Month: July 2012

We Should Have Called Guinness: Tales from 2012’s Annie Oakley Western Showcase

I haven’t made a secret of it, every year when we have dinner at the Fairlawn Steak House with my friends at the annual Annie Oakley Festival it’s a kind of calibration for me to get my roots firmly back in the ground. To see last year’s article (CLICK HERE). It was refreshing to see some of the old faces again, and it was wonderful to see new ones. There were some who had paying jobs who couldn’t come this year which happen to fall on this particular weekend which was unfortunate, but does happen. For the most part, the Wild West is alive and well with the group I feel privileged to know and call friends.

I’ve known Gery Deer for around a decade now as he has put on the Western Showcase at Annie Oakley for about that long. It’s a thankless job that encompasses a lot of love for the Western Arts which ranges from music to period weapons. I was asked by many people who know me in other places besides my outback hat and bullwhips if I was going to the Restoring Love event down in Dallas, Texas over the same weekend. Even though there were many reasons for not going, most of them due to time constraints, my primary restraint was not to miss this wonderful event on the last weekend of July at the Darke County Fairgrounds.

It was nice to see Lash Luke back from Birmingham, Alabama. Luke came to his first Annie Oakley event last year as a 16 year old. His mom had brought him and he attended his first dinner with us at the Fairlawn. This year he was back, this time his dad brought him. He was much faster and sharper as a 17 year old, and had improved a lot in just one year of very hard work. He was so good that he won the heart of the young lady who was Miss Annie Oakley this year at the event that completely takes over Greenville, Ohio. She was so impressed with him that every free moment she had where she didn’t have to do “official” Annie Oakley business she was in the Coliseum at our Wild West exhibit to see him as we were cracking whips and throwing knives to a captive audience.

An impressive new whip maker named David Crain brought his act up from Middletown and set up a booth that had a lot of interest as he displayed his hand made nylon whips which were very, very good. I worked with them all day and they had wonderful balance and a lot of snap. His whips are also extremely creative as he custom turns all the handles on his own lathe. By trade he is an instrument maker—specifically drums and his whips look very much like instruments and for an extremely reasonable cost. I could easily have done two handed routines with my normal 6’ Terry Jacka 12 plait whip that costs nearly $600 in one hand and one of David Crain’s nylon whips in the other of the same length and not known much of a difference for around $130. His whips are perfect for people just trying to get into the sport as his whips are wonderful for beginners and professionals alike. In fact Richard Best who travels the country every year with his wife Donna Daring performing traditional western acts commissioned David to make a special nylon whip just for him. Richard has several nylon whips none of them he likes a whole lot, until he saw David’s.

During the whip competitions this year David Crain on behalf of his company Heartbeat Artistry donated the prizes for the Speed and Accuracy competition, the Speed Switch, and the Bull Whip Fastdraw. The prizes were 3’, 4’ and a 5’ custom made Crain whips. I was very happy with my performance this year even without as much time to practice as I normally do; I came away with my fastest time ever on the Speed and Accuracy competition of 11 seconds flat. The world record is 9 seconds hitting 10 targets. I hit 12 in 11 seconds which comes out to around .9 per crack. That was pretty good. If we had called Guinness for that attempt I might have had a world record, but I didn’t expect to come that close. Usually the winning time is 12.5 seconds to 14 seconds. I’ve won before with 12.6. I also did well on the speed switch this year with a time of 18.6 seconds which is more difficult because you have to use both hands going down the target stands one way with your right hand then back the other with your left. Times on that one are normally in the high 20’s because it’s hard to be accurate with both hands and time deductions for misses are very common. I also did well in the bull whip quick drawl, which I’ve had a problem with in the past. If you go too fast, you tend to pull the whip off to the right depending on how it’s coiled. So I backed off my speed a bit this year and hit the target squarely each time, something my son-in-law Paul is very, very good at. He has won the bullwhip quick draw more than any of us because he has the perfect combination of aggression, patience, precision and of course speed. That’s the trick of the fast draw which was invented by Gery Deer and Kirk Bass of Bass Blades.

Because of my good day with the whip competitions my grandson will be the recipient of the whips won from these competitions when he’s born. He doesn’t know it yet because he’s still kicking around inside my daughter, but the moment he’s born, he gets the 3’ whip. When he gets older, like age three and then four, I’ll give him the longer ones on his birthdays. The whip maker David had his daughter with him and she was 5 years old and cracking a leaf out of his hands. So my unborn grandson will be expected to do at least that much. Those whips will be the perfect size to learn on for a small child and they will all match and will take him well into his teenage years.

Kirk and Melodie Bass routinely energize the crowds with their knife throwing shows that are very unique. Kirk has been throwing knives for about 8 years now, and he is one of the best there is. The Bass family concentrates on knife throwing, but they do a little bit of everything, including whips. Melodie has always participated in the bullwhip competitions having fun as she goes. While we were eating at the Fairlawn her 5 year old curly haired son gazed at me over chicken sticks. I remember vividly 5 years ago when Melodie put up a respectable time on the speed and accuracy competition while pregnant with that child. They are an amazing family.

Gery Deer and his wife were as busy as ever. They are regularly booked for whip shows, and musical acts with Gery’s band titled The Brothers and Company who are most recently known for their controversial appearance at the Murphy Theater in Wilmington, Ohio. There they performed a song called “Big Butter Jesus Burned to the Ground” in homage to the famous statue in Monroe, Ohio that caught fire during a lightning storm. Gery currently does regular news segments for Channel 2 WTDN in Dayton as well as other television work in and around Dayton. Gery occasionally does convention and costume work for Indiana Jones because of his whip studio. Gery has most of the official costume items of Indiana Jones except for an authentic hat as it was designed for Raiders of the Lost Ark, which is a very unusual Fedora design. At Annie Oakley this year a custom hat maker from Cleveland drove down and met Gery to give him the most authentic Indiana Jones hat I’ve ever seen worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $500. It looks exactly like the Raiders hat that is in the Smithsonian, to every detail. It even has the varied brim widths around the hat to hang down over the face more than a typical Fedora. Gery was excessively happy about receiving this new hat as he wore it to dinner after their music performance.

Like all good things, they don’t last forever. The night had to come to a conclusion at some point in time. Most of us reluctantly sat around the dining table at the Fairlawn drawing out the evening even longer, but once we started paying checks, the indication that the marathon race to the next Annie Oakley event was about to begin for 2013 became clear.

A lot happens in a year and annually at the Annie Oakley Western Showcase I calibrate myself to the true values that hold everything up, the values that support family, friendships, and nations, and all those elements are present at the dinner table at the Fairlawn Steak House. The truth is easy to see for those who venture outside of their comfort zone just a little bit. For those who don’t, one can only feel pity as their lives are like compass needless spinning in perpetual search for true north. For me, north is in Greenville, Ohio and the friends I meet there every year. It’s in the whip cracks, the gun fire, and the sound of the knives sticking hard into a wooden backdrop. It’s the smell of fried streak fries and wood smoke from an open campfire. It’s the bright eyes of little children clapping at the magic tricks of Professor Karns, or the whip routines of Lash Luke, the roping of Richard Best and the bravery of Melodie Bass. But more than anybody it is Gery Deer who keeps it all together one year at a time performing western acts that are nearly extinct. In him it lives with perpetual hope, that tomorrow it will be alive for a new generation. And when my grandson is born, it will begin with a 3 foot whip from David Crain. Because if I need to do anything different in this upcoming year as opposed to years past, it’s more of what has worked and less of what didn’t. For me what works best are lots of bull whips and cut targets, with memories, friends and 8 X 10’s.

____________________________________________

This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon

“Just finished the book and am sweating profusely. Wow, what a ride !!!  Fasten your seat belts for one of the most thrilling rides ever in print.“

Visit the NEW Tail of the Dragon WEBSITE!  CLICK HERE!

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

Review of ‘Dark Knight Rises’: A movie of great entertainment–and importance.

I wanted to calm myself down before giving a review of Dark Knight Rises, the latest in the highly acclaimed Batman trilogy by Christopher Nolan, because as a movie it does nearly everything correctly as a motion picture experience, and I found it absolutely stunning. Dark Knight Rises would be a great film even if you watched it on an iPod, because it’s about as close to a perfect movie that can be made. However, knowing that this film was going to be a spectacle that deserved the biggest screen with the best sound system I could find, I watched the film from my favorite movie theater in the Cincinnati area—the Regal Theaters in Deerfield Township near Mason.

There are very good movie regional movie theaters, the Showcase Cinemas in Springdale come to mind followed closely by the AMC Theaters at Newport on the Levee. For a theater to be great it needs to place its movies on a pedestal to be watched in a temple of honor. The hallways taking the viewer to their movie need to help pave the way to a mythic experience, because that’s really what people expect from the price of an expensive movie ticket. I’m not a fan of the Rave Theaters simply because they are typically dirty from large amounts of teenage traffic, particularly at the one in West Chester. The floors are sticky, the seats feel used, and the events leading up to the movie are cheesy and low-class. I’d compare the experience to a drive-in movie only it’s inside instead of outside. They were built to be majestic, but they are just not cared for, they take the moviegoer for granted, which is a big mistake. The Regal in Deerfield Township is everything that a movie theater should be. They are clean; they have nice big theaters with very good screens. They have wonderful seats, large isles, wonderful pre-movie entertainment and large hallways leading up to the individual theaters. The theater itself sits on a large hill and has colossal columns outside the ticket windows to provide a majestic appearance. I’d liken it to a great temple designed for storytelling.

When Dark Knight Rises finished I sat till the final credits scrolled across the screen feeling that I had maybe witnessed the best movie I had seen in twenty years. It was a true masterpiece. The last time I enjoyed a movie as much as Dark Knight Rises was Jurassic Park in 1993 where I came away from that movie pleasantly surprised and deeply satisfied. There have been a lot of movies since then, many of them good to very good. But none of them have had the visual impact, and story line punch that Dark Knight Rises had. Being a fan of Christopher Nolan’s last film, Inception I expected this latest Batman film to be good. I also expected it to be good because of the previous two Batman films, The Dark Knight, and Batman Begins were very good, but Dark Knight Rises goes to the extra trouble of being simply fantastic.

It was more of a visual novel paying homage to such classics as Tail of Two Cities. But during the entire film I kept thinking that it was more of an action packed rendition of Atlas Shrugged.  If it can be forgotten that Dark Knight Rises is based on a comic book character, the theatrics are very heady stuff. It’s a deeply intelligent film. It’s filmed with a philosophy that does not wish upon a star of blind hope, but is grounded in a gritty reality that hits the core of virtually every human being alive—the desire to be more than we are to serve a purpose that matches our imaginations.

I have read comic books all my life. But I didn’t follow the story of Batman very closely. I personally leaned more toward the character of Zorro over the years being more of a western oriented story which I prefer over the technical expertise of Batman—Don Diego and Bruce Wayne are essentially the same type of character. Zorro made the sign of the ‘Z’ whereas Batman had the Bat Signal. Both are wealthy men who work their bodies and minds into improvement to perform superhuman feats. Bruce Wayne and Don Diego are Nietzsche’s overman, they are Ayn Rand’s “men of the mind.” They are human like anyone else, but achieve a level of mental and physical prowess that exceeds what most human beings attempt, and they use their personal wealth to mask their social intentions of mankind’s preservation. But under Christopher Nolan’s direction, Bruce Wayne takes the next evolutionary step into a deeply compelling character.

The mentor of Bruce Wayne from Batman Begins is Ra’s al Ghul who is an international criminal mastermind intent on restoring perfect environmental balance to the world by destroying most of humanity. Ra’s al Ghul is at the head of an international terrorist organization called the League of Shadows which was the intended destination of Bruce Wayne in the first film. This is a very contemporary theme as there are many real life characters that have Ra’s al Ghul’s world view that the environment must be preserved at the expense of mankind. Actually this is the debate of our age and has led entire nations into communism, socialism, dictatorships and is in direct conflict with capitalism, which Bruce Wayne represents as a billionaire.

In Dark Knight Rises Batman’s ultimate nemesis is Bane, who comes out of the League of Shadows as an ‘evolved’ man himself, not afraid of anything, and presenting compelling problems. He presents to Gotham City an option of communism, while using it as a distraction to actually purge the world of human overpopulation. Bane immediately reminded me of Stalin in the former Soviet Union except with a theatrical overtone. Bane is the most effective villain since Darth Vader from the Star Wars films. Banes synthesized voice was striking and as a character. He won me over in his very first scene where he confidently put himself on death’s door in a plot as maniacal as the ultimate villains from any ten James Bond films. Bane was a wonderfully evil character. There is absolutely no mistake about it. He is the opposite of Bruce Wayne in every category except that both men were trained by the League of Shadows.

In the Star Wars films it is the conflict between the Sith and the Jedi that drives the constant yearning to always know more about those movies that has made them so enduring. There is a truth in Star Wars as movies and books that hold the essential arguments of our age about spirituality, heroics, sacrifice, and political structure. The Sith are evil as it might be typically portrayed and the Jedi are the good. But at times the Jedi are too sacrificial, and they allow evil to emerge because they are not aggressive enough to stop it. And the Sith have appeal because they are all about aggression to achieve their intentions at any cost. In these Batman films it is the League of Shadows which actually hits much more closely to reality than any work of fiction being produced today. Listening to the merits of the League of Shadows it is easy to draw modern comparisons to al Qaeda and the current Occupy Movement being driven by political anarchists, socialists, Marxists, communists and the environmental movement.

Bane’s character was fleshed out well before there was a current ‘Occupy Movement” on Wall Street. The call for these modern parallels comes from literature that has been pouring out of Europe for a long time, most recently The Coming Insurrection by The Invisible Committee. So Dark Knight Rises cannot be said to reflect those modern movements that has started to emerge in Greece and Spain with violence. Many countries in Europe are currently collapsing under the weight of socialism financially, which is driven by underground political groups reading The Coming Insurrection. Christopher Nolan definitely has his finger on the world’s pulse as he and his brother came up with a plot that is hauntingly timely considering much of the script to this latest Batman installment was written way back in 2004 and 2005. The creators of Dark Knight Rises observed the conditions of our modern world and saw that comic books had predicted much of our current trouble back in the 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, and 80’s so they brushed them off into the incredibly relevant motion picture adaption that take the next theatrical step.

Cat Woman played by Anne Hathaway was excessively gripping. Anne was caught herself last year as a ‘Wall Street Occupier’ disguised in the crowd before being caught on film. Cat Woman was openly a socialist at the beginning of Dark Knight Rises. She is built up as a character that the audience will most likely identify with. She like many young people have been taught that society owes them something and if they don’t get it legitimately, then they’ll take it. Cat Woman has some really terrific scenes with Batman, the ultimate capitalist about the nature of money and the social role of the rich. Bruce Wayne as Batman finds her compelling and doesn’t lecture her on her social errors which was a wise choice. Instead, Cat Woman learns like the rest of the audience what the horrors of her idealism can, and will lead to. Playing a kind of biblical Judas, she trades Batman over to Bane only to witness through Batman’s demise how Gotham City is destroyed by removing the only man who can protect it.

The question of why only one man can stop Bane is the general premise of the novel Atlas Shrugged, and it is explored in Dark Knight Rises epically. The personal quest of Bruce Wayne realizing that nobody but him can save Gotham from the mobs that have been collected under idealism is potent stuff in this film. There are some deep and meaningful insights that Bruce Wayne had to endure and overcome that are the themes to most of the articles I write here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom, and I was eating it up like popcorn. Specifically, the point in the film where Bruce Wayne is crippled, and barely kept alive—tortured into watching the violent demise of Gotham City from a hellish pit. It is in this pit that the classic mythic motif of death and resurrection takes place. Wayne faces down the ghost of his former mentor Ra’s al Ghul and discovers that Bane learned to be such a monstrous provoker of evil from this very same place, and the only way to beat Bane is to survive the way he did, to become even stronger than he was before. Batman discovers that his weakness was his success, and that he has been failing because he does not fear death. There is a part of Bruce Wayne who wants it all to end, who wants the pain to go away, and it is in that trait that is holding him back from defeating Bane.

It is in a love of life that we ultimately live and fight for each moment. Without that love, life takes on a darker meaning, and this is what poisons much of the world. Batman didn’t know it, but Bane was fighting from a position of love and therefore had more passion. It was in that passion that Bane had so much strength, and it is what Bruce lacked. At the beginning of the film, this is why Bruce Wayne is a broken man hiding as a recluse in exile. He has a broken heart, and his body and mind reflected it. To heel, he had to want to live. This is the heart of Dark Knight Rises.

As usual, Hans Zimmer conducted a masterpiece of film music. He is the next best thing to hit Hollywood films since John Williams. I enjoy all his soundtracks, and Dark Knight Rises was simply fantastic. The use of percussion was so pulsating throughout the film that my adrenaline often wanted to ram my head through a wall in excitement. Some of the combat scenes were simply epic in large part due to Hans Zimmer’s music. There were many moments that reminded me of Braveheart, and it was Hans Zimmer’s music that sold the scenes wonderfully.

Dark Knight Rises is filmmaking at its very, very best. Such a movie only comes along every so often, and will resonate in our culture for many years, and for good reason. I personally read many comparative religion books, political commentaries, economic theories, legal jargon, and world history. But I have always found a truth in comic book stores and national conventions that evades most social insiders.

There is a very good reason that young people flock to video games, movies, and comic books in greater numbers than they ever have before. They often don’t know the reason, but they are simply searching for a truth that they require to advance their lives. Many of them will not discover it. They will listen when someone tells them to ‘grow up’ get a job, and serve society. But the truth they are looking for is the one that Bruce Wayne was forced to discover in Dark Knight Rises. It’s a love of life that everyone must find. And before anyone can save anybody, they must first save themselves.

I was the last one out of the crowded theater at the Regal. My family had left me sitting right in the center of the large theater. I was happier at the conclusion of the film than I had been in a long time because when I am asked why I write all this work online for free, it is to cover many of the themes that were shown in Dark Knight Rises. I felt I had just watched a book that I had wanted to read for many years, and had been trying to get people to see by putting the information out for free just so people could discover their own love of life and not find themselves crushed by the Banes of the world.

I had so much positive energy flowing through me that I was reluctant to stand up because I might leap over the rail and bounce around the empty theater like an electron in a particle separator. I had to sit still to calm myself down. The projectionist looked down from his booth wondering if I was OK and seeing that I was left me alone. I sat in the theater for five full minutes in complete silence. No usher came in to clean since we had seen the last show of the evening. It was 11 PM. I have been hungry for Dark Knight Rises for such a very long time. I am glad that a director like Christopher Nolan had been given a chance, and the substantial budget to put on the big screen a spectacle that had all the heart of an independent film, with the epic scale that only a well-funded studio picture could provide. I know all too well how incredibly difficult it is to assemble anything close to what Nolan made for Warner Brothers and ultimately the world. But he did it, and I thank God that he did.

Dark Knight Rises is simply the best movie currently out. It is the best film I’ve seen in 20 years and that says a lot. There are many films that are very good, but Dark Knight Rises is on a level of its own. If you have not seen it do not waste another minute. While it’s true that we are all busy in life with projects of our own, work that must be done, families to raise, and social events to engage in, everyone should see this movie. Believe me—there isn’t a film that more accurately frames the problems of our day better than Dark Knight Rises. It is not a simple comic book adaptation. It is an epic myth that takes on virtually every major contemporary problem with a boldness that is unprecedented. It is the very best that Hollywood has produced and is a wonderful export of American ideas that can be shared with a world in deep need of the message. It is more than a movie; it is a life-sustaining essence that is deeply meaningful if the layers of entertainment are peeled away so that we can swim in a much-needed truth. If I had a ranking system of one star through five—one being the worst, five being the best—I’d give Dark Knight Rises TEN STARS (**********)

See Dark Knight Rises once—then see it again, and again, and again, and again, and again until they finally pull the film from theaters. I can say this; I will go out and buy an entirely new television and sound system so that when Dark Knight Rises is released to video, I can watch it on Blue Ray at least once a week using the latest technology and I will turn that sucker up all the way! I like the movie that much! But it will never be as good as the first experience in the Regal. That is why when the lights came up and everyone left the theater I was still sitting, because I did not want to leave that seat, or the theater. I wanted the magic to continue on forever, because I’m not sure I’ll ever in my lifetime see another movie as good as Dark Knight Rises.

____________________________________________

This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon

“Just finished the book and am sweating profusely. Wow, what a ride !!!  Fasten your seat belts for one of the most thrilling rides ever in print.“

Visit the NEW Tail of the Dragon WEBSITE!  CLICK HERE!

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

Bandit Run 2012: The future of ‘Tail of the Dragon’

One of the reasons I wrote the Tail of the Dragon was because I wanted to read it. When I was a kid, I loved the movies Smokey and the Bandit and Hooper and have been waiting for three decades for film makers and authors to write an updated version of those classic stories—but I’m still waiting. I’m not alone in this. To this day millions of movie fans still adore those films and some even go to the measure of doing the Bandit Run in their restored Trans Am’s from Texarkana, Texas to Atlanta, Georgia duplicating the car chase from that 1977 Burt Reynolds film. This year a group of car restoration enthusiasts just completed their annual 2012 Bandit Run which began in 2007 to touch the magic of those classic films and relive the enduring memory they have in American film culture.

I happen to have one of those old Firebirds from 1977 in my garage and it’s a family treasure. It is that car and the memory of those great films that provoked me to stop waiting for someone else to write a modern, Smokey and the Bandit story. I think its wonderful that there are still enough fans of the old films, and there are still a few of those old Firebird Trans Am’s around that allow events like the Bandit Run’s to take place, but I couldn’t help but think that young people today need an updated story—a new story that speaks to their age and the concerns of their times. For sentimental reasons, I wanted the star of the story to be one of those old Firebirds so that in the future there would be old car restorers years down the road who would want to organize a Tail of the Dragon run because the story I wrote inspired them to do such a thing.

I picked the Tail of the Dragon road on US 129 in Tennessee because I think it has the makings of being the kind of nostalgic road to the American psyche that Route 66 was. The Tail of the Dragon is a very unique road that features 318 switch back curves in an 11 mile stretch that forms the western border of the Great Smoky Mountains. Exotic cars and motorcycles from all over the world come to this section of road to exercise the suspensions of their beloved automobiles. Below is a video of a Ferrari that came to the motorcycle resort at the corner of the Moonshiner 28 and The Tail of the Dragon to make a nice run on the switch back curves. The camera work will show how curvy this road is. The video only shows a fraction of the road, but it supplies a wonderful perspective of the dramatic scenery surrounding the Tail of the Dragon.

The shack shown across from the motorcycle resort is now a full-sized store with a wonderful outlook built into the hillside. You can see more about that new store here, where Tail of the Dragon merchandise can be purchased. (CLICK TO VISIT) The scenery changed a little since that video was shot, but for the most part, nothing else has. It’s one of the most unusual sections of road in the world.

Police have made a habit of patrolling that thoroughfare to pick up speeders knowing that people are going to that section to push the limits of their vehicles. For instance, in our family minivan when I went recently to visit Darryl Cannon (AKA Killboy) I spent much of the time while on the Dragon at 37 MPH with the tires screeching constantly. That gives an idea how many curves there are, when 37 MPH is considered fast. In really nice exotic cars like Lamborghini, and the Ferrari shown above, speeds of 40 to 50 MPH could be achieved without too much trouble. But the nature of the road is a challenge for both car and driver alike. Brake timing is crucial because moving your foot from the accelerator to the brake is an ongoing battle. When I found Killboy parked on the side of the Dragon photographing riders as they passed by, I could smell my brakes from such aggressive driving. Our minivan wasn’t designed for that kind of run, but it was still fun.

I arrived to see Killboy right after he shot the video below. Every weekend he sits on the side of the road and photographs everything that goes by. He offers his photos on his site www.KILLBOY.com .  Riders can purchase professional grade photos of themselves driving by, and yes–business is good. Thousands of riders pass by him every weekend and he photographs them all. He is the original photographer of the Tail of the Dragon, so when I decided to write a book about the area, I had to make sure that he was one of the characters. His photography is highly sought after by automotive and motorcycle magazines across the country as he has samples on his site of some of his work. His brand of photography is kind of like fishing. He sits on the corners of the Dragon and shoots his camera at everything that goes by, and every now and then he captures something really spectacular—just like fishing. A story about the Tail of the Dragon just wouldn’t be the same without Killboy being a part of it.

Killboy is his video gamer tag name and over the years it just stuck. Now, it’s what he’s known by. In my novel Tail of the Dragon Killboy finds himself in a lot of trouble with the law in Blount County. He is the spark that starts a whole lot of chaos with just the simple bet of a hot dog. The officers of the law take serious offense to the activities Killboy was participating in with Rick Stevens—the novel’s hero–which ignites the greatest car chase ever.

When writing the novel it made sense that a car chase that would be bigger than Smokey and the Bandit, bigger than the ending of Hooper, bigger than anything ever done in books or films with much more speed than the popular NASCAR film Days of Thunder, or the insane car chase in the Blues Brothers where part of the chase ended up in a shopping mall–which is taken to much higher heights in Tail of the Dragon–the chase needed to start at this historic road of US 129. And it’s in the spirit of those great classics that the future of the Dragon will host similar runs that will bring great joy to thousands of people as they make the Dragon Run Car Chase part of an annual tradition. Such a run will take them from Deals Gap at the resort, down the Dragon, across the Foothills Parkway, into Townsend, Tennessee over to Pigeon Forge, Sevierville, then down I-40 into Ashville, North Carolina where the novel comes to an electrifying conclusion. At every stretch of that chase along those roads and towns are events that are as big as the climaxes in most movies. The chase is exhausting, but Dragon Run Car Chase Runners will make their journeys through those landmarks in much the way that the Bandit Runners have, and it will allow them to take in some of the most spectacular sites available in and around the Great Smoky Mountains.

For me it’s fun to take a break from politics, and finance to just enjoy the finer things in life. Most often, I enjoy works of fiction that on the surface are tension relieving and just plain fun. That is why Smokey and the Bandit is still a beloved movie that provokes so much emotion. And if I did my job correctly in writing Tail of the Dragon it will bring to a new generation that same kind of passion, which I hope it does. Because I want to be there when the first Tail of the Dragon Car Chase Run is made, which will be quite a sight. It’s the celebration of the fun things in life that often count most and give meaning to all the stuff in between.

____________________________________________

This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon

“Just finished the book and am sweating profusely. Wow, what a ride !!!  Fasten your seat belts for one of the most thrilling rides ever in print.“

Visit the NEW Tail of the Dragon WEBSITE!  CLICK HERE!

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

Bill O’Reilly Wants Gun Control?: The true ‘THIN BLUE LINE’

Bill O’Reilly is not alone in his confusion over the role that government plays in the gun debate. There has been a lot said about his heated debate with Rep Chaffetz over stricter gun laws. Bill O’Reilly the popular author and TV reporter on Fox News is typically a conservative leaning investigator, but due to his roots in working class Levittown, New York, he has a soft spot for labor unions, and due to the fact that he’s lived and worked around New York City for a good part of his life, where they have banned guns completely, his view of the outside world is somewhat tainted.

O’Reilly blew up recently on the air with Chaffetz stating that while he did support American ownership of firearms, O’Reilly thought that the FBI should be contacted when heavy weapons or ammo are purchased. On the surface, what O’Reilly says makes sense; law enforcement should know what’s going on and what they are getting involved with if they are required to apprehend a suspect like James Holmes who has been stockpiling assault rifles and ammunition ahead of an intended shooting spree. O’Reilly’s reasoning is that if the FBI had the ability to know that James Holmes was buying large amounts of ammunition that law enforcement might have been triggered to watch Holmes more closely and therefore might have stopped the Aurora, Colorado movie theater shooting before it happened.

People who live in gun banning cities like Chicago, Washington D.C. and New York share with people who live in gun banning countries such as Canada and England the naïve assumption that law enforcement is always on the side of the people they are sworn to protect. These people believe that law enforcement should have 100% of community cooperation yielding all freedoms to the scrutiny of those law enforcement officers. Typically the people who are worst in this complete yielding of their personal freedoms to government authority have lived in the coastal cities at some point in their life and already had to face the concessions of living in those gun banning zones, so the premise of their argument is corrupted by their experience.

In the fly over states, gun ownership is a fact of life. Virtually everyone I know who does not live in a metropolitan area treasures their guns. Many own 3 to 5 per household, and these are typically very intelligent people who have very good jobs, raise very good families, and are overall good citizens. There are probably as many guns within 10 miles of my home as there are on a small military base, and that’s good. That’s exactly how it should be. In my community there isn’t much for police to do except break up domestic violence situations and petty theft. People in my community do not shoot each other when someone cuts the grass over on the property of their neighbor. Generally, people get along nicely, even when some of those people support school levies and others do not. We take our differences out at the ballot box, but generally are kind to each other while in public. Part of the reason for the peace and prosperity in rural areas are because of the large amounts of guns.

Cops are not shot when they come to our doors in suburbia. They are respected even when all they really have to do is sit on the side of the road and give us traffic tickets. There is a respectful tension between the general public and law enforcement. But there is not fear, because we are armed, and so are they.

But law enforcement by its title takes their orders from the political system that is in place, and if the political system is corrupt, like we all know it is abuses are bound to occur. In areas where guns are confiscated, stories of police violence against citizens goes up dramatically. Now, in my family there are several members who are cops, and one of my nephews who I have always been close to wants to be a cop. So what I say is taken in context and from experience. I have personally employed cops, and have known some of them as good friends, and with all that said I would not surrender my life completely to them under any circumstance. I do not trust them to make decisions on my behalf that will dictate the direction of my life, the lives of my family, and my property. I respect them and the danger of their job, but that is also what they are being paid for. I don’t give them a right to my life and property in the name of safety, I don’t give them the right to molest my wife and daughters, and I certainly don’t give them the right to draw a gun on me because they have a tendency to overact with grand theatrics when danger is present. I’ve seen this kind of behavior in more than one fight outside of bars where they show up on the scene and see a person laying face down in a pool of blood and assume the guy still standing did something wrong. Cops just like most people panic at the site of blood and guns, and they let their fears get away from them often. Cops are dangerous under this condition. Many of the gun laws created have been created under the pretense of panic where law makers have pandered to police officer’s fears.

Before the baby shower that my wife and daughter where holding for my youngest daughter over the previous weekend they sent me up to the local convenient store to purchase ice for the multiple coolers that were to be filled with drinks. I found myself in line behind a derelict of a man who was buying lottery tickets. Once he had his tickets he left and I was able to pay for my ice and get the key from the attendant. I went outside to get my ice out of the freezer and found that the man with the lottery tickets was sitting in his car scratching off the numbers. As I pulled out my bags of ice, the man cried out in glee from his car. “I won—I won!”

He jumped out of his car as though he had just won a million dollars and held the tickets up for me to see. “It won me some big money today! I won twenty dollars! I was afraid I was going to have to borrow money from my brother-in-law for cigarettes, but now I don’t have to!” As I loaded up my ice I couldn’t help but smile at the man who wasn’t any older than I was. “Now, if that happened every day, you’d never have to work another day in your life,” I said. He looked at me with confused attempts to connect neurons in his brain and relate something in his life that would help him understand my context. But my comment was completely foreign to him. I might as well have spoken a foreign language to him, because his lifestyle and mine are so far apart they might as well be from different countries. As I watched him run in to cash out his lottery tickets and come back out with a box of cigarettes and a toothless smile from ear to ear I thought—that was a guy I don’t want to have a gun—because he’s not smart enough to carry one.

It is people like that guy who police worry about when they have to arrest them for domestic violence because they beat the hell out of their bother-in-law over cigarette money, or had sex with their wife’s sister because they were all drunk and passed out on the floor of their smoke infested trailer. The wife erupts into a violent range wanting to kill the man for his reckless sexual exploits. It is often the poor and destitute who have trouble with guns, just like they have trouble with money. I have tried to employee such people for years, and they often lose their jobs because of attendance—they just don’t have the ambition to get out of bed. Many of them would rather use government regulation and unemployment benefits to keep from having to show up for a job, and because they are essentially lazy, they have low quality people in their lives and a low quality life style, and it’s there choice.

I should not be restricted from owning military grade weapons because of people like that lottery ticket guy. I should be able to have the guns of my choice in case politics fail completely and I need an equalizer against tyranny. Hopefully, just by having the gun, it will mean I never have to use it. But in not having it, police abuse and political cover-ups will occur, because they do now—and always have. My life is more important than the collective sum of the lottery ticket guy, or the nature of a politician’s congressional district, or presidential reign. All those kinds of things are just blips on the radar screen and don’t mean much in the scheme of things.

The FBI, the CIA, the ATF, the Department of Homeland Security, the TSA and our local police officers cannot be trusted to do the right thing 100% of the time. The need for the gun is for the 1% of the time that humans fail their fellow-man with the knowledge that one group has power over another. When the officer cuffs a man for a traffic warrant late on a Saturday night and discover his wife is in a compromised position and is quite attractive and unprotected, they may offer to turn the man loose if the woman has sex with them. Yes it does happen. The wife may want not want her husband arrested, or maybe going to jail will bankrupt them so she might be inclined to do as the officers suggest. I know of cops who have sat in my backyard and bragged about this kind of stuff. The arrested man at that point should have the right to defend his wife, and is property from intruders. But because the man is handcuffed in the back of a patrol car and the law has taken possession of his home, the police are in complete command to dictate the terms of release or apprehension. If the police know that the man is not a registered gun owner who might seek revenge for the indiscretion, they are much more inclined to abuse their power and take advantage of the wife.

If the man is a gun owner, the police will treat the man with much more respect. They’ll be much more careful with any suggestions that man might interpret as threatening because after the court hearings are over, they don’t want that man to come after them for revenge. So they treat everyone with more respect. That respect comes because of the gun.

The bottom line is no government agency needs to know any more about our lives than they need for basic government operation. They do not need to have the ability to have complete control over the American population in times of martial law. The President of the United States does not have the right to impede our rights over some political panic. And the weakest links of our society cannot be allowed to create legislation to keep certain guns out of their hands which punishes all of society. If we allow the weak links of our culture to determine the levels of our freedoms then we might as well consider ourselves a conquered civilization.

People like Bill O’Reilly are well-intentioned, but they are corrupted with the gradual erosion of progressive politics that have made such slight indiscretions seem minor and reasonable. When gun grabbers suggest that the Constitution was written in a time when the only guns were balls of lead and single shot muskets they are missing the point. America is not a land of law run by lawyers, and the Constitution is not a legal document as typical lawyers might consider it. It’s a political philosophy that has law draped from it as decoration. The decorations can all be removed yet the structure is still intact. It does not matter if the gun is a single shot musket, or an automatic machine gun, the need for guns in society are to equalize all participants with the ability to wipe temptation from the minds of the would-be thief, the looting politicians, and the ruthless dictator.

The government does not need to know what, or when we buy something or what we intend to do with it. It’s none of their business. Having more law enforcement officers does not make me feel safe. Only a gun at my own hip, or the guns next to my bed, or in my garage make me feel safe, and the need for them is an acknowledgment of human philosophy that understands the true nature of people. Gun control is social engineering that assumes that the people who look over our records, and monitor our activities are superior in their decision-making skills to society in general, and that just isn’t the case. In fact, it couldn’t be further from the truth. For those who assume that dangerous weapons are OK to ban from the public the meaning of the weapons are lost in the discussion. No—we do not need an AK47 to shoot a deer. But we may need it if a major storm comes through and knocks out power for days on end and bands of looters roam from house to house to rape, pillage, and destroy the property and lives of the inhabitants while the police are overwhelmed with the emergency. That is the time when all you have is yourself, and your guns to keep tragedy from making another victim of a family that trusted the law completely even though all the rules of society changed the moment the power went out. In times like that, more than a .22 six shot rim fire will be needed. That’s when the big guns come out, and the threat of those guns becomes the true “Thin Blue Line,” that was always the reality but never acknowledged.

____________________________________________

This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon

“Just finished the book and am sweating profusely. Wow, what a ride !!!  Fasten your seat belts for one of the most thrilling rides ever in print.“

Visit the NEW Tail of the Dragon WEBSITE!  CLICK HERE!

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

The Mind of James Holmes: Looking for the keys in the darkness

It is obvious that the general American population is only comfortable speculating on the evil of James Holmes and the shooting that took place in Aurora, Colorado within a certain safe zone of opinion. I would liken this approach to looking for lost car keys thought to have been dropped in a large parking lot at night, but the only place anyone looks for the keys are under the parking lot lights. The keys probably aren’t lost under the few lights there are, but somewhere out in the vast darkness of the parking lot and will only be found with a flashlight, or waiting till daylight breaks over the horizon. The keys will not be found in only the places where they can be seen. If it was that easy, they probably wouldn’t be lost in the first place.

When the answer to bizarre social behavior falls outside the realm of the obvious, society in general has a difficult time seeing the cause of the behavior. Mainstream news at all levels only wants to assume that something snapped in James Holmes and this is why he shot up a movie theater. They do not want to consider that the situation may be a “false flag” operation or even more serious terrorism fantasies. The same handicap is currently creating havoc in our own government that has been infiltrated by radical Muslim elements intent on spreading Islamic rule over the entire planet, as they believe they are instructed to do. People like John Boehner and John McCain scoff at Michelle Bachman’s accusations that the Muslim Brotherhood is a threat to America. As politicians, they are looking for the keys under the light metaphorically speaking, and the keys are not there, but elsewhere where it’s not so easy to see.

To understand this basic human behavior all you must do dear reader is consider what you have done in the past to be a member of the cool kids, or the cool group. Whose ass did you kiss to play golf with a select group of people, or the bowling league you wanted to join—or the country club you wanted to become a member of. What about the fraternity and the hazing that go along with those memberships? People will compromise often their beliefs to become accepted in group behavior. And if that group is the leadership structure of anarchists, or even extreme fans of movies, the desire to be accepted among a group of peers is a very strong motivator in directing behavior.

The “false flag” portion of this shooting is difficult to explain to people who don’t allow themselves to see the world except under the parking lot lights. In my book The Symposium of Justice I went to some great measure to explain how “false flags” are created by the government even in local law enforcement situations by releasing known rapists into a community that is strictly traditional middle-class and safe from crime. Law enforcement might become convinced they need to promote this kind of activity among their ranks to create panic in their community and a desire for more police officers if a police levy is up for a renewal or increase. They typically don’t wish harm on the general population, but they do intend to scare the population into believing they need to vote for a levy approval. So if you want to know more, I’d suggest reading the scenario in my book Symposium. Even though it appears scientifically extreme, it is quite valid. School districts play this same game attempting to build public consensus using fear to motivate community unity on tax increases. Their methods are less direct. School districts use the fear that children will have a hampered development to direct the actions of a community who wants to be a member of the cool group—the pro school group—which is direct manipulation that is very similar to the antics the government uses to create “false flags” in order to accept United Nation proposals, pending legislation, and political stump speeches. The sum of the behavior by government entities whether it be local government or federal government is to use fear to collectively unify society into accepting things they would normally not accept if fear for their lives were not present in the decision-making process.

With James Holmes I don’t believe he was a lone wolf, as it is typically defined. I believe he was arrogantly brilliant, and that he loves the Batman films, as millions of people do—because the Batman films are good movies. So what I’m about to write is my personal theory conceived through speculative fiction as to what I think is going on in the mind of James Holmes if he were a fictional character. This is my way of looking for the keys in the middle of the parking lot where there are no lights before the sun raises only to reveal that under the cover of darkness, the keys were stolen by the instigators of the “false flag.”

Fictional first person perspective of James Holmes—facing a mundane life of working crummy jobs for crummy people society will always fail to grasp my brilliance. Yes that science researcher from Princeton who I had lunch with in April of 2012 “gets it.” (the researcher is the false flag instigator.) The Joker from Batman The Dark Knight was the key to making that film so great. It was not Batman who was the star of that film, it was The Joker. The Joker defines Batman. Without the Joker, there is no Batman. It took a psychopathic, schizophrenic mass murdering clown with zero compassion to bring about the heroics of Batman, and to take the wonderful Harvey Dent into the perilous depths of Two Face. The Joker devises ingenious situations that force Batman, Commissioner Gordon and District Attorney Harvey Dent to make impossible ethical decisions and it is in those decisions that defined the success of the Batman films.

After the plight of the Occupy Movement, the rule of the world by the big bankers, the corrupt hiding behind facades of goodness, where are the Batman’s—where are the heroes that will restore society? We won’t find them in a movie theater looking at fantasies on the silver screen. We must have them in real life.

The researcher was right–I wish I remembered to ask for his name–That was a very smart man. Society needs a Joker so it can have a reason to challenge itself and find its soul. It needs tragedy to discover its courage. Without a Joker, there are no Batmen in society. So I will give them one.

I can do that. I’m more intelligent than any of the people who could prosecute me. I can be the Joker in real life that society needs for its identity. After I’ve given them their death—given them their villain, they will be forced to confront themselves. I will do more for society as the Joker than as a neuroscientists.

But do I have the courage to go that far down the rabbit hole? Could I be arrested, convicted, and locked away in an insane asylum as the Joker was and still survive? Can I do it? Yes—yes I can. After all, John Hinckley was found not guilty by reason of insanity after he fell in love with Jodi Foster after the film Taxi Driver. Just 30 years later he is able to visit his parents outside of institutional control for weeks at a time. He will eventually go free soon and still have time to live his life.

I am only 24; I could spend 30 years behind bars and still have time to live my life. I’d still be a young man when I left custody. The weak parasites of the establishment won’t let my brilliance go to waste. Once they realize I’m scientifically sound, they’ll use me in a lab even if it is behind bars. What’s the difference? If I’m behind bars, I won’t be troubled with making a living. I won’t have to worry about employment and grants.

But how do I go about it? Well, I must show a break with reality, a definite change of behavior that others will testify to in my trial. It will have to even involve my parents. I must deceive them all. I’ll try to join a gun club, and I’ll make the owner so uncomfortable that he’ll testify to my erratic behavior. My neighbors will say that I was disturbed, and became increasingly isolated in my behavior. Maybe I’ll even mail a copy of my plans to one of my college professors so they’ll think I was trying to reach out for help. My past of peace and my current violent actions will show that I was two people, and that it was a slip of reality that pushed reality beyond my grasp. I’ve studied mental health patients, so I know how to duplicate the behavior. This is the story of Harvey Dent. This is the story of the Joker. Good people going bad as they collapse under their own genius.

But my crime would have to be so bad that it would stop the entire world and force changes. It would have to be epic in its destruction. It would have to be unfathomable by a sane mind. And as the researcher said in our lunch meeting, Batman is about a rich guy who saves society. It’s anti “occupy,” its pro capitalism. The hero is not Batman; it’s the Joker, its Bane. That must be made clear otherwise millions will take away the wrong messages in this upcoming film. I must stop that.

When I’m arrested I’ll warn the police that my apartment is booby-trapped. It will confuse everyone, and they will think that they have found an act of compassion in me, and it will be that hint of compassion that keeps them from putting me to death, even though they should. It will keep them from locking me away forever to be hidden from view. They will seek to loot my mind once they can convince themselves that I can be saved. They will save me because they want what’s in my head. And I will outlast them. I will show them that I can hide myself behind a mask of insanity, and at a time far from now after the acts of my brutality have played out and brought peace to the world, after I have brought out the best of what humanity has, I can be free to live in a world of my own making. I will have planted the seeds of life with acts of evil.

The joke will be on those who thought they could maintain the social illusions of greed, and cruelty on the backs of my generation. They will write books about me, they will make movies about me, and slowly I will bring to a whole new generation the “real Joker.” And in the end, I will beat them, because they don’t even know what game they are playing.

If that is indeed how Holmes views the situation, nobody but him can know for sure. It can only be speculated based on observed conditions, and through the exercise of creative writing can we begin to get our minds around the depth of evil it took to gun down a movie theater full of people. Clearly the thing to do would be to not allow James Holmes to get away with this crime by allowing him to disguise his true intentions behind a mask of insanity. If he is truly insane, then he won’t know the difference. But if he’s acting in the way described above, he will make fools of our American justice system, which is what the character of the Joker from the films was doing. We don’t need Batman to save our society from corruption, or from the Joker’s who wish harm to bring about their own forms of social justice. We just need to have the courage to look evil in the eye and spit in it—and remove evil from our concerns when the task is upon us.

If I had to place a bet that James Holmes calculated society would not have the fortitude to take a stand against him he would make that bet based on our history. Human beings are not able to process too many things at one time. They will need one or two major points to fixate on in order to determine the evil intentions of the terrorist actions. Holmes knew that if he presented a layered offensive that worked at many different levels, that he would defy prosecution. It’s up to American society to prove him otherwise.

As to the “false flag” I do not believe the intention was to create more aggressive gun legislation in front of the United Nations Small Arms Treaty that is coming our way. Those kinds of things would be bonus objectives in the world of subversion. They would not be the primary. The primary in this case is the obvious pro capitalist leanings of this Batman story coming out in a time where the socialism/capitalism argument is at its greatest. For many decades there have been saboteurs who have helped create a very compliant American society, and they know well what the power of a good story is. The Batman films under the direction of Christopher Nolan are powerful, and have the ability to communicate important, and complicated political themes to a mass audience. The “false flag” in this case was a desire to place on the entire Batman franchise the memory of murder and carnage. The intention is to make Batman appear as sinister on the minds of America as the World Trade Center has been. It is a message to the mass marketing of Warner Brothers and all other film studios not to make films with themes as powerful as what are in Dark Knight Rises, themes that stand behind capitalism and calls into question the merit of the Occupy Movement, and promotes individualism over collectivism. The hope of using a film fan genius as the real life Joker is to taint forever the mere speech of the name and the film franchise from American film heritage. It is to drive away the chance of Academy Awards, and box office receipts to be given to a very deserving film.

There are saboteurs who are very unhappy with the way young people are taking to films like Iron Man, and these new Batman films. They are radical enough to perform the unthinkable once they realize society is moving in a direction they don’t like. It is difficult to get the mind around the unthinkable, but we must in order to guard ourselves from the aggression that has now attempted to attack us in our living rooms through the influence of popular culture. The good message of Batman Dark Knight Rises was cut short by a young man claiming to be the Joker through a terrorist act that is beyond comprehension. But we must comprehend his evil so that we can see beyond the violence to the intended result. And we must make sure that intended result does not play out as planned, by denying the Joker the punch line he intended.

For more on ‘false flags,’ from a very reasonable examination check out this link:

http://www.naturalnews.com/036586_false_flag_survival_protection.html

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This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon

“Just finished the book and am sweating profusely. Wow, what a ride !!!  Fasten your seat belts for one of the most thrilling rides ever in print.“

Visit the NEW Tail of the Dragon WEBSITE!  CLICK HERE!

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

The Muslim Brotherhood Goes to Washington: Speaker Boehner needs to stop sleeping

I found it surprising that my congressman Speaker Boehner is not up to speed that the Muslim Brotherhood has infiltrated our government. He along with others appear to be in denial that Muslim extremists are tied very close to progressive politics and are determined to destroy America from within. So to bring Speaker Boehner and many others up to speed on information they may not have had time, or the political stomach to comprehend I am offering a series of radio interviews to watch below. The first is from my personal friend Matt Clark in Ann Arbor, Michigan on WAAM radio where he begins to peel back the layers of just how serious the situation really is.

Speaker Boehner and Senator John McCain has threatened Representative Michelle Bachman that they will remover he seat on the Intelligence Committee if she does not apologize to Anthony Wiener’s wife for a letter Bachman wrote questioning Huma Abedin’s parents ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. Anthony Wiener was the former combative progressive congressman who had to leave his seat because he got caught tweeting pictures of his actual wiener to women on the internet. His wife is a Muslim who is a direct aid to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Below, Glenn Beck sets the stage on how much of a storm was created by Michelle Bachman’s simple letter.

Where there is much anger over seemingly trivial issues, there is fire that nobody knew was burning. Whatever deals have been made between network heads and politics are not deals that are conducive to the American population if radicals wish to sing our nation to sleep with siren songs of peace while sharpening their swords on our chins. I would find it hard to believe that Speaker Boehner is on the direct call list of the Muslim Brotherhood. Rather, I would think that he believes he’s playing by the rules of politics. Unfortunately, those rules have been quietly established by those same Muslim infiltrators.

Playing nice politics will not lead America to victory which is what I think politicians like Boehner and McCain believe they are doing. They believe they should take the high road and not subscribe to wild theories. I believe they are simply naïve. But Michelle Bachman as a member of the Intelligence Committee has an obligation to defend the Constitution from enemies both foreign and domestic, and she is up in arms that known terrorists have been flown to The White House on the tax payer dime to meet directly with the President while she is being attacked from members of her own party for calling attention to the issue.

It is difficult to look at aspects of our friendships and political connections and assess the true value. Not the value we wish it to be, but the actual value. When a man wishes to sleep with a woman just for the sex of it, he might tell her he loves her, he might wine and dine her, he might buy her nice jewelry, but once the man has obtained his sex, the true nature of the relationship will be revealed. The woman may wish to believe the man loved her, but the reality is all he wanted was sex. In the case of the Muslim Brotherhood, they are very pleasant and say all the right things to the people they come into contact with. Members of the American government have been seduced by the charming Muslim Brotherhood radicals.

To people on the outside we can see clearly what’s happening. We don’t care if Weiner’s wife is the friend of John McCain. John may be letting his desire to believe his dear friend is completely clean and wants to be his friend because she genuinely likes him, taint his judgment. Other politicians who have similar friendships with Muslim Brotherhood members no doubt believe they are dealing with friends. But remember the story about the man who only wants to get a woman in bed, and once he does, the relationship goes downhill, and the woman will often find herself on the outside looking in used and abused. The Muslim Brotherhood wants an end to the American way of life and they don’t care how they bring it about. Like the man who simply wants sex, the Muslim Brotherhood will say and do anything to achieve their objective. It is the politicians who find themselves the targets of affection as their social simplicity leaves them defenseless against such charms.

I would suggest that Speaker Boehner not take for granted the evidence that is all around him. And he should not side himself against Bachman who is simply trying to do the right thing which her seat mandates. Playing politics plays into the plans of the Muslim Brotherhood. They count on such predictable behavior to launch their agenda against a sleepy society. But not everyone is asleep. And Speaker Boehner, it’s time to wake up and see things for what they are. These are not peaceful times conducted by peaceful people. And the Muslim Brotherhood is not your friend. All they want from you is your head on a pike, and they will do it the moment they get a turned back, and an open moment.

____________________________________________

This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon

“Just finished the book and am sweating profusely. Wow, what a ride !!!  Fasten your seat belts for one of the most thrilling rides ever in print.“

Visit the NEW Tail of the Dragon WEBSITE!  CLICK HERE!

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

More Guns Not Less: The reason we have the Second Amendment

After reading the George Costanza comments about the ‘Dark Knight’ shootings in Colorado chastising gun ownership, it is time to speak the truth about the reason we have the Second Amendment in the first place—the cold hearted truth which cannot be spoken about since progressives have turned the entire argument into an emotional one. Costanza isn’t the only one to say after the tragic shooting that there is no reason common citizens should have access to assault weapons and ammunition clips that allow over 100 rounds to be shot before reloading. Many sensitive types—other actors and politicians in the wake of the shooting were quick to express outrage that the American public should not have access to guns at all, let alone military grade firearms. They reason that we already have a military, and a police force, so the term “well regulated militia” as it’s described in the Second Amendment is already covered. We hire those defensive entities to do “protective” work for us, so the common population does not need to own firearms—in their view.

Pro gun people in reaction to the ignorance of the sensitive progressive types suffering from extreme levels of naiveté have tried not to hurt the feelings of their counterparts in direct argument by saying weapons are needed for hunting and self defense—but that’s not why we need the Second Amendment.

While people like George Costanza wish to believe that the security of our property can be hired out, just as they believe the education of children can as well, they fail to acknowledge a fundamental fact about human nature–the desire to control others. When one human being has more power than another human being, abuses will take place. It happens all the time with sexual abuse cases, and it happens all the time in regards to police officers abusing their right to assert dominance over civilians just because they have a gun. There are thousands and thousands of examples of police abuse over common citizens every year that are covered up because when law enforcement goes bad, there isn’t anyone to police the police.

Most of the actors who speak out against gun control live in social bubbles in the valley of land that rests between the mountains of California dividing Las Vegas with Los Angeles and the Pacific Ocean. Talking with some of these people as I have in the past, I doubt they know much about the world beyond those mountains to the east except when they travel to Vegas. They are not self reliant individuals, but they don’t have to be. They get paid good sums of money which helps isolate them from the outside world. If they are big actors they probably employ private body guards, so they can’t imagine a world where guns are needed. They use their money as a weapon in a different way, so they don’t need guns.

Politicians in Washington already steal for a living, so it’s to their advantage to have a society that does not carry guns. It makes it much easier for them to steal from the tax payers. Politicians use the civilian police force to enforce the money schemes they enact, so they have no need of guns to carry out their devastating desires. And residents of New York made a concession to their freedom to live on that island of concrete so they could see pretty lights and take their shot at success in the Big Apple. Politicians like Bloomberg who have vast amounts of wealth hire out all their protect duties, and when they need something from politics, they simply grease the wheels with their money, so they have no need of guns.

But for everyone else, the ability to own a gun is the only thing that stands between freedom and total control by an unruly government. The Second Amendment is there to protect the American population from an out-of-control government who can turn our police and military against us with a simple signature. For people like Costanza who was most likely having an enjoyable New Years Eve party in Hollywood with his acting friends, they weren’t aware, or didn’t want to be aware of the NDAA Act President Obama signed in Hawaii while nobody was watching on New Years Eve giving himself the power to call martial law and arrest American citizens for the suspicion of terrorism. In the case of the communist Obama, he could view people who advocate capitalism as a terrorist to his political agenda, so the NDAA Act gives him the power to use police and the military to carry out arrest and detainment of American citizens perpetually. This is a very dangerous situation, and most of our current Congress and Senate signed in favor of the law under the disguise of protecting America from terrorism.

Government cannot be trusted under any circumstances. When given power, they will take more than they are given 100% of the time. Only high quality minded people can handle such temptations without abuse. I believe there are a few such people in our current government, but not many. Our society just does not produce such people, not just in America, but anywhere in the world. When given the opportunity to abuse power, most people will. The only protective measure anyone can have is the ability to be just as armed as the military. That is the spirit of the Second Amendment.

When the people of America lose respect for the law, because the law has abused their rights, the American people are obligated to remove the corrupt from office and re-establish government. When politicians show they do not respect the vote and will lie, cheat and steal to obtain office so they can gain access to all the perks given by the tax payers, then more aggressive measure may be needed to restore the Republic. And that won’t happen with broom sticks and wooden swords. Currently the politicians can use our military against us, and the police now fall under direct Presidential authority because of the NDAA Act. If a United States President goes bad during their term they can use the police and military to keep them in office using martial law to stay in power.

Nobody wants to believe any President would be so bad, that such a thing could happen, but the precedent has been set in the latest trends of Presidents both Republican and Democrat to use Executive Order to by-pass congress. More and more, members of the Executive Branch seem inclined to believe that they are kings of America, rather than people’s representatives.

If America is unarmed, law enforcement would never have to worry about ramifications of abuse. The thought in their minds that a gun may be present when they knock on a door, or pull over a motorist gives them respect to uphold their side of law. If that threat is removed, abuse is a temptation that all too often will show itself, as it currently does on occasion. There are already eminent domain issues that arise where politicians use legal manipulation to obtain property they have no right to in order to build a shopping center or a new highway declaring “the greater good” as their reasons. But the real reason is to take care of a financial contributor who simply wants the property and uses the government and therefore the police to obtain that property so money can be made in the looting of it.

The Second Amendment is in our founding document to ultimately protect our property from foreign and domestic enemies. Domestic enemies are not always the kinds of people who hijack airplanes to run into buildings. They can be in our own government, put there by greedy interests to subtly steal American property and terrorize individual lives. Having a well armed population keeps everyone honest. Without that threat, evil will show itself.

I don’t want to believe it, but the Aurora shooting looks to be a “false flag” situation. We’ve seen it before where the CIA, ATF, and other government agencies get caught trying to manipulate circumstances in order to gain a public outcome designed to manipulate large numbers of people. That is what happened to Randy Weaver in the Ruby Ridge Massacre, and it happened under the direction of Eric Holder with Fast and Furious recently. That’s why Eric Holder has been found in “contempt of Congress.” Holder ignored the charge because he is head of the Justice Department working directly for President Obama. The only people who could prosecute Holder all work under him, so the contempt charge will go nowhere as long as Holder, and Obama are in office. Government has been caught several times attempting to manipulate people through coerced friendships into committing diabolical acts without being directly involved. It would not surprise me that this Aurora shooting is one of those times. The process is very similar to how sex trafficking works, where pimps use women to collect vast sums of money selling their bodies and out of fear; they turn that money over to their pimps. Such coercive measures have been utilized by government officials before and they will be done again. The reason that government must behave in a manipulative political manner is because they fear being caught by an armed public. If the guns are taken away, the actions of coercion will no longer be hidden; they will be out in the open.

The best defense against violence from all domestic enemies, which include the ‘Dark Night Shooter’, is a well armed population. It would have been much better if there were armed citizens in the theater to gun down James Holmes as he unloaded his ammunition into an unprotected audience. Progressives will say that this is not the Wild West, that we are a civilized society that should not be trying to kill each other with guns. But they are wrong, and in denial over the nature of the human being.

The old hippie notion of peace on earth is a utopian wish that is reckless, and stupid. It is that notion of peace that is behind the desire for gun control. Its social engineering which assumes that government can be trusted with complete power and control over the population, and it can’t. The people, who support guns, do not yield their lives and property to the blind trust of government. They want guns so they know that if the absolute worst case scenario comes about, that they can defend their property from an intrusive government. It hasn’t any thing to do with hunting, although that is a consideration. The gun is one of the reasons people are free. Fewer guns mean less freedom, and ironically, less economic activity because government without the threat of violence being present will inject itself everywhere with impunity, and that costs money by way of opportunity cost.

The people who want to ban guns in favor of a safe society are fools who are in denial of basic human instincts. The gun equalizes everyone, and is a necessary check on the many balances that are required in a thriving society. The quality of a country is not measured on how few people die; it is on the quality of life for those who live. The rest of the world does have it wrong, Canada, England and every gun banning nation have created docile civilizations that are easily conquered and do not have worldwide respect. America will not have world enemies if it continues to lose its economic power, but if it hopes to remain a superpower, it will have enemies both foreign and domestic because that is the nature of being the best. And the gun is extremely important to maintaining that superpower status. The gun is the symbol of everything being an America is. Those who wish to remove them from our society are the same who wish to change America into something else—which is not acceptable.

____________________________________________

This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon

“Just finished the book and am sweating profusely. Wow, what a ride !!!  Fasten your seat belts for one of the most thrilling rides ever in print.“

Visit the NEW Tail of the Dragon WEBSITE!  CLICK HERE!

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

OBAMA WILL LOSE ELECTION OF 2012: Movie Review of ‘DARK KNIGHT RISES’

Glenn Beck said two things that I agree with 100%. First, he thinks the new Batman film Dark Knight Rises is a fantastic movie that should be seen. So if you haven’t seen it and want to see a good movie—GO SEE IT! The other thing he said is that he is calling the presidential election already—Barack Obama will lose. Beck warns that everyone still has to do the work, they still have to get out and vote, but as it stands, Barack Obama has spent himself into bankruptcy before the campaign has really even started, his economy is a disaster, his justice department is corrupt, his health care is reckless socialism, and the Obama White House is guilty of security leaks. Obama has been a disastrous president, and as things stand now, the election shouldn’t even be close.  Just keep the hammer down and hit hard, and we can get rid of the worst president in American history.

So keep your noses to the grind stone. Do the work, vote, vote and vote. Don’t stay home because all the derelicts looking for free Obama money will show up and vote. So don’t let them rob you by not showing up at the election. And in the mean time, go see Dark Knight Rises. Don’t let the actions of a loon keep a very good American made movie be tarnished by the actions of a Joker.

____________________________________________

This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon

“Just finished the book and am sweating profusely. Wow, what a ride !!!  Fasten your seat belts for one of the most thrilling rides ever in print.“

Visit the NEW Tail of the Dragon WEBSITE!  CLICK HERE!

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

1-40 Tunnels: Explaining the next phase

I have to address a couple matters, one is fun, and the other is a clarification. First off, the picture shown here is the twin tunnels on I-40 in North Carolina just 4 miles south of the Tennessee border. For those in the media who are reading the advance copies of my new novel and have read the very exciting scene involving the roadblock at the twin tunnels, that scene takes place on the other side of that mountain at the mouth of those two tunnels. It is easy to see why the gunfire and explosions caused so much trouble when you observe how rugged the landscape is in that region.

I put that picture up because currently road crews are closing that tunnel at night diverting traffic through a service road so that the tunnel can undergo much-needed maintenance. For those who have read the novel, the kind of thing that happens in the story is a serious threat in that area, and requires constant maintenance. For those who have not read that scene, you will soon find out. Loud noises and violent behavior are not good for such areas. But it’s a fun fact of the novel to know that such an extreme occurrence is quite possible, and care must be constantly taken to avoid such catastrophes.

The other thing is attached to my new book as well. Some of my readers here–people I respect a great deal–are concerned that I may lose my credibility with the school levy issues by appearing self-serving because of all my promotional efforts over my new book. This deserves a bit of explanation that is needed at this point for my readers who visit Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom every day. To begin, a reminder of what my life was like before I got personally involved in the Lakota Levy in 2010 needs to be seen. The video below is a sample of the kind of life I lived before joining forces with the people who would eventually make up No Lakota Levy to defeat those tax increases. The efforts of my previous book, and several film festivals along with my other exertion in a professional sense had me constantly on the road, going to award shows, trade shows, and many other adventures that come as part of that life, which I put on hold to help solve community issues.

In 2010 I put aside some of these fun occupational endeavors and took a few years to contribute something to the battle that is raging in our nation. I started helping local liberty groups where I could, as I still do. I started this blog site as a way to offset the information that the newspapers wouldn’t cover, and I took on the Lakota School Levy because it was a lie being told on the backs of children, and looked to be devastating to a community I grew up in, and is currently in my hands to protect. I was between books anyway completing The Symposium of Justice in 2004, and was writing Tail of the Dragon and doing my research to make that manuscript into a saleable story that American Book Publishing would eventually pick up.

Working around progressive entertainment types I knew what kinds of things pro tax advocates would attack in my character, so when the Enquirer did the article about me featuring my whip work, I knew how the politics would play out. Believe me; it was very much by design. The pro tax people ridiculed my use of whips which helped me figure out who was who. I used that information to my advantage. I didn’t fight those levies to be mean, or destructive. I did it because it was the right thing to do. My ultimate message was the importance of traditional values versus progressive values being taught in school, and I didn’t then nor in the future wish to pay higher taxes for a “progressive” education. I could have went around the country doing dozens of whip shows trying to promote traditional values, or I could do the unthinkable and apply those skills to explaining Keynesian economics which is how public schools function much to their own detriment. Of course I chose the latter.

Before the start of the last levy campaign I told my friends in No Lakota Levy that I had a book coming out in 2012, and they needed to find another spokesman for the levy fighting effort. I told them I’d still fight the levy, but I didn’t think it would be right to do media stuff for my book, and do media stuff against the levy, because the mixture would appear self-serving. For that very reason I avoided any elected offices, even though many wanted me to volunteer, because when Tail of the Dragon was ready to come out, I would have to put my effort behind that promotional endeavor, and being formerly involved in Tea Parties and other official positions while promoting a book is tacky. I don’t like it when others do it, so I sure wasn’t about to do it myself. I hoped that after two solid years of fighting levies that other people had learned how to do it, and could become the face of those efforts in the future.

In February of 2012 it was time to make a change which had been talked about ahead of time, so I picked the fight that would bring all the rats to the surface so everyone could see who was hiding where. The pro tax supporters conducted a negative survey against me outside a local Kroger store, so the time to act was then. I let my anger go, because it was well justified and it created the opportunity I needed to take this next step. This allowed new people at No Lakota Levy to pick up the baton and carry on. I of course would continue to cover things as I had, but I needed the freedom to move on to book promotion mode.

I know people who successfully have their hands in everything, but I’m not like that. I enjoy my time to myself, so I don’t like being too busy. If I’m going to promote a book, I’ll put my effort into it, since it’s something I already believe in. When the time comes to fight for another community issue, I’ll be there. If the group we have in place is not ready, then I’ll assemble another one to meet the challenge. It’s that simple. But life is always in motion, and especially at my age, it is very busy.

A lot of people on the inside believe that Tail of the Dragon will do well. They believe it’s a very good book, and I am inclined to agree. But you just never know. The public may reject it, the timing may not be right, there could be problems. Any number of things can happen, and they often do. I hope the book does well, because if it does I will get the chance to write a book I’ve been thinking about for over ten years, called The Trial of Fletcher Finnegan. That book looks to be well over 1 million words. It will be considerably larger than Atlas Shrugged and will be quite an effort. I will need a good showing out of Tail of the Dragon to free my time up enough to be able to write the new book because it will be an exclusive task of mine for a number of years.

So I am putting out a lot of promotional material. These days, that’s how it’s done. For my daily readers, some of which have already read and loved the book, they are getting tired of seeing all my promotional stuff, because they’ve already been there and done it. It’s a good memory for them, but it isn’t new any longer. But for many people every day who come here for the first time, I put those ads up for them. Today alone I have multiple readers from 13 different countries ranging from Sweden, Romania, and Saudi Arabia to New Zealand and Australia. This is pretty normal, and as it would be thought that these readers are tuning in to see what happened in the Colorado shooting, ironically most of the views come from my articles about school levies. All those countries mentioned each had more than 10 hits each, so the Tail of the Dragon ads are important to gaining international exposure. Even though my daily readers are used to the Tail of the Dragon cover and blurbs, many of these international readers are just seeing them for the first time.

If I were in an elected office, or was an official spokesman paid by someone else to represent a product, I wouldn’t cross promote my personal projects with Lakota stories, or political material concerning the presidential election. But the fact of the matter is that I have deliberately made myself free of those obligations so I can do what I have been planning for quite some time. At this time there isn’t a levy at Lakota to fight, and there are plenty of ground troops in the liberty groups to handle the administrative stuff. I do my part in giving a local voice to many contemporary issues that get missed in the mainstream media outlets, stuff the liberty groups need to advance their positions, being someone who can untangle the complicated web of modern politics so it’s easy for others to see.

I offer the work at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom for free, because there is a need for it. If I make money it is not from memberships, or any donation. It will be because someone bought a book of mine. I work through many of the problems that will be in future stories by putting my thoughts and notes up for all to see, so I can refine those thoughts into more articulate works in actual books in the future. A good portion of these articles are my personal notes that I share for the development of ideas. I figure that if I need to resolve my thoughts on a matter than others do as well, so by putting the articles on this forum, I hope they help others.

But I don’t formally belong to any groups so I can have the freedom to pursue my own path, so that I cannot be accused of indulging in self-serving messages. Once the novel comes out, I may change that, but for the time being, that’s the way it has to be due to the nature of public relations. I support many groups, and I may attend their meetings. However to avoid the accusations of being self-serving, I keep my involvement limited to a supportive role. For me the most supportive role I can think of is to help frame the argument so others can see it clearly, and act on it. I had an open window between projects to offer myself publicly to controversial subjects, and I will have an open window again. But as of now that window is closed. That does not mean I will not write and contribute articles for analysis as I have, but my official spokesman roles for those endeavors will have to be on hold till my window opens once again.

I hope that clears things up for those who were wondering. It is much easier to answer the question this way as opposed to separate emails. When it comes to these kinds of things, constant reinvention of roles is very important so that stagnation does not set in. When you get a chance to work on a project that has national exposure, you take it, because the results will be useful later.

____________________________________________

This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon

“Just finished the book and am sweating profusely. Wow, what a ride !!!  Fasten your seat belts for one of the most thrilling rides ever in print.“

Visit the NEW Tail of the Dragon WEBSITE!  CLICK HERE!

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

Advice is Only as Good as the Person Who Gives It: Insights from a babyshower

CLICK HERE to review the referenced tone of the young City Beat writer attempting to frame his article about me as being “out-of-step” with the rest of society because of my loud declaration that progressives do not belong in America. I have heard and read on more than one occasion that my “intolerance” of those who are different from me displays that I am an extremist. To these critics they consider it “intolerance” if I show that I disagree with their life choices. What they don’t realize is that in asking me to accept their life choices they are often asking me to support them financially—through public school education that teaches sexual diversity to young people at too early of an age—they want me to invest in their public transportation systems—they want me to work while they draw mandated government unemployment—they want me to pay for their healthcare while they sit around all day playing Xbox. In short, they expect to leech off me, and they expect me to be happy about it.

I have always had the gift of clarity in knowing exactly where I am and where I want to go. I do not need GPS devices to get anywhere in the world, and I certainly have never utilized the advice of professional councilors for personal direction. My long known mantra has been, “Advice is only as good as the person who gives it.” What that means is you can’t expect to get good advice from a bad person. But to understand what a bad person is, you must have the guts to call bad behavior—bad. For instance, do not ask marriage advice from someone who’s divorced. Don’t ask career advice from a person who’s middle-aged and obviously unhappy. And don’t ask financial advice from an habitual gambler. You can’t make potato chips out of ice cream. Bad people are bad people. Good people are good people. People who claim life is all about shades of gray are trying to sell swampland in New York City—it doesn’t exist. It’s a rationalization to disguise personal bad behavior with traces of good looted from others.

When I was in public school and had to speak to guidance councilors as part of the “education experience,” I had three of them declare that I had too many interests and that I would have to narrow those down to skills that would provide the best occupation for my future. My response to those people then and to all people since has been—why? I explained to them when no answer was produced other than “that’s just how things are done” that society would falter if people built their lives around their career. My reasoning was that the indication from the guidance councilors was that the individual serves society by picking a career that benefited the collective sum and that is the primary fault of the progressive. My position is that I did not serve society, but society benefited by the various talents I developed out of my own self interest. This position has put me at odds with many progressive types who find such a statement abominable. I would point much of the misery of today toward this diabolical notion that individuals serve society instead of society benefiting from individual diversity. Among progressives, women have suffered most in this belief. Traditional American women used to forgo formal careers in favor of raising their children and while they did this they exercised skills from budget management to culinary excellence along with everything in between to the direct benefit of their families which became the sum of their talents.

These days many women actually brag about how bad they cook, or that they have no idea what to do with a needle and thread. This is their way of declaring to the world that they are “modern” women who have important careers that exceed the importance of those “traditional” skills. They will declare that they make so much money that they can “purchase” what they need, so have no reason to learn or master any skill that does not contribute to their careers. These same people are the primary types who vote in favor of school levies. They require public education to provide for their children the skills they are not teaching because they are too busy with their own lives. So in the typical progressive fashion they require people like me to provide a means for them through tax money to live out their false progressive fantasy—that they can dedicate their lives to a career without destroying their families in the process.

What progressives never have learned is that children learn from individuals within their families, and the better the individuals—the more diverse they are, the more there is for a child to be exposed to, making that child a well-rounded adult. This learning cannot be duplicated in the classroom. Certain things can be taught in a classroom, but a school cannot substitute the effect of successful parents and grandparents in a child’s life. With all the efforts progressives have attempted in order to destroy the American family they have never solved the basic problem that their way will 100% of the time create empty shells of people when they reach adulthood who are easily bored and easy to steer due to their lack of personal convictions.

All this is on my mind because in my family we have always gone against that progressive grain. When I was younger it was hard, because nobody understood what my wife and I were trying to do. But now that my children are grown up and my oldest daughter was giving a baby shower to my youngest daughter the results of the way we raised our family are easy to see as we prepared to welcome my first grandson to the world.

The pictures shown here are from the decorations my wife primarily, and my daughter along with her friends made for the baby shower. Most everything was handmade including the table cloths. My wife made those because she could not purchase the exact size and color she wanted for the party. My wife wanted everything to be just right, so she made what she needed because the desire was intended to welcome our grandson to the world with as much individuality as possible and that starts with our daughter. Her baby shower needed to be tailored just to her as much as possible to begin that process.

The cake seen in these pictures was made completely by my wife. She even made the monkey and the palm trees. Everything on the cake was edible. The photographs were done by my oldest daughter. The motorcycle made out of diapers and baby rags was made by my oldest daughter also. The pyramid of diapers was made by my daughters’ best friend from childhood who we helped raise. But the primary gift was the baby blanket made by my wife for her new grandson.

As I have said before, when my wife made me the American Flag blanket for my birthday a few years back, she makes blankets for every child born into our family. That extends to cousins and the children of our nieces and nephews. She has made many dozens and dozens of blankets over the years, but for her first grandchild she really outdid herself. The blanket is immaculately hand-made in every detail by her for her first grandchild.

People are shocked to learn that my wife does so many different things. It makes me proud to see her shine as brightly as she did at that baby shower. I know she personally put 6 weeks of preparation in for that party. She takes her role as a grandmother extremely serious and all the grandchildren that are born into our family will benefit greatly. Over the years when people have tried to make me and her feel bad that she didn’t have a career I would try to explain to them that I wanted my wife to wake up in the morning on her terms and go to bed on her terms. I didn’t want the corruption of a boss to influence her life, to alter the direction of our meals, our clothing, or the quality of our existence. I like that she has all day to shop at the grocery store and has time to pick the best prices for our items between Costco, Walmart, Meyer and Kroger. I have often joked that she has saved us more money over the years then she could have ever made in a career. Because she has time to do things right, the quality for our whole family is much higher because of her.

We were in Gatlinburg last weekend which is known for its crafts. Outside one of their many craft stores an old woman was quilting a blanket on the sidewalk so people could watch as they went by. I noticed that it always seems to be older women who do these kinds of things. The young girls aimlessly stand around proud of their lack of skill; because they have been taught that it’s cool to be unskilled and dim-witted—unless they have a specific skill that serves society. Even if the girls are quite intelligent, they still pretend to be thoughtless because they’ve been taught to hide their intelligence in favor of social norms. I remember how badly people spoke about my wife who gave up a potential career as a fashion model so that she could be married and have children that she could make blankets for. People would say to her that she could have anything in the world that she wanted, and when she’d say that she did have it—they just couldn’t figure out what she meant.

“Don’t you want to lay naked on the deck of a yacht covered in gold and diamond jewelry given to you by a rich man?” This is what people close to my wife would say to her when she was younger. She’d reply, “No.” What those people never understood, and are just now beginning to see is that she would have rather made those things herself. That the value she received in her life was not the envy of other women when she’d show her social status by exhibiting elaborate jewelry in public gained by her looks. She would rather have the man she wants, and live by her own terms so that her children could become great by their own definitions—which is the only definition that matters.

People don’t want to believe it, but there is no quick way out of raising children. You cannot purchase respect from young people. Young people grow up to become the sum of their experiences, and if the family is not a strong one, the child is greatly handicapped. Government in no way, especially in public education, fills the void of complacency. Barack Obama may be president, but he was nurtured along by progressive politics as the poster child for government programs, largely due to him coming from a broken home. The advocates of progressive politics were more interested in Obama being a minority candidate that studied public education abroad and was a global citizen. They didn’t care that Obama’s father was a revolutionary, his mentor a communist and his mother a broken woman raised by broken people. Obama is the sum of his family, which is why he thinks there must always be someone in government to help you along. Well, in my family, we don’t need government. We pay for our roads in the gas taxes, and we pay for our military with income taxes. But everything else my family can do better than any government agency and that includes self-defense and education.

When I show my anger at progressives, and suggest that they don’t belong in America, it’s in this context. They clearly don’t understand the self-reliance that has always been a part of the American experience. Often that self-reliance is taught to us not by the men of our families but by the women, who are our first impressions of the world around us as babies. A mother who makes blankets, gourmet meals, clothing, table cloths, wonderful flower beds, and is the pinnacle influence in the entire family provide stability that has far more value than the person who does one or two things only and hires out everything else to specialists to do for them. This is the big difference in an America at war between progressive philosophy that leaves people empty emotional husks, and traditional value that has been made to appear “uncool” but ironically contains the key to all the lasting influences society needs to hold itself together. The progressive way is a path to destruction, both socially and personally, and that is why I say, they should not be in America. I don’t say it to be mean, but out of personal experience. It’s time to stop kidding ourselves and face the music that there is only one path to success within a family, and it starts with a good mother who works hard to be that way, and is good at virtually everything. Young people want and need someone to look up to, and that begins with mothers and grandmothers who do for themselves what society cannot do for them, and that means building their life to individual tastes and not bending their lives around what society provides.

____________________________________________

This is what people are saying about my new book–Tail of the Dragon

“Just finished the book and am sweating profusely. Wow, what a ride !!!  Fasten your seat belts for one of the most thrilling rides ever in print.“

Visit the NEW Tail of the Dragon WEBSITE!  CLICK HERE!

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