Category: Union

The Power of Guilt: What Rush Limbaugh and Rich Hoffman have in common

Below is the link to the article of which this post is dedicated. 

http://westchesterbuzz.com/2012/03/14/lakota-anti-levy-figure-whips-up-controversy-on-blog/

When Rush Limbaugh called a Georgetown University student a prostitute on the air at the beginning of March it was several weeks after I had said similar things here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom about the type of people who attempt to make citizens who don’t want to vote for a school levy feel poor for not wanting to commit to further taxes. I didn’t mention anyone specifically, but alluded to a mentality that seemed to think applying peer pressure on their friends and neighbors in order to secure increases in school funding was appropriate.

Well my comments had been up for weeks, and clearly thousands of people saw them, and I personally didn’t think they were all that bad. But shortly after the Rush Limbaugh story shown below broke Julie Shaffer the new school board member and former tax levy advocate took sections of my comments and placed them on her Facebook page–and taken by themselves–without the context of the rest of the article, they sounded bad. So I put those articles on password protect so I could re-read them to see if there was any validity to the claims of my critics that they were harsh.

When I wrote them I was very angry, and tired of the criticism leveled directly at me saying that I “hated children” and that I was “greedy,” for fighting off the tax increase. So the text was more colorful than usual, but I still thought my critics were reaching, until I watched the news and saw where they got their idea from. Rush Limbaugh had just lost some of his radio sponsors and were protesting his show because of his comments and his enemies had him on the ropes. It became clear to me that the same type of progressive forces had just got in their heads to do the same to me.

The progressive mode of attack they use to protect their positions which cannot withstand scrutiny is to attack people like Rush Limbaugh whenever he says something they believe they can use against him in an emotional argument. Conservatives typically are terrible at playing this game with progressives because they tend to operate on a belief system rooted in the truth. So they can easily be attacked because if they cross the line, they feel bad about it, and that guilt is used against them to change their behavior in the future.

Locally I have seen this up close with the school levies. I have seen PTA groups work with principals of elementary schools to organize boycotts against businesses that have supported tax fighting efforts. The intent is not to allow all citizens of a community to vote their conscious, but to win votes, even if the method is arm twisting and extortion. Routinely those who oppose school tax increases are labeled as anti child, anti education, and anti community, and when citizens who do own businesses and are genuinely concerned about their taxes going up they are called selfish, greedy and destructive to the neighborhood if they oppose tax increases. The situation is so bad that there was even an effort to apply pressure to local businesses who opposed the levy by contacting the higher offices of some of those businesses to apply pressure on the business owners the next vote around. That is called “strong arming” the public and its wrong.

I have been categorized in all the ways above and more because I have been putting the focus of the real problem with school funding on the runaway costs associated with school salaries. The progressive political machine that functions behind the labor unions and is subscribed to by parents who just want their child to get what they perceive a good education have used boycotts, letter writing campaigns, and protests to apply pressure to anyone who opposes their plan. And that plan is to create budgets that always inflate and must be fed with higher taxes without opposition. It’s that plan that has made school boards only able to deal with 20% of their costs leaving 80% to be untouched which is ludicrous.

My approach to the levy fight has been to take on that 80% and I knew when I did this that the progressive machine would be very angry with me. But if the solution is ever to be fixed in public education, then the 80% of the costs must be tackled rationally. And this has made me public enemy number one in my community as far as those who support progressive politics are concerned.

Going into this fourth levy fight I have been reading the online boards and studying what has been said about me so I can get an idea of how to plan for the next levy attempt. The trouble is there are never any real names behind many online forums. It’s difficult to tell who is doing what and to trace back what’s behind them. So one tactic in discovering who your enemies are, and what they are planning to do is to provoke them to do it when you control the circumstances, instead of waiting till they decide to attack. So on occasion I will install dialogue at this site to provoke a reaction so I can study the behavior.

As predicted the forces who oppose me sought to take my words and use them in the same fashion that the progressive left did against Rush Limbaugh. It started with a school board member posting it on her Facebook account. Then it migrated into many of her supporters wanting to picket my house, wanting to run me out of the community, and wishing to declare that I was a threat to their safety. All these inflammatory comments were on the tips of their tongue and were prepped for the next campaign attempt. They then went to the next step of contacting anyone who might support me and put pressure on them to withdrawal from me, because I was not to be trusted, I was inflammatory, and a right-winged-nut job—to use their words. Then they contacted the papers to drum up articles about what a menace to the community I am, and they took excerpts of my words and are planning letter writing campaigns to our local paper to expose me. Of course their hope was to isolate me of my support in the community, by painting me as a radical.

From the inside and outside at Lakota I have learned that the superintendent has been sending links to this site hoping to turn the community against me. (I wonder if she has been doing this during company time.) But what she doesn’t know is that was my intention all along.

When you are fighting against forces who believe that boycotts, intimidation, peer pressure, and the dismantling of a school system to protect wages and benefits are good behavior, then equal force must be used against them, which is what I’ve done. But unlike Rush Limbaugh and other conservative and libertarian activists I don’t feel I should apologize. When I am told that I hate children, I take that very personal. It is one of the worst names anyone could call me. I consider it a very low blow, and I do not have any reservations of turning the tide against those name callers, especially when I need to identify the behavior patterns of those who are plotting for another tax hike. Now that I have seen that behavior I can adjust, and with the increased traffic coming to this site, those eyes will see the articles that those same angry activists hoped to avoid, such as the sex story at Lakota involving the teacher and the parent using the child as a vehicle, or the Laura Kursman $90,000 payout, or the fat double-dipping contract of the current superintendent.

Because the other side has dictated that using inflammatory rhetoric is the way they have chosen to play the game, I will oblige them with heavy doses of it in return. And I will use those words as a marketing device to bring people to the truth, so their eyes can see for themselves what our community is fighting for. You can’t fight a radical with a smile on your face and a polite nod. That’s how we got into this mess in the first place. You have to fight them the way they fight, and you have to be better at it than they are. Because in order for any community to survive, the radicals must be removed from games of extortion and peer pressure to cover up bad business practice. And this is the task that is before us.

Rush Limbaugh is using inflammatory speech to generate ratings for his radio show. I’m using it to bring people to the truth, not the same old people who read here every day, but I want the people from the other side of the aisle to join our levy fighting efforts. So I fanned the flames a bit to attract attention and bring people to the information that they may have been avoiding, because the truth is there for all to see. But they have to be willing to act on what they see, and not allow extortion methods to hijack their senses. The truth is more important to me than my public reputation, more important then having friends or supporters, or even having people wave hello to me at the grocery store. I’d rather get things out in the open so we can fix the problem instead of just throwing money at it to bury our community ten years down the road in debt beyond repair. The time to fix it is right here, and right now, and if some toes get stepped on and feelings get hurt in the process, then so be it.

I’m not interested in protecting the employees of a school system; I am interesting in protecting the community and the kids who are products of that community. Everything else must form itself to those two entities without compromise.

To those who wish to categorize me as a right leaning radical or Tea Party activists, the truth is that I’m a Transcendentalist in the purest form of the word.  Just to clear the air. 

Rich Hoffman

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

 
 

The Evaders of Lakota: Why our community, state, and nation suffers

The criticism abounds toward the creation of No Lakota Levy’s new group, where our tax fighting organization is helping to pay part of the school fees for kids struggling to come up with the money to play the sport of their choice. The critics say, “Why can’t ‘they’ also pay for kids in music, what about special needs kids, what about kids who need sign language? Why don’t they just pay the tax so we can have everything? What about busing? Why are ‘they’ so selfish?”

 

When these critics are talking about “they” it is the members of No Lakota Levy they are talking about, and our choice to pick sports as the object we would help fund because its programs like football, track, and baseball that carry the public image for a community, and that is what we are seeking to heal. $10,000 dollars is a heck of a lot of money to come up with to help kids which comes directly from people’s pockets. But the behavior of those critics is what articulates correctly the scope of the problem we are dealing with in regard to school funding, and in a greater regard, the funding of every program created under the umbrella of The Great Society, or The New Deal.

The lack of appreciation from these critics speaks that they have no scope, or understanding of the world around them. They are the classic examples of “EVADERS.” Evaders are people who chose openly to ignore the conditions of reality. They tend to use terms in sentences such as “I wish” instead of “it is.” They make a daily practice of evading reality. An example of this, which will upset greatly my Christian readers, is in the concept of religion. No matter what the faith, religion is an act of evasion. We ask our minds to accept on faith the concept of our version of God without any proof. We might read the Bible and declare that we will take it word for word as fact without any proof. This is an act of evasion, of evading reality in favor of a belief. This is why religion is such a volatile aspect of human existence. There are a lot of religions all of whom believe that their version of reality is correct, and they are willing to die to defend their version. This makes sense from their point of view because if their illusion of reality is stripped away from them, then they have no foundations upon which to exist, so they defend their religious views with much vigor, even without evidence to support their views.

The trouble with evasion is that once human beings open their mind to it once, for one thing in their lives, then they have a tendency to open it for all things. Again, when we are speaking of evasion we are talking about suspending logic in favor of blind belief. We are accepting facts that are not grounded in reality, but upon a belief founded upon wishes of how reality should be.

These are the people who typically make up the pro levy supporter base, and on a national level support President Obama’s notion that all things in government can be fixed with tax increases. And of course the easy target is always the “rich” because most people aren’t wealthy, so the target of reality is always on some horizon out of reach maintaining the illusions of the evaders. However, the evaders can only maintain their illusions if they deny the facts of the world around them, so they do not understand how business connects to residents, they do not conceive how their actions might put the corner coffee shop out of business because of high taxes because they are practicing evasion. These same people chose not to look at the senior citizens of a community who is locked in a fixed income, because the residents are practicing evasion in that aspect also, because the senior citizen represents “old age” which is something many middle-agers seek desperately to forget about. So they “evade” the reality of their own existence because in the back of their minds, they know their religions have provided them little truth and they fear what the truth of their own deaths might bring them in the future. So they evade the facts of old age by putting their parents in retirement communities and avoiding eye contact with them at the grocery store, because those senior citizens are facing immanent death, and can no longer evade reality.

A person asked me the other day why so many “gray hairs” were in the Tea Party movement. After all weren’t many of these people hippies during the 60’s era? The answer is that as time goes on, and life runs out, people can no longer evade truth. They tend to pick a religion and stick to it gathering as many facts as they can and root what they can’t prove into a general morality centered on goodness. Because goodness is a truth that extends beyond the reach of any religion and is generally agreed upon, so it’s universal, and senior citizens tend to base their religious lives not on silly facts written in a book, but on the concept of goodness. They do this because evasion will not help them at their age. There is no more tomorrow, there is only now and things must be fixed today.

Unfortunately pro levy supporters are at the beginning of this process. They have all the time in the world—they still have their kids to raise and then they have their retirement ages in front of them, so they have time to catch up in their minds all the aspects of reality that they are evading. And they are aware they are doing this. They drink, watch TV and pursue material wealth to help them evade their reality. These are the people who think there are no limits to taxes so long as they can get what they want. They don’t care how they get it; they only know what they want because they have evaded the conditions of the world outside of their perceptions distorted in the process of evasion.

People like Saul Alisnky whom the labor unions have used to help them hijack vast amounts of personal wealth, advance a progressive political agenda, and create legislation like what Lakota is suffering from, have used this science to their advantage. It is because of labor unions and their manipulations that a school board can only deal with 20% of its costs due to aggressive union contracts that have money guaranteed to its members from the community. They achieved this by playing on the human tendency of evasion, particularly those who are in the middle of their child rearing years, to use emotional arguments based on evasion techniques instead of reality. This leaves school boards with only extortive measures to utilize, such as cutting busing, sports, electives, and new teaching positions. The unions let the school boards take the entire public outcry while they hide in the shadows like cowards maintaining their evasive illusions, and that’s exactly what’s happening at Lakota. My anger at the school board is in their defending such a structure because they are guilty of evasion themselves. They know they have no real power to control their costs, yet they don’t reveal that to the community. That’s how they become union stooges. All the participants in this game are guilty of evasion. The school board in believing that they can just pass another school levy to give them the illusion of control, the unions in believing that if they just tax the “rich” more they can have infinitely high wages with great benefits and summers off and nobody will suffer. And the parents whose children attend the school believe the members of the community “owe” them a “sacrifice” so their children can become wonderful citizens while the parents pursue their own illusions of professional evasion.

This evasion process culminated late last week when superintendent Mantia told one or our members of No Lakota Levy that the Lakota School District’s legal team instructed them that the school board had no power to regulate their wages, that it was considered illegal. This is because of the wording of the union contract negotiated in the summer of 2011 where the teachers agreed to a wage freeze and elimination of their step increases. School Board President Dibble backed up Mantia’s statement in writing reiterating that sentiment. As I heard this news I thought, “Finally, they are at least admitting they are not in control. That’s the first step in grasping reality.” And I think that’s good, and I do not fault the school board members for such an admission. I only get angry when I see them evading reality. But the reality is they are powerless to the union machine, and they are finally admitting it in public.

The critics of No Lakota Levy have said to us directly and about us publicly that “The teachers have agreed to a pay freeze. They took a step forward.” I have said back both directly and publicly that it wasn’t enough, because it didn’t balance their budget. Those who participate in evasion believe that they are entitled to something I have, and believe that negotiations place them on equal footing with me and my friends in No Lakota Levy. It does not. The members of the union who constructed the labor contract which is dismantling our local government school of Lakota believe that they have given something, but they are not in a position to offer anything of equal value. It is the community that must give, and to the union members they can only receive. They have in their minds the evasion of reality and believe that their jobs are worth infinite amounts of money, and people who are also evaders tend to believe such a thing because they do not place value on jobs, people or ideas based on reality, but on their wishes.

But in reality, the world I live in, and the world of my friends in No Lakota Levy and the 18,000 voters who voted three times to defeat further taxes, we have sent a clear message that our value for their services have exceeded their worth and no more taxes will be tolerated. That message was given in realty, but the ears that need to hear it are practicing evasion, and as long as this continues, there will be a school district that will struggle, parents will be upset, and children will miss opportunities. But the villains are not those who say NO to further taxes, it is the evaders themselves who have allowed their lack of reality to control the world around them with neglect. In their minds people like me might be “evil,” “greedy,” and “selfish,” but such thoughts are only wishes and not grounded in reality. The opinions of those who evade responsibility of thought have no value in the realm of ideas. And their credibility will not be endorsed with time, and money since their thoughts cannot grasp reality, let alone the maneuvers available to move within it. Lakota is failing as a district, and the nation is failing as a country because of evaders, and their inability, or courage to face reality.

And that problem is a problem specific to the evaders, not the people who take the responsibility to live in reality. Ultimately it is the practice of evasion that makes people and their children suffer. To understand the scope of the problem and the real reality behind the Lakota budget this link below will clear it all up for you. It is this reality that the “EVADERS” are hiding from, and why our community is suffering.

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/10/26/lakota-teacher-overall-compensation-is-130219-per-year-vote-no-the-lakota-school-levy/

Rich Hoffman

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

 
 

Overmanwarrior: The Trial of Fletcher Finnegan–New Heroes in Lakota

The fight to control spending at our public school of Lakota has revealed a new twist this past week. The school board is now claiming that they have no control over negotiating salaries, and that their legal counsel has advised them that salary reductions are “off the table.”

It’s pretty difficult to control costs as a management board if you can’t manage 80% of your costs. And knowing several local school board members I know they can’t just mandate reductions without union approval. But they could have at least asked the question, putting the burden on the labor union to reject, therefore letting the public see the real villains behind the out-of-control spending problem within the Lakota School District. Because until that is done, the school board will get the blame for not managing the costs the tax payers have sent to the school.

It has been to my great relief to see several new faces beginning to attend the school board meetings and speak up, particularly the man pictured here who lambasted the school board and Mantia specifically for allowing the budget problem to virtually destroy Lakota as a school instead of placing the burden back on the union who has concocted up every legal trick in the book to protect their salaries even if it means the demise of the district completely. Without doubt many of the current employees at Lakota are hoping to keep the system intact just long enough for them to retire. They could care less what happens to the rest of the community in the process.

I became very frustrated two weeks ago when I wasted the time to attend a school board meeting only to see them performing in the same manner as always, even after all that has been said and done over the last three elections and defeat of the proposed tax increases. My frustration with them has led me to tell the people I know to just pull the plug and teach kids themselves, or send them to a private school if they can afford it. By the time a parent pays or all the transportation costs, the sports fees and all other associated fees, public school is no longer free, as our tax money has been hijacked by a union labor force purely concerned with their own well-beings, as demonstrated by their actions.

My relief in these new heroes who are showing up in these dark days is welcomed because it will take more than my voice alone to continue to illustrate the problems at Lakota. And I want those voices to know that there is plenty of room in the No Lakota Levy tent for your voices, or to even start a group of your own. In our group there are no power struggles, there is no ego to get in the way of successfully defeating tax increases because a tax increase of any kind at this point in time would kill our community on the business side of its development, and we are fighting to keep it intact, so we don’t care who speaks to the paper, or who is on TV. We only care that the job gets done.

In No Lakota Levy I have taken on the role of being the visible target so I could take the bullets. In reality No Lakota Levy is very deep as an organization. One way to know the location of your enemy is to get them to take shots at you and see where the smoke comes from. That’s how you determine the position of a sniper; you look for the blast signature. Since I don’t care about public opinion, or care to ever run for public office, or plan to work with people who do want to run for public office, I am free to be that target and take the shots as our spotters in No Lakota Levy look for where the snipers are. Once we find them, we have been attacking them and exposing their cover.

In spite of what the Lakota School Board member Julie Shaffer pro levy groupies think, my intentions are much larger than a school levy fight. I only participate because this battle is in my back yard and I’m actually doing research for a novel I’m getting ready to start, and the evil people involved in extorting money from innocent families and their children is something I feel very passionate about, so passionate that this will be the subject of a future novel. Since I have done so much work behind and in front of a camera, it was the natural pick to have me be that target, which I have been happy to do not only for the satisfaction of beating back a system I consider inherently evil, but for research into my own future work. And this is why I haven’t had the time to hang out at school board meetings every time they call one. The meeting on Monday, March 12th will be the third school board meeting in one week. And remember the school board members get paid for every meeting they attend. My conclusion is that the board must need to compensate themselves for the increase in gas prices, which is why they are having so many meetings lately. Because once they get there they don’t do anything but cut aspects of education that aren’t in their contract with the labor unions.

Currently I have been putting the final touches on my Tail of the Dragon novel that is due out this year (2012) as it has just returned successfully from the copy editor.  In fact as I was writing this my editor sent me the final proof of the summary of that book as it will appear on the back cover.  Here is it:

Rick Stevens—a rebellious loner whose NASCAR dreams have fallen short—falls victim to the governor’s plans to run for President of the United States. Governor Wellington Royce of Tennessee relies on support from the Fraternal Order of Police to catapult him into the White House. Royce beefs up the police presence on The Great Smoky Mountains’ highways, and offers incentives to those generating citations from tourists. Thrown in jail, abused, and setup, Rick Stevens accepts an offer from the governor’s political enemies to declare war on the highway patrol. With twenty million dollars, Rick builds the car of his dreams and wreaks havoc in what will become the greatest car chase in history. The car chase becomes a journey of self-discovery and newfound romance, as a gauntlet of guns, missiles, and the might of the military wait for him at the finish line. The treachery of politics proves more sinister than even death.

I also spent the last two weeks as the Butler County Coordinator for the Workplace Freedom Amendment that we are shooting to put before Ohio voters in 2013. And I have been working hard with our team at No Lakota Levy to begin the new foundation Yes to Lakota Kids, so time has been short, and I simply do not have the time to sit and listen to a bunch of cackling chickens talk about nothing at a school board meeting. But yet the job does need to be done and I am very happy to see more members of the community getting involved.

Many people around Cincinnati do not remember when I released my book The Symposium of Justice in 2004. My marketing of that book was interrupted slightly by the Lakota levy fights of 2004 and 2005 which overshadowed much of the good press I was involved in when that book was released, which was a comparatively smaller project than the one I am currently working on called Tail of the Dragon. The marketing for The Symposium centered around Dayton and involved Wild West shows and film festivals primarily and served as a platform for setting up this most recent novel. The marketing for Tail of the Dragon, which I’m at work on right now will heavily involve the market of New York, Los Angeles, of course Cincinnati, Detroit, Dallas, Knoxville, Chattanooga, Atlanta, Nashville and Orlando specifically and will involve an aggressive radio campaign along with television.

And that comes back around to the Lakota Levy fight and the reason I have written so much on this blog. These postings I do hope will help people, because I write to share big ideas with people, hoping that they may become inspired to act. But my next book I have been trying to get my mind around for the last four years and I’m about ready to begin. It called, Overmanwarrior: The Trial of Fletcher Finnegan. I anticipate that this book will take me 5 years to write and will end up somewhere around one million words. To put that into perspective, for those who know how big the book Atlas Shrugged is, that classic novel by Ayn Rand is 645,000 words. My Overmanwarrior: The Trial of Fletcher Finnegan will be nearly twice as long.

I did not set out to write a book inspired by Ayn Rand. But my character of Fletcher Finnegan, introduced in The Symposium of Justice is very similar to John Galt as both characters are contemplations into the kind of character Friedrich Nietzsche explored in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, my favorite book of all time. Galt’s protagonist aims are to use his two friends to help the makers of the world withdrawal from the looters of society to illustrate the fault of collectivism so that proper identity and respect can be placed on those of value in society. Fletcher Finnegan in The Symposium of Justice was a kind of modern Zorro character, but in The Trial of Fletcher Finnegan he has evolved into the embodiment of the five primary characters in Atlas Shrugged all rolled up into one person. Instead of withdrawing from society as Galt advocated in Atlas Shrugged, Finnegan fights back in very flamboyant ways on a scale never before seen in a literary protagonist. I use Atlas as an example because that is the only novel I know of which has such strong protagonists. There simply isn’t any other example. Not even Zarathustra himself from Nietzsche’s classic achieved such a level.

The blog here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom is in effect a tool that the public can use to get its news outside of the traditional media outlets. But for me personally, it is production notes for creating this epic novel. And to get an understanding of how large a book of over 1 million words would be, as of this writing here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom there are currently just over 600 postings each running between 1500 and 2000 words each. Doing a rough estimation I have written currently on this blog site alone, over 1 million words in just a year and a half. So writing The Trial of Fletcher Finnegan over a 5 year span is certainly doable.

However, convincing a publisher to carry such a large book in print is a task in itself. It’s simply not done in the publishing world today. People do not read enough, even though book stores are more plentiful than ever and such a large book is intimidating. So to pull it off, I need to have a good commercial response to my Tail of the Dragon coming out in 2012 and going into 2013 in order to convince the publishers to carry such a large book, and I will need to use the finances off Dragon to help me fund the creation of Fletcher Finnegan. By funding I mean giving me the time to make a living while writing this very involved book. I calculate it to be a 10 hour a day job for about two years to pull off. Not just in writing, but the concept building. By the time The Trial of Fletcher Finnegan hits book stores I should be about to just turn 50 years old, and by then I hope to see that society has shifted from the current status of being a decadent blob of fools plummeting down a singularity toward the circumstances shown in A Brave New World, to one that is hopeful represented by the Tea Parties.

On Saturday I attended a class of such people from all walks of life who wanted to learn how to fix the world one vote at a time. I was refreshed to see young people in the audience taking notes. I met several other people who wanted to become very active who live within a few miles of me currently and were my own age. Chris Osterhues from the popular motorcycle group Sons of Liberty Riders approached me to introduce himself as I spoke with old freedom fighting friends and laughed with new ones. The person who invited me to this event said, “So Rich, when are you going to run for something. You’re popular, people like you, you’re controversial, you should run for an office.”

I told her, “I just want to write my books. I want to feed these people with ideas to carry them through the tangled web of politics. I want to give their minds food.” She and I sat for a moment in silence as the setting sun warmed our faces and just looked at the large crowd of people, who a year ago weren’t even thinking about being involved in anything political, and now they were taking a class to learn how to fight back against the evils of progressivism, and I breathed a little easier. In the beginning it was much harder, and now with more people involved, the battlefield slant is looking to turn in our direction. And five years from now, when those people and thousands like them are knee-deep in the trenches I want a to give them a work of modern American philosophy in the spirit of Ayn Rand, Ben Franklin, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the great John Locke to energize their spirits and carry them through to the next phase. It’s not enough to just show up for a school board meeting, or to fight tyranny in high-profile media battles. The culture of corruption itself must be dealt with, and the nature of mankind’s failure. In culture building, it comes from art that something old and ugly like progressivism must be replaced with something new that contains within it the original ideas that built America to begin with. In 2012 my contribution will be Tail of the Dragon. And by 2017-2018 it will be Overmanwarrior: The Trial of Fletcher Finnegan, the long-awaited sequel to The Symposium of Justice.

So I have plans that are large in scope. I’m about to become a grandfather by one of my daughters so on the family front I am as busy as I’ve ever been and if my mind has always been obsessed with philosophy and deep contemplation it is now more than ever, because such a book as The Trial of Fletcher Finnegan is completely new ground from the stand point of an author. It’s as difficult of a concept to wrap a mind around as the book that inspired the name of Fletcher Finnegan, another favorite of mine from James Joyce called Finnegan’s Wake, a book that is a puzzle, within a puzzle, within a puzzle. Every word in that classic book seems to have multiple meanings and seems to be written in some ancient language, but it’s not.  My task as a writer is to unravel those puzzles so that the people who want to become involved, my freedom fighting friends at the Saturday class, my motorcycle friends at the Sons of Liberty, and people like the guy pictured above who have joined in the school levy fights can pick up those unraveled words and consume them like food for their minds so that they can then pick up the world and carry it upon their backs to resurgence.

So it has been a welcomed sight to see more and more people getting involved. And please, do not think for a moment that by doing so you will be stepping on my toes. If you are reading this and would like to speak to members of the media along with me, or in my place, let me know. I will arrange it. The fight at Lakota is not Rich Hoffman’s fight. I am just the target that is taking bullets for the cause to allow it to mature behind the scenes as my friends look for the snipers positioned to shoot at me, allowing us to discover who the enemies are and where they hide. The problems at Lakota just like the problems of America will not be solved in such conflicts, but when more and more people step forward and begin to smoke out the enemies where they hide as we spot them. And to do that will require more foot soldiers than we currently have and will take a number of years to achieve.

Taken in small bits, the job is not difficult. It simply requires us all to take responsibility for the world around us and not to trust those who we elect blindly. The stories I place here will most likely in some form or another find their way into my 2017 book Overmanwarrior: The Trial of Fletcher Finnegan so consider it all a sneak peek, a behind the scenes look at the production notes I’m using to unravel the gigantic puzzle of the human race taking a new step into a larger world. And that is the task I spend most of my time puzzling through.

One of my daughters visited me on Friday night as my wife made a fantastic dinner–a curry dish that belonged in a five-star restaurant. As the aroma danced from the kitchen and my family awaited the start of the epic Clone Wars episode featuring Darth Maul from The Phantom Menace, my daughter showed me the new book she had just bought. It was a DK Publication, The History of Philosophy. Both of my daughters are very deep thinkers, and it gave me great joy to see that this 22-year-old woman considered this great book to be recreational reading, and she was glowing with excitement showing me its contents, which were immaculate.

The food was delivered to my lap by my smiling wife who was very proud of her curry creation and my family gathered around the TV to watch our long-awaited episode of Star Wars on The Cartoon Network. As the show started and I ate my food I realized that there was hope, that under all the bad news people are waking up. My daughters certainly are, but beyond that, there are common everyday people who are beginning to get engaged, the way they should have been all along.

Once everyone went home for the night, I spent the next three hours reading all my email. Finally at 3:33 AM in the morning I wrote the first words of my next novel, Overmanwarrior: The Trial of Fletcher Finnegan.

Fletcher Finnegan began again the fate of justice long vanquished by tyranny in the hearts of man.
For more on this character as I have worked to flush out the concept you can see it at this link:

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/12/the-hidden-world-of-the-overman/

And as to others who wish to become involved…………don’t be shy. It won’t hurt my feelings to have other names appear in the paper and to speak on TV. It will give me pride in my community and might just end up in my future novel.

Rich Hoffman

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

 

 

Protected: The Land of Illusion: Tears that fall late in the evening

This content is password-protected. To view it, please enter the password below.

Lakota Superintendent Mantia: The employement contract

My anger at Superintendent Mantia of the Lakota School District is not some unwarranted diatribe incited by a simple disagreement. There is a history which is shown at the beginning and ending of this article where I gave two public presentations, one for Educate Ohio in June of 2011 and again for the West Chester Tea Party in October of 2011 shortly before the election. One of the reasons the pro levy people think my arguments are combative, vitriolic and harsh are because they typically only speak with people of their own kind. They do not associate often with the 18,000 people who voted against the tax hikes, so are ignorant as to how the other side thinks, and they make no attempt to understand. This is why both groups that I spoke to about Superintendent Mantia and my high hopes that she would get the Lakota budget under control were greater in number than those who attend the typical school board meeting. We have a lot of supporters in the No More Tax Effort. If more levies passed in this recent election it is not because people support those schools, it’s that the schools wore out the resistance, which is by design. The message the schools send is that if a levy does not pass, it will be back. So resistance yields to the oppressive tactics of union controlled public schools.

For those levy supporters who think I’m some lone wolf who simply doesn’t want to pay taxes because I can’t afford it, keep indulging in that fantasy as you stay in your little circles of pro levy supporters thinking that you are good because you don’t know how to say NO. No Lakota Levy as an organization and our supporters are deep, and active, as you can see in my public presentations over education. In my presentations I defended Mantia hoping that she would do as those of us in No Lakota Levy do routinely, and that is make hard decisions to balance our budgets. And I feel like she made me look bad for giving her the benefit of the doubt. In fact, every core member of No Lakota Levy has had to work with budgets in the millions of dollars, had to fire, hire or ask employees for wage freezes or reductions, and have had to spend many sleepless nights rolling around over those decisions. That is why we have no sympathy for Superintendent Mantia. She has turned out to be not what she sold to the community, and we are disappointed—me specifically. Residents from Pickerington warned me how Mantia was, and they were right.

I know the tricks of school superintendents. I know what they learn in Levy University in Columbus because I’ve read the same books and material they have. I got this material from my friends who are current school board members and have attended this class. My information also comes from former school board members who want to blow the whistle on the corruption that goes on in public education. The tricks are standard for every school and are designed by the Ohio School Board Association and the Ohio Education Association to extort from the public using Saul Alinsky’s methods of consensus, money if communities refuse to increase taxes on themselves. Those methods include, cutting busing to increase the burden on parents and force them to pass a levy. If that doesn’t work, schools take away liberal arts electives. If that doesn’t work they make sports pay-for-play. And if that doesn’t work they lay-off teachers at the bottom of the seniority ladder to scare parents into a declining school district and plummeting property values. These methods are used in every single school in the entire state of Ohio because they all share a connection to the OSBA in Columbus.

Another OSBA strategy is to form good relationships with realtors in a community so that home sales will be directly connected to school levy support. That’s why Joan Powell, former president of the Lakota School Board and current board member is so involved at Lakota—her full time job is that of a realtor. And one of Lakota’s biggest pro levy supporters is another realtor, Pam Perrino. CLICK HERE TO REVIEW HER INVOLVEMENT AGAINST MY GROUP. This is all by design at the Ohio School Board Association (OSBA). It’s a system designed to stack the schools and labor unions against the community. Both of those women will tell you they do what they do because it’s in their heart to do so, but they were brought into the circle of power because of their status as realtors. They may not be aware of it because they are only looking at their small piece of the pie, but they are part of the overall strategy, and they play their roles in levy advancement as expected.

And this is the reason for the disappointment in Superintendent Mantia. No Lakota Levy thought that Mantia should have proposed a wage reduction to the school employees in order to sustain the district far into the future. That way everything the public expects from the school could have still been maintained, busing, sports, electives and so on. But Mantia chose to preserve the system designed by the OSBA and imposed hardship on the residents just as the OSBA teaches at Levy University. In fact, she followed the text-book of levy passage taught at Levy University word for word. And this is simply unacceptable.

So this is the reason for the anger. We are not a stupid group of people at No Lakota Levy. In fact, we’ve seen it all, done it all, and could perform many of the decisions we are asking Mantia to make in our sleep without breaking a sweat. The solutions are so obvious and so easy that it doesn’t even require thought. But Superintendent Mantia is taking up a quarter million dollars in compensation from the district’s tax payers and she has not done the job we expected. She instead stood up for the teachers union that she started in as a teacher herself, and she knows as a double-dipper that she would never receive such a high salary with such poor performance in any other occupation but school superintendent. She is standing up for the system that has made her wealthy by employing these extortion measures taken straight out of the OSBA Levy University Class given every November the week after elections in Columbus, Ohio.

So I’m putting up the contract for Superintendent Mantia here for the residents of Ohio to see, so they can see what a juicy deal she has—a deal she would get no place else in any field of work. If Superintendent Mantia were in the private sector she would not stay employed for a single week making the level of income she currently is. I wouldn’t mind paying for a token superintendent job if it wasn’t filled with so many perks and loaded as if she were a celebrity on a Hollywood film; it deserves close scrutiny from a public that must fund her lifestyle for performance that is lackluster in only 6 months of employment. I would encourage you dear reader to watch these videos completely, especially the radio broadcast, and read this contract. If you are interested in understanding the scoop of the problem, you can at least do that much. I’m making it easy for you.

Use the tools I’ve placed before you! This is a very serious problem that is much larger than just passing a tax increase or not.

This will determine the kind of world we chose to live in for the foreseeable future.

Now, to be fair, I had several friends who attended the school board meeting on Thursday, March 9th, and below is the report from one of them to me from that event, which does involve Superintendent Mantia.  Her response is one that I believe a person of her caliber should be able to handle over the position of a lawyer, because lawyers are in the pocket of the unions.   With the kind of contract Mantia has, I expect her to be smarter than the lawyers.  They make a lot less than she does.  But here is the final word as spoken from her mouth to my friend.

At 10:50 I stood and asked why they DIDN’T DO ANY CUTTING ANYWHERE and simply lowered salaries and benefits until they were BELOW the budget?
After the four of us who stayed to ask questions at the close of the evening were finished, Karen Mantia answered my suggestion.
 
She took about 15 minutes and said that solution had been considered, but she was warned by the lawyers that it was illegal and therefore OFF the table.
They are going to chop the Hell out of the Lakota School District to meet the budget.
SIMPLY lowering salaries is OFF THE TABLE, when the alternate is to virtually destroy the school system in Lakota?

Ms. Mantia said she and the Board DID NOT HAVE THE POWER to lower salaries and benefits.

She said WE had that power, referring to the NO Lakota Levy Group.

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):

www.Yes-to-Lakota-Kids.org

Yes to Lakota Kids & NO to Lakota Levies

Protected: Yes to Lakota Kids: The press conference timeline

This content is password-protected. To view it, please enter the password below.

Rich Hoffman is Evil, Mean, and Wants to Hurt Kids: Letters from my critics

For some bizarre reason the announcement that the new group created by the No Lakota Levy has created a firestorm of controversy……………..who would have thought such a thing. (SHRUG) And I was the target of much criticism. As of this writing I have only been able to read a fraction of the emails sent to me or to follow the links discussing me online. So for fun and perspective I am putting a few of them up here to share with my readers.

Anyone who reads here every day knows how foolish the following comments are except for the comment by Joe Montana. If you hit the link below you can see the whole thread of these comments, and the author called Joe Montana was actually thought to be me. But I had never heard of this online forum until one of my readers tipped me off to it today. So as a scientific experiment it is interesting to study just how these people think. Obviously prior to this posting are over 600 articles that I have written each of them over 1000 words a piece, so there is a lot of documented evidence that shames these poor people to shame. I respond at the end of this posting to one of the emails I directly received that I only read because I recognized the name coming from The Pulse Journal last week that I responded to this week. In fact, I’ll post my letter that is in the Pulse this week after my response to Laura Sanders who I use as a climax to this mess. Enjoy.

Joe Montana below starts a discussion in reaction to the announcement that Yes to Lakota Kids is providing money to needy students struggling to pay the $550 fees to play sports at Lakota. CLICK HERE TO REVIEW THIS ISSUE. (Caution, the text below is presented as written, grammatical errors and all.)  Also, remember that all the anger and talk of boycotting below was started with my announcment of helping children.  That’s how messed up these people are. 

http://yappi.com/forums/showthread.php?p=4978906

JoeMontana

Lakota will balk at this, for sure.

It would be great for the kids, and great for the district…

BUT, unfortunately, the only thing Lakota admin/board cares about is funneling as much money as possible to their union cronies.

Thus, since NoLakota is actually trying to help the district–rather than funnel money to the teacher’s unions–the higher-ups in the district will shun and badmouth them…

Don’t believe me??? Just watch this unfold, and tell me if there’s ANY other possible explanation than simply that these crooked thugs are trying to funnel money to their union cronies…

Stizostedion

I get so sick of idiots complaining about what teachers make or how much time off they get. Think of the job we are trusting them to do. We want them to mold the minds of that which is most precious to us, our kids. Yet, we don’t want to pay for it, at least not what it’s worth. Everytime a community votes against education it’s an assault on children. That guy running the No Levy campaign in Lakota is punching every kid there right in the stomach. And he’s laughing about it. People there need to take action against that guy and all the jack knobs falling in line behind him. Picket those businesses, picket his business, picket his house. Make sure people know he’s hurting their kids and their community. It’s one thing to make this about politics and money, but make it about the kids he’s hurting and he’ll wither. Because that’s what bullies do when faced with united opposition.

fish82

That’s the thing…there have been changes in compensation. No Lakota asked for a pay freeze. They got that. Instead of offering support, Rich Hoffman moved the goalposts and asked for benefit cuts. He got that. He moved the goalposts again, and asked for salary reductions.

Don’t get me wrong…I’m no cheerleader for Teacher’s Unions. That said, Rich Hoffman is a lying, passive-aggressive dooshbag.

Easthawks14
What’s most disturbing about this is Rich Hoffman is using this as an opportunity to become a hero and gain more favortism within the community to support his cause but what about all the other students that have been hurt – those in the arts, band, other activities, etc.

What’s also disturbing is No Lakota is largely backed by business owners who don’t want to pay more taxes. Common sense would say you want your business to be established in a healthy community that is prosperous and growing. Will a community with a minimalized school system foster growth? Will their business benefit from this? I hope their revenues fall as fast as my home value. There needs to be an all out boycott of businesses that support NoLakota.

Dear Rich Hoffman

You are making teachers out to be lazy, not worthy of the salaries they earn. I have close friends who teach in Lakota, and believe me, they do more in a day than you will do in a week. BACK OFF!!!!!!

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/04/06/pay-rate-for-the-top-625-teachers-at-lakota-schools-yes-the-number-grew-much-larger/#comments

 

If you are going to post salaries online, then make sure you get your facts straight. The top 625 are NOT ALL TEACHERS. They are administrators as well. The average teacher salary is $58,000. The average salary in Liberty Township is $107,000. Do you have a problem with that ratio? Don’t you think our community can afford to pass a levy?

I know now much your home is worth, and it’s about half as much as most homes in Liberty Township. People built their big houses here, knowing fully well how much their taxes would be. We are a highly-residential community with no big businesses to offset our property taxes. I pay $5400/year in taxes. How much do you pay? $2800? If you don’t want to live in an affluent community with good schools, then move!

You are ruining Lakota.

Laura Sanders

Pretty interesting isn’t it. Amazing how these people think. To my frequent readers here, you might think that these comments were written by children, but no, these are adults—I know it—it is scary to think. But these are functioning adults who are really lost and have a long way to go. So I am including here what I sent back to Laura since she decided to send me her real name and email address.

Dear Laura and the rest of you misfits, buffoons, lowlifes, and ignorant apologists:

You and your kind are the problem. You only see your little piece of the pie. And I’m concerned with all the jobs, not just teachers. And being able to pay is not the same being stupid and just paying. And I was here long before you were, and I’ll be here long after. You are a fair weathered resident that needs a vast education before we can even have a conversation.

I don’t care who your friends are. Don’t you even think to tell me to back off. You’re likely to piss me off more than I already am. You left me two messages; both of them aren’t worth the time of my dog. I do so much work in a week that I could do your job and any 10 of your teachers at the same time. Don’t be so stupid to assume you have any idea to declare your friends are equitable to my work week.

Keep drinking the Kool-Aid sweetie. And learning the value of someone’s home is pretty easy. That’s no technical marvel, but it’s cute that you think it is.

And to answer your question, yes, I think $58K in average salary is way too high for what we get out of those employees. For the same reason that Payton Manning was cut from the Colts, teachers with a high salary at the top of the scale that are under performing should be removed to make room in the budget. That’s good business. The education output will not change. Believe me.

And you are comparing household salary to individual salary. You just made my point for me. If the average salary at Lakota was in the mid 50 range, we’d have a balanced budget. In fact, we’d have excess money.

A correction from last week’s Letters to the Editor–the average Lakota employee is not making $58,000 per year, but rather $63,000 per year.

And no, we are not obliged to pay a tax increase because the community can afford it. The superintendent and school board have shown so little skill in dealing with a multi-million dollar budget that I wouldn’t give them .75 cents to buy a can of soda from a vending machine. The final straw for me was the second budget meeting held at Lakota East. Their idea of meeting the budget is to cut away the outside crust of their funding pie instead of dealing with the middle. Every cut made, including the administrative cuts from Monday were token cuts that deal with jobs that should have already been reduced. The cuts do nothing to handle the problems of fiscal year 2013, and 2014. There is no long-term plan but to ask for more money—forever!

If Superintendent Mantia tried to sell the smoke and mirrors game she and the school board pulled with these large forum budget cutting meetings in the private sector she would have been fired after the first meeting. They were an insult to the intelligence of the community.

The only hope I have for Lakota’s employees is that in 2013 Ohio will have the Workplace Freedom Amendment which will allow teachers stuck under the Lakota Education Association contract to leave that union enabling the community to deal with them individually instead of the current collective bargaining agreement that is bankrupting our current $160 million plus budget. Be sure to sign the petition when you see it to help us make that happen. In the meantime, No Lakota Levy has started Yes to Lakota Kids to help families pay for the sports fees that the district has consumed on excessive union contracts. We are taking donations and this will help kids in the short-run while the adults of the community get the budget straightened out by driving teaching costs down. You can get more info including applications and helpful links at www.Yes-to-Lakota-Kids.org

 And to those who are thinking of retaliation against me in ANY way.  A fair warning……………….

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/11/12/dead-men-tell-no-tails-a-fair-warning-im-obligated-to-give/

Bad idea…………….I’ve been doing this stuff for a long time.

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/

Home Schooling Under Attack: Government schools are for lazy parents

I certainly understand the tendency for parents to believe that they must send their children to public school in order to be a good parent. After all, our current culture has instructed us through those same government schools that going to a publicly run school is important to our lives. So I support my local public school grudgingly even though I believe that home schooling is far superior to public school. My kids went to public school. They attended Mason for the first half of the school lives, and then they graduated from Lakota. But for one year in between those transfers they were home schooled by my wife, and I think that was the most important year of their lives. It was hard at the time, and the choice was difficult. The decision to pull our kids out of school came from a battle over sex education in the fourth grade that we disagreed with. The school retaliated at our lack of “consensus.” My wife had been a room mom and helped the teachers three times a week and loved it. She dedicated enormous amounts of her time to not just my kids, but my kid’s classmates, which is how it is supposed to be.

But the school could not tolerate our family’s position against the sex education policies as they feared more parents might follow our rebellion, so they went after us in an aggressive way as a family, which was a really bad idea on their behalf. The school let my wife know that she was no longer welcome to be a room mom and my kids became targeted by bullies as soon as my wife was no longer in the building. That decision by the school led to unnecessary violence and a lot of hurt people climaxing in a fight between me and 22 teenage boys in front yard of our house.

The boys were encouraged by teachers in the school to pick on my kids and the police took the side of the teachers because of the union “brotherhood” which led to the massive fight. The boys made it so my kids could not ride their bikes on the sidewalk in front of our home, openly challenging us to a confrontation. And I was not going to allow my children to be bullied by a bunch of rough-looking 10th, 11th and 12th grade Mason students. It is now a family joke that when the movie Gran Torino came out a few years ago, it was that last role by Clint Eastwood that reminded them of life in our house during that time, because I was at war with the entire neighborhood. Instead of being an old man at the end of my life like Eastwood was in that film, I was a young thirty something that seemed oddly misplaced among others in my age group who preferred to just keep the window curtains pulled and do what the thugs told them to. Instead I dug down and was in constant confrontation everyone which can be most closely explained in the clips below, which is why this film is a personal family joke.

The fight was unexpected. The calculation was that like every other family we would stay inside our locked up house and hide from the scary teenage boys. They didn’t think I would go outside and confront the mob with my bullwhips and fight them squarely because many of them were under aged, only a few were over 18. But that’s what I did and it caused quite a ruckus that lasted for an entire year and involved the police force of Mason all the way up to the chief of police. But this whole mess started in our kid’s elementary school and I finally convinced my wife that the best way to teach our kids was to home school them, so we pulled them out of school, and that caused our entire family to turn on us. So not only did the community turn on us but our family did as well. In that year we learned that there wasn’t anyone we could trust but ourselves. And that was the year that my kids learned more than any other, and most notably shaped them into the adults they now are. During that trying time I heard every one of the points that Glenn Beck discussed here from his GBTV episode on home schooling. He is 100% right! My family has been there and done it and can testify completely to what he is saying.

Now in hindsight, with my kids both grown and living their lives I can say honestly that I wish we had done home schooling for more than a year. Both of my kids finished their high schools with online courses and nearly two years early, because they wanted to travel and see the world, which is what they did. When their peers in school were graduating high school and getting their diplomas my kids were touring the London Museum of History and taking pictures of Big Ben. They followed the path of their mother who also left school early after her credits were finished. By the time my wife’s graduating class was putting on their robes to graduate she was married to me and we were on a cross-country trip traveling anywhere fast at over 100 MPH. Out of my core family I’m the only one who actually walked the stage in a robe with my friend Hickory who I’ve stated here sold his Honors Society Robe to a fellow student for a hundred bucks. CLICK HERE to review. My wife and I have lived very full lives and the whole graduation experience seems petty and stupid to us compared to other things we’ve done, and we would have done our kids a better service if we had home schooled them earlier and for more years.

I always viewed public education as education propaganda. It started for me in kindergarten. My teacher was an idiot and I remember thinking that at the time. My mom was always very active in my life and she like my wife was a room mom who took care of not just me, but my class mates. I remember watching lots of movies with my mom and know for a fact that I learned more from watching movies and documentaries with her and spending time around my grandparents than anything I learned in school.

Public school always felt like a waste of time. I spent most of my time getting into trouble with the teachers, getting into fights with other students, or drawing on my papers and writing stories. The art teachers and English teachers tried to capture my talent and steer me and I shut them all out. If I had listened to those teachers it’s quite likely I would be working for a newspaper somewhere as a reporter making a fraction of what I make now, and I wouldn’t be about to release my second novel. That’s not a knock against my reporter friends who read here every day, but they know it’s the truth. Advice is only as good as the person who gives it, and I wanted no advice from a teacher who worked for public education because I saw no value in their job. I felt that way as a child and I feel more strongly than ever as an adult. To me teachers were mind numb soldiers for something I wanted nothing to do with. I did not want them to impose on me the limits of their thinking.

When my kids were 5 and it came time for enrollment my mother was especially concerned when she heard my wife and me arguing about getting my oldest daughter ready for school. My wife enjoyed school until she met me, and saw nothing wrong with it. For her it was a bench mark, a natural progression to adulthood. For me it was like sending my kids to a death camp of propaganda. There was never a question that I was always radically independent compared to others around me, so I bent on my position because my entire family thought I was the one who was wrong. Of course as it turned out, I was the only one who was right. But you live and learn.

I told my daughter before she got on the school bus for the first time not to worry, that I’d deprogram her when she got home. Of course at age 5 my wife thought my daughter wouldn’t remember me saying that but at age 22 she still does, and luckily she listened to what I said. Now after all those years of raising our kids and seeing all the problems up close I was excessively right at age 25 about the intention of public education. The goal is not to make the best and brightest. It is to make kids average. Home schooled kids do better even with parents teaching them because those parents care about making their kids exceptional, and setting the bar high makes the children respond accordingly. That’s what’s missing in public education, it’s the expectation level.

Home schooling as an option is good because it brings competitive forces to public education and forces them to adjust their costs. Teachers are not worth 50K to 60K per year when they produce such complacent results next to the home schooled child taught by a parent with maybe only a high school education or college at best. Having home schooling as an option helps break up the monopoly of public education which is the intention of the government-run schools, it always has been. I knew it when I was a kid, even if I didn’t know why. I knew it when I was raising my own kids. And I know it now. My kids have had much improved lives because most of their socializing occurred outside of public education. They have done more in their first 25 years than most of their classmates will do in their first 50 and that’s a real shame. Social limits in life are started in public education. The chains are placed upon a child’s mind in government-run schools and I am even surer of it now than I was when I was younger. When I was a young man, I only had a feeling about it. Now I have facts.

There hasn’t been one day that my wife has woke up and wished she went to her graduation ceremony. She doesn’t ever feel like she missed something, because the activities we were doing were much larger in scope of experience. But many of the family that ridiculed us for home schooling our kids used those experiences in public education as bench marks of social development, getting a class ring, a jacket, and a cap and gown. It turned out that those family members were still stuck in some perpetual 15-year-old mentality and even at age 40 and 50 years old looked fondly back to their high school days with yearning. And I think that’s pathetic.

I outgrew public education within two weeks of starting kindergarten. My wife outgrew it at age 17. My kids did by second grade. The rest of the way they learned most of their information from me and their mom at home. They whizzed through school and were routinely on the honor role every single year, because it was easy for them, because I set the bar high at home. Public education is simply a bad product. It’s a failed social experiment and needs complete reform. It certainly doesn’t need additional funding. It needs less, and it needs competition to keep it honest, and all the unions should be made illegal. Unions have no place in public education.

So use public education if you want. Have your kids play the sports and socialize with the other kids. But in my opinion if you rely on public education to teach your kids exclusively, you are a lazy parent and a fool. You are surrendering your child’s life to an institution that will mentally confine the thoughts of your child to a life of social slavery and mundane misery. If you really want your child to learn and to be a good person, then you’ll home school them and you’ll do it as soon as humanly possible. In my eyes, it’s your obligation as a parent. And those who don’t at least try it I have no respect for.

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 Courage of Jada Williams: Fighting against the machine

The reason I fight against the public school establishment and the money it takes to fund it is embodied perfectly in the recent harassment of Jada Williams, the 13-year-old girl who recently wrote an essay about Frederick Douglass and compared it to her own life. In Jada’s essay she stated, “How the teachers do not want children to exceed their levels. They want you to stay on certain levels. They don’t feel like they need to instruct you.” Jada is saying from the viewpoint of a student what many of us have always suspected, that teachers under union rule have become complacent and are more concerned about social reform of a progressive nature than actually teaching children anything. The story has touched off a national outraged after Jada won the Frederick Douglass Foundation of New York award, The Spirit of Freedom. Once she returned back to her school the teachers had passed her essay around and attempted to paint her as an angry child that needed help. Glenn Beck covered this issue recently on GBTV: Check it out.

The teachers using the classic Delphi Technique of building a consensus retaliated against Jada deliberately dropping her grades from “A’s” to “B’s” and attempted to use her mother against her by bringing the mother in to “counsel” that Jada was an “angry” child that needed help.

Well, all the behavior above is constant with many such stories and is exactly why public education is failing. Instead of the best of the best, such as Jada, being displayed as an example of excellence, she is instead harassed. People like Jada are frequently the targets of “bullying” in public education because the teachers subconsciously enjoy the behavior of bringing down those who show themselves as exceptional. After all, public education is not about teaching children to be the best. It is to teach them to be average, to not stick their neck up too high; otherwise it might get chopped off. Schools only use the talents of people like Jada to win tax levies in their districts, then once the money is won by the community children like Jada are tossed onto the scrap heep and abused until the school needs more money. You can see the actual reading of the essay here:

Lucky for Jada, she had a mother who stood behind her daughter and understood the game being played against her family and they fought back, which is how the story managed to break out into the national media. If not for this family fighting back and not just taking the bad behavior, this story would have been stuffed under the carpet forever.

This is certainly the case of the recent Modesto teacher who ran off with his 18-year-old student leaving his wife and kids. It was the mother of the girl who refused to take the manipulation lying down and took matters into her own hands with a Facebook campaign. If the mother hadn’t made a big deal about the matter, the school would have kept the teacher on the payroll and would have found a way to cover him. Because the mother unleashed a public outcry, the teacher had to resign from his comfy job so that he could move from a six figure salary into an apartment collecting unemployment. We’ll see how long that love lasts once the teacher’s wife takes everything he has and no school will hire the child molester leaving him to work in the private sector for 30-40% less money. My hat’s off to the mother for standing up for what’s right.

I can say that in my own district of Lakota I know of a family that experienced similar bad behavior on behalf of the teacher. The school rationalized that the sex was between “consenting” adults and circled their wagons to protect their own. The case ended up at the State Board of Education, yet nobody in the media covered it, and the school went into damage control because they were trying to paint a picture of excellence to the community so they could win a tax increase in a fall 2011 vote. It’s exactly the same behavior as what was leveled at Jada Williams. The staff and teachers treated the situation as though this particular family was the villains, because they threatened the sanctity of the education institution. You can review that case by CLICKING HERE.

What all these stories have in common is a lack of customer service. The public schools, (government schools) believe that the community exists to serve the employees. They have a similar attitude toward the public that one might find at the license bureau where the employees tend to treat the customers badly because they know the customers HAVE to use them if the customer wants to drive a car. The teachers believe that the parents need the school otherwise their child will be uneducated. So they treat the customer with little respect. However, Jada Williams is obviously smarter than those around her and the teachers know it. So they attempted to pull the mother into the scheme of things to put pressure on Jada to “fall in line.” Lucky for Jada, she has a good mom and knows that her daughter was being manipulated, that the grade changes from “A’s” to “B’s” were not because her daughter was performing badly, but because the teachers were punishing her daughter for criticizing the teaching profession.

The way to end this kind of tyranny is to call it out when you see it. Do not trust that the teachers have your child’s best interest in their minds. Do not assume such a thing. Hold their feet to the fire because they exist to serve you, the customer. They are in essence no different from a typical worker at a fast food restaurant. If you don’t like the way they make your hamburger, or if they get your order wrong, do you not routinely go back to the counter to have it corrected? And sometimes, you must do the same thing at the public school, because the employees are lazy and well protected by their syndicate union. The only thing that can protect your child is you the parent. If you trust the teaching union syndicate 100% of the time you are doing your child a disservice.

It took courage for Jada Williams to do what she did in her essay. And it took courage for her mother to stand by her side when the heat started to pour on. I wish with every cell in my body that every American were like Jada and her mother. If they were, I would have no need to write here, because I would know that people would do the right thing. But unfortunately Americans like these are few and until they are many, they will be held in high esteem and honored for their uniqueness, which is the actual tragedy. For a society to exceed, it needs many Jada’s. When they are few and far between, they can be ridiculed as being “different” then we have a democratic system that is ruled by the stupid, and that type of society will fail eventually.

It is that kind of society that we currently have, a rule by the stupid, because they rule in mass. This is why America was designed to be a Republic, so that the majority of fools built by public education could not run the country into the ground on the whims of mediocrity. But the smart among us cannot hold back the damn of foolishness forever. More Jada’s are needed! And more parents of such geniuses are needed to run the gauntlet of public education to protect their children from ineptitude and perpetual stagnation so that society can once again succeed.

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/