Tag: President Obama

Ditzy Braless Bitches and Enamored Weak-kneed Men: How public relation firms destroy society with ‘Social Proof’

In the original draft of my novel Tail of the Dragon I was extremely critical of public relations firms—especially those owned by foreign interests in the New York market.  This of course did not sit well with the public relations branch of my publisher.  During rewrites it was insisted upon that much of my harshest criticism be removed.  As the publisher, they had a contractual right to do that even though I wasn’t crazy about it.  Much of the public relations subplots of the novel did not make it into the final draft which didn’t hurt the story, but did not allow me to expose to the extent that I creatively wished to illuminating public relation firms as the propaganda arm of misinformation by exposing a vulnerable aspect of human nature—their ancient and very tribal need to travel in herds.  I was tapping into my reader’s intellectual desire to rebel away from such a manner in my novel, but with that publisher, it wasn’t going to fly.  Public relations professionals such as those who work to improve the image of government schools or run cover stories for corrupt politicians use a term called “social proof,” which Bill Whittle from PJTV covered during a recent segment.  Social Proof, used to be called ‘Peer-pressure,’ but has since taken on a new, less harsh name.   It is essentially a type of mob mentality that convinces people to go along with the herd.  President Obama is really President Social Proof–he convinced a slew of voters that to question him was racist through public relations mechanisms utilizing social proof. Now, several voices are crying out that the Emperor…President…is wearing no clothes, and all that’s left to do is run the hollow people into the river.  Watch Whittle’s explanation of that metaphor below.

Social proof is how the scam artists of public relations work their magic.  They convince the masses that a truth is not a truth because a majority opinion does not believe such a thing.  Once the masses invest into a belief public relations specialists can then direct social temperament to the molding of that belief—which is happening at virtually every level of endeavor in modern America.  Public relations are so corrosive that it could easily be assumed that almost nothing we hear today we can believe—because most of it has been formed to expose social proof as the mechanism of mental acceptance.

Years ago I worked with a girl on a project whose father ran a large downtown Cincinnati public relations firm.  This project involved WLW radio, major local politicians, and a wide range of very dynamic individuals.  I attended several meetings at this downtown location and as things became friendlier, she came to my house.  The more I came to know this young woman, the more I despised her.  I held my opinions in check for the good of the project we were all working on, but quickly, my desire to work with such a corrupt—formless personality became too great.  On an evening when I was set to go do a show on WLW during Willie’s time slot, I refused as the personalities involved had attempted to steer this project into the realm of social proof where a formless void of chaos was acting upon the development.  I quickly learned during this experience why large companies become faceless, spineless organizations as public relation firms and lawyers take their products down a similar path and once there they often have too much time and money invested to back out—so they withdrawal from the creative process leaving everything to the parasites of public relations—which is about as unproductive as an endeavor as there is.  They do nothing for a product except expose in consumers their need to satisfy a social proof which drives them to participate in the products represented by public relation firms.

My experience with this firm disgusted me, and it took me several years to get the bad taste out of my mouth, but I did learn a tremendous amount from them—which ended up in my book.  But as my publisher stated, damning public relations firms would surely damn the sales of the book because without public relations—how could I hope to sell a book in this modern climate.  My statements were the same as what they were all those years ago with the Cincinnati firm and WLW radio—I’d let honesty and the desire for a product that touched on the human desire for anti social proof carry the day.  It doesn’t always work so well, but I feel better about the things I do when social proof is not a factor—but the curiosity of the masses are instead driven by individual desire.  Those generated by public relation firms promoting social proof are essentially advocating falsification of reality.

One of the reasons I love Star Wars so much is that the love of that product is driven by individual freedom and recognition.  Social proof actually worked against Star Wars in the 70s, the studios were rebelling against the film and if not for Alan Ladd Jr., 20th Century Fox would have pulled out of the deal.  The industry did not want the product of Star Wars, but the internal desire of the human race did—which proves to me that such things are possible—and it gives me hope.   Every time we go to the movies and see a preview for a new film—most of which will not live up to the hype, we are seeing attempts by public relations specialists to expose to the mass public a demand created by social proof to obtain strong opening weekend sales.  Most films because they are completely social proof in their content fizzle out within two weeks of their box office take as the public turns away disappointed to their next hope for a successful movie going experience.  In 2013 to 2014 the films which defy social proof are the Disney film Frozen, and Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug.  The product of those films exceeds the social proof of popular opinion and my excitement over those enterprises is because they overcome the falsification of social proof.  Those two films are the two best-selling films which still have strong box office support several weeks after their opening weekend release which means that the content of those films defies social proof.  People do not go see them because of peer pressure; they see them because the stories communicate to their individual natures.  There is a BIG difference.

The Disney Company utilizes social proof in massive droves to attract people to their television, movie and amusement parks.  But once there, Disney actually provides a good product and people come away generally happy and fulfilled on an individual level.  Barack Obama uses social proof to hide his many crimes and scandals.  This leaves society always feeling anxious and compelled to fill the void with conspiracy theories.  But the behavior does not change because social proof creates a paralysis among the human species which states that action cannot be taken against injustice if the masses do not recognize the peril.  This is why liberals, progressives, out-right communists and socialists have attempted to remove value from society using public relation firms to help them commit the deed, so that society would not have the intellectual tools to make such a determination.  So long as society is paralyzed with shackles of lost value, they cannot act out against political crimes because social proof prevents them from acting.

Social proof advocated by public relations firms are one of the worst aspects of modern society.  In my local school district of Lakota they are used to hide sex scandals from teachers against students, and advocate dangerously high tax rates among the property owners.  In the current White House, Obama uses social proof to hide the content of his past and the crimes of his present—such as Benghazi, Fast and Furious, and the IRS scandal.  Social proof does not hide the crime, but it does take away the means of holding conviction against it.  Individually, most people will declare under their breath that something is wrong, but due to their ancient tendencies toward collectivism, will not stand by such convictions in the light of day as social proof prevents them from openly advocating such a thing.  It is in this way that much evil is committed in broad daylight and suffering on an epic level is perpetuated.  And all such things begin with public relation firms and ditzy braless bitches lacking a soul propped up by cowardly men who would rather sip wine from their high-heeled shoes than stand on the ground of conviction for what’s right and what’s wrong.  They’d rather spin the facts with social proof and hide the crimes of existence behind that terrible form of peer pressure.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

The Real Robber Barrons of Puget Sound: Labor union votes for a new contract

What happens when you pay people who generally aren’t worth it over $100,000 a year–they operate a union against productivity which is what Boeing narrowly escaped over the weekend with a 51 to 49 vote among approximately 31,000 eligible members.   Making that kind of money the machinist union at Boeing is the economy of Puget Sound and the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers is basically their own local government.  Because of their belief in the evils of capitalism they nearly drove Boeing as a company to move their new 777X design build with its composite wing out of Washington to be manufactured in right-to-work states where the union could not wreck the development of the new state-of-the-art plane.  Most of the members of the machinist union do not have the technical aptitude to build a new airplane from scratch let alone sell it to markets all over the world.  Yet they are paid six figures because of the union infiltration into a successful American company and they buy their boats, their new trucks, and live their relatively opulent lives blissfully unaware of what makes a company work—or profitable.  Their union preaches against the evils of profit—yet they demand more and more money with every contract.  For this latest contract the members received a $10,000 signing bonus and money towards a 401K plan.  Still, the margin of victory for Boeing was razor-thin.  Many of the 49% of the union members who voted against the contract believe the company should continue to fund their pensions.  They don’t want the 401K plan.  They obviously don’t fathom that Boeing cannot continue to throw money at them in such a rate for indefinite periods of time—because they are disconnected from where the money comes from.  For them, the planes arrive on the shop floor, they assemble them, and they leave.  They have little to do with the design process, the sales and marketing, or the delivery.  They simply show up, do some work, and leave with their six figure incomes.

To get an idea of how much money the machinist make at Boeing understand that there are 11 different pay grades depending on job categories.  At Boeing the lowest level machinist are considered Grade 1 which stars at about $25,000 per year and tops out around $66,000 per year.  The top-level union workers before the contract made more than $90,000 in base pay annually not counting shift differentials, overtime or incentive payments.  After the contract those workers will top out over six figures in base salary.  Clearly this was the difference in the vote.  Many of the aging workforce at Boeing saw the writing on the wall.  In the Puget Sound/Evertt area where the Boeing plants reside the median household income is about $47,000 a year.  If Boeing packed up and left—which they clearly intended to do so to avoid more work stoppages in the future from their striking labor force, there is no place else capable of paying employees such large sums of money for performing jobs that are only worth half that value.

Boeing has been throwing money at the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers for decades and like gambling addicts they have spent it as fast as it has come in and continued to reach their hand out for more, and more, and more until the company finally looked to move from the Evertt area.  The decisions Boeing were faced with reminded me of my hometown where I once worked at Cincinnati Milicron—which is now a parking lot.  A vast complex that resembled a small city is now completely gone down in Oakley just north of Cincinnati along I-71.  All the skill that was employed there is gone.  Just to the west of that location was the old Norwood General Motors plant which built the old Camero.  It’s now gone—destroyed by the parasitic unions.  Just to the north up in Hamilton, is the old Fisher Body plant for General Motors where my grandfather worked.  Long after his death my grandmother continued to give me comic book money from the retirement benefits he received as well as thousands of other retired GM workers all over the country who were not productively working any longer.  General Motors was trying to cover all those legacy costs with newer workers in a pyramid scheme concocted by the unions which did not add up.  To this day the old Fisher Body building is still standing, but the company is gone.  It’s primarily just warehouse space now.  Over to the east in Middletown was a town—once a thriving place flourishing off the old Armco Steel Plant.  The wage structure got out of control there and most of the orders for business went away.  It is now AK Steel but employs far fewer people than it once did and is only a distant shadow of its former self.  The result is that the economy of Middletown crashed and burned.  Homes that should be $70,000 in value are $20,000, and the area is riddled with crime.  As people lost their jobs they became addicted to welfare and the quality of life for the once prosperous town dried up like a gold mine in the Old West once the precious element ran out.  That is the eventual future of Puget Sound.  This latest contract only buys a little more time.  It will cost Boeing a lot of money to move their operation to another state, so it was cheaper to throw $10,000 bonus checks at workers so they could pay off their new Ford F350s or plan to buy a new boat.  Boeing has a hot new plane to build and sell, so they took the lesser of the two evils.  But why should they be in such a situation and why would the Department of Labor side with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers and not Boeing in forcing the job provider to bleed itself dry to appease a bunch of out-of-touch workers bred under a communist labor union system designed to destroy American business.

In the videos above the guys at PJ Media hosted by Bill Whittle explore this topic, and it is worth watching.  The guest Dr. Burt Folsom told the story of the so-called Robber Barrons at the start of the progressive era, (just prior to the Twentieth Century) when many of the American labor unions were just getting started.  Because of their hatred of capitalism the government went after the Robber Barrons, such as the rail road industry and went on anti-trust witch hunts and essentially through federal force took away the power of American business and handed it over to the workers of manufacturing.  The manipulative power that the Robber Barrons formally had were now in possession of the solidarity effort of the labor unions—which turned out to be just as corrupt, and destructive.  The biggest difference is that the labor unions didn’t create jobs, as the Robber Barrons did.  With two evils being equal—that of human greed—the companies created by Robber Barrons through capitalism at least provided good jobs whereas the labor unions provided nothing but labor.  Labor can be found elsewhere if it becomes too problematic, but Robber Barrons who create jobs—cannot.  They are few and rare as gold whereas general labor who can push a button on a CNC controller and read micrometers into the thousands of an inch are quite common.

The vote at Boeing over the weekend which upset many of the labor union members is the grudging realization that without Boeing in Everett, Washington, there is nothing that will replace their loss and politicians, union leaders and all their F350 driving members with their $10,000 bonus checks are at the mercy of those who create the jobs.  100 years of progressivism has come smashing against a cold reality that should have been obvious from the start.  Eventually the union demands will outpace Boeing’s ability, or willingness to pay off the workers with bonus checks and excessively high salary—and Boeing will move to a right-to-work state or possibly move their operation to another country where they can obtain stable labor without such outrageous expectations.  But for now, with a narrow union vote, some of the members are beginning to see the writing on the wall and is appreciating Boeing not as a Robber Barron company that has been forced to become a heavily subsidized company of political entrepreneurialism, but for its roots as a Market Entrepreneur.  It was the labor unions which pushed Boeing into a relationship with politics to protect itself from the thieving hands of an ungrateful workforce—and the rest has been downhill—except that Boeing still makes cool airplanes that sell very well—which is the only bright spot of an otherwise bleak future.

Watch the videos above to learn more.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Dennis Van Roekel’s Epic Failure: An out of control unfunded teacher pension system

When National Education Association president Dennis van Roekel states that there “is no teacher pension crises” among his members, he is functioning from a level of denial common among left-winged nut-case progressives.  The Ohio Education Association, (an affiliate of the NEA) with net assets of negative $11.5 million, and a $1.2 million deficit in 2011-12 paid only $8.2 million in pension costs.  The reason that Roekel doesn’t believe this isn’t a crises is because he fully expects state governments to cover the gap—and to do that—taxes will have to be raised on residents.  This is expected by the unions because of their government monopoly status over the education system where they can drive up costs to any level they wish then impose on tax payers their reckless burden without fear of losing that business—because under government law they have access to virtually every child in America.  So from Roekel’s point of view—it’s not a crises—because he expects someone in government to wrestle the money away from the public for his members with manipulation or force.

Recently Roekel made a bit of a splash with the liberal progressive think tank The Center for American Progress when he proposed getting rid of the “outdated” “step-and-lane” system.  This brought about some upturned pinky golf claps among politicians and ass-sniffing, brown-nosing education professionals for its “forward” thinking.  Yet Roekel is only performing the traditional dog and pony union show where their monopoly power dictates progressive radicalism of a magnitude equivalent to domestic terrorism.  His ultimate solution for everything is higher taxes to provide a product that liberalizes American youth with a not so disguised babysitting service as parents struggle to work two jobs to pay for everything.  Read more about the ACP story at the link below:

http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/news/2013/10/25/77986/the-nations-largest-teachers-union-calls-for-revamp-of-teacher-pay-system/

The Education Intelligence Agency report recently looked at the unfunded liabilities of the NEA union to begin understanding the amount of trouble that is coming straight at Roekel’s government monopoly enterprise and illuminated how ridiculously foolish—and arrogant Roekel’s denial that there is no pension crises facing his members or the states that employee them really are.  Roekel has been destructively misleading.  The following is text from the Education Intelligence Agency website followed by the origin link.

14 state teachers unions have almost $700 million in unfunded liabilities

December 24, 2013

Mike Antonucci

Mike is the director of the Education Intelligence Agency and has covered the education beat since 1993.
Archive »

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The good folks at Bellwether Education Partners created a web site called TeacherPensions.org in order to focus some much-needed attention on the structure of the retirement system and its financial implications. The site features a range of opinions about teacher pensions, including that of National Education Association president Dennis Van Roekel, who says flatly: “There is no teacher pension crisis.”

Van Roekel defends the defined benefit system, and explains that a key principle of the system is “When actuarial liabilities exceed actuarial assets, the state and/or employer must make the necessary additional contributions to amortize the unfunded liability in no more than 30 years.”

That seems like a pretty simple solution, but if it were, perhaps Van Roekel’s own organization and its affiliates would not be experiencing their own mammoth shortfalls, due mostly to the pensions and retiree health care benefits they granted their own employees.

An Education Intelligence Agency analysis of 2011-12 Internal Revenue Service filings reveals 14 NEA state affiliates do not have the financial assets to match their liabilities and total almost $700 million in combined debt.

The ability of these affiliates to address their long-term debt by increasing pension contributions, as Van Roekel suggests, is compromised by their short-term debt. Nine of the 14 affiliates had deficits in 2011-12. In fact, the combined spending of all of NEA’s state affiliates exceeded their combined income by almost $24 million.

Even at the national level, NEA’s pension plan for its 2,600 employees and retirees was only 87.9 percent funded in 2012, down from 94.2 percent in 2010.

EIA has constructed a table that lists each of NEA’s state affiliates, its budget deficit or surplus for 2011-12 and its net assets, positive or negative, as of the end of the 2011-12 school year. For purposes of comparison, the table also lists the number of days each affiliate could operate solely on reserves based on its 2011-12 expenditures and net assets.

The 14 state affiliates with a negative net worth are:

* New York State United Teachers, with net assets of negative $302.8 million and a $24 million deficit in 2011-12. NYSUT contributed almost $30.8 million to its employee pension plan that year.

* Michigan Education Association, with net assets of negative $160.5 million, and a $4.8 million deficit in 2011-12. MEA contributed $14.1 million to its employee pension plan, and instituted a three-year, $50 annual assessment on its members for the express purpose of funding the staff pension.

* New Jersey Education Association, with net assets of negative $77.5 million. NJEA had a $13.2 million surplus in 2011-12, even after contributing $17.1 million to pension costs.

* Washington Education Association, with net assets of negative $35.1 million, and a $3.7 million deficit in 2011-12. WEA contributed $8.1 million to its employee pension plan.

* Massachusetts Teachers Association, with net assets of negative $26.7 million. MTA had a $7.8 million surplus in 2011-12 after contributing $4.1 million to its employee pension plan.

* Illinois Education Association, with net assets of negative $17.7 million, and a $17.9 million deficit in 2011-12. IEA paid $26.3 million to its employee pension plan. Despite its own mess, IEA is adamantly opposedto the Illinois state government’s efforts to address public employee pension debt.

* Indiana State Teachers Association, with net assets of negative $16.4 million, and a $4.5 million deficit in 2011-12. ISTA paid $4.1 million toward employee pensions.

* Iowa State Education Association, with net assets of negative $12.7 million, and a $4.3 million deficit in 2011-12. ISEA paid $2.2 million into its employee pension plan.

* Ohio Education Association, with net assets of negative $11.5 million, and a $1.2 million deficit in 2011-12. OEA paid $8.2 million in pension costs.

* Texas State Teachers Association, with net assets of negative $11.3 million, and a $243,000 deficit in 2011-12. TSTA contributed $1.4 million to its pension plan, and holds a $1.6 million quasi-endowment “to sustain the association for the long-term.”

* Pennsylvania State Education Association, with net assets of negative $8.3 million, though it did have a $9.2 million surplus in 2011-12, suggesting another similar year would put it in the black. It spent $7.3 million on pensions.

* Virginia Education Association, with net assets of negative $5.1 million, and a budget surplus of $1 million. VEA contributed almost $2.2 million to its employee pension plan.

* West Virginia Education Association, with net assets of negative $2.2 million, and a budget surplus of $132,000. It is unclear how much WVEA contributed to its employee pension plan in 2011-12, but its pension liabilities totaled $3.7 million.

* Georgia Association of Educators, with net assets of negative $1.8 million, and a $476,000 deficit in 2011-12. GAE paid $746,000 to its employee pension plan.

NEA’s largest affiliates are overrepresented on this list. This is problematic because the health of the large affiliates, particularly in collective bargaining states with agency fee provisions, enables NEA national to funnel crucial subsidies to its small affiliates. Many small affiliates could not sustain themselves at current levels without those funds.

As a union, NEA believes state governments should extract more revenues from taxpayers to sustain the defined benefit system of public employees. As an employer, NEA is aware of the pitfalls of extracting more dues money from members to sustain the much more generous defined benefit system of union employees.

It’s a race against time for NEA as it attempts to stave off public pension reform before it is swamped by its own private pension costs.

http://www.eiaonline.com/2013/12/23/pension-predicament-14-nea-affiliates-have-almost-700-million-in-unfunded-liabilities/

The good thing about these unfunded liabilities is that currently the NEA is trying to cover those costs with their union dues which means that they will have to increase those dues among their members.  That probably won’t be very popular.  This is also leaving little money for PAC funding which means less money for donations into progressive candidates.  As a former math teacher it would be assumed that Roekel would know this—but he doesn’t.  He’s preaching the same tired garbage which has made public education completely irrelevant over the last thirty years—really since the creation of the Department of Education in 1979 when education became centrally planned by the federal government.  The only benefactors have been the unions—certainly not the students.  Roekel’s concerns are primarily teacher recruitment and licensing of teachers as if this would stop the onslaught of his members who are trying to get into the pants of their students on an epic scale.  Roekel is ignoring that psychological and specifically “progressive” problem as vigorously as he’s ignoring the pension system issues.  But what would anybody expect from a former teacher who is now president of the largest labor union in America.

The bottom line is that Roekel’s perspective is shaped by the security that he has the power of the IRS at his back—as wind in his sails.  He knows that his union can recklessly spend over budget—as they have for years because the mandate for states and their tax payers is to just cover the tab without thought or question because the lives of their children are held as extortion pieces for ransom.  The NEA unfunded liabilities are just one aspect of a terrible web of failure coming from public education which is completely controlled by progressive labor unions. And that aspect alone should dictate why such organizations should be eradicated from the earth—forever.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

2013 in review: Numbers and Stats from the previous year

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 160,000 times in 2013. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 7 days for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

How People Learn: A test that proves public education is teaching incorrectly

When it is wondered why homeschooling is proving more successful than public school, or why Common Core education is so dangerous to the minds of young people, or even in determining the amount of money teachers should be paid, and how often—it must be understood how children learn and achieve.  The science of learning must be dealt with, and an assumption that the traditional top down learning system must be abandoned so that an open-minded analysis can be explored beyond cynical protection of the public education government sponsored empire building which has been enslaving children presently and entire societies globally.  For that analysis, let me provide a bit of evidence as provided by Delancey place.com regarding a 1999 study in India where Sugata Mitra conducted an experiment that should change the world if only government involvement in education would step out-of-the-way.  Governments create the kind of slums talked about in the article below, governments create ignorance, and governments create most of the roadblocks that stand in the way of innovation.  If left alone, society would advance much faster toward much more prosperous educational opportunities and social innovation as the proof below will display.  Please keep in mind upon reading this that the study was conducted well over 15 years ago as of this writing and that is simply appalling.  Sadly it has not been officially endorsed by any serious advocates of education.  The reason is that teacher unions do not want innovation, they do not want competition, and they don’t want any model of education that abandons their top down approach because it does not fit their long-term strategy of advocating dependence on government.  The purpose of education in public schools is not to teach independence among its students, but dependency—more specifically “interdependency.”  Thus, it is an educational system that deliberately works against the way human beings think, feel, and learn—it is in defiance of nature—and is the primary reason that it is a global failure not just in America—be everywhere in the world relative to the kind of educational methods described below.

Continuing Delanceyplace.com’s End of Year Encore Week: This year a full week on creativity.

In today’s encore selection — from Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandia and Steven Kotler. A creative approach to education:

“In 1999 the Indian physicist Sugata Mitra got interested in education. He knew there were places in the world without schools and places in the world where good teachers didn’t want to teach. What could be done for kids living in those spots was his question. Self-directed learning was one pos­sible solution, but were kids living in slums capable of all that much self-direction?

“At the time, Mitra was head of research and development for NIIT Technologies, a top computer software and development company in New Delhi, India. His posh twenty-first-century office abutted an urban slum but was kept separate by a tall brick wall. So Mitra designed a simple exper­iment. He cut a hole in the wall and installed a computer and a track pad, with the screen and the pad facing into the slum. He did it in such a way that theft was not a problem, then connected the computer to the Internet, added a web browser, and walked away.

“The kids who lived in the slums could not speak English, did not know how to use a computer, and had no knowledge of the Internet, but they were curious. Within minutes, they’d figured out how to point and click. By the end of the first day, they were surfing the web and-even more importantly-teaching one another how to surf the web. These results raised more questions than they answered. Were they real? Did these kids really teach themselves how to use this computer, or did someone, perhaps out of sight of Mitra’s hidden video camera, explain the technology to them?

http://r20.rs6.net/tn.jsp?e=001vln7_heHl4wTkvFZvHnwJl86tCteGzL-aT6KJSAiJTQUtXd7LPH_IKlZ6NkbJKbxQdw9LD_Xlhdt56PCxb5O9IRc80s-tb0AXFSvkWD5JCdDCFIqvuXCfjd_yMNUZMfOwAWQhf7kSbRkfDSvGofowpVo4OKaHTs0YfpFppwVG92eiDTVXvJVejiRzeCg1dTzzwqm-AUqB3awROuEYPllMPp8xemqL6w1cSKyCzKXj1ATmdjHrltBdHU71DLcKj626rPGWrn9ooDpruElprRIg4TIjWBO317G2k9_vTfi_-saUsbahILStrtwKGEo36T8yohzVg3Pb3euYg8vJZKfwG3ahyWSHZbfDqvgEZmawP2m0WGg9zWFyg==

“So Mitra moved the experiment to the slums of Shivpuri, where, as he says, ‘I’d been assured no one had ever taught anybody anything.’ He got similar results. Then he moved it to a rural village and found the same thing. Since then, this experiment has been replicated all over India, and all over the world, and always with the same outcome: kids, working in small, unsupervised groups, and without any formal training, could learn to use computers very quickly and with a great degree of proficiency.

“This led Mitra to an ever-expanding series of experiments about what else kids could learn on their own. One of the more ambitious of these was conducted in the small village of Kalikkuppam in southern India. This time Mitra decided to see if a bunch of impoverished Tamil-speaking, twelve-year-olds could learn to use the Internet, which they’d never seen before; to teach themselves biotechnology, a subject they’d never heard of; in English, a language none of them spoke. ‘All I did was tell them that there was some very difficult information on this computer, they probably wouldn’t under­stand any of it, and I’ll be back to test them on it in a few months.’

“Two months later, he returned and asked the students if they’d under­stood the material. A young girl raised her hand. ‘Other than the fact that improper replication of the DNA molecule causes genetic disease,’ she said, ‘we’ve understood nothing.’ In fact, this was not quite the case. When Mitra tested them, scores averaged around 30 percent. From 0 percent to 30 percent in two months with no formal instruction was a fairly remark­able result, but still not good enough to pass a standard exam. So Mitra brought in help. He recruited a slightly older girl from the village to serve as a tutor. She didn’t know any biotechnology, but was told to use the ‘grand­mother method’: just stand behind the kids and provide encouragement. ‘Wow, that’s cool, that’s fantastic, show me something else!’ Two months later, Mitra came back. This time, when tested, average scores had jumped to 50 percent, which was the same average as high-school kids studying bio-tech at the best schools in New Delhi.

“Next Mitra started refining the method. He began installing computer terminals in schools. Rather than giving students a broad subject to learn-for example, biotechnology-he started asking directed questions such as ‘Was World War II good or bad?’ The students could use every available resource to answer the question, but schools were asked to restrict the num­ber of Internet portals to one per every four students because, as Matt Rid­ley wrote in the Wall Street Journal, ‘one child in front of a computer learns little; four discussing and debating learn a lot.’ When they were tested on the subject matter afterward (without use of the computer), the mean score was 76 percent. That’s pretty impressive on its own, but the question arose as to the real depth of learning. So Mitra came back two months later, retested the students, and got the exact same results. This wasn’t just deep learning, this was an unprecedented retention of information. …

“Taken together, this work reverses a bevy of educational practices. Instead of top-down instruction, [these ‘self-organized learning environments’] are bottom up. Instead of making students learn on their own, this work is collaborative. Instead of a formal in-school setting for instruction, the Hole-in-the-Wall method relies on a playground-like environment. Most importantly, minimally invasive edu­cation doesn’t require teachers. Currently there’s a projected global short­age of 18 million teachers over the next decade.”

Author: Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler

Title: Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

Publisher: Free Press

Date: Copyright 2012 by Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler

Pages: 174-176

Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamand is by Free Press

So long as education methods stay as they are, human society will suffer, there will be continued poverty, continued subjugation to authority, and a level of ignorance that flat lines across the vast spectrum of society from the highest to lowest levels of archaic pecking order hierarchy.  That hierarchy is what public school is all about, and it is what holds back mankind the most from achieving a level of greatness that is on the tip of everyone’s tongue with a free mind able to comprehend that something is terribly wrong.  Public education does not work as well as the ‘grand­mother method’: just standing behind kids and providing encouragement. ‘Wow, that’s cool, that’s fantastic, show me something else!’  Kids, because of the tendency toward personal profit will work hard to get that personal encouragement from a figure of respect.  They do it for the same reason that a business owner tries to make money, or a video game player tries to score more points, or a man takes a woman to dinner hoping to have sex with her—it is the prospect of profit that drives the world, and for kids, all they usually need are the tools with limits removed and an encouraging voice to push them along—and “POOF” success is nearly 100% guaranteed.

Government schools are not about success, they are about combating this essential truth about human beings—they are at war with profit of every kind—the wish to socially engineer such desires from human minds and in so doing, they are destroying what it means to be human.  This is why they are detriments to society, and villains where they think of themselves as heroes.  They are in denial of the role they play in the destruction of mankind—and all those politicians who help them do it are as complicit to the act as a witness to a murder keeps their mouth shut, and provides a get-away-car for the bandits who committed the crime.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

“LIE OF THE YEAR” Awarded to Barack Obama: The Uncle Onyango The President never knew about

President Obama will be known for a lot of things—but his most virulent memory will be that he lied about the Obamacare legislation that his democrats crammed down America’s throat against their will with manipulation, and coercion.  The Tampa Bay Times Pulitzer Prize winning Politifact.com called Obama’s faux pas the Lie of The Year for 2013 by saying:

It was a catchy political pitch and a chance to calm nerves about his dramatic and complicated plan to bring historic change to America’s health insurance system.

“If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” President Barack Obama said — many times — of his landmark new law.

But the promise was impossible to keep.

So this fall, as cancellation letters were going out to approximately 4 million Americans, the public realized Obama’s breezy assurances were wrong.

Boiling down the complicated health care law to a soundbite proved treacherous, even for its promoter-in-chief.  Obama and his team made matters worse, suggesting they had been misunderstood all along. The stunning political uproar led to this: a rare presidential apology.

http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/article/2013/dec/12/lie-year-if-you-like-your-health-care-plan-keep-it/

Most Americans including me won’t sign up for Obamcare.  We’ll pay the fine and do without the insurance as the medical industry will decline.  Choices in healthcare will erode away because doctors won’t make a reasonable profit off the enterprise.  But that isn’t the worst aspect of Obamacare—even thought it’s very bad. The worse thing about Obamacare is that it compels every human being in America to participate whether or not they want to—or be subject to IRS harassment, and possible jail.  Just for being born in America, Obamacare compels those human beings to participate in government healthcare, and that is just a joke.  It is so audacious, so over-the-top ridiculous that it hardly merits addressing.  Most people haven’t even paid attention to that little notion—until now.  They do now because the law is being implemented, and it is started to affect them—and their reaction is understandably negative.

The government is demanding participation into a service they are ruining with their very presence—and the audacity of their expectations is simply unfathomable.  The sheer arrogance of their demand that all human beings participate in their scam is beyond measure.  And even as bad as all that is—they knew people would be upset, so Obama lied to the American people.  He has lied about his background and qualifications, he has lied about his mistakes—such as Benghazi, he has lied about his true intentions as president, and he certainly lied about Obamacare to the facts provided by Politifact.com.  Obama is a bad person, and unqualified to be president for the lies that he’s been caught in—let alone all the lies that have not yet been confirmed.  He should not only be impeached, but jailed like a prostitute or a drug dealer.  He is of the same quality.

Obama is one of those scum bags who scoots through life-like a dog with an anus itch who keeps everyone from looking at what he’s really up to with charisma which comes naturally for him.  He is worse than a typical crooked used car salesman because he doesn’t even have a car to sell, only compulsion to purchase a communist product that nobody wants or go to jail if the fines aren’t paid.  Obama lied to get Americans to listen to him, and he has put coercion behind the effort through the IRS and Department of Justice to execute the task.  A used car salesman might lie to make the sale, but at least consumers get to take home a car.  With Obama, they go home with less than the started with in cancelled insurance policies, lost opportunities for health care quality, and a lot more money out of their pockets.

The President of The United States is a liar, a cheat, and menace to American civilization.  And the proof of that statement is in what has happened with Obamacare.  The White House can spin the reason for the lies all they like, but the fact remains Obama lied and he will always be remembered for it.  Being a liar is the legacy of Barack Obama, and in the publication Politifact.com he has forever the distinction of having the “lie of the year,” which is quite a feat considering some of the things that have happened in 2013 in the public arena.

But that’s not all Obama lied about.  Recently Obama’s Uncle Onyango Obama received his green card after waiting 50 years to get it, living illegally in Boston.  President Obama has previously denied that they knew anything about Uncle Obama.  Yet at the deportation hearing recently, The White House had to grudgingly stand by the uncle—and within a few hours Onyango finally received his green card so he could stay in the country.    Here is the report from France 24:

A US immigration judge ruled on Tuesday that President Barack Obama‘s Kenyan-born uncle can stay in the US as a lawful resident, despite his decades of dodging deportation and a 2011 drunk-driving arrest.

Judge Leonard Shapiro made the decision after Onyango Obama, 69, testified that he had lived in the US for 50 years, been a hard worker, paid income tax and had been arrested only once.

Asked about his family in the US, he said he has a sister and two nieces, then added, “I do have a nephew”. Asked to name the nephew, he said, “Barack Obama,” then added, “He’s the president of the United States”.

Obama testified that President Obama stayed with him for three weeks in Cambridge while the president was a student at Harvard Law School.

“In our tradition, your brother’s kids are your kids as well,” he said after the hearing.

Wong said he didn’t receive any special treatment and was happy with the judge’s decision.

If the government appeals, a notice must be filed within 30 days. Wong said Obama could get US citizenship after five years.

The White House had said it expected the case to be handled like any other.

In the president’s memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” he writes about a 1988 trip to Kenya and refers to an Uncle Omar, who matches Onyango Obama’s background and has the same date of birth.

Onyango Obama is the second Obama family member to be found living illegally in the US. His sister, Zeituni Onyango, the president’s aunt, was granted asylum in 2010 after her first asylum request in 2002 was rejected and she was ordered to be deported in 2004.

http://www.france24.com/en/20131204-obama-uncle-green-card-kenya-usa/

Bet you didn’t know any of that dear reader…………did you?  Obama is a liar, the worst kind there is.  He lies about lying.  Yet he is in charge of the highest office in the world, and he’s likely one of the biggest criminals.  So is it any surprise that Obama has been designated the “lie of the year” honor?  And does anybody think these are the only ones?  If you do, the joke is on you.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

The Wonders of Jeff Bezos: How the FFA and other federal agencies hold back the world

What I enjoy most about playing the Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO game online is that the environment is so vibrant.  There are interesting robots co-existing with many life forms freely, flying drone droids, and interstellar flight between planets that a player can embark on.  The worlds and their options are full of cool new technology, and wonderful concepts that point to the kind of world we could have in America under open capitalism.  As I watched the Sunday news over this past weekend displaying the pro Street Car people in Cincinnati struggling to keep that old technology of public transport viable, I couldn’t help but think how ignorant, and backward it was.  Street cars were the premier form of transportation when few people had personal cars, and electricity had just been invented—at the start of the progressive era.  For progressives, the Street Car is the symbol of their movement’s beginnings, and the love of that era resides exclusively in such sentimentally.  Nearly at the same time that the nightly news was running the Cincinnati Street Car story CEO Jeff Bezos from Amazon.com was dropping a bomb on 60 Minutes showing the future of package delivery, a personal drone that can deliver packages directly to the doorstep of a residence with the simple click of a button.

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/12/01/how-amazon-aims-to-revolutionize-old-school-package-delivery-one-drone-at-a-time/

Bezos is correct when he stated to 60 Minutes that the biggest hindrance to the new delivery service is not technology, but the government through the FFA.  It will be the government which will hold back Amazon’s newest innovation, not the process of innovation itself.  But this is an old story.  The government wants street cars which take them back to the start of their political power—the progressive era of Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.  Government could have never created the kind of delivery system that Jeff Bezos did.  If not for Bezos the United Postal Service would still be hand sorting most of their mail the old fashion way paid for by a stamp.  Because of Bezos I can order just about any book I desire ever printed in the world and have it delivered to my doorstep within two days—and that is a tremendous gift.

Most of the purchases I make regarding entertainment come from Amazon.com.  I prefer to see the packages arrive on my door step as opposed to the pain in the ass of driving to get things at an actual store.  I love brick and mortar stores, but when it comes to making a purchase, I rarely ever buy something from an actual store.  It is purchased on Amazon.com because of the options they offer, reliability of service, and the convenience of the whole process.  With this new proposal of Amazon Prime Air if I need something that Amazon.com has in their inventory, especially business related items like toner cartridges, circuit boards, or even ram memory, I could click on the Prime Air delivery method and have that item delivered to my place of business within 30 minutes and that is a huge.  That is less time than it takes to drive to Staples and back if an IT type of situation arises during the business day.

Of course those in government don’t understand why anybody would want to be in such a hurry.  They think people should wait a few more hours to ride a street car as opposed to driving a car, that flying by air should take two hours of prep time before the flight because of the TSA for “safety,” and that the old postage service ran by the government should continue to be subsidized when UPS and FedEx are so much better—and more reliable.  Government doesn’t care about speed because their paychecks don’t depend on it.  Government wages are stolen from tax payers often against their will—so there won’t be much sympathy from the FFA over Amazon’s new proposal.  Look for the warning videos coming out by the government admonitions about the Amazon bots running into little children and cutting them into thousands of pieces, or drones falling out of the sky and damaging property–the federal government does not want Amazon shipping packages in such an innovative fashion.  Individual employees working for government of course will, but the general philosophy of government does not.

For twenty years I have been swearing by Paul Moller’s M400 Skycar which does exactly the same thing as the Amazon Drones, except they haul people instead of packages.  Moller is about 70 years ahead of himself as society has not been ready for his invention.  It will take years of science fiction–video games, novels, television entertainment and an older generation of old foggies who want stupid street cars and concrete highways to die off so that inventions like personal flying transportation can mature into the main stream.  CLICK TO REVIEW.  That’s why I play video games instead of spending my spare time in the real world—because the real world is too slow for me.  I don’t want the restrictions of what the FFA offers, or anything else coming out of government.  The propellers on the Amazon drones are only as dangerous as the little toy helicopters that kids can fly inside a house and could hit a human being at full speed and have no impact on their skin.  But the FFA will surely use the exposed propellers as an area of concern hindering Amazon’s implementation of their plan.

The one variable in this whole endeavor is Jeff Bezos himself.  I’m a fan to say the least.  He is the kind of person who carries the world on his back in the classic Atlas way.  He is an innovator and a wonderful example of a generally good person.  He’s charitable on his own accord, and he’s a capitalist—he’s a class act and the kind of person every American should strive to be.  He is smart to not attack the government directly.  He handled the 60 Minute interview wonderfully placing his ideals out to the public in the way that Walt Disney used to—with epic fashion.  I enjoy 60 Minutes as a group of good reporters who do generally honest work, but I don’t normally watch them as I’m usually too busy.  But after the epic Bronco game versus Kansas City, I gave it a chance because of the Bezos story, and I’m glad I did.  It might have been one of the most important news broadcasts I will see in my life time because of what such a revelation means.

Folks, I have told you here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom about cures for cancer, I have told you about regenerative growth for tissue, I have told you about all 11 dimensions known to physics, and the potential of personal air transportation on a larger scale, and now here are these Amazon Drones, a reality today only hindered by government regulation.  I have told you as recently as two days ago about the potential of Zero-point energy—which means free electricity for everyone—everywhere.  I have told you about the benefits of Thorium power and a host of many other topics.  I have also railed against public education, colleges, and politics with a fury because it is those things which stand in the way of mankind having the kind of inventions that Bezos is proposing.  Government is not trying to help society, it is killing it.  Bezos can’t say such things because he’s a billionaire and the IRS and many other regulatory agencies would crack down on Amazon.com faster than lightning during a summer storm if he did.   The way people like Bezos keep the looters at bay is to put money in their pockets and shut them up—which is a dirty little secret nobody wants to discuss in the light of day.

Meanwhile, as I wait for all the progressive looters of government to die off, and or run out of money—I’ll just continue playing The Old Republic where I can have all those things right now in a fantasy environment online.  When I play those games I don’t have to wait for the FFA to decide after 10 years of deliberation that the Bezos concept for Amazon is “safe” enough, because by then the propeller technology they are using today will be outdated in favor of something else—something even more reliable—like anti-gravity demonstrated through The Hutchinson Effect.  My anger at government is that they are just too damn stupid, and too limited in their thinking.  They are slow, lazy, and have the intellect of infants without the initiative to learn.   They are slugs to innovation and keep the world from being what it could be as decided by the free market.

Amazon.com led by Jeff Bezos is one of the most successful companies in the world and is a creation of American ingenuity.  It wasn’t invented in Russia, China, Japan, or any country in Europe.  It is the by-product of innovation, capital, and will-power that rose to influence quicker than government knew how to stop it—or rob it blind.  Because of who they are, and what they represent to every human being on planet earth, and their political neutrality, they have the best chance of getting their drone program through the FFA.  The Amazon Drones are the gateway to the future, and it was delivered to America’s doorstep on 60 Minutes to the eyes of the entire world.  Soon, with a lot of effort behind Bezos and many millions of dollars of money thrown at stuffy politicians and government looters, Bezos has the best shot at making something actually happen which is very, very exciting.  But what he is doing for Amazon.com now is something that a country functioning from pure capitalism would have already had twenty years ago, and something that the FFA will surely hold up for another ten—for no other reason but their own stupidity.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

The Chimera of American Courts: Erne Tertelgte’s epic standoff

If anyone were to wonder what the Founding Fathers would think of America today, people might have had a glimpse when Ernie Tertelgte, age 52, represented himself in court against misdemeanor charges of obstructing a peace officer and resisting arrest relating to an Aug. 31 incident where he was cited for fishing without a license, according to KBZK. He argued that “universal law” allows him to hunt for food to feed himself.

Tertelgte then proceeded to continue talking and was asked again to remain silent as a dumb founded judge sat helplessly in her chair bewildered as to how to proceed.  The court room employees who process daily dozens of cases and over the course of a year, thousands—purely for the revenue that is brought to the courts through guilty pleas was uncertain how to proceed against Tertelgte’s statements which were as close to what might have been heard from 1776 to 1791 in America as anyone living today could hope to encounter.

“I cannot ma’am in honor of the Constitution of the United States,” he said. “I can’t allow a man who carries British recognition for the purposes of British ministerial law to continue to persecute me.”

“I cannot ma’am,” Tertelgte continued. “I have to honor the founder’s ma’am. I honor the memory of those who fought and died that we can be free of this type of thing.”

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/11/24/i-am-the-living-man-protected-by-natural-law-you-are-probably-going-to-want-to-watch-this-epic-court-testimony/

There were of course snickers from those who have become used to blind compliance at Tertelgte’s naiveté.  After all the Montana man was failing to recognize over 200 years of progressive legal manipulation, feel good policies, and the minds of many academic scholars who have added their own words to The United States Constitution over the years—the case law from many attorneys, the decisions of Supreme Courts, and the stump speeches and laws created by many Presidents.  Tertelgte simply wanted to be left alone to fish, but even the remote state of Montana had imposed itself into the basic food gathering activity demanding that those who wished to participate pay them a fee.  Most Americans have been broken like a beaten horse to do as they are told, to speak when they are told to speak, and to think what they are told to think—so Tertelgte’s words seem alien to them, spoken from a different time by a different people.

The argument that Tertelgte cited in court is essentially the same type of thing that the plot to my 2012 novel Tail of the Dragon was all about—a rural personality colliding with the statists of a court room and refusing to acknowledge their power over individuals.  That novel was based on my personal experiences in court which were so numerous that they nearly number the stars in the sky on a cold cloudless winter night.  Starting at about the age of 25, I stopped hiring lawyers and just did the job myself which really angered judges—because they expect their victims to pay the proper lawyer fees and to respect the game they are playing.  But when lives and fortunes are at stake, it is foolish to leave freedom to chance letting some snot-nosed lawyer who golf’s with the judge a few times a year to throw you to the wolves with politeness—or some invisible courtroom etiquette that is made up of legal tradition vacant of respect for individual rights. 

To the 30-year-old millennial who spent the night before the recent Thanksgiving thinking about their drunken college days in intoxicated bliss, but proudly displaying their teaching certificate from those days on a wall at their home, or a law degree over their office desk, the words of Ernie Tertelgte might as well have come from E.T. The Extraterrestrial.  Tertelgte is a dinosaur from another time and another place—a Constitutional purist that naively failed to give the modern minds of statism the time of day.  Those same millennial’s drinking heavily on the Thanksgiving’s Holiday watching YouTube clips of Tertelgte on their iPhones with upturned pinkies and giggling tirades lack a mind to even understand that it was Tertelgte who was right and they who were on the path to extinction.  As remote and distant as Ernie Tertelgte might seem to the modern human being, it is Tertelgte’s position which is sustainable, not the modern statist who accepts the fines of the court blindly without question and the authority of a judge to rule over their lives with an ignorance bred in Europe.

Tertelgte was right when he stated that the American court system was British ministerial law.  In the years after the formation of the Constitution—beyond 1791, the American people a little homesick from mother Europe bounced back into the mentality of their former rulers.  They did this by default—because freedom is hard, and requires people to be self-reliant.  Freedom requires gumption, and intelligence—aspects of modern life that are grossly missing.  Governments through their control of the school systems, the national park system, taxes, regulation, and virtually every facet of modern life have taught people not to think—to just turn up their pinkies around a beer glass and chug—then make fun of people like Ernie Tertelgte so to discourage others from following his example.

Europe and its policies of kingdoms, statism, princes, princesses, peasants and all the hierarchies of obedience was rejected in America for a brief time in human history, and The American Constitution captured that philosophy in a bottle to preserve for all time.  It didn’t take long for European loving lawyers, judges, and homesick settlers who knew of nothing else to snap back into the mentality of their homeland, and attempt to reshape the Constitution into a document that reminded them of home through case-law.  That is what the judge sitting helplessly upon her throne facing down Ernie Tertelgte in her court room—paid for by the subjects of her little kingdom–was measuring the bearded man in the tri-cornered hat against.  She wasn’t judging him by the American Constitution, but against 200 years of progressive erosion of that same document.  Tertelgte simply rejected that progressive erosion and insisted on the original interpretation of the American Constitution.

Of course Tertelgte was found guilty and fined $150, which he responded, “you are trying to create a fictitious, fraudulent action, I am the living man, protected by natural law.”  He then yelled, “Do not tell me to shut up! I am the living, natural man, and my voice will be heard!”   The only thing that Tertelgte said in all his utterances that was wrong was that the judge had already played her part in creating that fictitious and fraudulent action—and for many years had done the same to thousands of others.  Thousands of other judges just like her had done the same to millions, and millions of other people over the course of their lifetimes.  Out of all those people only Tertelgte and a handful of others have taken the time to challenge that fictitiousness with solid fact based on the actual Constitution.  The fiction is the judge and all the years of case-law generated through years of many people believing that through consensus belief trumps the original law of the American Constitution.   Then those illusionists insist that the participants of the legal system also take part in that chimera because the laws of democracy demand that majority will rules, and so long as the majority wishes to participate in a fiction, then that fiction becomes their reality.  Under that mentality people like Erne Tertelgte are the ones accused of not having his feet in reality, and are snickered at for not having a realistic understanding of modern law and its protocols.  But in actuality, the only one living by the Constitution is Tertelgte with a bold authenticity that deserves respect—even if it did cost him $150 bucks of stolen money from the court to justify their jobs for the entertainment of an epic American fiction called the court system.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

 

Why Voting For The Lakota Levy Is Stupid: Darryl Parks talks about the 2013 school levy on 700 WLW

It was good to hear Darryl Parks maintain his position on school levies, and specifically, the Lakota school levy.  I have purposely avoided doing talk radio during this latest campaign primarily because the levy fighting going into the future needs to grow and more people must to be involved—and for some talk radio can be an intimidating forum to utilize.  Aside from that, there is already a large collection of talk radio interviews that have been done in the past, which are still relevant online.  More broadcasts talking about the same topics tend to become counterproductive, so they were avoided strategically.  Also involved was the issue that No Lakota Levy wished to maintain their message of fiscal responsibility within the Lakota district where I have evolved into questioning the basic premise of public education and believe that it should be abandoned all together in its current form.    Darryl’s position is closer to the No Lakota Levy view, where mine isn’t something that many people are ready to hear, because the answer requires difficult choices—and admissions.  Yet Darryl is well aware what is driving the Lakota levy and he talked about it on his Saturday, November 2nd show which can be heard below.  The Lakota levy is about wealth redistribution, it is a socialist concept created by progressives, and it’s unconstitutional.  It is all about taking from the rich and giving to the poor which is the ugly underbelly of all school levies—but one that gets avoided because of the implications pointing to communist roots.  Nobody wants to admit that their school where their children are attending is a socialist concept.  Nobody wants to face that the educations they received when they were young was a communist creation, but if they think hard enough, the admission becomes easier once they understand the meanings.  CLICK HERE TO REVIEW.  Darryl smartly stays off that topic, but discusses the result—the cost of the Lakota levy for people with $300K to $400K homes will be an additional $600.00 to $800.00 a year and that will likely mean no summer vacations, no big purchases of new furniture, televisions, or even air travel to an overseas destination.  If the Lakota levy were to pass, the people with the most money would have to make sacrifices that those without so much money would otherwise have to make.

Most of the supporters of the Lakota levy are either people who have ridden the coat-tails of those who do have money yet don’t understand the real value—so they are quick to give it away, or they are simply new parents who want what’s best for their children and they believe that public education complete with busing services is the best way to give it to them.  These types make up the vast majority of the levy supporters, and they believe that a “rich man” or a well to do household can afford an extra $800 dollars in taxes a year because they have a $400,000 house.  They believe that if a business can afford to carry payroll, or the owners have a net worth of over a million dollars that they are required to pay more in taxes so that the child of a family not so fortunate can have an education.  Well—anybody who thinks that way is wrong.  That belief is a communist sentiment brought to America through the labor union movement, and it is at the heart of every single school levy.

Just before the Lakota levy vote, superintendent Mantia sent out the following letter to business owners all across West Chester and Liberty Twp.  She likely broke the law sending it because it is campaign literature for levy passage created during her contract hours of work which is technically against Ohio Revised Code 3315.07, which states in part “no board of education shall use public funds to support or oppose the passage of a school levy or bond issue or to compensate any school district employee for time spent on any activity intended to influence the outcome of a school levy or bond issue.”  But whose going to prosecute her………..Sheriff Jones?  He has a deal with Mantia if the levy passes, so he’ll gladly look the other way and so will all the state prosecutors.  The letter from Mantia is a thinly disguised reminder that the business community must pay their “fair share” as determined by the needs of the many.  Mantia means to strong-arm the business community into supporting higher taxes so to avoid the public disgrace of refusing.  I know quite a few business owners in and around Lakota and not a single one of them believe the arguments Mantia presented on the document.  They know that less than 5% of the proposed levy revenue is going to the kind of things she addressed.  The rest of the money is going to Lakota employee raises.  Yet they have felt compelled in the past to just go along to get along.  If the school raised taxes, they’d just raise their prices of service.  This worked for decades until the present time when consumers have proven that they have had enough, and won’t purchase items at a higher price.  So businesses are no longer willing to pass off those higher costs as they are between a rock and a hard place.  If they chose not to support a levy they get called names like selfish, mean-spirited, and have the PTA organizations threaten boycotts against their businesses, such as what happened after the last election.  CLICK HERE FOR REVIEW.  If they pass the tax increase off onto their customers, they will lose business.LAKOTA-LETTER[1]

The levy advocates have a bottomless pit of need and they believe that because a homeowner owns a Mercedes, spends $800 on a meal for business clients, and has a home valued over $500K that they have an obligation toward higher taxes—and they are dead wrong.  Because the taxes never stop, one of those wealthy tax payers today might pay taxes at $600 to $800 more a year every four years for the life of their businesses and will find that they will either have to move to a district with less taxes, or let the value of their assets decrease so that there will be nothing left once their children inherit their lifetime of hard work.   Lakota business owners and residents have been relatively smart in voting down continued school levies—not passing one since 2005.  West Chester and Liberty Township are thriving economic communities where other places like Fairfield, Finneytown, and Evendale are struggling because they are yesterday’s has-beens.  They said yes to similar letters from school superintendents in the past and it cost them their livelihoods.

Butler County in general was built on a foundation of lower taxes.  Why does anybody believe that Bass Pro Shops is leaving Forest Park and moving to West Chester—or here is a better question—why is the economy at Forest Park so bad that the mall there is a virtual ghost town?  One, it is taxes, two it is too much government housing and a demographic population that lives off government money.  The people of Forest Park have less value for money because the government sends them a check in the mail.  Therefore, they do not enjoy the kind of things that Forest Fair Mall tried to offer them over the years as far as retail shopping.  So companies moved out or went out of business.  They went to West Chester where the taxes are less, and people appreciate nice things.  West Chester is still driven by capitalism where Forest Park is drowning in socialism—a string of unfortunate and unintended consequences.  I know this first hand, about twenty years ago I was a personal driver for a Bengal player.  It was my job to drive him around and make sure he got home safely while he jumped from bar to bar.  If people got too close, it was my job to make sure he was covered.  I’d drive this guy all over the city to every hot night spot in town.  Since I didn’t drink or do drugs, I was a good candidate for this kind of thing and wasn’t tempted to play along.  At the end of the day, around 4 AM I’d take him home to his wife.  They lived in a nice part of town full of promise.  They lived in Forest Park, and thought of it as a land of luxury.  Today, that same home is surrounded by Section 8 housing and a welfare demographic that has very few people officially employed.  That is why Forest Fair Mall has failed, and the former Bengal player is no longer married to that woman.  Bad investments lead to bad lifestyles.  Bad lifestyles lead to failed businesses.  Failed businesses lead to empty malls like the one at Forest Fair Mall.

Every resident in the Lakota school district has an obligation to defend their homes and property from the clutches of big government spenders like superintendent Mantia.  Failure to say no to them will result in the same kind of declining community as seen in present day Forest Park, Fairfield and many other places where high taxes and demographic changes have destroyed their communities.  In Lakota, it is the targets of Mantia’s letter that make the community such a nice place, the restaurant owners, the developers, and the financiers.  If they get frustrated with the tax rates and pick up to move, they will leave behind in Lakota a community with crushing tax rates yet no businesses to pay them, because nobody takes the risk of owning something without expected to earn money from it.  The value of any money earned goes down with every tax increase.  Communists, or those trained in the ways of communism have no value for money—they find themselves seeking government employment because that is the only place they can earn a decent living thinking the way they do.  Superintendent Mantia does not understand business.  She thinks because she gets a hand shake and a bit of idle chatter at a charity event from many of the people she sent that letter to, she is on good terms with them.  But she’s not.  What she gets is appeasement the way a person who gets pulled over by a cop tries to appease the cop so that they don’t end up in jail.  Business owners want to keep the peace and the looters out of their pockets.  Taxes like the one proposed for this November levy permanently change wealth, and gives business owners less money to invest in the community, and that is not a good thing.

The communists who devised this ridiculous plan knew what they were doing.  They hated the rich, and sought to level the playing field in every endeavor.  Most levy supporters when asked enough question will reflect the communist roots of their belief when they state that everyone could afford to pay just a bit more for the good of the children.  Many of them will only pay $30 dollars more a month, and since they have kids in the school, it’s no big deal to them.  It’s cheaper than driving their children to school if they are lucky enough to get busing back.  They may cut one trip out to eat with their family a month, and pay their higher tax without further complaint.  But for business owners with millions of dollars in assessed property value, they will be taxed much higher, and the levy supporters with much less personal value will directly benefit.  It’s called confiscation of wealth by the needy majority, and it is a communist concept—and a sickening enterprise.

The school levy at Lakota and every other school district is simply a redistribution of wealth scam that uses children to fulfill a political agenda that as Darryl Parks stated, is unconstitutional.  For the same reasons that superintendents like Lakota’s Mantia ignore Ohio Revised Code 3315.07, authorities under state control ignore the unconstitutional nature of the school levy system because they have allowed the monopoly of public education to dominate the political arena with a communist sentiment that belongs in Kazakhstan, not West Chester, Ohio.  There is nothing good that comes out of tax increases, but everything bad—an element missing from Mantia’s letter.  She likely has no idea what the people who she sent that letter to really think of her, and probably thinks they believe what she is saying as much as she does.  But the difference between her and them is that they actually produce things, while she is just another government parasite, a worker living off the tax payers and again advocating more taxes so her ilk can sustain their unsustainable wages for a few more years.  If there is no other reason to vote against a school levy anywhere in Ohio, it is because the concept is a flawed one that goes against everything America is supposed to stand for—capitalism.  School levies are wealth redistribution attempts by progressive minds for aims that are not beneficial to thriving economies.  And every one of them should be voted down because they won’t end in 2013.  They will continue well into the future until there is no money left to loot and people finally say no because they have nothing left to give.  For the sake of Lakota, and the community that feeds it, the NO VOTES need to come now, while there is still money being produced in an economy that is the envy of Ohio.  Voting NO on the Lakota levy goes a long way to keeping that status.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

‘The Naked Communist’ With Matt Clark: The root of the Green Bay Packers

IMAGE_713Over the weekend Matt Clark asked me to do a radio segment based my blog series dedicated to The Naked Communist.  CLICK HERE TO READ THE LATEST.  Of course I agreed even though I was traveling, specifically in the heart of labor union country–Wisconsin.  It was the perfect platform personally for me to do a radio interview as I had been thinking voraciously what the cost of communism brought to America through the labor union movement had been.  The evidence was very easy to see in the blue-collar towns of Wisconsin.  While traveling, a woman sat next to me and told me her life story even though it was quite clear to her that I was trying to read.  She complained about air travel and how cramped the seats were, even as her girth was spilling over into my side.  She complained that the airline companies just wanted to make “profits” by cramming as many people into the plane as they could—that it would make more sense to have more flights per day so people didn’t have to be so cramped.    She then proceeded to declare that automotive travel wasn’t any better.  Modern cars broke down too often and the car companies were greedy and only wanted “profits” and they were evil.  I asked her what companies were supposed to stand for if not for profit, and she said that they should stand behind the people who work for them.  I asked her where she was from, and she stated proudly with a bold Wisconsin accent…………..Madison—the birthplace of the labor movement and progressive party in America.  I said, ah-ha, I understand now.  She smiled a bit wondering what my reference indicated.  I then asked her how she felt about communism—and she went on a half hour tirade about how her father fought against it in Vietnam, and she hung an American flag from her porch every day and was happy to see the communists fail in Russia.  I listened with sadness as she had no idea that the roots of her thinking were fashioned from communism, and that she was a functioning collectivist shaped by progressive Wisconsin politics over the last century.  It was in this context that I gave a very animated interview from my hotel room to Matt Clark during his Saturday radio show on WAAM in Ann Arbor.  Watch and listen:

Wisconsin politics during the 20th Century was shaped by Robert Marion “Fighting Bob”[1] La Follette, Sr. (June 14, 1855 – June 18, 1925) He was an American Republican (and later a Progressive) politician. He served as a member of the U.S. House of Representatives, was the Governor of Wisconsin, and was also a U.S. Senator from Wisconsin (1906 to 1925). He ran for President of the United States as the nominee of his own Progressive Party in1924, carrying Wisconsin and 17% of the national popular vote.

His wife Belle Case La Follette and sons Robert M. La Follette, Jr. and Philip La Follette led his political faction in Wisconsin into the 1940s. La Follette has been called “arguably the most important and recognized leader of the opposition to the growing dominance of corporations over the Government”[2] and is one of the key figures pointed to in Wisconsin‘s long history of political liberalism.

He is best remembered as a proponent of progressivism and a vocal opponent of railroad trusts, bossism, World War I, and the League of Nations. In 1957, a Senate Committee selected La Follette as one of the five greatest U.S. Senators, along with Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, John C. Calhoun, and Robert Taft. A 1982 survey asking historians to rank the “ten greatest Senators in the nation’s history” based on “accomplishments in office” and “long-range impact on American history,” placed La Follette first, tied with Henry Clay.[3]Robert La Follette is one of five outstanding senators memorialized by portraits in the Senate reception room in US Capitol. One of America’s top schools for public affairs, located at the University of Wisconsin-Madison bears his name.

From 1901 until 1906, La Follette served as Governor of Wisconsin. During his first term, he proposed to set up a railroad commission, imposed an ad valorem tax on the railroad companies, and established a direct primary system. The Stalwarts blocked his agenda, and he refused to compromise with them.

During the 1904 elections, the Stalwarts organized to oppose La Follette’s nomination and moved to block any reform legislation. La Follette began working to unite insurgent Democrats to form a broad coalition. He did manage to secure the passage of the primary bill and some revision to the railroad tax structure.[2]

When the legislative session concluded, La Follette traveled throughout Wisconsin reading the “roll call”; that is, he read the votes of Stalwart Republicans to the people in an effort to elect Progressives. During this campaign, La Follette gained national attention when muckraking journalist Lincoln Steffens began to cover his campaign.

With the press coverage and his successful re-election, La Follette rose to become a national figure. His message against “vast corporate combinations”[2] attracted more journalists and more progressives.

As governor, La Follette championed numerous progressive reforms, including the first workers’ compensation system, railroad rate reform, direct legislation, municipal home rule, open government, the minimum wage, non-partisan elections, the open primary system, direct election of U.S. Senators, women’s suffrage, and progressive taxation. He created an atmosphere of close cooperation between the state government and the University of Wisconsin in the development of progressive policy, which became known as the Wisconsin Idea. The goals of his policy included the recall, referendum, direct primary, and initiative. All of these were aimed at giving citizens a more direct role in government. The Wisconsin Idea promoted the idea of grounding legislation on thorough research and expert involvement. To implement this program, La Follette began working with University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty. This made Wisconsin a “laboratory for democracy” and “the most important state for the development of progressive legislation”.[2] As governor, La Follette signed legislation that created the Wisconsin Legislative Reference Library (now Bureau) to ensure that a research agency would be available for the development of legislation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M._La_Follette,_Sr.

In 1911, La Follette set up a campaign to mobilize the progressive elements in the Republican Party behind his presidential bid. He made a disastrous speech in February 1912 before a gathering of leading magazine editors that caused many to doubt his stability.[12] Most of his supporters deserted him for Theodore Roosevelt[citation needed].

Embittered, La Follette opposed both Roosevelt and William Howard Taft in the 1912 election. When his former ally, Governor Francis E. McGovern, supported Roosevelt, La Follette broke with him, allowing the conservative Republicans under Emanuel Philipp to take control of Wisconsin in the decisive 1914 election. La Follette’s forces were out of power in the state from 1912 to 1920.[13]

In 1924, the Federated Farmer-Labor Party (FF-LP) sought to nominate La Follette as its candidate. The FF-LP sought to unite all progressive parties into a single national Labor Party.

However, after a bitter convention in 1923, the Communist-controlled Workers Party gained control of the national organization’s structure. Just prior to its 1924 convention in St. Paul, La Follette denounced the Communists and refused to be considered for the FF-LP endorsement. With La Follette’s snub, the FF-LP disintegrated, leaving only the Minnesota Farmer-Labor Party.

Instead, La Follette formed an independent Progressive Party and accepted its nomination in Cleveland with Democratic Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana as his running mate. The American Federation of Labor, the Socialist Party of America, the Conference for Progressive Political Action and most of the former supporters of the FF-LP along with various former “Bull Moose” Progressives and Midwestern Progressive movement activists then joined La Follette and supported the Progressive Party.  Many who today call themselves “progressives” sincerely trace their political roots to the Progressive Parties of Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Wallace or Robert La Follette, Sr.  But many others on the left nowadays call themselves “progressives” as a deceptive euphemism for more precise, less popular words that describe their real political objectives and ideology – words such as “socialist,” “Marxist,” or “Communist.”  Even through La Follette denounced the communists during the 1924 convention it was only politically that he separated from them, not ideologically.  He did however attract the softer version of communism to his party affiliation in the American socialists.

Wisconsin as I traveled around it emitted the classic hope of the early 20th Century progressives—vast spans of middle-class residences, labor unions, and a generally anti-corporation mentality.  Socialism was everywhere, even in the Green Bay Packer paraphernalia at the airport the only NFL team that is owned by “the people,” not a corporate owner. All money earned goes back into the club.

The Packers are deeply rooted in the Wisconsin city where they were founded in 1919. They were named after a local meat processing plant, the Indian Packing Company, which paid for the first uniforms. Starting in the 1920s, the Green Bay Football Corp. made a series of public stock offerings. In 1950, 1,900 local residents each put up $25 a share to buy the team.

From the Packers’ web site:

“Green Bay Packers, Inc., has been a publicly owned, non-profit corporation since Aug. 18, 1923, when original articles of incorporation were filed with Wisconsin’s secretary of state.

A total of 4,750,937 shares are owned by 112,120 stockholders — none of whom receives any dividend on the initial investment.

The corporation is governed by a board of directors and a seven-member executive committee.

One of the more remarkable business stories in American history, the team is kept viable by its shareholders — its unselfish fans. Even more incredible, the Packers have survived during the current era, permeated by free agency and the NFL salary cap. And, thanks in large part to Brown County’s passage of the 2000 Lambeau Field referendum, the club will remain solvent and highly competitive well into the future due to its redeveloped stadium.

Fans have come to the team’s financial rescue on several occasions, including four previous stock sales: 1923, 1935, 1950 and 1997.

To protect against someone taking control of the team, the articles of incorporation prohibit any person from owning more than 200,000 shares.”

http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Who_owns_the_Green_Bay_Packer_team

Silently, many who profess to see communism work in America look at teams like the Green Bay Packers and the progressivism of Wisconsin as hope that socialism and communism will still work.  Not long after my radio interview with Matt, which became quite animated at times, I had the profound desire to return to Florida and bask in the capitalism of the Disney World complex.  Wisconsin and the people there were too bleak and small-minded for me.  They were friendly, but dramatically philosophically limited which was evident in gross abundance by the small town cafes and general business climate.  If not for their dependence on the federal government, their social experiments into communism through the mask of progressivism would have failed long ago.   Suddenly I am a massive Scott Walker fan as it gives me hope that Wisconsin residents are just now pushing away their history of communist acceptance through Robert La Follette, Sr’s progressive party.  As for the woman on the plane with me, she was the kind of person that Matt and I spoke about……..her foundation beliefs were rooted in communism, only she didn’t know it.  She believed falsely, just like the union brothers of Wisconsin, home of the Harley Davidson motorcycle and the dream quest of traveling to Sturgis every August on a freedom driven pilgrimage.  The labor unions and collective ownership the unions, and Harley riders generally subscribe to are experiments in communism advocated by 20th Century politics implemented before the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

There was almost nothing I liked about Wisconsin.  I was never so happy to board an airplane as I was upon leaving.  When the wheels left the runway, and the plane moved into the sky, I could feel the oppressive pull of socialism drifting away beneath my feet.  As I looked through  the window down at the rows and rows of middle-class homes stacked in rows of uniformity I could have been looking down upon a small European town also infected with socialism—soft core communism.  The persistence of that socialism doesn’t dissipate until just south of Chicago where Indiana is now a right-to-work state and Ohio at least outside of Cleveland still embraces capitalism.  I didn’t argue with the woman, I just listened to her while trying to read my book.   She was a mixed up concoction of many political ideologies given to her by years of public education, left-winged controlled media empires, and unionized neighbors who falsely believe they are American patriots just because they stick a flag on the back of their Harley Davidson motorcycle—built in Wisconsin by union workers supporting their publicly owned football team, the Green Bay Packers.  Wisconsin is the result of what The Naked Communist warned about, the continued experiment into socialism at the expense of capitalism and a state I am eager to see turn away  eventually from the communism of the labor movement and an embrace into the kind of capitalism that drives the rest of America.  It is time to close the book on the dark days of communism in America so to save the mind of the poor people of Wisconsin from a doomed philosophy that has left them ignorantly blissful from their lowered expectations and contorted patriotism.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!