Tag: western arts

The Nature of Rules: Conformity, compliance and innovation often do not get along

The project I am currently working on, The Gunfighter’s Guide to Business is really an idea I’ve been exploring my entire life. It’s on my mind because I’ve spent the last week enjoying all the various Star Wars mythologies that are spawning out of Disney, the new Mandalorian tv series, the video game Jedi: Fallen Order, the new book Resistance Reborn which is setting up the new Star Wars movie, The Rise of Skywalker. All while planning my trip to the Galaxy’s Edge at Disney World with my wife. I remember how it was in the beginning when I was just a young 20 something hanging out in Washington D.C. at the Smithsonian with the Joseph Campbell Foundation for which George Lucas was on the board of directors and seeing the models from the films which had filled my imagination all during my youth. Joseph Campbell had done for mythology what I want to do for business, and after half a century of work, those mythic efforts are finally starting to shape our culture in a positive, and measurable way.

Campbell taught at the little maverick school Sarah Lawrence College where he was free to conduct his outside the box academics to his liking, and to be truthful, if he hadn’t, Star Wars likely would have never happened. But it was a slow go on an obscure topic that took a long time to form roots. And in many ways, I consider Joseph Campbell one of my primary influences growing up. I’ve read all his books many, many times and listened to his various lectures most of my life. And my plans for my own life have been similar, but very different from his. My subject matter goes many steps beyond his study of cultures and comparative religion, but to the source of all activity among the human species. That is why my focus is on business and why this book I’m working on is such a big step that keeps getting deeper and deeper the longer I work on it.

The theme of my two previously published books, The Symposium of Justice and The Tail of the Dragon explore the nature of rules in our society and what their usefulness is. Nobody would argue that having a society of rules is what keeps everything we build together and that is certainly true in business. But rules by their nature prevent innovation, which is the key to all business expansion. My pick of the gunfighter period of the American West, around the 1870s to the 1890s is due to the lawless period of the American experiment that brought forth so much upcoming economic activity, which then created so many opportunities for people who otherwise wouldn’t have had them. The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald captured some of this very well, the idea of old money and new money. The old money was from the aristocratic class migrating from Europe while the new money was made in America by new innovations spawning from this Wild West period. While shortly after the Gatsby novel Ayn Rand wrote her classics, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged which did a good job of getting to the meat of the American experience as opposed to other influences around the world.

I grew up with a natural, and healthy hatred of rules. For as long as I have memories, I despised the limits others placed on me and dedicated myself to solitude and the treasures that could be found there. My best friend growing up was my books, especially the works of Joseph Campbell and Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. Once I figured out the nature of rules when I was still under ten years old, I stopped caring about them. Teachers and their homework assignments would take a back seat if I had something better to do. Society and their rules for going up and down escalators, speed limits, or not standing too close to a steep edge were all open invitations to me to break those rules to see what society was trying to keep me from. When I could drive a car, I routinely always drove 100 MPH everywhere. Functioning under the speed limit to me was forcing me to live by the averages of mundane people who weren’t interested in pushing any limits but confined to live within the limits of very average, and boring people. And yes, I was involved in several fiery crashes at those speeds. Not where I was driving, but other people, so I know what it feels like and after each one, I resolved to go even faster and defy death even more.

I could tell stories from here to some distant planet well outside our solar system about the many perilous adventures that have spawned off this tribute to pushing limits and questioning every rule that there is. I am far from an anarchist so I do like rules to a point, but I think a culture should always be pushing up against them and that insurance agents and politicians should not be limiting our intellects with stupid conformity to concepts invented by lazy minded losers. So putting all these thoughts together into this Gunfighter’s Guide to Business has turned out to be incredibly revelatory. I have gone back through all the education of the years that brought me to this point in my life, the rules based education of Lean thinking, of college MBA programs, of the kind of talking down that goes on in those endeavors and have crippled the scope of business to this very day, and am flipping all those concepts on their heads. But like all rules, you don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. You don’t break all the rules only to have anarchy allowing for open theft of possessions by the destitute. There has to be some structure to it all that is conducive to risk-taking and risk mitigation.

Guns are the perfect combination of the two necessities so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that they are part of American culture the way they are. If you are reckless with a gun you can hurt lots of people, including yourself. But in shooting you unlock all kinds of gut instinct mechanisms that are obscure to the mind under any other condition, which is the nature of rule breaking so that innovation can flourish. By the time I’m done with this, I think it will have a very Joseph Campbell effect, not on mythology which was his thing, but on business, which is my thing. Looking at something differently than 5000 to 10,000 years of human evolution is a tough undertaking, but it takes being willing to break the very rules of assumptions by their very essence to get there. And that is what I am excited to see percolating out of obscurity in a very unique way. Rules are too often not put into place to help, but to hinder. The rule makers tend to be unenlightened and create the rules to keep challengers from dethroning them from some position of power they have acquired by learning the rules better than their competition. But rules in themselves don’t open the doors to the future, thinking outside of the rules does, so that new rules for new ways of thinking can then be applied. While we can’t have chaos, we can’t allow rules to hold us back from innovation. And that, once its understood has a marvelous potential that I am very, very excited about.

Rich Hoffman

A $1000 Check to Saugus High School: The social decay that leads to school shootings nobody is talking about

After a recent shooting at Saugus High School in California where the 16-year-old birthday boy Nathaniel Berhow shot at five students early in the morning killing two before shooting himself in the head, a local woman donated $1000 toward the school which I found perplexing. The donation was an obvious act of rebellion from the woman toward the trend toward violence among young people who are using guns to inflict harm in the pressure cooker that is public education. The woman obviously wanted it to be known that she stands by her support of the school and would go to extreme acts to show her solidarity with the students. But as we know who have been fighting the trends of public education for a long time that $1000 check was next to useless, as the teacher’s union would quickly consume it. For the overall problem, it was a simple gesture no different than a rain drop in the ocean, but it obviously made the woman feel good to write the check, and it gave the news a nice feel good story about community unity and public education support in the face of grave danger.

I’ll say it again, teacher’s need to carry guns so they can put down attackers like this depressed kid quickly when they make a move to attack. This school shooting didn’t last long, and the targets were obviously selected for a reason. The news outlets won’t say it, but I will, high school is all about peer pressure and what kind of person is formed from that pressure. The social circles that are formed can be quite intense, relationships are complicated among human beings and foundations of betrayal can be quite ominous. And to any 16-year old, a girl who likes this guy and not you, or a girl who is with this friend and not you can be tragic, and even very melodramatic, especially if the adults in their lives aren’t providing the proper level of wisdom to navigate the crises. And ultimately, that’s what we find in this shooting case at Saugus High School.

We need guns because our society is making these types of people who are dangerous. I’m sure people thought of Nathaniel Berhow as a nice kid who would never do such a thing, but in moments of anguish, people do a lot of dumb things without really meaning to. I would say we are a culture of guns which has derived from our cultural need for them. As America evolved to allow individuals to reach the limits of their abilities, there are always parasites who are seeking to claim jump success, and guns are needed to protect the property of the ambitious, so that they will keep trying to try at success. Its our system of civilization and these public education institutions are running against that tide. The woman who gave the $1000 check is likely a nice person, but her belief system is faulty as to what that check represents. I know a few people like her, wealthy people who want to throw money at something like these tragedies because it makes them feel good to do it, like they are helping. But what is always ignored is why the kid thought his 16-year-old birthday was so dire that his only option was to lash out at fellow students before killing himself in the process. There was so much life to live, why cut it short so soon?

That’s where our social system fails. The public education institution has eroded away at the parental role in the lives of these kids then everyone wonders why parents can’t help when things get so bad. The premise, the cause and corrective action that needs to be acknowledged is that the public education system can’t do the job. The teacher’s unions who work in these schools are radical, and lazy. The politicians who set the agenda for what is taught are corrupt and stupid. And while the parents are trusting that system to teach their kids saving them the burden, they are living reckless lives having affairs, getting divorced and indulging in too much lackluster leadership under the roof of their own homes. That is why kids like this Nathaniel Berhow shoot themselves on their birthdays, and desire to go out in a blaze of glory to hurt the people who have hurt them. Hurt of course is a perceptual exchange. What one person considers hurtful, others may not. That’s why adult mentorship is so important to help with biological perception changes that mind steer the teenage mind in the wrong direction.

Removing guns from our society simply ignores the root cause of these greater social problems. It buys time for the society that has helped create this mess to continue believing in the failed system just a bit longer so long as the public focuses on those $1000 checks and not the real problem in public education. Public schools don’t work. They are weak attempts at social engineering that fail often and with these kinds of catastrophic results. And from the media, and the political class, there is no leadership to change what we are seeing openly and with frequent occurrence. Its only a matter of time before another school shooting happens near all of us. Its not the guns that are the problem, it’s the desire to use them to solve these kinds of problems that are. ABC News owned by the Disney Company especially are bad on this topic. Their belief, which is the same as most progressives in this modern age is to take away the temptation, that having so many guns makes these events easier. But Nathaniel Berhow had an unregistered gun. What would ABC like to see, the uninventing of guns? Even if all the gun manufactures in the world were put out of business, any machine shop around could build the parts. The black market will always have guns, so any law created won’t change that fact. Chicago still has more shootings than anyplace in the United States. Guns are illegal there and populations are regulated with liberalism. Yet gun violence is as common as rain in a storm.

Any method of resolution will fail if it does not deal with the true problem of psychological trouble that spawns out of collective education services and the pressures that go with them. The failure in public education is deep and is in need of a complete overhaul and really if you get to the example of the woman who wrote that check and the media that gravitated to it as if it were made of gold and spoke of the good hearts that rose up to meet this tragedy with acts of kindness, the real evil was in writing the check and supporting that school in the first place. In supporting a failed institution that is leaving people so desperate and lost that they cannot solve simple problems as teenagers, and in allowing the parents to reside guilt free of responsibility for raising their children, further danger is assured. When the news tells us that they do not know why a shooter like Nathaniel Bernhow did what he did, what they really mean is that they can’t admit their role in it, and therefor can’t talk about it. Its not so simple as leaving behind a note, or in having some other form of confession. The real villain is in the construction of the minds who can’t deal with the trouble and how public education makes those conditions worse, not better. And that is what we should all be talking about.

Rich Hoffman

A Review of The Mandalorian: Boys never wanted the girls to invade their tree house.

There is no impeachment, even though that is the news of the day. All there is or ever was regarding the attempts of the Democrat controlled congress to attempt to get rid of President Trump is a frustrated attempt to manipulate the law in an effort to avoid their perilous fate of a 2020 loss even more embarrassing than over the past two elections. And my resolve is not to care too much about it unless they try to remove my president from his elected office, where I will then grab whatever volunteers are needed to defend him with the Second Amendment from those villains that have infected our government. Its that simple. No further commentary needed. Meanwhile, and I was glad for the options, Disney+ opened this week and we were all finally able to watch the new Star Wars show, The Mandalorian and let me just say this, it was fantastic.

I also say that for me visiting any story within the Star Wars experience is like a vacation for me. To understand that I’d refer to a recent article I wrote on the value of thinking like a 12-year-old. Children think in big, broad terms with solutions in focus and are not restricted on how to create the questions that might complete such a journey, so I see great value in it. The adult world would say that such a way of thinking is immature, but then look at their lives. They are heavy on burdens with limited options to deal with them, and their lives are most of the time a complete disaster. Nobody should listen to them under the best of circumstances. Star Wars was never meant for adults, but specifically for boys between the ages of 7 to 12. Of course, Disney wants to reach out to girls and older audiences if it can get them, but Star Wars as we have always known it was geared toward the problems of young boys. Visiting that way of thinking has always been fun for me because I like to explore lots of options with infinite optimism, and when everything fails in the real world, Star Wars has always been a place that values those sentiments.

As I have pointed out the new Disney owned Star Wars has not been as good. It’s been like that moment when all the young boys had a boys only tree house and the girls found out about it and wanted to join in. To be nice the boys let them but started grumbling when the girls brought with them dolls, cooking utensils and brooms to replace the guns, knives and acts of war of the boys. And instead of play fighting the boys found themselves talking about raising families and the difficulties of getting to the store, and they were noticeably upset about it. Under Disney, Star Wars became less about war and more about social justice and the skin color of the actors, and it became just boring. The Mandalorian much to my delight was made for the boys. Girls of course are invited, but the show was certainly an attempt to put Star Wars back to what it does best, and I think it exceeded at that.

The key to understanding big issues, such as this impeachment fiasco is in thinking without all the constraints that most adults learn to live with, and within Star Wars stories where big concepts are always at the front of discussion as we are talking essentially about the problems of a type 3 civilization, one that can use the power and resources of an entire galaxy yet have all the challenges of our present condition, it helps put the mind at play to behold the concepts. While most adults scratch their heads and attempt to put whatever the context of the modern problem is, such as the perplexity of the current congress to even attempt impeachment. That is because the reality of the present circumstances do not fit the adult assumptions of our understanding, which is precisely what the villains of modern government are counting on. To understand their game, you have to pull back your vision enough to play with various thoughts so that the true intention can only then be seen.

Such lofty thoughts are certainly at play in The Mandalorian, which was a nice science fiction/spaghetti western platform to tell some very interesting stories from. It was energetic and reminded me a lot of many Clint Eastwood westerns, everything from For A Few Dollars More to The Outlaw Josey Wales. It was fun and remarkably girl free. Not that girls are a problem. But the focus of The Mandalorian is being faster on the draw, not whether or not he cooks breakfast for his wife. I was a little shocked reading the most recent Star Wars book Resistance Reborn, which sets up directly the events of the next Star Wars film Rise of Skywalker, that the old hero Wedge Antilles was cooking breakfast when pilots arrive to recruit him back into the fight. Its not that cooking is a big deal, but the book was written by a woman and women think differently about things than boys. Wedge was a great warrior of the rebellion, yet the focus of his efforts was on cooking. Not something boys are naturally concerned with. That’s what I have been talking about with Star Wars with girls inviting the tree house of thought the boys would otherwise prefer to be in.

This is also why women are so easily tricked in politics, because their concerns are so quickly trapped by political theater and their natural predilection is not to fight, but to conform. When you can fight back against oppression, you tend not to find ways to live with it, and at the heart of Star Wars is that premise. Girls are invited, but its clearly a boy concept, and with The Mandalorian, that is clearly what is happening and its good to see that Lucasfilm can still reach that place even after so many progressive missteps toward social justice. Yet in other reviews about The Mandalorian the value of the largely female reviewers was that they thought it was great that the male leads in the show were from diverse backgrounds, one black, one Latino. I personally don’t care as long as somebody is shooting someone else. Its not about being white male that attracts me to a plot line, it’s the body count and the kind of guns they used. To get to the big ideas of anything the main character needs to be over the primal fears of a herd, and with women, they typically are trying to live with the world, not trying to change it.

Concerns about cooking, and feelings about things are not the natural state of boys. But overcoming problems and oppression are, and The Mandalorian certainly put its focus on those items. So, it’s the perfect entertainment to divert too while in real life congress is attempting to perform the worst scandal in human history. The goal is not to live with the consequences of that endeavor but to fight back against it. Star Wars was always about saying no to complacency and endeavoring for real change, not concerns of docile domestication, but in saving the galaxy from itself in spite of itself. And watching The Mandalorian it showed that the makers of Star Wars still understand what that looks like, and I’m looking forward to a lot more.

Rich HoffmanRich Hoffman

The Louisville Toll Bridge Scam: Who it really hurts and why bringing it to Cincinnati would be a disaster

There is a bridge extending from Louisville over into Indiana that is part of the 1-65 highway system managed by RiverLink, which is a toll collector that has been very controversial. I was quite surprised to learn after going across that bridge a few times to visit destinations on both sides of the Ohio River that I received a bill in the mail after cameras photographed my license plate demanding payment for a bridge that did not have the traditional toll signs that we have all come to expect from such toll collecting activities. I wrote an article about it which continues to be one of my most popular. It has many tens of thousands of impressions since I wrote it a few years ago, including from RiverLink which attempted to defend their poor signage and toll collecting practices. That article can be found at the link below along with the many comments from people inspired to contribute their thoughts.

https://overmanwarrior.blog/2018/01/21/the-river-link-scam-louisvilles-theft-of-the-innocent-through-a-toll-bridge-to-depraved-economic-activity-in-clarksville/#comment-63440

I don’t get many comments, not because people aren’t reading, but usually because the nature of my content is not conducive to it, and just like in any classroom setting, the audience does not feel comfortable raising their hand first. Once a few people do string together some thoughts, more join in, but most of the time, reader engagement is low due to the nature of my content. But occasionally a contributor like Christina chimes in, seen below, and the true scope of the issue comes into focus. I present it here as she wrote it. She is obviously upset and the sentence structure and emphasis show that. Essentially she represents why RiverLink is a massive scam created by stupid politicians who wasted the money we gave them on everything but what they should have, and they’ve passed on their incompetence onto this bridge for people like Christina to fund out of desperation and massive amounts of inconvenience. In her case, such as many other stories of people who move onto one side of the river and may not know about the toll bridge, but simply need to get to the other side to get to a job, they could unknowingly rack up many hundreds if not thousands of dollars before they get their first bill in the mail. And it does cause them a lot of pain, which is the nature of her comment.

christina
November 10, 2019 at 5:38 pm Edit

are you SERIOUS? i ONLY went across the bridge to go to work to feed my family!!!!!!!! yes i know that i owe them money and i was paying them what i could but then the charges got bigger and BIGGER! i was charged a total of $170 in fines just to send me a BILL!!!!!! now they have a lean on my car because i can not afford to pay them $511.40 that i KNOW I DO NOT OWE! THEY HAVE SENT ME OTHER PEOPLES BILLS AND HAVE CHARGED ME WHEN I WAS HOME AND NEVER WENT ACROSS THE BRIDGE!!!!!! not only that but i find out that you not only get charged when you go across the bridge but if you take exit 0 you are charged TWICE BECAUSE RIVER LINK “SAY’S” THAT IS ANOTHER BRIDGE!!!!!! HOW IS THE HELL IS AND EXIT A BRIDGE????? now i am screwed because i can not get tags on my car because they out a lean on it, and when i called to ask to make payments they said quote “MUST BE PAID IN FULL” then when i called a few months later i was told that i could have been making payment’s and when i asked why the other person said that i could not make payments she said IT IS NOT THEIR RESPONSIBILITY TO LET US KNOW THAT! IF WE DON’T ASK THEY DON’T TELL. THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT I WAS TOLD BY THE SUPERVISOR!!! THIS IS WRONG!!!!! PEOPLE LIKE ME THAT WORK PAY CHECK TO PAY CHECK AND DO EVERYTHING THEY CAN TO PUT FOOD ON THE TABLE PAY THE BILLS TAKE CARE OF THEIR KIDS SHOULD NOT BE DONE THIS WAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! this bridge was paid off a long time ago and we SHOULD NOT HAVE TO KEEP PAYING TO CROSS IT! AND THEN YOU GET CHARGED NOT ONCE BUT TWICE BECAUSE YOU TAKE EXIT 0????? THIS NEEDS TO BE DEALT WITH AND FAST! NOW I HAVE TO DRIVE ILLEGAL UNTIL I CAN PAY OFF RIVER LINK SO I CAN GET TAGS ON THE CAR I WORKED SO HARD FOR AND IS PAID OFF JUST TO GET TAGS AND INSURANCE!!!!!!!!

THEY NEED TO HELP PEOPLE LIKE ME THAT WAS JUST GOING TO WORK TO FEED THEIR FAMILY AND NOT OVER CHARGE ME SEND ME LATE FEES THEN PUT A LEAN ON MY CAR! AND I TRIED TO PAY THEM IN PAYMENTS AND WAS TOLD “NO” THEN WHEN I CALLED A FEW MONTHS LATER WAS TOLD I COULD HAVE MADE PAYMENTS AND WHEN I ASKED WHY THE PREVIOUS LADY SAID THAT I COULD NOT MAKE PAYMENTS THE “SUPERVISOR” SAID I QUOTE “IT’S NOT OUR RESPONSIBILITY TO TELL YOU, YOU SHOULD HAVE ASKED” ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

I was upset in a similar way over a $19 charge, much less than what she has gone through. It wasn’t the money; it was the silent intrusion into my mailbox that really pissed me off. That some cowardly collection agency just took a picture of my license plate and could bill me from behind some computer somewhere was revolting. It makes me wonder how many Christians are out there going through the same thing for the same reasons. RiverLink will say that they have up signs and that people should know that they are using a toll bridge. But for people unfamiliar with the area just trying to make sure they are on the right road, it would be easy to make the mistake of staying on that road until you cross over into the other side of the river, where it would then be too late. I think it represents the worst of the mismanagement of highway funds and politics in general, and just like Chicago, the tolls will likely continue far into the future as a money racket that is intended for oversized union pensions and other wasted dollars spend on worthless government employees.

It concerned me because I do travel to Louisville a lot and it bothers me that something so corrupt is so close to my home in Cincinnati. But even worse, politicians on both sides of the Ohio River in Cincinnati are looking to do the same thing to pay for the I-75 bridge replacement that is projected there. The corruption is migrating, and politicians are intent to provide the same type of RiverLInk scam in Cincinnati. I remember in the 90s when Cincinnati was building more bridges than they needed just to use up highway funds that were in the bank, yet 30 years later nobody can come up with the money to provide a badly needed bridge replacement on one of the busiest highway arteries in the nation. With the amount of money that we do pay in taxes, the money for a new bridge should be there, we shouldn’t have to fund bridges with these toll roads. If government wants to lower taxes, then maybe we can talk about tolls, but at this level of taxation, its just another tax on us all collected in a different way, behind some cowardly camera by lazy trolls. And the cost of that stupidity isn’t just economic, it hurts people like Christina much more than anybody, and that pain comes straight out of political mismanagement and bad fiscal planning. It certainly isn’t fair to the population in general.

Rich Hoffman

The Alleged Whistleblower, Beta Boy Eric Ciaramella: It’s all about the ‘Structural Ambiguity in the Georgian Verbal Noun’

It’s not that the alleged whistleblower’s name is Eric Ciaramella, a CIA analyst specific to the Ukraine issue that we should all wonder about, but its his ridiculously presumptuous paper he wrote for Harvard University titled the ‘Structural Ambiguity in the Georgian Verbal Noun.’ Anybody who can make that much fuss over a “noun” in a “Georgian” context is a person who can make a mountain out of a mole hill on any topic, and shouldn’t be employed by any of us to defend our country from bad guys. If this little kid is the kind of people that our government is hiring to defend the world from turmoil, we’re all in a lot more trouble than his role along with his lawyer Mark Zaid, in performing an attempted coup of the American presidency. Ciarmella essentially is the ultimate metro sexual beta male that is so common these days who fight everything with a passive aggressive sissy slap from behind the biggest rock they can find. After reading that academic paper its no wonder he found Trump’s words so disturbing. He would have said the same thing about the way Trump orders food at McDonald’s. The problem isn’t Trump threatening any leadership of Ukraine over an investigation into the corruption of Joe Biden, a political rival. It’s that Trump exists as an alpha male that disrupted the sensibilities of this very soft natured little boy. At only 33 years of age, the kid has barely hatched, yet he is doomed to a life of betahood and lonely nights from women who don’t find such creatures very attractive or good bed mates.

Eric Ciaramella Wiki, Age, Wife, Biography (CIA) Family & More

The name of Ciaramella has been floating around for weeks, and to me he wasn’t relevant, so I didn’t care enough to do an article on it. However, due to the attempts to keep his name covered for all kinds of mysterious reasons, the longer it has gone on, the angrier I have become over the issue. It always bothers me to see the sissified beta males that colleges are producing these days, especially at Harvard attempting to be tough guys in business and politics with passive aggressive games due to their timid natures which is certainly the case with Ciaramella. I would encourage anybody to look up his Harvard paper by the title indicated here and read for yourself the kind of people the CIA values, then it will become clear why they hire such losers, and why they hate Trump in the deep state so much. Why they show up in the early hours of the morning to arrest Roger Stone as CNN was tipped off and filming the whole incident. Or even why so many members of congress want to impeach Trump for doing nothing more than winning an election. Ciaramella is from the same age group as my children, and it is they who came up through the public education system of “everybody gets a trophy,” and the world will think you’re smart if you can have a debate about the use of a noun.

In any other time in the history of mankind the values of valor would have been in how much you could bench press, how far you could hit a golf ball, hit a target with a gun, or out punch the other guy in a fist fight. Ciaramella is from the age where all that kind of maleness was attacked by our public-school system, so the kid entered the world looking to succeed with those parameters of measure taken away, and replaced in stead with pencil pushers and bureaucrats. Without question this Ciaramella kid would be rattled by the sound of the booming Trump voice talking to a goldfish let alone a world leader. But that is precisely why Trump has been successful, because no matter what passive liberals from the far left education institutions like Harvard want to think, biology matters and the means of human interaction will always hold true. They can’t change the rules to fit their timid personalities, which is what the whole impeachment attempt truly is against Trump. It’s a coup against maleness, for which Trump is a fine representative for the human race. Those against him have been trying to change that trait and they are frustrated that it is making a comeback under his administration erasing years of progressive effort to the contrary.

I think we all feel a little sorry for such timid kids as this Eric Ciaramella fellow. Looking over his life it is obvious that he was a timid soul that the leftist educators wanted as their future. Most people like him, and it wouldn’t be a surprise to learn that he had no strong male figure in his life, use the rules of academia to replace the traditional roles of manhood into a context that has all but destroyed that entire generation, and the Beltway politics along with the media are hell bent to preserve. They want to use this timid person to overthrow maleness and to eradicate it from the earth so that they can have their illusion of supremacy by hiding behind big words in overly complicated Harvard academic papers that only the worst leftist on earth would find valuable, or even enchanting. No wonder Ciaramella isn’t yet married. Who would want to?

But on a more serious note, these types of people are obviously what the CIA and FBI are hiring and find valuable, so its no wonder they are actively working to overthrow the elections the rest of us are engaged in. They don’t see their roles as protecting our nation from the bad guys, they see us as the bad guys, and they want to remake our nation into something that resembles their mode of thinking. It really comes down to what we define maleness as and how that translates to the kind of typical American that makes up our population and character. Do we judge maleness as the beta males do, as sissy slapping intellects who fuss over a latté the nature of a noun in human language, or some brawny men who have pumped up their biceps in their spare time to attract females who replace engines in their cars on the weekends and drive their monster trucks to the gun range to shoot a few rounds before capping off the night with a few beers. The deep state isn’t just attacking Trump because they hate his maleness, but those of us who elected him so that they don’t have to face the facts that the world they were taught would welcome them with open arms still thinks of them as wimps and speed bumps on the ways to the next sexual victory. Chicks aren’t going to be lining up to sleep with guys like Eric Ciaramella. They will always fall for the guy in the Lamborghini with the expensive suit and fat wallet, made that way from many conquests garnered in business.

The political left didn’t want to hide Ciaramella as the whistleblower for his own protection, but for their own. Once normal Americans, men and women learned that this kid was just another wimp produced by our public education system trying to be a big shot off the government dole, they knew their case would fly right out the window. The credibility for their attempts to impeach President Trump would fall flat, as is obviously happening as we speak. With the holidays coming up, the calendar isn’t working toward the favor of House Democrats. Soon they will be in their own primary season and any impeachment attempts will be very distracting to their own efforts. So they needed this kid to look meaner and tougher than he was. Once people learned that Ciaramella was just another metro sexual loser, they’d lose interest and move on. Which is where we find ourselves today. However, what should make all of us angry is that these types of people are trying to take over our system of government, and in a lot of ways already have. We just didn’t know what kind of people the CIA was hiring. But now we do, and its less than impressive.

Rich Hoffman

Who Could Blame Matt Bevin: Notes from Lebanon and Talawanda after the election

I don’t blame Matt Bevin at all for not conceding the governor election in Kentucky to the teacher’s union boot licker Andy Breshear. Knowing what I do about the political left and their mechanisms of power and manipulation, it would not surprise me that more than 10,000 dead people and illegal aliens voted in Lexington and Louisville putting the Democrat over the top in that election. I always assume that there will be a little voter fraud, and that Republicans must have an even greater margin of victory to guard against it. But in Bevin’s case, why not challenge the election? The history is certainly there to question those results, so why not? Its not about being a sore loser, its about playing to win, which is a big difference. Republicans need to be doing more than that not just to win political races, but to preserve the American Constitution which is very much under attack. To understand why, just look toward the impeachment case against President Trump and how many media partners have linked up with the radicals to advance a story of nothing because they can’t win an election honestly. That behavior is no different than the teacher’s unions which went up against Bevin, and certainly against many of us in local elections as pointed out by friends of mine shown below.

The following two reports come from longtime friends of mine who were fighting education issues in their communities and were overcome for various reasons. The notes they sent me communicate their paint accurately. The first one is from Lebanon where the teacher’s union-built school board threatened to take away several tax payer funded programs essentially to create the pay scale shown below. All the levy in Lebanon was about was giving the teacher’s union a pay increase. The author of this note used to be a school board member herself, and she knows very well what is really going on in public education.  (Who is saying teachers aren’t well paid?)

We lost because the union campaigned in the classrooms. They threatened all kinds of cuts and fees for extra curriculars e.g. sports, band, plays etc. two high school boys told me they threatened $1,000.00 for football and band or maybe cutting them entirely. When I read the teacher’s union contract, I realized they wouldn’t cut anything because too many were making too much money participating in these after school fun and games projects. The NEA is a racquet organization no different than the Mafia. They threaten retaliation if the levies fail. The sad part is they claim high taxes are “for the children.” Nothing could be further from the truth. We have teachers making over $94,000.00 with better benefits than most corporate executives. Their contract is for 184 days, but they get ten sick days and three personal days off. They have many days off for various holidays and “ breaks.” They have planning periods, work one half day on Wednesday’s for their union meetings, paid extra for many normal duties. Former classroom teachers become superintendents. That means the union is negotiating with a union sympathizer. Homeowners don’t have a prayer. The board is selected by the union. Read the questionnaire that they send to candidates. The teacher’s campaign in the classroom the union agenda. Everyone needs to read the communist agenda that is passed at the annual NEA convention.

This second note comes out of the Talawanda school district and communicates the results of the school board members who eventually won. Like Lakota, they were trying to get conservatives elected to the board but fell short. It’s a tough gig in an off-year election. If Trump had been on the ballot, it would have been a larger turnout, but it is what it is. Voters need to understand the game so that they can define what victories need to look like. The teacher’s unions know their business, its to get bigger pay increases and to teach the next generation about communism and an overthrow of the American Constitution. For conservatives the parameters of victory is to stop that.

Rich,

Well, the liberal machine in Oxford beat us. We now have an all liberal board that will consist of:
2 present/retired Miami University Professors (don’t know for sure but appears they still have some association with the university)

1 current Sr. Director of Miami University Advancement Finance & Business Services
1 retired Talawanda Elementary Principal (prior teacher) that currently does educational curriculum consulting

1 retired educator/teacher …unsure of all locations but retired from Butler Tech [This current board member, Patrick Meade also doesn’t say the Pledge of Allegiance at board meetings, he simply stands and often glances around the audience during the pledge]

Thinking “the machine” over, its tough to figure out how to “break it”. Since Miami Univ. is a strong presence, they all have each others emails, the Teachers Union backed ’em so again they have their emails and most of the liberals run things in Oxford like the Sr. Center, League of Women Voters, Oxford Community Art Center, the Empty Bowls program, etc. In addition there is a HUGE base of the retired liberals from the University & School district. SO…I figure the liberals have the strong networking and many opportunities over & over to spread their word. VERSUS….the conservatives that are spread around Oxford but mainly based out in the surrounding townships with miles between their farms and small communities.

Sad but a fact of life.

Our conservative friends are holding our heads high, staying out of the fray and moving forward. Ha – using the post puller to take out large sign posts has been good for the soul.

We’ll be regrouping soon.

I was reminded how out of touch most people are from these issues when I was at a birthday party over the weekend before the election. Out of the many adults there, most from Lakota, they just didn’t have the bandwidth to even contemplate the important issues at hand. They were worried about things like the cake melting and who was going to win Fantasy Football that day. They didn’t have time to think about teacher’s unions wanting to ruin the minds of our children and destroying the American Constitution while robbing taxpayers blind to do so. They just want busing for their kids so they don’t have to drive them to school. That is certainly the understanding of the radicals from the left which have infiltrated every public school with an ideology of socialism and anti-American propaganda paid for by all of us. Most voters just aren’t willing to understand the game, because they don’t have time to play it. That’s how the teacher’s unions and their minions on the school boards win. Because nobody has the time or money to stand up to them. Or the willingness to endure public scandal which they always threaten using our own children as shields for their own protection.

Bevin should fight back on the election just as Trump should fight back against the impeachment inquiries, and the rest of us should fight back in our own ways with the same vigor. Its not worth getting along and playing nice if Republicans are going to lose. Winning should be the top priority and I would say to that, win any way possible. Forget about playing fair, the opposition certainly doesn’t. When the enemy accuses us of unethical behavior, which gets thrown at Trump all the time, what they are mad at really is that they have set up the rules of the game to favor themselves. However, they need all of us “nice” Republicans to play nice and follow those rules, just as they break them at every turn. Their anger these days at Trump, Bevin and the rest of us in the trenches fighting these little local battles is that they see that trend breaking and it scares them. Which is a very good thing for them to feel.

Rich Hoffman

When you get a Head Shot, Take It: An analysis of the 2019 election

Hindsight is always 20/20 and I think a lot of people did some really good work in the various school board races and school levies that were on the ballot. Everything from the scandal at Lebanon schools where the levy was rejected in May then it was right back on the ballot here in November to the governor election in Kentucky where Matt Bevin lost largely due to the mad mom teacher’s union types. Or the local school board issue in my district where the incumbents won and the needed Republican vote from James Hahn fell short. He did well, but not well enough to knock off Julie Shaffer, the longtime union endorsed candidate, and stooge for contract negotiations. But the summary and what we can learn from this election is something I’ve been saying for a long time. If you get a chance to take a head shot, take the shot, metaphorically speaking of course. When you have the kind of dirt that there was on Julie Shaffer, use it. And we should have.

I’m a little rough in these kinds of things, I think of politics as war and the opponents as our mortal enemies. I don’t see the exchange as a pinky out exercise of politeness where the enemy kills you with kindness every time. That’s not a game I’m interested in playing. And many times, during this campaign that was my advice, but I understand why people didn’t take it. They still want to believe in a system that they’ve grown up with. They aren’t ready to see the education system for what it really is. They have hope that I’m wrong about it all, and for that I understand. As my wife said many times over the last few months, she likes a lot of the opponents and thinks they are nice people. I would say to her, and anybody else who said similar things, “what makes them dangerous is what they think when nobody is looking, when the lights are out. How they think and the content of those thoughts are what make them so dangerous. It’s not the smile on their faces when you shake their hands or listen to them in a polite debate.”

I said more than once during this election season that Julie Shaffer could walk naked down the middle of the street and still get 5000 union votes no matter what. So to beat her it was going to take getting a little dirty, because the union plays dirty. Look at the Bevin case in Kentucky. You must match their zeal, or they will win every time. It probably would have been better to stick Jim next to Lynda closer instead of worrying about whether or not we’d lose both of them. Jim needed more name recognition and some bigger splash stories. Votes after all went for the candidates voters read about here and there over time. They didn’t have enough information to change behavior at Lakota schools, so they voted for what was safe.

A lot of people hoped that the proof that the Lakota school board had been involved in an extortion case with a local developer, and the proof of that evidence being released with a letter would help pro-business candidates like Jim get enough votes to win. He had a respectable showing, but the issue was too complicated for most voters to understand. Most voters don’t own businesses even if they do appreciate them. Voters need more meat and potatoes, not gold bricks. The gold brick may be far more valuable, but if nobody knows what to do with it, it’s just a hunk of metal. The other side has the “children” narrative, so any opposition to them must be just as powerful and something people can relate to. Once you start talking over their heads you may not lose voters, but new ones won’t be inspired to get off their couch to vote. The labor union and their families were, because they want a nice big paycheck off that $100 million surplus.

I don’t normally do Facebook because I think its an evil data collection service that is geared to low intelligence induced people, but it is the center of most social commentary. And several people sent me Facebook postings of election activity and in reading them and the comments of many people it was amazing how deceitful people truly are. And that’s where I draw the line between good and evil. Most of the people I know in politics are good people, and in the business community. They want to do the right things in spite of the climate they are trying to do them in. I do want to help people like that because I like to see good win out. However, there are people who are truly evil, and they work in the school system and they have no idea why I would think of them that way. But they are and they should feel some pain for their villainy. Now I have defined that evil in many places, including some of my own published work in addition to these millions and millions of words. It’s not a definition a lot of people feel comfortable with, but its there, nonetheless. Its not hard for me to come to the conclusion that in politics sometimes when you get the head shot, you should take it. The one who flinches is usually the one who loses. The other side has no problem with taking a head shot, and that is why they win. Voters vote for winners good or evil. They vote for who they think will be victorious and as a candidate, if you are on your heels, they’ll pick up on it and it will show in the voter results—most of the time.

The only thing holding Republicans back is niceness. They are nice people who truly want to do the right things. From my experience, they don’t deserve many of the attacks thrown at them, and too often, they are the ones who end up on the defense for something they never did. The public education system is not only built by the worst of the villains, but its whole purpose is to make more of them which is something everyone should come to terms with if they ever want to fix it. At Lakota, things will stay the same for now, but to improve it, we needed that third vote. For the other regional fights that went in the wrong direction, well, that is always part of the plan when there are union backed candidates on the board spending the money like there is no tomorrow. And what they are teaching kids isn’t what we might call education, its something far worse and much more radical.

The next time we do these things, just some advice, play to win, hit harder and if you have dirt, use it and crush your opponent. Forget about all this playing nice stuff. Forget the handshakes, the polite debates and the trivial nonsense. Where we did play hard, and the candidates couldn’t come up for air, victory was certainly there. But why not do that in every circumstance, especially when the issue is placed right before your feet. My wife doesn’t agree, but as I was telling her last night, morality is defined by those who are victorious. Right and wrong are largely a condition of political theater, what is truly moral or not is much more obscure, and philosophical. Its not a good person who pretends to be nice but supports an organization of anti-capitalist tyranny. The smiles and bridge building are worthless in that context. So, in the future keep that in mind, and don’t hold back so much. Play to win, and to crush your opponents so much, that they will never dare to get up again.

 

Rich Hoffman

The Mad Moms of Biological Socialism: A changing world that is taking root in logic instead of chaos

One thing is for sure, this latest round of local elections around the I-275 loop in Cincinnati has reunited me with many old friends from the No Lakota days. I used to cover education topics all over the city, not just at Lakota. But for the last several years have been more concerned about Second Amendment issues and the presidency of Donald Trump. Honestly, the debates about public education are boring and I have grown to hate many of the people advocating for government schools because I determined long ago that they were up to no good not only in what they were teaching our children, but in what they expected from the community. The fight against them is a needed one and I am glad to see how many people are still out there fighting the good fight, because it is having an impact. The needle has moved, and that has been beneficial.

I was with family members over the weekend who like all the wrong people for all the wrong reasons at Lakota, essentially so that they can have busing and some thought of day care for their children. The whole issue sickens me every time I go through it with people, because they just don’t get it. Just as in Lakota when pro-business forces produced a letter showing proof of anti-business bias from Ohio schools, most people just didn’t make a connection to the story. People sending their kids to these monstrosities of government programming are young socialists themselves. When I listen to a young mother talk, they seem all too often to be little biological socialists by default, and they vote that way. Everything in the world is supposed to yield to the needs of their child and that includes the mother herself who will literally sacrifice every last essence of their lives to give their little child what they need. I call these types of people biological socialists because they behave the same way as political ones. Their child becomes the institution instead of some government entity. But the behavior is the same, which is why government schools constantly tap into that sentiment with rigor, because it matches their overall objective.

Young moms most of the time are enduring a ten year period of insanity because its written into their biological code to do so, and it is those types of people who vote like ravenous wolves every little safety endeavor, and school levy need in government schools, because they are functioning from that train of thought, of a young socialist not much different than the most radical communist supporter of yesteryear. As well meaning as those people are, they are not functioning from logic meaning that they must be met on the battlefield of ideas with resistance, and to that effect I am glad to see so many still out there fighting the good fight even after many years of tough trench warfare that has yielded very little benefit. The important thing to note is that there have been incremental benefits that are changing the dialogue in a positive direction.

What becomes clear is that many of these modern rebellions against the school systems are by the very same women who used to be mothers but are several decades removed from the practice and have regained their minds from the turmoil of the constant needs of a young one. Once their children have grown up and away from those demanding years of childhood, they see the story for what it was all along, and they are standing up to the vast evils that emerge from public education as renewed spirits. No longer are they worried about their child getting to school on a bus, or what the cafeteria is feeding their kid for lunch, but they start to see the big picture of how things work and they aren’t happy about it politically, and want to do something about it. I especially heard from old friends in the Lebanon school district who are fighting a good fight there, as well as Talawanda. Over this last election we have had something of a class reunion, and it has been encouraging.

There is a reason that modern politics put their focus on these young socialist moms who have the depth of knowledge of a fruitcake and the memory of a fly. Because they are up to know good and looking to exploit their depleted natures for the benefit of their party politics, which in the case of public schools is nearly always some form of socialism. You don’t see many of these mad, crazy moms out there advocating for Constitutional concepts, rather, they just want their kid safe from a dangerous world and they turn to these crazy leftist teachers to give them instruction as to what they should be thinking about, whether the issue is transgender bathrooms or the fictions of global warming. When you dig just a little bit into the motives of public education and its supporters it becomes clear quickly how vastly evil it is, and how it exploits the natural biological inclinations of motherhood, especially among young ones who are still babies themselves. I would say anybody under 40 is still a baby who has a lot to learn. Yet those babies are making decisions the rest of us who know better constantly must live with and we get tired of it.

Rather than just taking it, many have been fighting back and that is new. The fights have sustained themselves over the many years that we have all been doing this, and they have formed their own cells of leadership that have not required a lot of maintenance. For me, four or five years ago it was a drain to cover everything for everyone, but now that has not been required. A change agency in the culture of public education has taken its own flight and does not need so much input to sustain a drive. And that has been good for challenging the basic premise of public education in a way it has always deserved. To give it a false value just because it was the only thing, has been a disaster for several generations of young people and we should be angry about it. And for me, its good to see that many are and are doing something about it.

Of course, the elections of November 5th will have winners and losers, there always are. What matters is that the desire to fight back is very much alive and has put directly many issues on the ballots across the nation that are healthy, and different from the narratives from a decade ago. People who have been in the trenches fighting are still doing so and are far from conquered, and the cracks in the other side are showing. While the pro government school types every year replenish their troops with a new generation of mad mothers looking toward socialism to protect their little child from the world, the foundations they use to beat us all over the head with are crumbling, and its about time. We will never have real solutions as long as their screaming voices drown out logic, when they would sacrifice everything to have busing when the more philosophical elements of public education need to be re-invented from the foundation up. It was good to hear from real friends whom I’ve come to know over the years and to learn that their spirits are far from broken. Rather, they are poised to take the fight to the next level where it belongs and to finally wear out the system that has been so destructive to the minds of kids everywhere.

Rich Hoffman

Its all about Guns in Lakota Schools: Remember to vote for Lynda O’Connor and Jim Hahn for School Board on November 5th

From the beginning it was always about guns for me regarding the school board candidates at the Lakota school district which we are voting for on November 5th, 2019. Not so much as we use guns to shoot people, but that they sustain ourselves from people who would like to shoot us. The political philosophy being embraced or not really, points to the essential differences of the management system that is up for debate. Julie Shaffer and Ray Murray represent anti-guns on teacher’s points of view, exactly the same position as the teacher’s union and Democrats nationally. The roots of their belief system is that we should all depend on each other, flaws and all for the betterment of a utopian society lacking individual identity and trusting in the system we have invented to sustain us. As opposed to Lynda O’Connor and James Hahn who believe guns should be worn by teachers as first responders in the moment of a hostile crises and that individuals, not systems, are the keys to solving many of the social ills starting with the ownership of firearms in general.

To further break down this parody Julie and Ray want voters to trust their very flawed personalities with the lives of our children, and that also is the position of the progressive teacher’s union politically. Once anybody admits to themselves that guns are in American society, and should be in all American schools, to protect the acquisition of individual possession then the formula for all public education to teach contrary realizations is exposed and ruined forever. So of course, Julie and Ray don’t want guns on teachers, they want everyone to trust the system they represent, and to their specific roles, are terribly underqualified. However, qualification is an individual assessment, so for them, so long as they can blend into the background, their personal faults ethically, financially, and morally can be ignored.

This interpretation of guns is a heady matter that is not conducive to the lazy thinkers and mass collectivists that have transcended from the deserts of the Middle East and migrated along the coasts of the Indian Ocean during the evolution of the many oriental religions of sacrifice and collective salvation. The gun has no place in those cultures because the aim of life is not to acquire individual traits, but to get rid of them. If you study the modern liberal, that is the roots that you will find dear reader, and that is the foundation of all teacher unions and government schools. Every single one of them. And when it comes to managing those school boards with like minded people, Julie and Ray are just the kind of people they want running things, easy to beat, flawed personalities, and not very smart.

In fact, at the core of education as we all assume is the individual attainment of intelligence, after all that is the purpose of education, to acquire knowledge. But that is not the goal of government schools led by these sinister, oriental style forces. They want a breakdown of individualism and an advocacy of social collectivism where the institution is worshipped itself, not the participants. You can see that at any Friday Night Football game at Lakota. The parents in the audience watching their kids play games under the lights of an October sky will say, “we won,” or “we lost.” By attending the game, they feel they are part of the game and therefor, the institution represented on the scoreboard. Individual touchdowns by heroics are lost to the next day news so long as the school gets the credit for individual behavior. And that is the way it is with these people, and it always has been.

So to come to such thoughts is a very individualized process, and for that people arriving at such a state need guns to protect themselves from the advocates of institutionalism, whether the attackers are crazed pot smoking lunatics or Manchurian candidates seeking actual assassination to preserve the status quo. You would be surprised to what extent lazy, dull; people will fight to avoid more work and real thinking. They would truly rather kill you than to step up to the level of thought you might introduce them to with a little effort. To that proof I would offer Socrates as an example, who was poisoned for corrupting the youth of Greek society. Today instead of killing Socrates as a middle-aged man they just kill them before they ever hatch out of kindergarten. The public schools don’t want the next great philosophers, and great thinkers and innovators. They want boring people that they can control easily, and they certainly don’t want them to have guns to defend themselves with.

Ultimately that is why teachers in school must have guns and why we need school board members who support education curriculums that advocate individualized learning and will push back against the tide of state and federal mandates to the contrary. We want kids to learn in school and we want guns to protect what they have learned from villains of old oriental philosophies from eradicating that possession from their minds with the threat of death. Guns protect all individualized possessions, even knowledge. Anyone who knows history well could think quickly of five or six situations where governments, kings, or anarchists have shown up on the doorsteps of a great thinker and killed them so that society would not advance beyond the intellectual reach of the worst and most wicked. For that is the true intention of evil and the reason it is bad.

Guns are about preserving what we teach to individual students so that they can live and carry out the products of their understanding. Not in just saving their lives for the sake of one more statistic sitting in the stands of a football game cheering for the institution when they could be at home reading a book and getting smarter. The goal of a school should not be to accept the perverted sexual understanding of the most obsessed mind with the basic functions of reproduction, but to teach them to think beyond such primitive cravings, to the point where we don’t even think about being transgender, but what is the state of life outside of the universe, or multiverse. It is up to the education system to teach to think beyond limits, not to hold everyone under them.

And that is the subtle message of this election, Lynda O’Conner and James Hahn stand for guns and the protection of individual possession of knowledge, Julie Shaffer and Ray Murray aren’t even smart enough to ask such a question, so they don’t want to be left behind by smarter people than they are, rather they want to keep guns out of the schools, and instead keep the topics of conversation on transgender bathrooms and how to blow $100 million by paying teachers countless amounts of money then asking taxpayers to subsidize their failure at some future time. By voting against guns in schools and in society, anti-gun personalities like Ray and Julie stand with the original masses in disregarding individual behavior in favor of collectivism. And when you see how Ray and Julie have led their lives, you can understand why they are so eager for such a position.

Rich Hoffman

The Losers of Lakota: Ray Murray and Julie Shaffer are the keys to the bank vault the teacher’s union wants to rob

Let’s just say that the election for the local school board members at Lakota has been a miserable experience for me. Not because on the Republican side of the voting selection there aren’t good candidates. There are, Lynda O’Connor and James Hahn are very good candidates whom I am sure if both are elected together would represent us very well on the school board against a hostile teacher’s union that is always looking to wreck the budget we all supply that school with our hard earned tax money. But along the way, doing research of all the positions for all the other candidates, and the people attached to them, it has just disgusted me. That would of course be the plight of Ray Murray and Julie Shaffer. Julie is currently on the board. Ray lost his seat a few years ago and now wants it back. Both Ray and Julie are part of the budget deficits that I have complained about over a decade so I have never been big fans of them personally. But it has only been until this election that I did any real look into the quality of their positions, and what I have learned by asking lots of people, and reading lots of things is that they are just complete losers I wouldn’t hire to wash my car. They are far worse than I thought they were, and it has been depressing to learn.

Looking at all these candidates the way I would in hiring for a new position for some important job, which a school board management position is, it is clear that Julie Shaffer and Ray Murray shouldn’t be anywhere near a job consideration due to their severe ineptness as people. No wonder they are such bleeding-heart liberals. They can’t afford to be anything but, and that is not doing any children in the Lakota school district any justice, which angers me considerably. They should have respect for the rest of us to not waste our time. Now, for me, Julie Shaffer lost me a long time ago when she and I debated school topics on WLW radio. Back then the school board was Joan Powell’s and she was building her little coalition of liberal union suck asses and Julie was part of it. Electing a school board is to hire representatives for the taxpayers to negotiate on our behalf. Not to be stooges for the labor union which already is well represented in school board activities. They don’t need help. But the way Joan operated until she stepped down a few years ago was to be a stooge and Julie was part of that culture, which is why everything operated as a deficit. Of course she couldn’t debate me on anything anywhere, in public forums, on the radio, anywhere, so Joan, Julie, the previous school superintendent along with many mad mom Lakota socialites tried an early version of the “me too” movement on me with the help of the newspaper reporter Michael Clark. I’m still angry about that and likely will be for the rest of my life. It showed me just what lowlifes these people really were who were spending massive amounts of money that we give them so recklessly and maliciously. I can handle people who come after me, which Julie clearly did, but in so doing she showed what she was really about. After the last levy since they stopped asking for money at Lakota due to declining enrollment, I haven’t paid much attention to her or the school, so Julie has been off my mind pretty much. However, after the last debate done this year for this election I was reminded just how bad for the job that she is and to be honest I am embarrassed that she even lives in my community, let alone sits on the board representing me as a decision maker. I saw her recently at Sam’s Club in Tri-County and thought about confronting her about things I had learned about her bad behavior regarding extracurricular Lakota events that were quite embarrassing, but her husband was with her, so I left it alone. I don’t want to be the guy that destroys her family. But I wouldn’t vote for her for anything if there was only one name on the ticket.

And she’s the good one. Ray Murray I have learned is even worse than she is.

Ray Murray I always thought of as kind of the Juan Williams of the Lakota school board. I disagreed with his politics but thought he was a nice enough guy to not run through the ringer. He’s a neighbor of mine, he lives close to me and I see him around. My wife likes him a lot and always has. But I kept hearing things about him from people around the community, especially the business guys that Ray wasn’t such a good guy. Well, I had no reason to think otherwise until he threw his hat in the ring for another run at school board then heard his alarming comments at a recent public forum regarding budgets and his views on transgender politics. So I followed the leads where they went and sure enough found out that Ray has drugs in his past and that he has had some serious financial problems. I don’t want to embarrass him; people go through things in life. Some of those problems were years ago, but some were quite recent. If he wasn’t running for school board, I might slide a $100 bill under the door so he could buy lunch, but I sure as hell wouldn’t elect him to a managing position of millions and millions of dollars at Lakota. He was part of the problem before, and knowing what I do now, I wouldn’t give him the keys to a demolition derby car. I sure wouldn’t let him near my wallet. He obviously has a hard time with money, and we’d be crazy to put him anywhere near some. His comments at recent Lakota school board debates are just the tip of the iceberg. He is a walking financial disaster. Look him up on Courtview for yourself at the Butler County Clerk.org site. You’ll see what I mean.

Then there is the reporting, if we had decent local reporters, we should know a lot of these things. Honestly, a local blogger who is busy with millions and millions of other things shouldn’t be the one covering these stories. I’m not even talking about the partisan angle, which from my point of view, the Journal News reporters, well all the Cox Media people are deeply in bed with all the progressive activism that is going on all over southern Ohio, and they sit on stories that might make their people look bad. A lot of this information about Ray should have been covered by them years ago, and maybe if it had, we wouldn’t have had some of the very contentious levy battles that we did, which was very costly to the community. Their coverage has been and continues to be disingenuous to the community who would like to read their articles but have learned that they can’t trust the content.

I will be glad when the election is over because I simply don’t like seeing and hearing from these losers as much as I have over these last several weeks. These people have not been representing me as a voter but have been serious partisan hacks hidden behind a mask of bipartisanship which was always a complete lie. I’m not sure we can believe anything that comes out of Julie Shaffer’s mouth and certainly not out of Ray Murray. I’m not even sure he ever lived in Chicago at this point, let alone was a cop as he has been saying. I was so disappointed in him that I just stopped looking to confirm. The other topics I learned about left me sick. Its nice that we have some options in this election and we’ll see if people show up and actually vote. However, the process up to this point has just been a disgusting look into a bunch of losers at Lakota who should be hiding in the cracks of society instead of being placed on a pedestal. But of course, those who want to steal from us want a key to the door of the bank vault, and for them, Julie Shaffer and Ray Murray are the incompetent stooges who would let them in and to take everything and then some, then ask for a levy from the tax payers to refill the vault. That is the game that has been going on for a long time and the more you learn about the whole thing, the angrier anybody would get about it. And that’s certainly where I am at.

Rich Hoffman