Those Mean Republicans: Why can’t everyone be sensitive, fair, and just raise taxes?

As a country, we don’t need a Department of Education. We don’t need the EPA to be as large and aggressive as it is. We shouldn’t have a large IRS organization. In fact, there are many government departments and programs that should have never happened, and now that we can see the cost of these government expansion programs, it’s time to correct those mistakes by ending them.

The reason I find the book Atlas Shrugged so revealing is that is was written in the 50’s, well before the rest of America saw trouble. So the perspective has truth to it because the book reads like a book written today, including the name of the bills that have been passed in the news lately. So it goes to say that the solutions to most of America’s problems are in that novel. It is the great American novel and should be revered as high, as or higher than Gone with the Wind, or Tom Sawyer.

It is true that there will be massive unemployment when all those government departments are ended. Those jobs should have never been filled by a government agency to begin with, so the pain of the transition will be immediate, and hard to swallow. But we have to swallow it. There isn’t a choice.

We can’t solve these problems on a national level without solving our financial problems on a local level. That is how we fix America, at the local level. Once that process is started, then we can tackle the problems at a national level. This is why school levies are so important. Schools teach generations of future American’s, and I think they’ve done a terrible job, because there are a lot of “other” social issues that have been thrown into that teaching. That’s a whole different topic that I’ve covered in various articles, so I won’t repeat it now. But the bottom line is that the cost of education is just too expensive.

Here Doc Thompson explains how property taxes are divided up and what they get spent on, much of which goes to schools.

As S.B.5 is about to be passed, union members are proclaiming that they’ll never vote for a Republican again. I say to them, so what. Who cares? The Republicans have an obligation to get our costs under control. Democrats have shown they don’t have the stomach for serious and needed cuts. They have made themselves virtually irrelevant. And if the country turns its back on the Republicans, they’ll face a third-party, which will really mess things up. But the country will not go back to what it was. One of two things will happen. We will go bankrupt. Or we’ll get leaner and meaner. There is not an option that allows for things to be as they were. The ignorant notion of overturning S.B.5 will be in the hands of the unions. If we give Ohio the tools to succeed and they overturn it, the blood will be on them, because it can never be said that we didn’t do our best to solve our problems.

When you hear the school board in Lebanon speak, or the unions of Lakota, they clearly don’t understand that money is not an infinite source. They truly believe, as Michael Moore does, that there is “plenty of cash out there. All we have to do is get it away from those that are sitting on it.” The fact that there are Americans who think such things are proof that our education system is completely broken and useless, because people aren’t learning what they should be.

If you’ve ever been on a camping trip, or a long motorcycle trip, you learn how to pack only what you need. I’ve been on such trips with people who don’t know how to pack correctly, and half-way through the trip they are complaining about being tired, or that the weight of their packing is hurting them. One of the great benefits in learning the skills of using only what you need is so that those same skills can be used in other parts of your life. The people who would be complaining on a hard camping trip are the same people who think government is in the business of creating jobs, and that’s why these people are miserable, because such thoughts go against nature.

How can you begin to explain anything to people like this?

It will be a painful process, but anybody who took a public sector job knew the risks, just like the person that is told not to pack too much in a backpack, but doesn’t listen and soon finds themselves in pain. They were warned.

The private sector will replace those jobs in time, but we have to deregulate our society so that those that create will create those jobs. Government only knows how to feed. Someone has to do the creating, and creators do not take government jobs. Those two things just don’t go together.

I can understand why public sector employees would be upset. They actually believed everything could continue and their good, well-paying jobs could continue forever. That’s what they were told anyway, just like the car salesman that sells a car he knows is prone to breakdowns, but says all the right things so the new owner doesn’t discover all those faults till later…..much later.

Look at these people. It must be terrible to not understand how things work. This video is from March 30th 2011.

Of course those people in public jobs are going to want to increase taxes to continue to fund their mistakes. But that’s not an option either, because taxes are a form of regulation, and regulation destroys creativity. And without creativity you have nothing, no jobs, no tax base, and no country.

So go ahead and get mad at the Republicans because they have to shut down the government. Get mad at the Republicans because they are passing S.B.5. Get mad at them for considering eliminating entire branches of government. Fantasize that Democrats will give all those things back to you. Because what they will give you if that happens is a third world country. America will no longer be a place where you can even hope to get a good paying job, let alone have a soft, union job full of benefits. You’ll elect yourself into the course we are currently on, if we don’t get control of it.

Here is your typical critic from the left.

So I’ll warn you now, don’t pack too heavy. Be ready for the long haul. Don’t look to government to create a job. Get out-of-the-way of those who create, and get ready to ask those people for a job, because that’s the only way. Wall Street is an easy villain for the weak. But without Wall Street, there is no creation, and ultimately no jobs. The motto that “we’re going to keep dancing as long as there’s music” is over. Because the music stopped, yet the people with their hand out are still dancing and showing that all along they never could hear anyway. If you want to know the truth, read a book, and I don’t mean the Communist Manifesto or The Coming Insurrection. Those are pamphlets for children. Drop the talking points designed my mindless, illiterate fools, because they did read those two pamphlets which are being accepted as a reality to our national demise.

Rich Hoffman

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

We Get Paid To Ask For More Money: With education, it’s all about marketing and spin

The day after the Lakota School Board chose to take a bit more time to analyze the deep cuts that must be met there was an article in the Enquirer about unions rushing to get contracts passed before S.B.5 becomes law. Listen to Doc Thompson discussing this issue on 700 WLW in the video below. It is good that Lakota did not get into a hurry to buckle under the union pressure. That would have been very irresponsible. However, most school districts, such as Lebanon went ahead and made deals with the unions. In Lebanon, Mark North, who makes $149,937 a year showed why he’s paid so much. He twisted the wording of his real intentions to proclaim that it was to the districts advantage to lock down their costs because S.B.5 would be challenged in court anyway. He gets paid to spin information like that so voters don’t see the real intentions, which is to secure their union contracts. But his actions, like a lot of other districts looking to pad the pockets of their union friends are revealed. Isn’t it nice to know where the loyalties of your elected administrators are? After all, it’s not their money. It’s yours………and before you say that Mark North is not an elected official, he is appointed by the school board who is elected by the public.

Here is the Enquirer article:

http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20110328/NEWS0108/103290330/Unions-employers-fearing-SB5-rush-contracts?odyssey=tab|topnews|text|FRONTPAGE

Under the comments section of that article there were a couple of the comments by the clueless types of people who inhabit the extraordinary costs of those collective bargaining agreements.

office1698
7:38 PM on March 28, 2011
Can’t wait for the referendum to begin! Gov Kasich and his Tea Party supporters have yet to see the power of unions.

ucfcltymbr
7:41 PM on March 28, 2011

Enjoy your Tea Bag Party reign. It will not take long for the public to come to their sense and run you and your pals out of Columbus and DC.

What we’ve seen over the last couple of weeks is that the unions and administrators have been most certainly in bed with each other. In casual talk we all make jokes about it to ease the tension, but in the back of our minds we want to believe that the administrators, whether it is a school board, or a city council, that they are acting in our best interests. With the rush lately to pass all these contracts before S.B.5 becomes law, the villains reveal themselves.

Villains? Is that the right word? Is that too harsh?

No. It’s not. Villains, looters, feeders, predators, are all words that can be accurately used to describe what the pubic worker has become to the American economy. They are those things because they have become too greedy, demanded too much, and are now in a position to make demands to the people who pay them. They have become corrupt to the point of treason if the word treason was used in a traditional capacity.

What are the definitions of treason?
treason
n
1. (Government, Politics & Diplomacy) violation or betrayal of the allegiance that a person owes his sovereign or his country, esp by attempting to overthrow the government; high treason
2. any treachery or betrayal

The unions, their strikes, their political manipulation, their raw extortion of the public tax dollar have engaged in treason, and they do it openly without fear of prosecution.

In the Pulse Journal report of the Lakota meeting of Monday, March 28, 2011 Lakota Education Association President Sharon Mays proclaimed that teachers have “stepped up” in these times of financial crises. She said, “We’re taking on more teaching responsibility-more class preps-in order to give students more opportunities. Delaying a decision is not fair to teachers or students.”

What does any of that mean? How have the teachers “stepped up?” Everything she stated is undefined, actually it’s expected. As employees of the district, everything she said is expected. Sharon makes $81,156 per year and at that pay rate, everything she stated is expected from someone in that pay scale. Everything and more! Yet she phrases it as though she were actually doing the district a favor of some kind that teachers are working longer than 7.75 hours per day.

Everyone I know that makes over 50K per year, including executives, company presidents, plant managers, sales managers etc, put in approximately 10.5 hours per day. They may spend 7 to 8 hours at the office and another 2 to 3 hours at home. Teachers take home papers to grade and do some class prep work as would be expected. And for Sharon to make $81K per year, I’d expect her to be on call 24 hours a day and do at least 4 to 5 hours of work per day at home. That is the value of that type of salary.

Yet that’s not what’s happening. Teachers are being paid extraordinary amounts of money to teach, which I’ve said should be in a range of pay between 40K to 70K. Any more than that is taking advantage of the tax payer. And the manipulation that union leaders commit against the community is a form of treachery, especially in the face of the last two weeks leading up to the S.B.5 passage.

The plan of these unions is to push hard to get their contracts signed, buy time, and then get their signatures for a referendum into the state by July 7th so they can freeze the bill and get it overturned in the November election. They truly believe that the public will be just as naive as they’ve been in the past, that holding babies and campaigns of “it’s for the kids” will work. They are counting on the same old strong-arm tactics to.

But what is the aim of those tactics. Are they protecting our children? Are they working on behalf of the greater good of the community? Are they working on behalf of a school system that is facing major layoffs?

No. They want their money. They want their money even if it costs their fellow union members their jobs.

I am proud that the Lakota School Board took some extra time to cut their costs. I would hope that once S.B.5 comes into play that they make full use of it to drive their costs down before the July 7th freeze, due to the referendum attempt.

For those union members at the top of the pay scale protecting your inflated salaries, you should be ashamed of yourselves letting others suffer so that you can continue a wage level you know is outrageous, and to hide such a fact behind children is despicable. If I were on the school board I’d set a cap on teaching salaries and for those that didn’t want to live under that cap I’d point to the door. You’re lucky I’m not on the school board. I hope the people we have there now can muster up a similar level of responsibility to protect the community. Teachers that put money before kids are not the type of people I want in my district anyway. We’ll pay you well, but not foolishly, and it is that foolish level of pay that causes the deficit.

It might be wondered or even considered malicious for me to include these wages in this article. The reason is that I know of no other way to balance a budget. How can you balance a budget without looking at the money you spend? Then you have to consider what that money buys you and assess whether or not you are getting the value for what you spend. And I don’t see it. I don’t think the money we spend on government is worth it. I don’t think the money we spend on education is worth it, because I see very little light on behind the eyes of our youth. And I get the sense that public education is simply an organized crime-like syndicate and they are charging the tax payer for protection of services the public values. If lightweights in the mind think my view is extreme, too bad. Everybody thinks it. They just don’t talk about it in order to maintain the status-quo. When people like Ms. Mays, and Mr. North, who makes a lot more money than the average taxpayer, says we need to increase taxes in order to continue to pay their salaries, I say to them, you’re not doing your jobs if all you can do is ask for more money. North as a superintendent should have put the community in front of the union. Mays as head of her own union should have brought her members to the table to take a pay reduction to save the teachers at the bottom of the totem pole and fit into the community’s budget. That would have been the responsible thing, but they didn’t do those things.

This is a fight that is just starting. We’ll see how much courage each side has when the smoke clears. One thing is for sure, I will be reporting every detail of it, because only one side is right. There is no left or right here. There is only right or wrong.

Rich Hoffman

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

The Presidential Fool: The Office of Barack Obama

One thing regarding authority is that most of the time the people who end up in positions of authority are addicted to the power that comes from it and become corrupt in some way or another. There are people who are good at authority, and leadership, and there are people who are inclined to follow. So it is difficult to distinguish between competencies at a leadership level when most of the focus of authority is to obtain it. The specific skills of managing authority often become lost in analyses.

This is the problem with police officers. Many of the people drawn to the profession possess a deep down hunger for authority. Larger social goals are used as the mask for their agenda, but the face behind the mask is one yearning for authority. Since human beings are a group of people who are comfortable being compliant to the laws they create for themselves, police officers regardless of their qualifications are looked upon with respect because they are symbols of authority. But this is a defective strategy of figuring out who in our society is actually capable of handling the kind of authority that police officers have access to, because there are corrupt measures that enter into the equation. Some of those measures and examples of the problem with blind acceptance of authority can be heard in this report from Doc Thompson on 700 WLW.

With all that in mind I thought about what President Obama said about Gaddafi over the weekend by saying that “Gaddafi needs to step down. He has lost the confidence of his people who means he should turn over power.” Well, Obama has lost the confidence of his people, at least a majority of them. Doesn’t that mean he should step down too?

The question doesn’t get out because as American’s we accept blind authority. President Obama is considered American royalty so people aren’t comfortable breaking down the performance of a president too deeply, so the analysis either gets explored by radicals that distort the information, or it doesn’t get considered at all. I don’t have such a problem. So I’ll ask the question. Obama is a socialist even if he doesn’t call it that and America is supposed to be a capitalist nation. He is openly working with union leaders that want to overthrow the capitalist nature of America. That’s the first problem. The second is that he worked with congress to pass Obama Care with no regard for the Constitution he is sworn to protect. He and his staff figured they’d circumvent the system using the famous “commerce clause,” and “supremacy clause” which is just manipulation of the legal intent hoping that nobody with half a mind challenges them in court. Their intention was to get enough people addicted to Obama Care, as what has happened with Social Security that public opinion would affect the eventual Supreme Court ruling that will be coming in the years to come. Obama has openly worked with other subversive groups, such as the Net Neutrality issue, and the Department of Justice has become a complete joke under the Presidents administration. That’s just in two years.

But worse of all, in my view, was his “vacation” to Brazil during a time of crises. Anybody with half a management mind knows that leadership sometimes means changing your plans. I’ve done it when bad things happen where I work; I changed my plans to show leadership and support for the people who work for me. But Obama doesn’t have ANY management experience, not even of a video store, and it’s clear he doesn’t understand these basics. Instead he goes to socialist leaning countries and coddles with their leaders then declares war while on the road in a tent saying that the “World Community” supports it. He’s clearly a President that is over his head. He is slow to make decisions because he waits for someone to tell him what to think. He is a nightmare of leadership and because of our respect for authority, we’re stuck with him. If he had went to congress and said, let’s get rid of Gaddafi and save those rebels that are being brutally killed, most of congress would have signed up. It’s not decisive action that’s the problem here. It’s the hesitation for weeks, then the sudden boldness while on foreign soil that’s the problem. He behaves like a king and America does not want a European king. And for me, I want very little identification with Europe at all.

Obama should step down out of office and admit that he’s not “the guy.” It’s time for us all to admit that we hurriedly elected him because of his skin color so we could prove to the world that we were not a racist country, which we’re not. We have the most diversity of ANYONE in the world. Nobody even comes close to our cultural diversity in a nation, so criticism is not permitted. It was in our lack of confidence in ourselves that we put an inept president into office that is simply a puppet to socialist interests. There is no question to that now. Anyone that argues it doesn’t know anything about history or definitions.

I used to be ashamed of Bill Clinton and couldn’t imagine a worse president, but at least he had been a governor and knew some basic management skills.

I’m not crazy about either of the Bush’s. I think they wanted to be president for too many of the wrong reasons. The first clue that you have a bad president is that if a man gets a surge of power just by sitting in a chair, he’s the wrong guy. A president should not be enamored by power of any kind. In fact, the office of the president should be a step down to what they’ve accomplished in their private lives. The popular myth is that it’s the most powerful position in the world, but it’s really not. Ronald Reagan breezed through his presidency just on his ability to act and a single-minded ability to believe he was right and on the side of God. There are many, many, many more people in our nation more qualified for the presidency than Reagan was, but he could speak well. So he goes down in history as one of the greatest presidents in American history. His greatest gift was that he didn’t listen to everyone around him. He knew what he wanted to do and he did it, which makes him distinctly American. American’s are not naturally collaborative. I know that might bust the bubble of many that think very highly of Ronald Reagan, but those are the facts.

My favorite president in recent history is Calvin Collage. That’s my idea of a manager president. Everyone else has fallen short, and that covers the entire span of the 20th century. Teddy Roosevelt was my next pick for a great president, but he became too much of a monarch lover by the end of his presidency and had the fatal flaw of craving power. He could not turn away from the power, so much so that he became a progressive in order to run against his friend President Taft. Many of the presidents have done their share of good things, but not enough. Not what we should expect out of an American president.

But Obama, he’s an absolute joke. He does not represent me as an American. I mean look at his website. What are we supposed to be “fired up” about? What change? And what are we organizing? He’s the president. His message is one for children in school and people without wit to know better.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/ofasplashflag/

If he believes Gaddafi should step down in Libya because he’s lost the confidence of the majority of the people, which I agree with him on that point, then Obama should step down voluntarily and admit that the job of the presidency is too big for him. Maybe he could try again in a few years after he works as a manager of a McDonalds and gets some experience under his belt. Because he is an absolute embarrassment that makes me look at the decadent days of Bill Clinton with yearning. The only reason he wouldn’t do it is because he’s in love with his authority, no different from the cop that flunks his test and doesn’t belong on the force because he’s not smart enough to be a cop. This President isn’t qualified to be a president. And the people of America respect authority too much to admit it to themselves.

Rich Hoffman

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

School Boards Still Don’t Get It: S.B.5 Empowers them to Control Their Costs!

Doc Thompson covers how the “rich Hollywood types and politicians hide their money from tax collectors, gaming the system. These are the same people who proclaim that we should pay increased taxes in order to fund public sector jobs. Doc has an argument with a guy that claims he’s willing to send in a $20,000 check to pay his “fair share.” Also, Doc covers a UC administrator that received over $900,000 in severance upon being released from his contract. Have a listen:

Meanwhile, local school systems, are still asking for more money claiming to be broke when in fact they are already receiving generous tax dollars from the communities. Public union leaders are somehow oblivious to why there isn’t enough money to pay them. How they don’t connect the dots is amazing. They insist that we should cut salaries in the governor’s administration before we cut teachers salaries, which sounds foolish. It’s not so much the amount of money individuals make, as it is that way too many in public office make it. That is where the socialist tendency differs from the capitalist. The socialist wants the increases across the board, as they are in step increases. The capitalist pays based on merit. That means fewer will receive “top pay” instead of a majority regardless of job performance as the system is now.

On the eve of Governor Kasich’s budget revelation it is interesting that Lebanon City Schools and Fairfield City Schools are not looking at using S.B.5 to control their costs on a broad scale, but are still playing the same game of small cuts that have been the preferred method, such as busing cuts and other items that are inconvenient to parents in the district.

Taking into account that the contracts under S.B.5 will be grandfathered in, it would seem most responsible for these school districts to begin exploring how they can severely reduce their labor costs under the new law without staff reductions.

My guess however is that these current administrators won’t explore that option unfortunately, because they cannot think any other way, which is part of the problem.

Further attempts to place levies on a ballot are not needed because these school districts don’t need the money. They need to reduce their budget expectations. They need to understand how to manage the money they do have. S.B.5 will give them the tools to do so. There shouldn’t be another levy on a single ballot anywhere in Ohio during 2011 because of the passage of S.B.5. If there is, it’s because the school districts wish to continue to play games, and not make the “hard”cuts.

If school districts like these two continue to beat the same old drum, it is because they are completely inept in the skills of money management, and those administrators need to be removed so that people who are skilled at money management can help these schools operate with their excellent ratings, but at a reduced cost.

Before a single layoff is ever explored, wage reductions should be implemented. Realistic wage amounts need to be established, not the outrageous levels they currently are. Teachers of high school students and junior high students are not all worth 70K or more no matter how much schooling they have. Some may be, but not a majority. Few people are worth that much in labor and a college degree does not guarantee those wage levels, which is the assumption under the established step increases, and the fact that I even have to write it down so that administrators have to be told says they are out of touch completely with the community marketplace.

The money is not coming from the state. The money is not coming from the federal government. The money is coming from the community, and these districts and the teachers that teach in them must decide now if they want to bend a little to make the districts remain excellent and within the community budgets, or if they will continue to think selfishly and strap these communities financially. For those highly paid teachers that don’t want to work for less, there’s the door. Good luck finding a better job because every district in Ohio is going through this trouble, and they all must come to this realization sooner or later.

The longer these districts avoid the obvious, the more damage they’ll do. They now have the tools, but further tax increases are not an option.

Below are two notices, one asking people to attend the school board meeting in Lebanon. If you care about this issue at all, you should go and ask those people how they are planning to think “outside” the box to save the community money without a loss of services. Because they will no longer be able to blame the states unfunded mandates.

The other is from Arnie Engle from Fairfield who has been fighting this fight for a long time.

To one and all
FYI
The board will be voting to cut High School busing this Thursday
Are you willing to risk our children’s lives to save $300,000??
The next Board meeting is 3-17-11
6PM in the Community Room at the HS

The blackmail tactics are about to begin

Our community was divided over the 3 school levies the board jammed down the throats of the community in 2004. This board is knowingly driving our district into fiscal crisis and a repeat of the 2004 community divide. Why are they doing this? Because they refuse to place the community and our children before the staff with appropriate cost cutting measures.
Please attend and let your voice be heard

Please pass this on to everyone you know !

You must sign in to speak at the beginning of the meeting and you get 5 minutes.
There is also an additional chance to speak before the board votes on the cuts. 2 minutes.

On the agenda are 3 million in cuts to be voted on. The list can be viewed on the school web site. In the list is the elimination of high school busing to save $300,000.

Fact!
The schools own finance report, shows we spent 6.6 million on pupil transportation in 2010.
We are cutting 1/3 of our busing. Shouldn’t we expect a savings of 1/3 of $6,000,000????
You can view this report on the school web site.

CAFR
Comprehensive Annual Financial Report
(Page 105 schedule 6)

School busing is the safest way to transport school children. Putting our kids on the road to and from school is a disaster waiting to happen.

And for what??? $300,000???

Are you willing to risk our children’s lives to save $300,000??

I’m not!

The following is what I said about cutting busing back in 2004.
The same applies today.

From the 2004 CARE flier
WHY CUT SPORTS AND BUSING?

The recent cuts made by the Fairfield School Board do more than balance the budget. They actually punish our children and the community,

in an effort to force an unjust $9,000,000 school levy on the taxpayers of our fine city. This tax levy will definitely benefit the staff, but NOT our children.

Regarding Sports, local papers have reported that the Xenia School District “saved $183,000 by cutting extra-curriculars. However, more than 100 students left the school district and went to other schools to participate in sports. The decreased student enrollment ended up costing the school $340,000 in school funding from the state.” Our school board and administration are aware of this, but they cut our extra-curriculars anyway.

Regarding busing, our school officials say we will save $400,000 by cutting busing. According to Treasurer Scott Gooding, we have a $5,500,000 transportation budget. We are cutting more than one-third of our transportation by cutting busing for grades 9-12 and extra curricular activities. You would expect to see savings of one-third of $5,500,000 or at least $1,800,000. Also note that the state gives us $2,000,000 for transportation as reported in the ODE, SF3 report. If we loose one-third of this funding that amounts to $667,000, nullifying the $400,000 savings projected by our officials.
Therefore, it just doesn’t make good economic sense to cut busing and sports, unless it’s really an effort to punish our kids, parents, and community in order to pass the next school levy on August 3rd.

I have heard it time and time again that the district needs to move forward and forget about the past \history. The problem is that history is about to repeat itself! We can all expect that $600 pay to play and the elimination of all busing will soon follow.

This board is, knowingly, running our district right into financial crisis. The solution to their madness was spelled out in my last letter to the editor. The boards blackmail tactics will never end as long as this board continues to places the staff ahead of the community and our children

BOARDS 1-13-11 RETREAT
Letter to the Editor
February 2011
BOARD INACTION WILL LEAD TO DISTRICT FAILURE

In regard to the Fairfield school districts budget retreat it was disappointing to hear the board was still considering a new tax levy. It would be a big mistake for the board to assume the community would support any type of levy. I would hope the board would anticipate this and enact the appropriate cuts to balance the budget. Failure to do so will send our district down the same road as Little Miami. The board needs to put the box of band aids away and get down to enacting a budget void of new levies. Time is running out.

Although there was an additional 4.6 million in cuts presented at the retreat there are still millions in possible cost cutting and revenue generating ideas presented by both me and the districts own hand picked finance committee. My suggestions and the finance committee’s suggestions should be reviewed, considered and enacted or rejected with reasoning shared with the public for any rejection, before there is any discussion of a new levy. The community is entitled to know, in detail, why the board refused to enact all cost saving ideas presented by anyone.

In my opinion there needs to be a fundamental change in the way the district does business. This would include but is not limited to the following suggestions.

Getting serious about contract negotiations.

Not relying on local property taxes to fund schools

The board must be honest with the public and follow through with their board actions.

The board should vote with an understanding of how their vote will effect the budget and leave their emotions at home
.
The board needs to start placing our children and the community first.

The board needs to review the business partner relationship it holds with it’s vendors and assure the public it is receiving the best possible price for the tax dollars spent.

The board needs to have a conservative outsider to review the way the district operates

The status quo of taxing and spending is not working in Fairfield or any government agency. If this philosophy can not be reigned in it will undoubtedly lead to the financial ruin of our district.

Let me leave you with a quote from the districts own finance committee “The current system is unsustainable without the fundamental changes we are suggesting — inaction will lead to district failure.” I have been warning the district of this for years. Time is running out.

Arnie Engel
Past member Fairfield Board of Education
CARE founder
829-7840
Please pass this on to everyone you know !
and please attend the
next Board meeting on 3-17-11.
Bring your neighbors, friends and family.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
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Motorcycles Tell the Whole Story: The Socialist States of America

The crowds around Wisconsin on Saturday March 12, 2011 had a diseased quality about them that cannot be summed up without a philosophic journey of epic understanding. In short however, I can only offer that those poor souls marching to a socialist drum beat are lost to what it means to be an American. Without question, many of the marchers are veterans, police, firefighters and other traditional patriots, but to me they seem weak, and ill-informed, lost in a portrayal the media has given them without actually earning it. The America they want and desire is one for the soft, fragile specimens of human being that finds their life spans sickly, and always in need of assistance.

I’ve rode motorcycles for more than 20 years and always stayed away from the stereotype of what a biker is, I guess because the image has been associated with gangs and violence. It’s also associated with death. The perception is that if you ride a motorcycle, you will die. Maybe not right away, but eventually, the grim reaper is in close pursuit if you chose to ride a motorcycle.

So I’ve kept my motorcycle riding more of a private thing. I’ve always embraced a sense of freedom and a love of individuality and vehicles on two wheels were the closest thing to a horse that I could get living in a modern, suburban environment.

Cowboys to me have always been the symbol of what an American is. And cowboys rode horses when they settled the west. To modern America, highways have replaced trails, and motorcycles replaced horses. And to the motorcycle rider, the goals are the same as the cowboy.

The cowboy wanted to extend his mobility over vast distances, whether he was herding cattle or just searching for food. And where herding cattle may not be needed, and food is available at the closest McDonalds, the need to extend your reach is still needed for the hungry adventurer.

And that’s what you find in a motorcyclist, a love a freedom and a desire to extend their reach without the protection of any other vehicle. To be exposed to the road flying by below you, exposed to the elements rain, wind and heat, and to be one mistake away from death. It’s a choice millions of motorcyclist volunteer each year.
I started thinking about defining motorcyclist when I kept getting the same questions, why do you ride in the rain? And why do you ride when it’s cold?

For me, it’s about truth. Not the kind of truth that’s about right and wrong. But the kind of truth you find when you push yourself to the limit. The kind of truth mountain climbers understand, or endurance hikers. People that put comfort aside and find strength in themselves they didn’t know they had.

motorcyclist, whatever their various forms, have this yearning in common, even if they aren’t completely aware of it.

When my wife and I made a long ride to Key West I thought about these things a lot especially as we neared our destination over the inter-coastal highway US1 south of Miami in temperatures that hovered around 107 degrees Fahrenheit. I look at motorcycles the same way I look at World War II aircraft. When introduced, it was the first time in human history that an individual could extend their boundaries beyond their home territory. The automobile of course had come along but where the auto departs from the nature of flying machines is a pilot uses a stick and rudder to fly, so all parts of the human body are engaged. On a motorcycle the same holds true, one foot operates the rear brake, another shifts the gears, another operates the throttle and the right brake, and yet another operates the clutch, and all this without much protection of any kind.

Airplanes are deceptively fragile, with only a very thin skin between the pilot and the outside air. In order to operate them, a well-defined understanding of the dangers involved is needed.

It is no coincidence that motorcycles and airplanes are both associated with freedom. At first, because they tie up their operators with being fully involved in the process of flying or driving them, it is this very fact that lends to the feelings of liberation.

Make a long run on a motorcycle, and you will feel you earned every mile, and it is inescapable to feel complacent afterwards. Where the motorcycle is unique over any other mode of transportation, the cost to operate it per mile is very inexpensive. And that makes it one of the best machines around if you’re willing to trade a bit of safety and comfort for the reach a motorcycle gives you.

On our trip to Key West from Cincinnati we traveled over 3000 miles in just under 7 days and spent $167 in fuel.

Riding a motorcycle is a reliable excuse to be different, even if some of that ends up looking the same. You can dress in leather jackets in the heat of an August afternoon and it’s OK. It’s a reason to dress outrageously and proclaim your individuality. A motorcycle invites adventure to what would otherwise be just a simple trip down the road. In hard weather, it forces you to adapt taking you out of your comfort zone.

And that’s the appeal for me. Every time you get on a bike, there is an opportunity for adventure that you just don’t get in an automobile. It gives you unprecedented reach for traveling because you can do it much more economically than any other mode of transportation. And it allows you to cater your bike and riding apparel to your individual tastes.

In a car, you might just get in and start driving, and the ritual is rather short and uninvolved. On a bike, you have to dress for the ride which will probably include a jacket of some kind, gloves, boots, and durable pants. You have to keep your eye on the world around you not only the traffic and the dangers associated with that, but the weather too.

A storm can surge up in an instant. A heavy downpour on a highway at 70 MPH can cause you enormous amounts of pain if your skin is exposed. And you’ll notice when the breaks in the clouds are coming and see how the rain rolls in and drifts away as you move through it, where in a car, you may drive 20 to 50 miles and barely register what’s going on in the world around you, because inside the car, life goes on much like it would in your home.

Motorcycle riders understand pirates. The two life styles go together very well. The romance that many secretly feel toward the golden age of piracy is embodied in the fantasies of the motorcycle rider for many of the same reasons described in the long motorcycle journey. And to understand the magic of America, you have to understand one of the greatest pirates of all time, and a personal hero of mine, Captain Henry Morgan.

It is true that I have a particular fondness for the pirates that roamed the Caribbean during the golden age of piracy from 1660’s to the 1720’s. Not to imply that I honor the life of the thief. But I do credit those particular pirates as being the foundations of America, because in my view the nations of Europe were the true thieves.

Controversial, of course it is. But you have to remember what the world was at the time and why the pirates came to be. At the time that Spain claimed central and South America, they eradicated all the cultures existing at the time and stole the wealth of those cultures. Just because a nation is behind the robbery, does not make them any less a thief. And consider that at the time the English navy, would kidnap young men and employ them against their will to serve the might of their empire, and that England and France, always at war with one another, could not stand to allow the Spanish to reap all the benefits of its conquest of the Aztecs and their great capital city of Tenochtitlan.

“Tenochtitlan was a marvelous metropolis with complicated lakes that surrounded the place. The Spanish upon seeing it claimed it was so beautiful that it looked like a dream. Cortez conquered the city shortly, and had Montezuma stoned to death in front of his own people. The Aztecs had an army, but their only real focus had been to raid neighboring tribes for victims in human sacrifice to their insatiable gods, especially Quetzalcoatl. They were no match for the battle hardened Spanish and their firepower.

Cortez destroyed the city block by block and built a new city on the ruins of Tenochtitlan, a city that would become one of the largest cities in the world, Mexico City. Not only did this city go on to become one of the most dangerous places in the world, but any attempt to uncover the past of Tenochtitlan are long since destroyed. The great monument that resides in Mexico City now is the golden-winged Angel of Independence. A very strange statue for a people who were completely conquered by Spain and had their culture eradicated.

Anyway, Cortez sacked the city, destroyed the culture which was rich with gold, and proceeded to bring all that gold to Spain much to the concern of England and France. England, recruiting naval officers in the manner they had, and the rigors of their sea fairing discipline made it easy for rebellion at sea to cast off their nation and become a pirate.

Privateers were acts of piracy backed by countries, to prevent the Spanish from keeping too much gold of their newly conquered land. It didn’t take long for those privateers to cast away their nations and the burdens of their ownership in favor of freedom. So the exploits of L’Ollonais, Captain Morgan and Black Beard may have been violent and against the law, but the law makers had broken many laws as well. Those pirates wanted freedom from the heresy of nations. These very pirates were the first democracies in the world. Pirates had elections, and insurance, and were certainly the first organizations in the world to show a successful democracy and the ability of a small few to stand up to the tyranny of nations. Without question, the very popular book Buccaneers of American by Alexander O. Exquemelin which was published just shy of the 1700’s sat on the book shelves of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams who at their time collected thousands of books. It is no accident that the exploits of the pirates in that book paved the way for the bold words of the founding fathers, because the pirates had managed to wreak havoc against the mighty English. Using the same basic principles as the pirate code, The Declaration of Independence was written with a bit more education behind the quill that wrote it, but with equal sincerity. In fact, in the final battle against the English during the War of 1812, Jean Lafitte helped Andrew Jackson defeat the English in New Orleans by using the pirates that ran with Lafitte to break the English will. Pirates have played an important role in the foundations of America, and I love them for it! Their descendents find themselves riding motorcycles instead of sailing ships.

Now among motorcycle riders, these modern pirates, there are two categories of which I am of the second. The first is the rider that brings out his motorcycle on the first warm day of the year and rides his bike when the sun shines. The second is the one that rides all year, rain, shine, hot or cold. I know many, many men that talk tough, but in reality are soft at heart. They may have large muscle mass, but that is usually to disguise the weakness behind their eyes.

Many of that first type is the union worker that buys a Harley because they have the expendable income, and of that group are thousands of police, firefighter and factory workers, the so-called middle class. They bring out their motorcycles when the sun shines and the weather is warm. And in the windows of their cars and trucks they place a sticker proclaiming, “Harley Davidson,” so as to let people know that they have a motorcycle at home in the garage.

This tendency says a lot about their character.

For a while, I was vice-president of the Suzuki Club of North America and I was on a long ride with them all across Ohio. My wife and I put 500 miles on our bike that day, but I had a dispute with the president because we hit rain and he wanted to stop under an overpass. He figured that because he was president of the organization that I should follow his lead, especially in front of the other members.

I quit the club that day and road in the rain alone with my wife clutched to my back. We all met at a dealership later that day for a membership drive, but that was the last day I ever spoke to those guys. The philosophic differences between us were too great.

You see, this is the fundamental trouble with our nation. America was founded on freedom and independence, bravery, valor, rugged individualism, endurance and a tendency toward isolationism. This new breed of American raised in the labor movement, which has its roots in European socialism attracts the weak, soft minds of those that are afraid to compete.

There is no question that through social legislation the life of the working poor can be improved, as is evidence in the modern union laborer. I’ve known many of those people all my life and their hearts are for the most part soft. They only have courage in groups. They rule through thuggish intimidation because alone they are weak souls that only ride their motorcycles on sunny days if at all. What they fail to understand, which is why socialism fails 100% of the time is that everyone’s success in this life or failure, is depended upon the “character” of the individual.

Collectivism lacks character, and that is why the same people walking around Wisconsin or Ohio with signs protesting the removal of collective bargaining legislation are terrified, because they don’t have the character to exist on their own actions, and they are un-American in my opinion. At least the America I understand.

Now to them, in the Socialist States of America they are American, and they’ll fly their flags proudly. I know them well. Because they lack character and individual strength they are easily mislead since they don’t know their own history, they have allowed others to rewrite it for their convenience.

This is why they believe collective bargaining is their “right.” They have allowed themselves to be soft, and psychologically weak. They only have strength in mass swarms which isn’t strength at all. They are a spreading cancer if anything that will trade freedom for security out of sheer lack of character.

A part of me feels sorry for those union protestors. 90,000 or even 100,000 fools can fill a stadium at a sport event, or even a rock concert. They don’t represent anything but a collective hive of insect minded creatures that can carry signs and attempt to hide their lack of character behind a mass. All they can do is make noise, scream and chant, or inflict vandalism on their opponents, because they don’t have the character to meet the majority equally in a war of ideas. I feel sorry for them because they lack the courage and character to truly be an American.

Our nation was founded by pirates, adventures, and intellectuals that dared to question the European socialism trends that Marx captured in his little pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto. I know some real Americans. They are a patient group that is easily overlooked by the media because they are self-reliant. And compared to the socialist, soft-minded, left-winged, characterless, malcontents inspired to chant as a mob to achieve rights that they have no claim to are in for a sad and pathetic awakening, the real Americans will be there when everything collapses because they are always what held the nation together.

The public sector worker has always been a parasite that took far more than it gave, and received a pat on the head like a dog, by politicians just looking for a vote. Collective bargaining gave improper rights to those that didn’t deserve it, by taking from those Americans that worked hard, and taught their children to have character. Such people are what hold the nation together with the heart of those old pirates that were willing to do anything to leave behind the tyranny of Europe.Unions are European by design and that makes them disgusting and doomed to fail and here is the reason why, radicals place too much emphasis on the monotony of a day’s work. They identify themselves as a “laborer” and not person of character and that is why these people will fail at life no matter how much money we give them. They meditate on that which is depressing, those hours of the day that they sell to someone else in exchange for financial compensation. And they expect that for all time they can minimize the impact of that sale through collective bargaining. Their failure is that they lost their character and become their jobs, so thus they see nothing but that time they’ve sold away. They seek to fill that void with more financial compensation.

That’s why they are a broken people doomed to fail over and over in their lives. To hear them speak is like listening to the ghost of a depressed soul that doesn’t know that life has left it. All you can feel is pity for the poor creature.
Thugs, losers and mindless fools are bred because they traded character for socialism.

It is these characters that have turned our society into a Logothete of ineptitude, over regulated and uninventive.
And that is something that deserves to be despised.

Rich Hoffman

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The Sheep and the Lion: How much is public education worth?

There is a term called “going down the rabbit hole” that is used to understand abstract and deep concepts. Depending on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go can determine your resolve for understanding a problem. This article is a “big picture” view of going down a rabbit hole more than some people are willing to go in regard to public education and the value it has for society.

The following radio broadcast from Doc Thompson is very good, and comfortably sits on the edge of that rabbit hole, where even this much people are unwilling to go. But I offer it as an alternative to the text that follows. Or I offer it to help the rest of the text go down more easily. But beware, if you want to maintain any illusions about education, then turn away from this page immediately. I talk about some of my personal experiences again, partly because there has been much speculation. But the opinions will not be comfortable for the reader wanting to continue “not seeing.”

The first thing that teachers assume of school reformers is that they must not have done very well in school, or that they had a hard time in college, or that they are simply social outcasts that have some vendetta against public education. What they fail to consider, because such a thought is outside of their “bubble” of experience is that there is a portion of society that think for themselves and have seen the scam for what it is, deciding to not take part in the whole process.

In my case, I decided long ago that the system didn’t work. It never worked for me because I’ve never been happy in a follower position. I’ve always questioned authority, my entire life. In fact, in kindergarten, I missed several of my recesses for arguing with the teachers. It became apparent to me early on that education wasn’t so much about learning arithmetic, language, and art, as it was about learning how to take direction.

I have had great success in life by being a leader. To date, the only thing I’ve received from family, friends or “others” is a workbench vice I inherited from my grandfather when he died. Money, or money gained from property sales passed down through my family have never found their way to me, and on purpose. I resist any relationships where I take a passive role and where a gift can be used as leverage against me down the road.

Now to many people who may seem extreme. However, if you want freedom, you must have freedom of such predatory relationships. And, unfortunately teachers, by design, form a predatory relationship with their students the way the system is currently set up.

When I was younger, I will admit that there was a blood bath that followed in my wake. I spent a lot of time in court, in fights with other students, and in general trouble with officials in school. Much of that trouble came simply because I refused to submit to an authority figure. That’s it. I never looked for trouble. I just didn’t like authority figures and since socially, submission of some kind to authority is required, I was in for a constant barrage of trouble which found me.

It has never occurred to me that I was in the wrong for taking this position. It doesn’t take a brilliant mind to sit in one of the many parties that I attended and see the failure of public education. Many of the kids back then when speaking of Pink Floyd would proclaim, “Man, you have to be wasted to understand The Wall.” At those parties stoned classmates would watch MTV with awe as “We Don’t Need No Education” played displaying a bunch of kids being processed in a factory, faceless and being cast into a meat grinder. Such a metaphor was very similar to my own thoughts, but I never did drugs and I certainly wasn’t wasted. I went to parties back then to pick up girls that were, but I did not partake in that behavior.

If you want to understand a culture, study its music, and you will learn a lot.

You would think that many parents would have wanted their kids to spend their time with me. After all, I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke, I didn’t use curse words, I helped people when I could, I was polite and well spoken. But I was also defiant, inquisitive, and perpetually skeptical. In fact there were two rules that people riding in my car had to live with when I was 16. (And note that I did not have a shortage of people wanting to spend time with me. It was the parents that didn’t want their kids around me.) First, there was no smoking allowed. Second, we would not play Pink Floyd on my car stereo, because I understood the stuff all too well and thought it was depressing to meditate on such things, where many of the youth back then did. One of my best friends back then was told by his mother and father to stay away from Rich Hoffman. He’s not the kind of kid I want you to be friends with.

His mother’s preferences were the drug induced kids from the neighborhood, whose parents she knew. My friend became addicted to drugs and was lost eventually, but not because he was friends with me. If he had been friends with me, he wouldn’t have done drugs, or stolen from people. He wouldn’t have contracted a variety of STD’s and probably would have entered adulthood with his head on straight.

My head has always been on straight, even when authority figures wanted me to believe otherwise.

The next question that arrives is that why would authority figures wish to convince a person that they are in need of care. The answer to that is easy. Authority figures are perpetually in need of justifying their existence. Since their lives and careers are embedded in the lives of others, they are terribly insecure of people who don’t need them.

College wasn’t any different. When I was there, young people were more interested in the social aspects of college life than the scholastic and the whole thing seemed like a money pit to me. Professors were seeking to drag out studies that could be done in weeks into events that went on for months so they could charge $10 per credit hour or more. The charge alone for books was an obvious scam. That’s how it appeared to me, and I still feel that way.

I’ve lived a life full of education, but also free of authority figures. And I’ve had success in life when I became old enough to be sought after as a leader, because that is my natural impulse. I don’t wake up in the morning looking for power or influence. But when I’m in a collaborative effort with others, I am only comfortable in a leadership role. That’s my nature and I understand it.

So I understand the frustration people who have committed, and submitted their lives to such things as to my motives and their speculation of my back ground. The idea of cutting all ties into their lives that are corrosive and manipulative is a completely foreign concept to them and something they cannot fathom.

Even knowing that the public education system was seriously flawed, I sent my kids anyway. My wife always liked school, until she met me, and she felt our children should have school in their lives. I argued that the kids could learn faster if they took a more independent route, but I listened to her opinion on the matter. The result, my kids breezed through school. I taught them not to take the whole thing too serious and not to submit to any authority and they navigated through the experience very well without all the pitfalls that most kids go through regarding peer pressure and social-climbing.

The reason for this explanation is that there is a story in mythology that I learned a long time ago that I think about a lot. It goes something like this; a lion was separated from his parents and was discovered by a herd of sheep. The sheep took the lion in and raised it for many years.

The lion grew to full size and was roaming around in the herd with the other sheep where a pack of lions hunting the sheep saw the lion and called him over whispering. “Hey, what are you doing? You’re roaming around with the sheep.”

All the Sheep trained Lion could say was, “Baaaaahaaahaaa.” Because his instruction came from the sheep all his life, he didn’t know any better.

The lions took the Sheep/Lion to the river and said, “Look at your reflection. You’re one of us. You’re not a sheep. You’re supposed to eat those creatures.”

The story goes on where the Sheep/Lion rediscovers his true identity and becomes in the end what he was meant to be.

Human beings are no different. We all are lions in sheep’s clothing. It’s a cultural phenomenon indicative of authoritarian culture created when humans moved from a nomad society to an agricultural society. Europe and all its problems are derived from attempting to maintain human beings in an agricultural society, including their attempt at education.

Those that settled the United States left that behavior behind in Europe in favor of a Lion’s life in the New World and it was so important to them that they’d risk their life to have it.

My oldest daughter and I had a long talk under the stars till about 3 AM one night a few years ago and she asked me what she was supposed to do with all the stuff I taught her. After all, it’s a fine line between enlightenment and insanity. The slopes to insanity are steep if you are not within the safety of the herd. It’s not that she questioned the truth of it, but co-existence with others becomes difficult when you insist on living awake when the people around you insist on being asleep.

I told her that most of the people who think in such a way as I do, end up going insane by their early 40’s, or they become abusers of drugs in order to maintain that reality to themselves against the current of sheep, that secretly wish the safety of the herd, so they turn to chemical abuse to numb them.

“How do you keep from going crazy?”

I smiled at her, “You have to start with being grounded to begin with. You read a lot and study other Lion’s that have lived full lives and witness how they did it. You don’t abuse alcohol or drugs or sub come to other human weaknesses. But you have to not compare yourself to the sheep around you, because relative to them, you will seem crazy. The life of a sheep and the life of a lion are completely different. The sheep grazes in the field, and travels in a pack. They mate and give birth occasionally. They run away when a predator comes near and if they live to old age, they die eventually as their bodies break away. The Loin travels in a pack when they find hunting that way more convenient, but they stay solitary animals most of the time. Like most cats, they are happiest when they are alone.”

That took the conversation into a different direction, the difference between dogs and cats.

I personally like dogs. They are always happy to see you. They are intensely loyal, even when you abuse them. Cats, they only come around when they want a lap to lay in. If they get mad at you, they’ll avoid you. They never seem to sink deep roots in their owner. They seem to choose their loyalty carefully and that loyalty leaves quickly if the relationship is strained. Those types of differences can be found in people too. Society expects dogs and the loyalty of them. But some people are just cats. We might sub consciously call those types a “cool cat.” I would make the psychological argument that what the nation is experiencing with Charlie Sheen right now is that very complex. It’s no secret that public characters like Snoop Dog, Charlie Sheen and Dennis Rodman are dear to the deep recesses of the human condition. Socially those characters are rejected, but when the doors are closed and the arms of a woman are wrapped around them, the truth is revealed.

To my observation of public education is that it fails at a fundamental level. It teaches our youth to be sheep and not lions. My view is taken in the context of philosophy, and I understand that many people in our society aren’t ready for that line of thought. They want to be sheep, and they want their kids to be sheep.

So the argument then becomes one of business. Can we afford the current form of public education? No. The way the unions have structured their contracts have turned the whole funding of education into a Ponzi scheme much like Social Security. The step increases that were negotiated require higher and higher taxes to maintain the funding, and we’ve hit the wall.

One of the benefits of being a leader type is that I don’t have the burden of appeasing any group. So I can look objectively at the situation and name the problems for what they are, because I’m not looking at any part of the problem with emotion. I already think the system is broken; I am not looking for ways to justify the behavior. And I have no illusion that by throwing more money at the situation that it will solve anything. All it does is push the wall a bit to delay the crash that’s happening. It’s hard for many people to see the wall because they don’t want to believe it’s there, because public education has become for them much more than basic education services. Sports provide the possibility of college scholarships, and school social events provide opportunities for young people to “interact” and discover themselves.

Teachers that truly believe they are the saviors of society are particularly arrogant in their thinking on this issue. But much of their work can be replaced with a computer in this new century, where the computer is ironically much more personable. I don’t say that out of a dislike of teachers, which I’ve admitted that I personally don’t like authority figures, but the idea of a solitary figure speaking to a class where the weakest link of the class sets the pace is archaic.

In truth, my dislike of public education was based on that one principle. I couldn’t stand the pace of the learning. I’m a person that enjoys doing things at a fast pace. And the classroom was always just too slow for me. Now I may be the exception, but it is apparent that it doesn’t work very well for other students either. The difference is other students were content to learn how to “game” the system, get their passing grades and move on to the next grade. Most of the time they forgot what they learned by the next semester because their goal was not to learn the material, it was to get a passing grade and advance to the next level.

When you learn to be a lion, a leader in the world, you will find that your services are always in high demand, because such people are rare when they are in great need. So career worries go away, where the sheep of the world are always concerned if the farmer will feed them, or if a predator will attempt to hunt them down and kill them, the lion doesn’t concern themselves with such matters. And thinking like a lion does not mean that I automatically support a sports team like the Cincinnati Bengals.

My favorite football team is the Tampa Bay Buccaneers so when my wife and I want to go to a football game, we fly down to Tampa to watch them play. It is more practical to me to fly 1000 miles to see a good team than to drive 20 miles to see a bad one. If I’m going to pay for the NFL experience, I’m going to enjoy it, and not just do what’s convenient. A few years ago, when we were waiting for a night game to start, we were killing some time at The International Mall, which is within walking distance to Raymond James Stadium, one of my favorite places in the world. We spent half an afternoon needlessly shopping and still had some time to kill before the gates opened, so we stopped by a very elaborate booth for Rosetta Stone Software located in the middle of the mall.

The attendant at the booth gave me a head set and computer and let my wife and I play with the foreign language software for several hours. When I finished, and we headed over to the game, I realized that the way we are currently learning foreign language and just about everything in public education is outdated. That Rosetta Stone Software had made learning much more practical and interactive, and that the only reason public school did not leap into this style of learning was because the teacher unions would stand in the way of that innovation.

They’d stand in the way because public education had become more about creating jobs than actually learning. The current focus was maintaining the system along the same fashion that education had been embarking on since schools were a one room building. The only thing that’s changed is the school became larger, but the teacher at the front of the room is the same, and it is no longer as necessary.

One of the arguments for this big system is that poor students don’t have access to computers and they need a teacher to help them, because they don’t have a family to take care of them at home. This is the way the unions sell their service now and why they insist on the current costly form of education. It has more to do with social structure and social ills, than actual educational performance, which shows in the students.

It’s easy for me to see all this because I wasn’t happy with the system to begin with. But I’m happy to pay my taxes and participate if the rest of the members of my community want it. And we do pay a lot in property taxes. But when I hear schools lie to people, and I see teacher unions manipulating the situation and attacking people for questioning their motives, then it changes the argument.

To participate in a system blindly costs money, not to mention social consequences. My view of those social consequences might be extreme to many, even though privately most people agree with me once they close their eyes at night and can read their thoughts across the backs of their eye lids. But the financial burden of the public education system needs to be broken down and restructured, and unions stand in the way of that, so that is the reason for the adversarial relationship. The more hate mail and comments I receive, the more convinced I am of the lack of merit in public education.

The intent behind the name calling, and the attempt to silence any critics are to continue to ask for more money to keep a broken system functioning. As I’ve established, I am an employer, and I’ve heard every possible justification and excuse from employees over the years that wish to convince me that they are special, and that they and only they can do a particular job. After several hundred of those statements you learn to see what truth is and what fiction is. As an employer you must have an understanding of the job you are asking people to do, otherwise you are guilty of not being able to make a proper assessment, and are 100% reliant on your employees to tell you how valuable they are. And they will try, and if you don’t know, they will take advantage of you 99% of the time.

With public education, I’ve been there and done that. I learned a lot more when I finally got out of public education because the barriers to learning were removed, and I was able to attack it at the fast pace I enjoy. I have had to provide instruction to people myself, and teach, lead and assess talent, so I understand what works and what doesn’t. And I’ve had success outside the classroom. Many of the professors and teachers that I’ve known over the years fit the description, “those that can’t do, teach,” meaning that people who can do are in the world working and producing, those who aren’t comfortable with producing stay in the safe world of academia, and they teach, or they attempt to be professional students. I have known more than a few of those types and have actually given a few of them jobs much to my frustration, because they are so timid. They tend to be the type of person that will stand at the side of a pool and stick their foot in to see how cold the water is. I’m the type that will jump in regardless of the temperature so they frustrate me to no end. But it takes all kinds of people to make the world go around, so I put up with them. The question is not whether or not those people have worth. They do somewhere. The question is are they worth six figures? No!

Public education if we look at it for what it is it’s for many people an opportunity for their kid to get a scholarship for higher education. For others it’s a day care facility, because parents are busy with their lives and don’t have anywhere to put their kids while they are at work. Let’s face it and call the situation what it is.

My goal is to see kids actually learn something. I think the whole idea needs to be turned upside down and rebuilt, because as I look around, the people functioning in the world around me are failing. The divorce rate is too high. The moral standards are too low. People’s understanding of politics is abysmal. Their understanding of geography is pathetic, some people actually don’t even know where India is! Their confidence in themselves is terrible and they pass that along to their children, which raises more insecure children. All these are social failures which to me start with a failure of public education, and more money does not solve it. We’ve poured a lot of money into the situation, and it has not worked.

It is easy to attempt to maintain the status quo by proclaiming that its critics “don’t like” education, or some other loose term. It would be expected for sheep to make vicious proclamations of the lion, because deep down inside, the sheep wish they had the courage to be lions, but they don’t. All that’s left is to hurl insults in an attempt to cover the fat life of the herd animal that just seeks more and more feed to provide nourishment to its virulent existence within the confines of the barn yard. My concern is the larger issue of actual performance as a primary concern, and secondly, of the financial stability, which is proven to be not well thought out.

The old games are no longer effective because the sheep in the barn yard have noisily protested for years and now we see that they are all fat and need to be sheered. And it is my hope that once we start doing the sheering that we will find beneath all the hair that some of those sheep are actually lions, and can return to their natural state and teach others to be lions and return the nation to what it started as, and avoid a fate of a depleted, crushed Europe full of glory from some ancient time while the future leaves it behind.

Unfortunately only leader types are able to see that far ahead. The sheep are only looking at their next meal, but the big cats, the lions lay perched in trees and look out over the savanna to what is far off and they will be the first to see what is invisible to everyone else.

Education needs reformed for more reasons than one and we will have it, because it’s what’s good for America, not just those that have built lives off it.

Rich Hoffman

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

Seeing Beyond the Headlights: Governor Kasich’s Press Conference on S.B.5 after it passed the senate.

It is interesting to hear the chants from unions and members of left-wing of politics that we need to create jobs, not pick on the “working man” or “bust unions.”

Who creates the jobs? Government? The people chanting about we need to create jobs in Ohio really believe that somehow Governor Kasich is supposed to wave some kind of magic wand and create some jobs. What do you say to people who believe those kinds of things? All I can conclude is our education system either completely failed these people, or they learned all the wrong things when they were there.

GOVERNMENT DOES NOT CREATE JOBS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

When they do, they screw them up and charge the tax payer for their lack of efficiency.

Here is Kasich at a press conference talking about the S.B.5 Bill and all the rumors and insecurities that have been initiated by groups like SEIU and others to discredit the procedure of passing the bill, in an attempt to erode public support.

What is bad about any of that? What don’t people understand about Governor Kasich’s press conference?Yet listen to these people? They have no understanding of economics. They are like people driving a car in the dark. They can only see as far as their headlights, and no further.

They don’t have to be able to see so far if they are unable to. That’s why we put the Governor in office, because he can see past the light of the headlights, and he’s not the only one. I know a lot of people who understand perfectly how S.B.5 saves money, brings jobs to the state and actually saves the system instead of destroying it. Those are people educated in business and understand how money works. Not Michael Moore types that think with some socialist economic policy that is completely invalid in the world outside of a college campus.

The people who will be hurt are those that have been “gaming” the system. They deserve to worry, because the state can no longer carry employees that are just “cruising through the system.” But for those that are truly hard-working, there’s a job for them in this new economy. And things will be better.

But you have to be willing to look beyond the light of your own headlights.

Rich Hoffman

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

The Communist Manifesto: SEIU ATTACKS OHIO SENATORS WHILE THEY EAT!

Isn’t this a great quote? Guess where it’s from, The Communist Manifesto.

My wife and I have a secret hideaway that we like to dine at, hidden from the world and its worries. Friday March 4th, 2011 was a glorious spring like evening complete with pouring rain, as we sat together in a cantina like setting waiting for our food to arrive.

She had been reading much about quantum mechanics and the latest theories of universal theory rejecting some of the work most recently proposed by Stephen Hawking and was discussing the topic vigorously as the aroma of our food cooking in the kitchen was overtaking our senses. My mind however was on a discussion I heard on the radio between Bill Cunningham and Sheriff Jones earlier in the day where they were critical of Senator Jones and Governor Kasich for their aggressive support of S.B.5. Their position is of the old Republican guard view of “gaming” the system as greedily as the Democrats over the years ever had and it is hard for some of those guys to admit it to themselves. They are uncomfortable with this “new conservativism” and spent much of their discussion belittling the lack of political understanding of Kasich and the aggressive nature of Senator Jones, as if they hoped that they could somehow turn the tide of anger that has been building for a long time back into some manageable form.

My mind was also on the Easy Street Café from Wednesday night where Senator Niehaus, Senator LaRose, Senator Bacon along with several others were harassed by members of SEIU District 1199 led by Monica Moran for passage of the S.B.5 bill just hours before. Monica stepped into that restaurant with 10 other SEIU members and began chanting at the Senators until the police had to arrive with a helicopter to whisk away the protesters.

http://www.dispatch.com/live/content/local_news/stories/2011/03/03/union-supporters-disrupt-gop-senators-restaurant-meal.html?sid=101

The owner of the restaurant had to endure pushing and shoving until the police came, and Moran was not apologetic. In fact she was quite defiant saying, “The moment of discomfort Senate Republicans may have felt as a result of my expressing my opinion pales in comparison to the extreme discomfort and financial hardships that public employees will endure as a result of SB5.”

My wife and I ate our own food I thought about Moran’s statement. I have absolutely no tolerance for bullying, and I couldn’t help but wonder how anyone brought up in America couldn’t see that the public workers using such strong-arm tactics for nearly three decades have painted themselves in this corner they find themselves in. I find it amazing that so many Republicans are weak kneed, including Cunningham and the Sheriff when it comes to taking a hard-line on this issue, insisting on more collaboration, more political procedures, and really more of the same behavior that has delivered our nation to the precipice of destruction.

When Nancy Pelosi and her Congress under the urging of President Obama, where former SEIU head Andy Stern visited the White House several times a week, pushed through the Health Care Bill, and Net Neutrality, and the bail outs, etc, there were many in America that decided that a push back was in order. That the bullying that had been going on for a long time had gone on for too long, and it’s time to set things straight.

Senator Jones and John Kasich are doing what many people, me included, want. I don’t want any collaboration with the type of people who will barge into a restaurant and shout profanity at Senators in an attempt to scare them into “proper legislation.” That kind of behavior has no place in the American landscape. It will take the bold actions of Kasich and Senator Jones to do the job.

Senator Niehaus had to display boldness for removing Senator Sietz who was stalling the vote under the guise of “compromise” and many other measures to undo much of the damage that has already been done by the actions and influence of SEIU and the politicians they control. The time for negotiation is long over; it’s been a one way street against the American tax payer from the inception of Executive Order 10988 under President Kennedy in 1962. Since then, the unions functioning with authority have behaved like an organized crime element in our society. And if politicians don’t fall in line they are intimidated and harassed until they change their views and therefore their votes. Monica Moran was just reading from the company handbook and her followers truly believe they are wrapped in the flag of the United States fighting for worker rights.

After the food was done, and our drinks were drained into our bellies, our date was far from over. Check paid, tipped placed on the table, we left our cantina and proceeded to our other favorite spot, the most romantic place on the face of the planet………the book store.

We usually spend two or three hours picking out our supply of books for the week, and my wife was intent to find more information on her quantum mechanical theories. So I went to one of my favorite sections, philosophy. There wasn’t anything new, I’ve read them all. They did have the little blue book, The Coming Insurrection in stock which I read and despised as tripe from a bunch of French fools lost in their own elitism. I saw a copy of my favorite book from Nietzche Thus Spoke Zarathustra which Hitler would distort under the assistance of Nietzche’s power hungry sister while her brother suffered from insanity shortly after the book was completed. There was also a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, also written by someone who suffered a major intellectual breakdown enduring electro shock treatment to “cure” him of his thoughts. Zen was written about 5 years later. Great book, but nothing new there for me, so I headed to the Social Science section.

In the Social Science section, again I have read many of them. There is of course all of the Glenn Beck books. Wonder why they are so popular? They are right next to all the liberal books; in fact Ed Shultz’s book was right next to Glenn’s. There was one copy of Ed’s book with 7 of Glenn’s book Broke. I asked the attendant if the reason was because Ed’s book was selling like “hot cakes.”

She said, “No, we’ve had that copy since August.”

I asked her about Glenn’s book.

“We just got those in on Monday. Can’t keep them.”

I took a mental note and continued to look over the titles looking for something new. There are all the Fox people, Bill O’Rielly, the Judge, Morris, Ingraham, all of them selling well. They must be doing something right. I saw some liberal books, The Audacity of Hope was there, the cover was torn and looked like it had been looked through a lot, but not purchased, and had experienced another lengthy shelf life. What becomes clear when traveling through a book store when all the covers are slickly done by professional book publishers and editors is that Americans vote with their wallet. Once the message gets out in the world of competition the better argument will win, and people will buy that product. People bought President Obama’s Audacity of Hope when they thought they were reading the book of American’s first black president. Not someone who was a mouth piece to powerful union interests. They rejected the idea and the sales have dropped off. Compare that to Glenn Beck’s An Inconvenient Book,published in 2007, a year before Obama’s book.

“How often do you order this book?” I asked the attendant. I noticed there were five of them on the shelf.

“Once a month,” she said. “We usually order about 10 at a time.

My wife found me in the isle and informed me she was going to be a while. She was having a tough time with her selections.

I told her to take her time, that there wasn’t any hurry. As she left my eyes fell on a book of evil, one I read years ago and there it was on the shelf with a new, hip cover designed to entice young hippie impersonators, The Communist Manifesto.

This version of The Communist Manifesto was just over a hundred pages by the time you read through the forwards and introductions. So I stood and read the book again while I waited for my wife over the next hour and a half. And when I got to that last page I thought it was particularly revealing the line they chose to place there, “forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have the world to win! Working men of all countries unite!”

Suddenly the behavior of Monica Moran doesn’t seem so out of place, if you take it in the context of The Communist Manifesto.

I put the book back on the shelf and thought about what I had just read.

The attendant came around and asked me, “Are you going to buy it?”

I gave her a disgusted look. “Hell, no. I have to go home and take a shower now that I’ve touched it,” I said half-joking. The girl was a younger girl in her early twenties. “Tell me something, does this book have any appeal to you?”

She looked at it and said, “The cover is pretty cool. I’ve heard it talked about by my literature professor in college. I don’t know. I think I probably would read it if I was pressed for time and had to do a report on a book. It’s short and would probably get me some points with the professor because of the subject matter.”

I smiled and nodded knowingly.

The girl looked self conscious. “Did I say the wrong thing?”

“No, you answered perfectly.”

My wife was back with an arm full of books. “I couldn’t make up my mind.”

I just smiled as we proceeded to the counter; my mind was on what the attendant had said.

The Communist Manifesto is a book for fools and lazy minded youth that lack true worldliness. It’s designed for the masses because the intent is to create an insect like response to arms, to overthrow the establishment and create a communist world draped in fairness. It’s a naïve notion born first from Plato’s Republic then glorified in Sir Thomas More’s Utopia written in 1516. The book has power because it does two things, it’s easy to read because it’s so short, and it appeals to the lazy.

Capitalism is for competition, but for it to work everyone needs to have a hunger for competition. Competition brings out the best of the best, and gives those who aren’t the best something to reach for. It is obvious that one of the imperfections of capitalism is that it leaves behind the lazy, because the lazy do not wish to work in order to better themselves and compete. To the lazy, the corporations will always be evil entities, because they represent difficulty in competing with others that are “competitive.” To those lazy citizens communism will always be attractive because it is far easier to hide in the masses under a collective association than to stand as an individual which is how America was founded.

The Tea Party shows that groups that associate themselves with individuality can come together and work as a unit and function socially as the Constitution intended. The philosophy that produced The Constitution has produced a successful country, the United States, where we have such a rich and diverse society that it is the only place in the world where all the races of the world actually work together without tribal warfare and even our poor are well off compared to the rest of the world. The American system works better than anywhere in the world with no exceptions.

Communism has only produced misery everywhere it’s been implemented. Everywhere! It is a half cocked idea created by a mad man soaked in poverty. He pulled together information from the British Museum to construct his theory along with Friedrich Engels study on the working class struggles. Marx was hardly a popular person. You can tell a lot about a person based on who comes to their funeral. Well, Marx had 11 people at his funeral.

When unions discovered that Marx’s short little book could unite the sectors of society that didn’t read much and tended to have the hobby of drinking, eating and pursuing women, the simplicity of The Communist Manifesto had a great deal of power. This helped give rise to the Labour Party in England by the 1920’s which destroyed England as an imperial power, which was the goal.

It should be remembered that the United States broke away from England to avoid imperial control, and our capitalism worked were England was an imperial tyrant. The United States never sought to become an empire, which is the system Marx studied. There wasn’t enough data in the mid 1850s to provide any data on capitalism in the United States without empire status.

But what did the Labour Party in England do to their country? Well, I have friends in England so I know firsthand. Also, my son-in-law is from England, and when he found out what kind of opportunities were available to him in American, he wasted no time coming here and working his butt off so he could provide my daughter with a good life. In England, there weren’t any opportunities for a kid his age. The townhouses in the country are incredibly expensive. They aren’t creating any new jobs because nobody is locating there. It was a big deal to him to see a McDonald’s so close to our house. He had to go to London to see one. But they aren’t producing anything and exporting anything. The Democratic Socialist Party, (the Labour Party) shut down the country and created the kind of European socialism that President Obama and others want to bring to the United States.

I don’t want that in my country. I want NOTHING to do with it. And I want NOTHING to do with ANY unions. Period. They were created with socialist intent, and socialism does not work.

Now, for those that don’t understand how I went from talking about communism to socialism, it’s because socialism is the gateway to communism. Here are the definitions provided by http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_difference_between_socialism_and_communism

” Socialism is the idea that the working class, the class that produces the profits, the wealth, the cars, houses, planes, steel, should take over and run things collectively, democratically, for the benefit of the majority (who also “just happen” to be workers too).

Communism is the idea that society should not have classes – exploiters and exploited oppressors and oppressed, and so on. ”

Socialism generally refers to an economic system, while communism refers to both an economic and political system.
Socialism seeks to manage the economy through deliberate and collective social control.
Communism seeks to manage both the economy and the society by ensuring that property is owned collectively, and that control over the distribution of property is centralized in order to achieve both classlessness and statelessness.
Both socialism and communism are based on the principle that the goods and services produced in an economy should be owned publicly, and controlled and planned by a centralized organization. Socialism says that the distribution should take place according to the amount of an individual’s production efforts, whilst communism asserts that goods and services should be distributed among the populace according to individuals’ needs.

Collective bargaining is a form of socialism that has been perpetuated by communist sympathizers. That’s not anybody on Fox News saying that. It’s not Glenn Beck, or Rush Limbaugh or anyone else. They are just stating the facts and history that is available to everyone. For too many years we’ve allowed these parasites of philosophy to attempt“European Style” socialism to America and we’ve all just let it happen. We haven’t taken pride in ourselves and defended our way of life properly so those groups that want to bring about socialist ideas took us for granted.

Republicans are traditionally as I mentioned regarding Bill Cunningham and Sheriff Jones, conservatives that align themselves with other conservatives and built business and helped create laws. They tended to be nice, God-fearing people. But on their watch, these parasites which hold The Communist Manifesto in such high regard have reigned free from impunity. Many of those Republicans are guilty of what they are accused of, being out of touch and spending too much time on the golf course, and they are partially guilty of letting these labor unions get out of control. So it’s not just the labor unions fault. Unions are made up of common, everyday people who are more interested in what Charlie Sheen is doing, or whether or not Lindsey Lohan has on any panties when she gets out of a car. Such minds are easy to fool and they have been fooled by power-hungry manipulators like SEIU, and the AFL-CIO and the NEA . Those unions made pay good through collective bargaining which allowed the lazy of our culture to continue to be lazy. It allowed them to get what they wouldn’t get in normal competition. And Republicans, the same Republicans that took a soft stance on S.B.5 let them do it because they didn’t want to think about the larger problem. Those Republicans were lazy themselves taking for granted that the United States would always be here, and that threats to our way of life existed on foreign shores. They took the labor movement as pests that had to be appeased and went back to their golf game. So they are guilty too, and still are!

But the urgency we are seeing now comes from a new group of conservatives that are not looking at long political careers, golf games, and fancy dinners with powerful people. In many cases like Kasich in Ohio, and Christie in New Jersey they are already successful and are not looking at being two term governors, and that’s how it’s supposed to be. Be bold, and fix our problems. If the people don’t like it, let them change things with a vote in the next election.

S.B.5 is not Health Care Reform. It’s actually the opposite. S.B.5 is about ripping control from the state and putting it in the hands of communities where it belongs. It’s not creating more central control like Health Care did. If the passage of S.B.5. seems aggressive, well that’s because it is. Time is running out. There isn’t time to sit down with a bunch of labor leaders and “collaborate.” That is how things were done in the past and it hasn’t worked. The union strategy is to just stretch out the negotiation process until public opinion turns against the Republicans. That’s how Democrats and unions have beaten the crap out of Republicans for years. That’s why those idiots in Wisconsin fled to the border, because it’s their “mode of operation.” By delaying the Wisconsin vote, the unions hope to turn the public against Scott Walker, only this time Scott Walker isn’t putting his finger in the air and checking the wind direction. He’s doing what he thinks is right.

So of course when Shannon Jones introduced S.B.5, and there was three weeks of testimony, Kasich knew he needed to implement his changes quickly so he can fix all the holes in Ohio. Everyone played fair and by the process, but they didn’t allow themselves to get bogged down, deliberately. And Senator Sietz, the rock solid Republican that asked Strickland to lead last year, was one of the Republicans from yesteryear that helped create the problem. He helped legitimize the labor movement that is intent on implementing a new social order. Not the rank and file members, they just want a pay check. But the leadership is certainly after a larger political agenda and that is not acceptable. So I am deeply proud of Senator Niehaus for not allowing Sietz to stall the vote and play politics with S.B.5.

Timing is important. All across this state school levies are threatening to break the backs of property owners everywhere, and once S.B.5 is signed into law, school boards will have a tremendous amount of ability to control their costs and take those levies off the ballots. Schools like Little Miami can renegotiate contracts and become solvent again, and that’s just the beginning.

Kasich’s motto is moving at the speed of business, and that’s what he’s doing. Let the unions put the issue on a ballot in November. Because Kasich will have by then put Ohio on a successful path and if the voters decide to go backwards, so be it. It won’t be because our Governor didn’t do the job. It’ll be because Ohioans failed to recognize a threat and take responsibility for the condition of their state. There won’t be any slack-jawed politicians to blame this time, only a preference for the status quo.

My wife and I closed out our evening with details I won’t reveal on these pages. But I personally stayed up till the small hours of the morning reading and thinking.

This is a battle not between left and right, young and old, rich or poor, but of those that truly want the American way of life, and those that simply want a “kick back.” And both sides are guilty of playing that game.

Rich Hoffman

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

Rich Hoffman and Realistic Solutions: The Many Reasons for S.B.5

The following comment is from a reader of the Cincinnati Enquirer responding to an interview I gave.

——————————————————————————————————————————————–

10:12 PM on February 28, 2011
More kids in the district, less state funding and no levies to go along with it – that’s the problem. I have no issue with Lakota doing pay to play. I agree with that.

Rich Hoffman – how about you provide some realistic solutions instead of merely stating “it’s the teachers.” Aside from further cuts to staff, what would you like to see? What would be sufficient for you to agree to a levy increase? When all of the kids are hearded back into a one room schoolhouse and the heat came in the form of a fireplace?

You see the above problem…increase number of kids in the district, less funding from the state. So what’s your solution if the levy isn’t the answer? Simply saying cutting staff won’t solve the problem as state minimums will still be required.

I’ve spent thousands and thousands of words spelling it out solutions. What has to happen is the school board needs some real teeth, the teachers union needs to have less power than management, and real education reforms need to be put in place. When those things happen, budgets can be managed, kids can get a better education, and the reality of the situation can be seen clearly.

——————————————————————————————————————————————————

What follows in these various radio broadcasts below is a large amount of information that anyone wanting to understand S.B.5 and how it affects the economy, politics, and each and every life of Ohioans, feel free to listen to your heart’s content. As the protests escalated in Columbus on March 1, 2011 chanting “KILL THE BILL,” in reference to S.B.5 I was on with Doc Thompson of 700 WLW speaking about the merits to the bill that get lost in the emotion of the debate.

Also just prior to the March on Columbus one of the organizers came on to Doc Thompson’s show to plead their side of the argument. He made some great comments and I enjoyed hearing them. They represent a majority of what the protesters think based on what they let out to the public.

Bill Cunningham had one several guests that provided potent information that every voter in Ohio should hear.

Given this large amount of information, where is the same information against the S.B.5 bill? Where is the compelling case as to why collective bargaining should continue? These radio broadcasts show all sides of the story yet where has the other side explained why it’s fair that tax payers continue to pay large amounts of tax and have virtually no control over how budgets are controlled because of collective bargaining?

Do those unions and their members have any facts besides the emotional appeal of chanting and carrying signs?

No!

This is how the OEA responds to S.B.5. This is how their lobby works. Study the words carefully and consider what they mean. This is how the OEA has done business for years, and this is why we have the financial implosion that we all suffer from.

Subject: Lobby Day March 2nd and growing momentum with the Educator
>>> Connector
>>> Date: Fri, 25 Feb 2011 11:04:14 -0600 (CST)
>>> From: OEA ACE’s Action Center govtsrv@ohea.org>
>>> Reply-To: OEA ACE’s Action Center govtsrv@ohea.org>
>>> Organization: Ohio Education Association
>>> To: ha@blanchester.k12.oh.us
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> Dear C******E,
>>>
>>> Keeping the pressure on our elected officials means reaching them every
>>> day in different ways. If you haven’t called or emailed this week,
>>> please do so today; if you have, please reach out to your colleagues,
>>> friends and neighbors to ask them to join you in standing up for our
>>> communities and against Senate Bill 5.
>>>
>>> *Our key, upcoming actions to oppose Senate Bill 5 and make your voice
>>> heard are:*
>>>
>>>   1. *Call and email your State Senator, using our Educator Connector
>>>      line (888-907-7309)* and ACEs email tool
>>>      <http://aces.ohea.org/site/R?i=e-zDZS9AVuStasiITpzQVg..>. If
>>>      you’ve already called and emailed this week, please ask 3 of your
>>>      colleagues and friends to join you. In the past two days, we’ve
>>>      had 6 times the calls as any previous 48 hours, and we need to
>>>      keep that advocacy growing. This is the fastest and easiest way to
>>>      make your voice heard directly to your State Senator. Senators are
>>>      reporting that they’ve noticed a marked increase in calls from
>>>      educators, and we need to keep the pressure up.
>>>   2. *Join us for our Educator Lobby Day on Wednesday, March 2^nd ,
>>>      *where you get a chance to meet and talk with your State Senators
>>>      and Representatives.**This is not a coalition rally but rather an
>>>      OEA event where you will get to hear from our Governmental
>>>      Services staff beginning at 9:00 a.m. before heading over to the
>>>      Statehouse. Our Educator Lobby Days are a great way to talk with
>>>      your elected officials about a range of issues, including Senate
>>>      Bill 5. RSVP here to let us know you are coming
>>>      <http://aces.ohea.org/site/R?i=O49lH3QTUpTvKWns1dq_4Q..> and so
>>>      that we can be prepared to help you make the most of your Lobby
>>> Day.
>>>   3. *Community Coalition Rally Against SB5 on Tuesday, March 1^st .
>>>      *The Insurance, Commerce & Labor committee has not yet released
>>>      official word if there will be a hearing or vote on Senate Bill 5
>>>      on Tuesday, but our labor and community coalition has scheduled a
>>>      rally. Once we receive the official schedule from the committee,
>>>      we will be sure to send you an updated Action Alert with more
>>>      details. All members are encouraged to attend Wednesday’s OEA
>>>      Educator Lobby Day regardless of what happens Tuesday. The Rally
>>>      will begin at 10:00 a.m. and the OEA building will be open at 8:30
>>>      a.m.
>>>
>>> Please continue reaching out to your colleagues, as well as your friends
>>> and neighbors in the community. Some enterprising OEA members are even
>>> talking with the owners and employees of the small businesses they
>>> frequent, telling them about how Senate Bill 5 would harm the community
>>> and asking them to take action, too. The more people you raise this
>>> issue with and move to take action, the larger our movement grows.

Rich Hoffman

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
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The Overton Window and The Jonestown Tragedy: Richard Trumka’s Progressive Push

I’ve said it many times, I read a lot. A whole lot. And over 2010 one of the books that most jumped out at me was Glenn Beck’s The Overton Window. My daughter had bought it for me for Father’s Day and I read it in one day.

I hear people like Richard Trumka of the AFL-CIO talk about the “RIGHT WING” and you hear what comes out of his mouth and you have to wonder about his sanity. As far as a union leader, and a person close to the White House, which he says he speaks to daily, I would be ashamed if that guy where my boss or leader. He clearly doesn’t understand basic economics and its people like him that create the message that millions of union workers chant.

Here is Trumka speaking in March of 2009. He has no idea how the bill he’s speaking about will “expand” the middle class, and he doesn’t have any idea how this will drive up the labor costs. He just makes statements that people seem to blindly following without question. Something he accuses Beck and other people primarily on the political right of doing.

You can read here how he believes the best way to expand the middle class is through further taxation. http://www.theblaze.com/stories/afl-cio-boss-raising-taxes-is-best-way-to-create-jobs/

America is supposed to be a group of individuals, not a unified collective sum like Trumka speaks about. The Federalist Papers, which went on to become The Constitution were written to protect American from people like Trumka, and Obama. Those people and people like them taken by themselves are not bad people, but they have a dangerous ideology and they disguise it with a message the masses can understand. So it is not a far stretch to say that when I saw Trumka speak on February 26, 2011 that the best way to create jobs was to raise taxes, which I know from economics is false, yet people chant and cheer in approval, and I witnessed the union protests all across the country, it reminded me of Jim Jones, of the Jonestown massacre from 1978. Jones had several thousand supporters that followed him from Indianapolis Indiana, to San Francisco, then to Guyana South America. Jones was an admirer of Marx, Lenin, and Mao. That’s why they chanted this song at their church rallies in the early 70’s.

Jim Jones is a tough story to swallow. Because it is the extreme example of what collectivism can inflict on people. Jones was a proud socialist. What you are about to hear is the actual death tape from the Jonestown Massacre. Jones turned on a tape recorder and gave a final speech while his thousands of followers drank poisoned drink to their deaths. He calls it “revolutionary suicide” to an inhuman world. You will actually hear people perishing in the background, so if you have a soft stomach, don’t listen to this. This behavior is far from a joke. If you listen you will hear several people step forward and speak about the greatness of Jim Jones, their “Daddy,” and of the merits of socialism and communism.
The following clip is from the film The Guyana Tragedy and is a reenactment of what you will hear below.

Here is the actual death tapes. Now consider as you listen to this, these people speaking are just moments from their death. They know it. Listen to their thoughts and what they intend.

So what is the lesson here? Well, madmen have a way of lying to themselves and distorting the reality of the world around them. And such people are attracted to socialism, communism, progressivism and all those collective “ism’s.” At that point it no longer becomes a simple argument about economics and the best way to handle economic issues. It evolves into a struggle between good and evil.

That’s where I start seeing startling comparisons from people in the modern labor movement. What they are saying are simply the words their leaders speak. Richard Trumka is a powerful union leader and in this recent case involving these labor protests, what he says in public, over a microphone, ends up coming out of the mouths of his followers.

Trumka, like many people attracted to those “collective ideologies” are prone to climb for power. History shows that it happens in every case. I don’t know of a single instance of a collective society that survives outside of a tribal village. The individuality inherit in the human being seems to break down true collectivism, and social experiments to water this tendency down in our youth have failed with terrible results. This is the reason the Tea Party has risen as a permanent movement, because many people are just tired of the “social experiments.” Many want to return to the original blue print that paved the way for the greatest nation on earth.

The Tea Party is a push back against the tendency of “collectivism” that has gotten out of control.

Whether or not he is aware of it or not, Trumka’s actions show that he is power-hungry and idealistic, and is essentially no different from someone like Jim Jones. It is quite possible that if that congressman from California had not went to Jonestown and been killed, Jim Jones and his followers would have lived for years without a mass suicide. But the scary thing about it is that Jones had to retreat to South America to have his utopian society. And the congressman was doing in that society much of what the Tea Party is trying to do in American Society. They are intervening and attempting to break up the dangerous collectivism that is consuming the nation.

Progressives are insistent in the modern age to not leave the country for their utopian society. They instead are intent to change the country itself. Here Trumka reveals what he is all about, which concerns me a great deal. It concerns me because watching his followers on Saturday; they seem to think he truly believes in this whole “middle class” protection. Yet he states otherwise.

Now this doesn’t mean Trumka is just like Jim Jones. Jones when he was in Indiana seemed like a reasonable guy. Thousands and thousands of people wouldn’t have followed him if they thought the path would take them to their sweaty deaths in a South American jungle within a decade. But Trumka’s followers behave almost identically to the congregation of Jim Jones, and that is what is troublesome.

Watch and listen to these clips from the Saturday Protests. And compare the behavior to what you heard from Jim Jones’s Congregation.

This brings me back to the Overton window concept introduced in Beck’s book. People can say what they want about Glenn Beck, but from what I know about the guy, he genuinely wants to get at the truth. His agenda is the truth. And that’s why he wrote his book, The Overton Window.

As I was reading The Overton Window, I realized that here is a guy that Time Magazine called the most dangerous man in American. Here is a guy hated by all these various progressive groups. Here is a guy that has become massively popular in a very short period of time. Here is a guy that has an agent that is very liberal. Here is a guy that knows a few rich people yet has not forgotten his humanity. Here is a guy that has hit the bottom, and realizes that it’s the little things in life that makes things precious. Here is a guy that would never, ever, under any circumstances be a Jim Jones. He might have the power to be, but he would not sub come to it. Glenn Beck is the kind of man who you could put a pile of gold in his lap, ask him to watch it for you till you come back, and when you returned 2 years later, he’d give it back without anything missing. Since he has a unique insight to how the game is played at the level he’s at now, the book, The Overton Window is a particularly rare opportunity for a reader. And I found the book and its concepts uniquely rich. It may not be the most profound literary work in history. But it is very bold in its attempt and it succeeds. What it is successful in doing is capturing the confusing political landscape that we are currently involved with revealing through a cleaver story what drives all the groups involved in creating their own Overton window that will pull society in their desired direction.
Here is the definition and description of what a Overton Window is as described in Wikipedia.

The Overton window, in political theory, describes a “window” in the range of public reactions to ideas in public discourse, in a spectrum of all possible options on a particular issue. It is named after its originator, Joseph P. Overton.

At any given moment, the “window” includes a range of policies considered to be politically acceptable in the current climate of public opinion, which a politician can recommend without being considered too “extreme” or outside the mainstream to gain or keep public office. Overton arranged the spectrum on a vertical axis of “more free” and “less free” in regards to government intervention. When the window moves or expands, ideas can accordingly become more or less politically acceptable. The degrees of acceptance of public ideas can be described roughly as:

• Unthinkable
• Radical
• Acceptable
• Sensible
• Popular
• Policy

The Overton Window is a means of visualizing which ideas define that range of acceptance by where they fall in it. Proponents of policies outside the window seek to persuade or educate the public so that the window either “moves” or expands to encompass them. Opponents of current policies, or similar ones currently within the window, likewise seek to convince people who these should be considered unacceptable.

Other formulations of the process created after Overton’s death add the concept of moving the window, such as deliberately promoting ideas even less acceptable than the previous “outer fringe” ideas, with the intention of making the current fringe ideas acceptable by comparison.
__________________________________________________

This site has an interesting twist on The Overton Window by describing it in four planes instead of just left and right, which I like.
http://www.correntewire.com/the_overton_window_has_four_panes

What these extreme left groups have done over time is they pulled the Overton window radically to the left with key phrases like, “workers’ rights” and “tax the rich.” Or “all conservatives are Hitler.” 100 years ago at the start of the progressive movement these ideas were considered radical. But in the election of 1912, Eugene V.Debs had doubled the Socialist vote from 500,000 in 1908 to 1 million in 1912. This wasn’t some guy from Europe; he was born in Terre Haute, Indiana. In fact, the Socialists had their 1912 Convention in Indianapolis; the same place Jim Jones started his socialist church. Ronald Reagan toyed with joining the socialist party when he was a young man in Hollywood. It was after he traveled to England and witnessed what socialism had done to England through the Labor Party that he turned far to the right, out of fear for his country. But those people, those 1 million people who voted socialist in 1912 are out there, and they attached themselves to progressive ideas, they had children, raised families and found themselves drawn to the Labor Movement in America on the backs of the unions. Now many of those people aren’t bad people, but they are attracted to the collectivism of socialist concepts by their family culture and genetic make-up, because let’s face it, some people are more comfortable hiding in the masses and are not inclined to stand on their own.

Those poor, unfortunate souls are the people who end up following someone like Jim Jones in the extreme circumstance. And to a lesser degree, they find themselves repeating word for word what someone like Richard Trumka utters, without any care as to the relevance of his words. Trumka knows he can’t talk to an economist about how he represents the “middle class” or how “increasing taxes on the rich,” “creates jobs.” Those are just buzz words to stir up the followers. What Trumka is really after is moving the Overton window far to the left as was the trend during the entire 20th century. It happened because people weren’t aware of the threat and it just crept into our culture subtly. Trumka said it himself; he’s not in the labor movement for wages and benefits. He’s using the labor movement as a platform to change society, and that isn’t any different from Jim Jones who wanted to change the world through religion.

The Tea Party wants none of that non-sense. The Tea Party wants people like Trumka off our back, and wants to pull the Overton window back to the far right so that the recoil will leave the political spectrum back in the middle where it belongs. The caution is there because half the nation isn’t drinking the cool-aid of Trumka. Half is, roughly. The problem is that other half are made up of people who have evolved to expect an entitlement culture, so those aren’t the kind of people who will carry a nation by themselves. They’ll need a fanatical leader to lead them. The Tea Party has no such leader. Glenn Beck could disappear tomorrow and someone like Doc Thompson in Cincinnati would just take his place, or maybe the young man in the radio broadcast above. The movement is essentially leaderless, because it is built upon the ideas of self-reliance, which was what America was intended to be.

The real threat and real money being poured into politics isn’t coming from Rupert Murdoch, or the Koch Brothers. George Soros, and all the Hollywood left has poured far more money into political manipulation so there isn’t any room to talk. Yet if Trumka says “the conservative right is for the rich, and we are for the working man!” Look at all these contributors to the radical left! Yet all these people point to the right and say it’s “Wall Street, the rich, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Sarah Palin, all are blamed for manipulating the American people when in fact it is these people that have committed the act of their accusations.

“The working man” is another false premise captured by the labor movement and placed into the minds of Americans by the Overton window. In Ohio 655,000 people work for a union, both public and private. That’s only 13.7 percent of the 4,787,000 million people who are employed in the state. That leaves over 4 million people not represented by a union, and don’t particularly want to be represented by a union. And most of those people are not in management. Most of those people are the real workers, and is proof that such extreme rhetoric as exhibited by people like Trumka to an army of people built on entitlement. Yet, because of the Overton window, the media, and the regular everyday people accept that “workers’ rights” represents union work, because that’s how the term was marketed.

The times we live in have these two ideologies colliding before us. And unlike in the past, people will have to choose. One side is the side of life, and one side is the side of doom. So we must choose and choose wisely. Because the time has passed where both sides can’t coexist together now that the radicals have made a move and shown their intentions.

Rich Hoffman

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

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