Category: Taxes

Everything You Need to Know about the Lakota School Board Candidates of 2019: The Teacher’s Union is ready to steal $100 million

It’s not my favorite topic in the world, but locally, the school board race for Lakota in Butler County, Ohio is a great opportunity for improvement, or a projected, unmitigated failure. And in a lot of ways, how goes things in the Lakota school district, the rest of the country follows, due to the amount of money that is involved and the situation involving government employee unions and the overall position of the Trump administration during a second term not yet resolved. There is over $100 million of surplus in the Lakota budget that the teacher’s union is licking its chops to get a hold of, and they are up for a contract renewal in 2021, and they have picked their candidates in this one. They want the budget novices Julie Shaffer and Ray Murray to be the winning votes during those negotiations and have supported them during this election. So, I have provided the full video of the recent Miami University VOA Meet the Candidates debate which was very well done I might add, so that voters can make up their own minds about this upcoming election. The differences between the candidates couldn’t be more obvious as presented here in the format totality.

Obviously from that video Lynda O’Connor has a lot of experience and is business friendly. I’ve known her for a long time and after sifting through the smoke of political theater have come to trust her with millions and millions of dollars of budget. So much so that I have felt I didn’t have to cover everything little thing that Lakota has been doing, instead looking more at national and international issues involving the Trump administration. But local issues will always be the core of what we do in our republic. The quality of who we vote for regionally has a direct impact on the national elements so we should never take our eye off the importance of local elections. And for that, Lynda certainly has my vote. And so does James Hahn. This is his first time running for the school board of any kind and he was obviously a little nervous in the video. I know him as well and can say that he’s a lot more comfortable with a balance sheet involving vast sums of money than either Julie or Ray is. I actually know all of them well at this point and without question Lynda and Mr. Hahn are the far better choices, especially for the many millions of dollars that are at stake.

Ray and Julie both will say in interviews and in those latte sipping formats with other voters that they don’t care about endorsements from either political party. Yet they are endorsed by the teacher’s union at Lakota and those members are very active on Facebook and other social media networks pushing for these two big spenders to be on the board so they can have easy access to that $100 million. Its like a bank robbery being planned through an election. The money is sitting there in the vault and the union plans to break into that safe to take it by electing union insiders onto the board and taking away fiscal conservatives like Lynda out of their way with a simple vote. It’s an off-year election so voter turnout will be typically low. The union members and their families will show up to vote for the pillaging of that surplus so that is what is at stake in this election, theft, or protection of that $100 million surplus.

It was in that video which I referred to earlier in another article that Ray Murray had said that it would take 38 years to spend that much surplus money, so to his mind, why not spend it and give it to people who need it. He was speaking just like a bank robber in the Old West preparing to loot a town for the plights of the poor and downtrodden. Only I’m not so sure that Ray Murray is the good pastor of a church that he says he is. Without question Ray is a likeable guy full of charisma, but so are a lot of bank robbers and other types of villains. If they can get something out of you without things getting messy, of course its better for them, and I would contend that is precisely what Ray is up to. I don’t think he’s as stupid as he’s acting in that video. If he and Julie get on the school board together, they will give that surplus money to the teacher’s union that has endorsed them and we’ll have another very contentious school levy in 2022 which is not that far off.

Of course, we have a choice at this point, we could elect James Hahn and Lynda O’Connor, (both of them) to get a third conservative vote on the school board to protect that money. It would be like hiring extra security at the bank so that looters couldn’t rob the money. Jim doesn’t need to know much as a first-time board member, he just needs to understand money, which he does. The debate itself didn’t go too far into these issues because it wasn’t meant to. It was a nice surface community thing that was meant to be a softball game so to be in the realm of Ray and Julie’s comfort zone. Conservatives never look as good in those types of debates because they tend to talk over the heads of common voters. The details of such large budgets require smart people and both Lynda and James are, but such a debate format doesn’t want to show how smart people are, only how compassionate, giving, and likeable they can be which feeds straight into the union narrative for their looting scheme.

It was a nice event, the debate, but I did notice something that was unusual about those types of events, before the narrative went down the rabbit hole on transgender bathrooms, guns on teachers—or rather the lack of them, and how we would never spend that $100 million surplus in 38 years. At the beginning of the debate there was no pledge of allegiance to the flag. I’ve been going to these kinds of events for many years and there is always some sort of acknowledgment to the flag of the United States. But not this time. Lynda and Jim are trying to bring to the board of education a conservative presence to protect the budget surplus that we currently have at Lakota. And they are also trying to create a friendlier business climate to steer away from the extortion tactics of the past by Lakota against potential investors. And they are both flag waving Americans. But as the board is now, Lynda is outvoted 3 to 2 and Lakota like all public schools is controlled by the very progressive America hating teacher unions. And the evidence was clear in that debate by the absence of the pledge of allegiance. Thieves don’t honor the structure of the bank of the investors. They just want to rob it and to use the money for their own efforts. And that is what the teacher’s union at Lakota wants to do with Ray and Julie, elect them so that the surplus will fall into the hands of the robbers. And to hell with the American flag, and the conservatives of Butler County who live in the Lakota district. They are counting on everyone staying home on election night so that they can sneak into that bank and take that $100 million without firing a metaphorical shot and enriching themselves in the process at all of our expense.

The question is, will you let them?

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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Vote for O’Connor and Hahn to Lakota School Board: It isn’t about being nice, its about being effective

The value to a person like me of the Lakota school system is in how little they take from the community to offer their free baby-sitting service. I think we are in a time where the college myth is no longer relevant, that we understand the cost of a liberalized education is very detrimental to young minds. But a lot of parents could care less, they just need somewhere to park their kids for the day while they do whatever they do. And if there are sports programs, they can play the lottery with their children by hoping that they may get a scholarship to a college and save them some money. That’s my opinion of the public education system which might be bleak to many, but its my observation that, that is the essence of it, so in my view, it needs to cost the least possible. The real figures that make up a good community are the businesses that create the desire to move into an area. The school that happens to be there benefits from the quality of people who are drawn to the businesses of a region. It’s a really broken system that measures all the wrong values, so while we all figure out the future of public education, we need a bridge from here to there that has smart people managing the resources so we don’t end up with the kind of mess that we have had at Lakota during the last decade.

At the recent VOA Miami University Meet the Candidate night which took place on October 22nd, 2019 I attended to provide coverage for those who couldn’t be there, and video of the event is provided here. I see this work as a kind of public service. Feel free to watch the videos and make your decisions on the candidates. For me the unquestionable choice for school board in this upcoming election is James Hahn and Lynda O’Connor. Lynda has been around for a while and knows how to manage the board and keep Lakota in a win column so that they don’t scare off potential investors into real estate as a deal breaker. I don’t think Lakota is a lure, not in the way public school used to be. Other factors certainly are a greater part of the decision-making process. And that’s where James Hahn comes into play. He’s a business guy and would provide Lynda and the current board member Todd Parnell with that critical third vote to keep the district running well with the massive amount of money that we do give them.

Much of the talk from that debate night was what to do with the massive $100 million surplus that Lakota is operating under. I filmed many of the questions and answers but was out of the room away from the camera when Ray Murray proclaimed that it would take Lakota 37 years to spend all that money, which was astonishing. I’m sure somebody in the room filmed that comment. But the gist of the night was that Ray and Julie Shaffer were nice people who just didn’t have a clue how to operate in this tightly controlled Lakota district where business owners have actually stood up for themselves against the extortion tactics that public schools often use to get more money in their pockets so they can throw it at the teacher’s union. Looming in the room around that event were many of them from Liberty Township and West Chester. Sure, everyone shakes hands at the end of those things and gets along, professionally. But the resentment of the game is a clear dividing line and since much has been said over the last decade about the negative ways Lakota has interacted with that part of the community, it is clear that the skills needed are well beyond Ray and Julie.

What’s different now as opposed to even a few years ago is that “just pay more money for the kids” isn’t enough any more for public schools, and at Lakota that is especially true. There are lots of psychological problems that make people do what they do, and as I often refer to strong supporters of government schools as rapid animals with their minds soaked into delusion as to what the school can actually do for their children, what everything eventually comes down to is money. Lakota has plenty of money that they are taking in. The question is, what happens to it? Without a pro-business school board who knows how to read a balance sheet, that $100 million surplus will be wasted on everything and the board will come back to the community asking for more money in a few short years.

Nobody wanted to talk about a school levy, obviously I was there for everyone to see, and many members of the old No Lakota Levy campaign were in the audience also very visible. Without question that changed the course of the dialogue a lot from pro levy discussions which of course the teachers and administrators always want to hear and centered on more fiscal responsibility which seemed like an oblivious concept to Ray. I am still astonished about some of the things he said during the debate. He may be a nice guy that is very likable but being likable isn’t a qualification unless the job is a Wal-Mart greeter. When we are talking about budgets ranging in the millions and millions of dollars, many times you want someone managing it who doesn’t give a rat’s ass about being liked. Quite the opposite.

Lynda O’Connor has come a long way in her years on the school board. I’ve always liked her but, in the beginning, I thought of her as another idealist who was pro education and would work the Republican ranks because of the regional consequences. But she has certainly proven to me that she is sincerely conservative. She also has a lot of hope in what can be done with public education and so long as we have that as the means of educating kids, she is the right kind of person for a job like the school board. James Hahn is new to all this, and that is great too. So long as he can learn from Lynda, his business experience will be a big help in keeping the business community close and part of solutions. The other two, experienced board members and part of what was the problem originally would be a disastrous pick.

Let’s face it, without opposition Lakota would not have that $100 million surplus. It wasn’t some miracle trick in accounting. Lakota has a good treasurer, much better than who was there before her. And I think the new superintendent is a good one. I’m sure he’d like more freedom to promote the brand of Lakota as more the center of the community than what it is. I don’t think its bad at all to be part of that anger. I see it as healthy. Nobody wants to read one more boring newspaper article about these topics from boring, fossilized reporters. They enjoy my work for sure, and I think giving it to them with an animated zeal is good for the decision-making process. Public school is a boring topic for those who have their kids all grown up and have moved away. They certainly don’t want their taxes to go up. They just want to enjoy their community, their jobs and a nice place to shop and go out to dinner on a Friday night. They don’t want to hear that Lakota has blown their $100 million surplus and is asking for more money because the school board mismanaged it. To avoid that fate, vote for O’Connor and Hahn. And make sure Lakota knows you are watching them. Because the moment you don’t, that money and much more will be spent, and we’ll have another levy. You can bet on that.

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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The Debt Clock at $23 Trillion: How the Trump “pro growth” plan is our only hope

A frequent reader here brought up an excellent point that has been bothering me regarding the amount of spending that we have in our government and our failure as a country to deal with the national debt which is presently almost at $23 trillion. I remember when it was only at $16 trillion and it was a big deal for the Republican platform, and clearly since Trump has been elected, it has not been a priority. Because there were essentially two problems that had been planted in American culture by those who wanted to destroy it for a transfer bail out into the United Nations, which was the strategy all along. The first of those problems was that we were borrowing at a high level to essentially chain us through regulatory compliance to the rest of the world who could then pull our loans and control us as a nation tossing out that pesky Constitution because as a nation we couldn’t afford to live up to it, and the second, we shipped all our jobs overseas so that there would be no way to pay the debt even if we wanted to. When Trump was elected his first method of attacking this problem was to stop the bleeding, which he has done. You can read the comment below:

When is he going to fight to lower spending? I like Trump for the most part. I love that he is pulling us out of Syria. But we cannot continue to spend like this.

Jason E Koslow

https://usdebtclock.org/

 

I hadn’t yet answered Jason because it required more than a five second answer, due to its very good point. If I know Trump the way I think I know him, which is quite well—I would venture to say that being an optimistic person that he is he plans to tackle this whole problem in the second term of his presidency now that the seeds for a great economy have been planted. And he plans to not do it by cutting, which many Republicans would think of as the first objective, but he wants to do it with growth. That is after all how he personally became a billionaire. In his mind, he plans to do for the country what he did for himself. Growth is the ticket out of debt, and he’s created the foundation to explode that growth.

Then you read his comments about why he couldn’t host the G7 Summit at his Doral golf course due to all the controversy and it brings to mind Jason’s point more succinctly. There are forces in the American government that are quite common, they persist actually into half the country that tend to vote for victimization representation in the form of Democrats. They don’t want to show off the potential wealth of America, they don’t want our billionaire president to show the world that he knows what he’s doing in building Doral. They’d rather the event happen in some government building with limited running water so that other countries not be so seduced by American capitalism. But for Trump that was precisely the point, to inspire more investment and that explosive growth that he has been counting on. And he was obviously disappointed in the small thinking of the press and the Democrats in general. Thinking small is not one of the things Trump has ever been good at and he has no desire to start now.

Under Trump’s next term which he has helped along with deregulatory practices and access to NASA, commercial space travel will become big business. Hyperloop transportation will become common language and the tremendous growth potential of his trade deals and bringing jobs back into the United States will contribute respectfully to the GDP. Then and only then will that clock begin to tick backwards and from my vantage point, it couldn’t happen soon enough. The great risk is that another year of this will put that debt up toward $25 trillion which is a major problem. That huge sum could be paid off with new space mining operations for rare metals. The amount of money that the commercialization of space could generate is stunning, and Trump is counting on those seeds to bloom to cover the debt. But he has to get elected first and for that to work, he has to protect what he has started from Democrats who want to torpedo it for their own future chances.

Which brings us back to why there is a debt to begin with. The Democrats wanted to crash the system, they set all this in place during the Obama administration and for Trump to stop it he would have to turn inward, which would have played into the hands of the Democrats who planted that seed long ago. It was their insurance policy for their own existence. What they didn’t count on was for Trump to come in and turn the ship around and for Republicans to stand behind his “pro-growth” vision. Trump trusts the innovations of the private sector even when they come from his enemies like Jeff Bezos. By getting government out of the way, the private sector could generate many trillions of dollars in additional GDP and that is the plan. But he can’t mess with the economy during an election year and start cutting our way to prosperity. We must grow. You can’t bring reality to people addicted to government services because that would end his election and the prospect for any future growth, so Trump is playing a big round of poker here, and he has a lot of chips on the table.

If it was anybody else, I’d worry. But the way that Trump handled himself personally during the 90s gives me the feeling that he can do it again with the American economy if he has our support. He certainly has my support. He has stopped the bleeding, now for part two, we must build up the blood. I would argue that an operating budget for America needs to be much less. But if we can turn the clock backwards with growth, well then, why not. I personally think there will be enough expanding market emerging in the 2020s to pay off our national debt and get to a positive position by the time we are settling people on Mars. But first the Democrats literally have to be destroyed as an opposition not just in politics, but to economic growth because for them the debt clock was a form of terrorism that was supposed to go off by now, only we elected Trump to bring back all our oversea business and to deregulate ourselves back to a growth based economy. I tend to think that one more election will do the job and free Trump and the supporting Republicans into launching those pro-growth initiatives. But we also must consider that the Democrats know all this and they are set to do anything to survive, and if they could destroy the economy in some way during 2020 to keep Trump from getting re-elected, then their debt clock becomes a driver again, and a means to destroy America and to merge it with a world management system. There is a lot of stake, and nothing that we can take for granted.

Rich Hoffman

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Hyperloop is Coming to India: How to prepare for it in your neighborhood soon

It’s been going on for a good part of the summer and is increasing in urgency now that India is going to be the first Hyperloop line built by Virgin Hyperloop One, but the roadshow for that same company has been soft selling the high speed next generation transportation system to Ohio, Pittsburg and of course Chicago heavily as the next logical step. Virgin Hyperloop One has taken their test vehicle which has successfully completed their testing just outside of Las Vegas and they are showing it off to various sites along the proposed path so that people can start to get their minds around the concept, because they are ready to dig dirt and built the thing. As I have been saying for a few years now, this is a game changing transportation system that will be well in place by 2030, but will start coming online in the 2020s with the first destination in India. The United States will need to embrace this concept so we can take the lead because this is the future, Pittsburg to Chicago roughly a half hour.

My job in these kinds of things is perspective, the future is certainly here and the desire for technology expansion is at the doorstep of the human race. How we manage it will largely dictate how successful it is, but the technology is there, billionaires with an imagination like Elon Musk who first came up with this Hyperloop concept not very long ago are coming up with the means leaving it up to us to figure out how to embrace the options. I personally think we have an opportunity to unleash hundreds if not thousands of Elon Musk types in the coming century and that a great many things could change for us all for the better. This is why I am against medicating children with hyperactive disorders, it’s a mistake because evolutionarily speaking, the speed for which young people are thinking, especially with the use of video games, is an evolutionary attribute that will help them live in that new world where such travel times offered by Hyperloop will really shrink the world in a good way.

I have also been suggesting that since Ohio is being considered as one of the hottest spots in North America for one of the first Hyperloops, that a Hyperloop station find a home along the I-75 corridor that is so explosive currently in the West Chester area—(hint, Monroe by the Outlet Mall). The ability to get around the world fast is the prime recipe for economic expansion and with a term 2 of the Trump administration understanding how the game is played and not having Democrats standing in the way of everything, this would be just the ticket. Speed is the key to growth, all growth in business sector measurements. The speed that we can extract information and do something with it, and the speed for which we can communicate with other people in collaborative efforts. And when dealing with supply chains, the speed that we can resolve issues up and down the line. A plane ticket is still an all-day affair, to visit a supplier in New England or the upper portions of the United States you can get there in a day, but the journey still takes most of a day with time zone adjustments taking entirely too long. Hyperloop will speed all that up dramatically.

We are becoming a faster world and the ability to think fast is the key. I would say that subconsciously we all understand this, which is why video games have been moving into our culture so persistently. I have been watching NFL football games lately differently with the understanding that the game is changing so rapidly due to most of the fans becoming so involved in Madden which is much more satisfying than just passively watching a football game on a Sunday afternoon. People don’t have time to waste on a 3-hour experience when they could do it in one and share that endeavor with friends all over the world through the internet. Consumers of the NFL product have so many other things to do these days, like watch a new series on a streaming service, or listen to a book through Amazon’s Audible, we just don’t have time to waste an entire Sunday watching two or three games like we used to, and those cracks are starting to show in the NFL business model.

People look at our 3% unemployment rate under the Trump administration and they wonder who will occupy all the new jobs that will be created by something like a Hyperloop. I would contend that air travel will still be important, especially internationally, and regionally. Hyperloop is a solution, but its still a fancy railroad, although if you have rode the monorail system in Disney World, Hyperloop would be more like that across a region of a country than just a train station that takes forever to get started and even longer in getting there. The speed of the Hyperloop makes up for the stagnant line that they present. Air travel will still remain important, and the competition should go a long way to bringing down prices with options, which is always a good thing. But who will do all these future jobs? Well, that answer is A.I. which is also coming along quickly. With birthrates being so low in the United States and places where birthrates are high, like India and China, matching economic growth to high population centers will require speeding up the travel and reach of people to ride the economic growth. But there are limits that artificial intelligence and robotics will have to fill.

Old timers will say, “well why would I want to get from Pittsburgh to Chicago in a half an hour with a few stops in between? Part of the fun of a journey is in getting there.” Well, those types of people can still drive a car or fly in a plane. But if you need to get somewhere, and this is certainly true for me, I don’t want to waste the time in getting there. I want to go do what I want to, then return back to my life as soon as possible. Such a transportation system would allow someone to live in Pittsburg or out in the country anywhere along Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana, but to work in the city without having to pay the extraordinarily high cost of living of such a job. This would really help in the city of New York, San Francisco and even down in Mexico City. A Hyperloop traveler could live a thousand miles away from their job and make the commute daily without having to move to a dangerous city, or an expensive one choking on limited resources. It would then force cities to compete with the suburbs for safety, cleanliness, and other general quality of living measures.

How we embrace this technology will largely determine the kind of world we could have, but first we have to solve some basic problems regarding the temptation to retreat back to anarchy and to run away from growth because its too scary, or too fast. A fast world is harder to control from the vantage point of politics. As I said, a second term of President Trump would totally understand how to make Hyperloop travel in the United States a common practice within five years of this writing, almost as common as a highway system. But we still live in a world that thinks there something wrong with having the G7 Summit. Would we want world leaders to see how nice we can build something like a Doral or stay in some gutter? Our political left doesn’t want the expectation of something so nice, so they protest against it. They want victimization for their political ambitions and that is one of our greatest challenges of the modern age. The challenge is in getting people to think in that proper, “big” fashion, which to me, is a problem with a solution that is clearly in front of us that can be solved with just a few good elections.

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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Should we be Sad about Elijah Cummings: The death of an impeachment leader

It was a little weird that one of the leaders of the Trump impeachment push, Elijah Cummings died suddenly at the age of 68 just a few hours after signing subpoenas for the effort, and that it wasn’t the lead story for every news outlet. Not to suggest a conspiracy of any kind other than the story was seriously underreported. Cummings sat on just about every panel against Republicans for a very long time, and suddenly he was gone and nobody was really talking about it. It was nice that Trump made a nice statement about Cummings showing that he was clearly taking the high road. I can’t say I would have done the same. Regardless, I would have thought it would have been more of a breaking story than it was. Likely, he was one of the leaders of the Trump impeachment and now with is passing, a lot of wind went out of the sails of the Democrats, and nobody was all that happy about it.

I’m not one to spit on the grave of anyone, but I’m not at all an Elijah Cummings fan, not in life or death. Just because he died doesn’t suddenly make him a martyr for justice, he was a loser and a big government advocate that was attacking the way of life that America offered, and a real problem. The political left lost an important part of the chess board with the Cummings death and it should be understood that way. After all, we aren’t playing pattycake here, Cummings was trying to impeach our elected President, and I’m not happy about it. I don’t really care what his intentions were, it was the results that we should have always been concerned about and the sudden loss of him will be a serious blow to Democrats and their impeachment efforts.

Honestly It wouldn’t bother me at all if all the Elijah Cummings types, the impeachment provocateurs and general liberal protestors of victimization over productivity would go away in a similar way. I don’t like the way they view the world and I really don’t want to share my country with them. It has nothing to do with color, but of values. People like Cummings are in the way of an otherwise great country and all they contribute to a national dialogue is a lot of complaints. And rather than compete in the marketplace of ideas, when they can see they cannot win, they instead seek to impeach our President and attempt to take the rest of over a cliff to our own demise. So you won’t find me losing any sleep over his sudden death. I thought President Trump’s words were nice, too nice.

It’s not that Democrats ever really had a case for impeachment that causes some mild relief that one of their biggest advocates has now died, its that I just get tired of listening to their version of the world—perpetual victims helpless to think and do things on their own, leading people into worse lives than they might otherwise have just to prove a political point from their long standing points of view. A politician like Cummings was on television all the time saying the worst things, so its not unsavory to be a bit happy for the relief. Listening to Democrats is a real chore, their outlook on life is so bleak and painful. Like Cummings most of us only put up with it because we feel sorry for them, but to me, that’s not enough of a reason. If they are so unhappy, then they can just leave.

I don’t care what Cummings did for civil rights, or what he put his name on during his long run as a politician, he was a loser by all definitions of that measure. His thoughts and actions imprisoned countless people to the politics of his advocacy which ruined countless lives instead of helping them as he suggested. And in the end all he had to show for it was to try to create a case for impeachment that just stood in the way of doing good things for America. If his ideas were so good, then why was he trying to impeach the President during an election year? Well, because he and the other Democrats leading the effort had no offering that could compete with President Trump on the world stage. They were all small thinkers being overshadowed by the big think of the president and for that they had no answer other than to try to undo him, ruthlessly. How are we supposed to feel about his death? Relieved is the only word that comes to my mind.

It is possible to imprison people with a mode of thinking, and Elijah Cummings certain did that. The people who followed him were doomed due to his small thinking. Then to prevent that thinking from being challenged by competitive ideas, they sought to destroy that competition so that their loser mentality could permeate our society with lackluster effort and victimization. If another country tried something like that with us we’d call it a provocation of war. That definition doesn’t change just because Cummings was a person of color from the Baltimore congressional district representing the poor. What he was trying to do to the rest of us was pretty unforgivable. And the media knew it upon his death. Once the realization set in that he did in fact die, there were a few articles here and there, but it certainly wasn’t the kind of coverage that we’d typically expect. The world ticked on rather quickly on the Republican side and the Democrats were licking their wounds knowing that one of their champion impeachment advocates was no longer on that chessboard, and they didn’t want to think about that prospect.

Because other than complaining, the Democrats have no plan or ideas. They have no candidates to offer in this 2020 election to the point where none of the networks can offer them up in the horse race as a viable contender. All they have as they look at their options is embarrassment. That is why they turned to Cummings and his friends to impeach President Trump—because they know they can’t beat him in an election. And the rest of us are supposed to be OK with it all and just go about our business? No, I don’t think so. Cummings was a hostile agent intent to overthrow our nation into becoming something that looks more like Baltimore today, and that was never a potential acceptable likelihood, so people outside the Beltway didn’t want to hear from him. And now we don’t anymore. I don’t wish damnation of his soul or any ill will toward his family. But I won’t miss him, not one bit. It won’t hurt my feelings to turn on the television and to no longer see his face on it yacking on and on about his victimized status. He didn’t bring anything to the table that we as Americans should be considering. His arguments were bad, his views terrible, and with his low thinking he held down many more people than he ever could have helped from his office. And with his sudden death, maybe now they can be just a little bit freer.

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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