Tag: overmanwarrior

Laura Sanders: My answer to your waltz of words in The Pulse Journal

Just like many people didn’t want to believe that anything was wrong with Ohio State football, Jim Tressel resigned amid a wave of controversy.  Our statewide school funding issue isn’t far off from the Jim Tressel controversy where little white lies that is in the context of the program, insignificant, the evil is in the cover-up.  And with school budgets, the cover-up is in the contracts extorted by the teachers unions. 

The apologists were out again in this past week’s Pulse Journal.  Another letter attacking me was placed in that paper proving the vast intellectual deficiencies of a certain percentage of the population.  When reading these things I almost feel sorry for those people.  I mean how do they live?  How do they make decisions?  Surely they aren’t so mentally challenged, because if you read letters from apologists like the author of the editorial below, that is the only conclusion a person that can actually think would conclude. 

Before I tear this letter to pieces, read it for yourself.  It isn’t my intention to make these people feel bad, but they do it to themselves.  They vote after all, and it is through apologists like the author of this letter that the teachers union uses to propel their strategy, which has worked because people like me couldn’t believe that there are actually people who can’t think critically enough to see through the façade of deceit. 

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Teachers aren’t just educators

Dear Richard Hoffman: You can rejoice now that Lakota’s teachers have agreed to a three-year freeze in step raises and a much less comprehensive health care plan. Or, is that not going far enough? Oh, that’s right…you believe our teachers are overpaid, even though 100 percent have bachelor’s degrees, and 68 percent of those have master’s degrees. I guess with six-hour workdays and summers off, they really aren’t deserving, huh? Those daily lesson plans and graded papers must magically appear on their desks each morning. 

I have friends who are teachers, and let me tell you, they are worth every penny they earn. Not only are they educators; they are counselors, role models, mediators, chaperones and disciplinarians. They perform a balancing act every day in the classroom, having to be assertive yet compassionate; formidable yet sensitive; strict yet respectful.

Instead of recognizing the commitments to our children put forth by Lakota staff members, you, Mr. Hoffman, are spending all of your time blaming unions, threatening school board members and charging “overpaid” teachers with taxpayer abuse. Your arguments are weak at best, accusing school administrators and board members of mismanaging school funds when it is well-documented that Lakota only spent $9,806 per pupil during the 2009-10 school year — less than most other comparable statewide districts. As a matter of fact,Westervilleschool Superintendent Dan Good was quoted in a February 2011 article as saying, “We’re going to be looking at what’s going on in those communities (Lakota and Fairfield) that’s allowing them to keep those high ratings along with such a low-cost per pupil.”

Our school system relies solely on levies being passed so that our teachers can be compensated. The reason for Lakota’s continued success is because of our teachers. They should be lauded, not punished.    

Laura Sanders

LibertyTwp.

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Ok, where to start? There are so many problems with this letter.  First off, I am not spending all my time blaming the unions.  I spend about 2% of my time fighting taxes, which began about 9 months ago.  The other 98% percent of my time is quite productive.  Of the 2% of my time I do spend on fighting higher taxes, it is the reasonable conclusion that unions are to blame for the overall funding problems.  They didn’t give themselves any budget limits.  Unions aren’t any different from teenagers, if you give them a $100 dollars, they’ll want $200.  You can never give enough because the teenager hasn’t learned the value of money. They don’t value what comes easily.  And neither do union members.  As a producer, and a capitalist, I don’t like unions.  I don’t want my money supporting them.  I’m fine if they can exist in the free market, but they can’t.  They have succeeded in driving up wages to the point that China,India, and Indonesia are now doing jobs that used to be done in the United States.  I blame the unions for that.  Labor costs are the unifying factor in the overall manufacturing problems our country is facing.  I think people should be paid a fair wage, but if it’s excessive, and drives up the cost of the product to where the consumer won’t buy it, or simply can’t afford it, then the victor of that wage level negotiation is not the union that extorted the higher wage, because the union killed the job in the long run. 

This is what the teachers union has done to the cost of education.  They have driven up the cost without a care in the world to the end result.  Their solution to everything is simply to raise more taxes, which isn’t a successful formula for prosperity.  That mentality has run the Norwood General Motors plant out-of-town, it shut down Fisher Body in Hamilton.  In fact it has practically decimated the economy of Hamilton.  It drove up the costs at Cincinnati Milacron down in Oakley.  The list goes on and on and on.  Those were all production jobs, and most of that work is now out of the county. 

I’ve employed people who worked for AK Steel in Middletown, several of them that wanted jobs while they were on strike during their labor dispute that went on for over a year back in 2006-2007.  I learned a great deal about the hard union mentality from those employees, since AK Steel is one of those mob type unions where they actually beat-up people who crossed the picket line during labor disputes.  A lot of my local motorcycle friends in and around town are big time union types.  I have made my feelings known to these guys.  I have told them, “You wouldn’t have a boat, and you wouldn’t have a Harley Davidson parked in the garage if not for the union, because you guys are too stupid to earn that kind of money on your own.”

“We ain’t got those head smarts like you do, brother,” is what they say to me.  “Thank God for the union.”

“You’re working yourself out of a job with the wages you guys demand.”

“Just so long as it don’t happen till after I retire.”  (they typically laugh at this point.)

Teachers are absolutely no different.  They are like anyone else.  They believe their job is the most important job on the face of the planet.  It’s up to someone like me, (in management) to let them know that their job isn’t quite so important, that someone else can do their job, and the show will go on without them if need be.  It’s my job in management to not be liked, because nobody likes to be told they aren’t that valuable. 

But for a manager to know the value of a job, they need to know something about the job.  I’ve worked in just about every endeavor someone could imagine and I know how difficult teaching is.  To me, teaching is worth a range of about 40K to 60K tops, because it is a degree position.  But a master’s degree has no value to me.  A doctorate has no value to me, not in public education.  I just want kids to be able to read, write and be productive citizens.  If parents want all that other stuff they can hire a private tutor, or a private school, and make sure that kid gets to college.  It’s an insane law to pay 68% of the teachers at Lakota more money because they have a master’s degree.  What’s the value in that?  Does it make them better?  The union will tell you it does, so where are the results?  Where are the test results that prove otherwise?  There aren’t any, its pure speculation.  What do a master’s and doctorate degree do to justify higher labor costs? 

I know a woman who is going for her doctorate.  I asked her, “why is that so important to you?” 

She said to me, “I’m a professional student.”  At least she was honest.  This particular woman is the really cautious type.  She is the kind that will put her kids in a helmet when they are riding their bicycles, and in her professional life, she doesn’t care much for competition, so she enjoys the security and pace of academia.  I know personally, as I look down the list of the top 625 highly paid teachers at Lakota that many of those teachers fit the same description.  Only in government does their vision for reality work, because the tax payer picks up the bill. 

The only reason a lot of the laws that school boards are constrained with regarding school budgets exists, like the run-a-way labor costs mentioned with the master’s degree ratio are because the OEA lobbied to get laws passed that completely benefited them. 

It is insane to create policies that drive up your labor costs then turn around and continue to ask for more money from tax payers to fund them.  With as much money as I spend in taxes, I expect Lakota to be the greatest districts in the state.  But don’t be a fool and ask me to pay for infinite amounts of money for it.  That doesn’t make any sense.  At some point there’s a diminishing marginal return and we’ve hit that point. 

As to grading papers, what?  A teacher is under contract for 7.5 hours.  Grading papers if a teacher has to do it every single day shouldn’t take more than 4 hours per day.  So that’s a 11.5 hour day.  So what.  Why was such a statement spoke about as though it were something special?  I average a lot more than that per day. I’m on call 24 hours a day, and most of the time 6 days a week, or 7 if I have people working all weekend.  And I don’t have summers off.  I would expect any employee that I hired for over 40K per year to do everything said in that letter and more.  I don’t understand the emotion.  Is all that money needed to pay these employees and a pat on the back too required?  What kind of fragile people are these teachers that think such talking points even dictate special merit?  It’s expected! 

It is well-documented that Lakota only spent $9,806 per pupil, but so what.  That’s too high. How do I know it’s too high?  What criteria?  Well, if the district asks for more money for a levy, that means they aren’t working within their budget.  When the average tax bill in the Lakota School District is between $3000 to $4000 per year and the district is still asking for more money which does not mean Lakota has done a good job.  It doesn’t change anything if another district in the state thinks Lakota is doing well.  All that tells me is that education costs everywhere are too high.  The teachers union and the school board need to find a way to bring that number down to $8,000 per student, or even $6,000 per student.  If it were up to me, and I were running the district I wouldn’t be happy till the cost per pupil was under $5000.  We’re talking simply about labor costs here.  Not helping children. 

The union is solely responsible for pricing themselves out of the market.  It is unreasonable to ask tax payers to fund this ridiculous perception that these radical teachers union members have about their value.  Are teachers valuable, sure.  But they aren’t more important than the kid’s parents, and many of the traits listed are not the job of the teacher.   If they wish to be mentors, that’s the teacher’s choice.  If they chose to be counselors, role models, mediators, chaperones and disciplinarians, that’s fine. But they are paid to teach the basics.  I don’t want to hear about all those other traits, because those are the aspects of living that kids should be getting from their parents.  The union types will say that the parents are not doing the job.  Well, who are they to say?  Who are they to take it upon themselves?  Who are they to impose on the sanctity of a family?  Is it their job to impose on every parent the policing that only a fraction of truly bad parents deserve?  Is it justice to extend those traits outside the classroom, which is what a lot of teachers mistakenly believe they have an obligation to indulge in.  No, because all those tasks cost money, money that is inflated for a role that is overly dramatized in order to justify the money spent. 

So to answer the question, am I happy?  No, because the contract was a ploy to gain an edge with the public to over-turn Senate Bill 5.  It was not genuine; otherwise the union would look at the financial situation with more intelligence.  It would have advised its members to reduce their cost to the district.  They would have sought to make themselves more marketable. 

I was happy to see the superintendent and school board members happy for a change.  It was nice to see them feeling good about their jobs.  I did like that.  But I know what they don’t want to admit to themselves, because they are stuck dealing with that crazy union every day, that this concession is just another manipulative scheme orchestrated by the union. 

I see through this labor debate.  I have employees that constantly lobby for more overtime, raises, less work hours, you name it.  I’ve heard every over dramatized excuse in the human vocabulary for why an employee thinks they are valuable.  The trick is knowing which ones are telling the truth, and which ones aren’t. 

I hope to God that the author of this letter about me is not a teacher, but is in fact just another neurotic mother that is overly emotional about all topics in her life.  I really hope that’s the case.  Because if this person represents the kind of employees that we are paying over 60K per year, which is the average wage at Lakota, then we are wasting our money much worse than even I have pointed out. 

 I see from experience that the labor situation at Lakota needs to be dealt with, in order for Lakota to remain excellent.  Labor does not make a school great.  Management of resources does.  Lakota has shown that it can manage resources better than other schools, but that’s not enough if it is asking for more money.  If the state cuts it’s funding, if the federal government cuts its money, and there’s less money to go around, then the school needs to find a way to do more with even less.  It’s insane, and highly ignorant to assume that the tax payer will shoulder that responsibility directly.  I’ve heard it said that Lakota needs new sources of revenue.  Well, how’s it going to do that when it doesn’t produce anything?  The product is the education of children, and the results of that education have not placed the United States in first place in the world, so why would we spend more than what we’ve spent at this point?  Why should personal property taxes go up over $4000 per property, what is the value?  So a public teacher can take a 5K vacation on their 3 months off?  Isn’t that what it really comes down to?  Because if it wasn’t, the union would have been more responsible in what they demanded, and we are where we are because of the demands on the community.  When the school levy passed, it wasn’t asked for, it was demanded. 

In 2005 I fought the school levy back then too.  For all the same reasons.  The money kicked in during 2006.  As soon as the money hit the district, and the union knew the receipts were in from assessed property value, after owners paid their taxes, they threatened to strike in 2008.  The teachers union pushed its members to strike, to walk off the job.  I will never forget that.  The strike was over money.  As soon as positive cash flow was shown to the district because of the levy passing, the union went after the excess money.  That is the path that brought us to the financial situation we’re currently in.  It’s my money they want, and it’s my money they squandered away like drunken sailors. 

Unlike a lot of people who live in the district, I have lived in the Lakota district for a long time, and I plan to stick around.  And I have a great memory.  I know that these are people who are attempting to scam my neighbors and children that I genuinely care for.  And that’s bullying, it makes me very, very angry.  And I will not stand for it!

So you apologists can figure out where you want to be on this position, but remember, there isn’t any negotiation.  There is right and wrong.  I’m right, and those asking for more money are wrong.  And that’s the end of the story.  Live with it……get an education and learn a couple of things, then talk to me when you figure out that you agree with me.

 

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

We are UNDER ATTACK: United Nations supporters show their cards in a strategy tax payers fund

We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing and nothing is too great for Allah.
Osama bin Laden

Bin Laden is not the only terrorist that looks at the United States with jealous eyes, because in the US, the Constitution works better than any document for any nation in the history of the world, and those that wish to be kings, presidents and other leaders of eternal reputation desire as many parasites in world history have, to become the next great leader, and in order to do that they must destroy what the United States is to the rest of the world. Because in the United States the desire is freedom, not compliance to a leader, Americans don’t make very good subjects.

The following documentary was filmed in 1997. I ran across this information back then when I was a member of Ross Perot’s Reform Party. This video pre-dates the 9/11 Attacks, the George W. Bush presidency and the Obama Presidency. It predates the Tea Party, the 9/12 Gr…oups, it predates anything Glenn Beck has ever written or said. This video proves much of what Beck and many like him have been saying for a long time, America is under attack, but not with guns, but from economic terrorists. To understand fully where we are today, listen to the ghosts of the past as they speak a warning that was meant to be heard, but was ignored resulting in the crises we are currently on. The documentary is just under an hour, so go pop some popcorn, grab a nice beverage and make yourself comfortable……I’ll wait………………………………………………………………………………Go ahead…………………………..this is important…………………………………………………………

This video will show you how the green movement led by people like Al Gore, Bill Clinton, George Soros (not named in this video since he was still flying under the radar back then) were working for a power grab to strengthen the United Nations that is set to crush the United States through regulation and to redistribute wealth to the rest of the world and create power for themselves. It is interesting to see how the policies put in place over a decade ago have turned out to be true. The goal, as Osama bin Laden stated was to destroy the United States not with weapons, or direct occupation, but to drain America of its wealth, and therefore its strength by bleeding it to death to be resurrected under a UN flag.

We have seen through the NEA, (National Education Association; the national teachers union) that they have done their part in the last decade of adopting many of the United Nations policies. The radical teachers in both colleges and public education have been extremely well documented at this site. Just pick an article. We have also seen the activity of people like Bill Ayers, Cass Sunstein, Michael Moore and many other left-winged radicals acting just as dangerous as the terrorist who wishes to hijack a plane and run it into the symbols of America’s economic power, to undermine the United States in favor of a stronger United Nations to achieve their vision of a new world order constructed around liberal philosophy. We have seen in the wake of such devastating actions the radical undertone of American civilization that is actively seeking to bring down America as a nation from the inside through education, taxation, and regulation policy.

Many of those global rulers understand that the key to such a conquest is wrapped up in our entitlement programs such as Medicare, Social Security, and excessively high pay for public employees. They understood that by sponsoring entitlement programs they accomplish two things as a military attack strategy, they buy the votes of the American people who are all too willing to support politicians willing to give them something for literally nothing. This strategy then accomplishes the second thing which is put radicals into positions of power with the ability to influence legislation.

This has led to the current economic crises, which was created by design to place our nation exactly where it is. We all see it and are now concerned with the debt problems our nation is facing. Paul Ryan has figured out how to solve the problem, which can be seen here in his budget plan video.

However, the people who created this crisis will fight tooth and nail to prevent Ryan’s plan. These people want the financial crash to occur. They are not interested in positions of government in the United States. They are already maneuvering themselves for a position in the United Nations of tomorrow. Bill Clinton has already done his two terms as President of the United States, and he is one of the many that are currently lobbying to be the first President of the United Nations.

Programs created at the United Nations, just like local school levy issues, are done for purely the political capital of the politician and funded with the money they take from tax payers. That makes them simple looters by definition. In the case of the United Nations the United States is responsible for 22 percent of the United Nation’s regular budget, an amount that in 2009 was $598,292,101, according to a report from the United Nations Secretariat on member states’ contributions to the U.N. regular budget for 2009. So to put it simply, all the tax payers of the United States are funding our own destruction, and the rise of political power to those that seek to undermine our way of life and redistribute our resources where they see fit.

The intention established by the documentary at the beginning of this article is now nearly 15 years old, and much of what they said then has occurred right on schedule. But it doesn’t need to continue. Americans have the right and obligation to defend themselves from the elusive enemies that seek its destruction. America is the only hope for the greater good because it is the United States that is the only working model for freedom. The members of the United Nations are just as infantile as the local school boards, township trustees, kings, queens, and European nobility that simply want to make names for their worthless lives behind the plastic meaning of an engraved nameplate and an “important” position.
On July 4th 1821 John Quincy Adams explained America’s role in the world like this:

America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own….She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assumes the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.

By the way, if you aren’t sure who John Quincy Adam’s is meet him here played by Anthony Hopkins in Steven Spielberg’s Amistad. The speech in this film sums up nicely the foundation principles of the United States. It is only in the United States that such speeches would be made and such thoughts considered. And if America is wiped away by a United Nations that it created, then such speeches will be extinguished for possibly centuries, maybe millenniums until the courage to create a new America can rise again.

And rise again freedom will. It may not be on the continent of the United States, it may be in China, or Russia, or Australia. It may even be on a star ship headed for some distant plant by some future humans on a quest for freedom, because such quests are forever in the minds of man. And the only place it truly has ever existed is in the United States, and this is the source of the world jealousy, and the target of tyrants who wish to prove to their subjects that the mighty America can be brought down.

America still has freedom, but we must fight to keep it, because the effort to get it back again will look like these battle scenes. This is how badly people are willing to fight for freedom once they’ve lost it.


This is the Europe that has been striving to suppress freedom for ages and freedom has attempted many times to overcome it.

Freedom is an elusive quality that a majority of mankind strives for, but only a few have the courage to protect.

In this current fight, where foreign invaders are using the greed and ineptitude of our own public servants to destroy American culture, it is not required to gather up your arms and fight in battle. Not yet. What is required in this battle is to beat the enemy the way they have been beating us, with economics.

Take away the funding to such organizations. Watch where your taxes are spent and turn off the supply that feeds those organizations so that they may dry up and die away, and retreat to a place where they are no longer a threat to our national sovereignty. In this day and age, the vote and your tax money are far more powerful than the bullet from a gun.

So use your taxes and vote, so actual bloodshed isn’t required later. Use them now while you still can. Cut the funding, kill the threat. Keep funding them, and you will lose your freedom. It’s that simple.

 

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

The College Scam: The cost of bad sex, bad education, and the hook hidden in the bait

TAKE YOUR TIME WITH THIS POST. WATCH THE VIDEOS AND LEARN FOR YOURSELF. WHAT YOU WILL SEE WILL CHALLENGE JUST ABOUT EVERYTHING YOU THINK. SO IT WILL TAKE TIME TO ACCEPT. TAKE YOUR TIME AND ENJOY YOURSELF. THINK ABOUT THIS INFORMATION OVER A PERIOD OF DAYS, NOT HOURS.

By far, out of the three hundred or more articles I’ve written here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom this article about the most successful people who never went to college is the most popular. You can view that article here. I just received the results that the article has reached over 60,000 views up to this point.

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/successful-people-that-didnt-go-to-college/

To me, creative geniuses such as Walt Disney, who didn’t even make it out of high school, and Steven Spielberg who didn’t finish college till after he made all the top movies in film history or Bill Gates who dropped out of college to start Microsoft all tell a similar story; creative genius is what drives our society. It is what makes the United States better than other countries. It is exclusively an American trait, the ability to think “outside the box.”

There’s a distinct reason films like Star Wars, and Pixar’s animated films are so distinctly good in the world marketplace.

I mean think about it, what is the last great film you saw from Russia, Germany, China? I can think of a lot of independent films I personally enjoy, but what about the blockbusters that make billions of dollars worldwide, like Avatar, Titanic, Star Wars, or the Pirate of the Caribbean films. Take Pirates of the Caribbean just as an example, as of this writing, On Stranger Tides, the fourth Pirate film, has been out just over a week and currently sits at:

Total Lifetime Grosses

Domestic: $124,447,000 26.1%
+ Foreign:
$352,700,000 73.9%
________________________________________
= Worldwide: $477,147,000

So the foreign market spent $352,700,000 on the new Pirate’s film in just one week? Yes! So where is the great blockbuster coming from China? (crickets) Why? Because American’s think outside the box and are able to make such films as a form of art and entertainment. I use films as an example because we all see them, America is overwhelmingly better at making them, where the rest of the world lags noticeably behind. But the same could be said about virtually any industry, aviation, computer science, (Microsoft wasn’t invented in some foreign land) industry, America is the place where good ol’ horse sense has been the father to the mother of necessity, which gives birth to invention.

But why? Why is America different? Well, I would offer two books to explain the problem to the curious observer. One is Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig. And Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Both works of literature explain why something things are better than other things and how the process works.

What doesn’t work is college. How is college a scam? College is a European concept and since America has adopted it as a way of educating our population, we’ve lost much of what makes America great. If you do nothing else today watch this documentary by the National Inflation Association called The College Conspiracy. It’s just over one hour-long but it is well done and loaded with important facts which supports what I reported in my article about why some the most successful people in human history didn’t go to college, or dropped out while there.

The bad news for all you education minded people out there, that have spent your entire adult lives either paying for your own college debts, or saving money for your children’s college like a “good” parent is encouraged to do, you are wasting your money. You are being scammed in one of the greatest scams in human history. History will remember this scam in future text books and future human beings will laugh at the blind obedience American’s placed at the feet of this phantom foe.

Of the people I mentioned above, George Lucas did go to USC, and from there he was able to network with other filmmakers, so the college did produce a networking opportunity. But USC did not give George Lucas his genius. USC did not make George Lucas. George Lucas made USC. Lucas also used the model that Walt Disney started, and Uncle Walt has never even graduated High School let alone going to college. Jim Cameron was a drop out from a two-year community college; saw Star Wars from George Lucas while he was a truck driver and decided he wanted to be a filmmaker. Jim got a job at Roger Corman’s studio as a special effects hand and learned by doing. Steven Spielberg snuck onto the lot of Universal Studios and pretended to work there so he could network and learn from working professionals. College had little to do with the success of these people. The success came from their inner creativity and could not be given to them or bought with money in the form of tuition.

I talk about film because I understand that business and people can relate. These are names we all know, so the stories are relevant. Colleges using the names of people like George Lucas, or sports programs like Ohio State, use entertainment to market their product and sell the relevancy of their service which is further education. Film schools were put on the map because everyone wanted to be George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, but to date, with thousands of students enrolled over a twenty year period; nobody is able to mimic their success. College is actually making people less intelligent, not more. I could tell story after story after story about people I’ve either hired that have a college degree, or people I’ve worked with that I had to retrain just so I could deal with them in a productive manner.

I’ve worked in Aerospace and other manufacturing facilities for a number of years. I walked out of college after trying to go three times. I went for a lot of the reasons described in the film above; I wanted to qualify for a higher income bracket. But I realize while going that the professors were actually stretching everything out and trying to waste my time. I wanted to learn 3 times faster, but the professors were working by the class and had the same mentality as someone who works in a union that gets paid by the hour. They weren’t in any particular hurry to launch me on my course. And I realized that the value of the degree had less meaning because everyone was getting one. So I chose the traditional path, and worked my way up through hard work. I learned by doing and I’m glad I did, because I notice that I have an advantage over others my age that seem to lack common sense, because it has been trained out of them. I literally walked out of a philosophy class where the professor was teaching from a book I had read years before on my own. I wrote the whole thing off as a tremendous waste of time and energy so I cut my losses before I put too much money into a worthless enterprise.

College is in the process of coming completely undone. Its funding expectations are too high. It’s not able to give students the level of service they are trying to sell. It is in every sense of the word a complete scam.

Teachers unions use college in two ways; they have created state legislation that pays their union members according to their education level. This ensures that new teachers will continue to further their education and support the system to some extent. Then the wage rates are predicated based on the degrees obtained which costs the taxpayer more to fund. Teachers also use college as a justification for why they are needed in high school, and why they should be paid so highly. “Don’t you want your child to get a good education so they can do well in college, and therefore get a good job? You’re a bad parent if you don’t do these things.” Well, I’d say you’re a bad parent if you do send your kids to college.

I have argued for many years with virtually every member of my family that college is a stupid idea. Of course people told me that I just hate education, that I always have and my opinion was skewed against it. They’d say that I hate authority which is true, but not for the reasons they think. (Authority kills imagination which I consider the most important human trait.)

People assume that if you dislike education it’s because you can’t do the work. Well, there’s also another reason, a better reason to dislike education; that’s because it’s a massive lie that has been perpetuated on our society which has made us a worse nation, not a better one. And, it robs individuals of the opportunity, the supreme achievement, of becoming “self made.” There is no higher quality of human endeavor but to produce from an individual’s own inclinations and education. The way education functions now prevent it. Education has within it a whole social class of looters that live off the public dime and provide virtually nothing that a good parent, aunt, uncle, or grandparent can’t provide for a child. I despise college education so much that when my kids want to make me mad they don’t threaten to sneak out of the house on some drunken binge with a bunch of low-life’s, or to get a tattoo in some embarrassing region of their bodies, they threaten to go to college in a place like Oxford, out of the country and in the hot bed of socialist teaching.

My wife went to college for a number of years even though she didn’t need to. I always made sure she didn’t have to work, and could stay home with our kids, and now that our kids are raised, she has the whole day to herself, which I consider valuable. For instance, it gives me great pleasure when she takes a day to go shopping, buys new items at Victoria Secret; perfume from Nordstrom’s and is ready for action when I step into the house at the end of a long day. Yes, I expect it. With her not having to work, dinner is made, the laundry is done, she is happy without the headache of some foolish boss or co-worker that is irritating her, so her mind is clear for a good romp in the bed when I get home, or maybe in the kitchen. There’s nothing wrong with that. There’s nothing wrong with throwing everything off the kitchen table and doing your business there either. Everybody thinks this way, but socially they don’t admit it unless they are intoxicated. Men can drop their worries quickly and sex actually relaxes them. Women worry about more things, so the more you give them to worry about, the longer it will take them to arrive at a point where they are ready for sex. So it only makes sense, if you’re a guy that wants lots of sex from your wife, wouldn’t it makes sense to keep her mind as relaxed and free of worry as possible? If people drop the crappy social progressive feminism agenda, they’d be a lot happier, take fewer drugs for mental problems and their sex life would be a whole lot better. (Just some advice for those with the courage to take it.) But anyway, I’d ask her, “Why do you want to go to college.” Her reasons were those that her mother gave her, “Once you have that degree, it always goes with you. She wants me to have that degree in case something happens to you, so I will be ok.”

“Where am I going,” I’d ask.

“Well, in case we get divorced, or you die or something.” ??????????????????????????????

Her mother is one of those people who bought into the lie of what college will do for you. She grew up in the time of Lyndon Johnston and all the Great Society talk that has all-but ruined our country now. These ideas of college, feminism, security and even divorce are all born in that age, so that’s why she thinks the way she does. People like her believed that by simply obtaining the document of a diploma there was some sort of infinite security that extended to the horizon of human existence until death which is a preposterous notion.

I could tell personal stories all day long about why colleges fail, and their professors fail worse in most cases. I know a few truly brilliant minds that are professors, they write books I enjoy, and I like their lectures. The problem with them is that mostly, everything is cerebral. They can say something without understanding how it can be practically applied. There was much discussion in the Western Arts Community of making my book The Symposium of Justice into a movie. A college professor from Ohio University that was the instructor of the media program there approached me at a bullwhip competition and said he loved my book and wanted to produce a short from it to distribute at film festivals. I agreed thinking it would be a good publicity spot for my book which would involve intense action scenes and it sounded fun.

I arranged to have an actress flown in to play the female lead; we brought in a stunt coordinator, cast a big guy to play the villain and assembled a crew. The professor was set to direct. He showed up on the set and I turned the action over to him.

He was completely lost. He had been teaching people for years how to direct television and film productions, he had stood in front of countless creative minds and proclaimed authority, and here was his chance to actually do it for a real production when it mattered.

We managed to get some good whip stunt shots, and as I pressed him on assembling a final cut that we were set to present to a film festival, he kept delaying. Eventually, after I pressed him to great lengths, he confessed that he didn’t have any good shots from our two-day shoot and hadn’t even compiled any usable footage after two months of editing a 5 minute fight sequence. I was furious on the phone with him and after I hung up told my wife who tried to be a voice of reason for the poor fool, that I could have cut together that footage in a weekend. It took him two months and he produced not one useable shot! What happened to him was he was embodying the long said notion of those who can’t do, teach. He was turning out to be a guy that couldn’t practice in reality what he was teaching students to achieve. Even with placing in his hands great quality whip work, he couldn’t even assemble footage that he had the confidence to send to a film festival. I was as furious with him as I’ve ever been with anybody I’ve ever worked with on a project. He sold me his talent based on his academic credentials, I invested time and money into him, and he failed to deliver anything of any use. I ended up finishing the clip myself in what became The Overman, which won best experimental micro film at the India Gathering Film Festival. It took me several months to get a new crew together and to recover from the previous folly, but it worked out well.

The short of it is that I have personally witnessed that much of the money poured into college, and public school is being completely wasted. Education is fine if people want the traditional education options, but it is not worth the amounts of money we are spending. College certainly cannot, hedge the inflation wave that is about to hit it. What it is selling cannot match the value of the end result that is increasingly becoming much less valuable. The students are learning the wrong things and paying too much for it, the value isn’t translating to real economic value. It’s just currently a system that everyone that works in education benefits from, so of course they don’t want it to change.

Traditional education is needed for the sciences. It’s needed for some art and computer oriented technology. But that’s about it. Everything else could be learned on the job someplace, including economics. One of the examples of this supersaturation of degrees is in lawyers. We have way too many that expect to earn good livings off divorces, law suits, DUI’s, and politics. None of those items are positive for our culture, yet we encourage young people to become them! Why would you tell your kid to become a leech on society, so they can make a good living? Yes, many parents would admit to as much. They would push their children into a law degree hoping their children could become a leech in a service industry, because that’s all legal work is. Legal work doesn’t produce anything. It doesn’t make something you can sell to another country. It only allows one person to take wealth from another; it’s simply an exchange of existing wealth. If we wanted society to be better, we’d produce fewer lawyers, because it’s the lawyers that have trouble making a living in the private sector that are drawn to politics so they can live off the public dime and make the kind of money they were promised in college. It’s a vicious cycle of non-productive thinking that is rooted in a looter mentality.

Economics is another service oriented field. What is it? What does it produce? It tells people how to move funds from one account to another or one investment to another, but it doesn’t actually make anything. So why so much emphasis? Parents will say, because I want my child to become rich. They say those things because the busy parent believes the college literature that their child will be successful at life if the parent spends 30K a year on higher education regardless of the usefulness of the field of study.

That same parent will be mystified why their child listens with so much interest to what Uncle Larry has to say, because Uncle Larry even though he’s all grown up still plays with the children on the floor, still talks the kid’s language. Years later when the child grows up and is sitting in court watching his assets being divided up because he’s going through his first divorce due to his wife’s affair with her boss and  left him for the price of simple cruise in the Bahamas, it isn’t the professors in college the man will think of, or even his parents who cast him like trash into the garbage can of college where all that’s in that dump are the inflated minds of highly paid fools that if they had any real value they’d be out producing in the world somewhere. The man will think of Uncle Larry and all the times they played together in the floor, and how wise Uncle Larry seemed. He’ll think of the time that Uncle Larry was having sex with Aunt Rose and the whole neighborhood could hear the noise through an open bedroom window. The man will think, yeah, Uncle Larry was cool then, and he’s cool now………….and he’s still married to Aunt Rose. Uncle Larry kept Aunt Rose feed so there was no boss to run off with. Uncle Larry thought like other kids, only he was in a grown-up body and seemed to be an equal back then. Now Uncle Larry seemed like a genius because the man was less of a person in the courtroom than he was when he was a boy. Somehow over the years he had regressed instead of growing and it was public education and college that killed his spirit making him less of a man than the boy he had been while playing in the floor with Uncle Larry.

As the judges gavel comes down and the ex-wife takes half of their combined wealth and the kids wonder what it’s going to be like to live in a house with a new daddy, the man watches his wife leave the courtroom and wishes he had listened to Uncle Larry, saved his money, not went to college, had more sex with his wife, worried less about silly things, and not allowed so many people who only wanted to make money off him to scam his existence to this monumental moment in court. The man will wish he was back in his childhood playing with Uncle Larry while all the other adults sneered at the immature Uncle and his antisocial antics. The man will wish that he never poured a dime into college that in an indirect way destroyed everything he ever hoped to be by taking the bait cast by an elusive fisherman, that life will be prosperous if he’ll only bite down on the hook.

Once you bite down, you’re caught. The following video is no different from a typical fundraising campaign for education institutions. Whether its fish or tax payers, the lure is all the same.

All too late many realize as the man does in his failed life, that college was but a simple lure no different from fishing. The fisherman is the education institutions that dangle the lure of a good comfortable life. The fisherman promises food for hungry fish. And we are all fish just swimming around trying to mind our own business. We want to eat, and colleges offer us food that only turn out to leave us stuck on the hook.

It is time to take a hard look at not just public education, but also the value of college education, because as it stands, it’s an over-inflated scam filled with looters that are actually weakening our society and a budget break is heading our way as the bubble is soon to burst. Our society will need to be psychologically ready for the fall-out of such an implication.

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

Kelli Kohls of the Springboro School Board: How to solve the education riddle

These are the kind of people who have created a dysfunctional public school system. Yet here is the Treasurer of the Springboro Education Association making a speech on how valuable she is, to justify why she should have tenure, and why she should be so highly paid. This woman is a union lobbyist, the kind of person that routinely pushes law makers to create laws just to shut them up. These are the type of people who Kelli Kohls of the Springboro School Board have to deal with on a routine bases.

People can say what they want about Doc Thompson, but anyone that says he doesn’t look at every side of a story to arrive at the truth is doing themselves a disservice to fallacy. Doc is a guy that asks questions and invites all sides to present their arguments. The invitation has been extended to school board members and superintendents all across Ohio to come on his show and dispute the accusations people like myself have leveled at the education industry and very few people have taken advantage of the offer.

That is till today, May 27, 2011. Kelli Kohls on the eve of a large vote in Springboro with their teachers union which occurs at 6:30 pm, came on 700 WLW to offer an insiders opinion of where public school is failing. The interview is particularly telling since it comes from a woman who is actively pursuing proper management of a school system, so her insight is magnificently portrayed in this hard-hitting interview, which is one of the first of its kind.

As Kelli stated in the interview, her school board can only really control approximately 15% of the total school budget. This is because of state laws and union negotiations that take the other 85% completely off the table. Kelli is noticeably frustrated because she genuinely wants to help her district. She wants kids to learn, and she wants the parents of those kids to get a good value for their tax money. But her hands are tied from every direction. She tells the story that so many ambitious community members tell that end up running for the school board, to help their community, only to discover that there is a giant political machine in place that makes all their efforts worthless.

I know several good people like Kelli that are current school board members, or former school board members. We’ve all discussed the process and how it’s broken. We all know the political games that are tied up into politics and the aspiring school board member must make a decision once they are elected by the community. Do they play ball with the unions, in exchange for financial benefits in indirect ways, discounted trips to Columbus where they are treated well and brought under the umbrella of the union syndicate. Or do they retain their values and continue to fight on behalf of the kids and the tax payers? If they do, it is a certainty that they will be singled out and hunted down by members of that syndicate.

Kelli is the school board member that I mentioned in another article, (click here to review) that the OEA was actively pursing harassment. That’s because she is one of the board members that is continuing to vote against their control of her district. She has a right to vote against them, because she is representing the interests of the tax payer. It’s not to the tax payer interest to have their taxes increase and still receive the same level of mediocre service. So she pushes back with her vote, and the OEA has singled her out.

I watched what happened to another friend of mine, Jennifer Miller formerly of the Mason School Board. (Click here to see the video Jennifer appeared with me in for an I-Team report by Brendon Keefe.) Jennifer was one of those lone voters that had the guts to go against the union syndicate and she was punished to no end. Watch this video where she had a confrontation with another board member. It’s not a position that avoids conflict. To do the job right, such confrontations are a necessity, sadly.

Many people have been pushing me to run for the Lakota School Board, which I have no interest. I’m used to having my way, and I would be enemy number one for the teachers union because they are openly extorting the public and I’d point that out publicly. I would bring constant combat to a school board because I don’t bend on anything. Negotiation to me is making people see things my way, because I work very hard to figure out the truth of a matter so negotiation is pointless, because all you’re doing in such negotiations is compromising to accept the other party’s feelings. In this case the other party is the union syndicate. But the truth is that public education has become too much about money and far too little about children, so feelings are irrelevant.

My vision for school boards is to have several people like Kelli on the board, people who will stand up to the union syndicate on behalf of the tax payer. I’ve seen personally that only one or two board members are not enough. There needs to be three or four such personalities that can actually garner a majority vote. That’s the only way to get these school systems under control, at least the start of it. But for now it eases my mind to know there are board members like Kelli out there fighting the good fight for all the right reasons, and there are people like Doc Thompson that will give equal voice where in the past there has only been silence.

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

 

End the Department of Education Now: The march to a smaller government should start there

The videos shown on this article I find repulsive. The Department of Education is populated with these types of people, which equates to a lot of talk about collaboration, caring for children, and test scores. The reality is that they are just adults spending a lot of money to pretend they are actually doing something that justifies the incredible amounts of money they expect to be paid. They are good at sounding important but when watching these videos consider if there is any authority, or truth in anything they are saying. There is a disconnect between these people and reality. They collectively believe that “outsiders” shouldn’t tell them how to behave, yet they forget that the “outsiders” are the people who pay the bill, and are therefore their bosses.

The Department of Education is one of those government creations that have no place at all in education.  It shouldn’t exist.  It costs too much, and has lost its way over the years. It has a budget roughly of $107 Billion dollars and has a jaw-dropping 4,800 employees.  By the governments own estimates in preparing for a government shut-down recently roughly 89.4 percent of the employees were deemed non-essential to operations. Yes, you heard that right, 89.4 percent…….non-essential.  That means only 10.1% of the employees at the DOE are needed to operate that whole branch of government. 

In 2009 the average federal employee earned $81,258 where the average private –industry employee made $50,462.  The private-industry employee then garners approximately $10,500 per year in benefits.  The federal employee receives a staggering $42,000 or more for benefits. That means the cost per federal employee at the Department of Education is $123,258. 

Reagan immediately tried to get rid of the DOE, as he promised, but he couldn’t get the democrats in the senate to go along with him, after all, they had already taken money from the NEA, and that was the last chance we had to rid ourselves of this giant government behemoth. 

We have created a government department that costs a lot of money, and is dedicated on taking the country in a direction that is against traditional American values. It’s a progressive branch that does nothing, staffed by non-essential employees, and it is formed to solidify the political power of a strong union, and we pay for it completely with tax money. 

Locally, school boards everywhere blame the DOE for compliance, which takes the anger away from the local districts.  The bureaucracy is created to make the system so large it can never be criticized because problems are too large for any one person to ever deal with.  It’s an organization built to maintain control of the NEA.  As school funding comes crashing down, and more parents are being forced to pay for sports programs, electives, and other extra-curricular activity, teachers won’t sacrifice any of their excessive wages as they stand quietly in the corner and watch parents struggle to give their children options.  Many parents are not only paying for their tax bill, which in my neighborhood is $3000 to $5000 dollars per home per year, but now parents are trying to come up with the extra money to pay for the stuff that used to be free, included in the price of their tax bill that supports the school.  Now parents must include the cost of transportation twice a day in many schools where a bus used to pick up the child.  Now the bill to teach a child has went up because school systems led by the example of the Department of Education have extorted massive amounts of money from the tax payer.  In fact, since the Department of Education was implemented, in just the last two decades the average spending per pupil has went up 44%.  That average salary for a teacher just since 2001 has jumped up 26%.  The cost of education isn’t increasing because the cost of actual education such as books and school buildings is going up.  It’s going up because the teaching profession is unionized and unlike in the private sector when costs go up we can go to Walmart, or buy a car from Japan, in education they have a monopoly, no competition, and therefore no mechanism to bring costs down. 

In many states Medicaid costs have increased and tax revenue is decreasing as industry moves over seas to avoid higher costs of doing business in the United States.  To deal with these financial realities states have decreased education funding by 17 billion dollars over the past two fiscal years.  Funding won’t be increasing, not unless the United States creates more product and exports goods instead of importing them.  So schools rather than change their funding model which is tied up in labor costs are resorting to passing the cost increases off onto the customer, the taxpayer.  In Medina, Ohio school costs have risen 23% over the last 5 years to $75 million in 2010, most of it is wage increases.  To shave costs the Medina school board eliminated 106 teaching position, otherwise 20% of their teaching staff over two years.  Class sizes increased from 25 kids per teacher to 31.  The teachers union agreed to $1 million in concessions taking just a 2.45% pay raise instead of the scheduled 3.45%.  The average cost per teacher with salary plus benefits is about $68,000 per year. 

Medina has tried to close the revenue gap by asking for levies which voters have rejected for three consecutive years.  So the district began charging $660 to play a high-school sport, $200 to join the concert choir and $50 to act in the spring play.  Local tax payer and senior citizen 70-year-old Joyce Harris said, “We can’t afford our teeth fixed because it’s too expensive.  If we have our taxes go up to pay for little Joey’s football, that’s not exactly fair.”

Notice that Arnie says “it will not become a competitive program,” as if that were a bad thing somehow.

So the Department of Education is worthless.  Their education standards have pushed America out of first place.  Click here to see my article on Waiting for Superman.  They are too expensive, and they have paved the way for the expectation that teachers should be making six figures.  And because the Department of Education is really a front organization that provides legitimacy for the teachers union, it has only exceeded in driving up the cost of education, eliminating competition by imposing on tax payers a monopoly that is arrogant, selfish, and grossly out of touch.

Now, this is a video that pulls back the curtain on the rest of the videos from above. This is a video that I have learned is the truth over years of personal experience.

I spend a lot of time talking about these education issues because our future is being raised in this public school system and I see an organization that I am paying good money for, teaching them all the wrong things and it disgusts me.  And because of the scam I am forced to support a union that I find un-American, corrupt, and destructive to the kind of country I want to live in.  So eliminating the Department of Education is something that should have happened the day Ronald Reagan took office.  In fact, it should have never happened to begin with.  It’s unconstitutional, violates numerous issues revolving around the 10th Amendment and is just something that should be removed immediately.  It has no place in American society.  It can’t even justify itself with results.  It’s just a waste of money that stands in the way of reforming our education system to something that is more effective, and it needs to go away.

 

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

Fraternity of Thieves: If the government runs it, you’ll meet the members

The usual reaction to the looter mentality, those people who seek to justify their existence by riding on the backs of the poor, the weak, the young, the minorities, so that they can cry injustice is being done, and they must help those people to create work for themselves.  These people remind me of the classic snake oil salesman that might sell a magic potion to frontier settlers to ease the minds of adventures always one decision away from death.  Looters are parasites that have nothing to offer but a false sense of security. 

Doc Thompson did an excellent report of public housing on 700 WLW.  Public housing is one of those programs provided by tax payers, created by politicians using tax payer money to leave their mark on the world by building something they couldn’t build themselves, and to help people who are down on their luck. 

What the looter mentality truly seeks to accomplish however is to make victims addicted to the service they provide, just as a drug dealer would do with highly addictive drugs.  Public housing is cheap, and provides very little incentive to the people who use it to care for the properties, making them tremendous failures.  Virtually everywhere public housing was created, they have only breed high crime, terrible real estate values, and created a class of people who are weaker than the generation that brought them into the world.  Weaker, because the ambition to create for themselves is vacant, the pride in not accepting help from someone else, especially government is gone.  Once these minds accept themselves as failures, their lives are greatly diminished.  The looter politician likes this, because now he has guaranteed voters in the next election because he has people addicted to his services.  And the tax payer becomes more of a serf because they are forced to fund programs they might morally disagree with. 

The strong and the brave know that to make a person stronger, you have to put opposition in front of that person.  For a body builder to make larger muscles, they must lift heavy weights.  “No pain no gain.”  For a football team to be good, they must have a coach that pushes the player beyond their limits.  They must be strong, lift weights and run all the drills required, and the best coached team in the end will win more games than the team that isn’t so well coached.  Being well coached means the coach has forced the players to reach a place deep inside to have a competitive edge.  A team that has a coach that panders to the players ends up with discipline problems, and victory seldom comes.  Case in point, the Cincinnati Bengals. 

The human being is built in such a way that they need to struggle to appreciate what is before them.  It has something to do with the way the brain creates neurons, how memory is written into the mind.  Memory and thought is created when the brain is forced to act to defend itself.  This is why poor managers and teachers believe that creating fear in their employees and students will make them better, but fear alone doesn’t work.  Fear breads contempt which gets in the way of respect, and without respect, the individual will fail to act on their own, but will wait for direction, which is counterproductive.  But those ill-advised managers and teachers are getting part of the process right, extreme circumstances do shock the mind into learning. 

This is why welfare doesn’t work.  This is why public workers are generally less competitive than private sector workers, and this is why public housing fails terribly.  This is also why public schools fail. 

I went to the Springboro School Board meeting on May 24th, 2011 to help my friend Kelly Kohls while she is struggling with a contentious contract negotiation with their teachers union.  The union there is adopting the same basic contract Lakota just passed.  It is obvious that the Ohio Education Association is working a strategy that is state-wide.  But to help sell the contract at the beginning of the meeting a parade of teachers came before the audience with selected children from their classes and awarded those children with awards of exceptionalism

I watched the various teachers proudly drape their arms about the shoulders of their students in great affection.  Flash bulbs filled the room often as proud parents took pictures to remember the event.  But I frowned in disappointment.  I looked into the eyes of those teachers, those bright-eyed young women in most cases, and I saw a looter.  They are looters because the traits they are celebrating in the young students were given to those students by their parents.  The teacher is just along for the ride, yet in the ceremony, the school system is taking credit for the success of the child exclusively.  This is being done to justify the existence of the education industry.  The teachers don’t know any better but to be looters.  They were taught to be in college, so their entire measuring system has its value in the heart of a looter.  They take from the community and they give back very little, something of limited value.  And they are actually the worst kind of looter, they use children to hide their actions even from themselves. 

I watched as each child received their award, the children can tell that something isn’t quite right.  Most of the kids were still under 10 years old, so their ability to tell the difference between right and wrong hasn’t been taught out of them yet, so they had blank looks on their faces.  But with each kid the superintendent stepped off the stage to shake the hand of the young student, as if the value of the superintendent had meaning.

The superintendent is a looter because his hand shake to the student has no meaning.  None what-so-ever.  But the superintendent wants to believe that his job is important, and he wants the parents to believe it too, because he wants them to be convinced they are getting the value for their education dollars spent by their property taxes.  Yet, the district is projecting a $40 million dollar deficit.  So somewhere in the awards ceremony, and the hand shake with the kids, the superintendent hopes to sell the image of importance to the parents so they can pass a levy.  That is why he is a looter, and why the teachers are looters.  They are using the parents children to sell their value as public employees to the tax payers when the value of the children and the money provided both come from the tax payer. 

Is that to say that the school does nothing for the child?  I suppose it does to some extent.  But in public school, like public housing, or even the BMV, they are all government-run and have very little incentive to succeed, because the culture of all are of the type that pander to the lowest, and weakest that participate.  So the strong children are held back.  The weak children are placed on a pedestal, and the tone of society takes a step back instead of a step forward. 

I have worked with weak, sick and even mentally deficient children.  To me, the worst thing you can do is pander down to them.  When I speak to such people, I always treat them with the same respect I’d give to the most intelligent person in the world.  When I have taken young people into the hard country and they fall, I help them get back on their feet and brush off the dust and keep walking without letting them complain that they are hurt.  When I’ve taken people rappelling and they are scared of heights I make them go with the promise that overcoming the fear will have more value than caving into their reluctance. 

When my daughters, who are very attractive young women, and I knew they would be, were little and a dog bit one of them in the ear almost tearing half the ear off, my wife and I superglue the ear back in place.  I looked at the wound and assessed that the experience of getting 25 stitches at the hospital might not only be traumatic for her and scare her worse than the blood running all over her, but it might even make her hate animals in the future and create an un-natural fear of dogs.  So I downplayed the whole thing, washed off the blood, put the skin back where everything was supposed to go and glued the ear in place. 

The natural reaction for many would be to run to the emergency room, but I was trying to teach her on that day many things.  One, not to fear dogs.  It was an accident.  Two, I didn’t want her brain to register the event as overly traumatic that might cause actual lifelong damage, and three, I wanted her to think in terms of self-reliance. 

The looter would seek to exploit a tragic situation like with my daughter.  They’d seek to comfort her, to make her trust them.  They’d go to elaborate measures to ease her mind.  But what they’d succeed in doing would be to draw her mind in the next tragedy to their comfort.  Instead of taking charge of her own situation, she’d seek them out.  This is how the health care industry has been operating, this is the cause of billions of dollars of insurance, and this is the impact of public education where information is spoon fed in comfort to the little human being.  What gets ignored is the pandering makes the child weaker while the true intention is to justify the employment of the public official. 

This is why public housing fails.  It breeds crime.  It breeds welfare recipients.  It breeds broken families because when real tragedies occur the people are left defenseless, because their brains did not go thought he exercise of struggle to obtain their position in life.  That is why they fail in virtually every way possible metaphorically and literally.

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

Pirates and Politicians, Same Thing: One uses a cutlass, the other uses a pen to force us into serfdom

Doc Thompson of 700 WLW discusses all the various ways politicians are misspending our tax dollars.

This is a rich country. We have plenty of money, and if you don’t believe me, ask Halliburton. There’s plenty of money out there; don’t fall into the trap of this whole deficit argument. The only question is how to spend it.

Van Jones, Former Obama Administration Green-Jobs Czar

It is not a false statement to call people like Mr. Van Jones a simple looter. Comments like what he has made, such as the one in the example, are statements rooted in sheer ignorance. But this is not an article to condemn only Van Jones. This is an article about condemning all those like him that look to the tax payer to fund their looter mentality. I write this on the heals of watching the new Pirates of the Caribbean film, which I liked a lot, but when watching the behavior of the pirates, and their mentality, I fail to recognize the difference between any official that asks the tax payer for more money to fund their “big ideas” when the reality of what they are doing is stealing the money outright. Yes, stealing is the correct term.

Why is stealing the correct term? Well, politicians are using tax money in many cases to buy votes. Lyndon Johnston was doing that as president. He was openly creating government programs that had to be funded with tax payer dollars to care for voter demographics beneficial to him politically. In other words, he took money from people who wouldn’t openly support his programs, but took that money in the form of taxes. If the tax payer refused to pay taxes for the programs he created then the tax payer would be arrested under force and thrown in jail. FDR did the same thing in the 40’s. Roosevelt wasn’t interested in being a president; he wanted to be a king. How is that any different from a pirate stealing the resources of a vessel at sea under a black flag? It’s not. LBJ justified this theft by declaring a war on poverty, which he lost, because if the war on poverty truly wanted to be won, the free market would be more openly embraced. Capitalism would be the goal, making money would be the goal, because if a society desires not to have poverty, it would be more in the business of making money so there is more money to be had. Not just simply printing money, like the Fed is doing now to cover the looting they have been doing for years, but actually producing goods that can be exported to a buyer in another country. That’s how you fight poverty.

Karl Marx spent most of his life in poverty, so it is no wonder he looked with jealousy at the world around him and wanted to steal from them. So he came up with communism as a way for people like him, that didn’t know how to make things, and didn’t want to work for a living, to loot money from those that do make things. Since he was a poor man himself, he didn’t understand the value of money. He thought like Van Jones does, that money just existed out there in the world and he needed to find a way to take it from those that have it and give it to people like him, in other words, outright theft.

Each week portions of our pay are taken from us without our consent. This money is taken under the justification of caring for the government. But if you are a person like me, that won’t use Medicare, that won’t draw a Social Security check, that doesn’t want government to be so big. That doesn’t want to support a system that breeds “legal” piracy, you don’t have a choice. I want government to be smaller, so it can be better managed. I don’t want my money taken and used for such purposes as to the expansion of government. In other words, my money is taken and used for purposes I’m against. It is not for the greater good of government, or the country, it is for the looting and plunder of pirates that instead of dressing as Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean they wear a suit and tie. In function they are no different. I will debate anyone that wishes to challenge me otherwise. If they do they are fools, because they are simply covering for crimes they know to be true and are complicit in that crime either through ignorance or their own corruption.

Want some proof? Of the 62 members of Congress that left office in 2008, 16 of them now work as lobbyists. Of those 16, 13 are Republicans. Between 1998 and 2004 43% of those former lawmakers became lobbyists. What is a lobbyists? A lobbyist pushes law makers to pass laws that give the organization that hires the lobbyist to have a competitive advantage over either the government itself, which is essentially a pay-off to avoided excessive regulation, or to gain an advantage over another competitor. This isn’t happening in isolated cases. This is the law of the land. It’s common practice! Think about it, why do we need so many laws? We already have a constitution. With every new law passed, there is money involved, money for attorneys, money for tax collectors, and a reason for politicians to be in session and not off doing something actually productive. Law makers are no different from a fry guy in a local fast food restaurant. If there aren’t any customers, they don’t have anything to do, so they’ll just shuffle the French Fries around the fry bin to look busy. Law makers create new customers with our money so they can have something to do and a reason to exist. And in the complicated laws they pass, lobbyists will then hire them for the knowledge on how to comply with that legislation. That’s how a thief gives value to nothing using the plunder of our resources.

To put the whole looting scheme into terms we can all relate with, lets look at school funding, and something we all must send our children to, so it affects virtually every single one of us. The teachers union lobbies law makers for legislation that protects their members. This is why in Ohio school boards can only negotiate approximately 15% of their total budget costs. The 75% to 85% are completely off-limits because they involve wages and are the largest cost of a school system. This means every time a teacher gets a higher degree, they must be compensated according to state law, because the OEA lobbied for the creation of that law. So when a school like Lakota is told that a $160 million budget is not enough and the question is asked, why? The answer is that labor costs that have no limit in their ceiling value are exploding the budget. Since in Ohio property tax is the primary way of funding schools, a school system has no choice but to ask property owners for more money. For a property owner like me, that thinks an average wage of 63K per year is too much to pay a teacher, I’d favor something more reasonable like 49K to 55K, but that doesn’t matter because the contracts were negotiated with the lobbyist not the tax payer. The politicians made the deal to buy votes from the OEA members in order to secure a deal to put the politician in office so he can collect tax money of their own in a different way. It’s lucrative otherwise they wouldn’t be fighting so hard for the opportunity to loot the public. And all the money used is coming from the tax payer. In this case my property value is looted to support values and education I think are mediocre and too expensive. But I have no choice. If I don’t pay, I would be prosecuted. Yet a prosecutor won’t touch the illegal activity that goes on in schools to pass a levy because a deal is made with the money the members of the teacher’s union supply. The prosecutor won’t touch the issue because they don’t want to deal with the political fall-out involved. The teachers union is too powerful, and not worth the political fight.

Why is the teacher’s union so powerful? Because they have many members and if you want to teach in the state of Ohio, you must be in a teacher’s union. There is no choice. So for every school built, and every teacher hired, a new union contributor is born. Each member contributes money to the union through their checks to feed the system. They do this because teachers know that the union has negotiated a larger than average wage for them, about 30% more than they’d earn in the private sector for the same job. The union knows it must negotiate wage levels that high because teachers are less likely to complain about spending their money on union dues if the teacher has a money surplus each week. As long as the union collects the dues from its members it can then dangle that money in front of politicians to achieve their goals. If teachers made less money, they’d be less likely to openly pay a portion of their check to union dues. But since the teacher is paid with taxes and the dues paid lobby the tax payer’s representatives who then make deals with the unions which then turn around and drive up the costs of the service on both ends, the cost of education goes up, and the elected representative has wasted tax payer’s money. The tax payer is spending money on the politician for making deals and not doing the business of the people. The money is stolen from the property owner and then used against the property owner in the form of higher taxes to support the structure of the scheme.

The tax payers just want their children taught. They want their children to read, write and know how to do math. But educators have made the whole business so complicated that they know in order to rally tax payers behind their cause they must hide the shell game behind local sports, like football, or basketball, things that the whole community values, while the real problems lurk under the façade. That is why sports are the first things districts cut, it’s to loot from the community the thing the whole community values in order to extort a vote in the next election to increase taxes. The message is “you will have something taken from you. You’ll lose your social event, (football games) or you’ll lose money from your property value.” Pick your poison.

But what if I don’t want to pay the extra cost? The answer from them is that “you aren’t patriotic,” or “you don’t like children,” or “are you so poor that you can’t afford the higher taxes.” These are the same games played with our politicians to convince them to work against us. But what if you still don’t want to pay? “Then you will be prosecuted.” The money will be confiscated from you one way or another. That’s why such people are simply looters. They are modern pirates out to loot our wealth. They take from us and give to their whore houses, liquor and other scandalous behavior. And by whore houses, that doesn’t always refer to sex. There is a lot of ways people whore themselves.

That’s just on the local level, in your school. Such things are happening in the building of bridges and highways. In the transfer of property from residential to commercial use, in the creation of every new federal program. If such looting wasn’t going on, K Street and the corrupt activity that goes on there in Washington D.C. would dry up like a mountain town in the Wild West that only exists for the benefit of the gold rush. When the gold went away, the town died. In Washington, the prostitutes that walk the streets with police officers driving by them all day long, the pimps that stand in the middle of the street watching over “their girls” all night, the drugs and bribe money that passes hands across the dinner tables would go away. But all those things are thriving to this very day, at this very hour just steps in front of the White House while Obama practices shooting basketball on the White House basketball court, that we pay for too. Stand on the corner across from the Days Inn on K-Street from 9 to 12 PM and watch the prostitutes standing there with their fish net stockings, their skirts that are so short you can see their panties standing up. Their long high heels force their butts to strut unnaturally as they get into a car, drive off and 15 minutes later that same car comes back around the block and pulls up. The girl gets out, joins the other girls, if any are left, then within 10 minutes, depending on how good she is, she’s back in another car and back around the block. I watched one night the same girl get into 5 different cars over the course of an hour and a half.

Who are the customers, lobbyists out-of-town and away from their wives, spending the money that comes easily for them. They are some of our elected representatives. They are mostly men enjoying their plunder, the same as pirates did in the sinful town of Port Royal. What’s the difference? The plunder was stolen whether it was at gun point on the high seas or under threat of jail. What’s the difference? Very few of us would choose to support this activity. So why do we, because we don’t want to be harassed by the government that we pay for?

Through taxation we have created a political class that believes just as kings and queens did in Europe that they are our rulers. They are entitled to loot from us, to rule us as they see fit. And to pay for their service we are taxed on virtually every movement we make in society. We are taxed for every item of food we eat, every gallon of gas we buy. We are taxed for the cloths we wear and the cars we buy. We are taxed, taxed, and taxed working toward goals that are not our own objectives to sums of money we don’t agree with, to support a public social class that thinks it rules us. There is only one term that describes such a person and that is a serf.

What is a serf by definition?

1. A member of the lowest feudal class, attached to the land owned by a lord and required to perform labor in return for certain legal or customary rights.
2. An agricultural laborer under various similar systems, especially in 18th- and 19th-century Russia and eastern Europe.
3. A person in bondage or servitude.

Doesn’t that sound like what we are? Like with the school systems, I am legally bound to pay for a school system against my wishes? My property is taken from me in the form of money so that I may retain my right to property in the form of land. That is theft. I don’t give willingly to my community, the way I’d prefer it. It is taken from me and spent in ways I find disgusting and sinful, unethical. Yet when I get up in the morning and go to work, I pay over 50% of my earnings as a serf.

The Road to Serfdom:

If we’re only a serf to them why not call them what they are. We may have to pay them as a legal obligation, under the threat of the law that they control with the money we give them, but don’t endorse their behavior with legitimacy. Don’t call them “sir,” or “your honor,” or any respectful designation. Call them pirates, thieves and liars, because they are. It’s not extreme to call them what they are. It’s not out-of-place just because they wear a suit and not a pirate hat and sword. They don’t need a sword, because they have a pen which truly is more mighty and dangerous. It is with the strokes of many pens that we are no longer Americans working for liberty and justice, but serfs working to support giant programs that our citizens are now addicted to like drug addicts that will never get enough. We are now committed serfs that are losing more and more of our wealth to support the extortion of radical pirates with only the mind of a looter. They are willing to take from us everything we have to give until we can’t give any more. It is the same thought process of the master against his slave that only has use for the slave as long as the slave is productive.

We are on the path to serfdom, and we are further along that road than many of us are willing to admit to ourselves. Until we are willing to admit to ourselves the reality of these impositions, and to call the conduct of the looters for what they properly are, we will continue down that path until it runs out. That is the nature of the pirate, they will loot and loot until it’s all gone because they lack the ability to plan from one day to the next. They are only concerned for the prostitute in front of them, or the food about to go into their stomachs. Planning for tomorrow’s sunrise is beyond their capacity, and they don’t need to, as long as they have serf’s like us that will continue to feed them.

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

Pirates of the Caribbean, On Stranger Tides: A Movie Review and Commentary

It doesn’t happen often, where I walk out of a movie theater at 2:30 am and feel as awake as midday. It’s been a very, very long time since I’ve seen a movie I enjoyed as much as the new Pirates of the Caribbean film, On Stranger Tides.

People who read my work frequently know that I cover school levies, political corruption, and legal maneuvering to great extent on these pages. However, I do an occasional story about football, motorcycles, and films also. My very first love in life is mythology, the stories of cultures. Stories tell you the true nature of the culture you are studying. This is why I know so much about the inner workings of politics, is because I understand the myths of the culture. So I can see through the stories politicians attempt to tell to sell the idea they are portraying. I know mythology from books. I know mythology from my life. And I know mythology from actually doing work in the entertainment business on occasion. So I understand all too well the difficulties of bringing a vast mythology to life that reflects more than what visuals can speak of, that speaks to the human heart. I learned when I was very young that some of the most accurate votes cast occurring in human culture is happening at movie theaters with the price of a ticket. What people chose to see at a movie theater is an accurate gage of the psychology of the over-all culture.

When it is all-encompassing, especially for people like me and the friends I associate with, to be politically active, to have concerns of George Soros and his “Open Society” of communist thought, or Barrack Obama’s latest faux pas, it is good, and revealing to step into a darkened theater and witness truth in the form of fiction. Even though many in Hollywood are leftists, the good stories they tell are not. Not the ones that sell tickets anyway. There are ideas in stories that contain truth because the mythology of that story has innate value, which transcended the political view points of the actors and directors because it’s the story that matters. It is the story that communicates. The actors are but vehicles that take you to the story.

The success of The Pirate of the Caribbean films reflects a deeper yearning in human society that moves beyond the political direction of power players such as what you might find in politics. The desire for individuality cannot be overlooked when the characters in films ooze such traits, and the recent surge in this last decade in the amount of young people who are getting tattoos is testimony to a social desire to “be unique,” to have something they choose themselves to place upon their bodies that they did not inherit from their parents. Something they decide to give themselves as a way to mark their bodies in an individual way. This is the inner pirate in all people, the desire to be unique, free, and left alone. The human need for this is very strong, and even though I, or anyone in my immediate family do not have tattoos of any kind, I understand the need. Tattoos are something I’d discourage someone from getting, because there are better ways to communicate individuality. But the human spirit craves authenticity. I have seen this same behavior in Key West where women completely undress at the Adam and Eve, the nude bar that sits above the Bull and Whistle and have body paint artists paint their bodies in such a way that they can walk down Duval Street completely nude, yet appear from a distance to be wearing cloths. The women get the sensation of being publicly nude and fearless, without openly breaking the law. This is an act of rebellion brought on by the necessity of an over-regulated society, a perversion of nature where an inner fantasy must be aligned with the living person because in daily life the two aspects function too far from each other.

I have acquaintances that work in show biz that are very liberal and often times they see me as their political enemy in matters of social value, but on a set or at the lunch table over a pizza, we have more in common then they’d wish to admit. I often shake my finger at them and remind them that they are living Doctor Jeckle and Mr. Hyde existences, and they won’t be happy as people until they unify their thoughts with their reality. But they don’t listen. Instead, they get tattoos and paint their bodies in drunken rages on occasion, because the social engineering doesn’t work, and their true natures only come out in drinking binges or in darkened theaters.

And that brings us to the success of the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise. I know why I love pirates. I’ve talked about it on these pages at great length. I like them so much that when Branden Keefe of Channel 9 News came to my house recently to do a story he asked me, “Are those cannons?”

“Yes,” I replied. He was looking at the cannons I have on my porch that I use to fire off during football games in the fall, or to announce the start of a new meeting at my house. I fired these cannons off at the start of a Tea Party meeting of the State Sovereignty Committee much to the amusement of my guests because they had never seen anything like that before. But my neighbors are used to it. Such things are part of the “pirate’s life for me.” It’s part of living the mythology of existence instead of just being a passive observer.

So am I alone in this love? No. People love The Pirate of the Caribbean movies. They love them for the high adventure. They love them for the spectacle. And they love them for the character Johnny Depp created in Captain Jack Sparrow. I was concerned when I learned that On Stranger Tides was going to have a more toned down budget then the previous film At Worlds End. Well…..in each of the previous three Pirate films, there were moments that I didn’t like. I enjoyed the overall story line, the high adventure, the sets, the visual effects, but I always felt there wasn’t quite enough swashbuckler in the series that should be oozing out of it. I always attributed this problem with too many characters and Disney-like sappy sub-plots that belonged in a different kind of movie. Critics like those sub-plots, but I don’t. A pirate film should be all about the swashbuckler and much less about emotion.

On Stranger Tides I expected to be not so good. I thought that if Disney pulled in the budget, that the franchise would suffer. But then I saw the budget, and noticed that even this scaled down version of the Pirates of the Caribbean series was north of $200 million, I was curious.

My wife and I planned to see the movie on Friday night. But, this is a film we wanted to share with our kids, because my kids grew up with a love of adventure films. I showed them every action film ever made when they were growing up, and they understand my passion for Pirates. Plus, in my family, our favorite past-time that we do together is playing the Pirates Constructible Strategy Game by WizKids, so my wife refused to go without the kids, and they were all working. So finding an open window where we could all get together and see the movie was very problematic, and I was getting irritated at all the various schedules.

During Saturday, May 21, 2011 I started checking the numbers from Box Office Mojo and saw that On Stranger Tides on Friday had pulled in $35 million which was good. Plus it had pulled in $92 million worldwide, so that was even better. The total take up to Saturday morning was $127 million, which is very good. If the film cost just over $200 million and Disney poured another $200 million in promotion, which means by the time everything is said and done, On Stranger Tides will be close to $500 million in total upfront investment, then Friday’s take puts it on target to recover its money, which is important, because for people like me, if a film like this doesn’t make its money back, more films like it won’t be made in the future. Plus, like I said, the amount of ticket sales is to me a kind of worldwide vote on the type of values our culture embraces, so I found such numbers much to my liking.

My wife and I entertained guests from across the pond on Saturday for a good part of the day. I kept looking at the clock all day for an opening that wouldn’t present itself. I told my wife, “We have to see the new Pirates movie this weekend! And we’re running out of time!”

She got on the phone and arranged to get my kids all together after everyone finished work and all their own social engagements were completed and we met at Showcase Cinema Springdale at 11:30 PM Saturday night, the last showing of Pirates for the day.

Again, I expected a fun film. I expected to be a little let down, but to enjoy the over-all tone of the film. What I saw surprised me.

The film was fantastic! It was a lot better than the other three. All the sappy sub-plots, the love story, the social commentary and all the confusing characters, were gone. What On Stranger Tides did was accomplish the perfect swashbuckler that would have made Errol Flynn or Douglas Fairbanks proud. It was the best movie of its kind that I had seen since The Mask of Zorro in 1998. On Stranger Tides had great stunt coordination with the sword fights, and action sequences, it had compelling characters that you either loved or hated, the visual effects were fantastic and not over-the-top and the plot was a simple treasure hunt that had old-fashioned appeal. It was obvious the Pirates franchise had either discovered itself again, or had just re-invented itself into a mature adult. From the kind of film On Stranger Tides is, it is the perfect movie. I can’t think of a frame of film that I did not like. Maybe the sequence with the palm tree, I understand what they were trying to do, but the physics didn’t work for me. But other than that, everything was fantastic.

It was such a good movie, I actually have to place it somewhere between Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom as far as a film that captured the spirit of high adventure. It was that good of a film.

Those things aside, the move would have been awesome all by itself. But for me personally something else held my heart dearer than anything I’ve seen for years on a movie screen, or even in real life. When it first hit the screen around 12:20 in the morning I thought I had died and gone to heaven, for I had seen something that had only existed in my mind up to that point.

My wife and I have lots of secret places we like to run off to. I’ve talked about Key West, Newport on the Levy, our favorite book store among many things. One of our favorite places is Raymond James Stadium in Tampa Bay, where the Tampa Bay Buccaneers play football. We love to stay in the Hilton on the Bay, eat at the International Mall, and catch a game at Ray Jay when we can get away for the weekend in the fall. Now, I love my wife. But one of my other great loves in this world is the Pirate Ship inside that stadium. I am utterly in love with the big skull that hangs off the bow of that ship, and has red glowing eyes and breathes smoke during the football game. I’ve told the Glazer family myself how much I admire them for building such a thing and I fly the Buccaneer flags they gave me personally every Sunday afternoon during football season in tribute to their pirate ship, because I think it is so innovative, creative, and such a good tool that engages the fans in the game. It certainly raised the bar in the NFL as to the fan experience. So what happened at 12:20 took my breath away, because it was obvious to me that Rob Marshall, director of On Stranger Tides feels the way I do about pirate ships with skulls on the bows.

The Queen Ann’s Revenge is a ship I know from our Pirates Constructible Game. I know the ship from history too, as the ship that Blackbeard died on when getting stuck on a sand bar off the coast of the Carolinas. Well, in this film, Blackbeard is alive and well, which he is fantastic to look at, and The Queen Ann’s Revenge is a haunted ghost ship that is absolutely spectacular. And I don’t mean spectacular with a little “s.” I mean SPECTACULAR! Nothing short of jaw dropping spectacular!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The Disney crew actually built a life-sized ship that they filmed on. There was no cheap visual effects shortcut here. They built an actual life-sized ghost ship that oozed pure sinister evil over every frame of film. It is worth the price of a ticket just to see this ship on the screen. It’s that good!

The story worked at every level. It was fun, romantic, thrilling, mysterious, and historically authentic. The costume design was first-rate, and I mean Academy Award winning material. If On Stranger Tides doesn’t get Oscars for best Visual Effects, Sound, and Costume Design, I would hate to see the film that beats it, because those categories were all top-notch, and I mean top.

When the film ended, I felt refreshed, completely rejuvenated even in the small hours of the morning. The film took my family on an unforgettable adventure that is of a quality I have not seen in well over a decade. There have been good movies since the films I mentioned, like the Mask of Zorro, and the first two Indiana Jones films, but On Stranger Tides is the first that comes to my mind probably in the lifetimes of many young people going to see this film to have such an experience.

This was not a tired old recycle of a franchise. This was a stand-alone first film that would be forever remembered if it was part one and not a fourth film. Any fears of not having the characters of Elizabeth and Will in the film are dismissed. The film is about Captain Jack, but the supporting characters such as Penelope Cruz as the old flame of Sparrow and Blackbeard’s daughter was perfect. She fit the role as though she were born to play the part. Barbarossa was still perfectly played as he was in the other three films, but Blackbeard in this film could go down as a classic villain as popular as Darth Vader. He was that good in this film.

Will people go see this movie three, four, ten times like they did in previous films? I don’t know. We live in a pretty cynical age. Film goers are pretty jaded these days, so whether or not they appreciate what at good film On Stranger Tides truly is will remain to be seen. I was just complaining the other day that nobody was making films like this anymore, and Disney actually pulled it off and they did it by trimming down their budget and expectations. They put restrictions on themselves to make their funding model more viable and not attempt to be everything to everybody. They focused on just doing a good job and letting the chips fall where they may. And it worked.

This film should be a lesson to everyone. Sometimes, less is more. Put the money where it counts and decide what you don’t need than make everything count. On Stranger Tides does that very well and will go down in film history as one of the very best films that Hollywood has to offer in a long tradition of evoking modern mythology to reflect the consciousness of the human spirit.

This is Hollywood at it’s best!


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

Sorry Israel, All the American People Are Not Stupid Fools Like President Obama: We’re working on getting a better guy for you to deal with. Meet Herman Cain

Watch Mr. Netahyahu, a real leader answer Barrack Obama over the 1967 boundary lines in Israel.

I feel on behalf of the United States of America that I must offer Mr Netahyahu an apology:

Sorry Mr. Netanyahu, our president does not represent the core beliefs of the United States. He represents hispanic bloc voting that just want their families to come here from Mexico. He represents minorities that want government assistance. He represents an intellectual class that teach because they lack the courage to actually do things in life. He represents voters that think with emotion and compassion, but lack knowledge of world affairs. And he represents the poor that want a government check. That’s about half the country these days.

But he does not represent me, or millions of others who are embarrassed by his sad grasp on worldly matters. I am embarrassed to have this silly man represent us, so please don’t think that all Americans are as foolish as this president is. Thank you for coming to the United States to teach him a lesson on leadership. He needs it. It is my hope that once he leaves office, he may be able to get a management job at a McDonalds. Next time he wants a government job, he needs to learn to order buns and french fries to supply a store, before he starts trying to divide up borders with countries.

Here’s the guy we’ll put in place of that silly fellow, a guy that much more clearly represents what the United States is all about.

So hang tight Israel, and the other 50% of the country. We have found a good candidate to go up against Obama in 2012, then we can begin to fix things back to the way they should be.

Here’s a bit more on Herman Cain:

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

Don’t Wait for Superman, Look in the Mirror: KASICH HOSTS A STATEWIDE PARTY!

At the Republican Headquarters in Lebanon Thursday May 19, 2011 a unique event occurred. I was skeptical of this event at first, but once concluded, I will admit to a level of enchantment that is unprecedented in these modern times. Concerned citizens looking for options in education funding and content issues gathered to listen to the Governor of Ohio, John Kasich speak from Cleveland at a statewide showing of the film Waiting for Superman.

I wasn’t sure how such a thing would be done. I knew the technology was available. I’ve been involved in many conference calls for business meetings, but what Kasich was trying to do was unique.

I sat down in the lobby of the Republican Headquarters, a small converted house just behind the historic Golden Lamb. It’s an older building unpretentious in it’s nature. Several of my friends were there popping popcorn and eating pizza. At 6 PM a laptop on a desk in the corner played Kasich live over the internet as he introduced the film Waiting For Superman, a film made by the same people who did An Inconvenient Truth which made Al Gore so famous. Kasich spoke about the need for education reform and said that this film, made by liberals, touched him so deeply that he felt compelled to act. He also added that he didn’t like to speak after watching the film but said that we’d all meet back online to have a discussion. Then he said hit play, and enjoy the movie.

There were about 25 of us crammed in the lobby sitting in chairs and watching a widescreen television that was playing the movie, which follows a number of children on their quest for a voucher school. The film explained how devastated public school had become through union influence and kids weren’t learning what they needed to. There were many charts about how America is falling behind the rest of the world in education and there simply isn’t any reason for it. America is nationally spending close to 10K per student, yet the results have not shown up in the kids.

The movie was sad. It’s a film I had wanted to see for a long time, but just didn’t take the time to view. It’s on Netflix, so if you haven’t seen it yet, make it a point to do so. I truly felt sorry for the parents that had children crying because they weren’t able to hit the lottery, which is how kids get into these crowded schools. It’s amazing that these charter schools are so crowded, that there is such a demand for them, because public school is free, and is supposed to take care of this issue without the extra expense. But like anything that’s good, and like everything that’s government run, there are vast discrepancies. What’s good is driven by passionate people who care, and are able to see beyond the headlights, visionaries, and other creative people. Government produces complacency, mediocrity, and sheer dullness. The two different styles and their results are grossly evident in the film.

As I watched the closing moments of the film, the popcorn that was freshly popped just hours before still filled the room with its festive aroma. A screen door that was the threshold to the small building was blowing open and closed in a gentle evening wind as the sun was setting quickly outside. I watched traffic rolling aimlessly down the street outside as the credits ran and nobody spoke for several minutes, computing their emotions. I thought of the people driving those cars, how most of them were so easily manipulated, because they are too busy to think. They are the first type of person that believes the Lakota Administration when they proclaim that their recent contract negotiation with the LEA was done in good faith, and not the threat of S.B.5. Those people driving down the road can’t see the shell game being played against them, not because they are too stupid, but they aren’t willing to deal with the problem. They do like they do most things in their life, they throw money at it and hope the problems go away. Their car breaks down a lot, they throw money at a brand new one. Their neighbor gets new gutters that direct the water away from their homes, so they go buy new gutters. Their neighbor buys a new television, so they buy a new television. They work too much, they are on their second marriages and have step children that need educated, but they don’t truly care for their step children, because the children remind them of a previous spouse, so they avoid the children psychologically. They instead count on the schools to fill the emotional gap so they throw money at the schools.

At the end of the credits Kasich was back on live from Cleveland speaking from the laptop. He went on to perform an hour of questions and answers about his views on education reform. Educators, school board members and other concerned citizens spoke in the town hall-style meeting and I thought Kasich did a great job of opening himself up. I couldn’t recall any governor of any state attempting with such sincerity to do anything close to what Kasich was doing, let alone tackle the controversial issue of education with such direct frankness.

Around 9 PM everything wrapped up, I grabbed a handful of popcorn and headed back to the car with my wife. On the way home we talked about the experience. She looked at me as the darkened countryside passed by outside the window. “I understand with clarity what the problem is.”

“You do?” I asked.

“Yes, I felt sorry for those mothers, but the problem is many of those women have forgotten to be mothers. They had other options. Looking to someone else to educate their children is asking for a disaster.”

I thought about it. She was right. She is a woman who took a lot of criticism while we were raising our kids because she took a very active role in their lives. When we were first married we made the decision to have her not work, so when we had kids she would be able to commit herself toward their development. We didn’t want to do daycare. We didn’t want to rely on a family member, because there was a certain vision toward life I wanted them to have, and I wanted a mother there to make sure they got it. We didn’t raise our kids waiting for superman. We decided to be superman. I did the extra work to make sure my wife was free to raise my kids. And she did the extra work to make sure it happened even though society ridiculed her for it. Here was a woman who could have been a professional model, here was a woman who had a load of brains and was book smart, where school was easy for her. But to society, she was wasting her life in sacrifice to her children. She was giving up a career and everything that comes with it so she could be cooped up in a house with a bunch of little kids. To society, that decision was tragic.

My opinions on this matter where settled when I was very young. My mother was the kind of woman everyone wanted for a mom. She did all the things that kids fantasize about in having an ideal mom. She was always there for a little treat. She was always there to hand out a band-aid. Dinner was always ready around at 5:30 pm when Dad came home. She was a room mom in school that would make treats for every kid in my class. She did all the little things that are so important while children are still developing their consciousness from those tender ages of 1 to 12. My mom was the kind of woman who would give me books that she’d write little things in that I still have, and I may not read the book right then, but within the next year or two, I would. She still does things like that, just the other day while my dad and her were vacationing in Hilton Head, she brought me back a new book mark that had pirate skulls all over it in 3D. She wrote a little message on the back for me to remember, which I will.

For me, I was done cooking at age 12, because I had a dedicated mother, and a grandmother that was equally dedicated. I had a stable father, and a good positive family environment. It worked wonderfully. All the kids my mother had turned out well. Nobody has any deep psychological problems. We all handle stress well, and are successful at the art of living, not just financially, but emotionally as well. It’s not a surprise. It’s not a secret formula. All it took was a mom. As a man, I don’t have a single insecurity. Not a single inferiority complex. I don’t have a single doubt, or fear. I didn’t get that by age 12, but the foundation was set. The rest I had to do myself and that didn’t get completed till I raised my own kids. Because when you are raising kids, you may not fear for yourself, but you do fear for them.

I married a woman who wanted to commit herself in the same way to my own kids. That’s what I looked for in a woman, someone who would be dedicated to building a family. Someone that would always be there for my kids, someone who would make actual birthday cakes, and not buy them at Kroger, someone who would buy my kids little treats while they are out shopping, so the children would have something fun to greet them when they came home from school. I wanted a woman who would drive them to school everyday so my kids wouldn’t have to ride a school bus, because I remembered what happened to little girls on the school bus in grade school, and since I had girls, I wasn’t going to put them through the humiliation. I didn’t want them to accept humiliation. When the school system crossed the line and didn’t teach my kids what I thought they should be learning, or they didn’t teach enough, we pulled the kids out of school and taught them ourselves. I wanted a woman that would do that kind of thing, that would buy my kids books and would read to them every night.


As the countryside went black I looked at my wife. She had done all those things over a 20 year period. She endured ridicule from family members and friends that most people never experience, because most people don’t go against the grain as furiously as she did. Only in hind-sight can those same family members see the benefits. Only in hind-sight do we understand what we fought so hard for. Our children are evidence of all the hard work. They are brilliant and good in every way a parent hopes for.

We have occasional disagreements like when I recently argued with my youngest about applying to college in London. I told her those socialists would attempt to reprogram her and she’d be too far away from home to get her grounding again. “Oh, dad, I’m not a weak-minded fool.”

My kids don’t lack courage. They are secure. And there isn’t any problem that they think they can’t handle, at any level. Why is that? Because they had a fantastic mother.

In the movie, Waiting for Superman, I realized my wife had hit the core of the issue. Those mothers, crying to get their children in a charter school and away from the apathy of public school were making a fundamental error in raising their children. They were looking for the school to do the job of the mother. That is the fatal error.

Not everyone reading this can take pride in having such mothers as I describe. We are suffering through a hundred years of progressive brain-washing. I know how hard it was on my wife and me, so I understand why people give up, or don’t even get started on the commitment. However, no amount of money can be thrown at a situation to fix education. It cannot be the job of a school of any kind, especially a government-run entity, to replace the parent. There is no substitute for a mother, especially a good one.

My advice to people is don’t wait for superman to come and save you. Become superman and save yourself. If you really want your kids to have a good life, fight for lower taxes so you children can keep more of the money they make. And spending time with your children is a lot more productive than spending money. There is no substitute as much as lost progressive souls wish upon a star of illusion. Their legacy has left mothers trying to be fathers, fathers trying to be mothers, and fathers divorcing mothers and mothers marrying other fathers of other children while those fathers marry new mothers. Progressives drool over the hope that they can fill the social destruction with a teacher that we are asking too much of, what they don’t see is that it is their policies that created the mess to start with. Progressives are responsible for the whole mess. They are what destroyed the American family. They are what have destroyed education. They are what have left us taxed beyond existence, the blood is on their hands as millions of young people grow less intelligent the older they get.

I know a very bright-eyed young girl of about 7 that is full of hope and dreams. Everyone when they first met her thought “this is a young girl that will be something.” But the closer she gets to junior high, the closer she gets to older kids that are “giving up,” because they see where their lives are going in their messed up parents, the light in this young girl’s eyes is dimming. I told my wife that in a few years, the light will go out all together.

“Why, we must do something,” she said.

“You can’t help her,” I said. “You can only help your own children, your nieces or nephews. You can be kind and offer yourself as a mentor, but ultimately those kids will only be as good as their parents.”

She whiffed in frustration, but she understood what I meant. We both drove into the darkness of Monroe, passed the Hustler of Hollywood store and noticed that it was full on a Thursday night. We both knew what the other was thinking as we continued west back to our home. Government tried to replace the family and they failed, and public school is the evidence of that failure. More money won’t fix that problem until we fix our desire to have strong families again, as a society. Because it all starts with a mom and a dad. And if the mom and a dad don’t make it, the kids will suffer. No amount of money can wash away the guilt of what those parents put their children through, even though countless parents hope and pray that the sins of their lives can be purchased from the souls of their children. We now understand that it is impossible.

Become Superman, don’t wait for him. The greatest gift you can give a child is to give them someone to look up to, to emulate. Money won’t do it. Only what’s in your soul will work, and you can’t hide that with material goods. You have to be superman to the core of your being.

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