Tag: Lebanon Schools

Trump’s Tax Holiday: Likely the best news of 2020

Probably the best thing about President Trump’s Executive Order providing anyone making less than $100K per year a “tax holiday” is that for the first time since the inception of a progressive tax system, people will finally get a taste of just how much money is being robbed from them each weak by a bloated and corrosive government. For those making six figures, they’ll see around $6,000 more added to their weekly check, distributed over those months of course, but the amount of money is significant. Most people don’t view taxable income as part of their salary because the money is robbed by the government before anybody ever gets it, so it makes it much easier for the government to spend that money knowing that nobody will challenge the amounts, because they never saw the money to begin with. This has been a problem with all taxes for a long time, the money comes from invisible methods that people seldom see or understand. Its quite another thing to have to write a check to pay taxes as opposed to the governments both state and federal just taking that money before we get our checks.

I kept waiting for somebody else to point this wonderful issue about the “tax holiday” out on one of the Sunday shows or even when the talk radio people returned to the national airwaves on Monday, since Trump signed the now famous executive orders on Saturday August 8th, 2020. But the news of the weekend wasn’t about the magnificent space successes of Space X, first splashing down the first Americans from space in decades from the International Space Station, or the successful testing of a controlled flight and landing of a Starship prototype, or just a few days later the launch of more Starlinks, all within a week of each other. The news instead was about riots destroying stores along the Miracle Mile in Chicago—again the news was focused on the primitive diatribes of yesteryear to direct the mind of mankind toward things that a slow minded government could highlight as core competencies. All this space stuff and concepts of becoming an interplanetary species is just too complicated, so the focus was on riots, failed politics and hiding from a silly virus when our society should be easily conquering all those issues with bandwidth to spare. So I’ll go ahead and make the point.

Collectively, government brings out the worst people and it is stupid for us to treat them with the kind of respect that a top-level CEO deserves. At best, government is a place holder for the real smart people who do make things happen in the world, so we should never be eager to throw endless amounts of tax money at them for the basics of society. One of the biggest criticisms of Trump’s tax holiday as a method of Covid-19 relief to everyday people is that it undermines the Social Security and Medicare systems. We are supposed to accept that those socialist measures created so long ago are viable solutions for a future that really doesn’t need either. The question of health care shouldn’t be in government managing it, it should instead be in how people can heal themselves better by living longer and more productively. And the idea of Social Security is archaic because people simply live too long now, and the money issued isn’t enough to justify all the work. It’s a system that needs to be re-invented into something else more conducive to modern society. But government, dumb as it is, wants things simple and easy for them to control, so they lay in the way of progress for all those obvious reasons, so they can stay in the management game, even though the world is moving way too fast for their tiny minds.

Trump’s brilliance on the tax holiday is that people will finally see how much money has been taken from them provoking them to ask questions as to why they should ever give it back, which is a good question. The government over the years just assumes that it owns 6% or so, even greater oftentimes just for existing while there are many people in America who pay little to no tax because they don’t make much money, and we are supposed to share government resources with them out of the kindness of our hearts. Its was always a ridiculous proposal for the last 100 years, and its just as dumb now. We need a tax holiday and once Trump gets re-elected we need to make those tax cuts permanent, and by then, people will have seen for a half a year or so how much money they have more from week to week as opposed to accepting the losses before they ever were paid. That is the best way to get support from people on serious tax cuts and innovative ways of looking into the future. People will be more likely to support such tax innovations if they can get their hands on more of their cash and see the benefit.

This idea of just blindly trusting government to spend our vast sums of income is just stupid. They do not spend our money wisely, and worse than that, they have come to feel entitled to our labor efforts without earning the respect that should always accompany the measurement of money. To listen to Democrats, negotiate with the Trump team over the stimulus package last week throwing around numbers in the trillions of dollars by people who likely struggle to add up the money for their lunch was preposterous. They don’t deserve our money and we shouldn’t have to give it to them by gunpoint, which is essentially what the IRS is for the government, a mob like entity that can take everything you own if they are displeased with you. That kind of power should never go to government and its about time we roll some of that back.

I always felt Trump was playing the hands of the coronavirus for politics, he had little choice. I may have been one of the angriest people about Covid-19 on planet earth because I saw it as a fake reaction to a global United Nations strategy from the outset. Others were much slower to it, but as of today, many more people are understanding the situation for what it has been. Yet Trump is doing what we expect him to do, to finally have a Republican who can turn a crisis into a benefit for a change. Finally we can push back on issues that otherwise would have never seen the light of day, and with Trump’s “tax holiday” we can finally get people to pay attention to real tax reform by disguising Covid-19 relief for a real strike against the progressive tax system and put the government on their heels for a change. They aren’t entitled to our money as they have believed for a long time, and with Trump steering the ship, we have our best chance ever to wrestle away that perception with lasting consequences. And that is very exciting, probably the most exciting news of this year of 2020. It may be depressing for the lazy governments that just want infinite amounts of money stolen from us with perpetuity. But its always been our money, and its about time that someone give it back to us to keep.

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior

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Racism is not the Problem in America: Its a lack of good fathers–the truth about ‘White Privilege ‘

Truly the source of the problems we are seeing, and the ease for which our youth, and media are striving toward socialism is for one primary reason, they are lacking stable fathers in their lives and they seek government to give them what a nuclear family could not. If you took a sample of all the rioters for Antifa, all the protestors of the communist organization Black Lives Matter, and the suburban white women who have made themselves part of the #METOO movement you will find most of the participants are lacking good fathers in their lives and that missing piece to their childhood psychology is why they are lost as young people now, unable to deal with the world and looking to government for a parental replacement. And what they are calling white privilege, or privilege of any kind if peeled back to all the sentiment is a jealousy that the people they are protesting against had good parental structure and opportunities in life largely because they grew up with a father who taught them the basics in life.

My daughter actually pointed this out to me as she was thinking about Father’s Day and shared with me a website on YouTube called ‘Dad, how do I’. The guy running the site started his channel during all the Covid-19 lockdowns and within a few weeks, has literally millions of viewers, much more people are watching his new material than are watching CNN for instance, just to provide some scale. And that doesn’t surprise me. It is quite clear that biologically for our nurturing as humans starting in childhood, we need input from two parents. We need our moms for lots of security needs, at least until we become teenagers in life. But we need dads too, to show us how to change tires, deal with interacting with the world at large, and how to solve basic problems. The current problems of our times is largely a progressive problem where our institutions have messed around with the biological natures of our species and they failed. For all the reasons that Democrats are wanting to rip down the statues of the past because it was they who owned slaves and fought for slavery in the Civil War, and they want to erase their involvement as much as possible, the same group of people, Democrats, progressives, and weak kneed Republicans have not stood up for dads and the important role that a solid family structure plays in the production of the next generation. Instead, they have experimented with replacing the nuclear family with government and those who have accepted have watched their lives be destroyed with the huge void that is left in them during that process.

Its not that America is a racist nation, far from it. There is no more diverse group of people on earth than those who come from many skin colors and nationalities to join under the rules and conduct of American life. But certain sectors of our government have sought to use those skin colors to create voting blocs for their own election process. Inner cities come to mind where Democrats have essentially put people of color back on a new kind of plantation. Government took away the efforts of fathers, by doing their jobs for them leaving millions and millions of young people to grow up without fathers and the rage is obvious. Of all the protestors we see on the news turning over cars and burning them, and destroying storefronts looting the content, I would be surprised if we found a single person in those mobs who grew up with a good father, or could find them on a map in their current state. When protestors proclaim that white privilege or privilege of any kind exists what they are really asking for is that everyone be equally miserable, that government destroy the good families out there so that everyone is working from the same equally bad playing field. It has nothing to do with racism, but everything to do with good families who teach their kids right and wrong, living in a world of competition with people who had very little family structure growing up.

Government is trying to cover up the father issue, because they are the ones who made the mess. They are quick to allow people to think that the issue is a racism one, because if people thought about the problem long enough, they would discover that the real result of inner city breakdowns, or the poor living conditions in any community, it was government attempting to take over the lead roles in a typical family pushing out the father, caring for the mother and the kids that are produced under those conditions tend to grow up to become wrecks of people spending the rest of their lives lost and afraid of literally everything—because they didn’t have a dad around to show them how to solve problems, like to turn a wrench, work on a gun, change a tire on a car, or even how to hook up a water hose to a house spigot. Government knows they have screwed up so they hope now that they can appease the Frankenstein monsters that they have created by shifting the blame to racism and historic blunders, instead of the real cause, governments tampering with families to minimize the role of fathers in them, and taking over the management of a family so that the members look to government for the traditional guidance men always played in making good families.

I say all the time, and I use gentlemen clubs often as the best example because they are such deplorable cases of what’s rotten with people, strippers and prostitutes are the direct result of having a bad relationship with their fathers. I would dare say that not a single girl working in those industries had a healthy relationship with their dad and that unfortunate situation is the cause of them picking that way of life to make a few bucks while they are young and pretty. And grown women who are not quite stable and have too many screwed up relationships in their lives could trace their problems back to having a not so good dad in their lives. But the problem could be said to be present in both sexes, we just notice it more in women because within a family structure they tend to lead the rules and parameters, so if those conditions are screwed up from the start, it is unlikely that a mom is going to know how to create a good family as an adult, and they will pass on their disfunction to the next generation. So of course, the key to fixing these problems that we are seeing is not more government, more philosophy from Karl Marx, or even more education. It starts with a dad and a mom staying together and working to create a family that teaches children important things they will need when they are adults, like knowing how to use a screwdriver, how to fix a grill, or how to use a saw to cut some wood. When these basic things are not taught, then the products of those environments are going to be looking for excuses as to why failure finds them in life. And government will try to hide their role in the mess by blaming racism, or some other mask that hides the real problem—a lack of fathers in the lives of the people causing all the trouble. And that is the truth that nobody is willing to face, which is why it’s a mystery to so many people how to deal with this current crisis. But its actually quite easy to fix once we push government out of the family making business, because like everything they touch for a lot of reasons, they screw it up every time.

Cliffhanger the Overmanwarrior

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“Social Distancing” was always a Scam: The new kind of terrorists in the world

My job in life is a problem solver and what I do on this site for free is because I enjoy helping people who can’t help themselves. I would not limit myself to an overly specialized field of understanding, such as to be a doctor. I would be bored out of my mind for one, and two, I wouldn’t be able to solve very many problems because often to do so, you must understand a great many things to create solutions and that is not the life of a doctor. What is sad is that this ability, the problem solver ability used to be common in America, but after listening to opinions from “experts” about the six foot distancing rule that has spawned from the coronavirus outbreak its quite obvious that the problem of dealing with Covid-19 was too far out of the scope of most people and anything that did not follow the dialogue has been considered a conspiracy theory by both Republicans and Democrats. Thankfully, Rush Limbaugh gets it and I was happy that he beat me to the punch on talking about the ridiculous nature of the “social distancing” policy that was created to give politicians more time to paint the Covid-19 virus to be more of a threat for their objectives than it really was. And they did that by tricking us to “flatten the curve” by artificially making the curve look worse with bad numbers from the World Health Organization, then prolonging the effects of the virus to justify the shutting down of the world economy. It was a massive hoax that goes well beyond the most audacious conspiracy theory except for those who can see the really big picture. Rush Limbaugh says pretty much what I have been saying about this whole matter in hour three of his April 9th show which can be viewed below.

It should be obvious to everyone that the resistance to the drug Hydroxycloroquine and azithroymycin is because to the eye of any problem solver, not a specialized doctor with political agendas, it was a quick solution from a fast acting President of the United States who wanted to put an end to the virus outbreak that was shutting down the economy, where a solution was not wanted by people like Dr. Fauci from the CDC. What he and big activist donors wanted was a means to shut down the world with a power that had never been tried before from the academic class that was heavily radicalized toward leftist causes. They were essentially Antifa but in suits and ties instead of the gear of anarchy. Most people have been trained in our society to trust what these people say, so that was the cause of the paralysis psychologically, and its why the attackers are very happy with the results of Covid-19, only that it appears to be much less deadly than they had hoped, because it’s tough to make a story out of a subpar virus and to convince people that it’s deadly when it wasn’t. The global numbers will be well under a typical virus and the only reason we are still talking about coronavirus is because we interfered with the herd immunity that naturally occurs with these things. The natural way to deal with these matters is for humans to get it, and get over it. The spread would stop by immune systems developing a resistance and if we had not interfered, Covid-19 would have died in March all on its own. Instead, we introduced social distancing to slow the spread not to save lives, but to make the story last longer for the advocates of changes to world economics through pandemic emergencies.

Once they “the experts” got our attention and froze our actions by associating everything we do on the potential for fake deaths, they had us. Now that we’ve given them this power over us not even the smartest people in the world can figure out how to reopen the American economy without being blamed by a left leaning socialist media for every death that might happen. The theme of the day is that humans interfered with the natural process of getting over viruses and stopping their outbreak by inserting medical professionals in the middle of the action to slow the spread because they wanted to do two things, highlight needs in the healthcare profession from their point of view, and to reduce the carbon imprint on the world to reduce man-made climate change. The social distancing concept was a scam from the start, sure they wanted to slow the spread, but not for the reasons they told us. They wanted to scare us into believing whatever it took to give them the stage and now that they have it, they aren’t giving it back. Trump is literally going to have to rip Dr. Fauci off the stage with his friends and to deal with the consequences. They don’t want a solution other than more laws and to make vaccines that can track us everywhere we go and everything we do mandatory by the same stupid government that over-reacted to this virus. And the longer it goes on, the more able they are to see success of their original objectives.

Now that so many have tasted the power of panic, they won’t give it back easily which is evident by the amount of time even people like Larry Kudlow are saying it will take to get back to normal. Of course, the governors and the doctors at the CDC never want to go back to normal where the world couldn’t care less what they thought about much of anything. Suddenly they are kings of the world and they like it. William Barr, the Attorney General has noticed the draconian violations to state and federal constitutions and is outraged by it. There has been so much wrong with all this activity that it has spun many minds into chaos. They can’t see the big picture because this virus has been smashing them in the face so that they can see nothing else. But I’ll be happy to report that the social distancing was never anything more than a trick to get us to look at one thing while the other hands moved the rabbit into the hat to pull out for a show to a terrified audience.

Just think of all the things we haven’t been talking about, like the FISA abuses, the many perils of the FBI activism in favor of the DNC. We haven’t even been talking about the attempts at freedom in Hong Kong and Iran by populations sick and tired of totalitarian regimes. This virus outbreak has distracted us all to the point we’d agree to almost any draconian measure just to be able to go to a restaurant again. That is exactly what these environmental wackos at the CDC and WHO wanted with this coronavirus outbreak. And their phony social distancing served only their own purposes by keeping us from talking to each other and putting our minds on this virus and nothing else so they could work Agenda 21 objectives through the World Health Organization. And to make the virus appear more dangerous and to keep the economy closed longer, they did want to slow the spread. Not to save lives but to save their movement, and we played right into it. It was a ploy any problem solver should see easily. But unfortunately, we have trusted the experts too much, because they have turned out to be terrorists of a different kind, one we weren’t prepared to see and we are now paying the price.

Rich Hoffman

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What Amy Acton has in Common with the Blackfoot Indians: Like the buffalo jump, we are being led over a cliff of Coronavirus to our doom, for the “greater good”

Well, finally there is something that Amy Acton from the Ohio Department of Health and I agree on. You might know her as the woman who has Mike DeWine wrapped around her finger and has essentially shut down almost all activity in the state of Ohio and inspired so many other very power hungry liberal governors across the nation to overreact to the Coronavirus. If you want to know why you are stuck in your home, why your businesses are closed and are bleeding money killing some of them forever, why there is no March Madness, no start to the baseball season, why Kings Island and Cedar Point are not going to open for at least another few months, you can blame Amy Acton and her crazy climate scientists from all over the world who have built bad models projecting the death toll of the Coronavirus and they have set policy to it. However, during her recent press conference on March 25th with the governor she showed who she really was, which I’ve been saying for a long time, she’s a crazy hippie chick who shouldn’t be anywhere near setting public policy of any kind. She spattered on and on about her love of Joseph Campbell, who also happens to be one of my favorite authors, and she dared to cite his great work, The Hero with a Thousand Faces as one of her main influencers. I was so touched by this I almost reached out to her with that common ground, however I know something about those people that they don’t seem to know about themselves. As a matter of fact, I used to be pretty deep into The Joseph Campbell Foundation when I was in my 20s and I left because of people like her, out of touch academic types who were attracted by the Joseph Campbell message of the power of myth, but clueless to the true nature of following one’s “bliss.” Instead, they had a propensity to act like the buffalo in some of Campbell’s stories in his best books about how the Blackfoot Indians used to treat them, and that became the range of depth of their understanding. Once I heard Amy Acton was a Joseph Campbell fan, I was convinced that everything I have said about her had been 100% true, maybe even more.

She also showed signs of the strain knowing what was coming next as this whole Coronavirus was coming to an end even as she continued to try to perk up the numbers to make her overreaction to it seem less severe. We were told that there would be millions of people dying of this stupid thing or on ICU back at the start of March and now that’s just not happening. The medical community is already trying to backtrack and say that they saved lives by acting early, but in all reality, Coronavirus was never that deadly. The scientists got it all wrong and they are responsible for literally trillions of dollars of lost GDP. Hippie chicks like Amy Acton as I have been saying is an activist using this virus to express her personal philosophies about life, and she thinks its great and heroic to sit in our homes and be quiet, and to say we are all in this together even as we now accept we have to be at least 6’ feet apart. Amy and I have one thing in common, we are both readers, and of our favorite authors Joseph Campbell we obviously share. And knowing many thousands of people like her over the years who have attended the Joseph Campbell Roundtables all across the country I feel quite comfortable in saying that those people should never be near any public policy making……..ever.

Surely since Amy Acton knows so much about Joseph Campbell then she knows in several of his books and lectures that he often spoke about the great buffalo jump that the Blackfoot Indians used to conduct to slaughter herds of the wild animals for food. What they would do was herd up the terrified beast into a rampage and direct them toward a cliff where the buffalo would jump over it and plunge to their deaths. This would then ignite some sort of Blackfoot Indian dance where the leaders of the community would dress up like the buffalo and the Indians would thank the dead bodies for sacrificing their lives so that they could live. The Blackfoot Indians believed that the spirits of the buffalo would return then to do it all again, so the little dance was important. For them it’s a wonderful example of the circle of life as identified by people spanning back 12,000 years of the practice. Essentially modern government hasn’t evolved much from that mentality, instead of the sacrifice being buffalo this time however, its average people suffering under the mistakes of a government power hungry and out of control. They are trying to paint the world in their image, of the need for sacrifice, and some notion of the circle of life, life, death, resurrection, or to cite the Vico Cycle from the great work of James Joyce which I’m sure Amy Acton is familiar with, theocracy, aristocracy, democracy, then finally anarchy. Putting health freaks in charge of our government, people like Amy Acton are resorting to their primal instincts which are not much different from the beliefs of the Blackfoot Indians—drive people over a cliff metaphorically slaughtering their individual natures only to have them rise up as a holistic species united through crises to unleash a new age. This is the anarchy those hippie types have been craving forever and they have run us all over a cliff economically, and emotionally to ignite that new age, where the scientists might be in charge instead of the industrialist job creator. It’s a slaughter they think is for the “greater good,” and we should all be very pissed off that its been done to us.

Yesterday I noticed that the news media, especially Channel 12 in Cincinnati had become one of the first to become the boot lickers of this power move as they told the police about some kids trying to play at a park near their homes. They proudly announced their actions on Twitter and showed the police showing up to tape off the area as restricted as they stated the children playing there were in violation of the Governor’s orders, who obviously is doing everything that the hippie chick Amy Acton tells him to. Every case of every new Coronavirus test suddenly became a weapon for the various departments of health in every county to trample all over individual lives all in the name of “safety,” and throw out the constitution for the benefit of all humanity, as defined by people like Amy Acton and her notions of sacrifice. For them the need for selfless acts are no different than the spirits of the buffalo knowing that the Indians need food and that they willingly jumped to their deaths to provide sustenance for the Blackfoot people, just as we all must by sacrificing our jobs, our restaurants and our potential for individual based happy lives. Yeah, I read a lot, likely much, much more than Amy Acton—I’ve seen all this before in history and its clearly happening now in America and specifically Ohio which has led the way in most cases to the trend of the rest of the country.

Ohio government led by Amy Acton by default of Governor DeWine’s lack of good judgment has revealed about herself a person not gifted in leadership. Her reliance on academic models to predict Coronavirus outbreaks were wrong and she knows the egg on her face is going to be ruthless. She is already talking about the arm chair quarterbacks who will scrutinize and skewer her for many months to come now that people can see that the death toll is nowhere near what Acton said they would be and that what she was really after was herding us all over a cliff to change our capitalist behavior, and through a death and resurrection, a new world of sacrifice and emphasis on collectivism would be given birth in the great cycles of life. If I didn’t know hundreds of people just like her over the years I might be surprised too, but I knew there was something kooky about her, and she clearly revealed it at that press conference. Individually, I might like talking to her—in a library or a bookstore about favorite books and great authors. But setting policy in Ohio—forget it. She shouldn’t be anywhere close to a decision, of any kind. Like the Blackfoot Indians, we can’t trust them to not see us as buffalo and lead us over a cliff to our own slaughter, because they believe it’s the only way to go—which is why they are so wrong to lead.

Rich Hoffman

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The Criteria for State Funding of Education in Ohio: A future state free of Parkinson’s Law

Just as a preview to the upcoming debate at Lakota schools, and the post Trump election of 2020 where Betsy DeVos will unleash her education reforms I think its only fair to give a sneak peak into my position model for state funding problems in Ohio. One thing that became very clear to me while fighting the Lakota levies during the early part of the last decade was that everything pointed to problems with state funding, where the state was having a terrible time of constitutionally providing money to schools due to two major character flaws in the foundation assumptions of the public education debate. First the cost for schools were filled with what I call in this case Parkinson’s Law, which is a business term to describe typical problems in schedules, where allotted time fills to whatever dates are provided, the work fills the time provided, and secondly, the attachment of money to real estate instead of the students provided by the tax payers. Those two elements have made it impossible to come up with a proper funding model and must be solved before the state can do anything, so to answer the questions from the past, how can the pro levy people and the anti-levy people get together to focus their efforts in Columbus toward real education funding change, those two questions must first be solved. Anything that does not deal with those two issues, is off track and a useless gesture, and that will be my position on the upcoming levy fights no matter what frontier we find ourselves fighting them.

Parkinson’s Law occurs when building things like Gantt charts in business where all the parties of a process are allowed to give their perceived dates for the completion of their given task. When looking at a total project and the critical path needed for its completion, it will be quick to note that all the participants in a schedule will give themselves a comfortable amount of safety in case they have runovers and problems in their task. Taken as a whole, this takes the completion date for a project well past the usual funding requirements and must be worked out by taking away all the fluff that finds itself into the assumptions. In public schools where collective bargaining agreements take up 80 to 90% of a $200 million budget at a school like Lakota, the desire to have tax increases is only to fund this out of control filling of a budget with Parkinson’s Law where the money in the budget always fills to satisfy the supply. It has nothing at all to do with the quality of education, but everything to do in order to satisfy the comfort level of the government school in recruiting, and labor management among a hostile organization that is bound to socialist desires, the government labor unions that are embedded and cannot be removed without destroying education as we know it and the free babysitting service that it has become for so many busy, working parents.

Knowing all that, the per pupil cost of education is excessively high and no state law maker can hope to sign their name next to such an inflated figure until the schools themselves work out the true need of their paid staffs, and are getting the most out of those they do have. If a school wants to pay a teacher six figures to do a job, that’s fine. But the teacher better be worth it. However, through collective bargaining, some teachers may be worth it, some may not, but all get it because of the nature of the union agreement which goes well above and beyond what taxpayers should be funding with their property taxes. It’s the same rule that applies to private businesses, if a company has a unionized workforce, that’s fine if they can operate with it. But don’t ask the customer to pay more for those services because the union is present. That is not the fault of the customer, it’s a non-value-added experience for the taxpayer to fund on the top end for mismanaged services passed down to them through the government school looking to appease the radical elements of their labor force. To keep the labor happy and justify all the advanced degrees and other elements, Parkinson’s Law says that the budget will grow to satisfy the demands placed on it by the comfort level of the participants.

How many teachers does it take to teach a classroom in this fast moving world where video games have more influence over students than a stagnant employee teaching things in the front of the room that are already two or three years too old by the time they are trained to teach it, and how much is that teacher worth for 7 or 8 hours of their day, 5 days a week and summers off? Is it worth $70K per year, or $100k, because a lot of teachers at Lakota are making averages of that amount of money and the report cards for the school show that it hasn’t helped them get “A”s on their state report cards. Questions like that have to be asked before state funding can be acquired because those are contributors to the Parkinson’s Law I am proposing must be answered before any model can be created legally. In this day and age couldn’t a government school operate with a lot less teachers and more interactive media, even larger classrooms? Given the state of the results of our current way of doing things, its clear our education system is not doing a very good job as compared to other countries, so why would we stick with the same old same old, its too expensive and its not very effective. Education needs to be faster, and more engaging, and up to date, with the rate that computer processers increase in memory and efficiency. Things kids learn today are almost outdated before they even leave high school, so we need better ways that are much less bureaucratic to keep up. All these considerations are part of the state funding crises that must be solved before anything happens. Just lobbying the state government for more money isn’t going to solve a thing because we haven’t dealt with how that money would be spent.

Of course the answer nobody wants to talk about that thinks of public education as a crowning experience for youth, where football games and dances are centerpieces of culture young people depend on, and parents who need someone to watch their kids while they are busy at work. But the future of public education is to get government out of it, out of the regulations, out of the report cards, out of the business as much as possible and to turn over that effort to private enterprise, which the labor unions are completely against because it would take away all their emotional leverage. But that is where education is headed whether it takes 10 years to get their or 100. The inevitability is fast approaching and it won’t take long for everyone to see it. The need for more personal freedom and faster rates of learning that are not so top heavy in costs demand such a thought and that is ultimately where the state funding will reside. Any discussion besides these things is a useless one.

The assumption among education activists is to lobby for money to feed the old broken system that has not been effective, as is evidence in our present society. The current system is too expensive and does not teach the right things at the rate that kids need the information. I would offer that the cost of an average teacher should be about half what it is now and that many of them should not just do teaching as a career, but as one thing in their lives. The structure of teaching should not need a stagnant employee present to hold down the speed of learning, but should only be present to provide an interface to knowledge. That is a part time job at best in the schools of tomorrow. Certainly not worth 80K per year for hundreds and hundreds of employees only working a fraction of the day in a fraction of the year. I measure a day in 24-hour intervals, so if a job only requires 8 to 9 hours of dedication from an employee asset, it’s a part time job to my eyes. And that is how things will look as we get into the future state of government school funding models. To me, they are already extinct. Its taking other people too long to realize it, because that’s the way we’ve always done it, but once Trump is elected for his second term and his sons or even Candice Owens takes over the future of the White House going into 2030, the word “government” is coming out from in front of schools which must be privately managed. Just like health care is headed, and just about every other utility of economic expenditure. That is the wave of a fast-moving future and government schools are way behind in recognizing it. But soon, they won’t have a choice. Their entire reality will be taken away with the Parkinson’s Law that has built their budgets with so much fluff over the years that people are tired of it. And will vote accordingly.

Rich Hoffman

Why EdChoice is so Beneficial: Removing Parkinson’s Law from the public education debate in Ohio

I’ve been watching and listening to the whole debate about EdChoice in Ohio with great interest. Of course, the Ohio Senate had to vote to delay the implementation of Ed Choice which was scheduled to take effect the day of this writing, until April 1st 2020. The public schools in particular have responded terribly to it, including the school in my own district which I’ve written a lot about, Lakota. It has been nothing short of embarrassing to listen to Lakota’s superintendent complain about the funding model that is coming whether they like it or not and move the entire district into a victimized status so quickly on the issue. The report back from some financial news from Lakota has not been good and they are floating the idea for another levy which would be a terrible, anti-growth tax increase just to supplement their mismanaged spending habits, so the news was bad enough. This EdChoice debate has only made things worse. Dealing with professional educators to me is the worst experience that there is in professional politics because they are so entitled and unrealistic about what they think their financial requirements should be, so we’ll deal with some of that here, and in the coming months. Listening to politicians attempt to put their minds around what to do about EdChoice, which is simply a grading system that inspires the financial contributions of the state to follow the student of that failing school to the school of their choice. This of course leaves variability in public school budgets for money they have been used to getting now going to an unpredictable number of students who may decide to go somewhere else with that precious state money.

I listened to Bill Cunningham and Representative Bill Seitz talk about this EdChoice problem on WLW and every word made me cringe. Here were two people who call themselves rock ribbed Republicans missing the whole point of the public education debate. Now, my history with these two is that they are on the wrong side of many issues. They mean well like a lot of people do, but their perspective has been tainted by years of acceptance of a system initiated by people like John Dewey during an experimentation of many things during the progressive era at the turn of the last century and like many have accepted that that’s just the way things are and the way they will always be. Money goes to the school from the state to teach children living in that district not just skills for a future job, but to turn them into democratic citizens with an emphasis on social change. In hindsight this has been a complete disaster, look at the products of the schools, which many of us are. People aren’t very smart, and they don’t set their sights very high in life. Dewey’s mistake was in attempting to steer society away from republic representation and more toward democratic majority rule, which we all know now is a disaster at the epistemological level.

For the two Bills talking on WLW about EdChoice, they are both people in their 60s and 70s now, to them public school is about sports programs, learning to follow orders so that kids learn to live in a civil society, and in establishing much needed social connections with peers. Way back, many decades ago when my wife and I pulled our kids out of public schools for a year to teach them at home because the results were just so disappointing we had family members literally melt under the news because they were afraid my kids would turn into complete social outcasts, because they believed after so many years of this Dewey philosophy that the goal of public schools was to establish these mental applications. Of course, those sentiments were completely fear based, just as about everything in public education is. We have learned to just accept the failure that is evident because that’s always the way we have done things. People like the “Bills” on WLW enjoy the idea that their public school is the holder of real-estate value, and that Friday Night Lights football in the fall months of every year make for great conversation. But it was flawed from the beginning and never was poised to do what Dewey wanted because his fundamental problem was in thinking that the state as a central authority should be in charge. It was a progressive experiment, but not a very “Republican” thing to do.

Schools like Lakota and many others who are complaining about the insecurity in their funding model should be looking at the situation like any business would instead of some free-loader sitting in a bird nest of a rich district and opening their mouths for tax money to flow in. They should be working to be the best school with the best options in a free market society. No matter what the report card states in giving families the choice of a school they’d like to go to, Lakota should feel confident that kids would want to go to their school for all the reasons that anybody would, to get a good education, be near a good sports program, or just to be around other students who aren’t problems coming from broken families. Students should have a choice and if Lakota wants those students, they should have to work to attract them.

The most tragic thing I have noticed, looking at the situation professionally, is that all public schools have become addicted to the natural state of Parkinson’s Law that has contaminated their budgeting structures. Everyone who has been involved professionally in process improvements understands that Parkinson’s Law is an adage that states “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion,” meaning that a work schedule blankly stated will allow a worker to fill that time allotment from beginning to end by the nature of human interaction. If you give someone an hour to do a 5-minute job, they’ll take the whole hour. Process improvement demands to understand how long it actually takes to do a job, and to work out the tendencies of Parkinson’s Law to misstate labor needs. Well, that same tendency is at the center of the public education debate all across the country, and is why the EdChoice trend is so badly needed. Budgets have been filled to their maximum to accommodate whatever the state provides and to what extent local school district tax payers will put up with in increased levies driven by labor unions looking to use Parkinson’s Law to attach need to student performance by using the chaos of money going to the schools, not the student, to keep the process centrally controlled and with a false understanding of what education per student should cost, leaving the real state funding model perpetually broken, which is just how the labor unions and lazy superintendents like it.

Clearly what we have had hasn’t worked. Education needs reformed and the centralized aspects of it need to be removed. Free market solutions are the only way to improve schools and the students that come from them. People should have the option to vote with their feet putting schools into the same competitive situation that every restaurant, shopping complex and entertainment destination must do, compete for the dollars available. Education is not so sacred to not be attached to competitive market conditions, end of story. A quick look at our students declares that trying something new wouldn’t hurt, because we couldn’t do worse. And ultimately that is the direction of education anyway, just as the trends of the world are declaring. People want more choices in life, not less, and it’s a matter of time anyway where money for education shouldn’t even come from the state. But while it does, it should go to the students so they can vote with their feet. Not to hold them to a school that doesn’t feel it has to earn their business. If Lakota is such a great school, or any government school for that matter, don’t tell us how good you are. Make yourself one of those schools that people want to go to. Make it so that you are so crowded that you must turn people away, which only increases the value of the product. Sure, it makes the current way that schools do business chaotic, it forces them to understand how much Parkinson’s Law is in their processes. It forces the teacher unions to think differently for sure. But that is their problem, not ours. And the state will never know how much it should spend on students so long as Parkinson’s Law is contaminating their assumptions. That is the key to this whole discussion and we’re going to have it now or in a few years, but the way things have been are not the way things are going to be. The old Dewey model was poised from the outset to fail. But these days, life happens too fast and there is just too much to learn to attempt to squeeze everything into the traditional classroom setting that we have been attempting to do. The times and this new economy are forcing us to change, so let’s get at it and solve this problem once and for all by looking at the entire concept differently.

Rich Hoffman

Lakota Alums Complain about EdChoice: School superintendents show they aren’t anything like CEOs, they just don’t have the skills

“I’m OK with choice and options for your kids. I’m not okay with public tax dollars going to the private schools,” said Matt Miller, the superintendent of Lakota Schools in reaction to this year’s expansion of Ohio’s EdChoice program. And across town at Hamilton City School’s Mike Holbrook the former Lakota principal and complainer-in-chief who is now the superintendent there, he’s back to complaining about money because this EdChoice challenges his district which has a report card of a “C” into making better decisions instead of just continuing to ask for more and more budget to fund failure. These Lakota school alums have spent some time lately complaining that the Ohio voucher program is getting more aggressive, which I have always said that it would, and its forcing them to control their budgets better, and they just don’t like it. I find their statements amazing because after all these years, we have been told that a school superintendent is like a CEO at a public school. Yet all they really have done is lobby for more money. Anybody can do anything with infinite amounts of money to work with, but only in public schools is it assumed that more money gets better results. Yet in Hamilton City and at Lakota Schools, that clearly is not the case. Those districts are not getting A+ grades and we pay them fortunes. So why not attach the state funding to children and allow competition to make everyone better? A CEO would certainly understand that, and these guys show in their statements on this EdChoice debate that they are clearly not up to the task.

This is what happens to a governing body when they are allowed to inflate their budgets with union contracts and overpay their staff without a funding model that lives within the scope of their resources. I have written about Mike Holbrook before when he was just a Lakota principal, you can see his comments after a levy defeat by clicking here. He has a long history of complaining about money, which public schools have allowed to be the role of superintendents. These guys want respect and to be treated as top managers, but they don’t want to do the work. They coddle the teacher’s union during contract negotiations and drive up their costs then expect taxpayers to bail out their failure. Hamilton certainly isn’t anything to be proud of with their “C” grade report card. But Lakota isn’t much better, and we did pass a levy in 2013 after a lot of debate, and guess what. They did just what I said they would, they gave the money to the teachers in the form of raises and performance went down. The school’s performance worsened. Paying top dollar for the so-called best teachers did not promise Lakota an A+ report card, and it should have.

The best way to secure the best scores is with vouchers, where tax money is attached to the kids. If parents don’t like the school, they should be able to take their tax money and pick another school. And if the schools want to be in business, they need to do a better job. That is the job of a CEO, to make sure that parents want to send their kids to their schools, and to make themselves that choice. They need to work at it, and if you have a six-figure income, that is your job to figure out guys. These token superintendent jobs were never intended to be levy cheerleading positions where you just spend and spend and spend and have guaranteed security due to the kinds of people living in your district. You should want to work for better kids, better parents, and better results. Not some state definition of success, but one that is market driven

.

Senator Bill Coley, whom I’ve known for a long time and who cares about this voucher issue a great deal, tried to explain it to these superintendents in ways they might understand. The school district still has tax money coming in from every home and business and those values are continuing to appreciate, the revenue continues to increase every year in an area like Butler County. What’s the problem? Well, the problem is they have gotten used to not having to manage the money. That’s the issue. They are used to it always being there and most of the problems have been solved with coffee talks. Schools like Lakota took away busing to save money. Parents have gotten used to driving their kids to school. So why wouldn’t they just drive their kid to school somewhere else if they had a choice? And why should Lakota get all their money just because that student lives in the district? If the money is for education why shouldn’t that money follow the student, and the performance that the customer expects?

Of course, we all know the answer, public schools and their labor unions depend on these fixed numbers to manage their collective bargaining agreements. But wouldn’t the unions get what they want with this EdChoice? Teachers would get smaller class sizes due to declining enrollment in failing schools, those only getting “Bs” and “Cs” are failing based on marketplace analytics. If parents want the best for their students, that would be an A+ on the report card. If a district can’t get that, get rid of the teachers and get better. Oh, you can’t do that because the union contract won’t allow it. Well, there is your problem and so long as the tax money is locked to the school, not the student, we will continue to fund failure.

Only by having such a competitive element, such as EdChoice will school superintendents be forced to do the job they were hired to do in the way that schools need to do it. The word “public” assumes that there is some community right to money and the education of kids. We have seen over the last century that public education is not the best way to teach a kid, and parents who understand that private schools are clearly better for children are already paying for that improvement. Why should their tax money go to appeasing failure? But as Senator Coley has said, Lakota will still get their money, so will Hamilton. They’ll lose a little but they’ll also lose some class size. Everyone should be happy. Property values continue to go up in this Trump economy. A CEO would understand how to make those elements work, but apparently all the Lakota alums want to do is complain that they don’t have enough.

Any real CEO of an organization would love to have the problems of these public schools, they have guaranteed income, they have nice new buildings, and they have sports programs to distract the base and keep team building exercises active in the community. It’s a dream job for anybody with half a brain so it is extremely disappointing to see these guys crying like babies. Manage your contracts, let the complainers leave with their poison to other districts because it hasn’t helped your report card anyway and pull up your bootstraps. Don’t ask for more money with levies because that’s lazy, work with what you have. And work to be better and to make yourself an EdChoice destination instead of a repellant. And if you can’t, cut your losses and be happy being a “B” or “C” player in the world. That’s life. The trend is in choice, choice in entertainment, choice in food, choice in government, and especially choice in education.

Property values unlike what people may have thought ten years ago are not so intricately linked to the public school in their districts. They are linked to choice, the kinds of jobs there are, the entertainment options, the overall quality of life. Most people in Lakota don’t even know that there are football games on Friday nights. They could care less; Netflix has all the options they need and the carryout down the road has dinner. I would suggest to these superintendents that they start acting more like the CEOs they want to believe they are instead of union stooges padding the way for continuous contract increases to their labor rates. Choice in performance will demand them to get with the program, EdChoice is just the beginning.

Rich Hoffman

A $1000 Check to Saugus High School: The social decay that leads to school shootings nobody is talking about

After a recent shooting at Saugus High School in California where the 16-year-old birthday boy Nathaniel Berhow shot at five students early in the morning killing two before shooting himself in the head, a local woman donated $1000 toward the school which I found perplexing. The donation was an obvious act of rebellion from the woman toward the trend toward violence among young people who are using guns to inflict harm in the pressure cooker that is public education. The woman obviously wanted it to be known that she stands by her support of the school and would go to extreme acts to show her solidarity with the students. But as we know who have been fighting the trends of public education for a long time that $1000 check was next to useless, as the teacher’s union would quickly consume it. For the overall problem, it was a simple gesture no different than a rain drop in the ocean, but it obviously made the woman feel good to write the check, and it gave the news a nice feel good story about community unity and public education support in the face of grave danger.

I’ll say it again, teacher’s need to carry guns so they can put down attackers like this depressed kid quickly when they make a move to attack. This school shooting didn’t last long, and the targets were obviously selected for a reason. The news outlets won’t say it, but I will, high school is all about peer pressure and what kind of person is formed from that pressure. The social circles that are formed can be quite intense, relationships are complicated among human beings and foundations of betrayal can be quite ominous. And to any 16-year old, a girl who likes this guy and not you, or a girl who is with this friend and not you can be tragic, and even very melodramatic, especially if the adults in their lives aren’t providing the proper level of wisdom to navigate the crises. And ultimately, that’s what we find in this shooting case at Saugus High School.

We need guns because our society is making these types of people who are dangerous. I’m sure people thought of Nathaniel Berhow as a nice kid who would never do such a thing, but in moments of anguish, people do a lot of dumb things without really meaning to. I would say we are a culture of guns which has derived from our cultural need for them. As America evolved to allow individuals to reach the limits of their abilities, there are always parasites who are seeking to claim jump success, and guns are needed to protect the property of the ambitious, so that they will keep trying to try at success. Its our system of civilization and these public education institutions are running against that tide. The woman who gave the $1000 check is likely a nice person, but her belief system is faulty as to what that check represents. I know a few people like her, wealthy people who want to throw money at something like these tragedies because it makes them feel good to do it, like they are helping. But what is always ignored is why the kid thought his 16-year-old birthday was so dire that his only option was to lash out at fellow students before killing himself in the process. There was so much life to live, why cut it short so soon?

That’s where our social system fails. The public education institution has eroded away at the parental role in the lives of these kids then everyone wonders why parents can’t help when things get so bad. The premise, the cause and corrective action that needs to be acknowledged is that the public education system can’t do the job. The teacher’s unions who work in these schools are radical, and lazy. The politicians who set the agenda for what is taught are corrupt and stupid. And while the parents are trusting that system to teach their kids saving them the burden, they are living reckless lives having affairs, getting divorced and indulging in too much lackluster leadership under the roof of their own homes. That is why kids like this Nathaniel Berhow shoot themselves on their birthdays, and desire to go out in a blaze of glory to hurt the people who have hurt them. Hurt of course is a perceptual exchange. What one person considers hurtful, others may not. That’s why adult mentorship is so important to help with biological perception changes that mind steer the teenage mind in the wrong direction.

Removing guns from our society simply ignores the root cause of these greater social problems. It buys time for the society that has helped create this mess to continue believing in the failed system just a bit longer so long as the public focuses on those $1000 checks and not the real problem in public education. Public schools don’t work. They are weak attempts at social engineering that fail often and with these kinds of catastrophic results. And from the media, and the political class, there is no leadership to change what we are seeing openly and with frequent occurrence. Its only a matter of time before another school shooting happens near all of us. Its not the guns that are the problem, it’s the desire to use them to solve these kinds of problems that are. ABC News owned by the Disney Company especially are bad on this topic. Their belief, which is the same as most progressives in this modern age is to take away the temptation, that having so many guns makes these events easier. But Nathaniel Berhow had an unregistered gun. What would ABC like to see, the uninventing of guns? Even if all the gun manufactures in the world were put out of business, any machine shop around could build the parts. The black market will always have guns, so any law created won’t change that fact. Chicago still has more shootings than anyplace in the United States. Guns are illegal there and populations are regulated with liberalism. Yet gun violence is as common as rain in a storm.

Any method of resolution will fail if it does not deal with the true problem of psychological trouble that spawns out of collective education services and the pressures that go with them. The failure in public education is deep and is in need of a complete overhaul and really if you get to the example of the woman who wrote that check and the media that gravitated to it as if it were made of gold and spoke of the good hearts that rose up to meet this tragedy with acts of kindness, the real evil was in writing the check and supporting that school in the first place. In supporting a failed institution that is leaving people so desperate and lost that they cannot solve simple problems as teenagers, and in allowing the parents to reside guilt free of responsibility for raising their children, further danger is assured. When the news tells us that they do not know why a shooter like Nathaniel Bernhow did what he did, what they really mean is that they can’t admit their role in it, and therefor can’t talk about it. Its not so simple as leaving behind a note, or in having some other form of confession. The real villain is in the construction of the minds who can’t deal with the trouble and how public education makes those conditions worse, not better. And that is what we should all be talking about.

Rich Hoffman

Who Could Blame Matt Bevin: Notes from Lebanon and Talawanda after the election

I don’t blame Matt Bevin at all for not conceding the governor election in Kentucky to the teacher’s union boot licker Andy Breshear. Knowing what I do about the political left and their mechanisms of power and manipulation, it would not surprise me that more than 10,000 dead people and illegal aliens voted in Lexington and Louisville putting the Democrat over the top in that election. I always assume that there will be a little voter fraud, and that Republicans must have an even greater margin of victory to guard against it. But in Bevin’s case, why not challenge the election? The history is certainly there to question those results, so why not? Its not about being a sore loser, its about playing to win, which is a big difference. Republicans need to be doing more than that not just to win political races, but to preserve the American Constitution which is very much under attack. To understand why, just look toward the impeachment case against President Trump and how many media partners have linked up with the radicals to advance a story of nothing because they can’t win an election honestly. That behavior is no different than the teacher’s unions which went up against Bevin, and certainly against many of us in local elections as pointed out by friends of mine shown below.

The following two reports come from longtime friends of mine who were fighting education issues in their communities and were overcome for various reasons. The notes they sent me communicate their paint accurately. The first one is from Lebanon where the teacher’s union-built school board threatened to take away several tax payer funded programs essentially to create the pay scale shown below. All the levy in Lebanon was about was giving the teacher’s union a pay increase. The author of this note used to be a school board member herself, and she knows very well what is really going on in public education.  (Who is saying teachers aren’t well paid?)

We lost because the union campaigned in the classrooms. They threatened all kinds of cuts and fees for extra curriculars e.g. sports, band, plays etc. two high school boys told me they threatened $1,000.00 for football and band or maybe cutting them entirely. When I read the teacher’s union contract, I realized they wouldn’t cut anything because too many were making too much money participating in these after school fun and games projects. The NEA is a racquet organization no different than the Mafia. They threaten retaliation if the levies fail. The sad part is they claim high taxes are “for the children.” Nothing could be further from the truth. We have teachers making over $94,000.00 with better benefits than most corporate executives. Their contract is for 184 days, but they get ten sick days and three personal days off. They have many days off for various holidays and “ breaks.” They have planning periods, work one half day on Wednesday’s for their union meetings, paid extra for many normal duties. Former classroom teachers become superintendents. That means the union is negotiating with a union sympathizer. Homeowners don’t have a prayer. The board is selected by the union. Read the questionnaire that they send to candidates. The teacher’s campaign in the classroom the union agenda. Everyone needs to read the communist agenda that is passed at the annual NEA convention.

This second note comes out of the Talawanda school district and communicates the results of the school board members who eventually won. Like Lakota, they were trying to get conservatives elected to the board but fell short. It’s a tough gig in an off-year election. If Trump had been on the ballot, it would have been a larger turnout, but it is what it is. Voters need to understand the game so that they can define what victories need to look like. The teacher’s unions know their business, its to get bigger pay increases and to teach the next generation about communism and an overthrow of the American Constitution. For conservatives the parameters of victory is to stop that.

Rich,

Well, the liberal machine in Oxford beat us. We now have an all liberal board that will consist of:
2 present/retired Miami University Professors (don’t know for sure but appears they still have some association with the university)

1 current Sr. Director of Miami University Advancement Finance & Business Services
1 retired Talawanda Elementary Principal (prior teacher) that currently does educational curriculum consulting

1 retired educator/teacher …unsure of all locations but retired from Butler Tech [This current board member, Patrick Meade also doesn’t say the Pledge of Allegiance at board meetings, he simply stands and often glances around the audience during the pledge]

Thinking “the machine” over, its tough to figure out how to “break it”. Since Miami Univ. is a strong presence, they all have each others emails, the Teachers Union backed ’em so again they have their emails and most of the liberals run things in Oxford like the Sr. Center, League of Women Voters, Oxford Community Art Center, the Empty Bowls program, etc. In addition there is a HUGE base of the retired liberals from the University & School district. SO…I figure the liberals have the strong networking and many opportunities over & over to spread their word. VERSUS….the conservatives that are spread around Oxford but mainly based out in the surrounding townships with miles between their farms and small communities.

Sad but a fact of life.

Our conservative friends are holding our heads high, staying out of the fray and moving forward. Ha – using the post puller to take out large sign posts has been good for the soul.

We’ll be regrouping soon.

I was reminded how out of touch most people are from these issues when I was at a birthday party over the weekend before the election. Out of the many adults there, most from Lakota, they just didn’t have the bandwidth to even contemplate the important issues at hand. They were worried about things like the cake melting and who was going to win Fantasy Football that day. They didn’t have time to think about teacher’s unions wanting to ruin the minds of our children and destroying the American Constitution while robbing taxpayers blind to do so. They just want busing for their kids so they don’t have to drive them to school. That is certainly the understanding of the radicals from the left which have infiltrated every public school with an ideology of socialism and anti-American propaganda paid for by all of us. Most voters just aren’t willing to understand the game, because they don’t have time to play it. That’s how the teacher’s unions and their minions on the school boards win. Because nobody has the time or money to stand up to them. Or the willingness to endure public scandal which they always threaten using our own children as shields for their own protection.

Bevin should fight back on the election just as Trump should fight back against the impeachment inquiries, and the rest of us should fight back in our own ways with the same vigor. Its not worth getting along and playing nice if Republicans are going to lose. Winning should be the top priority and I would say to that, win any way possible. Forget about playing fair, the opposition certainly doesn’t. When the enemy accuses us of unethical behavior, which gets thrown at Trump all the time, what they are mad at really is that they have set up the rules of the game to favor themselves. However, they need all of us “nice” Republicans to play nice and follow those rules, just as they break them at every turn. Their anger these days at Trump, Bevin and the rest of us in the trenches fighting these little local battles is that they see that trend breaking and it scares them. Which is a very good thing for them to feel.

Rich Hoffman

Pot Smoking and Ray Murray: The school board candidate who wants to shoot teachers if they have a gun

The Ray Murray I knew back in 2011 was nowhere to be found at the VOA Miami University debate on October 22, 2019 for potential school board candidates. I always thought Ray was a nice guy, but the person speaking at that event sounded like a drug induced lunatic. Suspicious of the things he said that night it became clear thereafter that there was a good reason. Under Case Number 0000477720 Ray looks to have been convicted of possession of marijuana and had to serve a year of probation. After seeing that, I would normally doubt that such a report would be accurate. So I checked it with two different sources and, after watching him in action and looking scraggly and worn out in ways I wouldn’t normally associate with him, there is good reason to believe it and then some. He sounded like a guy on drugs as he opened the door to scrutiny by talking about his years as a Chicago police officer and a champion for transgender politics. He painted himself for an election to be a virtuous person, but reality has something else to say.

Here is the problem with electing people with serious issues into a budgetary position, once they are compromised, whether it is in several broken marriages, drug use, being a cop and being scared of being shot at, people like that tend to side with the worst that our society produces. While its fine to feel sorry for them, and if they find meaning in life in a church by becoming some definition of a pastor, we should cheer them on for recovery. But we should not sit them down and ask them to control a budget of nearly $200 million while sitting on a cash surplus of over $100 million. If we did, we should expect all that money to go up in smoke just like any other pot smoking loser. Compassion is one thing, endorsing failure with elections however is something else.

I would go further and say that anybody who does drugs of any kind, even drinking is a cause to not vote for someone onto a school board. And Ray isn’t the only one guilty of this kind of scandalous behavior. I would say that his partners of liberalism on the school board have done far, far worse. Should we talk about it, well let’s just say, we don’t want to embarrass their children, although I would argue that honesty dictate that we should. When we vote for someone to represent us on a school board, or a trustee, commissioner, representative, senator, anything, we need to know what we are voting for. If we decide we want to vote for flawed people, then that’s fine. We shouldn’t be surprised when those flawed people get bad results, but at least we know what we are voting for. If Ray needs help with drugs, lets get him help. But that doesn’t mean we should put him in charge of millions of dollars.

Compromised people tend to look for redemption in public acts, which is why a lot of liberals are dangerous. People like Ray Murray and Julie Shaffer are so compromised with embarrassing things that they have done in their lives that they are looking for redemption with elected office, and they are using taxpayer funded resources to cover their weaknesses. Because they want compassion for the ways they have lived their lives, they are quick to support topics like transgender policies so that they can hide in the crowd and get redemption. They vote in favor of the teacher’s union because they need a cover story of friends to hide their own weaknesses behind with a big banner above their heads stating that nobody is perfect, lets show some compassion for the downtrodden. That sounds fine coming from a church pew on Sunday, but in the world of money, finance and education, it has no place. People who live their lives clean and don’t drink themselves into oblivion or smoke a bunch of dope to forget about all their problems in life, should be in charge of things and have the public trust. And if they get caught doing bad things, we may not blast them out of a cannon and forget about them. We may give them a second chance at life, but certainly we wouldn’t elect them to a board to handle a multimillion-dollar budget.

Being likeable isn’t the same thing as being logical and cool headed when tough decisions need to be made. One thing that must be considered when we are talking about school board candidates that have shown mental instability, and drunkenness and smoking pot or elements of both conditions, is that upon election we give them a badge to get into any building within Lakota. If they are depressed about something who is to say that some drug dealer selling them a bag of pot won’t get a hold of that badge and use it to get into any school building on a rampage of violence, the kind of potential tragedy that we have all been talking about. What was it that Ray said at the debate, that if a teacher had a gun, he would want the police officer to shoot the teacher? Yes, that’s what he said, does that sound like a person who has it all together? Yet his only answer to the problem is to trust the system, yet what if one of these loose cannon school board members ends up drunk and passed out somewhere and someone gets a hold of their badge so they can get into any school? No matter how much we spend on security, you can’t prepare a school to defend stupid and reckless behavior on behalf of the school board members.

Many think its hip and cool to have pot smokers and drunks on the school board. But its no wonder that they always seek institutional support because if something goes wrong, its likely going to be their fault and they want to always reserve the right to hide their faults behind good intentions, such as transgender support and spending that $100 million surplus on give-a-ways to keep anybody from looking too deeply at them. Of course, the teacher’s union wants compromised people on the board of education, because it makes it easier for them to defeat the board upon contract negotiations. When we elect school board members, we are electing our representatives. The teacher’s union has their representatives and they stick together. We elect ours with these elections, so why would we want to vote for anybody who has a union endorsement? We shouldn’t. Then we must ask why the union is endorsing them. Well, the answer to that is that they think they are easy to beat in contract negotiations. If you are the teacher’s union, would you rather go up against a tough business person like James Hahn and Lynda O’Connor, or some dude caught with pot or a person who can’t hold their liquor in public and ends up in compromising positions, all too often. The answer is obvious.

Its not wrong to want to help someone like Ray who no matter what has gone on in his life is at least getting up and trying to do better each day. But when there are problems managing marriages, money in his personal finances, and with substance abuse, then why should we think he can protect his badge from some malicious personality, and to protect our budget surplus. He’s ready to spend all of that $100 million over a 38-year period and to shoot teachers when cops come to a school during a mass incident if they have a gun. Ray might be a good neighbor and a nice guy to go to church with, but he clearly has trouble understanding money and cannot take a strong position on ethical decisions. Being one of the misfit toys out in the world does not make him a good representative of our school board. And feeling sorry for someone is not a qualification to make management decisions.

Rich Hoffman