Considering that I spent a good part of last weekend preparing DVD copies of my videos to prove a tax filing status to satisfy the IRS, the news that Facebook isn’t paying any Federal taxes caught my attention. Facebook (spelled with a little “f” to prove they don’t take themselves too seriously—which is the cool thing to do these days—won’t pay a penny in Federal income tax. Rather, they are getting money back after making over a billion dollars in profits. Shhhhhhhh, do you hear that……………………………..keep listening……………………….if you pay attention you will not hear a damn thing from the Obama White House when a huge financial contributor to his progressive causes dodges payment of their “fair share” in social obligations. More on the story is at the link below.
Now, I don’t begrudge Facebook the ability to make money, or file their taxes in creative ways to avoid getting pillaged over tax obligations. Taxes are legalized theft of property owner resources by a mob like government, so I applaud at every opportunity free enterprise and bold innovation to avoid the money collecting trolls calling themselves IRS agents. The trouble is, if the company getting caught doing such a thing were a company associated with the Republican Party, the Tea Party, or individuals who typically cause the IRS trouble, that harassment for not paying a mythical “fair share” would be aggressive. It has long been stated by people like me that the IRS (Internal Revenue Service=Tax Collectors) is not about fairness, it’s about control and is the oldest game in the book of manipulation from one entity over another.
But remember the constant utterances from the political left all during the Presidential election about Mitt Romney only paying 14% of his many, many millions to the IRS and the accusation that he was a bad, greedy man because he didn’t want to pay his fair share to the government. Even President Obama himself poked fun at Romney for hiding money in the Cayman Islands and attempting to shield his wealth from the grubby hand of progressive looters. Romney paid more in taxes last year than the $1 billion dollar profit generating free website Facebook. In fact, 49% of us did. Anyone who pays Federal taxes—which is just under half the nation–paid more in taxes than Facebook, but why.
Dear reader, if you want to be treated with the same respect that Facebook has, and not have IRS agents show up at your house asking for DVDs to justify tax status, or grill over all your financial records to prove that you are telling the truth, all you have to do is give a few million dollars to the organized crime syndicate called the Democratic Party and all will be forgiven. The hidden story behind Facebook is that if you pay the troll, the troll won’t come and eat you and your family. But if you try not to pay, then every law written in the IRS books will be brought to justice against any who dare question their authority, or avoid paying them the money they believe they have coming to them just for being born.
The hypocrisy is obvious. Not a peep came out of President Obama on the campaign trail following his State of the Union speech about how Facebook was evil in trying to avoid paying taxes. Not a word was said that executives at Facebook didn’t feel an ounce of guilt as they took their bonus checks and went on lavish vacations and rolled in the massive profits they generated by selling collected data to third party interests—(cough)…….like the government. After all, who pays Facebook a billion dollars? To learn how Facebook makes money, click the link below.
Once again the real nature of government business is easy to see and right out in the open for anyone with the guts to look. Obama has said nothing about the tax evasion of yet another one of his financial contributors and this flies in the face of progressive theory in ways liberals on the political left chose to ignore. Their idea of a utopian society forcefully provided through violence, extortion and massive wealth redistribution will never work because in the end, they are as greedy as the most corrupt oil company, the most openly capitalistic, profit generating Midwestern business. Obama doesn’t say anything because he wants easy access to Mark Zuckerberg and the young voters who think that Facebook is cool, and hip. Obama also needed the campaign donations from people like Zuckerberg to keep him in power over Republican rivals so turning a blind eye to tax evasion on behalf of Facebook is to his benefit.
The IRS is not about justice, it’s about protection money. If you are on the wrong side of the current President, the law will be used to hunt you down to prove your innocence–no stone will be left unturned. If you do not pay your protection money to the government through campaign donations, you will be publicly ridiculed, and perhaps even thrown in jail for not paying your taxes. But if you are a huge company that puts money in the mobster’s pockets indirectly, you can go free and even profit more because they will help you become more profitable with public endorsements and official cabinet seats within the administration. If President Obama really cared about the poor, the down-trodden, the debt ridden malcontent who’s been unemployed for over a year, he’d publicly call out Facebook for dodging their taxes the same way he accused Mitt Romney of doing during the last presidential campaign. But instead, Obama updated his Facebook status and bragged to his daughters that he knows the CEO of Facebook personally, and hopes that it makes him a better dad in the eyes of innocence that are blind to the dirty tricks and scandals that go on behind the cubicles of the IRS.
Below is a clip of what Kelly has been able to do as President of Springboro schools.
If public education were about actually teaching children, I would be all for it. If little boys wanted to grow up to become Thomas Jefferson and little girls Annie Oakley or Amelia Earhart I would support public education in less than one second. Instead, public education inspires young people to be more like Kim Kardashian and Honey Boo Boo. When I speak against public education and college it is not because I don’t love learning. It is because those institutions are reeking with liberalism and are teaching our youth everything wrong. They are filled with teaching positions held by liberals scared of the real world and in no position to teach the youth of American anything! The evidence of this liberal presence in all tax payer funded schools is overwhelming, and is vastly ignored by the adult population because the knowledge is inconvenient. Parents fear losing their day time babysitting service, which is all public education really amounts to these days—which is quite tragic.
Many people today would be shocked to learn that in the year 1636 Harvard was founded by Congregationalists to train for ministers. Yale in 1701 and Dartmouth in 1769 were founded with the same intention. The College of William and Mary was founded to train Anglican ministers. In fact many of the early education institutions in America particularly those guided by minds like Thomas Jefferson who founded The University of Virginia as a multi denominational school committed to higher learning, emphasized critical thinking, and a yearning for philosophy in their studies. Education in the early days of America was committed to more than just landing a good job with a high salary. The students were encouraged by their teachers to be good people, and to operate under moral conviction. Education in America during the time of the Founding Fathers intended to elevate the soul of the students through education not to reprogram them into some small-minded perpetrator of liberalism.
It is educators like Arnol Elam who have yelled to the world that good men like Founding Father Thomas Jefferson should be discredited by an affair with his 15-year-old slave Sally Hemmings—because the tenants of progressive philosophy must tear down Jefferson and those like him so that history will not measure progressivism against the philosophy of Scottish Common Sense, that are most guilty of destroying our society with moral depravity and watered down educations. But guess what? I measure Progressivism against the philosophy of Scottish Common Sense that founded American very unfavorably, so unfavorably that I reject modern education because of it.
The Scottish School of Common Sense was a school of philosophy that flourished in Scotland in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Its roots can be found in responses to the writings of such philosophers as John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume, where its most prominent members were, among others, Dugald Stewart, Thomas Reid andWilliam Hamilton, who combined Reid’s approach with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The peculiar influence it had on philosophers elsewhere in Europe, not to mention in the United States, exemplified by the American pragmatistCharles Sanders Peirce, is of a considerable magnitude.
One central concern of the school was to defend “common sense” against philosophical paradox and scepticism. It argued that common-sense beliefs govern the lives and thoughts even of those who avow non-commonsensical beliefs and that matters of common sense are within “the reach of common understanding”.[citation needed] The qualities of its works were not generally consistent; Edward S. Reed writes, e.g., “[Whereas] Thomas Reid wished to use common sense to develop philosophical wisdom, much of this school simply wanted to use common sense to attack any form of intellectual change.”[2]
In regard to the affair of Jefferson and Hemings it is highly unlikely that Jefferson even had intercourse with another woman after his wife died, let alone had an affair with Hemings. It was largely because of Jefferson that slavery began to be examined as immoral in The United States, steps that Lincoln would later utilize to abolish the practice for the first time in human history. And Jefferson was NOT having sex with underage girls as progressive modern educators hell-bent on embracing human weakness wish to slander and propagate to further their agenda of social destruction. Jefferson it would appear—especially once he was over forty, was far more concerned with reading, writing, and scientific thought than plotting ways he could have sex with a woman for a mere two hours of pleasure. Only an immoral progressive educator would think such a thing—who has nothing going on in their minds or private lives to indicate to them that people think any different from them.
Imagine the typical modern-day school superintendent who has a doctoral degree in education—in liberal studies, in progressive social advancement–that is committed to attacking America’s version of Scottish Common Sense, who don’t even have understanding enough to see that Kasich wasn’t stealing money from the poor to give to rich schools, but that it is the other way around. Modern education is not about teaching children big ideas about science, philosophy, or even spiritual awareness. It’s about creating good jobs for progressive minded human beings who seek to impose their small-minded world view onto all tax payers with the blanket assumption that education is universally good—when in fact it only advances thoughts favoring liberalism and rejects common sense entirely. The product of modern education is bad. It creates bad, immoral characters, and it is responsible for much of the misery that can be seen around the world to this very day. It is truly sad that dusty old relics such as the Founding Fathers of The United States were far more intellectually sound with all the limits of their day than the modern educator with far more tools at their disposal—but it’s true. Educators like Arnol Elam see only one thing—money and progressive causes in the daily conduct of their lives and they disgust me. I despise having to contribute money to such people with my tax dollars. I hate that a small portion of my money goes to the salary of Arnol Elam to propagate such disgusting verbiage to his school district that young people will learn and carry into their adulthoods.
There isn’t much in this world that I love more than books. I read every single day of my life, and most days I read for many hours. I understand people like Thomas Jefferson, and yearn to see his kind of America. I do not want to understand people like Arnol Elam. Educators like that are small people with small minds and they are teaching young people to be small adults—and that absolutely disgusts me. It is not the job of the American tax payer to throw more money at education so that people like Arnol Elam can have a good job on the public dime. The job of education is to teach young people how to be successful adults, and that job is not being done. So in that respect I see every public education issue as my problem because my money is being used to advance it. If I’m going to pay for public education I’m going to get a return on my investment. If public education takes my money, they will get my criticism especially when they fail to do the job as I think the job should be done. My measure for good education is people like Thomas Jefferson who placed education on the highest level of human thought and spent his life learning every day and wanted to share that love of learning with all American citizens. I do the same, and understand that. But advocates of a faulty product such as modern education like what Arnol Elam represents are parasites to common sense; they seek to advance the basic tenants of Immanuel Kant and the European Enlightenment. Jefferson spoke of that same European Enlightenment by saying “the comparisons of our governments with those of Europe are like a comparison of heaven and hell.” And so too is my idea of education compared to Arnol Elam, it is for this reason that I reject modern education in public and college models. I see them as lost ships guided far out to sea under the idiocy of modern progressives who built their philosophies off Kant and the European Enlightenment monstrosities. Such things may sound like disconnected rubbish when attached to superintendents like Arnol Elam, but the roots of progressivism are in his concerns, his political actions to move the city of Franklin to political action against a governor in Kasich that is trying to reform education spending. Districts being run by my friend Kelly Kohls are cast in a bad light by people like Arnol Elam because it is Springboro that is trying to emerge from the darkness of liberalism that has so infected every single education institution in America, breaking the universal commitment to collectivism which so terrifies progressives. As a conservative, anti-Federalist, Tea Party loving American, the liberalism being taught in public education is unacceptable and I’m not happy with it. If I had a choice, I wouldn’t spend one dime of my money on it. Instead though, because of big mouth, greedy, small-minded educators like Arnol Elam who cries out for more money at every turn to fuel their progressive diatribes my money is taken from me and wasted on liberal institutions in the form of public education without my consent—and that is not acceptable.
So it is not true that I hate education just like it is not true that Thomas Jefferson had an affair with Sally Heming’s. Both falsehoods have been spread by progressive enemies of Scottish Common Sense in order to advance modern progressive activism rooted in European Enlightenment. I love education, but I reject the liberal institutions that currently possess those houses of learning. Instead I advocate individual learning so to bypass the liberal control of the education process so that young minds can return their concerns to common sense and a life-long study of morality and goodness that they can carry not just into a job making them subjects to consumerism, but in every aspect of their lives from being good parents, to responsible voters, to committed community contributors, to thriving human beings. If education is not concerned with these things, it is worthless. The evidence to the state of modern education is in the words of Arnol Elam and his cries to steal more money from the rich to fuel his progressive school district toward the destruction of more youthful minds and their last hope for a clean and productive life.
Education is more than cheerleading, band, football practices, and art class. Education is philosophy, critical thinking, and moral grounding along with igniting a life-long yearning for knowledge. Education in the state that 2013 America holds is a deplorable excuse for human achievement that does little if anything to advance human progress. Instead, it seems committed to carrying mankind backwards to the tribal villages of Africa or the human sacrificing city-state of the centrally planned communities of the Aztecs and Mayas. I wouldn’t offer modern education to a dog I cared about, let alone a child I loved. So it has no value to me as a viable tax expense and there are few politicians qualified to offer commentary on the subject when their primary concerns in life is the quality of their golf game instead of the quality of their life. Thomas Jefferson did not, and would not have an affair with Sally Heming’s or any other sexual representation of feminine magic. Such a thought is hard for people who are still intellectually inept to grapple with, but sex is not the only concern for the human mind. As anyone who has a love of learning can attest to, and has lived a full enough life to tell the difference, books and learning are far more rewarding than sex. Thomas Jefferson in all probability spent the last 45 years or more of his life sexless completely because his mind was so active. Modern educators who seek to teach young people about sex in the 4th grade can’t imagine such a person as Thomas Jefferson—and because they can’t are not qualified to teach anybody anything, let alone a child. Thomas Jefferson to me represents how education should be in America and anything less than his approach is worthless and not worth any amount of money. If the desire in public education were to carry every child into the life of such a classic founding father, I would support it unequivocally. Instead, modern deconstructionist education seeks to tear Jefferson down, so that people like Arnol Elam can be seen by the public to be viewed as an equal measure of a man, instead of a money-grubbing thief with their gluttonous eyes on the public treasury.
Tail of the Dragon is about rebellion, it’s about living honestly even if the result of the honesty makes a person an outlaw in the eyes of politics. It’s also about romance, and the importance of relationships. It is a romantic, rebellious, ruckus story that challenges our current legal system in ways that deserve to be analyzed without lenses fashioned through fear. I appreciate when I receive so many comments about the story citing that they hope it is made into a movie, which I have discussed in other articles. I have a great love of old Jimmy Stewart films—especially Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life, and even though Hollywood doesn’t make films like that any more, I am happy that Tail of the Dragon evokes such a reaction from its readers. But unlike those classic character driven films, I take the action that is expected in a car chase story to an entirely new level that many find shocking—which is the intention. There are some action sequences in this story that are thoughts that have bounced around in my head for over 40 years. I have a great love of car jumps, car crashes, and high-speed chases that are integral parts of my character. They go back to my first toys that I played with as a kid, to the first bicycle I ever had, to my soap box derby racing days all the way up to my own early driving days that paralleled Rick Steven’s own life in many ways. The results of many years of high-speed driving, several car crashes and many, many, many close calls are found in Tail of the Dragon. But action by itself is not enough, the characters have to have a reason for their epic rebellion, and they must have heart and soul. It is a rewarding experience when, as a writer, all these elements can be captured and placed within the context of a story. But it is even better when readers of the story understand and feel what the characters are going through as can be reflected in the two reviews below reprinted from Amazon.com.
I’ve not finished reading this fun-filled ride on the wild side yet but what I’ve read so far is amazing! The characters seem well-developed and the high-speed car chases are amazingly detailed! I think if I were Rick Stevens GPS I would probably explode!!! I cant wait to see how this rollercoaster concludes!!!!
This was an outstanding book. Once you get started you can’t put it down. And if you do you can’t stop thinking about what is going to happen next. Once the story is set it moves very fast. You can see many comparisons to that state of our nation in the things that happen in this book. Rich has nailed it down in story form. I can picture every moment as if I were there. The setting is familiar to many and promises to give the chills to make the hair stand up on your neck.
There is nothing better than taking on “the system” at a time when it needs taken on more than ever. You can insert any of today’s leaders in politics in the places of the political characters in the book and see why things came to a head like they did, because it is fixing to happen in America in front of our eyes. The message in this book should be a wake up call to stand strong and firm to protect America the way it was founded.
Everyone needs a copy
My publisher has been very supportive, and I appreciate them for it. But they, especially in the beginning were very concerned that my small government views would isolate half of the book buying public, and in the short run they were right. However, I believe in what I write and will stand behind the actions of Rick Steven’s in his fictional rebellion against the Federal Government that is the start of the next Civil War in America because the winds are changing, and our society I believe will be very hungry for stories like Tail of the Dragon in that emerging future. If other publishers and Hollywood in general looks down upon the exploits of Rick Steven’s and his very rambunctious wife in the ultimate car chase that thumbs its nose at every law that politicians have concocted for the human race, in these modern times, rebellion against big government is coming back into fashion, similar to how it was when Star Wars, Smokey and the Bandit and The Blues Brothers came to cinemas in 1970s America. There is a little of all those films in my most recent novel as I dredged up my day dreams from the third grade of car crashes and polices chases with the mind only a child can produce in great vibrancy. America embraced rebellion once upon a time against big government and they will again, and the readers who are enjoying Tail of the Dragon now are ahead of the rest, who in the years to come will join the ranks of lovers, rebels, and small government advocates who find themselves enamored by Rick Stevens high-speed exploits with his bikini wearing wife and a 200 MPH classic muscle car that runs off vegetable oil fueled by restaurant garbage.
I found that meeting bizarre. I was being looked at because of my Midwestern upbringing, but at the same time I was expected to reject that upbringing to the greater cause of “collectivism, and secular progressive” commitment in the all-encompassing umbrella of liberalism. I would not doubt that many of the actors above would have privately expressed views that reflect their Midwestern conservative upbringing, but in Hollywood, those views are expected to be shelved if that star expects to stay employed. It all starts with a lunch meeting like the one at Katsuya but after 10 years of such political compromise, and many millions of dollars later, those same actors find themselves wearing t-shirts of Che in public because their groups of filmmaking friends think its funny—and cool. I didn’t come close to passing the test and was politely driven back to the airport with smiles and handshakes by shoulders that became colder with each mile that LAX grew closer on the odometer.
I am not willing to trade my beliefs for millions of dollars, so it is unlikely that Tail of the Dragon will ever be made into a movie within the next 20 years, because of the Walt Disney warning. So it should come as no surprise if I reveal here what I have revealed in private to very liberal-minded people in wonderful restaurants like Katsuya over some of the best sushi in The United States—that liberals are some of the most disgusting creatures ever to find the rays of sunlight shining upon their skin. I have never cared for liberals even though they have a right to exist, as not all people must think alike. But the trouble with liberals is that they require my money to live. I on the other hand don’t require anything from liberals. I don’t want their money, their services, their government, their collectivism—I want nothing from them. I don’t even want the military that is offered by the Federal government. For me, the Second Amendment and the other Bill of Rights is all I really want out of government.
Liberals have not been shy, especially in Hollywood of making fun of conservatives—like me—so it is only fair that they get it back in return, especially since conservatives pay for their existence with tax dollars. Liberals in relation to the kind of people I know in the Midwest—in Paul Harvey’s America, are destructive enterprises of faulty minds. They are parasites to everything that is good. They represent virtually everything that is wrong with modern America and the spoof titled “So God Made a Liberal” is sadly all too accurate. They are embarrassments to the human condition and destructive to every life they come in contact with. It is amazing that these very same vermin lecture conservative America on righteousness, and justice. Only such despicable human beings could claim that the same Republican Party that put an end to slavery is against Civil Rights. Only a pathetic disregard for facts could ever give a liberal moral authority over the conservative and paint the later as evil, when it is actually the former.
Liberals are such terrible creatures that I would not even pretend to be one for all the money in the world—because such a world would lose all value and money would no longer mean anything. After all, that is what the liberal does; it robs life of all value so that no thing or no person can be judged against those values. This is why people become liberal, is because they fear judgment against values—because they assume they will come up short on that judgment. So to protect themselves and their careers, it is safer to pick professions where the bosses also fear judgment—like what the film industry has become under the microscope of thousands of entertainment publications and critics in every newspaper. Liberalism centered on no judgment is appealing to the weak and malicious because their acts of destruction can proceed without risk to their personal integrity, because integrity has been minimized by the concept of liberalism.
If God made a liberal on the 9th day as the video above suggests, he did it to bring Armageddon to the Earth and to create the End of Days. A liberal does not bring productivity to a business or justice to the wronged—a liberal only creates chaos, menace, and terror by way of social values stripped away until they mean nothing. As funny as the video might be in a metaphorical way, I cannot say that the humor is excessive by way of exaggeration, but funny because it’s true. If Paul Harvey’s monologue expressed the values of the Midwest from years ago, this new rendition called “So God Made a Liberal” expresses the sad hopes of a couple of Hollywood producers in Katsuya who were more concerned about recruiting people to work with who shared their views of no value than a conservative voice that middle America is hungry to hear. Or people raised in those sacred lands who quickly reject their values in trade for work like a common prostitute will declare their love for anyone who pays them the proper sum for their love-making. The liberal is a degenerate species of human kind that produces only destruction and malice. Liberals are good for only undoing the creations of the conservative, the representation of good, of justice, and of honor.
For me, I’ll stick with Paul Harvey and his vision of conservative America, because it is only there that growth for the human race can take place. There is no dollar amount that could sway my opinion on the matter. As I told the letter writer honoring my latest novel, yes, I think Tail of the Dragon would make a cool movie, but it’s unlikely for that to ever happen. It’s not because the story is wrong for the silver screen, but rather because it does not fit within the confines of liberalism—which is quite intentional. The story is about values and fighting to protect those values, and there is no writer in Hollywood who could remove that core tenet from the context without destroying what the novel is about. Liberalism will stop at no limit to destroy a threat to its existence, and in the case of conservatives, it is more important to destroy or convert conservatives away from their Midwest roots so that liberals can monopolize bad behavior to the extent that they can then call them good—and people will finally believe it. Liberals seek to turn conservatives into their kind with the same kind of domination that a pot-head drug user intends when they purchase a killer snake to display in their living rooms. The pot-head wishes to show the world that they are in control of such a killer as they scoop up the big snake and put it in a glass display to be confined there so long as the pot-head feeds the snake rats and mice enough to stay fat, dumb, and happy. So too has Hollywood done to the stars of the Midwest, fed them plenty till those free-thinking humans ate from liberal hands and proved to the world that the liberal can control the majesty of the conservative with the promise of easy food, and some damn good sushi at Katsuya.
Watch closely, and very carefully…………………………………………………………….God made a liberal so that people like the guy below wouldn’t have to feel guilty about all the bad decisions they made in their life…………………as a direct result of…………………….liberalism. Which came first–the chicken or the egg………………the loser or the liberal?
Not all things at the Lakota School System have been bad. I personally like the treasurer for Lakota, Jenni Logan. She is very competent and is more than able to manage a multimillion dollar budget. School board members Ben Dibble, Ray Murray, and Linda O’Conner I personally like, even though they are way to the political left of me. I think they mean well. And the current spokesman Randy Oppenheimer seems to be a pretty honest person with his heart in the right place. Even though I think spokesmen for public education should be illegal, Randy is not bad at his job. Recently in the Hamilton Journal Randy gave an honest assessment of Lakota’s financial situation that deserves recognition. He stated along with reports from many other local schools regarding Governor Kasich’s new education budget that Lakota had been planning for a reduction in state funding so the news that cuts would not be forthcoming was seen as a budget surplus. The quote from the paper can be seen below with a link to the article following.
“Lakota Local Schools — with enrollment around 16,625 — is set to receive $35.6 million in 2013; and would receive $4.1 million or 11.6 percent more the first year, and $849,318 or 2.1 percent the second year. “We had projected a cut in funding, and the governor made his comments (last week) and indicated we couldn’t be cut,” said Lakota spokesman Randy Oppenheimer. “Any increase in funding is good news.”
That statement says that at least some of the management team at Lakota is crunching the numbers properly. At this point I have my doubts but logic would dictate that Lakota shouldn’t ask for another school levy for more than a decade since their student enrollment is set to decline over that time span. When Lakota was asking for school levies every 6 months a couple of years ago and we were fighting like cats and dogs Lakota had a student population of over 18,000. By the time The United States elects another president Lakota’s enrollment should hover just over 10,000, and I would expect that the staff of over 2000 employees would have to be cut to reflect that loss in demand. There may even be a combination of schools where some of the buildings will sit empty for lack of need. This is good news for the tax payers of Lakota as they should be able to save millions upon millions in staff that costs a lot of money in salary and benefits. If Lakota is smart, like some of the people who have emerged within the last couple of years have shown themselves to be, they wouldn’t ask for another levy till well after 2020. Their tax base will stabilize, new businesses continue to move into the area which contributes money to that base consistently—which should flood the market with new money once the Liberty Way development takes off in 2014, and home sales from the Carriage Hill development where Homearoma is taking place in the summer of 2013 will contribute revenue per household well above the 250K per pupil tax base needed to maintain a funding model of 20 mills. CLICK THE LINK BELOW TO LEARN MORE ABOUT CARRIAGE HILL.
Those are all wonderful and exciting things. Carriage Hill and the Liberty Way shopping complex will naturally expand the tax base while student enrollment will be declining rapidly bringing down the cost demands at the Lakota School System, if management does not give away the kitchen sink to the employees with excessively high labor contracts. I would think that it would be worth a reasonable salary of between 50K per year to 60K per year for a 10 to 20 year veteran of education to teach at Lakota where the kids are nice, the parents care about their children, and the community is thriving versus going after 70K to 80K per year in salary teaching in a district like CPS which is a declining community because the taxes are too high and there are way too many parents on government assistance, which statistically leads to poverty and crime.
The home owners who purchase homes ranging from $700,000 to $1.2 million at the new Carriage Hill development are not the types of families who bring 2.1 children into a school district seeking to flood the market with a desire to for free babysitting while they work an average job at P & G, climbing up their personal career ladder. The people looking to purchase homes in Carriage Hill will be successful people in their own right and most likely will find instruction for their children in private schools or tutors and won’t use the services of Lakota anyway—even though like the rest of us without kids in the school, will have to pay for it.
I don’t like the idea of having to spend the next 40 years of my life paying for kids to attend Lakota through my property taxes. I don’t like the amount I pay now, so an increase is unfathomably ridiculous and I know that the people who invest in communities like Lakota won’t keep their money in the distinct if they find it continuously stolen from them by short term thinking levy supporters. The fight in the Lakota School District is not over children, it’s over whether or not Lakota becomes the next Fairfield—overrun with Section 8 housing and degraded property value or continues to increase in value like Indian Hill has over the years with managed development and growth. Chaos and reactive spending will not lead to perpetual prosperity. The growth of the Lakota district has more to do with residents fleeing high tax communities from around the country than the nice trees and school system that levy supporters believe. It is low taxes and prosperity that are the most attractive feature to the affluent property owner, and that must be protected if the district wishes to maintain its value in the future.
Lucky for people like Jenni Logan, Ben Dibble, Ray Murray, Linda O’Conner and Randy Oppenheimer the numbers work in their favor at Lakota to not just sustain themselves but survive well into the future maintaining an Excellent with Distinction rating that reflects the community it resides in, even if the most affluent send their kids to private instruction. I hope they accept the manageable challenge of allowing the enrollment rates to decrease as the tax base stabilizes without asking for further tax dollars. That would be the responsible thing to do in virtually every facet of community management. The worst thing they could do is listen to the short sided utterances of their levy hound real-estate agents who want a levy increase to lure in more panicky 30-year-old parents who cry over every drop of spilled milk and perceived threat to their children’s lives who are still children themselves and willing to spend infinite amounts of money on education to compensate for their own internal insecurities as parents. Those are not the kind of people who should shape the direction of our community for the future. So a lot rests on how the school management team above handles 2013 at the Lakota School District and the numbers that are now known before them.
It’s was good to see that Channel 5 did a hard-hitting story on the extreme abuse that is going on in the Cincinnati Public Schools. They revealed that 45 employees at CPS were making over 100K per year, which is appalling, especially considering the poor performance of CPS as an institution. Further they went on to report that there are over 100 employees who make more than 90K a year. While this may be shocking, and an inconvenient statistic for those who do not want to believe that their local public school is raking tax payers over the coals using the innocence of children as the extortion mechanism, the reality is quite evident.
Most of the employees who are members of the 100K club in public schools are administrators, not teachers. But in public education most administrators come from the ranks of the teaching profession and are deeply loyal to the teachers unions of which they were at one point members. As members of management they do not have any desire to ruffle the feathers of political order and instead seek to increase their own salaries so that the teachers in the union can justifiably see pay increases as well. As members of management the more administrators who make close to six figures the better for a teacher with a Master’s Degrees because all boats rise in the public education system under union rules. If an administrator makes a lot of money, the wage limit for teachers goes up proportionally. This is how management gives the illusion that they fight the union while at the same time helping them with expectations that have already been set high by members of the 100K club. Any half intelligent analysis will quickly determine that the whole system is a giant financial scam that uses children to hide the crime—and a crime it is. You can read more about the Channel 5 report at the link below.
At best the whole public education system is a massive scam and I personally get angry about it when it seeks to exploit children the way they all do, which is why I call the activity a crime. To use children for the personal gain of a comfortable salary and retirement pension is just as exploitive as any other crime that hurts children for the personal pleasure of an individual. When asked why a teacher is worth 60K to 90K and an administrator is worth 90K to 150K they will all say that they have many years of service in the teaching profession and that their “quality” is exceptional and the district is paying for that quality. They will also say that they do what they do because they “love children.” Bull————-shit. I would believe that coming from an employee who works for 45K per year and stays late into the night and volunteers their time to children off the clock—as a few do—just so they can help mentor kids. I don’t mind people, who fight for their right to make a dollar or two more, but I can’t stand a liar, and these public education employees who inflate the value of their wages on the backs of children are liars.
Below are the specifics of the superintendent contract for Keith Kline at West Clermont Schools
-$138,000 salary which can never be reduced
(Brook’s–previous superintendent–first salary $118,000/last salary $145,000)
-2013/14 year there are 3 goals to meet, and each one
met will kick in a 1% salary increase
-After that the board will provide goals and guidance on raises
-Pension is picked up 100% (so an additional $13,800 in compensation on top of the $19320 (14%) that has to be paid by statute)
and if the pickup is ever legally taken away (legislation/board changes)
then the pickup amount is added to the base salary to cover it.
-Same health care as WCEA
-$500000 life insurance policy, beneficiaries are 50% family/50% board of education
-An annuity (additional retirement benefit) of 6.5% of salary for every contract year (pro-rated this year, but annual rate would be no less than $8970).
-Medicare tax paid up to $2000 per year
-Board pays all professional membership dues
-218 day work year
-Board president may allow 15 additional days worked above 218 at a per diem rate (for this year that would be $633 per day).
-Allowed same sick leave as WCEA
-Severance of 1/4 unused sick leave up to 65 days to be paid at retirement
-Mileage reimbursement at IRS rates
Knowing a bit about Kline since he worked at Lakota and had the arrogance to stand out in the parking lot of Lakota East and deride parents who were upset that they had to bring their kids to school because of the busing cuts—that they “should have passed the levy” there is a history that provides material for judgment. I’m sure he would declare that he’s put in his years of service and that his compensation isn’t any more extraordinary than the package of Karen Mantia, the superintendent of Lakota or any other public school. He believes that he’s in it for the “good” of the community because he WON’T face the truth to himself that he’s in a money racket that hides behind the collective façade of public education. The culture in government schools is that there is safety in numbers and nobody passes judgment because they all believe that if they put in the years of silence and time, that they have a payday coming to them before their retirement age of 55. Keith I’m sure believes he is owed a contract like the one above no matter how ridiculous the rest of us thinks it is compared to private sector market driven benefits.
No teacher is worth six figures. And I would say that very, very few administrators should be in any kind of 100K club. Their jobs are not that important or difficult. I have told school officials to their faces during the Lakota Levy days that I would not only teach their classes but I would volunteer to teach 4 at the same time. I said as much to the Spark Magazine at Lakota East during an interview in 2011, which of course never found its way into print. The trick public schools use against the tax payers is that they have a monopoly on the education system and severely attack ANY form of competition that would exploit their money racket with reality of a market driven system. They have control of the social presence of their product and of the value of that market by artificially setting the value high because nobody can ever challenge their statistics. Public school employees can maintain the extortion racket so long as they have a monopoly on the education system. They are well aware of what they are doing. Fortunately for them few people call them out on it, so give Channel 5 some credit for doing this recent story. Not too many news organizations are willing to go against the grain and expose the exploitation of children like Channel 5 did most recently, and Brendan Keefe at Channel 9 has done in the past. (CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW) There’s a lot of politics that goes on behind the scenes, so it’s tough business to expose these education manipulators, but sometimes there are members of the press who boldly do the job of reporting as it is supposed to be done, and on this particular story, Channel 5 did the tax payers an incredible service that is crucial to the protection of a thriving society.
It’s too bad that the two guys in the interview below did not read the popular book Fifty Shades of Grey as I did, because they would understand more about the world. CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW. The interview on 700 WLW between Governor John Kasich and Bill Cunningham was a sad mixed message between a couple of old politicians having a porch swinging discussion believing they are both staunch conservatives but often leaning toward secular progressivism. Kasich in the interview actually comes out in support of the kind of wealth redistribution plans that President Obama must have given him during their recent golf outing—where wealthy school districts are required to increase their local taxes through levies because “they can pay.” It is sad to hear a governor that once had so many good ideas and was willing to take on special interest groups speak on Cunningham’s show sounding like a broken horse that has been dominated by a determined rider. Kasich in 2013 prances about predictably in an obvious run for President in 2016, and is more willing to walk on egg shells politically than to take on the groups representing secular progressivism. Listen to that interview for yourself.
Behind those mixed messages in the interview is a real fear of making women groups angry and catching the negative attention of progressive groups like Progress Ohio and the multiple labor unions. There is no desire by Kasich to address why the teaching profession continuous to dump massive amounts of money into education without getting the results back in the proper education of children. He fears what most public personalities fear—in being called names by women’s groups because most teaching positions are held by women. Cunningham and Kasich specifically spoke about Mason and Lakota—both considered wealthy districts, and when I have brought up in the past the ineffectiveness of teachers making over $60K per year and suggested that Lakota could get the same results from teachers making $45K to $55K per year keeping their budget under control, the information is ignored out of fearful neurosis. The progressive levy supporting neurotic parents who feel tremendous guilt about raising their children in day care and under public education have always gathered together against any opposition to their bottomless pit spending proposals and they attack any sort of management of those resources. They can’t explain why more money in education doesn’t work, they simple suggest that no limit exists because the subject involves children. When they can’t answer the question they go on personal attacks like Laura Sanders did with me at Lakota in the Cincinnati Enquirer saying, “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.” That is why I say that men who cave into such criticism have not read Fifty Shades of Grey. If they did, they would understand what is behind such comments……..and it has nothing to do with children.
Kasich on the cusp of a run for a second term followed by a run for President does not want such confrontations so he has failed to explain why education in America no matter how much money is spent on it will fail. In fact, Lakota and Mason could spend six figure salaries on all their teachers and pass all their levies for the next twenty years and education will still be bad because the bottom line issues would still be left unresolved. The reason is actually quite simple and is the 1 million pound elephant in the room. The teaching profession has allowed progressive instruction to infest the school curriculums resulting in a very confused society—one that is accurately reflected in the Kasich/Cunningham interview. Education has not fulfilled the ambitious task set out upon the foundation of our country and instead has been infused with political agendas masking themselves as “goodness” and using pure emotion to advance diabolical plans. People like Laura Sanders attacks anyone who criticizes a baby sitting service people like her have come to rely on and politicians like Kasich have no desire to shoulder those criticisms. Politicians avoid a confrontation with irrationality at all cost—which causes the education failures. This is why politicians tend to throw money at education and hope that people will love them for it without ever determining if it is the quality of education itself that is at fault.
The failures in educational quality can be narrowed down to roughly six categories—the instruction of deconstructionism, post structuralism, the discouragement of American Exceptionlism, and the advancement of modernism, minimalism, and academic collectivism. It is within those six basic categories that education will fail no matter how much money is spent on children. If children are instructed in destructive social tendencies—which they are—they will grow up to become unsuccessful adults. So caving into the progressive feminist movement talking points will not help our kids while those same irrational feminists are still flooding the book market reading Fifty Shades of Grey and fantasizing about what they really want in life. Money cannot fix minds that are sick with secular progressivism shaped by many years of exposure to the categories below.
Deconstruction– A philosophical movement and theory of literary criticism that questions traditional assumptions about certainty, identity, and truth; asserts that words can only refer to other words; and attempts to demonstrate how statements about any text subvert their own meanings: “In deconstruction, the critic claims there is no meaning to be found in the actual text, but only in the various, often mutually irreconcilable, ‘virtual texts’ constructed by readers in their search for meaning”(Rebecca Goldstein).
Post-structuralism primarily encompasses the intellectual developments of certain mid-20th-century French and continental philosophers and theorists. The movement is difficult to summarize, but may be broadly understood as a body of distinct responses to structuralism, which argued that human culture may be understood as a series of signs or symbols; or, put differently, that human culture may be understood by means of a structure -— modeled on language —- that is distinct both from the organizations of reality and the organization of ideas and imagination — a “third order.”[1] The precise nature of the revision or critique of structuralism differs with each post-structuralist author, though common themes include the rejection of the self-sufficiency of the structures that structuralism posits and an interrogation of the binary oppositions that constitute those structures.[2] Writers whose work is often characterised as post-structuralist include Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Julia Kristeva. The movement is closely related to postmodernism. As with structuralism, anti-humanism, as a rejection of the enlightenmentsubject, is often a central tenet. Existential phenomenology is a significant influence; one commentator has argued that post-structuralists might just as accurately be called “post-phenomenologists.”[3]
American exceptionalism is the proposition that the United States is different from other countries in that it has a specific world mission to spread liberty and democracy.[1] It is not a notion that the United States is quantitatively better than other countries or that it has a superior culture, but rather that it is “qualitatively different”.[2] In this view, America’s exceptionalism stems from its emergence from a revolution, becoming what political scientist Seymour Martin Lipset called “‘the first new nation,’…other than Iceland, to become independent”,[3] and developing a uniquely American ideology, based on liberty, egalitarianism, individualism, populism and laissez-faire.[4] This observation can be traced to Alexis de Tocqueville, the first writer to describe the United States as “exceptional” in 1831 and 1840.[5]
Modernism, in its broadest definition, is modern thought, character, or practice. More specifically, the term describes the modernist movement in the arts, its set of cultural tendencies and associated cultural movements, originally arising from wide-scale and far-reaching changes to Western society in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In particular the development of modern industrial societies and the rapid growth of cities, followed then by the horror of World War I, were among the factors that shaped Modernism. Related terms are modern, modernist, contemporary, and postmodern.
Minimalism describes movements in various forms of art and design, especially visual art and music, where the work is set out to expose the essence or identity of a subject through eliminating all non-essential forms, features or concepts. Minimalism is any design or style in which the simplest and fewest elements are used to create the maximum effect. As a specific movement in the arts it is identified with developments in post–World War II Western Art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s. Prominent artists associated with this movement include Donald Judd, John McCracken, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Anne Truitt, and Frank Stella. It is rooted in the reductive aspects of Modernism, and is often interpreted as a reaction against Abstract expressionism and a bridge to Postminimal art practices.
Academic Collecitivism The fifth and final sophism by the left that undermines realism, truth and historical accuracy, or what David Barton in his new book on Jefferson calls “the five malpractices of modern history,” is Academic Collectivism, “whereby writers and scholars quote each other and those from their peer group rather than consult original sources. This destructive and harmful tendency now dominates the modern academic world, with a heavy reliance on peer review as the almost exclusive standard for historical truth.”
It is a combination of those items being taught to American children that has caused me to no longer support traditional education centralized in public schools. Public schools have failed to teach generations of Americans now how to be good, productive adults and I cannot in good conscience support them with $1 let alone many thousands of dollars as all government schools demand. Secular progressive education is the cause of many of the degrading values that are seen in our current culture and it makes no sense to require ALL of society to fund through extortion the teaching of children secular progressive political agenda points when half of society does not support that political affiliation. Parents like Laura Sanders at Lakota may think the above descriptions have too many big words, and prefers the easy explanation that “more education equals good kids” mode of thinking. But the facts do not match reality. Kasich on the other hand knows that the problem of education is much more complex, but since he feels he lost his authority over the Senate Bill 5 debate and was told on the golf courses of life from personalities like Bill Cunningham that Kasich needs to step away from Tea Party ideas if he has any hopes of a second term as governor, that he needs to change his tune–and he has. Kasich has surrendered logic to the neurosis of angry activists who are living two lives, one of crusading parents lobbying for tax increases to save the lives of their children while secretly locking themselves in their bedrooms for hours reading Fifty Shades of Grey.
Lucky for those confused citizens who are so embedded with secular progressivism that it’s not against the law to be a social menace due to faulty thinking. They confuse conservative ideas with education deconstruction that is more interested in teaching children to have sex out-of-wedlock so they become dependent on government programs early in life, or teaching children about gender equality when it takes strong families to build a proper tax base, than to teach children to be social producers in every sense of the word. Public education teaches dependency, not independence, and that is what makes government schools worthless at any value of tax revenue, and until that issue is dealt with, public education should be replaced with competitive alternatives. The monopoly needs to be broken up so the real cost of education can be discovered, and driven down like costs in the private sector have been.
In the respect of Kasich and his friend Bill Cunningham who are both products of Lyndon B. Johnston’s Great Society they are unable to address the true complexity of the modern problems in education because deep in their hearts, as is in evidence by their discussion on WLW, they are both confused themselves, driven by their own self interests and unable to see the truth fully. They are in essence no different from parents like Laura Sanders who confuses a whole mess of social issues into her support for a school levy. The same duality is present in such levy supporters who socially show one side of themselves, but in their private lives have made Fifty Shades of Grey the most popular novel in the entire history of novels. The cost of education is all about hiding these mixed realities that people try to maintain to avoid addressing the real issues. Public education is rotten with secular progressivism and must be starved out of existence before any intelligent discussion about financing the future of children can be addressed. So long as those six traits are being taught in modern education, no tax money should flow into any education instruction from the tax payer. If progressive advocates want to privately fund such activity, then Laura Sanders can send her children there at her expense. But to force all Americans to pay for such progressive ideas that are destructive not just to the children, but the future of America is insane. Yet the problem is simply too big for Kasich to address during a 15 minute interview with Bill Cunningham on 700 WLW. If they even brought up such a topic, then Kasich might be called a “woman hater” for not wanting to pay teachers infinite amounts of money for being glorified baby sitters. The trouble is with the content that the teachers are teaching, not the teachers themselves that is the big problem in education and has proven to be a worthless product that is bringing students ill prepared to their destinies. Public education has left kids lost and confused living with their parents till thirty years old and jobless. That is why public education isn’t worth another dime, and why it’s a dismal failure in need of a major overhaul which nobody has the courage to address.
I place a high level of credit for the success of Star Wars on the back of Stuart Freeborn. If the puppet he designed didn’t work in The Empire Strikes Back, the movie would have fallen on its face stopping the saga in its tracks after the second movie. The gamble that George Lucas took with his own money to make that classic science fiction film would have went up in flames if the audience did not accept Yoda as a believable character and all the magic that is currently falling like snow flakes upon our culture today. Star Wars would have gone out like a candle flame on a brisk day almost before it ever got started.
It is because of creative geniuses like Stuart Freeborn that Yoda has become over a thirty year period such a powerful character who might well surpass Mickey Mouse as the most recognizable iconic character in human history. Yoda was created by a wise old man who went on to live till the age of 98 and brought joy to many millions during his lifetime. But in his passing, Stuart Freeborn will live on and become stronger than anybody can possibly imagine, as his character of Yoda will carry Star Wars into a new dimension of entertainment experience in producing the myths that society lives by giving a rebirth to a new and prosperous century that nobody saw coming.
How do I know? Well, read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and understand that “A is A.” Once the value of “A” is known, then the addition of values can be added up and determined as an end result. Star Wars is about values in every way that they can be defined. And the grandfather of those values were people like Stuart Freeborn. He will be missed, but his memory will live on forever—like all Jedi who find themselves one with the Force.
I stopped my work in its tracks back in 1995 when I first heard Paul Harvey’s “God Made A Farmer” radio skit on 700 WLW at 3:30 in the morning during the Truckin’ Bozo show. I was working 16 hour shifts back then starting at 4 PM and lasting till 8 AM 7 days a week and every single night I looked forward to the home stretch break when Paul Harvey would come on and give the news of the day. I remember vividly when I heard that dedication to the farmers of America, and it gave me pause in positive reflection. It didn’t take me but two words to remember the passage word for word when Dodge used the old Paul Harvey speech during their Superbowl commercial for Ram Pick-up Trucks as those memories from old came rushing back in a fury.
The reaction to the Dodge ad was extremely positive in the days after the big Superbowl event. It was so effective that long after people forgot the events of the game itself, the blackout, the near comeback by the San Francisco 49ers, the goal line stand by the Ravens to secure the win, people were talking about this commercial. I would conclude that Americans detected in that speech by Paul Harvey an America they see slipping away, and they are in the depths of their heart trying to recapture it before its gone forever. It is the elements of that speech that the Tea Party is dedicated into preserving. It is not a mindless yearning for the ignorance of the past, but the stability of knowing the roles we all require not just from ourselves, but of our youth.
When I was growing up both my grandparents were farmers and several other family members also. When I went to Christmas dinners and our family gathered for Thanksgiving I went to real farmhouses where the unmistakable smell of manure greeted you on a gravel driveway while the bite of cold northern winds froze your cheeks upon stepping out of the family car. The kitchens would be blazing hot with wood burning stoves and fireplaces warmed the entire house, hot downstairs, cold upstairs in a traditional farmhouse guarding Ohio farmland. Bails of coiled hey could be seen out every window covered thinly with snow. Cows where in the barn where I would play hide and seek with my siblings and cousins swinging from high beam rafters like Zorro and landing on the hood of a tractor bought at an auction in the 1920s that had a flat tire for over twenty years. I remember seeing slaughtered pigs with the heads hung on the porch for ease of display when I first learned that it was their meat that made bacon and I learned many more such things from my grandparent’s farms over the emerging decades.
I feel terribly sorry for most people now who will never know a farmer in their lives. I feel sorry for the people who saw that Superbowl commercial and found that they couldn’t relate to it at all, as they have become too urbanized. When I was a kid most everyone knew at least one farmer in their lives, but now, almost nobody does. A lot of children don’t even know a home where both their biological parents are still married let alone know a family that has been married for 50 years and earned their living off the land like the American Farmer. I was benefited with knowing not just one or two, but I knew many, and for me, they set the social parameters that I hold to this day of strong families, and strong figures within those families who are the glue that hold society together.
Kids today visit their grandparents in condominiums and they have Christmas dinners in quarter million dollar homes with high-efficiency heating systems which is a testimonial to technological advancement, but in the process, America has lost its traditional roots and surrendered its honor to the convenience of progressive philosophy. Our entire society has lost touch with the source of their milk, as they’ve never seen a farmer milk a cow at 5:30 AM or deliver a calf at 12:30 PM. When I was a kid my grandpa called my dad late one night and we rushed to his farm to deliver a baby calf by tying a rope to its feet and pulling it out of the mother with a tractor.
My anger at progressives and the source of my outrage that is displayed with millions of words upon these pages stems from the intentional destruction of this purely American way of life that Paul Harvey so accurately captured with his creative monologue. Few people have ever done it as good as Paul Harvey did but thankfully at least one did. Because without Paul Harvey’s monologue it may have been possible that progressives in America might have erased all memory of this exclusively American life from the minds of the world forever.
The America I am fighting for is the one in Paul Harvey’s words. I think its fair to ridicule those who have advanced the destruction of those traditional values because I have seen once too many the people I cherish ridiculed by a progressive teacher who teachers that women in the workplace have more value over my grandmother who could cut the head off that chicken and prepare it for her family which she loved with every cell in her body. I am tired of hearing the progressive politician urge urban dwelling by smearing the good name of the rural farmer and their desire for personal liberty. And I am tired of attorneys who desire divorce at every turn just so they can make money off the misery. I prefer the terrified farmer cowering in his barn afraid to deliver bad news to the woman of the family instead of taking the easy way out by serving divorce papers through the mail. I do not like, condone, or believe in the America that progressives have been attempting to advance. I believe in the America that Paul Harvey so accurately captured with his “God Made A Farmer” monologue. That is why I paused over a decade ago to pay silent tribute to those ancient words, and why I personally loved the Superbowl experience of 2013, because Dodge had the foresight to release a commercial that pays tribute to the American Farmer. I’m glad they did it, but I am sad that so many people found the experience foreign. That is a trend that must be reversed if America is to survive, and it is that reversal of which I am fully dedicated. The silent yearning that the commercial evoked in the American consciousness is but a compass that our society needs to observe so to find our direction in a wilderness of confusion, and find our way back to greatness that has it’s backbone in the American Farmer.
It is because of Paul Harvey that I write here every day. I listened to him for years and I miss the guy. It is because nobody else has the guts to be him, or pour words into the tapestry of our day the way he did that I write so much about the world around us. I believe in the hearts of all Americans that there is a Paul Harvey in each of them, even if they have been taught to think otherwise. The video above featuring Paul Harvey in the Dodge Ram commercial had over 6 million hits on YouTube in just three days. Ratings say everything.
The episode they spent so much time talking about in the Google Meeting is called The Lawless. It was quite spectacular. It’s hard to believe that Dave and his crew was able to cover such a large expanse of story in just over 20 minutes, but the results are exceptional by any standard of cinema endeavor. I hope Star Wars: Clone Wars sticks around for a while, because after 5 years of broadcasting, they are every bit as good if not better than when they first aired in the late summer of 2008 with the feature film of the same name. Dave Filoni is a wonderful Star Wars director that in the context of history will give J.J. Abrams a run for his money in the magic and lore that has become the Star Wars Mythology. I am looking forward to many more future episodes so I can watch them with my grandson and introduce him to such a vast wilderness of ideas that is Star Wars in a morality play that is unequaled in the history of the world.
