Tag: education funding

Julie Shaffer’s Facebook: My response to the salacious Enquirer article

It’s true; when I was with No Lakota Levy we did approach Patti Alderson at the Community Foundation to partnership with them to attempt to heal the community. We had a plan to give substantial amounts of money to help kids and the community as a whole, but within a week of making the announcement public, Patti decided that it wouldn’t be a good idea and pulled away from the community unifying idea. Disappointed our guys went to work to begin our own foundation to be able to help the community in some way.

(To review this story as it personaly affected me CLICK HERE.)

The maneuver to me appeared to be completely motivated by community politics. Word from within the Lakota front who inform me of many things, let me know that a group that fights tax levies cannot be seen helping children, because to their minds the only thing that can help children was passing tax increases. Now, my opinion of Patti is that she does a lot of good in the community for what I see, but she stuck her name on my personal situation, and since her name appeared in probably the most salacious article the Cincinnati Enquirer has ever produced, I have to address her involvement and what led up to the demise of something that was intended to be very good.  (You can review that article here)

Shortly after this collapse of the No Lakota Levy reaching out to help heal the community while the levy fights continue I attended one of the large school board meetings at Lakota East and was shocked at the amount of parents who urged the board to attempt to pass yet another levy for the fourth time, instead of asking the union to take a 5% wage cut to balance the budget. I reported my findings at this article, CLICK HERE.

The more I thought about the situation, the refusal of the pro levy people to work with the anti levy people for the good of the community, and the push by a handful of parents to advance another tax increase on a community that already has high taxes, the short sightedness of it all stirred me into a rage. While all this was going on I was getting comments and messages along with information from my “feelers” within the school that I was anti child, anti education, and bad for the community in an effort to paint me negatively in front of their next campaign. Yet it was the group I was associated with that was reaching across the aisle to bring peace. And that peace was refused because the pro levy factions needed to maintain the public image that No Lakota Levy was a group bad for the community.  Because their message was that if you want to do “good” for the community then a new levy needed to be passed.

This blog site of Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom has become over time to be something like a newspaper that many people come to for information. Its numbers compete with small press newspapers daily, so I decided to take advantage of my site to stir the pot a bit and paint the picture of the situation as I saw it using a graphic metaphor. I didn’t hold back, for one, a blog site has an expectation to be a different news source than a traditional newspaper. So my readers like to see passion when I exhibit it, which was genuine. But I also wanted to see if I could smoke out some of these pro levy people who worked behind the scenes to make it so good things couldn’t happen, so the illusion that it was Lakota Schools who held all the cards in doing good things for the community could be exposed.

When I put up the controversial articles, I was a little disappointed that I didn’t get much reaction from the pro levy people. I shrugged it off and moved on. Approximately two weeks later the No Lakota Levy group had our press conference announcing the new foundation to help kids and it felt good to do something positive. The press enjoyed it. But ironically, the pro levy people seemed to become infuriated in a way that I wouldn’t have guessed. You can see some of their comments about me personally here upon this announcement.  (CLICK HERE)  And as you can see when reading those things, people used far worse language than I did in the bit I wrote and it was personalized where my wasn’t.

Within three days of our big press conference, Julie Shaffer went to my articles and took out sections of them and put them on her Facebook as seen below. Keep in mind that Julie has worked on previous levy attempts and she is now a school board member. Her intention here is to fan the flames of her supporters obviously against me. I wanted to see her do this, but what is most telling is that she waited until I was involved in something very good to take the shot.

I didn’t get all the screen shots from the posting, but down the page a bit was Pam Parino urging Julie to send this information to her “friends” at WLW, which she apparently did. Pam is a long time levy activist; you can see how she attempted to extort WLW a few years ago at this link. Now I still get along with people at WLW, but I was surprised at how they turned on me during the broadcasts of March 15th 2012, especially considering how they chose to broadcast. But I was told by Scott Sloan that I am a public figure and that I couldn’t say these kinds of things even if similar statements were made on their very shows. I disagree. I may be a public figure, but I am not a public servant. I can say whatever I want and it’s up to me to decide if voters will reject or embrace it. Not any social standard. It’s my risk to take.

My feelers at Lakota told me that the superintendent was personally sending out links to Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom to “community leaders.” My initial response was, “good, maybe they’ll learn something.” Then some of my friends asked me to take out some of the things I said which might affect the good work they were trying to do, which was fair enough, so I put the articles that might cause such trouble on password protect not to protect me, but to protect them. The entire time I saw no reason to not stand by my statements.

Within days the anger mounted and I was getting very heated messages like, “Rich Hoffman, you’re going down!” I knew the pro levy people were mounting an offensive, which I anticipated two weeks prior, so I wasn’t surprised. But once the Enquirer article came out, I was a bit surprised. It was way over the top and made me realize I should have just kept the article up so people could have seen the context of the metaphors I was using to describe the situation. Because the way that Mike Clark assembled his article painted me in such a bad way that there was no way to explain it without a tremendous back-story, which there wasn’t time for. I agreed to do the Scott Sloan show and I didn’t have a problem with the hard nature of that interview, but I was surprised at how he inflamed the situation after our interview, which again was fair play. Their ratings at my expense. When WLW called me later in the day to see if I would do a spot on Eddie and Tracy’s show I said no, because they had put me in a really bad position. Eddie and Tracy tried to call me out on the air knowing I almost said yes to the interview, so they attempted to push me over the edge to get me to come on. But they only had a piece of the story, and openly calling me a sexist all day long broke friendships that I felt for some of those guys, who have used worse language than I did on many occasions. So I elected not to blow my top on the air for 200,000 people to hear, and to calm down. Yet the blood was in the water, and I put it there to learn the lay of the battlefield. When I wrote that quote I wanted to see if Julie would take the bait, I wanted to see how Mantia would react, and who was in the pro levy network so I could figure out how to fight them. Because taking a passive approach wasn’t working. After three levy failures, it was still the minority who sought to impose on the majority their intentions for a levy increase and they had a network that was vast enough to prevent our work with an independent foundation headed by a powerful local personality in Patti Alderson. So I needed to see how these people were connected. When they thought they had me on the fence they emerged with bold words. Patty felt strongly enough about me to speak before the Lakota school board. She wanted to clarify that her group, which also raises money for needy Lakota students, has no affiliation with Yes to Lakota Kids. Alderson told the board audience of more than 200 people, that No Lakota officials had approached the foundation last month but that “we refused to accept their funds.” She said that with a pride that I found fascinating. She also said, “We refuse to accept funds where political statements are attached.” What she should have said is that she refuses to accept funds that had political statements that she didn’t agree with, because by endorsing the pro levy faction she is supporting the political position of the school, and not the entire community.

Out of all the terrible news that came from the Enquirer article the parts that actually made me laugh that day were from West Chester Township Trustee Catherine Stoker who said “the language used by Mr. Hoffman is not only egregiously offensive, but reflects badly on the No Lakota group that Mr. Hoffman supports.” So does that mean the No Lakota group had a good name before all this? If so, then why was our help turned down? And who in the world is Catherine Stoker? She’s a public servant. She should have shut her mouth and done some work instead of trying to grandstand on my head, which is what she was doing as a favor to Superintendent Mantia and the pro levy people. And who decides what’s egregiously offensive? Her? The pro levy people? Or these next two pretentious specimens.

Lakota school mother Kim Hesselgesser said “I was very disgusted by the blog Rich Hoffman posted.” I was also very saddened for this extremely disturbed man. To me it is evident that he has some agenda that goes far beyond increased school taxes. Although I hate the fact that he is getting exactly what he wants – a lot of media attention. I feel it is worthwhile to make the public aware of who they are truly supporting when placing No Lakota signs in their yards. Pro levy or no levy…is that the type of person you want leading a group in our community?” Well, Kim, if you don’t like my blog postings—don’t read them. You refuse to see what’s right in front of your face. You have no right to say that I’m an extremely disturbed man. You have no authority to speak from. You read one thing I said because Julie Shaffer put it in front of your face and you cast a judgment without any thought, just like you do when you support a school levy. If someone like Julie, or Catherine tells you to pass a levy because it’s for the kids, then you do what they tell you without further consideration. And that’s the problem. We will still be paying off the debts your type of people bring to our community decades in the future because you can’t get your mind around the truth. You just listen to what people tell you to do, and you make statements about which you know nothing. I’d respect your opinion if it was yours, but it’s not. You have no right to tell all of Cincinnati that I’m an extremely disturbed man. Based on what? Because I don’t agree with you? You made that comment as a fact, not an opinion, and I’m considering in the back of my mind of what to about it next. I’m waiting to calm down before acting. I can see such things being said in online forums, blogs, blog comments, but it surprised me that The Enquirer printed that quote. That’s very dangerous stuff and yes, I am deeply pissed off about it. If that’s what you wanted, then you succeeded.

And Laura Sanders who has personally emailed me with what I consider to be messages way outside her level of expertise and who I personally addressed at this link (CLICK HERE) said “Mr. Hoffman uses misogynistic and vile language when addressing women and mothers because most teachers are in fact, women and mothers. He wants the public to think that he is merely attempting to rein in public school spending, but his underlying mission is really one of hatred and fear of women earning decent salaries. He alone is the destructive force behind the last three levy failures, and I hope this … convinces the women in our community that he is not a rational or credible source for the counterpoint argument.” Laura—you are out of your mind to paint me in such a fashion. While I am certainly not one who supports feminism, mainly because I think it has destroyed the modern family, it does not give you the right to paint me with the broad brush of stating what I think and making the high salary issue all about hating women. That is a pathetic argument and I can’t believe you said it. Just like Kim you used generalities to explain aspects of me that you know nothing about. If you did just a little research you would know what my number 1 Rule is on my Ten Rules to Live By. You can see those rules for yourself at the bottom of every signature at the end of every post I make. The number one rule is to honor women, because they are the pillars of our society. I believe in it so much that I wrote a book about it, and I made boys who dated my daughters read that book so they’d know my position. Those Ten Rules to Live By are in the back of that book published in 2004! Everyone and I mean EVERYONE who knows me, particularly women, knows how much I love them. I have daughters, I have been married for over24 years to the same person, and I have a lot of women friends. I help women carry heavy objects—always! I hold the door for them when they come in behind me—always! In fact I do a lot every day that doesn’t even begin to articulate the kind of person you and your pro levy friends have attempted to paint me as. And for what, so you could try to destroy me, and get me out-of-the-way so you could have your money!!!!!!! IS THAT WHAT YOU THOUGHT GAVE YOU THE RIGHT TO MAKE STUFF UP AND PUT IT IN THE PAPER ABOUT ME WHEN I’VE WENT TO GREAT TROUBLE TO BE OPEN HERE AND SHOW EXACTLY WHAT I AM! That’s what you have told the world through your actions!!!!!! You spoke about nothing of which you had an understanding. You smelled my blood in the water and you crossed the line with made up assumptions!

I had a conversation about you with a man the other day who attends your church. He told me you are just the sweetest girl there is and he tried to calm me down after that email that you sent me which I was still mad over a week after you sent it. I listened to him and took your actions as just political rhetoric and blew it off. But what you said in the paper was not just inflammatory, it was personal, and your type of people believe you have a right to step all over me to get what you want. My comments might have been audacious, but they were left obscure on purpose. I wanted badly to reveal the names I was thinking of when I wrote the salacious blog posting, but I didn’t because that would make it personal, and even if I want to bring my enemies down, that is not the way to do it. There is a difference between political rhetoric and personal attacks and what you, and your pro levy friends did to me on Thursday was a personal attack designed to hurt me in every single way possible, and I had planned for you to do it. But I was disappointed to be right once again. I will tell all of you something. There will be payment given to me in one fashion or another for what happened on Thursday. You can decide for yourselves what that is and I expect at a bare minimum a public apology. Failure to act will dictate action on my part.

This isn’t just about name calling anymore. I am happy to argue back and forth, and even debate on the radio as we have in the past in friendly competition. And when you make yourself a public official you make yourself prone to attacks. And when you work in a government job, you are prone to tax payer scrutiny. But I have made a choice to never be involved in an elected position because I want the freedom to be able to speak my thoughts, even when they are outlandish to get my point across, because sometimes that’s what it takes. But what the people mentioned in this article attempted to do was destroy me for standing in their way, and that WILL not be tolerated or left unresolved!

I stand by my comments that I posted. I wrote it as a metaphor to the type of woman who just don’t grasp fiscal concepts, and their opinions should therefore be discarded in political theater. I spoke in generalities to protect the real people I was thinking of even though I was very angry with them for desiring to drag our community through a fourth levy attempt. But what the women above did was turn me personally into the poster child for progressive politics to attempt to remove me the way they have for many years any barrier that stood in their path. If I had to guess, 80% of all legislation that gets discussed daily in any governmental body has it’s start with these same radical types who came after me so aggressively, so the same blind pro levy supporters who refuse to look at any facts and vote purely on emotion are the same who lobby members of the house and senate to pass all types of ungodly legislation, and pass more rules of every kind in every neighborhood across America. It’s these pro levy types who have made it so a kid can’t just go out and ride a bicycle anymore, but have to arm themselves from head to toe with padding and helmets. I see these radical progressive agenda driven pro levy supporters as being a huge problem on not just our communities but our human race, and I said what I said to call them out on it, to let them know that they aren’t fooling anyone—maybe themselves. I used a metaphor that was taken literally to use against me as a political maneuver which was fine, but everyone mentioned here took it several steps further and for all different reasons. Some of those reasons were strictly economic. Some were political. But mostly it was pure hatred for anyone who thinks different from the pretentious pro levy supporters. And these people felt they had a right to “destroy” me and everything I have ever been, or will be.

And it all started on Julie Shaffer’s Facebook. See what happens when you elect a levy activist onto your school board. And do you see now what kind of school board we have? She’s the Vice-President. What does that say about how wrong the entire situation is and what we have been fighting against? And since they can’t win the arguments against me with facts, they sought with every gun available to them to destroy the mouth piece.

It’s not Lakota as a school that I am fighting. The school will still be there if every employee were removed, and the kids would still be successful because the parents in general of Lakota, as I’ve said many times, will make sure it stays good. I’m fighting the radicalism that has embedded itself into our tax dollars. And to continue that fight, I have to do it my way using my network of Overmanwarrior’s to help get under the covers. This group has always been the force that supplied No Lakota Levy with information, so the attempt to separate me from No Lakota Levy was a lot of energy spent on nothing. I know there is a lot of disappointment because the assumption was that the members of No Lakota Levy were funding me, and if I were cut off from them, I’d be rudderless. But my funding comes from my professional writing endeavors and exemplified by my The Symposium of Justice where my Ten Rules are published.  I wouldn’t bring it up if my integrity had not come into question. It’s my personal projects that allow me to fight like this. That’s also why at the bottom of the book on the front cover it says, “Tyranny has a new enemy.” Did you just think it was silly words on the cover? I meant it literally! So nothing that happened Thursday was unforeseen. I knew what to expect. But my disappointment is in being right and to witness firsthand the destructive nature of my neighbors and the manipulation that can be employed to advance an agenda even if it costs lives.

And if you want to know who I am and what I believe, look at my Ten Rules to Live By. I don’t talk about my books during levy discussions because I don’t want to confuse any messages with the selling of books. So I just put the link out for those interested, and never mention it otherwise. But those are my beliefs and I live by those every single day. I should know them, because in this case—I wrote the book on the subject—so I know the material well. The person that I am and what these reckless characters described in this article tried to paint me as are not even close to the same thing.  The words used to describe me by these people mentioned here are as far from the truth as one could get.  They took small little bits of information because they didn’t want to work for the truth even though I placed it here for all to see.  They did with me what they do with the funding problems at Lakota, saw what they wanted to see and assassinated the characters of anyone who stood in the way of what they wanted. 

 Here are the rules I live by:

1. To honor women, they are the pillars of society.
2. Stand as an example of the highest moral order.
3. Avoid mental depletion such as intoxication, and ignorance.
4. Pursue learning like a person on fire pursues water.
5. Live with integrity, where values are in line with behavior.
6. Live the given life, not the dreams of others.
7. In a crisis handle everything calmly and without confusion.
8. Be capable of firmness in the heart.
9. Sorrow is everywhere, accept it with a smile.
10. Resist hiding in numbers, stand as an individual contributor.

And to add a bit to that, I consider telling the truth even if the names are ugly to be of the highest moral order. That’s why I stand behind my comments.  The truth does not live behind political correctness.  It lives in the facts.

 

To understand the truth it helps to view the world through Hoffman Lenses.  To understand what those are CLICK THE LINK.  If you can’t handle the truth, then don’t read here.

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/12/03/socialists-live-hoffman-lenses-on-urban-meyer/

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

 
 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

 

 

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

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

The Termites in Lakota: Pulling up the floorboards to find the nest

The only way to describe how I feel at this current moment is to describe the situation as if I were trying to exterminate a home from the termites that are eating it from the inside out.  You know the termites are there, but you never know how many till you start pulling up floor boards.  Then once you do you see a giant nest of infestation that is bustling about in a fury now that you’ve removed their hiding places.  Obviously the termites must go; otherwise they’ll destroy your home.  It’s their nature to destroy.  So termites and a healthy home do not go well together, so if you want to save the home, you must exterminate the termites. 

Of course the termites will be angry when you start to burn them out, and put poison in their nest to destroy their eggs so more of their kind cannot hatch.  And they will think that you the homeowner are evil for trying to remove them from your home.  To them, you are the most evil being in the universe, and are the destroyer of their existence. 

And this is what I feel has happened in the wake of my announcement of our new group Yes to Lakota Kids.  What should be a good thing for the community and should have been a bridge that helps heal the community has turned out to become an angry tirade against me personally.  CLICK HERE TO READ SOME OF THE ANGER UTTERED ABOUT ME IN THE WAKE OF THE YES to LAKOTA KIDS PRESS CONFERENCE.  Considering how much anger was generated by our $10,000 donation proves that our community has termites, parasites that we always knew were there because we could see them here and there, but once we pulled up the floor boards, we discovered a swarming nest of vitriolic parasites that are slowly destroying our community. 

Just as I could never hope to set a termite down and explain to them the nature of things, the rules that all life are governed by, I could never explain to these blind school levy supporters the same type of information because they appear to have the same mental processing faculties as a termite—they consume, destroy, and breed.  So it’s wasted energy to attempt to explain to them anything.  But for my readers here who have their minds confused by the rhetoric of these parasites let me set some things straight for you. 

As demonstrated in a termite colony, it is quite possible to have 1 million insects be completely wrong if they establish their nest in a location that violates the property of ones home.  The proper place for the termites to create a nest is in a decayed tree, not a quarter million dollar home.  In that case, the termites are not correct because their collective minds believe the home is a good place for a nest.  So it is that 1 million pro school levy advocates are not correct by consensus.  Because they wish to believe that taxes are owed to them to maintain their existence does not make it so.  Their wish is simply that—an arbitrary desire that is not grounded in reality. 

No idea was ever implemented off group thinking.  The PC was not created with a group mind.  The car, the airplane, electricity, nothing in the history of man has ever been created by committee—anywhere—at anytime—or in any place.  An idea, such as public education was created in the mind of one man, then lesser men and women looted off that original idea for over a hundred and fifty years not adding anything but more funding requirements and rules to the concept.  But nothing new in thinking has ever come from a “consensus.”  Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying to you.  I challenge my readers here to come up with one thing created by a group mind in committee—-think hard.  Take the idea back to its root to conclude before you write.

It is not the obligation of any individual or business to give anything to anybody just because they exist.  It is not the individual’s job to provide sustenance to parasites.  There is no compassion clause that an infant signs for upon coming from its mother’s womb.  Yet that is the assumption from the parasitic levy supporters.  Levy supporters believe that every human being and the businesses they create are part of some “community property” and they have a right to the profits of those who create ideas. 

Taxes are legalized theft of property.  Taxes assume that a community will not take care of their communities on their own, so the money is stolen and distributed by bureaucrats for the aims of the bureaucrats.  The tax money collected is done by force.  It is stolen.  If a levy is passed and I vote no, then a group consensus has just found a way to legally steal from me because a democracy of fools, of termites, have decided they want what I have.  That is fundamentally wrong.  The way these schools operate is that they do not answer facts, they deal with emotion to achieve a group consensus, and this is how they perform the legalized theft.  I have proven here that homeschooled kids perform better than publicly educated children, (CLICK HERE FOR A REVIEW) so the argument made that a community must pass a levy if it is to produce great children is completely invalid and arbitrary.  It has no ground in reality.  Kids are produced good or bad depending on the quality of their parents.  It has almost nothing to do with the quality of the teachers and testing proves it.  That’s why unions are so terrified of testing children to determine compensation amounts. 

Anyone who claims they have a right to your property is a thief.  Anyone who makes comments that have no foundations in reality is a fool subscribing to theories of mere wishes that have as much merit as making a wish on a birthday cake or shooting star.  They are mystics who believe their lives are guided by mysterious forces they are too lazy to understand.  It is far easier to surrender thought to others and make wishes.  Not to function from reality.  That is the world of the termite and the school levy advocate.

The world, our country and our school system are in trouble because we have let the termites rule, and those with thought have avoided those parasitic nests because of the sheer ugliness, and unpleasantness of dealing with such bloodsucking insects.  This has made the thinkers of society victims to the parasites, and this is not how it is supposed to be. 

I personally know when I am right and once I know it will not retreat ground under any circumstances.  Other people who pursue actual truth will arrive at the same conclusions by default, because there are right answers and wrong answers.  There are not negotiations between the right and wrong to arrive at some middle.  A person of thought who wants to preserve their home cannot negotiate with the termite and hope the termite will not eat their entire home.  The termite must go if the home is to be preserved.  If the world all pursued the truth instead of wishes of the truth a consensus of correct answers would be achieved.  If every human being pursued the truth, they would all find the correct answers and incorrect answers.  The only variations would be their path to that truth.  But there are no arbitrary aspects to reality.  A fact is a fact and those who wish for more taxes, for collective “group” thinking, who take no responsibility for the thoughts in their heads, are parasites to society.  I am as sure of that concept as the sun in the sky causes daytime on earth.  And taxes are not owed become some mystic fool not rooted in reality decides they have a right to legally rob me.  Because that’s what taxes are, theft. 

The Yes to Lakota Kids group formed by the No Lakota Levy group is proof that the community is willing to privately take care of aspects of education without the interference of the looters, the termites, who just wish to consume more and more of our community until there is nothing left.  That is why there is so much anger at me for helping to start a group that does community good, because the do-gooders of education want monopoly power over community activity so they can justify their looting tendency.  They don’t want community volunteerism because it shatters their false reality of self-importance.  If we allow that to happen it is our fault for denying the destructive tendency of the termites.  And the pro levy people who do not think for themselves, who believe what the “group” tells them, who fantasize that boycotting me, or “running me out-of-town” with some sort of peer pressure–as some of these idiots have proposed, are attempting to rally the parasites to destroy me because I am a threat to their nest of vermin. 

To me, they are just insects.  They do not think, they can not be reasoned with, and they will never ever stop till they are destroyed or they destroy.  (Kind of sounds like a Terminator from the movie doesn’t it.)  There is no consensus.  There are only right answers and wrong answers and the most dangerous people on this planet are those who cannot distinguish between the two, and seek to use money to hide their ignorance.  And that ignorance will not be tolerated.  The more they push me, the angrier I will get, and I can promise you I won’t be the first to blink.  It doesn’t matter if it’s 1 parasite, 5 parasites, 50 parasites, or 1 million.  They’re all just insects of no thought to me, and have as much relevance as a termite.

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

 
 

Protected: Yes to Lakota Kids: The press conference timeline

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

Home Schooling Under Attack: Government schools are for lazy parents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

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

http://thepeoplescube.com/

The Courage of Jada Williams: Fighting against the machine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

http://thepeoplescube.com/

Luke Hall for President: But first he should be a Lakota School Board member

The first day of March 1, 2012 was special for three reasons. First the morning air was cool but noticeably spring like. There was a hint to the air that indicated that spring was very near as I rode my motorcycle to work with a sunrise poking above the horizon. The clouds high overhead reflected a brilliant orange and it was just a spectacular motorcycle ride, a welcome change over the many mornings of brutal cold. It felt as though I could actually feel earth’s elliptical orbit closing back in on the sun after a long journey through the cold of space for the last three months.

The second is that I was able to turn the calendar in my office to the month of March. It’s not only special because March is the month of spring, which happens to be my favorite of the four seasons, but my calendar features various aircraft and in March it displays a gorgeous P-40 Warhawk painted up in the Flying Tiger paint scheme. (CLICK HERE to see just how much I love The Flying Tigers and why.) Needless to say, I have been looking forward to looking at that picture on that particular month since I received the calendar just prior to Christmas.

The third is that I heard from a young man I supported for the Lakota School Board named Luke Hall. Luke is a political science major at Miami University and a former student at Lakota East who worked for Spark Magazine. During the last election I thought Luke was one of the two best candidates and unfortunately I think that Luke’s youth worked against him in the court of public perception. But I was delighted to watch a recent video that Luke did where he gave the history of American politics in a rather concise video that sums up American politics in a remarkably abbreviated fashion. When I watched this video it reminded me of why it should be Luke Hall that is on the current school board, and it gave me hope that during the next election that Luke will be back, because I want a person on the school board who knows as much about politics and history as Luke does. Check it out!

When the members of the school board and other pro levy advocates proclaim that I expect too much out of the education of our youth, I hear from them a sense of laziness. And I would point them in the direction of Luke Hall as an example of what I’d expect coming out of Lakota as a student body and what level of comprehension I expect on the school board. Luke Hall is the type of person I would like to see at every single school board position. He’s what I expect out of a superintendent. He’s what I expect out of principals and teachers. And I don’t think it’s too much because Luke is in his early 20’s. He’s only been out of high school for a couple of years, so how difficult is it for grown adults to learn what Luke does when they have much more time to learn it?

I think very highly of Luke. I’ve met his parents and it is immediately obvious that he comes from a caring family, which helps a lot to encourage a young mind to excel, to read all those books that are behind him in the video. A young person has to be the one to do the act of learning, but it is the adults in a young person’s life who set the bar of expectation. And Luke has those types of people in his life and it shows.

That is not to say that Luke and I always agree. During the Election of 2011 Luke and many of his friends from the Spark Magazine took exception to my opinion of their teacher at Lakota East when I called that teacher a “radical liberal.” Luke and his friends rallied to the defense of their teacher which didn’t bother me. I like to see young people believe something, so I encourage such confrontations. But ultimately in the theater of debate, compromise is not the objective. One’s political beliefs are not to be compromised in surrender to another. This is because there is a right and a wrong answer and one cannot make a correct answer partially wrong as a “compromise” to the opposite political party.

For that very reason it does not matter to me if Luke is a Republican or a Democrat. As he said in his video, politics has changed many times over time to reflect the strategy of party politics. So the title to something cannot be completely trusted. My interest in any discussion is what the truth is. Party is not a consideration. Learning the truth is. My support of Luke Hall for school board in spite of his youth was for this reason. It doesn’t matter what his age, it doesn’t matter what his political affiliation, or it doesn’t matter if he wants to defend his teacher–what matters is whether or not Luke has the ability as an elected official to discover the truth and to act on that truth.

The budget crisis at Lakota is not a negotiation between various political factions. It’s not a compromise. Currently the school board is behaving as though if they make a few cuts around the outside of the pie, the parameter of the budget–the meaningless crust, that the community will forgive them for not touching the heart of the pie, where the real costs are. These school board members are not dealing with the truth. They are not facing reality. They are showing that they do not have a grasp on history or an understanding of economics, because they assume that the rest of the community is at the same proficiency of understanding as they are. The budget crisis at Lakota is about truth and the ability of management to arrive at that truth. Truth is not a negotiation process.

Luke has shown that he has the ability to grasp facts and to reach the truth. Where politicians go wrong is that they begin to compromise the truth in exchange for political donations, then they seek to justify their position with more fuzzy facts and over time, they become corrupt because they lose the ability to see the truth. So they fall into this whole notion of compromise with other political factions to arrive at their reality, and that is why politics is screwed up, and that is why in the history of American politics that Luke so eloquently invoked there have been so many changes that have gradually taken America away from its founding concepts.

The American Constitution was not a document that was written upon fantasy. It was written based on philosophic observation and a pursuit of basic human truths that are not negotiable. That’s why the Constitutional foundations produced the greatest civilization in the history of the known world. America is now living off its reputation but is unable to rekindle its once potent power because it’s political structure as been seduced by the notion of “compromise.”

Luke’s video made my day better because it displayed to me that there are youth coming up today that are able to understand the basics of truth, and it gives me hope for the future. Because without knowledge of history and a grasp of essential truths, society will fail, and Luke is evidence that there is optimism. As I parked my motorcycle in my place this morning and put down the kickstand I thought of the presidential primaries that are coming to Ohio this upcoming week, and Luke Hall was on my mind as a potential future candidate. Ohio has not produced many presidents of late, and I hope that Luke Hall becomes one that breaks that streak in his political future, and I hope that he begins the practice now of holding on to his essential truths along the way. His first challenge to that process will be when he is finally elected to the school board, where his first test on that path will be cast against him by the powers of politics who have built their lives upon falsehood. Luke will be a threat to them because his mind is hungry for the truth. And that is why I will support him in his next run for school board, then school board president, and eventually President of the United States. Because whether or not I agree with Luke or not isn’t important. Luke like me is in search of the truth and once it’s discovered we will act on it, in spite of our personal beliefs. Because once truths are discovered they must be incorporated into our thoughts and our beliefs must reflect them. To do anything less is a “compromise” toward corruption that is the foundations to every kind of human failure. It is in such failures that we find our current school board suffering and our nation in general.

Soon Luke will have to add to his speech in that video to describe how America had to reset itself after that long chain of events to a national respect for The Republic upon which America stands and to pursue the truth that is required to feed such an entity on a diet of authenticity without compromise to the evil of falsehood.

Luke Hall for future President of The United States! But that is the end of a long road he has not traveled down yet. I look forward to his long journey. It should be a lot of fun to watch.

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

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

http://thepeoplescube.com/

The Spy Master Takes Power: A mirror into the United States

Only in Russia does a chain represent freedom, but under Vladimir Putin’s leadership that is exactly what the Russian people are trying to convince the world of. Barred from a third term of Premiership by the Russian Constitution Putin has maneuvered himself into an obsessive quest for power and his behavior is alarmingly similar to Barack Obama’s own quest for power. It’s very interesting to observe just how close Vladimir Putin’s leadership is to Barack Obama’s. For those who forget how dangerous the Russian KGB used to be viewed world-wide it is alarming to see how accepting that same world is toward Putin who is in effect a master spy right out of a James Bond film and has found power much to his liking.

Putin loves power so much that he was the subject of Glenn Beck’s GBTV episode on this very topic. For whatever reason, most Americans find it difficult to grasp that much of the fantasy of spy films like James Bond are actually watered down revelations of the real mentality occurring in the actual world. I have provided many instances at this site about how the KGB has infiltrated American culture during the Cold War and had the intent to manipulate our culture to destroy it from within. This is a fact! It is not fiction. You can see one of those articles here:

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/06/17/do-you-believe-in-spies-review-of-the-film-salt-and-how-sleeper-cells-have-corrupted-america/

You can see the video from GBTV below where Glenn Beck breaks down the most recent manipulations by the supposedly dismantled KGB, who now has a world leader from their ranks pulling the strings. This should concern every person on planet earth.

Spies like Putin know that most people are so addicted to their static patterns that they often will refuse to see the truth even if it is placed right in front of their faces. So for the sake of education I would encourage you dear reader to Google any term I use here along with the key word “OVERMANWARRIOR” and you will see the hundreds and hundreds of articles that I have written on that term. Pick any term, and you will see that I have written on it. Serious, try it out. So when you want to understand what static patterns are, know that they are what govern your life, and if you want to change those patterns then you must introduce a dynamic pattern and accept the results. If you reject the results, then your behavior will not change the evidence provided by the dynamic. Closing one’s eyes does not make the problem go away just like pulling the covers over your face may make one feel safer, but the danger outside of the covers is still very real. There is a real science to this stuff, and KGB agents, and the CIA are VERY aware of these methods. And they use them against each other, against other governments, and against the entire human race in various applications. This is not news.

Most people however do not want to accept that many of the influences in their lives currently may be the result of war between two counter spy networks who have become so good at their jobs that they are on a quest for power themselves. I saw a young girl the other day who was working on computers and she was covered in “PEACE” symbol jewelry. It’s very fashionable for young people to buy clothing and jewelry displaying the “peace symbol” so I asked her if she knew the origin. She of course didn’t, and when I explained to her that she was a victim of Cold War politics and that the peace symbol came from the KGB implanting it in American culture in the 60’s to turn the youth against the adults so that the will to fight against Russia was diminished greatly averting the necessity for direct conflict with communist Russia. Russia knew they could not beat America in a production war because communism cannot beat capitalism. So Russia sought out to turn American youth against the adult establishment in an effort to destroy America from within. And now we have a president like Obama which is a result of these youth created by the KGB in the 60’s who openly embrace communism. The KGB is as much behind the creation of The Great Society as LBJ was, because President Johnston and Kennedy before his assassination were reacting to the communist push by the KGB infecting Cuba at the time and felt they needed to respond to the millions of protesting youth who had the power to vote.

As angry as I get at President Johnston for bringing America The Great Society and Roosevelt’s New Deal it is communism pushed upon American society by the KGB forced onto those presidents into making mistakes against our own Constitution. It was an act of war during the Cold War and freedom was the casualty, not actual human bodies. It was a casualty predicated by the KGB.

I told this story to the young girl who was no older than my youngest daughter. And she looked at me like her head was about to explode. I just smiled at the kid and let her off the hook with conversation about the computer she was fixing. Her reaction was at least more honest than that of most contemporary adults who pretend to understand what I say, then belittle the information behind my back as though by doing so it might change the facts of the matter. Most people are so intent to keep their beliefs intact that they ignore the evidence of new information which tends to shatter the illusion they wish to believe about the world around them.

Putin in Russia is doing almost exactly what Obama is doing here in the United States and considering that it is well-known that Putin is a former KGB agent, a particularly dangerous one, who has been running Russia for a number of years both in front of public image and behind the scenes, it should bring every American great concern that Obama who hasn’t been anything in his life before becoming a Federal Senator from Illinois who was propped up to become president by powers many people don’t wish to comprehend, are so similar in their behavior.

The details of what Obama has done are so numerous that I have enough material here to fill an entire book. Just go back through some of my previous articles to learn how. Obama shares with Putin a love for power, a manipulation of the people with his public image, and a desire for world domination that is alarmingly similar and that should tell Americans everything they need to know about the political world around them. But they chose to ignore the information and this is by design. I have even went to the trouble to teach your dear reader how this is done to you, and you have read the information, yet are powerless to alter your behavior to incorporate that knowledge into your daily life. For a review look at this article of how you are manipulated by virtually every entity in your life, family, friends, local politicians, national politicians, public relations experts, and spies from far away lands. There is a lot of competition for your attention and often you are so tired you don’t even know why because so many images come at you on a daily basis that it’s just too much to comprehend. So you turn on American Idol to relax and let them entertain you while your brain recovers from forces you don’t understand.

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2012/02/18/the-crows-test-how-the-human-race-gets-screwed-over/

Like the girl I tried to explain the peace symbol history to, most people point at the things I say and want to call it fantasy. However, they are using an inaccurate definition of fantasy. A fantasy is an assertion that is not based on any fact and the facts of a case like the spy manipulation of America by the KGB show that our culture has been transformed by Russia into a country that does not pose a threat to them. The fantasy is to declare that the opposite is true, that all these world powers want world peace and is a world that holds hands and sings songs around a campfire. That is the fantasy.

If Obama is not stopped in 2012 during our own presidential elections you can look forward to taking another step into the direction of Russia which has been their plan all along. And if you want to have an understanding of how bad Russia is compared to the United States take a hard look at the reality of the people between the two cultures. If you go online, you will see without any difficulty thousands of attractive Russian women who are willing to marry an American man just to get into the United States to live. You do not see thousands of American women putting ads in the paper to marry a Russian man to move to Moscow. The market just isn’t there. That fact alone should tell you dear reader everything you need to know about the situation. The law of supply and demand will tell you what the media, controlled by people like Putin, will not tell you. And that is how you know you’ve been scammed, even when the conditions shown to you by the spy masters of the world indicate otherwise.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

http://thepeoplescube.com/