I woke up on the morning of February 24, 2012 with the note you can see below. It’s from a parent in the Pickerington School district who has been watching the actions of Superintendent Mantia here in Southern Ohio. This parent is uniquely positioned to give a statement about Mantia because Pickerington is the school district that the current Lakota superintendent came from in August of 2011. It read as follows:
I’m a parent of students from Pickerington and let me tell you that Dr. Mantia will ruin your schools. She removed almost all music, art, phys ed teachers and librarians. Our libraries used the most current media material and the students loved library where they learned to use podcasts, they wrote book reviews and they had the greatest book clubs. The students loved to read because of the fantastic librarians. They are gone. She has combined music, art and gym together. They currently meet as a group at a school every 6-9 weeks. That means that they only receive physical activity for one week and it isn’t intense activity either.
She took a pay raise one month before she left after resigning. Please watch her and her agenda for the sake of your students, teachers, support staff and your wallet.
As my readers here know, I declared the Lakota School District officially dead after the February 13, 2012 meeting, so I saw no point in going to this latest meeting.It was as predicted more of the same strategy of protecting the wages of the school employees with the smoke and mirrors of fancy terminology that essentially meant nothing. The concession by the Lakota School System to retreat backward as a district with these three public school board meetings instead of restructuring their very expensive labor contracts is deplorable. With this third budget cutting school board meeting, the No Lakota Levy has officially begun the campaign to end this fourth levy attempt which appears to already be underway on behalf of the school board decisions. No Lakota Levy will soon announce a major initiative in reaction to these decisions by the school board. I am done with Lakota as a governing body. I officially cast my vote of no confidence in their direction.
Lakota under the leadership of Superintendent Mantia from Pickerington elected to eliminate 36 more jobs centering on art, music, and physical education, which is consistent with the behavior indicated above by the note from the parent. This is in addition to the 69 positions cut from last weeks meeting that caused me to regulate my opinion as a nail in the coffin to the Lakota educational body as a whole.
During the meeting last night several people were texting me and asking what I was doing, and why I wasn’t there. I told them that I was watching the DVR backups of Ghost Hunters, and my TV show was more important. I said that I thought the ghosts walking around on that TV show were more real than the ghosts walking around at the Lakota School Board meeting on stage, because both were just as effective as managers. In the TV show the ghosts make noise by banging on doors and sending out cryptic EVP recordings. The Lakota School Board does the same; they make a lot of noise with a stupid program named S.T.E.A.M (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) while at the same time cutting those programs with staffing and as Jeff Kursman said at the meeting,
“These aren’t efficiencies, these are reductions. Efficiencies will include things that hopefully we’ll hear about in the next week or two. Things like outsourcing of technology when it comes with dealing with the central office, cutting back on central office administrators…centralizing purchasing or negotiating a better rate in health care. What I see you talking about here today is a degradation of liberal arts education.”
All that was occurring at the school board meeting was a bunch of ghosts making noise to a captive audience. Just like the ghosts in Ghost Hunters the ghosts are powerless to do anything in real life because they are in fact dead. The school board is powerless to do anything but scare people, just like the ghosts in Ghost Hunters. So I see no difference between the school board meeting and an episode of Ghost Hunters. With that in mind I stayed home in the comfort of my home and watched the ghosts on TV rather than waste my time at the school board meeting.
I’m happy to see the comments from Jeff Kursman and others who are now beginning to question the merit of this entire money scheming operation known as the Lakota School System. The key to meeting a balanced budget is to reduce the cost of the services, and that is to drive down the labor costs. Cutting a few teachers here and there is only a band-aid to the situation. Only by making across the board cuts to the 80% of the $160 million dollar budget can the Lakota School System meet its budget supplied generously by the community. Anything less than a contract restructuring with the Lakota labor force will be sufficient.
Karen Mantia has brought with her to the Lakota School System a strategy used at her last job of Pickerington to diminish the quality of the district in order to force parents to pass a tax increase to sustain their inflated union contracts. And to execute that objective she and the school board are willing to destroy everything that is good about Lakota to protect the wages of their union allies. That’s what these ghosts of Lakota were doing, and why I’m not interested in anything they have to say any longer. Instead, the No Lakota Levy will be shifting gears to approach our tax fighting methods without the assumption that Lakota will see the light and come to their senses by listing to our arguments. Now, we must assume that they are not even relevant, and we must find ways to remove their impact from destroying our community in an extortion ring that is evidently well underway. If this fight for more taxes were for the kids truly, then these ghosts of Lakota would not use the kids by stealing from the community’s $160 million dollar budget and take away programs while protecting employee incomes at the expense of the children.
So for now on, I will treat these employees like the ghosts they are, as irrelevant to the land of the living, and powerless to us all if they are robbed of their ability to invoke fear. Because as far as usefulness, they are lacking completely in any ability required in the real world, and are truly manifestations from the land of the dead.
This is the kind of world that our current government wants us to have. Every time I see one of these stupid little cars I feel like running it over with my motorcycle.
I heard a fool the other day proclaim that they were willing to pay more Federal taxes because they use roads. Don’t they know that there is a separate tax built into the price of every gallon of gasoline? Well, of course they don’t. That’s why they’re stupid and why they don’t realize they are being looted in their pay checks. They are being looted when they buy and sell items. And they are being looted every time they buy a gallon of gasoline. When you go to the gas pump and pay almost $4 per gallon for gas, make yourself aware that you are openly being robbed, and not just in the very high taxes per gallon, as in Ohio where it’s 28 cents. The government led by Barack Obama and his imperialistic EPA is stealing from you each and every time you put gas in your car. The reason they are doing the robbing is to force you to buy one of their government-owned cars built at General Motors. The arrogant bureaucrats in Washington believe that if they force gas prices higher than you the consumer will be inclined to buy one of their electric cars or stupid little go-carts. They have artificially driven up the price of gas through their regulations in order to “nudge” Americans into giving up on their fossil fuel cars and buying “eco friendly” cars.
I’ve covered this issue before, and by reading the article below and the links attached to it, much perspective and more technical explanations about the increase in fuel costs can be ascertained.
But the essence of the scam is shown in this video which breaks down accurately the utmost thievery that is going on in the greenie weenie movement.
The same people who won’t allow the United States to drill for oil—so that there is an oil shortage can also add more regulations through the EPA to force oil refineries to drive up their prices. The government will have you believe that the oil companies are evil for wanting to make a profit, but what they don’t tell you is that they are ultimately the organization that is driving up the cost of gas not just in regulation, but also in helping maintain oil monopolies by stifling competition.
The decision to drive gas prices up to over $4 dollars per gallon or even $5 dollars per gallon is a direct push into forcing the American public into considering alternative forms of transportation. The government is more than happy to force Americans to decide between food and gas so that the stressed out citizens will give up their fossil fuel burning car for a greenie weenie mobile.
The American economy is built upon the premise that its people will have expendable income to spend on the economy. Oil speculators will proclaim that the cost of oil is dictated by Middle East activity and world-wide demand. They are liars, and are serving merely as emissaries to the greenie weenies. So when fuel costs are driven upward to over $4 a gallon the Federal government is openly stealing from the American people, the money they might spend on eating out, on movies, on buying books, video games, or participating in a hobby. When it costs over $50 to fill up a vehicle for a tank of gas as opposed to $35 a year or two prior, that $15 dollars is stolen money that the owner does not have to spend on an activity they might otherwise enjoy.
The point is to frustrate the consumer of oil to the point that they will accept the dialogue of the greenie weenies. The intention is to force Americans to stop protesting the times with their large cars and trucks and buy one of these punky cars that are simply glorified golf carts. The price hike in gasoline is looted from the American people in order to achieve a social gain politically.
But what are we to do about it? How can we protest such a thing? Well, I can tell you what I do. I ride a motorcycle every day. I can afford to drive a car. I can afford to drive a big, fast car every day. But I don’t, because I purposely have cut down my consumption so not to pay the extra taxes, and the inflated costs that are politically motivated. My motorcycle gets nearly 45 miles per gallon and I ride it all year which saves me hundreds of dollars every month. With that money I take my family out to eat, go to movies, or give my wife more money to go shopping with. I do not give it to the government, or the greenie weenies. That’s one of the primary reasons I ride a motorcycle all year.
But if a person does not want to go to such extremes, I would suggest that you stop giving the government money that they can then use to take more money from you. For instance, do not agree to pay more federal taxes because that money will end up finding its way to further funding of the EPA. If you want to defeat an enemy, you must take away the money that feeds them. In military activity we call this cutting off their supply lines. In the Civil War the tactic was to destroy the railroads that fed southern forces with food and ammunition to the front. In World War II the D Day invasion was to sever Berlin from coastal access and step between Berlin and France. And in our modern war against government and specifically the greenie weenies we must cut off the money that feeds them so that they may whither away under their own opulence.
Do not approve a single new tax on yourselves. If you don’t wish to have a police state, take away the money you give to the police. If you don’t wish to have national insurance, take away the money that fuels those agencies. And if you don’t want government controlled schools that help propel the entire machine of greenie weenie philosophy, cut the money that fuels those schools. It is in the public schools that the greenie weenies teach our kids about the lie that is the climate concern movement of false science. Such a science is only designed to rob the public of its wealth and lifestyle and is purely evil.
I say to you do not turn the other cheek and just take it from these fools. But take an eye for an eye. If they rob from you, rob from them back. Take from them the needed funding for their government expansion. Take from them the funding for their “pet projects.” Deny them of their future ability to rob loot and steal from the American people by taking away their money.
But inaction is not acceptable and if you just blindly pay the extra money for gas without complaint then you are assisting evil and are just as guilty as they are, because you helped them bring America to it’s knees with lack of action or protest. For confirmation to what I’ve said notice that fuel costs right around the Christmas holidays dropped down to just under $3 per gallon, so that the economy would show positive growth during the holiday season. The American people would have the extra money to buy Christmas presents because of the saving in fuel costs. Such a drop in the cost of gas is not because the Middle East wanted to cut the American people a break, so they could go Christmas shopping, and it wasn’t the big evil oil companies who decided to cut their profits as a present to The United States. The manipulation is exclusively the design of the EPA and the influence of the Federal government and it’s speculators of deceit. The market is controlled by the government monopoly and the goal of global interdependence that is purposely driven to advance the agenda of the world greenie weenies, the old hippies of the 60’s and the children raised on the green initiatives of public education programmed into believing they will save the earth if they listen to the recommendations of the EPA.
The increase in fuel costs are an assault on the American lifestyle and until citizens’ stand up for themselves, the looting will continue. It will not be solved through pacifism, or through silent protests around the kitchen table. It will only be solved by taking back the money that is looted in ways that hurt the greenie weenies themselves. Cut the supply line of the enemy, and thus you will defeat the greenie weenies, and they deserve to be defeated because they attacked first. We didn’t ask for it, but because of the greenie weenie actions we must defend ourselves by striking back and taking away the money that feeds them so that we can expel them from further intrusions into our lives and quest for freedom. Once we defend ourselves we can then send the plans of the greenie weenies into a ball of flame, which is where they belong.
Alex Jones spilled the beans on why my favorite television show, Freedom Watch with Judge Napolitano is being cancelled from the Fox Business Channel. I have always enjoyed the work of the Judge and it was sad to see the decision by Fox to pull the plug on a successful show. It is even sadder to see that Fox News has been successfully undermined by the powers of control that have successfully implemented the 45 points from the book The Naked Communist. Anyone who thought that such concepts were fiction knows now that the media is dominated by those advocates of political theory, as stated in the book’s publication in 1958 and universally accepted as sacred social doctrine by the educators who taught that media. Control of the media is one of the 45 points, and with Fox News going down, it is obvious that those forces have been hard at work. Click here to read the 45 points for yourself:
I have experienced at virtually every level in my life over the last couple of weeks a push back from the progressive community of which the cancellation of Freedom Watch was simply the final act. In my school district I’ve seen it on the school board and the community at large as they attempt with a fever to suppress any negative stories so that they can make another tax request from the community using all the tricks mentioned in an article from The Blaze discussing how Saul Alinsky taught the unions to use children as propaganda tools in order to obtain funding. As I’ve been stating for years, it is now confirmed that the education unions all across the nation are using Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals as a way to drive up education costs, spread a communist philosophy against private property through excessive taxation, and control the flow of leftist political ideology in the education process. Read that story at the following link:
Even with the overwhelming proof I’ve provided the crazy PTA moms and their minions of latte drinking despots with diamond rings the size of car tires and asses to match, plot against me with an anger only estrogen can produce. They chant throughout my district’s neighborhoods that Rich Hoffman is their mortal enemy because I hate education and I am trying to rob from them the life they intend for their children. Yet they have no idea that they are just prostitutes to their husbands who do everything they can to be away from them aside from the occasional sex. Their husband’s roll them over at night and insert their manhood into these women of the bedroom and hundred-dollar bills find their way into their purses. The women don’t know what the man does to earn the money, nor do they care. They are busy saving the world one child at a time with howls of safety and more regulations as they rush to the polling places at election time to vote for Obama because he has a nice smile. Those women would do well to read that PDF file, but they won’t, because their minds are filled with shopping and have no room for a serious topic.
And my friend Doc Thompson lost his job at Clear Channel. The real story will be buried forever and the strings that pulled him off his job during his honeymoon are no doubt similar to those who removed Judge Napolitano from Fox Business, or even Glenn Beck from Fox News Channel. It’s not the ratings, it’s the controversy. It’s the rattling of the cage. The howls come from the same women as I mentioned above who plead with perfume still odorous from the previous day because it was stuck between the folds of their skin during showers who tell their executive husbands that the enemies of education, of labor unions, or smiling children are these men and they must be extinguished–cast out of society, which these queens control.
I’ve seen the same attempt in the print media, not by the male executives and their stay-at-home wives, but by the career climbing professional, the women who desire to prove they are every bit as strong as a man, so they too listen to these howling hoards of neurotic women and their estrogen based diatribes. “Shame on that mean Rich Hoffman. We will do more sports stories, and let’s cover the superintendent more—oh how about the new school board member. Let’s help bring the community together.” So the decision is made to put emotion in front of logic to paint a picture that supports the fantasy of the guilt ridden mothers. I speak of these things on the microcosm of my community because they are but elements of a whole that make up the macrocosm.
No, it’s not all women. There are plenty of men who have participated in pushing out entertainment personalities like Judge Napolitano, Glenn Beck and Doc Thompson. Those are the men who fear competition because their ideas are small and their brains cannot, or will not be able to keep up. They are too lazy to compete head to head with someone like Judge Napolitano, so they work to get rid of him. I’m sure Stossel is next. Those terrible libertarians are upsetting the Oprah audience, those same damn women and their brigade of latte drinkers. They don’t want a world built by the Constitution, they don’t want independence, and they want big government to take care of them like their husbands do. Or their bosses at work. Because the essence of these people is laziness, and they don’t want to exert the effort to act or make decisions, so they surrender to the parasites of control and advocate on their behalf. That’s why Soros has a contingent of willing participants to follow him on a tyrannical quest to rule the world with his billions of dollars spent to shape the culture of earth into his own image. Because it’s easy to just go with the flow that someone like Soros creates for the lazy, the timid and the mentally deficient.
Do I sound bitter? It’s an old story and I’ve seen it play out perhaps one time too many. I’ve seen it compressed more into the last 5 days then I care to, but that’s life. I’ve found myself in exactly the same position as Judge Napolitano too many times, where it is possible to do TOO good, that the apple cart gets upset and the enemies against quality come out in full force to inflict their fury. It’s because of those types that I write here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom to such an extent. It’s also why I’ve turned down entertainment venues, and other lucrative projects that have come my way in the last 5 years, because I don’t want to put myself in a position to have something taken away by looters. Like Glenn Beck, I have learned that I can do more good on my own than if I have a boss controlling my content–what I can say and when I can say it. And if I do too good, that I might become a threat to the powers that be, I might find myself fired to protect those threatened because they lack the fortitude to compete squarely on the battlefield of ideas.
The evils of the world are not all done by the mad mothers, the Opera watchers, the do-gooder, the church busy body who disguises their treachery with mountains of good tidings. It’s also done by the men of logic who turn away from reason to pursue peace in the household of vaginas who demand to be fed cosmetics and a beefed up ego so they can function day by day. The corrosion of the world is not all done by the mugger in a New York alley, the rapist, the drug addict or the child molester. It’s also done by those who see those characters coming and turn away from stopping them with broadcasts of peaceful perpetuity as displayed in the Michigan Education Association manual. As admitted in that union manual the intent is not honesty, it is not social valor. It is not spiritual sanctity. The intent is malice! The intent is manipulation! The intent is thievery! And we live in a time when millions have been taught that such things are (GOOD)!
Those millions will attack the few among us with the courage to see the activity for what it is, like Judge Napolitano, and Alex Jones, and Glenn Beck and many others. The millions believe that in silencing those voices they can continue to rob blind all of society by using those neurotic chatter boxes of estrogen as their weapons and the insolence of the men with muscle but no gray matter into drunken inaction. The belief from the vile bowels of social consciousness is that if the voices are silenced then the looting can continue infinitely.
Well no it can’t—I’ve personally fought it all my life. Before the invention of the internet I fought it in the darkness of night with bullets and bullwhips, court rooms, and police reports. For those who complain that forums like the old Fox News, or web sites like this one are doing damage to public education, to the network of looters that are out there and seek to put an end to the voices of warning that come from Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom, Info Wars, GBTV or Napolitano’s Freedom Watch, I don’t think you want the result from not having that voice.
My world before this voice was one that the bad guys will not like if I and these others return to that place. Violence is assured. Because there are people like Judge Napolitano who will not be turned to the evil of “not seeing” the treachery in the world around them. The answer for the good is to remove those who wish to commit evil among us so they are no longer a threat. The best and most obvious method of doing that is through education. But if the means of education are eradicated, then the thieving fools have left violence as the only choice.
I have seen this pretentious tendency first hand for many years so I know the aspects which add up to the sum. I’ve been in the boardrooms, the political offices, the brain-storming sessions and I know the heart of the enemy, and I won’t tolerate them with or without a voice. By removing the voices of reason, the world will not go back to the sleepy carcass that it was. In every human being is the desire to be free, and when tyrants impose themselves upon that desire, war will always break out. It is not for the tyrants like the billionaire Soros to decide the course of the human race and to eradicate all dissidents to his plan. It’s not his right to turn the arm of News Corp with legal proceedings so to put an end to shows like Freedom Watch and the Glenn Beck Program because the hungry public is buying up their books with a voracity which terrifies the looters of the world. Those tyrants are just one more in a long line of fools throughout history who suffered mentally from the ability to reason with the world around them, and comprehend the nature of freedom. And silencing the voices who call for freedom will not eliminate the desire. It only continues to rob young men of their wits and young women of their honor as they grow up in a confusing world designed by the tyrant types who desire to make the globe into their own fragmented images.
Losing Freedom Watch from the Fox Business Channel does not give me pause to despair. It just confirms in me that there won’t be a peaceful end to this reign of terror, this “rule by the stupid,” which is currently the case. Instead it infected me with the desire to run my flag out onto my front porch and look west in contemplation, to clean my guns, to oil my whips, to sharpen my knives and prepare them for a day that is coming, a day the media rulers of our day wish to postpone beyond their pensions–beyond their condo leases, to a day on the far horizon. A day they hope to push beyond their lifetimes by cancelling shows like Freedom Watch.
But that day is closer than they think, and as a western wind blew in my face I had to consider how pointless it is that such tyrants will plunge our nation into war with each other before they allow ideas to fight it out in honor for all to see, and for the winners to shape society. Instead, they have elected censorship of the worst kind, the cancellation of a popular show and the forfeit of financial profits in order to appease the foolish and latte drinkers surrounding public education.
A long time ago I used to be the guy who fed the string of exploding fireworks from the top of a Chinese restaurant that I worked at while the owners of the establishment put on an epic dragon dance like the one seen below. The fireworks were coiled up in a box that had over 50,000 tied to it and I’d have to stand on the roof and feed the lit explosions just over the dancing dragon below as it performed for a massive audience. My task was to keep the fireworks about two feet above the action but to protect anything from igniting the feed box, which was very dangerous work on my end, that I loved.
As I witnessed many oriental dragon dances I contemplated the difference in how oriental cultures viewed dragons and how the Occident, (western cultures) viewed dragons. They are very different ways of looking at the same thing. In the orient, dragons are a symbol of life renewing aspects. The dragon sheds its skin, and is seen as a serpent and life-giver in many respects. In the west, the dragon’s breath fire, are meant to be feared and usually sit on top of huge piles of treasure and are sought after to be slain. But why was this?
It was that primary question that sent me on a ten-year study and provoked me to quit college three times because nobody had a satisfactory answer for me in the field of philosophy. That might not have been the case if I had been able to attend Sarah Lawrence College where Joseph Campbell taught comparative mythology, or Leonard Peikoff’s philosophy classes at Long Island University, had I known about them when I was 18 to 28. But the books of those men were available, and I scooped up the work of Joseph Campbell and devoured them for the next ten years trying to figure out what was wrong with this whole problem of dragons in human society.
I spent many late nights at Waffle Houses all over Cincinnati reading till 4 to 5 AM over breakfast omelets pouring through all of Campbell’s classics meticulously, and it was this action that catapulted me into a lifelong study of myth, philosophy, and human culture that extended beyond the realms of classic anthropological and archeological study. The study of dragons in our culture actually is the skeleton key to understanding the conflicts of our age and it all begins with the grace of that dragon dance from my youth and the hypnotic fireworks I was tasked to feed during the ceremony. And it ends with the reason why I am so excited about the new Peter Jackson film translation of The Hobbit, which I so enthusiastically support at my site here.
My wife’s birthday was last night and my daughter, son-in-law and I went to our favorite Chinese restaurant in Liberty Twp to get my wife the only food she truly likes, Chinese from Panda King. My entire family loves the oriental family who run that restaurant and we’ve known them for years. The man and woman who operate Panda King are two of the hardest working people I know and their son grew up much like the sons I knew in my teenage years, working with the family business, doing their homework between orders and displaying a fantastic work ethic. It is that work ethic that I admire so much in the people of the orient. They have no fear of hard work and cannot be stopped once set in motion. So my wife wanted food from The Panda King for her birthday dinner and nothing else.
About that time a young man who I had fired from his job about 7 months ago came in to order food and appeared to recognize me. There was that tension where words cannot cross a void and nothing is said as a result. He didn’t know what to say to me, and there was nothing I could say to him to bring comfort. Asking how he was doing would have been inappropriate under the conditions of his termination, and asking for an appeal to me would have been degrading. So he avoided eye contact with me, ordered his food and left unceremoniously, as my daughter and I continued to talk about Smaug from The Hobbit.
Running into former employees that I’ve had to terminate happens a lot. It happens when I get gas, and at various shopping complexes as I am out and about, so I’ve learned to shift into the proper gear when those encounters happen. Firing an employee or letting them go as a reduction-in-force is difficult, but the situation is always in their control. It is a failure in job performance that does them in, and they either accept that fact or they don’t. So the choice to be angry is entirely in their control.
This guy in Panda King chose not to be angry and took responsibility for his actions, so his lack of desire to be confrontational to me earned some respect that he had won back just a little bit from how I felt about him upon termination.
When the food was done cooking the owners put it all in a giant box that it took to carry it all home. I joked to them about coming home with us to eat it all. The couple gave me an odd look not comprehending what I was saying as the thought of leaving their work in the middle of the evening was not even a consideration, even joking. And there-in-lies the fundamental difference between the east and the west, as much as I admire the oriental work ethic and their very dedicated preservation of strong families in their culture, they do not function very independently. Independence is not important to them culturally. The people of the orient think in terms of collectivism, as a complete organism of which they are but a single cell. They are naturally altruistic by their cultural heritage and as much as I admire them as a social organism, they think very different from the way I do. This is why their dragons are revered as life-sustaining, because the dragon to them is the state. This is why oriental cultures tend to fall toward communism. This is the case certainly in China, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, and if the politics is not literal communism, then it might be monarchy, feudalism such as what is found in Japanese cultures or an out-right dictatorship. The people of the orient are prone to sacrifice their individual lives for the benefit of the collective whole.
When J.R.R. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, and The Lord of the Rings he set out to bring Great Britain a proper mythology for their culture, which England did not have. England through their reign of empire had a hodgepodge of many cultures as they imported the King Author legends from France, which had its roots in the troubadours of romanticism. But England lacked an authentic myth to unify its people, so Tolkien set out to give it one with his characters in the literary classics of Middle Earth. As a professor at Oxford he saw firsthand the spread of socialism throughout London society and as a veteran of World War I he had some very unique perspectives into the progressive conditions that spread after the Treaty of Versailles. Tolkien the intellectual kept his mind free from politics like many creative people and instead delved into creating his own world mythology which reflected the concepts of our actual life. Walt Disney and George Lucas have done that in the United States and in England Tolkien was taking his observations of human behavior and painting them against stories such as The Hobbit in 1936.
Tolkien was so prone to withdrawal from contemporary politics that he lashed out in anger at those who declared his Lord of the Rings as an anti-communist parable comparing Joseph Stalin to the Dark Lord. Tolkien saw his work as reaching beyond the politics of the day even though he was clearly reacting to the events through the mechanism of myth.
The Hobbit is in essence a treasure hunt, not too unlike that of Disney’s beloved pirates from Pirates of the Caribbean. Bilbo Baggins was conscripted from a group of treasure hunters led by Gandalf seeking to take back their kingdom and the treasure guarded there by the dragon Smaug. This takes the home-loving Hobbit Bilbo on an adventure of the lifetime and lead directly into the events that become Lord of the Rings, which is a much more sinister story about evil and the nature of its influence. In The Hobbit, Smaug is the perfect embodiment of the classic occidental dragon motif as seen in this clip from the 1977 cartoon adaption of The Hobbit.
Notice Smaug is a pompous, arrogant creature who uses brute force to guard his treasure taken from the surrounding kingdoms. And he sleeps atop it guarding each and every item. Bilbo the Thief, the (pirate) has been tasked to steal an item from the dragon’s lair. The dragon in these stories represents The State, the institutional control of an organization that takes and steals by force the wealth of the people who have their rights to their creations. So the dragon is the villain in occidental mythology where the creature represents a destruction of individual liberty, and the right to their personal wealth. The dragon does not have a right to hoard the looted wealth of the people in its lair. This makes the dragon slayer, the thief of Bilbo Baggins a hero in this case.
However, if the same story were told in China, Bilbo would be the villain and it would be the dragon who would be the hero. Because in that culture the dragon is the revered creature, the state and the survival of the culture is the paramount concern. But in European post renaissance mythology, before Karl Marx spread his disease across Europe, it was the individual desire for conquering one’s personal dragons that become the concern.
I put the quality of J.R.R. Tolkien’s thinking in line with the Founding Fathers by way of intellectual capacity in what he was trying to achieve. Tolkien had the ability to behold very large ideas much the way Ben Franklin did, and was able to see beyond the political trends of his day to tell very powerful myths in an attempt to hold his culture together. Tolkien was creating a mythology which directly leads to philosophy, two ingredients that are paramount to holding a culture together.
Political science and other feeble attempts to bypass the process of myth always lead to social decay. Mythology is needed in order to form complicated social concepts which give context to large ideas. This is why the new documentary called Finding Joe, which is about the power of Joseph Campbell’s scholarship in creating a new field of endeavor called comparative mythology which will soon become a major field of study like anthropology, sociology, and even physics is now, because there is power in myths and the words that form them. So much so that societies will rise and fall based on the strength of their mythological messages.
But that is the difference between the east and the west and these ideas are in open conflict with each other. The hippie movement of the 60’s and into the modern-day sought to study the east as the premier mode of thinking using examples of India, Tibetan Buddhism, and Japanese Zen to challenge the thinking of western thought. It was even Jane Fonda who basically made love publicly with communist North Vietnam using her sex appeal to win over millions of American’s into communism.
But it cannot be disguised what lingers in the heart of mankind. And all the open conflicts of our day could be seen in Panda King where my daughter and I were buying my wife dinner for her birthday. My friends who run the place genuinely enjoy seeing me when I come to place an order and our friendship exists completely in respect. But they do not understand my motorcycle riding, my cowboy hats or my outlandish dress on occasion. They do not understand my strong desire for individual liberty. And I do not understand their blind obedience to collectivism, or their selfless natures. I admire it in some respects, but I do not, nor do I wish to understand it. When I see a dragon I wish to slay it and mount it’s head on my wall so I can hang my bullwhips from its teeth. When they see a dragon they want to do a dance and celebrate its nature.
And the fellow who I fired was a young fellow who was confused by all this stuff. He thought that work was optional, that he could show up when he wanted. He often wore symbols of the Yen and Yang on his jewelry and had a fascination with the Peace symbol. He thought that he could make up his own hours and that if he lost his job he’d just collect unemployment. So I gave him directions to the unemployment office and told him to get in line because he was now on it. He huffed and puffed and bragged on Facebook about how was going to stick it to me and what a bad guy I was, but in the end he had lost his job because he did not perform the tasks he was hired to do. He was functioning from a faulty philosophy. He wanted the collectivism of the east without the hard work, yet he still wanted the individuality of the west, again without the work. That young man is a victim of no mythology, but rather a grouping of broken symbols that had lost their meaning leaving his mind vacant of resolution. This gives him little social value in that he cannot even be hired like Bilbo Baggins to steal treasure from a dragon resting atop a pile of gold.
If you want a long sustaining society that will always hold itself together, the orient has the problem licked. They are a stable people who can have a continuous society that lasts for generations, but they are willing to give up individual liberty to have it. The Occident, (the west) tends to burn itself out quickly in the absence of strong family values since the innovations of one generation to the next die out as the great minds of one age find the descendents of the next one much like that guy I had to fire. Without the work ethic to sustain an idea, they quickly die out and the culture disintegrates. But, it is in individual endeavor that innovation thrives, and it is in the Occident that we developed aviation, computers, the internet, electricity, and virtually all technological marvels. Because the keys to a good life, the treasures of mankind are underneath the dragons of society and those dragons must be killed to gain those treasures. You cannot dance around them and throw sacrifices at those dragons and expect the dragon to give you treasure. Instead the dragon will only ask for more. So the dragons must be killed, so that society can prosper and advance with each slain monster.
American society will thrive once it stops feeling guilty for the dragons it kills, because we are not like those in the orient. We are unique, and it is our task to kill dragons and steal their treasure for our use. That is the mythology of the west, and one that at a subconscious level, we all understand.
But why? How did this person come to sit with me at a school board meeting? How did we become friends in the first place? After all, this was a guy who used to be a levy supporter, and a very active volunteer at Lakota East. Well, it’s the fault of the Lakota School Board actually for not taking action to help the guy out when he had a problem. This guy came to the board and presented his case and the school did everything they could to cover it up. They took his wife aside and pressured her into signing her rights away out of fear that they would smear her for the relationship she had with a teacher at the high school who had instructed her daughter. This case went all the way up to the state board of education and still the story was contained. The teacher who sent very salacious emails talking about sucking, and doing the horizontal mamba with this little girl’s mother from a school computer didn’t get fired from his position for violating the trust of the teacher-student relationship.
Instead the principal of the high school sent the teacher in question to the other high school to help keep him employed and shut up the parents who had reconciled the incident between each other after a lot of pain. Even after the relationship had ended between the woman and the teacher the parasite continued to pursue the woman asking how “their” little girl was doing on papers sent home and on voice messages over the phone. It was the kind of voice message that sent shivers up the spine of the woman. It felt as if the teacher was “bullying” her into a position of control, and the teacher continued to do this for quite some time after the affair ended and the child was out of his class. Because in all reality, nothing really happened to the teacher, he just reported to a different building within the Lakota School System once the story was presented to the principal and school board.
Out of desperation and risking that I would shoot him just for stepping on my property, this father sought me out for help because he had nowhere else to turn. He wanted someone to be accountable for what this teacher attempted to do to his family. So I covered their story in greater detail in another article. Click Here to view that piece. Over time, we have become friends and I have gotten to know their daughter who is now out of school. After the incident with the teacher this little girl was repeatedly harassed by other students at Lakota. The bullying became so bad that the parents had to remove their little girl from a very respected activity due to the constant harassment, all of which is well documented with an extensive paper trail. Remember, this used to be dedicated Lakota volunteer who is very well liked and respected in the Lakota community, so the man has no reason to be inflammatory. Once the little girl graduated from school she once again thrived, and this was the 18-year-old woman who recently showed me around her house and shared with me her crushes that she had on her favorite movie stars. As she spoke to me I could not help but wonder what kind of evil would possess a teacher to use this nice young woman as a tool to seduce her mother into beginning a sexual affair. What evil would try to pry from this innocent girl facts about her father that the teacher could use to smear against the mother. And what evil could use the special needs condition of the young girl to demand audience from the very busy, and concerned mother who would do anything to make sure her daughter got what she needed in school.
So is there bullying going on at Lakota, and virtually every public school all across the country? YES! Of course there is. Public schools are notoriously class specific, and peer groups are created within a public school system to meet the various classifications of personalities. Because such a thing is a primal desire, to find likeness among peers, children will pick on those who are not like them and pound into shape those similar into a group collective. Individuality is frowned down upon by every member of the public school system, which is why I dislike public school and always have. But when the pressure gets to be too great that it translates into a student wanting to take their own life, then the situation is way out of control and has expanded beyond the realm of tolerance.
When I heard about the recent suicide at Lakota West, I didn’t want it to be another negative article to write against the Lakota School System. My heart goes out to the parents of this little girl. I don’t care what the situation was, a system that lets a girl think death was the only way out has failed the child and the family who trusted the school. And unfortunately it sounds like the girl was suffering from bullying at her school to such an extent that she thought she had no way out.
Since this story was reported by Channel 9 one time during the second week of February 2012 and nowhere else, facts are hard to come by. The letter that Lakota sent home to parents was nowhere to be found on their website, which seemed to be big enough news to dictate sending the letter home with kids. I did however see the article by the Enquirer about the new school board member Julie Schaffer promoting her “volunteerism.” But there wasn’t anything about this tragic death that occurred on February 8th in the paper that I saw, or on the Lakota site giving any specifics. That seemed strange for such a sad story.
I figured that the media and the school were just being sensitive to the family, and by keeping the story quit, they were being respectful to the grieving family, which I thought was appropriate. That is until I saw the comments online from Leslie Agoston who is a student at Lakota West and knows the victim. Here is the posting.
Leslie Agoston I am a current Lakota West High School student. And I know what the girl went through and how she felt. I too get bullied almost every day. And Lakota could care less they just sweep it under the rug. They just care about their “excellence” rating. If they just stopped for a second and realize how many kids are suffering from bullying an incident like this would have never happened.
That is an interesting thing for a student at Lakota to say? That comment eerily sounded like the situation my new friend who came to the school board meeting with me went through. The comment from the student implies that the administration at Lakota doesn’t care about the bullying that goes on. It backs up the notion that my friend is not the only one who suffered from some indiscretion involving bullying at the Lakota School District.
But what constitutes bullying? Was it bullying to use a special needs kid to sleep with a parent? Might the child have felt pressure from such a teacher into revealing family secrets through acts of intimidation? Was it bullying to tell the mother that unless she signed a document releasing the school of responsibility that “word might get around the community about her indiscretions.” And apparently the students at Lakota West are complaining about bullying being a rampant problem that nobody is addressing.
Well, for clarity on this issue, let’s look at what Lakota itself says the definition of bullying is according to their website.
Lakota’s Definition of Bullying
“Bullying” is defined as an intentional written, verbal, electronic, or physical act that a student exhibits toward another particular student more than once; and the behavior both (1) causes mental or physical harm to the student, and (2) is sufficiently severe, persistent, or pervasive that a reasonable person under the circumstances should know will have the effect of: • Placing a student in reasonable fear of physical harm or damage to the student’s property; • Physically harming a student or damaging a student’s property; or • Insulting or demeaning any student or group of students in such a way as to disrupt or interfere with the school’s educational mission or the education of any student. http://www.lakotaonline.com/parents.cfm?subpage=2642
I know that my friend and his family suffered from bullying according to that definition at the hands of a Lakota teacher, a principal, and the school board members who knowingly let the issue slide through the cracks. They did not pursue termination of that teacher, but instead covered the issue up, which is consistent with the statement made by Leslie Agoston in her comments about the recent tragic death of her fellow student.
I understand that any organization with a lot of people and employees will be far from perfect. But we do expect perfection from an airplane pilot. If a pilot lands successfully 300 times then crashes on landing 301 that pilot would be held accountable, probably with the loss of their job at the very least. If there was a loss of life, there might even be a trial. The community of Lakota is employing an army of very well paid administrators, teachers and councilors to prevent tragic events like what Leslie described. It is also expected that teachers behave ethically without trying to have sex with the parents. The kids are watching how the administrators and teachers behave, and kids cannot be expected to be better than the teachers, can they?
It is a tragedy anytime a young person losses their life. It’s bad enough to consider whatever the sum of the conditions were that made the little girl want to take her own life. Again, my heart goes out to the family in the deepest way. And I truly hope that what Leslie said is not true, that this bully problem is not so epidemic within the Lakota School System that the situation could have been avoided with the skilled intervention of the highly paid mentors employed by the community. Because if it could have, then this suicide is a very serious issue for the school board to consider, and so far, all I hear them talking about is the passage of a new tax levy. They didn’t even bring it up at the school board meeting on February 13, 2012. They didn’t even say a prayer for the little girl or cover the issue in any way which would have been appropriate with such a large gathering. All these elements add up to be just another situation as what my friend experienced in his own family, a school that pushes all bad news under the rug to hide from the community.
I really hope I’m wrong, but something tells me that I’m not.
The biggest problem with the whole bullying issue is that the schools have painted themselves into a corner. They are not equipped to deal with bullying. Only a parent is, and sometimes the best way to eliminate a bully is to fight them. That’s how you shut down a bully. That’s how it’s been done for 10,000 years of human evolution. And if the child can’t take care of it on their own, the parents must step in and do it for them.
When my daughter was 9 years old she was picked on by a group of boys in the neighborhood who harassed her and her friends to no end. My daughter stood up to the bullies and one of the boys spit on her. My daughter was devastated by the embarrassment and came home very upset that a person would do such a thing to her, especially since the boy was much bigger than she was. That’s when the parent must step in and take control.
I put my daughter and all her friends in the car and went looking for the boys. I found them playing in the driveway of their house with the spitter’s father working in the garage, all of them were laughing as we pulled up. I made the boy apologize on his hands and knees to my daughter so my daughter would realize that I had her back and that if she ever got into a fix she couldn’t handle, that I’d be there to sweep it up for her. She needed to know that her father was there. Of course the boy’s father protested and wanted to fight me, which I openly accepted. Then he shut his mouth and went inside his house leaving his kids to fend for themselves, which scared the shit out of them. Their father had abandoned them when it mattered. Little things like that matter a lot in the art of living.
These matters are too complicated for schools to handle, yet they sell their services to the community as though they can. They are kidding themselves. Respect for human beings cannot be created through rules and regulations. Respect is earned, and standing up for yourself or your child is the way it is gained in the mind of the human being. There is no other way.
It is in this misunderstanding that bullying is an epidemic problem in public schools and parents who believe that the school system can, and will put children’s safety in the front of administrator’s minds are kidding with you. Administrators don’t have the intellectual capacity, or the fortitude to do such a thing, and the cost to society is great. The bully issue in public school is just another byproduct of an organized, overly specialized, labor force that has handcuffed parents into inaction because they assure society that all problems can be handled in the classroom. So parents believing they don’t have a right to get involved in the affairs of their children in school leave the job to the teachers and administrators that can’t even balance a budget, let alone handle complicated emotional issues with children who aren’t even theirs.
The schools know this. They know they can’t protect the children to the level they have sold to the public. Their primary concern is always how they are going to continue to gain funding from the community, so they are always focused on hiding unpleasant facts from the public rather than dealing directly with a problem. This is why Lakota didn’t even discuss the suicide of a student just four days later at the largest school board meeting I can ever remember occurring at Lakota with all the media in Cincinnati covering the event. The school board didn’t even acknowledge the tragedy, because the goal of the meeting was to convince the community of the need for higher taxes, not to actually deal with any tough problems like mature adults. This is the kind of behavior that has created most of the problems in public education. That’s how they got into trouble with my new friend. They sought to suppress the story rather than dealing with it directly.
The bullies of the world know this. They know that most of the parents, administrators, and teachers are paralyzed into inaction by rules and regulations that the bullies could care less about. So like the liberal gun laws that seek to remove guns from society in the aim of world peace, the progressive educators think that by employing more councilors and administrators that they can stop violence and the tendency of violence from the school environment. They can’t.
The answer is more parental involvement, less administrators getting in the way of a parent and their children, and encouraging justice where it’s appropriate. When a teacher does something wrong, FIRE THEM! When a child acts inappropriately, expel them! And when you hear and see reports from parents that violence is coming at their children in the school, don’t pass the reports to your PR director to hide from the public. Deal with them; deal with each and every report even if the parents are overly neurotic, because that’s what the community is paying for. If there is anything that can be learned from these tragedies it’s that there isn’t any replacement for good ol’ fashioned care and attention. Money can’t buy security and a clean conscious, only work can solve the problem and without the work, tragedies will continue to occur.
When Mike Schell of Fox 19 met me in the hall at Lakota East to get a few comments for his story on the epic school board meeting held at Lakota East’s auditorium that was packed to the ceiling with concerned Lakota residents, he asked me why I was there since I have been such a staunch advocate against the tax increases. I told him I was curious as to what the administration was going to do, that they had some time to get things right since the election, and I was coming to the meeting with an open mind hoping that Mantia and the gang of administrators were going to do something bold, and good for the future of Lakota. Mike then told me the cliff notes version of the meeting which he had in his hand. The proposal was 69 teaching positions cut and reducing the teaching day from a 7 period day to 6. I shook my head and told Mike I was disappointed. You can see the rest of the interview at the Channel 19 site and what I said next.
I was disappointed as I sat with my wife in the top row of the large auditorium and watched the proceeding with growing revulsion as the meeting began at 7 PM. To me, the school boards choice was an easy one. After the defeat of the levy in November, they had a mandate from the community with over 18,000 voters turning down their third levy attempt to ask the teachers union to take a 5% pay cut, which isn’t a big deal since the average pay at Lakota is $63K per year. That simple request would have put Lakota’s budget in line with the revenue stream coming to it where residents pay around $1,140 per 100K of property value on their businesses and residence. That tax is already high. So much so that it does discourage existing businesses and prospective businesses from coming to the Lakota district. That number is the breaking point, so from my vantage point and many who support the NO LAKOTA LEVY group, the tax burden needs to be decreased, not increased.
At the school board meeting the only way to describe my nausea at the obvious scheme to launch the district into a FOURTH tax levy attempt was to compare it to the visitation of a funeral. That’s how it felt. The participants on that large stage in front of a vast audience fumbled about like an episode of the Three Stooges. These buffoons had the audacity to attempt to attract this large crowd to the biggest venue in the district so they could show a PowerPoint presentation on a very large screen to look good for the cameras. I instantly recognized the tactic by Superintendent Mantia, because she used almost the exact same forum up in Pickerington when she lobbied for a levy passage that passed just this last August. The goal of the meeting, (THE REAL GOAL) was not to announce any real cuts. It was to say that the Lakota School System was going to go to state minimums and do only what they had to do to get by. In fact, the teachers are going to teach one less class a day since they are getting rid of the 7th period! So they are doing less work than they do now! How is that beneficial?
Hidden in the dialog throughout the evening was the reminder that if the community did pass a levy, that some of what was being taken away could come back as a kind of Plan B. The entire event was a page ripped right out of Saul Alinsky’s The Delphi Technique. The school board batted around comments like tennis players hitting a ball and a bewildered audience watched waiting for a score. A woman in front of me took vigorous notes until 8:30 as her three kids started getting restless. The meeting began with a lot of energy, but by 9 PM the energy had died and people started to look at the exits. The entire goal of the meeting was to drag out a large audience, complain about how little money the board had to work with, and then use a lot of terminology that the audience would think sounded impressive to appear efficient.
The only strategic option the school board had was to force the union to take further concessions and if the union refused, to use that against them in a public relations campaign. That is if the school board wished the future solvency of the district and not just some short shot in the arm from a tax increase by a levy passage. Increased taxes are not an option. It will cripple the growth of the Lakota district not only in families moving to the area, but also the commercial business that is prevalent in the community. Yet the school board showed at this latest meeting without any doubt that they are completely on the side of the union labor and lack the resolve to meet the budget crises head on and actually solve it. After several months of work after a failed levy, our triple dipping superintendent Karen Mantia from Pickerington, Ohio who makes nearly a quarter of a million dollars in overall compensation can do nothing more with her budget than cut teachers and services as an extortion racket to set up another school levy attempt in 2012.
I witnessed from the top row the funeral of public education, which I’ve never been a fan of, but saw it die right in front of my face. Any hope that public education could resurrect itself was beyond doubt gone from that stage at Lakota East on February 13, 2012. Lakota is the 7th largest district in the state of Ohio; it’s been excellent with distinction for over a decade. Lakota is the best of the best when it comes to public education, and it is a scam. So if Lakota is a scam, then what are all those schools who aren’t as good as Lakota? Lakota is a scam because there was never any intention to balance their budget no matter what combination of personnel was put on the board, because the system itself is on life support and what the audience has to do is decide whether or not to pull the plug or not.
As I watched a parade of parents plead with the school board to find ways to reach out to those of us in the NO LAKOTA LEVY so that some common ground could be found to pass the next levy, I saw a group of people addicted to money like a dying patient might be addicted to morphine. The public school of Lakota is comatose because its employees lack the will to make any hard decisions. They think the school exists so that their employees can make healthy incomes, double-dip in their retirements, have great insurance benefits, and have all summer off. And they are willing to feed off kids to achieve their goal. Their very lives require vast sums of money to feed their addiction and once that money is cut off it is clear that their collective minds lack any direction, imagination, or leadership to exist on their own. So the moment they are taken off that supply of money they become sick and are ready to die.
I’ve joked about it here, I’ve ranted about it on these very pages, but public education is in all essence dead. Tax levies are the life support that keeps them living, and they are in such a condition because they are money addicts. Their philosophy is essentially wrong and this has led to the addictive behavior that they don’t even understand about themselves. It was obvious to me and to others in the audience who see that the body is already dead even as that body attempts to put on a big show to pretend they are in fact alive and well. They aren’t. Because the moment there isn’t any money to keep them alive, they are ready to die, unable to break themselves of that addiction. The school as a whole would rather cut off parts of their body in labor reductions and reduce their offerings to the community as a service than adjust their bloated bodies with the hard decision of restructuring their lives to what the community is supplying them with in funding.
I left the meeting at a quarter till 10 PM as a slow boil of anger swelled within me well into the next day that finally erupted halfway through the following afternoon during a contentious conference call on an unrelated matter. As my wife and I left, it had the same feeling that we’ve had as we’ve left the visitation of a family member at a funeral. The school board members and supporters of public education are so far out of touch that they didn’t know they were already dead. Instead they reside like ghosts who refuse to move on hovering over their bodies in confusion as if somehow they would spring back to life.
It was sad to see, but also revolting all the same. It’s an insult to be told by a ghost how to live life, yet that is what the Lakota School Board did at their meeting. It’s like taking advice from an alcoholic how to avoid drinking too much; it’s an insult to listen to the slurred speech of the drunkard lecture on the evils of drinking. The school board instructed the audience of the need for cutting money while at the same time asking for more, so they could live just a few minutes longer, just one more year. Once 2014 hits the pay freeze will be lifted and Lakota will have an onslaught of employees expecting 3% to 6% increases to make up for their losses during the three-year pay freeze designed to get a levy passed.
Public education is a joke. The employees of the system are a joke. And the administrators are a joke and in bed with the employees. The whole system is a failure of money addicts lost in a reality of their own making. And they have committed their own suicide by their actions and lack of realism. When residents of the nearby neighborhood of Four Bridges are paying over $5000 a year on their homes, as both parents work hard to just keep their property as their value plummets and job opportunities are restricted, the idea of a further tax on homes like that are unbearable, not to mention the senior citizens on a fixed income or the businesses that are barely getting by and thinking of leaving their leases for a cheaper district. The Lakota School System under the leadership of the Ohio School Board Association in Columbus and the Ohio Education Association and its parent organization the National Education Association of socialists have painted themselves into a corner and expect to be rescued with life support to sustain their addiction to money. But the money isn’t there anymore and the community must now decide whether or not to pull the plug on a loved one in order to ease their own minds to the terminal patient that will never get better on their own.
To me the thing is already dead. It might look like its breathing; it might even look into your eyes. But it’s the drugs talking. In this case it’s a $160 million dollar plus budget that somehow isn’t enough. And given that fact, I’m prepared to pull the plug and leave the hospital. Because the death is inevitable—it’s just waiting for someone to make the hard decision.
As the Lakota School System attempts to paint a picture of efficiency and community awareness by putting their troubled school board members into the back ground and promoting their former levy advocates to the forefront in a publicity campaign of competence, there is a sinister wave of reality that is sweeping the nation regarding the trouble with labor unions in education. Have a look at the latest attempt by the Lakota School System to advocate their need for another levy in 2012 by showing the public how hard they are working, as if such measures would earn them the trust of the Lakota residents.
Reading this Enquirer article about Julie Schafer brought my mind to a Marty Steer review of the new book called Special Interest: Teachers unions and America’s Public Schools that is worth mention. So I have included Marty’s review below in its entirety. The specifics of this review are that the union element is completely corrosive to the public school system, and this is detrimental to any discussion of school funding. This review by Marty validates much of what I have been saying about public sector unions, and I will go further than Marty does by stating that no further public funding increases should be provided to any government school until the unions are dismantled. Because only then can correct assessments of the true cost and value of public education be ascertained.
Lakota in their lack of admission to their labor union problems believe that highlighting the sacrifices of their new star, Julie Shafer exhibited in the Enquirer article will successfully hide all the negatives engaged by the Lakota Education Association in driving up the labor costs to unreasonable levels. The how, why, when and where of how this has occurred are shown wonderfully in this review by Marty Steer seen below. Enjoy!
SPECIAL INTEREST: TEACHERS UNIONS AND AMERICA’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Terry M. Moe
In January, 2010, Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) gave a speech to the National Press Club that electrified proponents of school reform sending a surprising promise of hope. She called for sweeping changes in how school districts evaluate teachers, agreed to standardized tests, and favored a plan to get bad teachers out of the classroom. Even the New York Times headlined the breaking news, “Union Chief Seeks to Overhaul Teaching Evaluation Process.” Only problem: this doesn’t compute – especially given her staunch union track record. Today there’s pressure being put on unions that is threatening their survival, but they know how to play the game. Whitney Tilson, founding member of Teach for America, hit the nail on the head. “You know the saying. When you’re being run out of town, get out in front. Make it look like a parade.” (Pg. 269) And she did.
Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools, was written by Terry M. Moe,StanfordUniversity professor and senior fellow at the Hoover Institute. His book is exquisitely researched and highly praised by formerNew York City and Washington D.C. Chancellors, Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee. He begins with a description ofNew York City’s “Rubber Room,” the place where incompetent teachers go to relax while they draw full-salary, full-benefits and time to plan their paid vacations. But he ends with a ray of hope that reform will come, but not immediately. Taking you inside the operation of the teachers’ union, Moe reveals the details of their agenda and the consequences of their power. If the general public knew the truth, they’d be outraged and just maybe next time we’d do a little better at the ballot box.
Before digging into Moe’s book, I’d suggest Googling “A Nation at Risk.” Since Moe refers to it often, it would help to be familiar with this 1983 report to the Dept. of Education that addressed the alarming decline of American education. 25 years later, it had not improved, nor has it since. For the first time in history, they concluded that students did not receive as good an education as their parents, and we are now into the second generation of further decline, soon to be the third. That also just happened to be the time when teacher unions were forcefully on the move.
History: In 1857, the National Teachers Association (NEA) organized as a professional association of educators. Their mission was to meet high standards, attract well-trained teachers that were paid a professional salary and protected by tenure. It was controlled by superintendants, principals and other administrators responsible for making the key decisions. They were also in the business of removing schools from the clutches of party machines and patronage. This worked well for the first 100 years. Throughout the 60s and 70s NEA made a nationwide presence. They didn’t formally declare themselves a union until 1969, but acted like them, as did their union competitor, AFT. By the 80s membership soared and unionization and collective bargaining had now become the norm. (Pg. 44-48)
The Union’s Job: According to unions, they’re only doing their job: represent the special interest of the teacher by negotiating higher salary and benefits, protect them from job loss, issue seniority which protects bad teachers, guarantee a single-pay policy which disregards teacher performance, oppose accountability and school choice. Since the unions now replaced principals, superintendants and administrators with union control, they effectively run the show through the tool of collective bargaining. What follows are some of these “bargained” rules: (pg.174-175)
Teachers can make voluntary transfers to other schools based on seniority.
Senior teachers can take junior teachers’ jobs requiring junior teachers to be laid off first.
Principal is required to give advance notice to teachers before visiting their classroom to do an evaluation.
Use of standardized student tests for evaluating teacher performance is prohibited.
Unionspecifies rules for improvement, mentoring bad teachers, procedures to be followed in any effort to dismiss a teacher, and more.
Unions determine the number of faculty meetings and their duration.
They determine the number of parent conferences and other forums in which teachers meet with parents.
They determine how many minutes teachers can be required to be on campus before and after school.
They determine class size, number of courses, periods, or students a teacher must teach.
They determine non-teaching duties that teachers can be asked to perform such as yard, hall or lunch duty.
They allow teachers to take paid sabbaticals and give liberal options for personal leave days.
They control decisions about school policy, assignments, transfers, and put non-instructional duties in the hands of committees on which teachers participate and may have a majority.
Teachers are allowed to accumulate unused sick leave for years and to eventually convert it into cash windfalls.
Unions control grievance procedures that teachers can invoke if they feel their rights have been violated.
They give union official teachers time off to perform union duties (which requires school to hire a sub)
And they have access to school mailboxes, bulletin boards, classrooms, etc. to use for its own purposes.
Though collective bargaining doesn’t apply to all teachers unions, it is an accurate example of rules taking place within our public schools. The question is, does any of this have to do with what’s good for the kids? Who benefits?
Power, Politics and Reform Unionism: Together the NEA and AFT have over 4 million dues-paying members and collective bargaining is still the norm. That’s not to mention forced unionism which helps getting the legislation they want. They do it through the politics of blocking. Unions overwhelmingly support Democrats only with campaign donations and give more than any other organization, including SEIU. Democrats, in turn, feel obliged to support them. So even if a Democrat candidate genuinely does want reform, they’re between a rock and a hard place. There are organized Democrats who genuinely want reform and engage in what is called “reform unionism.” They ask for account-ability, teacher evaluation, school choice, etc. but here’s the rub. The union agrees with all of the above as long as it’s THEY who set the rules! In other words, they’re forced to buy something that isn’t going to work anyway. Enough said.
Has anyone tried REAL Reform? Yes. Has it worked? No. Why?
New Orleans: Quite successful but happened only as a result of tragedy: Hurricane Katrina. Because so many schools were destroyed, all the teachers were dismissed and the “local unions and its formidable power was essentially wiped out.” So free from the constraints of union power, guess what they built? Charter schools. Children in New Orleans now choose their school. 61% of them choose charter and most of their teachers are products of the revolutionary new real reform organization, Teach for America program. (pg. 215)
New York: When you read about theNew York “Rubber Room” you’ll know why theNew York school district is in deep trouble. Mayor Giuliani tried using his mayoral influence to achieve serious reform in the 90s, but failed. Mayor Bloomberg also tried with a little more success. His Chancellor – Joel Klein was good but his success also came at the price of a “buy-in” that ultimately didn’t work. Albeit a genuine attempt, they also failed. (pg. 220)
Washington D.C. D.C. has long been known as having one of the worst school districts in the country. It’s not from lack of money. In 2009, reported current-spending was $17, 542 per student. Including estimates on school construction, more like $28,000. Yet in terms of academic progress, they came in dead last. Parents were fleeing to charter schools. In 2007 newly elected Mayor Adrian Fenty, a serious reformer, gambled on hiring Michelle Rhee as Chancellor. (pg. 230-231) The unions didn’t know what they were up against. Rhee cleaned house. She even made the New York Times front cover pictured as a witch with a broomstick. Facing a union that had been weakened, she did more than anyone could imagine yet ultimately lost the battle when Fenty lost the 2007 Democratic primary to Vincent Gray. Moe writes” Rhee spent nearly three years bashing her head against a wall of union power, and for what? To bring about changes that are simply common sense and should never have been needed in the first place. They were needed because…the teachers unions have used their power to impose a labyrinth of onerous work rules that prevent the schools from being effectively organized.” (pg. 237)
Two Major Reform Projects
No Child Left Behind (NCLB Act), signed into law in 2001. was set to improve performance while ensuring that no child would be trapped in a failing school. The idea was to increase accountability, allow school choice, and flexibility in the use of Federal funds in exchange for strong accountability for results. While well-intentioned, “some of the most critical flaws arose because their designs were influenced by the unions and their allies – who don’t want educators held accountable and were using their power to purposely create a kind of “accountability” that would be weak and ineffective,” said Moe. Through collective bargaining they succeeded in eliminating private school vouchers and used their powers to ensure that NCLB was almost devoid of serious consequences when districts and schools failed to do their jobs. To date NCLB has been relatively toothless. (pg. 323)
Race to the Top was the work of Barack Obama and Arne Duncan, Obama’s appointment for the Dept. of Education. In a speech on education he reinforced his commitment to basic reformist ideas when he said “States and school districts need to take steps to move bad teachers out of the classroom…I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from consequence.” (pg. 359) Though his words were strong, action was weak and he, too, left with a “buy-in” option on the table which effectively stopped any real reform. The only good it did create was an explosion of reform activity that if kept alive can work to dismantle the power of these unions.
Other Significant Observations and Facts:
Teacher Benefits: Average teacher salary most likely in the $60,000 range – in the $40,000s for newer teachers and can easily become six figure for administrators and more. Add to that an attractive guaranteed pension and health benefits which for many is free. Not bad for a nine month job with seven or less work hours per day.
Union Strength: Massive membership, and politically massive money speaks.
Undoing a union: Not likely because you can vote out a bad politician, but you can’t vote out the unions. Reality: Unions are here to stay.
School boards generally stand in support of the unions. Critical to know candidates’ stand when you vote.
Mayoral support in your community reaches more constituents than does the school board. Important to know.
The Dance of the Lemons Description for bad teachers who are routinely given an unsatisfactory evaluation then passed around from school to school. (190) which of course is because they can’t be fired.
Hillary Clinton Think she’s a better option? Better think again! AFT’s Pres. Weingarten supported Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. (pg. 268) When it comes to education, Hillary’s worse. Hillary has been the union’s candidate right down the line. (pg. 369) Her record shows she opposes any and all attempts for school reform.
Teach for America is a privately funded organization that recruits, trains and places thousands of college students to teach in the most disadvantaged public schools. Though TFA has proven to be a gold mine of talent for the schools, they are trashed by the unions and obviously pose a threat. (pg. 313)
My Own Observations
In 1983 “A Nation at Risk” concludes that students did not receive as good an education as their parents and we are now into the second generation of further decline, soon to be the third. In 1998 “A Nation Still at Risk” found that “American 12th graders scored near the bottom on the recent Third Int’l Math and Science Study. U.S. students placed 19 out of 21 developed nations in math and 16 out of 21 in science. Our advanced students did even worse, scoring dead last in physics. This evidence suggests that compared to the rest of the industrialized world, our students lag seriously in critical subjects vital to our future… if we continue to sustain this chasm between the educational haves and have-nots, our nation will face cultural, moral and civic peril…. We should be able to rely on our schools to fortify students with standards, judgment and character. Trashy American culture has spread worldwide; educational mediocrity has not. Other nations seem better equipped to resist the Hollywood invasion than is the land where Hollywood is located.” (A Nation Still at Risk by William J. Bennett…) http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/6310
If we allow even one more generation of children to be subjected to the abysmal state of affairs in our public educational system, I think there’s no question we will lose this great country. Today we are at the crossroads in education. Based on growing realization by outraged parents, citizens and communities about the truth of the union agenda and reality of our academic failure, teachers unions have never before been as threatened as they are today. Moe feels confident that “we stand at a critical juncture today that can undermine the unions and put the system on a new and radically different path, and make reform a reality.” (pg. 345) He does see a light at the end of the tunnel, but we all need to own that knowledge and spread it. Now!
Marty Steer
Dec. 29, 2011
RecommendedReading:
“Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools” by Terry M. Moe, followed by
“The Beekeeper: Michelle Rhee Takes on the Nation’s Worst School District” by Richard Whitmire.
Note: (If you haven’t already seen “Waiting for Superman” Michelle Rhee plays a role in that documentary and I believe the “union master” Randi Weingarten, makes a pitiful appearance as well.) This movie will rip your heart apart but needs to be seen.
One of the least commented but most viewed posts I had last week was the Archie Wilson case. It seems to not be very surprising to many people that a commissioner would abuse his power to the extent that Archie did. I mean doesn’t everyone have a couple of prostitutes on the side that they supply cocaine to in order to have crazy sex with? Then—when they get caught, hide out-of-state and pretend they were in a drug rehab getting “fixed” for their “illness.” That illness is called—evil.
Well, I suspect that many of my dear readers here are suffering from little evils that are living out in their minds, and they do not feel qualified to cast a stone against it. After all, aren’t we told that we should not cast stones if we live in glass houses? Yet this is how evil lives and survives, with threats of destroying those who might cast a stone in its direction. This has left our society paralyzed against even identifying evil. And this is the topic of Glenn Beck on his recent GBTV episode. Check it out.
Do not take the position of not seeing evil, not hearing evil, or not speaking of evil. Because evil wants to remain hidden in our midst’s so it can consume our very souls. Evil wants to continue as it has leaving society paralyzed against it. But do not become seduced by its power. Do not be threatened by its fury. You are better than it is.
How do I know this? Well dear reader, because you are reading this. If you can read this without laughing, snickering or attempting to belittle it, then evil does not have your soul yet, and there is hope. So fear not, evil is not as ominous as it would have you think it is. Don’t be afraid to call evil what it is when you see it, hear it or someone speaks it. The agents of evil are not necessarily those who are actually evil, but those who remain paralyzed by inaction and guilt to stand against it. Don’t be an agent of evil. It’s a perilous path with an outcome that serves only those corrupt enough to benefit from not having a soul.
I’ll have to say that I agree with this father who saw the nasty comments his daughter put on Facebook about him and his wife. Should the father have unloaded a clip from his .45 into the laptop of his daughter for what she said about his family on Facebook? Absolutely!!!!!!!
I still get many questions as to why I do not have a Facebook account. The answer is that I think Facebook is evil, and I don’t care to participate in it. I do put a Facebook “like” button at the bottom of my posts and I see every day that hundreds of my hits come from Facebook where my readers put links to my articles on the Facebook walls to share with their friends. I recognize the upsides to having Facebook, it keeps you in easy touch with family and friends, and provides a timely status as to the activity of a person. As a matter a fact, a co-worker of mine just yesterday was trying to get a flight out of Dallas but it was delayed, so based on his Facebook page he was able to announce to everyone concerned that his flight would be later than anticipated.
But—Facebook does too much, knows too much, and tricks the user into revealing too much about themselves. About ten years ago I read a book by Jim Marrs called Rule by Secrecy. It’s a conspiracy theory book that talked about the Bilderburgers, the Rothschild’s and the One World Order type of stuff as might be expected. It also spoke about the methods the CIA and FBI were employing to attempt to put chips under everyone’s skin so they could track them easily. When I finished that book I wrote in the front, “THIS IS A VERY DANGEROUS BOOK.” I meant dangerous because knowing such things can warp your view of the world and can take the mind down a rocky slope of disillusion. However, at the time of reading that book people were openly angry about the cameras that police were having put up at traffic lights calling them “big brother” and the idea of tracking people anywhere they went was still science fiction. So the CIA and many other organizations found a more subtle way to impose their will on the American and world population so to make their job much easier, they found a way to trick us into giving them all the information they’d have to spend months, perhaps years gathering and allowing our own need for voyeurism to drive a complete end to our freedoms. They put their money behind Mark Zuckerberg and allowed the program of Facebook to do all the work for them. Apparently the CIA is so in love with Zuckerberg that the Facebook founder has earned the ominous nickname from the intelligence community—the Overlord.
Now, it must be disclosed that the segment you just watched is from The Onion which is a social satire show on the Independent Film Channel, which I am a fan of. So the facts shown in that episode are rooted in reality but are not literal. For instance, I don’t think Zuckerberg is an official CIA agent. But, the billions of dollars that came his way came from somewhere and as anyone who works with money knows, “he who has the gold rules.” Zuckerberg didn’t have any money, but he had the ability to make something like Facebook which a whole army of government workers couldn’t fathom, so they took our tax money in indirect ways and gave it to Zuckerberg to purchase his alliance.
Yes—I’m aware that the CIA is reading this. The FBI is too. Go drink another coffee boys, and see if there’s another doughnut in the break room, because I could care less. I know a few agents and my assessment of them are that they are government workers, just like cops, and teachers, and I have made it pretty clear what I think of them. They have a high opinion of themselves that is not based in reality, but on the strength of their pay checks, which to me is just looted money. I don’t value their service and they don’t keep me safe. I’m perfectly capable of doing that for myself. Because of my beliefs my family has been followed, bugged, and harassed for years. It was really bad in the late 90’s up until around 2005. My wife was followed all over town by strange men in white vans. When she’d go to the grocery they’d get out and follow her around the store.
None of this ever got violent. It was just harassment. It started when we took our kids out of the Mason School System to home school them because we disagreed with the 4th grade curriculum of teaching children to put on a condom. We felt that sex education was our job, and our kids were not interested in sex in the 4th grade, so we elected not to participate. The school retaliated by trying to separate my wife from the kids during school events which my wife frequently volunteered for, so we pulled the kids out of school and taught them ourselves. It was one of the best decisions we ever made as parents.
But the social ramifications where ominous, our families turned against us in a radical way, some of that family worked for school systems as superintendents and teachers. The police began to harass our street. Neighborhood kids began to harass my children as they rode their bicycles around the neighborhood. I responded by video recording everything that happened and the police responded by recording everything we did. After a few years of this it became evident that we were recorded everywhere we went about everything we did.
The constant pressure was unsettling to my wife who treasures her freedom and privacy. We’d have conversations knowing that there were listening devices picking up on everything we said and it took her a long time to realize that the idiots on the other end of the line were just mustache men with fat bellies and inflated egos propped up with tax dollars. They were to my mind peons to my overman concept. As I explained to my wife about 10,000 times, “who cares if a fly on the wall sees or hears what we do. Who cares if they can hear us having sex? We don’t mind the dog at the end of our bed as we kick him off, why should we care about some FBI agent, or other law enforcement personnel? What is there to know about us that we don’t want them to?”
So I am aware that these days virtually nothing is private. The scanners at the airport can see through your cloths. Drones can fly outside your bedroom window. And recording devices can pick up everything you say from many yards away. This information is obtained by the cowards of the government who have turned our hard-earned money against us by stealing it from us through legalized theft and propping up citizens like Zuckerberg in the name of safety. I am not troubled that Google watches every email I send and receive. I view such things as information given in a public place. And if people want to see what I put on YouTube have at it. That’s why I posted it. Or this blog site, I put it up to share with people so they might learn something. If it was private, I’d keep it in my head where it’s safe. But Facebook crosses the line for me. It has evolved into a form of behavioral control that I reject completely. It crawls too far into people’s lives and does everything that Jim Marrs warned about in Rule by Secrecy by making people want to behave like herds of sheep, which goes against everything I personally stand for.
Because of Facebook, my extended family often knows things about other family member’s way before my wife and I do. Facebook allows for that voyeuristic tendency, that secret passion to look at what your neighbor is doing from the comfort of your own home. But it’s a trick; your behavior is being plotted and analyzed carefully. Your contacts and the entire network of your contacts are scrutinized by pot-bellied piggies on the other of a monitor. Everyone is watching each other looking for leadership. The herds of Facebook users are being watched by the herds of the government workers in the CIA and none of them have the guts to step away and be independent.
What I mean by independence is doing things in your life without looking to see what your neighbor is doing, as if reassurance is needed. It is that human need for acceptance, which causes us to look at another human being and see if they have done it first before we dare try that is the downfall of our civilization and Facebook perpetuates it by encouraging it.
This is why those who fear to stand on their own two feet and be comfortable in their own lives can be controlled by some master—an overlord if you will. In my family, it took me almost 10 years to get my wife used to the idea that she could and was watched everywhere we went. It was a trip to Cancun where all our cloths were all over the beach and a Mexican security guard patrolling the area was trying to get a peak of the action. My wife saw the behavior of voyeurism that was inherit in all human beings as we dealt with the guard. I treated the guard like he was as useless as a dog at the end of our bed. His eyes and opinion mattered about as much to me as a fly on the wall or the dog at the end of our bed. And what he said to the other dogs at the guard-house mattered as much. It didn’t matter that he had an AK-47 in his hands. Having a gun is one thing, having the courage to use it, or the knowledge, is another. After that, the unnerving sensation that we were constantly being watched and analyzed by weak-minded, fearful human beings had less impact. We had shifted gears as a couple and learned to live our lives from that perspective.
It still doesn’t make this entire tendency toward voyeurism right. It just means that my expectations for the human race must be broke down into another category. And Facebook is a good gage of that. Those who use it to spy on their friends and neighbors, or even those in law enforcement are of the “sheeple” mind-set, which is they are comfortable in the herds of human existence and can easily be steered about by the overlords like Zuckerberg and the CIA.
But these are the same idiots who couldn’t find Osama bin Ladin even though he was right in front of their faces and had a porno addiction. So much for the effectiveness of the CIA, they have been dumbed down like the rest of society to watching for the status of people on Facebook to know what is happening. I know firsthand what it feels like to be watched by these people, even targeted. And it’s no different from the spider that spins a web in the corner of your bedroom. Its eyes and ears mean nothing because it is small and harmless. I’m certainly not going to kill it for being there. I might scoop it up and take it outside if I feel like taking the time to do so, but I’m not going to avoid undressing in my bedroom because the spider can see. But I’m also not going to invite spiders into my house so that they can make a mess with a network of webs all over my bedroom, and that is what Facebook is. It’s a web of voyeuristic spiders that just clutter up your life. And since I don’t wish to be tangled in their webs, or constantly brushing them away from my skin, I keep Facebook out of my life as much as possible.
The necessity for the human being to rise past the need for social reassurance is why I look to the overman as the intended goal of our species. If being human is defined by the weakness for public acceptance than moving beyond those needs would be the definition of an overman. An overman does not worry about the overlords. They do not have power over the overman’s life. The overman does not care about the happenings of those pathetic creatures. The overmen do not care if millions of eyes are upon them everywhere they go, for it is no different in the forest where thousands of insects and the cells on the leaves of trees are aware of a human in their midst’s and they observe carefully for the sanctity of their own survival. The eyes of the CIA, the FBI, of Zuckerberg and all the rest are just that to me, the eyes of insects whose lives rise and fall by the nature of their existence. Their feeble minds are bound to imprisonment for all eternity because they are stuck in a world built by acceptance and believe that by controlling the behavior of the masses that they can ensure the survival of all. But it’s just another web built by just another spider which can be swept away in an instant at the will of the overman, and there’s nothing the spider can do about it.
And as to how Facebook is evil let me refer to the definition of evil by one of my favorite philosophers Ayn Rand from the great book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand. “Evil is not consistent and does not want to be consistent. What it wants is to inject itself into the life-sustaining process sometimes—short-range, out-of-context, at whim. To achieve this end, it needs only a single concession by the good: a concession of the principle involved, a concession that evil is proper “sometimes.” Such a compromise is evil’s character of liberty. Thereafter the irrational is free to set the terms and spread by further whim, until the good—and man—is destroyed.” That is what Facebook is all about. That is why it’s evil.
Andrew Breitbart had a fantastic speech at CPAC which is worth showing here. In it he talks about his Superbowl party with Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn. He also climbs into the deep well of how far down the rabbit hole many of the radical reformists of the communist left truly are. Breitbart puts forth his battle cry which was fun and refreshing.
The political left today, with leaders like Bill Ayres, Barrack Obama’s mentor in Chicago, expect an end to America. They currently own the media through the head editorial departments because they all studied in the same places and read the same books. They own the press by the same mechanisms. They are used to pushing around the conservatives of us because traditionally they’ve gotten away with it. We’ve allowed terrorists like Ayres and Dohrn to move from a strategy of bombs and violence to racism and other name calling which has been more damaging. It was nice to see Breitbart utter what many of us have been thinking.
The conservatives of the United States have been pushed around, ridiculed, and manipulated for years because we were playing the game straight. But not anymore. Andrew Breitbart said it clearly; we’re not going to take it anymore. The time to fight back is now! And the future for the leftist, greenie weenie, soulless, terrorists are coming to an end.
During the meeting last night several people were texting me and asking what I was doing, and why I wasn’t there. I told them that I was watching the DVR backups of Ghost Hunters, and my TV show was more important. I said that I thought the ghosts walking around on that TV show were more real than the ghosts walking around at the Lakota School Board meeting on stage, because both were just as effective as managers. In the TV show the ghosts make noise by banging on doors and sending out cryptic EVP recordings. The Lakota School Board does the same; they make a lot of noise with a stupid program named S.T.E.A.M (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) while at the same time cutting those programs with staffing and as Jeff Kursman said at the meeting,
