As parents learn that they have options, it is by using those options that they can be most instrumental in bringing about change. By voting down school levies, by using other forms of education to teach your kids, by taking advantage of every opportunity available, the parent of a child will go a long way to ending these massive public education debacles that are making a joke of education in the United States.
But doing nothing will only make the situation worse.
If you’re a CEO and you think you can fudge the books in order to make yourself look better, we’re going to find you, we’re going to arrest you, and we’re going to hold you to account. –President George W. Bush, 2002
Yet school boards are still trying to hold on to the old way of learning. They are completely unable to think outside the box of tradition and embrace aspects of education reform that have been presented by Representative Coley. This is why Lakota, and many schools are floating the idea of another levy for November of 2011.
It is gravely unfortunate that the Lakota School Board has made it known that they intend place another school levy on the ballot in November of 2011. While the Teachers Union at Lakota had a much publicized wage freeze in August of 2010 mysteriously the wages for Lakota teachers crept up anyway.
Lakota has assured everyone that they have done their best to cut costs, they’ve cut busing, they made sports a pay for play program, they’ve cut electives, and teaching positions, but out of all those supposed reductions, not once did anyone address the problem of paying teachers too much.
Last year at the NoLakotaLevy.com web site we brought out an article where 434 teachers made over 65K per year, that was in 2010. In 2011, there are over 625 teachers that make over 65K per year. Nobody is looking out for the tax payers in the Lakota School District.
The No Lakota Group met on this issue early last week, in anticipation of the school boards announcement. So here’s what we’re going to do. Any board member that votes in favor of another school levy will be looked at to be replaced with a new board member. If you are interested in becoming a school board member please contact us at NoLakot@roadrunner.com. We have several people who have spoken to us over the last couple of months, but we would like the opportunity to put the best candidates on the school board and would like to begin interviewing now. The best candidates would be over 55, preferably retired, or semi-retired and not looking to use the school board as a political platform for higher office, or to enhance their real estate professions. We want people who will not cave to the union, or pay 50K just to look for a superintendent that they intend to over-pay at 200K to 300K per year. We want people who have been successful at life, and therefore able to run our school system without corruption and abuse of the taxpayer.
The crowd that showed up at the school board meeting in West Clermont was upset, saying “This board has done a pathetic job. You’ve been gilding the lily, and now we’re paying for it.”
Then with great shock, the school board president, Dan Krueger said “If you don’t like what we’re doing, vote us out, but whoever you put up here is going to find the same things we found.” He went on to say the board is not there to serve the tax payer, but to serve the children. (Brace yourself before you watch this video. You may want to act lash out in anger)
We have no choice but to call these people thieves since they refuse to give an interview to Channel 9, or WLW to say otherwise, because all the evidence points to these people as first class crooks.
Click on the link below to get to Brendan’s page where you can look up your districts superintendent.
I have a very talented daughter that does some fantastic photographic work. My wife and I took her to launch on Saturday and I had to take a minute to admire the person she has become. As a photographer her pictures are worth millions of words.
These are the pictures that reflect the young woman who sat across from me on Saturday and ate Teriyaki Chicken. It was impossible when looking at her to not think of jet setting all over the world, camping at Stonehenge, crawling on her belly through the mud to take a picture of a flower in the wet morning mist. To see the young adventurer that will fight through the thugs on a DC subway to get unbelievable pictures around the nation’s capital, or the young woman who went with her husband every weekend by train into London, and rode ferries to the shores of France in the frigid punishment of the English Channel.
She is a remarkable young lady that gets better by the day. And her extraordinary ability comes through in her art, captured through the lens of her camera. This was the young woman who laughed at her joy of living while stuffing the Teriyaki Chicken into her mouth, which seemed so incredibly fitting. I wondered while watching her how her vision would increase in the future. What she has managed so far is quite impressive.
She likes friends, so if you want to meet her, here’s her Facebook.
She enjoys that kind of thing much more than I do. But that’s part of what makes her unique, and why I think her photography provides a glorious insight into the human experience.
But Morgan had the king’s ear, and had made the man very rich in his spoils from Spain, and serving the king as a correspondence of sorts between Morgan, who had a base in Jamaica, and the king in England was none less than the philosopher John Locke, who Thomas Jefferson would base the Declaration of Independence off of Locke’s written work just a century later. There is without a doubt that the founding fathers held the book, The Buccaneers of America in very high esteem as a way to envision what freedom would look like. Many of the revolutionaries in the times of the founding fathers were sons of former pirates since New York had been a pirate haven once piracy was outlawed and those out of work privateers merged into legitimate fields of endeavor.
So anyone that knows me well knows that I love pirates, and the art of the swashbuckler. Here is video of the real pirate ship The Black Pearl firing its cannons.
A few years ago a game came out from Wiz Kids that combined model building, which I like, with military strategy, which I like a lot, with history, which I love almost as much as the air I breath, and touched on the fantasy of high adventure and pirate exploits on the high seas complete with treasure hunting, monsters, and supernatural events, all draped over actual historical context. So I introduced my family to the game and it became a family favorite.
The first release of the game was called The Spanish Main. Here is the original promotion video from that release.
Then Wiz Kids came out with a second series, with approximately a 150 new ships all themed around the period of the Revolutionary War.
The game combines the fun of model building with the historical facts that more mature players enjoy, and allows young players and older players to join together in a battlefield that everyone can enjoy together. It has not been uncommon from my son-in-law, my daughters and father-in-law and my wife to play a game at a big table for hours at a time, during an entire Saturday afternoon. My father-in-law who is a geology teacher for high-school students and lover of history in his own way enjoys telling my kids historic facts while they get the chance to blow up his ships and steal his gold. It doesn’t get any better than that for a young person. Here is what a pack of cards looks like when you buy them from the store and begin the process of building the ships.
The game has some simple rules, but the strategy is rather complex, involving thousands of decisions and possible variables. Here’s how the game is played.
There have been many releases over the years and literally thousands of ships to collect and build. These are just a few of the types of ships available.
So with this little introduction to put things in context my wife and I were out shopping yesterday for Mother’s Day. I wanted her to pick out a gift for herself, to treat herself to anything. My wife is the only person I know that can buy items from Victoria Secret, (She is really picky about this stuff, and Victoria’s Secret is the only quality she really enjoys as far as under garments.) then turn around and go over to another one of our favorite stores, Sci Fi City! It was her option to pick up a new bathing suit for the summer or to buy something from Sci Fi City, and she picked Sci Fi City. This is what she wanted The Pirates Constructible Strategy Game Expansion from Wiz Kids.
This is a role-playing expansion to the game we’ve played for years and opens things up a lot. Seeing how excited she got over this book made me proud to have her for a wife, because her priorities are clear. The pictures above are how we spent Mothers Day, enjoying her new book with the people she cares about most.
My daughter asked me yesterday, “What should we get mom?” I told her to come over, and bring your pirate ships for a day of adventure and probably some LaRosa’s Pizza. Nothing more is needed.
A few years ago Wiz Kids came out with an online version of the game which allowed people to play other players online using the same rules of engagement. This video will give an idea of how the game is played and how it looks in the minds of the players. The thing I don’t like about the online game is that you buy ships like you do in real life, but they only exist online. It is quite fun to build an actual ship and hold it in your hand and do battle. My family has spent many Saturday afternoons in comic book stores, book stories, gaming gatherings, looking for new decks of cards. The fun of these afternoon adventures is you never know what you’re going to get in a pack. I’ve bought hundreds and hundreds of ships, and I haven’t run into the problem of getting very many doubles of the same ship, so that gives some idea just how many ships were built for the game. Among my family, all of whom have hundreds of ships themselves, most of us have ships completely different from each other. The ships are broke down by color code, red (common), silver (uncommon), yellow (rare) and black (super rare. I have managed to get a fair number of rare ships and even a couple of super rare boats. Some of the most fun days we’ve all spent as a family together have been days were we’d find a fresh shipment at a comic store, a whole box, and we’d buy everything they had, and we’d go home and spend the rest of the day building ships, then the rest of the night playing.
Here’s what the action looks like online.
For people who are unfamiliar with the world of strategy gaming it’s very popular in an underground sort of way. When I was at Sci Fi City with my wife yesterday they have a gaming area in the back that was packed with about 30 people of all age brackets and demographic groups playing these games. I saw a mother and her daughter playing Magic the Gathering and the mother was well into her 60’s. Here’s video of Origins from the summer of 2010 in Columbus, Ohio. Origins is a big gaming convention done each year in Ohio. Some will make fun of these people, but let me provide a disclaimer. I’ve sat in front of some of the most powerful people in the country, or people who think they’re powerful anyway. I know the mind of people who wield great political power. And I know the power of people like this. I’ll pick them any day over the people who run the country currently.For all the reasons articulated in the book Atlas Shrugged, the people who play these games are much more intelligent, and able to construct a reasonable strategy than many of the people currently working in the White House and Pentagon. The difference between these people and those political types is that the people at Origins don’t wish to have limits placed upon their minds. So in strategy gaming their minds are free and not confined to “politics.” That’s why I’d pick these people as my friends any day of the week. The quality of their minds is superior to those who chose status quo complacency. I treasure knowing these types of people.
Here’s my family playing the game. This video was done by my son-in-law. We went as far to build actual three-dimensional islands replicas with great detail.
It’s a game that inspires imagination and to me that is the most important attribute to any form of entertainment.
So when we travel and visit a ship yard whether it’s in this country or another one, and one of these old ships fire their cannons there is a special place that I hold for them in my heart. Not only in the context of history, but in the memories of many battles fought with my family, where the mind does not know the difference between real or fiction because in this type of gaming, it is the minds process of thinking that is important.The Wiz Kids Constructible Strategy Game does all that at many levels, and it is a treasure to anyone that plays the game. For lesser minds, such as your typical politician, where they are always out for the end result, the better mind, the one of the strategy gamer, is out for the opportunity to think freely, without limit for the sheer process of doing so. The end result is secondary. That’s why it is not important to those gamers if people laugh at them for walking down the hall of a hotel dressed as a pirate or a dragon slayer, because they have freed their minds to engage in limitless possibilities, where the rest of the world is stuck on the rules and the achievement of victory. So when I see a sight like this:
The Bush administration was already projecting the largest deficit in American history—$475 billion in fiscal year 2004…But a big election was coming up that Bush and his party were desperately fearful of losing. So they decided to win it by buying the votes of America’s seniors by giving them an expensive new program to pay for their prescription drugs.
When the legislation came up for [an important vote on a motion to proceed]…it was failing by 216 to 218 when the standard 15 –minute time allowed for voting came to an end. What followed was one of the most extraordinary events in congressional history. The vote was kept open for almost three hours while the House Republican leadership brought massive pressure to bear on the handful of principle Republicans who had the nerve to put country ahead of party. The leadership even froze the C-Span cameras so that no one outside the House chamber could see what was going on.
A lot of people forget that I was one of the first people in Butler County to call Michael Fox, Butler County commissioner a crook and a thief in the media. I fought him toe to toe from 2001 to 2005.
Only when our society stops treating thieves as heroes, or as our leaders, will we stop the looting government from open theft and expanding to rob us in every aspect of our lives. The solution is simple, but it requires our resolve to commit to it.
Matt Mayer always has great information at the Buckeye Institute. He has an article that shows the origin of this behavior that we are being asked to pay for in school levies. Click onto this link to see his report and a copy of the magazine that the Ohio Education Associate sends its members. This tells you all you need to know about the social agenda of the OEA.
“Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: if it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.”
Most people know THX as the sound system that is a Lucas property, and yes, the origin of that name comes from that epic, break-through film. Here’s a trip down memory lane for movie lovers.
THX-1138 had problems because it hit too close to the fears people have about the culture of spoils and looting that goes on in politics. It makes people inwardly who participate in this diabolical behavior feel guilt. That’s why the Warner Brothers executives didn’t like the movie. That’s why the audiences didn’t like the movie, initially. It’s not a movie that desires to make people feel good and eat popcorn. It’s a warning of a possible future of which we are quickly heading.
What is terrifyingly obvious once a little investigation is applied to school systems is that superintendents as a group seem prone to fill empty aspects of their lives with the value of money. That’s where Keynes fails as an economist, it does not account for corruption and failures of the human heart.
The Overmanwarrior 