Tag: Lakota Schools

Lakota Throwing Away Money on Overpaid Teachers: New LEA union contract compensates the average teacher at over $100,000 per year–they are not worth it

There is of course a lot more to the story when we talk about what teachers cost, especially in overly paid districts like Lakota in Ohio. Lakota schools is one of the largest and most wealthy districts in the state with an average teacher salary climbing up to $73,000 per year now that the LEA union there has just extracted a massive pay increase for themselves with a new three-year contract. The costs of course don’t end there, unionized teachers, especially at Lakota have some of the greatest health insurance benefits that are available on the market, and they are expensive. Each teacher at Lakota on average now costs the district approximately $100,000—EACH for only working 180 days a year. The average private sector employee works around 50 weeks per years (250 days a year.) These government school employees cry about not making enough money—there isn’t enough money in the world to make them happy. I can say this, these employees aren’t worth that much money to me for essentially providing a glorified babysitting service, because what kids are learning today in the public education and the college system is not what I’d call a quality education. They sure as hell aren’t worth $100K each.

I watched the video of the Lakota LEA contract vote because I was interested in what would happen next. My hope was that the two conservatives on the board would hold, but one of them wavered and now the three liberals just signed up Lakota to exceed their 100-million-dollar budget. A decade ago roughly when I was giving Lakota such a hard time about their out of control budget I thought it was a lot that they were at $65 million, and that wasn’t enough because they over spent and needed to pass a property tax levy to pay their bills. Now only 8 years later they are out of control again. The district managed to gain a budget surplus and most of us who worked on the fiscal responsibility side of things got busy with other things, and these idiots took that surplus and just tossed it to a bunch of overpaid, spoiled brat teachers on an inflated contract then clapped themselves on the back for saving the school district from a possible LEA strike. What a dismal situation, no public-school teacher should ever threaten to walk off the job when they are paid to be that babysitting service at a bare minimum by the voters of the district. If you listen to the protestors in West Virginia, Kentucky and Oklahoma recently, which I’m sure the LEA teachers at Lakota were threatening to mimic, we are dealing with a very destructive class of government workers who complain about everything, do very little by way of real work, and have made themselves impossibly expensive to compensate.

Watching the video of the LEA contract approval Julie Shaffer, Brad Lovell, and the ultra-liberal Kelly Casper spoke in favor of throwing endless amounts of money at these teachers. Brad went so far to say that he thought of his property tax spending as an investment into our community’s children. Comments like that really make me sick because there is nothing about throwing over $100K at liberalized propaganda advocates that makes children better prepared to become educated and functioning participants in the world around them. Take a look at today’s youth, they aren’t doing very well—their educations have essentially destroyed their minds, not made them better—and these people expect to sell us this long-proven theory to the contrary that by over paying teachers we are helping our children? Brad and Julie even went so far in their rationalizations to indicate that they had children going to Lakota, or who would go to Lakota and they wanted to make sure there were teachers there to provide them with good educations—which obviously clouded their judgments.

I knew way back when I debated Julie Shaffer on WLW radio when she first ran for school board that I was dealing with one of those panicky mom types who feed these panicky teachers all the fuel they needed to become $100K employees each in the district. The teachers complained at every step having to do homework at night, or to work on the weekends—or to have to think about their jobs over the summer—or their requirements to go back to college to obtain their master’s degrees. The teachers want money for everything and if they don’t get it they threaten to walk off the job—and always there is a parent with a kid going to the government schools like Julie and Brad who think that they can compensate their parenting into a successful experience if they toss their kids into a government school to be raised by these liberal teachers who make way too much money for doing not much at all. Back then I was challenged to run a classroom, and I accepted it. I even offered to run four at the same time. I could teach a thousand kids more in one day than they learn in their entire high school years, so those types of threats don’t work with me. The guilt and insecurities of many parents are what cause all this trouble and we have at least two of them on the Lakota school board.

Taken on their own, all these people are nice. Some of the school board members are really just concerned parents themselves, and the teachers in most cases like being around children and they enjoy the profession of teaching. I have met some teachers at Lakota who are very passionate about their work. Are they worth 100K per year—hell no. Getting paid six figures in the private sector is considered a real appreciation of value. If someone is making six figures, they are doing something important for the companies they work for. But not in government schools—its expected collectively. The people might be nice who are involved in these discussions, but that doesn’t make them worth six figures, especially when it comes out of the tax payer’s pocket directly through their property values. But nobody, especially the school board members with children in the district, considers the real impact that the government schools have on the minds of the children. I watch every day parents dropping their kids off at day care facilities and if you press them in a discussion they’ll reveal that they can’t wait until their children are of age to attend Lakota because they will be free of the expense of paying for pre-school. Most parents don’t want to be bothered with teaching their children anything, so they hope that the government school will do all the education they can’t provide as parents either because they aren’t smart enough, or they are too lazy to do it themselves. And that is really what’s behind the lunacy of Julie, Brad and Kelly on the Lakota school board. They are insecure parents who want the best for their children and they naturally will do anything for their children, except take responsibility for their educations on their own as parents. They are relying on liberalized institutions to do the job instead, and that is a danger all its own.

There is no evidence that public schools are good for kids. We loosely talk about how children need to spend time with other peers their age and learn about life. But the way government schools have evolved make them cesspools of liberalism where kids learn to hate the Second Amendment, they don’t learn about American history to the extent they should, and they are having their minds turned off, not on. Ask an 8th grader about global warming and they’ll tell you how America is destroying the world, and they know so because their teachers at school taught them that. Ask that same child to give an opinion on capitalism and American business and they they’ll go on a tirade of how the 1% run everything and that society needs to put more focus on equal rights—which is a fancy way of saying the dumb and lazy need to be equal to the ambitious and productive. As those kids look around at their teachers who make $100K per year and have paid summers off—those students are surprised to learn that the world was never the way it was presented to them in their government schools—and they aren’t prepared for that disappointment. So how is paying all this money into the government school system worth it? It’s not!

Just saying something doesn’t make it true and paying teachers at Lakota over $100,000 a year each doesn’t magically produce a good child. As much as Brad wants to believe in the system, the system of public education destroys far more lives than it helps and is simply a very expensive baby-sitting service for the adults who are too busy with their careers, or not intellectual enough themselves to teach their children the things they need to learn in life. Instead they drop their kids off at a government school, which is like dumping them at a public park with supervision and expect good results no matter what the cost—so long as the whole community is willing to help pay for it. Most of those panicky parent types like Julie Shaffer don’t mind paying a $8000 tax bill on their properties each year because it would cost them a lot more than that to send their kids to a private school. they pay the higher taxes happily because it also coaxes their neighbors who no longer have kids in the school to also pay for their child—and that’s where things get nasty. The communities of Liberty Township and West Chester have given Lakota an extraordinarily high budget to work with, and the school board couldn’t even stay within those parameters—even with declining enrollment! It’s all very embarrassing to Lakota. Nobody sympathizes with teachers who make over $100K in compensation under any conditions—especially when they are really only babysitters for busy parents. That is not a good situation at all, the people involved should be very ashamed of themselves for wasting so much money on an emotional issue that defies logic.

Rich Hoffman
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Comey’s Crime is in Being a “Yes Dear”: The reason for the political divide in America

I had more than a few friends tell me this week that they just can’t take the political divisions in their country anymore, and that they were going to seek more positive things to do with their lives. As they said, the rhetoric is just too divisive to have proper discourse between people, and they were checking out. These are media people who work in the business and it is ironic that we heard pretty much the same thing when James Comey gave his interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s 20/20 Sunday night. As book stores opened today, the day of this writing, I picked up Comey’s book and read it just to make sure my thoughts about the guy were correct—and of course they were. Essentially James Comey is like a lot of my friends in the media who were proclaiming that the world had shifted in a direction they didn’t understand, and they were refusing to participate. Comey after all had thought of himself as a reasonable person even though his wife and kids were rather radical leftists. If it had been Jeb Bush who was running against Hillary Clinton the only division in the Comey household would be whether or not a woman would become president, because institutionally, the two candidates were the same. But since it was Trump, there was nothing in James Comey’s background to prepare him intellectually for what that meant. And many people find themselves in the same quandary at this point of time and they are distressed by it.

James Comey protecting the way things were took it upon himself to alter the political landscape of the 2016 election. He meddled far more than any Russians, or fat slob hacker in the middle of Kansas—as Director of the FBI he tried to walk a fine line of keeping Hillary Clinton in the candidacy for president even though she essentially disqualified himself with the email scandal. Thinking in hindsight, Comey should have suggested prosecution of Hillary Clinton and let the DOJ refuse it. At least the DNC could have put up another candidate before the convention process. That would have been the right thing to do, but then Comey would have been blamed for eliminating the first woman potentially for president, which is what got him into trouble. That pressure likely came mostly from within his own home. Reading what he has said about the matter I am completely convinced that he did all that to make his wife and kids happy. To them, the first female president was far more important than the law, so Comey put himself in a bad spot based on family pressure. But it didn’t help that he was surrounded at the FBI by the same kind of Washington Beltway types who were ideologically far to the political left from the average American. They all thought the game they were playing was a different one from which produced Donald Trump as the head of the Republican Party and James Comey had no way to navigate that reality. That is clear in his book which is devastating for him personally. If these were normal circumstances, he’d be put in jail just for his testimony given in his book. But there is a long line of people who are in that line with him and I don’t know that there are enough jails for all of them, so who knows what will happen.

Comey obviously hated Donald Trump, but not for the reasons he has managed to articulate. After reading Comey’s book it is obvious from a psychological point of view that he resented Trump for not being as pussy whipped as he was, where his wife controlled him too much. Comey views his role in his marriage as a sacrificial sanctuary that takes precedence over his personal desires and here was a Donald Trump who did what he wanted, when he wanted to, who doesn’t appear to answer to anybody—even his wife, and to Comey this was something he just couldn’t get his mind around. So he developed a disdain for Donald Trump from the outset. Of course Trump’s hands were smaller than Comey’s. Comey is around 6’ 8.” But to Comey he had to build up his lack of inferiority to Trump any way he could justify so to preserve his own relationship with his long-time wife. Using his marriage to show moral superiority to Trump was the only way he could protect himself from the reality of Trump’s election and justify his radical behavior to attempt to impeach him. For Comey, that was the only way he could protect the world he understood it to be—even though that is obviously not the reality.

I can say that the palatable anger that my media friends are talking about come from a realization that many have not yet come to terms with—just as James Comey hasn’t. For at least 32 years, through all of Bill Clinton’s presidency, then George Bush, then 8 years of Barack Obama normal Americans quietly sat by and let the system work to the best of its ability. We didn’t protest every little thing. We didn’t seek the impeachment of the president every five seconds. I did take a case for the impeachment of Barack Obama down to John Boehner’s office where his people laughed at it—like it was such an impossibility that it wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. So we worked really hard to put a change candidate for conservatism into the White House—after waiting all that time, and once the deed was done we did not receive the same respect for our guy. Now we see the political left pushing so hard against our choice with a constant barrage of disrespectful aggression that we are angry about it. And some Republicans that we thought we could trust have joined the left to preserve the institutions that we have come to hate due to our sudden mistrust.

Facebook is on fire with discontent, Twitter is rhetorically divisive, the comments sections of online newspapers are being shut down everywhere because the discourse is so volatile, and the reason is a good one. Normal Americans, for which I am one, have been lied to, manipulated, and used by people like James Comey for most of our lives and we aren’t happy about it. Jeb Bush and his brother were never our kind of Republican. James Comey was entirely too liberal for us, but we put up with him out of polite discourse and now that we have someone who truly does represent our part of the nation the same respect is not provided to our decision as we gave to the other side for three decades.

I announced on these pages many years ago that America was in a new civil war so none of this is a surprise to me. I think the hatred that is on display toward the political left these days is better than armed insurrection. It took a reality television star to really break down the ultimate reality television show—that which was driving our society politically at every level. Through Trump we have seen behind the scenes all the ugliness that was always there and we don’t like it. We always knew it was there, but we couldn’t be certain until Trump was elected. Then and only then did he metaphorically pull down the curtains, so we could all see the characters hiding there who were running everything we loved essentially into the ground. James Comey was one of the villains—a Boy Scout like figure who used his image to hide his political radicalism—which was largely formed by his “yes dear” relationship with his liberal wife. The same could have been said about the entire Hollywood industry, our favorite stores, and our music industry. Our country was being drug in a direction we didn’t like and when we put a stop to it we really saw the fangs of the other side and now instead of polite discourse, we have a fight. What did anybody really think was going to happen? Were we expected to stand down forever? We believed in the election process and now that appears to be in jeopardy, what are we to do—be happy about it and say, “yes dear?” No, that’s not how things work, especially in my world.

All that’s happening now is that my side is fighting back, they aren’t taking it any more the acceptance that the other side from Comey all the way over to the most radical leftist of the Communist Party USA have been very disrespectful to our part in the great Republic of America. Comey didn’t respect our “democracy” he tried to use his position as head of the FBI to pick his new boss—even if she grossly broke the law. He expected us to be civil about it? If you can’t trust the FBI, who can you trust? As we’ve seen the FBI has been weaponized against normal Americans, just as the IRS has been. Then to make matters worse, we elected our kind of guy into the most powerful position in the world and the FBI was audacious enough to break into the lawyer’s office of the President and steal information, so they could leak it to the press to instigate an impeachment case and we are supposed to be alright with that? If they’ll do it to the president, what would they do to the rest of us? So yes, we are mad, and no, we’re not going to take it anymore. And to those in charge within the media and in politics, you should all be extremely happy that its words and not bullets that we’ve chosen as our vehicles of justice. That could change in an instant if the political left continues to push it—which it seems obvious to me they are intent to attempt. That is their fault, they chose to disrespect us. Respect goes both ways; one side can’t give it all while the other pisses all over it. So they should expect to get everything they are getting and worse, because it’s what the political left chose. Yes, the situation has plenty of room to escalate. The lefties, for which Comey is a part, better decide if they really want to play at this bloodsport. Politeness should have never been identified as weakness. We simply waited for our turn and now that we have it, we aren’t going to put up with getting pushed around and lied to.

Rich Hoffman

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Don’t Worry About War with Russia, Syria, Iran, or China: Cheaters on a test have no ground to stand on

Let me say regarding the Trump action in Syria that on many levels it is justified. There are people who think the president should not have been pulled into the conflict, and there are those who are terrified of war with Russia. Neither concern is warranted. Essentially, there will never be peace in the Middle East so long as Iran and Russia are propping up dictatorships in Syria. We can’t run from evil. It’s that simple. Like it or not for there to be peace in the world, the world is going to have to become more American. There will never be a world of differing opinions that just mesh together seamlessly. There must be an epistemological starting point for peace and that must come from at least basic shared ideas. Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran are all hostile communist nations—Russia still is in many ways, and until they truly join the world as free market capitalists their values will never match those of America or even Europe, and conflict will always be a threat. So there is no way for America to turn away from the gassing of the Syrian people and allow the Middle East to fall under the rule of ISIS terrorists and Russian manipulation.

There will be no war with Russia, like I’ve said about China and North Korea, none of these countries have the money for it. They are bullies who must act with force to get what they want—and so long as they are functioning in the world this way, there will be senseless death and destruction attached to random terrorism. Russia certainly doesn’t have the means to go to war with the United States. They are broke now let alone after any kind of military engagement with the United States. For years, especially during the Trump administration Russians have been provoking American troops whenever possible and over the last few weeks a lot of comments have been made. Trump has been standing up to the bullies of the region even though he’d rather think about something else. And when they crossed the line, he had to take action because when you tell a bully you are going to punch them in the nose, you had better do it if they don’t yield. Russia continued to back Syrian aggression so Trump had to send in the targeted military strikes.

But do not worry about provoking Russia. This is all part of draining the swamp. The Deep State has always used the threat of hostile nations to scare the American people into paralysis in believing that we all need those extra security offerings provided by the FBI, CIA, and Homeland security. To sell that threat they need people like Putin to be thriving in the world, so they go to great effort when our eyes are turned away to provoke hostile actors around the world to believe they have a seat at the table. But guess what, they don’t. I’d refer to Plato’s shadow man theory from his great book The Republic. The Deep State creates these shadows on the wall to keep our attentions on the scary practitioners of existence to essentially keep that Deep State in power. The Deep State even controls what we call political ideology, what the ideology of the political left and right are by manipulating over a long period of time the differences between the epistemologies of political theory in the United States. But the truth is to peek behind the curtain and eliminate the real threats, to take down the puppets and drain the swamp water where everyone in the Deep State is hiding.

Only when all the enemies of the world are conquered, which is very near a reality after just over a year of a Donald Trump presidency, will people come to know that the Deep State has been always the real threat. Without the Deep State there is no Putin, there is no China, and there is no trouble in the Middle East. And when I say “Deep State” I’m not talking about a bunch of black masked Bilderbergers of wealthy elite—they are just people like anybody else. I’m talking about the ancient yearning of people to desire to rule others as either kings, religious leaders, or military generals who truly desire to take mankind back to the days of the primitive—intellectually, so that they can rule the way they understand—through fear. They need deficits, they need villains, and they need a big strong police state to keep people from looking at anything too closely. In truth however, and this is what people are learning, all those threatening countries are not very strong unless the Americans prop them up to look meaner than they actually are. By Americans I’m talking about the CIA, and the FBI—the American media, and the other agencies who make their livings off protecting “us” from those same villains.

For over two years now we were led to believe that Russia’s President Putin hacked our election system and deposed the incompetent Hillary Clinton putting instead Trump in place. Well, Putin had nothing to do with me—it was people like me who voted for Trump and I’m no fan of Putin. If Putin wanted anybody to win the American election of 2016 it would have been the pushover loser, Hillary Clinton whom Russian had already smacked around plenty when she was Secretary of State. They certainly didn’t want a businessman in the White House who understands money, because it is money that truly does decide who the winners and losers are in the world. By defeating the remaining tyrants in the world through exposure and turning the formerly hostile countries into capitalist zones to truly compete with the United States in trade, that is the only real path to peace which would then allow America to turn back toward itself and not get stretched across the earth putting out every little fire that every bad actor known to mankind can ignite.

I think its great that American is bombing targets in Syria and is calling the bluff of Russia. I told everyone who reads here that there wouldn’t be a trade war with China, look how fast Xi caved on his tough talk. Do you know why dear reader? Because they need American imports much more than we need them. All communist countries have one fundamental problem, their societies do not produce citizens with imaginations, so they have serious intellectual property problems. That means they have to steal it from those who do, and that is how China has been making their living for a long time. Russia is in much the same boat, without the West to copy off of, they are left to their own devices. They are like that kid in school who didn’t study for a test and have to cheat off the person next to them for the answers. Well the person who did study and has all the answers has the leverage in that situation. Halfway through the test if they decide to put their hand over their paper, the cheater is stuck with no resources to complete the test. That is essentially what Trump is doing in China, what he has done in North Korea, and what he is about to do with Russia and Iran. When you have the power position you use it, especially if it creates an opportunity for peace. Which is precisely what is happening presently in Syria.

Rich Hoffman

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The Criminal FBI Agents Robert Mueller and James Comey: Once you’ve seen a teacher’s bare breasts, respect can’t be returned

I have a school aged grandson who is learning what its like to transform from an unrestricted young person acting on his own volition largely and integrating a portion of his daily habits to the mass hoards of society. He’s learning to stand in lines with other kids and how to go along to get along and its very painful for me knowing that many of the things that kids learn are completely wrong. The habits that young people learn are not conducive to making smart, useful adults—they are taught to make compliant future followers of whatever political order emerges out of a mixed economy driven largely by a Kantian tilted philosophy. The emphasis of human development thus is on social engineering and not individual needs. But you can’t hide kids away from the world either. They have to learn to navigate it without being social rejects, they have to learn to become leaders and they can’t do that unless they understand how people live and function—so they have to stand in lines and participate in mass events drawing out their own conclusions about how their individuality feels about what they witness. But like I said, its painful to watch. The results for many are what we see in our modern FBI now that they’ve been caught in some of the most criminal activity imaginable. If Trump had not been elected president the behavior they had been engaged in would have continued unfettered. Only because he was elected did it expose the FBI criminal network to those of us in society with a mind to see outside the lines at their true intentions. As a result, I lost my faith in the FBI two years ago. Now, I view them as part of an enemy force working against our Constitution in America which obliges me to protect it from them—and that’s a big change in opinion that is growing by the day. It has taken most people a long time to accept that reality, because we were all taught to stand in lines as kids, but with each week more are seeing the obvious. Robert Mueller and his friend James Comey are enemies of the state as it should be, and those who support them are guilty as well which has put us all in a very dangerous place.

I think it is stunning that Robert Mueller allowed under any connection to his out of control multimillion dollar investigation commissioned by never-Trump political opponents to overturn a legitimate election, and to raid the personal office of Michael Cohen—Trump’s personal lawyer to advance his stalled case by any means possible. It’s an obvious abuse of authority given to the FBI to conduct the nation’s business. Yet the FBI isn’t raiding the offices of anybody else, only political opponents to the established order of Washington D.C. That should send shock waves of concern to everyone, no matter what political side they are on. That type of FBI behavior coupled with what we have learned about Facebook this past week and the intrusion on our privacy that is possible with it shows all too clearly that outside the lines of our normal living are some very sinister elements which require a correction. The FBI is out of control and is acting as a villain, certainly not the white hatted law enforcement that we need in a civil society. They have been weaponized by political opponents to violate the lives of most of us, and the only reason they thought they could get away with it was because most of us learned to stand nicely in line while the authority figures kept us from looking too closely at what they were really up to.

I was never a kid who learned to stand in lines in school. I did of course what I had to in order to survive that public school culture, but I never liked it, instinctively. There was a gym teacher who was having an affair with one of the sixth-grade teachers. She was unmarried and young, he was older and married and we’d see them flirting with each other, and everyone knew what was going on. But they thought it was a secret and they often abused their authority to keep it that way. Anyone who snickered at their behavior found themselves overly scrutinized during gym class and even the lady would show aggression at students who let it be known they knew about the affair. Well I snuck out of lines a lot, and I snuck out of class a lot taking extended bathroom breaks so I could explore around the school and on one such trip I found those two in the process of having sex in a janitor’s closet, during school hours. The first reaction of the gym teacher was to tell me I didn’t see what I saw and that if I told anybody I’d be in big trouble. So you know what I did? I went straight from that closet and into the principal’s office and told on the two. I didn’t waist five minutes. But guess what, I was told that what I was saying was a very serious allegation and that they’d look into it—and I got into trouble for being out of class. I received several weeks of detention and was told that I needed to mind my own business—basically to stay in line and keep my eyes looking forward, and not to question those of authority around me. Me and that gym teacher developed a hatred for each other that we never got over. I had him for gym class for the next three years and there was always tension between us. Of course nothing ever happened to either of the teachers and they married by the time I was a freshman in High School. I was treated pretty harshly by the gym teacher from then on which spoiled any love for sports that I might have developed during that period because I couldn’t stand the guy who ran the sports programs. However, what I did learn was to always look outside the lines at the many crimes being committed in full view if only people could turn their heads and look at them—because there are a lot. That is precisely the case with Robert Mueller and the political thugs who support him. The crimes are quite audacious.

I learned early in life to always question authority figures because titles alone didn’t make them good. The FBI isn’t just good because they are part of American law enforcement just like teachers aren’t good just because they are employed by a good school. We put our trust into the institutions that these employees become a part of, but if they abuse that trust, then there are consequences. And with Robert Mueller, if he couldn’t find anything with the amount of money he has spent investigating Trump, he should have said so. But because the investigation was started out of revenge for firing his friend James Comey, the endeavor was never in pursuit of justice, but impeachment of the President. He certainly isn’t conducting this investigation into Trump to make me happy. But after a year to come up short and desperate then abusing his authority to have Trump’s lawyer raided is a major overreach. You don’t see the FBI raiding the offices of Obama’s lawyers, or the Clintons. You don’t see indictments of Loretta Lynch—which means everything that’s happening now is political. That means that you or I dear reader could be singled out for abuse by the FBI not for crimes committed, but because we aren’t on the side of the political establishment that people want us on and that is not an acceptable criteria. I have lost faith in the FBI. Just like that teacher in the sixth grade, once I saw her bare breasts and the gym teacher with his pants down around his ankles I lost respect for both of them and no amount of abuse could restore it. That is the pain of seeing things for how they are, but its important to do so whenever possible, even though we are all taught as little kids to keep our focus on what they tell us to, while the authority figures in our life commit many crimes—and expect to get away with it.

Rich Hoffman

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Mueller Didn’t Just Attack Trump with Lawyer’s Raid: The FBI and many others in the Beltway are testing all of us

If the FBI had treated the Hillary Clinton and Loretta Lynch situation with the same vigor, I wouldn’t have any problem with the raiding to President Trump’s personal attorney on what is an obvious Deep State witch hunt to overthrow an American election. After all, if Trump was innocent, like I think he is, there wouldn’t be anything to worry about—except for the obvious violation of his personal sanctity which is a problem all its own for a separate discussion on unreasonable search and seizure. But they didn’t, in fact they did the exact opposite. There is a real problem with the FBI seizing through a secret raid on April 9th 2018 the office of Michael Cohen and his privileged communications with President Trump. What the whole incident evokes is cheating, where the referees of a game essentially penalize one team while allowing the other team to conduct their business unmolested in an attempt to give a win to one side at the expense of the other.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/‘a-bomb-on-trump’s-front-porch’-fbi’s-cohen-raids-hit-home-for-the-president/ar-AAvHeTw?ocid=spartandhp

I get that the other side doesn’t like Trump. I never liked Obama and I certainly felt that there were many issues that should have kept Obama from being in the White House, like his background with known American terrorists, his associations with communists that were on the FBI watch lists, and even his sketchy birth certificate that was never resolved to my eyes because what they produced was an obviously doctored document that had technology on it that did not exist in the 1960s. But Obama stayed president and I went to work to elect my own kind of president, which is how Trump ended up in the White House—because a lot of people like me came to the same conclusion. Trump is our answer to the obvious corruption that took place to keep Obama in the White House—even to the process that put him there to begin with.

But when the other side loses as badly has they have, and the refs try to snag away the advantages of the obviously superior team (the Trump team) and give it to the losers of yesteryear (the Deep State) then I have a problem with it. I’m not going to put up with it, let me just say that. Seeking evidence that the FBI can then leak to The New York Times, and The Washington Post, the way James Comey did which led to his termination as Director of the FBI—is simply not proper conduct. I’d go so far to say its illegal. For instance, for the FBI to cheat and take secret communications between Trump and his lawyer over the Stormy Daniels tabloid story so to alter the elections of 2018 is something that could happen to any of us. For the FBI to just take evidence that they are supposed to acquire through investigation means that they could use anything against us whether or not we exercise our right to remain silent. When the law can use evidence acquired by changing the rules of attainment as they go, the rules of any game are fluid to the point of ridiculousness. It’s like playing a game with a 5-year-old that makes up all the rules so that they can win no matter how poorly they play.

The Robert Mueller investigation was always a sham meant to exonerate the reputation of the poor way James Comey conducted himself during the election year of 2016. But the more that has come out the worse he and the FBI under him look, and so now the entire focus of the investigation is to keep the FBI out of court itself. What are we supposed to do when the top law enforcement in the land fails to investigate itself and when they will break into the office of the President’s private attorney and steal evidence they hope to leak to the press to make their case not look so bad by tearing down other people who do have the power to end their careers? Trump does have the power to end Mueller and everyone else attached to the top of the FBI and Justice Department and he probably should because they are out of control. But he won’t because the entire Republican Party is not behind him as they should be. Many of them hope to see Trump removed from power so they can have a chance at a power seat, so they allow this FBI to conduct an obviously illegal investigation with the same hopes that the political left is praying to, that it will push Trump into a mistake.

Trump figures he can outlast it all because of his innocence, but that doesn’t change that fact that none of this should be happening. The premise that is being established is excessively tyrannical and is a nightmare of Constitutional violation. A political Party should never have this kind of power, to manipulate the levers of government to entrench themselves to tax payer funded resources. The way that Hillary Clinton’s case was handled shows the bias, and anybody who thinks that Trump can be prosecuted for nothing when the Clinton case was about everything they are accusing the President of conducting is smoking crack if they think they’ll get away with it. What’s going to happen is that they’ll start a war with normal American people—which wouldn’t be a good idea.

I happened to read about this raid into Cohen’s office while we were celebrating my 50th birthday in the middle of Indiana at a Cracker Barrel. The short story with that is a lot of people care about me, particularly my daughters and we wanted to do something very unique for my 50th. I can promise that my experience was unique to just our family—nobody else out there could lay claim to sharing that experience with me. Just two days prior however I had the opportunity to spend time with some real Washington D.C. insiders so my particular experiences at life allow me to see things through the eyes of Beltway types and the kind of people who eat dinner at a Cracker Barrel in the middle of Indiana surrounded by farm country. It was a happy place for me to wait for my food and catch up on the day’s events with news clips on my iPhone. It was very apparent to me that Mueller wasn’t just testing how far he could get away with that kind of thing with Trump—but that he was testing all of us. And in that Cracker Barrel if they had to pick between the FBI and President Trump—they’d pick Trump. And as I say that I know the Beltway types have no idea why. That’s also why I was celebrating my 50th at a Cracker Barrel in the middle of nowhere and not at a $10,000 party at the Westin in downtown Cincinnati—or even in New York as had been discussed. We had a table near the fireplace and I could smell the wood smoke from my seat as a gentle snow fell outside and I was around the people I most cared about in the world. What more could you want? But the additional contribution to such an experience was perspective. I have perspective where many people lose it in the chaos of a day and that is a kind of birthday gift I give to myself. Many friends of mine were all twisted around an axle over the Cohen raid and the Ohio HB 478 bill that was being floated for passage. But I was sitting next to a nice fire, eating good food with people I care about and digesting the news surrounded by people who are the buckle of the Bible Belt.

If Trump were to be impeached for some silly thing, the people in Indiana wouldn’t suddenly become boot looking Washington D.C. lapdogs ignoring the politics of things like this FBI case just so they could keep a job, or their lives. People like Robert Mueller and James Comey forget that the reason Trump was in the White House in spite of his past reputation as a billionaire playboy was because of people who filled that Cracker Barrel on I-74 just 30 miles outside of Indianapolis. They are Christian soldiers in the purest sense of the word, but they have given up on honesty in politics. They simply want someone like Trump to drain the swamp of their capital city. They don’t want alligators and snakes like Comey and Mueller kicking down their doors and taking naked pictures of their wives and daughters and declaring the action “protection.” They want justice because they gave up trust in the FBI a long time ago. And if I had turned to them in that restaurant and asked who would be with me to stand against an out of control government—most of the men and a lot of the women would have signed up right then and there.

Rich Hoffman
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The Salk Institute: Declining new members at the country club of the everlasting

GE stock is tanking, as of this writing it is hovering just about the $13 dollar per share mark, which is embarrassing for one of America’s largest and most successful companies. But GE’s problems in a lot of way reflect America’s problems. GE as a legacy company controlled by labor unions for far too long, that used their sheer size to dominate their competition, pay their people too much and the people no longer working there are still on the payroll in the form of a pension. Since we are in a global economy and GE’s business model was formed in the years after the Korean War where really only America was making things the world wanted from appliances to avionics, GE could afford to be sloppy. The previous GE CEO Jeffery Immelt hedged the problems further into the future by befriending the Obama administration which was really the only move he had. The latest CEO, John Flannery is trying to straighten things out at the company now that it has a lot of divisions that are no longer competitive in the world, and that reality has contributed largely to the massive sell-offs of the stock. GE still does great things in the manufacturing world, but so does a lot of other companies, and so there isn’t any way to pay for all those top-heavy costs.

America too is at the same place. Our national debt is over $21 trillion. Trump’s plan to deal with it is to grow the economy by shutting off the rest of the world that is choking off American manufacturing while our government works out the problem of the legacy costs which is tying up most of the cash the United States has to work with through taxation. What America must deal with is ending the socialist program Social Security and solve the health care riddle by simply ending sickness. America cannot afford to have sick people who die and take their skills to the grave any longer. A sign of things to come can be seen in the Parkland radicals going after gun control in the wake of the tragic shooting there during February. If they are the future America won’t survive anyway. Not even with the promise of artificial intelligence will we survive. Most of the adults working today will need to work for at least another 100 to 200 years to retain the intellectual information they’ve acquire for the future economy which will be different. That is why the good people at the Salk Institute are working on ways to heal people through gene editing which has the real potential to cure cancer and many other human diseases, including old age. That is the key to not only solving America’s healthcare problems, but also the legacy burdens of socialist mistakes like Social Security. GE may have to break itself up or maybe even go out of business, but America can’t do that so solutions to the problem of legacy costs is the only answer.

I’ve been saying for a long time that regenerative medicine was the future of the medical profession. Why get old if you can just turn it off at the level of our DNA. And why should people even get sick at all? All of human development starts with the cell and ends with the cell. When we are born we grow everything we are ever going to need and the process of aging gradually takes away everything we acquire as children—which is a pretty stupid concept if you think about it. I am quite convinced that as we trace society back to a period well before the pyramids were built-in Egypt, well before Greek society—there was a period where humans lived a long time by either natural are artificial means and we lost that trait due to a philosophic introduction of ideas either through religion, or warfare that ended the practice, and we are still functioning from that depleted state. Noah lived over 900 years, so what happened and why to reduce our lives down to a mere 80 years? And if we could change it, should we?

My argument is of course. There is no profit in death. If the afterlife really wants new members at the country club of the everlasting then someone can come to the next board meeting and tell us, otherwise the human species led by the United States needs to dump Social Security with the trade-off of gene editing and other forms of regenerative medicine and to allow economies to expand around the world. As artificial intelligence contributes more and more to our rapid economic expansion since jobs are being invented quicker than humans can breed and meet those new jobs, we will be dealing with a new dynamic in work place maintenance. Humans essentially need to start thinking of themselves as machines which occasionally need to be repaired. What they have that is superior to the machines of our invention is the intellectual knowledge gained from lifetimes of experience. That is where everything is headed, it’s just a matter of admitting as much to ourselves.

The two things that hold us back from making the needed adjustments are religion and legacy habit. Like GE who is so big that so many employees have built their lives around outrageous pay packages and a company too big to move quickly on their feet to meet market demands, America is moving too slow to meet all the challenges of tomorrow and unfortunately the rest of the world is following our lead. The Chinese don’t do anything on their own without copying western civilization, so even with their rapid economy they aren’t exactly breaking any molds with new ideas. They just copy off the west and beat us to solutions because they have a communist system that doesn’t mind losing a few lives here and there to develop ideas. They make their livings with cheap knock-offs stolen from American patents. America is still the leader of everything and in the realm of science and biology it is companies like the Salk Institute who are paving the way for solutions tomorrow. It is up to our art and essential philosophy to structure our society in such a way to meet those challenges.

The advancements in just five years since I first started talking about these types of things has been astonishing. It has even exceeded my expectations and five years from now, while President Trump will likely still be in office, there will be a chance to make these new regenerative sciences mainstream. I think cures for cancer, extended life, and a cure for most diseases will be common practice instead of the drugs that are provided by pharmaceutical companies. They will soon be as primitive as a western frontier settler taking a swig of whiskey to solve the effects of the common cold. Everyone in the world should have access in the near future to a perfectly healthy 35-year-old body for the rest of time—however long time goes.

Obviously, earth isn’t big enough for all this activity—that is because we are meant to move into space as a human species. We are meant to work on the moon, Mars, and moons of Jupiter and Saturn and to move to and from the earth frequently. But humans are needed to settle the solar system and to harness the power of it to take those next great leaps of thoughtful development. I would argue that we are not meant to die a slow death like GE is currently undergoing because it has reached the top of its market and must now retract just to survive. We have the potential to reinvent ourselves for a new future that is not chained to the legacy mistakes of the past—and for everyone, a real chance at true equality. Nobody has to be old, nobody has to be sick and nobody would have to fight over the fledgling opportunities of a tomorrow that may never come, because tomorrow will always come. And humans can take that next step into an adventure of thought that can only be possible when intellectually the same people can see ideas mature over the span of thousands of years. That’s where we are, and that’s where we are headed.

Rich Hoffman

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The Forces that want to Overthrow America: Mueller’s investigation, Affairs, and Stormy Daniels back fat

I know I’m coming to it late, but my wife and I have been binge watching the television show, The Americans. Its been on my radar for a while and our schedules cleared enough to start watching it. I am completely convinced that the whole idea for the Russian collusion story is because many liberals came up with it after watching that popular show. I am also convinced that the strategy of the deep state was revealed during the racket ball scene during season one between the lead FBI agent and his next-door neighbor, the KGB super spy. Overwhelm your target into making a mistake. Even though the show is fiction mostly, there are realistic elements to it and it only reminded me just how fragile governments can really be. The episode where President Reagan was shot was very interesting because Russia was terrified Alexander Haig was going to step in and take control of the country which of course wasn’t about to happen. The Russians assumed that things would happen in America the way they would in Russia and even though they had lived in the states for many years still couldn’t get the basic concept of how American life worked. Even as they worked really hard to overthrow it at every opportunity. I’ve known about these spies for a long time, I’ve written about them and discussed them on several radio shows, but watching The Americans really shows things in a dramatic way of how fragile things truly are behind the scenes.

Watching how sympathetic the media was to the KGB spies in The Americans and how the FBI operated on that show, it is easy to see how the plot against President Trump was hatched to force him into mistakes, which I think is why he signed that omnibus bill on Friday. I’m certainly not going to apologize for him. We should have had a government shutdown on the issue, but the enemies of our Republic are applying a lot of pressure on him, and he’s making mistakes that he is designed to take. I don’t think there is anybody currently out there better than Trump who could withstand all these forces. At least with Trump, mistakes and all, we can see just how many bad guys there are out there and what they are up to. When Trump was elected he and all his supporters thought they were playing a straight game. Obviously not, the forces already embedded in America were already too deep to fight legitimately through executive orders and populism. As right-thinking Americans, it was all we had to combat the vast tyranny on full display now except for coming to this fight with guns blazing. If Trump can hang on and keep doing his thing we will see improvements, but it won’t be pretty. Let me just say that. I never thought it would, but I am personally surprised that he has held up this long.

The Mueller investigation clearly isn’t about Russian collusion, it’s just a story that the deep state is using to sell their means of overthrowing the American presidency. As I said, the entire story is meant to align with what the public sees on television, shows like The Americans. The truth is far worse. There are many more forces working against American capitalism than what is showed on any television show—the attempted tyranny and the reasons behind it are far more severe, much more so than any Hollywood writer could even begin to put their finger on. To get an idea about that I’d advise you dear reader to read Peter Schweizer’s new book Secret Empires. He’s the guy who wrote Clinton Cash which proved to be way ahead of its time. If you added Secret Empires to the television show The Americans I think you can begin to see what is really going on with the Mueller Investigation. It’s not about truth, justice, and the American way—its about overthrowing capitalism in the world and literally looting off the tax payers to feed these many empires at conflict with each other on the streets of Washington D.C. Most people just want to live their lives, but these many forces at war with the American way of life—many of them are in our FBI, our congressional seats, and in our media and they want an end to all of it—any way possible.

And they really think we are stupid. Think of the absurdity of these controversies with the old Trump girlfriends. I knew when I elected Donald Trump that in the 80s, 90s and early 2000s that he was the very definition of a playboy. If Hugh Hefner was an old man with a collection of many beautiful women to play with—Donald Trump was the living embodiment of that image. It was the main turn-off for me when he first announced that he was running. But I knew fully what I was getting in Donald Trump and I personally think he should say about Karen McDougal that sure, he had an affair that lasted nearly a year and that he screwed her many times in many different ways. Most men, and women surprisingly, would admire and respect him for it—because that’s how people are. Nobody is surprised to learn that Trump has slept with all these women. He was never a choir boy. Trump fully intended to live a James Bond womanizing lifestyle and Melania knew what kind of man he was, and it took her years to calm him down. He had all these girlfriends while she was dating him and even when he finally put a ring on her finger some of those old flames were still burning, and some new flames starting. I’ve met Melania in person and she is a very beautiful woman, and she’s not stupid in any way. She was the one who convinced Trump to marry her and to move her into a golden palace at the top of the New York social world. And now she’s in the White House after being born into a communist country with little opportunity. Don’t cry for Melania, she knows what she’s doing and she makes Trump a much better person. In a lot of ways, I credit her with his presidency. But she’s not going to go to pieces over a bunch of old girlfriends looking for one last shot at the spotlight now that they are too old to pose for Playboy, and nobody cares about them physically any more.

The media is obsessed with Stormy Daniels because like the idiots in The Americans who thought Alexander Haig was going to take over the country after Ronald Reagan was shot think that the Christian conservatives will move away from Trump if they find out he has slept with all these women. Nobody cares. We all stopped caring about those kinds of things after Bill Clinton was in office. What made Slick Willy such a bad person was that he lied about it. Trump at least indicates that he isn’t living under the weight of shame. That gives him a fighting chance to withstand all these opposing forces. But the media, these are the same people pushing same-sex marriage, loose sex and a life of no judgments, yet they fully expect the Stormy Daniels story to sink Trump. If Trump is ashamed of anything regarding Daniels it’s that she is too fat of a girl to brag about. Looking at her with the lights on and the cameras at full aperture Trump would probably like to forget about that one. But it’s not for the reasons that the media hopes to catch him on. She’s just over his preferred weight class.

We are witnessing at every front a country of insurgents who work in trusted positions at all levels of our social classes to overthrow our nation in favor of something else. They want gun control so we can’t shoot them when they break down our doors once they’ve bankrupted our country for everything that could be sold, and they’ll be looking for the last scraps of food at such a time not caring at all for our wellness. They have already sold us out and now that the heat is on in their direction too, they are making their share of mistakes as well. Trump isn’t the only one screwing up—the hits are going the other way for a change—and that’s a great thing. I wouldn’t care if a tape came out showing Trump in a massive orgy with 50 chicks sucking on him like Karen McDougal. I would care if there were some dudes in on the action with him—that would certainly cheapen him in my eyes, but I don’t think that’s a concern. A man can do those kinds of things with hundreds of women so long as the women are alright with it—which in most cases they are. Women are often willing to share a top-level man so long as they get a piece of the action. But such a man can’t go stick his dip stick into the caboose of some other dude. That just isn’t acceptable. And with that said, the media doesn’t have a story because most people feel that way. The media have nothing to stop Trump which scares them to death. And for a change, it’s a good thing to see.

Rich Hoffman

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The Trouble with Troubled Youth: Shootings at Great Mills High School and the Austin bomber are just the start

As I have been warning for quite some time, and it is certainly culminating now, young males, especially white young males—are on a directionless rampage due to terrible upbringings and improper personal philosophy taught to them during their public education process. Austin Rollins before school started on March 20th of 2018 at Great Mills High School in Maryland, just south of Washington D.C. shot a poor young 16-year-old girl in the face along with a 14-year-old boy in the leg. Likely the situation was a romantic spat which has happened in every high school across the country for generations—only these days where kids play video games like Grand Theft Auto and watch movies like The Hateful Eight after being taught that reality is based on feelings and that nobody is really at fault for anything, take those raw emotions to terror all too quickly now. And violence is becoming the norm. Fortunately, this school shooting at Great Mills wasn’t a big story on the news because a good guy with a gun, a resource officer was at the scene within 60 seconds to exchange gunfire with Rollins killing the kid—and ending the angry rampage.

Yet the lead story of the day was the mysterious bomber in Austin, Texas who had been creating terror around the capital city for several days. Shortly after a 5th bomb was discovered police found the 23-year-old Mark Conditt in his car and moved in to make an arrest. That’s when the kid blew himself up. After literally picking through the pieces of the young terrorist they could at least identify that he also was a young white male. The motives are yet unknown but what we can say with certainty is that what we are seeing is just the tip of the iceberg, there are some very disturbed young people functioning in our society and they are looking to place blame on the greater tapestry of our civilization for their problems. Where past young people may have had a fight with another student in a parking lot or found some other way to discharge the energy of a rivalry through sports, or even within their domestic families, these modern young people are open soars that liberalism has continued to poke and prod to breaking points. Most young people do not turn out to be mass murders and terrorists, but a predictable amount do get left behind and those tend to be the type of kids who are committing all these acts of violence.

The recent liberal crusade of directing anger at white males specifically hasn’t been a good strategy. The idea of chasing white privilege has only sent to young people this idea that they are being reverse discriminated against. While the idea of fairness, of promoting cultures within the United States from backgrounds that haven’t been so fortunate may seem to have merit, the downside is that it has been at the expense of a race of people—whites. Through historical context white cultures have had a tendency to dominate other cultures and so success through lineage has been something that whites have enjoyed. But it’s not the fault of young white kids that they were born white just as it isn’t the fault of a young Asian kid, or a black kid that they have a skin color that is different. Yet public schools and society in general has promoted this idea that there will be social justice in the future and if you are a white male, that the future doesn’t look like there will be many opportunities for them. There is a cost associated with taking away hope from anybody, white, black, red, brown or yellow—all people want a chance to have some sense of the American dream—which is why they came to America in the first place. But the big government fairness approach to build up bloc voting patterns has been disastrous, and public schools seeking copious amounts of school funding have played along pushing white males to the side and promoting other demographic types to the front of the line creating even more artificial anxiety than there was before.

That is why I have been proposing more guns in not only schools, but in the general public. We are facing as a civilization a massive erosion of values and an onslaught of young people who have been pampered beyond recognition, raised largely in daycare facilities since they were two and three years of age. Few people really loved them as they were growing up. Like most children they all started with big ideas and lots of questions but during those formative years of 1 to 8 years old they’d ask the adults of their life questions and what they got back was “I’m too tired,” “or leave me alone and go play in your room.” That’s when kids stop asking and expecting to do great things in the world and they begin the process of compromising their existence to the hopelessness they see around them. The teachers are often too radical to take a personal interest in kids, the parents are too busy and out of touch themselves, the media is hyped up on everything panic driven and neurotic, and religion has been watered down to be valueless. Once you toss in the influences of puberty, where young kids with all their young hopes and dreams realize that everything they were ever meant to be was to simply breed, then fade away into old age that sense of hopelessness can be overwhelming and young people like this Rollins kid or the Austin bomber take some action against that hopelessness.

Most young people simply accept that the expectations they may have had as young kids was the flight of fancy from being a baby—that didn’t know the limits that the world would impose on them later. I again would argue that many of those limits are philosophical, they are artificially created by our modern politics for purely political reasons—but there are real consequences to that kind of activity. And we are seeing the results of those failures. It’s too late of course to change direction too quickly now. We are stuck with this mess for several decades to come. Even if we made a major shift in the way we deal with our youth we wouldn’t see the positive results as a culture until halfway to the next century, because it takes a long time to change cultural behavioral patterns. 50 years isn’t long in relation to the many thousands that humans have done their work in the world but compared to the shallow waters of today’s historical perspective, 50 years is an eternity.

As sad as it may be, we must have more open carry of firearms to frustrate the rampages of our modern disturbed youth. The danger can come from any direction—any race or background. Likely it will be males that will create the trouble since violence is not typically associated with females. But with half the population having males, there are plenty of dangers now that the emotions of several hopeless generations have been stirred inducing violence on a scale we’ve never seen in the world. And its only going to get worse. That’s why we must come to terms on how we will deal with that onslaught of violence. Hopefully the open carry guns in society may minimize it, and at worst, prevent mass carnage. But we are facing a major problem that no law in the world can alleviate. The problem is very epistemological and that can only be fixed at the foundations of human thought—and to go back to the family first drawing board where troubled youth are dealt with before they become a menace to society.

Rich Hoffman

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Lakota Doesn’t Really Have a Choice: The Video of the CCW issue on February 26th 2018

Looking back on the video of the school board meeting on February 26th 2018 where the topic of arming teachers with a CCW drew a lot of media attention around the city of Cincinnati it wasn’t even close. The entire meeting is shown below, for which the media categorized it as “contentious,” which it was—but it was much more civil than you might think for such a hot button issue. The public comments section can be viewed at the 38-minute mark. My comment can be seen at the 53:30 mark. After me there was one other speaker on the list from the sign-in sheet and at that point the score was 6 for arming teachers with a CCW in class to just 2 against. Once the listed speakers had concluded Samuel Ronan who is running against Steve Chabot in the 1st Congressional district and was from Springboro spoke. He didn’t count in my view because he was simply there to give a stump speech on a national issue because the Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones took the lead on suggesting that he’d offer free CCW classes to any teacher who signed up for his class. After Ronan spoke there was a student who cried and couldn’t get through her speech followed by a lady who additionally added to the anti-gun comments. When the scoring was all said and done for the evening the score was 6 for allowing CCW teachers to bring their guns to school to act as first responders with only 5 against the proposal. That is the purest score this issue will ever get at Lakota. Obviously, the people against the measure hadn’t had time to professionally attack the CCW proposal and were caught a little flat-footed on the matter.

Those of us for the CCW proposal really hadn’t coordinated our efforts either. I had a few people call me to see if I was coming to the meeting and when I said I was, there were others obviously who felt they could come and add their opinions to the matter. If Lakota had a vote likely the tally would come down to a similar demographic as was shown in that school board meeting on that particular evening—something close to a 60% to 40% vote in favor of arming teachers in our 22 school buildings. Those who spoke against CCWs presented an emotional argument without any solution present, which is typical on this subject. There is a portion of our society that is just afraid of guns and wishes that humanity could remove them completely. Any logical person not thinking emotionally understands that 92% of all mass shootings take place in gun free zones—which is why schools are such a hot target. Wishing that guns were never invented isn’t a logical solution—especially in the short run. Lakota does have school resource officers—10 of them to cover the 22 current buildings, which isn’t nearly enough for a community that has over 100,000 residents. The cost is prohibitive to have an officer in every building and in every hallway in case something was to occur where a school shooter might attack and realizing all that, based on this school board meeting, there really isn’t a choice. Lakota is going to have to adopt a measure arming teachers and the reasons are obvious.

My first thought when Samuel Ronan handed his camera to an Islamic woman who was sitting next to one of the anti-gun speakers from earlier was that we were getting ready to hear from the professional anti-gun lobby. And that was confirmed when the 3-minute clock was not started for Ronan. Listening to Ronan speak I thought a member of the school board had invited him to talk which was why the clock never started for him, and why he was permitted to not address the board–but the audience and the television cameras that lined up the back of the room. But after going on for well over 3 minutes the board did stop him so it appears that the progressive politician had just crashed our meeting in a similar way that a school shooter might attempt to do and take advantage of our good graces as a community. He simply went on a stump speech for every progressive political platform and his supporters represent the emotional element which the media has latched on to. But if you listen to his speech there is no solution presented even though he is an obviously polished speaker. At the end of his speech we still had the problem and that was the same for every speaker against the measure.

Politically speaking for Lakota being one of the largest and most affluent school districts in the state of Ohio if a school shooting were to occur and footage from this meeting were to come out in the wake of the tragedy as it always happens in other mass shootings, because hindsight is always 20/20, it would destroy a lot of credibility in our school management that is completely unnecessary. If the comments of Butler County Sheriff Jones are added to the matter it will look really bad on Lakota if action is not taken, because the community spoke very civilly and succinctly on the matter when there was time to act. I personally think as a nation we are living on a time bomb where the combined elements of video games, lack of parental influence, aggressive music and the basic epistemological failure of philosophy for young people is throwing a disproportionate number of kids like the Parkland shooter out into the world. With the 100,000 residents of the Lakota district there are of course a portion of that population that will try something. It was only a month ago that the heavily tattooed and very scary looking Jason Lehman attacked a daycare facility in broad daylight for no apparent reason. Then a few days within that event a distraught Charles Warren attacked a mail carrier at gun point—intoxication appears to be a contributing factor. We are facing an opioid crisis virtually everywhere and all those people are potential bombs of danger that could pose a threat to a secure zone, like a school, and proportionally to the size of our community, there are a fair share of dangerous people who can and will inflict harm on the innocent should they take a chance to. What makes the Jason Lehman situation so disconcerting is that it could have easily have been a public school instead of a daycare facility. At least at the daycare it was a privately operated endeavor that was much smaller and easier to secure with passionate employees. In public schools where there are countless hallways and points of entry in the 22 schools, there aren’t many teachers available who will lay down in front of a door to keep an attacker from getting in, which is what happened at Children’s Learning Adventure Childcare Center on 747 at the entrance to Beckett Ridge. An attack at such a place would not seem likely because it’s in a very nice area where people don’t typically have to deal with people like Jason Lehman—scary, aggressive, and emotionally out of control. If not for the owner of the Buffalo Wings and Rings next to the daycare center who attacked Lehman, who knows what would have happened. Lucky for all of us it was a fist fight instead of a gun fight, but its only a matter of time. West Chester got lucky in that case.

Hoping that something won’t happen isn’t a strategy for dealing with problems. We can go back many years and study that among our Lakota population there have been plenty of people who have snapped and went on violent rampages. Not even considering the two people already mentioned, have we already forgotten the case of Donald Tobias Gazaway who held a kid hostage at gun point for over 30 hours just last month a few miles down the road from Lakota East? What if that guy decided to turn his wrath on the school instead of a residence? It’s only a matter of time before something happens, so hoping that the event never happens isn’t a strategy.

Lakota can pull together to help solve this problem or it can let an opportunity fade and be a victim with a whole lot of smart people pointing backward in hindsight to declare that they spoke their mind but nobody in leadership listened. I don’t think that is healthy for anybody, not the school, not the community, and certainly not the children in our care. The same media that showed up to wonder what makes people like Donald Gazaway and Jason Lehman want to threaten and attack places where there are children are the same people who listened to that Lakota school board meeting and considered the opinions evenly weighted on both sides. That wasn’t the case, the video proves it. Residents have expressed their opinions to the school board and it is now up to them to act either way. But if they don’t adopt the CCW measure, the media storm against them will be horrible when someone does attack one of the Lakota schools. And that will be a lot more painful than going against the progressive caucus that hates guns but doesn’t have any other suggestions for these troubling modern times.

I said my peace and I’m willing to give a little on the issue to help solve the problem, to make it easier for the school board to make a hard decision. But waiting for some other school board to make a decision first isn’t going to work. Lakota needs to be the pace setter on this issue, it needs to show the kind of leadership that comes with being the big school on the block to take action before people really do get hurt. The Lakota school district has had plenty of warning signs just in the past two months. Its one thing to have a tragedy when action to prevent it was taken, it’s quite another to get caught in indecision when there are families dealing with the aftermath. It is for that reason that adopting the CCW for teachers is really the only correct decision. And by the look of the video shown from that February 26th school board meeting, the community is behind the leadership of the school for what might be the first time in decades. It would be crazy to squander that rare opportunity to do something good. That same anti-gun media that tried to make the Lakota board meeting look evenly matched and even supportive of the anti-gun activists will be the same ones who cower through this video footage and show all the people who were for CCWs when something does go wrong—and that wouldn’t be good for anybody. These events are going to move forward whether or not we are ready for them. Leadership is meeting those events with solutions instead of being caught on our heels when maliciousness knocks on all our doors.

Rich Hoffman
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A $10,000 Bonus for Lakota Teachers: How guns in schools are conducive to team building

A lot of people don’t know it but when I put together the No Lakota Levy group by joining forces with some of the business guys who were also against the school levy over eight years ago now, we had prior to that experience been mostly rivals. Several of them about five years prior were at me over a contentious real estate transaction—actually several of them and we were not on good terms. But we were united under a common objective—a real concern that high taxation would destroy our community, so we united against the Lakota school system to get things under control. In the course of that action we became pretty good friends and a lot of those heated rivalries fell by the way side. I was reminded of that experience as I stood before the Lakota school board on Monday February 26th many years after our contentious levy fights to speak on behalf of arming teachers with firearms. Many of the school board members were new, some had been there back during those No Lakota Levy days and suddenly we found ourselves on the same side of an issue—a desire to secure the schools before some copy-cat shooter sought to put their name in lights for eternity by becoming the next assassin of the innocent. It was a little weird but was a very positive experience.

It was a productive evening and I had the opportunity to talk to a lot of people on this issue and I couldn’t help but see a pattern emerging, conflict resolution often is all about bringing people together on a common goal. We may argue about the means of teaching children, or what the purpose of a public school is, but one thing we all are unified on is that we don’t want bad people to come into our community where our kids are and exploit a weakness at their expense. As I spoke a lot of those heated rivalries melted away and I only saw eager and sincerely concerned faces looking back at me—everyone wanted to get this issue right and that was truly a special moment.

As we were having a good exchange where two sides of a political divide were joining together to solve a hard problem a reminder of how vulnerable we all are to charismatic radicals presented themselves right there at the school board meeting. CNN star and 1st Congressional District candidate Samuel Ronan from Springboro, Ohio crashed our meeting unannounced and took over for an uncomfortably long period of time taking advantage of our mutually good graces to speak out against the Lakota consideration to follow Sheriff Jones’ advice to arm teachers in one of Ohio’s largest school district. Ronan is a very progressive young man who is trying to lead a youth charge against guns in schools. Only he forgot one main thing, he willfully violated the terms of speaking that night as specifically cited in board policy 0160 which states: ” Participants must be residents of the District, or be the resident’s designee and be introduced as such, and have a legitimate interest in the action of the Board. The Board may also recognize representatives of firms eligible to bid on materials or services solicited by the Board. The Board may also recognize any employee or student of the District except when the issue addressed by the participant is subject to remediation under Board policies or negotiated agreements.” Ronan wasn’t the only speaker that night against the CCW recommendation for teachers, but he was the one who showed a complete disregard for the rules of our community to make his point—which is precisely what a potential school shooter would do should they decide to attack. It showed everyone in the room how vulnerable we all were to bold practitioners of radicalism from their own sometimes distorted perspective.

To my experience, and it was consistent with that evening’s activities, firearms bring people together, not apart, and that was what was happening between me and the school board at Lakota. Compared to some of our past issues this new problem transcended those transgressions. We needed to create a culture at Lakota that would protect kids from the types of people who put ideology over logic and will take those next dangerous steps toward the destruction of lives. As I said to several people that evening, I would support in this case a bonus for teachers who sign up for a CCW. I am thinking of something in the $10,000 per year range to encourage teachers to spend time with guns, to create a group of peers who might shoot together on the weekends down at Premier Shooting in West Chester then get together for dinner afterwards. We’re not talking about teachers wearing guns on their hips and advertising that they are CCW holders. We are just talking about concerned teachers who want to become first responders in case some crazy person comes into one of Lakota’s 22 school buildings and seeks to ruin the lives of the people inside. As Samuel Ronan showed us, someone who doesn’t belong can easily walk into a school and manipulate their way past security with the type of sincerity that he displayed and have their way with our most vulnerable because as good people we tend to trust that everyone else is also a good person. We are never quite ready for some villain who looks like a normal person, and acts like a normal person, until it’s too late. At that point, it would be good to have a teacher in every hall in those 22 school buildings who could at least keep their classrooms from becoming an unprotected zone of malice.

The bonus of $10,000 would be specifically to help create a culture among a group of people who up to this point have not been concerned about guns. By asking them to open their minds to the idea, the bonus would allow them to participate in the sport of shooting so that when and if something dire were to occur, they’d at least be familiar enough to use those firearms proficiently. Just as I came together with the Lakota school board that night in what was a good feeling exchange, people who shoot together tend to form bonds of friendship that extend into all parts of their lives. I am very certain that if Lakota were to adopt this policy there would be peer groups of shooters that would develop, and they’d enjoy the exchange with one another. As a gun owner and frequent user myself I can report that this is an experience I have in my life that I know would transfer over into the lives of the teachers who became CCW holders and it would be a very positive experience for them. Instead of dividing our community, it would unite in ways that nobody thought possible, just as nobody would have imagined years ago that I’d have a friendly exchange with the Lakota school board. Firearms have a way of uniting people who otherwise wouldn’t speak to each other any other way.

Shooting can be expensive, so I envision that $10,000 bonus helping the teachers pay for their lane fees at Premier Shooting and the ammunition to shoot there once or twice a month with other teachers. And after shooting they’d have a little money in their pocket to do what the rest of us shooters do with our time, you grab a bite to eat and enjoy each other’s company in a similar way that golfing buddies do. Only with guns there is always a higher purpose to what you are doing, and it makes saying hello to that other teacher in the hall a bit more special, because they would be in a unique club of potential first responders in case a radicalized terrorist would try to unleash pain and suffering on our nice and successful community.

My urgency on the matter is that Lakota is more vulnerable than other places in Ohio—because it is wealthy, its large, and its conservative. There was a reason that the progressive radical Samuel Ronan who is a pretty big-time star on cable news decided to target Lakota for his anti-gun protest. He had no other business in the Lakota community, he didn’t do it in Mason or Springboro, he came to Lakota. And if people like him who are just a bit too angry at the direction of the world are looking at the leadership of Lakota as a place to discharge their aggression, then someone just a few IQ points south of Ronan might just do the unthinkable, because it is a giant soft target for such people. Personally, I don’t want to see that happen. I’m willing to put away my past grievances for the purpose of a unifying objective—and this issue of giving teachers CCWs is the best idea that I’ve heard in public education for years. And I will promise this, it will be a very positive thing that will bring together the whole community—and will make the teaching staff much better. Firearms are the ultimate team building tool. I understand that many people don’t yet have a reference point to build off of, because firearms aren’t a normal part of their lives, but once they come to understand what a unifying factor firearms are—socially—the magic of that team building will become obvious—and as a side result, our children will be much, much safer as a net result.

Rich Hoffman

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