Tag: John Kasich

Lakota Schools Does NOT Need a School Levy in 2013: Meet the new Homearama Carriage Hill Development

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.”

http://www.journal-news.com/news/news/local/7-school-districts-may-receive-boost-in-state-fund/nWJdW/

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.

http://www.carriagehillliving.com/homearama/

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 people who aren’t happy at Lakota are those who push for more school levies that also happen to be real estate agents, people like Joan Powell who is the current president of the school board, and tax advocates like Pam Parrino who is also involved in real estate.  CLICK HERE to review when she threatened radio station WLW for giving me airtime to discuss school salaries hoping to discourage that kind of activity in the future—which obviously didn’t work.  When it became obvious to me that these types of people were using the Lakota School System to sell properties in their fields of endeavor by pushing for perpetual tax increases, exploding student enrollment by selling homes to families in the demographic age of 25 to 35 with 2.1 children per household, and covering the activity on the backs of children’s needs, the civil discussion we had been conducting erupted into an all out fight.  When the levy supports couldn’t win a tax increase from the public on the merit of argument they turned to more deceitful peer pressure and personal destruction.  I have never put up with that kind of thing, and I never will.  My current thoughts about those school levy advocates is that I don’t want 2/3 of my property tax bill to find its way into any of their pockets even indirectly.  And I will work my ass off to make sure that the more than 20,000 homes in Lakota who do not have children in the district learn of the motivations of those types of people because the only way to keep money safe is with a defeat at the ballot box.  I’ve seen enough evidence from the other political side to know that none of the levy support had one ounce of anything regarding the well-being of children.  It was for the well-being of the real estate agents who wanted an easy home sale and to make money off chaos in the Lakota community.

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.

We’ll see………………………………………………

Rich Hoffman

“If they attack first………..blast em’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

The 100K Club in Public Education: Good reporting by Channel 5 in Cincinnati

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.

I reported two years ago that there were over 625 employees at Lakota who made more than 65K per year which I thought was extraordinarily high compared to the salaries of the majority of the community of West Chester—which is an affluent community.  It doesn’t take much investigation to determine that the cause of many of the tax increase requests that go on in every community every couple of years in Ohio is due exclusively to this glaring statistic.  Public school employees make too much money, and some of them have been down-right outrageous in their wage expectations.

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.

http://www.wlwt.com/news/local-news/cincinnati/45-CPS-employees-members-of-100K-Club/-/13549970/18400362/-/w49rfi/-/index.html

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.

As an example of what is really behind the motive of public school employees have a look at the contract that Keith Kline just signed to be superintendent of West Clermont Schools.  I recently told the story of Keith Kline who had left the Lakota System, which is why I have been keeping an eye on him.  Upon looking at his contract, I dare anyone to logically explain to me that he gets paid $138K per year for a 218 day work year and is doing all this work for “The kids.”  The last time I checked there was 365 days in a year.  By the way this contract reads Kline is NOT required to work 147 days per year.  Plus, he gets paid back a quarter of all sick days not used during the 218 day period.  CLICK HERE TO REVIEW MY PREVIOUS ARTICLE.

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.

For anyone who thinks I’m being too hard on these education employees, or who think that Channel 5 did an “unfair” reporting job of exposing these extraordinary salaries, then advocate letting those same officials prove their market value in head to head competition with other schools by supporting School Choice in Ohio.  CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO.  The true value of these employees in public education will quickly be exploited, and they would learn quickly what life in the real world is really like—the world that the rest of us who don’t work for government function under.

Rich Hoffman

“If they attack first………..blast em’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

Why No Amount Of Money Can Fix Public Education: John Kasich and Bill Cunningham ponder the universe

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 enlightenment subject, 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.

Rich Hoffman

“If they attack first………..blast em’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

Winning at ‘Survivor’: Maintaining the rarity of toughness to gain an edge

I get the typical questions still almost every day I do it, wondering why I ride a motorcycle in the harsh cold and falling snow.  During the span of days where 6 AM temperatures hovered around 15 degrees in early February, 2013 through black ice and drifting snow I rode my motorcycle as I always do to the inquisitive curiosity of many.  They don’t understand why a 45 year-old man is riding such a vehicle and suffering through the painful cold when I clearly don’t have to.  My answer is one that many can’t understand logically, but it has to do with maintaining a Survivor mindset, one that does not falter under harsh conditions and can continue thinking when a physical reality is filled with pain.  That answer leaves even more people scratching their heads because they don’t understand why such skills would be necessary in today’s world.  But over the years I have done a very good job at surviving anything that has come my way, and I have been so good at it that my family has always joked that I should be a contestant on the TV show Survivor.  In fact, half-way serious back during the third season of Survivor when they were going to Africa I actually tried out for the show.  I was only 33 years-old at the time and went so far as to obtain my passport to appear on the show.  Below is my audition tape that I sent to the producers.  Their criteria at the time was to pick one item that I would want to bring with me on Survivor and describe why.  I picked my 12 foot bullwhip.

The fun thing about watching that old video now is that I haven’t changed that much from then to now.  My oldest daughter was just a little girl at the time as she held targets for me like she always used to.  I filmed that little audition tape while my wife was making breakfast with her mother on a brisk November morning mainly because I wanted to send a message to my kids not to be afraid to try anything even if the odds are very much against you.  Often the fun is in the journey, so it was delightful to assemble those clips with my daughter and allow her to take an active part in helping me try out for such a large television production while at the same time giving me a creative way to tell her the back history of how I came into using bullwhips as a hobby.

By now there is over a decade of Survivor episodes so we all know how the game has been played.  Even though I haven’t played that particular game on that particular show I have played the game in real life very effectively.  Some who know me best have seen to what extremes I am willing to play the game of Survivor in real life.  I’ve had to do it with several companies, personal triumphs, also with politics and in hindsight I had very good instincts to try out for Survivor all those years ago.  Watching the kind of people who have won over the last decade and studying how they’ve won I would have had a good chance at winning the million dollar prize, which is why that show has always been so popular.  The large financial incentive in the game pits many different types of personalities against each other in a successful duplication of reality.  After all, we all play Survivor in our everyday lives in some form or another, so we enjoy watching the show as it strips away all the masks that such competition hides behind.  In the TV game Survivor the settings are always exotic and primitive with the basic human condition exposed under the rugged conditions and easy for viewers to study—which is why the show has been so successful.

Even though I didn’t get the opportunity to be on that show I have survived many personal episodes over the years, and you might be surprised dear reader how many times my use of the bullwhip has bailed me out over that span.  Much of the time it is knowing when to be intense, when to form an alliance, when to break an alliance, when to be unpredictable, when to be predictable, when to show your cards and when not to that dictates who wins and loses in the game of Survivor which we all play every day.  Being good at Survivor requires an understanding of who is scheming against you and who is simply trying to use you to get closer to their eventual goal of which you share with them the final prize.  Much of the time alliances are formed with those you know eventually must be taken out before the game ends and you must detect when they are going to make a move against you so that the aggression can be headed off before hand.

In that regard the game of Survivor that we are all playing is not for a million dollars or even to survive in corporate America.  The game of Survivor we are playing now is one for all the marbles in American philosophy.  For the reasons that John Boehner has sided with Barack Obama in many cases while publicly pretending to dual with him is to maintain the alliance the two have formed along the lines of what George Soros recently revealed about a strategy against the Tea Party being played out in Davos, Switzerland.  Boehner wants to protect machine politics as does Obama, so they both have that trait in common and find the Tea Party as a threat to their personal philosophy.  They may not agree on much else, but they know they must get rid of the Tea Party before they fight each other, so they form a union, just like in the show Survivor.  CLICK THE LINK BELOW FOR MORE.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/02/03/soros-obama-trying-to-split-the-republican-party-push-the-tea-party-out-into-the-wilderness/

The weakness of the Tea Party movement is that they are inheritably honest by nature so they find themselves often on the short end of the stick when playing against deceitful competitors.  I too have the very same problem.  It took me a long time to work through this handicap, which I figured out in my teenage years.  I cannot be as deceitful as the typical politician and cannot change sides so quickly as others with less ethics have proven so capable of.  The Soros/Obama plan is to provoke that honesty prevalent in the Tea Party “into the forest” as they put it, so that they can regain control of the two-party system.  Locally we have seen traditional Republicans move away from the Tea Party for this very reason, because they are betting that the Tea Party will not survive, and they fear exposure.   This trend is so popular that even education reformers like Governor Kasich are quickly changing their tune.  He has formed an alliance with labor unions designed to earn his re-election and a run for President in 2016 by turning against the Tea Party ideas that he ran on.  Kasich may not philosophically agree with the labor unions, but he will side with them now so that he can advance to a political level where he can betray them at a future tribal council—(metaphorically speaking).

What is required if you are a Tea Party supporter is a change in strategy that “they” don’t anticipate.  As we move forward with fighting school levies, preserving the Constitution, and maintaining fiscal responsibility in government, it will require new alliances and a will to cut up the old ones into little pieces so that they cannot betray us in the future.  If a deceitful manner is not an option for the Tea Party, which I know before hand that it’s not, then it requires a toughness that the opposition does not have to beat them.

I have learned over the years that the willingness to be “tougher” than a rival can provide leverage over the more manipulative in the game of Survivor.  Opponents who play “politics” and believe they can outspend, outsmart, and outwit a competitor while sitting in the safety of their homes or their luxury cars are ALWAYS at a disadvantage to a rival who is not afraid to bleed, fight in the trenches and rip off the masks of those who desire to remain hidden behind them.  In this way it is possible to always gain the upper hand on a rival who desires to play Survivor from a level of comfort.

If I had been on the show Survivor all those years ago, I would have done well using my athleticism to win a majority of the immunity challenges, and I would have done well otherwise by created and dismissing the proper alliances at the proper time.  And the reason to this very day that I still do push-ups every day, and ride my motorcycle in the extreme cold, the snow, the rain, the intense lightning storms is to remind myself to never get comfortable, to always be ready to make an adjustment in alliances to one that is successful and will allow victory in the game of Survivor.  Typical politicians like Barack Obama, John Boehner, John Kasich and financiers like George Soros are playing the real game of Survivor with the standard “outwit, outplay and outlast” motto.  To win, all those elements are important and cannot bring victory to someone who doesn’t excel at all those traits.  However, I would add “toughness” to that motto.  The ability to be “tougher” than your opponents with all other things being equal proves that victory comes to the tougher player who plays as honestly as possible nearly 100% of the time.  “Toughness” beats all the billions of dollars that people like George Soros spends on politics nearly every single time in a head to head competition of wits.  That is the short answer to why I ride my motorcycle in the cold February months and leave the car in the garage 95% of the time.  “Toughness” is not something you can purchase; it has to be earned the old-fashioned way, and is the extra boost that any competitor can use to defeat their rivals with assurance.

If the Tea Party can maintain their sense of toughness while all these alliances change hands then it will be possible for a handful of tough-minded rebel rousers to dismantle all the billions that George Soros and his minions have spent to advance a global “progressive” society, and it can dismantle the two-party buddy system that is modern politics.  Weak minded competitors who can be purchased because of their love of comfort do not make good allies for the mentally tough anyway, so there is no loss when they abandon us in favor of George Soros type’s power and money.  In the end, honesty, toughness, and tenacity added to maintaining the ability to outwit, outplay, and outlast is a winning formula that will take the Tea Party into the real life finals in the game of Survivor.  The above formula will give the Tea Party a chance to do what many think is impossible—to save America from the advancement of global progressivism.  The real game of Survivor is not on TV but is being played out right here right now in this time and the winners will be those who play it best, and last to the bitter end.

As for me, since the time that I first made that video for the third season of Survivor and now I have survived many, many, many metaphorical tribal councils—enough to have won the TV game many times over.  Some of those real tribal councils have been every bit as vicious as what can be seen on that television show each week for over a decade now.  I anticipate that over the next decade I’ll survive even more that are every bit as ferocious.  There will many alliances that are broken, many tears that are spilled, and there may even be some blood—but in the end, it’s all about “outwitting, out playing and outlasting” competitors with my personal addition of playing with honesty, toughness, and tenacity.  I am confident that I’ll win far more immunity challenges than I’ll lose because at 6 AM in the morning through the pouring rain, the drifting snow, the black ice and extreme cold, I’m the only one on a motorcycle, which is why I do it.

Rich Hoffman

“If they attack first………..blast em’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

The Financial Health of America: How to adapt to the coming crises

This is the day of the Superbowl and as I watched the festivities of the day and thought about the countless parties going on all over America I had some thoughts about economics in The United States that I wanted to share.  I have covered so many radio broadcasts here at the OW over the years that I have moved on to new ways of communicating just to avoid redundancy.  For instance, when Darryl Parks covered two years ago the coming financial crises in America, he was talking about the time we are currently in.  CLICK HERE to revisit that broadcast and compare that broadcast to this new one done on 700 WLW during the first day of February 2013.  A lot of ground has been covered between the Darryl Parks broadcast of a couple of years ago and this recent one, but the scope of the problem is very accurately displayed for even economically naive listeners to understand.  Have a listen:

This financial crisis is the paramount topic of our day.  The state of our economy is changing rapidly and soon many of those who thought that finance in America was an impregnable fortress will soon learn what epic failure and a commitment to socialism has done to us all.  With student debt collapsing our economy as we speak, the old idea of retiring at 65 years old off a nice pension and other government driven revenue is gone forever.  Instead Americans in their mid-40’s on down will have to face a new reality for financing their lives and the luxury of one income to handle all their affairs just won’t do.

In my own life I have begun writing books to help fuel my own later years with additional sources of personal income, because the old traditional model will become obsolete in the coming years.  With the collapse of the American economy so to will the idea of working one job for eight hours every day go away.  In the future it may take 3 or 4 jobs requiring 10 to 30 hours each week to commit to, and that is the result of the massive plundering that has went on in our nation’s government.

College will not help fix this problem; it has only made it worse, because our education system has saturated the marketplace with too many employees trained in skills that do not have revenue generating potential.  The best jobs for college graduates are government jobs, because the private sector has not been able to sustain government intrusion and preserve profitability while maintaining the financial promises of a university degree.  Unions also won’t help, because like colleges, they have improperly skewed the profitability of their enterprises with redistributive wealth reforms that have had the opposite effect of their intentions.  Just a quick glance at the economic viability of Detroit, and the state of California provides all the proof one needs to predict the future of economies driven by these forces.

What this means is that a massive exodus of tax contributions is about to hit The United States government and they are not prepared to deal with that grim reality peacefully.  I recently spoke about the cost of high taxes pushing people out of their homes.  An empty home does not contribute taxes to a school district, or a police department, or those beloved firefighters embedded into our minds as heroes from the Fisher Price toys we played with as children.  When citizens can no longer make money off their jobs or own property, there is nothing for government to tax—there is no way to steal the money away from the citizens—and the government will go bankrupt once people lose the will to participate.  That will is quickly disappearing.

A failure to address these issues back when Darryl Parks first did his broadcast with Porter Standsberry has caused this current crisis to impact the lives of millions of families, and that is just the tip of the iceberg.  I put this recent broadcast up today so that a trend can be seen by the intelligent reader/viewer.  These broadcasts are more than doomsday entertainment, they are more than skeptical speculation; they are quite real in their announcements of economic disaster.  I believe that the downward economic trend is unavoidable and those who will survive are those who adjust their lives to these changing conditions.  The keys to this new survival are to keep student debt down.  Keep credit card debt low to non-existent.  And do many things for a living—not just one specialized thing.  Avoid high looting taxes because with every tax dollar you throw away to government, you will have to work a part-time job or two here and there to cover the cost of those taxes.  Keep it simple and stay out-of-the-way, because things will get ugly before they get better.  And most importantly, think like a “producer” not a “consumer.”  Conditions will get ugly because too many people are in denial of the present state of affairs, and refuse to acknowledge the true economic status of The United States.  Take broadcasts like the one done on 700 WLW and cherish the information, because failure to act will lead your family down a dark path that will most likely end very poorly for all involved.

Enjoy the Superbowl.  Hope your team won.  Depending on how you answer that will determine your ability to avoid trouble in the coming days.

Rich Hoffman

“If they attack first………..blast em’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

Keith Kline Superintendent of West Clermont: What’s next–Pee Wee Herman in The White House?

Proof of the quality of candidates becoming superintendents in public school positions is in dramatic decline and has been fully realized when Keith Kline the former principal of Lakota East High School was just named superintendent of West Clermont.  The context regarding the quality of some employees over others is more about the lack of competition which allows the worst to claim they are the best, and this is what we find among the current crop of superintendents who manage public education in Ohio.  CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO.  During his tenure at Lakota Kline was at the center of many controversies which came in my direction and there are many people who read here every day who will be outraged to learn that Kline has been given the highest job possible in Ohio public education—aside from a political bureaucrat in Columbus.  The next time someone tells me that a school superintendent is doing equal work to a company CEO, I will think of Keith Kline and will know honestly that they are out of their mind.

Kline’s ascension into such a powerful position proves the motivations of these professional education types.  Many people from within the Lakota School System’s halls of secrets gave me very direct information regarding the power struggles between Kline and school board member Joan Powell pointing to internal politics that make Washington politics look like a day at Chuckee Cheese’s Pizza Palace.  Based on some of those controversies, I thought anybody would be insane to give a promotion to someone like Kline.  As tax payers we are the employers of these public servants  so a recommendation to another employer would not come from me.  It was well-known that Kline wanted the top job at Lakota and one of the reasons he left Lakota was to pursue a superintendent job elsewhere once the top job went to Karen Mantia–the former teacher from Sycamore and retired superintendent from Pickerington, Ohio.

All these educators will tell their communities—especially when they are begging for money during levy requests—that they “care only about children.”  But to my eyes based on my experience supported by the mountains of evidence their real intentions speak otherwise.  These education professionals are simply in the business of using children to give themselves positions of social power they could get no place else but in a government school.  This doesn’t make them bad people so much as people who stand in the way of real education reform by true management of tax payer resources.  The personal quality of these people is dramatically and noticeably lacking.  They care only about the money they can make and how they can advance their careers and little else.  Those are traits that are not against the law, and in some circles of professional endeavor like lawyers, politicians, day traders, car salesmen, and education professions, it’s actually rewarded—as Kline’s promotion proves.

I know some of these people personally, and I can say that I believe that they believe the shit they are shoveling is gold and diamonds.  They have convinced themselves of their own scam—but when I look into their shovels the evidence is clear as to who has the proper perspective.  The whole charade game is a joke at best, and is made worse because education is an internally driven political nightmare that benefits only the very, very few.  That nightmare is exacerbated by the lack of competition that would prove quickly the management skills of a former high school principal who thinks he’s a CEO to be faulty next to the skill of a real CEO who might compete with Lakota or West Clermont under a free enterprise system where costs would be forced downward and profits upward.  In government schools, where there is no competition, it is tax money that drives everything, so nobody cares if the employees have any real quality about them.  This allows the most scandalous and manipulative paper pushers in society to advance above those who are more qualified but are suppressed under the unionized labor force.  Government favors the back-stabber, not the competitively superior, so government schools will always lack quality because of their inbred monopoly that is supported by tax revenue.

Those of us in the education reform movement joked a few months ago of how long it would take Keith Kline to work his way into the superintendent job.  The joke from some of my friends was that it would be within a year of Kline transferring from Lakota to West Claremont.  I actually said that the West Claremont School Board wouldn’t be that stupid–that surely they were aware of the things that went on at Lakota.  Well, apparently, I was wrong.  Every time I think that public education and its employees have hit a new low and proven the need for School Choice in Ohio, something like this happens—which sets the bar lower and lower.  The announcement of Keith Kline as superintendent of West Clermont is equivalent for me at learning that Pee Wee Herman just became President of The United States.  Any hope that you might have that the office of President had any “quality” flies out the window upon such an announcement which would seem ridiculous talking about it here.  But it is no more ridiculous than learning that a person like Kline has been given the top management job of a major school district.  Without question, West Clermont will be asking for another school levy now, because that is a sure sign of mismanagement and lack of leadership.  With Kline as superintendent, look for wages to increase, and tax hikes to become the norm in the school district of West Clermont.

For more context to this story read below an interview I gave to the Associated Press during 2011 and measure the comments made there with the situation we see today.

http://www.news-herald.com/articles/2011/11/07/news/nh4711053.txt

All of public education exists to provide good jobs to the very few—and the process that promoted Keith Kline is a perfect example of everything that’s wrong with that system.  I don’t blame Kline for playing that system to his advantage.  I blame the apathy that allowed that system to be there for an advantage to be taken.

Rich Hoffman

“If they attack first………..blast em’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

Government Will Always be Bad so Long as Bad People Join: The mystery of the social do-gooder

It is not enough to just point at the government and say that it’s bad.  Government is bad because it attracts the wrong kind of people to serve it.  Yet in order to fix government the understanding of what “good” people are, what they look like, and how they should behave must be understood.  Without that understanding, there is no hope for government to ever be reformed for the better no matter what the political affiliation is or under what flag it resides under.  The roots of people come out when they are pressed, as seen in the article link below from the West Chester Buzz regarding John Boehner and the comments about John’s current political predicament, from some of the same people who have intersected my life at times.  This posting is directed at some of those people, and the ornaments that hang from their lives to this day who are equally as baffled to the changes in political climate as Boehner is currently.

http://westchesterbuzz.com/2013/01/28/enquirer-whats-changed-for-john-boehner/

(Well written article by Deidre Shesgreen of The Cincinnati Enquirer by the way.)

I have known entirely too many people who do not understand what I mean when I speak of the word “honesty.”  Government is filled with many individuals who believe that the collectivism of government can shield them from scrutiny while their true intentions are to gain much wealth for themselves through collectivism.  I ran into this constantly from family and friends who wondered why I was so adamantly against the Lakota School Levy.  They believed that in some distorted way that Mark Sennet had hired me to be a spokesman for No Lakota Levy, and that my activity in local politics was somehow inspired by a climb for power into the Republican Party.  To answer one of the people mentioned in the West Chester Buzz article, it is OK to make a “buck,” I fully support free enterprise.  But it is not OK to enter politics so that the process of regulation can be controlled by the presence of a politician who is in the zipper of a builder or developer.  I say that even though I know many that I call friends, yet I know they do not understand what motivates me, which has always bothered me, and prevents friendship beyond polite formalities.  When many learned the truth—that I am as against people like Sennet for his blind and naive avocation of Agenda 21 style “community development” as I am the labor unions—and that the true rift with No Lakota Levy has its roots in these philosophical reasons than anything else—they are as unable to understand what I tell them as a dog can read a book.  CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW.  The language and cognition are just not available to them.

I know many Republicans who only have conservative beliefs so that they can advance their careers.  And I know many, many Democrats who do the same.  Statistics prove that many of the teachers, fire fighters and cops who voted the “union” ticket in the last elections do not care what the politicians on their tickets believed politically, but simply voted in the fashion that they did to secure their livelihoods.  In my own family there are superintendents, teachers, school bus drivers, professional students—kids who are school age children whose parents need their schools to watch their kids while they pursue careers.  They all wonder what I am after in my political arguments even though many of them have known me my entire life.  They assume that I will announce to the family that I have a big lobby job with Washington or a public relations position for a local school system because I must have some personal agenda for my political campaigns, otherwise, why else would I do them?

Lately I have went further down the rabbit hole of personal life management because the solutions to America’s problems reside in individual lives—and it does no good to point out the deficiencies and failures of government without addressing the reasons.  And those reasons are some of the most obvious yet obscure traits available to the minds of the masses on a daily bases.  Too many people arrive too late in their lives with a yearning to be “good.”  They fall in love for all the wrong reasons; buy the wrong kind of cars, clothing, and even dishwashers for motivations that defy practicality.  They pursue occupations that allow these movements not for their inward calls to adventure but out of a desire to find meaning in their meaningless lives.  They have pushed God from their lives, they have accepted collectivism as a social blanket to hide their inner demons from themselves, and they arrive into their adulthoods fractions of their true potential—wastes of human beings that are navigating T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland in their grim realities.

For the worst of the human being they seek to hide their personal wastelands from public view by joining government in a quest to save society because they cannot save themselves.  They do not have the courage to face life daily, they buy into collectivism and hope to have success in mass.  This is how it all starts, this is how government goes bad, because bad people join it with the good intention of saving themselves with redemptive escapades—but they only end up bringing the same kind of destruction to government and the people government serves as a result and they seek to use stolen money through taxation to cover their multiple personal evils.  If only one or two people did such a thing, society might be able to absorb the impact, but tragically, there is only one or two per thousand who are good.  The vast majority in government are broken souls trying desperately to fill their personal voids with public office under the guise of doing public good.  The reality is that they are trying to conceal from public view their many inner evils of which they spend most of their lives fleeing from only to arrive at retirement age broken relics of their once hopeful lives.

There is a real fear when it is realized that a few here and there involve themselves in politics not to redeem their past sins, or to curry favor to build alliances with others to advance their careers, but out of a desire to do “good.”  When objectives of personal gain cannot be found, the panic begins to set in and a new layer of anger emerges.  For those who are truly dedicated to being good and understanding the higher meanings of things, political theater is a trivial pursuit and I personally don’t have much tolerance for it.  When I make my comments about politics and the participants it is out of a personal disdain that I have for the quality of the people attracted to politics.  If their desire is to hide their personal faults from society by joining public office then spending my money to redeem their activity through collectivism, then I have a right to expose them for what they are attempting to conceal from public view.  It would be less of my business what their personal faults were if they did not consume my tax money, but because they do, they deserve the wrath of critical analysis.

My objective is to sort the good from the bad.  In my personal life, I only have room for those who want to do good.  I don’t enjoy the company of social climbers and political manipulators so it’s no skin off my back if I piss them off.  If they don’t wake up in the morning committed to being good people then I don’t have value for them.  In that regard, when I have been invited to meet Governor John Kasich, I have dodged those meetings not out of disrespect, but because my personal time is valuable and there is nothing in such a meeting for me.  Kasich is a public servant and to me that is equal to the kind of person I might hire to clean my house.  When I was invited to have breakfast with John Boehner fairly recently, I ducted the invitation not out of disrespect to Boehner, but out of a preference for having a private breakfast with my wife doing what we enjoy doing on Saturday mornings.  And there is no circumstance that Barack Obama could invite me to the White House for any kind of meeting that I would go to without having something better to do.  Many people would say that my comments in this regard are crazy–yet that is why our government is so screwed up, and what I fight against.  For those who don’t understand, I work to make them understand by forcing them to look at their actions in the context of goodness, and measure for themselves if they wish to continue down that path.

Such action may not be popular but that’s alright with me.  My view is on the long view, not the short.  There is nothing in the short view that interests me, and no amount of money in the world that could lure me into such a short-sighted view.  Along those guidelines, there is no tolerance that I have for those who are so short-sighted, and my respect for people who are, is non-existent.  So for those who wonder, I hope this explanation frames the situation correctly.

Rich Hoffman

“If they attack first………..blast em’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

Obama Found Unconstitutional: Do I have to say “I told you so?”

In case you may have missed it due to the fact that 90% of the media both national and local are in the zipper of Barack Obama—because they were all taught in the same progressive institutions under the same progressive guidelines–some of Obama’s appointments made one year ago were recently found to be unconstitutional.  Well, this is no surprise to me as I covered the issue here at the OW with a direct letter to the office of John Boehner, which of course he ignored.  CLICK HERE TO REVIEW.  Boehner if he had listened to me, and about a dozen other people from his district might have led the GOP to properly reel in the power grabbing Obama under the authority given to the House Speaker, and would most likely be working with a Republican White House by this time instead left-wing Weather Underground radicals.  The courts would have sided with Boehner if he had made a bold move one year ago, but instead he decided to play it safe–to play golf and take polite little jabs at his good buddy, Barack Obama publicly, while back slapping with him privately.  What was it that Biden said to Boehner not that long ago——“We’re at the gate, man.  We’re at the gate.”  Hmmmm, what do you suppose Vice President Biden meant by that?  Boehner ignored my message—because I’m not “at the gate………………” and dismissed my suggestions and warnings as those of a radical “right winger” from his home district who likes to hang out with those Constitutional purists in the Tea Party.

When Boehner’s office workers spoke to me they had that look of amusement on their faces that is so common with politicians these days.  After all, they had a plan.  Boehner and Ohio Republicans from John Kasich all the way down to the local trustees and commissioners were going to play it cool, take the high ground, let the Supreme Court overturn Obamacare during the summer of 2012, then run Mitt Romney against Obama in the fall where they would attack the President’s economic record.  Boehner’s office had “big plans” and they didn’t want to listen to crazy Rich Hoffman standing in their office dripping wet from a rare January thunderstorm where I rode to his office on my motorcycle and was asking Boehner to uphold the Constitution against Obama and his friends of American reformers.

Now here we are in 2013, Republicans lost to the White House due to the emotional pleas of the mentally unfortunate, they lost Obamacare to the bizarre ruling by Justice Roberts.  Now Republicans have to worry about Obama appointing more liberals to the Supreme Court—forget the 5-4 rulings in their favor in the future, because as Roberts proved, all it takes is one or two Supreme Court Justices to turn the whole world upside down.  And because of the Roberts opinion there is no doubt drool running from the mouths of Obama’s legal team who will challenge the unconstitutional rulings cited against The White House—after all, history cannot be allowed to remember such things, because in lawyer circles it is case-law that matters, not the original laws.

But as for now at least someone had the courage to defend the Constitution, and not snicker at the naiveté of a constituent who expected justice to be upheld on a rainy January day in 2012.   As the law stands today, President Obama has been found to have acted unconstitutionally, and my comments about Obama in my letter to John were not out-of-line in the least.  They were what all Americans should expect, if they intended to live within the letters of the law, and not be afraid to piss off the President and miss the next golf outing so they can all pretend they are masters of the universe when the actual money they are spending came from the American treasury.  Boehner had his shot, and he didn’t take it…………………..and I’m not talking about golf swings.  His personal loss was a tremendous loss to the Republican Party.  But more than anything, America loses when people like the pretentious “political class” look down their noses at Constitutional purists with a disdain more fitting in Nottingham England than West Chester, Ohio on the eve of the second Civil War.  Next time I won’t write a letter and hope for the legal system to listen.  I’ll just exercise my Constitutional rights on my own—before I lose them in a golf bet between John Boehner and Barack Obama.

Rich Hoffman

“If they attack first………..blast em’!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

Workplace Freedom Amendment in Ohio: Who could possibly be against freedom? “UNIONS”

If you are tired of school levies and ridiculous tax increases placed on a ballot every 3 years from your community school, then there is only one hope of removing that threat from your week-to-week budget; the Workplace Freedom Amendment that is currently circulating around Ohio.  If you want to do anything about the skyrocketing cost of education in Ohio, then you need to do your part in bringing freedom to the workers of those industries so that union bosses cannot continue to drive up labor costs unreasonably with smoke and mirror campaigns against choice.  The number one reason that unionized labor costs so much in public education is because the unions have eliminated competition, and they have done this through massive extortion tactics forcing collectively the 100% participation of all their employees, even those who may not otherwise agree with the progressive politics of which labor unions are a direct result.

http://ohio.mediatrackers.org/2013/01/22/deadly-truth-about-workplace-freedom/

Workplace Freedom in Ohio should be a slam dunk issue.  After all, who is pro-extortion and limited choice?  Nobody would consciously admit to such a thing.  Yet anyone who stands against Workplace Freedom is against freedom of choice, and they make their livings by taking advantage of that artificial leverage.   The people who are most terrified of Workplace Freedom are groups like the Ohio Education Association—who represents most of the teachers in Ohio.  Right now, the OEA is one of the largest progressive groups in America and they provide a lot of money to politicians like Barack Obama.  Employees who do not support people like Obama have no choice but to see their union dues support progressive politics even if they don’t support those causes.  The union has managed to shut up the complaints of their members by extorting excessively high wages to help make that lack of choice go down better, which is why teachers are paid so extraordinarily well.  Unions working with lap dog school boards support this pyramid scheme by continuously going to voters for school levies every few years to pay for the outrageous labor costs they have negotiated to purchase the silence of “lack of choice.”  Most teachers don’t support progressive politicians.  They complain about them in the teacher’s lounge, or may send me an email quietly asking for help, but in the end they are paid extremely well to keep quiet.

Labor unions since they are rooted in communism also get to fulfill one of the planks established in 1958 by obtaining their funding through eroding away the value of personal property taxes. (CLICK HERE FOR MORE)  In the long-term, school funding on the backs of personal property incentivizes more and more people to give up that property and to take up residence in apartments, which has long been the hidden strategy of the concealed social communist.  This is consistent with the 2012 presidential election results where it can be easily ascertained that most Barack Obama supporters were not suburbanite property owners who believed in the Second Amendment.  Obama supporters instead rely on government assistance and centralized housing more often than not. Such a thing is a progressive platform and the same numbers are seen in those who support school levies over those who don’t.  The trend with school levies due to the monopoly public education has on the process is to beat into the minds of the voters the idea of hopelessness.  For instance, Little Miami Schools in Ohio went through nine school levies before voters finally approved a 13.5 mill levy which has been crushing on the homeowners.  In the short run most homeowners dig deep to find the extra money to pay the taxes, but over time, they will sell their homes to escape the high taxes and the lack of buyers will force many of those properties to become Section 8 housing.  That is the long-term plan by communists hiding behind the labor movement who support progressive politics.  Such a sad story is exactly what happened in the Fairfield School District in Southern Ohio, who in the mid 1980s was ranked by Playboy Magazine to have in it the most beautiful women in the country.  Fairfield was a vibrant community full of promise.  But high taxes, Section 8 housing, and endless promises of future school levies have destroyed it.  Just 20 years later, it is a community on the decline.  The same plan is outlined for Mason, Lakota, Little Miami, Sycamore and many other “wealthy” areas in Ohio.  Progressives seek “social justice” and income “fairness” over maintaining property values, even though they sell their service of maintaining property values as a short-term fix for buying into their racket.  Like the teachers, progressives in labor unions sell their organized crime type of syndicate by playing up the greed factor of their service.

The only reason any of this works is because unions have a monopoly on worker rights.  The way to take that power away from the unions and give the freedom of choice back to the employees and the tax payers is to remove the extortive leverage that the unions currently have.   This is why Workplace Freedom is the only answer to the long-term problem of school funding.  Until unions are no longer able to hold destructive monopolies in the public sector workplace can competition be introduced to education to help drive down the costs of teaching children.

Do not expect any help from politicians on Workplace Freedom.  This will have to be a citizen initiative.  The unions and their extortive measures have broken the back of virtually all politicians in Ohio after Senate Bill 5.  The tactics behind the scenes are quite vicious and many people don’t have the stomach for the aggression.  But thankfully, there are a few who are not afraid, and they are circulating petitions.  So it you’d like to sign, look one up, or send me a message and I’ll point you in the right direction.   It’s only a matter of time before Ohio has a Workplace Freedom Amendment, because the economics of the situation dictate the necessity.  But with your help Ohio can have it sooner than later, before states like Indiana and Michigan begin pulling dramatically out in front of Ohio economically.  But there won’t be any solution to the school levy crises that every community currently faces until the unions are no longer able to hold communities and their children hostage of phony fear tactics and fuzzy math.   Competition will take care of the reality of labor unions, once teachers are given the freedom to chose, and parents the freedom to accept.

CLICK HERE FOR MORE INFO.

Rich Hoffman

“If they attack first………..blast em!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com

Belching, Farting, and Eating Chicken Wings: The greatest threat on Earth is stupid people

The reason I am so hard on public education and the college system in America is because they have let us down.  I mean educators are always talking about how important education is to our society, but look around.  Just a quick glance around the grocery store would seem to indicate massive failure of our education system that is unquestionable.  The greed, and politics involved in all of education has left our society dangerously dim-witted as a nation, and I do not care if it hurts the feelings of the people who I’m thinking of.  We are well beyond a point of no return and the quality of the people in America today is a direct result of our educational system.  The American people are the direct result of the kind of things they pour into their brains, and much of the garbage that we see today can be blamed on politics and the kind of education shaped by it.  Education does not get a free pass because of the children involved.  Quite the contrary, we should look hard at ourselves for our future generations and consider if this is the best that we can do, because if it is—we might as well fold up the tent and go home.

The situation is so bad in America that I am actually surprised when I meet someone with half a brain and that should not be the case.  We have allowed ourselves to believe that being “cool” is being stupid, and this is the heart of the problem.  This is also why I have so much anger at progressives, because it is they who have advocated such nonsense.  No civilization can aspire to new heights when stupidity is craved and intelligence is punished.  The math just does not add up, and anyone who supports such a structure is an enemy of the state.

Peter Griffin from Family Guy and Homer Simpson from the Simpsons do not represent life in my family.  I find Homer and Peter reprehensible.  I do laugh at the jokes because there is truth in them, but there is also sadness.  These days whenever an opinion is given, people feel they must add the small line—“I’m no expert but—“ before giving their opinion.  This is because our legal culture has turned everyone into an expert in a specialized field.  If one is not an expert, then they are not qualified to provide their opinion.   This has led our society to behave like a bunch of mindless drones ill-equipped to pass any kind of judgment or opinion, and under such eyes evil spreads, because there is nobody to check it.  Nobody feels “qualified” to cast an opinion so they don’t. Instead they just go with the flow as a brainless blob of energy whisks everyone through life aimlessly.  As a result, society is regressing at an astonishing rate and there may be no repair for it.  I am beginning to think that Armageddon won’t be a fabulously evil chapter of fire and brimstone emanating from devils as they roam the earth, but a bunch of brainless thugs chanting for their union rights as their minds refuse to instruct them how to walk to the end of their driveways.  These minds of the future may only be capable of stuffing their faces with food, while laughing endlessly at their ability to belch and fart.

Since I was a very small child, I have despised belching and farting—because there is something about those basic human tasks that point to un-sophistication.  When a baby craps in their diaper they smile because they are aware that they did something.  Their mind produced an action that they see, feel and smell manifesting in reality.  But when a 10-year-old does the same, it is an insult to the intelligence that the youth has achieved so far in their life.  Such things should no longer be funny to them at age ten.  They should be smarter, and striving for higher pleasures.  But the situation is even worse when a 40-year-old man does such a thing.  A man should be proud of the products of their minds, not their ability to shit their pants or pass digestive gases from their mouths.  That is the world we live in today, just visit a sports bar during a football playoff game.  Farting is more honorable than reading a book, and that is why our society is so damn stupid.

Many expect me to apologize for some of my insulting comments, but I won’t do it, because many people insult me just by their public exhibition of stupidity.  I place the blame on the backs of politicians and education squarely.  Both have failed miserably, and do not deserve money, pity, or a continuation of their destructive behavior.  If there was ever an enemy to the human race, it is the belching 40-year-old who is too stupid to pay attention to anything but a sports score.  But worse than that are the people who failed to teach that poor soul that he was more than just a biological entity that could eat, have sex, and exhaust bodily gases.  Our society is full of these Homer Simpson’s and it is one of the greatest tragedies the human race has ever suffered that so many of them exist at the same time.

Who else is there to blame but those who taught them to be that way?

Rich Hoffman

“If they attack first………..blast em!”

www.tailofthedragonbook.com