There are two primary reasons I accepted the position of Butler County Coordinator for Workplace Freedom. First, with my work at No Lakota Levy, and realization that the union labor in our public schools–specifically Lakota–do not have the will to balance their budget, and will seek perpetual tax increases to meet the demands of their labor force, the public education monopoly must be eliminated to stop the madness of tax increases every 3 to 4 years. That monopoly must end if education costs are ever to be brought down. So I plan to help get the signatures for an amendment to the Ohio Constitution that will allow a state-wide vote in 2013 to make union membership a freedom of choice rather than a requirement under force as the system currently entails under teaching contracts. At Lakota the current contract is up in 2014, so that would allow teachers under that contract to opt out of their union involvement and help Lakota balance their budget. My work as Butler County Coordinator is a natural extension to my mission at No Lakota Levy. The second reason is that during my work on the Issue 2 campaign in 2012, I learned that there were a lot of teachers and other public employees who wished to be removed from union membership requirements and forced due payments. Since Issue 2 was repealed, these employees need to have the ability to at least have the freedom of choice, and this amendment will give it to them. It will not end unions, but it will give freedom of choice to a system that does not currently have it.
The wording of this amendment change with a target date of 2013 is as follows;
Title: To guarantee the freedom of Ohioans to choose whether to participate in a labor organization as a condition of employment
SUMMARY
To add Section 22 to Article I of the Constitution of the State of Ohio
The proposed amendment would provide that, in Ohio:
1. No law, rule, agreement, or arrangement shall require any person or employer to become or remain a member of a labor organization.
2. No law, rule, agreement, or arrangement shall require, directly or indirectly, as a condition of employment, any person or employer, to pay or transfer any dues, fees, assessments, other charges of any kind, or anything else of value, to a labor organization, or third party in lieu of the labor organization.
3. Any person, directly or indirectly affected or threatened with any harm by a violation of this section, may bring a civil or equitable action to enforce this section, and upon prevailing, shall be entitled to injunctive relief, reasonable attorney fees, costs, and other damages.
The proposed law would not:
1. Prevent any person from voluntarily belonging to or providing support to a labor organization. 2. Apply to agreements entered into or renewed prior to the enactment of this section. 3. Conflict with federal law or apply to federal employees.
To implement this public vote, which appears even at this early stage to have major support from all Ohioans of all demographic groups and party affiliation we will of course need to collect thousands upon thousands of signatures which could take us the rest of the year. Many of us who watched how the unions repealed Issue 2 gawked at the way the union machine was able to twist the arm of their members to gather so many signatures and put the repeal effort on the ballot. So we learned from them, and implementing our own signature collecting push have decided to pay employees to gather up these signatures. We are a tired group and we must get back on the horse and start now if we want to meet the timeline discussed. So as Butler County Coordinator I will be paying employees for those signatures. And the pay is quite good.
Working for me in collecting signatures, it would be a great opportunity to make extra money as a second job. It would be wonderful for young people who want the political experience and relatively easy money since this issue is one that most people agree with. This issue is not as contentious as Issue 2 or other political initiatives were, this one is all about freedom, which is something all Americans can get their minds around. So collecting the signatures won’t be very difficult, it’s just a matter of doing the footwork.
I am taking applications at the link below. If you want to work for me, fill out that application, I only need the primary information. I’m not particularly interested in a detailed work history. I just need the basics.
I would especially encourage those who are fighting tax hikes in your schools, principally Fairfield, Talawanda, Ross, Edgewood, Monroe, and especially Lakota to help out with this. This is your end game; this is the light at the end of the tunnel. If you can end the union monopoly in these public schools, you can bring an end to the levy requests every couple of years. If you were already willing to distribute information to fight a tax, and have went door to door in those campaigns, this is a lot easier, and I’ll pay you! Instead of trying to stop a tax initiative by the unions only to have them come back with a new tax hike six months after a defeat; this amendment is the step in the direction of ending that maddening process once and for all.
To learn more about the group I’m working with you can visit them at the link below. You can still help and do everything I spoke about above no matter where you live. We have coordinators in most counties across Ohio and you can find them at this link, so this isn’t just for Butler County. But if you want to work for me directly, you’ll need to be able to collect signatures for Butler County.
For those who are interested, you can contact me here, or at the contact info at my home site of www.OVERMANWARRIOR.comwhere I can get into more detail, talk about the lucrative pay structure and answer any questions that I couldn’t cover here. If you’d like me to come and speak to your group, your Tea Party, your gun clubs, your YMCA organizations, whatever the gathering, just give me a buzz. I don’t want to fight tax increases in my schools for the rest of my life, and I’m sure you don’t either. This is the ultimate solution of freedom and fairness that is lacking in the current system and it needs to happen by 2014, so we need to start now.
Below are a couple of training videos to make things easier that were used to collect signatures for The Health Care Freedom Amendment that was successful in 2011. We are approaching this signature gathering in the same manner. So the information is still valid for this endeavor.
This is thanks to you and your other money-grubbing cohorts. We’ll be moving to Mason. Enjoy losing more property values.
Norma Stits February 25, 2012 at 4:35 AM
That poor woman actually believes what she says. She believes that I am greedy for not wanting to pay more money than we already do in taxes. She also believes that there is no end what current residents of the Lakota School District will pay in higher taxes, therefore ruining their property values forever and making the taxes so high that nobody will ever be able to afford to buy a home in the Lakota District because of the taxes. People like Norma actually believe there is no end. She would pay forever whatever was asked by those extortionists of public education.
Well, sorry to break it to you Norma, but you are wrong. Taxes don’t just affect you in your tiny little world of your tiny little home around your tiny little family. It affects commercial interest too, and commercial business has been dried up for 5 years because of the current tax rates which need to come down, not go up. You know who those “money grubbers” are? Those evil people who build and run the shopping complexes and restaurants you visit. In Norma’s world those people should give away their services for free. They should not seek to make a profit. They should donate any earnings they make to the “youth,” so that people like Norma can have a free education for her little children whom she’s too lazy or insecure to teach herself.
Well, I have two grown daughters who are quite attractive, and because of that I’ve met many young people, particularly males that have come out of the Lakota, Fairfield and Mason school system, and I’ve seen what the schools are teaching first-hand, and I see how stupid many of these kids are when basic things are explained to them. They are future products of stupid parents like Norma, ill prepared to even pay rent, hold a job, let alone—vote. I’ve met kids who show up and attempt to impress me with big words only to see they can’t hardly pull their pants up because they are trying to copy the black culture of their favorite R&B artists, (and I say R&B in an attempt to be respectful and not come loose on a diatribe about the degradation of music). I’ve seen kids who think a fun night out is to get plastered in drunkenness and that somehow I’d be happy to let my daughter wake up passed out in a room full of guys stoned on marijuana. My kids wouldn’t do such a thing, but the boys look at me strangely and roll their eyes when they think I can’t see while I speak about why those kinds of activities are wrong. They really don’t understand! These boys don’t understand either why I expect them to have jobs instead of playing X-Box when there are bills to be paid. Or why I’d be upset that they’d rather take a welfare check so they’d have more “time for themselves.” I’m not talking about poor kids in the ghetto; I’m talking about nice middle-class kids from Lakota and Fairfield.
Through my daughters I’ve had to learn the terrible truth that there are thousands of girls who are on Care Source, which is a form of Medicare that bails out these kids when they have sex, and get pregnant because their schools and stupid parents like Norma tell them it’s alright, that there are no consequences to actions. A boy can get a girl pregnant and it’s alright, the government is there to bail them out. The boys often claim that the act of sex just happened, that it was beyond their control. Yet it was. A boy had to stick a penis into a girl and inject semen into her like some parasitic animal in the wild, without thought or care. Without any thought about the next step, because the schools have taught these kids that the government will pick up the slack and pay for everything. Thousands upon thousands of kids think this way. Twenty years ago it would have been shameful to see a girl in her freshman years pregnant in school. It was scandalous. Today the teacher holds a baby shower for the girl in her classroom. The kids and their welfare mentality are victims of their environment and parents like Norma.
Norma may put her kids on Blue Cross and Blue Shield, but her behavior supports a system that endorses everything and more mentioned above. Ladies and gentlemen—and Norma, we are in serious trouble—culturally. Our youth is broken in ways that no amount of money can fix. They are truly victims of this age of broken homes, divorce, and intrusive public education establishments.
People who tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about are only mad at me because they don’t want to hear what I’m saying. They want to blindly adopt destructive policies of living that will eventually destroy them with the same intensity that a moth attempts to fly into a flame—because they like the bright light. People like Norma are in love with the idea of socialism and they do not want to see the results of their error. Well, I’ve seen it. I’ve been up close to it through my kids because I stayed involved with them even now that they are grown up, because there’s always something to learn. And I have many friends in the business community who are struggling. It’s not for Norma to say that these friends of mine should not be able to buy another restaurant, or a new second home, because people who build and make things are who move the world, and they don’t owe people like Norma an explanation as to their actions. The money they earn by creating things that people want is not Norma’s money, it’s not the money of public education, and it’s not the GOD DAMN governments! It’s their money!!!!! They earned it!!! Money made and generated is not for some group collective.
There are many problems that must be fixed in this year of 2012 that took nearly a century to arrive at. And those problems were perpetuated by people like Norma who voted in politicians like FDR. These same voters also fantasized about sleeping with JFK, and LBJ and like a porn actress swallowing semen from a stranger, these voters accept the policies of THE NEW DEAL and THE GREAT SOCEITY.
I don’t want The New Deal or The Great Society of which this Medicaid culture of welfare has sprung up and created a whole generation of weak-minded youth who have reckless sex and expect society to pay for it. Doesn’t Orgy-porgy from A Brave New World ring a bell with people like Norma, or let me guess—they haven’t read that book!
“Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun, Kiss the girls and make them One. Boys at 0ne with girls at peace; Orgy-porgy gives release.”
That’s a ritual from that classic book where everyone gets in a circle and has group sex so that all sense of possession and individually is erased from their consciousness. “Kiss the girls, and make them One.” Notice the capital letter on the word “One.” That is because the word ONE is an indicator of an entity onto itself. This is the goal of The Great Society created by the womanizing presidents of the sixties. This is the aim of public education; this is the aim of government insurance, Medicare and Social Security! And these are the pathetic creatures that my kids have to associate with as friends in their peer groups, these children of this distorted government experiment. To see what this Great Society is taking us to just read A Brave New World. That book seemed like a fantasy when I read it over twenty years ago. Now it’s a pending reality.
So call me names you orgy-porgy well wishers, you welfare recipients, you apologists for The Great Society. Your opinions mean nothing to me because your path is clear for anyone with eyes to see. Your story ends only one way, in cultural demise leading to complete social destruction. The end game is as easy to add up 2+2+2+2. One thing leads to the next, which leads to the next in a very predictable manner. Only people who add all that up and give any number beyond the answer of “8” are the ones being fooled. And people like Norma will add up all these conditions and declare that the answer is whatever she decides. If she wants the answer to be 10 then it’s ten. If she wants it to be 20, then it’s twenty. She will say these things because she is not giving opinions based on reality. She is ruled by emotion, the orgy-porgy of our day. The collective orgy of thought and action where there are no consequences with the giant safety net cast by mother government.
So with that, have fun moving to Mason, and don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out. And until your house sells, and since you obviously lack culture, here’s the movie version of that book since you obviously can’t read. Maybe you’ll learn something.
For those who do know better than orgy-porgy Norma, please pass this to a friend to share the classic work of The Brave New World. If they won’t read the book, maybe they’ll watch the movie.
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.
I have heard the criticisms coming from the pro levy people already who proclaim that it is easy to cast dispersions from the sideline as opposed to jumping in and helping to solve problems. These critics of course are attempting to highlight their volunteerism, or paid resolve as though they were helping to solve problems as opposed to someone like me who writes about what a bunch of fools they are. “Oh Rich Hoffman, you criticize but do not offer to help. Instead you throw in firebombs when you should move into an elected position or serve on a finance committee.”
This is a blanket statement that could cover any ground from the president of the United States, to my local school board of Lakota, but nobody can help people or their jobs if their beliefs are not grounded in reality. I have covered many topics and offered plenty of advice that I would hope some of these people might use to solve their problems. Particularly regarding the Lakota School Board, which I consider a microcosm of the federal government in general, I have identified the problem and determined that my volunteerism or even paid help will not help that body of government no matter how much money or good intentions I might invest. That is why I determined on February 13, 2012 that the school system was in fact effectively dead in its current form. It is my assessment that nothing can be done to save it because the parties involved in the process are in denial of their reality, and are therefore unable to alter it. So my involvement unless they would listen 100% to my direction would ultimately lead to their doom.
As I speak hereafter about Lakota as a school district I might as well speak about virtually all school districts and government in general, because all these public entities are suffering from the same problem. They are not functioning from a grounding in the rules of reality. I don’t mean that facetiously, but quite literally. It’s a philosophical problem that infects the very nature of civilization. And without having that philosophic problem fixed, there is nothing that can help those who do not live within the realm of reality. So with that said, the reality of the situation pertaining to the Lakota School System, and public schools in general is that they have built the entire structure not for the benefit of the students, (the product) but for the employees themselves. To exhibit this point please refer to this article on The Blaze about the Buffalo teachers union contract that has perks so outrageous that it covers plastic surgery, including liposuction.
I have been in Lakota School Board meetings where the teachers union has protested any increases in their health care benefits. I’ve seen them threaten to go on strike to drive up their wages. And their behavior is exactly in line with those of the Buffalo teachers union. The reality of the situation is that the employees of these public schools are a selfish lot who wish to loot from the community the wealth of the districts.
However, like a drug dealer tries to convince themselves that their actions do not harm people, or the prostitute who pretends they do not destroy families, or the drunk that convinces themselves that they are not a menace to their families, the public education teacher tries to convince themselves that they critical members of a community and important to a child’s life. They believe that they are providing a service that cannot be done by anybody else in society and that if they do not perform their task that our country will crumble to ash.
What teachers are professing with those thoughts are wishes, not reality. Reality says that even a stay-at-home mom without a teaching degree can teach their children better than public education can. The stats prove it. But the wish from these particular public employees is that all such evidence would be wiped away so that they can sustain their fantasy–that they are as important in reality as they are in their own minds.
This is called the Tinker Bell complex. These poor fools have been raised to believe that if they just wish upon a star, or rub Aladdin’s magic lamp that they will be granted wishes, and they wish to these invisible gods beyond reality to be important in the scheme of society. They believe that because they dream it in their small minds that reality can be bent to their wishes.
This is why they hate me, because they cannot argue against the facts that I’ve given them. They see my spreadsheets which point out reality and they react as though I just threw Holy Water on their demon infested souls. They whither in pain and protest and attempt to call me names and discredit my facts rooted in reality. They are like the small child who has just been told that the Little Mermaid is just a cartoon–that Ariel is not real. Or the Fairy Godmother will not turn their pumpkin into a magic carriage, because these are the actions of fantasy, of dreams, and wishes.
It might be fun to dream and make wishes. It might bring comfort to the mind to see a falling star and make a wish that something in our lives might be made better by asking the mysteries of the universe to help us with a problem. Or a birthday cake with lit candles where a wish is made before blowing them out. Our culture is built on wishes and pleadings to entities that exist outside of reality and this is part of our modern social problem. Too often people would resort to magic and wishes rather than hard work and wisdom, and this is the source of much social misery. So the public employee teachers are in good company, but their status in life is merely a wish outside the boundaries of reality. They wish themselves to be valuable and worth $63,000 a year because their unions have told them they have a value equitable to such a value. But the reality is that the average wage mentioned is about $20,000 more than the true market value. That entire amount of $63K per year is artificially propped up by hopes, dreams and wishes.
I know one of the daughters of a former union president locally and every time I see her she looks like she has a dead cat on her head which is intended to be fashionable, but in reality just looks ridiculous. She obviously gets her nails done frequently and is a continuous visitor to the hair salon. She always wears the latest fashion and is quite the socialite. Now none of those things are necessarily bad, but every time I see her I think of what she would have been if her mother had not been the union president who would twist the arm of a school board for everything they had in them. I’m sure this cat headed lady has a master’s degree and all the “qualifications” that the labor union deems important, but what is her real value? Is it $63K per year or $83K per year? Well, by my assessment of her talent and role in a school district I’d say it’s no more than $50K per year. She’s too young to make more than that off any pay scale and could have only arrived at a large salary by obtaining yearly increases exceeding 5% to 7% a year beginning with a very excessive starting point. Because of this inflated value this person gets to pretend they have true value and when she gets her hair done, and her other cosmetic work, she is functioning from a fantasy outside of realty. She did not earn her wealth. She stole it. Her mother stole it. Her mother stole it for all her union members, not just the daughter. The money wasn’t earned. It was gained through manipulation, extortion, and coercion by creating the illusion that all this activity somehow benefited children with the campaign slogan, “it’s for the children.” But in reality children have nothing to do with the actions or desires. The reality is that the members of the union, including the cat haired lady become wealthy off tax dollars without providing a service of real value. The real product was fear of what the world would be like without their service. Not the actual teaching of children.
This behavior is in no way exclusive to the cat haired woman or her mother. They are just playing the game of well wishers. They wish in their minds that their efforts in public education might actually be valuable, but the reality says teachers who make much less and with less experience could do the same work for equal outcome. The reality says that it is the participation of parents and the quality of them that makes all the difference in a child’s life. It is not the teacher no matter what the pay scale.
In order to fix the problem these participants have to stop wishing the world is one way when in fact it is another. Until that action takes place nothing I can do will help these poor people. They will continue to be lost in their own fantasies because they refuse to see the truth. I can place the facts right in front of their faces, but they will not see them because they are more attracted to the fantasies of their minds rather than the reality of their lives. The public employee teachers seek to cover the gap between their fantasy and actual realty with looted wealth and that is simply not acceptable. I am happy to help these poor people with their problems, but like an alcoholic, they cannot be helped till they realize that their wishes do not determine realty. And their wish is that they are indispensably important to the culture of public education. But the facts do not support this, and I am personally finished with trying to ease their minds back into reality. It is their task to get with the program, not society’s, and it’s not our burden to throw money at their fantasies in order to make them happy, so until they are prepared for the truth, they cannot be helped, and my time is too valuable to waste on looters of reality, so I will continue with the firebombs until they finally get the point. At that time when they ask, I will solve all their problems in about one month and at half the cost. But I will not be lured into playing their game their way in a land of illusion and fantastic wishes.
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.
A person of considerable intelligence might ask why our current society with all the technological innovation available to us, behave in such a foolish fashion. Why do people not see what Barack Obama and the government in general are all about? How have labor unions and politicians built an organized crime style empire on the backs of tax payer money in plan sight right without punishment? Why is it that with all the news stories happening at such a feverish pace on the nightly news that all news channels seem obsessed with the Republican nomination for president? Well, the answer is one of science, and is proven beyond refute, and the thieves of our society use this science to openly rob society in legalized theft.
This science is similar to what makes a human being see “magic” during a magic show. It’s used heavily in such demonstrations and can be tracked with the increase in media devices such as radio and television, and now the computer to happen in day-to-day life. One would think that with the advent of these technological breakthroughs that society would become collectively more intelligent, but this has not been the case.
To understand why society is functioning at a low-level of intelligence I will use an example discussed in the book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand to exhibit the condition that is currently enslaving the human race. To understand the science of this enslavement we must look at how crows process cognitive information. Crows have been studied because they have shown to be comparatively intelligent for a grouping of animals, specifically birds. So they serve as an excellent example of displaying a complex problem.
A hunter goes into the woods to shoot a whole flock of crows that have gathered there, but upon seeing the hunter the crows flock to the tops of the trees to hide. The hunter frustrated that the crows won’t show themselves leaves the woods. After the hunter leaves, the crows come out of hiding from the top of the tree and resume their activity.
The hunter thinks about the problem and decides to try one more time. He grabs four other hunters and returns back to the woods. The crows see five hunters and flee back to the tops of the trees. The hunters have no clear targets. But the original hunter tells his four friends to now leave the woods which they do. The first hunter remains still. The crows see four hunters leave and they assume the threat has now left the woods. This is because the crows do not have the cognitive ability to see more than three threats at a given time, anything more than three sort of blends in to the surrounding environment. So the hunter has discovered the weakness of the crows. He has figured out a way to trick them into thinking the threat to their lives is gone. Once the crows believe this they leave the tree tops to resume their activity. At that time the hunter can then open fire and kill as many crows as his gun can destroy.
For human beings, we are considerably more intelligent than crows, but how much cognitive material can we process at any given time? Is it 7 items, 9 items, 20 items, how many issues can we deal with in our daily lives until everything becomes a blur to us.
Well to my knowledge developing cognitive ability is a skill built much like one builds a muscle. By doing the work of cognition often, the ability is improved. So I would probably be able to count more hunters than someone else, because I work the ability more than most people do. But at some point, we reach a saturation point in how much information we can absorb.
This is the strategy of the modern crook, the politician who seeks to swamp the human mind with so much detail that the average person cannot retain the information presented. This is why legal contracts tend to be too long, and sales people speak too fast, and the wording for products sold on TV for $19.99 are often too small to see, because the intent is to scam the public by presenting so many facts that no single person can understand the information. Just like the hunter sending the other four shooters out of the woods to trick the crows into coming out of hiding, the salesmen of the world wish very much to overwhelm their customers with too much detail.
The looters of our society do seek to overwhelm the voters, consumers, and demographic groups into behavior they know they can control. Obama has been very active with executive orders while the media focuses on the Republican debates. Looters know that most people arrive home at the end of their day with their minds filled with their business, their associates, their pleasures, their pains, and the essence of their survival—such as food, water and clothing. The human mind after being concerned with those primary things in their life have perhaps room for one or two major news stories before all the other information coming at them turns into a blur of data.
A person who has developed the ability to grapple more subjects at the same time might be able to pay attention to the needs of their family, make a living, pay their bills, read a newspaper, listen to the radio, then send texts to their friends while still maintaining the ability to read part of a book, watch the evening news, check their email and browse the internet for interesting topics pleasant to their minds. But somewhere in all that the modern human must develop some interest in the laws of their state and community, and pay attention to what the federal government is doing.
The looters know that most of the human beings they are dealing with do not have room for those other topics, let alone the notions of world economics and the spread of communism as a global political philosophy. Human beings have the tools available to them, in computers, the internet, and more books published per day than in any time in human history. There are numerous television programs that can teach everything from advanced physics to the history of particular battles. Yet society seems to not have the ability to handle very many topics at the same time and find themselves easy prey for the hunters in our civilization.
I watched this hunting of the human population just the other night at a school board meeting in my home district. The administrators wanting a tax increase from the public used all the key words to trick the large audience into believing that the hunters, (the administrators) were looking out for the residence of the district. The hunters know that the parents supporting the school had very full lives, and there wasn’t any room for these parents to learn much detail about why the school needed money. So the parents just wanted someone to tell them what to do, to vote yes on a levy or no. They don’t have the cognitive room to think, so they let the looters do it for them which was the plan all along as the meeting drug on for over two hours discussing so many little details that meant nothing, that the real intent of the meeting existed outside the cognitive ability of most of the audience.
The same thing goes on in our state and federal governments. This is why more people know the contestants to American Idol over who their representatives in government are. It’s because the American Idol knowledge is more pleasurable to know, and if the typical human must pick between the cognitive retention of one item or the other, they will almost always pick the one that is most pleasurable. That’s why sex sells. But since human beings do not have unlimited cognitive ability they cannot behold everything, just as the crows could not determine that all the hunters had left the forest if the number was greater than three. The human being, like the crow is vulnerable to an attacker if the predator attacks while the mind is being asked to function outside of its cognitive ability.
Much crime happens under these conditions, and the roots to evil seen in the human race can be traced back to this notion of limited cognitive ability in the human being as they find themselves continued victims of hunters who reside like the forest hunter, outside the human perception of cognition.
So be cautious of any being, governing body, or media outlet that attempts to overwhelm your mind with too many details too quickly. Chances are its being done on purpose. When you feel it happening, even if you can’t see the threat, duck your head, because there is a hunter in your midst’s ready to take a shot at you. Chaos is the camouflage of the predator, and camouflage does not always have to be cosmetic. Sometimes the camouflage can be within the mind as too many details flood the brain’s ability to reason through all the options and cognitive ability falters under the load. That’s when the attacks happen and the hunter’s show themselves. That’s when we wonder how it happened even though we couldn’t see it coming, but should have because the enemy was right under our noses.
I don’t have much thought about the death of Whitney Houston other than to say that her trajectory was predictable and self-imposed. It was easy to see where she was headed, and it’s frustrating to see and not be able to help such people. I live around and speak with future Whitney Houston’s every day and they are hell-bent on personal destruction. So I usually don’t commit much of my mind to their lives.
But Glenn Beck had a wonderful summation of the life of Whitney Houston on his GBTV show that many people who aren’t aware of his show might have missed. So I’m putting it up here so that it can be shared for its own merit.
A fate cannot be escaped. One plus one equals 2. 5 plus 5 equals 10. This notion that people can have whatever life they conger up in their minds no matter what they put into their head is utterly ridiculous and leads directly to these terrible tragedies whether it’s Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, or Elvis. Talent in life is not enough, and money cannot make you happy. It’s far more important to put quality into everything you do in life, than to just coast on a raw talent and hope it all works out. It takes work to live, and it takes a lot of work to live a good life. And sadly for stars like Whitney Houston, she not only deprived millions of fans a role model to look up to, but she denied herself a quality life that love, money, drugs, or any mindful fantasy could not give her. It’s a life lived in the pursuit of the wrong things that leads to such tragedies, and should provide a lesson for all the future ghosts that hover around us hell-bent on the same fate.
I’ll always remember Whitney Houston the for film The Bodyguard and her rendition of this song.
Too bad the words and actions of Whitney in that song only reflected an idea and not the actual words of a wise person. They are just sounds that come from the talent of a unique voice but lack the foundation of reality like so many stars of our age. Be cautious of what you let into your mind, because you are the sum of everything that you put into it.
So for those who wonder why I’m such a mean guy who hates so many teachers, and their unions, have a look at this wonderful segment by Glenn Beck on the condition of Greece right now, since they are the result of many of the politics from Socialist International. It is to avoid becoming a future Greece that I fight so hard, and criticize so ruthlessly. It’s to eliminate those in our public debates who wish to take us down this road that are my intended targets.
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.
