Tag: Rich Hoffman

Why Pope Francis is an Idiot: God loves guns and their manufacturers

This is exactly why I am weary of organized religions.  It’s not because they espouse values and kindness toward other people—it’s because they wish to be just like the governments of the world, yet another force that controls the minds of mankind.  Enter the idiocy of Pope Francis and his recent proclamations in favor of progressive political platforms directly against capitalist forms of government—specifically the United States.  It must not be forgotten that the Roman Catholic Church is all that remains of the former Roman Empire, and in the wake of that ominous force in Europe under the banner of the cross, many deaths occurred and the Dark Ages were created.  So no, I don’t think religion by default is a wonderful thing.  Rather it holds back society into the limitations of the past within the framework of sacrifice—which is archaic and foolishly rooted in scientific ignorance.  It is within such a tapestry of ordainment that the Pope made the proclamation that gun manufacturers—especially those in the United States—were hypocrites if they call themselves Christian.  It is that kind of stupidity and radical detachment from reality that has led churches in general to declining memberships.  To put a foolish focus on the afterlife rather than the here and now is the mainstay of religion implying that one life defended with a gun has less value than the collective whole of civilization and that we should all be willing to sacrifice ourselves to the “greater good.”  That is why I no longer attend church—because of those kinds of teachings.  It’s not just the Catholic religion which I have roots in—it’s the entire industry of sacrifice that I have a problem with.

The Pope backed up his attack on weapons manufacturers by saying, “if you trust only men you have lost.  It makes me think of…people, managers, businessmen who call themselves Christian and they manufacture weapons.  That leads to a bit of distrust, doesn’t it?” That was followed by thunderous applause by thousands of ignorant young people raised under socialism in the economically bankrupt Italian city of Turin.  In essence the Pope was saying that weapon manufacture is anti-Christian.  He is implying that we should all turn our minds toward a God—which he is the representative on earth—and give up our needs for aggression by eliminating weapons of war from society.  The Catholic Church, just like every communist and socialist government around the world wants to be in the business of ruling our lives and the product of their endeavors is a flock of sheep that mindlessly puts their faith in a religion that can’t keep their hands out of the pants of little boys.  Take away the ability to defend ourselves and what kind of evils might swell from such trust?  Well, history tells us quite a lot on the matter—which was one of the reasons for the creation of the United States in the first place—freedom from religious persecution.  People had the right for the first time to worship what they wanted decentralizing the authority of churches into spiritual advisors instead of just another competing government.

Frances attempting to place his radical words of worthlessness into a world stage filled with like-minded thugs and social parasites declared during his speech—“duplicity is the currency of today—they say one thing and do another,” referring to people in his congregation asking for forgiveness during confession who then turn around and commit the same sins the moment they leave the confessional. That is because most human beings don’t give much thought to the church or the “men” who run them as self-proclaimed representatives functioning on earth on behalf of an all-seeing deity.  I know a bit about history and in America when the church becomes so bold as to come to my house to take what I have to give it to the so-called poor under church authority—there is ammunition on my shelf intended to stop that action from occurring.  I know better than the church what leads to the “poor.”  I don’t trust the Pope or his clergy of pedophiles and social collectivists to define it for me.  God has not come to my home and told me that Pope Francis is his representative on earth. Men have made that self-designation—and if you really get to the heart of what the Pope is saying it is that the world should trust the church and give up their guns in surrender to the global unifying force of the Christian religion.  Sorry, but no.

Years ago I had to make the hard decision of using rational thought to determine that the religion I grew up with was lacking something important—logic in their assertions.  I was at a communion ceremony at the front of the church watching all the people coming to the front to worship.  I used to be an assistant to the minister and would hand bread to the people in the congregation who waited for their sacrament.  As I held the plate of bread thinking about what it really meant I realized that the body of Christ sacrament was essentially just a watered down version of human sacrifice as it had been passed down to us over thousands of years of incorrect spiritual belief.  Now for context, be advised that I read the Egyptian Book of the Dead at the age of 13, so I was thinking heavily about such things during this period.  I saved up my lawn mowing money to buy the book which was a real treasure to me—it still is.  The wine representing the blood of Christ was no different from the cultures around the world that drink the blood of a sacrificed victim in the belief that a deity would be appeased by the action.  It took me about five years of this activity to finally admit to myself that it was within the framework of sacrifice that many evils around the world were committed—that the church itself was what Pope Francis attempted to paint against the gun manufacturers—a “duplicity is the currency” not only of today—but of the church itself.  Not just Catholics—but virtually every church.  It was under the Roman Catholic Church that many people died in the past and vast evils were committed needlessly against others.  Religion is not a mechanism for peace unless you happen to be a member of that particular congregation.  I determined this as many people who were supposed to be socially successful and smart would sit bowed before me awaiting the “body of Christ, prepared for you” that I’d hand them.  They went from the leaders of the community that I knew they were to willing sheep within the context of the church hoping that God might notice and give them everlasting life when they died.

Around this time I went on a youth camping trip with members of our church.  I had a girlfriend in this group so it was a chance to sneak over to her tent once everyone went to sleep. She was three years older than I was so there was much to learn.  I think I was fourteen at the time, and she was a hot-to-trot 17-year-old about to graduate from high school.  You might wonder dear reader why she was interested in me when she had access to so many older kids—well, that was because of my bullwhip which I had with me much to the anger of our minister.  Well, she wasn’t the only one who had a crush on me.  The minister did as well, and he conveniently had me sleeping in his tent on this trip.  It was a joke in my family how much the leader of our church liked me.  I was defiantly his favorite member of the congregation.  I helped during every service before and after, and my family helped set the church up on Saturdays.  It was a good wholesome experience, but at times was a little creepy.  He was a good person in most aspects of his life, but something about him made me weary.  At that time I had a reputation for fighting quite a lot, and my bullwhip use was known by everyone—and was a little scary to them.  But it kept me safe.  I felt—it kept everyone at bay, and gave me access to the kind of girls I wanted to know—so I was very obvious about it and even brought it on our youth church camping trip.

Once we all turned in for bed and were all in our tents, girls of course were matched up in their own tents, the boys in tents of their own, and I was of course paired up with the minister in his tent—just him and I.  The minister told me as we zipped up the tent that I didn’t need that whip in the tent with us—that it was a weapon of violence and that he found it offensive while laying his head down for a peaceful night’s sleep.  I told him I slept with my whip every night and that I couldn’t sleep without it. He then shrugged it off for the true motive of why he organized this whole field trip.   He took off all his cloths and encouraged me to do the same.  Without his ceremonial robes, or even the jeans and t-shirt he wore on the camping trip, it was clear to me that he was just a man of flesh and blood hungry for a physical sexual experience. He was married, but obviously in need of relationships with young people both intellectually and physically. I told him I couldn’t sleep in the nude.  I was still wearing the same camouflage pants I had worn all day and they were stinky from sweet, and he complained that they were stinking up the tent—all while he sat there in the nude trying to convince me to get undressed.  When I still didn’t, he persisted to criticize my false trust in clothing—that if I were a true Christian I wouldn’t feel I needed to hide behind my clothing.  What the minister didn’t know was that I had no intention of such a thing—that as soon as he was asleep I was going to sneak over to the tent my girlfriend was in.

That went on for about an hour.  Eventually he turned out the light; he stayed nude for some reason even though it was chilly that night.  When I heard he was asleep, I snuck out and did what I came to do on the trip.  I told the girl about my experience later that night and we laughed about it the next day. It was obvious that the minister had known I had left the tent because he had been waiting for me to go to sleep as well.  I didn’t come back to the tent until the first light of daybreak.  But he couldn’t say anything to me about it because he was guilty of bad thoughts and malicious intentions.  The girlfriend never saw the minister the same way again.  When she graduated high school and left for college she became something of a godless heathen and went dramatically in the opposite direction. I never saw or spoke to her again.  In a lot of ways the minister let her down most of all.  He became all too terrestrial that night and the guilt was clearly on his face the next day.  She lost her faith in religion never to recapture it again.  I told my parents about it as soon as I saw them.  They had a hard time with the information and never felt they could talk to the minister about it—because they were concerned that being a man of God, that it might reflect badly on them somehow.  I continued to help with the church for the next four years.  That guy married my wife and me but there was always a tension between us that remained. I wouldn’t say that he was a bad person because of that particular weakness for flesh, but it certainly diminished him in my eyes forever.  And my experience tells me that his behavior is the norm in a relationship where someone has authority over another whether it’s in a marriage, a government relationship, or a religion.  Honestly, what kept me safe from molestation was that I had my whip with me and everyone knew what I could do with it.  It is why I can tell this story now without a history of molestation in the wake.  Weapons keep us free from those who want to harm us due to their internal demons and weaknesses.

If anything gun manufacturers are saintly practitioners of goodness because they keep the bad thoughts of the power-hungry at bay.  Just because a religious leader is supposedly the representative of God on earth—it does not mean they are free of corruption.  Even those who are self-proclaimed non-sexual types have their weaknesses that come out when they think they are safely within the confines of an object of their desire.  I knew that guy really well until he pulled off his pants. That’s when you realize that you never really know anybody until you get that close and I hold those lessons adamantly to this day.  The world is full of freaks, punks and creeps, and within it we need ways to protect ourselves from intellectual and physical molestation.  My story came out alright because I had the unique abilities with the bullwhip to keep me safe.   But not everyone has such a luxury.  For them, it’s good to have a 9mm in their purse, or an AR-15 in their duffel bag.  It keeps the bad guys on their side of the tent you might say.  And it keeps decisions and responsibility for them in control of your mind—because you don’t have to yield to force under any condition.  That is why guns are a moral safeguard in America for the capitalist form of government.  The Pope may not like guns as he is trying to unite the world around his church and personal ideology of soft socialism.  But in America, we are different because we have the right to protect ourselves from people like the Pope.  He may not be as inclined to act poorly as my childhood minister, but the Catholic Church has a long history of molesting young boys—so they are not to be trusted.  The Catholic Church is responsible for more death and war than all the shootings in America added up over the last century.  They are hardly worthy of political advice, and I would argue spiritual as well.  They don’t understand “God.”  The churches of our world are focused too much on sacrifice to be truly relevant.  And it is in their error of focus that we need guns to protect us from their fallacy.  Guns give us the right to be wolves of our own design instead of sheep sent to slaughter under the poor philosophy of a church built on foundations of improper focus on worship to history interpreted by men more than the reality of actuality.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

A Rotten Rope up an Ominous Precipice: Treasure guarded by the Grim Reaper

Naturally there are a lot of creative people in my family.  I of course have a lot of very creative skills, and my wife does as well.  Yet we protect those skills of their virtual with the guarded care of a church going virgin from previous centuries.  We don’t whore ourselves out to the modern world.  We offer our services on our terms.  My wife is even stricter about that practice than I am.  Her crafts would make a fortune in an open market, but she’s very introverted and doesn’t like to see her creations tended to recklessly in exchange for money.  She usually only makes things for members of our family and not the outside world.  Naturally my children are very creative as well, and are happiest when they can express themselves in some form of art.  That means that when it comes time for gift giving the members of my family usually make things for each other rather than just buying an impersonal gift.  That made this last Father’s Day interesting because I had just come off a week of extreme stress, and my oldest daughter was very concerned about me. She captured her feelings in a nice card with some art expressed with the following picture.image

My previous week was enough to flatten all but the excessively resolute.  It involved first and foremost a legal issue that I can’t talk about at this time because of the entanglements involved.  The Grim Reaper came calling.  But I take this overman stuff seriously, so I denied its wishes.   Just because death wants something, doesn’t mean it gets it.  Human beings are a lot more powerful in their self-determination than they are often willing to admit.  Additionally, professionally it was one of the most difficult weeks I’ve had in my life—just with all the elements of things coming together at the same time from so many factions of people.  When people want to argue the great novel Atlas Shrugged and wonder why there are always only a few people who are competent, they need to walk in my shoes for a week and they’ll understand.  Especially this last week.  Then at the end of the week there was the Matt Clark radio show which I enjoyed and wasn’t a serious time burden, but did require some focus that was desperately in need of rest.  That same morning leading up to the broadcast when I was trying to do some show prep, I had guests from the other side of the world trying to get on a plane to get home and a major meltdown in my professional endeavors that would not allow a retreat from productive enterprise.  My kids knew about all this, so my daughter captured my week with that drawing.

When I first saw the picture I thought of Indiana Jones from the movie Temple of Doom.  I raised my kids on that movie, so the metaphor was appropriate.  Yet it was customized to fit my circumstances appropriately.  The hat is more like the one I wear rather than the one Indiana Jones does, and the physical body is more akin to me rather than the linky Harrison Ford.  In the picture the hero is trying to climb out of danger on a frail little rope ladder up a treacherous precipice.  Parts of the ladder are breaking away leaving nowhere to go but to fail or succeed in climbing hanging on to whatever one can.  Even though the picture is a dramatization of reality, it was exactly how the previous week had felt.

There were times during this week of tribulations when I wondered, “why.”  Why should I even try to climb up such a rope ladder?  Why not just stay on the ground instead of going up such an ominous precipice with a rickety device.   The answer is of course for the treasure that resides at the top.  Yet I’m not all that interested in treasure, but people I’m loyal to are—so I climb it to retrieve it for them.  I climb because they can’t.   They want the treasure from the top; I want the adventure of getting it.  I actually enjoy the danger of the climb, and that’s what I get out of it.  But my kids want my company, they’d rather me stay next to the fire in camp.  They don’t want the treasure I retrieve, just my company.  So it gets to be quite a challenge to give everyone in your life what they want—including yourself.  My daughter understands that and was able to capture her feelings within that seemingly simple picture.

There is no such thing as too much.  The circumstances presented require us to succeed or fail, and experience says that the more you push yourself, the more that you can get done in spite of any precipice intent on our destruction.  Because in life there are two kinds of treasure, there are those that drop alongside the trails we travel through life.  Occasionally someone drops a $20 dollar bill and we might find it because they have traveled that path before us, and lost something we have later found.  Perhaps in other times it’s a gold nugget that can bring us riches.  But treasures are best found off the paved road, because let’s face it, if you stick to the roads that are paved for our travel, you will only be able to go in life where others have intended to direct you.  That’s where the real treasures in life are—the kind that are still unclaimed by any who have come before us.  So I spend a lot of time on my own path off of any paved roads looking for treasure that nobody else dares to retrieve.  That is where I get a lot of my personal philosophy—off that paved road.  But there is danger off that paved path and bad things do happen. The dangers are often hidden until it’s too late.  This means you must trust yourself to contend with those dangers in whatever form they present.  After a lot of practice, I have an understanding that I can handle anything.  But from those watching, it is a dramatic romp through uncharted territory—and can be a little scary.

Father’s Day came and went, but what remained was the nice card given to me that means more than just a picture reflective of a favorite movie.  It was an appropriate metaphor.  Truth be told I was happy to get back to the camp to enjoy some time with my family because there were times this past week where all the rungs in the ladder did break leaving me hanging by only a rickety rotten rope.  That’s when you dig your bloody fingertips into the sides of the cliff and keep climbing regardless of the pain even if only bare bone is left grinding away at the rocky surface.  What makes such moments truly worth the effort is the campfire stories that came after—and on Father’s Day 2015 we had more than a few to tell.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

Rich Hoffman is Running for President: The bad is no longer protected from the good

I made the announcement during my show on the Clarkcast over the weekend that I am running for president of the United States, along with a little single cell creature newly discovered on the Jupiter moon of Europa. Of course I was using a little metaphorical humor to convey how ridiculous it is that there are so many people running for president in 2016, and the number is still growing. I’d say the cause of that effect is that president Obama has been so terrible, and lowered the bar so low, that now everyone believes that they too could be president and gain the ability to rule the world.  That’s what happens when a standard is lowered to a level where common people with an average background gain an ability that should only encompass the best and brightest minds produced within the United States. Also during the June 20th show I covered Matt Clark’s secret mission which he called in to surmise. I then spoke about my history with bullwhips a bit, gave some statistical analysis about the perceived gun violence in the wake of the South Carolina church shooting, and introduced my friend Gery Deer to talk about the upcoming Annie Oakley Western Showcase in Darke County, Ohio. It was an entertaining radio show that can be heard in its entirety below. Following the clip is the rough script of the show to make navigation easier for sections you may want to hear again.

Radio Show WAAM Saturday June , 2015 1 PM WAAM Talk 1600  734-822-1600

5 min — Matt Clark’s secret mission update

8 min – Nice to hear from Roy Hill at Brownells as the extreme left seeks to exploit the Charleston, South Carolina church.  After nine people were killed by Dylann Roof, Obama immediately sought gun control.   The progressive elements of our society were quick to point out statistics from the United Nations indicating that 81,300 nonfatal injuries and 31,672 deaths a year involve guns, which are 308 shootings every day. That sounds truly terrible—yet context is conveniently left vacant. There are approximately 32,000 deaths a year by automobiles and yet nobody has a press conference that declares that we should get rid of cars.  What’s worse is that a whopping 44,000 people die every year from some form of drug overdose and the president supports more of that type of behavior even getting behind efforts to decriminalize it. Isn’t that hypocritical? Of course it is. The drama around the latest shooting rampage has nothing to do with the loss of innocent life—it’s all about building a case against guns so that Americans might be convinced to give them up in favor of some measure of safety. “The Fanned Flames of Racisim: Barack Obama’s role in the South Carolina shooting” at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom.com

10 min – My history with bullwhips

17 min — Soft break

20 min – 30 years of history with bullwhips including movies, business instruction, and self-defense.  Lead in to my relationship with Gery Deer and the Annie Oakley Western Arts Showcase—home of the bullwhip fastdraw—invented in Ohio.  2015 event on Saturday July 25th.

30 min — Hard break

35 min – Introduction to Gery Deer – Gery Deer is the closest person I’ve ever met to a real life Bronco Billy. He has a background that is white-collar; he’s a writer, a television producer, a computer technician, a college graduate well versed and quite comfortable in professional settings. He’s been on America’s Got Talent and done films as a material supplier for projects like The Rundown. He also runs the only bullwhip studio in America from his home where he teaches the art form to students. He’s also a bit of a geek, and attends sci-fi conventions with boyish enthusiasm. But at his core he’s a western performer and vaudeville musician.   His band the Brothers and Company performs most weekends of the year and is a throwback to yesteryear with their compositions. He’s a very unique person who fits best in a motion picture screen rather than real life.

38 min – Gery conversation on the phone.

47 min — Soft break

50 min – Stories of the Annie Oakley Western Showcase and roots back to the stuntman great Alex Green.  Talk about the 2015 event, who, what, why, when, and where.

58 min — Exit to the top of the hour

imageAfter the show Matt sent me a picture of his view as he listened to the show from his hotel balcony in Hawaii at 7 AM in the morning. He had a nice little beverage there along with his laptop listening to the live broadcast from WAAM in Ann Arbor, Michigan over the Internet which I think is far superior to the old days of raw tower power. You get a much better signal over the Internet that goes much, much further. In this case the reach of WAAM was easily heard halfway around the world in real-time. As a host for Matt’s show I did it from my personal radio studio at my home while Derek at the home studio several hundred miles to the north worked the dials. All three of us worked together to put on the show you just heard from different places separated greatly by distance which I thought was a powerful breakthrough in radio. I know that The Blaze Radio is also doing something similar—and this is opening up a new frontier along the lines of talk radio. No longer are regional limitations necessary in talk radio. That means that those with the best message can now get it out no matter where they live and can reach audiences in every corner of the world without any restriction so long as they have Internet access. That is exactly why the FCC is trying to stick its nose into the Internet. It’s a very powerful tool for the crafty—and government hates it for that reason. Government intended to use the Internet for the opposite reason—as a population control mechanism—and yes porn is a form of population control. But people like Matt and the good people at WAAM are using the Internet to save the republic one broadcast at a time, which is why they put me on for a few weeks to advance the cause. It won’t be the last time I host a show—I’ll just say that.

A few years ago Darryl Parks at WLW radio told me that this was where radio was going, which meant that big stations owned by Clear Channel were in trouble. Back then there was some talk about me doing some weekend work at the Cincinnati juggernaut WLW—but there were some management changes, and reluctance on my part to get involved in that kind of thing. I am a very busy guy, and taking time out of my weekend to go down to the station to broadcast from a studio is just too great of an imposition. When they fired my friend Doc Thompson I had no choice but to pick sides against management and the rest is history. The station has been reducing its employees since then, and Lisa Wells filled the spot that I might have covered on Saturday mornings—hoping that a female might expand the station’s reputation from less of a sausage fest. But it really doesn’t.

Matt Clark asked me to guest host for him months ago and took measures to set me up at home with a complete studio so I could do the show from my home in Liberty Township, Ohio. That meant that I could do all my normal tasks and only block off an hour and a half to do Matt’s show—which was fine with me. I didn’t even have to live in Ann Arbor to be in the studio. Matt helped me set up a room in my house with a remote studio that worked just fine to produce what you just heard. Back in the day, such as at WLW, you’d have to drive to the station which is in a big building in Kenwood, park the car, go up one of the two elevators to the top floor, go through the sales office, walk down a hallway that is at least a 100 yards long, then camp out in the studio to do the show as the producer gave cues from behind the glass. It took me about a half hour to drive to the station, and an additional 15 minutes to park the car just to get to the studio. Then after the show it was the same amount of time to get back home. That in itself is an hour and a half of dead—unproductive time that I don’t have. Then you have the actual radio show which can be anywhere from 1 hour to 3 hours. A good part of the day would be completely consumed.

With the Clarkcast I was able to do my normal activities right up until the moment of the show. I went to my personal home studio, contacted the station producer, and he piped me in and off I went. After the show, I was back to what I was doing immediately. The total time was nothing more than a long telephone conversation and of a very little time impact. And Matt was able to monitor in real-time from the other side of the world. That is the power and reach of modern radio. It was fun, informative, and successful. We’ll definitely do it again. Because the world needs saving—and due to the power of the Internet, we can reach further more often than we’ve ever been able to before—and you can bet dear reader that we will continue to use those tools to preserve our republic well into the future. These tools allow the best and brightest to be heard so in a lot of ways, the bar has been removed so that many vindictive producers who control radio broadcast towers can no longer monopolize the airwaves protecting the bad from the good. In a lot of ways modern radio is seeing the opposite effect of the presidential race. Obama is so bad that he now has many challengers to his legacy because he has made the job look all too easy. Radio too is now decentralized—but now the very good can step around the big stations and get their message to the public without small-minded programmers getting in the way. And thanks to WAAM, we have all taken our first steps into a larger world.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

The Tragedy behind ‘Jurassic World’s’ Success: Hollywood in crises driven by a brain-dead culture

I know I’ve said it before, but I’ll do it again. I may not have said it in quite this strong of a fashion, but given the recent performance of Jurassic World at the box office, it is making several points that need some understanding. The greatest crises facing our American civilization is not global warming, inner city gun shootings, or even a tanking economy, it’s our inability to make new and original art.

I am extremely pleased with the box office performance of Jurassic World. I am a huge fan and I have written about the positive implications that such a film brings to the world of science. It’s almost immeasurable. So in that respect, there is wonderful news for the film industry this year, and for the next six or so—until this well of old material runs dry. Specifically, the contents of that well are all the retreads from the 1980s and 90s, the Star Wars films, Terminator franchise, the Avenger comic films along with other Marvel properties, Mad Max—etc—the strong box office showings declare quite strongly what American movie goers really want. For instance, Jurassic World is breaking records as of this writing making $400 million domestically in just 10 days. That record will last until of course the new Star Wars film hits in December. People are desperately hungry for these types of stories—and that is generally a very good—healthy thing for our culture. Films like the new drama Dope made under $6 million for its opening weekend which is well under the $7 million distributors paid for the film at Sundance. Once again, progressive films fail at the box office, traditional films succeed. The formula should be an easy one for studios—yet like idiots they continue to use the film industry as a way to evoke social change which most Americans are weary of. And it is that which has brought us to our present dilemma.

In Jurassic World the director is clearly similar to me. I’d probably get along wonderfully with Colin Trevorrow over a beer and nachos just because it’s obvious he loves the original film at least as much as I do. There were a lot of scenes in Jurassic World paying homage to Jurassic Park the way a person who truly loves something would do. I saw the same type of thing during last year’s Godzilla—specifically the scene where the classic movie monster was tearing its way through the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. It was nearly a scene for scene duplication in sound to the original Jurassic Park when the T-Rex first appeared. These directors today were obviously fans of the original Jurassic Park, and they want to make movies representing that love. There’s nothing wrong with that, but what is troubling is that there was once a day when Jurassic Park, and all these other movies from the past were original—and our culture is not presently making original films any longer. Now that Jurassic World is having so much success, studios will be very hesitant to attempt funding new projects because given the cost of movies these days to make, the box office expectations are just too high to justify the expense on anything less than a movie property that is not deeply imbedded in the consciousness of movie fans percolating for twenty or more years. Jurassic World is good on its own and might even do similar numbers as the original did 22 years ago by itself. Yet the massive drive to see the film, and huge oversea numbers are attributed to the recognition the film has historically in the hearts and minds of millions for two decades now. So there is a lot of pent-up desire to see this new film. Studios now will be so focused on resurrecting old properties that they will be extremely hesitant to do anything new—which is taking our culture to the edge of disaster.

When a culture is no longer making new art, it is losing its ability to think—and that is where American culture is headed. The public education system has failed to ignite in several generations a sense of wonder, televisions have made thinking a lazy exercise, literature is laughed at by younger people, and the music of our day seems only concerned with political motivations than anything of the human experience. Our society is making more Colin Trevorrow types who copy those from the past and less Steven Spielbergs who made the original and that is dangerous.

It’s not just in film that we are seeing this—but in the movie industry there are behavioral indexes that are easy to track. Likely we will see this same behavior in patent filings and new job creation in the coming years. It probably shows up already if there were proper ways to collect that data—but there really isn’t. The effects will be seen none-the-less in a less creative culture. Creativity is not just about making dinosaurs in a motion picture but in solving little problems that create new kinds of cars, new concepts in philosophy, politics, law and order—in just about every field where thought turns to action to advance civilization.

From experience, on the business side of things I can safely say that from one end of this country in the United States to the other are brain-dead slugs, which is unique to our time. When you pick up the phone to call someone in Seattle, New York, Chicago, or Atlanta—and everywhere in between, a person just going through the motions of life answers. Their primary objectives are to eat, reproduce, and pursue further reiterations of endorphin utilization—pursing pleasure over thought in nearly every circumstance. It wasn’t like that even when the first Jurassic Park came out two decades ago. This brain-dead society is a fairly new phenomenon, and the entertainment industry is the first to reveal its ugly realization. I would also dare to say that the reason there is so much hunger for Jurassic World is due to this obvious vacancy of thought. Suddenly there is a movie about things that has heroics, hope, horror, and possibility in it that people can see and touch—and they like it. Those are traits in our art that is becoming less obvious by the day, which of course leads to artistic and intellectual disaster for a society falling from its precipice.

A further perpetuation of that thoughtless manifest is in the so-called intellectual culture who thinks that Jurassic World is low brow and that films like Dope are proper representatives of a culture—and teach such nonsense to film students and college literature courses. They consider a Broadway play of Kinky Boots to have more artistic appeal than say Terminator Genesis—yet the masses of American culture do not find such progressive art appealing—they can’t relate to it. So they tune out and turn off—and remain that way sometimes for their entire lives. It’s quite a crisis.

After 2020 – 2021 I see a major drop off within the film industry. The movies we make as a culture will fall in on itself—and even the retreads will wear away in their appeal. New concepts will have to take their place and I don’t have faith that we have a culture any longer that can produce anything new. We should be in a period of incredible creativity with the modern tools available. But they are being wasted on pornography and gossip—not on innovation. That is when you know you are in trouble, and as much as I love the box office numbers of Jurassic World—they speak most obviously of the desperate hunger people have for that kind of entertainment that they aren’t getting from any other source—which is sad. A lot of what we take for granted today will be treasured greatly tomorrow—and that is obvious most distinctly in American art. As hopeful as movie studios are today in staying relevant—hard times are ahead for them—and the culture in general who consumes the product of Hollywood. That is the disaster I think is behind the massive success of Jurassic World.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

The Fanned Flames of Racisim: Barack Obama’s role in the South Carolina shooting

What an absolute idiot! What a diabolical fool. What a pandering, blundering loser. Barack Obama did it again, he attempted to take a tragedy that happened in a Charleston, South Carolina church and make it all about racism and gun control. Without question the shooter who killed nine needlessly within the church, was a bad person choking with hate. But it could easily be argued that he was a flame stoked by Barack Obama himself for the racial division the current president has brought to America under his terms of progressive lunacy.   Obama said in a speech shortly after the shooting, “frequent incidents of gun violence do not occur in other advanced countries.” What advanced countries? Who does Obama consider advanced? France??????

The insult of the Obama statements about the shooting reside in his behavior. He has went well out of his way to resurrect racism in all its ugly glory, then complains about the tendency of the behavior he instigates in people. He is both the guilty party contributing to violence and the victim all in the same sentences—and as he cries about nine deaths he does nothing about the hundreds and thousands loosing their lives in Iraq and along the Mexican border—and in Chicago, his home town.

The statements from Obama are those of an actor who has been hoping that through his provocation someone like this stupid kid who was the shooter would do something along these lines so that he could advance his progressive agenda in the wake of tragedy. The facts where hardly clear before Obama decidedly made statements against guns within a breath of the incident while other issues—such as the national debt—linger on unanswered for years. It’s not hard to figure out what he’s up to by his actions. Sure he’d deny such an allegation in a court of law, but when people no longer care what the Bible means anymore, the swearing-in court is worthless, and forked tongued words will flow out of their mouths like water over the Niagara.

The progressive elements of our society were quick to point out statistics from the United Nations indicating that 81,300 nonfatal injuries and 31,672 deaths a year involve guns, which are 308 shootings every day. That sounds truly terrible—yet context is conveniently left vacant. There are approximately 32,000 deaths a year by automobiles and yet nobody has a press conference and declares that we should get rid of cars—so what’s at work here? What’s worse is that a whopping 44,000 people die every year from some form of drug overdose and the president supports more of that type of behavior even getting behind efforts to decriminalize it. Isn’t that hypocritical? Of course it is. The drama around the latest shooting rampage has nothing to do with the loss of innocent life—it’s all about building a case against guns so that Americans might be convinced to give them up in favor of some measure of safety.

I don’t care about what the United Nations thinks about anything. And as I look around the world I don’t see a close rival to the United States in regard to culture, economy, diversity, innovation, and intellectual advancements in all fields. Show me any country in the world and they are lacking behind the United States in some fashion or another in their totality. A lie is being spread from the lips of Barack Obama and it should anger people more than it does. Guns are at the heart of American culture and they are there to keep the progressives within organizations like the United Nations out of our productive efforts—which often culminates in private property ownership. The rest of the world has not yet realized that governments cannot be trusted. They have not yet learned that the only way to keep corruption from seeping into their homes from the seething carcasses of their federal buildings is the threat of a gun which keeps even the bad as honest as possible. Without guns, violence escalates, it does not retreat.

When a robber proclaims to put up your hands, and drop your guns, they intend to disarm you so they can have easy access to molest you. Barack Obama is advocating the same, with the United Nations at his back. They don’t care about nine innocent people; they are collectivists, actors, and diabolical activist lawyers hell-bent on social change toward communism from capitalism. They want the gun removed American culture, and they will stoop to no low to achieve it. They will exploit any tragedy—even the ones that they created indirectly by blowing on flames they nurtured along.

The shooter was 21 year-old Dylann Roof who was given a .45 caliber handgun for a birthday present by his father. Fathers often do such things for their sons in America. There is nothing unusual about that. It is a bit strange that young Roof was so incensed by racial hatred that he drove from North Carolina to the 200-year-old historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church to shoot four pastors, six total women and three men dead on a site which was burned to the ground in the late 1820s during a slave revolt. It takes some unique motivation to drive such a distance to a very specific site like that to perform a terrible deed. There will likely be additional facts, but the killings were foolish and senselessly painful. Yet there were more shootings in Chicago where guns are “illegal” in just 24 hours from this writing—2 killed and 6 wounded coupled with homicides 11 out of the 12 last days—than in this South Carolina shooting. Obama didn’t have a press conference about those. Can you smell that?

In my book all lives matter. All men, women, and children of all colors and creeds—everyone deserves a chance at life. I apply the same to insects, if a little bug gets stuck in my pool and I get a chance to fish it out to extend its life—I do 100% of the time. I avoid stepping on bugs and worms if I can, and I certainly care about all human life. But guns protect that life from parasites like these big government types who want to disarm us so they can rule us. That’s their end game and believe me, we are far safer with our guns than without them. Bad things do happen from time to time. People like this kid Dylann Roof do get caught up in the drama of the moment and act foolishly due to their own ignorance. But in cases like this, just like on a sports field the original violation often goes unpunished. It’s the reaction that most of the time gets blamed and it can never be disputed that under Obama’s watch racism has escalated by his own design. And it is really stupid to be provoked by him into doing something brainless, and even dumber to give him your gun in the process. Obama doesn’t care about more safety—he wants to integrate America into the rest of the world defenseless and victims to the ignorance within the United Nations. That is the endgame to the tragic shooting in Charleston, South Carolina in June of 2015.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

The Real Jurassic Park Discovery Center: Universal Studios, bring on the Samsung Innovation Center

80% of my articles are about something negative and overcoming that negativity with critical thinking and assessment. It is always my hope that somebody will listen and improve a situation after my diagnosis. Most of the time that diagnosis is ignored leaving me to shake my head at how stupid people are for not listening—but I get over it and return to the task at hand in figuring out how to solve problems and live productively at life. The remaining 20% of my articles are usually about something I am passionate about—which is actually quite a lot. I feel a lot of very raw—boyish enthusiasm for a great many things. I have an extremely busy life as a result and a lot of people to maintain within it. But I am exactly the kind of man who I always wanted to grow up to be as a kid—which is essentially just a developed version of myself from 7 to 10 years old. That said I am oozing with enthusiasm over the new Jurassic World movie from Universal Studios because it shares with me a similar approach at living—a little terror, optimism, adventure, technical proficiency, and a lot of warning as our human species moves into the needed direction of playing in God’s laboratory.

I saw Jurassic World twice over the weekend within twenty-four hours of each other, and I could go see it another nine times back to back without getting tired of it. It’s my kind of movie to say the least. I literally finished my radio show on Saturday with the Clarkcast in Ann Arbor, Michigan and headed back to the theater to see Jurassic World yet again. It is one of the most satisfying movie experiences that I’ve had going back to The Dark Night Rises a few years ago. It is simply a marriage between filmmaking and science brought together in an orgy of delightful possibility. I couldn’t help but think of the real world Jurassic Park Discovery Center in Orlando, Florida while watching Jurassic World and thinking about how great it will be when Universal Studios builds an updated version of the Samsung Temple of Science from the latest film.DSC01151

I love amusement parks which often make up those 20% articles here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom. The king to me is the Epcot Center within the Disney World complex. It is by far the best theme park in the world in my opinion. But that’s not to say that the rest are bad, just that Epcot does for me what I think Disney always envisioned. It’s loaded with science and culture and it changes with the times so it’s always relevant. It’s quite an astonishing place. But, I love the Universal Parks nearly equally but for different reasons. The only knock on them from my perspective is that they are a little too hip for me—too contemporary. But within the Universal Park, Islands of Adventure they have an entire section dedicated to Jurassic Park which is to me like the Holy of Holies within King Soloman’s temple in Jerusalem as far as science. When people ask me what it would take to get me to support school levies and public schools I say to them—make all of them like the Discovery Center at Jurassic Park within the Island’s of Adventure theme park, and I would be the biggest education guy in the world. But because they fall dreadfully short, they deserve to have the wrath of critical opinion cast at them for being too lazy to pluck off the vine of knowledge the low hanging fruit that is there for us all—only we refuse to do so. And that is what the Discovery Center at Jurassic Park is all about.DSC01158

The pictures shown here are from a trip my wife and I took to it together not that long ago. We had a three-day pass to the two parks and spent nearly a day just at the Discovery Center out of all the attractions. It was an amazing building and I found myself writing several novels in my head just while sitting on the lakeside entrance staring at the Marvel Universe across the waterway from the Discovery Center contemplating many things all at the same time. It was a profoundly relaxing experience to my excessively active mind. I can only describe it as heaven on earth for a person with the kind of mind that I have. My wife was just as enthused which is why we have been married for so long together. We ate at the Discovery Center, participated in every exhibit that we could, spent a lot of time looking through everything in their gift shop, and just looking at the decorations. It is an amazing place and I just love it.DSC01165

I get a similar kind of joy out of the Dinosaur Alive exhibit at my hometown park of Kings Island operated by Cedar Fair Amusements. I love going to Gatlinburg and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee because of all the miniature golf courses featuring dinosaurs and monsters of all types. But I love that Island’s of Adventure Discovery Center most of all. So I couldn’t help but contemplate that with Universal Studios taking in $200 million domestically, nearly a half a billion globally just in one weekend with Jurassic World, that they might finally expand their Islands of Adventure park to include the Temple of Science complete with holographic projections just like in the movie. The technology is there now for that kind of thing and is quite possible. I want to take my grandchildren there! It may even be worth the investment to do what they have done with Harry Potter and make two worlds connected by a monorail of some kind, something that goes from the old Jurassic Park area to an actual recreation of the Jurassic World main street shown in the movie. I really want to physically go to that place shown in the movie and spend hours upon hours in the Samsung Innovation Center located in the temple at the end of main street.DSC01155

People often ask me how I juggle so many different things at the same time, which shocks me a little bit, because we all do it as kids. But when we grow up we just stop playing with life and lose that ability—at least most people do. I never did. I have so many hobbies it would take me fourteen lifetimes to get everything I want out of all of them. But places like the Jurassic Park area of Universal’s Islands of Adventure help a lot, because they are playful places full of wonder and discovery. A young lady once who grew up with a bad social outlook yet was quite attractive said to me that she wasn’t going to ever see that stupid Jurassic Park movie with all those stupid dinosaurs running around. She thought when she said it that I would play along and feed off her pessimism; because she was used to men treating her like that. They’d say anything to get her cloths off—even if it meant ridiculing Jurassic Park as a work of art. My response to her was that I never spoke to her again—which shocked her. That was well over twenty years ago and she has bumped into me around town here and there. She became exactly what I thought she would, a used up mess who has lost her attractiveness and is now a lonely bitter person and it all started with her refusal to enjoy something playful and fun when she was younger. Little things lead to big things—believe me. The same holds true to what you allow into your brain.DSC01166

Dinosaurs are part of our prehistoric past. They lived a long time on earth and died rather suddenly. We should study them to figure out what we might do differently. And it is there that the gates of science open into the world of philosophy which is my favorite place to be. And to most adequately utilize those gates, I find places like the Discovery Center in Orlando, Florida to be one of my favorite places—anywhere—outside of the Epcot Center of course. Now with the success of a new Jurassic Park movie, it is my sincere hope that Universal will build for me a recreation of their Samsung Innovation Center. Because I want to visit it badly! Such places make living life such a delightful experience. And I hope that they will use the power of capitalism to share that joy with the world on a much more epic scale than a darkened theater!

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

What Every Man Must Have: Brownells’ “Big Book”

This is just for the guys today. I’m sure there are ladies, especially those who read here who are just as interested in what I’m about to say, but demographically, this information is most potent to guys—exclusively! The information I am about to give the men in my audience here may rattle their very foundations to the bare DNA with delight. But let me first preface my statement by reporting that the little bit of construction occurring in West Chester just north of the railroad tracks on 747 is in fact a new target range built for indoor shooting and it will be able to handle my Smith & Wesson.500 Magnum. That by itself is something to get excited about.

As I stated previously I have decided to dust off my old gunsmithing roots and get back into things a bit—which for me the very first stop was where I left off—at Brownells and their famous “Big Book.” Well, two wonderful things happened over the weekend while I was on the air at WAAM radio. My family wanted to go see Jurassic World again—which we did as soon as I got off the air and my new Brownells “Big Book” arrived in the mail. I had been doing some work on a few old guns I have and have them all tore apart in my shop and needed a needle oiler to finish so I turned to Brownells for some Kellube synthetic gun lubricant for the magic stuff that makes guns work so well. They rewarded me not only with prompt service, but with a new “Big Book” catalog that features the most extensive gun parts supply in the world.image

What surprises me is that Brownells is not on every single man in America’s nightstand. Too many people who consider themselves shooters do not know about Brownells, which is a crime, because they have more cool gadgets and gizmos in their “Big Book” catalog than any Mac Tool or Snap On catalog ever hoped to have. It is in my opinion the best catalog for a man that there is in the world—and every guy should have one. Every man—even Bruce Jenner. It is in a man’s DNA to want tools to make life better and there is nothing better than tools and guns to a man—NOTHING! Nothing, nothing, N-O-T-H-I-N-G!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! The pictures here show just some examples.

imageOh, you need a cleaning kit for a military issue M203 (40mm) grenade launcher or perhaps a (37 mm) variant—guess what—Brownells sells one. Order it today and it will be on your doorstep in a few short days. Oh—you need a tool kit for your AR-15—Brownells has all the special tools you will need to break down that firearm to the last pin that holds it together and allow you to put it back together again. Brownells is the best resource for the modern shooter in the world. End of story. So when you find you need something—feel free to support the local gun dealers and outlets like Cabelas and Bass Pro Shops for the basics. But when you need specifics—schematics, special screw drivers, wrenches, punches, etc, Brownells is the place to shop. What about a hammer spring for your Marlin? Brownells has that spring in stock. You can buy it there as well as all the tools it takes to take the gun apart and put it in. That makes Brownells a treasure beyond value for any man who loves his guns and the tools it takes to maintain them.image

I remembered Brownells from my old gunsmithing days when I maintained a FFI and had to report at the tender age of 19 and 20 my work back to the federal government which I never liked. I got busy in subsequent years raising a family and working with friends within the Western Arts community specifically with bullwhips for the next two decades so I got away from gunsmithing. After I purchased my .500 Magnum I was looking for cleaning supplies for it and dusted off my memory of my old supplier. So I contacted them to see if they were still in business, and guess what—they are better than ever. But you don’t hear about them too much outside of close shooting circles so mainstream guys don’t know much about Brownells. If you are a guy and you like tools and guns, then you need to have a Brownells “Big Book.” There is no “ifs” about it. You just have to do it.image

Brownells carries over 30,000 custom accessories for firearms and is still a tight nit family company that conducts themselves with an old school emphasis on customer service and quality. They are among the best that America has to offer as far as a company. They are small enough to still be family owned, but big enough to carry so many unique items in their vast inventory. It is stunning what they have in their catalog. Much of it can be found online, but there are so many items that it still takes a classic catalog to browse through to see everything because often there are things you didn’t know you needed that you would only see by flipping through the hundreds and hundreds of pages of their “Big Book.”image

I’m sharing this valuable information because Brownells is important to maintaining the Second Amendment. There is a real push from progressive billionaires like George Soros to put pressure on firearm manufacturers and legislators to regulate the firearm industry with a mad mother neurosis on safety. Safety is overrated, what matters more is the experience of being alive, and when dealing with firearms it’s important to handle them with caution so that we can all be alive long enough to enjoy them and the freedoms they provide. Because there are a lot of bad guys out there, and they want our guns so they can thrive in the power vacuum left behind, there is legislation to attempting to destroy the industry on the supply side. Guns are needed to counter the attempts of the Soros types. George Soros would likely not be one of the men who would like Brownells—rather he would prefer Karl Marx for reading material, and that makes him a dangerous man. For the raw hearted American man Brownells has what you are looking for—especially the Gunsmith Kinks series of books sold through Brownells only.   The best way to take away the strategy of the progressive left against guns in America is to keep our guns working longer and better with the tricks of the gunsmithing trade so that all the attempts by Soros and his gun grabbing European progressives will be for nothing. Brownells actually allows you to build a gun from scratch, you don’t necessarily need a firearms manufacturer if you know what you are doing and you can learn through Brownells. That’s their mission in life.image

We want to keep Brownells around. They are based in Iowa and are in good hands in gun country far away from the grabbers of New York and Los Angeles, but they need business to hedge against the legislative attacks that they have endured for decades. There will be more of those attacks, so to keep the “Big Books” flowing Brownells needs our respect and support.image

As I get back into this field of endeavor I am so happy to see Brownells still out there doing the good work they have done for over 75 years. Every man should have a Brownells book next to their bed and should buy at least one tool from them. Because everything about Brownells points to quality and respect—they are the best in the business where threats to gun rights are coming from every direction and they are there to help expand firearm ability and add a new layer to their enjoyment. So if you believe in Second Amendment rights, of course the NRA is important—George Lang’s Second Call Defense is as well, but for my money Brownells is as important. They will enhance that trip to the new West Chester shooting range by having cool gadgets to work on the guns to get them ready at home and at the facility for a day of shooting. The “Big Book” is a work of literature that every man should have and enjoy for the sheer testosterone that emerges from the sight of quality tools and their utilization on fine and treasured firearms. There is nothing better than that! Click the link below to get your own “Big Book” today.

http://www.brownells.com/aspx/ppc/default.aspx?mc_id=1400&srch=1&ch=ppc&cm_mmc=ppc-_-Itwine-_-Bing-_-Gunsmithing%20Tools

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

The Community Foundation “refuses to accept funds where political statements are attached”: Except when Lakota is involved

You can always tell a lot about a situation by the people who are willing to speak on an issue. Such was the case of a normally calm, mild-mannered Lakota school board meeting on Monday, June 8th 2015 where a number of people spoke out against the Lakota property giveaway of the Old Union School, which many in the community want to see it made into a historic building worthy of preservation. As I reported yesterday, a strong core group of logical community citizens showed up to speak and they made valid arguments which actually ruffled the feathers of the superintendent. The show of support for the old school was enough to cause her to threaten a 10 million dollar bond on a future ballot. The whole meeting will be seen when Lakota publishes the video of the meeting on their website.image

However, the loudest voices at the event where those most silent. Such as the lack of reporting by the local media which would normally salivate over an issue like this—they were noticeably not present. Only Eric Schwartzberg from the Journal was there and he only took one picture—and that was of course the socialite Patti Alderson and her crusade to build a Boys and Girls Club on the site of the Old Union School. That in itself wasn’t shocking, just disappointedly predictable. However it was surprising that Patti’s husband Dick was there and had planned to speak which he eventually declined.

When I was on the Scott Sloan show years ago after calling levy supporters in and around Lakota Latté Sipping Prostitutes—which I chronicled in the latest Cliffhanger installment seen on the sidebar of this article—I was involved in an internal strategy designed to root out subversives in my No Lakota Levy group—and I found them. It was quite an explosive bit of controversy that rooted out many who were playing both sides of a fence, kind of like a two timing man trying to maintain a wife and a mistress by putting down the other when in the presence of either. It was hard to tell who was friend from foe. Patti and Karen Mantia worked together to further cloud the waters which infuriated me to no end—because here was a Republican who has John Kasich’s ear, and who spends a lot of time with the current Speaker of the House who was openly for tax increases using children to hide the obvious liberal behavior. I knew that Dick wasn’t on board with that liberal activity—so it surprised me greatly to hear that he was at the Lakota school board meeting on the arm of his wife. But then again, it didn’t.image

In a similar school board meeting three years ago Patti spoke about me personally. She was head of the Community Foundation and said she refused to accept funds where political statements were attached. I along with several No Lakota Levy leaders started a new Foundation and we presented a check for $10,000 which infuriated levy supporters who were doing just what Patti said she refused to do. The $10,000 was set to be given to poor students to cover their sports fee extortion that Lakota was imposing on tax payers to pass a new levy. Patti attacked me for getting in the way of that extortion racket with a very public assault. Now why would she do such a thing if she really wanted to help children?  Helping kids should be a non-partisan thing. Well, they said things about me and I said things back to them in return and when they had no answer they fell on the typical progressive trick of calling me a sexist and begging the media to stop covering me. They hoped that I would just drift away into seclusion. But that’s not what happened. Speaking of that, just as a reminder be sure to tune into my radio show this upcoming Saturday June 13th 2015 1 PM at the following link. Calls are of course welcome and a local man of power will be my guest. The topic will be guns, guns, and more guns and what to do when you have to shoot someone to defend your property. Tune in and hang on for the ride.

http://www.waamradio.com/

Now, back to the topic at hand–those pro levy people were facing down new foes, this time a whole set of fresh protestors advocating for the same logical approach to a current problem—but a majority of them were females which presents a tactical problem for Mantia and her gang of property tax insurgents to deal with. It’s harder to marginalize women making them more effective in future debates against progressive advocates. So during the June 2015 meeting, Mantia showed a side of herself that people had only read about from my reports. Suddenly she wasn’t the nice Community Conversationalist who tries to justify $40K per year on Jeff Stec as a change agent to advocate on behalf of levy passage. She instead displayed a patronizing, sarcastic, disrespectful, condescending, incompetent overpaid government worker to a group of people who had previously been willing to give her the benefit of doubt. Quite a mistake on her part.image

During a portion of the speech Mantia gave on the matter of the Old Union School she essentially uttered in advocacy of giving Patti the property or investing $10 million dollars as if no other options existed, which is a classic Delphi Technique diatribe. She once did that with me when she presented a couple of options for the declining state revenue coming from Kasich—that the area property owners had an obligation to cover the discrepancy with raised taxes. It never occurred to her that lowering her own costs should come into play. Only that more costs were needed to advance the cause of public education into one big pit of bottomless need was the only thing on her mind. The same holds true over the Old Union School, Mantia and Patti have a deal and every option outside of that deal is non-existent.

But we know those characters; we understand what their motives are—and how they implement their objectives. When Manita was first hired as a superintendent she met with me and a few other key people at No Lakota Levy to feel us out and see how she could go about marginalizing it to make way for her levy attempts. She pretended to tell us secrets as if we’d be in the know and would have information that everyone else would be hungry to get—like her eventual plan to bring merit pay to Lakota—which is a trend happening all across the nation—it’s not specific to anything she’s doing. But we let her talk and were polite with her. When she left I told the other guys what the objective was—and they all agreed. We knew what she was doing—but it appears that Dick didn’t get the memo—or he was powerless to resist it. He’s a very successful person so he doesn’t need to be involved in something as politically charged as this whole Old Union School deal.

imageFor Patti who stated publicly that she refused to take money from any organization that had political statements attached, the Old Union School proves that to be hypocritical. The Old Union School is all about politics.   It’s all about passing levies and giveaways to friends of the district and unifying those normally opposed to tax increases. Patti, one of the wealthiest women of West Chester spoke in support of the Boys and Girls Club wanting money from a district for purely political reasons—as a Republican representative of all things. As a person who respects her husband as a titan of industry—I was just a little embarrassed for him.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

The Trap Behind the Deal: Danielle Richardson standing against a tide of corruption

Danielle Richardson has been leading the way to save the Old Union School within the Lakota school district. She led a group of protestors to the school board meeting on Monday June 8, 2015 to stop the giveaway the district is attempting to create with a Boys and Girls Club offering free babysitting service to area tax payers. The deal is essentially a levy building consensus exercise designed to pull together the business community with the progressive aims of the government school. What is being destroyed in the process is a bit of history within West Chester, Ohio and the efforts of the tax payers at maintaining sanity from the runaway costs of the Lakota school system—for which they are paving the way for yet another tax increase.

Karen Mantia the superintendent of Lakota is up for a contract renewal, which should be allowed to expire and part ways because of her ineffectiveness from a community perspective. Under her watch taxes have gone up and so have her labor costs not resulting in an increase in services offered to the community. She is everything that people like me said she would be at the very beginning. Lakota during the levy fights have since yielded to the labor union strategy of pay for play programs and reduced programs putting as a priority their employees over the kids who attend resulting in a failure that is only hidden by the benefits of an affluent district. She has ridden the coat tails of that success and sought wherever possible to utilize progressive consensus building mechanisms like the Community Conversation program which costs $40K per year to do nothing but change people’s minds about increased property taxes. The other strategy utilized by her has been to make alliances with former opponents from No Lakota Levy to quiet them during upcoming levies, which is what the Old Union School giveaway is all about.image

Danielle’s protestors had a hardy presence even though it will fall on deaf ears, because Lakota has no other management option but to ask for more money and make deals to gain public support for tax increases. By giving away the Old Union School to development, the cost of the tax increases for the property owners involved are marginalized and everyone gets to walk away from the deal thinking they did something nice for kids—and everyone sleeps well at night with that belief. But that’s not the end of the story for everyone else not associated with the deal—and that’s the issue of concern.

Through an alliance with the Community Foundation Lakota has one of its largest levy cheerleaders which penetrate the heart of the GOP community within Butler County. In this way Mantia and her consensus builders within the Lakota organization gets the Republican Party to support unionized labor which indirectly works against them politically with the amount of PAC money that is generated through union dues. The Old Union School deal is something more reminiscent of Hillary Clinton’s backroom deals with Uranium One. It pulls local Republicans in on a trap set by her, using children as bait, to attack their financial base indirectly with union fees. It marginalizes their protests in public because they are all in on the deal, and moves them politically to the left neutralizing their future opposition when tax increases are proposed.

Lakota is too far committed to this Old Union School deal to listen to protestors now. Their goal is not to work with the local GOP as Mantia is a former school teacher herself—they are a progressive advocate intent to water down the GOP into a more centralist organization which has shown itself to be the case over the last four years. Mantia’s not alone of course; the woman who hired her was Lynda O’Connor who openly befriended many of the No Lakota Levy people in 2012 to the point where we supported her for re-election. She’s now the president of the school board and has helped pull all these elements together with consensus building of her own.   People who would normally disagree politically play ball because they want a piece of the pie that this Lakota team helped build. In this case the Lakota alliance with the Community Foundation and area developers whom I worked with in the past are the primary players.  I along with a few others exposed this ill begotten alliance when we started our own foundation to compete with the Community Foundation which resulted in a violent backlash toward myself—which has been well documented—much of it led by the same person who is advocating on behalf of this Boys and Girls Club project. The evidence had been emerging for quite some time, so we flushed it out, and not everyone had the courage to stand up to it. In the end, there were a lot of people who quietly showed me their support, but really in the end just like Danielle Richardson is experiencing now—it’s a lonely road that only one or two people at any given time have the guts to expose. Danielle’s protest is more of an exposure of this vile behavior than a hope for change. The silence and slander from Lakota is the confirmation of her validity because it’s the only play they have in the matter. The slander doesn’t always come from direct sources, but in the roundabout ways within party politics.image

But it should never be taken for granted that the overall goal of the Old Union School deal is to weaken the grip of the GOP, gain support for a future tax increase, and offer free babysitting services to already addicted parents who cannot afford to put their children in daycare so both parents can work and pay for the large mortgages it takes to live within Liberty/West Chester Townships. It is far cheaper to pay the taxes for those levy addicts than the yearly daycare costs—and that is at the heart of the entire strategy which pulls all these parties into supporting indirectly radical labor union intentions dedicated to progressive politics—anti GOP strategies. So while the Old Union School demolition and rebuilding of a new Boys and Girls Club might give local developers some much-needed work, the gains are short-term exclusively but the impact to the GOP down the road is gradual erosion of its small government platform.

As much as area Republicans might want to chastise Richardson for being a radical activist and a say-no-to-anything and everything related to progress type, she is more Republican than a whole room full of GOP leaders—and she’s not even a hard-core Republican. She’s a libertarian in almost every way yet her intentions and goals benefit the GOP far more than Todd Hall’s grand unification of the GOP strategy of pushing out all the radicals and pulling in all the business types under the same tent. Because when it comes to levy time, those who took the deal won’t be able to stand against the tax increase, and Lakota knows that. That’s the main objective of the Old Union School demolition and property giveaway. It’s a flytrap for insurgents who have too high a profile to stand honestly against the corruption as Danielle Richardson is. And for her, it’s going to be a lonely road.

If you want to join her you can at the following link:

http://www.saveoldunionschool.com/

As for fans of Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom who are distraught that No Lakota Levy members are involved in the Old Union School deal, do not fret. The resistance to the future tax increases is alive and well, and more vibrant than it was even four years ago when No Lakota Levy was in its prime. Things evolve and new faces emerge as other faces fade off under the pressure and make deals. People like Danielle Richardson will be a part of those future fights which of course begins with events like this one centering on the Old Union School. I wonder what Lakota will do when they can’t answer the questions that Danielle brings up……………..they certainly can’t call her a sexist. Ummmmmm, that might be a difficult problem for them to overcome. What’s the old term……………………….”what comes around……………goes……………..”

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.

West Chester Will Fight Anything: What makes a good community successful

I’ve discussed this Community Foundation deal set to take place at the location of the old Lakota Union school on Cincinnati Dayton road before. The proposal is to build a Boys & Girls Club at the site offering all day kindergarten for Lakota students—which is a fancy way of saying that it’s a full-time babysitting service funded by the taxpayers for residents of the Lakota schools district. In spite of the $40,000 that Lakota spends each year on the change agent Jeffery Stec to build public support for the union fees the public education employees extract from the tax payers each year, the school board has partnered up with the socialite Patti Alderson and former No Lakota Levy advocates to build a consensus within the community toward future school levies. The next levy is due to take place around 2017. With all the money spent, it just wasn’t enough to hire a progressive cheerleader from Cincinnati—other deals had to be made to keep public opinion in favor of the school system to over 50%. It’s a bit of a shell game going on behind the Boys & Girls Club at the proposed location. Everyone gets something out of the deal, even the tax payers who want to use the free babysitting service—except for a majority of the tax payers who end up paying for the whole enterprise. For them they are supposed to buy into the seemingly good intentions of the Boys & Girls Club mission to replace the parenting of young people with a progressive leaning education centered on altruism.

What is interesting is not that bandits, thieves and social parasites behind the issue, it’s the opinion of some who advocate on their behalf which I couldn’t help but notice in the comments section of the latest Journal News article on the matter, seen below. I’m certainly not one who demonizes builders and developers. I see those occupations as a creative enterprise. I am a fan of the Liberty Way developments and I love the Union Center Blvd developments. But I like to see a resistance that forces those developers to be either better in their presentations, or cleverer in what ends up finally built. Resistance is the key to good management. Those who do resist are not bad people or impediments to progress. Politicians have a tendency to lay down to developers because it is those type of businessmen who tend to contribute to political campaigns hoping that at some time in the future government will get out of their way to allow them to make some money. That leaves the private citizen as the natural counterbalance between these two forces that are needed to maintain good government. It is because of the many private citizens in and around West Chester that there are so many good things happening in one of the most affluent areas of Ohio. Yet the below comment was left on the mentioned article and illustrates a sad belief to the contrary.

You have to love West Chester. They will fight anything. Over the years, the community has fought a community Rec Center, a 1,000,000+ sf upscale Steiner development on Cin-Day (Yes, the same one building in Liberty), a YMCA, the schools, a new Kroger, a Christian school, sidewalks, bike paths and a Boys/Girls Club. Sounds like a great place to live.

http://www.journal-news.com/news/news/group-aims-to-stop-demolition-of-former-school/nmSWq/

In the article Danielle Richardson and the West Chester-Union Twp. Historical Society, essentially propose to the Lakota school district to buy the old school for the cost of $1—to clear it off their books and turn it over to someone else to manage. The Historical Society has an interest in the century old school building to maintain the image of Old West Chester as a hub of tradition to remember the roots of what made the area great to begin with. If everything that is built is new, then the roots will be lost forever of what attracted people to West Chester in the first place. If there is nobody challenging all these projects, such as the commenter above, everything that makes West Chester great would be lost forever—and changed into something else. For Lakota, which is a very progressive government organization—that is their intended goal on a social level—to change the behavior of the community at large, so their actions must be met with resistance. That’s why they hired Jeff Stec at a rather expensive cost to “change” the minds of the public toward support of a tax payer funded institution. New members of West Chester by their own destructive predilections want to change things into what they left behind. If everything is new and there is no sense of history, then they can feel equal to the people who have lived in West Chester for years. It’s a natural weakness that comes from the type of people who transfer to various locations around the nation. They are rootless by nature, so often have a tinge of jealousy toward those who do have a sense of belonging to a community or family.

An example of this is in Danielle Richardson herself, she is the person at the center of the “chicken” controversy which continues to boil in front of West Chester Trustees. Farms and chickens are part of West Chester’s history and some traditional value toward that memory needs to be made to accommodate that vintage sentiment. New money moved into West Chester and wants to think that the entire community is the Weatherington Country Club. It makes for some good back slapping over drinks to brag about pushing all the hillbillies out of West Chester with all their furry creatures. But, in doing so they destroy the nature of their very investments—which makes no sense, because they improperly value the wrong attributes of a society. West Chester attracted all the great investment it has now, chickens, goats, cows and all—and the old Union school is part of that—and they have value. If the image is allowed to change, then West Chester will become just another community that rises to greatness, and then falls once change agents transform the area into something that future generations despise. Because in thirty years when the new Boys & Girls Club building is old, and all the people who constructed it are dead and gone—nobody will want to preserve all the cheap construction that looks new in 2015, but will look out-dated in 2030. And where will that leave West Chester?

When Randy Oppenheimer from Lakota announced in April 2014 that a joint agreement between the district and the club to operate an all-day kindergarten program on the site was evolving and they were seeking public input—Lakota put Jeff Stec on the case in the form of three public Community Conversations that were held in June to garner public input. Pro levy school types showed up to listen to the paid change agent, but anti-tax people generally stayed home knowing what Stec was. His job was not to garner input—it was to change minds. It’s the old Saul Alinsky Delphi Technique trick talked about over the years—only dressed up with some new terminology. Lakota does not want to make a deal to preserve a piece of their history, they need to make a deal that pulls levy supporters and anti-levy supporters together, so they are using the Boys & Girls Club for that reason. Lakota to do the right thing should do as Randy suggested, and that is auction off the property. If the people who want to build the Boys & Girls Club are really interested in developing the property, they should pay for it without an alliance with government assistance to get premium property dirt cheap—and see what the market value the project will garner in the free market. If that happened, minds would change rapidly into a different direction. It would be my guess that the Historical Society would have more value for the property than the proposed Boys & Girls Club, unless Patti wants to cover the costs herself—which she could do. That would be the best way to proceed.

But to the people who think like the commenter in the Journal News article, they are missing many elements to the story. What makes West Chester great is not rubber stamping all the side-walk proposals, the YMCAs, Libraries, and Krogers, its in fighting for a standard of living that makes our community a—brace yourself—“community.” A community is more than a bunch of buildings and socialites who want to be remembered for their charity, or a school that wants to throw money at their out of control labor union, it’s about people, their history, their chickens and the connection to the past that gives a place a sense of grounding—even to those who move from far away seeking something of substance to fill their lives with meaning. West Chester is good because it has a vigilant population that will fight for its history mixed with a nice conservative base of finance that will make new things for people to enjoy. It takes resistance to offer proper management and an honest government that can make the best decisions possible. And in West Chester there are plenty of those types—and we are lucky to have them.

Rich Hoffman

 CLIFFHANGER RESEARCH & DEVELOPMENT

Listen to The Blaze Radio Network by CLICKING HERE.