Tag: Tea Party

http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2013/06/20/defying-directive-irs-set-to-pay-out-70-million-in-employee-bonuses/

Doc Thompson Rips the IRS: NTEU labor union gives employees $70 million in bonuses

If you want to hear some absolutely hilarious radio commentary, listen to the clip below, it is well worth your time. Doc Thompson and Skip LeCombe during their usual Blaze Radio Network show from 6 AM to 9 AM broadcast all over the world twice a day blasted the IRS for the recent issuing of over $70 million dollars in bonuses to their unionized employees. Many people do not realize that the IRS is unionized work force under the National Treasury Employees Union otherwise known as the (NTEU). So even though there is government furloughs and closed tours through the White House due to financial constraints, the IRS regardless of performance by its employees through their ridiculous collective bargaining agreements are receiving bonuses of an extraordinarily high amount. Doc breaks down the math in the broadcast below, about 5 minutes into the segment. But first Doc and Skip bring news of a terrorist summer camp that is quite serious, but is delivered with the usual Doc Thompson ability to make even the most sinister concepts more digestible with his rambunctious sense of humor. For long time readers here who remember Doc Thompson when he was on 700 WLW, he was functioning under severe handcuffs. Now that he is with The Blaze and reporting to Glenn Beck at Mercury Entertainment, he has freedom that any radio personality would love to have, which is to the benefit of listeners everywhere. The Blaze is available 24 hours a day through streaming audio, and is an experiment from Glenn Beck which broadcasts like any other radio station with news at the top and bottom of every hour. So enjoy this small sample from Doc’s recent show about the IRS bonuses that will make you laugh, but at the same time make you extremely angry.

Doc and Skip were one of the first news outlets to break the IRS bonuses story, but Forbes had a wonderful article about it written by Kelly Phillips Erb which can be seen in its entirety at the link below:

I included this link not just because the article was good, but the comments at the end were fantastic. One comment summed up the situation at the IRS remarkably well, even though I don’t agree with the writer at all—the comment reminded me of the same types of diatribes that were uttered when we begin to analyze collective bargaining agreements among public school teachers as being the cause of continuous tax increase requests. The comment from Peter Reilly shown below made the argument that the IRS needs incentives like great bonuses and pensions to attract “top talent.” This brings up a whole list of problems. But before getting into them, have a look at what he said:

Peter J Reilly, Contributor 1 day ago

For its top people the IRS has to compete in a labor market that pays much better than the IRS. There was recently published list of the top 1,000 paid federal employees. Number 1000 made just over $200,000 per year. Nobody on the list worked for the IRS.

In a regional accounting firm I know of there was a term for partners who made around $200,000 – the bottom quartile. The top quartile probably made about what the lowest paid partners in national firms make. And this is mere CPAs, never mind tax attorneys.

I think very few people go into tax work of any sort based on the sort of inner call that might lead someone to be a physician, a priest or a soldier. It’s clean work with no heavy lifting that pays pretty well. You’ve got to do something to feed your family.

Part of the tax profession is an arms race between people gaming the system and people trying to keep the gaming with reasonable bounds. Both sides require the same knowledge base, education and some common skill sets. In a free democratic society the top gamers will always make more money than the other side.

Working for the IRS might get you a better life work balance and a pension which might make it a better deal at the lower and middle levels, but the Service is at a huge disadvantage in retaining top talent.

For those of us who want a smaller, and more efficient government no matter if the employee is a local school teacher working in public school, or an IRS agent, when the pay and compensation to government work is equal or better than private sector work, then top talent will seek the government job. Reilly’s comment assumes that the IRS needs to have top talent in order to function efficiently. Without question, the NTEU union has made the same argument for its union members that the school teachers, police departments, and other unionized federal workers have made, that the service they provide is important, and that only through collective bargaining does America get the highest quality product.

Well, anybody with a brain knows this kind of thinking is ridiculously foolish, and the fun that Doc Thompson and Skip had in picking the theory to pieces was well justified. The way the system works now is that top talent is seduced to work for government because the pay is so good, and the retirement packages are better than anywhere in the world. That top talent is ruined in the non-competitive government environment where collective bureaucracy rule and individual achievement is frowned upon. Even the best top talent in the world will never make a collective oriented organization function miraculously well when all individuals serve the system of employment rather than the system serving the individuals that make it work. Within a few years of employment, most of the bright-eyed top talent which is employed by the government learns their place in the pecking order, and stop trying to be ambitious, and instead just bide their time, collect their paycheck, and prepare for their retirements, and eventual deaths.

The way things should work is that no federal employee should be unionized. Government also should not pay more than the private sector. Government work offers a security that is not duplicated in private sector work, so the pay should be much lower. Pay should be assessed based on risk level, not statist power. In this way, the private sector should pay a lot more than any government work so that those who wish to make more money will leave government, not join it. If any worker wants to waste their life as a government employee, they should be paid a bare minimum wage in trade for the security of the job. Then and only then will government ever get smaller, and government workers will vote with their minds and not their pocket books. It is the government type employees who vote to keep people like President Obama in power not because they like his socialist policies, but because he is their boss. So long as big government politicians are in office in Washington, job security is ever-present in their positions. And so long as government employees are in a union, they can act as a socialist collective to get bonuses, pay and pensions that they do not deserve. There will always be apologists like the commentator Reilly who believe that the IRS needs top talent to function—to catch those who are “gaming” the system. Well, this isn’t true. Turn the tax collecting system to a flat tax, and simplify the code, and suddenly sophisticated accountants with a broad knowledge of the complicated tax code wouldn’t be needed.

I was at a dinner event recently where a retired FBI agent was attempting to grab the same bottle of wine that I was out of a chilled bucket. I wasn’t in the mood for beer, or any kind of soft drink and the food was too good to just have water with it, so I wanted wine. The agent pointed at the bottle I had in my hand and asked, “Is that Chateau d’Yquem Sauternes? Here let me open it for us.” I looked at the label and tried to identify the label which was written mostly in French and replied, “Here’s your crushed grapes. You tell me.” The old federal worker of course wanted to display to me his knowledge of wine, and inform me of his extensive knowledge of them gained from around the world. All he succeeded in doing was reminding me that he came to such knowledge not by the merit of his work, but by years of kissing ass to work his way up the FBI chain attending little gatherings where expensive wines were tossed into chilled buckets like water bottles in a cooler for a picnic. That mentality does not make the people individually evil, just instruments of collective statism. I felt sorry for that particular FBI agent. His years of work had brought him to a retirement where he knew the names of French wine, but was unable to help a child thread twin string through a kite. He was very happy to joke about his lack of aviation knowledge declaring that such an endeavor required the services of an engineer, not an old FBI agent—then everyone laughed, except for me.

I have seen the same behavior in retired school teachers, retired military personnel, and especially retired bureaucrats. They want to feel that their life has some meaning, especially at the end of it, because their careers offered them nothing of any intellectual substance. They simply showed up at work every day and their labor union did all their fighting for them, so all they had to do was collect their pay, and plan social events with their co-workers using their discretionary income to purchase bottles of wine that other people didn’t have access to–get drunk and reminisce about their wild and crazy days during high school. Those same federal workers plan their vacations each year to Key West where they attend Fantasy Fest living out their most pent-up sexual fantasies. Walk Duval Street every October and interview the topless 50-year-old women, or the pot-bellied IRS cubical worker of 30 years who has traded in their suit for a woman’s dress and wig pretending to be a girl during the famous parade.

Check it out for yourself at the following link. The people who attend that event are upper middle-class types—and those are a creation of government, former FBI agents, school teachers, cops, IRS employees, politicians, adults who spent their entire adult lives adapting to a collective hive who can retire at age 55 and have money to spend because tax payers gave it to them through their labor unions. If I had to bet, I would say the number of people attending Fantasy Fest in Key West were just over 80% government employees.

http://www.fantasyfest.com/

The situation is endemic in all federal agencies, but is especially prevalent at the IRS which should be completely dismantled and replaced with a flat tax. But it won’t because the NTEU union has too much power, including organizing a campaign against the Tea Party from The White House. The next step with these types is to get together over sundown meetings in each other’s back yards and squabble about what bottle of wine to pull from the wine bucket, as such trivia is all that matters to their bureaucratic mindsets after a dozen or more years of employment by the federal government. Just think how many bottles of Chateau d’Yquem Sauternes the IRS workers will be able to purchase with their $70 million dollars in bonuses on top of a salary that is already pushing six figures.

If it’s not evident why the Tea Party wants to reign in the costs of the federal government it is to get control of this kind of statist mentality from employees who should be working for the private sector instead of government. The only beneficiaries to such unionized arrangements is the political machine of Democrats (socialists) who collect the union dues for the re-election of statist candidates, the union workers who get paid a lot of money to do very little, and the wine makers in France who sell most of their stock to retired federal workers because that’s who buys their product. It is in times like these that we should all be thankful that there are people like Doc Thompson on the radio to bring stories about such abuses to light, because without such a radio personality, the abuse would continue on unreported.

Rich Hoffman

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calvin_Coolidge

‘Coolidge’ by Amity Shlaes: Government wanted Stalin, the Tea Party wants Calvin

So what is it that the Tea Party wants in a president, or for that matter in a government? Do we want a royal prince to fly all about the world to kiss the rings of kings, queens and ass clowns? No. Do we want a political class of acadmianuts to dictate to us a morality derived one half from unproven faith, and one half scientific scholarships based on incomplete analysis from intelligentsia? No. Do we want a government with no concept of growth, who can do nothing but over consume until they are bed-ridden mounds of flesh that cannot even get up to walk? No. But when in history was there ever a president who did not exhibit these traits? The answer of course is Calvin Coolidge who took office as vice-president in 1920 and became president in 1923 when Warren Harding died. Coolidge is one of the few presidents who left office in 1929 with a government smaller than when he came in. His time in the White House was quit and relatively uneventful. However, his handling of the economy led to a surge in laissez-faire capitalism after the over-reaching years of the Woodrow Wilson regime took American into the roaring twenties. My good friend Matt Clark interviewed Amity Shlaes who wrote a wonderful biography on Calvin Coolidge simply titled Coolidge. Watch the video of that interview here to learn more.

John Calvin Coolidge, Jr. (July 4, 1872 – January 5, 1933) was the 30th President of the United States (1923–1929). A Republican lawyer from Vermont, Coolidge worked his way up the ladder of Massachusetts state politics, eventually becoming governor of that state. His conduct during the Boston Police Strike of 1919 thrust him into the national spotlight and gave him a reputation as a man of decisive action. Elected in his own right in 1924, he gained a reputation as a small-government conservative, and also as a man who said very little.

Coolidge restored public confidence in the White House after the scandals of his predecessor’s administration, and left office with considerable popularity.^[1] As a Coolidge biographer put it, “He embodied the spirit and hopes of the middle class, could interpret their longings and express their opinions. That he did represent the genius of the average is the most convincing proof of his strength.”^[2] Some later criticized Coolidge as part of a general criticism of laissez-faire government.^[3] His reputation underwent a renaissance during the Ronald Reagan Administration, but the ultimate assessment of his presidency is still divided between those who approve of his reduction of the size of government programs and those who believe the federal government should be more involved in regulating and controlling the economy.^[4]

Critics of the way Coolidge shrunk the federal government of course were in love with the severe micromanaging of the government that was being displayed by Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union. Coolidge would get the blame for The Great Depression which began in the United States in 1929 after Coolidge’s presidency ended. However, the cause of the depression was the global fascination with socialism, and hard-core communism which extended to every corner of the world prior to World War II. In the United States, the period after Coolidge’s White House term was called The Red Decade, because of the spread of communist ideas into mainstream thought.

The Red Decade was a term coined by journalist and historian Eugene Lyons to describe a period in American history in the 1930s characterized by a widespread infatuation with communism in general and Stalinism in particular. Lyons believed this idolization of Joseph Stalin and exultation of Bolshevik achievements to have reached its high point in 1938, running deepest amongst liberals, intellectuals, and journalists and even some government and federal officials.

Lyons argues that American intellectuals gave the then-Stalinist Soviet Union (and by extension, Stalinism) a certain international goodwill and respectability that it did not deserve.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Decade

Much like the failure in modern America to identify the threat of radical Islamic government ambitions, the political left during the Coolidge years failed to identify the downside of communism which was not reported to the public in the newspapers they controlled, and radio broadcasts they voiced. Stalin represented the opposite form of government that Coolidge ran, which has delivered America to the doorstep of tyranny ever since the 1930s. Intellectuals training America’s youth in colleges all over the world had bought into the seduction of Joseph Stalin as they found Calvin Coolidge’s small-government ideas appalling to their statist desires.

Joseph Stalin or Iosif Vissarionovich Stalin (Russian: Иосиф Виссарионович Сталин; born Ioseb Besarionis je J̌uḡašvili, Georgian: იოსებ ბესარიონის ძე ჯუღაშვილი, pronounced [iɔsɛb bɛsariɔnis dze dʒuɣaʃvili]; 18 December 1878^[1] – 5 March 1953) was the de facto leader of the Soviet Union from the mid-1920s until his death in 1953. Among the Bolshevik revolutionaries who took part in the Russian Revolution of 1917, Stalin was appointed General Secretary of the party’s Central Committee in 1922. He subsequently managed to consolidate power following the 1924 death of Vladimir Lenin through expanding the functions of his role, all the while eliminating any opposition. He held this nominal post until abolishing it in 1952, concurrently serving as the Premier of the Soviet Union after establishing the position in 1941.

Under Joseph Stalin’s rule, the concept of “socialism in one country” became a central tenet of Soviet society. He replaced the New Economic Policy introduced by Lenin in the early 1920s with a highly centralised command economy, launching a period of industrialization and collectivization that resulted in the rapid transformation of the USSR from an agrarian society into an industrial power.^[2] However, the economic changes coincided with the imprisonment of millions of people in Soviet correctional labour camps^[3] and the deportation of many others to remote areas.^[3] The initial upheaval in agriculture disrupted food production and contributed to the catastrophic Soviet famine of 1932–1933, known as the Holodomor in Ukraine. Later, in a period that lasted from 1936–39, Stalin instituted a campaign against alleged enemies of his regime called the Great Purge, in which hundreds of thousands were executed. Major figures in the Communist Party, such as the old Bolsheviks, Leon Trotsky, and several Red Army leaders were killed after being convicted of plotting to overthrow the government and Stalin.^[4]

In August 1939, Stalin entered into a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany that divided their influence within Eastern Europe, but Germany later violated the agreement and launched a massive invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941. Despite heavy human and territorial losses, Soviet forces managed to halt the Nazi incursion after the decisive battles of Moscow and Stalingrad. After defeating the Axis powers on the Eastern Front, the Red Army captured Berlin in May 1945, effectively ending the war in Europe for the Allies.^[5][6] The Soviet Union subsequently emerged as one of two recognized world superpowers, the other being the United States.^[7] The Yalta and Potsdam conferences established communist governments loyal to the Soviet Union in the Eastern Bloc countries as buffer states, which Stalin deemed necessary in case of another invasion. He also fostered close relations with Mao Zedong in China and Kim Il-sung in North Korea.

Stalin led the Soviet Union through its post-war reconstruction phase, which saw a significant rise in tension with the Western world that would later be known as the Cold War. During this period, the USSR became the second country in the world to successfully develop a nuclear weapon, as well as launching the Great Plan for the Transformation of Nature in response to another widespread famine and the Great Construction Projects of Communism. In the years following his death, Stalin and his regime have been condemned on numerous occasions, most notably in 1956 when his successor Nikita Khrushchev denounced his legacy and initiated a process of de-Stalinization. He remains a controversial figure today, with many regarding him as a tyrant;^[8] however, popular opinion within the Russian Federation is mixed.^[9][10][11]

Stalin, as head of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, consolidated near-absolute power in the 1930s with a Great Purge of the party that was justified as an attempt to expel “opportunists” and “counter-revolutionary infiltrators”.^[42][43] Those targeted by the purge were often expelled from the party, however more severe measures ranged from banishment to the Gulag labor camps to execution after trials held by NKVD troikas.^[42][44][45]

In the 1930s, Stalin apparently became increasingly worried about the growing popularity of the Leningrad party boss Sergei Kirov. At the 1934 Party Congress where the vote for the new Central Committee was held, Kirov received only three negative votes, the fewest of any candidate, while Stalin received at least over a hundred negative votes.^[46][47] After the assassination of Kirov, which may have been orchestrated by Stalin, Stalin invented a detailed scheme to implicate opposition leaders in the murder, including Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev.^[48] The investigations and trials expanded.^[49] Stalin passed a new law on “terrorist organizations and terrorist acts” that were to be investigated for no more than ten days, with no prosecution, defense attorneys or appeals, followed by a sentence to be executed “quickly.”^[50]

Thereafter, several trials known as the Moscow Trials were held, but the procedures were replicated throughout the country. Article 58 of the legal code, which listed prohibited anti-Soviet activities as counterrevolutionary crime, was applied in the broadest manner.^[51] The flimsiest pretexts were often enough to brand someone an “enemy of the people“, starting the cycle of public persecution and abuse, often proceeding to interrogation, torture and deportation, if not death. The Russian word troika gained a new meaning: a quick, simplified trial by a committee of three subordinated to NKVD –NKVD troika– with sentencing carried out within 24 hours.^[50] Stalin’s hand-picked executioner, Vasili Blokhin, was entrusted with carrying out some of the high-profile executions in this period.^[52]

Many military leaders were convicted of treason and a large-scale purge of Red Army officers followed.^[54] The repression of so many formerly high-ranking revolutionaries and party members led Leon Trotsky to claim that a “river of blood” separated Stalin’s regime from that of Lenin.^[55] In August 1940, Trotsky was assassinated in Mexico, where he had lived in exile since January 1937; this eliminated the last of Stalin’s opponents among the former Party leadership.^[56]

With the exception of Vladimir Milyutin (who died in prison in 1937) and Joseph Stalin himself, all of the members of Lenin’s original cabinet who had not succumbed to death from natural causes before the purge were executed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin

The Great Depression was caused by communism and the over-tampering of economies by left-leaning governments. Stalin was the exact opposite of Calvin Coolidge who presided over one of the best periods of economy the United States ever experienced even handcuffed with the Prohibition policies created during the Wilson Progressive Era. Stalin and his influence throughout the world articulated by seduced journalists created the Great Depression during the Red Decade in America as the statist architects of government wanted to carry America as far away from Calvin Coolidge as possible.

The political left and even many on the political right have found themselves shaped in 2013 intellectually, philosophically, morally, and even ideologically by the events mentioned above. America never recovered from this period of the The Red Decade, because immediately after was World War II, then a brief period of economic boom built off post war economics in the 1950s. Then the communists were back at it with more statist plans coming again through American colleges during the 1960s. The rest is history and indicate a very gradual slide toward complete statism exulted by Joseph Stalin who many intellectuals are glad to support the death, destruction and economic depressions so to witness the equality given to all by communism.

Calvin Coolidge was the shining example of what America could produce in a manager in the Executive Branch. He wasn’t a glory seeker, nor did he in any way desire to be viewed as a king. He simply wanted to work hard on behalf of the country and leave his office better than he found it—and smaller. If history tells any kind of coherent story it is that no matter how good a president is, or no matter how efficient the government, there will always be those threats to individual liberty who will gladly trade tyranny for some measure of security. There is safety in collectivism that is appealing to the weak heart and mind, and there will always be these types of people in a democracy who will vote for more statism through perpetually bigger government. And when things go wrong with their plans, even if they occur in an entirely different decade, they will blame somebody else. In our modern-day it is the incompetent manager in Barack Obama who still five years after taking office is blaming George W. Bush for his failing economy that is cause by his socialist tampering. And so too has history as it was written by liberals, college professors and social scum bags portrayed Joseph Stalin as a saint in spite of the millions of deaths caused by communism, and placed the blame of The Great Depression on the doorstep of Silent Cal, the American president who knew to stay as far away from government tampering as possible to give the economy a chance to grow, which it did.

It is important to know history, and those in the Tea Party are learning. It is for that reason that they find Calvin Coolidge so appealing, and the model for how government should be run going into the 21^st Century. Without the methods of a future Calvin Coolidge type as President of the United States, all projected government activity in America is destined to bankrupt themselves because of their roots in socialism that began as far back as The Red Decade—a period of time created by the political left to answer the prosperity of Calvin Coolidge, one of the greatest presidents that America never knew about—which is how it’s supposed to be.

You can find Amity Shlaes book Coolidge at the following link:

http://www.amazon.com/Coolidge-Amity-Shlaes/dp/0061967556

Rich Hoffman

“Justice Comes With The Crack of a Whip’!”

Liberty Township Tea Party Joins in Law Suit Against IRS: Seeking justice from an uncontrolled tyranny

Press Release as sent: Liberty Township Tea Party Joins in Law Suit Against IRS

Today June 25, 2013 the Liberty Township Tea Party official joined a law suit with the ACLJ, American Center for Law and Justice, in seeking action against the IRS.

The ACLJ filed the amended complaint in our lawsuit against the IRS and the government officials involved in the unconstitutional targeting of conservative groups.

Here is a copy of our press release discussing our amended complaint and our now 41 clients involved in the legal challenge: http://aclj.org/free-speech-2/jay-sekulow-aclj-now-represents-41-conservative-groups-in-federal-lawsuit-against-irs

Here is the online link to the redacted version of our amended complaint: http://media.aclj.org/pdf/tea-party-complaint-amended.pdf

“Plaintiffs seek a declaratory judgment that the Defendants unlawfully delayed and obstructed Plaintiffs’ applications for a determination of tax-exempt status by means of conduct that was based on unconstitutional criteria and impermissibly disparate treatment of Plaintiffs in violation of Plaintiffs’ rights under the First and Fifth Amendments to the United States Constitution and the Administrative Procedure Act. Defendants unlawfully delayed and thereby effectively denied approval of Plaintiffs’ applications for tax exempt status by means of a comprehensive, pervasive, invidious and organized scheme that purposefully established unnecessary and burdensome inquiries and scrutiny of Plaintiffs’ applications based solely upon Plaintiffs’ political viewpoints (or Defendants’ assumption of Plaintiffs’ viewpoints, based on their organizational names). “

The Liberty Township Tea Party applied for 501c3 status with the IRS in May of 2010. Our Tea Party was modeled after the League of Women Voters with the goal of encouraging the community to educate themselves in the political process. After three years and answering the one hundred seven questions asked of us the application has been neither approved nor rejected. The Liberty Township Tea Party began the process of applying for this application with faith in the government agency to process the application in a timely manner. That faith in the government’s ability has been tested. Our group is premised on the goal of smaller government. The IRS’s inability to make a decision, their intrusive, illegal politically motivated questioning prove to us that our bureaucracies are bloated and our representatives have failed miserably in controlling the agencies they have created. Our right to free speech and free assembly has been a bridged.

Liberty Township web site: libertytownshipteaparty.org

Rich Hoffman

I mentioned in a recent article that Joe Strain would soon announce he was going to provide to the public an official Lone Ranger bullwhip. CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW. Well here it is!

The Lone Ranger Bullwhip: By Joseph Strain

The Lone Ranger Bullwhip

Joseph Strain supplied 3 whips for the 2013 production of The Lone Ranger, one black 10 foot, one black 12 foot and one brandy 12 foot.

The whip pictured below is the black 10 foot prototype. The whips were all made from kangaroo, had 10 inch handles, were a finely cut 12 plait with 2 plaited kangaroo bellies. The 32″ falls were alum tanned burgundy latigo and the poppers were black nylon. The whips also had a narrower 4 plait wrist loop measuring 7 inches long. Lone%20Rnager%2010'%20Bullwhip%202

For a limited time, you can order one of these whips exactly as made for the movie by Joseph Strain. Production will take from 4 to 6 weeks from the time of order.

If you love the Lone Ranger, this is a must have item. You can order one at the link below!

http://www.northernwhipco.com/Lone_Ranger_Bullwhip.htm

Rich Hoffman

“Justice Comes With The Crack of a Whip’!”

http://www.theblaze.com/contributions/we-will-no-longer-accept-the-lies-becks-prepared-remarks-for-washington-d-c-rally/

Jason Easley’s Progressive Dream: “There was no Tea Party in Washington………….”

As the actions are self-evident, and crises are unfolding, to avoid repeating myself over and over again, I wasn’t going to speak much on the topic of the large rally held in Washington D.C where Tea Party Patriots from across the country joined together to protest the IRS. But the hilarious analysis of Jason Easley from a very left-winged progressive publication deserves exploration. Little does young Jason know or bother to discover, but the protests were not just in Washington on that pleasant June afternoon, but all across the nation. One rally, smaller than the one in Washington was at the office of John Boehner led by my friend Ann Becker president of the Cincinnati Tea Party, as seen in the video below, where many who couldn’t make the trip to Washington due to time constraints gathered to achieve the same intent—to get the attention of politicians who work as our public servants.

Before explaining the significance of the rally in Washington, and West Chester, have a look at what left-leaning dreamer Jason Easley had to say:

DC Tea Party Rally Bombs as Crowd For ‘Epic’ IRS Protest Rally Is Just 5,000-10,000

By: Jason Easley Jun. 19th, 2013

Moments before a tea party rally that is loaded with right-wing heroes like Glenn Beck, Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Michele Bachmann was about to begin the crowd was estimated at just 5,000-10,000.

At the height of his fame, Glenn Beck drew 87,000 to DC for his Rally to Restore Honor in April 2010. The Tea Party Patriots promised that this would be the biggest tea party rally since 2009-2010, “At noon tomorrow, we are going to tell the world about how the IRS tried to crush the Tea Party movement,” organizers with the Tea Party Patriots organization said in an email to supporters, “…Thousands of volunteers will rally in the largest demonstration of Tea Party support since 2010.”

They aren’t going to even get close to Glenn Beck’s biggest crowd. The livestream host for the rally, The Gateway Pundit’s Jim Hoft, estimated the crowd to be at 5,000-10,000. I would say that may be on the high-end of things, but it could be a potentially realistic estimate for the overall crowd by the time it is all said and done.

It is a major failure for a rally that has been hyped so hard across conservative media to draw such a small crowd. For the sake of comparison, Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity in 2010 drew 250,000 to DC.

Unless there are about 90,000 people stuck in traffic, it looks like this rally won’t be the biggest tea party event since 2010.

It is rather pathetic that an event featuring Glenn Beck, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Michele Bachmann can’t draw a bigger conservative crowd. Once again, the power of the tea party has been greatly exaggerated. The rally only runs from 12-2 PM, so it is not looking good for a huge turnout. The people speaking at and attending this rally won’t believe it, but the IRS scandal has already been debunked.

You can read more at the link below:

https://www.teapartypatriots.org/2013/06/wishful-thinking-dc-tea-party-rally-bombs/

The first problem with the leftist article by young Jason is of an attendance number that is not in dispute. Progressives are notorious for attempting to alter reality to their own liking, as their belief system is not rooted in facts, but feeling. With that said, 87,000 people were just in the front row at the Glenn Beck rally mentioned in the text. The real number in attendance was a quarter million people. Progressives needing a response to the overwhelming conservative outcry responded one month later with the John Stewart rally also mentioned which did have decent numbers from bused in union members to make the crowd look as big as Glenn Beck’s rally. But this report of the event should come as no surprise as the mode of operation for all progressives is evident in the article—pretend that something doesn’t exist which is unpleasant or a threat to their illusion of reality, then carry on as if their version of reality determined through consensus–fact.

The June 2013 Tea Party rally in Washington was able to drum up around 10,000 people in the middle of the week during the summer months. Additional rallies occurred all across the country, yet the young progressive writer wished to ignore the impact of the rally and instead compared it to the very large and organized rallies of 2010 using that benchmark as the reference point for judgment. He did such a thing as those combinations of facts fit the reality he was trying to build up in his mind.

Progressives are able to re-write their recollection of events at will because they practice a philosophy of anti-concepts, meaning they strip meaning away from everything so that no value can be attached to anything. So long as the world functions in this fashion, progressivism can be advocated. However, the world comes crashing down upon progressives when value is attached to even small things. In the face of such value progressives lose the argument 100% of the time. In reporting about the Tea Party rallies all across America, Jason Easley wrote what he wished to be true, not what was actually true. This is why progressives are parasites to the human condition, and are especially untrustworthy, because they do not deal with facts of reality, but only slinky emotions based on desire.

The facts of the matter are that after three to four years of activity the Tea Party can still organize to stand against the government even after suffering through two years of IRS harassment, and an attempt by the media to completely suppress the movement. The Tea Party is still able to show up on a whim at the Capital building lawn in the tens of thousands and protest their government while doing the same elsewhere in the country. And the most frightening aspect of these actions are that the Tea Party, unlike the government employees who work for labor unions, such as what the IRS functions under, are not paid to be there.

The Tea Party does not pay their protestors like the progressive rallies do. During the John Stewart rally mentioned above compared to the Glenn Beck rally, the AFL-CIO, SEIU, and many teacher unions bused in their members who were actually paid to be present. For the Glenn Beck rally, the participants paid for the whole event out of their own pocket. That is the big difference, and that is what terrifies the progressives. They see vigilant activity still coming from the Tea Party after many attempts have been made to suppress them, yet they still are showing up, and they are angrier than ever. In the face of such facts, Jason Easley could only count heads and attempt to compare apples to grapes hoping that he could alter reality just by believing that his thoughts can change reality—but they can’t.

Here is the whole rally in case you missed it:

Rich Hoffman

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10128539/Man-of-Steel-gets-box-office-boost-from-Supermans-God-fearing-fans.html

Hans Zimmer’s ‘Man of Steel’ Soundtrack: A love for America that only musical notes can render

If you offer yourself as a social commentator of not just how things are, but how things will be, it is important to always report information that is ahead of the curve, well before the mainstream has caught on to the changing circumstances. In that regard articles like the one I’m about to write might seem trivial as it does not deal with any of the major scandals coming out of Washington, the tragedies of education, or the generally demoralization of America by forces of collective remedy, but it is important in a way that hidden behind chaos. The other day my kids gave me for Father’s Day the deluxe soundtrack to Man of Steel, the new Superman movie by Hans Zimmer, CLICK HERE TO REVIEW. This gift was more than just a metaphor for how my children view me, but is one of severe substance for my personal musical tastes. Currently on my iPod I do not have a single lyrical music piece—not a single one that is not associated with a motion picture. I have stated many times that mythology is the most important thing in my life and I study mythology incessantly, especially contemporary mythology. Movies are the biggest contributors to modern mythology so my musical tastes center on enjoying the music that helps tell such stories through sound. So I listen to a lot of movie soundtracks.

To fit the Man of Steel soundtrack which is two disks of music on my iPod I had to take off the last of my favorite lyrical music like the work by Muse and a few classic rock songs. My iPod is an 8 gig type which is plenty for me, but it is currently 99% full and consists entirely of movie soundtracks—everything ranging from The Sound of Music, to Dark Knight Rises. I seldom listen to pop music because they are often songs about small ideas, boy meets girl, boy loses girl, girl wants a new boy—that kind of garbage that is just tripe. In my music I want to feel from it that I can conceptualize the largest ideas and still have room to spare. For me, it takes symphony orchestra music, and more specifically movie soundtracks. With those qualifiers, the new Man of Steel soundtrack done in a deluxe DTS format is the best of the best. For soundtrack lovers, it is simply the best of its kind to date. It is so good that surprisingly, the soundtrack was sold out all over the city of Cincinnati which I didn’t expect. Only two stores had a copy of Man of Steel, one was the Barnes and Noble at the Streets of West Chester, and the Barnes and Noble in Kenwood. The one in West Chester was a copy that was pre-ordered, and was on hold till the claimant stopped by to pick it up.

This sent my son-in-law on quite an adventure to locate the soundtrack so that he and my daughter could give it to me on Father’s Day. On Saturday June 15^th just a few hours after we had seen the movie the night before he stopped by the West Chester location to see if the clerk would cut loose of the one copy they had. Because a sufficient amount of time had transpired the clerk allowed my son-in-law to buy the reserved copy, which then allowed him to give it to me the next day prior to our Father’s Day festivities.

The soundtrack itself has a cover made of metal, which surprised me as the cost of production would have been much higher. Also, the soundtrack contained two disks, one of the actual music used in the film, and another that is experimental music created by Hans Zimmer while he worked out the themes of the film’s characters. It was this second one that had some of the most unusual music I have heard in years. But the more I dug into the soundtrack to the film I noticed there was quite a bit more to it than just musical compositions designed to help tell a story. There was an extra “umpf” to this collection of music that was difficult to put my finger on.

I spent all of Father’s Day listening to the two hours of music when I could, over and over again, and still there was a nagging concept that I couldn’t quite articulate. The music by German born Hans Zimmer created for a movie that had a global market in mind, had written a score that seemed extremely patriotic to American ideas. Zimmer for the track had brought together twelve of the best drummers in the world, names like Shelia E., Junkie XL, Josh Freeze, and many others who worked with a full symphonic orchestra on a score that hit a wide range of themes and emotional arcs. Musically, it is simply fantastic. But there was more to it than just goodness……

As I read through the book that came as an insert in the two CD case, I found a quote by Peter Asher who co-produced the soundtrack with Hans Zimmer. He stated in writing:

For this Superman, Man of Steel, Hans has managed to create a supremely American score. Perhaps we Europeans fall in love with “Truth, Justice, and the American Way” with all the extra enthusiasm of a long-distance romance – maybe with a higher level of commitment than those born into the relationship. While avoiding the specific and lubricious emotionality of rock and roll on the one hand and the corn fields of Aaron Copland on the other, this is the score for an America both modern and timeless, both realistic and optimistic. An ideal and a reality. And for a Superman we can greet as a true hero and in whom we can believe with all our hearts.

Reading this statement from Asher coming from a group of Europeans who worked as producers of not just the soundtrack to Man of Steel but also for the film with Christopher Nolan, there was extra effort by them to pay tribute to the uniquely American ideas that built the mythology behind Superman, particularly in this latest rendition. CLICK HERE FOR MY REVIEW. Hans Zimmer as an immigrant to America himself knows that he would have no place else in the world besides Hollywood, U.S.A. which would allow him to use his unique gift of music to produce the kind of work he currently does for some of the most popular films in the world. Germany does not make films like Man of Steel. For that matter France, Spain, Italy, Russia, China, nobody makes films like what America does, because such ideas are produced under the context of freedom, and no other method. It takes a freely focused society to make a film like Man of Steel where even the music soundtrack is desired with intense demand. For a change, here was a group of very creative people who got together to honor that freedom behind the character of Superman.

I have been collecting movie soundtracks my entire life. I have read the insert to every single one of those soundtracks and I can’t think of a single time that a producer like Peter Asher ever admitted to “loving” America and taking pains to articulate that love through music. The closest to an honest admission to such Americana that I can remember was the score to Far and Away by John Williams. But even that was very subdued by him for obvious political reasons. John Williams was very careful not to show Hollywood any overtly patriotic reverence to America in that movie about the American frontier from the perspective of Irish Americans settling the vast expanses of the Wild West. Williams like all creative people and members of intelligentsia know that to declare patriotism to America is to turn away from the progressive “cause” which has taken over Hollywood, politics, and even American business. So they are careful to keep their opinions neutral and let their art speak where their mouths would otherwise be chastised.

So it is quite extraordinary that Hans Zimmer and the team that put together the soundtrack to Man of Steel have openly declared their love of America, and that Zimmer put together a score that professes a love for everything that is built around the American idea—which is epitomized by Superman. The current trend as I’ve spoken about before, in film is to turn away from socialism and progressive causes. The art produced by Americans are beginning to reflect a shift in values that is first seen in entertainment, which will be followed by the culture at large. I have been thinking such a thing for a long time. The work of Glenn Beck, Doc Thompson, and even Judge Napolitano has opened a dialogue in American entertainment that has not been present since the decline of the western in film. I have listened intently to the music of Hans Zimmer for a long time, from the fantastic soundtrack of Gladiator to the Pirates of the Caribbean and have been convinced that Zimmer has a tremendous love of freedom which emerges from the notes he paints on a page for orchestras to bring to life. In the film Dark Knight Rises Hans Zimmer’s score was dark, brooding, but strangely patriotic. I’ve listened to it hundreds of times over the last year, and there is no mistaking it. But my suspicion has been confirmed with the Man of Steel soundtrack. The music is unquestionably patriotic, even holy, and it doesn’t apologize for it– not once. If the meaning of the music wasn’t clear enough then the words of Peter Asher spells it out.

I expect that an American Renaissance is well underway. With the scandals of the current day in full bloom, many cannot see this renaissance for what it truly is as the effects have not yet hit popular music, television shows, or even politics. But the music of Man of Steel makes clear that a new hope is on the horizon as creative geniuses like Hans Zimmer is honestly scoring music that is reshaping American culture from the jealous minds of the typical European and embracing the value which has long been ignored, and abused. I am deeply grateful that my son-in-law went to the extra trouble to find this fabulous soundtrack for me as a Father’s Day gift. It is one of the best works of music I have ever heard and will remain that way for many, many years. The musical geniuses of old like Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven had their day to export the values of Europe to the entire world through their classical music which held in it the values of Victorian society. The new geniuses of symphony, like John Williams and Hans Zimmer are American, and their mark has been made, and our world culture is shaping around it. To get a hint of what that world looks like and feels, just listen to the new soundtrack to Man of Steel, and the notes provided there by Hans Zimmer will give you a glimpse. That glimpse fills me with overwhelming hope that a day where justice and value will once again be prized components of a society that is not afraid of its own shadow. Remember where you read my words when ten years from now the evidence begins to emerge.

To understand the magnitude of the progressive left media influence and its hatred of goodness read this article for proof:

The Man of Steel soundtrack is so much about goodness that it is simply angelical in every meaning of the word. Thank you Hans Zimmer!

Rich Hoffman

http://westchesterbuzz.com/2013/06/14/lakota-unveils-phase-one-of-strategic-plan-seeks-feedback/

The Pathetic Effort of Lakota Schools: To understand why, read ‘The Naked Communist’

I don’t even take the Lakota School System serious any more. Since January of this year, a group of residents, teachers, students, administrators and school board members have been working together to form a strategic plan that will help guide the future of the Lakota Local School District. The result of this so-called first phase, which covers the strategic areas and goals identified by the mentioned “group,” is now available for the Lakota community’s review and comment, before the board considers adoption of the recommended plan next Monday, June 24. You can see that plan for yourself at the link below, but let me save you some time. The intent of the whole “phase one” strategy is listed on page four, after all the flowery details in the preceding pages. Lakota, after all the discussion we’ve engaged in and the millions upon millions of dollars in salary that has been spent on these people, have come up with a brilliant strategy…………..to simply ask for more money. Here are “their” words. They want to “transition Lakota to an organization with sustainable resources and funding to achieve its goals and mission.” They want to “build a financial plan that merits continued public investment and will sustain the mission.” They want to “develop a resource plan that will help sustain the mission.” Then they want to “communicate the financial status to increase understanding and support.” In short what that means is they want to find a way to pass more school levies then find a way to use the West Chester Community Foundation to get a few business owners to turn the other way and cough while they raise taxes on their properties, putting pressure on other businesses to do the same with peer pressure. Lakota hasn’t learned a thing.

If it were me and I had given Lakota schools a business assignment to provide a financial sustainability analysis of their future needs and they got together in a group of the mentioned patrons from January 2013 after spending thousands upon thousands of dollars in 2012 and 2013 on the “Community Conversations” program, and 5 months later presented me with that PDF file in a presentation, I would have fired every single person who worked on it. The work they presented is an insult to the intelligence of anyone reading it. It is a scam at best, and then to write “draft” in the background of the document attempting to make the gibberish look more important is just rubbing salt into a wound cut open by such a ridiculously camouflaged levy request. They might as well have said, phase one, we want to find a way to ask for more money. Phase two, we intended to propose another tax increase trying to make it look like we did a whole lot of thinking before putting the issue on the ballot. And Phase three, we spend the money we get from the tax increase on new union contracts which are up in the summer of 2014 for renewal.

I am convinced now more than ever that all government services from schools to the police and EMS services are designed by statist supports for aims that were constructed by the 1958 book, The Naked Communist. CLICK HERE TO REVIEW. That is the only reasonable conclusion one can make when the end game to a parade of never ending tax requests are made by government organizations is analyzed. Just in my local area alone, the below tax increase requests are listed for the August and November elections of 2013. Many of these communities just passed similar taxes just a few years ago, so there is no plan on how to sustainably grow a community. There is no care given when one branch of government such as police and fire services ask for property tax money for their needs then a few months later a school asks for another levy on the same property tax. They are all government yet they all want to be treated individually as they do not share their funding. For instance if public education operated with a surplus, they would never think to share the money with police and fire services. They simply give their unions pay increases then ask for more money. The police and fire fighting unions do the same, but they all take money from the same pot…….property ownership.

Issues filed for August 6, 2013 Special Election

Filing deadline is May 8, 2013

1 Deerfield Twp Replacement & Increase 4.0 mills, Police & EMS continuing period of time.

2 Franklin City School District Additional 7.92 mills, Current expenses continuing period of

time.

3 Lebanon City School District Renewal 2.0 mills, Permanent Improvement 5 yrs.

Issues filed for November 5, 2013 General Election

Filing deadline is August 7, 2013 4:00 pm

Lebanon City Additional 7.0 mills, Fire & Ambulance 5 yrs. Franklin Public Library Additional 1.0 mill, current expenses continuing period of time. Washington Twp Additional 3.0 mills, Fire & EMS continuing period of time.

http://www.co.warren.oh.us/bdelec/election_info/WEBissues07.pdf

The only thing that makes sense when viewing the public behavior of these government workers is that they are paid so well that they don’t question the statist strategy that they inherited from the “feds” but are simply doing their jobs. Those jobs were designed by radicals in the far away land of Washington with the intentions against America that were outlined in The Naked Communist. There simply is not another explanation for the lunacy that government services continue to offer as reasonable justifications for their absurd fiscal policies. At some point in time property ownership gets taxed to a saturation point, and then it’s over. Government buys up the defaulted properties through government backed loans, and a free society is nudged into a statist one with the corrosive, incremental votes of a naive public.

I wish I could say that the latest drivel coming from my home district of Lakota was a surprise, but it’s not. They are like virtually every public school in America. They were designed by statists in the Department of Education to destroy property ownership by tricking Americans to vote their rights away through the free babysitting service that is public education. The employees involved if they worked for any competent employer would be fired on the spot for presenting such ridiculous justifications for their ineptness. The people who put together that document for the Phase One development of levy request at Lakota are in denial on two fronts. First is the real intent of public education which they don’t want to consider since they are so well paid as government workers. Two, that a community will be willing to always support an institution of learning that has no control over its finances—no control over the collective bargaining agreement with its union. They expect that taxes can always go up and that there is no limit. That is the essence of what their Phase One presentation defines as their objectives after a lot of money was spent formulating it, and time consumed which can never be redeemed. For those reasons, I would terminate all employees involved and turn the document over to some first graders, who could surely do a better job. If that is all the highly paid administrators can come up with at Lakota for dealing with their financial situation, our community could do no worse, because the proposal of Phase One is simply pathetic.

Rich Hoffman

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/439668500/liberty-is-rising-truth-in-media-project-0

Ben Swann’s Bold New Endeavor: “Liberty is Rising Truth in Media”

I didn’t know that Ben Swann had left Channel 19 officially until I emailed him the other day regarding some info on the IRS scandal in Cincinnati. The email had bounced back and I was reminded that Swann was now on the next stage of his journalistic adventure, an endeavor that he fully expects to change the world with. For those who do not yet know, Swan is starting his own investigative journalism endeavor that is quite ambitious, and incredibly bold. But who would expect less from the co-anchor of Fox News 19 in Cincinnati who became internationally famous with his Reality Check expositions which featured hard reporting of very controversial material. Swann is raising money for his new endeavor which looks to prove a nightmare for government statists all over the world and is something to get excited about. To date, Swann has raised $140,000 of his intended goal of $1,250,000. I would encourage you dear reader to contribute something if you have it to Swann’s endeavor. A preview of what he has in mind can be seen below. Under the flag of this pioneering effort, Ben Swann has an opportunity to bring much-needed offense to the liberty movement that will save a lot of money down the road for everyone, so the investment is well worth the cost. Have a look.

When I first started doing this Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom site, very few people were doing any looking into why statist policies were corroding virtually every aspect of our modern government. But just a few years later, there are several individuals and groups that have formed which are changing the way the news is reported, and giving people who have been forced to live behind the veil of foggy recollection, to expose what is hidden behind that fog. My friend Matt Clark comes to mind from Michigan, a young budding radio personality who I think will be the next Glenn Beck in a few years time. The Blaze has jumped on the scene under Glenn Beck where my friend Doc Thompson is now changing radio broadcasting forever with an all internet radio show that bypasses FCC regulation allowing the truth to be truly seen without government censorship applied through strong arming tactics and audits. And now Ben Swann has given up a career as a very good journalist and news anchor that would no doubt lead him to many millions of dollars as a television personality to start his own thing to be run his own way—no editor to mold his stories to FCC sensibilities, and no advertisers to boycott his entire station if he doesn’t play by collective rules of political behavior. Instead, Ben Swann has elected to pursue truth, justice, and the American way the way every American should, through private enterprise and personal initiative. Swan is going to be his own boss, and do things his way, and his way is the libertarianism of a new generation that is deeply inspired by former congressman and presidential candidate Ron Paul.

Ben Swann is not going for money, fame, or power; he is trying to fix the country with a sincerity that is unique, and deeply needed. I sincerely support, and hope that Ben Swann is successful with his enterprising endeavor. If he is, it would help bring about the kind of world that I am fighting for, one that centers on individual responsibility, focuses on freedom, runs a republic government through fiscal responsibility, and stays out of the individual lives of all Americans. His success is my success in that if he gains the ability to do what he wants to do with his Liberty is Rising Truth in Media Project, then the fight my readers here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom have been fighting for over three years gets a whole lot easier, and expands in ways that have not yet been possible.

Where Ben Swann has an advantage is that he has been a media insider who has not been corrupted, or compromised at a very youthful stage in his career. Many freedom fighters discover through trial and error that the poor methods of their past do not add up to a good future. When the moment of crises arrives, they repent, change their ways, and grab on to some political leader like Ron Paul and follow his message toward their personal salvation. Swann however never appears to have fallen from any kind of grace in his life, and instead has started with a position of strength that he never lost. This gives him a powerful advantage in the world of the media as an independent reporter who is functioning from the raw ambition of an unconquered spirit. With his Truth in Media endeavor, political movers and shakers won’t be able to call up his boss to complain that Swann’s hard-hitting reporting is upsetting the “applecart” or that his coverage of public school funding is “harming the children” meaning advertisers focusing their marketing to children on a given network cannot be manipulated into reeling in a journalist in pursuit of the truth. Swann will be free to hit hard in his reporting, and with his already successful background in journalism, will position himself to be a major force in revolutionizing the news industry.

In my ideal world, I would like to see all progressive news outlets fail under conservative competition and the Overton Window of American politics move to a new spot where the Alex Jones types on InfoWars represent the far-right in politics, Ben Swann represents the “middle” and Glen Beck represents the left. Everything to the left of Beck would not have a market in America because nobody would be paying any attention to them. Progressive news outlets would be forced to return to European politics where their diatribes originated from. Those progressive networks have only succeeded in the absence of competition in the same way that public education has only called themselves successful by holding a monopoly on the process. But it all starts with a dream, and then the dream must be followed with action. Thus far, Ben Swann has taken that action and he is well on his way to meeting his $1,250,000 target amount that will launch him into the journey that will bring the world a scenario close to the one I’ve outlined above. And that is a reality that is worth dreaming about.

If you’d like to help Ben Swann with his new endeavor, you can see more about it at the link below along with a demo show of his proposed Truth in Media enterprise.

For those like me who miss Ben Swann from Channel 19 you can visit his website at:

http://benswann.com/

Rich Hoffman

The movie is better than Dark Knight Rises, and anyone who reads here knows how much I loved that film. CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW.

‘Man of Steel’ Review: A message of American pride and conceptual philosophy

The other morning over breakfast my wife and I had a raging debate of mankind’s need and desire to behold simple “concepts,” as philosophy defines them. It is because of concepts that I occasionally detour away from the normally serious matter at this site and dwell in great detail about the nature of Hollywood movies and published books. In my private life I have two basic loves which drive me, a love of philosophy and the mythologies of thought which attempt to frame them to the human world through “concepts.” Most everything else I care about in life drips off the leaves of knowledge from those basic forms of art esthetically. The reason for the raging debate over breakfast with my wife was over the value of concepts in people’s lives versus a given morality. My wife values morality among mankind as the highest honor, even over the air she breaths. If she had to choose between morality and taking another breath, she would choose morality. However, my side of the debate declared that the ability to behold a “concept” of morality is far more important, because without having the ability to grapple with conceptual ideas, morality falters in both human beings and animals 100% of the time. I explained to her that the ability to understand concepts was like getting popcorn into a bowl that has been popped in a kitchen. If a person’s mind is small, they have a small bowl from which they can place popcorn in from which to consume. If a person’s mind is large they can hold a lot more popcorn. In my metaphor I was of course transposing popcorn with ideas, or in this case “concepts” in order to explain why mankind is so sick these days. We spend the first five years of our lives being given gigantic “concepts” from our parents, grandparents, friends, and extended family through the toys we play with and ideas they give us. We are given from birth extremely large bowls which hold a lot of metaphorical popcorn so that concepts can be formed in our minds allowing us to walk, speak, and develop ranges of physical movement. But from every year after our first kindergarten class in public school, we find that our bowls get smaller and by age 10 to age 15 our ability to hold thinking concepts diminishes greatly so that by the time we are grown adults, instead of holding a bowl of popcorn with most of what could possibly be popped in the kitchen, we are lucky to get a few small kernels into our 35-year-old brains. I view human mythology as a way of expanding our metaphorical bowls so that our minds can hold more philosophy about the way life should be lived, and today in all of human history it is the movies produced from Hollywood which are the strongest creators of modern mythology, which makes them of great interest to me. This basic preamble is needed before I say that I understand why so many critics stated that they did not enjoy the new movie which I have been raving about—Man of Steel. They did not like the movie because they are suffering from conceptual handicaps given to them by their crumbling society, of which the most recent rendition of Superman clearly was conceptually articulating. So I will provide you dear reader with a conceptual handicap free review so that you can understand why a slight tear was running down your face at the end of the movie, and why you thought about standing up and clapping at the end while others actually did with a ruckus ovation.

I have spoken before about how important the concept of Superman is to my family in a previous article. CLICK HERE TO REVIEW. Before seeing the film, we went to Newport on the Levee to view the new Man of Steel film by Zach Snyder and one of my favorite modern film producers, Christopher Nolan and have dinner at Claddah’s Irish Pub. My daughter, son-in-law, and wife wanted to make a big event out of this film with me so we went to that particular theater and dining location to place the experience in proper perspective. The AMC theaters at Newport are built three stories above the mall below, and are unique in their design. Going up the escalator to arrive in the lobby is literally like arriving in some heavenly plateau which is appropriate for a modern viewing of Superman, especially for my family. The reasons I love Ayn Rand’s characters in The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged are because her characters created during the same era as Superman are about the same elevated sense of mankind’s potential. For Ayn Rand, Superman is in all men who have a thinking mind. Yet for the character of Superman created by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster, high school students living in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1933 their large concept ultimate man had extraordinary powers given to him from the sun’s energy on earth. But all these creations of the mind were a direct answer to the communism being imported into the United States by progressives during the roaring twenties and early thirties. It was a time when President Calvin Coolidge was going door to door running for office with a miniature chalk board trying to educate voters on the perils of socialism. Superheroes were born in literature as a way to protect the concept of Americanism against the anti-concept of European communism. Young Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster created Superman to define what living life in America was all about creating a symbol that allowed the concept of Americanism to be defined in a single character named Kal-El from the planet Krypton.

To understand what this 2013 version of Superman is all about, let me explain how the film ends without giving away any particular spoilers. Superman smashes out of the sky a drone aircraft which is attempting to spy on him and proceeds to lecture the U.S. military of his need for privacy even though he understands the military is afraid of all his vast powers. Superman continues to make clear that nothing the military can do will hurt him anyway, so the effort is useless. The military then asks Kal-El, how they can know Superman won’t use his superior powers against the American people. Superman explains with a smile, “I grew up in Kansas and am as American as there is; you’re just going to have to trust me.” This is almost the last scene of the film. Superman was metaphorically speaking on behalf of all Americans to their modern government which is currently plagued by scandals such as the IRS, Benghazi, and spygates against the American people. Superman represented in mythic form the power of every individual American who may not be able to leap about like Superman, or shoot lasers from their eyes, but hold the potential to be super in their own way which Ayn Rand would get more specific about in her own overmen exploits of literary endeavor. The message at the end of Man of Steel is that Superman wanted to be left alone to live as an American and that if he wanted to he’d crush anybody who stood in his way of achieving that goal. He chose to value the people of earth for the hope he had for them which was something that was lost to his dying planet of Krypton.

Russell Crow who played Kal-El’s father in Man of Steel was very good in his role of explaining how Krypton became doomed in the first place. The highly technological society of the Kryptonians had enjoyed a period of great expansion in their culture where they planted seed societies throughout known space. But as time moved on, their society had become more politically corrupt leaving them to pursue short-sighted goals like stripping out their own planet’s core for power, instead of harnessing the power from neighboring star systems, as they had in the past. The Krypton metaphor was clearly in reference to our own times where space travel has been cut away to virtually nothing in America as left-leaning politicians squabble in endless debate with political apathy serving as the centerpiece of their action. On Krypton, as many are attempting to suggest here on earth, they devolved from a flourishing society that embraced personal freedom and enterprise to one that micro managed the smallest detail of their lives including the birth of children which had been taken over by a technology called the Codex. Jor-El and his wife gave birth to the first free-born child in centuries on Krypton. That child was Kal-El–Superman, a free-born creation of two loving parents. Knowing that Krypton was imploding on itself, even as the political class squabbled in denial of the impending doom Jor-El sent his child to earth to allow the best of what Krypton was to live on elsewhere. All this while General Zod was staging a rebellion to turn Krypton back into a society under his managed care. In Man of Steel, Zod is a collectivist born under the dystopian care of the Codex, not having natural parents, but instead being raised to and for the collective Krypton society. (I knew Christopher Nolan would not let me down.) I was very concerned about how Krypton’s demise would be handled in the film, and it is very appropriate to the direction our current society is devolving. Man of Steel just in this regard is conceptually brilliant……….but that’s not all.

Even Kal-El’s adoptive parents were heroic as Jonathan Kent died in the Man of Steel defying a tornado’s wrath. He ran into the blistering storm as it consumed cars and entire homes to save a few more people only to get caught because he broke his ankle and couldn’t run away fast enough……..but he saved Kal El’s dog! That is a great dad! The good guys in the film were all heroic in their own way. Ultimately the pinnacle decision of the film was Kal-El having to decide whether the society of Krypton deserved to be resurrected on earth through the Codex killing all of humanity, or should the people who live on the planet be given the opportunity to have hope for their own future. Superman ultimately decided that Krypton had its chance, and it screwed it up. The people of earth had a real chance to get it right, and Superman had made a decision to lead them to the light under his guidance. Superman made a value judgment between the two societies, Krypton had taken a noticeably collectivist route and destroyed itself, and earth was headed in the same direction, but could still change course.

On the way home from the movie my family was philosophizing about the very idea of Superman, a man who was invincible and could be harmed by nothing on earth. For many this is a boring idea because the wish is to see conflict in their heroes brought about by fear and weakness. But that is not what Superman is all about. Superman could decide to rule the earth if he wanted as there would be nobody to stop him, but he doesn’t, because he is a good man who chooses to spend his time helping humanity instead of acting as a parasite off of it to feed his own ego. What Kal-El gained from his adoptive parents was a sense of knowing the difference between right and wrong which would be the key to allowing the grown-up Superman to use his powers for good, instead of evil. General Zod, with all his good intentions openly declared at the end of the film that his sole purpose in life was to serve the greater good of Krypton by any means necessary. He was speaking as a product of the collective and might as well have been a Russian revolutionary from 1917 marching around Petrograd destroying any life that stood in the way of communism, as the greater good of mother Russia was more important than the whims of any individual who might think they were serving good as it is defined by anybody. As I was explaining all this to my family a drunk driver nearly ran into the side of our minivan. I reacted as I have hundreds and hundreds of times over the years, with quick aversion out of harm’s way. It happened so quick that I barely paused in my sentence structure and after the danger was averted, I proceeded with the explanation of my metaphor without pause. Such situations are only dangerous if the mind surrenders itself to panic, and I don’t. After years of training myself, there is little that worries me. And it is this kind of attitude that Kal-El maintained throughout the Man of Steel once he had become comfortable in his role as Superman, savior of the planet earth from falling to a similar fate as his home planet Krypton. All men and women come to such a place in their own minds once the concept of goodness is understood by them. But first they must have a bowl big enough to hold the concept of such goodness and behold the definitions of evil in the same container. Once there, the mind can eliminate danger from its life-like avoiding a drunk driver by simply taking evasive action without any fanfare. Panicky social commentary asking politicians for more public safety never works. The truth is politicians are actually quite powerless to provide any safety without stealing from some to give to others in legalized theft. All they can really do is react as a second-hander and write new laws which bring our present society that much closer to the fictional fate of Krypton.

At the conclusion of Man of Steel my family sat till the end of the credits as viewers gradually left the theater. We were the last to leave. Several young men who might look like gang-like thugs in any other circumstance from the streets of Cincinnati were wearing the Superman emblem on their shirts and had obviously given up for the evening any youthful decadence they might otherwise engage in to see a story of “hope” unfold upon the silver screen. A young man covered in tattoos and body piercings saw me smiling at his big “S” imprinted across his shirt as he left the theater to descend the escalator back down into the shopping complex of Newport on the Levee. His first reaction was a bit of anxiety as he thought I was laughing at his immature love of Superman. But I gave him a reassuring wink as he walked by to let the young man know that I understood. He was attempting to behold a higher concept of what “man” should be, and I didn’t want him for a moment to think I didn’t approve. He smiled boyishly as he walked by, realizing that my gaze at him was not condescending, but quite the opposite.

Small-minded reviewers after they saw the movie found that without large concepts in their own imaginations to allow them to behold the messages of the film they were regulated to commenting on the physical appearance of Henry Cavell, the young man who played Kal-El or criticizing the 40 minute climax which took place in an epic battle all over the globe ending in a fist fight between Superman and Zod which migrated into space at times where even satellites fell from the sky in destruction. Critics spoke about the metaphors of 9/11 as half of the city of Metropolis was destroyed in the gigantic battle leaving a crater of cleared buildings in the center where the two earthly gods did battle in the climatic ending with Superman snapping the neck of Zod. When Kal-El broke the neck of the villain there was emotion in the audience. It was 1 AM in the morning, and the audience was filled back to the projection booth. One man yelled out from the crowd………….”damn!” Others clapped. Some whistled. It was not a critical appraisal, but one of approval from the audience, of seeing a battle between right and wrong, good and evil displayed clearly in front of them, resolving itself with the clear decision of a nearly decapitated villain.

Man of Steel is about “big concepts” and it assists the viewer in grasping those ideas which require large conceptual bowls to hold. It is why in spite of the attempts by established Ellsworth Toohey type film critics taught in their institutions of learning to have small concepts in their lives, not large ones; Man of Steel will become the next $1 billion dollar film franchise. Shortly after the drunk driver nearly hit us on the way home, and I dropped my kids off at their house, I thought of the export potential of this film. Man of Steel is about undeniably American ideas and it didn’t waiver from that responsibility for even a moment. Superman didn’t say he stood for “truth, justice, and the American way,” at the end of the movie, he simply said…………..”I’m an American.” What a wonderful thing for kids throughout the world to see whether they are in London, or Delhi. The best vehicle for projecting American ideas to the world is the film industry of Hollywood, which has traditionally been consumed by left leaning communist ideologues, like what’s represented in the upcoming Matt Damon film Elsyium. Most movies that Hollywood produces like Elsyium or the 2012 fall attempt with Tom Hanks called Cloud Atlas are not so subtle attempts to sell socialism to America and the world. But the box office take usually tells the story as fans reject the message. They will go see the movies for entertainment, but quickly drop them, as word of mouth does not spread like wild-fire, the way it does during the very capitalist movie messages like Iron Man, and now Man of Steel, which is going to break records during its opening weekend. The film made $21 million just off Thursday midnight shows, and $50 million on Friday alone.

Man of Steel is a fantastic film. It is worth watching many more times than once. It is a pleasure to live in a culture that can produce films like Man of Steel where the story telling is first class, the visual effects epic, the music astonishing, but most importantly, the concept is huge. The value of Man of Steel is in its ability to generate a concept that is epic in scope and definitive in its message. There is no question where the message of Man of Steel intends to go, and it is in no way complimentary to evil, weakness, or even blind dedication to a race of people just because they represent one’s ancestors. It is more valuable as an American export than all the money that is currently spent on defense because the message is clear, and void of politics from any party. Man of Steel is film making at its best and the message to everyone in the world with a mind to think is one of goodness! It is a big bowl of philosophy that will take multiple viewings for those functioning with small bowls of conceptual thinking and will require expanding enough to behold the real message of Superman, which is certainly one of hope. A hope that earth will find its way and not fail the way Krypton did, leaving that society to live on in the rebellion of an innovative young couple who decided to go against their entire society and have a natural child who would have to flee their planet and live again as the shining beacon of truth, justice, and the American way for not just on a continent in North America, but the entire world which desperately needs the message of Man of Steel.

One particular scene in Man of Steel defines the entire film. It’s a scene when young Kal-El is being picked on by a group of bullies who are around 10 years old. The little Superman is reading a book, called Plato’s Republic. It wasn’t Tom Sawyer, or the Diary of Anne Frank. It was a work of philosophy that the budding superhero was reading, and a message to all viewers was that Man of Steel is not just an action movie, it’s a work of conceptual philosophy designed to give mankind the tools it needs to save itself. All society needs to do is listen to the message and allow their minds to conceptually hold the memorandum of goodness which is represented immaculately by Superman: Man of Steel.

Rich Hoffman