Naturally I get a lot of email that is derogatory in nature. Taking the positions I have on issues tends to draw attention from the empire builders who drape themselves particularly from the mantles of public service. A good many of those emails I can’t share, because they are too mindless, derogatory, or simply vile. But one email I received and the banter between this guy and myself I would consider to be an interesting study of psychology.
Mike Stefanov has sent you a message On Tue, Sep 27, 2011:
You have some good messages but you really devalue them with statements such as this; “When they want to be paid well, they all stick together. But when one messes up and does something stupid, like the pedophile at Lakota, then the teachers act like he acted alone and they should not be judged because of him. So which is it? All for one and one for all………..or, judged by independent merit?)”
Your insinuation that the pedophile may not have acted alone is deplorable. You should be ashamed to equate other teachers with the trash of a pedophile. Your message is getting lost by some of your attacks on teachers. I think that you would have many more sympathizers to your cause if you did not spew the vile hared that you so often do. Putting all teachers in the same basket with the other pedophiles is classless. It would be like someone putting all Catholic priests together because there have been a few that have abused kids. Pedophiles can be found in every walk of life and in every occupation. Keep spewing your hatred and your message will soon be falling on deaf ears.
On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 12:29 PM, Rich Hoffman wrote:
Don’t count on it but thanks for the comment. In the case of that particular teacher, people knew what he was up to, and didn’t say anything. That doesn’t make them as bad as the pedophile, but they aren’t innocent either. The statement was a general statement on collectivism, but your interpretation is fascinating.
Keep in touch,
Rich
Mike Stefanov wrote:
Rich,
Thank you for the reply back. Just FYI; it was the Lakota SD that brought this particular pedophile to the attention of the authorities. If it were not for some at Lakota that alerted the authorities, this sick teacher may still be amongst the students.
As I alluded to in the other email, some of your messages are good but do not cause them to be viewed as untruthful by distorting the facts that you are presenting. Smart people will see through your distortion of facts. I view myself as a Libertarian but the bending of facts can be construed in the wrong way. Your enthusiasm can be commended but it must be tempered with truthfulness. I do not appreciate your attacks on teachers that actually are honest and hard working. I see through your distorted message. Keep bending the truth and spewing hatred and the message will be lost. History will back me up on this. Ronald Reagan must be turning in his grave when he sees what the GOP has become.
Mike Stefanov
On Tue, Sep 27, 2011 at 5:37 PM, Rich Hoffman wrote:
Good points, Mike. I’ll keep those views in mind and in perspective.
Thanks,
Rich
(Now here comes the going south portion)
On Wed, Sep 28, 2011 at 7:57 AM, Mike Stefanov wrote:
You do that, Rich. Keep those views in mind. I am one that may have given you support but will not because of the manner in which you degrade teachers. I have been fortunate to have had good teachers. Teachers have made a positive influence on my life and they have had a positive role in the life of my children as well. There are some bad teachers but there are many more that are good. Bad and incompetent workers can be found in every occupation. Education is not alone in this.
I have been blessed that I have had a good life and have been able to afford just about whatever I want to. I have an income that is in the 99th percentile. I have a nice home. A lot of this success can be traced back to having quality teachers. From what I can glean about you it appears that you are most likely unemployed and have had bad experiences in school. If you are employed you occupation is most likely menial and you more than likely have a middling income. This misfortune has caused you to become bitter. If you think that the Lakota SD is so poor and you don’t like it, just move to an area that would be more to your liking and more affordable for you. In the meantime, don’t continue your attempts to lessen the quality of the schools. Additionally, you are having a negative impact on the value of my home and that is not welcomed by me. The amount of additional taxes that I will pay is nothing compared to the amount that my home will depreciate by because nobody wants to move to either Liberty Twp or West Chester due to a school system that is subpar.
Believe it or not, I like minimal government. I am a Libertarian. I don’t like any more than you do. However there are no free lunches and paying for a quality school system is money that is well spent.
Mike
Rich Hoffman Replied:
You were doing so well, Mike, then you had to come back with that. I am certainly not unemployed, or underfunded. That’s cute that you’d make that assumption. As for school, I don’t think it does enough and gets in the way of the ambitious. I wouldn’t say I had bad experiences or good ones in school. I think it wastes the time of children to create jobs for the adults. I find it hard to believe that you are in the top 1% with your beliefs.
Bitter, me? I’m not bitter about much of anything. Don’t confuse lack of respect for bitterness.
The Cincinnati Enquirer did a tremendous piece on the front page of its paper which explored the reason behind the rash of tax resistant school board candidates running for positions all over Cincinnati. Michael Clark had interviewed me for that article weeks ago and had put a lot of work into gathering the scope of personalities in the article. You can read that article here for reference: CLICK THE LINK.
Shortly after my talk with Doc Thompson I met with Tiffany Teasley of Fox 19 for an interview about the new Lakota Levy. The Yes Lakota people were launching the first of their MOVE FORWARD seminars later that night and Tiffany wanted to know what I thought about it. You can see that interview at the link below.
I told Tiffany exactly what the Yes Lakota people would say hours before she even had the opportunity to interview them. “They’ll say that they need this levy passed so Lakota can move FORWARD. Without the money they’ll fall backwards. Yet they can’t explain to anybody why. They just ask for money to be tossed into a bottomless pit as if by burning the money, education will move forward.” I knew what would be said because it’s the same tired public union rhetoric that has been used and proven false for decades. The assumption by public unions is that taxes can always be increased to fund excessively high expectations.
Off camera, Tiffany asked me, “So how do you view your role in this levy, this time around? I remember last time they (Pro Levy Lakota) accused the No Lakota People of just saying “no,” and not offering any solutions,” Tiffany asked.
“Issue 2 is the kind of solution I had in mind, and once the election was over, I started talking to elected representatives about creating legislation that would fix the problem. That was the start of Senate Bill 5, which would become Issue 2. I was not alone in this as many others did the same thing contacting their representatives and demanding something be done. It was not created by some evil Republican conspiracy in some oppressive mountain of doom, where busting unions was the goal. It was started by people like me who asked our elected officials to provide relief from the incessant tax requests by cost overruns in the public sector. Kasich is simply doing what people like me asked him to. Shannon Jones wrote the bill listening to her constituents, who are simply sick of politics as usual and want an end to it. I know it because I know most of the people who were giving her an earful of complaints about this constant barrage of school levies year after year after year, and no matter how much money we give them, they find a way to spend a nickel more. That has to stop and Shannon listened to her constituents, at least the ones who bothered to let her know.”
Most of the people supporting a repeal of Issue 2 are people who profit from the squandering that has been going on. As I came back to my office after speaking with Tiffany, Bill Cunningham was stating that he would support a repeal of Issue 2 and that he stood with public workers. Cunningham like many of the cops and firefighters he’s defending have lived well off the government, so he really has no choice but to take a position against Issue 2.Through his legal work, and his wife who is a current Judge in Cincinnati, he has been a benefactor of public service, and cannot take a hard stand against it now, so he is part of that 50% who still support repealing Issue 2. But as the facts of the matter continue to come out, and it is realized that the public union position against Issue 2 is simply airless rhetoric, as credible as the Move Forward Campaign at Lakota, and dozens upon dozens of other schools all across Ohio, people are waking up.
Over the next month some of those 50% will either convert their vote to a Yes for Issue 2 out of the guilt they feel deep inside, or they won’t show up to vote, unable to vote against themselves. Because good people will emerge in the final hours of Issue 2 and do the right thing. As more facts reveal the true extent of the public sector union abuse, the good among them will do the right thing and that gap will narrow even closer as the election looms near. The days where public unions rule our community budgets is over, because like I told Tiffany on the delightful autumn breeze that carried my voice during our interview, “It used to be that the school levies would just keep coming and coming and coming until they finally pass them. After all, that’s what’s happening here in Cincinnati. Well, I can say for myself, that if Issue 2 does not pass, then the public unions will see it come back again, and again and again, until it does pass, because we will not take no for an answer. Reforms of public service will occur now, or in the future, but reforms will occur.”
Herman Cain is my pick of the Republicans so far running for the 2012 election and I think he’s black. I didn’t consider his skin color until Morgan Freeman made me think of it. As I watched the Freeman interview I said to the TV, “Hey, wait. That’s not true, Herman Cain is black. The Tea Party is trying to replace a black progressive with a black conservative. It has nothing to do with the word, ‘blackness.’” It’s more like replacing someone who can’t do the job with someone who can. I like Cain because he has more experience than our current president and he seems to understand the concept of limited government. Virtually everyone agrees that our tax system need reforming, including President Obama, and Cain has a plan. It’s called the ‘9-9-9’ tax plan. Check it out!
Saturday Night Live did a skit involving Herman Cain as an “unelectable” candidate. They also made fun of the fact that Cain was the CEO of Godfather Pizza, as if that “small” amount of experience did not qualify Cain for the Presidency. As I watched and considered the two weekend comments together I could not help but conclude that the “Progressive Machine” was functioning with full steam applied. Many in the media are afraid of Cain, because he is a black man, and he’s articulate, quite intelligent and he has a plan to straighten out an actual chaotic situation of government with solutions. That makes Progressives nervous because they need chaos to survive.
I was happy to see that Herman Cain won the Florida Straw Pole. The reason for these debates is to show who the strong candidates truly are over time, and Cain is emerging as one of the stronger candidates even though the orthodox media and political machines wish those candidates to be Mitt Romney or Rick Perry. You see, the static patterns of society know what to do with people like Perry and Romney, and the media has already decided they will not allow Ron Paul a seat at the table even though Paul is a fantastic candidate. But Herman Cain is fresh, and Presidential. And he’s a black man. The only knock against Cain (according to the media) is that he’s a conservative.
In Milgram’s first set of experiments, 65 percent (26 of 40)[1] of experiment participants administered the experiment’s final massive 450-volt shock, though many were very uncomfortable doing so; at some point, every participant paused and questioned the experiment, some said they would refund the money they were paid for participating in the experiment.
Milgram summarized the experiment in his 1974 article, “The Perils of Obedience”, writing: The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous importance, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.
Ordinary people, simply doing their jobs, and without any particular hostility on their part, can become agents in a terrible destructive process. Moreover, even when the destructive effects of their work become patently clear, and they are asked to carry out actions incompatible with fundamental standards of morality, relatively few people have the resources needed to resist authority.[3]
The crimes of humanity have always been perpetrated by that 65%, those mindless followers who are too timid to think for themselves. It is they who prop up the dictator, the authority figure and open the door to tyranny time and time again. They were there to collapse the Roman Empire, to crumble Egyptian Civilization, to cause Japan into Feudal conflict. They followed Genghis Khan into a conquest of the East. They propped up the expansion of Napoleons’ Empire. Those 65% have committed enormous evils upon the face of the Earth because they were too lazy to think, and submitted too easily to authority.
Shiva; Sanskrit Śiva, meaning “auspicious one”) is a major Hindu deity, and is the destroyer god or transformer among the Trimurti, the Hindu Trinity of the primary aspects of the divine. God Shiva is a yogi who has notice of everything which happens in the world and is the main aspect of life.
I learned about these types of magicians in 1992 when I sat on the steps of the Westin Hotel in downtown Cincinnati and watched Bill Clinton give his acceptance speech. I had supported Ross Perot and it was the Perot vote which split the Republican Party and allowed “Slick Willie” to become president. You see, it was not the present day which produced this new “anti-government” movement. It was alive and well in the Westin Hotel and the lobby was full of others just like me who were sick of the sell-outs of Bush Senior, and the con artists like Slick Willie. While Reagan provided a short reprieve from the corruption anxiety, which started with Lynden Banes Johnston, Nixon, then Carter, people like me had enough, and we wanted Ross Perot as president, not Slick Willie. The people gathered in the Westin Hotel, along with thousands all over America that night were beginning to call themselves the “Reform Party” which was the seed for what would become the Tea Party 15 years later.
Meanwhile, also funded by people like Soros, and the American taxpayer, the other arms of Shiva are working another angle to weaken the resolve of the average American. Here Stephen Lerner tells his union followers how to create a crisis so they can gain power, which is a strategy Clinton mastered during his presidency, and Obama has been successful as well. They’ve employed it well even when progressives did not even have a representative in the White House. Progressives have used this very strategy to completely baffle George Bush Sr. and George W. Bush overwhelming them strategically forcing them to act in foolish ways using these very same strategies in the legislative process.
Lerner now that the Tea Party has been exposing the progressive methods, is using outright intimidation as the next level of defense. After all, that’s how they advanced their position in the first place, through the 60’s radicalism. The Delphi Technique outlined by Saul Alinsky says that the middle-class, the true middle-class do not have the stomach for conflict and will avoid it at great cost. It is they who Lerner seeks to appeal to, by threatening them with violence, then by also appealing to their sensibilities. Lerner is basically saying to the middle-class, “We are you, and will fight on your behalf. So go back to sleep, we’ll take care of things.”
All these different arms of Shiva can be confusing and require all of us to develop the ability to watch all arms at the same time to understand what the intention of the whole magic trick is. Here my buddy Matt Clark explains how the left is using all this power to gain social change. Some of the big names he’s talking about are people like Bill Clinton, people like Al Gore, and people like Barry Obama to fulfill the agenda Stephen Lerner is advocating. The goal of that agenda is a weakening of the United States by yes, even a President, for the greater goal, or at least how progressives interpret it to be, which is a one world government that functions under socialism. That is why Bill Clinton refused to say that Democrats need to also learn to compromise. This is also why he mentioned that the Governor of Indiana was his friend even thought that particular Governor is a hard lined Republican. Clinton was showing that he can “compromise” and reach “consensus” but he did so by still painting one side as completely and morally wrong. That’s why we call him “Slick Willie.” Notice how Van Jones uses almost the same language as Bill Clinton. Is that an accident? No……..they all study the same literature and get their money from the same sources.
And if there is any doubt as to how to how low Bill Clinton will stoop, and what moral code he lives by, look beyond the sharp “blue” backdrops which are designed to appeal to the visual respectability of his Clinton Global Initiative to the real man behind the mouth.
In studying this particular arm of Shiva, know what that arm represents. So I am placing here for your convenience a review of the life of Bill Clinton for your enjoyment in a much-needed revisit to the lack of integrity that man has not only for himself, his family, but his nation. He only wants to be powerful, loved and remembered for something important. He is looking to the United Nations for some level of immortality in which to hide his many crimes over a great many years.
But Clinton is just an arm of this Shiva which truly seeks the destruction of American in order to give birth to something else. If you dare attempt as “they” do, those progressives, Shiva may be the destroyer to those of us who like America the way it’s been. But Shiva is also the transformer, the facilitator of rebirth which will bring the world to a new awakening of socialism. In their minds socialism will work if there isn’t any competition among any nation, for that has been the missing piece. Socialism could not work so long as all the nations of the world sought to come to the United States to live so they can be free. But if that freedom were removed, then the people of the world would have no choice but to stay put, and adopt for their own good, the socialism sponsored by the United Nations, by a President from the United States who will for the first time in history rise above his country to help lead the world to a greater good for all, the ultimate altruism of justice and compassion, where Shiva, and Mohammed, and even Jesus Christ will sit at a table together and be at peace.
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.
Let me guess. The pro union faction will declare the new report that Andrew Biggs from the American Enterprise Institute just released is false, which states clearly that public sector workers are being paid 43.4% more than private sector positions, and that many of the costs are the type of secondary costs that many in the private sector don’t even consider because they are only known in public sector service. The unions instead will declare that all the information contained in that report is somehow misleading and concocted by the “evil John Kasich” from his throne of power. (This shows what a poor grasp on reality those people function from)
That’s why I’m putting up the original video of Andrew Biggs where he explains how he arrived at the information and discusses how other information that had been floating around prior to this report is fundamentally wrong due to several errors of judgment, which this report corrected.
Public workers even if they gave back half of all their benefits to the taxpayers in order to be more equal would STILL be out ahead of everyone who pays their salary. That is where all the hidden costs of state budgets are. They get lost in the chaos of big government and explain why those employees are so expensive. The more government workers there are, the less efficient they are, because personal accountability is decreased. That is the subject of this Doc Thompson discussion on 700 WLW in a recent broadcast where he reveals how inaccurate states have been in issuing unemployment insurance. Doc continues on to discuss the new AEI report after this stunning revelation. The terrible performance discussed in this broadcast could be translated to virtually any form of government. This is the problem with politicians who “create” jobs just for the sake of filling seats with bodies without any concept on performance.
For your own reference, feel free to read the whole report for yourself. You can read it at the link below:
• Ohio public employees receive nearly the same wages as comparable private workers (2.5 percent less, although that’s an average disguising some of the education professions with lower level administrative work, such as those who issue the insurance payments. Teachers along with police and firefighters are very guilty of uncontrolled overtime payments, and double-dipping retirements which are paying the same employee twice and driving up the cost of staffing those positions.)
• Fringe benefits for Ohio public workers are more than twice as generous as those paid in the private‐sector, meaning that when pay and benefits are taken into consideration public workers receive 31.2 percent more in total compensation than private‐sector counterparts.
• Ohio Public employees enjoy significantly greater job security than private‐sector workers. That job security has an economic value equal to approximately 10 percent of compensation.
• Even if the provisions of SB 5 were implemented in full, it is very likely that Ohio public‐sector workers would continue to enjoy a substantial compensation premium over private‐sector Ohioans.
The Day of Rage that was so aggressively talked about turned out the way I thought it would. Watching the “call to arms” videos such as this one below is an indication of all the same old communist stuff. These young people were simply taught these static patterns of thinking by their teachers in school. Those teachers are the types who look to the grand old “60’s” as their shining moment. None of these people have a clear understanding of what they are doing or why they do it. They were simply taught to think certain things, and they do so without any further inquisition. To understand some of the science behind this foolishness, CLICK ON THIS HOT LINK FOR MORE INFORMATION.
A number of years ago I scurried the planet looking for a book called The Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake, by Joseph Campbell, for I had been trying to decipher the book Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce for years, and since this was the pre-days of Amazon.com, I had no way to get the Skeleton Key, so I never found it in a used book store or even a yard sale. It had become a book lost to time. So I worked out my issues with that very elusive book Finnegan’s Wake on my own, and then moved on to my next literary pursuit. (Someday I’ll return back to that project now that getting such books is easier than ever) I enjoyed Finnegan’s Wake to such an extent that I named my lead character in my own book The Symposium of Justice after Finnegan’s Wake. (to learn more about Finnegan’s Wake check out this link:
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.