Tag: Stupid in America

Overmanwarrior: The Trial of Fletcher Finnegan–New Heroes in Lakota

The fight to control spending at our public school of Lakota has revealed a new twist this past week. The school board is now claiming that they have no control over negotiating salaries, and that their legal counsel has advised them that salary reductions are “off the table.”

It’s pretty difficult to control costs as a management board if you can’t manage 80% of your costs. And knowing several local school board members I know they can’t just mandate reductions without union approval. But they could have at least asked the question, putting the burden on the labor union to reject, therefore letting the public see the real villains behind the out-of-control spending problem within the Lakota School District. Because until that is done, the school board will get the blame for not managing the costs the tax payers have sent to the school.

It has been to my great relief to see several new faces beginning to attend the school board meetings and speak up, particularly the man pictured here who lambasted the school board and Mantia specifically for allowing the budget problem to virtually destroy Lakota as a school instead of placing the burden back on the union who has concocted up every legal trick in the book to protect their salaries even if it means the demise of the district completely. Without doubt many of the current employees at Lakota are hoping to keep the system intact just long enough for them to retire. They could care less what happens to the rest of the community in the process.

I became very frustrated two weeks ago when I wasted the time to attend a school board meeting only to see them performing in the same manner as always, even after all that has been said and done over the last three elections and defeat of the proposed tax increases. My frustration with them has led me to tell the people I know to just pull the plug and teach kids themselves, or send them to a private school if they can afford it. By the time a parent pays or all the transportation costs, the sports fees and all other associated fees, public school is no longer free, as our tax money has been hijacked by a union labor force purely concerned with their own well-beings, as demonstrated by their actions.

My relief in these new heroes who are showing up in these dark days is welcomed because it will take more than my voice alone to continue to illustrate the problems at Lakota. And I want those voices to know that there is plenty of room in the No Lakota Levy tent for your voices, or to even start a group of your own. In our group there are no power struggles, there is no ego to get in the way of successfully defeating tax increases because a tax increase of any kind at this point in time would kill our community on the business side of its development, and we are fighting to keep it intact, so we don’t care who speaks to the paper, or who is on TV. We only care that the job gets done.

In No Lakota Levy I have taken on the role of being the visible target so I could take the bullets. In reality No Lakota Levy is very deep as an organization. One way to know the location of your enemy is to get them to take shots at you and see where the smoke comes from. That’s how you determine the position of a sniper; you look for the blast signature. Since I don’t care about public opinion, or care to ever run for public office, or plan to work with people who do want to run for public office, I am free to be that target and take the shots as our spotters in No Lakota Levy look for where the snipers are. Once we find them, we have been attacking them and exposing their cover.

In spite of what the Lakota School Board member Julie Shaffer pro levy groupies think, my intentions are much larger than a school levy fight. I only participate because this battle is in my back yard and I’m actually doing research for a novel I’m getting ready to start, and the evil people involved in extorting money from innocent families and their children is something I feel very passionate about, so passionate that this will be the subject of a future novel. Since I have done so much work behind and in front of a camera, it was the natural pick to have me be that target, which I have been happy to do not only for the satisfaction of beating back a system I consider inherently evil, but for research into my own future work. And this is why I haven’t had the time to hang out at school board meetings every time they call one. The meeting on Monday, March 12th will be the third school board meeting in one week. And remember the school board members get paid for every meeting they attend. My conclusion is that the board must need to compensate themselves for the increase in gas prices, which is why they are having so many meetings lately. Because once they get there they don’t do anything but cut aspects of education that aren’t in their contract with the labor unions.

Currently I have been putting the final touches on my Tail of the Dragon novel that is due out this year (2012) as it has just returned successfully from the copy editor.  In fact as I was writing this my editor sent me the final proof of the summary of that book as it will appear on the back cover.  Here is it:

Rick Stevens—a rebellious loner whose NASCAR dreams have fallen short—falls victim to the governor’s plans to run for President of the United States. Governor Wellington Royce of Tennessee relies on support from the Fraternal Order of Police to catapult him into the White House. Royce beefs up the police presence on The Great Smoky Mountains’ highways, and offers incentives to those generating citations from tourists. Thrown in jail, abused, and setup, Rick Stevens accepts an offer from the governor’s political enemies to declare war on the highway patrol. With twenty million dollars, Rick builds the car of his dreams and wreaks havoc in what will become the greatest car chase in history. The car chase becomes a journey of self-discovery and newfound romance, as a gauntlet of guns, missiles, and the might of the military wait for him at the finish line. The treachery of politics proves more sinister than even death.

I also spent the last two weeks as the Butler County Coordinator for the Workplace Freedom Amendment that we are shooting to put before Ohio voters in 2013. And I have been working hard with our team at No Lakota Levy to begin the new foundation Yes to Lakota Kids, so time has been short, and I simply do not have the time to sit and listen to a bunch of cackling chickens talk about nothing at a school board meeting. But yet the job does need to be done and I am very happy to see more members of the community getting involved.

Many people around Cincinnati do not remember when I released my book The Symposium of Justice in 2004. My marketing of that book was interrupted slightly by the Lakota levy fights of 2004 and 2005 which overshadowed much of the good press I was involved in when that book was released, which was a comparatively smaller project than the one I am currently working on called Tail of the Dragon. The marketing for The Symposium centered around Dayton and involved Wild West shows and film festivals primarily and served as a platform for setting up this most recent novel. The marketing for Tail of the Dragon, which I’m at work on right now will heavily involve the market of New York, Los Angeles, of course Cincinnati, Detroit, Dallas, Knoxville, Chattanooga, Atlanta, Nashville and Orlando specifically and will involve an aggressive radio campaign along with television.

And that comes back around to the Lakota Levy fight and the reason I have written so much on this blog. These postings I do hope will help people, because I write to share big ideas with people, hoping that they may become inspired to act. But my next book I have been trying to get my mind around for the last four years and I’m about ready to begin. It called, Overmanwarrior: The Trial of Fletcher Finnegan. I anticipate that this book will take me 5 years to write and will end up somewhere around one million words. To put that into perspective, for those who know how big the book Atlas Shrugged is, that classic novel by Ayn Rand is 645,000 words. My Overmanwarrior: The Trial of Fletcher Finnegan will be nearly twice as long.

I did not set out to write a book inspired by Ayn Rand. But my character of Fletcher Finnegan, introduced in The Symposium of Justice is very similar to John Galt as both characters are contemplations into the kind of character Friedrich Nietzsche explored in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, my favorite book of all time. Galt’s protagonist aims are to use his two friends to help the makers of the world withdrawal from the looters of society to illustrate the fault of collectivism so that proper identity and respect can be placed on those of value in society. Fletcher Finnegan in The Symposium of Justice was a kind of modern Zorro character, but in The Trial of Fletcher Finnegan he has evolved into the embodiment of the five primary characters in Atlas Shrugged all rolled up into one person. Instead of withdrawing from society as Galt advocated in Atlas Shrugged, Finnegan fights back in very flamboyant ways on a scale never before seen in a literary protagonist. I use Atlas as an example because that is the only novel I know of which has such strong protagonists. There simply isn’t any other example. Not even Zarathustra himself from Nietzsche’s classic achieved such a level.

The blog here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom is in effect a tool that the public can use to get its news outside of the traditional media outlets. But for me personally, it is production notes for creating this epic novel. And to get an understanding of how large a book of over 1 million words would be, as of this writing here at Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom there are currently just over 600 postings each running between 1500 and 2000 words each. Doing a rough estimation I have written currently on this blog site alone, over 1 million words in just a year and a half. So writing The Trial of Fletcher Finnegan over a 5 year span is certainly doable.

However, convincing a publisher to carry such a large book in print is a task in itself. It’s simply not done in the publishing world today. People do not read enough, even though book stores are more plentiful than ever and such a large book is intimidating. So to pull it off, I need to have a good commercial response to my Tail of the Dragon coming out in 2012 and going into 2013 in order to convince the publishers to carry such a large book, and I will need to use the finances off Dragon to help me fund the creation of Fletcher Finnegan. By funding I mean giving me the time to make a living while writing this very involved book. I calculate it to be a 10 hour a day job for about two years to pull off. Not just in writing, but the concept building. By the time The Trial of Fletcher Finnegan hits book stores I should be about to just turn 50 years old, and by then I hope to see that society has shifted from the current status of being a decadent blob of fools plummeting down a singularity toward the circumstances shown in A Brave New World, to one that is hopeful represented by the Tea Parties.

On Saturday I attended a class of such people from all walks of life who wanted to learn how to fix the world one vote at a time. I was refreshed to see young people in the audience taking notes. I met several other people who wanted to become very active who live within a few miles of me currently and were my own age. Chris Osterhues from the popular motorcycle group Sons of Liberty Riders approached me to introduce himself as I spoke with old freedom fighting friends and laughed with new ones. The person who invited me to this event said, “So Rich, when are you going to run for something. You’re popular, people like you, you’re controversial, you should run for an office.”

I told her, “I just want to write my books. I want to feed these people with ideas to carry them through the tangled web of politics. I want to give their minds food.” She and I sat for a moment in silence as the setting sun warmed our faces and just looked at the large crowd of people, who a year ago weren’t even thinking about being involved in anything political, and now they were taking a class to learn how to fight back against the evils of progressivism, and I breathed a little easier. In the beginning it was much harder, and now with more people involved, the battlefield slant is looking to turn in our direction. And five years from now, when those people and thousands like them are knee-deep in the trenches I want a to give them a work of modern American philosophy in the spirit of Ayn Rand, Ben Franklin, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and the great John Locke to energize their spirits and carry them through to the next phase. It’s not enough to just show up for a school board meeting, or to fight tyranny in high-profile media battles. The culture of corruption itself must be dealt with, and the nature of mankind’s failure. In culture building, it comes from art that something old and ugly like progressivism must be replaced with something new that contains within it the original ideas that built America to begin with. In 2012 my contribution will be Tail of the Dragon. And by 2017-2018 it will be Overmanwarrior: The Trial of Fletcher Finnegan, the long-awaited sequel to The Symposium of Justice.

So I have plans that are large in scope. I’m about to become a grandfather by one of my daughters so on the family front I am as busy as I’ve ever been and if my mind has always been obsessed with philosophy and deep contemplation it is now more than ever, because such a book as The Trial of Fletcher Finnegan is completely new ground from the stand point of an author. It’s as difficult of a concept to wrap a mind around as the book that inspired the name of Fletcher Finnegan, another favorite of mine from James Joyce called Finnegan’s Wake, a book that is a puzzle, within a puzzle, within a puzzle. Every word in that classic book seems to have multiple meanings and seems to be written in some ancient language, but it’s not.  My task as a writer is to unravel those puzzles so that the people who want to become involved, my freedom fighting friends at the Saturday class, my motorcycle friends at the Sons of Liberty, and people like the guy pictured above who have joined in the school levy fights can pick up those unraveled words and consume them like food for their minds so that they can then pick up the world and carry it upon their backs to resurgence.

So it has been a welcomed sight to see more and more people getting involved. And please, do not think for a moment that by doing so you will be stepping on my toes. If you are reading this and would like to speak to members of the media along with me, or in my place, let me know. I will arrange it. The fight at Lakota is not Rich Hoffman’s fight. I am just the target that is taking bullets for the cause to allow it to mature behind the scenes as my friends look for the snipers positioned to shoot at me, allowing us to discover who the enemies are and where they hide. The problems at Lakota just like the problems of America will not be solved in such conflicts, but when more and more people step forward and begin to smoke out the enemies where they hide as we spot them. And to do that will require more foot soldiers than we currently have and will take a number of years to achieve.

Taken in small bits, the job is not difficult. It simply requires us all to take responsibility for the world around us and not to trust those who we elect blindly. The stories I place here will most likely in some form or another find their way into my 2017 book Overmanwarrior: The Trial of Fletcher Finnegan so consider it all a sneak peek, a behind the scenes look at the production notes I’m using to unravel the gigantic puzzle of the human race taking a new step into a larger world. And that is the task I spend most of my time puzzling through.

One of my daughters visited me on Friday night as my wife made a fantastic dinner–a curry dish that belonged in a five-star restaurant. As the aroma danced from the kitchen and my family awaited the start of the epic Clone Wars episode featuring Darth Maul from The Phantom Menace, my daughter showed me the new book she had just bought. It was a DK Publication, The History of Philosophy. Both of my daughters are very deep thinkers, and it gave me great joy to see that this 22-year-old woman considered this great book to be recreational reading, and she was glowing with excitement showing me its contents, which were immaculate.

The food was delivered to my lap by my smiling wife who was very proud of her curry creation and my family gathered around the TV to watch our long-awaited episode of Star Wars on The Cartoon Network. As the show started and I ate my food I realized that there was hope, that under all the bad news people are waking up. My daughters certainly are, but beyond that, there are common everyday people who are beginning to get engaged, the way they should have been all along.

Once everyone went home for the night, I spent the next three hours reading all my email. Finally at 3:33 AM in the morning I wrote the first words of my next novel, Overmanwarrior: The Trial of Fletcher Finnegan.

Fletcher Finnegan began again the fate of justice long vanquished by tyranny in the hearts of man.
For more on this character as I have worked to flush out the concept you can see it at this link:

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/12/12/the-hidden-world-of-the-overman/

And as to others who wish to become involved…………don’t be shy. It won’t hurt my feelings to have other names appear in the paper and to speak on TV. It will give me pride in my community and might just end up in my future novel.

Rich Hoffman

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

 

 

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Home Schooling Under Attack: Government schools are for lazy parents

I certainly understand the tendency for parents to believe that they must send their children to public school in order to be a good parent. After all, our current culture has instructed us through those same government schools that going to a publicly run school is important to our lives. So I support my local public school grudgingly even though I believe that home schooling is far superior to public school. My kids went to public school. They attended Mason for the first half of the school lives, and then they graduated from Lakota. But for one year in between those transfers they were home schooled by my wife, and I think that was the most important year of their lives. It was hard at the time, and the choice was difficult. The decision to pull our kids out of school came from a battle over sex education in the fourth grade that we disagreed with. The school retaliated at our lack of “consensus.” My wife had been a room mom and helped the teachers three times a week and loved it. She dedicated enormous amounts of her time to not just my kids, but my kid’s classmates, which is how it is supposed to be.

But the school could not tolerate our family’s position against the sex education policies as they feared more parents might follow our rebellion, so they went after us in an aggressive way as a family, which was a really bad idea on their behalf. The school let my wife know that she was no longer welcome to be a room mom and my kids became targeted by bullies as soon as my wife was no longer in the building. That decision by the school led to unnecessary violence and a lot of hurt people climaxing in a fight between me and 22 teenage boys in front yard of our house.

The boys were encouraged by teachers in the school to pick on my kids and the police took the side of the teachers because of the union “brotherhood” which led to the massive fight. The boys made it so my kids could not ride their bikes on the sidewalk in front of our home, openly challenging us to a confrontation. And I was not going to allow my children to be bullied by a bunch of rough-looking 10th, 11th and 12th grade Mason students. It is now a family joke that when the movie Gran Torino came out a few years ago, it was that last role by Clint Eastwood that reminded them of life in our house during that time, because I was at war with the entire neighborhood. Instead of being an old man at the end of my life like Eastwood was in that film, I was a young thirty something that seemed oddly misplaced among others in my age group who preferred to just keep the window curtains pulled and do what the thugs told them to. Instead I dug down and was in constant confrontation everyone which can be most closely explained in the clips below, which is why this film is a personal family joke.

The fight was unexpected. The calculation was that like every other family we would stay inside our locked up house and hide from the scary teenage boys. They didn’t think I would go outside and confront the mob with my bullwhips and fight them squarely because many of them were under aged, only a few were over 18. But that’s what I did and it caused quite a ruckus that lasted for an entire year and involved the police force of Mason all the way up to the chief of police. But this whole mess started in our kid’s elementary school and I finally convinced my wife that the best way to teach our kids was to home school them, so we pulled them out of school, and that caused our entire family to turn on us. So not only did the community turn on us but our family did as well. In that year we learned that there wasn’t anyone we could trust but ourselves. And that was the year that my kids learned more than any other, and most notably shaped them into the adults they now are. During that trying time I heard every one of the points that Glenn Beck discussed here from his GBTV episode on home schooling. He is 100% right! My family has been there and done it and can testify completely to what he is saying.

Now in hindsight, with my kids both grown and living their lives I can say honestly that I wish we had done home schooling for more than a year. Both of my kids finished their high schools with online courses and nearly two years early, because they wanted to travel and see the world, which is what they did. When their peers in school were graduating high school and getting their diplomas my kids were touring the London Museum of History and taking pictures of Big Ben. They followed the path of their mother who also left school early after her credits were finished. By the time my wife’s graduating class was putting on their robes to graduate she was married to me and we were on a cross-country trip traveling anywhere fast at over 100 MPH. Out of my core family I’m the only one who actually walked the stage in a robe with my friend Hickory who I’ve stated here sold his Honors Society Robe to a fellow student for a hundred bucks. CLICK HERE to review. My wife and I have lived very full lives and the whole graduation experience seems petty and stupid to us compared to other things we’ve done, and we would have done our kids a better service if we had home schooled them earlier and for more years.

I always viewed public education as education propaganda. It started for me in kindergarten. My teacher was an idiot and I remember thinking that at the time. My mom was always very active in my life and she like my wife was a room mom who took care of not just me, but my class mates. I remember watching lots of movies with my mom and know for a fact that I learned more from watching movies and documentaries with her and spending time around my grandparents than anything I learned in school.

Public school always felt like a waste of time. I spent most of my time getting into trouble with the teachers, getting into fights with other students, or drawing on my papers and writing stories. The art teachers and English teachers tried to capture my talent and steer me and I shut them all out. If I had listened to those teachers it’s quite likely I would be working for a newspaper somewhere as a reporter making a fraction of what I make now, and I wouldn’t be about to release my second novel. That’s not a knock against my reporter friends who read here every day, but they know it’s the truth. Advice is only as good as the person who gives it, and I wanted no advice from a teacher who worked for public education because I saw no value in their job. I felt that way as a child and I feel more strongly than ever as an adult. To me teachers were mind numb soldiers for something I wanted nothing to do with. I did not want them to impose on me the limits of their thinking.

When my kids were 5 and it came time for enrollment my mother was especially concerned when she heard my wife and me arguing about getting my oldest daughter ready for school. My wife enjoyed school until she met me, and saw nothing wrong with it. For her it was a bench mark, a natural progression to adulthood. For me it was like sending my kids to a death camp of propaganda. There was never a question that I was always radically independent compared to others around me, so I bent on my position because my entire family thought I was the one who was wrong. Of course as it turned out, I was the only one who was right. But you live and learn.

I told my daughter before she got on the school bus for the first time not to worry, that I’d deprogram her when she got home. Of course at age 5 my wife thought my daughter wouldn’t remember me saying that but at age 22 she still does, and luckily she listened to what I said. Now after all those years of raising our kids and seeing all the problems up close I was excessively right at age 25 about the intention of public education. The goal is not to make the best and brightest. It is to make kids average. Home schooled kids do better even with parents teaching them because those parents care about making their kids exceptional, and setting the bar high makes the children respond accordingly. That’s what’s missing in public education, it’s the expectation level.

Home schooling as an option is good because it brings competitive forces to public education and forces them to adjust their costs. Teachers are not worth 50K to 60K per year when they produce such complacent results next to the home schooled child taught by a parent with maybe only a high school education or college at best. Having home schooling as an option helps break up the monopoly of public education which is the intention of the government-run schools, it always has been. I knew it when I was a kid, even if I didn’t know why. I knew it when I was raising my own kids. And I know it now. My kids have had much improved lives because most of their socializing occurred outside of public education. They have done more in their first 25 years than most of their classmates will do in their first 50 and that’s a real shame. Social limits in life are started in public education. The chains are placed upon a child’s mind in government-run schools and I am even surer of it now than I was when I was younger. When I was a young man, I only had a feeling about it. Now I have facts.

There hasn’t been one day that my wife has woke up and wished she went to her graduation ceremony. She doesn’t ever feel like she missed something, because the activities we were doing were much larger in scope of experience. But many of the family that ridiculed us for home schooling our kids used those experiences in public education as bench marks of social development, getting a class ring, a jacket, and a cap and gown. It turned out that those family members were still stuck in some perpetual 15-year-old mentality and even at age 40 and 50 years old looked fondly back to their high school days with yearning. And I think that’s pathetic.

I outgrew public education within two weeks of starting kindergarten. My wife outgrew it at age 17. My kids did by second grade. The rest of the way they learned most of their information from me and their mom at home. They whizzed through school and were routinely on the honor role every single year, because it was easy for them, because I set the bar high at home. Public education is simply a bad product. It’s a failed social experiment and needs complete reform. It certainly doesn’t need additional funding. It needs less, and it needs competition to keep it honest, and all the unions should be made illegal. Unions have no place in public education.

So use public education if you want. Have your kids play the sports and socialize with the other kids. But in my opinion if you rely on public education to teach your kids exclusively, you are a lazy parent and a fool. You are surrendering your child’s life to an institution that will mentally confine the thoughts of your child to a life of social slavery and mundane misery. If you really want your child to learn and to be a good person, then you’ll home school them and you’ll do it as soon as humanly possible. In my eyes, it’s your obligation as a parent. And those who don’t at least try it I have no respect for.

Rich Hoffman

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

Check out Rich Hoffman’s favorite website, (besides this one):

http://thepeoplescube.com/

Luke Hall for President: But first he should be a Lakota School Board member

The first day of March 1, 2012 was special for three reasons. First the morning air was cool but noticeably spring like. There was a hint to the air that indicated that spring was very near as I rode my motorcycle to work with a sunrise poking above the horizon. The clouds high overhead reflected a brilliant orange and it was just a spectacular motorcycle ride, a welcome change over the many mornings of brutal cold. It felt as though I could actually feel earth’s elliptical orbit closing back in on the sun after a long journey through the cold of space for the last three months.

The second is that I was able to turn the calendar in my office to the month of March. It’s not only special because March is the month of spring, which happens to be my favorite of the four seasons, but my calendar features various aircraft and in March it displays a gorgeous P-40 Warhawk painted up in the Flying Tiger paint scheme. (CLICK HERE to see just how much I love The Flying Tigers and why.) Needless to say, I have been looking forward to looking at that picture on that particular month since I received the calendar just prior to Christmas.

The third is that I heard from a young man I supported for the Lakota School Board named Luke Hall. Luke is a political science major at Miami University and a former student at Lakota East who worked for Spark Magazine. During the last election I thought Luke was one of the two best candidates and unfortunately I think that Luke’s youth worked against him in the court of public perception. But I was delighted to watch a recent video that Luke did where he gave the history of American politics in a rather concise video that sums up American politics in a remarkably abbreviated fashion. When I watched this video it reminded me of why it should be Luke Hall that is on the current school board, and it gave me hope that during the next election that Luke will be back, because I want a person on the school board who knows as much about politics and history as Luke does. Check it out!

When the members of the school board and other pro levy advocates proclaim that I expect too much out of the education of our youth, I hear from them a sense of laziness. And I would point them in the direction of Luke Hall as an example of what I’d expect coming out of Lakota as a student body and what level of comprehension I expect on the school board. Luke Hall is the type of person I would like to see at every single school board position. He’s what I expect out of a superintendent. He’s what I expect out of principals and teachers. And I don’t think it’s too much because Luke is in his early 20’s. He’s only been out of high school for a couple of years, so how difficult is it for grown adults to learn what Luke does when they have much more time to learn it?

I think very highly of Luke. I’ve met his parents and it is immediately obvious that he comes from a caring family, which helps a lot to encourage a young mind to excel, to read all those books that are behind him in the video. A young person has to be the one to do the act of learning, but it is the adults in a young person’s life who set the bar of expectation. And Luke has those types of people in his life and it shows.

That is not to say that Luke and I always agree. During the Election of 2011 Luke and many of his friends from the Spark Magazine took exception to my opinion of their teacher at Lakota East when I called that teacher a “radical liberal.” Luke and his friends rallied to the defense of their teacher which didn’t bother me. I like to see young people believe something, so I encourage such confrontations. But ultimately in the theater of debate, compromise is not the objective. One’s political beliefs are not to be compromised in surrender to another. This is because there is a right and a wrong answer and one cannot make a correct answer partially wrong as a “compromise” to the opposite political party.

For that very reason it does not matter to me if Luke is a Republican or a Democrat. As he said in his video, politics has changed many times over time to reflect the strategy of party politics. So the title to something cannot be completely trusted. My interest in any discussion is what the truth is. Party is not a consideration. Learning the truth is. My support of Luke Hall for school board in spite of his youth was for this reason. It doesn’t matter what his age, it doesn’t matter what his political affiliation, or it doesn’t matter if he wants to defend his teacher–what matters is whether or not Luke has the ability as an elected official to discover the truth and to act on that truth.

The budget crisis at Lakota is not a negotiation between various political factions. It’s not a compromise. Currently the school board is behaving as though if they make a few cuts around the outside of the pie, the parameter of the budget–the meaningless crust, that the community will forgive them for not touching the heart of the pie, where the real costs are. These school board members are not dealing with the truth. They are not facing reality. They are showing that they do not have a grasp on history or an understanding of economics, because they assume that the rest of the community is at the same proficiency of understanding as they are. The budget crisis at Lakota is about truth and the ability of management to arrive at that truth. Truth is not a negotiation process.

Luke has shown that he has the ability to grasp facts and to reach the truth. Where politicians go wrong is that they begin to compromise the truth in exchange for political donations, then they seek to justify their position with more fuzzy facts and over time, they become corrupt because they lose the ability to see the truth. So they fall into this whole notion of compromise with other political factions to arrive at their reality, and that is why politics is screwed up, and that is why in the history of American politics that Luke so eloquently invoked there have been so many changes that have gradually taken America away from its founding concepts.

The American Constitution was not a document that was written upon fantasy. It was written based on philosophic observation and a pursuit of basic human truths that are not negotiable. That’s why the Constitutional foundations produced the greatest civilization in the history of the known world. America is now living off its reputation but is unable to rekindle its once potent power because it’s political structure as been seduced by the notion of “compromise.”

Luke’s video made my day better because it displayed to me that there are youth coming up today that are able to understand the basics of truth, and it gives me hope for the future. Because without knowledge of history and a grasp of essential truths, society will fail, and Luke is evidence that there is optimism. As I parked my motorcycle in my place this morning and put down the kickstand I thought of the presidential primaries that are coming to Ohio this upcoming week, and Luke Hall was on my mind as a potential future candidate. Ohio has not produced many presidents of late, and I hope that Luke Hall becomes one that breaks that streak in his political future, and I hope that he begins the practice now of holding on to his essential truths along the way. His first challenge to that process will be when he is finally elected to the school board, where his first test on that path will be cast against him by the powers of politics who have built their lives upon falsehood. Luke will be a threat to them because his mind is hungry for the truth. And that is why I will support him in his next run for school board, then school board president, and eventually President of the United States. Because whether or not I agree with Luke or not isn’t important. Luke like me is in search of the truth and once it’s discovered we will act on it, in spite of our personal beliefs. Because once truths are discovered they must be incorporated into our thoughts and our beliefs must reflect them. To do anything less is a “compromise” toward corruption that is the foundations to every kind of human failure. It is in such failures that we find our current school board suffering and our nation in general.

Soon Luke will have to add to his speech in that video to describe how America had to reset itself after that long chain of events to a national respect for The Republic upon which America stands and to pursue the truth that is required to feed such an entity on a diet of authenticity without compromise to the evil of falsehood.

Luke Hall for future President of The United States! But that is the end of a long road he has not traveled down yet. I look forward to his long journey. It should be a lot of fun to watch.

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

Check out Rich Hoffman’s favorite website, (besides this one):

http://thepeoplescube.com/

The Hobbit Blog part 3: Escape toward reality and away from the mystics

Fantasy is the bridge that meets the world of reason with the perception of what one suspects is there, but does not yet have the facts, or the methods of obtaining those facts. Under such conditions we can never say with any certainty what something is. But in our rational minds we can spot truth even if it is laced in the play of fiction. It is because of these elements that I am fascinated by the production of The Hobbit directed by Peter Jackson where he takes viewers on a journey through the third video blog directly from the set. You can view my previous comments about The Hobbit by clicking on this link. You can see the next video below where Peter Jackson has traveled to London to film Christopher Lee in his pick-up shots at the legendary James Bond stages in England. There is so much to like about this clip as it is a wonderful trip into the history of film that crosses many genres to explore the significance of the dwarves in full make-up.

My enjoyment of fantasy films and books is not to say that I openly embrace the theories of mysticism, the practice of arbitrarily placing faith in ideals that do not have any roots in reality. To me, I see the theories of most modern economists, particularly those of the Federal Reserve to be more mystical than the actions of the dwarves and wizards of The Hobbit. I see blind faith into any idea to be mysticism, and that includes religions and even the political trends of global warming. Anything that is believed with an abandonment of fact is considered a form of mysticism. That includes the arbitrary statement that education funding must increase to improve education, because such statements have nothing to do with reality. The reality is that increases in funding do not improve education. Such statements are made because the participants who say those things want to believe it, not because things are actually that way in actuality.

To say that the earth is warming and therefore carbon credits must be sold to save it from mankind’s degradation is to place the same faith in fantasy and mysticism that one places in a religious figure, which is why such political measures are presented in the same fashion as a religion. People are asked to arbitrarily subscribe to a theory based on completely agnostic comprehension. They are asked to believe that the earth is in danger because “experts” told them this was the case. To me, these thought patterns are pure mysticism.

So the magic in a film like The Hobbit wielded by a wizard like Gandalf the Gray is not a lesser concept than anything proposed by a modern mystic such as those behind the global warming movement. All politicians who propose that they can heal the sick, bring riches to the poor and thus change the world for the better are simply making arbitrary claims rooted in pure mysticism. I find the literature of J.R.R. Tolkien to be more valid than those mystics who run for president or state governments. Because I have learned that I can’t believe anything that the average politician says, or the media that reports it. But I can trust in the sincerity of the characters in The Hobbit. There is a truth in their actions that point to observations not yet made with human eyes.

We are all children of the universe and we come into its existence learning greater and greater truths as each year meets us. We might not understand at age one the complexities we can fathom by age 19, or age 50. As time passes we develop the cognition to piece together observations based on reality. So with age we can be said to gain much wisdom. This is why the mystics seek to discredit the old and give power to the young, because the young are not yet developed and do not understand the tricks of the mystics. But the wise do. And in The Hobbit, it is Gandalf, the wise old wizard who embodies more truth even in his magic than most who live and breathe among us in the real world.

When I see these clips from The Hobbit I see an honesty present that is more real than a whole day of watching CSPAN on cable TV. There is less fiction in a fantasy set in an unspecified time in a fictional place called Middle-Earth, than in the suit and ties of modern politics. And that is why dear reader, I am spending so much time on this subject of the upcoming film called The Hobbit.

The mystics of our time point at fantasy stories like Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars and declare them to be harmless fantasies intended for light entertainment and escape. But the escape is not one from reality, but toward it. In these fantasies I do not seek them so diligently to leave the world of reality to immerse myself into their imaginative splendor. I seek these epic stories because there is a truth present in the actions of the characters that hint at knowledge not yet discovered through the mechanisms of deductive thinking. It is through the imagination that we see what our senses have not yet matured enough to see and the mystics of our time would have us cast away logic and drink ourselves drunk so that we are enchanted by their crooked tongues.

And even as one of the greatest film directors on the planet, Peter Jackson cannot help but be enchanted not by the film he is currently making, but by the memory of the great films of James Bond at the historic sound stage in England. Because as all story tellers and lovers of those epics know, there is truth in myth that shows the error of those actual mystics who wish to defy logic with every breath they take and word they squeeze through their teeth. It doesn’t matter if the fantasy is from The Hobbit and its magic wielding leader the wizard Gandalf, or the suave charisma of James Bond, there is truth in those fantastic movie characters that point to reality and those of us who are hungry for it.

I’m not really interested if what I’ve said here is too obscure for most to understand. I’m sure a handful of you will know what I’m saying, and a majority will be thoroughly baffled by my statements. That doesn’t matter because I’m writing to those select few who have developed the ability through their love of fictional fantasy to grasp complicated concepts. It is in those types of people who the world is not a mystery and the actions of the mystics are obvious. Because before one can see the big picture, they have to be able to grasp it in their mind and it is in fantasy that the tool for developing this ability manifests.

The world is full of false prophets and mystics at virtually every step in the human experience. Yet the answers are usually in all the places they tell you not to look. And they say not to look at fantasy films like The Hobbit for any grasp of reality. But in my experience, if it’s reality you seek, you will find it in those places of the imagination built with the scaffolding of observed logic.

Rich Hoffman

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

Check out Rich Hoffman’s favorite website, (besides this one):

http://thepeoplescube.com/

The Ghosts of Lakota: Fear, and illusion from Superintendent Mantia

I woke up on the morning of February 24, 2012 with the note you can see below. It’s from a parent in the Pickerington School district who has been watching the actions of Superintendent Mantia here in Southern Ohio. This parent is uniquely positioned to give a statement about Mantia because Pickerington is the school district that the current Lakota superintendent came from in August of 2011. It read as follows:

I’m a parent of students from Pickerington and let me tell you that Dr. Mantia will ruin your schools. She removed almost all music, art, phys ed teachers and librarians. Our libraries used the most current media material and the students loved library where they learned to use podcasts, they wrote book reviews and they had the greatest book clubs. The students loved to read because of the fantastic librarians. They are gone. She has combined music, art and gym together. They currently meet as a group at a school every 6-9 weeks. That means that they only receive physical activity for one week and it isn’t intense activity either.

She took a pay raise one month before she left after resigning. Please watch her and her agenda for the sake of your students, teachers, support staff and your wallet.

As my readers here know, I declared the Lakota School District officially dead after the February 13, 2012 meeting, so I saw no point in going to this latest meeting. It was as predicted more of the same strategy of protecting the wages of the school employees with the smoke and mirrors of fancy terminology that essentially meant nothing. The concession by the Lakota School System to retreat backward as a district with these three public school board meetings instead of restructuring their very expensive labor contracts is deplorable. With this third budget cutting school board meeting, the No Lakota Levy has officially begun the campaign to end this fourth levy attempt which appears to already be underway on behalf of the school board decisions. No Lakota Levy will soon announce a major initiative in reaction to these decisions by the school board. I am done with Lakota as a governing body. I officially cast my vote of no confidence in their direction.

Lakota under the leadership of Superintendent Mantia from Pickerington elected to eliminate 36 more jobs centering on art, music, and physical education, which is consistent with the behavior indicated above by the note from the parent. This is in addition to the 69 positions cut from last weeks meeting that caused me to regulate my opinion as a nail in the coffin to the Lakota educational body as a whole.

During the meeting last night several people were texting me and asking what I was doing, and why I wasn’t there. I told them that I was watching the DVR backups of Ghost Hunters, and my TV show was more important. I said that I thought the ghosts walking around on that TV show were more real than the ghosts walking around at the Lakota School Board meeting on stage, because both were just as effective as managers. In the TV show the ghosts make noise by banging on doors and sending out cryptic EVP recordings. The Lakota School Board does the same; they make a lot of noise with a stupid program named S.T.E.A.M (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Math) while at the same time cutting those programs with staffing and as Jeff Kursman said at the meeting,

“These aren’t efficiencies, these are reductions. Efficiencies will include things that hopefully we’ll hear about in the next week or two. Things like outsourcing of technology when it comes with dealing with the central office, cutting back on central office administrators…centralizing purchasing or negotiating a better rate in health care. What I see you talking about here today is a degradation of liberal arts education.”

All that was occurring at the school board meeting was a bunch of ghosts making noise to a captive audience. Just like the ghosts in Ghost Hunters the ghosts are powerless to do anything in real life because they are in fact dead. The school board is powerless to do anything but scare people, just like the ghosts in Ghost Hunters. So I see no difference between the school board meeting and an episode of Ghost Hunters. With that in mind I stayed home in the comfort of my home and watched the ghosts on TV rather than waste my time at the school board meeting.

I’m happy to see the comments from Jeff Kursman and others who are now beginning to question the merit of this entire money scheming operation known as the Lakota School System. The key to meeting a balanced budget is to reduce the cost of the services, and that is to drive down the labor costs. Cutting a few teachers here and there is only a band-aid to the situation. Only by making across the board cuts to the 80% of the $160 million dollar budget can the Lakota School System meet its budget supplied generously by the community. Anything less than a contract restructuring with the Lakota labor force will be sufficient.

Karen Mantia has brought with her to the Lakota School System a strategy used at her last job of Pickerington to diminish the quality of the district in order to force parents to pass a tax increase to sustain their inflated union contracts. And to execute that objective she and the school board are willing to destroy everything that is good about Lakota to protect the wages of their union allies. That’s what these ghosts of Lakota were doing, and why I’m not interested in anything they have to say any longer. Instead, the No Lakota Levy will be shifting gears to approach our tax fighting methods without the assumption that Lakota will see the light and come to their senses by listing to our arguments. Now, we must assume that they are not even relevant, and we must find ways to remove their impact from destroying our community in an extortion ring that is evidently well underway. If this fight for more taxes were for the kids truly, then these ghosts of Lakota would not use the kids by stealing from the community’s $160 million dollar budget and take away programs while protecting employee incomes at the expense of the children.

So for now on, I will treat these employees like the ghosts they are, as irrelevant to the land of the living, and powerless to us all if they are robbed of their ability to invoke fear. Because as far as usefulness, they are lacking completely in any ability required in the real world, and are truly manifestations from the land of the dead.

Rich Hoffman

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

Check out Rich Hoffman’s favorite website, (besides this one):

http://thepeoplescube.com/

Whitney Houston: Glenn Beck talks about her life and death on GBTV

I don’t have much thought about the death of Whitney Houston other than to say that her trajectory was predictable and self-imposed. It was easy to see where she was headed, and it’s frustrating to see and not be able to help such people. I live around and speak with future Whitney Houston’s every day and they are hell-bent on personal destruction. So I usually don’t commit much of my mind to their lives.

But Glenn Beck had a wonderful summation of the life of Whitney Houston on his GBTV show that many people who aren’t aware of his show might have missed. So I’m putting it up here so that it can be shared for its own merit.

A fate cannot be escaped. One plus one equals 2. 5 plus 5 equals 10. This notion that people can have whatever life they conger up in their minds no matter what they put into their head is utterly ridiculous and leads directly to these terrible tragedies whether it’s Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, or Elvis. Talent in life is not enough, and money cannot make you happy. It’s far more important to put quality into everything you do in life, than to just coast on a raw talent and hope it all works out. It takes work to live, and it takes a lot of work to live a good life. And sadly for stars like Whitney Houston, she not only deprived millions of fans a role model to look up to, but she denied herself a quality life that love, money, drugs, or any mindful fantasy could not give her. It’s a life lived in the pursuit of the wrong things that leads to such tragedies, and should provide a lesson for all the future ghosts that hover around us hell-bent on the same fate.

I’ll always remember Whitney Houston the for film The Bodyguard and her rendition of this song.

 

Too bad the words and actions of Whitney in that song only reflected an idea and not the actual words of a wise person.  They are just sounds that come from the talent of a unique voice but lack the foundation of reality like so many stars of our age.  Be cautious of what you let into your mind, because you are the sum of everything that you put into it.

Click here to see the TAIL OF THE DRAGON press release for an update on my most recent project:

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

Check out Rich Hoffman’s favorite website, (besides this one):

http://thepeoplescube.com/

The Bully Problem at Lakota: Cover-ups, taxes, and peer pressure


Yes—those who hate me most know exactly who I brought to the Lakota School Board meeting. He was seated on my right and to those who sought to cover up his story, you know you felt a pang of guilt, of regret, and some fear that he was affiliated with me.

But why? How did this person come to sit with me at a school board meeting? How did we become friends in the first place? After all, this was a guy who used to be a levy supporter, and a very active volunteer at Lakota East. Well, it’s the fault of the Lakota School Board actually for not taking action to help the guy out when he had a problem. This guy came to the board and presented his case and the school did everything they could to cover it up. They took his wife aside and pressured her into signing her rights away out of fear that they would smear her for the relationship she had with a teacher at the high school who had instructed her daughter. This case went all the way up to the state board of education and still the story was contained. The teacher who sent very salacious emails talking about sucking, and doing the horizontal mamba with this little girl’s mother from a school computer didn’t get fired from his position for violating the trust of the teacher-student relationship.

Instead the principal of the high school sent the teacher in question to the other high school to help keep him employed and shut up the parents who had reconciled the incident between each other after a lot of pain. Even after the relationship had ended between the woman and the teacher the parasite continued to pursue the woman asking how “their” little girl was doing on papers sent home and on voice messages over the phone. It was the kind of voice message that sent shivers up the spine of the woman. It felt as if the teacher was “bullying” her into a position of control, and the teacher continued to do this for quite some time after the affair ended and the child was out of his class. Because in all reality, nothing really happened to the teacher, he just reported to a different building within the Lakota School System once the story was presented to the principal and school board.

Out of desperation and risking that I would shoot him just for stepping on my property, this father sought me out for help because he had nowhere else to turn. He wanted someone to be accountable for what this teacher attempted to do to his family. So I covered their story in greater detail in another article. Click Here to view that piece. Over time, we have become friends and I have gotten to know their daughter who is now out of school. After the incident with the teacher this little girl was repeatedly harassed by other students at Lakota.  The bullying became so bad that the parents had to remove their little girl from a very respected activity due to the constant harassment, all of which is well documented with an extensive paper trail.   Remember, this used to be dedicated Lakota volunteer who is very well liked and respected in the Lakota community, so the man has no reason to be inflammatory.  Once the little girl graduated from school she once again thrived, and this was the 18-year-old woman who recently showed me around her house and shared with me her crushes that she had on her favorite movie stars. As she spoke to me I could not help but wonder what kind of evil would possess a teacher to use this nice young woman as a tool to seduce her mother into beginning a sexual affair. What evil would try to pry from this innocent girl facts about her father that the teacher could use to smear against the mother. And what evil could use the special needs condition of the young girl to demand audience from the very busy, and concerned mother who would do anything to make sure her daughter got what she needed in school.

So is there bullying going on at Lakota, and virtually every public school all across the country? YES! Of course there is. Public schools are notoriously class specific, and peer groups are created within a public school system to meet the various classifications of personalities. Because such a thing is a primal desire, to find likeness among peers, children will pick on those who are not like them and pound into shape those similar into a group collective. Individuality is frowned down upon by every member of the public school system, which is why I dislike public school and always have. But when the pressure gets to be too great that it translates into a student wanting to take their own life, then the situation is way out of control and has expanded beyond the realm of tolerance.

When I heard about the recent suicide at Lakota West, I didn’t want it to be another negative article to write against the Lakota School System. My heart goes out to the parents of this little girl. I don’t care what the situation was, a system that lets a girl think death was the only way out has failed the child and the family who trusted the school. And unfortunately it sounds like the girl was suffering from bullying at her school to such an extent that she thought she had no way out.

Since this story was reported by Channel 9 one time during the second week of February 2012 and nowhere else, facts are hard to come by. The letter that Lakota sent home to parents was nowhere to be found on their website, which seemed to be big enough news to dictate sending the letter home with kids. I did however see the article by the Enquirer about the new school board member Julie Schaffer promoting her “volunteerism.” But there wasn’t anything about this tragic death that occurred on February 8th in the paper that I saw, or on the Lakota site giving any specifics. That seemed strange for such a sad story.

I figured that the media and the school were just being sensitive to the family, and by keeping the story quit, they were being respectful to the grieving family, which I thought was appropriate. That is until I saw the comments online from Leslie Agoston who is a student at Lakota West and knows the victim. Here is the posting.

Leslie Agoston
I am a current Lakota West High School student. And I know what the girl went through and how she felt. I too get bullied almost every day. And Lakota could care less they just sweep it under the rug. They just care about their “excellence” rating. If they just stopped for a second and realize how many kids are suffering from bullying an incident like this would have never happened.

Read more: http://www.wcpo.com/dpp/news/region_north_cincinnati/west_chester/lakota-west-freshman-school-student-commits-suicide#ixzz1mV4Yv6cX

That is an interesting thing for a student at Lakota to say? That comment eerily sounded like the situation my new friend who came to the school board meeting with me went through. The comment from the student implies that the administration at Lakota doesn’t care about the bullying that goes on. It backs up the notion that my friend is not the only one who suffered from some indiscretion involving bullying at the Lakota School District.

But what constitutes bullying? Was it bullying to use a special needs kid to sleep with a parent? Might the child have felt pressure from such a teacher into revealing family secrets through acts of intimidation? Was it bullying to tell the mother that unless she signed a document releasing the school of responsibility that “word might get around the community about her indiscretions.” And apparently the students at Lakota West are complaining about bullying being a rampant problem that nobody is addressing.

Well, for clarity on this issue, let’s look at what Lakota itself says the definition of bullying is according to their website.

Lakota’s Definition of Bullying

“Bullying” is defined as an intentional written, verbal, electronic, or physical act that a student exhibits toward another particular student more than once; and the behavior both (1) causes mental or physical harm to the student, and (2) is sufficiently severe, persistent, or pervasive that a reasonable person under the circumstances should know will have the effect of:
• Placing a student in reasonable fear of physical harm or damage to the student’s property;
• Physically harming a student or damaging a student’s property; or
• Insulting or demeaning any student or group of students in such a way as to disrupt or interfere with the school’s educational mission or the education of any student.
http://www.lakotaonline.com/parents.cfm?subpage=2642

I know that my friend and his family suffered from bullying according to that definition at the hands of a Lakota teacher, a principal, and the school board members who knowingly let the issue slide through the cracks. They did not pursue termination of that teacher, but instead covered the issue up, which is consistent with the statement made by Leslie Agoston in her comments about the recent tragic death of her fellow student.

I understand that any organization with a lot of people and employees will be far from perfect. But we do expect perfection from an airplane pilot. If a pilot lands successfully 300 times then crashes on landing 301 that pilot would be held accountable, probably with the loss of their job at the very least. If there was a loss of life, there might even be a trial. The community of Lakota is employing an army of very well paid administrators, teachers and councilors to prevent tragic events like what Leslie described. It is also expected that teachers behave ethically without trying to have sex with the parents. The kids are watching how the administrators and teachers behave, and kids cannot be expected to be better than the teachers, can they?

It is a tragedy anytime a young person losses their life. It’s bad enough to consider whatever the sum of the conditions were that made the little girl want to take her own life. Again, my heart goes out to the family in the deepest way. And I truly hope that what Leslie said is not true, that this bully problem is not so epidemic within the Lakota School System that the situation could have been avoided with the skilled intervention of the highly paid mentors employed by the community. Because if it could have, then this suicide is a very serious issue for the school board to consider, and so far, all I hear them talking about is the passage of a new tax levy. They didn’t even bring it up at the school board meeting on February 13, 2012. They didn’t even say a prayer for the little girl or cover the issue in any way which would have been appropriate with such a large gathering. All these elements add up to be just another situation as what my friend experienced in his own family, a school that pushes all bad news under the rug to hide from the community.

I really hope I’m wrong, but something tells me that I’m not.

The biggest problem with the whole bullying issue is that the schools have painted themselves into a corner. They are not equipped to deal with bullying. Only a parent is, and sometimes the best way to eliminate a bully is to fight them. That’s how you shut down a bully. That’s how it’s been done for 10,000 years of human evolution. And if the child can’t take care of it on their own, the parents must step in and do it for them.

When my daughter was 9 years old she was picked on by a group of boys in the neighborhood who harassed her and her friends to no end. My daughter stood up to the bullies and one of the boys spit on her. My daughter was devastated by the embarrassment and came home very upset that a person would do such a thing to her, especially since the boy was much bigger than she was. That’s when the parent must step in and take control.

I put my daughter and all her friends in the car and went looking for the boys. I found them playing in the driveway of their house with the spitter’s father working in the garage, all of them were laughing as we pulled up. I made the boy apologize on his hands and knees to my daughter so my daughter would realize that I had her back and that if she ever got into a fix she couldn’t handle, that I’d be there to sweep it up for her. She needed to know that her father was there. Of course the boy’s father protested and wanted to fight me, which I openly accepted. Then he shut his mouth and went inside his house leaving his kids to fend for themselves, which scared the shit out of them. Their father had abandoned them when it mattered. Little things like that matter a lot in the art of living.

These matters are too complicated for schools to handle, yet they sell their services to the community as though they can. They are kidding themselves. Respect for human beings cannot be created through rules and regulations. Respect is earned, and standing up for yourself or your child is the way it is gained in the mind of the human being. There is no other way.

It is in this misunderstanding that bullying is an epidemic problem in public schools and parents who believe that the school system can, and will put children’s safety in the front of administrator’s minds are kidding with you. Administrators don’t have the intellectual capacity, or the fortitude to do such a thing, and the cost to society is great. The bully issue in public school is just another byproduct of an organized, overly specialized, labor force that has handcuffed parents into inaction because they assure society that all problems can be handled in the classroom. So parents believing they don’t have a right to get involved in the affairs of their children in school leave the job to the teachers and administrators that can’t even balance a budget, let alone handle complicated emotional issues with children who aren’t even theirs.

The schools know this. They know they can’t protect the children to the level they have sold to the public. Their primary concern is always how they are going to continue to gain funding from the community, so they are always focused on hiding unpleasant facts from the public rather than dealing directly with a problem. This is why Lakota didn’t even discuss the suicide of a student just four days later at the largest school board meeting I can ever remember occurring at Lakota with all the media in Cincinnati covering the event. The school board didn’t even acknowledge the tragedy, because the goal of the meeting was to convince the community of the need for higher taxes, not to actually deal with any tough problems like mature adults. This is the kind of behavior that has created most of the problems in public education. That’s how they got into trouble with my new friend. They sought to suppress the story rather than dealing with it directly.

The bullies of the world know this. They know that most of the parents, administrators, and teachers are paralyzed into inaction by rules and regulations that the bullies could care less about. So like the liberal gun laws that seek to remove guns from society in the aim of world peace, the progressive educators think that by employing more councilors and administrators that they can stop violence and the tendency of violence from the school environment. They can’t.

The answer is more parental involvement, less administrators getting in the way of a parent and their children, and encouraging justice where it’s appropriate. When a teacher does something wrong, FIRE THEM! When a child acts inappropriately, expel them! And when you hear and see reports from parents that violence is coming at their children in the school, don’t pass the reports to your PR director to hide from the public. Deal with them; deal with each and every report even if the parents are overly neurotic, because that’s what the community is paying for. If there is anything that can be learned from these tragedies it’s that there isn’t any replacement for good ol’ fashioned care and attention. Money can’t buy security and a clean conscious, only work can solve the problem and without the work, tragedies will continue to occur.

Rich Hoffman

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

Check out Rich Hoffman’s favorite website, (besides this one):

http://thepeoplescube.com/

Seeing Evil: Fighting against those who are agents of destruction

One of the least commented but most viewed posts I had last week was the Archie Wilson case. It seems to not be very surprising to many people that a commissioner would abuse his power to the extent that Archie did. I mean doesn’t everyone have a couple of prostitutes on the side that they supply cocaine to in order to have crazy sex with? Then—when they get caught, hide out-of-state and pretend they were in a drug rehab getting “fixed” for their “illness.” That illness is called—evil.

Well, I suspect that many of my dear readers here are suffering from little evils that are living out in their minds, and they do not feel qualified to cast a stone against it. After all, aren’t we told that we should not cast stones if we live in glass houses? Yet this is how evil lives and survives, with threats of destroying those who might cast a stone in its direction. This has left our society paralyzed against even identifying evil. And this is the topic of Glenn Beck on his recent GBTV episode. Check it out.

Do not take the position of not seeing evil, not hearing evil, or not speaking of evil. Because evil wants to remain hidden in our midst’s so it can consume our very souls. Evil wants to continue as it has leaving society paralyzed against it. But do not become seduced by its power. Do not be threatened by its fury. You are better than it is.

How do I know this? Well dear reader, because you are reading this. If you can read this without laughing, snickering or attempting to belittle it, then evil does not have your soul yet, and there is hope. So fear not, evil is not as ominous as it would have you think it is. Don’t be afraid to call evil what it is when you see it, hear it or someone speaks it. The agents of evil are not necessarily those who are actually evil, but those who remain paralyzed by inaction and guilt to stand against it. Don’t be an agent of evil. It’s a perilous path with an outcome that serves only those corrupt enough to benefit from not having a soul.

Click here to see the TAIL OF THE DRAGON press release for an update on my most recent project:

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

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http://thepeoplescube.com/