Category: People String

Ancient Aliens and the Tea Party: Koyannisqatsi (LIFE OUT OF BALANCE)

Do yourself a favor, after you read this spend the time to watch these videos then read this again.  After that, pass it to a friend and let them start a journey they will never forget.  I have included the entire film of Koyannisquatsi at this end of this post, which is one of my favorite films of all time.  Enjoy!

Remember the speech that President Obama gave right after the shooting in Texas where he wanted to give a “shout out” at the Native Americans of the area? That was an awkward moment which showed just how out of touch the President really was in that instant of crises. The President exhibited all the typical signs of an out of touch academic which is what he is. He was simply revealing the Static Intellectualism, of which the Progressive Platform is built around, specifically in this case empathy for the plight of the Native American without really understanding the beliefs of the culture they are empathizing with.

The modern academic however, of which Obama is a part is limited in their understanding of many things, particularly the study of mankind’s past. They are stuck in the Static Intellectual culture patterns of which they helped create, and that is all life emerged in one of two ways, through evolution, or creation. One theory is one of science, which the Static Intellectual controls; the other is controlled by the religious institutions which is another type of Static Intellectual control. To the Static Intellectual who created progressive politics no other options exists, because the cultural patterns they established are the rules they are living by. That leaves out one small problem with their love of the Native American; the foundation beliefs of the Native American Culture most likely came from another planet which is represented in many of the rituals of Native American culture which permeates most societies from the Hopi to the Iroquois of New England. It was the Iroquois Five Nations that greeted William Johnston in his frontier fights against the French during the French and Indian war and those Five Nations were unified by a being that landed on Earth and instructed them not to be a war with one another, and to unite their efforts under one nation, of which the Iroquois did. (See the book Wilderness Empire by Allen Eckert)

The problem with this is that through study of the Native American rituals clues to the origins of mankind can and should be studied, but the Static Intellectualism of our modern culture have built their cultural patterns around the history of Europe which does not study the Native American cultures. Instead they study the known regions of Africa and the Middle East as the cradle of civilization and assume with arrogance that it’s always been that way, which Europe and its imperial roots contained within the Roman Empire gave birth to the world. So the scientific premise regarding the origin of the human race which has been controlled by the Roman Catholic Church, as a direct descendent of the Roman Empire refuses to look at all the new scientific archeological evidence coming in from all over the world. See my article on The Secret of Malden Island.

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/08/13/secret-of-malden-island-why-public-education-is-hiding-history/

Progressives led by the Static Intellectualism of the Victorian Era, and their love of the Native American culture because of the terrible exploitation imposed upon them particularly by President Andrew Jackson, who was a frontier fighter, a rugged American, it suited their political purpose to smear Jackson, yet in their study of this political history as intellectuals they completely missed the beliefs of those Native Americans and the foundations behind their tribal mythologies.

Chief Standing Elk seen below shares a friendship with a person I know who is a shaman and lives in St. Louis. This shaman is a dream-walker and a spiritual healer and I find her fascinating because her belief system is so completely different from mine. I enjoy conversations with her, she is to my personal Static Pattern belief system a Dynamic which challenges those beliefs that I find valuable. Anyway, this shaman friend of mine invited me to a spiritual meeting at Serpent Mound a few years ago with this Chief who is an active spiritual leader attempting to carry on the beliefs of the tribes who inhabited America before the immigration of the European. Listen to what the Chief believes.

I became interested in Native American cultures through the film Koyannisqatsi, (SEE THE WHOLE FILM BELOW) which is one of my favorite films, and features a haunting Hopi Indian chant that has never left my mind. The word Koyannisqatisi means in Hopi, “life out of balance, crazy life.” I nurtured that understanding through the work of Joseph Campbell’s comparative mythology studies, so I have a pretty good idea of what they are all about and I’ve always been fascinated by the origin of their beliefs. For instance, my wife and I frequent the Serpent Mound Archeological site a couple of times a year for many years now and have watched the perception of that place change dramatically from one of hard archeology based on the Adena Indian culture to this new age Star Culture idea that Chief Standing Elk believes. One of our visits a few years ago had various Indian tribes and shaman types chanting outside the museum and I told my wife that the science of the place was reverting, not advancing. These primitive beliefs and tribal chants seemed silly to me, until I did some reading of my own.

The big mystery of Serpent Mound is that it not only is a mound structure of a serpent, which is a universal symbol of life renewal, but it is particularly designed to be seen from the air, and all over the world such as the Nazca Lines of Peru and several features all over England, this is a common occurrence where societies seemed to be preoccupied with impressing the gods from the air. But the biggest mystery is the location itself in the middle of a crypto explosion event which occurred during the Permian Period, about 248 to 286 million years ago. Read more about the mound here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpent_Mound

Check out this clip, right about the 2:30 mark:

The crypto explosion is mysterious because it was a violent occurrence several miles wide and would usually be a result of a meteor impact similar to the site in Arizona just to the east of the Grand Canyon outside of Winslow, but it doesn’t look like that. It appears that at least half of the force occurred under the ground as well, so it’s quite a geological mystery. The haunting thing about this mystery is why the Serpent Mound is located right in the middle of this very unique spot that occurred hundreds of millions of years before any builders of the Serpent Mound came along. How did anyone from the Serpent Mound Culture know that something extremely unusual geologically occurred in that exact spot, out of all the spots on the face of planet Earth, a so-called primitive culture knew that something unusual and astronomically significant occurred right there in the middle of a wooded area in Ohio, with no visual reference on the surface. You have to do some digging to see the results of the crypto explosion.

Well, the shamans are saying that a seed ship landed on Earth and brought visitors who inhabited this new land. Such comments make me think of how the European encountered the Aztec and Mayan cultures of Central America and also the Polynesian cultures of the Pacific Ocean, where they imposed their religion upon the primitive people they encountered. Those cultures were influenced by the goods brought from Europe and changed forever as a result of this interaction and in the case the Native American; their cultures were almost completely destroyed by this exchange with the European. It is this aspect of the exchange that the progressive celebrates out of guilt so they do not look any deeper.

Our current culture is only about 200 years from being able to jump from planet to planet itself, so such space travel isn’t very far-fetched taken scientifically. Modern human culture achieved this ability in just about 10 to 20 thousand years, so it’s possible there could be many cultures out in space that are many thousands of years more advanced than we currently are. It is starting to appear that Earth has been greatly influenced by much more than just simple evolution or even creationism, which certainly have played a part, but there are other influences which gave rise to the sudden explosion of technology upon the human race, and the Native Americans seem to have a better understanding of that process than the Anglo-Saxon.

But the Static Intellectualism of academia who has built their universities upon flimsy theories based on Darwin and the Archeology of the Middle East refuse to see it. They, like President Obama think only of the suffering of the Native American at the hands of the “white man” because if fulfils the mission statement of their political platform. But if they actually took the time to listen to the Native American mythology, passed the obvious concern for conservation which also fills another political platform of “green technology” the study of Native American mythology and their roots don’t seem to be examined at all.

This is why television shows like the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens are so poplar, because the Dynamic Intellectualism of our current culture sees that the Static Intellectualism of our education institutions are missing the point in their interrelationship with the progressive politics of the Victorians in America. We are beginning to question the basic premise of the whole religious and scientific premise of mankind’s origins and that’s a good healthy process. If our education system is wrong, then it needs to correct that wrong with new understanding and not resort to the methods of the Spanish Inquisition, or burning heretics at the stake for being non-believers.

The Static Intellectuals of Progressive politics will insist that any notations of aliens colonizing planet Earth and bringing technology to the Homo sapiens who already lived here are preposterous. This is similar to when the church was upset with Isaac Newton for declaring that the Earth was not the center of the universe, which seems laughable now considering what we have learned about not only our galaxy but the many galaxies that make up the universe. In fact, through our understanding of quantum mechanics we are now beginning to think of the concept of a multi-verse. So the church was wrong, and the Victorians who built the progressive politics of which the current Static Intellectualism is protecting, are also wrong. In fact they are way off, and the evidence is overwhelming.

And this is where the Tea Party comes into this whole thing. Progressives are the political entity that is holding the world to a Static Pattern that is flawed in it perception of virtually everything. As it turns out, they are not so “progressive” but have been caught assuming that they are the “enlightened” ones and that they would be the ones who teach the world everything. They currently hold an imperial like grip on academia, which we can see is wrong, because Dynamic Intellectualism is using its imagination to ask the hard questions, where did we come from? And the answer is not in the Static Intellectual offering, so the pattern is wrong and must be broken down and rebuilt with new data gathered up by Dynamic Intellectualism.

The same is happening in politics, where the Dynamic Intellectuals represented by the Tea Party are shattering the Static Patters of progressive politics, because those politics are turning out to be completely false and ridiculously naive. This is why both mystics who say that the Earth was influenced by alien encounters and those who say that America should return to the principles of the United States Constitution are kooks. Because it is the Static Intellectuals who are threatened by the Dynamic Intellectuals of interrupting the Static Pattern that modern science has been established on.

I don’t know if aliens did or did not visit the Earth and influence our culture in any way. But I do know that archeology and anthropology along with geology and other sciences are in their infancy of understanding our world history, and a lot of discoveries have not been reasonably explained by anything more than some Static Intellectual politically correct assessment. But Static Intellectual ideas have not explained how temples were built all over the Pacific, or the mystery of Easter Island, or the Temple at Baalbek, Stonehenge, the Great Pyramid, the Sphinx, the city of Tiahuanaco which may be as old as 16,000 BC, and many, many, many, many others. Only Dynamic Intellectuals have ventured into this territory of exploring explanations, and like Newton, they are ridiculed.

The Tea Party too knows that the Static Pattern of America is wrong and it needs to be corrected as they are called names by the Static Intellectuals such as “terrorists, assassins, kooks, radicals, uneducated fools,” and the like. The Tea Party is a threat to the Static Patter of the Static Intellectual who is clamoring to their education empire even in the face of overwhelming evidence that they have been completely wrong about most everything they believe. The path of the progressive is a dead-end and they refuse to see their error even when the evidence is right in front of them.

This is what they have done to the Native American. They took only the parts of their culture that they could use for the progressive political platform, but they rejected the aspects that didn’t support their political platform and this is most obvious in the words of Chief Standing Elk, who is a strict conversationalist, represents the thoughts and beliefs of his ancestors, but he also believes that the world co-exists with “star people.” If the Static Intellectual were honest about their assessments they’d call Chief Standing Elk a kook for his beliefs, but they won’t because he is a Native America and part of the progressive political platform. They’ll just ignore the rest of Chief Standing Elk’s beliefs like they do everything else they don’t understand and will remain just as ignorant as those who were in charge during the Dark Ages, because as Static Intellectuals, they are stuck with beliefs that are fixed to the foundations of their existence, and they lack the courage of the Dynamic Intellectual who will go out on a limb with a scientific theory, because the Static Intellectual is simply too timid to venture in unknown regions of the mind. That is why they call people names, and that is why they always fail in the end as history marches on without them.

Too bad there isn’t a word in the English language that sums of the statement, “life out of balance, or crazy life” like the Hopi have. The reason the Hopi have this word is because in their culture they saw a need for such a term. The European had to invent a series of words to mean the same thing, because their culture wasn’t advanced enough to understand the need for some kind of balance between the various forces that exemplify a culture. Most of the time that out-of-balance state is the war between the Static portions of society and the Dynamic portions, and the Hopi understood this and they invented a word to bring all the aspects of their life into focus so they could advance as a culture, and that word was Koyannisqatsi.

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

Dynamic Intellectualism and the Tea Party: The battle between the Spider and the Wasp!

I have spent a lot of time explaining the troubles of finance in education, the disparity of truth propelled by the organized labor elements, and the general failure of progressive politics on this site. Generally society as a whole is happy with general assertions as to those failures because once they understand what they are, they can act correctly in understanding the danger and how to avoid it. I see pointing out the danger of progressivism and all that falls under it, such as public education models, communism as a governing body, and the lack-luster ambition the hippie-generation has propelled upon American society, the same as I might warn a spider that it is the nature of the wasp to stun a spider into paralysis, inject a wasp egg into the spider to live as a parasite using the body of the spider as food for the young wasp before emerging forth from the carcass of the spider to live a wasps life. Looking to nature in understanding the behavior of our current society is an intelligent thing to do, because all living things are following the innate laws of cellular biology. In human society the more intellect applied to creating new rules from which to live, the less of a tendency for human beings to behave in such a raw biological form, such as can be seen in this following video of the spider and the wasp. But when intellectualism fails by picking all the wrong things to think about for all the wrong reasons, and the default for the human mind is to resort to biology, then it is entirely possible to suggest that there are elements in our current society that will inject other elements of our society with an egg, to feed off our collective bodies for sustenance until those host bodies are dead completely giving rise to the parasitic infant which will seek to procreate using the same destructive methods.

Needless to say what I refer to throughout this article may require a foundation understanding of the principles of quality discussed with elementary terms in my previous article Why Public Unions Fail: The Science of Stagnation, where I provide some basic foundation concepts that will assist the reader on this next exploration of thought. The following article will explain why our society is failing, and the paralyzing force behind racism as the primary concerns of our age, and why it is necessary to return to a new foundation built from the Constitution and what role the Tea Party plays in this. The goal of this article is not to simply point out what’s wrong but to properly diagnose the trouble much the way one would diagnose the failure of an automobile, so that the car can be fixed. Society cannot be fixed if we do not diagnose it correctly, and that’s what we’re about to do.

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/08/23/why-public-labor-unions-fail-the-science-of-stagnation/

Unique to the 20th Century was a human effort to place intellectualism as the foundation principle of our society. Through public education and colleges, this has been the great leap attempted by the human race. Intellectualism was intended to usher in the values of the Victorian Era morality taking individuals above their biological natures in their mere social class natures to function from a grand new intellectualism built upon science. However, as pointed out in my article The Secret of Malden Island, science is far from perfect. It often fails when objective observations alone are its foundations and mode of operations, so the intellectual is already handicapped, right out of the gate. This is why progressivism has failed and will always fail, because intellectuals require a “dynamic” component, which they are missing and often reject.

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/08/13/secret-of-malden-island-why-public-education-is-hiding-history/

The joke that intellectuals can only see what’s right in front of their face and nothing else is actually quite serious. Such an observation is completely true. This is why they are reluctant to speak outside their field of study citing that they do not have the authority to speak on a topic for which they are not trained properly. That notion is a distant result of the old Victorian era beliefs which were also flawed. To put it in terms easy to understand the Victorian, who essentially built up New York city into the type of society it is today and left behind the type of culture most easily found on the East Coast of the United States who look to Europe with those homesick eyes function in a similar nature as the spider in the video shown. Their job is to cast a web and hunt other insects to eat. They are clearly the superior species and they considered it best for the rest of the world to make all living things more like them. That is the foundation of their morality. But they are not wired in their brains to defend themselves from the wasp, a more aggressive creature than they are who is able to sting them and plant their eggs within the spider’s bodies to provide growth and sustenance to the larva of the young wasp.

The wasps of our current American culture are those aggressive religions, such as what Glenn Beck was attempting to point out in his Restoring Courage speech in Israel. It is also in allegations of racism where societies built upon their biological natures can poke holes in the intellectual approach that science has not observed, and therefore cannot pass judgment on one cultures belief system or another’s because all cultural beliefs are relative to that culture. So the intellectual scientist will not see, much like the spider will not see, that they are in danger of being stung by a wasp to provide host to its young by devouring the spiders body. The spider is helpless because its cultural conditions do not provide protection from a wasp, so the spider won’t see the danger, and is therefore always vulnerable.

This is what happened in the Hippie Movement of the 1960’s. Intellectualism, built on many poorly conceived premises failed. The intellectuals led at first by Woodrow Wilson then followed by many, many others were not able to stop poverty, they created more of it. They could not end racism, they simply did as the typical scientist does, and they pointed it out, allowing different cultures to take advantage of other social cultures with a kind of paralysis of observation. They tried to imitate communism which has halted America’s competitive advantage. They tried to eliminate the need for a parent, because it was thought that the biology of child rearing could be better achieved with Victorian intellectuals who could provide the young with more perspective than the biological parents. What the intellectuals really achieved was providing the wasps of the world, (the communists, the radical religions, the social reformers) bodies to carry their larva. Of course the consequences were completely unintended.

Intellectuals did not mean to usher in millions of young people into the sting of a wasp. They intended to save those children from the ignorant biological impulses of their parents, but it didn’t work. It failed massively which led to the hippie movement of the sixties, which our American society has never recovered.

Intellectuals fail over and over again because the foundation of everything they believe is built upon static social patterns constructed by objective observation. But as explained, this form of science is just one step in scientific observation. There must be creative thought applied to the process as well. This is why NASA has been successful as a government organization. All the static patterns of traditional science are present. But at NASA they can also dream, brainstorm, and reason out the gaps between what is observed and what they have yet to discover. NASA functions with the needed element of Dynamic Intellectualism.

When I went to college I saw that the intellectual culture there, of which the education institutions were attempting to sell to me as “fact” was flawed because the foundations of their teaching was rooted in static observations and did not readily allow for dynamic adjustments. This is why so many dynamic personalities just drop out of the college experience because there really are only a few choices. You accept at face value the teaching the intellectuals are providing, which is flawed to begin with, or you reject it in favor of your own life experiences, your own dynamic impulses. Most people chose the former, they allow the Static Intellectual to “teach” them, but those people only grow up to be stung and paralyzed by a wasp to carry the egg of a parasite which uses them as a host. Look into the eyes of many parents who look at their children covered in tattoos, living failed lives of two and three marriages, children out-of-wedlock, severe psychological trouble. Those parents realize by age 40 or 50 that they were simply consumed like a spider by the larva of a wasp. Their bodies are used up and wrinkled and death is the next step and all they can cling to is their flawed beliefs that static intellectualism will save those children. So they save up all their money and send their children and grandchildren to more college to get more Static Intellectualism hoping that somehow the results for the next batch of children will be different. All it does is allow those children to become host of a wasp larva much quicker. That’s great if you’re a society of wasps, but not if you are a society of spiders.

As seen in my article on The Most Successful People Who Did Not Go to College,

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/10/27/successful-people-that-didnt-go-to-college/

 many of those people became Dynamic Intellectuals at some point in their lives. They either did not go to college at all as in the case of Walt Disney and Henry Ford, or they dropped out, such as in Bill Gates, Steven Spielberg, Richard Branson, the list goes on and on at great length. The Dynamic Intellectual has an education that never stops, they push scientific observation to the limit with creative thought and are always seeking to reach beyond the static patterns of Static Intellectualism without shattering those previous patterns, but bringing new information that will build upon the static patterns. This has worked incredibly well, and makes one wonder why colleges have not picked up on this trend and made adjustments to their educational style. Even worse, why public education has not realized its failure and done the same…………………………well, they can’t. You see, the Static Intellectuals who cling to their static patterns are also some of the more timid of the human species. It is under this new idea of Static Intellectualism created by Victorian Intellectuals that these timid creatures have been revered so highly in our current society, and if America were to return to a society where actual bravery, and valor were the values of that culture, the Static Intellectuals would suddenly be looked upon as frail and meaningless. So the static pattern motivation of the modern intellectual is no different from a typical politician, and that’s to be viewed as meaningful by their peers, to be accepted, which is not an intellectual trait at all, but a biological one of basic human essence. So the ultimate failure of the Static Intellectual is that they are falsely propped up socially, and provided no incentive to be anything larger than their primary biological impulses for social acceptance. This makes them spiders in a cage run by wasps with full intention to use their bodies as a breeding ground.

The way to correct this entire situation is to return to a social static pattern that worked then rebuild society from that static pattern using a combination of Static Intellectualism with Dynamic Intellectualism to allow for expansion of that static pattern. This is what the Tea Party is doing by going back to the Constitutional principles of America’s foundation. The Constitution is a static pattern for the creation of a country, and it worked. So the Tea Party wants to reset the pattern. That is equivalent to teaching a spider how to defend itself from a wasp. Back when the Constitution was written it was designed to protect the spider from a wasp, the New America from the Old Europe. That is good if you are a spider, bad if you are a wasp. Good if you are American, bad if you are from Europe.

To understand who the wasps of our society are, all one has to do is look at the various sectors of our society who are upset with the Tea Party. Those are your wasps, and now you know their intentions. They may not actually want to inject your body with larva. But they do seek to paralyze you in the form of Static Intellectualism so that they can inject your children with ideas that will grow up and serve their purposes. This process is not some grand design of the types of world builders like George Soros and the super wealthy. They are simply the nature of parasites, and the human race is filled with them.

American society used to know how to detect parasites, back in the days when frontiersman had to understand the dangers of the world in order to live, back before the time of the Victorian Static Intellectual. Once those Static Intellectuals came to be, those timid creatures were paralyzed by their own intellect to be easily stung by wasps which gave birth to more parasites which are now ravaging our culture at an alarming rate and a war between spiders and wasps is underway.

The answer is to return to a static pattern that works and in going forward to lean on the insight of the Dynamic Intellectual to grow society properly, not in the manner we currently see. The Static Intellectual has failed on their own, and should have never been given so much power as to determine the fate of our species, for they are not the most dynamic of our society and can only hold us to a static pattern like a spider caught in its own wed, only to be consumed by a wasp.

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

The Flip Flop of Steve Chabot: Who is the media?

There are so many things wrong with the Steve Chabot town hall meeting on Monday, August 22, 2011 where he had the police confiscate the cameras of citizens recording his speech.  Before I get into the details of this listen to Doc Thompson of 700 WLW cover the two videos he put on his blog site, both of them from Progress Ohio which shows the terrible act being committed.

After the whole issue blew up, and Doc was covering it on WLW, Chabot attempted to clarify that in the future, he would make the policy clear that only the media would be allowed to have cameras during a town hall meeting.  Well, that created so much of an uproar on 700 WLW that later in the day Chabot came out and said that there would not be any rules about cameras in the future.  The reason it created an uproar is that the media cannot always be trusted, and politicians for way too long have learned to manipulate the media to make themselves look better.   

One of the greatest benefits of this modern age is that everyday people can also be part of the media.  With all the video cameras out there, and cell phones, and blog sites like this one, politicians can no longer wine and dine members of the media to mold their public image.  People have to actually be what they say they are, and that’s a great aspect of our current age.  This is why schools can’t get away with ripping off the tax payers anymore with fluffy terminology, because it is no longer just newspapers and television that are covering the “feel good” stories that shape public opinion.  Because of the internet and YouTube specifically a political blunder can now be seen, and not pushed under the rug so bad behavior can continue.  Stories like the Stacy Schuler case in Mason can no longer be “controlled” by a public relations media personality, because there are other ways for the public to get at the truth, or at least remember the event.  So politicians like Steve Chabot who are aware that his enemies, Progress Ohio are in attendance at his town hall meeting have tried to control their public image just like the policy shown in the video, of police confiscating the public video cameras.   Progress Ohio clearly was looking to rattle Chabot and get video they could use against him in a future campaign. Chabot has to be a good enough of a politician to stay away from double-talk and not give those people any ammunition.  But no politician has a right to “censor” their public image in a public forum.  That just isn’t something that can be allowed to happen.

Now, here’s the worst aspect of this situation……..it’s the fact that without any knowledge of the law, the police on the whim of a politician, can instruct the police to do their bidding.  Those police officers had no right to confiscate one single video camera.  If Chabot wanted to enforce a video camera policy, it was up to his staff to provide that security.  The police department cannot be used as his personal enforcement service.  And as to the early comments that Chabot uttered about only the media would be allowed to film events, that brings up the question, who is the media?  Is it the media that only the politician likes?  Is it the media that represents the major television stations?  Is it just the media like newspapers who have reporters that are kind to the political entity, of course not.  The media are the people who chose to cover it, so in this day and age, every member of society is a member of the media, and that’s the way it has to be.  So no politician has a right to pick and chose who covers them if they are a public official. 

I’m happy that Steve did the right thing in the end.  I’m sure his intentions were good, because he knew the sharks were in the water.  But this is a perfect example of how good intentions can pave the path to hell, because police powers were abused, private rights were abused, and trust in the government was violated all because a politician wished to control his public image with censorship.  That is the path that has placed our current political system into such a shambles, it is decades and decades of this kind of “censorship” that is just now being challenged because it is only in the last decade that virtually every citizen in America has their own video camera and access to the internet in order to convey the truth as they see it.  So the dynamic has changed for the better, and politicians must adjust to that dynamic because the dishonesty of politics can no longer be shoved under the rug to hide which just mounts up to a hugely expensive government full of dishonest people who stay in office because they had control of the media.

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

Lakota gets a Good Grade: But didn’t they say the world would end without a levy?

Wow, I came home to a flood of email today from parents upset about the busing cuts, and even angrier at the school system for not dealing with the excessively high salaries before taking away busing to their children. It looks like many people are starting to see how this scam works, and that is good to see. I’ll deal with that in another article because I think the bigger story is the recent rating that Lakota received from the ODE. Remember the busing cuts are only around 3% of the total budget, and it is the labor costs that make up 80% of the school budget, so let’s keep that in context.

Before we get into the details have a look at the various interviews from me, and those of the Yes Lakota people prior to the election of 2010 from the clip above. Listen to what the Yes Lakota people say will happen if the levy isn’t passed, then compare that information to the results you will see below and decide for yourself what’s fact from fiction.

As Lakota received news that they received from the Ohio Department of Education an “excellent” rating for the 10th year in a row, I was actually surprised. I fully expected with all the cuts and controversy of the last year to see a lower rating, after all that’s what the pro levy people said would happen if we didn’t pass a levy last fall, and even the school board said as much. But the levy didn’t pass, the district made deep cuts, yet last year the rating was 104.9, but this year the rating went up to 105.9. How did that happen? Below is the article from the Pulse Journal by Steven Mathews. Have a look for yourself.

_______________________
Lakota’s top state ranking 
puts district in elite group
Excellent with Distinction honor draws praise from community, school board members.

By Steven Matthews, Staff Writer 10:16 AM Wednesday, August 24, 2011

LIBERTY TWP. — The Lakota Local School District’s Board of Education met on Monday night, and much of the session was centered around the big news that was announced last week — the Excellent with Distinction honor awarded by the state for the 2010-11 year.

The meeting, which included a PowerPoint presentation from Assistant Superintendent Lon Stettler and praise from community members, lasted about 90 minutes at the Lakota Central Office.

“Despite the challenges that we had last year and we continue to go through, the focus is where it needs to be — in the classroom,” board member Lynda O’Connor said.

Stettler emphasized in his presentation that Lakota — the seventh-largest district in Ohio — was the largest district to receive the state’s highest honor.

It’s the 10th straight year that Lakota has earned the highest possible honor, and its 105.9 performance index is an all-time district high.

“In the last 10 years, we’ve experienced changing demographics,” President Joan Powell said.
“It demonstrates that our staff has risen to the occasion.”

• New Superintendent Karen Mantia said that she has met with several focus groups, which consisted of residents, business leaders, government officials and parents. She also plans to meet with students once the school year gets underway.

“Here’s what I learned,” Mantia said. “It’s absolutely imperative that if we do nothing else, we make sure we maximize our children’s performance, and maximize the staff’s performance and expertise. … Across the board, they all understand the expectation of our staff is high.”

• The board approved a policy to either provide a cell phone or a cell phone stipend of $60 per month for certain district positions. Chris Passarge, the executive director of business operations, said most eligible employees chose the stipend.

• The board also approved the acceptance of a $2,000 eTech Ohio grant that has been awarded to the Lakota East Freshman School.

Tamera Terndrup, a Spanish teacher at the school, will use the grant to purchase four wireless laptops with microphone headsets.
___________________________

I think that’s excellent news about the rating, the rest of those issues I’ll cover in another article, but it proves what the No Lakota people have been saying all along, for the school to do more with less, and you’ll find better results when you’re lean and mean. Oddly enough, Lakota did not even have a superintendent during this rating increase, so what does that mean? Lakota made cuts to their deficit, eliminated positions, cut busing, sports programs and electives and they did all this without a superintendent, yet their rating went up, not down on the heels of a failed levy.

Even more baffling are the comments of Superintendent Mantia in that article where she says after her short time at Lakota, “Here’s what I learned, It’s absolutely imperative that if we do nothing else, we make sure we maximize our children’s performance, and maximize the staff’s performance and expertise…..across the board, they all understand the expectation of our staff is high.” WHAT??????????????????? What does any of that mean? Doesn’t Lakota always maximize its performance and understand that the expectations are high?

The answer is no. Until the No Lakota Levy group came along and started challenging everything that the school was doing in order to defeat the last two levies, the school district and its employees had been cruising along. Once the public in the form of No Lakota Levy came along, that anti-tax group had taken the role of “management” in the community, a role the school board had not been performing. It is because of No Lakota Levy breathing down the neck of all these officials that the costs of education at Lakota have come down, and the rating actually went up from this year compared with last year.

I’m not unnecessarily taking credit for the good work the administrators did in this endeavor. But they knew that they would be challenged so they have tip-toed around trying to be creative in their financing and still perform at a high level, which we all expect as a district. But it is the Lakota School Boards job to do what No Lakota Levy has been doing. I would personally prefer to do something else with my time, but since my elected officials have shown “no fight” in standing up to the organized labor forces that have embedded themselves in public education using tax increases to hide their terrible management of that labor, I am actually angered that myself along with a small army of businessman in the community have to actually do their job for them by showing them what kind of questions to ask, and understanding where that line is in our community of when too much is too much. The school board was supposed to be doing that all along, but they didn’t.

The reason for Mantia’s comments being what they are is now that she’s arrived here and got her feet wet, she is realizing that Lakota did really well without her, without a levy increase, and now she really can’t do anything but fail. She has come into a district at the top of its game and she really can’t expect to improve it. So here’s the question, and I’m sure this is bouncing around in her head also, why she should cost the district a quarter million dollars in costs just for her employment expenses? (To see a breakdown of what she costs the district CLICK HERE)

The school board hired Mantia because they are still stuck in an old formula of organized labor education philosophy which is based on the failed economic Keynesian economic models of Europe. But Lakota has proven that it can do more with less, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many more savings to be gained if only the school board would “manage” its labor costs and if the community could free itself from the organized labor elements of the teaching profession. This can be done if the people in Ohio will simply vote YES to keep S.B.5 on Issue 2. That simple step would go a long way to allowing future school boards to drive down the cost of education even more than Lakota has, while still maintaining their excellence. (Click here to learn what S.B.5 does for you)

The rhetoric that schools utter when they proclaim that if they don’t get more money is the same old tired diatribes that all labor utters when they are asked to do more with less. The problem with organized labor is they threaten to strike if they don’t get what they want, and will walk off the job like infants who don’t get a pacifier and it is that element in this whole equation that has driven up these labor costs and dictated these levy requests, and that is the hidden message behind Mrs. Mantia’s comments. She has been hired to preserve that empire, not to drive down costs, because the real savings is in dismantling the empire of education so that the children of these schools actually see the money, and not political labor unions attempting to finance their enterprises with a straw into our wallets and purses as a lifeline of finance, as they empty us to only fill themselves.

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

Politicians Damn the Tea Party to HELL: More reasons for voting YES on ISSUE 2

Maxine Waters and many others of her political persuasion are damning the Tea Party to Hell for wanting to undo all the mistakes those progressive politicians have made over the last century. So before I get into Maxine and the rest of this issue please review the following video which I included on my article about WHY PUBLIC UNIONS FAIL (CLICK HERE TO READ AND VIEW THE FANTASTIC VIDEOS ON THAT ARTICLE) This video paints the picture of our current political situation extremely well. So before you do anything else, WATCH THIS!

What is happening in states like Ohio, New Jersey, and Wisconsin are people like myself, who are absolutely sick of politics, tired of the double-talk, tired of new legislation buried in the back of another bill similar to the practice of EARMARKING and PORK BARREL spending, are hiring strong governors who are not in bed with labor unions to bring down the costs of doing business in our states. I don’t care where a governor like Kasich came from, I hired him to do one job, and that’s to balance Ohio’s budget, and I don’t want the public unions to pull him to their side like shown in that video. That has been the problem for many, many, many years and this is the cause of the strong governors we are starting to see emerge, such as Chris Christie in New Jersey who is bringing public sector reforms to his state. Listen to his most recent endeavor here:

In Ohio, Kasich and the House and Senate in spite of being Republican are attempting for the first time in my lifetime to actually fix something in state government. And that something is a tremendous huge fix that to the labor unions may feel far-reaching, but it’s really not. I think Senate Bill 5, otherwise known as Issue 2 is extremely fair and it has infuriated me that people like Bill Cunningham who have claimed to be a Tea Party leaning American have been so critical about S.B.5 and all this so-called “fairness” he keeps talking about. Where was all this fairness when progressives like Maxine Waters, and Barney Frank and Ohio’s own Ted Strickland and Bob Taft have been stuffing new legislation down our throats for years which only strengthened the public sector union against their boss……..the American People! It was a relief to hear Tom Niehaus come on 700 WLW to defend S.B.5 against all the misinformation created by the labor unions to convince busy voters that this bill is somehow “unfair,” that the process from which the bill was written was bad, and corrupt in some way. Listen to that broadcast here:

The facts of the matter are that Tea Party American’s are finally starting to stick up for themselves. They are tired of being pushed around, lied to, manipulated, disrespected, and over-looked because we don’t stuff money in politician’s pockets to get our way. We are sick of it, and people like Maxine Waters doesn’t like it, so she’s doing the manipulative thing and going to her political base, who she is obviously using to her own advantage, taking advantage of a demographic group that isn’t asking the hard questions but is content to sit with their mouths open waiting for someone to feed them. Those are the people who give Maxine power, and make her believe she has a right to damn Tea Party American’s to HELL! What she is really worried about is that those Tea Party Americans are about to discover just how corrupt and terrible her party has been against all Americans under the light of day.

Barney Frank is worried about the same thing; watch him here pretending that he is somehow superior to his bosses, the American People. He knows that it is the labor union empire, that tyrannical beast of complacency that operates like organized crime lords and stuffs his pockets, and those are his masters. And it is his job to eliminate that threat to his bosses. That’s what he’s doing here.

But this game is over. People like me support Senate Bill 5, (ISSUE 2) because I want this empire off my back and out of my tax dollars. I don’t want them infecting my elected representatives in ANY way. I don’t want them manipulating my school board, my trustees, my city councils, my state legislators, my Governor. I don’t want them in my White House. I don’t want them in my life at all; because history has shown me that they are wrong, misguided and dangerous to the American way of life. And already they are declaring that they are willing to go to war with people in the Tea Party. I find that comment laughable.

It is not they who are the silent majority, the sleeping giant as they claim to be with Senate Bill 5. It is the normal people who are in their garages working on their cars on a Saturday afternoon watching NASCAR, it is the farmer, the engineers, the architects, the businessman, the “masses” out there that are the sleeping giant and they are beginning to stir. Senate Bill 5 is just the start of their intentions, and these new politicians are “their” politicians. We are tired of the back room deals; we are tired of being told that more taxes will solve the problem because it never does. We are sick of the light at the end of the tunnel being drug down the hall so we can never catch it. We are tired of the process and Senate Bill 5 (Issue 2) helps us reset the table so real “fairness” can finally play out in government.

Maxine Waters doesn’t know what she just did when she publicly spoke to God Almighty and asked for the Tea Party to be damned to hell because it is desired to take away the corrupt influence of progressives like her upon the states and nation of our political system. What Maxine Waters and her kind are doing is declaring war against America, which reveals what the intentions have always been from her party. So the time for suspicion of their intentions has passed and it is hoped that through legislation we can defeat these foes against our Constitution. But it looks like legislation may not be enough, because these desperate manipulators are willing to fight for all the “progressive” gains they’ve achieved at our expense and that may lead to real violence if it is not suppressed now, before the situation really gets out of control. Because if she will use that kind of language in public, God only knows what she says behind closed doors, and that’s where the real battle plans are constructed.

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

Why Public Labor Unions Fail: The Science of Stagnation

It is one thing to say that communism, or labor unions do not work, that they are bad for American society, and history shows us that the typical result when these collective organizations have a majority rule are either a stagnate society or a declining one. The benefits of collective ideas when it comes to social construction are short-lived and only last a few generations. But the big question is why? What is the science behind this failure?

Well, there is a science to it, a predictable path that can be witnessed and predicted accurately as to why labor unions and other collective organizations are doomed to failure. For such a science I turn to the work of Robert Pirsig, which came to my mind while I was writing another article about the needs for voting YES on Issue 2. Click here to see that article:

Pirsig many years ago came up with a definition, a way of determining the “quality” of something that needs to be understood in reference to what I’m about to say. I created a chart which articulates this definition of quality into two types, Romantic and Classic. So click here to see that chart and learn a bit about these two types. But for the purpose of understanding why unions are doomed to fail understanding that there is a science behind determining the quality of something is important and can be obtained with mathematic certainty.

Once the quality of something is determined then that quality can be broken down into two types, Static Quality and Dynamic Quality. Static Quality tends to be all the rules of society, or the rules of your business. Static Quality is the rules that everything runs off of. One of the reasons that I like Robert Pirsig is that he has done the work of understanding the classic Greek thinkers, but where the classics fall short, because metaphysically, society has advanced, we now know of quantum physics and have an understanding of how the universe works that is based on much better data than the astronomical observations made with primitive telescopes. So our society has advanced, and the force that drives that expansion is Dynamic Quality. An example of Dynamic Quality would be Leonardo Da Vinci, or Bill Gates, people who brought radical changes in thought to the Static Quality of the rules society had previously lived by. Pirsig is the most recent philosopher to take into consideration this Dynamic Quality change with the new science discovered in the most recent century.

Dynamic Quality are the rebels of society, or even of a body. They are the cells of a body that fight off diseases and strengthen an immune system or they are the people who challenge conventional thought and force an expansion of human understanding. Between the two types of Quality, both types are needed. Without Static Quality everything would fly apart, and chaos would rule. Dynamic Quality needs Static Quality to keep some sense of order in existence. But Static Quality also needs Dynamic Quality to allow it to grow. In fact in organizations where Dynamic Quality is stifled Static Quality has shown to actually proceed in an evolutionary decline. Without the presence of a Dynamic Quality regression of an organism or an organization is the natural next process. This could be said to be the cause of aging in human beings, or the decline of cultures the human beings have built. This can also be seen in sports organizations that become complacent and do the same things over and over and why some teams are always competitive because they are always seeking to bring a “dynamic” quality to their teams. Maintaining a dynamic order to anything is the key to any measure of success. But you must do so while still maintaining a sense of order, otherwise known as Static Quality.

Labor unions fail because in order to preserve their Static Quality, which is the focus of all their endeavors, they destroy any chance of allowing Dynamic Quality into their organization to help challenge their beliefs and expand their culture. So instead, they are a culture on decline.

A decline in culture can be seen most evidently in inner cities where the problem is not one of race. It is of losing the aspects of their Dynamic Culture. When welfare and other government care is introduced to the culture and the parents of the children of that culture are no longer pushing young people to become “dynamic” then the individuals who have these tendencies will turn their efforts into a destructive behavior that leads to their premature deaths or they move away from the inner city leaving the Static Quality of the inner city belief system to rule, which leads to the decline that can seen by everyone.

This is also the reason why public education is failing, is because the dynamic individuals are punished by being different rather than celebrated or challenged for the health of confrontation. The dynamic elements are attacked like a cell in a body would attack a white blood cell in the body because the white blood cell is different from the common cell. This process leads to disease in the body the same as it does in society. The result is no different.

This explanation is but a fraction of what I could say on this topic. In fact, I could write volumes of books on the matter, but for the novice in this field, the person who normally doesn’t think about these kinds of things, this should at least suffice to demonstrate that there is an order to all this discussion about central organization from government, or labor unions and understanding why the work and products they produce always seem flat and unimportant. It is because by their very nature; they spend their energy as organizations fighting off their Dynamic Quality competitors in order to protect the Static Quality of their existence.

So the argument is not one of union busting, Republicans or Democrats, or young against old. It’s not the Middle Class against the “rich.” It is simply about the battle between Static Quality and Dynamic Quality being stifled which is the direct cause of decline in any culture, and that is the premier reason why labor unions and government will always fail.

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

The Worth of Warren Buffett’s Opinion: Looters demand more taxes!

About a decade ago, I was in a wedding party for my brother and we were dining at the Grand Finale in Glendale when he gave me my gift for being in the wedding party. It was a book by Warren Buffett, a man my brother greatly admired, so while the conversation of the evening drifted from tales of marriage and hardship, I read the book at the table.

My thoughts about Buffett were that he was “lucky” to have become rich as an investor. Like many of his type, he became wealthy not by creating, but by a manner of deception, playing on the behavior patterns of the timid and foolish. This isn’t illegal and is a natural part of capitalism, where predators take advantage of those not as ruthless, cunning, or even greedy. The threat of these predators encourages the very good to become better in order to compete, and this is where ideas are born.

But people like Warren Buffett and George Soros did not gain wisdom from the creation of something new. They gained wisdom by dealing with fools and this is the net result of books like what Buffett has put out, and Soros. They gained their wealth by being bottom feeders. They did not earn their wealth the valid way, like a Bill Gates, by creating something from nothing. They simply capitalized on the mistakes of others in a quest for wealth pursuits. So if the goal is simply to “get rich” no matter the method, then the works of these types of “investors” is commendable.

Their wealth however does not make them experts in all things involved in money and value however. Buffett and Soros are not experts on the art of living, and advice from them must be taken in context. If one wishes to become rich by climbing over the backs of others with a sense of ruthlessness and cold-hearted rancor, then their advice should help the hungry investor. But if an advice seeker wishes to know more about the complexities of existence, then these characters will leave that seeker very hungry for more, because they do not understand themselves the nature of society.

When Buffett says that more taxes are needed, he is making the statement of a progressive, not a traditional American. So it is only natural that Buffett would want to continue to fund the social programs created by his fellow “progressives.” The feeding of taxes with the money of the people in American society is a reckless enterprise that if the goal of that society is to have a smaller government that is less intrusive, then of course fewer taxes will be needed to maintain that infrastructure.

If the goal however is to have a larger government well then of course more taxes are needed, so when Buffett and Obama speak about raising taxes, and that people of wealth like them are willing to pay, it must be considered what kind of men they truly are. They value money based exclusively on the merit of the dollar value in relation to other things. These progressive types mistakenly believe that their money has equal value to those who actually create something, and this is the reason they tend to dislike actual producers, like oil tycoons, and “big business” owners. They exhibit a jealousy toward their fellow wealth peers hoping that they can be seen as “equal” to those producers because deep in their hearts they know that their wealth was created by a measure of looting, where they took advantage of someone not quite smart enough to hang on to their money, and not by the benefit of invention.

This is why these types of people do not understand the value of what they are asking. Buffett might understand the value of stock prices, but he does not understand the value of the merit behind the company which holds the stock. He understands the nature of speculating the behavior of ownership and the way the public will perceive the actions of a company, but he does not understand the value of creation, obviously, otherwise he wouldn’t say such naïve concepts as blindly tossing tax money into the tax monster that is government.

Much of the corruption in government is due to the money that flows in it. The reason politicians will do anything, say whatever, and make any promise to get into public office is because they want to be in control of the money that comes to them in the form of taxes. Public union’s exist for one reason, and that is to gain control of the money which comes to the public worker. It is money which corrupts government and it is money that ruins the attempts of any country to maintain a reasonable, trustworthy republic. So when a progressive makes the statement that they support higher taxes, what they really are saying is that they wish to maintain the structure of corruption from which they have enriched themselves. For people like Warren Buffett, this is perfectly acceptable. But for people who want to see government become more trustworthy and for politicians to become more representative, cutting the amount of money that is tossed into that black hole of government consumption will make public office much less attractive to the thieves and miscreants who are currently attracted to public office.

To improve the quality of government, society must take away the incentive of those bottom feeders to migrate into public service, and the only way to do that is to take away the waste from which they flock to.

I closed the book at The Grand Finale and kept my opinion about Buffett to myself because the men at our table were all gushing over themselves regarding the achievements of Warren Buffett. The nature of Buffett and those like him are elusive to their minds, because in society, we are trained that the value of something is contained within a fixed dollar amount. So we are trained to believe that Buffett’s wealth gives him immediate value as a person of the mind, after all, he was smart enough to amass massive amounts of wealth, so he must know something important, and the men at my diner table were hungry to unveil that knowledge so that they too might achieve some measure of success, and take care of their own families with some wealth of their own.

As I sipped the remaining contents of my wine that night I knew that the real genius is not in the indulgence of a fool and the advantage taken from them, but it is in the restraint. For the way to truly build society is not always to indulge and roll about like pigs in a mud pit, but to refrain from the impulse to indulge with an eye on the greater good, even when that good appears to be bad to the pig wishing to roll in the urine and feces of it’s own kind to accumulate merit earned by decadence.

And that’s what I think of the opinions by Warren Buffett.

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

Public Unions Should be Illegal: They are simply too expensive and too demanding

CLICK HERE TO SEE AN ARTICLE I WROTE CALLED PAYING FOR PROTECTION: THE ORGANIZED CRIME OF TEACHERS UNIONS FOR MATERIAL SIMILAR TO THE ONE BELOW.

Leslie Ghiz of Cincinnati City Council goes ballistic on 700 WLW while talking to Doc Thompson about the lack of interest in dealing with the Diana Frey case, the public union president accused of stealing over $750,000 from her members. The source of the complacency she is upset about is the very reason why public positions simply cost too much money to the tax payer. Click here to listen to that broadcast:

There is a disconnect between the reality of the public union leader and the rest of the world. Doc Thompson recently did another show where the average tax payer would have a lot of difficulty coming up with $1000 if they needed to without going into debt. Yet the public union expectation when their contracts demand more money is just to raise taxes to fund their demands, and they don’t care at all that they are draining the communities of their wealth, who simply don’t have the money. You can listen to that broadcast here:

The public sector unions have shown no restraint, no sense of economic understanding, no compassion for their employers, which are the tax payers. They have been excessively greedy, corrupt (Diana Frey and she’s not the only one), manipulative, and perfectly willing to walk off the job if management doesn’t see things their way. Their behavior has driven up the cost of their employment simply to the point of being very unattractive as a labor option.

When the public union representing the teachers at Lakota in 2008 went on strike, and a deal was made to appease them, to keep the teachers from walking off the job, I decided that I would not support another school levy until the public sector union was out of the equation. They simply drive up the cost of education too much. The unions make it impossible to have an intelligent conversation about cost controls, because the direction of the negotiations always migrates back to the welfare of the employee, and not the product they create.

I have noticed that the television stations lately are focused on the catastrophe of public funding and are resorting to the feel-good stories of emotion, which plays straight into the kind of manipulation the unions have used to extort massive sums of money, (tax money) for themselves. It is never asked by the established media why all these public employee jobs are going bankrupt, because the answer is simply too painful. Public employees, particularly teachers are too expensive. They cost too much money to employee, and they did that to themselves with extreme labor practices such as threatening to walk of the job with strikes.

The legislators who made it law that a teacher should have a master’s degree to keep their teaching certificate helped perpetuate the situation with legislation. They did as they always do; they created laws without considering the cost of compliance. That is the problem with electing small-minded people into positions to create laws, because they are unable to take in the whole picture. Since they too are public employees and not responsible for creating the funding, they don’t make the connection but simply take money from the public in the form of taxes, so they bare no responsibility.

Public employees do not exist for the benefit of job creation. They are not there for the convenience of the employee. But that is the expectation. The tax payer is expected to jump through hoops to figure out how to appease the high expectations of these out-of-touch employees.

If I were the superintendent of a school, which I could never be because there are actually laws to keep people like me from being hired by a district, the unions have covered their tracks in every direction, I would simply let the teachers walk the next time they attempted a strike, and I’d hire cheaper labor. It is the cost of labor that is the problem and is creating the demand for more taxes in every sector of government service. Government in no capacity should ever be paid more than the average wage of the public, because it creates an incentive for people to attempt to become a government worker that will do anything to become employed by the government because it’s simply too lucrative.

Teachers should be paid fairly, and if they want to make a lot of money, they should work for a private institution that will pay them according to their expectations. If the United States were the best in the world, I might buy into the union argument that we need to pay for the best to have the best, but the United States education system is not the best. It’s average and that’s being generous, and I think it fails in entirely too many ways. It certainly isn’t worth the amount of money we are pouring into it.

Politicians and news organizations looking to simplify their stories focus only on dollars spent equals’ value to the child, but that simply is not true. We could pour all the money the United States produces into education and the result would still be a flat line. Education is an elusive quality that comes from the strength of a family and the mentors that surround a child. Children just do not learn on an assembly line and making the factory more expensive won’t improve the results.

I’m not against public education. I think it’s a good thing for people who come from broken homes, or poor families. In those conditions, it is possible for a teacher to have a major influence on a child, because the teacher can fill the role that the parent is neglecting. But in families that are strong where there are two parents, grandpa’s and grandma’s and the family has a middle to upper income, there isn’t much a public school has to offer in the development of a child but a baby sitting service. I know that hurts the feelings of many “sensitive” guidance councilors and teachers, but those are the facts. As a tax payer, I’m happy to employee some of those people in my district for some of the underprivileged, but having hundreds and hundreds employees all making extremely lucrative incomes is simply not good business.

But it is the unions who have high-jacked the entire process, allowed no management control on a run-away train that just goes faster and faster requiring more and more money to fuel. To me, they are not worth the money. They are guilty of being too greedy and out-of-touch. To be honest, I have never seen a system so screwed up, as wrong as you find when you lift up the rocks of public sector unions. The entire situation is terribly out of control which directly affects the overall cost. I believe the teachers for the most part believe they are in the profession for the kids they teach. But the union leaders are clearly out for the greed of the position and have shown no restraint on their demands. And the teachers who have voted to keep those types of leaders in place are all guilty of putting themselves over their job to the children and the more I learn, the angrier I become.

Being foolish is not against the law. If the union leaders wish to be so foolish as to be out-of-touch with the rest of the world, that’s their prerogative. But when they ask me to fund their foolishness, that is passing the fool baton to me, and I’m not going to carry it. They make it my business when they ask me for more money to support their folly, and I know better. Therefore, I will not support public sector unions with any more additional taxes until they remove themselves from the process. They are getting in the way of proper management of public employees and should be outlawed. We have tried that little public employee union experiment started by President Kennedy and it has failed, and needs to be abolished as a practice.

The unions will call it union busting. I call it practical. I do not recognize the authority of any union to take my money out of my pocket and do what they please with it. Such a practice is simple robbery. It’s nothing else and needs to be outlawed at every level in government. Until that happens, there will never be any management of government costs which is just plain foolishness when money is the primary concern.

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

Rich Hoffman and Doc Thompson Fix the World: In spite of the hauntings from the past

As we are bombarded incessantly for further impositions into our personal income with the demand for higher taxes the irretrievable implication is that there isn’t a plan for taxes to ever be reduced, only to grow forever, until society completely collapses. This is the case of all government these days and has been since President Kennedy signed into law with executive action, the legalization of public unions, which Lyndon Johnston then expanded to build a voter base. (CLICK HERE TO SEE HOW IT ALL BEGAN) The incredible lack of wisdom and complete selfishness of the Democratic political party in those critical years of the 60’s have taken us all down this current path which ends at a collapsed bridge with steep cliffs on all sides and nowhere to go but back. Standing at the end of that road on a Saturday afternoon, being the first to arrive there, Doc Thompson of 700 WLW and I have a serious talk laced with humor and frustration about all the reasons why the school funding models are failing, and how ridiculous it is that school boards have no other option but to request higher taxes in an out-of-control system bent on self-destruction. If you have any doubts, questions, or fears about why taxes for your school keep going up, then listen to this broadcast. After my interview, there was a parade of callers all deeply frustrated who shed further light into this diabolical modern-day catastrophe that has become public education.

I’m not just blaming the Democrats in this folly. All politicians are to blame, because they didn’t address the problems, fearing political fallout. I personally have no desire to ever be a politician. From my experience too many politicians celebrate their wins as though they won the lottery, not as a sacrifice. Politicians know that there will be opportunities to enrich themselves, that there are unions and other special interests out there that will give them money to do as they say and they can become wealthy in the process, and that’s what’s been happening. (CLICK HERE TO SEE JUST HOW BAD THE SITUATION TRULY IS) My desire is to write, read, and continue to climb mountains with my wife on weekend adventures. Public office or political gain of any kind is unattractive to me. Fixing the problems of politics however is, because I don’t want to spend money on aspects of culture that isn’t needed because it lowers the quality of the culture I wish to enjoy.

I had lunch with my daughter after the radio interview and she showed me a new phone application on her smart phone that she downloaded for free. It’s a language translation program where she can speak into her phone, then the phone will translate the phrase into any language she wishes, and it will vocalize it as well. This will be helpful if she is in Romania on a photo shoot, but she doesn’t know the local language, and she needs to ask someone a question, she can simply speak into her phone, and then play the translation for the person she’s asking. The phone has become an instant translator.

My wife and I stopped by Best Buy on the way home to check on buying new computers for a new video game called The Old Republic by Bioware. I’ve been looking forward to that massive online game for years, and the release date is nearing, so my wife and I plan to buy a couple of new computers just to play that game, one for her and one for me, so we can spend time with all our nieces and nephews and other friends who are scattered all over the face of the planet. I was shocked that virtually every young person I spoke to from my daughters friends to the employees at Best Buy are all on a waiting list for that game. I joked to my wife on the way home that when The Old Republic is released, the economy may tank, because nobody will want to do anything but play that game. People my age and younger are eager to jump into that extremely immersive world.

But what does that say about our current society? Many of these people wanting to play The Old Republic currently play World of Warcraft and will spend countless hours learning everything there is to know about a fictional world with absolutely no implication to their actual lives. It’s all a fantasy. But why the powerful desire……escape?

Many people have given up on American culture, and public unions have capitalized on that apathy. The technology of online gaming and my daughters smart phone should be incorporated instantly into our education system because that is the way young people are learning now. They are wasting their time in modern education. It makes the parents feel good about themselves, but the kids really aren’t learning anything other than social boundaries which makes public education a complete failure in my book.

I can speak for myself; I understand why so many people are drawn to online gaming. Because there are no restrictions in those environments, the internet is the freest way of life ever conceived by human minds, and online gaming whether it is for Maddan Football, or World of Warcraft allows the human mind to venture beyond the social restrictions of our current culture, and that is the tragedy of our age.

Public education has been captured by public sector unions and molded into a boring, stale, environment that kids are simply not interested in, and is preparing them for a world that will change tomorrow. Public education is way behind the curve; they are in the back of the train as I’ve discussed using Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance as a prime example. (If you haven’t read Pirsig it’s in the philosophy section of your local bookstore.) Click here to see what I say about it.

I have taught those close to me many things, one of them is a phrase I’ve used for more than 30 years and its “Advice is only as good as the person who gives it.” If the quality of the person giving advice, teaching ideas, or even coming up with a social model of ideas that are deemed important, if the minds “advising” are not quality minds, then the advice is worthless. When my wife was younger she had a parade of people who were always telling her she should be a fashion model, she should go to school to become a great scientist, that she should do a bunch of things because she is a very intelligent woman who is also very attractive, attributes that many around her secretly resented. So I’d say to her, “Where are the lives of the people telling you these things? Are they what you’d consider successful people? Even the people who are wealthy, do they look happy to you? If not, then why would you even consider their advice even a little? Their advice has not led their own lives to prosperity and happiness, so how can they be expected to tell you what to do.”

Yet in traditional education, we send a child to school to be taught by a complete stranger advice which the child is supposed to carry deep into their lives. I understand that many parents are not equipped to live by the mentality I provided my wife with, but in sectors of the internet, gaming community, and social networks like Facebook the true desires for human development are there for everyone to see. And the reason new ideas are not being explored in education is exclusively because public sector unions are resistant to the rapid changes happening in the world around them. They are like a boat going downstream in a swift river filled with rapids only to toss out an anchor into the water to stop all movement because they are “scared” of the changes. But in doing so they have limited the maneuverability of the boat to navigate in the water and the swift current is actually beating on the boat threatening to sink the vessel by sheer force.

I am convinced that no adjustments to public education are even possible as long as public sector unions exist. They are a cancer in the body of thought. And they are in denial of their corrosive nature.

Their leaders are fools intent to hang on to some archaic education practice long outdated, and is increasingly just too expensive. The teachers unions have priced themselves out of relevance because not only are they teaching in an outdated model that they force upon society with their fear of change, but they charge too much to do it. It’s that simple. They’ve high-jacked all administrative control, political persuasion, and social latitude to arrive at a place where the world is marching on without them and they are still holding their stupid signs from the 60’s, “better jobs for teachers.” Who cares? The kids can’t wait to leave the classroom of the teacher to get home and get on their computer and play World of Warcraft with their friends, or The Old Republic. If education was smart, it would be teaching in that realm so that kids could learn perhaps three times as much in a shorter period of time than what is currently experienced.

When a Smartphone can do with a free download what it takes two years of foreign language studies to achieve, society has reached an impasse, and the public sector unions like what the teaches have, are still walking around with the dinosaurs. They sadly believe they are more relevant than they really are, and society up till now has just thrown money at them so they don’t have to feel bad about all the years of college they have, the massive debt they’ve accumulated, and the social fulfillment they were promised when they entered the profession. They have become extinct, because society, like that swift river, is moving too fast for their timid minds to navigate.

And more taxes won’t fix that void left in the broken heart of the disillusioned soul who discovers that the impact they believe they have on social development is easily out-done by a video game character in a virtual world who can level up by initiative, without needless restriction. It is the teacher who belonged to a union and used that collective influence to make themselves extinct, like ghosts haunting a house who do not know they are dead, and insist on living by sheer force even though they are just reflections of the past.

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

The Cincinnati Bengals, School Levies, and Health Care: Why they all suck!

As I was watching football, my favorite team the Tampa Bay Buccaneers was on one channel, and the Cincinnati Bengals were on the other, I received several emails from some of my valuable contacts who supply me with a stream of information daily. One was about the Health Care Freedom Amendment. Another was about Sycamore Schools and their thoughts about going to the tax payers for more money, both of those I’ll include here to share with this audience, and retain their value for future reference.
The Tampa Bucs led by Raheem Morris looked fantastic. The Cincinnati Bengals looked absolutely pathetic. Actually, terrible was more like it. Considering how much the tax payers of Cincinnati are paying for the stadium that the Bengals play in, it was a slap in the face to see such a pathetic display of complacency taking place on the field in what the Bengals showed. As I watched the Bengals stumble around during the game I could not help but think that they are the perfect example of why throwing money at a political problem does not work.
Also, yesterday morning it was revealed that even with all the court challenges by Progress Ohio, the Health Care Freedom Amendment, which will allow the State of Ohio to challenge Obama Care under the rights of state sovereignty. Getting the issue on the ballot in November is the huge first step to knocking back the intrusive hands of government bureaucrats who are aggressively advocating the rapid expansion of government with even more far-reaching impositions. Read all about it below:

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August 12, 2011 9:51 AM Ohio high court: Healthcare signatures valid COLUMBUS, Ohio — Opponents of a federal health care overhaul scored a key legal victory on Friday that should clear a proposed ballot measure for a fall vote.

The chance for voters to reject portions of insurance changes championed by President Barack Obama will appear Nov. 8, alongside a ballot issue seeking to repeal a contentious re-write of Ohio’s collective bargaining law. One is expected to bring out Republican-leaning voters and the other is expected to bring out Democrats in a state closely divided along political lines.

In a unanimous decision Friday, the Ohio Supreme Court rejected a liberal policy group’s lawsuit challenging certification of the so-called Health Care Freedom Amendment on the grounds petitions carrying 69,000 signatures were flawed.

ProgressOhio executive director Brian Rothenberg argued that Secretary of State Jon Husted counted signatures on petitions that contained technical errors, including the way paid circulators listed their employment.

Husted, a Republican, argued the challenge revolved around petitions carrying extra information, a practice government should not discourage.

Justices said the secretary of state is “entitled to deference.”

They found that Rothenberg’s charges lacked legal merit, noting “even if his challenge had substantive validity, Rothenberg’s evidence is insufficient to establish that the part-petitions do not have enough signatures.”

Husted announced July 27 that the coalition of tea party organizations and other groups behind the measure that submitted 427,000 valid signatures, well over the roughly 385,000 needed to get the amendment on the Nov. 8 ballot.

The proposed amendment to Ohio’s Constitution would keep people from being required to buy health insurance or face penalties. The federal mandate would go into effect in 2014, when new competitive insurance exchanges are scheduled to open.

Opponents say the federal government is overreaching by requiring individuals to purchase a product. The Obama administration counters that Congress’ power to regulate interstate commerce squares the constitutionality of the mandate.

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The Bengals are such a terrible as a team for all the reasons the government screws up everything it touches, whether it’s education, or health care. The ownership of the Bengals believes as government does, that money spent equals value on the field, and that clearly is not the case. Carson Palmer gave up over 40 million dollars to leave the organization because he was so embarrassed to be a part of the Bengal organization, because at least he wants to retain his soul moving forward. But many in government have given up their souls long ago in trade for financial security.
These soulless creatures of bureaucracy are why government believes that “they” have the right to force us to buy their health care plan, and of course why public education simply doesn’t understand that they will have to learn to decline their revenue streams to match the declining wages, declining property values, and less money coming from outside community sources because the education bubble has burst. They believe they have a service so valuable to society that they should be exempt from any decreases in value.
This next article displays the extreme arrogance of the Sycamore School District, which is similar to what has been going on at Lakota where almost the same terminology was used to justify a 4.75 mill levy they voted on early this past week. It is not by accident that all the districts seem to be saying the same kind of thing. It is the Ohio School Board Association, a centralized organization in Ohio who helps provide the guidance to these school boards in times of crises, and it is this OSBA that is seeking to fulfill the type of education agenda that Progress Ohio, (the same group against the Health Care Freedom Amendment) wish to implement, at the tax payer cost. Check it out:

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Update five-year forecast

Regarding the July 13, 2011 article “Sycamore schools: Some light at the end of fiscal tunnel.” In order for the taxpayers and board members to understand the significance of the lost state revenue, the district’s May, 2011 Five Year Forecast must be updated now.

The lost state revenue needs to be looked at in the context of the five-year plan. The five-year plan would show the new revenue, planned expenditures and new cash balance for each year.

The development of a revised plan should not wait until the next state mandated October forecast. This revised forecast will provide the school and community four more months to consider the consequences of these changes.

Twice in the article, Diane Adamec, board president referred to a planned tax levy in 2012. The school has promised not to approach the community for more money until at least 2012.

She said, “What the regular citizen will not see is a request for an additional tax levy sooner than planned.”Later she adds, “By holding expense growth to an average of 1.5 percent annually, this district will maintain its promise not to go back to the community until at least 2012 for new taxes for operations – an eight-year span.”

Based on what I read and hear about the worldwide fiscal crisis, the possible U.S. financial default and constant deficit spending, there is no “light at the end of the fiscal tunnel.”

All government entities at the Federal, state, local levels including public schools, and citizens are facing a huge challenge ahead. Thinking that we might see some light ahead may be a comforting thought, but it is more akin to burying one’s head-in-the-sand.

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I like that article because that is precisely what these schools are doing; they are burying their heads in the sand. They are pretending to “sacrifice” and maintain a lower rate of growth, in this case only 1.5%. They pretend that they are doing it “for the community” and at a great sacrifice to themselves. Preposterous!

I heard multiple times last week in regard to Lakota Schools that it’s been since 2005 that Lakota has had a revenue increase! It was only two years after that increase that the teachers union mounted a strike against the school which drove up costs 10.1% over the next two years, so some of us have learned that putting more money in the basket doesn’t get better results, or even maintain the old ones, because the union once they see the money, will threaten to walk off the job anyway in order to get at the extra money the community has supplied. It is in these modern times, where all the inflated costs are contracting, and education falls under that category, that plans must be made along that contraction. It is only natural that revenue should be less than the 2005 numbers because the financial supply, (which was inflated) is contracting, so it is not growth that should be expected, but decline, and their budgets should reflect that.
Yet with all the discussion Sycamore Schools articulates the dilemma wonderfully. They think it appropriate to present to the public that they only expect a 1.5% increase in revenue per year, like they are doing everyone a favor, by not going to voters for more money more often!
The value of something cannot be measured in some transitory monetary figure. Teachers have overpriced themselves and with the absence of elusive state and federal money, it is obvious now. Arrogant academics like these superintendents who think the voting public to be fools, just like the academic oriented president who has tried to force the nation to buy into his Health Care Policy, in order to fulfill the political whims of progressive groups like Progress Ohio, are simply out-of-touch and living their lives buried in the sand while their bodies are visible, but their heads are not. And if anyone doubts that there are people in the world who are just so heartless and outrageous by their actions yet friendly and conciliatory in their public presentation, (just like school systems are) just have a look at the ownership of the Cincinnati Bengals.
The Bengal organization threatened to move to a different city, just like teachers threaten to strike to get their money. The city voted to give The Bengals a new stadium, which is now bankrupting the city for a game that is played 8 times a year in a stadium that is average at best compared to other NFL homes. And the product the Brown family puts on the field is terrible…….absolutely terrible with no sign of getting better…….ever! I look at that team as proof that money spent does not acquire the desired results, it just fills the pockets of those who care for nothing else but money.
The city is under contract, and obligated to fulfill that contract. And the schools are under contract too, with their unions who have extorted enormous sums of tax payer money into their pockets out of sheer greed…….and they talk down to the public like they are children! This election of November 2011 will have a lot to deal with, but more than anything it will say what kind of society we are to become. Because in voting for these school levies, allowing President Obama to mandate that citizens must “purchase” something from the womb to the tomb, and that unions should continue to have the right to drive up costs even when market factors show their expectations should be declining, are all at play, and depending on the outcome of that vote, our society will be shaped accordingly. This is not one where people can sit back and let somebody else make the decisions. Ultimately, that is why the Bengals are such a bad team, because the contract was forged from the blood of the community and it lacks accountably, or even reality and that has infected the leadership, which infects the players, and ultimately infects the fans. The same happens in a school, and it always will until the public puts a stop to it. Until then, everyone is guilty just a little.

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