Tag: Senate Bill 5

The Circus of Lakota: My Debate with the Pro Levy People

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.

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/01/04/lakota-teacher-busted-for-child-porn-made-over-65k-per-year/

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.

http://www.pulsejournal.com/news/crime/ex-lakota-teacher-pleads-guilty-to-child-pornography-1243985.html

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.

For the answer to everything as to why labor unions fail, check out this link:
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/08/23/why-public-labor-unions-fail-the-science-of-stagnation/

Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Lakota Take Notes from Larry Powell: Feeling guilty about the funhouse scam

I have contained here a sneak peak of my Letter to the Editor article that will be published in Thursday’s Pulse Journal. In context of my statements I supposed that the realization that the deeper you dig in this whole education quagmire, the more you learn that many of the educators are clearly in the business only for the money. Not only are these people paid well, as they should be, but they are getting wealthy in these professions. So to provide that context I’d like to reference a couple of superintendents who are realizing ahead of their peers that they are participating in a corrupt system, even if by default, and they are making sacrifices.

This past week I learned about the extraordinary pay cut that Larry Powell, the California superintendent of the Fresno County School System who asked the school board to impose on him an $800,000 give back from his salary and benefits. He’s offering to work as superintendent of 325 schools and 35 school districts with 195,000 students which had been paying him $288,241 a year for $31,000 a year.

At first I thought this was an extraordinarily generous offering until it’s realized that Larry is already technically “retired” and was in fact a double-dipper making an extraordinary amount of money. It looks like Larry was simply recognizing that the system was wrong, and he is taking the cut to provide leadership in preserving the programs in his district that mean something to him as an educator. By his own admission he decided that just “stockpiling” the money wasn’t the best thing to do while his district was facing major cuts. He is secure for many years and more money simply doesn’t have much value to him. Larry Powell is an example of just how much money is at play in his profession, where he doesn’t consider $800,000 to be detrimental to his retirement.

But Larry isn’t the first superintendent to do this. A Michigan superintendent, Ron Ferrell last year took an $80,000 pay cut Montebello Community Schools in Michigan. He was scheduled to make 95K during the year. His reasons were similar to Larry Powell. Listen to this news report.

In my district of Lakota I have seen so many exaggerated numbers, so much manipulation from the educators that it is nearly impossible to tell reality from an out-right scam. If I thought business was on the up an up, I wouldn’t be so angry, but at Lakota, they just spent a lot of money on a superintendent they proved they didn’t need and the rating for the school actually went up after major cuts were implemented. This makes me feel like I have been lied to, which I’ve always suspected, so my comment in the paper shown below reflects that betrayal.

________________________________________________

I would like to congratulate Lakota for doing such a fine job on obtaining an EXCELLENT rating for the 10th year in a row! That is quite a feat, and the administration is to be commended for doing such a fantastic job! In fact, they did such a great job that their rating went from a 104.9 rating to a 105.9 rating, and they did it while cutting over 12 million dollars from the budget and without a fulltime superintendent!

Being one of the people who voted NO against the last levy attempt, I was a bit nervous that all the warnings from the Pro Levy people that if we didn’t pass the levy, then Lakota would fall into decline never to be respected again. Well, since the levy did in fact fail, and Lakota did not fall off the side of the world, but actually did better, it seems the crises has been somewhat averted. We are now talking about a levy to help with financial issues in the upcoming years, not next month.

But there’s always room for improvement. Since the school board did such a good job of cutting and working with minimum resources just think how much money the district could save if there was actual management of the union labor contract, we wouldn’t even need a school levy. And I think they could have saved the quarter of a million dollars in expenditures that the new superintendent costs, because they showed that they didn’t need such expensive service. That money should have been spent on restoring busing to all the poor parents that are now extremely inconvenienced by the busing reductions, a cost that is less than 5% of the total budget. That doesn’t make much sense.

Those are just minor issues though, this last year with all the trials and tribulations proved that money doesn’t buy excellence, good, hard work does however, and Lakota dug deep and actually improved, and that makes me proud. Everything was going well until the school board decided to ask for more money. You guys were doing so well………

——————————————————————————————————–

I don’t mind providing a good school for the children of my district, and I don’t mind paying the people in that business a respectable income. But don’t play games with me; don’t attempt to twist the facts around, because if you do, you’ll bring my mind to the situations in these next two reports, one from Cleveland, the other from Atlanta; both showing the level of greed and personal selfishness exhibited in public education. The ironic part of these stories is that they are not regional, but are in fact endemic to the profession of education itself, and I know that Lakota and the rest of the public schools in the Cincinnati region are not exempt. They just haven’t been caught.

Read this article about Cleveland teachers who have retired at the end of a school year, then turn right around 60 days later and started again as a rehire so they can draw two pay checks instead of one. The situation is so bad that they can’t even start on the first day of school because the teacher has to wait 60 days. This is that whole double-dipping issue again, a way of payment that looks to be grossly abused. Just think about how much money education would have flowing into its use if just the process of double-dipping was outlawed. Because double-dipping, is a problem because the retirement age to qualify is set way too low, which invites abuse of the system, which is rampant.

http://blog.cleveland.com/metro/2011/08/some_teachers_skip_school_on_f.html

 

And for anyone who thinks that it’s not all about money with educators consider this case In Atlanta, which exploded just last month in July, where there was a major scandal in the Atlanta Public School System where nearly 200 teachers and administrators were caught cheating to improve test scores so they can receive better bonuses. Go ahead, CLICK TO VIEW:

To see more on the issue at Lakota read my recent article on the whole grade improvement at that school for detailed analysis.

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/08/26/lakota-gets-a-good-grade-but-didnt-they-say-the-world-would-end-without-a-levy/

 

The bottom line is that I don’t trust much of anything that anybody in this current education system says. Even in a very nice school like Lakota they have said that if we don’t pass a levy that their performance standards would be compromised, then they turn around within a year of that failure and get an excellent grade, then send out thousands of pamphlets in the mail taking credit for the rating increase as if this somehow justified more money for the upcoming levy that the community will vote on in November. The whole thing seems like a carnival act to me, and is an absolute joke.

I would begin to take things more serious when the educators started doing what Larry Powell is doing in California and that’s admitting that enough is enough, and they are prepared to admit it and give some back to the community so that the community can then make a decision on how much to fund. But the way the system is now, throwing thousand dollar bills at a simple image in a funhouse mirror only to be lost in the twisted corridors of a carnival maze is simply foolish. The profession of education deserves to be met squarely in seriousness and not open deception, and until then all levies for all public education must fail, because only in the constricted revenue is the truth coming out on just how much money has actually been lost to outright greed and manipulation.

The problem is not specific to Lakota, but as shown is epic, sweeping the entire nation, and it must be corrected before any talk of federal funding is even explored and what all schools have in common from each and every district across the nation is that they are all represented by a labor union.
Oh, one more thing, something just couldn’t be overlooked when I thought about Lakota’s new superintendent Mrs. Mantia in comparison to Larry Powell out in California. I have heard it justified that Lakota should have paid almost $300,000 when they were looking for Mantia, whom they eventually paid at $165,000 in straight salary, but up to a quarter million dollars in the complete compensation package. Again for more details see my article linked above for that breakdown. Mrs. Mantia must manage 2000 employees, 18,000 students and over 22 school buildings. My question is how is her salary comparable to Larry who was making $288,241 managing 325 schools over 35 school districts and managing 195,000 students! I’ve often said that the superintendents are incredibly overpaid, because Mrs. Mantia is currently making more than the Governor of Ohio. But I was told that I didn’t understand how “education” works. So here is a comparable “educator” with a much larger work load, but only making $120,000 more than Mrs. Mantia. All other things being equal, both Mantia and Powell are both double-dippers, both superintendents, but one has a lot more school buildings to manage and the other doesn’t. So why are their wages so closely related?

Hmmmmmmm, I wonder why? Welcome to the funhouse of distorted mirrors that is public education where reality is warped into funny shapes and twisted beyond comprehension, to hide the real intention behind the whole enterprise, and that’s to make money………..a lot of money. The funhouse may be painted with the faces of children holding hands to lure people in, but the result is simply to empty their pockets and leave them with a sense of being entertained, but always somehow feeling depleted. Such is the state of modern education in America. Thank goodness some like Larry Powell are starting to develop a guilty conscience.

For the answer to everything as to why labor unions fail, check out this link:
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/08/23/why-public-labor-unions-fail-the-science-of-stagnation/

Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Ancient Aliens and the Tea Party: Koyannisqatsi (LIFE OUT OF BALANCE)

Do yourself a favor, after you read this spend the time to watch these videos then read this again.  After that, pass it to a friend and let them start a journey they will never forget.  I have included the entire film of Koyannisquatsi at this end of this post, which is one of my favorite films of all time.  Enjoy!

Remember the speech that President Obama gave right after the shooting in Texas where he wanted to give a “shout out” at the Native Americans of the area? That was an awkward moment which showed just how out of touch the President really was in that instant of crises. The President exhibited all the typical signs of an out of touch academic which is what he is. He was simply revealing the Static Intellectualism, of which the Progressive Platform is built around, specifically in this case empathy for the plight of the Native American without really understanding the beliefs of the culture they are empathizing with.

The modern academic however, of which Obama is a part is limited in their understanding of many things, particularly the study of mankind’s past. They are stuck in the Static Intellectual culture patterns of which they helped create, and that is all life emerged in one of two ways, through evolution, or creation. One theory is one of science, which the Static Intellectual controls; the other is controlled by the religious institutions which is another type of Static Intellectual control. To the Static Intellectual who created progressive politics no other options exists, because the cultural patterns they established are the rules they are living by. That leaves out one small problem with their love of the Native American; the foundation beliefs of the Native American Culture most likely came from another planet which is represented in many of the rituals of Native American culture which permeates most societies from the Hopi to the Iroquois of New England. It was the Iroquois Five Nations that greeted William Johnston in his frontier fights against the French during the French and Indian war and those Five Nations were unified by a being that landed on Earth and instructed them not to be a war with one another, and to unite their efforts under one nation, of which the Iroquois did. (See the book Wilderness Empire by Allen Eckert)

The problem with this is that through study of the Native American rituals clues to the origins of mankind can and should be studied, but the Static Intellectualism of our modern culture have built their cultural patterns around the history of Europe which does not study the Native American cultures. Instead they study the known regions of Africa and the Middle East as the cradle of civilization and assume with arrogance that it’s always been that way, which Europe and its imperial roots contained within the Roman Empire gave birth to the world. So the scientific premise regarding the origin of the human race which has been controlled by the Roman Catholic Church, as a direct descendent of the Roman Empire refuses to look at all the new scientific archeological evidence coming in from all over the world. See my article on The Secret of Malden Island.

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/08/13/secret-of-malden-island-why-public-education-is-hiding-history/

Progressives led by the Static Intellectualism of the Victorian Era, and their love of the Native American culture because of the terrible exploitation imposed upon them particularly by President Andrew Jackson, who was a frontier fighter, a rugged American, it suited their political purpose to smear Jackson, yet in their study of this political history as intellectuals they completely missed the beliefs of those Native Americans and the foundations behind their tribal mythologies.

Chief Standing Elk seen below shares a friendship with a person I know who is a shaman and lives in St. Louis. This shaman is a dream-walker and a spiritual healer and I find her fascinating because her belief system is so completely different from mine. I enjoy conversations with her, she is to my personal Static Pattern belief system a Dynamic which challenges those beliefs that I find valuable. Anyway, this shaman friend of mine invited me to a spiritual meeting at Serpent Mound a few years ago with this Chief who is an active spiritual leader attempting to carry on the beliefs of the tribes who inhabited America before the immigration of the European. Listen to what the Chief believes.

I became interested in Native American cultures through the film Koyannisqatsi, (SEE THE WHOLE FILM BELOW) which is one of my favorite films, and features a haunting Hopi Indian chant that has never left my mind. The word Koyannisqatisi means in Hopi, “life out of balance, crazy life.” I nurtured that understanding through the work of Joseph Campbell’s comparative mythology studies, so I have a pretty good idea of what they are all about and I’ve always been fascinated by the origin of their beliefs. For instance, my wife and I frequent the Serpent Mound Archeological site a couple of times a year for many years now and have watched the perception of that place change dramatically from one of hard archeology based on the Adena Indian culture to this new age Star Culture idea that Chief Standing Elk believes. One of our visits a few years ago had various Indian tribes and shaman types chanting outside the museum and I told my wife that the science of the place was reverting, not advancing. These primitive beliefs and tribal chants seemed silly to me, until I did some reading of my own.

The big mystery of Serpent Mound is that it not only is a mound structure of a serpent, which is a universal symbol of life renewal, but it is particularly designed to be seen from the air, and all over the world such as the Nazca Lines of Peru and several features all over England, this is a common occurrence where societies seemed to be preoccupied with impressing the gods from the air. But the biggest mystery is the location itself in the middle of a crypto explosion event which occurred during the Permian Period, about 248 to 286 million years ago. Read more about the mound here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpent_Mound

Check out this clip, right about the 2:30 mark:

The crypto explosion is mysterious because it was a violent occurrence several miles wide and would usually be a result of a meteor impact similar to the site in Arizona just to the east of the Grand Canyon outside of Winslow, but it doesn’t look like that. It appears that at least half of the force occurred under the ground as well, so it’s quite a geological mystery. The haunting thing about this mystery is why the Serpent Mound is located right in the middle of this very unique spot that occurred hundreds of millions of years before any builders of the Serpent Mound came along. How did anyone from the Serpent Mound Culture know that something extremely unusual geologically occurred in that exact spot, out of all the spots on the face of planet Earth, a so-called primitive culture knew that something unusual and astronomically significant occurred right there in the middle of a wooded area in Ohio, with no visual reference on the surface. You have to do some digging to see the results of the crypto explosion.

Well, the shamans are saying that a seed ship landed on Earth and brought visitors who inhabited this new land. Such comments make me think of how the European encountered the Aztec and Mayan cultures of Central America and also the Polynesian cultures of the Pacific Ocean, where they imposed their religion upon the primitive people they encountered. Those cultures were influenced by the goods brought from Europe and changed forever as a result of this interaction and in the case the Native American; their cultures were almost completely destroyed by this exchange with the European. It is this aspect of the exchange that the progressive celebrates out of guilt so they do not look any deeper.

Our current culture is only about 200 years from being able to jump from planet to planet itself, so such space travel isn’t very far-fetched taken scientifically. Modern human culture achieved this ability in just about 10 to 20 thousand years, so it’s possible there could be many cultures out in space that are many thousands of years more advanced than we currently are. It is starting to appear that Earth has been greatly influenced by much more than just simple evolution or even creationism, which certainly have played a part, but there are other influences which gave rise to the sudden explosion of technology upon the human race, and the Native Americans seem to have a better understanding of that process than the Anglo-Saxon.

But the Static Intellectualism of academia who has built their universities upon flimsy theories based on Darwin and the Archeology of the Middle East refuse to see it. They, like President Obama think only of the suffering of the Native American at the hands of the “white man” because if fulfils the mission statement of their political platform. But if they actually took the time to listen to the Native American mythology, passed the obvious concern for conservation which also fills another political platform of “green technology” the study of Native American mythology and their roots don’t seem to be examined at all.

This is why television shows like the History Channel’s Ancient Aliens are so poplar, because the Dynamic Intellectualism of our current culture sees that the Static Intellectualism of our education institutions are missing the point in their interrelationship with the progressive politics of the Victorians in America. We are beginning to question the basic premise of the whole religious and scientific premise of mankind’s origins and that’s a good healthy process. If our education system is wrong, then it needs to correct that wrong with new understanding and not resort to the methods of the Spanish Inquisition, or burning heretics at the stake for being non-believers.

The Static Intellectuals of Progressive politics will insist that any notations of aliens colonizing planet Earth and bringing technology to the Homo sapiens who already lived here are preposterous. This is similar to when the church was upset with Isaac Newton for declaring that the Earth was not the center of the universe, which seems laughable now considering what we have learned about not only our galaxy but the many galaxies that make up the universe. In fact, through our understanding of quantum mechanics we are now beginning to think of the concept of a multi-verse. So the church was wrong, and the Victorians who built the progressive politics of which the current Static Intellectualism is protecting, are also wrong. In fact they are way off, and the evidence is overwhelming.

And this is where the Tea Party comes into this whole thing. Progressives are the political entity that is holding the world to a Static Pattern that is flawed in it perception of virtually everything. As it turns out, they are not so “progressive” but have been caught assuming that they are the “enlightened” ones and that they would be the ones who teach the world everything. They currently hold an imperial like grip on academia, which we can see is wrong, because Dynamic Intellectualism is using its imagination to ask the hard questions, where did we come from? And the answer is not in the Static Intellectual offering, so the pattern is wrong and must be broken down and rebuilt with new data gathered up by Dynamic Intellectualism.

The same is happening in politics, where the Dynamic Intellectuals represented by the Tea Party are shattering the Static Patters of progressive politics, because those politics are turning out to be completely false and ridiculously naive. This is why both mystics who say that the Earth was influenced by alien encounters and those who say that America should return to the principles of the United States Constitution are kooks. Because it is the Static Intellectuals who are threatened by the Dynamic Intellectuals of interrupting the Static Pattern that modern science has been established on.

I don’t know if aliens did or did not visit the Earth and influence our culture in any way. But I do know that archeology and anthropology along with geology and other sciences are in their infancy of understanding our world history, and a lot of discoveries have not been reasonably explained by anything more than some Static Intellectual politically correct assessment. But Static Intellectual ideas have not explained how temples were built all over the Pacific, or the mystery of Easter Island, or the Temple at Baalbek, Stonehenge, the Great Pyramid, the Sphinx, the city of Tiahuanaco which may be as old as 16,000 BC, and many, many, many, many others. Only Dynamic Intellectuals have ventured into this territory of exploring explanations, and like Newton, they are ridiculed.

The Tea Party too knows that the Static Pattern of America is wrong and it needs to be corrected as they are called names by the Static Intellectuals such as “terrorists, assassins, kooks, radicals, uneducated fools,” and the like. The Tea Party is a threat to the Static Patter of the Static Intellectual who is clamoring to their education empire even in the face of overwhelming evidence that they have been completely wrong about most everything they believe. The path of the progressive is a dead-end and they refuse to see their error even when the evidence is right in front of them.

This is what they have done to the Native American. They took only the parts of their culture that they could use for the progressive political platform, but they rejected the aspects that didn’t support their political platform and this is most obvious in the words of Chief Standing Elk, who is a strict conversationalist, represents the thoughts and beliefs of his ancestors, but he also believes that the world co-exists with “star people.” If the Static Intellectual were honest about their assessments they’d call Chief Standing Elk a kook for his beliefs, but they won’t because he is a Native America and part of the progressive political platform. They’ll just ignore the rest of Chief Standing Elk’s beliefs like they do everything else they don’t understand and will remain just as ignorant as those who were in charge during the Dark Ages, because as Static Intellectuals, they are stuck with beliefs that are fixed to the foundations of their existence, and they lack the courage of the Dynamic Intellectual who will go out on a limb with a scientific theory, because the Static Intellectual is simply too timid to venture in unknown regions of the mind. That is why they call people names, and that is why they always fail in the end as history marches on without them.

Too bad there isn’t a word in the English language that sums of the statement, “life out of balance, or crazy life” like the Hopi have. The reason the Hopi have this word is because in their culture they saw a need for such a term. The European had to invent a series of words to mean the same thing, because their culture wasn’t advanced enough to understand the need for some kind of balance between the various forces that exemplify a culture. Most of the time that out-of-balance state is the war between the Static portions of society and the Dynamic portions, and the Hopi understood this and they invented a word to bring all the aspects of their life into focus so they could advance as a culture, and that word was Koyannisqatsi.

Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Lakota gets a Good Grade: But didn’t they say the world would end without a levy?

Wow, I came home to a flood of email today from parents upset about the busing cuts, and even angrier at the school system for not dealing with the excessively high salaries before taking away busing to their children. It looks like many people are starting to see how this scam works, and that is good to see. I’ll deal with that in another article because I think the bigger story is the recent rating that Lakota received from the ODE. Remember the busing cuts are only around 3% of the total budget, and it is the labor costs that make up 80% of the school budget, so let’s keep that in context.

Before we get into the details have a look at the various interviews from me, and those of the Yes Lakota people prior to the election of 2010 from the clip above. Listen to what the Yes Lakota people say will happen if the levy isn’t passed, then compare that information to the results you will see below and decide for yourself what’s fact from fiction.

As Lakota received news that they received from the Ohio Department of Education an “excellent” rating for the 10th year in a row, I was actually surprised. I fully expected with all the cuts and controversy of the last year to see a lower rating, after all that’s what the pro levy people said would happen if we didn’t pass a levy last fall, and even the school board said as much. But the levy didn’t pass, the district made deep cuts, yet last year the rating was 104.9, but this year the rating went up to 105.9. How did that happen? Below is the article from the Pulse Journal by Steven Mathews. Have a look for yourself.

_______________________
Lakota’s top state ranking 
puts district in elite group
Excellent with Distinction honor draws praise from community, school board members.

By Steven Matthews, Staff Writer 10:16 AM Wednesday, August 24, 2011

LIBERTY TWP. — The Lakota Local School District’s Board of Education met on Monday night, and much of the session was centered around the big news that was announced last week — the Excellent with Distinction honor awarded by the state for the 2010-11 year.

The meeting, which included a PowerPoint presentation from Assistant Superintendent Lon Stettler and praise from community members, lasted about 90 minutes at the Lakota Central Office.

“Despite the challenges that we had last year and we continue to go through, the focus is where it needs to be — in the classroom,” board member Lynda O’Connor said.

Stettler emphasized in his presentation that Lakota — the seventh-largest district in Ohio — was the largest district to receive the state’s highest honor.

It’s the 10th straight year that Lakota has earned the highest possible honor, and its 105.9 performance index is an all-time district high.

“In the last 10 years, we’ve experienced changing demographics,” President Joan Powell said.
“It demonstrates that our staff has risen to the occasion.”

• New Superintendent Karen Mantia said that she has met with several focus groups, which consisted of residents, business leaders, government officials and parents. She also plans to meet with students once the school year gets underway.

“Here’s what I learned,” Mantia said. “It’s absolutely imperative that if we do nothing else, we make sure we maximize our children’s performance, and maximize the staff’s performance and expertise. … Across the board, they all understand the expectation of our staff is high.”

• The board approved a policy to either provide a cell phone or a cell phone stipend of $60 per month for certain district positions. Chris Passarge, the executive director of business operations, said most eligible employees chose the stipend.

• The board also approved the acceptance of a $2,000 eTech Ohio grant that has been awarded to the Lakota East Freshman School.

Tamera Terndrup, a Spanish teacher at the school, will use the grant to purchase four wireless laptops with microphone headsets.
___________________________

I think that’s excellent news about the rating, the rest of those issues I’ll cover in another article, but it proves what the No Lakota people have been saying all along, for the school to do more with less, and you’ll find better results when you’re lean and mean. Oddly enough, Lakota did not even have a superintendent during this rating increase, so what does that mean? Lakota made cuts to their deficit, eliminated positions, cut busing, sports programs and electives and they did all this without a superintendent, yet their rating went up, not down on the heels of a failed levy.

Even more baffling are the comments of Superintendent Mantia in that article where she says after her short time at Lakota, “Here’s what I learned, It’s absolutely imperative that if we do nothing else, we make sure we maximize our children’s performance, and maximize the staff’s performance and expertise…..across the board, they all understand the expectation of our staff is high.” WHAT??????????????????? What does any of that mean? Doesn’t Lakota always maximize its performance and understand that the expectations are high?

The answer is no. Until the No Lakota Levy group came along and started challenging everything that the school was doing in order to defeat the last two levies, the school district and its employees had been cruising along. Once the public in the form of No Lakota Levy came along, that anti-tax group had taken the role of “management” in the community, a role the school board had not been performing. It is because of No Lakota Levy breathing down the neck of all these officials that the costs of education at Lakota have come down, and the rating actually went up from this year compared with last year.

I’m not unnecessarily taking credit for the good work the administrators did in this endeavor. But they knew that they would be challenged so they have tip-toed around trying to be creative in their financing and still perform at a high level, which we all expect as a district. But it is the Lakota School Boards job to do what No Lakota Levy has been doing. I would personally prefer to do something else with my time, but since my elected officials have shown “no fight” in standing up to the organized labor forces that have embedded themselves in public education using tax increases to hide their terrible management of that labor, I am actually angered that myself along with a small army of businessman in the community have to actually do their job for them by showing them what kind of questions to ask, and understanding where that line is in our community of when too much is too much. The school board was supposed to be doing that all along, but they didn’t.

The reason for Mantia’s comments being what they are is now that she’s arrived here and got her feet wet, she is realizing that Lakota did really well without her, without a levy increase, and now she really can’t do anything but fail. She has come into a district at the top of its game and she really can’t expect to improve it. So here’s the question, and I’m sure this is bouncing around in her head also, why she should cost the district a quarter million dollars in costs just for her employment expenses? (To see a breakdown of what she costs the district CLICK HERE)

The school board hired Mantia because they are still stuck in an old formula of organized labor education philosophy which is based on the failed economic Keynesian economic models of Europe. But Lakota has proven that it can do more with less, and this is just the tip of the iceberg. There are many more savings to be gained if only the school board would “manage” its labor costs and if the community could free itself from the organized labor elements of the teaching profession. This can be done if the people in Ohio will simply vote YES to keep S.B.5 on Issue 2. That simple step would go a long way to allowing future school boards to drive down the cost of education even more than Lakota has, while still maintaining their excellence. (Click here to learn what S.B.5 does for you)

The rhetoric that schools utter when they proclaim that if they don’t get more money is the same old tired diatribes that all labor utters when they are asked to do more with less. The problem with organized labor is they threaten to strike if they don’t get what they want, and will walk off the job like infants who don’t get a pacifier and it is that element in this whole equation that has driven up these labor costs and dictated these levy requests, and that is the hidden message behind Mrs. Mantia’s comments. She has been hired to preserve that empire, not to drive down costs, because the real savings is in dismantling the empire of education so that the children of these schools actually see the money, and not political labor unions attempting to finance their enterprises with a straw into our wallets and purses as a lifeline of finance, as they empty us to only fill themselves.

Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Politicians Damn the Tea Party to HELL: More reasons for voting YES on ISSUE 2

Maxine Waters and many others of her political persuasion are damning the Tea Party to Hell for wanting to undo all the mistakes those progressive politicians have made over the last century. So before I get into Maxine and the rest of this issue please review the following video which I included on my article about WHY PUBLIC UNIONS FAIL (CLICK HERE TO READ AND VIEW THE FANTASTIC VIDEOS ON THAT ARTICLE) This video paints the picture of our current political situation extremely well. So before you do anything else, WATCH THIS!

What is happening in states like Ohio, New Jersey, and Wisconsin are people like myself, who are absolutely sick of politics, tired of the double-talk, tired of new legislation buried in the back of another bill similar to the practice of EARMARKING and PORK BARREL spending, are hiring strong governors who are not in bed with labor unions to bring down the costs of doing business in our states. I don’t care where a governor like Kasich came from, I hired him to do one job, and that’s to balance Ohio’s budget, and I don’t want the public unions to pull him to their side like shown in that video. That has been the problem for many, many, many years and this is the cause of the strong governors we are starting to see emerge, such as Chris Christie in New Jersey who is bringing public sector reforms to his state. Listen to his most recent endeavor here:

In Ohio, Kasich and the House and Senate in spite of being Republican are attempting for the first time in my lifetime to actually fix something in state government. And that something is a tremendous huge fix that to the labor unions may feel far-reaching, but it’s really not. I think Senate Bill 5, otherwise known as Issue 2 is extremely fair and it has infuriated me that people like Bill Cunningham who have claimed to be a Tea Party leaning American have been so critical about S.B.5 and all this so-called “fairness” he keeps talking about. Where was all this fairness when progressives like Maxine Waters, and Barney Frank and Ohio’s own Ted Strickland and Bob Taft have been stuffing new legislation down our throats for years which only strengthened the public sector union against their boss……..the American People! It was a relief to hear Tom Niehaus come on 700 WLW to defend S.B.5 against all the misinformation created by the labor unions to convince busy voters that this bill is somehow “unfair,” that the process from which the bill was written was bad, and corrupt in some way. Listen to that broadcast here:

The facts of the matter are that Tea Party American’s are finally starting to stick up for themselves. They are tired of being pushed around, lied to, manipulated, disrespected, and over-looked because we don’t stuff money in politician’s pockets to get our way. We are sick of it, and people like Maxine Waters doesn’t like it, so she’s doing the manipulative thing and going to her political base, who she is obviously using to her own advantage, taking advantage of a demographic group that isn’t asking the hard questions but is content to sit with their mouths open waiting for someone to feed them. Those are the people who give Maxine power, and make her believe she has a right to damn Tea Party American’s to HELL! What she is really worried about is that those Tea Party Americans are about to discover just how corrupt and terrible her party has been against all Americans under the light of day.

Barney Frank is worried about the same thing; watch him here pretending that he is somehow superior to his bosses, the American People. He knows that it is the labor union empire, that tyrannical beast of complacency that operates like organized crime lords and stuffs his pockets, and those are his masters. And it is his job to eliminate that threat to his bosses. That’s what he’s doing here.

But this game is over. People like me support Senate Bill 5, (ISSUE 2) because I want this empire off my back and out of my tax dollars. I don’t want them infecting my elected representatives in ANY way. I don’t want them manipulating my school board, my trustees, my city councils, my state legislators, my Governor. I don’t want them in my White House. I don’t want them in my life at all; because history has shown me that they are wrong, misguided and dangerous to the American way of life. And already they are declaring that they are willing to go to war with people in the Tea Party. I find that comment laughable.

It is not they who are the silent majority, the sleeping giant as they claim to be with Senate Bill 5. It is the normal people who are in their garages working on their cars on a Saturday afternoon watching NASCAR, it is the farmer, the engineers, the architects, the businessman, the “masses” out there that are the sleeping giant and they are beginning to stir. Senate Bill 5 is just the start of their intentions, and these new politicians are “their” politicians. We are tired of the back room deals; we are tired of being told that more taxes will solve the problem because it never does. We are sick of the light at the end of the tunnel being drug down the hall so we can never catch it. We are tired of the process and Senate Bill 5 (Issue 2) helps us reset the table so real “fairness” can finally play out in government.

Maxine Waters doesn’t know what she just did when she publicly spoke to God Almighty and asked for the Tea Party to be damned to hell because it is desired to take away the corrupt influence of progressives like her upon the states and nation of our political system. What Maxine Waters and her kind are doing is declaring war against America, which reveals what the intentions have always been from her party. So the time for suspicion of their intentions has passed and it is hoped that through legislation we can defeat these foes against our Constitution. But it looks like legislation may not be enough, because these desperate manipulators are willing to fight for all the “progressive” gains they’ve achieved at our expense and that may lead to real violence if it is not suppressed now, before the situation really gets out of control. Because if she will use that kind of language in public, God only knows what she says behind closed doors, and that’s where the real battle plans are constructed.

Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Why Public Labor Unions Fail: The Science of Stagnation

It is one thing to say that communism, or labor unions do not work, that they are bad for American society, and history shows us that the typical result when these collective organizations have a majority rule are either a stagnate society or a declining one. The benefits of collective ideas when it comes to social construction are short-lived and only last a few generations. But the big question is why? What is the science behind this failure?

Well, there is a science to it, a predictable path that can be witnessed and predicted accurately as to why labor unions and other collective organizations are doomed to failure. For such a science I turn to the work of Robert Pirsig, which came to my mind while I was writing another article about the needs for voting YES on Issue 2. Click here to see that article:

Pirsig many years ago came up with a definition, a way of determining the “quality” of something that needs to be understood in reference to what I’m about to say. I created a chart which articulates this definition of quality into two types, Romantic and Classic. So click here to see that chart and learn a bit about these two types. But for the purpose of understanding why unions are doomed to fail understanding that there is a science behind determining the quality of something is important and can be obtained with mathematic certainty.

Once the quality of something is determined then that quality can be broken down into two types, Static Quality and Dynamic Quality. Static Quality tends to be all the rules of society, or the rules of your business. Static Quality is the rules that everything runs off of. One of the reasons that I like Robert Pirsig is that he has done the work of understanding the classic Greek thinkers, but where the classics fall short, because metaphysically, society has advanced, we now know of quantum physics and have an understanding of how the universe works that is based on much better data than the astronomical observations made with primitive telescopes. So our society has advanced, and the force that drives that expansion is Dynamic Quality. An example of Dynamic Quality would be Leonardo Da Vinci, or Bill Gates, people who brought radical changes in thought to the Static Quality of the rules society had previously lived by. Pirsig is the most recent philosopher to take into consideration this Dynamic Quality change with the new science discovered in the most recent century.

Dynamic Quality are the rebels of society, or even of a body. They are the cells of a body that fight off diseases and strengthen an immune system or they are the people who challenge conventional thought and force an expansion of human understanding. Between the two types of Quality, both types are needed. Without Static Quality everything would fly apart, and chaos would rule. Dynamic Quality needs Static Quality to keep some sense of order in existence. But Static Quality also needs Dynamic Quality to allow it to grow. In fact in organizations where Dynamic Quality is stifled Static Quality has shown to actually proceed in an evolutionary decline. Without the presence of a Dynamic Quality regression of an organism or an organization is the natural next process. This could be said to be the cause of aging in human beings, or the decline of cultures the human beings have built. This can also be seen in sports organizations that become complacent and do the same things over and over and why some teams are always competitive because they are always seeking to bring a “dynamic” quality to their teams. Maintaining a dynamic order to anything is the key to any measure of success. But you must do so while still maintaining a sense of order, otherwise known as Static Quality.

Labor unions fail because in order to preserve their Static Quality, which is the focus of all their endeavors, they destroy any chance of allowing Dynamic Quality into their organization to help challenge their beliefs and expand their culture. So instead, they are a culture on decline.

A decline in culture can be seen most evidently in inner cities where the problem is not one of race. It is of losing the aspects of their Dynamic Culture. When welfare and other government care is introduced to the culture and the parents of the children of that culture are no longer pushing young people to become “dynamic” then the individuals who have these tendencies will turn their efforts into a destructive behavior that leads to their premature deaths or they move away from the inner city leaving the Static Quality of the inner city belief system to rule, which leads to the decline that can seen by everyone.

This is also the reason why public education is failing, is because the dynamic individuals are punished by being different rather than celebrated or challenged for the health of confrontation. The dynamic elements are attacked like a cell in a body would attack a white blood cell in the body because the white blood cell is different from the common cell. This process leads to disease in the body the same as it does in society. The result is no different.

This explanation is but a fraction of what I could say on this topic. In fact, I could write volumes of books on the matter, but for the novice in this field, the person who normally doesn’t think about these kinds of things, this should at least suffice to demonstrate that there is an order to all this discussion about central organization from government, or labor unions and understanding why the work and products they produce always seem flat and unimportant. It is because by their very nature; they spend their energy as organizations fighting off their Dynamic Quality competitors in order to protect the Static Quality of their existence.

So the argument is not one of union busting, Republicans or Democrats, or young against old. It’s not the Middle Class against the “rich.” It is simply about the battle between Static Quality and Dynamic Quality being stifled which is the direct cause of decline in any culture, and that is the premier reason why labor unions and government will always fail.

Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Why to Vote YES on Issue 2: Being bold and doing the right thing

Was it the novel Lila that stated, “Once a thief is caught a whole string of crimes is often solved? Yes, it was Robert Pirsig who had articulated my thoughts as I heard Sheriff Jones and Bill Cunningham argue against Senate Bill 5 promoting a repeal attempt. Sheriff Jones as a traditional Republican is working against Governor Kasich with many assumptions that have fed much of the misinformation about Senate Bill 5. Jones was very critical about Kasich offering the unions a seat at the negotiating table which can be seen below. The unions did not show up, and Kasich explains the situation to the press.

On the front of that meeting Sheriff Jones and I both spent a considerable amount of time on 700 WLW debating Senate Bill 5. Sheriff Jones’s position same as Bill Cunningham’s is one to protect the unions who they have either worked for or have done work in other capacities. So their arguments are the same basic union talking points based on party politics, emotion, and obscurity that we are hearing from union leaders like Richard Trumka. That important discussion can be heard here and is well worth listening.

There isn’t much about Senate Bill 5 that a public sector union supporter will like, and this is the cause of much of the misinformation, the protests and the divisive comments. And among the Republicans they are split over this issue, because S.B.5 is not the typical piece of legislation that is rooted in political gains. I have met Senator Jones on a couple of occasions now and several other legislators who were involved in the creation of Senate Bill 5 and I haven’t detected any level of maliciousness among them. It is quite the opposite. In fact, you can CLICK HERE to see a couple of them speaking at a School Choice event on the eve of this very issue way back in January of 2011. They knew then that this was going to be a tough fight because the public union worker, of which Sheriff Jones is a part, have grown too powerful and control too many of the costs. It is too late for elected leaders to “just say no” as Sheriff Jones proclaimed. That time has passed and time is of the essence. And, as I will show you in a clip below, just saying no is not so easy.

When Sheriff Jones says that the public boards of education, trustees and council members need to do their jobs and say no to these unions, that’s an unrealistic answer. Jones has managed to control his costs and lay-off workers depending on his budgets, but he’s done plenty arm twisting of county commissioners to get a good budget for himself, and he’s also openly supported the double-dipping process among his deputies, which is a legal loop-hole created by union lobby power purchased by the union dues paid by members.

So the process is not nearly as smooth as Sheriff Jones attempts to articulate. When he says all these elected officials have to do is say “NO” he is being completely misleading. To illustrate the reason why Kasich did not initially sit down and attempt to negotiate with the unions in a one on one sit down is for all the reasons heard in this broadcast from Darryl Parks way back in December of 2010 where the police and firefighter unions went ballistic over a PowerPoint presentation. This is not the exception, the kind of yelling and screaming you’ll hear in this broadcast. The only reason the public unions have been quiet in the year of 2011 is because they are afraid of Senate Bill 5 and they are putting on their best face in order to win over the public to repeal the law the November. But the broadcast below happened before Senate Bill 5 was even talked about, and it is because of this radicalism that the authors of Senate Bill 5 did what they thought was right knowing full well they would be relentlessly attacked in a massive public relations campaign and they knew that it was going to hurt. It was kind of like going to the dentist knowing that it was going to hurt, but they just had to put up with it so they could get their teeth fixed. LISTEN TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE POLICE UNION THEN LISTEN TO THE PRESIDENT OF THE FIREFIGHTERS UNION. (By the way, I think John Kasich did exactly as Darryl demanded of the councilwoman in this interview, Kasich does not care if he gets reelected. He’s trying to do the right thing which I’ll show below, and that earns him my support because he’s trying hard to be honest in spite of traditional politics. I judge a man by his actions, not by the spin. (The casino situation and union positions are all spin designed to make him play ball)

Now that I’ve had a chance to understand what finally made it through the final approval of Senate Bill 5 I find it baffling that anyone thinks it’s unfair in some way. As I have looked it over as a neutral observer who recognizes that reforms need to be implemented, Senate Bill 5 is extremely fair and well thought out. The only trouble with it is that it goes against the grain of “traditional” politics. It’s a uniquely bold piece of legislation that does not come about very often in politics. It is the kind of political fix that millions upon millions of Americans secretly yearn for because it is understood how difficult it would have been to do even one of the reforms listed below. CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO SHANNON JONES HERSELF. WHO IS SHE? WHAT WAS HER MOTIVE…….FIND OUT FOR YOURSELF.

• I think the greatest aspect of ISSUE 2 (Senate Bill 5) is that it protects employees from unwanted union membership. The practice of government union contracts requiring employees to pay fees to a union has been ended in this bill which means the unfair practice of withdrawing money from their paychecks for union use is over. The bill does not outlaw unions, but provides the option to join or not, which I think is absolutely essential.

• Another thing ISSUE 2 stands for is it eliminates binding arbitration. What that means is that the current system allows an unelected, out-of-town mediator to settle government employee contract disputes. We see this all the time in school districts where a federal mediator is called in to bring school boards and union leaders together, and this is a process that we have all become numb to, but it is highly corrosive. This means that someone with no direct accountability to the voters decides how to spend our tax dollars. Senate Bill 5 says those decisions should be made by the people who answer directly to the taxpayers, which is what Sheriff Jones says he wants. But he left out the process of how a person in his position has to play “politics” smartly to win over the arbitrator. Most elected officials are not as “smooth” at it as he is, or do they have the ability to pad the pockets of county commissioners with their personal “war chests.” That is part of the dark side of politics that get left out of the discussion, and Senate Bill 5 is written to eliminate that type of political maneuvering. IT HAPPENS IN EVERY DISTRICT AND MUNICAPALTIY TO VARYING DEGREES.

• Senate Bill 5 Prohibits government workers from striking. Police currently cannot strike but school teachers can, and Senate Bill 5 eliminates this practice. I can speak from the case of Lakota Local Schools where in 2008 the teachers threatened to walk off the job shortly after the district passed a school levy. The teachers demanded better wages and better insurance rates and they were willing to walk off the job in October of 2008 if those demands were not met. The school board buckled under the pressure and the unions got their way in an undisclosed settlement. Over the next 2 years the cost of labor at Lakota shot up 10.1%, so the teachers got their money then again in the spring of 2010 they were ready to strike again, this time over insurance contributions. A federal mediator came in and helped resolve the issue. If the strike attempt had not occurred Lakota would not need to come to voters for a school levy in 2011, which they are. This practice is happening all over Ohio and it must be stopped. Federal government employees have long been prohibited from striking, a policy upheld by liberal Presidents like Franklin Roosevelt and Barack Obama. In fact, it was Roosevelt, an advocate of organized labor in the private sector who was opposed to collective bargaining among government employees so much that he called strikes “unthinkable and intolerable.” CLICK HERE TO SEE THE EXECUTIVE ORDER PRESIDENT KENNEDY SIGNED TO MAKE PUBLIC UNIONS LEGAL, SOMETHING THAT SHOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN DONE.

• Senate Bill 5 is asking public employees to pay 15% of their benefits. A vast majority of Ohioans pay an average of 31% of their family health care coverage. For too long government employees have paid less than 9% and that type of disparity between public and private sector benefits must end. It’s not only unsustainable, but unfair to the tax payers who pay the salaries of their public workers. As Sheriff Jones says, “But we public workers pay taxes too,” well not exactly. The value of the initial money comes from the original tax payer for the services rendered by the public employee. The government is simply using taxation as a way to keep some of the public workers pay. The value of the money to begin with was created by someone in the private sector. The taxes that a government worker pays only helps prevent some of the slide of declining revenue that is happening around the pension requirements, sky rocketing Medicare costs, and other entitlement programs that are draining state and federal budgets.

• Senate Bill 5 rewards performance rather than longevity. Most Ohioans work under this system in the private sector. They’re retained and rewarded based on the job they do, not on how long they’ve been on the job. Teachers for a long time have attempted to keep any kind of performance assessment out of their pay structures which has simply not worked, leaving the United States far from the top in education placement throughout the world. Much of the reason so many school districts all over Ohio are asking for school levies this upcoming year is because of this very problem. At Lakota, my district, there are over 600 employees who make over 65K per year, and that has driven up the labor costs dictating another levy. If the school board were allowed to manage their costs they could still pay good teachers and administrators that kind of money, but the ones that they know, and everyone else knows are bad could be kept out of the higher rates of pay. Under the current system good teachers and bad teachers all advance at a steady rate under union contract which is what drives up the costs of a school district. It’s a terrible system that must be corrected immediately. Thirty years of this behavior have created such a burden on school districts that have only been fixed with increased taxes which is no longer a fix that people can afford. Reforms must occur before districts like Little Miami become insolvent and under state control forever.

• Senate Bill 5 ends seniority based layoff. This is something that Bill Cunningham, Senator Bill Seitz, and Sheriff Jones are all against and have been very vocal about. Today’s government contracts often require a system known as “last hired, first fired.” Well, this is an insane practice, if forces the newest employees to be laid off first, regardless of their performance. This is especially a problem in our schools, where good, new teachers are let go and bad teachers are kept on the job just because of seniority. Improving government services requires policies that keep the best and brightest not just the longest-serving. It must be remembered that the whole goal of a public sector job is to serve the public. It is not to create a position for a government employee that is secure for their entire lives. S.B.5 puts the public worker in the same situation every private worker in Ohio is in, and goes a long way to helping to get the most out of a work force, which should always be the goal of any employment endeavor. The personalities mentioned who are against this idea are all people who have helped build it, so of course they desire to protect it now. It doesn’t matter if it’s Republicans or Democrats, it is politics that put that system in place to help buy bloc votes in politics, and it is simply a failed system that must be removed.

When opponents of this bill say that Senate Bill 5 is too FAR reaching, that Governor Kasich should have come to the table to discuss these issues, those same people are the types who would have yelled and screamed just like in the Cincinnati City Council meeting played above where the union presidents of the police and firefighters were SCREAMING over two slides on a PowerPoint presentation, let alone the 6 major reforms listed above. Each of those items could have been a bill in and of itself, and under a normal political system they would have been. But in these current days where trouble is erupting everywhere from entitlement programs suffering years and years of abuse, drastic action was needed, and it took a Senator in Sharron Jones who is a newcomer to politics, without a cluster of special interest ties to write the bill and it took a governor in Kasich who could make a lot more money in the private sector, and could care less if he gets re-elected to sign it. After looking into their eyes and peering into their souls, I can say that I believe completely that these politicians wrote Senate Bill 5 because they know it was the right thing to do. They didn’t write it to play politics, or be popular, obviously, because the political machine is in an uproar, which is the primary reason Bill Cunningham and Sheriff Jones, both old political veterans, are aghast at S.B.5. They represent a portion of politics that wishes the train could continue forever, and they believe that if somehow someone could talk to the labor unions, that somehow the problem would be fixed going into the future. But their way still requires “dirty politics.” Their way still requires “war chests” of money to grease arbitrators, or re-elect commissioners so that the budgets will hold and alliances can be built, and that is how this whole thing became a mess in the first place.

Senate Bill 5 is the kind of bill that workers standing around their tractors in a barn in Greenville, Ohio, or the fishing boat in Sandusky Bay, or the McDonalds dining room in Pebbles, Ohio sipping coffee in the morning air all demand why those “damn” politicians don’t do something right for a change. Well, they have for once, and the people who wrote and signed the bill are feeling the wrath of the “political machine” that has suppressed these reforms for decades and allowed abuses to take place that are epic and once removed will show just how far-reaching the corruption really was.

And that’s the real fear behind the chants and the arguments to repeal the bill. The people who have openly manipulated the system of the public worker for years to achieve tremendous financial gain know that they are caught. They were caught the moment that Senate Bill 5 was signed because all the scandals hidden in the reforms listed above will soon be revealed. It will take only a few short months for the light to show just how much money was disappearing from the tax payers once these controls are in place and as stated in the opening line of this article, “many crimes will suddenly be solved.”

The repeal attempt is simply no different from a criminal who would entertain once they were convicted of their crime to evade their sentence through an appeal process. The public unions, and those people who have profited from them, hope that if they can just convince enough people that they are innocent, than they can be set free once again. And since there are so many people in Ohio guilty to some extent of the treachery that has occurred, there are a lot of people who will vote to hide their crimes. There is no shortage of people who will apologize for public union behavior because many of them carry just a little bit of the guilt for allowing it to continue for so long, they will attack the people who are just trying to solve the crime, and they will do anything to save their own skin, even if it means taking that skin off someone else’s back.

To me in this discussion I feel like the musicians on the deck of the Titanic playing one last song before the floods come and whisk everything away. I hope that by writing just one more article, or speaking on the radio one more time I can avoid the inevitable sinking of this entire public union debacle. But like the movie Titanic, the public union workers believe that their ship is unsinkable, and it is their naive arrogance that places all of us in danger.


After the ship has sunk and everyone is stuck in the freezing water the true primal nature of those in peril can be seen for all the ugliness a human being is capable of. That behavior is currently hidden behind the “political machine” but the ruthlessness that many will engage in to survive and preserve their own interests can never be underestimated and can be seen if looked at close enough.

I do not work for the Republican Party in any way shape or form. I am loyal to absolutely no politician. I have never taken one dime of money from a political party and I’ve never given one dime to a political party. I have zero desire to be a future politician for I despise the very term. In fact the only thing I’ve ever received from a politician is a tie from Ross Perot’s family for the work I did for his campaign during the 1992 election. I was tired of this whole process even back then! With that in mind I’m going to say that I not only think Senate Bill 5 is fair and a bold piece of legislation that I have personally desired for my entire adult life, but that I believe it was written in the most fair way possible to assist public workers with the change in political culture that must take place. The riots and protests that have been seen toward S.B.5 would have been witnessed with the same intensity over just one of those issues, and the politicians knew it, and this is the reason Kasich wasn’t willing to “talk” as Bill Cunningham and Sheriff Jones have accused him of doing, to the unions. But to Kasich’s credit the process did allow for input. There were two weeks of testimony where all sides presented their arguments before the Senate. This was not a deal done like Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi where they rushed “Health Care” through without anyone reading the bill over a holiday weekend. The Republicans did not do that. They did listen and they acted according to what they believed was the right thing to do. The unions spoke in testimony. They chanted outside and their history of intimidation over just minor issues as heard in the Cincinnati City Council recording are well noted, and the politicians involved braced themselves for the pain that would ensue.

But the authors of Senate Bill 5 did the right, and essential thing in a time of crises even though the task would be extremely difficult.

One last broadcast before I end this. In an interview by Bill Cunningham with his buddy John Kasich right before he was sworn in as Governor; this was about a month before S.B.5 was initiated as a law, provides some interesting insight into the world of politics. Kasich is the same person today that he was then, but it is Cunningham who has changed, because the foundations of the public sector worker are part of his business and these changes are uncomfortable. I’m not sure what people thought was going to happen when Kasich was sworn in, but Kasich is doing the job I elected him to do.

Kasich did exactly what he said he would do. But the people who benefit off the system as it is today obviously turned on him when the unions started their lobby campaign, which everyone knew was going to happen.

The reason I do this blog and have over 200 videos on my YouTube account, is to keep everyone honest and keep the “political machine” from manipulating the tax payers as they have for over 200 years. Since the newspapers and television stations have short memories, and I don’t, I created Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom to bring the truth to people with my opinion behind it. But the history of our existence is fact and is shown here for all to see, and I don’t mean to pick on Bill Cunningham, alliances and friendships only extend to the flow of money in politics, so it can be difficult to understand whose friend or foe. A friend today can be your enemy tomorrow and in a period of just six months a good friend like Bill Cunningham can turn into a Judas for all the reasons history provides, because when it gets hot in the kitchen some just can’t take it.

So I’ve provided you with the truth as I see it. If you dear voter do not vote in favor of Issue 2, you will regret it for years to come. You will see the kind of financial conditions that those people on the Titanic were experiencing. The issue of Senate Bill 5 is not matters of life or death like on the Titanic, but the financial requirements for your city, your schools, and state government will see a similar flooding of the fiscal nature if not passed. School teachers will still teach. Fireman will still fight fires. Police will still serve our communities if you vote YES on Issue 2. It is the financial culture behind those public positions that must change, not the jobs themselves. It cannot continue as it is now, because public workers already make nearly 30% more than the average private sector employee. CLICK HERE to read some stats for yourself and be armed to deal with the facts when a public worker claims they are being treated unfairly. In fact, click on every paragraph of this article to go to another article about S.B.5. This entire article is HOTLINKED to multiple articles.

Ultimately if you do not have the courage to vote in favor of keeping Senate Bill 5, by voting YES on Issue 2, you will be personally responsible for the aftermath of fiscal trouble that will follow. It’s already too late, this repeal process is stalling the needed reforms that school districts everywhere need to avoid going to the tax payers this upcoming November, and the tax payers can no longer afford to pay, even if they wanted to. With costs of everything up, the average taxpayer does not have the extra money, and there aren’t enough rich people to loot in order to balance the budgets the labor unions have negotiated. The radical extortion of the past has no place at the table of the future and if public workers want to be a part of that table, they need an approach different from what we experienced with Cincinnati City Council when the head of the police union refused to “discuss” the numbers on a simple PowerPoint. Instead she attacked the data with yelling and screaming and violent protests, a tactic that Senate Bill 5 virtually eliminates, so that proper negotiations can take place and disparities can be managed with a fairness every citizen in the State of Ohio deserves.

Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Money, Prostitutes, and Libertarian Islands: The history of fleeing tyranny

The Report Card for local school districts in Southern Ohio are out during a year where almost all of these schools have cut back their spending dramatically, reduced their staffing to unprecedented levels, yet still maintained their excellent ratings. Doc Thompson of 700 WLW had some fun with the facts because he is the only media personality who has tackled the hypocrisy of school funding. The same administrators who are now patting themselves on the back for performing well in their school districts are the very same administrators who proclaimed that the school districts would decline if tax payers didn’t pass new school levies. Listen to that broadcast here:

During Doc’s discussion he covered the debacle of college expectations, where the debt for college loans is about to exceed 1 trillion dollars in the United States. Professors and college administrators have marketed their product of education so well that every American believes they must have that product in order to be successful. However, to a person who sees clearly it is obvious what’s going on, those in the education industry share a common thread with unions to communicate their message that more money makes education better, and are manipulating the situation to suit their own financial interests. There is no evidence which suggests that more money poured into education makes education better at all. The entire premise of education is based on a foundation void of results or measurements of any kind, because the real origin of the education culture has a much more cryptic intention.

On my way out to speak with Doc Thompson on his broadcast toward the end, I was engaged in a conversation with a person who was struggling to save enough money to put his kids through college. My comment to him was “why, with the rate that tuition is increasing uncontrollably, and the amount of students coming out of college these days with a degree but no job to work, why does college for your child make sense primarily considering the expense?” All the man could say to me was that he had a moral obligation to give a college education to his kids. (CLICK HERE TO READ WHY THIS IS A BAD IDEA) I felt sorry for the guy, because he was obviously a victim of the marketing machine of education that has been allowed to grow uncontrollably and indicates a problem of a higher nature.

The trouble with America’s colleges as they are now is that they attack the kind of person who traditionally is an American. Colleges are inventions of Europe and were brought to the United States by people who value education a great deal, just as I do. What was mistaken in this process was the failure to recognize just what an America was and why it needed to be protected from foreign ideas.

In the great novel, The Frontiersman, the essence of the American is seen clearly. The very land from which I am writing this piece was embroiled in a wilderness war with the Native American Shawnee Indians against the English frontiersman. The frontiersman who came to America in those days wanted nothing more than a fresh start away from the European hierarchy, which can be seen to this very day not only in Europe, but in virtually every college institution. The Americans who founded this country became something of a hybrid adventurer who craved freedom from political strife more than their fear of death, and America was a “chance” to escape those psychological shackles. The personality of the American adventurer became an interesting mix of the Native American warrior personality merged with the European.

Well, once the frontier battles were fought by people like one of my all time favorite Americans, Simon Kenton, Tecumseh, Blue Jacket who was a white guy adopted by Indians and fought on their behalf, and Daniel Boone, the Europeans moved in droves to this new land cleared for them by the spirit of the adventurers. Those adventurers resenting the migrating Europeans continued to move westward for all the same reasons that Native American tribes were being pushed westward. It was in this wave of people who settled in New York, Philadelphia, Boston and the like who brought with them the university system, and the education methods of their homeland. The trouble is Europe was a broken, fractured land full of conquered people from thousands of years of war. It was this system that poured into the borders of the United States after the frontier wars, almost immediately after the American Revolution.

It is not by accident that John Wayne was born in Iowa; Annie Oakley was born in Greenville, Ohio. Roy Rogers “King of the Cowboys” himself was born just outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. It’s because the land of the Midwest, the land of the Frontier Wars, was ignored by this emerging European style culture being established on the East Coast, so the people born in this region still maintained some of the spirit of the brave adventures who fought and died in that part of the country and those traits showed up in those famous personalities who went on to evoke the spirit and adventure of westward expansion, which is an innate desire in not just American culture, but world-wide. Freedom is a universal desire.

That spirit was captured I think pretty accurately in St. Louis at the arch. They have a nice little museum at the foot of the arch that shows this whole process pretty well, from the objective standpoint of history. But what doesn’t get dealt with is why; what were the motivations of the frontiersman in the first place to brave a strange new land laced with danger. Well, the progressive history education in this European mindset of the universities will say that it is greed that the white man was after, greed for more. But as history now shows, that greed of which they speak is the same greed that we are hearing about today, from the same segment of the population which looks to Europe as the secure hand of a parent and thus explains they way they think. They are the same people who say that people who do not wish to pay more taxes are greedy, because those Americans do not support the social mechanisms of the tax hungry progressive. Europeans since the start of America viewed the type of person who founded the county with distaste. American’s were considered “uncivilized ruffians, and “undisciplined slobs.” The idea of the cowboy, and the Indian were terms of terror in the eyes of the European noble, and they did not have a hard time convincing a conquered people, and let’s face it, all of Europe contained conquered people at that time that life in America was for the fool and downtrodden. The European nobles had to market America this way to keep all their people from being tempted to flood into America to flee the tyranny of Europe.

Karl Marx and other European types like John Mayard Keynes, both residents of London came up with their own solutions to the European problem of declining economic gain, as America seemed to accelerate at a frightening rate under the flag of freedom. Those ideas were of course Marxism and Keynesian economics, and England adopted these methods more with an eye to America than at themselves. Through the university system, which American universities were attempting to duplicate from the European model of places like Oxford, English nobility infected American education with the notions of those types of European thinkers. In this way they were able to slow down the growth of America and prevent the new nation from getting too far ahead of Europe.

Another philosopher more than a century before Marx named John Locke who had frequent correspondence with my favorite pirate of the Caribbean, Henry Morgan was learning through Morgan’s exploits the merit of valor and freedom for the first time. Morgan was the ultimate frontiersman and it was the work of Locke who influenced the American intellectual rebels like Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin to cast Europe away, keeping the good but scrapping the bad, and this worked for over a century. Morgan had been hired by the king of England to roam the Caribbean for one reason, to keep Spain from accumulating too much wealth from the sacking of the Mayan and Aztec cultures of what would become Mexico. It was fear of Spain gaining too much wealth which provoked the whole pirate era. It was this same fear which caused Europe to infect American education with subversion tactics of an ideology which would suppress the culture for generations to come, and thus prevent America from growing out of the reach of the rest of Europe, intellectually, philosophically, economically and worst of all, as a world power.

It is this European system of education that our public schools are built around. The goal of these public schools is not to teach kids about Daniel Boone, or Simon Kenton, or Henry Morgan but about all the things they need to know so they can get into college. And once they are in college, radical European sympathizers will then teach the social principles of European nobility so that the American citizen will be “cultured” and not emit the kind of radical frontier independence that was so dangerous to the mind of the European when they had to confront the stories coming back from America in the adventures of Lewis and Clark. (I’ve been to college, my wife has, and I have many friends who teach in college, so I speak with firsthand knowledge)

When Teddy Roosevelt had captured America’s imagination with his exploits out West as a cowboy, and a rough-rider, it was Europe who seduced him under their wing. Roosevelt, being born of wealth in a European oriented culture in New York always had in him a kind of yearning to please the parent country of Europe, which was no different from a child wishes to please their own parents. After Teddy’s presidency and subsequent tour of Africa on his great year-long hunt, Europe begged Teddy to visit every noble family of their lands where they took him under their tutelage. Saul Alinsky many years later would call this process The Delphi Technique. (Click here to read all about it) It was during this trip through Europe that the monarchs seduced Teddy Roosevelt into “Progressivism.” Teddy still the rough and tumble adventurer of the Dakota’s was still mentally present, but he used the Progressive platform to split the Republican Party away from his former friend but now political rival, the President of the United States, (his successor) William Howard Taft. (also from Cincinnati) Teddy wanted to be President again, for a third term and it was the Europeans who planted the seeds in his power-hungry head. It was Teddy who then paved the way for progressives like the educator, President of Princeton University Woodrow Wilson and later Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Teddy’s younger cousin.

It was education that was used during this whole process to tie America’s wild spirit to the motherland of Europe with a yearning for European culture that survives to this day. London is a dank, compact city that is terribly crowded and rigid. Paris, the city of lovers is much the same. They are no different from any American city; in fact some of my European friends were shocked when I took them to the top of Carew Tower in Cincinnati. “My goodness, you have such high buildings here!” this coming from a guy who goes to London for everything he needs in a city. When I say that Carew Tower may be the tallest building in Cincinnati, but places like New York and Chicago have many, many more that are much taller he would just look at me like I was speaking from Mars.

Education costs too much because it is based on European models of thought which of course are failing. It is the European that threw American adventurers into the path of the Indians and created westward expansion. It was not greed for land to steal from the Native American, but a thirst for freedom that had always been there, but was suddenly released upon the discovery of the New World. Within a few centuries oppressed Europeans could leave the stifled political climate of Europe and run into the dangers of settling America, and they did.

Today American’s still love their cowboys, their NASCAR, their straight shooting Midwesterners who are descendents of those original Americans. But Americans are truly confused. The European plan to infect generations of these crazy, individualistic Americans has worked by using education institutions to halt the growth of America and turn its citizens back to the monarchs of Europe, which is what they always wanted, and yes, they do think in terms of centuries, where the typical American does not. People like the guy I mentioned at the beginning of this are dedicating their lives to sending his children to an education institution that is designed to turn his child against everything he thinks he likes about America, but has forgotten in the chaos of living. The man does not question whether the value of the tuition is even worth the money, because his mind has been trained by the education system itself to support the system blindly.

This led me to wonder about the mind of human beings. Why would they openly support a tyrannical system when they can see with their own eyes that it is bad for them? Well, all one has to do to understand that is to study the behavior of a prostitute who will sell her body for sex, subject herself to tremendous danger then turn around and give the money she’s earned to a pimp out of fear that the pimp will beat her. The woman is perfectly free to roam the entire Earth, and she could easily escape the pimp’s power which is usually only relevant for a few city blocks, maybe even a portion of a town. But the woman will not leave the territory of the pimp because she knows her surroundings and lacks the spirit of adventure to exceed beyond those limits, like a typical European. She will gladly walk into the violent abuse of her pimp because she knows him. This is similar to the guy struggling to pay for college tuition for his children. He does not question the validity of the money needed, he will just prostitute himself out in some blind pursuit to support a structure he knows and trusts without regard to whether that structure is right or wrong.

The conflict of the age of which we are all a part is no different now than it has always been. There are still those who know better who are looking to flee the confines of this cancerous European monarch system complete with nobility and political corruption that we are all taught to trust. Recently Peter Thiels the founder of PayPal placed over a million dollars of seed money into a manufactured island off the coast of San Francisco to give people a place to flee the corruption of government. I have met many of these types of people. You find them on obscure mountain trails in the middle of West Virginia, lonely roads in the middle of Tennessee, sitting at a bar in Key West, and on island paradises all over the Caribbean, people who just want to be left alone. They want freedom from the looters and thieves of monarchy, or European social structure, and they’ll do just about anything to have it.

So when Doc covered the report card for area schools, it is quickly revealed that it isn’t about results that the schools are really after. It’s money, and the money feeds the machine invented by Europe to suppress culture, not to expand it, so that no country on Earth would exceed the development of mother Europe. Institutional control is more persuasive than all the missiles, tanks and guns of all the worlds’ armies, because if thought can be limited and controlled, then conflict isn’t needed. And in a territory such as Europe, who has been at war with itself for several thousand years, they know very well how to wage a war whether it’s with literal troops, or thoughts in a mind. (Just read Shakespeare) But make no mistake about it, war is the objective even if the warlord who is the enemy shakes hands with a smile on their face and appear to be “cultured” and “civilized.” Such manipulations are designed to keep the mind fixed on the past so innovations of the future can be suppressed for fear that those who currently hold power can keep it.

Click here to read about all the successful people who did not go to college and make your own assessment to the validity of my content.

Remember, Einstein came up with his Theory of Relativity while working in a low-level position of a patent office, and William Sidis spent the rest of his life after predicting the existence of Black Holes 47 years ahead of their conceptual theory, working odd jobs and writing for his own amusement in obscurity. He could have owned the world with his mind alone, yet he chose to turn away from it. What does that say?????????

Education does not create intelligence; it simply passes on what others have done to share with the class the exploits of those who do things. In all the billions of hours of classes taught universities have not produced another Einstein, Sidis, or a George Lucas. It is the individual themselves who make their own way which cannot be purchased with money, and it is typical of the European noble to loot the achievements of their “subjects” to their own benefit. And this is the answer as to why schools even in cutting back their funding were still able to produce at a high level. Because it is the parents of a community who send their children to the school who make the school good, and if the child is good, then the school will be good. Social engineering with a European mindset will never change this as much as they’d desire too. The answer to this equation is contained in the Metaphysics of Quality, seen at this link.

Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

Meet Lakota’s Mrs. Mantia: Is a superintendent of a school system the same as a CEO?

John Halase is a frequent contributor to the West Chester Tea Party and since he attends many school board meetings for the Lakota School System, and has a technical background, he is the perfect candidate to take some of the obscure fiscal information dressed up in the legalism of education terms and explain them in a way everyone can understand. John is one of the most neutral human beings I know. His only goal is fairness, but a firm understanding of the facts involved in any particular situation. This can be seen clearly in his presentation of August 16, 2011 to a crowd of approximately 200 to 300 people eager to understand why Lakota has placed another levy on the ballot. Central to this new discussion was the new superintendent Karen Mantia and the justification of the one-quarter of a million dollar annual cost she is to the district.

My argument when it comes to costs, which dictate to the tax payers whether or not more funding is needed to fund a school is how much is the public supplying, and if it’s sufficient, then why is there still a requirement for more funds. If the revenue is insufficient, then what criterion determines the level of funding? Well, that answer is what the community can afford, and that is determined in a vote. If the people of the district vote no, then it is the school boards job to go back and trim the budget to the level of revenue that the tax payers approved. It’s that simple.

But how it is currently is a ridiculous situation. If the community votes no, then the district just puts the issue on the ballot. Most school boards do as Lakota did, and that’s drop some staff through attrition, cut small costs like busing and sports programs because it punishes the people for voting no, and they’ll keep putting it on the ballot however many times it takes till it passes. That is a foolish business model. Lakota is on its third attempt in a two-year period, and Little Miami is on their 9th over a four-year period. Most of the schools in Southern Ohio can tell a similar story.

That’s why it becomes necessary to look at just what the costs at a school like Lakota are, what they are spending their money on. Lakota has a total of 1,976 employees at an average wage of over $62,000 per year. 600 of those employees make over $65,000 per year. Of that employee matrix there are 1,192 teachers, 712 support staff, and 72 administrators serving 18,458 students. In 2010, Lakota brought in $157 million and it spent $167 million.

Now to regulate those costs, which were obviously at a deficit even though the revenue coming in is over 150 million dollars, which is nothing to balk at; it is the job of the superintendent to manage those costs. I keep hearing that it is the superintendent, who often makes over six figures and deserves to be paid like a CEO at a corporation, should be paid so much money because as in the case of Karen Mantia, she is responsible for over 24 buildings and 2000 employees with budgets in the tens of millions of dollars. Ok, fine, but with all that responsibility I see a trend with these superintendents where they don’t behave like CEO’s at all. They behave like spoiled union workers where there’s never enough money coming in, and that’s the big difference.

Karen Mantia is no different. She started off as a teacher at Northmont City High School where she worked for 24 years as a law/economics and government history teacher. While there she was a principal, Director of Curriculum, then Assistant Superintendent. She took a job at Sycamore Community Schools as Superintendent from 2000 to 2006 for 100K per year overseeing 5,710 students. In 2006 she retired when she turned 55. She then took a job at Piqua City Schools double dipping from her retirement at Sycamore while making 117K per year managing 3,750 students. She wasn’t at Piqua long, because by 2007 she took the Superintendent position at Pickerington School District making $144,000 managing 10,500 students. It was from this position that Lakota spent $42,266 to recruit Mantia from her Pickerington position where Lakota paid her $165,000 to manage 18,458 students.

Mantia’s contract pays her a base salary of $165,000 a year plus an annual deferred compensation of a $30,000 annuity. She gets an annual performance award, retirement contribution and STRS Membership “pickups,” health and dental along with vision insurance, “known as a Cadillac plan,” Life insurance based on 2.5X her base plus annuity. She is required to work 227 days a year, she gets 23 vacation days, 15 sick days in addition to 3 personal days during that span of time. She also gets all the administrator paid holidays. She is also paid for any professional membership meeting expenses. The over-all cost of Superintendent Mantia is one quarter of a million dollars, ($165 + $30K + $61K (31.7% benefits) per year. Mantia also has a severance package that is 3 years her base salary plus annuity up to the 5 years or less remaining on her contract for contract termination.

Now, to me, those are wonderful benefits. I think it is extremely generous. And what I expect a person so well compensated to do is to manage the district costs like a CEO, because she is currently paid higher than the Governor of Ohio.

But already, the indications are that she will provide a “business as usual” approach. On her first meeting as a superintendent, was the meeting where the school board voted to go for yet another school levy this November. So why?

The problem is, Mantia like all the other superintendents come from a teaching background and seem to be sympathetic to the union. In Ohio, because by law every teacher must be in a union and as a teacher Mantia was a union member, and she will not choose to take a hard-line against union demands, because it is because of those union demands in the past that she is able to receive the tremendous benefits she has received at Lakota. This is the big difference between superintendents and CEO’s. Mantia is a functionary and not making hard decisions about labor costs and management of them. Her primary function is that of a politician, not a cost reducer. Her job is to secure more revenue from the community, and make cosmetic cuts to convince the tax payers that they are doing everything to reduce costs, when in reality she is protecting the integrity of the union contracts which just continue to grow without any mechanism at reduction, which is needed.

If a superintendent could promise the community that the revenue needed by the district could decrease year after year, and at a certain point when we realize that we’ve minimized staff, wages, and contracts to a level that actually jeopardizes an excellent school, it is only then that any tax increase should be explored. But with education currently it is perceived that every year an education budget will increase and that just isn’t going to work as a long-term sustainable model. That is the reason why there is so much fuss about what Mantia makes as far as compensation. The education industry sells the superintendent position as a CEO, and in comparison to other CEO’s she holds a “lame duck, powerless” position that is carefully regulated by union contracts. It would be the CEO’s job to operate the corporation at a profit, which would be met with an increase in sales, and a decrease in costs. With a school superintendent, they are regulated to only dealing with 20% of the costs that are not covered by a union contract which means they cannot control their costs, and can only ask for more revenue in the form of taxes to cover the disparity. That is why such high compensation for administrators in education positions are considered too high, and why Lakota should have looked for a superintendent that was much, much cheaper.

It is decisions like those made in acquiring a new superintendent at Lakota that drive up the cost of education for everyone, and display vividly for all to see where the real problems truly are.

Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com

RICH HOFFMAN NO LONGER RECOGNIZES THE AUTHORITY OF ANY PUBLIC UNION

There are few things that truly anger me, and this whole issue of the attempt to bargain with the unions over the repeal of Senate Bill 5 is one of them. Because, the comments of We Are Ohio, a union backed group articulates the entire problem when they said, “we view the repeal of Senate Bill 5 as only the beginning.” It is that attitude which has virtually bankrupted the State of Ohio in order to pay for the services public sector unions have manipulated for themselves. For the unions to even proclaim for a moment that they are somehow innocent of any wrong doing in the whole budget crises of the age, that they are victims in some warped universe, is the ultimate denial from a group of people fighting to cover-up over 50 years of political mistakes instigated by their little “clubs.”

It is in the type of fury that I feel right now that I feel compelled to do something similar to what one of my favorite writers Robert Pirsig has done, and that’s to buy a sail boat and retire traveling the world without a care, because as Pirsig believed in frustration when people had difficulty understanding his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila. It was the same frustration that Ayn Rand experienced after Atlas Shrugged came out, when people were slow to understand the material. Those two writers are part of modern philosophy. The trouble with our society is that it is believed that philosophic growth ended with Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Voltaire, Marx and the several others from the “old days” of philosophy. They forget that modern philosophers like Pirsig and Rand are continuing along the traditions of thinking based on the evolution of society.

Well, I’m a person who understands the work of Pirsig without any difficulty. He matches my own thoughts which have been forged from a full life of experience. I can honestly say that I have seen every type of human deception, witnessed every type of scandal, and experienced the most brutal forms of violence first hand. I have to say that as a qualifier for what I will now say, because my feelings are harsh in regard to public unions.

I am not a supporter of unions of any kind. In private industry, we have seen unions drive up the cost of a product, and if the demand for that product can support it, then fine. Having a union should be an option to people who want them. To date, unions for entertainment and sports are the strongest surviving unions, because people have shown they will pay the extra money for a ticket, or sports memorabilia to support sports unions, and buy movie tickets for all the entertainment unions. But in manufacturing, once NAFTA was signed into law in the early 90’s, jobs have fled the United States because the labor is simply too expensive. Only large manufacturing jobs who rely on government contracts have truly survived. It is unions that have killed manufacturing jobs in the United States and I resent them for it.

But the public sector union has absolutely no place in modern society. I personally don’t even recognize their right to exist. A union is simply a club of like-minded people, just like any club. It’s no more complicated than that. However, the make-up of this club tends to be, unless compelled by law to join, the very weak. They are the type of people who fear sticking up for their own rights to an employer. They are the type who prefers to cower behind a group of friends where courage only comes to them in mass. Unions have achieved what they have through violence, extortion, intimidation and other methods which lack personal valor. Unions allow the complacent and average to be equal to the best and that is a crime against society.

It is in the pursuit of being the best that makes one the best. One cannot be the best just by being paid wages that are high. The short-term sense of fairness and antagonistic relationship these types of employees have with their employers is culturally deficient and socially destructive. Unions kill culture the same as deforestation and drought killed Mayan, Aztec and Native American Cultures, just as war and territory wars have held back European society. Unions have their roots in Europe and are products of the Dark Ages. They should be despised in American culture like cancer is despised in the human body.

Public Unions should be illegal. They are not the back bones of the middle-class as they are sold by the complacent, the small-minded, and intellectually deficient. Unions are a short-term solution to the jealousy of those who lack ability, or ambition. To those who are too lazy to push themselves to reach beyond their limits to earn a sense of pride in their self-reliance. Unions, as a club of such lazy types have attracted the masses, because it is true that many people are born with a natural inclination to follow, but should look with eagerness at those around them who are strong and strive to be strong too. Unions kill this process. It forces the strong to be average and the weak rule in mass, so whatever enterprise is created under this arrangement is less than it otherwise would be.

Unions are a fix for the human sense of insecurity to have and maintain a sense of extended family. It is common for union members to refer to each other as a “brother” or “sister” as though their unity is bound by flesh and DNA. The only unity of such types is one of poor mental evolution. These people share in common a sense of basic functioning from the food that goes into their bellies, and the sex they can achieve with their reproductive organs. They are what the Kundalini Yoga refers to as the beings of the lowers states, those of Chakra 2, maybe 3 at the highest. Their only concern for existence is what goes into their bellies or comes out of their penises. They lack any sense of history but what occurs in their lifetimes, and they care not for what the waste of their lives produces in the future.

Unions are the inventions of fools, miscreants, socialists, the weak-minded, the violent, the power-hungry, and the empire builder. They are the mechanisms of fantasy for the social reformer, the corrupt magpie wishing to undermine society with a smile but a hand on the knife concealed under their clothing, (metaphorically speaking).

The gains public unions have made over the years they achieved through either the threat of violence or the threat of work stoppage, not the merit of their arguments. Not on the strength of their ideas. They gained respect through fear and are no different from a street gang fighting over turf in a city, or a drug cartel leader establishing a trade route over a rival cartel. They are no different from the organized crime habits perfected by Al Capone, and evolving to this current day in various enterprises where a baseball bat and a threatened loved one halts any intrusion into their business practices.

If I were the governor of Ohio, this is what I’d be thinking when a group of public unions struggling to maintain their business monopoly on the tax payers of Ohio wanted to meet. And when the Governor refused to meet with these people he spoke as my representative, because I did not want to even give those people the merit of an audience. They should be illegal, not legitimized with even an acknowledgement. By sitting down with those union leaders the governor gives them a strength they do not deserve, that was taken in the first place by violence and manipulation, and represent the kind of America that Karl Marx envisioned, not the one of Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, or John Locke conceived.

But don’t mind my opinion dear reader. My view of America is that the Federalist Papers were too imperialistic, if I lived in the time of the founding fathers I would without a doubt be an Anti-Federalist! But today I shake my head at the lost souls around me who have such a shallow understanding of history to actually believe they have a “right” to special privileges because they are a member of a club funded by the tax payer. My anger becomes paramount in my personal philosophy. The anger is from the kind of frustration one might feel toward a child who you are trying to teach to read, yet can’t even read the first word in a sentence.

These people against Issue 2, these union leaders, and blind followers have been taught all their lives all the wrong things. It is those wrongly taught things that are the sources of wrecked lives, health problems, broken marriages, and children who dislike their parents, because looted money from the tax payer cannot fix the mind that drives the bodies of these union people. They are on a path of personal destruction and do not have the eyes to see that it is their fault the foundations of modern society is failing. They fail to understand because they are stuck on the fixed idea of fairness created by philosophers long dead, and refuse to accept the new data which is arriving to our minds in great abundance in this very modern age that indicates mankind is doing all the wrong things for the sustenance of the human race.

A destructive class of people have the right to be stupid. But they do not have the right to dictate to a governor a seat at the table of power, a power they stole from the tax payer and did not earn with their personal merit of strength and intelligence. By sitting down with a simple club which is what a union is, the governor and his staff will only appease a mob hell-bent on personal destruction and have no interest in negotiation of any kind unless that negotiation involves the sacrifice of someone else. History has taught us this, and if we have not learned by now, then hope for intelligence to rule ever, appears unrealistic.

I understand now why Pirsig sails the oceans of the world on his boat, because the masses do not understand his words, because they waste their time in groups like these unions, reducing their minds with false philosophy and sit with their mouths open for society to feed them like some little bird in a nest waiting for a mother to drop food into it’s mouth. The more I think of it, the more Pirsig’s solution to society’s foolish behavior seems rational and actually evolutionary preservative. Because it is only on the open sea void of politics and the rules of mankind that the nature of existence makes sense. Thus the source of my anger is not at myself for choosing not to join Pirsig on the open waters, but it is in my belief that people are worth the fight, to help them become better than they show an inclination to become themselves. Such a task at this point seems pointless in the wake of a deal with the labor unions over repealing Senate Bill 5.

Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com