Category: Teacher Unions

The Day Lakota Died: February 13th 2012–the decision to be taken off life support

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.

http://www.fox19.com/story/16927607/phase-ii-of-proposed-cuts-for-lakota-schools

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.

Rich Hoffman

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

Check out Rich Hoffman’s favorite website, (besides this one):

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The Past of Barack Obama: President of the Weather Underground

What I’m getting ready to say has nothing to do with racism. I must remind all the readers here that I supported Herman Cain for president, even after we learned that he enjoyed the company of women beyond the attention of just his wife. If those were reasons to not vote for a president, then Bill Clinton would have been rejected, Kennedy, LBJ, and FDR—all those presidents were serial womanizers, so I didn’t see the problem with Herman Cain. I’d still vote for Cain today if he was running.

But the media brought Cain down because they basically all came from the same kind of colleges that Barrack Obama did, and they all read the same type of communist propaganda literature that has delivered us to an age where a President of the United States can openly campaign for socialism. My good buddy Matt Clark of WAAM in Ann Arbor recently covered this Obama socialism and pointed out the absolute ridiculousness of his policies. But as you will see in the pictures though-out this post, Obama does not come from the kind of back ground of a Herman Cain, which is why the media was terrified of him. Cain was poor and worked his way up to be the CEO of a major company. That is an American success story. Obama was a radical college professor who hung around liars, radicals, and communists and was simply a community organizer who was pushed along through his political career by communist sympathizers who wanted to use Obama’s good looks and skin color to advance their personal agenda. Obama has shown a tendency to completely lie with a straight face especially over his relationship to Bill Ayers the radical terrorist of the Weather Underground who just so happens to also be a college professor at the University of Chicago where Obama taught constitutional law from 1992 to 2004.

As seen in these pictures Obama’s family in Kenya is not the kind of family that a Herman Cain would have had in the south. Obama’s folks are still village people. There’s a reason that the people of Africa aren’t building sky scrapers and creating their own economies. There’s a reason they are poor and dying of AIDS by the thousands—because every village functions from a kind of socialism where the head chief of the village passes out like a king the tasks for the whole society. This is Obama’s background. He thinks he’s the village chief in America.

You can see that Obama in these pictures is just another bright-eyed little boy looking for acceptance from his father. Unlike the ghetto whores here in America who tends to sleep with every man who lives on their street and has babies with all of them to qualify for more government assistance, Obama’s mom slept with radical black men from other countries who advocated overthrowing the political powers of their home countries. This took little Barry Obama into a globetrotting adventure never really knowing who his stable parental figures were.

His mother eventually shacked up with an Indonesian fellow who apparently ruined Obama’s citizenship when Soreto was recalled to Indonesia taking little Obama with him. It was Obama’s grandparents in Hawaii who provided little Barack with the only real stable parental role models available.

None of that is poor little Barry’s fault. You can’t chose your parents, and nobody can blame him for seeking stability among the fraternity of communist advocates that he met in college. Obama is a product of socialism. Every cell in his body oozes it. He has learned from them, he smoked dope and partied with them, and he’s hung out in actual African villages getting close to his roots championing socialism with his cousins, aunts and uncles. Obama has done nothing in his life to earn money from the private sector. He’s had plenty of looters who have sought to use his race to advance their communist agenda, so they helped Obama get elected into the Senate. They helped him get a few books published and created a platform for a presidential run. All Obama had to do is bull-shit his way through his speeches, like he had learned to do from his broken family background and do what the village masters told him to do. Having a background of poor ethical behavior made it easy for Obama to just do whatever he was told, and go along for the ride.

To get an idea of who is behind Obama, and who tells him what to do, where to stand, how to hold his head in a certain way, here is a nice little article that digs into the money that is poured into Obama’s re-election campaign.

http://www.sodahead.com/united-states/buying-barry-soreto-aka-obama-the-election-again/question-1795633/

 

When Obama says to tax the rich, he doesn’t know what that means. He thinks he’s rich, so he naturally thinks all the value of money and wealth equals his feelings about it. What he fails to grasp is that he was given looted wealth. He is a creature of public service. He has not done work in the private sector. He does not create anything on his own. He has simply been the recipient of looted wealth. For all he knows in his communist little mind is that he’s a millionaire. His books sold because of his presidential run that was supported by donations from campaign contributions. That’s a pretty good PR campaign to run for office supported off campaign donations that drives people to buy books and make him wealthy. All Obama had to do was follow directions like the nice little communist that he is.

I say communist because that is without question his end game. He is currently a progressive socialist. He uses only the progressive part of that in his designation. I think he has actually convinced himself that he’s some sort of capitalist. But that is the actor in him. That’s what he has in common with every actor in Hollywood who has come to the White House. Many actors lead troubled lives because their core personalities are vacant since they often become the characters they play in movies, and these characters are constantly changing depending on the content of their scripts. I know a few of these types of people and they are purposely not very grounded. Some of the best actors are those who come from broken families and lack strong personality traits. This makes it easy for them to climb into the skin of another character like a chameleon and just change their attributes to reflect their surroundings.

Obama has shown that he can be anything to anybody, so to know him requires one to dig into those who prop him up. Like any actor he believes he is the center of attention, the village chief, and that his money was earned. Because he lacks real world experience he does not understand that he is a “created” personally, like an actor in a movie. The progressive radicals saw a distraught little Barry Soreto high as a kite in college and groomed him into a president that would advance their cause. All Obama had to do what listen to what he was told to do by his directors, which came natural to the young fellow, because that’s what communists do—they listen to what their superiors tell them to.

Obama is a reprehensible president that will go down in history as the greatest joke produced from the damn hippie era radicals that have infested our government like termites in an abandoned house. The Obama presidency is the result of the 60’s where they found in Obama a blank kid with a troubled past and put their arms around him to use him for their evil, twisted ends. They put money in his pocket and told him he’d be king if he just smoked another joint and did what they said. Obama is the president of the Weather Underground, a terrorist organization that wishes to dismantle capitalism completely in a plot that began 40 years ago, when baby Barack was just an infant looking for a father in the dusty villages of Africa, but growing up in the paradise of Hawaii by grandparents who had to care for the child of their deeply troubled daughter.

This is your president America. This is what you voted for, a fool who wishes to end the American way of life. Barry knows that people are coming on to him, so he’s now wearing his little American Flag pin, and trying to sound like an advocate for American values. But he cannot hide his communist wishes from those wise enough to see it. Obama is not the president for the strong, the brave, and the lovers of freedom. He is the president of the down-and-out, the weak, and the lazy. Obama and his minions seek to make more of America into poor, depleted recipients of government so that the power base of the progressive can expand. And the media is on board with fulfilling that agenda. They don’t want to cover the story of Herman Cain, a black man who rose up and became successful. That is not the American story that those who put so much money into Barack Obama’s pocket wish to advocate. The radical power brokers want Obama and his history of socialism, broken families, and low moral code because such people are easy to control. And if they can give America an icon with so many faults, then perhaps the people of America will not strive to be any greater than they are. Weak people are easy to control, and keeping people in a depleted state is the goal of the money men behind Obama, the actor.

Yes, dear reader. If you have bought into the smile of Barack Obama and his constant attempts to rape America of its producers, its rich, who actually create the jobs, then you are a processed fool. You are a result of progressive politics and you are broken at your very foundations. It is people like you who are ruining a great country because you lack the intelligence to fathom the result of your actions in supporting a president who is even more of an actor than Ronald Reagan was. The Presidency of the United States has officially been reduced to just another acting job where the actor has a vacant personality that is easily imprinted upon by the true masters who actually write the script. And every citizen who votes for such an actor for president is guilty of openly advocating socialism, and destroying the one great icon for world peace and economic prosperity—America.

That’s why the enemies of The United States support Barack Obama.

Click here to see the TAIL OF THE DRAGON press release for an update on my most recent project:

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

Check out Rich Hoffman’s favorite website, (besides this one):

http://thepeoplescube.com/

More Tricks from Lakota: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools

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.

 

http://news.cincinnati.com/article/20120210/NEWS/302100191/Lakota-board-member-brings-unique-perspective

 

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?

  1. 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)
  2. 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)
  3. 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

  1. 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)  
  2. 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.

To learn what a Overmanwarrior is CLICK HERE:

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2012/01/09/the-overmanwarriors-eating-fighting-and-philosophizing-the-keys-to-a-good-life/

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

Watch Rich Hoffman’s favorite T.V. show:

http://www.foxnews.com/freedomwatch/

Lakota’s Sports Billboard: Darryl Parks writes a letter–read it and pass it along

Look at the mighty billboard advertising Lakota Tomahawk football and cheerleading registration. Doesn’t it look expensive? Considering these types of extracurricular activities are now pay to play sports at Lakota because of the levy failures, the advertising of on this billboard seems misleading, even audacious. That is because anyone can see the hypocrisy just in looking at that billboard. The Lakota School System needs its sports programs to keep busy parents occupied on something easily measured like sports to justify the extraordinary cost of public education. Sports unite a community under school pride that causes regular thinking people to forgive many of the flaws inherit in any school system where education methods simply fall short most of the time to the expected results.

But even deeper than that, the government schools know that they need parents to buy into the pride of their sporting programs because it is a proven formula into gaining additional revenue. Mike Brown mastered this art when he constructed his stadium deal with Hamilton County in the mid 90’s which have led to nearly bankrupting the city of Cincinnati today, even though the warnings were sounded by many beforehand. Cincinnati did not want their Bengals to leave for another city, so they did whatever they had to do to make Mike Brown happy.

Labor unions and school boards have figured out that the same formula works in their education institutions for obtaining additional taxes. They use sports and a parents pride in their child’s participation to increase their budgets and obtain increased wages and benefits for the employees. It’s a nice little sleight-of-hand that has been going on for many years now. Parents have shown they will support higher taxes to give their children an opportunity to be a part of a winning team, or even the possibility of a scholarship.

The other side of this issue is that once the school marketing has successfully created in the mind of the parents and the community the need for sports to fill the community newspapers, the school sports programs are part of the cultural significance of an entire district. This of course gives schools leverage over voters when it comes time to ask for increases in taxes, because the community overwhelmingly wants sports from the schools to entertain them. For many parents it is more fun to root for the kids in their neighborhood rather than those at a professional level, because they can relate to the local athletes. So if a school like Lakota does not get their funds, they can then make the sports programs pay-for-play programs, which is just a fancy way of extorting the public into voting in favor of higher taxes. This is where Lakota is. They want parents to sign up their children into sports programs and they’ll spend the money on a sign to advertise the openings, then they’ll turn right around and demand $500 per sport for a child to play. What gets missed in the discussion is that the employees of the district are already being paid an average salary of $63k per year and many of the teachers would happily donate their time so that the kids could be coached. And uniforms and other costs are already covered by other fees that the parents must commit to. And at football games there is admission revenue, concessions and other streams of money that come back from the community and go to the school. So why the $500 fees? Where does it go and who gets it?

The fees are to force a community to pass a levy, to increase the taxes on their property and its raw extortion that is very destructive to the sustainability of neighborhoods everywhere. Such a practice is incredibly short-sighted and brings to question the merit of the entire educational institution when reason cannot be seen by them, yet they insist they are qualified to teach our children.

Darryl Parks of 700 WLW and I have been at this levy fighting thing for a long time. He is currently gearing up his fight against the Forest Hills Levy in his district. One of the great fights of our time is the realization that we have seen what tax increases do. We’ve seen over time what tax increases have done to Cincinnati Public, Reading, Princeton, Mt. Healthy, and Fairfield, those with means and money move away. Currently the wealth band of affluence is around the I-275 loop most notably Sycamore, Mason and of course Lakota. Darryl and I know that this trend will last for a few short years and once taxes become too great, residents who now have grown children will simply move on to a cheaper home that is taxed at a lower rate. This brings down the demand for homes since a disproportionate amount of homes hit the market in a given area as average home values decrease.

Growing up, I used to work on Chester Road just down the road from Princeton High School. That was the days when many of the Reds players lived on the west side and in Blue Ash, so Chester Road was the main strip in all of Cincinnati. It was where everything happened. Restaurants like the Wind Jammer and Bombay Bicycle club where the destination dinning centers in the city and I was right in the middle of it. Because of all this Princeton City School dominated sports as many involved parents made their home around the Princeton District to be near this hot spot of activity. Today Princeton has an average per pupil cost of $15K per student and it’s a district in decline simply because many of the successful home owners have moved away and now reside in Lakota and Mason. Today Chester Road in Sharonville is only a slim reminder of what it once was, a victim of high taxes that push away property owners and businesses.

The church I always attended all through my life in Fairfield used to be the heart of community. Playboy Magazine in the 80’s listed Fairfield as having the most attractive high school girls in the country because it was a rising star of economic activity–so attractive, successful parents moved to Fairfield to be near the great schools and great shopping on RT. 4. My church always had lots of very attractive girls looking for a date, and had a very active youth group that was mainstream back then. Most of the kids who went to Fairfield High School went to church because the girls had to be home around midnight on a Saturday to get enough sleep to go to church the next day. When you picked up a girl for a date you had to meet the parents. There were always two of them, as a divorced woman alone in a big home was still not considered normal. So in other words, there was a culture in Fairfield that aimed to produce some sort of quality in the family unit.

I went back to that church a few weeks ago and there was no youth. All that was left were gray hairs from my parent’s generation. The nice homes 20 years ago now had public housing residents filling them with single mothers caring for two to three children per home and those kids weren’t going to church. The culture in and around that church was dying and all you had to do to see it was look at it in the parking lot of the old church. It was spreading like a disease.

The reason I brought up Darryl is because he was speaking to a neighbor of his earlier in the week and they reported they were moving, because of the Forest Hills levy request. They had simply had it. You can read what Darryl said about this situation at the link below. I also have the broadcast by him discussing this during his Saturday show below the link.

http://www.700wlw.com/pages/onair_parks.html?article=9719712

Darryl is dealing with the microcosm of his neighbor leaving which is similar to what communities are dealing with in the macrocosm. When we fight these tax levies we are not trying to hurt kids, hurt the schools or the parents who move to these districts to attend the great schools. We are fighting to keep the costs low so that the cancerous destruction that we’ve seen happen in our lifetimes does not destroy our own homes and the communities they reside in. It is not our fault if the types of people who so easily vote themselves tax increases don’t understand the basics of economics. Or that they don’t care what happens to their communities 20 years from now because their plans are to sell their home and move any way.

Taxes do not incentivize people to stay in a community. Higher costs make them leave. It doesn’t matter if it’s a business or a residence. Anyone who governs money with a loose had and perpetually thinks that taxes can always increase is a fool who does not understand economics, and it is not the job of the wise portions of the public to give these people educations they should already have as adults. Those who believe in tax increases simply do not value money and that is a failure of their personal philosophies. They will not be allowed to destroy communities without opposition. Darryl is fighting for his community from his home district and I am from mine. I know of hundreds all across Ohio who are joining us in this endeavor, and they are all doing it for the same reason—they wish to preserve their homes and not see them destroyed by reckless tax increases initiated from a looter mindset.

The billboard in Lakota says it all. It’s an elaborate display designed to show off the wealth of the district and increase enrollment. But it’s also designed to advance the cause for further tax increases. Such a sign to me reminds me of the kind of gloating that went on in the days of Chester Road by Princeton High School, in glory days long gone, and at Fairfield. If the taxes continue to increase, the fate of all the poorer districts of Hamilton County are in the future for Lakota and it’s our responsibility as citizens to use our knowledge of history to prevent that treachery. Because without opposition, there will be more and more neighbors like the ones Darryl Parks mentioned leaving for land that is less restricted by taxes and allow the residents to keep the value of their hard-earned wealth. They won’t do it because they are mean, or selfish. They’ll do it because they are wise.

Click here to see the TAIL OF THE DRAGON press release for an update on my most recent project:

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

Check out Rich Hoffman’s favorite website, (besides this one):

http://thepeoplescube.com/

Why FACEBOOK is Evil: A dad shoots his daughter’s laptop

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.

Click here to see the TAIL OF THE DRAGON press release for an update on my most recent project:

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

Check out Rich Hoffman’s favorite website, (besides this one):

http://thepeoplescube.com/

The Origional Argument from Joshua Charles: A changing landscape built from the heart

When I first received a very good book by Joshua Charles and Glenn Beck it was after I was speaking to a group of education reformers.  A friend of mine had left it for me while I was shaking hands and speaking with people after the speech and my friend had left like a phantom amiss the chaos.  But in her seat she left me a gift; it was a copy of The Original Argument by the mentioned authors. 

Right after this speech I had to leave for Florida on a family vacation, so I had time to read a bit.  The book in this respect was a very timely gift that I appreciated greatly.  Books to me are the greatest gifts I can receive.  I love every single one of them I’ve ever received and I never get tired of running my fingers through their pages, even years after my initial reading.  Every book to me is a treasure.  To this very day my favorite places, virtually the only place I enjoy shopping, is a book store.  My wife and I share this love and we often spend our date nights in such places picking up the next weeks reading material. 

It was during our most recent “dinner and a book store date night” that I noticed in the social sciences section that even after 9 months in print, The Original Argument was still selling well.  In fact, it occupied a whole shelf stacked five books deep all the way across.  I counted 26 books on that shelf which means that the demand for The Original Argument has not died off after its publication, but has increased.  The story of how this book came about is a bit of a miracle story, which you can hear Glenn Beck talk about in the clip below. 

Selling a book is a hard thing to do, and I’ll be doing it myself for the second time in a few short months. There are a lot of books that come out and each one is the hope and dreams of the author. Many of them fail to take root into the public for various reasons. These days books with great names attached sell well for a few weeks after their release because they have access to the publicity machine of the popular media. But those same books lose steam quickly if the public fails to embrace them. Because of Glenn Beck’s name being attached to The Original Argument this book by the very young Joshua Charles had a big release with a great marketing platform, so big numbers in its first week were not a surprise. But big numbers almost a year later are more impressive, and The Original Argument is still steaming along.

As I ran my fingers over the books in the book store I thought about my copy at home which I now look at every day at least once. The book has the feeling of a work that has the power to change the static patterns of our culture, which is good—powerful, and you can feel it when you hold the book in your hands. It has an essence of substance that is unique for books. This probably has everything to do with the contents of the material. The Original Argument is essentially a modern re-write of The Federalist Papers, which is the foundation of The United States Constitution, and is fundamentally a work of modern philosophy.

I spent the summers of 2009 and 2010 reading The Federalist Papers and The Anti Federalism Papers and I will admit that I struggled though them. They are written in an older language that assumes that society is much more intelligent than it is today. Reading these books as they were published in the late 1700’s it becomes quickly evident that the public who read those original documents in their newspapers were of a higher reading level than our modern counterparts so even I struggled with the language. But they had such an impact on me that I started this blog site, Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom to act as a modern version of those original Federalist Papers. I wanted to put into context the modern arguments for our day and time with the language used to make a new argument on behalf of the original arguments for freedom. I focus on education issues because it’s obvious to me that public education isn’t working since our population can’t read something like The Federalist Papers and comprehend it. Many of our own congressman and senators have not even read the Constitution let alone The Federalist Papers. So the quality of the political philosophy started with The Federalist Papers has been diminished as society has been made to be of a lower intellect.

This lower intellect is by design. It has been imposed upon us by the enemies of America through a very complex spy network that has penetrated our political machinery, our media, and our government at all levels. To understand how this happens just study the modern movements of George Soros. Without question politicians looking for money from Soros are willing to adapt his policies in exchange, especially in vacancy of their own philosophy, leaving our government easily manipulated by special interest money. This has went on for many years, and Soros is just one of thousands over the years that have sought to dismantle The United States through greed and ignorance where the people of America have lost their way and allowed themselves to be intellectually diminished.

As I sat on the balcony of our condo in Florida and read The Original Argument I was shocked how easy it was to read. What Joshua Charles had done was take the complex wording of The Federalist Papers and simplify them into modern language so it was easy to grasp. Reading that book in the early morning sunrise in Florida and listening to the waves hit the beach with fury as a storm off to the south over the Bahamas was roaring far out at sea I realized that this book had a real power to it and I hoped for it’s longevity and cultural acceptance.

I became a Glenn Beck fan not because of his television show, not because of his radio show, but because of his reissuing of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. I read that book in an afternoon and immediately thought it was more powerful than the classic of communist thought Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto. With Beck bringing out again the classic from Thomas Paine he was able to answer the kind of literature that was suppressed by the modern media who had used the 45 points from the 1958 book The Naked Communist to push such American philosophy out of the public’s reach. In that strategy of erasing American history, Common Sense and The Federalist Papers were the primary targets. Beck through his own media empire had developed the ability to push back and reintroduce America to its original philosophy with his new updated version of Common Sense. It’s short, easy to read, and contains the original Paine text in the back of the book.

More powerful than Common Sense, The Original Argument puts the very powerful Federalist Papers into the reach of the modern public and that is a supreme ray of hope in our modern age. Changes do not come quickly. They didn’t at the time of the original revolution and they won’t now. It will take a lot of thought, discussion and reading to reeducate the American population to their roots. I hope to add to that with my own work Tail of the Dragon soon. The goal is to entertain a modern audience into considering what the roots of American society is supposed to be, not what has been manipulated and twisted from the original meaning into the modern progressive theory inspired by political philosophers like Marx.

The power of The Original Argument can be seen on the bookshelf. Bookstores cannot afford to keep books on their shelves that do not sell. And to understand the true temperature of our nation all one has to do is go to a bookstore and see what is selling, and that will show you what the people of our country are looking for. What’s selling is Glenn Beck, Bill O’Rielly, Mark Levin, and many other conservative writers. In philosophy it’s Ayn Rand and Robert Persig. In fact the great book of philosophy by Leonard Peikoff called Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand is now selling that the first Atlas Shrugged film has introduced through DVD sales a whole new market to the work of that philosopher. Rand actually has breakthrough thinking which exceeds the works of Plato, Aristotle and Kant that is uniquely American. It’s good to study the German philosophers, the Greek, the Chinese, but America is now producing its own, and Rand is certainly one of the finest examples. In fact she shreds Immanuel Kant as a founder of a philosophy that has so thoroughly destroyed the thinking of many on the political left, and she does it with very detailed facts.

That work by Peikoff is more on the heavy side philosophically, but still, people are buying it up now, which is a wonderful sign. 4 to 5 years from now American culture will change for the better because of all this reading that is going on. To my thinking the best example of easy philosophy for the majority of American society to grasp right now is The Original Argument. If you have not read it yet, I highly suggest it. Reading that book will give you power, it will give you a better knowledge of The United States Constitution than most of the public officials have and will allow you to demand of them an adherence to it. Communist infiltrators in our public education system know that an uneducated public is easy to mislead, which has been their agenda all along. By reading The Original Argument you can take the next step into fixing your nation by understanding what it is that you are expected to know in order to make requests of your elected representatives. I don’t take my hat off to many people, but to Joshua Charles I do. He did a great thing that history will remember. And thank goodness Glenn Beck had the ability to get this book into the hands of a hungry public. It’s an important work and as long as I live I’ll never forget the speech I gave where I looked for my friend at the end and found a book left behind for me to read instead. The book sat in her seat and invited me to read it, which I did several times now. Those kinds of gifts continue to give for many years. The gift of a book is immediate, but the information gained upon reading it once gives back to you again. If the book is good then the story will stay with you everywhere you go from then on. And if it’s really good it might just expand your thinking to accept new ideas, or ideas that were good but long forgotten. And such is the case with The Original Argument.

Click here to see the TAIL OF THE DRAGON press release for an update on my most recent project:

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

Check out Rich Hoffman’s favorite website, (besides this one):

http://thepeoplescube.com/

Why John Hughes is a Hero: The evil behind legalized theft

What was 55-year-old John C. Hughes thinking when he paced a patrol car for seven blocks in the town of Butte, Montana then pulled his SUV around to pass the cop at over 70 mph instigating a chase that went up to 100 mph down an interstate toward Rocker, Montana? Well, the police didn’t know what to make of it. They chased Hughes until patrolmen threw stop sticks across the road flattening the tires of the SUV. When they arrested the driver Hughes proclaimed that being in a car chase was on his bucket list, and saw this as his opportunity to make good on that list.

Naturally reporters and law enforcement personnel across the nation were confused as to why anyone would want to do such a thing. Why would anyone openly challenge the law like that? Why would something so reckless be on someone’s bucket list?

Well, I have some very strong feelings about the reason and necessity by John Hughes to instigate a car chase with the police which are challenging to pin-point because often the social parameters that nag us most are those that remain undefined. For many, we drive about on the roads and highways eyeing the police as though they are wolves ready to pounce on our gazelle nature. We carefully worry about whether or not our tags are up to date on our licenses, whether or not we are carrying our insurance cards and keep an eye on our speeds so not to attract the attention of these wolves.

When we pass down the road and see a fellow driver pulled over there is a part of us that feels sorry for them. We know that at a minimum there will be a big fine that comes from a traffic stop. Sometimes it’s worse, it could involve jail time. Most of the time being caught by the police in some fashion means a loss of freedom to some extent and over time our subconscious feelings about these wolves patrolling around has caused Americans to accept a lifestyle wrapped in tyranny.

Most police patrol vehicles have on them someplace a logo that indicates, “To protect and serve.” We accept this logo as a reality in the discussions of everyday speech, but in the back of our minds we know this is a disguise designed to make the wolf appear to be something it’s not. The law enforcement officer is not stopping crime with their traffic stops. They are not protecting and serving the society by setting up DUI checkpoints and hindering the freedoms of drivers from getting to and from their destinations without harassment. They are toll collectors and law enforcements chief goal is to sustain the jobs of attorneys, judges, clerk of courts, jailers, and politicians who make up laws to support these public jobs. The ticket gained on the side of the road by an officer who has pulled you over is a legalized theft of your personal wealth. It is a forced acquisition of your time and money that dictates you will pay your fees, you will appear in court, that you may retain the services of an attorney. You will do all these things because a cop selected you to be pulled over, and you find yourself caught in a political snare that is open looting.

Police will tell society that it is because of the presence of police officers that crime is deterred. If there were fewer police there would be more robberies, there would be more rapes, there would be more DUI’s and reckless speeding. Police and politicians use fear of crime to drive society to accept their tyranny. The measurement of the truth is easy as to what the intentions are of law enforcement. They are the perpetrators of evil disguised as justice.

In my book The Symposium of Justice the police wanting to earn community trust inject a known rapist recently paroled into a neighborhood hoping that the pedophile will resume his activity and put the citizens into a froth looking for police support. Police do these things within the realm of the law, but their secret intentions which they do not reveal in the light of day is to gain public acceptance of their levy requests, and to support the staffing requirements without question. They use fear to gain advantages for their law enforcement entity. In cities locally like West Chester and Mason the nature of these police is easy to see. When driving from townships like Sycamore or Liberty into these cities the cops sit like hungry predators in parking lots and on the side of roads looking for an easy traffic stop so to meet their ticket quotas. Those police aren’t there to protect society from crime. In both of these regions Mason and West Chester their neighboring townships of Liberty and Sycamore do not have higher crime because they do not employ full-time police. Those regions tend to have low crime because the people who live there are good, families on public assistance is down, and value in education is higher. It’s the quality of people who determine the level of crime, not the presence of police. This leaves the nature of those police exposed for those who dare proclaim it.

How do we know a society is evil, or better yet, how do we know that the work of police in protecting and serving that society is evil? The answer is if a society is built upon a system of theft than that society is evil. And currently, or society is built upon theft.

We do not give our taxes freely to benefit our society for the better. Behind our façade of participation, each week our taxes are taken from our pay checks and used to pay for the toys of politicians. I am forced by coercion to pay for Medicare, a program that Lyndon Johnston created to compliment Social Security. It was the ideas of looting presidents trying to impress their mistresses who dictated that all American’s would pay for these grand social programs. For me the tax payer, I will have peace and some resemblance of freedom so long as I pay my taxes. But if I do not pay my taxes, then I will be arrested and thrown into jail by law enforcement.

Having staffed levels of police so high is not to clean up the occasional accidents on roadways, or the domestic violence that sometimes takes place in a large population. The infrastructure of the police car on the side of the road is not to protect and serve you, it is to protect and serve the society’s ability to legally loot by means of open theft. The police are there to remind the American citizen that they must obey the law, they must pay attention to the registration of their vehicles, their insurance cards, and hundreds of little details because we must all drive to get to our jobs so we can pay our taxes which encompass almost 50% of everything we earn by the time you add up the gas tax, the various sales taxes, the payroll taxes, and our property tax. I personally think most of that money is spent unwisely, and should be greatly reduced. But it is the law enforcement officer who stands between a population that would turn its anger on a political class that has built a society of evil in open theft, and strict compliance with the law. The cops absorb and diffuse the anger so it doesn’t migrate to a higher level.

When the officer sits in his patrol car like a wolf hunting food for the day, most of us hope that we will be protected by the sheer numbers as we travel like herds hoping to blend in and not attract the attention of the wolf in his patrol car. So we watch the speed limit and make sure we don’t roll through a stop light when a cop is around, because we don’t want to see those lights on in our rear view mirror. If we do, we know the chances are we’ll be going to court to pay a ticket that will be $50 to $100. We may even have to hire a lawyer at $75 to $200 an hour. Those lights on in our rear view mirrors might mean we will be forced to pay additional taxes on top of everything else of another $1000 to $2000. The fear of these fines keeps society from acting on the open theft because we all know you cannot fight the law, you cannot fight city hall, it is pointless to resist. That is the message.

The law enforcement officer represents tyranny to an evil system. Most people don’t have the capacity to consider their life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness when their attentions are consumed with all this trivia of paying taxes mentioned here. When the worry of our days must be negotiated between our taxes and our obligations to our families and ourselves, there isn’t much time left for philosophy and social context. So we look at the police with disdain, fear, and apprehension and do our best to avoid their wrath with careful adherence to the law, laws that are created faster than even the law makers can read them. The cop is the symbol of a society built on theft. They are the means of force to attain with might if necessary the legalized theft of our property.

So when John C. Hughes sped by a cop car in his SUV at 70 mph to instigate a police chase, he wasn’t trying to get arrested, or even break the law. Mr. Hughes put this car chase on his bucket list before he died because he wanted for once in his life to hunt the wolf instead of being afraid of them. For just a moment, John Hughes was the aggressor, and found a moment of freedom when he took action to step beyond fear to overcome the intimidation of those red and blue lights that flash from a patrol car. Hughes wanted to be free for just a moment to be his own man, and was willing to trade away his freedom once he was caught for the sensation of that true freedom while he was a temporary outlaw.

For that reason I admire Mr. Hughes. I understand that the law enforcement officers involved were perplexed, and the judge I’m sure was aghast. The members of the law enforcement community had their cage rattled. The reality that if everyone behaved as Mr. Hughes did, the law enforcement officers would find themselves on the bad end of a very sharp stick. Law enforcement is accustomed to societies blind conformance to the law, and all the members of the political class that have built the law enforcement community need that conformity to ensure their ability to legally steal from society the wages earned from their labor. In a society that is built upon theft, it is the thin blue line that makes it so. And most of the time a challenge to that authority goes unanswered until a 55-year-old man from Montana decided to put that challenge on his bucket list so that at least one time in his life he could spit in the face of his masters and touch the face of freedom, even if the experience lasted only for a moment.

Click here to see the TAIL OF THE DRAGON press release for an update on my most recent project:

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

Watch Rich Hoffman’s favorite T.V. show:

http://www.foxnews.com/freedomwatch/

Atlas Shrugged Part 2: Green lit and ready for production!

I make no attempt to hide the fact that I think Atlas Shrugged is one of the greatest novels of all time, and that Ayn Rand is one of the greatest philosophers in the history of mankind. When the recent film, Atlas Shrugged Part 1 came out to scathing reviews, the establishment found themselves attempting to deface the film at every turn. The reason for all the commotion is that Atlas Shrugged is essentially a philosophy that decertifies the altruistic tendencies of our modern society.

I thought the makers of the film version attempted a bold endeavor and everything was uphill for them. With the rights for the film being bounced between film icons like Clint Eastwood and Angelina Jolie who wanted to make a film version, it was obvious that traditional Hollywood could not get their minds around a film version of the massive book that is Atlas Shrugged. After much trial and tribulation, it was decided to proceed to film the movie in a three-part series with Part 1 coming out on April 15th 2011 with John Aglialoro producing assisted by a team of very dedicated Ayn Rand fans. What resulted was an entertaining film that left people traditionally viewing characters of business as villains lost to articulate their feelings, and wanting to lash out at the movie for challenging their stereotypes. Aglialoro had committed to making all three films, but after taking a beating on the first one, he has wisely sought to take his time and pull in even more talent for the very challenging 2nd and 3rd films.

I am pleased to have received in my email box yesterday a notice from the producers that they are proceeding now with Part 2 and have obtained the additional talent of Duncan Scott who worked on Ayn Rand’s We the Living film. Part 2 is set to be released in October 2012 amidst the presidential election which will be appropriate, and the team has released this teaser trailer to entice the legions of hungry fans.

The film versions of Atlas Shrugged are caught between a rock and a hard place. Without the top line talent of the Steven Spielberg’s or George Clooney’s of the world, Hollywood will of course look down its nose at the production values of these films. The greatest film makers in our modern times are unfortunately against everything that Atlas Shrugged is for, so top-level talent is hard to come by for an epic film like this. On the other hand, lovers of the book like me will undoubtedly feel frustration because there is no way to put into a movie the depth that a book like Atlas Shrugged can provide. But that’s ok, because the films serve as completely adequate cliff notes versions of the book and are a wonderful way to introduce the work of Ayn Rand to an audience that may not have heard about her before.

Atlas Shrugged whether we are talking about the book or the movies is not a simple work of just a story intended to entertain. Atlas Shrugged is a work of philosophy. As a work of philosophy it is OK to not have all the usual Hollywood flare, because it’s the meaning of the work that is important. And the film makers have done well to install that philosophy into the movie as seen in the clips below where scenes from the first film are broke down and analyzed for their meaning.

I ran into Ayn Rand for the first time while reading the book Dutch by Edmond Morris. Morris made a mention about the life and times of Ronald Reagan during the 50’s and Ayn Rand’s ubermensch novels were best sellers then. Well the word ubermensch means in German overman which is a concept Nietzsche talked about extensively in Thus Spoke Zarathustra so Morris’s choice of words to describe Ayn Rand sparked my interest. I think he meant it in a derogatory way. But if the progressives didn’t like her, there was a sure bet that I would so I checked out Ayn Rand and discovered that she had arrived at many of the same conclusions about life as I did. Reading her was an affirmation that many of my thoughts were not wrong, and better yet, she had made predictions a half a century earlier that were coming true now. So her work was a validation that I had been on the correct path all along.

The troubling aspect however was that I had always read a lot, and it wasn’t until my upper 30’s that I discovered this very prolific writer, even when that writer was essentially a carbon copy to the type of material that I enjoy reading and writing myself. That is because the work of Ayn Rand had been purposely kept from the public mind for the most part by the kinds of progressive groups who are the villains of Atlas Shrugged in a literal sense.

Over Christmas 2011 my father-in-law who is also a prolific reader, and a school teacher who holds a master’s degree in geology had told me about this great new movie called Atlas Shrugged over dinner. I stared open-mouthed at him as he went on and on about how much he loved the film. I couldn’t believe that he had never heard of the book. After all, he was in high school when the book came out, so I would have thought that at some point he would have run into the material.

He assured me that he had not, and he said the movie made him want to read the book and he planned to get the novel the next time he was at a book store. I told him to wait a moment, that I’d be right back. I excused myself from the dinner table and left my family sitting there while I got into the car and drove down to the local Barnes and Noble Bookstore in Louisville. Not wanting my food to get cold, I told the girl at the help counter, “I have an emergency; my father-in-law has never read Atlas Shrugged. I need a copy of it right now so I can rectify that situation.” She smiled and said that has been happening a lot lately, since the movie had come out. People were pouring into the book store and demanding Ayn Rand’s works! I gave my father-in-law Atlas Shrugged at the dinner table when I returned and his smile was from ear to ear as he held it in his hands as though he possessed magic between his finger tips.

That is why the movies are so important, because our society has had this fantastic work by Ayn Rand covered up to some extent for 50 years. Apparently some literature classes in high schools and colleges have exposed students to Atlas Shrugged, but for the most part the literary classic has been discouraged by progressive groups, and now that the movies are starting to be made, the films are igniting curiosity into actually reading Atlas Shrugged so that more of the philosophy can be absorbed in the written word than could ever be shown on the silver screen.

To me a film is successful if it entertains first, and then leaves the viewer hungry for more information at the conclusion. And for those who do not know the work of Atlas Shrugged these films are introducing millions upon millions of people to a whole new way of thinking that is uniquely American, and I think it’s absolutely wonderful! So the news that the producers have managed to scrape together the money and talent to produce the second film is great news and I will be a tremendous advocate helping wherever I can so that more and more people will be exposed to the wonderful philosophy of Ayn Rand which is virtually inseparable from my own philosophy. For more information on Part 2, there is a new website that let fans follow the progress to its completion and release in October.

http://www.atlasshruggedmovie.com/

Stay tuned!

To learn what a Overmanwarrior is CLICK HERE:

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2012/01/09/the-overmanwarriors-eating-fighting-and-philosophizing-the-keys-to-a-good-life/

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

Watch Rich Hoffman’s favorite T.V. show:

http://www.foxnews.com/freedomwatch/

Ding Dong the King is DEAD: Remember the day Woodrow Wilson left this earth

February 3, 1924 was the day that the progressive president Woodrow Wilson died. Listen below to Glenn Beck as he talks about what President Wilson meant to America and how Wilson should be remembered.

America was seduced by Wilson and the progressive revisionists of the period which took our nation on a fast track to the type of conditions we are struggling with today. It is because of Wilson that we should place the blame for the state of education which can be heard in this next clip. The kids in this video are proof that progressive education methods have destroyed America starting with our youth.

Just because things are today the way they are does not mean that we should maintain them. Woodrow Wilson was a mistake for America and we should rewind our history to our national identity before he and his progressives did their work. So remember, every February 3rd of every year from now on, that the world is better because one less progressive ideologue is attempting to bend the United States Constitution into a platform for kingship.

To learn what a Overmanwarrior is CLICK HERE:

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2012/01/09/the-overmanwarriors-eating-fighting-and-philosophizing-the-keys-to-a-good-life/

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

Watch Rich Hoffman’s favorite T.V. show:

http://www.foxnews.com/freedomwatch/

Thanks Joe Jobs: The Channel 9 Story

I’d like to thank Joe Jobs for putting the Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom links out when Channel 9 posted their article about the Wednesday Lakota School Board meeting. I have so many articles posted that tell the story of why Lakota is in financial trouble, but I spend so much time doing research, reading and writing, that I don’t see all these little articles that come out. Joe noticed the article and put the Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom links up to share with all the viewers of that particular article.

I only learned about this article when I noticed a tremendous spike in the hits coming to the Lakota postings from Channel 9. You can view that article for yourself at the link below:

http://www.wcpo.com/dpp/news/region_north_cincinnati/west_chester/cuts-loom-for-the-lakota-school-district?CMP=201202_emailshare

The best weapon against high taxes we have is the facts, and I provide these articles for all you warriors out there to use in just such a fashion that Joe Jobs did in this instance. Many people, who don’t read very much, don’t listen to talk radio, and allow the school system to be their primary source of information still doesn’t know this information, and Lakota prays that these social conditions remain the case far into the future. But Joe Jobs used the tools of this website to get the word out to those who are still learning and for that I am greatly appreciative!

Thanks Joe! It’s people like you who can stop these tyrannical tax increases and spread the word for others to benefit. You are part of the solution which can only come through learning.

To learn what a Overmanwarrior is CLICK HERE:

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2012/01/09/the-overmanwarriors-eating-fighting-and-philosophizing-the-keys-to-a-good-life/

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

Watch Rich Hoffman’s favorite T.V. show:

http://www.foxnews.com/freedomwatch/