Tag: education funding

The Empty Feeling of Sports: Why my nickname used to be “The Animal”

The comments I’m about to make require context since much of our current society is built around the importance of sports.  When I was in high school, my nickname was “The Animal” because of my particularly violent style of play in team sports.  Every coach and gym teacher I ever had tried hard to convince me to sacrifice my afternoons and weekends in pursuit of some ridiculous “team” concept with practices for football, track, baseball, basketball and anything else that required strength, endurance, incredible coordination, speed, charm and personal determination—because I’ve always had plenty of those attributes and often they wanted to ride my back to their own glories.  By default, I sometimes caved under the pressure as a youngster and would feel bad about it later—which is why I don’t “cave” to anybody or anything as an adult—but needless to say I would agree to play soccer to shut everybody up.  Since I didn’t care about making a living as an athlete, getting a pat on the head from a coach, having the support and friendship of my team mates, or getting an ice cream from my own parents, It created many opportunities for me to show why people called me “The Animal.”  I was hated by the opposing teams and that aspect was virtually the only reason I played organized sports at all until I could drive a car on my own and earn my personal freedom by working and earning my own money. When I could drive a car, my days of being driven to organized sports practices ended immediately—as I would not do such a thing out of my own self-interest.  And I never have looked back with reverence at those days like many adults do as middle-agers and wish I could do it again.  I did it right the first time, and I have no regrets.  Some people felt I threw away massive amounts of talent because I did not “exploit” my athletic abilities.  What they fail to realize is that by preventing myself from being exploited, that I preserved my core integrity which affords me the ability to say what I say below with authenticity.

As I mentioned yesterday (CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW) I noticed that grown adults were obsessed with information for the big BCS game between Alabama and Notre Dame, the playoff game between The Bengals and The Texans, and the wall to wall news coverage concerning sports statistics that mean nothing.  Considering that our nation has just went over the “fiscal cliff” and requires some serious consideration by the minds of those who run our American Republic they are too busy thinking about trivial nonsense involved with sports to do their jobs as caretakers of our society.  Organized sports are the harbinger of fools—it occupies their minds in a way that is pointless. For instance, with all the effort given by The Cincinnati Enquirer toward the Bengals playoff game, and all the wall-to-wall hours of discussion on talk radio and cable television dedicate to Andy Dalton and the gang what good came of any of it?  The Bengals lost yet again.  The teams that won will advance, the teams that lost have their seasons ended.  Whoever wins the Super Bowl will be forgotten within two weeks after the game is played so what was the point?  The same for the BCS title game, who will remember the victory in February? 

Now again, I understand the drama of sports.  My favorite football team is the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.  My wife and I have been known to fly down to Tampa just to watch a game at their very cool stadium.  But there has never been a great victory or a sports moment so grand that it eclipsed the experience I’ve had reading even a mediocre book.  Reading for me is much more powerful because it is the ultimate individually based endeavor—whereas sports are shared—collective experiences—and if you read here often then it is already known what a big “no, no” that is.  I would say that much of the reason our current society is so sick, is because of the distraction it has with sports and the mental investment in collective based endeavors. 

Many colleges are supported with tuitions because of their sports programs.  Many public schools receive community support because of their sporting programs.  Many kids play sports so they can get scholarships to attend university so they can play sports for that school and help sell the entire university with sporting events that have nothing to do with scholastic aptitude or the advancement of the human mind.  Public schools even shut down and have a “pep rally” for the entire school before a big game to unify the eyes and ears of the students, their parents, and everyone else around the community.  So it is very important to our modern society who wins and who loses a sporting event.  For the winners it often means more money and community support of higher taxes or tuition–for the losers it means constantly reshuffling coaching staffs so people can hope to have a victory in the future. 

But in the end, the victories are forgotten within days, and the loses are painted over—and nobody really cares.  This fascination with sports is no different from the mob during the Roman Empire’s fascination with gladiator arena games.  The fascination with barbaric games is the sign of a society in decline, and America is on that path led by the education institutions that should stand against such a thought.  They betray their own cause with an hypocrisy that cannot be forgiven or rationalized. 

In the case of the Cincinnati Bengals, because of their foolish love of sports, the entire city has ignored that the owner—Mike Brown, has robbed the community of many millions of dollars through the Paul Brown Stadium deal to provide a mediocre product that occasionally goes to the playoffs.  His product otherwise ties up prime real-estate downtown with only eight games a year yet people accept it because they look forward every day with many thousands of dollars in personal investment toward a game like what happened on Saturday January 5th 2013 between the Bengals and the Texans.  When the Bengals lost, it soon became realized how much money was wasted on the team, the stadium, and the amount of time gone forever thinking about the gladiator sport of football only to walk away with an empty feeling in the end and the proclamation—“maybe next year.”  America is still failing economically, and all the personal problems people have in their lives are still there.  That empty feeling people have after a sporting event comes to a close is the reality they have put off while they poured their attention into the distraction of sports they should have given to the lives they are living.  Pretty soon those “maybe next years” add up to old age with their lives behind them instead of in front and a head of empty ideas shaped by sports statistics. 

Sports are not the measure of goodness that so many people think it is.  It is a commitment to social failure and a mental investment that never pays off.   Sports can earn for the athlete some brief fortune and glory only because the social stigma tosses looted money and cheap women at the gladiators during victories.  But they are always short-lived and the trade-off isn’t worth it.  For those who believe it is—they have never really lived to begin with.  Sports is the folly of fools and but an excuse to cast their minds into evasion—which will solve nothing and lead them individually into a slow decline both physically and mentally.   Marshall McLuhan had it right when he said:

 “The school system, custodian of print culture, has no place for the rugged individual. It is, indeed, the homogenizing hopper into which we toss our integral tots for processing.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–80), Canadian communications theorist. The Gutenberg Galaxy, “Cervantes Confronted [1]

I’ll take the rugged individual over the sports star any day.  I’ll take a good book over the cheap women won in a sports victory.  I’ll take the retained investment of knowledge over the result of a final score every single time.  Sports are the devices that makes those custodian’s of print culture seem worthwhile by glazing over the empty feelings following losses with the term, “maybe next year,” forever keeping analysis from happening today on the worth of such a faulty cause.   This is why my nickname was “The Animal.” The rage I expressed on the field of play was not to impress my coaches or the fans.  It was a hatred of the pawns on the field with me, and a desire to devour them with superior aptitude that I personally thought so little of—so much so that I would not even think of exploiting it for my own personal gain obtaining the riches of a society that is morally bankrupt.

[1]The Columbia Dictionary of Quotations is licensed from Columbia University Press. Copyright © 1993, 1995 by Columbia University Press. All rights reserved.

Rich Hoffman

“If they attack first………..blast em!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

“Good Cops” and “Bad Cops”: Becoming a Leathal Weapon for the freedom movement

Oh, it’s nice to get started on 2013. It’s wonderful to wake up in the morning and be free…………..

As the rest of the world is falling off the “fiscal cliff” I am feeling the freedom for the first time in many years to be able to fully speak my mind without being concerned about representing large numbers of people in my community. When I woke up one year ago on New Years Day 2012 Obama had just signed the NDAA Act, and I realized that things were going to get ugly, and the freedom movement needed to get down in the dirt and fight harder. So I was looking for a divorce—not from my wife of course–but from the people attached to me that wanted me to play “Good Cop” in the public debate against progressive radicalism. Nothing against those people connected to me but they had the wrong strategy against progressives. Instead, I saw the very real need to have a “Bad Cop” in the debate over public education and the many progressive intrusions on daily American life, and I wanted to be that “Bad Cop,” and I needed a separation from the old role to do it.  CLICK HERE TO REVIEW.

Being a “Bad Cop” is not the same as being a “bad guy.” But when dealing with people who have no understanding of their community imposition, of the tyranny of their collectivism, of their advocating gigantic government intrusions it is needed to have a “good cop” who will speak to the media and play the game the way progressives do, but there is a need for a “bad cop” to do all the things that the “good cop” can’t. Progressives have a lot of “Bad Cops” out there functioning fully, so the liberty movement deserves the same armament, and I wanted the role as far back as last year, primarily because the Lakota levy was gearing up for another try, and NDAA was signed into law.

The freedom I feel is similar to ending a job that one hates when you realize you don’t have to go to that particular building again and speak to all the people you didn’t like there. It’s like ending a relationship that was dysfunctional, but endured because of prior obligations. Once those obligations are fulfilled, you might be free to pursue another path leaving your mind free for the first time in a long time. For the last two or three years while representing many moderate personalities in Southwestern Ohio on issues raging from the Lakota levy attempts, to the Right-to-Work campaign in Ohio, to all the media contacts I had to maintain—I was constantly aware of what I said and to whom I said it. I had to be otherwise my ability to do radio interviews and get coverage in the newspapers and television would be limited as they tend not to cover radicals if they are on the political right—even though they do cover radicals on the political left. This left me always feeling like I was fighting a battle with my arms behind my back, and I was getting sick of it as 2012 dawned one year ago, only to see that government had a controversial new law that directly violated the Fifth Amendment, signed by the President on New Years Eve in the faraway land of Hawaii. Watching that progress it didn’t take long for me to realize that the liberty movement needed its own “bad cops” to counter all the goof-ball radicals advancing progressive causes at the expense of us all.

Now with 2013, I am free to act as I see fit without the burden of political correctness, which will be necessary to solve the problems that we are facing in America. I mean look at our dismal situation, a national debt of over $16 trillion dollars, a dysfunctional government, a communist president, radical teacher unions controlling the thoughts and lives of our children—and a whole slew of tax increases that will hit us all—at least those of us who already pay taxes. We are not in a good situation. Yes—I am looking forward to a very colorful year in 2013, one where I won’t hold back as much as I have in the past. Freedom feels good, it fills your lungs with copious amounts of fresh air, and lifts the spirit—and I am free to do what’s right without the restrictions of public sentiment. So to those who thought they had seen the worst—no, not even close. It’s time to shift gears and pick up some steam instead. It’s time for other people to play the “good cop” role, and its time for others to play the newly created “bad cop” role also. It is time to treat progressives as they have treated conservatives for years. The correct strategy with progressives is not with a pat on the ass and bribery whispered into their ears, but to treat them like dog shit that is found on the bottom of a worker’s boots. Starting in 2013, I have in my hand a scrapper ready to make sure the heel of my boots stay clean as I do my work. And it feels good!

Rich Hoffman

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

Doc Thompson Goes Nationwide: Stripping away more than cloths on the air for America’s benefit

One of the things that people most ask me when I’m out and about talking, is what will happen to Doc Thompson—what’s next for him?  They ask me because Doc and I made a lot of waves in Cincinnati when he was on 700 WLW and people enjoyed the playful way that he dealt with very serious topics.  Being a conservative talk show host with a lot of Marconi awards behind his many years of radio experience, Doc is one of those unusual people who have never let the cynicism of life catch up to him.  He has a quality that traditional Americans find refreshing, so when he recently left his radio jobs in Cincinnati and Richmond Virginia to fulfill a position in Detroit on 1270 AM people became concerned.  Then they nearly panicked when they learned that CBS radio was moving around their programming schedules, and that they might not get to hear Doc on the radio yet again.

In reality the opposite is true.  Doc Thompson is actually expanding—he’s about to go into syndication all over the nation which is a deal he has been working on for a long time.   The website that announces his next big step can be seen at the link below along with affiliate information for radio stations who want to bring his unique brand of radio to their airwaves.

http://www.docthompson.net/

Out of all the Doc Thompson broadcasts I’ve used here at the OW, the most popular, is his radio bit called “The Answer is C,” which was hilarious radio while at the same time making his point about why our society is in so much trouble presently.  CLICK HERE to revisit that monumental broadcast. 

Doc often fills in for Glenn Beck’s radio show when needed, so a national audience has already had a taste of what Doc has to offer.  But it was after the Thanksgiving 2012 broadcast on the Glenn Beck Program that Doc really showed how important his unique radio style could be in a nation that has never been so divided without being in open war.  It is Doc’s ability to tackle very serious issues with genuine humor that sets him apart from everyone else.  CLICK HERE TO LISTEN to the entire broadcast from the Glenn Beck Show.

So don’t worry about not being able to hear Doc on the radio.  The truth is that Doc will be available more often and to a much wider audience.  So if you’d like to hear Doc and your local radio affiliate isn’t yet carrying him, send them an email asking them to become an affiliate.  They’ll appreciate the tip since it will instantly help their ratings, and you will have helped your community by bringing a real treasure in Doc Thompson to their radio airwaves.   Doc’s personal story reminds me a lot of the Howard Stern narrative shown in the movie Private Parts.  Doc has a long history of taking chances and jumping from job to job until he found just the right producer and home to build his unique brand.  But unlike Stern who became a household name by having women strip off their clothes on the air to shock audiences into listening, Doc does the opposite, he strips away the truth of Americas contemporary problems in ways that are equally enticing, shocking—but always in good taste.

Rich Hoffman

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

  

How Much OEA Leadership Makes: The Fate of Public Education at the Oxford Tea Party

I’d like to thank the Oxford Tea Party for inviting me out to speak to them at their December 19th, 2012 meeting.  During my hour-long speech I gave them a summary of my experiences fighting the Lakota school levies over the years and my assessment of the state of public education today.  Regretfully I had to end my summation with the declaration that the Tea Party will never be popular and that it was their task to combat the many faces of evil which present themselves through political discourse.  I had hoped to avoid such a summary as left leaning extremists have made such terminology out-of-fashion, but there is no other explanation for groups of people who actively seek to exploit children.  It is clearly the exploitation of children that is going on in great abundance, and it is getting worse with each year that passes.  Politicians use children for political leverage, and greedy teacher unions use children to negotiate extraordinary salaries for themselves.  Under any definition such open exploitation is essentially evil even though such acts of manipulation are presented with smiling faces and doctorial degrees.  As I gave my speech, I was aware that members of the Talawanda school board and administration where present, so I tried to include them in the discussion with a level of understanding—and some sympathy.  But closing our eyes to evil does not make it go away and unfortunately, many people who work in and around education openly participate in the spread of evil from the corrupt hearts and minds of adults onto the innocent minds of our nations next generation.  You can see my complete speech here:

For context to my claims I present the evidence shown below from Media Trackers which provides the salaries of the Ohio Education Association members by their appropriate pecking order. The OEA is the large teacher union that is so active in progressive politics in Ohio.  Patricia Brooks for instance makes more money than Governor Kasich who only earns a bit over $140K per year.  This provokes the question as to–why?  Is the work that Patricia is doing along with her army of assistants that important?  Is it more important than the work of a state governor?  Is the president of the OEA more important than the governor of the state that the OEA functions within?  It would appear so if wages are the measure of worth—which they usually are.  $$

http://ohio.mediatrackers.org/2012/12/19/meet-the-bosses-oea/

  • Patricia Frost-Brooks, President: $267,916
  • Larry Wicks, Executive Director: $222,167
  • William Leibensperger, Vice President: $193,766
  • James Timlin, Secretary-Treasurer: $189,640
  • Bonnie Joseph, Labor Relations Consultant: $181,319
  • James Martin, Assistant Executive Director: $178,009
  • Thomas Jowhar, Labor Relations Consultant: $175,816
  • Kevin Flanagan, Assistant Executive Director – Member Services: $170,881
  • Venita Shoulders, Labor Relations Consultant: $168,976
  • Rachelle Johnson, Assistant Executive Director – Member Services: $166,814
  • Donald Dalton, Labor Relations Consultant: $166,119
  • Susan Babcock, Assistant Executive Director: $164,768
  • William Pearsol, Labor Relations Consultant: $160,463
  • Diane Tieman, Labor Relations Consultant: $157,496
  • Patricia Collins Murdock, Regional Director: $156,091
  • V. Randall Flora, Director Of Education Policy: $155,573
  • George Bozovich, Labor Relations Consultant: $154,794
  • Linda Fiely, General Counsel: $154,592
  • Cristina Munoz-Nedrow, Regional Director: $153,562
  • Jeffrey Kestner, Regional Director: $152,728
  • Parry Norris, Regional Director: $152,636
  • Mary Suchy, Director Of Membership: $152,511
  • Rodney Bird, Labor Relations Consultant: $152,074
  • Talmadge Hutchins, Labor Relations Consultant: $151,968
  • Robert Matkowski, Labor Relations Consultant: $150,023

The only purpose of these employees is to strengthen the cause of a labor union that is committed to progressive politics.  These agents of the OEA are in my opinion sinister because they support progressive social platforms such as the destruction of the America family, the destruction of private property fulfilling global communist hopes, an erosion of self-reliance in children, revisionist history, ineffective education making the American population unequipped to properly think, and they do it at the expense of immature panic driven parents and their vulnerable children.  The names above are committed to maintaining an education monopoly over children and their parents that only succeeds in driving up labor costs purposely by destroying competition and guaranteeing that higher quality education can never emerge.  As I said in my speech, comparing the differences between Costco and Wal-Mart, there are no such competitive alternatives in public education.  Parents have no choice but the one controlled by a progressive labor union.  They have no choice but to give their money to progressive educators who will then pay their union dues to the people mentioned above, who will then funnel money to politicians who will further advance progressive—collectivist politics that directly attack the American Constitution.

I also stated in my speech how such evil can be conducted by good people who wish to believe that they are doing the right thing.  Many of the individual players in public education truly do have their hearts in the right place.  They sincerely want to help children, and want to make the world a better one.  But their fundamental thinking is flawed, making them carriers for evil—evil being anything that imposes itself on the individual sovereignty of other human beings.  Such an imposition is the forced participation in progressive activity.  For instance, property owners have no choice but to pay their taxes even if they think the schools are teaching children the wrong values, or are supporting politicians that are destructive to traditional American viewpoints.  Property owners are forced by government force to participate in this corrupt education system whether they agree with it or not under coercion and the rules were written by the kind of people who are on the above list.  Those members of the OEA are paid more than the governor of Ohio because the money is a bounty to keep their consciousness clean, and their loyalty secure to a cause that is not on the side of justice.  They are paid well to be blind to their actions, and live their lives as instruments of tyranny, coercion, ignorance, and of gradual national erosion of self-reliant identity.

As I said at the end of my speech to the noticeable huffing and puffing of the Talawanda administrators that public education as it stands today is finished.  It must be replaced with a more competitive national model such as School Choice, or other private instruction that will drive down educations costs, and increase the productivity making education better for the kids who need it.  The barrier to any proposed improvements in education are the names listed above, and the total of what all those names make from union dues paid by teachers from taxes collected from the property owners is $4,250,702.00.  Every Ohio property owner must contribute to those names whether or not they want to, or agree with the progressive viewpoints that those people represent.  That coercion is evil and the way those names use children to advocate their massive salaries are legalized theft—theft created through lobby power of weak-willed politicians.  Public education is built by a society of thieves who would otherwise rival the pirates who once plundered the Caribbean.  They are not good people who want to do well for America, Ohio, or the families who pay the taxes.  They want only to plunder the loot collected through taxation to provide extraordinary wages for themselves at the expense of the productive.

My feelings about public education deteriorated when I saw that my home district of Lakota had no desire to balance their budget the correct way, but instead after three elections chose to ignore the results with more intensified radical behavior.  When the levy supporters came after me personally for pointing out their faults, I saw the work of the names listed above, and I decided I wanted no part in their actions.  READ MY OPINION HERE.  That was my line in the sand and my abandoned of recognizing public education run by the government as a future consideration for teaching Americas youth.  Yet those who demand my participation in a government program I do not support, are conducting upon me an evil that is backed by coercion and force destined to be resolved in violent conflict.  And that action is not initiated by me, but by those who wish to impose their will upon others in order to supply the kind of wages for do-nothing occupational positions such as those of the OEA.

As usual, it is always wonderful to speak with people of similar belief, even if the words they use to describe those beliefs are less harsh.  I am no longer interested in negotiating with people from the other side, so my concern for their feelings is no longer a consideration.  But my visit to the Oxford Tea Party was wonderful.  They were a very nice group that are full of piss and vinegar and a hope that the future will be brighter than the vile darkness cast from the shadows by the typical progressive of present company.

Rich Hoffman www.tailofthedragonbook.com   

The Domestic Enemies of America: How and who can stop them

Apparently most people in America today never learned that they have an obligation to protect our country not only from foreign invasion like the Japanese bombing Pearl Harbor, or radical Muslim extremists flying airplanes into the World Trade Center on 9/11, but from domestic enemies as well.  Many Americans have been lulled to sleep by progressive attackers of the Constitution in a diabolical scheme designed to rob America of its wealth and destroy it from within.  Many Americans think that such a statement is the plot of some menacing novel to be found on the New York Times Bestsellers list, not a serving member of their local school board—so they allow many evils to perpetuate unchecked—without action.  But trust me dear reader, as sure as you are reading this now, there is evil working in America right now, and they seek to undermine the Constitution with progressive revision for global aims, and you will not like the result.   Those global aims do not care about your children, they do not care about your jobs, they do not care about your homes, your cars, or your families.  The intent is to rob all those possessions of American sovereignty and re-distribute them to American enemies posing as friends with smiles behind their handshakes, yet holding a concealed knife waiting for our backs to turn.    Yes—the most aggressive enemies of America are functioning within The United States these days and they are rotting the core of our once great nation from the inside out with an insidious plot conducted by the hands of the average person.  The crime of Americas murder will not be by their hands—but by the hands of those rocked to sleep with sweet songs of peace.

I am so certain of this attack that I would give the odds to its validity to be 100% and the politicians who have operated under a flag of “social justice” are essentially no different from pirates who seized vessels at sea in 1670 under a false flag of peace, or solders who entered Troy hidden inside a giant horse, or Muslim pilots training in Florida to fly commercial aircraft into buildings, but showing no desire to land.  Enemies do not announce their intentions with boldness like what might be expected on a battlefield.  Instead, they seek to deceive, and coerce with any measure necessary to attack their target with the most surprise possible.  If they are caught red-handed, they will lie.  They will steal.  They will kill.  They will rob, loot and plunder.  They will spit in the face of God if it means they can rob America of its wealth, and they will do it with bold deception.  If they are forced to testify before Congress with their hands on a Bible they will lie—because they do not believe in God, and therefore do not care about Heaven or Hell.  They regard them both the same—and only desire to pillage all that stand in their way for power and glory in the life of today with no thought to the hereafter.

Who are they?  How can we know who they are when they dress nicely, speak well, have excellent educations with large bank accounts plundered from tax payers—it is easy dear reader.  Very easy.  You can tell America’s enemies by those who seek to manipulate the words of the Constitution to suit their selfish plots.  If they call themselves progressives—they are domestic enemies of America and should be dealt with as such.  There is no reasoning with such people, there is no compromise.  There is no such thing as peace—for as long as such people are supported in the shadows, they will seek to destroy America with their progressive changes and selfish manipulation of robbing from those who have, so they can give to those who don’t.  Yet they are not really helping the poor; they are raising an army of slaves dedicated to their cause by capitalizing on the laziness of those slaves, and their willingness to plunder off the socially productive in trade for a steady flow of food, and shelter not possessing the self-motivation for more beyond those meager daily requirements.  For those daily rations such slaves will gladly become weapons of social destruction fulfilling the diabolical aims of America’s domestic enemies that have slid behind our security to tear down our defenses slowly.

Yes dear reader, it is you who must vanquish these domestic enemies.  Nobody will do it for you.  A politician will not send the military to do it for you.  The police will not do it for you.  The teacher will not provide wisdom so all can see it.  They won’t do it because they have all been recruited to serve this system of American destruction and they do their deeds with each new law passed, every new dollar that is deflated in value, and every new dollar of borrowed debt.   They are utilizing the well-studied methods of Cloward and Piven to attack American imperialism so that they can free the world to the new masters who desire to rule with open communism once and for all.

The obligation to the task of protecting America is no further than the person who gazes back at you from the mirror on your wall.  To turn away from the task is a disservice to our nation, and to ourselves as evil is perpetuated on the back of complacency.  The attack is well under way and is moving along as planned betting that people will not rise up to stop it.  And so far they haven’t, as the politicians have padded their pockets at America’s expense and are hell-bent to submit to the next world governing body of which they have already carved out their personal niches within that framework.  This evil will continue until it is stopped by calling it what it truly is, and not allowing it to do its work without opposition.

Rich Hoffman

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

  

Public Education is more Dangerous than Guns: Why the Sandy Hook Shooting makes people anguish

I was a bit baffled by the panic that the collective nation felt in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in Connecticut.  I understand the sadness, but to hear news personalities and politicians so distraught—to see the nation turning on their televisions after work and mashing their faces against the screens wanting to learn more information goes several steps beyond simple grief.  There was a fear invoked by the events of December 14th, 2012 where a 20-year-old shooter walked into a school and gunned down over twenty people, mostly kids, before taking his own life, that exceeds rationality and the reason is not what anyone is willing to discuss.

My thoughts about public education have evolved over the last couple of years from something that I previously tolerated as a local nuisance to a national menace of the American psyche.   I have learned through my school levy fights that most parents don’t care one iota what their kids are learning in school, or what damage to their social futures that government schools might do to their children over 13 years of elementary school and high school education.  Parents simply view public education as a babysitting service while they conduct their busy lives climbing a career ladder hoping that instead of love for their children they can purchase respect with the incomes they’ve earned from their occupations.  Some parents do get involved in their children’s education, particularly in sports.  However, many of these parents deep down inside hope their children’s participation in extracurricular activities will save money through scholarship earnings when it comes time to pay for college tuition leaving some of the savings that parents toiled over for years free for a nice vacation.  The sports participation is not one of love for the child as much as it is hope that their child will land a cherished scholarship.  It is rare to see parents in modern America taking an active role in their children’s education because they figure that is the job of the school—and in the back of their minds, the parents reserve the right to blame the school and the teachers for their failures as parents when things go wrong later.  That is the essence of modern public education in government schools.  The labor unions are happy to exploit this trend to their advantage, and they have.  Politicians are happy to exploit the guilt parents feel over their lack of involvement to enrich themselves as social looters.  But the real victims have always been the kids who just want parents to love them, teach them, and launch them into a life of their own with some measure of confidence—which they often find completely void.

So I did not feel stunned as others might have when hearing about the Sandy Hook shooting.  In fact, due to the social conditions involved on all sides, I am surprised that it doesn’t happen more often.  The failure is truly in social collectivism, where parents, kids, and politicians have embedded themselves into each other’s lives like mashed potatoes on a Thanksgiving Day dinner to be consumed by modern society and defecated out as waste products of a life dedicated to serving the collective whole.   When it comes to gun violence and the most vulnerable places that they are occurring with the most emotional impact, it is in school settings that they are most rampant.  This latest rampage, coming less than two weeks before Christmas, was the nation’s second-deadliest school shooting, exceeded only by the Virginia Tech massacre that claimed 33 lives in 2007.  Before that it was the Columbine shooting that was so glorified by the communist leaning Michael Moore film Bowling for Columbine.

The logical conclusion that one could make if they thought clearly on the matter is that if parents wanted their children to be truly safe, and to get a proper education that they would home-school their children instead of sending them to a public school full of unarmed progressive advocates where the children are vulnerable to the collective whims of society.  It is in such whims that distorted minds like Adam Lanza can make victims of unarmed children and naive human beings who prefer the peace sign over the barrel of a gun with a continued belief that evil can be legislated out of Earth’s social fabric.   People who think in such ways are the real danger to children because they are functioning from a false philosophy that is not driven by logic, but by their own internal selfishness.  They do not wish to take the time to raise their  own children properly so they send them to public school hoping the government can do it for them—but in so doing, their children are vulnerable to progressive politics, global power grabs, collective identity, and the barbarous malcontents of mental erosion.

My wife and I never left our kids to the fate of public education.  My wife was always a stay-at-home mom who drove my kids to school every day and helped them with their homework every night.  She also home-schooled them when the school wanted to teach my kids things we didn’t think they should be learning in the fourth grade—such as sex education.  Most of what my kids learned they learned with the input of my wife and me spending time with them and taking an active role in their lives which still exists to this day.  Many of my kid’s friends they went to school with who had parents who did not take an active role in their child’s lives, are rudderless despots drowning in the oceans of daily living, and that fate was sealed by their parents who used public education to do the job of parenting.   We have watched the decline first hand over the last decade and the differences are incredibly obvious.

It is dangerous to place children in large groups unarmed in a school room that only has one door in or out and is guarded by pacifist progressive leaning teachers radicalized by national teachers unions.  The policies of progressivism are failing in modern life, and there will be more incidents like the Sandy Hook Elementary school massacre.  There will be more because all the sorrow in the world can’t remove evil from the planet.  Evil cannot be controlled by more rules and regulation.  It cannot be quelled by guidance councilors or even more tax money.    Success in every American child requires a parent or mentor who will take direct responsibility for a child with real love and understanding that is rooted in individual responsibility.  The collectivism that is taught in modern society will produce many more troubled youth like Adam Lanza and leave millions of children perpetually vulnerable in classrooms all over the country because parents use public education as an extension of day care leaving complacent employees to safe guard the lives of Americas children—which is a recipe for disaster.

If parents really wanted their kids to be safe, they would withdrawal them from public school, teach them at home on a computer with online education within the safety and sanctity of private property guarded by American sovereignty, and one of the spouses would quit their full-time job and become a full-time parent because that’s what it takes.  The fear that society felt on the day of the dreadful Sandy Hook Massacre was not because of the victims—it was the realization that a system that most everyone has accepted as “good” is actually a very vulnerable environment that is well out of the control of the parents.   That vulnerability has been glazed over while busy parents pursue their individual careers, but the knowledge that a crazed lunatic can walk into any public school known to be full of unarmed—naive human beings is a lucrative target for the mentally anguished like Adam Lanza.  The fear that people felt upon hearing the news is that what they believed to be safe is quite the opposite, and if they want to keep their kids out of the grips of deaths embrace, or the many social pressures that lead to small losses of innocence, that the parents will have to take more active roles in their family’s lives.  And if I were them, I would take my children out of public school and do the job myself—so that I could ensure safety and success.  The grief that people are feeling is not for the unfortunate victims and their families, it is the realization that the responsibility for children cannot be pawned off on a group collective, but are the sole enterprises of a parent and their children, and is best protected with a personal firearm, a solid peace-loving religion, and a thirst for learning that is as free of social degradation as possible.

Rich Hoffman

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

  

More Proof Obama’s White House is Red: Communists in American Government

Jeffrey Immelt–Obama’s jobs council head and the CEO of General Electric proved that he is a far inferior replacement to his protégé Jack Welsh when he said about China’s economic power that one thing “actually works” in governance and that is “state-run Communism” in China.  Such comments show a lack of worldly understanding about demographic tendencies between people in the East versus the West, and a lack of understanding about what makes China work as an economy—and how dependent they actually are on The United States economy, and technology developed under capitalism. China has been good at stealing Western technology through an intense spy network, and forcing their workers to do things that would be unheard of in The United States, and these are the sources of their modern-day success, not a superior political philosophy.  For more about the conditions of China from the standpoint of a citizens living under communism in that country refer to a previous article I have written by CLICKING HERE.

CEOs and political pundits often don’t understand how facts are strung together behind the scenes; they tend only to look only at bottom-line results, or just a small piece of the overall picture.  They look at China and see over 1 billion people who are outpacing the GDP of America but they don’t see the crash course that China is on culturally.  Communist China would easily be in jeopardy if America turned its policies of socialism back to capitalism preventing so much manufacturing from fleeing to China to avoid organized labor in the states.  States in America are doing just that by passing right-to-work legislation to stop the manufacture bleeding that has been taking place, and if such things become common place in America, along with tax breaks, businesses will flee China for America in a heart beat.  But such things were not on the mind of Charlie Rose who brought up “the ‘growth rate’ of China has been falling from double digits to about eight percent,” as Immelt chimed in, “Look, I think it’s good for China,” he said. “To a certain extent, Charlie, 11 to 12 percent is unsustainable. You end up getting too much stimulus or a misallocation of resources. They are much better off working on a more consumer-based economy, less dependent on exports, driving technology and innovation harder. Really, the one thing that actually works, state-run communism may not be your cup of tea, but their government works.”  You can read more about this at the link below:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/head-of-obamas-jobs-council-state-run-communism-actually-works/

The reason the Chinese government works under communism is because the people of China are collectivists by their nature—dictated by their religion and other cultural background criteria.  Americans are not, but the public education system driven by current government policies are attempting to make Americans into collectivists so that communism will be received as a world-wide philosophy.  This was one of the key attempts of The Department of Education when it was founded in 1979, and is not news that comes out of conspiracy theory.  The information is clear for anyone who wishes to Google it—but few desire to acknowledge such a terrible truth—because it’s inconvenient.  But for a validation of the depth of communist penetration into the American government, and public education system read this American Thinker article:

  http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/11/pay_no_attention_to_the_commun.html

Communism only works if the society is mindless, and inquisitively evasive.  It takes “no thinking” to make a society into a communist one, and it doesn’t take a miracle to produce 1 billion brain-dead drones who can manufacture goods for a fraction of what it costs in The United States, if those drones do not question their reality.  And many communists are willing to trade thinking for comfort, which is the clear message in today’s public schools.  Young people are taught to take orders, follow directions, and comply with authority.  They are not taught to rebel, to think for themselves, to revel in their own independence.  Those types of behaviors are discriminated against in the society of government workers, and their brain-dead products.

People like Jeffrey Immelt and his boss Barack Obama don’t value individuality even though Immelt is politically listed as a Republican.  Such Republicans are of the “progressive” type, which is clearly indicated by his statement about China.  America, as it is now, would never comply with government orders, put up with the government restrictions on personal liberty, and absorb the loss of such personal luxury as the Chinese do while still showing up to work each day to work for bread and water.  Only a communist country of conquered people can get by with something like that—and the big government types are trying in America—but they will fail.

If China were held to the same regulatory standards as The United States is with socialist labor unions, aggressive EPA regulations, and a standard of living that expects more than 1000 SF of living space per person and all the food they can eat, China will find it’s economic growth evaporate in a flash.  And in the future, that is how America can beat China economically, by loosening the regulations, the taxes, and the socialism from labor unions, then America will thrive once again—because behind the mind of Americans is a thriving mind that craves individual freedom, and behind the oriental is a dominated collectivist that is easily controlled by authority lacking imagination as an entire country totaling millions upon millions of blank thinkers.  All together, they cannot compete creatively with the average American not because their minds are less—but because their political and spiritual philosophy limits them to restrictions of their imaginations—which are the ultimate fuel behind economic development.

Government looters ignore such facts, and it is for those reasons that they are so incredibly inept as managers, leaders, and financial tycoons.

Rich Hoffman

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

  

Doc Thompson Fights for Detroit: Michigan becomes a Right-to-Work State

The biggest mistake that all organized labor advocates make is that they believe collective bargaining is a viable device for gaining wages, which it is not. From the employer’s point of view, wages are the way employers can motivate the best and brightest of their work force to excel, which ultimately sifts the bad workers from the good, the lazy from the ambitious.  In the game of football and other sports, there is a tryout process, and players that excel because of their skill and ambition are the ones who often end up making the most money.  Collective bargaining destroys this entire discovery endeavor.  It imposes upon the revenue generating entity an equal distribution of wages that all the employees do not deserve, because not all employees perform equally.  It is this very economic misconception that has destroyed the economy of Detroit, and is why the city is considering Chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy protection after years of gradual decline.  The city was built by the car industry, and the unions killed the car making business in Detroit.  To understand why, just read Atlas Shrugged written in 1957 for the long answer.  Here is a USA Today article on the issue.

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2012/12/10/march-toward-bankruptcy-detroit/1758305/

It was good to see my old friend Doc Thompson who is now doing radio in Detroit acting as he did when he was in Cincinnati and that is pointing out where the discrepancy is in perception between public sector unions and economic reality.  As Michigan has looked at Detroit and learned some hard lessons, they have come to realize that the best way to bring business back to the state is by passing right-to-work legislation as Indiana has, and Wisconsin.  As predicted the unions have taken to the streets in an all out assault to defend their legal rights to loot and pillage from the American tax payer.  Doc had some wonderful appearances on the Kudlow Report on CNBC talking about this very volatile issue.

 

When Doc was in Cincinnati as a radio personality he hosted a debate between factions involving Ohio’s Senate Bill 5 which was in essence an attempt to make public unions a right-to-work option, which of course the unions attacked heavily out of fear that if employees had the freedom to join a union without coercion, that most employees would elect to not pay the union dues—which is all the unions really care about.  The money they make off union dues gives them lobby power over politics.  Doc handled the radical crowd fairly.  CLICK HERE FOR A REVIEW.  I was a much bigger supporter of Senate Bill 5 than Doc was at the time because I saw it as a chance to take control of our local government politics away from public sector unions—which was essential to keeping taxes minimized.  But now that Doc is in Detroit, he can see clearly what the unions have done to that once great city, and he has stepped up to the front line to fight the parasite that the unions have made of themselves at the expense of South Michigan’s entire economy.

The villain of Detroit is the labor unions that are rooted in communism that is forced upon employers with “collective bargaining.”  Labor unions controlling management that are in the business of making goods like cars, cans of beer, and paper find that through “collective bargaining” the cost matrix of operating a business pushes up their labor costs way too much for a business to properly function, so the business locates to a state, or a country where they can control their labor costs.  Labor union’s answer to this trend is to spread communism to every corner of the world so that businesses have nowhere to go and thus no option but to pay employees through “collective bargaining” extraordinarily high wages that most of them do not deserve.  This is why public schools are failing, because bad teachers and good teachers all make the same amount of money no matter what they do, so failure is incentivized.  Businesses, like sports and other entertainment have survived under high organized labor costs because the public has so far supported the extraordinary mark-ups in the product to subsidize the collective bargaining impact.  But even those industries are about 10 years away from total collapse of their profit profiles.  Movie actors are paid too much as ticket prices at the box office have capped out, which will lead to a recession in the movie business.  And sports franchises are hitting the same cap, the public can’t afford in general to spend more than $200 for a football game so the profit matrixes for the NFL are about to hit a brick wall as well.  But that brick wall hit Detroit many years ago as companies like Toyota, and Honda have made better cars cheaper than the union wages of Detroit, leading to a collapse of that industry.

Michigan will be a right-to-work state, and Ohio will follow shortly thereafter.  They will become freedom to work states because the economy demands these actions.  Anything else leads to direct socialism, which will choke off the economy and send too many American citizens to welfare programs to survive, which will collapse the GDP of our nation, so there isn’t a choice.  The only fools who haven’t received the memo are the union workers who want to believe that pixy dust will save their hides from their own stupidity—and the Keynesian economics that politicians like Barack Obama subscribe to, which is destroying the economy of Europe presently, will have to be abandoned.  These are facts that cannot be ignored, even though all politicians who cozy up to organized labor practices “evasion” in denying the facts of economic reality.

No economy can flourish if the potential for profit from the job creators is taken away, and labor unions take away from management the tools designed to produce wealth.  Once a company loses its ability to manage their costs, and can no longer raise their price to off-set the labor costs, they have no choice but to file bankruptcy, or move their business to a more business friendly environment.  However, in the case of Detroit, the entire city cannot just pick up and move, it will simply fail, and become part of a long list of once thriving areas that prospered economically for a time, then failed under their own stupidity.  Detroit will join cities such as the Native American city of Cahokia, the mysterious, Teotihuacan, or Ankor Wat all which found their previous flourishing economic periods erode away due to droughts, disease, poor crop yields, or just political corruption which had the city of Chichen Itza on decline before the Spanish ever set foot on the Yucatan Peninsula.  Detroit is failing because it cannot manufacture goods to export, and people are abandoning the city because there are no jobs, and those jobs where ran out-of-town because of labor unions.  The economic failure is unlike those other ancient cities.  Detroit is a victim of self-imposed greed, and lack of proper economic understanding.  I feel honored to know Doc Thompson personally and see that he is still fighting for what’s right, even when it might otherwise be unpopular, or socially unfashionable.  The fix to Detroit’s problems, or America’s are not to glaze over the obvious economic facts of organized labor failures, but to fix the problem before one of America’s once great cities becomes only a distant memory.  Right-to-work cannot come soon enough for the poor state of Michigan.

Read more at the link below:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/angry-union-protesters-shout-down-tea-partiers-in-michigan-and-state-rep-tweets-violent-threat/

Rich Hoffman

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

  

Star Wars: The Old Republic: ‘Deceived’ — A book review relevant to modern America

We live in a dangerous time, the progressive utopia of collectivism is failing dramatically worldwide, and every cog in that machine is collapsing primarily impacting teachers, firefighters, police officers, nurses, politicians, and virtually every government employee.  The world of progressive vision is failing and the participants are thrashing about like fish just caught and thrown upon a dry deck moments before being cooked over a propane oven—and we all know it.  The failures of that society are due to a focus on all the wrong human attributes, and have materialized into massive economic failures.  Those who bought into those progressive social fantasies are in store for serious social unrest and are now beginning to panic like guests on the Titanic once it had been realized that the ship will sink—slowly, and they will all find themselves soon in the freezing water fighting for their lives.

People like me, and my readers here knew as soon as the ship of America hit the iceberg, that the ship would sink, and we immediately took action to save ourselves.  We knew that when America was faced with life or death in the icy water that it would take individual effort to save ourselves, and collectivism of any kind would result in drowning.  We were wise to not embed ourselves into any collectivism, so that when the ship of our nation sank, we could swim freely, and be away from the chaos—driven by shock that will surely follow.

But it is painful to see my fellow countrymen suffer needlessly, because I tried to warn them—we all did.  But they did not listen—expectantly.  They thought we were pulling their leg, that we were “conspiracy theorists” that we were radical right-wingers—which of course does not justify why we are prepared for the detriment of the fiscal cliff, and they are not.  I was asked the other day what I do to stay sane during the whole ordeal, and I replied that I read.  In fact, I read a lot.  Right now, I’m averaging three books a week, completing one about every 3 to 4 days.  The only exception is that I spent about a week and a half on War and Peace, and before that, about the same amount of time on The Golden Bough.

Out of all the books that I have read lately however, one book jumped out at me as being wonderfully reflective of our times here in modern America, and how I personally feel about it.  Oddly enough, that novel was a Star Wars book from The Old Republic series called Deceived which takes place 3650 years before the action of the popular films that are so well-known.  I found that book to be extremely relevant to what is happening all across the contemporary earth, particularly in United States politics.  The gist of the book is that the Sith Empire has made a move against the Republic stronghold of Coruscant to destroy the Jedi Temple who are the guardians of peace and justice throughout that fictionalized universe in events that took place a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.    The villain of the novel utters to the Jedi prior to the Sith attack, “Our time has come.  For three hundred years we prepared; we grew stronger while you rested in your cradle of power believing your people were safe and protected.  You were trusted to lead the Republic, but you were deceived, as our powers of the dark side have blinded you…you were deceived and now your Republic shall fall.”

I couldn’t help but be a little haunted by how relevant, and current some of the drama was in that novel.  It was extremely compelling and I highly recommend reading this fine book, even if science fiction is not the normal preferred type of reading material.  Deceived is a novel that explores what happens to people on the microcosm and macrocosm of political failure and how it affects individuals and multi species demographics across the face of an entire galaxy.  I enjoy most of the Star Wars books for the obvious reasons of big ideas, and fun fantasy, but this Deceived novel was quite impressive.  The novel follows the events of the attack shown in the above video advertising the new MMO computer game from Bioware titled Star Wars: The Old Republic.  And no, Old Republic is not just a simple video game—it cost $200 million to produce and counting, and is the absolute cutting edge standard in online computer game play.  It is stunningly epic.

Ultimately, the novel hit a theme that I spend a lot of time considering, and that is how do you re-build a society once it has crumbled?  What do you do when it is realized that the ship of society that we are all floating on is destined to sink into the abyss?  What is the proper method of maintaining integrity in the face of so much devastation and destruction?  For me, the ideas were explored in the novel Deceived and were wonderfully relevant, and a much-needed vacation from the treacherous events of the real world, and the many plots of destruction that are unfolding upon the American landscape where it is now obvious that we have all been Deceived in nearly the exact way that the Sith characterized in that very good Star Wars novel from the Old Republic Era.

I like the guy in the hat. He has the right attitude on how to deal with the crises that befalls us.  And to learn more about Star Wars and hear an interview that I have done on this subject with Matt Clark on WAAM……….CLICK HERE. 

Don’t forget, Friday, December 14th is Star Wars Dress up day.  Support Katie Goldman.  (CLICK HERE)


 

Rich Hoffman

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

  

The Unions of Detroit: Wisdom from Mark Etterling

Below is a guest article from Mark Etterling.  For more about Mark, CLICK HERE.

I was listening to the news today as they discussed the Right to Work legislation currently pending before the Michigan State House.  As is usually the case there was the obligatory union boss pontificating about how passage of such legislation would automatically doom any and all future labor to an abyss of virtual corporate slavery.  As is also the usual, the person holding the microphone never even bothered to ask the most basic of follow-up questions like “Can you elaborate on that statement?”.  Since the modern-day media is obviously nothing more than a sorry bunch of ideological hacks I thought I would do their job for them by asking the question myself.
 
Hey Union Boss!  Explain in to me.  You make such asinine statements, but the facts don’t agree.  There are currently 23 states that have already passed RTW laws and from an overall economic standpoint those states are doing just fine without the need to force employees to accept union membership as a condition of employment.  To the contrary, union laden cities like Detroit, Flint,Toledo, and Cleveland are collapsing in on themselves as the former jobs of those cities are being migrated to the more friendly confines of the southern RTW states.  After having passed RTW last year Indiana picked up over 13,000 new manufacturing jobs.  In that same time span Michigan has lost over 8,000 with their current “closed shop” attitude.
 
If you listen to the union battle cry they will chant sophomoric rhyming slogans about how it’s all about workers rights.  Okay, great, now explain that as well.  Exactly how is it an invasion of someone’s rights to simply give them the freedom of choice about joining a union versus being forced to do so?  There is nothing in the pending Michigan legislation (or RTW in general) that prevents union membership.  In fact, Taft-Hartley guarantees the right of employees to unionize.  Therefore, no one’s rights are being threatened in the least by RTW legislation.  So explain your statement, because quite frankly it doesn’t pass the smell test.
 
If you ask a hardened union member they will tout all of the good things that unions do for their members.  Great!  If that’s really true than the unions shouldn’t feel the least bit threatened simply by giving people the option.  It’s like taking vitamins.  If I see a real benefit from taking them I’ll gladly pay for them.  I’ll use them freely where I don’t need someone to force me to do so.  However, if I don’t see a real benefit than why bother?  We shouldn’t be forcing people to join unions any more than we should be forcing them to take vitamins.  If unions are as great as advertised than keeping up membership up without force should be a piece of cake.  However, as Wisconsin and many other states have recently proven, that’s not the case.
 
So what’s this really all about?  Well, as is usually the case, it’s not rocket science.  As I mentioned above, in the first year after Wisconsin passed RTW the public employee union membership dropped by 56% as all those employees with a new-found freedom exercised that freedom.  56% fewer members translate into 56% less dues.  So in reality this is all about union membership dues and the political power that those dues represent and has nothing to do with anyone’s “rights”.  When fully 95% of union political contributions go to a single party it’s pretty obvious that party can’t live without the unions anymore than the unions can live without that party.  It’s a marriage of convenience to say the least.
 
The Democrats tried unsuccessfully to get card check passed in order to enhance union membership by forcing open ballot voting.  It didn’t work simply because the Democrats couldn’t come up with a single legitimate argument as to why it was necessary to permit such a coercive act without any justification.  When it comes to losing all these states to RTW they keep losing that debate as well for the very same reason.  The unions can hold all the statehouse rallies their little hearts desire, but what they can’t do is justify their own actions.  In the mean time they have become a caricature of what a democracy is supposed to look like simply because the exercising of the freedoms democracy offers should at least have a purpose, and this debate has none.
Mark Etterling

Rich Hoffman