Category: Policial Science

What they are Doing at Ross will soon come to Lakota: A promise I’ll make if you’ll vote correctly

In case you haven’t heard dear reader, the future of Lakota is actually happening in the Ross Township school system where they just passed a levy a short while ago and now the teacher’s union there is begging for a raise based on the extra revenue. And as reported by the soft taco education writer for the Journal-News, Michael D. Clark, the Ross teachers just rejected the latest offer by the school board even after a federal mediator came in to help resolve the matter. We also have seen nationally that the Chicago teacher’s union have been striking yet again to demand pay increases leaving thousands of parents scrambling to find somewhere to put their kids during their busy workdays. In my world, I would say to fire every single one of them and replace them with brand new employees who are not part of the union. But these are all government schools. We hire a school board through the election process to represent us at the table, but honestly, and they all know it, there is only one eventual resolution, they will have to agree to the pay increases one way or another because all other options to manage the situation is illegal. The government has ensured its employees of that much, and they use it against taxpayers all the time, and to hell with the children. The Ross teachers don’t give a damn about the kids otherwise they’d take the money the school board was willing to give them, and they’d shut the hell up and like it.

And that is precisely why the Lakota teacher’s union is eager to elect Ray Murray and Julie Shaffer to the school board so that when it comes time to have this same negotiation next year with the union, that Ray and Julie will lay down and give them all that they want without a lot of fuss. Because after all, the deck is stacked against management and they don’t want a lot of bloody news in the newspaper hurting their union brand. Ross Township in relation to other schools in Butler County is out across the river in no man’s land. Not really along any big commercial paths. It’s kind of the wild west version of a community in the very Republican county. So its easy to ignore and overlook in the paper. But it has all the same problems that a big school like Lakota has just to the east by ten miles or so. And what is happening there is a mirror reflection of what is coming to Lakota where a lot of people will be very upset when the same conditions are presented to them as voters.

Michael Clark and reporters like him are part of the problem. They are just going through the motions in life, and don’t want to disrupt their contacts on these school boards. So his reporting is soft shelled when it comes to the education beat because his newspaper employer relies on the old system to work, they need the sports pages, the advertising connected to that system and the ankle deep reporting that never gets to the heart of the kind of topics that are really floating around in the depths of all education. When he writes a story, it doesn’t put pressure on the union representatives like Robin Plowman at Ross to get her members in line to the school board demands. It only puts pressure on the school board because all the powers of nature are aligned by the rules and regulations to destroy their position, made worse by the reporters who are clearly aligned politically with the teacher’s union. For school boards its like being trapped in a house surrounded by armed forces and they’ve cut off your power and water and food supply. Eventually you’ll have to come out into a hail of gun fire. And as a school board member, you are expected to like it.

What we need desperately, especially at Lakota are school board members like Lynda O’Connor and James Hahn to hold the line during next year’s contract negotiations and when the teacher’s threaten to strike, which they will, to be willing to tell them to take a hike. But that is only one part of the puzzle. To fight their out of school antics, there need to be people like me willing to fight them with their games. I’m not saying it has to be me, it would be nice if it was a bunch of people like me, but someone has to engage them radical antic to radical position because that’s the way they fight and it’s the only path to beat them. The community has to back its school board and take the fight to the lap of the teacher’s unions knowing that you can’t trust the newspapers or the television reporters to stand behind the community representatives. I am certainly willing to do that and I have under considerable fire which I enjoy. That has been the point of this continued fight over the last decade. What’s different now is that there is a chance to get a real school board in place instead of a lot of those soft-shell tacos that Michael Clark likes so much so he can write those easy stories and not ruffle any feathers with his editors. He has enough ruffled feathers living in that beard of his especially this time of year as birds too lazy to fly south for warmer weather just reside in his beard.

What voters have to come to terms with, and we all have to accept is that teacher’s unions do not put children ahead of their paychecks. They use them as extortion pieces, but they don’t love them at all, and will abandon them in the classroom to put leverage on their contract negotiations without a second thought. There are lots of teachers that I have talked to who will say to me that union membership is a requirement and that they have no choice but to hide within membership and do what the leadership tells them. The union understands that too, they don’t give their membership a choice in the matter, they expect their members to follow their lead and use their numbers as leverage in negotiations. If the teachers go along with it but silently send messages out that they really just want to teach the kids, they are still acting against the children by allowing the union to have all that power. They are contributing to evil every time and its their fault that these negotiations go so poorly. If they are honest with themselves, they just want the pay increase. They aren’t doing the work for the pleasure of teaching children—even if the district can’t afford them. They just want the money and the union gets it through collective bargaining which is stacked against the school boards in every circumstance.

At Lakota things are a bit different. I am personally willing to fight the union if the school board will stick up to them. But first we must have a school board that will do so. The next time there is a strike at Lakota I will take that fight to them building a coalition of our own and to hell with that federal moderator and Michael Clark’s reporting. Put real school board members on the board and I will promise that I will defend that board with whatever it takes to beat that union. But first you will have to vote for James Hahn and Lynda O’Connor on Tuesday November 5, 2019. Do that much and we’ll take care of the rest. Unlike reporters such as Michael Clark I will get the dirt on every member of the teacher’s union, who they are sleeping with, who they didn’t tip well at a local restaurant, even what kind of underwear they are wearing and we will paint the world with their antics. And they won’t like it one bit. That’s what will happen the next time teachers at Lakota try what they are doing now at Ross and ultimately Chicago. It’s a game I’m sick of seeing and I’m not a soft taco kind of guy. I like a lot of hot sauce and there is plenty of it there to consume. Now get out there and VOTE!

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

Shakedowns at Lakota: The trolls robbing openly the business community

It’s not often easy to understand the many veiled ways that a school system, any school system, extorts the business community for extra cash in the pay to play scheme that is what has become of government schools. When anybody talks about the teacher unions as a negative radical force, it goes far beyond the wages that destroy budgets that school boards are constantly having to deal with. It actually seeps into the management of the school system itself flowing over into zoning and finance. When we see these radicals in action they usually present themselves as nice cordial people, perhaps with too much jewelry and perfume–even the guys. Their pant suits would make Hillary Clinton proud as they profess to be “all about the children,” which nobody would argue with because they don’t understand the details. But when the lights are dimmed a bit, or these union radicals are sipping their lattés at Starbucks, their true intentions become much clearer and a hatred for the rich and industrious comes sharply into focus, even as they make plans to strike against a school system over more money such as what seems always to be happening in Chicago. And from the letter presented below, this practice of harassing businesses isn’t just happening in my home district of Lakota, it’s pretty much everywhere that labor unions operate with taxpayer funds.

What makes stories like this hard for people to understand is that its not the direct action that progressive teacher unions create themselves, it’s the results that they instigate as a radicalized political entity. Anybody who has the endorsement of a labor union and is running for school board is playing the game and do the bidding of that radical element. This example is within Lakota, but the same story could be told in Mason, Monroe, or any government school. The foundation for this particular practice at Lakota goes back to the severe mismanagement of the school board that went on when Joan Powell was running things. To a large degree Julie Shaffer has carried on the tradition along with Ray Murray and Brad Lovell. Ray lost his seat a few years ago to Todd Parnell. Lynda O’Connor and Todd have been two votes toward solutions and are both business friendly. For this upcoming election, Jim Hahn is poised to join the school board and like Todd and Lynda, is a pro-business candidate and would be part of the solution. But before we can talk about that we must define the problem that is expressed in the letter presented.

The names were blacked out to protect the innocent on the letter shown here. Even though I have permission to use the letter in its raw form it’s not really necessary for the story. The story is that a real-estate investment by an enterprising opportunity has been trying to gather up the funds to initiate the endeavor and they are being told in this letter that the common practice in public schools operating in this region are demanding even more money to leverage control over the project before a shovel ever hits the ground. And that threat will continue until the owner or prospector of the property makes a payment to the school for the increased value assessed by the legal entity who is also part of the game. Essentially that means that any investment coming into an area doesn’t just have to look at the costs of the project itself, but the amount of extortion money that the local school system applies to them. Of course, if they don’t play then as the letter says, they will be “blacklisted” and will have trouble elsewhere.

Such as in the case of Lakota, this is why incoming projects, shopping centers, home developments either move to some friendlier district without the kind of leverage that Lakota has or they just buck up and shut up so they can do business in our community. The teacher’s union create the false narrative that their employment makes a great school which attracts investment by developers. They have the media platform to get a sympathetic ear from both print and television news because the kids are used as a shield to advance the topic. But the chaos is driven by the insatiable need for ever more money that is always increased by the labor demand for unreasonably high wages, which must be paid for by the “rich,” property owners. Those property owners are of course the general taxpayers who own real estate—they are all looked at as soft targets by the teacher’s union out for progressive changes to society in general. But it is the business owners who take the biggest hit, just as this letter explains. If they want to do business in Lakota, or any school district through Ohio and Pennsylvania, they will have to pay the troll living under the bridge between finance and the local school system.

The worst part of all this is that it is the crazy labor costs that are driving the activism. Business owners typically don’t want to get involved in contentious disputes because the teacher’s union will threaten quite openly to boycott their work, which to any business could mean complete destruction. Its hard enough to come into a community with a business plan to get funding for the project, but then to survive a shakedown by the local school that might put 7% to 10% extra cost into the project. Then to have it all threatened with bad press and a bunch of angry latté sippers from the teacher’s union is often a “not worth it” decision. People may look around Lakota’s district and declare that everything is great, there are lots of businesses and lots of residents. But what isn’t talked about is that there could be more if the school system wasn’t such a negative impact on potential investors. When it is wondered why Lakota has had declining enrollment, this is one of the contributing factors. Or why young people move out of the area once they graduate. Or why Liberty Center still hasn’t leased out all its available space in spite of all the wonderful things it has to offer to the community, the cost of doing business is too high for most, so it limits our opportunities as a community.

Meanwhile the demand for such high cost appropriations does come from the teacher’s unions who are always threatening the school district with increased costs which pushes not so bright school board members like Ray Murray, Brad Lovell and Julie Shaffer into participating in these shakedowns to keep from having to go to the voters every couple of years to get more levy money to pay the unending appetites of the radical Lakota teacher’s union. The businesspeople are easy targets because they often can’t afford to defend themselves once they have sunk a lot of money into a project, then are stuck holding to it once the bleeding starts. Sure, the labor radicals are nice to them and are not shy to ask for more shakedown money any way they can get it with cordial conversation at public events, but make no mistake about it, the practice is vile and is just as criminal as any thief looking to rob a bank. It’s the same thing, only the school districts wait for some investor to come along with bright ideas to do all the work, then once they are too far along to turn back, find they have to secure more revenue to appease the trolls in the school district. And that is just disgusting. It is certainly happening at Lakota in abundance, but to be honest, it is happening everywhere. The reality is that nobody has the guts to cover it which is why it continues to happen on and on and on.

Rich Hoffman

Julie Shaffer and Ray Murray Want Transgender Bathrooms at Lakota: Lynda O’Connor and Jim Hahn could stop them if elected

Another thing that voters need to understand in the Lakota school district as they vote on November 5th 2019 to cast a ballot for new school board members, is where they stand on the transgender bathroom policy. Clearly by the video below, and on many other issues there are two right thinking candidates, and two who are out of their minds. The two good ones are Lynda O’Connor and James Hahn. The two bad ones are Ray Murray and Julie Shaffer. What makes Ray and Julie bad are several things, but for this particular circumstance its their policy of allowing sex to determine the focus of a taxpayer funded education that makes them such villains. Lynda and Jim are against the proposal of taking away parental rights from their children by allowing transgender kids in locker rooms and in the general bathrooms. Transgender politics is a dangerous progressive platform that is driven by government schools and is meant to erode away family value so that children are raised under the umbrella of an all intrusive government. The issue is not about fairness, its about family destruction. Listening to Ray and Julie below I would say they are not savvy enough to understand the politics behind the movement. And that makes them even more dangerous to the Lakota school board, because they are pawns to a progressive policy without even knowing it. But if left to them, if Julie and Ray are on a board together, you can bet they will be voting for transgender bathrooms and locker rooms. Listen to them for yourself:

In many ways Lakota dealt with this years ago, and Lynda O’Connor was part of the leadership in creating an option for transgender kids with a separate bathroom. The continuation of this issue proves that the agenda is not about keeping kids from committing suicide because boys want to be girls, and vice versa. It’s about eroding away the values of students into instruments of progressive thought and turning them into activists for change into a liberal, anti-traditional family direction. To be clear, Jim and Lynda working together on the school board would prevent further transgender issues from becoming a distraction. Ray and Julie would perpetuate the issue and vote to allow mixing boys and girls into general bathrooms and locker rooms. They are weak people who are not very smart making them easy victims of the aggressive teacher’s union. The union has supported both of them because they know that Julie and Ray are easy targets for their agenda of progressive considerations. To prevent this issue both Lynda and Ray would need to be elected because currently Lynda is outvoted on the board two votes to three for approval. The only thing stopping it currently is this upcoming election.

Its hard for many people to admit, including school board members, but education is much less about teaching kids anything, but is more about changing them into progressive activists. In many ways, no discussion about sex should be going on with taxpayer funded efforts. Liberals have been pushing for years to continue lowering sex education among student populations into younger and younger ages. In many cases students aren’t even thinking about sex as public schools are proposing teaching about it in the fourth and fifth grade. Progressive planners at the state level who make up these curriculums know that most children are home alone and bored out of their minds as both parents work these days. And when kids are thinking about sex, they are easy to control especially at school because the teachers become the adoptive parents. Julie isn’t thinking in such conspiratorial terms and Ray is too busy smoking pot and digging his hands into the pavement of Chicago streets to think very deeply about anything. But those are stories for other articles. For this, they just do what they are told by the union. And believe me, the leadership within the unions are all about advancing the progressive anti-family national position of their liberal organization.

Transgender issues are a minority and to provide them with a bathroom to use is fair. Anything beyond that is disruptive to the other students. I could go back to my school days and tell lots of stories as these issues were just becoming part of the narrative. I was a very good athlete and obviously all the school coaches wanted me to play on their programs whether it was basketball or football. I liked playing the games, but I hated, HATED undressing and dressing in the locker rooms. I hated it with kids of the same sex. I can’t imagine it with people who were openly gay and girls who were claiming to be boys. Nudity for me was always a very vulnerable position. I grew up going to church every week. My mom was a housewife and we had a very traditional family structure so I had clear definitions of right and wrong and not being vulnerable around strangers.

We have learned over the last decade or so however that sexual manipulation is actually very common among coaches and students and creating conditions where kids are getting nude is meant to teach them to lower their defenses. With me, I never did. I just didn’t play the sports, because I didn’t want to be stripped of my clothing and assimilated into a Borg Continuum that they called a “team.” I would say that most people reading this are at least my age or older, so they likely had similar experiences and all this modern talk about transgender locker rooms and bathrooms is beyond their understanding. But its quite an obvious attack on our lifestyles in America and its on purpose. It is happening at Lakota. But it is happening everywhere that the teacher unions touch taxpayer money.

When Julie Shaffer says that over 70% of students are thinking about committing suicide, she is talking about 70% of something like 2% of the student population, overstated on purpose to exacerbate the issue for overly emotional people. Rather than deal with the exceptions the progressive position is to use the exceptions to change the standard and drag more and more kids into the confusing condition of sexual identity when most of them can’t even read a book or do basic math. And that is the real crime. Even if nobody wants to believe that progressives at the state and federal level are attempting to destroy the American family with these transgender policies, the truth of the matter is that while we are talking about these issues, kids aren’t learning what they should be, so a change is desperately needed if we are to save them at all from these dangerous educations. What is absolutely certain is that if either Julie or Ray are elected to the Lakota school board, then they will have the votes to advance this agenda. They both support it, you heard it from their own mouths. But if Jim and Lynda are elected, then the issue will be held off and parents will retain their rights to at least manage their children’s sexuality as they should have the responsibility for. Its not the school’s place to stick their noses into such a small topic of the human experience and anybody who says otherwise is looking to limit the intellect of young people with such a trivial topic to consider. Which to my mind should be a crime. But for now, its at least subject to a vote and with an election, we can stop the continued damage.

Rich Hoffman

The Timid Lakota School Board Candidates, Julie Shaffer and Ray Murray: Being a cop doesn’t automatically make a person an expert on courage

With a big school board candidate election coming up this year at Lakota in southwest Ohio the differences are quite obvious between them. Of the topics most talked about at a recent Meet the Candidates evening at the VOA Miami University Lecture Hall on October 22nd 2018 the topic of arming the teachers to prevent another mass shooting, especially at a large, affluent school like Lakota, and the various ways of looking at that problem was very well defined. Lynda O’Connor and James Hahn had the obvious conservative approach to things, self-reliance, and solution-based results at the point of danger whereas Ray Murray and Julie Shaffer were obvious liberals who believe in big government, passivity, and some kind of prayer to avert danger. Of them Ray had the most ridiculous answer to the question of arming teachers in the classroom, although Julie Shaffer wasn’t far behind with her 22% of shooters hit their targets under duress. Well, that’s 22% better than not having a gun. What a lunatic. But her thinking was very much captured in Ray’s statement which can be seen below, and it took everything I had to sit there and listen respectfully.

I get tired of people like Ray, people who are obviously timid peaceful people lecture the rest of us how society should be constructed to their sensibilities, then selling it as if being a police officer at some point in time gives him the right to say such a thing. As he told his story about wanting to dig into the concrete to get away from a firefight when he was a cop in Chicago all I could think of was the word “wimp.” Now that’s not a politically correct term, but lets face it, that’s what we all thought of it and if we didn’t, we would call ourselves liberals, people who count on some institutional system to avert our fears about the things in life that scare us. Just because Ray was a cop doesn’t make him some magical man of authority on the subject. Lots of people become cops for all the right reasons, and when they get shot at, they learn perhaps that the job is not for them. It can be scary, but for some people, being shot at is exhilarating and they are the best that they can be when danger is presented. I’m sure we have those types of people working at Lakota and it is they who should be carrying a gun. If Ray is too scared, well that’s fine. We don’t want him digging into the hallways of Lakota if there is a firefight. We want someone to engage the target, so I get it, Ray and Julie are not the people we want armed. But when a bad guy shows up, somebody needs to meet them while we wait for the police to arrive, because the body count will be measured in seconds of engagement, not minutes.

Speaking for myself I am an adrenaline junkie. I have been shot at and had guns pointed at me, many, many times. I am a little too crazy for the structure of the military or the police force but unlike the institutional perspective of Ray Murray and Julie Shaffer there are other ways that people get shot at in life. For a time, I was a repo man during the years that a lot of people go to the military repossessing cars from deadbeat owners who often become violent when they learned you were there to take their property away. I volunteered for every assignment I could because I thought it was exciting and when gunfire did break out, I thought it was pure heaven. Being that close to a dangerous situation was fun to me and I couldn’t get enough of it. I was also a bouncer at a night spot I worked at around the same period of my life. I wasn’t yet 21 years of age, yet I was throwing out drunks, breaking up fights, and taking fights to safe places with people much older and bigger than me. And in those fights guns came out all the time and I never thought twice about crying about it or digging into the pavement while bullets flew around. I’ve seen people get shot, and I’ve seen people die. And all that occurred in the private sector. I once knew a judge of very high rank in the city of Sharonville and when I got into trouble, he helped me out. It was a good arrangement and I learned a lot from it. But why did he help me, well, people who love danger as much as I did, and still do are hard to find. And he appreciated that trait and thought it valuable enough to cut me some slack when things did go wrong. Let’s just say that.

I tell that little bit of the story to say that some people love danger and they want to help others get away from it. And we need to empower those people to stop crimes before they happen. It’s better to have someone smashed up and in the hospital sometimes than to play everything safe and leave the problem to the institutions where some pot smoking loser kid who knows they are going nowhere in life decides to go shoot up a school. By the time Ray and Julie’s police arrive, 5 to 20 kids could be killed, because that is the kind of world we are living in. And you’d be surprised at the kind of people who hear a gun shot and will run straight through the bullets to stop the carnage because they have a natural inclination to do well while in danger.

I thought hard about becoming a cop, or joining the special forces in the military, but honestly, I was never a yes sir no sir kind of guy. I don’t like the structure of those organizations, so I didn’t join, even for the ability to carry a gun and shoot down bad guys. It was tempting, but it wasn’t worth enduring all the silly rules. But don’t assume that being a cop makes someone an expert on gunfights. Personally, I’d love to be in a gun fight, every day if I could. So, Ray is speaking from an experience of a guy naturally timid, and that’s OK. But don’t assume you speak for everyone.

Just a rough bet, but I would say that at least 5% of the employees at Lakota have some bit of the adrenaline addiction that I described about myself. When danger happens, they only think of one thing, engaging it and stopping it. They don’t pay attention to the sounds of the gun fire; they are instead inspired like a fine symphony to conduct their lives to the beat of danger. And if not for those types of people, we would have a much more dangerous type of world in America. I would argue that suppressing those types of people with institutional constrictions has led to far more death than in allowing adrenaline junkies who love justice for all to carry open firearms to engage any potential targets in fractions of seconds than the time it takes to make a 911 call. And that again is proof of how ridiculous Julie Shaffer and Ray Murray have been as school board members. They make decisions based on their timid perspectives while the real solutions are handcuffed behind institutional virtue. To assume that everyone in the world is just as timid as they are is more dangerous than arming teachers. And that is what nobody is putting into perspective, that is, perhaps until now.

Rich Hoffman

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Ray Murray Thinks it will take 38 Years to Spend Lakota’s $100 Million Surplus: Why people like he and Julie Shaffer should never be in charge of a budget

$100 million is a lot of money to liberals who only see future pay increases for subpar work leading to easy labor union contract negotiations. And clearly one school board member, Julie Shaffer displayed at a recent meet the candidate’s night at the VOA Miami University Campus Lecture Hall how little she knows about money. Her partner in such a perspective was Ray Murray, the former school board member coming back for more and local pastor pontificated that we wouldn’t—couldn’t spend that much money of a surplus for 38 years, so to his utterances why not give it all away. Now you can see dear reader why it’s dangerous to elect these kinds of people into a management of our tax money. Instead of respecting that money and understanding that the surplus wasn’t really one at all, but a debt leverage problem that needed attention, they tried to paint the fiscal conservative on the board, Lynda O’Connor as a Chicken Little for pointing out that deficit spending is not a healthy condition. No wonder the teacher’s union is licking its chops to get Ray and Julie back on the board and managing their contracts a few years out. They already have that money spent whereas Lynda and the newcomer James Hahn understand that $100 million is not that much money, especially when you look at the overall budget needs.

I did get to talk to Matt Miller the Lakota superintendent and the very good treasurer Jenni Logan, recognized throughout the state of Ohio as the very best in her field, and they assured me that they were going to tackle the deficit spending problem. Sure, it’s fun to spend money like there’s no tomorrow, but smart people like Jenni, and Lynda understand that $100 million as a surplus isn’t much when the operating budget is around $160 million per year, where the only product is educating students, (or babysitting them) and they aren’t doing a very good job at that either, getting a recent poor report card from the state that shows money does not improve results. The teachers need to work harder and worry less about transgender bathroom policies.

I was encouraged to see many friends from the business community not sitting this election out, they are not impressed with the $100 million surplus either. They are wondering why Lakota can’t lower their tax burden if they are operating at such a surplus and not considering spending pauses so that they could continue to build up elements of our community that really matter, jobs and recreation that make a community what it really is, and not just a cesspool of employment for a liberalized labor union trying to program our children into future Democrats. Had they not been there this election might have a different tone, but even the spending addict Julie Shaffer had to watch her mouth so not to sound “too” Democrat in such a conservative district even with pro spending liberals showing out in full force to support future contract negotiations. The smart people want to see James Hahn elected instead of Ray or Julie because that would put a third conservative on the board and would help manage that surplus responsibly. But if left to Ray and Julie, to Lynda’s point, the money will all be gone in around 5 years. Jenni gets it. But Matt didn’t look so happy to see me, and not so excited about focusing on the deficit spending aspect. Elections have consequences and a lot of people are waiting to see how this one turns out.

The best thing to do with the money would be to lessen the burden on future taxpayers to inspire more investment and continued growth. What is lost on Ray and Julie as to the role of the school board in the community is that they not only have to manage the quality of the school, but the cost and to understand the balance between the two. The way it has been, which has sickened me to my core, is that school districts leverage their power to tax against future investment. If you want to play in their school district then they expect you to pay, which is something I will be covering much more in subsequent articles. I can understand the tension in the room at that candidate’s forum. I understand idealistic people with a bloodthirsty zeal to support their school system without understanding how the cheese is made behind the scenes. It’s much easier to just focus on kids and transgender bathrooms, whether or not busing is available and the quality of the sports program. But the question remains, what makes a school district good, is the businesses that attract jobs and good quality applicants who need housing, places to eat, and shop. Or is it the schools that we pour millions and millions of dollars into that just go to overpriced teachers teaching our children radical leftist political activism only to have those kids grow up and to move away. I would say it’s the businesses that come first then the schools that reflect the quality of a well-managed community. And that is something no school system wants to admit to, because it would destroy their extortion racket that they have politically on a community, and financially.

There is a reason so many real estate people are involved with pro levy endeavors, or government labor union types. It’s because behind the scenes schools leverage themselves into the business community with subtle threats directly attached to their ability to tax. Pay or be destroyed, or don’t do business altogether. Being in pro education anything groups like I was last night the people are not the risk takers who go out and obtain financing for some next new great thing, they are just average people who want to feel what they are doing by investing in Lakota will make their kids like them when they grow up. They want to think that the education system will fix all their deficiencies as people. That is certainly the case of Julie Shaffer and her past protégé Joan Powell who were part of those upside-down deficit spending habits that almost destroyed Lakota and the community it sits in. The reason there is a $100 million surplus now is because so many kids grew up and away and new kids did not replace them, so Lakota has declining enrollment that will continue into the future, and that took the pressure off our budget tremendously, but the deficit spending has continued and will so long as there is a three vote majority against proper budget management.

As Julie said trying to defer blame from herself, school boards don’t pass levies, they don’t demand further tax increases. They leave it up to the voters. But what school boards do however is mismanage the money we give them. They cave into labor union demands for ever increasing rates of pay that is not connected to any performance standards. And when Julie won’t take her part of the blame for the deficit spending and when Ray, who was there all along thinks it is party time at Lakota, that they have 38 years to spend that $100 million surplus, well there is the problem. We have a chance to fix it with this election, but people are going to have to show up to vote. If they don’t then the same deficit spenders will be in place, the labor unions will love it because Julie and Ray would gladly approve a contract negotiation because they don’t have the guts to deal with a strike or bad press for standing up for the taxpayers. And they will lead the charge against the business community to twist their arms into silent approval or else boycotts from the radical union members will come after their brand with a fury. And none of those questions were asked at the candidate forum because as we all know, it’s something that people just don’t talk about. But it is every bit the core of the problem.

Rich Hoffman

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Creating Crises for Change Agency: Why so many are so angry about Syria

It is truly scary to think how close we came to having Mitt Romney as president in 2012, Mr. Pierre Delecto. If you add him to John Kasich who was governor of Ohio during that election, its no wonder the GOP lost all the time. Those guys just suck. Horrible representatives of conservative values and in the scheme of things, before there was a Donald Trump in politics, they were the good guys. We all suspected how deep the deep state was, and why we had troops all over the world supporting make work wars just for the benefit of having something to do and always a crisis to manage. You would think that more Democrats would be happy that Trump is pulling our troops out of Syria and asking other countries to pay their own way in matters of conflict, but nobody in government is happy about it, because essentially it exposes them for not really having anything better to do. They create the crises, then they send resources to manage the crises, all the while enriching themselves in the process. And now that we have a president that is exposing that scheme people like Romney are apocalyptic. If there is anything good coming of it, it is that conservative radio and talk shows are finally starting to see how the game has been played all along. Rush Limbaugh had a particularly good show about it, seen below, as did Laura Ingraham on Fox.

One of the first rules of change agency is to create a false crisis, a situation where people in a panic will make decisions, they otherwise wouldn’t make to usher in a change state to their daily lives. And nothing provokes change more than a war without end. I would think that the Hollywood anti-war protestors would be supporters of President Trump due to his desire to turn away from that chaos of global war machine politics. Instead they have turned toward the next crises, an invented diatribes like “climate change.” They are hoping to see the President impeached before the swamp is drained and all their tricks for creating crises are exposed. Wars used in this modern era, as we have clearly witnessed by the evidence, are make work programs for the lazy, and institutionalized thinkers, such as the Harvard educated Mitt Romney. Trump’s election has turned the world he thought he understood on its head leaving us all thankful that the common sense of the American people made an important change in electing Trump before it was too late, which in 2012 was at the precipice. Many in the Tea Party movement were seeing the writing on the wall, much earlier even than 2009 when things really started to get heated. But the panic now, for losers like “Pierre Delecto,” is that their make work wars have been exposed and that the world will forever be changed, and that they don’t understand their place in it.

Rush was correct, these political class players used our love of military, patriotism, and country to create a military complex that we would cheerfully send over seas to manage other people’s problems all in the name of crises management. Yet the crises were created by hidden agents operating behind the curtain, infusing a little anger here in some socialist cell in the Middle East, or making it so that America couldn’t fly into space but through Russian agents due to cutbacks at NASA. And we were all supposed to accept these ridiculous limits and provocations and like it. Then when we elected a different kind of politician that would turn the GOP into a true Republican Party, politicians like Mitt Romney and John Kasich fell into an all-out panic. They had spent their lives learning the rules and now the rules were all thrown out the window. If we had elected Romney, the Republican Party would essentially slide more to the left and become what the Democrats would like to be about now.

You can see the weakness of these arrogant institutionalists when pressed, Mr. Pierre Delecto uttered “C’est moi,” just to show everyone how educated and “New English” he is while confirming his clandestine Twitter account so critical of President Trump. He was so eager for some reporter at Slate to sniff at his breadcrumbs and tell the world that Romney wasn’t such a boring guy after all, and that he really hated the president desperately, because essentially, he had lost at his chance. He’d rather have someone in the White House that he understands even if they are from the other party. Sounds a lot like James Comey as he talked about drinking wine while leaving Washington after being fired from his job by Trump as another worthless beltway bureaucrat. These people, who we used to call conservatives are simply coastal liberals who have no idea what makes the rest of the country tick, and they have no desire to learn because they are representatives of institutionalism, and that behavior seeks to justify themselves through chaos and crises. They never did want any solutions to any problems, they just wanted problems so they could appear to do things about it, while making themselves wealthy off the process. A quick look at how much incoming senators make as opposed to what they make leaving office tells the whole story. It is insulting that these types of people were upset with Trump for wanting to host the G7 at Doral. I still think he should.

If not for the Trump election none of this would have been exposed, but it is now. Better yet, conservative outlets are no longer treating the subject as a vast conspiracy, but as real news, as it always was. The best thing that could happen is that people like Mitt Romney and John Kasich be flushed from conservative thinking and that the GOP form under the small government tendencies of the Trump administration. The hypocrisy couldn’t be more obvious, even from a giant media company like Disney who should love the Trump administration for its anti-war stance, its solution-based trade wars, and economic sanctions which hit villains in the pocketbook, not in innocent collateral damage. If it’s not obvious by now, our military is not exactly a bastion of conservatism. They are by nature big government bureaucrats which Trump learned while trying to put them in his administration. Troops might vote for Republicans, but generals are very liberal in their thinking, and they love to have perpetual wars with no solutions in sight because it keeps everyone fed with make work programs and reasons to celebrate with dinner parties for the heroes of the movement. You would think that more people would support pulling back the troops but now that someone in the Executive Branch is actually planning to do it, without asking for permission, the outrage is rather explosive, and for our benefit, very revealing. There is nothing new about it, but we do now see a truth that has always been there. And it’s a good thing that we finally did, and that news types, such as Rush Limbaugh are finally addressing it for what it is. We had to admit that our GOP was not fully conservative and that our former politicians were just as corrupt as the Democrats. To me, Trump’s anti-war stance is a liberal one, and he is not what I would call a strong conservative. But next to Mitt Romney and John Kasich, and many others, Trump is the most conservative politician to ever sit in the White House, or anywhere for that matter.

Rich Hoffman

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Public Education Sucks: If President Trump really wants to drain the Swamp, make government unions illegal

Part of the solution to the public education nightmare is to elect good local school board members who take the job seriously and truly want to help children become smarter with a proper education. In my local district of Lakota I will be voting for Lynda O’Connor who has been in that position for a while and needs a critical third vote to have proper management authority to do anything productive, like at least keep the budget in check. And to get that third vote I will be voting for James Hahn who is a savvy business figure offering his talents to help solve some of the public education problems. Those are the conventional measures that can be taken at a local level to help provide a solution. But as many know by now, my involvement in the public education system has shown me that the entire thing needs to be scrapped, which Betsy DeVos stated quite nicely on a segment with Bret Baier on Fox News Friday evening, October 18th, 2019. The problem isn’t money, public education has been well funded for many years. The problem is all about performance. Public education has been terrible for our children and it needs a complete overhaul. Local elections might slow down some of the spending bleeding that goes on, but it can’t change what kids learn, only competition can do that.

Most of the things that President Trump would like to do with education is a second term thing, Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos has been setting the stage for quite a long time and for a good reason as she stated on Bret’s show. America, a first world country of considerable resources is ranked around the world #24 in reading. #25 in science. And #40 in math. 40! For me only a top ten measure would be acceptable. And I personally would expect a ranking of #1 in all the categories if not just a few of them. Based on those measures, public education isn’t working and every other week we have another school district somewhere going on strike demanding more money using those kids as hostages to get it. The madness has to stop and until it does, we need to call it what it is, an unmitigated disaster that is only a very expensive publicly paid babysitting service for busy parents who aren’t managing their children and are committed to raising a generation of idiots.

I know Lynda personally and respect her commitment to education, she has dedicated a considerable amount of her life to it. And I have come to know a bit about James Hahn, he really, really cares about education. I have had countless people ask me to run for a school board position and I have had to decline time and time again simply because I can’t do what they want to do, and that is beat my head against an emphatically broken system. They are willing to save what they can of it. I’m not, I’m with Betsy DeVos, School Choice is really the only way to fix the system. Attach the money to the kids and keep the unions out of it. I would go so far to push for making union membership illegal in any government entity. If you want to drain the swamp in D.C. that would be a good place to start. And in education, the evidence would quickly present itself of just how bad the labor unions are for the education system. There are likely few people who care as much about education as I do at my age. I still endeavor to learn things every day like a 6-year-old child does naturally. Books and education are a part of my daily life, and not just a little bit—but a lot. I still read at least one book a week and push to learn something new every day, so it is quite insulting to me to listen to a bunch of stupid people telling me we need to spend more money on education just to inflate government employee’s paychecks, and that we will still be ranked so low by international standards. I know what education and a life with a mind on fire should look like for young people and the public education system we have now does not get us there, and it never will.

All the performance standards we have now are baked into protecting the labor union employees. The goals of those employees is not to train a bright mind to become brighter, but to train them to be good stewards of the state and to care more about fictional climate science and gay rights then learning to engineer the next great thing. Luckily in America through our free market system we develop great talent in spite of such a disastrous public education system, but we could do so much better. Light years better! What we have now is garbage, even in the best of cases. My district of Lakota is considered one of the top destinations in the country, great neighborhoods, great business inputs, great infrastructure yet with the kind of budget that could fund a Fortune 500 company they still got a “B” on their state report card. Anybody who thinks that’s good enough is part of the problem and no matter how much you try to help solve the problem, until you change the way it functions, it will continue to fail.

We should not allow labor unions to control regionally the quality of an education institution with one bland choice after another. Lakota just had a debate about transgender bathrooms, that is the kind of garbage that these loser teachers are pushing down our kid’s throats on a daily bases. But guess what, move out of the district to the east part of town or even worse yet, down into the city and you’ll get the same crap because the teacher unions are progressive organizations set on an agenda that is very much anti-American and they take our property taxes and use that money to advance that line of thought. If we completely dismantled public education and replaced it with nothing, we’d be better off than forcing kids to unlearn for the last half of their lives all the garbage they learned in their formulative years when learning was easier. We are graduating not contributors to the greatest economy of the world, but little monsters that want to use anarchy to topple our entire system, and spit on our flag. That’s what we are getting for our money spent in public education.

Our public education system does not work for anybody but the teacher unions. And we must change that to have a shot at any significant improvement in our national and international test scores. People might argue that the entire world is following the same basic education standards. But the problem is, American society is based on free will and when given a bad choice, like many of our kids do, they choose not to learn where other countries will not give such an open option. America needs competition in its schools to bring about the kind of performance that is expected. And to then give school board members something truly beneficial in managing a school system. Until then, work with what you have. But understand that in the very near future, public education is going to have to be completely overhauled down to its very foundations. And until then, it sucks.

Rich Hoffman

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The Secret to Toyota: Guns’n’Stories in VR and the benefit of play

I’ve had a lot of interesting conversations with people this week wondering about me and they seem surprised that I know so much about Toyota manufacturing systems at a holistic level and that I play so many video games. And as I explained, I see the two as the same, not separate endeavors. To understand why the Toyota company did so well culturally in the realm of business is not in reading and understanding some magic book, or a three day course given in Tokyo where someone stands over you with a cane to beat you with it if you get the incorrect answer to a question, as many believe is necessary. You won’t get it from an MBA program from any college, its one of those things you either get or you don’t. In Toyota outsiders call it the Toyota Kata, which is doing something over and over again until the task is second nature. In their organization managers were successful in establishing a “kata” of success as defined by the target conditions management sets to achieve superiority in the marketplace. Simple. Yet the world struggles with this concept so it is my hope to help it out a bit with this little article.

Playing video games is an excellent way to develop an internal “kata” to use the Japanese word, for training yourself to get used to winning. To identifying what the target conditions for victory are, then learning the rules for getting there. Every video game may be different just as every workplace can have its challenges, but the idea is the same for everything. Once you learn and expect to win, by nature of instinct you’ll get used to identifying what target conditions need to be found to support victory. Once you can do that in a video game, you will train your mind through a kind of kata to finding it everywhere, in relationships, in business, with your children, in society—everywhere. So, it should not be such a surprise that I play many hours of video games per week. The byproduct of that behavior pattern is to constantly push myself to complete those games and to win whatever the parameters of victory are. Knowing what victory looks like is half the battle and so many people just haven’t trained their minds to measure reality in that way, especially adults.

I have a new VR game for my PlayStation called Guns’n’Stories: Bulletproof which was an absolute delight to me. It is an amazing virtual reality shooting gallery type of game where animated villains attack you from all directions while you stand in the middle of various wild west towns gunning them down with a multitude of very fun weapons. I completed the story mode of the game over this past week and found it wonderfully enchanting, a nice vacation from the rigors of daily life. And I was replaying several of the levels last night while I had the television on listening to Fox News and the reports that the Democrats stormed out of the President’s office over the troop pullout in Syria. I took a moment to think about how much information was pouring into my brain, between the VR headset and furious action from the game as hundreds and hundreds of bad guys came at me to shoot down as fast as I could, then the news broadcast going on in the background as my wife was telling me about all the events of her day, it was a lot. But I’ve trained my mind to deal with all that, and that isn’t that much more unique than a typical day at the office.

The difference between Toyota, or most Japanese companies, is that they have not forgotten how to play with ideas as a culture whereas we have in the West, from Europe to North America. We look at work as, well, work, and the Japanese don’t, its just another part of their life. They enjoy the work most of the time and that is one of the key ingredients to Toyota’s success as a company. Playing a lot of video games over the years allowed me to do much the same with my own life, there isn’t always time to play a football game with a bunch of people, or to go shooting somewhere that you can actually shoot targets by the hundreds of thousands, or fly around in some vessel engaging in dogfights. All of that is play, but more seriously all those games have objectives toward winning the game and in playing them the target conditions for victory are always occurring. You as the player must discover them through playing the game. And the benefits continue long after the game is over because the process has wired into your brain the ability to discover target conditions in everything, even when you aren’t playing video games.

I watch so many adults struggle in life over this very basic misconception. They wonder why their wives don’t love them or find them attractive anymore as they complain that their car is in the shop again, their house isn’t big enough, and that they are overlooked in their jobs for the next big promotion. They ponder why their kids seem indifferent to them as they grow up because they have sacrificed so much as the parent to give them a good life and they feel unappreciated, and of course all those behaviors show up in their work. At 5 PM on the nose they are leaving for that long drive home where they are met in the kitchen by an indifferent spouse with their own version of the same problems. Then when talking to me, they say, “video games are for kids. I’m busy making a living and living in reality.” Of course, to that I say, “reality is defined by your interpretation of it.” If you don’t have the tools intellectually to make reality work for you, but rather against you, then its no wonder you are miserable.” In truth, by playing games, video games or some sport for fun, you are actually helping train your mind to identify target conditions for success, which is what Toyota as an organization does for all the employees that work for it. They know how to define success and getting there becomes a kind of game instead of feeling like just more pointless work. Give people that autonomy, you give them more than a good job, but a good life.

It is always a treat to me to play a cool game like Guns’n’Stories: Bulletproof in a virtual reality environment. After all, to me for that time that the headset is on, that is reality. And to take a break in that kind of world is a real treat. Whether its actual reality or virtual reality the objective is the same, to define target conditions and endeavor for a win. By achieving victory, the mind gets used to seeing and striving for the parameters of victory, and if truth be told, that is the key to the Toyota Kata. Knowing how to win and learning to strive for the ways to do so. Empowering people to win and share in the ownership are the keys to any success. So, from that vantagepoint, video games aren’t so silly, but a good tool for training the mind in how to learn to win.

Rich Hoffman
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The Meaning of Life: It is to grow as an individual, not to hide behind collectivism–the real cause of both World Wars

It is coming up more and more, largely due to the kind of president that we have in the White House these days, but the understanding of individualism as opposed to collectivism is quite the topic. As I have been saying, much of the consternation about President Trump is that he acts on his own, without a bunch of consultants and his own political party guiding him on the decision-making process. This is not at all unusual in the private sector where a CEO may answer to a board of directors and the shareholders, but as far as running a company, they tend to be front of the train decision makers by default and very secure in their personal considerations. Its particularly an aspect of American business to produce those types of people to lead companies. This of course stands as a stark contrast to the way our political system operates, especially under the umbrella of government employment. And is a topic of considerable importance.

Not to provoke a lot of unnecessary conspiracy theories, and the research will come clean with time, but I have a nagging feeling that it was Thus Spoke Zarathustra from Frederick Nietzsche that provoked both World War 1 and World War II—the second world war being caused by the sanctions of the first. But the first being driven by a European hatred of the kind of individually based thinking that was coming out of Germany by way of the anti-institutionalist Nietzsche. It’s essentially the same kind of hatred that is being leveled from the same type of people toward President Trump. That does not mean to conclude that Trump is a Nazi, far from it. At that time of that very powerful book by Nietzsche the works of Karl Marx was also coming out of Germany and the governments of Europe loved the idea. It gave them a chance to level the playing field where a political class ran by the traditional power brokers could issue out fairness. But Nietzsche was saying something else that went against all that, and the concept was not welcomed. They wanted socialism in Europe not individualism. That left Hitler to rot in jail stewing on all these complexities only to mix the various German philosophies into madness resulting in a dark period of history.

However, going back to the ideas of Thus Spoke Zarathustra there is something very revolutionary going on, which can be seen for the first time in the presidency of Donald Trump. It’s the idea that the fully developed individual has great power over the masses, and that the attempts to teach those masses the benefits is a fruitless exercise, usually. And that those best equipped to rule themselves and others are those best able to think on their own, far away from the kind of group think that is so common today. President Trump is showing that the concepts of self-rule, self-thought, and self-action are very much alive and were not destroyed by the wars of Europe which pulled the entire world into their rebellion against the basic premise that it is individuals who hold the meaning of life, not self-sacrifice to the void of existence.

My happiest state is when I’m alone free to think what I want as long as I want to. It is hard to see just how much I am in love with that state because I seldom get that kind of time to myself. I do believe that I could spend decades completely alone with just my thoughts, but that is me speaking from a vantage point of only a few hours a week. There is always someone who needs something of my time and that comes from being a good, competent person. People need you and I am the type of person who will always try to help, much like Zarathustra did at the beginning of that famous book. Only I don’t get frustrated and go back to my cave like he did, but I have the energy to try and try again even if it looks to be fruitless. But truth be told, I am happiest when I am alone, and this is not the condition of most people. Most people are terrified to be alone and they will go way out of their way to find companionship and to talk to people about something, anything. For them contacts with other human beings fills them with energy they wouldn’t otherwise have. For me, it robs me of sustenance. I never feel good after speaking with a large group of people. Its always work. But for most, it’s the goal of their existence.

In that way, I would say that the meaning of life is to overcome this shackle to needing others. We were never meant to be born, learn over our lifetimes only to die into some primordial goo back to the dirt we came from. We were meant to start off as a blank slate driven by DNA programming, then to take that and to construct a self-thinking individual, because it is from there that all creation springs forth, and thus the furtherance of existence. Nietzsche figured this out leading to madness at an early age and the concept was so terrifying that the governments of the world declared war on Germany to suppress such thoughts, and what came forth was the spread of Marxism which benefited the governments. What was pushed deep down into our culture with the stigma of being affiliated with the racist Nazi’s was Nietzsche’s ideas on individualism, much distorted by Nietzsche’s sister after his death.

And now that we have President Trump who has emerged essentially straight out of the pages of Zarathustra, we have the deep fear and hatred emerging that has always been there and had killed millions and millions of people in the hopes of surpassing the concept. Ayn Rand, the American author would go much further than Nietzsche and write better books about individualism and how it fuels the world of creation taking mankind away from the primitive notion of sacrifice, yielding to the forces of the universe, and essentially surrendering everything we were meant to become at the moment of death to the forces of nature, instead of using it to make something new. And that hatred has remained and will until the human race makes a decision on the matter. In any democracy, where most of society is of the type who needs the companionship of others, and the pursuits of individualists are demonized, it is clear that the conflict will ensue in spite of the odds of success not being favorable. Just because most of the world is populated by group thinkers it doesn’t mean they are the best or brightest, only the most numerous. Take the situation with every mass shooter where their three proper names are given to better illustrate their individual nature, and their tendency to be loners. The attempt by the masses to deal with the carnage is to seek affiliation with the evils of self-rule. Standing on your own leads to madness “they” will say, when actually it is the other way around. Going crazy is to follow the masses back into their deaths of dust and sand erasing from the earth everything they made to brand. And that is not a new story, but one that has different endings and is culminating in our present time in ways that nobody ever thought possible.

Rich Hoffman
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