Tag: Down the Rabbit Hole

We Have Guns to Keep Politicians Honest: Another pot smoker, Karmala Harris and her gun buyback lust

When people talk about the success of the Australian gun buyback program it must be understood that they only have around 25 million people in their country. For comparison my home state of Ohio has roughly 12 million. And culturally, the histories of the two places aren’t similar, America was founded out of revolution and the Constitution created to uphold that law at gunpoint if necessary. If the police serving the state in the morning was your friend upholding the same Constitutional objectives but by the time of sun set were the enemy, it has been understood that the need for assault weapons could give people a chance to take back their government, whereas in other places around the world it has been assumed that the people would surrender themselves to the state under whatever conditions were presented. And it is under those understandings that the greatest economy in the world flourished, because investment was safe and opportunity boundless, which is good for business. Guns are at the center of American life and in that regard, buybacks of any guns is off the table.

So here we have another Democrat running for president, this time Senator Karmala Harris, another pot smoker, who is suggesting gun buybacks for assault weapons on the Tonight Show, even as we have learned to what extent the FBI and The New York Times conspired to resurrect a smear campaign against the Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh over completely salacious stories going back to his Harvard days in an attempt to destroy him and the Trump nomination that put him in place. The obvious attempt by the government and the forces supporting that government, the liberal press, are obviously willing to do anything to destroy anybody who stands against them with a very thuggish manner and we’re supposed to view these events with candor and entertain the slightest notion that those same people want to buy back our weapons to usher in an age of peace? Give me a break.

I am passionate about this issue for the same reasons that I hate school levies for public schools, because the suggestions come from vile institutions representing failure and they hide behind children to sell their message. You can clearly see that on the Tonight Show townhall like event that had Karmala Harris talking about gun buybacks with students in the audience. You can always see that when labor unions want a raise, they put the kids out in front and their guilty parents to sell the levy at football games and the corner grocer. In the case of the school levy intent to tax private property in order to give kids a free, socialist education, or in the case of gun control, to provide safety. In both cases the plea is meant to rock our sense of security and for a price, we can win it back.

Most of the gun violence in America is committed in low income areas overly manipulated by failed Democrat policies and is generally gang related. Governments like gangs no matter where in the world they exist because they inspire in the public a need for more safety. Voters will vote for more police and more police levies if they think it will make them feel safe, so gangs of thugs and drug dealers are allowed to menace portions of society just enough to keep stories flowing on the front page of newspapers and the nightly news leads. People, especially peaceful people, will always vote for more politicians who promise to do something to solve the situation, which of course never happens. The gangs of our cities and of the world do their purpose, they drive normal people to clamor for safety and that often means more government.

But there is a reason there isn’t much crime outside of our cities where there are likely three to four guns per household and people don’t go around shooting each other. That is where America lives, and they understand that government often fails them. They are ready in case it comes knocking on their door, but they’d prefer to think about other things until that time comes. If and when it does, they have their guns in their gun cases and it reminds them of the laws we all agree to under the Constitution to have them. Once that security is taken away, well that’s another matter. America is not Australia, or New Zealand, or even Great Britain for that matter. Our nation was founded with the understanding that we have a government and we want that government to work. But we also understand that it fails often, government and without the threat of guns in every home, its really the only thing that keeps politicians honest.

We have seen from the same people who are suggesting gun confiscations and increased background checks a tendency to manipulate government for their own climbs to power. Hillary Clinton comes to mind and the FBI that was firmly in her camp to overthrow an American election in 2016 using the courts to do their bidding. When such a world is presented to us we have a choice, we can either take it as the rest of the world has decided, or we can take back our government by force. And that will require more than a BB gun. It will take those AR-15s and even more powerful weapons. I would argue that we should have our own military style weapons bigger than guns to defend our homes and neighborhoods from power hungry politicians who turn our police into weapons of war—friends today, enemies tomorrow. Assault weapons are not for hunting, they are for defense and maybe against property rights abuses from well prepared military figures who beat down our doors with full body armor and heavily plated vehicles. God forbid anything like that might happen, but personally, I’ve seen the roots of it many times and its very, very possible. The only way to keep a government honest is with the threat of gun ownership. The more, the better.

And that is what all the Democrats are afraid of. What they are selling to the public in their runs for office is more government, not less. So of course, if mistakes happen along the way, which they always do, they don’t want people shooting back. Democrats are more than happy to have collateral damage if it takes them to their version of the “greater good.” But we have seen what they are willing to do with 300 million guns in American households, imagine what they would do if that threat wasn’t there, and all we had to throw back at them was a strongly worded letter. Mankind has learned its lesson and America was the result. We’re not going back to European hierarchy. The Australians may have been tricked into it, as is New Zealand, but in the United States, its just not an option. It is well understood how to eliminate the next mass shootings. The FBI, CIA, Homeland Security, all those government agencies just need to do their jobs. And we need to get rid of gun free zones so that good guys can shoot and kill bad guys. It is that simple. But gun confiscation is when government goes too far, and answers will be required that nobody will like. And that is the way it is.

Rich Hoffman

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Seeing What’s Really There: Why Iran attacked Saudi oil fields and why we shouldn’t give a damn

One thing is very clear about liberal intellectual circles, and even conservative ones, they rely on the rules of society to disguise what they cannot see about life. They are blind as bats without the sonar to navigate a dark cave on a black, moonless night. So, it should not be surprising that they have no idea what to make out of the sudden Iranian attack on Saudi Arabian crude oil facilities launched from within Iran sending cruise missiles into their targets knocking out 5% of the oil production for the world. Obviously, Iran is struggling under the U.S. sanctions and they hope by taking their competitor down a notch or two that they might survive on the world marketplace just a bit longer. Having friends like Russia, North Korea and even China doesn’t mean much these days so all the old Marxist regimes are struggling to find their way in the world of capitalist markets. All they can do is lash out as Iran did.

For those who can’t see clearly what the situation is, the Iranian revolution during the 70s was a Marxist incursion meant to spread socialism and communism all over the Middle East to control the oil fields. Communist policy makers in the United States trained at our best colleges and sent forth to do the bidding of evil over regulated the oil industry in America so that Iran and the Middle East in general could leverage the world and its capitalism through high prices on barrels of oil which is essentially an attack on every one of us and our cars. This game went on all through the past decades as America was pulled into war after war to protect those interests and even when Iran was losing, they were winning because of their Marxist intentions, which was why the Obama administration was trying to help Iran along, to keep that machine running for the cause.

But Americans aren’t stupid, they voted for Trump, he deregulated the industry and that has made America for the first time in our history oil independent and has driven down through competition the prices on a barrel of oil. That has also given us leverage to sanction Iran for bad behavior because we don’t need their oil. In pain, economically since most of the vision of the typical Iranian is regional, they blame Saudi Arabia for that leverage, because they haven’t yet accepted that America can produce its own oil. So they attacked the crude oil facilities to get themselves at a seat at the negotiating table.

It has been a complete myth for intelligentsia to assume that America went around the world controlling territories out of imperialism, or simply so that we could have cheap oil for our cars. Every person who says such a thing is lost as to the real cause of what makes what and who the good guys are in the world. America stands for the creative potential of capitalism and freeing oppressed people who have been living under tyrannical leadership for all of their history. Socialism is all about centralized authority which limits human creativity and freedom, which is why China must steal intellectual information from their competitors just to stay relevant in the marketplace, because imagination and development do not happen when human minds are constrained to regulation.

America had an obligation to stand behind capitalism in the East and in the Middle East as well as Central America because it was an attack on the progress that could be made under that political philosophy. There are of course nuances between Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Karl Marx’ Communist Manifesto but our human development has brought us to a place where we can’t have both. The problem is most people can’t tell the difference. They have been taught in their public educations and their government that socialism is the path of the future, but logic and business say that capitalism is the only means of real advancement. The two aren’t compatible. For many years the United States did go around the world trying to put out every little Marxist revolution to keep markets open and as free as possible, not just for ourselves, but for the benefit of the world that didn’t always appreciate it. But the real villains were within the American government where they set policies to push America beyond its borders and into that imperialist accusation that the liberal pinheads like to talk about all the time.

As a wealthy guy who knows how the game is played President Trump didn’t need a fancy room of advisors to tell him that the way to beat everyone at the oil table was to make ourselves independent. He just did it and now even if nobody sells oil to the United States, we can make our own. That has put all these tyrants at a severe disadvantage and taken away all their leverage—particularly Iran. Even by knocking out Saudi Arabian oil fields, the American economy will not be stifled and that is the big picture as to what happened as a result of this attack by Iran.

Should the United States get involved in the conflict and protect Saudi Arabia, well, no. Its true, we have been selling arms to Saudi Arabia to defend itself. They can defend themselves. The people who don’t see so well, the television pundits and cable news producers will want to tell dramatic stories about how barrels of oil will go up as a result, but the truth is, America doesn’t need their oil. We have our own. And that is a pretty good place to be. There is no reason to attack Iran. They are already on the brink of annihilation due to their commitment to Marxist ideology for which they needed to have domination over the oil market for it to work. The moment that America took that leverage away, Iran as a powerhouse of world affairs ended. It’s just taking a while for the rest of the world, the blind people, to catch up.

There is nothing for America to do about Iran, or Saudi Arabia. We can sell more weapons to the Saudi’s to help them defend themselves, but there is no reason to put boots on the ground in any fashion. The Iranians are lashing out with everything they have left trying hard to excerpt force to bring people to the negotiating table. But there is nothing for them to barter with. The problem that leftists used against America was the anti-imperialist angle that always put capitalism in a bad light, because American leaders just didn’t know how to defend it. They’d provoke America into action then blame them for overreaching in corners of the world over indigenous people who were quietly being recruited into socialism and communism. But you can’t call America an imperialist if they get their own oil out of Texas and Ohio and stay out of wars in the Middle East. We can just make our own. They can fight it out all they want. And that is why this new game is so much better than the old one. And why finally America can win, because the villains are all now exposed and standing behind barrels of oil that nobody really needs or cares about.

Rich Hoffman

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Public Education was Free for a Reason: The communist and socialist agenda that was their goal all along

I suppose that its refreshing now to hear so many people finally get what public education has been all about, all along. I’ve never been a fan and something that has bothered me for a long time going way back to the first time I went on WLW radio to discuss the Lakota school finance problems the issue was raised and at the time I was the only one talking about it. Back then the pro tax advocates that are always in every school system cheering on tax increases to pay the bounty on that the teacher’s union demands routinely from contract to contract were pointing out that I wasn’t just anti-tax, I was anti public education and that I shouldn’t be given a legitimate platform to speak from. Well, I was also good for ratings and was willing to publicly take on people like Julie Shaffer, the current pro tax school board member with debate that was embarrassing for the pro tax advocates, because normally nobody ever challenged them. But it was true, the money was always one part of it. My concern has always been, its not that education isn’t offered, but that its what was taught that mattered, in the entire education system that I had experienced in America from first grade to the higher degrees of college was socialism and communism. Not the skills of capitalism that were needed for our society. However, that is changing, many more people are coming to realize decades later what I have been saying all along and they are talking about it much more openly. Videos like the one below is no longer fringe but are part of the mainstream understanding of what public education really is.

Education has always been important to me and continues to be. But I’ve never considered what is offered these days to be education, I’d just call it propaganda. We talk about teachers as if they are “heroes” because they baby sit our kids while we are off working, then we are perplexed when they grow up with all these crazy ideas about “fairness,” gender roles, and economic theory. Lately it has been shocking to the mainstream news that most millennials support socialism over capitalism and are now voting that way for open communists like Bernie Sanders who clearly wants to turn America into China. To the many people who have begged me to be a school board member at that same school of Lakota I have had to explain that my position has always been to dismantle the public education system, not to support it with further ruined minds. I am of the belief that it would be better for parents to pay for their children’s education out of pocket then to get the free public park version that the government offers. I’d be miserable trying to defend a system that clearly wasn’t working and shouldn’t work because the intent all along was to make compliant socialist kids, not free-thinking capitalists.

I do admire people who do care about these education topics and fight to make it better, but clearly the only way that change can happen is from the top, from a presidential administration that then flows down through congress their strategy to finally get their hands around these issues. The philosophy of education must be dealt with. Dealing with the cost can make people assess whether or not the education system is valuable to them, but if they think that they are going to send their kids to public school to make geniuses out of them like Albert Einstein, they have another thing coming. Its not that there are lots of smart kids biologically gifted toward a tendency to succeed, its that they have been taught to push all that deep inside into a repressed state for the socialist goals of the education system itself. After all, a government of any kind wants to stay in power and the best way to do that is to dumb down the future participants that elect them to that power. Not free-thinking people.

I think my kids and now grandkids have a much better shot at a balanced life than I did going through the public-school system. I feel that as an influence leader in the lives of the people I care about that I must overcome the brain washing they get in the public-school system. That in the competitive field of thought, that my ideas needed to be judged better than what they were getting from their social influences. For whatever reason I figured out the public education game early in my life, while I was still there. I had a terrible kindergarten teacher which was probably a blessing and did set the stage for the rest of my life. Later that crazy old lady reportedly had major mental problems which surprised nobody. But she was considered at the time one of those heroic teachers that everyone is always talking about, and I had to somehow survive.

I would say I had above average intelligence, everything came quick to me in school, I always knew the answers before most of the questions were asked, but it was clear to me that the focus of the public school experience wasn’t in developing individualized thought, it was in learning to get along with the other kids and to fall into some invisible category of social behavior for which the school system seemed obsessed with developing. This trend was eased into over the beginning grade school years but seemed poised to exacerbate itself especially during the puberty years once the need for mating was aligned with the government’s need to control ambition and human focus. If the public schools could get kids thinking about their sexual natures, they could lower their aims for bigger things in life and thus keep them comfortably under the thumb of a powerful all needing government that consumes resources like a chocolate obsessed candy lover popping M&Ms like they were going out of style. Most people reading this understand what I’m saying whether or not they are 60 years old or 10. The obvious damage is quite apparent in our adult population.

Its not that these problems could be solved at the local level because everything was set regarding curriculum at the federal level and enforced by an international labor union which beholds the standards across the world. In that way the same basic things taught to some kid in France is the same one taught to a kid in Alabama, regional considerations thus being minimal. And in that way, a path toward global communism, that has been a fantasy of Karl Marx supporters from the very beginning, might be realized.

It has been a challenge to get people to look beyond the “free” nature of education and to accept that you are getting what you paid for. It has always been difficult to convince people that they couldn’t purchase their way into a high paying job by trading away free thought for a college education that for most people has been entirely too expensive and was teaching all the wrong things. I was particularly disappointed to learn when I went to my first year of college, and friends of mine joined fraternities with their hazing rituals that all the intimidating standards that high school teachers had been warning about simply weren’t true. College was all about partying and losing. It was about sexual conquests and puking on the sidewalk after getting shitfaced at one of the many bars. And if you skipped all your classes, nobody cared. The colleges just wanted your tuition money and for you to show up at their sports games that were televised so that they could recruit more financial contributors and run them through the communist meat grinder. Lucky for me, I read a lot of books on my own and had pursued my own education all of my life outside of the public school and college system and I was able to arrive as an adult fully intact. But most people are not so lucky or committed, and the results are obvious.

The solution to the public education problem is not more school levies, or even hiring more teachers. It’s changing the very nature of the education into something that is actually useful. And that education system needs to be specifically American, something that prepares students for life in America, not some global communist community. Until that happens, kids and their minds will continue to be wasted and they will spend most of their lives trying to unlearn everything they have learned. Because if they want to be good contributors to society, and to have good lives of their own, they need to get as far away from public education and the current college experience as possible, if they really want to be smart and functioning under free will. We have a long way to go as a society, but its good to see that more and more, people are asking those questions on their own and finally accepting that what I’ve been saying for four decades was true all along.

Rich Hoffman
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Americans Love Their Guns Far More Than They Love Their Government: The cost of a Beto O’Rourke gun buyback

I consider even the proposition insulting, but looking at it practically, the ridiculousness of the Beto O’Rourke gun buyback on just “assault weapons” would cost about $20 billion. The amount of money it would take coupled with the manpower of performing the task is by itself staggering. And assuming that most people would cooperate, because they always do, there is a percentage of those who wouldn’t who would make the endeavor impossible. For the greatest military in the world and with trillions of dollars spent, the culture change in Afghanistan and Iran have not changed much. The targets in those conflicts went into hiding and the military struggled to root them out. A gun buyback in the United States would be no easier. It would cause a major civil war and is as impractical as anything ever proposed by government because it attacks the central premise of our entire legal system. Guns are what make America great and there are many, such as myself, who would never support a government that confiscates guns to hold their power.

I am not a fan of the mantras “come and take it” and “over my cold dead hands” because it assumes that we are daring a powerful entity to attack, and assuming that they would win by sheer mass of effort. I never intend to die in such a conflict, or that I am not the superior force. There are over 300 million guns in America and the peer pressure right now is to force retailers like Walmart and Dicks Sporting Goods to pick the pro government confiscation side, and to tax ammunition and to shut down manufactures within America to cut off the supply. That is the Beto O’Rourke view of the world where centralized governments could even garner such power. And they might in the cities where Democrats have ruined the prospects for growth and good human conduct. But outside of the highway loops, and out into the farmland between cities, I know those people well, and let me just say something. No military on earth could take the guns away from those people. And a lot of people would die in the process.

Regarding the Beto O’Rourke t-shirt indicating that he plans to take away the property of the American public in the form of their AR-15s I had to respond by daring him or his campaign to wear that to a stop in Slade, Kentucky, and to see how that goes. Really it could be anywhere USA that is off the path a bit, but I know the area of Slade really well, and understand that even the old grandmothers there are very suspicious of even postal workers and census takers. Try driving into the neighborhoods of Slade with military vehicles and national guard troops with the intentions of confiscating their guns and a blood bath would be quick to follow. They would probably beat the shit out of pot-boy Beto just for wearing that shirt in their community. I think it would be very entertaining for Beto to stop by and see how things go with that shirt on at the local McDonald’s because it would be a good indicator for how it would go elsewhere in the country. It wouldn’t be good.

And that’s the real problem is that these politicians look at the world through their little bubbles of urban life, and they assume they have a bead on everyone, and they don’t. Like most Democrats they view the world in a compliant fashion without ever really considering what human beings really desire outside of their needs for safety. The typical Democrat is a helpless form of human being living as victims to the very nature of breath itself. So, they turn to government to tell them what to do and when to do it. Then politicians like Beto O’Rourke and media types from the big urban markets start believing that all people are that way, which is far from true. I would say it would be impossible to confiscate guns in America, or to instigate a buyback program that would only increase criminal conduct from thieves trying to make money from the government by stealing guns and selling them on the buyback. The effect would fail miserably.

The government foolishly assumes that we need Walmart and gun manufacturers to put a dent in those 300 million guns that we have and to stop the sale. However, as I’ve pointed out often, we can make our own guns and our own ammunition. We don’t need official manufacturers because the science has been invented. People in Slade, Kentucky and all over the eastern part of Ohio down into West Virginia just thinking of my region could set up shops in their garages that could make guns off mini milling machines and ammunition presses. In fact, they would enjoy it. The entire operation would simply move underground like it did in the days of prohibition which gave rise to Al Capone in Chicago where everyone knew he was selling booze, but the law lacked the ambition to enforce the law because they wanted the product. It would be much more severe with guns, the black market for guns and ammunition would be extensive and harder to control than moonshine. The government isn’t big enough and never would become that way to put a dent in the gun market if it were forced underground.

The only way that government can even begin to control guns is through a system kind of like what we have now where there is a little background check and the ATF has some visibility on who is buying and selling guns. Its such big business that is the only way the government can collect some of the tax money off the enterprise, and in reality, that’s the only control they are ever going to get. The government could never get big enough to make a compliant nation without major bloodshed and they could never enforce it. They can’t even control that effort in their big cities such as Chicago. They certainly couldn’t go door to door in Greenville, Ohio and take all the guns from the farmers there. My bet on any government agency that would even try such a thing is that they would just “disappear” without a trace in the middle of the night from wherever they were staying and nobody would ever see them again, or who took them. And even if they did make it to the doors of people who would never give up their guns, shootouts would ensue and things would really start to get out of hand.

The foolish nature of big government advocates like Beto O’Rourke is that they really don’t understand Americans or the love of guns. They simply don’t like those people and want to change America into something else so they have never really taken the time to understand what an American is. For the typical American it is different than any other place in the world and guns are more a philosophical element than a practical one. Most people never intend to shoot a person in their entire lives or want to be shot at. But having that gun in the house is a reminder to them that they are free and independent. The threat of taking that away from them would make a desperate and angry person, and that is what the government is not prepared to deal with. Beto O’Rourke thinks by poking the fence like he is that he can Trump his way into a Democrat nomination. But what they don’t understand, any of the Democrats, is that people love their guns much more than they do their government. And they won’t tolerate any form of confiscation. At all, and that’s more than tough talk. It’s a fundamental element to our country itself.

Rich Hoffman

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Should People of Value Express their Political Opinions: What good is freedom if we don’t live to support it?

Everyone must come to these things in their own way, but the question continues to be asked among people in the community who are “valuable,” whether or not they should get involved in politics beyond the occasional donation or remain in obscurity. My answer to that must be defined by the understanding of social value. It’s not politically correct to make such a judgement, but that is also why as a society we have trouble, because under political correctness, value is a loose term defined by government efforts, not reality. People of value are those who move mankind forward. It might be the owner of your local Taco Bell or the industrialist who is running five or six manufacturing plants. The workers who are employed by those establishments can come and go as they’d like, so their impact to that future growth, for which all economic measures are leveraged against is minimal. Meanwhile, it is the risktakers and investors in our society who have more value over those who don’t do such things. So the question is, should such people, such as President Trump who could be living a good life in his retirement years watching the world go by, should they get involved and letting it be known that their business is ran by a liberal or a conservative—or should they show themselves as middle of the road political supporters?

Well for the political left, they have already answered that question. They are not shy about their political beliefs. And for establishments like Chick-Fil-A, they lean toward the religious conservative side and we’ve seen how the political left has treated them—bullying them at every opportunity. Most people who invest in businesses don’t want the extra headache of a teacher’s union protest outside a place they’ve poured a huge amount of their time into at great risk to give jobs to people, so they are shy about such conflict, which unfortunately is the way the political left has established things will be. They are not peace lovers, they are bullies, pure and simple.

I can’t say that I’ve ever been shy about my political affiliation, but for a time while I was contemplating a career as a film director and movie writer, I didn’t run down the street screaming about it. I have always been able to get along with people of all types and never had a problem with people of color, the opposite sex or people from entirely different political beliefs. Even though I have very firm beliefs; I never have felt that my roots were so insecure that I had to yell and scream at people who didn’t think the way I did. So in spite of the Hollywood bias against people with my political affiliation, I found myself at one of those dinners in Glendale, California with around nine people all of whom were at a minimum, millionaires and were looking for ways to make more money, which is why I was at that table.

I remember it vividly; I was at a very nice restaurant at the Americana shopping complex eating at a big round table overlooking a courtyard set in the middle of the complex on a Friday night in early summer. It was literally a seat at the table of some big-time movers and shakers in Hollywood, producer types and money people. I was brought in because of my firewhip demonstrations that I had done at a film festival representing my membership in the World Stunt Association and because I had a hot script that had won some awards there were buyers for it. The talk was to change that script a bit from an anti-progressive horror adventure film to something more mainstream and less violent. This was before the days of Kill Bill, so producers were concerned that would hurt the potential box office. But essentially the people at that table didn’t care about the script or my bullwhip skills, they wanted to know if I would play along with the rest of the industry or would a be a pain in the ass. And that question was asked of me point blank, I was expected to talk down about George W. Bush who was president at the time. I of course didn’t, even though he wasn’t my favorite guy, he was the best that Republicans had at that time. And I thought about the consequences. I had literally worked 20 years to get to that point and the offer was on the table.

After that project I wasn’t invited to do any more, it really does come down to peer pressure and who you know in that business, unless you put up the money for your own movie. I had decided that I’d rather be honest about my opinions than to have a show business career making a lot of money, but not having the freedom to express myself. And that should not have been a decision I had to make. Long time readers here probably will notice that I took a year off after all that to travel the world and do many things with my wife that I had long planned. Then thereafter, I started this blog and became politically active because if I had to choose, I was at least going to be free to have my own opinion about things.

Growing up I loved the Disney version of Zorro and I watched every episode countless times. But I had always promised myself that I could never be like Don Diego and pretend to be foppish. I’d want to be Zorro all hours of the day seven days of the week. When I created the Cliffhanger character in my book The Symposium of Justice which was one of the projects that had landed me at that table in Glendale, California I wanted to answer my opinion about the Don Diego complex. So pushed in reality I had to pick my Cliffhanger character which was unyielding to the pressures of society as opposed to Zorro who played hero at night, but rich fop during the day so that he could have the approval of his peers and not lose his land to corruption.

Yet all conservatives are expected to be like Don Diego. Even if they do give to a political campaign of their choosing, if it isn’t the liberal candidate there will be consequences, and the political left is quite adamant about that. However, I wasn’t about to write about something and not live it in my real life, so that is the paradox we all face these days and that is my opinion on it. You can’t make peace with the political left. And if you go against them, they will come after you. But my experience is that they aren’t that powerful. They don’t have much in their bag of tricks. When pressed, they come up short most of the time, so why be afraid of them. People of value shouldn’t. I understand making decisions to avoid that conflict. But if you run from it, then you empower them even greater in the future, because they know their pressure worked. And we can’t have that. Everyone must make their own decisions about things, but one of the greatest things we have in life is our opinions and the freedom to have them. To squander that away is a crime in and of itself, not worth the money you might make otherwise. And that is the grim reality when such a choice is made, and it’s never easy.

Rich Hoffman

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Of Course Dan Bishop Won: It’s not that close

No matter how much they tried, when the votes were counted the conservative Dan Bishop won the special election for the North Carolina House seat that the mainstream media had been indicating was up for grabs. Supposedly Bishop was down 17 points to his rival Dan McCready just three weeks ago, but everything tightened up by the time the election was held to a squeaker—by 2 points. Well, it wasn’t that close after all, and it never was. It was a special election, the Democrats pulled out all the stops to get their guy in position and the guy still lost. That is the story. Even with the “fake news” meaning the favorable polling samples, and the massive media backing of McCready, the Democrat still lost. It has nothing to do that Trump won that same district by 12. It has everything to do with turnout. A lot of people were home watching Netflix, not out voting which is the key to understanding who will win in 2020. Even when advantages are given to Democrats, they still lose because most of their real power is only in manipulation and help by government and media. Not by the actual sentiment of real voters.

As President Trump pointed out on Twitter, Greg Murphy won by 62% to 37% not even a close race, also in North Carolina, and more of an indicator of actual national sentiment, especially through the core of the country. Yet almost nobody covered the North Carolina 3rd District race in any measurable way. It was mostly ignored, and that tells you everything, I of course was, I had on all the outlets I could get from my war room complete with popcorn and Mello Yello. I was in heaven listening to all the breaking results which for my ears never leaned toward the Democrats. The compelling story for the media with Bishop was that he was attached to the anti-transgender bathroom movement, so he was a target for the liberal press. For Greg Murphy, he is likely going to become part of the House Freedom Caucus. His views are very solid conservative.

Personally, I love the Xs and Os of politics, and in business—in everything really, because it is there where the truth always resides. You can know how good a sports team is not always by the little victories they get when the other team plays worse than the eventual winner, but in the tape where real performance is measured. The same holds true in business. A clock is right by default twice a day, but all other measures, anything goes. And that is how it is in politics. A few stumbles here and there by Republicans figuring out how to live under a Trump lead party where people like John Bolton are fired, who would have been put on a pedestal in the Bush administration as the party “experts.” The party is different, its better. Its much less global and much more hometown than it used to be and that has taken some adjustments, and during that transition, the country has been split. There are many moderate people out there that just want to live their life and they don’t really know what they feel about things, and they vote for the middle of the road, which is why things have been so close in so many elections.

But the real Xs and Os of politics shows a trend that is obvious to me. It doesn’t mean that Republicans should take anything for granted, because they shouldn’t. Even where Bishop should have blown the doors off McCready if the election had been during a presidential ballot, where turnout would have been much higher, there is always the risk of underperforming due to lack of enthusiasm. But the Democrats know the same Xs and Os that I’m seeing, and so do all the smart people out there. Even with the massive retirements from congress, Democrats are not poised to hold the House. And they don’t have anybody who is going to come out of the primaries to face Trump in 2020. Trump is going to butcher any Democrat who tries to face him in a one on one debate. And everyone can see that writing on the wall even though currently they are trying to position the election the way it was between Bishop and McCready—with Trump at a deficit so that they can inspire Democrats into action.

But the action just isn’t there. The Democrats have turned so hard left that its forcing many of those moderates to choose, which they don’t like to do. And being part of human nature, when people are forced to do something, they usually show antagonism toward the side forcing them to make a decision and will go in the opposite direction. In that regard the election season is not even close. The media wants to portray it that way for their ratings needs but in reality, the boots on the ground, the money in the bank and the voter enthusiasm just isn’t there for Democrats. That is what is obvious in the North Carolina elections. Even when Democrats cheat and hedge things to their advantage with the cooperation of the media, they can’t win.

Democrats completely rely on the victim status of their voters to carry them to the wins they can get and most of America just doesn’t see themselves as victims, below the line thinkers. Enough do to give Democrats the hope to play a game against Republicans but more and more, that game is leaning toward lopsided victories. And for Republicans they should not let their foot off the gas but should blow out the Democrats to the point where they are destroyed as a party. Because in all actuality, what they represent needs to change anyway. Socialism has no place in American politics. The Democrats are not the optimists of JFK, they are the socialists of Karl Marx and that is what we are fighting. They do not have a seat at the table thinking in that way and voters are voicing their opinions wherever the media actually covers the situation honestly, which is very hard to get, even for me.

The truth in the cases where they try to hide it is often in what is not said, not what is. And learning to read those signs shows the real Xs and Ox of politics and what we can expect next. The two wins in North Carolina indicate that after all that’s been said by the media and Democrats in general, even when they can focus their efforts on just a few Republicans, that they can’t even move the needle. What do they think is going to happen when Trump is on the ballot with all these incoming Republicans? Voter turnout will be high and if it is, Republicans will take back the House and all three branches of government will rightfully go back to Republicans. And Democrats are generally terrified of that, and they should be. A second term Trump presidency with no Mueller investigation, the FBI on its heels from the previous corruptions and everyone in the Beltway running to hide in the nearest bar hoping they don’t get a summons by the Department of Justice will be dangerous for them. But good for the country. And future elections won’t be so close, not by a longshot.

Rich Hoffman

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Beto O’Rourk’s Gun Buyback Tyranny: Walmart should be ashamed of themselves

The skateboard riding marijuana supporting Beto O’Rourke advocated for increased criminal conduct recently when he announced his desire to promote a federal buyback program for guns. That would be after all the result of any buyback program advocated by the federal government to seize control of 300 million guns in America. Criminals looking for quick cash to support their drug habits and other scandalous enterprises would simply break into homes and steal all they could get their hands on so they could turn in the guns no questions asked, as other liberalized countries around the world have done. Only those places weren’t America and the love for their guns not nearly as intense. For Beto and all the other gun grabbers running for president, gun confiscation is the name of the game, even if it unleashes a criminal element that we all consider undesirable. They don’t care about any of that so long as they get what they want, more centralized authority and more public demand for daddy government to protect everyone with them leading the charge as Democrats.

Did you hear that I am suing the San Francisco Board of Supervisors for branding the NRA a “domestic terrorist organization.” I’m not personally suing, but through my proud membership, and those of another 5 million Americans, we are. And we should. Something that is constitutional and protected by the Bill of Rights, such as gun ownership for the purpose of changing a corrupt government if needed is not a terrorist organization, and it is all the signs of a government getting out of control that would even try to establish that NRA members are “domestic terrorists.” The opposite is true, and anybody trying to do such a thing to good people have trouble coming. Big trouble. For most of those 300 million guns, nobody gets killed and good conduct is expected among the owners. It is those who are suffering under failed Democrat policies, such as the poor people of South Chicago, who use guns in a bad way. It is not a proper reflection of a gun culture as America is.

Shame on Walmart for caving into these sorry excuses for human beings, the gun grabbers who don’t take cause and effect into their considerations, such as the presentation of a gun buyback program. I’m not generally one who calls for boycotts, but I would think we should all use other options for our shopping experience. Walmart should have stood behind the concept of Americanism, which requires guns to keep it going, instead of taking a stand against it. The idea of how to regulate the intentions of the wicked and corrupt in a free society is to expand government and hope that the police can come within 10 minutes to a crime is simply preposterous. Ownership of the gun is the same concept of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” that states that self-interest will drive the economy, not government regulation. To have free flowing commerce, people must be able to defend property rights at the point of resolution, not some court date set a year after, or a police force that is always boarding on corruption because of the amount of power we give them.

Do you ever look at a highway at 2 AM and wonder where all those people are going? So many people independently thinking about going somewhere and without talking to all the rest of the highway travelers are out at all hours of the night doing whatever they do. Most are going on trips, or going to work, or just going out for a drive. Some are up to no good, but all are independently contributing to commerce and the invisible hand of Adam Smith’s economy. The world of people like Beto O’Rourke or any Democrat for that matter would be that those people would stay home under a curfew and live within the parameters of their rules and tight regulations. Sure, they’ll let you smoke pot so that you are too drugged to see what they are doing to you, but what they want to do is regulate everything, starting with guns. Once they convince people to give up their guns, they intend to attack that free commerce using the ever-present safety need to drive society toward less and less freedom. Once they convince people that guns are dangerous, they can then convince them that capitalism is dangerous. That it is dangerous to travel at night un-supervised, and that we must elect more of “them” to keep us all safe.

I would argue that it was liberal talking points that spawned the drugged mass shooters into action and provoked them to kill. The utterances of Beto O’Rourke and Elizabeth Warren certainly had an impact on the mind of the Dayton shooter recently who made his choices knowing it would spawn gun control debate. Conner Betts was a gun control advocate and under the influence of drugs and liberalized thinking when he used a .223 100 round drum magazine to conduct his “domestic terrorism.” It’s never NRA members doing these things, it’s the drug addicts and those otherwise victimized by liberalized thinking who do. Then once the act is done, those same people look to legislators and say, “see, something must be done.” That’s like some loser farting in a room then complaining that people shouldn’t smell up such a tight space with body gas.

So then we are supposed to just accept that these same people are trying to spread more violence with gun buybacks by encouraging more criminals to hit the streets and rob our houses so they can get their hands on free government cash. Then defenseless, we will all turn to more government for safety and protection. The cycle is endless, and intentional, and is as anti-American as anything ever proposed on the North American continent. We don’t care what Australia, or New Zealand have done, we don’t care about Switzerland, Sweden, or China. American’s want their freedom and they need their guns to have it. Calling the NRA a terrorist organization and to encourage government buybacks are the aggressive tactics of “domestic violence,” and it’s time we call it that.

I would encourage you dear reader to join the NRA if you have not already. Sure, 5 million members is a lot, but it should be more like 20 million. It costs a lot of money to fight these thugs in court and we need to be doing more of it. For every San Francisco Board of Supervisors there are countless others wanting to do the same thing and I propose that “we” the NRA go after them all before they strike at us, because if left alone, they will. The enemy is agenda driven and they want communism like what China has in the United States and to get there, they must have people stoned on drugs and unarmed. They must kill the young before they ever get their first Red Ryder BB gun, so that they can’t grow up to defend the American Constitution. It has always been a war and the guilty are always the gun grabbers who help cause the incidents of violence that sometimes occur, then use them to try to turn public sentiment into gun confiscation. And if a gun buyback creates more crime, that’s just fine with them. Because it’s not your safety and security that they want, it’s your guns so that you’ll have no way to protect yourself from them. And that is the name of the game.

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The 25/25 Rule

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rich Hoffman

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