The episode they spent so much time talking about in the Google Meeting is called The Lawless. It was quite spectacular. It’s hard to believe that Dave and his crew was able to cover such a large expanse of story in just over 20 minutes, but the results are exceptional by any standard of cinema endeavor. I hope Star Wars: Clone Wars sticks around for a while, because after 5 years of broadcasting, they are every bit as good if not better than when they first aired in the late summer of 2008 with the feature film of the same name. Dave Filoni is a wonderful Star Wars director that in the context of history will give J.J. Abrams a run for his money in the magic and lore that has become the Star Wars Mythology. I am looking forward to many more future episodes so I can watch them with my grandson and introduce him to such a vast wilderness of ideas that is Star Wars in a morality play that is unequaled in the history of the world.
I get the typical questions still almost every day I do it, wondering why I ride a motorcycle in the harsh cold and falling snow. During the span of days where 6 AM temperatures hovered around 15 degrees in early February, 2013 through black ice and drifting snow I rode my motorcycle as I always do to the inquisitive curiosity of many. They don’t understand why a 45 year-old man is riding such a vehicle and suffering through the painful cold when I clearly don’t have to. My answer is one that many can’t understand logically, but it has to do with maintaining a Survivor mindset, one that does not falter under harsh conditions and can continue thinking when a physical reality is filled with pain. That answer leaves even more people scratching their heads because they don’t understand why such skills would be necessary in today’s world. But over the years I have done a very good job at surviving anything that has come my way, and I have been so good at it that my family has always joked that I should be a contestant on the TV show Survivor. In fact, half-way serious back during the third season of Survivor when they were going to Africa I actually tried out for the show. I was only 33 years-old at the time and went so far as to obtain my passport to appear on the show. Below is my audition tape that I sent to the producers. Their criteria at the time was to pick one item that I would want to bring with me on Survivor and describe why. I picked my 12 foot bullwhip.
The fun thing about watching that old video now is that I haven’t changed that much from then to now. My oldest daughter was just a little girl at the time as she held targets for me like she always used to. I filmed that little audition tape while my wife was making breakfast with her mother on a brisk November morning mainly because I wanted to send a message to my kids not to be afraid to try anything even if the odds are very much against you. Often the fun is in the journey, so it was delightful to assemble those clips with my daughter and allow her to take an active part in helping me try out for such a large television production while at the same time giving me a creative way to tell her the back history of how I came into using bullwhips as a hobby.
By now there is over a decade of Survivor episodes so we all know how the game has been played. Even though I haven’t played that particular game on that particular show I have played the game in real life very effectively. Some who know me best have seen to what extremes I am willing to play the game of Survivor in real life. I’ve had to do it with several companies, personal triumphs, also with politics and in hindsight I had very good instincts to try out for Survivor all those years ago. Watching the kind of people who have won over the last decade and studying how they’ve won I would have had a good chance at winning the million dollar prize, which is why that show has always been so popular. The large financial incentive in the game pits many different types of personalities against each other in a successful duplication of reality. After all, we all play Survivor in our everyday lives in some form or another, so we enjoy watching the show as it strips away all the masks that such competition hides behind. In the TV game Survivor the settings are always exotic and primitive with the basic human condition exposed under the rugged conditions and easy for viewers to study—which is why the show has been so successful.
Even though I didn’t get the opportunity to be on that show I have survived many personal episodes over the years, and you might be surprised dear reader how many times my use of the bullwhip has bailed me out over that span. Much of the time it is knowing when to be intense, when to form an alliance, when to break an alliance, when to be unpredictable, when to be predictable, when to show your cards and when not to that dictates who wins and loses in the game of Survivor which we all play every day. Being good at Survivor requires an understanding of who is scheming against you and who is simply trying to use you to get closer to their eventual goal of which you share with them the final prize. Much of the time alliances are formed with those you know eventually must be taken out before the game ends and you must detect when they are going to make a move against you so that the aggression can be headed off before hand.
In that regard the game of Survivor that we are all playing is not for a million dollars or even to survive in corporate America. The game of Survivor we are playing now is one for all the marbles in American philosophy. For the reasons that John Boehner has sided with Barack Obama in many cases while publicly pretending to dual with him is to maintain the alliance the two have formed along the lines of what George Soros recently revealed about a strategy against the Tea Party being played out in Davos, Switzerland. Boehner wants to protect machine politics as does Obama, so they both have that trait in common and find the Tea Party as a threat to their personal philosophy. They may not agree on much else, but they know they must get rid of the Tea Party before they fight each other, so they form a union, just like in the show Survivor. CLICK THE LINK BELOW FOR MORE.
The weakness of the Tea Party movement is that they are inheritably honest by nature so they find themselves often on the short end of the stick when playing against deceitful competitors. I too have the very same problem. It took me a long time to work through this handicap, which I figured out in my teenage years. I cannot be as deceitful as the typical politician and cannot change sides so quickly as others with less ethics have proven so capable of. The Soros/Obama plan is to provoke that honesty prevalent in the Tea Party “into the forest” as they put it, so that they can regain control of the two-party system. Locally we have seen traditional Republicans move away from the Tea Party for this very reason, because they are betting that the Tea Party will not survive, and they fear exposure. This trend is so popular that even education reformers like Governor Kasich are quickly changing their tune. He has formed an alliance with labor unions designed to earn his re-election and a run for President in 2016 by turning against the Tea Party ideas that he ran on. Kasich may not philosophically agree with the labor unions, but he will side with them now so that he can advance to a political level where he can betray them at a future tribal council—(metaphorically speaking).
What is required if you are a Tea Party supporter is a change in strategy that “they” don’t anticipate. As we move forward with fighting school levies, preserving the Constitution, and maintaining fiscal responsibility in government, it will require new alliances and a will to cut up the old ones into little pieces so that they cannot betray us in the future. If a deceitful manner is not an option for the Tea Party, which I know before hand that it’s not, then it requires a toughness that the opposition does not have to beat them.
I have learned over the years that the willingness to be “tougher” than a rival can provide leverage over the more manipulative in the game of Survivor. Opponents who play “politics” and believe they can outspend, outsmart, and outwit a competitor while sitting in the safety of their homes or their luxury cars are ALWAYS at a disadvantage to a rival who is not afraid to bleed, fight in the trenches and rip off the masks of those who desire to remain hidden behind them. In this way it is possible to always gain the upper hand on a rival who desires to play Survivor from a level of comfort.
If I had been on the show Survivor all those years ago, I would have done well using my athleticism to win a majority of the immunity challenges, and I would have done well otherwise by created and dismissing the proper alliances at the proper time. And the reason to this very day that I still do push-ups every day, and ride my motorcycle in the extreme cold, the snow, the rain, the intense lightning storms is to remind myself to never get comfortable, to always be ready to make an adjustment in alliances to one that is successful and will allow victory in the game of Survivor. Typical politicians like Barack Obama, John Boehner, John Kasich and financiers like George Soros are playing the real game of Survivor with the standard “outwit, outplay and outlast” motto. To win, all those elements are important and cannot bring victory to someone who doesn’t excel at all those traits. However, I would add “toughness” to that motto. The ability to be “tougher” than your opponents with all other things being equal proves that victory comes to the tougher player who plays as honestly as possible nearly 100% of the time. “Toughness” beats all the billions of dollars that people like George Soros spends on politics nearly every single time in a head to head competition of wits. That is the short answer to why I ride my motorcycle in the cold February months and leave the car in the garage 95% of the time. “Toughness” is not something you can purchase; it has to be earned the old-fashioned way, and is the extra boost that any competitor can use to defeat their rivals with assurance.
If the Tea Party can maintain their sense of toughness while all these alliances change hands then it will be possible for a handful of tough-minded rebel rousers to dismantle all the billions that George Soros and his minions have spent to advance a global “progressive” society, and it can dismantle the two-party buddy system that is modern politics. Weak minded competitors who can be purchased because of their love of comfort do not make good allies for the mentally tough anyway, so there is no loss when they abandon us in favor of George Soros type’s power and money. In the end, honesty, toughness, and tenacity added to maintaining the ability to outwit, outplay, and outlast is a winning formula that will take the Tea Party into the real life finals in the game of Survivor. The above formula will give the Tea Party a chance to do what many think is impossible—to save America from the advancement of global progressivism. The real game of Survivor is not on TV but is being played out right here right now in this time and the winners will be those who play it best, and last to the bitter end.
As for me, since the time that I first made that video for the third season of Survivor and now I have survived many, many, many metaphorical tribal councils—enough to have won the TV game many times over. Some of those real tribal councils have been every bit as vicious as what can be seen on that television show each week for over a decade now. I anticipate that over the next decade I’ll survive even more that are every bit as ferocious. There will many alliances that are broken, many tears that are spilled, and there may even be some blood—but in the end, it’s all about “outwitting, out playing and outlasting” competitors with my personal addition of playing with honesty, toughness, and tenacity. I am confident that I’ll win far more immunity challenges than I’ll lose because at 6 AM in the morning through the pouring rain, the drifting snow, the black ice and extreme cold, I’m the only one on a motorcycle, which is why I do it.
In the study Jerome McKibben made a compelling argument when he said “This isn’t a Lakota problem or a Cincinnati problem or a Ohio problem, we see this trend in successful suburban school districts all across America.” He went on to present the finer details of his analysis.
Population in school district –
Has increased from 74,433 in 2000 to 94,639 in 2010
Is projected to grow to 100,516 by 2020
Number of 10-14 teens is projected decrease from 8,266 in 2010 to 7,320 in 2020
The median age is projected to go up from 36.9 in 2010 to 40.7 in 2020
Ages 50+ are projected to go up from 26,729 in 2010 to 36,264 in 2020
McKibben cited that districts similar to Lakota have high graduation rates, high rates of students going to college, and high rates of graduates leaving their hometown. “They don’t marry the boy or girl next door,” McKibben said. “They marry the boy or girl in the next dorm.” McKibben also said that the fastest growing household type in this area over the next ten years will be empty-nesters. Hmmmmmmmmmmmmm.
I don’t dispute what McKibben said in the least. But I think we should expand on the notion of the boy next door who goes to Lakota and is successfully urged to go to college and marry the girl in the next dorm—who then settles in a big city in some far away land beyond the realm of small town Lakota. I think the situation is far more complex than that.
The birth rates are lower these days as a direct result of public education’s platform of easy sex without consequences. Public schools have been teaching children sex education earlier than the fifth grade so as a result children well before they even hit puberty are thinking about sex and using birth control to avoid pregnancy. In addition to that public schools have also been very supportive of same-sex relationships which is quite extraordinary given the statistical results of such relationships to the bottom line of tax bases. The government school instruction is like everything progressive–people are born a certain way and have no control over their thoughts and feelings—making them eternal victims always in need of some sort of government assistance—whether it is civil rights protection or laws making opportunities equal to them beyond discrimination. Government is ceaseless in their sales pitches for their services. The progressive instruction that has been given to two decades worth of American children is that actions do not have consequences, and as a result we have entire generations of children who do not believe that if they have a baby out-of-wedlock that it is their responsibility to care for that child. They believe they can put the child on welfare to cover the costs of raising the child. They also believe that same-sex relationships can be as productive as traditional relationships, and the results are beginning to show up in statistical analysis like the McKibben study.
When a school system like Lakota begs for more money due to their teacher’s union contract that is coming due in 2014—so they can pay their teachers even more money—they forget who pays the bill and what kind of people make up a community’s most productive. Tax payers who must pay the salaries of teachers haven’t in many cases seen a pay increase of any kind since Obama has been president. School administrators are assuming that there will be enough homes in a district to pay their enormous tax bills and that the desire to pay will never diminish. But as I indicated the other day, more and more homes are being foreclosed on as families trying to make ends meet are falling into dire straits in an economy that does not favor them. Tax payers are tapped out, leaving very little income for families to even pay their cable TV bills with, so they are slowly eroding away into foreclosure.
Most of the time with financial hardship comes the divorce of a couple and the breakup of a family. Public schools like that statistic because the education institutions fancy themselves as caretakers of community’s children anyway so broken families strengthen their social beliefs that government is the center of a family, not the parents—but their thoughts are short-sighted. Without a family struggling to pay their bills and raise their families in a community, there aren’t enough people who desire to send their children to public schools and pay those extraordinary taxes on their property for the rest of their lives. Compound that short-term problem with the progressive strategy of supporting same-sex relationships and another issue emerges. A gay couple cannot produce a child. They can adopt a child, but they cannot do as traditional America has and pop out 6 or 7 children from one woman who would then grow up and become productive members of their communities. Progressive education instead has taught young people to wait until their 30’s to have children and once they do, they only have a one or two. While these young people are waiting to grow up, they spend their time in apartments in urban environments and spend many years experimenting sexually to “find themselves” which is a reckless waste of time for a young person. The result of this “unproductive” period means that families are not being created—which means that the tax base is not being replenished—meaning that Lakota and many public schools do not have enough tax payers with kids in the school system to buy into their product.
The people on the opposite side of the table from me on this issue, the blind school levy supporters will say that they are forced to teach what “The State” deems necessary for the curriculum and they have no choice but to follow the progressive agenda and the bi-product of that commitment. Their common response to me is that it’s “bigger than all of us,” meaning that they feel they are too insignificant to make any kind of meaningful impact, so why try. Well my answer to them is the same one that I utter here continuously in what school board member Julie Schaffer calls my “rants.” Most of the laws that Lakota claims they have to adhere to were shaped by labor union lobbyists and dim-witted politicians who secretly look for middle age love in bathroom stalls with same-sex partners or hang out at rest stops looking for a quick hit from an over the road trucker missing his wife. Who are these types of people to judge a young child who wants to experiment sexually, so progressive sex education finds its way into public school curriculums, and administrators go right on along with it because where else can they make six figure incomes just for showing up and sipping coffee half the morning in the teacher’s lounge. The school employees put up and shut up, and do what they are told, and never question their reality.
The problem is much more complex than Jerome McKibben’s report analyzed fully. Public education is a victim of their own stupidity and short-sighted world view. They spent years trying to tear down the American family with social engineering experiments that belong in the nightmarish novel Brave New World rather than in the lives of our children and they caused their own destruction with progressive strategy. The boy next door who moved away to California after he married the passed-out girl in the dorm next door after half a dozen other boys had their way with her incapacitated body wait another 7 years to have children so they can put the memory of their “wild college days” behind them. By the time the couple decides to have children, they only have two before the woman hits menopause and loses the ability all together. This number goes down even more if the boy next door moves in with a boy from New York and they conduct a 15-year relationship marching in gay pride parades with colorful outfits wearing flowers in their hair. The anal sex the two conducts in their lives will not produce a child, so while the couple live it up in their urban apartment, children are not a part of their lives, meaning they most likely won’t buy a 200K home in the suburbs—unless they work for government in some way and can afford it.
So thanks to progressive philosophy most homes in suburban school districts like Lakota will not have children in them—and the owners of those homes won’t be willing to pay over $3,000 to $5,000 dollars a year in property taxes to cover the collective aims of only 15% of the community’s total population. The funding model for public education is falling apart before their very eyes and it is their own mistakes that created it. That is why it is so much fun to fight public schools on these school levies, because the education institutions are arrogant enough to ignore these facts and prove how ill prepared they are to deal with statistics preferring the flighty fantasies of progressive social engineering over the logic of thought one hundred percent of the time. They are the architects of their own destruction and always defend themselves behind the backs of children, which makes them deplorable and a delight to expose.
If you haven’t watched them yet, please do watch the videos above for support information. It is important to understand this changing world. All kidding aside, this is a serious matter. That last video is a real eye-opener.
This financial crisis is the paramount topic of our day. The state of our economy is changing rapidly and soon many of those who thought that finance in America was an impregnable fortress will soon learn what epic failure and a commitment to socialism has done to us all. With student debt collapsing our economy as we speak, the old idea of retiring at 65 years old off a nice pension and other government driven revenue is gone forever. Instead Americans in their mid-40’s on down will have to face a new reality for financing their lives and the luxury of one income to handle all their affairs just won’t do.
In my own life I have begun writing books to help fuel my own later years with additional sources of personal income, because the old traditional model will become obsolete in the coming years. With the collapse of the American economy so to will the idea of working one job for eight hours every day go away. In the future it may take 3 or 4 jobs requiring 10 to 30 hours each week to commit to, and that is the result of the massive plundering that has went on in our nation’s government.
What this means is that a massive exodus of tax contributions is about to hit The United States government and they are not prepared to deal with that grim reality peacefully. I recently spoke about the cost of high taxes pushing people out of their homes. An empty home does not contribute taxes to a school district, or a police department, or those beloved firefighters embedded into our minds as heroes from the Fisher Price toys we played with as children. When citizens can no longer make money off their jobs or own property, there is nothing for government to tax—there is no way to steal the money away from the citizens—and the government will go bankrupt once people lose the will to participate. That will is quickly disappearing.
A failure to address these issues back when Darryl Parks first did his broadcast with Porter Standsberry has caused this current crisis to impact the lives of millions of families, and that is just the tip of the iceberg. I put this recent broadcast up today so that a trend can be seen by the intelligent reader/viewer. These broadcasts are more than doomsday entertainment, they are more than skeptical speculation; they are quite real in their announcements of economic disaster. I believe that the downward economic trend is unavoidable and those who will survive are those who adjust their lives to these changing conditions. The keys to this new survival are to keep student debt down. Keep credit card debt low to non-existent. And do many things for a living—not just one specialized thing. Avoid high looting taxes because with every tax dollar you throw away to government, you will have to work a part-time job or two here and there to cover the cost of those taxes. Keep it simple and stay out-of-the-way, because things will get ugly before they get better. And most importantly, think like a “producer” not a “consumer.” Conditions will get ugly because too many people are in denial of the present state of affairs, and refuse to acknowledge the true economic status of The United States. Take broadcasts like the one done on 700 WLW and cherish the information, because failure to act will lead your family down a dark path that will most likely end very poorly for all involved.
Enjoy the Superbowl. Hope your team won. Depending on how you answer that will determine your ability to avoid trouble in the coming days.
When it is wondered what I have against public education and government in general, I can understand that unless people have seen what I have up close and personal that they may not have context to relate with. Few people look too deeply at any problem, and it requires a cavernous look to understand why public education and their employees are bad for society at large–why they are detrimental to the human condition. Most people are happy to accept out of convenience the opposite–that public education is the savor of society’s children and their parents because government schools offer a glorified babysitting service that has a subtle social engineering objective driven by progressive politics. My problem with public education and the government, of which they are an important part, is that they are filled with participants who are bullies seeking to impose evil with a thug-like imposition of submission against individuals to a collective sum.
Since I stepped into the public education debate in the spring and fall of 2010 with a logical argument against excessive spending I have had many bullies attempt to conform me into some type of collective submission. Those bullies have learned, what over 40 years of a blood soaked past filled with similar bullies have learned about me—that it only gets them more name-calling and violence, not less. In my entire 45 years on this earth I have never backed down from a bully no matter how big or powerful they thought themselves to be and I won’t start now. And there have been a lot of them. Anyone who does some checking into my past has come to that conclusion on their own by now. I never look for these fights, but they happen because I refuse to be moved by any collective force whether it is the federal government, or an entire city’s police force who is taking money off the top of drug sales using kids to sell marijuana to high schools. For me the individual will of every American citizen is the most sacred element of existence and I do not like to see individuals twisted and manipulated into the will of any collective organization no matter what it is. This is why I hate governments, I hate mobsters, I don’t like authority when it seeks to break the back of individuals for some “greater good,” and this is what I have discovered public education to be completely about—breaking down the individual will in children and forcing their parents to pay for it with public extortion.
I would not care so much about the activity of public education evils if I were not “forced” to pay for it, but because of the collective extortion practice called “taxation” I have no choice, so my only recourse is to confront the bullies—which I have done. However, when you get involved and start fighting these bullies, and others see you doing it, you learn about all the individual cases of institutional bullying that are going on around you. I have met since 2010 many victims of public education bullying where the institutions and its servants impose themselves upon the free-will of many individuals. Often I have taken up the banner and offered to fight on behalf of those individuals making some of the fights very public which of course attracts more people from all over Ohio who send me their stories and want help fighting their individual circumstances. The posting I provided yesterday is one of those stories. A family was a victim of institutional manipulation and cover-ups designed to protect the careers of the participants at the expense of a little girl whom I became quite found of in my dealings with the family. The family eventually left the state to start a new life elsewhere, and I can’t blame them. I helped them the best I could, but the institutional imposition of public education is an ominous beast that doesn’t give a damn about the little girl or the family—it only wants to fill its belly with the lives of individuals.
I continue to get these pleas for help, and they have only increased over the years. I would hope that they would trend down, not up, but in the case of a letter I received the other day shown below, they are getting worse. When I read this letter I immediately felt for this family. I hate to hear that a family is about to lose their home, that their children won’t have a place to lay their head at night and study in comfort. I hate to hear that the Social Security tax increases that went into effect at the start of 2013 are putting a family like the one below under financially—that they are only able to buy groceries by charging them on their credit card. I hate to hear that they are trying to fight their school levy just so they can keep their house because an extra $20 a week will crush them, because they’ve already given up their cable TV, and their home phone as needless expenses. And I hate that the only place a family like the one shown below feels they can turn to is my email box. Read the letter for yourself. They are from a school district in central Ohio. I removed their name and district for their own protection.
From: ********** ************** Date: Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 9:38 PM Subject: Re: School levy To: Rich Hoffman
Hi Mr, Hoffman, I would really love for you to contact me. I am currently fighting my school against our levy; I am currently tied up in a law suit because I made a political website for voting no on this levy in November. I am speaking for all the poor families that cannot afford anymore money being taken from us. Our so-called American dream is becoming a nightmare, my family can no longer afford our home due to the over spending and taxing of others on my husband’s paycheck and the schools using our home as their personal ATM. I feel like I am fighting a losing battle, the school board wont listen to anything my family has to say. Can you please contact me with some advice because the school is putting up the next levy for May voting. My family needs your help!!! I am in the ****** school district, I am being sued by the campaign manager for the schools vote yes party, I was banned along with two other woman for asking questions, nothing out of line just general questions, so I made a Vote No Facebook page, the law suit is not my concern so much as I do have an amazing attorney, but more my concern is with them trying to pull this levy off again after it was voted down in November by an 11% margin. I am treated poorly by the board anytime I ask questions when the only thing I am trying to do is keep the quality of life at home for families like mine, you see we no longer even have the money to go to see a simple movie with our children, we have already eliminated cable TV, home phone service, the only thing we still have is the internet, it is required as I do have one home schooled child due to the levy in November, I felt scared and did not want my son to be under the conditions at school so I pulled him out. I don’t feel like I can defeat these people, they do not care about families like mine. I know that the first week of 2013 our first paycheck was again short another $63.00 when we currently did not have extra money and the school just wont quit they say they are short revenue, but my house hold is also short revenue so how do they expect to get blood from a turnip, we are wiped out financially and our home is already on the chopping block, if it does not sell by April we may be forced to give it back to the bank. I am so frustrated as a parent I feel so sorry for my children and others children in our situation, while the school admin drives around in their fancy cars and living it up in those fancy houses when so many in our district are losing their homes. I know all of 2012 we had to use credit cards to buy groceries with to feed the kids. Something’s gotta’ give! Please help the families in this district!
With every letter I get like the one above I increasingly hate the system that advocates more and more of that behavior. I used to be able to maintain enough distance to coolly lay out the argument of why public education has a spending problem, but when they responded to my suggestions with thuggish resistance—well, it only pissed me off. Once it was realized that logic was not welcome in the public education debate, and that the institutional commitment toward collectivism sought to stamp out the lives of couples like the one above, that was the end for me.
I am not impressed with Governor Kasich’s new public education funding model. I see that he has given in to the bullies of Columbus and my respect for him is much less than it was. I commend him for trying to do something, and I think he thinks he’s being clever about his education reforms. But in the end, he will lose because he is afraid to punch those bullies square in the mouth like they deserve. Bullies are bullies when they attempt to impose upon individuals a collective goal, and I have absolutely no tolerance for it—at all. I never have, and I never will—the more I see of it, the worse it gets. With that said if you are a member of the media reading this and you side against the kind of people who sent me the letter above by giving a free media pass to the thugs who cause the trouble, you are as bad as the bullies—because you participate in the destruction of families everywhere one dollar at a time till they are going bankrupt because of a $63 dollar tax increase out of their personal income in 2013. Nobody is looking out for them, and that is truly a sad, and a terrible story in modern America.
I’m sure that people who support school levies from the teachers and administrators to the PTA moms that I have had so much fun with don’t know about families like the one above. They don’t want to know, until tragedy strikes their families with a major lay-off, or another form of income loss. Instead of trying to act as individuals they hedge their bets by befriending the bosses of the collective—who fuel their lives off tax dollars funneled by government. The real motive of collectivism is to hedge against the danger of being an individual, so they have no care for those who have decided to live on their own merit—who fall on hard times. Secretly, they desire to see families like this crushed leaving them no place to turn but a stranger who has a tendency to stand up to bullies hoping that they can do something on their behalf. The collective seeks to make an example of individuals who try to go it alone—like the family above has. To the collective, resistance is futile, and they love to see families suffer who are not part of their public education clique.
I have been shocked as my daughter and her husband have been house hunting to learn how many $170K to $250K homes are empty of their former residents. 10 years ago so many homes in foreclosure were a rare sight that had behind them a social stigma that was negative. It absolutely breaks my heart to walk through these homes and see that the residents left in haste with televisions, refrigerators and toys left behind. In some cases pictures are still on the walls, and these are not isolated homes. Most of the homes are in this condition and it is a sign of bad times that aren’t just coming—but already here. Those homes are proof that there are many who are in the exact same situation as the couple above. The only difference is that the woman who wrote me had the courage to face public scrutiny by admitting that her family is struggling while the others were reluctant to admit such things publicly. Most of them probably kept their financial situation a secret till the very end, till they had to leave their home so fast that they couldn’t even take their pictures down off the walls. For everyone who participates in such an erosion of freedom, they are bullies who deserve their asses kicked, and not tomorrow, but today! I despise such people. The root of my anger is in the knowledge that they are willing to see individual lives crushed so long as the collective good can be maintained and I find that absolutely evil. So I do not care what those on the “other” side think of me. I do not care if they want an interview from me, or if they even want to be cordial with me. I only want to see collectivism crushed under the boot of individualism and the first step in that is to stand up to the bullies of collectivism in glorious fashion—something I’m prepared to do and have spent a lifetime nurturing. For those who hope that I will run out of gas—sorry to say—my engine just warmed up. The fuel I run on is letters like the one above. Families like that deserve justice, and if there is any good in the world, they will eventually have it.
Kline’s ascension into such a powerful position proves the motivations of these professional education types. Many people from within the Lakota School System’s halls of secrets gave me very direct information regarding the power struggles between Kline and school board member Joan Powell pointing to internal politics that make Washington politics look like a day at Chuckee Cheese’s Pizza Palace. Based on some of those controversies, I thought anybody would be insane to give a promotion to someone like Kline. As tax payers we are the employers of these public servants so a recommendation to another employer would not come from me. It was well-known that Kline wanted the top job at Lakota and one of the reasons he left Lakota was to pursue a superintendent job elsewhere once the top job went to Karen Mantia–the former teacher from Sycamore and retired superintendent from Pickerington, Ohio.
All these educators will tell their communities—especially when they are begging for money during levy requests—that they “care only about children.” But to my eyes based on my experience supported by the mountains of evidence their real intentions speak otherwise. These education professionals are simply in the business of using children to give themselves positions of social power they could get no place else but in a government school. This doesn’t make them bad people so much as people who stand in the way of real education reform by true management of tax payer resources. The personal quality of these people is dramatically and noticeably lacking. They care only about the money they can make and how they can advance their careers and little else. Those are traits that are not against the law, and in some circles of professional endeavor like lawyers, politicians, day traders, car salesmen, and education professions, it’s actually rewarded—as Kline’s promotion proves.
I know some of these people personally, and I can say that I believe that they believe the shit they are shoveling is gold and diamonds. They have convinced themselves of their own scam—but when I look into their shovels the evidence is clear as to who has the proper perspective. The whole charade game is a joke at best, and is made worse because education is an internally driven political nightmare that benefits only the very, very few. That nightmare is exacerbated by the lack of competition that would prove quickly the management skills of a former high school principal who thinks he’s a CEO to be faulty next to the skill of a real CEO who might compete with Lakota or West Clermont under a free enterprise system where costs would be forced downward and profits upward. In government schools, where there is no competition, it is tax money that drives everything, so nobody cares if the employees have any real quality about them. This allows the most scandalous and manipulative paper pushers in society to advance above those who are more qualified but are suppressed under the unionized labor force. Government favors the back-stabber, not the competitively superior, so government schools will always lack quality because of their inbred monopoly that is supported by tax revenue.
Those of us in the education reform movement joked a few months ago of how long it would take Keith Kline to work his way into the superintendent job. The joke from some of my friends was that it would be within a year of Kline transferring from Lakota to West Claremont. I actually said that the West Claremont School Board wouldn’t be that stupid–that surely they were aware of the things that went on at Lakota. Well, apparently, I was wrong. Every time I think that public education and its employees have hit a new low and proven the need for School Choice in Ohio, something like this happens—which sets the bar lower and lower. The announcement of Keith Kline as superintendent of West Clermont is equivalent for me at learning that Pee Wee Herman just became President of The United States. Any hope that you might have that the office of President had any “quality” flies out the window upon such an announcement which would seem ridiculous talking about it here. But it is no more ridiculous than learning that a person like Kline has been given the top management job of a major school district. Without question, West Clermont will be asking for another school levy now, because that is a sure sign of mismanagement and lack of leadership. With Kline as superintendent, look for wages to increase, and tax hikes to become the norm in the school district of West Clermont.
For more context to this story read below an interview I gave to the Associated Press during 2011 and measure the comments made there with the situation we see today.
All of public education exists to provide good jobs to the very few—and the process that promoted Keith Kline is a perfect example of everything that’s wrong with that system. I don’t blame Kline for playing that system to his advantage. I blame the apathy that allowed that system to be there for an advantage to be taken.
I sympathize deeply with Tom Egger and his neighbors on Wethersfield Drive who are fighting the proposed Kroger Marketplace construction. They do not want to see a shopping center with thousands of people parked at the doorsteps of their homes. I say that knowing very well many of the people who are involved directly in the development of some of these properties in Liberty Twp and West Chester. There is only one thing that I respect more than the right of a property owner to make money off their properties and that is the rights of the home owner to protect their individual plots of land. To me residential homes are equally valuable to a plot of land that is currently just a field. The developer makes such a plot of land into a revenue generating entity and that is very valuable. But that value does not exceed the value of the individual property owner.
When the developers bought the plot of land in question they spent a lot of their own money on it with the understanding that the proper arms would be twisted to make way for the eventual commercial development of the property and provide a return on their investment a decade down the road. Many of these developers tie their money up in properties for many years before they ever see the opportunity to get their money back in developments like the Kroger Marketplace. Developers will purchase these plots of land based on initial zoning maps that show 20 year forecasts where current day zoning may be residential, but future zoning shows commercial development.
This is where the fight over Agenda 21 comes into our local communities and why I will soon be at odds with the same people I worked with in NoLakota Levy to fight the local school levies. The zoning maps are created by big government lovers who socially engineer communities around Agenda 21, and developers, trustees, and business finance uses those zoning projections to make their investments into communities. When fights break out over these changes the fight always happens between the developers and the residents when the real culprits are the zoning central planners who are either dead and in a grave by the time the zoning change is proposed or retired comfortably in a Florida condo living the rest of their lives off a government pension. The villains are nowhere to be found as they made their plans without voter input away from the eyes of the community leaving residents to fight it out with developers over plans nobody ever knew existed, and are helpless to stop because politics sides most of the time with the developers. When campaign times come, the developers are the ones who make the financial contributions to politicians, not Tom Egger and his neighbors, so local government tends to roll over the rights of the private citizen, which is what will happen with Kroger at the end of Wethersfield Drive.
Central planners from twenty years prior will point to the “greater good” as a reason to step all over the property rights of private citizens with emanate domain justification, such as what happened with the Butler Country Regional Highway. Without the Regional Highway and the many lives it destroyed by basically stealing away the properties of the people in its path there would not be a current Bridgewater Falls shopping center or the upcoming Liberty Way development would not even be a thought. So developers will often use the “greater good” as a reason to justify the developments they wish to build. Developers are used to opposition to their projects and they often know how to play the politics in their favor. For people like Tom Egger knows all too well, often the zoning approvals occur regardless of how many people show up to speak against a proposed zoning change—because the deals for the property were made long ago by forces who do not represent the homeowners, but the financial investment into the community.
Usually when the property owners lose in these zoning fights; they get a nice financial settlement that makes the pill go down a bit better. Over time, most everyone forgives the imposition. Government workers and developers know people will forget and forgive over time, so in the short run, they will steam roll over the private citizen because they can, and because they have millions of dollars of their own money tied up in a development while the homeowner is only investing 200K to 300K in their private property. In this way, the developer can justify their position.
However, the developers are wrong. Communities like Indian Hill have never yielded to such pressures as commercial development that is over zealous and a direct response to Agenda 21 community planners who want to see utopia like communities complete with fountains, side-walks, easy access to gas stations, and plenty of convenient banking. This is why Indian Hill is filled with extremely valuable real estate, because the zoning was never infused with Agenda 21 strategies. Instead, Madera, Deer Park, Kenwood and all the surrounding communities have felt that wrath with very mixed results. What Tom Egger is fighting for is the long view return on his investment. His property will not increase in value because a Kroger Store sits at the end of his road. It clutters up his life unnecessarily, because when he moved to West Chester Kroger was down the road, not at the end of his driveway. Developers will say that a Kroger Store was always slated for that property, but the real estate agent surely didn’t tell Tom Egger and his family that when they invested in their home over a decade ago.
People like Tom Egger have just as much value as property owners as the developers who bought the big field of the proposed Kroger site. Egger and his neighbors should not be steam rolled over because they do not pour thousands of dollars into local politics, or have millions tied up in a potential real estate deal. The rights of the individual rules 100% of the time over those of the collective good—there is no argument about the greater good that developers can make to justify moving a Kroger store one mile down the road so it can reside in front of Tom Egger’s property. Tom Egger’s home may not be worth millions dollars, like the property being developed for Kroger is, but to Tom it is. It is his palace, his cherished enterprise, and the result of his work and effort. Tom should not lose the quality of his life to the whims of money and politics just because he can’t play the political game at the same level as the developers.
I will fight to protect those same developers from being unnecessarily pillaged from collectivist school systems and big government taxation policies, as I did by joining with some of them in our group called No Lakota Levy. But I will always fight for the rights of people like Tom Egger who are the valued citizens who maintain thousands of similar properties all over West Chester and Liberty Twp. It is they who make up the community and it is they who ultimately hold the most social value. Their individual rights far exceed those of financial investment and political will which is aligned in a marriage made in court and sanctioned by judges. It is for this reason that I stand with Tom Egger, his neighbors and those like him against a Kroger Marketplace shopping center. The context for my opinion is in my prequel statements. CLICK HERE TO REVIEW. Doing what is right and good is not always easy, and can cross the lines of political parties, friendships, and even vested interest. But doing “good” is what we must all be committed to, no matter what the cost of that “good” is.
If Kroger wants to build a new Marketplace Center, they need to do it in the location it currently resides at. If it’s not possible, then Kroger can live with shoppers going to the Liberty Twp location. Better yet the old Biggs building could be converted over to a Kroger Marketplace easily since it has plenty of square footage–but such logic is not what this Kroger deal is all about. It’s not about doing what’s good for the community–it’s about recovering the money invested in the field across from Tom’s house with a political favor that will be just one more empty building 30 years down the road. That is why Tom Eggar and his property should not be crushed under the political will of collectivism and an original sin designed by the architects of Agenda 21. When the Kroger building becomes old and out-of-style Tom Eggar and his grand-kids will probably have Christmas dinners at his home, and a Kroger store that will lose value in the coming decades will then be an eye sore and a grim reminder to future generations of the power of politics and the people it crushes when they get in its way. In this regard, Tom Eggar’s home will still have much value, but the Kroger store will just be another old building that nobody wants to visit.
It is not enough to just point at the government and say that it’s bad. Government is bad because it attracts the wrong kind of people to serve it. Yet in order to fix government the understanding of what “good” people are, what they look like, and how they should behave must be understood. Without that understanding, there is no hope for government to ever be reformed for the better no matter what the political affiliation is or under what flag it resides under. The roots of people come out when they are pressed, as seen in the article link below from the West Chester Buzz regarding John Boehner and the comments about John’s current political predicament, from some of the same people who have intersected my life at times. This posting is directed at some of those people, and the ornaments that hang from their lives to this day who are equally as baffled to the changes in political climate as Boehner is currently.
I know many Republicans who only have conservative beliefs so that they can advance their careers. And I know many, many Democrats who do the same. Statistics prove that many of the teachers, fire fighters and cops who voted the “union” ticket in the last elections do not care what the politicians on their tickets believed politically, but simply voted in the fashion that they did to secure their livelihoods. In my own family there are superintendents, teachers, school bus drivers, professional students—kids who are school age children whose parents need their schools to watch their kids while they pursue careers. They all wonder what I am after in my political arguments even though many of them have known me my entire life. They assume that I will announce to the family that I have a big lobby job with Washington or a public relations position for a local school system because I must have some personal agenda for my political campaigns, otherwise, why else would I do them?
Lately I have went further down the rabbit hole of personal life management because the solutions to America’s problems reside in individual lives—and it does no good to point out the deficiencies and failures of government without addressing the reasons. And those reasons are some of the most obvious yet obscure traits available to the minds of the masses on a daily bases. Too many people arrive too late in their lives with a yearning to be “good.” They fall in love for all the wrong reasons; buy the wrong kind of cars, clothing, and even dishwashers for motivations that defy practicality. They pursue occupations that allow these movements not for their inward calls to adventure but out of a desire to find meaning in their meaningless lives. They have pushed God from their lives, they have accepted collectivism as a social blanket to hide their inner demons from themselves, and they arrive into their adulthoods fractions of their true potential—wastes of human beings that are navigating T.S. Eliot’s Wasteland in their grim realities.
For the worst of the human being they seek to hide their personal wastelands from public view by joining government in a quest to save society because they cannot save themselves. They do not have the courage to face life daily, they buy into collectivism and hope to have success in mass. This is how it all starts, this is how government goes bad, because bad people join it with the good intention of saving themselves with redemptive escapades—but they only end up bringing the same kind of destruction to government and the people government serves as a result and they seek to use stolen money through taxation to cover their multiple personal evils. If only one or two people did such a thing, society might be able to absorb the impact, but tragically, there is only one or two per thousand who are good. The vast majority in government are broken souls trying desperately to fill their personal voids with public office under the guise of doing public good. The reality is that they are trying to conceal from public view their many inner evils of which they spend most of their lives fleeing from only to arrive at retirement age broken relics of their once hopeful lives.
There is a real fear when it is realized that a few here and there involve themselves in politics not to redeem their past sins, or to curry favor to build alliances with others to advance their careers, but out of a desire to do “good.” When objectives of personal gain cannot be found, the panic begins to set in and a new layer of anger emerges. For those who are truly dedicated to being good and understanding the higher meanings of things, political theater is a trivial pursuit and I personally don’t have much tolerance for it. When I make my comments about politics and the participants it is out of a personal disdain that I have for the quality of the people attracted to politics. If their desire is to hide their personal faults from society by joining public office then spending my money to redeem their activity through collectivism, then I have a right to expose them for what they are attempting to conceal from public view. It would be less of my business what their personal faults were if they did not consume my tax money, but because they do, they deserve the wrath of critical analysis.
My objective is to sort the good from the bad. In my personal life, I only have room for those who want to do good. I don’t enjoy the company of social climbers and political manipulators so it’s no skin off my back if I piss them off. If they don’t wake up in the morning committed to being good people then I don’t have value for them. In that regard, when I have been invited to meet Governor John Kasich, I have dodged those meetings not out of disrespect, but because my personal time is valuable and there is nothing in such a meeting for me. Kasich is a public servant and to me that is equal to the kind of person I might hire to clean my house. When I was invited to have breakfast with John Boehner fairly recently, I ducted the invitation not out of disrespect to Boehner, but out of a preference for having a private breakfast with my wife doing what we enjoy doing on Saturday mornings. And there is no circumstance that Barack Obama could invite me to the White House for any kind of meeting that I would go to without having something better to do. Many people would say that my comments in this regard are crazy–yet that is why our government is so screwed up, and what I fight against. For those who don’t understand, I work to make them understand by forcing them to look at their actions in the context of goodness, and measure for themselves if they wish to continue down that path.
Such action may not be popular but that’s alright with me. My view is on the long view, not the short. There is nothing in the short view that interests me, and no amount of money in the world that could lure me into such a short-sighted view. Along those guidelines, there is no tolerance that I have for those who are so short-sighted, and my respect for people who are, is non-existent. So for those who wonder, I hope this explanation frames the situation correctly.
· This episode marks the first appearance of Darth Sidious “in the flesh.” In all other appearances, he has been a hologram.
· Obi-Wan Kenobi is wearing his Rako Hardeen disguise (from Season Four’s “Deception” arc) when he arrives on Mandalore.
· The much battered Twilight now sports a cartoonish illustration of Anakin as a boy Podracer pilot, with Aurebesh text that says “WIZARD!!!” The Twilight has not been seen since Season Two’s “Children of the Force.” Rich Hoffman
My often lengthy discussions about the importance of Star Wars in the future of our world is not rooted in escapism fandom or a simple love for fantasy fiction—but in the understanding of what eludes many about the power of mythology. Many years ago I read what has been one of the most important books I have ever read titled The Hero With A Thousand Faces. It is a book that is filled to the brim with truths hidden to civilization over thousands of years. The book is the explosive result of Joseph Campbell’s foundation study of comparative mythology and religion. Anyone who has come to know anything knows that all things about human culture begin with those two issues. Politics, economics, art, science—virtually everything begins with religion and a culture’s mythology. When an enemy of any people wish to destroy another culture they most effectively do it not with bombs and chemical weapons of mass death—they do it by destroying the culture of those people. As I look around America, I see clearly that the culture of America is under attack, so I look toward mythology to make the repairs and that is when Star Wars comes into play for me. The video below is about an hour and a half long and is well worth watching if it has not yet been seen. It explains much about Star Wars and Joseph Campbell’s influence on the creation of that modern mythology and shows how important a simple story can be to the unification, and strength of a mature culture.
In that video it should be noted that popular personalities and government officials ranging from Newt Gingrich to Nancy Pelosi weighed in on the importance of Star Wars to human culture so it cannot be minimized how important mythology is to American culture. There is a love and understanding for myth that goes well beyond the reach of political theory even though Newt Gingrich is a conservative and Nancy Pelosi is a bra burning progressive. The differences in their opinions on social matters are in faulty interpretations ultimately of world mythology and the lessons they have to tell society at large.
I spent a good number of years in the Joseph Campbell Foundation during the 1990’s and to this day I treasure it as an organization. Without them, many of Joseph Campbell’s literary works would not have received the kind of attention they have under the Foundation’s leadership, and they owe a lot to the work that George Lucas has done behind the scenes in his pursuits of Lucas Learning and Edutopia to give them the fuel to start the organization as it appears today. When George Lucas brought in Bill Moyers to Skywalker Ranch to sit down with Joseph Campbell in the last year of Joe’s life and talk about The Power of Myth, Lucas once again changed mankind for the better. (Please do yourself a favor and watch this whole clip) The rest of the series is available at The Joseph Campbell Foundation website. They are fantastic videos.
The difficulty is when the various translations of Joseph Campbell’s work come into play—and why I am no longer an active member—even though I support their endeavors enthusiastically. Progressive minded people in the entertainment industry have misread Joseph Campbell’s studies of India, of the various Asian cultures and have denigrated them into various forms of collectivism. Joseph Campbell during his time in the 1930’s to the 1980’s was going against the grain of communism and was able to pinpoint the key to all successful mythology—the pursuit of individual bliss. Sprinkled throughout Joseph Campbell’s intensive intellectual works is the struggle to marry the social collectivism that permeates all the world’s societies from the very first Neanderthal with the very intense desire of individuals to follow their own path through life. Political progressives find themselves unable to completely understand the messages of individualism that Campbell uncovered through his studies and instead fixate on the studies of collectivism themselves missing the value of the myths in the exchange.
For me even though I saw tremendous value in the individuals who carried on the name of The Joseph Campbell Foundation, I had a falling out with them at a conference in Washington D.C. that I have spoke about elsewhere in greater detail. The short part of the story was that I realized that the key people had missed the message of Joseph Campbell and where instructing others incorrectly. This included Joe’s wife Jean whom was a lovely little old lady my wife, kids and I meant in a downtown D.C. hotel suite. When I attended the big meeting at the weekend long event and met several of the people from all over the country who worked in entertainment, politics, upper education, publishing, and literature, I quickly learned that collectivism had hidden the most important aspects of Joseph Campbell’s teachings from them. People like Susan Sarandon understood on an intellectual level what Campbell was teaching, but her social application of that teaching was lost to her innate static patterns of learned behavior. Many of these people are good people who have a limited ability to translate what they learn from comparative mythology because the very fabric of their lives are built around either progressive or conservative politics. So when they act as heroes of action in their own existences, they end up being the kind of people who was warned about in the old Navaho story about the Twin War Gods. They are the village soothsayers who warned the Twin War Gods not to go East to search for their father and help them defeat the monster that were attacking them because nobody knew what laid to the East. West, North and South had been adequately explored and was also seen to be the direction that the attacking monsters came from, so the village told the Twin Gods to search for their father in those known locations. But the Twin Gods go North anyway because it is society that is in trouble, and they are not equipped mentally to provide advice, so the answers must come from those areas most unknown.
This is where America finds itself in 2013. Progressives advocate searching for life’s answers in the South, Conservatives in the West, Libertarians in the North, but the answer is in the East–in the undiscovered country of which America’s Founding Fathers began to knock on the door and map out. The answer must come to individuals, not collectivists. It is only in the bliss of every individual that the collective society most prospers, and that is the heart of everything that Joseph Campbell taught. It is a most elusive trait to understand even for people who spend their entire lives reading and dedicating their lives to publishing the work of Joseph Campbell. During the span of all of human history mythology has searched for this elusive truth and it has not been until the mythology of Star Wars that any story has been so successful in reaching not just regional audiences around a campfire in Kenya, or the Plains Indians of South Dakota, but all cultures at the same time. Star Wars is the first of its kind to look for the answers in the North and take the minds of mankind into the undiscovered plain of reality where individualism for the first time in human history is shown to be the savor for the collective whole—not the other way around.
This is why Star Wars is so important and why the study of mythology is more important than even the study of physics, medicine, or mathematics. Without a proper mythology a society degrades quickly into a formless blob. This is also why Star Wars is about to hit a critical mass that will transform society in ways that nobody can yet see coming—except the very, very few who understand the work of Joseph Campbell and the first comprehensive study of 100,000 years of human evolution done in the history of mankind. It all starts with the very great book, The Hero With A Thousand Faces published in 1949.
As for the people at the Joseph Campbell Foundation, I love those people. They may have found my interpretations of Joseph Campbell destructive to their personal philosophies, but they’ll get over it once they learn for themselves the truth on their own blissful journeys through their individual lives. The members as they were in the 90’s I’m sure are not the same as the people who run it now. They are some of the closest people on earth to being enlightened individuals who actually are beginning to understand some of these difficult concepts, so I forgive a lot to those who actively try. You can learn more about them at their website seen below:
And now, another video. Please do watch all these fully. They are important.
If you’d like to participate in one of the Round Tables as seen in the video above, then visit JCF’s Mythological RoundTable® Home Pages to find a group near you; contact the organizer and find out when the next meeting will be.
Click here to Support the Joseph Campbell Foundation.
The Joseph Campbell Foundation relies on donations to help fulfill its mission of perpetuating Campbell’s ground-breaking work. The Joseph Campbell Foundation is a US registered 501 c(3) not-for-profit corporation (Federal Tax I.D. #99-0285097); contributions should be fully tax-deductible. Please consult your tax professional regarding deductibility.
