Tag: education funding

The Bee Hive of Lakota Schools: Parasites, Thugs and Communists

A wonderful example of the labor union hypocrisy penetration of public education came to me through an email message from a guy who communicates with me regularly arguments contrary to mine. As it is well-known by now, I report virtually every bit of news that comes out of my school district of Lakota with the intention to combat the constant tax requests imposed by that education institution upon my community.  I write at least one article every day, sometimes two or three. When Lakota is light on news, I cover other topics discussing schools all across the country, and sometimes just to take a break I talk about other kinds of things all together.  However, the primary focus of my blog is the evils of public education particularly centered on my home district.

Of course there are people who take great offense to what I write, because they profit off the education business in some way or another as it currently is.  And those people look constantly for some way to undermine my arguments.  That is the spirit of the letter listed below where the commenter sent me three pictures of nice, pleasant women who teach at Cherokee Elementary as an attempt to invalidate my claims that teachers are typically, parasites upon civilization, thugs as their radicalism brings harm to the communities that employ them, and are serving an occupation that is designed around the philosophy of communism.  I list the letter below without the pictures of the teachers to protect them from unneeded scrutiny.

Rich,

 

I am a little tired of seeing images of teachers from other cities in your blog.  So I give you images of three teachers from Cherokee Elementary.  The titles above them have been given to them for no apparent reason other than they are teachers in Lakota, just as you have labeled virtually every teacher in Lakota as being parasitic, a communist, and a thug.  Why don’t you start with these three teachers in your effort to call out the bad guys instead of beating around the bush with the out-of-towners you like to put in your blog.

 

Parasite

 (picture omitted)

Thug

  (picture omitted)

Communist

 (picture omitted)

 

 

William Schmidt

 

 

What I love about that letter is it shows the weakness of the labor argument.  The primary driver of high taxes imposed upon communities by their school districts is the collective bargaining agreements that were typically reached through the threat of labor strikes by the same teachers that were mentioned above.  It is through collectivism that the budgets of Lakota were wrecked—as all boats in the teacher labor pool rise together regardless of skill level and personal behavior.  Typically, through collectivism, the bad teachers such as the parade of teachers who have been busted recently at Lakota for sexual misconduct hide their evil actions behind the smiling faces of the nice teachers exhibited from Cherokee Elementary.  Through collectivism the bad, unskilled, and corrupt disguise their failures behind the good deeds of the few.

When a bee hive is identified as a threat to a small child out of fear that the youngster might swat at it and stir up the hive of bees into stinging in retaliation, it is the fear of the collective bees that is the threat.  But when individual bees are seen landing from flower to flower harmlessly doing their business, they might be considered a thing of beauty.  Typically when I see a bee land in my swimming pool, I will scoop it out hoping to save it, so that it can live life one more day.  But if a bee hive were near a spot where a child I cared about played, I would incinerate the hive killing thousands of bees in the process to protect the child.

The collective bargaining agreements reached by the teachers unions are a bee hive in our communities.  It protects the bad by using the good as props to show value for the collective whole, which is what the letter writer above was attempting to do—sensing that public sentiment is very much against their public education arguments.  He is attempting to play on my sentiments, which are universally human, to fish out a struggling bee out of a pool to save it from drowning, when I am arguing the incineration of the entire hive.  The hope is that by pulling the focus away from the collectivism that caused the trouble of creating school levies and focusing on the individual lives of a few teachers the bad behavior of the of the collective whole will be forgotten.   They are attempting a trick from the past which created the entire problem.

Collectivists in education want the power of group force behind them to advance their position, but when they get into trouble they seek individual recognition.  When a teacher has sex with a student it is just one or two bad apples that have went bad, but when they want more money, they collectively stop work and hold children hostage from their educations to force wage increases.  I show routinely that these problems are nationwide and exist in every school where labor unions control the political structure.  This leaves the only strategic maneuver by them to loot off the good merits of a few teachers to justify the cost of the entire bee hive.  The teachers mentioned above I have no doubt are nice people taken individually.  They are someone’s mother, someone’s daughter, someone’s special someone, and are not the epitome of evil.  Yet, they allow their good names to be tarnished in association with the group hive of their labor union where statist advocates use the good deeds of a few to justify the evils of the many with looted value.  This makes them every bit the menace as the child molester because the pervert is allowed to hide behind such good teachers through the collective bargaining process.  This makes the entirety of the teaching profession in public school an evil entity which should be defunded at the very least, and eradicated politically before it further destroys the next generation the way it has the previous three.

The attempt to use three mild-mannered teachers from Cherokee Elementary as a way to run cover for a profession that advocates open communism, and radical Democratic political policy on the backs of children is sheer evil.  Evil is not always in the biggest, scariest foe, but sometimes is most dangerous when the single bee stuck in the swimming pool appears harmless enough, but is simply a trap for the entire hive.  Public education is on a declining trend and its advocates are seeking the good name of the very few to loot their collective value for their perpetual salvation.  However, eventually just like money, good deeds do run out and once the good stop offering themselves up as sacrificial victims to the merits of collectivism, the communists, the thugs, and the social parasites will have nowhere left to turn as they are then exposed for lack of anything to hide themselves behind.  This is the nature, and frustration of the note sent to me from an education advocate who can’t fathom such a realization.  But even if the skill is not present to see the facts, the facts exist and will not go away just because pro education supporters wish them to.  Once the masks of goodness are stripped away from individual analysis, what becomes quickly evident is that the teaching profession is filled from the top to the bottom with parasites, thugs, and communists.  This leaves the next statement which should then be obvious to all—what will society do to protect themselves from this diabolical menace that unleashes upon all society an invisible attack designed to conquer the minds of children before anybody ever realizes it?  The first step is to not approve tax increases, and from there let the system collapse on itself.  The way to destroy the bee hive is not to become filled with compassion for one single bee, but to see the threat as a whole.  In this case, every public school in America is a bee hive filled with busy bees functioning as a collective unit for the manufacture of honey.  But in these schools the honey is not the kind consumed as food, but is taxes for the solitary consumption of the federal government and their statist policies of doom concocted with tyranny in mind sold to the public through promises of comfort…………and goodness.

 

Notice how all those lip dub videos were published around the same time as Lakota did their video.  Lakota wasn’t doing anything new.  They were just copying off everyone else like all collective organisms do, and that is what they are teaching children.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

Common Core at Lakota: Jaden Smith “School Is The Tool To Brainwash The Youth”

The reason I have been pointing out recently the excessive popularity centering on the war games from Fantasy Flight Games is that there is an obvious social shift that modern statists are not observing.  The amount of people who are rushing out to purchase new updates of the new Star Wars Miniatures game is quite astonishing.  The reason is that when I was a kid, it was very unpopular to be such a geek and openly play Star Wars games, or even Dungeons and Dragons.  That kind of activity came with a kind of social stigma that was negative.  If a young person didn’t play a sport, or hang out with a certain kind of popular personality type, they were on the out and thought of as social rejects.  But in 2013 that stigma is all but gone.  To get a sense of what I’m talking about watch the video below which was an annual address given by Fantasy Flight Games at the recent Gen Con in Indianapolis.  Pay particular attention to the 41 minute mark of the video and measure the crowd reaction.

I find that an important observation for the simple reason that within ten years there will be a dramatic shift in public sentiment toward the traditions of public education, especially the benefit of extra-curricular activities like football and cheerleading.  As the college bubble busts, millions of kids realizing they are not going to get a scholarship to a school that will only waste their time will not submit to the age-old scam of public education funding. When the youth of the current generation, the age of young people who are rushing out to purchase the latest Fantasy Flight Game offering, there will not be sympathetic ears to future levy requests and the type of tripe offered by the Lakota school system shown below attempting to sell the benefits of Common Core instruction to a gullible public.Common Core Curriculum 1


Common Core is a statist education system, and those who support it typically see big government solutions to family problems.  They envision the school stepping in to a family to save the child from a future their parents are not qualified to provide—at least as defined by the statist.  The pro and con selections above are clearly in favor of preserving the present education system—which a year or two ago might have upset me greatly.  But there is a trend forming that the supporters of Common Core and public education in general has not yet identified—the trend that can be seen in gaming circles where young people from age 15 to 30 are gathering to play games like Magic the Gathering, X-Wing, and War Hammer.  Those gamers are not raising families as their predecessors did many years ago, the types of people who attended the Cherokee Elementary meeting about Common Core shown in the above documents.  Those previous generations loved the social activity of public school, the bands, the cheerleading and the football.  The next generation doesn’t care so much, and it shows.  There’s nothing in a Friday night football game for them when it is far more exciting to play a war game with friends over pizza.Common Core Curriculum Page 1 of 2

When I was a kid, only remote pockets of people did these kinds of things, playing games and indulging in “anti-social” behavior which was the typical stereotypes of Dungeon and Dragon players.  Most everyone else craved to “be seen” at the football game parents and students alike.  In this way, the school was the center piece of a community, and the labor unions took advantage of the social addiction with high taxes for wages that were clearly inflated.  Increasingly, the demographic group who plays Fantasy Flight types of games and video games is changing the marketplace.  Speaking with these people increasingly with my experiences playing X-Wing there is a noticeable rebellion against school centered activity.  I do not see today’s X-Wing, and Magic players sitting in a future meeting of Common Core education and listening like mindless drones to the diatribes of big government school board types.  I see a rejection of state centered education in favor of alternatives.

Jaden Smith represents well this new emerging public school sentiment from the upcoming generation.  Jaden might be best known as the star of the remake of “The Karate Kid” and for his lifelong role as the son of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, but the 15-year-old is also starring in his own online controversy after sounding off against America’s education system, calling school a brainwashing tool.  And guess what………….It should come as no surprise, but as a 45-year-old man, I agree with the young fellow.  He’s dead right.Common Core Curriculum Page 2 of 2

Jaden tweeted to his more than 4.5 million followers on Sept. 12, “School Is The Tool To Brainwash The Youth” and “If Newborn Babies Could Speak They Would Be The Most Intelligent Beings On Planet Earth.”

Jaden, 15, is considered Hollywood royalty, being a friend of Justin Bieber and dating a sister of the Kardashians, Kylie Jenner, but some people say he is setting a bad example with his comments.

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/entertainment/2013/09/jaden-smith-finds-wisdom-in-everybody-dropping-out-of-school/

Jaden Smith’s opinion is rather typical of the gaming crowd—a crowd that is growing rapidly.  Again, when I was a kid, nobody spoke the way Smith did.  Nobody wanted to be considered a “social outcast.”  But increasingly, it is cool to be against statism, and to play table-top war games and World of Warcraft late into the night.  Those people once they become property owners of their own and get married are likely to plug their children into a computer and homeschool them so that they can save the expense of paying for fees at a public school for typical sports programs, and transportation costs.  The parents of tomorrow won’t be whisking their children off to soccer games to satisfy some silly social imposition of public opinion—they will be playing games with their kids at their dinner tables and staying home to save the money so they can buy more games from Fantasy Flight Games.

I bought a new B-Wing fighter over the weekend from the Wave 3 release of Star Wars: X-Wing.  The store owner told me that his shipment of 50 arrived on Thursday and were gone by Sunday.  I bought his last one. Ten years ago, I along with a handful of others would have been the only ones to make such a purchase.  Today, there are at least 50 in three days.  Ten years from now, it will be commonplace, and high school sports will be the rarity.  The social gains made in public school that were so important to previous generations are dying on the vine, and Common Core, with all the cheerleading by statists for it, is an education system that is currently on the life support of extraordinary high taxes paid by a sympathetic generation who still sees public schools as the center of communities.  But at Yattaquest in Mt. Healthy on a Friday night, or Gamestop any day of the week, an entirely new voting bloc is emerging, and they feel about public school the same as what Jaden Smith does.  When they grow up and have property and their own families, they won’t listen to the kind of Common Core presentations that Joan Powell and company performed at Lakota with the above documents.


Public education may win a victory here and there, but the nail is already in their coffin.  The youth of today will not support it in the future the way that other generations have because they have seen the scam firsthand.  The statists who advance the myth that public education and society in general are the pillars of a community are going to learn in the very near future the folly of their beliefs.  To see the future, visit a war game store on the weekend and study the type of people who are so passionate about those games.  Society may call them nerds, but they are smart, because their hobby demands they use their brains, and they see through the veil of statist education programs like Common Core—and they won’t bite on the bait thrown into the tax increase waters.  They won’t care if the statists call them names such as selfish, greedy, or anti-social.  Because all they will care about is having enough money to purchase a new pack of Magic the Gathering, or X-Wing Miniatures.  To them, the schools can rot away into oblivion and free the children who are imprisoned within their clutches of unthinking tyranny.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

The Communist Teachings At Lakota: Superintendent Mantia Protects Teacher Wages

The scouting report at Lakota regarding all things campaign related is that I am a narcissist that thrives in the spotlight and the way to win this next election is to diffuse me without engagement—so not to play into my strengths.  Lakota as a progressive institution find it appalling that any individual would see themselves as “bigger “than their socially centered school.  On the other hand, my scouting report on Lakota is that they are the narcissists as a collective organization who believes they are the center of the community, and that they are acting on behalf of what’s good.  The reality is that they are a cancerous leech that uses children to drive unionized government workers into inflated wages and have tied themselves over time to real estate values as a back-up to their child extortion racket.  As a progressive organization they were set up years ago to fulfill the communist infiltration of America after McCarthy overplayed his hand—and the insurgents were emboldened by the public support of their cause which followed.  Communism sought to infiltrate the public school system through the teacher unions and advance progressive goals, and there was never a finer example of this trait than the article by Superintendent Mantia in this week’s Today’s Pulse.

To know how ridiculously misleading and parasitic the Lakota school system intends to make itself upon the community which is its host it is important to read the quarter page public awareness column that the community newspaper gives to Lakota’s Superintendent each week.  This latest week, as much as their campaign strategy has been designed to diffuse my “narcissism” Mantia acknowledges that she is reading here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom frequently, because she addressed several of my recent points made upon these pages.  Her topic this week was a proposal to reduce fees in extracurricular activities so to increase student participation.  But first she felt she needed to set the record straight on the value of teachers who volunteer their time—“for a small fee of course”—to provide students with extracurricular activities.  She said, “Many, though not all of our extra-curriculars are guided by our teachers.  They earn a small amount of extra money for doing it, but the vast majority put in far more hours than they’re required to, because they love what they’re doing and know how much it means to kids.  Per-hour our coaches and advisors could make far more money working at any fast food restaurant.”  The most dangerous part of that statement is that Mantia is a quarter million dollar member of Lakota’s management team and they are preparing to engage the labor union in 2014 contract negotiations.  Mantia clearly is on the side of the teachers and the union based on just the statement she provided above—so anyone hoping that Lakota will put up a good fight against the union can wake up.  Mantia is a former teacher, and she is on the business side of teachers.  The management at Lakota is bought and paid for by the labor union and they are just “narcissistic” enough to believe that the residents of Lakota are stupid enough to supplement their scam with higher taxes.

Mantia goes on to say, “The two qualities we see young people develop so often in extra-curricular activities are leadership and teamwork.  They also learn the value of sacrifice and hard work, and often, other life lessons.  They may have to accept that they may not always be the star.  Sometimes they will have other roles to fill.”  She goes on for several more paragraphs with the same kind of progressive drivel for the next quarter page in the newspaper in that same fashion neglecting to report that the causes for the high fees imposed upon students and their families in the first place are due to her mismanagement.  She chose to raise sports fees to punish parents for voting down Lakota’s previous three levies, and not ask the teachers and other Lakota employees to take a 5% pay cut which was proposed by No Lakota Levy after the levy defeats.  Instead she advised the rest of Lakota’s management to raise sports fees to protect the teachers who work under her from unnecessary public scrutiny over their average salaries of 63K per year.  She chose protecting the highly paid public employees over the community health then, and now to appear as though she were doing the community a favor ahead of the fourth levy attempt, she is floating the idea of being “compassionate” so that she can earn votes for a levy allowing her to throw that money gained straight at her upcoming union contract—which she already blew the negotiations by revealing her pro-teacher position—which for those who know her was a foregone conclusion.  CLICK HERE TO SEE THE FINANCIAL FACTS ABOUT THE UPCOMING LEVY.

Mantia had the audacity to state that her teachers would make more money working at a fast food restaurant then they would be paid to stick around a few extra hours a day to teach kids during extra-curricular activities.  For those who aren’t so good at math, with an average salary of 63K per year, the teachers average approximately $30 dollars an hour, so teachers can make a lot of extra cash off their “extra-curricular sacrifices.”   But what’s worse in Mantia’s comments are the things she values from these experiences which come straight out of the progressive playbook, sacrifice, team-work and other “shared values.”

The statements about communist penetration of our public schools have been underway for many years, so long that it is doubtful that Mantia has the intellectual history to grapple with the issues.  She and her teachers are paid well to not pay attention to the “big picture” only to teach it.  She was raised into the system and knows of nothing else.  The attack against America was subtle, and occurred before her time.   She believes she is sticking up for her employees with her comments and support of another tax increase against the community.  But she is the one who’s narcissistic, and wrong.  My father-in-law was visiting over the weekend and told me the story of how on Friday he was called into a school district where he lives in Kentucky as a substitute—a very affluent district that is the home of many thoroughbred owners.  The demographics there are very similar to Lakota.  He was called in to teach as he has been a teacher for public schools for several decades, and now in his later years does it only as a substitute.  He holds several degrees, one of them a Master’s in geology.  He reported his anger to me upon seeing two of the topics given by an advanced English teacher to their class written on the chalk board, one on the merits of Marxism, the other on the merits of feminism.  Students had to pick one of those two topics to write about.  It wasn’t hidden with subtle dialogue the way that Lakota hides their progressive educations, because there isn’t a narcissistic Rich Hoffman in my father-in-law’s school district to call them out, so they recklessly placed their agenda up on the chalk board for all to see.  He was aghast at what his very affluent public school was teaching children and his obvious question—why wasn’t there a third topic about capitalism to choose from?  The answer was that public schools are not about American traditional values, they are about collapsing economies and advancing fairness for all—at the expense of productivity.  They are about higher taxes through schools as a way to redistribute income from one sector of the economy to another and they advance their agenda recklessly through the narcissism of the parents who support a large centralized institution that is simply a parasite upon the community.  Those parents believe that in exchange for their support of people like Superintendent Mantia, and the 63K per year teachers at Lakota, that their child will escape a life of mediocrity and become successful adults.  But what those parents discover too late is that the taxes raised are intended to be spent on teaching their children the merits of sacrifice—of sharing their wealth for the benefit of others.  What their children are learning, which was confirmed in the comments of Superintendent Mantia in the Sunday, September 15, 2013 edition of Today’s Pulse of Butler County, is that kids are learning to work hard for the sacrifice of others so that collective society can advance fulfilling the aims of communists many years ago.  These school officials will mislead, manipulate, and stoop to any low to advance the progressive platform.

The fight of our day is not in Syria, Russia, or even the Middle East, it is in our public schools where saboteurs are using our money stolen from property taxes to convert our children into socialists through an advanced communist plot hatched before Superintendent Mantia was even born.  She is paid to advance that plot and look not too closely at their intentions—which is driven by government for the service of government with the ultimate example of narcissism provided anywhere.  And it is our task to put an end to their scheme.  There is no hiding it now; they are out in the open with their intentions.   All that is required now is to admit that such sinister plots are at play and they intend to feed off the innocent minds of our children for a social goal that is not in their best interest.  As Mantia said in her article, sometimes kids need to “learn the value of sacrifice and hard work, and often, other life lessons.  They may have to accept that they may not always be the star.  Sometimes they will have other roles to fill.”  Those roles under communism are to work hard for the benefit of the greater good, a greater good that is determined by mother government for the benefit of itself and the employees who make it grow.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

A Morning In Liberty Township: Celebrating a backyard fantasy land of creativity and life yet to live

IMG_8055I usually wake up at 5 AM every morning to begin my day, and I am often alone with the early morning noises that accompany a sunrise.  I never tire of mornings.  There is something optimistic about every one of them that I find endlessly enduring.  Every start of a new day is a hope for something that was better than the day before.  However, over the weekend I awoke to find my wife still up, not yet having gone to bed, baking and preparing for a mammoth day of celebration that occurred at my oldest daughter’s home—a celebration of my youngest daughter’s first born son paying tribute to his first birthday.  CLICK HERE TO REVIEW THE DAY HE WAS BORN.   My daughters created for our first grandson a complete conversion of their Liberty Twp home into a story book themed party inviting both sides of the family to a mythological exercise that will lay the path for static patterns lasting a lifetime.  For the many birthdays that follow, my grandson will have this first one to launch him onto a lifelong quest of adventure, curiosity, and creativity.

In our family creativity is extremely important.  I raised my girls on the idea of creative enterprise even when the world no longer values such things because the benefits extend well into more remote aspects of individual lives.   As little girls my wife and I would allow them to convert the entire house into the concepts of their creative thoughts.  My girls had access to the entire basement to create anything they wished any time they desired.  If their creative enterprises took them into the late hours, we let them do it without restriction.  This followed a tradition my mom started with me, allowing me to do much the same, only on a smaller scale.  The belief was that the mind being active had value on a young person and that value would translate over into other aspects of their lives.  It was certainly true for me.  I did so much of it that many adults were deeply concerned when I arrived into my teenage years showing no desire for pop rock music, girls, or fashion of any kind.  I didn’t care about school, or the people I knew there because I was more content to live within the world of my own making, than in sharing my space with others.  The creativity that I had as a young person was the first foundation I had into self-reliance.  When some of those adults decided that I needed to grown up, and took away all that creativity, I gave them a string of violent years in protest which really never went away.IMG_7933

For my children I never restricted them in manners of creativity.  Over many years I have known many very affluent families in Indian Hill, Northern Kentucky, and other similar places where their wealth afforded them the luxury of eccentricities.  I have known entertainment types on both American coasts who make their livings off creativity, and host grand extravaganzas at great expense for their children and grandchildren.  But all such events and people fell short of what my daughters did for my grandson, for reasons that defy conventional logic.  As adults, and for the first time in their lives my wife and two children all shared equally in creative input as each are extremely gifted at different crafting skills, which was why my wife had baked, and cooked for a straight 30 hours without going to bed or resting.  She even forgot to eat all day Friday in preparation for our grandson’s birthday.  Her mind was in rapture with creative enterprise as the cake, and various other extravagant deserts she prepared had her mind working on overdrive.IMG_7713

My daughters meanwhile where busy at work transferring their Liberty Township home into a storybook setting of a living mythological significance.  Most everything cooked was done by either my wife or daughters, and every decoration was made or built by an immediate family member meaning my children or one of their husbands.  Nothing was store bought directly.  Everything was made by hand only for the event of my grandson’s first birthday.  There was no financial reward at the end of the endeavor, not a single bit of it was done with a fiscal concern.  The entire effort was performed for the solitary reason of launching the young fellow into a life filled with creativity unhindered by convention.

When I was a kid, my mother was a room mother at school hoping that it would engage me more in my classes which I found grotesquely boring.  I hated every moment of school, starting as early as kindergarten.  My teachers noticed my obvious athletic ability early on, but more than even that, they found I was very artistically inclined.  My art projects were always the features hanging up in class for all to see as my teachers hoped to use me to show what a good job they were doing, and hoped to inspire other students to do the same—which none of them could of course.  The reason is that I learned my creativity at home, from my mother who would do multiple craft projects all the time.  As a room mother for our holiday parties, she would do elaborate gifts to give all the kids in my class.  She did this until I was in the fourth grade and every kid wanted her for a mother.  Many of them acted like the little craft gifts she brought to school to give them were the best things they had ever received in their lives.  For some, it was.  Even some of those young kids who would grow up and become wealthy, driving Ferraris and indulging in the rewards of fiscal surplus never forgot the wonderful things that Mrs. Hoffman did for them during their grade school holiday parties.  The reason is that many of their parents were just beginning to accept the progressive dual income role that is now the standard today and they had no parents at home who did nice things for them—because the parents were too busy.

I made a point with my own children to make sure they at least had what I had—hopefully more.   I made it so that my wife was always home, and my children had unlimited creativity to indulge in to build their brains.  My children when they were little came home from school, and went straight into the basement where they built entire cities out of wood, cardboard, and putty.  This went on until they were essentially graduated from high school.   My wife extended the tradition my mom had started and provided for my children–an unlimited creative environment.  My wife, a creative bastion herself makes blankets, clothing, cakes, and exotic foods and is a limitless resource of creativity that mixes style and fashion perfectly.  When she was a teenage girl she was a model for the John Casablanca School of Modeling and had parents who had wonderfully high tastes.  She was set to become a fashion model in New York—until she met me.  That sense of style helped shape my kids from the raw creativity that I had, into a careful balance of fashion that my wife brought to the table.  The result has been the best of the two worlds.  The culmination of that experience was seen at the magnificent party my children put on for my grandson—and extended family.IMG_7793

The intention was not to impress anybody, not me, not the family, not their neighbors—nobody.  My children simply wanted to participate in the act of creation with the opportunity to provide for my grandson a life that holds all possibilities that the mind might possibly generate.  Many might think that the little boy will never remember the events—that such an extravaganza was a waste of time.  But they fail to understand that even though the brain does not consciously remember, it unconsciously writes information upon itself forming the static patterns of an individual’s life.  CLICK HERE TO REVIEW STATIC PATTERNS.  This is why it is so important to put good things into a brain even during sleep so that good things come out of the mind.IMG_7708

Driving home the other day on my motorcycle a very expensive Harley Davidson pulled up alongside me with its radio blaring.   Normally motorcycle riders wave to one another, but this guy didn’t want to look at me.  He was a middle aged guy, bald, fat around the middle, and he had a mustache typical of cops and firefighters.  Sure enough by the stickers on the back of his motorcycle he displayed several showing that he belonged to a firefighter’s union.  He seemed to recognized me because of my heavily anti-union stance, especially among cops, firefighters, and teachers.  He was playing classic rock on his Harley radio very loud and truly thought he was cool.   I looked at him directly laughing hoping to engage him, but he refused to look my way.  He was an example of garbage in, garbage out.  Young people in their 20’s can put garbage into their minds and hide the results from the rest of the world because they are only a few years away from their childhoods—from the constant positive messages aimed at kids through toy commercials, and  popular entertainment.  But after abusing themselves from 18 to 30 with careless sex, terrible music, and chemical intoxicants such as marijuana and alcohol the effects begin to show by age 31 to 40.  By the time those individuals are 40 to 60 they look like beat up sacks of garbage that have been drug behind a truck for twenty years.  Their cell structures rebel against years of abuse and their small minds cannot give any other command to their bodies but to look like chaotic messes.  They are often fat, smelly, and look sickly.  This rider was a victim of many years of bad decisions and his music was an attempt to carry him back to the beginning of his life, to his morning years.  In his mind he hoped that a young 20-year-old girl who is at her own beginning might find him appealing.  But the young girls only see a ruined old man—fat, ugly, hairy in all the wrong places, and a follower of other such men because he’s so proud of his “union brotherhood.”  The girls laugh and snicker sending photo texts to their girlfriends making fun of the Harley rider as they pull up next to the guy at stop lights.IMG_7699

The reason my daughters put on such an elaborate party for my grandson was to give him the start of a life that carries him far away from the fate of people like the Harley rider.  It was to launch him into a lifelong quest of creativity that will take him further than any of us have been able to go thus far.  The extravagance was not to impress, but to repeal a society that does not value such things—which is why society is struggling with so many personal issues.   The party was intended to write upon the young boy’s static patterns a brain activity that carries him to new heights not yet known, for a life that has possibilities only experienced through boundless creativity.IMG_7692

I am proud of them and all their work.  They did what they did not for a single ounce of social gratitude, but for the unsaid mysteries that feed the human mind of a young child.  Birthdays are a celebration of life and in our family; life is meant to be lived not squandered.  It would be a failure if my grandson grew up and became like the unionized Harley rider, middle aged and still stuck mentally at the age of 15, and still looking for girls the same age.  The work my family did was to insure against that tragic scenario, to guarantee that our grandson will grow up to reach for the stars instead of another bottle of Jack Daniels and become just another adult porn addict.  My wife stayed up all day and night cooking and baking to make sure that her grandson can begin the second year of his life with the knowledge that life can be whatever you make it to be.  Learning to make life good starts by developing creativity at an early age. Creativity can be applied not just toward career goals but in every aspect of life from the time that a person wakes up in the morning until they journey off to sleep each night.IMG_7751

I love mornings because like my grandson’s life, they hold infinite possibilities for creative use toward goals only a human being can conger up.  I never tire of their infinite possibilities as the sun gradually grows brighter throughout the day.  I am proud of the party not only for my grandson’s life, but for the rest of my family, who contributed, from my mom who went against the grain when the rest of the world was going to their jobs to be the mom every kid in school wanted.  IMG_7751I gave that to my fashion model wife who gave even more of that creativity to my own kids.  While at Disney World over this past summer, my children hatched this birthday party by looking at the way Downtown Disney was decorated and decided to elaborate further into their own backyard for my grandson’s first birthday.  I am proud to have watched the creative arc occur over many decades culminating at this wonderful event, dedicated to a life lived, not squandered to faceless decay.  As my reference to the Harley rider shows distain, it is because in the morning of his life, he chose to waste it, and the cost of his waste is evident now, no matter how shiny the motorcycle, or loud the radio.  For my grandson, the first steps into his life will more than guarantee that his life will not be wasted as the day of his life lengthens and gets warmer, and busier muddled with complexity.  The intention of the party was so that when he arrives at bed at the end of the day he can rest his head knowing that he lived his day fully, and utilized every measure of what is offered to the mind that thinks creatively.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

What Fast Food Workers and Teachers Have in Common: Rich Hoffman and Matt Clark talk about it on WAAM Radio

Matt Clark had me on his WAAM radio show in Ann Arbor, Michigan to discuss the inflated wages fast-food workers have been demanding as unions are attempting to infect the food service industry with communist oriented mediocrity.  During our conversation we covered some of my personal stories and feelings about how value has been robbed from all fields of endeavor due to the subtle influence of communism through labor unions, and how that has lowered the performance level of productivity in America.  CLICK HERE TO REVIEW MY THOUGHTS ON THIS MATTER IN GREATER DETAIL.  As our discussion evolved we discussed public school teachers and how they are like the ridiculous fast-food worker in thinking they are worth a lot more money than they really are just because of their collective-bargaining agreements.  Watch and listen to the interview for yourself:

What has been robbed from the fast food industry, the teaching profession, and every endeavor where unions’ public and private have taken root is the value of value.  Value has been stolen from the American worker through these collective bargaining agreements, the belief that just because the ignorant masses believe something, that they can assert a value to it.  Obviously, they can not.  When people like Matt and I show outrage at the behavior, it is because we see that it is value for an endeavor that has been lost in the process of teaching, building cars, or simply making hamburgers as mediocre workers inspired to achieve a “living wage” through collective enterprise no longer reach for the stars, dream of becoming more than they are, or constantly invent new and better ways of doing things because they are complacent.

American industry was the best in the world because it offered the prospect of profit, even at the lowest level job—as effort and value drove the market.  Through the typical progressive, through the unions, the government workers, and all forms of collectivism from the private union steward to the college fraternity, it is the concept of “fitting in” to a group that is destroying American ingenuity, and thus, destroying the American worker.  All participants in such processes understand the concept of collectivism and they sense there is something wrong with it, yet they continue to keep their mouths shut because they know they must do so to reap the benefits of group affiliation.  Groups do not like individuals who speak out, because there is comfort in silence, and under the communist like methods of the labor unions, there is pay through collective bargaining.

That mentality is attempting to migrate into the fast-food industry out of sheer desperation.  Like a cancerous leech, labor unions have destroyed American manufacturing, all government unions, and a good portion of the food distribution network.  They need fresh blood to keep their influence migrating off the used carcasses of their members, so they are targeting restaurants.  The cost is a loss of value from the industry that is there to some degree in individual pockets where exceptional workers can still make a difference in some fast food stores, and rise to the top to eventually run some of those establishments.  But the threat of a labor union moving in to build a nation of more complacent workers happy to make $15 an hour for doing a job that is only valued under $10 is a threat not only to cheap and easy food, but the value of capitalism that is implanted in every free-standing restaurant in America.

Once workers become unionized they are forever tainted by the effects of collectivism, and are more or less ruined for life.  The union employee is a typical individual that has been cannibalized for the greater good, and yielded all their hopes and dreams to the value of the worst of their group affiliation.   Unions are anti-America, anti-capitalism, and anti-productive.  They are no good for anybody.  But worse than anything they are looters of value as they not only rob individuals of their merit, but steal value from every task they are affiliated with.  And for that reason, they are agents of destruction upon a wasteland that was once known as the most productive country on the planet—now consumed with the parasite named “collective-bargaining.”

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

The Overworked Lakota Teacher: New levy talking points from the regime of public union monopolies

If it was ever wondered what the cost of public education monopolies are, read the following comment from an apparent Lakota teacher who came unglued the other day on the Channel 9 website for a story they did about the upcoming levy attempt.  CLICK HERE TO REVIEW.  The teacher’s comments are shown below.  Before I dismantle this teacher’s claims to pain and suffering, read it for yourself.  The short of the issue is that this teacher can make the claims of hardship because they are working for a monopoly—they have no competition to judge against.  So they can claim any little thing as an unwarranted pain, because the unionized workforce of the teaching profession backed by the federal government is operating as an anti-trust.  Their demands, and pay rates are dictated by price-fixing, and their expectations are ridiculously high because of it.   Now read what a teacher from Lakota thinks is a hard day as they answer to a commenter named “Joe Jobs.”

Let me be succinct in case you can only hold one or two thoughts in your head at any one time. First, those “unions” are made up of teachers; teachers who spend their every day in the classroom with their students and then do the grueling “union” job after hours in many cases. Teachers choose their profession because they are dedicated to helping children be successful people and citizens of their communities. See, it benefits us all when our children succeed in life. Joe, take a “sick day” this week and visit any Lakota school. Sign in and tell the secretary you want to volunteer in a classroom for the day. Don’t forget to pack a small lunch; you won’t be going out and you won’t have much time to eat that lunch anyway. Better be sure to go to the bathroom before the students arrive, because once they do, your only “break” of the day will be after the students go home. Please dive right in; help that teacher manage classes filled with students who arrive with a myriad of abilities and challenges. Some don’t speak English yet. Others are living through family wars, losses of parents or jobs, some are latchkey and arrive at school before the sun is up and most people are not even dressed for work. Be sure you help the students understand how to edit their writing to make it clear. Then help the students understand the challenging new math curriculum that the state and the new “common core” dictates they must understand and succeed with. You’ll have to write for the student whose muscular disease no longer allows her to hold a pencil. You’ll need to always be aware of the time so that students get to the nurse for their insulin checks and their medications. The counselor will need to see some who desperately need his/her help. Several in your class will need to leave at their appointed time to go to the resource room where they’ll continue to work with their specialist who tailors their work to meet the individual needs of each of those students who struggle. Don’t forget to challenge those kids who fly through their work and crave more! Follow the students as they travel their day to each of their classes without their favorite subjects: art, music, and PE. They’ll get a lunch and small recess; you won’t. During your half hour lunch, I hope you can eat with one hand while you answer parent emails with the other, tutor that child that comes in needing help with their math facts, and of course, you’ll have a meeting 4 out of 5 days. When everyone is exhausted, and you finally send your students home, get your butt outside because you have carpool duty. See, Lakota lost most of their busing, so you’ll stand outside every afternoon while hundreds of cars line up to retrieve their children. Pay attention; make sure the right kid gets into their car quickly. The kids will be too busy talking with their friends to be paying attention, so you’ll have to. Finally, at 4:30, go to the bathroom, finally, and drag your butt into your car. Did you remember all those papers that must be assessed before the kids arrive tomorrow? Take them home. Forget watching TV or going out for a run or walk, you have work to do. This is your 60+ hour a week job, that you love, by the way, for 40+ weeks of the year. With an advanced degree and 20 years of experience, what is your salary? Seriously? Think again, JoeJobs. Support our children and their education. Teachers have been doing just that every day.less

I see no problem with arriving at work at 7:30 in the morning and not taking a break until 5 PM.  The teacher however does get a bit of a breather between class periods all through the day, so no matter how grueling this teacher attempts to portray their day; it is an obvious neurotic exaggeration.  A ten-hour work day is a piece of cake, and I have offered Lakota schools to take this teacher’s challenge and teach not just one of their classes, but four of them at the same time.  I made such a challenge to Lakota East’s Spark Magazine where Dean Hume is the head of that endeavor.  Of course they didn’t take me up on the offer, and our relationship is so deteriorated now that it is off the table.  But the gist is they know at Lakota that their claims of hardship are overblown in a big way, and their collective bargaining agreement expecting over $60K a year on average is too high.  Way too high—by about 10K per year.

Much of what the teacher complained about is driven by failures in progressive education, where teachers have attempted to take the place of traditional parents, infusing themselves to the lives of all children in intrusive ways.  They have desired to push traditional parents out-of-the-way and raise children into a statist education making students always dependent on others.  This has made the teacher’s job harder as parents have yielded to this intrusion seeking a taxpayer-funded babysitter while they build their careers for their own pursuits.  The teacher at Lakota made themselves advocates of a progressive education, and they are dealing with the results of a classroom full of dependents.  The failure is in the style of education.  If the teacher’s job is harder, it is because the progressive education children are receiving has made it so.  The task of putting a band-aid on the failure by throwing money at education through permanent tax increases is a stupid idea.

If there were competitive options, that teacher would be happy to have the problems they are complaining about now.  The only reason they feel obliged to complain in this case is because there is no competition to their profession other than a few remote private schools, or the occasional home-schooled family.  Therefore, the severity of the workday expressed by this teacher is measured against the unrealistic expectations of employment created by a government monopoly at Lakota.  Only in such monopolies could employees behave as badly as some of those teachers at Lakota who have been involved in sex scandals, and gotten away with the crime, and still make the claims of hardship similar to what was made in the above statements.  The reason is that they are anti-trust employees justifying their impositions on the communities that employ them with parades of complaints that are driven by their own incompetency.

For further proof of this mentality, here is a letter to me from a pro tax supporter I received just the other day.

Rich,

I disagree with your goal of $45K average salaries for teachers.  But the public will ultimately decide that.  If that goal is reached, it will be up to the teachers to work at a $45K pace and not the pace they are currently working..  Your comment that “teachers at Lakota are making too much money for doing too little” is the point of the levy results.  Why would anyone devote so much time toward a job which the community deems as being not worth it?  Why isn’t 8 hours of hard work each day enough time toward their jobs?

Mr. George says that the public wants to work with the teachers, but the union won’t let them.  Who does he think the union is?  It is that 2nd grade teacher that comes in to school 3 weeks early to set up her classroom and prepare for the year.  The union is the 5th grade teacher who postpones her bathroom break so her students are under constant supervision..  The union is the AP teacher who teachers college level material using a high school schedule with high school materials and support.  When parents go to open house and conferences, that is when they should voice their displeasure with the union because that is who they are directly talking to.

Once again I call on the labor force of the schools to determine the next round of cuts if the levy fails and those cuts should be in the time devoted to the job at hand.  Make gone the 50-60 hours work weeks.  The public, by voting no, is saying they can’t afford to type of service.

William Schmidt

Isn’t it amazing how similar those comments are to each other?  It is the new union talking points for the elections of 2013.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

The HWK-290: Preparing for war, gaming way into the night, and the start of revolutions

I have a running fantasy that someday the government will show up on my doorstep with tyrannical intentions and shred off the pretext of decency for open warfare.  At that time I will be free to do what I do best and have loved since my feet could carry me upward, and that is to fight—fight for independence, fight for respect, fight for the human race—fight for anything—but fight.  Now when I say fight, I don’t mean “serving” for some greater cause made up by a statist government.  I mean fighting where my strategy and effort destroy an opponent no matter how great the numbers or odds of victory, the worse, the more attractive.  So the fantasy of a large statist government having the audacity to believe that they will win my submission with force is an attractive one to me.

I do not make a good soldier material, or a sports player who simply does what somebody else dictates.  That is not the kind of fighting that I’m good at.  In sports I never wanted to be a player, only the coach or the owner of a franchise, never some meat head player who was simply a field soldier.  In the military, I never wanted to be a soldier, only a commander.  But the way the human race is set up, they expect people to run through some kind of social initiation period where they start on the bottom and work their way up.  However, by the time that such people find themselves in charge, they have been beaten down into submission and lose the ability to “think” uniquely.  So I avoid all structured war games like the plague, and always have.  When I play at war whether it is politics, business, or physical submission of one group over another, I require being in charge otherwise I’m just not interested.  If people shut up and listen, they find that they benefit greatly by doing what I tell them.  I don’t get out of such arrangements anything from the participates—any level of camaraderie, any back slapping from social respect—any feeling of “fitting in” to the structure of human existence.  I simply enjoy winning in games of conflict.

One of the greatest aspects of being human is that we are thinking creatures and find many ways to entertain ourselves.  Of the many things invented to entertain the human race, war games for me have always been the thing that I most enjoy.  When I was a kid I ran into tabletop war gaming from a military history class I took where famous Revolutionary War battles could be re-enacted.  As an adult my wife introduced me to similar games such as the Star Wars: Assault on Hoth which we played nearly every night during the first couple years of our marriage.  When I started having kids I played a lot of video games with them—all of which were about war, fighting, and combat.  I never approached the games as an escape from reality, but as the only way I could do the types of things I enjoyed doing without destroying the fabric of the world around me.  Then of course there was the Wiz Kids Pirate Constructible Strategy Game that I have discussed in great detail here before, which my family spent a good five solid years playing together.

As fate would have it, one of my son-in-laws is a serious table top gamer.  He plays games I never had the patience for like Magic the Gathering relentlessly and will play any board game that has ever been invented.  He simply loves games.  He along with my nephews over the past summer introduced me to the Dungeons and Dragons like game, Hero Quest which I enjoyed greatly.   But I have since discovered something much, much cooler—Star Wars X-Wing Miniatures by Fantasy Flight Games.   This game has all the things I enjoy and have only found possible since LucasArts produced the old video game X-Wing, which was a combat flight simulator that I often spent entire nights playing.  As video games became better and moved online, Star Wars: Galaxies had Jump to Hyperspace, which was the latest evolution of the old X-Wing game, but it has since left the scene since Star Wars: The Old Republic arrived.  There was a void in my heart that was there in the years between the exit of Jump to Hyperspace and the creation of Star Wars: X-Wing Miniatures that wasn’t filled by anything else.  Now that I have discovered X-Wing Miniatures, it has been like revisiting my favorite games of the past with new updated spins which should be expected with evolution, and I have been soaking up.  I have enjoyed myself more since the discovery of X-Wing Miniatures than I can remember consistently in decades.  I have been buying up ships for the game like crazy and getting very serious about it.

Both of my son-in-laws have also been getting into the game, so over the weekend we went to Yattaquest in Mt. Healthy to purchase a mat for our X-Wing Miniatures game as the playing surface is supposed to be a 3’X3’ area and we wanted something nice.  So we went to Yattaquest and saw that the place was absolutely rocking with activity as they had a game night where the back room was filled with players.  I was stunned how many other people were playing these games for the same reasons that I do, and I was shocked by how many different games were on the shelf at Yattaquest.  There was an entire section for Warhammer—it was simply amazing.

  I picked up my game mat and the last two ships they had for X-Wing Miniatures, a couple of A-Wings.

http://www.yottaquest.com/

Then all my kids along with my wife went to Sci-Fi Cincinnati over in Northgate Mall and found two Y-Wing Fighters and a Tie Fighter Advanced, which are both extremely rare.  I bought them up knowing that they were selling for over $50 dollars a piece on the internet because of their rarity.  I felt I had just uncovered a gold nugget—a rare treasure and it made my entire weekend.

http://www.sci-fi-city.com/cincinnati.htm

We arrived home late after the mall had closed and began playing X-Wing as a family with the game ending at around 3 AM.  We then played most of the next day and I can report that it is some of the most fun I have had in years.  It has many of the elements that I personally enjoy more than anything, it’s about miniature detail models, strategy, technology, large concepts, and it has a creativity level that is limited only by the player—which is very attractive to me. After our very successful weekend of playing X-Wing Miniatures, I treated myself to a rare privilege; I pre-ordered a ship that I am hungry to get as a compliment to my Millennium Falcon builds, the new HWK-290.   In a 100-point game, the HWK-290 will provide for me the perfect support for my aggressive style of game play and I am very happy to see it come available as it does not technically ship to the general public until September 11th.  Fantasy Flight Games pre-released HWK-290s during Gen Con in Indianapolis, but until then and since nobody has put their hands on them.

The ship is a sentimental favorite for me; it’s from the video game called Dark Forces which my daughters used to play with me.  So it meant more than just a game piece for X-Wing Miniatures to make the purchase, I am just ecstatic that it will be coming to me.  It is a unique item that I can’t wait to put my hands on, and it feels good to have something which drums up so much happiness.  Yes, there are a lot of very bad things going on in the world, and I have written about many of them here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom.  But the new game X-Wing Miniatures has given me new juice where few things prior provided.  I simply love the game for what it does.  But more than anything it is allowing me to build a squad that has the Millennium Falcon as a tactical option with the HWK-290.

I don’t socialize much, but it was nice to see so many people with similar interests at Yattaquest.  The place was huge and very busy as business was good.  I’m obviously not alone in my love of combat because most of those games were themed around conflict resolution.  As I stood in the center of Yattaquest I had the sense that if the first American Revolution started in pubs around New England, then the second and third will be in places like Yattaquest.  The game players were simply enjoying some escapist fun while not compromising their minds in the process.  Those people are not compliant statists of the type who built the trouble of LBJ’s Great Society.  They are rebels, commanders, and tacticians that nobody else takes serious as they have fallen through the cracks of the establishment only to become the next sleeping giants awakened during the next great crises.  But never before that I can recall did so many people flock to games like Warhammer, Magic the Gathering, and X-Wing Miniatures as they do now.  I attempted with all my resources to find Y-Wing fighters but could not, because they were sold out everywhere I looked, even on Ebay and other online outlets.  I found them by chance at Sci-Fi Cincinnati and quickly bought them up.  They weren’t sold out because the company didn’t make enough of them—quite the contrary—they were sold out because the demand is that high.  I find that extremely encouraging.

I might have to wait for my fantasy of a statist government gone mad showing up on my door step to declare war against me and my family.  Obama can’t even make a decision against Syria, so I’m not worried about progressives making a visible move against the American people who would cost them terribly—because such things at least require courage, which they lack.  But until then, I love that there are games like X-Wing Miniatures that I can play with my family late into the night and all the next day.  War gaming is a good substitute for the real thing and I love being a member of the human race because it invents such things.  But one thing that is a running theme among these gamers is that submission is not an option.  They enjoy war gaming because players contemplate resistance and wish to play out scenarios that bring about such results.  The exchange is peaceful so long as participants have an outlet.  But heaven forbid that places like Yattaquest didn’t exist.  These are not the games of our grandparents, these are the direct response to large-scale statism, and the minds drawn to them are not compliant.

I’ve bought cars, homes, taken exotic vacations and raised families.  I’ve been successful, won many real battles and have enjoyed my life immensely in many capacities.  But let me just state that when I purchased the HWK-290 for $14.95 a chill of delight went up my spine that I can’t get from anything else in this world…………….and the reason is beyond the comprehension of the average statist politician.  Only people who play such games understand.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

“We Are Lakota” Campaign Exploits Children: Parents demand tax increases to shrug their responsiblity

Taylor Mirfendereski from Channel 9 in Cincinnati did a nice article about the upcoming Lakota Levy of 2013 as the new campaign launched.  She interviewed members of both sides of the tax increase argument which is highlighted below.  Lakota’s new campaign this time is the marketing slogan “We are Lakota” and the angle they are playing is obvious, the inclusion of “community” spirit to encourage voters to feel they are part of the team by voting for the levy.  Again the common mistake the pro levy crowd makes is they only react to the causes of tax increases.  They never ask why conditions are the way they are, they simply respond with a desire to raise taxes.  One of the carrots Lakota has dangled out in front of parents is the promise of more busing to earn votes back from people like the women mention below.

Kim Reber is a mother of three daughters and is a levy supporter. Reber lives within two miles of the school district and has to transport her children to school each day.

She said the success of the levy is critical for convenience reasons and for the success of her children’s education.

“A lot of things that kids need to develop and to grow are being taken away gradually and kind of falling apart. Lakota is known for being excellent and without funding, they cannot maintain that excellence,” Reber said.

She said the stakes are so high for her family, she’s even considered moving if the levy doesn’t pass.

“When I came here, I came here because of the schools. I’m not seeing that the schools can maintain their excellence given the lack of support from the residents,” said Reber.

Some residents say they will never support a Lakota school tax hike because they don’t think enough money is going directly to the students.

Graeme George, an 80-year-old Liberty Township resident, is a staunch opponent of school tax levies.

“We can’t influence the cost and benefits and make improvements because the unions are too much in control. We can’t work with the teachers and the school board and the public because the unions come in,” he said.

George is a member of the anti-levy group, No Lakota, which says it has plans to actively campaign for the levy’s failure once more.

Bob Hutsenpillar, a Lakota district resident and No Lakota member, said he will also vote against the levy because of  “wasteful spending” towards teacher salaries.

“What they are asking for to give to students is a very small percentage of the levy,” Hutsenpillar said.

But Willms said taxpayer contributions to teaching salaries are essential for the successful operation of any school.

“We have 900-plus teachers. You have to understand what schools do. They have teachers who teach kids. It’s a service industry, so of course a bulk of your budget would have to go towards your employee,” she said.

The actual article from Taylor Mirfendereski can be seen at the link below complete with pictures:

http://www.wcpo.com/news/education/lakota-school-district-pushes-for-levy-after-three-time-failure

What Willms misses in her statement from above is the salary level amount, not just the wages.  Most teachers are not worth $60,000 a year.  They may be worth $45K per year, or even $50K, but they are not worth an average salary north of $63K per year, which is what the teachers at Lakota average through their collective bargaining agreement.  When 900-plus teachers make over 60K per year it wrecks the budget at Lakota, from a tax rate that is already 33 mills.

People like Kim Reber moved to a nice community like Lakota for the schools, but that is not all the community has to offer.  Reber doesn’t ask the question “why are the teachers making over $60K per year, she simply wants a free education for her children and assumes that the cost of her home was all the payment she had to contribute to the task.  Parents like her assume that “WE” means everyone, that I, Graeme George, Bob Hutsenpillar and other NO voters are responsible for raising Kim’s children.  This is the same mindset of Hillary Clinton’s ridiculous notion of “it takes a village” mentality.  No, it doesn’t.  It takes a mom and a dad caring for their own family, and not asking a community to cover higher taxes just to throw money at a teacher’s union that is already over paid. 

The Lakota Levy is supported by the kind of people who do not want to take responsibility for their own children—but rather want Hillary Clinton’s “We Are Lakota” type of message insinuating that we are all in this together—the raising of children.  The presumption that children are the only aspect of a community is dangerous, and will lead to short lived prosperity when those children grow up and move away never to return because taxes prevent them from moving back to Lakota to raise their own families.  The levy supporters at Lakota are again short-sighted, selfish, and lack fiscal understanding.  They are happy to parade around with signs on a Saturday afternoon pulling on people’s heart strings hoping to win votes by exploiting their own children so to take the responsibility away from their own parenting, instead of asking the hard question of……………why.

The teachers at Lakota make too much money for doing too little, and that is the reason for a levy request, and the reason behind the extorted children. Parents looking for freebies, and radicalism exhibited by a school that wishes to make itself the center of a community that has a lot more going for it than just football games on Friday night are the type of people supporting higher taxes through a levy vote.  The Lakota Levy of 2013 is all about selfishness on the part of the school and its employees, and the amount of deceit and scandal they are willing to exploit in order to get their way. 

The lowest part of the whole ordeal is seeing parents stick their children out in public carrying signs such as can be seen in Mirfendereski’s article.  The parents should be ashamed of themselves.  I can’t imagine telling a child they are required to stand with a pro tax sign to cover for the lack of effort by the parents who are hoping to save the cost of transporting their children to school, or even the extra cost of private instruction, with a collective tax increase.  If parents really want their children to have a good education, why aren’t they willing to pay for it?  Why do they expect the other property owners of Lakota to care for their children?  We are not Lakota.  They are, and they simply want a hand out for something that is their unmanaged problem to cover an effort they are too lazy, or cheap to handle themselves.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

Egalitarianism: Parasites seeking asylum from their own ineptness

Chances are dear reader you fall on the latter half of this upcoming statement as opposed to the former, that often there are those who are on the cutting edge, who fearlessly face down the impossible with a mentality that is obscure to all others, and there are those who wish to sit down with such people and share in the wealth of fiscal opportunity they have created with sheer uniqueness.  People who believe in consensus building and shared ideas are those trained in the false ways of egalitarianism.  Most every education system in the world teaches this forged method of human achievement because it masks a grim reality—that it is the very few who have the courage to face down the unknown, the perilous opportunities of uncharted waters, but the many wish to take credit for the voyage once safety is realized and strategy is achieved.

I have sat through many dozens of human endeavor where I solitarily cut through the dangers of a task only to have a parade of parasites join me at the finish line wanting to pop corks and celebrate in a victory with the chant of “teamwork.”  I laugh inwardly at such people knowing that at any moment I could repeat the task over and over again forever—but they could not, and they know it.  They hope that I don’t know it, or that nobody else discovers it, but they do—and it terrifies them.  So they promote the social activity that was taught to them during their educations—egalitarianism.

Egalitarianism (from French égal, meaning “equal”)—or, rarely, equalitarianism[1][2]—is a trend of thought that favors equality for particular categories of, or for all, living entities. Egalitarian doctrines maintain that all humans are equal in fundamental worth or social status, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.[3] The Cultural theory of risk holds egalitarianism as defined by (1) a negative attitude towards rules and principles, and (2) a positive attitude towards group decision-making, with fatalism termed as its opposite.[4] According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, the term has two distinct definitions in modern English.[5] It is defined either as a political doctrine that all people should be treated as equals and have the same political, economic, social, and civil rights[6] or as a social philosophy advocating the removal of economic inequalities among people or the decentralisation of power. Some sources define egalitarianism as the point of view that equality reflects the natural state of humanity.[7][8][9]

 

At a cultural level, egalitarian theories have developed in sophistication and acceptance during the past two hundred years. Among the notable broadly egalitarian philosophies aresocialism, communism, anarchism, libertarianism, left-libertarianism, social liberalism and progressivism,[dubious – discuss] all of which propound economic, political, and legal egalitarianism. Several egalitarian ideas enjoy wide support among intellectuals and in the general populations of many countries. Whether any of these ideas have been significantly implemented in practice, however, remains a controversial question.

One argument is that liberalism provides democracy with the experience of civic reformism. Without it, democracy loses any tie—─argumentative or practical—─to a coherent design of public policy endeavoring to provide the resources for the realization of democratic citizenship. For instance, some argue that modern representative democracy is a realization of political egalitarianism, while in reality, most political power still resides in the hands of a ruling class, rather than in the hands of the people.[13]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egalitarianism

Egalitarianism allows a room full of businessmen to believe that they deserve a seat at the table when it is only one or two at the table who gave them all something to talk about.  Without the initiative of the self-motivated, nothing happens.  In politics, board meetings and town hall gatherings allow democracy to claim the rewards of the very few who created the options discussed such as whether or not a new store could be built into a community, or how to spend the tax money taken from property owners.  The money and business opportunities were created by the very few, but is spent and consumed by the many who wish to see themselves as equal contributors to the process through egalitarianism.  But they are not equal, they are simply parasites—they depend on the actions of others to sustain themselves.

In the case of today’s egalitarian trend, for over two hundred years Europe’s altruist, collectivist intellectuals claimed to be the voice of the people—the champions of the downtrodden, the disinherited masses.  They advocated unlimited majority rule—rule by consensus.  But their error was that they failed to pay heed to those who created their opportunities. Without those types—the creators–the “champions of the people” would have nothing to discuss or distribute to the masses.  Capitalism and its moral—metaphysical bases had to be destroyed by the egalitarians so that the evidence of this parasitic enterprise indulged in by the could be realized.  The concept of justice had to be destroyed so that value judgments could not be distributed to those who were ripped off—the creators of virtually everything—the forward thinking individualist whose mind and effort molded the world from their sheer imaginations.

In the end, it was Payton Manning who won the game for Denver and the loss of Ray Lewis sealed it for Baltimore.  Everyone else playing the game were egalitarians.  The Broncos “team” simply rode the coattails of Payton Manning.  Without him, they would only be “average.”    

Every time I encounter these egalitarians it sickens me to my very core.  I offset my disgust by withdrawing from them for long periods of time, and I always return to the act of creation not for them, but for me.  I create because I enjoy it.  But the process of the egalitarians never ceases to disgust me in the way that maggots on a rotting corpse might sicken the stomach.  Egalitarians are simply vile to the creative process, and they bring nothing to the table.  Consensus building exercises do not work, it has never worked, and it will never work under any conditions.  There are always only two types, there are people with ideas, then there are people who seek to loot portions of other people’s ideas to fill voids in their own lives.  Value is not created through equalitarianism.  It is simply another form of wealth redistribution, the value of those who create given to those who do not by democracy.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

Vote Justin Binik-Thomas for Deer Park School Board: The right person for the right reasons

For those who need to be reminded, Justin Binik-Thomas is an author, one of the founders of the Cincinnati Tea Party, and was at the heart of the IRS scandal personally targeted because of his conservative beliefs.  He is also a fan of my novel Tail of the Dragon and is a recent conqueror of that treacherous road in the mountains of the North Carolina/Tennessee, which is evident by the picture on his web site: http://www.binikthomas.com.  He is a frequent guest on Greta Van Susteren’s Fox News broadcast and does several radio spots a year with my friends Matt Clark and Doc Thompson.  He is also a personal friend of mine.  So it gives me great pleasure to announce that Justin is running for the Deer Park School Board.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Committee to Elect Binik-Thomas Contact

Justin Binik-Thomas
Candidate for Deer Park School Board

candidate@binikthomas.com

(513) 402-2727

Binik-Thomas Responds to Deer Park School Levy Request

Deer Park, OH, September 4, 2013– The budget shortfall remains one of the largest district concerns.  I have had the opportunity to review the coffee session materials and the five-year budget with senior district leadership.  I have come to the conclusion that the levy is premature.

As a taxpayer, I expect budget lines that do not impact services or people should be reduced or removed prior to a request for new funds.  The five-year budget includes quite a few areas where this has not yet occurred.  Among these are a postal meter, awards, and a line labeled “other.”

The coffee session materials provided attendees with a false choice of ‘tax me a bit more now’ or ‘tax me a lot more later.’  Predictably, the attendees selected the lower tax number.  District mailers tout this “choice.”

The proposed levy will tax us forever in order to plug a potential four-year gap.

Next Steps

Regardless of the outcome of this levy, we need to engage in long-term revenue planning to ensure we can cover unfunded mandates, educational needs, and emergencies without continually asking for taxpayer bailouts or levies.

We have two success stories in town to use as a model:  my alma maters, Walnut Hills High School and the University of Cincinnati.  Each has provided ways to grow funding, using many under-$20 donors, to achieve their goals.

We can further mitigate this risk by limiting our dependence on taxpayer (federal) funds.

About Justin Binik-Thomas

http://www.binikthomas.com

Justin is married to Casey and the proud father of two preschool children (aged 1 and 3).  He is a nine-year resident of Deer Park and graduate of Indiana Wesleyan University (MS) and the University of Cincinnati (AA, BS).  In addition to working as a contract manager in the medical research industry, he specializes in media relations as owner/consultant of Conservative Media Group.

In his free time, he volunteers as a chaplain at his synagogue and leads the Sunshine Committee.  Justin has taught at religious school (grades 2, 3, and 7), currently teaches a social media course annually at a local university, and is responsible for training new employees at both businesses.

Even though I personally think public education is a complete waste of time, and am not the politician type as I don’t play well with others, I admire when local people who are very passionate about reform get involved in politics.  I would say to Justin that he is wasting his time with the Deer Park School Board; however, he wouldn’t be if all the school board members were like him.  It is entirely possible that public education would not be such a wreck as it is today if people like Justin were school board members in every district in America.

Unfortunately most school board members are big spenders who are in love with the government statist version of public education—filled with progressive politics and antagonistic toward American tradition.  That’s why they often run and win while conservatives build businesses, make money and throw money at progressives like a fisherman trying to escape blood thirsty piranhas by pouring blood in the water to take them off the scent.  Justin Binik-Thomas is not one of those types.  He is a star in his own right, an accomplished person who could care less whether or not he has a powerful nameplate on his desk in charge of millions of dollars.  If voters of Deer Park had to pick anyone in a ballot box during their entire lifetimes, it is unlikely they would run across a candidate as pure as Justin Binik-Thomas who simply wants to do the right thing for the right reasons at the absolute right time.

Vote for Justin Binik-Thomas for Deer Park School Board!overmanwarrior-team

 

CLICK HERE FOR MORE ON JUSTIN.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!