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Published on May 05, 2013 17:00

Community Foundation Makes a Political Decision: Levy Addicts purchase “love” with other people’s money

Stop the presses! I thought the Community Foundation of West Chester and Liberty Township refused to accept funds or support political statements with their local charity group. Yet as the Lakota school system is gearing up for support of another levy attempt using their public relations machinery to close a nearly $2 million dollar budget deficit projected for 2014 due to employee wage increases, the Community Foundation did a really nice job of putting their name behind two teachers from Lakota, Amy Smith and Dean Hume featuring them with the Lakota Educator of Excellence Award. The Community Foundation promoted their picks with the following two videos featuring the teachers. Have a look.

The Community Foundation had this to say about teacher Amy Smith:

Those who nominated Amy Smith indicate that there is no teacher more deserving than she to receive the “Educator of Excellence Award.” Amy is described as a compassionate and caring teacher who goes above and beyond for her students. She is often spotted at her students’ sporting events and dance recitals, and has been known to call parents at home after school hours just to update them on something their child accomplished that day at school. Amy works to ensure that each of her students’ needs are met, whether that means enhancing curriculum for students who excel in a particular area or setting aside individual time for a student who might be struggling. Beyond academics, Amy prepares her students for success in life by teaching them empathy and compassion for others, and by building their self-confidence. As one parent writes, “Amy is the kind of teacher that every parent hopes and prays their child will get. The heartfelt nomination letters are a testament to the lasting impact that Amy Smith has made on her students, their parents and the whole Endeavor Elementary community.”

The Community Foundation then said this about Dean Hume:

The majority of nominations for Dean Hume to receive the Educator of Excellence Award came from former students who, under his tutelage, were on the staff of Spark, the award-winning student-run news magazine at Lakota East High School. Dean founded Spark 21 years ago and has since been the faculty adviser, although he takes no credit for the publication’s success. Instead, credits accolades like the publication’s 10 National Pacemaker awards and 18 All-Ohio rankings to his talented students. Dean is known at Lakota East for his unorthodox approach to education. One student describes her first day in Dean Hume’s class, saying, “He shut off the lights and climbed onto a table…he explained that as our time in the Journalism program went on, the lights of the world would turn on so we could see it for what it truly is.” Former students comment on how he saw in them what, oftentimes, they didn’t see themselves and pushed them to fulfill that potential. Dean would stay after school when his students needed to work on a story and would be there with them on deadline weekends when the pressure was on to put out another excellent issue of Spark each month. Dean Hume is truly committed to his students. As one nominator put it, “It is fitting that the newsmagazine he created is called Spark because that is exactly what Dean Hume finds in each of his students…a spark that he then fans into flame with unparalleled dedication.”

While all that sounds very nice, and sweet, and even though Dean Hume has reportedly said many bad things about me to his class, I do like his choice of paintings on his classroom wall. I’m sure those teachers are very good teachers, but I would argue that what they are doing is expected by the community, and should not be the exception, but the rule. I expect every teacher to perform at the level of those teachers, so I do not understand why all the hoopla. But from a public relations standpoint, just ahead of a levy attempt, I can see why these teachers would be highlighted. I’m sure they enjoyed the award. But here is the problem. During the winter of 2012 my group, No Lakota Levy tried to work with the Community Foundation to help pay for the students who were being raked over the coals with sports fees of $550 per sport because the Lakota administration mismanaged their money. We didn’t want the kids to suffer for the problems of the adults, so we approached the Community Foundation to join forces and help the Lakota school district have a positive experience. I thought it was nice for my partners to reach across the aisle, even though I disagreed.

The response to our measure was a negative campaign against me personally which can be seen by CLICKING HERE. This was the choice of the Foundation who designated me as a detriment to the community because I did not blindly advocate throwing endless amounts of tax money to the public school of Lakota. Well, naturally that made me very angry and I responded appropriately. The levy addicts did not appreciate my comments as they came forward to make their opinions known. One of those opinions came from the head of the Community Foundation itself. Here is a quote from the Cincinnati Enquirer on March 14th 2012 where Patti Alderson, board chair and CEO of the Community Foundation of West Chester and Liberty Township, complained about me as she spoke before the Lakota school board. Alderson said she wanted to clarify that her group, which also raises money for needy Lakota students, had no affiliation with Yes To Lakota Kids, (No Lakota Levy) a group I was involved in and helped start with the intention of helping Lakota students pay portions of their sports fees. Read an article about this issue from Forbes featuring my efforts, CLICK HERE.

Alderson told the board audience of more than 200, that No Lakota officials had approached the foundation but that “we refused to accept their funds.”

“We refuse to accept funds where political statements are attached,” said Patti who took exception to my comments here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom where I said about the levy addicts “even with the overwhelming proof I’ve provided the crazy PTA moms and their minions of latte drinking despots with diamond rings the size of car tires and asses to match, (they) plot against me with an anger only estrogen can produce. They have shown no restraint in casting aspersions in my direction by calling me every name the human mind can create in human language. Did they think it wouldn’t get back to me? And being a head for an eye kind of guy I’m happy to return the favor. And yes, I meant it the way I said it. I do not think an eye for an eye taken is harsh enough. I generally leave people alone and let them make their own decisions without my interference until they attempt to impose themselves upon me. School levies are imposing themselves onto my life.” I knew when I said all this that it would anger the levy addicts, so I put a period at the end of my statement directed to those strongest advocates of higher taxes. The levy addicts had already slandered my name every way possible and painted me as a community menace, so I felt my opinion of their lifestyles was justified since they had already thrown in my direction names like, “wife beater,” “hillbilly,” “child hater,” “greedy businessman,” and many other derogatory terms. So I made my opinions of the levy addicts known by saying they are, “just prostitutes to their husbands who do everything they can to be away from them aside from the occasional sex. Their husband’s roll them over at night and insert their manhood into these women of the bedroom and hundred-dollar bills find their way into their purses. The women don’t know what the man does to earn the money, nor do they care. They are busy saving the world one child at a time with howls of safety and more regulations as they rush to the polling places at election time.”

As The Enquirer stated I was unapologetic for my writings. In fact, I should have really spoken my mind. I actually held back in concern that little children might read what I thought of the levy addicts. Knowing the real motive behind the games that were at play within Lakota made me very angry. The Community Foundation did not spontaneously line up to speak against my comments but had been planning them for a long time.

I said in The Enquirer about the issue, “Emotions get pretty intense in political campaigns and let’s face it; we have had to continue with our levy resistance for a couple of years now. It gets very frustrating when you present good arguments then the pro levy side paints you as being against children, and wanting to dismantle the community because they can’t come up with compelling arguments against you.” The rest of the article can be seen by CLICKING HERE.

It is often very difficult to tell good intentions from bad ones when children are being used as extortion mechanisms. In my community there are a lot of groups who advocate that what they do is for the good of “children” but what their real intentions are constitute power, whether that power is political, emotional, economic, or just psychological. It is even more difficult to announce the kind of tyranny that I am about to name, because there isn’t any mechanism in our courts that define the behavior as bad, or even illegal. There are no moral codes that do so either. In fact, Christianity espouses the value of charity with great fanfare, so organizations like the Community Foundation feel that so long as they show altruist measures in society that they will be given a free pass to behave in any manner necessary to achieve any aims they deem “good.”

Some of my partners in No Lakota Levy were also very active in the Community Foundation, which is a good organization with intentions that are beneficial. They expressed an interest to donate money to the Community Foundation but they were not doing it because they wanted to solve the problem. They were doing it because powerful community members in the culture of the Foundation were applying pressure on them to cave on their resistance to the school levy at Lakota. As a local charity group the Foundation appears to have believed that they needed to support the school levy otherwise they were letting down “the children.” As perceived leaders in the community many of these people were pushing my partners to separate from me as I was too radical and detrimental to the “growth” of West Chester and Liberty Township. I watched all this activity with great humor. I eventually agreed to help with the donation project because on the surface it was a good one. But I had something else in mind for all those “society” types who were slandering my name to my partners, and to other people around the community who were firm “NO” votes on tax increases. I needed to identify the slanderers by name for future battles, and I needed to expose their true intentions. This meant flushing them out from behind their hiding places of smiling faces attending Lakota. The best way to do this was to expose the game they were playing by beating them at it.

In spite of the comments I said above, I have said far worse publicly, in writing and in fisticuffs around town. But the levy addicts never cared much until The Enquirer article from March 7th. After my partners and I started our own foundation once the Community Foundation closed their doors to our $10K donation the following dialogue appeared in The Cincinnati Enquirer. “Unlike similar anti-school tax groups in some other area suburban districts, No Lakota is now in a privately funded $10,000 partnership to help students pay for higher school sports fees, says the group’s founder Rich Hoffman.

Hoffman and other tax opponents have long contended that Lakota’s teachers and their union should be taking the brunt of recent budget cuts through pay cuts rather than eliminating student services and upping sports fees.

“It’s obvious that the greatest casualty in these three levy fights has been the kids, and that’s really unfortunate,” says Hoffman of the “Yes to Lakota Kids” program to be publicly unveiled later Tuesday.

Hoffman said the unusual effort is designed to remove students from being used by school labor unions as “emotional hostages” in the often contentious tax levy campaigns of recent years.

“With the sports fees so high, it certainly has an impact on families that aren’t as fortunate as other families and we feel that’s simply not fair, and we are seeking to rectify that situation while these disputes with the school’s labor over pay continue. The kids have been used by that labor force unfairly, and it’s time to remove the kids from being caught in the middle,” I said. CLICK HERE for the rest of the article.

Just a few days later, Patti Alderson made her comments to the school board and one week after that Enquirer article levy addicts were scouring through my public writing here on Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom looking for anything they could use to smear my name not just privately—as they had been doing—but to take me out of the “public” debate. However, their behavior was something that had to be triggered because behind the scenes—through charity events, fund-raising dinners, and inner circle emails, the attack on my group was taking place from the Lakota levy addict public relations machine—and I didn’t appreciate it. School officials were working illegally behind the scenes to pull the strings of power to make their moves of offense. (illegally because officials were working on levy related material during school hours, which is traceable by email and witness testimony.) It was expected that since I was a public figure that I would behave like Mitt Romney did during his presidential campaign when Barack Obama called him names and slandered him any way possible, but Romney was inclined to show that he was “above such reproach.” Well, I don’t follow any such rules. After The Enquirer article there was the Forbes article and my comments about students being used by school labor unions as “emotional hostages” was too close to the mark for the levy addicts. They were forced to make their move against my organization to reveal what they were secretly attempting to do behind closed doors. For me this was equivalent to a “controlled blast” that a bomb squad might attempt to do to safely detonate a booby trap or other dangerous device. The trick was in the timing.

I published the comments seen above in the middle of February after I learned about the Kroger survey organized against me to smear my name publicly. I was curious when and if anyone from the other side would take issue, but they didn’t as I had said such things before. The important thing to note is that the levy addicts did make their move once they realized that my organization was stripping away their “emotional leverage,” with the financial donations. This was the weakness of the levy addicts. Deep in their hearts they were conscious of their social hypocrisy. They were aware of what they were doing, but they could not reveal the truth, even to themselves. The levy addicts attempted to make my comments into one of sexism, vulgar pretense, and social unreliability. But their anger was toward none of those things. Their anger was toward the worst thing that I said which was that the school, and everyone attached to promoting school levies were guilty of using the children of Lakota as “emotional hostages.” For that comment Patti Alderson took to the microphone on behalf of her Community Foundation and feigned anger at my derogatory remarks when the real issue was the role that the Community Foundation had to take in denying the $10K check from No Lakota Levy as a contribution to the children of Lakota attempting to actually unite the community.

This brings us full circle back to the Community Foundation giving two teachers from Lakota, Amy Smith and Dean Hume Lakota Educator of Excellence Awards. Patti Alderson proclaimed in her public comments about me that the Community Foundation refuses to accept funds where political statements are attached. Yet the support of the Community Foundation getting behind the Educator of Excellence Award with a flashy video and a touchy—feely symposium of Lakota employees, obviously filmed during school hours was a political statement considering that Lakota is gearing up for another tax increase attempt.

They are of course entitled to their opinion at the Community Foundation and on a perceptual level, anyone with a brain can tell that there was something wrong with the scenario, but the crime is difficult to define conventionally, which is why it continues to happen in virtually every school district across the country. After all, the school and the Community Foundation are helping children. This is supposed to give them a moral license to do and say anything they want so long as they are flying a flag of honor with pictures of smiling children upon it. But when I pulled the flag down giving both parties nothing to hide behind, they reacted in fear and extreme revulsion lashing out predictably. The question of why this happens is the real mystery that many of the levy addict players cannot define themselves. They have no idea of why they are motivated to behave in such a way.

In the 1960s even up to the current gay marriage debate the essence of the free love and non sexual denomination relationship discussion is to achieve one primary aspect of life that is particularly disconcerting to voters who tend to lean-to the political left. These people tend to want to be loved, and they are often insecure about losing love once they obtain it from others. Love is one of the most primary functions and desires of a human being. It could be said that the level of love in one’s life dictates their happiness. The trouble is some people understand that love is obtained when two or more individuals share common values, and some ignorantly believe that it is obtained through altruism—a sense of sacrifice. When a man tells a woman, “I’d die for you,” he is proclaiming the later. He is an idiot. It sets the relationship with the woman on the wrong footing. She will always unconsciously be on the lookout for another mate in case the man fulfills his proclamation. If the same man says to the woman, “I love you because of who you are.” This has more weight and the woman will understand that the love is generated from shared values. The former will be successful because the relationship is built on values that are shared. This is the ultimate failure of our modern age. The wrong types of people seek love for all the wrong reasons. The left leaning voter seeks sacrificial love through the measures of non value because it is less risky for them. Love without value means that any given person of any given value can love any person anywhere no matter what their sex, age, or success factor. This belief is driven from the fear that if love is obtained, that it might be lost if the values of people change. So to safeguard themselves from this fear, they seek to remove value from love so that they never have to be without love. This is of course sweet when looked upon in this fashion as it is easy to feel compassion for such people. But this leads to social failure because it strips society of values, which is what we are seeing in America today.

Many of the levy addicts involved in the Lakota Levy debate are suffering from this problem of insecure lust for love. Their intentions are not to pass a levy, save children, or ever solve the public education funding problems provided to them by greedy labor unions. Instead they hope for a return to the problem every couple of years because they are addicted to levy attempts as this is the way that they have learned to make other people “love” them. For an example of this need for love, look at the faces of the levy supporters in the picture at THIS LINK, CLICK TO VIEW. It’s not about children for them, but about community, love, sharing, and all kinds of mushy emotions. This is the real intention of levy supporters and why I call them “Levy Addicts.” They are addicted to the euphoric feeling of crusading for a cause (children) for an invisible desire for goodness—as it has been defined by government. Anyone who stands in the way of that “love” is a threat to their existence, and they attack the way a jealous spouse attacks someone who they fear might steal away their love. But the love is not pure. It is instead neurotic and doomed from the start. It can never be filled, or achieved because it requires the theft of other people’s money to acquire. Many of the levy addicts could write personal checks for the $2 million dollars and never miss the money if they really wanted to help the community. I can think of a few of the levy addicts who would consider the $10K that No Lakota Levy raised for the children of Lakota to help pay for their sports fees as equal to the same cost that they spend on lunch. It doesn’t mean anything to them, the value of money is negligible because they have so much of it, and have forgotten how they came to it. But what does mean something to them is whether they can manage to unite an entire community through charities, politics, or business into loving them to the extent that they are willing to surrender their personal values and logic. These are the deep dark secrets of the levy addicts.

My threat to their existence is that I proposed to solve the problem and remove the financial chaos which they need for their scam. The levy addicts need the chaos to fill their lives with love which they are always yearning for—the desire to be loved by others to fill a value they can never seem to find any other way. In this way the levy addicts become just as tyrannical as the Crusaders attempting to move the world toward a particular religion out of a professed love of God through altruistic sacrifice—but if not the Crusades pick a mass movement of any other radical group seeking to crush individuals in pursuit of a collective good. The definitions of “goodness” are set by those with the loudest mouths and deepest yearning for public love. At Lakota the fantasy of the levy addicts is if only they could remove the opposition to their plans, then the community would shower them with love and affection—kissing their ass in every public appearance because they are powerful financially, politically, and socially. They would thus be loved by all for every reason imaginable—except the one of personal value—which they are lacking. These levy addicts become terribly insecure when they realize that people only “love” them for what they can give them. They are always looking for ways to give other people things they’ve stolen from someone else because of this deep fear of lacking personal value.

This is what the hate due to my words was really about, and what was exposed when No Lakota Levy wanted to actually help children with a $10,000 donation. Nobody in either the media or the politics of the community knew what to do because they had been exposed for what they really were. Everyone involved pretended that they were innocent of any emotional crimes, but when I spelled it out in The Enquirer the real sin of which those supporting school levies were guilty of using children as emotional hostages I had hit the nerve everyone wished to keep hidden from the public. The hypocrisy and sin against all children by the adult population seeking community love was out in the open and nobody knew what to do with the emotions.

The Community Foundation which had declared itself non-political announced its political support of the local government school with their video support of the two teachers which they recently awarded. If such charitable foundations really wanted to help the entire community, they would simply cover the cost of the tax increases with their own personal checks instead of attempting to compel the entire community to support a school they may not like or support. There is no call by the charity group to solve the actual funding problems at the school because that would defy their real intention, which is to maintain their power base at the center of the community which is in perpetual pursuit of “love” from their peers.

If the motivations were not one of public love, the money would quietly find its way into the Lakota treasuries in the still of the night without a name attached to the donation. If those involved in community health were actually willing to serve altruism, they would not place themselves on pedestals so that everyone could see how much they did for the community–they would simply do the work without fanfare. But the intention is not about “goodness,” but is instead about “love,” and the pursuit of it for all the insecure reasons it was ever pursued. The reasons behind the Community Foundation award to the two teachers sadly looks to not be about merit, but politics, and even more tragic are the attempts to hide such charades behind children. Without my incident to measure against described above, the presentation of the award to the Lakota teachers might otherwise go unnoticed. But in relation to the upcoming school levy, the objective is clear.

The funds that No Lakota Levy attempted to give the Community Foundation occurred before I wrote what I did in mid February. In fact, there wasn’t even a levy announcement yet for that year as No Lakota Levy had just won the recent election. The Community Foundation well before any of these events occurred declined to work with my partners and me for reasons that are obvious now, because they support the school levy at Lakota perpetually. They care not what causes the levy, they just blindly seem to support them for the reasons offered. The response in the early winter months of 2012 was instead to smear my name and attempt to remove me from the argument instead of bringing the community together as we proposed. I simply wanted to see the school offer the teachers union a 5% pay reduction to prevent another levy. The school district as a whole chose not to listen to the 18,000 voters during the previous election. Instead they chose to proceed with a smear campaign against me personally instead of solving their problem. Then they expected me to take it when word came back to me from No Lakota Levy members and Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom readers who told me what was going on behind the scenes—what was being said about my name and why. That is when the decision to advance the campaign to a new level proceeded.

All the parties involved believe they are right and moral in their position. Yet only one group is right. I would contend that these charity groups and levy addicts are detriments to the community because they feel they have a right to compel property owners to contribute to their silly pursuits of community love. The Community Foundation is perfectly free to support the Lakota school levy if they wish to, just as the levy advocates are free to support their public educations to their heart’s content. They are all free to pursue their desire to be loved by the public by giving teachers special awards and publicly showing how much they love children through charitable contributions. But they are not free to compel me to do any of those things, and they are not free to bend an entire community around their small-minded needs for social “love.” They are not free to impose their beliefs on others by forcing tax increases on everyone to fulfill their worldly visions corrupted by an unquestionable hunger for love—devalued love where judgment of right and wrong are not applicable. That is the trouble with the situation of government politics which public schools are tightly bound with large charity organizations camouflaging their inner desires for attention through altruistic goodness. The fact and hypocrisy remain that if those who speak loudest of the value of teachers, Lakota schools, and community value of government education institutions, then they should cover those costs on their own and not try to compel people like myself into contributing where I chose not to, and then seek to defame me personally because the neurotic, love starved levy addicts didn’t get their way. It is not OK for institutions to crush individuals all in the pursuit of collective love. And that is the current arrangement between local charities like those who attach themselves to public schools with the primary, yet disguised intention of promoting the image of that school in order to garner votes in an upcoming election. The levy addicts do their so-called good by writing checks on the backs of children using their innocence to justify community tax increases. The reason is for love, not justice—and in that revelation much coercion is performed against free minds for a tyranny that destroys generations.

Making of Tail of the Dragon Novel: Taking on “fear” at Moonville and the Mothman of Point Pleasant

Fear is the most abused emotion that potential dictators use to advance their positions. Anytime an individual or organization of any kind uses fear to attempt to move emotions into seeing their point of view, their argument will be a weak one that contains hidden intentions deceitful in nature. Overcoming fear is therefore the primary task of any potential modern-day hero and is one of the most prevalent themes in my most recent novel, Tail of the Dragon. The main character Rick Stevens is a man who has incredible command of fear, and is motivated to respond more aggressively when the strategy of fear is thrown in his direction by forces who seek to rule him. In order to write about such a character I felt I needed to face down any fears that might linger in my own mind, so I organized a motorcycle trip with my wife and son-in-law across southern Ohio to the extremely haunted Moonville Tunnel in Vinton County, to do some rappelling off that ghost town monument. Later, we planned to head down to Point Pleasant, West Virginia to visit the 8th Annual Mothman Festival, which is an outdoor exhibition of fanfare to celebrate the framed monster which terrorized the citizens there in the 1966. For me, one of the scariest books I’ve ever read was the Mothman Prophesies by John Keel which was made into a Richard Gere film many years after the publication. The non-fiction book was truly alarming stuff and captures wonderfully the very mysterious happenings that occur routinely in southeastern Ohio, where monsters, murders, and supernatural events are rather commonplace. These endeavors lead to the video below which is Part VI of The Making of Tail of the Dragon the novel. Click here to see the previous installment.

I have told the story of Moonville in other articles, so I won’t repeat it here but to say that the old ghost town of Moonville just to the east of Athens, Ohio has some strange connection to supernatural elements. Out of the three times I’ve been there with my family, two of those times involved supernatural happenings. However, this most recent trip on the motorcycles did not have a supernatural occurrence leading me to conclude that whatever the content of those living in a supernatural realm, they feed off the fears, and anxieties of participants who willingly believe in their schemes. I have seen ghost-like images and strange things at Moonville, but I have never seen anything that could actually bring harm to people. Most of the supernatural events occur because they exist outside of our observable reality. The extent of their power is regulated to the effect they have on the imagination. Moonville unlike another ghost town that I wrote about in the Kerr City remote Florida ghost town is known for its excessive numbers of teen suicides, grisly murders, and the disappearance of visitors who are easily pounced upon by aggressive individuals who hunt in those remote woods. The Moonville area is very rugged and can only be reached by a dirt road. If something happens along that road which is several miles from any civilization, there is nobody to hear you scream. To me, this is the source of most of the ghost stories. Young people go there to “feel” something positive or negative, and once there and intoxicated on drugs and alcohol, the ghosts get into their heads and accelerate their imaginations into jumping off railroad trusses, hanging themselves, or committing vile acts against other. So to go to the Moonville Tunnel means to either surrender to these emotions, or to remain in control of them.

When we left early on a chilly September morning in Ohio with the tinge of autumn in the air, we knew it would be the last major motorcycle trip of the year as the weather was simply getting too cold for long distance riding. I was nearly finished with the manuscript of Tail of the Dragon and was set to turn it into the publisher by Christmas of that year. Even though I had a formal invite to publish the book, I still had to go through the process of having it accepted out of nearly 2000 other submissions, so it was not a done deal at the time. American Book only publishes roughly 80 titles a year, so the odds were still against the novel being put into print. After all the work I had done on the book over the summer and all the travel which preceded this supernatural journey which has been chronicled in previous “Making Of” submissions, there was a good chance that Tail of the Dragon would not make it through the publication process. So the anxiety was mounting for me. It is one thing to engage in a creative process, which is what I had been doing, and enjoying. It is quite another to begin thinking of such endeavors as a business enterprise, which was the phase that I was at. I still needed to nail down some of the character traits of Rick Stevens fearlessness, which was difficult to do with the anxiety I was feeling over the publication of the book, so I needed an “EXTREME” situation to bring my own mind out of it. So my son-in-law and I decided to tackle several supernatural themes on a long day trip to the east.

Rappelling at Moonville is something my family had always wanted to do. The tunnel itself cuts through a steep hillside and runs through where the ghost town used to reside. It’s an interesting engineering feat for a group of people who built the tunnel during the period of the Civil War. The town Moonville lived and died due to the mining of iron for the war, as the area was rich with iron mines which appear to be connected to the supernatural happenings—something to do with effect on gravitational waves and how the mind perceives them. I would attribute this heavy concentration of iron to the heavy reporting of ghosts in the buildings at Ohio University at Athens just a few miles away, and the swarm of Big Foot sightings that occur in the area. I am happy with the footage I was able to get during the event. It takes viewers on an interesting journey across the face of the tunnel in a way that only a rope can provide. It really gives an appreciation for how human beings were able to create such a tunnel in the first place before modern excavating equipment large enough for a train to travel through. The area at the time of Moonville’s rise to power was one of the most remote places in The United States, yet people built the large tunnel essentially by hand.

For whatever the reason, whether by reputation, or some chemical reaction in the brain caused by the iron deep in the ground, or actual inter-dimensional beings that use such places as points to and from other planes of reality, Moonville is an intimidating place. On a previous visit my family took to Moonville around midnight, we found local college kids camped out in the tunnel attempting to brave their fears against the supernatural with collective reassurance and drugs. They dealt with that subtle hostility of the place with chemical evasion and communal reassurance. But on our motorcycle trip to Moonville with all our equipment packed on the back of our bikes, we were pretty much alone. We had the tunnel to ourselves with only the ghosts to witness our time there. That made rappelling off the tunnel a unique experience that is not easily duplicated.

We had no obvious paranormal encounters on this visit to the Mooville Tunnel. Other than the obvious uneasy feeling that accompanies the place, it was a peaceful and beautiful day. The ride to the tunnel was long, and cold as the morning air had been very chilly, in the lower 40s. My wife stayed cold well into the afternoon. After a few hours of rappelling my son-in-law and I warmed up and began to sweat a bit. By mid-afternoon, the temperature was up to the mid-seventies as we found our motorcycles where we had parked them along the dirt road in Vinton County from the short hike into the hills to the tunnel entrance. The railroad which ran through the area is now long gone as the only real relic from the period is the tunnel and some dilapidated old railroad bridges that travel west across a swampy lowland. Our next destination was the Mothman Festival at Point Pleasant, West Virginia about an hour’s drive to the south.

We arrived to a town packed to the rim with people coming to see the various paranormal oriented exhibits celebrating the haunting of the mysterious Mothman who appeared there the year leading up to a major bridge collapse that killed many from the town. The Mothman terrorized members of Point Pleasant solidly for 13 months up to the bridge collapse. It is an excellent example of one of the largest group hauntings in American history. For me, coming to the actual site was a way to put sights and smells to the words painted on my mind from that terrifying book, which is excellent. The book, unlike the Richard Gere film, went even further than just the strange Mothman creature into the realm of the paranormal. In the book, Keel covered many mysterious elements that ended up becoming major motion pictures elsewhere. The movie Men in Black produced by Steven Spielberg was a comedy look at an actual phenomena that took place in Point Pleasant during the Mothman huantings, leaving many to wonder who the government looking Men in Black really were. They behaved like FBI, or CIA agents, but proved to be something else altogether. Spielberg was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and appears to have read The Mothman Prophesies in his youth, because his film Close Encounters of the Third Kind seemed deeply inspired by The Mothman Prophesies. Close Encounters took place on the Indiana, Ohio border in the same general region of the country and to this day, no filmmaker has made a better movie on the subject of unidentified flying object sightings than Spielberg’s Close Encounters. Much of activity that occurred in Close Encounters actually happened at Point Pleasant during the Mothman hauntings. For a solid year between 1966 to 1967, journalist John Keel chronicled some of the craziest paranormal activity ever recorded in one area with the exception of Area 51. I always believed that some of the U.F.O. activity was from experimental aircraft at the relatively nearby Wright Patterson Air Force Base, but only a few of The Mothman Prophesies U.F.O. sightings could be explained away with experimental aircraft. There seems to be more to those stories that defy observable explanation at this current time.

Whatever it was, the entire town has found a way to relieve their tension over those events, and that is to have a festival every September to celebrate the strange happenings. For me, it was haunting to look at the actual buildings and locations first hand as I read about them in the book. It was difficult to imagine why such a remote place had provoked so much paranormal activity, but it had. To me the huantings at Moonville and Point Pleasant over a long period of time had common elements that were directly related to the region. There is something dark and menacing in those places. The locals don’t notice it much as they have only ever known such fear present in their lives. But for those who come from outside that area, the tinge is easy to detect. Standing on the banks of the river at the Mothman Festival I spoke with my son-in-law about The Yellow Creek Massacre which was a brutal killing of several Mingos by Virginia frontiersmen on April 30, 1774 which was one of the main incidents that contributed to Lord Dunmore’s War. That terrible incident occurred nearly where we were standing as outlined in a favorite book of ours, The Frontiersman by Allen Eckert.

Chief Logan was a good friend of the English-speaking settlers in the region and was away on a hunt but his wife Mellana, his brother Taylaynee, Taylaynee’s son Molnah, and Taylaynee’s sister Koonay were among the slain. Koonay was also the wife of John Gibson a prominent trader between the English and various Native American groups who at the time of the massacre was on a trading expedition to the Shawnee.

The Greathouse group lured the Mingo group under Taylaynee into their camp with a promise of liquor and sport. Then they sprung an ambush on the Mingos and shot them dead. After the killings many of the bodies were mutilated. In a particular brutal killing Jacob Greathouse ripped open Koonay’s abdomen and removed and scalped her unborn son. The only member of the first group who was not killed was Koonay’s two-year-old daughter who was eventually returned to the care of her father, John Gibson, after she had for a time been in the care of William Crawford. To me, the coincidence between the two events, the killing of the Mingo group in 1774 and the terrible events of the Mothman haunting in 1966 along with all the crazy UFO sightings and the mysterious Men in Black were somehow connected. Such a concentration of strange events in the same area not to mention the collapse of the Silver Bridge right before Christmas at the end of the 13 month Mothman hauntings killing 46 people on December 15th 1967 are more than a coincidence. Fear lives on the banks of the Ohio River in Point Pleasant, West Virginia for reasons that extend deep into human logic and history.

The travel to these places I didn’t expect to solve any of those lingering riddles. However, I did want to get a sense of how Rick Stevens in Tail of the Dragon would deal with ever-present fear, as he contended with a legal system representing the entire country coming after him during the greatest car chase in the history of car chases. I’m not a very skittish person by nature, I am used to a certain amount of ever-present danger. But it is quite something else to put the mind into the kind of situation that Rick Stevens finds himself involved in during the events of my novel. Studying the people of Point Pleasant at the festival, and climbing around in the deep woods of the Moonville Tunnel actually set my mind right on the issue.

We returned home later that evening well before the sun had set. The experience was surreal. We had traveled nearly 400 miles that day yet I was writing that night the final touches of Tail of the Dragon to meet my submission deadlines. The trip had moved so quickly that it seemed like we had never even left that day. My anxiety over that deadline had evaporated after the hard ride realizing that fear is really just a state of mind. My family had stepped over fear and had a nice trip that day in the land of the supernatural. What we discovered was that most of what anyone has to fear is mostly in the mind, and it is easy in such states of consciousness to see how silly it is for society to build their entire civilization on “fear.” Ultimately Rick Stevens in Tail of the Dragon lives his life beyond the grip of fear which infuriates the “fear monger” controllers represented by the police and their puppet master politicians. When Rick stands before a judge in Tail of the Dragon with the threat of life imprisonment for defending himself, he behaves with a level of confidence and fearlessness that is simply unfathomable in modern society. But to tell a story of real freedom in the human mind, it is “fear” that must be overcome, and for Rick Stevens he must deal with the worst of it in Tail of the Dragon.

It is this premise against fear that eventually helped the novel jump out over those thousands of other manuscripts to become published, so the work was well worth it. Fear is the means that is used to control massive portions of the population whether the fear is generated from a supernatural source or a political fear monger. The intent is the same, to control the behavior of individuals away from freedom and toward tyranny. Rick Stevens in Tail of the Dragon is committed to living his life without fear, and this causes him great danger from those who insist that he stay under their control. But like the ghosts of Moonville, Ohio, the real fear that the authorities have to impose on Stevens is only mental. Once it is realized that man is superior to the ideas of the infantile authority driven dictators of politics and power it is soon discovered that real power is really generated among the human race in their ability to generate, or deny fear. If a person develops the ability to live beyond the realm of fear, they will discover how foolish such notions used to be for them, and they will find freedom there to greet them. It is on that side of the mental spectrum that readers are discovering such freedom through the life of Rick Stevens. A life without fear sets the mind into the kind of focus which is rare in the history of mankind, a life that Rick Stevens achieved with a $20 million dollar muscle car in a car chase to end all car chases, in the novel Tail of the Dragon.

Now, here is a clip from one of our previous visits.

Rich Hoffman

Visit the Tail of the Dragon Store and meet Ron Johnson

“Like” Tail of the Dragon on Facebook by CLICKING HERE

If the novel is SOLD OUT at Amazon.com try Barnes and Noble by CLICKING HERE.

“If they attack first………..blast em’!” www.tailofthedragonbook.com

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Published on May 03, 2013 17:00

Liberty Center $300 Million Mega-Retail Project: The gifts of many individual minds

Let’s set the record straight before getting into all the wonderful glory of the upcoming $300 million Liberty Center mega-retail project scheduled to open in my hometown. I personally believe that the $35 million remaining dollars needed for sewage and other infrastructure modifications should fall on the Steiner group who is developing the magnificent property. Government should not be involved with private business, and many of those $35 million in costs are due to the interrelationship that business has had to endure over the years from government seeking to mooch off its good ideas. The developers should front the entire cost of the project in exchange for government keeping its nose out of the entire affair and let the marketplace drive the project.

But as it is, the Liberty Center development is an impressive undertaking that is worthy of mention. I have described on these pages my love of Newport on the Levee and discussed how my wife and I enjoy spending our evenings there. I go to Newport because of the experience, because of the festive environment and wildly varied options. Other than Newport on the Levee I admire greatly the Americana complex on Brand Blvd in Burbank, California and La Isla at Cancun, in Mexico. Those are three examples of some of the finest examples of capitalism I have seen anywhere, and they are extraordinarily dynamic in what they offer shoppers. I believe that the upcoming Liberty Center will be among the best of its kind in the world as Steiner has presented it, so needless to say I am excited about it.

But I see already a desire from local politicians to grease their fingers and pick the pockets of the many businesses that Steiner is securing for this project, and I can already see the Lakota school system is ready to proclaim that the success of the upcoming project is a result of their silly government school, which is absurd. So let’s set the record straight on why the Liberty Center development will be a success, and why it will be one of the best such shopping complexes anywhere. The credit does not go to the local school, as the teachers union will undoubtedly attempt to proclaim, and it doesn’t have anything to do with politicians—other than the work to insert the Liberty Way interchange on I-75 in a key location under the tutelage of business investors. The credit goes to the fact that per capita there is a lot of wealth in the surrounding area of this proposed development, and the taxes are not yet so outrageous that residents have been able to keep a good portion of their money, and businesses have been able to turn a profit for all their risk. If there is one element that makes Liberty Way possible in Liberty Township, Ohio it is because wealth has gathered in that region as it has fled from cities and other communities filled with looting politicians who could not keep their hands out of their pockets.

Touted as the Easton of the northern Cincinnati area, the Liberty Center will include a 200,000-square-foot Dillard’s store, and about 370,000 square feet of specialty retail shops and restaurants, a 1,200-seat dine-in restaurant, luxury apartments and a hotel. Yaromir Steiner, founder and chief executive officer of the Columbus-based development company, said he also plans to build a chapel in a public square for non-denominational services, weddings and small concerts. The complex promises to feature a state-of-the-art movie theater among many other wonderful inventions of creativity.

I’m not a big shopper. I typically wear the same type of cloths for decades and couldn’t care less about fashion. But when my wife does talk me out of my reading chair for a night out, I do enjoy looking at all the products that are available in such dynamic markets. I see behind every new purse, every pair of shoes, every shirt, necklace, book, dinning ware, every product for sale in such large shopping complexes the result of someone’s mind. Without capitalism those minds have nowhere to exhibit their fine products. I even enjoy going to movie theaters to admire not just the movies on display there, but the movie posters advertising the films. Each poster is the product of someone’s creativity somewhere who attempted to sum up the contents of a movie with a still shot work of art on display to make a profit for the film studio. I love shopping complexes not for the things I can buy, but for the display of other people’s creativity.

Steiner intends with the construction of his shopping complex to attract such minds with their personal businesses, like the owners of the Apple Store, the Lego Stores, the Victoria’s Secretes, the high-end audio/visual stores, and many more. The attraction is of course the location and the type of people who will shop there—meaning they are primarily gainfully employed and not looking toward government assistance for their sustenance. That is an attractive demographic for businessmen and women. Also, the tax rates cannot be too high where the local schools, fire departments, and police departments have been kept in check protecting taxpayers from public sector union wages that are excessively greedy in socialist demands. In Liberty Township it is the Butler County Sheriff who handles the policing action. Liberty Twp. does not have its own police force, because it doesn’t need it. My neighbors have the Second Amendment, and criminals know it. That arrangement saves a lot of money and means businesses get to keep much of the profit they earn instead of paying for some cop to sit in a squad car and harass motorists with speeding citations 24 hours a day—7 days a week. The name of my community is not Tyranny Township—it’s “Liberty”—as in “Freedom” Township. Freedom is cheaper and far more fun. Tyranny is expensive as government workers expect to be paid excessively from those they seek to tyrannize. This is why there is a large concentration of wealth in the area for Steiner to provide such a retail experience.

The other two shopping complexes I mentioned, particularly the one on Brand Blvd in Burbank, California does well because the entertainment industry pays those workers well, and the shopping experience is primarily for them and their families. The one in Cancun is a tourist trap. Within two miles of that shopping complex is one of the worst examples of socialism I have ever seen, downtown Cancun, where all the workers live. Most of these shopping resorts in tourist towns are smoke and mirrors designed to appeal to travelers. The Newport complex and the one being built-in Liberty Township are different in that they host sustainable communities with the same level of appeal to dramatically increase the shopping experience of the neighborhood making every day like a vacation for local property owners.

But the credit does not go to any politician, or school. The credit does not belong to any government regulator, or administrator. The credit goes to the type of entrepreneurs who own and operate the 1,200-seat dine-in restaurant projected to be built at Liberty Center. It goes to the individual minds who take a risk with a business to offer the product of their minds with all the variety individuals can devise. It goes to the people who intend to lease space at Steiner’s development. It is they who will make the experience of shopping at Liberty Center a good one. Anybody else in the process is simply a barnacle hanging on for a ride from those who are productive, and enterprising.

Personally, I can’t wait to walk the grounds of Liberty Center and celebrate the best of what human beings can achieve. I will cherish every brick of every building for the productivity they represent, and sheer creativity of the many minds who contributed to their placement. I suspect that my wife and I will visit Liberty Center often. It would be my hope that a Joseph and Beth bookseller would find the site lucrative. They do such a great job of bringing in big name authors for book signings and speeches, that it would be a perfect venue at Liberty Center. But regardless, I am very much looking forward to the Liberty Center and the many evenings of joy that it will provide my family in the years to come. My appreciation of it will not be for one single political element, but for the creative souls brought under one tent by Yaromir Steiner. It is because of creative minds like his, that anything ever happens. And it also why Liberty Twp has the rare opportunity for such an endeavor, because to date, the looters, moochers, and scallywags of social erosion are not part of the economic factor—which is why it will be successful and a massive contribution to the culture of Liberty Township, Ohio.

Rich Hoffman

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Published on May 02, 2013 17:00

Tom Zawistowski Interview: Is it moral to compromise beliefs to be part of the “team?”

A few days ago I announced my intentions to start my own political party called the Capitalism Party. I also stated that I didn’t care if I were the only member because it has become blatantly obvious that politics in its current form not only is dysfunctional and recklessly collective in its orientation, but catastrophically deficient in their moral underpinnings. For myself I made the decision that I didn’t like any of the options that have been presented by any “pressure group” currently involved in government, including libertarians, and I will simply not support any candidate who does not support capitalism as the political pursuit of my state and nation. To further validate my claims, have a listen to Tom Zawistowski who had been in the running for the Ohio Republican Party Chairmanship, who is also a respected member of the Tea Party. To understand why people like me are turning away from machine politics and starting their own fragmented parties, just listen to Tom’s explanations as to the state of Republican politics in Ohio and the nation in general.

When the question was asked of Tom, “do you think you can be a team player” regarding the upcoming election, and getting behind Governor Kasich in his next run for governor, the question provider said a mouth full without realizing their violation. Tom attempted to explain that the Tea Party movement is like herding cats, as everyone is a free-thinker who cannot be unified under a flag of compromise, as traditional politics requires. This is true, and to date, there are not enough cats in the game to make much of a difference in elections, so the Tea Party has been quietly shunned by established political rule in an attempt to maintain the status quo. The crux of the problem is in requiring free thinking individuals to compromise their beliefs to be a part of the “team” which is the primary problem in American politics at every level, and I for one am tired of it. In this regard, a candidate either stands for capitalism and is willing to defend it, or they aren’t. It is that simple.

Governor Kasich ran his 2010 campaign as a defender of capitalism. He was for business; he was for reeling in the costs of big government. He was against Obamacare. He was against taking federal money for silly intrusions that erode away the 10th Amendment through the Commerce Clause. He was for School Choice in Ohio, so he had a lot going for him that represented much of what the Tea Party stands for. They all share in common, a support of capitalism—because even if everyone disagrees on various policies—the cats all stand for capitalism as a political ideal and can unify behind such a banner. However, Kasich and House Speaker Boehner went on a golf outing with President Obama and Vice President Biden and have never been the same since. It could be noted that Kasich and Boehner were seduced by the snake-like charm of Obama and his collectivist minions because as political parties go, Kasich and Boehner have more in common with Obama and Biden than they do with any citizen in America who stands for individual liberty.

Kasich’s fatal flaw in his thus far first term is that he has attempted to expand Medicaid, which is essentially the same sin that was committed by Barack Obama—it is using other people’s money stolen in the form of taxes to purchase elections. Ideologically, Kasich didn’t fight very hard for his Tea Party beliefs. He abandoned them at the first sign of trouble, allowing the rule by force of a mixed economy to determine his core beliefs. After his golf game with Obama, and the defeat of Senate Bill 5 by the public sector unions in repealing Kasich’s reforms at collective bargaining, Kaisch turned into a progressive. Within two years of attempting to take on public unions with needed legislation, he surrendered and joined with the enemies of freedom by attempting to expand Medicaid in Ohio to purchase votes for the next election.

The Republican Party currently being led by Kaisch in Ohio expects other Republicans like Tom Zawistowski to fall in line with the party platform and “compromise” their beliefs for the good of the collective party, and that is the difference between politics of the past, and the politics that the Tea Party is pushing for. It is not Tom’s job to conform his beliefs to the party strategy of John Kasich or John Boehner as both men have elected to sell out their ideas as a compromise to the forces of persuasion—the pressure groups who routinely lobby such men with trinkets of advantage in trade for political pull. That is not governing, or leadership. It is simply appeasement in the same way that payoffs to the mob might be encouraged. If the yielding of beliefs is not achieved, then the pressure groups will pounce with collective authority to change those beliefs. This is the direct result of the type of economy that has moved away from capitalism and toward socialism. It is the direct result of a mixed economy. A mixed economy Governor is the type of man who Kasich is. When the wind blows from the Tea Party, he spoke of Tea Party values. When the wind blew from the direction of the opposing labor unions, Kasich then became an advocate of Medicaid expansion to redeem his “sins” of the past. When John Boehner was throwing his support behind Mitt Romeny for President, he spoke of ending Obamacare with a repeal the first day of Romeny’s administration. But when Barack Obama won the election through questionable means, Boehner declared that Obamacare was the law of the land, and seemed to forget that as House Speaker he has the power to fund or not fund the train wreck of socialism that Obamacare is. He simply changed his mind in response to the “pressure groups” in charge.

This is not how government was supposed to work according to the foundation of America. The Tea Party represented in politics by people like Tom Zawistowski and Matt Mayer are not running for office to respond to the consensus whims of pressure groups—lobbyists. They are running for office to maintain purity of the Ohio and federal Constitutions. This is an idea that is not understood by virtually anybody, particularly in the media. That is the reason the question, “do you think you can be a team player” is such an absurd question. It openly suggests that Tom should be willing to compromise a right idea for a wrong one depending on the nature of the pressure groups who are really in charge which is against everything anybody who believes in a representative republic stands for.

The way to beat this monstrosity of political corruption is to just make things simple and focus on the idea of capitalism. In politics, an idea is either good for capitalism or it’s not and from that vantage point, political unification can be achieved by removing the emotional elements from the debate, of which nobody will ever completely agree. A political commitment to capitalism also declaws the pressure groups that have the mouth of politicians like Boehner and Kasich on their marionette strings rendering them ineffective. It doesn’t take a heard of cats marching to orders like a bunch of mindless automatons to run a government. It simply takes the commitment to a political philosophy that carries over to the benefit of the population at large. Capitalism naturally sorts out the good from the bad, the corrupt from the saint through competitive efforts. The cheating that goes on so often of which capitalism gets the blame comes from the pressure group relationships such as what Speaker Boehner and Governor Kasich represent—a mixed economy relationship ruled by thugs who have more “pull” than others without such arrangements. Under pure capitalism, such relationships would not be possible as the best and most effective ideas would percolate to the surface in spite of the desires of various pressure groups.

If I had to make a prediction as to the direction of Tom Zawistowski I would say that people like him will migrate to a party like the one I’m talking about, the “Capitalism Party” to begin the intellectual argument that has to take place in the coming months. After all, it does free thinking people no good to vote for Governor Kasich once again. He has shown to be just as fiscally destructive as Governor Strickland, the socialist democrat was. The biggest difference is that he had a “D” next to his name so he was easy to identify. In many ways the “R” next to Kasich’s name is more dangerous because voters thought they were getting a Tea Party conservative—instead they got a sell-out, and a LBJ fascist—well intended, but desperately, and catastrophically wrong in his political philosophy. That is why people like Tom Zawistowski are leaving the Republican Party. If they are smart, they’ll join me in the Capitalism Party then things can really get moving as the debates will evolved from ones of emotion to ones of actual goodness that is not relative to opinion.

Rich Hoffman

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Published on May 01, 2013 17:00

Lebanon Schools Goes to Court: Shhhhhhh, they are trying to pass another tax levy

Lebanon City Schools is going for a tax increase yet again, so they don’t want anybody to know about the court case shown below where a resident Chris Young represented by Christopher Finney was denied information that was her right as a tax payer to know. When school districts, or any elected government body goes into “executive session” obviously it is in an attempt to escape the ears of the knowing public—otherwise they’d discuss all issues in general meetings. Technically, everything is supposed to be “open” to the public, yet most of the time this is not the case. In the appeal case shown below it is easy to see what is going on at Lebanon involving “executive session” and their willingness to violate Ohio Sunshine Laws with open manipulation and scandalous behavior, which can be seen at the end of the document.

The back and forth of this case over the last couple of years did result in a win for Chris Young and attorney Christopher Finney as she was absolutely correct to challenge Superintendent Mark North when she arrived at a public meeting thinking it was a regular school board meeting to discuss survey results, then discovered that it was actually an unlisted “executive session” held at Mark North’s office to discuss the new school levy and teacher pay – according to North’s testimony. The judge dismissed the case during summary judgment which provoked attorney Christopher Finney to file the appeal seen below which did not go in favor of Lebanon schools.

Without getting into too many details, it can be reported that Lebanon seems willing to appeal the appellate courts decision, again seen below, which could lead the case to the State Supreme Court costing tax payers possibly hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorney fees for litigation. The school doesn’t care because the money isn’t theirs, its looted money from the Lebanon tax payers, so it’s no skin off their back to dig their heels deep in the sand even if legal precedent is against them. Their real objective in this case seems to be only to delay the results of this case long enough to pass their next planned levy. So long as the case is perpetually tied up in court, the public is typically unaware of the details. The nature of this case reminded me of an article by Tom Wicker in The New York Times on October 11, 1964 that I had read regarding “the mainstream of American thought,”

That mainstream is what political theorists have been projecting for years as “the national consensus”—what Walter Lippmann has aptly called “the vital center.”…Political moderation, almost by definition, is at the heart of the consensus. That is, the consensus generally sprawls over all acceptable political views—all ideas that are not totally repugnant to and do not directly threaten some major segment of the population. Therefore, acceptable ideas must take the views of others into account and that is what is meant by moderation.

The reason I thought of that article in relation to this court case is due to the fact that this is how all government operates, especially public schools. They believe that even when the law is against them, or they are guilty of violation of the law that because there is a consensus by the mass public—which they have helped to educate into place through mass public indoctrination—that they can ignore the law if there is a “consensus” in their favor. Lebanon clearly felt that they could violate the law to conceal information and they are willing to apply any measure needed to build consensus against those seeking justice. Like the perilous situation described by Tom Wicker, the intent of all government bodies in our modern age spanning these last 50 years, has been to not follow the law—but to build consensus regardless of what the law states. And if that still doesn’t work, then a case will be stalled perpetually causing all seekers of justice to spend themselves into oblivion in an attempt to enforce the law. The government entity can afford to play this game because they are operating with legally stolen money that is infinite. The taxpayer does not have the same infinite resources. So large government institutions such as what Lebanon schools are routinely ignore the law and focus on consensus building. The same strategy can be seen in virtually every public school in The United States. For instance, when Lakota just a few school districts to the west of Lebanon after three attempts could not win at the ballot box they did not attempt to go to the union with a 5% wage reduction deal to balance their budget. Instead, they spent $40K on Jeffery Stec to create the “Community Conversations” program to engage the public with private meetings in an attempt to build “consensus.” Whenever a public institution uses the word “consensus” in their dialogue, something is wrong with what they are saying. Chances are, with just a little digging, laws are being broken, but openly ignored, and a scandal is amiss.

That is certainly the case once again at Lebanon and Superintendent Mark North is at the heart of the issue. The purpose of public meetings is so that the tax payers can oversee the actions of their school management. Yet routinely, they are treated like children, not the authority figures they truly are. The tax payers are the ultimate authority—at least in the eyes of the court. The premise that Christopher Finney and Chris Young took this case to court was under the authority that the taxpayer is the ultimate management entity, and Lebanon elected to ignore that authority in an attempt to conceal information. The school clearly believes by their actions shown below that they wish to play the gray areas of the law to their advantage and instead focus on building a “consensus” of their innocence rather than deal with the literal interpretations of the law. Even if they lose at the Supreme Court level, they still win because they have managed to maintain their “consensus” with the public through secrecy, manipulation, political pull, and many other direct violations. All they seem to care about is sliding through yet another school levy hoping that the public at large has forgotten the last one which occurred only a couple of years ago—in a mismanaged attempt to throw more money at their teacher’s union. The focus is on “consensus” not justice.

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Leb15 Leb16 Leb17 Leb18

Rich Hoffman

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Published on April 30, 2013 17:00

Superman: Man of Steel — an ideal to aspire to

I’m going to go out on a limb to declare that the new version of Superman: Man of Steel will be one of the best films of 2013. Needless to say I am very much looking forward to Christopher Nolan’s version of Superman, because after Dark Knight Rises, I am pretty sure I know where Nolan is going with that long famed hero. If I had to guess, I would say that Nolan and I share a love for the classic book Thus Spoke Zarathustra. To understand what I am talking about, let us study just a few quotes known to come out of the new film set to be released on June 14th 2013 in tribute to the 75th year of the comic book creation. Many similar quotes are spoken by Zarathustra in that wonderful book which has meant so much to me over the years. They have been modified to fit the story of Superman, but the essence is there as either an accidental or intentional tribute by Nolan, to Thus Spoke Zarathustra. To place faces to the dialogue below, Jonathan Kent is being played by Kevin Costner, and Jor-El by Russell Crow two of my favorite actors.

Superman: My father believed that if the world found who I really was, they would reject me. He was convinced that the world wasn’t ready. What do you think?

Jonathan Kent: You’re not just anyone. One day, you’re going to have to make a choice. You’ll have to decide what kind of man you want to grow up to be. Whoever that man is, good character or bad, he’s going to change the world.

Jor-El: What if a child dreamed of becoming something other than what society had intended? What if a child aspired to something greater?

Jor-El: You will give the people an ideal to strive towards. They will race behind you, they will stumble, they will fall. But in time, they will join you in the sun. In time you will help them accomplish wonders.

To understand what Superman means to me, let me take you dear reader back to the time when I met my wife 26 years ago who felt that her father was the only living embodiment to Superman on Earth. She quite literally felt this way about him as he had then and still does have a Clark Kent quality of gentile courtesy even as a very large and strong man. He could crush most people easily, yet he didn’t. He supported the world in a way that Ayn Rand’s character of Hank Rearden did—another man of steel as a business tycoon—quietly, tenaciously, yet graciously. That man, my wife’s father was involved in a very serious accident a few years ago at the age of 65 when he was riding his Vestpa home from the school where he taught geology and was hit by a car driven by a young girl texting on her phone. The crash broke his leg so badly that doctors threatened to cut it off. Being a man of science, he knew that there was a chance his body could repair the fractured bones if only the living tissue within his femur would take and bond again. Doctors were very doubtful. There really wasn’t enough stable bone to even place rods through, so the prognosis was not good at all. Months later he came to my house and my son-in-law and I tried to pep him up with a positive discussion so that his mood would influence his peptides and feed his cells into rebuilding the bone of the femur. At the time, it looked like the bone was dying, as doctors had predicted. Yet his mood was good. He arrived at my house and insisted on walking on the broken leg. He dressed in a very nice outfit complete with a fedora hat and suspenders which was typical for him. He seemed to have a handle on the situation even though amputation seemed inevitable.

Months later the bone began to heel, and it was obvious that his shattered leg would repair. He has recently just returned from a 10,000 mile trip all over the western United States with his spouse, my wife’s mother. He hiked the Rocky Mountains with his leg and countless other places as a 67-year-old man. He’s fine now and can walk without a cane when he wants to. Over the years even during the tragic deaths of loved ones, economic difficulties, social upheavals, and any tribulation known to man, he has always risen to face those problems time and time again. In fact, on the day of his mother’s burial recently, we spent some time in his basement movie theater watching movies and laughing as though nothing had happened in the outside world. His ability to carry trouble on his back so adequately–protecting the more sensitive females in the family boldly is why my wife has always thought of him as Superman. In fact, she is planning to take him to see this updated version for his birthday, which occurs around that time.

My wife let me know from date number one that she expected from me to be Superman too. She wanted nothing less. Now many people who knew me then thought that her expectations were outrageously high and terribly unrealistic. Superman Part II from 1980 was the very first film she and I watched together and I noticed her sincerity when it came to Superman. We were in Richmond Virginia the day that Christopher Reeve had an equestrian accident that left him paralyzed from the neck down. She openly wept because reality had come to her mind that Superman played by Christopher Reeve was fictional. It’s not that she didn’t know it already, but it was blatant that the idea of being greater than just a slop of human flesh was not obtainable in the world except in the fantasy of the mind. To her it was sad that such a strong man in Christopher Reeve was imprisoned to a wheel chair for the rest of his life, which was greatly shortened because of the accident. Reeve had put on a valiant “Superman” like fight, but in the end had lost. My wife never really got over it.

When my wife met me, I was very rough around the edges. Actually, I still am. I don’t like dinning customs, social manners that remind me of European Victorianism, and I’ve been so mad that as recently of two years ago I’ve put my head through doors splitting them in two to make my point. I used to hope that my wife would be impressed by those acts of strength, but she never was. Now I only do things like that when I need to make my point to someone attempting to impose themselves on me. What did impress her were the times I rode a bicycle for 12 miles a day round trip in 10 degree weather working two jobs so she could stay home with our growing children. Or when I worked 16 hour days 7 days a week to make ends meet, or when I took on a whole neighborhood of rowdy kids to bust up a marijuana ring endorsed by the police, or the night I caught a peeping tom outside our window trying to get a look at my changing wife—and many other incidents. Not all of them were so obvious and clear-cut, but in my mind I always held in my mind the famous “S” shape that is the second most recognizable symbol in the entire world behind only the Christian cross—and I pushed forward no matter how daunting the feat in front of me was. My wife’s insistence that only Superman would impress her put my mind into the mode that was required. As a result, I don’t belch or fart and I never let even lip saliva run down a glass I drink out of. The reason is that those things are reminders of the grotesque nature of the human body, the simple collectivism of cells running about trying to live one more day in slow decline toward death. The human body needs to be more than that, or at least aim higher. Because of my wife, I hold the door open for all ladies young and old, I walk on the street side of a sidewalk when I walk with her to protect her from dangers that might come from that direction, and I have learned that there is a lot of strength in kindness, which has preserved many walls, doors and windows over the last couple of years. Instead, I have focused that energy not in the misplaced reaction to ill will toward me and my family, but in the pro-active attack of threats—often before they have a chance to manifest.

In short, since I have met my wife, I have tried every day to get up in the morning and be Superman. I expect to be Superman. That doesn’t necessarily mean the physical manifestation, or the ability to fly. But what it does mean is the “IDEA” of superman, the yearning to be more than just an average man, a man of faults, of weakness, of scandalous character, of pathetic whimpering, a man less than super. There were times where I thought such expectations where unrealistic, and that I thought she was the out-of-her mind to expect such high quality from me. But the result is that I am now at an age where I can hear that classic John Williams score and understand it intellectually, not just perceptively. I now have stories worth telling, and they are much greater than they would have been if I had not pushed myself to be a Superman every day of my life.

Sure, there were times like in Superman II where I understand just wanting to be a normal guy, and surrender all the power of the cape to be “human.” But what is quickly learned, just like in that old film, is that without Superman, evil rules the Earth, and hiding in the mountains, or in the Fortress of Solitude with a loved one won’t stop evil from advancing. It advances when there are no Supermen to meet it. So the world needs Supermen. My wife without realizing it set a high standard for me. I struggled to meet it, and in the end, I feel I understand Superman extremely well. I strive every day of my life to be Superman and nothing less.

It is easy to see why my wife was so insistent on living up to the image of Superman now in hindsight. Having kids of my own, they have a father who is someone they can legitimately look up to. Like I always looked at my wife’s father as something to aspire to, I have now given a new generation something to emulate. My version of Superman may be more like Indiana Jones, dirty, gritty, with streaks of blood running down my arms and back routinely. I lack the cleanness of leaping buildings in a single bound and flying around the world to stop time itself, but the idea is what’s important. The yearning to be more than just a decaying human being that simply wants to fill their bellies with food and have sexual relations with the same intensity that one uses the restroom—and for the same reasons, is something to be overcome, not cherished.

Because of Superman, I have looked for real examples of such an idea, and this is how I found Thus Spoke Zarathustra and ultimately became such a fan of the Übermensch idea which means in German “OVERMAN.” This is why this site is named Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom as Overman means Superman.

It sounds as if Christopher Nolan and Zack Snyder made their version of Superman: Man of Steel understanding all of what I have said above. After Dark Knight Rises for Nolan, and 300 for Snyder, I am 100 % sure that these guys understand what Superman is. It is highly likely their own wives have a similar yearning from them to behold a Superman, after all, what woman in the world deep in their hearts doesn’t? It is up to such men to be Supermen for their women.

But more than anything, Superman is an American idea. Superman evolved from the German ubermensch of Nietzsche and was carved into a preserver of Truth, Justice and the “American” way through comics. I almost turned away from Superman not long ago when the comic took a dark turn toward statism and Superman declared his alliance to The United Nations, which is to take such an American icon and turn him into an advocate for socialism. This is a trend I trust Christopher Nolan will halt in this upcoming film.

The only thing I am worried about concerning Superman: Man of Steel is the music by Hans Zimmer. I am deeply in love with the John Williams score from 1978, and it will be difficult to accept anything less. It is not rare for me to put that soundtrack on in our family car and blare it loudly with the windows down. My kids know all too often that this is routine with me and comes with riding in the same car. They were raised on that type of music. But Zimmer is my second favorite music composer behind only Williams, and I have a sneaky feeling that the musical score may actually be spectacular on many intellectual levels. Another popular soundtrack that is played all the time in my car and on my iPod is the soundtrack to Gladiator, which Hans Zimmer wrote. So Superman is in good hands.

Superman is great not because of his strength, but because he stands as a symbol of what everyone should strive to become. Unlike Robin Hood who steals from the rich and gives to the poor, which is an entirely socialist scheme, Superman stands alone as a beacon to the world as something to be aspired to, something to attempt to become. Superman is what capitalism is to the world, an example of the best among all human beings and someone who drives all of society forward in an attempt to be better. This is how Superman became the embodiment of the “American way.” It is the same as to say Superman endorses capitalism and fights for the right of mankind to be free and not to struggle under the tyranny of scheming despots, like what Lex Luther always represented as the primary villain.

I feel a little sorry for my son-in-laws. My daughters do expect them to be Supermen, and it will be tough. They don’t expect those boys to be cut the way Henry Cavill is but they do expect the heart of the Superman character to be in their every day life. They do expect their personal Supermen to hold up the entire world and crush any threat to their freedom; they expect a man who would crawl into the depths of hell to rescue a loved one, or to fight an army of millions all alone. Is such a thing unrealistic……………of course…………….that is if the problem is viewed from the lens of being only human. But if the same problems are viewed the way of Superman, then no problem is too great, and not threat is too severe.

The “S” on the front of Superman’s shirt does not stand for “super” but for “hope.” This is why young women desire their men to be Supermen, and if they don’t they should. Young men need such targets to aspire to. They should not look up to weaklings, and belching comedians. They should look up to Superman and work every day to be super. In that fashion, the “S” represents the hope that all people have to be more than they were born into, to be more than any terrestrial goal could otherwise provide. Hope is what Superman represents, and I “HOPE” that Man of Steel is even a fraction of what I desire it to be. I am looking very forward to seeing that picture with my wife, because out of all the characters in film or literature there is not one that she admires more than Superman, and the idea of a man who is more than just average.

Today is the twenty-fifth anniversary of my wife and I. Traditionally, a man is supposed to give his wife some kind of silver after 25 years of marriage. But our life has not been conventional to say the least. So some silly silver trinket just won’t do. So what I give her instead is the gift of the Superman. I give her the literal meaning of the “S” and everything it has come to represent. It’s all she has ever wanted, and after 25 years of marriage she has the right to have it. Thus Spoke the Overman.

Rich Hoffman