Tag: Tea Party

Lakota Superintendent Mantia: The employement contract

My anger at Superintendent Mantia of the Lakota School District is not some unwarranted diatribe incited by a simple disagreement. There is a history which is shown at the beginning and ending of this article where I gave two public presentations, one for Educate Ohio in June of 2011 and again for the West Chester Tea Party in October of 2011 shortly before the election. One of the reasons the pro levy people think my arguments are combative, vitriolic and harsh are because they typically only speak with people of their own kind. They do not associate often with the 18,000 people who voted against the tax hikes, so are ignorant as to how the other side thinks, and they make no attempt to understand. This is why both groups that I spoke to about Superintendent Mantia and my high hopes that she would get the Lakota budget under control were greater in number than those who attend the typical school board meeting. We have a lot of supporters in the No More Tax Effort. If more levies passed in this recent election it is not because people support those schools, it’s that the schools wore out the resistance, which is by design. The message the schools send is that if a levy does not pass, it will be back. So resistance yields to the oppressive tactics of union controlled public schools.

For those levy supporters who think I’m some lone wolf who simply doesn’t want to pay taxes because I can’t afford it, keep indulging in that fantasy as you stay in your little circles of pro levy supporters thinking that you are good because you don’t know how to say NO. No Lakota Levy as an organization and our supporters are deep, and active, as you can see in my public presentations over education. In my presentations I defended Mantia hoping that she would do as those of us in No Lakota Levy do routinely, and that is make hard decisions to balance our budgets. And I feel like she made me look bad for giving her the benefit of the doubt. In fact, every core member of No Lakota Levy has had to work with budgets in the millions of dollars, had to fire, hire or ask employees for wage freezes or reductions, and have had to spend many sleepless nights rolling around over those decisions. That is why we have no sympathy for Superintendent Mantia. She has turned out to be not what she sold to the community, and we are disappointed—me specifically. Residents from Pickerington warned me how Mantia was, and they were right.

I know the tricks of school superintendents. I know what they learn in Levy University in Columbus because I’ve read the same books and material they have. I got this material from my friends who are current school board members and have attended this class. My information also comes from former school board members who want to blow the whistle on the corruption that goes on in public education. The tricks are standard for every school and are designed by the Ohio School Board Association and the Ohio Education Association to extort from the public using Saul Alinsky’s methods of consensus, money if communities refuse to increase taxes on themselves. Those methods include, cutting busing to increase the burden on parents and force them to pass a levy. If that doesn’t work, schools take away liberal arts electives. If that doesn’t work they make sports pay-for-play. And if that doesn’t work they lay-off teachers at the bottom of the seniority ladder to scare parents into a declining school district and plummeting property values. These methods are used in every single school in the entire state of Ohio because they all share a connection to the OSBA in Columbus.

Another OSBA strategy is to form good relationships with realtors in a community so that home sales will be directly connected to school levy support. That’s why Joan Powell, former president of the Lakota School Board and current board member is so involved at Lakota—her full time job is that of a realtor. And one of Lakota’s biggest pro levy supporters is another realtor, Pam Perrino. CLICK HERE TO REVIEW HER INVOLVEMENT AGAINST MY GROUP. This is all by design at the Ohio School Board Association (OSBA). It’s a system designed to stack the schools and labor unions against the community. Both of those women will tell you they do what they do because it’s in their heart to do so, but they were brought into the circle of power because of their status as realtors. They may not be aware of it because they are only looking at their small piece of the pie, but they are part of the overall strategy, and they play their roles in levy advancement as expected.

And this is the reason for the disappointment in Superintendent Mantia. No Lakota Levy thought that Mantia should have proposed a wage reduction to the school employees in order to sustain the district far into the future. That way everything the public expects from the school could have still been maintained, busing, sports, electives and so on. But Mantia chose to preserve the system designed by the OSBA and imposed hardship on the residents just as the OSBA teaches at Levy University. In fact, she followed the text-book of levy passage taught at Levy University word for word. And this is simply unacceptable.

So this is the reason for the anger. We are not a stupid group of people at No Lakota Levy. In fact, we’ve seen it all, done it all, and could perform many of the decisions we are asking Mantia to make in our sleep without breaking a sweat. The solutions are so obvious and so easy that it doesn’t even require thought. But Superintendent Mantia is taking up a quarter million dollars in compensation from the district’s tax payers and she has not done the job we expected. She instead stood up for the teachers union that she started in as a teacher herself, and she knows as a double-dipper that she would never receive such a high salary with such poor performance in any other occupation but school superintendent. She is standing up for the system that has made her wealthy by employing these extortion measures taken straight out of the OSBA Levy University Class given every November the week after elections in Columbus, Ohio.

So I’m putting up the contract for Superintendent Mantia here for the residents of Ohio to see, so they can see what a juicy deal she has—a deal she would get no place else in any field of work. If Superintendent Mantia were in the private sector she would not stay employed for a single week making the level of income she currently is. I wouldn’t mind paying for a token superintendent job if it wasn’t filled with so many perks and loaded as if she were a celebrity on a Hollywood film; it deserves close scrutiny from a public that must fund her lifestyle for performance that is lackluster in only 6 months of employment. I would encourage you dear reader to watch these videos completely, especially the radio broadcast, and read this contract. If you are interested in understanding the scoop of the problem, you can at least do that much. I’m making it easy for you.

Use the tools I’ve placed before you! This is a very serious problem that is much larger than just passing a tax increase or not.

This will determine the kind of world we chose to live in for the foreseeable future.

Now, to be fair, I had several friends who attended the school board meeting on Thursday, March 9th, and below is the report from one of them to me from that event, which does involve Superintendent Mantia.  Her response is one that I believe a person of her caliber should be able to handle over the position of a lawyer, because lawyers are in the pocket of the unions.   With the kind of contract Mantia has, I expect her to be smarter than the lawyers.  They make a lot less than she does.  But here is the final word as spoken from her mouth to my friend.

At 10:50 I stood and asked why they DIDN’T DO ANY CUTTING ANYWHERE and simply lowered salaries and benefits until they were BELOW the budget?
After the four of us who stayed to ask questions at the close of the evening were finished, Karen Mantia answered my suggestion.
 
She took about 15 minutes and said that solution had been considered, but she was warned by the lawyers that it was illegal and therefore OFF the table.
They are going to chop the Hell out of the Lakota School District to meet the budget.
SIMPLY lowering salaries is OFF THE TABLE, when the alternate is to virtually destroy the school system in Lakota?

Ms. Mantia said she and the Board DID NOT HAVE THE POWER to lower salaries and benefits.

She said WE had that power, referring to the NO Lakota Levy Group.

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):

www.Yes-to-Lakota-Kids.org

Yes to Lakota Kids & NO to Lakota Levies

Teacher James Hooker: Leaving his wife for an 18 year-old-student

Am I surprised that James Hooker the Modesto City School business and computer teacher made $110,537 in 2009?  Am I surprised that this same teacher aged 41 just left his wife and children to “follow his heart” and have a sexual relationship with one of his 18-year-old students?  Am I surprised that one of Hooker’s children is a junior at that very same school and is almost the same age as the girl Hooker is leaving his wife for?  No.  You can read the details of this terrible story at the link below.

http://www.mercurynews.com/top-stories/ci_20078313

The teachers unions and other education apologists are attempting to proclaim that this relationship between teacher and student is unusual, and that such things are not wide-spread in public education.  Well, those apologists must have already forgotten the story about the teacher who fed his own semen to his students which was covered here.  CLICK HERE FOR A REVIEW.  There are thousands of these cases across the country and point at an inherit sickness in our culture that I consider to be devastating. 

Hooker as a human being is not equipped to teach anyone.  He should have never been a teacher and the evaluation process should have filtered him out of the system.  It is only because of aggressive teachers unions that a person of such low quality could be employed at a job that can pay him six figures.  Hooker is a person of low quality because of his very simple statement, “In making our choice, we’ve hurt a lot of people.  We keep asking ourselves do we make everyone else happy or do we follow our hearts.  I just kind of knew that she’s the one.”  Such a statement or resemblance of it in a sane society should have resulted in immediate termination during an evaluation process. His boss at the school should have seen in this teacher that he was functioning from an emotional foundation that is not rooted in reality, and should have ended the employment contract immediately. 

But if the administrator had done so, they probably would have lost 75% of their teaching staff and they might even have to fire themselves for being guilty of the same crime.  No teacher in America should ever—and I mean EVER teach that reality is controlled by emotional whims, yet most of them do.  A teacher may find a young girl attractive.  He might enjoy the sign stimuli of her breasts, or her buttocks.  He might like the newness of her skin and her naivety that indicates to a middle-aged man that he can return to a time before all his mistakes that he made and live again with a new start with a girl fresh off the assembly line.  Such thoughts are natural aspects of biology and they cannot be allowed to drive the mind from logic with fantasies guided by primitive cravings. 

Without a doubt Hooker in his marriage to his wife most likely believed that his wife at some point was “the one” and with his mature years of aged 41, he should have the wisdom to understand that he cannot destroy the lives of all the people who count on him to participate in resetting his own mistakes by destroying the life of an 18-year-old girl. His “following of his heart” in this case is not following his brain, which is what we expect out of a teacher. We do not expect teachers to instruct our youth to follow their feelings, but to use logic. That is why public education fails as an institution.

Hooker is however a product of his times. As a teacher he has studied the liberal doctrines of that particular profession. He has seen the left leaning bulletins from his teachers union come to him in the mail and the summation of all this progressive philosophy is that reality is determined by agnostic thinking—meaning what the mind wishes can be made into a reality. For instance, green technology will save the earth when in reality it is an elaborate scheme intended to make green technology companies billions of dollars in a global marketplace. Or teachers are valuable and essential to the stability of our nation’s future when the reality shows that even with increased spending, test scores have not improved and our youth seems to be degrading in every category of their lives. Reality says that home-schooled kids learn better than publicly educated kids yet the facts are ignored. Or that we should follow our hearts and not our heads and if we have sexual feelings for another person man or woman, we should act on those feelings. The reality is that this is a primitive desire to procreate and has nothing to do with logical human cognition. It’s purely a function of reproduction. This is a core problem in our public education system, after all isn’t this at the heart of sex education in modern America. Isn’t this what schools are teaching in health class–act on your feelings, and if the girl gets pregnant—have an abortion? Wear a condom to protect yourself from disease, especially if the sex is gay sex. Isn’t that what is being taught in public schools all across the nation? YES!

With such an emphasis is it any surprise that the teachers are unable to use their logic to fight off temptations with their young students? Should James Hooker be expected to not seduce his young, fresh student with the promise of starting over leaving the rest of his family to demise? No, because the concept of abortion says that life can be sacrificed if the individual is inconvenienced. It says that consequences can be abandoned if one simply wishes for them to be. That is the world of the public education teacher, taxes are infinite, green technology is good for the earth, and sex has no consequences. Divorce and abortion can free a person from their responsibilities if their heart tells them to. The head is to be ignored, because logic is not important.

If I ran public education I would terminate every single employee who utters such agnostic prophecies. The goal of an education institution is to teach and use one’s head. If logic is not being taught, then the teacher is ineffective and the education institution will be a failure in its intentions.

Until this problem of how teachers think is addressed, and teacher unions are no longer a factor in helping to shape public education policies with a progressive agenda, there will continue to be terrible stories of sex, abuse, and teachers in public education. It is an epidemic not because the population randomly produces a certain percentage of faulty citizens who will always misbehave, it’s an epidemic because we have a system in public education that allows poor quality people to be employed as though they have enormous value, and because of this financial comfort level, these individuals are particularly susceptible to social pressure by the progressive movement to live out the fantasies of a utopian fantasy that abandons personal responsibility.

I hear in the words of James Hooker virtually the same type of dialogue that can be heard in the classic novel and movie The Brave New World. The teacher Hooker is a product of a society that has indulged in social engineering and he is the byproduct of that folly. For all those troubled souls such as Hooker the warnings were always there in art. You can read more about those warnings in the below two articles, and if you have not yet read or seen The Brave New World, you can see it at the link below. It’s worth your time. And if you don’t believe in that source then I encourage you to watch the George Lucas classic THX-1138 also discussed in great detail at the second link below.

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2012/02/26/the-orgy-porgy-of-norma-a-brave-new-world-in-the-eyes-of-a-loving-parent/

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2011/05/06/thx-1138-a-great-movie-where-our-current-education-system-is-taking-us/

These teachers and the general failure of public education is a malfunction of our culture in general for embracing the wrong values. These things cannot be fixed with new laws. They cannot be fixed with money. They must be fixed with a new emphasis on the aspects of human life that we value. Until we know as a culture what we value, we can never fix anything no matter how much money is spent or what level of education we receive. The defect is in us. There is a James Hooker in too many people who casually throw away their wives and children for the lust of youth. This tendency is particularly prevalent among the liberal-minded progressives, predominantly teachers, because teachers are insulated from reality by their unions. They are insulated from the terrible consequences of their lives by an organization that seeks to perpetuate more of it in exchange for union dues and political power. And until this miserable fact is looked squarely in the eye, thousands upon thousands of young girls will find themselves targets of people like James Hooker and the multiple degrees of evil that drive their minds.

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/

Orlando Gets a New Treasure: Getting to the finish line in spite of the looters

A friend of mine just opened a new restaurant in Orlando, Florida. Every time I hear about one of these success stories, where an entrepreneur is able to leap all the hurdles placed in front of such an endeavor to open a new establishment I find myself enjoying the announcements more than I should. To me, these types of things should be common place in America. Ideas should be allowed to flourish, and actually encouraged. But the way things are it’s a minor miracle when something like a new restaurant opens because there are so many regulations and looters involved in the process of innovation. By the time all the regulations are satisfied, the permit issues are written, the taxes are paid in addition to all the requirements involved in funding the enterprise; it is only the strongest projects with the most money behind them that survive.

The reason is that America has allowed socialism to permeate every single government position in our country so the amount of government employees that are involved in any entrepreneurial activity directly impacts the chance that a project will survive to actually open. The situation is so bad that John Stossel of the Fox Business Network and Glenn Beck discuss John’s attempt to open a lemonade stand in downtown New York. Watch this video so you can see how difficult it is to even start a business, let alone defend yourself from all the looters who attempt to rob you with law suits and excessive taxes once the business is established.

This is why I get so infuriated by government organizations, primarily schools that push for tax increases. Every business you see is a minor phenomenon. The fact that you see many businesses in your neighborhoods is evidence of 5 to 6 failures for every success. So when a new restaurant is seen opening in your neighborhood or a shopping complex, you are seeing the lucky ones who made it. If an entrepreneur is politically active and gives money to a lot of charities, they find that their chances of success increase dramatically, because paying off officials with political support and getting the crazy emotional mothers of a community appeased with charity work calls off the looting dogs as long as the money flows, but it takes money to pay off such fools. So only the luckiest of the lucky gain the ability to use their money to pay off the trolls who set up shop in our political system.

It is not the “permit” department at your local government office who creates jobs and new ideas. It’s not the regulator of any agency. It’s not the bureaucrat in any capacity who does anything, but creates a barrier for the dreamers, for the entrepreneur. These barriers push up the cost of playing the game so that only those who have been lucky enough to squeeze through the cracks before the looters realize that there is money to be made, make it, because that’s the only way one can achieve success these days. The business needs to either be established or have large financial reserves to combat the looters in court and in politics, or the business must fly under the radar of convention and arrive before the looters realize that the new business is going to be profitable.

I know this tragedy first hand. I’ve been involved in many business start-ups and all of them were made unnecessarily hard by excessive regulation. I once had a building code permit issuer tell me I had to prove to him that the HAVAC unit he was demanding I buy was not required under the Cincinnati Building Code. I spent an entire weekend reading a boring book to prove that the HAVAC unit was not necessary for my change of use submission. In a book of over 750 pages I found one sentence that disqualified my project from the imposition. Once I found it, the administrator gave me a rubber stamp with a smile on his face, as though it was an office joke whether or not I’d find the one sentence out of the thousands that would exclude me. It was literally like finding a needle in a hay stack.

But that wasn’t the end of the road. That was just one issue out of 32 similar complaints by the CBC office, and that was just one organization that had their teeth into my project. There were as many as 7 such agencies that my project had to comply with just to open and my choice was to do the work myself, or hire out a small army of lawyers, engineers, architects and other professionals to do the work of arguing each item for me. By the time all those employees are hired just to meet the cost of compliance the project budget increased by nearly a half a million dollars.

So these days I just write books, and study philosophy. I hire out my expertise because it’s unattractive to argue with all the fools in any endeavor that catapults the idea generators into the quick sand of the social looters. I determined a long time ago that since I refused to play the pay-off game because I find it ethically questionable, and too expensive on the front end, that I have no chance of getting anything off the ground in this modern environment. But I have friends who aren’t so restricted by such limits and they have managed to do the nearly impossible and open new shopping complexes, and restaurants. And for that I admire them.

That is why I get very angry when I hear people proclaim that my friends, are “rich” and they owe their school system more, or they “owe” the township more in taxes, or they “owe” Barry Obama more! They owe their state government more when it is proven that there are too many government workers to pay whose only purpose is to create more bureaucracy, which in turn drives up the cost of compliance as shown above. Anyone who says or thinks such things are correct thinking are fools—and socialist sympathizers. They are parasites to everything America has stood for and are destroyers of its future.

So I do salute with utmost respect my friend and the opening of his new restaurant. The small-minded and looter mentality will look jealousy at him and proclaim that he should do more for his community. They will say that he is wealthy, and if he has enough money to buy a restaurant then he has enough money to pay more in taxes. What those same fools don’t comprehend is that it will take years to return to my friend the money he invested, not just in opening the building, but the cost of fighting the looters along the way. And they don’t know that my friend has plans that will fuel his own retirement in the future and that these restaurants are part of that plan. He has no plans to draw a government pension or a check of any kind. He plans to take care of his own business the way every American should. And every time there is a new cost to him, a new looter who attempts to rob some of his money from him because they are too lazy to do for themselves, it pushes my friend’s retirement further into the future. The ultimate cost is to my friend who has worked hard, created jobs, and fought his way through every kind of red tape imaginable. The cost to the looter is nothing. They simply show up and demand money for doing nothing. It is my friend who must make more money to pay for more looters who have attached themselves to those who create, like my friend.

So congratulations are in order to my friend and those like him who have survived well enough to open a restaurant in the golden land of Orlando, where imagination still counts for something, and making money is expected, and not chastised as criminal behavior by the lazy looters of the government employee. The next time I’m in Orlando, I will stop by for a visit and pay homage to the great ordeal that has become of starting a business in modern-day America as controlled by the looters, the moochers, the derelicts, the welfare recipients, and the mentally deficient who occupy the jobs that make opening a restaurant such a pain in the ass.

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/

Butler County Workplace Freedom Coordinator Rich Hoffman: Apply now, make money and save the world

There are two primary reasons I accepted the position of Butler County Coordinator for Workplace Freedom. First, with my work at No Lakota Levy, and realization that the union labor in our public schools–specifically Lakota–do not have the will to balance their budget, and will seek perpetual tax increases to meet the demands of their labor force, the public education monopoly must be eliminated to stop the madness of tax increases every 3 to 4 years. That monopoly must end if education costs are ever to be brought down. So I plan to help get the signatures for an amendment to the Ohio Constitution that will allow a state-wide vote in 2013 to make union membership a freedom of choice rather than a requirement under force as the system currently entails under teaching contracts. At Lakota the current contract is up in 2014, so that would allow teachers under that contract to opt out of their union involvement and help Lakota balance their budget. My work as Butler County Coordinator is a natural extension to my mission at No Lakota Levy. The second reason is that during my work on the Issue 2 campaign in 2012, I learned that there were a lot of teachers and other public employees who wished to be removed from union membership requirements and forced due payments. Since Issue 2 was repealed, these employees need to have the ability to at least have the freedom of choice, and this amendment will give it to them. It will not end unions, but it will give freedom of choice to a system that does not currently have it.

The wording of this amendment change with a target date of 2013 is as follows;

Title: To guarantee the freedom of Ohioans to choose whether to participate in a labor organization as a condition of employment

SUMMARY

To add Section 22 to Article I of the Constitution of the State of Ohio

The proposed amendment would provide that, in Ohio:

1. No law, rule, agreement, or arrangement shall require any person or employer to become or remain a member of a labor organization.

2. No law, rule, agreement, or arrangement shall require, directly or indirectly, as a condition of employment, any person or employer, to pay or transfer any dues, fees, assessments, other charges of any kind, or anything else of value, to a labor organization, or third party in lieu of the labor organization.

3. Any person, directly or indirectly affected or threatened with any harm by a violation of this section, may bring a civil or equitable action to enforce this section, and upon prevailing, shall be entitled to injunctive relief, reasonable attorney fees, costs, and other damages.

The proposed law would not:

1. Prevent any person from voluntarily belonging to or providing support to a labor organization.
2. Apply to agreements entered into or renewed prior to the enactment of this section.
3. Conflict with federal law or apply to federal employees.

To implement this public vote, which appears even at this early stage to have major support from all Ohioans of all demographic groups and party affiliation we will of course need to collect thousands upon thousands of signatures which could take us the rest of the year. Many of us who watched how the unions repealed Issue 2 gawked at the way the union machine was able to twist the arm of their members to gather so many signatures and put the repeal effort on the ballot. So we learned from them, and implementing our own signature collecting push have decided to pay employees to gather up these signatures. We are a tired group and we must get back on the horse and start now if we want to meet the timeline discussed. So as Butler County Coordinator I will be paying employees for those signatures. And the pay is quite good.

Working for me in collecting signatures, it would be a great opportunity to make extra money as a second job. It would be wonderful for young people who want the political experience and relatively easy money since this issue is one that most people agree with. This issue is not as contentious as Issue 2 or other political initiatives were, this one is all about freedom, which is something all Americans can get their minds around. So collecting the signatures won’t be very difficult, it’s just a matter of doing the footwork.

I am taking applications at the link below. If you want to work for me, fill out that application, I only need the primary information. I’m not particularly interested in a detailed work history. I just need the basics.

Apply here:
http://www.conservativejobsohio.com/

I would especially encourage those who are fighting tax hikes in your schools, principally Fairfield, Talawanda, Ross, Edgewood, Monroe, and especially Lakota to help out with this. This is your end game; this is the light at the end of the tunnel. If you can end the union monopoly in these public schools, you can bring an end to the levy requests every couple of years. If you were already willing to distribute information to fight a tax, and have went door to door in those campaigns, this is a lot easier, and I’ll pay you! Instead of trying to stop a tax initiative by the unions only to have them come back with a new tax hike six months after a defeat; this amendment is the step in the direction of ending that maddening process once and for all.

To learn more about the group I’m working with you can visit them at the link below. You can still help and do everything I spoke about above no matter where you live. We have coordinators in most counties across Ohio and you can find them at this link, so this isn’t just for Butler County. But if you want to work for me directly, you’ll need to be able to collect signatures for Butler County.

http://ohioansforworkerfreedom.com/

For those who are interested, you can contact me here, or at the contact info at my home site of www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com where I can get into more detail, talk about the lucrative pay structure and answer any questions that I couldn’t cover here. If you’d like me to come and speak to your group, your Tea Party, your gun clubs, your YMCA organizations, whatever the gathering, just give me a buzz. I don’t want to fight tax increases in my schools for the rest of my life, and I’m sure you don’t either. This is the ultimate solution of freedom and fairness that is lacking in the current system and it needs to happen by 2014, so we need to start now.

Below are a couple of training videos to make things easier that were used to collect signatures for The Health Care Freedom Amendment that was successful in 2011. We are approaching this signature gathering in the same manner. So the information is still valid for this endeavor.

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/

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/

The Day Lakota Died: February 13th 2012–the decision to be taken off life support

When Mike Schell of Fox 19 met me in the hall at Lakota East to get a few comments for his story on the epic school board meeting held at Lakota East’s auditorium that was packed to the ceiling with concerned Lakota residents, he asked me why I was there since I have been such a staunch advocate against the tax increases. I told him I was curious as to what the administration was going to do, that they had some time to get things right since the election, and I was coming to the meeting with an open mind hoping that Mantia and the gang of administrators were going to do something bold, and good for the future of Lakota. Mike then told me the cliff notes version of the meeting which he had in his hand. The proposal was 69 teaching positions cut and reducing the teaching day from a 7 period day to 6. I shook my head and told Mike I was disappointed. You can see the rest of the interview at the Channel 19 site and what I said next.

http://www.fox19.com/story/16927607/phase-ii-of-proposed-cuts-for-lakota-schools

I was disappointed as I sat with my wife in the top row of the large auditorium and watched the proceeding with growing revulsion as the meeting began at 7 PM. To me, the school boards choice was an easy one. After the defeat of the levy in November, they had a mandate from the community with over 18,000 voters turning down their third levy attempt to ask the teachers union to take a 5% pay cut, which isn’t a big deal since the average pay at Lakota is $63K per year. That simple request would have put Lakota’s budget in line with the revenue stream coming to it where residents pay around $1,140 per 100K of property value on their businesses and residence. That tax is already high. So much so that it does discourage existing businesses and prospective businesses from coming to the Lakota district. That number is the breaking point, so from my vantage point and many who support the NO LAKOTA LEVY group, the tax burden needs to be decreased, not increased.

At the school board meeting the only way to describe my nausea at the obvious scheme to launch the district into a FOURTH tax levy attempt was to compare it to the visitation of a funeral. That’s how it felt. The participants on that large stage in front of a vast audience fumbled about like an episode of the Three Stooges. These buffoons had the audacity to attempt to attract this large crowd to the biggest venue in the district so they could show a PowerPoint presentation on a very large screen to look good for the cameras. I instantly recognized the tactic by Superintendent Mantia, because she used almost the exact same forum up in Pickerington when she lobbied for a levy passage that passed just this last August. The goal of the meeting, (THE REAL GOAL) was not to announce any real cuts. It was to say that the Lakota School System was going to go to state minimums and do only what they had to do to get by. In fact, the teachers are going to teach one less class a day since they are getting rid of the 7th period! So they are doing less work than they do now! How is that beneficial?

Hidden in the dialog throughout the evening was the reminder that if the community did pass a levy, that some of what was being taken away could come back as a kind of Plan B. The entire event was a page ripped right out of Saul Alinsky’s The Delphi Technique. The school board batted around comments like tennis players hitting a ball and a bewildered audience watched waiting for a score. A woman in front of me took vigorous notes until 8:30 as her three kids started getting restless. The meeting began with a lot of energy, but by 9 PM the energy had died and people started to look at the exits. The entire goal of the meeting was to drag out a large audience, complain about how little money the board had to work with, and then use a lot of terminology that the audience would think sounded impressive to appear efficient.

The only strategic option the school board had was to force the union to take further concessions and if the union refused, to use that against them in a public relations campaign. That is if the school board wished the future solvency of the district and not just some short shot in the arm from a tax increase by a levy passage. Increased taxes are not an option. It will cripple the growth of the Lakota district not only in families moving to the area, but also the commercial business that is prevalent in the community. Yet the school board showed at this latest meeting without any doubt that they are completely on the side of the union labor and lack the resolve to meet the budget crises head on and actually solve it. After several months of work after a failed levy, our triple dipping superintendent Karen Mantia from Pickerington, Ohio who makes nearly a quarter of a million dollars in overall compensation can do nothing more with her budget than cut teachers and services as an extortion racket to set up another school levy attempt in 2012.

I witnessed from the top row the funeral of public education, which I’ve never been a fan of, but saw it die right in front of my face. Any hope that public education could resurrect itself was beyond doubt gone from that stage at Lakota East on February 13, 2012. Lakota is the 7th largest district in the state of Ohio; it’s been excellent with distinction for over a decade. Lakota is the best of the best when it comes to public education, and it is a scam. So if Lakota is a scam, then what are all those schools who aren’t as good as Lakota? Lakota is a scam because there was never any intention to balance their budget no matter what combination of personnel was put on the board, because the system itself is on life support and what the audience has to do is decide whether or not to pull the plug or not.

As I watched a parade of parents plead with the school board to find ways to reach out to those of us in the NO LAKOTA LEVY so that some common ground could be found to pass the next levy, I saw a group of people addicted to money like a dying patient might be addicted to morphine. The public school of Lakota is comatose because its employees lack the will to make any hard decisions. They think the school exists so that their employees can make healthy incomes, double-dip in their retirements, have great insurance benefits, and have all summer off. And they are willing to feed off kids to achieve their goal. Their very lives require vast sums of money to feed their addiction and once that money is cut off it is clear that their collective minds lack any direction, imagination, or leadership to exist on their own. So the moment they are taken off that supply of money they become sick and are ready to die.

I’ve joked about it here, I’ve ranted about it on these very pages, but public education is in all essence dead. Tax levies are the life support that keeps them living, and they are in such a condition because they are money addicts. Their philosophy is essentially wrong and this has led to the addictive behavior that they don’t even understand about themselves. It was obvious to me and to others in the audience who see that the body is already dead even as that body attempts to put on a big show to pretend they are in fact alive and well. They aren’t. Because the moment there isn’t any money to keep them alive, they are ready to die, unable to break themselves of that addiction. The school as a whole would rather cut off parts of their body in labor reductions and reduce their offerings to the community as a service than adjust their bloated bodies with the hard decision of restructuring their lives to what the community is supplying them with in funding.

I left the meeting at a quarter till 10 PM as a slow boil of anger swelled within me well into the next day that finally erupted halfway through the following afternoon during a contentious conference call on an unrelated matter. As my wife and I left, it had the same feeling that we’ve had as we’ve left the visitation of a family member at a funeral. The school board members and supporters of public education are so far out of touch that they didn’t know they were already dead. Instead they reside like ghosts who refuse to move on hovering over their bodies in confusion as if somehow they would spring back to life.

It was sad to see, but also revolting all the same. It’s an insult to be told by a ghost how to live life, yet that is what the Lakota School Board did at their meeting. It’s like taking advice from an alcoholic how to avoid drinking too much; it’s an insult to listen to the slurred speech of the drunkard lecture on the evils of drinking. The school board instructed the audience of the need for cutting money while at the same time asking for more, so they could live just a few minutes longer, just one more year. Once 2014 hits the pay freeze will be lifted and Lakota will have an onslaught of employees expecting 3% to 6% increases to make up for their losses during the three-year pay freeze designed to get a levy passed.

Public education is a joke. The employees of the system are a joke. And the administrators are a joke and in bed with the employees. The whole system is a failure of money addicts lost in a reality of their own making. And they have committed their own suicide by their actions and lack of realism. When residents of the nearby neighborhood of Four Bridges are paying over $5000 a year on their homes, as both parents work hard to just keep their property as their value plummets and job opportunities are restricted, the idea of a further tax on homes like that are unbearable, not to mention the senior citizens on a fixed income or the businesses that are barely getting by and thinking of leaving their leases for a cheaper district. The Lakota School System under the leadership of the Ohio School Board Association in Columbus and the Ohio Education Association and its parent organization the National Education Association of socialists have painted themselves into a corner and expect to be rescued with life support to sustain their addiction to money. But the money isn’t there anymore and the community must now decide whether or not to pull the plug on a loved one in order to ease their own minds to the terminal patient that will never get better on their own.

To me the thing is already dead. It might look like its breathing; it might even look into your eyes. But it’s the drugs talking. In this case it’s a $160 million dollar plus budget that somehow isn’t enough. And given that fact, I’m prepared to pull the plug and leave the hospital. Because the death is inevitable—it’s just waiting for someone to make the hard decision.

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 Origional Argument from Joshua Charles: A changing landscape built from the heart

When I first received a very good book by Joshua Charles and Glenn Beck it was after I was speaking to a group of education reformers.  A friend of mine had left it for me while I was shaking hands and speaking with people after the speech and my friend had left like a phantom amiss the chaos.  But in her seat she left me a gift; it was a copy of The Original Argument by the mentioned authors. 

Right after this speech I had to leave for Florida on a family vacation, so I had time to read a bit.  The book in this respect was a very timely gift that I appreciated greatly.  Books to me are the greatest gifts I can receive.  I love every single one of them I’ve ever received and I never get tired of running my fingers through their pages, even years after my initial reading.  Every book to me is a treasure.  To this very day my favorite places, virtually the only place I enjoy shopping, is a book store.  My wife and I share this love and we often spend our date nights in such places picking up the next weeks reading material. 

It was during our most recent “dinner and a book store date night” that I noticed in the social sciences section that even after 9 months in print, The Original Argument was still selling well.  In fact, it occupied a whole shelf stacked five books deep all the way across.  I counted 26 books on that shelf which means that the demand for The Original Argument has not died off after its publication, but has increased.  The story of how this book came about is a bit of a miracle story, which you can hear Glenn Beck talk about in the clip below. 

Selling a book is a hard thing to do, and I’ll be doing it myself for the second time in a few short months. There are a lot of books that come out and each one is the hope and dreams of the author. Many of them fail to take root into the public for various reasons. These days books with great names attached sell well for a few weeks after their release because they have access to the publicity machine of the popular media. But those same books lose steam quickly if the public fails to embrace them. Because of Glenn Beck’s name being attached to The Original Argument this book by the very young Joshua Charles had a big release with a great marketing platform, so big numbers in its first week were not a surprise. But big numbers almost a year later are more impressive, and The Original Argument is still steaming along.

As I ran my fingers over the books in the book store I thought about my copy at home which I now look at every day at least once. The book has the feeling of a work that has the power to change the static patterns of our culture, which is good—powerful, and you can feel it when you hold the book in your hands. It has an essence of substance that is unique for books. This probably has everything to do with the contents of the material. The Original Argument is essentially a modern re-write of The Federalist Papers, which is the foundation of The United States Constitution, and is fundamentally a work of modern philosophy.

I spent the summers of 2009 and 2010 reading The Federalist Papers and The Anti Federalism Papers and I will admit that I struggled though them. They are written in an older language that assumes that society is much more intelligent than it is today. Reading these books as they were published in the late 1700’s it becomes quickly evident that the public who read those original documents in their newspapers were of a higher reading level than our modern counterparts so even I struggled with the language. But they had such an impact on me that I started this blog site, Overmanwarrior’s Wisdom to act as a modern version of those original Federalist Papers. I wanted to put into context the modern arguments for our day and time with the language used to make a new argument on behalf of the original arguments for freedom. I focus on education issues because it’s obvious to me that public education isn’t working since our population can’t read something like The Federalist Papers and comprehend it. Many of our own congressman and senators have not even read the Constitution let alone The Federalist Papers. So the quality of the political philosophy started with The Federalist Papers has been diminished as society has been made to be of a lower intellect.

This lower intellect is by design. It has been imposed upon us by the enemies of America through a very complex spy network that has penetrated our political machinery, our media, and our government at all levels. To understand how this happens just study the modern movements of George Soros. Without question politicians looking for money from Soros are willing to adapt his policies in exchange, especially in vacancy of their own philosophy, leaving our government easily manipulated by special interest money. This has went on for many years, and Soros is just one of thousands over the years that have sought to dismantle The United States through greed and ignorance where the people of America have lost their way and allowed themselves to be intellectually diminished.

As I sat on the balcony of our condo in Florida and read The Original Argument I was shocked how easy it was to read. What Joshua Charles had done was take the complex wording of The Federalist Papers and simplify them into modern language so it was easy to grasp. Reading that book in the early morning sunrise in Florida and listening to the waves hit the beach with fury as a storm off to the south over the Bahamas was roaring far out at sea I realized that this book had a real power to it and I hoped for it’s longevity and cultural acceptance.

I became a Glenn Beck fan not because of his television show, not because of his radio show, but because of his reissuing of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense. I read that book in an afternoon and immediately thought it was more powerful than the classic of communist thought Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto. With Beck bringing out again the classic from Thomas Paine he was able to answer the kind of literature that was suppressed by the modern media who had used the 45 points from the 1958 book The Naked Communist to push such American philosophy out of the public’s reach. In that strategy of erasing American history, Common Sense and The Federalist Papers were the primary targets. Beck through his own media empire had developed the ability to push back and reintroduce America to its original philosophy with his new updated version of Common Sense. It’s short, easy to read, and contains the original Paine text in the back of the book.

More powerful than Common Sense, The Original Argument puts the very powerful Federalist Papers into the reach of the modern public and that is a supreme ray of hope in our modern age. Changes do not come quickly. They didn’t at the time of the original revolution and they won’t now. It will take a lot of thought, discussion and reading to reeducate the American population to their roots. I hope to add to that with my own work Tail of the Dragon soon. The goal is to entertain a modern audience into considering what the roots of American society is supposed to be, not what has been manipulated and twisted from the original meaning into the modern progressive theory inspired by political philosophers like Marx.

The power of The Original Argument can be seen on the bookshelf. Bookstores cannot afford to keep books on their shelves that do not sell. And to understand the true temperature of our nation all one has to do is go to a bookstore and see what is selling, and that will show you what the people of our country are looking for. What’s selling is Glenn Beck, Bill O’Rielly, Mark Levin, and many other conservative writers. In philosophy it’s Ayn Rand and Robert Persig. In fact the great book of philosophy by Leonard Peikoff called Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand is now selling that the first Atlas Shrugged film has introduced through DVD sales a whole new market to the work of that philosopher. Rand actually has breakthrough thinking which exceeds the works of Plato, Aristotle and Kant that is uniquely American. It’s good to study the German philosophers, the Greek, the Chinese, but America is now producing its own, and Rand is certainly one of the finest examples. In fact she shreds Immanuel Kant as a founder of a philosophy that has so thoroughly destroyed the thinking of many on the political left, and she does it with very detailed facts.

That work by Peikoff is more on the heavy side philosophically, but still, people are buying it up now, which is a wonderful sign. 4 to 5 years from now American culture will change for the better because of all this reading that is going on. To my thinking the best example of easy philosophy for the majority of American society to grasp right now is The Original Argument. If you have not read it yet, I highly suggest it. Reading that book will give you power, it will give you a better knowledge of The United States Constitution than most of the public officials have and will allow you to demand of them an adherence to it. Communist infiltrators in our public education system know that an uneducated public is easy to mislead, which has been their agenda all along. By reading The Original Argument you can take the next step into fixing your nation by understanding what it is that you are expected to know in order to make requests of your elected representatives. I don’t take my hat off to many people, but to Joshua Charles I do. He did a great thing that history will remember. And thank goodness Glenn Beck had the ability to get this book into the hands of a hungry public. It’s an important work and as long as I live I’ll never forget the speech I gave where I looked for my friend at the end and found a book left behind for me to read instead. The book sat in her seat and invited me to read it, which I did several times now. Those kinds of gifts continue to give for many years. The gift of a book is immediate, but the information gained upon reading it once gives back to you again. If the book is good then the story will stay with you everywhere you go from then on. And if it’s really good it might just expand your thinking to accept new ideas, or ideas that were good but long forgotten. And such is the case with The Original Argument.

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/

A Woolly Mammoth in Siberia: Attacks, Mystery and Obama sings

Early in the morning as the Archie Wilson story was breaking my imagination was temporarily sparked by the urgent news that a Woolly mammoth was spotted in Siberia. Being personally interested in cryptozoology such a discovery ignited my imagination in the cold morning hours of February 8, 2012.

However, the source of the news drew my skepticism, it was from The Sun, a tabloid newspaper and as I watched the video featured on the article below, I became more and more disappointed. Have a look for yourself.

http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/4116326/Woolly-mammoth-spotted-in-Siberia.html

The trouble I have with the video, and this comes from a great deal of experience, is that it is too blurry, and the cameraman doesn’t attempt to cut the animal off as it leaves the river. If I had been shooting this video I would have at least moved in for a closer look. There is no way I would have let that animal out of my sight with a short shot of it crossing a waterway.

I believe that such creatures still roam the earth. A Woolly mammoth in the extremely large land mass of Siberia is entirely believable. But footage gathered up from a paranormal investigator should be expected to be heavily scrutinized. So the cameraman owes it to his investigation to get the best shot possible. These days video cameras are more than capable of getting a better, much less fuzzy shot than the one seen in this Woolly mammoth video. So it must be concluded that the poor film quality is on purpose, to mislead the viewer into believing they are seeing something they aren’t.

Visual effects are both fortunately and unfortunately much easier for even low tech equipment to produce these days so a video confirming a Woolly mammoth requires much higher quality video. In fact, I wouldn’t believe it unless I saw the cameraman actually touch the animal. Standing at a safe difference with a fixed location just won’t cut it these days.

This Woolly mammoth video reminds me of another hoax video of a killer whale attacking a kid on a Mexican beach. This video is actually quite good as it replicates accurately how killer whales attack and eat seals. They do slide on shore and grab unsuspecting mammals in this fashion. Have a look for yourself.

Special effects are a part of our lives and we can no longer trust what we see at face value. In this whale video everything about it is accurate as it would happen in nature. The waves actually break against the victim’s feet and the whale’s body as it eats the human with arms flailing about. We are inclined to believe it. Yet we don’t. The problem with the video is that it violates the rules of cognitive recognition.

Cognitive recognition is the ability to learn the meaning of words and develop the ability to combine those words so that images can be formed in the mind as the words are read. In order for this to happen a mind has to accept the meaning of the words. We do this in life also, we accept the meaning of certain events, the way rain falls from the sky, or how the sun feels on a summer day. Our collections of these cognitive recognition patterns help us determine reality. They might tell us that a politician is lying to us even if what they say sounds and looks good to our eyes. Our experience might tell us that something is amiss if the cognitive recognition of a given experience does not add up to our understanding of reality. In the case of the whale video the biggest problem is that the cameraman would have naturally ran to help the victim in some way. The victim waves to the camera then within seconds is eaten. All the while, the camera remains steady. This behavior violates what we know through cognitive recognition to represent reality.

Here’s another video that is even stranger than the Woolly mammoth or the whale, it’s the President of the United States trying to convince the crowd that he is a good, and legitimate president. When watching this video the cognitive recognition patterns bring about pleasant memories of experiences we might have had as the president smiles, and even sings to a crowd. Everything about this video says that this president is a good man—yet there is something wrong.

Vacant from this video are the facts that the behavior avoids. Like the Woolly mammoth that was filmed from a distance and not captured leaving the water, or the whale being betrayed by the calmness of the cameraman, the Obama video says more about what is missing than what it shows. In this case there is no resemblance of the 6 trillion dollars in debt that has been added during his three years as president, or the multiple infractions he has committed against the United States Constitution. These things are known in our cognitive understanding of the world, yet they are noticeably missing in the Obama video leaving us with the feeling that something isn’t quite right when we watch the President sing to a screaming crowd. We enjoy what we see, but understand that something I wrong.

With all three videos we can prove that they are fakes based on our cognitive recognition patterns. Even when our eyes want to believe what we see through special effects, sound, or even camera lightning, blurriness, or distance, the fraud is revealed when the behavior seen betrays our understanding of how things truly behave.

It looks like the search for a Woolly mammoth will continue on. The video from Siberia does not prove that any have survived to our modern age. I will still have fun looking for these creatures from the campsites of remote locations. And when I find one, I will not let the camera betray the reality of the situation. I will film plenty of footage that is perfectly clear. And I will get so close that I could crawl on its back if need be. Because seeing is not always believing when there are tricks available to manipulate our senses into what we are seeing. At times like that, we must rely on our cognitive recognition to help us discover the elusive truths based on our experience and not what we desire. I might want to see a Woolly mammoth, but just having the wish is not enough. Reality must be measured by our cognitive recognition.

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
 

Watch Rich Hoffman’s favorite T.V. show:

http://www.foxnews.com/freedomwatch/

Archie Wilson and his Prostitue Amanda Lay: The mask of evil

The story of Archie Wilson is a sad one. A Tea Party Conservative, and a bible thumper, Archie is now the subject of a manhunt after his resignation on February 2nd from the Clermont County Commissioner position.

Archie is proof that nothing any public official says can be trusted. Public employees must be measured by their actions not on what they say. Archie who lobbied to shut down the strip club of Déjà Vu in Mt. Carmel recently took a position of integrity in upholding his office. However while he was declaring that he’d uphold the integrity of his grandchildren through his righteous actions, he was supplying cocaine to the prostitute Amanda Lay–age 26–to have sex with him, pictured to the right. You can see more details about this case at 700 WLW where Scott Sloan broke the story in the early morning.  The story link is:

http://www.700wlw.com/cc-common/news/sections/newsarticle.html?feed=119585?feed=119585&article=9729426

Archie Wilson was the type of person who everyone would assume could be trusted. He’s 61 years old and a Christian conservative and was endorsed by the Tea Party. As I’ve discussed here, no member of public office can be trusted. The lure of power the moment politicians get behind a desk with their name plate on it corrupts their minds to such twisted measures as Wilson displayed in these acts of terrible judgment.

This story explains beyond doubt why the foundations of our country must be the Constitution and nothing else, because the minds of men are too weak to be trusted with alterations. Even those who publicly declared themselves champions of the Constitution as Wilson did are prone to fall from grace.

Remember Archie Wilson during every speech you see from now on where a politician declares their beliefs to be pure and in the public’s best interest. Make sure to listen to that voice in the back of your mind that says that you are listening to a liar, because you probably are.

And a note to all those who are to the left of the Tea Party and will look at the Archie Wilson case as proof that such characters have infected positions in the political right. You have your own problems. You can read an example from just last week at this link.

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2012/02/03/mark-berndt-teacher-arrested-feeding-his-semon-to-the-students-with-a-spoon/

The corruption of these minds is not political. It’s cultural quality, which is deficient.

To learn what a Overmanwarrior is CLICK HERE:

https://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2012/01/09/the-overmanwarriors-eating-fighting-and-philosophizing-the-keys-to-a-good-life/

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

Watch Rich Hoffman’s favorite T.V. show:

http://www.foxnews.com/freedomwatch/