Month: September 2019

Dancing to the Songs of the Universe: The girl in the white hat and her fiddle

I am always touched, no matter where in the world it is, when I see one of these street performers giving everything they have for a chance at getting noticed. Many of them are extremely talented and if only Hollywood or the record industry would just discover them, life would be great! But that’s not often how it happens and scenes like this one with the young girl performing in an open European market street are common, especially in Europe. Yet I really love watching this girl perform. That video was actually from over a year ago, but every time I see it I am enchanted with her raw ambition and lust for life. I could listen to her play music all day long and never tire.

It’s not a secret that I love children. It’s also no secret that I am not a big fan of teenagers and young twenty somethings. Out of all the ages of human development I have always hated those stages of people’s lives, the sexual age. With children, like the girl in the video playing wonderful music for tips, ambition and dreams are still alive. With teenagers and young adults many of the dreams of childhood surrender themselves to the impulse of nature to simply find a mate and to reproduce. With children their minds are coming alive and their individual ambitions are ignited. But once puberty kicks in nature is taking over and it is the liberal reminder that individuals serve nature, not the mind over nature itself. While kids have their minds growing, they are at the best that humans can ever hope to achieve. The sad story is that once they surrender that growth to nature, then it is seldom that they ever recover and they grow into adults that are constantly yearning to return to their youth, for the rest of their miserable lives.

Then occasionally you see a girl like this street performer will show up with her little hat and a fiddle and throw her dreams to the wind and hope that the shared experience will lead to good fortune. But in the honesty of most children there is just the lust to experience life in some profound way and share that expression with great ambition and talent, which is obvious in her performance. This girl reminds me of a young lady I saw who was about ten years older perform on the streets of Canterbury several years ago. My thoughts on seeing her was that she should be on America’s Got Talent, or some other high-level broadcast. But if every such person would be so discovered we couldn’t hold them back from filling a country of their very own, which is in a lot of ways why America was born. Every village around the world from India to the Congo have similar young people bursting with talent until they start giving birth to kids of their own and their dreams of ambition are lost to the pressures of reality. Sometimes, which I am always encouraging young people to hang on to, they get into their upper years with that ambition still attached, or they resurrect them. But often the case is that such ambitions are lost once the yielding to nature occurs, then such people are forever changed, and they never return.

I love seeing that these people are out there and I do cheer on that this bright young girl might hold her talents close even if Hollywood or some other entertainment market doesn’t give her a job, that she continues to perform like this for the raw ambition of protesting against nature and instead remain as humans were designed, playing their brand of music against the backdrop of the universe and whatever songs spring forth.

I am also a person who doesn’t like dancing, I don’t do it. The reason is that the music is reminiscent to me of nature and most music worth dancing to is of the low intellect pubescent variety. The music is made by people in their young adult phase and the goal is to get people into the mating rituals, the low thinking of sexual frustrations and hunger. It has often made me weary to go to dance halls, night clubs and those types of environments and watch bright young people surrender away their guarded bodies to the mosh pit of a mob that grinds against them in sexual ways in full view of the public as primitives would in a village orgy. We are not talking about the songs of the universe in this case, but the lower standards of the human desire to breed then die like some springtime flower that has done its duty, flowered, then bake away in the summer sun until its just a wrinkled up mound of vegetation dead by the first freeze of autumn. That is where that kind of dancing takes everyone, and its very sad for me to see, if I must admit as much.

But the music this girl is playing to, and dancing is of another kind. Its not intended to be sexualized, or even provocative, but is an affirmation of a musical score that was provided to her life for which she put her own spin on with her fiddle. That to me is the essence of what human life is and why it could have so much potential if only people would behold it and interact with it honestly. While most of these street performers in the world are hoping to get noticed, or to earn enough tips for the day to pay their way through that day of life, it is the last vestiges of childhood dreams that I see. These people are resisting to get that life crushing job, that boss that just doesn’t get it, for a chance to hang on to the dreams of childhood just a little bit longer before rent payments and healthcare dominate their thoughts, while their childhood lives and the freedom of thought that came with them are still there.

Here is this girl, defiant against the changes coming to her life playing music to the songs of the universe and all the hopes and dreams that come from an independent mind squaring off against reality itself. And the crowd gathering knows what they see. They have long surrendered to those pressures but they give the girl a tip because in some small way, that is one of their last acts of rebellion against the forces that are ruining their own lives in the vast wasteland of their existence, to give that girl a small tip of support and hope for her sake that the world might notice. And for the range of that little song the girl in her bright white hat and her sandals playing in the streets of a big city her declaration that she is independent and free, and not just putting her life in conjunction with human ambition in changing nature to a musical score of thought—but she is in command of it.

We might be thinking that once the music stops the bite of nature will come after her, and rip her to shreds like what happens to most people. But as she bows at the conclusion and people clap, we suppose that the grim reaper is just around the corner. However, I think that so long as she has that fiddle in her closet, or under her bed, no matter how many kids she has, or how many loved ones she knows who lose their life to the ailments of nature, that she will be alright. She may never taste fame or fortune, but so long as she can play music like that, she will always be a free person and will be among the most wealthy among us in the history of the human race.

Rich Hoffman

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The 25/25 Rule: Get better, don’t yield to weaknesses

A lot of the methods of business have been on my mind lately due to the work I’m putting into a new book I’m working on called the Gunfighter’s Guide to Business. In it there is a chapter on the International Journal of Production Research’s 25/25 rule and it is just another example of how the private sector is always trying to improve themselves so that they can make more money and stay relevant longer in a business environment. Yet government at any level never does and it shows in what their final products are. We joke about how inefficient government is, and people do desire jobs in the government sectors because performance standards are not part of the vocabulary, but it doesn’t take an accountant to realize that for every hour worked in a to heavy government environment that it is costing the taxpayer a tremendous amount of money because something like the 25/25 rule is not being utilized, and its very disingenuous to everyone forced to contribute to the madness through the tyranny of the IRS.

The 25/25 rule essentially states that you take the 25% of your business portfolio and not focus on it so that you can give attention to all your top customers. The effort was created to attempt to give more focus on organizational support for the best of your customers and requires a judgement call. The rule also assumes that there is always another 25% of your company portfolio that can be improved with cutting out non-value-added tasks. Can you imagine a school board meeting where such a conversation would take place? The teacher’s union which really runs all public schools would be up in arms and protesting in seconds, since the goal of any employee run management is to be as inefficient as possible so that the bar of expectations cannot be lowered, just ever inflated so that the “collective” is not pressured too much in any task. That is problem number one.

Yet even in relation to the private sector I think the 25/25 rule doesn’t go nearly far enough and is a very disrespectful way to treat customers if they don’t happen to be in that upper tier of a company’s portfolio. It’s not their fault that you as a business have focus problems and need to find ways to internally prioritize effort. While I do agree that there is always 25% of an organization that could almost always be eliminated in unnecessary process flow and streamlined operations, I also think that the task of every organization is that they need to get 25% better on their portfolios, not to ignore 25% of their current load so they can focus on their best and most important customers. A top-level organization is always doing that and getting better so that they can show off their capacity to handle pressure for future state growth opportunities.

What I find happening in organizations using the 25/25 rule is that its giving bad management another tier of excuses to use until they are forced to look in the mirror and admit what a bunch of losers they are. The intent of the 25% portfolio reduction is to manage overbooked businesses with a steadier workflow, with the notion that its better late than never getting it at all. To me this is reprehensible thinking and is the nature of that particular chapter in my book. The difference between the East and the West is that winning matters and some of the parameters of western thinking that determine victory is speed and accuracy—the drive thru window with everything in the bag that you ordered—the first time through. We want it fast and we want it accurate. This whole 25/25 rule had me thinking of the bullwhip competitions that I’ve been in over the years where you are supposed to be 7’ from the five targets in the Speed and Accuracy competitions. You are timed how quickly you can use a 6’ bullwhip to crack out the ten targets. For every miss, there is a 5 second penalty. Learning to do that competitive event is a good way to step beyond the 25/25 rule and instead to focus on improving yourself by 25% not passing along your inability to some down the line customer.

We see it all the time, we’re picking up some food at a drive thru, the restaurant is obviously understaffed for the level of business they have and lines are wrapped around the building with everyone waiting on their food. Additionally, the people who don’t want to wait in that long line go inside to order at the counter, hoping to step around the mess. But standard practice in every fast food restaurant is to use that 25/25 rule to deal with such carnage, and the first thing that goes is worrying about the dining room because it is the drive thru windows that have the timers on them and is how they are measured as a successful business. Such a place could be said to have a capacity problem and the managers will blame their high call-off rates and blame the weak condition of their employees as the reason for their victimized status.

I would argue that the capacity constraints are not in the machinery, since most fast food restaurants are built to do the business, its in the high turnover and generally unreliable nature of the employees they hire that causes all the problems. I find the fault in the managers who have such a bad staff that calls off too much, or the kind of people they hired to begin with, in not determining at the interview that their employees might turn in to unreliable employees, and that the management culture allowed the employees to call off often without consequences which is why restaurants sometimes are slammed and unprepared to deal with their customer bases. Hiring the right kind of people through the interview process then developing those people through proper management practices is the key to successful staffing which then solves the capacity challenges that are not related to the equipment itself.

The 25/25 rule tends to give bad management the excuse to hide behind this measurement system and give them a victimized status to explain away their failure. “My employees called off, so I couldn’t successfully handle the customer demands.” Yet it was the reason all their employees called off that the management system didn’t deal with, which is why there is a problem in the first place. The company should focus instead on having a 25% increase in hiring efficiency where their new employees have better attendance. Or the drive thru window workers get 25% faster than the less experienced newbs. Or that you can run the whole operation with 25% less people. Those should be the targets and people who do things like that bullwhip competition that I mentioned understand that process because it simply wouldn’t be permissible to complain that the competition was too hard and that they didn’t have the speed and accuracy to compete. That is the nature of my new book, is to change the thinking about these kinds of things from a victimized status to a proactive one. If you want to do something, don’t blame the conditions. Get better, and acquire the skills needed for success.

Of course, the obvious hatred for President Trump by protectors of the status quo, the government employees who have been sucking off the system hiding behind a lack of standards reviews, or the government labor unions who have their own rules, such as a 99/99 rule. Unions are only willing to give 1% toward performance review, or a process improvement. They aren’t willing to sign up for any performance expectations because they don’t want the bar set where their lazy employees have to live up to. While that makes for a nice job for them where they get paid whether or not they actually do anything, the benefit to the end use customer is us, in that they cost too much money. At least with President Trump a part of our government is starting to think more like the private sector, and that’s the way it should always have been.

Rich Hoffman
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The 25/25 Rule: Using Bullwhips to understand Overcapacity problems

I have enough for my book to include this small sample from the upcoming Gunfighter’s Guide to Business.  There is still a lot of editing to conduct and it will likely be a 2020 project at this point, but thought my audience here would enjoy it, since so many people have been asking how it is coming along.  So enjoy this short sample:

The 25/25 Rule

There are many rules of practice that businesses use to manage their capacity, such as Warren Buffett’s 25/5 rule, or the International Journal of Production Research’s 25/25 rule. With Buffett, he states that out of the top 25 things that you want to do in life, you should only focus on the top five, until you’ve completed them. And with the 25/25 rule the goal is to reduce focus on the bottom 25% of your workload and to squeeze improvements in process out of another 25%. Thinking like a gunfighter however, these measurements in business are only new ways to present targets to hit and have their own sets of problems that unless looked at correctly, are useless. As I have spoke about, there are many weapons that gunfighters can use to do their business, guns are just one of them. Another is the bullwhip which I find has many direct correlations that apply to conceptual business matrixes such at the 25/25 rule.

As I have said about the bullwhip and in fast draw shooting in general, the primary objective is to do the most work with the most power in the shortest and most accurate time span possible. With bullwhips, to get the maximum impact out of the end of the weapon with the minimum effort it requires the handler to project that effort toward a target at a proper moment where the crack will occur in space and time. It is really quite an effort in physics to be able to crack out the flame on a candle with a bullwhip which among those who can call themselves experts, is a common act. When hitting targets with a bullwhip the effort looks effortless when done correctly as most of the action happens within a second’s time of measure. But there are many small steps within that second that must occur correctly to make such a thing happen, especially under the burden of timed pressure. Yet even just cracking out a flame on a candle with all the time to do it in the world takes a very timed approach to inflict the minimal effort to get the maximum results of cracking the whip so near the candle that the sonic boom created blows out the flame.

When companies utilize the 25/25 rule essentially what they are saying is that they are over capacity due to their sales departments over booking the facility and that they are picking the bottom end of their 25% of business portfolio to ignore so that they can focus on their top percent of valuable customers. The problem with this approach is that it allows bad management to hide behind a method of measurement and to use the analysis to disguise bad approaches to solving the problem. In the Cowboy Fast Draw competitions and Wild West Arts work that is like saying that the weapon handler needs more time to do a good job. But as we know in gun fights, the fastest and most accurate were the ones who won the duels. There were no rules for taking time to deal with the incompetence of the duelists. If the gunfighters were incompetent, they were killed. And the same holds true in business.

The aim of the Western Arts isn’t just to enjoy the historical nature of traditional weapons used in war within American culture but is to represent the necessities of living within a western society. The needs of American business is one of those requirements, and not connecting those proper metaphors to the function of business can lead to detriment, which for too many companies is a common occurrence. Such as the case with the 25/25 rule the way it has been proposed to help companies with their problems of overcapacity. The solution to those problems are experienced in western competition where speed and accuracy are measured. There are many very good shooters in the world and very good bullwhip artists who have trouble with the fast draw competitions of Western Arts. They look great when performing for audiences until the pressure of time is added, then things get tough and people start reacting poorly under duress, which is the point.

Most consultants in the United States and Europe are following similar methods of reducing push systems and instead incorporating pull, where one element of a supply chain does not ship until the downstream source is needed. The 25/25 rule is an element of this thinking and it essentially dances around the true villain which is incompetence. If a manager either upstream or downstream just can’t handle the pressure and has a hard time recruiting and retaining good employees, they will obviously have trouble doing the required job. The 25/25 rule gives them some cover to then focus only on their valuable customers and letting the less valuable fall off the portfolio. This might look great for the internal measures of a production environment, but it doesn’t equal the task of the sales department that is trying to book work and help a company profile with new business. The incompetent managers within an organization might be angry toward sales for bringing in more work than they feel comfortable handling. And that is the core of the problem. Many of the Lean consultants do have good ideas but they try to use peer pressure to level load a facilities production output instead of focusing on making the individual contributors better.

I have seen many really good bullwhip artists struggle with the speed and accuracy competitions that are in the Western Arts events, because the rhythm and pressure of a timed competition throws off everything and they would argue that if the rules were not so rigorous, if only they had more time, they could do better. Well, who couldn’t? The point of timed pressure is to sort out the good from the bad and in business that is certainly the case. Thinking like a gunfighter, anything less than fast and accurate would mean death, and it does to businesses also.

It is up to the weapon handler, such as in the case of the bullwhip artist to get better and to acclimate themselves to the conditions of the battlefield. If doing a speed and accuracy competition with bullwhips between 15 to 12 seconds is the parameters needed to win, then that is up to the bullwhip artists to get better to compete in those parameters. In the case of businesses where sales provide jobs and the various program managers within the organization determine that the scope of work fits within the company portfolio it is not up to the weaknesses of production to decide that they can’t live up to the expectations. They must get better to meet the needs, not hide behind some bounty hunter rules created to make their business thrive while the businesses that hire them suffer under their own incompetence. Rather than try to force the industry to deal with the artificial constraints created by bad management, companies should strive to get 25% better to meet those market needs and to create value for their customers. What if a town sheriff stated to the population looking to them for protection that to be a good representative of the law that the criminals needed to be 25% slower in their threats and actions of aggression so that the sheriff could handle the danger? Instead, it is up to the sheriff to get faster, and to be better. And if more bandits come to town, and are smarter and faster yet, it is up to the law to get better to keep the peace. So, it is with any business. The customer needs what they need, it is up to the company to give it to them, or to figure out how to without going out of business in the practice. And that only happens when you force everyone to get better, not playing to the weaknesses of the workforce managed poorly by the incompetent.

Rich Hoffman

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Republicans and Democrats will Never Work Together: Above and Below the line thinking

I learned a long time ago when dealing with the Lakota school system, the government school in my home district, that most everything related to government functioned below the line, which is a saying in the private sector especially popular among business consultants. In the private sector such definitions are used to convey troublesome cultures that are unprofitable. Above the line, positive affirmations are often the key to solving financial problems in private sector companies, but in government such things never happen, and the expectation is that they never will. I was told by so many labor union employees within the Lakota government schools system that private sector metrics could not be applied to things like schools, and government in general. That was of course before Republicans elected a businessman like Donald Trump to the White House, which has changed things significantly in how government operates. Trump fires people and is constantly moving people around to find the best fit, which should always have been happening in government. But until recently, it wasn’t even a consideration, which is of course why government tends to operate poorly, too expensively, and always below the line.

When I talk so poorly about Democrats its not political in the way that has become fashionable, it’s by conjecture of the evidence. If I were hired to fix a company I would have to first overcome the issues with the below the line thinkers that are always a part of every organization and use some means to correct that situation, either by terminating them, or changing their mindset to above the line thinking. We have the same problems in families, you can’t have a bunch of positive people who want to make a happy family and mix them with a bunch of below the line negative types who want to be victims at everything just so they can use failure as a shield for their own laziness. So of course we will have such people in our political system that we must vote for in the ballot box. Of those, Democrats certainly represent below the line thinking and the big government approach to everything where Republicans are above the line. President Trump is an excellent example of an above the line thinker, his business background lends itself naturally to that type of person. His popular television show was about teaching young project managers how to think above the line and not be victims, and to be successful. Then of course that is what he has been doing as President and the results to the economy are obvious, just as any company would experience when led by such a person. But Democrats are all about below the line thinking and in the scheme of things, the two just can’t co-exist without one destroying the other.

Examples of above the line thinking would be the ability to make choices, to be personally accountable, to always seek solutions, to take action. Examples of below the line thinking are to blame others, wait for others, to see failure, to see problems as obstacles. No company works well when it is filled with below the line people and it would be the consultant’s task to change that below the line culture into an above the line culture, and there are all kinds of tricks to get there. But the essence of the need is that for success to happen, switching people from below the line thinkers to above the line is not an option. We can’t live with below the line thinkers and expect to ever have success at anything. And that is the lesson for us as a nation politically.

The same holds true in everything we do whether it is trying to hold together a marriage, to build a family, running a business, or running a government. If a government is filled with a lot of below the line people, then there is no chance at success. And in my experience when trying to figure out why a multimillion dollar budget wasn’t enough for the teacher’s union, I learned quickly that there was no way to solve the problem so long as below the line people were the ones doing all the negotiating over budget allocation. You can’t solve problems with below the line people because they use problems to hide their aversion to solutions, because solutions take away excuses which leave those types of people vulnerable in ways, they aren’t comfortable with. And when such people are in control, money is wasted, resources destroyed, and nobody is ever responsible. Thus, problems rule the day.

Its not a matter of people having different opinions about things. It’s a matter of whether or not people want to solve problems or not. Those who don’t will never be able to negotiate better conditions because they need the below the line thinking to hide behind. No amount of negotiation will ever solve anything with such people, as they will constantly try to undo anything that is ever solved. And that is the state of the entire Democrat party, its all about victimhood, its all about excuses, and ultimately hopelessness. When we talk about Republicans and Democrats getting along as they once did, well I don’t know that they ever did. Thinking or John F. Kennedy when he pointed to the moon and proclaimed that we would go there, as a Democrat he was a very above the line thinker in that fashion. And he was also murdered because whether the killing was a lone communist sympathizing gunman or a government conspiracy from the deep state that wanted him out of the White House, a solution based presidency was not wanted. So he was killed.

When it comes to this topic, we can’t just let below the line thinkers rule us from their negative standpoints, and still retain our above the line values. Those things never go together and they never will. Democrats will never play well with Republicans and that is a political reality we must face. So it is not wrong to demonize Democrats for not wanting to be part of any solutions. In any company where the below the line thinkers are standing in the way of solutions, they must be removed. Its not an option. So neither is it when those same types are in the way in politics. There is no such thing as a fair world where all people get to have an equal seat at the table. There is only winning and losing, we are either doing one thing or the other. But both things can’t happen at the same time. We must make a choice. Will it be Republicans above the line or Democrats below the line in what runs a government and everything that spawns off it.

I would say that it is our modern task to figure this out and to apply such concepts to our elected offices. We should expect above the line thinking from our politicians and our government, just as we would from a well run company. If we want to have good Thanksgiving dinners with our families, we should encourage above the line thinking among all the participants. But if some of the grown up children are still mad at their parents for their own lack of success in life and are trying to blame the college they went to, the attention they received from mother, or even who among the siblings had the bigger bed growing up, then there will probably be a lot of backstabbing at family gatherings and Thanksgiving will be miserable. Everyone is either working to solve things in their life or they are using problems as shields to maintain their below the line status. And so long as government schools, judicial buildings, IRS collections, and everything under the umbrella of government is below the line, and supported by Democrats wanting more and more of it, then there will never be solutions to inflated budgets and poor performance. The solutions to those types of things is in changing behavior, not the politics of the individuals. What people call themselves are not nearly as important as to whether or not they are below the line or above the line in their essential thinking.

Rich Hoffman

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The Democrat Fight to Continue Mass Murder: Bernie Sanders reveals what we’ve known all along

Even though it is considered radical to have an opinion that goes against the hippie notions of acting together and sharing ideas in modern America, it is good to call things as they are. Conservatives are not obligated to give liberals a seat at some table of discussion just out of fairness. A domestic enemy is a domestic enemy and it requires our values as a civilization to designate them as such, which of course is what I’m referring to as the Democrat party specifically, but more to the point, the socialists and communist who are using that platform to change America into something we all despise. Walmart turning against gun owners is just one step in that change, what they want is murder, mayhem, and the eradication of the human race—and that is in and of itself a clear revelation as to their evil intentions.

It must happen at some point, a general philosophy about what an American is must be agreed upon, just as any business must create something of a company philosophy in order to be productive. Everyone working for the company can function as an individual, but everyone must agree on what the company philosophy is and work toward it in order for the organization to have its own individual identity, which is then a value to its customers. For instance, Apple needs to have its own identity from Microsoft. They both make computers and software, but each has their own philosophy that consumers value to maintain their market sustainability. The same with nations, there must be some agreed upon philosophy that the nation functions from, you can’t have a bunch of mixed messages fighting it out under free speech. The results of conflict is that one side will win over the other and that then becomes the national philosophy.

In America the political left lost the Civil War. They were the slave owners. They were the losers who tried to reinvent themselves with the progressive movement trying to rebrand themselves away from their past evils with feminism, and civil rights, but behind it all was this desire for abortion. Abortion to kill lots of babies from their undesired social circles all the while trying to promote rights for the same people they were trying to kill. Its similar to the liberal gun control arguments where every time a few people are killed, they scream for more legislation to erode away the Constitution, yet they will kill millions of babies every year, even right up to the moment, or immediately after, that the child is born and call it “rights for the mother.” Lets just call it what it is, pure evil, and un-American.

And now its mainstream, the Democrat presidential candidates have admitted what many of us have known about them for years, they wish to tell us all what to do, everywhere we go, at all hours of the day and they have Google and Amazon helping them. They want to manage our healthcare in such a way that we don’t live very long, and that they can kill away as many people as possible to save the planet from a made-up environmental catastrophe. But their real intention is murder, the murder of millions just as it always has been with abortion activists. The racism of the post war Democrats who despised blacks because the Union had won the war, were the Democrats of the progressive party that wanted to kill off those blacks by corralling them up in inner cities and addicting mothers on welfare, making alcoholics of the fathers, and killing the babies before they were ever born. To cover their tracks which was coming to light during the Vietnam War and they wanted communism to spread over Asia, then to America, they took to civil rights to hide their true intentions of mass murder and anti-capitalist carnage.

The situation was never clearer than in 1969 when man walked on the moon proving that our society could migrate into space and take a big step in evolution. Meanwhile a month later there was Woodstock where naked young people rolled in the mud in degradation and drugged themselves into a state of below the line thinking that yearned for the primitive, to get back to nature, and to let nature rule over us all. We were never going to be one America with such radically different philosophies, one side would have to win and push out the other, and that was the way it was always going to be. Ronald Reagan was the first answer. Donald Trump was the second. Conservatives listened and tried to play nice with the other side with both of the Bush presidents, and Clinton then Obama, but at the heart of America was a desire to be above the line in their thinking.

In business above the line thinking and below are ways to make an organization better. Above the line thinking is the can-do spirit that we all like to think about when it comes to contemplation about the American flag. Below the line thinking is essentially the victimization culture, the “I can’ts” which most of us despise at face value. We may have sympathy for such people and try to help them think above the line, but not at our own peril, and that is where we are as a nation presently. Both sides can’t have their own way. It doesn’t work in any business, it doesn’t work in families, and it certainly doesn’t work in nation building. Democrats need to think below the line to exist because nothing about them is about stepping up and becoming better. They are about abortion, banning plastic straws, worship of nature which sounds good at face value until you consider that the four seasons of our earthly year are precisely the same as the Vico Cycle, spring, summer, fall and winter, theocracy, aristocracy, democracy, anarchy, and that is how things have been for tens of thousands of human years. Democrats want to keep mankind on that path even if they must kill millions of potential lifeforms to do it.

Sure it was a little strange to hear Bernie Sanders admit to the reason he supports abortion is to save the planet from human habitation. But let’s face it, mass murder is mainstream in the Democrat party because of the reasons I have provided. They want to remain below the line in spite of how much the rest of us want to think above the line. And we will never agree. One side is going to win, and the other side is going to lose. We can’t co-exist. To say otherwise is to become a contributor to death, to human destruction and to step backwards not forward in the plight of mankind toward a perfection that is embedded. Democrats are not about compassion; they only use that to lure us to sleep so they can have their murder. They want abortion not for women’s rights, but to kill off undesirables and to rid the world of what they consider human filth and future capitalists. They want to worship the earth the way the primitive tribes of yesteryear did, and they would rather be as a political party the village chiefs than to walk on the moon, or Mars. And that is what we are all up against. The only question is which will we choose, because we can’t have it both ways.

Rich Hoffman

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Don’t Shop At Walmart: Anyone against guns is against the idea of America and is an advocate of domestic terrorism

Do you know what the difference is between “us” and “them” the political right and the political left, both of which cannot have a stake in the future of America because the philosophies of living are just too dramatically far apart? “We” talk about doing things and “they” do them. Such is the case with “us” talking about making Antifa a terrorist organization, which it clearly is, then the San Francisco Board of Supervisors passing a resolution declaring the National Rifle Association a “domestic terrorist organization.” While the resolution is purely a political stunt, what is at stake is the branding of guns in general and any group or individuals who defend the right to have them—as terrorists. This as Antifa members beat people senseless, harass elderly flag waving veterans, and espouse brown shirt socialism from their corner Starbucks with outward threats of violence and mayhem. Even the now wimpy Walmart is in on the game of banning ammunition and pistols from their inventory refusing to sell them to their customers under pressure from these same forces.

The same mode of attack is at play as Andrew McCabe and Peter Strzok suing the FBI for wrongful termination even though they are the ones who committed the crimes, or the school levy supporter who advocates to boycott any business that does not support their mandatory tax increases, or the drug advocate who wants to ignore that all these mass shooters were depressed fatherless young people who by their indicated states had altered their mental acuity into dangerous assassins. The political left doesn’t care if 5 people are killed in a mass shooting or 50. Much higher numbers are shot and killed every weekend in Chicago. The goal for the left isn’t to eliminate shootings and mass killing. If they were for life, they wouldn’t be supporters of abortion which kills many more people every year. So do car accidents, and stabbings. For them mass killings, which they have their hand in the philosophies that cause them completely, are opportunities to exploit their real aim, the abandonment of the Constitution the re-invention of America, and the acquiring of power for a large central government over an independent republic.

My advice to you dear reader is not to shop at Walmart due to their activism against guns, which is the backbone of American life in so many ways. I am writing a book on that subject as a matter of fact and I could easily fill it with content as large as War and Peace. Of course, that would be too long, so editorial considerations must be made in the process, and I’m certainly not going to try to define it here, in these little 1200-word articles. Its beyond the scope of this subject. However, Walmart has built an empire off the American lifestyle and once they turn against guns and their users, they are headed in the wrong direction and are victims of the radicals rather than helpers of a better world.

My wife has to drag me to a Walmart every time we go. She likes it, has a loyalty to them for offering goods at the lowest price possible. But what I see is an ocean of mediocrity and I like to avoid the place and the smell. My thoughts on the matter are that low prices tend to bring out low expectations in life, so in a lot of ways, Walmart has hurt people, not helped them. Lowering the bar for living a good life may not be the best thing. After all, what good is an expensive item gained cheaply if you cheat the real value. The only way to pull off that hat trick is to actually lower the value of the product itself which is the case with Walmart. The value of Walmart to a person like me is that I can buy guns and ammunition while my wife shops for groceries. If I can’t do that, then I have no value for Walmart.

And that’s the way it always is, it’s always conservatives who move toward a position that the left claims—its never the other way around and that is because conservatives are such nice people. They are just and they do have empathy while the left is like that spoiled teenager that can never be made happy. What we never talk about is why they are never happy. Its not because they don’t want to be happy, but because they use their unhappiness to change policy for themselves, so they can get one more hour on their curfew, or the keys to the family car for a night out on the town. The left throws fits of rage for the hell of it, so they can bring hell to the rest of us. They expect us to compromise while they do nothing to meet us halfway. So why in the world would we do it knowing that?

The reason is that conservatives are smarter than liberals and are naturally averse to conflict. They would rather use other aspects of their intellect to solve a problem than fight and that is what the left exploits, because like a spoiled teenager of loving parents, or guilty parents, they know they can get away with it. That is precisely how Antifa expects to inflict terrorism on us, and why the FBI drifted away from justice and became radicalized. They knew they could get away with the effort, so they went for the aggression, because nobody was standing in their way.

I am a proud member of the NRA. I just renewed my membership which I do every year at this time just so I can have the privilege of renewing it. I like knowing that I am a member, so the renewal is my way of keeping it fresh in my mind. And within that membership I see and hear from the true backbone of America, and I like those people. I take offense to it when they are called names and when my organization is attacked and called a terrorist organization. To whom? The actual domestic terrorists within our borders—the political left?

For me I do have other tools to fight with than violence and I spend most of my life using those tools. But unlike other conservatives I am not against meeting violence with violence. If that’s the only language that the left can speak, well I can assure them that I can shout louder than they can. I am not OK with Walmart turning anti-American, I am not OK with my group being called a terrorist organization. And I am not a supporter of Antifa terrorism, radical levy moms and their boycotts of businesses, teacher union losers striking for more money when kids need someone to watch them while their parents are working, and I’m not OK with an FBI that tampered with the last American election and expects to get away with it. Guns mean that my life will not be controlled by those kinds of people. Removing guns from society means those types of people will decide how I live and that isn’t acceptable. The debate isn’t one of gun control, its about what kind of America we want. Mass shootings are caused and exploited by left leaning political activists for their own brand of terrorism, and it is not the task of the political right to appease them unopposed. Since we can’t trust politicians, we have the NRA, which people like me make up. And when it is attacked, I consider it an attack on me. And that is not a good strategy on behalf of the real domestic terrorists, the political left.

Rich Hoffman
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Failure is Never an Option: Trump is right, bad companies blame the tariffs, not themselves

I’m glad President Trump said it, its true, badly run companies are using the tariff war with China as an excuse for their poor performance. I agree with him. That is usually the case any time an organization is caught performing bad, they will use any excuse to hide their own behavior. In public school systems they always blame the unfunded mandates of the state, or the allocation of the state money, but what is usually the case, its their lazy union employees who are the cause of poor performance and the unwillingness of the school boards to fight them. In the private sector the same kind of blame game goes on, only in business there are constant exercises in management review that exploits the real problems. Not all companies, in fact most companies, are not well run so price increases due to the China trade war or long lead times from suppliers is an easy target for losers to blame for their own problems. So, it was good to see that we finally have a president who has run businesses, and understands how things really work, instead of some out of touch politician who believes everything advisors tell him.

Good management is to close gaps when it is obvious that they need to be closed, such as in the trade deficit with China. For all the bellyaching that is made about how bad the trade war is hurting farmers in America, Trump has moved $16 billion collected from the realignment of the new tariffs on Chinese goods and sent them straight to the farmers since they have been targeted by China. And as Trump pointed out, there are many more billions of dollars that we are collecting now that we weren’t before, so the farmer issue in losing to China isn’t even a consideration. And neither are the complaints where price increases are being blamed by the tariffs. As far as revenue collection, the United States is making money. As far as supply chain management, companies always knew the risks of doing business with a communist country, and they should have had contingency plans. That they didn’t says a lot about the kind of companies that they are, lazy and unprepared, so the tariffs are an easy target for the incompetent.

Almost before the trade war started between Trump and China I heard business insiders starting to blame the poor condition of their supply chains as an excuse to either push out lead times or jack up their prices. But if they were actually a well-run company, they would have already thought about those things, even a year out and they would not be affected by a trade war with China. Blaming the tariffs for anything is the first sign of people who don’t know better, and are bad managers of the elements of their life which interact with business. Before Trump came along nobody said such obvious things so we should all be grateful that Trump is willing to take on big communist currency manipulators like China but also the big companies in America who love to hide their out of control management on politics. Most of the time, the fault is theirs and theirs alone.

Every organization that runs a budget, whether it is the large government schools of nearly every community in North America or a large corporation like Apple, they are expected by reality to produce and to do so well. The challenges that come along whether its unfunded mandates or the supply of metals are tasks that all management is supposed to deal with. Nobody wants to hear excuses; they just want results and that is ultimately the value that companies bring to their markets. An excuse is not a value, it is simply a means to explain away failure. But from my perspective, and this has always been the case, failure is never an option.

I was very encouraged the other day; I was at a stop light and a large tractor trailer pulled up alongside me. On the trailer was a company motto stating, “failure is not an option.” I thought to myself, there is a great company. Any company or organization that puts that as part of their branding is at least trying to avoid the blame game of failure that is part of their business. Someone is always failing them, the question is, will they accept that failure or overcome the imposition? A company that does not accept failure but simply moves on from it is one that is trying to be successful. But a company that says, our business is hurt by the tariffs with China, or the interest rates that are at play, or we are having a hard time hiring people because everyone is on oxycontin these days, those are all loser statements. They may have roots in reality but accepting them for poor performance is detrimental to any organizational behavior.

A great football team doesn’t stop trying to win if their star player goes down, or if the referees call a bad game against them. Those things might actually cause a team to lose, but blaming those elements are loser statements. Accepting that failure is the first step in losing and any company that blames things for their poor performance is acting as a loser, and not taking the steps that success requires. To win at anything overcoming barriers to success are expected. If a company doesn’t have the talent to do so, or the will to do it, then failure may happen. To explain their inadequacy to their share holders and other carriers of the public trust, they might blame tariffs or supply problems. But in all honesty, it was their job all along to overcome whatever opposition to success that there was, and to win the game, whatever it may have been. When people say that “it’s not whether you win or lose, its how you play the game,” they are partially right. How you play the game is all important in whether or not you will experience success. But even in that popular statement are the seeds for failure planted. It implies that even if you lose, if you played a good game, then you are off the hook. Bad companies have become very good at looking like they are playing the game well with lots of nice charts and excuses, but ultimately it is how you play the game, and whether you win or not. Nobody likes second place. Everyone loves a winner. The goal is always to win and to overcome impediments.

Excuses are for those who are lazy or stupid, incompetent or up to no good. I often decry labor unions because they are often to blame for a company’s lack of management, or the organization as a whole of something like a public school where the inmates run the asylum. Management at these places often throw their hands up and say things like, we failed because none of the union workers wanted to work the weekend, or we had a strike and couldn’t bring in raw materials. But what they are really saying is that they have no control of their business and weren’t thinking far enough ahead to have contingency plans. Such companies are blaming the tariffs for their poor performance and they make Trump a target for their failure, but in all reality, they own that failure. And nobody else.

Rich Hoffman

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I’ll Take The Art of the Deal over The Art of War: China has already lost the trade war

You can go back a long ways, even to the time where Doc Thompson and I talked about the China problem on WLW radio frequently. You can Google me or him on the topic of China and discover that this issue is not a new one. Long before there was a President Trump, people like us were trying to wake people up to the fact that modern warfare was not in tanks, guns and troops, it was economies and China was seeking to knock America off the ladder and to become the dominate player in the world as a communist country of everything financial. And they almost got away with it. I would vote for Donald Trump again, and again, and again if only to get out of his entire presidency this one thing, taking on China and halting the incursion into our lives that was well at play before his election. What people don’t seem to realize is that China was sucking out of the American economy over $500 billion per year in trade deficits. When we talk about the United States operating at a trillion dollars per year deficit, that is where half the money is going. If Trump hadn’t come along when he did, we’d all be in big trouble right now, Obama and Bush were all in on the deal. China was going to rule the world as a communist power, and even members of our own government were seeking to make it happen.

I was pretty furious that the public school in my home district of Lakota was sending teachers to China in exchange programs intent to learn how we could be more like them, because as an education institution, it should have been the other way around. I was even more furious when visiting the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis that they had an entire exhibit dedicated to learning about the Chinese way of doing things, as if preparing American students for the inevitable takeover. The United States was poised by a lot of dumb politicians prior to President Trump to give away American wealth to the Chinese and they were going to be handed the keys to the world just for showing up as a global communist power that leftist economists wanted to breathe to being since the same experiment in Russia, and Vietnam had failed.

China was never as powerful as authorities told us. As a communist tyranny their society naturally lacks imagination and deep philosophic thinking, and that is clear in their culture, as it is in every communist society. That is not a political statement, it’s a human one. It doesn’t matter if the subject is the sad housewife who spent her entire life serving her family only to see them all grow up and away giving her little back in return or the business professional that has poured their entire life into their company serving their bosses then dying one year after retirement, people are happiest when they are free to act and think what they want when they want to. Capitalism allows for more of this behavior than centralized controlled societies. That society may be the contents of a marriage between two people where one clearly dominates the other, and the other is a miserable wreck of a person, or a company and its employees, where top down authority is more important than horizontal harmony. China as a power is too centralized for their billion plus people to think for themselves. They have the workers, but they don’t think freely which is a huge impediment to an expanding economy built off wealth production.

The whole trick worked so long as America could be coaxed into giving away their wealth so that China could have it. So long as America followed green agenda points with over regulation while China could do anything to the environment and nobody would say anything—especially the climate science activists who secretly knew the name of the game was and will always be for them, global communism. They want a welfare state so they can sit around collecting a government check while their lazy asses play video games all day, and they vote accordingly. But they do not represent the intellect of America, that’s why we voted for Trump. To avoid this downward spiral.

Its time to say all this because this issue as I said has been around a long time. My friend Doc Thompson was recently killed by an Amtrack train, which I still find uncharacteristically odd, but whatever. He’s not around any more, but this China problem is exactly as he and I said it would be nearly ten years ago. And I for one am extremely happy with how President Trump is playing the situation for American advantage. The Chinese are exposed. The American economy will start to see plus revenue as the money flows out of China and back into the United States. That isn’t to say that we don’t have to solve our spending problem in America, but Trump isn’t president to do that. He’s there to put money back in the jar. We’ll fight later about how to spend it. His job is to stop the bleeding and he is certainly doing that.

There are a few YouTube videos confirming what I’m saying, and a few business analysist types on cable news who agree with me, but I have found it shocking that with all the great intellect that we have in America that more people just don’t understand the problem with China and what they have been up to. However, I did spend about ten years of my life reading The Art of War not just in the words that were printed on the page, but in soaking up their meaning in the way that the Chinese think. The book itself dates back to around 500 BC to the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu and clearly that has been the way that the Chinese not only came to power after World War II where America did all the fighting for them only to lose the entire East to communism, in Korea and Vietnam. Was it on purpose, I think so. Our government wanted communism in the East and it looks now that FDR and his partners in government wanted communism, not to hinder it. One of the people I most admire in the world was Claire Lee Chennault, the leader of the Flying Tigers who was tasked with defending China from the Japanese. After reading his book, the Way of the Fighter its clear to me that the United States military only wanted him to preserve China for the obvious communist invasion coming out of the Soviet Union. People disliked Ronald Reagan for standing up to Russia in the same way that they hate Trump for standing up to China, because they wanted communism to rule the world, and that has always been the fight. Its not new, but is to those who don’t read books, and haven’t been screaming about this issue from the rooftops on national radio shows for years, or writing about it as extensively, and solitarily, as I have.

For a change America has its own book on strategy, The Art of the Deal and the author of that book is the guy in the White House. The Chinese wish they had back Sun Tzu but all they can do is read his words. For America, the sequel to The Art of the Deal is applying those tactics to real life as we speak, and the result will be an end to Chinese communism. Trump knows that the financial status of China is all paper tigers and shadows on the wall made to look bigger than they really are. The reality is that they are going to collapse the longer they fight, and that is why these protests in Hong Kong are happening now. The people there know that this is their best shot at freedom so they are taking it. And I am so proud to have Trump in the White House fighting this fight even though many of the people around him in Washington D.C. are cheering on the Chinese. Their betrayal tells us who they were all along.

Rich Hoffman

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The Latest Mass Shooter Seth Ator: Where liberalism has failed, they always call for gun control

It took nearly 24 hours after another gunman identified the 36 years old Texan Seth Ator as the Odessa mass shooter which led to many conspiracy theories right after the tragedy. What was different from this event was that the killer was pulled over by police and shot at as they approached his vehicle. It wasn’t necessarily a preplanned massacre as others have been, while using an AR platformed weapon to invoke mass destruction on innocent people. This time the guy was just doing his thing and when he was engaged by law enforcement that broke up whatever activity he was doing, it set him off into a volatile rage that turned deadly quick.

It was sad that immediately after there were already calls for gun control, and this time it was a bit different also. Anti-gun people revealed more what their intentions were, since it was obvious that Seth Ator had a bit of a criminal record. Just like with health care it was the Obama part of it that was sold with the intention of going to a public option and complete socialist takeover. Well, the red flag laws that have been proposed, as well as the background checks are just the beginning. Gun grabbers and solid political leftists want guns removed from society. They quickly were using this case as one where open carry wouldn’t have worked, and tried immediately to apply the shooters “white guy” status to support their attempts at gun control. Its all been part of their overall story, angry white guys are dangerous, racist and that they created America and all that needs to be erased from history. But to do that, of course they have to take away the guns because that’s what keeps such a rebellion from happening.

However, as I have said, and from what we know is directly applicable to this case, failed parental structures are what is causing these mass shootings, the values these kids are not getting in their families is far more destructive than any other element. Then as has been the case with every shooter lately, we are still learning about this one, but drugs both legal and illegal have played a part in altering the consciousness of the attackers. All those elements are foundations of liberal policy in the failed experiments of replacing the family with government and the results are exploding on our streets now that many of the basic foundations of proper behavior have been eroded away into this anarchy movement that we see everywhere these days.

There were early reports that this guy was on meth and was an Antifa member which I stated wouldn’t have surprised me at all. To be honest, at 36 he’s a little old for Antifa terrorism, but it would be closer to a reality than to say he was a good Christian kid from Odessa that just freaked out one day and killed a bunch of people at a traffic stop. Liberals want to remove guns from our society because they have made kids like this killer with their social policies and they are determined to use every tragedy that occurs to attack America’s gun culture, and they truly expect everyone to just take it, and go along with implied guilt for things they had nothing to do with. But the left did. As is typical of all these recent shooters, Ator came from a divorced home. While divorce has been around for a while, it only became common in our society over the last few decades. There was a stigma against it in the 70s and 80s. If a woman became pregnant prior to that period, you got married and you forced yourself to live happily ever after so that you could grow a family. And when you got older and couldn’t stand each other anymore, you still stayed married because it was the right thing to do for the kids. Because kids psychologically need parental structure, no matter how much they rebel. They need the structure of a father and a mother, and when that is replaced with something else, such as a government welfare check, a student loan program, or any form of handout that replaces a father as head of a family, we see trouble in the products of that family, the children.

Not that every young person who has a dad that lives across town and must watch their parents date other people and spend Thanksgivings with their new boyfriends and girlfriends, they don’t go out and shoot a bunch of people just for the hell of it. But it is a problem among a large portion of our population, just as heavy marijuana use is an indicator of psychotic behavior in a minority of their users. Not everyone who smokes pot becomes a killer just as not everyone growing up without a dad does, but it is certainly an indicator of future violent behavior.

I will be the first to say that the kind of world I want to live in, where we openly carry our guns, everywhere, that such a society would require the best of what our culture could produce. People in such a society would be well educated, would not abuse drugs and alcohol, and would come from solid families with loving backgrounds. The only reason we don’t have such a society is because left leaning activists want all the bad things, broken families, reckless—inconsequential sex, drug abuse, and an ignorant population. And to have those things, they don’t want guns so everyone can kill each other. They want the deviant behavior and they don’t want consequences. That is the real issue and no law proposed could fix that.

The anti-police stance of Antifa likely did have more to do with Seth Ator opening fire on the police as they approached his vehicle after a traffic stop. The solution for the political left is to take away all guns so that Seth Ator wouldn’t have had the opportunity to do such a thing. But of course the ignorance of that proposal is that it does nothing to correct the desire to shoot a cop in the first place. After the initial attack against the police, Ator drove around killing random people, but there clearly wasn’t a plan. It was behavior driven and the elements that created that behavior that was the real cause. If it wasn’t guns, it would have been something else. Killers and lunatics will use anything to invoke a menace on a population if they are unhappy, which is why guns are needed to keep such things from getting out of control. In an open carry environment, he would have been shot by a good guy with a gun sooner, but this was different because he was in a car driving around before people could really get a sense of what was going on.

Without question these shootings are more political than demanding a legal mandate because no law proposed, background checks, red flag laws, or even illegal drug enforcement will change these occurrences. They are the results of liberalism injected into an otherwise conservative society and the conflict that is the natural biproduct. At the very least in this case was the lack of a biological family that was stable and secure. Mom and dad were divorced, and some people just can’t handle that. Their anger may project outward to innocent members of society, but the root cause is the broken family and the disappointments of a child that was robbed of that basic security. We would do better to make divorce illegal than guns. But to admit such a thing, liberals would have to admit that their social experiment of removing dads from homes and attacking the core values of American life has been a failure. And they certainly won’t do that. They’d rather blame guns.

Rich Hoffman

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There is a Storm Coming: Lakota better have a boat

I think the best thing that could happen is that Julie Shaffer would lose her seat to a new school board candidate in this upcoming fall 2019 election. Jim Hahn is a potential for that, he’s running and is a business guy, and if the Lakota school board could pick him up and keep Todd Parnell, and Lynda O’Conner, there would finally be a three vote conservative presence that could avert the current levy plans that are in place for attempts beginning as early as 2020. If there is another tax attempt, I will say right now that I am all on board to resume the fight against it, and I understand that others are also interested. A gentle message to Lakota and all the real estate agents that spawn off the school system, there is a storm coming, so I hope you have built a boat, because the next levy attempt will be a bloodbath. The liberal activities of Brad Lovell Kelley Casper and of course Julie Shaffer along with the very disappointing sentiments that have evolved from the new superintendent Matt Miller, they have squandered a very good opportunity, a great budget with declining enrollment that has even further inflated the payroll for teachers who clearly aren’t worth the money, and they have been caught in gross mismanagement. The two conservative school board members have shown a bit of hope in properly managing the district, but the school board itself hasn’t gone far enough—the liberal activism is still a problem in the management of the government school.

I have no love for Julie Shaffer, we have a history together. When she couldn’t defeat my arguments back in 2012 she had to turn to identity politics to separate the No Lakota Levy group I represented for their 2013 attempt which they ended up winning by a very narrow margin. But it wasn’t Lakota who did anything to turn the tide, it was Sheriff Jones who wanted to put armed cops in the schools to protect them from mass shooters, or the potential. As it turned out, just as I said it would be, the whole thing was a scam, the money from the levy wasn’t used to cover cops or even security. Lakota did do those things, but ultimately the money was only to give teachers raises for their very high wages. My argument back then was that it didn’t bother me that Lakota had several teachers with six figure salaries, but that through collective bargaining the labor union wanted everyone to have those extraordinary salaries and back then the average wage was over 70K per year. We always hear stories about how low teachers are paid, well that’s not the case at Lakota, the teachers are well paid and the union props them all up and makes it nearly impossible to fire problem employees like the recent drama witnessed by the ex-Lakota employee, the transgender activist Emily Osterling. She sued the district for her proposed termination, and she won a settlement of $175,000 which the tax payers had to cough up ultimately.

Lakota is in my back yard so I want them to do well, but only until they become a pain in the ass in asking for too much money. I am proud of Lakota as long as they aren’t asking for money and by looking at their annual budget of over $220 million per year it is clear that the school board has not managed the money correctly. Now to their defense, the collective bargaining agreements by the union make normal value stream assessments nearly impossible. It takes three solid votes to really manage a district when there are five board members. It has taken a long time to get the two good ones that we have now and a lot of pushing and shoving. I have been asked many, many times to take on the job, but for my part, I have no desire to negotiate with a labor union all the time and I think the education system should be completely dismantled and recreated with a school choice competitive option. So its not a job for me, but we do need smart people who understand value creation to do the job. In that regard, there is an option in Jim Hahn.

However, the union vote will come out for their own preservation and they will vote this November for Julie Shaffer, so it will be a tough climb for Jim Hahn. He’s going to need some help and a good turnout. The union will not want him on the school board because they are against anything that does not stop the upward mismanagement of financial resources that are set to run out by 2023. Most of that $220 million budget is all in teacher salaries and that is just ridiculous. In an age where kids are learning more from hand held devices such as smart phones and personal computers, physical teachers are going the way of the drive-in. The test results just do not show that a teacher in the classroom make or break much in a student’s life. Most of the feel good stories are propaganda by the unions which young people are prone to be sucked in to, but are shallow in credibility at best. Just take a look at the Lakota website and their reported financials. They are short on substance but are flashy with surface points and comparisons to other districts who are every bit as much of a disaster as they are—because they are all driven by unionized employees hungry for inflated wages and as little work to do as possible.

The bloodbath that I am promising will be simple value stream analysis of what Lakota really does for our community, which is very little. The high school football games are only important to the students and their families, the other 100,000 people who live in the Lakota school system could care less and people like me without kids in the school system go through our daily days not even noticing the school buildings or their occupants. Life is busy and there is a lot for people like me to do that has nothing to do with the school system, and people like me are in the majority. All it takes is to get them to show up to vote, and they can easily out vote the union radicals which is why it takes Lakota an average of three levy attempts to get a tax increase passed. And to do that they have to resort to guerrilla warfare, not the goodness of people’s hearts. I would personally rather have the bloodbath rather than harm future business growth in our region with another Lakota tax increase, and argued that way, the way all businesses are measured, the story is quite clear. Lakota is not a value to our community, but a hindrance and the product they produce is failing and will continue to fail until the unions no longer run the government schools. That is, unless a third conservative is elected to the school board, and the budget crises that is coming can be averted. The value of the district won’t change but the bad reputation that will put Lakota through a lot of pain could be averted. And I would think that to be a good thing.

Rich Hoffman

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