What I found fascinating was the comments accumulated over the first 24 hours. American Thinker is widely read all over the nation, and apparently all over the world so it was interesting to get some outside perspective on how they view Issue 2, so I am posting the comments obtained over the course of the first day, because they say a lot about how a vast majority of the people truly feel. I include those comments in their entirety below. They appear as they do at the link above, but I feel they deserve their own isolation as a study specifically unique to the topic of Issue 2.
That leaves those of us with reason to vote in November to keep a law that will allow us to manage the costs of this massive Empire. Of course the members of that Empire won’t be happy. They would like that Empire to continue forever. But it can’t.
The only question is when the Empire gets dismantled, do we get the opportunity to manage it or does it collapse under its own weight? If Ohio votes to keep Issue 2, then we can avert a major economic disaster this year, while there is still time to save the structure of the services we employee in those sectors. If we do not maintain Issue 2, and lose it to the Public Union Empire, then financial catastrophe is on the horizon for every single tax payer in Ohio, because it will either require massive layoffs of public sector jobs, or major tax increases. There isn’t any middle ground.
So what will it be? I can say for myself, I will vote YES, and regardless of the outcome, I will know that I did the right thing, even if it is hard to do.
To provide testimony for everything you will read and see in this article I would like to present to you a simple game called, “The Answer is C,” presented by Doc Thompson of 700 WLW. Listen to this short little contest and study the questions and answers by the public.
When Van Jones talks about the success of Germany and China taking care of their people what he fails to mention is that China is not exactly a free country. They do not share the same values as the United States. You are not even allowed to have more than one child per family, let alone decide all other aspects of their life. And Germany is just now recovering from the fall of the Berlin Wall where the West was finally able to merge with the Soviet controlled East. Once capitalism was able to work in Germany their country began to produce again. In China it was when Hong Kong was transferred back to China from the Capitalist tendencies of England in the year 2000. Back then there was a lot of fear as to what would happen to Hong Kong under Chinese rule. Would China bring down Hong Kong into a communist province or would the communists attempt to accept Hong Kong and the great economy that was flourishing there? China decided to adapt, reluctantly, and their economy is flourishing.
But not everyone is falling for it. More and more young people are leaning in the direction of conservatism. I would say that in social representation, they are the 2 out of 5 who answered right. These people have the ability to see that there are serious errors to the social patterns that have formed around them and they are beginning to emerge, which was the topic of a recent discussion on GBTV.
This is the terrible condition people like Matt will always suffer from. Matt is a smart young man, but so are people who are progressives. I would venture to say that George Soros is smart, after all he’s a billionaire so he did something right. Van Jones is smart. Barack Obama is probably smart taken one on one. But all those people are suffering from a failed understanding built within their static patterns. Their failure comes from their education to begin with. So it’s not a matter of intelligence. I know a lot of smart people who are really, socially stupid. Some of them suffer from having traditional parents and a stable household, but try desperately to merge those values with the values they learned in public education and college and what happens is a mess of personal ideology which prevents them from seeing the obvious, because their static patterns are fundamentally broken.
Matt Clark however managed to come out of college recently much like the young people on GBTV, and they are fully aware of what is wrong and can see it clearly even if the rest of the world can’t. Even without a life of experience behind Matt, he can see the error of what Nancy Pelosi’s progressive philosophy is advocating, even though Nancy seems oblivious to her hypocrisy even as she says it.
The trouble here is that many police and firefighters seem to lean in a conservative direction politically, unlike teachers who overwhelmingly are liberal, yet all fall under the category of public service and are all guilty of the kind of explosive growth shown by Nick Gillespie from Reason Magazine.
The work rests on the 2 out of 5 to do all the work anyway. They must carry the whole burden of this failed philosophy called progressivism and replace it with what worked before progressives brought their nonsense to the whimsical Victorians of early New York City, to culturally launch the nation into a static pattern of degradation much to the pleasure of our enemies.
One of the great things about Glenn Beck is that he’s spent the money he’s made off his books, his subscriptions, and his shows and reinvested it back into the message he’s been committed to. You won’t find Glenn Beck running around with some stripper in a New York hotel,or find that he has used any of his money to abuse anybody in society. Regardless of whatever mistakes he may have made in the past, I sincerely believe the person he is today is a good person who just wants the truth, the same as me, and millions of other Americans who simply don’t like the progressive direction of our country.
A sign that Beck is achieving that success can be seen in President Obama’s new Attack Watch website, which I find disgusting, but also revealing, for it shows just how juvenile politicians as high-ranking as The President of the United States truly is. Listen to Beck discuss it from the set of his new show, totally free of any editorial censoring, which I believe has triggered this move by the president and his staff.
After I saw this episode with Beck I checked out the website for myself and the very first thing that came to my mind was the way that East Berlin used to engage in similar propaganda to prevent its people from trying to escape over into West Berlin. Obama is actively looking for dissidents to his administration so those dissidents can be targeted. Of course people like Beck will be targeted, but as I read the intent of that website it became clear that the goal of Attack Watch wasn’t so much after Glenn Beck, but it’s intended to target people like me and the material I publish on this site, which I stand behind proudly. But the nature of this type of information set my blood into a boil, so I contacted Attack Watch and turned myself in with the note shown below, which is the exact text that I sent to Barack Obama and his minions running Attack Watch.
Dear Attack Watch:
I will have to report myself. I am embarrassed at this administration and his support of public unionized labor. And he has put himself on the front line of Ohio’s Issue 2 and is very responsible for his own attacks and false information. The fact that he supports this site says everything about the guy.
Rich
Shortly after I did this I heard that Doc Thompson was covering this very issue on 700 WLW so I called in at about the 11 minute mark and confessed what I had done, that I had turned myself into Attack Watch. Doc and I had some fun at the expense of the President over his Jobs Bill and this tyrannical Attack Watch website, which the President deserves. CLICK TO LISTEN:
It has been a difficult couple of weeks, the worst of which was the news that my editor had been particularly affected when Hurricane Irene hit the East Coast. She was so affected that she was unable to continue on with the task of editing my new book, since she needs time off to recover from the damage. So the publisher is assigning me someone else, which in the world of publishing is kind of like a “blind date,” you aren’t sure how much common ground you’ll have, and whether or not the relationship will be fruitful. But that’s the nature of business. When devastation strikes people you respect and care about, your heart goes out to them, but the objectives of business must march on.
This is why ISSUE 2 is such an important law. Diana Frey was not the first and certainly not the last union leader or politician who will take advantage of their power position to enrich themselves. And she is not the first to use the static patterns of society to hide their true intentions. In fact, many of the school levies on the ballot this year are using the static patterns of social education perception, sports, college prep, real estate value to disguise the labor union looting of the public treasury where the real intent are excessive wages and benefits for their members. It has nothing to do with the education of children. ISSUE 2 will allow the dynamic elements of society, to question things that aren’t right, and bring it to the attention of those who are stuck in static thinking, which simply can’t see it.
One of the most popular art forms which exemplify this static and dynamic tendency is the film series Star Wars. When people talk about Star Wars most people will say that they enjoy the older films more than the newer films. The complaint is that the new films are boring and discuss politics too much. Well, I don’t think that’s the real reason. The real reason that people like the older films over the newer films is by design. If Lucas had come out with the new series first, Star Wars would have never been popular.The series would have died off a long time ago. The original series, episodes 4 through 6 are all about Dynamic Quality. The rebellion is a dynamic static pattern confronting the static pattern of the Evil Empire. It’s the classic struggle, the David versus Goliath principle. Goliath did not expect David to simply launch a rock to hit the much larger man in the forehead. Goliath loses because in his static pattern thought there would be a great battle, where he would use his size against the much smaller David to defeat the little man. In Star Wars the small rebellion fires one small torpedo into the giant Death Star to blow it up and end the tyrannical super weapon of the Empire. It’s all the same stuff.
But in Episodes 1 through 3, known as the Prequels, the story is all about the rise of that Empire to power. Those films are about how the good guys, stuck in a static pattern of their own, failed to see the evil of Senator Palpatine who would become Emperor of the growing Empire in his power grabs which occurred right under the noses of the well respected Jedi.
The Jedi Council with all their wisdom and sage-like understanding rooted in thousands of years of defending the Old Republic from aggressive enemies, with the ability to even read the minds of people, could not see the actions of Senator Palpatine who had befriended the Jedi Council and used that relationship against the Jedi to hide his true intentions; the destruction of the Republic and the creation of an Empire of which he would lead.
Lucas knew from experience that the public would reject the Star Wars films if he started with the collapse of a static pattern looked after by the socially good and the evil dynamic was the actual protagonist, Star Wars would not have been so accepted and loved, so he began his story with the collapse of an evil static pattern to be replaced with a dynamic good pattern. Once he had a captive audience hungry for more, he had a portion of society who was prepared to hear his message. This is the message he tried to tell in films like Apocalypse Now, and American Graffiti as well, but never quite hit the mark until he moved the story to Star Wars, a world of his own making to create the tapestry in which to tell such a complex tale that worked at many psychological levels.
One of the questions I get a lot is…………..What right do you have to say the things you do? Who do you think you are? The next is, if you’re such a great writer, why aren’t you writing for organizations like American Thinker,or other conservative publications. Well, the answer to that question is that I have. My preference however is to have creative control over my content, and when you present that material without a lot of middlemen involved, then the material has the opportunity to be more authentic.
But, for those readers here who would like to see a sample of my work from before I started this forum, here is an article from American Thinker, from back when Governor Kasich was just getting ready to run for the office in Ohio. I was reminded of this article recently, and thought it prophetic given the current battles over Issue 2 that we are all facing. So for brevity, I provide the link below to that article for your enjoyment.
Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinborough , had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years prior.
“The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:
1. From bondage to spiritual faith; 2. From spiritual faith to great courage; 3. From courage to liberty; 4. From liberty to abundance; 5. From abundance to complacency; 6. From complacency to apathy; 7. From apathy to dependence; 8. From dependence back into bondage.”
With the tragedy of 9/11 occupying almost every broadcast and social event of the weekend, the common theme which came to my mind was that I felt that the tragedy of 9/11, as terrible as it was, fails in comparison to attending a memorial service for your own country while it still lives.
As the NFL did its tribute, and the firefighters climbed to the psychological heap to lift the flag high about their heads, I thought of the unions behind those firefighters, concoctions of socialism hidden behind a mask of American Pride and I could only shake my head. “They don’t even know what they are,”I would think to myself in disgust. They have no concept of history. Their rituals are only a few generations deep and keep them stuck into a ritual that reminds them of the greatest defeat inflicted on American soil, an attack that went far deeper than buildings falling in the financial district of New York City, or even the terrible deaths which occurred there. The tragedy of the 9/11 attack is that it forced America to change, to become too introspective, and to meditate on the tragedy itself in a vain attempt at recollection.
I looked at the guy shifting gears, because the memorial event was touching and my mind was on it. “Yes, that’s right. I am that guy.”
“Well, I want to tell you, I grew up with firefighters, I’m friends with firefighters, and I stand with firefighters.”
I looked out the window as he spoke and looked at the long lines of firefighters gathered around their trucks and a group of motorcycles all propping up the American Flag from the backs, the riders showing AFL-CIO stickers on their windshields and fenders. “So because you grew up with them you have to think like them?”
The man looked at me with a challenging gaze. “I’m not looking to dispute you with a bunch of ‘fancy’ words. I just want you to know where I stand.”
The firefighters at the service I was at, along with all the armed forces personnel gave me the same feeling that I thought watching the start of all the NFL games, that the memorial we were all attending was not one for 9/11, it was for ourselves. And the events which led to that death was an elusive quality that nobody even saw coming. It is like a death by cancer as opposed to a gruesome death by a visible enemy on a remote battlefield. The death by cancer just eats you from the inside out and the death just happens quietly in a bed.
The men I was looking at were good people, but they are carrying within them something that is destroying their spirit without them even knowing it. It’s rotting them using their static patterns as camouflage. Many of them have no idea they even carry it within them, within their belief patterns which govern their lives.
On 9/11 the tragedy of The World Trade Center was just the needle which injected into the body of our American Culture a disease which would topple our society with apathy. For while we attend memorials and contemplate whether or not firefighters and police should be attached to communist philosophies in the form of labor unions, the enemy moves against us. It runs through the blood of our cultural bodies and is turning the elements of our body against itself, with the aim of destroying it.
The sad thing is, such as in the case of what that guy said to me, that he “stood with firefighters,” as though the prerequisite for supporting firefighters, teachers and police means you must support unionized labor. My question is, why can’t I support those public workers without supporting unionized labor, which is rooted in socialism? I wanted to tell that guy that, but he didn’t give me the chance. He walked off too quickly, and even if he didn’t it would have taken hours of conversation to even arrive at a place where his mind could accept what I was telling him. He is functioning from a static pattern that he spent over 40+ years forming, and that wasn’t going to change in an afternoon conversation with me.
As I watched the guy and his firefighter friends, I thought of the AIDS virus, how as HIV it attacks the immune system of the human body by disguising itself as a friend, then when it is near, it destroys the body’s ability to fight it off the virus, until it’s too late.
America has been infected, and the events of 9/11 has paralyzed America’s immune system and allowed the virus of our enemies to attack us, to overwhelm us, to turn friend against friend on a premise that was a virus to begin with.
Doc Thompson talks to Lisa Richards from Women Fighting Sexism on 700 WLW in what turned out to be a very revealing discussion that I think spills over into many other aspects of society. Ms. Richards represents a portion of the human population that has “other” problems and seeks to fix them through activism. It is evident by listening to her in this broadcast that she has a real dislike for men, who unfortunately for her make up half of the population.
My thoughts are that women like this are suffering, and I think they need help. I covered this syndrome in another article so repeating it here would be redundant. Have a look to review:
Lisa Richards is not alone, and I frequently see the footprint of her type in the radical dialogues of organized labor, particularly teachers unions and that’s where the opinion of these lost souls becomes costly. It’s not against the law to have a flawed opinion, but when you follow the origin to destructive human behavior which costs money to fix, which we find in the education profession, it is people like Richards who brought about the unintended consequences from which many suffer.
For instance, let’s look at Lisa Richards’s militant hatred of men, and her desire to prove that women can be every bit superior to men. That is the platform of her position, and has been the foundation of the women’s movement for 100 years of progressive politics. What has it given women?
I’d say women have now become every bit as disgusting and sexually driven as men. They are just as aggressive and selfish too, so from that aspect, feminists have achieved their objective which can be seen in the new football league called Lingerie Football, which airs on the progressive television network MTV. (What this has to do with music is nothing. MTV is simply the ‘progressive’ channel, designed to prepare the minds of the young in all manners of progressive politics.)
In male football, the men are well-built, they show their assets anytime they can, and they behave the same way. Football is meant to be attractive to the opposite sex. With women, they are attracted to small waists with narrow butts of men, as I pointed out in my article on sign stimuli:
Women like large shoulders and narrow hips because in the role of sex, these are the parts of the mating ritual that will hold a woman down and allow the man to enter without difficulty. A man with large hips just doesn’t fit so well, and makes sex less desirable for the woman. So women like these things, the shoulder pads and uniform of men are designed to be appealing to women as much as ad protection in the game play. That’s one of the reasons the NFL is successful, it appeals to men’s aggression, and the sign stimuli of women, so men and women can share the game together.
The Lingerie Football League must do the same if it wishes to elevate women to the same level of game play and public approval as the men in the NFL. So the LFL has learned what the WNBA never learned, and that there must be some sexual attraction to the players for people to accept the sport, because sports are a primal activity rooted in sex. At a subconscious level, sports is a way of determining who wins, and that determines the best genes which indicates who is suitable to reproduce with, so without those elements, sports loses much of its appeal. For a sport to be successful, it must appeal to both men and women to have market value. So feminists have achieved equality, because men in the NFL market their game exactly the same way.
Women are hitting each other just as hard as men do, but yes they must wear less clothing because if they are to appeal to men’s sign stimuli, which they must to be successful, the women can’t cover up their sign stimuli. So the breasts must be exposed as well as the entry points for the penis in the woman’s pelvic region. For the women, the feminists the get the satisfaction of knowing they are just as fast, just as strong as men, that they can hit hard and be respected just as men are. But for men to stay interested the costume designers for the LFL knew what they were doing and applied scientific reason to the process.
That’s how the men do it. In fact if these women didn’t look like women, I think I might even forget that they are women, but just gladiator warriors in the arena of battle. That means they have achieved social equality. The LFL is smartly marketing itself with this in mind and in just two short years it is taking on the qualities of legitimacy from its origins as a publicity stunt.
The LFL game looks like football and the pace is the same. Without the big hits, the LFL would never get away with “equality.” Flag football attempted for years to achieve what the LFL has achieved, because women can’t respect themselves as equal unless they are willing to take or give a big hit, or even fight brutally, the way men do.
So to women like Lisa Richards, you have achieved your success, you have brought women down to the same level of men, instead of goddesses to be aspired to, you and the feminist movement have made them equal to men, and your march to exceeding that mark is well on its way.
You can hear the same feminist wrangling in the labor movement, and there can be no question that much of the perceived value, and cost along with the budget breaking pay increases that society has thrown at feminists for years to help them feel “equal” in society have not placated them. They just keep asking for more.
These are the results of the feminist equality as launched by progressive politics. Like many progressive policies, there are unintended consequences. I’m sure Lisa Richards and her kind despises the LFL Football games, but it is they who made the LFL possible. And the whole process of “man hating” which launched the feminist movement and has brought women down to the level of men, and actually wrecked budgets because financial decisions are made collectively toward women as a whole, and not as individual performers. I’ve seen these feminist types littered with abundance in the Pro School Levy advocates I’ve had to deal with in many political fights. They fully expect that because they are women, that logic should not apply to them. Most of them sound just as off their rockers as Lisa Richards did. It is their psychological problems at that point that they become social pariahs, because logical discussions are no longer within reach with these broken women.
People are often shocked when they learn that my wife and I have been married for over 20 years. While most of the time it wasn’t easy, much of the trouble we have had in our marriage was due to the fact that when we were married, we made a decision to reject progressive politics, and that meant everything related to feminism. My wife has never had to work, she raised our children and when I came home each day my dinner was waiting on me. We share our household obligations in the traditional sense completely, because it is my observation that feminism doesn’t work, and deep down inside, most women don’t want it to work either. Most of any trouble my wife and I have had in our marriage were a result of family members attempting to impose upon our marriage the progressivism of the age, which I rejected as destructive very early in my life, and I would not budge, and at times those expectations from family members was very overwhelming. They did not see as I did, what the whole movement added up to, and that’s creations like the LFL. So when I raised my two daughters, I taught them the same thing, don’t listen to progressive politics even if it comes out of the mouths of treasured family members. Just look at them as sick, or senile concoctions of regressing social evolution, it will lead you down an unhappy life of unfilled expectations. I told my daughters that one of the reasons so many men are selecting women from other countries to marry and not America is because women from other countries, especially economically impoverished countries, are that foreign women tend to still believe in traditional marriage responsibilities.
I explained to my daughters that men want a partner in their life, not some radical short-haired vigilante. Men want to be pampered; they like to be cooked for. And they like a woman who stays interested in sex, and not some social “equality” thing. Once equality takes place among the sexes, a man would just as soon have sex with another man because if the whole activity of sex for them is simply ejaculation, they can do that with a man the same as a woman. But it is the woman who is the traditional “goddess” figure in culture, who thinks of the things men don’t and encourage the man to be a better human being, that challenges a man to always improve that drives society. The feminist movement has turned that whole social structure upside down and ruined it in America. That’s why men are looking for wives in other countries, where those women still believe in a traditional family structure.
So I’d say the same thing to Lisa Richards and almost every woman who chants for “equal” rights in the labor movement, what I told my own daughters, that men don’t want the kind of woman the feminists want to be. And guess what, because of this new globalism, you will have to compete with “other” women from other cultures who still believe in traditional values. In fact my oldest daughter had to go to England to find a man who still thought the way I do about family, valor and being an honorable man, because the United States isn’t making them anymore.
Ultimately, that is the anger you hear in Ms. Richards voice, that her beliefs have led her down a path of loneliness, and her life will always have a lack of fulfillment in it. Her only real option will be to find companionship in another woman, which will always lack real sexual fulfillment because even with sex toys and other techniques, the experience just isn’t the same. And she will never find a man of any real passion because men who have passion are either already taken by another woman, or a man will simply grab a plane and fly to another country to get a nice looking woman who doesn’t have a bunch of stupid hang-ups.
Meanwhile, as America finally achieves “equality” in the 100 year war of feminism, men who just want to have sex with other women, it’s never been easier, so they are happy. They can now watch football and see plenty of the fine attributes of a woman without even having to do any work to see it. And this cheapens the whole ritual of sex for men, which makes them lazy, and less of a man. I would never advocate an age where men were free to beat on a woman with impunity like what happens in the Muslim culture, which these same feminists are advocating mysteriously due to their beliefs in progressive politics. There was a time where men in American culture played straight into the feminist hands with binge drinking and treating their wives badly, which is a crime in and of itself. But the baby in this case was thrown out with the bath water. Feminism has been terrible for American culture and the people who advocate feminism are extremely expensive as public servants because they expect to use money to fill aspects of their lives where a penis is missing. And that’s a shame, because every woman should have the honor of experiencing the wonder of sex with a man who truly loves her. And every woman should witness the benefit of watching a man work all day and all night just to have the honor of pressing himself and his pheromones upon her, and to know that he had to earn that right and does not take it lightly, which brings added meaning to the entire ritual, and actually elevates the consciousness of the human race in the bliss of an enchanting evening.
The most accurate emotion to articulate when schools ask for more tax money is one of humor and can be seen in the following video.
Before I get into the details of last my recent debate with the Pro Lakota Group remember our buddy Ryan Fahrenkamp, the Lakota teacher busted for child pornography and being a pedophile? See my article that I broke back in January here, the one that all the Pro Levy people accused me of being such a “rush to judgment,” “unfair,” and “inaccurate.” Read what I said……………..way back then.
Now read what happened on September 1, 2011 while I was preparing for a small debate with Sandy Wheatley of the Yes Lakota Group at the Lakota West Freshman building.
I will deal with Fahrenkamp in a separate article because the debate with the Pro Levy faction at Lakota deserves an extensive mention here. I only bring up the Fahrenkamp case because Sandy Wheatley chose not to deal with facts and figures in her debate with me, but with bible quotes, taking the high moral ground, as though money spent equaled quality. As she spoke I couldn’t help but wonder why she was placing the entire teaching profession on such high moral ground when one of Lakota’s ex-teachers had just confessed to taking “inappropriate pictures” of a child during an out-of-state trip.
“Ryan Brant Fahrenkamp, 42, of Mason, plead guilty to child pornography charges in U.S. district court, according to court records. Fahrenkamp was arrested at his home by FBI agents and local police in January. Fahrenkamp was a teacher at Lakota Schools for 14 years, most recently teaching at Endeavor Elementary School in West Chester Twp.
Fahrenkamp admitted to keeping child pornography on his school-issued laptop and also to taking inappropriate photos of a former male student during an out-of-state trip, according to court documents.”
I would have thought that Mrs. Wheatley would have taken some sort of position on this activity since she showed her extensive knowledge of bible verses, but instead she focused her whole speech on attempting to use the Bible to disqualify the “facts” she knew I would present. I was extremely disappointed by this approach, because taking the high road and using the Bible for some sort of political advantage seems cheap, but then not attempting to separate the levy campaign from Ryan Fahrenkamp on the day of his admission seemed either naive, assuming she didn’t know the news yet, or manipulative in that she attempted to talk around it. Because when the statement is made that we need to invest in our schools, someone on the Pro Levy side needs to articulate a plan for how to detect and remove people like Fahrenkamp in the future. Because there are others out there, just look at the Stacy Schuler case in Mason, the district next door.
You can see that debate between Mrs. Wheatley and myself here:
Sometimes the only way to see the clowns of society is to go to a circus, and in a lot of ways these kinds of political forums are just that. People often think that they are worthless exchanges, so intelligent people tend to stay away from the circus of politics. But like I’ve said recently to a friend of mine who was questioning the validity of these types of events, you go to the circus to see the clowns, and that’s how you learn what they’re up to. If intelligent people don’t get involved and actually go to the circus sometimes that leaves the clowns free to not even put on a show, so they come up with other schemes to fill their time. The game in the circus act is this, when a politician doesn’t have an answer, they seek to attack the data and inject emotion into the argument, and this can be seen by the efforts of the Pro Levy group. This is precisely why education is so expensive, because many of the decisions are not based on facts, but on emotion. We are asked to suspend all logic and not apply the same rules that we might apply to paying our electric bill or some other serious matter. We are just supposed to pay the increased tax but not question how the money is spent.
My biggest rage of the evening came from Jamie Green one of the school board candidates during the Q&A phase. (I’ll have video up of that soon.) Jamie, a former school board member from back in 2005, attacked my data too. I submitted a question to ask her how, but there wasn’t time to get to it in the forum. “You have to be careful what information you get out there,” she said of my material.
So Jamie officially eliminated herself from my support, in fact I’d say that if Lakota had someone like Jamie Green on the school board that would be the event which what would take Lakota backwards. It’s certainly not my charts.
Why is Jamie Green and Sandy Wheatley upset with my “FACTS,” those elusive numbers that speak some strange language from a far-away land called “reality.” Why did they sit in the audience and huff and puff as I spoke flustering about like fish out of water, well, because those facts show that more money does not make a better school. As shown in this spreadsheet, which came from the presentation shown in the video, money spent does not amount to quality. Here is a list of many school districts in Southern Ohio all with different rates of spending per pupil and of many different ratings.
This next graph is the same date but shown differently, it takes away the names but instead plots their position in relation to the cost spent and the results gained. As shown, there is no behavior which indicates more money is justified. If what Jamie and Sandy are saying is true, then Princeton who spends $15,922 per pupil should easily be an Excellent with Distinction district, because they spend the most money. But they only rank at “Effective.” On the other hand Bethel-Tate Local spends $7,167 per pupil but they have the same ranking as Lakota. Lakota spends $9,806 to get that same rating. By the logic of Jamie Green and Sandy Wheatley all the schools at the top of their per pupil cost should be Excellent with Distinction, yet many aren’t. Look at Winton Woods who is spending $12,636, they are spending a lot of money, near the top of the list, yet they are at the bottom of the category rating.
Instead, Jamie Green and Sandy Wheatley will say,“don’t pay any attention to Mr. Hoffman’s facts. It’s all a matter of ‘interpretation’” and graphs can be made to say anything. Really? What these apologists are doing is hope that they can capture people’s minds with Bible quotes and some kind of former school board “experience” where the typical behavior is to bow to a labor union who behaves like a bottomless pit in funding demands. They are doing the same thing with this levy issue that they did when Ryan Farhenkamp was busted for child pornography. They talk out of both sides of their mouth. When a child pedophile, who worked 14 years in the school system, ironically under Jamie Green’s watch while she was a board member, pleads guilty to the charges, the Pro Levy people say “you can’t assume all teachers are bad because of the actions of one teacher!” Then they turn around and say, “Teachers need to collectively make ‘X’ amount of dollars to qualify your school district to be an ‘Excellent with Distinction’ school.“ They will then say that all teachers should be taken as a collective unity of quality. So which is it, independent assessment or collective altruism, because they can’t have it both ways?
As Sandy Wheatley basically said in her presentation that anybody can take selected sections of some information and paint it anyway they want to, which is what she was accusing me of doing with my “mysterious” graphs and “technical data.” She picked the story of when “Judas hanged himself,” from Mathew 27 then another quote of the “go and do likewise” portion of the Bible which is from Luke 10:37. She picked totally unrelated parts of the Bible to make her point, but she also sought to use that body of work to claim a moral high ground which is traditionally beyond refute. Well, I’ve read Biblical Archeology Review for over thirty years and I have about 21 volumes of the Biblical Encyclopedia of the Holy Bible, so I know a bit about the Bible myself. I read the actual book about 5 times before I was out of high school, and I have seen this kind of thing done many, many times by politicians, even within the Bible itself, where they think they have a right to use a Holy Book to shield some kind of truth, and that makes me VERY angry. Of course those stories aren’t even related to each other and that was her point. This is great insight into how the Pro Levy people and the school system in general operate. They do just as Sandy Wheatley did, they select the stats they like and ignore all the rest, just like those completely unrelated sections of the Bible, and they assume that I am doing the same thing, which I would consider unspeakable. This is precisely what they did with Ryan Fahrankamp, news that broke the same day they were pleading their case why they needed another tax levy. Instead they gave an emotional appeal that just dealt with the facts they are prepared to deal with. I would think that anyone who wishes to use the Bible in a political position would also take a hard stand against the extreme “sin” of one Ryan Fahrankamp. But in this circus of politics, that’s not what the show is about.
I would say further that it is this very tendency that gets Pro Levy Supporters into trouble with the labor unions and puts the district in a weak position with those labor negotiations. The union does deal with facts and employee mass and they routinely out-maneuver the more emotion Pro Levy types every time and to hide their sins, the Pro Levy people resort to words like “morality” and “good for the community” without ever defining how throwing more money at an obviously broken education system ran by a public union empire can somehow be redeemed through the sacrifice of yet more tax dollars.
The reason is because their foundation arguments are corrupt with the premise that the school itself is the guiding light in a child’s life, instead of just an important social and cultural aspect. If you go back to that chart and see which schools are failing, even with extraordinary amounts of money spent, you will see districts that are statistically high for single parent households,welfare recipients, and other “entitlement culture victims” and the children coming from those communities cannot be saved by the school. That is the real crime and the solitary fact that the Pro Levy people do not wish to answer. Just like they can’t face themselves in a mirror and take responsibility for not detecting that a pedophile was allowed to take a child on an out-of-state school sponsored event which put the child in danger, because the school itself failed to recognize the danger. There was not a value system put in place to assess teachers by merit, so administrators didn’t even bother with the frustrating task of posing the question to the labor union. The mountain is too steep to climb, so everybody avoids it. That’s how someone like Fahrankamp falls through the cracks.
The failure in all of this is not being able to diagnose the problem, because the Pro Levy people have a system of belief which rejects hard data in favor of emotion, because it is emotion which allows them to overlook the hard data that is all around them to detect the Ryan Farhankemp’s of the world before the danger ever happens. For the same reason they won’t look at the data I present, because the reality of what that data tells them is something those people are not emotionally equipped to deal with, so they hide their beliefs in the scattered quotes of a Bible without understanding the meaning of the whole body of work, and they’ll insult the intelligence of those of us who know better by suggesting that nobody look at the man behind the curtain. They want you to stay focused on the image, not the content and that would be fine if this were all just a visit to a movie theater where we are supposed to suspend belief for a couple of hours. But this is millions of dollars, and the lives of many, many people and such seriousness requires detailed analysis and honesty, even when mistakes are made, so that the entire community can move forward without the infantile desires of former school board members to have once again a “name plate” which bears her name in some illusionary honor.
All this amounts to is that you are not supposed to ask any hard questions or even look at the facts. But you’re supposed to sit quietly and watch the clowns in the circus do their silly tricks and not question the motivations of the personalities behind the face paint, or even why so many of them are packed into one car in some comic diatribe. Because what the real show is truly about is money, and protecting that money with some mild entertainment to keep the audiences placated as to the bona fide show that is going on behind the scenes. Such behavior has been the act for decades, so it won’t change overnight, but for me personally, I’m tired of all the clowning around that has been going on, and I’m ready to see the school walk a tight rope instead, and display the ability to balance themselves in a more serious portion of the show that is ultimately a circus.
When I think of Progress Ohio I think of people like Darryl Hanna who was just arrested protesting a new oil pipe line into Canada. When I listen to her speak, I wonder how she knows to pick up food on a dining utensil to place it in her mouth. Her thought process and values don’t make sense to me.
I truly don’t mean that in a derogatory way. I don’t understand what those types of people are thinking. They are obviously lacking in a fundamental understanding of how the world works and they are primarily ruled by just emotion and a limited understanding of history.
As August closed I was wondering if I was going to hit 80,000 views by the end of the month on my Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom site, and as it turned out, by the time I learned about Darryl Hanna being arrested at the White House for her protest, I saw that my numbers had easily went over that number, to something like 82,000. That reminded me that there are a lot of people stopping by and reading what I put down here. Many of them are on the right side of things, yet there are many others who aren’t.
I have been aware that Progress Ohio is one of those groups making up part of that 80,000 who thinks the exact opposite about most things as I do. So it isn’t a surprise to me that they’d attempt to take something I do here and twist it around to suit their purpose, after all that’s what they do. They mislead, manipulate, and make a lot of noise in a way similar to a child. The purpose is to achieve their objectives, at any cost.
Before I break down below how ridiculous their notion of compromise is I must deal with their attempt to be misleading. The labor movement types are so focused on this whole “compromise” issue in relation to S.B.5 and John Kasich that they can’t see anything else. So they look for evidence of “others” who agree with them so they can make their argument. One of those “others” I would have never dreamed would be Bill Cunningham of 700 WLW, a person I would have thought would be their arch nemesis. But as the reality of what was happening with S.B.5 unfolded, there are a sector of society who love politics and S.B.5 is essentially an anti-politics bill as much as it’s a reform of collective-bargaining, leaving Cunningham not sure how to deal with it. After all, the guy has built his life around politics, so as Kasich has said many times in the last 6 months, his goal isn’t just to pass laws and balance the budget, but it was to bring a fundamental culture change to how politics operates. So Progress Ohio suddenly found a friend in Bill Cunningham which they attempted to expose by using this clip of video from one I created.
My original video was over 15 minutes long, and I put it below for reference. Progress Ohio took only the section where an argument broke out between Kasich and Cunningham over how to deal with the union. Progress Ohio doesn’t ask if the idea of discussion or compromise is right or wrong. They simply move along with the assumption that if a majority of the people feel a certain way, then it’s “good.” So they take the fact that Bill Cunningham is on their side to validate their claims, and used it to their advantage.
Here’s the complete interview. They left a lot out. Kasich said he’s heard their concerns, and this was after two weeks of testimony. He said it’s time to do some things and to stop talking. I’ll cover this issue in greater detail below.
Kasich and Cunningham have been close friends and Bill appears to have assumed that Kasich was planning to participate in politics as usual, so the breakdown of their friendship that has occurred on the air has been interesting. This first interview of two since Kasich has been governor was the one that Progress Ohio used and Kasich seemed to feel betrayed by Cunningham during the conversation so many of his comments were taken in the defense of that betrayal. Kasich had after all told Bill on an interview in January exactly what he was planning to do, and Bill seemed to be on board. So a few months later Kasich came to the studio to try again to make amends with his friend, and again Cunningham took the union position which put Kasich on the defensive. This broadcast was in April.
This whole premise of “compromise” is a flawed one. Kasich apparently thinks much the way I do on this issue and being a man of action, and not one of political talk is something Bill Cunningham was not prepared to deal with psychologically. So there’s a lot going on here. See my article about Static and Dynamic patterns to understand my references in this explanation. CLICK THE LINK:
Cunningham is stuck in a Static Pattern of accepted politics and that is obvious. He’s certainly not alone in this matter, so he is facing a Dynamic Static change in what Kasich represents, and it’s a painful process. Eventually, Cunningham will come to understand what Kasich is trying to do, just as many others will too. Kasich is bringing permanent changes to the Static Pattern of politics which will result in a culture change of politics in Ohio. Any group or individuals that are clinging to the Static Patterns of current politics will of course be threatened by the changes being implemented by S.B.5.
However, people like Darryl Hanna and Progress Ohio are people suffering from being stuck in a Static Pattern that is fundamentally flawed. They believe that just because things have always been a certain way in their lifetimes that they deserve to always have those things for all time in the future. Such a notation is rooted in selfishness, a sense of Freudian ID that is short-sighted.
I recognize that labor unions are a part of American life, and my attitude is that if they can survive in a private business, like in sports, or entertainment, then fine. But if they ruin your manufacturing capacity as a country, state or city, as they’ve done in places like Pittsburg, Akron, and Detroit then unions are terrible.
I enjoyed the film by Michael Moore called Roger and Me where he stumbled around Flint, Michigan wondering where all the jobs went. Moore represented a segment of the population that just can’t seem to think beyond raw emotion by asking the question “is it fair.” Moore blamed the loss of jobs in Flint, Michigan on the CEO’s of General Motors and their vast wealth and his solution was to have those CEO’s give up their wealth so that the “working man” could share in that wealth. But this premise is flawed because if all that wealth was put in the hands of a “working man” they would tend to spend that money on alcohol, marijuana, strippers, and other destructive behavior. I’ve seen that behavior first hand. I’ve personally seen $10,000 dollar bills placed into the hands of “working men” on Friday only to have that money gone on Monday, all of the money wasted on lap dances and orgies in strip joints. And I don’t base this whole issue on just one or two people, but many, many people over the years. The reason for this is that the minds of these people do not think the same way as those CEO’s. While it’s true that the CEO may hire “high class escorts” they won’t do it till they have invested their money first to generate a replacement of what they spend on women, boats, cars and expensive vacations for their mistresses.
The fundamental difference between the CEO and the “working man” that Moore was screaming at in his film is that the CEO is planning for tomorrow where the “working man” is just thinking about the next pay check. This is a fundamental difference in the behavioral Static Patterns of the two groups and there isn’t a “collective entity” on this plant that can change this fact because the flaw is in what creates the Static Pattern’s of those two groups.
Unions came to America as vehicles for communism. That is a fact, it is indisputable. It is also indisputable that Ronald Reagan the great Republican had applied to become a member of the Communist Party of America when he was young and idealistic and infected with the same spongy mind as Darryl Hanna and the Static Pattern belief system of Hollywood. Reagan was in fact a union leader and the unions were in fact communist organizations and to this day communist sympathizers reside in these groups.
I’ve been on motorcycle runs with other bikers who are “big labor lovers” and I’ve felt sorry for them because they wear shirts and bandanas with American flags on them and believe that their participation in a union makes them American, unions are in fact the complete opposite of everything America was intended to be, and those poor people are stuck in a Static Pattern rooted in a belief system created by out-right communists. So their entire foundation, their entire belief system is essentially flawed, and now that many of these people are “entitlement babies” they know of nothing else. To change the Static Pattern of these people it would require them to go through a violent personal crises, much like Bill Cunningham is going through. Kasich is the Dynamic Pattern colliding with the Static Pattern in Cunningham. Neither is wrong, but one is stuck and one is moving.
So when Progress Ohio demands that there should be compromise, I am reminded of all the times in the past that there were opportunities for this so-called compromise. I haven’t seen it. I’ve seen teachers go on strike for just asking them to pay $5 more on their health care. So when the intention is to change this culture of consumption, which the unions tend to represent, where the reputation is one of “it’s our way or the highway” then I don’t blame Kasich for his attitude. He did speak with them, but like me, he knew the strategy of the union would be to drag this whole culture change out for years and in turn that would take the edge off the need for a change, to preserve the Static Pattern. Kasich knows that if he doesn’t hit it hard and fast that it won’t happen. He knows this because he’s the Dynamic Pattern trying to merge with a Static Pattern that will do everything in its power to resist any change.
I would say that public unions shouldn’t even be legal to begin with. It is an insane concept to have public officials funded by tax payers represented by a union. By John Kennedy was the one who signed that Executive Order in 1963 and it was Kennedy who was a Dynamic Pattern colliding with the Static Pattern that resisted the growth of unions to begin with. That’s what the entire sixties were, an assault on Static Patterns by a Dynamic one, and in order to fix the error of that time it will take the same kind of effort to return to a period before these mistakes were made. This is why Darryl Hanna and Progress Ohio seem so similar, they are focused on preserving a Static Pattern established in the turbulence of the 60’s, and they have no reference in their lives that tells them their position is incorrect because they don’t have minds grounded in history. Their beliefs are in the collective beliefs of the current Static Pattern which is destructively incorrect and built on a foundational philosophy that is fundamentally un-American.
For those of you stuck in that Static Pattern and read this scratching your head and wondering what I’m talking about, I sympathize. I watched my dog observe me the other day laughing at something that happened on TV. The dog was completely oblivious to the events going on inside the television screen. The dog does not have a mind to see or understand anything outside of its present reality. It simply reacted to my laughter, not what I was laughing at. I patted the dog on the head and felt sorry for the fact that the poor creature could not understand such things, and I throw him a dog treat so that at least the animal could share in my joy even in some remote way. I’ve attempted to do the same with people in the labor movement, until I realized that like the dog, they never seem to get full, and will always ask for a new dog treat because they are trying to compensate for all the things happening in the world that they don’t understand, so they look to money to fill them in a similar way. I sympathize; it must be terrible to have such a limited perspective.
The Overmanwarrior 