Rich Hoffman's Blog, page 434

‘A Theory of Justice,’ by John Rawls: Destroying America through the legal system

A major escalation of degeneracy by the modern statist regimes using meritocracy to propel mediocrity into every modern profession is a fairly recent trend inspired by the 1972 book A Theory of Justice, by John Rawls who was a professor of philosophy at Harvard University.  Rawls argued in that popular statist book that a new theory of social justice demands that humans counteract the injustice of nature by instituting a corrupt and unthinkable concept upon mankind, equality at the expense of quality.  Rawls believed that nature should be rebelled against depriving those favored by nature of the right to rewards they produce, and grant to the incompetent a right to the effortless enjoyment of the rewards they could not produce or imagine on their own.  In other words John Rawls believed that justice should be redistributed into society to alter nature itself bringing different standards of justice based on social need, not individual desire.  Under this thinking if a dirt bag raped a woman, or broke into a home and stole all the money of the occupants, the scales of justice would be altered for the man if he was a member of the poor, or minority because nature did not give him the proper tools to be equal to those he robbed, or raped.  Under Rawls theory, the individual crimes are secondary to the greater good of social equality, so under his “Theory of Justice” the criminal is a useful tool of fighting against nature the tendency to make some people better than others.

A Theory of Justice is a work of political philosophy and ethics by John Rawls. It was originally published in 1972 and revised in both 1975 (for the translated editions) and 1999. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls attempts to solve the problem of distributive justice (the socially just distribution of goods in a society) by utilising a variant of the familiar device of the social contract. The resultant theory is known as “Justice as Fairness“, from which Rawls derives his two principles of justice: the liberty principle and the difference principle.

In A Theory of Justice, Rawls argues for a principled reconciliation of liberty and equality. Central to this effort is an account of the circumstances of justice, inspired by David Hume, and a fair choice situation for parties facing such circumstances, similar to some ofImmanuel Kant‘s views. Principles of justice are sought to guide the conduct of the parties. These parties are recognized to face moderate scarcity, and they are neither naturally altruistic nor purely egoistic. They have ends which they seek to advance, but prefer to advance them through cooperation with others on mutually acceptable terms. Rawls offers a model of a fair choice situation (the original position with its veil of ignorance) within which parties would hypothetically choose mutually acceptable principles of justice. Under such constraints, Rawls believes that parties would find his favoured principles of justice to be especially attractive, winning out over varied alternatives, including utilitarian and right-libertarian accounts.

Rawls belongs to the social contract tradition. However, Rawls’ social contract takes a different view from that of previous thinkers. Specifically, Rawls develops what he claims are principles of justice through the use of an artificial device he calls the Original position in which everyone decides principles of justice from behind a veil of ignorance. This “veil” is one that essentially blinds people to all facts about themselves so they cannot tailor principles to their advantage.

“no one knows his place in society, his class position or social status, nor does anyone know his fortune in the distribution of natural assets and abilities, his intelligence, strength, and the like. I shall even assume that the parties do not know their conceptions of the good or their special psychological propensities. The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance.”

According to Rawls, ignorance of these details about oneself will lead to principles that are fair to all. If an individual does not know how he will end up in his own conceived society, he is likely not going to privilege any one class of people, but rather develop a scheme of justice that treats all fairly. In particular, Rawls claims that those in the Original Position would all adopt a max -min strategy which would maximize the prospects of the least well-off.

They are the principles that rational and free persons concerned to further their own interests would accept in an initial position of equality as defining the fundamentals of the terms of their association [Rawls, p 11]

Rawls claims that the parties in the original position would adopt two such principles, which would then govern the assignment of rights and duties and regulate the distribution of social and economic advantages across society. The difference principle permits inequalities in the distribution of goods only if those inequalities benefit the worst-off members of society. Rawls believes that this principle would be a rational choice for the representatives in the original position for the following reason: Each member of society has an equal claim on their society’s goods. Natural attributes should not affect this claim, so the basic right of any individual, before further considerations are taken into account, must be to an equal share in material wealth. What, then, could justify unequal distribution? Rawls argues that inequality is acceptable only if it is to the advantage of those who are worst-off.

The agreement that stems from the original position is both hypothetical and ahistorical. It is hypothetical in the sense that the principles to be derived are what the parties would, under certain legitimating conditions, agree to, not what they have agreed to. Rawls seeks to use an argument that the principles of justice are what would be agreed upon if people were in the hypothetical situation of the original position and that those principles have moral weight as a result of that. It is ahistorical in the sense that it is not supposed that the agreement has ever been, or indeed could ever have been, derived in the real world outside of carefully limited experimental exercises.

“
First: each person is to have an equal right to the most extensive basic liberty compatible with a similar liberty for others.[1]

”

The basic liberties of citizens are, the political liberty to vote and run for office, freedom of speech and assembly, liberty of conscience, freedom of personal property and freedom from arbitrary arrest. However, he says:

liberties not on the list, for example, the right to own certain kinds of property (e.g. means of production) and freedom of contract as understood by the doctrine of laissez-faire are not basic; and so they are not protected by the priority of the first principle.[2]

The first principle may not be violated, even for the sake of the second principle, above an unspecified but low-level of economic development. However, because various basic liberties may conflict, it may be necessary to trade them off against each other for the sake of obtaining the largest possible system of rights. There is thus some uncertainty as to exactly what is mandated by the principle, and it is possible that a plurality of sets of liberties satisfy its requirements.

Social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that (Rawls, 1971, p.302; revised edition, p. 47):

(a) they are to be of the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society, consistent with the just savings principle (the difference principle).

(b) offices and positions must be open to everyone under conditions of fair equality of opportunity

Rawls’ claim in (a) is that departures from equality of a list of what he calls primary goods—”things which a rational man wants whatever else he wants” [Rawls, 1971, pg. 92]—are justified only to the extent that they improve the lot of those who are worst-off under that distribution in comparison with the previous, equal, distribution. His position is at least in some sense egalitarian, with a provision that equality is not to be achieved by worsening the position of the least advantaged.[clarification needed] An important consequence here, however, is that inequalities can actually be just on Rawls’ view, as long as they are to the benefit of the least well off. His argument for this position rests heavily on the claim that morally arbitrary factors (for example, the family one is born into) shouldn’t determine one’s life chances or opportunities. Rawls is also keying on an intuition that a person does not morally deserve their inborn talents; thus that one is not entitled to all the benefits they could possibly receive from them; hence, at least one of the criteria which could provide an alternative to equality in assessing the justice of distributions is eliminated.

The stipulation in (b) is lexically prior to that in (a). Fair equality of opportunity requires not merely that offices and positions are distributed on the basis of merit, but that all have reasonable opportunity to acquire the skills on the basis of which merit is assessed. It may be thought that this stipulation, and even the first principle of justice, may require greater equality than the difference principle, because large social and economic inequalities, even when they are to the advantage of the worst-off, will tend seriously to undermine the value of the political liberties and any measures towards fair equality of opportunity.

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

When it is wondered why there doesn’t seem to be any justice in the world of modern America, and why the court system seems to be failing, look to A Theory of Justice by John Rawls.   Under the accepted terms of Rawls’ work, if a member of society daily injects themselves with heroin, pimps out stolen women into prostitution to pay for his drug habit, runs a theft ring and is a general menace to society, the social and economic inequalities are to be arranged so that they are to be of the greatest benefit of the least-advantaged members of society, consistent with the just savings principle.  Meaning, all the good people of society who have made quality decisions in their life, worked hard, treated others with fairness are to pour some of their hard work into the degenerate so that social justice can look favorably upon the entire human race regardless of individual value.  Isn’t it clear now why studying philosophy should be more important in your daily life dear reader?

Every courtroom in America with miles of case-law supporting them created by too many money-grubbing, parasitic lawyers have taken the work of John Rawls and made it mainstream thinking.  It is why criminals believe they have rights to the merit of the good, and why they are not motivated to change their behavior because John Rawls new theories of justice instruct them that nature has given them an unfair advantage in life, and it is up to the intelligentsia of meritocracy to determine winners and losers in society arrogantly suppressing nature behind the rule of the academic class.

Until A Theory of Justice is rejected by the American population and the case-law built upon its failed philosophy is scrubbed completely, justice will be elusive in modern society.  Criminals will continue to believe that they are “owed” something by somebody, and innocent victims will continue to search for justice among judges who sit upon their ivory towers and defend Rawls because through the meritocracy of the Harvard University elite, there is a power they dare not challenge.  It is largely because of Rawls that the Second Amendment is being eroded away, that the NDAA Act was voted upon, that the TSA, the NSA, and every other government organization works against the vast amount of American population with violations against their personal liberty.  Because under A Theory of Justice the rights of individual citizens is secondary to the rights of the under-privileged, the lazy, and the corrupt because nature selected them to be less, and it is the obligation of mankind to help them become better by giving them a free pass to continued behavior of a social menace.  Sometimes it only takes a few generations to wreck a civilization and in the case of American justice it only took a few years from 1972 to destroy the logic of our legal system.  The blame rests on the shoulders of John Rawls and his Harvard University meritocracy agenda driven psychosis of reshaping the world against the desires of nature to create a world molded by the morally bankrupt in a perpetual draining of wealth not just monetarily, but ethically till there is nothing left but a distant memory of a once great culture.  America was a land built by rules yet was destroyed by A Theory of Justice, written in 1972, a college professor functioning from a failed philosophy that was never corrected in time to save civilization.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

The Meritocracy of America: Why Steven Spielberg is more important than Barack Obama

The greatest failure, and largest misconception practiced by the human race in regard to politics is the old anti concept of a meritocracy.  When America put to practice many years of contemplation by the realm of philosophy, political science, and human psychology it was an experiment which quickly failed as Europeans wanting to become a part of this new ideal of personal freedom came to the shores of the growing United States to experience it.  Like many modern immigrants all well intentioned, yet bringing with them half-baked, mixed up, chaos in regard to political belief, those early Europeans settled the New England region with the garbage of their minds to be mixed in with the philosophy which started the American Revolution.   With them, and growing in importance over time through America’s education system where the essential importance of a meritocracy in human culture has been taught with the intention to level the playing field with a kind a wealth redistribution not of money, but of perceived personal power equating the man of ability with political rulers.  In essence the purpose of instructing society on the merits of a meritocracy was to associate the power of creative achievement with political power.  A good example of this would be to say the work of Steven Spielberg is equal to the work of Barack Obama.  Both have a college degree.  Both have won approval in the court of public opinion.  Both support democratic politics so in the world of meritocracy Barack Obama believes that he is equal to Steven Spielberg as opposed to someone who has not yet achieved those levels, such as a local school board member who may have a college degree, but has not yet moved up the political food chain of meritocracy yet.  They are still “lowly” local politicians not yet finding themselves on the cover of a popular magazine which are the gate keepers of modern meritocracy.

Meritocracy (merit, from Latin mereō: “earn” + -cracy, from Ancient Greek κράτος, kratos: “strength, power”) is a political philosophy that holds power should be vested inindividuals according to merit.[1] Advancement in such a system is based on perceived intellectual talent measured through examination and/or demonstrated achievement in the field where it is implemented.

The “most common definition of meritocracy conceptualizes merit in terms of tested competency and ability, and most likely, as measured by IQ or standardized achievement tests.”[2] In government or other administration systems, meritocracy, in an administrative sense, is a system of government or other administration (such as business administration) wherein appointments and responsibilities are assigned to individuals based upon their “merits”, namely intelligence, credentials, and education, determined through evaluations or examinations.[3]

Supporters of meritocracies do not necessarily agree on the nature of “merit”, however, they do tend to agree that “merit” itself should be a primary consideration during evaluation.

In a more general sense, meritocracy can refer to any form of government based on achievement. Like “utilitarian” and “pragmatic“, the word “meritocratic” has also developed a broader definition, and may be used to refer to any government run by “a ruling or influential class of educated or able people.” [4]

This is in contrast to the term originally coined by Michael Young in 1958, who critically defined it as a system where “merit is equated with intelligence-plus-effort, its possessors are identified at an early age and selected for appropriate intensive education, and there is an obsession with quantification, test-scoring, and qualifications.” [5]

Meritocracy in its wider sense, may be any general act of judgment upon the basis of various demonstrated merits; such acts frequently are described in sociology and psychology. Thus, the merits may extend beyond intelligence and education to any mental or physical talent or to work ethic.

In rhetoric, the demonstration of one’s merit regarding mastery of a particular subject is an essential task most directly related to the Aristotelian term Ethos. The equivalent Aristotelian conception of meritocracy is based upon aristocratic or oligarchical structures, rather than in the context of the modern state.[6][7]

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

To be put simply a meritocracy allows Barack Obama to believe he is equal to Steven Spielberg in value because the conditions of social merit generally agreed upon have been satisfied.  Spielberg is a spectacular example of a man of ability.  He’s made several motion pictures that have touched the hearts and molded American culture with art.  He launched the career of Opera, as well as most of the major stars in Hollywood.  Yet by the rules of a meritocracy because Barack Obama won the popularity contest of an American presidency, the creative achievements of a Steven Spielberg are equated with the political power of a Barack Obama.  It does not matter to a meritocracy if the President obtains his position through lies and manipulation.  All he has to do is obtain it, because once holding office, the merit of the position has perceived power.

A meritocracy has allowed scum bags, looters, social parasites, con artists, and power hungry liars to obtain power over vast portions of society by this insanely stupid belief—that by obtaining an office, or a name plate on a desk, automatically merit is created and importance to official titles respected.  This has led human society away from the needed achievements to obtain real value, but has led them to brown-nosing, cheating, and rigging elections to obtain the benefits of a meritocracy.  It is because of a meritocracy that so much money is spent on American elections, especially presidential elections—because the belief is that merit is up for purchase if a political candidate can raise more money than his opponent, buy more adds, and purchase from the voting public the merit of office.

Barack Obama is not as good of a person as Steven Spielberg—not in productive enterprise.  One man lied his way into a job to work on movie sets at Universal Studios then went on to shape the movie business to what it is today, the other lied his way into colleges, political circles, and eventually the presidency.  Both men lied to get where they wanted to go, but one was productive, the other was simply a social parasite.  But under a meritocracy both have equal value under their celebrity status and it does not matter to the world how they arrived at their stations.  The American media considers meritocracy of celebrity as their criteria and supports the ritual benefits in their publications which is accepted by the American public at face value.

The sin of a meritocracy is that it allows the unproductive to equate themselves with the productive.  It is the primary driver why personalities of moral deficiency seek political office when they realize they will become nothing in life under their own power of creative force.  So to gain power over others, and celebrity, they enter politics to win under any means necessary so they can enjoy the benefits of a meritocracy once they obtain an office.  They assume upon the creation of a nameplate which sits upon their desks that they are now members of the intellectual elite—and they falsely believe they are among the most creative individuals on the planet.  But they would be wrong.  Their meritocracy does not give them the ability to make movies like Steven Spielberg, or behold the genius of a Bill Gates, or become a 10 time demolition derby champion at a local fair ground.  The elected politician is just another failed concept created under the terms of a European meritocracy that has no place within the rules of personal freedom and value of capitalism.  The believer of a meritocracy hopes to hide their personal worthlessness behind the veil of perception so that it will never be known to the public at large the real lack of worth a political office holder actually possesses.  The only value the politician actually obtains under a meritocracy is the wealth redistribution of merit from people who actually have it, to those who are empty to create a public perception of worth they would otherwise never obtain but through elected office.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

Fast Food Workers Are Not Worth Top Wages: When I eliminated four line positions by myself

A few years ago I had to work a second job because of a tax bill that came in the mail from the IRS.  The reason the IRS is such a terrifying organization is that if you get in the cross-hairs of them it will cost either in defense or compliance.  In my case it was compliance.  I had worked hard the previous year and some of the work wasn’t easily calculated and the IRS disputed that I owed them more.  Defending my amount would have cost more to take to court so I had to pay, and they knew that was my only real option.  So I elected to work a second job to pay my bill rather than rob the money from our family’s normal income.  Every morning at 4 AM I got up and rode a bicycle from Mason to Lebanon to report for work at 5 AM at my primary employer.  At 3 PM I got off that job and rushed up the road to the Kings Island exit to work at a popular fast food establishment there by 4 PM.  My job was to work as the grill cook, and within a few short months I became known as the fastest grill man from Michigan to Florida and my exploits drew the attention of corporate headquarters.  Fast food executives paid personal visits to me to figure out how I was able to work so fast.  I worked every night the dinner rush and left at 8 PM to ride my bicycle home arriving around 9 PM.  Finally after a long hard day I’d go to bed to begin the day again the next morning.  In addition to that schedule I worked at the fast-food restaurant on Saturday nights as well covering the lunch and dinner rush from 10 AM to 7 PM as Kings Island provided a lot of business.

It took me two years to pay off my tax debt in this fashion but I eventually did without it sucking the money from our primary income.  My wife did not work and I did not want her to.  She was homeschooling our children for a bit of time during this period and she needed to be free to care for them.  Even when they did attend Mason public schools, my wife drove them every day so that they wouldn’t have to ride the school bus with all the vile filth that goes on during bus rides.  So my wife working simply wasn’t an option.  During the day she also was a teacher’s assistant in my daughters classrooms until the relationship with the school went south when we would not allow our 4th grade children to attend a sex education class that consisted of teaching them how to put condoms on a fake penis.  We declined and from that point the administrators put an “X” on my wife’s back, so we pulled our children out of the school for their own protection, and proper instruction.  Meanwhile, I rode my bike to my jobs and kept the money coming in.  My exploits during this period of time were described in my novel, The Symposium of Justice.

I was so good as a grill cook that the restaurant management agreed to some of my unusual working mandates.  I did not participate in any customer interaction; I did not take orders from the front register or talk to anybody on the drive thru.  I could make such demands because I was the best at my job that there was.  Nobody came close to my speed.  (REVIEW MY BULLWHIP FAST DRAW).  I personally eliminated four line positions at this restaurant.  Normally there would be a grill worker for the front grill, a grill worker for the drive thru grill, a fry person and a chicken runner for the deep fryer in the back.  The restaurant I worked at was busier than most because of the Kings Island traffic, so corporate was very perplexed as to how I managed to be so quick and efficient all by myself.  I of course saved this restaurant a lot of money in labor hours.

I explained to them that I could read what a person would order by way of food by the look on their faces when they stepped into the dining room.  I had their food already cooking before they stepped up to place their order.  And on the drive thru I would watch the cars pull into the lot headed for the speaker and determine what they were going to order based on the way the driver looked, how many people were in the car, the condition of the car, and various other factors.  By the time the sandwich maker called the order I had the meat prepared and perfectly cooked ready to hit their prep.  The ability was physical of course.  I have always been very fast at everything I do.  But in this case it was more psychological than physical.  This left the corporate executives baffled as to how they could train other stores to have grill cooks who did the same thing.

They offered me a .50 cent raise for my efforts which I gladly accepted bring my total to $7.50 in 1997 money.  It wasn’t much then and it isn’t much now, but it was I thought a fair wage for the work I was doing.  My rule against the customers was that I knew that some government workers came to Kings Island often and I didn’t want to speak to them.  They had put me in the position of having to work a second job and be away from my family, so I didn’t want to be nice to them, or even acknowledge their existence.  I could always tell those types upon site, so I worked it out so that all I’d have to do was prepare the food, I would not have to give the people who put me in that situation the privilege of serving them directly.

I of course became the restaurant psychologist and the young people often confided in me their problems seeking my help, which I gave them.  The managers often had wrecked lives due to all the crazy hours they worked so I helped them too; by solving many of their personal problems.  But my rule about dealing with the customers was firm.  On one such occasion a pretentious Mason school teacher who weighed in at least three hundred pounds came to the front register while the 16-year-old girl manning that station was using the restroom.  The teacher demanded service and I was the closest one to her.  I instructed her to sit tight until someone came to take her order but she ignored me and continued anyway.  Needless to say her order fell on deaf ears.  I continued doing my work ignoring her.  When the girl came back, the Mason teacher was standing their refusing to repeat herself expecting me to tell the girl what the order was, which of course I didn’t provide.  Rather than repeat her order to the cashier the teacher complained about me to corporate headquarters thinking she would get me fired for disrespecting her.  She called from the dining room making a huge fuss in front of the other customers and demanding our own management to remove me from the line.  The lead manager told her that we were in the middle of lunch rush and that they couldn’t afford to remove me from the line.    The teacher proclaimed that nobody was “irreplaceable!”  Corporate took my side on the issue and the frustrated teacher took her business elsewhere.  She was back a week later, but this time didn’t look at me.  She simply placed her order and I had her meat ready for her.  I knew exactly what she was going to order, and it was a lot of food.

With all that said, the recent union attempt to inject themselves into the fast food restaurant business is a vile attempt at communism.  Fast food workers are not worth $15 an hour.  I was the best of my kind, and I wouldn’t have thought of asking such a fee for a job that was worth more to me for its flexibility than the wage I earned.  I enjoyed being able to come in and dominate a position so that I could dictate my terms based purely on performance.  While it’s true I could have made more money quicker if I were willing to “compromise” the fact was that I wasn’t, and fast food gave me the opportunity to work such a job, get the government off my back, while not having to lower myself to people like that 300 pound Mason teacher.  People who knew me then felt sorry for me, because I rode my bicycle to work every day, worked long hard hours, and had to wear a fast food uniform well into adulthood even though I was making good money and showing great talent at my regular job.  My wife and I could have just used the public school like a baby sitting service like everyone else did, she could have worked, we could have had two cars and life could have been easier if we just played along.  But we chose to do only what we had to in order to appease our government obligations.  Making a lot of extra money would have just been consumed in further taxes and was not a smart strategic choice.  Fast food gave me the perfect opportunity to dig out of that tax liability without making it worse, and without lowering myself to making plea deals with the IRS, or using expensive lawyers to just feed the monster even more.  And it also allowed me to take care of the problem so that my wife was always around my little girls, shielding them from the evils of the world that were being placed upon them by a statist government gone mad wanting to teach them to put on a condom in the fourth grade.  Little girls who had both parents working late staying in an empty house from the time they get home from school till their parents arrive between 5 and 6 PM have lots of opportunities to get into trouble with boys in their neighborhoods, but since my wife was always home, my girls didn’t have that problem. They didn’t need to learn how to put on a condom when that was furthest thing on their minds than anything at the time.

The protests from restaurant workers demanding a “living wage” for their work in fast food are not worth more than $7 to $8 dollars an hour, I don’t care who they are.  Fast food work is entry-level work designed to fill the social needs for cheap food on the go.  Nobody should work in fast food as a career choice unless they want to go into management.  There is no such thing as a “living wage.”  But there is such a thing as “value,” and restaurant workers are only worth so much.  The fast food restaurants of America have one obligation, to provide a good quality product cheaply.  If I could have taught corporate headquarters my skills at working a grill, I would have.  Unfortunately for them, I cannot be duplicated, and no machine can do what I could do—not even the perverted imbeciles who work at the NSA and supposedly have supercomputers that cross-reference everything we do in our lives.  They can’t calculate human behavior as well as I can.  Even so, the work I did was not worth more than $8 dollars an hour and I would never have considered asking for more.  I used the job to clear my tax debt and a little bit more, and then saved up money to move out of Mason and back to my childhood home of Liberty Twp.  I stayed on at the fast-food restaurant working to make extra money for some time after so to get out in front of our financial condition.  $8 dollars an hour becomes quite a lot of money when you don’t drive a car and your wife is at home teaching your children.  The household expenses go down rapidly when you are not part of the system.  And a good bit of savings can be generated while working fast food.

A “living wage” as the communist labor unions advocate is attempting to do the same thing they’ve done to the teaching profession and virtually every endeavor that they are a part of.  They set artificially high values for their labor that is built purely on monopoly power.  In fast-food, they know they cannot obtain that monopoly unless they get all the workers in that industry to buy in to their scheme.  Fortunately for America, that plan will fail.  If twenty fast food workers decide to strike from a local McDonald’s, there are always people like me who will step in and take the money that is left in the void, and can do four jobs all by myself.  It would make me happy to do it just to keep prices low on the hamburgers we buy.  There is no shame in it, but only advantage, for what I’m talking about are the benefits of capitalism—a concept that labor unions do not understand, and despise with every cell in their bodies.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

The Lakota School Wedding Crashers: Levy supporters late to the party and pretentious

I’ve given my two daughters both nice weddings.  One had her wedding at a nice country club setting that was very private.  That was a great experience and has fond memories.  The other was one that took place near downtown Cincinnati in a nice establishment specializing in wedding receptions, and often hosts multiple weddings in the same building.  When my daughter had her wedding at this facility, there were four other weddings going on in the same building and that I didn’t care for.  The place we were holding the wedding was very posh and elegant, but the lack of exclusivity made me perpetually uneasy.  I didn’t like it.

Our wedding reception went on for quite a while and was the last of the multiple weddings to yield to the night.  With that said as the music was thumping and our dance floor was crowded a group of guys from another wedding which had just ended came into our wedding looking for some fun, alcohol, and action.  Well, that was a big mistake, because this is my family, my nieces, and friends of my daughters, not some random pieces of meat for young men to fondle, and I wasn’t going to stand for it.  So I told the boys to get lost, that I wasn’t going to tolerate any wedding crashers.    They insisted that they just wanted to have a good time, and that I should reconsider.  I told them flatly, “NO.”  It was my money, my family, and my decision, end of story.

The boys left with their heads hung with rejection.  They couldn’t help but notice the attractive women in my family and cussed at themselves for the lost opportunities.  However, little did they know or understand that part of the reason there were so many attractive women in my family is because there are men like me who fight to give them some sanctuary to reside within, who keep them from being just cheap pieces of meat for the use of young boys looking for conquest.  Some members of my family thought I was too hard on the boys, and thought the wedding would be a lot more fun if a massive party erupted and I was the “cool” type who allowed wedding crashers to liven things up with their spontaneity.  But I’m not that kind of guy and if I’m spending thousands of dollars on a reception center for my daughter’s wedding, it will be the way she wants it—and wedding crashers didn’t fit the profile.

I spent about the same amount of money on that reception hall as I do in taxes for the Lakota school system each year which is the public school in my area.   Yet just last night embolden by events at the Lakota football games where the school had a booth set up passing out campaign signs for their upcoming levy attempt, several emails and comments came my way from levy addict supporters who were charged up with “school pride” established at the football game.  The message to me was that if I didn’t like the tax increase then I should move out of the community.  Click the link below to see one of those comments and my response.

 http://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/lakota-schools-does-not-need-a-school-levy-meet-the-new-carriage-hill-development/#comment-38777

To me, those types of people are like those kids who wanted to crash my daughter’s wedding.  I graduated from Lakota many years ago and have lived in the area most of my life.  When I was a kid I grew up in a house along 747 when it was farmland for as far as the eye could see.  My home was on the kind of land that the Carriage Hill homeowners are paying 150K per plot to own today.  But I lived on such anchorage when very few homes could be seen from my front yard.  Traffic down 747 had the character of a distant country road.  My boyhood home is gone now replaced by a strip mall that one of the guys in my group No Lakota Levy built.  I didn’t always get along with those guys, but we did join together to fight the Lakota schools massive taxation plans for a community we had all been in from the beginning.  I have watched many new homes move into the area who are willing to pay extraordinary amounts of money to have essentially what I had as a kid—and that’s fine.   I understand wanting to have the best for families.

But when snot nosed despots move into the area with about a 5 second investment of their time and resources into my community then tell me I need to move, I think back to the kind of mentality that was exhibited by those wedding crashers at my daughter’s wedding that I had to run off.  These new pretentious homeowners who have moved into the Lakota community and overpaid for their properties due to their own stupidity, and arrogance are wedding crashers in the Lakota community relative to my position.  I am the one who paid for everything with my years of tax revenue contributed, and I helped shape the school into what it is with my participation in it, because I attended there.  So it’s my business if I want to tell the Lakota administration they are full of shit and need to manage their money better.  And if I want to call the levy supporters a bunch of pretentious latté sipping prostitutes with asses the size of car tires, and diamond rings to match—I will do it, and I have a right to do it—because it’s my community and I’ve invested a lot more in it than they have.

The levy supporters think that just because they show up in Lakota and purchase a half million dollar home on a quarter acre plot of land that they have some right to tell people like me to move if I don’t like their intentions to vote for higher taxes.  They are just as stupid and immature as those wedding crashing young men who thought they could come to my daughter’s wedding and play out some fantasy of what they saw in a movie.  In that fantasy they thought I’d sit idly by while they grabbed the asses of the women attending and had a jolly time drinking from the bar while I paid for everything and quietly sat in a corner and acted like the out-of-touch middle-ager they thought I was.    To their mindset I was old, and I had my day in the sun, and I should sacrifice myself to the youth so they could have their fun, and memories which they wanted to make at my expense.  The same mentality is present with the wedding crashers of Lakota.  A bunch of pretentious snobs have moved into the area and think that their little 7 to 8-year-old children should have infinite resources and that the community should spare no expense for their pleasure.  They are of course wrong.

I spend as much money in taxes on Lakota every year as I did on just that dance hall for my daughter’s wedding.  So it should come as no surprise what my response to the wedding crashers of Lakota is.  To me they are mindless zombies who don’t consider what the cost of a tax increase will do to the community, but only indulge in their own short-term desire to fill their bellies, and they have no right to make any demands, let alone move into my community then tell me to move out if I don’t like their decisions.  That is not how the world works.

If that is the levy strategy concocted at the Friday night football games by the pro levy crowd, good luck.  I’m not the only one who feels that way.  To most who live in the Lakota community, they see the levy zombies the same way I do, as wedding crashers.  Those types of people—the wedding crashers do not care for all the events that led up to the wedding, they only want to attend the party once everyone else has done the work.  In Lakota, few have done more work than I have, and few have the concerns of Liberty Twp., in their blood more than I.  So it naturally disgusts me to see pretentious, short-sighted snobs enter the arena of debate with demands for higher taxes to cover a neurosis that resides deep within their psychological imperfections.  I do not tolerate “community crashers,” especially when I’m paying the bill.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

War in Syria: The real cause of chemical weapons in control of terrorists and dictators

I am not a supporter of military engagement in Syria by America.  If “they” do so, “they” will do it without my backing.  If “my” military must engage in the long mismanaged debacle in Syria, it is due to the incompetence of our own government—driven by progressive politics that does not represent me—but has “progressed” along to do their own thing for global reasons.  By saying such a thing I understand that the “establishment” will attempt to label people like me as a radical for not supporting our military—but so what.  I could care less.  To understand why, watch and listen to every video on this article so that you too may come to understand the real intentions, and meaning of the Syrian military engagement and what is really behind it.

Few recently have even contemplated how Syria acquired the supposed “chemical weapons” to begin with, which has set off this whole debate.  As to the question as to why America must become involved in Syria the reason is that it is highly likely the weapons came from American CIA involvement to begin with.  Here’s why:

As reported in the New York Sun on January 26, 2006:

“‘There are weapons of mass destruction gone out from Iraq to Syria, and they must be found and returned to safe hands,’ Mr. Sada said. ‘I am confident they were taken over.’”

“Mr. Sada’s comments come just more than a month after Israel’s top general during Operation Iraqi Freedom, Moshe Yaalon, told the Sun that Saddam ‘transferred the chemical agents from Iraq to Syria.’

“Democrats have made the absence of stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq a theme in their criticism of the Bush administration’s decision to go to war in 2003…

“The discovery of the weapons in Syria could alter the American political debate on the Iraq war. And even the accusations that they are there could step up international pressure on the government in Damascus. That government, led by Bashar Assad, is already facing a UN investigation over its alleged role in the assassination of a former prime minister of Lebanon. The Bush administration has criticized Syria for its support of terrorism and its failure to cooperate with the UN investigation.”

In September of 2002, Reid is quoted as saying:

“Saddam Hussein has, in effect, thumbed his nose at the world community, and I think the President is approaching this in the right fashion.”

And then in October of 2002, he said:

“We stopped the fighting [in 1991] on an agreement that Iraq would take steps to assure the world that it would not engage in further aggression and that it would destroy its weapons of mass destruction. It has refused to take those steps. That refusal constitutes a breach of the armistice which renders it void and justifies resumption of the armed conflict.”

And then, finally, in 2008, said:

“Now I believe, myself, that the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense…and you have to make your own decisions about what the President knows…is that this war is lost and that the surge is not accomplishing anything, as is indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday.”

I would also be equally nervous if I were Nancy Pelosi, who in December of 1998,said on her congressional website:

“Saddam Hussein has been engaged in the development of weapons of mass destruction technology which is a threat to countries in the region and he has made a mockery of the weapons inspection process.”

And who then said in May of 2004:

“I believe that the president’s leadership in the actions taken in Iraq demonstrate an incompetence in terms of knowledge, judgment and experience in making the decisions that would have been necessary to truly accomplish the mission without the deaths to our troops and the cost to our taxpayers…”

Read more details about this issue at the link below.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Peace/2012/07/14/And-where-did-syrias-chemical-weapons

But how did the weapons get to Iraq?  Well, many have long forgotten that Saddam Hussein was put in place by American desire to send Iraq into war with Iran, and the weapons likely were given to him by America, directly or indirectly, to off-set the Iranians during the Iran, Iraq war.  From 1980 to 1988 Donald Rumsfeld could be seen shaking hands with Saddam Hussein openly showing support for Iraq.

Tensions between Iran and Iraq were fueled by Iran’s Islamic revolution and its appearance of being a Pan-Islamic force, in contrast to Iraq’s Arab nationalism. Despite Iraq’s goals of regaining the Shatt al-Arab,[note 2] the Iraqi government seemed to initially welcome Iran’s Revolution, which overthrew Iran’s Shah, who was seen as a common enemy.[4][25] It is difficult to pinpoint when tensions began to build, but there were some cross border skirmishes, including when Iraqi aircraft bombed an Iranian village that anti-Iraqi Kurds allegedly hid in on June 1979.[31]

After this incident, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini called on Iraqis to overthrow the Ba’ath government, and it was received with considerable anger in Baghdad.[25] On 17 July 1979, despite Khomeini’s call, Saddam gave a speech praising the Iranian Revolution and called for an Iraqi-Iranian friendship based on non-interference in each other’s internal affairs.[25] When Khomeini rejected Saddam’s overture by calling for Islamic revolution [17] in Iraq, Saddam was alarmed.[25] Iran’s new Islamic administration was regarded in Baghdad as an irrational, existential threat to the Ba’ath government, especially because the Ba’ath party, having a secular nature, discriminated and posed a threat to the Shia movement in Iraq, whose clerics were Iran’s allies within Iraq and whom Khomeini saw as oppressed.[25] Some scholars have argued that Iranian-backed attacks and cross-border raids on Iraqi territory compelled Iraq to launch a preemptive invasion.[32]

However, Iraq’s regime was very politically secure, and in little danger of being overthrown by alleged plots of revolution-wracked Iran.[17] According to some sources, Khomeini’s hostility towards Saddam was actually milder than his Arab neighbors hostility towards Saddam.[33] Saddam’s primary interest in war stemmed from his desire to right the supposed “wrong” of the Algiers Agreement, in addition to finally achieving his desire of annexing Khuzestan and becoming the regional superpower.[17] Saddam’s goal was to replace Egypt as the “leader of the Arab world” and to achieve hegemony over the Persian Gulf.[34] He saw Iran’s increased weakness due to revolution, sanctions, and international isolation.[27] Saddam had heavily invested in Iraq’s military since his defeat against Iran in 1975, buying large amounts of weapons from the Soviet Union and France. By 1980, Iraq possessed 200,000 soldiers, 2,000 tanks and 450 aircraft.[4]:1 Watching the powerful Iranian army that frustrated him in 1974–1975 disintegrate, he saw an opportunity to attack, using the threat of Islamic Revolution as a pretext.[4][35]

Read all about that war at the link below, which also has a nice picture of Rumsfeld and Hussein warmly greeting one another.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2Iraq_War

It would appear that once the relationship disintegrated between America and Iraq leading to two wars in two subsequent decades, the Iraq’s chemical weapons were stored across the border in Syria so that UN inspectors would not discover them leading up to the war with Iraq during 2003.  America knew Iraq had the weapons because they allegedly supplied them, even if they couldn’t find them.  That was because Hussein’s buddy Assad was storing them in Syria.

But years later after America had finally removed Hussein from control of Iraq, the modern progressives went to work on Assad.  This is how John Kerry as a senator was seen dinning with Assad as their wives gathered to discuss all the fine shopping options in Syria.    A photo is going viral (GO AHEAD, CLICK ON THE LINK) showing the Kerrys and the Assads enjoying quite the intimate dinner in 2009.

Kerry was leading a delegation to Syria to discuss peace in the region at the time. According to French news agency AFP, Assad told Kerry during that visit that America needed a “proper understanding” of issues Syria faces.

Kerry has met with Assad on numerous occasions and once lauded Assad in 2011 as being a “very generous” man, according to the Weekly Standard.

“Well, I personally believe that — I mean, this is my belief, okay?” Kerry said. “But President Assad has been very generous with me in terms of the discussions we have had. And when I last went to — the last several trips to Syria — I asked President Assad to do certain things to build the relationship with the United States and sort of show the good faith that

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/08/28/john-kerry-wasnt-always-so-harsh-to-syrian-president-assad/

Now that all the progressive manipulation in the Middle East region has come to fruition it is time to cash in on the years of investment and wash everyone’s hands of the evidence.  That is the cause of most conflicts between nations, when governments have to clean up their mistakes from the past.  War is the great eraser which wipes away the sins of history—the manipulation of progressives in a region designed to advance their agenda.

The current situation in America is that Obama has a trail of scandals behind him and is falling in the polls.  The Republicans are terrified of getting stuck in a budget battle in September, so all the statists in the American government need something to avoid the justice seeking their careers.  War is the great unifier which often brings together members of all political parties under a common flag.  After all, that is the mantra of the Skull and Bones Society.  Military action of any kind is an attempt by the current government in America to erase years of mistakes they have made following interests that do not reflect The Constitution.  I do not trust the American government to do the right thing, so I certainly don’t trust them to spend lives and limb to erase their errors at a cost I provide with tax money.

I’m all for providing humanitarian aid, but the poor people of Syria are only a small group of people in the grand scheme of the world where millions upon millions of people suffer under governments not advocating capitalism.  Military engagements to help rebels who are built by terrorists to help former friends of Saddam Hussein is a no win situation that will not bring about justice, but only serve to allow the current government in America full of statists, progressives, and open socialists to cover the sins of their mismanagement of the Middle East region.  So I do not support military engagement in Syria.  If the U.N. wants to see justice there, let them use their own troops not supported by America do so, and see how far that goes.  I am not open to allowing the United Nations to believe they have authority over Syria by dragging America into a war so that they can take the credit for justice at our expense.  Syria is a mistake and will only serve to allow the bad guys to hide just a little while longer, and many of those bad guys, are in the American government.  They cannot be trusted to do the right things…………because if they could be, there wouldn’t be chemical weapons in Syria to begin with.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

Doc Thompson Blasts Public Education and Common Core: Entertainment and Education tag team children behind parents backs

The harsher reality to the presidency of Barack Obama is not just that he is a manipulative saboteur of American ideals who supports socialism over capitalism, but he was elected as a representative of a large number of the American public—people who enjoy welfare support, think the Miley Cyrus stunt at the recent MTV awards was cool, and loves intoxication, drug abuse, and alternative sexual practices.  The worse realization about the Obama administration is that it represents a growing number of Americans.  The origin of how those people came to be such a group of degenerates is harder to pin down because it forces an admission that is difficult to acknowledge.  The minds making up the typical modern progressive described started at the same point as everyone else, small children born of a mother and a father.  But the path that delivers such minds to fish net stocking wearing voters dressed in drag voting for Obama and his free government “stuff” is different from those who tend to find such personal philosophies repulsive.  Those differences of course start in a child’s home and are determined by their parents.  But beyond that, it is public education that destroys the minds of young people and corrupts them well into their adulthoods.  Public schools are breeding grounds for progressive philosophy and are dangerous.  They have been for a long time, but it has only been the last couple of years where such admissions have begun to be made.  Doc Thompson and his producer Skip on The Blaze Radio Network dedicated an entire hour and a half to the topic of public education corruption which can be heard at the clip below.  It is worth the time to listen to, because they cover Common Core instruction during the beginning then allow the discussion to evolve into the aim of public schools—which is to educate and create progressive citizens—who wishes to work against traditional America.  Have a listen! This is classic radio and you should take the time to listen to the whole thing.  

Public schools are incubators for social change—the kind of change that would rather see a child attend a Rocky Horror Picture Show screening at midnight in some dank college campus movie theater rather than attend church on Sunday to worship the teachings of Jesus Christ.  So it should come as no surprise that kids after twelve to thirteen years of public school education arrive at 18 years of age unprepared to do anything of any responsibly as an adult, because progressive education teaches personal irresponsibility.  Public school educations are destructive, and do ruin the minds of the attendees.

The tough admission is that almost every American comes from public schools and to arrive at the conclusion that it is there many of the stupid ideas which lead to presidents like Obama sitting in The White House are born.  Public schools are for most parents free baby sitting services which gives the illusion of positive social instruction, so it is hard for parents to blame the progressive tendencies of their children on “the baby sitter” because it forces acknowledging that they must take action to help save their children.  For many parents this means they have to make decisions that will likely cost them money…………..and time, which often they have neither.  So they are stuck sending their children to their local public school and they put on blinders to the faults of the institution because they do not have the mental or financial capacity to solve the problem.

Public schools consume enormous amounts of tax money which strip away the expendable cash that these same parents could use to send their children to a private conservative school—so to undo the progressive instruction otherwise given.  This leaves parents with no options but to hold their nose and support their local public school just because it’s near their home.  Parents do not have a choice because public education is a monopoly.  They suppress competition and openly destroy the minds of individual children leaving the consumers and suppliers with no choices.  When a child complains to their parent that the public school is a bad place, the parent has only one choice but to instruct the child that life is unfair, and that they need to learn to live with their displeasure.  This begins a chain reaction that slowly begins to destroy the lives of those children from that day on.

Three years ago Doc Thompson did not have a microphone that allowed him to discuss public education to such a degree as he has in the broadcast above.  Radio stations that employed him would have feared losing their FCC license—which further solidifies the public education government controlled monopoly.  Criticism of public education was nearly non-existent leaving millions of desperate souls to anguish over their unacknowledged fears regarding the intentions of public education.  But now, popular radio personalities like Doc Thompson are free to delve honestly into the evils of public education in several game changing broadcasts that are routine on The Blaze Radio Network.  It will take a while to change the culture of acceptance which public education has enjoyed using their monopoly to invoke on witless students the aptitude of a destructive progressive education.  But the start of such dismantling, and reinvigoration comes from the understanding that something is terribly wrong and should be corrected in order to save future generations.  A large portion of our modern youth are lost and will never recover.  They will continue to vote for politicians like Barack Obama because they have been trained in progressive statism.  Many of those same types were seen screaming after Miley Cyrus and her sexual antics on MTV that raised the eyebrows of many concerned parents.  Someday those former students will have children and life will beat their progressive educations out of them, and they will recover to some extent to live decent lives—if they are the fortunate few.  But their minds cannot be recovered fully as they were handicapped as children in public education.  However, if our society acts now, it may be possible that twenty years from now, public education and its impact on society will be greatly diminished allowing more people to rise to new emotional and intellectual heights.  At that time, the voting population will become better and vote for better representatives because the quality of their mind will be improved.

It is not enough to just proclaim the name of the problem.  Once known, it must be acted upon, and slowly over a fairly short period of time, radio broadcasts like the one Doc and Skip produced are changing minds, and forcing admissions.  Those admissions are difficult, but they are healthy.  Nobody said that doing the right things would be easy, or convenient.  But for the health of all our futures, we must do the right thing, and that is realize that public education is a corrosive endeavor that is laced with vile thoughts and teachings—which should be sanctioned from tax dollars.  Any group, even progressives should be allowed to compete equally in the battlefield of ideas, but citizens should not be forced to pay for such things with money extorted from them through taxation under force of a monopoly.  That is the greatest evil of public education, and the reason that it must be changed—options create competition and allows evil ideas like progressivism to be crushed out of existence in direct interaction with ideas which actually work.  Progressives claim that they have the superior mode of thinking, yet they can only convince others of such a claim through monopoly status by eliminating competing modes of thinking.  The first step in destroying such a tyrannical hold on the minds of our society’s youth is to destroy the monopoly that backs public education, and to introduce new ideas—ideas that are born out of the wreckage of the old—a public education system designed to put presidents like Obama into office for aims that are not American.

Now to explain a bit, “artistically” what was going on at the MTV event where Miley Cyrus was paraded about like a slut for the advancement of progressive causes.  Watching her performance I was reminded of two other events, the Janet Jackson Super Bowl stunt where she had her top ripped off to expose her breasts, then the famous kiss between Britney Spears and Madonna.   What all three women had in common was that the “public” thought of them as good girls.  Miley Cyrus and Britney Spears are graduates of the Disney Channel and were examples of nice wholesome teenage girls.  Progressive backed money was poured into entertainment, and it can make these girls do whatever the financiers’ desire like prostitutes working for an escort service.   Miley Cyrus was coached into performing the dance routine which was all very carefully designed.  Cyrus was placed on stage to rip from millions of youthful girls the innocent image of Cyrus as a Disney girl.  The dance routine was set up with the teddy bears looking not quite so innocent so to show on stage that Miley Cyrus had lost any resemblance of her youthful innocence and was no longer a little girl.  The act has been repeated for several decades now and is constructed by the same minds that stand behind Common Core education.  To understand what investors into Miley Cyrus’s record label believe, and MTV’s investment in the event, listen hard to the broadcast from Doc Thompson and his producer Skip shown above.  They have the answer.  Miley Cyrus is simply a paid spokesman for progressive causes, and she was established by an entertainment culture infused with “political progressive” money to unlock the teaching instructed to children in public schools.  Former Disney personalities are targeted because of their naturally high-profile, with foundations in family entertainment that Disney is known for.  This makes them very important in reaching the proper demographic groups with the ritual understanding of merging from childhood to adulthood through sexual practice.  Since the government profits off of misconduct through sexual recklessness, this is to their advantage.    

When people believe that Bill Gates is behind Common Core and is a good man, so Common Core must be good, consider again that Common Core computers only run on Window’s operated machines, Macintosh computers will not work.  So part of the implementation of Common Core in public schools is to support the sale of Windows operating systems over Macs.   That in itself isn’t bad, but the minds who shape the Common Core agenda for which Gates latches himself on to, in order to make a deal that will launch Microsoft driven computers into every school in America are the same minds who take the innocent greed of a young woman named Miley Cyrus and tell her that they’ll fund her record and image if she’ll dance half naked on stage with stoned looking teddy bears and sell herself to the public.  Bill Gates and Miley Cyrus think they are cleaver and astute business people taking advantage of the glories of capitalism to advance themselves.  But what they don’t see is the progressive puppet masters who have shaped the battlefield in both entertainment and education for the same intentions, to break down the traditional American family and revise the minds of youth to sexual deviancy which pushes them away from parental care and into the loving, manipulative arms of mother government, and the sinister plots of doom which were touched up in the classic novel Brave New World.   Now considering those things, listen to Doc Thompson recite the specifics of Common Core education to second and third grade students, and consider what the real intention of public education is in America.   The Miley Cyrus MTV event was the result, but the cause started in the classrooms of America’s government schools, and the plots of progressive politics that are behind nearly every single institution.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

‘For the Record’ On The Blaze TV: Hosted By Laurie Dhue, exploring the depth of the NSA

The Blaze Television is one of the most cutting edge programs produced today and is the latest project of Laurie Dhue.  She left Fox News to work for her new employer Glenn Beck.  Watch this stunning episode and share it with a friend on the extreme depth of the NSA and how it affects your life. 

The level of domestic surveillance in the United States has reached such shocking levels in the post-9/11 world that people will find it hard to fathom, said Laurie Dhue, host of TheBlaze TV’s new investigative series “For the Record.” The show’s first episode, “Surveillance State.”

“I think this is going to open a lot of people’s eyes…people will be absolutely shocked to know that things have gotten even less transparent in the last 10 years — there’s even more surveillance going on than ever before,” Dhue told Beck on his radio show.

The show reveals how the National Security Agency transformed from its stated purpose of foreign intelligence gathering into an arm to listen in on U.S. citizens — all on the taxpayer’s dime.

“After 9/11 the spigots just opened, money continued to flow in the NSA. The NSA got everything it wanted, and the taxpayers basically just got taken to the cleaners,” Dhue said.

What information the government collects, they keep — including in a massive Utah facility slated for completion earlier this year, Dhue said.

“This is all being done in the name of protection, in the name of keeping us safe. But it’s scary stuff when you think about it,” Dhue told Beck.

Read more here:

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/03/13/people-will-be-absolutely-shocked-beck-interviews-the-host-of-for-the-record-ahead-of-tonights-premiere/

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

The Goodness of Being “White and Nerdy”: An untapped resource waiting to explode

Since receiving the new game X-Wing Miniatures, I have been reading the rule book extensively and mock playing several games against myself so I can understand all the different scenarios.  I find the game endlessly intriguing, and an amazing achievement.  It is fun, fast, and free in many ways that sustain the best attributes of a gaming experience.  I simply love it.  My wife with a polite jest asked me as we were logging on the other day to play Star Wars: The Old Republic as I was reading the X-Wing rule book, if we were being “White and Nerdy”—a reference to the old Weird Al Yankovic satirical song.  I told her, “absolutely, and proud of it!”  At the current moment I have a number of very key strategies in real life that are being played out and I have learned that over time, the best way for me to stay engaged and keep my mind sharp enough to deal with things on a large-scale is to give my mind a vacation while in the heat of the events.  By means of vacation I don’t mean a physical vacation which we take often enough—and costs many thousands of dollars every time we do it.  I mean a vacation that the mind enjoys, and during the year 2013 that has been The Old Republic which she and I play often.  We enjoy our short trips to the Star Wars galaxy and they are always beneficial.  But of late, I have found the new X-Wing Miniatures strategy game to be even more intriguing, and infinitely fascinating.

It can’t be missed that even though Weird Al is poking fun at nerds in his music video of “White and Nerdy” that many of the attributes exhibited in the video are good ones, intelligence, moral aptitude, social innocence, creativity among them.  And the humor of that video is that it is more or less true.  I know, and have known a lot of nerds, and they are like the people in the “White and Nerdy” video.  However since that video came out, “White and Nerdy” types have not declined in number throughout American society, but have rather increased.  To get a sample, just visit Gen Con in Indianapolis each August and meet the members of the “gaming” culture, people who enjoy strategy games to a larger extent than I do.  They are people who spend even more time playing The Old Republic than my wife and I, and they are every bit into the new Star Wars Miniatures strategy game.

Outsiders might say that the gaming industry is being driven by a desire for escapism—that many of those “gamers” would rather play Dungeons and Dragons than participate in the political process.  It is highly likely that many of the people who attended this year’s Gen Con did not vote for Mitt Romney or Barack Obama in the last election, and instead played games from Fantasy Flight around their kitchen tables.  So that demographic is being overlooked in poll counts.  These “White and Nerdy” types are not watching Fox News, CNN, or showing up for President Obama’s latest diatribes about education funding.  Most of them find the entire political process repulsive, and have elected to drop out of it all together.  They are either currant Ron Paul supporters, or future supporters of his son, Rand.  And until the political machine gives them the kind of candidate they can get excited about, they will spend their time and effort of leisure playing the kind of games sold at Gen Con.  Listen to the following broadcast about gaming from the guys at Mos Eisley Radio to get some perspective.

Playing these kinds of games is not an escape from reality in the same way that watching television is, or watching sports.  I know a lot of mainstream people who get very excited about their Fantasy Football picks or their latest score on a golf course.  The people who play games like Star Wars X-Wing Miniatures are choosing to spend their leisure time in a very thinking type of scenario.  You have to enjoy thinking to be good at a game like X-Wing Miniatures.  For me that is the grand appeal.  I simply love that game.  At 2013’s Gen Con Fantasy Flight Games who produce the X-Wing Miniatures game made a grand announcement, displaying for the first time they are taking the epic table top game and “going big” with it.  They are producing the Tantive IV corvette and the Rebel Transport in a scale that has not been seen in any strategy game.  The enthusiasm present upon that announcement can be seen in the interview below.  The prospect of playing a game that features those large ships in a strategy format is very exciting to me.  I am already planning giant matches that take up specially made tabletops taking up entire basements.  It was in reviewing these recent announcements that provoked me to read so intensely the X-Wing rule book.

Tantive IV

“Tear this ship apart until you’ve found those plans and bring me the passengers. I want them alive!”

–Darth Vader, Star Wars: A New Hope

The Tantive IV is perhaps the most famous of all CR90 corvettes. Not only that, it is the first starship to appear in the classic Star Wars trilogy. We see it fly across the screen, racing from right to left across the bright surface of Tatooine, firing its rear lasers, until the shape of its hull is nearly lost behind the glow of its eleven ion turbine engines.

Coming soon to X-Wing, the Tantive IV Expansion Pack allows you to command the starship that first hooked us into the greatest space opera of all time!

Designed for use in Cinematic Play and the new Epic tournament format, the Tantive IV miniature doesn’t match the 1/270 scale shared by those starships legal within the game’s standard tournament format. Instead, this carefully detailed and pre-painted miniature is sculpted at a relative scale that feels good on the tabletop, alongside the game’s starfighters and other huge ships. In addition to the miniature, the expansion features new missions that promote deeply thematic play experiences, whether played individually or linked into a larger campaign, and Imperial players will have their chance to try to capture this notorious Rebel blockade runner.

The Tantive IV won’t be legal for standard tournaments, but you’ll be able to bring it to battle in both the Cinematic Play and Epic tournament format. Furthermore, you’ll gain the opportunity to crew it with the indomitable Rebel hero, Leia Organa!

Rebel Transport

“The first transport is away.”

–Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back

When the Empire launched a massive assault against the Rebellion’s Echo Base, it dealt the Rebel Alliance a tremendous blow. Still, the Rebellion’s losses could have been much greater. They were lucky to escape with the majority of their command structure intact, and the very fact the Rebellion was able to continue its liberation efforts after the battle owed much to the GR-75 medium transport and the role it played during the famous evacuation effort.

With new rules, one Rebel transport miniature, one X-wing miniature with an alternate paint scheme, and a wealth of new ship cards, upgrades, and missions, the Rebel Transport Expansion Pack allows you to recreate the drama of the Rebellion’s desperate escape from Hoth.

Like the Tantive IV, the Rebel transport is too large for standard tournament play. Smaller than the CR90 corvette, the GR-75 medium transport is nonetheless large enough to dwarf its starfighter escorts. Even though the Rebel transport is depicted at a scale that allows you to maneuver it in battle, it is still so large that it comes with multiple new damage decks to track hits against different sections of its hull.

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_news.asp?eidn=4312

I thoroughly enjoy the kind of people who attend Gen Con, even though they tend not to be intensely social, or politically active.  For them, playing those types of games are done for the same reason I do it, to preserve their mind in a rebellion against a society that looks down on those who are “White and Nerdy,” or otherwise, those who wish to think, and be genuinely good people.  I have seldom encountered another person who attends Gen Con regularly and spends their spare time playing games like this to be overtly “bad,” or “malicious.” They are genuinely good, as their hobby is “thinking.”  These games just give them the mechanism to do so in an entertaining format.

If games like X-Wing Miniatures were not so popular then the game would not be expanding into a large format with the new ships discussed above.  So the delight is two-fold when hearing these kinds of announcements.  First, it is nice to see creativity permeating our culture in such a positive way.  Second, it is nice to see so many people excited about it.  It is nice to see people genuinely happy about something that doesn’t involve drugs, sex, or debauchery, but does involve thinking.  The demographic of “White and Nerdy” types who love Gen Con, and share with me a passion for X-Wing are a group who at some point will become interested in what is going on in the “outside world.”  That time will come when they don’t have money for Gen Con any longer, or have the ability to stay up all night playing X-Wing or The Old Republic.  For a government addicted to statism, many of these game players use fantasy strategy to give themselves a vacation away from the types of people who are not “White and Nerdy” and are willing to avoid them to keep the peace.  But, when it comes a time that those “White and Nerdy” types can no longer enjoy their leisure time, then the ramifications will not be pleasant for the establishment. The future largest demographic growth sector is not women voters, Latinos, or even African Americans…………it is the “White and Nerdy” types who simply want to be left alone to think, but if prevented, can become the statist’s worst nightmare.    It is unwise to ignore them.  Because they are smart!  And they “think” as a hobby, something that modern politics requires people to avoid.

Mechanisms like these types of games work in tandem with difficult real life strategies because they are essentially “concept” building exercises.  As I’ve explained in these pages on previous articles, before any idea in real life can be understood, it must be held as a “concept.”  A concept is like a bowl holding water.  The bigger the bowl, the more water it holds.  If the bowl is too small, it can only hold so much water.  If a concept is too small, it cannot hold big ideas or strategies that are required to solve complicated problems.  These days, small concepts are advocated by statism so much of society does not have the ability to hold large concepts in their minds.  They cannot wrap their thoughts around them.  By playing games like X-Wing Miniatures or some other variation of strategy game the practice of “concept building” is exercised allowing a mind to hold larger ideals.  This is why these kinds of games are a tremendous benefit to the people who play them, and those who don’t are always at a tactical disadvantage.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

State of the Union at Lakota: The compliment of silance

I know a great deal about human behavior and would happily argue with the most respected minds in the fields of psychology and psychiatry regarding their theories wherever they came from in the world.  I learned what I know because I’ve been around the block so many times that I have every brick, and crack memorized around that block.  On my blog postings I openly invite comments, but there often isn’t any.  This isn’t because people aren’t reading—they are.  Just watch the daily counter off on the sidebar.  However, in the world of strategy, silence is the best compliment.  When “they” can’t beat you—whoever “they” may be, the only tactical option available to them is to ignore you and hope that social castigation will dislodge a deep-seated insecurity taking you out-of-the-way of “their” objectives.

Over the summer while on vacation in Florida my nephews and I had an intelligent conversation about human nature while throwing football in the condo swimming pool.  One of my highly educated nephews argued that human beings are social creatures and needed to be brought together in optimal ways to manage peace and harmony in society, even if those instances are sometimes coerced by government.  Of course I disagreed vehemently with that statement, not because he was wrong, but because that is only part of the issue.  He is right; human beings are a social species.  They learn from babies to mimic others and this is how we all start in life.  99.99999999999999999999999% of all human beings continue that destructive practice well into their adulthood—so he is right, humans are a social species.  But my argument is that humans are destined at some point in their life to graduate from this way of thinking as the mind takes over what the social connections cannot provide and becomes a freely functioning entity of its own.  I am this kind of person.  I do not need the approval of anybody to make a decision, and this is a radical concept to most.  I am able to function without social input based on the product of my own thinking.  I do not need to consul, collaborate, or gain assurances about my decisions about my private life.  It is a learned trait that I would argue every human being should strive for—but it takes courage—like a child learning to walk on their own for the first time.  Human beings need to be able to function off the products of their own mind—but often they don’t.  Instead, they gather together in clumps of social organisms like our primitive ancestors around a fire and wait for some village chieftain to instruct them what to do next.  This is how we get into the political messes we are currently in.

The reason for this elaborate introduction is to explain this next phase in the Lakota school district levy fights and why things are the way they are.  It might be noticed that the newspapers and I have very little to say to each other these days.  I have thoroughly insulted the press and would not expect them to solicit my thoughts, but at this point it no longer matters.  I have made my decisions based on the observed conditions, and the strategy of current was formulated on those observations.  With that said, I offer this small article as an explanation for those curious.  It gets back to me what Lakota administrators say when they think the doors are closed and the phone lines are secure.  I know they are frustrated with me for being a “bomb thrower” and working from the outside instead of partaking in their structured manner, so this is more directed at them than my normal readers so that they can understand what is happening and why.

In past levy attempts I tried to work with Lakota in the traditional way.  I came to the school board meetings and allowed compliance of their silly two-minute rule where the board members pretend to be in control of a courtroom setting by “allowing” members of the community to speak to them as though they were royal nobles of some sort.   When I was acting as a spokesman for No Lakota Levy I put up with this behavior to respect the wishes of the members who wanted to see the levy defeated without fracturing their social relationships with Lakota.  I did not like the social schmoozing that went on in the early days of my involvement.  I also took note that as I began to go on the radio and television to argue the case of No Lakota Levy, those members did not want to sit near me at the school board meetings as they feared members of the Lakota community recognizing that we were all on the same team.  They enjoyed the benefits of my tactics but wanted to maintain their social status with the same people from the other side of the political aisle.  After a couple of levy defeats under my strategy, those fears began to relax a bit.  People were less resistant to acknowledge their association with me as I had several victories under my belt at that time—and people love a winner.  So people began to sit next to me at meetings and say hello in public.  But not until then.

I went out of my way to speak with people from the other side like Ron Spurlock who was the acting superintendent until Mantia came along, Jenni Logan, the treasurer, and Linda O’Conner.  I was happy to speak to them in a civil manner even though we agreed on very little.  But I knew it wouldn’t last because the behavior wasn’t changing which put them in trouble.  As nice of a man as Ron Spurlock was, he felt woefully slack during handshakes and he looked away a lot when I spoke to him.  This was because he was in internal conflict.

At this point everyone in town was trying to advocate that I run for school board and become politically active.  They still suggest the same when it comes to trustee spots and other high-profile political offices locally.  Yet the strategy to the kind of victory I am after cannot be obtained in that fashion, so I never had any intention of indulging in that activity which frustrated people who want changes to the system within the system.  When Mantia was hired essentially by Linda after all the discussions we had, I saw the direction that the school board was going.  They hired a political divider who would come in and play all ends against the middle where Lakota would control the strategic high ground.  Immediately that is what Mantia went on to do leaving Ron Spurlock to retire and stay on at Lakota as a consultant.  Mantia came to a late night meeting with the key people of No Lakota Levy assuring us that she would do one thing if the levy failed, then she did another when that reality presented itself.  Within a month of the levy failure Lakota was in full political mode.  Mantia did not perform as a business mind, but as a progressive radical politician, and went straight to the type of levy passing tactics that was taught at the OSBA’s Levy University.

I came to one of the meetings announcing Lakota’s cuts and as Channel 19 was interviewing me in the main hallway at Lakota East, Mantia stood off to the side like she wanted to speak to me.  When I made eye contact after the interview she looked away and hustled into the auditorium.  It was a strange engagement that I noted for later.  Then I saw Ron Spurlock who was approaching a man who was well-known at Lakota in the band circles—a popular guy who was well-respected.  That man had come to the meeting with me, which I had known would cause trouble—which is why I did it.  I wanted to confirm the moral position that I suspected about the school.  After my television interview this “respected man” stepped next to me and Ron, who had been working his way through the crowd to a warm greeting, immediately stopped and turned away.  Out of all the bad things that were said about me behind the scenes at Lakota, the much discussed Lakota Kroger Survey, the Letters to the Editor in the Pulse Journal, it was this event that bothered me the most.  I liked Spurlock.  I thought of him as a good man.  But he was so terrified of the internal politics at Lakota, even though he was officially retired, that he didn’t want anybody of any authority at the school to see him even shaking hands with me.  It was at that moment when I knew what Lakota was all about, and that the path to fixing it would not be by running for school board, or any other “respected” position.  More extremes would be necessary.

A month later my group started Yes to Lakota Kids under tremendous pressure from community groups to bring No Lakota Levy away from being such a negative social influence on the community.  I agreed to the charity group creation because it was a kind of checkmate against Lakota.  This was confirmed when I organized a press conference.  We were giving a $10,000 check to Lakota to help pay for student participation in sports.  Both sides were talking and were going to be present to issue and receive the money.  I brought the media.  Nobody from Lakota showed up, instead excuses were provided as to why they couldn’t come.   Anticipating this, we staged the press conference within walking distance of Lakota East where many officials especially from the athletic department were.  Even better, the board of education was literally four miles down the road.  It was a 15 minute drive for them, yet nobody showed.  Channel 5 was there, Channel 19, The Cincinnati Enquirer, The Pulse Journal, but there wasn’t any Lakota representatives.

This didn’t surprise me at all.  It simply exposed what was already known.  Lakota couldn’t take a donation from their enemy No Lakota Levy, even to help children and they knew it.   They needed the extortion of children to execute their demands, and would not stand for losing that emotional leverage against the community by my group.  Lakota did exactly what I expected; they went on a full court press to smear me personally because they knew they would never pass a levy as long as I was intimately involved in the process.  If I had been the kind of person who needed group reassurance as the foundations of my thinking, some of the moves made against me at this time might have destroyed me for life.  This appears to certainly be their intention.  They did not care who they hurt, or to what extent they executed their plans, as long as they preserved their strategic objectives, which was a tax increase.  Mantia and others put a lot of pressure on the other No Lakota Levy people to publicly pull away from any association from me.  The reason was that it was believed that in so doing I would feel the bite of being an out-cast and either change my behavior, or be ignored by the public.

Little did they know but I was choking under the “in” crowd and desperately wanted those shackles off so that I could be an out-cast once again, to have the freedoms that come with such a position.  That is where the best strategy is, and what I desired.  I did not want to be a school board member and fuss with people who constantly played things both ways every day of their lives for some perceived “greater good” and at the point I had arrived at, there was no desire to see public education preserved in any fashion.  It’s a bad idea that should have never been implemented, and that is the direction I wanted to argue.  I did not want the burden of being a spokesman for a system I think is destroying our youth even in protest against taxation.

Peer groups are learned in public schools primarily.  The kids who are “in” and “out” are designated quickly.  Kids who are “in” have something to bring the “greater good,” of whatever group is involved.  Kids who are “out” do not.  When I was in school I was certainly on the “out” group because I did not want to be in service to any group.  I enjoyed thoroughly being on the “out” because there are many more opportunities for a colorful life outside of group comfort, which is what I’ve always strived for.  Of course back then nobody really understood what I was rebelling against.  My parents encouraged me to buy a class ring which they said would mean something to me later in life.  It doesn’t.  I never wore it, but simply gave it to whatever girlfriend I had at the time.  They also told me I needed a school jacket, which I never wore—favoring my leather jacket instead.  They also told me I needed to go to my five-year-reunion that was at Coney Island.  So I did and while there they had the usual contests, who had been married the longest, who had the most children, who had the oldest children and that kind of thing.  Out of the five categories in the contest I won three of them, I had been married the longest, (four years at that time), I had two children, three and two years old, clearly the oldest of the participants.  In fact my children were running around playing tag around the podium where the Class President was speaking from.  Yet I didn’t win a single category formally.  I was sitting in plain view of everyone, my wife was there, my kids playing and screaming in delight running around the tables which everyone could see, yet I was as invisible to them all as a ghost on Christmas morning.  Apparently it was frowned upon to bring children and spouses to the Class Reunion and socially I was supposed to know that.  But I wasn’t about to go to Coney Island without taking my children.  I never did things like that without them.  So I brought them without asking if I could.

My wife and I laughed about that event for years.  It was a clear example of the social need for groups of pack mentality to preserve their thinking on an issue in order to maintain a pre-conceived notion.  The evidence of who had the most and oldest children was running around the podium during the award presentation, yet I did not win a single category.  That was because I was an outcast even then, and very proud of it.   The only retaliation they had to offer to me was to hope being castigated from their group would make me feel some level of shame, and desire to comply socially.  Of course that concept is horrendously preposterous to anyone who knows me.  Just yesterday I was having a nice lunch by myself taking some time to read a book and enjoy my day.  Another man dressed in business attire sat down next to me, first asking if I was dining with anyone.  I said no.  So he sat down and started talking about the upcoming Bengal season, the quality of the food, the weather, about anything and everything.  The guy was a real chatterbox.  I was trying to be polite, but there was a reason I was eating lunch alone.  I wanted to read my book.  Nothing the guy said was of any value to me, and it was really getting on my nerves.  After about five minutes I told the guy as politely as possible, “You know, it’s hard to read a book and have a conversation.”  He looked at me as if I threw Holy Water upon his forehead.  “Sorry, I just thought you wanted some conversation.  I saw you sitting here by yourself and thought you wanted company.   I guess you don’t…….right?”  I replied as nicely as possible, “that’s right.  I don’t want any company.”  He got up in uncomfortable silence and took his food with him and disappeared into the restaurant.  I was so happy that he left and for the next hour and a half I was alone with just my book, my food and the nice outside air of a late summer August day.  When I was ready to leave, that guy was inside the restaurant sitting at the bar talking to the bartender and anybody nearby who would listen.  Three businessmen were comparing Fantasy Football picks with him and they were all happy as sluts at a navel port gabbing at each other with much fanfare.  The man didn’t look at me even though I had to pay the remainder of my bill with the bartender.  It was easier not to acknowledge each other, and I was grateful that he felt that way.

That same mentality was present when Ron Spurlock turned away from me in the halls of Lakota East to preserve his position in the social structure of Lakota.  Well before I called the levy supporters at Lakota “Latte sipping prostitutes with asses the size of car tires and diamond rings to match” in the Cincinnati Enquirer the wheels of castigation were well in place.  I had tried to work with the Lakota school board and the superintendents to bring down their costs.  I worked with the media nicely to give them entertainment within the context of their acceptability, and I was gloriously successful at it.  I even played the charity game to make my friends happy who stood against the tax increases, but still wanted to maintain relationships with members of the Lakota administration.   But none of them wanted to stand by the truth and deal with the severity of the situation in the manner it called for.  They all separated into their various groups and expected me to facilitate myself to their whims, which simply wasn’t going to happen.  When I didn’t, not even good people like Ron Spurlock wanted to be seen speaking with me in public out of fear that it would put him socially on the “out.”  People fear more than most anything in the world being rejected from their respective “groups.”

I learned a long, long time ago that these groups are more destructive to the human psyche than all the mental deficiencies available to insanity.  They are as my nephew argued part of the human condition generated upon the human mind during childhood when dependency is the only option.  Good parents never allow their children to feel the bite of this dependency so that as maturity sets in, those individuals grown into self-driven entities reliant on their own thoughts and motivations and cast away group participation like a snake sheds its skin.  The human race cannot survive with the mode of thinking that drove Ron Spurlock to walk the other way under the Mantia regime at Lakota, or the class president ignoring my children as they ran around playing at her feet.

When groups of people are at wit’s end and cannot strategically deal with the impact of an individual, they attempt to look everywhere that they aren’t.  They attempt to ignore such people so to preserve their own thoughts and feelings without a challenger.  Shortly after No Lakota Levy and I parted ways after the events described above, I received the following note from a radical levy supporter at Lakota.  The contents are particularly revealing as it confirms everything stated:

richhoffmanhateskids@gmail.com

208.102.50.136

Submitted on 2012/03/19 at 4:40 pm

HA HA HA!  LAKOTA DOESN’T WANT YOU…HA HA HA! Its a sign that you are a nobody when groups start running away from you.

ha ha ha ha ha!!!

That letter writer was an adult who holds a very responsible position within the Lakota school system, and provides insight into the kind of mentality that Ron Spurlock feared so much on a cold February evening at Lakota East.   As mature and sophisticated the participants of the education profession pretend to be, they are still functioning human beings that are deficient of self-reliant thinking, and as far as I’m concerned, behind the evolutionary curve.  The money they ask for with tax increases is to cover the gaps of their thinking and mask their internal neurosis.  It has nothing to do with reality, but only the primal need for group behavior to separate social tasks into blocks of consensus building.  The very foundations that they have built their institutions upon is set to sink in the sand during high tide as it has no philosophical foundation to plant roots of thought.  All they can do when such a reality is presented to them is to ignore the facts to preserve their warped illusions.

That is why this next levy attempt of 2013 will be different.  I will not try to solve the problem from the inside, because it clearly will not work under any condition.  This is a problem that must be solved from the outside—in, because the root of the problem is on the inside and must be starved out of existence.  They cannot see the problem because they refuse to look at it and nobody on a school board or through the mechanism of politics can solve the problem in that insider fashion.  So my new tactic will be to launch the attack from the outside in, to famish the antagonists from within their own walls by starving out their supply chain.  Such strategies brought down the rule of the Mongols in China, and it brought down the Roman Empire.  It can bring down little ol’ Lakota, which is what I intend.  It’s not against education that I rebel; it is the institutionalism of individual minds that I despise.  I love education.  I just can’t stand the process that is currently accepted, and I don’t like the politics connected to it.

As it should be clear by now, at no point in my life did I care to be on the “inside.”  I have been at times when groups wanted to use my talents, but I do not volunteer to go.  They come to me.  And they can go away just as well, but my position does not change, as it has been built upon the foundations of logic and my personal observations.  I will not surrender that position to the illogical perspective of group consensus to preserve the neurosis of established thinking if that thinking is wrong.  My nephew was right from an academic standpoint, human beings are a social species.  They need each other, and seek to speak, touch and interact with others of their kind.  But I am right too, that such behavior is for the human race equivalent to a small child learning to walk for the first time afraid to let go of what props them up.  A human mind needs to learn to walk on its own, free of emotional shackles to inferior intellects and it must grow from there perpetually over a lifetime.  What Lakota does, and other institutions like them is artificially constrain thinking so to preserve political beliefs forged by group consensus, and that is a recipe for disaster that I cannot, and will not support—but will fight as though it was the most corrosive organism in existence—because it is.

Now, if anybody who has read this wish to argue with me, feel free to leave a comment below.  I won’t chastise or belittle you for trying.  I like the mental exercise.  But if you don’t, your silence will confirm all that I have said above.  So have at it……………….

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!  

The Lakota 2013 Report Card: More excuses from Superintendent Mantia

After reading the recent report card with explanations from the Lakota school district it instantly reminded me of a kid who had been goofing off that was expected to get straight “A’s” who needed to pad the results with explanations to justify too many “B’s” and a “C” in the outcome.  Like the unwitting teenagers they instruct, Lakota blamed their bad grades on the conditions the grades were formulated.  A teenage student might declare that their grades would have been better if only they had more time to study, or had better tools to study with.  Lakota, as a district declared that they could have done better, especially in performance if voters would have just passed their last levy.  Superintendent Mantia in a report seen below did exactly that blaming the poor grade in “performance” on having to make budget reductions.  Here’s what she said, “Our performance index went down after years of increases. The performance index measures the achievement of all students regardless of their level of proficiency. That’s one sign that the budget reductions we’ve had to make are affecting all students.”

No wonder with that attitude the report card came in with much lower grades than was expected.  Lakota plans to get “A’s” by throwing money at the teachers so that they can have more “resources” to teach children.  If Lakota dosen’t have the money they plan to do just as they’ve shown here, let their letter grade drop so to motivate their parents into buying them “better books,” a new computer, and other resources so that the student can get an “A.”  Rather than attack the cultural aspects of the letter grade as a student might buckle down to improve, Mantia immediately relegates her terminology toward the unsaid implications of the 2013 levy attempt which intends to raise taxes to throw money at their teacher base with an upcoming contract in 2014.  Mantia said a lot of things in her released statement on the report card for Lakota.  Her full report can be seen below:

A Letter from Superintendent Dr. Karen Mantia

Ohio’s New School District Report Cards

Report cards on the first day of school. It was just coincidence, but the Ohio Department of Education released its new school district report card Thursday, just as we were welcoming students back to school.

The report card is for the 2012-13 school year, the one that ended last spring. It’s completely different than the old report cards, where districts were rated “Excellent, Effective,” etc. Now, we get letter grades, A to F, just like students’ report cards.

In case you haven’t seen it yet, here’s what Lakota’s report card looks like:

Standards met

Performance index

Overall Value-Added

Gifted Value-Added

Disabled Value-Added

Lowest 20% Value-Added

Annual Measurable Objectives

4-year graduate rate 2012

5-year graduate rate 2011
A

B

A

A

B

B

C

A

B

We could write whole chapters, whole books even, explaining all those categories and measurements, but we are still working on going over the data ourselves and preparing information we can share with parents and residents to help explain it all. But here’s some information straight from the Ohio Dept. of Education that offers an overview of the report card categories.

I’m pleased, of course, that our students met 100 percent of the state indicators. That’s what the first line, “Standards met,” refers to. That was the major component of the old report card system, the 24 standardized tests that are specific to a grade level and subject. I’m also pleased at our “A” in overall value-added, a measurement of how much progress all our students are making in a year.

But there are areas of concern, as well, and I’ve been talking about them for some time now. We track trend data internally all the time, so by the time the report card comes out there shouldn’t be any big surprises in it, and there weren’t. Our performance index went down after years of increases. The performance index measures the achievement of all students regardless of their level of proficiency. That’s one sign that the budget reductions we’ve had to make are affecting all students.

The one “C” on our report card is also a concern. That grade is for “annual measurable objectives.” You’ll also hear it called “gap closing.” It’s new with this report card, and measures achievement gaps between all students and student subgroups. We have no problem being accountable for the learning and progress of every student in our schools. So we need to do even more in that area.

It will require focused, increased resources in these high priority learning areas. We must ensure the district can continue to maintain its strengths in programming and instructional approach so that we can serve all students. Certainly no one test, letter grade, or rating captures the learning of thousands of students, but it does offer an overview of where we’re doing well and where we can do better.

Dr. Karen Mantia

Superintendent

Lakota Local School District

Spoken like a true levy addict.  When Mantia says, “increased resources in these high priority learning areas” she means that Lakota needs a levy passage so that she can lead her school district to improved grades.  It is equivalent to the teenage student who tells their parents that if they received a new computer, they’d have a better time at their studies and their grades would improve.  Of course everyone outside the school knows better than that.  They know that hard work and determination are what will improve those test scores—and leadership starting with Mantia.  But, when students see that the head of their school is blaming the mediocre report card grades on lost resources due to levy failures, then they will use the same excuse on their own report cards.  Education starts from the top, and Mantia just taught all of Lakota how to use excuses when the results are not favorable.  That is the reason for the poor “performance.”  It has nothing to do with money—but everything to do with attitude.

When Lakota had the previous grading system they essentially gained their Excellent with Distinction rating the way a mediocre student typically got an “A” in their class, by sucking up and becoming a teacher’s pet.  Excellent with Distinction rankings were mostly issued on the bases of political ass kissing, more than actual measured results.  This new system driven by public demanding actual measurements makes that ass kissing much more difficult—which it should be.  It will take more than money to improve the grades at Lakota.  It takes leadership from the top, and based on Mantia’s comments, that leadership is not there.  She intends to fail if the levy doesn’t pass in 2013.  If Lakota gets the money, she will pull whatever political strings she needs to in order to improve those grades in the future.  But if Lakota does not pass her levy, she has already planted the seeds that failure will continue.  They will continue because as a former teacher, she is aligned with her labor, and has their interests first, and she is making excuses for them which sends the message that the criteria for success is less about hard work, and more about getting what you want out of the deal.  Students are watching, and they know what everyone else knows, that the carefully worded statement from Lakota’s superintendent is simply a fancy way to demand more financial resources.  And that is not the way to lead an institution of any kind to improvements.  It becomes clear quickly why Lakota is dropping in their rating, and it has nothing to do with money—but everything to do with the leadership.  If Mantia wants to know why she received four “B’s” and one “C” on the Lakota report card she only has to look to one place—the mirror.

Rich Hoffman

 www.OVERMANWARRIOR.com

Give yourself the gift of ADVENTURE.  CLICK HERE!