The Answer to “Statism”: Rick Stevens from ‘Tail of the Dragon’

Statism

The political expression of altruism is collectivism or statism, which holds that man’s life and work belong to the state—to society, to the group, the gang, the race, the nation—and that the state may dispose of him in any way it pleases for the sake of whatever it deems to be its own tribal, collective good.

–The Ayn Rand Lexicon

I know my son-in-law cringes when he comes to my house and sees my political signs for president Mitt Romney, Ohio Supreme Court Sharon Kennedy, State Representative Margie Condit, and Senator Josh Mandel in preparation for the upcoming election. Since he has become a citizen of The United States he has moved politically toward libertarians in a quest for the kind of American freedom he always dreamed about. He cringes because to him the entire American complex of statism is a failure and is destined to be replaced with elements of anarchy or fall into an out-right empire one step away from collapse. In fact, he wrote a wonderful article on statism complete with 5 very important videos that can be seen at this link:

http://abundanttruth.wordpress.com/2012/10/24/statism-is-dead

My son-in-law and I have had many hours of conversations about these issues and I know where he’s coming from. On the other hand, out of those four signs in my yard, I know two of those politicians personally, and they along with many of the media I also know in Cincinnati, business owners, and other politicians, are wondering if I have moved too far to the right and have become an extremist since most of my conversation these days are anti-communist history lessons, progressive bashing, and a determined desire to defund government at every level with severe tax decreases. Over the last three years they have watched me make very valid arguments that once uncovered have made me very angry. And being the kind of person who fixes things—which I have done my entire life from dishwashers to businesses, the evidence cannot be escaped—America is being crushed by statism and pretending that it isn’t a problem won’t make the problem go away.

Many of the people who know me best wonder how I went from a levy fighter of great respect to a radical right-winged extremist (in their view) to the author of the new novel Tail of the Dragon. The answer is that my new novel is my answer to the statism problem I discovered in those previous endeavors without going to the extreme example shown on my son-in-laws displayed videos by Stefan Basil Molyneux. I understand what Molyneux is proposing and why. But I also understand that his view is radically different from what mainstream Americans view as reality that they will simply reject the ideas as dangerous to protect themselves from responsibility of action. But Stefan is right about state run schools advocating terrorism, Stefan is right about taxation being the weapon of larger government for an end only onto itself. He’s also right about the free-range slavery. I know he’s right because I have seen the process up close and personal and can verify the truth.

My answer was to write the novel Tail of the Dragon using the character of Rick Stevens to serve as the vehicle to showing how statism crushes individuality. By having Stevens be the type of character who had grown into manhood without ever being emotionally, or physically broken at any point in his life, to show what the idea kind of man could or should be not only in America, but in the world, I needed a character and a story to hold the image valiantly. Stevens in the Tail of the Dragon is as close to a perfect man as I can imagine making it into his middle years after having children, maintaining a career, maintaining a marriage, paying a mortgage yet never giving up on his pursuit of individual freedom. For Stevens, he had a car which sat in his garage that served as a symbol of freedom from his youth, before taking on the obligations of all the above which are normal for most people. Rick Stevens knows that he is a member of society being deliberately farmed as a serf but he has maintained his resistance in as healthy a fashion as possible, so not go insane—or lose himself along the way.

The plot of Tail of the Dragon almost follows point for point without intending to the issues described in Stefan Molyneux’s videos, even to the point of Stevens being arrested for not joyfully participating in an elaborate tax scheme perpetuated through police traffic citations and being thrown in jail for it. While in jail he is abused in the way that Molyneux suggested, except that Rick fights back and gets himself into all sorts of trouble because he simply refuses to submit. This is what leads Rick Stevens to provoke and flee the law into what becomes the greatest car chase in story telling history

People are often shocked to learn that most of what Rick Stevens went through in the book I have seen firsthand, and is not the work of over-the-top fiction. The plot of Tail of the Dragon is not a commentary on anarchy even though Rick Stevens and his wife Renee openly, and quit audaciously break every law known to the legal system. But it is an attempt to show the reader through a likeable character in Rick Stevens what the world could look like if a person could break free of those chains of serfdom that Molyneux speaks about in his presentations. Rick Stevens is not happy to live as a free-range servant to statism and he seeks to do something about it“.

Additionally, what is different about Tail of the Dragon that sets it apart from other car chase epics in films like Smokey and the Bandit, The Dukes of Hazzard, or even Speed is that the hero has fans working behind the scenes in politics who want what he wants, they don’t wish to be a part of statism, even though they are the people who have helped build such a condition. Often, just like in real life, they find they are servants to a system that grew beyond their control and they do desire to do something about it. Most of the people I know in politics, and the media, are these kinds of people and fancy themselves as free thinkers even though in public they show something else completely. Even people I know in labor unions and on the opposite side of me in political issues are good people when spoken to one on one. Even my most diabolical rival, the superintendent at Lakota Karen Mantia and I had a nice discussion once about motorcycle riding and the island of Key West on more civil shores of political discourse. But what makes these people bad, or evil are the institutions they serve, the steps toward statism that they help build—most of the time without knowing it.

Tail of the Dragon is my answer to three years of needing to put into an artistic format these very difficult problems in a summary that fits contemporary life. If my desire is to fix the problem, I have realized that such a thing cannot be done conventionally, through political office, serving as yet other state lobbyists for specific causes, or even picking a political side and sticking with it indefinitely. The character of Rick Stevens in Tail of the Dragon does not turn his back on his country, as is the temptation regarding his anger over statism. Instead he takes the $20 million dollars he acquires and restores his old car, the symbol of his own private independence into a war machine against the state—against America—but he paints on the roof of his car the old Spirit of 76 flag from the American Revolution to make it clear that he is not giving up on the ideas that founded the freest nation on earth, but rather the mechanism that drove it toward an imperial tyrant headed for its own destruction through statism. His fight for freedom is the fight of every man, woman, and child in the world and it is through him that the reader touches the face of life without the chains imposed by statism upon their minds and bodies.

For me personally, even though I am a bit of a recluse these days not socializing much around town, lashing out at latté sipping prostitutes with real anger, my signs in my front yard are my own personal Spirit of 76 flags declaring that I am still willing to fight for the kind of ideas that built America, even if the system is flawed. I will support those politicians who favor the lowest possible taxes, since it is low taxes that directly fight statism. The minute those candidates support any taxes, they will become my mortal enemy, because in real life I want to see an end to statism and would prefer to bring it about legally even if the extraordinary fantasy shown in Tail of the Dragon attacked statism directly, and gallantly with a fanfare that is dynamic. It is no secret that the ambition in that novel comes from the heart of the author in a frustration observed with real eyes that watched more than one election produce results edging American more toward the abyss of cataclysm than ever produced success. But there is a romantic in me that keep hoping for success, and is manifest in the actions of Rick Stevens in the action packed novel, Tail of the Dragon. In real life, I will vote for people who I think will buy into my anxiety against statism today, or who I think might listen and become converted tomorrow.

The thinking that is required is not one fashioned from team sports, public education, or any other collective organization—because they all point toward a social disposition of statism. As radical as such a concept might appear, only a philosophy against statism will preserve America and serve as the beacon of light the world expects. That is why it is no longer important who thinks what, who belongs to what group, or what political affiliation anybody is. What matters is whether or not individuals are dedicated to freedom for the real sake of it, and not the contrived definition sold as modern serfdom. All that matters is that people get their minds around the necessity to think differently and it is my hope that Rick Stevens will help the pill go down a little bit easier so that the journey toward understanding can begin.

Rich Hoffman

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. . . . To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.

–Henry James

I appreciate the support my readers here provide me with by clicking on the pictures below to enter the doors to even more adventure. The support expands life in ways that will ultimately create the means to boundless imagination. For a sample of such projects, click here and witness one of my ever reaching projects.

Stalin, Hitler, and Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio: They all share a love of labor unions

Progressives are some of the vilest creatures on the face of the planet primarily because they share with other vile creatures such as cockroaches, termites, vultures and piranhas the tendency to cohabitate politically with others to the parasitic aims of a collective society. They lack a sense of self, a sense of identity, a sense of personal responsibility and instead chose to crawl their way through life as a mess of creepy vermin attaching themselves to the bold, the productive, and the innovative. The more progressives there are functioning in society, the weaker it is—and the closer it is to becoming a society that does not build skyscrapers and new scientific breakthroughs, but yearns to merely pitch a tent and spend all day rubbing two sticks together to make a fire.

It is with much distress that one of these vile, sinister progressives is a senator in Ohio by the name of Sherrod Brown, and he is seeking re-election in 2012 to continue to pander to socialist labor unions and advocate progressive politics with the full endorsement of every progressive organization in the nation. His senate seat is one of the very valuable seats up for grabs at the federal level and is being directly challenged by Josh Mandel whom I enthusiastically support for the simple reason that Brown is a notorious progressive.

But one thing stands out most that embodies what kind of politician Senator Sherrod Brown is, and that is his suggestion on the U.S. Senate floor in March of 2011 when he said “I look back at history and some of the worst governments we’ve ever had, you know one of the first things they ever did? They went after the trade unions. Hitler didn’t want unions. Stalin didn’t want unions. (Former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak didn’t want independent unions. These autocrats in history don’t want independent unions.” He was of course grandstanding the cause that Ohio and Wisconsin were in the thick of trying to reform their collective bargaining agreements with their public employees in an attempt to balance their budgets without destructive tax increases. Wisconsin succeeded, and is much stronger financially because of it, but Ohio failed leaving public sector workers in each district all across the state to seek tax increases in order to balance their budgets so to satisfy their collective bargaining agreements—which is insane.

Politicians like Brown deliberately played on the ignorance of the masses—especially public sector workers who think ancient history was 1970—in a vain attempt to sound worldly and wise by showing his deep knowledge of history in the labor movement. He deliberately mislead the public with his speech by trying to paint Republican governors like Kasich and Walker as being fascist dictators which incited the mobs of rioters to use such dangerous metaphors to appeal to the historically ignorant.

The trouble with Brown’s statement, which is especially misleading— and alone, disqualifies him for another term as Ohio Senator in Washington, is that he deliberately distorted the truth to paint an inaccurate picture of history. CLICK HERE FOR REFERENCE. The reality is that Stalin riding the coattails of Lenin was the leader of the largest labor union in the world, the Soviet Union, which was created as a direct assault against the Russian bourgeois (wealthy) by the proletariat (workers) as instigated by the writing of Karl Marx and his Communist Manifesto. The entire political party of the proletariat intended world-wide revolution of the worker as Marx declared, “Workers of the world unite!” All labor unions in the entire world were born from this proletariat movement from these roots in Petrograd, Russia. Every one! Labor unions anywhere in the world are equivalent to communism. They are the same thing contextually speaking. Lenin wishing to become a dictator used the mechanisms of collectivity to rise to power, something that couldn’t happen in the independent minded, capitalist society of America. It is only through collective organizations where leaders such as Stalin can dominate a mass population that such tyrannical regimes can thrive, which is counter to the kind of speech Sherrod Brown uttered. He attempted to paint politicians who bulk at labor unions as being the same as Stalin when in fact without a labor union dictatorships are very difficult to organize. So is Brown’s claims that Walker and Kasich wished to rule their states as tyrannical despots–eliminating the labor unions would make doing such a thing nearly impossible, because it is through the lazy, group oriented labor union worker that such dictatorships rise to power. Not through independent minded corporations and individuals seeking to make a profit from their businesses.

Brown also brought up Hitler as a dictator that eliminated unions, but like Lenin, Hitler used labor unions to solidify his base in a climb for power. Hitler saluted unions by naming his political party the National Socialist German Workers’ Party and went so far to make “May Day” the German equivalent of “Labor Day” in America a paid holiday on May 1st 1933 to unify his regime under waving banners. The next day on May 2nd 1933 Hitler dissolved the unions, confiscated their assets, occupied their offices and arrested their leaders. Hitler like Sherrod Brown spoke out of both sides of his mouth and was willing to say anything to climb into power.

It is ironic that Brown would try to classify Kasich or Walker as equivalent to Hitler when it was he who most behaves like Hitler and Stalin using the labor unions as his way of continuing his progressive power. Neither of the Republican governors from either Ohio or Wisconsin has ever showed an inkling of wanting to rule anybody. They—like many Americans simply want to make money, which is the America way. Labor unions see such activity as evil because like the communists who founded their organizations they continue to utter the ghosts of the past with continued hatred of wealth, which is ironically the basis of their political platform. This makes them parasites to society because they seek to steal the wealth of those who make it with the same notion of communist utopia that gave rise to tyrants like Stalin and Hitler using the same misleading tactics as Sherrod Brown uses currently.

Sure, Senator Brown apologized after his ghastly comparison, but the damage had already been done. He rallied his political base with such an irresponsible utterance that could have been pulled straight off the pages of Mein Kampt. Thousands upon thousands of union workers used that rally cry just like the fools in the National Socialist German Workers’ Party did on May Day one day after waving banners of celebration for Adolf Hitler only to find the next day they were in jail and deposed by the man they put in power.

It helps to know history and most of the idiot union workers who stand behind progressive organizations like the ones who prop up Sherrod Brown have no grasp of it beyond a couple of decades. To the average union worker they consider the public union collective bargaining rights voted into legality in 1983 in Ohio to be as old and authentic to America as the Declaration of Independence, and those are the kind of diabolical monstrosities who support Senator Sherrod Brown. They are so dangerous and such low-life, intellectually deficient sloths that America cannot survive if they are permitted a seat at the table, just like no house, or no tree, or no structure can hope to survive if it is infected with so many parasites that the good and strong can no longer provide support in spite of the mindless destruction that comes from labor unions and their communist roots.

For those reasons and hundreds more Senator Sherrod Brown needs to be removed from office on Election Day, 2012.

Rich Hoffman

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

I appreciate the support my readers here provide me with by clicking on the pictures below to enter the doors to even more adventure. The support is providing the tools needed to expand life in ways that will ultimately create the means to boundless imagination. For a sample of such projects, click here and witness one of my ever reaching projects.

Lies, Cheats, and the Game of Cowards: The Benghazi Mask of Fools

It is now obvious that the White House knew about the terrorist attack against the four Americans in Benghazi that claimed the life of Ambassador Chris Stevens, two former Navy Seals and a State Department official. The terrorist group Ansar al-Sharia took credit for the killings and the body mutilation of Sevens. In fact a drone and other reconnaissance aircraft observed the final hours of the fight. The White House knew two hours into the seven hour attack that American officials were under assault by terrorists which is deeply disconcerting considering The White House after seeing the evidence wished to deflect attention away from the idea of a terrorist assault that occurred on 9/11 2012 even though Sevens had even warned about the activity prior to the attack. Instead The White House insisted that the violence was instigated by an anti-Muslim American movie—but it didn’t work—The White House, apparently the CIA and many other manipulative federal agencies had been caught with their hands in the cookie jar attempting to create a “false flag” event. Watch the videos below for further clarification of who knew what and when they knew it. The situation is extremely serious and looks to make the Fast and Furious event look like a misdemeanor—which of course Obama invoked Executive Privilege to protect Eric Holder and himself from further implication. What has occurred under this Obama White House may well be the most corrupt and destructive since Al Capone ran his famous organized crime syndicate in Chicago during the Prohibition. The actions taken by many people just between the Fast and Furious scenario and now Benghazi deserve prison terms and possibly capital punishment. They are reprehensible actions and I am personally ashamed that these kinds of people are the face of my country.

But those of us who can see these actions for what they are, also know that nothing will ever come of it. Obama will earn millions of dollars as a public speaker once his term is done, and Congress will lose it’s will to pursue justice. These problems are just too big for the average mind of the average American to deal with. CLICK HERE TO SEE WHY. The criminals of manipulation are very aware of their desire to overwhelm the media and the public with too much crime so that nobody can possibly get their mind around the enormous tragedies of modern politics, so I will frame the argument in the fashion that so many conspiracy theories and minds of madness wish to ignore.

The trouble with the Middle East, and all other places in the world is that America uses the CIA to manipulate governments, topple regimes, and pit factions against each other so that America can profit off the chaos. Any rational mind can see these activities in their simple local governments, and the situation is greatly magnified on the world stage where a lot of money and crony capitalism reigns supreme. The political left wishes to address the problem with socialism, with a feeling of fairness to eliminate such global terror that often follows America’s own Central Intelligence Administration. The political right looks to align themselves with the crony capitalists who hold the power of a particular regime.

America has made it a habit of using the CIA specifically to implement a thousand James Bond plots all over the world without the stereotypical villains and the beautiful women in casinos. But the manipulative plots conjured up to protect American interests are deplorable, and if used in a sporting event would be equivalent to cheating. The Obama White House has been caught doing what the Bush Administration has done, the Clinton Administration has done, the Reagan Administration has done, Carter, Ford, Nixon, Johnston, Kennedy, all the way down to World War I essentially—and that is to use clandestine activities to advance American interests while also maintaining the public ability to shake hands with those same countries at the table of The United Nations. It is the American participation in The United Nations that causes the need for back-stabbing actions by bringing into the equation politics showing the public a nice smiley face when in fact the various factions hate each other and want nothing to do with peace.

I would rather see all sides of an argument spit in each others face and go to war over their ideas than to shake hands in public and assassinate each other behind the cloak of secrecy. I would rather live in an America that out produces the rest of the world with laissez-faire capitalism than to use the CIA to get two sides fighting so that America can sell them both items made in America. I would rather win by truly being superior than by invoking manipulative schemes to topple our enemies from within their own cultures. If a president wanted to get rid of Kaddafi, I would have rather that president announce it clearly instead of using an Ambassador to funnel guns to the rebels who were actually connected to al-Qaeda and knew it—but also knew that the American people would never support such alliances, so the whole thing was done under the cloak of manipulation.

People seem to forget that Saddam Hussein was created to invoke war with Iran during the Reagan years to help stabilize the situation there to American advantage. And Osama bin-Laden was created to help Afghanistan fight against the Soviet Union. Currently the war in Afghanistan could be argued not to be about fighting the Taliban but in protecting the opium trade of which Afghanistan is the world’s largest producer. Have a look at the article below and the date:

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/20/world/taliban-s-ban-on-poppy-a-success-us-aides-say.html

Now look at the same paper reporting the situation 10 years later, and any mind with a brain can see that opium production has steadily increased each year since the 9/11 event in America.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/12/world/asia/un-reports-sharp-rise-in-opium-production-in-afghanistan.html?_r=0

Does this mean that President Bush started a war with Afghanistan to protect world-wide opium production? No. But his advisors who are not elected but appointed who clearly get their marching orders from political donors do have a vested interest in the billions of dollars produced by Afghan opium production. Those same donors give money to Obama, and both presidents have learned that even though they may publicly oppose drug use and opium production must turn a blind eye to the actions of their political contributors who need to maintain a façade of philanthropy while cashing in on the drug trade in Afghanistan, because the Taliban had tried to put a stop on the practice for spiritual reasons in 2001, just a few months before 9/11. Such a case is purely hypothetical, but none of it would surprise me. It can be seen how such tangled webs can snare so many good people to endorsing a reprehensible evil that nobody in the public wishes to acknowledge. So often, the CIA is sent in to fix up these loose ends and keep all the dirty business away from the public eyes, including Presidents of The United States.

There are a lot of Chris Stevens in the world who are killed and wiped from the earth with no eyes to witness. The attackers of Stevens knew there was blood on the hands of powerful people in America and they dared those powerful people to challenge them by maiming the body of Stevens in a deplorable manner. And just as they figured the guilty actions of all involved in the Benghazi debacle–the powerful people in America hid like cowards and attempted to blame a film maker for the violence that was started through area manipulation—that went wrong.

I am not against the aggressive protection of freedom throughout the world, the crushing of tyrannical despots, and authoritarian regimes. But I am against shaking hands with such people in the halls of the United Nations, then sending assassins to cut off their heads in the night so the blood is off the hands of public opinion. I would rather see America do such things in the light of day with full declaration of their bold intentions. It would be advisable going into the future for the power brokers who whisper into the ears of naive Presidents to stay out of the protection of illegal, reprehensible drug trafficking, the modern slavery of the sex trade, and a whole laundry list of financial despots who wish to rule the world not with a crown, or a kingdom, but with bank accounts that control politicians like mindless puppets to play the entire world—including America—as pawns in their vast schemes of power grabbing all in the name of philanthropy.

Such days of cloak and dagger games are ending because the world is shrinking, and such things can no longer be hidden. And in the future, such honesty is required so that courage can be truly awarded to those who are the best, and not the most sinister.

Rich Hoffman

The Truth about ODE School Report Cards: Lakota and the Cincinnati Enquirer hold hands and kiss

Since my own personal Judas………Michael Clark of the Cincinnati Enquirer has written yet another apologist’s article in favor of public education it requires clarification of the matter at hand, which is the issue of school report cards issued by the Ohio Department of Education, where the highest grade possible is an Excellent with Distinction. The article Clark wrote can be seen below as it was reported by the West Chester Buzz.

http://westchesterbuzz.com/2012/10/22/last-week-in-west-chester-lakota-maintains-rating/

(Watch an interview I did with a Michigan radio station over this issue)

Based on that article, any intelligent skeptic would deduce that Superintendent Mantia of Lakota is indicating that she is going to let the rating of Lakota drop to just Excellent following what Mason has done recently. Mason and Lakota have very similar demographics, but like Lakota have not passed a school levy for a number of years and have had to change out superintendents due to intense pressure from tax resistance groups. Mason has a strong tax resistance group and now Lakota has two. Yet Mason was lowered by the ODE to push voters into supporting a future school levy. Little Miami was also punished by the ODE because of their multiple levy failures where Fairfield who just passed their levy last year was increased on their report card. The ODE designation is purely a political scheme designed to increase taxes on property owners in favor of the radical union influence, and reporters like Michael Clark who have a personal stake in maintaining the status quo education system as it is, ignore the mechanisms of the scheme hoping that nobody notices.

For the record I have for nearly two years now favored complete education reform with 100% School Choice in the State of Ohio and I want nothing to do with a teachers union. Teachers should have a right to opt out of a union and until that discussion takes place, I am completely against the current education models that the Ohio Department of Education represents. With that said, the report card system of the ODE is a foolish, corrupt, and out-dated system that favors political pull more than actual results and since reporters like Clark won’t do their job and uncover these types of stories because it might make their wives or reporting contacts angry, then I’ll gladly do the work in their place.

I speak with school board members all over the state and am personal friends with several former school board members, and I will relay to you what they have relayed to me. Schools all across the state sometimes win their ratings by destroying the tests of low scoring students. (proof below) Superintendents make it their task to stay on good political terms with ODE personnel and staff so to keep the eyes of that board from looking too closely at the activity that actually produces the test results. In schools like Lakota and Mason where the social demographics produce students who test better than schools like Princeton, CPS, or Lockland, there are more tests that must be excluded from the sampling and the risk of getting caught is much higher. But superintendents have more or less in their power the ability to pass or fail their ratings at will.

It should be noted that the superintendent of Little Miami stated that their testing suffered because of the 8 failed levies in previous years. By saying such a thing he is declaring publicly that he failed in his job as superintendent, and politically he is playing the game of warning the public that if they don’t pass their school levies, their districts will also suffer a poor rating from the ODE. Mason due to their finances need a levy in 2013 so they have been downgraded to attack the egos of the Mason residents with displaying a lack of school pride so that when their next levy is put on the ballot, the residents will pass it. Lakota has a teacher’s contract that is up in 2014 and it will need a tax increase to pay for the bloated salaries of its employees when the pay freeze expires, so Mantia–the effervescent quarter million dollar politician–is planting the seeds for passing that levy by threatening to become downgraded as Mason was.

The Ohio Department of Education gladly puts on the blinders to this behavior, and they are very aware of what they are doing and why they are doing it. They will of course publicly deny that such things are going on, but in the field of public education, it is the radical unions who run everything at every level, leaving the Ohio Department of Education members without any real teeth to hold any real authority. Since most of the people working in education make extremely good money for maintaining the status quo, there is absolutely no desire to change anything, or question anything even when the red flags are glaringly obvious.

Just to show that the ODE is doing their job they will occasionally pick a school to crack down on—to make a sacrificial victim of—and this year they focused on Southwestern Ohio because of all the levy resistance that has went on in the region—mostly by my personal friends and associates. In fact, I am happy to report that we have tax resisters in almost every school district in these regions and yes—we all talk. Recently the ODE targeted the lowly school district of Lockland for cheating on their test scores because the results were so obvious that nobody could claim to turn a blind eye away from the data. Lockland is already on the verge of a major restructuring from the state, so there was no skin off the back of the ODE to crack down on them in order to show the public that the “system works” prompting the media to report the incident in a public relations campaign designed to attract the attention of the public while all the other schools in the region continue the same practice. The ODE operates very similar to a traffic cop who tends to pull over red sports cars rather than family mini vans even though both are doing the same speed. The driver of a red sports car is potential trouble to the status quo, so they usually get the ticket while the driver of a mini van is probably a responsible citizen who is just in a hurry trying to do their jobs in society, at least in the mind of such cops. Lockland was the red sports car, Lakota I wouldn’t be surprised to learn, is the mini van. Mantia in her political wisdom with the wink and a nod from the ODE may allow Lakota to become downgraded in 2013 so that the community will be incentivized to pass a levy by 2014 when the new teacher’s contract must be negotiated.

For the proof of what has just been said here below is the article of Lockland getting caught by the ODE eliminating 36 low scoring students to improve their state score, just to prove that such activity goes on. As school board vice-president of the Lakota school board, Julie Shaffer likes to say about me, that I “rant” when bringing such activity to public light, be it known that Lockland is simply a small fish and punishment by the ODE does little to affect the education culture that is so defective in Ohio. Somehow I get the feeling that Shaffer won’t post this little bit of info on her Facebook page as she has other things that I’ve written here. Enjoy those lattés ladies.

http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20120725/NEWS/307250057/State-Lockland-schools-cheated

If my mood about education has become increasingly darker as time has went on it is because I have learned about the many tricks such as the one shown above that are embedded in the big business of public education and I have had to face the reality that the entire system must be completely scrapped and reformed. 100% School Choice is the only solution that I see as it is currently being used in countries like Sweden with great success, and is needed to break the terrible hold that teacher unions have on America’s public schools. Until there are choices like “School Choice” there will continue to be corruption between superintendents, teacher unions, members of the Department of Education, the Ohio School Board Association, state legislators, trustees, even zoning officials who wrap themselves in such a tangled web that they can never hope to legitimately escape honestly.

The sad reality of the entire report card situation is that it is all about job protection and money wrapped up in collective bargaining agreements that are sold on the backs of children. And everyone who has participated in such a folly should be extremely ashamed of themselves. In my first hand experience, the education culture from reporters like Clark all the way superintendents like Mantia is treacherously destructive to a beneficial society because they know better, yet put on the blinders for their own interests that I do not hesitate to describe. I am as aghast at their behavior as anybody and believe me the proof stacks up high. People just choose not to see it. I do not wish to participate in their actions with my endorsement—or silence. The report card evaluations from the Ohio Department of Education have only one purpose and that is to bring in more money in the form of taxes to the schools of their districts. For districts that have shown they won’t pass their levies, the report card scores have been lowered, and for those who have passed their levies, the scores have increased taking into account a one year lag period, such as in the example of Little Miami. And in the case of Lakota, the threat is that the district rating will be lowered as other areas of Lakota’s district show great promise such as the new Liberty Way shopping complex and the 2013 Homearama exhibition in Carriage Hill boosting the real estate world with an inflection of interest that neighboring communities will benefit from. The politician Mantia is positioning herself for another levy run on the backs of these prideful events as some of those same real estate brokers whisper in her ear how best to proceed. And you can bet that The Ohio Department of Education will work with her in every way possible to bring about the results they mutually desire—which is a preservation of an education monopoly that favors the teachers unions at the expense of the children and their parents.

Rich Hoffman

Übermenschs are Born: Emerging from the shadows of superstition and collectivism

When studying the nature and evils of “collectivism” the ultimate question comes to mind inevitably—why. Why is it that collectivism is such a prevalent human trait that is the greatest threat to individual liberty? Why are there a large number of people who live in modern society who are attracted to political philosophies like socialism and communism? Why is it that some people believe that for their lives to be successful that it requires my participation in their life so they can feed off my effort just to live? This is without question the duality of modern America and the greatest challenge the human race faces in the 21^st century. Some in America like me wish to be left free to achieve whatever our effort and imaginations can conceive while others wish simply to live from day-to-day in a collective pattern of herd mentality living and dying uneventfully with an eye always on the horizon toward some spectacular afterlife.

When looking for answers to the hard questions of the modern age, I like to look beyond the start of the progressive age in America, before the New England Victorians brought to The United States the corruptive disease of a festering European socialist model. To understand why please refer to my article on “Han Shot First” by CLICKING HERE. Even with a popular story like Star Wars there is much debate over a simple aspect of it such as in that example. As the filmmaker George Lucas grew older, and more compassionate as multiple influences affected his world outlook, he has subtly revised a scene in that famous movie that has fans in an uproar. Leo Tolstoy thus also went through a similar transition throughout his life from when he wrote the great classic novel War and Peace, but desired at the end of his life to wonder the streets of Russia as a peasant. People and ideas of time do change a bit, and with their minds can come to reality an attempt to revise history to fit their shape-shifting perceptions.

I would argue that such dramatic changes in philosophy come from minds that have lived in gray areas of their lives, and those shades of gray do allow unstable minds to alter their world-view. This is a prevalent trait in creative people, and creative people are often the ones who interpret history for the more logical businessmen and legislators of any age. So it is for this reason that I tend to trust only bodies of work, creative literature and serious science that predates the progressive era of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson and their love of European royalty. It is in just such a book that I went searching for an answer to this problem of modern and historical collectivism—and I think I’ve found it in the below quote.

“Among the Thompson Indians of British Columbia, when the men were on the war-path, the women performed dances at frequent intervals. These dances were believed to ensure the success of the expedition. The dancers flourished their knives, threw long sharp-pointed sticks forward, or drew sticks with hooked ends repeatedly backward and forward. Throwing the sticks forward was symbolic of piercing or warding off the enemy, and drawing them back was symbolic of drawing their own men from danger. The hook at the end of the stick was particularly well adapted to serve the purpose of a life-saving apparatus. The women always pointed their weapons towards the enemy’s country. They painted their faces red and sang as they danced, and they prayed to the weapons to preserve their husbands and help them to kill many foes.” Such is the statement provided after the exhaustive research that went into the great book The Golden Bough written by Sir James Frazer in 1890 under the chapter “Sympathetic Magic.”

When Friedrich Nietzsche proclaimed in what used to be my favorite book prior to The Fountainhead, his great work Thus Spoke Zarathustra that mankind was about to move beyond the limits previously experienced as he suggested that humans were on the cusp of a revolutionary point in their evolution and that it was the Übermensch translated as the Overman or otherwise “the superman” that would begin to emerge and transform society into the next great age. Ayn Rand, the great Russian author would take this idea and bring it to life in perhaps the most controversial bodies of literature thus far seen on planet earth, because in essence she was disputing the ideas of collectivism which is rooted in superstition and sought to replace such silly concepts with logical observation that goes back to the roots of Aristotle’s original arguments, before the Dark Ages and many empires along with ruling kingdoms would water down the minds of human beings for centuries through the strong belief in “sympathetic magic” articulated above by Frazer. Nietzsche was attacking the idea that “sympathetic magic” would continue to rule human beings into the future, and that the rational mind was beginning to take over such previous primitive thinking.

As ridiculous as some might think that the behavior of the Thompson Indians were, all one needs to do to see modern examples of it today is to attend a sporting event. In any stadium where football is played, “sympathetic magic” is being used as fans wear clothing and practice rituals that they believe will help their team to victory. Some fans and even players will pray to God to help them attain victory. It is well-known that baseball players often will wear a particular pair of shoes or wear the unwashed socks from a previous “big game” in hopes that the magic of those past events will translate to success in a future, yet un-played game. The name “sympathetic magic” means that the ritual performed in whatever capacity will invoke success through some magical, unknown means, but that the belief that like, or “shared” things have power over fate permeates. Such as the fan who wears the jersey of their favorite player hoping in the back of their mind that such an action will help that player perform better on the field of battle. Fans of the modern age may think of themselves as being more educated and sophisticated than the Thompson Indians of British Columbia, but they aren’t in practice.

We see the same attempts at “sympathetic magic” with politics, and even the way tax money is spent. Teacher unions and their neurotic soccer mom supporters advocate that more money spent on a school will magically make the school better. They have direct evidence that such a thing can’t happen, and even history and logic speak against such a thought. Yet they insist to believe with all the naiveté of a fool that throwing money at a problem will solve it. Their scientific logic has all the merit of a child throwing a penny into a fountain and making a wish, which is “sympathetic magic” yet they adhere to such foolishness with great religious zeal—even violence to protect their desire to retain such beliefs against the face of reality.

To protect themselves against reality, people who have such feeble minds to construct their lives around “sympathetic magic” gather in groups just like the village people of primitive cultures in a shared belief that if they all focus their minds on the same idea using “sympathetic magic” that they can alter reality. This is the root cause of collectivism. This is actually the root cause of much evil in the world and was the warning of Nietzsche and Ayn Rand. It is also why collective orientated people hate those philosophers with religious fury, because the introduction of such a reality contaminates the “sympathetic magic” they are attempting to invoke among the Gods. Collectivism therefore is the mechanism that is holding human kind back into a continuous state of decay and regression whereas the American experiment of individualism produced explosive invention and dramatic wealth production. In America human beings for the first time in recorded human history could think and live without the imposition of having a ruler force upon the individual an insistence of scientific thought bound to the mechanisms of “sympathetic magic.” In America the first of the Übermenschs’ emerged as Nietzsche predicted and like all cultures the birth begins in art—in this case the minds of creative science, authors like Ayn Rand, and filmmakers like George Lucas who in his youth created Han Solo, even if in his older years philanthropy and being a billionaire with the added pressure of old age, created in his mind the hope for a little “sympathetic magic” to reach across the great unknown and hope that the Gods will smile upon his actions on earth. The old George Lucas insists that the young George Lucas always intended to have Han shoot second. But it is in such revisions that all manners of “sympathetic magic” are protected through historical revision so that the minds of collectivists can maintain their illusions in the face of a grim reality—that courses of history can only be altered through individual will by those who most honestly follow their own private bliss as solo participants in their own hero adventures divorced from any collective cause and downtrodden superstition.

Rich Hoffman

Labor Unions Back Sheriff Jones: The slippery slope of political compromise

During the debate over Issue 2—the repeal of Senate Bill 5 in Ohio during 2011, many political lines between many established political circles were exposed where at once they were believed to be hard-core Republicans, but learned they were actually very progressive advocates of the same policies that allowed a president like Obama happen. In Cincinnati such stories were Bill Cunningham, Sheriff Jones and Senator Bill Sietz who showed that their public positions of conservativism were actually a mixed bag of progressivism. Sietz was a vocal critic of Governor Strickland as a political insider, Cunningham a big time talk show host for 700 WLW who sometimes does labor work as an attorney along with Sietz—and is married to a government employee—a judge, and Sheriff Jones selling himself as one of the hardest nosed law enforcers in the country on illegal immigration. All three seemed poised to be the best spokesman of our day on conservative principles in the Cincinnati area. Cunningham specifically from his microphone of 700 WLW pushed for governor Kasich to be bold and do the hard things it would take to reform Ohio with a loud mouthed crusade that sounded tough, but turned out in reality to be a ruse.

All three men sold themselves as red rocked Republicans in the past and learned during the election of 2011 that they were just as guilty of many of the country’s troubles as the Democrats masking the socialism of communist infiltrators emerging in America during the Hippie Movement. Compared to the socialist advocates of the 1960’s, Cunningham, Sietz and Jones probably do think of themselves as conservatives. But their support of labor unions exposed the flaws in their logic. Jones and I had in common that we were both frequent guests on 700 WLW. I would come on with Doc Thompson regularly to discuss school issues, and Jones would come on with Bill Cunningham to discuss union issues, especially regarding Senate Bill 5. Their position seemed odd to me since I believed that they were as committed to conservative principles as Doc Thompson and I were. Over the course of the election of 2011 as Cunningham came out in favor of the union repeal going against his friend, the Governor of Ohio John Kasich I learned that Cunningham was simply playing the part of a Rush Limbaugh type over all the years I’ve listened to him on WLW, and that he was just playing the part of a character on the radio. Doc and I however believed in everything we were saying, and weren’t afraid to speak it.

I knew there was big trouble in the Republican Party when I attended a large event with the Governor in the heavily conservative area of Liberty Twp. Every important Republican, financial contributor, and other powerhouses were at this event, yet Jones was not, because he had to come out with Cunningham in favor of the Senate Bill 5 repeal, which would have reformed the collective bargaining agreements with unionized public workers in the state. The bill was backed boldly by Governor Kasich. Jones and I ran into one another at different events, but since he and I had a somewhat public debate over Senate Bill 5, we ceased to speak to each other after that as it was obvious we were working for different political positions. The last time we spoke before the election was at a 9/11 event where police, firefighters and teachers all attended a wonderful ceremony at the Ronald Reagan building at the VOA Park. I had to face Jones during the ceremony and I knew as I looked at him that he saw all the public workers around us as a wonderful, patriotic service to his community and country. I on the other hand saw the public workers as a bunch of social parasites that should all be fired to save the tax money. Even though his beliefs were founded in elements of conservatives, his core beliefs were in bigger government where more public workers were given jobs by created government branches fashioned by spend happy politicians. All during the ceremony I thought of my favorite Christmas song by the Royal Guardsman “Snoopy’s Christmas.” Jones to me was the Red Baron and I was Snoopy and we were gathered in a momentary truce under the American flag. Click the link below for review.

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/12/25/snoopy-vs-the-red-baron-the-true-meaning-of-modern-christmas/

I realized after this event that I could not play politics the way Sheriff Jones and Bill Cunningham did. In the hallway after the ceremony I got into a heated discussion with a union worker who actually told me he was entitled to the pay and benefits gained through collective bargaining and that was the end for me. I could not play both sides of the fence the way politics demanded, and Sheriff Jones was a politician. I was not willing to compromise my beliefs to preserve a system that should have never been allowed in the first place—collective bargaining.

I went on to win my personal political issues, but Jones and Cunningham won their repeal of Senate Bill 5 and the unholy alliance of Republicans working closely with labor unions to support the Democratic Party in a round-about way was revealed and it sickened me to my very soul. I decided that I would step away from politics as a front advocate in the community and cast my extra energy into writing novels and other articles full-time. The political two-faced position required for that game was not something I was interested in. Rather, I wanted to crush the system entirely even if it brought everyone down with it. Sheriff Jones and Cunningham tried to make amends with the Republic Party publicly after the election but behind the scenes Doc Thompson was fired, and 700 WLW took a noticeably leftist direction that coincided with the start of Cunningham’s new Jerry Springer type show. I became a political outcast which actually fit the personal decisions I had decided upon.

Now it is election time again, and Jones is running for re-election. I noticed that the home he skipped out visiting when Governor John Kasich came to Liberty Twp to speak was displaying a large campaign sign for Jones indicating that he had made up with that portion of the Republican Party and was now back in their good graces. Such sights sicken me a bit each time I see them, as it becomes obvious that nobody really deeply cares about anything, or has personal convictions that they will stand behind, even if it means their complete demise. I don’t want to understand people like that. Cunningham on 700 WLW has come out against Obama on the air and seems to be supporting Romney. Cunningham also seems mystified that Romney won’t come on his show to do an interview–but without question the Romney people have done their homework on WLW’s descent into progressive broadcasting and don’t want to provide the clips that doomed John Kasich during Senate Bill 5 and John Boehner even though Rob Portman has tried to make it happen. But all else appears to be normal. Butler County has anti-Obama signs on almost every street except for public employees like teachers, cops and firefighters who are always voting for more government expansion. In fact labor unions are notorious for pushing their members to vote for Democrats, because ultimately that’s where their money comes from.

If anyone gives money to a labor union directly or indirectly they are feeding socialism in America, because that’s what labor unions are. Those who have drunk the Kool-aid of labor unions, and do not question why firefighters have to have an “International” union backing them, or why police have to belong to the Fraternal Order of Police, or why teachers have to be a part of the NEA other national unions with their connections to international unions are kidding themselves. Unions are socialist advocates for Democracy intending communism. That is their history and that is what any money given to them becomes. So with that said anyone who directly pays a government worker their salary is giving money to a union that intends the progressive manipulation of America from a capitalist country to a socialist one. Sheriff Jones, Bill Cunningham, and Bill Sietz all showed that they support the progressive transformation of The United States with their past actions by supporting labor unions. And in this upcoming election, in the very conservative area of Butler County of which Sheriff Jones is the highest representative of law enforcement that there is, you will see his sign for re-election in almost every yard that has a Romney sign……………………………..except one.

At the union hall near the old American Amusement Park almost directly across from the Speedway on RT 4 is one spot in all of Butler County where Obama signs are easy to see, because unions support the socialist tendencies of Obama’s past record. But also among the Obama signs as can be seen clearly in the picture above, is the sign of Sheriff Richard K. Jones and how mixed the lines of politics truly are. It is in such alliances that ultimately behind people like Jones and Cunningham who talk tough are really just putting on a show for the public. They never intended anyone to take them really serious for having any real convictions as their actions dictate their ethics. People generally vote their pocket books, and in the case of public workers, they want government to give them the kind of money that only the looted money from the IRS can provide with the might of the military at their back to do their bidding of tax collection. People like Jones and Cunningham will advise anyone to play the game or get played—which is why they are both successful politicians who have enriched themselves off the public they claim to serve. To them it’s just business as usual, and anyone is a fool if they think the system can be changed.

But I’m not playing. My decision is not to go down that path. I know from their stand point that I am viewed as a radical idealist who refuses to bend even a little to the compromises needed in a world gone mad. Without question, if I could turn off my mind, I may be able to do as Cunningham has done and become the next Jerry Springer even after spending most of his adult life saying otherwise. People will say about him long after he’s gone that Cunningham was a smart man, and he made a lot of money. He will be admired by all for many years because of the money he made. But I won’t be one of them. Because if I were Cunningham I wouldn’t have taken the New York job that made me look like a cheap suit. And if were Sheriff Jones I’d be insulted that a labor union supported me for office. He would say that he’ll take support from anyone who wants to give it, whereas I would not. That is the reason for the tension at the 9/11 event and the reason we haven’t spoken since. I chose not to involve myself in compromises of any kind. Instead I turn to my other work for clarity. I’d rather live my life from dime to dime instead of rolling in the looted money of a political process that creates such blurred lines and involves such a game of deception as is the standard practice of politics in America. For me it’s black and white and must be that way to avoid the many shades of gray that come from the art of political compromise.

Rich Hoffman

The New Miami Traffic Cameras: Sending over $1 million dollars to Optotraffic LLC of Lanham, Md.

And to think that I actually wondered–even after extensive research on my new novel Tail of the Dragon, that exposing the police as unjustified tax collectors with money grabbing traffic citations was fair, or even right. I worried that exposing the practice of “citation quotas” among the Tennessee Highway Patrol was responsible, as I did in my fictional novel so to make people aware that the tickets were not issued under the guise of safety but strictly as a revenue generating mechanism. I wondered about it until stories began breaking in Ohio of small community police departments that have been caught issuing tickets in order to supplement their police operating budgets, so they could avoid tax levies that obviously wouldn’t pass under such harsh economic conditions. Police have turned to traffic citations in order to tax citizens to pay their own salaries and pensions. Police have been caught in a big way in Arlington Heights and other Ohio communities, but now the cops aren’t even doing the work of pulling over residents. In New Miami they are simply setting up speed cameras, taking a picture of license plates; an out-of-state company processes the citation report and sends them back to the police to issue out as mailed citations that require the vehicle owner to pay a $95 dollar offense per citation. This practice is without question taxation without representation.

In the period between October 1st and October 12th 2012 New Miami, Ohio collected over 1000 speeding violations generating more than $101,000 dollars. The village of New Miami then splits the take with the company who owns the equipment. New Miami kept $57,000, while the remaining 40 percent, or $38, goes to Optotraffic LLC of Lanham, Md., who administers the program. Optotraffic gets to sit back in the faraway land of Maryland and collect 40% of every ticket their machines generate without even having a cop on the ground to do the work. The business is extremely lucrative for the thieving natures of politicians who of course set many of the speed limits unnecessarily low all over the state and country so to provide the F.O.P offices as a means to fund themselves with supplemental income at their discretion.

It was only a few months ago that I received a ticket along that same road, RT 127 about 25 miles north of this New Miami location in the town of Camden. An officer gave me a ticket for going a minuscule 88 miles per hour at 12:30 in the morning as I was coming back from an event up in Greenville. The snot nosed kid was about as old as my own kids and had about as much worldly wisdom as a potato, as he attempted to lecture me on the dangers of driving so fast until he saw how pissed off I was. He being still young and idealistic believed he was actually saving lives by issuing tickets. What he has yet to realize is that his F.O.P brothers who were playing cards at their union hall were using the lad to do their dirty work and make the money to pay their salaries so Camden could avoid going to tax payers for a police levy to cover their extraordinary salaries and lucrative retirements. The older cops hadn’t told the wet nurse cop that most of the laws created at the state level were made under lobby pressure from the Fraternal Order of Police to create means for raising money. The stretch of road I was on could easily afford to have a car traveling 100 MPH, yet the speed was set at the turtle crawl pace of 55 MPH, and like the Sammy Hagar song of the 80’s says, “I can’t drive, 55.” I never have been, and I never will. This has put me into courtrooms so many times to face judges and clerk of courts that could equate each instance to all the years of my life times four. I’ve been to court more times over the years than I have sat at my own dinner table—so I know up close and personal what a racket the whole process is. I write about my experiences in fictional stories to let people know what goes on behind the political scenes so that they can know that it is taxation and not safety that are the real concerns over traffic citations. Knowing that, I refuse to slow down out of my own personal rebellion against a system that is foolishly corrupt. Traffic laws are simply a blanket thrown over a bed where a massive orgy is taking place. Under the sheets are insurance companies, politicians, law enforcement contractors, and many government employees—most notably cops.

Ironically one of these camera set ups mentioned above is in the town of Seven Mile where some might recognize as the fictional town of Fort Seven Mile from another one of my novels, The Symposium of Justice. I used the name of that town because I had always liked it, and needed to have a good name for a small Ohio town to serve as a backdrop for my storyline. In that book police allowed a known rapist out of jail and inserted him into the general population hoping to scare the citizens into voting for the support of more police officers. The rapist in my book Symposium was assaulting young women and scaring the female population into a froth of desiring more police presence at any cost. Now with these new cameras, a cop isn’t even needed in a car. The camera runs 24 hours a day all days of the week and doesn’t get paid to even do a job. Instead all the people involved in the scam get to sit back and let the machine do all the work. In many ways, as extreme as my scenario in Symposium seemed at the time of 2004 America, these speed cameras are far worse. At the rate of citations in just 12 days of operation the new speed cameras of New Miami, and Seven Mile are projected to generate $ 3,041,666.67. Of that money $ 1,216,666.67 is projected for the company in Maryland who makes the cameras, and that is just off three cameras. There is a plan to put these cameras all over the state and nation, which is a plot so sinister, it moves beyond the belief of any novel plotline. In fact, I wouldn’t have even considered such a thing in one of my stories, because I would have never thought anyone would believe it—yet here it is in reality.

Like the school levies designed to pay members of the teachers unions enormous sums of money for their government work, police and fire fighters also look for tax money to supplement their incomes while they sit around their union halls playing video games and cards waiting for something to happen. Their traditional reason for asking tax payers to approve levy requests was to make their communities safer. It has taken a long time for the mask to be pulled off the traffic cops and what their real intentions have been, of course under the guise of “safety.” Now, the traffic cameras prevent even the staffing of trolls in patrol cars. Now a traffic ticket is mailed to the violator without any interaction at all while the police on staff have even less to do, and an out-of-state company makes millions off the backs of tax payers who didn’t even know that their taxes have went up without their approval. Of course portions of that money will find its way into the lobbyists of state and federal governments and will pay for the lap dances of more than a few comb over politicians in favor of lowering speed limits to generate more of these citations and pay for more illicit behavior on their end, and more lap dances and prostitutes while the cameras do all the work. (Firsthand knowledge)

Police and politicians will declare, “If you don’t want to get a ticket, then slow down to the speed limit.” But such statements are of course ridiculous. The world is getting faster, not slower, and the automatic panic reaction to every accident or social complaint by a politician is to put up a new stop sign, stop light, or lower the speed limit to show the public that they are looking out for the concern of their constituents. What they don’t declare is that they like to pass laws to give work to sign manufacturers, traffic light contractors, and now Optotraffic LLC of Lanham, Md., and that the law has nothing to do with safety, but about revenue generation. These relationships are an unholy alliance who protect the labor unions of law enforcement with their radical benefits packages while appeasing power hungry politicians using radar cameras like the ones built by Optotraffic LLC to make boatloads of cash from small towns all over America for doing nothing but exploiting the stupidity of everyone involved, and the never-ending cries for more safety by society’s most docile, and pathetic squeaky wheels.

Rich Hoffman

Han Solo from ‘Star Wars’ “SHOT FIRST!”: ‘Atlas Shrugged’ is also about Science Fiction

The release of the latest Atlas Shrugged Part 2 film in theaters all across America has again touched off a firestorm of debate in the media, as the gate keepers of the political left have revealed how deeply entrenched many of the parasite destined proletariats of progressive propaganda wish to propel The United States. They have like demons thrashed about as if involved in an exorcism involving Holy Water and the incantations of a sorcerer priest to dislodge the evil spirit from the body of an unsuspecting victim upon hearing the simple words…………….Ayn Rand—or Atlas Shrugged. The most universal attack against Rand by these progressive thinkers is to say that she was selfish, and that all her work is a mindless manifestation of capitalism that stands at odds with global socialism, and it is not to be tolerated. The characters of Atlas Shrugged have been attacked for being one-dimensional, lacking emotional depth, being self consumed, and in general being angry—reprehensible—and entirely too self confident. In fact, such utterances about the new film version of Atlas Shrugged Part 2 would have viewers believe that the movie was just a boring discussion about the virtues of capitalism versus socialism—that the lovers of socialism find the message of ASP2 a threat to their core beliefs, and their screams over the plot have masked the real nature of Atlas Shrugged as a story—which is that of science fiction. Yet it is, Atlas Shrugged the movies, as are the books, very much about action, adventure, and the unfettered exploration of the human soul against the sands of time, where the villains are those who wish to prevent the full development of the individual imagination. The picture shown above is from the new film, and declares that Atlas Shrugged is not just about political philosophy, but is a magnificent work of science fiction, and the roots of it predate some of the most beloved movies in American culture. In fact, the picture above reminds me of another film that virtually every American knows well—a film that when I first read Atlas Shrugged I felt I had uncovered a long-lost Rosetta Stone from the past. And the most popular character from that film went on to become the most popular film series in history and is a character that is right off the pages of any Ayn Rand novel. The movie is Star Wars, and the character that is undeniably Randian is Han Solo.

Atlas Shrugged the novel was written in 1957 and a young George Lucas in love with Jules Verne novels, Flash Gordon comic strips, and Walt Disney films without question ran across the work of Ayn Rand. You can see her influence in his film THX-1138, and in Star Wars, Atlas Shrugged is all over the very first film A New Hope. Lucas being a smart businessman who knew how to play his cards close to his vest knew not to show too much love of Ayn Rand publicly because of her controversy, so he changed many of the themes and events of Atlas Shrugged and set them in “A Galaxy A Long Time Ago in a Land Far, Far Away” and used Joseph Campbell’s great book The Hero of a Thousand Faces to build mythic themes for his space saga that would tell the vast story arc of Luke Skywalker, the rise of a Galactic Empire, and the sad fate of Darth Vader as a failed victim and perpetuator of a vast and tyrannical political system intent to crush individuality. But Lucas wisely and quietly used the character of Han Solo played by Harrison Ford to help all the giant themes go down the mind’s eye with a character right off the pages of Atlas Shrugged. Han Solo is a combination of virtually every hero in Atlas Shrugged–he’s competent, self-proclaimed to be out for himself, and he’s unstoppable. Han Solo is one of the two most popular characters from Star Wars; the other is Boba Fett, the bounty hunter and nemesis to Captain Solo. Solo is a pirate in the Star Wars films, while Fett is an independent assassin. Both characters come right out of the Sergio Leone films that Clint Eastwood played so effectively—The Man With No Name—who are also the type of characters apparently very influenced by Atlas Shrugged in the 1960’s. Bill Whittle below covers an intense recent controversy of how there was a lot of Hollywood pressure to re-edit the scene from the original A NEW HOPE in a classic gun fight scene involving Han Solo inspired from those same Sergio Leone films to meet the modern temperament of progressive thought–much to the discontent of millions of fans.

Lucas after his box office flop THX-1138 knew it was possible he’d never make another movie but his friend Francis Ford Coppola helped him make American Graffiti, forcing Lucas to learn to sell his ideas disguised behind contemporary plot devices. Coppola, was the director of The Godfather and it was the producer of those fantastic movies Albert Ruddy who purchased the rights to Atlas Shrugged in the mid 1970’s just before the release of Star Wars, and worked heavily with Ayn Rand to bring her book to the big screen. The deal almost worked, except Rand insisted on final script approval which Ruddy couldn’t give her. The film was killed eventually when Fred Silverman rose to become president of NBC.

Lucas watching all this activity by his film mentors placed into his Han Solo creation all the gallant traits of Ayn Rand’s classic heroes. But he sold it brilliantly on the screen by having Solo interact with the idealistic youthful Princess Leia, who represented the progressive feminist movement, and served as a vehicle for the audience to fall in love with Solo, just as the young princess did. Also there is Luke Skywalker, who represents the silly yearnings of all young people and their impractical quests built off good intentions. However, it is always Han Solo who saves everybody in the end. It is Solo’s bold rescue of the princess lured by Luke exclusively over money that would eventually save the entire rebellion effort against the evil empire, and Solo would save Luke on many occasions just at the right moment. Han Solo was chastised by Leia and Luke in the film for being selfish–conceited—recklessly bold—and a menace to the life of all mercenaries, but such accusations never pierce the thick skin of Solo.

At the end of A New Hope while the rebels are fighting to destroy the dreaded Death Star Solo is told by Luke that he’s “only out for himself” as Solo takes his reward and threatens to leave rather than get killed attacking the dreaded weapon of the enemy. In the end, Solo saves Luke without violating the rules of self-interest. Solo likes Luke and saves the kid out of self-interest without giving up his reward, or his independence. In fact the Death Star in A New Hope serves exactly the same purpose as Project X does in Atlas Shrugged. And Solo during The Empire Strikes Back would go through a very similar torture scene as John Galt had to undergo in Project F, near the end of Atlas Shrugged. Lucas had done with Han Solo something that no filmmaker in Hollywood has been able to do since; he brought to the screen the best rendition of Ayn Rand’s classic characters since Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood in a work of fiction that would sell the ideas without the contemporary fuss that we see in 2012. Without question the same people who criticize Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged as being a loathing work of selfishness and capitalist propaganda, most likely love Star Wars, and secretly love best Han Solo or Boba Fett—two of the space sagas most “selfish” characters.

George Lucas is a brilliant man. There are not many like him and nobody working in Hollywood today can match his unique ability to create characters like he has in his films. The later Star Wars films produced from 1999 to 2006 did not have a character like Han Solo in them to keep the audience interested in the story, and the films suffered as a result. In fact, there have been few movies made since The Empire Strikes Back in 1980 that have had characters anywhere close to being as strong and personally confident as Han Solo. Solo in the end solves his problems on his own, he wins the girl, and gains his wealth on his own terms, and he stays loyal to the causes he deems are important. When Lucas tried to appease the idealistic side of his sensibilities which he shared with many other Hollywood types then and since, Star Wars lost some of its power. In The Return of the Jedi where Luke saved Han Solo from the vile gangster Jabba the Hut, something ends up lost in the story. The movie was still fun, but it lacked the honesty and punch of A New Hope and The Empire Strikes Back—primarily because Han Solo was turned into the role of the victim. Solo also let his old friend Lando fly his beloved Millennium Falcon on another Death Star run which was a form of sacrifice that psychologically was rejected by millions in the audience. Another story failure was the scene on Endor where Solo showed Princess Leia that he could be “compassionate,” by giving her a hug when she was in a state of turmoil. Lucas was by this time trying to show the Han Solo had “evolved” as a character, which is standard fare in progressive Hollywood. He tried to show that Solo had learned to think of others more than he thinks of himself, and the story suffered as a result. Sacrifice as a theme in Star Wars is only accepted superficially in the standard dialogue that religions function. Deep in people’s hearts, it is Han Solo that holds the entire story together which Lucas seemed to learn as he progressed through the story. For Lucas, what started out as a simple plot device inspired by Ayn Rand’s classic novel became the glue that held the entire thing together and separated Star Wars from every other attempt in film history to duplicate, including Star Trek. If not for Han Solo, Star Wars and Star Trek would have very few distinguishing characteristics to separate one from the other. In Star Trek there is The United Federation, which is a socialist idea, and in Star Wars there is the rebellion against individual conquest. However, the means to get there is not through organizations, Jedi Councils, rebel Leaders, and these tend to always fail as they are rooted in collectivism. It is always through rogue pirates like Han Solo, and his belief in himself, for his own preservation that directly results in the success of everyone in his wake. It is because of him that rebellions succeed and wealth is created.

Han Solo is so important to Star Wars that even after over 200 books written since Return of the Jedi when Solo and Princess Leia go off to supposedly live happily ever after, Solo is still alive in his 80’s and still flying his Millennium Falcon, gun slinging bad guys and performing acts of death-defying bravery. His kids, his wife, his brother-in-law Luke, along with all their friends are all magical Jedi with super powers that defy logic. But Solo is always there when courage is needed and logic is in short supply. He has gifts that no magic Jedi can utilize and no author can overcome in plot necessity. If a story wants to be successful it must have characters like Han Solo, and since Star Wars came out in 1977, there have been watered down versions that were enjoyed, but never achieved quite at the same level of love as Han Solo. It was the character of Han Solo that made Harrison Ford a star, and without Solo, there would have never been an Indiana Jones and Harrison Ford would have lived out his days as a carpenter trying to get work in Hollywood as a bit player. Han Solo is the ultimate producer, the fearless advocate of individuality, and the bridge between common sense and fantasy. Without him Star Wars is just another mythic tale that would hit the movie screen, make a little money, then disappear from the minds of mankind forever.

But because Lucas wisely intentionally or unintentionally made Han Solo to resemble Ayn Rand’s classic characters Star Wars will forever be as loved as Ayn Rand’s books are. The film makers of the modern Atlas Shrugged films know they are doing something special and their enthusiasm comes out in scenes like the one shown in the picture above. When I saw the mysterious plane taking off in Colorado trying to escape from the pursuit of a hunter, I thought of the Millennium Falcon piloted by Han Solo blasting off from Mos Eisley in Star Wars: A New Hope. The modern filmmakers however are businessmen, so they tend to focus on the politics and business aspects of Atlas Shrugged. Lucas however being a lover of history, comparative religion and world mythology captured wonderfully the essence of what Ayn Rand created in her novels in the much beloved film series called Star Wars. But it doesn’t change the fact that the rules of plot dictate a severe discrepancy between what progressive media types and film makers acknowledge as truths, and stories that show strong characters in a reality that is subconsciously understood. This later idea is where Ayn Rand was functioning from, and this has caused much anxiety from the social reformers who wish to socially engineer these traits from the mind of all human beings. It is the same people who root for Han Solo to win in Star Wars who also try to commit society to the schemes that gave rise to the evil Empires in that galaxy far, far way—a long time ago. Their duality is a result of social sickness that has not yet come to terms with their inner workings and instead have attempted to achieve the work that creative people like George Bernard Shaw, and H.G. Wells tried to create—which Lucas attacked in Star Wars. Atlas Shrugged as a novel was the first of its kind to show what the potential of man can be, and George Lucas was the first to successfully place on the movie screen a character that Ayn Rand would have written if she had been the author of Star Wars. Instead the torch was handed down to the next generation, and yet again a new generation is struggling to maintain such heroes for the preservation of ideas that will propel into tomorrow the magnificent potential of the human race—personified by characters like Han Solo. It is that fight and tendency that critics of the new Atlas Shrugged film scream about in protest, and is also why there has not been another character like Han Solo in any film since 1980.

For the record, Han Solo SHOT FIRST and it will be up to the next generation to make sure everyone remembers it so that all the great heroes of the future can “Live Long and Prosper.” (Star Trek) George Lucas in the quiet of his home I think would agree, and it will take filmmakers like those producing the modern Atlas Shrugged films to help make a Hollywood who will defend Han Solo along with all the men and women like him, and not try to re-write history to fit the agenda of modern politics. Even the best and brightest sometimes lose their way when the wonder they gained from reading a book like Atlas Shrugged in their youth gets pounded out of them in the realities of life. As Lucas has said, sometimes while trying to tell the story of Luke Skywalker you can become Darth Vader lost in the blind devotion to a system not of your own making. And this is what happens to many good people who find through years of philanthropy that they lose the Han Solo in them and become Darth Vader, or even the naive Luke Skywalker–fighting for a sacrifice to something other than themselves. It is in those dark moments of “maturity” that these poor souls need Han Solo to save them from the crushing weight of service to a system that is brainless collectivism paving a way to hell with a brick road each marked with a good intention. It is in those moments when the question must be asked……………………….”WHO IS JOHN GALT.”

To go down the rabbit hole even further CLICK HERE:

Rich Hoffman

Obama Hates Money and those Who Make It: The Masks of Communism

The biggest weakness of the Obama Presidency is his hatred of the wealthy, which was an undeniable fact concluded upon after the presidential debate with Mitt Romney on October 16, 2012. Obama has a real problem–that no matter how much he says in an election year that he loves the free enterprise system, and the art of business—his actions speak otherwise. The gist of Obama’s debate performance against Mitt Romney was that Romney was evil because he’s a “rich guy” and that he only paid 14% of his $13.7 million dollars made during 2011 to federal taxes. Obama painted a picture of Romney as a mean, evil, corporate executive that isn’t paying his fair share. The insinuation from Obama is that “fair share” is determined by some mysterious intelligence of a mythical “middle class” and Romney has a moral obligation to pay taxes at the level determined by that mob of democracy. If Romney tries to pay less tax money through deductions and oversea investments with tax shelters, he is in some way disingenuous—even crooked.

Repeatedly during the aforementioned debate Obama stated that Romeny was paying a tax rate that was less than the average person in the middle class. What Obama declined to mention was that Mitt Romney paid in 2011 $1.94 million in taxes to the federal government. The average “middle class” person would be lucky if they even broke paying $10,000 in federal taxes and around 49% of all American citizens don’t pay any federal income tax. So the comment that Mitt Romney and other wealthy Americans owe more tax money—far more than other people who are equal people in the eyes of the law, all use the same roads, the same government services, yet the wealthy are supposed to be happy about paying over $1 million in federal taxes while many Americans simply don’t contribute equally, is preposterous. Obama thinks that by feeding that fire of guilt Romney should feel guilty and inclined to pay even more than he does now which is absolutely laughable.

I have pointed out on many occasions that the root for this kind of thinking comes philosophically from Karl Marx and is by the most fundamental definition communism. Of course Obama doesn’t call himself a communist, but should not be surprised when people call him a communist, because when an argument is made that the “rich” owe the “poor” parts of themselves, their property, and their livelihoods, it is communism behind the mask of progressivism. It continues to be baffling how and why the media and society at large lets politicians like Obama get away with such criticisms. In the scheme of things Mitt Romney is a much more important person than the average “middle class” union stooge who works 9 AM to 5 PM and expects to be paid six figures to do basic labor work. Those ideas are the fantasies of communists, not capitalists, and America became a great country because of capitalism—not crony capitalism, but laissez-faire capitalism—the more pure, the more powerful the economy. Such statements are beyond dispute, and cannot be refuted by a logical mind not seduced by machine politics and half-baked philosophies.

Obama whether consciously or unconsciously is behaving as a communist because of his severe hatred of the wealthy. I’ve always suspected it, but for me the information was 100% confirmed when I realized that Obama and other political progressives were saying the exact same kinds of dialogue sentence for sentence as was used in the great novel called We The Living covering the events of the Red Revolution in the Soviet Union in 1917 through 1926. We The Living was published in 1936 and to this day is one of the most vivid examples of what life behind the Iron Curtain in Russia was in the beginning days of communism in that very large country destined for economic failure. These events brought to America what was called the Red Decade starting with intelligentsia from 1930 to 1940, which was a period where communism was offered to America as an offering to future economic growth. Out of that communist pressure came The New Deal and Social Security from President Roosevelt. The names were changed at the time to reflect the independence of America but progressivism in America has very few differences from the communism of the early Soviet Union. Is it any wonder that Obama is referred to a “socialist” or a “communist?” People who say such things understand the definition of communism and know they have at their philosophical roots a severe hatred of the “rich.”

Obama’s biggest failure is that he shares with world-wide Marxists, communists, socialists and progressives a lack of understanding of the value of money. Keynesian economics reflect this lack of value in their economic models and the same disconnect can be seen in the Obama Administration. This is why the debt has increased in such an out-of-control manner under Obama’s watch. This is also why he thinks it’s fair that Romney pay millions more in taxes than the average everyday person, even though technically Romney is no better or worse of a person than anybody else. The only difference between Romney and the average “middle class” person is that Romney makes millions of dollars each year. Obama views such money-making ability as though Romney is just luckier than everyone else and the money he made is part of some ridiculous finite resource like fossil fuels, water, or air. To people like Obama, money is a mystery to them, so they believe that Romney has a disproportionate amount of it because he’s greedy. It is completely foreign to communist minds that America could support millions of Mitt Romney’s if all Americans worked as hard and were as creative with their money-making opportunities as Romney has been. That is why in America under laissez-faire capitalism we term acquiring money as “making money,” because it is wealth that is created under capitalism, and money is not viewed as a limited resource. It can be made.

Obama clearly doesn’t understand this, and his anger at Romney for being a “fat cat” is obvious. It is no wonder the American economy is faltering, the President of The United States doesn’t even understand the basics of money or the value of it. All he seems able to do is recite the historical communist argument of his party platform as a progressive from the early days of the Russian Revolution. It is too bad that history is so easily forgotten, because the argument at these presidential debates could be elevated if only people knew what the President truly represented as a politician instead of hiding his hatred of money, and the people who make it, behind what is sold as legitimate politics accepted blindly by the types of people whose knowledge of history is as deep as a dried up-stream in a scorching desert. The hatred for the wealthy is the key to why America has a faltering economy, and is becoming more akin to a mob of fools addicted to government services demanding free money from the gods of productivity, and that people like Romney owe the rest of the world the gains of their investments as a selfless testament to existence for the end result of the destitute.

Rich Hoffman

If you like my work at this site then check out my books shown below, along with quotes, interviews, reviews, and ways to find them. Clicking the pictures below are your doors to even more adventure:

The “Pet Rocks” at Lakota: Teachers and their scam against the public

For my national and international readers, you might be confused by this article, but be assured; the contents of this essay do affect you. My conflict with the Lakota School System, which is my home public education institution, has been robust and much discussion has occurred at this site about it. So it must be discussed now that the State of Ohio has issued the report card for public schools over the more than 600 districts, what the intentions and results are of the report. The timing of the report card of course is to help schools who have a November levy on the ballot pass their tax increases, which is the political band-aid expected to perpetually kick the can down the road of public education sustainability. The report card in essence is a complete scam, and does not even begin to tell the story of why public schools need higher taxes on property in order to provide a baby sitting service for thousands of district parents at the cost of tens of thousands to generate the revenue.

The Lakota School District achieved an Excellent with Distinction rating yet again even after tens of millions of dollars have been cut from the budget and dozens and dozens of jobs have been removed from the work force. Superintendent Mantia knowing that I would point out this issue made a public statement, “When someone says we cut the budget by millions and the results are still just as good, we need to remember these results are from last year. We had many teachers who helped our kid’s learn this material who are not here anymore.” She knew that I would say………”see—I told everybody so.”

http://westchesterbuzz.com/2012/10/17/lakota-local-schools-earns-excellent-with-distinction-rating/

The reality is that Mantia is caught between a rock and a hard place. She is paid by the residents of the district nearly a quarter million dollars to play whatever political, and economic game she needs to in order to ensure that Lakota gets whatever rankings it needs, and to preserve a strong bond rating. But she is alluding to her statement that Lakota may be downgraded in the future because of the layoffs—which at some point she will need to do if she wishes to pass a school levy, because people like me will always point out that there is no reason to pay higher taxes if the district is getting more for less. However, if she allows that to happen she will be a failure as a superintendent, so she is literally caught in a perilous political position between letting Lakota become downgraded, or continuing to prove that Lakota can cut, and cut, and cut without losing the quality of its institutional education power.

Cincinnati Public Schools was downgraded by this same report card and they have spent increasingly more amounts of money on their schools, and they are currently selling their November levy as a fix for returning back to the column of a good school. However whether or not a school district is successful or not has almost nothing to do with the teachers or the school as an institution, but rather the schools are a direct reflection of the community. The myth of higher paid teachers’ equally improve schools has officially been busted. If the situation concerning Lakota didn’t prove it to the world, or the lack or performance in places like CPS or Lockland who was recently caught cheating on their performance ratings to maintain their statuses, money spent on education has virtually nothing to do with the end result of good student production.

I have said often that all the teachers at Lakota could be fired and replaced by clamoring idiots who know virtually nothing of the world around them, and the kids of Lakota would still be good, and the district would still be rated Excellent with Distinction. The reason is simple, at Lakota the demographics mandate that successful children will become somewhat successful adults because per capita, there are more homes with two parents in them who care about the quality of life for their children. There are more children not living in poverty. There are not very many apartment dwellers in the Lakota district allowing residents to move into a nice district without having a direct financial stake in the taxes paid. There are fewer welfare recipients per household. There are fewer homes that have step children co-habiting with mixed marriages. In other words, many of the parents at Lakota take an active interest in their children’s lives, they take personal responsibility for the child’s behavior more so than other school districts with much more chaotic family structures, and the average income of the residents of Lakota are higher, meaning the children have a higher quality of life to grow up in. Districts who have the opposite of the above mentioned qualities will tend to have declining results in education performance standards no matter how much money is spent on the school, because the school is only the tail that is wagged by the dog—the parent. The process does not work the other way around as the unionized teachers would advocate. For clarity on this issue all anyone need do is remember the teacher’s strike in Chicago during the summer of 2012. Virtually every school in America that has a teaching work force that is unionized has the exact same problems as shown in Chicago. The reality is that the teachers of these schools have sold the public a “pet rock” making their services sound better, and more valuable than they really are.

The biggest villain of the entire process is the trend (legal requirement) to only hire as Superintendents of these public schools former teachers who were members of the union in the past, and remain loyal to the teachers union even as members of management. Teachers with more than 15 years or more experience tend to become radicalized by their extensive time served in a labor union, and Superintendent Mantia has been shown clearly, and her comments reflect it, that she is willing to toss infinite amounts of money at teachers’ wages, which are the real drivers of tax increases on private property. The situation becomes simply a loaded scam designed to pay teachers for a job that is grossly inflated with value.

Who says that a teacher is worth $60,000 a year, and who says that they must have a Master’s degree to teach a 1st grader when home schooled children perform better than the public educated one in most every instance? Who says that a teacher should be paid so much for fewer than 8 hours of contracted work and summer’s off? Who says that districts should be required to pay for all this nonsense when the real value actually comes from the families themselves and not the school? The school is simply the benefactor of a good community not the driver.

http://www.pulsejournal.com/news/news/lakota-earns-11th-year-of-excellent/nSfnb/

So keep in mind all these facts when you go to the polls to vote for your local school levy. Understand that the school is simply a parasite to the good deeds of your family. And if your family sucks, your child will most likely grow up to suck. Paying more money in taxes will not change whether or not a child grows up to be a low quality person. Success cannot be purchased with a more expensive teacher. It can only be acquired through hard work, family love, and personal dedication toward the art of success. The correct thing to do would be to take away the money that feeds the radical labor unions behind the teaching profession and force them to come back down to reality. It is irresponsible to pass school levy issues for public education and not force the hypocrisy to the surface with the grim measurements of reality. And that reality is it is not teachers who make a student successful, they are only supplements to the work a parent do. The reality is that if the parent does not do the work of raising a child, no amount of money spent on the teaching profession can save them. And with that said, virtually every statement made by public schools is a bold face lie. For the proof, just look at the Lakota School District in Southwestern Ohio and everything else will be confirmed without effort. Click here for a review.

Rich Hoffman

If you like my work at this site then check out my books shown below, along with quotes, interviews, reviews, and ways to find them. Clicking the pictures below are your doors to even more adventure:

	Anonymous on Sheriff Jones, the Big Tent: …
	Anonymous on Islam Means Submission: Jonath…
	Anonymous on THE SYSTEM WAS NEVER DESIGNED…
	Anonymous on THE SYSTEM WAS NEVER DESIGNED…
	Rich Hoffman on Paradise Lost, Pickle Rick, Jo…
	Anonymous on Paradise Lost, Pickle Rick, Jo…
	Anonymous on Why Christianity Survived as a…
	Anonymous on Christianity as a Weapon of Wa…
	Anonymous on Christianity as a Weapon of Wa…
	Anonymous on Is God an Idiot: I don’t…

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this:

Share this: