With the school levy season now in full bloom during the fall 2012 election cycle, I must make my position on tax increases for public education perfectly clear. When I was a spokesman for No Lakota Levy I would agree with Darryl Parks at 700 WLW and proclaim that if you vote for a school levy, you are stupid. Such a term is acceptable within the realm of political rhetoric. Well, the more I have learned about the school funding issue, the more I realized that those words were not harsh enough. The situation is far worse, and the people involved are more than stupid. It is this realization that led me in a different direction from the rest of my levy fighting friends who simply don’t want their taxes to go up. My feelings about public education has evolved over time into realizing that the union “machine” that runs the public schools needs to be removed completely from the business of education for the sake of all children. My new stance is that our society must figure out a way to free ourselves of that money eating, progressive political device called public education that is turning the minds of our children into mush, and enriching many political looters with the value of our real estate. “If you vote for a school levy, you’re a diabolical idiot who is a detriment to your community, and your nation.” The reason why is shown in this wonderful video released by Reason Magazine. It shows clearly how public sector unions are ruining public education, corrupting politics, and consuming our tax dollars with a sensational appetite, and it must be stopped. It can’t be ignored, it can’t be reasoned with, it simply must be destroyed in American society.
Anyone who watched the Democratic National Convention can see clearly that the people who attended seem to be from some other planet, and don’t belong in the land of the free, because they wish to be a part of the machine shown in that video, and people like me want to be free of people like them. Progressive thinking people like those at the DNC convention are not entitled by their very existence to feed off the rest of society to maintain the machine they have built, which is most obvious in our public education system. Public education does not exist for children; it exists for the employees who are cogs of that machine. That machine of unionized public education consumes children like a car uses oil to lubricate all its gears. It does not care about the individual lives of its students. It seeks to use them to keep the gears from rubbing together and by the time the child reaches their 18th year they are dirty like motor oil to be discarded and recycled in new service to the machine of public education in the form of neurotic parents.
But if children are the motor oil in the public education machine the tax payers are the fuel. And the bigger the machine, the more fuel it consumes, and “consumes” is the correct term. The fuel burned to keep the machine running is gone forever, and serves no purpose but to keep every part of the machine running. Pro levy looters during every tax increase campaign for a school declare that voting “yes” for a school levy is an investment into our communities, and an investment into our children. They are lying 100% by saying such a thing. Calling the consumption of tax money in public education an investment is the same as saying putting gas in your car is an investment into the value of your car. All the gas gets you is a calculated distance from point “A” to point “B.” When the gas runs out, the car has little value unless more gas is put in. But the gas is not an investment. It’s a consumable demand that simply buys time and distance. It does not improve the value of the car.
Public Education should be scrapped completely and re-invented from the ground up. I personally don’t care where the United States ranks with the rest of the world who are using similar teaching methods for similar reasons. The system itself is an unmitigated failure, and to measure that all one has to do is look at the fools, the destitute, the inter-depended succubus’s looking for more kids to supplement their welfare checks, the drooling Walgreens addict who is too scared to move through one day of their life without the advice of their doctor, those are the kind of people who attended the DNC convention, and they are the products of public education. Public education is breeding complacency, fear, self-doubt, political interdependence, collaboration over individualism, and a celebration of the human peaking order which is contrary to everything it takes to maintain a free and peaceful society.
The problem is of course that many people in our society are parts of that machine. Many politicians make a lot of money off the public education machine, and know of themselves as simply cogs of it. Real estate values have been attached to the machine as if to help protect it from prying fingers. Many parents are also cogs of the machine, and public employees are vital gears to keeping the machine running, and if the machine stopped, they would not know what to do. Their lives are so embedded in the public education machine that they can only beg for more fuel to keep it running just a bit longer like a desperate traveler on a lonely desert highway hoping to get enough fuel to make it to the next gas station. That is the source of the cries for more tax money to keep the machine running just a few more miles. It’s a desperate hope that the machine will stay running so all the people embedded into it can continue to function with a purpose.
When I first started working on that machine, I noticed what was broken, and what parts needed to be upgraded and replaced. The machine has refused to allow itself to be fixed, so in lieu of the public education resistance to change, my recommendation is to scrap the machine completely and to not spend any more fuel and oil on keeping it running. My stance is that if a parent really loves their children they’ll home school them which are proven more academically proficient. If parents really love their children they’ll teach socialized skills with scouting and church groups, instead of public education sports and extra-curricular activity. Parents would do well to more heavily utilize online learning for their children; they are more effective than a classroom of peers being group taught by a bored teacher with a mind emptied by union rhetoric and is just a cog in the education machine.
This is why I have upgraded my severe opinion of the voter quality of those who support school levies. Public education is not in existence for children, it consumes them, and anyone who says otherwise is a liar, and is behaving in a socially destructive manner. People who say such things are simply asking for a fill up at the gas pump so they can continue to run the machine, which is a waste of time, and destructive to entire generations of students and their parents who struggle to fund it. The truth of the matter is that calling voters stupid who support school levies is not just stupid, it is completely foolhardy. It is a failure of thought in the highest extreme and such people are contributing to the destruction of the human race. Anyone–and I mean anyone, who a votes for a school levy is a diabolical idiot, because the machine of public education needs to be re-invented and shut down in its current form. It’s a waste of time, money and the minds of millions upon millions of young people. The evidence is in the types of people who attended the DNC convention. They are the products of public education, and proof that the education machine should be shut down forever in favor of a system that is actually productive, and much, much cheaper.
Due to my feelings about this issue, I’m happy to let someone else speak as a spokesman for education reform and state funding. I am happy to let those people try their hand at fixing the system. Because my diagnosis after a lot of work is to pull the plug and let public education die. I see nothing good coming from public education for all those who exist outside of the machine, and are only needed by it to supply fuel which is endlessly consumed until it eventually runs out. Anyone who says otherwise is in denial, and are hell bent on keeping a broken, corrupt, machine running when the only use of the mechanism is for it’s own existence.
If you vote for a school levy, you are a diabolical idiot.
For everyone who isn’t an idiot, go see this movie. It’s what you need to do in your own public school. Watch it, learn it, and act on it.
Rich Hoffman
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At this point I’m not even going to venture to guess what Democratic strategists were thinking when they made the statement that “we all belong to government” at the start of the DNC convention. It is clear that those people are not Americans as you and I might think of them, but some other species all together. Read the Washington Times at the link below to investigate more about that strange species of humanoid called “Democrats.” Just keep in mind that most public teachers, firefighters, cops, TSA employees, union workers, welfare recipients, illegal immigrants, race baiters, feminists, IRS employees—virtually anyone who collects a government pay check thinks like these strange Democrats. You would think they would avoid such stereotypes with carefully worded speeches, but no, right out of the gate, they professed their love of government, which is contrary to everything we’d like to believe about the freest country on earth.
I was not a fan of the RNC convention or the machine politics it represents. But listening to the speakers, I can say with all honesty that they at least sound like normal people. The DNC convention on the other hand sounded like beings from some other planet who have a political ideology that is grossly out-of-touch, entirely too emotional, and completely devoid of logic. At the start of their convention the national debt clock marched beyond the 16 trillion dollar mark, which is absolutely devastating. It’s appalling, unequivocally irresponsible, and every single politician involved in that 16 trillion dollar number should be thrown out of office immediately. All Republicans, all Democrats, all old people, all young people, all men, women, white men, black men, Asians, Latinos, everyone—who played a role in that horrendous national debt should lose their job as the earliest possible time.
The Democrats more than any group are most guilty for that number. For the first two years of Obama’s presidency they controlled the House, the Senate, and The White House, and the rapid rise in the debt shows it. The Republicans who were voted into office in 2010 have attempted to propose a responsible budget but it has been blocked by Senate Democrats and The White House with cries of pandering toward a mythical middle-class, the muddy middle of social orthodox.
What is disguised in their political approach at the DNC convention is a love of power, a truly disgusting enjoyment of being members of the political class. The Cincinnati firefighter who spoke at the DNC convention regarding Senate Bill 5 and the union interest against Republican reforms to collective bargaining was never a real conservative. He may have thought he was in the days when he supported John Kasich for governor over Ted Strickland, but many Republicans discovered during the fight in Ohio over collective bargaining that they were in fact progressives who were not traditional conservatives, but had been bitten by the labor union tendency for social looting at tax payer expense. The firefighter from Cincinnati was simply a pawn for the union desire to maintain their political power, which Ohio tried to fix. But the power of the unions, which is legalized theft of tax payer dollars showed how deep into Ohio’s political system they resided. Those were the kinds of people the DNC convention put up to speak as success stories. People like the progressive firefighter are what they consider the strength of their platform. That’s bad.
All through the DNC convention it was public employees like the firefighter, and teachers who Democrates like Barack Obama think are so valuable. Yet I would argue that the “education funding” they hold in such high esteem is worthless if it is taught by the kind of idiots who attended the Democratic Convention. The infrastructure jobs that Obama and his political boot lickers speak of involve government employees who make up the “middle class,” where people in the “political class” rule with legislation. People like the Cincinnati firefighter don’t care to be indentified as a member of the “middle class” because they are essentially un-ambitious, and are happy to trade their freedoms for a union wage that allows them to buy bass boats, $200K homes, and fund their yearly vacations with unused workdays, compliments of the American taxpayer.
I find the designation of being a member of middle class to be an insult. It’s like being told that you are in the middle of a competitive event and you rank in the middle of the pack. It’s an un-American concept, the middle. We don’t celebrate football teams that come in “middle place.” We don’t give awards to runners who cross the finish line in the “middle.” Only in politics do we celebrate being average, because that’s where the voters are, and for the Democrats at the DNC, they cater to the lazy, the unsophisticated, the poor with the promise of stealing the wealth of others through legislation, and giving it to those who don’t have the ambition to even attempt to be the best at what they do. Is it any wonder why the economy is failing? Is it any mystery why the national debt is so large? It’s because of the legalized looting that government embarks on and no group has been guiltier than the Democrats.
As the DNC organizers paraded out Bill Clinton, an impeached, lying president who got caught letting a woman his daughter’s age giving him oral sex in the Oval Office, they clapped as though he were a celebrity. And to the intellectual loser, and morally inept, Clinton is their hero. To me he’s just another scum bag looter who claims the success of his balance budget to his economic wizardry while riding the coat tails of Reaganomics in the 1980’s. Yes Reagan spent too much on defense spending, but we were engaged in a Cold War with the Soviet Union at the time, and it was justified. Reaganomics brought to America cheap oil, cheap gas, cheap homes, job creation, and an economy that produced enormous GDP numbers. In the 1990’s in the wake of that success the tech bomb occurred and Bill Clinton coming out of his cocaine induced sexploits let the Republicans like Newt Gingrich and John Kasich balance the American budget as he went along with it to the benefit of the country.
Unlike Obama, Clinton was a looter that was more than happy to let other people do all the work, because he planned to take the credit for it. Obama plans change and transformation in America and the only people who find that message appealing are those who are too lazy to compete. Obama’s message to the NFL would be not worry about building a championship team, because he would spread the wealth. He’d be inclined to take away the players of a really good team and give them to the team performing in the middle to be “fair.” The result would be of course an NFL that doesn’t even try to win the Superbowl, because the prize at the end of the season would be cheapened by the president’s interference. But that is the essence of Obama’s economic platform and the summary of the DNC convention, and they wonder why they are failing economically.
They must be the most bizarre collection of misfits assembled in one place. Listening to them speak it is shocking that half of them can get out of bed. They are certainly the bottom rungs of society, and are embarrassments to the future of America. Listening to them speak I get the feeling that they should not even have a political party. Who do they represent? Who are the idiots who would vote for such fools?
The answer is that it’s the two faced public employees who will believe anything the people who give them a pay check tell them to believe. The Cincinnati firefighter is not a man of conviction, a pillar of the community. He’s just another looter looking for a government handout, and since he saw that Kasich and the Ohio Republicans—(myself included—proudly) wanted to take that handout of collective bargaining away, he was willing to switch parties and join the rest of the political looters at the DNC convention.
The debt clock breeched the 16 trillion dollar mark because of idiots like what spoke at the DNC convention. They are looters in every possible meaning of the word. They take credit for the actions of others, they make their livings off legalized theft, and they have no personal convictions aside from a progressive political platform. They govern from their feelings, not their heads. They seek fairness instead of siphoning to discover the best among us. It is because of these traits that they will all be failures at everything they do in their lives, except steal from those who are already successful. Listening to them speak as a fellow American, I can’t find any common ground with anything they utter. Fairness, and being nice sounds good, but it is expensive, and when a political platform is built with emotion, it will of course be expensive. Look at public education for an example. In America, progressives in both political parties have blown the great strides made as a result of Reaganomics which at least Bill Clinton had enough sense to leave alone. But since the 90’s, looting politicians have done nothing but act irresponsibly, over emotionally, and put their priorities into all the wrong things to cover up those follies which have caused the national debt to hit 16 trillion dollars. Most of the guilty parties are at the DNC convention and every one of them should be removed from politics as detriments to our national security.
Even when they attempt to dress up their speeches to appear sophisticated their basic message is still more government expansion, more mediocre results, more “middle class.” Their views belong in Europe, not America, because it was people like them who caused “westward expansion.” The move west was not driven by greed; it was to escape the pretentious big government types from Europe who moved here after the brave adventurers paved the way in the 1800s. And the more of them who moved to America and settled in cities like Philadelphia, New York and Washington, the more the adventurers moved west to face off against the Indians in a battle for freedom to be left to govern their own ways. The DNC convention is made up of all those people the brave, the adventurous, and the enterprising spirit have sought to flee as though their lives depended on the evasion, because often it does. There is no more West, so now the looters and the adventurers are forced to finally fight it out, and that’s what’s about to happen. The two sides cannot live together as is evidence from the past. And based on the debt clock, only one side deserves to win, and it’s not the looters at the DNC convention.
I don’t know if my favorite home town reporter in Cincinnati is Ben Swann of Channel 19, or Brendan Keefe of Channel 9. I’m a big fan of both reporters. They represent “excellence” in reporting to the highest degree. But in this particular case, on this particular day Ben Swann had the testicular fortitude to ask President Obama in a face to face interview about the presidential kill list that has caused a lot of anxiety among people who have been paying attention. Watch this!
Be sure to write Channel 19 and let them know you support Ben Swann and his hard-hitting reporting. Most reporters would have been satisfied to even get an interview with the president, and would have never risked asking such a tough question. But Ben Swann, acting out of journalistic integrity drove all the way across Ohio on a Sunday afternoon to interview Obama in northern Ohio, and when he got in front of the President, he asked him one of the hardest hitting questions Obama has had to answer in person during his entire term. That took guts—serious guts.
Many of us are on that list, so thank you Ben Swann. It is the job of a reporter to keep politicians in check so that secrecy can’t shroud sinister intentions. And the Obama Kill list is one of the most sinister leaks to ever come out of any White House. It was Channel 19 through Ben Swann that put the president in the hot seat, where he belongs, and did everyone in America a tremendous service.
Gery loves my first book and has always been one of its greatest supporters. He showed me how he was prominently displaying The Symposium of Justice on his online bookstore which can be seen at the link below, and we reminisced about the many adventures we had over the years because of that novel.
Gery’s wife is a tremendous reader, and the last two times I’ve seen her, she had her face planted in her trusty Kindle. I told her that I didn’t understand why the Kindle was so popular and she showed me how she could download a lot of books into it and read them on the run. She absolutely loves it. She also mentioned to me that she noticed I never advertised The Symposium of Justice in its Kindle version, and I realized that mostly the reason was that I haven’t accepted the technology. I am still very much in love with traditional books that I can hold in my hands and smell. These download versions are such a new concept that I just can’t accept them the way others have.
The Symposium of Justice is a favorite book among those who have read it, particularly those in our little whip community. The character of Fletcher Finnegan/Cliffhanger is an interesting twist to the traditional Zorro/Batman type of character. As written, Fletcher Finnegan is a combination of Howard Roark from Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Zorro. He’s very complex, athletically perfect, and has a tremendous intellect. He is by all definitions a perfect man. He is the type of hero that everyone wants to be, and he lives his life without any fear. The plot tension comes not from his weaknesses but in his interaction with a society that strives to beat him into submission any way possible and the reader’s desire to see how he can survive such a social gauntlet.
My characters are all like this, because to be honest, that’s the only type of character I think is worthy to write about. In my recent Tail of the Dragon Rick Stevens has been found to be of the same caliber of strong, fearless quality as Finnegan. Although I did go out of my way to put Rick Stevens in situations that would show him to be more “human” than Fletcher Finnegan was in The Symposium of Justice, because of the incredible blowback I received from the progressive literary community, which at that time was not so well-defined. Reviewers back when I released that book didn’t know what to think about such a strong character, because socially we have become so used to whiny, snot-nosed, beta men. Nobody but children openly like and admire such strong characters as Fletcher Finnegan. However, the problem is that The Symposium of Justice is a very “adult” book so kids weren’t the ones buying it, it was adults.
Slowly, over time, people have started to show their love of Fletcher Finnegan. Maybe it has something to do with the re-emergence of Ayn Rand’s strong characters from The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged that is contributing to it. Or maybe the Obama Presidency has left a yearning for such characters that wasn’t there in the years immediately following the 9/11 tragedy which placed The United States on the defensive and trillions of dollars of over-reactionary, panic driven debt. Or maybe it’s because people have been reading my blog and are hungry for the kind of characters who live the lives I paint in the millions of words I’ve posted hoping to share my thoughts about how the world should be, and not willing to yield to in our current social state. It’s probably a little of all those elements that is giving The Symposium of Justice new life for a new generation of readers.
There is a scene that occurs in The Symposium of Justice that is so contrary to a typical action story that many who read it the first time through didn’t know what to think. The scene occurs in the chapter titled ‘Salad Bar Goddess’ where a hit man named R.L. Justice tracks Fletcher Finnegan and his family down to kill in front of a crowded restaurant in the town of Fort Seven Mile. The hit man, a traditional tough guy from the south side of Chicago, and feared as most sinister in his profession realizes that upon seeing Fletcher’s wife Misty, the town’s popular city council woman, Justice realized that he was sent to kill the perfect man, because nobody but a perfect man could have a woman as beautiful both physically and spiritually as Misty Finnegan. Once Justice figures out who Finnegan is, he makes eye contact and for the first time in his life sees a man looking back who has not one ounce of fear in him. Justice realizes that even if he could kill Fletcher Finnegan, that to do so would be a crime against humanity and suddenly Justice realizes that he is nothing but an assassin for a corrupt system that seems to only exist to stamp out people like Fletcher Finnegan. It is a life changing moment for R.L. Justice to meet Fletcher Finnegan. No words are spoken between the two men, but the communication that flows between the individual lives of the two radically different men completely alters the direction of the professional hit man. Realizing that his life has been a terrible waste, and that he is simply a puppet to his puppet masters, R.L. Justice decides to do one good thing in his life after that pivotal meeting. He leaves the restaurant, and gallantly throws himself out onto a highway in front of an oncoming truck, and kills himself instantly. That’s the kind of novel that The Symposium of Justice is.
My wife loves the character of Cliffhanger/Fletcher Finnegan. She thinks that young people should have such a positive character in their lives. Finnegan is everything I always wished Zorro to be, but lacked. Finnegan doesn’t bother to pretend to be foppish as Don Diego did in the Zorro stories. Finnegan knows that people don’t know about his vigilante antics as the masked Cliffhanger because society wishes not to acknowledge him socially. They refuse to see what is right in front of them, so there is no need to hide. It is that revelation which confronts the old, seasoned hit man R.L. Justice who considered himself an expert at dissecting human beings in order to identify his targets, and even he did not see who Fletcher Finnegan was, until it was too late. So obviously, I have thought about a sequel to The Symposium of Justice and have been anxious to begin it. My wife has been pushing me for years, and it was one of the first things Gery always mentions to me in our meetings over a long period of time.
So I am going to take the advice of Gery’s wife and embrace this whole Kindle thing. The least I can do in these tight economic times is let people know that they can get a Kindle version of The Symposium of Justice. It costs only $7.99 at Amazon.com and can be downloaded today. So while you’re out there reading my new book Tail of the Dragon, feel free to download The Symposium of Justice and enjoy the obscure exploits of Fletcher Finnegan as he fights the Dark Knights of Order. It’s a contemporary tale with an unusually strong central character that is my idea of what every human being should strive to become. It’s a fan favorite of all my whip friends who love that Fletcher’s weapon of choice is a bullwhip, but it’s not his physical prowess that defeats his enemies—it’s his mind. A man who can do both is the most lethal weapon imaginable, and a society of such men and women are what I as an author strive to see.
Click the picture to enter the world of Fletcher Finnegan without further hesitation. Even though I’ve explained one of my favorite scenes, it is not the only twist and turn in that first writing endeavor that I professionally completed. It is only the beginning of a deep and intricate story that goes to places only literature can imagine.
It didn’t take a little bird to land on my window this time to inform me that there is something amiss in our community, again involving the West Chester Trustees. It appears a disrespectful indiscretion is deliberately being conducted regarding the transparency of the Trustee meetings as President Cathy Stoker after the August 28th 2012 meeting showed her intentions to append in the public record comments made during the June 26th, and July 10th meetings.
Having disagreements are part of politics, and hashing out the truth through conflict can be very healthy. And part of learning that truth comes from the transparency of the public documents generated by the Fiscal Officer Bruce Jones who attends these trustee meetings so that the people of West Chester can reflect on what transpired in their community government. However, because of all the attention that the crosswalk issue had generated it appears that Trustee President Stoker has become concerned that some of her statements needed to be appended, which is a gross violation of public transparency. At the conclusion of the August 28th meeting Cathy instructed the Judi Boyko to work with Tim Jester and WCTV to append the June 26th Trustee meeting minutes responding to so-called erroneous statements made by Fiscal Officer Bruce Jones about the process surrounding the crosswalk incident.
The content of the “erroneous” statements are fairly minor and reflect disagreements with the politicians at play. They are of such a nature that Bruce Jones said to Cathy Stoker, “Furthermore at no time at the meeting o May 22 did you Cathy comment to the effect that you were out there watching traffic on Eagleridge. It’s not in the records.” Cathy’s response in the appended meeting notes were that she did indeed comment during that meeting to the effect she had watched traffic; as Mr. Jones himself admitted in his email to Mrs. Stoker on July 13 wherein he stated, “originally did not recall your comment about sitting in our car observing traffic at the intersection…I again reviewed the videotape and at the 43:15 minutes into the 5/22 video you made that comment.” The comments are those kinds of disagreements, all of which can be seen at the previous article I wrote on this matter.
The trouble is when a trustee like Cathy has a clear vote always in their favor with Lee Wong and a government employee who makes $140k per year like Judi Boyko to eat out of the hand of whoever sits in the presidents chair at a trustee meeting, seeks to append bickering records from public view because they know that people may catch the manipulation that is going on and start adding two and two together, deep trouble is not far behind. Clearly, the intentions of Cathy Stoker and Lee Wong from the previous article were to use public money to build a crosswalk in Beckett Ridge where Wong’s wife is a member of the homeowners association and there appears to be some bragging that has went on about how Lee being a trustee in West Chester could get a crosswalk put in for his friends and neighbors. The issue is not the merit of the $5,000 crosswalk which may or may not be needed; it’s the process that put it in play to begin with. Lee Wong, Cathy Stoker and Judi Boyko already had the whole project in motion before the May 22nd meeting was put to a vote, and that’s not how things work. Then when Cathy got caught in the manipulative scheme, she sought to manipulate the public records to cover her tracks, which is why she instructed Judi to work with Jester and WCTV to “append” the trustee notes.
When politicians get caught doing these kinds of things, it does make me very angry. When I had similar problems with the Lakota School System, after three votes by the community to reject a tax increase, the school system instead of forcing a 5% reduction in salaries and benefits among their unionized work force to balance their budget instead raised sports fees, cut busing, electives, and sought to undercut the work I was doing behind the scenes with No Lakota Levy to help pay the sports fees for children who most needed it. Their response to me was to stand outside Kroger by Lakota East and smear my name and the good work I was trying to do, which led to a very public spat that Cathy Stoker felt she was mandated to speak on. In The Cincinnati Enquirer Cathy Stoker said about me, “the language used by Mr. Hoffman is not only egregiously offensive, but reflects badly on the No Lakota group that Mr. Hoffman supports.” Clearly, Stoker is the kind of politician that seeks to hide her actions behind appended notes and polite backstabbing. I prefer to fight out in the parking lot and when these manipulative types find themselves painted into a corner, the try to sanitize history, and when someone gets angry about it, they call them “egregiously offensive.” What they really want is “shut up and take it!”
What is “egregiously offensive” to me are trustees who appear to be keepers of the public’s trust, as Cathy illustrated herself at my expense in The Cincinnati Enquirer telling me that I should hold my temper when I see the nasty political games that I’ve witnessed, only to allow the people who run the show like her to “append” documents, twist the facts, and attempt to cover up scandalous behavior with public consensus before everything hits the fan. These types of people hate transparency, they love it when nobody watches what they are doing, because it’s all too easy to cut deals and use public tax dollars like a child uses Lego building blocks to construct anything their imaginations can conger up. Nobody really cares about the procedures, the safe keeping of the public treasury because when they run out of money they just look for a tax increase or a new tax all together. It’s the looters life for those kinds of politicians.
For me, it’s not the comments between politicians resulting in the discussions from the various trustee meetings that are the problems. I expect conflict in a trustee meeting. I expect George Lang and Cathy Stoker to fight it out. I expect Lee Wong to call George Lang a rich suppressor who lives in big mansion while he lives in the lowly neighborhood of Beckett Ridge. (Yes, Lee actually said something to that effect) I expect those public representatives to have disagreements. To me, it is perfectly fine for Bruce Jones to call Cathy a liar, and to force Stoker to defend herself. That’s politics. It helps put the truth on the table. What I don’t like is a person who seeks to eliminate the opposition so that there is nobody to call them on their manipulative tendencies and collude with others for the benefit of the few. And manipulating public notes or altering them with chaos to cover tracks is disingenuous to the keeping of public records. It defeats the purpose.
To me calling people publicly who will do anything for money a “prostitute” as I’ve done on more than one occasion is far less “egregious” than telling a township employee to meet with the people at WCTV so that the record can be altered to cover up the betrayal of public trust. Yet that is how Cathy managed to get a crosswalk built for her friend Lee Wong without a proper vote or discussion beforehand. She conducted her meeting in an underhanded way to leave openings later for editorial manipulation in the chess game of politics. If she got caught, she’d say she really meant this, or really meant that, and if she got caught flat-footed, then she’d just have the records altered to reflect her version of reality. Yes, that is far more egregious than calling people a bad name, or even disagreeing with their politics. The open manipulations of the public trust, including the media who turn a blind eye toward these occurrences are all just a little guilty of “egregious” behavior that is in direct violation of the public trust. And those violations are never more evident than in a trustee president who wishes to append public comments, because if she weren’t trying to cover something up, she wouldn’t care to begin with.
After months of discussing it finally my new novel Tail of the Dragon is being released. My publisher is using Baker and Taylor to distribute the book so it will be available everywhere as they are one of the largest book distributors there is. American Book put a nice review and sales link at the article below as well:
There is always the assumption that politics is an option that everyone considers a cherished social accreditation. When the radical unions who have their fingers in everything realized that I was not going away over the public school funding debate they had to do something to attempt regain control. In an indirect way their hands are clean, it’s their fingers that are dirty. It is the lobby of organized labor that is often the real villain as the employees of the system march to the parameters of thinking established by union labor. They set the rules of all political engagement.
I have been working on Tail of the Dragon for a few years and before that book I wrote a novel called The Symposium of Justice. I’ve worked on screenplays, been to film festivals with various projects, and been a professional bullwhip instructor for stunt coordinators in film and from my perspective the issues of local politics, or even national politics, are very minor compared to an actual achievement as an author. I knew what I was doing when I let the Enquirer come to my home and photograph me using bullwhips to articulate why Lakota needed to balance their budget. I knew what the radical elements within the public education industry would say as they jumped all over my love of traditional values since many of them are progressive and I told the reporter as much during the interview. It was those pictures taken over two years ago that resurfaced during the “blackballing” article done by the Enquirer discussed in Matt’s radio interview above. For an example, and review click the link below:
“Blackballing” is where the media or a political entity cuts you out of having access to them. It’s a kind of castigation for not following the proper rules of engagement. During all the levy fights of the last couple of years I have been able to speed dial various reporters in print, radio, and television to get my stories out about why the Lakota school system is wrong for wanting to increase taxes, countering anything that the pro levy factions might bring up. I am not the first to do this. I knew before getting involved that others who have come before me have been used by the media to generate stories until the comfort level of everyone involved got too testy, then the media collectively pulls the plug, “blackballing” whomever the controversial figure may be.
I knew from my friend Arnie Engle over in Fairfield who has been harassed every way a man can be harassed because of his opposition to school levies, and my friend Jennifer Miller, the former school board member in Mason who was harassed to no end because of her desire to do a “good job,” and my good friend former Lakota School Board member Sandy Tugral who was ran out-of-town labeled a “kook” by organized labor that if I put myself out there that the same types of people would come after me. The people mentioned suffered various degrees of vandalism to their private property, especially Arnie. They have been publicly ridiculed. And they have all been “blackballed” by the media once the media was done with them. I knew that if I put myself out on a limb in a local levy fight I would become a major political target.
So I gave my Enquirer article dressed in my cowboy hat and my bullwhip to let the people who would come after me later know that they would do so at their own peril. Most people assume that a career in politics is in the back of the mind of any activist. Nobody considers that a person might actually only be concerned with doing the right thing, so to their minds, appearing on the front page of The Cincinnati Enquirer announcing my resistance to a local tax issue dressed over-the-top was political suicide. Nobody considered that my intent was to take my measure beyond the touch of traditional politics, because I knew it was only a matter of time before the “blackballing” attempt would be made in my direction—since that is the only way that public education can maintain their tax payer scam.
Here is a link to that Enquirer article mentioned above, when things were still on good terms:
Blackballing is how the school controls the media in the first place. The Enquirer was given a choice after No Lakota Levy started Yes to Lakota Kids helping needy children pay their sports fees, if they did not fall in line with the union controlled politics of public education, they would be “blackballed” by the school, in this case, Lakota. That is why the media is so quick to come after people who align themselves against the established political order. The media will use people to help create a series of good stories, just like a person might eat a nice meal not to be full, but simply for the taste. But in the end, the media will shit them out without regard once they are done with them, and I knew eventually that day would come.
The fault that I noticed all my friends mentioned above had fallen victim to in their various political fights is that they tried to do it through the established order of politics, where all the union controls are already implemented. They tried to become school board members, or run for some kind of office so they could get on the inside and attempt to create change from within, which of course doesn’t work. I decided not to try that, because my primary focus is that of an author, and because I have no intention of ever being elected into public office. I have no fear of doing, or saying anything that might cause me trouble down the road, so traditional politics was worthless to me. As an author I can operate without the fear of being “blackballed,” because the written word cuts through the immediacy of politics.
That is the advantage when you write novels, and run around the country with bullwhips and live a life that is superior to anything that politics can offer, is that you are free of their reach. So when the organized labor apologists attempted to “blackball” me I was already prepared. Their frustrations were already evident since they could not threaten physical violence on me. Who in their right mind was going to attack a bullwhip expert who could make mince-meat of them quickly in a personal conflict? So they attacked my media contacts.
What they didn’t know was that my media contacts were not limited to only Cincinnati, since my field of endeavor is literature, controversy is actually good marketing and works to my advantage. So the more “blackballing” they attempted to inflict on me, the better it has been on my literary endeavors. The “blackballing” would only work if I wanted to run for some type of public office, and cared what people thought about me in being “electable.”But my business is not in such popularity contests. My job is to tell stories and give insight from “the front of the train,” not adhere to the politics in the back. CLICK HERE FOR A REVIEW ON THIS METAPHOR. Literature trumps politics, which is why politicians eat out of the hand of Hollywood actors. Just ask the Republican Party about Clint Eastwood. Clint knows that he has more value to American society than some manager who wants to run for office and is a prisoner to all the silly political rules that the media has established to keep their stories within their editors 500 word limits, and their 3 minute TV story blocks. Books, movies, music and other art is where more detail is explored and entertainment gains more value beyond the politician. So the mistake of those who took on the union controlled school systems protected by a media afraid of being “blackballed” is that they played the games of politics instead of the rules of literature. And when I did that Enquirer article two years ago starting everything that followed, I never intended to beat them with politics, but with the written word.
None of that matters now. I’ll still of course be involved in issues that affect my local community, because it’s my responsibility. But I am not a prisoner to their political rules of engagement, my new book Tail of the Dragon as we discussed it on WAAM, in Ann Arbor, Michigan and many media outlets to come are what I do for a living. It is the result of a lot of hard work and that hard work is beyond the reach of silly politics and the media “blackballing” that goes on to keep everyone in their respective social categories. In my case the goal of a novelist is not to be “liked” but to be “respected.” And to gain respect, you have to say what you mean and not speak the “double-talk” of politics. And sometimes that means calling a group of levy apologists “latté sipping prostitutes with asses the size of car tires” because it’s the truth as a novelist sees it, and not some comb-over politician who simply wants a desk with a nameplate and the respect of a community for a tax payer funded job title.
It’s harder to write a novel, get it through a publisher, an editor, and a public relations staff than to fight a silly school levy that labor unions, media reporters, and thousands of insecure parents feast off of. So it pleases me greatly to announce that my new book Tail of the Dragon is now available to the public at the links provided, and that as a body of work is beyond the reach of the media “blackballing” that goes on, or the political controls of the small-minded name-plate gods. It’s a work onto itself that is far superior to any act of politics and is why I put my efforts there, beyond the reach of the “blackballers” in the back of the train.
The reason I mentioned all the above upon the release of my novel is because I’m not the kind of writer who articulates from a mountaintop on just pure speculation. I write from experience. In this case at the same time that The Enquirer was photographing me with my whips in my back yard I wrote the below article about my book Tail of the Dragon, August 23rd 2010. Much of what I experienced above over the last 2 years found their way into the plot of that action packed book. So dear reader, when you experience the corruption and betrayal of the novel’s characters as seen through the eyes of Rick and Renee Stevens, you can rest assured that there is more truth in the story than pure fantasy. And you can also rest assured that I was writing the plot for the novel that has been my real life all along paragraph by paragraph, and there was a method to the madness from the very beginning.
I waited a couple of days to calm down before stating my opinion of the Eastwood speech at the RNC Convention just prior to Mitt Romney being officially nominated as the Republican nomminee for President of the United States. The panicked Romney aide behind the stage at the Convention who said cringing as the speech time on stage exceeded the 5 minute mark and was way off-key from the typical stuffy Republican stage setup, “You don’t edit Clint Eastwood” was absolutely correct. You don’t “edit” Clint Eastwood. Eastwood is one of the most recognizable names in the world not because he sat quietly while others told him what to do, but because he has often embarked on wild chances and taken great risk upon himself and others in the building of his international persona. He has an elevated level of understanding of what audiences want to see, and his speech certainly reflected it. His knowledge of what an audience wants to see far exceeds the knowledge of the typical 30 to 40-year-old PR specialists handling Romney’s campaign, and they are not qualified to “edit” Clint Eastwood.
I knew what to expect when Clint Eastwood took the stage because I have watched the film icon give hundreds of interviews over the years, and most of them are just like that. Eastwood does not like to use notes, Teleprompters, or come across with flattened authenticity. To understand what Eastwood thinks deep down inside all anyone has to do is watch some of his most personal films, like White Hunter Black Heart, and Bronco Billy. Nothing Eastwood said on stage just minutes before the heavily scripted acceptance speech of Mitt Romney came as a surprise to me.
I was impressed to learn that Mitt Romney personally invited Eastwood to speak. It shows that Romney as a manager can identify talent thinking outside the box and will likely surround himself with good people like Paul Ryan when he gets the presidential job. But Romney was not giving Eastwood any kind of break in letting him speak. Unlike the speeches by Paul Ryan, Scott Walker, Marc Rubio and many others that were carefully scripted, Eastwood was not, and the Romney people wouldn’t dare ask the legendary actor to do such a silly thing. Romney like all politicians sought from Eastwood credibility, and to show that prestigious members of the Hollywood community supported Republicans, and that not all Hollywood was in the corner of Barack Obama. That message was so important to Romney that he had Eastwood give the last independent speech before his own introduction, and he got what he wanted in Clint Eastwood. To me, that shows great vision and instinct even if the Romney handlers were dumbstruck by the performance.
I was however baffled by the criticism, many saying that Eastwood looked like a stumbling fool on stage, a senile old man. Eastwood’s hair was a wreck, his manner seemed unorganized, and he was crude and insulting. But the biggest criticism of all is that he sucked all the air out of the room and had people talking about his speech the next day instead of Romney. Well, news flash, I could have told the Romney people exactly what Eastwood was going to do. I was so unsurprised by his speech that my wife and I hardly noticed it because in the Hoffman house, Clint Eastwood is the closest thing to a religious icon anyone will find. Over my dresser are two pictures of Clint Eastwood carefully framed and I look at them every day. My DVD collection has every single Clint Eastwood movie ever made, and they have been watched, and watched, and watched again. I even have the T.G. Sheppard album that features a duet with Clint Eastwood called “MAKE MY DAY.” For many years my family has ushered in each New Year by watching all 5 Dirty Harry films on New Year’s Eve and New Years Day. No football games, no parties, just Clint Eastwood movies with him playing Dirty Harry. Every young person in my family who has had to drive around in a car with me has had to listen to me playing that song while we drive. I simply love the man. I admire his grit and ability to age well every bit as much as the toughness he exhibited in his youthful movies that made him an international star. Eastwood has not been afraid to piss off people before, people he had admired greatly, specifically John Wayne when that cowboy icon was up in arms over Eastwood’s film direction, and acting in the movie High Plains Drifter, which Wayne felt was an insult to the American Cowboy image he helped to craft. Eastwood’s portrayal in that film as a “hell hound” returning from the dead to punish an entire town for the betrayal of their sheriff crossed many established lines of thinking in the early 1970’s. It is so refreshing to see that the 82-year-old Clint Eastwood is still not afraid to take a chance to make his point and is much smarter than the people around him. Even after a lifetime well lived, Clint Eastwood is still authentic to his own personal beliefs and cannot be swept up in the tide of politics. Eastwood showed up as a favor to the Romney Campaign and at no point did he get wrapped up in the glitter. To Eastwood, he knows just him being there helps Romney. But Romney does not help Clint. The sacrifice was purely on Eastwood’s end.
When I give public speeches and other presentations I do not use notes because I learned it from watching the many lectures of Joseph Campbell, and interviews with Clint Eastwood. The reason is that carefully prepared speeches come out sounding fake. It is much better to speak from the heart. Now on the downside, a public speaker without notes sometimes rolls through sentences while stringing together thoughts. People expecting Eastwood to give a polished performance like his younger speakers at the Convention have simply become used to the well oiled machine that has become the political norm. When Clint Eastwood went on stage, I know he was thinking he had to hit all the marks the Romney people told him to hit, but he was going to do his own thing as he usually does. Knowing Clint Eastwood, he went up on stage with a metaphorical idea he came up with while listening to the other speeches of the evening, and he wanted to use the “empty chair” to convey how we all feel about President Obama and politics in general. Most of the directors at the RNC failed to grasp the metaphor, and that is their problem. Eastwood figured that it’s easier to ask for forgiveness than permission, so what the hell. Everyone in the room wanted somebody to take a shot at President Obama that was stylish and worked on any levels, and Eastwood had the guts to do it.
When people say “if I were to die tomorrow” they mean they would do things differently if they knew they did not have to live with the consequences which implies that they would be willing to live with little lies in their lives if they know they have to wake up tomorrow and face the music. In Eastwood’s case, he has lived his life this way for a long time, and now that he’s 82, he could die tomorrow. He could die at anytime, and he knows it, and is comfortable with that knowledge, but he’s not about to leave this earth being a stooge for a political looter, who simply wanted to use Eastwood’s image to prop up his own credibility.
Clint Eastwood detests–especially in politics–over grooming, too much make-up, and cardboard cutout people. Oddly enough, some of the appeal of Paul Ryan is that he represents an Eastwood style of politician, no-nonsense, fit, smart, and practical. When he first took the VP position his own hair and clothing was a bit sloppy, and that is appealing because it shows that Ryan cared more about his work than his appearance. But in two weeks once the Romney handlers began to “manage him—Ryan received a nice $300 haircut and is getting a taste of the “looters life” and it is obvious that he’s starting to like it. You can see it by the way he scowled at Eastwood’s speech looking at his watch in quit protest. I would offer to Ryan not to forget who he is, and to not get too wrapped up in images. When Eastwood, one of the greatest film directors of all time went on stage with his hair a mess—without a single speech note—without a care about his future and how the Romney people might scowl at what he said—he did every bit of it on purpose. Clint Eastwood had a very good idea that what he was about to say would be analyzed heavily, criticized, and belittled. He knew that the finger-pointing politicians would run for cover and attempt to distance themselves from him within seconds. Eastwood’s intention in his speech was for one last time in his life on a big stage to show everyone viewing just what is wrong in politics, and why people have lost faith in the two-party system. Everything he did was on purpose to be analyzed, and talked about for years.
Eastwood’s goal on stage that night at the RNC was not to be liked. He was already liked. Mitt Romney simply wanted to show the world that movie stars like him too. That was the entire purpose of bringing Clint Eastwood to the RNC convention. Nobody gives a damn about the crap a politician says. And it should come as no surprise that a movie actor could show up and take all the attention from the other looters in the room. And nobody gives a rat’s ass about what the media thinks, because those are the same idiots who “made” Obama. It’s the heart and soul of America that Clint Eastwood was speaking to and that is why the people who enjoyed his speech did, and the people all caught up in the wrong aspects of politics called it “strange,” and like “an episode of Twin Peaks.” Even Glenn Beck belittled the Eastwood speech, which really lowered Beck’s grade in my book. I was planning to go see Beck when he comes to Cincinnati in a few weeks, but based on his comments over the Eastwood speech, I don’t think I will value what he says. I might listen to him every now and then on the radio, but I won’t go out of my way to see him in public like I did when he came to Wilmington. Beck like Ryan, Anne Romney and Scott Walker based on their comments and behavior over Eastwood is looking too closely at the established order of things, and it is that order that people are sick of. Beck has done a good job asking for courage among politicians, and out of all people, he should understand what Eastwood was trying to do. But even he is too wrapped up in the “established” thinking to see what’s really going on, and that is disappointing. Like Ryan, Beck is becoming too big, and his concern over his own legacy is starting to overtake his reasonable assessment. Politics should not be so well rehearsed, it should not be so scripted, and it should not be praised as royalty. When Eastwood took the stage he did so as a rebel who didn’t comb his hair, and was going to speak from the heart. That should be honored.
The drifting from sentence to sentence that Eastwood was doing, especially after the 5 minute mark was because the red light was flashing, telling him to wrap up his speech. When I speak in public, I get told often to wrap it up, because if people let me, I will talk all day. But in Eastwood’s case, he knew that the directors of the RNC event were not happy with what he was doing, and that what he was saying was going to hurt. But he had to do it anyway, and he controlled his emotions very well, picking carefully which thing to say next so that it was right at the edge of acceptance, without crossing the line. It was not that Eastwood was a senile fool on stage, but a man walking a tightrope, and he was in no hurry to fall. He took one step after another to deliver one of the most scathing rebukes of a sitting president ever delivered on such a large public stage, and he did it with all the bravado that made him one of the biggest movie stars in the world. Mitt Romney got what he wanted whether he was consciously aware of what he was asking for or not. As I said before, Romney is showing a good instinct for hiring the right kind of people for the job, and bringing Eastwood to the convention was a brilliant idea. But I would caution those same Republicans not to distance themselves from what Eastwood did and said. Clint Eastwood did the Republican Party a tremendous favor at his own personal risk. The politicians involved should accept it at its value, which is great, and not distance themselves from him. To do so is to betray what they proclaim they are fighting for.
The American public is sick and tired of contrived, plastic, politics. They want to hear things told from the heart, and they like to see the soul of the person speaking. Glenn Beck is a great public speaker, and even he writes down notes in outline form so he can deliver punctual presentations to the public and not bounce around when he gets stuck in front of 60,000 people like Eastwood was doing. But notes are still a crutch, and it takes great courage to stand in front of so many people with only your intellect as your alley, which is why Eastwood does not speak with notes. It’s also why he’s 82 years old and still able to speak with such authority as he did at the RNC convention. His wits were clearly about him, as he delivered a speech that worked on many levels, not just a superficial, visual one.
If I was disenfranchised with politics before the Eastwood speech, I am certainly more so now, based on the political response to it. The Republicans are the good guys in my book and even the good guys are deeply tainted. I can see where the next line of battles will occur in the years following the buffoon Obama, and it will not be with the professional politicians in the room at the RNC convention or their handlers. I stand with Clint Eastwood completely over anyone else from the RNC event. It’s not that the man can do no wrong in my eyes. I can think of a few times he has let me down, as in making the film Tightrope, and a few others, but I trust that Eastwood makes every attempt to be honest with himself, and his intellect has benefited from his honesty. So when he says something, I trust what it is. I may not agree with it all the time, but I know there was a thought process that delivered the thought, and it didn’t come from some snot-nosed speech writer fresh out of college who doesn’t have a lick of experience in real life. I don’t want to hear Romney deliver a carefully controlled and well-orchestrated speech given to him by a hundred such handlers. I want to hear the authenticity of what a man is, not what kind of image he can conger up for himself. It is a sad state when it is an actor who is the most real person in a room, and at the RNC convention, Clint Eastwood was the most honest. Anne Romney should still be grateful that a person like Eastwood is supporting her husband and not make sly comments about how there should have been more contrived video of her family instead of the Eastwood speech. Nobody gives a shit lady. Don’t even think about turning into another Washington princess before the seat from the previous fat ass duchess has left it.
It should say everything to everyone watching the Eastwood convention speech that an “empty chair” was the most interesting thing that happened at the RNC convention. The empty chair worked on many levels of psychology. It obviously represented President Obama who has spent his entire presidency running for re-election, and not doing the job he was elected to do. But it also represented the emptiness present in politics. I would not put it passed Eastwood that the idea came not while on the plane from California, but while the Romney people where giving him their talking points to incorporate into his speech. The idea for the chair was meant as a warning not just to Obama, but to the Republican Party to not just become more empty minds in empty seats holding public office. It was a warning not to be afraid to shake it up a little, and be unpredictable, because that’s how you get the media eating out of your hand instead of the other way around—and that is a lesson that the Republican Party hasn’t been able to achieve since Ronald Reagan was president, who like Eastwood knew all the tricks of the trade because they are actors who have mastered public image. The Eastwood speech was not a debacle, it was a brilliant metaphor intended for minds too dim to see it. But the resonance of Eastwood, in what felt like one last public performance was a potent one that sadly shows how bad our political system really is. It revealed that even people I thought “got it” still don’t and I won’t bend over backwards ever again to listen to what they have to say, because the mind behind the thought is still in its infancy.
Yesterday Romney came to Cincinnati. I was invited, but I did not go, mainly because of the ill feelings I have after listening to the controlled finger-pointing after the Eastwood speech. In a couple of weeks, Glenn Beck is coming to town and I was planning to attend, but won’t be now. I’ll still support both people, and in Beck’s case I enjoy 80% of his work most of the time. But to jump on the Eastwood bashing bandwagon tells me a lot about these people. When it comes to picking and choosing, I’ll stick with the “Man with No Name” over the “Name” of a politician or political commentator. Because there is far more value in the man who arrives at 82 years of age and has not been seduced by the glittery lights of politics over the men who are enamored by it and became that way in a much shorter span of their lifetimes. I will not go out of my way to see those first people speak in person. But if Eastwood announced that he was coming to Cincinnati tomorrow to eat a hamburger but would not be giving any public statements I would drop what I was doing and attend, because there is more manliness in the authenticity of sticking to a set of beliefs than the person who follows the trends of belief. The world is so full of the later, and is in desperate need of the former. The value of a wordless bite into a hamburger by Clint Eastwood holds more merit than a whole string of convention speeches by polished politicians and their puppet handlers of orthodox opinion. The aide was right, “you don’t edit Clint Eastwood.” His brand is proven, and if you ask him to speak, you take what you get. In the case of politics, a movie actor is much more important than a roomful of politicians, and that sad fact is a reality that cannot be covered up with fancy lights and balloons, but is exposed by the presence of a simple–empty–chair.
When the discussion of merit between individuality and collectivism is considered, its social manifestations illuminate most dominate in our love of institutions. A love of institutions is collectivism, and carries the most blame for much of the world’s troubles. For instance, I was asked the other day how I felt about the up coming season for my favorite football team The Tampa Bay Buccaneers. My response was that I’d have to wait and see, because the coaching staff was new and I didn’t know what to think without them playing a game yet. The assumption was that I would blindly support The Bucs regardless of performance, which I would consider idiotic. I may root for them but I won’t blindly support any collective entity on the bases of an institutional name.
For instance, supporters of The Cincinnati Bengals have through their institutional support of a losing franchise allowed a bad owner to use tax payer money to fund his financial enterprise putting Hamilton County into serious debt funding Paul Brown Stadium for 8 games a year. The Bengals as an organization are doing the same thing that Lakota and Colerain public schools is doing and that is to use a publics loyalty toward sports to sell institutional support for a larger enterprise. When people support an institution just because of loyalty to a name, they allow themselves to become victims of institutional failure. Radicalized public unions in public school can hide their true intentions behind the patriotism of school pride unified behind a sports team. People do pass school levies over such silly presumptions. Just as they passed a stadium tax in the 90’s to keep the Bengals from leaving only to discovery it would bankrupt Hamilton County. Since the problems are too complex to grapple with fans of the Bengals have decided win, lose, or draw, they are going to support their home town NFL Football team no matter what it costs.
To understand the severity of institutional worship all one needs to do is look at the sex cover-up at Penn State involving Jerry Sandusky. To the degree that seemingly sane administrators protected the institution of Penn State Football, members of the media, and many years worth of alumni all chose to ignore the facts in favor of serving the institution as a collective whole.
The obvious confusion comes in mistaking patriotism with worship. There is a difference in honoring the President of the United States with respect and forgiving the crimes committed by a President because his position is one of institutional honor. Collectivists consider it honorable to show devotion even in the face of wrongdoing. The idea of “taking one for the team” is a commonly accepted rationale among collectivist thinking people. Notice the trend proclaiming that there no I in “team” is rooted in this commitment toward collectivism where the individual is secondary to the “the greater good.”
This is a disease in American culture that is not native to our country. America was founded on individuality and this is why no place else on the face of planet earth has societies of difference cultures, different religions, and different financial backgrounds where they mingle in a free society better than in The United States. The disease comes from the trend of collectivists who embrace a global society under the umbrella of collectivist political philosophies, to point out circumstances in American society where collective groups—such as women, gays, racial minorities are suffering an injustice at the hands individuals, or groups with their roots in classic American individuality.
Collectivist tendencies are the direct result of our education system. They are to blame for why there is only a two party political system where one side roots for one set of ideas, while the other party roots for other ideas. Both political parties have the idea of what’s good for the party in their hearts over the well being of the individuals in that party. At the RNC Convention in Tampa the scripted delegates were expected to throw their support behind Mitt Romney instead of Ron Paul out of loyalty to their party, not the individuality of the delegates, and this is a fundamental flaw that has it’s tentacles in every aspect of American society, and it is fundamentally wrong.
The source of the failure is public education. It is there that all of society was taught incorrectly the merits of collectivism, which has turned the quality of education into a brainwashing session of future lost adults cheering on their children’s high school football team even if the coach and players of that team find themselves embroiled in a scandal. In public education, when such a scandal breaks, a sacrificial victim is picked and tossed to the public to appease the gods just as the Aztecs cut out the hearts of their victims hoping to bring rain to their villages. Ask Stacy Schuler about such sacrifices at Mason High School, because the scandal she was involved in involved the entire school. Yet only she went to jail for having sex with half the football team. The football players were looked upon as heroes, while she was disgraced and sent to the gallows so to speak, because she was expected to take one for the team, for the benefit of the Mason School System.
It’s bad on all levels, and yet we still continue to teach collectivism as though it was good for the future of our country, and it’s not. All institutions have the tendency toward collectivism, and are therefore vehicles for evil. Institutions are publicly considered honorable, yet deep in most hearts of human society there is an inherit distrust of them, because at a fundamental level it is acknowledged that the individual is being crushed by the evil encroachment of collectivism. There is an unease in group activities that says that what is happening is wrong, and people cope with it by drinking too much at social events. But it is known by all, even though it’s not understood consciously.
The villain of the matter is public education and it plagues almost every American citizen who came from public education. The modern problem is in understanding to what extent society has plummeted under the flag of collectivism in service of institutions. To understand what impact such a mentality has had on a country of individuals damaged by a philosophy that is fundamentally wrong the evidence is easy to see. To measure the impact, all that needs to be done is to see the damage that institutions inflict on society at large, and to admit that service to them is as foolish as worshiping some Mesopotamian god in the city streets of UR. Institutions are hokey concoctions built by collectivists on a half-baked journey to hells of their own making, upon the backs of individuals.
That quote comes from an angry mother in the comments section of the following video.
I enjoy comments like that, which I have received in copious amounts, because they say a lot about the kind of people who write them. For perspective, I can’t image writing such a thing to someone unless I’m responding to an attack from someone else. In my case, I have done nothing to the person writing the statement—I have not harmed her child in any way, I have not personally insulted her, I have not brought any ill will to her. The only I have done to cause so much anger, and to provoke such rhetoric is to say no to tax increases at the Lakota School System. The anger does not come from what I have done to her; it comes from what she wishes me to do on her behalf. It comes out of frustration that I am not willing to do what she has designed for me.
To care what someone’s opinion is—is to have respect for the person who gives the opinion. She obviously cares what my opinion is; otherwise she wouldn’t try to alter my direction with insults. To go out-of-the-way to actually insult someone, the goal is to change their behavior with peer pressure, through the condemnation. If the person being insulted does not value the opinion of the antagonist, then the insult has no power, and this is what led to the severity of her comments.
While it is true that I do insult the Obama presidency, unions, Democrats, sometimes Republicans, corrupt politicians, teachers caught in disgraceful acts, along with other issues, my comments come from anger that the people who took money from me as a tax payer are misusing it. If those people did not take something from me at some point, I would not otherwise care about the merit of their actions, but because they do, I am determined to get my money’s worth when something goes wrong. If they waste my money, they are going to hear about it, because honestly, I work too hard to make it. I do not enjoy seeing it squandered away by thieves. This is a big difference from what someone like the commenter above does, and what I do. Her anger derives from me not doing what she wishes me to, and my insults are simply getting back the value of my money spent. When I dish out insults it is to let the people know that I do not approve of how they are spending my money, and if they don’t want to hear it, then they shouldn’t take my money.
When I first became involved in the school levy issues the insults that were thrown in my direction by the same kind of pro levy supporters were that I should try to teach a class so I would know how difficult it is. My response was that I would be happy to teach a class at Lakota. In fact, I told a reporter for Spark Magazine, with the intention of Dean Hume to see it, that I would not only teach one class, but I’d teach three classes at the same time, just to show how easy it was, and to prove those teaching positions were not worth paying employees $60K per year. They didn’t take me up on my offer, so I have done my teaching here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom covering topics ranging from education reform, world history, comparative religion, mythological studies, American history, legal analysts, economic theory, literary review and many, many other issues. Basically, if a reader here wants to know something all they need to do is Google OVERMANWARRIOR, and the “KEYWORD” of their choice. Love, sex, marriage, political theory, science, psychology, just name the category and it has probably been covered here. I have written enough free information here to fill ten 100,000 word books and I have done it in my spare time, really just for fun. For all these highly paid teachers whom I heard so much about how they sacrifice so much to help children on their own time after their 7.5 hour work day is complete and getting paid very well to do it, I don’t see them going to the extra trouble I have to even back up their claims. I have seen them attempt to strike in 2008 and complain about their health insurance costs going up, but their idea of sacrifice is grading papers while they watch TV at home. I wrote ten novels worth of information for free, to help those who want to know the truth–who want to understand how things really work, and to learn what they should be learning in public education. Sometimes I do get a bit insulting, but it’s my prerogative. The bottom line is that those teachers, administrators and levy advocates have been exposed as frauds, as lazy and overpaid sloths that are too specialized and conduct their life as social parasites.
I know there are school board members at Lakota who have master’s degrees in education. I know there are teachers and parents who sincerely do care about the education of the community’s youth, but I am baffled as to why these people have not started blogs like the one I have here to compete with me, to counter my offerings with their version of the facts representing their own viewpoint. If I were a teacher making six figures, I can promise this much, I would have an education blog and I would be trying to teach the whole world everything I knew, since my living would be taken care of by the community tax payers. My proof is in the work I’ve already done. I would expect nothing less from the supposed sacrificial teachers and administrators, who claim they live, eat and breathe the benefit of their students. If that were the case, they would do a lot more for free, and they wouldn’t bitch about it by constantly asking for pay increases.
The real answer to why there aren’t more education blogs and education employees who are volunteering their time and energy for the sake of education is because they are really only in the business of teaching kids because they expect to be paid, and paid well. The reason these people think of me as vile, as disgusting, as the greatest, most diabolical threat to the security of the Lakota School District is because my actions expose their true intentions, which is to make as much money on the backs of children and pretend it’s for the greater good of humanity– that it’s a sacrifice they take at great personal cost. The reality is that those education employees are spouting union talking points, and the parents who support school levies do so because deep down inside, they are simply looking for a babysitter. If they really cared, they would go above and beyond, but they don’t.
Instead, they are using a tactic that was exposed here at this site almost two years ago called The Delphi Technique as a way to hit up tax payers for additional money to pay for their already inflated wages. The advocates of future school levies aren’t even smart enough to not call paying $167,000 for 2 different “facilitators,” to help Lakota pass a levy by name. Again Lakota is wasting money to try to pass a levy instead of just balancing their own budget with cuts to their labor! With these new facilitators they are going door to door into as many living rooms in the district over the next 6 months as possible and giving their speech as to why tax payers should pass a levy. They want a person on every street to have a “facilitator” meeting that includes everyone else on their street. That is the choice Lakota has made instead of doing any real work. The whole process is right out of the Saul Alinsky playbook. The word “Facilitator” in this case comes straight out of The Delphi Technique. They are so arrogant that they didn’t even try to hide what they are doing. Click the link below to see how it works.
So when these people call me names it’s not because of the comments I make. My anger magnifies when those same people hire “facilitators” to attempt to tell me and the community I live in that the sky is green and the grass is purple and expect the statement to go unchallenged. If those people want to call me names, it comes from their anger at being exposed for what they really are. They desire to keep the truth hidden from even themselves, let alone public scrutiny, and they make statements to such an extreme effect hoping it stops my behavior. The roots of their indiscretions are to prevent resistance with an insane peer pressure tactic that is deeply troubling, and a blatant attack on reasonable thinking.
Contextually, calling me a vile, disgusting human being is more of a plea than anything. It’s a cry out to stop holding up the mirror which shows how ugly these strange collectivist levy advocates behave in the light of day, in full view of everyone. It is just as insane as walking naked in public and expecting nobody to notice, then getting mad when someone points it out. The profanity is simply a mask intended to hide a laziness that is evident to everyone. Never again can a teacher or administrator write me under a fake email address and declare that I should try teaching, because I have already done it. I do it here every day, and I do it in larger amounts than any handful of professionals employed in the field of education. So the argument of the teacher sacrifice has also flown out the window forever, because people outside the school system see how little teachers actually do compared to their own occupations, and how whiny they sound with their silly organized labor pleas. It is for that exposure that the name calling comes in my direction, because the dirty little secrets of the education monopoly have been exposed, and they are embarrassed, as well they should be. For that reason, every insult to me is an honor that I cherish, and the worse, the better because of the meaning behind the act.
One of the top 100 places to live in the entire United States is West Chester, Ohio. In 2012 it comes in at #97 which is extremely commendable. This is not the first time that West Chester has ranked in the top 100, which takes economic factors, quality of schools, social life, crime rates, and projected demographic forecasts into the equation. The region around West Chester hosts nearly 100,000 people who shop, work and live in the thriving community that is one of the best places on planet earth to reside. The real factors for why West Chester has been so successful is because there are smart people who live in West Chester, it’s very pro gun, so crime is very low, and it is still run by trustees, which is very direct representation by the citizens. West Chester still has a small town feel with big business wealth generation. West Chester as a business community supports very high-tech business, fine dinning, and has within it just about every conceivable chain restaurant known in the country. It is such a diverse community that it can even support one of the most unusual gun targeting ranges in the entire United States in a business that just open called Shoot Extreme. CHECK IT OUT, CLICK HERE.
Like anywhere in the country however the temptation for decline is ever-present, and in West Chester the desire of the “wanna’ be” communist, the “wanna’ be” socialists, the bottomless pit school levy supporters, the endless fire levies, policies levies, and a yearning to loot from every business in the community and the people who work in them contains the same level of addiction as the typical porn advocate. In West Chester, those types of people are the ones who desire to incorporate West Chester into a city from its current state of a township. These are the people who desire centralized planning, chaotic bureaucracy to hide the corruption that pads their pockets with extra income, but more than anything a nameplate on their desk which tells the community that they are important.
The dream of these functioning socialists are to become city council members who control millions of dollars, and ultimately to have their worthless fingers on the value of business owners who are thriving in West Chester currently. These are the types of people who do not have the ability to produce worth on their own, because they are simply barnacles who act as parasites on society by imposing their will on those who actually create jobs, wealth, and the quality index reflected in the top #100 rating. The advocates of West Chester incorporating wear masks of civic duty to disguise their power grab and part of that mask are cleverly disguised arguments that conceal their tendency to loot, suppress, and control thriving industries by advocating four primary motivations to move from a township to a city. They are:
1) Business’s are not paying their fair share of taxes, (sound familure—Obama comes to mind)
2) A city would be more efficient, (which is completely false. The opposite is always true.)
3) Becoming a city will lower residential property taxes. (False because the same advocates of a city are the same idiots who support endless school levies, any tax savings will be gobbled up by the radical unionized labor of West Chester’s largest employer, Lakota Schools. Cincinnati Public Schools and Princeton come to mind, both have outrageous per pupil teaching costs due to their looting school boards aligned with high tax city councils.)
4) Becoming a city would be more prestigious. (What is more prestigious than being one of the best areas to live in the country? West Chester is already there. Becoming a city would take West Chester into the other direction–Section 8 housing because it makes people feel “worldly and enlightened,” even though it’s just another form of human slavery, larger government enterprises, and more complicated zoning regulations to justify the jobs created by bloated city councils.)
Just like with school levies, the people who typically run for school board and city councils tend to be left leaning political types who fall in love with the prestige a nameplate on their desk gives them. This is because they are not successful people in regular life, and they seek to fill those voids with public service. The smart people, the wealth creators, the right thinking people tend not to run for political office because their time is simply worth too much per hour. To give away 15 to 20 hours a week to community politics is a waste of their time, so it is usually only the fools who run for office, and have no idea how things work in actuality. To expand on the arguments above in favor of incorporation consider these more detailed facts:
1) According o West Chester’s Zoning Dept, about 35% of land in West Chester is zoned for business. This 35% is about 60% developed. According to the Butler County Auditor, this 35% currently pays 58% of taxes collected compared to 42% for residential (keep in mind that residential comprises about 65% of available land in West Chester).
% of Land% of Tax PaidIndex
Business 35% 58% 166%
Residential 65% 42% 64%
To further exacerbate the problem, according to American Farmland Trust, for every $1.00 a resident pays in taxes, they take out about $1.22 in services; for every $1.00 a business pays in taxes, they take out about $.45 in services.
The incorporation movement wants to punish the group that is carrying the majority of the burden…talk about killing the goose!
2) Relative to a city being more efficient a township is the most efficient form of government currently allowed by ORC. The Cincinnati Business Courier in 2008 ran a list of the largest tri-state governments. Included in that list were number of employees and total population. According the CBC, West Chester had 1 employee for every 232 people living in the community. How does that compare to all of the cities on the list? See below.
Municipality Employees/Population
West Chester 1/232
Cincinnati 1/63
Hamilton 1/88
Middletown 1/129
Covington 1/128
Fairfield 1/153
Mason 1/156
Norwood 1/118
Blue Ash 1/80
Lebanon 1/148
Newport 1/115
Oxford 1/174
You only have to look in the papers to see what is going on in most cities around West Chester. The financial outlook is bleak. West Chester is very healthy. Our Carryover (retained earnings in the corporate world) has grown from $700,000 five years ago to $13,000,000 today. You would be hard pressed to find a city that is more efficient than a township.
3) Lowering property tax? Don’t believe this for a minute. Government does not give money back. West Chester currently comprises less than 20% of the property tax bill received by its residents. Let’s pretend that by incorporating we can lower our property tax (not likely but let’s pretend). If we can lower West Chester’s portion of your property tax bill by 20%, it would only lower your total bill by less than 4%. How do West Chester property taxes compare withy other cities located close by? In 2008, the effective tax on a $200,000 property in the following communities was:
CommunityTax
West Chester $3,604
Loveland $4,030
Middletown $3,629
Cincinnati $3,526
Mason $3,453
3) Being a city is more Prestigious…compared to what? By being a township, without extra money to spend, we are able to stay focused on our core competencies; Public Safety and infrastructure. On March 13, 2008, Moody’s Investor Service raised West Chester’s rating to Aa1 for General Obligation Various Purpose Bonds. This is the highest rating of any community in Ohio! Money Magazine in 2006 Ranked West Chester as the 45th most desirable community to live in America. They stated that the only thing hurting West Chester was the lack of medical services. With the opening of the state of the art West Chester Medical Center, that problem has been solved.
The proponents of incorporation discuss the fact that people living in West Chester but working in another city currently pay an income tax anyway. If reciprocity is not granted, these citizens will pay a tax to both communities. For example, if you currently live in Wyoming and work in Cincinnati, you pay a 2.1% tax to Cincinnati, and a 2% tax to Wyoming, for a total of 4.1%. Given the state of today’s economy, reciprocity is not a given. The argument in favor of a city tax is no different from a thief claiming the resident’s money as their own by saying the residents are already giving their money to another thief elsewhere.
Proponents of incorporation also say that by becoming a city West Chester will gain more power and control. They are correct! This will transfer power and control from citizens to the government. As a township, West Chester can not raise taxes without a vote of the people. As a city, this can be accomplished with a vote of council and is the real intention. The desire to incorporate West Chester is the desire to loot the public. The only people who would benefit are the socialist leaning politicians who are advocating it. The benefits of incorporation are only masks to the sinister aim of more bureaucracy, higher taxes, and more centralized control over community activity. The aim of that activity is not rooted in capitalism, but socialism. The dream of these goofy left leaning tax advocating losers would be to see businesses like Shoot Extreme end, while more families would gather on the lawn outside of the West Chester Library to listen to the future city council members pander their socialist dreams with more sidewalks and group hug social events. The key is that city council members would decide which businesses succeed or fail implemented through tax regulation and zoning ordinances, as opposed to the determinations of capitalism. This happens to a small degree now as the pub I mentioned here with great reverence just a few months ago went out of business triggered by zoning issues and unfriendly business practices. CLICK TO REVIEW. Becoming a city would create more of that behavior not less.
The essence of such advances toward cityhood are the crux of many spirited debates when communities far into the future wonder where their declines began. They are concocted in the mind of functioning socialists whose only logic skills are managing parks and other utopian public concepts that are non-profit in their orientation. Cities are big, and too complex to manage by a part-time staff of trustees, and are attempts at government expansion by progressive minded individuals. They are a detriment to a thriving economy, and only benefit the political class, as everyone else in such communities find themselves subservient to liberal mysticism. And that is not the direction that a great community like West Chester should be contemplating even remotely. The advocates are simply looters with their eye on a potential prize of $20 million dollars of additional revenue that could be tallied up by the politicians and their love of nameplates. The money is to be spent creating jobs that report to the politicians who stole the money to begin with; so that in their small, futile minds, they can pat themselves on the back and pretend they are job creators just like the rest of the businesses in West Chester who are currently successful whereas the politicians are not.
For the back-story on this issue refer to the below article:
