It also is rare to see a politician that will take on an old-time friend and conservative that prides himself as the conservative voice of the common man, and in the times when it really counts between those two old friends, it is obvious who meant what they said over the years and who was all talk.
Kasich should be representing the position that all businesses have an equal opportunity even if he doesn’t like them. There is a Hustler of Hollywood store near my house that I can’t stand. I think it ruins the small town of Monroe, Ohio with its presence. But, every time I drive by it, it’s full of people looking for their pornography fix and all the tax collected through each sale is paying taxes. I don’t agree with the pornography, but I vote by not going, and I won’t be going to a casino in Cincinnati for many of the same reasons. If the business model fails, it fails. I’d be happy about it, but I won’t do anything to bring it about either, because it’s a business that has the right to attempt. If it finds a market, even if that market is evil, so be it. It’s not for me to decide what’s evil for someone else.
The theme of the article was that Lakota is operating with fewer administrators than the state average, so doesn’t that mean they are operating more efficiently than other school districts?
No. Statements like that, just like the president’s speech, is full of smoke and mirrors designed to justify excessively high costs of an out-of-control government at all levels, hoping that people will be foolish enough to just look at the smoke and not at what causes it.
Read that article here:
Lakota has 58% fewer administrators per pupil than state average, report says By Lindsey Hilty, Staff Writer Updated 1:43 AM Thursday, April 14, 2011
LIBERTY TWP. — At a time when finances of the Lakota Local School District have come under intense scrutiny from voters, officials say state data shows they are running a lean operation.
The district has 58 percent fewer administrators per pupil than the state average, and 20 percent fewer administrators than similar districts, which are categorized by size and demographics, according to the latest report released from the Ohio Department of Education in March.
In the 2009 report, Lakota had 43 percent fewer administrators than the state average, Interim Superintendent Ron Spurlcok said; however, “with our recent budget reductions and consolidations, we have seen that number grow.” While that number may be touted as a good thing for the bottom line, he warned that it puts a strain on operations.
Assistant principals are responsible for discipline and also must sit in on all individual education plan meetings for students with disabilities.
“We realize economies of scale by running larger buildings, so we can economize where possible,” Kursman said. However, fewer administrators in larger buildings means a bigger demand for their time, whether it is handling parent concerns, analyzing student data or reviewing teacher performance.
Many buildings now share assistant principals, she said, if the principal is called away for a meeting or to direct traffic due to transportation cuts, there is no one left to manage the building.
Levy opponent Rich Hoffman said he isn’t impressed with the numbers. “I don’t believe any of the stats they give me anymore, because the reality is that they could do a lot more with a lot less if things really get pushy,” he said.
Hoffman said administrators could be reduced more, but they aren’t the issue.
The problem, he said, is “I think Lakota has drowned itself in salary obligations, and when you’re trying to cover 22 buildings when management of those salary obligations has been bad, it turns out to be a catastrophic mistake. Administrators get paid a lot, but there aren’t so many of them that it affects the bottom line costs, so their damage to the budget is negligible.”
There are too many employees netting more than $65,000 annually, he said, and that is the crux of the problem. He pointed to the salary lists recently published in the Pulse-Journal, and said the increase in employees in just one year who reached the $65,000 plus benchmark is unsustainable.
“You have to get the costs in line, but the costs are your salaries … None of us can afford it anymore.” Hoffman called for tough negotiations as the board as the Lakota Education Association reopen the 2011-2012 school year contract, and said many in the community would stand behind the board as long as it was aggressive in controlling costs.
In fiscal year 2010, Lakota spent $96 million on salaries. In 2011, that number dropped $2 million due to retirements, no increase to the base salaries and a reduction in force. Employees still earned close to $2 million in step raises, Treasurer Jenni Logan said, but one third of employees, who are at the top of the pay scale, saw no step increase. As details from legislation like SB 5 keep the district in a holding pattern, Logan said, “Inside the walls of Lakota, we’re focusing on the job at hand, which is educating our students.”
If you’ve studied other cultures, their rise and fall, there are common themes. Visit any ruin of an ancient civilization and you will see that all those societies bankrupted themselves. They either ran out of water, food, or their currency. Visit Ankor Watt, Chitzen Itza, or any city in Egypt and you’ll see it. Study the past to see your future.
In Mel Gibson’s brilliant film, Apocalypto Gibson showed wonderfully the height of the Mayan Empire and displayed the problems they were having. The Mayans built huge cities, depleted their food supply and built a corrupt hierarchy of politics that sought human sacrifice to appease the mob, and to keep the masses believing that the ruling class held some sort of power with the “gods,” so that society could continue for just a bit longer hoping by some miracle that if they cut off just one more head, or paint their faces just a few more colors so the gods would take mercy on their lives and save them all. In this case the god is Kukulcan. For those of you that don’t know much about history, the main street in Cancun that all the nightclubs are on, is named after that god.
• A mass burial containing 40 men and women who appear to have been violently killed. The suggestion has been made that some of these were buried alive: “From the vertical position of some of the fingers, which appear to have been digging in the sand, it is apparent that not all of the victims were dead when they were interred – that some had been trying to pull themselves out of the mass of bodies.”
The relationship of these burials to the central burial is unclear. It is unlikely that they were all deposited at the same time. Wood in several parts of the mound has been radiocarbon-dated to between 950 and 1000 CE. Check out more about this from this article. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cahokia
Many people don’t even know that Cahokia is even there in the middle of the United States. It’s the giant hill alongside the highway on the way into St. Louis. You can see the arch of St. Louis easily from the ruins of Cahokia, yet people don’t know much about the ancient city. In fact, Cahokia wasn’t even discovered until developers tried to build a neighborhood over it. I wrote a screenplay about the place for some financial people a few years ago and we had an actress and a director, but the whole thing fell apart in pre-production. But here was the conception teaser for it. The history that I speak about is real. The modern aspect of it is fiction.
On the other hand there are people like Porter Standsberry out there that are “really” looking at the real problems coming to our culture, and people like Porter are the kind of people our government wants to cut their head off in human sacrifice, figuratively speaking of course.
As stated in the interview, there is a preponderance of evidence that Obama was born in Hawaii. What that means is that there are some newspaper reports, and some other documents that lean in the direction of birth in Hawaii, but it appears that Obama claimed otherwise to get financial aid. So on one side of the story or another, Obama has lied in his past. He’s either claimed to be a foreign student for admission into Occidental College or he was really born in Kenya and his grandparents placed the notification in the newspaper in Hawaii. I think many Americans would forgive him for the first offense. Because the second offense is much more serious, which is why over 10 million dollars and much public relation debate has been created to combat even bring up the question.
If we are stuck with this joke for a few more years because everyone is too weak to actually demand that our public officials live by the actual rules of our law, then I say the law goes our way too. Ignore that speed limit sign, those demands to buckle up, forget the DUI laws. And for taxes, forget about April 15th, just send in your taxes whenever you feel like it. Heck, it’s just rules and laws. Who cares……..right?
The expectation that such a thought is even a possibility is a serious flaw in the thinking of school districts that have turned education into their own “cash cow” business.
I was going for a big topic there on a 7 minute radio spot, but I liked the question and the eventual debate that followed. I meant it when I said that I do not play the lottery, ever, because I wouldn’t want to come into any money that way. I would not keep money given to me in an inheritance either, or any other random act. In fact, once when my wife and I were at a casino cruise in Cape Canaveral, I spent .25 cents on a slot machine and lost my money. I was extremely upset so I spent .25 cents on one more try. I won back .50 cents and my wife and I spent the rest of the cruise eating from the buffet and watching sea gulls fly next to the ship while reading a book, happy I made my money back and was leaving with what I started with. I was done with gambling for the rest of my life. I simply will not gamble away anything loosely that I earned with my hard work for the fantasy of hitting some kind of collective jackpot. I don’t even do office pools for the same reason, which people think is strange because such things are very popular.
If I were to win the lottery I would have been robbed of the opportunity to earn the money with my skills and tenacity. It would be like winning a football game without the other team ever showing up and the score keeper just putting some points on the board, and you automatically win. For me, the fun is in beating an opponent, to taste the blood in my mouth from a hard-fought battle, to sweat droplets from my forehead in the hot sun, or to work late into the night to outsmart a competitor. If someone just handed me a check and said, “you win, the fight is over,” I’d feel deprived of a true victory.
I understand that my way of thinking is “old fashioned,” and probably is a complete foreign concept with today’s youth. Socialism is a big part of their life, and it starts in school when they are taught that nobody is better than anybody else. Everyone is the same. Except athletes and straight “A” students that can help a school system get funding from the community by putting those students on a pedestal. But for the most part, our youth is taught that it’s bad to excel. It’s bad to be the “best.” It’s bad to be strong, faster, or more creative.
Our government created millions of welfare recipients that have put out the lights of ambition in many people. When someone is given something, and they don’t earn it by giving back something of equal value, they are robbed of their merit. This might bother them at first, but once they accept the lack of merit they lose their ambition, and this is the cause of massive failure in the welfare system.
I once attended a trade show in Chicago’s McCormick Center for one of my products. I drove up from Cincinnati and was appalled that there were so many toll booths on the way into the city. Counting all the cars going through the booths, it was obvious that Chicago was ripping people off by generating enormous sums of money with the tool booths. So on the way back home after the trade show was over, I drove back through South Chicago and was stunned by how poor it was. My plan was to avoid the toll booths and get back on the highway far to the south. I drove through miles and miles and miles of slums and getting back on the highway that was built over the slums was nearly impossible. It seemed as if the slums were desired by the city of Chicago in order to keep everyone on the toll highway, and discourage what I was doing, by driving through a crime riddled neighborhoods to leave the city.
I looked at angry faces at every stop sign at every block. I had a few arguments with men and boys that shouted racist slurs at me and I expected at any moment to have a gun fight right in the street. It was obvious to me that the good intentions of socialism as implemented in the welfare system was a massive failure, and I felt sorry for the people I was seeing. I knew that if I could have a few of those angry young boys for a few weekends, and take them on a camping trip and teach them to value themselves, I could probably help some of them a little, because what was missing was a sense of value in their lives. They had learned and accepted to live off the government, and had lost their ambition. They had lost their merit. It is no wonder they turned to crime, trying to steal back from society what was robbed from them, which is their honor. The crime began with our government “helping them.”
This is why when people who have lost their merit, or never had it to begin with because their parents didn’t provide them with a sense of value, and they inherit money, or win the lottery, they go broke in just a few years. The money does not make them better people. Money cannot buy merit, or honor. Money is only as good as the people who hold it. Social problems cannot be fixed by throwing money at those problems.
The same thing happens when an owner of a business works hard to build that business, and then passes it on to his kids later in life, only to have the kids screw it up. The kids don’t work the business the same because they didn’t earn it.
Kasich is a self-made man, and he governs that way. Willie did work for the public sector, so he cannot see the socialist tendencies present, because he accepted them in his past. He can justify them, but cannot speak against them now, even when it’s the right thing to do.
There have been plenty of warnings about what socialism will do to people who embrace it. If you haven’t seen it, here is a version of George Orwell’s, Animal Farm. The British animation firm of John Halas and Joy Batchelor perform yeoman service in adapting George Orwell’s allegorical novel Animal Farm to the screen. As any high-school English student can tell you, the original 1945 novel was Orwell’s spin on the rise and fall of the Communist myth. A group of intelligent animals overthrow their corrupt human owner and set up their own self-sustained farm, predicated on an idealistic credo: “All Animals are Created Equal”, “No Animal Shall Ever Drink Liquor”, “Four Legs Good: Two Legs Bad” etc. But when Snowball the Pig (read: Trotsky) is overthrown by the despotic Napoleon (read: Stalin), all idealism goes out the window, and soon the pigs are ruling dictatorially over the other animals. Before long, Animal Farm operates on but one principle: “All Animals Are Created Equal, But Some Are More Equal Than Others.” Orwell’s ironic ending, in which it becomes impossible to tell the difference between the Pigs and the Humans, is blunted in favor of a grafted-on happy ending, perhaps to mollify the kiddie trade. Maurice Denham supplies all the character’s voices, while Gordon Heath serves as narrator.
The warning signs have always been there for us in literature, whether it’s from George Orwell, or Ayn Rand, the analysis on socialism as been conducted.
Socialism is a disease that robs society of ambition and takes us down only one path, our eventual destruction.
But there are those in government who use the excuse to “help” people in order to place themselves in the managing role, so their support is simply a power grab built on the backs of slaves. They will exploit millions of people’s integrity in order to feed their own egos for power. That’s why socialism will never work.
Here’s just one example from the Comedy Central cartoon South Park. Guess popular culture doesn’t want young people to read Atlas Shrugged……………..why do you think that is?
Socialism is a terrible concept which leads to all out communism and the eventual destruction of the culture that embodies it. If you don’t want to hear me yell about it on WLW, or Glenn Beck yell about it on Fox News, or Milton Freeman lecture about it try Ayn Rand from 1961. Ayn was a little girl when socialism took over her country of Russia and she dedicated her life to combating the disease of socialism because she had seen firsthand what it did to her home country. She fled to the United States and fell in love with skyscrapers, because such a thing could have never been built without American ingenuity and the power of individuals in a capitalist society.
Capitalism works because it allows for merit. Socialism doesn’t work because it robs people of merit. To see why just look at the high cost of education in your local community, and the blank look of our children coming out of those schools, and have the courage to ask the hard question……..why did I surrender our children to a blank, meritless life of socialism?
And why did I buy that lottery ticket hoping to escape the perils of life by wimping out when times are tough. Money won’t make a person better if they lack merit to begin with. And people with merit will find that money isn’t that difficult to obtain, because the world lacks people with true merit.
Darryl Parks is right when he says that only the weak, veal type people in our society are attracted to socialism. Let’s just hope that the weak don’t outnumber the strong, because that’s when freedom dies forever. And socialism knows it. So long as the welfare system expands, so long as government continues to be a primary employer, so long as public sector unions exist, the weak will continue to put representatives into our republic that will slowly convert our society into socialism.
How do we get more people strong in our society, so we can get the country moving back toward capitalism? You have to stop pandering to people. Stop coddling that child every time they bump their head. Stop dressing your kids in elbow pads and knee pads. Stop trying to breast feed your kids even when they are 16 to 17 years old. In fact, this is the path of socialism, watch this clip of Hugh Jackman zip lining into the Sydney Opera House. I think Jackman did well. He came in too fast, but so what. He was able to make his transfer to his rappel line. But look at the women’s reactions here.
All those girls and women are probably going to have kids, and they’ll be the ones to pander to their children’s every whims, and nobody will attempt to toughen up those kids creating a society of……..as Darryl calls them………………………….veal.
Veal is good for only one thing, to be eaten. And you can’t build a country on people like that and expect it to stay strong for long. That’s when socialism takes over.
If Mr. North were innocent of such allegations, he’ll gladly be prepared to go on the Big One to defend the reputation of his district under his leadership. Because in the court of public opinion, silence means your guilty. The branch of truth has officially been extended for him to defend these actions for all to hear and to settle any misconceptions the public may have about the situation.
This isn’t a witch hunt to those of you that wish to think so. This is a demand of honesty, and for the system to work as it is supposed to. This is a demand to not perform illegal activity behind closed doors, and then ask tax payers to pay for incompetence. That’s all it is. If it’s painful, well……too bad. Your public officials and your boss want to know why you behaved the way you have, and you owe an explanation. Why not provide that explanation on the 50,000 Watt FLAME THROWER, 700 WLW for all to hear?
Declare your innocence…..if you can. After all, anyone that makes $149,937 a year should have no problem talking to half a million people over 38 states and part of Canada. Show up on April 9th and the debate will occur without a representative from the Lebanon School System.
The other thing I want for my birthday is for the government to shut down on April 8th, the day before my actual birthday. The reason? Because I want people to see how little the government actually does? I don’t want to see people’s lives be interrupted, but I do want to show that American life will continue without the government functioning. For those of us that want a smaller government, people need to see that the government is not essential to American life. In fact, it is a hindrance. And only a government shut-down will show that.
But first, meet a couple of looters, as described in the literature quote.
• Rep. Connie Pillich, D-Montgomery, said: “I am disappointed that my colleagues across the aisle voted against having the bill read in its entirety…. It undercuts veterans and attacks the middle class. It is unconstitutional and is public policy at its worst.”
• Rep. Denise Driehaus, D-West Price Hill, said, “As a Catholic, I strongly believe we have an obligation to respect the dignity of all workers. We also have a duty to protect their right to organize so they are able to collectively work to ensure justice and dignity in their workplace.’’
More and more, Rand’s work comes to my mind as I see what is going on in the world around us. When you ask the obvious question, “Why are people so foolish,” only literature provides an explanation. Not TV. Not music or any popular form of entertainment. No Hollywood actor or politician, nobody has any real answers. Only Literature, because in literature, the proper amount of time is given to an idea, and the blank page is there to hear it. And in Ayn Rand’s case, time has proven her 100% correct in all aspects over half a century.
To quote the passage, the following comes from a character in Atlas Shrugged who is at a wedding party attended by very powerful people. The speech is given when questioned about the evil of money, and those that make it.
What Senate Bill 5 will do: • Makes public employee strikes illegal.
• Generally restricts the topics on which unions can bargain to wages. Police, firefighters, nurses and other public workers may still bargain for safety equipment.
• Eliminates step raises or automatic raises based on years of experience and years of training.
• Reduces seniority rights. For example, it would prohibit workers from being laid off solely because they are new.
• Bans “fair share’’ fee charged by unions for bargaining-unit members who don’t join the union or pay dues but receive negotiated pay and benefits.
• Eliminates automatic union deductions for political campaigns without employee’s written consent.
