Category: Political Theroy

Fly A SkyCar Today: The Future of Transportation

So how does America become a primary manufacturer again, where we are exporting something the rest of the world wants, instead of being a primary importer? It seems like a daunting task, after all, we’ve lost the car market to the East, the computer age was born here, but now is developing in the East, and we are no longer pushing the space race in America. In order to recapture the technological lead on the world stage, America would have to invent something dramatically, and radically new, that every person on the face of the planet would want.

Let me introduce the M400 Skycar. It’s a personal Skycar with a top speed of 350 MPH and has a range of 750 miles and a flight ceiling of 30,000 feet. It is the future. Now, there are a lot of videos here. This is one of the rare times that I’ll say the videos are more important than the text I provide. So take your time and watch the videos, all of them. And pass this link on to a friend so the word can get out. I believe this is extremely important to the United States in 2011 and on.

I’ve followed the work of Paul Moller for most of my life and am a tremendous fan of his. So much so, that I dedicated a large part of my book The Symposium of Justice to the M400 Skycar in hopes that the military would see the potential for applications, and get the ball rolling.

Paul Moller is the equivalent to the modern-day Henry Ford, or Bill Gates. His idea could be just as explosive if only politics would embrace the concept and accept that highways, manufacturing unions, and current aerospace manufacturers and their government contracts, are becoming obsolete. Can you imagine the changes that would have to take place in the airline industry? Can you imagine the airline industry lobby against the Skycar concept? Do you think GE would want this technology to emerge unless they had their feet already in the game, which they don’t? If the TSA employees join a union, can you imagine the protests trying to protect their jobs that would be leaving as people gained the independence of personal transport and wouldn’t need TSA Security any longer; all the vehicles would be controlled by GPS Systems? Nobody would be running into buildings with these things because they’d just be riding around like a passenger while computers do all the flying. Of the large aerospace companies, only Boeing has entertained the construction of Skycars so far, so the protective interests are actively in place.

I gave a Powerpoint, to John Boehner so he could possibly do something to help with the lobbyist politics that exist on K-Street and other places so the M400 Skycar could enter the marketplace. I also sent the same Powerpoint to the current President and to the head of General Motors, giving them the idea to “re-invent” themselves. They of course are committed to building electric cars, which will soon be irrelevant.

Does it work? Yes! Now that these tests are completed and on the record, even if Moller never gets this M400 into production, the steps have been taken, and a vertical takeoff personal vehicle will emerge for personal use. The sky is the future because it costs less to maintain and eliminates costly infrastructure need. There will always be need for highways for shipping reasons, but personal transportation of 50 miles or more needs to go to the air. That might seem like science fiction, but it’s currently science fact. All that fact needs is for public consciousness to catch up and accept the technology, and that will happen when people understand how they’ll benefit.

Here is the testing of stability in flight, hovering controls. Pretty important so the vehicle can land in a parking lot with reliability. This is one of the most difficult technical feats the vehicle had to overcome, and it has been successful.

So who is Paul Moller? Meet him here. He has testified before congress on this issue and has worked with NASA. This entire infrastructure is in place now. All it will take to bring it to a reality is for you to demand it. Paul will explain the whole concept, just listen, and enjoy.





I personally can’t wait to have one. For my life style, it will be perfect. I could be in New York within a morning, take care of my business, and be back that night for dinner without any difficulty. Same for Atlanta, Chicago and Washington D.C. since all those cities are within 500 miles from Cincinnati. In other places around the country, the trip from LA to Las Vegas would be minutes, and from San Fran to LA under an hour with most of the flight time being accent and descent. New Yorker’s could be out of the city and up into Connecticut, Vermont and Massachusetts within an hour. No traffic because the GPS system would stack all the destinations at different elevations. Weather conditions would be the only variable, but conditions would be favorable over 95% of the time. Only heavy wind and thunderstorms would prevent flight.

Image the trip from London to Paris, which currently takes a few hours by their high-speed rail system that goes under the English Channel from the time you buy your ticket, get on the train, and arrive at your destination. You could literally travel from the British Museum of Natural History and arrive at The Louver Museum in well under an hour including getting into the Skycar and exiting.

However, there is a lot of resistance to the Skycar out there, particularly from the existing infrastructure, and politics and I have a sincere concern that Paul Moller’s dream may be all too reminiscent of one of my personal hero’s, Preston Tucker. If you don’t know the story, Tucker was a GREAT car builder and was WAY ahead of his time. His car was so ahead of its time that the Big Three put pressure on the government to prosecute Tucker though Senator Ferguson, who was taking lobby money from the Big Three, before he could launch his car to the public. Listen to this clip from the film Tucker: A Man and His Dream as delivered by Jeff Bridges.


This is one of my favorite films. If you haven’t seen it you are missing a classic from Executive Producer George Lucas and Director Francis Ford Coppela.

I don’t want to see Paul Moller become a Preston Tucker. I see dramatic parallels between the two men. I think Moller is a lot more level-headed, and more classical engineering minded where Tucker was a salesman first and an engineer second, Moller has the great ability to stay out of trouble.

Eventually, the Big Three automakers would adapt to the innovations that Tucker introduced in 1948, by the 1970’s. If we were a smart society, we’d learn from history and listen to Paul Moller now, and not shove him into the corner to protect the status quo, and put off technology we need today. Because we may lose it to the East, or to a costly two or three decades only to have it emerge in the distant future anyway. It’s really up to the United States.

Tucker died shortly after his trial, which he was of course innocent, but the experience cost him market delivery of his vastly superior automobile. The Big Three grudgingly adopted many of Tucker’s features but not for another 20 years. The Big Three didn’t want to absorb the cost of competition, so they put him out of business. And that is the problem that Paul Moller will have to overcome. It’s not the technical obstacles that are the problem. It’s the political ones that hold back our country. Here is Tucker’s story.




You can have the world you want if you have the courage to put horse-sense ahead of politics. If that happens, then you could have a Skycar to drive and fly within a decade. You may have a job in the Skycar emerging field in the same time frame, and the United States could return to the world stage as a primary manufacturer of something the rest of the world wants, while China and Japan continue to make cars, which will decline in importance, and become a secondary market item similar in usefulness to a motorcycle or bicycle, and certainly high-speed rail which is next to useless compared to Skycar technology.

But I suspect that history will repeat itself and Paul Moller will go the way of Tucker obscurity, and our great nation the United States will too drift into the cloudy recesses of a foggy morning in history, which once lifted everyone, will wonder if the fog had ever been at all.

It’s up to you.

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Yes Lakota is Misleading People: Painting over the dirt

Georgetta
voteyeslakota@aol.com
75.185.0.41
Submitted on 2011/01/20 at 11:14 pm
Evil prevails when good people do nothing. I am a good person and I am about good education. I am doing something: speaking out. Rich Hoffman is misleading people. Teachers teach children so they DON’T end up working themselves into an early grave and barely making payments on a lot in a trailer park. The good teachers will go elsewhere in order to make a living wage. Rich Hoffman raised children and his wife didn’t work. Apparently he is making too much money. Yet, I hear no one attacking him. Some of us have to have both parents work in order to put food on the table.

Georgetta here reflects many of the comments that I get from people who think just like her. The premise is this, that education is a right, they hide the actual numbers in the scribble of government bureaucracy, and if you show that you don’t support it, or if you even question their reasoning, they use “peer pressure” to shape the community to their will, just like kids on a playground. That’s the mentality. They end up sounding like children with their minds wrapped up in extreme assertions to make their points seem to carry more weight.

The first thing they do is attack you “the tax payer” and your ability to pay the increase in tax. They’ll say, “Public education was there for your children, but now that you don’t have children in the school, you don’t want to pay.” They do the same with business leaders, “We built the good schools and you provided the homes, and now you don’t want to pay.” What doesn’t get said is that as all this growth was going on, the LEA, the teachers union at Lakota, negotiated an aggressive contract in October of 2008 that was focused on wages and that contract is bankrupting the community because at the same time, indications were that state funding was on a decreasing trend. So the contract was irresponsible, and what is happening now, is the community is establishing the parameters of future contract negotiations, because we can’t trust school officials to do the job, otherwise it wouldn’t have gotten this far out of control.

These pro levy people will attempt to proclaim that nobody but them can look at the numbers and understand the situation. They sadly put out apologist groups to plead the case like what you will hear in the below interview. What they don’t want to discuss is why there is a financial crises. They simply discuss finance as if it were beyond their control. When listening to this interview ask these questions, if cutting only a million here, or there isn’t much because the numbers are so large, then why is it such a large savings that cutting busing to 9000 students will only save $600,000, then why cut busing? And how has Lakota done everything it can do before cutting busing. Did the LEA come to the bargaining table to renegotiate their contract? And how does the tax dollars stay in the district when the union spends the union dues on political candidates. One of the reasons the LEA wants its teachers to make so much is so that the teachers will want to pay their union dues without hardship. But nobody talks about any of that here. The sum of this discussion is that there isn’t an answer. These are nice parents that just want the system to work long enough for their children to get an education. Nobody wants to play the hot potato game when the music stops, and the music is stopping. All they can really do in an interview like this is paint over the dirt.

All businesses whether they are service oriented or manufacturing oriented have a responsibility to keep their costs in line. One way that businesses do that is to use the 10-80-10 rule as it’s applied to labor. That rule states that 10% of your workforce will be your typical “top” performers, and they will get the most dramatic increases, 4% to 15% depending on the situation. 80% of your workers are average, and will typically get a standard 2% to 3% increase, otherwise considered a “cost of living” increase. And of course every place of business has approximately 10% that are poor performers and they won’t get an increase of any kind. Why? Because those bottom 10% you want to look for another job, and you want them to leave so you don’t have to pay them. It gives you a chance to hire somebody that might want to compete for the top 10% percentile. If you manage things correctly, your bottom 10% are the kind of people that your competition is hiring at the middle 80%, and you want that so you can maintain a competitive edge.

What you don’t do is uniformly advance everyone in your place of business with some socialist “everybody is equal” policy like what we have in school systems, and unions advocate. That’s a disastrous concept and gives employees like Ryan Fahrenkemp time and the luxury of job security to participate in an evil deed like child pornography. I would argue from experience that if Ryan had to fear for his job, and didn’t feel comfortable hiding in the muddy 80%, he probably would have not indulged in his warped perversion while at school. He might have done it in hiding, or in his mother’s basement, but not with his students, and not with school equipment. And he certainly wouldn’t have been making 70K at only age 42 no matter how much experience he had with the amount of tenure he’d accumulated in a relatively short time.

I used Fahrenkemp as an example because he belonged in the bottom 10% and somebody didn’t do their job in the review process of weeding him out. And that didn’t happen because he was protected by the complicated process created by the OEA which the president of the LEA had been a big part of, and knew how to manipulate the system to the advantage of her members.

So I’d say to you Yes Lakota people, who say that I am misleading people. Who is doing the misleading?

I’d say you are, by telling the tax payers that the budget just “grows” on its own. That the school system had no way to deal with people like Fahrenkemp, and that all teachers are worth over 62K, and if the community doesn’t pay it, those beloved teachers will leave the district for another one.

I would say any teacher that would leave Lakota is only in it for the money, and those are personalities that I would rate low on a review, and may be tempted to put them on the bottom 10% anyway, so for them to leave would be desirable.

All the Yes Lakota people have to argue with is emotion,
• “The money is for the kids.” No it’s not, if it was, the LEA wouldn’t have threatened to strike in 2008 to get more money, and again in the spring of 2010.
• “We have to offer top pay for top teachers or they will leave.” No they won’t because the other districts are broke too and are getting ready to go through the same process Lakota is.
• “We have to protect property values by voting for the schools.” No you don’t. If taxes keep increasing that will kill real estate values anyway, tax payers in the district already pay $11 per $1000 assessment on their property.
• “I’m for education.” No you’re not. If you were, you’d keep the budget under $160 million. Throwing money at something doesn’t mean you’re for education. It means you don’t value the source of the money but want what the money can buy.
• “We have had explosive growth and must adjust to it.” Growth, like budgets can be controlled. If the cost is too high, growth will slow down, and growth will slow down because of the economy. Growth will also slow down from parents wanting to go to Lakota who aren’t willing to pay for the extra things they want, too. One of the reasons Yes People want sports and extracurricular activities is so enrollment will increase, so parents looking for those items can move to the district and participate cheaply. It’s all about job creating and getting parents used to programs that the district tax payers fund collectively. No different from colleges with NCAA programs that are nationally known for their sports, will see increases in enrollment. It’s always about increased enrollment so money can be justified.
• “The state is forcing us to all-day kindergarten.” No, the OEA lobbied to get all-day kindergarten passed, and the Republicans in the state house are getting ready to eliminate that unfunded mandate along with many other mandates lacking funding. So that anticipated requirement will be taken away from district budgets.
• “We have to spend $50,000 dollars to get the best superintendent we can get.” No, you are throwing money at the situation like you do everything else. It’s that kind of mentality that locked us into the contract with the LEA that is causing the current financial crises. Money does not equal quality. It seldom does. Money can be used to create competition, but it is useless without competition. If money is not getting you dramatic results, it is simply killing your budget.
• “Paying for a school levy keeps your money in the community.” No it doesn’t. The union dues collected by school unions are directly applied to liberal politicians that further perpetuate the bureaucratic mess creating expensive economic necessity. The OEA had revenue of over $62 million dollars in 2008. Where did that money come from? They don’t make any products that they can sell? Check the info for yourself here. http://teachersunionexposed.com/state.cfm?state=OH All that money comes from union dues, paid from the salaries of teachers that are paid exceptionally well by the local tax payers. The average pay at Lakota for teachers is 62K per year. So the money doesn’t stay in the community.

Those are just some examples of how the Yes Lakota people are misleading the good people of the Lakota District. And they will continue to treat the voters like the fools they believe they are as long as it works.

Get ready for the next levy announcement for May. They’ll do it because they don’t know how to do anything else but ask for more money.

And you Yes Lakota people go ahead and leave your comments. I’ll post them, and I’ll use them. People need to see your thoughts. For those of you wanting to see some of them, read the comments here. I am quite aware that there are many people at many levels reading all the posts I’ve put up here and you’re looking for a way to spin it to your advantage. For an example, have a look at the work David Little from Progress Ohio attempted. I’m happy to fight your sloppy facts with the truth and if you want to spin the community around and make them so dizzy they can’t tell which way is up or down, I’ll continue to prevent it, as I have. And I’ll do it because I love my community, and I want to see education continue to be an option for families in the future. But it won’t be in a form controlled by organized labor. Those days are over.

Don’t believe me; read this from your parent union the OEA, this is how bad the financial situation is. Even the union staff is threatening to strike and the union itself is participating in union busting strategies.

The Ohio Education Association and Its Goose

The executives of the Ohio Education Association sent a memo informing local presidents that if the union gave in to striking staffers’ demands, it would require an $80 to $90 dues increase per member. Such an increase would raise roughly $10 million. That sounded familiar to me, so I checked the archives and found this, in the May 8, 2000 EIA Communiqué:
Ohio Education Association in Severe Financial Straits. The last time the Ohio Education Association negotiated a staff contract, in September 1997, it resulted in a two-week strike, restraining orders against picketers, and a lot of bad publicity. That contract expires this year and it’s bad financial news all around for OEA, its members, and the staff. OEA recently informed its local presidents that the union is facing a projected deficit of $6.3 million for next year. The union is asking staff to accept benefit cuts totaling $4 million. The rest of the deficit would be eliminated through a dues increase of up to $25 per member.

“Specifically, and regrettably, we can no longer afford to sustain the current number of OEA employees at their current level of compensation and benefits and continue to provide the expected level of services and programs without significantly raising OEA dues for you and every other member,” reads a memo from OEA President Mike Billirakis and Executive Director Robert Barkley.

Read the rest of the article here:
http://www.eiaonline.com/intercepts/2010/09/03/the-ohio-education-association-and-its-goose/

If our community is going to continue to be a “great” and “excellent” district, we have to get in front of this problem. Not avoid it by tossing more money at the problem. And the Yes Lakota people need to listen to the No Lakota People, because the solution is in good business strategy. The same tired old bullet points won’t be valid any longer. I’ll make sure of it.

Now, these video links exist elsewhere on this site, but I’ll put links here for your convenience. These are radio spots specifically dealing with education issues. Feel free to listen to the hours and hours of debate so you can form your own opinion about things. There are many radio personalities here, so the view points are varied. But the topics and discussions are fantastic.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1sIDwFW6tFA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vxd5XO54o68
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HPwhFbsTmww
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXEIUPRRxAQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r09fAoSAQhM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbJETAE1iXw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAX20OsiIS0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHPjBY8UY98
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7f6iBfFxV0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDvFo_v24Y0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CG9vYWHO6OM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RynERHb3jBU
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sU57EDXLxtw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhAeyuLovtk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yoviASrmQBw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDW98mhSyPQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-vtoC9QosaA
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2w9zXhNdw_M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrblE1gu4lU

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

The Superintendent of Tomorrow

Bill Cunningham had on a superintendent from Clermont Northeastern that has been very successful at saving his district money by thinking “outside the box.” Listen to that interview here.

Here is a link to the district website: http://www.cneschools.org/

What’s interesting about that interview is the superintendent is actively pursuing innovative cost savings as opposed to the approach at Lakota where they spent over $50,000 just searching for a new superintendent to replace the retiring Mike Taylor. The Lakota method is the “old” way, where inflated costs are built into every step of the process, and the footprints most always lead to organized labor.

The superintendent of tomorrow will find ways to save money at every turn, including the elimination of such extraordinary candidate searches as Lakota participated in. The School Board elected to spend $40,000 looking for a treasurer, and $50,000 looking for a superintendent that they haven’t yet hired.

The superintendent of tomorrow will not be bullied by union leaders as what happened at Lakota on the last Thursday of October 2008 where the teacher’s union of 1,200 members threatened to walk out on all 18,000 students they profess to think so much of. What was the primary issue in that proposed strike? Pay!

The superintendent of tomorrow wouldn’t have paid into the union system for 25 years or more and then take a passive position at the negotiating table as what happened when both sides, the LEA and the Lakota officials sat down after school that memorable Wednesday just before Halloween and finally hammered out an agreement at 12:30 AM Thursday morning, the day the LEA was ready to walk off the job.

I know quite a few teachers around the country. Specifically, in Oldham County, KY, which is one of Kentucky’s most exclusive communities, there is a teacher with a master’s degree in science that teaches geology, and his rate of pay is just shy of 50K. Doc Thompson a few weeks ago had on another teacher that was from Atlanta that was making wages in the mid-40’s, and I thought he had some valid arguments.

At Lakota, the LEA has been successful at convincing the School Board and the Superintendent that teachers should be paid on average over 62K per year, which is what they are currently being paid at Lakota. In fact, Mike Taylor is quoted saying, “I don’t think teachers are paid enough.” Such superintendents have recklessly encouraged the extraordinary wage rates that are occurring at Lakota.

And the economic disaster that is being described which is hitting Lakota is caused by these same wages that are too high if it is considered that state money is not a factor and that the communities must fund the budget on their own. The superintendent of tomorrow will help keep wage cost in line to protect the communities they serve and still maintain great teachers for a good price.

The superintendent of tomorrow will reflect the community, and will build an administration that does the same, and not be lap dogs for powerful unions, that takes the union dues collected from each teacher and applies those funds to progressive political candidates that only exacerbate the situation further at the state level. When it’s said that our tax money stays local, it does not. Those union dues work in a way to support democratic and progressive candidates, and are only a cleaver way invented by organized labor to prop up the candidates they support. The money originally comes from the local tax payer that just wants to have the community schools teach their children.

When we find this superintendent of tomorrow, we can begin to solve some of the problems of today, but not until then.

Now for those of you that want more information check out this press release from from the Buckeye Institute. I’m not the only one saying this stuff. Feel free to check the link at the end of the press release.   Oh, and you YesLakota people, I’m for education too.  Keep it under our 160 million dollar budget and we’ll all get along.  But don’t ask the community to pay for your poor business understanding.  Go ahead, check the link below. 

Buckeye Institute News Alert
Where Transparency Is More Than A Slogan And Ideas Really Do Matter

PRESS RELEASE January 18, 2010

Contact: Matt Mayer,

2010 K-12 Teacher Salary and Estimated Pension Data added to Searchable Database along with Search Counter

COLUMBUS – The Buckeye Institute for Public Policy Solutions today released on its website the 2010 K-12 salary and estimated pension data for all Ohio public school teachers. Unlike the data collected for previous years, the 2010 data includes salary and pension information for many superintendents, principals, and other administrative staff members. The pension data includes each teacher’s salary based on a 2,080-hour year (40 hour work-week, 52 week year) so users can properly evaluate teacher pay, as most teachers are contractually limited to working 1,350 hours per year.

In 2010, approximately 1,800 school employees earned over $100,000 per year. Due to increasing staffing costs, Ohio’s 613 public school districts are expected to face a $7.6 billion funding deficit by 2015, with personnel expenses consuming 96 percent of tax revenues.

In the last election, citizens used the Teacher Salary Database to hold their school districts accountable for spending choices, citing that average teacher salaries had grown at rates that, in many cases, far outpaced inflation.

In addition to the new data, the website now contains a search counter which records the number of searches performed in the eight database tools (State Salary, Federal Salary, Higher Ed Salary, Teacher Salary, Local Salary, School Data, County Data, and State Lobbyists). Since the website’s launch on April 30, 2010, visitors from 473 Ohio cities, the 49 other states, and 119 foreign countries have spent over 20,000 hours conducting almost 1.5 million data searches.

Buckeye Institute President Matt A. Mayer stated: “With so many school districts under financial duress, it is now even more important than ever that taxpayers know how school districts are spending their money. Instead of cutting staff positions, sports, bussing, and other programs, most school districts could balance their budgets without raising taxes through cutting staff compensation packages by a small percentage.”

The Teacher Salary data tool is available at www.buckeyeinstitute.org.

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

The Lakota Busing Cuts: Going Forward in Reverse

Seeing miles and miles of backed up traffic the morning that Lakota’s busing cuts were implemented was like watching a world of sanity coming undone and going backwards into a time of primeval foolishness. Scott Sloan and Tracy Jones capture the lunacy wonderfully.

It was the day after the dreaded “B Day” busing cuts at Lakota when I discussed the aftermath on The Big One with Doc Thompson.

So what’s the next step? Without question, the school system is poised to put another levy issue on the ballot targeting the roughly 10% that are anti-tax but only moderately. Those people will have to decide if they will be steadfast, or buckle under the pressure extorted by the busing cut strategy, because it’s all about converting a few percentage points in voter turnout, into a “yes” vote.

Oh, and click here to get a taste of what Doc was talking about regarding college education.

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

China and the Cincinnati Bengals: Being tough, winning and losing.

When you talk to just about anybody about sports they are quick to declare what their favorite team should do in order to win. “Get rid of T.O. He costs too much and is a pain in the ass!” Or, “get rid of Chad, he runs his mouth too much, he’s too expensive and they can’t even win with him.” I am refereeing to a couple of players for the Cincinnati Bengals, and I hear comments to that effect all the time.

But speak to those same people about how to deal with Social Security, or Education, or any number of social programs, and people clam up and refuse to commit an opinion. I suppose that’s because the game under which politics is played is just too complicated for many of them, or they are taking something out of the systems in question, and lack the courage to assert an opinion.

And that’s the beauty of sports. Sports allow people to become arm-chair coaches because they don’t have anything invested in the team other than committing to an occasional game or a sport jersey. So they can be objective as to the possible problems with the team they’re watching.

People like Doc Thompson, and myself, can be objective about social issues, because we aren’t expecting government to do anything for us. I wrote off Social Security a long time ago, along with all the other entitlements that are floating around out there. So I particularly enjoyed Doc’s show on January 18, 2011 where he laid it on the line as to what the real problems are. Listen to that here.

Hey, he’s not exaggerating. The issue truly is whether or not the United States will stay on top of the heap in world affairs. We won’t do it complaining about silly issues as to whether or not Native American bones are returned to their graves, or whether or not the entire Constitution can be read because of our internal guilt over slavery. The rest of the world is not hindered by that type of restrictive guilt, and we have to compete with them economically.

My team, the Tampa Bay Buccaneers are not in the playoffs, but I am proud of how they played over the 2010 season. I watched how management approached the off-season last year and I believe they are on the march to winning ways going forward. But the team in my home town, the Cincinnati Bengals continue to be a bad team no matter how much money they spend.

Now you can go to any sports bar in America and even a drunken fool could tell you why the Bengals can’t win. And the same holds true for our county. Everybody knows how to fix the problems. But we won’t win if we don’t toughen up. It’s that simple.

What Doc talks about in that clip is a perfectly articulated synopsis of our counties problem. It sounds easy to hear him say it, but he has the luxury of seeing things clearly, because he doesn’t want anything from government. People like Thompson rely on themselves first to do most things, so the problems are easy to see.

So America, you better get tough quick. Because being tough is how you win.

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

The Taxpayers Deserve Better: Evil Prevails When Good People Do Nothing

It was a busy weekend and there was a lot of mud getting slung on the eve of the busing cuts. Once the owner of the Starkerz Bar and Grill, discussed in the audio clip from the Darryl Parks show on January 17, 2011, stated that she was willing to provide a statement that she’d stand behind, I felt comfortable to tell the story.

Even so, telling that story made me sick, because the whole event seems so petty. I don’t like being in the middle of that kind of thing, “mudslinging” but I am often reminded of how the Pro Side came after me when David Little was hired to attempt to smear my name with obvious attempts at slander. For instance, in that now famous six paragraph letter, there were 4 complete lies about me proclaimed in the body of the letter, along with several statements not even closely rooted to the truth, but designed to anger the people reading the letter.

I confronted Little about what he wrote, and he lied to me again, telling me that he hadn’t sent that letter to anyone. What he didn’t know was that I was tipped off by more than one person in the press, and Little confirmed my suspicions when he assumed the leak was WLW, which it wasn’t.

But that’s the game these people chose to play and every time I see them perpetuating the games progress, it reminds me of why these out-of-control budgets need to be brought into a realistic expectation.

Darryl mentioned that I did the Lakota Levy all by myself. It feels that way some of the time, but that’s not the case. There are lots of good people behind me. Most of them wanted to think about something else after the election, and to enjoy the holidays. The outrage over the bar and grill story brought many people’s minds back into the subject lately because that story is a very personal issue with many involved and is so openly wrong.

I’ve stayed with this topic all this time because the education system needs to be fixed, and the people getting in the way are bullies. They may wear perfume and dress nice. They may have a smile on their faces when they do the bullying, but the behavior I keep seeing has no other name.

And tax payers deserve better. And they are going to have it…………………………………….

So those of you that are up to no good, and want to play these games, remember, there will be leaks. And when I get them, I’ll post them. I won’t do it until someone is willing to stand behind the statements. There has to be proof. But I will hold those accountable that wish to bully others into turning a blind eye to the disingenuous behavior exhibited toward our community tax payers.

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Things Will Never Be the Same! Educate Ohio is Uniting the State

I’ve been working with a group of reform minded people all over Ohio. In fact there are a number of these types of movements going on, while sadly, the school systems are playing the same old game. Here is an article from Larry Budd, writer for the Dayton Daily News.

To give a bit of background, Kelly is a board member for Springboro whom I’ve had some great discussions with, and Paul Lambert has been instrumental at getting things started with some fantastic facts and figures. He resides and does most of his business in Columbus and is a great resource. You can see some of Paul’s work here:

http://savethehilliardschools.blogspot.com/

Paul and Kelly are a lot more patient than I am regarding politics, and are great people to be at the front of this effort. 

School-levy foes back to work on new state group

Educate Ohio would be an alternative to the Ohio School Boards Association.

By Lawrence Budd, Staff Writer Updated 2:04 AM Friday, January 14, 2011

CLEARCREEK TWP., Warren County — Selected board members from school districts in six Ohio counties will huddle Saturday in Warren County to continue the creation of Educate Ohio, a new organization designed in part to make up for perceived shortcomings of the Ohio School Boards Association.

“There are board members that aren’t necessarily following the teachings of OSBA,” said Springboro board member Kelly Kohls. “It’s probably a presentation of the other side of issues. We need someone presenting the taxpayer points of view.”
OSBA executive director Rick Lewis said his group — governed by board members supported by all but three of Ohio’s 719 school districts, including Springboro — communicates information and curriculum used to educate school board members across the country.

“We’re very responsive to changing our priorities,” he said. “Sometimes there’s just different perspectives on how to get there.”

Kohls said her group would provide the public different perspectives on budgeting, tax levies and negotiating contracts with teachers’ unions.

The state teachers’ union, the Ohio Education Association, questioned whether the public would turn to Educate Ohio for information.

“The media and the public tend to turn to state educational organizations that represent hundreds of thousands of education personnel. They have a proven track record of working with education policy,” said spokeswoman Michele Prater.
Educate Ohio also would help other grass-roots statewide organizations, such as Educate Springboro, Educate Hilliard and Educate Worthington, which opposed recent levies in those districts.

The group was conceived in Hilliard by school board member and blogger Paul Lambert.
“We’re not trying to build some statewide political force. We really want to help the folks in the local communities,” he said.
Lambert purchased the educateohio.com web address, as well as web addresses for community-based offshoots in Hilliard and Worthington, two Columbus suburbs. He provided the address used by Educate Springboro, a community group that formed a political action committee to oppose a November property tax levy that would have generated new operating money for the district.

While a founder of Educate Ohio, Kohls has emphasized she is not a member of Educate Springboro.
“You have to kind of remove yourself from any political-action group,” said Don Miller, incoming president of the Springboro board. “It’s kind of our job to look at it from a big-picture perspective.”

Current, former or aspiring board members from Marysville to Versailles and Kettering to Springboro are planning to attend the 2 p.m. meeting at the Clearcreek Twp. Government Center. Yet Miller said, “I had no idea” about the meeting in his district.

It is the group’s second meeting following one in December at the Golden Lamb Inn in Lebanon. In addition to current, former or aspiring board members from Springboro, Hilliard, Marysville and Grove City districts, the meeting is expected to attract people such as Rich Hoffman of nolakota.com, which opposed a recent levy for Lakota Local Schools in Butler County.
Hoffman suggested public education reform hinges on decisions by Gov. John Kasich and progress in settling debates over equity in school funding that go back decades.

Herb Ernst, a former Oakwood board member affiliated with Citizens Advocating Responsible Government, a PAC that questioned school spending in Kettering, said his local group is considering adopting the name, Educate Kettering.
While hesitating to yet call himself an Educate Ohio member, Ernst said he planned to attend Saturday’s meeting.
“I think there’s going to be growing interest,” Ernst said.

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

The Disease of Regulation: The Scam of Legalized Extortion

People ask me all the time why I ride a motorcycle in the snow and extreme cold.  When you have to spend the day within our court system, as I have this week, several things become extremely obvious, if you consider the situation with logic, regulations created from law makers are born and breed to employee people.  And when you realize how foolish that is, such trips in the snow help me see the truth of things. 

A court-house is filled with security, court clerks, bailiffs, administrators, judges, police officers and many other support personnel. The hallways around the court rooms fill with eager faces at exactly 8:30 to 9:00 pm waiting for their cases to be called. Attorneys walk purposefully with arms filled with documents, because this is their battlefield and are comfortable in the environment.

If one is punished with a case that extends for the entire day, or for multiple days, the pattern emerges. By 1 or 2 PM the busy court-house diminishes in its busyness and the hallways clear after tears are shed from some of the occupants, and congratulations occur on the other. These are palaces of high emotion and loaded with drama.

As I weighed out much of what was happening around me, including the case I was involved with, I had to measure how much of it had any true social merit. The answer was very little.

The system works like this, regulations are created by a law-maker someplace either locally, at the state, or the federal government, and the citizen out there in the world either knowingly or un-knowingly breaks those regulations. If someone chooses to hold the citizen accountable for breaking the regulation they can proceed to court. This can be instigated by a private citizen, or an officer of the law.

Lawyers try the cases in a courtroom and the wins and losses of these cases establish case-law, which forms the ebb and flow of the legal system.

The entire system is built to employee all parties that play supporting roles in that process. It could be argued that without that system many people would suffer injustice. But much of what I observed, including the case I was on, involved people seeking to abuse the system to work the case-law into their advantage in some way, and if some of those regulations were not in place, there wouldn’t be near so many cases on the court dockets, and a lot of the people who filled the parking garage in the morning wouldn’t need to be there.

You can see this first hand at your local court on virtually any day through the week. You can see it also in your state house for whatever state you live in. And of course you can see it in Washington to great effect. Much of what you see as far as employees rushing around like ants at an ant farm is unnecessary.

Therefore the goal of all this regulation is not to make a safer, more just society. It is to create jobs and a reason for people to show up to work.

That might seem preposterous, especially if you are one of the people who are in the process of regulation creation, or enforcement.

At the conclusion of many of these cases, the plaintiff attorneys and defense attorneys, locked in immortal combat shook hands at the end and wished each other well. The whole thing had the appeal of a game of football. While all these opposing forces are together, the clients walk behind their counsel like dogs on a leash. Nobody speaks to each other as invisible walls restrict it. Eyes do not meet between defense and plaintiffs. But attorneys treat the whole thing like a game, because it is.

Regulation costs us economically, and if the economy were allowed to expand on its own accord, jobs would be created as a natural by-product. But the kind of jobs that are created through regulation are the kind of desirable, well-paying jobs that exist between 9 to 5, which is how many want it. And the act of manipulating the nature of economics corrupts and restricts it in unnecessary ways.


Human nature will of course take advantage of the regulations because it allows the power behind the enforcement to make people stronger than they individually would be otherwise. A single, selfish, human being can take on an entire corporation with a simple accusation that should shoulder the burden of proof. But the defendant will have to hire counsel to defend themselves which can cost an extraordinary amount of money to prove their innocence, because the regulations are so incredibly great, that individual citizens and companies can handle their own legal affairs, because of the complexity. And as we’ve discussed here on this site, complexity means money. Whenever something is too complicated for an individual to do the work themselves, it is built to be that way so people can’t understand the foolishness behind the complexity. Because the intent behind the complexity is to support government oriented jobs that exist from 9 to 5. It’s that simple. 

Riding a motorcycle in the snow is something that this regulation society of ours doesn’t do.  And that’s why I do it every day.  Because spending days on end in court can turn you into something you don’t want to become.   

Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Edward Bernayes and the Evolution of Cass Sunstein: Manipulating the Human Race!

Glenn Beck did a wonderful job of covering Edward Bernayes on his program, and I thought it was worth gathering some of the videos that are collected about Bernayes. There are many who believe that the world around them has always been just as we see it. But when you understand the art of shaping the human mind, you learn that people like Edward, have inflicted more evil on mankind than guns ever could.

There is a lot of video here. More information than most care to absorb. But if you take the time to watch all these video, you can benefit from the education they offer and begin the process of understanding how it relates to you.

Enjoy!







So who’s the new Bernayes? Meet Cass Sunstein.


Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com