Not so, in fact it is this type of radical view of the world, and the public union’s hostile approach toward management that created a system that clearly is one-sided. As far as Republicans giving tax breaks to their “corporate friends,” well, they are doing that in an attempt to bring business to the state, because believe it or not, businesses that actually provide jobs don’t like to pay taxes to a system that wastes their money, and then keeps trying to hose them for more money. Business tends to go to states with low tax rates. That’s why Ohio has to manage its costs better. It’s not just the politicians in Columbus who want Issue 2. I want Issue 2 because it will give me more control of these costs locally, especially at my local School Board at Lakota. I’m tired of levy, after levy, after levy, and this whole idea that we aren’t supposed to manage those costs is ridiculous. Because it’s education, we are supposed to turn off logic and toss money into a bottomless pit. YES, THEY REALLY THINK THIS WAY!!!!
As usual, Glenn Beck does a good job of connecting all the dots. Issue 2 is but one small attempt by the public to fix a lot of nonsense and inequity that has been going on in public service. And the first thing that the “less thoughtful” do when they can’t win an argument based on facts instead of emotion, is they resort to violence or racism, and this has given rise to the declaration of class warfare.
What I found fascinating was the comments accumulated over the first 24 hours. American Thinker is widely read all over the nation, and apparently all over the world so it was interesting to get some outside perspective on how they view Issue 2, so I am posting the comments obtained over the course of the first day, because they say a lot about how a vast majority of the people truly feel. I include those comments in their entirety below. They appear as they do at the link above, but I feel they deserve their own isolation as a study specifically unique to the topic of Issue 2.
That leaves those of us with reason to vote in November to keep a law that will allow us to manage the costs of this massive Empire. Of course the members of that Empire won’t be happy. They would like that Empire to continue forever. But it can’t.
The only question is when the Empire gets dismantled, do we get the opportunity to manage it or does it collapse under its own weight? If Ohio votes to keep Issue 2, then we can avert a major economic disaster this year, while there is still time to save the structure of the services we employee in those sectors. If we do not maintain Issue 2, and lose it to the Public Union Empire, then financial catastrophe is on the horizon for every single tax payer in Ohio, because it will either require massive layoffs of public sector jobs, or major tax increases. There isn’t any middle ground.
So what will it be? I can say for myself, I will vote YES, and regardless of the outcome, I will know that I did the right thing, even if it is hard to do.
What? The President said he’d veto any proposal that did not include tax increases……oh, I mean “revenue.” I thought this President was all about “compromise.”(Auh Oh, I better be careful. Someone might send this article to Attack Watch.)
People like Barry Obama, and many in his party and some from the Republican Party are not acting in our best interest. For many years there has been a plan to turn The United States Republic into something else.
That small example could be greatly expanded to include Medicare, Social Security, The EPA, the entire Department of Education, and Homeland Security. In fact I could probably put down a whole book just on the wasteful programs built by liberalism, as a subtle march toward socialism, that simply cost too much money and don’t deserve my hard-earned money.
The President mentioned again that people “like him” should make a sacrifice, to dig deep into their pockets to pay their fair share of taxes. Well, no WE shouldn’t. First of all, Barry Obama became wealthy because of his public service. Without politics, Barry would still be organizing rallies in Chicago and smoking joints like a lot of his union brothers. He certainly wouldn’t be a millionaire, because he doesn’t make anything or manage anything that can produce a profit. Second, what is a “fair share?” Why is it fair to require me to fund programs I think are ridiculously foolish and are weakening our society, in my opinion? I have no intention of ever receiving a Social Security check, so why should I continue to pay? How is that fair, that some absentminded fool politician came up with some looting law for me to work extra hard to pay for, when if I kept the money, could have done something more productive? The tax to me is just legalized robbery. It’s going to groups I don’t believe in to fund philosophies I have no faith in, to support an agenda I find detrimental to the future of the country. So why do I have to pay again? How is it my obligation, because some incompetent manager like Barry decided I had to pay?
The Day of Rage that was so aggressively talked about turned out the way I thought it would. Watching the “call to arms” videos such as this one below is an indication of all the same old communist stuff. These young people were simply taught these static patterns of thinking by their teachers in school. Those teachers are the types who look to the grand old “60’s” as their shining moment. None of these people have a clear understanding of what they are doing or why they do it. They were simply taught to think certain things, and they do so without any further inquisition. To understand some of the science behind this foolishness, CLICK ON THIS HOT LINK FOR MORE INFORMATION.
A number of years ago I scurried the planet looking for a book called The Skeleton Key to Finnegan’s Wake, by Joseph Campbell, for I had been trying to decipher the book Finnegan’s Wake by James Joyce for years, and since this was the pre-days of Amazon.com, I had no way to get the Skeleton Key, so I never found it in a used book store or even a yard sale. It had become a book lost to time. So I worked out my issues with that very elusive book Finnegan’s Wake on my own, and then moved on to my next literary pursuit. (Someday I’ll return back to that project now that getting such books is easier than ever) I enjoyed Finnegan’s Wake to such an extent that I named my lead character in my own book The Symposium of Justice after Finnegan’s Wake. (to learn more about Finnegan’s Wake check out this link:
All week long we heard about the “jobs” speech from President Obama as he attempted to address the nation before the opening of the NFL season Thursday September 8, 2011. Obama’s speech was a silly exhibition of naïveté. I cringed watching him thinking of all worlds’ dictators; George Soros included who were also watching with hungry lust on their minds. For the imagery of a fool president speaking in generalities that are completely worthless to the political landscape, dictators will lust after those images with pornographic seduction. I am sure they were licking their lips the way a hungry lion gazes at a herd of gazelle prior to pouncing upon those passive creatures for an evening meal. President Obama is simply embarrassing in every way.
And to cover up his obvious lack of worldly knowledge, the President seemed to evoke his usual Wizard of Oz persona where he almost seems to take on the personality of that factional character from that fictional tale to represent a fictional presidency and offer America a “jobs bill” that is simply no different than a Las Vegas slot machine.
The reality of what Obama uttered in his speech was that if you pull the government lever, somehow, magically jobs will appear. That by spending more money on the slot machine, that America will receive some kind of “jack pot.”
Yet as the Great and Powerful O travels all over the Midwest in his bus, the strain of the financial structure of the whole government gambling mentality is taking its toll. When talking about Social Security, which is a ponzi scheme by design, Rick Santelli argues with Thomas Friedman over the merit of Social Security, and what Friedman fails to understand is that if Social Security were built with some level of honesty behind the premise, then it might possibly work. However, because those in government all-to-often behave as though they are in a casino, the money gets spent on games like that slot machine to pursue jack-pots which simply don’t exists, or if they do, it’s just to convince people to spend more money to get a bigger jack-pot.
When people who are in decision making positions can’t even admit to what they are doing, and don’t understand what name to even give to things like Social Security, they are no different than a gambler with an addiction.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and proclaim that the best way to save money would be not to pay any of the people who were in the room when the President gave his speech to congress, because to those people, the whole ordeal is just a game, a slot machine that will have a pay-out to some fortunate soul who manages to pull the lever and get a “jack-pot.” But before there can be a jackpot, someone must put money in the machine, and once there is money in the machine, then the Great and Powerful O can then decide how he will spend it. I believe the Great and Powerful O is convinced that by spending money in his government casino, that he is helping people. But what he’s really doing is just creating more “dependent,” and “addicted” people whom the government exploits for its own ends. Just like a casino.
But don’t you see dear reader, that the Great and Powerful O, or any of those Looters of Washington have no power unless you put money into their machine. They are toothless fools with no bullets in their gun. It is you who put the bullets in their gun to use on you to force you to spend money on their casino schemes. If you don’t give them money, they have no power at all!
You have the power to stop it and I would propose that we should do so. The best way to end the corruption of the casino is not to give the casino money. Don’t give it money, and it will go out of business soon. The same with government, if you don’t like the level government which is expanding rapidly, all you have to do is starve it of what it eats, in this case it is your tax dollars. If left to their own devices, they will never stop eating. They are simply no different than this poor woman who proclaims she cannot stop eating. But consider the amount of food it takes to maintain this body. Where did she get it………her family fed her. They brought it to her when she became so big that she could no longer get it for herself. Yet this woman cries and proclaims that her situation is completely out of her control, just like government.
And study the compulsive gambler. Listen to this poor guy. How is he any different? It’s exactly the same, the compulsive gambler and the “spend happy” politician. Both believe that if they spend just a little more money, they will hit a “jack-pot.”
The government programs like Social Security, Medicare, welfare, education, all of it, are simply images similar to a slot machine dressed up to convince you to put money in their machine and give them power. As ridiculous as that first video was, with the Wizard of Oz slot machine, using images from that great movie to seduce people into putting money into it, to feed the gaming industry, is manipulative and excessively exploitive. Government does the same for exactly the same reason. It’s a game! It’s a racket!
And the Great and Powerful O is a racket also. I would say that he is simply no different than the large woman who became so obese she could no longer go into public and move around on her own. These are addictive personalities who are hiding their disorders from even themselves, and they will beg and plead to anyone to help them by bringing more food or more money.
The Great and Powerful O is determined to seduce people into spending their money on his casino like programs by taking advantage of people suffering from addictions by feeding those addictions to prop up his own power base, because that’s how a casino makes its money……..from addictions.
It’s all about fancy lights, and sweet talk with seductive music all designed to control the sign-stimuli which make a human being function.
Call it what it is……………………..a scam! The whole thing! And while you wonder why that woman’s family didn’t stop feeding her so she wouldn’t become so obese, or the gambler’s wife didn’t stop him before it was too late, ask yourself why you vote to pay more taxes when the game is simply designed to drain you for all you’re worth and when you’re done, the system will drain someone else, until they are done, then it will move on to someone else, completely consuming every part of their life, financially, and socially until there is nothing left. And all the while the government will convince even itself that it is helping its addicts by at least caring for them, which is the greatest sin of all. It’s the justification of just another addict whom is on a destructive path beyond their control, and that begs the question, why did we continue to feed it when we knew it was wrong to begin with?
The answer is of course is that we failed to call it what it was…….until it was too late.
For my national readers, I know that all this Lakota information is distracting, but the situation at my school district is essentially the same trouble you are experiencing in your own districts no matter where in the country you reside. What bothers me at the Lakota School System is that the community is already providing an adequate budget, we are heavily taxed, yet we are told that it’s not enough. So that begs the question, why?
If you look at the Yes Lakota position this time around, you will see how they avoid the hard facts of why they put themselves in financial hardship to begin with. Instead they use community testimony and their Excellence record to somehow justify why they should have more money in the form of higher taxes. (See their website here)
And that’s the trouble; their entire position is built on emotion, not rational decisions. They are in financial trouble because of union radicalism, most notably the strike attempt of 2008, and as an organization they are seeking to cover up that behavior with pictures of children and emotional testimony declaring that Lakota must move forward instead of going backwards.
Personally, I have fought wrongs of this kind before. I write books about it, and fight against misleading information even within my own family. I have taught my kids not to put up with it either, so when a giant labor organization has embedded itself into my community and tries to play the smoke and mirrors game, I am obliged to confront them which is why I’m even involved in an education issue. The excessive costs associated with education are a result of radicalism from the labor force, and a lack of managements desire to confront that radicalism. Those two things do not dictate that the community bails them out for the trouble they brought themselves.
I would not care so much if the Lakota School System presented the levy request by saying, “We need more money to support a very large obligation that we have to the union labor contract.” That would be honest and I could then vote “NO,” but if the rest of the community voted, “YES” I could live with it. But instead, the YES people tell us that if we want to move forward then we’ll vote ourselves more taxes. That if we love our children, we’ll vote for a levy. That if we want to protect our property values, we’ll vote for the levy. They’ll tell us all that without dealing with the WHY. Well, the WHY is because radical union behavior at all levels of politics, through their lobby power at the state level, and their ability to strike at the local, have driven up the cost of education in many ways, and personally I see that the bed they have made for themselves is a problem based on a failed Keynesian economics model and is not my problem, until they ask me for something. And it’s not the problem of my school district either. It’s the problem of the people who did not educate themselves properly and instead resorted to radical behavior to force through financial ideas that are completely wrong. It is for that reason that Lakota believes that they need more money. It is because of a lack of will to deal with a radical labor force and when the cost per pupil is over $9,000 per student, those costs need to be reduced dramatically, and the only way to do that is to bring reality to the union labor force and let them carry the burden of their failed philosophy, not the rest of the community and certainly not the children we are trying to teach and raise.
So for your benefit, I will put here a link to most of the articles and videos I have written or produced over the 2010 to 2011 school year so you can see for yourself the kind of game that is being played against you. It is my intention to remove the radicals from the process of this whole financial discussion so that truly intelligent minds can solve these problems. And that will not happen by appeasing the radicals (union labor). By giving them more money, you just let them believe that their radical behavior works, and you’ve perpetuated the problem. So please enjoy the links below to articles from the past year, and learn the truth of what has been happening to our district.
I know it’s a lot, but if you really want to know, you will book mark this page and visit it a little bit at a time from now to the election so that you can make the most informed vote possible. Or you can do the easy thing and just “believe” the sweet words that the Pro Levy campaign is feeding you, and you’ll regret the decision years down the road, even if you’re one of those people who will move away from Lakota the minute your children grow up, it will still bounce around in your head for the ensuing decades, because you knew they were misleading you, but you didn’t have the courage to face it squarely.
The answer is always in the WHY. Why won’t the Lakota people admit to WHY they have a financial problem? The answer is because if the public knew, they wouldn’t support the financial requirements of that demand. So they hide their behavior behind your kids hoping that you won’t push the issue too far, and allow them to continue the radical union scam that has embedded itself in public education.
ENJOY! This isn’t all of them, but a good sample of the last year.
I’ve said before that America was developing it’s own unique philosophy called Transcendentalism in the 1830’s to the 1840’s through the work of Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margret Fuller and many others, who at the time were observing the “American” experience and articulating it into a philosophy of a new nation. After all, that was the intent of a new country, and that was to come up with something “new.” It was in that march that American’s had the debate about abolishing slavery, which made it the first nation in the world to do so.
But in the middle of this awakening came “European” ideas from Germany, and London in the form of Marxism. This occurred in the 1850’s and involved several American newspaper editors who were the emerging “Victorians” and loved with homesick yearning the secure psychological blanket of Europe and rejected Transcendentalism in favor of Marxism. And instead of the two ideologies playing out against the American consciousness in the 1860’s, America had a Civil War which stopped all thinking in a positive direction. In the aftermath of this war which ended the terrible act of slavery, but at a cost to national pride which would recover in time, Marxism grew in power with the same motivations that English kings hired privateers and pirates to sabotage Spanish vessels in the 1670’s, to stop a competing nation from exceeding beyond the reach of the almighty England. In this spirit Marxism was pushed into America in the same way that it was pushed throughout Europe and into Russia. Lenin grabbed hold of Marxism and used it in the Bolsavik Revolution to overthrow the rulers of Russia and turn it into the Soviet Union, a communist nation. In America there wasn’t a Lenin, but communist though came to the United State during the rise of the Industrial Revolution on the backs of the labor movement. The founders of unions in America were Communists inspired by the work of Karl Marx and this was the birth of the “labor movement.”
The Labor Movement is Anti-American because of this history. It is because of this history that I suggest America return back to the principals of Transcendentalism, a philosophic period prior to the Civil War and the chaos perpetuated by the labor movement. All those current leaders associated with the labor movement should be rejected, because their path is the incorrect path completely for America’s direction.
It is nothing against the unions to say that they don’t have a “right” to exist. In America, any idea should be able to be explored. But failed philosophies do not have a right to be artificially propped up such as what is happening in America currently with the public sector unions. And the essence of that failed philosophy is in the union workers insistence that “somebody” create a job for them. This is a ridiculous notion and rests on the foundation similar to a little bird freshly hatched from an egg which “chirps” for the mother bird to drop food into its mouth. When these union leaders cry out for someone to “create” jobs that’s what they are doing.
This is why I do not have any respect for labor unions or their leaders. Their actions show me that they do not have what it takes to be an American, which is a foundation of self-reliance. They are “dependent” on a third-party to care for them and they preach this philosophy of dependency as if it were a “good” thing.
To provide an idea of the type of people who run these modern unions, have a look at the invitation letter that was put out to the labor unions up in Detroit where the President was scheduled to speak. Have a look at the people on that list and measure their worth against what you know about the state of the world. I will make the statement ahead of this analysis to proclaim that every one of them are technically a social “looter” as defined by the great American novel, Atlas Shrugged. They are looters because they exist by taking from others. This includes President Obama who is only wealthy now because of what he was able to loot from public sector service. This looter mentality is common in Europe, but it was rejected during the Transcendentalist movement of the 1840’s.
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Dear Friend,
Michigan is honored to have the President of the United States in Detroit on Monday to celebrate Labor Day. All are welcome to be part of this important tradition. In addition to the President, speakers will include Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, national AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, UAW President Bob King, Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa, SEIU President Mary Kay Henry, Members of the Michigan Congressional Delegation, and special musical performances by the fabulous Queen of Soul Aretha Franklin and the Mosaic Youth Theater of Detroit.
Downtown events begin with the actual labor day parade at 9am, followed by the rally at the GM Parking lot next to the Renaissance Center on Atwater Street, between St. Antoine and Beaubien. Gates will open at 10am and guests can enter at the corner of Rivard and Atwater Streets. The events is free and open to all. Do be aware that all attendees will go through airport-like security and should bring as few personal items as possible. No bags, sharp objects, chairs, umbrellas, liquids or signs will be allowed inside the venue. Cameras and cell phones are permitted.
Join Deborah and me as well as our friends, family and other community members in honoring the working men and women who make America strong! Hope to see you Monday.
With every good wish, Sincerely yours,
John Dingell
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The only person on that list who has achieved anything on their own was Aretha Franklin. All the rest of those people are “social parasites.” That means their existence is completely dependent on the labor of someone else to support their livelihood, just like a baby bird in a nest. And if you think about it, the yelling and screaming that the labor unions are doing is done for exactly the same reason as the baby bird, to convince someone to feel sorry for them and drop food into their mouths because they are hungry.
When people who are marketed as “significant and important people” such as what those on that letter are made out to be yet completely live off the labor of the public, how can they be determined to have any kind of “self worth” in regard to their ability to produce work. How can the baby birds be looked to for leadership? Because that’s the indication, that we are supposed to look at these “dependents” for leadership, none of those people have any new ideas, not a single one is producing anything. The only production they are speaking of is by taking resources from one place and then turning it into something else for which they will take the credit for. But who created the labor to begin with? Not the people on that list. They took it from someone else just like a baby bird takes a worm from the mouth of an adult bird and converts it into something else. In the baby bird’s case, it converts the worm into “shit.” In the case of the union minded president and union leader like Trumka they create a “government job.” Both things are essentially equal in the metaphysics of science, the bird shit and the government job.
Now many will question how I can say such a thing, that this whole notion of Transcendentalism is a step backward, that society has advanced beyond all that nonsense of the 1800’s. Well, no it hasn’t. You see, this whole progressive mentality that rides on the back of the labor movement has it’s roots with Karl Marx who wrote the Communist Manifesto in 1848 and the roots of much of what’s wrong in American Philosophy today, and if you want to fix it, you have to go to the root problem. The foundation of that labor union mentality is flawed from its root. And there are better ideas in existence from that same period that could work better for America and should be explored.
When the union movement says they are fighting for their very lives, they are right in some respects. But the life they are fighting for is one that was never theirs to begin with. They exist off the collective lives of others and such a philosophy is doomed to fail, and a nation should never build itself upon a collective premise which requires the looting of some people in order to support other people. If America had begun the nation with such a mentality it would have never made it passed a couple of stump speeches in a city square. Europe knew this, and this is why they slid the notion of communism under the door to weaken America as a world power that they didn’t have the personal ambition to compete with in the world market place. Europe planted the seeds in the 1800’s and that idea grew into it’s own entity by the 1940’s to the 1960’s to give us what we have today, a bunch of wanna-be leaders chirping like little baby birds shitting all over themselves and looking for more to eat. And the more they eat the more shit they make. During this process they never stop being hungry and because they are dependent on others to feed them, and lack the courage to fly from the nest from which they reside, they just continue to “chirp” insistently irritating us all with the utterances of a failed philosophy from a failed continent and supported by social looters.
The American Worker is not what the labor movement is all about. The American Worker is simply the soil from which the tree that is the labor movement grows. If the tree were removed by its roots the soil which produced the tree would still remain. And when I look at the ugly tree that has become the labor movement, I would think a better tree would be much more attractive to the soil of the American Worker. That is why I look to Transcendentalism for that next species of tree from which to plant, because the tree of the labor movement is dying and hollow, and when it collapses it may fall down and wreck the house we live in, and nobody wants that, including the silly baby birds that live in the tree chirping for more food to eat.
Who declared war on whom James? The peaceful Tea Party or the mobster driven teamsters known for roughing up people who won’t cough up their “protection” money. Hey, you’re a lawyer. It’s all in the wording, isn’t it? : )
The most accurate emotion to articulate when schools ask for more tax money is one of humor and can be seen in the following video.
Before I get into the details of last my recent debate with the Pro Lakota Group remember our buddy Ryan Fahrenkamp, the Lakota teacher busted for child pornography and being a pedophile? See my article that I broke back in January here, the one that all the Pro Levy people accused me of being such a “rush to judgment,” “unfair,” and “inaccurate.” Read what I said……………..way back then.
Now read what happened on September 1, 2011 while I was preparing for a small debate with Sandy Wheatley of the Yes Lakota Group at the Lakota West Freshman building.
I will deal with Fahrenkamp in a separate article because the debate with the Pro Levy faction at Lakota deserves an extensive mention here. I only bring up the Fahrenkamp case because Sandy Wheatley chose not to deal with facts and figures in her debate with me, but with bible quotes, taking the high moral ground, as though money spent equaled quality. As she spoke I couldn’t help but wonder why she was placing the entire teaching profession on such high moral ground when one of Lakota’s ex-teachers had just confessed to taking “inappropriate pictures” of a child during an out-of-state trip.
“Ryan Brant Fahrenkamp, 42, of Mason, plead guilty to child pornography charges in U.S. district court, according to court records. Fahrenkamp was arrested at his home by FBI agents and local police in January. Fahrenkamp was a teacher at Lakota Schools for 14 years, most recently teaching at Endeavor Elementary School in West Chester Twp.
Fahrenkamp admitted to keeping child pornography on his school-issued laptop and also to taking inappropriate photos of a former male student during an out-of-state trip, according to court documents.”
I would have thought that Mrs. Wheatley would have taken some sort of position on this activity since she showed her extensive knowledge of bible verses, but instead she focused her whole speech on attempting to use the Bible to disqualify the “facts” she knew I would present. I was extremely disappointed by this approach, because taking the high road and using the Bible for some sort of political advantage seems cheap, but then not attempting to separate the levy campaign from Ryan Fahrenkamp on the day of his admission seemed either naive, assuming she didn’t know the news yet, or manipulative in that she attempted to talk around it. Because when the statement is made that we need to invest in our schools, someone on the Pro Levy side needs to articulate a plan for how to detect and remove people like Fahrenkamp in the future. Because there are others out there, just look at the Stacy Schuler case in Mason, the district next door.
You can see that debate between Mrs. Wheatley and myself here:
Sometimes the only way to see the clowns of society is to go to a circus, and in a lot of ways these kinds of political forums are just that. People often think that they are worthless exchanges, so intelligent people tend to stay away from the circus of politics. But like I’ve said recently to a friend of mine who was questioning the validity of these types of events, you go to the circus to see the clowns, and that’s how you learn what they’re up to. If intelligent people don’t get involved and actually go to the circus sometimes that leaves the clowns free to not even put on a show, so they come up with other schemes to fill their time. The game in the circus act is this, when a politician doesn’t have an answer, they seek to attack the data and inject emotion into the argument, and this can be seen by the efforts of the Pro Levy group. This is precisely why education is so expensive, because many of the decisions are not based on facts, but on emotion. We are asked to suspend all logic and not apply the same rules that we might apply to paying our electric bill or some other serious matter. We are just supposed to pay the increased tax but not question how the money is spent.
My biggest rage of the evening came from Jamie Green one of the school board candidates during the Q&A phase. (I’ll have video up of that soon.) Jamie, a former school board member from back in 2005, attacked my data too. I submitted a question to ask her how, but there wasn’t time to get to it in the forum. “You have to be careful what information you get out there,” she said of my material.
So Jamie officially eliminated herself from my support, in fact I’d say that if Lakota had someone like Jamie Green on the school board that would be the event which what would take Lakota backwards. It’s certainly not my charts.
Why is Jamie Green and Sandy Wheatley upset with my “FACTS,” those elusive numbers that speak some strange language from a far-away land called “reality.” Why did they sit in the audience and huff and puff as I spoke flustering about like fish out of water, well, because those facts show that more money does not make a better school. As shown in this spreadsheet, which came from the presentation shown in the video, money spent does not amount to quality. Here is a list of many school districts in Southern Ohio all with different rates of spending per pupil and of many different ratings.
This next graph is the same date but shown differently, it takes away the names but instead plots their position in relation to the cost spent and the results gained. As shown, there is no behavior which indicates more money is justified. If what Jamie and Sandy are saying is true, then Princeton who spends $15,922 per pupil should easily be an Excellent with Distinction district, because they spend the most money. But they only rank at “Effective.” On the other hand Bethel-Tate Local spends $7,167 per pupil but they have the same ranking as Lakota. Lakota spends $9,806 to get that same rating. By the logic of Jamie Green and Sandy Wheatley all the schools at the top of their per pupil cost should be Excellent with Distinction, yet many aren’t. Look at Winton Woods who is spending $12,636, they are spending a lot of money, near the top of the list, yet they are at the bottom of the category rating.
Instead, Jamie Green and Sandy Wheatley will say,“don’t pay any attention to Mr. Hoffman’s facts. It’s all a matter of ‘interpretation’” and graphs can be made to say anything. Really? What these apologists are doing is hope that they can capture people’s minds with Bible quotes and some kind of former school board “experience” where the typical behavior is to bow to a labor union who behaves like a bottomless pit in funding demands. They are doing the same thing with this levy issue that they did when Ryan Farhenkamp was busted for child pornography. They talk out of both sides of their mouth. When a child pedophile, who worked 14 years in the school system, ironically under Jamie Green’s watch while she was a board member, pleads guilty to the charges, the Pro Levy people say “you can’t assume all teachers are bad because of the actions of one teacher!” Then they turn around and say, “Teachers need to collectively make ‘X’ amount of dollars to qualify your school district to be an ‘Excellent with Distinction’ school.“ They will then say that all teachers should be taken as a collective unity of quality. So which is it, independent assessment or collective altruism, because they can’t have it both ways?
As Sandy Wheatley basically said in her presentation that anybody can take selected sections of some information and paint it anyway they want to, which is what she was accusing me of doing with my “mysterious” graphs and “technical data.” She picked the story of when “Judas hanged himself,” from Mathew 27 then another quote of the “go and do likewise” portion of the Bible which is from Luke 10:37. She picked totally unrelated parts of the Bible to make her point, but she also sought to use that body of work to claim a moral high ground which is traditionally beyond refute. Well, I’ve read Biblical Archeology Review for over thirty years and I have about 21 volumes of the Biblical Encyclopedia of the Holy Bible, so I know a bit about the Bible myself. I read the actual book about 5 times before I was out of high school, and I have seen this kind of thing done many, many times by politicians, even within the Bible itself, where they think they have a right to use a Holy Book to shield some kind of truth, and that makes me VERY angry. Of course those stories aren’t even related to each other and that was her point. This is great insight into how the Pro Levy people and the school system in general operate. They do just as Sandy Wheatley did, they select the stats they like and ignore all the rest, just like those completely unrelated sections of the Bible, and they assume that I am doing the same thing, which I would consider unspeakable. This is precisely what they did with Ryan Fahrankamp, news that broke the same day they were pleading their case why they needed another tax levy. Instead they gave an emotional appeal that just dealt with the facts they are prepared to deal with. I would think that anyone who wishes to use the Bible in a political position would also take a hard stand against the extreme “sin” of one Ryan Fahrankamp. But in this circus of politics, that’s not what the show is about.
I would say further that it is this very tendency that gets Pro Levy Supporters into trouble with the labor unions and puts the district in a weak position with those labor negotiations. The union does deal with facts and employee mass and they routinely out-maneuver the more emotion Pro Levy types every time and to hide their sins, the Pro Levy people resort to words like “morality” and “good for the community” without ever defining how throwing more money at an obviously broken education system ran by a public union empire can somehow be redeemed through the sacrifice of yet more tax dollars.
The reason is because their foundation arguments are corrupt with the premise that the school itself is the guiding light in a child’s life, instead of just an important social and cultural aspect. If you go back to that chart and see which schools are failing, even with extraordinary amounts of money spent, you will see districts that are statistically high for single parent households,welfare recipients, and other “entitlement culture victims” and the children coming from those communities cannot be saved by the school. That is the real crime and the solitary fact that the Pro Levy people do not wish to answer. Just like they can’t face themselves in a mirror and take responsibility for not detecting that a pedophile was allowed to take a child on an out-of-state school sponsored event which put the child in danger, because the school itself failed to recognize the danger. There was not a value system put in place to assess teachers by merit, so administrators didn’t even bother with the frustrating task of posing the question to the labor union. The mountain is too steep to climb, so everybody avoids it. That’s how someone like Fahrankamp falls through the cracks.
The failure in all of this is not being able to diagnose the problem, because the Pro Levy people have a system of belief which rejects hard data in favor of emotion, because it is emotion which allows them to overlook the hard data that is all around them to detect the Ryan Farhankemp’s of the world before the danger ever happens. For the same reason they won’t look at the data I present, because the reality of what that data tells them is something those people are not emotionally equipped to deal with, so they hide their beliefs in the scattered quotes of a Bible without understanding the meaning of the whole body of work, and they’ll insult the intelligence of those of us who know better by suggesting that nobody look at the man behind the curtain. They want you to stay focused on the image, not the content and that would be fine if this were all just a visit to a movie theater where we are supposed to suspend belief for a couple of hours. But this is millions of dollars, and the lives of many, many people and such seriousness requires detailed analysis and honesty, even when mistakes are made, so that the entire community can move forward without the infantile desires of former school board members to have once again a “name plate” which bears her name in some illusionary honor.
All this amounts to is that you are not supposed to ask any hard questions or even look at the facts. But you’re supposed to sit quietly and watch the clowns in the circus do their silly tricks and not question the motivations of the personalities behind the face paint, or even why so many of them are packed into one car in some comic diatribe. Because what the real show is truly about is money, and protecting that money with some mild entertainment to keep the audiences placated as to the bona fide show that is going on behind the scenes. Such behavior has been the act for decades, so it won’t change overnight, but for me personally, I’m tired of all the clowning around that has been going on, and I’m ready to see the school walk a tight rope instead, and display the ability to balance themselves in a more serious portion of the show that is ultimately a circus.
When I think of Progress Ohio I think of people like Darryl Hanna who was just arrested protesting a new oil pipe line into Canada. When I listen to her speak, I wonder how she knows to pick up food on a dining utensil to place it in her mouth. Her thought process and values don’t make sense to me.
I truly don’t mean that in a derogatory way. I don’t understand what those types of people are thinking. They are obviously lacking in a fundamental understanding of how the world works and they are primarily ruled by just emotion and a limited understanding of history.
As August closed I was wondering if I was going to hit 80,000 views by the end of the month on my Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom site, and as it turned out, by the time I learned about Darryl Hanna being arrested at the White House for her protest, I saw that my numbers had easily went over that number, to something like 82,000. That reminded me that there are a lot of people stopping by and reading what I put down here. Many of them are on the right side of things, yet there are many others who aren’t.
I have been aware that Progress Ohio is one of those groups making up part of that 80,000 who thinks the exact opposite about most things as I do. So it isn’t a surprise to me that they’d attempt to take something I do here and twist it around to suit their purpose, after all that’s what they do. They mislead, manipulate, and make a lot of noise in a way similar to a child. The purpose is to achieve their objectives, at any cost.
Before I break down below how ridiculous their notion of compromise is I must deal with their attempt to be misleading. The labor movement types are so focused on this whole “compromise” issue in relation to S.B.5 and John Kasich that they can’t see anything else. So they look for evidence of “others” who agree with them so they can make their argument. One of those “others” I would have never dreamed would be Bill Cunningham of 700 WLW, a person I would have thought would be their arch nemesis. But as the reality of what was happening with S.B.5 unfolded, there are a sector of society who love politics and S.B.5 is essentially an anti-politics bill as much as it’s a reform of collective-bargaining, leaving Cunningham not sure how to deal with it. After all, the guy has built his life around politics, so as Kasich has said many times in the last 6 months, his goal isn’t just to pass laws and balance the budget, but it was to bring a fundamental culture change to how politics operates. So Progress Ohio suddenly found a friend in Bill Cunningham which they attempted to expose by using this clip of video from one I created.
My original video was over 15 minutes long, and I put it below for reference. Progress Ohio took only the section where an argument broke out between Kasich and Cunningham over how to deal with the union. Progress Ohio doesn’t ask if the idea of discussion or compromise is right or wrong. They simply move along with the assumption that if a majority of the people feel a certain way, then it’s “good.” So they take the fact that Bill Cunningham is on their side to validate their claims, and used it to their advantage.
Here’s the complete interview. They left a lot out. Kasich said he’s heard their concerns, and this was after two weeks of testimony. He said it’s time to do some things and to stop talking. I’ll cover this issue in greater detail below.
Kasich and Cunningham have been close friends and Bill appears to have assumed that Kasich was planning to participate in politics as usual, so the breakdown of their friendship that has occurred on the air has been interesting. This first interview of two since Kasich has been governor was the one that Progress Ohio used and Kasich seemed to feel betrayed by Cunningham during the conversation so many of his comments were taken in the defense of that betrayal. Kasich had after all told Bill on an interview in January exactly what he was planning to do, and Bill seemed to be on board. So a few months later Kasich came to the studio to try again to make amends with his friend, and again Cunningham took the union position which put Kasich on the defensive. This broadcast was in April.
This whole premise of “compromise” is a flawed one. Kasich apparently thinks much the way I do on this issue and being a man of action, and not one of political talk is something Bill Cunningham was not prepared to deal with psychologically. So there’s a lot going on here. See my article about Static and Dynamic patterns to understand my references in this explanation. CLICK THE LINK:
Cunningham is stuck in a Static Pattern of accepted politics and that is obvious. He’s certainly not alone in this matter, so he is facing a Dynamic Static change in what Kasich represents, and it’s a painful process. Eventually, Cunningham will come to understand what Kasich is trying to do, just as many others will too. Kasich is bringing permanent changes to the Static Pattern of politics which will result in a culture change of politics in Ohio. Any group or individuals that are clinging to the Static Patterns of current politics will of course be threatened by the changes being implemented by S.B.5.
However, people like Darryl Hanna and Progress Ohio are people suffering from being stuck in a Static Pattern that is fundamentally flawed. They believe that just because things have always been a certain way in their lifetimes that they deserve to always have those things for all time in the future. Such a notation is rooted in selfishness, a sense of Freudian ID that is short-sighted.
I recognize that labor unions are a part of American life, and my attitude is that if they can survive in a private business, like in sports, or entertainment, then fine. But if they ruin your manufacturing capacity as a country, state or city, as they’ve done in places like Pittsburg, Akron, and Detroit then unions are terrible.
I enjoyed the film by Michael Moore called Roger and Me where he stumbled around Flint, Michigan wondering where all the jobs went. Moore represented a segment of the population that just can’t seem to think beyond raw emotion by asking the question “is it fair.” Moore blamed the loss of jobs in Flint, Michigan on the CEO’s of General Motors and their vast wealth and his solution was to have those CEO’s give up their wealth so that the “working man” could share in that wealth. But this premise is flawed because if all that wealth was put in the hands of a “working man” they would tend to spend that money on alcohol, marijuana, strippers, and other destructive behavior. I’ve seen that behavior first hand. I’ve personally seen $10,000 dollar bills placed into the hands of “working men” on Friday only to have that money gone on Monday, all of the money wasted on lap dances and orgies in strip joints. And I don’t base this whole issue on just one or two people, but many, many people over the years. The reason for this is that the minds of these people do not think the same way as those CEO’s. While it’s true that the CEO may hire “high class escorts” they won’t do it till they have invested their money first to generate a replacement of what they spend on women, boats, cars and expensive vacations for their mistresses.
The fundamental difference between the CEO and the “working man” that Moore was screaming at in his film is that the CEO is planning for tomorrow where the “working man” is just thinking about the next pay check. This is a fundamental difference in the behavioral Static Patterns of the two groups and there isn’t a “collective entity” on this plant that can change this fact because the flaw is in what creates the Static Pattern’s of those two groups.
Unions came to America as vehicles for communism. That is a fact, it is indisputable. It is also indisputable that Ronald Reagan the great Republican had applied to become a member of the Communist Party of America when he was young and idealistic and infected with the same spongy mind as Darryl Hanna and the Static Pattern belief system of Hollywood. Reagan was in fact a union leader and the unions were in fact communist organizations and to this day communist sympathizers reside in these groups.
I’ve been on motorcycle runs with other bikers who are “big labor lovers” and I’ve felt sorry for them because they wear shirts and bandanas with American flags on them and believe that their participation in a union makes them American, unions are in fact the complete opposite of everything America was intended to be, and those poor people are stuck in a Static Pattern rooted in a belief system created by out-right communists. So their entire foundation, their entire belief system is essentially flawed, and now that many of these people are “entitlement babies” they know of nothing else. To change the Static Pattern of these people it would require them to go through a violent personal crises, much like Bill Cunningham is going through. Kasich is the Dynamic Pattern colliding with the Static Pattern in Cunningham. Neither is wrong, but one is stuck and one is moving.
So when Progress Ohio demands that there should be compromise, I am reminded of all the times in the past that there were opportunities for this so-called compromise. I haven’t seen it. I’ve seen teachers go on strike for just asking them to pay $5 more on their health care. So when the intention is to change this culture of consumption, which the unions tend to represent, where the reputation is one of “it’s our way or the highway” then I don’t blame Kasich for his attitude. He did speak with them, but like me, he knew the strategy of the union would be to drag this whole culture change out for years and in turn that would take the edge off the need for a change, to preserve the Static Pattern. Kasich knows that if he doesn’t hit it hard and fast that it won’t happen. He knows this because he’s the Dynamic Pattern trying to merge with a Static Pattern that will do everything in its power to resist any change.
I would say that public unions shouldn’t even be legal to begin with. It is an insane concept to have public officials funded by tax payers represented by a union. By John Kennedy was the one who signed that Executive Order in 1963 and it was Kennedy who was a Dynamic Pattern colliding with the Static Pattern that resisted the growth of unions to begin with. That’s what the entire sixties were, an assault on Static Patterns by a Dynamic one, and in order to fix the error of that time it will take the same kind of effort to return to a period before these mistakes were made. This is why Darryl Hanna and Progress Ohio seem so similar, they are focused on preserving a Static Pattern established in the turbulence of the 60’s, and they have no reference in their lives that tells them their position is incorrect because they don’t have minds grounded in history. Their beliefs are in the collective beliefs of the current Static Pattern which is destructively incorrect and built on a foundational philosophy that is fundamentally un-American.
For those of you stuck in that Static Pattern and read this scratching your head and wondering what I’m talking about, I sympathize. I watched my dog observe me the other day laughing at something that happened on TV. The dog was completely oblivious to the events going on inside the television screen. The dog does not have a mind to see or understand anything outside of its present reality. It simply reacted to my laughter, not what I was laughing at. I patted the dog on the head and felt sorry for the fact that the poor creature could not understand such things, and I throw him a dog treat so that at least the animal could share in my joy even in some remote way. I’ve attempted to do the same with people in the labor movement, until I realized that like the dog, they never seem to get full, and will always ask for a new dog treat because they are trying to compensate for all the things happening in the world that they don’t understand, so they look to money to fill them in a similar way. I sympathize; it must be terrible to have such a limited perspective.
The Overmanwarrior 