John Kasich must be applauded for taking a very controversial stand against human trafficking in the early months of 2012. Human trafficking is modern slavery and it is an epidemic that I have covered extensively here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom.
It is always a good thing when a high-profile personality like John Kasich puts light on an issue that has been purposely kept in the dark for many reasons. To review my other articles about this very important issue, please refer to the following links:
Sex trafficking is not a victimless crime. It is 100% modern slavery and is every bit as evil as the slave trade in the 1600’s through the 1800’s here in the United States. No group should point at that time in American history as a sin while all the while letting it continue in the modern age.
I believe so much in this issue that I opened my novel The Symposium of Justice with a form of sex trafficking being broken up by a vigilante. My editor at that time was so upset with me for refusing to take this scene out of the book that it cost me my relationship with that editor. Few people realize just how wide-spread this modern human slavery penetrates our social network, but it is an epidemic without measure.
Thank you John Kasich for putting yourself out there to bring this very important issue to the front of people’s minds.
P.S. shortly after I posted this story, the Governor sent me an email. It is as follows:
Dear Rich: Thank you for your words of support. Human trafficking is a horrific crime and we are going to take strong action to stop this from happening. I am proud and humbled to be serving as the 69th Governor of Ohio. As your Governor I will work to unite all Ohioans, and work towards the common purpose of creating new jobs and improving Ohio’s economy. Ohio is a great state. I believe in the future of Ohio and have faith in the people of Ohio. We invite your continued input on the journey. If there is any way my office can assist you in the future, please do not hesitate to contact me.
So for those who wonder why I’m such a mean guy who hates so many teachers, and their unions, have a look at this wonderful segment by Glenn Beck on the condition of Greece right now, since they are the result of many of the politics from Socialist International. It is to avoid becoming a future Greece that I fight so hard, and criticize so ruthlessly. It’s to eliminate those in our public debates who wish to take us down this road that are my intended targets.
But why? How did this person come to sit with me at a school board meeting? How did we become friends in the first place? After all, this was a guy who used to be a levy supporter, and a very active volunteer at Lakota East. Well, it’s the fault of the Lakota School Board actually for not taking action to help the guy out when he had a problem. This guy came to the board and presented his case and the school did everything they could to cover it up. They took his wife aside and pressured her into signing her rights away out of fear that they would smear her for the relationship she had with a teacher at the high school who had instructed her daughter. This case went all the way up to the state board of education and still the story was contained. The teacher who sent very salacious emails talking about sucking, and doing the horizontal mamba with this little girl’s mother from a school computer didn’t get fired from his position for violating the trust of the teacher-student relationship.
Instead the principal of the high school sent the teacher in question to the other high school to help keep him employed and shut up the parents who had reconciled the incident between each other after a lot of pain. Even after the relationship had ended between the woman and the teacher the parasite continued to pursue the woman asking how “their” little girl was doing on papers sent home and on voice messages over the phone. It was the kind of voice message that sent shivers up the spine of the woman. It felt as if the teacher was “bullying” her into a position of control, and the teacher continued to do this for quite some time after the affair ended and the child was out of his class. Because in all reality, nothing really happened to the teacher, he just reported to a different building within the Lakota School System once the story was presented to the principal and school board.
Out of desperation and risking that I would shoot him just for stepping on my property, this father sought me out for help because he had nowhere else to turn. He wanted someone to be accountable for what this teacher attempted to do to his family. So I covered their story in greater detail in another article. Click Here to view that piece. Over time, we have become friends and I have gotten to know their daughter who is now out of school. After the incident with the teacher this little girl was repeatedly harassed by other students at Lakota. The bullying became so bad that the parents had to remove their little girl from a very respected activity due to the constant harassment, all of which is well documented with an extensive paper trail. Remember, this used to be dedicated Lakota volunteer who is very well liked and respected in the Lakota community, so the man has no reason to be inflammatory. Once the little girl graduated from school she once again thrived, and this was the 18-year-old woman who recently showed me around her house and shared with me her crushes that she had on her favorite movie stars. As she spoke to me I could not help but wonder what kind of evil would possess a teacher to use this nice young woman as a tool to seduce her mother into beginning a sexual affair. What evil would try to pry from this innocent girl facts about her father that the teacher could use to smear against the mother. And what evil could use the special needs condition of the young girl to demand audience from the very busy, and concerned mother who would do anything to make sure her daughter got what she needed in school.
So is there bullying going on at Lakota, and virtually every public school all across the country? YES! Of course there is. Public schools are notoriously class specific, and peer groups are created within a public school system to meet the various classifications of personalities. Because such a thing is a primal desire, to find likeness among peers, children will pick on those who are not like them and pound into shape those similar into a group collective. Individuality is frowned down upon by every member of the public school system, which is why I dislike public school and always have. But when the pressure gets to be too great that it translates into a student wanting to take their own life, then the situation is way out of control and has expanded beyond the realm of tolerance.
When I heard about the recent suicide at Lakota West, I didn’t want it to be another negative article to write against the Lakota School System. My heart goes out to the parents of this little girl. I don’t care what the situation was, a system that lets a girl think death was the only way out has failed the child and the family who trusted the school. And unfortunately it sounds like the girl was suffering from bullying at her school to such an extent that she thought she had no way out.
Since this story was reported by Channel 9 one time during the second week of February 2012 and nowhere else, facts are hard to come by. The letter that Lakota sent home to parents was nowhere to be found on their website, which seemed to be big enough news to dictate sending the letter home with kids. I did however see the article by the Enquirer about the new school board member Julie Schaffer promoting her “volunteerism.” But there wasn’t anything about this tragic death that occurred on February 8th in the paper that I saw, or on the Lakota site giving any specifics. That seemed strange for such a sad story.
I figured that the media and the school were just being sensitive to the family, and by keeping the story quit, they were being respectful to the grieving family, which I thought was appropriate. That is until I saw the comments online from Leslie Agoston who is a student at Lakota West and knows the victim. Here is the posting.
Leslie Agoston I am a current Lakota West High School student. And I know what the girl went through and how she felt. I too get bullied almost every day. And Lakota could care less they just sweep it under the rug. They just care about their “excellence” rating. If they just stopped for a second and realize how many kids are suffering from bullying an incident like this would have never happened.
That is an interesting thing for a student at Lakota to say? That comment eerily sounded like the situation my new friend who came to the school board meeting with me went through. The comment from the student implies that the administration at Lakota doesn’t care about the bullying that goes on. It backs up the notion that my friend is not the only one who suffered from some indiscretion involving bullying at the Lakota School District.
But what constitutes bullying? Was it bullying to use a special needs kid to sleep with a parent? Might the child have felt pressure from such a teacher into revealing family secrets through acts of intimidation? Was it bullying to tell the mother that unless she signed a document releasing the school of responsibility that “word might get around the community about her indiscretions.” And apparently the students at Lakota West are complaining about bullying being a rampant problem that nobody is addressing.
Well, for clarity on this issue, let’s look at what Lakota itself says the definition of bullying is according to their website.
Lakota’s Definition of Bullying
“Bullying” is defined as an intentional written, verbal, electronic, or physical act that a student exhibits toward another particular student more than once; and the behavior both (1) causes mental or physical harm to the student, and (2) is sufficiently severe, persistent, or pervasive that a reasonable person under the circumstances should know will have the effect of: • Placing a student in reasonable fear of physical harm or damage to the student’s property; • Physically harming a student or damaging a student’s property; or • Insulting or demeaning any student or group of students in such a way as to disrupt or interfere with the school’s educational mission or the education of any student. http://www.lakotaonline.com/parents.cfm?subpage=2642
I know that my friend and his family suffered from bullying according to that definition at the hands of a Lakota teacher, a principal, and the school board members who knowingly let the issue slide through the cracks. They did not pursue termination of that teacher, but instead covered the issue up, which is consistent with the statement made by Leslie Agoston in her comments about the recent tragic death of her fellow student.
I understand that any organization with a lot of people and employees will be far from perfect. But we do expect perfection from an airplane pilot. If a pilot lands successfully 300 times then crashes on landing 301 that pilot would be held accountable, probably with the loss of their job at the very least. If there was a loss of life, there might even be a trial. The community of Lakota is employing an army of very well paid administrators, teachers and councilors to prevent tragic events like what Leslie described. It is also expected that teachers behave ethically without trying to have sex with the parents. The kids are watching how the administrators and teachers behave, and kids cannot be expected to be better than the teachers, can they?
It is a tragedy anytime a young person losses their life. It’s bad enough to consider whatever the sum of the conditions were that made the little girl want to take her own life. Again, my heart goes out to the family in the deepest way. And I truly hope that what Leslie said is not true, that this bully problem is not so epidemic within the Lakota School System that the situation could have been avoided with the skilled intervention of the highly paid mentors employed by the community. Because if it could have, then this suicide is a very serious issue for the school board to consider, and so far, all I hear them talking about is the passage of a new tax levy. They didn’t even bring it up at the school board meeting on February 13, 2012. They didn’t even say a prayer for the little girl or cover the issue in any way which would have been appropriate with such a large gathering. All these elements add up to be just another situation as what my friend experienced in his own family, a school that pushes all bad news under the rug to hide from the community.
I really hope I’m wrong, but something tells me that I’m not.
The biggest problem with the whole bullying issue is that the schools have painted themselves into a corner. They are not equipped to deal with bullying. Only a parent is, and sometimes the best way to eliminate a bully is to fight them. That’s how you shut down a bully. That’s how it’s been done for 10,000 years of human evolution. And if the child can’t take care of it on their own, the parents must step in and do it for them.
When my daughter was 9 years old she was picked on by a group of boys in the neighborhood who harassed her and her friends to no end. My daughter stood up to the bullies and one of the boys spit on her. My daughter was devastated by the embarrassment and came home very upset that a person would do such a thing to her, especially since the boy was much bigger than she was. That’s when the parent must step in and take control.
I put my daughter and all her friends in the car and went looking for the boys. I found them playing in the driveway of their house with the spitter’s father working in the garage, all of them were laughing as we pulled up. I made the boy apologize on his hands and knees to my daughter so my daughter would realize that I had her back and that if she ever got into a fix she couldn’t handle, that I’d be there to sweep it up for her. She needed to know that her father was there. Of course the boy’s father protested and wanted to fight me, which I openly accepted. Then he shut his mouth and went inside his house leaving his kids to fend for themselves, which scared the shit out of them. Their father had abandoned them when it mattered. Little things like that matter a lot in the art of living.
These matters are too complicated for schools to handle, yet they sell their services to the community as though they can. They are kidding themselves. Respect for human beings cannot be created through rules and regulations. Respect is earned, and standing up for yourself or your child is the way it is gained in the mind of the human being. There is no other way.
It is in this misunderstanding that bullying is an epidemic problem in public schools and parents who believe that the school system can, and will put children’s safety in the front of administrator’s minds are kidding with you. Administrators don’t have the intellectual capacity, or the fortitude to do such a thing, and the cost to society is great. The bully issue in public school is just another byproduct of an organized, overly specialized, labor force that has handcuffed parents into inaction because they assure society that all problems can be handled in the classroom. So parents believing they don’t have a right to get involved in the affairs of their children in school leave the job to the teachers and administrators that can’t even balance a budget, let alone handle complicated emotional issues with children who aren’t even theirs.
The schools know this. They know they can’t protect the children to the level they have sold to the public. Their primary concern is always how they are going to continue to gain funding from the community, so they are always focused on hiding unpleasant facts from the public rather than dealing directly with a problem. This is why Lakota didn’t even discuss the suicide of a student just four days later at the largest school board meeting I can ever remember occurring at Lakota with all the media in Cincinnati covering the event. The school board didn’t even acknowledge the tragedy, because the goal of the meeting was to convince the community of the need for higher taxes, not to actually deal with any tough problems like mature adults. This is the kind of behavior that has created most of the problems in public education. That’s how they got into trouble with my new friend. They sought to suppress the story rather than dealing with it directly.
The bullies of the world know this. They know that most of the parents, administrators, and teachers are paralyzed into inaction by rules and regulations that the bullies could care less about. So like the liberal gun laws that seek to remove guns from society in the aim of world peace, the progressive educators think that by employing more councilors and administrators that they can stop violence and the tendency of violence from the school environment. They can’t.
The answer is more parental involvement, less administrators getting in the way of a parent and their children, and encouraging justice where it’s appropriate. When a teacher does something wrong, FIRE THEM! When a child acts inappropriately, expel them! And when you hear and see reports from parents that violence is coming at their children in the school, don’t pass the reports to your PR director to hide from the public. Deal with them; deal with each and every report even if the parents are overly neurotic, because that’s what the community is paying for. If there is anything that can be learned from these tragedies it’s that there isn’t any replacement for good ol’ fashioned care and attention. Money can’t buy security and a clean conscious, only work can solve the problem and without the work, tragedies will continue to occur.
When Mike Schell of Fox 19 met me in the hall at Lakota East to get a few comments for his story on the epic school board meeting held at Lakota East’s auditorium that was packed to the ceiling with concerned Lakota residents, he asked me why I was there since I have been such a staunch advocate against the tax increases. I told him I was curious as to what the administration was going to do, that they had some time to get things right since the election, and I was coming to the meeting with an open mind hoping that Mantia and the gang of administrators were going to do something bold, and good for the future of Lakota. Mike then told me the cliff notes version of the meeting which he had in his hand. The proposal was 69 teaching positions cut and reducing the teaching day from a 7 period day to 6. I shook my head and told Mike I was disappointed. You can see the rest of the interview at the Channel 19 site and what I said next.
I was disappointed as I sat with my wife in the top row of the large auditorium and watched the proceeding with growing revulsion as the meeting began at 7 PM. To me, the school boards choice was an easy one. After the defeat of the levy in November, they had a mandate from the community with over 18,000 voters turning down their third levy attempt to ask the teachers union to take a 5% pay cut, which isn’t a big deal since the average pay at Lakota is $63K per year. That simple request would have put Lakota’s budget in line with the revenue stream coming to it where residents pay around $1,140 per 100K of property value on their businesses and residence. That tax is already high. So much so that it does discourage existing businesses and prospective businesses from coming to the Lakota district. That number is the breaking point, so from my vantage point and many who support the NO LAKOTA LEVY group, the tax burden needs to be decreased, not increased.
At the school board meeting the only way to describe my nausea at the obvious scheme to launch the district into a FOURTH tax levy attempt was to compare it to the visitation of a funeral. That’s how it felt. The participants on that large stage in front of a vast audience fumbled about like an episode of the Three Stooges. These buffoons had the audacity to attempt to attract this large crowd to the biggest venue in the district so they could show a PowerPoint presentation on a very large screen to look good for the cameras. I instantly recognized the tactic by Superintendent Mantia, because she used almost the exact same forum up in Pickerington when she lobbied for a levy passage that passed just this last August. The goal of the meeting, (THE REAL GOAL) was not to announce any real cuts. It was to say that the Lakota School System was going to go to state minimums and do only what they had to do to get by. In fact, the teachers are going to teach one less class a day since they are getting rid of the 7th period! So they are doing less work than they do now! How is that beneficial?
Hidden in the dialog throughout the evening was the reminder that if the community did pass a levy, that some of what was being taken away could come back as a kind of Plan B. The entire event was a page ripped right out of Saul Alinsky’s The Delphi Technique. The school board batted around comments like tennis players hitting a ball and a bewildered audience watched waiting for a score. A woman in front of me took vigorous notes until 8:30 as her three kids started getting restless. The meeting began with a lot of energy, but by 9 PM the energy had died and people started to look at the exits. The entire goal of the meeting was to drag out a large audience, complain about how little money the board had to work with, and then use a lot of terminology that the audience would think sounded impressive to appear efficient.
The only strategic option the school board had was to force the union to take further concessions and if the union refused, to use that against them in a public relations campaign. That is if the school board wished the future solvency of the district and not just some short shot in the arm from a tax increase by a levy passage. Increased taxes are not an option. It will cripple the growth of the Lakota district not only in families moving to the area, but also the commercial business that is prevalent in the community. Yet the school board showed at this latest meeting without any doubt that they are completely on the side of the union labor and lack the resolve to meet the budget crises head on and actually solve it. After several months of work after a failed levy, our triple dipping superintendent Karen Mantia from Pickerington, Ohio who makes nearly a quarter of a million dollars in overall compensation can do nothing more with her budget than cut teachers and services as an extortion racket to set up another school levy attempt in 2012.
I witnessed from the top row the funeral of public education, which I’ve never been a fan of, but saw it die right in front of my face. Any hope that public education could resurrect itself was beyond doubt gone from that stage at Lakota East on February 13, 2012. Lakota is the 7th largest district in the state of Ohio; it’s been excellent with distinction for over a decade. Lakota is the best of the best when it comes to public education, and it is a scam. So if Lakota is a scam, then what are all those schools who aren’t as good as Lakota? Lakota is a scam because there was never any intention to balance their budget no matter what combination of personnel was put on the board, because the system itself is on life support and what the audience has to do is decide whether or not to pull the plug or not.
As I watched a parade of parents plead with the school board to find ways to reach out to those of us in the NO LAKOTA LEVY so that some common ground could be found to pass the next levy, I saw a group of people addicted to money like a dying patient might be addicted to morphine. The public school of Lakota is comatose because its employees lack the will to make any hard decisions. They think the school exists so that their employees can make healthy incomes, double-dip in their retirements, have great insurance benefits, and have all summer off. And they are willing to feed off kids to achieve their goal. Their very lives require vast sums of money to feed their addiction and once that money is cut off it is clear that their collective minds lack any direction, imagination, or leadership to exist on their own. So the moment they are taken off that supply of money they become sick and are ready to die.
I’ve joked about it here, I’ve ranted about it on these very pages, but public education is in all essence dead. Tax levies are the life support that keeps them living, and they are in such a condition because they are money addicts. Their philosophy is essentially wrong and this has led to the addictive behavior that they don’t even understand about themselves. It was obvious to me and to others in the audience who see that the body is already dead even as that body attempts to put on a big show to pretend they are in fact alive and well. They aren’t. Because the moment there isn’t any money to keep them alive, they are ready to die, unable to break themselves of that addiction. The school as a whole would rather cut off parts of their body in labor reductions and reduce their offerings to the community as a service than adjust their bloated bodies with the hard decision of restructuring their lives to what the community is supplying them with in funding.
I left the meeting at a quarter till 10 PM as a slow boil of anger swelled within me well into the next day that finally erupted halfway through the following afternoon during a contentious conference call on an unrelated matter. As my wife and I left, it had the same feeling that we’ve had as we’ve left the visitation of a family member at a funeral. The school board members and supporters of public education are so far out of touch that they didn’t know they were already dead. Instead they reside like ghosts who refuse to move on hovering over their bodies in confusion as if somehow they would spring back to life.
It was sad to see, but also revolting all the same. It’s an insult to be told by a ghost how to live life, yet that is what the Lakota School Board did at their meeting. It’s like taking advice from an alcoholic how to avoid drinking too much; it’s an insult to listen to the slurred speech of the drunkard lecture on the evils of drinking. The school board instructed the audience of the need for cutting money while at the same time asking for more, so they could live just a few minutes longer, just one more year. Once 2014 hits the pay freeze will be lifted and Lakota will have an onslaught of employees expecting 3% to 6% increases to make up for their losses during the three-year pay freeze designed to get a levy passed.
Public education is a joke. The employees of the system are a joke. And the administrators are a joke and in bed with the employees. The whole system is a failure of money addicts lost in a reality of their own making. And they have committed their own suicide by their actions and lack of realism. When residents of the nearby neighborhood of Four Bridges are paying over $5000 a year on their homes, as both parents work hard to just keep their property as their value plummets and job opportunities are restricted, the idea of a further tax on homes like that are unbearable, not to mention the senior citizens on a fixed income or the businesses that are barely getting by and thinking of leaving their leases for a cheaper district. The Lakota School System under the leadership of the Ohio School Board Association in Columbus and the Ohio Education Association and its parent organization the National Education Association of socialists have painted themselves into a corner and expect to be rescued with life support to sustain their addiction to money. But the money isn’t there anymore and the community must now decide whether or not to pull the plug on a loved one in order to ease their own minds to the terminal patient that will never get better on their own.
To me the thing is already dead. It might look like its breathing; it might even look into your eyes. But it’s the drugs talking. In this case it’s a $160 million dollar plus budget that somehow isn’t enough. And given that fact, I’m prepared to pull the plug and leave the hospital. Because the death is inevitable—it’s just waiting for someone to make the hard decision.
What I’m getting ready to say has nothing to do with racism. I must remind all the readers here that I supported Herman Cain for president, even after we learned that he enjoyed the company of women beyond the attention of just his wife. If those were reasons to not vote for a president, then Bill Clinton would have been rejected, Kennedy, LBJ, and FDR—all those presidents were serial womanizers, so I didn’t see the problem with Herman Cain. I’d still vote for Cain today if he was running.
But the media brought Cain down because they basically all came from the same kind of colleges that Barrack Obama did, and they all read the same type of communist propaganda literature that has delivered us to an age where a President of the United States can openly campaign for socialism. My good buddy Matt Clark of WAAM in Ann Arbor recently covered this Obama socialism and pointed out the absolute ridiculousness of his policies. But as you will see in the pictures though-out this post, Obama does not come from the kind of back ground of a Herman Cain, which is why the media was terrified of him. Cain was poor and worked his way up to be the CEO of a major company. That is an American success story. Obama was a radical college professor who hung around liars, radicals, and communists and was simply a community organizer who was pushed along through his political career by communist sympathizers who wanted to use Obama’s good looks and skin color to advance their personal agenda. Obama has shown a tendency to completely lie with a straight face especially over his relationship to Bill Ayers the radical terrorist of the Weather Underground who just so happens to also be a college professor at the University of Chicago where Obama taught constitutional law from 1992 to 2004.
As seen in these pictures Obama’s family in Kenya is not the kind of family that a Herman Cain would have had in the south. Obama’s folks are still village people. There’s a reason that the people of Africa aren’t building sky scrapers and creating their own economies. There’s a reason they are poor and dying of AIDS by the thousands—because every village functions from a kind of socialism where the head chief of the village passes out like a king the tasks for the whole society. This is Obama’s background. He thinks he’s the village chief in America.
You can see that Obama in these pictures is just another bright-eyed little boy looking for acceptance from his father. Unlike the ghetto whores here in America who tends to sleep with every man who lives on their street and has babies with all of them to qualify for more government assistance, Obama’s mom slept with radical black men from other countries who advocated overthrowing the political powers of their home countries. This took little Barry Obama into a globetrotting adventure never really knowing who his stable parental figures were.
His mother eventually shacked up with an Indonesian fellow who apparently ruined Obama’s citizenship when Soreto was recalled to Indonesia taking little Obama with him. It was Obama’s grandparents in Hawaii who provided little Barack with the only real stable parental role models available.
None of that is poor little Barry’s fault. You can’t chose your parents, and nobody can blame him for seeking stability among the fraternity of communist advocates that he met in college. Obama is a product of socialism. Every cell in his body oozes it. He has learned from them, he smoked dope and partied with them, and he’s hung out in actual African villages getting close to his roots championing socialism with his cousins, aunts and uncles. Obama has done nothing in his life to earn money from the private sector. He’s had plenty of looters who have sought to use his race to advance their communist agenda, so they helped Obama get elected into the Senate. They helped him get a few books published and created a platform for a presidential run. All Obama had to do is bull-shit his way through his speeches, like he had learned to do from his broken family background and do what the village masters told him to do. Having a background of poor ethical behavior made it easy for Obama to just do whatever he was told, and go along for the ride.
To get an idea of who is behind Obama, and who tells him what to do, where to stand, how to hold his head in a certain way, here is a nice little article that digs into the money that is poured into Obama’s re-election campaign.
When Obama says to tax the rich, he doesn’t know what that means. He thinks he’s rich, so he naturally thinks all the value of money and wealth equals his feelings about it. What he fails to grasp is that he was given looted wealth. He is a creature of public service. He has not done work in the private sector. He does not create anything on his own. He has simply been the recipient of looted wealth. For all he knows in his communist little mind is that he’s a millionaire. His books sold because of his presidential run that was supported by donations from campaign contributions. That’s a pretty good PR campaign to run for office supported off campaign donations that drives people to buy books and make him wealthy. All Obama had to do was follow directions like the nice little communist that he is.
I say communist because that is without question his end game. He is currently a progressive socialist. He uses only the progressive part of that in his designation. I think he has actually convinced himself that he’s some sort of capitalist. But that is the actor in him. That’s what he has in common with every actor in Hollywood who has come to the White House. Many actors lead troubled lives because their core personalities are vacant since they often become the characters they play in movies, and these characters are constantly changing depending on the content of their scripts. I know a few of these types of people and they are purposely not very grounded. Some of the best actors are those who come from broken families and lack strong personality traits. This makes it easy for them to climb into the skin of another character like a chameleon and just change their attributes to reflect their surroundings.
Obama has shown that he can be anything to anybody, so to know him requires one to dig into those who prop him up. Like any actor he believes he is the center of attention, the village chief, and that his money was earned. Because he lacks real world experience he does not understand that he is a “created” personally, like an actor in a movie. The progressive radicals saw a distraught little Barry Soreto high as a kite in college and groomed him into a president that would advance their cause. All Obama had to do what listen to what he was told to do by his directors, which came natural to the young fellow, because that’s what communists do—they listen to what their superiors tell them to.
Obama is a reprehensible president that will go down in history as the greatest joke produced from the damn hippie era radicals that have infested our government like termites in an abandoned house. The Obama presidency is the result of the 60’s where they found in Obama a blank kid with a troubled past and put their arms around him to use him for their evil, twisted ends. They put money in his pocket and told him he’d be king if he just smoked another joint and did what they said. Obama is the president of the Weather Underground, a terrorist organization that wishes to dismantle capitalism completely in a plot that began 40 years ago, when baby Barack was just an infant looking for a father in the dusty villages of Africa, but growing up in the paradise of Hawaii by grandparents who had to care for the child of their deeply troubled daughter.
This is your president America. This is what you voted for, a fool who wishes to end the American way of life. Barry knows that people are coming on to him, so he’s now wearing his little American Flag pin, and trying to sound like an advocate for American values. But he cannot hide his communist wishes from those wise enough to see it. Obama is not the president for the strong, the brave, and the lovers of freedom. He is the president of the down-and-out, the weak, and the lazy. Obama and his minions seek to make more of America into poor, depleted recipients of government so that the power base of the progressive can expand. And the media is on board with fulfilling that agenda. They don’t want to cover the story of Herman Cain, a black man who rose up and became successful. That is not the American story that those who put so much money into Barack Obama’s pocket wish to advocate. The radical power brokers want Obama and his history of socialism, broken families, and low moral code because such people are easy to control. And if they can give America an icon with so many faults, then perhaps the people of America will not strive to be any greater than they are. Weak people are easy to control, and keeping people in a depleted state is the goal of the money men behind Obama, the actor.
Yes, dear reader. If you have bought into the smile of Barack Obama and his constant attempts to rape America of its producers, its rich, who actually create the jobs, then you are a processed fool. You are a result of progressive politics and you are broken at your very foundations. It is people like you who are ruining a great country because you lack the intelligence to fathom the result of your actions in supporting a president who is even more of an actor than Ronald Reagan was. The Presidency of the United States has officially been reduced to just another acting job where the actor has a vacant personality that is easily imprinted upon by the true masters who actually write the script. And every citizen who votes for such an actor for president is guilty of openly advocating socialism, and destroying the one great icon for world peace and economic prosperity—America.
That’s why the enemies of The United States support Barack Obama.
As the Lakota School System attempts to paint a picture of efficiency and community awareness by putting their troubled school board members into the back ground and promoting their former levy advocates to the forefront in a publicity campaign of competence, there is a sinister wave of reality that is sweeping the nation regarding the trouble with labor unions in education. Have a look at the latest attempt by the Lakota School System to advocate their need for another levy in 2012 by showing the public how hard they are working, as if such measures would earn them the trust of the Lakota residents.
Reading this Enquirer article about Julie Schafer brought my mind to a Marty Steer review of the new book called Special Interest: Teachers unions and America’s Public Schools that is worth mention. So I have included Marty’s review below in its entirety. The specifics of this review are that the union element is completely corrosive to the public school system, and this is detrimental to any discussion of school funding. This review by Marty validates much of what I have been saying about public sector unions, and I will go further than Marty does by stating that no further public funding increases should be provided to any government school until the unions are dismantled. Because only then can correct assessments of the true cost and value of public education be ascertained.
Lakota in their lack of admission to their labor union problems believe that highlighting the sacrifices of their new star, Julie Shafer exhibited in the Enquirer article will successfully hide all the negatives engaged by the Lakota Education Association in driving up the labor costs to unreasonable levels. The how, why, when and where of how this has occurred are shown wonderfully in this review by Marty Steer seen below. Enjoy!
SPECIAL INTEREST: TEACHERS UNIONS AND AMERICA’S PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Terry M. Moe
In January, 2010, Randi Weingarten, President of the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) gave a speech to the National Press Club that electrified proponents of school reform sending a surprising promise of hope. She called for sweeping changes in how school districts evaluate teachers, agreed to standardized tests, and favored a plan to get bad teachers out of the classroom. Even the New York Times headlined the breaking news, “Union Chief Seeks to Overhaul Teaching Evaluation Process.” Only problem: this doesn’t compute – especially given her staunch union track record. Today there’s pressure being put on unions that is threatening their survival, but they know how to play the game. Whitney Tilson, founding member of Teach for America, hit the nail on the head. “You know the saying. When you’re being run out of town, get out in front. Make it look like a parade.” (Pg. 269) And she did.
Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools, was written by Terry M. Moe,StanfordUniversity professor and senior fellow at the Hoover Institute. His book is exquisitely researched and highly praised by formerNew York City and Washington D.C. Chancellors, Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee. He begins with a description ofNew York City’s “Rubber Room,” the place where incompetent teachers go to relax while they draw full-salary, full-benefits and time to plan their paid vacations. But he ends with a ray of hope that reform will come, but not immediately. Taking you inside the operation of the teachers’ union, Moe reveals the details of their agenda and the consequences of their power. If the general public knew the truth, they’d be outraged and just maybe next time we’d do a little better at the ballot box.
Before digging into Moe’s book, I’d suggest Googling “A Nation at Risk.” Since Moe refers to it often, it would help to be familiar with this 1983 report to the Dept. of Education that addressed the alarming decline of American education. 25 years later, it had not improved, nor has it since. For the first time in history, they concluded that students did not receive as good an education as their parents, and we are now into the second generation of further decline, soon to be the third. That also just happened to be the time when teacher unions were forcefully on the move.
History: In 1857, the National Teachers Association (NEA) organized as a professional association of educators. Their mission was to meet high standards, attract well-trained teachers that were paid a professional salary and protected by tenure. It was controlled by superintendants, principals and other administrators responsible for making the key decisions. They were also in the business of removing schools from the clutches of party machines and patronage. This worked well for the first 100 years. Throughout the 60s and 70s NEA made a nationwide presence. They didn’t formally declare themselves a union until 1969, but acted like them, as did their union competitor, AFT. By the 80s membership soared and unionization and collective bargaining had now become the norm. (Pg. 44-48)
The Union’s Job: According to unions, they’re only doing their job: represent the special interest of the teacher by negotiating higher salary and benefits, protect them from job loss, issue seniority which protects bad teachers, guarantee a single-pay policy which disregards teacher performance, oppose accountability and school choice. Since the unions now replaced principals, superintendants and administrators with union control, they effectively run the show through the tool of collective bargaining. What follows are some of these “bargained” rules: (pg.174-175)
Teachers can make voluntary transfers to other schools based on seniority.
Senior teachers can take junior teachers’ jobs requiring junior teachers to be laid off first.
Principal is required to give advance notice to teachers before visiting their classroom to do an evaluation.
Use of standardized student tests for evaluating teacher performance is prohibited.
Unionspecifies rules for improvement, mentoring bad teachers, procedures to be followed in any effort to dismiss a teacher, and more.
Unions determine the number of faculty meetings and their duration.
They determine the number of parent conferences and other forums in which teachers meet with parents.
They determine how many minutes teachers can be required to be on campus before and after school.
They determine class size, number of courses, periods, or students a teacher must teach.
They determine non-teaching duties that teachers can be asked to perform such as yard, hall or lunch duty.
They allow teachers to take paid sabbaticals and give liberal options for personal leave days.
They control decisions about school policy, assignments, transfers, and put non-instructional duties in the hands of committees on which teachers participate and may have a majority.
Teachers are allowed to accumulate unused sick leave for years and to eventually convert it into cash windfalls.
Unions control grievance procedures that teachers can invoke if they feel their rights have been violated.
They give union official teachers time off to perform union duties (which requires school to hire a sub)
And they have access to school mailboxes, bulletin boards, classrooms, etc. to use for its own purposes.
Though collective bargaining doesn’t apply to all teachers unions, it is an accurate example of rules taking place within our public schools. The question is, does any of this have to do with what’s good for the kids? Who benefits?
Power, Politics and Reform Unionism: Together the NEA and AFT have over 4 million dues-paying members and collective bargaining is still the norm. That’s not to mention forced unionism which helps getting the legislation they want. They do it through the politics of blocking. Unions overwhelmingly support Democrats only with campaign donations and give more than any other organization, including SEIU. Democrats, in turn, feel obliged to support them. So even if a Democrat candidate genuinely does want reform, they’re between a rock and a hard place. There are organized Democrats who genuinely want reform and engage in what is called “reform unionism.” They ask for account-ability, teacher evaluation, school choice, etc. but here’s the rub. The union agrees with all of the above as long as it’s THEY who set the rules! In other words, they’re forced to buy something that isn’t going to work anyway. Enough said.
Has anyone tried REAL Reform? Yes. Has it worked? No. Why?
New Orleans: Quite successful but happened only as a result of tragedy: Hurricane Katrina. Because so many schools were destroyed, all the teachers were dismissed and the “local unions and its formidable power was essentially wiped out.” So free from the constraints of union power, guess what they built? Charter schools. Children in New Orleans now choose their school. 61% of them choose charter and most of their teachers are products of the revolutionary new real reform organization, Teach for America program. (pg. 215)
New York: When you read about theNew York “Rubber Room” you’ll know why theNew York school district is in deep trouble. Mayor Giuliani tried using his mayoral influence to achieve serious reform in the 90s, but failed. Mayor Bloomberg also tried with a little more success. His Chancellor – Joel Klein was good but his success also came at the price of a “buy-in” that ultimately didn’t work. Albeit a genuine attempt, they also failed. (pg. 220)
Washington D.C. D.C. has long been known as having one of the worst school districts in the country. It’s not from lack of money. In 2009, reported current-spending was $17, 542 per student. Including estimates on school construction, more like $28,000. Yet in terms of academic progress, they came in dead last. Parents were fleeing to charter schools. In 2007 newly elected Mayor Adrian Fenty, a serious reformer, gambled on hiring Michelle Rhee as Chancellor. (pg. 230-231) The unions didn’t know what they were up against. Rhee cleaned house. She even made the New York Times front cover pictured as a witch with a broomstick. Facing a union that had been weakened, she did more than anyone could imagine yet ultimately lost the battle when Fenty lost the 2007 Democratic primary to Vincent Gray. Moe writes” Rhee spent nearly three years bashing her head against a wall of union power, and for what? To bring about changes that are simply common sense and should never have been needed in the first place. They were needed because…the teachers unions have used their power to impose a labyrinth of onerous work rules that prevent the schools from being effectively organized.” (pg. 237)
Two Major Reform Projects
No Child Left Behind (NCLB Act), signed into law in 2001. was set to improve performance while ensuring that no child would be trapped in a failing school. The idea was to increase accountability, allow school choice, and flexibility in the use of Federal funds in exchange for strong accountability for results. While well-intentioned, “some of the most critical flaws arose because their designs were influenced by the unions and their allies – who don’t want educators held accountable and were using their power to purposely create a kind of “accountability” that would be weak and ineffective,” said Moe. Through collective bargaining they succeeded in eliminating private school vouchers and used their powers to ensure that NCLB was almost devoid of serious consequences when districts and schools failed to do their jobs. To date NCLB has been relatively toothless. (pg. 323)
Race to the Top was the work of Barack Obama and Arne Duncan, Obama’s appointment for the Dept. of Education. In a speech on education he reinforced his commitment to basic reformist ideas when he said “States and school districts need to take steps to move bad teachers out of the classroom…I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from consequence.” (pg. 359) Though his words were strong, action was weak and he, too, left with a “buy-in” option on the table which effectively stopped any real reform. The only good it did create was an explosion of reform activity that if kept alive can work to dismantle the power of these unions.
Other Significant Observations and Facts:
Teacher Benefits: Average teacher salary most likely in the $60,000 range – in the $40,000s for newer teachers and can easily become six figure for administrators and more. Add to that an attractive guaranteed pension and health benefits which for many is free. Not bad for a nine month job with seven or less work hours per day.
Union Strength: Massive membership, and politically massive money speaks.
Undoing a union: Not likely because you can vote out a bad politician, but you can’t vote out the unions. Reality: Unions are here to stay.
School boards generally stand in support of the unions. Critical to know candidates’ stand when you vote.
Mayoral support in your community reaches more constituents than does the school board. Important to know.
The Dance of the Lemons Description for bad teachers who are routinely given an unsatisfactory evaluation then passed around from school to school. (190) which of course is because they can’t be fired.
Hillary Clinton Think she’s a better option? Better think again! AFT’s Pres. Weingarten supported Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama. (pg. 268) When it comes to education, Hillary’s worse. Hillary has been the union’s candidate right down the line. (pg. 369) Her record shows she opposes any and all attempts for school reform.
Teach for America is a privately funded organization that recruits, trains and places thousands of college students to teach in the most disadvantaged public schools. Though TFA has proven to be a gold mine of talent for the schools, they are trashed by the unions and obviously pose a threat. (pg. 313)
My Own Observations
In 1983 “A Nation at Risk” concludes that students did not receive as good an education as their parents and we are now into the second generation of further decline, soon to be the third. In 1998 “A Nation Still at Risk” found that “American 12th graders scored near the bottom on the recent Third Int’l Math and Science Study. U.S. students placed 19 out of 21 developed nations in math and 16 out of 21 in science. Our advanced students did even worse, scoring dead last in physics. This evidence suggests that compared to the rest of the industrialized world, our students lag seriously in critical subjects vital to our future… if we continue to sustain this chasm between the educational haves and have-nots, our nation will face cultural, moral and civic peril…. We should be able to rely on our schools to fortify students with standards, judgment and character. Trashy American culture has spread worldwide; educational mediocrity has not. Other nations seem better equipped to resist the Hollywood invasion than is the land where Hollywood is located.” (A Nation Still at Risk by William J. Bennett…) http://www.hoover.org/publications/policy-review/article/6310
If we allow even one more generation of children to be subjected to the abysmal state of affairs in our public educational system, I think there’s no question we will lose this great country. Today we are at the crossroads in education. Based on growing realization by outraged parents, citizens and communities about the truth of the union agenda and reality of our academic failure, teachers unions have never before been as threatened as they are today. Moe feels confident that “we stand at a critical juncture today that can undermine the unions and put the system on a new and radically different path, and make reform a reality.” (pg. 345) He does see a light at the end of the tunnel, but we all need to own that knowledge and spread it. Now!
Marty Steer
Dec. 29, 2011
RecommendedReading:
“Special Interest: Teachers Unions and America’s Public Schools” by Terry M. Moe, followed by
“The Beekeeper: Michelle Rhee Takes on the Nation’s Worst School District” by Richard Whitmire.
Note: (If you haven’t already seen “Waiting for Superman” Michelle Rhee plays a role in that documentary and I believe the “union master” Randi Weingarten, makes a pitiful appearance as well.) This movie will rip your heart apart but needs to be seen.
However, the source of the news drew my skepticism, it was from The Sun, a tabloid newspaper and as I watched the video featured on the article below, I became more and more disappointed. Have a look for yourself.
The trouble I have with the video, and this comes from a great deal of experience, is that it is too blurry, and the cameraman doesn’t attempt to cut the animal off as it leaves the river. If I had been shooting this video I would have at least moved in for a closer look. There is no way I would have let that animal out of my sight with a short shot of it crossing a waterway.
I believe that such creatures still roam the earth. A Woolly mammoth in the extremely large land mass of Siberia is entirely believable. But footage gathered up from a paranormal investigator should be expected to be heavily scrutinized. So the cameraman owes it to his investigation to get the best shot possible. These days video cameras are more than capable of getting a better, much less fuzzy shot than the one seen in this Woolly mammoth video. So it must be concluded that the poor film quality is on purpose, to mislead the viewer into believing they are seeing something they aren’t.
Visual effects are both fortunately and unfortunately much easier for even low tech equipment to produce these days so a video confirming a Woolly mammoth requires much higher quality video. In fact, I wouldn’t believe it unless I saw the cameraman actually touch the animal. Standing at a safe difference with a fixed location just won’t cut it these days.
This Woolly mammoth video reminds me of another hoax video of a killer whale attacking a kid on a Mexican beach. This video is actually quite good as it replicates accurately how killer whales attack and eat seals. They do slide on shore and grab unsuspecting mammals in this fashion. Have a look for yourself.
Special effects are a part of our lives and we can no longer trust what we see at face value. In this whale video everything about it is accurate as it would happen in nature. The waves actually break against the victim’s feet and the whale’s body as it eats the human with arms flailing about. We are inclined to believe it. Yet we don’t. The problem with the video is that it violates the rules of cognitive recognition.
Cognitive recognition is the ability to learn the meaning of words and develop the ability to combine those words so that images can be formed in the mind as the words are read. In order for this to happen a mind has to accept the meaning of the words. We do this in life also, we accept the meaning of certain events, the way rain falls from the sky, or how the sun feels on a summer day. Our collections of these cognitive recognition patterns help us determine reality. They might tell us that a politician is lying to us even if what they say sounds and looks good to our eyes. Our experience might tell us that something is amiss if the cognitive recognition of a given experience does not add up to our understanding of reality. In the case of the whale video the biggest problem is that the cameraman would have naturally ran to help the victim in some way. The victim waves to the camera then within seconds is eaten. All the while, the camera remains steady. This behavior violates what we know through cognitive recognition to represent reality.
Here’s another video that is even stranger than the Woolly mammoth or the whale, it’s the President of the United States trying to convince the crowd that he is a good, and legitimate president. When watching this video the cognitive recognition patterns bring about pleasant memories of experiences we might have had as the president smiles, and even sings to a crowd. Everything about this video says that this president is a good man—yet there is something wrong.
Vacant from this video are the facts that the behavior avoids. Like the Woolly mammoth that was filmed from a distance and not captured leaving the water, or the whale being betrayed by the calmness of the cameraman, the Obama video says more about what is missing than what it shows. In this case there is no resemblance of the 6 trillion dollars in debt that has been added during his three years as president, or the multiple infractions he has committed against the United States Constitution. These things are known in our cognitive understanding of the world, yet they are noticeably missing in the Obama video leaving us with the feeling that something isn’t quite right when we watch the President sing to a screaming crowd. We enjoy what we see, but understand that something I wrong.
With all three videos we can prove that they are fakes based on our cognitive recognition patterns. Even when our eyes want to believe what we see through special effects, sound, or even camera lightning, blurriness, or distance, the fraud is revealed when the behavior seen betrays our understanding of how things truly behave.
It looks like the search for a Woolly mammoth will continue on. The video from Siberia does not prove that any have survived to our modern age. I will still have fun looking for these creatures from the campsites of remote locations. And when I find one, I will not let the camera betray the reality of the situation. I will film plenty of footage that is perfectly clear. And I will get so close that I could crawl on its back if need be. Because seeing is not always believing when there are tricks available to manipulate our senses into what we are seeing. At times like that, we must rely on our cognitive recognition to help us discover the elusive truths based on our experience and not what we desire. I might want to see a Woolly mammoth, but just having the wish is not enough. Reality must be measured by our cognitive recognition.
What was 55-year-old John C. Hughes thinking when he paced a patrol car for seven blocks in the town of Butte, Montana then pulled his SUV around to pass the cop at over 70 mph instigating a chase that went up to 100 mph down an interstate toward Rocker, Montana? Well, the police didn’t know what to make of it. They chased Hughes until patrolmen threw stop sticks across the road flattening the tires of the SUV. When they arrested the driver Hughes proclaimed that being in a car chase was on his bucket list, and saw this as his opportunity to make good on that list.
Naturally reporters and law enforcement personnel across the nation were confused as to why anyone would want to do such a thing. Why would anyone openly challenge the law like that? Why would something so reckless be on someone’s bucket list?
Well, I have some very strong feelings about the reason and necessity by John Hughes to instigate a car chase with the police which are challenging to pin-point because often the social parameters that nag us most are those that remain undefined. For many, we drive about on the roads and highways eyeing the police as though they are wolves ready to pounce on our gazelle nature. We carefully worry about whether or not our tags are up to date on our licenses, whether or not we are carrying our insurance cards and keep an eye on our speeds so not to attract the attention of these wolves.
When we pass down the road and see a fellow driver pulled over there is a part of us that feels sorry for them. We know that at a minimum there will be a big fine that comes from a traffic stop. Sometimes it’s worse, it could involve jail time. Most of the time being caught by the police in some fashion means a loss of freedom to some extent and over time our subconscious feelings about these wolves patrolling around has caused Americans to accept a lifestyle wrapped in tyranny.
Most police patrol vehicles have on them someplace a logo that indicates, “To protect and serve.” We accept this logo as a reality in the discussions of everyday speech, but in the back of our minds we know this is a disguise designed to make the wolf appear to be something it’s not. The law enforcement officer is not stopping crime with their traffic stops. They are not protecting and serving the society by setting up DUI checkpoints and hindering the freedoms of drivers from getting to and from their destinations without harassment. They are toll collectors and law enforcements chief goal is to sustain the jobs of attorneys, judges, clerk of courts, jailers, and politicians who make up laws to support these public jobs. The ticket gained on the side of the road by an officer who has pulled you over is a legalized theft of your personal wealth. It is a forced acquisition of your time and money that dictates you will pay your fees, you will appear in court, that you may retain the services of an attorney. You will do all these things because a cop selected you to be pulled over, and you find yourself caught in a political snare that is open looting.
Police will tell society that it is because of the presence of police officers that crime is deterred. If there were fewer police there would be more robberies, there would be more rapes, there would be more DUI’s and reckless speeding. Police and politicians use fear of crime to drive society to accept their tyranny. The measurement of the truth is easy as to what the intentions are of law enforcement. They are the perpetrators of evil disguised as justice.
In my book The Symposium of Justice the police wanting to earn community trust inject a known rapist recently paroled into a neighborhood hoping that the pedophile will resume his activity and put the citizens into a froth looking for police support. Police do these things within the realm of the law, but their secret intentions which they do not reveal in the light of day is to gain public acceptance of their levy requests, and to support the staffing requirements without question. They use fear to gain advantages for their law enforcement entity. In cities locally like West Chester and Mason the nature of these police is easy to see. When driving from townships like Sycamore or Liberty into these cities the cops sit like hungry predators in parking lots and on the side of roads looking for an easy traffic stop so to meet their ticket quotas. Those police aren’t there to protect society from crime. In both of these regions Mason and West Chester their neighboring townships of Liberty and Sycamore do not have higher crime because they do not employ full-time police. Those regions tend to have low crime because the people who live there are good, families on public assistance is down, and value in education is higher. It’s the quality of people who determine the level of crime, not the presence of police. This leaves the nature of those police exposed for those who dare proclaim it.
How do we know a society is evil, or better yet, how do we know that the work of police in protecting and serving that society is evil? The answer is if a society is built upon a system of theft than that society is evil. And currently, or society is built upon theft.
We do not give our taxes freely to benefit our society for the better. Behind our façade of participation, each week our taxes are taken from our pay checks and used to pay for the toys of politicians. I am forced by coercion to pay for Medicare, a program that Lyndon Johnston created to compliment Social Security. It was the ideas of looting presidents trying to impress their mistresses who dictated that all American’s would pay for these grand social programs. For me the tax payer, I will have peace and some resemblance of freedom so long as I pay my taxes. But if I do not pay my taxes, then I will be arrested and thrown into jail by law enforcement.
Having staffed levels of police so high is not to clean up the occasional accidents on roadways, or the domestic violence that sometimes takes place in a large population. The infrastructure of the police car on the side of the road is not to protect and serve you, it is to protect and serve the society’s ability to legally loot by means of open theft. The police are there to remind the American citizen that they must obey the law, they must pay attention to the registration of their vehicles, their insurance cards, and hundreds of little details because we must all drive to get to our jobs so we can pay our taxes which encompass almost 50% of everything we earn by the time you add up the gas tax, the various sales taxes, the payroll taxes, and our property tax. I personally think most of that money is spent unwisely, and should be greatly reduced. But it is the law enforcement officer who stands between a population that would turn its anger on a political class that has built a society of evil in open theft, and strict compliance with the law. The cops absorb and diffuse the anger so it doesn’t migrate to a higher level.
When the officer sits in his patrol car like a wolf hunting food for the day, most of us hope that we will be protected by the sheer numbers as we travel like herds hoping to blend in and not attract the attention of the wolf in his patrol car. So we watch the speed limit and make sure we don’t roll through a stop light when a cop is around, because we don’t want to see those lights on in our rear view mirror. If we do, we know the chances are we’ll be going to court to pay a ticket that will be $50 to $100. We may even have to hire a lawyer at $75 to $200 an hour. Those lights on in our rear view mirrors might mean we will be forced to pay additional taxes on top of everything else of another $1000 to $2000. The fear of these fines keeps society from acting on the open theft because we all know you cannot fight the law, you cannot fight city hall, it is pointless to resist. That is the message.
The law enforcement officer represents tyranny to an evil system. Most people don’t have the capacity to consider their life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness when their attentions are consumed with all this trivia of paying taxes mentioned here. When the worry of our days must be negotiated between our taxes and our obligations to our families and ourselves, there isn’t much time left for philosophy and social context. So we look at the police with disdain, fear, and apprehension and do our best to avoid their wrath with careful adherence to the law, laws that are created faster than even the law makers can read them. The cop is the symbol of a society built on theft. They are the means of force to attain with might if necessary the legalized theft of our property.
So when John C. Hughes sped by a cop car in his SUV at 70 mph to instigate a police chase, he wasn’t trying to get arrested, or even break the law. Mr. Hughes put this car chase on his bucket list before he died because he wanted for once in his life to hunt the wolf instead of being afraid of them. For just a moment, John Hughes was the aggressor, and found a moment of freedom when he took action to step beyond fear to overcome the intimidation of those red and blue lights that flash from a patrol car. Hughes wanted to be free for just a moment to be his own man, and was willing to trade away his freedom once he was caught for the sensation of that true freedom while he was a temporary outlaw.
For that reason I admire Mr. Hughes. I understand that the law enforcement officers involved were perplexed, and the judge I’m sure was aghast. The members of the law enforcement community had their cage rattled. The reality that if everyone behaved as Mr. Hughes did, the law enforcement officers would find themselves on the bad end of a very sharp stick. Law enforcement is accustomed to societies blind conformance to the law, and all the members of the political class that have built the law enforcement community need that conformity to ensure their ability to legally steal from society the wages earned from their labor. In a society that is built upon theft, it is the thin blue line that makes it so. And most of the time a challenge to that authority goes unanswered until a 55-year-old man from Montana decided to put that challenge on his bucket list so that at least one time in his life he could spit in the face of his masters and touch the face of freedom, even if the experience lasted only for a moment.
This is a notice from my friend George Nafziger about a candidate forum for the Butler County commissioner and the Clerk of Courts. These kinds of things are great opportunities to let your public servants realize that they are in fact servants and not deities behind a name plate on their desk. Events like this are what make government work and if you are one of my local readers and will be in town during the time period indicated below, you should plan to attend.
Below is the notice:
_______________________________________________
Folks,
We’re having a candidate forum on 9 February. If you would be so kind as to share this with your members, we’d be most appreciative.
The following will be present at a Candidate Forum to be held at 7:00 p.m., on 9 Feburary, at the Lakota West Freshman School on Tylersville Rd., approximately 1/2 mile east of Rt 747: Mary Swain, Jeff Wyrick, Corky Combs, T.C. Rogers, Jodi Billerman, Daryl Olthaus, and Don Dixon. Commissioner Furmon has declined 2 invitations to come.
The forum will be in two parts. First will be Clerk of Courts, second Commissioners. The Clerk of Court Candidates portion will be 15 minutes. Jeff and Mary will both get two-minute opening statements. The will be asked 4-5 questions and will be given 1 minute to answer. We will have a time-keeper, so they know how much time will remain.
The Commissioner candidates will also have 2 minute opening statements. They will receive 8-10 questions with one minute to answer.
I enjoyed an unusually personal day on Saturday that gave me a minute to breathe, which was much-needed. I began my day they way most of them have lately, with the old KISS song, War Machine. Of recent I have been turning this song up so loud on my iPod while I ride my motorcycle that cars next to me at stop lights can hear my music even with their windows rolled up, their heaters on full blast and my helmet confining the earphones.
I like the music loud because I want to hear the words and I don’t want any interruptions into my mode of thinking. On my motorcycle I can feel most of what I need to know from the world around me, so sound won’t cue me as to if there is danger, I just always assume there is, so I’m always ready for it. As I began this recent Saturday from my reading chair surrounded by my stacks of books, my multiple guns that are close by just in case, my maps, my phone, my two televisions broadcasting the news to me at all hours of the day I ushered in my predawn day to KISS on my iPod so not to wake up my wife upstairs.
I usually begin my day around 4:30 A.M. every day of the week no matter what is happening. I do this because I don’t like to let time slip away without capturing all I can from it. Occasionally, as it was a week ago when an outside contractor came to give me a quote, he noticed my guns and had to ask, “Are you enemy number one or what? Are you expecting a riot?” To answer that question would require a long complicated answer that is best described in the picture shown below involving the cop and the old lady. It is the privilege of being an American to be armed to the teeth, to secure your own freedom from any possible invasion of your time and space.
But…….to what end?
The busy bodies wouldn’t understand why the loud music, why the guns, why getting up at 4:30 A.M and going to bed at midnight are important. Why the reading, why the news, why all the deep conversations about philosophy, when it’s football post season play that is the talk of the town. Who will win the Superbowl, the Patriots or the Giants? “I DON’T KNOW OR CARE UNLESS THE TAMPA BAY BUCCANEERS ARE PLAYING! I’m trying to focus on the science of abstraction!” I turn my music up to tune out the world and I listen to warlike music to remind me that there are many who wish to rob me of my time so I can defend it vigilantly. Because if I don’t stick up for my time, who will?
A friend of mine sent me the video below in the middle of this contemplation and it articulated wonderfully the moment. To the outside world, my measures may appear violent and over-the-top, but as I prepare for a very busy summer in my normal career, my political involvements, fighting yet another stupid Lakota tax increase, and the release of my newest book Tail of the Dragon I made myself a promise upon viewing this video–that I will take time to breath, to visit Alberta, Canada after this next wave of impositions and pursue the visions in that video.
When I try to explain to people why I fight so much, why I think like a War Machine day and night, it’s because I want the freedom of the visions in that video. I want that life free of those parasites that cannot fill themselves so they seek to empty you. I have little tolerance for those who wish to rob me of my time. I have even less tolerance for those who waste their own time. To me the greatest sin a human being can partake in is saying, “I’m so bored.”
After watching that Alberta video I read my email, caught up on the news I missed while I slept, and took a few calls. But after that the day was before me with no contractors to speak with, nothing severely broken to fix, no family to visit, no meetings to attend, and no literary work on my part since my book is now on a closed edit at the copy editor and the publisher is handling the artwork. For the first time since I signed my contract with the publisher in May of 2011, I have not worked on that latest book in my spare time. So I had nothing at all to do which was wonderful, it felt just like the images in that video.
I read a fiction book for a change that was so fun and exciting that I finished the book by 10:45 P.M. Saturday night. For months I had been reading my own book so many different times during a very exhaustive edit, where every single sentence was contemplated for effectiveness, that it was nice to read the fiction work of someone else. Lately when I have been reading, it has been heavy-duty philosophy and history. So a book on the light side of fiction was very refreshing.
My wife and I sat in our usual places, both of us in a friendly race to see who could finish our books faster. She started with one that was about 400 pages, mine was only 350. At the end of the night when we decided to go to bed she had about 40 pages left so she probably outpaced me a bit, but that didn’t matter. I was so wrapped up in my own little world that I was surprised when she made dinner and brought it to me when it was time to eat, as the setting sun outside showed the last traces of orange for the day.
The fighting is in pursuit of the ability to have days like the one mentioned above. Being a War Machine is not to bleed away your enemies, or even to make more of them. Being a War Machine is to fight away the altruistic parasites, the lazy, the easily bored, so that a day can be enjoyed to its fullest. So that I can read my books! So I can think!
I turn up my music over the roar of my motorcycle and the busy traffic of West Chester to hear myself think. To drown out the noise of the leeches who like a candle burning at both ends expect me to consume my life for their entertainment, because they are bored and don’t think for themselves. I think about war at all hours of the day not because I want a medal for some valor, or for the glory of defeating an enemy. My mind is a War Machine because I want freedom. I want unlimited access to my books, to the places of the world like Alberta, Canada and anything that gets in my way will be plowed over. So you better watch out………..because………………..well listen to the words.
And to those who give me dirty looks at the stop lights, I have one more message. When I was younger I had a shirt I wore all the time that said on the back, IF IT’S TOO LOUD, YOU’RE TOO OLD. It was a shirt I bought at a KISS concert. One of my friends parents back then used to scathe at that shirt whenever I’d come to their house. “You better hope you grow out of this rebellious phase Rich Hoffman. For your own good. All that loud music will blow out your ear drums. By the time you’re my age, you’ll be deaf.” Well, I always kind of liked that lady. She was very politically active and genuinely cared about her kids. However she was the epitome of the salivating soccer mom we joke about today who works to pass school levies and mistakenly over thinks her role as a parent. I decided back then I didn’t want the life she and her kind were selling. I am now older than she was then, and I still love my music loud not because I want to become a brainwashed demon worshipper like in the video below, but because I want to tune out the caution dwellers, those people who come out of high school with one foot in the grave and with every move thereafter is another nail in their own coffin. I know many such types who have allowed themselves to become “older” and “civilized,” or in other words……………what’s the word……………….“mature?” Those people are all unhappy and if they have not found their muse in life, I consider them more dangerous than any creature on earth because they seek to fill their emotional voids with money taken from us in taxes, with food off the self at the grocery, the diamond rings in the glass case at Costco, or the puritan beliefs of maturity, but no matter what the disguise, they are simply parasites who wish to rob you of your life. That’s why this War Machine LOVES IT LOUD! And I love it loud to push the world away so I can be close to my books. I always played my music loud not to gain attention, but to keep away those who were too timid to win my company, because my time has always been too valuable to waste by those who just consume.
