More Opinion by The Springboard

American Manufacturing Is About More Than Just Jobs
Bringing back American manufacturing is critical to American society in more ways than just economic ones. In order for America to succeed it needs the ability to make things, not only for the stability and good jobs it provides, but for national security as well.

Thursday, April 27, 2023

Biden Harris is Harris Question Mark

It may still be up in the air momentarily whether or not Kamala Harris will be Joe Biden's running mate into the 2024 presidential election. But if one were to assume how the Biden/Harris administration, and perhaps even the democrat party at large, views the success of what they've done, one could easily assume they see no reason to make any changes.

In their eyes, despite all indications otherwise, including in the polls, their administration has been a glowing success full of achievement and progress.

Without sounding brash or harsh, aside from my personal politics, I think one major consideration needs to be made this time around when people go to the polls and make their choice for who becomes the next president in 2024.

Joe Biden is now the oldest serving president in United States history.

For one thing, the life expectancy for males in the United States stands currently at about 76 years, and Joe Biden is 80 years old now. He'd be 82 by the time he took the oath on January 20, 2025. In order to complete his term, he'd have to make it to nearly 86.

Sure. That's possible. But despite what the public has been told, it is also clear to most people that Biden is not necessarily in the best of cognitive health—something that is vitally critical when you are the president of the United States or any country for that matter.

Therefore, it is safe to assume that Kamala Harris, if she is indeed the intended running mate going into 2024, will be, not might be, but will be the president at some point if Joe Biden wins reelection.

So, the ticket really isn't Biden/Harris. It's Harris/? That is ultimately what you are voting for if you cast a vote for Joe Biden. A Kamala Harris administration with whomever she will choose as her vice president when she takes the oath of office in Biden's absence through death or for health reasons.

Does anyone really think this is a good idea?

I mean, unless you happen to be living under a rock, the Biden presidency has been an abject failure that pales in comparison to anything that ever happened under Trump. And when it came to Trump, it wasn't his policy that had their issues. It was the optics, and the way the media portrayed things Trump did and said.

Can we afford one disaster after another for another four years? And moreover, can we afford potentially three or four years of Kamala Harris as president?

When we go to the polls in 2024 we need to be focused on what's best for the country, set our politics and divisions aside, and make the best decision we can possibly make for America. That's going to present a hard choice, no doubt. But it's a choice we are going to have to make if we want to preserve our country and actually move it forward.

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Tuesday, April 25, 2023

What is Truth and the Silencing of Conservatives

It often becomes, to me, a confusing area of contention. Why does it seem that the only people being sought after to silence is targeted to silence only those who speak from the right? Granted, there may be no actual data to support the claim, so let's just call it an observation, shall we?

But you have to admit, it does seem a bit obvious. The right IS the target.

I will even grant you that most of the time there's "something" behind the silencing. Or at least, that is the impressive that wants to get left after the silencing occurs. 

Why is that, and again it seems, that the left can say anything it wants, call anything it wants to truth, and have their say and no one gets to question that? But when the right says something, everything is questioned. And in the minds of those asking the questions, and ultimately doing the silencing, there is no room for questioning the questioner. 

You will remember around 2017 Bill O'Reilly, then the top-rated cable news show host on television, was boost off the air amid sexual harassment allegations. Okay, sounds justified, right? Sure, according to all of the allegations and reports he was a bit of a fox in the den of Fox News. 

But was he? Or was he simply pushing back too hard and getting too big of an audience for his clearly conservative viewpoints? Maybe. Maybe not. It does seem odd that Fox News would want to remove a host who was clearly a large part of their bread and butter without at least good cause.

Or was the left just pushing too hard? Were the other things Fox News was concerned about that they used Bill O'Reilly as an opportunity to quiet the potential bigger onslaught?

Tucker Carlson, the latest target, was removed from their airwaves with his last show airing Friday, April 21st—which at the end of the show he told audience he would see them on Monday. So, it was a quick development over the weekend following the settlement of the Dominion voting machines defamation lawsuit.

Lou Dobbs was also recently cancelled, and he happens to be another one among those named in the filing against Fox News.

Before I go any further, might I remind people that there were many hosts on other networks who were offering up false information and lies galore during the entire Russia Collusion farce. Who fact-checked? Who offered redactions? Who corrected the record?

Why was no one sued for defamation in those cases? Okay, no one brought the suits. But should someone have? Maybe. Should calls to action have been encouraged? Probably. Should it have been important to set the record straight and tell the news straight? Would it even have been a good idea to maybe offer up apologies?

I mean, say what you want about the claims regarding Dominion sort of accusing Dominion of being the source for stealing an entire election from the American people. But one could easily argue that the entire left wing media news organization which is comprised of NBC, CNN and even media giants like Google and Facebook might have had more to do with rigging an election than Dominion ever was if the claims made against them by Tucker Carlson and others were true.

Whether it was about issues surrounding the election or the supposed insurrection of January 6th when it was supposed that angry conservative Trump supporters sought to storm the capital and overturn an election, the mere fact is that conservatives were literally silenced and shut down from having anything to say to potentially open a dialogue, even if was just to ask questions and see where those questions might lead.

Donald Trump was at the forefront of course. A former sitting president was literally kicked off of Twitter. And others followed him—all conservatives. All of them cited for supposedly spreading misinformation and lies.

Based on who's truth? I mean, that should be the question of the day, right? Who's truth is the Imperial truth and who gets to decide what that is? Why is always so immediately assumed the right is at the helm of harmful misinformation?

We have people out there who can openly debate that a woman exists for Heaven's sake. Isn't that patently false? Is it even an argument? Apparently it is. They can freely say that a woman cannot be defined by old outdated standards. But can we, the right, openly deny their truth?

No. We can't. Even if we are not silenced for that speech, surely we are made into pariahs for it. We're called liars and racists and homophobes, we're called out of touch and out of sync with the times. We are called imaginiationists (a word I just made up) instead of realists. We're labeled as bigots.

To be completely honest what I take issue with more than anything is the very use of the word misinformation. Frankly, I think it gets tossed around too readily and too easily—and of course it's the right being accused of it time and time again.

As I asked before, "Based on who's truth?"

Who are the fact checkers? The media of course. And what makes up the largest portion of the media? Liberals. The left. They are the ones cracking the code of truth and anyone who questions the person supposedly setting the record straight is simply spreading more misinformation and denying the truth. The truth they decide.

Now TikTok is up in arms and running a bit scared by the truth seekers of the world—particularly the United States government.

They say they have a team of individuals of more than ten thousand people scanning through the media being offered by members to root out the evils of hate speech and information. And who gets targeted? Not the woman sitting in her bath robe sipping on a cup of coffee in a live stream getting to voice her opinions about men and women not existing in the world and defending her use of the word cis to redefine non-transgender people, who before the word existed in the imaginations of the left, simply described men and women. No. She gets to keep talking even if she is offensive to tens of millions of people who disagree with her.

The ones getting silenced and banned and shut down are the ones who voice their opinions other than what the left has already predetermined to be the truth. A guy can be banned for a week for simply suggesting that president Biden may not actually be running the country. Not because he stole the election. But because maybe he does not have all his faculties and can't be in charge.

Granted, it's an opinion. Just like suggesting a man or a woman is somehow now a cis is an opinion. But of course the left are the ones who decided that there is a difference between fact and opinion. Saying a man cannot be a woman, even if biologically that's a true statement, is not allowed. It's misinformation that could potentially be harmful of disrespectful to others.

Never mind the harm or disrespect imposed on someone who thinks otherwise.

Will it ever change? Who knows? I can say that more people seem to be pushing back more than ever. Even coming from both sides—although of course most of the push back is coming from the right and those middle ground people who call themselves independents.

No one sought to silence that crazy democrat congresswoman Maxine Waters from California for shouting, "Impeach 45," with no basis for impeachment other than she disliked the president, or called her out for potentially inciting violence during the Derek Chauvin trial telling protesters to "get more confrontational." No one held Chuck Schumer to the fire for saying there would be "hell to pay" if Roe v. Wade would be overturned which sent a madman nearly to the door of Supreme Court Justice Cavanaugh wishing to murder him.

But people Mike Lindell and Tucker Carlson will be targeted and silenced. Donald Trump himself will be hounded by baseless accusations and investigations, impeachments and indictments. And rather than stack the courts the media and whoever can find any dirt to dig up will go after a Justice like Clarence Thomas and try to physically remove him from the courts.

It is literally a case of the fox minding the chicken coop here and people need to start paying better attention to what's really going on. The misinformation is happening not just on the right—in fact, I would strongly contend that the lion's bulk share of it is actually coming from the left. 

The left, by the way, who have become literal masters of fictional tales selling their books as gospels of truth and verifiable and undeniable correctness to the masses for wide consumption, also bearing the arms against anyone who might question their truths so that they may pounce swiftly and unleash their terrorism of their own defamation and destruction of character—hopeful that eventually all real truth might finally see its own abolishment so that the only thing ever labeled as truth is what they badly want you to believe.

Monday, April 24, 2023

Is Alissa Heinersheid Out, or Is She Over Bud Light Marketing Controversy?

Was the vice president of marketing, Alissa Heinsersheid, fired over the Bud Light controversy? Well, that depends on who you talk to and how you want to interpret words. Which, by the way, is an age-old tactic with the left that perhaps took root when Bill Clinton famously answered a question by asking another question, "That depends on what is is."

Or maybe it was something the left has been doing long before Clinton's now famous response to what was a rather simple question. They say things that sound like the same thing but aren't exactly necessarily the same thing.

What Anheuser-Busch InBev said is that she simply took a "leave of absence."

One thing the left, and particularly the woke and cancel culture people, hate to do is admit defeat. They very strongly don't want to be wrong. 

It depends on what "is" is.

Whether or not company officials say she was fired or not to me doesn't matter. As I have said before, business is about dollars and cents. Not politics—even if many corporate America executive boards and leadership now seemed to have tapped into woke people to lead them.

They chose to allow a bad idea to hit the airwaves thinking they were being inclusive and thinking that woke culture is "the new next best thing," and they thought that consumers would rejoice when they saw transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney on their beer cans.

Because woke people, besides being misinformed about their own cause and popularity, and despite the feeling of power they think they have, are simply out of touch with reality. Consumers are having had enough of it and they sent a clear message to Anheuser-Busch InBev about it. They don't want to just come right out and say they were wrong.

So, they didn't fire the person behind the marketing idea gone wrong. She's just on a leave of absense. Okay. Whatever.

Meanwhile, Todd Allen, who is the vice president of global marketing for Budweiser takes her place, and other changes to marketing teams and leadership have also been made so that there is more oversight over how marketing campaigns will be conducted and reviewed in the future.

Sounds clear to me that Anheuser-Busch InBev is making these changes because of the Bud Light, Dylan Mulvaney controversy. What else would it be about?

Speaking about transgenderism, I think it is worth noting that the way the media is portraying any backlash on the issue, they say that the right (and republicans in general) are "fixated on transgender issues," with many state governors and legislators introducing bills that they claim infringe on transgender rights.

Wait a minute. Who is fixated?

For several years now I think the truth is that the left has been fixated on it, literally shoving their cause down everyone else's throats and forcing them to "accept this or else." Join our woke movement or be labeled as a racist, homophobe or demagogue.

They don't care what the majority wants. We are not supposed to have our voices heard. We are supposed to just quietly sit back and take it—all of it—and accept whatever their definition of the world is.

Regardless of whether or not Alissa Heinsersheid is out of a job or not I don't think makes a difference, ultimately. At least not in the short term. With this wording of her departure, I think consumers are smarter than the narrative. They want an admission of guilt, and they want the company execs to be honest about what happened and why, and admit they were wrong.

This isn't going to be a moment where consumers, essentially ignored and unappreciated, now simply go back to the stores and start buying Bud Light again. The damage has been done and the little token of a "white flag" being thrown up in a kinda sorta way isn't enough.

Besides, I think consumers need to continue to stand tall against what Bud Light tried to do. If the "moment" is one in which execs simply feel they dodged a little bullet here, the real message will be lost in translation.

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Friday, April 21, 2023

In Bud Light Debacle Workers Should Fight Too

I stand firmly with the Bud Light boycott over the controversy surrounding putting transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney on their beer cans. And that's saying something since I am generally opposed to boycotts. However, when it comes to woke and cancel culture, which has permeated businesses of all kinds for some years now, I take a different stance.

Enough is enough.

The role of business is not to promote social causes or to necessarily have one position or another. It is to promote their products and services and make a profit. When they sway from this primary purpose, they jeopardize their ability to do that.

But it is not just owners and shareholders that suffer when a backlash happens. It's the workers who get hurt in the process as well.

Consumers who are unhappy with what a business is doing is going to make a stand against it with their wallets. As someone once was quoted as saying, "Every dollar we spend casts a vote for the kind of world we want to live in." In the case of the Bud Light controversy, consumers are speaking quite loudly about their unhappiness.

At some point the position the company is taking is going to affect the workers who produce the products and services and I think they should be fighting just as hard against this sort of thing as consumers are. It's their jobs at stake, after all.

Because let's not forget, while Bud Light is only one brand among many, consumers boycotting Bud Light aren't necessarily boycotting just that brand. They are boycotting the company behind it. Anheuser-Busch InBev. So, while one may consider that other brands being sold could pick up the slack, so to speak, that's not necessarily the case.

Workers need to stand up and tell the company they work for that this sort of thing doesn't do anyone any good. You are taking a stand for a group of people who represent only 1% of the population. The other 99% are standing against you and if profits fall, our jobs could be cut.

Granted, people in general do have short attention spans, and so it is reasonable to assume that perhaps this issue falls by the wayside sooner rather than later. Still, with losses looming around $7 billion and counting, and with woke and cancel culture becoming more and more disliked, the impact of Bud Light's decision to put Mulvaney on the can could well be a lasting one after all.

Part of the issue, I think, is that I don't think companies are necessarily getting the message clearly enough. The response from Anheuser-Busch InBev about the controversy, which was more of a non-response, seems to indicate that.

They sort of said to their customers, "We don't care what you think." And even if that's not word-for-word what they said, that's what customers heard. That was the essence of the company's response. "We are going to do what we want to do and you're just going to have to accept that and fall in line."

In other words, I don't think it is enough for just consumers to stop buying the products. I think other businesses should make a stand too and pull products from their shelves, and workers should step off the production line and say, "We're not returning to work until you understand your customers better."

You have to fight fire with fire. Because the woke and cancel crowd right now have all the fire, and a lot of it. The rest of us need to have as much fire individually as they do, because ultimately we will have more fire. We are the majority.

Whether or not workers would actually do this is debatable. Or even retailers. I understand, on a common-sense surface level why they might choose not to. Still, if the message is not delivered strongly enough, the other side will simply keep on winning, and the majority will have to continue to be bombarded with more of this nonsense that is becoming a deadly cancer on American business.

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Sunday, March 26, 2023

Most People Want More Money But Don't Actually Want More Money

The title, I will admit, seems a bit strange, doesn't it? I mean, one either wants more money or they don't. Doesn't everyone naturally want more money? It would seem like a no-brainer to say, most people want more money.

The thing is, that's just what most people say. The reality is quite a different thing. The reality is that most people don't have more money, and there is actually a simple answer to why they don't.

They don't actually do anything to go after it.

Part of the problem lies in how people think about money. To a lot of people, it's magic. Or it's luck. Or they think that only rich people can actually be rich and get richer because they are already rich.

The fact is that most of the rich people in this world did not start off that way. Many started off quite poor and became rich. And the reason that happened for them is that they did want more money and actually wanted more money.

Perhaps the title is making a bit more sense?

Let's go back to what I said about how people think about money. Beyond magic and luck, people think of money in terms of mainly income. Money that is created through a job, or a second or third job, through side gigs, using certain apps and taking surveys. Perhaps they write online and that's a source of income. Or they decide to sell crafts or something else on eBay or some other similar selling site.

All good things, mind you. And there is nothing wrong with doing any of these things to create more income and have more money. But really, the new money is rarely tied to getting ahead. It's tied to simply continuing to get by.

In other words, the objective for getting more income is to spend all of it. And here's another reality. You cannot spend your way to riches.

When I say more money, I am not just talking about earning more. I am talking about all the ways that are out there to actually grow what you have already made. And that's the part most people overlook. Thus, they don't actually want the real money that's available to them.

Because, that part is not a secret. It's not magic or luck. It's simply knowing where the money is and taking the time to learn how to get it.

It's not the easy way. Not necessarily. I mean, to me it is. But I have been doing it a long time and know my way around. That learning process didn't happen overnight. Nor did growing my stash. And that is also the reason a lot of people avoid it.

The stock market. 

People think of it as a private organization. An exclusive club. A place for the rich to play high stakes games, sometimes at the expense of the little guy with pockets less full.

That can't be farther from the truth. But of course, I will repeat what I said before. You just have to know what you are doing. The question is, if the stock market is one of the best sources of money and one of the best opportunities to actually become rich, why don't more people do it?

Because again, it's no secret. In fact, when you look at the Forbe's Richest list published every year, a good many of the people on that list made their money through investments. Yeah, a lot of them own businesses. Sure. Of course. But owning a business and making a lot of money doesn't necessarily mean running it or even having started it.

Many of the people on the Forbe's list are simply investors.

The stock market can be complicated. I want to be clear about that. I mean, it is not always complicated. Take a guy like Warren Buffet. He takes the easiest approach there is to investing. He simply buys low—and in his case rarely ever sells. He rides on the waves of successful companies and collects dividends as they continue to grow and operate.

That is where and how he had made most of his money.

A great book to read if you want to know how Warren does it is called The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. To some it is considered to be the Bible of Basic Investing. If you wanted to call it something else, you could call it the nuts and bolts of making money by buying solid businesses.

I am going to tell you that reading Graham's book might be one the most valuable reads you may ever read, aside from maybe the Bible Itself if you happen to be religiously inclined. It is the key that opens the door to the vault of knowledge secured behind it.

It dispels the magic and the luck theories.

Going back to the income thing, think about this for a second. It goes right along with that how people think about money thing. College. For some it's a big deal. If you want to have a good income you need to have a degree that gets you a good job.

But even that, having a good job, does it serve one to really get ahead? The answer is mostly no. No good job really gets anyone ahead. Investing the money they earn does. And again, the people who actually want more money know this. It's why they have money.

Besides the fact that many non-college degree jobs pay more than degreed jobs do. Plumbers and electricians make a lot of money. So do welders and factory workers—depending on the job of course. A guy working in a brewery might make over $80,000 a year easily while someone working in a cereal factory might be closer to about $40,000-$50,000 a year.


Back in the day I worked for a Coca-Cola bottling plant on the factory floor and made over $60,000 a year. And that was more than 20 years ago.

But that's not my point. Just an illustration. I have always worked and continue to work to this day even though I don't really have to. But the second part of that, even if I don't really have to, is because I never spent all of what I made. 

I invested.

Moreover, I took the time to learn how to invest. I learned about the stock market. I even went beyond what Warren Buffet does and learned other aspects of investing such as writing covered call options contracts and that sort of thing.

I actually wanted more money and continue to want more money. To actually want it, achieving it through doing things that actually make it. By not wasting my time seeking out high incomes or time-consuming side gigs exclusively just to chase the next payday and do nothing more than get by.

There is one other thing I did. Rather than lambaste and scold the rich, or even be envious of them, I studied them. I wanted to know what they did to get there. I wanted to know how they did it. 

The bottom line is that simply wanting more money doesn't more money make. Only actions can do that. Only an active interest and participation in things that make money and create wealth will do it. Either you can sit back beneath the table of the rich and wait for crumbs to land on your plate. Or you can sit at the table with them and have your own plate.

The choice is entirely yours. But it is up to you. The opportunity is not lacking. You true desire to get at it is.

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