learned to do this trick from you.  Nothing against Mark Allen, but he would have never considered such a thing before some of your technical experiments.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

The Knoxville Tragedy: A clash over value in Eliot’s Wasteland

I’ve talked about it before; the opening chapter to my novel The Symposium of Justice was dedicated to the immense frustration that I feel every time I hear about cases like the one Glenn Beck revealed recently that had been buried since 2007 from media scrutiny.  If not for people like Glenn Beck and The Blaze Radio Network, stories like what happened to Christopher Newsom and Channon Christian from Knoxville, Tennessee would simply be swept under the rug forever, as many such stories are.  Hearing the story upset me so much that it took me a week to respond accordingly to it.  I feel very passionate about these kinds of cases.  But needless to say, I feel terrible that nobody was around who could have helped Christopher and Channon from being brutally raped and killed by five attackers Lemaricus Davidson, Letalvis Cobbins, George Thomas, Vanessa Coleman and Eric Boyd.   The crime committed was so malicious that it should have been a national story, but it wasn’t, most likely because the attackers were black and the victims were white.  The story didn’t fit the modern progressive agenda, so it was ignored.  I wish that someone would have been able to stop this crime before it happened.  For me, I think the worst aspect of the case was the fact that Channon Christian was a virgin, who had made a decision to avoid sexual activity due to her Christian beliefs for her future husband.  Channon thought enough of the act to make a day-to-day decision that would be a grand gift to her future husband meaning her entire life’s objective was savagely stolen from her by a gang of thugs.  When they dumped Channon’s broken body into a trash can later that night after hours and hours of torture, rape and severe mental abuse, it was more than just Channon’s life that left her body after slowly suffocating.  All her life decisions were simply stolen from her and cheapened by a group of people who completely lacked value of any human standard, and behaved like a pack of rampant animals to destroy the lives of a nice couple just because they could.  Virginity doesn’t mean much to a cheapened nation such as what we have today, but for people who are not progressive, who are not liberal malcontents, or products of modern government dependency, it still has value and that value was brutally taken from Channon Christian in an act that is terrible beyond the physical abuse.  The violence cuts through to the heart of what we are as people, as rational human beings.

As reported by Glenn Beck’s The Blaze, on January 6, 2007, the couple made plans to watch a movie at a friend’s apartment, but they never made it. They would never be seen alive again.

When Christian didn’t show up for work the next morning, family members immediately grew worried and reported them missing, Beck explained.

“It turns out that the couple had made it to dinner, but when they arrived at the apartment complex where Christian’s best friends lived, they were carjacked by multiple assailants,” he said. “What followed was one of the most heinous, gruesome, senseless hate crimes, ever.”

It was at this point in the program that Beck advised parents to have their children leave the room or pause the show and watch it at a later time due to the graphic details of the story.

Newsom was gagged with a sock in his mouth, his ankles were bound with his own belt, his hands were tied behind his back, his face was covered with a bandana and his head covered with a sweatshirt that his five assailants had tied around his neck with shoestrings.  He was than violently raped with an object and beaten.  “One can only imagine the horror Christopher experienced as he was then forced to walk barefoot to the nearby railroad tracks, where he was shot in the neck in the back,” Beck said solemnly. “But the shots didn’t kill him — he fell to the ground and was paralyzed.”

“That’s when the assailants stood over him, placed the gun against his head and fired, killing him execution style,” he added. Newsom was shot a total of three times.  But not even that was enough. The attackers then poured gasoline on his body and set him on fire.

Unfortunately, the horror of this tragic story is not over. Beck went on to speak of what also happened to Christian on that night.

The woman was forced into a back room of the house where she was hog-tied with a strips of fabric from a bedding set. She was brutally raped “in every possible way imaginable” for several hours as the assailants beat her viciously with several objects, including a broken chair leg.  By the time Christian was taken into the living room, the five attackers realized they had left their DNA on their victim. In an attempt to cover their tracks, they poured bleach down her throat and on her body before they wrapped her body in black garbage bags and covered her head in a plastic grocery bag.  “She was then placed in a garbage can in the kitchen of the house — all of this while she was still alive,” Beck noted.

“Channon Christian’s last minutes on earth were spent slowly suffocating in a garbage can after she had been savagely beaten and raped for hours,” he added.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/08/13/the-gruesome-story-of-a-murdered-tennessee-couple-you-may-have-never-heard-about-but-that-you-will-never-forget/

Could the police have stopped Lemaricus Davidson, Letalvis Cobbins, George Thomas, Vanessa Coleman and Eric Boyd from carjacking the poor couple on their way to the apartment complex?  No.  Would further taxation of a new police levy stop the violence?  No.  Would more welfare money dumped into the system prevent the vast evil exhibited by the attackers?  No.  Would more education about race differences stop the crime?  No, in fact it probably made it worse by giving the attackers the belief that they were “equalizing” themselves by destroying the life of a young white couple because of the hate that flows into their culture from music, from government, and all progressive outlets.  There are only two things that could have eliminated this dreadfully destructive incident………..a very large handgun that would have killed the attackers on the spot, or a society that advocates social value.  I prefer the later, but understand the former is more of an option in a valueless world.

Channon Christian was trying to live her life with some sense of value.  Her commitment to virginity was a step in that direction which is sorrowfully lacking in modern society.  It’s not so much the act of sex that virginity represents; it’s the commitment to placing value on it.  Millions of women give sex away cheaply, but Channon was attempting to set herself above such tawdriness by saving herself for her marriage and the children that would come out of such a union.  Women who make these kinds of commitments to families they don’t even have yet are the kind of women who become wonderful mothers, wonderful wives, and wonderful grandparents who inspire entire generations.  These punks took that from Channon and every child she would have produced from a loving husband conceived in a bed that only they shared through a union they believed to be pure and under the care of God.

It is not because of the color of their skin that these attackers are scum bags that belong to my temperament at the end of a vigilante’s justice.  Hearing this story makes me wish terribly that I could have been somewhere close by to lend a hand—to prevent the terror from even happening.  But the reality is that this isn’t the only crime like this that has happened.  It’s not the worst of these crimes to have been committed.  In fact, it is happening right now somewhere in somebody’s dark corner of the world and there isn’t a politician, a law, or an education institution that can stop it.  The more they try, the worse they make things.  The only combat there is against this kind of thing is a sense of value, a sense of goodness that is advocated and supported by society at large.  I cannot be in every spot of the globe, so I hope these words will reach people who are, and inspire them to change their communities for the better.  I spend all this effort on blog postings, articles and books because it is the best strategic option against the kind of parasites we are up against.

What was the real hate crime here?  Was it racism?  No.  It was a group of valueless thugs who wanted to steal value from someone else.  So they took it from a couple in love on their way to building a future together.  Since the thugs couldn’t give themselves value where they were lacking, they sought to steal it away from someone else.  Even though the murders couldn’t make the thugs suddenly become valuable people, it could break the measure of goodness against bad, and give the perception that everybody is just as tainted and corrupt as the twisted fools Lemaricus Davidson, Letalvis Cobbins, George Thomas, Vanessa Coleman and Eric Boyd.  In the much discussed Treyvon Martin case where a young kid of color was shot and killed by neighborhood watchman, George Zimmerman, was it a case of racism?  No.  Based on the evidence presented in the case, it would appear that young Treyvon thought about the world unfortunately that he had a right to travel through a gated community and not to be accosted by any neighborhood watchmen.  The community he was passing through had value, value for their yards, their landscaping, their cars, their homes, and this made an attractive target for people seeking to fill themselves with value others built.  The attack provocation is not one of racism but of differing values.  One party either wants to steal the value of another monetarily, or metaphorically.  Sometimes they just get a charge out of putting the fear of violence into those with value who feel frightened to shut themselves up behind think glass windows and locked doors.  Sometimes the next step is the preference to actually yank those of value from their cars in Knoxville, Tennessee and steal away everything they ever were and everything they would ever become with brutal, diabolical sex, then murder.  Where does the hate come from………….it’s not racism, it’s in hating those who have values making those who don’t feel like they can’t measure up in comparison, which they don’t.

My idea of justice on these kinds of matters are what I wrote about in The Symposium.  I do not think tax payers should continue to pay for the life of Lemaricus Davidson, Letalvis Cobbins, George Thomas, Vanessa Coleman and Eric Boyd with life in prison.  Tax payers should not have to feed those worthless criminals in jail for the rest of their lives, it is simply too expensive.  It’s not even an eye for an eye type of revenge thing; those criminals are parasites on society that have done more than enough damage.  They have robbed the world of a likely nice couple who would produce nice Christian children who would have raised them with nice southern family values, and that is a detrimental cost quite enough. The cost of one night of brutality is bad, heart wrenching, and terribly cold-blooded.  But the cost of the loss of such innocence is far worse, because it is increasingly becoming more and more difficult to find people in this world who actually have value and to preserve them from becoming victims of the valueless.  The cost of losing such people has a far greater impact on the social fabric of our civilization than anything else.  Good people are lost forever in such cases and it is happening every day.  Meanwhile the scum bags that do the crime get to sit in jail for the rest of their life fed like animals in a zoo off the tax payer.  They get to live out their days as productive contributors of nothing, while those who would have otherwise been productive find themselves brutalized and stuffed in a garbage can to die where the media placed the story because it didn’t fit their agenda.  The violence is not created by racism in its natural state, but by a media who seeks to advance a political agenda that pits the valueless against the valued in an attempt at social equality where nothing of worth is safe from the convicts of righteousness.

This story brings to my mind one of my favorite poems, T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland.  For all the obvious reasons, it is only there that it makes sense away from the politics of current events.  Click to read more. 

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

Oprah Winfrey Used An Old Trick: Creating racial division to promote her new movie ‘The Butler’

Oprah Winfrey used the oldest trick in the book as far as promoting the latest “progressive” film containing her direct involvement.  Her film The Butler already has Oscar buzz as a surprising summer hit and tells the story of a White House butler who served eight American presidents over three decades. The film traces the dramatic changes that swept American society during this time, from the civil rights movement to Vietnam and beyond, and how those changes affected a man’s life and family. Forest Whitaker stars as the butler with Robin Williams as Dwight Eisenhower, John Cusack as Richard Nixon, Alan Rickman as Ronald Reagan, James Marsden as John F. Kennedy.  This is the same film where Jane Fonda played Nancy Reagan.  The cast is a who’s who of the extreme political left, and primary spokesman of modern progressive philosophy.  If Winfrey didn’t know how to use such tricks, she wouldn’t be one of the richest women in the world.  But she does, and she did—one week before The Butler hit theaters she managed to say something that angered half of America and empowered the other half putting her name in all the news outlets ahead of the movie’s release.  Her film which cost only $30 million to make pulled in nearly all that total during its opening weekend, an amount that was likely spiked 7% – 9% due to Oprah’s controversy.

 In case you missed the inflammatory statements, Oprah’s played the race card one week before The Butler hit theaters when a trip to a Zurich shop ended in a supposedly disturbing racial encounter for the billionaire media mogul — a national humiliation that forced the Swiss tourism board to issue a public apology.  Winfrey had said she was in town for Tina Turner’s wedding last month and stopped in the posh Trois Pommes boutique where she asked a clerk to see a $38,000 Tom Ford bag behind a glass case.  Oprah claims that the clerk looked down on her assuming that she couldn’t afford the bag because she was a black woman.  Pictures of all these characters and more about the story can be fond at the following link.

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/oprah-winfrey-brush-racism-sparks-international-incident-article-1.1422325#ixzz2cJZ30FuD

Oprah Winfrey has also chosen this past week to break her silence on the controversy surrounding her friend Paula Deen, the disgraced television chef’s use of the N-word in the past.  “I think Paula Deen was sort of used as a symbol, but I think lots of people use the word inappropriately all the time,” Oprah said during a revealing interview on Entertainment Tonight Monday. The 59-year old television mogul says she’s very sensitive to racism — a major theme in her new movie, “Lee Daniels’ The Butler.” “I do not run in the circle of people who use the word loosely,” she told ET. “For me it’s out of respect to those people who it was the last word they heard while they were being hung, the last word they heard when they were being fired, the last word they heard when their house was being burned.  “It’s the word heard every day when they were walking down the street and they had to step off the side-walk to let other people pass.”

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/oprah-winfrey-breaks-silence-paula-deen-controversy-article-1.1419098#ixzz2cJaiWah3

I understand the use of playing such cards to promote works of entertainment, especially when in so doing it reveals what kind of person is really behind the image.  I’ve played similar cards for similar reasons such as before the release of my novel Tail of the Dragon.  I don’t see anything wrong with it so long as the advocate is being authentically revealing—standing up for what they truly believe in.  That’s why it’s easy to see what Oprah was up to.  She knew exactly what she was doing, and the results are in the box office of The Butler.  And I also believe that Oprah believes she was a victim of racism at the Swiss purse store.  I believe that Oprah also believes that when she heads a board room conference that the reason there are people jealous of her, as she claims, is because she’s a black woman—and that white men despise her for her role of authority.  So for me, it is not surprising that she said any of the things she has recently.  My sentiments about Winfrey reflect those of Glenn Beck in a recent radio broadcast that he gave on the matter declaring that Winfrey’s action disgusted him.

Behind the public image of Oprah Winfrey is a woman who was given a tremendous chance by Steven Spielberg after the release of the film, The Color Purple to launch a media empire, which she did.  The doors were opened for her to take the wheel and steer herself to an unfathomable destiny, and she did not hold back once given the chance.  Many “white guys” wanting to prove they were not racist or sexist were actively seeking a black woman to advocate progressive philosophy to mainstream America in the late 1980s, and Oprah was up for the challenge.  The media got behind the effort for the same reason they get behind Barack Obama.  Their public and college educations taught them that the civil rights issues of the 1960s were the most important historical aspects of America’s development and they all want to play a part in shaping that history for the better.

In spite of what public image Winfrey has been able to build for herself through aligning her career path with progressive politics, deep down inside she is still the same woman she was before she stared in The Color Purple, and that personality comes out when she is being candid.  With her new film The Butler, as conservatives were angry with Jane Fonda playing Nancy Reagan, Winfrey did what progressives have done for years and that was disarm the critics and raise awareness for her film project by soaking up all the media attention with a blind accusation that could never be proven as millions of Oprah fans went to the theater to see her new movie—who otherwise would have passed.  By choosing to see The Butler over other kinds of movies, like Kick Ass 2 or some other film, Americans felt that it would prove that “they” were not racist by going to see such a movie, a challenge that Oprah initiated with her statements about racism. 

I don’t see Oprah as a success even though she is one of the richest people on earth.  I see a highly paid progressive spokesman who has been given power to help re-shape the world—which she has done.  No matter how much you dress up someone, and prop them up with photo shoots, films, and enamoring articles, they are what they are, and Oprah revealed what she was to the world during her press tour for The Butler.   I don’t blame her for trying to boost her ticket sales with inflammatory remarks.  But I do for being a phony all other times of her life and only revealing her deepest, darkest beliefs when it is financially advantageous to do so.  She knows as well as anybody that she would not have gained so much global popularity uttering such things during her rise to the top in the 1990s where nearly every woman in America looks to Oprah as the tribal chief of their global village.  But I do blame Oprah for being an inflammatory phony and seeking to use race as a way to prop up ticket sales and a possible Oscar nomination for her new movie purely out of fear of being called a civil rights violator.  It’s not a free market of equal ideas that people like Oprah are after, it is in the use of guilt, fear, and scandal where advantage is gained through such methods and why people like her “are” the most powerful people in the world when they would otherwise be store sellers of used junk in a flea market.

Remember above everything, Oprah is an actress.  She is paid to say what other people write for her.  In her case, she is extremely well paid to act not only on the silver screen, but also in real life.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

Doc Thompson Dismantles John Boehner: “Gotta do whatever I can to save the children, the puppy dogs, and the rainbows,’ dirt bag in congress.”

According to Doc Thompson on The Blaze Radio Network John Boehner is a “pinko, commmie, bed wetting, mambie pambie, hand wringing, crying, orange tinted, ‘I’ve gotta do whatever I can to save the children, the puppy dogs, and the rainbows,’ dirt bag in congress.”  It should have been clear from the outset that John Boehner had been bitten by the progressive bug of statism when he took the gavel of House Speaker from Nancy Pelosi, then immediately started crying.  Boehner was crying because he had gained enormous power the way he perceived it–3rd most in the entire world behind only the President and Vice President of The United States, and he was proud of himself for being elected into that position.  He was proud that his peers had just voted him in congress the equivalent of the Homecoming King of a big high school football game.  They had enough faith in him to protect their lobby interests on K-Street, to look the other way while they made millions off insider trading on Capitol Hill,  but worse of all, did exactly what Doc and his producer Skip established during the following broadcast,  use Cloward and Piven methods of overwhelming financial systems in order to create havoc allowing for massive changes in American philosophy through case-law to bring about “progressive changes.”  This is what Congress led by John Boehner is guilty of doing by adopting methods of making illegal aliens legal so that they can vote in upcoming elections.   Listen to that epic Doc Thompson broadcast from The Blaze Radio Network at the video below.  (CLICK HERE TO LISTEN LIVE)

John Boehner recently sent Barack Obama a birthday present knowing full well that America is burning on several fronts, many inspired directly by those same Cloward and Piven strategies designed to invoke progressive changes.  In the world of Capitol Hill the idiots there believe that they are royalty and actually rule over the population, and in order to stay in such power they must continuously find new ways to “game” the system in order to increase their voting blocs, and they do this by giving away the wealth of others, confiscated through government, and literally buying votes in elections based on their wealth redistribution.  The Democrats have done this kind of thing for years, and now the GOP is doing the same once they suffered a stinging defeat after Barack Obama was elected for a second term.

The GOP lost the last election because they played by the rules against an opponent where anything goes.  The GOP did not respond accordingly.  Fewer voters participated in that election on their behalf than did in 2008 showing support for John McCain and the first possible woman vice-president Sarah Palin.   Palin was publicly dismantled by attack through every branch of the media ruthlessly, even though she was a woman—because she was a conservative and had been a successful governor.  McCain was simply too much of a “nice guy” to respond to any attacks from the left believing that he and his party were above such a fray.  Republicans under McCain’s leadership routinely believed incorrectly that they were “above” such fisticuffs while Obama and his minions ruthlessly attacked all their political opponents with blood in their eyes and a knife behind their backs.  The GOP has failed to respond to progressives in American government since Ronald Reagan was in office three decades ago.  Instead, they have taken up the mantra, “if you can’t beat them—join them.”

This is how Republicans have invested so much of themselves in the new Gang of Ocho Bill that seeks to give amnesty to illegal aliens.  While the budgets across the nation collapse under progressive strain, the GOP seeks to find voters for 2016 among the illegal aliens hoping to beat out the Democrats in giving away more stuff to earn those voters.  Meanwhile they have surrendered ground to their old base of support assuming that they will always vote for the GOP instead of the lowly Democrats.  But they have been wrong.  Instead of holding their nose and voting or people like John McCain in 2008, then Mitt Romney in 2012, they just stayed home to watch sports, play video games, or went shopping.  People have stopped being interested in politics because of all the crookedness that is going on in Washington, surrendering their voting rights to the illegal immigrants who mean well, but often come from statism controlled governments and see nothing wrong with taking all the free stuff the American government wants to give them to earn their votes.

This brings everything around to Doc’s statement about Boehner.  Boehner was supposed to use his power to bring about justice, and enforce righteousness, yet he has refused choosing instead to defend government statism.  Boehner has chosen to “get along” with a president who has openly been hostile to the American way of life.  Obama is a devoted radical of the left and ran an administration that will go down in history as one of the most corrupt and secretive in the history of presidents.  From the questionable origins of Obama’s birth and education background to the Benghazi scandal, to the IRS attacks against conservative groups the Executive Office has openly used Cloward and Piven methods to “progress” society to the left by yanking the Overton Window dramatically in that direction.  John Boehner has stood by like a weeping child and let him do it believing incorrectly that Americans don’t want a fight in politics.  He and all those who think the way he does are wrong.

I was proud when a politician from my area took the third most powerful position in the world in 2010.  However, watching what he’s done with it, I am deeply ashamed of the man.  If I saw him or a member of his family around my town, at the grocery, or other social event, I would not seek to shake his hand, or even acknowledge his existence.  A year ago I was invited to a breakfast occasion with John Boehner which I turned down.  Now I would be insulted if I even received such an invite.  I wouldn’t simply refuse due to time constraints, but because it would be an assumption that the host considered me cut from the same cloth of such a weak-kneed, wussy, of diabolical character, soft will, and corruptible spirit.  I would consider such an invite today in late August of 2013 to be equivalent to an invite to fight in a parking lot—because the invitation would be one of disrespect.

Doc was right to call John Boehner all the things he did because the guy has not only done a bad job as House Speaker, but has caved into the enemies of America as defined by logic.  Capitol Hill is a land infested by peasants not of financial demeanor, but of moral aptitude.   They are lacking minds capable of leading anybody anywhere, and to cover their deficiencies, they seek to redistribute wealth to maintain office.  This is what John Boehner and his GOP supporters are after with their support of illegal aliens.  In America foreign immigration is part of what made The United States great, and there is a process for earning the honor of citizenship.  But that path does not involve free phone apps telling immigrants how to “game” the system with welfare abuse and parasitic living.  Anyone who supports such methods deserves to be called everything that Doc called them, and much, much more.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game: Pizza, Coca Cola, and Strategy, the cornerstones of a happy life

At Mos Eisley Radio these guys not only talk news concerning the most recent Star Wars Game X-Wing Miniatures, which I am crazy about, but a lot more.  Have a listen to them for  in-depth looks at classes, guilds, lore, and everything else fans care about in the galaxy far, far away.  But related to this article, they go into great detail about the strength of ships and strategy of the game for those who are prompted to get more involved by the conclusion of this article.   Have a listen while reading the below text!

star-wars-x-wing-miniatures-game-milennium-falcon

While it’s true that many of the people I know are locked into the very real and immediate danger of a real-life rebellion, which is covered at this site extensively, the way I endure the stress of such a thing is to fill my life with interesting hobbies, that also help build up my strategic ability.  I share some of those hobbies from time to time in hopes that others might become inspired and do the same for themselves, not by copying my suggestions so much as in finding something that works for them to give themselves a break so to endure the rigors of life just a bit more efficiently.  I have shared glowingly my love of the strategy game Pirates, the Constructible Strategy game by Wiz Kids.  My family has spent many hours buying, building, and playing that game till the very small hours of the morning.  I can remember one very fun Holiday week after Christmas where my kids and I with a small army of other kids bought every single pack of WizKids pirate ships on a cold December afternoon at Cincinnati Sci Fi in West Chester, Ohio.  The delighted store clerk even brought out a new shipment of those ships which had just arrived that was in the back while we were in the store, of which we bought every single one.  So needless to say, we love those types of role-playing games as a family, and as individuals.

Recently while on vacation in Florida my nephews along with my kids, my wife and I played a very cool Dungeons and Dragons type of role-playing game called Heroscape over pizza from the best place in Central Florida till the late hours of night with the condo door open to the ocean outside.  We had turned our large dinning room table into a war zone and found ourselves intensely engaged in mortal combat with dragons and warriors.  Like the referred to pirate game, I enjoy those types of games that allow you to play with several live players around a dinner table.  It is a great way to bond with other family members and actually speak to each other, while exercising the brain. 22_Top I find those types of games to be stimulating in a similar way to reading a novel, or playing a great video game.   The difference is that you have to work with other people in a way that is only possible with this type of strategic gaming.  For many years these role-playing strategy games have increased in popularity from a sub-culture of Dungeon and Dragon players, to what is now considered mainstream geekdom at major conventions all over the country.  The transition came officially from the popular game, Magic the Gathering.  The gaming industry in that market has never been the same, which is wonderful for the human race.  A short history of this type of gaming can be seen at the link below.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungeons_%26_Dragons

However, for me, I always loved that Pirate game from Wiz Kids the best of any that I have played in the last twenty years.  My entire family was deeply into it and our playing time together represent some of the most fun we’ve had together, which is quite a statement.  So I have missed it as Wiz Kids stopped making the game in the format we enjoyed, and time and distance has moved us away from the contents.  However, I recently received news from Lucasfilm about their latest version of a Star Wars Role Playing game by Fantasy Flight Games which I thought at first would be gimmicky, but upon investigation quickly found that it was a quite in-depth game that actually combined the type of game play that I enjoyed so much in  Pirates, the Constructible Strategy game by Wiz Kids and the Heroscape.  The new game is called Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game.

Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game is a tactical ship-to-ship combat game in which players take control of powerful Rebel X-wings and nimble Imperial TIE fighters, facing them against each other in fast-paced space combat. Featuring stunningly detailed and painted miniatures, the X-Wing Miniatures Game recreates exciting Star Wars space combat throughout its several included scenarios.

Whatever the chosen vessel, the rules of X-Wing facilitate fast and visceral gameplay that puts you in the middle of Star Wars fiercest firefights. Each ship type has its own unique piloting dial, which is used to secretly select a speed and maneuver each turn. After planning maneuvers, each ship’s dial is revealed and executed (starting with the lowest skilled pilot). So whether you rush headlong toward your enemy showering his forward deflectors in laser fire, or dance away from him as you attempt to acquire a targeting lock, you’ll be in total control throughout all the tense dogfighting action.

Star Wars: X-Wing features (three) unique missions and each has its own set of victory conditions and special rules; with such a broad selection of missions, only clever and versatile pilots employing a range of tactics will emerge victorious. What’s more, no mission will ever play the same way twice, thanks to a range of customization options, varied maneuvers, and possible combat outcomes. Damage, for example, is determined through dice and applied in the form of a shuffled Damage Deck.1XW For some hits your fighter sustains, you’ll draw a card that assigns a special handicap. Was your targeting computer damaged, affecting your ability to acquire a lock on the enemy? Perhaps an ill-timed weapon malfunction will limit your offensive capabilities. Or worse yet, your pilot could be injured, compromising his ability to focus on the life-and-death struggle in which he is engaged…

The Star Wars: X-Wing starter set includes everything you need to begin your battles, such as scenarios, cards, and fully assembled and painted ships. What’s more, Star Wars: X-Wing’s quick-to-learn ruleset establishes the foundation for a system that can be expanded with your favorite ships and characters from the Star Wars universe.

More can be learned at these links:

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_minisite.asp?eidm=174

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/103885/star-wars-x-wing-miniatures-game

The hook for me was when I saw the game’s version of The Millennium Falcon which is for me one of my favorite fictional symbols in film history of rebellion.  CLICK HERE FOR MORE.  I remember vividly when I toured the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C. to see the actual model of the Falcon in a traveling display that was set up there.  I traveled to Washington that weekend just to see the Falcon.  I spent nearly two hours looking at it, photographing it and memorizing every pipe, dent, and burn mark on a ship I had watched so many times in the feature films.  It was for me one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen in my life.  When I saw the level of detail that Fantasy Flight Games had poured into the Millennium Falcon game piece for the X-Wing Miniatures role-playing game it called to my mind memory of that original model in sheer detail and I instantly fell in love.  I immediately bought a starter set of the X-Wing game and launched my family onto a new generation of game play that is sure to engulf for many years. In the game players can fly the legendary Millennium Falcon into fast-paced battles for the fate of the galaxy! The Millennium Falcon™ Expansion Pack for the X-Wing™ Miniatures Game allows players to blast through hyperspace with Han, Chewie, Lando, and more. The Millennium Falcon comes with four pilot cards, thirteen upgrades, and all requisite tokens. New rules expand the X-Wing galaxy to include large ships and modifications. With its pilots, upgrades, and lovingly detailed miniature, the Millennium Falcon Expansion Pack is a beautiful addition to the X-Wing game!  It may be the coolest thing I have seen in years regarding this kind of thing.  It is a marvel to look at and unbelievable to have as a game play option.  I consider it stunning.

If the Millennium Falcon didn’t close the deal for me on the new X-Wing game the promise of the next ship did.  It doesn’t come out until the end of August, but when it does, I will buy it immediately.  It is the HWK-290 designed by Corellian Engineering Corporation to resemble a bird in flight, the “hawk” series excels in its role as a personal transport. The HWK-290 Expansion Pack comes with one detailed miniature at 1/270 scale, a maneuver dial, all necessary tokens, six upgrades, and four pilots, including the renowned Kyle Katarn. Each HWK-290 provides a wide range of support options for your squad and can be outfitted with both a turret weapon and crew member.  The reason this ship is significant for me is because it was the featured spacecraft of the main character in the video game Dark Forces.  pic1394907_lgIt never appeared in a Star Wars film, but was the home craft of the video game character Kyle Katarn, who would later become a Jedi Master in the novels years later.  One of the very first video games that my oldest daughter ever played was Dark Forces.  It was a first person shooter that came out in 1995.  My daughter was only 6 years old at the time and helped me play it by pressing the space bar on the key board when I told her to which caused my character to jump.  She was too young for the complex shooting and strategy it took to win the game, but she knew how to hit the space bar when I told her to and it was that game that launched her into a lifelong love of video games.  She and I will always share that unique father/daughter experience, and I will always think of her when I think of the HWK-290.  I was dazzled to learn that Fantasy Flight Games was actually inserting that ship into the game mythology before other types of ships, which let me know that the game designers were very serious about expanding the Star Wars experience of role-playing gaming in a format that hasn’t seen such a level of attention since our beloved Pirate Constructible Strategy Game.

Now that I’m going to be playing, it won’t take long before other members of my family will also and soon we will be ordering LaRosas pizza late at night and lining up 2-liters of Coke along our kitchen counter playing Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game well into the night.  It doesn’t matter that everyone playing will be well over 20 years old and in my case their 40s.  I still get a thrill about purchasing new strategic game pieces that can be used under battlefield conditions that have infinite possibilities.  I do not feel this kind of passion for other types of games.  The reason is that the role-playing games allow for complete independent freedom of strategy, unlike board games where the path is set and random chance puts players often into a position to win the game.  With games like X-Wing Miniatures all the conditions of battle are set and designed by the player, and that is why I love these experiences so intensely.  For me the game is only part of the fun.  I enjoy often reading the stats of the cards and infinitely considering various strategies before hand.  The game only proves a theory good or bad. 

 

I have played these games with people who are really good.  They are very quick with their mind and spend a lot more time playing the games than I ever will.  It is fun to watch these kinds of players at tournaments and conventions.  I will never put the kind of time into these games that they do, but I admire their efforts.  Too many adults in our modern age believe falsely that games are for kids and that such things should be put away as adulthood consumes our lives.  Games are not for kids, they are for minds.  Games like the Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game feeds the mind with more than entertainment, it provides mental exercises that are invaluable to real life.  I can’t say how many times I have been locked in epic political struggles and other situations where I resorted on the practices used in these strategy games to apply some skill I tried and won with in theory, against real opponents in real scenarios. 

 

So as I sometimes take breaks from the rebellions of the real world to embark on these flights of fantasy, even in my leisure, strategy is an important part of my life.  It is far safer to make errors in judgment among friends and family over pizza and Coca Coke than when it really counts in real life. 

And with that said, I am ecstatic to see this new Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game available at what might only be termed, an essentially important period in my life.  The timing couldn’t have been more perfect and I am so glad that the good people at Lucasfilm put the short playing clip of the example with Wil Wheaten and Seth Green up so I could see the Millennium Falcon playing piece for the first time and become enticed enough to investigate further.  That investigation will yield tremendous benefits that can only be found when adults play the games of young people and further develop their minds against the antagonists who have lost such abilities to their own detriment.  Sometimes being good at strategy isn’t about being better at the game itself, but is due to working against un-armed opponents.  Those who don’t play these kinds of games find their minds unable to think strategically enough to compete when it really matters, and every time a new game like Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures Game comes out, I am deeply thankful for the opportunity to feed my mind with the contents that have benefits which extend beyond convention.  When a vacation is needed, it’s not just the body that needs rest, the mind does also.  But the mind enjoys stimulation, not stagnation, and often a game like this can provide the crucial ingredient that the mind seeks with abundance in all the best scenarios.

 

To get the gist of what I’m talking about read this review from Boardgamegeek.com.  It reveals why this game is so much better than most other games, and why it will become one of the most enduring games of its type in this generation. 

 

 

 Harrowing dogfights, family drama, shootouts, a tender moment, amazing monsters, humor.

There’s a tempo to Star Wars. We all remember Luke screaming NOOOOOOO at Vader. For different reasons, we remember Anakin turned Vader screaming NOOOOOO. But we also remember Leia offering a little cracker to an ewok. We remember first seeing Darth Maul’s double lightsaber. And we remember Han saying “I know.”

It is NOT all pew-pew-pew. It is NOT all Vrusssshhhhhhhzwwwmzwwwmmm. It’s a cycle of teasing action and drama.

Even though the X-Wing Minis game plays out some incredible dogfight sequences, the play of the game is NOT a straight forward flow.

I’ve got dozens of rounds under my belt now, and I’ve been wanting to write a review, and it finally came to me what it is that makes this game such rip roaring fun.

It’s not the astoundingly detailed minis. And anyone complaining about scale needs to take a close look at the movies, where the scale of the ships to each other changes from shot to shot due to the compositing techniques used at the time.

The minis are awesome. I’m somewhat surprised that different ships use different plastics, but I understand why. That denser stuff used on the X-Wing would collapse a Falcon into itself.

The prepaint jobs are incredible. The cards gorgeous, the components just off the scale. Even with the bit more they must pay in royalties to Uncle George, the massive appeal of this game allows them to make a ton of copies and the price, while at first glance seems daunting, isn’t a lot for what you get.

What makes the game work is the pendulum swing. The rhythm.

First, the setup. The agonizing squad building. Is it worth 2 points to raise this pilot’s skill, not knowing what the enemy force contains? It could easily be two points that have ZERO effect on the game. Terribly tough gambles. Now that wave 2 is out and you could just as easily face a hulking mothership like a decked out Slave I or a swarm of the world’s most annoying TIE fighters, you really have to prepare for a wide contingency of opponents.

This setup is tense. You want flexible. But strong. Synergistic support between squad members, but not so much that the loss of a key ship means defeat. And you ALWAYS want about 3 more points for that perfect build. No matter how many points you choose to fight, you will kill for another 3.

So it’s got that whole squad building aspect down great. Especially now that there’s a ton of options. Who knows what your opponent will bring?

But the flow of a turn is brilliant.

Everybody chooses their maneuvers. No downtime. But here in the game is where you are playing cat and mouse. Maybe psychologically toying with the opponent, making them think your plan is A when it is actually B.

Hidden agendas and secret moves. That’s the next game that plays out after the squad building math.

Then the wonderful move system. Everyone slowly reveals their moves, in what might be the games most questioned rule. The lowest skilled dudes go first, and eventually the better skilled dudes, which mean they have a fairly good chance of accidentally hitting and losing their action, where the lower skill guy might pull it off.

But it works in the long run, because it keeps higher skills in tailing positions.

Bit in this phase of the game, again, very, very little downtime, as the nefarious plans and maneuvers are revealed.

Squeals of glee and grunts of horror abound as unexpected collisions happen and skillful turns are executed.

But then comes the start of your devastating on the spot decision making. While plotting your squadrons moves, you had an overall plan. Now, each ship must choose it’s precious action.

Evade? How many guys might end up firing on you? Target? Are you clear to get the shot this or next turn? Focus – the all purpose “Egads, I need help” token. Or maybe that barrel roll or super freakin cool new Boost – move a bit maybe out of a firing arc or -surprise – snap someone into your arc. Maybe you execute some trick of your specific pilot.

Here is where you are tempering your odds. Things that will alter the upcoming luck sequence. carefully guiding the gods of luck to your favor.

The tokens build up on the board as actions get selected. At first, this is a pile of confusing cardboard. In a few games, the counters become invisible, simply reminding you of who plans what.

Whew. So, strategic planning in the squad build, then the secrecy of move plotting, then the agonizing action choices. What more does this game need?

Raw luck.

Bring out the dice. Or the iPad app, if you prefer.

Its Star WARS and the dice bring on the war. Now MORE decisions that hurt. Do I spend my focus token to get that extra damage possibly in, or hold on to it to help me avoid possible damage? What if I hold it and no one fires? What a waste… Two hits coming in… Do I evade? Or hold on to the evade since a crit might come next?

Hopefully, you’ve pile bonus upon bonus on your fighters. Distance, skill, weapon, focus… Or maybe all you’ve got is a shot in the dark.

Fire away.

Even defenders are active, choosing focus and evade moments.

Again, very little downtime. Lots of whining and cheering. Little downtime.

Start the cycle again. Hidden choices, movement reveals and actions, combat.

I think THIS is why X-Wing is such a stunningly successful design. It bobs and weaves each turn. No phase is long enough to overstay its welcome. And you must juggle and balance each phase to support the others.

An excellently designed system that overcomes any of it’s perceived problems due to the overall strength of play.

http://boardgamegeek.com/thread/942443/why-it-works-review-after-wave-2

Listen to Star Wars gaming news at Mos Eisley Radio broadcasting straight from the Outer Rim!

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Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

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