Stop the presses!  I thought the Community Foundation of West Chester and Liberty Township refused to accept funds or support political statements with their local charity group.  Yet as the Lakota school system is gearing up for support of another levy attempt using their public relations machinery to close a nearly $2 million dollar budget deficit projected for 2014 due to employee wage increases, the Community Foundation did a really nice job of putting their name behind two teachers from Lakota, Amy Smith and Dean Hume featuring them with the Lakota Educator of Excellence Award.  The Community Foundation promoted their picks with the following two videos featuring the  teachers.  Have a look.

The Community Foundation had this to say about teacher Amy Smith:

Those who nominated Amy Smith indicate that there is no teacher more deserving than she to receive the “Educator of Excellence Award.” Amy is described as a compassionate and caring teacher who goes above and beyond for her students. She is often spotted at her students’ sporting events and dance recitals, and has been known to call parents at home after school hours just to update them on something their child accomplished that day at school. Amy works to ensure that each of her students’ needs are met, whether that means enhancing curriculum for students who excel in a particular area or setting aside individual time for a student who might be struggling. Beyond academics, Amy prepares her students for success in life by teaching them empathy and compassion for others, and by building their self-confidence. As one parent writes, “Amy is the kind of teacher that every parent hopes and prays their child will get. The heartfelt nomination letters are a testament to the lasting impact that Amy Smith has made on her students, their parents and the whole Endeavor Elementary community.”

The Community Foundation then said this about Dean Hume:

The majority of nominations for Dean Hume to receive the Educator of Excellence Award came from former students who, under his tutelage, were on the staff of Spark, the award-winning student-run news magazine at Lakota East High School. Dean founded Spark 21 years ago and has since been the faculty adviser, although he takes no credit for the publication’s success. Instead, credits accolades like the publication’s 10 National Pacemaker awards and 18 All-Ohio rankings to his talented students. Dean is known at Lakota East for his unorthodox approach to education. One student describes her first day in Dean Hume’s class, saying, “He shut off the lights and climbed onto a table…he explained that as our time in the Journalism program went on, the lights of the world would turn on so we could see it for what it truly is.” Former students comment on how he saw in them what, oftentimes, they didn’t see themselves and pushed them to fulfill that potential. Dean would stay after school when his students needed to work on a story and would be there with them on deadline weekends when the pressure was on to put out another excellent issue of Spark each month. Dean Hume is truly committed to his students. As one nominator put it, “It is fitting that the newsmagazine he created is called Spark because that is exactly what Dean Hume finds in each of his students…a spark that he then fans into flame with unparalleled dedication.”

While all that sounds very nice, and sweet, and even though Dean Hume has reportedly said many bad things about me to his class, I do like his choice of paintings on his classroom wall.  I’m sure those teachers are very good teachers, but I would argue that what they are doing is expected by the community, and should not be the exception, but the rule.  I expect every teacher to perform at the level of those teachers, so I do not understand why all the hoopla.  But from a public relations standpoint, just ahead of a levy attempt, I can see why these teachers would be highlighted.  I’m sure they enjoyed the award.  But here is the problem.  During the winter of 2012 my group, No Lakota Levy tried to work with the Community Foundation to help pay for the students who were being raked over the coals with sports fees of $550 per sport because the Lakota administration mismanaged their money.  We didn’t want the kids to suffer for the problems of the adults, so we approached the Community Foundation to join forces and help the Lakota school district have a positive experience.  I thought it was nice for my partners to reach across the aisle, even though I disagreed.

The response to our measure was a negative campaign against me personally which can be seen by CLICKING HERE.  This was the choice of the Foundation who designated me as a detriment to the community because I did not blindly advocate throwing endless amounts of tax money to the public school of Lakota.  Well, naturally that made me very angry and I responded appropriately.  The levy addicts did not appreciate my comments as they came forward to make their opinions known.  One of those opinions came from the head of the Community Foundation itself.  Here is a quote from the Cincinnati Enquirer on March 14^th 2012 where Patti Alderson, board chair and CEO of the Community Foundation of West Chester and Liberty Township, complained about me as she spoke before the Lakota school board. Alderson said she wanted to clarify that her group, which also raises money for needy Lakota students, had no affiliation with Yes To Lakota Kids, (No Lakota Levy) a group I was involved in and helped start with the intention of helping Lakota students pay portions of their sports fees.  Read an article about this issue from Forbes featuring my efforts, CLICK  HERE.

Alderson told the board audience of more than 200, that No Lakota officials had approached the foundation but that “we refused to accept their funds.”

“We refuse to accept funds where political statements are attached,” said  Patti who took exception to my comments here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom where I said about the levy addicts “even with the overwhelming proof I’ve provided the crazy PTA moms and their minions of latte drinking despots with diamond rings the size of car tires and asses to match, (they) plot against me with an anger only estrogen can produce. They have shown no restraint in casting aspersions in my direction by calling me every name the human mind can create in human language. Did they think it wouldn’t get back to me? And being a head for an eye kind of guy I’m happy to return the favor. And yes, I meant it the way I said it. I do not think an eye for an eye taken is harsh enough. I generally leave people alone and let them make their own decisions without my interference until they attempt to impose themselves upon me. School levies are imposing themselves onto my life.”  I knew when I said all this that it would anger the levy addicts, so I put a period at the end of my statement directed to those strongest advocates of higher taxes.  The levy addicts had already slandered my name every way possible and painted me as a community menace, so I felt my opinion of their lifestyles was justified since they had already thrown in my direction names like, “wife beater,” “hillbilly,” “child hater,” “greedy businessman,” and many other derogatory terms.  So I made my opinions of the levy addicts known by saying they are, “just prostitutes to their husbands who do everything they can to be away from them aside from the occasional sex. Their husband’s roll them over at night and insert their manhood into these women of the bedroom and hundred-dollar bills find their way into their purses. The women don’t know what the man does to earn the money, nor do they care. They are busy saving the world one child at a time with howls of safety and more regulations as they rush to the polling places at election time.”

As The Enquirer stated I was unapologetic for my writings.  In fact, I should have really spoken my mind.  I actually held back in concern that little children might read what I thought of the levy addicts.  Knowing the real motive behind the games that were at play within Lakota made me very angry.  The Community Foundation did not spontaneously line up to speak against my comments but had been planning them for a long time.

I said in The Enquirer about the issue, “Emotions get pretty intense in political campaigns and let’s face it; we have had to continue with our levy resistance for a couple of years now. It gets very frustrating when you present good arguments then the pro levy side paints you as being against children, and wanting to dismantle the community because they can’t come up with compelling arguments against you.”  The rest of the article can be seen by CLICKING HERE.

It is often very difficult to tell good intentions from bad ones when children are being used as extortion mechanisms.  In my community there are a lot of groups who advocate that what they do is for the good of “children” but what their real intentions are constitute power, whether that power is political, emotional, economic, or just psychological.  It is even more difficult to announce the kind of tyranny that I am about to name, because there isn’t any mechanism in our courts that define the behavior as bad, or even illegal.  There are no moral codes that do so either.  In fact, Christianity espouses the value of charity with great fanfare, so organizations like the Community Foundation feel that so long as they show altruist measures in society that they will be given a free pass to behave in any manner necessary to achieve any aims they deem “good.”

Some of my partners in No Lakota Levy were also very active in the Community Foundation, which is a good organization with intentions that are beneficial.  They expressed an interest to donate money to the Community Foundation but they were not doing it because they wanted to solve the problem.  They were doing it because powerful community members in the culture of the Foundation were applying pressure on them to cave on their resistance to the school levy at Lakota.  As a local charity group the Foundation appears to have believed that they needed to support the school levy otherwise they were letting down “the children.”  As perceived leaders in the community many of these people were pushing my partners to separate from me as I was too radical and detrimental to the “growth” of West Chester and Liberty Township.  I watched all this activity with great humor.  I eventually agreed to help with the donation project because on the surface it was a good one.  But I had something else in mind for all those “society” types who were slandering my name to my partners, and to other people around the community who were firm “NO” votes on tax increases.  I needed to identify the slanderers by name for future battles, and I needed to expose their true intentions.  This meant flushing them out from behind their hiding places of smiling faces attending Lakota.  The best way to do this was to expose the game they were playing by beating them at it.

In spite of the comments I said above, I have said far worse publicly, in writing and in fisticuffs around town.  But the levy addicts never cared much until The Enquirer article from March 7^th.  After my partners and I started our own foundation once the Community Foundation closed their doors to our $10K donation the following dialogue appeared in The Cincinnati Enquirer.  “Unlike similar anti-school tax groups in some other area suburban districts, No Lakota is now in a privately funded $10,000 partnership to help students pay for higher school sports fees, says the group’s founder Rich Hoffman.

Hoffman and other tax opponents have long contended that Lakota’s teachers and their union should be taking the brunt of recent budget cuts through pay cuts rather than eliminating student services and upping sports fees.

“It’s obvious that the greatest casualty in these three levy fights has been the kids, and that’s really unfortunate,” says Hoffman of the “Yes to Lakota Kids” program to be publicly unveiled later Tuesday.

Hoffman said the unusual effort is designed to remove students from being used by school labor unions as “emotional hostages” in the often contentious tax levy campaigns of recent years.

“With the sports fees so high, it certainly has an impact on families that aren’t as fortunate as other families and we feel that’s simply not fair, and we are seeking to rectify that situation while these disputes with the school’s labor over pay continue. The kids have been used by that labor force unfairly, and it’s time to remove the kids from being caught in the middle,” I said.  CLICK HERE for the rest of the article.

Just a few days later, Patti Alderson made her comments to the school board and one week after that Enquirer article levy addicts were scouring through my public writing here on Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom looking for anything they could use to smear my name not just privately—as they had been doing—but to take me out of the “public” debate. However, their behavior was something that had to be triggered because behind the scenes—through charity events, fund-raising dinners, and inner circle emails, the attack on my group was taking place from the Lakota levy addict public relations machine—and I didn’t appreciate it.  School officials were working illegally behind the scenes to pull the strings of power to make their moves of offense.  (illegally because officials were working on levy related material during school hours, which is traceable by email and witness testimony.)  It was expected that since I was a public figure that I would behave like Mitt Romney did during his presidential campaign when Barack Obama called him names and slandered him any way possible, but Romney was inclined to show that he was “above such reproach.”  Well, I don’t follow any such rules.  After The Enquirer article there was the Forbes article and my comments about students being used by school labor unions as “emotional hostages” was too close to the mark for the levy addicts.  They were forced to make their move against my organization to reveal what they were secretly attempting to do behind closed doors.  For me this was equivalent to a “controlled blast” that a bomb squad might attempt to do to safely detonate a booby trap or other dangerous device.  The trick was in the timing.

I published the comments seen above in the middle of February after I learned about the Kroger survey organized against me to smear my name publicly.  I was curious when and if anyone from the other side would take issue, but they didn’t as I had said such things before.  The important thing to note is that the levy addicts did make their move once they realized that my organization was stripping away their “emotional leverage,” with the financial donations.  This was the weakness of the levy addicts.  Deep in their hearts they were conscious of their social hypocrisy.  They were aware of what they were doing, but they could not reveal the truth, even to themselves.  The levy addicts attempted to make my comments into one of sexism, vulgar pretense, and social unreliability.  But their anger was toward none of those things.  Their anger was toward the worst thing that I said which was that the school, and everyone attached to promoting school levies were guilty of using the children of Lakota as “emotional hostages.”  For that comment Patti Alderson took to the microphone on behalf of her Community Foundation and feigned anger at my derogatory remarks when the real issue was the role that the Community Foundation had to take in denying the $10K check from No Lakota Levy as a contribution to the children of Lakota attempting to actually unite the community.

This brings us full circle back to the Community Foundation giving two teachers from Lakota, Amy Smith and Dean Hume Lakota Educator of Excellence Awards.  Patti Alderson proclaimed in her public comments about me that the Community Foundation refuses to accept funds where political statements are attached.  Yet the support of the Community Foundation getting behind the Educator of Excellence Award with a flashy video and a touchy—feely symposium of Lakota employees, obviously filmed during school hours was a political statement considering that Lakota is gearing up for another tax increase attempt.

They are of course entitled to their opinion at the Community Foundation and on a perceptual level, anyone with a brain can tell that there was something wrong with the scenario, but the crime is difficult to define conventionally, which is why it continues to happen in virtually every school district across the country.  After all, the school and the Community Foundation are helping children.  This is supposed to give them a moral license to do and say anything they want so long as they are flying a flag of honor with pictures of smiling children upon it.  But when I pulled the flag down giving both parties nothing to hide behind, they reacted in fear and extreme revulsion lashing out predictably.  The question of why this happens is the real mystery that many of the levy addict players cannot define themselves.  They have no idea of why they are motivated to behave in such a way.

In the 1960s even up to the current gay marriage debate the essence of the free love and non sexual denomination relationship discussion is to achieve one primary aspect of life that is particularly disconcerting to voters who tend to lean-to the political left.  These people tend to want to be loved, and they are often insecure about losing love once they obtain it from others.  Love is one of the most primary functions and desires of a human being.  It could be said that the level of love in one’s life dictates their happiness.  The trouble is some people understand that love is obtained when two or more individuals share common values, and some ignorantly believe that it is obtained through altruism—a sense of sacrifice.  When a man tells a woman, “I’d die for you,” he is proclaiming the later.  He is an idiot.  It sets the relationship with the woman on the wrong footing.  She will always unconsciously be on the lookout for another mate in case the man fulfills his proclamation.  If the same man says to the woman, “I love you because of who you are.”  This has more weight and the woman will understand that the love is generated from shared values. The former will be successful because the relationship is built on values that are shared.  This is the ultimate failure of our modern age.  The wrong types of people seek love for all the wrong reasons.  The left leaning voter seeks sacrificial love through the measures of non value because it is less risky for them.  Love without value means that any given person of any given value can love any person anywhere no matter what their sex, age, or success factor.  This belief is driven from the fear that if love is obtained, that it might be lost if the values of people change.  So to safeguard themselves from this fear, they seek to remove value from love so that they never have to be without love.  This is of course sweet when looked upon in this fashion as it is easy to feel compassion for such people.  But this leads to social failure because it strips society of values, which is what we are seeing in America today.

Many of the levy addicts involved in the Lakota Levy debate are suffering from this problem of insecure lust for love.  Their intentions are not to pass a levy, save children, or ever solve the public education funding problems provided to them by greedy labor unions.  Instead they hope for a return to the problem every couple of years because they are addicted to levy attempts as this is the way that they have learned to make other people “love” them.  For an example of this need for love, look at the faces of the levy supporters in the picture at THIS LINK, CLICK TO VIEW.  It’s not about children for them, but about community, love, sharing, and all kinds of mushy emotions.  This is the real intention of levy supporters and why I call them “Levy Addicts.” They are addicted to the euphoric feeling of crusading for a cause (children) for an invisible desire for goodness—as it has been defined by government.  Anyone who stands in the way of that “love” is a threat to their existence, and they attack the way a jealous spouse attacks someone who they fear might steal away their love.  But the love is not pure. It is instead neurotic and doomed from the start.  It can never be filled, or achieved because it requires the theft of other people’s money to acquire.  Many of the levy addicts could write personal checks for the $2 million dollars and never miss the money if they really wanted to help the community.  I can think of a few of the levy addicts who would consider the $10K that No Lakota Levy raised for the children of Lakota to help pay for their sports fees  as equal to the same cost that they spend on lunch.  It doesn’t mean anything to them, the value of money is negligible because they have so much of it, and have forgotten how they came to it.  But what does mean something to them is whether they can manage to unite an entire community through charities, politics, or business into loving them to the extent that they are willing to surrender their personal values and logic.  These are the deep dark secrets of the levy addicts.

My threat to their existence is that I proposed to solve the problem and remove the financial chaos which they need for their scam.  The levy addicts need the chaos to fill their lives with love which they are always yearning for—the desire to be loved by others to fill a value they can never seem to find any other way.  In this way the levy addicts become just as tyrannical as the Crusaders attempting to move the world toward a particular religion out of a professed love of God through altruistic sacrifice—but if not the Crusades pick a mass movement of any other radical group seeking to crush individuals in pursuit of a collective good.  The definitions of “goodness” are set by those with the loudest mouths and deepest yearning for public love.  At Lakota the fantasy of the levy addicts is if only they could remove the opposition to their plans, then the community would shower them with love and affection—kissing their ass in every public appearance because they are powerful financially, politically, and socially.  They would thus be loved by all for every reason imaginable—except the one of personal value—which they are lacking.  These levy addicts become terribly insecure when they realize that people only “love” them for what they can give them.  They are always looking for ways to give other people things they’ve stolen from someone else because of this deep fear of lacking personal value.

This is what the hate due to my words was really about, and what was exposed when No Lakota Levy wanted to actually help children with a $10,000 donation.  Nobody in either the media or the politics of the community knew what to do because they had been exposed for what they really were.  Everyone involved pretended that they were innocent of any emotional crimes, but when I spelled it out in The Enquirer the real sin of which those supporting school levies were guilty of using children as emotional hostages I had hit the nerve everyone wished to keep hidden from the public.  The hypocrisy and sin against all children by the adult population seeking community love was out in the open and nobody knew what to do with the emotions.

The Community Foundation which had declared itself non-political announced its political support of the local government school with their video support of the two teachers which they recently awarded.  If such charitable foundations really wanted to help the entire community, they would simply cover the cost of the tax increases with their own personal checks instead of attempting to compel the entire community to support a school they may not like or support.  There is no call by the charity group to solve the actual funding problems at the school because that would defy their real intention, which is to maintain their power base at the center of the community which is in perpetual pursuit of “love” from their peers.

If the motivations were not one of public love, the money would quietly find its way into the Lakota treasuries in the still of the night without a name attached to the donation.  If those involved in community health were actually willing to serve altruism, they would not place themselves on pedestals so that everyone could see how much they did for the community–they would simply do the work without fanfare.  But the intention is not about “goodness,” but is instead about “love,” and the pursuit of it for all the insecure reasons it was ever pursued.  The reasons behind the Community Foundation award to the two teachers sadly looks to not be about merit, but politics, and even more tragic are the attempts to hide such charades behind children.  Without my incident to measure against described above, the presentation of the award to the Lakota teachers might otherwise go unnoticed.  But in relation to the upcoming school levy, the objective is clear.

The funds that No Lakota Levy attempted to give the Community Foundation occurred before I wrote what I did in mid February.  In fact, there wasn’t even a levy announcement yet for that year as No Lakota Levy had just won the recent election.  The Community Foundation well before any of these events occurred declined to work with my partners and me for reasons that are obvious now, because they support the school levy at Lakota perpetually.  They care not what causes the levy, they just blindly seem to support them for the reasons offered.  The response in the early winter months of 2012 was instead to smear my name and attempt to remove me from the argument instead of bringing the community together as we proposed.  I simply wanted to see the school offer the teachers union a 5% pay reduction to prevent another levy.  The school district as a whole chose not to listen to the 18,000 voters during the previous election.  Instead they chose to proceed with a smear campaign against me personally instead of solving their problem.  Then they expected me to take it when word came back to me from No Lakota Levy members and Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom readers who told me what was going on behind the scenes—what was being said about my name and why.  That is when the decision to advance the campaign to a new level proceeded.

All the parties involved believe they are right and moral in their position.  Yet only one group is right.  I would contend that these charity groups and levy addicts are detriments to the community because they feel they have a right to compel property owners to contribute to their silly pursuits of community love.  The Community Foundation is perfectly free to support the Lakota school levy if they wish to, just as the levy advocates are free to support their public educations to their heart’s content.  They are all free to pursue their desire to be loved by the public by giving teachers special awards and publicly showing how much they love children through charitable contributions.  But they are not free to compel me to do any of those things, and they are not free to bend an entire community around their small-minded needs for social “love.”  They are not free to impose their beliefs on others by forcing tax increases on everyone to fulfill their worldly visions corrupted by an unquestionable hunger for love—devalued love where judgment of right and wrong are not applicable.  That is the trouble with the situation of government politics which public schools are tightly bound with large charity organizations camouflaging their inner desires for attention through altruistic goodness.  The fact and hypocrisy remain that if those who speak loudest of the value of teachers, Lakota schools, and community value of government education institutions, then they should cover those costs on their own and not try to compel people like myself into contributing where I chose not to, and then seek to defame me personally because the neurotic, love starved levy addicts didn’t get their way.  It is not OK for institutions to crush individuals all in the pursuit of collective love.  And that is the current arrangement between local charities like those who attach themselves to public schools with the primary, yet disguised intention of promoting the image of that school in order to garner votes in an upcoming election.  The levy addicts do their so-called good by writing checks on the backs of children using their innocence to justify community tax increases.  The reason is for love, not justice—and in that revelation much coercion is performed against free minds for a tyranny that destroys generations.

Read more here:

Press conference on Yes to Lakota Kids

Rich Hoffman

“If they attack first………..blast em’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com