Month: February 2013

Why No Amount Of Money Can Fix Public Education: John Kasich and Bill Cunningham ponder the universe

It’s too bad that the two guys in the interview below did not read the popular book Fifty Shades of Grey as I did, because they would understand more about the world.  CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW.  The interview on 700 WLW between Governor John Kasich and Bill Cunningham was a sad mixed message between a couple of old politicians having a porch swinging discussion believing they are both staunch conservatives but often leaning toward secular progressivism.  Kasich in the interview actually comes out in support of the kind of wealth redistribution plans that President Obama must have given him during their recent golf outing—where wealthy school districts are required to increase their local taxes through levies because “they can pay.”  It is sad to hear a governor that once had so many good ideas and was willing to take on special interest groups speak on Cunningham’s show sounding like a broken horse that has been dominated by a determined rider.  Kasich in 2013 prances about predictably in an obvious run for President in 2016, and is more willing to walk on egg shells politically than to take on the groups representing secular progressivism.  Listen to that interview for yourself.

Behind those mixed messages in the interview is a real fear of making women groups angry and catching the negative attention of progressive groups like Progress Ohio and the multiple labor unions.  There is no desire by Kasich to address why the teaching profession continuous to dump massive amounts of money into education without getting the results back in the proper education of children.  He fears what most public personalities fear—in being called names by women’s groups because most teaching positions are held by women.  Cunningham and Kasich specifically spoke about Mason and Lakota—both considered wealthy districts, and when I have brought up in the past the ineffectiveness of teachers making over $60K per year and suggested that Lakota could get the same results from teachers making $45K to $55K per year keeping their budget under control, the information is ignored out of fearful neurosis.   The progressive levy supporting neurotic parents who feel tremendous guilt about raising their children in day care and under public education have always gathered together against any opposition to their bottomless pit spending proposals and they attack any sort of management of those resources.  They can’t explain why more money in education doesn’t work, they simple suggest that no limit exists because the subject involves children.  When they can’t answer the question they go on personal attacks like Laura Sanders did with me at Lakota in the Cincinnati Enquirer saying, “Mr. Hoffman uses misogynistic and vile language when addressing women and mothers because most teachers are in fact, women and mothers.  He wants the public to think that he is merely attempting to rein in public school spending, but his underlying mission is really one of hatred and fear of women earning decent salaries. He alone is the destructive force behind the last three levy failures, and I hope this … convinces the women in our community that he is not a rational or credible source for the counterpoint argument.”  That is why I say that men who cave into such criticism have not read Fifty Shades of Grey.  If they did, they would understand what is behind such comments……..and it has nothing to do with children.

Kasich on the cusp of a run for a second term followed by a run for President does not want such confrontations so he has failed to explain why education in America no matter how much money is spent on it will fail.  In fact, Lakota and Mason could spend six figure salaries on all their teachers and pass all their levies for the next twenty years and education will still be bad because the bottom line issues would still be left unresolved.  The reason is actually quite simple and is the 1 million pound elephant in the room.  The teaching profession has allowed progressive instruction to infest the school curriculums resulting in a very confused society—one that is accurately reflected in the Kasich/Cunningham interview.  Education has not fulfilled the ambitious task set out upon the foundation of our country and instead has been infused with political agendas masking themselves as “goodness” and using pure emotion to advance diabolical plans.  People like Laura Sanders attacks anyone who criticizes a baby sitting service people like her have come to rely on and politicians like Kasich have no desire to shoulder those criticisms.  Politicians avoid a confrontation with irrationality at all cost—which causes the education failures. This is why politicians tend to throw money at education and hope that people will love them for it without ever determining if it is the quality of education itself that is at fault.

The failures in educational quality can be narrowed down to roughly six categories—the instruction of deconstructionism, post structuralism, the discouragement of American Exceptionlism, and the advancement of modernism, minimalism, and academic collectivism.  It is within those six basic categories that education will fail no matter how much money is spent on children.  If children are instructed in destructive social tendencies—which they are—they will grow up to become unsuccessful adults.  So caving into the progressive feminist movement talking points will not help our kids while those same irrational feminists are still flooding the book market reading Fifty Shades of Grey and fantasizing about what they really want in life. Money cannot fix minds that are sick with secular progressivism shaped by many years of exposure to the categories below.

  • Deconstruction– A philosophical movement and theory of literary criticism that questions traditional assumptions about certainty, identity, and truth; asserts that words can only refer to other words; and attempts to demonstrate how statements about any text subvert their own meanings: “In deconstruction, the critic claims there is no meaning to be found in the actual text, but only in the various, often mutually irreconcilable, ‘virtual texts’ constructed by readers in their search for meaning” (Rebecca Goldstein).
  • Post-structuralism primarily encompasses the intellectual developments of certain mid-20th-century French and continental philosophers and theorists. The movement is difficult to summarize, but may be broadly understood as a body of distinct responses to structuralism, which argued that human culture may be understood as a series of signs or symbols; or, put differently, that human culture may be understood by means of a structure -— modeled on language —- that is distinct both from the organizations of reality and the organization of ideas and imagination — a “third order.”[1] The precise nature of the revision or critique of structuralism differs with each post-structuralist author, though common themes include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of the structures that structuralism posits and an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute those structures.[2] Writers whose work is often characterised as post-structuralist include Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Julia Kristeva.  The movement is closely related to postmodernism. As with structuralism, anti-humanism, as a rejection of the enlightenment subject, is often a central tenet. Existential phenomenology is a significant influence; one commentator has argued that post-structuralists might just as accurately be called “post-phenomenologists.”[3]
  • American exceptionalism is the proposition that the United States is different from other countries in that it has a specific world mission to spread liberty and democracy.[1] It is not a notion that the United States is quantitatively better than other countries or that it has a superior culture, but rather that it is “qualitatively different”.[2] In this view, America’s exceptionalism stems from its emergence from a revolution, becoming what political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset called “‘the first new nation,’…other than Iceland, to become independent”,[3] and developing a uniquely American ideology, based on liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism and laissez-faire.[4] This observation can be traced to Alexis de Tocqueville, the first writer to describe the United States as “exceptional” in 1831 and 1840.[5]
  • Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement in the arts, its set of cultural tendencies and associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In particular the development of modern industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities, followed then by the horror of World War I, were among the factors that shaped Modernism. Related terms are modern, modernist, contemporary, and postmodern.
  • Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts. Minimalism is any design or style in which the simplest and fewest elements are used to create the maximum effect.  As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post–World War II Western Art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with this movement include Donald Judd, John McCracken, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Anne Truitt, and Frank Stella. It is rooted in the reductive aspects of Modernism, and is often interpreted as a reaction against Abstract expressionism and a bridge to Postminimal art practices.
  • Academic Collecitivism The fifth and final sophism by the left that undermines realism, truth and historical accuracy, or what David Barton in his new book on Jefferson calls “the five malpractices of modern history,” is Academic Collectivism, “whereby writers and scholars quote each other and those from their peer group rather than consult original sources. This destructive and harmful tendency now dominates the modern academic world, with a heavy reliance on peer review as the almost exclusive standard for historical truth.”

It is a combination of those items being taught to American children that has caused me to no longer support traditional education centralized in public schools.  Public schools have failed to teach generations of Americans now how to be good, productive adults and I cannot in good conscience support them with $1 let alone many thousands of dollars as all government schools demand.  Secular progressive education is the cause of many of the degrading values that are seen in our current culture and it makes no sense to require ALL of society to fund through extortion the teaching of children secular progressive political agenda points when half of society does not support that political affiliation.  Parents like Laura Sanders at Lakota may think the above descriptions have too many big words, and prefers the easy explanation that “more education equals good kids” mode of thinking.  But the facts do not match reality.  Kasich on the other hand knows that the problem of education is much more complex, but since he feels he lost his authority over the Senate Bill 5 debate and was told on the golf courses of life from personalities like Bill Cunningham that Kasich needs to step away from Tea Party ideas if he has any hopes of a second term as governor, that he needs to change his tune–and he has.  Kasich has surrendered logic to the neurosis of angry activists who are living two lives, one of crusading parents lobbying for tax increases to save the lives of their children while secretly locking themselves in their bedrooms for hours reading Fifty Shades of Grey.

 

Lucky for those confused citizens who are so embedded with secular progressivism that it’s not against the law to be a social menace due to faulty thinking.  They confuse conservative ideas with education deconstruction that is more interested in teaching children to have sex out-of-wedlock so they become dependent on government programs early in life, or teaching children about gender equality when it takes strong families to build a proper tax base, than to teach children to be social producers in every sense of the word.  Public education teaches dependency, not independence, and that is what makes government schools worthless at any value of tax revenue, and until that issue is dealt with, public education should be replaced with competitive alternatives.  The monopoly needs to be broken up so the real cost of education can be discovered, and driven down like costs in the private sector have been.

In the respect of Kasich and his friend Bill Cunningham who are both products of Lyndon B. Johnston’s Great Society they are unable to address the true complexity of the modern problems in education because deep in their hearts, as is in evidence by their discussion on WLW, they are both confused themselves, driven by their own self interests and unable to see the truth fully.  They are in essence no different from parents like Laura Sanders who confuses a whole mess of social issues into her support for a school levy.  The same duality is present in such levy supporters who socially show one side of themselves, but in their private lives have made Fifty Shades of Grey the most popular novel in the entire history of novels.  The cost of education is all about hiding these mixed realities that people try to maintain to avoid addressing the real issues.  Public education is rotten with secular progressivism and must be starved out of existence before any intelligent discussion about financing the future of children can be addressed.  So long as those six traits are being taught in modern education, no tax money should flow into any education instruction from the tax payer.  If progressive advocates want to privately fund such activity, then Laura Sanders can send her children there at her expense.  But to force all Americans to pay for such progressive ideas that are destructive not just to the children, but the future of America is insane.  Yet the problem is simply too big for Kasich to address during a 15 minute interview with Bill Cunningham on 700 WLW.  If they even brought up such a topic, then Kasich might be called a “woman hater” for not wanting to pay teachers infinite amounts of money for being glorified baby sitters.  The trouble is with the content that the teachers are teaching, not the teachers themselves that is the big problem in education and has proven to be a worthless product that is bringing students ill prepared to their destinies.  Public education has left kids lost and confused living with their parents till thirty years old and jobless.  That is why public education isn’t worth another dime, and why it’s a dismal failure in need of a major overhaul which nobody has the courage to address.

Rich Hoffman

“If they attack first………..blast em’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

Stuart Freeborn Becomes One With “The Force”: How ‘Star Wars’ is the real life ‘Atlas Shrugged’

Stuart Freeborn died at 98 years old recently, but he will forever live in the character of Yoda from the popular Star Wars stories.  Freeborn was already an old man when he designed Yoda as a character puppet in 1979 for the Star Wars film The Empire Strikes Back and without question put many of his own features into the face of the great science fiction philosopher.  It doesn’t take much imagination to see Stuart Freeborn in the face of Yoda as the character has evolved from a puppet to a digital character in the prequel trilogies to the current fantastic cartoon series Clone Wars on the Cartoon Network.  Yoda is the embodiment of Stuart Freeborn and will reflect for all the years going forth the best that the movie business has to contribute to the magic of mythmaking.  For the latest incantation of Stuart Freeborn’s creation you can see Yoda this Saturday February 9th, 2013 in the latest Clone Wars episode filled the with the usual perilous drama mixed with political betrayals that aren’t so science fiction if placed in parallel to our current society.

I place a high level of credit for the success of Star Wars on the back of Stuart Freeborn.  If the puppet he designed didn’t work in The Empire Strikes Back, the movie would have fallen on its face stopping the saga in its tracks after the second movie.  The gamble that George Lucas took with his own money to make that classic science fiction film would have went up in flames if the audience did not accept Yoda as a believable character and all the magic that is currently falling like snow flakes upon our culture today.  Star Wars would have gone out like a candle flame on a brisk day almost before it ever got started.

I have covered in great detail, especially lately Star Wars importance not just mythologically—which equates out to cultural improvements–but in economics.  I am sure George Lucas and his collaboration with other filmmakers would cringe in trying to explain to their Marin County neighbors how what they’ve done at Skywalker Ranch in California has a lot more to do with Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged than the traditional Hollywood moochers who attempt to duplicate the quality of the Star Wars Franchise.  As the political left hates Ayn Rand, it is obvious that quietly in the rolling hills of Central California, the values of Ayn Rand are celebrated in great abundance at Skywalker Ranch under hushed voices and public denials.   The falsification is that Ayn Rand was a selfish witch and that Star Wars is about self-sacrifice and altruism.  That is why everyone gets it wrong.   The growing assembly of excellent creative talent gathering at Skywalker Ranch from Industrial Light and Magic to some of the most original music composition in our modern times is leaps and bounds beyond anything else being done in entertainment.  As far as make-up designers Stuart Freeborn was the best of the best and his impact on human culture will forever be measured by his original designs in Star Wars characters like Yoda and Chewbacca.  Freeborn like the wonderful characters in Ayn Rand’s great novel is one of the exceptional in his field of endeavor and it was ultimately George Lucas’s creation that allowed Freeborn the freedom to step beyond the restrictions of social dogma and unleash creations that propel the power of myth into mass culture with magnificently positive results.

The same people who complain that the Disney merger with Lucasfilm is one of a deplorable exploitation of capitalism also complain about the moral justification of Ayn Rand’s novels—particularly Atlas Shrugged.  These personalities have been so embedded with socialism and the values of collectivism that they are unable to see the real power and message behind myth and the businesses it takes to deliver them.  I have spoken about a vacation that my wife and I took playing the MMO video game Star Wars: The Old Republic (CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW).  We spent move than six weeks continuously enjoying that game for hours upon hours every day together doing the work of the Jedi Council by solving problems in that galaxy far, far away.  One of the problems with the massive BioWare game is that they have an XP (experience points) level cap of 50, which takes most players who spend a large amount of time on the game about two months to reach.  Obsessive players can reach that cap within a month.  At level 50, XP points no longer awarded, and for many they lose interest in the game because they no longer get the reward of earning XP for their game playing investments.  So these players have been dropping their subscriptions forcing BioWare to find creative ways to convince players over level 50 to continue their memberships.  This is what is called “game economy” and reflects accurately real life behavior.  If citizens are taxed too much, or do not get to keep what they earn while working, they stop working, they stop being productive, and every kind creative input comes to a halt.  Without incentives, gamers in The Old Republic lose interest if they can’t earn XP or large amounts of game credits and things to buy with them.  Gamers who drop their subscriptions when they lose interest in playing the game without earning XP are proving Ayn Rand correct when the heroes of the classic novel Atlas Shrugged quit participating in America because taxes became too great.  They abandoned socialism in the book and embraced the freedom of Galt’s Gulch (Atlantis).

Star Wars is all about generating wealth, not just in the economic numbers that the films, books, television shows, and retail merchandise generate for Lucasfilm and Disney as major corporations.  But wealth is also generated as so many people desire the material, because they NEED mythologies that properly reflect the world they live in.  CLICK HERE TO READ ABOUT THE POWER OF MYTH.  The move that Lucas made in selling his company to Disney was one that would allow him to expand the Star Wars mythology to fulfill the market demands of his product, which in many ways resided on the shoulders of Stuart Freeborn over thirty years ago.  If George Lucas is the John Galt of the Star Wars saga—READ ATLAS SHRUGGED TO UNDERSTAND, then Stuart Freeborn was the Hank Reardon who made a product so good that nobody could equal his efforts—and the power of that creation is about to explode upon our modern culture in a way that is unfathomable.  Trust me.

This is why I am spending so much time discussing Star Wars.  There is nothing in our culture that captures all the elements of modern life the way that Star Wars mythology does not just spiritually, but economically, politically, and ethically.  On both the business side of Star Wars and the creative side it represents the very best of the absolute best of all those individuals who make the Disney company, Lucasfilm, Industrial Light and Magic and the dozens and dozens of support companies that trickle down off them the best in their businesses.  It should come as no surprise that the values of Yoda as expressed in the Star Wars stories are so popular that stand alone films of Stuart Freeborn’s characters are going to get their own films in addition to the completion of Episodes 7, 8, and 9.  Yoda is getting his own film apparently, and Han Solo and Chewbacca are getting their own films in addition to the Joe Johnston creation of Boba Fett.

It is because of creative geniuses like Stuart Freeborn that Yoda has become over a thirty year period such a powerful character who might well surpass Mickey Mouse as the most recognizable iconic character in human history.  Yoda was created by a wise old man who went on to live till the age of 98 and brought joy to many millions during his lifetime.   But in his passing, Stuart Freeborn will live on and become stronger than anybody can possibly imagine, as his character of Yoda will carry Star Wars into a new dimension of entertainment experience in producing the myths that society lives by giving a rebirth to a new and prosperous century that nobody saw coming.

How do I know?  Well, read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and understand that “A is A.”  Once the value of “A” is known, then the addition of values can be added up and determined as an end result.  Star Wars is about values in every way that they can be defined.  And the grandfather of those values were people like Stuart Freeborn.  He will be missed, but his memory will live on forever—like all Jedi who find themselves one with the Force.

To my readers here, people like Stuart Freeborn and Paul Harvey mean a lot to me, so it is only right to pay tribute to them when the times come.

Rich Hoffman

“If they attack first………..blast em’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

Paul Havey’s “God Made A Farmer” Speech: The yearning that America has for something real

I stopped my work in its tracks back in 1995 when I first heard Paul Harvey’s “God Made A Farmer” radio skit on 700 WLW at 3:30 in the morning during the Truckin’ Bozo show.  I was working 16 hour shifts back then starting at 4 PM and lasting till 8 AM 7 days a week and every single night I looked forward to the home stretch break when Paul Harvey would come on and give the news of the day.  I remember vividly when I heard that dedication to the farmers of America, and it gave me pause in positive reflection.  It didn’t take me but two words to remember the passage word for word when Dodge used the old Paul Harvey speech during their Superbowl commercial for Ram Pick-up Trucks as those memories from old came rushing back in a fury.

The reaction to the Dodge ad was extremely positive in the days after the big Superbowl event.  It was so effective that long after people forgot the events of the game itself, the blackout, the near comeback by the San Francisco 49ers, the goal line stand by the Ravens to secure the win, people were talking about this commercial.  I would conclude that Americans detected in that speech by Paul Harvey an America they see slipping away, and they are in the depths of their heart trying to recapture it before its gone forever.  It is the elements of that speech that the Tea Party is dedicated into preserving.  It is not a mindless yearning for the ignorance of the past, but the stability of knowing the roles we all require not just from ourselves, but of our youth.

When I was growing up both my grandparents were farmers and several other family members also.  When I went to Christmas dinners and our family gathered for Thanksgiving I went to real farmhouses where the unmistakable smell of manure greeted you on a gravel driveway while the bite of cold northern winds froze your cheeks upon stepping out of the family car.  The kitchens would be blazing hot with wood burning stoves and fireplaces warmed the entire house, hot downstairs, cold upstairs in a traditional farmhouse guarding Ohio farmland.  Bails of coiled hey could be seen out every window covered thinly with snow.  Cows where in the barn where I would play hide and seek with my siblings and cousins swinging from high beam rafters like Zorro and landing on the hood of a tractor bought at an auction in the 1920s that had a flat tire for over twenty years.  I remember seeing slaughtered pigs with the heads hung on the porch for ease of display when I first learned that it was their meat that made bacon and I learned many more such things from my grandparent’s farms over the emerging decades.

I feel terribly sorry for most people now who will never know a farmer in their lives.  I feel sorry for the people who saw that Superbowl commercial and found that they couldn’t relate to it at all, as they have become too urbanized.  When I was a kid most everyone knew at least one farmer in their lives, but now, almost nobody does. A lot of children don’t even know a home where both their biological parents are still married let alone know a family that has been married for 50 years and earned their living off the land like the American Farmer.  I was benefited with knowing not just one or two, but I knew many, and for me, they set the social parameters that I hold to this day of strong families, and strong figures within those families who are the glue that hold society together.

When I am criticized for my rejection of progressive feminism and my belief that women should stay home to be the center point of their families, those latte sipping critics never saw my grandmother cut the head off a chicken, pluck it clean and present it for dinner within a few hours while washing the blood off her hands in a washbowl of water brought in from a well.  To me, those were strong women and they forced their men to adhere to a code of honor.  I can’t report accurately how many times I saw strong men hiding in their barns behind loads of work because they feared giving their farmwives bad news and how scared they were at the wrath of such women.  These same men were the kind who changed tractor wheels with broken off tree branches as a jack and a crescent wrench, and little else.  And to see them terrified to confront their wives with disappointment speaks volumes of what America has lost, not gained through progressive feminism.

Kids today visit their grandparents in condominiums and they have Christmas dinners in quarter million dollar homes with high-efficiency heating systems which is a testimonial to technological advancement, but in the process, America has lost its traditional roots and surrendered its honor to the convenience of progressive philosophy.  Our entire society has lost touch with the source of their milk, as they’ve never seen a farmer milk a cow at 5:30 AM or deliver a calf at 12:30 PM.  When I was a kid my grandpa called my dad late one night and we rushed to his farm to deliver a baby calf by tying a rope to its feet and pulling it out of the mother with a tractor.

My anger at progressives and the source of my outrage that is displayed with millions of words upon these pages stems from the intentional destruction of this purely American way of life that Paul Harvey so accurately captured with his creative monologue.  Few people have ever done it as good as Paul Harvey did but thankfully at least one did.  Because without Paul Harvey’s monologue it may have been possible that progressives in America might have erased all memory of this exclusively American life from the minds of the world forever.

Paul Harvey is no longer with us, and neither are my grandparents and many of the people I knew at the time who had farms.  My connection to such people these days are through people like my friend Gery Deer who manages the Annie Oakley Wild West Showcase each year in Darke County.  (CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW)  Gery’s father still operates one of these farms in Jamestown, Ohio and Gery and his family gather there every Saturday night in the traditional way.  They sing campfire songs like old cowboys and dine together in a way that has become lost in America and I cherish knowing them for it.  I look forward to that event every July because it gives me a good reason to travel through the farm country of Western Ohio and buy fresh produce from roadside venders who still have dirt under their fingernails.

The America I am fighting for is the one in Paul Harvey’s words.  I think its fair to ridicule those who have advanced the destruction of those traditional values because I have seen once too many the people I cherish ridiculed by a progressive teacher who teachers that women in the workplace have more value over my grandmother who could cut the head off that chicken and prepare it for her family which she loved with every cell in her body.  I am tired of hearing the progressive politician urge urban dwelling by smearing the good name of the rural farmer and their desire for personal liberty.  And I am tired of attorneys who desire divorce at every turn just so they can make money off the misery.  I prefer the terrified farmer cowering in his barn afraid to deliver bad news to the woman of the family instead of taking the easy way out by serving divorce papers through the mail.  I do not like, condone, or believe in the America that progressives have been attempting to advance.  I believe in the America that Paul Harvey so accurately captured with his “God Made A Farmer” monologue.  That is why I paused over a decade ago to pay silent tribute to those ancient words, and why I personally loved the Superbowl experience of 2013, because Dodge had the foresight to release a commercial that pays tribute to the American Farmer.  I’m glad they did it, but I am sad that so many people found the experience foreign.  That is a trend that must be reversed if America is to survive, and it is that reversal of which I am fully dedicated.  The silent yearning that the commercial evoked in the American consciousness is but a compass that our society needs to observe so to find our direction in a wilderness of confusion, and find our way back to greatness that has it’s backbone in the American Farmer.

It is because of Paul Harvey that I write here every day.  I listened to him for years and I miss the guy.  It is because nobody else has the guts to be him, or pour words into the tapestry of our day the way he did that I write so much about the world around us.  I believe in the hearts of all Americans that there is a Paul Harvey in each of them, even if they have been taught to think otherwise.  The video above featuring Paul  Harvey in the Dodge Ram commercial had over 6 million hits on YouTube in just three days.  Ratings say everything.

Rich Hoffman

“If they attack first………..blast em’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

The Great Star Wars Director Dave Filoni: Thoughts about Clone Wars Season Five and beyond

One of the only television shows that my wife and I watch on a regular basis is Star Wars: Clone Wars that broadcasts each Saturday morning on the Cartoon Network.  For science fiction based cartoons, I find them deeply entertaining, and exceptionally dramatic.  They are also quite intelligent, and gorgeous to look at as separate pieces of art.  I enjoy the sights, sounds and morality displayed within the Star Wars universe, particularly The Clone Wars animated series.  I love them all, but recently after a particularly powerful episode in the middle of Season 5 director Dave Filoni proved that he’s not afraid to display his skills and episode leadership into an epic direction that I don’t think has ever been done for a show directed at children.  They didn’t make cartoons like this when I was a kid, that’s for sure.  After the February 2, 2013 episode arrived at 9:30 AM, which I displayed the press release sent from Lucasfilm, (CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW) Dave and the cast and crew had a Google Hangout meeting where fans of the show could chime in and learn more about what is in store for the rest of Season 5 and Star Wars in general.  You can see that hour long meeting in full at the video below.


The episode they spent so much time talking about in the Google Meeting is called The Lawless.  It was quite spectacular.  It’s hard to believe that Dave and his crew was able to cover such a large expanse of story in just over 20 minutes, but the results are exceptional by any standard of cinema endeavor.  I hope Star Wars: Clone Wars sticks around for a while, because after 5 years of broadcasting, they are every bit as good if not better than when they first aired in the late summer of 2008 with the feature film of the same name.  Dave Filoni is a wonderful Star Wars director that in the context of history will give J.J. Abrams a run for his money in the magic and lore that has become the Star Wars Mythology.  I am looking forward to many more future episodes so I can watch them with my grandson and introduce him to such a vast wilderness of ideas that is Star Wars in a morality play that is unequaled in the history of the world.


Rich Hoffman

“If they attack first………..blast em’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

Winning at ‘Survivor’: Maintaining the rarity of toughness to gain an edge

I get the typical questions still almost every day I do it, wondering why I ride a motorcycle in the harsh cold and falling snow.  During the span of days where 6 AM temperatures hovered around 15 degrees in early February, 2013 through black ice and drifting snow I rode my motorcycle as I always do to the inquisitive curiosity of many.  They don’t understand why a 45 year-old man is riding such a vehicle and suffering through the painful cold when I clearly don’t have to.  My answer is one that many can’t understand logically, but it has to do with maintaining a Survivor mindset, one that does not falter under harsh conditions and can continue thinking when a physical reality is filled with pain.  That answer leaves even more people scratching their heads because they don’t understand why such skills would be necessary in today’s world.  But over the years I have done a very good job at surviving anything that has come my way, and I have been so good at it that my family has always joked that I should be a contestant on the TV show Survivor.  In fact, half-way serious back during the third season of Survivor when they were going to Africa I actually tried out for the show.  I was only 33 years-old at the time and went so far as to obtain my passport to appear on the show.  Below is my audition tape that I sent to the producers.  Their criteria at the time was to pick one item that I would want to bring with me on Survivor and describe why.  I picked my 12 foot bullwhip.

The fun thing about watching that old video now is that I haven’t changed that much from then to now.  My oldest daughter was just a little girl at the time as she held targets for me like she always used to.  I filmed that little audition tape while my wife was making breakfast with her mother on a brisk November morning mainly because I wanted to send a message to my kids not to be afraid to try anything even if the odds are very much against you.  Often the fun is in the journey, so it was delightful to assemble those clips with my daughter and allow her to take an active part in helping me try out for such a large television production while at the same time giving me a creative way to tell her the back history of how I came into using bullwhips as a hobby.

By now there is over a decade of Survivor episodes so we all know how the game has been played.  Even though I haven’t played that particular game on that particular show I have played the game in real life very effectively.  Some who know me best have seen to what extremes I am willing to play the game of Survivor in real life.  I’ve had to do it with several companies, personal triumphs, also with politics and in hindsight I had very good instincts to try out for Survivor all those years ago.  Watching the kind of people who have won over the last decade and studying how they’ve won I would have had a good chance at winning the million dollar prize, which is why that show has always been so popular.  The large financial incentive in the game pits many different types of personalities against each other in a successful duplication of reality.  After all, we all play Survivor in our everyday lives in some form or another, so we enjoy watching the show as it strips away all the masks that such competition hides behind.  In the TV game Survivor the settings are always exotic and primitive with the basic human condition exposed under the rugged conditions and easy for viewers to study—which is why the show has been so successful.

Even though I didn’t get the opportunity to be on that show I have survived many personal episodes over the years, and you might be surprised dear reader how many times my use of the bullwhip has bailed me out over that span.  Much of the time it is knowing when to be intense, when to form an alliance, when to break an alliance, when to be unpredictable, when to be predictable, when to show your cards and when not to that dictates who wins and loses in the game of Survivor which we all play every day.  Being good at Survivor requires an understanding of who is scheming against you and who is simply trying to use you to get closer to their eventual goal of which you share with them the final prize.  Much of the time alliances are formed with those you know eventually must be taken out before the game ends and you must detect when they are going to make a move against you so that the aggression can be headed off before hand.

In that regard the game of Survivor that we are all playing is not for a million dollars or even to survive in corporate America.  The game of Survivor we are playing now is one for all the marbles in American philosophy.  For the reasons that John Boehner has sided with Barack Obama in many cases while publicly pretending to dual with him is to maintain the alliance the two have formed along the lines of what George Soros recently revealed about a strategy against the Tea Party being played out in Davos, Switzerland.  Boehner wants to protect machine politics as does Obama, so they both have that trait in common and find the Tea Party as a threat to their personal philosophy.  They may not agree on much else, but they know they must get rid of the Tea Party before they fight each other, so they form a union, just like in the show Survivor.  CLICK THE LINK BELOW FOR MORE.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/02/03/soros-obama-trying-to-split-the-republican-party-push-the-tea-party-out-into-the-wilderness/

The weakness of the Tea Party movement is that they are inheritably honest by nature so they find themselves often on the short end of the stick when playing against deceitful competitors.  I too have the very same problem.  It took me a long time to work through this handicap, which I figured out in my teenage years.  I cannot be as deceitful as the typical politician and cannot change sides so quickly as others with less ethics have proven so capable of.  The Soros/Obama plan is to provoke that honesty prevalent in the Tea Party “into the forest” as they put it, so that they can regain control of the two-party system.  Locally we have seen traditional Republicans move away from the Tea Party for this very reason, because they are betting that the Tea Party will not survive, and they fear exposure.   This trend is so popular that even education reformers like Governor Kasich are quickly changing their tune.  He has formed an alliance with labor unions designed to earn his re-election and a run for President in 2016 by turning against the Tea Party ideas that he ran on.  Kasich may not philosophically agree with the labor unions, but he will side with them now so that he can advance to a political level where he can betray them at a future tribal council—(metaphorically speaking).

What is required if you are a Tea Party supporter is a change in strategy that “they” don’t anticipate.  As we move forward with fighting school levies, preserving the Constitution, and maintaining fiscal responsibility in government, it will require new alliances and a will to cut up the old ones into little pieces so that they cannot betray us in the future.  If a deceitful manner is not an option for the Tea Party, which I know before hand that it’s not, then it requires a toughness that the opposition does not have to beat them.

I have learned over the years that the willingness to be “tougher” than a rival can provide leverage over the more manipulative in the game of Survivor.  Opponents who play “politics” and believe they can outspend, outsmart, and outwit a competitor while sitting in the safety of their homes or their luxury cars are ALWAYS at a disadvantage to a rival who is not afraid to bleed, fight in the trenches and rip off the masks of those who desire to remain hidden behind them.  In this way it is possible to always gain the upper hand on a rival who desires to play Survivor from a level of comfort.

If I had been on the show Survivor all those years ago, I would have done well using my athleticism to win a majority of the immunity challenges, and I would have done well otherwise by created and dismissing the proper alliances at the proper time.  And the reason to this very day that I still do push-ups every day, and ride my motorcycle in the extreme cold, the snow, the rain, the intense lightning storms is to remind myself to never get comfortable, to always be ready to make an adjustment in alliances to one that is successful and will allow victory in the game of Survivor.  Typical politicians like Barack Obama, John Boehner, John Kasich and financiers like George Soros are playing the real game of Survivor with the standard “outwit, outplay and outlast” motto.  To win, all those elements are important and cannot bring victory to someone who doesn’t excel at all those traits.  However, I would add “toughness” to that motto.  The ability to be “tougher” than your opponents with all other things being equal proves that victory comes to the tougher player who plays as honestly as possible nearly 100% of the time.  “Toughness” beats all the billions of dollars that people like George Soros spends on politics nearly every single time in a head to head competition of wits.  That is the short answer to why I ride my motorcycle in the cold February months and leave the car in the garage 95% of the time.  “Toughness” is not something you can purchase; it has to be earned the old-fashioned way, and is the extra boost that any competitor can use to defeat their rivals with assurance.

If the Tea Party can maintain their sense of toughness while all these alliances change hands then it will be possible for a handful of tough-minded rebel rousers to dismantle all the billions that George Soros and his minions have spent to advance a global “progressive” society, and it can dismantle the two-party buddy system that is modern politics.  Weak minded competitors who can be purchased because of their love of comfort do not make good allies for the mentally tough anyway, so there is no loss when they abandon us in favor of George Soros type’s power and money.  In the end, honesty, toughness, and tenacity added to maintaining the ability to outwit, outplay, and outlast is a winning formula that will take the Tea Party into the real life finals in the game of Survivor.  The above formula will give the Tea Party a chance to do what many think is impossible—to save America from the advancement of global progressivism.  The real game of Survivor is not on TV but is being played out right here right now in this time and the winners will be those who play it best, and last to the bitter end.

As for me, since the time that I first made that video for the third season of Survivor and now I have survived many, many, many metaphorical tribal councils—enough to have won the TV game many times over.  Some of those real tribal councils have been every bit as vicious as what can be seen on that television show each week for over a decade now.  I anticipate that over the next decade I’ll survive even more that are every bit as ferocious.  There will many alliances that are broken, many tears that are spilled, and there may even be some blood—but in the end, it’s all about “outwitting, out playing and outlasting” competitors with my personal addition of playing with honesty, toughness, and tenacity.  I am confident that I’ll win far more immunity challenges than I’ll lose because at 6 AM in the morning through the pouring rain, the drifting snow, the black ice and extreme cold, I’m the only one on a motorcycle, which is why I do it.

Rich Hoffman

“If they attack first………..blast em’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

Lakota is Losing Students: The destruction of the American Family

It was not a surprise to me when a recent study presented to the Lakota School Board revealed that in the upcoming 4 years that student enrollment at the 8th largest school system in Ohio will drop by 1,040 students—otherwise 6.1%.  That information is not new and was in fact covered here at the OW nearly a year ago.  I also don’t mind revealing at this early time that it is the results of that study which will be our primary strategy in the upcoming levy attempt in 2013.  At Lakota, which is the public school in my home district, they know that Governor Kasich is not taking away all their state money, and they know that their student enrollment will drop noticeably in the immediate years to come meaning the workforce of nearly 2000 employees who make an average of $63K per year will have to be reduced in relation to the student population.  It should be a foregone conclusion that Lakota could balance their budget without tax increases.  But it is not this information that I wish to focus on at this time—rather the reckless results of progressive based education models and their idiotic strategy for social construction that is even more fascinating.  Read more about the study as it was presented to the school board at the link below:

http://westchesterbuzz.com/2013/02/01/study-lakota-local-schools-enrollment-will-go-down/

In the study Jerome McKibben made a compelling argument when he said “This isn’t a Lakota problem or a Cincinnati problem or a Ohio problem, we see this trend in successful suburban school districts all across America.”  He went on to present the finer details of his analysis.

Population in school district –

  • Has increased from 74,433 in 2000 to 94,639 in 2010
  • Is projected to grow to 100,516 by 2020
  • Number of 10-14 teens is projected decrease from 8,266 in 2010 to 7,320 in 2020
  • The median age is projected to go up from 36.9 in 2010 to 40.7 in 2020
  • Ages 50+ are projected to go up from 26,729 in 2010 to 36,264 in 2020

McKibben cited that districts similar to Lakota have high graduation rates, high rates of students going to college, and high rates of graduates leaving their hometown. “They don’t marry the boy or girl next door,” McKibben said. “They marry the boy or girl in the next dorm.” McKibben also said that the fastest growing household type in this area over the next ten years will be empty-nesters.  Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

I don’t dispute what McKibben said in the least.  But I think we should expand on the notion of the boy next door who goes to Lakota and is successfully urged to go to college and marry the girl in the next dorm—who then settles in a big city in some far away land beyond the realm of small town Lakota.  I think the situation is far more complex than that.

The birth rates are lower these days as a direct result of public education’s platform of easy sex without consequences.  Public schools have been teaching children sex education earlier than the fifth grade so as a result children well before they even hit puberty are thinking about sex and using birth control to avoid pregnancy.  In addition to that public schools have also been very supportive of same-sex relationships which is quite extraordinary given the statistical results of such relationships to the bottom line of tax bases.  The government school instruction is like everything progressive–people are born a certain way and have no control over their thoughts and feelings—making them eternal victims always in need of some sort of government assistance—whether it is civil rights protection or laws making opportunities equal to them beyond discrimination.  Government is ceaseless in their sales pitches for their services.  The progressive instruction that has been given to two decades worth of American children is that actions do not have consequences, and as a result we have entire generations of children who do not believe that if they have a baby out-of-wedlock that it is their responsibility to care for that child.   They believe they can put the child on welfare to cover the costs of raising the child.  They also believe that same-sex relationships can be as productive as traditional relationships, and the results are beginning to show up in statistical analysis like the McKibben study.

When a school system like Lakota begs for more money due to their teacher’s union contract that is coming due in 2014—so they can pay their teachers even more money—they forget who pays the bill and what kind of people make up a community’s most productive.  Tax payers who must pay the salaries of teachers haven’t in many cases seen a pay increase of any kind since Obama has been president.  School administrators are assuming that there will be enough homes in a district to pay their enormous tax bills and that the desire to pay will never diminish.  But as I indicated the other day, more and more homes are being foreclosed on as families trying to make ends meet are falling into dire straits in an economy that does not favor them.  Tax payers are tapped out, leaving very little income for families to even pay their cable TV bills with, so they are slowly eroding away into foreclosure.

Most of the time with financial hardship comes the divorce of a couple and the breakup of a family.  Public schools like that statistic because the education institutions fancy themselves as caretakers of community’s children anyway so broken families strengthen their social beliefs that government is the center of a family, not the parents—but their thoughts are short-sighted.    Without a family struggling to pay their bills and raise their families in a community, there aren’t enough people who desire to send their children to public schools and pay those extraordinary taxes on their property for the rest of their lives.  Compound that short-term problem with the progressive strategy of supporting same-sex relationships and another issue emerges.  A gay couple cannot produce a child.  They can adopt a child, but they cannot do as traditional America has and pop out 6 or 7 children from one woman who would then grow up and become productive members of their communities.  Progressive education instead has taught young people to wait until their 30’s to have children and once they do, they only have a one or two.  While these young people are waiting to grow up, they spend their time in apartments in urban environments and spend many years experimenting sexually to “find themselves” which is a reckless waste of time for a young person.  The result of this “unproductive” period means that families are not being created—which means that the tax base is not being replenished—meaning that Lakota and many public schools do not have enough tax payers with kids in the school system to buy into their product.

The people on the opposite side of the table from me on this issue, the blind school levy supporters will say that they are forced to teach what “The State” deems necessary for the curriculum and they have no choice but to follow the progressive agenda and the bi-product of that commitment.  Their common response to me is that it’s “bigger than all of us,” meaning that they feel they are too insignificant to make any kind of meaningful impact, so why try.  Well my answer to them is the same one that I utter here continuously in what school board member Julie Schaffer calls my “rants.”  Most of the laws that Lakota claims they have to adhere to were shaped by labor union lobbyists and dim-witted politicians who secretly look for middle age love in bathroom stalls with same-sex partners or hang out at rest stops looking for a quick hit from an over the road trucker missing his wife.  Who are these types of people to judge a young child who wants to experiment sexually, so progressive sex education finds its way into public school curriculums, and administrators go right on along with it because where else can they make six figure incomes just for showing up and sipping coffee half the morning in the teacher’s lounge.  The school employees put up and shut up, and do what they are told, and never question their reality.

The problem is much more complex than Jerome McKibben’s report analyzed fully.  Public education is a victim of their own stupidity and short-sighted world view.  They spent years trying to tear down the American family with social engineering experiments that belong in the nightmarish novel Brave New World rather than in the lives of our children and they caused their own destruction with progressive strategy.  The boy next door who moved away to California after he married the passed-out girl in the dorm next door after half a dozen other boys had their way with her incapacitated body wait another 7 years to have children so they can put the memory of their “wild college days” behind them.  By the time the couple decides to have children, they only have two before the woman hits menopause and loses the ability all together.  This number goes down even more if the boy next door moves in with a boy from New York and they conduct a 15-year relationship marching in gay pride parades with colorful outfits wearing flowers in their hair.  The anal sex the two conducts in their lives will not produce a child, so while the couple live it up in their urban apartment, children are not a part of their lives, meaning they most likely won’t buy a 200K home in the suburbs—unless they work for government in some way and can afford it.

So thanks to progressive philosophy most homes in suburban school districts like Lakota will not have children in them—and the owners of those homes won’t be willing to pay over $3,000 to $5,000 dollars a year in property taxes to cover the collective aims of only 15% of the community’s total population.  The funding model for public education is falling apart before their very eyes and it is their own mistakes that created it.  That is why it is so much fun to fight public schools on these school levies, because the education institutions are arrogant enough to ignore these facts and prove how ill prepared they are to deal with statistics preferring the flighty fantasies of progressive social engineering over the logic of thought one hundred percent of the time.  They are the architects of their own destruction and always defend themselves behind the backs of children, which makes them deplorable and a delight to expose.

If you haven’t watched them yet, please do watch the videos above for support information.  It is important to understand this changing world.  All kidding aside, this is a serious matter.  That last video is a real eye-opener.

Rich Hoffman

“If they attack first………..blast em’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

The Financial Health of America: How to adapt to the coming crises

This is the day of the Superbowl and as I watched the festivities of the day and thought about the countless parties going on all over America I had some thoughts about economics in The United States that I wanted to share.  I have covered so many radio broadcasts here at the OW over the years that I have moved on to new ways of communicating just to avoid redundancy.  For instance, when Darryl Parks covered two years ago the coming financial crises in America, he was talking about the time we are currently in.  CLICK HERE to revisit that broadcast and compare that broadcast to this new one done on 700 WLW during the first day of February 2013.  A lot of ground has been covered between the Darryl Parks broadcast of a couple of years ago and this recent one, but the scope of the problem is very accurately displayed for even economically naive listeners to understand.  Have a listen:

This financial crisis is the paramount topic of our day.  The state of our economy is changing rapidly and soon many of those who thought that finance in America was an impregnable fortress will soon learn what epic failure and a commitment to socialism has done to us all.  With student debt collapsing our economy as we speak, the old idea of retiring at 65 years old off a nice pension and other government driven revenue is gone forever.  Instead Americans in their mid-40’s on down will have to face a new reality for financing their lives and the luxury of one income to handle all their affairs just won’t do.

In my own life I have begun writing books to help fuel my own later years with additional sources of personal income, because the old traditional model will become obsolete in the coming years.  With the collapse of the American economy so to will the idea of working one job for eight hours every day go away.  In the future it may take 3 or 4 jobs requiring 10 to 30 hours each week to commit to, and that is the result of the massive plundering that has went on in our nation’s government.

College will not help fix this problem; it has only made it worse, because our education system has saturated the marketplace with too many employees trained in skills that do not have revenue generating potential.  The best jobs for college graduates are government jobs, because the private sector has not been able to sustain government intrusion and preserve profitability while maintaining the financial promises of a university degree.  Unions also won’t help, because like colleges, they have improperly skewed the profitability of their enterprises with redistributive wealth reforms that have had the opposite effect of their intentions.  Just a quick glance at the economic viability of Detroit, and the state of California provides all the proof one needs to predict the future of economies driven by these forces.

What this means is that a massive exodus of tax contributions is about to hit The United States government and they are not prepared to deal with that grim reality peacefully.  I recently spoke about the cost of high taxes pushing people out of their homes.  An empty home does not contribute taxes to a school district, or a police department, or those beloved firefighters embedded into our minds as heroes from the Fisher Price toys we played with as children.  When citizens can no longer make money off their jobs or own property, there is nothing for government to tax—there is no way to steal the money away from the citizens—and the government will go bankrupt once people lose the will to participate.  That will is quickly disappearing.

A failure to address these issues back when Darryl Parks first did his broadcast with Porter Standsberry has caused this current crisis to impact the lives of millions of families, and that is just the tip of the iceberg.  I put this recent broadcast up today so that a trend can be seen by the intelligent reader/viewer.  These broadcasts are more than doomsday entertainment, they are more than skeptical speculation; they are quite real in their announcements of economic disaster.  I believe that the downward economic trend is unavoidable and those who will survive are those who adjust their lives to these changing conditions.  The keys to this new survival are to keep student debt down.  Keep credit card debt low to non-existent.  And do many things for a living—not just one specialized thing.  Avoid high looting taxes because with every tax dollar you throw away to government, you will have to work a part-time job or two here and there to cover the cost of those taxes.  Keep it simple and stay out-of-the-way, because things will get ugly before they get better.  And most importantly, think like a “producer” not a “consumer.”  Conditions will get ugly because too many people are in denial of the present state of affairs, and refuse to acknowledge the true economic status of The United States.  Take broadcasts like the one done on 700 WLW and cherish the information, because failure to act will lead your family down a dark path that will most likely end very poorly for all involved.

Enjoy the Superbowl.  Hope your team won.  Depending on how you answer that will determine your ability to avoid trouble in the coming days.

Rich Hoffman

“If they attack first………..blast em’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

The Bullies of Public Education: A cry out for help while few listen

When it is wondered what I have against public education and government in general, I can understand that unless people have seen what I have up close and personal that they may not have context to relate with.  Few people look too deeply at any problem, and it requires a cavernous look to understand why public education and their employees are bad for society at large–why they are detrimental to the human condition.  Most people are happy to accept out of convenience the opposite–that public education is the savor of society’s children and their parents because government schools offer a glorified babysitting service that has a subtle social engineering objective driven by progressive politics.  My problem with public education and the government, of which they are an important part, is that they are filled with participants who are bullies seeking to impose evil with a thug-like imposition of submission against individuals to a collective sum.

Since I stepped into the public education debate in the spring and fall of 2010 with a logical argument against excessive spending I have had many bullies attempt to conform me into some type of collective submission.  Those bullies have learned, what over 40 years of a blood soaked past filled with similar bullies have learned about me—that it only gets them more name-calling and violence, not less.  In my entire 45 years on this earth I have never backed down from a bully no matter how big or powerful they thought themselves to be and I won’t start now.  And there have been a lot of them.  Anyone who does some checking into my past has come to that conclusion on their own by now.  I never look for these fights, but they happen because I refuse to be moved by any collective force whether it is the federal government, or an entire city’s police force who is taking money off the top of drug sales using kids to sell marijuana to high schools.  For me the individual will of every American citizen is the most sacred element of existence and I do not like to see individuals twisted and manipulated into the will of any collective organization no matter what it is.  This is why I hate governments, I hate mobsters, I don’t like authority when it seeks to break the back of individuals for some “greater good,” and this is what I have discovered public education to be completely about—breaking down the individual will in children and forcing their parents to pay for it with public extortion.

I would not care so much about the activity of public education evils if I were not “forced” to pay for it, but because of the collective extortion practice called “taxation” I have no choice, so my only recourse is to confront the bullies—which I have done.  However, when you get involved and start fighting these bullies, and others see you doing it, you learn about all the individual cases of institutional bullying that are going on around you.  I have met since 2010 many victims of public education bullying where the institutions and its servants impose themselves upon the free-will of many individuals.  Often I have taken up the banner and offered to fight on behalf of those individuals making some of the fights very public which of course attracts more people from all over Ohio who send me their stories and want help fighting their individual circumstances.  The posting I provided yesterday is one of those stories.  A family was a victim of institutional manipulation and cover-ups designed to protect the careers of the participants at the expense of a little girl whom I became quite found of in my dealings with the family.  The family eventually left the state to start a new life elsewhere, and I can’t blame them.  I helped them the best I could, but the institutional imposition of public education is an ominous beast that doesn’t give a damn about the little girl or the family—it only wants to fill its belly with the lives of individuals.

I continue to get these pleas for help, and they have only increased over the years.  I would hope that they would trend down, not up, but in the case of a letter I received the other day shown below, they are getting worse.  When I read this letter I immediately felt for this family.  I hate to hear that a family is about to lose their home, that their children won’t have a place to lay their head at night and study in comfort.  I hate to hear that the Social Security tax increases that went into effect at the start of 2013 are putting a family like the one below under financially—that they are only able to buy groceries by charging them on their credit card.  I hate to hear that they are trying to fight their school levy just so they can keep their house because an extra $20 a week will crush them, because they’ve already given up their cable TV, and their home phone as needless expenses.  And I hate that the only place a family like the one shown below feels they can turn to is my email box. Read the letter for yourself.  They are from a school district in central Ohio.  I removed their name and district for their own protection.

From: ********** **************
Date: Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 9:38 PM
Subject: Re: School levy
To: Rich Hoffman

Hi Mr, Hoffman, I would really love for you to contact me. I am currently fighting my school against our levy; I am currently tied up in a law suit because I made a political website for voting no on this levy in November. I am speaking for all the poor families that cannot afford anymore money being taken from us. Our so-called American dream is becoming a nightmare, my family can no longer afford our home due to the over spending and taxing of others on my husband’s paycheck and the schools using our home as their personal ATM.  I feel like I am fighting a losing battle, the school board wont listen to anything my family has to say. Can you please contact me with some advice because the school is putting up the next levy for May voting. My family needs your help!!! I am in the ****** school district, I am being sued by the campaign manager for the schools vote yes party, I was banned along with two other woman for asking questions, nothing out of line just general questions, so I made a Vote No Facebook page, the law suit is not my concern so much as I do have an amazing attorney, but more my concern is with them trying to pull this levy off again after it was voted down in November by an 11% margin. I am treated poorly by the board anytime I ask questions when the only thing I am trying to do is keep the quality of life at home for families like mine, you see we no longer even have the money to go to see a simple movie with our children, we have already eliminated cable TV, home phone service, the only thing we still have is the internet, it is required as I do have one home schooled child due to the levy in November, I felt scared and did not want my son to be under the conditions at school so I pulled him out. I don’t feel like I can defeat these people, they do not care about families like mine. I know that the first week of 2013 our first paycheck was again short another $63.00 when we currently did not have extra money and the school just wont quit they say they are short revenue, but my house hold is also short revenue so how do they expect to get blood from a turnip, we are wiped out financially and our home is already on the chopping block, if it does not sell by April we may be forced to give it back to the bank. I am so frustrated as a parent I feel so sorry for my children and others children in our situation, while the school admin drives around in their fancy cars and living it up in those fancy houses when so many in our district are losing their homes.  I know all of 2012 we had to use credit cards to buy groceries with to feed the kids. Something’s gotta’ give! Please help the families in this district!

When people wonder why I get so angry at the arrogance that is seen in public education it is because I’ve seen one too many letters like the one above.  I am tired of a media that refuses to look at what high taxes do to families like the one who wrote me the letter.  I am tired of putting school employees who work for progressive labor unions on a pedestal and listening to newspapers and television broadcasts advocate on their behalf when the taxes raised for these public schools are destroying the lives of the tax base and nobody does the hard reporting, because nobody wants to face down the bullies in public education.  These bullies think the court system is in their back pocket and nobody will have the guts to call them out into the light.  When I came unglued last year in the Cincinnati Enquirer it was because the bullies were making their move at a cost to many families like the one shown above.  The levy supporters don’t give one bit of a damn if 100 families lose their homes to the tax increases, so long as they get their way.  In my life it was people like Laura Sanders at Lakota who sent me letters advocating for higher taxes that infuriated me with their unfathomable selfishness and narrow-minded perspective.  CLICK HERE FOR A REVIEW.  I can pick on Laura because she had the nerve to send me personal emails attempting to belittle the value of my own home compared to her own as if to apply pressure on me into believing my tax contribution was less than hers.  She also gave an interview in the Cincinnati Enquirer attempting to smear my name because I stood between her and a YES vote for a tax increase by playing the “women hater card” that worked so well against Mitt Romney—only I’m not Mitt Romney.  Her position was that she was willing to pay more taxes, so why wasn’t I?  It’s the same progressive argument that Barack Obama made against the rich, “if a wealthy guy like me is willing to pay more taxes, then why aren’t you?”  That is how these people work, and this is why parents are afraid of the public castigation from people like Laura at church on Sunday finding themselves charging their food for their families on a credit card so that they aren’t called “cheap” by the collective masses who advocate more money thrown into the black hole of public education.

With every letter I get like the one above I increasingly hate the system that advocates more and more of that behavior. I used to be able to maintain enough distance to coolly lay out the argument of why public education has a spending problem, but when they responded to my suggestions with thuggish resistance—well, it only pissed me off.  Once it was realized that logic was not welcome in the public education debate, and that the institutional commitment toward collectivism sought to stamp out the lives of couples like the one above, that was the end for me.

I am not impressed with Governor Kasich’s new public education funding model.  I see that he has given in to the bullies of Columbus and my respect for him is much less than it was.  I commend him for trying to do something, and I think he thinks he’s being clever about his education reforms.  But in the end, he will lose because he is afraid to punch those bullies square in the mouth like they deserve.  Bullies are bullies when they attempt to impose upon individuals a collective goal, and I have absolutely no tolerance for it—at all.  I never have, and I never will—the more I see of it, the worse it gets.  With that said if you are a member of the media reading this and you side against the kind of people who sent me the letter above by giving a free media pass to the thugs who cause the trouble, you are as bad as the bullies—because you participate in the destruction of families everywhere one dollar at a time till they are going bankrupt because of a $63 dollar tax increase out of their personal income in 2013.  Nobody is looking out for them, and that is truly a sad, and a terrible story in modern America.

I’m sure that people who support school levies from the teachers and administrators to the PTA moms that I have had so much fun with don’t know about families like the one above. They don’t want to know, until tragedy strikes their families with a major lay-off, or another form of income loss.  Instead of trying to act as individuals they hedge their bets by befriending the bosses of the collective—who fuel their lives off tax dollars funneled by government.  The real motive of collectivism is to hedge against the danger of being an individual, so they have no care for those who have decided to live on their own merit—who fall on hard times.  Secretly, they desire to see families like this crushed leaving them no place to turn but a stranger who has a tendency to stand up to bullies hoping that they can do something on their behalf.  The collective seeks to make an example of individuals who try to go it alone—like the family above has.  To the collective, resistance is futile, and they love to see families suffer who are not part of their public education clique.

I have been shocked as my daughter and her husband have been house hunting to learn how many $170K to $250K homes are empty of their former residents.  10 years ago so many homes in foreclosure were a rare sight that had behind them a social stigma that was negative.  It absolutely breaks my heart to walk through these homes and see that the residents left in haste with televisions, refrigerators and toys left behind.  In some cases pictures are still on the walls, and these are not isolated homes.  Most of the homes are in this condition and it is a sign of bad times that aren’t just coming—but already here.  Those homes are proof that there are many who are in the exact same situation as the couple above.  The only difference is that the woman who wrote me had the courage to face public scrutiny by admitting that her family is struggling while the others were reluctant to admit such things publicly.  Most of them probably kept their financial situation a secret till the very end, till they had to leave their home so fast that they couldn’t even take their pictures down off the walls.  For everyone who participates in such an erosion of freedom, they are bullies who deserve their asses kicked, and not tomorrow, but today!  I despise such people.  The root of my anger is in the knowledge that they are willing to see individual lives crushed so long as the collective good can be maintained and I find that absolutely evil.  So I do not care what those on the “other” side think of me.  I do not care if they want an interview from me, or if they even want to be cordial with me.  I only want to see collectivism crushed under the boot of individualism and the first step in that is to stand up to the bullies of collectivism in glorious fashion—something I’m prepared to do and have spent a lifetime nurturing.  For those who hope that I will run out of gas—sorry to say—my engine just warmed up.  The fuel I run on is letters like the one above.  Families like that deserve justice, and if there is any good in the world, they will eventually have it.

Rich Hoffman

“If they attack first………..blast em’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

Keith Kline Superintendent of West Clermont: What’s next–Pee Wee Herman in The White House?

Proof of the quality of candidates becoming superintendents in public school positions is in dramatic decline and has been fully realized when Keith Kline the former principal of Lakota East High School was just named superintendent of West Clermont.  The context regarding the quality of some employees over others is more about the lack of competition which allows the worst to claim they are the best, and this is what we find among the current crop of superintendents who manage public education in Ohio.  CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO.  During his tenure at Lakota Kline was at the center of many controversies which came in my direction and there are many people who read here every day who will be outraged to learn that Kline has been given the highest job possible in Ohio public education—aside from a political bureaucrat in Columbus.  The next time someone tells me that a school superintendent is doing equal work to a company CEO, I will think of Keith Kline and will know honestly that they are out of their mind.

Kline’s ascension into such a powerful position proves the motivations of these professional education types.  Many people from within the Lakota School System’s halls of secrets gave me very direct information regarding the power struggles between Kline and school board member Joan Powell pointing to internal politics that make Washington politics look like a day at Chuckee Cheese’s Pizza Palace.  Based on some of those controversies, I thought anybody would be insane to give a promotion to someone like Kline.  As tax payers we are the employers of these public servants  so a recommendation to another employer would not come from me.  It was well-known that Kline wanted the top job at Lakota and one of the reasons he left Lakota was to pursue a superintendent job elsewhere once the top job went to Karen Mantia–the former teacher from Sycamore and retired superintendent from Pickerington, Ohio.

All these educators will tell their communities—especially when they are begging for money during levy requests—that they “care only about children.”  But to my eyes based on my experience supported by the mountains of evidence their real intentions speak otherwise.  These education professionals are simply in the business of using children to give themselves positions of social power they could get no place else but in a government school.  This doesn’t make them bad people so much as people who stand in the way of real education reform by true management of tax payer resources.  The personal quality of these people is dramatically and noticeably lacking.  They care only about the money they can make and how they can advance their careers and little else.  Those are traits that are not against the law, and in some circles of professional endeavor like lawyers, politicians, day traders, car salesmen, and education professions, it’s actually rewarded—as Kline’s promotion proves.

I know some of these people personally, and I can say that I believe that they believe the shit they are shoveling is gold and diamonds.  They have convinced themselves of their own scam—but when I look into their shovels the evidence is clear as to who has the proper perspective.  The whole charade game is a joke at best, and is made worse because education is an internally driven political nightmare that benefits only the very, very few.  That nightmare is exacerbated by the lack of competition that would prove quickly the management skills of a former high school principal who thinks he’s a CEO to be faulty next to the skill of a real CEO who might compete with Lakota or West Clermont under a free enterprise system where costs would be forced downward and profits upward.  In government schools, where there is no competition, it is tax money that drives everything, so nobody cares if the employees have any real quality about them.  This allows the most scandalous and manipulative paper pushers in society to advance above those who are more qualified but are suppressed under the unionized labor force.  Government favors the back-stabber, not the competitively superior, so government schools will always lack quality because of their inbred monopoly that is supported by tax revenue.

Those of us in the education reform movement joked a few months ago of how long it would take Keith Kline to work his way into the superintendent job.  The joke from some of my friends was that it would be within a year of Kline transferring from Lakota to West Claremont.  I actually said that the West Claremont School Board wouldn’t be that stupid–that surely they were aware of the things that went on at Lakota.  Well, apparently, I was wrong.  Every time I think that public education and its employees have hit a new low and proven the need for School Choice in Ohio, something like this happens—which sets the bar lower and lower.  The announcement of Keith Kline as superintendent of West Clermont is equivalent for me at learning that Pee Wee Herman just became President of The United States.  Any hope that you might have that the office of President had any “quality” flies out the window upon such an announcement which would seem ridiculous talking about it here.  But it is no more ridiculous than learning that a person like Kline has been given the top management job of a major school district.  Without question, West Clermont will be asking for another school levy now, because that is a sure sign of mismanagement and lack of leadership.  With Kline as superintendent, look for wages to increase, and tax hikes to become the norm in the school district of West Clermont.

For more context to this story read below an interview I gave to the Associated Press during 2011 and measure the comments made there with the situation we see today.

http://www.news-herald.com/articles/2011/11/07/news/nh4711053.txt

All of public education exists to provide good jobs to the very few—and the process that promoted Keith Kline is a perfect example of everything that’s wrong with that system.  I don’t blame Kline for playing that system to his advantage.  I blame the apathy that allowed that system to be there for an advantage to be taken.

Rich Hoffman

“If they attack first………..blast em’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

Tom Egger and the Kroger Marketplace: Politics always gets its way–but they shouldn’t

My previous articles about some of the deeper troubles with politics have been leading up to this issue, which I felt I needed to explain in prequel fashion to provide context.  In the battle with West Chester residents over a new Kroger store, where the supermarket chain wishes to build a new superstore at the corner of Tylersville Road and 747, it is the residents who have more power and say over the political machine built by Republicans to change zoning in order to satisfy the end game on their property investments.  CLICK HERE for a review on those prequel thoughts.  For more info on the Kroger store, click the link below.

http://westchesterbuzz.com/2013/01/28/last-week-in-west-chester-neighbors-aim-to-stop-kroger/

I sympathize deeply with Tom Egger and his neighbors on Wethersfield Drive who are fighting the proposed Kroger Marketplace construction.  They do not want to see a shopping center with thousands of people parked at the doorsteps of their homes.  I say that knowing very well many of the people who are involved directly in the development of some of these properties in Liberty Twp and West Chester.  There is only one thing that I respect more than the right of a property owner to make money off their properties and that is the rights of the home owner to protect their individual plots of land.  To me residential homes are equally valuable to a plot of land that is currently just a field.  The developer makes such a plot of land into a revenue generating entity and that is very valuable.  But that value does not exceed the value of the individual property owner.

When the developers bought the plot of land in question they spent a lot of their own money on it with the understanding that the proper arms would be twisted to make way for the eventual commercial development of the property and provide a return on their investment a decade down the road.  Many of these developers tie their money up in properties for many years before they ever see the opportunity to get their money back in developments like the Kroger Marketplace.  Developers will purchase these plots of land based on initial zoning maps that show 20 year forecasts where current day zoning may be residential, but future zoning shows commercial development.

This is where the fight over Agenda 21 comes into our local communities and why I will soon be at odds with the same people I worked with in No Lakota Levy to fight the local school levies.  The zoning maps are created by big government lovers who socially engineer communities around Agenda 21, and developers, trustees, and business finance uses those zoning projections to make their investments into communities.  When fights break out over these changes the fight always happens between the developers and the residents when the real culprits are the zoning central planners who are either dead and in a grave by the time the zoning change is proposed or retired comfortably in a Florida condo living the rest of their lives off a government pension.  The villains are nowhere to be found as they made their plans without voter input away from the eyes of the community leaving residents to fight it out with developers over plans nobody ever knew existed, and are helpless to stop because politics sides most of the time with the developers.  When campaign times come, the developers are the ones who make the financial contributions to politicians, not Tom Egger and his neighbors, so local government tends to roll over the rights of the private citizen, which is what will happen with Kroger at the end of Wethersfield Drive.

Central planners from twenty years prior will point to the “greater good” as a reason to step all over the property rights of private citizens with emanate domain justification, such as what happened with the Butler Country Regional Highway.  Without the Regional Highway and the many lives it destroyed by basically stealing away the properties of the people in its path there would not be a current Bridgewater Falls shopping center or the upcoming Liberty Way development would not even be a thought.  So developers will often use the “greater good” as a reason to justify the developments they wish to build.  Developers are used to opposition to their projects and they often know how to play the politics in their favor.  For people like Tom Egger knows all too well, often the zoning approvals occur regardless of how many people show up to speak against a proposed zoning change—because the deals for the property were made long ago by forces who do not represent the homeowners, but the financial investment into the community.

Usually when the property owners lose in these zoning fights; they get a nice financial settlement that makes the pill go down a bit better.  Over time, most everyone forgives the imposition.  Government workers and developers know people will forget and forgive over time, so in the short run, they will steam roll over the private citizen because they can, and because they have millions of dollars of their own money tied up in a development while the homeowner is only investing 200K to 300K in their private property.  In this way, the developer can justify their position.

However, the developers are wrong.  Communities like Indian Hill have never yielded to such pressures as commercial development that is over zealous and a direct response to Agenda 21 community planners who want to see utopia like communities complete with fountains, side-walks, easy access to gas stations, and plenty of convenient banking.  This is why Indian Hill is filled with extremely valuable real estate, because the zoning was never infused with Agenda 21 strategies.  Instead, Madera, Deer Park, Kenwood and all the surrounding communities have felt that wrath with very mixed results.  What Tom Egger is fighting for is the long view return on his investment.  His property will not increase in value because a Kroger Store sits at the end of his road.  It clutters up his life unnecessarily, because when he moved to West Chester Kroger was down the road, not at the end of his driveway.  Developers will say that a Kroger Store was always slated for that property, but the real estate agent surely didn’t tell Tom Egger and his family that when they invested in their home over a decade ago.

People like Tom Egger have just as much value as property owners as the developers who bought the big field of the proposed Kroger site.  Egger and his neighbors should not be steam rolled over because they do not pour thousands of dollars into local politics, or have millions tied up in a potential real estate deal.  The rights of the individual rules 100% of the time over those of the collective good—there is no argument about the greater good that developers can make to justify moving a Kroger store one mile down the road so it can reside in front of Tom Egger’s property.  Tom Egger’s home may not be worth millions dollars, like the property being developed for Kroger is, but to Tom it is.  It is his palace, his cherished enterprise, and the result of his work and effort.  Tom should not lose the quality of his life to the whims of money and politics just because he can’t play the political game at the same level as the developers.

I will fight to protect those same developers from being unnecessarily pillaged from collectivist school systems and big government taxation policies, as I did by joining with some of them in our group called No Lakota Levy.  But I will always fight for the rights of people like Tom Egger who are the valued citizens who maintain thousands of similar properties all over West Chester and Liberty Twp.  It is they who make up the community and it is they who ultimately hold the most social value.  Their individual rights far exceed those of financial investment and political will which is aligned in a marriage made in court and sanctioned by judges.  It is for this reason that I stand with Tom Egger, his neighbors and those like him against a Kroger Marketplace shopping center.  The context for my opinion is in my prequel statements.  CLICK HERE TO REVIEW.  Doing what is right and good is not always easy, and can cross the lines of political parties, friendships, and even vested interest.  But doing “good” is what we must all be committed to, no matter what the cost of that “good” is.

If Kroger wants to build a new Marketplace Center, they need to do it in the location it currently resides at.  If it’s not possible, then Kroger can live with shoppers going to the Liberty Twp location.  Better yet the old Biggs building could be converted over to a Kroger Marketplace easily since it has plenty of square footage–but such logic is not what this Kroger deal is all about.  It’s not about doing what’s good for the community–it’s about recovering the money invested in the field across from Tom’s house with a political favor that will be just one more empty building 30 years down the road.  That is why Tom Eggar and his property should not be crushed under the political will of collectivism and an original sin designed by the architects of Agenda 21.  When the Kroger building becomes old and out-of-style Tom Eggar and his grand-kids will probably have Christmas dinners at his home, and a Kroger store that will lose value in the coming decades will then be an eye sore and a grim reminder to future generations of the power of politics and the people it crushes when they get in its way.  In this regard, Tom Eggar’s home will still have much value, but the Kroger store will just be another old building that nobody wants to visit.

If you don’t know what Agenda 21 is, CLICK HERE TO REVIEW.

Rich Hoffman

“If they attack first………..blast em’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com