This is the clip where Glenn Beck answers Van Jones.
Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
Tag: State Soverignty
Jimmy McMillan is the Real Deal: in a house of warped mirrors and flashy lighting
Read all about Jimmy here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_McMillan
Early campaigns
McMillan’s first run for political office came in 1993, when he ran for Mayor of New York on the Rent Is Too Damn High ticket. In the course of that campaign, McMillan was at one point tied to a tree and doused with gasoline;[5] he would later climb the Brooklyn Bridge and refuse to come down from it unless television stations broadcast his message.[6] He was ultimately disqualified from the ballot for coming 300 petition signatures short of the 7,500 needed to qualify for the general election ballot.
McMillan next ran for governor of New York in 1994 by traveling from his home in Brooklyn through upstate New York to Buffalo on foot, staying in homeless shelters along the way; his original itinerary had him walking back to Brooklyn as well, but an injury in Rochester led to him taking a bus home.[7] When he arrived in Buffalo, the site of the state Democratic convention, McMillan disrupted a speech by incumbent governor Mario Cuomo at the convention and was thrown out because of it.[8] After failing to collect enough signatures to get onto the ballot, he continued in a write-in campaign.
The Federal Elections Commission has a record of McMillan entering himself in the United States presidential election, 1996 as a Republican; McMillan did not get onto any primary ballots.
McMillan was removed from the ballot during the 2000 U.S. Senate election in New York.[9]
McMillan’s political positions contain heavy influence from populist principles. The Rochester Democrat and Chronicle described his 1994 platform as such: “While McMillan said he hopes to be a spokesman for the poor in his bid for Governor, his solutions make him sound more like a Republican.”[7]
• McMillan has come out against federal bailouts, specifically the Wall Street Bailout of 2008 and the Obama Administration’s bailout of General Motors. Referencing the bailout and his presidential run, he said of Obama: “If you don’t do your job right, I am coming at you.”[30]
• McMillan believes that global warming is a natural occurrence that occurs every 15,000 years. He disputes the idea that is caused by man and pollution, saying he “isn’t buying [the] punk science” of Al Gore.
• A supporter of same-sex marriage, McMillan joked in the 2010 gubernatorial debate he would allow marriage between a person and a shoe.[31][32][33]
• McMillan, as founder of the Rent Is Too Damn High Party, is against high rent and property taxes for homeowners. He believes that lowering rent and cutting taxes will ease financial stress and help eradicate hunger and poverty, as well as raise tax revenue. He surmises that reducing rent would “create 3 to 6 million jobs” by freeing up capital to give businesses a chance to hire people. He also favors tax credits for commuters.[34][35]
• McMillan and the party are in favor of writing off all taxes owed to the state, consolidating the rent boards in New York, seizure of unoccupied apartment buildings, reforming the state court system, and free college tuition.[34][35]
• McMillan is in favor of having fixed rate of low rent across America, which would be the same regardless of property value. He states that adjusting the rent for property value “is a bunch of crap” and “a scheme to run out the poor.”[citation needed]
• McMillan supports allowing laws to be influenced by Christianity. His website states that “we need more reliance on the moral laws brought by religion and not limit out goodwill to our neighbors and co-workers to what the law demands alone.” He also spoke of “restoring family values” and making sure that one parent remains at home to watch children.[36]
• McMillan and the party oppose any spending cuts to education or elderly care services.[34][35]
• McMillan has called for investigations of, and has sought to increase awareness of, fraud and Ponzi schemes in the real estate markets.[37]
• Of his potential Republican opponents for the Presidential nomination, he thinks of Newt Gingrich as a “good liar” in the vein of John Edwards and that “people look at him and laugh,” Mitt Romney as a “good-looking guy [that] will keep the ladies from looking at me.” He has also stated that he loves Sarah Palin[38] and holds an extremely negative view of New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg.[39]
And of course just like all the radicals Obama has surrounded himself with, when they get caught, he washes his hands of the subject, hangs them out to dry, and changes the subject.
I want common sense. I want the least polished candidate that is functioning from true intentions. And more than any of that, I want a guy that has made peace with themselves, and is happy with who they are, because such people are less likely to attempt to use public money to fill the voids in their lives.
Half of what he says in this next clip, I don’t agree with at all. But he’s right about one big thing, government is corrupt.
I think that once Jimmy had an elected office he is smart enough to figure out what’s right and wrong. I’d trust him well before I’d trust another candidate.
Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
Photographic Genius at Newport on the Levee: The art of an adventurous soul
My daughter, Brooke did a marvelous thing, she is one of the featured artists who is displaying their work at the Stonebrook Winery at Newport on the Levee. 
They put her photography work on a wall there and she wanted to bring her mom and me down to have a look.
Here’s her website:
http://www.brooketownsendphotography.com/
While walking through the winery, it was a pleasure to see patrons looking over my daughters work while sipping from their glasses of wine. 
I sat in a rocking chair hand-made by a retired engineer and relished it’s comfort as I watched my daughter answer questions about her work and discuss the aesthetic relationships between her nature photography and her self-portraits. Naturally her political photography is stunning, and her Washington D.C. pictures are unlike any I and many others have ever seen.
One of the greatest pleasures in life is to create something that wasn’t there before you made it and then share that with people to enjoy. Among those of us present, my youngest daughter is an excellent illustrator, web designer and photographer in her own right, of course my daughter being featured, my son-in-law a social network guru and entrepreneur. 
My wife has made a blanket for every child and married couple brought into our family for almost two decades, and I’ve written books, designed t-shirts, been a Wild West performer, a screen writer, an independent filmmaker, and I’ve started and ran several businesses, so among us we’ve had a lot of experience. Every endeavor doesn’t work out, in fact most don’t, but it never gets old to start a new venture and study the dazzle on customer’s faces when they experience something they never would have felt if the artist had not brought those emotions about through some form of art.
If you are looking for that special something to put on your wall that needs some life and energy injected there, go down to the Newport on the Levee Stonebrook Winery and Art Gallery and look up Brooke Townsend. She’ll be the most spectacular photography at the exhibit, so you won’t miss it, and do yourself a favor, and get yourself a gift of vision that will give back to you each time you look at it. And enjoy the journey of getting there, because Newport on the Levee is always a fun place to visit.
Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
We are UNDER ATTACK: United Nations supporters show their cards in a strategy tax payers fund
We are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing and nothing is too great for Allah.
Osama bin Laden
The intention established by the documentary at the beginning of this article is now nearly 15 years old, and much of what they said then has occurred right on schedule. But it doesn’t need to continue. Americans have the right and obligation to defend themselves from the elusive enemies that seek its destruction. America is the only hope for the greater good because it is the United States that is the only working model for freedom. The members of the United Nations are just as infantile as the local school boards, township trustees, kings, queens, and European nobility that simply want to make names for their worthless lives behind the plastic meaning of an engraved nameplate and an “important” position.
On July 4th 1821 John Quincy Adams explained America’s role in the world like this:
America goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own….She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assumes the colors and usurp the standard of freedom.
By the way, if you aren’t sure who John Quincy Adam’s is meet him here played by Anthony Hopkins in Steven Spielberg’s Amistad. The speech in this film sums up nicely the foundation principles of the United States. It is only in the United States that such speeches would be made and such thoughts considered. And if America is wiped away by a United Nations that it created, then such speeches will be extinguished for possibly centuries, maybe millenniums until the courage to create a new America can rise again.
America still has freedom, but we must fight to keep it, because the effort to get it back again will look like these battle scenes. This is how badly people are willing to fight for freedom once they’ve lost it.
This is the Europe that has been striving to suppress freedom for ages and freedom has attempted many times to overcome it.
Freedom is an elusive quality that a majority of mankind strives for, but only a few have the courage to protect.
So use your taxes and vote, so actual bloodshed isn’t required later. Use them now while you still can. Cut the funding, kill the threat. Keep funding them, and you will lose your freedom. It’s that simple.
Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
The Start of Collective Bargaining: FDR and his Second Bill of Rights
Few people really understand, because it’s now been a couple of generation’s old, but life in America is not supposed to be as it is, and two definitive dates have moved America toward a socialist system that has greatly hampered the explosive growth that made our nation great. Those dates are the year of 1913 when the Federal Reserve was created, and income tax was implemented. The second is 1944 where a king seeking president in FDR created with great audacity the thought of a Second Bill of Rights.
In 1944, FDR was fulfilling a long sought after promise of progressives, which his cousin Teddy Roosevelt helped begin, to create a better, more fair world, which were a direct play-book from socialist thought. FDR like his cousin, whom I admire because of his energy and intelligence, suffered from a desire for power, and a belief that he was one of the elites that were enamored by God to help the less-fortunate.
American exceptionalism is unique because the people who fought and survived in this growing nation bred children that reflected the tenacity of the pioneers that worked hard, were inventive, and loved freedom. But as more and more immigrants came from Europe, with European ideas those ideas began to compete with the ideas of our Founding Fathers, which were working dramatically, as is evidence in the great number of inventions and rapid expansion of our cityscapes in a very short time, even while the nation was still reeling from the Civil War.
Walter Lippmann, the hero of modern media, was a progressive and advocate of The Second Bill of Rights. It was a young Lippmann that sat in Teddy’s home in the last days of TR and attempted to coax Teddy to continue the progressive march, which TR had lost interest in after Taft left the presidency. TR primarily became a progressive to fight his old friend in President Taft because he felt pushed out of the Republican Party. But younger cousin FDR was a true blue progressive which is a fancy word for a socialist and the New Deal was a socialist concept.
A much older Walter Lippmann stated at the time that the New Dealers would “Rather not have a recovery if the revival of private initiative means a resumption of private control in the management of corporate business…the essence of the New Deal is the reduction of private corporate control by collective bargaining and labor legislation, on the one side, and by restrictive, competitive and deterrent government action on the other side.” That statement embodies most everything that the press speaks to this day, and socialist leaning union members, film makers, and politicians that hide their beliefs in socialism behind the Democratic Party, or under the more encompassing term, progressive.
Here is FDR reading his Second Bill of Rights from 1944. Just like a king from a far away land, he consults his subjects in a similar manner, which is fundamentally an incorrect American philosophy. Unfortunately, for those in society that have a tendency to be skittish by nature, socialism is an attractive idea because they naturally lack courage. Those are the kind of people who embraced FDR and his New Deal policies.
“The Economic Bill of Rights”
Excerpt from President Roosevelt’s January 11, 1944 message to the Congress of the United States on the State of the Union[1]:
“ It is our duty now to begin to lay the plans and determine the strategy for the winning of a lasting peace and the establishment of an American standard of living higher than ever before known. We cannot be content, no matter how high that general standard of living may be, if some fraction of our people—whether it be one-third or one-fifth or one-tenth—is ill-fed, ill-clothed, ill-housed, and insecure.
This Republic had its beginning, and grew to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights—among them the right of free speech, free press, free worship, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable searches and seizures. They were our rights to life and liberty.
As our nation has grown in size and stature, however—as our industrial economy expanded—these political rights proved inadequate to assure us equality in the pursuit of happiness.
We have come to a clear realization of the fact that true individual freedom cannot exist without economic security and independence. “Necessitous men are not free men.”[2] People who are hungry and out of a job are the stuff of which dictatorships are made.
In our day these economic truths have become accepted as self-evident. We have accepted, so to speak, a second Bill of Rights under which a new basis of security and prosperity can be established for all—regardless of station, race, or creed.
Among these are:
The right to a useful and remunerative job in the industries or shops or farms or mines of the nation;
The right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation;
The right of every farmer to raise and sell his products at a return which will give him and his family a decent living;
The right of every businessman, large and small, to trade in an atmosphere of freedom from unfair competition and domination by monopolies at home or abroad;
The right of every family to a decent home;
The right to adequate medical care and the opportunity to achieve and enjoy good health;
The right to adequate protection from the economic fears of old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment;
The right to a good education.
All of these rights spell security. And after this war is won we must be prepared to move forward, in the implementation of these rights, to new goals of human happiness and well-being.
Americas own rightful place in the world depends in large part upon how fully these and similar rights have been carried into practice for all our citizens.
For unless there is security here at home there cannot be lasting peace in the world.
FDR attempted to hang on to his presidency by running for 4 terms. It is because of him that the United States began term limits for the presidency, like a king that seeks the meaning of his existence in an elected position. It was easy for FDR to continue getting elected, because the weak side of human nature will always like the person that gives them things, and FDR was giving away things that weren’t his. He is most responsible for the budget mess that we are currently in. And he wasn’t the end. Today, the progressive tradition is alive and well in financiers like George Soros, Presidents like Barrack Obama, and appointments to the Obama administration such as regulatory tzar, Cass Sunstein.
Cass Sunstein is working toward a different kind of America. People like me completely reject what Cass proposes.
This is a video from Cass Sunstein during 2006, long before he was Obama’s regulatory tzar. He is exactly why the FDR’s Second Bill of Rights would never work, because people like Cass are weak-kneed intellectuals that would rather have price fixes instead of allowing competition to drive the market.
My mind has been emancipated individually, so Cass is wrong, completely wrong. In fact, he’s so far off base he’s not even in the same city of the team he thinks he’s playing for. If he had things his way, to put it in everyday terms, if you let Cass Sunstein manage the NFL, every player at each position would have to weigh the same, would have to run just as fast, would be able to bench press the same amounts, the QB’s would have to be identical, because neither team would be allowed to have an advantage over the other team. That is basically the world FDR, and Cass Sunstein have been trying to create for the United States. It is socialism. Pure and simple.
The ghosts of these follies continue to resonate in the minds of people everywhere. It is these Second Bill of Rights that are uttered in union protests. They want the promises made by a man who had no right to squander American Ingenuity by robbing private industry and giving it to all those who are too lazy to match the task, yet had the power of the vote. So the man in FDR gave people something for nothing and took from those that had something at the expense of the future, and he did it for his quest of kingdom, the oldest, and most primal desire known to man.
I can say that I recognize nothing in the Second Bill of Rights. If it isn’t in the Constitution it doesn’t exists. I will continue to pay my income tax, which progressives are robbing from me. I will pay my Social Security, and my Medicare which progressives are robbing from me out of respect for the law, even though I believe the minds behind the law are no better than insects. But I will never take a check from the government. I will never cash in on a “pay day” of spoils provided by “the system.” I want nothing to do with it, and once they’ve robbed me of my money, that money is corrupted by their corrupt hands and I no longer want it.
Thus, that is the essence of taxation and the term “collective bargaining.”
Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
We Are Ohio and we’re Sick of Unions: The terrible cost of repealing S.B.5
We Are Ohio and sick of Unions. That’s what I was thinking as I watched the news reports of the various unions all over Ohio gathering up signatures to repeal S.B.5. Utter foolishness is what came to my mind while watching them carry their signs indicating that collective bargaining is a “right.” That “teachers are not the enemy.” That “they are the middle-class.”
If they are not the enemy, who is? A look at this chart shows why the teachers are fighting to get rid of S.B.5. Look how much more teacher’s make than the rest of labor in Ohio. Even people who have difficulty reading charts can see that Ohio Education Association employees make a lot more than the average middle class employee working in Ohio. And teaching is a theoretical part-time job. They have a real scam going at tax payer expense, that’s what we’re fighting, so are they the enemy? Yes, because they are taking money from our pockets! They are an enemy just as a thief that robs us in an ally. It happens in education, it happens in Medicare, in fact in virtually everything that has the word GOVERNMENT attached to it. Listen to Bill Cunningham discuss with a doctor the cost of the Obama health care plan to begin to understand what we’re facing just in the medical industry.
I listened to a speech at the Ohio capital steps where a man spoke “who runs to danger when we run away, Police, who teaches our children while we are working, teachers, who runs into fires when we run away, fireman. So let’s support them.” Fine, let’s support them. But that doesn’t mean writing them a blank check of infinite amounts of money. Those groups are taking too much money and mismanaged their funds raking up huge drains on tax payer supplied revenue. If they stopped doing their jobs, I’d form a militia to do the policing of my community. If the fireman stopped answering calls, I’d form a volunteer department to do the job. If teachers stopped working, I’d teach my kids at home. Those jobs are not as needed as they pretend. School Choice would allow children to get education anywhere. In fact, this is why teachers unions are against S.B.5, and school vouchers, because they’ll lose their monopoly on education, which is exactly what they have now.
I remember when the government went after Microsoft for their monopoly status in the 90’s. I remember when Teddy Roosevelt went after the railroads for their monopolies at the turn of the century. Well, who is going after the teachers unions for their monopoly? Nobody. Obama? No, he’s trying to build monopolies of union labor, not reducing them. That’s the situation we’re in. Ironically, Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, knew that we were in trouble and dissolved collective bargaining for federal employees. And Mr. Big government himself, FDR, warned us in the 40’s that unions should never be attached to the taxpayer. Yet that’s what’s happened.
I don’t want my tax money to pay for communist thought. That’s what they have been doing, and that’s what they want to continue. When this issue goes to the ballot in November that’s what we’re all fighting is an attempt by these groups to preserve a communist cause in the United States.
That doesn’t mean that your average teacher, cop or firefighter is aware of the fact. After all they are waving the flag of patriotism in these rallies and they truly believe that they are fighting for an American right. But ignorance is not an excuse, and they are ignorant of the issue. Because many of them don’t read, they don’t know the facts. They only know what they are told by their leaders, and their leaders are open communists and they do read. They read the Communist Manifesto, they read the Coming Insurrection, they read Rules for Radicals, in fact the OEA puts out literature that quotes Alinsky. So while the fools carrying the signs and screaming about “rights” they have no idea that they are the pawns of socialism that is embedding itself in American culture the same way it has in Europe.
When my son-in-law first came to America I took him to the top of Carew Tower in downtown Cincinnati and we went to the top and had a look. He couldn’t believe that America had such large buildings. This is a kid that went to London every other weekend, one of the largest and most prestigious cities in the world. He told me that no city in Europe had such things.
I had always thought that Cincinnati was a pretty small town for American standards, and Carew Tower is hardly worth mentioning when compared to the sky scrapers of New York and Chicago. It was fun to see my son-in-law’s parents come to visit him in the United States and to drive them around to all the things that the United States has that Europe does not. His parents were even more thrilled than he was when they first went to the top of that tower. Baffled was more like it. They found it hard to believe that we had a building at Kings Island that was taller than what they had in London, and Kings Island is just an amusement park. Socialism is what the Labor Party in England is. They just call it a different name. And in the United States, Democrats are socialists. And Progressives are Communists. That is their shared ideology even if they don’t name it so.
I had a teacher that actually sent me an email telling me that I thought McCarthyism was an acceptable practice. Well, it was. Joseph McCarthy wasn’t doing some frivolous endeavor. He knew that communists had penetrated the United States, and Hollywood was swarming with them. Ronald Reagan was leaning in that direction when he was a man in his twenties. It was only after he did a film at Elstree Studio’s in England that socialism scared the crap out of him and he became a spokesman for Capitalism. It was this change in political ideology that drove him and his wife Jane apart. That’s how advanced socialism was in Hollywood. Ayn Rand, fresh from leaving Russia to escape socialism was working in Hollywood during this era, and it was among her friends and associates that she was speaking to in Atlas Shrugged. She had been there when socialism ruined Russia, and she was warning them of the danger. So the McCarthy hearings were not a waste of time. There was a lack of “political will” to follow through with the information the hearings produced. That lack of political will is the same as the lack of will to force Obama to deal with the birth certificate issue. Anyone that questions the issue is called a “birther” by the media and the whole thing is chalked up as a conspiracy, just like the McCarthy hearings. When Bush was president in the first decade of the 21st century we heard story after story about his draft dodging, drug and alcohol use, and anything that could discredit him. But when Clinton was president and wouldn’t produce his medical records, which appear to be to cover up his syphilis problems, nobody questioned it. And now Obama appears to be a completely illegal president, which should be of great concern. I mean, Obama isn’t spending 10 million dollars for nothing to hide the issue. Even if he was born in Hawaii, he probably claimed a foreign status to get into college, so somebody lied somewhere about something, and nobody cares.
The reason there is a lack of political will to follow-up on these kinds of stories, or even to call these public unions what they are, which are communist organizations that grow with tax money, is because half the nation is taking part in some form of government program and they vote in favor of big government types for their own selfish reasons, because of what they expect to get from that government. With all the problems with Obama, the Republicans are having a hard time finding a candidate that can beat him, because everyone knows that the various voting blocs, Hispanics, blacks, women, the youth, unions and all those types of voters will tend to vote for the Obama regardless of what is wrong with him. Why, because those voters are looking for government to do something for them and those same demographics tend to be emotional voters that don’t use critical thinking in casting their ballots.
That’s why there is a danger in overturning S.B.5., because those public workers, which are well over 300,000, which isn’t that many compared to the 11 million that live in the state, it is that same demographic of voter that the unions are reaching out to, the mindless, the uneducated, the lazy, the emotional, and all those who are weak-willed and have their hand out for government to fill it, with our tax dollars. The risk as I see it is have we gone too far now, are there simply too many of the weak ones, the people who are attracted to communism, to actually do anything to save ourselves and capitalism in the United States? Is this it? If Ohio does not show up for this election in November it could literally mean the end of America.
That is not an inflated statement. If the unions are allowed to continue to rob us all blind it will take at least a whole year to arrive back to the point where another bill like S.B.5 could be a law again. And without S.B.5, our education system will go bankrupt because the communist leaning teachers unions do not understand finance. All they know is that they need to continue to make extraordinary amounts of money for the common service they provide. And another year will be too late.
Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
35deg 39’17.80″N 83deg 26’27.77″W—-My Little Secret: The Obama Budget Plan
Obama is a progressive. His mistake is that he believes like other progressives do, that money equals value, and it does not. He is completely lost, like the others of his kind. His America is not my America. My America is described below.
Speaking of progressives, they are all upset with the upcoming release of Atlas Shrugged. What is with all the Weiners that are part of the progressive movement? When I saw the sad little article from The Huffington Post about Atlas Shrugged, and the terrified attempts from a “Weiner” named Ellis Weiner to paint Atlas Shrugged as something bad and unsophisticated for mankind, I had mistaken him for the Congressman Weiner, thinking they were both the same Weiner. Read that article for yourself
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ellis-weiner/on-atlas-shrugged-as-a-gu_b_157295.html
But Weiner crosses the line when he puts down the aim of the film, which will not be discovered in the part one portion of the film released. He reveals as anyone who is a fan of the book knows, that the “Men of the Mind” that have went on strike, have moved to the high mountains of Colorado to create a society of their own while the rest of the world perishes. It is obvious that Mr. Weiner just as in Congressman Weiner are a couple of people who have a limited intellectual capacity so they missed many of the deep subjects of the film. But Ellis Weiner seems to not understand that such places as mountaintop retreats of this kind exist, same as the mountain refuge mentioned in Atlas Shrugged. 
Well……I’m going to give you a secret dear reader, so that you can know for yourself that fools like these Weiners live their whole lives seeing the world from the perspective of their city streets or their congressional districts. Their perspective is so warped and limited that they cannot see what is right in front of them and therefore cannot even conceive of the kind of world or ideas of a John Galt. I personally know of a place very similar to the mountain retreat from Atlas Shrugged. I will provide you with the coordinates, but shhhhhhhhh. It’s a secret. 35deg 39’17.80”N 83deg 26’27.77”W
I have spent some wonderful moments at that location. Here are some of the pictures from that place. It is one of the best kept secrets in the United States, but it is a real honest to god place and it exists for all the same reasons as in the book Atlas Shrugged. 
If the world ended tomorrow, as we know it, if there were an economic collapse, that appears unavoidable at this point, and our political structure crumbles to the ground, the people who live and visit this spot on the earth will continue living and will not miss a beat. The people who know this place I’m speaking about will never miss President Obama. They’ll never care whether congress or the senate ever shows up for work again. Everything in the United States could end tomorrow and this place would still continue on.
From that place, the world is placed into its perspective. All the things that the “looters” like the aforementioned Weiner’s proclaim to be important will quickly be seen for what they truly are, just the cries of small-minded children.
When you are at that retreat it is evident, especially if you do like I do, where I download video, and radio programs onto my Ipod to watch and listen to in that remote location where power is not available, the voices of politicians sound meager in such a place. But literature, where a good book doesn’t require power, so I’ll never give them up for a Kindle, holds true from such a place. And Atlas Shrugged is meant to be read from a mountaintop and understood by the people who go to such places. It’s not intended for people like the Weiner’s. 
The Huffington Post must spend hundreds of thousands of words to attempt to counter the truth which everyone knows deep down inside.
When Nietzsche proclaimed in “Beyond Good and Evil,” that GOD IS DEAD, he didn’t mean it literally so much as metaphorically. Nietzsche believed, as Ayn Rand did, and as I do that religion is used to hold mankind down. That doesn’t mean that one should not go to church or to find solace in religion on a Sunday morning. Religion is a personal thing that takes one to the thresholds of eternity. However, it was religion that ushered in progressive thought even though now progressives seek to move toward atheism and other non traditional religions. This is why the founders sought to separate church and state. They didn’t write it down that way, but it was warned against, so religion couldn’t be used to manipulate the masses through collectivism. We see that the Muslim faith is suffering from this very kind of social movement. Most of the intolerance and conflict in the middle-east is over religious topics, over who is correct and who is not. So it is concluded by thinking people that religion should be free to be practiced, but not related to government action. 
The reason is that we don’t want a return to the type of foolishness that led the United States to our current position, where religious zealots of the left and right plagued our nation with progressivism, which led directly to prohibition, Social Security, Welfare, Medicare and all the other “cares,” all in the name righteousness.
In the either-or world of the small-minded, they cannot understand such a spiritual division. It is in human weakness that they feel they must impose upon others the merits of their home religion in order to eliminate from their own minds temptations which may lure them off a spiritual path. And the government do-gooder, who wishes to be the modern Robin Hood, who takes from the Rich and gives to the Poor, my allegiance is the same as the pirate from Atlas Shrugged, Ragnar Danneskjold who proclaimed in that book that his aim in life was to KILL Robin Hood! Of course this is figurative in its assessment, but the metaphor is one that intends to change the focus of value on those that take and loot, to one that creates and employees.
Such thoughts are preposterous to progressives like the Weiner’s of the world. They do not have the intellectual capacity to even understand the basics of self-reliance, and the merit of individualism. Because that is the salvation of mankind, it’s in an evolution to a man of self-reliance that pushes away all forms of collectivism and takes care of their own sector of existence. By becoming good at a trade, that individual has something to trade with others and that is the limit of the collectivism. But the Weiner’s and their kind are part of the old plague driven world of medieval Europe. Shakespeare knew that the old world of Europe was full of deception and corruption. I’ve read Titus Andronicus from a mountaintop and it reads differently there than from a library or classroom. 
So now you know a secret of mine. I fear no breakdown of society because of that place. I know what the world could look like if you took away all government, because there isn’t a government at that place. It is beyond the reach of people like President Obama, George Soros and his silly Huffington Post and all the Weiner’s he likes so much. Those people are the representatives of the lead-foot travelers that are either too scared or too unhealthy to move on their own. And they do not represent the direction of the human race.
All things should evolve into improvements, not in decline, and Atlas Shrugged besides the book Thus Spoke Zarathustra is the first serious work that explores that evolution. And it is understandable that those who are close to that transition themselves would be attracted to the message. That message will be missed by the Weiner’s and those like them. Because of their limited perspective, they will cleave like fools to the world of their understanding, and will always fear the perspective of a mountaintop hideaway. The revelations that would fall upon them will shatter their reality in ways that they aren’t prepared to deal with. 
I heard the Tea Party movement identified by people like those Weiner’s as being of the “extreme” hard right. They are mistaken. The Tea Party is of those types that are reaching for that next step. It has nothing to do with the current order of things. It has nothing to do with right or left. It’s about right and wrong, and passing between those dualistic principles to a place of human evolution. And that is what critics of Atlas Shrugged fear with all the essence of their being. 
As I’ve seen from the mountaintop the future of America can and should be this:
The future of medicine, forget Social Security and Medicare. Invest in this.
The future of food. There is no reason to under use our land, as we currently are.
And the future of education is not the traditional way.
Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
The Sheep and the Lion: How much is public education worth?
There is a term called “going down the rabbit hole” that is used to understand abstract and deep concepts. Depending on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go can determine your resolve for understanding a problem. This article is a “big picture” view of going down a rabbit hole more than some people are willing to go in regard to public education and the value it has for society.
The following radio broadcast from Doc Thompson is very good, and comfortably sits on the edge of that rabbit hole, where even this much people are unwilling to go. But I offer it as an alternative to the text that follows. Or I offer it to help the rest of the text go down more easily. But beware, if you want to maintain any illusions about education, then turn away from this page immediately. I talk about some of my personal experiences again, partly because there has been much speculation. But the opinions will not be comfortable for the reader wanting to continue “not seeing.”
In my case, I decided long ago that the system didn’t work. It never worked for me because I’ve never been happy in a follower position. I’ve always questioned authority, my entire life. In fact, in kindergarten, I missed several of my recesses for arguing with the teachers. It became apparent to me early on that education wasn’t so much about learning arithmetic, language, and art, as it was about learning how to take direction.
I have had great success in life by being a leader. To date, the only thing I’ve received from family, friends or “others” is a workbench vice I inherited from my grandfather when he died. Money, or money gained from property sales passed down through my family have never found their way to me, and on purpose. I resist any relationships where I take a passive role and where a gift can be used as leverage against me down the road.
Now to many people who may seem extreme. However, if you want freedom, you must have freedom of such predatory relationships. And, unfortunately teachers, by design, form a predatory relationship with their students the way the system is currently set up.
When I was younger, I will admit that there was a blood bath that followed in my wake. I spent a lot of time in court, in fights with other students, and in general trouble with officials in school. Much of that trouble came simply because I refused to submit to an authority figure. That’s it. I never looked for trouble. I just didn’t like authority figures and since socially, submission of some kind to authority is required, I was in for a constant barrage of trouble which found me.
It has never occurred to me that I was in the wrong for taking this position. It doesn’t take a brilliant mind to sit in one of the many parties that I attended and see the failure of public education. Many of the kids back then when speaking of Pink Floyd would proclaim, “Man, you have to be wasted to understand The Wall.” At those parties stoned classmates would watch MTV with awe as “We Don’t Need No Education” played displaying a bunch of kids being processed in a factory, faceless and being cast into a meat grinder. Such a metaphor was very similar to my own thoughts, but I never did drugs and I certainly wasn’t wasted. I went to parties back then to pick up girls that were, but I did not partake in that behavior.
If you want to understand a culture, study its music, and you will learn a lot.
You would think that many parents would have wanted their kids to spend their time with me. After all, I didn’t drink, I didn’t smoke, I didn’t use curse words, I helped people when I could, I was polite and well spoken. But I was also defiant, inquisitive, and perpetually skeptical. In fact there were two rules that people riding in my car had to live with when I was 16. (And note that I did not have a shortage of people wanting to spend time with me. It was the parents that didn’t want their kids around me.) First, there was no smoking allowed. Second, we would not play Pink Floyd on my car stereo, because I understood the stuff all too well and thought it was depressing to meditate on such things, where many of the youth back then did. One of my best friends back then was told by his mother and father to stay away from Rich Hoffman. He’s not the kind of kid I want you to be friends with.
His mother’s preferences were the drug induced kids from the neighborhood, whose parents she knew. My friend became addicted to drugs and was lost eventually, but not because he was friends with me. If he had been friends with me, he wouldn’t have done drugs, or stolen from people. He wouldn’t have contracted a variety of STD’s and probably would have entered adulthood with his head on straight.
My head has always been on straight, even when authority figures wanted me to believe otherwise.
The next question that arrives is that why would authority figures wish to convince a person that they are in need of care. The answer to that is easy. Authority figures are perpetually in need of justifying their existence. Since their lives and careers are embedded in the lives of others, they are terribly insecure of people who don’t need them.
College wasn’t any different. When I was there, young people were more interested in the social aspects of college life than the scholastic and the whole thing seemed like a money pit to me. Professors were seeking to drag out studies that could be done in weeks into events that went on for months so they could charge $10 per credit hour or more. The charge alone for books was an obvious scam. That’s how it appeared to me, and I still feel that way.
I’ve lived a life full of education, but also free of authority figures. And I’ve had success in life when I became old enough to be sought after as a leader, because that is my natural impulse. I don’t wake up in the morning looking for power or influence. But when I’m in a collaborative effort with others, I am only comfortable in a leadership role. That’s my nature and I understand it.
So I understand the frustration people who have committed, and submitted their lives to such things as to my motives and their speculation of my back ground. The idea of cutting all ties into their lives that are corrosive and manipulative is a completely foreign concept to them and something they cannot fathom.
Even knowing that the public education system was seriously flawed, I sent my kids anyway. My wife always liked school, until she met me, and she felt our children should have school in their lives. I argued that the kids could learn faster if they took a more independent route, but I listened to her opinion on the matter. The result, my kids breezed through school. I taught them not to take the whole thing too serious and not to submit to any authority and they navigated through the experience very well without all the pitfalls that most kids go through regarding peer pressure and social-climbing.
The reason for this explanation is that there is a story in mythology that I learned a long time ago that I think about a lot. It goes something like this; a lion was separated from his parents and was discovered by a herd of sheep. The sheep took the lion in and raised it for many years.
The lion grew to full size and was roaming around in the herd with the other sheep where a pack of lions hunting the sheep saw the lion and called him over whispering. “Hey, what are you doing? You’re roaming around with the sheep.”
All the Sheep trained Lion could say was, “Baaaaahaaahaaa.” Because his instruction came from the sheep all his life, he didn’t know any better.
The lions took the Sheep/Lion to the river and said, “Look at your reflection. You’re one of us. You’re not a sheep. You’re supposed to eat those creatures.”
The story goes on where the Sheep/Lion rediscovers his true identity and becomes in the end what he was meant to be.
Human beings are no different. We all are lions in sheep’s clothing. It’s a cultural phenomenon indicative of authoritarian culture created when humans moved from a nomad society to an agricultural society. Europe and all its problems are derived from attempting to maintain human beings in an agricultural society, including their attempt at education.
Those that settled the United States left that behavior behind in Europe in favor of a Lion’s life in the New World and it was so important to them that they’d risk their life to have it.
I told her that most of the people who think in such a way as I do, end up going insane by their early 40’s, or they become abusers of drugs in order to maintain that reality to themselves against the current of sheep, that secretly wish the safety of the herd, so they turn to chemical abuse to numb them.
“How do you keep from going crazy?”
That took the conversation into a different direction, the difference between dogs and cats.
I personally like dogs. They are always happy to see you. They are intensely loyal, even when you abuse them. Cats, they only come around when they want a lap to lay in. If they get mad at you, they’ll avoid you. They never seem to sink deep roots in their owner. They seem to choose their loyalty carefully and that loyalty leaves quickly if the relationship is strained. Those types of differences can be found in people too. Society expects dogs and the loyalty of them. But some people are just cats. We might sub consciously call those types a “cool cat.” I would make the psychological argument that what the nation is experiencing with Charlie Sheen right now is that very complex. It’s no secret that public characters like Snoop Dog, Charlie Sheen and Dennis Rodman are dear to the deep recesses of the human condition. Socially those characters are rejected, but when the doors are closed and the arms of a woman are wrapped around them, the truth is revealed.
So the argument then becomes one of business. Can we afford the current form of public education? No. The way the unions have structured their contracts have turned the whole funding of education into a Ponzi scheme much like Social Security. The step increases that were negotiated require higher and higher taxes to maintain the funding, and we’ve hit the wall.
One of the benefits of being a leader type is that I don’t have the burden of appeasing any group. So I can look objectively at the situation and name the problems for what they are, because I’m not looking at any part of the problem with emotion. I already think the system is broken; I am not looking for ways to justify the behavior. And I have no illusion that by throwing more money at the situation that it will solve anything. All it does is push the wall a bit to delay the crash that’s happening. It’s hard for many people to see the wall because they don’t want to believe it’s there, because public education has become for them much more than basic education services. Sports provide the possibility of college scholarships, and school social events provide opportunities for young people to “interact” and discover themselves.
Teachers that truly believe they are the saviors of society are particularly arrogant in their thinking on this issue. But much of their work can be replaced with a computer in this new century, where the computer is ironically much more personable. I don’t say that out of a dislike of teachers, which I’ve admitted that I personally don’t like authority figures, but the idea of a solitary figure speaking to a class where the weakest link of the class sets the pace is archaic.
In truth, my dislike of public education was based on that one principle. I couldn’t stand the pace of the learning. I’m a person that enjoys doing things at a fast pace. And the classroom was always just too slow for me. Now I may be the exception, but it is apparent that it doesn’t work very well for other students either. The difference is other students were content to learn how to “game” the system, get their passing grades and move on to the next grade. Most of the time they forgot what they learned by the next semester because their goal was not to learn the material, it was to get a passing grade and advance to the next level.
When you learn to be a lion, a leader in the world, you will find that your services are always in high demand, because such people are rare when they are in great need. So career worries go away, where the sheep of the world are always concerned if the farmer will feed them, or if a predator will attempt to hunt them down and kill them, the lion doesn’t concern themselves with such matters. And thinking like a lion does not mean that I automatically support a sports team like the Cincinnati Bengals.
My favorite football team is the Tampa Bay Buccaneers so when my wife and I want to go to a football game, we fly down to Tampa to watch them play. It is more practical to me to fly 1000 miles to see a good team than to drive 20 miles to see a bad one. If I’m going to pay for the NFL experience, I’m going to enjoy it, and not just do what’s convenient. A few years ago, when we were waiting for a night game to start, we were killing some time at The International Mall, which is within walking distance to Raymond James Stadium, one of my favorite places in the world. We spent half an afternoon needlessly shopping and still had some time to kill before the gates opened, so we stopped by a very elaborate booth for Rosetta Stone Software located in the middle of the mall.
The attendant at the booth gave me a head set and computer and let my wife and I play with the foreign language software for several hours. When I finished, and we headed over to the game, I realized that the way we are currently learning foreign language and just about everything in public education is outdated. That Rosetta Stone Software had made learning much more practical and interactive, and that the only reason public school did not leap into this style of learning was because the teacher unions would stand in the way of that innovation.
They’d stand in the way because public education had become more about creating jobs than actually learning. The current focus was maintaining the system along the same fashion that education had been embarking on since schools were a one room building. The only thing that’s changed is the school became larger, but the teacher at the front of the room is the same, and it is no longer as necessary.
One of the arguments for this big system is that poor students don’t have access to computers and they need a teacher to help them, because they don’t have a family to take care of them at home. This is the way the unions sell their service now and why they insist on the current costly form of education. It has more to do with social structure and social ills, than actual educational performance, which shows in the students.
It’s easy for me to see all this because I wasn’t happy with the system to begin with. But I’m happy to pay my taxes and participate if the rest of the members of my community want it. And we do pay a lot in property taxes. But when I hear schools lie to people, and I see teacher unions manipulating the situation and attacking people for questioning their motives, then it changes the argument.
To participate in a system blindly costs money, not to mention social consequences. My view of those social consequences might be extreme to many, even though privately most people agree with me once they close their eyes at night and can read their thoughts across the backs of their eye lids. But the financial burden of the public education system needs to be broken down and restructured, and unions stand in the way of that, so that is the reason for the adversarial relationship. The more hate mail and comments I receive, the more convinced I am of the lack of merit in public education.
The intent behind the name calling, and the attempt to silence any critics are to continue to ask for more money to keep a broken system functioning. As I’ve established, I am an employer, and I’ve heard every possible justification and excuse from employees over the years that wish to convince me that they are special, and that they and only they can do a particular job. After several hundred of those statements you learn to see what truth is and what fiction is. As an employer you must have an understanding of the job you are asking people to do, otherwise you are guilty of not being able to make a proper assessment, and are 100% reliant on your employees to tell you how valuable they are. And they will try, and if you don’t know, they will take advantage of you 99% of the time.
With public education, I’ve been there and done that. I learned a lot more when I finally got out of public education because the barriers to learning were removed, and I was able to attack it at the fast pace I enjoy. I have had to provide instruction to people myself, and teach, lead and assess talent, so I understand what works and what doesn’t. And I’ve had success outside the classroom. Many of the professors and teachers that I’ve known over the years fit the description, “those that can’t do, teach,” meaning that people who can do are in the world working and producing, those who aren’t comfortable with producing stay in the safe world of academia, and they teach, or they attempt to be professional students. I have known more than a few of those types and have actually given a few of them jobs much to my frustration, because they are so timid. They tend to be the type of person that will stand at the side of a pool and stick their foot in to see how cold the water is. I’m the type that will jump in regardless of the temperature so they frustrate me to no end. But it takes all kinds of people to make the world go around, so I put up with them. The question is not whether or not those people have worth. They do somewhere. The question is are they worth six figures? No!
It is easy to attempt to maintain the status quo by proclaiming that its critics “don’t like” education, or some other loose term. It would be expected for sheep to make vicious proclamations of the lion, because deep down inside, the sheep wish they had the courage to be lions, but they don’t. All that’s left is to hurl insults in an attempt to cover the fat life of the herd animal that just seeks more and more feed to provide nourishment to its virulent existence within the confines of the barn yard. My concern is the larger issue of actual performance as a primary concern, and secondly, of the financial stability, which is proven to be not well thought out.
The old games are no longer effective because the sheep in the barn yard have noisily protested for years and now we see that they are all fat and need to be sheered. And it is my hope that once we start doing the sheering that we will find beneath all the hair that some of those sheep are actually lions, and can return to their natural state and teach others to be lions and return the nation to what it started as, and avoid a fate of a depleted, crushed Europe full of glory from some ancient time while the future leaves it behind.
Education needs reformed for more reasons than one and we will have it, because it’s what’s good for America, not just those that have built lives off it.
Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
Teachers Cheat in Wisconsin: Lying about why they’re off work
During school levy campaigns, it doesn’t matter if it’s Lakota, Mason, Little Miami, Lebanon, just name the Ohio district and you’ll find a multitude of accusations of impropriety on behalf of the teachers. Teachers through their unions have learned how to “game” the system, and they’ll do whatever they can do to achieve results for themselves. This has been most obvious to those of us that work on anti-levy campaigns where State Revised Code prohibits school officials and administrators to use school resources to work on campaigns for levy requests, but they do it anyway.
Teachers and administrators participate openly in extortion tactics such as cutting busing to make transportation inconvenient on parents of the district, and other cosmetic cuts imposed for much the same reason. There is a level of arrogance in these school systems that you might experience from organized crime elements, yet we send our kids to these institutions and pay the tolls because we don’t have much choice. It’s easy for us to turn away from the crime because much of it is done in the gray areas of the law.
You can learn a lot by observing people while under duress, and now that there are protests in two states over legislation that is seeking to end collective bargaining, there’s a lot of duress from unions. The union rank and file is now out of their comfort zone and showing what they truly are, including President Obama, who has attached himself to the movement. And what we are seeing is much of what many of us feared in our deepest darkest anxieties. At the protests in Wisconsin teachers, the same people that we trust to teach our children are openly seeking doctor notes from physicians that have made themselves available to falsify documents to excuse those teachers while they protest.
Doc Thompson has some great sound bites with examples of this behavior which is extremely disgusting. He also has some great quotes from the testimony Jeff Berding who is a Democrat that has come out in support of the S.B.5. Jeff testified to collective bargaining abuses to Cincinnati’s personnel costs that are growing 18 percent annually. The city’s contract with police gives officers an average of $87 an hour for working holidays and can let workers retire with six-figure sums for unused leave, totaling $93 million. Listen to all that from Doc himself from the February 21, 2011 show.
If you really want to see what is behind this type of insidious behavior, look who emerged from his Clown Rally in Washington, Ed Schultz. It would seem that Ed couldn’t get a crowd to come to him, so he went to the crowd. Listening to these people says a lot about their mentality. What they are chanting has nothing to do with a middle class life style. What they want is essentially un-American. It is clearly socialist theories that people like Ed have been pushing for years. (That’s why the system is bankrupt, Eddie.)
It’s a good thing to know these things, because the next time these schools ask for a levy, people will know what is behind the numbers. So I encourage those protests to continue as they are and show us all what you’re made of. I’ve known for a long time. Now, it’s time the rest of America see it for themselves.
I wonder what the parents of those kids think? I’d be ashamed if my kid was participating in this vile, disgusting, hippie-like behavior. Maybe that’s why these kids are doing it, because their parents yearn for the radicalism of the 60’s. Maybe they get the ideas from MTV and through their music which again craves the radical 60’s. It’s probably a little bit of both those things topped off with the influence of radical teachers toeing the union line on a daily basis. My opinion is that nobody in the United States should behave like this. This behavior belongs in some third world country, because that’s what this behavior gets you. And to all you left winged hippie sympathizers, all you’re doing is proving Glenn Beck right. He called this behavior from you people over a year ago. If this is what education is all about these days, I want NONE of my money to go to it, because it’s not working.
Rich Hoffman
https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/04/ten-rules-to-live-by/
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
An Act Suitable for Las Vegas: The Public Education Money Scam
On February 8, 2011 Stacy Schuler will resign from the Mason School District at the 7 pm school board meeting. Kevin Bright has made the announcement that he will recommend Stacy be fired, and the board will of course act on that request. And to make matters easier on herself, Stacy is resigning, much the way George Coates did. George so far has stayed under the radar even though his actions may be technically much worse.
Now, it would seem that the firing of Stacy Schuler should be a forgone conclusion. It shouldn’t even be a question. George Coates the assistant principal felt bold enough to take cell phones from students, apparently in search of nude pictures of the student body from text messages sent to boy friends and girl friends known as sexting. And we know that the assistant principal was sending Stacy nude pictures of himself, at a minimum. These employees felt so untouchable that they abused their positions audaciously. The union provides an unprecedented level of job security, and that leads all too often to various degrees of abuse.
So the announcement of firing Stacy Schuler sounds all too similar to me. The proceedings from superintendent to school board are extremely reminiscent of how levies are introduced to a ballot issue, or how busing and other services are reduced. The formal proceedings are only formalities designed to make the public feel like they are a part of the process, when in fact the real decisions have already been made.
And that’s what’s wrong with education broken down into its most simplified form, and why many people are looking to School Choice as an option to this kind of tyrannical monopoly. It’s the kind of issue I’ve spent thousands of words discussing here in a hope that this chronicle can provide others questioning public education, some sense of support, and a blueprint to defeat their own school levies in other districts.
The things I’ve brought up for years are not only coming out of my mind however. Traditionally the union strong-arm methods have successfully isolated dissent to a defensive position and used the press to radicalize those dissidents in the eyes of the public. Meanwhile those same political thugs capture the high ground of “defending the children,” and use that platform to negotiate lucrative contracts from the public. Doc Thompson had on a guest from the Kato Institute that validates with a professional opinion what many of us in the trenches are feeling. It’s a great interview so enjoy it.
This whole public education game works until someone like Stacy or Ryan Fahrenkemp from Lakota get busted doing something despicable and are caught abusing their positions under union protection. Because the existence of the union is so formidable, it prevents the kind of probing that common sense would naturally question. So questions that might be leveled at a teacher goes by the way side because the perceived fight to act on such questions would be too great and not worth the wrath of the union.
When Stacy goes to court, it will be revealed that the activity within the Mason School System should be on a nationally syndicated soap opera of provocative tradition, not taken as a serious institution that has the aim of educating our students. When board members are engaged in affairs that are publicly known, and other teachers are caught doing despicable, and immoral acts that are known by many in positions of power, the public faces the moral dilemma as to what to do.
What often happens is parents kick the can down the road because their kids are only in the school system for a relatively short time and those same parents just want the system to stay in tact long enough for their children to get what they need from the system. The union knows this, and they calculate that each year some kids leave, and new ones enter and since nobody cares truly for the health of their neighbor, and their communities, unions use that sense of selfishness to conduct a stage play full of smoke and mirrors.
So when Kevin Bright makes his announcement, and publicly chastises Stacy Schuler for her terrible behavior, know that he and the school board are aware of much worse than what Stacy has been involved with. But they will throw Stacy to the wolves like a Roman Emperor throwing a thief to the lions in a gladiator arena to appease the crowd. Their intent is to get past this terrible episode so people forget and get back to their lives, and the school can put another levy on the ballot in November to cover the step increases that the union contract requires.
Ironically, and this gives you an idea how big this story is, this is a video from China showing the Mason School System attempting to distance itself from Stacy when just months ago all was well, cover ups and all.
I say cover ups because these stories were very well-known, and for the superintendent to not know about it is one of two things. He’s really out of touch and isn’t listening to anybody. Or he is just trying to keep the bad stuff hidden so there isn’t any interruption in revenue flowing into the school system. Both options are bad.
Rich Hoffman
http://twitter.com/#!/overmanwarrior
www.overmanwarrior.com
The Overmanwarrior 